Chapter Twenty-Three: The Return of Dr. Bryson

Bryson lay in a tub of cold water beneath the broad and shapely crown of an oak tree. Hanging off a wooden coat stand was her white cotton bathrobe and a hemp sarong tie-dyed blue, pink and green. A side table to her left supported an ashtray and a bunch of hand rolled cigarettes, and a gold composite lighter with a woman doing a strip act on it in three abrupt moves. Her pasties flashed like red bubble sirens.

She lay at the end of an entropic mental process through which all the binary tensions had attenuated into an even, granular grey. It had been weeks since she had watched t.v obsessively for news of transcryptasine. Many more weeks since she had sat up late reading by lamp light in the library. Life in the GMZ had neutralized her.

Never in her life had Bryson experienced such enervation. Except for a week at the beach now and again she didn’t take vacations. Travel consisted of trips to conferences, junkets in secure ports on the Adriatic or the Caribbean. Once she met Velodia in Irkutsk where a psychiatrist, Dr. Karensky, laboring in Siberian obscurity, was experimenting with prion therapies; or to Milan where Dr. Marinetti’s neuronanobots were busy destroying brains for the good of medicine. Noble failures all. She could afford to be generous.

Everyday tasks engaged her. The fates of pigs and chickens, the thirsty vines, weeding the garden. Everything else seemed irrelevant.

After a month she no longer noticed the smell of rotting vegetation on the lakeshores. The flies crawling across her face and neck in big black mats ceased to irritate. Her stomach growled hungrily when the first fumes of grilled venison filled the air.

She pulled the cold guts of fish out with her thumb and forefinger, nailed their heads to cedar planks and smoked them. In the mornings she awoke a little after he did, read while he wrote in his journals. There was something beautiful about these black leather bound books with the creamy lined paper. They filled three shelves in the library, almost eighty years of notes and drawings, each day’s weather, recollections. He wrote in a flowing script and his drawings were stark and precise. He was secretive about them, but referred to them unabashedly in conversation or argument.

Then she took water to the dogs and pigs, in two huge galvanized steel buckets. Some days she shoveled chicken and pig shit, some days she turned compost. He had a solar farm machine that could sow, till and pick. It was small and extremely light, with tall wheels and articulate arms and she liked to ride it between the grape rows. Together they repaired the irrigation lines and the electric fence, jobs he hadn’t gotten to. It saved the grapes. Wine was fermenting in the vats.

Some mornings, after work, they packed a lunch and walked a mile through sultry fields loud with stridulating insects, down a wooded path, through a swamp, to the landing where they kept a dinghy tied up to a rotting pier. Keuka Lake’s color changed like gorgeous eyes, jade, cobalt, indigo. They rowed up to a little cove to swim, eat and nap till the sun was low and the bugs started to bite. Sometimes they made love. Sometimes they just sat and watched the kingfishers dart crazily out over the water, laughing and diving for fish.

For the very first time in her life she wanted to be gentle and relaxed. Whatever knot she had used sex to pound away at was gone and with it her most trusted companion, urgency. How could life be worth living without it? Urgency got things done. It left in its wake a hunger, a vacuum in the senses. Her body was used to going twelve, fourteen hours without food and then devouring whatever lay at hand, panic and need like a fistula forming in the gut and the attendant thirst. She tried to burn the hunger out of her lungs with cigarettes. But now something else was taking hold, bright ease.

The hardest part was not thinking. For that she was self barraged. In the beginning she substituted long sessions with Owen Bradlee and constant news watching. By day she fired off missives. Every idea for a study that she ran by him he nixed and yet, in light of the news reports he insisted that she return to work right away. Phones were not secure. They spoke about these things vaguely. She wasn’t always sure what was going on. It was typical Bradlee.

Leonard was terribly jealous and neither knew what to do about it. They were just not used to living together. And then she met Sky.

Bryson came in from the pigpen at ten one morning, covered in shit, profoundly pissed off at the pigs for existing at all but also defiantly proud of having slopped and watered them. The reek of pig feces was strong in her nose. She kicked off her green gumboots outside the door, examined with disgust the grime of filth that coated her thighs and forearms, and headed for the solar shower downstairs. On the way she stopped to drink some water in the kitchen, and spied them on the porch. Sky was tall, slender, unadorned. Her hair was disheveled, hanging in a loose, golden tangle. At thirty she was just hitting her stride, and still innocent, which was both pathetic and intriguing in a woman that age. Bryson certainly knew a thing or two about throwing her ass around. But she had a lot less to work with, and earned every inch she got. She had powered her way through men by means of personality, which was enough to land them in bed, where she knew how to close the deal.

When Bryson met Leonard, he fell hard for her, and she knew it. It was the hair. In those days, she could just let it down in a bar and scrounge someone up. And then there were her eyes. If they caught the spark, they could give it back and then some. At 27, she was so fast. She saw things others didn’t see, in the math. It had happened all of her life, starting with simple things, decks of card, checkerboards and chess. It was not till she got in college that she realized it was worth something. She would run down a problem and then stupidly toss a napkin she had nervously and pointedly balled up into the lap of her interrogator. What manners she had were acquired painfully.

It was strange, assuming that with age and isolation he would stop taking lovers. That he wasn’t up to it. Well, she hadn’t caught them in flagrante. That was important. It was one of their two rules.

Sky leaned back against the rail, hands spread out behind her, with a puzzled look. He stood facing her and said with his hands, what can I do? Sky shrugged and pushed past him, stomping her foot at the threshold and nearly knocking Ruth over. They stared at each other a moment and then Sky smiled condescendingly and said, “You must be Ruth.”

My god, thought Ruth, there must not be any men around here. “Call me Bryson.”

“All right then. Bryson.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Ruth,” Leonard said, coming in from the porch. “This is Sky, Jason’s sister.”

“You live up in the woods past the tobacco shack?”

Sky smiled. “I’m just here to give Leonard a hand if he needs it.”

“I’ll bet you are. I thought he got along just fine with his own hand on the rip cord.” Then Bryson bit down on it and said, “Won’t you stay for lunch?” She had been bred for this.

“I’ve already eaten. Another time though. I’m here,” she looked around, trying to calculate how often, and came up with, “a lot.”

After she left Bryson said to Leonard, “She seems a little pissed off.”

“She wanted to stay for lunch.”

“Then why didn’t she stay when I asked?”

“How the hell should I know? Did you slop the pigs?”

“Can’t you smell it on me?”

He made a noise with his lips and said, “That’s just how this place smells. I don’t even notice anymore.”

“So I’m to the manner born now, indistinguishable from pig shit.”

“She’s a good woman,” Leonard said. “A midwife. Very strong. She also lays ‘em out when they’re dead. People around here couldn’t do without her.”

After that a mutual jealousy simmered between them, but who was pot, and who liquid, over what flame, she couldn’t say.

In early September they met Velodia near Old Geneva Landing and went on a three-day hike on the Interlaken Trail, which ran through the forest between the lakes. Velodia and Leonard had not seen each other since Christmas ‘68. It was a blazing, dry day, 45c in the shade. A hard wind blew in across sere fields, spinning the many clustered blades of windmills through a shimmering blue.

An Amishman drove up to the landing, dust in big swirls overhead, in a black coach. He was young, with a short black beard and hair- hanging straight below his ears. They loaded their packs in the back and squeezed into the facing seats, Sasha on the floor between them.

“Not a day goes by Leonard,” Velodia said, leaning forward to keep her hair and hat from coming apart on the ceiling.

