The Affinities (15 page)

The second guy—shorter, rounder, pig-eyed—took less time. I had just finished when Suze came bounding up, demanding to see what I'd done. I showed her. Her eyes went wide. “Who are
they
?”

“Nobody in particular,” I said.

“Draw me!”

“I think your mother wants to go first.”

“Oh, no,” Rachel said. “Go ahead and make a picture of her. I need to stretch my legs.”

She went off to find a public washroom and smoke a joint. Drawing Suze was fun, though she kept jumping up to see how the picture was coming along. It was pretty good for a rough sketch, I thought. I captured her sandy knees poking out from the hem of her dress, her cautious eyes and wary smile. When it was done I gave it to her. She inspected it critically. “Can I color it?”

“If you like. It's all yours.”

She nodded, tucked the drawing into her mother's backpack, and rose to return to the holes she had been making in the beach (because they filled up with seawater, she said, and there were tiny shells in them, along with cigarette butts and bits of charcoal from the nearby barbecue pit). Then she seemed to remember something. She turned back and said, “Thank you for making a picture of me.”

“You're very welcome.”

When Rachel came back she posed on the drift log, riding it sidesaddle. I produced a quick sketch but a good one; good enough that I was almost reluctant to hand it over to her. She said, “Well, this is bullshit, Adam. I mean, it's great. But you prettied me up.”

What I had done was pay attention to the way doubt and mischief took turns with the curve of her lips. “Or maybe you're just pretty.”

“More bullshit.” But she grinned. “Time flies. We should collect Suze and take her to my mom's. She'll be wanting dinner soon.”

A few hours in the parking lot had left the car sun-warmed and smelling of sand and ozone. Suze insisted on holding the picture I had drawn of her, and she sang
chiddy chiddy bang bang
to the hum of the wheels on corduroy blacktop as we crossed the Lions Gate Bridge.

*   *   *

Rachel's mother struck me as a wearier, more cynical version of Rachel. She had suffered a minor stroke a couple of years back and lived in a public housing complex with two Corgis and a budgerigar named Saint Francis. She didn't say much—the stroke had left her slightly aphasic—but she surveyed me with unmistakable suspicion, and I did my best to appear small and harmless. “TV dinners?” Suze asked. Her grandmother nodded. “Yay,” Suze said.

Rachel kissed her mom and promised to pick up Suze by noon tomorrow. Then we were on our own. Rachel wanted to have dinner at a New West bar she liked. It was a working-class bar that smelled of stale hops and was dim as a dungeon, but the tables were reasonably clean and the staff called Rachel by name. We ordered steaks from the grill, and I asked for a beer. “Usual?” the waitress asked Rachel, and she nodded. “Usual” turned out to be a rum-and-Coke. She went through a couple of them while we waited for the food, then ordered another. She eyed the beer I was nursing and said, “You drink like you're afraid of it.”

“I'm not much of a drinker.”

“Yeah, I heard that. About Taus. Big potheads, but not heavy drinkers.”

Sociologists had been taking long, interested looks at the Affinities for years now. The studies were generally accurate, but the public's misunderstanding of them had generated all kinds of stereotypes. “That's true,” I said. “Statistically. But in the real world all it means is that the numbers are a little skewed. We have our share of drinkers. A couple of months ago, in my tranche, we helped a guy get into rehab for his alcohol habit.”

“Ah,
rehab
. Where rich people go, because prison's so darned uncomfortable.”

The bigger Affinities ran their own rehab and therapy services. It had nothing to do with being rich, but it had a lot to do with being treated by people whose Affinity you shared. Nobody can help a Tau like another Tau. “It's not always about the money. What else do you know about us?”

“There's a lot of LGBT people, I've heard.”

“A few percentage points over the general population.”

“And you all sleep together.”

“Not true.”

“Maybe not as much as Eyns or Delts. I know a woman who joined the Delts. More like her
vagina
joined the Delts. We used to be pretty friendly, but she started to ignore me once she found a bunch of fuck friends to play with.”

