World Enough (And Time)

by Edmund Jorgensen

  This was the crucial moment. The matter Jeremiah wished to discuss with Mr. Porter was delicate and emotionally charged, and if he approached the man too early, before the coffee had cleared his head and booted his rational systems, Jeremiah might as well be chatting with a zombie suffering from migraines and impulse control issues. If he waited too long, on the other hand, the caffeine in Mr. Porter’s bloodstream would reach its normal levels, which levels would have driven a typical Clydesdale to expire of terrified palpitations, and lent Mr. Porter his signature twitchiness and anxiety—an equally unfortuitous mode in which to tackle tricky issues of backgammon and any cheating thereat. The window was narrow, and after about 30 seconds—as Mr. Porter had finished his eighth cup and was filling his ninth—Jeremiah pounced.

  “Good morning, Mr. Porter,” said Jeremiah.

  Mr. Porter looked over his shoulder and cut off the spout.

  “And to you, Jeremiah,” he said mildly. Things were going nicely.

  “I wanted to chat with you for a minute about Mr. Wendstrom.”

  The name acted like a mainline of the darkest, foulest espresso to Mr. Porter’s heart. His hands began to shake, a tremor developed in his jaw, and the color in his face rose until it kissed the red of the coffee cherry itself.

  “I have nothing to say about that cheating bastard,” he said, spitting the words. “Except that he’s a cheating bastard.” He drained the ninth coffee at one pull and began to coax a tenth from the urn.

  “You should see the state he’s in,” said Jeremiah. “He’s locked himself in his cabin and turned the music up to dangerous levels, just so he can’t hear you spoil Crowns on Fire for him. I’m worried he’ll permanently damage his hearing.”

  “It would serve him right.”

  “He’s very sorry for what he’s done.”

  “Then why isn’t he here apologizing himself?” asked Mr. Porter.

  “Because he’s terrified you won’t even give him a chance to apologize before you blurt out the name of—who is the character whose paternity is in doubt?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest clue—I haven’t read any of those idiotic novels. Animals dressing up in armor and wizard robes? I prefer realism,” said Mr. Porter. As if to wash the taste of fantasy from his mouth, he downed another cup.

  “Then how were you going to spoil them for Mr. Wendstrom?”

  “I wasn’t, of course. I was just angry and looking for something to threaten him with. After all, I’m not going to engage in fisticuffs. But now that I’ve seen the effect, maybe I will get someone on Earth to wave me the ending. It would serve him right, the cheating bastard.”

  Mr. Porter drained another cup. The caffeine concentration was rising rapidly, and the conversation spinning out of control. Mr. Porter had to be slowed down, and quickly.

  “Do you mind if I just slip in here quickly and grab a bit myself?” Jeremiah said, taking a cup and slipping it below the spout in the narrow window of opportunity offered by Mr. Porter’s chugging of cup number who-knew-what-by-this-point. Mr. Porter looked as though he did mind quite a bit—his eyes widened in affront, and Jeremiah took the distinct impression that if Mr. Porter had been a cup or two in either direction, the matter might have come to blows.

  “All I’m asking,” said Jeremiah, allowing the merest trickle through the spout and into his cup, “is that you give him the chance to apologize.”

  Mr. Porter eyed the meager flow of coffee painfully. When 30 seconds had passed and the cup was only about half full, he resigned.

  “Fine,” he said, “tell him—tell him that I’ll give him one chance to apologize. But if he cheats me again, I’ll get someone to wave me every Crowns on Fire spoiler they can find, and I’ll—I’ll tattoo them on his arm while he sleeps. And on his forehead—backwards, so that it will be perfectly legible when he looks in the mirror. You got that?”

  Turning off the spout and pulling his cup so that Mr. Porter could resume his ritual of auroral resurrection, Jeremiah promised that he did have it, and that he would pass it on to Mr. Wendstrom, verbatim and posthaste.

