him. At least I was reasonably sure nobody could find me at Clara’s. If they could, they already would have.
I needed to find out more about Robert Grindel. Tchekhy wasn’t convinced that Grindel was the man behind the curtain, but Tchekhy is an old cold warrior at heart and thus would always be inclined toward blaming a government apparatus whenever possible. (And he did have some historical precedent to fall back on.) I was less conspiracy-minded, preferring to put my stock in the proverbial wild-eyed madman. Grindel seemed like the type.
The question was how to research without leaving the apartment. I would need Clara’s laptop. And possibly Clara. I just had to convince myself I could trust her.
Iza had finished off the mushrooms and was buzzing around with renewed fervor.
“Shouldn’t you wait a half hour before you do that?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
“I go back?” she asked.
“Not now,” I said, pocketing the recorder. “Thank you, Iza.”
“All done?”
“If I need you, I’ll leave some mushrooms up here. Okay?” Because you never know when a pixie will come in handy, especially a tame one.
“Okay.” Without so much as a fare-thee-well, she buzzed off. Whoever said ignorance is bliss had been talking to a pixie.
“You freeze anything off?” Clara asked as I re-entered the apartment with the telescope in tow. She was sitting at the kitchen counter eating a slice of cold pizza and reading the laptop screen. Stark naked.
You can draw your own conclusions regarding a woman who prefers to walk about her curtain-free apartment without a stitch on. My thoughts drifted between wondering what deep-rooted factors from her past led to such exhibitionistic behavior and quietly applauding my good fortune. I could only imagine what the people in the building across the street thought.
“No frostbite that I’m aware of,” I said as casually as one can when speaking to a naked woman. “What’cha doing?”
“Reading my mail,” she said. “Got about a hundred inquiries about you from the MUD folks. And the boards have gone nuts over the Central Park massacre. Since everybody knew you were there, the consensus seems to be that you’re dead, and that’s led to a massive freak-out regarding the philosophical consequences of a dead immortal. It’s pretty interesting. You sure I can’t respond?”
“Please don’t,” I said, unbuttoning my shirt.
She pushed away the laptop. “Again, why?”
“I told you. Somebody is after me and I don’t know who.”
“You know that sounds kinda paranoid, right?”
“You were there,” I said. “How many more armed men do you think would have shown up if we stuck around? Aside from the police?”
“I know that, but it’s not like my web access can be traced.”
“They’ll find the building,” I said. “That’s close enough.”
She sighed theatrically, in a manner reminiscent of Marie Antoinette. (I’ve found while women’s faces tend to be fairly unique, their expressions of exasperation are often not.) With youth comes restlessness. In the last forty-eight hours we’d had six versions of this conversation. I was putting up with it because I sort of liked her a lot. Same as with Marie.
“Hanging with an immortal not as exciting as you thought?”
“No, Adam, it’s not that. I don’t understand why you’re just… waiting. If somebody is after you, do something about it.”
Having attained total personal nakedness myself, I walked past her to the refrigerator for some water and a decent pregnant pause while I tried to find an analogy that fit the current century and get me out of the conversation at the same time.
“I saw a cat pin a mouse behind a radiator once,” I said, having chosen the first clunky analogy I could think of. “The cat couldn’t reach the mouse and the mouse had no place to go except out from behind the radiator.
“Okay.”
“So the cat just sat there and waited for the mouse to panic and make a break for it. For hours.”
She closed her laptop and fixed me with an arch look. “And you’re the mouse.”
“And the best thing to do is not panic. Plus, I can wait for a very, very long time.”
“You just made that story up.”
I smiled. “How could you tell?”
“You would have saved the mouse,” she declared confidently.
“You know me that well, do you?”
“I do.” She got off the chair and walked around the kitchen bar and up to me until our bodies were just touching. It might have been mildly exciting with clothing. It was considerably more so without. “You would have rescued the mouse because that’s what you do. You’re the hero.”
“Not
“That’s right.” She took the water bottle from my hand and put it down on the counter. “You’re the one who comes to the rescue. The knight in shining armor.”
“I was never a knight.”
She lifted her leg and wrapped it around my hip, pulling herself onto me. “Liar,” she whispered.
Much later, after a lengthy and elaborate workout that involved every flat surface in the apartment and about half of the vertical ones, we lay together on the bed and enjoyed a little post-coital peace.
“What was your first name?” Clara asked from her position under my arm. Her breathing had been so regular I’d thought she was asleep.
“When?”
“In the beginning.”
“I didn’t really have one.”
“Everyone has a name. You didn’t grow up in a preverbal society.”
I sat up and looked down at her. “How do you know?”
“Because,” she said, rolling onto her back. “You have the capacity for language. Did you know that if you don’t introduce language to a person by the age of twelve, they never develop it?”
“Now who’s making things up?”
“I did not make that up. I’ll show you the study.”
“Well, then they just made it up,” I insisted.
I have a real love/hate relationship with science. On the one hand, I can speak from personal experience that scientific and technological advances have made life a whole hell of a lot easier in just about every way imaginable. (Just two words illustrate that point amply—indoor plumbing.) But I also remember when science meant bleeding people to get the sickness out of them, boring holes in heads to free the evil spirits, and serving powdered human remains to cure gout. If there’s one thing I’ve been thankful for in my many years, it’s that I never had to experience the hundreds of dubious medical solutions offered for the supposed benefit of mankind.
I realized she was still waiting for an answer, so I gave her one. “I don’t know if I’d call it language,” I said. “We were barely even self-aware. I can remember some specific events, but not very much, and only if I work at it. But I did have a name, sort of. More of a sound than anything. It sounded like ‘urrr’.”
“Ur.”
“No, with a longer
