Adam said, “Your turn.”
I said, “If you’ve read the author blurb on my books, you already know everything.”
“You’re right. My favorite thing is the photograph, that look in your eyes.”
“Cut it out.”
“Actually, I Googled you,” he said. “You made Phi Beta Kappa. You’ve got an MFA and a PhD. You were an all-conference lacrosse player in college. Did you have a lacrosse scholarship?”
“Women’s lacrosse? Are you kidding?”
Adam said, “One more thing. Our meeting in the gallery was no accident. I spotted you on the street and followed you.”
This was kind of sexy to know, but also kind of not. I said, “Why, when you knew you were going to have dinner with me?”
“I didn’t know you were you. Meeting you was supposed to be a surprise. It was a surprise. I was late at the restaurant because I was looking for you all over Chelsea.”
This was good for my ego. On the other hand, it was eight thirty already, practically midday according to my usual schedule, and I hadn’t yet written a word, except for the smut.
“Looking for me all over Chelsea?” I said. “What’s the plan from now on? Are you going to go on stalking me?”
My tone was not as light as maybe it should have been.
Adam recoiled, then shook his head as if he had never imagined that I could say such a thing to him after what we had been to each other. He left without another word. The door closed behind him. What had I done? Was I out of my mind?
I sat down at the keyboard. Words flowed as from a mountain spring. At noon exactly, Henry’s face popped up on the computer screen. I felt a little current of guilt. It didn’t last long.
I said, “Hi, Henry. Nice timing.”
Henry said, “Can you come for dinner tonight? There’s someone I want you to meet.”
“Another Amerigo?”
“I’ll send the car around seven.”
The other telephone rang. I let it ring. Adam was leaving a message on the answering machine. He wanted to know why I had turned into such a spiteful bitch so soon after we had gotten out of bed? Why? He was at a loss to understand.
To Henry I said, “Fine, seven o’clock,” and hung up.
Adam’s disembodied voice was telling me that if he had any sense he would never want to see me again. However, he was prepared to give me one more chance.
He said, “Let’s get over this bump in the road. My place. Grab a cab, now.”
He gave me an address on Broome Street. I didn’t pick up.
Adam said, “Fine. I know you’re there. The hell with you.”
After he hung up, I went to the computer and Googled him. He didn’t have much of an entry, but what there was checked out with the life story he had told me.
Evening shadows were falling. What would I wear to Henry’s? I pulled on my tightest jeans and a pretty good top and my favorite necklace made of alternating polished and unpolished silver links, and a ruby ring I had inherited from an aunt, and sat down to watch the news while I waited for the intercom to buzz.
Henry’s other guest was a very laid-back Chinese in a two-thousand-dollar suit. He looked like a younger and taller version of the late Zhou Enlai—same handsome face and obsidian eyes, same coiled manner. I was glad I had dressed up a little. He handed me his business card. I tried to make points by reading the side printed in Mandarin. His name thereon was Ng Fred. He was chairman and CEO of CyberSci, Inc., of Beijing.
He said, in Mandarin, “The Ng is pronounced Wu. It’s a long story. The Cantonese ideograph is the same as the Mandarin character but has a different sound. But maybe you already know that.”
In English, I said, “Is Fred really your first name?”
“My business name,” he replied.
“So what should I call you?” I asked in Mandarin, showing off again.
“Fred is fine,” he replied in native American English. “Your Mandarin is quite good. You have a Shanghai accent. Where did you pick it up?”
“In Shanghai. I taught there for a year after grad school.”
“What subject?”
“Western art history, in a high school.”
“So you taught in Mandarin?”
“Sort of, sometimes. I was supposed to talk English, a twofer. Lots of giggles from the kids when I broke into Chinese.”
He gave me a real look of amusement. I liked this guy.
As Henry explained while we dined, the topic he wanted to discuss was defense systems for the spaceship. Fred’s company, in which Henry held a lot of stock, was going to build the ship—in fact, had already built a factory not far from Henry’s yurts in Hsi-tau. He and Henry were old friends—classmates—roommates, even. Fred’s mother was an American Chinese who as a Movement chick had been such a fervent Maoist that she moved to China and married a Red Guard. She sent Fred to a New England prep school, but I had already heard that in his voice just as he had heard Shanghai in mine. Later he had gone to Caltech, where he met Henry.
“I used to copy his notes,” Fred said.
Henry and Fred had been exchanging ideas about a defense system for the ship. The question of weaponizing a spacecraft was a difficult one, ethically speaking. Should humanity go unarmed into the cosmos or not? Theoretically mankind had no enemies except itself, in space or anywhere else. I said as much.
Henry said, “So what are you saying? That we should concentrate on countering a threat from Earth? That human beings would destroy the ship out of resentment or disappointment?”
I’m no great believer in the proposition that human beings will act rationally if given the opportunity to do so. Their natural state is irrationality, especially when they turn into a mob, which is essentially what they would become in the hypothetical circumstances we were talking about.
“The people who are being left behind might go crazy,” I said. “That’s always been the expectation in a worst-case scenario. But however crazy they went, I don’t think they’d be stupid enough to shoot down the spaceship. That would mean shooting down their only hope of escape.”
