It was the day that Roebuck committed.
Stepping back into the lobby, he told Carol in his sternest straw-boss voice that he had several important calls to make so could she please do her job effectively for once and be certain he wasn’t interrupted? Then he closed his door and locked it—something that hardly ever happened—and commenced his preparations.
Throughout that afternoon—throughout the ninety-odd minutes between Yasmin’s first and second appearance that pivotal day—Roebuck’s hands kept returning to the fascinating parcel on his desk.
One of the nice things about a client in the fishing business was the steady stream of tackle. As a valued partner in Ripreeler’s North American retail operations, Roebuck received samples of every new product his client released. Most of it was overkill; last summer they sent a marlin rig that was bigger than the rock bass he and Zach fished for off the dock. But the supply of spinners, jigs, and plugs, to say nothing of all those glossy crankbaits, had made their tackle box the envy of all the other fathers on the lake.
This package was different. First of all, it hadn’t come from Ripreeler directly. This one had been delivered by courier from a location in Manila, the Philippines. Roebuck removed a pair of scissors from his drawer and cut the wrap. Inside he found a flat polyethylene bottle, like the nasal spray dispensers he and Anne used when the kids were still in diapers, the kind you squeeze to make the medicine gush straight up the nostril.
It was, he realized, the new pheromone product poised to revolutionize sport fishing. Attached was a handwritten note from the marketing manager, an American he’d met briefly in Helsinki. Roebuck unscrewed the cap and tentatively sniffed. He jammed the lid back on. It smelled exactly the way you’d expect a fish extract to smell; worse. But that was good. They were selling to the fisherman, after all, not the fish, and that stink would certainly leave an impression. Roebuck put on his reading glasses to make out the tiny print. Not good. Anglers fall mainly into older demographics. The font size would definitely need to be increased, though the instructions, once in focus, seemed straightforward enough: “Spray a small quantity on your lure and watch the fish jump into your boat! This amazing product mimics key pheromones that send fish into a feeding frenzy.”
And there, at that moment, Roebuck found the crisis he was hoping for.
Pheromones, as everybody knows, stimulate the desire to mate, not eat.
Or at least that was the argument he intended to put into play the moment he heard Yasmin coming through his door. The note from Manila had thoughtfully included the sender’s home phone number. Roebuck programmed it into his speed dial, made sure the door was closed but unlocked, and waited.
An hour later, he was waiting still.
In the meantime, he’d consulted his time-zone converter and determined that in the Philippines it was very, very early in the morning. In fact, it was tomorrow. With any luck at all, marketing manager Frank O’Neil would be a light sleeper. But at least at that hour he was almost certain to be home. Roebuck was never entirely comfortable conversing with speakers on the far side of the dateline. He enjoyed a good paradox, but that one had always unsettled him: today and tomorrow being one and the same. This conversation was certain to be awkward whenever it was situated in the time-space continuum.
Though that, too, could prove beneficial.
When the line from the reception desk buzzed, he only just stopped himself from answering. Roebuck sprang to his feet. The buzzing stopped. Silence. Then another, longer burst. By this time, his earlobe was applied directly to the inside panel of his door.
Voices, raised voices; a confusion of footsteps …
Leaping back to his desk, he hit the call button and hovered—still on tiptoes—while the connections clicked through. A phone in a bedroom somewhere in a residential district of Manila commenced to ring. Roebuck almost feared no one would pick up when at last he heard a female voice, groggy, in a language he took to be Tagalog. “Hello!” he said loudly, cutting over it. “I’m calling for Frank O’Neil, please.”
More Tagalog. An alarming silence. Then, finally, a different, hoarser voice. “Hello? Hello?”
“Is that Frank O’Neil?”
Cough. “What time is it?”
“Frank! This is Julius Roebuck.”
Roebuck pressed the button to increase the volume as he spoke.
“Who?”
