Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

She let out an exasperated sigh and sagged against the door frame. “Let me guess,” she said. “One of them is money, and the second is sex. What’s the third? The car?”

It might have been funny if it wasn’t true. When we had agreed that a separation was probably the best thing for both of us, after I had moved to a motel and before I had found a new job, those were the three favors I most commonly called to ask of her: wheels to get around in, a ten or twenty to tide me over till the next paycheck, and a quick roll in the hay because I was so damn lonely and because I still believed sex would heal all the wounds. All three she had agreed to, at one time or another, until she hardened her heart and told me that I was on my own. Hell, the only reason why we still hadn’t become officially divorced was because neither of us could afford lawyer bills right now.

“Hey, if you want to have sex with me and give me some bucks and the car in return-” I began, and she started to slam the door in my face until I pushed my hand against the knob. “Wait, I’m just kidding. Seriously …”

Again the sigh as she opened the door again. “Seriously what?”

Now was no time to bullshit my wife, even if she hated my guts. “I need a place to crash,” I said. “Just for tonight, I swear … and I need to use the computer.”

“Uh-huh.” She gazed at me indifferently. “A bed and the computer. Yeah. What else?”

“Hey, I can sleep on the couch-”

“Damn straight you’re going to sleep on the couch,” she replied. “What’s the third thing, Gerard?”

I hesitated; this was probably the biggest favor of all. “The third thing is no questions asked.” I took a deep breath. “I’m in trouble, kiddo. Big trouble.”

“Oh, Christ.” She sighed as her eyes rolled upward. “You’re running from the cops, aren’t you?”

I almost broke down laughing. “Babe, a cop gave me a lift out here-”

“Uh, huh. Sure …”

I raised my hands. “Believe me, Marianne, if this was going to get you in any trouble, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’m not in trouble with the cops.” Not technically, anyway, I thought. “All I need is the couch,” I went on, “and to use the office computer for an hour or so. I don’t want your money, I don’t want to sleep with you, and I’ll call a cab bright and early tomorrow morning. Okay?”

She sighed again, closing her eyes as if she was carrying the burdens of the world on her shoulders. “Jeez, Gerry, why can’t you go bug John for this?”

Because John is dead, I almost blurted out, but I held my tongue. Telling her would only have prompted all the questions I wanted to avoid, and it was far safer for her to remain ignorant. I was lucky that she obviously hadn’t seen the late news on one of the local TV stations or hadn’t yet received a call from Sandy Tiernan.

“Please,” I said. “Just do it for me, okay?”

She gazed at me for another moment, then she pushed the door open a little wider and stepped aside. “All right,” she said. “But remember … you’re sleeping on the couch.”

The house was a little cleaner than it had usually been before I moved out, yet otherwise everything was much the same. She hadn’t changed the living room furniture or taken any of the prints from the walls; although she had removed our wedding photos, there were still baby and toddler pictures of Jamie on the fireplace mantel. Marianne let me grab a Diet Dr. Pepper from the fridge, then went upstairs to gather some sheets and a spare pillow from the linen cabinet while I retreated to her home office.

The office was located in the rear of the ground floor, in what had been a den before we had put in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Before the quake hit, we had shared that space; she had used it during the day to telecommute to her insurance company’s home office in Kansas City, and when she was through at five o’clock it became my study for the writing of the Great American Unreadable Novel. I noticed that she had removed my books and mementos from the shelves, but I didn’t want to make an issue of it. Right now, I was interested in only one thing.

I found the plastic CD-OP filebox on a small shelf beneath the desk; the particular disk for which I was searching was contained in a scratched, often-opened case marked FAMILY. Marianne must have been looking at it often; it was at the front of the box, in front of the business disks. I pulled out the case and opened it, and after switching on the computer and opening the REVIEW window, I slipped the disk into the optical diskette drive.

Starting shortly after we became engaged, Marianne and I had videoed almost everything we did, using a camcorder one of her relatives had given her at the bridal shower. Hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, summer scenes on Cape Cod, strange little home movies when we were both full of wine and creativity, the wedding day ceremonies, and the honeymoon trip to Ireland … we had recorded everything, and stored the bits and bytes on CD-OP for replay on our computer as an electronic family album.

We had gotten bored of the novelty after a while, and thus there were large chronological gaps on the menu until Jamie was born, when we had rediscovered the camcorder and started making the inevitable baby pictures. As a result, the submenu screen showed a lot of filenames marked JAMIE.1, JAMIE.2, JAMIE.3, and so forth, one for each birthday he had passed. Yet there was one piece of footage in particular, lodged in JAMIE.6, that I now needed to see.

After we had moved back to St. Louis, there had been a rash of kidnappings in the city. Children were vanishing from schoolbus stops and playgrounds and shopping malls, rarely to be seen again by their parents, and then sometimes not alive. The police never caught the evil bastards who had stolen these kids, and only God knows what happened to the ones who were not found, but Marianne and I did what the local authorities suggested parents should do: videotape their kids in advance, so that the footage could be used to identify lost children should the unthinkable happen to them.

It had taken me a while, but something about the weird phone call I had received just before the ERA soldiers broke down the door of my apartment had jogged an old memory. After I opened the VIDEOVIEW window on the computer screen, I moused JAIME.6 and the REPLAY command; it took me only a couple of minutes to find the footage I remembered shooting of him, just a few weeks before he was killed.

And now here was Jamie, very much alive and well, sitting in his child-size rocking chair in the living room. He was wearing blue jeans and his favorite St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt; just a cute little kid, both bored and embarrassed to have his dad making yet another video of him.

My voice, off-camera: “Okay, kiddo, what’s your name?”

Jamie, pouting, wishing to be anywhere but here: “Jamie …”

Me again: “And what’s your last name?”

Jamie looks down at the floor, his hands fidgeting restlessly on the armrests of his chair: “Jamie Rosen, and I’m six years old …”

My voice, prodding him gently from behind the camera: “That’s good! Now what’s your mommy’s and daddy’s names?”

His face scrunches up in earnest concentration, the child who has only recently learned that his folks have names besides Mommy and Daddy: “My daddy’s name is Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … and Mommy’s … my mommy’s name is Marianne Rosen …”

Me, playing the proud papa: “That’s good, Jamie! That’s very good! Now, can you tell me what you’re supposed to do if a stranger comes up to you?”

Jamie dutifully recites everything I had just told him: “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers, even if they ask me if I want a present, and I can … I’m supposed to run and get a p’leaseman or another grownup and tell them to take me to you, and …”