Temporary Agency, page 7
‘I believed you when you said you’d protect him. I fell for all your big buddy buddy talk with the goddamn SDA. I believed you!’
‘And I believed it would work.’
‘Why? Why didn’t you realize? You’re the expert. You’re supposed to know everything, do everything.’
Her face looked like it would break apart and I thought, don’t you dare, don’t you dare cry. She said, ‘I thought…I thought the SDA could control them. And I thought I controlled the SDA. Oh God, I was so stupid.’
‘I trusted you,’ I said.
‘I know. And Paul trusted me. That poor boy. Ellen…I…I’m—’ She stopped. I guess she realized she’d already said how sorry she was.
I said, ‘He just wanted love. That’s all he wanted.’
‘Love and power,’ Alison Birkett said. ‘Just like all of us.’
And that did it. I don’t know why, but I just started to cry. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, all I could do was run on like a double faucet, with my shoulders jerking up and down. She held open her arms, timidly, halfway. I might have resisted if she’d been more confident. Instead, I half stepped, half fell into her hug.
I don’t know how long she held me. It felt like a long time. I think she was crying with me, but I’m not sure, I was crying enough for both of us. When I stopped and pulled loose from her, I didn’t know what to do, if I should say something, or run out of the office.
Alison said, ‘I understand the SDA put a chip in you.’
I shrugged. ‘Yeah. I guess they told you.’
‘I might as well let you know,’ she said. ‘I got them to tell me the frequencies and I’ve had my own teams monitoring the readings day and night. We can no longer trust the SDA for anything.’ When I didn’t answer, we both just stood there.
That’s when she brought up the other thing, the part of this I’d known would come up sooner or later. ‘Ellen,’ she said, ‘there’s something we need to talk about. I don’t know if this is the right time, but I’m not sure there’ll ever be a right time.’ She waited. When I didn’t answer, she sighed, ‘I suppose you know what I’m going to ask. I’m sure you’ve thought about it. I’ll have to speak to your parents as well, but I wanted to ask you first. The question is this: do we fight? Do we go public?’
Well, I had thought about it. I’d imagined her asking me that question, or something like it, and I believed I wouldn’t know what to say. I thought I didn’t care. But I didn’t even hesitate, I answered right away. ‘Yes,’ I said, and my hands amazed me by clenching into fists. ‘I want to get them. I want to make them hurt.’
She sighed. ‘You’re too smart not to know what will happen. Especially after that damn TV spectacle of Paul in the elevator. The reporters will be all over you. You, your parents, anyone they can find. The magazines, the newspapers and especially the TV people, they’ll come at you like an army of Malignant Ones themselves.’
‘And you,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘It’s my job. With me, they’ll come to my office. With you, they’ll come to your house.’
I said, ‘Maybe Nightline will hire Lisa Black Dust 7.’
She smiled. ‘Maybe they already have.’
‘I want to fight.’
‘Yes, I know. I do too. You have no idea how much I want that. I want to go after them more than I’ve wanted anything in a very long time. But please, Ellen, think about it. At least until I speak with your parents. I…I can try to protect you. I’m certainly not going to promise. Not after what’s happened. But if we do fight I will do everything I can to help all of you. With the media as well as the enemy. And I do promise never to take you or your safety for granted.’
Well, it turned out that just getting my folks to talk with Ms Birkett took a couple of weeks. She’d tried to call them, apparently, and my father had threatened her, while my mother had simply refused to speak at all. When I tried to push them into a discussion of what we should do they pulled the ‘you’re just a kid’ routine on me.
I figured Daddy was the weak link and went to work on him. I played up all his anger at government cover-ups, at corruption, at the SDA having too much power. But he was scared. It was one thing to shout and shake his fist, but another to actually do anything. When I tried to talk about Paul, and not just the government, he always changed the subject.
