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Chapter 7

Woolgathering on the Lam

Paul said, "I think it's time to stop underestimating these people."

June, involved with a "footlong" sub (nineteen centimeters, counting projecting silage), did not respond. They were in the safest place they could think of to dine at 10 p.m.: on a bench by the harbor at Jericho Beach. An overhanging tree shielded them fairly well from the intermittent rain. People approaching on foot could be observed for hundreds of meters in silhouette before they reached small-arms range; there were a hundred and eighty directions in which to flee at need; innumerable cloutable cars were parked nearby; there were even cloutable boats moored at hand, and three different places of concealment to which one might swim underwater if need arose. The twinkling panorama of Vancouver's downtown—the Emerald City indeed—was arrayed on their right, with Stanley Park jutting out into the water to the left of it like Nature's Last Stand. Distant lights twinkled and shimmered at the tops of the ski runs across the water in North Vancouver. A tiny Asian man waded with rolled trousers at the water's edge well to the west, ignoring the drizzle, stalking tomorrow's breakfast. Dark water lapped at the shore, too gently to obscure approaching footsteps.

"I think it's time to change tactics, too," he went on. "I've been on the defensive for over an hour, now, and that raises my lifetime cumulative exposure to damn near a whole waking day. I think it's time we scared the shit out of them."

"Paf 'ime," she said, then swallowed and repeated, "Past time."

"So we need a plan," he said, and took a bite of his own sub. He hoped that she would take up the conversational ball while he chewed, but she took another big bite of her own food. When he had cleared his mouth again, he tried, "So what are our assets?" and took another mouthful.

"I come up with bugger-all," she said.

"Zheevuf, Zhu'," he said, and then, "Jesus, June!"

"Am I missing something? As an asset, a hot car has the shelf life of a donut. We have to consider both of our addresses blown. All three cars gone or useless. Every ID we have is hot, including passports. Chump change. No weapons. No good way to get out of town without new ID. Three real friends in the world, each of whom would regard us as radioactive typhoid HIV-positive lepers with Ebola fever if they knew what's after us. And I wouldn't blame them."

"Hell, I don't know what's after us. Maybe we're all of those things. All I know is, I'm a dog who just got chased out of his own damn house, and if I don't do something about it I gotta lie down and die."

"I agree," she said. "I simply said we have no assets. Except fear, terror, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope. So how would you like to start?"

He looked down at his sandwich, and gave thought to pitching it into the sea . . . following it, perhaps, with the portion already consumed. Then he sighed, and took a deep breath, and bit off another hunk.

"Okay, no asshetsh," he said, chewing vigorously. "Exshep Key Wesh, maybe, if we cang 'et there . . ."

"I think we have to consider that blown, too," she said.

"Not for awhile, maybe," he said. "There's no paper on it back there at home."

"Its in the computer."

"Jesus, June, the fucking NSA couldn't hack into my private partition in less than a week: even you might have some—" His voice trailed off. "Oh."

She nodded. "We've already seen them do things the NSA couldn't do."

"I said I was going to stop underestimating them. Right." He resumed eating, frowning.

She corrected him. "What you said was, 'It's time to stop underestimating these people. . . .' Maybe that's doing it again."

"Huh?"

"I've stopped assuming they're people."

He spat out a mouthful of sandwich and stared. After a moment, he wiped his mouth and said, "What, then? Martians? Sauron of Mordor? Cthulhu? Christ, Scientist?"

She shook her head impatiently. "I don't have any labels for what's after us. And I'm not looking for any. If I think of them as humans, I'll be subconsciously expecting them to have human limitations. If I let myself think of them as Martians, I'm liable to hunt them with a water pistol. If they're Sauron, I'll start looking for the Ring—you see? I can't afford preconceptions: this is more than our lives on the line."

"There is nothing more than our lives."

"Yes, there is!"

"Not so loud—"

She lowered her volume to a passionate whisper. "I'd rather the bastards rape me and torture me to death and crap on my corpse than monkey with my mind. They're welcome to anything else they're smart enough and strong enough to take from me, including my life—but they can't have my memories. Those are all I've got out of all this."

