@Expectations Read online

  “To keep their name out of the papers, you mean.”

  “Not exactly. Maybe. Partly, but there was more. He said they had to do it.”

  “They didn’t have to do it.”

  “He made them do it.”

  “Azeath?”

  “No, Azeath didn’t make them do it.” Lark sighs. “Reverdy did.”

  I am shaking my head like a fresh war widow. “But they didn’t have to do it.”

  “StBrêve said Reverdy was a negative presence. Divisive.”

  “No. This is about their image. Reverdy was onto them and they were afraid.”

  “He said Reverdy was poisoning the community.”

  “That’s a lie!” Pain makes me extraordinarily bitter. “They knew he was onto their game.”

  “You want to know something wild?” Lark gives me a sweet, bemused look. “I’m not sure they have a game. Like, this whole weird, complicated thing you do and I do, that thousands of us do and care so much about? This island of ours, all of us with our own special places, plus enough room for the stuff underground and in the volcano and on the grounds? This whole wild society takes up less than a gig in a computer in some back room in the Suntum home office. We’re all in a box stuck under a desk somewhere!”

  “It’s much, much bigger than that,” I say.

  Then he says, “Like, are any outsiders really accessing us?”

  But I’m intent on my own track. No. I’m speeding along Reverdy’s track, on rails waxed with paranoia. “If they aren’t using us, they will. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Like, does anybody really care what we do?”

  “You bet they care! There’s profit in it and Reverdy knew it, so they had to erase him before he could blow the whistle. He was onto their game.… Whatever it was.”

  “Is. If there is a game.”

  “Lark!”

  He sees where I need us to be going. “StBrêve did say they’d do anything to protect it.”

  “The game?”

  “The corporation.”

  “So they did set him up. Murdered him!”

  “If you want to call it that.” Licking chocolate off his fingers, Lark says pensively, “Unless it’s suicide.”

  “Don’t even joke. It’s an ugly word.”

  Lark is looking at me now, here in the middle of the airport lounge with the physical world flowing by on either side, my rickety, pathologically shy friend is looking straight at me. His eyes drop into my consciousness like perfect stones. Anchoring me. “If you want to know the truth, Zan, it’s got me scared. Reverdy bails without a fight. Doesn’t tell me. Won’t mail. Doesn’t return calls. What’s happening to him?”

  “Nothing. He’s fine and he’ll be back!”

  Lark groans. “It’s like he’s over. Done.”

  “No! As soon as we find him, he’ll…” The rest of the sentence eludes me. Our flight has been called. “And we’ll be fine.”

  Lark stands. He touches my arm! His expression tells me he’s not so sure. For the first time he doesn’t flinch when I move toward him; we lock for a minute in a hug. Grimacing, he mouths but does not say: I hope so.

  “We will. We’ll be OK.” And with my eyes gritty from lack of sleep and my hands sticky from travel, paddling through this industrial wasteland, I am stricken quite unexpectedly right here at the gate to our last departure lounge. What I feel is sudden joy. When we get off this plane we will be in Alaska. We can rent a car and drive to the city where Tom Dearden lives. We’ll go to the address Lark has committed to memory and I will see Tom, and if I wonder why, when he loves me so much, he hasn’t tried to come for me, I can’t afford to consider the implications. For the first time since we fell in love, Reverdy and I—no, Tom Dearden and I are going to meet. Blood and bone. Flesh and flesh. Him, me.

  What he said that keeps me going: “We’ll be together soon!”

  thirty-two

  FLORENCE/VINNIE

  I don’t feel good. It’s been two hours. After ten years in the penitentiary at Wardville Vinnie Fuller may know how to beat a secret out of anybody but he won’t get this secret out of her. He won’t get anything out of this squat, stubborn, embattled woman in this squalid roadside motel on this particular night in her miserable physical life. What Vinnie doesn’t know about Florence Vito Watson is how strong she is, deep down. Or how much in love.

  If Vinnie has other ways of finding Tom Dearden, whose right name he does not yet know; if he is going to devote the rest of his life to hunting his enemy down, Florence will die without knowing it. She is in the act of defending Reverdy to the death.

