“Think about Erin. One thing overrides everything else. Her beauty. It’s the central fact of her life. It shaped her whole character. But to her-inside-it must be nothing, you know? I mean, nothing and yet everything. At the same time. Just like you being smart.”
Miles ran a hand over his flattop. “I was right about one thing, anyway.”
“What?”
“You can do this. You’ve got him going.”
“One conversation is nothing, and you know it.”
“Oh, it’s something. He likes you.”
“You mean he likes Erin.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “If you say so.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you can think what you want, but Erin Anderson-I mean Graham-couldn’t have written that conversation if her life depended on it. I mean, she might
“You don’t know her that well, Miles. She’s a lot brighter than anyone ever gave her credit for.”
“I know her better than you think.”
“What does that mean?”
He put down the printouts and looked away. “Nothing. I’m talking out of my ass.”
I grabbed his sleeve. “Don’t try to crawfish on that line. You said you saw her in New York. Is this something to do with that?”
He studied the floor for several moments. Then he looked up, his blue eyes flat with defiance. “Look, I fucked her, okay?”
My train of thought momentarily derailed. I knew Erin had been promiscuous, but this was a shock. “When was this? In New York?”
“Yeah. Let go of my arm.”
He tried to pull away, but I squeezed tighter, at the same time recalling what Lenz said about Miles battering some guy outside a gay bar with martial arts. But the rigidity went out of him, and he broke eye contact again.
“It was just one time, okay? Erin showed up at this party I was at in the Village. She was with this singer, a real asshole. She was high, but he was almost comatose. She said hello to me, then walked away. About an hour later she came back and asked if I could give her a ride. She didn’t want to go back to their hotel. We ended up at my place.”
“And?”
“And
“Yes.”
He took a deep breath, then blew it out in one hard rush. “We talked for a long time. She told me she’d always thought I was gay.”
I was sorry I’d asked the question, but too late. Miles was reliving the moment.
“If anyone else from home had suggested that, I’d have flipped out, brained them. But not her. She was so frank about it. She wasn’t judgmental at all, just interested. We talked about it for a while, and then… she made love to me. It was unbelievable. Harper, she was everything I’d ever longed for in a woman and had never found.”
“Miles-”
“No, let me finish. I think… she sensed the pain I was in at that time, and she was trying to heal me. Isn’t that funny? Because she was twice as screwed up as I was. Her whole life has been a tragedy, if you ask me. But that was her nature, I could tell. She was whatever people needed. As if through her, they could move to some better place. You know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“God knows what kind of degrading crap she put up with from assholes like that singer.”
“And she just left you after that?”
“The next morning she woke up looking like an angel that had crash-landed in my apartment by mistake. She called a cab, kissed me on the forehead, and disappeared from my life forever.”
I shook my head in wonder.
“That’s why I knew that female soul stuff was right on. That’s her, man. That’s what she needs.”
“She told you that?”
“Not in those words. Like I said, she was… I don’t know, emotionally farsighted, maybe. She could see other people’s problems clearly but couldn’t focus on her own.”
“That’s her, all right.”
He smiled with compassion. “I won’t ask where you got your insights.”
“It was different with us, but not too different. It’s like a dream sequence in the middle of my life.”
“And it never goes away.”
“Not completely, no.”
“That’s why you picked her, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Because she’s haunting. Tragic. She has this unresolvable tension. She pulls men like a force of gravity.”
After this strange moment of communion, Miles picked up the transcripts and shuffled through them. “Printer’s low on toner,” he said, holding up a sheet with letters so faint I could barely read them. “Got another cartridge?”
“No.”
“We can take the cartridge from the printer on your Gateway. Good thing they’re both LaserJets.”
“We don’t have to,” I told him, glad to be able to hide my awkwardness in a mechanical task. I walked to a shelf and took down a tall white plastic bottle.
“What’s that?” he asked. “Toner?”
“Yep.”
“You refill your own cartridges?”
“Out here in the boonies, it’s the only way to fly.”
“Isn’t it a pain?”
I shook my head. With Miles staring in rapt attention, I removed and partially disassembled the wedge- shaped toner cartridge from the Hewlett-Packard printer with a tool called a screw-starter. Then, so as not to end up looking like a coal miner after a cave-in, I very carefully removed the plug from the toner reservoir and refilled the empty space with the ultrafine black powder that constitutes the “ink” of a laser printer.
“That’s it?” Miles asked.
I replugged the reservoir and replaced the cartridge cover. “Ready to go.”
As I reloaded the cartridge into the printer, he pretended to write a note on his palm and said, “A new job for my assistants.”
But the fallout from his earlier revelation still hung in the air, like ozone after a lightning strike. I walked over to my minifridge and took out a Tab.
“Why don’t you scan for Brahma?” he suggested.
“I doubt he’s still on.”
“You’re the one who broke contact. No reason to think he’s closed up shop.”
Using Miles’s search program, it took less than a minute to locate “Maxwell” in another private room. There, true to his habits of the past three days, he was conversing with “Lilith.” Again the voices confirmed my suspicion: there was a lot more information flowing from Dr. Lenz to Brahma than the other way around.
“Lenz’s plan isn’t working,” I said over my shoulder.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because he’s not learning a damn thing about Brahma.”
“He’s not supposed to, is he? He’s just laying out bait, hoping to provoke Brahma to come after him.”
“But he