It really amazed me when my mother turned out to be the one to give in. I hadn’t even really talked with her about it, though a couple of times she’d intervened between me and my father. But I knew how scared she was. I saw her once doing the laundry. She opened the washing machine lid and jumped back, as if snakes would come slithering out at any moment. And a couple of times I’d caught her gripping her amulet really hard, with her eyes closed and her lips moving. And then one night we were all sitting at dinner, none of us saying anything, and Mom looked like she wanted to cry, and I was thinking, great, just what I need, when suddenly she banged her fist on the table, and said, ‘Damn! Damn, damn, damn.’
Daddy stared down at his plate a moment, then he got up to walk over to her. ‘Honey,’ he said, and tried to put his arms around her.
She pushed him away. She growled and pushed him away. I’d never heard her growl before. She looked up at him, and even though her head was shaking no, she said, ‘I want to go see Alison Birkett.’
So we did it. It took several more days of discussion—especially about the precautions we needed to take, the extra teams Ms Birkett had brought in to watch over us (she had them implant a second chip in each of us, with frequencies known only to her staff), the methods to make sure the story got out if anything happened to us—but we finally did it. We all sat there in the office, Daddy and Mommy and I all holding hands, while Alison called the New York Times and offered them the biggest story since the Pentagon scandal.
Maybe you saw the headlines. ‘Man Found Dead In Elevator Was Under SDA Protection.’ That’s how we started. Alison said we should break the story ‘in increments’ to let it build. But it didn’t take long for the blockbuster to get out. If I’d wanted, I could have saved another Time cover. And Newsweek too. I still remember the Newsweek one. That repulsive picture of Paul’s body and above it, in flaming letters, ‘Demonic Corruption’, with smaller letters underneath: ‘Alison Birkett Accuses US Government Of Hiring And Protecting Malignant Ones.’
That was half the attack, the media pressure. The other half was a lawsuit against the SDA. We charged them with malfeasance, malpractice and various other mals, and demanded $10,000,000 in damages. At first the idea overwhelmed me. Alison Birkett and I were suing the SDA! But somehow, I don’t know, after a while it kind of sickened me. That we might get rich because Paul fell for some stupid Ferocious One. Paul had hoped to get rich. All that talk about promotions. And now the snakes had gotten him, and we were asking for $10,000,000.
In a way, we did need money, if not that much. Alison had her teams watching over me and my folks day and night. As well as checking our personal readings, they monitored the house, Daddy’s office, even my school. At the moment, she was paying them herself, but she couldn’t keep that up for long. And of course, when you ask for a lot of money you get more publicity than if you ask for a little. Even so, I didn’t like it.
I felt kind of rotten about the media uproar too. At first, it knocked me out, the idea of being on television. But then it just exhausted and finally disgusted me. Actually, Alison did a pretty good job of shielding me. She managed to break the news in ways that emphasized the government’s part in what happened and not me and my folks (she even apologized to me for ‘trivializing’ my ‘heroism’). Maybe you saw that creep John Sebbick squirming on 60 Minutes. I enjoyed that one.
Still, just being Paul’s closest relatives guaranteed us all a place on, you guessed it, Nightline, and anyone else who could get a hold of us. At least after a couple of weeks the interest in us faded, revived only a little by the lawsuit. (I still remember a letter that described Mom and Dad as ‘tawdry money-grubbers trying to cash in on a genuine tragedy.’ How can people write such things about someone they don’t even know?)
I did have to stay home from school for a while. I even had to stay off the street. People would recognize me from TV and think that that entitled them to come up and talk to me. Usually, they gave me the ‘poor dear child’ routine, but a couple of people ran away or made hand signs of protection against me. One woman started screaming at me. Apparently she thought I had summoned the Malignant Ones to attack Paul and now would do the same thing to her. That same day, a woman in the supermarket recognized my mother and actually pronounced the Standard Formula against her.
But even that kind of craziness died down and we went back more or less to our normal lives. I was a big deal in school for a while. I noticed that a lot of the kids, and the teachers too, couldn’t seem to decide whether they wanted to hang around with me or get as far away from me as possible. Some parents tried to ban me from the school as a danger to their own kids. Nothing personal, they assured everyone, but what would happen if Lisa Black Dust 7 sent her snakes at me in the school cafeteria? But when everything stayed safe over a couple of months, and I stopped showing up on their evening news, everyone lost interest. I could go back to being a kid again.
