Snap! Simon had the Frisbee in hand, now standing beside Pickles on the grass near the white slat fence. He looked across the yard, and saw himself looking back. He looked up in the air, and saw himself drifting down toward the back porch.
Pickles snatched the Frisbee from him, and with both hands reached behind her back. When she brought both her hands forward there was a Frisbee in each. She fired one high toward the porch, then once again put her hands behind her back and returned with yet another Frisbee. One, two—low and long, and so high that Simon knew it would pass entirely over his house.
Until he caught it, in empty air yards above his red brick chimney. He spun and hurled it not at Pickles but at himself, standing idle at the center of the yard. What was the use of an instance of himself just standing around?
The instance caught it, and threw it to Pickles. A rhythm line and new music appeared out of nowhere, just as it always did in the old movies. The music itself was unfamiliar, but after a few phrases he felt it resonate with the new sense that Pickles had granted him with her kiss.
Hey, so be it! Simon saw Frisbees headed his way, three ways, to three instances. Pickles produced a fourth Frisbee from behind her back and hurled it toward the driveway. In one beat he was there ahead of it, and spun it to his instance now hovering above the gray roof shingles of his house.
She leapt again, far out over the yard, until at the peak of her arc she simply stopped, hurling back the Frisbees that his four instances hurled her way. Gravity and air resistance governed the Frisbees, but they did not govern him.
At the center of the figure they drew in the air, Pickles danced, turning and tumbling. Now she would catch a Frisbee and set it spinning on a new course, now she would twist aside to let it pass, allowing Simon’s instance on the opposite corner to capture it.
Simon began to realize what was happening: He was dancing not with Pickles but with the Frisbees. The disks left his hands in sync with the rhythm line. His instances placed themselves in the air just where the beat told them that the Frisbees would arrive. When his hands stretched out to catch them, the Frisbees were there, and the small sounds of the disks striking his palms sounded a subtle sub-rhythm to the main line.
The Sun set in the haze on the indistinct western horizon, and the color faded from the sky. Pickles slowly descended from her point in mid-air. The Frisbees he threw to her she kept, until she and all four instances stood again on the grass. Simon bowed to her from the four corners of the yard. His instances then merged, and he was standing beside her again on the now-shadowed grass. The Frisbees were stacked near her feet, seven high.
Pickles applauded, then leaned up and kissed Simon’s cheek. She snatched the five-pointed cap from his head with one hand, and with her other curled her index finger up like a hook. She hung his cap on her finger.
Simon understood immediately. “The line. If this works here…”
17: Carolyn
Sunday! It was a Sunday and Carolyn would not be hanged in a fortnight, nor even Monday morning. Dr. Johnson be damned—her mind was wonderfully scattered, and she was loving it.
Her boarder needed some familiar energies, that was for sure. She led Stypek by the hand down the stairs, he stumbling against the drywall and feeling around his chest for the bulging photo vest she had refused to let him wear in public. “Take that damned thing off!” was all she’d needed to say, and he obeyed like the seventh grader he sometimes resembled. So the radio tubes and the ice cream scoop would remain on the bed, and his makeover would begin.
“I finally got an email back from Marcella last night.” She popped the passenger door on the Prius, and shoved him in, then bent to yank the seatbelt over him. “AILING has no idea where your luggage is. She’ll put somebody on the case Monday, but don’t get your hopes up. You need some better clothes—” she sniffed the air as she snapped his belt in place “—and a shower. I can’t have you going over to Zertek tomorrow like that!”
He was running his fingers along the smooth strapping of the shoulder harness. “I will not flee, Chatelaine. Safe do I become in your presence, and of a desire to learn.” He cupped his hand over the dashboard, as he had on Friday night. “This chariot runs on stored…lightning.”
“Not lightning. Well, ok, close. The word is ‘electricity.’”
“Eel eccentricity?”
“No. Electricity.” She spoke the syllables separately. “Say ‘ee-lec-tri-ci-tee.’”
He spoke the word slowly, as though tasting each syllable for too much salt. “Electricity. Yes. A name of worthiness for a prime mover.”
Carolyn nodded. “Electricity powers everything.”
