“I guess someone’s told you about me?” said Ron Loughner, and Ada shook her head.
“Hmmmmm,” he said. He put his hand on his face as if puzzled. “Well, your friend Diana Liston hired me, since she’s the executor of his estate. We’re in the early stages,” he said, and then he trailed off, looking suddenly sorry, noting her age, not wanting to continue.
“Early stages of what?” asked Ada.
“I think maybe you should talk to Ms. Liston,” said Loughner. Ada looked at him sharply. Already her heart was beginning to pump more quickly, sending an angry rush of blood to her face, swelling her veins. She did not like the feeling of not knowing something, when it came to David. It was not right of Liston to leave her out.
Impulsively, she walked around to the front of David’s armchair to see his face.
He said nothing to her. He looked, Ada thought, stormy. His brow was lowered; he frowned. His face had not been shaved yet, and a gray stubble was speckling his jaw. He was wearing a light blue cardigan that he never would have chosen for himself; it was October, and getting colder. Perhaps it was a donated sweater that the Carmelite Sisters had received from outside. The thought shamed her. She made a note to ask Liston if the two of them could buy him a few warmer things.
“Hi, David,” she said.
“No,” he said, his head back in his chair, looking at her sideways.
“What were you just talking about?” she asked him, loudly, so that Ron Loughner could hear. She shocked herself. Her anger made her bold.
In the background, she could see Loughner shifting.
“Nothing,” said David.
“Do you know him?” Ada asked him, pointing to Loughner.
“No, I don’t know him,” said David.
“Do you know me?” she asked. It had been more than a month since he had called her Ada without prompting.
“Yes, I know you,” he said, nodding.
“What’s my name?”
And he lifted a hand from the armrest, let it hover there, then dropped it down again, a needle on a record.
Ron Loughner took that opportunity to tell her that he really had to go, and he raised a hand to her in parting.
“Wait,” said Ada, “can you tell me anything? Just tell me what you were talking about,” she said bravely.
“You’d better talk to Ms. Liston,” he said again, and smiled tightly. He left the room, a faint scent of cologne trailing behind him.
David sat up slightly in his chair and turned around to see Loughner go. Then he looked at Ada.
“Bad,” he said, directing a thumb over his shoulder at where Loughner had been before.
“Who was that? What was he doing here?” Ada asked, but he shook his head.
“Bad,” he said again. He raised and lowered his eyebrows, and then his shoulders.
She did not stay with him any longer. She left him. And on the bus ride home she planned how she would confront Liston. This was the word—a confrontation—that echoed through her mind on the bus ride home, still bruised by the idea of her being closed out of some important decision. She had never confronted anyone before, but she was very upset. Until that afternoon, she had believed herself to be in charge of David’s welfare in some essential way: his protector, his overseer, his sentinel. To be left out of any discussion or negotiation when it came to his well-being infuriated her. To be treated like a child. Her face and her ears were hot with the injustice of it all.
But when she found Liston at the kitchen table, working out some problem on her yellow legal pad, Ada discovered that her voice had decided to fail her. Gone was the fury that had pumped through her at St. Andrew’s and on the bus ride home. Liston looked old to her, and she was pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingers as if willing her brain to work.
“Hi, baby,” she said, when Ada walked in. “How’s David today?”
“He’s okay,” said Ada quietly.
And then she paused.
“Are you all right?” asked Liston.
“Who’s Ron Loughner?” Ada asked her.
Liston exhaled.
“He was supposed to meet with David this morning,” said Liston. “Was he still there when you got there?”
Ada nodded somberly, reveling slightly in her righteousness, waiting for an explanation, waiting for some sort of apology from Liston.
“He must have been late,” she said. Ada crossed her arms.
Liston put her pen down and looked at Ada steadily, assessing something. Then she nodded to herself. “Right,” she said, as if she had finally come to a decision.
“Ada, we have some reason to believe that David might not be who he has always said he is,” Liston said, carefully. And she stood up from her chair and crossed the room, extending both hands, at the same time that Ada sat down, hard, in her chair.
2009
San Francisco
“What would you say,” said the man, “if I told you that when life got stressful, you could relax whenever you wanted in a fully immersive alternative reality?”
He was sitting on a sofa. He was sitting next to a woman.
The woman turned, nodding enthusiastically. “It’s true. We at Tri-Tech are hard at work on technology designed to offer an exciting virtual alternative to everyday life. Just put on this device,” said the woman. She was wearing a black suit. Her legs were crossed. Her foot bobbed slightly to some unknown rhythm. In her hand she held a headset: a sort of sculpted black crown, a circle meant to fit neatly over the head and eyes and ears. She donned it.
“And suddenly you’ll find yourself in another world. Think of it as lucid dreaming,” she continued. She was blinded, now, by the head-mounted display. Her arms moved differently, fumblingly. Her fingertips searched the air, gestured in arcs that were ten degrees removed from where they would be when her sight was restored. “Here, you have total control over your own fate; just blink and you’ll be transported to Paris, or to the North Pole, or to a secluded beach, invented by you, designed to meet your personal specifications for the ideal beach. Our virtual-world technology includes sensory controls that allow you to feel and smell and taste what you see before you, by emitting signals that trigger the neurons in different regions of your brain. Too hot on that beach? Lower the temperature to a perfect seventy-eight degrees. Don’t just look at the chocolate truffles in the case; taste what you see before you, and never gain a pound.”
“Meet up with friends and family,” said the man. “Or with an old flame who lives halfway across the globe,” he added, suggestively. “The options here are limitless.”
“Infinite,” the woman said. “More infinite, in fact, than they are in reality as we know it.”
She froze, then. Her hand stuttered through the air and then stopped; her mouth paused on its way to closing.
The man was caught mid-turn. He had left his hair behind; he was momentarily bald.
“Come try it,” said his voice, outside his body.
And the voice of the woman said, “We’ll be waiting for you.”
Ada shook her head.