“Thank you,” Pinter says. “I loathe those gadgets. The sins man commits in the name of keeping in touch.”
“I normally leave it behind on social occasions. I’m in a fog today.”
“The topic,” says Margaret.
“Are we ridiculous?” Pinter asks me. “Do we seem ridiculous to you? Our insistence on keeping the dinner hour holy? Our love of discussion? Our odd erotic pasts?”
“No,” I say, not audibly.
“If we do, it’s because we don’t buy it. We just don’t buy it. This wireless wired hive of ours. A sinkhole. No one can be everywhere at once, and why should they want to be? We’ll come close, of course. We’ll come within a hair, then half a hair, then half of a half. But we’ll never ring the bell. And that’s their plan, you see. Progress without perfection. The endless tease, slowly supplanting the pleasures of the sex act.”
“An hour ago you said the world’s a beaker.”
“Is this still pursuit?” Margaret asks. “Or have we switched?”
“A beaker is a charming antiquity compared to what they’ve got in store for us. Tiny antennas planted in our follicles. Digital readouts on our fingernails.”
“Attached without our permission?”
“We’ll
“They? You don’t feel implicated here?”
“Of course I do. I’m in on the ground floor. I’d prefer it if there was another ‘they’ to join, but this is the ‘they’ that history offered me. Advice: If you hear there’s a ‘they,’ get in on it, if only to be pro-active and defensive.”
“In your seminars you teach accountability. This sounds like passivity.”
“It’s always a mix—the seminars overstate one element. The seminars are for psychic adolescents, not vigorous whole realized beings with perspective.”
“Remind me not to sign up for any more of them.”
“Sandy, you were pursued once. By that company.”
“That’s Omaha again. That’s business, Margaret.”
“Please,” I say. “I’m interested in this.”
“They asked me to write down my dreams for them. I did. After three months, they started faxing things back. Predictions. Guesses. What I’d dream of next. At their peak, they reached forty percent accuracy. It’s tedious.”
“How can you say that? Not at all. Dreams about what?”
“What I’d shop for the next day. Shaving cream dreams. Frozen meat dreams.”
“You’re joking with me.”
“They do some good work. They do some bad work, too. Mostly, they’re show-offs. It’s all just razzle- dazzle.”
“That’s not what he thought at the time,” says Margaret. “It staggered him. He fell ill for a whole year.”
“That was chronic fatigue. That wasn’t them. You brought up business, darling. Discussion over.”
Margaret deserts us. She carries her drink to the steps by the back door and sits down facing the alley, its peeling palm trees.
“I think MythTech’s after me, too.”
“You’ll know. Now drop it.”
“We need to discuss the Pinter Zone,” I say. “Don’t take this as pressure, but I’m relying on it.”
“I’m not sure I want my collected works on coffee mugs. Not that omnipresence isn’t appealing. Have to tinkle now. Try those onions there. And why not take off your jacket? You look hot.”
With the table as cover, I take out my phone and activate “last caller.” A Salt Lake area code. Asif again—he must have news of Julie. Now that he knows there’s a crisis, he’ll be tireless.
Margaret has turned and seen me from the stoop. “Just make your call. Don’t let him rattle you. Do it from outside, if that’s more comfortable.”
“Thank you.”
“My husband would like you to sleep over, but I can see you’re not ready. I’ll explain to him.”
I walk around behind Pinter’s car and dial. She answers on the first ring. My sister. Safe.
Her voice is not strong, though I doubt that mine is either. I can hear the road in her voice, the truckstop coffee, as she describes her all-night diagonal journey down through South Dakota and Wyoming in her Plymouth van. She punctured a tire passing Rapid City, repaired it with a can of Fix-A-Flat. She picked up an Indian hitchhiker near Sheridan who gave her a bear-claw pendant for good luck. Crossing the Utah border at Flaming Gorge, she stopped for an hour to examine with her flashlight a hillside bristling with fossil dinosaurs. And no, she insists, it’s not the wedding she’s fleeing, but the deaths of Miles and TJ, the poisoned dogs, who expired, as Keith reported, at her feet, of unstoppable internal bleeding. Their deaths were her fault. In fact, it’s all her fault.
“What else?” I ask.
“Everything.” Julie is not right.
“Have you eaten?” I say.
