37

In slippers and underwear, Linda was ensconced in front of the bank of computers, diligently taking care of some pressing Series #4 business. Her white Hazmat suit had been tossed haphazardly onto the floor near the bed. She had pinned up her dark hair so that she looked a little like an undressed office secretary waiting for the boss to return from a meeting so she could give him a surprise. She was busy crediting the accounts that had picked the right hour in the rape pool, her fingers racing over a calculator keypad. She thought this was important. Their clientele would expect a rapid return on their wagers, and there was a sense of obligation involved. She was aware that there were any number of ways Michael and she could have cheated the winning subscribers out of their money, but this seemed distasteful and unfair. Honesty, she believed, was an integral part of their success. Repeat customers were important, as was word-of-mouth recommendations. Any good businesswoman knew that.

Michael was in the shower and she could hear him singing haphazard snatches of tunes. He never seemed to have any rhyme or reason for the songs he chose; one morsel of country and western blended into an operatic aria, followed by something from the Dead or the Airplane—“Don’t you want somebody to love . . . Don’t you need somebody to love.” He seemed fond of antique rock and roll from the sixties. She was the music expert in their relationship and she was in charge of their iTunes account.

She hummed along as she glanced at one of the monitors keeping an eye on Number 4. Because the blindfold had been discarded and Number 4 was back beneath the hood, it was more difficult for Linda to assess her state of mind. Number 4 remained curled in a fetal position and very well might have finally fallen asleep. As best Linda could tell Number 4 was no longer bleeding. She did need a bath. But, more important, the girl needed her rest.

They all did. She wondered whether any of the subscribers to Series #4 fully appreciated the constant effort and exhausting work that Michael and she put in to bring the Web theater to its final curtain. They had to battle their own fatigue, along with attention to every conceivable detail. They were constantly alert to both criminality and creativity. Series #4 required that much and more. The subscribers ranged so widely in their backgrounds and interests it was a never-ending chore to make sure all desires and all fascinations that flooded through the interactive board were accommodated. While there were similarities—a request from Sweden might be the same as a demand from Singapore—they tried to adapt their responses, and Number 4’s behavior, to the distinctions in cultures. There was a worldwide audience and she had to be sensitive to detail. This was tough work. That it was astonishingly rewarding, Linda thought, was pretty much beside the point. Ultimately, Whatcomesnext.com was about their dedication.

Video game designers, porn site maintenance—these were big, mainstream businesses that employed dozens or more. None was anywhere near as edgy as what she and Michael had invented all by themselves. This made her proud.

She listened for Michael, smiling as he butchered one tune after another. They couldn’t do this, she thought, if they weren’t really in love.

Linda shook her head.

She couldn’t help herself. She laughed out loud just as he emerged from the shower.

Over the years they had been together, she had memorized every routine step that Michael took in the bathroom. He would grab a threadbare towel and dry himself off, rubbing away the residue of his task with Number 4. He would emerge, shiny-skinned, refreshed, glowing a little red from the steamy heat, and naked. She could picture his lanky body as he dried his hair. Then he would stand in front of the mirror and painfully drag a comb through his tangled locks. Maybe afterward he would shave. Slicked down, clean-cheeked, he would step out of the bath and look at her with his endearing, lopsided grin.

He will be beautiful, Linda thought. And I will be beautiful for him forever.

Linda checked the monitors again. Nothing from Number 4, except for the occasional rabbit twitch. She wanted to speak to the image on the screen, very much in the same manner that she suspected the subscribers did: You got through the tough part, Number 4. Well done. You survived. And it couldn’t have been all that bad. It didn’t hurt that much. I got through it once. Every girl does. And anyway, it would have been far worse in the backseat of some car or some low-rent seedy motel room or on the living room couch some afternoon before your parents arrived home from work. But it wasn’t the biggest challenge you are going to face. Not by a long shot.

Listening for the sounds of Michael’s feet padding against the wood floor, Linda took a quick glimpse at the chat boards. There were hundreds of responses filling the queue. She sighed, knowing that the two of them would have to get to all of them promptly, because those responses would guide their next moves.

Did they want to see more?

Did they want it to come to an end?

Were they tired of Number 4?

Were they still fascinated?

She predicted that the end was closing in on Number 4, but she wasn’t completely certain. Number 4 had been by far their most intriguing subject—if their bank account and the number of people who were drawn into the story were accurate ways of measuring. Linda felt a twinge of sadness.

She hated to see things come to conclusions. Ever since she was a child she had hated birthdays, Christmas, summer holidays, not because of what she had done or received on those occasions but because she had known that whatever fun and excitement accompanied them, it had to end. On more than one occasion she had sat as a child in hard-backed pews listening to priests’ phony talk about eternal life standing over a coffin. Her mother’s. Her grandparents’. Finally, her father’s, which left her cold and alone in the world until Michael arrived. That was what she hated, the finishings.

