Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [106]
Charlie saw Anna rest against the counter as well, and got her a beer from the fridge. “Here snooks have a drink.”
“Thanks dove.”
Sucandra asked about the kitchen’s wallpaper, which was an uncomfortably brilliant yellow, overlaid with large white birds caught in various moments of flight. When you actually looked at it it was rather bizarre. “I like it,” Charlie said. “It wakes me up. A bit itchy, but basically fine.”
Frank said he was going to go home. Anna walked him around the ground floor to the front door.
“You’ll be able to catch one of the last trains,” she said.
“Yeah I’ll be okay.”
“Thanks for coming, that was fun.”
“Yes it was.”
Again Anna saw that whole smile brighten his face.
“So what’s she like?”
“Well—I don’t know!”
They both laughed.
Anna said, “I guess you’ll find out when you find her.”
“Yeah,” Frank said, and touched her arm briefly, as if to thank her for the thought. Then as he was walking down the sidewalk he looked over his shoulder and called, “I hope she’s like you!”
FRANK LEFT Anna and Charlie’s and walked through a warm drizzle back toward the Metro, thinking hard. When he came to the fateful elevator’s box he stood before it, trying to order his thoughts. It was impossible—especially there. He moved on reluctantly, as if leaving the place would put the experience irrevocably in the past. But it already was. Onward, past the hotel, to the stairs, down to the Metro entry level. He stepped onto the long escalator going down and descended into the earth, thinking.
He recalled Anna and Charlie, in their house with all those people. The way they stood by each other, leaned into each other. The way Anna put a hand on Charlie when she was near him—on this night, avoiding his poisoned patches. The way they shuffled their kids back and forth between them, without actually seeming to notice each other. Their endlessly varying nicknames for each other, a habit Frank had noticed before, even though he would rather have not: not just the usual endearments like hon, honey, dear, sweetheart, or babe, but also more exotic ones that were saccharine or suggestive beyond belief—snooks, snookybear, honeypie, lover, lovey, lovedove, sweetie-pie, angel man, goddessgirl, kitten, it was unbelievable the inwardness of the monogamous bond, the unconscious twin-world narcissism of it—disgusting! And yet Frank craved that very thing, that easy, deep intimacy that one could take for granted, could lose oneself in. ISO-LTR. Primate seeks partner for life. An urge seen in every human culture, and across many species too. It was not crazy of him to want it.
Therefore he was now in a quandary. He wanted to find the woman from the elevator. And Anna had given him hope that it could be done. It might take some time, but as Anna had pointed out, everyone was in the data banks somewhere. In the Department of Homeland Security records, if nowhere else; but of course elsewhere too. Beg or break your way into Metro maintenance records, how hard could that be? There were people breaking into the genome!
But he wasn’t going to be able to do it from San Diego. Or rather, maybe he could make the hunt from there—you could Google someone from anywhere—but if he then succeeded in finding her, it wouldn’t do him any good. It was a big continent. If he found her, if he wanted that to matter, he would need to be in the D.C. area.
And what would he do if he found her?
He couldn’t think about that now. About anything that might happen past the moment of locating her. That would be enough. After that, who knew what she might be like. After all she had jumped him (he shivered at the memory, still there in his flesh), jumped a total stranger in a stuck elevator after twenty minutes of conversation. There was no doubt in his mind that she had initiated the encounter; it simply wouldn’t have occurred to him. Maybe that made him an innocent or a dimwit, but there it