He kept silent, from surprise at her passion and confusion at her words and a general instinct to lower their average sound production. He had known that what had happened to June was very bad; awful, sure. He had not realized until now it was skin-crawling. . . .

Well, which was more important to him? Staying alive? Or preserving the integrity of his mind? You can live, Mr. Throtmanian, but you'll never be able to trust your own memories again as long as you live . . . never know for sure what has been or will be taken from you—or, if you prefer, we can put you out of your misery right now. . . .

What finally brought him out of his thoughts was the classic Sub Eater's Dilemma. (You've finished the sandwich; your hands are greasy; the paper napkin you were using is a sodden, useless mess; you have another napkin, but can't get it without soiling your shirt by reaching into your pocket for it with greasy hands.) He solved it as he did most problems, impatiently, running his fingers through the stubble on his head until his hands were clean. June regarded him with fond distaste. "Can't take you anywhere," she said softly.

"Do we even know it's a 'they'? Do we know for a fact that there's more than one . . . Jesus, we have to call it something—more than one monkey demon?" He knew she would get the reference, having lent her the book. In Richard Farina's novel BEEN DOWN SO LONG, IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME, the monkey demon was the symbol of all ancient evil; it had no limitations.

"Good point. Let's think it through using one, and see if we stumble. Okay: I trip over the demon in the woods, and I—" She hesitated. "—I have an orgasm, and it takes over my mind. It interrogates me until it's happy, disposes of my damp underwear, and lets me go. It doesn't need to follow me any more, any more than it needed to follow Angel Gerhardt. But now it knows I phoned you. It knows everything I said. It wants me to erase the message, but I have no way to do that because your machine is so primitive. So it goes to your place, but you're not there, you're out cleaning the sci-fi people. So the monkey demon stakes you out."

He held up a hand. "Interesting point. Why? Why not just enter the house, find out everything it can about me, and wait inside for me to come home? Or just erase the phone machine and tiptoe away?"

"I don't know," she said, "and it's the first thing like a limitation we've spotted on it. Maybe it could smell your alarms, and decided to let you turn them off. Mark for later analysis; onward. Then you come home—but it doesn't know you have, right away, because it doesn't know about your back way in, because I didn't—you'd hinted you had a bolt-hole, but you never showed it to me. For all we can prove, there was a second demon behind the house, with no idea you were strolling by under his feet."

"There was a back door alarm too," Paul said, "and I never heard it go off."

"To notice you were home only after a while suggests the demon or demons were monitoring the house with something like thermal gear, from outside: it took time for you to set it off. They thought I was in there alone, waiting for you."

"Okay, I buy that. I still see only one set of tracks."

"You're right," she said. "There's no reason to assume there's more than one monkey demon. On the other hand, there's no reason to assume there aren't fifty. And my mother is dying." At the non sequitur, she flung the heel of her sandwich from her, so heedlessly that it fell short of the water, providing not even the satisfaction of a splash. "So what I say is, screw the bastard or bastards. You want vengeance; I can relate. Let's deal with it in our next lifetime. Let's abandon our luggage, figuratively and literally. Forget Key West. Forget any plans we ever had that got as far as being spoken aloud. Forget anybody we ever knew. Let's just hit the restart button on our lives, right now. Make it didn't happen. Go someplace we've never been and create new personas and go back to what we were doing: educating the gullible. Yellow alert: I think the distant silhouette approaching from the west is a cop." Her voice did not change in pitch or tone in the slightest, on the last sentence.

Paul scratched his neck and peeked. "Still a ways off."

"Alone. Fat. Moving slow. I think he's just strolling his beat."

"Back to business, then: can we do that, you think? Just walk away?"

