The Deluge, page 100
You swallow. Four lives for the life of your children and their mothers. After everything, it turns into an even trade. You can already feel hell’s flames licking at the tight leather of these foreign boots, for that’s where this will take you. No question about that.
“Deal.”
The walk back through the kitchen seems to take twice as long. The sounds of frying and sautéing and chopping recede. When you’re about to reach the doors, you turn to the kitchen and cry out, “Excuse me. I need your attention.” A few heads turn but mostly people keep working. “Excuse me!” you bark. The sounds of the kitchen quiet. “There’s been a threat against the hotel. I need everyone here to proceed to the exits immediately. Put down what you’re doing and exit immediately.”
There is a great deal of hesitation. They all look afraid to leave their posts.
“Now! This is not a drill. We got a serious threat! You need to drop what you’re doing and go now!”
And then they’re moving, scattering like mice.
“Tell everyone!” you call after them. “Everyone in the hotel—tell ’em!”
You turn and, without looking back, push through the doors and into the restaurant. You stay against the wall, sure that they won’t set off the vests until you’re closer.
“Quinn, do I got your word on this?”
“Keeper,” she sounds almost sorrowful, “of course you do. Of course you have my word.”
You take no chances this time. You belt it out, as loud as you can.
“Excuse me! May I have your attention please! Right now, please direct your attention to me!” You thump your chest, feel the dark materials beneath. “I need everyone to proceed to the exits immediately. Leave your food. Leave everything and exit the building immediately.”
To your utter disbelief, no one rises. People continue to sip wine while several irritated diners demand to know what’s going on. You spot the man at table fifty-one, and you recognize him. He’s been in the news a lot over the years. He is a famous man. He ran for president. Mackowski is his name. He looks bored and leans over to the woman sitting next to him to ask her something. A nearby diner tells you his skirt steak hasn’t come out yet, and he’s not going anywhere until it does because it’s already been twenty-five minutes. You can’t believe how they look right through you, even in this situation. You try again. “There’s been a threat against the senator’s life, and all of you need to get out immediately. Senator, I need you and all of your, uh, tablemates, your friends, to stay where you are.”
A few people rise and begin to move out, but not the vast majority.
“Are you people fucking stupid?” You take the rubber gun from the holster, and a woman chirps in shock. You begin stalking past the tables. “Go!” You grab an older man by the arm and jerk him out of his chair. There are gasps, but this gets the whole crowd moving.
You lock eyes with the senator.
They filter through doors at the front of the dining area, but not nearly as fast as you would have imagined. You can even see a few of them reaching for their phones. Likely to complain to Guest Services. You move toward the senator’s table, and the Asian woman he was speaking to begins to rise, so you bark at her, “Not you! Sit back down. Please.” And she does.
As the people hustle past, you approach table fifty-one. The senator sits with his legs crossed and his hands stacked calmly on one knee. He wears a blue jacket with a white open-collar shirt. Gray chest hair puffing out the top. His face is weathered but strong. He appears unimpressed with you and this display. He is utterly unafraid. Beside him the Asian, thin and attractive, wearing a sleek purple dress and expensive jewelry, wavy black hair with a pin carefully placed in the side. There’s no mistaking how badly she wants to leave with the rest of the diners. On the other side of the senator is a tall, handsome guy with a beard like a billy goat, the chin all white. His eyes flap from you to the senator and back to you. He has his phone in his left hand and a drink in the right, which he still has not set back down. His thumb is poised above the screen of his phone as if in mid-text. Finally, beside him is a woman, brown like Arma, but older and wearing an expensive black dress. She stares at you coldly, the first to question all this.
“What kind of threat?” she demands.
You stare at the four of them. You don’t see any point in hiding this anymore. You drop the fake gun, pull the trigger from your vest, and flip the cap up. “Bomb threat,” you say. Then you rip the stitching so the false front of the vest tears open, and there it is. Wires. Battery. Cell phone. Plastic-packaged bricks of ruddy orange something held with black electrical tape. The lumps you felt were plastic bags of bolts, washers, and nails. When they see this, the bearded man cries out, and the Asian woman tries to stand.
