Warp (2 page)

“Jennifer Holquist, maybe,” said Brian.

“Who the hell is that?”

“She was in that TV show. The one about the tennis prodigy.”

Hollis squinted into the sun, which was starting to set.

“Did you watch that?” he said. “I can't believe you watched that.”

From the top of the hill they looked down at the rest of the park, a huge, empty green field that sloped down and away. In a neat little baseball diamond at the far end, a man and a woman were playing catch with a tennis ball. While they watched he threw her a tricky grounder, which she snapped up one-handed.

“How come you're still here, anyway? Somebody told me you were already gone.”

“I am.” Brian grinned and started jogging in place to stay warm. “I'm going. I'm fucking history. I'm dust.”

“Where are you going?”

“Germany. I have an internship there, in Stuttgart. With Lufthansa. They're putting together some kind of international commission. Airline deregulation. EC stuff. It's a big fat Euro-party.”

“What are you going to do for them?”

“I don't really know,” Brian said. “It's no big prize—somebody saw my thesis title and jumped on it. I'll just be some kind of glorified gopher, probably.”

He held up his hands in protest.

“I'm no hero. Please, ma'am—don't thank me. I'm not a celebrity.” Brian was tall and athletic, slightly over six feet, with longish blond hair and a stubbly chin. He was wearing sweats and a blue Windbreaker.

Hollis cupped his hands and blew into them to keep warm. The evergreen bushes dotting the park cast long, black shadows back towards them, away from the sun. The wind was making cat's-paws on the coarse green grass.

“Don't take any wooden nickels,” Hollis said absently.

He found a thread on the front of his coat and snapped it off.

“How's your German?” he said.

“Bad. You know any?”

“Kenne nur Bahnhof.”

“Damn Jerries. Who won the war, anyway?” Brian sniffed and cleared his throat. “And what's with these German girls? They're all like sophisticated or something. You know who they remind me of? Tasha Yar. You remember that woman on
Star Trek
? Blond. Slim. Butch, but vulnerable at the same time. Kind of a feminine butchiness. She was the security officer before Worf—she quit after the first year.”

“Didn't she get killed?”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “That's right. She was eaten by Armus. Armus, the Skin of Evil. Then her acting career started not working out, and she tried to get back on the show. It was complicated—I can't remember it all. She ended up sleeping with a Romulan. It was very complex.”

“I should get so lucky,” Hollis said.

“It was too much, really.” Brian yawned, holding the back of his hand against his teeth. “It's kind of sad. Sometimes I wonder how she's doing. I saw her in a guest spot on some one-season, no-count action series or other.
Dark Justice, Dark Knight, Night Justice—
something like that. She looked depressed. She's even already posed for
Playboy
.”

Hollis hugged himself. All he had on under the overcoat was a cheap black T-shirt with a white Atari logo on it. The plastic stuff of the decal was cracking and flaking like the surface of an old oil painting.

“I'm sure she'll be fine,” he said. “She's Frank Sinatra's granddaughter or something.”

“Bing Crosby. Jesus Christ, that's her name, for God's sake—Denise Crosby. That actress. She's Bing Crosby's granddaughter.”

A stretch of road ran along the edge of the green for a few hundred yards. A white Toyota Camry pulled off it and onto the wide shoulder, crackling across the gravel.

“Hell,” said Hollis.

“What is it?”

“I knew this would happen.”

Hollis walked over a few steps, casually, so that Brian stood between him and the car.

“Jesus, what is this, Hollis?”

“Relax. Just act natural.” He crouched down a little. “It's nothing—I'll tell you in a second.”

“You know, I really don't have the time to get stuck in the middle of something.”

“Who's asking you to? Jesus, just stand still for a second. Just act natural. Be yourself.”

The front door of the car opened, and a fit-looking older man with salt-and-pepper gray hair and a mustache got out. He whipped off his hunter-orange baseball cap and shaded his eyes, scanning the park, hands on hips.

“Look at him,” Hollis said. “Ever the fashionable little carnivore. God, I have to get out of this city.”

The man grimaced, spat on the grass, and sat back down into the car.

At the same time the back door opened and a young black woman in a nylon ski parka got out, tenderly cradling something in her arms. She bumped the door shut with her hip and set the thing gently down on the grass. Immediately it started to scamper off on the end of a leash, and she followed along after it without much enthusiasm.

“That's a ferret,” Hollis said. “She does this every day. Same time, same station. I don't even think it likes it all that much—I think ferrets are supposed to live on prairies or something.”

Hollis and Brian saw and heard the solid metal
pop
of the trunk opening. The man got back up out of the front seat again, circled around to the rear, and heaved out a bag of golf clubs. Then he locked all the doors with a remote control, slammed shut the trunk, and walked briskly off through a stand of trees and out of sight, the bag of clubs bumping vigorously against his hip.

Hollis straightened up again.

“Who was that?”

“My landlord,” said Hollis. “Looks like he's taking a little driving practice. I told him I was going to Aruba for six weeks—if he saw me here there'd be some fireworks, let me tell you.”

He kicked at the grass. The pale orange sunlight seemed not to carry any heat, and a cold wind was starting to come up. An empty plastic shopping bag tumbled by, weightless, ten feet over their heads.

“Oh. I saw Eileen Cavanaugh a couple of days ago.” Brian hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his sweatpants. “On the street. I didn't talk to her—I was in a car. She looked different, though. Her hair's all wavy now.”

“They always get prettier after we break up,” Hollis said. “I hear she has a real-live adult job now—she works at an investment firm downtown, one of those big-time, old-money ones.”

“Oh, yeah?” Brian tossed back his blond hair. “Which one?”

In the distance they could hear the high-pitched warning beep of a big truck backing up.

“I don't remember the name.”

