The Affinities (3 page)

“You ever regret not joining?”

“I regret not having what so many of our clients find so useful and empowering. Sure. But I made my decision when I married my husband, and I'm happy with it.”

“Which Affinity did you qualify for?”

“Now
that's
a personal question. But I'm a Tau, for what it's worth. And I take some comfort from knowing I have a place to go, if I ever need to call on people I can really trust. But let's get on with business, okay?”

*   *   *

The next day I got a call from Jenny Symanski.

Some people thought of Jenny as my girlfriend. I wasn't sure I was one of those people. That wasn't a dig at Jenny. It was just that our relationship had a perpetually unsettled quality, and neither of us liked to name it.

“Hey,” she said. “Is this a good time?”

She was calling from Schuyler, my home town. Schuyler is in upstate New York, and all my family were there. I had left Schuyler two years ago for a diploma program in graphic design at Sheridan College, and since then I had seen Jenny only on occasional visits home. “Good a time as any,” I said.

“You sure? You sound kind of distracted.”

“I kind of am. I think I told you I'm up for an internship at a local ad agency, but I haven't heard back. Classes this morning, but I'm home now, so…”

“I don't want to be a nuisance when there's so much else on your mind.”

She was being weirdly solicitous. “Don't worry about it.”

“You seem to be dealing with the situation pretty well.”

“What situation? The internship? The job market sucks—what else is new?”

Long pause.

“Jenny?”

“Oh,” she said. “
Shit
. Aaron didn't call you, did he?”

“No, why would Aaron call me?” Another silence. “Jen, what's up?”

“Your grandmother's in the hospital.”

I sank onto the sofa. Dex and I had snagged the sofa when a neighbor put it out for the trash. The cushions were compacted and threadbare, and no matter how you shifted around you could never get comfortable. But right then I felt anesthetized. You could have pierced me with a sword. “What happened?”

“Okay, no, she's basically all right. Okay? Not dead. Not dying. Apparently she woke up in the night with pain in her chest, sweating, puking. Your dad called 911.”

“Jesus, Jen—a heart attack?”

I pictured Grammy Fisk in her raggedy old flannel nightgown, white with a pink flower pattern. She loved that nightgown, but she wouldn't let any of us see her in it before nine at night or after six in the morning—and strangers
never
saw her in it. The prospect of paramedics invading her bedroom would have horrified her.

“That's what everybody thought. But I was over at your dad's house this morning and he said now the doctors are telling him it was her gallbladder.”

I wasn't sure what that meant, but it sounded slightly less terrifying than a cardiac condition. “So what do they do, operate on her?”

“That's not clear. She's still in the hospital for tests, but they think she can come home tomorrow. There's something about diet and medication, I don't really remember…”

“I guess that's good…”

“Under the circumstances.”

“Yeah, under the circumstances.”

“I'm really sorry to be the one to tell you.”

“No,” I said. “No, I appreciate it.”

And that was true. In some ways, it was better getting the bad news from Jenny than from Aaron. My brother didn't entirely approve of me
or
Grammy Fisk. My father had underwritten Aaron's MBA, and Aaron currently co-managed the family business. But the only one willing to pay for my graphic design courses had been Grammy Fisk, and she had done it over my father's objections.

A question occurred to me. “How did
you
find out about it?”

“Well—Aaron told me.”

The Fisks and the Symanskis had been close for decades. Jenny and I had grown up together; she was always at the house. Still: “Aaron told you but not me?”

“I swear, he said he was going to call. Have you checked your phone for messages?”

I rarely had to check my phone for messages. I didn't get a lot of calls or texts, outside of a few regulars. But I checked. Sure enough, two missed calls from a familiar number. Aaron had tried to get hold of me twice. Both attempts had been yesterday evening, when I had turned off my phone for my session at InterAlia.

*   *   *

I called Aaron and told him I'd heard the news from Jenny. I apologized for not getting back to him sooner.

“Well, turns out it's not such an emergency after all. She's home now.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“She's sleeping, and she needs her rest, so better not.”

