Robert Onopa (departmental website http://maven.english. hawaii.edu/cw/pagel2.html) is associate professor of creative writing and literary theory at the University of Hawaii. He has been a Fulbright lecturer in West Africa and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Fiction Writing. In 1980, he co-edited (with David G. Hartwell) TriQuarterly 49, the special science fiction issue of that distinguished literary quarterly, which included stories by Gene Wolfe, Thomas M. Disch, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and a first story by Michael Swanwick. The issue also set a record at the time for generating subscription cancellations. His SF novel, The Pleasure Tube, was published in 1979, and he has since published a number of well-written stories in F&SF over the last twenty years.
“Geropods,” from F&SF, is an amusing variant on the gestalt personality trope common in SF since the days of Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. It is also an interesting contrast to Eleanor Arnason’s story appearing earlier in this book. In the near future, a geropod is a legal entity that constitutes a full human being: “any group of infirm old people whose combined physical and mental capacities constitutes the powers of a single, competent individual is collectively entitled to act as an individual.” So old Kaplan, in need of a posse to right a wrong done to his daughter, forms a geropod.
Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be….
—Robert Browning
Like me, my two elderly companions had outlived their wives, but I was new to Arcadia. You know the sort of place I’m talking about, somewhere between a nursing home and a morgue: pastel walls with prints of rolling hills in “quality” antiqued frames, sturdy plastic furniture, a tiled, low-maintenance floor. That afternoon, the digital holo in the corner of the sunroom was tuned to The Young and the Old, a trendy soap starring the ancient Macaulay Culkin, his already pale colors so washed out by the late afternoon glare he looked transparent. The air was laced with the odors of antiseptic and urine. Distant rattling and the indistinct conversations of the old echoed through the chip-array hearing aid I wore like a baseball cap.
I’d come out of a long stay in the hospital—my total deafness aside, a Parkinson’s-like movement disorder was getting the best of me. Pinkie and I hadn’t had any kids. After my long career as a shrink, it looked like I’d moved into my final home.
“Bored?” Kaplan said from his wheelchair. “Are you kidding? I used to be a Hollywood agent. Bored? It’s so boring here it must be a new medical condition, right?”
“That evidence is accepted by this court,” Judge Ortiz said from the couch, waving his red-and-white striped cane. The dot from its laser guidance flew around the room like a bug.
“I had depressives who literally put me to sleep,” I recalled from my practice. “But, okay, maybe we do break new ground here. The question is, what’s the alternative? We’re disabled and technically incompetent. The law says we can’t leave.”
“Not quite right,” Kaplan said. “Judge, tell him about Geropods.”
“Geropods?”
The judge shushed me in a conspiratorial way as an orderly cruised in behind a trolley rattling with glass and plastic. I already knew him as Dennis, his hair the color of straw, his neck wider than his ears. He passed me my dopamine agonists in a little plastic cup and ticked his stylus on his palm chart. “DIDN’T SEE YOU AT THE LUAU LAST NIGHT, DOC,” Dennis shouted, as if my hat was out of order.
“That’s because I lived in Hawaii during the Aussie war,” I muttered, watching my hand shake and water splash out of the cup. “Luau Night here is pathetic. Hawaii without the beach.”
“Exactly,” Judge Ortiz agreed.
Kaplan swung his wheelchair around, just missing Dennis’s shin. “Casino Night without the money,” he chimed in. “Casting without the couch.”
Dennis, who’d gone a bit pink, tucked the palm chart into the trolley. “Valentine’s Day coming up,” he said ingenuously. “Let’s see. That would be sex without the….”
Kaplan pumped his arms and nailed him with a quick reverse sweep of his chair.
“Re…strictions…,” Dennis hissed when he could speak. “Going to talk to…Nurse Tucker…Re…strict…you all from…recreation…room….”
When we were alone again, Kaplan wheeled over to the judge. “All right, tell him about Geropods. The Doc’s been in the hospital.”
“Okay,” said Judge Ortiz. “Supreme Court decision last month. Civil rights case brought by the AARP. You’re correct; the law says we can’t leave as individuals—danger to ourselves, incompetent, all that crap. But the Court ruled that any group of infirm old people whose combined physical and mental capacities constitute the powers of a single, competent individual, is collectively entitled to act as an individual, as a single, legally defined human being.”
“A Geropod,” Kaplan chimed in. “Free as a blue jay.”