The air smelled like wet grass. Hollis turned all the way around, slowly, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, just looking out at the view. By now the road on the other side was completely in the shadow of the little hill they were standing on.

He turned back around to face the sunset again. Looking down at the rolling, sea-green expanse of the park, he was overcome by a rush of memory—something he'd been assigned to read when he was in elementary school. It was a story.

It was about the ocean.

Malo lived with his family in a little village by the sea. When Malo was a little boy, his father made a rule:

“Never, never fish alone at night,” he said. “Bring your brother with you. Or better still, do not go at all.”

But the summer Malo turned eleven years old the fishing was very bad, and his family had nothing to eat. His mother fell sick. At last he could wait no longer. One night Malo stayed awake until his parents were asleep, then he slipped out the window and down to the docks where the fishing boats were kept.

Hollis blinked his eyes against the cold, dry wind.

“So what was she doing?” he said.

“Who? Eileen? Just standing there, I guess. On the sidewalk. Looked like she was having some kind of a sneezing fit.”

“She's allergic to practically everything.”

“What about this place where she works?” Brian said. “It's in Boston?”

“Sure.”

“You don't know where?”

Hollis gestured vaguely.

“It's downtown somewhere. Where all those places are. The financial district, I guess. Jesus, it's not like I memorized the address.”

Munson, Hanson, Gund, Inc.

75 State Street, Suite 2176

Boston, MA 02154

Member FDIC

“So you guys don't hang out anymore?” said Brian.

“Not really.” Hollis sniffed.

“Maybe I'll give her a call.”

“Look, go right ahead. It's a free Commonwealth.”

“Say no more—I hear you.” Brian held up his hands defensively. “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!”

He bent over and started stretching his calves. A seagull landed a few yards away, hunting for trash in the tall grass. Down below in the park the woman and the ferret orbited around each other at opposite ends of the leash. The couple had stopped playing catch. They were sitting together on a dugout bench next to the chain-link backstop, drinking cans of soda.

“Jesus, how can they stand that stuff?”

“I didn't even know they had Diet Mountain Dew,” said Hollis.

An hour went by, and Malo still hadn't caught anything. He paddled farther out towards the mouth of the bay, where the water was deepest. Standing up in his skiff, he looped the rope around his wrist and threw out the net one last time.

For a moment nothing happened. Then there was a gentle tug on the line. Malo looked over the side, down into the water.

A big shape was moving under him, and he heard a little splash, very tiny, and something heaved hard on the other end of the rope, which was still tied to his wrist.

It pulled him right out of his boat and into the water.

“So are you working?”

Hollis blinked and looked in the other direction.

“Not really,” he said. “Not right now.”

“What
have
you been up to?” said Brian, looking up at him while still hanging on to his ankles. “I never know when I'm going to run into bad old Hollis Kessler anymore. I thought you were at some design company in Back Bay, they did museum displays or something—”

“I was. I quit.”

Brian straightened up and patted his stomach.

“I should keep going,” he said. “All those Eurobankers think I'm going to be some kind of fat American. You like these sneakers?”

He held one out towards Hollis. It was a complicated patchwork of canvas and rubber and leather.

“They have gel in them.”

“Gel, I put on my head,” said Hollis, in a fake Yiddish accent. “To put on my feet, who knew?”

Brian looked out across the park at the couple again.

“She sure as fucking hell is cute,” he said.

“Oh. I almost forgot—Prasad says hi.”

“I know. I saw him too.”

“Did he clue you in? Wise you up?” Brian turned and looked at him suddenly. “Set you straight? You know how he's always laying this stuff on people, about what's wrong with them? I bet he had a high old time with you. Not that there's anything wrong with you, cowboy,” he added hastily, holding up his hands. “Hey, we
need
you. You're probably the last person I know who isn't—I don't know. Fucking somebody else over for more Experience Points, or something like that. You're not—you know what I mean. Infected.”

Formerly a public health inspector, I am now the last human being left alive on earth.

I am Chingachgook. The Last of the Mochicans.

“Prasad. What a penis that guy is. You know what Sree called him? An ABCD: American-Born Confused Deshi. ‘Deshi' is supposed to be slang for Indian, or something. You want to jog with me?”

“I can't,” Hollis said. “I don't have sneakers.”

Brian nodded and looked back over his shoulder at the steep slope that ran down the other side of the hill, down to the road. He pushed his long hair back behind his ears.

“I should go,” he said. “Anyway, what are you waiting around here for? Shouldn't you be getting out of here too?”

“Yes.” Hollis sighed and looked around for the woman with the ferret, but she was nowhere in sight. “I should try to get back to the building before they do—I can't have him catching me coming in. They'll be a while, though. I think they're having an affair. I should try blackmailing him.”

The sun had sunk lower on the horizon, the bottom edge eclipsed by the tops of the trees, and they could look straight at it without squinting. Brian put his hand on Hollis's shoulder for balance and switched to his other leg. Their long shadows ran back into the shadow of the hill and merged with it.

The ball-playing couple had a tiny white subcompact parked on the grass at the other end of the field. They watched the woman as she went through her purse on the hood of the car, looking for her keys.

Pretty. Must destroy.

“So when's your flight?” Hollis said.

“Next Thursday. A week from today. Boston to New York to Stuttgart. On
Lufthansa!
”

He did a Nazi salute, still standing on one leg.

“Das bestes Airflügt! Ist zo chip!”
He dropped the ankle and stood up straight. “I'll send you a postcard from the Reichstag. Does Steve have your address?”

Hollis nodded. They shook hands.

“Okay, dude.”

“Super.”

Brian turned away, skipped once or twice as he got going, and jogged off along the crest of the hill. His sneakers pounded softly on the turf. Then he plunged down onto the slope, out of the sunlight, galloping out of control down towards the bottom.

“Whoa!”