Omnitopia Dawn (36 page)

“Hey, Dev,” Bob said. “Busy day?” He was a big blond man, a former Olympic shotputter, huge across the shoulders and looking like the archetypal jock—which made the doctorates in child psych and so on all the more surprising for those who weren’t expecting them.

“You have no idea,” Dev said. “How was hers?”

“Active but otherwise uneventful, I’m told,” Bob said. “Ate a good dinner, and only needed two reads of
Wuggie Norple
to get to sleep tonight.”

“Great. Thanks,” Dev said, and headed back to Lola’s bedroom. He slipped into the darkness and found her engaged in her eternal war with her blankets, having knotted them around herself in such a way as to avoid actually getting any warmth out of them. Dev leaned over the bed, unwound the blankets somewhat and rearranged them, then bent over his daughter and just looked at her a moment, listening to her breathe. The silence, the moment of doing nothing but being there, was balm.

He yawned, keeping it silent: then kissed Lola night- night, straightened up, and headed out. A wave for Bob, out into the corridor, down to his own quarters: the thump of the door shutting behind him . . .

The weariness came down on Dev all at once. The living space was on nighttime lighting: Mirabel hadn’t waited for him. Dev sighed—why would she? She knew what his hours were like. He headed straight back for the bedroom, opened the door softly, went in.

The bed was empty.

He stared at it and for several moments simply wasn’t able to understand what he was seeing. “Miri?” he said.

Nothing.

After a moment Dev summoned up enough presence of mind to go over to the house phone and wave it awake. “Night concierge,” he said to it.

“Yes, Mr. Logan?” It was Ian, another of the household staff who couldn’t seem to get casual. But then Ian had been a butler once, and Dev supposed that butlering tended to leave too deep an impression of formality for a mere few years of other employment to erase.

“It’s okay, Ian,” said the voice from behind him. “He’s looking for me.”

Dev turned, saw the shape standing in the doorway, smiled wearily. “Sorry, Ian,” he said.

“No problem, Mr. Logan.”

Dev waved the phone back to sleep. “I was over in your office,” Mirabel said as she came in. She was wearing a large floppy Omnitopia T-shirt over her most beat-up jeans, and she was holding something in her hands. “And where have
you
been?”

“Oh, God,” Dev said, “don’t ask.” He sat down on the bed and dropped his head into his hands for a moment, then rubbed his face. “What a day. And it’s going to get worse.”

“You’re so right,” Mirabel said, sitting down next to him.

He looked at her in complete confusion. “What?”

She showed him what she was carrying. It was a plate. On it was a forlorn-looking bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich that was curling up at the corners.

“Oh, God,” Dev said.

Mirabel scowled at him. “I should make you eat this one,” she said. “Are you insane? No, don’t answer that, I know the answer already!
You are a crazy person!
You’re trying to run a Fortune 500 company on an empty stomach! What do you think your blood sugar is doing? How are your brains supposed to work? Don’t even
try
to tell me: you don’t have any brains to answer with at the moment!”

She shook the sandwich under his nose. Dev made what he hoped would pass for a contrite face and reached out for it. But Mirabel snatched it away from him. “You
are
a nut case,” she said, and put the plate down on the bedside table. “Who knows what’s growing in that mayonnaise by now? One of the cats can have what’s in there, maybe, but
you’re
not getting it.” She opened the drawer in the bedside table and pulled out another BLT, this one still wrapped. “Here. This is fresh. Eat it right this minute or I will never speak to you again until tomorrow.”

Dev sighed and pulled the plastic wrap off the plate. “It’s almost tomorrow already,” he said.

“I wouldn’t try to produce any logical statements just yet if I were you,” Mirabel said. “You’ll just get yourself in more trouble. Shut up and eat.”

Dev ate, and rather to his surprise went from not feeling particularly hungry to feeling ravenous in about six bites, that being how long it took him to finish the sandwich. Mirabel watched with scowling approval, then took the plate away from him.

“Is there another?” Dev said.

“Not for you. You’ll get indigestion if you overdo it this late. You can go get a glass of milk, but that’s it.”

“Yes, Mommy.”

She cuffed him lightly behind the head. “Speaking of whom,
that’s
from Bella. She told me to tell you to stop acting like a big shot and do as you’re told.”

Dev sighed and stretched. “My life is completely owned and operated by women,” he said, and let himself fall backward on the bed.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Mirabel said, and more or less fell over beside him, winding up leaning on one elbow and looking down at him.

“Did you get down to Coldstone finally?” Dev said.

Mirabel nodded. “Lola insisted that I bring you an ice cream, despite the fact that there’s already half a ton of it in the pantry freezer. So if you see a waffle bowl full of half-melted double chocolate chip in the little freezer by the coffee bar, you know what that’s about. Make sure she sees you eat it tomorrow or she’ll worry.”

He nodded and closed his eyes.

“What time is get-up time?” Mirabel said to him.

“Five . . .” Dev muttered.
Oh, God, please don’t let things get any worse between now and then.

“Six,” Mirabel said.

“Five . . .” said Dev. . . .

He never heard himself start to snore.

“You sold your soul,” the voice said conversationally. “Or, no, okay, you
pawned
it. But then did you lose the pawn ticket, or throw it away?”

With a shock like falling out of bed, his eyes flew open.

Darkness . . .

Phil lay there gasping for breath: his heart was racing.
A dream,
he thought at last.
Just a dream.

