The Affinities (23 page)

So we said pleasant and inconsequential things to each other for a couple of minutes and finished the conversation with smiles that were genuine but seemed weirdly distanced from the present crisis. Then Damian got back on the line.

“One more thing. And this is for Trevor as much as it is for you. We've got information that there's a Het security detail en route to Schuyler.”

I relayed this news to Trev, who gave me a look signifying something like: “Whoa—really?
Why?
”

“I can't tell you anything more than that. It might be they want to keep an eye on Congressman Fisk prior to the vote. Or it could be more sinister. So keep your guard up, right?”

Right.

*   *   *

Getting closer to Schuyler, as farmland gave way to scrubby forest and outcrops of glacial debris, I called my father's house.

A voice call, not a video call. Neither Mama Laura nor my father believed in paying good money for a little extra bandwidth. The last time I'd been there, the phone had been a landline with a clunky handset. My father carried a contemporary phone for business purposes, but he had never given me the number.

“Adam!” Mama Laura exclaimed. “So good to hear your voice! Where are you?”

“Just a few miles out of town, actually.”

“Wonderful! Your old room is all ready for you. You're not the first to arrive—Aaron and Jenny aren't here yet, but can you guess who is?”

“Geddy?” I hoped it was Geddy. I hadn't seen Geddy for years, but he still called from time to time.

“Yes, Geddy! And he brought a friend!”

“Oh?”

“A girl friend.” I could hear the pause she put between the two words: she wasn't sure whether the girl friend was in fact a girlfriend. “Her name is Rebecca. Rebecca Drabinsky. She's from New York City, one of those places in New York you read about, I don't know, Brooklyn? Queens? I forget.”

This was Mama Laura's way of telling me two things. One, Geddy's new friend was Jewish; and two, Mama Laura was okay with that. Which suggested to me that my father
wasn't
okay with it, and that Mama Laura wanted to get her own opinion on record before any controversy erupted.

“I look forward to meeting her.”

“She's quite a character! But I like her. Can you still find your way to the house or do you need directions?”

“I could find it in my sleep.”

“That's good. I can't wait to see you! And I can tell you Geddy's very excited, too.”

And still not a word about my father. “What time do you want people arriving for dinner?”

“You're welcome anytime. Say five o'clock if you want to freshen up first?”

“Five it is.”

I ended the call and Trevor drove a few more miles. We passed what I recognized as the quarry road, winding into a patch of wild scrubland where you could break your leg tripping over glacial till or stumbling into some ancient kettle hole buried in the duff. “Family,” Trevor said philosophically. “Remember what Robert Frost called it? The place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

“Doesn't always work that way,” I said.

*   *   *

We approached the outskirts of Schuyler. There was the usual strip of highway-exit businesses—gas stations and fast-food franchises—and then a couple of motels, sparsely populated. We could have stopped there, but Trev wanted accommodations closer to town. That left two obvious choices, a Motel 6 just off the main drag or a Holiday Inn a little farther north. Trev started to pull into the Motel 6 but paused before making the turn. We could see most of the parking lot in front of us, cars fronting a two-story row of rooms with doors painted Pepto-Bismol pink. “Huh,” he said, and pulled back into traffic.

“What?”

“You see that? In the lot? Four black Chevy SUVs, identical models.”

“So?”

“Those are Het cars, bet you any money. And I'd rather not share accommodations with Het enforcers if I can help it.”

So he registered at the Holiday Inn. He talked to the concierge about arranging a rental car, and I took the vehicle we had come in. Alone on the drive to Mama Laura's, I turned on the radio and tuned in a news site. The announcer was using solemn words like “international crisis” and “ultimatum,” but nobody had actually nuked anybody. Yet.

 

CHAPTER 14

Polite commentators liked to call the state of affairs between Tau and Het a “rivalry.” In reality it was a fight—a fight for the future of the Affinities. Tau wanted to preserve and defend what Meir Klein and InterAlia had created. Het wanted to take absolute control of it.

Het was winning.