  There is blood in the room. She hears ugly noises—threats and a guttural song of pain. Is that coming out of me? Other things are happening. Vinnie is yelling and she … Mireya goes back inside her head, where it’s safe. She won’t see or hear the ugly, struggling physical avatars for the ideal Mireya or Azeath in the ugly sounds they make RL.

  On StElene, Mireya is protecting her lover, and whatever Florence Vito Watson is outside the box, in her heart, the Amazon princess Mireya is strong. Florence is wearing Mireya now, she has put on her idealized and powerful virtual persona and locked it around her like armor. Nothing can hurt her now.

  “Tell me, bitch!” Thwack.

  Never mind what this violent man she thought she knew tries to do to her. Never mind how much her pathetic, baggy old body hurts; Florence is safe now, girded in Mireya, and Tom Dearden’s secrets are safe. Her real lover’s particulars IRL are written nowhere. They are locked inside her mind; she would never go into an encounter with Tom’s address IVR or IRL written on a piece of paper that just anybody could find. Not even Azeath, whom she thought she loved. Nobody’s going to locate her dearest Tom and go there. Nobody can hurt him as long as she’s alive. And if Florence dreamed that Reverdy would hear about this RL meeting with Azeath/Vinnie and be jealous and come for her, that hope has gone by. But if she’s done nothing else on this day she has done one thing, is doing it now, and in spite of the questions and the hammering, is doing it extremely well.

  And if there is eternal love and there is justice, Mireya thinks as Vinnie’s fists come down and keep lifting and coming down again, the man she loves most in any world, this or the other, will know how much she loved him. She wants Reverdy—love!—she wants Reverdy and Tom Dearden both to know that Florence Vito Watson loved him so much that she protected his site information and his home phone number and his location in a cul de sac in a suburb of Fairbanks, Alaska, forever. Is protecting them with her life.

  Before StElene they were nothing—sour, frumpy schoolteacher. Two-bit convict in the pen for not much. Changed, elevated by the story they have been weaving, two ordinary people are transformed. In a feat of performative utterance they have become the roles they wrote for themselves. Valiant lover. Powerful villain, fixed on revenge. They are different from what they were: someone more.

  The last thing she hears is Vinnie screaming, “Wake up and fucking talk to me, you bitch. Wake up!”

  But she won’t.

  Maddened by frustration, Vinnie keeps beating on her until even he understands there is no point. Then he turns Florence over and starts rooting through her pockets for a scrawled phone number, list, address book, scrawled note, anything that yields what she refused to give; later he will gut the car before he remembers that he has her key-ring and that one of the keys must open the apartment in Boston where Florence Vito Watson lived in what used to be her real life. Vinnie will scour the place; he’ll turn it upside down. If he has to, he’ll turn what remains of her intelligence upside down too, shaking until the truth falls out. He’ll sweep her computer’s hard disk until he finds it. The motherfucker’s legal name! His address! After all, Vinnie has nothing but time, and now that Florence is dead, he has a place to stay. He has nothing but time.

  Hatred has fast-forwarded this recently unshelled convict into a new identity. He has stopped being Azeath; he is no longer Vinnie. He is an engine of veng
eance steaming toward a collision that will be realized sooner or later, he vows, even if it takes the rest of his life.

  Time is not important to Vinnie Fuller. It doesn’t matter how long it takes him to finish this. He’s got as long as it takes. If he has to pursue his enemy through the archives at Suntum International he will pursue him. If he has to threaten or bribe the Directors RL he’ll find a way. He is going to find fucking Reverdy. He’ll hire detectives if that’s what it takes. He is going to crack Reverdy’s site information and find out where the bastard sits when he logs on. Vinnie is going to hunt him down; he will go wherever the pursuit takes him.

  Like the Frankensteins, baron and creation, master and monster, they will finally collide. Vinnie Fuller and Reverdy are going to fight if it takes the rest of Vinnie’s life to bring him down. He will engage the bastard and grapple him up and over the last horizon if he has to, Godzilla and Rodan, enemies to the end of the earth.

  thirty-three

  ALASKA

  My love is everything I think he is. Then why am I so scared? Partly, it’s being this close to something I never knew I always wanted, and the rest? Too soon to tell.

