Strange Flesh (31 page)

But even then I knew the tears would come.

Only six weeks later, I was tracing her collarbone with my fingertips on a Tuesday afternoon. We’d both ditched class in favor of the coziness of
her mammoth Chinese canopy bed, and we were listening to the ticking of snow starting to melt in the bright sunshine of late March. I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect.

Yet true happiness had proven maddeningly elusive. I was unable to bask in the moment since it took all my energy to prevent myself from saying to her, “I love you.” The words battered around my head like a thrush flown indoors, going frantic to escape.

This had been a problem for the past weeks, my finest hour made insufferable by my need to utter those three absurd words. I’d spent the better part of the previous four days creating a prop to help set the stage.

“I have something for you,” I said as I reached for its hiding place under the bed.

A bouquet. Roses, yes, but not the hackneyed floral default.

They were heavy, hand-dyed stationery that I’d twisted into exquisite origami flowers. On each page I’d inscribed a love poem. Naturally, I spent dismal nights trying to compose my own, but the failure of that enterprise demanded that I let the masters speak for me.

The obligatory Shakespeare, of course, and Yeats. Her favorite, Byron, and mine, Dante. Lastly, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” to add a touch of plaintive irony, given the events of our first “date.”

As I tendered them, Blythe’s eyes flashed, instantly decoding their meaning. She studied my gift for a moment, then me.

Finally she said, “They’re beautiful, but you know I’d rather hear it from you.”

That sounded an awful lot like the invitation I needed. But the dare in her voice and some hint of amusement in her eyes frightened me. I was left speechless and miserable.

With her usual grace, Blythe rescued me by plucking out one of the roses. She took my right hand and wrapped its paper stem around my wrist. Then she tied the stem’s other end around the carved framework of the bed.

“I have ways of making you talk.”

Just as she started on my other hand, her phone shrilled us out of the moment. I tried to stop her from answering it but as always was no match for her. I’m not sure who had called, but he was certainly direct. After “Hello,” she fell silent for a few seconds. Then she said, “No.” And that single word bore the weight of a crushing loss.
When she hung up, she closed her eyes and said, “My father.”

I have to admit feeling excited at this chance to show my empathetic mettle. I shook my hands free and gathered her gently in my arms, murmuring my consolations.

I said, “I’m here, Blythe. Anything you need.”

She was stiff and disassociated, and I realized with dawning dismay that she was suffering this embrace for
my
benefit, not her own.

She said, “I need my father.” I heard the “not you” loud and clear.

Of course, she called Blake. He’d already booked tickets home.

In her library I realize Blythe isn’t at all tipsy and is itching to talk business. My hopes dashed, I say, “So you wanted to see me?”

“Yes . . .” She gives me a tight smile. “After I spoke with Blake about your most recent conversation, I just couldn’t help thinking there were some issues I could, ah, elaborate on.”

Interesting
.

She turns and leads me to a small, book-lined reading room adjoining the library. There’s an inlaid table upon which rests a stack of thick black binders. Blythe picks up a silver-framed picture lying on top. She hands it to me.

The shot shows the Randall family seated around a long dinner table. My eyes settle on Blythe in the full glory of her college years, her fingers brushing the shoulder of William Coles, her ex-boyfriend from the Bat. Billy slouches to her left. Robert Randall is beaming, with evident determination, at the head of the table. Blake sits across from Billy, and to his left appears Gina Delaney, smiling shyly a few degrees askew from the photographer, who I conclude must be Lucia Randall.

“My brother can be slow to trust, James. When you started asking about his connection to Gina, I think it surprised him. And when in doubt, his instinct is to withhold. I will try to get him to be less reticent. I certainly don’t want these kinds of misunderstandings to impede your work.”

“It’s fine, Blythe. I already knew.”

She cocks an eyebrow but doesn’t ask me how. Instead, she seems to lose herself in the photo. “My father always tried to get his stepfamily together for Easter. Lucia, not unjustly, believed that our mother had poisoned us against her. And she didn’t handle tension well. Billy of course
absorbed tidal waves of stress from her. With my father insisting that everything was fine, well, let’s say these were less-than-joyous reunions. Being the youngest, Billy was particularly affected.”

She tells me how in that year, the twins decided that the emotional strain might dissipate somewhat under the view of outsiders, so they decided to invite their current significant others. Their idea turned out poorly. Lucia Randall took the innovation as a serious affront and was correspondingly rude to the twins, which precipitated a blowup with her husband. Billy, always terrorized by their fighting, suffered even more acutely in the presence of strangers.

Coles, “never a subtle creature,” in Blythe’s words, tried to take him aside and distract the poor kid with questions about sports, girls, and “partying.” When Blythe checked on them, she found Coles looking at Billy like he was a three-headed porcupine, as her brother ignored him and played chess with himself. She could tell he’d focused on the game to keep from crying in front of a guest.

“I’d never seen Billy so dejected. I wanted to go to him and somehow comfort him. I don’t know why, but he’d always flinch away from me like I was on fire. And my failed efforts just made things even more awkward between us. So, by that point, I’d almost decided that we should all just leave, whether my father liked it or not.

