The Incrementalists (6 page)

“No?”

“Never!”

“What then?”

“Develop a sudden and unnatural love for the ‘Hall of Presidents.’ No lines. All sitting.”

“Very clever,” Phil said.

I sat down on the stool next to him, but couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “I need help,” I said. “And I’m not willing to miss out on seven-eighths of the fun because I’m too proud to ask for it. But I’m scared and overwhelmed and have a lot to learn and I can’t learn it all right now. After the dreams I had all night, I need a change of scenery. I want to look away from all this and come back with clean eyes. I want to throw myself into an experience that isn’t mine, a movie or not-a-memory, something I can’t possibly be responsible for.”

“Let me show you Las Vegas,” he said. His eyes were the brown of bearskin.

“I’ll get my walking shoes,” I said.

Phil

Sinatra sang “Fly Me to the Moon” as the fountains at the Bellagio went through their paces. I watched her, pleased she was enjoying it, and wondering how the hell I was going to get her to tell me what she had planned. It was wall-to-wall people, as always, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“I’m going to need a primer on the jargon,” she said.

“It’ll come back to you.”

“No, not Incrementalist jargon; poker jargon.”

“What brought that up?”

“You didn’t hear the conversation behind us?”

“I wasn’t paying attention, sorry.”

“I think I can quote it. ‘I had the nuts on the flop. He called my push with fuck-all, and hit runner-runner straight.’”

I nodded.

“What does it mean?” she said.

“That he’s a whiner.”

“No, the terms.”

“The nuts is the best possible hand for a given board. A push means betting all of your chips. Fuck-all means—”

“I got that one. And I know what a straight is. What’s runner-runner?”

I did my best to explain, which required explaining the basics of hold ’em, which took most of the cab ride to Treasure Island. We watched the pirate fight, which had been better before it was just another skin show. A short walk brought us to the Venetian, where we wandered around the fake canals and got Italian ice and Godiva chocolate and admired the lighting job and, again, fought our way through the stifling, dense Las Vegas crowds.

After a cab ride to and from the Luxor we were at the Mirage, where I’d parked. We had the buffet, and I explained that the volcano didn’t start until night, and that we needed to wait for the Fremont Street Experience.

“There is,” she said, “a roller coaster.”

“Three of them, in fact, on the Strip.”

“Incredible.”

“If you consider America a large amusement park, Las Vegas is the Midway.”

“That is an interesting way to consider America.”

“It explains Las Vegas.”

She was done eating her samples of this and that; I finished my shrimp creole and stood up. “Want to gamble?” I said.

“No. What would you do if someone was about to shoot me?”

“What?” I stopped in midstride and stared at her. A middle-aged couple in matching Hawaiian shirts stepped around us. “No one is going to shoot you.”

“I know. But what would you do?”

“Convince the person not to. What are you getting at?”

“Convince the person how? Magic, or threats?”

“It’s not magic.”

“You know what I mean.”

“All right. Magic, I suppose, if I thought it might work. I’m not very intimidating. Why are you asking about this?”

“You study people pretty thoroughly, don’t you? If you’re planning to meddle with them, I mean.”

“Even more thoroughly if we’re trying to recruit them. What of it?”

We fought more crowds, and eventually made our way out into the Las Vegas heat that always hits like a tangible object, no matter how used to it you are. She ignored it, but she was from Phoenix, where it’s even hotter.

I handed the valet my ticket.

“Do you always do valet parking?”

“Habit,” I said. “Three buy-ins for a two-five no-limit game is about fifteen hundred dollars. If you’re walking around with that much cash in your pocket at two in the morning, a dark parking garage isn’t your favorite place to be. Now, you’ve been getting at something for the last hour. Ren, would you please have pity on me and tell me what it is?”

“Not yet,” she said.

“Are you enjoying this?”

“I’m not being coy. This is research. What did you and Celeste fight about?”

“God! What didn’t we fight about? Religion, politics, morality, food—”

“Ever since you’ve been Phil and she’s been Celeste?”

“She’s only been Celeste a few hundred years. But yes.”

“Meddlework. You were on opposite sides of a lot of them?”

“If it had been up to her, Antietam wouldn’t have been fought.”

