“A ruthless honesty, dedication to fact, respect for process, a relentless pursuit of that which we know to be the end of all action-by these fruits shall we know the true Intellatrawl Associate.

“Let us begin this new day, the first of the week, as we would a journey through an unknown and dangerous wilderness beyond which lies a golden field, fresh water and great happiness.”

Felix filed out of the auditorium and walked down his stretch of the long spiral, in a herd of white, tan, grey and metallic mesh, with the occasional pastel silk like a dried flower in a bouquet of grass.

Over the course of the uneventful day he mused, sucking on ice chips, reviewing the stream of BioWatch data, productivity figures mutating upward or downward by the second. In his gut he realized that jealousy was the simple, elegant explanation that fit all the facts. He would rather have her sick and his than well with her heart in another world. But what was sickness and what was health? The concepts were unclear. If a person is happy in a delusion can they be well? Could he even be sure it was a delusion? Was it just a lovely dream that left its gentle mark on her day? Didn’t he really envy her peace of mind?

Anger was justified; the contract had changed. The woman he had fallen in love with, with whom he had negotiated a life, and who occupied with him an edge, had fallen off to one side. He kept his part of their bargain by grabbing hold of her sleeve, pulling her back up after a great suspenseful struggle with snapping stitches and fraying cuffs Just when she slipped from his grasp and fell he grabbed her by the hair and flung her to safety. Now she went and fell off the other side and could fly, she didn’t need him.

There was something in her silences, her frank and imploring eyes ever watchful of him that led him to believe she did actually need him but he felt in himself some resistance. The need was gravitational almost, an attractive power that meant to suck him into whatever alternate reality she haunted. Every time she dropped a green pill into her palm and swallowed it his stomach tightened, as if she were talking to a lover. He could not follow her there. He didn’t want to. It was wrong.

He ate his sandwich mechanically at the urinal, the smell of ammonia and disinfectant disguising the processed meat taste and mustard, For exercise he walked to the fortieth floor and back and sat down at his BioWatch WorkStation, red and green lights dancing on the bubbles of CellPack encasing his head.

At six o’clock the screens shrank to a dot and he shuffled out to the Amphibatrains. His tolerance of things was growing brittle. Chairman Aung’s paeans to the glories of excellence (at one time benign palliatives he took in the same attenuated spirit with which they were offered) began to seem idiotic, malevolent even. The air on the Amphibatrains was no longer a little stale but fetid. The man seated next to him was no longer ugly in the normal shabby way but vile, monstrous. Pores gaped and oozed. Dandruff was the sloughed scale of reptilian heads. People sat consuming filth. He felt like he was wandering among toads.

Peter poured him his second martini and he sank deeper into a misanthropic gloom. The doors opened and another regular entered, a man with a pile of spongy hair and a long rippling nose. A big talker. Possessive of his bartender’s attention, Felix stiffened with hostility. The man was repellant, a sports enthusiast who knew the performance records and genealogies of all the major players of every sport. He knew who had what gene and which company they were contracted to, even the history of bids and trades. He had mastered the human sports pedigree and shared this cornucopia of useless information with all in earshot.

The man ordered his fruit juice drink, a glass of moody reds and oranges, layered, intricate, sweet, and Peter executed the complicated procedure of juice and liquor pours while the man discoursed on the fate of Iranian tobogganers and Costa Rican high divers. Felix read Peter’s paper, turning from the murder and mayhem of Midtown, where Police Chief Pradip Herskovitz was on the verge of declaring marshal law, to the serene uncertainties of the business section. MONOZONE ROCKET! Fueled by foreign sales of its latest Euphoric, Paregane, Monozone’s stock price hit record levels today, out performing all other pharmaceuticals. Not since Broadway Inc’s spectacular climb of two years ago has anything like it been seen around the world. Paregane, an over-the-counter drug in Asia and Africa, is only approved for prescription use in this country. But if Owen Bradlee, project supervisor and chief advisor to General Priss Valdez has his way, Paregane will be on the shelves here by the end of the year. “It’s a juggernaut,” he said, adding, “It’s as close to a panacea we are likely to see in our lifetimes.” Unlike other mood altering drugs Paregane is not a stimulant, there is no ‘crash’ associated with its use, nor is it addictive.

His eyes clouded. It was time to go. He was sinking slowly into the milieu, the stool was comfortable, and the air salubrious despite the chatterbox seated four spaces down. Two women who worked for Intellatrawl swung in giddily laughing.

“Hey Felix,” the one on the left said, the red head whose name he could never remember. “Going so soon?”

“My wife made dinner.”

“Isn’t that nice,” said Nadine, the other one, the one with a two inch high helmet of natural black hair twinkling with raindrops.

Suddenly, and with regret he signed the check, slipped out the door and rode his bike home through a strong, wet wind. It wasn’t rain exactly. It wasn’t even cool. It was a hot, industrial wind blowing around random drops of atmospheric liquid.

The lights of the living room were blinding at first, the smell of dinner revolting, the sight of Veronica (calm, regal) guilt and terror inducing. Her lips swelled up off of her teeth and her eyes fell on him like a disturbance, her vigor and health a rebuke. She smiled, tentatively, almost as if she were afraid to say anything. Why should she be afraid, he wondered. What does she see? “Hello. Have a good day?” Obviously she had decided to forget about the argument in the morning. It hadn’t gone anywhere for him, it’s killing animus was still alive. He wondered what he was doing there, withering beneath her electric gaze, the palpating energy of her body. “Dinner’s almost ready,” she said, the smell of hot dogs filling the room. “Do you want salad or broccoli?”

He sat down on the couch and looked up at her. She wore a loosely belted paisley silk robe that fell to her knees and was open between her breasts. One hand was placed provocatively upon her hip and the other held a long, two-pronged fork.

“Salad,” he said, staring at the t.v, from which issued the flat, nasal voice of a virtual announcer.

Nervously she approached the couch and stood over him, lustrous, resilient, pliable, full. Her shadow fell on his face; his skin grew hot. He felt her eyes probing his gut. They were the kind of eyes he could never hide from. They always came for him, through his many masks, self defenses, shifting personae and found out the place where he felt the pains and joys and contingencies of existence, where he himself existed as both known and knowing. She ferreted out his love for her even when it hid from himself. He tried to ignore her but she sat down next to him and took his hand in hers. Then she stood and returned to the kitchen. It was, he knew, an invitation.

He stared at the white plate trying not to smell or see the pale, pink, sweating hot dog with a twizzle of bright mustard running down its length. Instead he tried to get enthusiastic about the little pile of greens with orange dressing on the side.

“It hardly qualifies as food, I know,” she said. “But they’re cheap.”

“Have you ever seen the animal they grind up to make these?” he asked, spearing it with a fork and holding it up like a specimen for display.

She thought about it and asked, “Seriously?”

He put it down on the plate and munched on the salad. “Yes.”

“At a state fair when I was a kid, in Georgia. There was a warehouse of industrial pigs.”

He nodded. “Vestigial legs. Kind of like land whales. Feed in one end, shit out the other.”

She laughed. “Sort of like an elegant reduction of existence itself, wouldn’t you say?” She looked at the table. “We can’t afford better now.”

He didn’t feel like talking. He just wanted to drink and go to sleep. With effort he tried to maintain his end of things while also avoiding a fight, but this was difficult because the only things they had to talk about were the very things they fought about. “Do you ever feel sick about the pigs?” he asked.

Warily she ventured, “Of course. I could get tofu.”

“Bean Curd.” He let the words hang there like an implication of dirtiness. “Better for us, better for the environment. Pud food.” He sawed the tip of the hot dog off and chewed. Smoky rubber fell apart between his teeth.

She became pensive. “I feel sick, Felix, about everything.”

“Oh. I didn’t know. I thought Paregane took care of that. I thought you’d found paradise.”

“I’m not afraid anymore. Not afraid to live anyway. But I didn’t stop thinking Felix, I didn’t cease to exist. I feel the perennial lousiness, the desultory, grimy, inane mess we’ve made of our lives, and of the world.” Laboriously she chewed a bit of her salad and sighed. “It doesn’t have to be like this. We used to be better. Remember–”

“Before you were sick? No, not really. It’s like it chewed my life up and spat it out and now here we are, alone–”

“That’s not what I meant. And we’re not alone. We have each other.”

“You may have me but I don’t have you. You’re–you’re off somewhere all the time where the food is good.”

“Please don’t yell. You never yelled at me before.”

“I’m yelling at myself. I can’t live up to you now.” He sputtered looking for words.

“I’ve applied for work.”

He put his fork down. “Why didn’t you say so? Where?”

“I didn’t want to fight with you. Every morning we fight and at night you come home drunk, late. I’m afraid of you now Felix. Not of legless pigs. Not of hot dogs. You.”

“Where’s this job?” he demanded.

“Alaska.”

“Great!” He slammed down his fork and stood. “First you go nuts on me, then you take a hike to Shangri-La, and now you announce over dinner that you’re leaving me to live in another country?”

“I won’t take the job if you won’t come with me,” she said calmly.

He worked her over with his eyes. “What’s the point.”

“To change our lives. Live according to our dreams, our beliefs, our desires.”

Now he was incredulous. “Isn’t that what we’re doing? Isn’t that the whole point? Of the jobs, the money? To travel–”

“No, not travel, not vacation, for real. There’s a job in Fairbanks, managing a tour outfit’s office. The pay’s lousy but we can make it.”

Felix felt his brain cramp up. Her eyes opened on him and she asked, “Will you at least consider it?” The eyes stirred up his nerves; they were little feelers, tactile tips, extensions of a visionless brain. They crawled up along the inner edge. He sat down and stared at his plate, afraid to look at her, but he did. He looked up from the warm tube of meat with its knotted tip sliced off, so that the contents bulged a bit out of the silicon casing.

“Come with me,” she said.

And now he knew she wasn’t talking about Alaska.

“If you want to live, come with me.”

Mechanically he began to rub his forehead with an open hand, up over his hair and down. An odor, the odor, crept between them. What is that? What? He fired words, names at it but it evaded all his thoughts and yet maddeningly it–the odor–entered his nostrils, entered his mind and sank to his bowels and groin. Like her eyes, those hypnotic waters sketched with gold, stirring him up from within till his cock began to swell and tug, pud no more. No, he wanted to scream, rubbing his forehead, blinking. It didn’t smell like sweat. It didn’t smell like cunt or like butt or breath. It didn’t smell like her hair or her flesh. It didn’t smell like fruit or flowers or like an animal, not like wet fur, not like shit, not like semen. It hovered in- between these things and places, these vents, it was floral, piney, like pepper, like heat, like something deep inside, like fucking, glandular, fishy, feathery, imaginary, slow and relentless, attractive, dark; it fermented, bred, grew, like crystals it multiplied, like wet wood and leaves rotting in the rain it spawned and fed, like everything and nothing at all.

“We have no money,” he said, weakly.

“Then let’s sell the embryos.”

Felix was aghast. He didn’t need to say a thing; his expression was a horde of scorn and terror.

“Look at you! Felix, we’re people. We can have children naturally.”

“What, so they get sick and die at an early age, no longevity, no cloned organ transplants, no–”

“Yes, we give birth and we die naturally, the way people always have done and still do. Do you think most people can afford to sock away a few embryos? That a stem cell line is some sort of entitlement, some sort of necessity? I’ve done the math. We have six months. We can sell off all our stock and the embryos. Then we fly to Winnipeg and buy a car and drive to Fairbanks. We can camp out on the way. Look, the embryos will pay for all that and leave us a little cash to live on till I can start work. You can find a job there too.

I know it.”

“But it’s so cold in Alaska.”

“Yeah, and dark. But it’s not this–this–”she reached across the small white table and touched his clenched hand. He looked at her, into her eyes and face and saw through to the Veronica he had always known, always trusted, always loved. Tears surged into her eyes. They glazed up and glistened. “I know why she killed him now,” she said.

“Why?” he asked, knowing right away that the she was her mother.

“She didn’t want to leave him behind. She didn’t want to be alone and neither did he. It was the only way.”

For a moment he imagined she was about to kill him and he felt suddenly exhausted by a surge of adrenaline.

“No,” she laughed. “I’m not going to kill you. My god, you should see your eyes. Look, when I was lying there in that bathtub, all I could think of was our freedom, that soon I’d be nothing at all and you’d be free. Don’t you see? I didn’t want or need to take you with me, not your body. In me, in here,” she touched his hands and touched her heart, “that’s where you live, you’re always with me.”

He shook his head. “No, this is a gentle kind of madness, a safe delusion, a plan that has us abandon all we’ve worked for, to sit for six months at a time in darkness, half a year and half our life spent in dreams. But I still live in a world of daylight, and you grow stronger and stranger every day.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.” She stood and ran down the stairs. He pushed his plate away and collapsed into torpor. She stomped up the stairs and stood over him, panting, redolent of sex. “Look here. I have enough.” She held up the brown glass bottle and twisted off the top. “I don’t want to be alone. Come with me, I say.” She shook out a little green pill and held it out to him in her open hand. “No one has to know.”

Fear crept up his throat and furred his neck and back with cold. They were at a threshold he didn’t understand and was afraid to cross but he couldn’t stand the alienation anymore, couldn’t stand being unhinged from her. He wanted to regain a sense of imbedded reality; he didn’t want to drift through life like an impostor playing himself. He wanted the world back, he wanted to hate with satisfaction and love with fulfillment. He took the pill, dropped it in his mouth and swallowed it down with pale flavorless beer. The warmth of her smile didn’t spread to him. He felt worse than ever, like he’d done something irrevocable. But at least he would have her.

“Don’t you have to get up? You’ll have to rush.” She swung out of bed and stretched again. He grunted. She breathed deeply and walked around the room. “That was just,” she paused and exhaled.

“Will you make coffee for me too?”

“Anything to eat?”

He gagged. “No.”

She smiled and sat down next to him on the futon. He smelled her. She had a strong odor, very enticing but not normal. It wasn’t perfume exactly, it wasn’t sweat, maybe something in between. But he couldn’t respond to it, the martinis were stale on his breath and most of his thoughts were taken up by the next move. She felt around in the blanket and took him in her hand. “I wish you could just stay here. We could fuck, go back to sleep, spend the day in the park.”

His bladder ached. “It’s a piss hard on,” he croaked. She dropped his cock and stood, pulling the white silk sleeveless gown over her head. Felix looked up at her. She seemed to tower over him. In the bright light her skin smouldered like a jar of honey in the sun. It was almost like rubber, firm and lustrous. Her buttocks swelled out and her breasts were full, as if she were lactating. She wasn’t any hairier than before but the hair she did have was glossy and thick and stood up off her body, under her arms, in a line down from her navel to her pubic hair. She had become an alien beauty. He felt small and dirty, weak and hung over. Even his unhappiness felt petty.

“How did you sleep,” Felix asked, finally, knowing the answer already. But it was a custom with them to ask and he wanted to get on with it.

“Marvelous,” she warbled.

“I wish I knew what that meant.”

She faced him and stepped into a pair of black cotton briefs, the muscles flexing in her calves and thighs, her breasts swinging down as she bent forward. “I just feel so good in the morning now.” She stood straight. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Why.” It wasn’t a question even, just a sound he had to make now and again, the human form of echolocation.

“It’s just that you might feel bad, that I spend my nights walking through paradise.”

Jealousy. Was that it then? He could feel it, so could she. There was no way to hide. They heard each other’s thoughts. She put on a black bra and buttoned up a peach blouse, open at the neck, with loose sleeves. “I don’t mind hearing about the dreams.” He swung out of bed and rubbed his scalp. “It’s when you act like those dreams of yours are real.”

“I wish you didn’t get so mad about it.”

“Who’s mad?” he half shouted, and then, feeling ridiculous, glared at her to let her know that it was her fault they were fighting.

“That’s o.k. I understand. I would be mad too.”

He gripped the sides of his head and sort of silently screamed. “And then you are so even tempered all the time. It’s that goddamn drug, and that goddamn place. I don’t have you anymore. You’ve become something else.”

She sat by him. “It’s been hard, I know. I’ve put you through a lot. I’ve put myself through a lot too. But this is who I am, who I’ve always been.”

He shook his head. “That’s not it. Something’s not right with us. I slog away at that BioWatch WorkStation while you moon about. You’re like a lotus-eater. And we’ve got no money.”

“I’m looking for work,” she said evenly.

“Every day you say that.”

“Do you want me to work in a bar?” She stood and stepped into a simple obsidian miniskirt and went out the door. Naked, Felix followed her up the stairs and into the living room.

“No, not at a bar. Anywhere. What you do–I want us to be happy.”

“By drinking yourself into a stupor every night of the week? When did we last even eat a meal together?”

Felix grumbled. “I’m tense by evening. I’m trying to adjust.”