"There's only one weakness I've noticed about the monkey demon. I don't understand it, but I'm sure of it: somehow, despite all his power, he's as afraid of The Man as we are. He could have taken either of us out at any time, with anything from an axe to a nuke—but he doesn't want to attract attention to himself for some reason. I won't be terribly surprised if he sends a fucking curse after us . . . but he can't put out an APB. I don't think that cop is looking for us. About forty meters away now."

Converting that laboriously in his head to a hundred and thirty one and a quarter feet, a hair under forty-three and a quarter yards, Paul decided the metric system could stand to be damned one more time. "And maybe if the monkey demon notices we've disappeared, and after awhile nothing he doesn't like has happened, he'll decide we're not a threat and let us live. It plays. So let's see if it's safe." He stood and walked like a numbskull directly toward the cop.

June sat still, and discreetly put a hand into her purse.

"Excuse me, Constable," Paul said, pitching his voice just a little too loud for the time and place, the way a real numbskull would do. "My name is Ralph Metkiewicz, and that's my fiancée June Cleaver, and we've been talking about our relationship for hours, you know how it is, and we were just starting to wonder, sitting here trying to remember, whether we turned the gas off before we left my house, or . . . what I'm getting at, I'm sorry to bother you, I know this must sound stupid, but have you heard anything about a house fire or some kind of commotion up on West Thirteenth tonight?"

June held her breath. That's my warrior, she thought. A hair trigger—everywhere except in the rack, thank God! Hope it doesn't get us killed . . . or even pinched. This is a lousy time to be trapped in a known location and have our faces on the news.

The cop sized him up. After an endless few seconds, the registers of his eyes displayed: Numbskull. "Friend, if it doesn't concern this particular stretch of shoreline, I tend to get most of my local news from the TV, just like you. I was in your shoes, though, I think I'd conclude it was something worth going home to check on."

"You know, you're probably right," Paul told him. "Joan—Miss Cleveland there—excuse me, honey, Ms. Clevelyn—was just saying something like that. Risk versus game, or something like that. Weren't you, honey?"

"The term 'honey' is a demeaning sexist put-down, you know that, Ralph," she said. "It is not flattering to be compared to something wild bears paw and slaver over. And I think the constable is quite right—aren't you, Constable?"

For her the cop took no time at all: Numbskull. "Well, ma'am, all's I'm saying is, it wouldn't hurt to go check. I hope everything turns out alright for you both. Goodnight, Ms. Clevemumble—good night, Mr., uh, Metka . . ."

"Meskavitz," Paul said. "Thank you, Constable. Have a nice night."

"Anybody ever tell you you look like that starship guy on TV?"

"What guy?"

"Never mind. Good night."

Paul and June left their bench and headed west, listening carefully to the tired footsteps behind them. When Paul calculated that the fat cop was once again a shade under forty-three and a quarter yards distant, he murmured, "See? Good news: we were right about something."

"I said I didn't think he had us on his hot list," June said, a wonderful sentence to hiss through one's teeth.

"And that was good enough for me . . . 'honey.' What would have been better: wait a few hours for the morning paper to come out? Now we know we're not law-type hot, and we can plan our getaway."

"Fine. Go ahead."

"Jesus, do I have to do everything around here? You start. We want to go far far away. Tell me where."

"Not there."

"Huh?"

"Far far away is where the monkey demon will expect us to go. We want to get clear, sure—but some place so close to the known Danger Zone that only a numbskull would run that far and then stop. The monkey demon thinks he knows we're not numbskulls: that's our secret weapon."

He snorted. "By that logic, the smartest thing for us to do is pick up some marshmallows and wieners and go back to my place to toast 'em. We can join the crowd and ask in a loud voice if anybody's seen a monkey who can suck your brain and make you forget you saw him."

"Maybe that would be the smartest thing we can do," she said dryly. "I have a feeling the least threatening place we could be right now, in his estimation, is in a nice snug VGH mental ward with heads full of thorazine. It's something we know that makes us dangerous to him, and mental patients don't have any information anyone else cares about." She stopped, confused; instead of being squelched, he looked almost cheerful.

"You think he considers us 'dangerous'?" he said.

