It was the sort of hotel room that you could project onto, the walls and soaps and bedding white and lovely, all clean cotton ball feeling. Because of this blankness, the impossibility of maintaining it, Alexandra treated the room carefully, and, more than usual even, urged a personal spotlessness, without residue, scrubbed of aftermath. She flipped the television channel. A voice-over spoke of a Harvard psychiatrist accepting nearly two million dollars from a drug company manufacturing the drug Risperdal; in return, he’d signed a scientific abstract that reported Risperdal’s efficacy in treating child bipolar disorder and prescribed it out of a special clinic at Mass General. It might have gone unnoticed, the broadcaster said, if little boys with the prescription hadn’t started drooling and growing breasts.
Now, trying Jeremy’s phone, she again stared at the television where the stories looped. Alexandra turned the television off. In her ear, the tone intoned. From some months ago, Jeremy’s voice through the earpiece apologized that he could not now be reached.
“I miss you,” she said, “and you didn’t even go anywhere.”
She heard muffled fingers on her door. In the peephole scope, a deformed figure stood squinting down the hallway. Something rushed down the inside of her torso that she didn’t trust, but she felt her fingers twist on brass, opening the door. Lyle leaned his head against a fist on the doorframe.
“Figured you’d want to know,” he said.
Lyle put his hands in his pants pockets. They looked at each other from either side of the threshold until something animated in her stomach, and she had to turn her head to look at an area of the floor.
Lyle began to speak, and she focused on the gray matted in little snatches by his face, the slight paunch in his lower cheek. To do that to someone. He had understood something she didn’t. It was why Shel had gone to him, not her.
“Are you going to offer me a drink out of a tiny bottle from a tiny refrigerator?” he asked.
“There are only the bathroom cups.”
“If it looks like a cup, and it walks like a cup, and it quacks like a cup,” he said.
“It must be a goose.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” Lyle said, “if that’s what you think.”
“All right.”
“Talk on the same side of the door like two civil human beings?” he said.
She shrugged but turned. In the refrigerator, there were small bottles of vodka, gin, light and dark rum, whiskey, a green glass bottle of sparkling water, and small red cylinders of cola. Her hot hand clarified condensation on the can. She sat at the end of the bed, and when he did too, she stood. She walked across the room and didn’t look at him, stared into a hung masterpiece blanded by reproduction on the wall. Lyle Michaels had said that he needed her expertise, expertise on her brother. It was a competency she wanted to have, and she knew she didn’t.
But for a while, she listened. She listened to Lyle say Sean McCreight was rueful on behalf of their century. He kept using that name. Sean McCreight. Sean McCreight could not believe all around them people saw intelligent boxes and didn’t want to know what lit them from within, what made them expel nearby restaurants and the sixth president of the United States. Sean McCreight thought these people were fools.
And fool was his idea of her, she knew. She crossed the room. She opened a shade and looked down at all the people she didn’t know, would never, perhaps like her brother. She turned back to Lyle. “And why is he talking to you?”
“Because he says he sees now it won’t stop. They are beginning to send cops to houses based on predictive policing and to develop diagnostic codes. They will round up people for crimes, for mental illness, and he doubts anyone will fight it because they don’t know how to argue with the science of safety. He doesn’t like agencies monitoring when you are home with Wi-Fi thermometers. All the unmitigated windows. And I think part of him wants to stop it. Part of him is saying the Fourth Amendment crisis slips into every crevice. Maybe he also wants to prove something simpler: that he was there. That he exists. That he did something bigger than what anyone expected of him. And I think he thinks, you make your life a public document, you can seek asylum. You get open arms in another country.”
“I mean why you of everyone?”
Lyle sucked on the inside of his cheeks. “Maybe because of you,” Lyle said.
Alexandra took the glass and slid it in small circles on the table. “Do you think he’s happy?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Will you help me?”
There was something nervy in her body, and there was nowhere to put it. McCreight. McCreight. She thought of what Lyle Michaels would never know about her brother, and it was all of when her brother had been Shel Chen.
“Why would I do that?”
Lyle twisted the top from a bottle. A little gasp indicated the release of pressure. “Tell me I’m wrong,” he said. “Tell me you don’t want to see him.”