She ran boiling water out of the faucet into a glass bowl full of coffee grounds, which she stirred briefly but vigorously with a glass rod. “I think we should change our lives.”

“I’d like to have our old life back,” he answered, facing her close, in the doorway. She put slices of white bread in the toaster.

“Look at this place,” she said. “We’re like rats in a hole.”

“This,” he declared indignantly, counting off each point with a finger, “is a great apartment. We’ve got total climate control, dawn to dusk natural lighting, photosynthetic air and water filters, easy access to mass transit. People swelter away in storm prone boxes, little composite huts! In foul suburbs, near methane plants and fusion reactors, literally dying to get into one of these, which they’ll never do, even if they save all their lives. Be real.” He stared at her. Her composure was sound, she was relaxed, listening to what he said, sort of, but she seemed to be drifting off. “You’re there right now, aren’t you? Thinking about that place, fantasizing as we speak.”

“We can change, Felix.”

He retreated to the living room and sat on the couch. She poured coffee into two glass mugs and handed him one. They sat together on the couch a moment in silence and then he put his cup down on the coffee table and stood. “I have to get ready.”

Pud, he thought, gazing down at his penis in the shower. It was a depressing thought, a heavy, shapeless word dropping through his mind and landing on a soft dark contour with a dull thud. Felix soaped his dead member, dead in its little nest of hair, like a fledgling bird. He soaped up his nearly hairless armpits. He washed out the crack of his ass. He cleaned between his toes. The water felt good. It was hot. It smelled like vaporized perfume. The billows of steam and water contained him in a totality he otherwise lacked. It blurred the lights into amber and lavender clouds and it blurred his thoughts till the worst they could manage was the monosyllabic pud, without alarm, just the slow, depressing realization of the true, the inevitable. Then the shower dissolved even that into prismatic aerosol. He toweled off and dressed in a white shirt, white slacks and an artichoke linen jacket. He selected one of his many maroon ties and knotted it carelessly.

Upstairs they faced each other in the doorway. He felt hungry and tired and when he looked at her he saw that she had somehow grown a little in height and stature. There was a look in her eyes, the spokes flashing like emeralds and sapphires, that could command who ever looked there to do her bidding and yet her expression seemed to renounce this power. It lay all within, beyond intention or control and he realized it was focused entirely on him. It stirred up in him an old thought, I am a lucky man, but luck at that moment lacked the gravitas of pud.

Veronica recovered both physically and mentally. She spent her days working out at their gym, The Arcadia, a synthetic indoor rain forest with five story waterfalls and sulfur crested cockatoos flying about. Money was running short.

As Veronica’s strength grew her physical presence became almost threatening. Some force was imposing its will on the world through her body. It made Felix feel like a bug, creeping about. It was an extremely subtle eclipse of a pride he didn’t know he had. He hated himself, he hated the world. Life itself had become hateful and that was the pride that was hurt, the pride he took in being alive. A loss of vitality and its self-regard.

Felix was cornered, by her, by work, by circumstance.

For a while he fussed over Veronica at home, but not anymore. Now he spent most nights getting zonked on a slow drip of Gulag martinis stirred to frigid perfection by Peter Nguyen.

Peter poured two shots of vodka over ice rinsed in absinthe and gave it a few decisive spins with a long, twisted metal spoon. The glass shaker whitened. He dumped ice and water out of a trim martini glass, wiped the inside dry with a napkin and ran lemon zest around the rim. Then he strained the drink into the glass, and gave the zest a squeeze. A little spritz of lemon oil sprayed down on the surface. Deftly, without concentration or effort he carried the drink to Felix, seated at the end of the zinc-topped bar, back to the door.

The words for no reason at all repeated blandly in his head. He was resting on a certainty, that his constant feeling that the world was about to do something awful to him was a delusion driving him to behave in ways incomprehensible to himself. He sipped the drink. It had an evil flavor. He gave it another chance.

Felix scratched his head and looked to Peter for some sort of human interaction. Peter wore his usual uniform of maroon jacket and black t-shirt. To appear busy he messed with things that didn’t need messing with. Appearing to be busy is important. He measured out the cheerfully colored glass straws. He folded red cloth napkins. When he could no longer avoid it he opened a cheap edition of the paper (printed on flimsy, recycled hemp) next to Felix and casually read the news. From time to time he looked up to indicate he was listening.

Felix, as he did every night, was trying to figure it out.

“If my wife calls, tell her I’m not here.”

“Where should I say you went,” Peter said to the paper, without inflection.

“Say you don’t know.”

He laughed quietly. “She’ll know you’re here.”

“Not if you don’t tell her.”

They read a headline together.

MAN GUNS DOWN 3 IN MIDTOWN BAR

Peter poked his finger at the picture of three bloodied corpses laid out on the sidewalk in front of the bar. “Shit. That’s near where I live.”

“It’s not like she’ll actually call,” Felix said.

Peter turned to the business section. “She never does anymore.”

“But that’s just it. Even when she hated me it was like we were in it together, you know? She hated me cause she couldn’t get rid of me, I wouldn’t let her go, I wouldn’t let her die. We were one then, at odds, o.k., but one. Now, I don’t know.”

Peter grunted. A couple, elderly, in their mid nineties, entered carrying umbrellas, which they shook off like wet dogs. The man stood tall and predatory, gazing around at the small, wood paneled room through avian eyes over an avian beak, in search of helpless wait staff. His wife, equally avian and equally impatient stared at the water, which had pooled in the creases of his shoe.

“The host will be right with you,” Peter said, standing stiffly. “Would you like to have a seat at the bar?”

“If I wanted that, why would I stand here now?” He turned to his wife. “We might as well leave.”

“The food is good,” she reminded him. He looked at his watch.

“Slow as all get out.”

Felix shuddered and slunk between his shoulder blades. This was the future. This was what awaited him.

“Let’s have something at the bar, dear.”

He glanced angrily about. The host, a man in his fifties, a little slow of breath, and sad in the way of all people lost in jobs they neither love nor hate, came with a stack of menus. “Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer?”

“What took you so long?” Mr. Mortimer asked.

“Yes, that’s us,” Mrs. Mortimer said.

“Your table is ready.” They placed their umbrellas in the large brass stand by the door and followed the host to their table. Peter landed like a butterfly on his paper, looked at Felix’s empty glass and said, “Another?”

“Yeah, why not.”

As Peter mixed the drink Felix reflected further. “She doesn’t even have a job yet, which is fine, it takes time. But it doesn’t worry her. Nothing does. She wakes up feeling perfectly great. I mean, radiant, grand. But it’s like, I’m not in it with her.”

“Sounds like you’re out of phase.”

“That’s right–that’s just it. Out of phase.”

After another drink he slurred. “You remember what it was like. She took it right out of me. Maybe there’s just nothing left.”

“You need to recharge a bit, that’s all. Once she starts working, things’ll look up.”

Felix darkened. “I don’t know about that. I think it was work that set it off. That mess with her parents didn’t help. She shot her husband, and then herself.”

“But she was rabid.”

“So what?”

“Rabies makes a hell of a difference. Down there in Florida weird things are always happening. Too hot. Too wet.”

Felix mulled it over. He had said such things himself, to his parents, when they announced that they were moving to Louisiana.

Her parents had insisted on retiring to Florida, despite the violence and the heat. All of it was under water and Amazonian in climate and wildlife. They had lived through the tail end of things, heard first hand stories of tornados, tidal waves and hurricanes. They made their fortune in the salvage business, running crews in and out of swamps, after diesel, bank vaults, machine parts, whatever. They studied old maps and located landfills for composite plants. It was big money and they bought land (a string of islands in the Everglades) from the Seminoles. Her father liked to shoot crocodiles and her mother painted birds.

“I should go,” he said.

Peter looked up from the paper. “Well, goodnight then.”

“Thanks.” Felix signed the check, slipped off of the stool and headed out the door. The street was empty. He looked up and down it for his bike. The air was cool after rain. It felt good. Water dripped rhythmically off facades and splashed on the crushed stone pavement, glittering in streetlight. Back and forth he walked, distracted by dim movements behind black windows, or the sudden burst of noise when bar room doors opened.

On a Sunday night most people were at home in bed. Only the unemployed, the retired and drunk came out. He thought about the old man and woman barking at the waiters. Why didn’t they just get on with it? Why didn’t they die and leave something for the rest of us? They were always going to be there, getting older and older, like the Sybil at Cumae, a voice in a pile of living dust.

At last he found the bike and rode off through the drizzle. He didn’t raise his hood; he wanted to feel the rain at the back of his neck, running like a cold sweat off of his head and down his bare cheeks.

Once home, he blinked against the living room lights, dim as they were, set to dusk, and sat for a few minutes on the couch, taking off his shoes and staring at the blue mirror framed in opaque stained glass on the wall opposite. The reflection in the mirror was of the ceiling, and refracted light. Nothing really. He stared at his feet. In the bar he had felt tired, drunk, ready for bed. The contentions, worries, threats, and enticements of physical existence had receded sufficiently to release him back into the black, reassuring nothingness of sleep. But now this good rest stood off to the side. Like the mirror, it allowed oblique views but vanished at the touch of a head or look. A sleepless, sullen silence overcame him.

For all of the differences in temperament and class between his parents and her parents there were remarkable similarities. He was often struck by the fact that both had used the word freedom to justify their moving to the edge of the habitable world. Free from what? And for what? To die of some horrible disease. You would think they would want to retire in comfort, after living in such places all of their lives, working in that unbearable heat for months, his mother the only doctor around for hundreds of k. He remembered summers when he saw children lined up for shots, arriving by rowboat, which they tied up to the pontoons of the floating hospital. Certainly all four of them could have afforded what they had earned.

He had always been taught that one could have specific freedoms, but freedom as a general idea just didn’t exist, a word without a referent. There was no defense of abstract freedom. Capital could be free, or speech. Markets.

He just couldn’t understand how living where both his and her parents did constituted freedom at all. Nearly 2/3rds of people on the frontiers died of unnatural causes. Living in a bamboo and thatch shack erected on stilts in a lagoon wasn’t free at all. You were enslaved to animals, became the food of insects and bacteria and of their reproductive cycles. You served their ends at your own expense.

The only time he ever had a sense of what they might have meant was on vacation, a sort of bracketed freedom within the security of a regular life. Skiing down a mountain, hiking and sleeping out beneath the open sky. Most of that had been on the road from Thunder Bay to Vancouver. In Canada he had felt the exhilaration of a momentary freedom. And the exhilaration had a charge that persisted in his memory long after the event. If that was what they meant, then maybe he knew.

Freedom is subjective. One didn’t need to suffer pain and loss to be free. His parents, her parents, were a little nuts to destroy themselves for that.

He stumbled down the stairs and brushed his teeth. In the bedroom he got totally naked. The cool sleeping air stippled his skin. He stood, swaying by the bed and watched Veronica sleep. She was curled up in a fetal position, facing him. The light cotton blanket, grey in the near dark, rose up over her hip and dipped at her waist and rose up her shoulders, like hills at dusk. Her black hair was tucked beneath the blanket, which she gripped across her cheek. Her face was relaxed, expressionless, still, as if she were immobilized, maybe frozen, and he had to watch very carefully to see her breaths come and go.

He looked at her for a long time. She wasn’t there. Veronica was gone. This was her husk, her facsimile, a sort of place marker. The sarcophagus to which she had to return before morning, enlivened by her travels. But it wasn’t that. It was an animal in repose, virile, in its prime, resting up for its departed master. Slowly he yielded to sleep in the chair. As his neck grew cold and stiff he half awoke and crawled into bed beside her. She didn’t stir. He rested against her warm, upright body and slept.

The craft set down on the west side of the lake, in a sheltered area Leonard had cleared, beneath the ridge of the hill that separated the vineyard from the road. Set in the brush like that it was safe from wind and invisible from the road and the house. In one hand she carried a bag and used the other to balance herself. Grasses and weeds grew up two metres high and smelled of corn silk. There was a cacophony of insect and amphibian voices, frogs going dunk dunk dunk, scissoring cicadas, the busy mandibles of grasshoppers chewing. Moths and butterflies bounced among the tall hot weeds and she was a little unnerved to discover that the unbroken background buzz was made by yellow jackets. Overhead a turkey buzzard circled.

Weeds slowly gave way to rhododendron. The dark, resinous leaves smelled strong, of nightshade, and the stalks, or trunks, had grown rankly, reaching a frightening height for a plant she thought of as a sort of flowering shrub. The shade was close, choking. As a child the leaves always reminded her of fingers. A cool breeze from the north bore a cruel scent of rain. It wouldn’t stop here; those clouds were just passing through.

She was sweating profusely now. It ran off her head and back. Long ago she had stopped noticing the drops rolling down her side. Black flies settled en masse upon her shoulders. She could feel their little feet running around on her neck. Mosquitoes and gnats engulfed her face. They bit at the tips of her ears. But she didn’t bother swatting, confident that the BiteStop pills she took would keep them from stinging anywhere else.

The path soon joined the driveway and the space opened out on either side. To her left was a stand of oak trees, hundreds of years old, with broad canopies. Each was different. There was the listing fat one and the one with a trunk like a mast. A few were split and twisted. Even on the hottest days the air beneath these trees seemed cool, sweet with acorns and dense, tannic leaves. To the right was a grove of dogwood, separated from the driveway by a split rail fence. Then there were crooked apple trees, moss and lichen covered, small green apples hanging in the gnarled boughs. Up ahead the weathered grey clapboards of the house came into view. In between was a sort of tent, a flat canvas roof held up by bamboo poles with netting for sides and a hole cut in the center to let out smoke. It was connected to a couple of mismatched composite shacks with solar panels. Then there was the baby blue and white pick up truck with the smashed out headlights. The thatched roof of the house blazed like a stupa covered in gold.

A small dog began to yap and within seconds there was a din of barking. Dogs ran in from all sides, starting with a mangy black poodle. Inside the structure sat an old man in shorts, shirtless, his back to her. He was tending a fire with a stick and talking to another man.

“That you, Ruth?” he shouted. The seated shadow stood and as it approached the black netting, its flesh came into soft focus. A red snout poked out from the bottom and Sasha ran up to her. She pet the dog but could never match her enthusiasm. The fur felt dirty in her hand, greasy, with a vague odor of death. “Hello, hello, hello,” she sang. Leonard rushed towards her and hugged her to him. They kissed lightly on the lips. “Come in, come in,” he said. They entered the netting. It was dark and smelled smudgy, of smouldering green wood. In the center of the room a pot bellied copper alembic sat atop a pile of coals. The air was unbelievably hot. She could not remember anything so unpleasant. A man sat sweating in a chair. As she approached, choking and blinking back sweaty tears, he stood. “Forgive me,” she said, blowing her nose.

“Let me get you a glass of water.”

“No.” She waved him off though she desperately wanted one.

“Here,” Leonard said, thrusting a warm water bottle into her hands, which she began to glug down. “You won’t believe what I’ve got going here. You remember Dennis Blanpied?”

“Of course,” said Dennis. He was in a khaki uniform, with pistols in each holster. He had a middle aged, weather beaten face, kind brown eyes and a military haircut.

“Try this,” Leonard said, handing her a small glass with clear liquid at the bottom. “It’s made from the grapes. I finally figured, why not make booze if the wine’s no good? So I got Jason, you know that hippie who lives off the main road, about a mile up in the woods, just past the tobacco shed? You know, he’s got a fat wife, a bearded daughter and two beautiful sisters? He helped me rig it up. It’s a pot still.”

“Not bad,” Dennis said. “For moonshine.”

“The Italians call it grappa.”

She took a sip and sputtered. It burned into her lips, tongue and throat. Then the heat faded and a slight taste of fermented fruit lingered on her palette. Immediately she wanted another sip. The second didn’t burn half so much. “You ought to at least age it in some of those oak barrels downstairs,” she said, when she could finally speak.

“Well, that’s what we were just talking about,” Leonard said.

“I figured he could char the barrels and put some color on it. Anyway, I’ll take a bottle of it just as it is.”

Leonard handed him the bottle. “Dennis brought tobacco.”

Bryson looked up with interest. Between smoking and drinking it was a bit of a toss up but in the end smoke always took the prize of her affection.

“Yeah, I have Canadian cigarettes if you want to buy some. But I also have some of my own tobacco.”

“You wouldn’t believe the taste. It’s, it’s heirloom tobacco, what you imagine a cigarette tasted like in the 1940’s, the kind Humphrey Bogart smoked.”

As Leonard spoke Dennis rolled her a cigarette and she lit it up. Jesus fucking christ, she thought. No wonder Bogart died of cancer. A few drags later and she was able to inhale. That was better. But between the two she could feel her voice getting hoarse.

She lowered her bag to the floor and sat on a crate between the men, who stared periodically at the fire. Leonard was strong. His calves were sharp and his stomach small. His white hair had grown down below the ears but he was clean-shaven, deeply tanned.