“Maybe not,” Ng Fred said. “But a boarding party might be dispatched to capture the ship before it launched—or if it had already left, to pursue it, overtake it, and commandeer it.”
Henry said, “Where would they get the ships for an expedition like that?”
“Do you really think the U.S. government is not going to build its own ship when it finds out about yours? Not to mention the government of every other technological state in the world.”
“So how do we protect the ship?”
“You find a new way to protect it without destroying it or killing too many pirates.”
Ng Fred said, “That rules out sabers and muskets.”
I said, “Hornets, maybe.”
I was kidding. Henry liked the idea.
“Not a bad thought,” he said. “Hornets wouldn’t kill, but they’d disable and confuse the attacking force without damaging anything on either ship. And afterward they’d return to the hive.”
I said—I couldn’t stop myself—“Wouldn’t the hornets have to have little space suits?”
Henry said, “I’m not talking about real hornets. But we could design a robot hornet, a manufactured device, that would do the job. That’s feasible, isn’t it, Fred?”
“Provided the robots’ stingers are long enough to penetrate space suits but thin enough not to make them leak, why not?”
“Can you do it?”
Fred said, “You design it, Henry, and we’ll manufacture it.”
I asked questions. Would the hornets’ stings be lethal, or would they just hurt so much that the pirates would surrender? How would we keep the hornets from attacking our own crew as well as the pirates?
Henry told me to remember the chows of Hsi-tau and the ID tags. Something similar—chips implanted under the skin of the crew, maybe—could solve the problem. The hornets would sting only the enemy, never the good guys.
Just the same, I wondered. If there was life on other planets, was there an organism anywhere in the universe that could defend itself against Henry’s hornets, especially as they would surely be improved by the crew of the mother ship? And what might the combination of human beings and indestructible hornets mean for the universe?
7
LATER, GETTING OUT OF THE car in front of my building, I half hoped that Adam would spring from the shadows and plead for another chance. However, I saw no sign of him or anyone else except the usual dog walkers and couples staggering home after dining out. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. Across the river, beyond a row of leafless trees washed by streetlight, New Jersey was a lattice of lighted windows. The city was unusually quiet. A full minute passed during which I did not hear a siren or feel a subway train beneath my soles. A couple of bicyclists in full racing gear whirred by, taking advantage of the light traffic. Somebody got out of a taxi across the street—nope, not Adam, just a woman with a briefcase. I liked this city in the same way that I liked my body—nothing was new, yet everything was always new. For the first time in ages, I felt the exhilaration of being where I was.
That changed when I reached the door of my apartment. I leaned against it, thinking to prolong my moment of euphoria while I got my keys out of my bag. The door swung open under my weight, and I staggered backward into the hall.
The door was unlocked. All four deadbolts, the chain, and the steel bar were open, every one of them. This was impossible. I never failed to lock the door. Locking it was an obsession. I distinctly remembered locking up before I left for dinner.
Were the intruders still inside? Where else would they be? I should have run for the elevator. Instead, don’t ask me why, I dashed into the apartment, slamming and locking the door behind me and trapping myself inside with whatever killer or rapist might be waiting to pounce. There was no one there—no one under the bed, no one in the closets, no one behind the shower curtain. The thousand dollars in cash I kept in a Baggie in the icemaker were still there, but the inside of the freezer looked different, as if things had been moved around and then replaced. Same thing with my dresser drawers, with the bookcase, with my address book and diary. All were in slightly different places. Someone had touched them. Likewise the clothes in my closet. I examined the clean glasses in the cupboard for fingerprints but found none.
The apartment had been searched. I knew it. Nothing had been taken, but my space had been violated. Why? What were these people looking for? Beside the telephone I kept a scratch pad and a pencil. I held the pad level with my eye and looked across its surface. Yes, there definitely were indentations. I scribbled over them with the pencil and there it was, the proof. A number had been written on this pad and the page on which it was written had been torn off. The number was written in somebody else’s hand, in large figures that slanted to the right. My own handwriting was small and perpendicular. I had worked for years to make it so.
I dialed the number on the pad. There was no answer, no answering machine. I dashed to the computer and tried to do a reverse lookup of the phone number. No luck.
Now what? What were my choices? If I dialed 911, the cops would treat me like a hysterical female. There was no point in calling a locksmith. If these people could pick these locks that had cost me a fortune, they could pick any locks ever made. Were the intruders lurking in the hall? On the roof? Where was I going to sleep from now on, where could I work? To whom could I turn? My father was dead. No lover protected me. I didn’t want Henry to know what had happened. I was alone.
They had left the door unlocked. They wanted me to know they could come again whenever they liked.
8
THERE WAS ONLY ONE THING to do—leave. I stayed awake all night reading For Rent classifieds on the Internet, then went to the bank as soon as it opened and withdrew several thousand dollars in cash. Before noon, I found a spacious, utterly sterile place on York Avenue in a tower whose enormous windows overlooked the East River. It came equipped with phony Bauhaus furniture and awful pictures and rugs and a wonderful bathroom and state-of-the-art kitchen. The building manager did not blink when I mentioned that I wished to rent the place under an assumed name. The rent was astronomical. However, I was getting value in return. This was the last neighborhood in which anyone who knew me would think to look for me, and the manager assured me that the building had a squad of large, no-nonsense doormen and a security team of ex-cops that prowled the corridors day and night, on the lookout for intruders. Front and back doors had keypad locks, backed up by deadbolts and what I was told was an undefeatable alarm system.
