Super Born: Seduction of Being (30 page)

Then a realization shot through me,
causing me to sit up in bed. I had three things going for me: I
knew how she looked, I knew she had a daughter, and I had the
computer address from which she had contacted the B.I.B. site. I
would check birth records for the B.I.B.’s child and have Rebecca
Sans interpret the hit log to try to locate that computer. By then,
it was 6:37 a.m.
Hell, I should be up
anyway.

An hour later, I was cleaned and java-ed up,
ready to go. It was just another beautiful Saturday morning,
nothing special. Just any other day—like the day life had first
crawled out of the slime, or the universe had burst into being with
a big bang. Today was the day I would find the B.I.B.

I was full of energy and anticipation, but, at
the same time, my stomach was in knots. And you wouldn’t want to be
standing behind me for any length of time, if you know what I mean.
Call it anticipation and fear or whatever, but I had it—a bad case
too.

When I asked Rebecca for the
computer trace, I had a detailed explanation of my request
prepared, but didn’t get halfway through it. She had not only the
IP address for me within a minute, but all the information tracked
down to the subscriber’s home address.
Damn, she’s good!
I remembered
thinking, like a sap. But when it came time to give me the
information, I could sense a hesitation in her voice. Later I would
realize that she’d been battling the ethical dilemma of whether or
not she owed it me to give me the true information.

I thanked Rebecca wholeheartedly,
hung up, and stared at the address on the paper for a long moment,
as if admiring a priceless prize—the Mona Lisa, perhaps, or a
personal note from god concerning the meaning of life. I cleared my
throat to drive down the acid from my nervous stomach, and then
navigated a route to her house on the computer: trip time,
thirty-seven minutes.
Thirty-seven
minutes
, I thought, feeling like Neil
Armstrong after being given the okay to start his descent for the
lunar landing. Thirty-seven friggin’ minutes to the
B.I.B.

Thirty-seven minutes, my ass! It was almost a
belching, farting, hour later before I coolly slid past her house,
007-like, and parked along the street a block or so down. I sat in
the car watching the door for as long as the untrained could take
it and then began nervously patrolling the sidewalk across the
street from her house.

My body’s reaction to the idea of seeing her
again made me debate leaving and just giving her a call or writing
her an email first. Maybe that was the way to go. Then I thought
about those gray eyes as they had flashed at me in O’Malley’s. I
could feel the warmth of our connection snapping us together like
two magnets of opposite poles; billions of fingers of energy
connecting with a great and comforting force. At least that’s the
way it was in my mind. I just had to convince my stomach and feet
of that.

Frankly, the neighborhood was not what I had
expected. It was an old, rundown part of Scranton—I mean even older
and more rundown than the rest of Scranton. As I walked slowly down
the street, I could see the local residents were either the very
young who had no money, or the very old who had no money: RFDs
lived beside retirees.

I walked past one RFD who wore his jacket on
backward and, when he turned to say hello, he promptly ran into a
small tree. His friend, working on his car in the driveway, laughed
at him for a moment before the hood of his car closed on him. His
neighbor, a little old man, just looked at the trapped RFD from his
front porch and waved his hand in disgust. “I’m not getting you out
of there again, Jimmy,” he said as he stepped inside. “I told you
there’s a stick to hold that up. A stick, you moron!”

The fourth inconspicuous time I belched my way
past her house, I had finally built up the courage to knock on the
door. As I started across the street, I heard the roar and saw the
flash of a beer truck that had suddenly appeared around the corner
and accelerated in front of me. I stepped back, and an RFD on a
bicycle ran straight into a parked car. “I’m okay,” he said,
holding up an arm from the other side of the car.

When I got to the door, the veins in my neck
were pounding like bongos and I was glad I hadn’t tried to have
anything solid for breakfast, if you know what I mean. It was early
on a Saturday morning, so I thought my chances were good that she
would be home. No answer. I tried a second ring and then heard an
unintelligible voice drawing nearer. As the door swung open, I
swear my heart stopped.

In the doorway stood not the B.I.B., but a
middle-aged, dark-haired woman dressed in a robe. I asked her if
there was another woman living there, and she replied in an Eastern
European language. I tried again to make it clear that I was
looking for a blond woman. I doubt she understood half of what I
said, but the “looking for” and “woman” part seemed to incite her.
She grabbed my arm, pulled me in, and closed the door.

She continued speaking in her language, but the
tones became slower and she emphasized the parts that must have
been significant to her. The fact that her words hadn’t sent me
packing implied I was in agreement, bringing a smile to her face.
How did I know what the hell she was saying? She got close and kept
talking while she ran her hands over my shoulders and began
squeezing my arms, each squeeze making her hiss a
little.

I looked around the house in the hope that
someone else was there who spoke English. As I turned, she loosened
the belt and her robe dropped off her shoulders, revealing a very
hairy, very naked, very horny woman who spoke only some language
that I didn’t.

I gracefully tried to back away without
insulting a woman whose cause, I had to admit, I supported
wholeheartedly. If there were a “Horny Women Who Want to Use Me”
committee,” I would be certain to give…regularly. As I shook my
head and began to apologize, the nimble old minx pulled my arm and
swept my legs with her foot, leaving me to fall right on top of
her, while she continued to speak and hiss in her language. She
took hold of my hand and dragged it over her cheek, her breasts,
down her stomach, and finally slipped it into the soaking wet
jungle between her legs while trying to reach up to kiss
me.

The cavalry arrived in the form of a potbellied
old man in pajamas who came waddling into the room—quickly, but
still waddling. He yelled at her. She yelled back. I began my
feverish escape while she tried to push my hand deeper into her
steamy, excited jungle. As he neared us, she turned her attention
to him, I pulled away, and then she got up.

