A Stand-In for Dying Page 9

  “You may stand if you like,” she said, “whatever makes you comfortable.”

  “This was a mistake,” Ray replied. “I should go.” He began to turn, but his leaden legs bound his feet solidly to the floor. He was going nowhere.

  “Let’s see,” the doctor said. “Tell me what you’ve come to get help with and we can decide if your trip was worthwhile.”

  “Lena...my wife...wanted me to see you. She’s tired of all my precautions. She thinks you can help.”

  “Precautions?”

  “Safeguards for our lives. Keeping out intruders. Protecting against infection.”

  “Reasonable threats,” Dr. Jensen said, palms outstretched.

  “Yes...yes. Reasonable threats. So you understand, then.” Ray’s posture relaxed just a bit.

  “But Lena thinks your precautions are somehow excessive?”

  “Yes, she does. She doesn’t understand how perilous the world can be.”

  “Not like you do, of course. So tell me, Ray, what do these precautions cost you?”

  “Cost me?”

  “What do you give up in exchange for your absolute safety?”

  Ray’s legs were getting tired and his head was beginning to swim. He longed for a safe place to rest. The doctor’s eyes scanned his body and fixed on his trembling legs.

  “Comfort? Do you sacrifice comfort like you’re doing now? Pleasure? Freedom? What are all the things you’ve given up?”

  Ray’s shoulders slumped and his head hung. He sighed all the way to the bottoms of his feet.

  “Yes, comfort, pleasure, freedom...everything, I guess. I’ve given up everything. And I’m about to lose Lena, too.”

  “So we need to learn how the world came to feel so dangerous to you that you’ve had to give up living just to keep from dying. Does that make sense?” Her eyes were again engaged with his. Her face was relaxed and peaceful. Ray felt the muscles of his own face relax as his facial expression began mirroring hers. And from somewhere deep within him came a glimmer of hope. He nodded in agreement.

  “Then you will need to trust me.” She stood and faced him, holding both hands out in front of her. This time he took them in his.

  “Good,” she said, “now breathe with me.” She took in a long, deep breath, held it a few seconds, and let it flow out. Ray followed her lead. On the fifth breath, she engaged her vocal cords in a deep, vibrating sound that seemed to emanate from her belly. Ray joined in the vocalization that resonated throughout the room. When they were done, his fatigue had lifted and his body felt looser.

  “Now how do you feel?”

  “Better...relaxed.”

  “Do you think perhaps now you can permit yourself to sit?”

  Ray glanced around the room. The noise in his head had subsided. While he still believed that microbes lurked everywhere, the paralyzing terror was gone. He walked over to the couch and sat down.

  “Good. Now we can begin.”

  By the time Ray left the elderly doctor’s office, he was in her spell. She was unlike anyone he’d ever met, yet she’d been able to set him completely at ease in a setting that was anathema to every vision of his safety. When he emerged back onto the street in the middle of the twenty first century, he wondered whether this ancient apartment and its equally ancient inhabitant had been some sort of elaborate hallucination. As he stepped into the waiting hovercar, the trappings of his present-day life triggered all of his accustomed defenses and by the time he returned home to Lena, his body was stiff from the armor that once more held him in its grip.

  *****

  Lena had agonized for weeks over whether to publish her piece on Marcus and Corinne Takana. Theirs was a wonderful story of brilliance, generosity, and love. They seemed so trusting of one another. How wonderful it must be, she’d thought, to be young, innocent, and entirely without secrets. How enviable to be in love with the one you’re with. The story flowed so easily from her fingers that it seemed to write itself.

  But in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to publish it. She did still love Ray, although it might be some time, if ever, before she could be with him sexually again, and she knew that the story would bring him unbearable pain. When she’d finally decided not to publish it, she’d deleted it completely from her stored works lest she change her mind in a moment of anger or recklessness. When it was done, she felt as though she’d murdered one of her children.

  In her grief for her lost masterpiece, she couldn’t bring herself to write again. She turned down one assignment after another until the lines of communication with her working world went silent. As much as she accepted responsibility for her decision, the kernel of resentment toward Ray for the vulnerability that would have crushed him if the story were published grew within her and kept her from breaching the chasm that had opened between them. She knew she couldn’t live much longer with the way things were. When Ray had agreed to see the psychiatrist, she’d felt as if a boulder had been lifted from the middle of her chest and she breathed freely for the first time in months.

