G133: What Have We Done (4 page)

Did the animal not get tired? Did it not require something? George would occasionally hose off the curry from the unmolested meat in his takeout container, and scrape it into the dog bowl, only to clean it up, untouched, days later. The animal viewed these meals with calm detachment. How alienating it was, to live with a creature
so ungoverned by appetites. This thing could go hungry. It had a long game. What kind of level playing field was that? George felt entirely outmatched.

One night George tried to force the issue. He wanted more from it, and it wanted absolutely nothing from George, so perhaps, as the superior species, with broader perspective in the field, George needed to step up and trigger change. Be a leader. Rule by example. Maybe he had been playing things too passive? He pulled the thing onto his lap. He stroked its wet, stubbled skin, put on one of those TV shows that pets are supposed to like. No guns, just soft people swallowing each other.

The dog survived the affection. It trembled under George’s hands. Some love is strictly clinical. Maybe this was like one of those deep-tissue massages that releases difficult feelings? George forced his hand along the dog’s awful back, wondering why anyone would willingly touch another living thing. What a disaster of feelings it stirred up, feelings that seemed to have no purpose other than to suffocate him. Finally the dog turned in George’s lap, as if standing on ice, and carefully licked its master’s face. Just once, and briefly. A studied, scientific lick, using the tongue to gain important information. Then it bounced down to its corner again, where it sat and waited.

M
onths after his father’s death there was still no word from Pattern. After he’d returned from California, and cleansed himself in the flat, gray atmosphere of New York, George had sent her another email, along the lines of, ‘Hey Pat, I’m back. I’ve got Dad’s dust. Let me know if you want to come say goodbye to it. There are still some slots free. Visiting hours are whenever you fucking want. —G.’

He never heard back, and figured he wasn’t going to – on the Internet now Pattern was referred to as a fugitive wanted by Europol, for crimes against the environment – but one night, getting into bed, his phone made an odd sound. Not its typical ring. It took him a minute to track the noise to his phone, and at first he thought it must be broken, making some death noise before it finally shut down.

He picked it up and heard a long, administrative pause.

‘Please hold for Pattern,’ a voice said.

He waited and listened. Finally a woman said hello.

‘Hello?’ said George. ‘Pattern?’

‘Who’s this?’ It wasn’t Pattern. This person sounded like a bitchy tween, entitled and shrill.

‘You called me,’ explained George.

‘Who’s on the line,’ said the teenager, ‘or I’m hanging up.’

George was baffled. Did a conversation with his sister really require such a cloak-and-dagger ground game? He hung up the phone.

The phone rang again an hour later, and it was Pattern herself.

‘Jesus, George, what the fuck? You hung up on my staff?’

‘First of all, Hello,’ he said. ‘Secondly, let’s take a look at the transcript and I’ll show you exactly what happened. Your team could use some human behavior training. But forget all that. What on earth is new, big sister?’

She wanted to see him, she said, and she’d found a way for that to be possible. They had things to discuss.

‘No shit,’ said George. He couldn’t believe he was actually talking to her.

‘Wait so where are you?’ she asked. ‘I don’t have my thing with me.’

‘What thing.’

‘I mean I don’t know where you are.’

‘And your thing would have told you? Have you been tracking me?’

‘Oh c’mon, you asshole.’

‘I’m in New York.’

She laughed.

‘What?’

‘No, it’s just funny. I mean it’s funny that you still call it that.’

‘What would I call it?’

‘No, nothing, forget it. I’m sorry. I’m just on a different, it’s, I’m thinking of something else. Forget it.’

‘O-kay. You are so fucking weird and awkward. I’m not really sure I even want to see you.’

‘Georgie!’

‘Kidding, you freak. Can you like send a jet for me? Or a pod? Or what the fuck is it you guys even make now? Can you break my face into dust and make it reappear somewhere?’

‘Ha ha. I’ll send a car for you. Tomorrow night. Seven o’clock.’

G
eorge met Pattern in the sky bar of a strange building, which somehow you could not see from the street. Everyone had thought the developers had purchased the air rights and then very tastefully decided not to use them. Strike a blow for restraint. The elevator said otherwise. This thing was a fucking tower. How had they done that? The optics for that sort of thing, Pattern explained to him, had been around for fifteen years or more. Brutally old-fashioned technology. Practically caveman. She thought it looked cheesy at this point.