“Don’t,” you snap at her. “Sit back down.” And again she does. A woman to your left screams, and now people are running for the exit. Now they’re listening to you, and you have to admit, you like that power. However fleeting. As the last of the guests scramble out, the room is silent except for the sounds of the wind and river coming in from the veranda. Holding the trigger in your right hand, thumb hovering over the phony switch, you take a chair and set it between the senator and the bearded man, who is white-knuckling his drink.
“Please,” says the bearded man, breath whistling. “Oh Jesus please, man, please don’t, just don’t.”
“Peter,” says Senator Mackowski. “Settle.” And Peter stops talking. He sets the glass down and sucks a breath into his palm. Tears form in his eyes and spill quietly down the sides of his face. The brown woman keeps glaring at you, her face unchanged since you walked into the room.
“Okay,” you say, speaking to Quinn and Jansi. But you’re looking at the senator, so he thinks you’re talking to him.
“Okay what?” he says and braves a look at the bomb. His eyes quickly return to yours.
The brown woman reaches into her bag, and you jerk the trigger at her in case she’s like Secret Service reaching for a gun.
“Hey—it’s just my phone,” she says, retrieving the device and unlocking the screen. “All I want is to—”
The Asian woman abruptly stands and you swing the trigger at her, spit flying from your mouth: “Sit the fuck back down!” She does so immediately.
“Emii,” says the senator. “Do what he says.”
“No why no why,” whispers the Asian woman, her whole body shaking. This strange combination of words. “No why no why.”
“Hey. My friend.” The brown woman is holding her phone at you. She’s showing you a picture.
“What’s taking so long?” you say to Quinn and Jansi, but they don’t respond, and for a brief moment you wonder if they lost their nerve.
“What do you mean?” the senator asks you. Emii is gasping and rocking, maybe hyperventilating.
“This is our family,” says the brown woman, and she rubs Peter’s arm. She is so calm, her startling brown eyes searing into you. “See these two? These are our children.”
Your eyes well. You understand Peter is this woman’s husband. You don’t want to look at this picture of their family, but you can’t help yourself. In it, they are both skinnier, younger, and beaming. The two kids are a shade lighter than the woman, an older girl in jeans and a purple tank top and a boy who has only half a mouth of teeth and smiles to show off every one of them. Toby would be about the age of the girl.
“I don’t suppose,” says the senator, “that I could talk you out of this.”
“It ain’t really up to me,” you whisper.
“That’s Noor. And the boy is Gregory,” she says, pointing to each of the children. She must be as scared as her husband, but her fear is different. In fact, she swipes her thumb to show you another picture. “These are our children,” she repeats, and finally tears brim in her calm and terrifying eyes.
You’re clutching the trigger so hard your hand hurts.
Then the senator says, “I beat cancer three times—you believe that? Three times.” He nods. “And I feel lucky that this is the way I get to go. They’ll be telling stories about this for the next five hundred years.”
Then suddenly you drop the trigger. You drop it because your hand is shaking so violently. Everyone’s eyes fall to the device. The senator snatches after it, and Emii bolts from the table, but her legs freeze midstride.
There is a thunderous crack, a deafening jet-engine howl, and a sensation of swelling, of expansion, of hyper-acceleration, of being rent apart. It is so oddly long and painless, like the acceleration of a roller coaster the moment after it crests the first hump and begins its descent. So that’s what comes to you: riding the tallest roller coaster at King’s Island when Joe Biggs took you that one summer, and he never gave you the chance to chicken out. And then at last, a fleeting glimpse of all these infinite and eternal ciphers, watched by the burning eyes of angels, and roaring into vivid, unyielding creation.
