Читать книгу Fall or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson, Neal Stephenson - Страница 12

Corvallis felt his phone buzzing in his shirt pocket and peeked at the screen. It was a local number that he did not recognize. It ended in two zeroes, suggesting the call was originating from a main switchboard. He excused himself, arose from the table, and walked into the foyer of the suite before answering it.

A minute later he was back in the dining room. In his absence, chairs had been pushed back, dishes collected, laptops slipped back into bags. Zula caught his eye. “El Shepherd still hassling you?”

“It was the place,” Corvallis said. Fully aware of how inarticulate he was being, he blinked, shook his head, and circled around for another try. “The medical office where Dodge was yesterday. Where he was, uh, ‘stricken’ I guess is the word.”

“The people who killed him?” Alice asked. “What did they want?”

“I’m on record as his emergency contact—I was there when it happened,” Corvallis said. “They were just calling to let me know that they have his bag. With his stuff. And his clothes and his wallet and so on. All of that was left behind when the firemen came and grabbed him. So, I guess I’ll walk over there and pick all of that stuff up.” The Forthrasts were all just staring at him. “If, you know, that makes things easier.”

“Please,” Alice said.

“I’ll walk you down,” Stan announced, placing a companionable hand on Corvallis’s shoulder.

In the elevator, Corvallis asked him, “Did I miss anything?”

“Zula is going to talk to a couple of vent farms,” Stan said.

“What’s a vent farm?”

“Horrible term. When you have a patient like Richard, who is fundamentally stable but who can’t be taken off the ventilator, there’s no need to keep him in the ICU. It is overkill. It’s expensive and it takes up bed space that the hospital could use for people who really need intensive care. There are businesses that exist to serve this market. Think of it like a nursing home, except all of the people who live there are …”

“Are like Richard?”

“Yeah. There’s a politically correct term for it, but doctors call it a vent farm.”

“So we’re thinking of moving Dodge to a vent farm?”

“Alice is vehemently opposed,” Marcus said. He managed to say it in a manner that, while utterly deadpan, still conveyed some sense of the vivid impressions he had taken in, during the conversation just concluded, of Alice Forthrast.

“She wants him to stay in the ICU?”

“The alternative would be to move him back to his apartment and put him back in his real bed,” Stan said. “The ventilator would have to go with him, of course. Round-the-clock nursing care, the whole bit.”

“Esme Hurlbut is pushing for it hard,” Marcus added.

“She wants him off the property,” Stan said.

The elevator doors opened and they walked out into the hotel lobby. “She’s a lawyer,” Corvallis pointed out.

“She can see where it’s going—the protocol. The ice bath, the freezing of the remains. No way does she want that happening on hospital property.”

“I see.”

They stepped out into the hotel’s front drive and paused under the awning, which was giving off faint white noise as small drops of rain filtered down onto it from the silver sky. “You’re going to get Dodge’s effects now?”

“Effects? Yeah.” Corvallis wondered at what point the clothes, wallet, and so forth became effects.

“I would be shocked if they tried to pull a fast one,” Stan said, “but say nothing, okay? Other than hello and goodbye.”

“A fast one?”

“They are going to be worried about a malpractice suit. If they start pumping you for information—anything other than just handing over the bag—just walk away. Then call me.”

Corvallis shook hands with Stan and Marcus and then stepped out into the rain and began navigating the streets of First Hill on foot, headed for the medical practice where Dodge had been stricken. It was a short walk but a much-needed head clearer.

Or at least it was until his phone rang again. He was just outside the building, looking down a street lined with spectacular red maple trees. The very spot where Dodge had yesterday been buttonholed by the young fan with the broken arm, and unwittingly filmed his last video.

It was El Shepherd again. Corvallis decided to take the call.

“Corvallis Kawasaki. Is it true that you go by C-plus? Or is that just close friends? I don’t want to be unduly familiar at a time like this. I’m sorry for what you’re going through.”

“At an intermediate level of formality, I am frequently addressed simply as C. I would not take that amiss. And what shall I call you, Mr. Shepherd?”

Elmo Shepherd had been named in honor of a grandfather or great-uncle or something who had been born in a time and place where Elmos, Elwoods, Delberts, and Dewaynes had been thick on the ground, and such names had seemed normal and even dignified. Upon shedding Mormonism and moving to the Bay Area to seek his fortune, he had learned that the name was likely to be seen as somewhat comedic and so had dropped its back syllable. Under the moniker of El he had risen to a level of wealth and influence such that, without provoking snorts of laughter, he could begin using the full name again on formal occasions such as White House dinners and ribbon-cuttings of state-of-the-art research facilities. Corvallis was aware that it was something of a shibboleth. Usage of “El,” in the right tone of voice, could suggest personal acquaintance.

“El is fine, thank you,” said the voice on the other end of the connection. Then there was nothing, for a moment, save for the sound of a propeller-driven aircraft taking off. “Sorry,” he said when the sound had dwindled, “I’m at Boeing Field. Just let me get inside the building here.”

“You flew up?”