She suppressed an urge to smack him. "Amend that to 'annoying,' all right, Tarzan? 'Worth hunting and mindraping.' You want to pick up those marshmallows and franks? We'll have to pull a short con on a Seven-Eleven guy. . . ."

He sobered. "As Oberlin Bill used to say, it never pays to be too smart. Maybe a shade less audacity wouldn't hurt anything. Okay, nearby, but not too near—someplace we can get to without leaving a record or passing a security camera, with no ID and chump change. Well, I know one last good border crossing I think I can afford to use up—but I'm afraid we're going to arrive in the Land of the Fee smelling just like everything else that comes out of that pipe. Let's try and clout something with two changes of clothes in it—"

"The border's too far and too intelligent," she said. "Everybody tries to disappear to a crowded place where you can blend in easy. Let's go to someplace we'll stand out—to the locals, who we don't care about—and where we can hang out a lot of tripwires, where we'll hear early about any other odd strangers in town. We're both city kids, so we'll hide in the boonies."

"The Gulf Islands," he said. "A ferry."

"That'd work," she said. "But I've got something better in mind. Cast your mind back about a million years, to when we were free human beings, loose on the earth. What was I working on, when I had to go visit my mother?"

Paul stopped short, and stared in admiration. "Jesus. Of course. Whatsisname! Bonehead Island!"

June's recent trip south to visit her mother had forced a working con onto the back burner: the mark had been ripe but June was too busy to pluck him, so she had been forced to reschedule. He was a yuppy software baron named O'Leary, presently away with his beloved on a long-planned trip around the world which would take him three months even in the absurd event that everything went as planned. Postponed opportunity had proven to be a blessing in disguise: O'Leary's luxury A-frame home stood unoccupied until his return.

"Bowen Island," June said. "Henry O'Leary."

"Where is that one?'

"It's one of the Horseshoe Bay jobs."

"Better and better," he said. "A little one. This likes me well. Have you noticed that things always start to look better after you eat a sub?"

"First we have to get there," she said. She was cheering up too, but was not yet ready to admit it. "Let's go find a doss. Tomorrow we scrounge a little, and then catch a ferry."

"Scrounge what?"

She thought. "We need a backpack, maybe an overnight bag, some binoculars, sunglasses . . . an ice chest wouldn't hurt. And cash, of course, at least enough for two pedestrian ferry tickets. And as much L.L. Bean as we can lay our hands on." She looked him over critically, and suddenly started to laugh. "And you'll need to shave." The laugh built as he stared in incomprehension. He had forgotten. "Nothing looks less respectable than five o'clock shadow all over your fucking head," she managed, and then lost it.

So did he, of course, and the shared laugh grew until they had to stop walking and hold each other up, and in no time at all they were kissing, still laughing but really kissing.

"Are we having fun yet?" he asked when they broke for air.

"Who stopped?' she said. But there was something indefinable in the placement of her eyebrows, or possibly her lower lip, that cued him it was time to stop kissing and get back to business.

Besides, the rain was starting to really come down, now.

 

The Lower Mainland of the province of British Columbia is more than generously supplied with islands; if you're missing one, it's probably there, somewhere. There ought to be a Lower Mainland salad dressing.

In 1995 one could drive thirty minutes south from Vancouver, almost to the U.S. border, and take a large ferry from the immense ways at Tsawwassen (providing one resisted the urge to attempt to pronounce it) southwest to any of the medium-size, generally well-populated Gulf Islands; these gathered like hungry pilotfish around the anus of the leviathan Vancouver Island, whose immense torso enclosed the Strait of Georgia between it and the mainland. Alternatively, one could drive twenty minutes north and then west to the feverishly picturesque Horseshoe Bay, and take a small or medium-size ferry from more modest docks than Tsawwassen's to an assortment of smaller and less populous (thus more interesting) islands in Howe Sound. These varied widely in state of development—from rustic Gambier Island, accessible only to foot traffic, to Bowen Island, relatively built up and well built. People were starting to call it Commuter Cay: it perfectly met the needs of the yuppie commuter, being as far from Vancouver (in every sense of the term) as one could get and still be within reasonable travel time. There was more than one Porsche on Bowen Island, and you could rent Buñuel movies or buy fresh Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee beans at the general store—but you could also get Cheese Whiz, frozen waffles and King Red Man chewing tobacco.