  * * *

  Never one to sit on a promise (or on good news, which was in short supply these days), and with almost two hours to spare before he had to open the office, Jeremiah raced directly to Mr. Wendstrom’s room—a feat he could have accomplished if he were blind and his seeing-eye dog at the optometrist for the day. The distant thunder of Frank Sinatra’s serenade began 100 yards from the door, leading Jeremiah to suspect that Mr. Wendstrom had found some way—perhaps exploiting his skills as a motivational speaker—to coax his PED to give even more than 110 percent.

  But there was a new, odd thrum to the song now—a bass drum striking everywhere except the beat, as if a bebop drummer had drunkenly wandered into the wrong recording studio, sat down behind Old Blue Eyes, and proceeded to carpet bomb his smooth baritone. When Jeremiah came around the last corner, he discovered that the drunken bebop drummer was Jack, and his instrument was not the bass drum, but Mr. Wendstrom’s door. There was a vocal component to Jack’s musical arrangement as well, which went something like this: “Bernie! Open up! I just want the name of your supplier! Your SUPPLIER! I’m not the police! NOT the POLICE! Your SUPPLIER, Bernie!” And subtle variations thereon.

  Unsure whether Jack’s willingness to descend to physical violence had subsided since their last encounter, Jeremiah was of two minds about making his presence known—namely, whether he should back away slowly in the hopes of escaping notice in the first place, or say to hell with stealth and sprint for all he was worth—but the decision was taken out of his hands when Jack, who must have caught some movement in the corner of his eye, turned and saw him.

  “Informer,” Jack hissed. Jeremiah could not help but be impressed by Jack’s hissing of a word that contained no sibilants.

  Despite Jeremiah’s earlier fears, there was no threat of violence in Jack’s voice or attitude this time, only utter contempt and a hint of sadness that anyone could ever become so subsumed in the System as to stoop to the depths that must be required to run a sting against a senior citizen and grateful recovering Systemite who just wanted to puff a little weed and get mellow before returning to Earth.

  “Informer!” Jack shouted, turning and pounding again on the door. “Don’t trust him, Bernie, he’s an INFORMER!”

  “Jack,” Jeremiah said, “please listen to me.”

  “No!” Jack shouted, making earmuffs of his hands, as if the mere voice of an informer might corrupt or undo all that was still good and anti-Systemic in him. “No!”

  He ran down the hall, still cradling his head in his hands, now practically sobbing over and over “Informer, informer, informer.”

  Once he had gone, Jeremiah took his place and banged a few times on the door.

  “Mr. Wendstrom!” he shouted. “It’s Jeremiah! I have good news! Mr. Porter hasn’t read a word of Crowns on Fire! You’re safe! Mr. Wendstrom!”

  But his efforts met with no more success than Jack’s. The door stayed closed, Fly Me to the Moon continued to loop blastingly behind it, and the time allotted for breakfast before opening the office continued to tick away. Finally Jeremiah wrote a note telling Mr. Wendstrom the good news and slipped it through the mail slot. He peered after it for a moment to see if he could detect Mr. Wendstrom coming to read it, but it was impossible to say. Perhaps he had finally exhausted himself so thoroughly that, even with the blasting music, he had fallen asleep—in which case, thought Jeremiah, he would find a welcome surprise waiting when he woke up.

  * * *

  After a quiet and wonderfully Mayflower-less rest of the morning in the office, Jeremiah coded two keycards: one for Mr. Roof’s door, and one for Mr. Wendstrom’s, in case he had time to check on him after tossing Mr. Roof’s room. Then he closed the office for lunch and set out on his next adventure in espionage. He trusted that Mr. Chapin would hold up his end of the operation, keeping Mr. Roof busy during lunch, but out of caution Jeremiah still rang the
bell and called out a few times before entering.

  Roof’s Super Luxury cabin had the neat, happy glow of a room occupied by a seasoned and disciplined traveler. Everything was unpacked, ordered, available. Mr. Roof’s formal wear hung in the closet, sorted in order of ascending pigmentation, from linen to seersucker to black tie. An antique book, with a cover of worn red cloth, sat perfectly squared to the edges of the bedside table, a bookmark peeking out from roughly halfway through its pages. Other volumes shared the bookshelves with a few brightly colored objets d’art, all looking recently dusted by the pink feather duster that lay on the bottom shelf, which Mr. Roof had apparently brought on board himself in order to keep standards in his own hands. It even seemed that Mr. Roof had made his own bed, or at least came after the maids to give the comforter a few final folds and pillows a couple plumps according to his own style. His sock drawer held nothing but socks, and the desk drawer was empty except for the golden keycard indicating that Mr. Roof kept a safe deposit box on board. Jeremiah could make out no signs of illness here in the main living area—no bottles of medicine by the bedside or used syringes in the wastebaskets. He headed for the bathroom.