WHAT WE DREAM OF WHEN WE’RE DYING
2037–2038
Tony missed Kate Morris’s funeral, so he missed his daughter’s eulogy for her friend. Two days before he was supposed to fly to Oregon, a pain in his stomach kept him from even packing a bag and left him in bed for a day. He had to watch Holly deliver her eulogy on TV, her skin zitty and eyes puffy with post-baby sleeplessness. She spoke with clarity and beauty. She was perfect. He called her afterward to tell her so and that he was pissed he’d gotten food poisoning and couldn’t make it. For the next three months, however, he continued to experience cramps, constipation, and nausea, and treated it by guzzling Pepto. He kept explaining it away until one morning he went to flush and saw the toilet water filled with blood. By then he more or less already knew what was going on. His primary care physician, possibly the only man he knew more cantankerous than himself, scolded him for forgoing a colonoscopy for seven years.
“Or computational pathology. An algorithm would have caught this.”
“I was indisposed for part of that,” said Tony. “The preventative care wasn’t tiptop in black-site prison.”
“You should file a lawsuit,” the doc suggested.
“I did.”
“In the meantime, you need a gastroenterologist immediately.”
A week later, it was confirmed: A tumor in his colon. The biopsy came back, and no surprise, it was cancerous. The good news was that it wasn’t that big, stage III, not stage IV, so they’d resect it, and there was a chance that would be that.
In a way, he was almost relieved that it had finally happened. During Gail’s diagnosis and rapid deterioration, he’d become so familiar with cancer, overreading, overstudying, making sure the doctors were trying everything in the arsenal, that his own cancer felt like a homecoming. That was the calling card of the emperor of all maladies: It simply had no quit. Given enough time it would come for everyone.
He did not tell Holly or Catherine. The resection was a simple procedure, and his surgical oncologist seemed confident, so by late May with the Dow Jones imploding and unemployment surging, Tony had the surgery. He lay in the hospital bed, watching as the anesthesiologist fixed a syringe into the IV, delivering the cloudy propofol, a liquid as milk-white as the lunule of a thumbnail. He knew this would be followed by a paralytic and a general anesthetic, but before he could reflect much, the oxygen mask was lowering over his face and then he was awake again and sore as hell in the gut. They’d gone in laparoscopically, three incisions, including the belly button and, according to the surgeon, taken out twenty inches of his colon, along with a tumor that measured 3.1 by 2.8 centimeters. He spent three more days in the hospital, but he was defecating and passing gas very soon after and the soreness in his abdomen diminished. He took a driverless home. He slid behind his desk to tackle his hundreds of missed calls and emails. Ash Hasan and Marty Rathbone had been contacting him nonstop for several days. “I’d rather just be put out of my misery than call these two back,” he told his dog, Jamie.
“Tony?” cried Rathbone. “Where the hell have you been? We’ve got the opportunity of a lifetime here.”
He knew that witless moron Warren Hamby had bestowed Rathbone with the dubious honor of Treasury secretary, mostly because of the paper he and Marty had written in ’24 that predicted exactly what was happening as housing prices collapsed. Rathbone explained that the new president was convening a task force to draft emergency legislation: bank rescue, coastal rescue, climate rescue all in one.
“Why should I be interested in helping out the government that disappeared me into an extrajudicial cell for seventeen fucking months? Not sure if you heard, Rathbone, but I’m suing those cunts.”
But Hasan called him next and laid out the stakes.
“This isn’t just about your expertise, Tony,” Hasan told him from his screen, bouncing his son, Forrest, on his leg. “You’re viewed by many as the foremost authority on the matter. Your very presence, I’m hazarding to guess, will help calm fears, markets, and panic. I would sooner trade the rest of the team for your presence if that’s what it takes.”
He knew he’d agree, given how unpleasant it would be to watch others screw the pooch via cable news clowns, but first he had a follow-up with his surgeon.
In the waiting room, he was treated to memories of all the same rooms from Gail’s ordeal, the TV in the corner with its programming about how bell peppers have antioxidants and more Vitamin C than an orange or why it’s helpful to exercise between chemotherapy treatments. All the worried people waiting, everyone wondering who had it worse.
