Woke Up Lonely A Novel

II. In which the Lynne Five-0 creeps her team out. In which stories begin to assert themselves like pebbles thrown up from the sea. Cloud seeding, speed dating, clogs. The language of back then. A joust.

II. In which the Lynne Five-0 creeps her team out. In which stories begin to assert themselves like pebbles thrown up from the sea. Cloud seeding, speed dating, clogs. The language of back then. A joust.





Alone with her problems: Anne-Janet Tabetha Riggs.

DOB 3.4.75 SS# 145-08-633

Anne-Janet tarried. Outside her mother’s hospital room, gelling her hands clean. Next up, the mantras: Forty-five minutes are all I need to stay. Forty-five minutes look like love. Multiple attempts to visit the patient look like love. I will be kind. If not for her, then for the propitiation of God, in whose caprice illness comes and goes.

So far the news was bad. Her mother had a stent and a clogged lumen in her calf. Immobility can do that, they said, can increase the threat of embolism. So they’d plunged a tube in Marie’s leg. Her charge? Stay put or bleed out. For Anne-Janet, the sight had been dreadful, her mother’s lips collapsed for lack of teeth, the skin of her face pleated and wan. It was one thing to regard her own face and note the loss of its selling points—when was the last her eyes had spangled with the greens of mint and holly for which she was known?—but quite another to confront decay in her mother, who was timeless.

“You’re up,” Anne-Janet said. “How are you feeling?”

“You don’t want to be here,” Marie said. “Hospitals are where people come to get even sicker than they were before. You have a depressed immune system. I can tell you want to go home.”

“You’re up!” Anne-Janet said, and she sat in a chair next to the bed. “Sleep well?”

“Ech. I am on so many drugs. And I’m thirsty. You wouldn’t want to go get me some juice, would you?”

“I’ll have to ask the nurse. Be right back.”

She stood and made for the station. It was awful having to bother a nurse about kid stuff like juice. But then what if Marie was on blood thinners that turned evil with sugar? What if her liquids were being restricted for a reason? Anne-Janet would corner a nurse, who would refer her to another nurse, who would not be pleased—not at all—to answer Anne-Janet’s questions. Next would come anxiety about having pissed off the nurse, in whose disposition hung the balance of a good or bad stay at the hospital. Ring the bell at 3 a.m. and get help, or just lie there in your own vomit. Sometimes you had to enlist a roommate to get attention because the roommate was still on good terms with the staff, in which case the roommate did not always want to imperil those terms by helping you. Every patient in a hospital needed an advocate to raise hell on her behalf. Anne-Janet beelined for a woman pushing a cart of towels down the hall.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but my mom, in room thirty-four—”

“Marie, sure. And you must be Anne-Janet. She talks about you all the time.”

“She does? Well. We’re wondering if she can have some juice. Also, while I have you, do you know when the doctors are coming by? Or when they’re going to remove the stent? Is the stent permanent? Why haven’t they scheduled her surgery yet? She’s just getting the plate, right? Not a whole new hip or anything?”

The nurse said, “I’m Lynne. I don’t really know the answer to any of your questions, but you’re free to walk with me while I distribute these towels. I’ve sat with your mother a fair amount today. She’s a great lady.”

Anne-Janet stopped walking. People didn’t say these things about her mom. She looked the nurse over. Maybe if Lynne just stood up straight—but then maybe she couldn’t. Maybe that hunch was permanent. Or maybe it was just her uniform, which was oversized, even for her. Could be, though, it was just her face that gave Anne-Janet the heebie-jeebies. Imagine high school with a nose like that.

“Thanks,” Anne-Janet said. “But I’d better go.”

“Okeysmokey.”

The hallway spooled around reception, as it did on every floor. If Anne-Janet closed her eyes, she could be in oncology, awaiting results from one scan or another. After five years with metastasized colon cancer, you stopped caring about the names of the tests or what they were for. Your tumors have grown, they have shrunk—these were the words that mattered. For now, they were shrunk. All but gone. Anne-Janet was on a cancer furlough and wanted to make the best of it. She wanted, even, to date. To date with minimal exposure to men, which explained her plans for the night. A Helix event. Speed dating. Since she was twenty-five, cancer had given her ample excuses not to date, among them feeling too ill, too ugly, too pointless. But finally, this was not the inhibition that needed surmounting. She was, simply, afraid to be touched. Her memories of touch were steeped in terror. It was the thing she talked about most, not in its fraught detail but in general. She would not hide it; it was always there. And seemed to come up whenever she made a new acquaintance, people being unable to call her by her full name and wanting, immediately, to call her AJ instead. Could they call her AJ? Well, her father used to call her AJ and her father had touched her inappropriately. So no, they could not. Not unless they wanted to rouse in her memories so vile, she had not had intercourse since age eight.