The Horseshoe Bay terminal was ideal for a fugitive, big enough for one to hide in the crowd but not big enough or important enough to be watched. Paul and June, carefully dressed and outfitted to suggest fairly rich people who had dressed down for the trip so as not to appear pretentious, would have been effectively invisible even without the drizzle.

Paul could not believe the security.

"There isn't any!" he exclaimed almost angrily. "Look at this place! No ID check, no cameras—I swear to God I don't smell a single cop, uniform or plain. There must be some, but they're all cooping." They were strolling along the edge of an immense parking lot which had filled in the last half hour and would empty in fifteen minutes, on the opposite side from the long row of washrooms, "restaurant" and other dollar-traps that were currently milking most of the cars' passengers while they waited for the ferry.

"They're probably helping a trucker with his engine," she said. "Usually they try to stay visible. In case someone needs to ask them a question."

Paul stared at her. "I will never in my life get used to this country. It isn't fucking natural."

"Thank God!"

"Christ, we could clout a car right here in broad daylight, if we had any use for one. I've seen three with keys in them."

"Where the hell are they going to go? Every one is boxed in."

They reached the front of the lineup, found a spot from which they could admire Horseshoe Bay. It was easy work. The stage-prop binoculars proved useful. The ferry was in sight in the distance, looking rather like Roseanne Barr—a white tub and proud of it, with great bumpers—and a cinch to beat the napping Hare in the swimming race, approaching Horseshoe Bay with the speed of the bell at the end of Geometry class.

"June?"

"Mm?"

"About your mother . . ."

She kept staring out across the gunmetal water. "She's still here. I can feel it. Still hanging on."

He nodded uselessly. He began to speak three times, producing nothing at first, and then, "We could," and "If."

She nodded, and put the binoculars on a bird. "Pop has enough on his plate just now," she said, tracking it. "He can't believe they moved to a country without socialized medicine."

"Yeah. I just . . ."

"I know." She put down the glasses. "And what I'm supposed to do is come into your arms and let you comfort me. You deserve that. You really do. I'm sorry."

He said nothing.

"I don't know if this is going to make sense," June said. "I want to try and say it just right." There was a long pause, and then the words came out quickly. "You and me. When we're together I want you inside of me, and me inside of you. You know that. When we're together and it's good I want to be naked for you, naked to you. I want you to come inside of my skull and know me, know me better than anybody else, know me better than I've ever been able to make myself known to anybody else, know all my secrets and all my sorrows." She stopped speaking, bent her head. The ferry was 25 percent nearer when she continued. "Well, it happened to me, the real deal, and it sucks. I feel like I've been raped by a column of ants, like a burglar left turds on the carpet of my brain on the way out. I don't know, it—" She broke off again. When she resumed, her voice was thicker, her words clumsier. "So what I mean, us, it's for a while it'll be a little hard, okay? I'm trying to say hard the way it was, like before, feeling that way again for a little while, with anybody. I just—I've only got the two speeds, flat out and neutral, and I'm scared to touch the pedal. . . . I hope you can deal with that."

He had trouble enough dealing with the simple urge to reach out to her with his hands, then and there: the lunatic certainty that if he only touched her he could draw out some of her pain even if she said otherwise. And he did have the fleeting, guilty thought that running for your life is much more fun if you can get laid during the lulls. But he was a strong man, and loved her enough to give her anything she asked that would not kill him outright or spoil his opinion of himself. He took several deep breaths without being caught at it, and when he had himself under control, he said, as if agreeing on a restaurant, "Space. Sure."

The ferry was near, now. She checked his backpack, then picked up her overnight bag. "Thanks."

"Yowsah."