“Me too Velodia.”

“We had some good times.”

“The best, hands down.”

“So what about this forest?” she asked.

“Some real old trees, two, maybe three hundred years. Mixed hardwood, mostly oak. Swamps and streams and gorges, some high land. We’ve got panthers, wolves, bears. One cat I know is over three meters long. Possibly four. It may be a case of emergent gigantism.” He smiled as if that really pleased him.

Velodia stared at him doubtfully and then laughed. “Are you trying to scare me?”

“Don’t ask about the bears. Don’t ask about anything.” Bryson half sincerely cringed.

“I like to let people know what they’re in for.”

They rocked along. Vegetation by the road grew in thicker as they passed. Brown gave way to grey and green. “So who’s the driver?” she asked.

“Tobias Big Coach. People say he’s proud, you know, to put him down, cause he makes money-giving people rides to the forest. A short cut goes through it, you see? There’s a trail, straight through, to Cayuga Lake.”

Velodia held her arms out and said, “I can’t remember the last time I did this.”

They paid Tobias Big Coach ten dollars each, and put their things down on the ground. On either side of the road grew a thicket of sundry thorns and thistles. The bees were heavy and large, and gave off a loud, threatening buzz. She couldn’t stand to look at their six hairy legs and the octagonal eyes, or that bag with the long ugly stinger.

Here they waited for a friend of Dennis Blanpied’s to drop off a mule. They were absurd, she thought, standing out in the middle of nowhere, dressed in light khaki, in these preposterous hats (black Amish hats on Leonard and Bryson, a straw extravaganza perched on Velodia’s lemon meringue hair, casting shade down over her alphous skin.)

And then, of course, the guy was two hours late. Bryson and Velodia stood together smoking in a patch of shade beneath a stand of extremely lethal vegetation. A morass of sharp and twisted brown and green was brought to order by Leonard who pointed out highlights, poison ivy, stinging nettles, burrs, varieties of thistle, and something he called brambleberries. On the ground, in long straggly knouts, were tricorns, an invasive Australian native, a tiny, rock hard, three-cornered thistle. “You step on one of these barefoot, the tip breaks off and works its way into your skin. Then it goes septic.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Bryson said. “Jesus Leonard, where the hell is this guy?” She ground out a cigarette with her foot and kicked the butt onto the pile growing between them.

Velodia looked around and said, “Let’s go sit on the baggage.”

Leonard professed irritation. “Where the hell is he? How should I know?” He began to mutter. It was clouding up but no rain fell. Occasional, chill gusts teased before dying back into the hot air. Once twelve fat raindrops pocked the dust. In the late afternoon they watched two distant figures grow larger, walking through shadows and shafts of sunlight punching through cracks in the cloud. The man was covered in dust, dressed in old jeans and a big green T-shirt that said UCLA. He was leading a grey and brown mule with a long face that seemed to have had all the mirth beaten out of it by life. Puffs of dust rose up and engulfed their feet.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, offering the reins to Leonard. Bryson looked at the man’s face and decided he looked a lot like the mule. They had spent too much time together.

“What’s going on?” Leonard asked.

The man checked them out.

“Dennis says you’re all right. Which one’s your wife?”

Leonard nodded in the direction of Bryson and then Velodia.

“And our friend. Dr. Velodia.”

“There’s trouble back in Ganudasaga. Army surveyors. The man who owns the land told ‘em to get off, and when they don’t, starts shooting.” He chuckled. “I wish I’d been there, see them run off like that. But, you know, the police might come tonight.” He shook his head. “If they’re looking for a fight, they’ll find it.” He made a noise of disgust and smiled. “So, if we’re all still alive, meet back here in three days?”

How did he know to laugh, she thought, watching Leonard pause and then chuckle, with the man. “That’s right,” he said.

They loaded the mule with their packs and followed Sasha into the woods, down a narrow path and onto the main trail, broad enough for a four-horse wagon team to pass. As the woods closed over them, as it grew dark and cool and silent, all feeling for the world outside faded and it was just the three of them.

Most of the day was gone and they were tired, so they didn’t go far and made camp a ways off the main trail, by a stream.

That night, as Sasha walked her beat and the fire fell to coals, they drank whiskey and talked. After old times had been discussed they got around to transcryptasine.

“Did you buy the stock yet?” Velodia asked.

“Yeah, just like you said to.”

“Well it’s going up like crazy.”

“I don’t see why you give a damn,” Leonard said, taking a slug off the bottle and passing it to Velodia. “You oughta just come out and say that this thing kills people and put an end to it.”

Bryson looked at Velodia, and thought, pass the bottle. Well, at least she was there, cause Bryson couldn’t say it again, not for the hundredth time, naming all the things she couldn’t do.

“Please,” Velodia said. “She can’t. They’d never let her do that. You know what would happen.”

“Leonard, I told you what we were going to do.”

“Don’t you think it’s a good way to go?”asked Velodia.

“What way is that?”

“You haven’t been listening?” Bryson said in exasperation. She drank down the hot whiskey and passed the bottle. “We only talked about it a half dozen or so times.”

“I just don’t get how you ding something.”

Bryson groaned. “Let’s not get hung up on the word ding here. You know what I mean.”

Leonard poked at the fire with a stick. He threw on a piece of wood and it smouldered. “How does bruiting it about that transcryptasine kills, on the sly, affect sales sufficiently to bring the product down? You need lawsuits to do that,” he said, wincing through the discharge of smoke. Flames lit up the log.

“Look, we have to do something, but we can’t let her risk her life-” “Oh, as opposed to the thousands of lives you’re willing to sacrifice?” “But that’s not the point,” Bryson said. “That is precisely the point. Owen Bradlee–” “That prick,” Velodia said.

“Can not be up to any good. You’re at risk now, the way it stands. This thing blows up in his face, when he goes down you go down with him.”

Velodia shook her head. “It doesn’t have to be that bad. To get the stock price down, all we need is rumors about safety. I mean, everyone will know of course, but if doctors start refusing to prescribe the drug–”

“Other doctors, fearing liability won’t prescribe it,” said Bryson.

“Right, and then stockholders get the jitters. It drops enough they’ll discontinue transcryptasine to preserve the council seat.”

Leonard nodded. “But aren’t the illegal sales driving all of this? They can’t get approval for general use but–”

“Sure,” Velodia said. “But again, what are our options? And don’t suggest again that Ruth should hold a press conference.”

“It’s the only right thing to do. I trust you two know more about this than I do though.” A couple of crickets creaked.

“I’m hoping they fire me, actually.”

“For what?” Velodia asked.

“Transcryptasine, whatever. I just don’t give a damn any more.”

She stared into the fire, watched the colors change from red to orange. “I keep trying to work out a protocol.”

Velodia nodded and leaned towards her. “Well, what kind of sales have you head? What’s the customer profile?”

Bryson rubbed her temples. “Every day Bradlee tells me precisely that and by night I forget.” She picked up the bottle of whiskey, drank some and passed it to Velodia.

Velodia sat up straight and announced, “There’s a conference of the Lackawanna Psychiatric Association. Freudian Analysis, that kind of thing. I’ll notify my colleagues that this would be an important conference to attend. They won’t look for us there. It’s a totally obscure venue, far from state or corporate eyes. We can talk there. I’ll let them know.”

“Do you think Fripp will let me go?” She took a drink and offered the scotch to Leonard.

“Fripp’s a prick too,” Velodia said.

“But a stoogey kind of prick.”

“A stooge? Who for, his wife?”