“Julius Roebuck! From Roebuck and Associates. We met in Helsinki. I’ve just opened your sample bait.”
From out in the hall beyond the door to his office came the sound of a struggle. One of the voices he recognized as Carol’s.
“Oh, Julius, of course. Hello. Nice to hear from you. You know it’s …”
The other voice was definitely Yasmin’s.
“I’m very sorry for disturbing you, Frank. But I’m afraid we have a problem.”
A covert knock; more scuffle.
“It’s four o’clock in the morning!”
Carol—he will have to do something to make up for this, later—was bravely mounting a last-ditch resistance. But Yasmin had leverage and far more capable hips.
“A problem, Frank. A very big problem.”
Roebuck had ensured his back was turned, precisely at that moment: the better to spin dramatically in shock and consternation. Right on cue, his door burst open.
“I’m so sorry Julius!” Carol was flushed and possibly bleeding from an ankle. “She just wouldn’t …”
He made a point of staring, mouth agape, as if not quite believing the effrontery of this, then whirled and cupped his hand over his ear, furiously deadening the interruption.
“What do you mean, a problem?”
“Julius, I …”
Roebuck rounded for a second time, eyes ablaze, throwing up one hand like a Columbian traffic cop, still concentrating mightily on the telephone pressed against his ear. “I mean we have a problem, Frank. The messaging is wrong.”
“Messaging? What messaging?”
Yasmin took a step forward.
“The messaging, Frank! The central messaging. It’s totally wrong!”
Then another step.
Mashing the phone against his chest, glaring ferociously, Roebuck snapped his fingers. He’d been practising his snap the past half-hour: its percussion echoed off the walls like gunfire. Yasmin and the receptionist froze like rabbits. Roebuck jabbed a furious finger Yasmin’s way and aimed it at a chair, then glared some more at Carol and jerked his wrathful thumb toward the door.
“Could you maybe be more specific?”
Carol backed out of the room. Yasmin crept softly to her chair.
“I’ll explain when I get there.”
“Here?”
“This is critical, Frank. I’ll be landing,” Roebuck furrowed his brows and studied his watch but gave up on the time-change calculations, “in a matter of hours!”
“Here? You’re coming here?”
“See you shortly.”
“But …”
Roebuck slammed down the receiver.
He took a moment to allow his stare to linger in the space between them: a man only just containing his wrath.
“Julius, I …”
Roebuck clenched his teeth until he felt his molars squeak, then stabbed the button on his phone. “Book me a flight to Manila. Today! This afternoon!”
“Yes, sir.”
She had never—or anyone else, for that matter—called him sir. It wasn’t even the receptionist’s responsibility to look after travel arrangements. He would definitely have to find some way of making up for this. Still staring into nothing, Roebuck brought his fist to his chin and studied the wall a measured heartbeat longer. After a time, exhaling loudly, he moved his hands to the armrests of his chair. At last he eased himself back and slowly, consciously, relaxed his body. “Yasmin …” he said
, tasting the syllables.
For a while no other word was spoken. Her eyes were on the floor, and Roebuck used the opportunity to take her in. She too was out of breath: adrenaline—and a cocktail of other, more arresting hormones—spiking through her system. Roebuck absorbed the lambent rise and fall of breast.
“It’s today …” she whispered in a voice that rustled like the fabric of her skirt.
Roebuck kept his tone as hieratical as he could make it. “What’s today?” He wanted to hear her say it.
Yasmin’s tongue emerged, slid across her teeth. Her lips parted then opened then parted again. “I … I tried calling. You, you didn’t get back.”
“Yasmin, I have a company to run. I‘ve been tied up the entire day.”
“I’m ovulating. Right now! Today … maybe tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow I’m gone. Tomorrow I’m on the far side of the dateline. Which makes it the day after tomorrow as far as you are concerned.”
“What …? I mean … Can’t you just …?”