“Justice Kirkpatrick’s term,” Ortiz said. “I’m blind, but Kaplan here can see. Kaplan’s in a wheelchair, but you’re ambulatory. As a matter of fact, you’re the one who’s going to move us around.”
“Me?”
“We’ve been looking for a guy like you. Of course, you’re stone deaf without your hat, and you goddamned vibrate all the time….”
“Parkinson’s….”
“So you need help yourself. But among us we’ve got all the parts.”
“And where would we go?”
“Mr. Kaplan has a burning mission,” the judge told me, his face swinging from side to side.
“My daughter Monica,” Kaplan explained, “is in her late forties. Five years ago she marries a client of mine, ‘Boots’ Bacci. From that talk show on the Moon? Remember him? Always wore silver boots? I get admitted into Cedars with a stroke, the snake talks me into signing over the house in Brentwood. I get released from Cedars, and instead of taking me home, he gets behind my wheelchair, crams me into his sports car, then pushes me in here.”
“Time for a little payback,” Judge Ortiz said, pushing on his cane and rising from the couch. “Are you with us?”
A sharp animal sound, a yapping, came from the direction of the lobby. I adjusted my cap, feeling a bit frail. My companions didn’t strike me as completely stable, but. …“Is that a dog?”
“No, it’s a Yorkshire terrier. Animal therapy day.”
I like animals, but I recalled how the previous week a potbellied pig had fouled the library floor. “I’m with you, gents. Let’s roll.”
And so I stood there the next morning, shaking on my walker, leaning on the gurney, fresh air just ten feet away. Dennis was scanning our forms into the web station with a frown, Nurse Tucker looking over his shoulder. Partly because we were dressed in street clothes, my two partners in old suits, myself in cords and a cardigan, we’d attracted a bit of a crowd. There was Agnes Dorchester with her humped back and blue nightgown, Ted Makelena with his robe pockets filled with sweets, Marjorie Walters in her ridiculous tracksuit.
Nurse Tucker grimaced over the terminal. “What about him?” she asked, pointing to the gurney that Kaplan had instructed me to push.
“He’s with us. Tiger Montelban,” Judge Ortiz said. Even I remembered him as a screen playboy. He’d been Kaplan’s most productive client.
“Medical data’s in order, but what’s he do for your ’pod? He’s been comatose for a year.”
“He can pee, which I can’t,” Kaplan said. “Wanna see my catheter?”
Tucker rolled her eyes. Actually, so did I.
“Look here,” the judge snapped. “It doesn’t matter if he can do anything. The law says that the sum of our powers merely has to replicate those of a normal adult.”
Tucker sighed, puzzled over the terminal, then it beeped. “Admin says you guys can go,” she said with quiet surprise. “What name?” As a new single legal entity, we had to provide a separate name.
“Story Musgrave,” the judge answered. Musgrave had been my idea. The bald ex-marine, one of the first astronauts, had been active into his nineties, had six graduate degrees including one in medicine, and at ninety-seven was with the crew that went to Mars.
The sliding doors opened and we took our first step through.
It was surprisingly easy going at first. We weren’t fast, exactly, but the gurney I was pushing stabilized my tremor and provided a platform for Judge Ortiz to walk along as he tapped his way. Kaplan was out in front, leading us to the parking lot. He’d been savvy enough to hire a van, a big one, into whose capacious back the driver helped us slide Tiger Montelban’s gurney.
I took a deep breath and smelled the hot pavement, the wet grass under the sprinklers. I heard noise from traffic on Wilshire, and, yes, birds!, so loud I had to turn down my hat. The sunlight was amazing, the sky huge. I knew Pinkie would have been proud of me. I swung closed the rear door. “Why are we taking this guy along?” I wondered.
“Kaplan said he owed him one last ride,” Ortiz shrugged. “Now help me in.”
At the judge’s suggestion, Miguel, our driver, first drove us toward the Pacific at Venice, then through the park in Santa Monica and up along the beach in Malibu. Ortiz had his head out the window like a Lab, his thin hair streaming in the wind. What a pleasure it was to be along the blue ocean, the wide stretches of sand, to see the girls on their maglev boards weaving down pedestrian tracks. Trees! Dogs! People whose hair wasn’t white! At a crosswalk, an infant in a stroller made me realize how much I’d missed seeing children. When we turned back toward the city, I rolled down my own window and caught a scent on the breeze and remembered something else: Mexican food!