“Who’s she?” Bryson asked.

“Julie Fripp? I remember her from some boarding school, in

Connecticut I think, it was one of those. Ochs? Anyway, she was rich, liked to have a good time.”

“Well,” Bryson said. “I knew Fripp in Switzerland I think. He doesn’t have any idea who I am. I mean, he does now, but before this, forget about it. If he’s not working for his wife, then it’s his old man. The Fripps are big.”

Velodia said, “Well, he brought in Bradlee, and Bradlee’s with General Valdez. Maybe they’re,” she wiggled her fingers, “you know.”

Bryson seemed to know what this meant and shook her head. The fire reddened her white hair, and her stare was fixed and angry.

“Either way,” Leonard said, taking a slug off the liquor, “it’s not going to go well. If they found out you colluded with Velodia to hurt sales of a Monozone drug–” He let it hang. They stared at the fire. Sounds she had only been dimly aware of before magnified. The crickets were almost deafening and the water rushing over the rocks was bright and loud. The dark around them grew dense. Leonard was densely ethical and unrealistic. It wore her out, depressed her. He was an absolutist, unable to compromise with the realities of their time and so had gone off on his own. She used to have no such desire. Although she hated her family, and had been thoroughly disowned by them she had been made by the dangerous and elegant world of politics. By contract she was committed to Monozone for life, and had no choice in the matter. But she thrived in its ethically neutral environment, threaded the labyrinth of science, business and bureaucracy with great skill.

Through the early fall news about transcryptasine and Monozone was constant. Bradlee’s daily reports were professional and ebullient. When the stock hit 110 and split he sent an alias to congratulate her. It was more than weird to see his dapper, grey presence against the bare plank floors and walls. It made the place look like a lodge for retired travelers, those fraying ancient presences in obscure resorts.

“Hello Bryson,” it said. Without the mellow delivery his voice lost its modulating sarcasm and sounded menacing.

“Bradlee, delightful as always. Why the personal appearance?”

“An awful lot of bare wood, or so it looks from here. Do congratulate Leonard for me on his good fortune in finding such a place so far from home.”

“He’ll be gratified to hear you say so.”

“My dear, I do miss your dry sense of humor.” The alias walked about, through chairs and furniture. “I thought you’d like to know that the stock hit 110 today and split. By afternoon it was up twelve points. They’ll be warming up a council seat soon enough.”

“What’s the news from China?”

The alias darkened a shade. “Sales are spectacular but there appear to be a few, eh, squeaks in the springs. Taiwan just banned Paregane, though I’m reassured private sales are substantial. There is talk of retaliation for the bans but the fact that it’s not approved here is making things difficult.”

“Why was it banned?”

“I believe it has to do with a cluster of unexplained fatalities.”

“What a surprise.”

“Indeed, death always catches one off guard.”

“It has no mercy.”

“None that I know of. Perhaps your next venture could address the situation.”

“Dark Force modifications?”

“I leave the details to you. So how are you getting on?”

“Today I shoveled pig shit. Too bad you’ve got no sense of smell.”

“Another project!” It silently clapped its hands together and chuckled airily. “You are pregnant with ideas tonight. When do you anticipate your return my dear? We miss you terribly. And I’m dying for you to join me and the general for dinner one evening.”

“I said two months.”

“Hasn’t it been that long yet?”

“No.”

“You know, it’s quite lonely getting hammered by myself. Half the reason I took on this job was to be with you.”

“Go hammer your dick to the wall, Bradlee.”

He chuckled airily again. “Does that image console you in your isolation?”

“I’ll be back when two months are up, give or take. End of October.”

“Don’t push it, Bryson. You don’t work for yourself.”

“So I am constantly reminded.”

“Well, I’m sure you are happy about the news. Ciao.” The image stuttered and warbled out.

Now the two months were up. It was late October. After weeks of intermittent rain it was hot and dry again. The intense green of summer had given way to the dark and tired green of late fall. Many trees had lost their leaves. The sumac was dark crimson, covered like everything else with a film of dust that looked like ash.

For days she had been sitting, depressed, unmotivated, or distracted, in the tub. She did not want to return but she was down to her final days if not hours.

In her torpor, relieved only by reverie and daydream, she gradually became aware of Mordecai Hertzler, a tall, scrawny Amishman with sunken eyes. He stood about thirty feet away, under another oak. He wasn’t exactly staring; she didn’t feel spied upon, but instinctively slid down the tub till the water covered her. It was a move as calculated to relieve his embarrassment as hers. He must have come down the road. She waved and smiled. “Hello Mr. Hertzler. Are you looking for Leonard?” she shouted.

He looked at the ground and said, “Ja ma’am.”

They were called plain people by some. His affiliation was traditional, Old Order Amish. They wore black pants, jackets and suspenders, over plain white shirts, and wide brimmed black hats. His hair hung down straight to an inch below his ears and he had a beard like a thick brush, but no mustache.

The Amish worried her. They had so many rules and she seemed to violate them all. But they were also tolerant people. And, she had observed, they smoke and drink: pipes and hand rolled cigarettes, and beer. It didn’t seem to square with the Christian business, but then, neither did sex. And given the size of their families, sex was just fine in their religion.

She didn’t know Mordecai well, had only met him a few times. His kids were all over the place though, and they looked just like him, but with young skin and a rebellious spirit. Bravely she decided to continue the conversation.

“He’s up the lake. Something about thatch.”

“Fur de roof, ja.”

“He’ll be back by supper. Turn around, will ya? I’ll get out and put my things on.” He faced the trunk of the oak he was standing by and she got out, toweled off and dressed in a loose t shirt and hemp sarong, tie dyed blue, pink and green by the Rasta family Leonard was up lake visiting. “All clear.” When he didn’t turn around she clarified. “I’m done. Will you come to the house?”

“All right.” He had a very serious face, calm, with penetrating eyes and sunken brown cheeks above his beard. His hands were big, with wide fingers and dirty nails. The skin around his eyes was creased. He smelled of manure and animals, but he wasn’t, despite the heavy clothes, sweating. They walked into the house.

“Sit down, please,” she said in the kitchen. It was ten degrees cooler inside and smelled of old pine. He took a seat at the table and stared at his hands. “There’s cold ginger water to drink.” Ginger water was made with sugar, ginger, vinegar and water, an old recipe Leonard got out of a book, Little House on the Prairie.

“Ja ma’am.”

She sat down opposite him and they sipped their drinks. “Is it important what you’ve come for?”

“Ja. Ich believe he would want to know right away. Ist de thatch he went up lake about at de Rasta farm?”

“I think so, yes.”

“That mountain lion he’s been after came to our farm last night. It took a lamb, and one of de boys was going to de barn when it happened. Ich had to run it off.”

“Oh, how terrifying. Weren’t you afraid?”

“Nein. Not till Ich saw it. It was ein big cougar. De biggest Ich seen is no bigger than a man. But this one, it’s ten feet. Maybe more.”

Leonard would be thrilled. Mr. Hertzler didn’t look thrilled at all. “That’s big for a mountain lion?”

“Oh ja, ja, that’s quite big. Leonard says out west they get to eight feet. This was bigger than that. As Ich say.”

“Well, I know Leonard wanted to tranquilize and track it. The big cat.”

“We’ve got to watch de children.”

“Of course. If I embarrassed you out there, I’m sorry.”

“It’s a way to keep cool, Ich guess,” he smiled. “Ich best be going now. De family don’t want to wait long.”

“So you’re going to go get him?”

