CV

32

Randall Geller and Yvonne Barlow, wearing dark glasses and sipping tall drinks, were lying side by side in lounge chairs near the pool, looking out across the bright ocean. Their bathing suits were almost dry. “What do you want to do next?” Barlow asked.

“Dunno. Go watch the geriatrics play shuffleboard?”

“Or sit here all day?”

“I can do with a lot of sitting here.” Geller hoisted his tall glass and drank.

“Not worried about boredom?”

“Hell, no. You know what I dreamed about last night?”

“No.”

“I dreamed I had the solution to the problem of sexuality.”

“That sounds boring.”

“It was very exciting. You know, why did bisexuality ever arise? You’ve got the Best Man theory, the Red Queen theory, the Tangled Banks theory, and none of them work. I had it all figured out, but I forgot it."

“Maybe it was just for fun,” Barlow said lazily.

“Well, why not? Pleasure is a survival factor—if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have it.”

“There’s a circular argument if I ever heard one. Do you think a spider gets a kick from building a web?”

“No opinion,” said Geller.

“Well, if you were going to design a machine to build webs, would you put pleasure into the circuit or not?”

“Oh, God.”

“No, you wouldn’t, because number one it wouldn’t be necessary, and number two you wouldn’t know how to do it, and number three if you did do it, it would be counterproductive. A spider that built webs for kicks might get bored and quit. Spiders just go ahead and build them.”

“Uh-huh. You remember the elevator operator in Brave New World?" Geller mimicked a voice trembling with ecstasy: “ ‘Up, up!’ ” Then misery and despair: “ ‘Down—down!’ ”

“So when was the last time you saw an elevator operator?”

“Um.”

They sat in peaceful silence; then Barlow said, “You ever know anybody who was rich?”

“No.”

“I did—a girl I went to school with. Her parents left her umpty million dollars.”

“What’s her address?”

“She wouldn’t look at you twice,” Barlow said. “Anyway, okay, she’s been married three times, she doesn’t have to do a thing she doesn’t want to do, and she’s really a failed human being. Can you imagine life as one long birthday party? She knows she blew it, and she doesn’t know what to do about that, and she’s very unhappy.”

“Tough,” said Geller. “That’s very tough.”

“Sure it is. Suppose you didn’t want to do anything except watch television and go to football games?”

“Paradise,” said Geller.

There was a buzz from Barlow’s beach bag. She reached over, extracted the phone. “Hello, Doctor.”

The phone quacked at her.

“Who else would be calling us? . . . We could, but we probably won’t. ... If you want to talk, why don’t you come up here? We’re at the Sports Deck pool. . . . Come up if you want to.” She put the phone away.

“Now why did you do that?” said Geller.

“Why not? Good for your boredom.”

McNulty showed up a few minutes later, interrupting a spirited argument. “Good old Doc,” said Geller. “Sit down, have a drink.”

“Not during working hours, thanks,” said McNulty, pulling over a web chair. “It’s nice up here, isn’t it? I can’t remember the last time— Well, anyway, I just wanted to tell you, I’ve been interviewing some of the other recovered patients, and there’s a pattern, all right. Marriages breaking up. People leaving their jobs. I keep thinking, maybe the parasite doesn’t know what it’s doing to us. If only we could talk to it.”

“Well,” said Barlow thoughtfully, “you know, we can. That’s not the problem. Look, we’re assuming the thing is intelligent and it understands what we say. So we can talk to it all we want to; the only thing is, it can’t talk to us, or won’t.”

“Which is it?” McNulty asked. “Randy?”

Geller shifted restlessly in his chair. “How the hell do I know?”

“While you were infected—”

“Infested,” Geller muttered.

“—did you ever feel that your actions were being controlled in any way?”

“Are you kidding?” Geller got up, his face set.

“Randy,” said Barlow.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Do it for me. This is interesting. Come on.”

Geller sat down sulkily. “It’s all bullshit.”

“What he means is, the answer is no.”

“I can tell him what I mean, Yvonne.”

“So tell him.”

“The answer is no,” said Geller. “Not just maybe or perhaps or a little bit. I know that for sure, because while I had the parasite, I did just what I would have done anyway. Look, use your brain. Here you are, you’re a thing from another planet or God knows where, and you’ve never seen people before, or walls, or toothpicks, or coffee cups. If you could control the person you’re in, what would you do? You’d walk it around and look at everything. If you could make a person talk, you’d ask questions. Then you’d have your wish.”

“He means you could have a conversation with it,” Bar-low said. “And he’s right. As far as I can tell, I didn’t do or say a thing that I wouldn’t have said on an ordinary day. So I think we’re justified in assuming, the way we have before, that if the thing doesn’t do something, it’s because it can’t.”

“Would you both agree,” McNulty asked delicately, “that your attitudes changed after the parasite left you?”

“Sure.”

“Yvonne, you too?”

“Of course. I suddenly saw I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do with my life, so I quit.”

“What do you want to do with your life?”

“I want to have some fun, and find out things, and do something that makes sense.”

“Okay. But you know it must have been the parasite that changed your mind.”

“True.”

“And you like that.”

“Sure, I like it."

“Don’t you have to ask youself—being objective, now—if you would have liked the idea of having your mind changed, if you’d known it was going to happen?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Geller broke in. “Come on, you know you can’t argue that one way or the other. Either we’re crazy now or we were dumb before. I say we were dumb before.”

“So you think the thing did you a favor?”

“A favor?” said Geller. “Maybe.” He gnawed a fingernail. “Interesting question. Might be just a by-product of the parasite-host relationship. Or maybe it’s a symbiote, not a parasite—it gives you something for what it gets, like the bacteria in your gut.”

Barlow was nodding. “I think that’s right.”

“So you’d definitely say it doesn't intend us harm, basically?”

“Right.”

“Even though it makes everything fall apart?”

“What do you mean by everything?”

“Well, the marine lab, for instance. You both walked off your jobs. What would happen if everybody walked off their jobs?”

“I don’t give a damn about their stupid jobs. Look, McNulty, I know you think I’m a brainwashed idiot, but that’s your problem. Take a good look at the things people do for a living and ask yourself how many of them are worth doing. How many people go through their whole goddamn lives screwing part A onto part B?”

“So you think the best thing to do would be to spread this around? Let the parasite get onto the mainland?”

“No.”

McNulty glanced at Barlow, then leaned back and folded his hands. “Now, isn’t there a little bit of contradiction there?”

“Think, McNulty. The system works because most people are dumb. That doesn’t mean I have to be dumb.”

“I see. And you don’t feel any obligation to help make the system work? Even though you’re in trouble if it doesn't?”

“No. The system will probably collapse. We’ll get a new system. It might be a better one.”

Next morning Emily Woodruff was wheeled into the hospital annex; she had collapsed in the Quarter Deck Breakfast Shop. McNulty looked at her and wondered if that was coincidence. Had the parasite deliberately sought her out, so they couldn’t play that trick again?