  We are flying into Fairbanks, Alaska. Making it this far has cost Lark and me. He’s twitching in and out of sleep while I drift in limbo, stretched taut between Charlie’s house on Church Street and here, and the Dak Bungalow on StElene. I can’t see it or touch it but the lost Dak Bungalow is more real to me right now than anything on Church Street or in this plane. When I logged on and found the bungalow and all the things Reverdy and I built together and cared so much about had vanished, @erased by the Directors, I was torn in two. Part of my life had ceased to exist. Imagine walking into the ruins of a burned-out city where everybody you care about has died.

  Now I am flying into Fairbanks, Alaska, to put myself together again, but oh. What’s going to happen next? What if he’s nothing like I think? Impossible. I know what he’s like. Typing to each other over months, Tom Dearden and I have stripped each other to the soul. He let me see right into him, and he saw me. We know and love each other to the bone.

  But what if, I can’t stop thinking, what if? What if he isn’t what I think? What if I find not Reverdy but one of those unseen typists we used to make private jokes about, some twisted soul typing from an institution, what if he turns out to be hideous or bizarrely transgendered, a woman waiting, where I thought I was in love with a man. Worse, what if my glorious partner is only the archetypical fat geek in a shrunken T-shirt, the post-millennial flip on Cyrano? Oh God, what if he’s only a randy teenager who’s duped me over time?

  Impossible. In the intimacy of space, love is intuitive. Quick. And sure. We know things about each other without having to be told.

  He needs me now. I know this without having to be told.

  I am flying in to rescue my lover from his life. Tom wants me but he’s held in place by decency, won’t walk out on Louise, won’t take another man’s wife … All I have to do is tell him that I’ve left Charlie for good. When he sees me come in that door … Grief rolls into me. For good! What I did when I left Brevert without telling Charlie was burn my bridges. I’m burning them now. So what if I’m a little scared?

  We’ll be together soon enough. I see us blazing into eternity, like matched stars.

  Imagine our first meeting. I can’t! Zan hasn’t even seen a photo; there are no sense memories between us, nothing to go on but the word portraits we’ve typed—who we are to each other on StElene. This is crazy! No. It’s wonderful.

  Linked souls. We will know each other at once.

  As the plane circles for the descent, I scour the grid of dismal streets and Monopoly-board houses that crosshatch the map of Fairbanks. It looks so bleak! If I stare hard enough, I think, I can home in on Tom Dearden’s house, page reverdy I’m here! He’ll hear. No, he’ll divine—the man will know without being told that I’m circling overhead. I’ll look down and because it is fated, Tom’s front door will smash open and he’ll come running out. I’ll see him standing in the street below me with his arms spread and his mouth wide. “A miracle,” I say recklessly, wondering whether this is what Tom means when he talks about convergence. We’ll know each other on sight.

  In the seat next to me, Lark stirs but does not wake.

  It helps to say his name. “Tom? Tom.” But even though we come in low over a housing development, coasting this close to the ground, no front doors pop open. Nobody comes out. I can’t even be sure that this distorted checkerboard is part of the right development or even the right neighborhood. And there is no sign of Tom.

  Anxiety rolls in like a medieval war machine. What if something’s happened to him? What if he was in an accident, or worse. What if he’s trapped inside the house? The first fear is crazy; the second is logical. My Tom has angered the Directors of a major corporation here. They’ve betrayed him and the only way he can get back at them is to go public. Suntum’s a big corporation, oh God, they’re bound to have a security arm. What if the officers at Suntum have put him under house arrest? He could be locked in there, angry and trapped. Like Achilles, sulking in his tent. Reverdy loves StElene so much, he had such dreams!

  “Oh, Tom!” I’m flying in to see a man who pinned his hopes on an ideal society, and now look. Forget democracy, my love. Come away with me. But he won’t. He’ll want me to stay and fight. I’ll get him a lawyer. Then we’ll show them all right, I know a few things about using the press. American Civil Liberties Union. Electronic Frontier Foundation. TV news. Louise will see how much we love each other and she’ll go. We can stand back to back, fighting the Suntum Corporation to the Supreme Court.

