The Traveler's Companion

by Chater, Christopher John

  “Damn right they are. And we’re going to make her look fabulous,” Gibbons said, now drunk.

  They both laughed.

  “I better get the Congressional Medal of Honor for this one,” Gibbons said.

  “Or a photo op in Vogue.”

  They laughed even harder.

  “This is ridiculous!”

  There was a knock at the front door.

  “Oh, shit,” Gibbons said. “He’s here.”

  “Why is he here? Doesn’t Angela have her own room?”

  “He must have gone there already.”

  “Go tell him she’s not here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Tell him she went somewhere to get ready.”

  “Where?”

  “Just tell him she’s not here. There’s still another ten minutes before the computer initiates the reboot.”

  “Damn it, Iverson!”

  Gibbons went to answer the door. Iverson could hear Go’s voice. It sounded as if he were inside the hotel room. Did Gibbons invite him in?

  Gibbons came storming back into the bedroom. “Go insisted on coming in.”

  “What for?”

  “He wants to know if I want to join him and Angela for dinner.”

  “Tell him no and be done with it.”

  “He says he wants to discuss national security with regards to the Zone’s release.”

  “The Zone cannot be safely released to the public.”

  “He won’t listen to that, Iverson. He thinks he’s the fucking king of the Zone or something. He’s not going to surrender.”

  The computer beeped. A message read: Scan Complete. Reboot Initiated.

  Angela sighed, but her eyes remained closed.

  “What happened?” Gibbons asked.

  “It didn’t work.”

  “Shit! Now what?”

  “I’ll have to do it again,” Iverson said.

  “There’s no time for that!” Gibbons went over to Angela, grabbed her by her shoulders, and sat her up. The comforter fell off her chest, exposing her breasts. Her head fell lazily to one side.

  “What are you doing?” Iverson asked, trying to push him aside.

  Gibbons backhanded her across the face. “Wake up you artificial slut!”

  “You idiot!”

  Just then her eyes opened. She yawned widely and stretched her arms above her head. “I’m sorry. I must have dozed off. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  There was a knock at the bedroom door, “Everything all right, Director?” Go asked.

  “Fine! Just looking for my glasses.”

  “You don’t need glasses in the Zone, Director. One of the amazing things about this place.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Gibbons said.

  “I should really see if Angela is back. Did you want to join us?” Go asked.

  Iverson shook his head at Gibbons.

  “No. You two go ahead. We’ll talk later,” Gibbons said.

  “Sounds good. I’ll see you soon,” Go said.

  Gibbons and Iverson waited for the sound of the door closing before they exhaled.

  CHAPTER 9

  Iverson went home and locked the doors.

  They had gotten Angela ready in time for her date, despite Gibbons’s drunken hostility. Being the director’s emotional dummy was starting to get old. Luckily Iverson had gotten away from him before he said something he shouldn’t have. “I quit!” had often been on the edge of his tongue after an extended amount of time spent with the director. Were Iverson in his real home, right now he’d be reading over the resignation letter saved on his computer.

  Given Angela’s performance, there was a better chance Gibbons would fire him. After checking her database, Iverson had intentionally failed to mention his findings. Mr. Go’s brain scans didn’t look promising. Test subjects usually showed activity in the basal ganglia by now. His dopamine levels were higher than normal in her presence, which meant he was attracted to her, but he wasn’t falling in love. Was the Zone to blame? Who knew how the nervous system reacted to this place?

  There was also another possibility, a much more damaging one for the mission: C.C. Go, and men like him, might be incapable of love. Though she tested well with men suffering from a variety of mental disorders—bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, and even mental retardation—test subjects suffering from antisocial disorders with emotional disassociation were inconclusive. Sociopaths didn’t feel sympathy, empathy, or romantic attachment. With abnormalities found in their prefrontal cortexes, the part of their brains that allowed them to experience love may have been turned off. There was the hope that Angela could search around in the darkness of their minds and find the on switch. If she couldn’t, it would be the end of the project. Billions of dollars in funding couldn’t be justified if she only worked on psychologically well-adjusted criminals. Mr. Go certainly fit the sociopathic bill: the lack of empathy (blithely asking Iverson to create a version of his dead wife, treating ephemera like they were cardboard cutouts), the inflated sense of self, the superficial charm. Whether or not he was capable of an emotional bond had yet to be seen, but it wasn’t looking good.

  Iverson manifested himself a glass of wine.

  One glass led to a bottle. Then two bottles.

  For some reason ordering a pizza sounded like a good idea. He didn’t actually call anyone. Iverson was thinking over the idea when a teenager showed up on his porch holding a pizza box.

  “How much do I owe you?” Iverson asked, reaching for the wallet in his back pocket.

  “Seventeen fifty,” the pizza boy said.

  Iverson extracted a twenty-dollar bill, but didn’t hand it to him. “What’s your name?” he asked with a drunken slur.

  “Dunno.”

  “No? How about we call you, Jake. How do you like that?”

  “Cool,” Jake said.

  “Got a Social Security number, Jake?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Home address?”

  “Nope.”

