The Skill of Our Hands--A Novel Read online

  * * *

  I was looking for pivot markers in Irina, and finding plenty. She was in crisis. I was certain. And I was right.

  —O

  * * *

  “You’ll look for him too, Jimmy?” Ren asked, her voice gratingly steady by comparison. “I mean, I have all of his switches buried in my mud, but you’re better at grazing than I am.”

  “I’ll look too,” said Jimmy. “I wish we knew better where in that Second’s life to look.” Jimmy’s voice remained steady, but Irina could hear the effort that took.

  “Okay,” Ren said. “What do I do when I find it?”

  “Seed the location,” said Ramon.

  “Are you looking too?” Ren asked him, and Irina thought how stabilizing the weight of something important to carry could be. Then she remembered Sophal and her son, and sat down against the air conditioner under the window.

  “No,” Ramon said. “I’m going to keep an eye on Carter. Er, Phil. Frio.”

  “Matsu,” Ren said. “You’ll watch Irina?”

  Matsu nodded and Irina looked away before he could catch her eye. Ren closed her eyes to graze, and a phone rang.

  “Oh, shit,” Ren said, without standing up. “That’s Phil’s phone again. It’s in my bag.” She pointed at it on the ground at the foot of Frio’s bed. “Can someone answer it? It’s probably that Menzie kid calling back.”

  All the warmth flushed out of Irina. She needed to get off the air conditioner, but didn’t trust her legs. And Oskar saw it.

  * * *

  I did. I was willing to let her break; hell, I was willing to push her to breaking, if that was what it took to get answers out of her.

  —O

  * * *

  Oskar took Ren’s bag, extracted the ringing phone, and checked the caller ID. “Menzie Pulu,” he read, and let it go to voice mail.

  Fear opened a cold, frictionless space in Irina’s head. All the complicated lines of connection and isolation unwove and tangled themselves, and Oskar was standing too close to her, kinetic with anger. “Irina,” he said. “Who is Menzie Pulu?”

  Matsu, as still as Oskar was restless, looked no less dangerous guarding the door. For a second or two, Irina considered turning and diving through the window, but the glass wouldn’t break like it did in the movies and she’d trip over Ramon’s medical bag or get tangled in the filmy curtains, anyway. Also, Matsu would catch her before she got fully into motion.

  Irina looked back and forth between the two large, beautiful blond men: Oskar pale and feline, Matsu honed to a cold, keen edge. Celeste had titaned them both, selecting beefcake variations on a masculine theme, the vampire and the surfer version of the same beauty. Oskar had been livid for years. Probably still was.

  * * *

  It was a stupid, selfish, Celeste thing to do and someone should have stopped her.

  —O

  * * *

  “Irina?” Oskar held Phil’s phone in his hand like a knife.

  Phil had left Oskar all the seeds of his work on SB 1070 as a knife.

  “Ren?” Irina knew that if she dropped his eyes, Oskar would repeat his question, make demands. She didn’t want to have to confess her mistakes. But even more she wanted to put them right. She didn’t want to have to turn to Oskar for help, but it was exactly what she’d set out to teach Ren. And Ren had never needed the help of her fellow Incrementalists more. “Ren!” Irina repeated. “Oskar knows where Phil’s stub is.”

  * * *

  I swear I didn’t. Not then.

  —O

  * * *

  * * *

  Oskar opened his mouth to accuse Irina of keeping secrets and telling lies, but—

  “Oskar,” Irina spoke directly to him—and even without his Incrementalist training, Oskar would have seen the tangle of emotions holding her together and tearing her apart: fear, shame, pride, determination, and, covering it all like a sheet of black ice on a winter highway, unutterable weariness. She spoke through it all, her voice quivering, but steady: “Phil gave you a knife. You seeded it. It was a knife. But the form it took before it became a knife, was—”

  “Fire. Like a falling star or firebomb.”

  “Celeste,” Ren whispered. “She tried to set something in my Garden on fire too.”

