Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

Together they scouted the prepacks in the freezer, and then they settled together at the steel kitchen table to pick their way through the edible parts of their meals.

“We’ll eat better than this on board, I trust,” Tidwell said, eyeing his rubbery lasagna with suspicion.

“Never enough cheese in one of those,” she said. “I should have warned you. The cafeteria’s lasagna is better. But if you really like lasagna, I ought to try to get you some of Mother Alicia’s. Two inches thick and three kilos to a pan. It takes her all day to make enough for the whole family.”

“My wife enjoyed cooking,” Tidwell recalled. “Not Italian. Her specialty was sweets—poisonously rich desserts.” He smiled. “A weakness that crosses all cultures.”

“Real sugar and I have a pact,” she said. “It doesn’t jump into my mouth and I don’t make it live on my thighs. Just because I can’t walk around in high heels doesn’t mean I can’t be shapely.”

“You are a very attractive young lady.”

She clucked unhappily. “ ‘Young lady’—those sound like words you use to keep someone in their place.”

“Habit of speech,” Tidwell apologized. “I meant nothing by it. Except the compliment.”

She smiled acceptingly. “I’m actually the youngest old woman you’ve ever met. I’m a crone at heart, waiting to grow into her role. I can hardly wait to be respected enough to be listened to.”

“Do you have to look the part?”

“Or get paid for it. People take advice much better if they’re paying for it.”

“I must confess I’ve never been to a bodywork counselor,” Tidwell said.

“I know.”

“Excuse me?”

“I can tell by the way you police every motion. I don’t think you’re very comfortable in your body.”

“It serves me passably well,” Tidwell said, then his face reddened with embarrassment. “Forgive me—I didn’t mean—”

“That’s all right, Thomas. Everyone asks eventually, so I’ll save you from working up to it,” she said easily. “Did you know that about three in a million contract polio from their vaccinations? I’m one of them. Our family health worker is a nice man but a rotten diagnostician. He missed the early signs and then sent me to a chiropractor when he should have been feeding me virus-eaters.”

Tidwell cocked his head and gazed at her appraisingly. “Are you truly not angry, or do you simply hide it well?”

“What would angry get me?” she asked. “I’m not a cripple. I can dress myself in the morning, fuck in three of the four most popular positions, and swim a 1:20 hundred-meters. But don’t ask me to rumba. It’s just not in my personality.”

A surprised laugh fought its way through Tidwell’s tightly drawn lips. “Well said.”

“I didn’t scandalize you? How disappointing.”

The irony of attempting to shock the author of A Summer in Eden made Tidwell smile. “I’m afraid I’m no longer very easy to scandalize. But feel free to try again sometime.”

“Veteran reporter has seen it all.”

“Something like that,” he said, recalling the afternoon’s events. “But sometimes I can still be surprised.” He gestured toward the drape-hidden doors. “There were people outside the fence today—”

“Ah, you’ve discovered the vultures. They’re probably still there, in fact,” she said. “Don’t worry, the curtains are Kevlar weave, and anyway, Security says the vultures rarely have any weapons. Just don’t tempt them by wandering around out back.”

“So I learned,” he said ruefully. “Malena, who are those people? Are they there every day?”

Her face took on a serious cast for the first time that evening. “Every day since I came here.”

“There must be a hundred of them.”

She nodded. “Fifty, a hundred, five hundred some days. The faces keep changing, but the expressions are always the same. There’s anger for you.”

“But who are they? Not starheads, surely.”

“No. Not starheads,” she said, shaking her head. “The starheads come to the west gate. They get protection.”

“Then what?”

Instead of answering, she backed her chair away from the table, dimmed the lights, and crossed the room to peek out through parted curtains. “When I first moved in, I could feel them all the way over here,” she said. “I had to ward the house so I could sleep at night.”

“Feel what?”

“What they’re sending at us.” She straightened and let the curtains fall closed, then turned back to Tidwell. “Didn’t you feel it when you went outside? There’s two kinds of people over there, Thomas. Those that hate us for leaving—and those who hate us for leaving them behind.”

There was almost nothing Christopher McCutcheon liked about coming to see Eric Meyfarth, R.T.

Christopher hated the ritual of signing Loi’s complaint and being called by Meyfarth for confirmation. He hated scheduling the appointment and leaving work in midday. He hated the walled canyons of downtown Houston, the warren-towers of plex and chrome.

He hated the office manager’s earnest cheeriness, and the tight mouths and guarded eyes of the other clients waiting with him in the twenty-sixth-floor lounge. No, not clients—patients. Patients that belonged in a back-street clinic, seeking treatment for some embarrassing disease, deathly afraid of being asked why they were there. That was how they behaved—no help to Christopher, fighting against the same feeling. Up went the walls, driving Christopher back behind his own.

The little man in the pinstripe cap and white bristle-brush moustache, raccoon eyes furtively glancing around the room, retreating to the window when Christopher spoke to him. The woman in the short white skirt and the glittery cascade of string earrings, paging hopefully through a glamour magazine in search of one more secret. The child-faced woman in the blue flower-print dress, her toddler on a tether, a faraway look in her eyes until she was brought back to her boredom by the tug of her charge.

Never give them your eyes . There must a school which teaches that as a survival skill, Christopher thought. When by chance eyes met there was no contact. They stood mask-to-mask for the instant of surprise, before turning politely away. It was as though they held to their masks more tightly for knowing that beyond the door, they would be expected to let them fall.

So Christopher waited, unhappy and uncomfortable, for the part he hated the most.

Not that he had any personal enmity for Meyfarth. Referred by their former arty in Oakland, Christopher and Loi had come to see Meyfarth for baselining in the first weeks after arriving in Houston. They had come back a second time a few months later to introduce Jessie.

Neither session had been particularly demanding, and Christopher had come away with qualified good feelings. He would have preferred they sign with a woman, but the bearded and round-bellied relationship technologist had a calming presence and, it seemed, a genuine heart.

But then, Christopher had expected to see him only for periodic checkups and the odd arbitration, not with a major family crisis blowing. That pushed ugly memories to the fore, memories of the long, angry sessions when his marriage to Donald and Kristen was collapsing. Whether it was their arty’s incompetence or his own intransigence, all he learned from that episode was that he resisted being dissected, and resented being made to feel a failure.

And there was no way that he would be able to escape either experience in the sessions to come.

With the unerring accuracy of a master archer, Meyfarth went straight for that discomfort in the first five minutes.