The steaks arrived from the kitchen, and they were big and unpretentious and reasonably tender. Rachel continued drinking at a steady pace. I did not, which seemed to make her unhappy. I was a bush league drinker; I didn't like being drunk, I didn't drink gracefully. So I ordered serial rounds of chips and salsa to keep the waitress happy while some local band began to set up on the tiny stage across the room. The bass player struck an open E that rattled the cutlery.

“You're going back to Toronto in a few weeks,” Rachel said.

I had told her that the first time we had lunch. “Right.”

“So I guess that means we're just, we're … not anything, really. The famous two slips. I mean ships. I keep thinking, I'll never know him better than I do right now.”

“It is what it is,” I said. “I like you, Rachel. I don't want to mislead you.”

“You like me all right, but I'm not a Tau.”

“I didn't say that.”

The heat or the alcohol was making her sweat. She ran the back of her hand over her forehead. “You don't have to. They used to say, ‘All the good ones are gay.' Or ‘All the good ones are married.' Well, sometimes the good ones just have an Affinity to go home to.”

“It's nice you think I'm one of the good ones.”

“Maybe I
shouldn't
.”

The band launched into a full-tilt cover of some old Tom Petty tune, and suddenly Rachel and I were shouting to each other as if we were separated by an abyss. I suggested it was time to start for home.

“Hey,” she said, “no! We're just getting started! It's fucking early! Or maybe that's what you had in mind—some
early fucking.
”

“Come on, Rachel.”

“I want to hear the music! Then we'll go. You can keep it in your pants until then.”

She began to sing along, loudly and inexactly, to “I Won't Back Down.” I leaned back in my chair and surveyed the room. A guy at the bar, a tall dude with long pale hair and narrow, angry eyes, had been giving Rachel covert glances for the last hour, and now he was just staring.

Rachel looked where I was looking. She leaned toward me and yelled, “That's just Carlos!”

“Carlos?”

“Old friend of mine! We had a thing for a while! He gets protective!”

Great, I thought. Carlos. Then I thought: What if the guy staring at us hadn't been Carlos? What if it had been one of the insurance adjustors from the drawings? It was possible I was endangering her simply by being with her. “Okay, Rachel. Let's leave Carlos to his business and go home.”

She gave me a contemptuous, drunken smile. “Are you afraid of him?”

“Yeah. I'm terrified.” I took out my wallet and put money on the table. “You coming?”

She pouted but stood up, gripping the back of her chair to steady herself. She let me take her arm.

We passed Carlos on our way to the door. I avoided eye contact, but Rachel gave him a look that was half leer, half sneer. Carlos responded by standing up and blocking my way. He put his face in my face but he shouted to Rachel over the music hammering from the stage: “YOU ALL RIGHT THERE, RACHE?”

Rachel nodded. When it became obvious he hadn't seen the nod, she said, “YEAH! I'M FINE! LEAVE HIM ALONE, CARLOS!”

“SURE ABOUT THAT?”

He was a messy talker. Some of his spittle missed me, some didn't.

“YES! DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE!”

Carlos winced. Then he mouthed something I couldn't hear. He stepped out of our way, but his nail-gun stare followed us all the way to the door.

In the car, windows open, cool night air flowing in, Rachel grew moody and quiet. She didn't say anything until we reached the block where she lived, when she asked in a small voice, “I fucked up there, didn't I?”

“Not sure what you mean by that.”

“Our big evening together. Rachel and Adam. What fun, huh?”

“Maybe just not my idea of a good time.”

“I should have known. Taus are potheads, not drinkers. Taus are a little bit prissy, too. So they say on the Internet. I mean—oh, fuck! Now it sounds like I'm calling you names. I'm sorry!” She leaked a tear. “I just wanted us to have fun.”

I helped her to the door of the low-rise building, helped her get the key into the lock. Helped her down the stairs, though she pulled away and insisted on unlocking the door of the basement apartment herself. The night had gotten chilly, but the air inside was overheated and stale. As soon as I had closed the door she leaned into me, pressed herself against my body, grabbed my hips. The smell of Bacardi and sour sweat swarmed off of her.

