Джеймс Келли: The true history of the end of the world

She found him half an hour later standing by the filing cabinet, a folder with his name on it opened flat on top of the shelf of other folders, leating through clippings, faxes, photographs, and half a dozen disks in plastic folders, each labeled in her small handwriting: "Journal — Early Life," "Journal — Political Career," "Joumal — Relationships."

"Here you are," she said.

He didn't bother to look at her. "You broke into my journal."

"Yes." She settled herself on the futon. "It reads as if you intended it for an audience. You have some amazing insights, Chester. Your analysis of the campaign of '16 is the best I've ever read."

He considered. "You expect me to be flattered?"

"Maybe you should be." She gestured at the stickers on the walls.

"Twentieth-century politics is a hobby of mine. I'm interested in your career, Chester."

A hobby, he thought. Like fly-fishin, stamp collecting. He closed the folder and put it back in the cabinet. "There are lots of files in here. I'm just one of your interests."

"You're a distinct individual."

"Chester Drummond. Your patient."

"Chester Drummond, hunter for secrets. Believer in truth." He could not tell how much of her voice was mockery. It didn't sound like mockery. "Leader of men. Last of the pre-millennial giants."

"And I'm fascinating, right? You're impressed by me, but then you're impressed by Emil. Bet. Allan Fence." He searched her brown eyes for some sign that she thought he was different from the rest. The light was failing and the room was heavy with shadows. She gave him nothing and he turned his back to her, feeling old, almost on the verge of tears.

He felt her hands on his shoulders. She slid them down his back, around his waist, and pressed herself against him. He could not have been more surprised had she pulled a gun on him.

He laughed, a choked laugh. She rested her head on his shoulder blade. She slid her slender fingers between the buttons of his shirt, touching the gray hair of his chest. Her hands were warm in the chill of the room. Unbelieving, he turned around.

She drew him toward the futon, and for a brief time he stopped asking himself questions, as surely as if he had C-K'd himself into equanimity, while her pale body moved through the gray dusk against his aging one.

When he awoke he found she had covered him with a quilt. It was night and a Halloween moon threw a wedge of silver light across the comer of the futon. Roberta was sitting in front of her datagate, another quilt wrapped around her body. Her dark hair tumbled over her forehead, and the profile of her face stirred unnameable emotions in him. For the first time since he'd gotten on the train in New York, he felt more calm than angry.

"What did this mean?" he asked.

"Did you enjoy it?" She did not look away from the screen.

"Of course. Didn't you?"

"Oh, yes, certainly. So why does it have to mean anything?"

"Because we have some kind of relationship. Doctor-patient, jailer-prisoner — I don't know exactly. We work together, maybe we're even friends. This changes things."

"No, it doesn't." Finally she turned to face him. "You needed something I had to give, that's all. It's amazing how a little serotonin boost can change your outlook on life."

Chester sat up, reaching for his clothes. "You're saying this was behavior modification?"

"Don't get me wrong. You're a legitimately fascinating man, Chester. Your

rebelliousness, egocentricity, radical self-confidence — they're qualities that should make you a valued member of society."

"They did, at one time," Chester said, calmer than he felt. "In case you've forgotten."

"I haven't. But there's no reason you shouldn't find a place in the world now. I heard you got upset when the latest school field trip came through this afternoon. Fine. So why shut yourself up in this museum?"

"Were you this much of a manipulative bitch before you were C-K treated?"

"I was very young. I don't remember."

Chester pulled on his pants. He had a knot in his back from the futon.

"You know, there's nothing you can do to change the world," Roberta said. She reached behind her without looking and shut off the gate. "You didn't change it as much as you thought you had, and what you did accomplish was a working out of your own inadequacies through denial and projection. You were a dangerous man, a trigger waiting to be pulled to set off the millions of similarly warped and frustrated people around you. Until they all changed, and you were left alone."

"I'm not alone here."

"Right. The others at the Mitchell center are like you. But I don't think

there's enough explosive material in them for you to make much of a blast."

She rose from her chair, pulled the quilt around her and came to him. She

touched his cheek. "And you don't have to be alone, you know."

Chester pushed her hand away, pulled on his shoes and left. * * * 8.

Chester ate dinner alone, late, sulking. For some reason he couldn't stop

thinking about Charlotte, his first wife. They had been very young, both of them law students at Duke, when they'd married. They'd lived in a roach-infested apartment upstairs from a shopfront a few blocks from the campus. Charlotte was scared of insects, and when the weather turned cool the large roaches that bred outside in the leaf mold would come into the house in search of food at night.

Charlotte would walk into the kitchen, flip on the light and spot one crawling up the face of the kitchen cabinet, or in the silverware drawer. She invariably screamed, but she didn't allow him to use insect spray, and she didn't want to crush them. Neither did he — though he wouldn't admit it, he was hardly less squeamish — so they kept a plastic cup and a piece of cardboard on the bookshelf. Chester would trap the roach under the cup, slide the sheet of cardboard under the cup and carry the roach to the bathroom and flush it down the toilet.

After a while, whenever he heard Charlotte's shriek from another room, he knew that it was time for him to fetch the cup and go roach hunting. The ritual, Chester later realized, in its gruesome acknowledgment of the imperfect nature of the world, and the way they coped with it without betraying their sensibilities, was a textbook example of politics at work. It bound them together.

Not so firmly, of course, that it kept them bound when the marriage went sour. A politics sufficient to the dispatching of roaches hadn't carried them very far in the end.

In a black mood, feeling all his life behind, nothing left ahead of him, Chester was drawn to Bet Wiley's room. She sat knitting, her chair turned toward the door, as though she were expecting him. There was a portrait of the Virgin hanging over the bed.

"Ah, Chester. Sit down."

He sat. Her attitude of knowing that he was going to arrive only irritated him. "Why are you always knitting? You're a little old to be expecting a baby."

"There are all kinds of babies."

He let that pass. "Do you have children?"

"Two. My daughter Reshonda is a hospital dietician in Rochester. Roger, my son, was studying law before he was C-K boosted. Now he's a landscape architect."

"Grandchildren?"

She shook her head. The clack of her needles filled a long silence. She was waiting for something from him.

"What are you making?"

She fanned the stitches out along the needles to keep them from falling off and then held up what was obviously a sweater. "I started back in March." She came out of her chair, pressed it to his shoulders and nodded in satisfaction. "For you."

"For me?"

"She told me you would come and take over here."

"What do you mean, take over?"

"It's time for me to move on to another farm."

"Move on? I don't understand." His brain was like mud. "Were you-aware of my work?"