Stypek’s head jerked back, as though he had just achieved an Aha! Insight! moment. “Of course! And soft wear controls it!”
“Software. Don’t stop in the middle. But yes, software controls electricity.” She thumped the Prius’ dashboard. “Damned near everything that runs by electricity has software in it.”
Stypek laid his right hand on the dashboard and leaned back. He had a satisfied look on his face. “I understand now. In thisever universe of yours here, the prime mover and the means of its control are separate, as electricity and soft wear.”
Carolyn gave up on ‘soft wear.’ “Ok, I’m with you so far…”
He put his hands in the air over his lap, fingers interwoven. “In the universe of my own, they are one. One entity. Magic!”
Carolyn swung the Prius into the drive-through lane under the fake battlements at Burgerburg. They were still on the breakfast menu. “Give me a Spam Muffin Stacker, no cheese.” She turned to Stypek, who was staring at the young, black-haired woman at the window, either amazed or aghast. Was it the tight blouse? She’d untangle his cultural taboos later. “Make that two. And two large iced coffees, extra cream, sugar-free vanilla.” As the window girl tallied it up, Carolyn laid a hand on Stypek’s arm. “Don’t stare like that.”
Stypek nodded solemnly, his gaze again to the front. “All pardons, Chatelaine. I do not wish to…make of her ash…with gaze focused.”
Where was Yoda to translate when you needed him? Not the blouse, then; Stypek was evidently not a breast man. “Ash is the wrong word. The right word is…” Carolyn paused. There were limits. “No. You don’t talk like that in public. Especially in front of Mr. Romero.”
Stypek nodded, and hushed.
Spam was her guilty pleasure. One trip to Hawaii and she’d been hooked. Brandon, on the other hand, loathed it, right down to the smell. She’d been binging on it every other morning since the end of June. Carolyn took another bite from her Spam Muffin Stacker. “So…where were you born?”
Stypek had removed the lid from his iced coffee and was dunking his Spam Muffin Stacker in the cup. He seemed to be struggling with the words. “Trynng Brokklyn Nygyggug.”
For a moment Carolyn feared that he might be about to vomit. Maybe men just couldn’t deal with Spam. But no, it was a spoken—if partly sputtered—name, completely in keeping with his accent. “Forgive me if I won’t try to pronounce it. Does the name mean something specific in your language?”
She saw him bite his lip before replying. “Poor is the mapping.”
She laughed gently. “Go ahead, try. It’s your home. I’d like to know a little bit about where you’re from.”
He nodded. “It means…imprecision granted due to mapping…‘The Islands Where…Fun…Goes To Die.’ Mmmm, no. Perhaps, ‘The Archipelago of the Laughing Dead.’ We have issues with…zombies, alas.”
Carolyn thought of the previous Halloween, and the tweens who had spilled fake blood all over her driveway while acting out a scene from The Walking Dead. “So do I.”
Stypek followed her, puppy-like, across the vastness of the Gris Towne Mall parking lot to the main entrance of Sibley’s. She had a little trouble getting him into the revolving door, but once past that Carolyn elbowed their way through the crowds to the men’s department on the second floor.
Her personal shopper worked Sundays and gr
eeted them from the checkout desk.
“Mr. Stypek, this is Mrs. Neuitha Payton. Neuitha, this is Bartholomew Stypek. He’s a student intern from…” Carolyn chewed her tongue for a second. “…a former Soviet republic. He grew up on an island in the Black Sea. His English is a little spotty, so don’t take it too seriously if he says something weird.”
“Welcome to America, sweetie!” Neuitha said with a warm smile, taking both his hands in hers. “Weird is never a problem over here!”
Carolyn was careful to keep one hand under Stypek’s armpit in case he got the impulse to curtsy. “He starts at Zertek tomorrow, but they lost his luggage and all he has is what he’s in. So I need you to get him a week’s worth of business casual plus underwear and socks, a neutral blazer for meetings, and…a robe.”
Stypek perked up. “A robe! For rituals ceremonial?”
