Afterparty (27 page)

“Then you got to make it count,” Bucko said. “Eddie Junior’s been away for weeks. Get the latest messages off his pen and show ’em to Grandpop. Leave no room for Eddie to bitch out of this.”

Sasha frowned. Even with a roomful of IFs, deciding was so hard. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get the latest messages tonight. If Eduard’s still hiding things, then I’ll tell Grandpop tomorrow morning. Did you get all that, Tinker?”

The robot boy dinged twice. Of course he’d gotten it; Tinker forgot nothing.

“All right then,” Sasha said. “Back in the deck.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Somehow, impossibly, Rovil got up and went to work the next morning. I ate a rock star breakfast: dry toast at noon.

Ollie watched me eat. She said, “You want to tell me what that was about?” “That” meaning several things: the freak-out after seeing Eduard, the night with Rovil, my decision to flood my bloodstream with toxins.

“Not really,” I said.

“You’re not solving anything by not talking to her,” Gloria said. She sat in the living room, and if I didn’t know better I would have thought she was nursing her own hangover.

“I know about Sasha,” Ollie said.

“You
know
?”

“That day in the Marriott. I looked at your face, and I looked at hers. She has your cheekbones. Your eyes.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“I should have put it together earlier, but I wasn’t on my game. I knew you’d had a child. And four years ago, Eduard and his wife Suzette became foster parents for a mentally handicapped girl from a group home in Lockport, Illinois. They adopted her a few months later. She was mixed-race, and six years old. The same age as your biological daughter.”

“Is this what you’ve been doing? Digging through my life? Can you even help yourself?”

“You know I can’t.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Obviously Edo was behind the adoption,” she said. “I have a theory on why he’d do it.”

“Of course you do,” I said.

“It’s a legal maneuver,” Ollie said. “Vik can’t make Numinous legally because he doesn’t own the intellectual property outright. You could sue him. He owns only forty percent of the company and its IP. Gil owns ten, and you and Mikala split the rest, with two percent for Rovil.”

“How the hell do you know all this?”

She blinked. “I read the corporate filings.”

“Ollie, people don’t … nobody does that.”

“They should.”

“Rovil’s percentage came out of Mikala’s share,” I said. “He wasn’t a founder, and we hadn’t promised him anything, but she said he ought to get something when we were bought out.”

“That was generous of her.”

“She was probably already on Numinous when she decided that.”

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Out.”

“Out? Where?”

“Just—” I raised a hand. “Give me some fucking space, okay?”

She followed me to the front closet, where Rovil had put my coat. “Mikala’s shares went to you when she died, but you officially transferred them to a trust. For your daughter?”

“Get to the point,” I said.

“When she comes of age, that trust can only be hers if she’s mentally competent. Otherwise the guardian gets control.”

I opened the front door. “I can’t believe you knew about her.”

“I was waiting for you to tell me,” she said.

*   *   *

An addict off the wagon is a fundamentally boring creature, an animal with one dietary requirement, one habitat, and one schedule. It’s a fucking koala bear, minus all cuteness.

For the next four days I clung to my barstool as if it were a eucalyptus tree. When the bars closed I made my way home down spotless streets to Rovil’s apartment, slept hard, and got out of there before he returned from work. Ollie of course knew what I was doing; there was no fooling her brain. My strategy for dealing with this was to see as little of Rovil and Ollie as possible. I wanted to ditch Dr. Gloria as well, but I wasn’t able to do that until the second night.

We were in a faux-Czech bar that served tall pilsners and short vodkas. “This is just cowardice,” the angel said. She sat on the empty stool to my left, sipping water as if she were the designated flyer for the evening.

I said to the guy to my right, “A horse walks into a bar—”

“Good one,” he said. He was in his mid-fifties, and he’d been trying to look down my top for the past two hours.

“Wait for it, damn it!”

“If you want your daughter back, go see her,” Dr. Gloria said.

“So the bartender says, ‘Hey buddy, why the long face?’ And the horse says, ‘My wife just died.’”

He smiled uncertainly.

“Fuck you,” I said. “That is an
excellent
joke.”

