Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

"I know the perfect place," Jason said.

"Where's that?"

"The Big House," he said.

I laughed, until I realized he was serious.

* * * * *

Diane didn't call back until a week after Lomax's visit to Perihelion, a week after Molly left town to claim whatever reward E. D. Lawton or his hired detectives had promised her.

Sunday afternoon. I was alone in my rental. A sunny day, but the blinds were pulled. All week, balancing time between patients at the Perihelion clinic and secretive tutorials with Wun and Jase, I'd been staring down the barrel of this empty weekend. It was good to be busy, I reasoned, because when you were busy you were awash in the countless but comprehensible daily problems that crowd out pain and stifle remorse. That was healthy. That was a coping process. Or at least a delaying tactic. Useful but, alas, temporary. Because sooner or later the noise fades, the crowds disperse, and you go home to the burned-out lightbulb, the empty room, the unmade bed.

It was pretty bad. I wasn't even sure how to feel—or rather, which of the several conflicting and incompatible modes of pain I ought to acknowledge first. "You're better off without her," Jase had said a couple of times, and that was at least as true as it was banal: better off without her, but better still if I could make sense of her, if I could decide whether Molly had used me or had punished me for using her, whether my chilly and perhaps slightly counterfeit love equaled her cold and profitable repudiation of it.

Then the phone rang, which was embarrassing because I was busy stripping the sheets from my bed, balling them up for a trip to the laundry room, lots of detergent and scalding hot water to bleach out Molly's aura. You don't want to be interrupted at a task like that. Makes you feel the tiniest bit self-conscious. But I'd always been a slave to a ringing phone. I picked up.

"Tyler?" Diane said. "Is that you, Ty? Are you alone?"

I admitted that I was alone.

"Good, I'm glad I finally got hold of you. I wanted to tell you, we're changing our phone number. Unlisting it. But in case you need to get in touch with me—"

She recited the private number, which I scribbled on a handy napkin. "Why are you unlisting your phone?" She and Simon had only a single static land line between them, but I guessed that was a devotional penance, like wearing wool or eating whole grains.

"For one thing we've been getting these odd calls from E.D. A couple of times he called late at night and started haranguing Simon. He sounded a little drunk, frankly. E.D. hates Simon, E.D. hated Simon from the get-go, but after we moved to Phoenix we never heard from him. Until now. The silence was hurtful. But this is worse."

Diane's telephone number might have been something else Molly filched from my household tracker and passed on to E.D. I couldn't explain that to Diane without violating my security oath, for the same reason I couldn't mention Wun Ngo Wen or ice-eating replicators. But I did tell her that Jason had been engaged in a struggle with his father over control of Perihelion, and Jason had come out on top, and maybe that's what was bothering E.D.

"Could be," Diane said. "Coming so soon after the divorce."

"What divorce? Are you talking about E.D. and Carol?"

"Jason didn't tell you? E.D.'s been living in a rental in Georgetown since May. The negotiations are still going on, but it looks like Carol gets the Big House and maintenance payments and E.D. gets everything else. The divorce was his idea, not hers. Which is maybe understandable. Carol's been just this side of an alcoholic coma for decades. She wasn't much of a mother and she can't have been much of a wife for E.D."

"You're saying you approve?"

"Hardly. I haven't changed my mind about him. He was an awful, indifferent parent—at least to me. I didn't like him and he didn't care whether I liked him. But I wasn't in awe of him, either, not the way Jason was. Jason saw him as this monumental king of industry, this towering Washington mover and shaker—"

"Isn't he?"

"He's successful and he's got some leverage, but this stuff is all relative, Ty. There are ten thousand E. D. Lawtons in this country. E.D. would never have gotten anywhere if his father and his uncle hadn't bankrolled his first business— which I'm sure they expected to function as a tax write-off, nothing more. E.D. was good at what he did, and when the Spin opened up an opportunity he took advantage of it, and that brought him to the attention of genuinely powerful people. But he was still basically nouveau riche as far as the big boys were concerned. He never had that Yale-Harvard-Skull-and-Bones thing going for him. No cotillion balls for me. We were the poor kids on the block. I mean, it was a nice block, but there's old money and there's new money, and we were definitely new money."

"I guess it looked different," I said, "from across the lawn. How's Carol holding up?"

"Carol's medicine comes out of the same bottle it ever did. What about you? How are things with you and Molly?"

"Molly's gone," I said.

"Gone as in 'gone to the store,' or—"

"Plain gone. We broke up. I don't have a cute euphemism for it."

"I'm sorry, Tyler."

"Thank you, but it's for the best. Everybody says so."

"Simon and I are doing all right," she said, though I hadn't asked. "The church thing is hard on him."

"More church politics?"

"Jordan Tabernacle's in some kind of legal trouble. I don't know all the details. We're not directly involved, but Simon's taking it pretty hard. You sure you're okay, though? You sound a little hoarse."

"I'll survive," I said.

* * * * *

The morning before the election I packed a couple of suitcases (fresh clothes, a brace of paperback books, my medical kit), drove to Jason's place, and picked him up for the drive to Virginia. Jase was still fond of quality cars, but we needed to travel inconspicuously. My Honda, therefore, not his Porsche. The interstates weren't safe for Porsches these days. The Garland presidency had been good times for anybody with an income over half a million dollars, hard times for everybody else. That was pretty obvious from the look of the road, a rolling tableau of warehouse retailers bookended by boarded-over malls, parking lots where squatters lived in tireless automobiles, highway towns subsisting on the income from a Stuckey's and a radar trap. Warning signs posted by the state police announced 'NO STOPPING AFTER DARK' or 'VERIFIED 911 CALL REQUIRED FOR PROMPT EMERGENCY RESPONSE'. Highway piracy had cut the volume of small-vehicle traffic by half. We spent much of the drive bracketed between eighteen-wheel rigs, some of them in conspicuously poor repair, and camo-green troop trucks servicing various military bases.

But we didn't talk about any of that. And we didn't talk about the election, which was in any case a foregone conclusion, Lomax outpolling any of the two major and three minor rival candidates. We didn't talk about ice-eating replicators or Wun Ngo Wen and we surely didn't talk about E. D. Lawton. Instead we talked about old times and good books, and much of the time we didn't talk at all. I had loaded the dashboard memory with the kind of angular, contrarian jazz I knew Jason liked: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins—people who had long ago fathomed the distance between the street and the stars.

We pulled up in front of the Big House at dusk.

The house was brightly lit, big windows butter yellow under a sky the color of iridescent ink. Election weather was chilly this year. Carol Lawton came down from the porch to meet the car, her small body shrouded in paisley scarves and a knitted sweater. She was nearly sober, judging by her steady if slightly overcalculated gait.

Jason unfolded himself slowly, cautiously from the passenger seat.