Learning to Swear in America (32 page)

Yuri stayed in his room, icing his face periodically, until nine the next morning, when Decker and Linares walked him three blocks to the conference, held in another hotel. Everyone had heard of the late registrant and he got an ovation when he walked into the lobby. He nodded, flushed, and searched for his adhesive name tag.

“You really don’t need a name tag, do you?” the woman behind the table said, smiling. He nodded numbly.

He wanted to slip into the first panel discussion, on neutrinoless double beta decay, sit in the back and ignore the proceedings. Figure out how far he was from the Ambassador Bridge, and how he could possibly get to it. But his progress down the hall and into the room was slowed by well-wishers and heralded by applause. And every single person, after introducing him or herself and expressing admiration for his work, had to comment on his bruises and split lip. He told the story over and over of having been assaulted by a deranged man. Decker and Linares, hovering nearby, said nothing, and Yuri didn’t admit that the only deranged guy he’d been near the previous night was himself.

He slipped into the conference room, and someone recognized him and started clapping. The rest of the room picked it up, so he raised a hand in acknowledgment but turned to get a cup of tea from the refreshments table. Decker and Linares flanked him, both in dark Windbreakers with “FBI” on the back. When he’d arrived at JPL he was lugging a suitcase, and thought that was embarrassing. Now he was dragging two federal agents around.

He slipped into a seat. The guy behind him reached over Yuri’s shoulder to grab his hand and pumped it, even though Yuri was juggling the tea and a notepad. The moderator stepped to the podium and tapped the microphone, blasting sound through the room. Why did people who understood amplification do that? But the room quieted, and people stopped looking at him, and that was a relief.

“I think we’ll go ahead and get started,” the man said. “We’ve got Thomas Kroc scheduled to speak, but we also unexpectedly have Yuri Strelnikov here.” The guy grinned. “A pleasure, Dr. Strelnikov.” Yuri nodded and tried to smile. The moderator swiveled. “Thomas, you don’t mind if we get Yuri up here first, do you?”

A tall, red-headed guy waved a hand in agreement. “Could you explain a little about your work?” the moderator said. “We’d love to hear what you guys did at JPL.”

Yuri rose, still holding the tea. “Thank you. I don’t want to interrupt conference, and anyway I don’t have anything prepared.”

“We don’t care. Off-the-cuff remarks are fine,” the moderator said, stepping aside from the podium and throwing an arm toward it.

Yuri hesitated, then trudged to the front, thinking,
This conference was supposed to get me out of sight and close to the Canadian border
. He gripped the edge of the podium, cleared his throat, and stumbled through an explanation of antimatter containment. It was choppy and awkward, partially muffled by his swollen lips, and desperately in need of visual aids.

And he had to repeat it in four subsequent panels.

But a crowd surrounded him at lunch, patting his back and shaking his hand.
So this is what it takes to be the popular kid in the cafeteria.

Yuri ducked out after dinner, skipping an evening panel on spin-orbit coupling in cold atoms. Decker said, “Well, that was successful,” and seemed to mean it. Yuri stared at him.

He walked into the lobby behind Decker, ahead of Linares, and so neither guard saw his gaze bounce across the lobby and stop on a guy in a wheelchair and a girl sitting beside him. The girl rose and stepped toward him. Yuri threw his palm out.

“Sorry, no autographs.” He turned to Linares. “This is going to be real pain.”

She smiled, and he dropped the key card in his hand into a potted palm and caught Lennon’s eye for a moment, making sure he saw it.

“Just, um, moment,” Yuri said to Decker and Linares, and he walked to the desk, fifteen feet behind Dovie and Lennon. “I’m afraid I forgot my key to room 410. So I’m locked out of room 410. Is it possible to get another key? I have another in my room—in 410—but I can’t get in to get it.” He shrugged his shoulders. The woman at the desk smiled.

“No problem, sir.”

A moment later he had a replacement card. As he walked to the elevator, he could hear the whisper of Lennon’s wheels on the carpet as he went to retrieve the other key.