  Mr. Roof’s bathroom was Spartan and sparkling, with nary a hand towel out of place. Toothbrush and toothpaste lay perfectly parallel on the side of the sink. It seemed so clear that there was nothing to find here that Jeremiah was tempted to skip the medicine cabinet, as a kind of token refusal to invade at least one area of Mr. Roof’s privacy. But he had told Mr. Chapin he would find what there was to find, so he apologized to Mr. Roof in absentia and swung the mirror open.

  At first he thought the shelves had been bricked up and filled in, but slowly Jeremiah realized that the mint green rectangles stacked to occupy all available space on all three shelves were pillboxes—the kind with separate compartments for Thursday morning and Monday night and so on. Taking great care not to upset the entire pharmaceutical wall, Jeremiah removed a single brick for examination.

  Mr. Roof greeted each day with a decent cocktail of pills: the morning compartments each held a blue pill, a white pill, a pink pill, and two red pills—one square and one a rounded triangle. For a nightcap Mr. Roof took a yellow pill that looked like a tiny cookie cutter had been applied bloodlessly to a canary. Jeremiah had no idea what any of these pills were, but they were numerous and certainly looked potent, and Jeremiah could imagine that they were keeping any number and variety of health issues at bay. He replaced the pillbox with equal care and left the bathroom.

  Jeremiah was standing by the door of the cabin, ready to leave, when something odd registered in his mind. He walked back to the bookshelf to take a closer look at the objets d’art there: three tasteful figurines of carved wood, facing out in a trident formation, all three works sharing a common subject.

  “Iguanas,” Jeremiah whispered.

  For there they were: highly stylized, fantastically colored, resting on their elbows in unlikely anthropomorphic poses—but undeniably iguanas. And now that Jeremiah had noticed these iguanas, the cabin was suddenly crawling with others. Field Guide to Iguana Identification, proclaimed the spine of one book on the shelf. Another, thicker tome promised the secrets of Raising Happy Iguanas in Captivity. Jeremiah picked up the red book from the nightstand: The Night of the Iguana. And the postcard bookmark? Jeremiah slid it halfway from the pages—a glossy iguana hung inverted from a leafy branch, staring out with cold eyes that dared Jeremiah to make any sense of this latest discovery.

  * * *

  When Jeremiah returned to the office, Mr. Chapin was already waiting for him in the hall.

  “I saw that woman again while I was waiting,” Henry Chapin said as Jeremiah turned on the lights and settled in, “Since it seemed like you weren’t keen on having her come in here, I walked up and introduced myself to scare her off.”

  “Thank you,” said Jeremiah. “She’s going to get me at some point, but you’ve helped me dodge one more bullet.”

  “Let’s not forget who is doing whom a favor here. Speaking of: what’s the news?”

  “Mr. Roof is the neatest person I’ve ever seen in my life. His quarters are immaculate.”

  “But is he sick?”

  “He takes a lot of pills,” said Jeremiah.

  “How many is a lot?”

  “Let’s see, in the morning he takes a blue one, a white one, a pink one, and two different red ones. At night there’s a yellow one.”

  Mr. Chapin chewed this over, no doubt comparing it to his own regimen, which must have been more impressive still.

  “We’ll have to find out what they’re for. I don’t suppose you got samples? Of course you didn’t, I can’t ask you to steal a man’s medication. Anything you found to suggest why he’s on E4?”

  “No,” Jeremiah said.

  “But you found something else, didn’t you? Something that doesn’t sit right with you—I can tell.”

  “I left his room with some questions,” said Jeremiah, choosing his words carefully, “about a totally unrelated matter.”

  “Jeremiah, I have to find out what those pills are for.”