But before we could eat, Kaplan insisted, we had an assignment at his house in Brentwood.
“What’s the plan?” I asked, not for the first time. The night before, Kaplan had prattled about “degrading assets,” but he hadn’t been entirely clear. I had him diagnosed as manic, the judge as suffering from cerebral arteriosclerosis, a side effect of which is senile dementia. I suppose I had a touch of that myself.
“First step, we shake him up. Ground zero, the garage,” Kaplan said. “That sports car of his? He’s got one of the first fuel cell Lamborghinis. The model that looks like a shuttle?”
I sucked in air between my teeth. “We’d stoop to petty vandalism?”
“No no no no. He loves that car more than he loves Monica. It’s his financial security, see? His first two wives got all his money, and it’s the only asset he has. Aside from my daughter.” From a pocket of his wheelchair, Kaplan extracted a small black case. “I’ve still got a remote for the garage,” he whispered.
“And?”
From another pocket, he pulled a spray can with an ugly, mustard-colored top. “Think you can handle this, Doc?” he said with gloe. “The idea is, I open the door, then we…well, you…decorate the Lamborghini.”
I raised a shaking hand. So vandalism it was. My first impulse was to refuse, but then I took a deep breath…and imagined Pinkie laughing. So what if we got caught? And maybe we could get it over with quick, like a prostate exam. We could have a wonderful day. “And then?” I asked.
Kaplan hesitated, his eyes glazed with confusion.
“And then the rest of the plan develops,” Ortiz said gamely. He was still half out his open window, the breeze on his face, a self-absorbed smile on his lips. “We take it one step at a time.”
From a block away, Kaplan’s house looked to be an impressive small mansion in the Tudor style. It had a gabled portico, two stories with a large east wing, a sizable pool and a cabana in the side yard, and a four-car garage.
“Somebody’s there!” Kaplan choked. Miguel pulled along the curb, and I watched a heavyset man heave himself out of the pool. I saw him slip on silver sandals and with a shock recognized that it was Boots Bacci himself. He had put on a lot of weight since he’d returned to Earth’s gravity, and the way he scratched his ample belly, he was not expected at the studio anytime soon. He pushed his wet black hair back, and it seemed to lift from his scalp. “Say, how old’s that guy?”
“Sixty-two,” Kaplan muttered. “You’d think he’d have more consideration, right?”
Boots bent toward his towel and sunglasses, picked up a script, threw the towel around his shoulders, looked toward the street. He cast a quick, hostile glance at our van, and walked into the house.
We could follow his progress through a side window, see him step half naked into a small room, ease his dripping body into a leather chair, hoist his feet up….
“My teak desk,” Kaplan said in a small, unhappy voice.
Then Boots pointed a remote toward the window and closed the blinds.
Kaplan had Miguel move up the block, putting a stand of bright pink oleander between us and his house.
Kaplan and Ortiz started bickering. Under the pretext of a battery problem, I took off my hat and fiddled with it as they talked. That’s the one thing, the only thing, about my deafness for which I am grateful: I don’t have to hear anything I don’t want to hear. You can imagine what that did to my psychiatric practice toward the end. Now, though I’d lost confidence in Kaplan, I was still glad to be away from Arcadia. My jiggling foot tapped a rhythm on the van’s floorboards.
After a while I realized that Kaplan was shouting at me.
“I can hear you now,” I said, adjusting my hat.
Kaplan ordered Ortiz and me out, got out himself, and dispatched Miguel back to the house. His mission was to ring the doorbell and ascertain if Monica was at home. Kaplan’s idea was that if she was home, we could discreetly enter through a side door and occupy the screening room, where we could lock ourselves in. The plan sounded lame.
Turned out she was at work, at her desk at the William Morris Agency in Studio City. And Boots Bacci made it clear to Miguel that if “that van” didn’t “evaporate” from the neighborhood, he was calling the cops.
“Do you think he made us?” the judge asked as Miguel put the van in gear.
“I tol’ him we was gardeners. You know, mow and blow?”
“Where now?” the judge asked.
“Weapons,” Kaplan said. “Tasers. Pipe bomb.”
“Dios,” Miguel muttered under his breath.
“You’re obsessing, Marv,” I told Kaplan in my best professional voice. “You’re going to give yourself another stroke. I prescribe lunch.”
