Jesús crossed himself and kissed his hand.
“What about you, Luis?” asked Jeremiah.
“Oh, me, I am running from bad trouble. The police, they think I stole a veecar. I didn’t steal no veecar, but this man who no likes me say he saw me, and they want to put me in the prison. So my brother Mundo, he knows about the statue of libertations, and he tells me ‘Luis, always they are looking for maintainers at Golden Worldlines, and they don’t check no backgrounds or ask no questions, and you know very well how to work with the wood. The statue of libertations for stealing a veecar in California is just three years, and you going to be gone 20.’ So.”
“Luis,” said Jeremiah, “are you sure the statute of limitations counts Earth time instead of the time here on the ship?”
Luis laughed and clapped Jeremiah on the back.
“My friend,” he said, “Mundo knows all about the statue of libertations. When I return to Earth, I will be intocable.”
Jeremiah did not share Luis’s confidence on this point, but he let it go for the moment, and the table began to encourage him, under the pretext of “Spanish lessons,” to converse in Spanish, which eventually left Carlos Second gasping for air so hard that Humberto mistakenly delivered the Heimlich maneuver.
“I should probably head out,” Jeremiah said. “I have to find an iguana.”
“Iguanas-ranas,” said Heriberto after Luis had translated, which was apparently so hilarious that Carlos Second began to relapse.
As Jeremiah was standing up to go, he took note of a sign on the wall, which read “Please feel free to bus your own table. Sorry.” Though there were once again flocks of Canadians flitting about and clearing dishes, Jeremiah felt a momentary pang for them. After all, it was debatably not their fault that they had been born Canadian, and it seemed to Jeremiah that the least he could do to assist a fellow human being was to bus his own table, which he did.
But as he was separating his dirty dishes, someone bumped into him from behind, so hard that he dropped his spoon into the vat of soapy water meant for forks.
“Excuse me,” Jeremiah said, turning around. He had not yet decided whether he was actually excusing himself or inviting whoever had bumped him to excuse himself, but he saw right away that the Canadian doctor on the other end of this bumping transaction shared no such doubts about who was in the wrong.
He was about Jeremiah’s age, height, and weight, wearing a white coat and stethoscope. Jeremiah had taken vague note of him before, as young men always take note of potential romantic rivals. He was much better looking than Jeremiah—or he would have been if his Gallic good looks had not been held hostage to what could have been charitably described as brooding intensity. It was the kind of brooding intensity that Jeremiah generally crossed the street to avoid—the kind he associated with violent outbursts at random passersby—and if there were a kind of brooding intensity that Jeremiah would have welcomed trapping him in the back corner of the cafeteria, this wasn’t it.
As a result, Jeremiah found himself apologizing to a Canadian—and not just in the idiomatic sense of “apologizing to someone he had no earthly business apologizing to,” but also in the literal sense of “apologizing to someone he had no earthly business apologizing to, who also happened to be Canadian.”
“Sorry about that,” said Jeremiah. “My fault entirely. If I could just squeeze through here.”
The Canadian doctor, who had planted himself firmly between Jeremiah and his escape route through the cafeteria, did not budge as Jeremiah sucked in his gut, stood on his tiptoes, and took other exquisite pains to get around him without further physical contact.
“Right,” Jeremiah said when he was past and therefore able to breathe again, “nice bumping into you.”
“Vat fair foot,” said the Canadian doctor—or French words to that effect.
The moment had come for Jeremiah to employ his French language skills.
“Excusez-moi?” he said.
“Jamie Aussie long Tom Kujo vee,” said the Canadian doctor—or something closely resembling.
Though Jeremiah’s French was not as good as his Spanish, he doubted the phrase added up to an apology. As he took his brisk leave from the cafeteria, he saw Grubel eating a sandwich and watching from across the room. He was frowning as he chewed.
* * *
Back at the office Jeremiah found Mr. Boyle pacing back and forth in the hallway and talking to himself.
“My keycard doesn’t work,” Mr. Boyle said, not to himself.
“I can help you with that, Mr. Boyle,” said Jeremiah as he unlocked the door. “Come in and take a number.”