“It’s a gutt idea. Dr. Leonard would want to know what we decided.”

“Well,” she calculated what hours of lying alone on the couch doing crossword puzzles and drinking grappa would be like compared to riding up lake up to the Rasta’s with Mordecai Hertzler. “Mind if I come?’ she asked. “Can I ride with you?”

Mordecai’s thin, dark lips pressed together and his eyes became intense, not angry so much but as if they were scrutinizing all the possible consequences. “That’ll be just fine, if you like.”

She jumped up from the table. “Just let me run to the toilet.”

He nodded gravely and she got the feeling for a moment that his wife was her age and he was thinking, women are the same all over. She peed, spritzed on some rose water and joined him on the path up to the main road. Weeds loud with insects towered over the narrow, washed-out way. She brushed bugs from her eyes and spit out gnats. Down by the hen house a peacock screeched. The air smelled faintly of smoke and a haze blew in from the south and west on a slow, hot wind. The last bit of the path was steep and she stepped breathlessly out on the road. Acres of broken cornstalks stretched like fire into the western sun.

Mordecai held open the door to the buggy, a little black composite box with an unbleached canvas roof and big rubber wheels on a sturdy, intricate suspension system. It was hitched to two horses eating oats out of bags and depositing piles of shit behind them.

She got in. The seat sank down on its springs. He got in next to her and, like Charles the Fifth, spoke German to his horse. Horses were thoughtful enough animals but the joy of horse-human synergy had eluded her since childhood.

The road was a single lane dirt path through fields and woods. The ruts were deep, sometimes filled with tan dust and level with the surrounding road. The ditch on either side was weed choked. Hertzler let the horses pick their way through, but even with the suspension her teeth rattled in her head.

Her mouth was dry. Dust was sifting down onto her head through the roof. It was like smoke, boiling up around them and drifting into her eyes, a fine, gritty mist. It filled the wrinkles and creases on her face. Turkey buzzards circled high overhead. The lake twinkled blue and purple in the distance. Fields gave way to light savanna and woods.

All her life had been a playing out of consequences determined for her by her parents. And all her life she bucked hard against them, broke every rule and custom, but the one. She had honored the contract. It gave her all she ever wanted. Money, exciting work, doing what she loved. The total opposite of the life she had been bred for.

Her family shuttled back and forth between Geneva (Switzerland) and the Catskills, where they had an estate. She spent summers and vacations in their suite of rooms in The Hotel St. Denis, built on stilts out on Lake Geneva, or back home.

The Catskills’ estate was a stone castle built on the side of a commanding hill. The approach was by a winding dirt road (not much better than the one they were on), which ended at a moat and drawbridge. There were turrets, and towers, and crenellated walls. Banners, emerald, scarlet, gold, fluttered in the wind.

Within the castle walls stood the main house, a bleak Norman fortress that was fully modern within, and assorted outbuildings, stables, gardens, servants quarters, a brewery, a winery, a smokehouse. It was built in the nineteenth century by a robber baron, a Van Diesing. Next it devolved to a degenerate heir who lived there alone, committing despicable acts, for seventy years. After his death a succession of insane rich people took up residence until a developer turned it into a resort, which he subsequently abandoned for tax purposes. Thus it lay forgotten and unoccupied, slowly buried under a canopy of trees until finally, 250 years after it was built, it became Bryson’s maternal grandfather’s wedding gift to his daughter.

Bryson’s father spared no expense in its renovation. He had fallen victim to a fad for aristocratic living. The surrounding land was brought into cultivation, planted in fruit and nut trees, hops and vines. The remaining woods were full of turkey, boar, elk and deer, which her father and his friends hunted. They ate exclusively off the land. He had a water wheel built in the creek to run nut presses and gristmills. The cellars were stocked with ripening cheeses, the rafters hung with curing hams, and kegs of beer and barrels of wine were aged in the warehouse. Over a hundred people were on staff, architects, engineers, carpenters, masons, mechanics, gardeners, custodians. There were maids, butlers and footmen. Chauffeurs drove their big black cars with tail fins and fat fenders. They even had tenants who paid part of their rent in food. Her father was obsessed. She could still see him sitting in the window of their hotel room in his red silk caftan and yellow fez, pouring over garden plans or investigating heirloom varieties of corn. He was such a bastard, but it was her mother she really hated.

She could not remember a time when she didn’t detest the lot of them. Of course she loved her surrogate, Lena. Who didn’t love their surrogate? It was she who gave birth to you, she who nursed you, she who took care of you when you were sick. Lena was certainly the only one Bryson could trust. She used to accompany Lena and her dog on their rambles, up and down the orchards, out into the fields. But she never got on the horses. She didn’t play tennis, or hunt. Her favorite days were sick rainy ones, when she could lie in Lena’s bed and watch t.v. and play cards.

She never wanted to hear the word breeding again. It was a constant topic of discussion. If you had nothing to say, you discussed the pedigree of the baby bronze lettuces you were eating, or the lineage of the koi swishing through your pond. There were orchids, blue hound dogs with long droopy ears and bloodshot eyes. Horses came from houses of royalty. Even rabbits had a genealogy. But it was the pedigree of human beings that commanded the most attention. They followed each other’s trade in genes like stocks. They plotted out their marriages to maximize licensed heritable traits.

Enormous sums were lavished on the genetic make up of each thing. They were obsessed with control and order, of perfecting the world, convinced that this was the nature and destiny of things. Without this effort, this shoring of the ruins, the world would degenerate. The universe had been biding its time till their superior control methods had had time to evolve. Now all that dirty becoming could end and true being begin.

The house, or whatever you call such a thing, was obscenely grand. Every time she stepped into that ground floor rotunda, with the spiral staircase, and the floor to ceiling tapestries, she could feel a little wisp of warmth fleeing her. The dome was frescoed midnight blue, with a constellated firmament of gold and silver. The floor was of inlaid marble, a mandala of black and white diamonds. In the center was the fountain, an enormous white marble basin on a pedestal, sporting a buxom headless goddess, water gushing out of her neck. The busts of select Greek and Roman Stoics monitored the doings of the great hall with their empty eyes and bulging adam’s apples.

Her father entertained from a high-backed crimson velvet chair, in the grand salon on the second floor. The floors of that room were literally strewn with priceless hand made carpets from the Hindu Kush. The shelves were packed with plunder, Arabian hookahs, brass oil lamps hanging from the ceiling by chains. Persian miniatures, scenes of the Moghul court, erotic rubbings. There were several intimate areas of overstuffed crimson and gold couches and green velvet wing back chairs; chinoiserie; a card table covered in baize, amphorae and painted apothecary jars.

The family assembled in the first floor drawing room for cocktails at five, plenty of time for everyone to go to dinner drunk and irritable at seven, around the mahogany table, one end of which they occupied while the rest stretched like Siberia off of Russia.

Unlike Bryson, her brother Roger and sister Noel had successfully expressed their full suite of genes. Thus, instead of having unpigmented hair they had their selected shades of chestnut and straw. Well, what did she care anyway. Most hair screw-ups were much worse. No hair all. They dyed it when she was young. And her first successful act of defiance was at the age of ten demanding that her hair be allowed to revert to its natural white. Her mother could not hide her disgust. It pulled at her lips. White hair in a child scared her. She preferred, voice creaking, “The lemon yellow look in a little girl. Egg yolk by thirty.” Yes, and hollandaise in the crypt.