  “No,” Irina said. “Not Celeste. But one of Phil’s memories of her. And Phil turned it into an index for all the information he had collected on SB 1070.” Irina pressed Oskar. “Why? Why would he do that? We all know he only loves Ren.”

  Oskar felt everyone’s eyes on him. Ren’s gripped his gaze with her own, as if it were the only rope to the only boat in the ocean. “There was a resonance between the SB information and something related to Celeste.”

  “Yes,” said Irina. “With what?”

  “I don’t know,” Oskar said.

  * * *

  You will understand this better now than I did at the time. Remember, Carter’s seeds from the 1800s weren’t available to me. Or they were, but not as things I’d had any clue I ought to revisit. They weren’t collected anywhere yet. So I was just trying desperately to see whether what I’d learned about Celeste in Phil’s dust ritual had anything to do with his most recent death, because Irina was right. I don’t mind saying it. Irina was right about Phil not loving Celeste. He didn’t even grieve her. But her memory could still flame up in his Garden, and in Ren’s, and even, apparently, mine. And Irina was right too that I knew more than I realized. I just had to figure out what Celeste and Carter had in common with Ren and Phil, and the work, and the man who had looked at me through Frio’s eyes and called me a toad.

  —O

  * * *

  “Kansas before the Civil War,” Oskar said. “Phil was working for abolition—it meant everything to him. And now he’s seeing it all come back around. The Minutemen are the new border ruffians. The laws being passed are again as much about trying to control the skin color of a region as they are about the economy. It isn’t slavery, no; but to Phil, I think, it felt like the same thing. The same fight. And the same failure.”

  “But abolition succeeded,” said Ren. “I don’t see—”

  “No. Phil wasn’t just working for abolition, but for abolition without violence, for a peaceful transition from one mindset to another. He was trying to meddle the nation, to change its collective mind. And he failed. I don’t think he ever recovered from it. And it was tied to everything for him—to all of the crap between him and Celeste, and to guns, and when you do and don’t pull the trigger. It was tied to what it means to be good or to do good, to what it means to be an Incrementalist, and to what happens when you’re not the shooter, but the shot.”

  “Oskar,” said Jimmy, his voice as strong as hope and as determined as insurrection, “Where is he now?”

  “Where he failed. Kansas, sometime between when he didn’t pull the trigger in December of 1857, and May of 1858, when someone else did. That’s as close as I can narrow it. The Second’s name was Henry Lattimer.”

  Oskar turned to Ren.

  She nodded. “I’ll find him,” she said.

  * * *

  Occasionally, I feel a strong sense of acceptance and affirmation, a simple “Yes” in my mind when I consider a given Incrementalist. It’s equal parts confidence in them and alignment with me. I call it love. And right in that moment, for the first time, I loved Ren. I loved Jimmy for asking the right question at the right moment. I even loved Irina for showing me I’d forgotten what I knew. But it was Ren, frightened and brave, determined and untried, we sent to collect Phil’s distributed stub. I knew where to look, but only she could find him.

  —O

  I’ve been interrupting too much. I’ll stop.

  —O

  * * *

  * * *

  Ren didn’t know whether the Garden was made of thought, or by thinking, or simply was thought, but it was mental enough to mute the body’s howling, and sometimes that was as good as actual quiet. If your brain wasn’t too frighten
ed or drunk or damaged to reach the Garden, then your mind, once it was there, was free of its neurochemistry, or alcohol or plaques. The freedom felt a little alien in its distance and sheen; pure thought is a hallucinogen.

  Ren’s Garden lay at her feet like an etherized patient. She knew something malignant lived below the skin, but not where to put the scalpel in. How could she find Phil in all that wasn’t Phil? What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

  Phil would say you make the next right play, but Ren didn’t even know what the game was. Maybe the next right play was to stand up from the cards and go dancing. Knowing the right play depended on knowing the game. But when you play alone, you win and you lose—a dialectic. Oskar would be so proud.

  Win and lose, first and last, toward and away from, and Phil was always moving forward. So Ren would too. But toward what? Not what scared her, what frightened her away, but toward what attracted her, toward what she loved.

