Spin (25 page)

Quietly, I levered myself up and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. The clinic was dark, my cell was dark, the only light was moonlight through the high window… which was suddenly eclipsed.

I looked up and saw the silhouette of En’s head like a hovering planet. “Pak Tyler!” he whispered.

“En! You scared me.” In fact the shock had drained the strength out of my legs. I had to lean on the wall to stay upright.

“Let me in!” En said.

So I padded barefoot to the side door and threw the latch.

The breeze that rushed in was warm and moist. En rushed in after it. “Let me talk to Ibu Ina!”

“She’s not here. What’s up, En?”

He was deeply disconcerted. He pushed his glasses up the bump of his nose. “But I need to talk to her!”

“She’s at home tonight. You know where she lives?”

En nodded unhappily. “But she said to come
here
and tell her.”

“What? I mean, when did she say this?”

“If a stranger asks about the clinic I have to come here and tell her.”

“But she’s not—” Then the significance of what he’d said pierced the fog of incipient fever. “En, is someone in town asking about Ibu Ina?”

I coaxed the story out of him. En lived with his family in a house behind a
warung
(a food stall) in the heart of the village, only three doors away from the office of the mayor, the
kepala desa
. En, on wakeful nights, was able to lie in his room and listen to the murmur of conversation from the
warung’s
customers. Thus he had acquired an encyclopedic if poorly understood store of village gossip. After dark it was usually the men who sat talking and drinking coffee, En’s father and uncles and neighbors. But tonight there had been two strangers who arrived in a sleek black car and approached the lights of the
warung
bold as water buffalo and asked without introducing themselves how to find the local clinic. Neither was ill. They wore city clothes and behaved rudely and carried themselves like policemen, and so the directions they received from En’s father were vague and incorrect and would send them in exactly the wrong direction.

But they were looking for Ina’s clinic and, inevitably, they would find it; in a village this size the misdirection was at best only a delay. So En had dressed himself and scooted out of the house unseen and come here, as instructed, to complete his bargain with Ibu Ina and to warn her of the danger.

“Very good,” I told him. “Good work, En. Now you need to go to the house where she lives and tell her these things.” And in the meantime I’d gather my possessions and exit the clinic. I figured I could hide myself in the adjoining rice fields until the police had been and gone. I was strong enough to do that. Probably.

But En crossed his arms and backed away from me. “She said to wait
here
for her.”

“Right. But she won’t be back till morning.”

“She sleeps here most nights.” He craned his head, looking past me down the darkened clinic hallway as if she might step out of the consulting room to reassure him.

“Yeah, but not tonight. Honest. En, this could be dangerous. These people might be Ibu Ina’s enemies, understand?”

But some fierce innate stubbornness had possessed him. As friendly as we had been, En still distrusted me. He trembled a moment, wide-eyed as a lemur, then darted around me and deeper into the moonlit clinic, calling, “
Ina! Ina
!”

I chased him, switching on lights as I went.

Trying at the same time to think coherently about this. The rude men looking for the clinic could be New Reformasi from Padang, or local cops, or they might be working for Interpol or the State Department or whatever other agency the Chaykin administration chose to swing like a hammer.

And if they were here looking for me, did that mean they had found and interrogated Jala, Ina’s ex-husband? Did it mean they had already arrested Diane?

En blundered into a darkened consulting room. His forehead collided with the extended stirrups of an examination table and he fell back on his rump. When I reached him he was crying soundlessly, frightened, tears rolling down his cheeks. The welt above his left eyebrow was angry-looking but not dangerous.

I put my hands on his shoulders. “En, she’s not here. Really. She’s really, really not here. And I know for a fact she didn’t mean for you to stay here in the dark when something bad might happen. She wouldn’t do that, would she?”

“
Uh
,” En said, conceding the point.

“So you run home, okay? You run home and stay there. I’ll take care of this problem and we’ll both see Ibu Ina tomorrow. Does that make sense?”

En attempted to exchange his fear for a judicial look. “I think so,” he said, wincing.

I helped him to his feet.

But then there was the sound of gravel crunching under tires in front of the clinic, and we both crouched down again.