Returning to normal disappointed her. Even if normal was going to be a fancy resort beach with a cold drink in hand and money in the bank—it was still something she didn’t look forward to. In a way, she was already impatient and wanted to start planning Series #5.

She leaned back at the desk, eyes still traveling over the monitors, but in actuality she was thinking about who their next subject might be. Number 5 needed to be different. Number 4 had set the bar high, she thought, and their next show would need to surpass what they had done in the past weeks. She was extraordinarily proud of this. It had been her insistence that they move away from the prostitutes they had collected for the first three series and expand into someone totally innocent and significantly younger. Someone inexperienced, she had insisted. Someone fresh.

And random, she reminded herself. Utterly random. Hours spent cruising quiet suburban areas in a variety of stolen vehicles, slinking past schools and shopping malls, lurking around pizza joints, trying to spot the right person to snatch at the right time. It had been risky but she had known it would be rewarding.

Michael, in truth, had been the one who had said that Series #4 should be the worst of middle-class nightmares. He had believed that the very surprise of it all would fuel the drama.

He had been right. Her idea. His refinement of it.

They were the best of partners.

She felt desire swelling inside her chest and she raised a hand and caressed her breast slowly.

Behind her, she heard a familiar shuffling from the bathroom. She quickly turned away from the computers and unpinned her hair, shaking her head seductively. Rapidly she shed her few clothes and, as Michael entered the room, tossed herself, giggling, onto the bed. She turned to him and crooked her finger, gesturing for him to join her.

He smiled and eagerly stepped toward her.

Linda knew that what Michael had done with Number 4 was an integral part of the job. It was critical that she make certain he never thought of it as anything except a duty he did for her. No pleasure. No excitement. No passion. Those belonged to her. Even as she had handled the camera capturing the job with Number 4, she had felt detached, clinical. He should experience no joy.

This was important, she thought, as she reached out to embrace him. She wanted to wrap her arms and legs around him with every muscle she owned, possessing him as deeply as she could, covering him with herself like a huge and powerful wave at the beach. She needed to make certain that the only thing he could feel, the only thing he could smell, the only thing he could hear was her and her caresses and her heartbeat.

“Well,” Michael said, as he was dragged down onto her. He broke into a grin. “Well, well, well . . .”

She paused, stroking his cheek with her hand. She did not have to ask for love. She saw it.

What he had done earlier was just good business.

Linda lifted her lips to his. Only for a second did the next difficult job cross her mind. But she knew Michael would take care of that as well. She knew she would have to help. She always did. But she trusted him to do the hardest part.

Love and death, she thought. They are a little the same.

Then she gave in to all the explosive emotions reverberating within her, closing her eyes tight with girlish delight.

* * *

“Hey, Lin,” Michael said, clicking computer keys. “What do you think of playing this real loud?”

He had risen from their bed after they had completed their lovemaking, drawn magnetically to the computers and the camera monitors.

The speaker system filled the room with the sound of someone singing. It was very country, Loretta Lynn wrapped around “High on a Mountain Top,” which had an intoxicating, friendly aw-shucks beat and attitude, driving a listener with each note farther up into the Ozark or Blue Ridge mountains.

Linda shrugged. “You don’t want to play the babies or the school again?”

“No,” Michael said. “I thought something different. Something really unexpected and kind of crazy. I doubt Number Four has ever listened to old-time country music.”

He paused, clicked a few more keys. Suddenly Chris Isaak groaning “Baby did a bad bad thing” filled the room.

“Our man Kubrick,” Linda said. “That’s part of the soundtrack from his last movie.”

“Think it works?”

Linda made a small face. “I think she’s already totally disorientated and completely lost. I don’t think she has any idea where she is or even who she is anymore. Music, even if it just pounds her, I don’t know . . .”

“We don’t have many audible options left,” Michael said. “I’ve got a few we haven’t used but . . .”

Linda rose, naked, from the bed and went to his side. She rubbed his shoulders.

He looked up at her. “I’ve been reading through the chats,” he said.

“So have I.”

“Maybe we’re near the end,” he said.

He pulled up some of the comments on the monitor in front of them.

Don’t stop. Make her pay!

Do it again! And again. And again.

“A lot like those,” Michael said. “But these . . .”

The two of them bent forward reading words on the screen.

I thought she’d fight more.

Number 4 is broken now.

Number 4 is finished. Kaput. Finito. Toast.

Number 4 is over. She can’t go back. She can’t go forward. There’s only one way out for her now. That’s what I want to see.