She looked at her mom. Probably it had been worse for her. Not to know what evils were transacted in her own home.

“No juice?” Marie said. “Did you check every floor?”

“I’ll get it in a bit. Have some ice chips.”

“So how was work yesterday? Like the new job?”

“It’s where God has landed me, I guess.” She said this wistfully because she did, in fact, marvel at change. Yes, she was surprised to have landed anywhere—to be alive, really—but mostly she was surprised to have landed at the Department of the Interior when two weeks ago she was still hawking celebrity mouth guards on eBay.

“But what’s your title?” Marie said. “What do you do?”

“Are you asking so you can tell your girlfriends? Because if so, you can tell them I am head of Research and Development.”

“But is that true?”

“No. Hey, I met a strange-looking nurse just now. Says she’s been hanging out with you. I think her name is Lynne.”

“There are so many, I can’t keep track.”

“She’s got weird posture.”

“The one with the nose?”

“You got it.”

“She’s new. She showed up out of nowhere. Listen, my angel, you wouldn’t want to get me that apple juice now, would you?”

“I think you’re on a restricted diet. Because of the surgery.”

Marie sat up. “I’m having surgery? No one said I was having surgery. What? Oh my God.”

And with that, she tried to swing her legs over the edge of the bed, never mind the stent or that her hip was fractured in two places.

Anne-Janet dove at her mother. Yelled at her. “Get back in bed. You want to die? You could die. Just get back in bed.”

She rang for the nurse while struggling with Marie, afraid the struggle would make things worse and eyeing the heart monitor as if she knew what all the numbers meant but certain a spike in any direction was bad.

“Let go of me!” Marie yelled. “I can’t stay here. You can’t put me under!”

“Mom, don’t be like this.” But her mother pushed her away with a strength she’d obviously had on reserve. “Mom, you are scaring me. I can’t help you if you are doing this.”

“Get off me, AJ!”

“Don’t call me that!”

And they struggled still. Anne-Janet depressed the emergency button. She could hear it ringing down the hall. But no one came. She looked to the roommate, who’d been shot in the gut by a bullet strayed from gang violence, but she just shook her head. No one had come to visit her, she had no advocates on the outside, she had to protect her standing in this hospital no matter what. Would she ring for the nurse? No.

Finally, Lynne of the jumbo duds stormed in with a syringe poised above her head. It was one of the scariest things Anne-Janet had ever seen, this stout little woman who wore her hair like a baseball mitt, coming at her mother like a slasher—practiced but lusty. She stabbed Marie in the thigh.

Marie went slack with the sense of being outnumbered. “You are psychotic,” she mumbled, and she let herself be helped back into bed.

Anne-Janet glanced at the heart monitor. The numbers were blinking. She looked at Lynne.

“Don’t ask her,” said Marie. “She is the stupidest nurse ever.” And then, turning to Lynne, “It is strange, the way you know nothing.”

She settled into the mattress. The numbers stopped blinking. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said. “You look like you want to go home anyway.”

Lynne said she had other places to be but that she’d come back later. Anne-Janet wet a towel in the bathroom. Wet and wrung and tried to return her thoughts to something safe, though instead they alighted on the whys of her being here in the hospital alone, the whys of having to shoulder her mother alone, the mistakes she’d made, the chances she’d never even had.

She passed the towel across her mother’s face and hands. “There,” she said. “Good as new. You’re going to feel much better in a second.” She swiped the cloth behind her ears and along the folds of her neck, and the room said: Washing your mother when she is incapacitated looks like love.

As soon as Marie fell asleep, Anne-Janet slunk out. The sedative would probably give her a few hours’ reprieve. Time enough to go speed dating without thought of her mother calling out her name in vain.

She headed for the bar, just a couple of Metro stops away. Options to drink in this neighborhood were limited to the New Wave—an all-night karaoke bar for British punk—or Nixon’s, whose three rooms could accommodate multiple events at the same time. A favorite among government staff, who came for the beer as much as the decor: renderings of the presidents no one cared about or even recalled. Zachary Taylor, who died of fruit and never brushed his teeth. Chester Arthur, of the morbid kidneys and rowdy facial hair. Warren Harding, whose reputation would have fared better if his wife really had poisoned him, and, next to him, a vacancy where once was the sober likeness of Rutherford Hayes, whose contentious election was, these days, just too much grist for argument. In point: good-bye, Hayes; hello, Reagan of the unifying landslide, whose triptych depicted the president with dog, horse, and gun, respectively.