  What did she love?

  So many things, but they all boiled down to either individuals or ideas—love and imagination. Share your imagination with your lover, and you win.

  Play that game.

  To get into his Garden, Ren needed a memory of Phil’s. She knew he’d seeded escaping Celeste as a gibbeted doll, and although Ren had never grazed the memory, the date was clear in her mind.

  * * *

  I know, I know. I’ve just promised to be more circumspect in my commentary, and here I am again, but this needs some explaining. Remember at the beginning when Phil was dying and I broke into his Garden? I explained how it worked then, but it’s important for you to understand what it meant that Ren was doing the same thing here. That Phil had enough purchase in Frio’s brain to call himself Carter, told us his mind had access to his model, his Garden, which would have been impossible if he were fully in stub. So we knew he wasn’t anymore. But he wasn’t fully in Frio either. Which was a big part of what made all of this so frightening to us, and so dangerous for Phil. And Ren.

  —O

  * * *

  Ren conjured the screens and filtered everything else away. She unstrung Raggedy Ann, and the doll burst in clouds of white cotton batting that blew and jettied and became whitewashed walls, stretched and crouched low to form the domed cellar ceiling in the belly of Celeste’s garden. Ren knew how it felt to have a full linen shirtsleeve pinned to the wall by a glittering arrow, and she forced the room to smell not of roots, but of salt air. She made the taste in Phil’s mouth into root beer, not tears, blending her sense triggers with his to get into his Garden.

  She hung on as the ocean pinkened into cherry blossoms, and the root beer washed into chives, until she stood at the back gate of a Roman merchant’s villa.

  “Phil!” Ren shouted across his garden. “Phil, I need your help!”

  Phil’s Garden was cluttered with seeds, and Ren wandered it calling for him like they’d had to look for Nana before they hired someone to watch her.

  Nana had lost her memory, then herself, so when Ren learned Incrementalists could permanently preserve memories in their collective, distributed imagination, she’d taken the spike, Celeste’s stub, and become one of them. But she’d lost Celeste. Ironic, she knew.

  As a result, Ren had spent her time as an Incrementalist trying to understand how the Garden worked, how it collected, searched, and shared information, so if there was one thing she knew for sure, it was how to locate and trigger emotional memories in the man she loved. She would create a switch for finding Phil.

  Or better, for making Phil find her.

  Smells were the best, but impossible now. Music was a very close second.

  “When Johnny comes marching home again, hoorah, hoorah!” Ren sang as loudly as she could. It sounded awful, but that wasn’t the point. She walked through the back door of Phil’s villa, singing.

  “We’ll give him a hearty welcome then, hoorah, hoorah!” Ren didn’t know whether the song had been written before Henry Lattimer died, but she didn’t think that mattered either.

  Marching home mattered.

  Ren walked down the long, dark central corridor to the atrium where a shallow pool of water shone beneath an opening in the roof.

  “The men will cheer and the boys will shout,” Ren sang, thinking about Oskar and Jimmy and Ramon and Matsu waiting back in the hotel room for Phil.

  “The ladies they will all turn out…” Ren sat on the pool’s raised edge and looked up at the sky and back to where the water in the impluvium had sunk deeper than a grave.

  The next line came out tear-choked and whispered. “And we’ll all feel gay when—”

  Ren stopped. The flicker in the pool wasn’t the sun, the moon, or the stars reflecting. It was movement.

  “When Johnny comes marching home.”

  Ren reached into the water, and felt it draining out the bottom through a hole, small as a bullet, large as a hurricane’s eye. Ren wanted to stopper the vortex, but she closed her fingers over the emptiness at the heart of the spiral, and retracted her hand, dripping and on fire.

  She opened her eyes, shivering with cold in the overcrowded hotel room. “Phil found me.”

  Matsu turned to her from where he stood between Oskar and Irina.

  “I’ve got Phil’s stub in my—around my hand,” Ren said.

  “Jesus, Ren!” Oskar whispered. “Seed it.”

