He was panting so loud, he didn’t hear her at first. “The Helix,” she said. “They’re amazing. And the guy who started it?” She reached for a tissue and plucked the semen off her quad. “He’s a genius. So that’s what I want. They say he’s nicknamed Lo. I think it’s cute. So it’s settled, okay?”
“What?” Bruce said, though he was laughing. “Are you kidding?” And he laughed harder. “The Helix?”
“Stop laughing!” she said.
“What? I can’t hear you.” He was laughing so hard, the piss romped through his pipes and the brandy lees down his colon, so that unless he got to the bathroom now, the rain of his ejaculate would be but prelude to something much worse. And so he got up not having said yea or nay, so that Rita began to holler after him: “Thurlow! I want to name the baby after THURLOW DAN!” at which point, Esme, who had fallen asleep on the job, woke up with a start, certain she’d been wandering the world in dream and calling his name. Thurlow, where are you? Thurlow, I miss you. Wait for me, I’m trying.
Team ARDOR: Ready, willing, able.
A municipal building two miles from the Capitol. A conference room with window, wall, and two-way mirror. Around a table, four Department of the Interior employees who’d been summoned from their place of work and given roast beef sandwiches with extra mayo. Standing up: some guy who seemed distantly familiar to Ned and Bruce, but not enough to distract from the oddity and thrill of what he was offering, which was, in the main: hope.
Ned stared out the window, looked up at the sky. In 1986, the USSR seeded the clouds above Chernobyl so that they would deposit their radioactive load on the peasants of Belarus instead of on the cognoscenti of Moscow. And it worked. The Soviets had engineered the weather to kill people. The Chinese, too, were obsessed with the weather. With rainmaking to forfend drought. But in all cases, for good or evil, these people were frosting the sky and changing the world. It was science at its most heretical. Do it right, and you could conjure a storm that was godlike in its rage, steeped in the punitive grammar of the Bible. Do it right, and you could show the heavens who was boss. And this mattered to Ned, since his fear of powerlessness had always aspirated whatever went sloshing about his heart, so that he couldn’t date the same woman more than a few weeks, couldn’t acquire any real friends, couldn’t lock down a single feeling and make it last. But not for long. Cloud seeding and weather modification. It was why he’d been hired, or so he’d been told, and though studying cloud cover in Cincinnati seemed like a dubious application of his talent, it was still a chance to prove he could impose his will on the big things. Find his sister and be happy. Cincinnati, tallyho.
The guy in charge handed out envelopes. He said, “In each you’ll find a key to one of four lockers at the Greyhound bus station. In those lockers, you’ll find coveralls, badges, and clipboards. Anne-Janet, in your locker you will also find keys to the van, which will be parked on Court Street. Now, are you okay to drive the van, or do you want someone else to do it?”
Anne-Janet was startled. She’d been staring at Ned’s shoes under the table. Brown lace-up gum shoes that were popular among the preppies at her school circa 1993. Did that mean he’d been a preppy and was hanging on to the glory days via his shoes? Or did he just shop secondhand?
One of the fluorescents overhead began to strobe. The effect was to slow time in the room and to repulse its occupants even further into themselves.
“I can drive,” Olgo said, and he nearly stood up. Would have stood up, if not for his reflection in the mirror, which showed a man without purpose. Yes, he was working the Indian land claims, but no, he really wasn’t. So maybe he’d started moping around the house. Maybe, for feeling so aimless, he’d stopped managing his looks, such as they were. For instance, his shirt, muddied with raspberry ganache from his birthday cake. But was that any reason to leave your husband? Not that Kay had left. She was just out to graze. Kay Panjabi was grazing. “I can drive us from here, if you want. Right now. Anyone object to leaving right now?”
“That won’t be necessary,” said the man. “But your enthusiasm is noted.”
Bruce lifted his arm in the way kids do when they want to look like they’ve volunteered but don’t want to be called on. Today was payday. If he did as told and allotted his income responsibly, he’d have enough money left to buy his wife and unborn a six-pack of Jell-O pudding snacks for dinner.
“You have a question, Bruce?”
“Yes. Can I keep whatever footage I shoot at the Helix House? Can I get the rights and use it for whatever I want?”
The man touched the hearing device lodged in his ear and said, “After it’s been cleared.”
“I’m ready to leave now,” Olgo said. “Drive right to that man’s door and blow the place up if I have to.”
“What?” Ned said. “When are we going?”
“Whenever you’re going,” Anne-Janet said.
Esme stood. She’d been watching them through the two-way, but she’d seen enough. She patched in to Martin and told him to wrap it up.
She slung her purse over her shoulder but stopped at the door to answer her phone, and then not to answer, because it was Jim Bach. He’d want to know about her progress. He’d ask to meet the team. She let it go to voicemail, and when she listened two minutes later, it was as she suspected.
He said: Esme, the stakes have never been so high. Imperialist pretensions abroad are kid stuff in comparison. Are you sure you know what this means? She stopped listening there. Of course she was sure. And here was why: Some people hear voices and the voices are bad. They say: You’re going to die alone. And: You suck. Sometimes, when these voices come to you via satellite because it is your job to listen, it is your career as a sleuthing mercenary, sometimes they say the last thing you want to hear: Thurlow Dan accepting money from North Korea. Thurlow Dan giving presents to a hooker. Thurlow Dan weeping into his pillow at five in the afternoon, knowing that if his muscles have failed to rouse him from bed, it is because they are instruments of depressing notice that he does not want to live. She had heard it all, and so when Jim asked, for the millionth time, if she understood what was at stake, the answer was easy: Yes, I understand, I understand better than you. Though if he asked for more, she wouldn’t tell him. She could barely tell herself. Time heals all wounds? Ha, ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha.
III. In which a cult leader makes a tape. In which an ex-wife gets her chance. Like honeybees to the hive, Hostage Rescue to the Helix House
THURLOW GOT THOUSANDS OF EMAILS A DAY, which Dean reduced to the few that seemed pressing or of interest. Among today’s crop was one was from a girl petitioning him to visit her weekly meeting, it being the most popular in her district — hundreds aggregating to lament the darkness of 2000; the squandered surplus; WMDs; etc. He wrote: Dear Crystal, I’m glad your meeting has attracted so many people, except I encourage you to reacquaint yourself with the Helix charter and core principles because they don’t have too much to do with what you’re talking about. But then instead of sending it, he just shook his head. To another follower, who’d promised his mom the Helix would make him a better son, though he wasn’t sure it had, Thurlow wrote: The only promise that’s been despoiled is the one I made you. But then he deleted that, too. Turned off his computer and looked at the video camera aimed his way. There was one in every room of the house, programmed to record in his presence and to send this footage to his PC for compiling. He had modeled the system on Nixon’s White House, only he never forgot it was on. Often, he’d look into the cameras and talk to himself. His work proceeded from the unhappiness of a deserted man — who else did he have to talk to? Plenty of people, it turned out. As of today, the whole world. Now that he was about to obliterate the trust so many had put in him, it was better to address them all in one go. He cleared his throat. And began.