‘A stealth scraper,’ said George, wanting to sound appreciative.

‘Hardly. It’s literally smoke and mirrors,’ Pattern said. ‘I am not fucking kidding. And it’s kind of gross. But whatever. I love this bar. These cocktails are fucking violent. There’s a frozen pane of pork in this one. Ridiculously thin. They call it pork glass.’

‘Yum,’ said George, absently.

The funny thing about the bar, which was only just dawning on George, was that it was entirely free of people. And deadly silent. Out the window was a view of the city he’d never seen. Whenever he looked up he had the sensation that he was somewhere else. In Europe. In the past. On a film set. Asleep. Every now and then a young woman crept out from behind a curtain to touch Pattern on the wrist, moving her finger back and forth. Pattern would smell her wrist, make a face, and say something unintelligible.

But here she was, his very own sister. It was like looking at his mother and his father and himself, but refined, the damaged cells burned off. The best parts of them, contained in this one person.

‘First of all, George,’ Pattern said. ‘Dad’s girlfriend? Really?’

‘Trish?’

‘What a total pig you are. Does this woman need to be abused and neglected by two generations of our family?’

‘How could you know anything about that?’

‘Oh cut it out. It astonishes me when I meet people who still think they have secrets. It’s so quaint! You understand that even with your doors closed and lights out . . . Please tell me you understand. I couldn’t bear it if you were that naive. My own brother.’

‘I understand, I think.’

‘That man you pay to watch you while you’re cleaning the house? On your laptop screen?’

‘Guy Fox.’

‘Oh, George, you are a funny young man.’

‘That’s actually a fairly mainstream habit, to have a watcher.’

‘Right, George, it’s happening all over the Middle East, too. A worldwide craze. In Poland they do it live. It’s called a peeping Tom. But who cares. Baby brother is a very strange bird.

‘So,’ she said, scooting closer to him and giving him a luxurious hug. ‘Mom and Dad never told you, huh?’

‘Told me what?’

‘They really never told you?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘I’m just not sure it’s for me to say. Mom and Dad talked about it kind of a lot, I mean we all did. I just figured they’d told you.’

‘What already, Jesus. There’s no one else left to tell me.’

‘You were adopted. That’s actually not the right word. Dad got in trouble at work and his boss forced him to take you home and raise you. You were born out of a donkey’s ass. Am I remembering correctly? That doesn’t sound right. From the ass of an ass.’

He tried to smile.

‘I’m just kidding, George, Jesus. What is wrong with people?’

‘Oh my God, right?’ said George. ‘Why can’t people entertain more stupid jokes at their own expense? Je-sus. It’s so frustrating! When, like, my world view isn’t supported by all the little people beneath me? And I can’t demean people and get an easy laugh? It’s so not fair!’

‘Oh fuck off, George.’

They smiled. It felt really good. This was just tremendously nice.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said, trying harder than usual to be serious. ‘Mom punted so long ago I can’t even remember her smell. And Dad was just a stranger, you know? He was so formal, so polite. I always felt like I was meeting him for the first time.’

He tried to sound like his father, like any father: ‘Hello, George, how are you? How was your flight? Well that’s grand. What’s your life like these days?’

Pattern stared at him.

‘Honestly,’ said George. ‘I can’t stand making small talk with people who have seen me naked. Or who fed me. Or spanked me. I mean once you spank someone, you owe them a nickname. Was that just me or were Mom and Dad like completely opposed to nicknames? Or even just Honey or Sweetie or any of that.’

‘Jesus, George, what do you want from people? You have some kind of intimacy fantasy. Do you think other people go around hugging each other and holding hands, mainlining secrets and confessions into each other’s veins?’

‘I have accepted the fact of strangers,’ said George. ‘After some struggle. But it’s harder when they are in your own family.’

‘Violin music for you,’ said Pattern, and she snapped her fingers.

He looked up, perked his ears, expecting to hear music.

‘Wow,’ she marveled. ‘You think I’m very powerful, don’t you?’

‘Honestly, I don’t know. I have no idea. Are you in trouble? Everything I read is so scary.’

