Page 5

The only real social engagement I had for the weekend was going to a play with Jason, Domenic, and Marika on Saturday night. It was a community theater production of “Rent” somewhere in Evanston, and some girl Domenic wanted to date had a small role, so he’d told her he would come and bring a few friends. I did not have high hopes for the quality of the production, and it had taken some persuading to convince Marika to come up from Atlanta to so she could attend, but I was still looking forward to an evening of great amusement.

Marika and Domenic and Jason and I have been our own little group since we were teenagers. Any time we’re together, we start feeding off each other until a sort of manic energy builds and pretty much anything can happen. Less often, now that we’re older and more sober, but the potential is still there.

We had made plans for everyone to gather at my apartment—where, Jason had informed me, a meal had better be ready. So I made a spicy chicken dish, threw together a spinach salad, and set a few trays of chocolate chip cookies in the hotbox. I’m not a particularly inventive cook, but I can put a simple meal together and be pretty sure it’s edible.

Marika was the first to arrive, staggering through the door on the highest heels I had ever seen on any human being. The clunky black shoes were rimmed with winking rhinestones, a motif that was continued in a spiral pattern up her opaque black stockings. She wore a short black miniskirt and a tight-fitting lace blouse, all covered up, when she first walked in, by a long leather coat that reached to her ankles.

“How can it be this cold anywhere on the planet at this time of year?” she demanded, heading straight toward the decorative mirror hung on my living room wall. The mirror, a gift from Marika, had a silkscreened pattern of butterflies across it, which made it impossible to get an uninterrupted inspection of your face. However, it was good enough for Marika to peer into as she reapplied her wine-colored lipstick and fluffed up her hair.

It did not need fluffing. Her hair is this wild explosion of light brown curls that tumble to the small of her back and give her pale, narrow face an expression of perpetual surprise. People go wild for her hair. Strangers stop her on the street and ask her who does her perms. I’ve seen small children reach out to stroke it from their vantage points in shopping carts or on their fathers’ shoulders.

“It’s cold in Chicago until July third, and then we have about eight days of summer, and it gets cold again,” I said. “You know that, you grew up here.”

“Yes, but I didn’t choose to stay here for the rest of my natural life. God, there was such a creep at Olympic Terminal. I swear I thought he was going to follow me to Chicago. But I remembered the code for the downtown police station, and I was going to punch that in if I saw him anywhere near me at O’Hare.”

“How do you know the code for the Chicago PD?”

She shrugged. In typical Marika fashion, she was moving restlessly around the apartment, picking up books, touching the lamp, adjusting pictures on the wall, glancing out the window. I don’t think she is completely still even when she’s sleeping. “Oh, that time Domenic and Jason got arrested for, what was it, disturbing the peace.”

“That narrows it down a lot.”

“When they were serenading that girl out in her front yard. You were gone, so they called me. I thought it might be handy to know the code, so I committed it to memory. Eight-six-four-four-seven.”

Jason walked in without knocking. “Smells good. Hi, Mareek.”

She clumped over on her awkward heels to give him a hug. Normally she’s about an inch shorter than Jason, but the shoes made her tower over him. Didn’t seem to bother either of them. “So who’s this girl we’re supposed to be impressing?” she asked. “Is this serious?”

Jason made a rude noise deep in his throat and waved a dismissive hand. “When is Domenic ever serious? I’m not sure he even knows her last name.”

“Hey, Jason,” I said, “what’s the gate code for the Chicago police?”

“Eight-six-four-four-seven,” he said promptly. He didn’t ask why. “When are we going to eat? I’m starving.”

“As soon as Domenic gets here. You can open the wine if you want.”

He had just poured three glasses when Domenic strolled in. He, too, was dressed all in black, with a long trench coat that floated behind him like a superhero’s cape, but it was hardly the most striking thing about him. He’s tall and reedy, with long flowing black hair that frames an absolute angel’s face and luscious rum-and-coffee-colored skin that reflects his mixed Irish, Japanese, and African heritage. His dark mystic’s beauty always makes me think of some enigmatic stranger arrived in the night to avenge a terrible wrong.

“Who dresses you people?” Jason asked from across the room. Marika and Domenic put their arms around each other and posed briefly. Even when she was wearing such outrageous heels, the top of Marika’s head just reached the level of Domenic’s.

“At least we don’t get our fashions off of lakerboy-dot-com,” Domenic said in his intense melodic voice that gives even his most casual utterance an almost hypnotic force.

As always, Jason was wearing well-cut and well-pressed cotton pants and a white shirt. “At least I look like an ordinary human being,” he retorted. “You two look like the bad guys in an old Western.”

“Who cares?” Marika said. “I’m hungry. Let’s eat.”

The meal, of course, was fairly raucous, with four determined voices competitively raised in jokes, anecdotes and insults.

