an old model, and who knows what kind of glitches he’d suffer?
But Terry could tell by Martha’s tone that the prospect excited her. According to the literature and the videos they’d explored, it would be a long year or more of testing and counseling and schooling, harder on her than it would be on him. Over the last ten months, as they’d seesawed back and forth over the idea of being parents, he found himself just as happy when she was leaning toward yes as when she was leaning toward no. A little boy, a stranger, would start his life by profoundly changing theirs. He knew it was the right thing.
He reached over to touch her left knee, but the seat belt and windshield glare had positioned her body so that he couldn’t reach it with his hand, and so he rubbed his knuckles against the blue cotton covering her hip and with his thumb made cuneiform shapes on the top of her thigh that he hoped would translate as affection.
Martha smiled and closed her eyes, leaning back against the headrest. She set the brochure on her lap and with her own thumb tickled her flat belly and imagined herself as host to a new life for a man now dead. She knew it wasn’t like that exactly, but she believed in people, loved all people, loved even their mistakes, and believed that every person, even saintly ones, wanted and deserved a second chance.
– 2 -
From the passenger seat of his twenty-year-old Cutlass Supreme, Mickey Fanning watched the door of the New Tech Fertility Clinic for most of three days. Each morning he arrived at 7 a.m. and claimed the best of spot of all, on the opposite side of the street and just south. This morning he shifted into park, freed himself from the fraying shoulder harness, and scooted across the bench seat. It had occurred to him the night before that he would be less conspicuous if he weren’t behind the wheel.
At eleven, exactly eleven according to his old watch, which he checked and adjusted whenever time and traffic were given on talk radio, he slid back to the driver’s side and pulled out, circling the block until he could find a less good but still adequate surveillance position. At 3 p.m. he did it again, settling even farther down the street. He left for his motel only after the last doctor locked up, noting the exact times of the physicians’ arrivals and departures in a perfect-bound pocket notebook, the cover of which he had decorated with blue ballpoint crosses and the letters JESUS across the top and JUSTICE down the left margin, with each word sharing the adorned initial j.
His cleverest friends called him Mickey the Gerund back in the days when he had clever friends. Since he was nineteen or so, Mickey had been suspicious of clever people. Clever people were very nearly intellectuals, and intellectuals were the reason – one reason, anyway – that the world was going to hell soon, starting with the Arab nations, followed shortly thereafter by atheist China, pagan India, and then, probably, the United States, from the coasts inland (although the heartland was rotten with sin, too, a fact to which he was about to testify). Intellectuals, in his experience, didn’t believe in right and wrong. Mickey the Gerund believed in nothing but. Not just the practical right and wrong of deeds as revealed to the apostles by the example of Jesus Christ (although that, too), but right and wrong as it has existed from the beginning (and ever shall be, world without end. Amen). God did not arbitrarily decide what was right and what was wrong; God was right and wrong incarnate. What else did Jesus mean when he said, “No one is good but God alone”? The Lord did not invent righteousness, but instead was made up of it. If Mickey were ever called to account by the laws of man for what he had done and what he was about to do, he would calmly produce his four-hundred-page typed manifesto, in which he explained this and other truths. Few would understand it, but those few would have a chance, just a chance, of passing through the needle-eyed gates of His Kingdom.
He watched a couple exit through the tinted doors. The man was older than the woman and they were holding hands. She was young and fit and wholesomely pretty. He watched her, was aroused by her. He prayed in a distracted whisper, but the words spilled out in an unexamined, rote chain. Mickey the Gerund did not believe that sex was evil in itself (and procreation was, of course, preferable to the reproductive perversions that took place in jars inside the clinic), but he was certain that his sudden covetous lust for this woman was proof she was trapped in the clutches of a demon. Would it not distort the bigger picture, disrupt the master plan, he could extract some measure of justice through her. He wasn’t going to fall for such wicked temptation, however. The devil would no doubt sacrifice a common siren to maintain control over the hell soldiers still inside the building. Mickey had sworn off many sins on the day he decided to give himself to Jesus, women being one of them, and women had been the hardest of all to give up. In many ways celibacy had been the most rewarding, however. He saw things clearly. So long as a man thinks he might again know woman, his mind will always be fogged with desire, and Mickey was reminded of this by every unclean thought and every painful erection.
Mickey pointed his first and second fingers at the couple as they paused beside their parked Acura down the street, cocked his thumb hammer, and let it fire, first at her, and then at him.
– 3 -
“Here. I got you a present.”
Anna Kat placed in front of Davis a thin, square package, about as long on a side as one of her slender fingers. Then she reached back and found a chair with her hand and pulled it forward so she could sit opposite him, across his desk.
“What’s this for?” he asked, pleased. Anna Kat’s visits to his office were often inconvenient but they always cheered him. Surely it was not unusual for a man to be proud of his daughter, to feel bettered by her, but Davis dared to consider his relationship with Anna Kat especially close. In spite of his dedication to work, he had raised the kind of young woman a teenaged Davis Moore would have admired, would have befriended, would have pursued with all his energy and charm. More important, he had raised the kind of young woman who would have seen through teenaged Davis Moore’s unflappable, swaggering bullshit.
“It was supposed to be for your birthday,” she said. “But then I figured you could use it before then, and anyways, once I get a gift for someone, I pretty much want to give it to them right that second, so I guess you could say this is really a thanks-for-the-impatience-I-inherited-from- you gift.”
“From me?” Davis pretended to be offended as he lifted the tiny-bowed present and began picking at the wrapping. “Your mother’s the impatient one. Always was.”
She laughed. It was so easy to make her laugh. When she was small he could get her started, and the giggling recharged her like an alternator, until minutes had gone by and she became incapacitated by a delirious aerobic seizure. That would get Davis started, too. Countless times, Jackie discovered them together in the family room, turned on their backs like turtles inverted on their shells, at the mercy of spasms of laughter.
The tape unstuck and the paper unfolded to reveal a small, reflective disc in a black plastic case. “What’s this?”
“Newly uncovered birth and death records: Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Nevada. Eighteen hundred through 1833, although not all the states are complete.”
Davis turned it over. It had no label, or even printing. “Where did you buy this, exactly?”
“Buy?” AK fingered through a bowl of candy on his desk for something chocolate, no crunch. She pinched a tiny Hershey bar, unwrapped it in a manner that was unconsciously similar to the technique just used by her father to unwrap his gift (picking at the ends, first the left side and then the right). “No buy,” she said with candy in cheek. “Download. Copy. Burn.”
Davis reproached her with a severe stare.
“Yeah. So,” she said. “There was a certain amount of hacking involved.” A remorseless confession.
Davis shook his head.
“You can possess information, but no one can own information, Dad,” she said. “These are allegedly public records just sitting on a server in Dallas, and they weren’t going to release them for another two years. Even then they were going to charge an astronomical fee for the privilege. That’s fascism.”
“Uh-huh.”
“This isn’t just an early birthday gift, it’s an act of nonviolent protest.”