  “As far as you know, your name is just Jake and you have nowhere to live and no legal documentation with which to make a living in this country?” Iverson asked.

  “Is that okay?”

  “How about parents? You have those, don’t you?”

  Jake shook his head.

  “So how the hell did you come into existence?”

  “Just did,” Jake said with a shrug.

  “How about your career? Have you ever even delivered a pizza before?”

  “Before this one? Before this one here?”

  “Yes. Has there ever been an occasion where you brought a pizza to a person other than me?”

  “Before this one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nah.”

  “Then how’d you know how do to it?”

  Jake thought long and hard, but he didn’t know the answer.

  “I see. So you just arrived here? You didn’t use a map? You just found my house?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You must have been born with the information encoded in your genes like bees programmed to pollinate flowers.”

  “Sweet,” Jake said, nodding.

  “Would it shock you to know that I was the one who created you?” Iverson was so drunk he had to lean against the door frame to stay vertical.

  “No . . . doesn’t shock me . . . yeah . . . I guess . . . but, hey that’s cool, you know?” Jake gestured to the twenty-dollar bill and asked, “You need change?”

  The kid had no idea that this was his God. The drunken guy who had ordered a pizza was a deity. He was the Supreme One who had created him and everyone else he knew.

  Iverson handed him the twenty-dollar bill and said, “Keep it.”

  As Jake was taking the money, he vanished. He was completely corporeal one second and the next he was gone. He was like a mayfly, living thirty minutes or less, just enough time to deliver a pizza. Destiny fulfilled.

  Iverson took the pi
zza box into the dining room and set it on the table. When he opened it, he saw that it had mushrooms on it. He hated mushrooms.

  He decided to go out to eat.

  He teleported to North Beach. From the street corner, he scanned the neighborhood until he saw an Italian bistro. He went inside and sat at the bar.

  A bartender in a black vest and red tie acknowledged Iverson while filling a pint glass from the tap.

  “Can I get a menu, please?” Iverson asked.

  “Sure thing,” the bartender said. He put the glass of beer on the cocktail station and reached under the bar to get Iverson a menu.

  Iverson suspected that this was probably the most important moment in this bartender’s life. How many people got to directly serve their creator? Iverson didn’t know much about urban types, but he didn’t expect much from anyone with spiked hair and two days’ worth of a goatee. But how much intelligence did he need if all he had to do was keep Iverson drunk?

  “Any specials tonight?” Iverson asked.

  “Penne pasta in an alfredo sauce with breaded chicken.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll take that. And a glass of wine. Red, please. I don’t care about pairing the meal with white. Make it a bottle of your best cab. Do you have Petrus?”

  “Yes, sir. We do,” he said, his eyes widening.

  “What year?”

  “It’s a nineteen ninety-six.”

  “What’s the price?”

  “Three thousand, sir.”

  “Perfect. I’ll take it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Actually, do you have a magnum?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Seven thousand dollars, sir.”

  “Bring me that one instead.”

  The bartender got the manager and together they went to the wine cellar. The bartender brought back the Petrus, holding it like a newborn child.

  “Are you from out of town?” the bartender asked, pouring a taste for Iverson.

  Iverson tasted the wine and nodded his approval. The bartender filled the glass.

  “Boston,” Iverson said.

  “In town on business or pleasure?”

  “Business.”

  “What type of business would that be, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “You could say I’m in the creation business.”

  “Interesting. What do you create?”

  “People, cities, universes.”

  The bartender laughed. “Sounds almighty.”

  “Turns out the difficulties of such endeavors were greatly exaggerated.”

  “I can create drinks. Does that make me a creator?”

  “No, because you’re not actually creating, you’re mixing. You’re using materials already available. Don’t feel bad. I’m a scientist and we’re not much more than glorified bartenders ourselves. We mix things together to get a result. But imagine if you had no alcohol. What if you had to make the ingredients from scratch?”

  “Don’t think I could do that.”

  “Indeed. But I can. This ability, unfortunately, sends my previous occupation as a scientist into obsolescence. Sort of ironic. Science was on its way to completely eradicating magical thinking, but I think now it’s going to come back with a vengeance.”

  “Creator. Makes you some kind of a god, doesn’t it?”

  “To you, I’m a god. To someone else I’m just a drunk guy in a bar waiting for pasta alfredo.”

  “Let me go ring that in. Would you like some bread with it?”

  “Don’t bother. I got it.” Iverson manifested the plate of food in front of him, along with a steaming basket of bread.

  The bartender was shocked. “Oh, my God. How did you do that?”

  Iverson realized he was in jeopardy of attracting unwanted attention, so he laughed and said, “Just a trick. Don’t worry.”

  “That was amazing.”

  “Did I say I was also an amateur magician?”

  The bartender shook his head. He looked perplexed and mildly upset.

  “Can you make something else appear?” the bartender asked.

  “No,” Iverson said, chuckling. “I’d have to bribe all your coworkers again.”

  “You put them up to this, huh? How will I top it?”

  “How about getting me some parmesan cheese?”

  “Sure. I’ll be right back.”