Then neither of them said anything until he said, "Say when," and she said, "You'll know." By then the ferry was beginning its approach, snorting foam, and he picked up the cooler and they joined the rest of the foot passengers lining up at the gate.

They were much more plausible as rich people, walking a couple of feet apart.

 

Snug Cove, the ferry terminus at Bowen Island, was a lovely, sleepy little place, quaint but not yet aware of it, its "downtown" small enough that there was nowhere you could stand in it and not see forest, but just large enough to offer a choice of "restaurants." They dined in silence (as was expected of people dressed like that) at the least worst. The deck view of a rustic duck pond guarded by a magnificent old grandfather tree was splendid, but Paul was still moved to swipe tips on the way out. As they stepped back out onto a sidewalk which, between ferries, was empty as a politician's word, he spoke to his lady for the first time since they had left the mainland. "So how far is this place?"

"About a fifteen-minute drive, I think. I've never actually been there."

He groaned. "Naturally. We can't go around clouting cars, either; we have to live here. Is there any point in my even asking whether they have cabs on this overgrown speed bump?"

"Nope." She headed off uphill through the drizzle, toward the beckoning wilderness. He followed with as much good cheer as he could muster. Within what he thought of as a city block, the terrain leveled off—but the buildings and sidewalks went away. He was too much of a city kid to be comfortable walking anywhere that didn't have sidewalks, but his guru had once drummed into him that he must never complain (because she was sick and tired of listening to it), and so he soldiered on, scheming ways to humiliate an irresistible force. Any place that has fifteen-minute drives should have cabs, he thought from time to time, as the blisters began to form.

Suddenly June stopped, for no reason he could see. Distantly he heard the sound of a motorist, and envied him or her fiercely. "What's up?"

As though it were an answer, she moved a few steps to the edge of the roadbed, held out her hand, and stuck up her thumb.

He blinked, puzzled. "What are you doing?"

She sighed. "Just wait. And pray."

The vehicle, a truck that had emphysema too bad to be singing that loud, was almost upon them now. All at once it dropped its pitch, like Tom Waits nodding off in the middle of a song, and slowed to a complete stop beside them.

The driver, a senior citizen, stared at them. At a loss, Paul stared back. Both the old man's hands were visible on the steering wheel.

"Where you folks headed?" he asked.

Paul was too flustered to remember his cover; June supplied the name of the man whose house they were supposed to be sitting, and described its location. At once, as if some sort of agreement had been negotiated, the old man leaned to his right and opened the passenger door of his pickup, clearly offering them a ride. Up front, with him.

When June began walking around the front of the truck, Paul decided people must just do things like this in the country, in Canada anyway, and followed her.

Sure enough, without so much as displaying a weapon, the old man put the truck very neatly in gear and took them where they wanted to go. He did talk nearly as much as a New York cabbie, in a voice clearly audible above the roar of the truck's renewed Waits imitation, but was willing to listen to June bullshit back—he even gave her something like fifty percent of the airtime. In the course of his own rambling he disclosed at least three pieces of information of use to anyone who wanted to come clean him out some night. He even waited to offer his name until June gave their current names.

"And it's all right to laugh when I tell you," he prefaced it.

"I wouldn't laugh," June assured him.

"Aw, go ahead, I wouldn't want to see you folks hurt yourself. My daddy's name was spelled L-Y-C-O-T-T, and he always pronounced it 'like it'—'like it is,' he'd say, 'and you can Lycott or lump it!' And then my ma decided she just had to name me after her dead little brother Maurice. . . ." He waited until their faces showed they'd got it, thumped the dashboard and cackled. "That's right: I'm Moe Lycott!"

After a polite pause, they used the dispensation they'd been given and began to giggle. "You don't seem mad about it," June said.

"Hell, no," he said. "All my life, whenever I walk by, people point and say, 'Now, that's—' "

June obligingly supplied the punchline, and giggled some more.