  As incisive an investigator as Lena was, she’d failed to find a chink in the stronghold containing Ray’s childhood memories when she first ventured to write his story. From time to time during their life together, she would spot a ray of light emanating from the darkness and would reach out to capture it before it went away. Over time, she managed to piece together enough of his story to understand how badly damaged he was. Not only did he lead a life of paralyzing caution, he had every reason never to allow anyone to penetrate so deeply into his life that he couldn’t bear to lose them. Appreciating the origins of Ray’s fragility, Lena found it within herself to forgive him for it. The same well of forgiveness flowed over to allow her to forgive herself for seeking in another’s arms what she despaired of ever getting from Ray.

  She sought solace every couple of weeks by walking in Dolores Park. Most times she sat alone, gazing at the city skyline and listening to the sounds of children playing, wondering what it might have been like to bring children of her own to mingle with the others. Every few visits, she was met by her friend.

  Ray observed only one other meeting between Lena and her companion in the park. He kept a respectful distance and took unexpected pleasure in the happiness that it seemed to bring her. As damaged as Ray was, he felt connected enough to her in these moments to care about her feelings and felt sad that he couldn’t give her more and share more intimately the happiness that he observed. But he’d insulated himself sufficiently against loss that he felt no pain or betrayal at sharing her with another. She deserved, after all, something more than he was able to offer her from within the constraints of the relentless obsessions that ruled his life.

  And so they settled into parallel lives, living side by side but inhabiting emotional worlds light years apart. Lena learned to tolerate the sterility of their home and the emptiness of the emotional space between them. The one thing that she never got used to was the sameness of their existence from day to day. She thought the boredom might someday kill her.

  15

  “WE’VE HAD OUR EYE on you for a long time,” began the woman sitting next to Marcus in the cruising car. “Your accomplishments are impressive for such a young man. Your country is deeply indebted to you.”

  “Thank you, Madame Vice President,” replied Marcus.

  “How would you like to serve your country in another way?” continued Vice President Hauer.

  “What do you mean?” Marcus was flattered, but still reluctant to do anything that would put him back into the limelight.

  “We envision your future as very bright, almost limitless.” Hauer paused to allow her words to sink in. “Someday, you might even be president.”

  Marcus had no such aspirations. He couldn’t imagine anything more contrary to his penchant for privacy. He wondered, too, whether or not his secrets could sustain the intensity of inquiry that accompanied running for public office. And among those secrets was the possibility that he could be replac
ed at any time by an unknown stranger, somebody whose agenda could be anathema to the interests of the country and of the world.

  “So what do you want of me now?”

  “The President has empowered me to offer you the position of Minister of Discovery. We both believe strongly that you’re the perfect choice for the position.”

  Marcus took a deep breath, then let out an involuntary whistle. The Ministry of Discovery was the largest and most influential department of the government beside the Ministry of Defense. And given the extraordinary era of peace that the world now enjoyed, it had arguably become the most important. It guided the course of the vast majority of scientific inquiry in the modern world and was largely responsible for keeping the world on the path of sustainability. He was flattered to be considered for such a weighty position.

  “I don’t know what to say, Madame Vice President. It’s quite an honor. I’m not sure I can live up to it.”

  “We have no doubt about it. You’ve proven yourself to be an extremely resourceful, and we believe honorable, man. You have all the necessary qualities to do the job proud.” She put a hand on Marcus’s shoulder and squeezed it in a gesture of kindly approval. “And call me Juliet,” she added. “I expect we’ll be spending a lot of time together over the next few years. No need for formalities.”

  “I’ll need some time to think it over,” Marcus said. “I’ll have to discuss it with my wife. She should have a say in something that would so drastically change our family’s life.”

  “Take a few days. Give it as much time as you need. I understand your concerns about your family. I’ve had similar concerns about mine. You’ll lose some of your privacy and there are, of course, risks. But understand that you and your family will have your own security detail.” She nodded toward the woman in the front passenger seat. “They will do everything imaginable to keep you safe.”

  The car had driven a large circle around the park and came to a stop in the same place it had picked him up. The vice president held out her hand for Marcus to shake and the Secret Service agent opened the door to let him out. The car lifted off again and sped away.

  He had no idea whether or not he would accept the appointment. As a presidential appointee, he would undergo some scrutiny by the government and the press, but not anything like the microscope to which candidates for elected office are subjected. It was unlikely to expose his secrets. But there was still the risk that his benefactor could die and wind up in a position of unprecedented power. That risk was still a long shot in the near term. The man on the other end of the contract would still be relatively young and unlikely to die at least of natural causes. Did he have to put his whole life on hold to avoid it? Perhaps there would be a way to alert someone if it happened. Maybe even Terra could intervene.

  Or perhaps, the thought suddenly occurred to him, this scenario was part of Terra’s grand scheme. Perhaps the so-called buyer in the transaction that she brokered was someone groomed to assume the power of the office that Marcus was now being offered in order to advance the interests of her organization or of a hostile government. That would be a new twist on a plot common to several works of fiction in his database, in which prisoners of war were brainwashed to alter their identities, then returned home as heroes to rise to positions of power. It would also mean a much shorter horizon for his demise.