The lawsuit just seemed to get stuck in technicalities. Ms Birkett assured me it was moving along, but it looked to me more like a legal video game between her and the government. Outside the suit, the scandal bogged down in debates about special prosecutors versus congressional hearings. A lot of lawyers and constitutional experts worked themselves into a frenzy arguing about whether the Bill of Rights covered ‘non-human entities’ and whether Ms Birkett, or Congress, could legally compel Bright Beings to testify. That’s where it looked like things would stay for a long time.
And then I started seeing Paul.
The first time was on a billboard near my school. It was lunchtime and I’d gone for a walk after eating by myself. I’d been doing a lot of stuff by myself. It wasn’t that people were shunning me. They’d mostly gotten over that. I just felt, I don’t know, kind of strange around my friends. Anyway, after lunch I went for a walk to a candy store. I had to pass this cutesy billboard which shows a guy in a sports car waving his hand. They’ve got it rigged so the metal hand actually moves back and forth. Now, I’ve seen this thing hundreds of times. I never look at it any more. But that day I looked up as I came towards it—and the man in the car was Paul.
He didn’t look like Paul, he was Paul. The waving hand even wore Paul’s initiation ring from college. ‘Paul!’ I shouted.
A car jerked to a stop. A man about sixty leaned his head out. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I know you.’
I stared at him. ‘Huh?’ I said, or something equally clear.
He sighed. ‘You called me. I’m Paul, right?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, I didn’t mean you. I meant him.’ I pointed up at the billboard. The man next to me shook his head, muttered something and drove off. I just stood there, squinting up at the billboard. Because when I’d looked again, the face had returned to its normal bland nothing, with the hand empty of rings or marks of any kind.
I went back to school and somehow got through the afternoon. On the way home, I wondered if I should tell my folks, or Ms Birkett. I don’t think I made an actual decision not to tell them. I just didn’t.
Just as I didn’t think about it. Or tried not to. For a week, whenever it came into my mind, I did my best to push it away. Somewhere in my head, I was wondering why the monitor teams hadn’t picked up anything and if their precautions would turn out as useless with me as they did with Paul. Then one night I was lying in bed, watching the little television my folks had given me to replace the one I smashed throwing Alison’s picture at it. I should have been sleeping, with school the next day, but I felt so awake. So I watched some soap about a bunch of pilgrims on their way to the Beach of Marvels in Northern California, and then the news. And then came one of those talk shows where everybody’s lively and no one’s ever depressed or suffering. And you know how they always start with the announcer blaring the name of the host and the audience goes wild? Well, this time the announcer shouted out the usual stuff about live from Hollywood and all the wonderful guests, and then suddenly he said, ‘And here comes…Paul!’ And sure enough, there came my cousin, dancing out from behind the curtains, waving his hands, bowing and grinning in mock embarrassment at the adulation of his fans.
Well, I screamed. I screamed so loud I don’t know how the windows stayed in the walls. Seconds later, my folks came tumbling into the room like circus clowns, shouting ‘What’s wrong’ and ‘What is it?’ and other clever remarks. Nothing, I told them. Bad dream. Because by then the host had turned back into his usual obsequious self.
Are you sure? they asked. My Mom gave me a searching look, and my Dad suggested maybe I should ‘see someone’. Oh no, I told them. Nothing to worry about. Just fine, thanks. I hated the thought I might have to go back to that damn hospital. More important, I was scared. Too scared to talk about it or get help. Because seeing Paul on network TV did not strike me as all that different from strange sounds on the telephone or a shower that smelled of perfume. I could have called the emergency number the protection team had given me, but what would I do if they said they hadn’t detected anything? I went to bed that night holding on tight to my protection and saying my formula over and over.
Paul didn’t go away. Two days later I was walking on the old shopping street of our town when I saw a meter maid giving a ticket to a blue Mercedes. As I walked past her she glanced up from her pad—and Paul was looking right at me. I ran. I didn’t wait for the meter maid to change back from my dead cousin in drag, I took off down the block, nearly knocking down an old lady who shouted after me. I didn’t stop to help her or apologize. I was scared she’d turn into Paul.
