Gateways (72 page)

The chopper clawed the air and lifted him up over Manhattan, the canyons of steel stretched out below him like a model. The racket of the chopper obliterated any possibility of speech, so he could ignore the pilot and she could ignore him with a cordiality that let him pretend, for a moment, that he was a powerful executive who nonchalantly choppered around all over the country. They hugged the coastline and the stately rows of windmills and bobbing float-homes, surfers carving the waves, bulldozed strips topped with levees that shot up from the ground like the burial mound of some giant serpent.

Leon’s earmuffs made all the sound—the sea, the chopper—into a uniform hiss, and in that hiss, his thoughts and fears seemed to recede for a moment, as though they couldn’t make themselves heard over the white noise. For the first time since he’d walked out of Ate, the nagging, doubtful voices fell still and Leon was alone in his head. It was as though he’d had a great pin stuck through his chest that finally had been removed. There was a feeling of lightness, and tears pricking at his eyes, and a feeling of wonderful
obliteration
, as he stopped, just for a moment, stopped trying to figure out where he fit in the world.

The chopper touched down on a helipad at Newport State Airport, to one side of the huge
X
slashed into the heavy woods—new forest, fastgrowing
carbon sinkers garlanded with extravagances of moss and vine. From the moment the doors opened, the heavy earthy smell filled his nose and he thought of the Living Room, which led him to think of Ria. He thanked the pilot and zapped her a tip and looked up and there was Ria, as though his thoughts had summoned her.

She had a little half smile on her face, uncertain and somehow childlike, a little girl waiting to find out if he’d be her friend still. He smiled at her, grateful for the clatter of the chopper so that they couldn’t speak. She shook his hand, hers warm and dry, and then, on impulse, he gave her a hug. She was soft and firm too, a middle-aged woman who kept fit but didn’t obsess about the pounds. It was the first time he’d touched another human since he left Ate. And, as with the chopper’s din, this revelation didn’t open him to fresh miseries—rather, it put the miseries away, so that he felt
better
.

“Are you ready?” she said, once the chopper had lifted off.

“One thing,” he said. “Is there a town here? I thought I saw one while we were landing.”

“A little one,” she said. “Used to be bigger, but we like them small.”

“Does it have a hardware store?”

She gave him a significant look. “What for? An ax? A nailgun? Going to do some improvements?”

“Thought I’d bring along a doorknob,” he said.

She dissolved into giggles. “Oh, he’ll
like
that. Yes, we can find a hardware store.”

Buhle’s security people subjected the doorknob to millimeter radar and a gas cromatograph before letting it past. He was shown into an anteroom by Ria, who talked to him through the whole procedure, just light chatter about the weather and his real-estate problems, but she gently steered him around the room, changing their angle several times, and then he said, “Am I being scanned?”

“Millimeter radar in here too,” she said. “Whole-body imaging. Don’t worry, I get it every time I come in. Par for the course.”

He shrugged. “This is the least offensive security scan I’ve ever been through,” he said.

“It’s the room,” she said. “The dimensions, the color. Mostly the semiotics of a security scan are either
you are a germ on a slide
or
you are not worth trifling with, but if we must, we must.
We went for something a little . . . sweeter.” And it was, a sweet little room, like the private study of a single mom who’s stolen a corner in which to work on her secret novel.

Beyond the room—a wonderful place.

“It’s like a college campus,” he said.

“Oh, I think we use a better class of materials that most colleges,” Ria said, airily, but he could tell he’d pleased her. “But yes, there’s about fifteen thousand of us here. A little city. Nice cafés, gyms, cinemas. A couple artists in residence, a nice little Waldorf school . . .” The pathways were tidy and wended their way through buildings ranging from cottages to large, institutional buildings, but all with the feel of endowed research institutes rather than finance towers. The people were young and old, casually dressed, walking in pairs and groups, mostly, deep in conversation.

“Fifteen thousand?”

“That’s the head office. Most of them doing medical stuff here. We’ve got lots of other holdings, all around the world, in places that are different from this. But we’re bringing them all in line with HQ, fast as we can. It’s a good way to work. Churn is incredibly low. We actually have to put people back out into the world for a year every decade, just so they can see what it’s like.”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

She socked him in the arm. “You think I could be happy here? No, I’ve always lived off campus. I commute. I’m not a team person. It’s okay, this is the kind of place where even lone guns can find their way to glory.”

They were walking on the grass now, and he saw that the trees, strangely oversized red maples without any of the whippy slenderness he associated with the species, had a walkway suspended from their branches, a real
Swiss Family Robinson
job with rope railings and little platforms with baskets on pulleys for ascending and descending. The people who scurried by overhead greeted each other volubly and laughed at the awkwardness of squeezing past each other in opposite directions.

“Does that ever get old?” he said, lifting his eyebrows to the walkways.

“Not for a certain kind of person,” she said. “For a certain kind of person, the delightfulness of those walkways never wears off.” The way she said “certain kind of person” made him remember her saying, “Bears shouldn’t be that happy.”

He pointed to a bench, a long twig-chair, really, made from birch branches and rope and wire all twined together. “Can we sit for a moment? I mean, will Buhle mind?”