The bar was packed. Half the place was given over to a birthday party, the other half consigned to the Helix, whose logo was postered all over the walls and spiraled from the ceiling in rainbow pipe cleaners.

Anne-Janet looked around. Speed dating had already begun, which gave her full view of the roulette being played among these single men and women with nothing happier to do. Was it too late to leave? This night was going to be a bust, she knew it. She searched for the coat-check ticket in her purse, the plan to about-face, go home, and do nothing.

Eh, enough; stay focused. She’d heard the testimonials, same as everyone else. Helix Heads. Members who’d directed their goals, resources, and beliefs to practice empathy, no matter how hard. Members who were happier for it. They were together, she was not, so just shut up, Anne-Janet, and date.

Besides, she wouldn’t go home. She’d go back to the hospital and watch the State of the Union with her mother, which was worse. Our generation has been blessed. The speech bawled from speakers in the next room and careened off the windows and wood floor of cappuccino tint.

She signed in and collected her date cards. At orientation for the Department of the Interior, she’d been told that new hires who wanted to thrive did well to go to Nixon’s, and so she was not surprised to see Ned Hammerstein in a corner with a woman fifty times prettier than she—the woman sporting a red baize spencer and suede skirt with edelweiss buttons. Throwback Bavarian, repressed but hot.

Anne-Janet hadn’t actually met Ned at work, but she’d been eyeing him from day one. She chose a table across the room from his. And started her night. On your marks, get set, talk.

“Hi,” she said, and looked at her date. His stats were: Gandhi glasses; facial hair goateed but unkempt; skin pallid, eyes pallid.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi back.”

A minute spent. There were prompts on the list; she chose one. “My worst high school moment? This girl Dawn on my gymnastics team tried to switch the talc in my bucket with boric acid because my Yurchenko double-twist vault was better than hers, except a rat got in the bucket and died, and Dawn went to juvie, but the rest of the team blamed me. So, yeah, that was it for friendships meant to last forever.”

“You know,” he said, “you have an asymmetric mouth. I find that very attractive. I think we as humans like symmetry but that we also like to see a pattern, and then to see some slight variation. Music is a great example of that. Establish a pattern and then throw in variations. I guess what I’m saying is, your face is like a song. Like ‘Take Five.’”

Speaking of which: ding.

Ned stared at his drink. There were cherries in his highball glass; he stabbed one with a cocktail pick. Tried to stab for emphasis. Get it? I hate that my life has brought me to this.

His date scanned a list of questions. “You got any hobbies?”

“I do,” he said. And he looked her over. Her smile was big, and he could see that her front teeth were canted in the direction of her throat and that her lips were tight against her gums, all things moving one way, which boded well if you were a guy with a libido, which Ned was and was not. Not for weeks, but here trying.

“I study the weather. Weather as warfare. Technically, there isn’t much use for the skill because of the UN’s 1977 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. But the fact is, no one cares. I mean, really: if you can roll in a float of clouds just when the enemy needs a sight line, you’re saving lives.”

“Are you a lifesaver?”

“No.”

“Is this your first time doing this?”

“Yes,” he said, but quietly, as though the word, quartered among pride, defeat, disgust, and hope, were not able to assert itself.

“How about we talk about you,” he said.

“No problem,” and she told him she’d just finished six months of psychiatric analysis. That her husband’s helicopter went down in Afghanistan during a training exercise. That the army, finding in six months’ psychiatric surveillance more than enough penance for having murdered her husband, stopped paying for it. “So here I am,” she said. “Trying to make new friends.”

“Jesus,” he said. And he nodded, with the helper literature in mind. It said the only way to assault estrangement and isolation was to pursue ego diminishment. How? By living the life of your contemporaries. So he nodded and frowned and let himself be visibly moved because this woman’s story was awful.

Two down, seven more to go. Ding.

Anne-Janet had worked her way to Ned’s table at last. She asked if he was having a nice time. Her eyelids fluttered as she spoke, and he couldn’t tell whether she meant to keep them open or closed, which impulse she meant to heel.

She didn’t wait for an answer. Asked, instead, about his life.

“Adopted,” he said. “Just found out, actually. Not even six weeks ago.”

“That come as good or bad news?”

“Both.” And he thought, You are what you are until you are not. Not the genetic progeny of Larissa and Max T. Hammerstein. Not an only child. Yes, a child with a twin, who, for being a girl, was not palatable to Larissa and Max T., who remanded her to foster care on the day she was born, thirty-three years ago.

“Sounds bad,” she said. “But great Prereq.” And she rubbed her eye with the fat of her palm, which jutted from a sweater sleeve that was too long. “You know, like whatever in your life sucks enough to count as prerequisite for wanting to join the Helix.”

