“So tell me,” I said. “Why doesn’t Silk target drug dealers? Tyrants? Serial killers? Really bad people. You should work to improve society, rather than going after arrogant scientists.”
“I don’t know,” Lissa said.
“Was my wife part of Silk?”
“No.” Then she added, “I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think she was, either. She wasn’t like you at all. Not nearly so beautiful.”
“Silk gives that to us. Not that I was an unpretty child.”
An unpretty child. I rolled that around, savoring it. “You swallow Mudd’s little sparkly pills and you’re suddenly lovely?” I asked.
She brought her brows together, narrowed one eye. She didn’t get the reference. A woman marries a scientist but doesn’t watch Star Trek? No wonder Rob had become suspicious. “We are very healthy,” she said. “No diseases.”
“Still, you’re going to get old and die,” I said, and suddenly wished I could take it back. A horrible thought. Beauty fading.
“The other way is madness.”
“What about Golokhov?” I asked, innocently enough. “Is he going to live forever?”
Lissa slapped me hard. She grabbed me under my arms and dragged me into the motel room, which was still hot, and pushed me back on the bed. “I won’t allow someone to come in here and hurt you,” she said. I saw tears on her cheeks. “But it will make me happy if you hurt yourself. It will make me very happy. I have to leave now. Go to sleep.”
I plumped a pillow and tried to do as she asked, but it was too hot. Through slitted eyes, I watched her gather up her luggage, go outside, and close the door.
Heard the lock click.
Lissa and the man in gray engaged in a heated exchange outside the room. Something about “transition” and “all finished.” They were really going at it, but after the first couple of sentences, I didn’t understand a word. They were speaking Hungarian, maybe, or Russian.
I tried hard to sleep. Glanced at the alarm clock by the bed: 10:00 p.m. I had slept a little. My body felt as if it was coming down with something. Shivery warmth. Could be a gross bacterial infection. Maybe Lissa had pathogenic bacteria in her mix, as well as persuasive ones. Little flesh-eaters. Wouldn’t that be a kick?
“What kind of retirement plan do you have, sweetie?” I shouted into the dark, hoping she would hear and come in and slap me. All sorts of little concerns drifted through my head, especially when I saw that another hour had passed and I still hadn’t heard a peep outside. Was it okay if I got off the bed?
“Do you sleep in dormitories, communally?” I called out. “Or is it a little, you know, Shaker village sort of thing? Not celibate, that’s for sure. Are you celibate with your family? You did say you have family, but you’re an orphan, from Booda-Pesht. All sorts of beautiful women back there. In the former Soviet Union and Hungary and Romania and Czechoslovakia. They want to come here and find rich husbands.”
The door did not open. Perhaps I could make her pay attention if I did something rash. I looked around the room, got up, and switched on all the lights. Peeled off my clothes except for my briefs. Examined the electrical cords to the lamps. One was frayed. I applied the bare wire to some white stuffing creeping out of the cheap quilted bedcover. Nothing happened.
I wandered around restlessly, thinking about what Lissa had said. She wouldn’t make me hurt someone else. Maybe she couldn’t. I had felt the touch of Silk’s bacterial persuasion in the DSV, in the hotel room with Banning in San Francisco. I was feeling it now. But I could not be turned into an assassin. That made me glad. The saucy little widow of my twin could not make me kill somebody else. That was significant.
You both have half the secret.
I looked on the dresser, then on the nightstand in the corner. Lissa had left little matchbooks around the room with their covers open. How accommodating. She would probably return to the room and check on me if I started a fire. At any rate, she would approve.
I pulled a match from the nearest book and struck it, then dropped it into a metal wastebasket. The little doily at the bottom of the basket caught fire and started smoking. Curious, I looked up at the smoke detector. Not a peep. Batteries dead, probably. Cheap hotel. Frame and wallboard, with a continuous attic, great for sucking air and spreading flames. Burn fast and hot like a cracker box.
I pulled out bathroom tissues and set them around the room, wondering all the while what little areas of my brain Silk’s bacteria were activating. Through my skin. In my nose. On my cock? Up in my urethra? The salty coffee. In my gut again. Something to do with dopamine and adenylate cyclase inhibitors, activated G proteins, cyclic AMP. A little symphony orchestra of subtle effects, direct and indirect.
The urge to join mob action? More likely the urge to please a powerful woman, to please my mother, my wife. Women have such a strong influence on young men. Pyro boy locked in hotel room pining for a good rubdown, baby won’t you light my fire.
The tissues I arranged on the worn carpet burned like little campfires. I imagined myself looking down on Sherman’s troops camped around Atlanta, waiting to torch the whole city. The city, of course, would have to be the bed. I set to work ripping the mattress, impressed by my cleverness.
I have half, Rob had half. Put them together . . . All the little pathways line up, and we’re in it for the Long Haul.
The doorknob turned. I stood back from my labors, curious about the noise. I was wearing only jockey shorts and my watch. I was ready for Lissa if she wanted another session.
A little swearing, a low deep voice, barely audible. Scratching. All right, this was the guy who was coming to kill me. If Lissa had lied, had actually gone out to arrange for my murder, rather than let me burn up in a fire, that was fine. Less cruel, actually.
The door burst open with a bang and the old heater behind it rattled and dropped some screws internally. A big shadow stood there against the night, six feet at least, bulky, with a glint of streetlight on a balding head.
“Hal Cousins?”
“That’s me,” I said, turning to make a better target.
“You look just like him.” The silhouette’s shoulders drooped, and I heard him let out his breath. “You’re a mess.”
“I am in proper attire.”
“We’re hauling your ass out of here, understand?”
“Not unless that’s what Lissa wants.”
“Fuck Lissa.”
It was beneath me to discuss such things.
“Who are you?” I asked, dropping back seductively on the bed. Everything was so sexy.
The big guy stomped out the little tissue campfires. He pulled me off the bed and stood me up. “You stink,” he said.