Already he could feel the vascular shift, the blood rushing from his brain, rerouting. He was very glad he’d had the sense to stay behind his desk. The phone startled them both. Roebuck picked it up.
“I found a flight.”
“A flight?”
“Direct to Manila.”
“Yes. Excellent … When?”
“It leaves this afternoon. Not much time to pack, but I can get you a seat.”
“Book it,” he said. And then, “Well done.”
“Yasmin …” Roebuck quietly replaced the phone. “This has gotten out of hand.”
Several seconds more elapsed in silence. An interesting transformation: Yasmin meek; Yasmin suffused like this in blush. She was looking at him, and he tried to hold her gaze. “I have a lot to do …” he said. “I’m at the airport in an hour …”
“Couldn’t you just …”
“Just what?”
“No. You’re right. You’re always right.”
The phone went off again.
“I forgot to tell you. Daniel wants to see you. I had the feeling this might not be a good time …”
“What would give you that impression? Two minutes. Then send him in.”
Yasmin had risen, smoothing her skirt in that way of hers, fingers in the dimples of her hips.
“I should go.”
He needed to be careful. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out this time.”
She stopped and caught her breath. He could almost feel the heat from where he sat behind his desk. “This time …?” Yasmin was standing, poised beside his door.
“In future, if you could provide me with some warning …?”
He still can’t decide if it was deliberate, but Yasmin’s fingers caressed the doorknob as she spoke, turning and unturning the latch. “Twenty-eight days,” she whispered. “Just count.”
“I’ll make a note in my calendar.”
“You’re such a lovely man!” Yasmin swept toward him for a lingering embrace. “I brought this …” she said, unfastening her purse. She had misread his expression. “Oh. But of course you can’t right now. Anyway, you can keep it for next month.” She placed a plastic sample bottle with its now-familiar orange lid on the corner of his desk.
On the way out, she blew a kiss.
“Who was that?”
Greenwood was stopped outside the door watching Yasmin, weaving down the corridor. Roebuck swept the sample jar into a drawer.
“Can I help you, Daniel?”
“What? Yes. Just wondering if there’s any development on that drag and clop concept?”
“Still holding tight on that one. But since you’re here, look at this.” Roebuck held up the pheromone dispenser and, once Greenwood stepped into range, allowed himself a purging squeeze …
He doesn’t see the ticket until he’s pulled out into traffic. Roebuck unbuckles at the next light, hops out to yank it off the windshield, and almost doors a cyclist; he is not as apologetic as the circumstances warrant. More bad Karma. It has now been twenty-three days, exactly, since Roebuck staged his show with Yasmin in his office. He has indeed been counting. According to his calculations, Yasmin will be in the sweet spot of her cycle this coming Monday. Again his plans are in ruins. And what was he thinking, not feeding the meter?
As expected, he has missed his teleconference.
“Sleep in?”
Greenwood is wearing that look he gets whenever he senses the moral advantage has tilted in his favour.
“Nose to the grindstone, Daniel.” Roebuck heads for his office, yellow parking ticked crumpled in one fist. “No rest for the weary.”
Greenwood looks as if he’s not quite certain whether the remark was meant for him. “You know,” he calls out, “I had to throw that shirt away. Did I mention that? Two times to the cleaners and it still stinks!” But Roebuck has already passed out of hearing.
Almost always, now, there’s some new treat waiting in his private inbox.
It’s been an interesting tutorial, these last weeks, on the finer points of human oogenesis. He is glad he had no need for all this earlier in life. With Anne there was no science. It took a little longer than expected the first time, with Katie, and for a while there they started to worry. But after that, all the mechanics just fell into place. They had sex, they had kids; they had sex, they had kids. In retrospect, so elegantly simple. Yasmin monitors her ova like FedEx tracks its waybills. She set up Hushmail accounts, early on, to facilitate the flow of information. Roebuck has only to log in, now, to receive his daily update. “I’ve begun the Luteal Phase,” she informed him back at the start of things, which to his ear sounded like the title of a Michael Crichton novel.