  “But you still can’t tell me why.”

  Mr. Chapin shook his head.

  “Maybe,” said Jeremiah, “we can help each other here. I find out what pills Mr. Roof takes, and you ask him some simple questions—questions that have nothing to do with why he’s on this cruise.”

  “Just tell me what to do.”

  “When you talk to him next, find some way to turn the conversation to iguanas.”

  “Did you say ‘iguanas’?” asked Mr. Chapin.

  “That’s right.”

  “What am I supposed to ask him about iguanas?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Jeremiah, “just bring them up naturally.”

  “And then?”

  “Just listen to what he says and report it to me.”

  “All right,” said Mr. Chapin, standing up. “I suppose if you’re taking my request on faith, I can do no less for you. I’ll think up a few clever ways to work iguanas into the dinner conversation tonight.”

  “One more thing,” said Jeremiah. “Make sure you’re out of earshot of Mrs. Abdurov and Mr. Wendstrom—if he even bothers to come out of his room. Trust me,” he added in response to Mr. Chapin’s questioning expression, “you don’t want to know.”

  * * *

  Mr. Chapin had not been gone long before Bradley arrived, bursting through the door with a headlong intensity.

  “So now you are engaged?” he said to Jeremiah by way of greeting.

  “I get off at five,” said Jeremiah. “Why don’t we meet in the cafeteria and sit down for a civilized chat?”

  “So you don’t deny it?”

  Jeremiah, sensing that this might not be as short a conversation as he could have wished, stood up and came around the desk. Seated, he felt, he would be at a disadvantage.

  “This is my place of employment,” said Jeremiah—which was a novel thing for him to be able to say. “I don’t come into your place of employment and start asking you questions, do I?”

  “Because I don’t go around getting engaged to the woman you’re in love with and then lying to you about it, do I?”

  Jeremiah sighed.

  “All right, yes—we’re engaged.”

  “So why did you say you weren’t engaged?” said Bradley.

  “I suppose I was having complicated feelings. It’s always—”

  “You were afraid I was going to get violent with you?”

  “Now that you mention it,” said Jeremiah, “yes.”

  “Coward,” Bradley said. “I would never stoop to violence.”

  “You hip checked me in the cafeteria—and you pushed me out of the doorway the other night.”

  “That hardly qualifies as violence. If I ever get violent with you, you’ll know—believe me, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “I believe you,” said Jeremiah.

  “But I don’t believe you,” said Br
adley.

  Jeremiah thought this over for a moment, but then had to admit he didn’t understand.

  “I don’t think you really are engaged to Kimberly,” Bradley said.

  “Oh, but I am engaged to her,” said Jeremiah. “In fact we’re both engaged, to each other. Very, very engaged.”

  “You’re not.”

  “We are.”

  “You’re not,” roared Bradley, “and by God I’ll hear you say it!”

  In the increasingly unlikely event that Jeremiah were ever called on to write a best man’s speech for Bradley’s wedding, he would have been hard-pressed to come up with too many bullet points of sincere encomium. With a few hours of hard phrase-turning he might have found a complimentary figure to flatter Bradley’s brooding intensity—and he supposed that he could have dug up some notable achievements in the field of medicine, along with a mention of the charitable impulses evinced by his plan to return and practice medicine in the ravaged remains of Canada. But now Jeremiah could have rounded out that meager list a bit with the goodness of Bradley’s word and his reputation for honesty. Jeremiah could even have called it brutal honesty, for—just as Bradley had promised—Jeremiah was the very first to know when Bradley stooped to violence.

  “Stooped,” that was, in a physical as well as a moral sense, for as Bradley ran at Jeremiah he crouched low enough to grab Jeremiah around the calves. Bradley proceeded to try and pick Jeremiah up and throw him over, as if pulling out the evil he represented from the very root.

  While the experience was not as painful as Jeremiah could have feared, it was extremely awkward, with plenty of tugging and grunting on Bradley’s part and the occasional rhetorical question delivered between highly punctuated breaths, such as: “Why. Won’t. You. Just. Go. Over?” Jeremiah found himself wishing he had something to read.