Ned smiled. Thinking, This woman’s all right. She hates her wrists.

“Me, I don’t normally do this kind of thing,” she said. “Mostly I set up other people, even if I like the guy, because I figure the other person could make him happier than me. So it’s like doing service.”

“Wow. Sounds like you have good Prereq, too.”

“I know. You got a rash?”

He’d been farming for a spot, several spots, on his back. Anxiety Itch. So many women, so much to tell. Sweat began to front along his hairline and rill down his face.

“No,” he said. “I mean, yes. I get nervous around people.”

“You read the helper lit?”

He shrugged.

“Me too,” she said, and she tugged at her hat—a beanie, really—which saved her at least one confession: I’ve got a crew cut, and whatever the reason, it’s not good.

She reached in her bag for the brochure. It was glossy, picture heavy. Smiling people who didn’t look brainwashed so much as happy, and, of course, a snap of Helix honcho, Thurlow Dan.

They looked over the material, which seemed to fortify the whys of their finding themselves here. What else was there to say? From the lounge came news of the birthday. Happy birthday, Olgo Panjabi, happy birthday to you. The voices sang at length, they sang with joy. The hodgepodging of ethnicities in this man’s name was all very beautiful—very consolidating—and people wanted to think about that, especially now.

“That was nice,” she said.

“You’re nice.”

“We should hang out at work,” she said, though he just stared at her blankly.

Ding, and the MC’s voice: “We are taking a break. Mingle.”

There was birthday cake in the lounge. There was Bruce Bollinger, whose lips were kissed with ganache. There was Olgo Panjabi, source of it all. Olgo, who was now sixty and in whose face was a foreboding about his new year of life, tempered by this impromptu swell of affection for him. There was, also, Anne-Janet and Ned. Interior claimed fifty-eight thousand employees; here were four. They had just met.

From the TV: “Each age is a dream that is dying or one that is coming to birth.” The president quoting FDR, who himself quoted an Irish poet.

From the TV: We have seen the threads of purpose that unite us. Two terms with this guy. That nasal voice. Those platitudes.

The bartender snorted. He was fluent in drinks that made you sick. Tonight was $5 Trips to Hell, a multi-schnapped, Red Bull, Jägermeister shot he mixed for six at the counter, saying, “The Helix probably pulled in ten thousand people tonight, events all over the country, and this jerk-off is saying we’ve seen the threads that hold us together? Unless he’s Helix, too, he hasn’t seen a thread in years.”

There was laughter. And secret looks. Half the bar was Helix already. Out to recruit, then back to the Bond. The Helix had bought personal data from ten Internet dating sites, which meant it had the emails and psychological vitae of more than fifty million people who had already contributed to the effort of finding each other, and, as such, were reasonably disposed to attend these events. Rest of Your Life Socials. And when the RYLS didn’t produce—when, in fact, they depressed everyone—a Helix Head would swoop in to suggest an alternate means of camaraderie. Weekly meetings. Daily meetings. A lovely house not five miles from here.

Ding.

“So this is my theory,” Ned said. “There is no more famous prototype for twins asunder than Luke and Leia. You know, from Star Wars.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And a twin rent from its other will always feel the loss.”

“Sounds reasonable. Only wasn’t there something hanky-panky about Luke and Leia?”

“No,” he said, appalled. “Luke is an ascetic.”

“Do you have a job?” she said, though her voice was so slouched in boredom, she sounded like a teller at the DMV.

“I guess. But it’s weird. I was reading a lot about weather-modification offices in China, silver iodide and cloud seeding. You know, how to make rain and stuff. It’s big in Texas.”

“And?”

“I got a call.”

“Saying what?”

But Ned did not want to say. It was too personal, even for this. He was obsessed with the Vonnegut brothers—one a scientist who discovered the prowess of silver iodide, the other a novelist whose ice-nine plunged the world into the next Frost—and it was Ned’s idea to be like a hybrid of the two. So when he got a call, the decision was easy. Did Ned want to do something for the Department of the Interior that had something to do with changing the weather, which itself had everything to do with snubbing his powerlessness in the world? Why yes, yes he did. Ned had been with Interior for three weeks. But no one had asked him about the weather or anything else.

“It’s boring,” he said. “Tell me about you.”

“I’m anorexic—what more’s there to say?”

“Do you want help?”

“Oh, hell no.”

They laughed until the bell.

Anne-Janet pressed her napkin into a tear blooming at the corner of her eye. You were not supposed to sit with the same person twice, but there are glitches, there is fate.