He boosted himself up in bed, leaning back on his elbows to look around the darkened room. Everything was as it should have been: no sound to be heard anywhere but the soft, never-ending crash of the waves outside on the beach. This time of year, regardless of the mosquitoes, he liked to leave the upstairs windows open to the night and the sea: the on-grounds security was more than adequate to make sure that nobody would ever climb up onto the terrace and come strolling in the bedroom’s open French windows.

You sold your soul,
said the voice again, calm, conversational, as it had sounded in his ear a moment before. Which was strange, because there had been nothing conversational about that dream. In the dream, it had been a shout, a cry of anguish
—
as it had been in reality, years ago.

It was a long time since he’d dreamed about that. It had become like one of those adolescent anxiety dreams that you grow out of, where all your teeth fall out or you haven’t studied for a test and everybody laughs at you. Yet despite the long respite, Phil actively shied away from the memory.
Let the past be the past. No point in letting it run your life! It’s
done.

But now, as sometimes happened, Phil was wondering whether it ever really
was
done. When he and Dev had still been friends, they’d never really fought. Oh, sure, casual squabbles about stuff that wasn’t important. But this one time, when they’d really
fought
over something serious, they had screamed and nearly come to blows. Even now, when he was in private, the memory made Phil go hot with shame and rage.
It wasn’t my fault! It should never have happened! If we were such good friends, one really big fight shouldn’t have been enough to break it up! It can’t have been much of a friendship to start with!

But that was a lie, and he knew it.

Phil cursed, threw the sheets and the light blanket aside, and padded across the polished teak floor toward the French windows. By the center window he paused, pushing aside the gauze curtains that stirred in the sea breeze. Outside, a fainter darkness than the room’s was wrapped around everything, and that dark was featureless. As so often happened in mid-June before the South Fork weather had come fully up to summer temperatures, the mist had rolled in off the water a couple of hours after midnight and now lay blanketing everything. No stars tonight, no moon; and if there was any boat traffic out on the Sound, any fishermen out for the predawn catch, their lights were invisible in the mist.

Phil stood still, listening to the waves. After a moment one more sound added itself: the two-tone foghorn of the Montauk Point light-house, surprisingly carrying tonight through the damp air. For some reason, the mist made it sound sadder than usual, and the sad sound stirred an analogous, irrational sorrow in his gut.

He pushed through the curtains, walked out naked onto the terrace and stood there, feeling the slightly chilly wind on his skin, ignoring the way the hair rose on him at the touch of it.
You’ve forgotten what life’s for!
the furious voice said, years ago, worlds away.
You’ve forgotten fun, you’ve forgotten joy, and whenever you see anyone else having any, you try to get between them and it, and your jealousy drives them away! This isn’t what we’re about! There’s more to our business than money, or there would be, if you hadn’t blown it all out your butt!

I’ll sure as hell never be spending again, not after today, because every penny I put into this business is gone,
and not because I spent it!

He could still feel the rush of cold that ran through him with those words, the incredulous sense that he actually might have gotten something wrong. Phil shook his head and sighed: then leaned on the railing and looked out toward the invisible sea.
Why is all this coming up now?
he thought.

But that was a shrink-type question of the type he’d long since given up asking himself. The one time he’d had a brush with psychotherapy, about five years ago, the shrink had been most unhelpful. “The basic position of the human mind,” he’d said, “is, ‘I am blameless. ’ And when you hear your mind saying that to itself . . . then you know the sound of deception. Because we are none of us are blameless. What distinguishes us is how we handle blame, even
whether
we handle it.” That kind of negative thinking had, after a few sessions, struck Phil as incredibly unhelpful: so after the first month he’d dumped the guy and had never gone back.

Phil, for God’s sake,
why didn’t you listen to Jim?
Jim knew what he was doing! Why does anybody hire a Harvard MBA and then
ignore
him! He told you what the markets were going to do and they
did
that. He told you that you needed to change brokers and get our capital out of those convertible funds, and you said you were going to do that, and you
didn’t
do that. And now all our capital is gone, and we can’t bring the new game out, and my whole investment is lost, and all the work the team and I did is for nothing! You knew what you had to do, and you did nothing!
Why did you do that?!

In the heat of that now ancient-seeming moment, Phil hadn’t been able to find an answer that made any sense. Then the fight had gone off into other, far more personal, more damaging territory, and any attempt to explain himself would have been brushed aside. But eventually Phil realized both that he had never trusted Jim Margoulies’ judgment, and that he had had no good reason on Earth
not
to. He hadn’t discounted Jim’s advice because he thought it was wrong or misguided, but because he honestly thought Dev took Jim more seriously than him. Because Dev and Jim had been friends for longer.
And the more Dev denied it, the more I couldn’t believe him—the more it seemed that Dev really did trust Jim more than he did me, and I could never
win
in that relationship, never even pull equal—

—and when you can’t win, you leave,
his shrink had said to him. Not as a question for once, framed in the nonattributive manner beloved of shrinks everywhere, but a conclusion, drawn out in the open because even the patient had said as much himself and couldn’t possibly be so obtuse as to have missed the message.

Which of course had been the real reason he’d left the shrink, as he was plainly never going to win there, either.

All I wanted to do was prove that Jim wasn’t God, that he could be wrong occasionally, that my instincts were as good as his. Okay,
I
was the one who got it wrong! I would have admitted that eventually! We would have clawed our way back up the ladder eventually, we’d have made it work again if he’d just have committed to stick with me and let me help pull us out of the hole! We’d have been the winners someday!
But Dev hadn’t been willing to give Phil a second chance. That was what Phil still regretted the most about that terrible fight, which had ended everything between them except litigation. And there was no way back, now. Too much bitterness, the ashes of the burned bridges long scattered . . .