“Bet I know what you want,” she said.

Bet you don't
, I thought.

I excused myself for the purpose of using the bathroom. The parade line of brown plastic pill bottles caught my attention again. This time I was less scrupulous about inspecting them. Lithium, Depakine, Risperdol, Seroquel. Some of the prescriptions were old and expired, some were fresh.

She was slumped on the sofa when I came out. I said, “Rachel…”

“You're leaving, aren't you?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “But yeah, I think that's best.”

“Because I fucked up.”

“No. Listen—”

“Just go.”

“Rachel—”

“Do I embarrass you? Well, you embarrass me! Smug candy-ass Tau boy. Get out! I'm tired of you anyway. You know what's better than your dick? My
finger
! My
little
finger! GO!”

*   *   *

Amanda was waiting in my hotel room when I got back (we shared keys). She said she wanted to see the sketches I had made. I gave them to her. She examined them approvingly. Then she asked me what happened with Rachel. And I tried to explain.

“She was showing you her world,” Amanda said. “Her apartment, her daughter, the ratty bar where she spends her weekends. Even the pill bottles she leaves out where people can see them. She probably wanted to find out whether all that would offend you or whether it would turn you on.”

“It didn't offend me. I was just worried the wrong people would see us … Why would it turn me on?”

“Tough single mom in a working-class bar where she probably screws half the clientele? Catnip for a natural bottom like you.”

“What?”

“Look at you, you're so tense you're practically brittle.” She reached into her purse and fished out her pipe and the tiny, ornate wooden box in which she kept her weed. “We'll share a little of this, then you can take your clothes off and I can fuck you silly.”

The smoke went directly to my head. I felt an unsatisfied need to explain, but the words were elusive. “It was,” I said, “I mean, I shouldn't have let her think—”

“Oh, stop. You got the sketches, right?”

“Sure, but—”

“That's what's important. The rest of it doesn't matter.”

 

CHAPTER 9

My research team hit a snag that week. The cranial sensors used in Affinity testing were a proprietary design, and their specifications had not been among the data Meir Klein had provided. We determined that the closest equivalent was a neural scanning sensor manufactured by a company in Guangzhou called AllMedTest. These were dime-sized devices, incredibly sophisticated, and an array of six or seven would be enough to generate the kind of imaging the test required. But they were expensive, and buying them in quantity would be a major investment.

When I approached Damian about it, he said not to worry: “We have T-Bourse money to invest, and I can't think of a better use for it.”

“Okay, but the sensors are fairly delicate, which we have to factor into the design. And my tech guys have to know exactly how much processing power they need to build into a portable device. They're complaining that the flow of information from the theoretical side has slowed way down.”

“They're right,” Damian said. “The thing is, we've come across some anomalies in Klein's data.”

“Anomalies?”

“Some unsettling implications.”

“Such as?”

He looked unhappy. “We'll talk about it on the weekend. You, me, Amanda, the two team leaders, plus a security detail. I rented us a place on Pender Island. We'll be out of harm's way and we'll have a couple of days to think it through. Okay?”

It sounded like trouble, and I wanted to know more. But Damian wasn't ready to talk.

*   *   *

The ferry from Tsawwassen to Pender Island chugged through a rainstorm that raised whitecaps on Georgia Strait and turned what should have been a postcard view into a gray obscurity. Damian was too moody to make conversation, and Amanda was using the downtime to read through a report from her team leader. I crossed the promenade deck of the ferry and found an empty seat by a rain-slicked window, took out my phone, and returned a call that had come in that morning. The call was from my brother's home, but it was Jenny Symanski who picked up.

I had talked to Jenny only sporadically since her marriage to Aaron six years ago, not because of any lingering awkwardness between us but because my brother had become the wall over which any communication had to pass. When I spoke to Jenny it was usually at Christmas or Easter, and it was Aaron who handed her the phone and Aaron who took it back when the conversation was finished. If Jenny carried a phone of her own, neither she nor Aaron had given me the number. “Jenny,” I said. “Is this a bad time?”