The Duration (27 page)

He looked at me like I was crazy.

“What do I look like?” he said.

“You look like a man who could use forty bucks,” I said, taking out my wallet. I wrote my cell number on a card and put it on the desk with two twenties.

“Call that number if he checks in,” I said.

Bowhunter took the cash and looked at the card.

“What's this about?” he asked, buying in.

“I'm afraid I can't tell you that,” I said. “Just call that number if he checks in. Do you understand?”

He nodded. I turned to go.

“And do not engage him.”

Bowhunter's chin quivered, and he nodded. He'd been deputized.

The streets around St. Eustace were empty and dark. I swung the Escalade over around KMC, but couldn't see anything there either. I tried a number for an Elvis LaBeau in Dalton, but it was his dad and it didn't sound like they were close.

The moon was fat and yellow in the black sky, a patchwork of clouds around it. I drove back to Head-Connect, rolled up to security.

“Listen,” I said to the guard, whose name, I knew by now, was also Pete. “Listen, Pete. Were you working Thursday night, when all that stuff went down with the trespasser?”

Pete nodded. We were old buddies by now. Two Petes.

“Well, keep an eye out for him. He's actually a friend of mine who's having a hard time these days, and if he comes back around—I don't think he will—I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know.”

Pete the guard narrowed his eyes.

“Well, Mr. Johansson, obviously we have protocols in place for something like that.”

We were no longer two Petes.

“Oh, you do? Cool,” I said, nodding, trying to salvage the page I wanted to think we were both on. “Okay, then. Have a good night.”

They have protocols. I don't have protocols. They're security guards. I'm just a guy.

This is stupid.

I rolled back up the long drive, leaving the night town and its salty streets behind me. Halfway up, I passed Tudd leading a moonlight snowshoe expedition. Two newcomers, the mother-daughter, one of the Asians. Come with us, he said through my rolled-down window, so I dropped the car with a valet and did.

The woods were lit by the moon and utterly silent. We clomped along in our snowshoes, the snow at this point a hard shell, beaten down by the cold, compressed by previous explorers into a resentful crust. We followed a winding path until it ended at the Magic Meadow, an ancient lawn of tractor-mowed fields, enclosed on all sides by the forest, hidden from the roads and town surrounding it. My father had taken us sledding there as kids, Chick, Jimmer, all of us packing onto plastic shells and toboggans for the long drift down a knoll to the edge of the distant woods. The air had the tang of nearby wildlife, deer asleep in the groves, raccoons foraging along the creek beds.

“Powder tomorrow,” Tudd said in his vague accent. “Good for the skiing.”

“Isn't it late for snow?” asked the mother of the mother-daughter pair.

Tudd shrugged.

“Every winter is different. Last year, very little snow. This year, a good winter.”

“I think it's almost over,” I said. “Right?”

Tudd shrugged again and looked to the sky.

“Famous last words.”

We crossed the meadow, shoes crunching through the crust, the snow frozen on tall grass and brook reeds, like gravel underfoot. I walked next to the Asian man, toward the back, as Tudd led the others through the bent boughs of a passage at the edge of the meadow, back onto the trails to Head-Connect. Many of the marble statues from the heyday of Forsyth Van Nest had remained in the woods when Fleur-de-Lys went under, and the Head-Connect designers were smart enough to leave them there. Now the statues whispered to each other in their ghostly winter tongue, pale torsos and bare breasts and bearded heads, seraphim, blank eyes. You want to know what a gnome is, they could tell you. That and more.

In a half-hour, the lights from the spa's rear entrance began to glow through the trees, a spaceship, a boat in the fog, and we were back.

We unhooked our snowshoes and passed them to Tudd for storage. The mother-daughter team hustled off down the residential corridors toward their room. The mother looked older, but not in a bad way, and the daughter looked taller. She held her mother's hand in the hallway. The rest of us stood around, basking in the warmth and sense of ennoblement that a winter night's hike can evoke. Like we'd just survived something, communally. Nobody went down. Nobody got left behind.

Tudd clapped me on my shoulders and pointed toward a rolling cart set up just inside the spa's rear entryway.

“There is soup,” he said, almost giggling. He was a happy guy after stuff like this. “Carrot-ginger, good after a cold hike. And the saunas are open.”

He gathered the snowshoes and, whistling, headed back out the door.

I ladled some soup into a paper cup and sipped it like espresso. It did taste revivifying. Made me feel like a large, healthy rabbit, just back from a trip to Mr. McGregor's microgreens. I needed to go to my room—Jimmer's room—and pack my stuff up. Get organized. Read through some briefs I'd brought out on Friday. Answer some e-mails or something. At some point soon I needed to get back to Boston, back to work. This hearing ruse wouldn't work for more than a day or so.

I went instead to the nearly empty lobby and searched for Ava Winston, who was probably, I hoped, getting off work. She was standing by the edge of her desk, stacking papers on top of each other. She looked up and saw me coming, a look like the end of a long day had just gotten both longer and less predictable.

I walked up to her and looked around quickly. The oxygen bar was clear. The kombucha tureen was moldering silently. There were some attendants at the front desk, but they wouldn't activate unless a guest approached.

So I kissed her, full on the mouth. Right there in the lobby.

She made a noise of surprise and pushed me away. And damn I thought I might have misjudged things.

“Come with me,” she said, pulling me down a side hallway. “Please.”

I went with her, beginning to formulate an apology for what now felt less like a scene from
Say Anything
and instead maybe a little like assault.

We entered the corridor. She wheeled on me and punched me in the arm. Hard.

“Asshole!” she hissed.