Carolyn sighed. “Yes, like getting ready for bed.” She turned back to Neuitha, who was taking notes on a clipboard. “Polos ok, though I’d like him to have two or three casual oxford shirts in sedate colors. No ties. Wait, one tie, just in case. Oh—and he needs a pair of reasonably dressy shoes. I’d say black. And a reversible belt. A sweater would be good—we’re almost out of September—and maybe a jacket.”
“Does he need a hat, honey?”
Carolyn considered. Brandon hated hats. Patrol caps, sure—she’d tossed several in the trash over the summer. They seemed to breed like rabbits on the back of the mudroom closet shelf. “No hats. And Zertek’s paying, so it should be top-shelf stuff. Make him look good. Damn the cost.”
“You got it.”
Neuitha handed her the clipboard. Carolyn scribbled her signature at the bottom of the form. She then pulled the stout middle-aged woman a few feet down one of the aisles and leaned over to whisper. “Um, if he stares at your butt, don’t forget he’s right off the plane. I still have to have that talk with him. He means well. He’s just clueless.”
Neuitha chuckled. “Don’t worry, honey. Nobody wants to look at my butt anymore. Calvin, he just wants to look at football.”
Carolyn gave her shoulder a conspiratorial squeeze. “Men never know when they’ve got it good.”
They returned to the sales desk, where Stypek stood at attention. “Mr. Stypek, Neuitha is an apparel expert, and she’s going to get some clothes together for you. Do whatever she tells you. I’m going outside to make a couple of phone calls. Do not give her any trouble.”
Neuitha pulled a worn yellow cloth measuring tape from a pocket, and began sizing Stypek up by eye. Stypek was looking back at her. He seemed apprehensive.
“Romero.”
Against expectation, Carolyn felt the tightness in the back of her neck release a little. It wasn’t quite as bad this time. Maybe it was the beautiful warm September Sunday, sitting on a bench somewhere that was neither home nor work and getting some Vitamin D on her legs. Maybe it was being able to talk with something around the house that wasn’t a salad spinner.
Practice. She had spoken to him only a couple of days ago. Maybe it was just practice, practice for the new equilibrium that she kept failing to reach, no matter what she tried.
“Hey, I should have called you yesterday. The OAF is working again. Cosmo and that new grad student made it go in a couple of minutes. So…thanks.”
Before he even replied, Carolyn heard clanking and motors in the background, and the hollow echo that meant he was still in his hideous copier factory full of robot hands and forklifts without drivers. On a Sunday.
“No problem.”
“Cosmo said you were cleaning up a monster mess.”
“We lost a line start. Something spooked the AIs, and we’re cleaning house. But I’m glad you’re up and running.” Carolyn heard him cover the phone while he spoke to someone else, doubtless giving orders. It was his core expertise. “Anyway. Do you need anything else? I’m up to my eyeballs in broken copier parts.”
“I know, I know.” One thing he had had lots of practice on was keeping their phone calls short. “Give me another minute, and hear me out for a change. I want you to take the OAF back.”
He said nothing for several seconds, and when he did reply, Carolyn sensed surprise—even shock. “Wait. Why give it back? The agreement was open-ended. And hey, it’s free.”
Carolyn knew without seeing that he was making that predictable, what-an-insufferable-idiot-you-are face. “Free? Free for who? Norm Marietta? He just bought himself a new Beemer. He can damn well afford a laser printer that isn’t some kind of lab experiment.”
“Look, I figured you’d make some points with him…”
Carolyn took a deep breath. Favors. She was in hock up to her eyeballs in favors, to a man she couldn’t stand to look at anymore. “I got the points. With The Norm, points last about ten minutes. But I’m on the hook forever. If the damned thing croaks it’s my fault.”
There was a long silence, with forklifts to fill the gap instead of Muzak. “What do you want me to do?”
“Get your software girl to draft a letter, and say that the experiment is over, and that two guys and a truck will come by in 30 days to pick it up. Throw in a flyer for your latest model. Have your sales people call him.”
“He’ll think it’s because of the divorce.”
“Yes. He will. Because it is. Brandon, this is not healthy for me. I’m trying to put my life back together. I’m trying to be my own woman again. Begging you to bail me out every other month is not getting me there.” Something screeched in the background like bad drum brakes. Carolyn heard the zot! zot! of air tools.
