“Eyelids,” Kelly says.
I open my eyes. “What?”
“Eyelids are the result of random genetic mutation.”
“Yes,” I say.
“You have to be able to imagine how it felt before eyelids. If you looked at the sky during the day, your retinas would burn. You’d have to walk with your face pressed into the ground, dirt in your mouth all the time. You’d have to sleep with your eyes open.”
“Yes,” I say.
Kelly nods. “You need to be able to imagine the time before tear ducts.”
Heather’s father leaves his office between 6:18 and 6:51. Monday through Friday. On Saturday and Sunday he works noon to five. It takes him between four and seven minutes to make his way down to the garage, depending on the elevators. He drives a black Lexus sedan.
There ought to be two men in bland suits who drive Heather’s father to and from work and sit all day behind Plexiglas in the hallway outside his office and shadow him wherever he goes.
This would make for more of an operation.
In that case, we might use a pipe bomb. We might use an incendiary device underneath the back seat. We might use a sniper. If the bodyguards blocked sight lines to the subject whenever they were out in the open (as they should), we might use the sniper to take out the bodyguards and use a chase man to go after the subject if he broke and ran. Of course, it is better to snipe in two-man teams. And neither of us knows how to use a rifle.
I am pressing my face into Heather’s neck and smelling her perfume and her shampoo and the soap she uses, which is goat’s milk and honey and costs twenty dollars a bar. Even through all of that, I can still catch the scent of her skin.
Heather is wearing a pair of my boxer shorts and a T-shirt from the gym I go to, which is called Advance.
We are watching 2001 on my DVD player.
I stop nuzzling Heather’s neck and sit back into the sofa with my legs extended in front of me. Heather rests her head on my chest. The light from the television twinkles all around us.
“It’s less than two thousand years since the fall of the Roman Empire.”
“Is that right?” Heather says.
“That’s right,” I say. “Less than two thousand years after chariot races, we have airplanes and space shuttles and movie-theater popcorn.”
“Amazing.”
She shifts the position of her body and nestles into my chest.
I say, “We weren’t even the same species until about twenty thousand years ago. Before that we were Cro-Magnons.”
“Fascinating,” Heather murmurs. Her breathing is becoming deep and slow.
“Until recently, we were carrying clubs and living in caves.”
She is silent.
I watch the television. Keir Dullea has just shut down the supercomputer. This is immediately before the part I don’t understand, in which he imagines himself sitting in a room that looks like the smoking room from the world’s fanciest mental hospital and then sees himself as an old man and a fetus.
I say, “Kelly and I are making preparations.”
Heather stirs for a moment and then relaxes back onto me. “Mmm,” she says sleepily. “Preparations for what?”
“Never mind,” I say. “It’s all right if you don’t want to talk about it.”
Kelly says, “You’re the bastard who gave measles to the Yanomami.” He is talking to the waiter, whom he has just accused of sneezing over his Parmesan-and-onion tartlet. “These people lived in isolation for hundreds of years and then you goddamn sociobiologists and you save-the-rain-forest fairies came in and gave them a measles vaccine, except that there were measles in the rain forest until you brought them. And when the vaccine made some of the people sick, you refused them treatment on the grounds that you wanted to study a society completely free from outside influence.” The waiter is trying to figure out whether Kelly is making fun of him. The men sitting next to Kelly are laughing. One of them says, “This guy is a card. A goddamn card.”
The other one nods and says, “The genuine article.”
Kelly says, “Do you have any idea how many germs live in the mucus inside your nose?”
We are in a restaurant called Neoterra in which each of the tables has a different shape from the others and none of them is round. Our table is shaped like a lima bean or like a slug writhing to death under a blanket of salt.
The men we are eating with all wear suspenders and Kenneth Cole glasses and have their sideburns trimmed every other day. There are five of these men. They are venture capitalists. I cannot remember any of their names, so I have assigned names to them, at random. When I cannot remember the name that I have assigned, I say the first name I can think of. They do not seem to notice.
One of the men next to Kelly is saying, “The plain ones are always the most suggestible. The pretty ones tend to be too uppity and the ugly ones are too wary. The plain ones are up for whatever.”
Kelly says, “How do you know who’s pretty and who’s ugly?”
The man says, “You look.”
“But how do you assign categories? Certain features make you feel physical attraction, but these features are different from culture to culture and even, sometimes, from person to person. It is a selection-based instinct to want to combine your genes with the genes of someone physically attractive, in order that you will have attractive offspring whose appearance will make them more likely to have reproductive success. Of course, you have a chicken-and-egg problem there. Also, that does not account for differences of opinion.”
The man stares at him.
Kelly says, “Do you ever try to imagine the time before dilating pupils?”
When I open my eyes, the man to my right is speaking earnestly to my boss. He is asking to see the business plan.
My boss shifts in his chair.
“You do have a business plan,” the man says.
My boss clears his throat. “Of course we have a plan,” he says. “But we’re not planning to be captains of industry. This isn’t industry. We’re not planning to be the world’s leading distributor of butt plugs. We’re sure as hell not planning to build the world’s best shuffleboard Web site so that some Daddy Warbucks can stroll up and pat us on the head and pay us twenty-five million to split twenty-four ways, so we can buy a town house and a Benz and some pussy and live god-damn upper-middle-class. Upper-middle-class means dick. Fuck the suburbs. Fuck commuting. Fuck neighbors. Our plan here is to be rich enough not to have neighbors. To be able to stand in front of your house and turn around in a circle and own everything you see. Not season tickets, not even courtside. I’m talking about owning your own team. No Internet millionaires here. Fuck that, too. I’m talking about Internet billionaires. What we’re offering you is the opportunity to be part of that.”
The man to my left, whom I have decided (I think) to refer to as Gill, looks at me and says, “So, you played halfback at Princeton?”
“Not Princeton,” I tell him.
“Of course not,” he says. “How tall are you? Six feet?”
“Why not?”
“You weigh around two hundred?”
“One-ninety.”
He smiles. “What’s your forty time?”
“My forty time.”
He nods.
“I don’t know these days.”
He frowns.
“I’m not really an athlete anymore,” I explain.
“Hmm,” Gill says.
We drink in silence for a while. Suddenly Gill looks at me. I lean back toward him.
Gill says, “What’s your body-fat percentage?”