They made small talk for a while and she drank grappa and smoked the tobacco. She figured it would tan her like leather and then the bugs wouldn’t bother biting the extremities not protected by BiteStop. She wouldn’t feel the heat either, even if she dried out and cracked.

Leonard stood. “You want to go up to the house and cool off Ruth?”

“That would be nice.”

They left the tent. “Why don’t you go inside,” Leonard said. “I have to show Dennis something.”

“What?” she asked, not wanting to be left out. The sun hammered at them. “Aren’t you worried about skin cancer?”

“Skin cancer,” he roared. “My god, I’m more likely to be eaten by a mountain lion!” He crossed the driveway and they followed him into the shade under the oaks where a canvas tarp covered the remains of the doe. “Hold your nose Ruth, and look at this.” He lifted off the tarp and he and Dennis squatted down around it.

“That’s a big one,” said Dennis.

“Look at the neck.”

Dennis poked his fingers into the bloody crumpled fur. “That’s a big cat.”

“Hertzler’s seen it down on his place.”

Dennis shook his head. “They’ll have to shoot it then. Too bad.”

“Do they though?”

“Look Leonard, I know how you feel about this but I’m no game warden.” They headed up to the house. “These days I feel like the sheriff of Nottingham. That’s not what I set out to be.”

Inside it was cool and smelled of pine. The room was a big loft with a wall of screened in windows, shaded by the over hanging thatch roof, overlooking the lake. To the right was a living room area defined by floor to ceiling bookshelves, with a big woodstove and ceiling fan turning quickly, and a couple of easy chairs and a couch covered with red muslin arranged on a cotton rug around a low oak coffee table. Directly in front of her was a long dining room table with three high backed chairs and to the left was the kitchen, with a doorway leading out onto the porch. The rafters of the cathedral ceiling were exposed and amber with age. The wide plank pine floor was worn smooth and unpolished but swept clean. She took an open wooden stairway to the next floor down. Here there was a hallway running along the windows and to the right, built into the hillside, were bedrooms. Their room was a small, spartan space. She sat on the edge of the flat futon and undressed, put on a black bathrobe hanging for her on the back of the door and padded to the shower down the hall. The water was frigid; she gasped and seized up as it struck her but soon she was dancing around beneath the cold jet. She toweled off, brushed her teeth and returned to the room to lie down. When she awoke it was early evening. The hills were glowing with low reflected sun and the lake was striped orange, blue and black. Bugs banged into the window screens, big hornets and grasshoppers.

Upstairs Dennis and Leonard were seated in the kitchen, a sweating pitcher of iced tea between them, munching on dried strawberries.

“I’ve got it coming from every side,” Dennis was saying. “So I need your help here.”

“I try to stay out of things,” Leonard said.

Dennis spread his hands and shrugged. “Sure, me too, and they made me sheriff. But the time comes when you have to take sides. What we’re offering you is a civilised life. You GMZ folks can choose as you like of course, but when the shit comes down, there’ll be no neutrals in Iroquoia.”

Leonard stared out the window and ate a strawberry. “And the Amish?”

“The Amish have already cut a deal. They’re the seventh nation.

They’re exempt from military duty, but they pay taxes, help to build roads, things like that.”

“Well the others will certainly do that.”

Dennis shook his head skeptically. “I dunno about that.”

Ruth got a glass out and sat down with them. “How far will twenty five million bucks go around here?” she asked, drinking down the sweet, minty tea. “Cause that’s what I’m walking around with. You gonna keep the muggers off of me, chief?”

“I’m not a chief, ma’am, and god help me if I ever am one.”

“Was that your pay out?” Leonard asked. He looked like he had just swallowed an ice cube.

“That’s just the half of it.”

Dennis whistled. “Well, I wouldn’t say that out loud around here.”

“Why not? The whole world will know by the end of today.”

“The whole world who watches t.v.,” Leonard said. “There’s a lot of world out there that never sees a paper, much less t.v.”

“Yeah, well the town crier will carry the news if Monozone gets a council seat.” She scowled.

“Ruth works for Monozone,” Leonard explained.

“I don’t know what the fuck a Monozone is, but it sounds lucrative.”

“You’ve heard of Genetel?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Well, we just got bigger.”

“So they approved transcryptasine?”

“Bingo.”

The three sat musing on what twenty-five millions bucks can do.

“Ruth,” Leonard said, addressing her now as if Dennis weren’t there, taking her hand in his, “why don’t you get out? Isn’t now the time? You could come live here.” “They’d track me down in a second. There’s no secret about this place.”

“Isn’t it right Dennis that they have no jurisdiction here?”

He rolled his eyes. “What’s a jurisdiction exactly? I’d say, whoever has the greatest firepower has jurisdiction. Fugitives come up here expecting us to hide them out but if a police convoy pulls in or a fleet of armored hovercraft, what’m I gonna do? It happens all the time. We have to be realistic.”

“Sovereignty must mean something,” Leonard said.

Ruth shrugged. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“That’s o.k.,” Dennis said. “I didn’t mean to stay so late. I want to make it back before dark.”

“You’re cutting it close,” Leonard said. “If you stay the night we could go out and look for that cougar before sun up. I figure we could tag it with a BioWatch bug and track it.”

“Where are you gonna get that around here?”

“I get all that stuff from Cornell. It’s part of my contract, isn’t it? To track and preserve wildlife.”

“Just another reason to stay indoors at night.” Dennis looked at Ruth and said, “I don’t want to be in the way.”

“It’s no problem, is it Ruth?”

Ruth was expecting this. Wearily she said, “No, no problem at all.” It was the usual, Leonard so self-involved he had forgotten all about her. She wondered which of old Jason’s sisters or daughters he was fucking and if a beard would keep him off of her. But that was unfair, jealousy was unfair.

“I’ve got a venison tenderloin and some rice,” he said.

Dennis stood. “I don’t know. I’m curious about that mountain lion, but I think we might as well kill it and get it over with. And I meant to tell you, there’s a group of uh, pilgrims I guess you might call ‘em, coming through sometime today or tomorrow.”

“Church?” Leonard asked.

“I guess so. They’re a rough looking group, man and two women. One of the women is blind. Nice though. I think one of ‘em’s a christian. They’re walking to Onondaga.”

“I’ll take them as far as Ganudasaga in my boat if they want. Wouldn’t you like that Ruth? We could do some fishing. Camp out the night and come back the next day.”

They looked at her. She felt like an alien invader. What will the lady want to do? She didn’t want to be seen as prissy, afraid of a boat trip, of dead deer and wriggling fish. She chewed a strawberry. It was soft and sweet. It made her feel good inside. “Sure,” she said. At least after they got rid of the Handsome Lakes they’d be alone.

After dinner the three pilgrims arrived. After settling them in Dennis and Leonard retired to their rooms and she sat up in the living room with an oil lamp watching the news on her computer. There was a message from Owen Bradlee. His face was smoothed out, painted, a put on job. “Bryson,” he said jocularly, with lips pursed into an ironic smile, “just wondering how you’re doing. Try to keep cool and don’t work too hard.” He held up a Manhattan and winked, then pulled out the cherry by the stem and munched it. “Sweet dreams.” The picture zeroed out.

She replied, “Gone fishing. See you in two months.”

In the morning she awoke early, with the first light, but Leonard was not at her side. She never awoke this early at home, but here it was the coolest time of day. The air smelled good, of blossoms that only open at dawn, of wind chilled in the shadows of gullies. Upstairs the coffee can was out and the water was hot, quick to return to a boil. She padded barefoot, wrapped in a green sarong, out onto the porch to watch the morning and read her detective story. There was this huge state of siege in her nerves she hadn’t even been aware of before but now that they were starting to release she could feel them. All of her preoccupations continued but they were less frequent. She seemed to have minutes of abstraction where she thought of nothing at all.

It took most of the day to reach Ganudasaga at the north end of Seneca Lake. The three passengers sat in the bow as if in prayer. The man was quite large, dressed in old denim and a blue button down work shirt and the women, one of whom had cataracts, wore long grey dresses with loose sleeves.

Seneca lake was huge and deep. They spent the afternoon fishing in spots he liked. At its widest point one could barely see the opposite shore. The sun was intense; she dove overboard a few times to cool off. The air smelled good away from the rotting vegetation of the shores. She caught a big trout, 2 kilos, and he caught three small bass and a four-kilo salmon. An hour before dark they pulled into a cove, tied up the boat and prepared a campsite, working quietly and quickly. She sat on a barkless fallen tree, cursing the insects under her breath while he gathered wood and built a fire. They grilled and ate the trout and watched the sunset, bleeding out into a puddle of inky lake water. He got boards of cedar out of the boat and planked the bass and salmon, smoking them in the fire and wrapping them carefully up to stow away in the boat, so they wouldn’t attract bears. After a few glasses of grappa they lay down in the tent and talked things over in the dark, to the sound of croaking bull frogs. She told him about everything but hesitated when she got to the part about Owen Bradlee.

“So how exactly did state take over?” he asked.

“They sent in Owen Bradlee.” He tensed up. She could feel it. Immediately she felt a rush of guilt. Of all her lovers Owen was the one who pissed off Leonard. There was something about him, probably the length of time they were together, how it had almost become a second relationship as opposed to an occasional fuck.

“That bastard is back?” He sat up.

“Look, you haven’t been any better.”

They stayed like that in the dark, she on her back, a root digging into her hips, he upright, head brushing the top of the tent, for minutes.

“I need a cigarette,” he said. She joined him outside of the tent. He poked the embers with a stick and blew on them, lighting a hand rolled cigarette off of a coal. The strong tobacco odor filled the air.

“Can you roll me one?” She asked. He handed her his and rolled another.

“We’re not exactly an ad for the nuclear family,” she said.

“I love you, Ruth. Always have.”

“Look, let’s not start now. We’ve made it this far in our lives, living as we do.”

“Or wasted them. Ever feel like that?”

“Not really. But,” she hesitated, making sure it was the truth, “these days I have some questions.”

“Those bastards you work for, Owen Bradlee, Monozone. What good do they bring you or the world?”

She hated when he became self-righteous, better than the world around him. Everyone did what they had to do and not everyone had the luxury of living in isolation. “Every time a sick person takes a Euphoric and gets to work or stays with a lover or doesn’t kill herself we’ve done some good.”

“Is that what it’s about though? Haven’t we both pursued dreams we thought were for the good of someone or something but really served no other purpose than to feed our egos? I remember, or at least I think I remember, a time, maybe a month or two, when you were my dream. I thought we’d get a chance to know each other and to be together. You were just this slightly demented, really hardboiled kid in her twenties who liked to drink a lot. I felt like there was this bottomless meaning to you, something I could never hope to plumb but in the process of trying would find out what it was to be alive. And it seems to me in the forty years we’ve been together, I’ve felt that over and over and yet you weren’t there. And then, there were all those times I felt like you were after the same thing but I wasn’t there. For once I’d like to feel that we’re in the same place again, together, that it isn’t just an old man’s fantasy of youth.”

They were both exhausted and stared into the fire. He didn’t expect or receive an answer. She touched his shoulder and it relaxed. They each smoked another cigarette and crawled back into the tent. In the dark, she reached out and took his hand, stroked his forearm. He rubbed her belly, between her breasts and brushed his fingers in her pubic hair. Slowly they aroused each other, stroked and kissed their way back, not in time or space so much but back into their minds to the place where they met. Brain stem resonance hummed between them. Age, depredations, insults, history vanished for a time and they made love as the moon rose full above the hills and an owl hooted in a nearby tree.

Leonard didn’t feel guilty, it was how they had chosen to live, but he felt he hadn’t much time left to do something he had always, since the beginning, wanted to do, which was to spend time alone with

Ruth in an actual home. Most of all he wanted to both know and enjoy her the way he imagined he would when they first met, when he didn’t know anything at all about what happens in life and stepped right into it with her. Love, abiding, real, shocking, erotic, jealous, tender, erupted into his 44th year…then lay dormant, like herpes, every few years inflaming him anew. How can one, he thought, so screw one’s life up, so as to miss the central point? As he creaked out of bed and made for the kitchen, barefoot, wrapped in a black fringed, gold sarong, he knew their life would probably not take some sudden turn for the different. But he wished that it could. And then he thought of his dying grape vines, withering in the drought, for which he had no more energy left. He thought of the lemon tree he was coaxing back from death, of Muscatine’s that needed pruning, of an artichoke patch he’d been meaning to mulch, and a drainage ditch that had silted up last spring and had to be cleared before the fall rains arrived, if they ever did. But before he could do any of that, before the sun was fully up, he and his chow Sasha had to go out hunting for signs of the mountain lion.

Leonard’s day began before dawn and ended after dark. There were stretches of time when it was too hot to work, or too windy, and then he would sit for hours in his living room, with the view of the lake and valley and its shelves of old books, reading with only the dogs for company. He stared out onto the dark porch, beneath the overhanging roof, perched three stories up. The dogs were barking to be let out and other dogs and coyotes, across the hills, howled and barked back. A rooster crowed harshly and often. There were the gentle early cheeps and whistles of birds. Down below the terraced vineyard, past an orchard and fields of crops and tall meadows, about a mile off, Keuka Lake was a luminous black, edged with shadow. The sun was below the horizon, turning the sky a dim, periwinkle blue.

Sasha followed him around the kitchen. He poured hot water from a white enamel kettle, blackened on the bottom, onto fresh coffee grounds in a deep mug. The water swirled up to the rim and turned dark. He gave it a stir with a long spoon and watched the grounds slowly settle, then took it out on the porch with a book, 17th Century Naturalists’ Accounts of Siam. He lit an oil lamp and the roof timbers glowed like amber ribs. Mourning doves hoohooed. Jays shrieked from tree to tree and a woodpecker tocked at the old oak spread out over Ruth’s bathtub. His hand fell down to his side and Sasha licked it. He scratched the thick red fur behind her ears abstractedly and sipped his coffee, listening to the nocturnal world sink away into silence and the diurnal one emerge just ahead of the sun. Ruth really was the only thing missing from his life. And soon she would be there.

Greenhouse Mitigation Zones (GMZ’s) were a joint state, business and university effort to reclaim frontier lands that had been abandoned and gone to waste. Settlers in GMZ’s were given free title to land and in return they agreed to restore wetlands to control runoff, plant trees and experimental crops, to find profitable uses for the land in a changed climate, track and protect wildlife, destroy insect disease vectors, and in general bring the land under cultivation and human control and keep it that way.That, at least, was the official explanation and certainly why many people moved there. They were idealists and drifters, people bored and disgusted by city life. Some, like Leonard, were scientists.

But state had other reasons as well for establishing GMZ’s, as any examination of a map will reveal. A hundred and more years ago, as climate related disasters became more devastating and more frequent, populations began to abandon entire towns. The few remaining farms, weakened by generations of successive drought and flooding, finally succumbed to a combination of insects and disease, followed by wildfire. Cities like Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and Binghamton burned to the ground before sinking beneath rising lake and riverwaters.

In the Great Lakes region, from Minnesota to the Hudson, casino gambling collapsed and Indian capital fled to the cities or out west, along with the people who had come to depend on it. In upstate New York this left only the poorest and most traditional people of the Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, behind in villages located on the old reservations, or in isolated settlements, where they had been hunting, farming and fishing for centuries. They were now free to reclaim their land. State neither noticed nor cared; the entire region was written off as worthless.

Next, they annexed any land contiguous with theirs that had been abandoned. Lawyers at state became alarmed at the annexations, which were being repeated elsewhere in the country, wherever similar conditions prevailed, in Maine, Wisconsin, Florida and Georgia, the Pacific Northwest, coastal Massachusetts, Louisiana, all along the Mississippi, St. Croix and Missouri rivers. But all state money was consumed by reclamation projects in the major cities, managing unruly refugees, controlling internal migrations to the west as well as the border crisis with Mexico and international military obligations. State signed the treaty with Haudenosaunee, which became the model for other state-Indian treaties, recognizing their sovereignty on any land they could claim to occupy, contiguous with their own, for more than a generation.

For decades, as the land between Buffalo and Albany became infested with malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus and encephalitis, and the water bit deeper and deeper into the land, things went on in this way. Populations left and each of the Six Nations annexed land. But as the worst of the storms and temperature fluctuations seemed to abate, and the polar ice caps started to re-form, businesses began to look at the waste areas and wonder if they had made a mistake. This was once valuable land and one day would be again. The sovereignty movement was beginning to claim a lot of territory and state was now treaty-bound to recognize those claims. Military officials ruled out a reinvasion as a waste of badly needed troops and ammunition. By establishing GMZ’s the state could compete for open land, under the uncontroversial guise of an environmental reclamation program, with broad leadership support.