Before leaving my old apartment, I copied my manuscript onto a flash drive. I left everything else behind—the bed unmade, dishes in the dishwasher, clothes in the closet. I poured out the milk and threw other perishables down the disposal—spoiled food in the refrigerator would be a dead giveaway. I shredded my credit cards and checkbook. I felt a pang when bidding my books good-bye and a surge of anxiety about the new computer Henry had installed until I realized that the intruders had no doubt already drained it of any secrets it might contain.
I put on jeans and sneakers and a coat and hat and sunglasses, and went out. It was a short walk to a bookstore on Second Avenue. I ordered a dozen reference books, paid cash, and had them delivered. A few doors down the avenue I found an electronics store and bought one of those throwaway cell phones that drug dealers use. In a mail store I bought some stamps and envelopes and rented a mailbox. Henry was on my mind. I thought of walking to his house, only a few blocks away. I thought better of this, and instead wrote Please call me at once and scribbled the number of my new cell phone on a page of my notebook and mailed it.
Back in the new apartment, I disguised myself. I changed my hair—shorter, fluffier, darker. I wore my glasses all the time now instead of contacts. I walked more briskly, as if I had places to go and too little time to get there. I felt like a secret agent setting up a cover identity. When I ventured out to do some shopping, a man who needed a shave made eye contact with me. Was he stalking me? Was my every move being watched? Was this going to last forever? Was there no escape? Should I go to the airport and buy a ticket for Rio de Janeiro? Was I losing my senses? Did I have any further use for my senses? The apartment was inhuman in its sterility. The takeout I ordered for supper was blander than the takeout I was used to. The river I saw through those huge windows was the wrong river. The apartment, the neighborhood, were deathly quiet. Everyone was all dressed up. I had woken up in hell.
Henry didn’t answer my note. He could be anywhere, doing anything. The media gave me many reasons to think about him: An ice shelf the size of Connecticut broke loose from Antarctica, carrying thousands of penguins and seals out to sea. The North Pole inched ever closer to Siberia. The magnetic field continued to fluctuate. Migrating birds appeared in countries where their species had never before been seen, and vanished from destinations where they had been arriving on schedule since the Stone Age. Still no one saw a pattern.
By the time Henry called, at the end of a week, I had accepted that he would never find me, that I would never hear from him again. I told him I had moved, as he had suggested. I told him why. I told him my new name.
“I’ll be right there,” he said. “What’s the address?”
When he arrived, minutes later, he looked around, taking it all in, object by object—the furniture whose minimalism made it all the more showy, the gaudy faux Jackson Pollock carpets—carpets!—the imitation Warhol silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe as a sheet of postage stamps, the trompe l’oeil that looked like a framed sofa cushion until you saw that it was really a zebra. I won’t go on.
“Wow,” Henry said. “No wonder you changed your name.”
Now he was being funny? I didn’t reply.
He said, “It’s not possible that you just forgot to lock the door?”
“Never in a million years.”
He said, “OK, then somebody is trying to scar
e you.”
“They’ve succeeded.”
He looked around again. “Beyond their wildest dreams,” he said. “Pack a bag. You can’t live here and think at the same time, and I need your brain.”
I didn’t argue. Fifteen minutes later we were headed for the airport. For a change he told me where we were going. We stopped at my old place while I picked up clothes suitable for Hsi-tau, our destination. The driver collected the computer Henry had given me and lugged it down to the car. Everything was as shabby and jumbled as usual, but nothing was the same. The atmosphere had been disturbed. An invisible presence had moved in and it had no intention of ever leaving.
I could feel it.
Two
1
WE ARRIVED IN HSI-TAU AT dusk. After dinner in the big yurt Henry amazed me by asking if I played chess. I did, sort of. I won the Camp Wingenund grand championship when I was twelve, and five years later made it to the semifinals of a high school tournament. In the here and now, I sometimes played a few games online, though I almost always lost because I overstated my skill level. That night, versus Henry, I played far beyond my abilities, and actually won one game out of three. If he let me have that victory (how else to explain it?), I didn’t catch him at it.
Outside, after the chess, a grit-filled wind blew. The beam of my flashlight reflected from the swirling dust as from a snowstorm. The chow dog that had assigned itself to me walked me back to my yurt. Its presence made me feel absolutely safe. Not only was my protector on duty, but the rest of the pack roamed the howling darkness, ready to attack any intruder at a moment’s notice. Inside my little yurt, America awaited—air-conditioning, satellite television and radio, a refrigerator full of wine, springwater and fruit and healthful snacks, clean sheets on a king-size bed, hot water. I showered and got into the bed and fell asleep. I was safe here on the far edge of China, with my attack dog curled up on the doorstep.
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