“Sitting here self-medicating is not going to accomplish anything,” Dr. G said.

“Physician, heal thyself,” I said.

The man next to me said, “Pardon?”

“It’s funny,” I said, “because the horse is clinically depressed.”

“Ollie knows where he lives,” the doctor said. “Rovil can drive us.”

I wheeled on her. “You think we can just roll in to Little Edo’s estate? Did you see those fucking bodyguards? He’ll have us fucking arrested!”

The bartender appeared in front of me. “Okay, I warned you once. Get out.”

Shit. I’d been talking out loud again. “It was a joke,” I said. “These two guys with multiple personality disorder walk into a bar, and the fourth one says—”

“Let’s go, or I’m calling the cops,” the bartender said.

“Do as he says,” Dr. G said.

“God
damn
it!” I yanked the stool out from under her, but she recovered gracefully. “You think this is making anything better? Do you? You think you can
nag
me into doing what you want? Get the fuck away from me.”

Dr. Gloria’s expression had turned stony.

My departure was assisted by the bartender and one waitress. They did not toss me into a back alley like a 1930s’ drunk, but the exit was just as firm. It was three in the morning, and the sidewalk was empty, not an angel in sight. I was free.

For the next two days, the space in my head was cavernous, an empty warehouse in which I heard only my own footsteps, my own voice. Paradoxically, I had to work twice as hard to muffle those few remaining thoughts. But I was ready; I had trained for this moment for ten years. Yes, I’d dabbled with many substances over the past decade, but booze was the mortar of my addiction, making all other abuses possible. I knew how to build that wall. My body, like a good horse, had learned the way home to Rovil’s place, and whatever crime-stopping fairy circle was in effect continued to protect me. On none of those early-morning trail rides home did I run into anyone who made me nervous, much less made me fear for my wallet. When I passed a figure sleeping in a doorway it was almost a relief.

I started to point him out to Dr. Gloria, but of course she was long gone, missing for days. I walked on, then stopped. There was something odd about that homeless person, and I walked back to him.

He lay on his side upon a cardboard box, one arm under his head, his face toward the street. A black garbage bag was wedged into the space behind him. Most of his face was in shadow, but I could see that his eyes were closed. His hair was a wild expanse of gray.

No,
I thought. Information that is too strange to process is literally too strange to process. The mind’s first defense is to recoil, retreat, deny. My body, responding to that mental whiplash, jerked back. I told myself,
It’s not him.

Then he opened his eyes, instantly focusing on me. “Hey now,” he said.

It was the homeless man from the park in Toronto. The man who’d watched me try to summon Dr. Gloria with a box cutter.

I backed away from him, then stumbled as I stepped off the curb. I crossed to the other side of the street, already trying to shove down the memory of what I’d seen, my head roaring like an ocean.

*   *   *

“I need to show you something,” Ollie said.

It was daytime, though I wasn’t sure of much more than that. I tried to roll back over, but she dragged me out of bed. “It’s important.”

The living room was lit up like Times Square, every wall screen vibrating with color. I winced and said, “Why would you do this to me?”

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said.

The images kept changing. Each one was a digital re-creation of an abstract oil painting, and each done in fireball colors of yellow, red, and orange. There were dozens of them, varying in size from a few feet square to rectangles three meters long. They faded in and out on the walls according to the apartment’s slideshow program, so there was no telling how many paintings were in the collection. But it was clear that they were all by the same school, if not the same artist.

“I’ve seen these,” I said. “Or something like them.”

“You said that Eduard Jr. told you that if you sent Edo a picture he’d pass it on. That seemed like an odd thing to say. So I started looking at Edo’s art collection.”

“He posts his entire collection online?” I said. “People do that?”

“These are special,” she said. “They weren’t on Edo’s personal site, or his corporation’s. They’re on a government site, for artwork created by federal prisoners in a rehabilitation program.”

“Edo funds it or something?”

“Through the Vik Group. There are thousands of pieces, almost all of them crap. But these are the paintings that are highlighted in the collection. They’re the only ones available in archival-quality hi-res files. And they’re the only ones that the Vik Group bought outright.”