Recently Leonard had heard another explanation. Indians believed that the most compelling reason state had for establishing GMZ’s was water. The population shift west to high arid regions with agreeable climates was taxing water supplies. There was a plan in the defense department (the only branch of state still capable of thinking in these terms) to build a series of aqueducts from the Great Lakes, across the country and into the Rockies. To avoid war with Canada, they would secretly drain water out of the Great Lakes and divert it south to the Finger Lakes. To do so they would need the Erie Canal and the rivers, which were increasingly under Iroquois control.

When he had finished his coffee he dressed and took a rifle down off the rack, loaded the magazine and checked the safety. He filled a canteen with water, got a coil of rope and headed out the door with Sasha. The house was built into the hill, and the top floor exited onto a dirt and stone driveway, deeply rutted and parked up with three decrepit trucks, one with a boat hitched to it. Around on one side of the house was the dog pen. Beyond that was the hen house, a stack of weathered wooden crates and a sort of shed built of bamboo, corrugated tin and chicken wire, surrounded by a steel fence. Then there was a pen for three black pigs.

The dogs he had collected over time, a basset hound named Boswell, anonymous pit bulls and retrievers, a border collie named Bruce, a toy poodle named Max, 8-12 at any given time, running back and forth and barking and yapping to be let out. They burst through the bamboo gate when Leonard unlatched it and surrounded him in a lithe, excited stream of noisome fur before breaking up and heading off to hunt for breakfast. He and Sasha walked up the steep path to the road above and then crossed into the cornfield, owned by Mordecai Hertzler. The ground was hard and yellowish grey. Stunted corn stalks brushed his legs. They weren’t green enough for early August.

Leonard wasn’t sure exactly where he would find it, but he had heard the mountain lion in the middle of the night. It was a terrible sound, a disturbing high pitch scream that set every dog barking for a mile around. The nearest woods were at the edge of this cornfield, and he had a hunch he’d find the remains of a deer there.

Sasha ran ahead. There was no better time of day to be out, the wind was soft and cool and he could think. Soon they were in the woods. These were young trees, thin boled, with plenty of undergrowth between. He walked along slowly, following Sasha, smelling the dusty air, listening to the leaves stir. She became suddenly focused and he had to follow her now as she drove in a line toward the spot. Mountain lions had been seen for a hundred years in Iroquoia but he was particularly interested in this one because of its size. The Hertzlers had spotted it several times and the old man insisted it was 3-4 meters, which was huge. Gigantism in animals was of particular interest to Leonard. Everything that survived seemed to get bigger. He had seen six and eight inch cockroaches. Bull frogs 45 centimeters long. Eighty-pound catfish were common and, on the Mississippi there was a 1,000-kilo carp hauled in by a sludge barge. He himself caught fifty kilo Sturgeon in Lake Pepin, but it had hormonal ulcers. The elk and deer were 10 percent larger on average. It was what one would expect with few people and more territory. But in a carnivore it also increased the danger. Bears were especially worrisome at five hundred kilos and 3, 3-1/5 meters tall. He didn’t want to run into any bears without a gun.

The problem was convincing people not to kill off the big predators. The idea of the whole cycle repeating itself sickened him. Indians were more inclined to them. They mostly lived in villages, in houses with fenced yards. Their fields and orchards were at the edge of town and they hunted the forests. But the Amish and the homesteaders might live miles from another neighbor, surrounded like Leonard was by cultivated land and young woods. Mountain lions and wolves could live in the big forests to the north and come down hunting at night. If they ever lost their fear of people there’d be trouble.

The woods were denser now and Sasha’s rust colored coat flickered between the trees. She would circle around and come back and then head on. When he had first come here he went for long walks with her every day. He knew nothing would be as simple as advertised, that the land which was his was probably also claimed by Indians, that there’d be a well established community of sorts, spread out as it was, into which he’d have to fit. It didn’t take long for Dennis Blanpied, the local sheriff, to show up on his motorcycle and inform him that he was trespassing on Seneca territory. Haudenosaunee did not recognize GMZ settlers as legal occupants of the land. He would be allowed to stay. The land was his so long as he could keep it under cultivation and recognize the sovereignty of the Haudenosaunee.

And there was indeed a complex community. Salvage companies, the spawn of rough, get-rich-quick schemes, cruised the canals and lakes in their weird collection of work boats, fueled by salvaged diesel, coal and sometimes even wood, or alcohol. The crews had a reputation for being desperate, borderline criminals. Then there were the Iroquois and their antagonists, pockets of Upstate New Yorkers, descendants of the original colonists, mostly born again christians. Sporadic, open warfare broke out between them until the Upstaters were subdued and scattered. They continued to live in deep resentment, clustered around clapboard churches and dark, violent taverns, praying and drinking. In the high land between the lakes lived the Amish and hippies.

All the land around there was dotted with the failures of earlier entrepreneurs, eccentric millionaires who had tried to start tropical fruit farms but had failed to take into account the periodic blasts of arctic air the region still received. Lake Effect snow and once in a decade blizzards of a couple of metres wiped them out.

Leonard had avoided politics his entire life. The whole business was dangerous and unproductive. Politics epitomized everything about the human animal he despised. He was incapable of that philosophical mood in which politics become the shit of human interaction, unpleasant but necessary, nor did he see it for what it was, the human ecosystem. It was what kept him on the road, away from universities and think tanks or even offices. He could have been an experimental scientist like his wife but lab conditions drove him crazy. He was very much a nineteenth century man. The most pleasing activities he could think of were drawing and describing specimens and their habitats in his journal, or reading the journals kept by other naturalists. He had collected many of these books over the years and gone to great expense to have them shipped up to Keuka Lake; the last twenty k the boxes were dragged by horse cart. These volumes, some three hundred years old, preserved from old libraries by families like his own, quixotic and endangered individuals holed up in ancient apartment buildings, now lined the shelves of his living room, shelves built to hold wine bottles, glasses and flatware. He never understood Ruth’s enthusiasm for the blood and guts of research, office machinations, bureaucratic brawls, competition for dollars. Yet despite his avoidance of politics and people he had always found himself plunged in the life and death struggles of those living in the places where he worked. For from the outside these places seemed depopulated, grim sites of disaster, symbols of the failure of political process to address the most fundamental issues of survival ever faced by modern human beings, especially the failure to understand the impact rising sea levels would have on every single major city in the world. But from the inside they were not only rich with flora and fauna but with that most tenacious weed of creation, humanity. Here life for humans was stripped down to something far more harrowing and basic than one would ever experience in a restored city or suburb. And for every person who chose to be there, there was another who had no place else to go.

Indians had largely recovered their land, it was not even really contested, but what were they going to do with it? That was politics. Religious folks, Holy Rollers as Dennis Blanpied called them, saw the world through 16th century eyes. These could be Indians or Amish, and as Dennis was also fond of saying, “How do you forge a nation out of people who just want to be left alone?”

If they ever forged that nation Leonard Bryson would be its most ardent patriot. It was why ten years ago he was among the first to stake a GMZ claim. He joined a group as naive as the nuts that had tried to plant bananas. Few had a good understanding of the weather, of what plants did well under such circumstances, or even of how to build and maintain a house without reliable power. They would live far from any doctors, with limited supplies arriving via long networks of trade. It was a 19th or even 18th century world they were entering, albeit with fuel cells, solar panels and computers. But to date none of these has ever shot a deer, dug a well or built a road.

Leonard was fascinated. All his life he had studied places just like this, made recommendations, identified mutant life forms and emergent species, but he had never been in a position to stay and do something, to be a part of a people, connected to a land. There was Manhattan of course, but he was no longer of that place; his place was a tent, a factory apartment, a motel room or a berth in a boat. He had slogged through every coastal swamp of the country east of the Mississippi. Hip waders were his second skin. He’d had fevers: malaria, dengue, hemorrhagic, West Nile Virus and encephalitic, yellow fever, typhoid, cholera, dysentery. He’d been bitten by bats, toads, snakes and dogs; stung by wasps, spiders, jellyfish and scorpions. Once in Alabama he was forced to flee a fifteen-foot estuarial crocodile. Compared to that Keuka Lake was relaxing. And the 1970’s vineyard, built of 19th century wood, felt like a spawning ground, returned to in old age with no memory of having been there before.

He was born in Manhattan, born into an old matriarchal clan occupying a palatial suite of rooms on Central Park West and 89th street. This world was so contained, so crowded, so loving, he scarcely knew any other existed till at the age of ten he was sent off to school. The apartment and the family of Goulds who occupied it were inseparable. The eponymous Ur couple were Eli and Stella Gould, Bulgarian Sephardic immigrants from the lower Danube, who met and married in 1920 and purchased the apartment in 1947, after Eli, a chemist, invented a process for producing long synthetic fibers cheaply. It was a seven-bedroom spread with three bathrooms.

Upon Stella’s death in 1990 at the age of 97 the apartment passed on to her granddaughter, who had been angling for it, progressively turning her grandmother against each of her siblings and cousins. This granddaughter married and had children with an afro cuban saxophonist. She taught comp lit at Columbia for 40 years. Upon her death, her daughter, Ursula, and Ursula’s lover, Siam, moved in and began collecting scientific texts discarded by libraries and children discarded by their parents. They joined a Wicca coven and established a matriarchal clan centered on goddess worship, ritual lesbianism, scientific research, poetry and the apartment. The apartment was passed on to the oldest female child; male children could stay until married, when they were expected to take their wife’s name and move out. Thus any male child born into the Gould family was surrounded by women from birth, and books.

Nothing in the household conformed to the outside world. They had just hung on somehow, resourcefulness cropping up every other generation or so to meet the threat of eviction for unpaid taxes. As rising sea levels flooded out the city, resourcefulness became a prime survival skill. Each of these old apartments and buildings that escaped demolition for the canals was like a museum preserving some impoverished family, ossified by tradition–dark hallways walked by wispy old women in muumuus and housecoats and sarongs, little underground whorehouses, vessels holding the oil of obscure religious cults, political heresies practiced in bizarrely evasive language, a sort of Alexandrian poetry, radical ideas imprisoned in acrostic puzzles. There were clans of vegetarians, Latin praying catholics who ate fish on Fridays, muslims who slaughtered goats for the birth of a child. The center courtyards were gloomy with neglect, ailanthus breaking up through the cobbles and growing to great heights while within, plaster fell upon each generation. It was a sepia colored, coffee and incense scented childhood of naked old ladies praying over a bowl of roses, libations of sweet wine and foreheads smeared with menstrual blood.

When he thought of it he could hardly breathe. There was never any sun and the dust tasted of the flesh of mouldering Goulds. Iroquoia place on the other hand was an environment in transition. Strange and chaotic, but immensely prodigal in its power to dispense new forms and destroy old ones. The hot lakes and marshes were incubators of mutant life forms. New diseases flourished in weakened populations of plants and animals. The air was thick with flying cockroaches; flies grew fat on the bloated corpses of animal herds felled by epidemics. People could use vaccines, stay indoors, take antibiotics and immune boosters but wildlife could not. Populations of cattle, horses, turkeys, pigs, cats and dogs gone feral surged and dwindled by the season. He registered their numbers and conditions in his journals. To the north oaks had grown into immense forests while maples shrank, leafless, barkless, drowned in bright green pools of water. Rats, mice, raccoon, possum, squirrel, porcupine and skunk flourished.

Even in the time he’d been here the storms had become less frequent and intense and the temperatures were beginning to modulate towards a mean. Big predators, wolves and mountain lions, grew fat on the elk and deer herds restoring some semblance of balance. Moose were again sighted in the north.

Small, independent homesteads and communities could survive these circumstances. Even the Amish, especially resourceful farmers, had gone north in large numbers, to settle on the plains of Canada.

Hippie communes on the other hand had short shelf lives, due mostly to a disproportion of enthusiasm to skill, though some families had first settled in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. Some thrived as specialized hunter-gatherer.

The Senecas were the only legally constituted authority in the area, with a system of laws and police to enforce them. But they themselves were deeply divided over just about every question except for one, and that was that all the land that was once theirs would be again.

The lake country was mostly peaceful, but drifters came through constantly and there were bandits, gangs hiding members out from the city. Fights broke out on the road, people were robbed and murdered. Justice was simple, restoration of property, fines, and in the case of murder or rape, if the victim or their family demanded it, death.

Out there, everyone relied upon their neighbors. There was a rule of hospitality. He had ingratiated himself with people, made available whatever records he had, plant specimens. He helped to identify insects and animal diseases. Strangers could always stay with him and get a meal. The Hertzlers helped him rebuild his vineyard and he gave them rides, hauled their hay, corn, sugar and cheese for sale up north. There was a family of Rastas about a mile away, Sky’s commune up the lake, and of course his fellow GMZers. All of these folks could be relied upon to help bring in crops or raise a barn.

They crunched through a clearing. The sun was fully up and he had been walking about an hour. By now Leonard had assumed they would find the kill. Given all the racket he reasoned the cougar had stalked the deer through his property. Then, beyond the clearing, in a stand of cottonwood trees by a dry creak bed, Sasha began to bark animatedly, wagging her tail and poking her muzzle down. Quickly Leonard walked up to her and there on the ground was a huge albino doe, her rump completely devoured. Bloody bones lay collapsed and glistening on the ground, the white pelt pushed up about the shoulders like a shawl. The smell of blood and shit was heavy in the air. Warily he looked about for the mountain lion, above in the trees and at the bushes. It was obviously a big animal. He would have to consult Munkden’s Carnivores of North America to find out exactly how big, but the doe would have stoodtwo metres tall at the head and its spinal cord was cleanly severed. A mountain lion attacking a larger animal would chew through the throat. This one was big enough to have stalked her and when it was good and ready, leapt on her back, and very precisely, controlling her with its paws, found the space between two vertebrae with its teeth and bitten through. The wild cats were remarkably precise. Connections between their jaws and brains were dense and complex. A mountain lion was a two- meter house cat, which should unsettle anyone.

He was tired by the long walk and thirsty. He drank water from the canteen and took the coil of rope off of his shoulders and tied it around the deer and then around his waist. It would take time and he’d have to rest but he was determined to drag the carcass back to the house before vultures or bugs got to it. If he came back for it later there’d be nothing left.

The morning air was chilly and dry. It blew down on the concrete platform, two stories above the street. She leaned against the dark blue ceramic balustrade and looked up the tracks. Four silver rails arrived in a knot and separated just beyond.

Bradlee must be up to something, she thought, but she couldn’t figure out what it was yet. She had gotten what she wanted, she should be happy. Many years of research had taught her to follow her hunches though and she wasn’t about to rationalize away the suspicion that Bradlee was setting her up.

The problem was, that as far as she could see, she was the patsy anyway, no matter what. So her instinct was to get the hell out. She wouldn’t feel right till she was with someone she could talk to. Someone she could trust like Leonard, who wasn’t involved.

A couple PCPs chugged by stuffed with outsized office guys and then an empty one arrived. She got in, punched in her destination and stared at her feet, like someone on the toilet, dazed by gin. The claustrophobic, faded plastic bubble lurched out of the station and along its track. They crossed empty canals, glazed with a brownish green slick of mire and algae stuck full of garbage.

Maybe, she thought, there was another way. Her old friend and colleague Dr. Velodia had been back at Cornell for almost a year now and they were to have lunch that afternoon. Maybe she could do something to help her out. It was delicate though. Bryson couldn’t even appear to be moving against Monozone interests, they would kill her. And Velodia would be in danger too, if she were caught in an act of sabotage at Bryson’s direction.

She was flung out on a cable high above the wide, churning East River. Flooded, broken and abandoned homes and factories pocked the tidal mud, a slew of wreckage left by the bankrupt state, to fall apart in the ceaseless tides and inundations. Then she descended onto a network of elevated rails that took her to the Monozone stop, where she got out with an empty, pitching stomach and aching bowels, in a coating of thick sweat.

The Monozone office building was a massive pink neoclassical skyscraper, with broad, steep steps leading up to three story brass doors. That was not her entrance though. The lab building, which was an annex to the main office tower, was entered by means of two small, highly secure doors. ID was required to open the first, then bIOmEtrIscAn opened the second, which led to a small, grey, functional lobby of BioWatch tiled walls with brushed steel trim, and composite floors.

Security greeted her at the door as usual, guns lowered and visors up and she had no doubt that they noted her condition. It was a running joke. Nothing malicious, just the knowing nod of the guards in their slightly shabby blue uniforms, rumpled from a night’s long duty in the sweltering lobby. The elevator at least was cool.

In the lab she observed the stark early morning order with a little sadness: it would remain stacked and clean until a new project began. There were no windows, and the overhead work lights were off. Floor lights glowed like candles, up the walls and across the white composite tile. One day it would revert to its human appearance, machines and chemicals out on the black work tops ranked in two rows up the center of the room, clothing and coffee cups piled up in the workstations along the walls, personal items hanging by straps off the backs of steel stools and chairs, glove boxes lit through the night, air alive with the ambient hum of assorted meters, incubators, refrigerators, vacuum chambers and compressors.