They got the heroic profiles and full lips. She got longevity and intellect. It was the only reason they let her off the leash. Or at least, that was how they understood it. But intelligence was not something any of them actually understood. And because they so thoroughly lacked it they uncritically accepted that her intelligence was a result of their superior judgment in all things genetic. She was convinced that the intelligence package was a fraud. Perfect pitch is one thing, but even computational skills are too complex to genetically determine. And what of intuition, what is the program for that?

That intelligence package determined her fate. She was a trade secret, from birth. She didn’t own the gene, she leased it. Any thought, any idea she had was theirs. She didn’t buy it, but there was a fact in their argument that was hard to refute. Her one strange talent, the ability to visualize multiple dimensions, up to twelve, was the basis of all her work. And it was also the bridge over the moat, out of the Catskills and into the world. She took it. But nothing pissed her off more than the belief in intelligence genetics. What did Shakespeare’s children do? Milton’s daughters? Where were Einstein’s spawn and Newton’s progeny? Nowhere on earth. They happened once and went away.

There the five of them sat in their customary places. She and her mother on one side, facing her placid siblings. Her mother filled the ashtray up, eating little, flicking blond hair from her twisted face. At the head sat her father, broad, black mustachioed in full diplomatic dress (white or black depending on the occasion) sawing away at his meat and announcing his thoughts on whatever mania consumed him currently. His obsessions were unerringly dull. “They just don’t understand trade talks.” Shaking his head angrily, “Pass the rolls.”

“Well good lord, tell me what it is they do understand,” her mother would say. Or, “The world is full of idiots, you know that.”

Like their sire and bitch, Roger and Noel thrived in a morass of stupid, common opinion. Her only escape from this was school and school was so uncertain. Every few years she wound up in a new place.

Being unhappy places, all boarding schools had a different story. But the buried struggle was always the same. It took her about fifty years to realize it was authority that pissed her off, not the particular institutions of family, school and state. In any event, institutions were created to crush the imagination. She responded accordingly.

The Ecole de Polytechnique was lenient but located in a stretch of industrial and intellectual slag between France and Germany. There they drank in the local dives. No one gave a damn that they were fourteen, and looked it. They hung around the sex clubs, where the beer was cheap, and the tables were sticky.

Others were so strict it was like getting throttled, except the academics might be good and there was often a teacher she loved. Then there were the hybrid schools. There was one such place in the White Mountains, rich in illicit possibility and with a first rate department of physics.

The absolute worst were the entertainment and sports academies for genetically altered humans, where she swam in a school of replicated siblings.

For a while when she was sixteen she’d fuck anyone who’d get drunk with her. She liked men but girls would do in a pinch. She went after cooks, custodians and security guards. She seduced her physics tutor, which was great, till he fell in love with her and her father found out. That ruined everything. Grounds crews were reliably felonious.

Most of the wild girls were good looking. They rode dressage and came out at sixteen, in a private ball. The most depraved, nihilistic pagans she knew put on lace and pumps and a corsage of green carnations. Not Bryson. They never put the doilies on her. She looked so crazy, with that white hair and those eyes that seemed to pop out of her head like cobalt marbles.

She hated the horses till her senior year, in New Hampshire, when she discovered a riding trail that took her past a salvage crew working a landfill. She got one with a missing eye and three nipples. That might have been her greatest year with men. Every one that looked at her, if she wanted him, she took. And she hadn’t even had an orgasm yet.

The horses trotted along. Mordecai gave her a black shawl, which she wrapped around her head and face, to keep the dust out. The mountain lion was an exciting piece of business. It was brave, strong, out of place and now the farmers were going to band together to hunt it down and kill it.

She had never been to the Rasta house. It had a legendary feel to it, the way Leonard and Dennis Blanpied talked.

“What’s a Rasta?” she asked, aware that her interlocutor was not exactly voluble, and by conviction showed no interest in the outside world. Her voice startled him out of a road trance. The reins, loose in his hands, tightened some and he said, after thinking it over, “I don’t know exactly.”

Now she was sure that it pained him more to talk to her than she had ever imagined.

“Ich guess the Rastas are religious folks. Sort of like a hippy. Folks say they come from Jamaica. Not this family though. They’re de English. They come from Iroquoia. Been here a long time.” His face

darkened and he nodded, “Their way is not our way.”

“They smoke marijuana, right?”

“They do. They make gutt medicine, salves and pulses and essen only what the bible tells them.”

They rode on for a while through fields and then groves of cypress, bamboo windbreaks shaking in the wind.

“It’ll get a little rough here,” he told her. She wrapped the shawl tighter, seeing out through a slit framed in black. The horses climbed up a twisted, narrow path through bamboo to the top of a ridge. The wheels thudded into ruts or had cliffhanger holds on the edge of a wash out, teetering upwards. Leaves of bamboo scraped the sides of the carriage. Bamboo gave way to tall pines, natural conifers. It grew silent, dark and cool, the wheels turned over the soft bronze carpet of needles flecked with yellow sunlight.

Suddenly they came to a clearing. It was high land, cooler, and dry. Old stonewalls wandered, fell over and got up again like drunks, through bleached fields and orchards. Then just as suddenly, they entered irrigated fields of marijuana, hemp and tobacco. The air had the resinous smell of oozing sap. Further on were harvested fields of corn and soybeans.

“Corn and soy beans aren’t in the bible,” she said.

“No ma’am. They’re cash crops.”

They came to a low, long shack on a little clearing of land. It was shaded by a fat oak tree and some pines. The earth was bare and dry. In the back was their barn and gardens. Pale firewood, cut small for a cook stove, was neatly stacked against the side of the house, and kindling littered the ground around a stump. Smoke curled up out of a metal pipe stuck into the composite roof. The walls were of mismatched siding, some clapboard, some shingle, and patched all over with sheets of tin, plywood and composite. A fence, also built of this-and-that, topped with barbed wire, surrounded the place.

They heard a sound like distant thunder but it came from behind the fence. Two massive greyish-black mutts with square heads stood growling at them. Meanwhile, within this perimeter, chickens peacefully pecked at the ground: white ones with white and black striped ruffles around their necks, and little red bantams pricked out in green, blue and grey, strutting among the fretful hens. A bunch of beautiful, spooky goats, with little horns and black and red coats lay in a sunny corner against the fence, in a scattering of cabbages and corn stalks. Outside of the fence was a small wooden cart, and Leonard’s pick up truck, the grey one. The bed was loaded with thatch and covered with a tarp. A horse, a mule and two ponies chewed grass in a field a little bit off. And between was parked an outlandish contraption, a fantastic sort of carriage, difficult to describe, so varied was it in detail. There was a low seat, with small wheels, and pedals the driver pushed before him. Extending forward from this seat were long, bowed wooden handles, painted yellow, with multi colored ribbons hanging down like fringe, so that the whole thing could be pulled like a rickshaw. Behind the seat, was an enormous, multitiered carriage with benches, extending in a half moon up either side of the shell, which was framed out in bamboo and decked with a crazy quilt of bright patches. On top of this floated a silk dragon with a head of gold, nostrils spewing scarlet flame, armored plates of kelly green, a great swagging belly of jeweled bells, and an undulating tail of black spikes hanging down the back. The legs extended down the side of the carriage into golden talons framing the doors, which stood two metres off the ground and were entered by means of a knotted rope ladder.