She looked at Ned and said, “My mom broke her hip yesterday morning. I got home at about six and found her on the floor. Know what that means?”

“God, that’s awful. Is that why you’re crying?”

“Seven hours on the floor. Just lying there. She’s asleep now. I hate hospitals.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Being here isn’t so bad, though. You think you’re gonna join up?” she said. “The Helix?”

He shrugged. “I’m kind of a member already. But just for stuff like this. I’ve got this twin sister now and have never felt lonelier in my life. So I’m not in it for the politics or whatever. I think that part’s bullshit, anyway.”

“Which part?”

“The armed-and-dangerous part. You hear rumors, but I don’t believe them.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Probably right, only I have a couple friends who joined a Bond and now no one knows what’s up with them because they won’t talk to anyone but each other.”

“A Bond?”

“Like a commune. People living together in some house or building. They’re all over the country. But I gotta say, I actually think it sounds nice.”

“I bet the Branch Davidians thought their gig was nice, too.”

“No, but they were bonkers. And anyway, how do you know? Maybe they knew they were in a cult and just liked it that way.” She cast her arm like it was the line and she was fishing.

Ned tilted his head, gave her a look. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Do I know you from someplace else?”

Her face said it all. “I work four doors down from you, Ned. I see you every day.”

“Oh, jeez. How embarrassing.”

“That’s okay. I’m not all that stand-out.”

Ding.

Ned thumbed through his date cards. Five dates, one match. AnneJanet 358. He returned to the lounge for a last drink and a closing look at her because he was determined to remember her face. He found her with Bruce. Bruce and Olgo.

Ned said, “Happy birthday, Olgo Panjabi.”

Bruce said, “So what is that, anyway? Italian-Indian?”

Olgo wanted another drink. He was feeling vibrant. Sixty years old. Sixty today! Sixty at a time when sixty was the new forty, or so his wife liked to say after orgasm, which she still had, with decent frequency and élan, so that even as he thought about it now, he felt a gathering of love for her ramp up his chest and blossom across his face.

“Okay, one more,” said Bruce, as he assessed the détente in his gut—would it keep until home? He had a bad stomach.

When asked, Bruce said he once did consulting. And Olgo? “Arbitration. I used to envoy proposals between people who hate each other. I wrest accord from the teeth of hostility.”

“Wow.”

“My wife put that on a business card for me once. Just for fun. Olgo Panjabi: Wresting accord from the teeth of hostility since 1945. Year I was born.”

Bruce said, “I used to work in TV. Trial by Liar—my baby.”

Anne-Janet laughed. “And now we all work for Interior, and none of us knows why.”

A man tapped Ned on the shoulder. He was the organizer of the night. He was saying: Nine minutes, nine women. When you do eight, or four, you leave a woman in the lurch. There is a woman in the lurch, and she is demanding satisfaction.

Good grief. Ned was directed to a private room, which was empty barring a single woman at a table and, weirdly, a security detail in the nooks. These guys were so conspicuous. So maybe this woman was a higher-up. Maybe she had powers. Not that powers were such an asset if they meant having to take your security team on a speed date. This woman had a stoop—he could tell even though she was sitting. And though there was supposed to be an age limit here, the woman’s neck said fifty. Drapes of neck. Cascade of neck.

“Ned Four Four Four,” she said. “Sit.”

There are men, it’s true, who like to be bossed around. Men who want to be called bitch and slave and whore. Typically these are men in power who just want to give it a rest. Ned knew such men. His father—his faux father—was such a man, though no one had known. At least not until two months ago, when he had confessed, in his sleep, to having affinities at odds with his wife’s temperament in bed, so much so that he was pleading for things of which she had never heard. What, for instance, was a hog tie?

His mother might well have let it go—a dream is but a dream—but she didn’t. Instead, she flew into such a rage that she intimated gratitude for Ned’s lineage unknown—thank God he could not inherit this sickness, this depravity!—at which point, she realized, the game was up. The truth will out: he was adopted. Ned left home with a folder of documents and letters, and a sense that the wasteland he’d come to regard as his inner life owed its provenance to strangers.

He sat. The woman produced a clipboard. “Drugs?” she said.

“No.”

“Illnesses?”

“None. My dad has hypertension, but then I guess that means nothing for me anymore since he’s not really my dad.”

She checked things off as she spoke.

“This is efficient,” he said. “Do you multitask at home? I’ve got it so I can piss, shave, and brush my teeth at the same time. Assuming you’re man enough to sit on the toilet, it’s no problem.”

“You’re very talented,” she said, and she seemed to lean forward, though perhaps it was just the illusion produced by her nose and jaw, as though these features wanted off her face and were just waiting for the chance.