Yuri was pacing in his room when he realized he couldn’t possibly have a conversation with the Collums without Decker and Linares being aware of it. If he could hear them shutting dresser drawers, they would certainly hear murmured conversation from his room. He fretted for half an hour, not wanting Dovie and Lennon to show up. Because even if they quietly let themselves in, the guards would surely investigate once they heard him talking to someone. It could make it harder later to escape, to get back to Russia and defend the authorship of his theory. If he didn’t get home, Laskov would officially become his co-author.
He
would be
Laskov’s
co-author—Laskov’s father had that much clout.

There was a knock at the door.

“Pizza.”

Yuri checked out the peephole and saw nothing. Lennon. He opened the door as Linares and Decker opened theirs.

“I’m still growing,” he said to them, shrugging. “Here, bring it in, please. I need to get my money.”

Lennon rolled in, a small pizza box on his lap, face shaded by a baseball cap. He was wearing an “I survived the BR1019 asteroid” T-shirt. Decker and Linares exchanged a glance and retreated to their rooms.

“How much do I owe you?” Yuri said loudly, then whispered, “If you’d showed up with book again, I would have killed you.”

“I figured that,” Lennon whispered. “Hence the pizza. Besides, eating pizza is a credible teenage activity.” He raised his voice. “Twenty-two dollars.”

“Twenty-two dollars? For small pizza?”

“Yeah.” Lennon whispered, “And the worst part is, I ate it on the way here.” He flipped up the lid to show a box empty save for a couple of ridges of cheese and a sauce smear.

“That’s outrageous,” Yuri said, grinning.

“What happened to you, anyway? Did they beat you up?”

“Here’s two twenties,” Yuri said. He whispered, “No, I angered bunch of tough guys in bar.”

Lennon pulled his head back and squinted sideways at Yuri. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

“I was stressed.”

Lennon tucked the twenties in his jacket.

“My change,” Yuri said.

“My tip.”

Yuri sighed.

“Dovie was upset at how your face looks,” Lennon said.

“I get that from women.”

Lennon snorted.

“Can you get to the roof? We thought we’d meet up there, plan your escape.”

“This is top floor. I can swing up from balcony if they don’t see me.”

“Jeez, man, that’s stupid. Those things don’t always work out okay.”

Yuri looked at him, then glanced down. Lennon was right, and he had the wheels to prove it.

“You take my chair down the hall, they’ll think it’s me. Just hike it up onto the roof with you so no one sees it.”

“Damn, shit, hell, Lennon. You’re brilliant.”

“True,” Lennon conceded. “Completely true. I’ll stay in your room for a couple of minutes, in case the zookeepers are paying attention. I’ll switch TV channels, flush once—refine your theory of antimatter if there’s a pen around here.”

Yuri grinned, then thought of something. “How will you get up there?”

“Dovie’s commandeered a maid’s cart. She’s dumping the stuff underneath—like the Windex and crap. She’ll just stop by and get me.”

“That might actually work.”

He waited for Lennon to get out of the wheelchair, then realized he couldn’t. “Um, how do we …”

“You’re gonna have to put me on the toilet.”

“On—what?”

“The toilet, damn it. On the lid, so I can flush. How do you think I’m going to get in there to do it?”

Yuri nodded. Lennon put his arms up and Yuri bear-hugged him, and lifted him onto the toilet. He handed him the remote, and angled the TV so Lennon could see it through the open bathroom door.

“Thanks,” Yuri whispered, and took the baseball cap Lennon handed him. He pushed aside the NASA restraint Lennon still had on the chair, and sat. It felt weirdly intimate. He twisted the doorknob, then realized one wheel was in the door’s arc. He backed up, lost his grip on the knob, and had to try again. Lennon just shook his head.
It’s one thing to know he has to deal with this every minute. It’s another to have to do it yourself.

“Thanks for the tip, man,” Lennon called as Yuri wheeled himself past Decker’s door and down to the elevator. The door swung shut and clicked behind him.