“All right, Miguel,” Kaplan said with dismay. “Head for Casa Escobar. On Alvarado Street.”
The new “old” Mexican part of town, for all its advertised ethnic uniqueness, looked a lot like the Beverly Hills Mall. Half the buildings were sand-colored stucco, with heavy black timbers, Mission-style arches, and red-tiled roofs. Many of the arches opened onto recessed mini-malls disguised as blocks of market stalls. Miguel maneuvered us into a disabled parking space, and we formed our pod again, Ortiz and Montelban and I in a wedge behind Kaplan’s wheelchair.
We moved through the crowd fronting Pescado Mojado like a tanker in heavy seas, past Selena World, past Hologames ’R’ Us, past Alberto’s Secret. I had forgotten the theme park domesticity of the new old part of town, the fountains, the fishponds, the forests of cacti and rented ficus, the tidy upscale families with their matching body studs. Interiors were uniformly dense with epiphytes and those sheet-water walls that have become so big. Really, I hate it when I accidentally lean against one.
“Whoa,” I heard Kaplan shout. “Señoritas at eleven o’clock!”
I looked ahead. Three elderly women were pushing along a narrow white table high with what I took to be catered food.
“What’s he talking about?” Ortiz asked.
“Señoritas,” Kaplan said. “Babes.”
“Good grief,” I said. “They’re pushing a gurney.”
“Tell me what they look like,” Ortiz said.
“They look as old as we are. Except the one in front—Kaplan’s right—she’s some…babe. Big blue hair, leopard skin outfit, wide black belt, gold high heels. Great legs. Behind her, alongside the gurney, there’s a woman who looks like…I guess you’d say a giant robin. Big bosom, big behind. Grandmotherly. She’s got a red-and-white striped cane. Laser guidance.”
“Come to Papito,” I heard Ortiz say, to my surprise.
“The thin one on the other side reminds me of Pinkie. My late wife. She’s using one of those electric canes. That woman up front, though. She’s got to be somebody’s daughter.”
“Faster, Doc,” Kaplan urged, leaning forward into his wheelchair and pushing hard. “Let’s cut them off at Orange Julio’s.”
“An all-woman Geropod?” Judge Ortiz marveled. “I’m absolutely charmed.”
“Such a gentleman,” the blind woman replied, feeling around the table discreetly for her venison burrito with one hand, fingering the straw in her fluorescent green margarita with the other.
We were clustered at the rear of Casa Escobar. There’d been some trouble about the gurneys, but we arranged to park them just outside, in a quiet alcove with a little birdbath. To my great relief, the woman who reminded me of Pinkie turned out to be a retired intensive care nurse. Between us we checked vital signs on Tiger and started a new IV line on her temporary patient, a one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old woman whose hair was so white, whose still smile was so beatific, she looked like a porcelain angel.
Kaplan had settled deep into the red booth alongside the woman with the blue hair. Her name was Bette. Her makeup was very thick, but expertly applied. She was as old as the rest of us, it turned out, and a marvel. Her artificial lungs gave her a breathy voice and she’d somehow managed to keep her figure, or at least had tucked and squeezed it into the leopard skin suit in a way that belied her age. Unless you looked closely, you might have easily mistaken her for a woman in her early fifties.
“Were you in the industry?” Kaplan asked. “Films? Holos?”
“I was on a poster once,” she said coyly.
“If you’d had the right representation…” Kaplan speculated, flattering her in the easy way of an experienced professional.
Bette’s false eyelashes fluttered so vigorously I thought I felt a breeze.
And so we ate and talked. By the time it came to coffee and flan, the restaurant was almost empty. Ostensibly to try one another’s laser canes, Ortiz and the blind woman groped their way into a separate booth for dessert.
The ex-nurse and I went out to the alcove to check on our charges again. Her name was Barbara.
“So how do you like being old?” I asked, adjusting my hat.
“Today is fun,” she said. “But it’s hard to do things.”
I nodded. “I suppose I had some training. In med school they had us put on scratched-up goggles—like we had cataracts. Plugged our ears with wax, gave us heavy rubber gloves….”
“Like arthritis….”
“Put marshmallows in our mouths….”
“Mmmm. Post-stroke paralysis.”
“…corn kernels in our shoes, braces around our necks. The worst thing was the padded diapers.”