It was easy to picture Aaron standing at the ancient landline phone in the living room back home. It was hot in Toronto and probably just as hot in Schuyler. The front windows would be open, curtains dappled with the shade of the willow tree in the yard. The inside of the house would be sultry and still, because my father didn't believe in air-conditioning before the first of June.

And Aaron himself: dressed the way he always dressed when he wasn't doing business, black jeans, white shirt, no tie. Dabbing a bead of sweat from his forehead with the knuckle of his thumb.

“How are Dad and Mama Laura taking it?”

Mama Laura was our stepmother.

“Ah, you know Dad. Taking charge. He was practically giving orders to the EMT guys. But worried, of course. Mama Laura's been in the kitchen most of the day. Neighbors keep coming by with food, like somebody died. It's nice, but we're up to our asses in lasagna and baked chicken.”

“What about Geddy?”

Geddy, our twelve-year-old stepbrother, Mama Laura's gift to the family. “He seems to be dealing with it,” Aaron said, “but Geddy's a puzzle.”

“Tell Grammy Fisk I'll be there by tomorrow morning.” I would have to rent a car. But the drive was only five hours, if the border crossing didn't slow me down.

“She says not.”

“Who says not?”

“Grammy Fisk. She said to tell you not to come.”

“Those were her words?”

“Her words were something like,
You tell Adam not to mess up his schoolwork by running down here after me.
And she's right. She's hardy as a hen. Wait till end of term, would be my advice.”

Maybe, but I would have to hear it directly from Grammy Fisk.

“You'll be paying us a visit sometime in the next couple of months anyway, right?”

“Right. Absolutely.”

“All right then. I'll put Dad on. He can fill you in on what the doctors are saying.”

*   *   *

My father spent ten minutes repeating everything he'd learned about the nature and function of the gallbladder, the sum-up being that Grammy Fisk's condition was non-trivial but far from life-threatening. By that time she was awake and able to pick up the bedroom extension. She thanked me for my concern but urged me to stay put. “I don't want you ruining the education I paid for, just because I had a bad night. Come see me when I'm feeling better. I mean that, Adam.”

I could hear the fatigue in her voice, but I could hear the determination, too.

“I'll see you in a few weeks, no matter what.”

“And I look forward to it,” she said.

*   *   *

My third test session was the most uncomfortable. They strapped me under the dome of an MRI scanner for half an hour. Miriam said the scan would be combined with EEG data from my earlier sessions to help calibrate the results.

The next evening it was back to the headband, this time listening to recorded voices speak a series of bland, cryptic English sentences.
If it rains, you can use my umbrella. We saw you at the store yesterday.

“In the end,” Miriam said, “the point of all this is to locate you on the grid of the human socionome.”

I took her word for it. The details were a well-kept secret. Meir Klein, who invented the test, had done basic research in social teleodynamics when he was teaching at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, outlining what it would take to construct a taxonomy of human social behavior. But the meat of his work had taken place after he was hired by InterAlia, and the details were locked behind airtight nondisclosure agreements. The process by which people were assorted into the twenty-two Affinities had never been fully described or peer-reviewed. The best anyone could say was that it seemed to work. And that was good enough for me.

I liked the idea of it. I wanted it to be true. We're the most cooperative species on the planet—is there anything you own that you built entirely with your own hands, from materials you extracted from nature all by yourself? And without that network of cooperation we're as vulnerable as three-legged antelopes in lion territory. But at the same time: what a talent we have for greed, for moral indifference, for wars of conquest on every scale from kindergarten to the U.N. Who hasn't longed for a way out of that bind? It's as if we were designed for life in some storybook family, in a house where the doors are never locked and never need to be. Every half-baked utopia is a dream of that house. We want it so badly we refuse to believe it doesn't or can't exist.

Had Meir Klein found a way into that storybook house? He never made that claim, at least not explicitly. But even if all he had found was the next best thing—well, hey, it was
the next best thing
.

