Нил Стивенсон - Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

The conversation paused for an afternoon. The pause grew to encompass the evening and the night that followed. Twenty-four hours elapsed before it resumed. Corvallis spent it in a kind of limbo. Until there was a death certificate, Dodge wasn’t legally dead, and so there was no need for an executor. Executor—or, in the more modern gender-neutral usage, “personal representative”—was to be Corvallis’s role. He devoted a little bit of effort to learning how the job worked, but it was mostly legalese of the sort that made his head hurt. He had responsibilities at work.

And at about ten in the evening, word somehow leaked to the Miasma that Richard Forthrast was in the ICU with serious medical problems. Then his world exploded for about six hours and ruled out getting very much sleep. The Miasma behaved, sometimes, as if it expected every man, woman, and child on earth to have a social media and PR staff on twenty-four-hour call. It would have been impossible even if Corvallis had been at liberty to say anything.

When next they got together, it was in a suite in an old but well-maintained luxury hotel a couple of blocks from the hospital. Corvallis knew Alice Forthrast a little—well enough to guess that she hadn’t chosen this place. Zula had done it for her. Alice would have made a sort of performance of her frugality and her lack of interest in the ways of big coastal cities by staying in the cheapest available motel near the airport. Zula had preempted all of that by making other arrangements and simply driving her here and dropping her off last night. The place was within walking distance of where Zula, Csongor, and Sophia lived. The relatives back home would wonder why Alice didn’t just sleep on Zula’s couch, or in Richard’s now-vacant apartment for that matter. But Corvallis followed Zula’s thinking. The family would need a command center near the hospital, some neutral ground from which they could operate. A conference room at Argenbright Vail would have put them too much in the law firm’s pocket. The kitchen table at Zula and Csongor’s condo would have made certain conversations awkward, if Sophia were underfoot asking to have everything explained. So the hotel suite it was.

By the time Corvallis got there with Jake Forthrast—Richard’s younger brother—in tow, Zula had already stocked its fridge with milk, yogurt, and a few other staples so that Alice wouldn’t have to go on making outraged Facebook posts over the cost of room service. Csongor had taken a few days of leave and was at home on full-time Sophia duty so that Zula could focus everything on this. Corvallis had warned people at Nubilant that he would be out of pocket for a few days—almost unnecessary given that most people there had awakened this morning to gales of social media coverage of the Forthrast tragedy. Number one on Reddit was a brief video that some random kid had shot yesterday of himself standing next to Dodge outside of the medical building where, only a few minutes later, Dodge had been stricken. Corvallis had forcibly ignored it for a few times and then just broken down and watched the damned thing. Dodge was being reasonably cheerful about being waylaid by his young fanboy; he’d pulled his headphones down around his neck so that he could hear what the kid was saying, and tinny music could be heard from them when cars weren’t shusshing past on the wet street. Corvallis had expected that the video would wreck him, but instead he found it weirdly comforting, and watched it several times. Reminding himself of who Dodge was, and getting ready for the post-Dodge world.

Corvallis had, a few minutes ago, picked Jake Forthrast up at the train station downtown. He was in his late forties—a straggler, much younger than the other three Forthrast siblings. He lived in northern Idaho, in a remote community of like-minded people, which was to say extreme libertarians with a religious bent. He had a wife and a brood of kids there. Outside of his little area, he couldn’t drive, because he didn’t have a driver’s license, because he did not believe that the government had the authority to issue them. Yesterday, upon hearing the news, he had somehow made his way to the train station in Coeur d’Alene and boarded a westbound Amtrak that was running seven hours late. He and Corvallis had crossed paths before and were more comfortable around each other than might have been expected based on the differences in their backgrounds and their political and religious thinking. The drive from the train station to the valet parking in front of the hotel had not lasted much more than five minutes and so Corvallis had not been able to tell him much, other than that Richard’s condition was unchanged. Jake had a somewhat scruffy beard, auburn turning gray, and had gone mostly bald. He was wearing the sensible flannel-lined work clothes that he wore day in and day out at his job, which was building log cabins and rustic furniture. He gazed around at the lobby’s opulent furnishings with an expression Corvallis did not know how to read. The elevator, which was paneled with finely wrought hardwood, gave him something to focus on.

Alice Forthrast was the widow of Richard’s older brother, John, and the matriarch of the extended family, operating from a farmhouse in northwest Iowa. She was in her seventies but could have passed for younger. She hadn’t bothered with trying to color her hair, which was thoroughly gray now, and cut short. When Corvallis first saw her she was smiling at Zula, showing real teeth, somewhat the worse for wear. They had been remembering something funny that Richard had done. But when Corvallis and Jake came in they sobered up, as if they’d been caught out misbehaving. Jake greeted Zula with a long, warm hug and Alice with a more perfunctory one; she did not fully rise out of her chair, but she did smile at him, lips pressed together, eyes slitted against tears.

Corvallis and Alice had met before, but Zula reintroduced them just in case Alice had forgotten his name. Maybe Alice’s short-term memory was a little leaky, or maybe it was one of those all-Asians-look-the-same deals. Anyway Alice nodded and said, “Of course, I remember Dodge talking about you and your Rome activities.” Referring to an eccentric hobby.

“But he’s also—” Zula put in.

“Of course, I know that there’s much more to C-plus than just that,” Alice said, then turned to Corvallis. “Otherwise I don’t think that Dodge would have entrusted you with being the executor of his will, would he?”

Good. So someone had laid that on her.

Alice continued, “I want you to know that Richard, whatever some people might say about him, was a fine judge of men, and if he trusted you, then we trust you. And I can see all kinds of intelligent reasons to have the executor be someone outside the family—an impartial person.”

“Well, I’m just sorry that we are re-meeting under these circumstances,” Corvallis said. This was a bit of dialogue he had concocted ahead of time, and it sounded that way. So he improvised, “Thanks for your statement that you just made.” Zula and Alice kept looking at him as if they were expecting more. “It means a lot to me,” he tried. Both women seemed to find this acceptable as a termination of whatever it was he’d been trying to gasp out. “I’ll do my best,” he tacked on, unable to stop himself, and they began to look a little unnerved.

He was saved by the timely arrival of Stan, who showed up with a younger lawyer in tow.

The summit conference had now attained a sort of quorum. Alice, Zula, and Jake were the closest Richard had to next of kin: to put it bluntly, enough critical mass to pull the plug on Richard’s ventilator. Corvallis was there in his role as executor, which had not formally commenced yet, and the lawyers were in the house, and on the clock. Insensitive to the ways of lawyers and their hourly rates, Alice insisted on making coffee and small talk, racking up, in Corvallis’s loose estimation, about a thousand dollars’ worth of billable hours before allowing the conversation to spiral around to matters that might be considered business. Distracted by the meter running in his head, Corvallis sipped his coffee—which was terrible—and looked around at the room, which was finished like the abode of a wealthy old lady. Of course, Alice Forthrast was, in fact, a wealthy old lady, but he suspected that her house was finished in an altogether different style.