“There’s no one else here—why do I have to take a number?”
Jeremiah was about to reply with an unkind witticism, but he caught himself. Below the shock of red hair, Mr. Boyle’s face had a certain puffiness that Jeremiah associated with large doses of steroids or years of unhappiness. And the cold glitter and streetwise edge in his eyes, Jeremiah suddenly realized, was just a bluff—a desperate bluff to cover up not only the profound fear behind them but an even deeper bewilderment.
It seemed to Jeremiah that, although he and Boyle inhabited the same universe—which universe they both, being grown men, knew to be absurd—they could not have interpreted that absurdity more differently. What Jeremiah took as arbitrary, Boyle experienced as personal. What Jeremiah thought to be uncaring, Boyle knew to be tricksy and hostile. What Jeremiah assumed was a cosmic joke, Boyle was sure was a dirty swindle. In that moment, Jeremiah could see perfectly in Boyle’s eyes the unshakeable certainty that the entire universe, and everyone and everything in it, was designed and deployed solely contra Robert Boyle, and wanted nothing more than to get the better of him. And Jeremiah could see as well Boyle’s conviction that of the two weapons available to defend himself against this onslaught—his wits for one and a nasty, blind suspicion for the other—only the second was sharp enough to bother reaching for.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jeremiah.
But Jeremiah’s relenting so easily only seemed to sharpen Boyle’s suspicions that he was being conned, and he took a ticket ostentatiously.
“Now serving number … TWENTY-EIGHT.”
“So your keycard doesn’t work?” Jeremiah asked.
“The woman who cleans my cabin has been looking at me funny. My ex-wife probably waved her and put her up to it. Even at this distance she’s found some way to screw me. I’ll have the last laugh, though. I don’t care how many passages I have to book, I’ll stand above her grave and piss on it while holding out my last credit, and she won’t be able to touch it. Because she’ll be dead.”
Jeremiah, who had heard enough variations on this theme over the last two years that he had learned to ignore them, opened the playbook and skimmed a page.
“What cabin are you in?”
“H06.”
“May I see the keycard?”
Boyle handed it over and Jeremiah, following the steps carefully, recoded it using the encoder he found—just as the playbook promised he would—in the bottom desk drawer.
“This will work now?” said Boyle.
“If not, just bring it back. We’re here until five. Thank you for visiting the Guest Services Desk, Mr. Boyle,” said Jeremiah. “Have a Golden Worldlines—”
Boyle slammed the door behind him.
“—day.”
* * *
Thus began the afternoon’s parade of keycards on the fritz—four more guests in the space of an hour, each having been greeted by the same blinking light and angry beeping when they returned to their rooms for a little post-lunch siesta.
All four were embarrassed and pleasant and grateful, but nothing could quite erase the flavor of Boyle’s visit from Jeremiah’s mouth—or wipe from his mind the unpleasant glimpse of what lay behind Boyle’s eyes.
* * *
“It’s my keycard,” said Mr. Werther hoarsely as he sat down. “Quite stupid, actually.”
“I li
ke your vest,” said Jeremiah.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Mr. Werther rubbed the turquoise wool between his thumb and fingers. “They’ve been keeping it so cold in here lately.”
“But you were saying, about your keycard? Let me guess,” said Jeremiah, already opening the drawer with the encoder, “the light on the door blinks red? Angry beeping sounds?”
“Even stupider, I’m afraid. I’ve lost it.”
He took a handful of mints from the desk and tossed one into his mouth as if it were a heart pill.
“Good,” said Jeremiah, “a little variety.”
In two minutes flat Jeremiah had read everything the playbook had to say on the matter of lost keycards, found the stock of spares in a cabinet behind the beaded curtain at the back of the office, and encoded a replacement, but even in that short interval Werther managed to put a sizeable dent in the dish of mints. His eyes had an absent, sad look.
“Would you like a bag of those to take with you?” Jeremiah asked.
“Oh, no—no, thank you. My goodness, I’ve eaten all your mints. Ech, they’re actually terrible, aren’t they? It’s a nasty habit. Whenever I’m preoccupied with legal questions, I crave sugar.”
