Home Fires

REFLECTION 3: Old Things

I have forgotten the old man’s name; I remember everything else: his tousled gray hair and the old white shirts he always wore, threadbare shirts sometimes patched and darned but always clean, the jeans and the blue rubber-soled shoes from Eastasia.

His shop was always clean, too. I would have expected dust, but the old lamp with the peeling bronze finish was immaculate and every chipped Dresden plate shone. He spent the hours between customers scrubbing and dusting, he told me, and thus fled depression.

Vanessa fled as well, and it is possible (though not, I think, probable) that she too fled inner demons. Could she not have searched her tiny apartment herself, slashing her faded pink cushions with the bone-handled shaver? She would have hated the cramped rooms I gave her and the old furniture. Could she not have avenged herself on both?

Yes, but that is the point, or so it seems to me. When tenants vacate a place they hate, hate because of the money it snatches from their account each hundred-day, perhaps, or because their neighbors make noise or cook cabbage …

When they truly hate the place they are leaving, they vandalize it, smearing obscenities on its walls, stealing its electrical outlets, and so on and so forth—all the rest of that long, sad catalogue; I know it only too well. Nothing of that kind had occurred. The search had been a search, and not vandalism. Vanessa had (they had thought she had) some small item, a paper or something of the sort, a thing that might have been hidden almost anywhere. What it was, I could not guess, and it may have been something that did not in fact exist.

If it did not exist, what was it they thought she had? What made them think she had it? If it did exist, what was it and where did she get it?

Chelle thought her mother had been a spy. She had said so in my hotel room. The walls of such rooms are notoriously thin; she may well have been overheard. Or a surveillance device may have been planted in the room. Or Chelle may have expressed the same thought on some other occasion, most probably a debriefing.

Suppose that Chelle had brought home something she should not have, and that she had given that forbidden object to her mother. Or that someone suspected she had. That, too, was possible. In that case, Chelle herself held the answer to all the riddles—assuming that she knew what it was she had.

Have I lost her? If I have, I am well rid of her. It should be possible to imagine a less suitable mate for a middle-aged attorney, but it might take an hour’s thinking. If I have lost her, I will be miserable—and fortunate in my misery.

I have not. No, not yet. Or if I have, I will strain every faculty to win her back. What would be the point of boasting my advantages—the contract we signed, my wealth and position, her college memories, and the rest? All of them together will weigh less with her than my lined face and receding hairline.

There is another: Vanessa.

And one more: Chelle’s own good sense. She rejected my logic, but rejected it in a storm of emotion. Whatever else Chelle may be, she is no fool. Storms are powerful, but storms (like men) do not endure.

Vanessa … What age is she? Biologically between thirty-five and forty, I would say. The woman into whom Vanessa’s every thought was uploaded was thirty-five at youngest, forty at oldest. Or so I (a poor judge) would imagine; but how old was Vanessa? How old at death, how old when she had her last scan?

Scans can be loaded into a mainframe. How are they loaded into the brain? If her case goes to trial, I’ll need to know that.

If she died in a hospital, she may well have been scanned just before death. Those things will be a matter of record. Boris can find them out for me.

Vanessa wants me, and who can blame her? She needs a hold to counter the hold I have on her. She will not get that one.

How old? She was alive when Chelle was twenty-three; I know, because I saw her then. Such a woman would not have married before twenty, or so I think.

I wish Susan were here. She is always a better judge of women. I could send for her, perhaps.

No. Not if I judge Chelle correctly. Susan must stay where she is.

Say that Vanessa was twenty-three when she contracted with Charles C. Blue. Forty-six when I saw her? Perhaps. If she had lived, she would be what? Sixty-six, sixty-eight, seventy. Charles was older, certainly, and is most probably dead. If not, seventy-five at least. Can I make use of a wealthy and ruthless man of that age?

Very possibly; and if he makes use of me, he will be billed. Zygmunt could find him, certainly. Houses, cars, and all the rest.

A new woman? That, too, is possible.

These men on the ladder lifts, how hard they work and how desperate they must be to take such work and cling to it. How long can an athletic man do such work? I wish I had binoculars.