Warily observant of the dogs’ exposed lowered teeth, they stood at the gate and knocked. It was then she noticed a naked child seated in the dirt playing with a stick. Three black flies crawled across his face in opposite directions. “You can just go in,” he said. There was a loud screech. A peacock stepped into view. The door opened a crack. A pair of somber eyes looked them over a second and then the door opened. The dogs jumped up on him and began barking loudly. “Shsh,” he quieted them and beckoned gently with his hand. “Come in, come in. Mordecai, hello.”

He was short, with a wavy blond beard and dreadlocks coiled up in a light blue snood. He had thick eyebrows and a large nose, like a rock in the ground, and grey eyes.

The house was a single room, long, rectangular, lit only by beeswax candles and oil lamps hanging by chains from the rafters. To the left bunk beds lined the wall, down the entire length. Above them were shelves stowed with all kinds of stuff, guns, fishing rods and nets, traps, blankets and earthenware jars. Tied upside down on the rafters were strings of dried pears and apples, bunches of herbs, braids of garlic, bandoliers of chili peppers. People were seated on chairs and pillows in several discrete areas. They sat around a high wooden table, with a bowl of pears and another of apples. The air was hot, but had a spicy, herbaceous odor. There was the smell of wood smoke, like bass notes, and the rhythm of tobacco and marijuana, a haze hanging in the varnished light. And the sweet buttery candles, the cello and viol, the melody of sandalwood and drying herbs and fruit about to turn. Around this table Leonard and the others sat.

To the right was the kitchen. Over an iron cook stove stood a very sturdy middle-aged woman, stirring a pot of beans with a long wooden spoon. An assortment of dented, blackened aluminum and steel pots simmered on the other burners. She was pouring off these liquids into open jars. Every now and again she turned her head from the bubbling pot of beans back towards the conversation at the table. She wore a black snood, shorts but no top.

Leonard sat next to the head of the table. Next to him was Sky, asleep on her elbows, breasts squashed flat. There were two other woman at the table with their dreadlocks hanging down. One was nursing a baby and filling in a crossword puzzle in a crossword puzzle book, the other fussed with two naked children. There were children everywhere. Some ran up and down the house, bouncing in and out of various bunks, shrieking and climbing ropes up into the rafters, which they swung off of and back onto their feet, running away again.

Two men, hard to see in the shadows, sat at a low table on cushions, playing cards and sipping from big mugs. Far in another corner a man sat playing guitar while a teenage girl beat out a rhythm on a small handheld drum with two skins, a high and a low.

The group smiled to welcome them. She looked at Hertzler. He looked just the same as always.

Leonard said, “Ah, Ruth, Mordecai. We were just about to have a smoke and some peppermint tea.”

A congenial air passed through the room, and as her eyes adjusted faces emerged out of the dark, in the old master glow of lamps and candles.

“Jordan,” Leonard continued, leaning back in his chair. “This is my wife Ruth.” Jordan was the bearded man who had opened the door. She went up to him at the head of the table and shook his hand.

“A pleasure,” Jordan said. “This is my family. Rose at the stove, our daughter Rebecca,” the woman doing the crossword puzzle nodded, “And there her children are, running.” His daughter laughed and filled in a clue, leaning down close to look at the squares. “This other one having a bite to eat is my child Bob with Grace. My son

Tobias is playing guitar, and that’s his wife Willa, and her brothers, who just stopped by to visit and pick up some supplies. We have an herbal medical practice up on Buffalo Creek. Please, come sit down. Mordecai, how are you?”

Bryson wondered if she was expected, in the land of naked breasts, to take her shirt off. She sat at the opposite end of the table from Leonard and Sky, so she could see them. Mordecai Hertzler casually took a corncob pip out of his pocket and began stuffing it with pinches of tobacco.

Jordan put the finishing touches to a long cigarette and handed it down to Ruth. “It’s our finest red bud. Light up.”

“We’ve had a very profitable discussion. And business deal to conclude,” Leonard said.

Ruth lit the 12-inch cigarette up and took a deep hit. It made her cough and tear up terribly. Once she calmed down she tried a little bit and passed it on.

“I see you got the thatch loaded,” Mordecai said. He took short puffs of his pipe and when it was well lit, settled into just keeping it going.

Leonard said, “We all put it on. There’s a couple more loads.”

“It may rain,” Mordecai observed.

They chewed on that for a while. Would it rain? Leonard observed there hadn’t been a fall drought in thirty years. And it had rained in September.

“That rain saved us, that and the ponds,” Jordan said.

Mordecai nodded. “We have enough till spring I reckon.”

Leonard said, “Every day clouds blow in off the lakes.”

“What we need is a few big rains from the south.” Jordan took out an ivory pocketknife, opened the blade and cut an apple up into wedges, which he popped into his mouth and chewed slowly.

Bryson was not a marijuana smoker, never had been. Hallucinogens made her nervous, paranoid. The physical symptoms were unpleasant too, and it never seemed to end. Alcohol was a great reconciler; it funneled one into sleep, beguiled one into sympathy with the world or allowed a fully justified indignation to come to a boil. But marijuana always seemed like a girls’ bathroom drug. Nothing terribly serious and hardly worth the effort. Like sucking cock in the woods and spewing bourbon on the ground. Midnight swims. Hot sheds, faces crowded around a cracked window blowing smoke. Even so she had taken the cigarette to be polite. It may even have been that she had so accustomed herself to things here that she did it out of habit, did what others were doing as if she had done so as long as they had. Every time the spliff came to her she took a robust hit and passed it on. She really did like the taste. It was as if she had never smelled or tasted it before. It seemed to have a dimension she had always missed. The sensual aspects had heretofore eluded her. These were the most important aspects of any drug, after the high of course. But seduction precedes the effect. It is the anticipatory act, the initiation. Teetotalers of every stripe failed to appreciate this. The habit, the high and the lifestyle embodied in tastes and lingering odors. The way a glass of hard liquor will diffuse through a room. Like sex, the shambles afterward, the wetness, the myriad sensations that form the ambiance of orgasm. How different the taste and texture of first tentative kisses are from the open, florid ones of love making, the nearly unhinged post coital embrace of tongue and lips. So the stale air of a finished cocktail party, in the nose of a ten year old, before the servants had cleaned up. She rummaged through the main room, and the banquet hall hung with mirrors and chandeliers, through abandoned glasses, lemon and lime crushed in a puddle of ice melt. The stagnant adult air of hors d’oeuvres, frilly cellophane topped toothpicks in ashtrays, gnawed stogies.

She held the long, smouldering joint like a cigarette. They were talking about something else now. Leonard and Jordan talked back and forth. No one else seemed to listen, but neither did they speak. The burning paper curled and grew moist. Smoke hit her eye. She passed it on to one of the men playing cards. He wore cutoff overalls and no shirt. The suspenders cut into the muscle between his neck and shoulders when he leaned forward to take it, acknowledging her with a slight drop of the head and a smile. The light in the room was oily, dark, vermillion. The babies, nursing or running about with the other children, were shellacked by the oil lamps and looked like antique dolls.

The woman stirring the pot of beans looked like smoked meat. The spoon beat at the side of the pot. She lifted her strong arms out of their shroud of steam and stood up straight to laugh. Her breasts pointed to her feet. They had fed so many people, it made them beautiful. They had served her well, not as play things only. They had once been full of milk. Her body built the bodies of her children. She gave them fat, protein and sugar. Placenta. Flesh from flesh, bone from bone.

Jordan was asking Leonard a question. It seemed to be important. They were discussing the council, politics. She strained her eyes to bring them into focus, but they were blurry and small. The words were coming out backwards. She concentrated. Jordan’s voice was garbled by his magnificent beard, like carved maple. Leonard rose like a white headed copper pole, rail thin and stiff.