Though the Luteal, as it turned out, was by and large a friendly interval, at least at the onset. A week or so later, when a message headed “The Ischemic!” blazed in (he had to Google that one, too), things turned decidedly hostile. This was when Yasmin coldly informed him of her preference for freezing his sperm in order to accomplish their objective with a minimum of personal contact. Subsequent investigation, luckily, revealed that the process called for liquid nitrogen and a range of technical abilities well beyond the scope of home enthusiasts. As the cycle advanced, her interest in cryogenics quietly ebbed.
Menstruation itself, by comparison, was a fairly calm and quiet time. But things took a radical turn once the Follicular Phase commenced in all its fearsome splendour.
The Follicular, as Roebuck has now amatively grasped, is where the rubber truly hits the reproductive highway. Throughout this past week, Yasmin’s estrogen levels have been twitching skyward. A newly bathed and scented ovum now quivers at the gates, straining for release. In one of the most bizarrely erotic texts ever to have shivered down the length of Roebuck’s spine, she has described for him in detail how the mucus in her cervix has changed from thick and clumpy to slippery and thin.
Roebuck is barely able to withstand the strain.
The Follicular Phase, as he knows, is not the big day. But the big day is just around the corner.
And once again he is going to have to take a pass.
Though almost not. Roebuck very nearly convinces himself to go ahead and damn the consequences. He has, after all, completed all twenty ejaculations, plus. It has been a full two months, plus. The considered sum of Roebuck’s intuition is advising that he must by now be safely shooting blanks.
Except that, from the start of this, he has set rules in place.
Roebuck’s respect for his own standards has bound him to the sovereignty of reason. And it isn’t just Yasmin. It’s Lily, too, who is expecting him for more than lunch, come Monday. He gets up to close the door, then contritely opens it again. This sort of thing has been happening too much lately. There’s a recession, after all; revenues are down. His people have reason to be nervous. Tha
t sudden, emergency flight to Manila didn’t help, though Roebuck has a strong sensation that one, at least, is going to work out in the long run; a very strong feeling that that piece of theatre may have achieved much more than was intended. Wheels are in motion. He makes a mental note to stand a round or two this Friday night at Matrix Three and hint that something big is in the works, which calms and reminds him, too, that it’s time to bring Daniel in on this.
But first, a far more noxious piece of business. Roebuck won’t commit himself. Not yet. But he has been turning this over and over and still hasn’t come up with anything better. He is running out of thinking room and clearly—this time—it will have to be spectacular.
He opens up Google and asks: “What can I eat to make myself throw up?”
Seconds later, Roebuck receives an astonishing sixteen million hits. For a few moments, even Yasmin fades from mind as he contemplates the scope of what this says about his species.
The good news, though, is that he finds what he requires right away.
Later he will learn that it’s derived from the roots and rhizome of the ipecacuanha plant, a native of Brazil. He will also discover, subsequently, that many people in the non-bulimic world are legitimately familiar with this substance, too. He will be even more surprised to learn—months on and inadvertently—that once upon a time it was stocked in his own house, before the ban, by his judicious wife as precaution against accidental poisoning. But for the moment, syrup of ipecac is something Roebuck has never heard of, never once encountered.
Owing to the power of the Internet, he is rapidly caught up. It soon becomes apparent that the people who weigh in on this topic—the mind-boggling number of people who post on the subject of self-induced vomiting—self-sort into cohorts. The first group Roebuck would characterize as information-seekers: folks requesting practical advice on the how-to’s of regurgitation. A second, and significantly larger, category seems to be comprised of answer-givers: good Samaritans offering a wide assortment of useful tips. The third and final segmentation—which Roebuck deliberately ignores—is a loose collection of observers posting comments on the intellectual qualities of the previous two.
Fire in the Firefly Page 14