But then she kissed me back, just as hard as the punch.

I'm not going to tell you how the rest of the night unfolded, because I'm a gentleman and I think some things should stay private, at least while they still have potential, but let's just say that when I woke up, alone and late for my 8:30 shiatsu, I could see clearly the benefits, from an emotional and physical standpoint, of a career in high-end health services. I lay in the big bed in Jimmer's suite, its high-thread-count sheets wrinkled and buffeted and whispering whenever I moved my arms, and tried to meditate on the night's events. The things said and done, the promises implicit in them. The flexibility. How staggeringly rested I felt.

We didn't do it, if that's what you're wondering. Didn't seem that big of a deal. I mean, yeah, I took a wide turn around third and sort of juked toward the plate a little bit, but I wasn't going anywhere and she knew it. I didn't need to go anywhere. That was the feeling. Which was good because I'd have been out by a mile. Instead, I could just hold off, play it cool, see a few more pitches. It was a good game, once I apologized for kissing her like that, explained myself as best I could. It had the potential to be a classic.

I hadn't hooked up with anyone besides Kelly in probably four years, if you don't count some mild grinding with a temp paralegal in a broom closet at our firm's Fourth of July/End of Fiscal Year Party during the summer I was an intern. She was now, as I understood it, studying to be a physician's assistant in Quincy. Kelly had been in California; it was before we'd gotten serious and moved in together, and there'd been an open bar. It wasn't much of a transgression, as transgressions go, although I think the paralegal might have been engaged at the time. As for Kelly herself, and the tacit disloyalty the past ten hours might suggest, well, not sure. We weren't exactly staying in touch. Feeling I got was that we were over. She'd set her social media platforms to private, and for all I knew she was clubbing on Melrose, backstroking toward the grotto at the Playboy Mansion, whatever the single kids do on the Westside.

Probably not.

Anyway. I wasn't exactly wracked with guilt, and whatever betrayals were there to dwell on, they felt vague and diffuse. Maybe I should have been dwelling on them more.

I tried that for a second.

Nope, too much. I switched gears and thought about breakfast. Steel-rolled oats? With fresh goji berries? Don't mind if I do. What was a high thread count anyway? A thousand? My hair had a high thread count. Maybe that's why I was so handsome. I moved my arms and legs against the sheets like I was making a very expensive snow angel. My arm was sore from where Ava'd punched me, but the rest of me felt like a million bucks, give or take.

My phone rang from a pants pocket draped over the back of a chair.

I considered three possibilities, maybe four, as I fished it out. But it was the fifth—Jimmer.

“Are you in the big bed?” he asked.

I stopped moving my arms.

“How did you know that?” I asked.

“Dude,” he said. “I would kick your ass if you were not in the big bed. Nice, right?”

I sank back into a pillow. Were the pillows Egyptian and the duvet down? Or the other way around?

“Yeah. Very nice.”

I considered telling him about Ava. Instead, I asked him about Vishy Shetty.

“Sweet girl,” he said. “Very spiritual.”

“You're just saying that because she's Indian.”

“She's Indian?”

I could hear someone in the background.

“Is she there?”

“No,” Jimmer lied. “She wants to know if you've seen Neena.”

“Who's Neena?”

“Joanne. Her sister. You know. The minder.”

“Nope,” I said.

I could hear Jimmer speaking to someone, Vishy, in the background. Then he was back to me.

“Vishy thinks she's following us.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. She's on someone's payroll. The studio, the tabloids. We're not sure which. Don't sweat it.”

I rolled over and looked out the window. The pale winter light was seeping through the shades, high cloud cover, grays and whites.

“How was your conference?” I asked.

More laughing in the background.

“Good. Some really cool stuff.”

“Like what?” I asked. Sounded interesting. Progressive. I liked to stay on the cutting edge.

“Uh, one of these kids is pitching a sort of web search-and-destroy program, like it would hunt through the Internet and delete stuff. But not wholesale slaughter, like a virus. Targeted killings.”

I didn't really get why computer people used such violent language.

“The Internet sounds like a scary place.”

“It is,” said Jimmer. “It is. I mean, it's not if you know how to stay ahead of it. Which is why we're interested in this start-up.”

“Weaponizing again?”

“Well, yeah,” he said, sounding a little defensive. “But the real widespread applications aren't martial. Or maybe it's the other way around—like a Sun Tzu thing. Maybe all applications are martial. Anyway, for example, and, you know, this is confidential, right? I mean, I'm not worried about you, but keep this stuff to yourself, obviously? In the spa? At breakfast. Who knows who is lurking around? Loose lips sink ships and all that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Just hold on a minute while I get off the other line with my broker.”

It only took Jimmer a second to laugh.

“Right. That's not funny. No, but there are all kinds of applications for this stuff. If it works. Like imagine you could program an app to search the web and remove any mention of your name. Shit, every job applicant with a Twitter account would use it. It's like that movie, the one with that guy,
Eternal Sunshine
? Right? Erasing memories. Except instead of working on your own brain, this thing would work on the web.”

I had a vague sense that this sort of thing would be monumental for a certain kind of person engaged in a certain kind of lifestyle, but for me it was sort of remote. I mean, wouldn't people just repost stuff? Wouldn't the truth of what someone said or did remain in the world, whether or not anyone could find it online? But I could also see that both Jimmer and Vishy Shetty were people of this new world, future people, and that for them this sort of thing was probably like growing a pair of wings.

“And you know what they call it?”

I did not know what they called it.

“They call it Webster. Which sucks. But we're gonna call it WolfSpidr. No
e
. Because we prowl the web.”