  The plane touches down, bounces and rackets to a stop. Lark jerks to attention. “Well,” he says in a thin voice. “This is it.”

  “Yes!”

  Then we’re on the ground, half-sick and unsteady from sitting too long. I totter out to rent a car. “Well,” I say.

  We aren’t ready; we are. Being this close has silenced Lark; it’s as if God saw him smiling and filled his mouth with cement.

  Never mind. It’s hard enough here, just doing the right things to get us moving. I don’t have the energy to respond. I wonder what exactly we’re doing in this unfamiliar landscape, what we’re going to do when we get to the house. “Should we phone ahead?”

  Lark grimaces.

  “Yes? No?”

  He mouths, but no sound comes out. “I’m not supposed to give out the number.”

  A question hangs between us. What if we call and he tells us not to come? I nod. “Maybe better not.”

  Lark looks relieved.

  I am not exactly praying, but I am: Oh please, let me get this right.

  Lark pulls the area map supplied by Avis out of the dashboard. He’s turning it this way, that way, as if by squinting he can match coordinates with the printed email Tom sent. “Oh God,” he says at last. He sounds like the Tin Woodman, unrusting. “Alaska! We’re really here.”

  “Yeah. We’re here.”

  Lark is staring out at the tarmac with a wild, disconnected look. The poor kid is trying; he’s trying to be cool but it’s clear that the pressure is getting to him. His—OK, his idol, Reverdy, in this city, so near. No wonder his voice quavers. “Too bad we don’t have one of those cool programs with the area map and a blip to track the car.”

  “Too bad we don’t have the laptop to run it on.”

  “Or the modem.” He wants to joke, but we both know it isn’t funny. “We could log on.”

  “Just one more hit before I go cold turkey.” My voice shakes. We are so close. Resolution plows into me and I blurt, “I’m through with logging on.”

  “As if!” We try to laugh.

  Lark falls silent. It’s as if a boulder has dropped out of the sky and smashed him flat. I want him to keep talking while I drive, I want him to say something, anything, to take my mind off what we’re about to do. I need background music for this progress to the connector that takes us into
a city I never dreamed I’d need to know.

  I try, “It’s cold!”

  Spring hasn’t found this place. It looks like upper New York State in November. Bare and cold. Blinking like an astronaut walking out on a new planet, I wind along the road out of the airport and find my way into the raw landscape. It’s beautiful but blasted looking, as if a firestorm came through, taking everything that might soften the outlines, and then moved out. Unhospitable. No wonder Tom wanted to move to StElene. This place is stranger than Mars. Next to me on the front seat, Lark is gnawing his knuckles.

  Oh God, what am I doing here?

  Please tell me what to do, make something happen. At least make Lark talk to me.

  But he doesn’t. Unless he can’t. When Lark finally does get his speech back it’s to ask, “D’you think he’ll be glad to see us?”

  “Of course he will!”

  “I hope.”

  “He has to be. After all, we came to help.” My mind won’t stop fast-forwarding to our meeting, never mind that I can’t see us, I don’t need to. I am fueled by everything Tom ever said to me and everything I hope to say to him. Reverdy and Zan. “He’s waiting for us. Right, Lark?”

  “Right.” Lark lapses into expectations of his own.

  He knows. He knows! I catch a sudden, wild glimpse of us together. Tom will see me from the upstairs window. Zan! He’ll rush downstairs and come running out and we’ll know each other at once. We’ll hug right there in the street in front of Lark and Louise and everybody, we will fuse like two parts of the same person, blood and bone. When he and I bury ourselves in each other we won’t care who sees, I’ll feel his bulk, I can absorb his distinctive smell, and then …

  My imagination stops short. I’ve never seen or felt or touched Tom Dearden RL. What fills my senses now is the familiar Charlie smell, his heartbeat, the sweet drone of our lost all-night conversations. The rush of sensation leaves my throat tight. Every cord in my body is twanging. It’s as though I’ve been brought down in midflight by a tripwire, or smashed into an electrified fence.