Paul did not really think the bald husband of a chirpy yuppie woman who kept silent himself would be out of character, but eventually he felt he should produce at least a token attempt at polite discourse, to make clear that he was not the world's only wealthy skinhead. He cast through his mind for movies he'd seen involving country life, and at the next gap in the conversation, he said, "So Moe, do you have any cows?"

The truck was allowed to take a solo for the next forty-three and a quarter yards or so.

"I been a widower twenty year," Moe finally said, and immediately asked June something about her imaginary job back in the city.

Although June's directions had been general, Moe spotted the right mailbox with his cataracted eyes and let them off exactly where they wanted to be. He drove off before Paul could even begin to embarrass himself by offering to pay for the ride, leaving them the single word, "Goodnight," as though he no longer had a right to talk their ear off now that they were no longer locked into being with him. June turned at once and started down the weeded driveway, but Paul stood where he was for a moment, frowning.

"What?" she said, turning back.

"Nothing," he said. "I just feel like a tiger trying to hide in a slaughterhouse. This island is candy. Hell, Hopeless Harry could get healthy, here." He blinked. "I can't believe I just said that sentence." Hopeless Harry was the worst grifter either of them knew, a man with a face so quintessentially dishonest that he had once been stopped and frisked while dressed as a priest in a wheelchair; you had to admire his doggedness, but then you were done admiring him.

"Down, boy."

"I know, I know," he said. "I feel like the Invisible Man in the girls' dormitory, though."

As he had prayed, that got a faint grin. "Up, boy. Come on, let's check out our lovely new home."

The keys, as expected, were where people hide keys.

 

Much money had been both thoughtfully and tastefully spent on that home. The location itself was a postcard. The A-frame was a sketch drawn on the back of the postcard by a master. It had two decks out back, both cantilevered out over a dizzying slope that dropped what Paul thought of as about fifteen stories in about one block to Howe Sound; lush forest on either side framed the view perfectly, making it endurable. Next stop, Japan. Hi, birds.

"I can't believe this clown didn't actually get someone to watch a house this nice for him while he was away."

"Why? To make sure nobody moves in and trashes the place, or something? What do you think this is, civilization?"

There was a hot tub built into the lower deck, big enough for seven people or four programmers. The barbie on the upper deck enabled a reasonably bright child to cook half a beeve at a time to perfection, and the deck itself had a built-in cable-and-power hookup in its railing so you could take the portable TV/CD/tapedeck/tuner/VCR out there without stringing unsightly wires from the bedroom. There was an Aptiva in the den, with Pentium 133 chip and 32 megs of RAM, a ten-gig hard drive, a 25-inch monitor and an 800-dpi printer. There was a similarly equipped Power Mac in a corner of the living room; apparently O'Leary had taken all of his Powerbooks with him on his world tour. The brand-new state-of-the-art high-end entertainment console beside the Mac produced sound you could taste and video you could smell in any room of the house including both bathrooms, and could be remotely programmed from most of them. The fridge and freezer could have supported a midsize restaurant; the microwave could have accommodated the other half of the barbecued cow, with the gas stove for the potatoes and vegetables; there was no room in the house without at least one ceiling-high shelf of books (most either old friends or intriguing); the construction and carpentry were ostentatiously breathtaking throughout; the interior decor said you deserve this quietly but very persuasively, and it came as something of a relief to Paul when he managed to find (in the garage) a single, inexplicably uncomfortable chair.

"I don't want to con this guy," he said to June, when he found her sorting through excellent drugs in the drawers of the guest bedroom. "I want to be this guy." He smelled a bag of marijuana, and sighed. "I love this part of the world."

"You haven't seen what he's sleeping with," she said.

"True. What is Mrs. O'Leary like? You never told me."

"What's that got to do with what he's sleeping with?"

"Ah," he said. "You were working a Diabolique."

"A modified Diabolique," she agreed. "What he's sleeping with has a Y chromosome. Likes girls just as much as Henry does, thank goodness, or I'd have had to be big sister fag hag."

Paul nodded. "I wondered how old Henry was dealing with the problem of bringing his mistress along on a world cruise."