  “Yeah.” Ren closed her eyes and took the burn out of the fire.

  * * *

  What Ren didn’t know, or hadn’t remembered yet, was that tune had other lyrics from another time that meant even more to Phil: “Mighty the engine, vast the field / From coast to coast / The skill of our hands, the wealth they yield / Is all Earth’s boast / For ours are the hands on those machines / Just think for a minute of what that means. / And the time has come when we’ll not be fooled anymore”

  —Oskar

  * * *

  TWENTY-ONE

  Halfway Out of His Head. Sometimes More than Halfway

  Irina fully believed herself to be as rational as Matsu and as tenacious as Oskar, but she wasn’t at her best, and she knew it. She was frayed by what she’d been through with Frio, spun thin with exhaustion and grief, and more scared than she’d been since the night she had waited with a loaded gun for Phil in a Vegas hotel room, and ended up dead on the carpet. Irina looked from Jimmy to Frio—or Phil—or Carter. Whatever Matsu had done had put him into a deep sleep. Thank Christ.

  “The police,” Matsu reminded them all, “are liable to arrive at any moment.”

  “I know,” Jimmy said. “We need to decide—”

  “There’s nothing to decide,” said Irina. “We need to leave before they get here.”

  “How do we get Frio out?” Jimmy asked.

  “We don’t,” Irina told him. “For now, his friends can have him. He knows how to get in touch with us.”

  Oskar bared his teeth. “Oh, that’s just fine. And then the police will be looking for us—”

  “For what?” said Irina. “Driving an invisible stake into the forehead of an undercover agent? I’d love to see the complaint.”

  “She has a point,” said Matsu, bless his rational heart, or lack of one.

  “What about Ren?” said Oskar.

  “If she’s not done reseeding Phil’s stub—and how long can that take?—we either wake her up or carry her.”

  Oskar’s eyes narrowed. “You have this all worked out, don’t you, Irina? And what happens next?”

  “I believe we’re scheduled to attend a funeral.”

  “He’s coming around again,” said Ramon, still positioned next to Frio. “I won’t leave him if he’s in pain.”

  “He’s a cop,” said Oskar.

  Ramon gave Oskar a look; the blond man shrugged.

  “Ramon—” said Irina.

  Jimmy stopped her, looking at Ramon. “You’re wasting breath.”

  Ramon took Frio’s pulse, and made a grunt that sounded odd coming from his new and very female throat.
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  Frio opened his eyes.

  “Phil?” Jimmy whispered.

  Phil nodded. “I’m going,” he said. “I shot me.”

  His eyes closed again and he was out.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Oskar.

  Jimmy turned to the room. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  Ramon topped off Frio’s sedation and collected his vials, the used hypos and their lids, even the discarded cotton balls. Oskar swooped Ren up in his arms.

  “Get dressed, Irina.” Jimmy’s voice was kind but uncompromising. If Jimmy wasn’t willing to accord her the dignity of digging through the trashed bedding for her clothes after everyone else left, Irina knew it wasn’t going to happen. She retrieved Ren’s gray dress from the wad of sheets, swept her phone into her handbag, and retreated to the bathroom.

  * * *

  Each night, in her undoctorly neat block printing, Kate wrote “Sleep,” on her to-do list so that every morning could begin with a sense of accomplishment. She kept herself busy—idle hands and the devil and all that, of course—besides, she just liked it, the bustle and productivity. She made sure her office, and both clinics where she donated time, whistled about like windmills in a spring breeze. There were protocols and appointments, set times budgeted per patient with minutes allocated between to dictate notes. But today Kate felt like a bird in the blades. She couldn’t shake the agony of Ramon’s patient she hadn’t been able to see or touch. And she couldn’t forget Daniel’s sincerity and kiss—not with the young man puppying behind her, anyway.

  All morning Kate let Daniel shadow her at the free specialty clinic for children and adolescents with diabetes, and she let the kids stare at his scars the way only children will. Kate introduced him to her young patients and their parents as, “her friend Daniel.”