“Yes, you might have seen that I tried to call you a couple of hours ago. From the tarmac in San Rafael.” El then gave a muffled thank-you to someone who, to judge from sound effects, had held a door open for him. Corvallis knew exactly where he was: the private jet terminal on the eastern edge of Boeing Field.

“Yes, sorry, I was in a meeting. With the family.”

“Of course.”

“I had heard you didn’t like to fly,” Corvallis said.

“That’s actually true, unlike a lot of stuff that’s written about me,” El said, “but there is a need to take calculated risks.”

As often happened when he was talking on the phone, Corvallis’s gaze was wandering about freely, focusing from time to time on things that lit up his visual cortex: a pretty student from the adjacent university, a purple Tesla driving by, a chocolate Lab taking a crap in the bushes as its owner stood vigil with a blue New York Times bag everted over his free hand. A perfect red maple leaf lay spread-eagled on the sidewalk at his feet, plastered down by the rain. Around it, the concrete was stained with the colors that kids’ toys came in: sickly artificial purples and greens and pinks. Someone had come here with a box of sidewalk chalk and drawn a piece of art. Corvallis took a step away from it and saw a rain-blurred portrait of a man with white hair and beard. A God of the Old Testament in grape-colored robe with a rainbow aura surrounding his head. Inscribed at the base of the artwork was EGDOD. The name of Dodge’s most powerful character in T’Rain. Some fan must have seen the video on Reddit, pulled out its GPS coordinates, and come to the site to pay homage by chalking up an ikon. Maybe they believed that Dodge’s hospital room overlooked this place, that Dodge was in some sort of condition to look out the window and see it.

“You still there?” El asked. “I ducked into a conference room.” The private jet terminal was the sort of place that had nice conference rooms just sitting there available for people like El to duck into.

“How do you see the day taking shape?” Corvallis asked. Because El must have had some reason to take what he viewed as a calculated risk. Basically—according to what was written about him—El Shepherd intended to live forever, and so he didn’t like to place himself in situations where his brain could be destroyed. He had a mobile office, built into a bus, which he preferred over airplane travel. Buses could crash, of course, but unless you T-boned a gasoline tanker at a hundred miles an hour, the destruction probably wouldn’t rise to the level that would completely destroy the brain. Whereas the crash of a jet airplane could leave nothing behind for rescuers to scrape up and put into the freezer.

“I have a few errands I could run, as long as I’m up here,” El returned, “but I’m sure you can guess the primary reason for my visit.”

“Yes.”

“The last thing I want to do is impose on the family at a time like this …”

“It’s fine,” Corvallis said, wondering if El could hear the smile in his voice. He got it. The bereaved family was off-limits but the bereaved friend was fair game. “I am running a brief errand. It will take me five minutes. Then I’ll grab my car and head for Georgetown.” That was the neighborhood just north of Boeing Field. “If you want to pick out a suitable restaurant or whatever, just text me the coordinates and I will be there in half an hour.”

“Fine. Over and out,” El said.

Corvallis snapped a picture of the sidewalk art, then went into the building, steeling himself for yet another in the seemingly endless series of awkward conversations that had accounted for the last day of his life. It was going to be awkward because the people at the medical office were going to try to be nice to him, to voice sympathy. And yet they couldn’t say anything that would place them at a disadvantage when it was repeated in a courtroom during a malpractice suit and so it was all going to be so terribly awkward. By comparison he was actually looking forward to the meeting in half an hour with El Shepherd, who could be relied upon to charge blindly across the emotional minefield and get down as soon as possible to geeking out on connectomics.

They had a little conference room near the front desk of the medical practice, the most generic conference room you could imagine. The office manager escorted Corvallis to it. Sitting there alone in the middle of the table were Dodge’s shoulder bag and a canvas tote bag emblazoned—this was too inevitable—with the logo of the local National Public Radio station. Someone had neatly folded Dodge’s clothing, which Dodge had no doubt simply left in a heap on the floor of the changing room, and placed it into the tote bag. This one detail made it more clear than anything else that Dodge was dead. Corvallis pulled one of the chairs back, sat down, folded his arms on the table, bent forward, and rested his forehead on them. He cried fully and freely for a couple of minutes. The office manager hovered nervously at first, then excused herself, then came back a minute later with a box of tissues, then excused herself again. Corvallis inferred all of this from sounds; he could see nothing through his tears but the fake wood grain of the conference room table. When he sat back up again, he could see her standing outside wringing her hands. He blotted his eyes with tissues and then used them to wipe tears that had spilled onto the tabletop. He threw the damp tissues into a convenient receptacle, then slung Dodge’s messenger bag over his shoulder and tucked the canvas tote under his arm. The office manager opened the door for him. He nodded to her and walked out of the medical practice without looking back.

On the sidewalk outside, someone had, during the last few minutes, placed a bouquet of grocery store flowers on the picture of Egdod. The bouquet had been additionally wrapped up in a length of black wire. On a closer look, it was a controller from a video game console neatly bundled around the stems of the flowers.