  Marcus arrived home soaked in sweat and headed straight for the cleansing pod. Corinne was waiting for him with a glass of wine when he got out. He slipped a robe over his freshly slick body and took it from her.

  “You were gone a lot longer than usual,” she said. “Is everything alright?” Corinne was usually very intuitive, particularly when it came to Marcus. She could read his emotions with such uncanny accuracy that he was amazed that she hadn’t yet stumbled onto his web of lies.

  “Actually, no,” he replied. “Something rather extraordinary has occurred.” He told her about the encounter with Juliet Hauer and the position he’d been offered. Corinne listened patiently, looking for as many clues as possible to his intentions before she spoke.

  “So what are you planning to do?” she asked.

  “What do you think I should do? What would you want?”

  “What I would want is for us to be able to have our little family and to watch Natasha grow up as normally as possible,” said Corinne. She turned her back to him for a moment. When she turned back around, she locked her eyes with his, laid both hands on the back of his neck, and spoke slowly and deliberately. “What I think is that you should take it. It’s a chance to do a lot more good, to influence a lot of things that can deeply affect the future for us all.”

  Three weeks later, Marcus Takana took the oath of office as Minister of Discovery of the United Commonwealth of North America. The following day, he delivered an address to Congress, outlining his agenda, that was holovised throughout the continent.

  “Our world now has to feed more than nine billion people,” he began, “and it’s up to us to guarantee that nobody will have to go hungry ever again. We cannot use up our planet’s resources faster that we can replace them. We must never again come close to exhausting the water supply that is the lifeblood of the world’s population.” He concluded with his vision of the role of SPUDs as partners in the stewardship of the planet and their right to share in its bounties.

  This would ordinarily have been a public event of moderate interest, but given Marcus’s preexisting celebrity, people crowded around his holographic image and hung on his words in communities spanning the continent. A little more than a hundred miles away, a small group was listening with particular intensity. A wiry man of around thirty with curly, reddish brown hair and a full, closely cropped beard stood at the front of the crowd close enough to touch the speaker’s image. A stocky older man standing a quarter of the way around the circle caught his eye and held out his right hand with forefinger pointed at the speaker, his thumb in the air, and his other fingers folded tightly against his palm. The other man echoed the gesture along with a grin that framed his gleaming white teeth with coarse, reddish brown whiskers. As if in response, the image vanished.

  16

  IT WAS RAINING on the day of Ray’s second appointment with Dr. Jensen. Water cascaded off his transparent spherical headgear and down the frictionless surface of his clothing as he reached for the button to ring the bell in the doctor’s apartment. He left a wet trail along the stairs and shook off the remaining water as he emerged into the third-floor corridor. The doctor’s door was ajar, but she wasn’t in sight. He let himself in.

  “Make yourself at home,” called the doctor from the next room. “I’ll be right there.”

  The first thing Ray noticed upon entering the office was the aroma that had so unsettled him on his previous visit. The room smelled exactly the same as it had then, but its effect upon him this time was different. There was still the vague familiarity that he couldn’t place, but it no longer put him on edge. To the contrary, it aroused nostalgic feelings that seemed somehow connected to long forgotten pieces of his past life, things still too out of focus to perceive as more than amorphous impressions.

  He walked around the room, looking at the photographs and paintings on the walls, seeing details that had eluded him in the throes of his panic at the beginning of his previous visit. In one of the photos, a young couple stood facing one another. The man’s hair was a mass of dark curls with long sideburns terminating close to the corners of his mouth. The woman had flowing black hair, fine features, and exquisite skin, but her most striking feature was large brown eyes that seemed to have been sculpted into her face.

  Another photo showed the same couple seated, this time facing the camera, with a small child on each of their laps and a grinning dark-haired boy of eight or nine standing between them. The man’s hair was now closely cropped and his face clean-shaven, revealing a striking resemblance to the standing lad. The woman’s hair was also shorter, reaching halfway to her shoulders. Her eyes now looked straig
ht at Ray as if she were inviting him into the picture. He was becoming lost in those eyes when Dr. Jensen entered the room.

  “The past shapes our present, Ray,” said the doctor as she gestured for him to take a seat. “Our memories of those we’ve cherished are precious and worth preserving, even if they sometimes bring us pain.”

  Ray’s gaze moved from the photo to the eyes of the living woman before him and wondered if she could see into his soul. His vision blurred. He blinked away the film of moisture over his eyes until the doctor’s face came back into focus.