She crossed the lab to her office, turned on the low lights and shut the door. It was deliciously cool, 16c. She locked the door and undressed, turned on the coffee maker. The smell of her own sweat mingled with the funk of decaying sex and diffused through the air.

The office was a purely functional cell. There was a bed, a desk, and a counter top with a toaster, a small oven, and a coffee brewer and below, a bar fridge and shelves for bowls and mugs. There was a dark red composite stall with a toilet and a showerhead from which hung a small, soap-splattered mirror. Toilet paper hung on the wall just outside of it; she could reach around and pull off a wad by feel.

Dr. Bryson opened a container of plain yogurt and ate it slowly, seated naked at the end of the bed. Then she lay back and tried to go to sleep but she could not stop thinking. Images of her and Owen Bradlee in bed together, not unpleasant, were interrupted by snippets of their final exchange, and the flash of anger that still hadn’t faded. Vainly she tried to think of nothing, a white light, water rippling into sun.

Finally, she took a hot shower. The water drilled away the gin and Owen Bradlee’s damp clutch. She shut her eyes, and let it come down on follicles and eyebrows, neck and shoulders, between her breasts, belly and legs. Then it was gone, the day, all of its events and humiliations washed away with the semen and spit and the long rhythmic undulations that continued, hours later, to radiate out from her womb. All she felt was steam and water, till finally she was a plump, pink lady with red eyes and tired joints and a nicely sore crotch. She stepped out in a yellow cloud of soapy vapour and toweled off.

It struck her that transcryptasine, over time, would prove to be highly addictive. There was nothing to prevent people taking more than one dose a day. No one even knew what would happen if they did. They never tested transcryptasine abuse levels with humans, and the deaths made pretty obvious the fact that animals and humans reacted differently to it. Animals weren’t likely to be dreaming of gardens and angels anyway. They didn’t definitively penetrate to Penumbra, much less Umbra. Maybe it was the mental equivalent of ready prey. Once people got a taste of something easy and decent, they’d go for it all the time. What would that do to the 10% fatality rate? There wasn’t a bastard out there who knew anything at all, she included. Shoddy, time serving science, she thought.

The thing to do was to design a protocol. Maybe advertise in the newspaper for volunteers…. her thoughts began to slip around from thing to thing, like smoke, imperceptibly fading out of language and she knew she had to get dressed, she didn’t have time to lie back on the cot, eyes shut and the cold dry air patting her down. There was an opportunistic aspect of herself, one loath to change any situation pleasant enough to warrant lingering in. It wanted nothing more at that moment than to nap for an hour and then sit in boxer shorts at the computer futzing with thoughts and calculations. But then she would miss her lunch with Velodia.

Bryson forced herself into muslin travel clothes, a puce wrap she detested over polished hemp pants, and fibre sandals, worn knotty soles squooshed black and flat at the heel. It was like being wound up in cerements and buried. Into a canvas bag with big wooden handles, the kind of thing her mother would have once had, she flung some black night clothes, soft and sexy but with frump (Leonard required nothing in the underwear department, never seemed to notice if she was dressed or not.) Leonard could be exquisite in bed, 3 out of 10 times, which wasn’t bad, after all. The fact that he didn’t require all the do dads was fine with her. But it was always so fraught. He had no technique or sense of rhythm and was often distracted. And he was old and refused medication of any kind. When it worked it was the quality of affection, so odd and alarming, that overwhelmed everything before it. The love came positively rolling off of him in waves, great vibrations and oscillations of humor and kindness and infectious fulfillment. Desire was what it was she supposed. A dimension they had entered together once and could, without warning, inexplicably return to. And then, poof, it was gone in a cloud of sudden and enthusiastic work. All the passion for flesh was sublimated. Now it was for classification, or a search for an undiscovered something far away and awful. Counting crocodiles, crossbow murderers, mutant rednecks pumping out collection pools in 44c sun, loading landfill onto barges headed for the composite fusion plants, with their concrete vents rising 200 metres in the air. It was the worst of every world down there, biblical, forsaken. Who but desperate fanatics could stand it? Yet Leonard was not a dangerous man, or a lunatic. She understood that if the object of your study was Venus, you’d go there if you could, you’d search out what dark surface lay beneath the poison clouds. Those deltas down south, the lake basins and tidal washes, the Great Lakes of the north, they were his laboratories.

Into the bag went two bottles of Cargill Bros. Scotch, a stack of papers, her computer and some electraweave, and a book of detective stories set in 19th century Russia. She looked around her and thought that if she dropped dead there was nothing to tie her to this room but fingerprints and DNA.

Would they really try to kill her though? Her plan, such as it was, did seem to involve that possibility. So long as the plan was an abstraction, so long as it existed in a part of her mind where all plans are born and succeed, there was no chance of detection. They would never find out it was her. There would only be the fact that no one was prescribing the miracle drug. Flat domestic sales, combined with foreign lawsuits and the evident disaster of many inexplicable deaths, all apparently linked to transcryptasine…. Certainly she was safe and in the event, she would be right. You don’t kill people for being right. But that line of thinking was unsustainable even by her most optimistic monad. There were all the examples of licensed researchers who had disappeared, their mutilated corpses dumped in the canal or left to rot in the city. Companies were neither quiet nor slow in their retribution. Contracts were sealed in blood and loyalty was the first oath taken. They owned your genes, they owned you. She began to feel afraid. She had never done anything like this before.

With the trepidation that customarily precedes journeys and transitions she allowed the office door to close behind her and crossed the nearly black, odorless, echoey lab without looking back. On the stainless steel elevator she joined a couple of techs in white coats with clipboards and work-absorbed expressions. They recognized her right away and smiled with their eyes, which she acknowledged.

Hovercraft were a hateful invention. Their sole redeeming feature was that they only sat one comfortably. Not that she had ever experienced comfort in a hovercraft. But it was all she could afford. Maybe now that she was rich she would buy a car, a cheap ugly one, and keep it in the country.

She slammed the clear composite door shut, sat back in the black chair and programmed in her coordinates, Cornell, and Keuka Lake. The hovercraft coughed a bit and swung upwards in a slightly drunken flight path that took her at a steep angle out over Long Island Sound, and then across Westchester and New Jersey, with its sparsely broken tree cover, scattered with settlements, roads and factory complexes. To the south lay large rectangles of green farmland offset by stretches of tan and brown earth. She passed over horse country and then it was desolate, wooded mountains, flooded river valleys along the Delaware and the Susquehanna, flashing back the sun like tinted windshields. She was there in under two hours.

During the flight Bryson consumed three litres of water and had had to pee into an in-flight urination bag. One of the plagues of middle age–fat, veiny, grey–and having to piss without regard to circumstance. Fortunately none had spilled; her agility, even at two hundred K an hour in a scarred and blistered, lurching bubble with an aging guidance system, was still good.

She landed on a roof adjacent to the building where they were to have lunch, al fresco, she thought sourly. And in this heat. It radiated even off the nonreflective roof surface, that horrid putty colored material.

She walked down the dim, green internal stairs. The smell reminded her of her twenties, of beer and cigarettes and staying up for days. But wasn’t that what she still did? Not with her fingers in it though, not immersed in the smells and sounds of research. She spent as much time now adjudicating conflicts and setting budgets as anything else. In the wet, mildewy stones and concrete were hundreds of years of postdoctoral ambitions. In stairwells and halls here she and Velodia had created the future. She had arrived a bitter, lonely, rebellious rich girl, a total failure in her world of estates and horses and political dinners. Here she found herself, her husband, and her life’s work. She spent nearly fifteen years eating in these old stone buildings, or glassed-in in the labs. They water skied on Cayuga Lake, hiked in the surrounding hills and gorges, twice, even, played in huge drifts of snow. It was an uncomfortable, odd feeling, to be brought low by memory. In the intervening thirty years, she had returned often enough, for conferences, or to visit her friend, without a second thought. It was just a place, no different from any other. But just as she and Leonard had ascended, early, into desire, so had she and this place at some time ascended together and it only took a glint of light, or a waft of grilling hamburgers, or undergraduate vomit drying on a stone, to bring her back. It was infantilizing, it wasn’t real, sometimes it meant nothing at all. But what hovered, always, at the edges of the memory, was a sort of delight, a happiness she could not even believe was true or possible. And if she tried to pick apart the two lives, here, and the last thirty years at Monozone, she could not find the difference, not with her eyes, though she tasted it. All she ever did at either place was work. Here she had been a virtual slave to professors whose work she did and then to whatever grant was sponsoring her own research. Was it teaching then? But she still taught all the time. She only hired people who wanted to learn; no one else was any good. She wanted hungry, young, ambitious people, out to make a name for themselves. She could rein them in and the harder it was the better it was. That’s what Leonard had seen in her.

Even under the awning the patio cafe was blazing hot. But Dr. Velodia was a visionary, masochistic, survivor type. She beamed with rude, throaty vigor beneath a pile of artificial blond hair, nearly tipping over as she stood up from the table on her canary high heels. The bug nets swayed gently in the swishes of giant ceiling fans. The women embraced and kissed. Dr. Velodia’s mouth was cold and tasted of gin and tonic. Dr. Bryson, sitting down, craned about for a waiter and said, mostly to herself, “Bring me one of those.”

The patio jutted out from the fourth floor of an ancient stone building, with a slate roof and copper gutter pipes, built into a hill overlooking Cayuga Lake. Cayuga Lake, fed by torrential gorges, slopped over homes, railway tracks and stores. The creeks burst out of their canals and culverts, fish spawned in the crevices of collapsed retaining walls.

At neighboring tables sat a few elderly professors, either alone (newspapers and books open before their eyes), or with students. There was a young couple in sun hats, she catlike, he unfinished with a big adam’s apple. “Whuddya gotta do to get a drink around here?” Bryson asked. Velodia demurred. She had white, freckled skin, like milk with nutmeg floating on it. “You’re not in the city anymore, relax.” “If there’s anything left of me. I’m about to sweat five kilos off.” “That would do you some good.” “Oh come on, and be one of those mean old ladies with tight faces, and scrawny bodies. Blech, who would fuck that?” A waiter appeared at her side, towering, bald, and fit. “Good afternoon,” he said. Bryson said in a brusque, dismissive voice, “Gin and tonic.” She was impatient with waiters. He stepped away for a minute and returned with a tall icy glass on a tray. “Oh god, it’s been a year and I still can’t believe I’m back,” Velodia said, looking around at the screen, and the indistinct, green and grey valley beyond it. “Well, it’s been a while for me too.” “But you haven’t worked here for thirty years, it isn’t your home.” “No, thank god for that. So what’s good to eat?” The menu swam around in her eyes. “The duck’s smoked locally. And most of the meat is Amish.” Bryson grunted. “Good. I loath that legless pork they have now.” “Hmmm. It’s worse in Boston.” “Oh, I was at Mass General once for a conference. What is it about that place?” Velodia shook her head and ran her finger over the menu. “Beats me. Here, the trout. It’s still on the menu. That’s what I want. And beets with dill.” “How about the chowder?” Bryson asked, and they both laughed. “Not today thanks, I’m drinking.”

“Cheers then. Welcome back.” They clinked glasses. A breeze blew through the place and the waiter took their order. Bryson got a smoked duck salad with frisee and lardons. They split a linguini with plum tomatoes and basil. Velodia got the trout and the beets.

Velodia had been in Boston for two and a half years, as interim head of Psychiatry at Mass General. Before that she had been on sabbatical, so it had been many years since they had last met. Velodia, of course, was aware of Bryson’s work with transcryptasine, but they had to be discreet when writing and even if meeting in public. Not only were researchers like Bryson under strict confidentiality agreements, companies like Monozone were particularly sensitive to academic contacts, since they could conceal other more nefarious contacts with rivals.

Velodia had also followed the budding career of transcryptasine through rumors, discussions at conferences, speculative articles in the trade literature. When they started animal trials she read the published results. Since then there was largely silence. But she had recently received a visit from a Monozone Rep alias and just that morning a package of promotional literature had arrived on her desk with a sample.

“You’re not going to believe this, but I just got a whole transcryptasine package today.”

The waiter set down their salads and Bryson slowly raised the sweating highball glass to her lips. “They don’t waste any time, do they?”

“Didn’t you know?”

“It was only official yesterday.”

“Paregane. I like it. It oughta fix you for life, if it’s for real this time.”

Bryson’s stomach felt like a worm on a hook. “Oh, it’s for real.”

Velodia lowered her fork and moved as if to shade her eyes, though they were in a veil of black netting. “Then why aren’t you happy?”

Bryson laughed. “Yeah. Maybe I should take transcryptasine.”

“Or something. Euphoria’s not your problem.”

“It was just too soon,” Bryson said, quietly, to the table, and then she looked at Velodia, probed her face, her hazel eyes, a tiny dot of beet juice on her lower lip.

“Ruth–” her voice dropped a little. It was Velodia’s way of calling her out, using her name like that.

“They gave me 25,000,000 bucks too.”

“Holy fucking shit. No.”

Bryson nodded and smiled. “You’re not kidding. And an option to buy a 100,000 shares, at yesterday’s closing price.”

“Exercise that.”

“There’s talk of a council seat.”

“Then it really does work.”

Bryson forked a piece duck breast. “Should we order wine?” she asked.

“There’s a Riesling I like. Lots of acid. Good fruit.”

“O.K. Waiter?”

Velodia ordered the wine. “I can’t tell you how badly something’s needed, even if it works a little. There’s an epidemic of suicides. I can’t explain it. People aren’t just killing themselves, they’re mutilating their bodies first, setting themselves on fire and jumping out of buildings into crowds. Violent, sick stuff. Vindictive notes blaming the survivors. Extreme desperation. A man came into emergency one night. He had chopped off his own left hand and before he bled to death, had managed to cut out his tongue. These people, they load up on painkillers first. It’s a level of self-hatred that is inexplicable, and statistically significant. Nothing seems to work with them either.

“Most of these people are high functioning normal types too. They don’t hallucinate and may even appear to be rational in most respects. What they have is a rage to die. It’s as if they can no longer endure the normal pain of existence. When things go wrong, they have no resilience, no hope, none of that loopy narrative sense humans use to keep themselves going.”

Bryson couldn’t just come out and say it. “Well,” she began, unsure of where the sentence would eventually land, “I’m afraid transcryptasine carries a risk.”

“New medicines always carry a risk.”

The waiter presented the wine to Velodia, uncorked it and poured her a taste. She nodded and he poured two glasses of pale yellow wine.

“What’s an acceptable risk in psychiatry today? What’s your theoretic limit.”?

“Well, one has to be philosophical about things, given the history of the profession. We routinely render people frigid and impotent so they won’t feel bad and want to kill themselves. Sometimes we make them fat, sometimes skinny. Let’s see, we’ve used electricity, insulin shock, cold baths, whippings, isolation, cages, sedation. Field manipulators: neuronanobotic, prion, or viral mentation rewrites. Or we can get them high; restore perceived or conjectured imbalances, either chemical or electromagnetic. Every method has one thing in common: most of the time it fails, at least in the worst cases. The ultimate outcome then is suicide. Given that, a little danger in a drug is acceptable, as well as a lot of skepticism going in about talks of panacea.”

They tucked into a nest of linguini built on a puddle of scarlet sauce with a chiffonade of basil and shaved parmesan cheese.

Bryson sipped the wine. “Does a ten percent fatality rate seem high?” Velodia arched her right eyebrow. “Not for experimental chemotherapy on terminal patients with less than six months to live. Experimental.”

“I have no control here–”

“Then they took it away from you.”

She shook her head. “Did I ever have it?”

“Ten percent.” Velodia kicked it around. “Well, I could see in some situations, where suicide is a certainty, and the patient, paradoxically, say in a moment of clarity, wants to recover; it would all depend. Maybe condemned criminals, if it actually made them feel good, without side effects–”

“There are no apparent side effects and they feel great.”

“What about consent though, how can a person crazy enough to benefit from this drug be sane enough to consent to it? How many clinical trials have you had?” She sipped her wine and began eating again.

“Right. Three different double blind studies, a thousand in each, all suicidal. A hundred and fifty died.”

“Was it ten percent in each study?”

“Exactly.”

“And how many controls killed themselves?

“1 percent during the trial, some more after that. We’re tracking them.”

“But that’s madness. You can’t put out transcryptasine as a general Euphoric, what about the liability?”

“It gets worse. It’s being marketed overseas as an over-the-counter drug.”

“My god, consider your reputation.”

“I’m screwed.”

Velodia sat stupefied.