The back and forth between clients seemed to reflect a sense of loss, as if for the first time they saw imperfections in Number 4’s ideal figure. At first, she had been exquisite fine china; now she was cracked and chipped. Her being chained in the room, knowing what might happen, anticipating it, had fueled their fantasies. Now that the inevitable had taken place, it was as if she had been soiled and they were ready to move on to what they had always known would come next.

Both Linda and Michael saw this.

They might not have been able to fully articulate it but they both understood. There was only one step left.

Linda stopped rubbing Michael’s shoulder and squeezed it as hard as she could.

He was nodding his head. He loved many things about Linda, but chief among them was her ability to say so much without words. On stage, he thought, she would have been special.

“I’ll start scripting the exit,” he said. “We need to be careful.”

Both of them knew that, even with all the planning they had put in, Number 4’s popularity had created a situation where the last act had to be special.

“What we need to be,” Linda said slowly, “is memorable. I mean, we can’t just Wham! Bam! End it. We have to do something no one will ever forget. That way, when we get series number five rolling . . .”

She didn’t need to finish her thought.

Michael laughed. Linda drove them creatively, which, he thought, was a kind of lovemaking all of their own. Once he had read a lengthy, appreciative article about the artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who partnered with him in inventing many of their huge projects—draping wide canyons with orange sheets of fabric or encapsulating bay islands with pink rings of plastic—and then, a few weeks later, removing everything so that whatever had once been art was restored to the way it had been. Jeanne-Claude got less credit in the art world, but more credit in the bedroom, he guessed. Regardless, Michael thought the two of them would understand what Linda and he had accomplished.

He cut off the music coming through the speakers.

“All right,” he said. He had a mocking tone in his voice, as if making a joke that would amuse only the two of them. “No Loretta Lynn for Number Four.”

Jennifer could no longer tell whether she was conscious or not. Eyes open was a nightmare. Eyes shut was a nightmare. She felt damaged, as if a leech were slowly but surely sucking all the lifeblood from her veins. She had never thought much about what it felt like to die, but she was sure that this was what was happening to her. If she ate, it did nothing to prevent her from starving. If she drank, it didn’t stop her from dehydration and dying of thirst. She clutched Mister Brown Fur, but now she whispered to her father, “I’m coming, Daddy. Wait for me. I’ll be there soon.”

They had allowed her only once into his hospital room. She’d been young and frightened and he’d been trapped on his bed by late-afternoon shadows, surrounded by machines that made strange noises, tubes running from his thin, skeletal arms. The arms seemed like a stranger’s. She knew he was strong, able to lift her up and swing her around the room. But the arms she saw couldn’t have mustered the strength to stroke her hair. It was her father, but it wasn’t, and she’d been scared and confused. She had wanted to touch him but she was afraid she would break him into pieces even with the smallest caress. She had wanted him to smile, to reassure her and to tell her that everything would be all right. But he couldn’t do that. His eyes fluttered and he seemed to slide in and out of sleep. Her mother had said that was the drugs they were giving him for pain, but she thought then that it was death just trying him on, like a suit of clothes. They had hustled her out of the room before the machines announced the inevitable. She remembered thinking that the man on the bed wasn’t the man she knew as her father. He had to be an imposter.

But now, she thought, the same thing had happened to her: all the parts that made up Jennifer had been erased.

There was no escape. There was no world outside the cell and nothing past the hood over her head. There was no mother, no Scott, no school, no street in her neighborhood, no home, no room with her things. None of that had ever existed. There was only the man and the woman and the cameras. It had always been that way. She was born in the cell and she was going to die there.

She imagined she was becoming like him in the hospital. Sliced away slowly, inexorably.

Jennifer pictured the moment early on when her father had come to her and told her that he was very sick. “But don’t worry, beautiful. I’m a fighter. I’m going to fight like hell. And you can help me. I’m going to beat this with your help. Together.”

But he hadn’t.

And she hadn’t been able to help. Not a bit. She was sorry. She had told him she was sorry hundreds, thousands of times in her head where she stored all her memories.

For the first time throughout her confinement, she suddenly no longer felt a need to cry. No tears on her cheeks. No sob crushing its way through her throat. The muscles in her arms and legs, her rigid spine, had relaxed.

As hard as he had battled, there was nothing he could do. The disease was just too powerful. It was the same for her. There was nothing she could do.

She had a single additional thought: if she had the chance to fight and die, that would be better than simply letting them kill her. That way when she saw her father again, she could look him in the eye and say, “I tried as hard as you did, Dad. They were just too strong for me.”

And then he could tell her: “I could see. I saw it all. I know you did, beautiful. I’m proud of you.”

That would be enough for her, she insisted silently to her bear.