That time I got as far as standing by the telephone, taking deep breaths and reciting Alison Birkett’s home phone number over and over in my mind, like some deep meditation release chant. When I finally walked away without calling I almost had to laugh. At one time I would have loved an excuse to call her at home. But not that excuse.
The next day I had a date with my friend Barb to go to the park. The last thing I needed, I thought, was Barb going on about her latest catalogue of cute boys who’d asked her to some school ritual or something. I thought of cancelling, but I didn’t want Barb attacking me. We’d been friends since second grade, and she’d been getting upset that since I became ‘famous’ I’d stopped seeing her.
We were walking down by the pond, with Barb doing all the talking and me nervously looking at everyone who passed, even dogs and squirrels, when a skateboarder spun by us. I didn’t even notice him. I was looking the other way at a baby carriage. Suddenly Barb grabbed my arm. ‘Ellen,’ she said. ‘That kid on that skateboard? He looked just like your cousin Paul.’
Barb will probably never know why I hugged her and kissed her and then ran off as fast as I could. ‘Alison,’ I shouted into the phone by the park restaurant. ‘He’s alive!’
Ms Birkett met my parents and me at the SDA headquarters in Manhattan. The protection team came too; it was the first time I’d seen them in weeks. I don’t know what I expected, really. Maybe some great enactment to bring Paul back from the dead. What I got was tests. Though my folks made a weak protest, and I didn’t like the idea at all, we let Ms Birkett convince us we had to get some scientific basis for what was going on. At least it wasn’t like the hospital. They didn’t strap me down or anything, and they did all the testing in a large open room with a carpet and couches.
As a government agency, the SDA displays portraits of the president in all their offices. You know the kind—an official government photo of our nation’s leader smiling blankly in his official bird costume and sacred headdress, with painted-in guardian spirits hovering in the background, like Secret Service agents. In the middle of all their testing, when I realized none of it was going to do anything worse than bore me, I started looking around the room and my eyes clicked on the president’s portrait. Paul was there. His face looked down at me from underneath the president’s jewelled and feathered cap of office. ‘There he is,’ I told them. ‘Right there. In that picture.’
They all stared and then a bunch of them ran over with their meters and gauges. By the time they’d reblessed their equipment the photo had changed back again, but that didn’t stop them. After about ten minutes they announced ‘Significant computational levels of post-manifestational residualism.’ SDA people love talking like that.
They went back to me after that and tested me all the rest of the afternoon. Later, I found out they had sent teams to the various places and objects where I’d told them I’d seen Paul. At the end of the day they reported that early indications showed that the ‘manifestations’ were genuine (I figured that that meant I wasn’t crazy) and did not come from ‘the enemy’. That was why the protection teams hadn’t picked up anything. They’d set their monitors for Bright Beings only. The investigators said they needed to do further tests and run computer analyses, but I could go home.
Wait a minute, I told them. Go home? What did they plan to do? Analyze. Examine. Ponder. Report in five days. I jumped up and strode from the office. ‘Ellen?’ Alison Birkett called, but I didn’t turn. A moment later, my folks came scurrying after me.
The week went more quickly than I thought it would. Paul appeared twice—once as my school principal in the middle of an assembly, the second time as a kid running out of a store, with the store owner chasing him and calling him a thief. I almost joined the chase, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Even if I’d caught him, he would have changed back again.
Six days later (it took them an extra day) we were all back there; me, my folks, Ms Birkett, her own team, the SDA techs, and their boss, a real ‘holycrat’ as Alison called such people. Only now two other people had come along; government lawyers in their dark suits and short haircuts. Alison had invited them. Summoned them was more like it. Told them they would ‘hear something vital to our mutual concerns’. So they came and sat upright, frowning at both the SDA and Alison Birkett, who appeared very relaxed in an antique chair with curved arms and a flared back. She wore a dark gold suit and had her hair combed back from her face. Leaning back in her chair she set her right elbow on the chair arms and rested her chin in the bridge between her first and second fingers. She looked the absolute model of fascination as she listened to the techs explain what was happening.
