AFTER ANOTHER TWO weeks at the center, following a relatively light day of treatment and a very gentle expulsion by the goo, Chet breezed into my bungalow wearing civilian clothes, a crew-neck sweater, white linen slacks, and loafers. He looked ready for the post-regatta yacht club reception or a J. Crew cover. He held a bundle of additional clothes covered in dry-cleaner cellophane over his arm.
“You dress up nice, Chet,” I said.
“Thank you, sir, and you will too.” He held the clothes out to me. They looked like carbon copies of what I wore for the press junket on my first movie, strategically distressed jeans, white button-up shirt, blue blazer. “Now, no time to waste, we’ve got a party to go to.”
By this time I’d pretty much figured out the WHC game and I was wholly on board. If it was stock, I would’ve made it 100 percent of my portfolio. They did not take your memories, there was no wiping clean of the slate. Rather, they cleansed your memories and they returned sanitized, 99-percent free of psychic harm. The theory was that over time, the damage accrued, memories piling up like plaque in an artery and at some point the blockage is complete and well … we’re getting close to hearing about the kind of harm that can cause.
They seemed to be a custom job on each guest, though. Mitch Laver had had his ability to feel physical pain cleared, but when I banged my head on the shower door in my room, I saw stars like I would’ve any other time. I wasn’t sure if all this was a good thing, but I couldn’t deny that I was feeling better than I had in a long time, and that things I never should have forgiven myself for no longer seemed so terrible. Everything from the past was at arm’s length, like a movie I’d seen once long ago starring someone else.
Just that morning, the goo’s final question was, once again, “What do you want?” and I said, “To be with someone,” and as I said it, I realized I meant it.
THE FOOD WAS familiar at the party: pureed meats on toast circles, cylinders of Parma ham skewered on toothpicks, cheese puffs. Apparently, even the Center uses the same caterers as everyone else. The faces were familiar as well since all of us were famous, and I’d seen most of them at Mr. Bob’s speech. The party was at a kind of mansion-plantation-style house with a grand entryway featuring a double-helix staircase leading upward. We were ushered into several separate drawing rooms with fireplaces and overstuffed furniture frayed at the edges that had been pushed to the walls, exposing large, ornately woven throw rugs. Soft string music came from an indeterminate place, but it sounded live rather than recorded. Everyone was in regular clothes, not a tracksuit in sight, but not everyone was dressed up. Apparently, we had been outfitted to look our best. In some cases that best meant urban-prep casual (me), while in others it meant three-days-from-their-last-shower grunge.
Mingling was at a minimum and if they’d been as isolated as me, I understood why. The only person I’d spoken to on a semi-casual basis since I’d arrived was Chet. The unfamiliar faces were obviously the handlers, the handler/celebrity ratio pretty much being one to one. Without explanation, Chet had left me alone to nibble my canapé and sip from my goblet. (At the Center, the only glasses are goblets.) We all drank the omnipresent Center mead.
As I was about to go in search of a goblet refill, Chet reappeared with one in his hand. With his other hand, he was steering a very recognizable face toward me.
“I believe you two are acquainted,” Chet said, exchanging my empty goblet for the full one.
“We got toasted together,” I said, and she smiled.
“Wonderful,” Chet said. “Perhaps you’d like to spend some time getting to better know each other.” He disappeared as quickly as he’d arrived.
I took a good look at her for the first time. Of course I’d seen her face a million times before. She was in my magazines, on my television. Her face looked at me from my box of cereal and I could chew and stare at her like we were having breakfast together. A breakfast for champions. Like the rest of the world I’d followed her path from child athletic prodigy, in a grand slam final at age fourteen, to an early adulthood of as-yet-to-be-fulfilled promise. She was nineteen now, maybe twenty, and she looked it; fresh, healthy, unspoiled. She wore a sheer white top pulled just off her shoulders that emphasized the broadness of her back and straight black pants that emphasized the length of her legs. I remembered she was tall, but being close again, I saw she had a half inch on me. Her hair was down from its usual ponytail, which softened her face from the competitive mask we were all used to. She looked both beautiful and powerful. I felt like a used-up brute next to her, even with all my good work with the goo behind me.
I had no idea what to say. I knew everything about her already, didn’t I? She’d arrived fully constructed, fully understood.
“Those are some shoulders you have there.”
“Thank you,” she replied, half twirling and smiling shyly. “They’re what allow me to have such a devastating arsenal from both sides.”
“You don’t say.”
“I did. I did say.”
“Yeah, well, my material is killer,” I said.
“My serve is a howitzer, the forehand a rifle.”
“I’ve slayed entire audiences before.”
“I also have a slice backhand that I sometimes use to drive a dagger into my opponents’ hopes for victory.”
“When I murder my jokes, I bomb.”
“Does that happen often?” she asked.
“It didn’t used to.”
“When I’m tired, my serve occasionally misfires,” she said.
“Does that happen often?” I said.
“Too often, apparently,” she replied. She held out her hand. “I’m Bonnie, but everyone calls me Bunny, which I hate with a burning, passionate intensity of a thousand suns.”
“Most everyone calls me a washed-up hack.”
“Nice to meet you, Hack,” she said, smiling.
“You too, Bunny.”
We were starting to get to know each other, but I already felt out of words. We weren’t allowed to ask, “What brings you here?” And besides, I pretty much already knew. She couldn’t manage to win the big one. At a tour stop in Minsk she would be raising the trophy above her head at the end of a fortnight, but in the majors she would devastate her opponents as she moved through the draw until the finals, when she would fold in on herself and lose, often to obviously inferior players. One of the sports weeklies had put her on the cover, a crown askew on her head with the caption MISS RUNNER-UP.
Just as I was about to say, “nice meeting you” and go looking for my Chet life preserver, she placed her cool, dry hand in my sweaty one and said, “I think I saw a pool in the back.”