“So who’s this girl we’re going to meet, Domenic?” I asked.

“You’re not going to meet her,” he said. “Once the play is over, you will talk amongst yourselves while I make a brief visit backstage without you.”

Marika said, “Why do you even want us to go with you if you’re embarrassed to be seen with us in public?”

My brother toasted her with his wineglass. It, too, featured a butterfly motif, since it, too, was a gift from Marika. In a high school Spanish class, she had learned that the closest approximation to her name was mariposa , which translated to butterfly , and butterflies had been her personal emblem ever since. “How could someone dressed as you are embarrass anyone?” Jason said.

“You should be grateful to have a friend so fashionable.”

I changed the subject. “Hey, Domenic,” I said, “what’s the gate code for the downtown police department?”

“Eight-six-four-four-seven.”

“And a good thing you know it,” Jason said, “since I think we’re all about to be hauled down there.”

“For which of our crimes?” Domenic asked.

Jason nodded at me. “Ask her.”

“Oh yeah. The security check,” I said. “Did anyone get in touch with you?”

“Not me,” Jason said. “Called my boss and my faculty advisor. And apparently had done a pretty thorough search on me before they even made the calls. I realize privacy is an arcane concept, but I admit I was a little disturbed to find out how quickly Duncan Phillips can get access to my life when he wants.”

“Duncan Phillips?” Domenic repeated. “Why is he interested in you?”

“I might be taking a job tutoring his son,” I said. “But apparently there are all these high-risk hoops to jump through. So I knew he’d be checking out my friends and my family—sorry about that. And apparently he never hires women, so I don’t know if I have a real shot at the job.”

“Never hires women,” Marika exclaimed, instantly fired up. “Okay, I’ve got a friend who’s a lawyer, we’re skipping the theater and heading right back to Atlanta—”

Domenic was staring at me. “His son,” he said. “Is he the one with Kyotenin degradation?”

I nodded. The other two grew quickly quiet, sensing something serious in the air. “He’s nineteen,” I said, knowing Domenic would understand the time limit that implied. “I almost hope I don’t get the job, you know? I’ll get too attached to him.”

“You get attached to all your students,” Marika said. “So what?”

“He’ll probably be dead in five years,” Domenic said. “Less.”

“Well, that’s shitty,” said Jason.

Domenic shrugged—not a gesture of indifference, I thought, but helplessness. “We can cure some kinds of cancer. We can wipe out polio and bubonic plague and leprosy. And our bodies find new ways to turn against us. There will always be new diseases that prey on humankind. That’s the way it works.”

“I never heard of it before,” Marika said.

“It’s pretty rare, which is about the only good thing about it. It’s resistant to every vaccine and antibiotic ever developed and hasn’t responded to a single treatment they’ve tried. A few years ago, they thought muscle and organ donation from a healthy subject would slow it down or even stop it, but then it turned out the disease infected the new tissue, so they stopped the transplants. It’s pretty gruesome.”

“Well, I’m depressed,” Jason said.

“I don’t think you should take this job,” Marika said.

“I will if they offer it to me.”

“If you do, you can snoop around his mansion and sell information to all the gossip sites,” she said. Celebrity watching was one of her passions; she could give me the romantic and financial scoop on any actor, model, or billionaire anywhere on the planet. “No one can ever find out much about his private life—like, no one ever knows who he’s dating until the romance is over—so you could make a fortune if you could get a photo of him with a new girlfriend.”

“This is just fascinating,” Domenic said.

“What happened to his wife?” I asked. “Quentin’s mother?”

“Well. That was very strange,” Marika said. “She was only about thirty when she died—in her sleep, they said, of a heart valve malfunction. I read a couple of accounts that said she drank herself to death or overdosed on sleeping pills. A lot of people think she killed herself because she couldn’t stand living with him, but she didn’t want to divorce him because of the pre-nup.”

“Can we talk about something else?” Jason demanded.

Domenic ostentatiously checked his watch. “No time. We’re almost late as it is.”

We were all simultaneously on our feet. None of them so much as glanced at the table where the dirty dishes sat in sticky splendor. “On our way,” Jason said.

*

The musical was not quite as bad as I’d feared but worse than I’d hoped, and Domenic’s new crush was a mediocre singer at best. About every third line, Marika would lean over to me and whisper, “What did he say? What did she say? I didn’t catch it,” while Jason was consumed with giggles induced by one poor girl’s completely inaudible delivery.

Domenic sat, serenely enthralled, appearing to watch every scene with beatific attention, but I was suspicious. My guess was that he was wearing a pair of VR contact lenses and was streaming some kind of media through his EarFone instead of watching the performance.

When the last number had finally been performed, we joined the rest of the audience in a polite standing ovation. “Well, that’s over,” Marika said in relief.

“Let’s get something to eat,” Jason suggested.

“We ate barely two hours ago,” I pointed out.