“You’re a lawyer! I’d forgotten!”
Jeremiah’s having forgotten was not remarkable: none of his fellow passengers seemed able to hold in their minds the fact that Mr. Werther had made his own credit, and if they ever happened to be reminded, the memory faded as rapidly as if it had been written in water.
This collective amnesia had less to do with any social mercies on the part of the other passengers than with Mr. Werther’s own nature. He was one of those people who fit in anywhere, a universal donor in the circulatory system of society. He would not have raised an eyebrow in either a Detroit dive or a fundraising dinner in Washington.
“Yes, well, a semi-retired lawyer,” said Mr. Werther.
“What kind of law are you semi-retired from?”
“Oh, mainly family law of one type or another. Divorce, inheritance, the odd disowning.”
“Mr. Werther,” said Jeremiah, fighting the impulse to leap across the desk and hug him, “could I ask your advice on a couple legal matters?”
* * *
“Ferrets, eh?” said Mr. Werther when Jeremiah had finished.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Jeremiah said.
“It’s actually quite common.”
“Really?”
“I mean, this is the first I’ve heard of ferrets in particular, but there’s something about animals that makes rich old people want to leave them everything. Not the animals you’d expect, either. The dolphins and lions? They hardly see a credit. The sea-slugs and wolverines, on the other hand? Rolling in it. Lots of poodles. Octopuses, once. Octopi?”
“Octopodoi,” said Jeremiah, “a consortium of. Do you have a legal opinion about my chances of breaking the will?”
“How good is your lawyer?”
“The best,” said Jeremiah. “That is,” he added, in deference to present company, “one of the best.”
“You’re swimming in tricky waters. In most states wills can’t be contested more than two years after the death of the testator—but two years for whom? Back on Earth, your Uncle Leo is nearly three years deceased, but for you, less than two years of subjective time has passed since his death.”
Werther had started eating mints again—his nails clinked on the bottom of the dish.
“Generally the courts have favored whatever time frame makes matters more predictable for people on Earth—which means, usually, Earth time. The legal term for it is ‘Principle of Least Earthly Surprise.’ Write that down. They don’t want some poor fool to inherit a fortune, buy a mansion, and then find out 20 years later that the credit isn’t his after all. That would be surprising. But—and here’s your angle—how can ferrets be surprised about credit? Would they even know if the will were reversed and the credit went back to you? The people at the shelter would, of course, but they’re just the stewards of the inheritance, not the beneficiaries. Once you’re back on Earth, aren’t you the one surprised to find your rights subordinate to what is essentially a form of weasel? It’s far from a slam dunk, but that’s what I think you’ve got. Tell your lawyer to check Hansel v. Hansel, Lemaire v. Bulger—write these down!—Jonas v. Jones, and Mead v. Mead. Those are the landmark cases—or at least they were 20 years ago.”
“And Mead v. Mead,” repeated Jeremiah, scribbling furiously. “Got it.”
“Now as for your friend with the grand theft veeauto charge waiting for him, there’s no ambiguity there, unless the Supreme Court has revisited Alabama v. Pinkerton in our absence, which I doubt. The statute of limitations expires on subjective time. End of story. Hartshorne posits exactly this situation in his majority opinion: a man who commits a crime and immediately boards a ship for a journey at relativistic speeds, then returns a mere year older himself but having escaped prosecution for a crime that should have followed him for ten. Allowing such behavior would be a form of moral hazard.”
“So my friend will be in danger when we get back?”
“Well, I imagine they could still charge him. As for whether he’s in actual danger: who knows if after 20 years anyone will still be interested in a missing veecar? It sounds like the whole case turns on the testimony of this supposed eyewitness. Who knows if he’s still angry enough to testify after what has been, for him, 20 years? Who’s to say he’s even still alive?”
“So you’re saying he might be all right?”
“Lawyers don’t say things like that,” said Mr. Werther. “Your friend needs to get himself a lawyer the minute he sets foot on American soil again. A criminal lawyer.”
