Traffic is insane. The expressway is packed up tight, and the pink smog is so thick I’m afraid to open the windows. I turn on the radio. “Ask Your Shrink,” the soothing rush-hour show, is just ending, leaving me feeling friendless in the murk. By the time I get to the hospital, I’m a wreck. At the sight of my Ma, I just wanna bawl.
But paranoia holds me back. I’m thinking, Is this room bugged? There’s so many unfamiliar machines in Jilly’s hospital room that a bug the size of a dime would never be noticed.
“How was school today, honey?” Jilly says. She’s alone, which surprises me.
“Where’s Tuesday bridge with the gay nurses?” I say.
“The boys are vacationing in Mexico.” She sighs and casts a glance up at the storks and instruments ranged around her bed. “Wish I could go with them.”
Take me along, I think, but I don’t say it. Part of the deal is, I’m the responsible one who stays home and works.
“What’s the matter?” This is my sharp-eyed ma.
Jilly was a radical in the sixties. She was on J. Edgar Hoover’s list by the time I was seven. She understands living on the fringe, in the shadows. That’s why she won’t apply for Medicare, or register for the Do Not Call list. She barely fills out a tax return. It’s from her that I get my instinct for self preservation. One of the things she taught me was that in a paranoid world, one of the best protections is being Way Out There.
She doesn’t say a word while I bite my lip and think all this. Something has set off Ma’s instinct, too, and I am at once anxious for her and deeply, childishly grateful.
Because I need Mommy right now, big time.
I blurt it out. “A Federal agent approached me today. At work. He wants me to spy on somebody.”
“What? On somebody at work?”
“No.”
If Agent Jones is listening, he’s kicking himself for revealing even this much. I hope he’s writing me off as a blabbermouth who runs and tells the first person she sees. Surely I can’t be trusted not to say too much to Dr. Katterfelto, too. I’ve realized that Agent Jones could destroy me at work, at the school, without ever even knowing the worst truth about me. All he has to do is draw attention to the fact that my personnel records at the school have claimed that I’m twenty-four for three consecutive years now.
But it’s a risk I have to take.
Ma says, “Do you know what he did to get on their radar? The guy they want you to spy on?”
I chicken out. “Agent Nick didn’t say.”
“Did he show you any ID?”
I think. “Shoot. No, he didn’t. I’m an idiot!” I slap my head.
“Doesn’t matter, honey,” Jilly says, and she sounds so relaxed that I begin to relax too. Ma could relax on the Titanic. “Half the time they show you an ID for one agency and they’re with another. What agency did he say he’s with?”
“Some magic study slash investigation thing. Which is to laugh.”
I do laugh, with relief, because I live in such shadow that it hadn’t occurred to me that all the private citizens I’ve ever met who study magic couldn’t find their asses with both hands. The government won’t be able to make a dent. Probably they have huge databases full of incidents and names and pictures, but I’m positive that if they had any expertise whatsoever, they wouldn’t be sending bozos like my friend Jones to terrorize schoolteachers. They’d be too busy annexing anyone with magical knowledge or power into their own agency, before somebody else’s agency could get ’em.
Then it occurs to me that maybe they know Katterfelto is onto something, and they want to control him, and so far they can’t. Or else their investigation hasn’t gone far enough and they want me to help them figure out how to annex him.
Then, deep paranoid thought, it occurs to me to wonder if they know what I am.
I could be very useful to a secret agency with governmentally-sanctioned murders to commit. When I suck somebody all the way down, they turn into a gray powder and blow away.
I feel the blood drain out of my face, and my hands go cold.
“Honey, it’s all right.” Ma puts her hand over mine. Her hand is like a hot coal. “Just say no.”
“I did.”
“Well, then. I guess you just have to wait and see. They can’t make you play along if you don’t want to.”
“Jilly, I don’t want to be a Federal agent. Or a shill for a Federal agency. I don’t want anything to do with them.”
“Oh, baby, you don’t have to.” She takes me in her arms, carefully, and I hold very still so I don’t jostle any of her needles or drip feeds.
I shiver in her hot, hot arms. “Hold me, Ma.”
Jilly holds me and I stop thinking for a few minutes because it feels so good.
Then I remember what I am. God, after forty-three years of this crap, you’d think I would remember. My own mother.
I pull myself free with a jerk. I step back from the bed.
Ma looks at me with sympathy in her eyes, and I know she’s thinking, My poor little cold daughter, she can’t accept affection, I wonder what happened to her to be like this, she used to be so affectionate when she was a child.
I’m not telepathic. I’ve just lived with her for fifty years.
“Ma. How do I convince these guys that I will never, ever help them?”
“You may have convinced him already.”
“Yeah, and maybe not,” I say through a tight throat.
She sighs. “Well, you’ve already come running to me and blabbed the whole thing. If they’re bugging this room, then they know you’re a terrible security risk.”
I look at her in shock. Once again, she’s way ahead of me.
“If that’s not enough, you could always warn their target, the victim, whatever you call the poor schmuck they’re trying to spy on. Tell him they’ve approached you to do this. Did they tell you who it is?”
I nod slowly. The nurse opens the door and comes in. Deliberately raising my voice, I say, “It’s some guy named Katterfelto. He’s on cable and the web, this sort of pollyanna idiot who talks a lot of nonsense about magic.”
Actually, I’m thinking that Katterfelto talks a lot of sense about magic in a way that no one else online does. That’s why I’ve spent so much time at his site. Jones picked his victim well when he contacted me.
It occurs to me that I’ve been working myself up to contacting Katterfelto myself, and I wonder if Jones isn’t smarter than he looks — or the people who spy on my internet activity are. Might not be Jones himself. It’s hard to imagine the size of the infrastructure behind these guys, if you only see one agent. I’m sure that’s why they make the contact through one agent.
Paranoia isn’t pretty.
“Jilly, I’m screwed up. I don’t know what to do.”
“You’ll figure it out.” She pats my hand. “You’re my very intelligent girl.”
I smile at her and the nurse comes in and unhooks her from about six things and she goes to the bathroom, chattering the whole way about the nurse’s kids and the Bulls game and the price of gasoline, a thing she hasn’t had to worry about since they took her license away fifteen years ago.
I go home. I have to feed my cat.