Het had about as many members as Tau, according to a recent census, and we were the most populous of the twenty-two Affinities. So we brought roughly equivalent numbers to the field, but Het had an immediate advantage: in sociodynamic terms, Het was
monohierarchical.
Which meant it possessed a
single hierarchy
: just one rigorously denominated chain of command, one leader, stacked ranks of followers. It was a classic form of human collaboration: horizontal equality among members of any rank, but top-down decision-making. Usually that takes a certain amount of policing and coercion, but the genius of Het is that its members tended to fall into place as neatly as Tetris pieces. The result was a kind of instinctive monarchy. They didn't call him that, but the Hets had a king: I had seen him in passing, during sodality negotiations. His name was Garrison, and when Garrison said jump, Het jumped.

Tau, on the other hand, was
polyhierarchical.
When we did the leader-follower thing, we did it to address some specific task or local problem. You want to put out a fire, you let the fire chief call the shots. You want to build a house, you defer to an architect and a carpenter. We had hierarchies, but we were constantly constructing and dismantling them, hierarchies like temporary circuits in a vast neural network.

It made us versatile, adaptable. It also made us loose and complex and slow, where Het was blunt and simple and fast.

And Het had brought blunt, simple weapons to the battlefield. Weapons like bribery and expensive lobbyists, backroom threats and hired lawyers. Not to mention, should you step out of the light and into the shadows, actual guns and muscle. Whereas Tau had come to the fight like earnest Quakers, armed with little more than a love of justice and the power of persuasion. In brief, our asses had been kicked.

At least at first. Slowly, slowly, we were bringing our own weight to bear. We didn't punch with much strength but we knew how to swarm. How to find a vulnerable point and work it from many angles. How to crowdsource a counterattack.

One thing you look for is the unexpected connection: say, between a Tau member and a congressman who might be about to cast a critical vote.

Say, between me and my brother Aaron.

Then you look for an exploitable weakness. A troubled marriage, maybe, in which one partner has a great many secrets to keep.

Like Aaron's marriage to Jenny.

You find the weak point. Then you press until something breaks.

*   *   *

It was Mama Laura who had engineered this family reunion, and it was Mama Laura who answered the door when I knocked.

Late afternoon, and the sun was behind me. Sunlight came through the branches of the budding willow, and Mama Laura shaded her eyes as the door swung open. She gave me what she sometimes called her “big old welcome-home smile,” but with a hint of uneasiness in it. “Adam,” she said. Then, almost as an afterthought, she opened her arms and I hugged her. “Come on in,” she said.

She had grown a little grayer and a little portlier in the years since I had left Schuyler, but time had been relatively kind. The same was true of the house itself, from what I could see from the entrance hall. Same carpet, same faded furniture, same heavy drapes, but all of it freshly scrubbed and dusted. The air smelled of wood polish and savory overtones from a slow roast sweating in the oven. “Geddy absolutely cannot wait to see you! He's up in his old room. And your father is upstairs, too … Can I get you something to wash away the road dust? We have lemonade, Coke…”

“I'm fine,” I began to say, but I was interrupted by the pounding of footsteps on the stairs.

I doubt Geddy could have reached me any faster if he'd slid down the banister. He had never been good at concealing his feelings, and now he wasn't even trying. He had a grin as wide as his mouth could make it. He was practically laughing with pleasure. “Adam!” he said, and took me in an embrace that nearly bowled both of us over. “I heard the doorbell!”

“Hey, Geddy,” I said.

He stood back. “You look great! You dress better than you used to.”

Mama Laura and I both laughed. I wasn't wearing my thousand-dollar suit—it would have gotten me expelled from the house for the crime of pretension, I suspected—but I guessed a tailored shirt and wool pants looked upscale to Geddy. Geddy wore blue jeans with a checked cotton shirt tucked in at the waist, a style Mama Laura called “Walmart formal.” He was thin enough to be called skinny these days: this was what had emerged from the chubby cocoon of his adolescence.

“Still playing the changes?” It was the question I asked whenever I talked to Geddy on the phone. Originally a reference to his music career, now a general-purpose what's-up.