“So where are they now?”

Ollie looked smug. “Edo’s private residence.”

“All of these? They went directly to Edo?”

“One a week, for months.”

I looked up to see a four-foot by four-foot painting start to fade, and I jumped up. “Bring that one back.”

Ollie touched it to make it stay. “This one was hanging in the pastor’s office,” I told her.

“We didn’t go in the pastor’s office,” Ollie said.

“I did, the first time I was in the church. There were two other posters just like it on the wall.”

“All these are a series,” Ollie said. “They’re numbered with major and minor version numbers, like software: one point one, one point two, two-oh. The major numbers get more and more dense, like sketches getting filled in. The minor versions seem to be alternates of the same picture.”

“There’s something else,” I said. “They remind me of something, not just the church posters … shit.”

I sat down on the couch, trying to concentrate, but I couldn’t put my finger on where else I’d seen them. My brain felt … dull. It wasn’t just the alcohol, though there was enough in my system that any traffic cop would qualify me as drunk. No, my body could handle that. It was that I was trying to function without Dr. Gloria.

We shared the same memories because we shared a brain, but
having
memories meant nothing if you couldn’t access them. Access depended on associations, one neuron tripping another, and her initial set of associations was different from mine. We had two different maps to the territory, and some locations weren’t on my map at all.

“Fuck,” I said. “I need Gloria.”

“Why?” Ollie asked. “What for?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Try me.”

I told her about associations and maps, about the chain of firings that led to this thing in the prefrontal cortex called “recognition.”

“Okay then,” Ollie said. “Why don’t you pretend to be Dr. Gloria?”

“Uh…”

“Look, I used to talk to people all the time, try to help them remember details. It was one of my jobs. Pretending can help. Just treat it like a game. Maybe it leads somewhere, maybe it doesn’t.”

All I wanted to do was go back to sleep. “Okay, what do you want me to do?”

“You’re feeling like Dr. Gloria has something to do with this memory, and you remember seeing the posters in the church. She was with you when you were there, right? So start there. What else did she see?”

“We started in the sanctuary,” I said.

“Walk around as Gloria,” Ollie said. “What does she see? Where does she go?”

I pictured myself as the doctor, walking around the edge of the sanctuary as I—as Lyda—talked to the pastor and Luke. There were dioramas and art projects, all depicting the members’ gods. None of them rang a bell. After that, I waved Lyda into the back rooms: the warehouse, the pastor’s office, the bathroom. The smell of amines was in the air. Then Lyda pulled back the rubber curtain to reveal the printer. She lifted off the lid—

“That’s a painting of the chemjet engine,” I said. I said the words, knowing I was right, but without knowing why I was right.

I looked up at the picture, trying to reconcile the shapes in that image with my memory of the internals of the chemjet. The intense colors of the painting made this difficult, because the machine was all silver and black inside. Also, the orientation was wrong.

“Flip the painting,” I said. “Can you do that?”

Ollie grabbed the edge of the current image and turned it.

“No, the other way,” I said. “Ninety degrees.”

And then the two images—one in front of me now, the other hovering before my internal eye, but both firing the same neurons—seemed to snap into place.

Ollie saw the change in my face. “What is it?” she asked.

“This isn’t just a painting,” I said. “It’s a blueprint.”

Ollie thought for a moment. “That kind of makes sense.”

“Tell me who painted them,” I said, though I could already guess the answer.

“That was my big surprise,” she said. “These were all painted by Gil Kapernicke.”

*   *   *

Rovil sat on the couch facing the wall and the camera. His palms lay on his knees, the two fingers of his left hand still taped together. He wore a business suit, and his face was locked into a pleasant expression. He was on hold.

Ollie and I stood in the kitchen, out of sight of the camera. Ollie had connected her pen to a receiver Rovil wore in his right ear, and she’d synched the display with the wall screen so that we could see what he was seeing. Right now, that was a commercial for the Delwood Detention Facility, a private prison in Ohio that offered excellent outsourcing options for overcrowded state and federal prisons. The minute-long commercial had already looped a dozen times.