“It was wonderful to have you here.”
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“I love you, Paul.”
“I love you, Jeannie. Really.”
Into the car. On the road. Eyes swollen with fatigue, tongue thickened by booze, face all stubbly. The quarantine zone. The swollen, plummeting red sun. Ashes and clinkers; and then, a thousand years later, the smoothly rounded tawny hills of the Bay Area, the tunnel into Berkeley, Nick Rhodes’ apartment high up on its hillside with the fantastic view.
“Isabelle will be here soon,” Rhodes said. “We’ll all go out for dinner. Jolanda wants to come along too. Unless you don’t want to see her, of course. She has Enron with her, you know. I told you that when you called, didn’t I?”
“Yes. What the hell. The more the merrier.”
A peculiar evening. Isabelle terrifically sweet, gentle, tender, several times expressing her deep concern for all that Carpenter had been through lately—the therapist Isabelle that Carpenter had not seen before, the softer woman with whom Nick Rhodes was so desperately in love. She and Rhodes were like a loving married couple in the restaurant, not in the least adversarial this time, a real team. Jolanda too told Carpenter how sorry she was for his troubles, and consoled him with a torrid hug, breasts pushing close, tongue flicking through her lips and between his, which from anyone else might have seemed an immediate invitation to bed, but which Carpenter realized was just Jolanda’s standard kind of friendly greeting. Enron didn’t seem to care. He scarcely looked at Jolanda, showed no sign of interest in her whatever. The Israeli was oddly remote, none of the frenetic intensity of that other dinner ages ago in Sausalito, hardly saying anything: he was physically present but his mind appeared to be elsewhere.
Dinner that night—an early one at some restaurant in Oakland unknown to Carpenter—involved a lot of wine, a lot of superficial chitchat, not much else. Jolanda, obviously hyperdexed to the max, bubbled on and on about the wonders of the L-5 habitat that she and Enron had just been visiting. “What was the occasion for the trip?” Carpenter asked her, and Enron answered for her, a little too quickly and forcefully, “A holiday. That was all it was, a holiday.” Odd.
Something was bothering Nick Rhodes, too. He was quiet, moody, drinking heavily even for him. But, then, Carpenter thought, something was always bothering Nick.
“Tomorrow,” Jolanda said, “we all have dinner at my house, you, Nick, Paul, Isabelle, Marty and me. We have to finish off everything I’ve got in the freezer.” She was going away again, she and Enron, off to Los Angeles this time. Strange that they were traveling together so much, when they scarcely seemed to pay attention to each other. Jolanda said to Carpenter, “There’ll be one other guest tomorrow night, a man we met on Valparaiso Nuevo. Victor Farkas is his name. It might be useful for you to talk to him, Paul. He works for Kyocera, pretty high level, and I’ve told him a little about your recent difficulties. Maybe he could turn up something for you with Kyocera. In any case you’ll find him an interesting man. He’s very unusual, very fascinating, really, in an eerie way.”
“No eyes,” Enron said. “A prenatal genetic experiment, one of the atrocities in Central Asia during the Second Breakup. But he’s very sharp. Sees everything, even behind his head, using some kind of almost telepathic ability.”
Carpenter nodded. Let them invite a man with three heads to dinner, or with none, for all he cared. He was floating now, drifting a short way above the ground, indifferent to what might be going on around him. He had never felt so tired in his life.
Jolanda and Enron disappeared right after dinner. Isabelle returned to Rhodes’ house with Rhodes and Carpenter, but didn’t stay. Carpenter was surprised at that, considering the warmth that had passed between the two of them at the restaurant. “She wants to give the two of us a chance to be alone,” Rhodes explained. “Figures we have things to tell each other.”
“Do we?” Carpenter said.
That was when the bourbon came out, or perhaps it was rye.
“Who’s this Chicago woman?” Rhodes asked.
“Just a friend, from the Samurai office in St. Louis, years ago. Very dear kind woman, somewhat fucked up.”
“Here’s to fucked-up women,” Rhodes said. “And fucked-up men, too.” They clinked glasses noisily. “Why didn’t you stay with her longer?”
“She didn’t seem up for it. We never were lovers before, you know. Just good friends. I think sex is a very charged thing for her. She was sweet to take me in the way she did, hardly any notice at all, just told me to come right to her. A port in a storm is a welcome thing.”
“Ports. Storms.” Rhodes raised his glass in a toast again. Downed its contents, poured more for them both.
“Go easy,” Carpenter said. “I’m not the bottomless pit that you are.”
“Sure you are. You just haven’t fully tested your capacity.” Rhodes refilled his glass and topped off Carpenter’s. Brooded for a moment, studying his shoes. Said finally, “I think I’m going to take the Kyocera job.”
“Oh?”
“I’m not sure, but it’s sixty-forty I will. Seventy-thirty, maybe. I’ll be giving them my final decision the day after tomorrow.”
“You’ll take it. I know you will.”
“It scares me. Working with Wu Fang-shui: we’ll be achieving wonders, I know it. That’s the problem. The good old fear of success.”
“You may fear success, but you love it, too. Take the job, Nick. Go ahead, turn us all into sci-fi monsters. It’s what the fucking world deserves.”
“Right. Cheers.”
“Cheers. Down the hatch.”
They laughed.
Rhodes said, “If I go to Kyocera, maybe I can find a slot for you there. What do you say?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. You and Jolanda both. She was talking before about getting her friend Farkas to find me a job with them. Don’t any of you have any common sense? I’m the guy who left a bunch of Kyocera people in the sea to die, remember?”
“They won’t give a shit about that, not after a little time has gone by. I can probably get them to hire you as a favor, or else this Farkas probably could, even easier. You change your name so it doesn’t look too weird, and they’ll find a slot for you. Most likely some level lower than what you had, but you can work your way back up. Excellence will always out.”
“Don’t be crazy. Kyocera wouldn’t touch me.”
“I know a Level Three man there. Honestly. If I tell him he can’t hire me unless he hires my friend too, who has had a little bad publicity in an unfortunate recent event, but is eager to redeem himself under another name, a fresh start—”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s dumb,” Carpenter said. “Dumb and impossible. Don’t even try, Nick. Please.”
“What will you do, then?”
“People keep asking me that question, for some reason. I don’t know, is what I say. But I don’t think I have a future with Kyocera, that’s all.”
“Well, maybe not. Here. Have another drink.”
“I shouldn’t,” Carpenter said. “I don’t handle this stuff as well as you do.”
“Indulge yourself,” said Rhodes. “Why the fuck not?”
Somewhere in the middle of the night Carpenter realized without any sort of anxiety about it that he was slipping into delirium. He and Rhodes were still sitting at Rhodes’ living-room table, with two empty bottles in front of them, or maybe three—it was hard now to distinguish fine details— and Rhodes was still pumping the liquor into