The elevator opened to the roof, but when it stopped the doors wouldn’t slide open. The hotel probably didn’t want guests diving off—bad for business. Yuri groaned in frustration and slammed the control panel with the side of his fist. A barrette crusted with lime-green sparkles fell to the carpet. He retrieved it and stuck it in the lock beside the button for roof access. The doors swung open and he put the barrette back on the control panel. It was shaped like a peace sign—it had to be Dovie’s, and she was going to need it.

He wheeled out onto the flat roof of the hotel and immediately stepped out of Lennon’s wheelchair. It was too personal—not like wearing someone else’s jacket. Like wearing their underwear. He looked out over Detroit’s evening skyline until he heard the elevator doors hiss open, and turned.

“You don’t sign autographs?” Dovie said, shoving the maid’s cart aside. From inside, Lennon yelled, “Hey!”

Yuri smiled and pushed Lennon’s chair over to the cart and locked the brakes. Dovie reached under and lifted her brother’s legs out, then heaved him into his seat as he grabbed the hand rests.

“
I
want an autograph,” Lennon said, grinning and fishing a Sharpie out of the bag on his chair. He tapped his shoulder, and Yuri leaned down and signed the T-shirt. “It’s in Russian,” Lennon said, peering sideways. “You signed in Russian.”

“I didn’t think about it. Does it matter?”

“You might have written, ‘Lennon smells like hamster farts.’ I mean, how do I know?”

Yuri grinned. “I said ‘guinea pig,’ but you were very close.”

Dovie sighed and ran a finger across Yuri’s swollen left eye. “We know what you did. We heard on the radio on the drive up here. They said it was all you.”

“No, not all me. We had hundred people, and we needed every one.”

“They said it would have hit if it weren’t for you.”

He hesitated and looked at the roofline while he told her. “I hacked their computer and changed important data. I made it send
one extra, huge antimatter pulse. It scraped off side of asteroid and gave it final push away. It was also aimed directly at us.”

She stared at him for a long moment.

“Jeez, Yuri.”

“Yeah.”

Finally she said, “I brought ice cream. It’s probably half-melted.”

She retrieved it from the cart and they sat on the tar paper with a brick of mint chocolate chip between them, three wooden spoons sticking up like antennas.

“It was this or little plastic spoons, and they would have broken,” Dovie said.

“This is good.”

They ate, the ice cream cold and sweet. Above them, stars began to glimmer.

“It’s really pretty,” Dovie said. She turned to Yuri. “Do you find beauty in it?”

Yuri looked at her, startled, then at the sky. “Yes, I guess I do.”

“What’s beautiful about it?” Dovie asked.

Yuri struggled, trying to find the words. “Its precision. And imprecision. And our struggle to know.”

“Whoa there,” Lennon said. “You almost expressed yourself.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes.

“I’m sorry,” Yuri said.

“For saving our lives,” Lennon said, “or for almost being articulate for a moment?”

“For my arrogance. I was trying to do what was right. Like Kant said.”

“I think you did,” Dovie said, sweeping a spoon up toward the sky.

“But is doing right thing issue of process or content?”

“You lost me there, big guy,” Lennon said, wiggling his spoon. Yuri held the carton up so he could reach it.

“Should I have done things right way—by best process—even though result would have been bad?”

“No,” Lennon said. “No, you shouldn’t have.”

“Or should I have produced right result, by using wrong process?”

“I already answered that,” Lennon said. “Saving my ass is always the right thing to do.”

“This was really hard on you, wasn’t it?” Dovie said.

“Yeah.”

And then he was crying, hugging his knees, and Dovie threw her arms around him and held him and Lennon put a hand on the back of his head. When he was done crying, and just making embarrassing little gasps, Lennon said, “You remember the story of Callimachus? From ancient Greece?”

“Of course not,” Yuri said. “Do I look like historian?”

“No, historians don’t generally have snot running down their chins. They’re a dignified people.”

Yuri swiped at his face with his sleeve.