He checked his watch. Seven minutes to go. He said, “What’s your name?” and looked at his date card. Because, in a way, this bossy little woman was hot. Twenty years older than him, but hot. Go figure.

“My name is Lynne.”

He leaned forward, wanting to whisper something about the security detail, only as he moved in, so did they. One got his forearm between Ned and Lynne so fast it came down like a tollgate. The arm appeared to say: Sit back. Good thing Ned had powers of deduction, since the man also appeared incapable of speech. He was so much brick, there were probably bricks all up and down his throat.

The woman waved him off—“Martin, enough”—and the Brick went back to his corner.

Ned retracted. Pulled out his chair. “This is getting uncomfortable,” he said. “I don’t think I’m the guy for you.”

But Lynne kept to the script. Fears? Phobias? Allergies?

“I don’t handle eggplant all that well.”

“Anything you can tell me that your basic spy wouldn’t catch within a week of surveillance?”

He had to think. He scratched his back with kitchen utensils, wore Star Wars costumes to relax, and sometimes talked to Kurt Vonnegut in the bathroom because the man’s photo—from a magazine—was taped to the mirror.

“No,” he said. “Probably not. Though if you had someone spying on me, it’d be for a reason, which would make me way more interesting than I am. So it’s sort of an unfair question.”

“Okay, let me ask you this: Do you ever feel like you want to do something great? Something that will make you king of the world?”

He sat back. Studied her face. Did he know this woman, too? He didn’t want to risk asking.

“I guess,” he said. “That’s why I study weather modification. I mean, if you can turn water to ice, you are powerful. You are allpowerful. So who knows? Defy Nature in a small way and maybe you can do it in a big way.”

“And that appeals to you?”

“I’d like to be in charge of my own life, yes.”

She seemed to approve. “So you just found out you’re adopted, is that right?”

“How could you know that?” he said. “Okay, please tell me you are just really into me and did some research.”

“Is that what you’d prefer?”

“Don’t write that down! Am I safe in assuming we’ve long since ended our date? I’m going to try to be smart about this and venture you are from Interior and are, uh, interviewing me for one reason or another.”

“Don’t be silly. I just overheard what you said earlier. And anyway, here comes the bell.”

“You are weird,” he said. “That was weird.”

“Nine-minute dating is weird. Get over it.”

He watched her leave the room, security on either flank.

In the lounge were the bartender and backs. A few guys watching golf highlights. A woman saying it might be nice to watch the minority response to the State of the Union, and another saying: Bohhhring.

Ned grabbed his coat from the stand. He felt for his gloves and was reassured to find them there. Outside the window, he caught sight of one of his dates getting in a car with the security guy of brick. One date and then another, and Lynne bringing up the rear. Well, how do you like that? The silent brick thing was not supposed to work. The Helix said so. Equity theory said so—only people in receipt of a self-disclosure will respond by sharing about themselves at a companionable level of intimacy, which was code for putting out, and yet there was the Brick with half the bar in his pants. Ah, the world was a mystifying place. And being in it was not so much an exercise in humility as disjuncture.

Ned checked his watch. It was only nine. Guess he’d go home and pelt the TV with wasabi peas. Or have a drink like his boss, the Secretary, who would inherit the earth if the Capitol blew up on this night of all others. Somewhere in a safe house mandated by the doomsday caveat to the Succession Act of ’47, the Secretary was sipping Bénédictine and napping through the State of the Union like everyone else. Probably, though, Ned would go home and study the weather. Rawinsonde data from balloons one hundred thousand feet in the air; thunderstorm identification, tracking, analysis, and nowcasting info; Stüve diagrams and the CAPEs of every cloud deck within ten miles. An hour’s worth of study that would help him counter dread of the unknown with his command of the fates. He needed all the help he could get for that moment when he’d find his sister and disclose their kin. He had, after all, seen Star Wars a thousand times.

LUKE: I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.

LEIA: You’re who?

He spotted Anne-Janet on her way out and ran to catch up with her. “Hey,” he said, “if you’re not doing anything right now, maybe we could have a beer or something?” Because, romance or not, it’d be nice to have a friend at work. Share your boredom, and next you know, you’re streaking the Pentagon for kicks.

“I can’t,” she said. “I have to get back to the hospital. Mother calls.”

He nodded and felt like he didn’t need the Helix to get this one right. He understood perfectly. We are put on this earth to rue the family that comes apart. Look after you and yours.

