When I had finally deciphered the photoR5, I sat and stared at it for a long time, frightened and disturbed. I discussed it with Joelene, and she explained that it was about the beautiful inevitability of entropy, the wilting of flowers, the browning of leaves, the cooling of cream coffees, the fading of color. Then I understood that I, too, appreciated these things. I sought them out and savored them. But as Joelene slipped the jacket over my shoulders, and I felt the servomotors create perfect folds and wrinkles as I moved, I knew I could never appreciate a world without Nora.
Three
Joelene and I rode back around the globe to the RiverGroup family compound in the speeding silver teardrop that was my limousine. For the first few minutes, I reviewed the post-date interviews, but soon, I switched off the screen and stared out the window at the scenery rushing by. But that motion reminded me of the Bee Train and of my last date with Nora, so I closed my eyes.
“Nora is at Slate Gardens,” said Joelene. “For cold baths, mud, and mourning.”
I refused to look at the photos or her family’s publicity release. Joelene read part of it aloud, and it sounded like something a phalanx of lawyers had produced. I counted the word regrettably five times.
As the car exited the Loop, the super highway that only the upper echelon of the families could use, and we wound our way through the baking desert southwest, my feelings shifted from despair to anger. Of course it wasn’t Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu, nor was it as Joelene had said, a terrible and inopportune breach. It was Father! It was his ineptitude, his incompetence, and his dreadful strategies. Like so much of what had gone wrong in my nineteen years, it was all his fault.
The access road began to rise above the garish city of Ros Begas, into the Rockies where a valley had been dug in a mountain and the RiverGroup compound had been built. Just as the car came to the top of the lip and started down, a ray of sunlight glinted off the huge glass dome that protected the buildings from the sun, the insects, and the carbon dioxide. Beneath stood the dozen mismatched buildings that made up our little city. Some were windowless warehouses with flat roofs. Several were covered with wooden shingles as if they were trying to be old-fashioned ski lodges. Around the edge were smaller office buildings. Most were glass; a few had metal skins, one was stone. Dead center, sat the black and gold, now abandoned, PartyHaus, with its wide stairs, Ionic columns, and crumbling friezes.
As the car slowed before the garage, I could see attendants, cooks, maids, and workers running toward us. Some were wailing and crying as if I were a coffin containing myself. They clustered around the car, and as I exited, I said, “Thank you. I’m fine. I’m fine, everyone.”
Joelene jumped in front to shield me as a tall orange family satin with a golden visor subdued a maid who was tearing off her clothes to expose a complicated set of sharp-looking bands and wires across her chest and crotch. “I’m the one, Michael. It’s me. I’m the one who really loves you!”
Years ago, when I danced, I told myself I enjoyed these hopeless displays, like the time an army of teenage girls, dressed in lanolin wools, marched up from the valley, surrounded the compound and demanded all my dancing outfits, toiletries, shaven hairs, and a week’s worth of excretions. Now, all of it embarrassed me. As the woman was taken away, Joelene and I hurried in the other direction to my building.
Before my heart attack, my house had been rather like an enormous egg carton inside, with a dozen different rooms. The floors of each room were speaker heads and the place reverberated day and night with heavy bone-jarring thuds and squealing highs. Besides the music, each room was decorated with a theme, like the blinding red light room and the dead lamb room. When I demanded to be taken from the PartyHaus to somewhere quiet and dim, the place had been gutted. Over time, I had decorated and now it had polished muslin walls, black iron floor tiles, and just a few upholstered pieces sat here and there. Two surveillance cameras, little more than black bugs, were mounted on the walls. And while they were there for my safety, I had positioned my bed, desk, and couch out of their range.
Once we were inside and Joelene had shut the cast-iron front door, I felt like I wanted to get in bed and bury myself beneath a hundred layers of wool. I started toward my bed only to jump back in surprise. My mother lay there.
She was a few years younger than father and had at least as much surgery, but seemed older. Her skin was dark and had a leathery quality. Last time I saw her, a year ago, her hair had been long, straight, and hung to her waist. This time it was frizzed like a giant tumble weed and dyed a hundred different colors. Her robe of a dress looked like something a cavewoman would wear. Made of a patchwork of small tanned pelts, I could see tiny rat claws here and there. The bones in her face were beautiful and proud, but now she looked like a former beauty queen who had been forced to fend for herself in the wilderness.
While I felt bad for her, and I had tried not to let Father’s poisoned opinion influence me, I distrusted her. Every time I saw her, she wanted something. And not just that, but she always got shrill and hysterical like her generation.
“Thank goodness you’re ok!” she said, as she leaped up and came toward me with open arms. “You have to leave,” she said, as she hugged me. She smelled of barbecue smoke and soap. “Leave before it’s too late.”
“Mrs. Rivers-Zssne,” said Joelene, pulling Mother’s arms from me. “I don’t believe you’re authorized to be here today.”
Mother stepped back and glared at my advisor with her wide, fearsome sage-colored eyes. “I am!”
“May I see your pass, please?”
“A mother needs a pass to come and hug her son! And to think that we were supposed to be the perfect family. What a lie it all was!”
“Regardless,” said Joelene, smiling stiffly, “I must see your pass.”
As embarrassed as I felt for my mother, my advisor was right—especially after a terrible security breach.
While glaring at me as if this were my doing, Mother pulled a card from her pouch. Somehow she’d been able to bend the hard plastic. After straightening the crease, Joelene checked her screens. “It was valid,” she said. “It expired one hour ago.”
“I spoke to his father,” said Mother, trilling her fingers dismissively. “He said I could have a word with my poor, injured son.”
Joelene handed back the pass. “No disrespect, but you did not speak directly to his father, and we are extremely busy. Additionally, I would advise you to hurry if you want to, wisely, avoid Mr. Rivers senior.”
“If you don’t mind!” bristled Mother. “A moment, please.”
Joelene didn’t blink. “If you’re asking to be alone with Michael, I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
I wanted to tell Joelene that it wasn’t necessary, that I’d be fine, but I knew she wasn’t going to budge. She probably felt responsible for the freeboot’s bullets.
“It’s okay,” I told Mother, “we can talk. She’s family.”
Mother’s face paled; her mouth shrunk to a dot. “Don’t confuse family. She is not your family. She never will be. Your real family loves you. And they desperately need you,” she said, her tone shifting into her familiar pleading. “They’re waiting to meet you. They’ve been waiting for so long. It just breaks my heart.” Mother covered her face and began to sob. “I’m so sorry for everything! I’m so sorry!”