She laughed and blushed. “Let me guess. They had you try to read prescription labels with the goggles on, count out pills with fat fingers, eat around the marshmallows.”
“Exactly.”
“In nursing school, we had to spend a morning in a hospital bed, got applesauce shoved into our mouths every half hour. Isn’t it great to be out here?”
“Want to walk down Alvarado?” I asked.
It took us forever, but not since Pinkie died have I spent such a pleasant hour with a woman. We lingered in Casa DIY, admiring the lawn furniture and the barbecue grills. Outside Burrito Loco her electric cane got confused by a passing maglev scooter. She started to stumble, and I reached out to hold her arm to steady her.
When she regained her balance, she slipped her warm fingers into mine, and we made our way back down the sidewalk holding hands.
“I’d give you my heart,” she said as we approached the restaurant, “but it’s plastic and I think it needs a new battery.”
I laughed. “Like my kidney,” I said. “But how about if I ask you for a date sometime?”
Back at the big red booth in Casa Escobar, Kaplan announced that he had a plan.
“I hope you don’t have too much for me to do,” I admitted. “I’m bushed.”
“Not necessary,” Kaplan said. “Bette here’s going in.”
Kaplan explained that he’d sent Miguel over to the office supply store next door and was faxing over some forged NASA stationery from an FX vault he used to work with. The idea was to mock up a letter from Story Musgrave Junior to Boots Bacci—as Kaplan recalled, Junior had been a guest on Boots’s talk show some years earlier during a tribute to his dad. The letter would personally introduce Bette as a talented performer whose career just wanted the kind of help Bacci could provide through his extensive contacts. “Let’s see,” Kaplan muttered as he scribbled notes. “We’ll put in something about using Boots to host an old astronaut special. ‘Please give this warm lady your special attention, the Boots Bacci boost we all know about, that big, stiff rocket….’”
Bette was going to take a cab and present herself at the front door of the Brentwood house with the letter in hand.
Kaplan set down his notes. “Then we let Nature take its course.”
“What was—uh, is—your career?” I asked Bette.
“She was an exotic dancer.” Barbara giggled.
“Use what you’ve got, honey,” Bette said. “Just get me to Casa Charo on the way so’s I can get a blond wig and some sunglasses. And I’d like another Margarita.”
Kaplan was radiant. “She’s gonna be a star.”
We all wanted to be there in Brentwood, if only down the block, to see if she’d get into the house. But we were stumped about the gurneys.
“We could get arrested for harassment,” the judge said. “I’d hate to see them in a cell.”
Barbara pointed out that our charges had been in comas for months. Kaplan said he didn’t see anything wrong with leaving the gurneys side by side in the alcove, and giving the busboy a hundred dollars to page us if there was any noticeable change in their condition.
The busboy was not only willing, but even trained in CPR. Though it was a little irresponsible, Barbara and I went along. Kaplan hacked away at the letter, and when it was finished, Miguel moved the van around and helped us in.
I really was tired. There in the back of the van, I settled in for a bit of a nap. I woke up with the mid-afternoon sun in my eyes and realized that we’d stopped. My companions were hushed. When I looked down the street, I saw a blonde in a leopard skin outfit at the front door of the Brentwood house—the blonde was Bette—falling into a big hug from Boots Bacci and being ushered in.
“I still don’t get it,” I admitted.
From the front of the van, Kaplan placed a call to Studio City, telling Monica that Boots had had a seizure and was unable to get out of bed and that she needed to rush right home.
What really frosted Monica, she told us later, was the way Boots hadn’t even folded back the family quilt (an heirloom in colorful interlocking circles, the classic “wedding ring” pattern). When she burst in, distraught, limping on a shoe whose high heel she’d broken during her breathless climb up the stairs, he was sitting right on it, back against the teak headboard, stark naked except for the silk bathrobe Monica had only recently given him for Christmas (strike two). From behind a hand-held holocorder, he was apparently directing Bette in some sort of “audition” (strike three). The holodisc, of course, left as little doubt about his guilt as the famous bin Laden tape from before the Aussie War. In a somewhat empty tribute to virtue, leggy Bette had never in fact had to get out of her leopard skin outfit, which was probably just as well, even though she’d closed the drapes and dimmed the lights. Monica confessed that the affair confirmed growing suspicions she’d had about her husband, who had been taking uncommon interest in a series of female trainers though he never seemed to exercise, and had started locking himself in the screening room.
