I wake up to discover I’m having sex. I am so groggy that I don’t realize when it began, only that Polly has made her intentions eminently clear, and nature takes its course.
“Pregnancy has left me with a craving for sex and pork ribs,” she says after we finish.
I laugh, and wince. Even smiling is causing pain to ripple through a corpus that for two days has been through a menu of near misses by fire, bullet, and knife, chloroform, scarf, and flashlight.
“Nat, I’m not asking for anything and I’m not negotiating.”
“I know.”
“But I have to tell you the truth.”
“Okay.”
“You’re not a great blogger.”
“And a good morning to you too.”
She laughs.
“What I mean is that you’re a great long-form journalist. You dig into stories and pursue them. You’re not meant for this medium.”
“I can post more often.”
“I’m not negotiating our future,” she reiterates. “I’m telling you the truth.”
“Polly . . .”
“Stop. Let’s start telling each other the truth, about everything.” She raises her eyebrows, like, Okay? She continues: “What were you talking about last night, about the crusade and Chuck and your paranoia? Were you just being you, or is it something real?”
I nod.
“Let’s hear it. Please. I need to talk about that right now.”
“Over breakfast.”
“You shower. I’ll make coffee.”
I peel my body away from hers and slide from under the sheets. With early-morning sun soaking in through the blinds, I watch Polly plop her feet onto the plush area rug that covers her polished wood floor. She walks to the bathroom. When will pregnancy change her body? Can I get used to this?
Over cantaloupe and Frosted Flakes, I tell Polly the tale of the last few days. She is curious, concerned, nearly incredulous.
She comes around to me and surrounds me with a prolonged hug.
“You and Lane are safe.”
I let myself relish the feeling of her slender arms around my neck.
“This is nice,” I finally say. “But I’m going to have to break away at some point this morning to get some answers and mete out some vengeance.”
She withdraws. She sits next to me and studies me.
“Chuck was involved,” I say.
“Speaking of Chuck, he backed out,” she says. “An investor no more.”
“He did? But he’d already committed.”
“He had a due-diligence clause that let him escape. He said he couldn’t make the numbers work. He said he wanted to go back to focusing on his primary interest.”
“Which is what, being strange and duplicitous?”
“Innovating and refining core Internet technologies,” Polly said, making air quotes with a pair of fingers.
“Polly, I’m sorry. But not completely.”
“Yeah, well, he made it worth my while. He gave us seventy-five thousand dollars for our trouble. He said he felt he’d led us too far down the road.”
I stop chewing mid-bite. That’s quite a forfeiture. I’ve never heard of anything like that. Polly says she hasn’t either. In exchange for the money, Polly says she has signed a strategic partnership that gives Chuck and his military investors a first look at any new technological developments or distribution methods.
“I’ll do some digging and see what I can find out about him,” she says.
We fall silent.
“Go find Copernicus,” she says.
“Newton?”
“Newton.”
She disappears to the bedroom, and returns with the keys to the Cadillac. I need to get my own car fixed if I’m going to have a family. Or get a better car.
“Polly. I’ve been fighting my feelings for you. But they’re real. More so than I’ve felt with anyone since . . . They’re the real thing.”
“Sleep on it again.”
I take the keys.
“Can I borrow your cell phone?” I ask.
“This is how it starts. You get me pregnant, then you want to share cell phones?”
“And a joint bank account and the early-bird special at House of Pork Ribs.”
She laughs. “I’m as terrified as you are.”
I wonder if that’s so.
I drive to the basketball court. I think about what I told Polly, and how much remains unanswered. Or maybe it’s straightforward as Chuck has made it seem. Biogen and Pete and the U.S. military collaborate to create a computer program that will enhance memory. They test it with old folks and veterans. It doesn’t work. It queers memory, erases it, writes over it.
The conspirators decide to get rid of the evidence, including my grandmother. She’s the proverbial Demented Octogenarian Who Knows Too Much. It just all seems too pat, and with so many holes.
What is the meaning of the paper Pete handed me? What happened to Pete? Did he survive? What happened to the man in his library?
I realize I’m not sure I’m even angry. Just curious. And with a new uncertainty: Can I afford to delve into this any further? If I do, I risk myself and my safety as the father of the zygote growing inside Polly.
The basketball court is empty. I wait outside in the car, staring and thinking. After fifteen minutes of coming up without any new answers, I decide to call for backup. It’s just past 10 a.m. Bullseye, while a night owl, should be up. I call and tell him about the piece of paper I got from Pete, with the lists of memories, and the “1/0” at the top of the page.
“Isn’t that computer language?” I ask.
The list itself seems to have binary pairs—Kennedy/Nixon, or polio in family/no polio.
Bullseye takes in the evidence in silence. I consider telling him about Grandma’s abduction, the revelations from G.I. Chuck, my impending fatherhood. But these things can wait. Bullseye tells me he’ll think about the implications of binary pairs and call me back. I suspect he’s going back to sleep.
It’s sunny, but deceptively chilly. I exit the car and walk to the basketball court.
I look up at the building where Newton and Adrianna live. From the third story, I see a face peer through a window.
Adrianna has surfaced.