She and the man continued in loud
tones and gestured toward one another while I backed away. The fact
that Mr. Potbelly hadn’t paid me the slightest attention told me
that she
may
have
done this before. They spoke no English, but from the look of them
and their gestures, I imagined that this woman had married a much
older man whose potbelly had grown while something below it had
not.

By the time I closed the door behind me, their
tones had already changed and I heard them begin to laugh amid a
quieter conversation. I guessed the woman’s ready body had given
Mr. Potbelly other ideas. Apparently, someone else had entered the
jungle “l’amour.”

I, on the other hand, was
devastated. Not only had I failed to find the B.I.B., I knew I
didn’t have any hand wipes in the glove compartment.
How could that have been the wrong address?
I looked back one last time to make certain it was
the house Rebecca had given me. I shook my head as I opened the car
door, but then heard a laugh. When I looked down, I heard another
laugh and saw an RFD slide out from under the front of my car and
run into a yard nearby. I shook my head, thinking,
What the
… Then two
more appeared from under the back of my car and ran away, one
tripping over a raised section of the sidewalk, while the other
howled with laughter as he continued to run.

“
I could have killed you!” I
screamed after them, shaking my fist. “Fuckin’ RFD’s!”

I looked under the car and all around, but I
didn’t see any more RFDs—except for the one across the street who
had run his bicycle into the parked car. He remained on the ground
behind the car. He was not holding his hand quite as high as before
and his “I’m okay” didn’t seem quite as believable anymore. After a
minute, I watched his hand plummet, and he began to plea for
water.

I called Rebecca, and she insisted that the
address was the house from which the site had been accessed. That
was the first time I began to doubt anything Rebecca had done.
Plus, she’d told me that she was at home, but I could hear the cars
passing her on a street. Was it possible that she’d been lying to
me—on both counts?

I ended the call and this time, I looked left,
right, left, and right again, before pulling out; you never knew
when a fast-moving beer truck would appear in this
neighborhood.

I started to crash from the lack of sleep and
the overdose of adrenalin even before I got home, in thirty-nine
minutes (still not thirty-seven). I hit the couch and felt
everything drain out of me.

I still knew what she looked like, and I still
had the Super Bowl information to research, but my “ace in the
hole” computer trace had vanished. Could the B.I.B. know that
strange woman I’d met, or have actually been at that house in
RFD/retiree land? I doubted it. I doubted Rebecca and I doubted
myself…again. Welcome home.

Chapter
2
6

Finally

I
couldn’t
tell who the woman was, but every time I passed the kitchen
window, I saw her sitting in her car, and it
seemed like she was looking right at me. She spoke on her cell
phone now and again but spent most of her time staring at my
apartment.

I crouched beneath my window, watching her, and
waited her out, hoping she’d lost sight of me. She seemed to yell
at someone on the phone, and then took a last glance—did she know
she was looking right into my eyes?—before her car sped off with a
squeal. It made my blood run cold. Had someone found me?

I checked the window one more time to be
certain that she was gone, thankful that Paige wasn’t home. Then I
put my fingertips to my mouth as I thought and began pacing the
living room like a caged animal. I hadn’t made any mistakes,
right?

Well, there was the picture from the bar with
the mask on, thanks to too many Miner’s. But that was
it.

No, there was also the fish face picture. But
that was it.

No, there was the contact I’d just made with
the website. But the picture was gone now, right?.

No, there were a million other things that
could have gone wrong; security cameras, witnesses, fingerprints,
DNA, my own daughter might have figured it out. I started to feel
paranoid. If I kept at this, something was certain to go wrong
eventually. Maybe it already had.

I texted Paige; no reply. I panicked and called
her as I mumbled, “Come on, pick up, pick up” with every ring of
the phone.

“
Hi, Mom. What’s up?” Paige said,
and then spoke to someone in the background.

“
You okay?”

“
Well, I just had one of Lori’s meat
loaf sandwiches, so how good can I be?” she asked, and then laughed
to whoever was with her.

“
Nothing weird going on over
there?”

“
Other than Lori painting her
bathroom green…again?”

“
There aren’t any creepy people
hanging around over there, are there?”

Paige burst out laughing. “Yeah, this house is
full of them!”

“
Okay, just wanted to check in with
you.”

“
Okay…oh, Mom? Is it okay if Kelly
and I hit a movie tonight? Her mom’s taking us, so you don’t have
to freak out or anything.”

“
Fine. That’s a good idea…love
you.”

“
Love you? Mom, is something
wrong?”

“
Can’t I say I love you?”

“
Sure, but that just sounded a
little creepy.”

“
I don’t care how it sounded. I
don’t say it enough.”

“
Well, okay…love you
too.”

I clicked off the phone and sighed, feeling
relieved. Paige was okay, but it would just be a matter of time if
I weren’t more careful. It seemed that time had come.

* * *

When I blinked and found that it was already
dark in my stylishly sloppy apartment, I knew I had crashed badly.
I didn’t even feel rested, just…nasty. My mobile phone was ringing
merrily somewhere like a joyous bird, which I hated and wanted to
kill. I dug around furiously and finally found it on the floor
beside me. “Yeah,” I said, pushing my hair back out of my
eyes.

“
She’s ’ere!”

“
What?” my bleary voice started.
“Who’s this?” Smooth, ain’t I?

“
It’s me, you old sod, Martin from
O’Malley’s. You told me ta call when she was ’ere and I’m
calling.”

“
Huh?”

“
Your blond bird, remember, the big
tipper? She’s ’ere at her table as we speak!”