  The bartender refilled Iverson’s glass with wine then went back into the kitchen. He returned with a block of cheese and a cheese grater. He sprinkled Iverson’s meal with it until Iverson told him to stop. The food looked excellent. He planned on eating every last bite, even though he wasn’t hungry.

  “Enjoy,” the bartender said.

  As he ate, he observed the other diners in the restaurant. It would have been impossible to distinguish them from people in reality. A young couple was dining together and the man was going to propose, though he had spinach in his teeth. Despite his fear of commitment, he wanted to spend the rest of his day with her. An older woman was wearing a hat her grandmother might have worn, maybe in an attempt to prove that there were people actually older than her. It was a black hat with a veil and a purple feather sticking out the side. She only had one day to live and she had chosen to wear this hat—in reality it would have been a fashion faux pas, but here it was a tragic waste of life. A family of six was sitting at two joined tables and the youngest kid was trying to drink a glass of milk from the wrong side, soaking his shirt. He was watching with detached coolness as a pool gathered in his lap. His mother had no clue. A single man was eating and reading a book, trying not to look lonely while doing it, unaware that if he was alone now he would be alone for the rest of his fleeting life.

  “How is everything?” the bartender asked.

  “Perfect,” Iverson said.

  A woman sat at the bar a few stools away from Iverson. She was about thirty, quite attractive, and dressed in a red cocktail dress.

  “Hello,” Iverson said.

  She smiled at him. “Is that Petrus you’re drinking?”

  “Would you care for a glass?”

  “I’d love one.”

  The bartender set an empty glass before her and filled it with Iverson’s Petrus. She lifted the glass by the stem and came to sit next to Iverson.

  They toasted the evening with a clink of their glasses and drank.

  After a taste, she said, “Wonderful.”

  “I’m Ryan. Doctor Ryan Iverson,” he said, extending a hand.

  “Doctor?” she asked, limply shaking his hand.

  “PhD. I’m a scientist.”

  “What field?”

  “Science and technology.”

  “Sounds smart.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I work here in town.”

  “Doing what?”

  She grinned at him. “A little of this, a little of that.”

  “Are you a prostitute?” Iverson asked.

  “You’re a little drunk, aren’t you?”

  “Unfortunately, I’m quickly getting sober.” He leaned in to whisper to her, “I think they water down their drinks here.”

  She laughed.

  “You don’t seem like the drinking type,” she said.

  “I’m not, usually. Special circumstances have led me to drown my concerns in a seven thousand dollar bottle of wine.”

  “Not a special occasion, but a circumstance?”

  “I’m currently taking a break from being a supreme being.”

  “Oh, I see. I’m sure you deserve the time off. Being God is a lot of work.”

  “Long story,” Iverson said.

  “I can imagine.”

  “You seem like a smart girl. Do you have a name?”

  “Not that I can remember,” she said. “I should know it, shouldn’t I? Better be careful, could be some type of epidemic.”

  “Wine must be an antidote,” he said.

  “Then I’ll keep drinking.”

&nbs
p; Iverson refilled her glass, though she had only drunk a sip.

  “I think you’re name’s Cassie,” Iverson said.

  “Cassie. I like that.”

  “You want to know a secret, Cassie?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve only had sex once in twenty-five years.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “The one time wasn’t even that good. It was awkward and weird.”

  “Maybe you were with the wrong woman.”

  “We didn’t go out again after that. Truth is, after my wife died, I had a hard time imagining myself with anyone else. Felt like cheating.”

  “Ah, now I understand. God is lonely.”

  The drunkenness had dissolved his defenses and he couldn’t mask the effect her words had on him. He suddenly felt the supermassive black hole of loneliness eating away at him, made larger over the years by denying it, by trying to fill it with work.

  “You’re a good listener, Cassie. I should have manifested you a long time ago.”

  “Manifested me? What does that mean?”

  “Met you. I meant ‘met you’ a long time ago,” Iverson said, trying to backpedal.

  “If you manifested me, you certainly would be god-like.”

  Iverson pushed away the plate of food and reached into his pocket for a cigarette.

  “They won’t let you smoke in here,” she said.

  “A supreme being can’t even smoke in his own universe? Outrageous.” Iverson stood from the stool. “I’ll be right back.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on the wine,” she said.

  “I bet you will,” Iverson joked.

  He stepped out onto the patio and chose a black metal table as far from other people as possible. It was warm and nice out and people were walking under a prism of electric light. For a moment he was enjoying himself. It got better when Cassie showed up with both glasses of wine, refreshed.

  “Thought I’d join you,” she said. “It’s a beautiful night.”

  They clinked glasses again and drank.

  As Iverson drank his wine, he was captivated by the low cut of her dress. Her skin was spotted with freckles, and a gold necklace with a heart shaped pendant hovered above her cleavage. Her fair colored hair was highlighted by the electric light.

  She was cupping the glass by the bowl, sipping daintily, and smiling at him over the rim. Iverson knew enough about inveiglement to know that he was being played. He was nothing more than a target to her. He almost wished that this wasn’t the case; it would have made this night something special.