Bryson said, “They dismiss liability as a concern because the cause of death can’t be traced to the drug. Nothing can be proved.”

“Surely there’s a cause of death.”

“Nope. Natural causes. There’s no little pin point hemorrhage, no constriction of a blood vessel, no toxicity, no fluid in the lungs, no evidence of arrhythmia. No predictors either. Nothing. The patient takes a dose at bedtime, goes to sleep, and just doesn’t wake up.”

“Nothing like that could be approved.”

“It was rushed through. Monozone had someone on the inside that got wind of what the drug can do and it sailed through without a hearing. They didn’t even tell us on the team, they went straight to sales.” The waiter cleared their plates, which they had swiped clean with bread. Bryson sighed and drank deeply of her wine. “What’s the point of a long life if you don’t enjoy it?”

“I don’t know,” Velodia mused. “People are so desperate. Even the sensation of being alive is painful. Not agonizing, but a little bit off. And I don’t mean a spiritual state, mind enslaved by matter, or a body made uncomfortable by the presence of spirit. It has nothing to do with joy or agony or all the losses and disappointments and temporary ecstasies. It’s just that the pulse of consciousness is contrary to the pulse of the universe. The necessary discord. Duality, paradox. Chiasmus. It’s what accounts for that sensation of something being wrong. Now, if that’s the way of things, then what are we restoring? Treatment is a denial of the facts. Being is a design flaw. A mistake that draws more and more energy to itself. If we could, wouldn’t we drain the universe of its last photon just to stay alive? And yet, we hate it.

“Now you say you’ve found a way of correcting that pulse, at least in highly variant individuals, those who suffer more than others, those who feel like they’re on fire all the time. So maybe sometimes, transcryptasine goes too far in restoring balance, it reconciles the pulse of consciousness with that old ripple of the big bang and life ceases to exist.”

Bryson smiled at Velodia and they drank another glass of wine in relaxed silence. Then she said, “I took it, you know. It did nothing for me. But the oddest thing about transcryptasine is, everyone dreams of returning to the Garden of Eden.”

Velodia unleashed a peal of delighted laughter. “Well, I’ll go dust off my Jung then.”

A six foot two woman, with silver bangles on her long bony wrists walked in, wearing a flamingo pink paper suit. Her long neck terminated in a slightly small, square head of short black hair, with two lawn green composite discs in the ears, a sharp nose and pert, jungle red lips. The ancient professor she brought along was dressed for tennis. Without the stoop, he would have been a little taller than she was. He had blond, synthetic hair, a whole head of it, and it shined against his plum colored cheeks. Velodia rolled her eyes. Bryson checked them out and said, “She’s exotically bad.”

“But what’s with the geezer?”

Bryson drank some wine and lit a cigarette, flicking ashes in her water glass. “I only do geezers these days it seems. Last night I screwed Owen Bradlee. Remember him?”

Velodia made a face like she had just sucked smoke up her nose. “Not that pinky dick faux Englishman you used to drink with.”

“You’re confusing him with someone else. Bradlee’s got a whopper.”

“Well, I’m sure I never trusted him.”

“I’ve got no choice but to trust him, at least a little.”

“He’s a snake, always in and out of things, quiet, smooth. I wouldn’t fuck a man like that.” Bryson dropped her cigarette in the water glass. “You don’t like

dick anyway.”

“I don’t mind a little now and then, just to gas up the jets. That girl we were looking at? When she was just seventeen she ate every pussy worth eating in this place. But now? I hear there’s this intern who goes to her once a week and fucks her in the ass.”

Bryson made a face. “Once a week? My god, she’s made of strong stuff.”

“It must hit the spot, that’s all I can figure. No one likes her now.”

“Oh, who the hell cares. Look at her. The height genes took, but proportion failed. You can’t think of everything.”

“Do you want coffee?”

“Hell no. I’ve still got to ride out to Keuka Lake.”

“Well the wine’s gone.”

They looked around for the waiter. A new one came by, this one with hair, big red curls of it, and sallow skin. They ordered two more glasses of wine.

“So how is Leonard?”

“I hardly see him at all. It’s been close to six months since I went up there.”

Velodia stretched her arms across the table and made her hands into fists, and pulled the fists slowly towards her with a sigh. “I Like Leonard, always have.”

“You oughta come up some time.”

“I’d love to.”

“We eat a lot of deer and fish.”

“That’s fine with me.”

“And there’s a sort of crazy entourage.”

“You get used to that up here.”

Bryson scowled. “Oh, I suppose. Tell you the truth, I get bored. They talk so goddamn slowly. You have to ‘get around’ to everything.

God help you if you try to rush Mordecai Hertzler. Tomorrow might mean next week. Nothing happens right away.”

“But it must be beautiful.”

“Sure, hot and more bugs than air. There’s like this constant screech of living things”

Velodia laughed. “You used to like that when we were young.”

Bryson shook her head. It was true. She was quite acclimated to nature as a child and despite punting nearly every facet of her upbringing this she retained through college and all of her years of research at Cornell. But thirty years of living in the city and suburbs was a long time. It had effaced so much of that early self that when she felt it peering at her she usually turned away and that was that. Sometimes though, like an ivy-covered face of statuary in a dream, she couldn’t lose its stare and fell before it.

Bryson looked around the room, at the net walls swaying into the blue, cloudless sky, the army green ceiling fans, the stone floor and stonewalls. No one seemed to be paying any attention to them at all. The professors were either absorbed in their books or themselves. The waiters did their jobs, whisking crumbs off of tables before dessert, bowing slightly as they presented the menu cards. There air was serene, if hot. One could think here. She felt suddenly wistful and her usual wariness gave way. “I really loved working here,” Bryson said, feeling a little drunk. “Maybe with that money, I could afford to come back.”

Velodia looked at her friend strangely. “Why would they ever let you do that? It’s a lifetime contract.”

“Well, I could try to buy myself out, they don’t need me that much.”

Velodia lit a cigarette and pursed her lips. She didn’t look jolly or harebrained or comical anymore but hard. Bryson wasn’t making any sense. “They decide that and you know it. And as long as you produce, as long as see these things that you see, the danger of even suggesting–”

“Oh, but I’m tired of the things I see. I’ve earned my keep. And who the hell are they anyway?”

“With a council seat you’ll find out soon enough.”

Bryson looked around again. “Do you know all these people?” she asked.

“I think we’re safe enough. There’s more hostility than sympathy around here these days.”

“Did you tell anyone I was coming?”

“No, of course not.”

“After I get back I’m going to keep working on transcryptasine. Bradlee said he could fix it for a while. But it seems prudent, to me, to have a back up plan. Just to cover my ass.” As she approached what she had to say she faltered, her words forming around a hard black lump in her gut. Bryson wasn’t a fearful person and she gave little thought to death. Most of her life she’d been coasting from one success to another, and the way things are, the order, had always yielded to her irreverence. She got away with doing what she wanted because what she wanted to do always in the end proved to be so profitable. But now she was breaking a law, perhaps the only law. Others had done it, but they had done it by changing allegiance, going from a weaker to a stronger patron. Moving against Monozone was a transgression no one would forgive, especially not Owen Bradlee, unless he was in on it. But this kind of move would never interest him; it would appall and disgust him. This kind of a move had no pay off, it was a simple betrayal. The words came trembling to her lips and with a gust of determination left them, so small after such great effort.

“I’m wondering if there’s some way to try to stop sales by alerting doctors to the danger.”

They were quiet then. The ceiling fans took the separate curls of smoke from their cigarettes and dispersed them into haze.

Finally, Velodia, who was in a state of introspective fear, almost a swoon, whose head felt like a candle flame suddenly blown flat by wind, intense and vulnerable, cleared her throat. “Are you really ready to do this? Do you have an escape plan?”

“It doesn’t have to be so very dangerous,” Bryson said, recovering her footing some. “Maybe a discreet word here or there. Everyone knows the dangers involved.”

“No one wants to die, not to save the lives of strangers. Besides, a lot of them will look at these reports, they’ll get the briefings, and they’ll go for it. It looks like a panacea. I mean, you, or rather they, are touting it as a cure for ennui. Give me a fucking break. A drug that cures unhappiness is worth a little risk for most people.”

“That’s what they’ll say. But I know it’s not true and now you do too.”

Velodia studied her bony pale hands, the color of birch bark, with the sculpted red nails; she turned them over as if she were reading her own palms. “I’ve been lucky in life. I didn’t go with you to Monozone. I didn’t become a conference whore. I believe in psychiatry, the treatment of the soul. I believe that life inevitably makes us sick at heart, but that the mind is also an organ, the brain. I have studied its waves, its sirens and its tickings. I’ve tinkered with its stops and pedals, I’ve turned its tuning pegs, raised and lowered its pitch with drugs and talk and in return I get to sit on this terrace of an afternoon and sip wine with a dear old friend. There aren’t so very many of us in the world Ruth. I’ll see what I can do. The chiefs at the major teaching hospitals will be easy. It oughta diffuse from there, down through the ranks. Give it a couple of months. But I’ll tell you what, it’s the company doctors who scare me. They’ll just hand out what’s given them. And if they catch on to what we’re doing, then you and I are dead.”

That first night Felix sat in a chair by her side, not really sleeping. The sun, advancing up the center of the windowpane, reached his eyes. She stirred, swallowed and opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling.

“Baby?” He sat up straight and whispered, “Veronica? Are you awake?” For a minute she continued to stare at the ceiling, and then her head flopped on its side, as if it had been knocked over, and he was in her line of vision.

She gulped painfully and studied Felix. She seemed to recognize him. He smiled.

Every cell of his brain, lungs and heart, every breath and thought was bent to the one task of bringing her to life, as if he could control both matter and fate by will alone. It was childish, he knew. And despite these efforts, he was too skeptical to believe that she would be all right, or even that she would live. Yet here she was.

She swallowed again and said, in a low brittle voice, “Fuck you!” Then she looked back up at the ceiling, shut her eyes, and went to sleep, with a grunting snore.

For several days they kept her heavily sedated, strapped to a bed in the locked ward. He sat in the chair, only getting up to buy food and drink, or go to the bathroom. Once a day he washed his face. Twice brushed his teeth. Her food remained untouched till it was cold and congealed. Then someone came and took it away. They measured her fields, they drew blood, spinal fluid, assayed her tears, incinerated stools, disarticulated urine.

When it was time for a consultation with Intellatrawl Doctor Tarlton, they restored her to her senses.

“I’ve fucking had it with that Intellatrawl quack,” she said, sitting up in the hospital bed.

“I know, but we have no choice.

“Can’t you just push me out the window?” He ignored her. “It’s my right to die.”

“I’m at a loss. We crossed a line here somewhere.”

She hid her disgust in her hands. “If I could take it, take you or any of it, do you think I’d want to die?”

“But that’s crazy despair.”

“No, that’s not crazy, that’s sane. This–this whole fucking planet-this organization of matter into molecules and brains and society, sexual reproduction, language, viruses and history, are insane. Woman, man: insane; the binaries and the unities; progressive division. This clade ends here. Like Christ. If we stopped fucking it would all go away and then there’d be the kingdom of god. Or Buddha. The end of passion is the end of suffering. To go and not come back. My bath was not insane.”

“Do me a favour and don’t talk like that in front of Tarlton.”

“Oh, what are you afraid of? You don’t understand. I used to think you did. I thought you knew.”

“Knew?”

“Yeah, knew. About things. Knew what was up. You don’t know shit. You just,” she mumbled.

“I do understand about things. Now be quiet. If you want to go, be quiet.”

“I’m just going to try again. By the end there, when I wasn’t scared and I wasn’t cold, I liked it. I think I’ll try again, first chance I get.”

Felix helped her into the wheel chair. Her legs were stiff. She had little white booties, and a hospital gown that came untied in the back, showing the crack of her ass. She looked forlorn and damaged, old. The bandages on her arm looked like white crosses in a graveyard at dusk. Despite her anger, she took his hand, and clung to his neck, before sitting down heavily in the chair. He pushed her to the desk, signed out of the locked ward and went through double leather- upholstered doors, down another hall and into the consultation room.

The lights popped on. An older man, in his seventies, with a grey crew cut, sat at a computer. His well-tanned head was large, larger than his small skinny body. He had heavy hands. “So good to see you both again,” he said without facing them. “Have a seat Felix, I’m just reviewing Veronica’s file.” He had a cheerful, professional voice, no hint of condescension. “Well, well, well. Here we are again.” He swirled around in his chair and looked at them. “Still hostile,

Veronica?”

“Why do you say that?” she asked.

“Just thought I’d ask. Let’s get down to it. We seem to have tried everything. You first came to me complaining about ennui, restlessness, anxiety, lack of satisfaction with life and career. The treatment option we pursued was a mild mood enhancer, increased exercise, a low fat, high protein diet. Then it was insomnia and frequent painful cramping. We selected DigestAid to relieve gas and a mild relaxant before bed, maintained the mood enhancer, increased protein intake and the intensity of exercise. Meditation recommended. Your irritability increased and you manifested hostility towards the various treatment protocols. So we increased the mood enhancer, went to a strong narcotic therapy, and advised you to seek out some form of therapeutic talk sessions, spousal communication therapy, and deep massage. Next it was nightmares and delusional episodes. Drop the mood enhancers and narcotics and add antipsychotic preventatives, SchizAvoid 9000, Norave, Comatode. Headaches, lack of sexual desire and anhedonia with incipient drug- induced anorexia. Anti-anxiety drugs, intense aerobic workouts, labial dilators. Then there’s the death of three parents, oh my, a bad stretch, that. We went straight to sleeping pills and the most potent Euphorics then available, as well as four hours of confessional psychotherapy. You changed analysts several times, Neo Freudian, Adlerian Modified, Jungian…hmmm…oh, look, a Lacanian. How quixotic. How long were the sessions?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Not bad! Chiropractic readjustments, electroconvulsive therapy, acupuncture and quantum wave analysis. Now you’ve tried to kill yourself.”

Felix and Veronica said nothing.

“You know, I’ve been at this a long time. Flus, cancers, hepatic conditions, resistant congenital defects, various manias and dementias. All sorts of things. I’ve even treated broken bones. Nearly every mental illness known to us has a treatment option. But there are a few recalcitrant disorders that respond to no known treatment. These usually end in suicide and we have to just throw up our hands and say ‘boo’.” He turned to the computer. “I suppose you are starting to despair, or you never would have done this to yourself. I don’t blame you. But I have a rather pleasant surprise for you. I’ve arranged for a consultation with the chief of psychiatry here at Rockland General.”

The computer burped and the alias of Dr. Eulenfeld materialized in the room. It looked at each of them, a stoop shouldered man in his forties, completely bald, with a face like a bellows. Periodically the alias dissolved into pixels, and reassembled into grids of color, or a grainy continuum of grey, pink and lavender. The voice was missing its bottom.

“Greetings Mr. and Mrs. Clay, Dr. Tarlton.”

“Nice to meet you Dr. Eulenfeld,” said Felix.

Veronica glared distantly.

“As Intellatrawl Dr. Tarlton was saying. There are those persnickety cases that always seem to end in death,” his voice dropped to give the next word drama, but with the lower end out, he garbled, “or tragedy. Despite our best effort. But I have been having great luck with a new Monozone Euphoric. Now, Monozone has the best Euphorics on the market, they invented the field after all. But Paregane is a step up. It is the first drug that has ever been truly effective in cases like yours, where the prognosis is grim.”

Veronica wiggled her butt around on the chair and made a face. “I’m tired of your stinking drugs. And you aren’t even real.”

“Mrs. Clay, I understand why you feel that way. Are you aware of the statistics–”

“You mean more fucking chances.”

“The numbers, Mrs. Clay, are clear. Over 90% of cases like yours end in successful suicide.”

Veronica spit. “This one kills your appetite for food. This one makes you never wanna fuck again. This one makes you feel stupid. This one suffocates you in your sleep. This one destroys your dreams. This one your hope and desire. I would like to finish what you started.”

It spread its hands apart and smiled, squatting down beside the wheel chair and speaking at eye level to Veronica. “Now,” he said kindly, “I’m aware of our shortcomings in this area. But you’re really in for quite a surprise here. There are no known side effects to Paregane. You take one pill at bedtime, have delightful dreams and awake after just 7 1/2 hours sleep fully refreshed, strong and happy. It doesn’t just restore your appetite, it makes it stronger. You have better sex, better relationships, better exercise even. Paregane makes you feel good again, without killing your energy.

“Will that be all?” the alias of Dr. Eulenfeld asked.

Intellatrawl Dr. Tarlton smiled. “That was great Dr. Eulenfeld. Thank you.”