“She thought it was too big.”

“If it had been up to Oskar, the entire Southern aristocracy would have been dispossessed after the war.”

The car arrived. I held the door open for her; I guess because she’d gotten my mind-set into an earlier age. She accepted it without question, maybe for the same reason.

“The big fight with Celeste,” she said, like she was prompting me.

“The big one? This lifetime? The 2000 election. Florida. I still think she was wrong.”

“Then why didn’t you do something?”

“It was already done.”

“I mean, afterward. You could have exposed it.”

“It was pretty well exposed.”

“Not completely. Why didn’t you?”

“That would have been … I don’t know. Oskar wanted to. No one else did.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Christ, Ren. It would have been huge. I don’t know. Because…”

I stopped talking and thought about it, trying to remember. I was in the Bellagio lounge when the election results were coming in. I was drinking Macallan 25. I was angry, disgusted. I picked up my cell phone to check flights to Florida. Celeste called right then, and said—

And said—

“Fuck. She meddled. With me. Long distance, for chrissakes.”

“I just thought you should know,” said Ren.

I turned onto the Strip from Spring Mountain, going through the red light. Of course, there was a cop there.

Fifteen minutes later, citation in hand, I pulled us out into traffic; extra careful the way you always are with those flashing lights right behind you.

“Will the car drive better if you pull the steering wheel off?”

I didn’t answer, but relaxed my grip.

“You’ve been wondering,” said Ren, “what piece of meddlework got me so excited I just went and jumped into this thing.”

“Uh, sorry,” I said. “Yeah, but this thing with Celeste caught me off guard.”

“Right,” she said. “The thing I want; I think Celeste started it.”

FOUR

Young Blood Is So Important

Ren

Phil tucked the traffic ticket between the driver’s seat and center console in a way that I knew he’d have no memory of tomorrow when he went to pay it. He drove on autopilot, navigating what I’d said about Celeste. But he didn’t ask for specifics about what she had started, so I stayed quiet. It would have embarrassed me to say I coveted the connection she had had to him, and it would have hurt him to learn her interest was strictly in his unique relationship to the Garden. Sitting next to him felt like standing on a rotted pier over a winter lake. By the next block, we were speeding. “Where are you taking me now?” I asked, hoping to sound like the tourist I knew I wasn’t anymore.

“Nowhere,” he said. “Home.”

“I do have a hotel room, you know.”

He turned to me, then back to the windshield.

“I’ll take you back to The Palms, if you want, but most Seconds like to stay near their titans for the first couple of days.”

“So that’s why you have a stash of new toothbrushes and baby toothpastes and travel-size shampoos and little wrapped soaps in your bathroom?”

“Yeah,” he said. “No. You’re the first person I’ve been titan to in this lifetime. Do you want me to turn around?”

“No, but I wish I’d thought to grab my bag when I went up this morning to change. I should charge my phone, and I’d like to have my own shampoo, and my makeup.”

Phil took a corner so hard we both leaned into the curve like cyclists.

“But I look fine without it,” I prompted.

He stopped at the red light. A full stop. Then he turned right and accelerated hard enough to invalidate his momentary lawfulness.

“You said earlier you could teach me how to manage the dreams,” I said. “Can I get a first lesson before bedtime?”

“Sure.”

We pulled up in front of his little house, which looked much more inviting now, in the early evening gloom with light pouring from all its windows, than it had when I’d first arrived yesterday morning. “I can’t believe it’s been just twenty-four hours since—”

“Shhh!” Phil stood by his car, shoulders taut, with one hand raised behind him as though to hold me back.

His front door was open. And I’d watched him turn out all the lights when we left.

We crept closer. The dark, and the stealth of our feet, the wordless communication of care and caution, and the leashed rage of hunters hurt my chest with its familiarity and danger. Orchestral music came from the house. I knew this man, this hunt, this opera. I straightened up by his badly trimmed hedge. “
Gilbert and Sullivan
?” I said.

The screen door banged open. “Hello, darling!” cried the tiny winged silhouette in the porch light.

“Irina?” Phil asked, none of the tension lost from his voice or body.

“My precious boy, come give us a hug! And this must be our new Ren! Come in, come in!”

