Brilliance (33 page)

At first he’d sipped his drinks, feeling on edge. The second of the icy vodkas had taken care of that, and the cider—distilled here, Shannon told him, apples and pears being two of the handful of things that grew well in Wyoming—was cut with a pleasant bitterness.

“Vitamins,” Shannon said. “Most Bs. We eat a lot of meat here, but vegetables are expensive.” She took one shot right after the other, chased that with one of the ciders. There was a lightness to her that he hadn’t seen before, like she was uncoiling. The security of friendly ground. She laughed and joked and ordered more drinks, and somewhere along the line he’d decided, why not.

“So,” she said. “First impressions.”

“I thought you were very pretty, but a bit explosive.”

“Cute.”

“Thank you.” He took a long pull of the cider. “Honestly? Not what I expected.”

“How’s it different?”

He looked around the bar, at the dozen or so other patrons. Young, all of them, and loud. The tables covered with empty glasses. Laughter that broke like a bomb, a whole table falling apart at a joke, following it with a toast. When was the last time he’d sat in a group like that, been lost in a conversation, lived only for a drink?

The selfish focus, the certainty that this moment was all there was, it was familiar. When he’d been eighteen and a soldier, drinking with his buddies had been pursued with the same relentless energy, the same showy self-determination. But there were differences. Everyone was thinner, with the tight-fleshed look of people who didn’t drink enough water, spent a lot of time in the sun. The clothes were light and similar, very functional. Earlier, at the border, he’d thought that the place looked more like the past than the future, and he’d half expected to see big hats and cowboy boots, a generation playing at an older role. He’d been half right; there were a lot of hats, but the boots were all function and bore the marks of hard wear. None of it seemed to follow a fashion, or at least not one he recognized.

“No beer signs,” he said.

She cocked her head.

“A bar like this anywhere else, there would be beer signs. You know, the old-school logos, the Clydesdales. And even the new beers, they make signs that consciously reflect the ones that came before. Because that’s the way it’s done. You brew a beer, you make a sign for it. It’s like a pool table in a bar, even though no one really knows how to play pool anymore. Our grandparents shot pool; we get drunk and whack at the balls with warped sticks. No one thinks about it, but it’s nostalgia. It’s a sense of the past, of the way things are done.”

“Like classic rock,” she said. “I could go the rest of my life without hearing ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ again.”

“There you go. I mean, the Rolling Stones are great. But Credence Clearwater, or the Allman Brothers for the ten-thousandth time? Is anybody moved by their music? Does anybody even
hear
it? It’s nostalgia.”

“Cars,” Shannon said. “Most people live in cities, don’t drive more than a few miles through traffic. So why do car companies keep making big cars that go fast and use a ton of gasoline? What they should be is light and electric and easy to park.”

“I don’t know about that,” Cooper said. “I like big cars that go fast.”

“Old-world thinking,” she said, smiling. “Another round?”

Outside the windows the world turned gold and orange and finally violet.

When they left he was feeling good, not wasted but certainly on the way, the world slippy around the edges. She hailed them an electric cab and gave the driver instructions. Their knees touched in the backseat of the tiny car. Martinis before dinner, and then steaks, an inch-thick rib eye crusted in rock salt and black pepper and grilled a perfect medium-rare. Every bite made him want to melt onto the plate.

He noticed that people around the restaurant noticed them, marked them as tourists, but there didn’t seem to be any threat in it. Newton got its fair share of tourists, and probably thought of it as exporting goodwill.

She ordered a bottle of wine with dinner and matched him glass for glass. Things got hazier, the world shrinking. He knew he was drunk, didn’t care.

Sometime later they were in a basement club. Sleek plastic furniture and low tables, a smoky haze sweet with marijuana. On a small stage a three-piece band—bongo, violin, guitar—played a strange, highly rhythmic melody somewhere between reggae and jazz, the musicians all heading off on complex tangents like mathematical equations, the sounds nearly, but not quite, discordant. Brilliants, he was sure, musicians who could play anything they’d ever heard once and yet never wanted to play the same thing twice, bored with a pattern explored. Shannon was in the bathroom, and he leaned back, listening to the music. The smarter plan for the night would have been to stay in her apartment, study maps and read Epstein’s biography, but he couldn’t make himself care.

She came back swaying, partly to shift through the crowd, partly a hip swing that fit the beat from the band, her legs strong and toned and two more drinks in her hand. “Here you are, Mr. Cappello. Tom.”

He laughed, said, “Thank you, Allison.”

They were on a couch nestled in a corner, and she dropped beside him. She smelled very good. From behind her ear she pulled a neatly rolled joint, then leaned forward and lit it off the candle on the table. “Ahh. Wyoming Sunset.”

“The bar doesn’t care?”

“The county can’t make it legal, so there’s a twenty-dollar fine. Which you pay upfront when you buy one at the bar.” She took another drag, leaned back into the seat. “You were married, right?”

“Yes.” He had a flash of Natalie that last night he’d seen her, standing under the tree at the house where they’d once lived together. “Seven years, divorced for four.”

“You got married young, then.”

“We were twenty.”

“Gifted?”

“No.”

“Was that the problem?” She offered him the joint.

He started to pass, then figured what the hell. Took a gentle puff, then a deeper one. Felt an immediate rush, a tingle in his toes and fingers that flowed inward. “I haven’t been stoned since I was seventeen.”

“Go easy, then. We grow it strong out here.”

He took another hit, passed it back. For a moment they just sat together, shoulders almost touching. He could feel the warmth of her, and a glow through his whole body.