From the street, the sequence was elegant in its economy—Monica running in the front door, Boots ejected from the rear, hopping past the pool and cabana, struggling to pull on his clothes. He nearly lost it all together when Kaplan punched the garage door’s remote.
There were repercussions, of course. Bacci maintained that he had been harassed, entrapped, and defrauded. Before the day was out, we actually had to answer some questions posed to us by an investigator at the L.A. prosecutor’s office.
Bacci himself was there, his eyes puffy, his silver boots scuffed, his anger palpable. He’d inflicted a long scrape on the side of the silver Lamborghini as he’d peeled out of the garage.
“Okay,” the investigator, an anorexic attorney, began, “Who’s Story Musgrave?”
“I am,” the judge said.
“I am,” Kaplan added, then he pointed to me.
I waved. “Did you say Story Musgrave?” I asked, adjusting my cap. “That’s me.”
She sighed. “Mr. Bacci maintains that earlier today, February 7th, you gentlemen, particularly Mr. Kaplan and Judge Ortiz, colluded to defraud him. Now, Mr. Kaplan, I want you to tell me your precise whereabouts from the hours of….”
“Excuse me,” he interrupted. “Let’s cut to the chase. The medical record will show that I have suffered a massive, debilitating stroke, and the legal record will show that specialists under Mr. Bacci’s own supervision had me declared incompetent as an individual not six months ago. Any testimony I might give can’t have standing in the State of California.”
“Mmm,” she mused, consulting her softscreen for a long moment. Then she turned to me. “Doctor, did you hear any conversation between Mr. Kaplan and Judge Ortiz that would suggest such a conspiracy?”
I fiddled with my cap. “Would you please put your question in writing?” I asked.
When she did so, I read the sentence, fiddled with my hat again, and replied. “I’m so sorry for the trouble, counselor. I was trained to be a good listener, but, you see, I’ve become stone deaf, and my hat’s not entirely reliable. So I could hardly….”
“Judge Ortiz,” she said, looking down at her softscreen again, sucking her upper lip. “Did you see anything today to call into question the legal standing of the woman known as Bette Waters as a legitimate entertainer seeking professional advice from Mr. Bacci?”
Ortiz twirled his red and white cane, and a bright red dot flew around the room. The dot finally got her attention. “Justice is blind,” he said, setting his cane on the floor and rising. “Now can we go?”
That hour at the prosecutor’s office, however, wasn’t the strangest thing that happened toward the end of that day. Miguel, who said he’d never had a better time in his life, and who still is with us as our driver, ran us back to Casa Escobar to retrieve the gurneys.
They were there in the alcove, all right. But Tiger Montelban wasn’t, and neither was the one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old lady.
The busboy was distraught. He’d checked every quarter hour, he told us. He’d been a bit late just after five because he’d had to help set up for dinner. When he’d finally looked in the alcove, they were gone—the tops of the gurneys empty landscapes of rumpled sheets and dented pillows punctuated by a trailing IV line. The restaurant staff had searched the neighborhood. People on the street spoke of an elderly couple in white who looked to be romantically involved, but it was just impossible. There was no report back at the nursing home, nothing from the nearby hospitals, nothing from the police or the morgue. To this day, we don’t have a clue as to what happened to them, except for a series of charges that appeared on Montelban’s credit chip at a resort in Cabo San Lucas. The chip had been embedded in his wrist.
These days we count on Arcadia for our medical care three days out of every seven, but otherwise we spend extended weekends at the house in Brentwood, sitting in leather furniture, watching sports in the den, taking in old movies with Barbara and Bette and Ramona in the screening room—that’s really a treat, as Marv has remastered digital holos of all the great ones from the past hundred and fifty years, from Birth of a Nation to the ten Lucas Star Wars sequels. Monica’s a regular angel, kind and considerate and a world-class caterer, though we do our best to look after ourselves as much as we can.
Barbara and I have taken to light exercise in the pool and lounging beside the cabana. Every once in a while, lying on my back, relaxed and at peace—a third try with stem cells has reduced my tremor—I look up and think of them, Tiger Montelban and his angel. Occasionally I see them in the shapes of clouds rolling in the sky, soft and free as floating gauze or down, white as bright moonlight on a snow-covered mountain, drifting in the heavens together, arm in arm.