Anne-Janet took the long way back, and when she found out her mom was still asleep, she went to the lounge. Most unhappy place ever, the hospital lounge, except maybe the playground after a miscarriage. It was empty but for a coffee station and snack machine with offerings strangely antagonistic to health. Not just candy bars and chips, but the really caloric foods, like Marshmallow Fluff shortbread and maple honey buns. Honey buns in a bag. Anne-Janet bought water and a pack of gum. She sat on a couch frayed at the arms and pecked with holes. Nails burrowed into the fabric while people waited for death.

She retrieved her Helix membership card from her back pocket. She should laminate the thing and yoke it to a string around her neck, just to advertise her need. That or rip it up because, really, those people were lame, the socials were lame, and just because the energies of the lonely tended to mobilize in vigilant and constant pursuit of an end to loneliness, that did not make their aggregate any less lame.

Even so: Nine men, one match. Ned Hammerstein. She’d spent most of her first weeks at Interior trying to find out more about him. But the results were minimal. So either he was this wonderful enigma or the most boring man ever. It didn’t matter which, only that Anne-Janet liked to know in advance what she was getting into. She hated surprises. As a girl, just knowing when her father was coming took the edge off the assault. In time, she hardly cared what he did because she was prepared. On the other hand, nights he showed unexpectedly, she sobbed into the dishrag he thrust in her mouth.

She put the card away and crossed her ankles. Was about to go to her mom’s room when Nurse Lynne plunked down on the couch and said, “There you are. Been looking all over.” She seemed out of breath. And looked as if she’d applied her eyeliner in an earthquake. What kind of nurse had a hand that unsteady?

“Why? How’s my mom?”

“Down for the count. I gave her a sedative.”

“Another one?” And because Anne-Janet was a little afraid of her, she looked at Lynne’s shoes. Not the rubber clogs made famous by that fat Italian chef, but black suede pumps. “I’ve never seen a nurse wear those,” she said.

Lynne outstretched her foot. “Shift’s over. I’m on my way out. Just stopped to check on you.”

“Oh. Well, that’s nice.”

She noticed that Lynne’s calves were tremendous. Water balloons. Amazing.

Lynne scratched one with the tip of her pump. She said, “Your mom tells me you work for the Department of the Interior. What’s that like?

It sounds grand.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I mean it. I’m a nurse, what do I do all day? A man came in this morning, he weighs five hundred pounds. We had to get him from the gurney to a bed. Exciting, right? But you work for the government. You’re doing something that matters.”

Anne-Janet blushed. She had never thought of herself as a woman who did work that mattered. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s sort of grand. I don’t know how up you are on the divvying of responsibilities in government, but my department pretty much runs the show. I mean, the fundamentals. Land, water, energy.”

“Wow. And what’s your part?”

“Research.”

“Yeah? Do you go out into the field or whatever?”

Anne-Janet sat up with zero regard for the crossroads before a giant lie and said, “Yes. I am out there all the time. Oil production, gas lines, reservoirs, coal mines—you wouldn’t believe what would happen to these things if we didn’t step in. People need guidance. They need oversight.”

“It’s great they have you,” said Lynne.

Anne-Janet smiled. She plumed and bluffed and grinned.

“But I’ve been thinking,” said Lynne—and here her face lost that admiring ingenue quality Anne-Janet had quickly come to love—“I’ve been wondering: is it hard working for the government these days? Because of what’s happening?”

“What do you mean?” Though the fact was, even World War III would have registered but faintly on Anne-Janet’s screen. Such was the colonizing tyranny of cancer; you hardly noticed anything else.

“Oh,” Lynne said. She looked disappointed. “So you’re not involved with how to deal with the Helix? The movement’s so big, there are rumors of an Indian land-claim thing going on. Like they want to be self-sufficient. Carve up the states. I hear Thurlow Dan is a secessionist.”

“Uh, yeah,” Anne-Janet said, feeling the need to recoup Lynne’s respect tussle with the need to defend or conceal her patronage of the Helix—she wasn’t sure which. “We’re on top of that,” she said. But also: Carve up the states? What? There were rumors, yes, but they were stupid conservative rumors. The Helix wasn’t militant. It was about reconciliation, and, in Anne-Janet’s exercise of the fundamental option of faith, it was about consigning the pitch of your heart to God and letting him restore what being human fractures to bits every day. So, in fact, the Helix was about the opposite of secession. And Thurlow Dan? He started the thing. Had devoted his life to bringing unity where there was strife. Who knew what this nurse was on about. She was an idiot.

“Aha,” Lynne said. “So you’re not interested?” She inched forward with a disregard for personal space that gave Anne-Janet the creeps. Already Anne-Janet had retreated to the edge of the last cushion; any farther and she’d fall off.

“No, I am. I’m interested.”

Lynne was squared before her; their knees touched. “What do you really know about the Helix?”