We hurried to the reception room, where I peered through the slatted bamboo blinds with En behind me, his small hands knotted into the fabric of my shirt.

The car idled in the moonlight. I didn’t recognize the model but judging by the inky shine it looked relatively new. There was a brief flare from the interior darkness that might have been a cigarette lighter. Then a much brighter light, a high-beam spotlight sweeping out from the passenger-side window. It came through the blinds and cast rolling shadows over the hygiene posters on the opposite wall. We ducked our heads. En whimpered.

“Pak Tyler?” he said.

I closed my eyes and discovered it was hard to open them again. Behind my eyelids I saw pinwheels and starbursts. The fever again. A small chorus of interior voices repeated,
The fever again, the fever again
. Mocking me.

“Pak Tyler!”

This was very bad timing.
(Bad timing, bad timing
…) “Go to the door, En. The side door.”

“Come with me!”

Good advice. I checked the window again. The spotlight had winked out. I stood and led En down the corridor and past the supply cupboards to the side door, which he had left open. The night was deceptively quiet, deceptively inviting; a span of pressed earth, a rice field; the forest, palm trees black in the moonlight and tossing their crowns softly.

The bulk of the clinic was between us and the car. “Run straight for the forest,” I said.

“I know the way—”

“Stay away from the road. Hide if you have to.”

“I know. Come with me!”

“I can’t,” I said, meaning it literally. In my present condition the idea of sprinting after a ten-year-old was absurd.

“But—” En said, and I gave him a little push and told him not to waste time.

He ran without looking back, disappearing with almost alarming speed into the shadows, silent, small, admirable. I envied him. In the ensuing quiet I heard a car door open and close.

The moon was three-quarters full, ruddier and more distant than it used to be, presenting a different face than the one I remembered from my childhood. No more Man in the Moon; and that dark ovoid scar across the lunar surface, that new but now ancient
mare
, was the result of a massive impact that had melted regolith from pole to equator and slowed the moon’s gradual spiral away from the Earth.

Behind me, I heard the policemen (I guessed two of them) pounding at the front door, announcing themselves gruffly, rattling the lock.

I thought about running. I believed I could run—not as deftly as En, but successfully—at least as far as the rice field. And hide there, and hope for the best.

But then I thought of the luggage I had left in Ina’s back room. Luggage containing not just clothing but notebooks and discs, small slivers of digital memory and incriminating vials of clear liquid.

I turned back. Inside, I latched the door behind me. I walked barefoot and alert, listening for the sound of the policemen. They might be circling the building or they might make another attempt at the front door. The fever was coming on fast, however, and I heard many things, only some of which were likely to be real sounds.

Back in Ina’s hidden room the overhead light was still out. I worked by touch and moonlight. I opened one of the two hard-shell suitcases and shoved in a stack of handwritten pages; closed it, latched it, lifted it and staggered. Then I picked up the second case for starboard ballast and discovered I could barely walk.

I nearly tripped over a small plastic object which I recognized as Ina’s pager. I stopped, put down the luggage, grabbed the pager and slid it into my shirt pocket. Then I drew a few deep breaths and lifted the cases again; mysteriously, they seemed to have grown even heavier. I tried to tell myself
You can do this
, but the words were trite and unconvincing and they echoed as if my skull had expanded to the size of a cathedral.

I heard noises from the back door, the one Ina kept closed with an exterior padlock: clinking metal and the groaning of the latch, maybe a crowbar inserted between the hasps of the lock and twisted. And pretty soon, inevitably, the lock would give way and the men from the car would come inside.

I staggered to the third door, En’s door, the side door, unlatched it and eased it open in the blind hope that no one was standing outside. No one was. Both intruders (if there were only two of them) were at the back. They whispered as they worked the lock, their voices faintly audible over frog-choruses and the small sound of the wind.

I wasn’t sure I could make it to the concealment of the rice field without being seen. Worse, I wasn’t sure I could make it without falling down.

But then there was a loud percussive bang as the padlock parted company with the door. The starting gun, I thought. You can do this, I thought. I gathered up my luggage and staggered barefoot into the starry night.

