how ugly it could be.”
He got up now and opened one of the sliding doors, hurriedly, like he had to get outside. A balcony stood under a retractable awning, hanging out over the edge of the cliff, a table with a few chairs standing against it and two potted plants going brown. The rain had let up and the streetlights were winking through the settling fog, showing off the contours of the canyon below. The hillside seemed to drop in tiers, first a shelf with trees, then a drop to another shelf, on and on unto infinity or at least unto town.
“I was out on the street overnight. That was all I could take. I have a little shame now for what I did-I could have stayed and tried to help my homeland-but I really doubt I could have done any good there. In truth, it didn’t feel like home. They brought me up to be an American. Freedom of speech, press, religion, the sexual revolution, mind-expanding drugs, Pearl Jam, Harrison Ford and Gwyneth Paltrow.
“I found a woman who would take me in that first night. The next morning, I broke back into the program. No one resisted-no one cared. If I’d asked politely, they probably would have given me what I took-my birthrights as a spy; several passports, social security numbers, drivers licenses, the records for my bank accounts at Chase Manhattan, the ones containing dollars that had been set up for me years earlier. The Soviet Union had collapsed and I felt like an American-where should I go?”
He sat back, waiting for me to supply a judgment, a conclusion.
“So now you’re an American,” I said.
“For almost twenty years,” he replied.
“Loyal to America,” I said but it was a question. “It’s what you were hoping it would be?”
“Hoping? This country? Hell, no. Who reads Jefferson-or Twain-here? Who reads in this country anymore? Russians read and debate all the time-they have fanatical debates about philosophical nothing. What is the price of a soul? Ask that on a street corner in Russia and take a seat for four hours-all you do is listen. Here, everything’s about money and celebrity, for its own sake, shallowness for shallowness sake, to no purpose. Real estate goes up and up and up even though everyone knows it’s overvalued-here, take a mortgage, no money down, no credit, no problem-and eventually it’ll crash, down and down even though everyone knows it’s land, it will never be worthless. The speculators make loads of money both ways and everyone else is miserable. It’s a gold rush-what could be more American?
“ No, this country is nothing like I hoped but I’m a true American now. I love what we stand for and hate what we do. I don’t file my taxes, I’m hung up on sex but I never get any and I don’t think much about freedom of speech, press or religion. And Harrison Ford hasn’t made a decent movie in years.” He looked down into the narrow infinity below and laughed.
“I’m not answering your question,” he said quietly. “This is a beautiful country but there’s lots of beautiful countries. There are good people and scumbags everywhere. Generally speaking, governments stink and religions stink and anything that tries to organize people into obedient groups stinks.
“My loyalty now is to Dave. He was a radical-he argued that this time, for the first time in history, human beings should not use a power they were given. That was a provocative thought but not one someone should die for. If America stands for anything good, it’s that guys like Dave can be their benign crackpot selves without being punished for it.”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling profound, “he meant you should use the power for a good purpose.” If it had been a movie, that would have been a key line. I could see Harrison Ford saying it.
Renn sighed and then coughed up a laugh. “I have a gift,” he replied, “that has no positive use. I can root out things people want hidden and force people to do things they don’t want to do. Where does positive fit in?” He went back into the living room and slid the door closed after I followed him in.
“And so, now I’ve told you my story. I’ve led you to a dangerous place and I’m not sure what the next step is. I don’t know who these people are who are after us now; I don’t know why they killed Dave. I know they aren’t going to give up-we’ve gone a long distance away and I can still feel them probing for us every few minutes, even here. I won’t keep you against your will and I wouldn’t blame you for bailing. If you want to, I’ll drop you in town in the morning.”
“They’ll torture me to get what I know about you.”
“They wouldn’t have to torture you in any case,” he said. “But if I drop you off, you won’t know anything about me-and they will be able to read that pretty quickly.” He shrugged. “ It’s your decision. I’m not very pleasant but I’m not a jailer.”
“What about the stuff in my head? The other names that might be there? Don’t you need them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. It won’t bring Dave back, will it?”
“It does matter,” I said as a reflex and knew in that instant it was everything to me. “We’ve got to get the guys that did it and find out why.”
“Why?” he asked and I could see he was really listening, that for some reason he really needed an answer.
“Because we know they’re out there, whoever they are. And because we-you-can do something about it.”
“That simple?”
“He was my friend. And yours.” He nodded. “That’s pretty simple, I guess.” Looking at his face, I thought, He envies the fact that it’s that simple for me. And then I had another thought. “Of course,” I said, “you knew I was going to say that.”
He shrugged and laughed his grating laugh. “I don’t have a choice,” he said. “Thoughts like this don’t mean much until you say them out loud. Or, really, until you do something about them.”
“Okay,” I said. “So now what do we do?”
“Now,” he concluded, “we play cards.”
Seven
“Seven.”
“Wrong.”
“Three,” I said, straining to pluck an answer out of the air, trying to imagine the far side of the card he held in front of me.
“No.”
“Nine. Two. Six Hundred and Fifteen.”
“Funny,” he said. “Okay, just stop what you’re doing. Stop imagining. Stop trying to figure things out. You can’t learn this; you just have to know it.”
“That’s stupid! How can you know something without learning it?”
He reached across the table and pinched my hand, hard. “Yeow!” I recoiled.
“There,” he said calmly. “No learning involved. You don’t make this happen. Stop trying to explain. Your conscious mind demands control; your subconscious just knows. Look at the card and say whatever comes into your head. Say it before your mind gets a chance to corrupt it.”
“Like the Force,” I said. “In Star Wars.”
“No!” he said sharply, holding up that admonishing, dangerous finger. “Don’t do that. The American mind control program fell apart from that kind of association-‘New Age’; crystals, Vulcan mind melds, the love that overcomes all obstacles. Good Vibrations. Unless you’re getting royalties from the song, there are no good vibrations. What’s good in life vanishes in a breath; pain lingers forever.”
He went through the deck, sorting the cards into two piles and then shuffling one pile. “Okay. I’ve narrowed it down-hearts, spades and diamonds, nothing else. Just tell me which. No thinking allowed. No questioning. Just say what you think as soon as you think it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He held up a card.
“Diamonds.”
“Good.” He made a mark on one side of a sheet of paper on the table.
“That was right?”