Anne-Janet frowned. “Is there any chance you’re talking DNA because we’re in a hospital and my mother broke her hip and maybe I am next because osteoporosis is genetic?”

“No.”

“Okay then. As far as I know, the Helix has a pretty comprehensive website. Lots of info. Events, literature, stuff like that. In its name, people get together to talk and share about their lives. Make new friends. You know.”

“Yes, fine, but I mean—oh, never mind. Why am I even asking you.” Lynne pulled back a good two feet.

Anne-Janet took offense. It was bad being crowded in but worse to repel the crowd once it had started. She thought hard. Did she know anything about the Helix that departed from what anyone else knew? Some nights the only info she got on just what Interior did was from collecting strips of paper from the shredder bins on the Hill and recreating the original sheets. Her mother would say, “Oh, honey, go out, get a boyfriend,” and she’d say, “I am dating the shredder.” Last week, she’d pieced together a memo, which she’d forgotten about until now, that did say something about Dan and his people in Cincinnati. Was this what Lynne was talking about? Her mother’s nurse, Lynne?

She said, “I’ll let you in on a little secret. There is something afoot with the Helix. I think it’s at the Defense Department, but I can’t talk to you about that. I don’t even know how you’d get that kind of information. I guess people talk. Loose lips. No respect for confidentiality.”

She said this and felt indignant and then bolstered, equally by the idea of herself risen above the leaking crowd as by Lynne’s face, which had reinterested itself in her life.

“Do they talk?” Lynne said, sitting up. “Like, everyone, or just a few people?” Her tone was a little aggressive. Again she leaned.

“I might have overstated it. There’s talk, sure, but probably there’s talk everywhere. I haven’t made too many friends yet—I mean, because I’m rarely at my desk—but the people I know seem moderately interested at best.”

“But you’re in the Helix, right?”

“I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”

“How well’s it working out for you? Have you found true love?”

Anne-Janet frowned. There was venom here, but who had the energy to care? “Not yet,” she said. “But if you must know, I was just out with some department friends, and, since you mention it, I did meet someone. A colleague. It was a Helix event, jam-packed.”

“I see,” Lynne said. “So, basically, if I’m getting this right, you don’t give a hoot about anarchists or revolutionaries so long as you’re avoiding your mother and scouting for love.”

Anne-Janet’s mouth opened. Her front teeth were overlaid, of which she was conscious to the point of never opening her mouth except to yawn, talk, eat—certainly not to express surprise or, in this case, alarm, because this Lynne of the close quarters was the most repellent nurse ever.

“I have to go now,” she said.

Mental notes: Lynne Somebody, midfifties, Reed Memorial Hospital, short in stature, face arranged like an open cash register. Wears surgical gloves at all times; might be wigged. Further research: look up Jewish Orthodoxy or female hair loss. At least Anne-Janet would have something to do at work.

She returned to her mother, who was, in fact, still asleep. No, she was feigning sleep to avoid chat with her roommate, who had grown vocal about how stuff happens for a reason, like maybe a shot to the gut was going to open doors for her. Maybe her son might come to see in her scrambled intestine a reason to stay out of the gangs. Maybe her boyfriend would come to find in the accident purchase for his self-esteem: he could take care of her, be a man. That neither son nor boyfriend had come did not so much rock her theories as grow them to include the virtue of patience.

Anne-Janet sat on the edge of her mother’s bed. “Now, Mom, listen to me. You’re just getting a plate and some screws in your hip. Not a big deal. You will piss off everyone at the airport, but that’s about it. Recovered in a few weeks.”

Marie opened one eye. “I understand I can stay in a rehabilitation center until I am well enough to be self-sufficient. That way I won’t be a burden on you.”

“Mom, you are not a burden.”

“But you can’t handle my needs at your place, can you? It’s too much. I don’t want to be a burden.”

Anne-Janet looked away, settled her eyes on the rise and fall of the roommate’s chest. It was so tedious, this runaround, her mother never saying what she meant but always getting her wants across.

The roommate said, “You ought to talk to each other—don’t just sit there in silence. When my son comes, you can bet we won’t just be sitting here in silence. Unless I’m slapping ’im up the head or something. Ow, don’t make me laugh. Ow, ow.”

Anne-Janet turned to her. “It’s fine to sit in silence. This is a hospital. Silence is fine.”

“No, that’s not right. People want to feel like they got people.”

“Feel whatever you like,” Marie said. “But the bottom line is the same. You’re born alone, you die alone”—and she closed her eyes with the thought.

“Mom, you are not alone,” Anne-Janet said. But it’s not like she didn’t know what her sick parent was talking about.