Hertzler spoke, but his words were lost on a wisp of air.

It was politics. “The General Council meeting in July, at Onondaga,” Leonard said. “Some folks think I should go, to represent state citizens.”

“What does that involve for us? I mean, I certainly don’t feel like a citizen of state. I mean, this is sovereign land as far as I’m concerned.”

“There will be taxes, for the roads–”

“Ha,” Jordan said. “Right.”

“Security.”

Everyone in the room looked at Leonard. Jordan said, “We have guns, if that’s what you mean.”

“The idea would be that anyone not currently a recognized nation of The Haudenosaunee would become an eighth nation. The Amish are the seventh, isn’t that right Mordecai?”

Mordecai thought about it for a while. They all went far away. She was a ghost, haunting them, unable to make contact. Their syntax became strange. What was it like to be Mordecai Hertzler in a room full of drugs and naked women? She thought she should feel sorry for him. There was nothing here but menace and shame. She should never have brought him here. It was like lying there naked in the bath. Had she been masturbating? A man walks into the woods and sees a woman masturbating in the tub, Hand me my towel, she says. But she made him turn around. Well, even the president of the united states sometimes has to stand naked. She could have driven one of the other trucks over, or flown the hovercraft. It would have been so much faster.

The nursing baby’s eyes were closed and one hand clasped its mother’s breast. The mother’s eyes were slightly dazed, they gazed off into the dark. There was something so bovine about nursing a child. She herself had had a wet nurse. It was the healthy thing to do. But that wasn’t what she was thinking about. It was this sort of sustained, mutual harvest. To dissolve bones into bones, mulch oneself and give over. It was life, that thing that always lay beyond control. There was something irredeemably errant and free to life. Drift was ruler of the universe. Complexity and change, theme and variation. They thought they could nail it down, but all you could ever do was initiate a new process.

“We need to have a voice at council. The idea is to first put together a delegation, and then hold elections. It’s a start.”

“We’ll talk about it.”

What had she asked her friend to do? It was insane. They’d find out, right away, it was inevitable, they always do. Owen Bradlee, reviewing an electraweave sales report, while eating toast, will want to know why sales are down and get an answer. A hospital administrator will crack at the bottom; sell out a psychiatrist to a sales rep, who will send it on to a manager and so on up the line. Bradlee nails the doctor, and then they search for an inside job. One day, someone you don’t know walks up to you at a soda machine and shoots you in the back of the head. Her heart pounded in her ears. Possibilities raced by behind her eyes. Everyone was under an imminent certain threat. There was nothing specific, just an increase in chatter. And the certainty that things always work out badly. She had overplayed her hand. The contract. It never went away. People were slaves to their genes. Parents signed lifetime contracts before birth. You can’t control life itself, but you can control things. You could satisfy vanity. There were gene hunters out there. After women like Sky. Naturals. They searched for beautiful eyes and tall physiques; sense anomalies, acute vision, perfect pitch. The richest people in the world were enslaving themselves for vanity. What did that mean?

There was no way out of this. Every second she spent just sitting there increased the risk. The room diminished around her and her eyes were buried deep in the middle of her head. Way across the table she watched Leonard and Sky break into slow laughter. Smoke poured from his nose and mouth. Jordan laughed in quick amused outbursts, and pinched his nose. The nursing woman smiled and Hertzler was laughing too. Then her face became a point, her eyes slits. She felt very snakelike. She could actually become her snake self, a cobra, hissing and flicking her tongue, with a jeweled hood, like a crown of fire, charmed by the dancing lights of the room. She realized at once that she was going insane.

The woman stopped nursing and her distended, purple nipple glistened in the candlelight. The candle on the table grew brighter as she watched it. Wax accreted in drips up the base. Leonard was speaking to Hertzler and Hertzler was looking at her.

“But Little Shem is O.K.?”

“The boy’s afraid. We had a meeting with the bishop and we’re gonna go ahead and kill it tonight if we can. I knew you would want to know, so I come to tell you.”

Leonard frowned. “If you’d only let me tag it.”

Mordecai shook his head. “The old ways are the best ways.”

“But I could have rigged a collar. Anytime it came near your place,

ZAP,” he said, pointing at his head, “in the neck.”

Jordan chuckled. The woman at the stove smiled.

“The Bishop says it isn’t Ottning.”

“But it uses solar power, you’ve been doing that for two hundred years.”

“Can’t be, I’m sorry. Do you want to come with us then?”

“It’s worth studying alive. It could be the only one of its kind, or it could be one of many. We need to know.”

“Children got to milk the cows in the morning. It ain’t safe up there like that. You know.”

Jordan said, “The tag, what’s it do?”

Leonard grew animated, sat straight up in his seat and began to shape what he was saying with his hands. He was squeezing words between his fingers like dough and then saying them. “It’s a BioWatch Unit, about as big as a tick. It sends out a signal. You can program it anyway you want. It’ll send back medical data, blood analysis, and its position, up to twenty k away. I could tag an animal and know everything about it without ever seeing it.” Leonard stood. “Well, let’s get on with it then. Jordan, I’ll pass along what you said to the others, and we’ll meet at my house. Thank you for the thatch.” They shook hands. “You coming with us Ruth in the truck?”

She nodded yes. “I’m sorry Mordecai.”

“No ma’am, it’s quicker that way.” He smiled and bobbed his big rough head. Reality was starting to gel again. She was tired. Thoughts and feelings knocked about. The fear and panic faded and she felt dull and flat and thought, poor cougar.

Sky was slumped against the door of the truck, Bryson sat in the middle. They waited. Sky’s eyes were bloodshot. She smelled sweaty and her arms were dirty. My god, she thought. What would a bounty gene hunter do. They’d scrape out all her bone marrow, harvest her ova, her neural stem cells, and sell off the organs. There was a knock on the window. It was Rose, with a basket. Sky sat up and opened the door. “For you Ruth,” she said. Ruth took the basket.

“What is it?”

“Many things. Chamomile and peppermint tea, skin cream, one for your face, one for your body. And the green one there is bite and sting salve. It’s real good with ticks.”

“I love these candles.” She felt and smelled the beeswax.

“That’s the last thing. Honey.”

She held the jar up to the sun and watched the light refract. “Thank you so much.”

Back at the house she couldn’t make herself look at the computer or think about work. She was ravenously hungry and thirsty. She popped some popcorn and drank a couple of stouts on the porch, then lay down in the hammock, swinging back and forth. Velodia was at risk. Bryson knew how to work Bradlee, but the people he worked for were another story. Bradlee under real pressure? She’d never seen it.

The only way to protect Velodia was to go back and fix it.

She needed to study a large number of heavy users without tipping off the competition, or lawyers. They were gathering in underground clubs. She had read about it in the newspaper, and reports from Bradlee. He knew how many pills they were selling.

The dogs made a huge racket, barking and claws scraping around on the truck bed. He was on his way out to join the Hertzler’s lion hunt. Most likely they’d tree the animal and gun it down that way. What was worse, getting gunned down out of a tree, or wearing a BioWatch tag and a shock collar? It was better off dead.

What would a BioWatch unit do to a man, she wondered. How would it feel knowing your every move is monitored. Heart rate and respiration. It happens all the time. House arrest. On the job surveillance. Certain medical conditions.

She could tag them on the street. Follow their movements, monitor their vital signs. Chart their mortality. It would be the only intervention. There’d be no exposure. There would be no placebo effect. Just data.

