The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [68]
Hickok’s professional life was strangely familiar to Van. It was full of small elite teams. Quick, quiet black-ops soldiers who did peculiar things on very short schedules. They never bragged. The American press never printed a word about them. They were very busy guys. They were very much like top-end computer wizards, except for one thing. They were not pale, pudgy hackers wearing glasses. They were cold-eyed athletes with crazy, kick-the-door-in fitness standards.
Behind the Humvee’s wheel, Hickok was an iron man. Hickok drove like a low-flying aircraft buzzing the Kuwaiti Highway of Death. Hickok’s reflexes were so much keener than those of normal drivers that he whipped through traffic with race-car twitches of his fingertips. Van learned to watch the windshield as if it were the screen of a video game. It was much easier on his nerves if he pretended that the two of them could just win some extra lives.
Whenever Hickok needed a break, he retired to the Humvee’s cavernous backseat. There he amused himself, munching take-out double cheeseburgers, sipping strawberry shakes, and leafing through his usual leisure reading, Christian apocalypse fiction. Hickok had no problem reading novels in a moving car, for Hickok was Air Force Special Ops. Hickok never got carsick. He had the stomach for five or six gees.
Hickok was a big devotee of a best-selling series called “Tribulation Force.” In tomorrow’s post-Armageddon world, the Rapture had carried off all the Believing Christians, leaving all the liberal scoffers, skeptics, and atheists to fight it out with the evil troops of the Antichrist. Hickok liked to read the most ruthless sections of the book aloud, chuckling to himself.
“Y’know,” Hickok sang out suddenly.
Van gripped the Humvee’s wheel. Van was dead tired, but it was a lot more relaxing to drive the Humvee than it was to watch Hickok doing it. “What is it, Mike?”
“We never really talked about that secretary of yours.”
“What’s Fawn done this time?”
“Did you ever clear it with her about those surgical gloves?”
“Mike, I’m just her boss, all right?”
“What is it with her allergies? The girl is allergic to everything. And what’s with that talcum powder? Is that all in her head?”
It was pitiful that Hickok asked him for advice about dating geek women. Van already had a geek woman. And unlike Hickok, who was awesomely promiscuous and never thought twice about it, Van badly wanted to keep the geek woman he had. Dottie was the only woman in his life who had ever understood him.
Now that Van was out of his bunker office and with his nose out of the briefing papers, he could guiltily realize how much hell he had been through and how much harm he had done to himself. Why was he shooting the breeze with some war buddy when he was a married man?
Van knew that Dottie’s love for him was large, and generous, and without conditions. But oh, how they were hampered by all those other boundaries in their lives. All those far-sighted, professional postponements, those acts of scholarly discipline, those duties and obligations. They were both so well meaning about it, and maybe that was the worst thing. It wasn’t like they really meant to neglect each other. They just arranged their lives so that they always could.
They talked each other into it somehow, making nice lists in their e-mail, researching the alternatives, checking out a spreadsheet maybe, wisely agreeing on what was surely best for them in the long run.
But the long run never came around for them. They used their smarts and knowledge to lop off all time for each other. There was something inhuman about being dutiful workaholics, something that wrecked marriages, shattered families, and made a man and woman shrivel up inside. It was going to kill them both someday.
Without his wife and his child, hinges had popped loose in Van’s soul. He could feel that something quiet but vital to his humanity was slowly going down the shredder.
Why was it that he could never tell Dottie these things? She never denied him things he needed—when he asked her