‘Look at that,’ she said, holding up a Dorito. ‘That orange. Nothing in nature is that orange.’
Jones looked at her Dorito.
‘An orange is that orange,’ he said.
Bree ignored him. She put her feet on the dashboard. ‘Damn,’ she said, munching happily. ‘What did they do before Doritos?’
Bree and Jones continued west, stopping to use landlines, where they could, to contact Red Queen. Data points came back: here, a probable sighting; there, a CCTV image of the Smart boy in a gas station forecourt. They were going in the right direction, feeling their way half blind after their quarry. They discovered, only twelve hours afterwards, that he’d been in the same motel in Tupelo.
Bree did most of the talking. Jones almost never originated conversation, but Bree poked and prodded. Bree had become curious about Jones. She asked him what he did when he wasn’t doing what they were doing.
‘I’m not usually a field agent,’ said Jones. ‘I work in a small department in Washington. I go through data.’
Bree raised an eyebrow. ‘Most of the Directorate’s desk work is in New York,’ she said.
‘I work for different agencies,’ said Jones. ‘I work in a small department. My condition is useful to agencies looking at data. I can find inconsistencies. I don’t suffer confirmation bias.’
‘What’s confirmation bias?’ Bree asked. Bree was smart, but Bree couldn’t fill out a tax return. When she’d been at school, statistics and math had swum before her on the page. They’d role-played a business class when she’d been a teenager, and when presented with a pretend balance sheet she had gone red and found herself giggling with fright and embarrassment.
‘People see patterns that aren’t there,’ said Jones. ‘They see what they want to see. I don’t. I see only what’s there.’
‘Is that rare?’
‘They say so. Much of the work I do is with tax. But also climate data. I check the algorithms used to identify terror suspects.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ said Bree, thinking otherwise. Sifting data. Jeezus. ‘You get bored?’
‘No,’ said Jones. ‘Never.’ Bree had lost the ability to be surprised by this.
His tone was light and his eyebrows remained in position.
‘What do you do to relax?’ Bree said.
‘I smoke. I do Sudoku. I cook.’
‘You cook?’ Bree said. Her interest was piqued. She couldn’t imagine Jones cooking. Bree loved to cook. She cooked a lot. It was one of the things she did to pass the time when otherwise she would have been drinking.
‘I was told I needed a hobby,’ Jones replied. ‘ “Take your mind off things.” I cook every evening and on weekends I cook twice a day. I like food.’
‘What you can taste of it through all those cigarettes…’ Bree interjected.
Jones didn’t sound in the slightest defensive. ‘I have a good sense of taste.’
‘What do you like to cook, then?’
‘I’ve cooked all of Julia Child and Larousse Gastronomique and Robert Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World and Delia Smith’s Summer Collection. I am on number 467 of Marguerite Patten’s Cookery in Colour.’
Bree had an image of Jones, solemn and methodical, dressed in an apron and a chef’s hat, in the kitchenette of some anonymous and undecorated apartment in which he would be entirely at home. She imagined him holding a burger flipper. He would look like an illustration.
‘Black Cap Pudding,’ said Jones. ‘Put a good layer of stoned prunes or blackcurrant jam at the bottom of the basin.’
Bree burst out laughing. ‘What?’
‘That is one of “More Steamed Puddings”. After that I will cook “Castle Puddings”.’ Jones looked almost happy.
‘Castle puddings, eh? Whatever floats your boat, I guess. You a good cook, then?’
‘No. My food is not always good. The instructions have to be exact. I am not good at guessing. I know a “lug” and a “pinch”. But what is a “good layer”?’ Bree resisted cracking wise. ‘I have been finding Marguerite Patten difficult. Delia Smith is very good. I like Delia Smith.’
‘My favourite food,’ said Bree, apropos of nothing, ‘is…’
And then she started to think about what her favourite food was. Once again it had eluded her. Every time she played this game – usually imagining herself on Death Row – it changed, but never that much. She had once looked online at a list of actual last-meal requests, and she realised that she had all the same favourite foods as most prisoners on Death Row. Gray’s Papaya hot dogs. White Castle sliders. Fried chicken. Pancakes with bacon. A pint of vanilla ice cream with cookie dough. Cold toast thickly spread with salted butter. Banana cake.
She let her sentence trail off. Time and landscape passed.
‘You cook for friends, then, Jones?’ Bree said a little later. Picking up a conversation with Jones was easy. It was as if you could put him on pause, like a VHS. ‘Throw parties?’
‘No. I cook for myself. I don’t socialise,’ Jones said matter-of-factly. ‘People find me unnerving. I have assessments with a specialist, Dr Albert, and a socialisation worker called Herman Coldfield. Herman works for the government. He tells me to think of him as a friend.’
‘Do you?’
‘No.’
She almost said: ‘Got a girlfriend?’ but then had second thoughts. Of course he didn’t. But did he have sex? Even thinking about Jones’s sexual needs, if he had any, creeped her out. She had started to think of him as a child, almost. The idea of him as a sexual being repulsed her. But presumably he did – well… something. Everybody did. But sex without imagination; without fantasy; without thinking about what the other person was thinking…
Bree pushed that aside, and pictured Jones’s life, and felt a little sad. His half-life. That unfurnished apartment – clean, drab, anonymous – in which he would be at home. The bedroom in which he would do his crying, the kitchenette in which he would do his cooking, the shoes by the door each morning waiting for him to step into them and go out into the world without fear or expectation.
That was how it had felt to her, the first months sober. I’ll be your friend, Jones, she thought.
And so, across country, the three cars proceeded. There were Bree and Jones, making shift with each other. There was Alex, making lonely time – thinking, driving, enjoying the pleasurable melancholy of the road, listening to the Pixies and Talking Heads over and over again, wondering how he would remember this journey, how he would describe it to his children.
And there were Sherman and Davidoff, making no progress, wondering why their iPods didn’t work.
‘My name is Bree, and -’
Bree had liked drinking. She had been a good drunk. A happy drunk. When she took the first beer of the afternoon – never before noon; never, at least not till towards the end – and felt its coldness scald her throat, its warmth blossom in her chest, she had been suffused with… what? A sense of generosity, of well-being, of peace with the universe.
That was the best bit. Of course, she’d smoked then too, just the odd one. So the cigarette, the first hit. That was good. But the drink was where the action was. A six of Michelob, pearled with frost in the top of the refrigerator. Crack and sigh as the cap came off. The bottle sighed too. Then a big pull from the neck and it was like the lights came up.
Bree had been sociable. She and Al had gone out in the evenings, taken Cass when she was tiny. They couldn’t afford a sitter in those days. Nobody was buying Al’s paintings, and though he got a bit of work here and there hanging other people’s stuff it wasn’t enough. Bree had stopped being a cop and was pulling down one quarter of jackshit working part-time at the Pentagon.