“Thank you Mr. Werther,” said Jeremiah. “You’re a lifesaver.”
* * *
Some time later, as Jeremiah was flipping idly through the playbook, the door of the Guest Services Office opened and a figure darkened the frame, backlit dramatically by the lights in the hall.
“Jeremiah,” said the figure.
“Mrs. Chapin,” said Jeremiah.
“Jeremiah,” she said again.
“Mrs. Chapin,” said Jeremiah, gamely.
She crossed the room, sat down across from him, and reached across the desk to take his right hand in both of hers.
“Jeremiah, oh, Jeremiah!” she said.
“Mrs. Chapin,” he said, and then, because he could not think of anything else to say, “can you please take a number?”
“How can you speak of numbers after what you’ve done to me?”
“What have I done to you?” asked Jeremiah.
“You have rekindled a fire, Jeremiah. Here.”
Attempting to further Jeremiah’s understanding with a tactile aid, Mrs. Chapin drew his hand towards her breast, slowly and deliberately enough that Jeremiah had some time to consider his options. It was not much time, but that was all right, as he didn’t have many options, and all of them were bad.
Jeremiah had seen all the waves in The Graduate family—the original, both remakes, and even that abomination of a sequel The Postgraduate—so he was quite clear on the best methods for ruining his life at this moment. But he could not call to mind any wave that might serve as instructional material for how to politely reject the advances of an older woman who could, with a single word from her scorned lips, condemn her scorner to two years of indentured servitude.
“Mrs. Chapin,” he said, grasping at straws, “think of Mr. Chapin.”
“No!” shouted Mrs. Chapin, releasing his hand, which Jeremiah retrieved and parked safely on his knee. “He’s lived his whole life with privilege and credit, he has no right to deny the smallest fraction to someone else.”
For the first time Jeremiah held out some hopes for the future of this conversation. Reading cunningly between the lines of Mrs. Chapin’s last statements, he had concluded that credit was involved somehow—from which he further concluded that she was not proposing simple adultery. The
refore she was proposing something else: perhaps turning Jeremiah into a gigolo and compensating him for services rendered—which was far from ideal, but not materially worse than the situation he had recently thought himself in, and marginally more profitable. Or perhaps the passion she had referred to so dramatically was more of a pitying, charitable, maternal passion, and Mrs. Chapin meant to offer him credit to assist him out of the troubles in which he had landed. This second possibility seemed significantly more likely—there was precedent for it, as the Chapins had already offered to pay for his ticket—and infinitely more attractive. Jeremiah would still be compelled to refuse, but as a lifelong student of human nature he had noted that people tended to get significantly less exercised at the refusal of their credit than their bodily affections.
“Mrs. Chapin,” said Jeremiah, “you’re very generous, but as I said before, I can’t let you pay for my ticket.”
“I don’t want to pay for your ticket,” Mrs. Chapin said.
“You don’t?”
“Have you been listening to a word I said? Why would I pay for your ticket?”
“Well,” said Jeremiah, “I just thought, since you said the other day about how I was being persecuted by Golden Worldlines, and maybe ferrets, and then there was the passion you just talked about and all that, so I naturally assumed—”
Jeremiah had never said the word “naturally” less naturally in all his natural life. The effort proved too great to sustain, and he drifted to a stop with a toss of his hand, as if Mrs. Chapin should be able to fill in the rest without his help.
“Ah,” Mrs. Chapin said. Her face fell. “I did say something like that. But then my brain kept turning, Jeremiah, and my heart kept fluttering. I hardly slept last night. Then, this morning, I recognized the feeling: I was thirsty.”
“I see,” said Jeremiah. “Glass of water? Tea?”
“Not that kind of thirst—a thirst for justice. I was so angry about the injustice that was being done to you. But then I started to think, and I realized: what was being done to you was nothing compared to what was being done to the workers on this ship. I used to worry about that kind of thing, Jeremiah. My life used to have some purpose. In college I was something of a radical. I attended marches and demanded things. But when I married Henry, I promised him I would give all that up. I didn’t want to hurt his chances of becoming president.”
World Enough (And Time) Page 7