“Have you seen this?” Molly Seagram waved her hand at a magazine on the reception desk as I entered the Perihelion infirmary. Her expression said:
Badjuju, evil omens
. It was the glossy print edition of a major monthly news magazine, and Jason’s picture was on the cover. Tag line: the very private personality BEHIND THE PUBLIC FACE OF THE PERIHELION PROJECT.

“Not good news, I take it?”

She shrugged. “It’s not exactly flattering. Take it. Read it. We can talk about it over dinner.” I had already promised her dinner. “Oh, and Mrs. Tuckman is prepped and waiting in stall three.”

I had asked Molly not to refer to the consulting rooms as “stalls,” but it wasn’t worth arguing about. I slid the magazine into my mail tray. It was a slow, rainy April morning and Mrs. Tuckman was my only scheduled patient before lunch.

She was the wife of a staff engineer and had been to see me three times in the last month, complaining of anxiety and fatigue. The source of her problem wasn’t hard to divine.

Two years had passed since the enclosure of Mars, and rumors of layoffs abounded at Perihelion. Her husband’s financial situation was uncertain and her own attempts to find work had foundered. She was going through Xanax at an alarming pace and she wanted more, immediately.

“Maybe we should consider a different medication,” I said.

“I don’t want an antidepressant, if that’s what you mean.” She was a small woman, her otherwise pleasant face crunched into a fierce frown. Her gaze flickered around the consulting room and alighted for a time on the rain-streaked window overlooking the landscaped south lawn. “Seriously. I was on Paraloft for six months and I couldn’t stop running to the bathroom.”

“When was this?”

“Before you came. Dr. Koenig prescribed it. Of course, things were different then. I hardly saw Carl at all, he was so busy. Lots of lonely nights. But at least it looked like good, steady employment in those days, something that would last. I guess I should have counted my blessings. Isn’t that in my, um, chart or whatever you call it?”

Her patient history was open on the desk in front of me. Dr. Koenig’s notes were often difficult to decipher, though he had kindly used a red pen to highlight matters of pressing urgency: allergies, chronic conditions. The entries in Mrs. Tuckman’s folder were prim, terse, and ungenerous. Here was the note about Paraloft, discontinued (date indecipherable) at patient’s request, “patient continues to complain of nervousness, fears for future.” Didn’t we all fear for the future?

“Now we can’t even count on Carl’s job. My heart was beating so hard last night—I mean, very rapidly,
unusually
rapidly. I thought it might be, you know.”

“What?”

“You know. CVWS.”

CVWS—cardiovascular wasting syndrome—had been in the news the last few months. It had killed thousands of people in Egypt and the Sudan and cases had been reported in Greece, Spain, and the southern U.S. It was a slow-burning bacterial infection, potential trouble for tropical third world economies but treatable with modern drugs. Mrs. Tuckman had nothing to fear from CVWS, and I told her so.

“People say they dropped it on us.”

“Who dropped what, Mrs. Tuckman?”

“That disease. The Hypotheticals. They dropped it on us.”

“Everything I’ve read suggests CVWS crossed over from cattle.” It was still mainly an ungulate disease and it regularly decimated cattle herds in northern Africa.

“Cattle. Huh. But they wouldn’t necessarily
tell
you, would they? I mean, they wouldn’t come out and announce it on the news.”

“CVWS is an acute illness. If you did have it you’d have been hospitalized by now. Your pulse is normal and your cardio is fine.”

She looked unconvinced. In the end I wrote her a prescription for an alternative anxiolytic—essentially, Xanax with a different molecular side chain—hoping the new brand name, if not the drug itself, would have a useful effect. Mrs. Tuckman left the office mollified, clutching the script in her hand like a sacred scroll.

I felt useless and vaguely fraudulent.

But Mrs. Tuckman’s condition was far from unique. The whole world was reeling with anxiety. What had once looked like our best shot at a survivable future, the terraforming and colonization of Mars, had ended in impotence and uncertainty. Which left us no future but the Spin. The global economy had begun to oscillate, consumers and nations accumulating debt loads they expected never to have to repay, while creditors hoarded funds and interest rates spiked. Extreme religiosity and brutal criminality had increased in tandem, at home and abroad. The effects were especially devastating in third world nations, where collapsing currencies and recurrent famine helped revive slumbering. Marxist and militant Islamic movements.