It was time to go back to work. Then she’d be all done with it, one way or another.

She tried to go to sleep then for a few hours, before packing her things and leaving but she couldn’t. At 11, 12 and at 1:30 she awoke to pee, feeling as if she hadn’t been asleep at all. She drank shots of liquor and still her heart took off with her thoughts and raced out of control. It was like being divided in two and the two halves were passing each other by at high speed, like Amphibatrains arriving and leaving the station. One side watched an onslaught of images, of Hertzler and the distended purple nipple, Sky’s perfect breasts squashed flat on her elbow. Of BioSynthesis Tanks, goggle eyed embryos suspended in yellow liquid. A handful of barley pouring into the pot of beans, dreadlocks in a midnight snood. The cold empty space where Leonard belonged. She drank so much she felt nauseous and the room spun slowly overhead.

She must have fallen asleep because the cry awakened her. Her heart froze, her neck got cold and her scalp tingled. It was the cry of a murdered woman, a soul shrieking out of the body, followed by dogs barking and a dozen or so gun shots, trailing off. She got out of bed. It was 3:30. She threw on a wrap and stepped into sandals, stomped up the stairs and out the front door. No one was in the driveway but there was a commotion in the apple orchard up the driveway, lantern lights flashing in the trees.

The hunting party, all dressed in black, with white shirts, hats tipped back on their heads so they could see, stood around the cougar which lay steaming on the ground, punctured with bullet holes. The lanterns were set around the cat to light it and the men were quite animated, their big shadows cast onto the bare apple boughs loomed and shrank. They talked all at once, kicking back the dogs that kept poking their noses in-between their legs, to get a piece of what they found and caught. Three dogs lay mauled on the ground a hundred yards back, where the panther turned to fight. It didn’t look so huge. It was brown and gold and white, soaked in blood. The head was large and limp; the eyes squeezed shut, the white jaw slack.

Leonard didn’t say a word. He and Mordecai Hertzler stood off to the side, in the shadows. His face was creased and grim. He stared coldly at the dead animal and shook his head. “It was just a regular cat. We could have beaten it away with a stick.”

Dennis Blanpied came in from the driveway. “Whudja catch?”

Leonard squinted at the dark to see him. “Oh, a mountain lion,” he said scornfully.

“I need to talk to you.”

“So do I,” Bryson said.

“Can it wait Ruth?” “I’ve got to go back.” “I’ve got time,” Dennis said. “I’ll see what the boys are up to.

Hey,” he yelled out. “Whatcha got there?”

She looked at the cat as the men opened their circle to let Dennis in. There is always something shameful in a corpse. This cat who had terrified men lay dead in a heap. It was that way with people. This is how we learn.

The men began to tell about the hunt, in German and in English. Dennis handed out tailormades. She followed Leonard up the short path out of the orchard. In the shadows he looked old and hollowed out. His eyes were red and sunken.

He made coffee and they sat on the porch.

“I’m not up for this anymore, staying up all night hunting,” he laughed. “Those boys thought they had treed the world’s biggest cat. My god, they were expecting a monster. Hell, I was too. I believed it.”

“It’s out there somewhere, isn’t it?’

“Oh sure. I got casts of paw prints, teeth. But, even to hunt one down like that and gloat. Maybe it had to go. But it’s a bad thing. They have furious, bloody souls. They contemplate, stalk their prey. A bunch of men and dogs blast that to pieces in a tree. Anyone of us alone with that animal would be wetting our pants and climbing a tree, I can tell you that. You can beat them off with a stick, but will you? Or will you stand there staring at it, too afraid to move. It will look you in the eye and decide what to do.”

“Leonard, I’m sorry about the mountain lion, but I’ve got to talk to you now.”

He looked at her absently and then smiled. “Yes, of course, I’m sorry. You were saying?”

“It’s time. I’ve got to go back.”

“You’re not happy here?”

“It’s been two months.”

“It hasn’t been that long. You’ve only just gotten here. The weather is turning. Rain will be here any day, more than you can stand. And winds, I promise winds.”

“I’m serious. Two months are up. I have work to do. I’m worried about Velodia. I think I’m onto something. I think I can get a BioWatch bug made, to tag transcryptasine users and monitor them electronically.”

“But that’s demented. You can’t do that.”

“You’d do it to a mountain lion.”

“Yes, a wild cat. Rather than kill it I would. To protect people. To learn.”

“Why draw the line there? Look, I’ve been following the news. It’s a fad in every city now. They estimate thousands of users in the New York alone. I know with a sample that size I’ll find something, some way to make it work. And then, I’m out of it. I’ll come back to stay. I’ll pull my weight. You can hang on to Sky too, I don’t care. Just let me finish this one last piece of business.”

“And your contract?”

“They’ll let me go if I fix it.”

“And if you can’t?”

“I’ll write a report and release it.”

He rubbed his chin and drank some coffee. Dennis appeared in the doorway. Leonard looked at her.

“Goddamn it Leonard! Do you know how hard it is for me, leaving you here? I’m going to do it though.” She breathed to calm down and said, “Dennis, come in.”

“I’ve got a favor to ask.” He spoke quietly and low, looking at them steadily.

“What is it?” Leonard asked, suddenly worried. “Sit down. What’s wrong?”

Two men walked into the room, dressed in jeans and T-shirts.

Baseball caps shaded their faces.

“I need you to hide these guys out for a few days.”

Leonard nodded slowly. “Who might come looking for them?”

“The police. The army.”

“What’d they do?”

Dennis looked at them and made a face. “Killed two surveyors who wouldn’t get off their land. Oh,” he said, interrupting Leonard, “the surveyors fired first, but–” he gestured with open hands.

“What do I do if the police come?”

Dennis looked around. “Hide ‘em out with your dogs, or your pigs. These cops, they’re stupid. They follow their little instruments around and bark into their helmets. They won’t mess with dogs and they won’t get into any pig shit.”

Leonard looked dubious.

“Look, I’m asking as a favor. These men are my nephews. I look out for them.”

“O.K. Take ‘em down to the where the wine vats are. I’ll bring ‘em some blankets. We can work something out in the morning.”

They shook hands. “Thanks Leonard. In a couple of days we’ll move ‘em out to Hertzler’s.”

“No.”

“Yeah. The Bishop says o.k. Ruth, goodbye.”

He kissed her on the cheek and she said, “Chief, keep my husband out of trouble.”

“Yeah, right. Tomorrow Leonard?”

“Tomorrow.”

When the three men were well out of earshot she handed him one gold disc. “The phone won’t be safe. We have to be extra careful now. If there’s a dip in sales they’ll be looking for an inside job. I’m leaving these with you. Keep it in one of your diaries. When the time comes I’m going to sell the stock and buy diamonds. The other disc I’m hanging on to.”

“I don’t want the money.”

“It’s eight million dollars. Of course you want it. Knock yourself out.” She laughed. “I’m going to pack now.”

“When will you come back?”

“It all depends.”

“Thanksgiving?”

“No. Definitely not.”

“Christmas?”

“We’ll see.”

He got up and went to the rail of the porch. The men were down below asking what to do with the cougar.

“Put it in the tool shed,” he yelled in German.

“Lets go downstairs and take a shower.”

“Do I smell that bad?”

“Feral. But I’m beginning to like it.” She put her arms around him. They showered in the hot, sulfury water, soaping each other up. They toweled off and lay down side by side, dozing until sunrise. Then she packed her few things into the canvas bag with the wooden handles, kissed him on the lips and flew back to the city.