Distraction - Bruce Sterling [27]
Oscar’s phone suddenly emitted a personal ring. “Oh, Oscar,” Rebecca teased him. “There’s that sparky phone again.”
“I’ve been expecting this call,” said Oscar. “Excuse me.” He stepped around the back of the bus as the others continued to pack.
It was his girlfriend, Clare, back in Boston. “How are you, Oscar?”
“Fine. It’s going pretty well down here, all things considered. Very interesting. How’s life at the homestead? I miss you.”
“Your house is fine,” Clare said. Too quickly.
A hairline fracture shot through him. Don’t get anxious, he thought. Don’t think too fast. This isn’t one of the other ones, this is Clare. This is Clare, this is doable.
Oscar wanted direly to confront the source of trouble. That would be very stupid. Work around it. Let her open up first. Be funny, be charming. Make some light conversation. Find a neutral topic. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of one.
“We’ve been having a picnic,” he blurted.
“That sounds lovely. I wish I were there.”
“I wish you were, too,” he said. Inspiration struck him. “How about it? Can you fly down? We have some plans here, you’d be interested.”
“I can’t go to Texas now.”
“You’ve heard about the Louisiana air base situation, right? The Senator’s hunger strike. I’ve got very good sources here. It’s a solid story, you could fly down, you could cover the local angle.”
“I think your friend Sosik’s got that story sewn up already,” Clare said. “I’m not doing Boston politics. Not anymore.”
“What?” He was stunned. “Why not?”
“The net’s reassigned me. They want me to go to Holland.”
“Holland? What did you tell them?”
“Oscar, I’m a political journalist. How could I not do The Hague? It’s the Cold War, it’s a dream gig. This is a big break for me, my biggest career break ever.”
“Well, how long is your assignment overseas?”
“Well, that depends on how well I do at the job.”
Oscar’s brain began to hum. “I can appreciate that. Of course you want to do well. But still … the diplomatic situation … the Dutch are so provocative. They’re very radical.”
“Of course they’re radical, Oscar. Their country is drowning. We’d be extremists too, if most of America was below sea level. The Dutch have got so much to lose, they’ve really got their backs against the dikes. That’s why they’re so interesting now.”
“You don’t even speak Dutch.”
“They all speak English there, you know.”
“The Dutch are militant. They’re dangerous. They make crazy demands from Americans, they really resent us.”
“I’m a reporter, Oscar. I’m not supposed to scare easily.”
“So you’re really going to do it,” Oscar concluded leadenly. “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?”
“I don’t want to put it that way.…”
Oscar gazed emptily at the back of the bus. The blank shell of the bus suddenly struck him as an alien and horrible thing. It had stolen him from his home and the woman in his bedroom. The campaign bus had kidnapped him. He turned his back on the bus and began walking with his phone, randomly, toward the tangled Texan woods. “No,” he said. “I know. It’s the work. It’s our careers. I did it first. I took on a big job, and I left you. Didn’t I? I left you alone, and I’m still gone. I’m far away, and I don’t know when I’ll come back.”
“Well,” she said, “you said it, not me. But that’s very true.”
“So I really have no business finding fault with you. If I did, I’d be a hypocrite, wouldn’t I? We both knew this might happen. It was never a commitment.”
“That’s right.”
“It was a relationship.”
“I liked the relationship.”
“It was good, wasn’t it? It was very good, for what it was.”
Clare sighed. “No, Oscar, I can’t let you say that. Don’t say that, it wouldn’t be fair. It was better than good. It was great, it was totally ideal. I mean, you were such a great source for me. You never tried to spin my stories, and you hardly ever lied. You let me live in your house. You introduced me to all your rich and influential