"By the time they all get back from being locked in a hotel together for three months, all the way 'round the planet, the boyfriend will be happier than ever to have me help him set up a burglary-gone-wrong on the happy couple, and run away with me. I just hope he stays greedy and half-smart, doesn't decide to ad-lib and lever them both over the rail somewhere along the way. I won't blame him if he does, but I want this place for the whole three months if I can get it."

The turn of this conversation was giving Paul a powerful warm furry urge to tear off all that L.L. Bean, peel his lady like a grape and throw her on the guest bed, so he put down the bag of marijuana and said, "I've got the water and heat back on, and the hot tub is warming. Is it time to go next door—wherever the hell that is—and start establishing our cover, so nobody has the cops swing by?"

She shook her head, and dropped a large chunk of hashish on top of the cocaine in the drawer. Coke was just money one shouldn't flash, to both of them. "That's covered."

"What, you mean Mo' Like It? We don't even know how far away he lives; he could be a hermit at the other end of the island."

"Doesn't matter. On an island this size, the jungle telegraph is like the Internet: all users are equidistant. Twenty bucks says at this moment, one of the neighbors is asking what the world is coming to, when even decent people are shaving their heads."

"Twenty Canadian? Or American?"

June shut the drawer. "Whatever. And I have a much better idea than borrowing a cup of credibility."

"Go."

"Why don't you tear this goddam L.L. Bean off me, peel me like a grape, and carry me upstairs to the master bedroom?"

Don't ever let anybody tell you enough money can't heal, sometimes, Paul thought. "That bed there's a lot closer," he pointed out.

"Yeah, but I want to be carried further than that."

He shrugged. "Works for me."

Even for a strong man in love and his prime, yuppie clothing is oddly hard to tear; Paul had to settle for merely rumpling everything but the panties. June didn't seem to mind.

 

He was very careful, very alert, until she signaled clearly that he did not need to be; then he burst open and died and was annihilated and, timeless time later, painstakingly reassembled from a kind description. Perhaps it should have been disappointing to both of them that she didn't come, too. But she did not always, when they made love, and often didn't care, and could be relied on to cue him if she did. He offered anyway, licking her throat in a way that was one of their signals, but she declined with a warm hug and an uncounterfeitable kiss, and reached for the remote.

"That's why you wanted to come up here," he said sleepily. "Better TV."

"You know me so well," she said, and gave him a friendly tweak.

He fell asleep watching a genuinely astonishing commercial, in which an immensely fat hairy jolly man (immensely all those things) wearing only a jockstrap and a skipper's cap did—for a Pacific Rim audience—a sumo shtick that must have been to a Japanese what Step'n'Fetchit is to a brother. It turned out he sold junk. What a country! was Paul's last coherent thought.

Then he slept, and dreamed that he was Gnossos Pappadapolous, and the monkey demon was chasing him and his buddy Heffalump through New Mexico desert. When it turned into Batista's Cuba and guns started going off, Paul tried what Gnossos had done in the book—run in circles; scream and shout—and it worked: he became Exempt. But not Heffalump, the only human being Gnossos ever genuinely loved: Heffalump was down, and Gnossos was hip too late. He tried to change the dream channel, and found himself in Heinlein's JOB: A COMEDY OF JUSTICE, he and Margrethe on an ocean liner, suffering from mal de merde. This was insufficient improvement: Margrethe was stacked but so was the deck, which promptly sank out from under them. So he went deep, and found darkness and quiet for awhile.

June switched to headphones when she saw he was asleep, found the satellite channels and watched a Japanese porn movie dubbed into Chinese for an hour, marveling at the endless variety of ways different cultures have evolved to make idiots out of themselves while doing something necessary, all in the name of a little quiet in the pants. Hasn't there ever been a sexually sane culture? she wondered for the thousandth time in her life. Will there ever be one?

Just before she drifted off, she thought, I almost came. Next time I will. I won't let the bastard take that away from me, too.

Her sleep was dreamless when it came, and she woke hungry.

 

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Framed