She flicked her fingers. “Buhle’s schedule is his own. If we’re five minutes late, someone will put five minutes’ worth of interesting and useful injecta into his in box. Don’t you worry.” She sat on the bench, which looked too fragile and fey to take a grown person’s weight, but then she patted the
seat next to him, and when he sat, he felt almost no give. The bench had been very well built, by someone who knew what she or he was doing.

“Okay, so what’s going on, Ria? First you went along with Brautigan scooping my job and exiling me to Siberia—” He held up a hand to stop her from speaking and discovered that the hand was shaking and so was his chest, shaking with a bottled-up anger he hadn’t dared admit. “You could have stopped it at a word. You envoys from the vat-gods, you are the absolute monarchs at Ate. You could have told them to have Brautigan skinned, tanned, and made into a pair of boots, and he’d have measured your foot size himself. But you let them do it.

“And now, here I am, a minister without portfolio, about to do something that would make Brautigan explode with delight, about to meet one of the Great Old Ones, in his very vat, in person. A man who might live to be a thousand, if all goes according to plan, a man who is a
country
, sovereign and inviolate. And I just want to ask you,
why
? Why all the secrecy and obliqueness and funny gaps?
Why
?”

Ria waited while a pack of grad students scampered by overhead, deep in discussion of telomeres, the racket of their talk and their bare feet slapping on the walkway loud enough to serve as a pretense for silence. Leon’s pulse thudded and his armpits slicked themselves as he realized that he might have just popped the bubble of unreality between them, the consensual illusion that all was normal, whatever normal was.

“Oh, Leon,” she said. “I’m sorry. Habit here—there’s some things that can’t be readily said in utopia. Eventually, you just get in the habit of speaking out of the back of your head. It’s, you know,
rude
to ruin peoples’ gardens by pointing out the snakes. So, yes, okay, I’ll say something right out. I like you, Leon. The average employee at a place like Ate is a bottomless well of desires, trying to figure out what others might desire. We’ve been hearing from them for decades now, the resourceful ones, the important ones, the ones who could get past the filters and the filters behind the filters. We know what they’re like.

“Your work was different. As soon as you were hired by Ate, we generated a dossier on you. Saw your grad work.”

Leon swallowed. His résumé emphasized his grades, not his final projects. He didn’t speak of them at all.

“So we thought, well, here’s something different, it’s possible he may have a house to go with our doorknob. But we knew what would happen if you were left to your own devices at a place like Ate: they’d bend you and shape you and make you over or ruin you. We do it ourselves, all too often. Bring in a promising young thing, subject him to the dreaded Buhle
Culture, a culture he’s totally unsuited to, and he either runs screaming or . . .
fits in
. It’s worse when the latter happens. So we made sure that you had a good fairy perched on your right shoulder to counterbalance the devil on your left shoulder.” She stopped, made a face, mock slapped herself upside the head. “Talking in euphemism again. Bad habit. You see what I mean.”

“And you let me get pushed aside . . .”

She looked solemn. “We figured you wouldn’t last long as a button-polisher. Figured you’d want out.”

“And that you’d be able to hire me.”

“Oh, we could have hired you any time. We could have bought Ate. Ate would have given you to us—remember all that business about making Brautigan into a pair of boots? It applies all around.”

“So you wanted me to. . . what? Walk in the wilderness first?”

“Now you’re talking in euphemisms. It’s catching! Let’s walk.”

They gave him a bunny suit to wear into the heart of Buhle. First he passed through a pair of double-doors, faintly positively pressurized, sterile air that ruffled his hair on the way in. The building was low-slung, nondescript brown brick, no windows. It could have been a water sterilization plant or a dry goods warehouse. The inside was good tile, warm colors with lots of reds and browns down low, making the walls look like they were the inside of a kiln. The building’s interior was hushed, and a pair of alert-looking plainclothes security men watched them very closely as they changed into the bunny suits, loose micropore coveralls with plastic visors. Each one had a small, self-contained air-circ system powered by a wrist cannister, and when a security man helpfully twisted the valve open, Leon noted that there were clever jets that managed to defog the visor without drying out his eyeballs.

“That be enough for you, Ria?” the taller of the two security men said. He was dressed like a college kid who’d been invited to his girlfriend’s place for dinner: smart slacks a little frayed at the cuffs, a short-sleeved, pressed cotton shirt that showed the bulge of his substantial chest and biceps and neck.

She looked at her cannister, holding it up to the visor. “Thirty minutes is fine,” she said. “I doubt he’ll have any more time than that for us!” Turning to Leon, she said, “I think that the whole air supply thing is way overblown. But it does keep meetings from going long.”

“Where does the exhaust go?” Leon said, twisting in his suit. “I mean, surely the point is to keep my cooties away from,” he swallowed,
“Buhle.”
It was the first time he’d really used the word to describe a person, rather than a
concept
, and he was filled with the knowledge that the person it described was somewhere very close.

“Here,” she said, and pointed to a small bubble growing out of the back of her neck. “You swell up, one little bladder at a time, until you look like the Michelin man. Some joke.” She made a face. “You can get a permanent suit if you come here often. Much less awkward. But Buhle likes it awkward.”

She led him down a corridor with still more people, these ones in bunny suits or more permanent-looking suits that were formfitting and iridescent and flattering.