“I’m sorry to say, Tony, the news is not what we wanted. It’s not dreadful, but it’s definitely not what we wanted.” The surgeon’s office was a warm, light-filled space with a view of lush trees outside the window. Tony marveled at how many people had gotten shitty news in this very same setting.
“We took out twenty-six lymph nodes, and ten of them were cancerous, which is, I probably don’t need to tell you this, but that’s a bad prognostic indicator. It’s not a death sentence—not at all—so I want you to stay positive. But I also know you’re a no-bullshit kinda guy and the no-bullshit prognosis here is that we need to start you on chemotherapy as soon as possible. I’m going to refer you to a medical oncologist…”
The surgeon went on for a while after that, but Tony wasn’t listening. Patients responded in different ways to the violence of chemo, but it had been absolute hell on Gail. She’d come home after getting the tamoxifen pumped into her, be okay for about twelve hours, and then spend the next day vomiting into a bucket because she was too exhausted to even get out of bed. Her hair fell out, and she was in such agony, unable to even watch TV, the nausea and pain were so bad. The worst part, she once said, was that when she did feel well enough to eat, nothing tasted right. She’d bite into a peach and it would taste like sheet metal. She couldn’t enjoy the brief moments when she didn’t want to vomit everything up. As the surgeon droned on, he realized he’d already made up his mind about what he was going to do.
“I have an important trip coming up,” he said. “This’ll have to wait until I get back.”
The surgeon looked deeply vexed to hear this. “Tony, that’s a really bad, really dangerous idea. Chemo treatment will reduce the chances of metastasis significantly.”
“It’s not something I can put off,” he said, standing to leave. “I’ll call the oncologist as soon as I get back. Shouldn’t be more than a couple weeks.”
He called his daughters to tell them where he was going. Catherine sounded strangely awed by everything that was happening. Too young to recall ’08, and she’d treated the pandemic like an inconvenience to her social life, this was her first go-around at global crisis as an adult. She was still down in Florida working for Corey, trying to rescue the family business. Catherine, sounding too much like her uncle, said, “I’m hoping, Dad, that you’re going into these conferences with an eye as to how it affects the small businessperson?”
“Yes, Cat, my first priority is rescuing your uncle’s house in Sarasota.”
“I’m just saying, Dad! There’s about a million unemployed construction workers down here ready to jump into the sea. It’s bad.”
Catherine looked healthy and vital, her cheeks plump, her smile mischievous again. Holly, on the other hand, was stick-thin, her pregnancy weight sloughing off along with too much else. She had Hannah on her lap when he called. (“Say hi to Grandpa! Say hi!,” waving the baby’s pudgy arm.) Her eyes were pitted, her cheeks hollow, but she did not want to talk about how she was doing. She wanted only to speak of the task force.
“You have to push them, Dad. This is a big opportunity.”
“Everyone keeps saying that.”
Hannah Gail Yu sucked on her fist while simultaneously trying to look up and behind at her mother. Hannah looked a lot like Dean, no bridge to her nose, enormous brown eyes, and straight coal-black hair.
“You have security in the building?” he asked.
“We’re taking precautions.”
“You’ve been in the public eye now, especially after the eulogy—”
“I know, Dad.”
“And it was an amazing speech, but—”
“Dad, I know.” This bubble of her irritation burst abruptly, and they were both quiet. He’d been at her apartment with the new baby when they heard about the shooting, and even as Holly began trembling and weeping, he’d felt almost exalted. Because Holly hadn’t been there. Her grief couldn’t match his blinding relief. She’d twice dodged the bullets of madmen, first Victor Love and then this David Joseph Madison. Because she’d been through so much, because she likely lived with the guilt and pain of having her friends die all around her for this cause, because she looked exhausted and angry every time he saw her, he did not feel like he should tell her about his diagnosis. Hannah craned her head back and tried to grab her mommy’s chin for attention.
“They’re monitoring our communications while we’re in Idaho,” he said. “So there are no leaks.”
“Go save the world,” she said, already reaching to end the call. “I’ll talk to you when you’re back.”