Dr. Eulenfeld collapsed into a spark and a dank, echoey voice said, “This has been a Virtual Consultation with Dr. Eulenfeld of Rockland General Hospital. Your consultation number is 7756-3270574– 02279-565628109/udot/memcodes3H. If at any time in the future, for the period covered by the statute of limitation, you wish to file a complaint, reference all correspondence and evidence to this number, along with your case file number, name of your Intellatrawl Primary Physician, and today’s date and time.”

Dr. Tarlton smiled again. “A formality. All of that information is right here on your chart.” He waved his personal recorder around in the air. “So Mrs. Clay, what do you think? Give it a whirl?”

Veronica was phasing in and out, chewing her tongue and licking her lips.

“Dr. Tarlton. If she says yes to Paregane, can she come home?”

He folded his hands in his lap and leaned back in his chair. “If she takes it tonight, I would say she could go home in the morning. Is that soon enough?”

Felix could hardly restrain his joy. “Did you hear that babe? Tomorrow!”

“Fuck,” she muttered.

“Mrs. Clay, we need your consent.”

“It’s the only way, babe.”

Veronica, with great effort, turned to Felix and said, “Will you stay another night then?”

He wanted a shower, a good night’s sleep. “Of course. Dr. Tarlton, it’s been a long time in that chair.”

“Oh, we can do something about that. And let’s get you off the locked ward.” He turned back to the computer. “I have a private room available on the Klingenstein Pavilion. It’s small, but I think a cot’ll fit, just for one night. I’ll come by at 9 am and discharge you.

How does that sound?”

Felix stood. “Great. Thank you Dr. Tarlton.”

They settled into their new room and watched a movie about the swimming kangaroos of Adelaide. They held hands, between the cot and the bed, and ate packaged food. At midnight a nurse came in and gave Veronica a glass of orange juice to wash down a little green pill stamped with the letter P.

They had been searching for Felix and caught up with him just as he entered his living room, when the heat sensors indicated a recently ridden bike in his garage. As they landed they heard his emergency call to the county medivac. This was a surprise since they had assumed the criminal had sustained the usual minor injuries. They were there mainly to issue a court summons and evaluate the situation. If necessary they could bring him in, but neither expected to do so. They were mostly pissed off at having to chase down another brawling businessman.

If there was one thing they hated more than breaking up fights it was uncertainty. Especially on a Friday night when all the suburban towns slowly exploded with drunken violence. Approaching a home like this was always dangerous. They simply never knew what awaited them on the other side of the door.

Shannon drew down her gun while Bop Molloy knocked loudly. “Security,” he said in a commanding, amplified machine voice.

“Open up Mr. Clay. Let’s get this over with.” When there was no answer they repeated the command and then opened the door, to which they had an override key, and descended the spiral stair into the soft aura of night light.

Quickly they secured the living room and kitchen and then slowly walked down the steps to the bedroom, headlamps on high, the cold bright beam playing over the walls and steps. “Mr. Clay,” Bop Molloy barked, “Do not move at all when we enter the room.”

With a little push of adrenaline they faced the bedroom doorway, blasting Veronica’s disheveled nude body with light, wet bloody hair half across her face and pillows, legs parted unnaturally, one arm across her belly, the other entwined in Felix’s, who winced and cowered. Felix hoped they would just go away. Bop Molloy said to Shannon, “Shit,” and then, “Mr. Clay, sir, step away from the body.”

“Fucking typical,” Shannon said. “So you go and get drunk, beat a guy up and then come home and kill your wife.” She shook her head. “Typical fucking Friday night.” Felix didn’t move. The lights played over him, shined in his eyes. One of the cuts on Veronica’s arm had opened up again. Blood oozed out. It was smeared on his cheeks and forehead and all between his fingers. His eyes were swollen shut. He had a fat lip.

“I can’t let go,” he said. “I think I hear a heart beat.”

“Give it up. She’s dead. Step away from the body.”

“Then you might as well shoot me now. Without her I’m nothing.”

Shannon said, “I’m losing my patience Mr. Clay. Step away.”

The door upstairs opened. There were shouts and commotion.

“It’s them,” he said. “The medivac!”

Bop Molloy looked at Shannon who said in a sarcastic, crackling voice, “It ain’t the fucking cavalry Mr. Clay.”

“She’s all done,” Bop Molloy added. Felix stood, chest trembling, the bloody arm still in his hands. “Drop the arm sir.” Felix laid it gently across her chest. It swung down off the bed. He reached for it and Bop said, “Leave it. Raise your hands above your head, where I can see them, and lay face down on the floor, feet spread.”

Shannon aimed her gun at him, the red dot resting on the back of his head. The medivac team trotted down the stairs with a small, collapsible gurney. A young, intense redheaded woman raced to the bed, shouting.

“Forget it doc,” Shannon said. “She’s dead.”

The doctor looked at the helmets with contempt. “She’s not dead, it’s a botch job. Look.” She pointed to Veronica’s lips. A bubble of saliva was forming. She yelled instructions out to the orderlies, who set up an i.v. while she gave Veronica an intercardial shot and oxygen. With great efficiency they installed a line, hooked her up to several bottles, jerked open the gurney and hoisted her onto it.

“Alive!” Felix shouted into the stone floor. “Alive!”

“You shut up,” Shannon said.

Bop Molloy, ready to give the information to a small pad, asked the doctor, “Where’d he stab her?”

The doctor looked Veronica over. The shot, the oxygen and the i.v.’s were taking affect. Her chest rose and fell. “He didn’t. These wounds are self-inflicted. She passed out before hitting a vein is all. They wanna die so bad they can’t get it right. It’s my second one tonight. It’s like a fucking epidemic. What I don’t get is, why don’t they just use a fucking gun and get it over with?”

Bop Molloy asked Shannon, “What do we do with him?”

They looked at Felix.

“I dunno. He’s in worse shape than the other guy.”

“And he’s got a job.”

“Fuck it.”

“Mr. Clay,” Bop Molloy said, “you can stand at ease now. You are no longer under suspicion. We apologize for the mix up.”

“She’s alive. I told you but you wouldn’t believe me.”

The orderlies covered Veronica up to the chin in a copper electraweave sheet. Sparks darted across the surface. The doctor said, “Load her up boys and bandage the arms. If she wakes up, keep her awake and restrained till we figure out what she took.” She turned to Felix. “Are you done with the cops?”

He looked at the helmets.

“Yeah yeah, he’s done,” Shannon said. “And no more street brawls, Mr. Clay, or I will personally haul your ass in front of a public safety board, after kicking all of the shit right out of it.” They followed the gurney up the stairs.

“Put your clothes on Mr. Clay,” the doctor said. He was covered in blood and vomit, wet, sweaty, dirty, tired. His eyes burned. “You can wash off in the shower first if you want, I’ll wait. We’ll catch up with them at the hospital. You can tell me on the way what drugs you have lying around the house.”

Without comprehension he watched the bloody water drain out of the tub and stood beneath the scalding shower jets just long enough to be clean. Then he dressed and followed her out of the house, as if it belonged to her.

The village of Rockland consisted of two commercial streets that served about 20,000 people spread out, mostly underground, over three k of constructed hills. It was one of five planned villages that made up the town of Hartland. Planned settlements had superior water drainage and protected utilities so that even in tornado and hurricane seasons life went on much as usual. Each village had a large 24-hour supermarket, retail mall, post office, gym, levee park with a small bandstand, plus assorted diners, restaurants, cafes and bars.

Felix locked his bike up at a titanium rack as close to Les Jardeen as he could get, about two blocks away, and strolled along, looking into restaurant and bar windows. They were all full and cheery, with rosy lights winking on and off, neon sculptures of various beloved characters, a figure skater spinning on glowing skates, a pink and powder blue ballerina leaping up, a cat dressed like a whore exposing her breasts, ruby nipples flashing and then emitting the words POW POW POW, a chef stir frying a colorful mess of vegetables in a wok.

Les Jardeen, his regular watering hole and dinner spot, was part of a quiet neighborhood spot chain. In the window was a neon monkey in a red beret drinking a glass of beer. The doorbells jingled as he entered the foyer and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. The room was cozy, paneled in real wood, decorated with old parisian cafe posters, lit by brass sconces and chandeliers with faux gaslight. A fake fire burned in the dining room beneath a mantel with decorative crookneck gourds and a basket of apples, pale green and dark, almost black red.

Peter Nguyen, the bartender, greeted him with a napkin. “Good evening Mr. Clay. How are you sir?” Peter was a young man, an aspiring actor, handsome, light skinned with dark eyes and a smile seductive to both sexes. He wore a red bartender’s jacket and black T-shirt and moved efficiently in the narrow space between the zinc bar top and the mahogany liquor shelves.

Felix felt quite indebted to Peter since he had, over the years, unburdened himself to him over many vodka martinis. He said, “Couldn’t be better, Peter,” and watched him load a steel shaker with ice, rinse it with vermouth and glug three shots of Gulag Potato Vodka in.

“Where’s Mrs. Clay tonight?” Peter asked, alighting the drink on a coaster and placing before him a basket of bread and a dish of olives.

“I’m not sure if she’s meeting me or not. I’ll call in a bit and see how she’s doing.” He munched the bread and olives and rinsed them down with the martini, feeling the long week’s discipline unravel like mummy bandages. Maybe he’d better call now, she might be worried.

There was no way to tell. Although fear and sorrow were her dominant moods, she was also unpredictably hostile. He pushed his empty glass forward and called her. There was no answer and he hung up, annoyed.

As he worked on the second drink a pocket opened up in his stomach swallowing all of the light and leaving only dark feelings. Maybe she was with a man and they’d lost track of the time. His call had interrupted them. Even now he was in a panic to get his pants on while she lay in a trance, perhaps thinking the man was Felix come home in disguise. It made no sense. He saw her nude body, as it had been, when they were young, on all fours sucking a strange, faceless man’s cock, his lips planted on her upraised vulva. Veronica turned to look at Felix and smile. He practically knocked over his glass. He had to shake free of it. But the image of Veronica’s arched buttocks and the man’s puckered lips on her cunt would not fade, it raced about, now shaming, now exciting, till finally he downed the rest of the drink and doused the red hot poker in a bucket of cold water.

He called home again and again no answer. Maybe she was taking out the garbage, or was in the bath or on the toilet. But these seemed silly to him. As the veil of alcohol descended, the veil of optimism was rent aside. She wasn’t fucking a strange man and she wasn’t taking a long shit, she was passed out or semiconscious, the t.v. stuttering.

He drank his third drink with equanimity then. Peter spread the evening paper out on the bar and read the news. Gangs were shooting it out in midtown. A new drug fad had hit the cities of China. He munched on the bread and olives and reflected on the fact that food was good, nourishing, it brought the world into focus. The madness of midtown shootouts, of business deals faded before the reality that he could trust her, his jealousy was a sort of paranoia. Veronica loved him, they were faithful to each other. She couldn’t even stand the sight or smell of other people, much less get into bed with them.

It was nine o’clock and he’d had five drinks. She still didn’t answer the phone. She was definitely not going to come down to meet him then. When he stood up to go to the bathroom the room did a loop around him, then he was steady. Five drinks, he thought. Let’s make it six, then I’ll eat dinner and go home.

The sixth drink was the ticket. He no longer cared or noticed who was or wasn’t in the restaurant. Peter saved him the embarrassment of having to carry the drink to the table, sloshing it over fingertips and exaggerated attempts at maintaining balance. He sat down near the fireplace and felt the linen tablecloth. A beautiful young woman, two metres tall and flat chested, with disproportionately long naked legs and a disdainful, humorless expression, took his order. He got the half a duck with currants, lentils and parsnip latkes. With it he had a split of pinot noir. By the time he was done he had ceased to notice anything in the world, not the garbage or the bath or his sleeping wife or the faceless cunt kissing man, or even the build up of rage in his own heart. The waitress brought him his bill, which he signed without reading.

It was eleven o’clock when he left. The air felt like a stocking soaked in hot water had been pulled over his head. Above he heard the squeak of bats and the thwock of flying cockroaches striking the lamps. Rowdy crowds of people poured in and out of the bars in lurching groups of five to ten. He weaved up the center of the sidewalk, storefronts and streets on a tilted plane, like refractions of a vanished reality. Ahead a man approached, also weaving down the center of the sidewalk. Felix stepped to the left to allow him to pass. As he approached he could see the man’s face–it was hard, stupid, belligerent. He had prisoner eyes and walked with his hands balled into fists.

The man stepped onto the same side of the sidewalk as Felix. That was just ridiculous. Felix had yielded the center. If the man wanted a fight, he’d found one.

The two men were on a collision course now, neither slackening their pace, nor stepping aside. They didn’t collide; each stopped and stared at the other.

Finally Felix said, “I stepped aside, all right!”

“What are you, from Mars? You stepped to the left.”

“Maybe that’s how they step on Mars,” Felix snorted.

“You’re drunk.”

“What if I am.”

“Step aside.”

“No,” Felix said.

The man swung at Felix and the punch landed square on his jaw, knocking him back. The sky circled massively and he felt and saw himself fall. It was the cunt eater, he knew it now. Fueled by an accumulation of rage he stood and the man laughed. “Drunk motherfucker in a suit. Serves you right.”

Felix slugged him in the face. The man went down and Felix leapt on him but before he could smack him around the man kicked him in the balls and the two began to wrestle on the ground. They pulled hair, bit and screamed, finally standing up. Blood poured out of the man’s nose and out of a cut on Felix’s forehead. A small crowd gathered to cheer them on as they cautiously and murderously circled each other.

“Cunt eater,” Felix growled.

“Cocksucker,” the man growled back.

They sparred, striking at chest and stomach but neither man yielded to the other. Finally, Felix, darting in, hit the man in the stomach and then the face and he fell to the ground at his feet, vomiting blood and teeth.

Quiet now spread through the crowd, a palpable disappointment. The sky lit up with hovercraft; the county police were landing. Mobilized by panic and nerves Felix pushed through the crowd, some of whom shouted, go man, go. Somehow he made it to his bike and rode home. He was sure the police wouldn’t come after him, a man in a suit, if they had a criminal in hand.

The streets leading up to his house were lit only by green and red ground lights. The headlight wobbled uncertainly over the stone composite road. He weaved towards the edge and then out into the middle. Hovercraft passed overhead, blinking. Thunder rumbled in the distance and heat lightning flashed. Insects bounced off of his face and the air was full of the sound of nocturnal bugs. Toads hopped out of his way. He rode up the cul de sac, through thickets of bamboo, each house marked by a garage big enough to house a hovercraft, the peaked solar roof a foot or so off the ground, and the tall solar tower extending up above the tree line. Every house was separated by a hedge, or bamboo, or stand of RapidPines. He parked his bike next to Veronica’s and descended the spiral stairs leading to their living room. The ambient ceiling panels were on late dusk, cool, green and amber. Felix turned them up till his eyes ached and headed for the little kitchen off the living room, a straw colored cubicle large enough for a steel table for two, a two burner stove, black toaster, small convection oven in the wall, sink and fridge. His face was broken and crusty with blood, it was hard to breathe through his nose, which felt crooked. His eyes were swollen. His hands hurt; they were scraped up. He ran water in the sink and tried to wash his face a bit, soaped up his hands, and then he drank a glass of juice and took some aspirin. The taste of blood dissolved on his tongue.

As the alcohol wore off he felt a creeping sense of shame. He had inexplicably attacked another man and left him to his fate with the police. At least he was safe and not seriously injured, but he had no idea how he was going to explain any of this to Veronica. Hopefully she wouldn’t wake up when he crawled into bed and he wouldn’t have to. He opened a beer and went downstairs to their bedroom.

The bathroom light was on, the door was shut and all of the lights in their bedroom were off, even the baseboards. He went into the bedroom and sat down on a chair in the dark and took off his shoes as quietly as a drunk man who has just been in a fight can. They tumbled off of his feet and clunked to the floor. His eyes adjusted to the dark. He rolled off his socks and took off his pants and shirt and took a long slug of beer. Then he removed his underwear and sat a moment naked in the chair. He couldn’t possibly sleep. His heart thumped. The excitement kept at him, agitating his thoughts with alternating feelings of triumph and guilt. He’d won a fight, he’d crow; he’d beaten an innocent man, came the response. Finally he put the t.v. on and casually looked at the bed. It was empty. “Veronica?” he called. “I’m home. Is anything wrong?” No answer. “Are you sick?” That might explain why she didn’t answer the phone or come, she was sick. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He smelled, faintly, vomit. “Babe,” he said, standing unsteadily, “can I come in? If you’re sick I can get you something.”

He knocked on the bathroom door. “Come to bed. I’m home now.” He knocked again and turned the handle. It was locked. “Babe?” He rattled the door. Everything slowed down. For what seemed like a long time he stood in a silent time bubble. His mind wouldn’t turn or work. Pressure built in the bubble. He pushed weakly at the door and then, all of a sudden, the bubble burst, reality whooshed in and he exploded. “Babe! Veronica!” He shouted and smashed at the door, running blindly at it from the bedroom, kicking until the wood splintered and it swung open.