‘I am in a little bit of trouble, yes. But don’t worry. It’s nothing. And you. You seem so sad to me,’ Pattern said. ‘Such a sad, sad young man.’ She stroked his face, and it felt ridiculously, treacherously comforting.

George waved this off, insisted that he wasn’t. He just wanted to know about her. He really did. Who knows where she’d vanish to after this, and he genuinely wanted to know what her life was like, where she lived. Was she married? Had she gotten married in secret or something?

‘I don’t get to act interested and really mean it,’ George explained. ‘I mean ever, so please tell me who you are. It’s kind of a selfish question, because I can’t figure some things out about myself, so maybe if I hear about you, something will click.’

‘Me? I tend to date the house-husband type. Self-effacing, generous, asexual. Which is something I’m really attracted to, I should say. Men with Low T, who go to bed in a full rack of pajamas. That’s my thing. I don’t go for the super-carnal hetero men; they seem like zoo animals. Those guys who know what they want, and have weird and highly developed skills as lovers, invariably have the worst possible taste – we’re supposed to congratulate them for knowing that they like to lick butter right off the stick. What a nightmare, to be subject to someone else’s expertise. The guys I tend to date, at first, are out to prove that they endorse equality, that my career matters, that my interests are primary – they make really extravagant displays of selflessness, burying all of their own needs. I go along with it, and over time I watch them deflate and lose all reason to live, by which point I have steadily lost all of my attraction for them. I imagine something like that is mirrored in the animal kingdom, but honestly that’s not my specialty. I should have an airgun in my home so I could put these guys out of their misery. Or a time-lapse video documenting the slow and steady loss of self-respect they go through. It’s a turn-off, but, you know, it’s my turn-off. Part of what initially arouses me is the feeling that I am about to mate with someone who will soon be ineffectual and powerless. I’ve come to rely on the arc. It’s part of my process.’

‘You think these guys don’t mean it that they believe in equality?’

‘No, I think they do, and that it has a kind of cost. They just distort themselves so much trying to do the right thing that there’s nothing left.’

‘And you enjoy that?’

‘Well, they enjoy that. They’re driven to it. I’m just a bystander to their quest. And I enjoy that. It’s old school, but I like to watch.’

‘So you are basically fun times to date.’

‘I pull my weight, romantically. I’m not stingy. I supply locations.
I supply funding. Transportation. I’m kind of an executive producer. I can green-light stuff.’

‘Nobody cums unless you say so, right?’

‘That’s not real power,’ she said, as if such a thing was actually under her control. She frowned. ‘That’s bookkeeping. Not my thing at all. Anyway, I think the romantic phase of my life is probably over now. My options won’t be the same. Freedom.’

‘Jail time?’ asked George.

‘It’s not exactly jail for someone like me. But it’s fine if you imagine it that way. That would be nice.’

G
eorge hated to do it. They were having such a good time, and she must get this a lot, but he was her last living blood relative and didn’t he merit some consideration over all the hangers-on who no doubt lived pretty well by buzzing around in her orbit?

‘All right, so, I mean, you’re rich, right? Like insanely so?’

Pattern nodded carefully.

‘You could, like, buy anything?’

‘My money is tied up in money,’ Pattern said. ‘It’s hard to explain. You get to a point where a big sadness and fatigue takes over.’

‘Not me,’ said George. ‘I don’t. Anyway, I mean, it wouldn’t even make a dent for you to, you know, solve my life financially. Just fucking solve it. Right?’

Pattern smiled at him, a little too gently, he thought. It seemed like a bad-news smile.

‘You know the studies, right?’

Dear God Jesus. ‘What studies?’

‘About what happens when people are given a lot of money. People like you, with the brain and appetites of an eleven-year-old.’

‘Tell me.’ He’d let the rest of the comment go.

‘It’s not good.’

‘Well I don’t fucking want it to be good. I want it to be fun.’

‘I don’t think it’s very fun, either, I’m afraid.’

‘Don’t be afraid, Pattern. Leave that to me. I will be very afraid,
I will be afraid for two, and never have to worry about money again. Depraved, sordid, painful. I’ll go for those. Let me worry about how it will feel.’