Phil’s restrained little living room and kitchen were gaudy with flowers. Great masses of hydrangea and tiger lilies, towering spikes of gladiola and fronds of fern shrouded the furniture and breakfast bar. The sparkly little woman disappeared behind them on her way to the fridge. Phil and I wandered in her wake like stoned ducklings.

Phil turned off the stereo, silencing the very model of a modern major general. “What the fuck are you doing in my house?”

Irina held the now-fully stocked fridge door open in one hand while hoisting two bottles in the other. “Campari? Prosecco? Alone or together? No? Come. We sit down.”

Still clutching both bottles in one boney hand, Irina swooped three chilled champagne flutes from the freezer with the other. No way she could have done that if the doors still swung towards the back wall. She swept into the living room and enthroned herself, her bottles and her glasses in the center of Phil’s small sofa. She looked like a paper doll cut from beef jerky, brown-red and sinewy, swathed in gauze.

“Jimmy called you,” said Phil.

“Of course he did, darling.”

“And you’ve come to pry.”

“No, no! I’ve come to welcome our newest Second. Young blood is so important.”

I resisted the urge to protect my neck with my hands. If Irina was a vampire, she was badly past feeding time.

“Ren, correct?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Still Ren?”

“Yes, still Ren.”

“Cut it out, Irina,” Phil snapped.

“Ren, be a love and fetch me the oranges I sliced in the fridge.” She frowned. “The oranges in the fridge that I sliced. No. First I’m in the fridge, now I slice it. Phil, darling, what shall I say?”

I held up the bowl of fruit I’d been to the kitchen to get, gotten, and carried back.

“Ah, she is so clever this one!”

I wondered if wrinkles that deep hurt when you smiled.

“Drop the bullshit, Irina.”

“I am holding no dung of—”

“I mean it!”

Irina dropped it. I would have too, seeing Phil’s face.

She concentrated on pouring and garnishing, her words just as measured. “Phil, Jimmy said he asked you point-blank what you were playing at with this new recruit, and you didn’t answer him. Now she’s Celeste’s new Second and I’ve seen everything you seeded about her, too.”

“So?”

I looked from Phil to Irina feeling like a kid whose parents fight. Phil was pale around the eyes. Irina was shriveled—well, pretty much everywhere. Now I knew what Phil looked like afraid. I didn’t like it.

“You volunteered to recruit for Celeste’s Second. That took balls. We all respected it, and we mostly left you alone as you searched and selected. But you took it too far, Phil. You doubled the genome. That’s risky for her. And for you. You had no right to meddle in that kind of work.”

I knew what Phil looked like afraid, and what Irina looked like undead. Although from what I’d seen today, the sun-baked and starved-dry were hardly an oddity in Vegas. I thought this would be a terrible city for zombies. I wouldn’t want to have to gnaw through Irina with a mouthful of loose teeth, no matter how tasty the brains.

“She’s not listening.” Phil’s voice was low and dangerous. Somewhere between Irina handing out the aperitifs and my imagination, he’d gone from frightened to deeply pissed off.

“Well, poor love, who can blame her?” Irina had dropped all affectations from her voice. It wasn’t young, but it was warm and strong. “All the memories would be just starting to come back to her now. There might still be breakthrough personalities. Christ, Phil, we can’t know if she’ll settle as Ren or Celeste, and she probably still has a monstrous headache.”

“I want you to go,” Phil said.

“But I have a tuna casserole in the oven.”

“Leave.”

“No chance in hell. Ren needs someone looking out for her.”

“What do you think I’m doing, Irina?”

“I think you’re looking out for Celeste. Or maybe just looking for her. To tell the truth I don’t know what you’re doing. But I know it’s dangerous and stupid.”

“What does that mean, ‘doubled the genome’?” I asked.

Phil and Irina pulled their focus off each other and pointed it at me.

“Sounds sci-fi,” I suggested.

Irina looked genuinely perplexed. Phil shrugged. “It’s figurative,” he said.

“Doctor, all the mutants have doubled genomes! They may never die!”

Irina scowled. “It means Phil put Celeste’s stub into you because you are biologically linked to her previous body. In addition to being a good character match and a physical fit.”