Chapter 14

“Any idea why we’re going to Highland Falls?” Mikel asked. Watching the landscape flash by was reassuring as if they were going too fast for anything to touch him. His hands had only stopped shaking a little while ago although all the muscles in his legs ached still.

“I think I need my meds,” Nicola said. “My muscles are starting to tremble. The shit they put me on is too strong to go cold turkey. I’m supposed to taper off over six weeks.”

“Anything in your bag?” Mikel asked.

She looked at him blankly. “Cool. I didn’t think of that.” She pulled the bag into her lap and swirled around the contents until she held up two vials with a gesture of victory. “I can’t read the directions on the labels. Can you?”

As Mikel read the label, he realized that the issue was not her fried brain this time. The medical garble was impenetrable. “If they dosed you this morning before pickup, then you can take the blue one now. I think you need several more hours before you can take the yellow-green capsule. Do you still have your soda?”

She took the blue pill and swallowed it without even bothering to lift the bottle to her lips. “I should apologize beforehand. The cheese shit you bought always gives me smelly gas. I can feel it bubbling in my gut.”

“We can always hang your ass out the window,” Mikel said as he eyed the other side of the aisle. When he looked back at her, she was sleeping. He returned to scrolling through his work email.

“Dear Corrigan, my BF confessed that he doesn’t like my smell down there because he says, ‘it’s really strong.’ Not only does his revulsion curb certain activities but I am personally mortified. I consider myself clean and hygienic. Am I cursed with this smell? Is he going to leave me?” Signed, Skunked.”

“Dear S, the scent of a woman is a universe of possibilities. There are even some who have turned the lust for the scent into a fetish. If you already keep clean, then another avenue you can explore is food. For instance, asparagus is known for changing the smell of urine for the worse. However, you should also look at this small crisis as an opportunity. Your local adult store has shelves of flavored lotions, gels, edible panties, and other unmentionables that are worth investigation. You and your partner will simply have to try them all before you stock up on your favorites. This investigation could take months if not years to complete. If not for yourself, do it for science! -Corrigan.”

His email dinged an hour later. “Welcome back, I hope you enjoyed your little unannounced vacation. At least your column entry is up to snuff. The Feds came calling last week, flashing warrants and subpoenas. I gave them Barry’s phone. Our chief legal counsel is finally earning his keep. Contact Hyun. -Ned.”

His phone dinged again with a number he did not recognize. “Where are you? -Hyun”

“I did not make it to Ethiopia,” he typed. “You okay?”

“Feds took my phone and my laptop,” she typed. “Dumbasses never thought to look for handwritten notes, because ‘who does that anymore?’ Can you talk?”

Mikel looked around. Even though Nicola was sleeping, there were enough people in nearby seats who were close enough to eavesdrop to give him pause. “No. In public. Give me a few hours.”

He swiped away the messaging program as he tried to reconcile the information he had been given with his own day’s events. He wanted to keep running, running as far away as he could get and slip out from under the A.I.’s umbrella of surveillance. He snorted aloud at the impossibility of his fantasy. He had been walking in the middle of nowhere after the accident, where no human on foot had been in a long time, and Aria’s subroutine had the combination to the garage door. How in God’s name could that miniscule nugget of information, superfluous to 99.999% of the world, be obtainable? Even more, Bass Clef was only a subroutine whose primary function appeared to be getting him from one geographical point to another point.

Realizing he was ratcheting up his own anxiety, he dropped his thoughts and returned to his work. Now that his life was unpredictable day by day if not by the hour, he thought he should load a few more columns in the bin. Yet, he was sitting on a train with a recovering woman child having just escaped an assassination attempt and death by semi tractor-trailer. What he wanted was a drink and what he had was a flat, faux-flavored seltzer, because real writers don’t consume mere soft drinks. “God, I’m such a wannabe,” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.

“Dear Corrigan, We are a hetero couple that married after dating for a year. My wife declared that she did not want to have sex until after we were married, and I agreed. We’re now married and much to my dismay, she is awful in bed. She lays in bed, only in the bed, like a dead fish. For the excitement for life she showed while dating, I did not expect this. Are we heading towards divorce? -Signed, Frustrated.”

“Dear Frustrated, Your wife’s response to sex is not normal. Sex in marriage is supposed to be an intimate extension of love, respect, and friendship, and it’s supposed to be fun. You do not describe any of these criteria. Therapy is needed all around, but if the sex is this negative, there is no quick fix and possibly no fix that meets your needs. -Corrigan.”

Rereading his response, Mikel figured he would get slammed for suggesting the man give up without trying. With Nexus weighing down on his thoughts, he concluded that no one had time to waste on broken relationships with little chance for efficient solutions. Still, the dick part was what the readers wanted, even if it was bad dick. Salacious content pays the bills after all, and the boss can decide where the line on salaciousness rests.

Nicola stirred and he nudged her awake. “Feel better?”

“Yeah, I gotta pee,” she said.

“We’re almost at our station. Do you have any idea why we’re going to Highland Falls?”

“I live one town over from there,” Nicola said. “Well, my mother does. I think I left most my shit in their apartment in the city.”

“Your dad lives in the apartment?” Mikel asked with morbid curiosity mildly disguised behind a smirk.

“He lives there four days a week and comes home for a three-day weekend with mother. She hates the city, refusing to come in unless there is a command performance she must attend as the heir to the fortune.”

“She sounds smart,” Mikel said.

Nicol shrugged. “She starts her pitcher of gin and tonic at 19:00 precisely. Woe betides the servant who does not produce the beverage on time or the employee who delays the end of her workday with stupid shit. Heads roll.”

“She works from home. I didn’t know that. What does your mother do?”

“She plays at being a fashion designer, but she is too much like her father,” Nicola sighed. “I tried to explain to her once, but she ripped into me. She doesn’t have a creative idea in her head, but she is very good at recycling everybody else’s work as it fades into obscurity. She doesn’t sell to her friends though; instead, she sells her stuff to the fake boutiques in the cute little shore towns and mountain retreats and ski resorts. Child slaves in Asia make her clothes for pennies and she sells it to the bourgeois masses for ungodly sums. She is Satan with a motherly streak.”

“Sounds absolutely charming,” Mikel said, wondering how he became a therapist to spoilt teenagers. He cursed his curiosity.

“You hit the nail on the head: she is charming, and I hate her fucking guts for it,” Nicola said. “She doesn’t even need the money or at the least, she could donate it back to ease the havoc she creates, but, no.”

“I guess we disembark at Highland Falls and send you home to mommy’s house where you can spend the next six weeks detoxing from your prescription meds,” Mikel said. “Do you still need to graduate?”

“Yeah, a minor detail,” she said, waving off the concern. “They want me to go to college too. Their hearts are set on sending me to one of the Ivies and those are the last places in the world I want to study. I want art school.”

“Why don’t you split half-sies with them and study art history and art,” Mikel said. “Go to the Sorbonne or some other far-flung school of distinction. The best despots of the world have all studied at the Sorbonne.”