“I’ll picture the president’s wife. That ought to stifle it.” He gave her a spousal peck on the cheek. “Tomorrow night, I promise. We’ll go for a double.”
“Big promise.”
As Mark brushed his teeth, Alexis rummaged in her luggage and found a granola bar, choking it down with one of the hotel’s eight-dollar bottles of spring water. Good thing the federal government offered a generous per diem, or she couldn’t afford to serve on the bioethics council.
Mark’s salary was in the low six figures, but she still insisted on keeping their expenses separate when possible. Even though she understood the male’s traditional role as provider, she was enough of a feminist to keep gender issues neutral in her own marriage.
Man smart, woman smarter. Acting like the weaker sex.
And my sex is feeling pretty damned wobbly right about now.
She got one more kiss out of Mark before she returned to the bioethics committee and more debate about the use of psychopharmacology to make people happier, more productive, and better socially adjusted.
In short, whether drugs should be used to make everyone feel the same. To feel “normal.”
God, what she wouldn’t give for a normal life.
CHAPTER NINE
Wendy was only ten minutes late for her noon class.
The eight students in Studio Drawing II were working in their sketch pads, some with charcoal, some with Conte crayons, and two with fat pencils. A tape of eighties synth-pop band The Cars thumped and squished from a cheap boom box in the back of the room, and Wendy was grateful for perhaps the hundredth time that she didn’t have a demanding career with a fire-breathing boss.
This class was self-selecting, juniors or seniors with a serious yen for art, and they didn’t really need motivation. In fact, they seemed as joyful not to have a “real class” as Wendy was not to have a “real job.”
After the odd incident at the restaurant, the reprieve was doubly welcome, and the aroma of paint thinner cut the memory of bacon grease and chaos and Anita’s recollections of the past.
“Hey, folks,” she said, and most of them nodded or gave quick waves before returning to their work. “I’ll just be chilling at my desk in case you need me.”
Wendy had a tiny office, with a long counter and slots underneath for students to store their portfolios, but in typical bureaucratic shortsightedness, a battleship-sized metal desk took up much of the floor space. She parked herself behind it to collect herself before launching into instructional mode.
She picked a piece of glass out of her pocket. The E-Z’s front window had been comprised of safety glass, although the square shards were still capable of cutting flesh, as evidenced by the wound on Anita’s forehead. Wendy tilted the piece of glass like a prism, looking for a rainbow in its oblique surface.
Although she was still shaken by the incident, and the fact that officials had offered no explanation, she’d shrugged it off as just another bit of crazy in a world built of the stuff.
Once settled into the scarred wooden chair that looked to be a holdover from the days of segregation, she fiddled her cell phone from the folds of her jacket.
Anita answered on the second ring. “I think it was Halcyon,” Anita said.
“Calm down, hon. I knew I shouldn’t have left you.”
“Briggs did it.”
“Nobody did anything.” Although she couldn’t understand why an unoccupied car could navigate itself into a building, she failed to see a looming conspiracy theory that would make Oliver Stone cream his jeans.
She was annoyed that Anita brought up the name of a drug they swore they’d never mention again. “It was just an accident.”
“But he knew I was there.” Anita paused and then added with an anxious rush, “First my psychiatrist and now this.”
“Your psychiatrist died of a heart attack.”
“I don’t know that for a fact. Besides, there’s only one way to die, and that’s when your heart stops beating.”
“Anita, you’re worrying me.” Anita had been so distressed at the scene that Wendy, despite a vague sense that she probably should have offered some sort of eyewitness testimony to the police, had yielded to her friend’s frantic desire to leave. Not that Wendy had really seen anything. It wasn’t like she could have identified the driver.
“Did you see the way they looked at me?”
“Who?” Wendy was used to people staring at Anita. Besides being beautiful, her friend often evoked a feeling of vague recognition, as if the viewer had seen her somewhere before but couldn’t place the face. Some did but couldn’t admit it in polite company.
“The cops,” Anita said. “They know.”
“You told me you quit drugs when you left LA. You’ve never been paranoid before.”
“Just like the trials. Freak out, and then forget.”
“You didn’t take more of that stuff your dead psychiatrist gave you, did you?”
“Right after you left. I couldn’t wait till noon.”
“Damn. I told you to consult your doctor before you took more.”
“I needed it. Those monsters in their holes-”
“Listen-”
“I have to go now. They’re coming. Like they came for Susan.”
“Nita?” Her query fell into the white noise of a dead connection.
Susan. Who is Susan? And why is that name scaring me?
She wondered if she should call the police or 911. Given Anita’s persecuted state of mind, the sudden arrival of uniforms might drive her to-what? Wendy didn’t know.
Her friend, though flamboyant and prone to deep depression, had never suffered from irrational complexes. Anita lived only two miles from campus, but with college-town traffic, it might take half an hour to reach her apartment.
I shouldn’t have left her, but she seemed fine.
Wendy tried the phone line again but gave up after seven rings. She was about to try again when she sensed movement in the office doorway behind her.
Her chair squeaked as she turned, the grating noise causing her to grimace. The door seemed far away, the office walls appearing to stretch from her and tilt at steep angles.
The sudden onset of vertigo disturbed her. She wondered if she was catching the flu, or if the Long-Haul Breakfast was making a contaminated run. Her head had been aching and mildly stuffy all morning, but she had no fever.
The morning’s events had been stressful, but she considered herself adaptable and able to handle the unexpected. She was bracing for an attempt to stand when a shadow fell over the door.
“Wendy?” It was Chase Hanson, a student who wore his hair in a 1950s duck and favored checkered shirts. Mediocre talent, but like many aspiring artists, he thought attitude and style far outweighed the need for craft. “Got a sec?”
She swallowed and closed her eyes, hoping he wouldn’t notice her unease. She motioned to a chair in the corner. “Sure.”
Chase closed the door behind him, and the room felt impossibly cramped, like a mausoleum vault.
Like the factory.
He turned and gave her a smile, but his teeth descended in vulpine proportions. The look on her face must have startled him, because the boyish grin froze.
“I thought…” He looked past her to Madonna of Egypt, one of Wendy’s surrealist creations, an oval-faced, hollow-eyed female swathed in filthy bandages like a mummy. “About yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” Wendy gripped the arms of the chair, hoping the solidity of the oak would reaffirm her