*   *   *

The final test session was four hours in front of a monitor with my body hooked up to some serious telemetry. Miriam appeared during breaks, bearing gifts of coffee and oatmeal raisin cookies.

The program running on the monitor was a series of interactive tests, using photographs, symbols, text, video, and occasional spoken words. The computer correlated my test performance with my facial expressions, eye movements, posture, blood pressure, EEG readings, and the beating of my heart.

The tests themselves were pretty simple. There was a spatial-relations test that worked like a game of Tetris. There was an animated puzzle involving a runaway train full of passengers headed for certain destruction: do you throw a switch that causes the train to change tracks, saving all the passengers but killing a couple of pedestrians who happen to be in the way, or do you let the train roll on, dooming everyone aboard it? Some of the tests seemed to touch on identifiable themes (ethnicity, gender, religion), but the majority were pretty obscure. At the end of four hours it began to seem like what was really being tested was my patience.

Then the screen went blank and Miriam popped in, smiling. “That's it!”

“That's it?”

“All done, Mr. Fisk, except for the analysis! You should get your results within a couple of weeks, maybe sooner.”

She helped me peel off the headset and the telemetry patches. “Hard to believe it's over,” I said.

“On the contrary,” she said. “With any luck, you're just getting started.”

*   *   *

I stepped out of the building into a hot, humid night. The last of the business crowd had gone home, abandoning the neighborhood to speeding cabs and a couple of sparsely populated coffee shops. I walked to the College Street subway station, where a homeless guy was propped against a wall with a change cup in front of him. He gave me a look that was either imploring or contemptuous. I put a dollar coin in his cup. “Bless you,” he said. At least I think the word was “bless.”

By the time I got back to my apartment a drilling rain had begun to fall. The short walk from the subway left me drenched, but that didn't seem like such a bad thing once I had a towel in my hand and a roof over my head. In the bathroom I looked at my cheek where the cop had clubbed me. The bruise was fading. All that was left of the gash was a pale pink line. But I dreamed of the incident that night, when the room was dark and the rain on the window sounded like the roar of massed voices.

*   *   *

Ten days passed.

Two interviews for a summer internship went nowhere. I finished an end-of-term project (a Flash video animation) and handed it in. I fretted about my future.

On the tenth day I opened an email from InterAlia Inc. My test results had been assessed, it said, and I had been placed in an Affinity. Not just any Affinity, but Tau, one of the big five. My test fees would be debited to my credit card, the email went on to say. And I would be hearing from a local tranche shortly.

*   *   *

I was headed to school when my phone burbled. I didn't let it go to voice mail. I picked up like a good citizen.

It was Aaron. “Things took a turn for the worse,” he said. “Grammy Fisk's back in the hospital. And this time you really need to come down and see her.”

 

CHAPTER 2

The town of Schuyler was situated at the northeastern corner of the New York State county of Onenia. “Onenia” was a corruption of the Mohawk word
onenia'shon:'a,
meaning “various rocks,” and for more than a century Schuyler's primary business had been its quarries: pits carved into the fragile karst that underlay the county's unproductive farmland. Since the 1970s most of those quarries had grown unprofitable and had been shut down, left to fill with greasy brown water that rose in the spring and evaporated over the course of the long summers. As a child I had been warned never to play around the old quarries, and of course every kid I knew had gone there as often as possible, biking down county roads where grasshoppers flocked in the heat like flurries of buzzing brown snow.

On the way to my father's house I drove past trailheads I still recognized, hidden entrances to pressed-earth roads where trucks had once carted limestone to stoneworks across the state. Stone from Onenia County had helped build scores of libraries and government buildings, back when libraries and government buildings still commanded a certain respect. On Schuyler's main street there were a few remnants of that era: an old bank, gutted to house a Gap store but still wearing its limestone fa
ç
ade; a Carnegie library in the Federal style, with a tiny acreage of public park to separate it from the liquor store on one side and the welfare office on the other. All dark now: I had left Toronto in an afternoon drizzle and reached Schuyler just after a rainy sunset.