“Yes,” he said. “That was the problem.”

“Was she jealous?”

“No, nothing like that. Part of the reason we got married was that I was gifted. Her parents didn’t like us dating, and she hated that in them. Used to joke that we were an interracial couple. Then she got pregnant, and that pretty much settled things.”

“Were you happy?”

“Very, for a while. Then less.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, just—life.” He held one hand up, stared at it, taking in the texture of his skin, the flex of the muscles as he wiggled his fingers. “You can’t turn it off, you know? What we do. It wore her down. My fault, a lot of it. I was impatient, always finishing her sentences. The thousand weird ways our differences played out, like the fact that she loved surprises but could never plan one for me. I had her patterned too thoroughly. And when things got tense, I’d respond to her anger before she said a word, and that would piss her off more. The end…it came slowly, then all at once.”

“That’s Hemingway,” she said.

He turned to look at her, the wide dark eyes and heavy lashes. Her face swimming a little in his inebriation. “Yeah.”

On the stage, the violinist went into a ragged solo, the notes jarring and alien, and yet not quite wrong, and more vivid with the impact of the drug. It sounded like an insomniac Saturday night spent staring out the window and not seeing.

“I was engaged once,” she said.

“Really?”

“Christ, Cooper, you don’t have to sound so surprised.”

He laughed. “Tell me about him.”

“Her.”

“Really?” He straightened. “But you’re not gay.”

“How would you know?”

“Pattern recognition, remember? I’ve got spectacular gaydar.”

It was her turn to laugh. “I’m not, really. These days, with everything going on, it just doesn’t seem to make as much difference. I mean, maybe if the gifted hadn’t happened it would be a whole issue, maybe people would care about sexual orientation, but we’ve got much bigger reasons to hate each other.”

“So what happened?”

She shrugged. “Like you said. I’m not gay.”

“You loved her, though.”

“Yeah.” She paused, took another puff of the joint. “I don’t know. It was a lot of things. My gift was part of it, too. It’s hard. Loving someone, but not being able to share the way you see the world. Like trying to explain color to someone who’s blind. They’ll never really get it.”

Part of him wanted to argue with her, but it was more from habit than anything else. An attitude he’d had as an abnorm in a normal world. A twist who hunted other twists.

“It was nice, though,” she said. “Being loved.”

He nodded. They fell silent, leaned back and watched the band. His body felt elastic, pliable and smooth and melting into the cushions. He caught fragments of a dozen conversations, felt a woman’s laugh thrill down his spine. Tomorrow felt far off, and with it all the things he would have to do, the battle he would resume. But for now, right this second, it felt good just to sit here and float in a warm haze. To sit next to a beautiful woman in the midst of a strange new world and revel in being alive.

“This is nice, too,” he said. “Taking a little break. From everything.”

“Yeah,” Shannon said. “It is.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

The band started a new song.

Everyone knows the world changed forever with the arrival of the gifted. Now acclaimed social scientist Dr. Donald Masse details what might have been: war with the Middle East, the rise of violent religious fundamentalism, and a planet on the verge of irreversible ecological damage.

• Michael Dukakis would have lost to George H. W. Bush

• The European Union would be facing bankruptcy

• NASA would have abandoned manned space exploration

• American education would have degenerated to standardized testing

• Elephants, whales, and polar bears would be in danger of extinction

• Central America would be embroiled in a brutal drug war

• Heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes would be leading causes of death

Think you know your own world? Think again.

Discover what would have happened…if the gifted had never happened.

Cooper woke with a gasp, a sudden snapping of unconsciousness. Sweaty and tangled and head pounding. Struggled against his bonds, realized it was his clothes, soaked and tight, and a sheet half on him. He blinked, rubbed at his eyes, tried to put things back together.

There was a soft sigh beside him, and he looked over, saw Shannon curled around a pillow, her hair spilling across her bare neck. The bed. They were in bed back at her apartment. Had they…

No, still dressed, both of them. He had a vague memory of more drinks, and finishing the joint. A flash of dancing, the last thing he could remember. She had been a very good dancer, and beside her he’d felt big and clumsy and happy. Then nothing.

Cooper groaned, swung his legs off the bed. He’d managed to kick his shoes off, at least. He rose, head pounding, and wobbled into the bathroom. Peed for about half an hour, then stripped off his clothes and got in the shower. The controls were odd, a temperature gauge and a button. He set it all the way to hot, then pressed the button. A light trickle of water flowed from the showerhead, then shut off ten seconds later.

Right. The evaporators outside of town stripped what water they could from the air, and every building had a catch basin for rain, but water was eternally short here. That was one of the weaknesses of the Holdfast, a tactical advantage he’d seen plans for exploiting: destroy incoming pipes and hit the evaporators with surgical strikes. Estimated population decrease of 17 percent in two weeks, 42 percent by the end of a month, industrial and technical operational ability lowered by 31 percent. He hit the button again, soaked his hair, helped himself to her shampoo when the water cut off. A hit to wash it clear, a hit to soap up, a hit to wash it off. All in all, one of the least satisfying showers he’d ever taken, and no help at all for a hangover.

He toweled dry and put on his clothes. Looked in the mirror.
Game on.

Shannon was making coffee when he came out. Her hair was limp, and one side of her face creased with pillow marks. “Morning,” she said, her back to him. “How you feeling?”

“Dead and buried. You?”

“Yeah.” She filled the pot with water, poured it into the machine, her back to him. He watched her hands, the way they fidgeted at nothing. She opened the fridge, stared at the empty shelves. “Breakfast options are limited.”