“Still working at the warehouse,” he said. “Mostly indoors now. I sit in with a band on weekends. Some guys I know. Trad jazz, but we're pretty tight. Rebecca says—but you have to meet Rebecca! She's in the basement, going through some old boxes—”

Mama Laura took my arm in a firm grip. “I think Adam should say hello to his father first.”

*   *   *

It was why this reunion had been arranged, after all. It was why Geddy had come from Boston, it was why Aaron and Jenny had traveled from DC, and it was at least one reason why I was here.

My father had received his diagnosis last winter, but he had forbidden Mama Laura to share it with us until a month ago. Even then she had been reluctant to talk about the details, as if his disease were an intimacy she dared not discuss except in the most basic outline. Cancer. Inoperable. Stage IV. Originally in the lungs, now throughout the body.

He had refused chemo out of some combination of terrified denial and stoic acceptance. He said he felt fine, which meant his pain was mostly under control. His main symptoms, Mama Laura said, were debilitating fatigue and loss of appetite. Plus heightened irritability and moments of confusion.

I went upstairs to see him. He was in the bedroom he shared with Mama Laura, but he wasn't in bed; he was dressed and sitting stiffly upright in the upholstered chair by the window. The little video monitor on the dresser was babbling quietly away, but he had turned his face to the sunlight. Maybe he was appreciating the spring of a year that would likely not include, for him, an autumn or a winter.

“Adam,” he said, swiveling to face me, putting his features in shadow. “Nice you could make it.”

“Good to be here.”

“Laura was real happy about you coming. She sets great store by family.”

“You can tell by her cooking. The roast smells great.”

“It's lost on me. I can't smell a damn thing anymore. Food tastes like sawdust and library paste.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“It's not your fault. It's not anybody's fault but God. You look like you're doing all right.”

“More or less.”

“Still working for your club?”

“It's not a club.”

“Yeah, I know, it's been in the news. The Affinities. They got in everywhere, didn't they? Like Communists. Or Freemasons. You don't know who is one, unless they tell you. But you've obviously had some success at it. Good for you, I guess. It's just that we can't boast about it, the way we can boast about Aaron.”

“Well, at least you can boast about one of your sons.”

It occurred to me that I didn't know what to call him. When we were kids Aaron and I had been trained to call him “sir.” But I hadn't addressed him as “sir” since the day he insulted Amanda. It was decades too late to start calling him “Dad.” And if I had called him by his first name he would have considered it a shooting offense.

He gestured at the TV, a little Samsung panel at least twenty years old, and said, “All this shit going on.”

“Anything new?”

“Is there ever? Bullshit threats from one side, bullshit threats from the other. Now and then a bomb goes off. Only difference this time is, the bombs are getting bigger. I guess I won't live to see who's left standing. I can't bring myself to feel much regret about that.” He raised his hand—it shook a little—and smoothed the wing of graying hair that was supposed to disguise his baldness. The expression in his eyes grew vague. “I want to tell you something. While I'm thinking of it, before I forget. That's a problem these days, forgetting things.”

“Okay. What is it?”

“You know I sold the business. Couldn't stand up to those chain-store bastards forever. So there's money. Enough to pay for my dying, enough to support Laura. And plenty left over. I had my lawyer draft a final will. Most of the money's going to Aaron. I'm sorry if you feel insulted by that. The thing is, Aaron has been around when you weren't. He doesn't need the cash, but he'll be a good custodian. I set up a trust fund for Geddy, and Aaron agreed to manage it. If it ever happens you fall on hard times, talk to Aaron—I told him to let you have whatever you need, if you really need it.”

“Okay.”

“Like I said, it's not an insult. I'm thinking of you. It's just that…” His words faded; maybe he lost track of the thought.

But I wasn't insulted, and I understood perfectly. The family was a hierarchy. My father had always been the indisputable boss. Aaron had never openly challenged that presumption, though I suspected he honored it only when he was within spitting distance of the old man. He performed the part of the dutiful son impeccably, whereas I had left Schuyler at the first opportunity and found myself a more congenial sort of family. That was the sin my father could never forgive.