“I’m hungry again,” he said.

“We have to wait till Domenic’s made his impression on the girlfriend,” Marika said scornfully.

“I meant, after that.”

“Give me a minute,” Domenic said, and strolled away from us to talk to the actress. She was pretty, in an insipid blonde way; it never failed to amaze me how someone as exotic as Domenic could be drawn to such ordinary women. Then again, perhaps that’s why all his relationships failed. Then again, if you were as exotic as Domenic, perhaps all your relationships would fail, anyway.

“I could go for some dessert,” Marika said.

“I was thinking pizza,” Jason said.

“Pizza!” I exclaimed. “You just ate !”

“Okay, someplace with pizza and dessert,” Marika said, turning toward the door. “Rush Street? Or stay in the ’burbs?”

“Let’s go downtown,” Jason said. He was grinning as he watched Domenic charm an attractive smile from the blonde girl. “Be there in a sec.”

“What?” said Marika, but Jason had already left us to stride over toward Domenic and the actress. I could see that his sunny face had assumed an expression of pained fury.

“Oh! I see! That’s why you wanted to come to the theater ,” Jason exclaimed in a voice loud enough to carry to the back balcony. “I suppose you don’t think it doesn’t count if it’s a woman. I suppose you think it won’t matter to me.”

The blonde girl looked over in alarm, but Domenic never even glanced in Jason’s direction.

“Oh dear God,” Marika murmured.

I grabbed her arm. “Let’s get out of here.” I pulled her toward the door, through the press of audience members who were craning their necks to get a better glimpse of the drama unfolding off the stage. We could still hear Jason ranting about cheating and heartbreak as we slipped out into the cold Chicago night.

“I don’t know why those two are even still on speaking terms,” Marika observed, drawing her long coat more tightly around her body.

I couldn’t help it. I was laughing. “Ready to leave them behind any time you are,” I said cheerfully.

She shook her head. She didn’t seem to think it was as funny as I did. “No, I hardly ever get to see them anymore. I miss them. Maybe they’ll behave a little more normally at the restaurant.”

I stared. “Domenic and Jason? I don’t think so.”

She shrugged, a half-smile on her face. “Well, okay. So I’ll put up with it anyway.”

She seemed a little pensive, a rare mood for the headlong and oblivious Marika. “So, anything going on? You talk to Christopher again?” Christopher was her recent very dull boyfriend whom she’d dumped about a month ago, though he’d called her every day to beg her to take him back. You’d think one of the four of us could stay in a stable relationship for longer than a few weeks. Well, okay, I’d been married to Danny for four years, but I didn’t count that as a success, and the other three considered it such a lapse of judgment that they put me in the negative column when we were totaling up our days of romantic happiness.

She made a dismissive motion. “Ugh. Christopher. I don’t know why I put up with him even as long as I did.”

I enumerated the reasons. “Nice—kind of cute—didn’t call you whore-slut every other day.” This last was a reference to Axel, the boyfriend before Christopher, who had been darkly handsome and a complete and total asshole.

“I suppose. Nothing like variety.”

“Well, you haven’t heard from Axel, have you?”

“Yeah, actually, he called last week, thought we should go to dinner sometime.”

“You didn’t agree, did you?”

She shrugged. “No, but—you know—at least I felt something for him. Felt nothing for Chris. I mean, are those the choices? Nice boring guys you can’t stand to be around, or jerks who make you feel alive?”

We’d had this conversation before. About six million times, I would guess. I was spared the necessity of answering when Jason and Domenic burst out the door together, laughing and arguing simultaneously. I smiled at her and shrugged.

“Maybe,” I said. “Solve it some other time. C’mon, let’s go find some chocolate.”

*

I didn’t get home until about two in the morning. I offered to let Marika stay over, since she didn’t like teleporting alone late at night, but Jason said he’d escort her home. I figured it was unlikely he would abandon her at the teleport gate, as he would me, so I felt reasonably secure putting her in his hands. Domenic, who probably needed more watching than any of us, went on his way alone.

I’d already brushed my teeth and gotten ready for bed when I thought to retrieve my messages. Unlike Marika, who rarely turns off her EarFone because she can’t bear to be out of the information loop even for thirty seconds, I’m notorious for shutting the system down for hours and then forgetting to check for notifications. Turned out that I’d missed two calls while I was out. Naturally, the first one was from my mother, wanting to know if I was alive or dead. The second one was from Bram Cortez.

“Duncan Phillips has decided that you would be the best candidate to tutor Quentin. Please report back to his house on Tuesday afternoon at three. If that time is inconvenient for you, let me know. Come to the public gate on Tuesday, and we’ll set you up with a code for the rest of your period of employment.” There was a moment’s pause; I would have thought he’d hung up, but the line still sounded live. “Quentin is looking forward to seeing you again,” he said, and then disconnected.