“But then Gina breezed into the room and took the seat opposite Billy. She cleared his chess pieces and started resetting the board. Without trying to meet his eye, she said, ‘Best of seven. I’ll bet I sweep you. Ten-minute games. I always open with the Latvian Gambit.’

“Billy was surprised, but ecstatic that he wouldn’t have to keep talking to Coles. I believe what he said was, ‘Bring it.’”

Blythe goes on. “She saved the whole weekend right there. Slowly got him talking about his alpha-gamer interests, and he was even laughing by the end of it. Gina was smart. She didn’t let him win, which Billy would have hated.”

She describes how he followed her around the next two days, obviously nurturing a Typhoon-class crush.

I smile and say, “In the right hands, I’m told the Latvian Gambit is irresistible.” From what I’ve heard of the Delaney household, I can well imagine how it might move Gina to see a kid suffering from a poisonous family situation.

Blythe resumes. “It didn’t stop there. Blake and I were blown away later that spring when Billy asked if he could come visit us at Harvard. A totally unprecedented request. Of course my father was thrilled to pieces. He hoped that his quarrelsome children were finally thawing toward each other. I had a feeling about Billy’s real reasons for visiting. But we agreed anyway.”

Blythe’s eyes close in sorrow. “Imagine the catastrophe when he showed up at South Station to find that Blake and Gina had broken up. Blake snapped at him when he asked about her. Billy just marched back to the ticket counter and bought the next return without saying another word to either of us.”

“Cherchez la femme.” I hand the family photo back to her. “He must have been delighted to come across her again at PiMP.”

She checks me for signs of irony to make sure I’m not a complete imbecile. Apparently satisfied, she props the picture on a nearby shelf and says, “Billy is like some kind of Terminator pit bull. Once he gets hung up on something, he doesn’t let go easily. He needed that grad school like he needed an amateur lobotomy. But he is patient in pursuit.”

Her phone rings. Glancing down at it, she says, “I have to take this. Those binders contain IMP’s payroll records from before things were computerized. Feel free to flip through them. You’ll find Ronald Farber in the earliest ones.”

With that little daisy cutter, she leaves me alone in Robert Randall’s archives.

Blythe has flagged the most important item: a human resources file on one Ronald A. Farber, an IMP employee for the three years prior to his founding Freyja Films.

So how does a lowly camera technician get the money to fund a high-end production company?

I’ll check his tax returns for a rich uncle kicking off in ’71, but I already know who Billy pegged as the silent partner.

From a chart of major IMP acquisitions that Blythe has helpfully included, I can see that the date of Robert Randall’s bid for CalCast lines up almost perfectly with Mondano’s investment in Freyja. So when he
needed capital to take his shot, Randall had Farber take the investment from Mondano in order to buy him out.

If the CalCast deal represented Randall coming out of his chrysalis, then IMP was built squarely on a foundation of porn and mob money. Presumably, Billy thinks this tidbit might be of more interest to the general public than the fact that people jerk off in hotel rooms.

It wouldn’t take much of a leap to suppose that some laws were broken or taxes evaded in one of these deals. If IMP expanded via financial fraud, that would be far worse than having grown from the fertile earth of heaving breasts and unimaginative dialogue.

That said, an allegation is one thing, proof another. I consider the disheartening prospect of having to gather evidence to support my theory. Melting the ice around transactions presumably handled by private banks is a pretty monumental task, like taking a blow dryer to an Antarctic glacier.

Then again, nobody asked me to prove anything. It doesn’t really matter whether Robert Randall made shady deals with pornographers. What matters is that if Billy came to believe this, what is he planning to do with the information? Unlike his father, who tried to conceal his past, Billy wants to tell us the whole story.

Of course, people tell stories for many different reasons. Usually they entertain or enlighten, but some stories are meant to deceive or do damage. Others to scare or torment. And I think we know which kind Billy has in mind.

W
ait, James, there’s more.”

I’m back in the Orifice working with Xan. After the incident at Foo Bar, I’d proposed we set up an alternate site. But Olya’s warlike nature doesn’t admit such concessions, and she wouldn’t hear of it.

I flip up my visor and back my MetaChair away from Ginger’s insistent maw. “Sugar, any more will mean an hour cleaning our girl here with Q-tips. Garriott needs to figure out the wash cycle before I go insane.”

“I thought you might like that.”

“I do. But Xan, you know, you’re way off spec here.”

She frowns. Xan has been crafting demos to show off the capabilities of our wanton WALL-Es. We’ve just been through a scene involving a Puritan tutor and his comely but recalcitrant charge. I’m honestly stunned by what she’s done. Xan has a deep understanding of the machines’ attributes and how they can pander to all our manifold lusts. Like any virtuoso, she can be prickly with criticism, so I hesitate over how to put this.

“I mean, it’s genius. You’re the Orson Welles of the feelies.” The “feelies” are a VR-like entertainment medium that appears in Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
. Simulated sex is naturally a favorite activity in futuristic dystopias.

“Patronizing bastard.”

“You won’t think I’m patronizing when I electrocute myself again. The good thing about this medium is that appreciation cannot be faked.”

“You really liked it?”

“Yes, but I’m hurt you’re not using my new program.” I’m talking about my software called e-Jax that we’re supposed to be testing. It gives users an easy way to control the Dancers in order to set up their own sex scenes. But Xan likes to write custom code directly to the machines.