Felix looked down at Veronica’s body in the tub. The water was murky, red and orange. The floor tile and sides of the tub were smeared and caked with half dried blood. Little bits of food and whole capsules floated around on the surface of the water and Veronica’s head lay tipped back, caught on the edge of the tub by a flap of skin. It was like she was watching the ceiling except that her eyes were shut. A puddle of blood had collected between her neck and the tub and had trickled down to the floor. Her lips were parted and her tongue protruded slightly.

“Oh, Oh!” he cried in confusion and panic even as his body went into action. Please please please not dead, he thought, don’t be dead, not dead, and yet he was sure, surveying the shambles, that she was. He dropped to his knees, afraid to move her, and took her scabbed, lacerated arm up in his hands. “Oh my god, my baby,” he sobbed quietly. He knew he couldn’t just squat naked in a puddle of his wife’s blood sobbing, he had to do something. Gently at first he put his hands into the cold water, one beneath her knees, spread haphazardly apart, bringing them together, and the other beneath her shoulders to gather her up as best he could and lift her. But she was slippery and heavy. He got her up a bit, enough for her head to tilt back and mouth to gape open hideously before he dropped her, sending slow sloshing waves over the edge of the tub.

Again he lifted, this time not gently but with all his strength and he carried her dripping body into their room and laid her on the bed. In a functional trance he called the Hudson County Emergency Medivac number and collapsed beside her on the floor, convulsed with tears, all thought shattered. Then he laid his head on her breast, took up her hand and prayed and waited. Sometimes he felt a heartbeat, but whether it was hers or his own he had no idea.

They were all headed towards the Friday assembly. There were five assembly rooms, one for every eight floors. Felix’s was on the 16th floor. He worked on the third. It was a good enough walk, if he could avoid the crowd.

Monday morning and Friday evening assemblies were the kind of ritualized affairs no one even bothered to make fun of. If you were to go into a room full of Intellatrawlers and start cutting up about Chairman Aung Thwin’s Friday sermon on excellence, with dead on impersonations of his voice and slightly exaggerated pantomimes of his characteristic moves, no one would laugh, they would stare glassily and wonder what you were talking about. People showed up, took their seats, fixed their eyes upon their chairman’s cheaply reproduced three dimensional alias and watched it deliver his thoughts on a number of recurrent themes, in an emotionally distressing monotone, like a man who never blinks. Often these talks touched on loyalty, work, and life’s uncertainty.

Small spurs off the main Intellatrawl Trunk were dark, crammed with cell like offices, but the main hallways were brightly lit and the walls were painted in bold colors, the sorts of colors that make us happy, green, yellow and pink. The floors were unpolished stone, they felt cool to the foot. The air smelled faintly of the woods, of wet bark and wild flowers blooming in the first morning light. Overhead were signs of encouragement, in vibrant neon.

EXCELLENCE BEGINS WITH YOU

TO BE ON TOP STAY ON TOP

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

Some were more topical or exhortatory than others:

OUR VOICE IS YOUR VOICE AT STATE

DON’T FORGET TO ELECT

RAINY DAYS DON’T MEAN DISMAL DAYS

These bright bromides passed above the heads of Intellatrawl associates without catching their eyes, but new employees were sometimes puzzled by them, getting bumped along the way if they paused to figure them out.

Felix and the others strode up to the 16th floor. It was a long, slightly banked hall. From any spot a person could see three floors in either direction. Without a murmur they filed in and took their usual seats, not assigned but assumed by custom. His was almost precisely in the middle of the raked room. The walls were brown metal rods on a white clay background, and the seats were white, composite buckets. The whole room pitched down towards the small presentation area, where a wooden podium was set up. No one wasted time in getting seated, they didn’t clear their throats or cough. The lights overhead dimmed and some serene yet inspiring music warbled out of the walls. The wall behind the podium glowed a dark blue and in walked Chairman Aung’s holographic alias, in a simple paper suit. He wore round, steel framed glasses, had a full head of black hair and skin so white you could powder it for house paint. His eyes were serious, dark, like pits beneath his brows and his red mouth was fixed. He flickered, almost at one point zipped out, and walked to the podium. Once enough time had elapsed for the entire Intellatrawl nation to come to attention, he smiled.

“Greetings my friends. It is Friday, the end of our week. I know you are all tired with your final effort, that last mile to which you always give your all, with unflagging attention and devotion. I thank you all. Not a penny here is earned unless you go out and earn it.

“This week I’d like to remind you that every effort towards excellence is its own reward and that you can expect both love and perfection to be a part of your organizational lives.

“The Motivated associate doesn’t wait for perfection to happen but seizes upon every opportunity to achieve it, to proactively perfect our workplace and take Intellatrawl all the way to the top, where we belong.

“But just as love and perfection exist in our organizational lives, so might they elude us at home. And so, as we leave each other on this beautiful Friday evening to join our families at home, let us remind ourselves that life may not be perfect. Our children cry for no reason at all. They throw food on the floor, curse and run off. Our husbands and wives betray us or we betray them. Our parents live in far off places, stubbornly refusing to come to their senses, suffering diseases and dementias caused by the long and painful decades of loss, followed by their brave reclamations.

“Though we may, through the miracle of genetic medicine, live to the Methuselean ages of 110 or 120, many of us will fail to establish stem cell lines, or will die of an unnamed disease with no known treatment.

“Accidents, disasters, and crime beset us. We do not control our world. Failure is surely a part of life and we must learn to accept and even embrace it.

“Until Monday then, I leave you all in peace.”

Chairman Aung, oscillating at his customary rate, traveled across the room and vanished in a spark.

The associates stood and left, in waves of grey and tan suits, linen, hemp and cotton, and playing above this wave, a few coats of loosely woven metal, gossamer capes of gold, bare shoulders showing through, copper headscarves and platinum wraps, pastel synthetic jackets with one belly button and shoulder pads. White shirts and crepe shoes and loose black pants stood at the doors and merged.

After about a half an hour Felix exited the Intellatrawl door. He and Veronica did not yet own a hovercraft. They commuted via Amphibatrains, to their home in Rockland, on the west bank of the Hudson.

He struggled to breathe. The air smelled of burning rubber. Hovercraft droned about in the evening light, into celadon sky. Gnat swarms caught on his eyes and lips, he brushed them off and spit. He still felt flutters of joy on Friday afternoons, walking quickly even with the late summer heat. Free of the chair, of the graphs and numbers, of the bleeps. And the feeling would persist till right before he opened his door and realized Veronica was about to offer up to his lips her medicated cheek.

He stood on the concrete platform, beneath a composite shelter, nonreflective, grey and violet and pink, watching for the Amphibatrains. The train arrived silently and hissed to a stop. It was like a glass log with dorsal, wing and tail fins. The doors popped up and Felix entered the chilly car in a crowd of Intellatrawl associates. They pushed and wiggled into position. Felix got a seat between two people.

He tried not to look at anyone directly. He looked at people’s knees and waists and rear ends. He looked at his feet. He tried looking at the bamboo and pines on the hills, and pampas grass growing thick on the slopes between land and water. No matter what he looked at, he could still smell and feel all the people. It wasn’t like he could read their thoughts, it was like he could feel the volume of internal chatter. Like insects chewing leaves.

Slowly the car filled with murmurs. The man in the black wool suit to his left spun into a restless sleep and began to snore fitfully. The train hummed and rocked, picking up speed. As the liquor went around, voices grew louder, and soon there was laughter.

Felix divided their relationship up into three stages. Stage one began imperceptibly almost, with a flickering between their eyes, of signals sent and not received, received but never sent. An evanescent thing between them that developed of its own accord into a crush. They read together in the library, drank in the afternoons at a variety of grad student dives on Broadway. They participated in a staged reading of The Tempest, rode out to New Jersey on the Amphibatrains to drive cars, spent afternoons in November wandering the gentle ruins of Central Park or the decayed halls of the Museum of Natural History.

Soon they were living together, in a crusty old apartment on 106th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam. They sweated and fucked in front of a roaring fan, watched t.v. all night and drank cheap espresso in the mornings in their underwear, watching the angry, impatient, lovely world conspire below. They were wholly for each other. No one else existed except as barrier or entertainment. The ugliness and folly of the world stood at a comic distance. All discord was resolved in the system of their boundless bodies. As the practical demands of life intruded they experienced a redivision of their collective self into two functioning, differentiated selves that nonetheless incorporated so much of the other that what they became was two complementary composites. Where one left off and the other began was permeable.

Felix looked at the sleeping man’s head, at the pores of his skin in the shaky light, the pink scratch left by a razor on his jaw, the hair growing out of his ear, the grease shining on his nose, the flecks of dandruff on his scalp. Mucus gurgled in his throat, soft palatal tissue throbbing like a bullfrog.

The woman on his right, with the dry, nearly transparent skin of a centenarian, peered through red Bakelite reading glasses at a sheet of silver electraweave displaying the news. She had black synthetic hair, glossy as if wet, and a perfect set of teeth. The rest of her was flaking off beneath and around these two formidable features. The train dipped down and headed for the river.

They had never planned on any kind of career at all. All their plans were of travel. Then school was over and they had to go to work. The first job offer either received was in sales. Veronica had applied to a small but growing company that distributed outdoor gear for hiking and skiing, located in a strip mall in the Poconos. They moved to a small studio apartment not far from work, on the edge of a state park. Here the first stage rocketed into the second, the great complacency.

It proved to be a delightful setting for the exploration of, and surrendering of, dreams. Slowly they settled into jobs, Felix processing the orders, Veronica handling virtual sales. Soon he was a supervisor and she managed all the operations.

The apartment was the third floor of a small, two hundred year-old house. They had a kitchenette, shower and toilet cubicle, double bed, dresser and two chairs around a tiny circular table. If a storm was up they could go to the basement, but the age of the house was reassuring, and the area was not prone to tornadoes. For the first time in their lives they were free of their parents’ expectations, of school, of their own crush.

Now instead of virtual mountains and virtual kayaks on virtual streams they could hike the state park and rent a canoe to take out on the relatively tame rivers in the area. They boated through townships and wooded hills, sailed on lakes, swam in reservoirs and climbed small mountains. Not far away was a CarPark with over two hundred k of road. There were stop lights and turn signals, potholes and yield signs, sharp turns and straightaways long enough to go 100 miles an hour.

They thought that one day they could buy a country house and a car of their own.

Years passed in this way, in which they took morning kisses and Sunday afternoons sprawled naked in front of the t.v. as a matter of course. But then the Intellatrawl jobs came up, through an associate they dealt with there, a buyer and seller of antique inventories. Without thinking about what they were leaving behind, assuming the additional money would give them more of what they had, time and joy, they bit and moved to Rockland.

Life on the west bank of the Hudson was more varied, more cosmopolitan. The views of the river from the levee park were grand, but the trees were genetically modified pines and bamboo, they had no smell, and they could never ride a horse. They had a Shakespeare subscription and ate out in nice restaurants and the one bedroom on the cul de sac was much larger. If the climate was hotter, nastier, more humid, at least their home had perfect air, and space for clothes and things.

With the extra money they decided to start a stem cell line and have children. They bought a cryovac package deal and Veronica produced six embryos in five years. Two would be children, the remaining four would go to the stem cell line. The package included two non-inheritable genetic modifications. They chose longevity and musical talent over dozens of options, like height, beauty or athletic ability.

It was a form of coasting, a life drifting into ritual. Friday French food, virtual book club, sex three times a week, yearly vacations somewhere in the far north or the Rockies. Christmas with her parents in Florida, Thanksgiving with his parents at a hotel in Manhattan. They were no longer saving for a car, but for a hovercraft.

The ritual, starting with work, began to degenerate into a stultifying sterility. It was in fact not a life either of them had ever dreamed of having. They had no friends to speak of because they hated people like themselves. And the selves they loved in each other were disappearing, under a load of dull routine.

Now the newspapers spread between their nude bodies were no longer flimsy hemp but copper electraweave. Even so it served as a prop for an empty voice: “There’s a rock trio playing an all Hendrix program on original equipment, Saturday night.”

“Do you want to see the Jazz Orchestra play on the levee?”

“Ellington?”

“No, Basie.”

“Look, there’s a total sound immersion at three. Your body becomes the instrument. Feel what it was to be Bach’s organ.”

Their faces, more beautiful at 35 than at 25, eyes like still drops of human pain in an endless, frigid dimension of space, the candle light between their irises, as they sat in a calm, poised against black restaurant windows. “The rolls are warm tonight.”

“Did you get the real butter?”

“I’ve never had New Zealand lamb.”

“Maybe,” he said, picking apart a chicken breast with knife and fork, “we should become vegetarians.” He often thought this while eating extruded meat products, but why bring it up while slicing into the real thing?

The train dipped down suddenly. He looked out the window. As the cars uncoupled (without slowing down a bit), he felt the moment of freefall; thrilling, to be suspended in nothingness, however briefly, before striking the water, each car heading across the Hudson to a different rail link. He never tired of watching the thick tubes with their quiet green and red reflectors at intervals on the top, the blinking tail fins and dorsals, each car nosing through the rough water while a carnival of other crafts evaded the wake. It was a silent world, hot and attractive but removed, far beyond the hard thick walls of the amphibatrains.

Veronica was the first to crack. The prolonged stasis of the second stage provoked the chaos of the third. It was like an aesthetic, a creative renaissance marmorialized in a classical period followed by decadence.

It started with complaints–work was boring, stupid–then became metaphysical, why do we work so hard, for what? But this was their agreement, silently negotiated, a future they conspired to make.

“Couldn’t we move out west?”

But everyone was moving out west, there were no jobs. That was when he unwittingly became the voice of reason. It was a voice poised against himself. He hated the cul de sac as well, and the job, and the idea of a job. In the midst of this initial churn they reacted by clinging together tighter, more desperately. They’d come home from work, bathe and then begin to fuck, wordlessly, brutally, tearing away at something they didn’t understand, trying to rend the curtain that had descended between them. One night as he was ramming away at her, as she bucked to meet his pelvis and he collapsed onto her sweating breasts, his lips pulsing in her ear and little gasps escaping he felt a trickle of hot liquid on his cheek. He lifted off and looked down. For the first time Veronica’s eyes had that raw red look that would become so familiar.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m just so afraid.”

“Afraid? Of what?”

“Of losing you.”

Gently, he said, “Oh baby,” and touched her cheek, tears brimming up in his own eyes now. “Never. You will never lose me, I would never go. Never.”

But that was probably not what she had in mind.

Over the next few years their meals became more and more catatonic. She was often ill, vomiting for days on end. She broke things, injured herself, didn’t talk but brooded incessantly over things. They saw the Intellatrawl doctor. He prescribed physical therapy, walks, swimming and meditation. Then came the medicines, anti emetics, appetite stimulants, tranquilizers. They rarely made love and when they did it was quiet and desperate or mechanical, a release of his load of semen and her load of guilt. Everything they had once enjoyed was now a source of pain.

Then came the deaths. Her father was bitten by a rabid bat while sleeping out one night on the everglades, and didn’t know it until it was too late for treatment. He went mad and Veronica’s mother shot him and then herself. A year later Felix’s father had a series of strokes and lay in a coma awaiting reconstructive brain surgery. His mother, in a paroxysm of grief, overrode the program controls of her hovercraft and it crashed fifteen k out in the Gulf of Mexico. It felt then like some monstrous beast had arisen to raven their lives.

Now she began to rave and he found himself drinking alone after work, just to avoid going home to the scenes and abuse.

Intellatrawl Dr. Tarlton prescribed her first course of Euphorics, saying that grief was natural but Euphorics could restore her balance. Nothing worked. She went on medical leave and was finally fired.

They had to live on his income alone now. Everything grew precarious. There would be no more saving up for a house or a hovercraft. No more fantasies of moving out west or to Alaska. No recreational car. His job just covered the necessities, insurance, retirement fund. It was just enough to keep them alive. He worried about everything. He worried about the embryos and stem cell line. He worried about his own dumbfounded confusion and melancholy, his need to somehow smother an outraged protest against life, his need to demolish every conscious thought with alcohol. He was worried that Veronica would do something genuinely crazy.

Of late, he began to feel jealous even. Thoughts nibbled away at him, that she might be with someone else during the day, that she might be masturbating. Even her madness made him jealous. As she drifted off he became possessive and this he experienced as a kind of insanity, as one part of him warred against the other.

The amphibatrains reassembled as they crossed in a breathtaking, technological ballet and then bumped up onto the rail at the Newburg tunnel, a brief, steep climb up through the towering levee and onto dry land. In a few minutes they hissed into the station. The snoring man sucked in breath, his eyes popped open and he stood, with Felix and the old woman. They exited the car.