“Well, sure, but…could we take this up again once I’ve got the plant working?”
She ground her teeth. “See? I’m begging again. I held up my part of the deal. I don’t dump coffee in it, and I chew ass when I see other people parking their cups on it. I pester Ethel and everyone else in the office to take care of it. It still breaks.” She took a deep breath. “I want to call in a favor here. I’m putting up your Ukrainian grad student whose luggage you lost and I’m getting him a wardrobe and trying to keep him from coming across as Son of Borat…”
“I don’t have any grad students.”
“He’s an intern.”
“I hate interns. When HR sends me interns I send them back.”
Carolyn closed her eyes. She wanted to bite the phone. Thinking over the last two days, she could not in fact recall any evidence that Stypek was working for Brandon. Brandon had probably called somebody who’d called somebody who’d grabbed the first warm body within arm’s reach. Idiot, indeed: She was trying to break the chain of obligation to Brandon by doing a favor for someone else.
“Then whose intern is he?”
“I don’t know. Send him over and I’ll have HR find his owner and get him some tags.”
“Stop it! He’s not a dog. He’s quiet and brilliant and picking up English as fast as he can. He says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and defers to me like I was a baroness or something and doesn’t complain about crumbs on the kitchen floor.”
“Hey. Sounds like he’s made an impression.”
“Brandon!”
She was shouting. People streaming into the mall were looking at her. Carolyn stabbed the End Call button, and rose to go fetch her intern—or whoeverthehell’s intern he was.
18: Stypek
The seamstress was a queen—and if not a queen, then a princess stolen from her family and raised as a commoner. Her hair was the blackest of all blacks, blacker than the void between the stars, blacker than that of a duchess or a marchioness or certainly a baroness, lying close against her skull in tight curls. Her skin had the deep luster of the Scepter of Tryngg, which touched all pretenders to the throne, and killed those whose hearts were not stout enough to rule. In the odd moments when the continuous crackle of electricity faded enough for the perception to come through, his snerf-sense told him that he was in the presence of blood royalty.
Stypek sat quietly on a bench in a room filled with light
and walled with mirrors. He stood when she commanded him to stand, and held his arms out to make way for the measuring tape and its indecipherable glyphs. When ordered to sit, he sat. At Queen Neuitha’s word younger men and women, all pale-skinned commoners, gradually built a heap of clothing beside him. One had brought an armload of shoes in boxes, and struggled to find a pair that could accept his wide feet.
Neuitha got down on one knee, watching the young man try and fail. “Samuel, stand and observe, for I had years in its learning and know this art well.”
The young man muttered some complaint that would have gotten him hung in Trynng Brokklyn, but stood aside. Neuitha placed Stypek’s right foot on a metal gauge with her own hands, then pressed down from several angles as though seeking his bones. That done, she opened the boxes one by one, peering down the length of each shoe and forcing her hand into it. After some minutes she chose one pair from the stack of boxes, and with two smooth motions slipped them onto Stypek’s feet.
The young man left the room, still muttering. Stypek strangled the urge to separate him from half his teeth. “Majesty, a queen should not touch the feet of a commoner.”
She met his eyes and laughed a rich laugh. “There are no queens here, nor commoners.”
Stypek looked at the floor, still amazed, and ashamed. “Yet you have the hair, skin, and blood of a queen.”
She laughed again, and rose to her feet, gripping the bench on which he sat to help her rise. For long seconds she stood, looking down at him. “Yes, you are odd, as Carolyn warned me, but I believe that you are sincere. Odder still, my sire spoke to me in my girlhood of the priests and kings from whom we descend, away in the land of Africa. We are far from there, in space as in time.”
Stypek nodded. “As I am from my own land.”
She gripped the shoulder of the short tunic he wore, and tugged at its seam. “And with only these rags to your name. I understand. I hope, in fact, that fortune will treat you better than it has treated me.” Her hand spread out to grip his shoulder. “So be it: I give you the blessing of a Queen of faraway Africa.” Neuitha bent down, and kissed the top of his head.
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 12
