H2O: The Novel Part 7

"What?"

"I told you that you weren't ready to hear this. But you will be. In a few weeks, if my guess is right. You'll call me, at your wits' end, and tell me in tears that you're open to any option. Happens that way each time." He winked with a strange half smilehalf frown. His brown eyes locked with mine, while waiting for me to take the next step.

My doctor is rude, and his hospital boss has flipped. There's no hope for me here.

"You think I'm crazy." He said it with a matter-of-fact tone, like he could read my mind. "I hear it all the time, Kate. You certainly won't be the first." He turned into the corridor; somewhere under that rumpled doctor coat and comfortable exterior lurked Santa Claus.

"Answer the call, Kate. It's collect, but someone you need to know is trying to reach you. Only you can accept the charges, and you'll be glad you did."

"We missed you, Kate," Hiram said as he opened the door to ISIP four days later. At six on a Friday morning, I'd be his first and only customer. That's the way I wanted it.

"Bed rest," I said, not anxious to get into a prolonged conversation. Sunday's face-smashing episode-followed by Monday's hospital stay and the bed rest Tuesday through Thursday-had separated me too long from Hiram's coffee. Folgers in a can and cups of hospital Starbucks didn't do it for me. I wanted something exotic this morning, something distinctly African. I needed my import jolt.

"Been sick?" he asked as he pointed to the familiar "funt" table. It was too early for Candice, so I was on my own. Fine by me.

"Maybe. We're not sure. Wrecked the bike-I guess you heard about that."

"Yeah. Bet it hurts. To lose the bike, I mean."

"It does. I feel like I lost my right arm. It was a part of me, you know?"

"I've walked that path. I'm that way about my bike, too," Hiram said with a furry smile. "My bicycle, that is. I love it."

I imagined my brown hairy friend, whiskers whipping in the breeze as he pedaled away. He stood there, waiting for me to finish, like he too could read minds.

"Then, last Sunday, I fainted again. Like I did here. I've been thinking, Hiram-"

"That's dangerous."

"Maybe. So here's the deal. I only faint when I've had your coffee in the past twenty-four hours. Is there something in your roast that you're not telling us about?"

He stopped midstride and turned, a hand to his chin in thought. "Sorry to hear that, Kate. But no. Ever since the jail time, I've stopped doping the beans." His brief smile faded. "Seriously, we've been worried about you. So, sit tight. I'll be right back." He turned toward the kitchen and jogged away. I could hear him yelling at me from the kitchen just moments later. "Your usual will be ready in five minutes!"

"Don't want 'usual,'" I yelled back. "Need something exotic. Rwanda maybe."

"Got it. Back in ten."

ISIP served up the rocket ride of wireless providers, and at this time of morning, with no other customers, I had the rocket to myself. I read once that the new world-the flat world of globalized Internet commerce, free video downloads, free book downloads, free music downloads, and free Wi-Fi-was the model of things to come. It amazed me what I could find in such a short amount of time, sitting at the "funt" and cruising around the world on a borrowed laptop. This last day of designated bed rest would be spent on my time. No office. Just ISIP in the morning, five hours or more of research into these stupid fainting spells. And all afternoon at the spa.

Internet. Coffee. Ma.s.sage. In that order, and lots of each today.

"You've been at this since six this morning. It's time for lunch. Hungry yet?" Hiram asked. He waved at his wife in the kitchen, sharing one of their private codes for orders. Sometimes I wondered if she could read his mind.

I rested my chin on my hands, elbows propped on the table. "May as well," I responded without much emotion. "Nothing to show for all this." I waved at the laptop screen.

Hallucinations?

I needed a fever, or drugs, or some severe problem like chronic fatigue to hallucinate. I'd prefer one of those problems. Everything else screamed "cuckoo."

Dementia? Delirium?

I had to be old or going nuts for those, and I wanted to believe I was neither.

I dreaded the last option. Not crazy or sick, but somehow I was becoming my mother, the "seer." An oracle like I lived with for seventeen years at home, every day punctuated with my Italian-American mom's latest spiritual insight, every breakfast tedium another blow-by-blow replay of her latest dream. One of my girlfriends had a mom who swore she saw blood running from the wounds of Jesus on the crucifix in the church sacristy. Her mom had nothing on mine. Every day revealed some new spiritual handiwork in my mother's life through the magic of her vivid imagination. I'd rather be sick, or insane, than be her.

"Three cheese, grilled, on the way." Hiram tarried at the table. "Not finding something you need?" he asked. I knew his tone, his "information technology consultant" role. Poor Hiram couldn't keep his hands off computers. "Can I help?" he asked as he peered over my shoulder.

I shook my head but wished it were possible. Deep inside I desperately wanted-needed-his help. But for now, I liked just having him here, asking me questions. He cared what I had to say, which was more than could be said for the doctor . . . or for Xavier.

"The doctor says I'm not sick. But I've fainted four or five times, nearly killed myself on the Ice Rocket, and I have these incredible dreams. I mean really vivid walking-in-a-rainbow-and-touching-it sort of dreams."

I waved at the laptop, and then slammed it shut. "I'm crazy-the only conclusion I can reach with the available data-or I'm sick and hallucinating, yet the doctor says I'm just fine." I drained the last of my fourth cup of the Rwanda special, with no idea what he called it.

"Are you just Googling stuff?" he asked, fingers lingering on my computer, anxious to learn more.

"Yes. Got a better idea?"

"Mmm-hmm," he said with a strange smile. The beard turned up on the ends and seemed to make a halo around his face with his long matted hair. "I still have a few tricks up my sleeve."

Hiram was like this-a human Rubik's Cube taunting you to solve him. He waited, eyes locked with mine. He wanted to be asked.

"Okay, Hiram. I'm onto your game," I said with a shrug. "Help me. Please."

His teeth flashed as he smiled, blinding white orthodontic perfection. "Great! We'll do a latent semantic index search. That'll help us narrow some things down."

"Excuse me?"

"LSI. It's the latest thing to read any kind of text input and find the common denominators, the core themes. Folks discover amazing things with it. We'll put in all your symptoms and let the system mine through the net for a few days looking for common threads. That'll show us every connection that's out there." He watched me closely. "Get me a file with all your problems, all your symptoms-"

I shook my head, pushing back from the "funt." "No can do, Hiram. It's too personal."

"Do you want to get well?" he asked with a wry twist of the beard and his mouth.

I nodded. He had me.

"Then write it down, Kate. At least do it for your sake. It'll be cathartic." He started to walk away, then faced me again and finished his thought. "If you change your mind, bring the doc.u.ment to me. I can tell you all the common themes of your disease, even connect it to standard diagnoses. Who knows? Maybe you're not sick. Maybe it's a message or something. Perhaps you're fainting and seeing things so that someone can get your attention." He shrugged and turned away, talking over his shoulder as he reached the kitchen. "Stranger things have happened!"

That did it. More talk about "someone" trying to reach me through a spiritual telephone. I tossed the laptop in my shoulder bag. "Whatever," I huffed.

The moment that horrible word slipped my lips, I froze in place, one leg off the tall chair and my bottom halfway out of the seat.

This can't be! I'm talking like my father, and I'm crazy like my mother. The Irish couch potato and his Catholic prophetess.

I slid off the chair and dashed out of the shop without even saying good-bye. Hiram probably never noticed I'd left until he returned with the lunch. Five blocks south, headed to downtown on foot, I realized I'd stuck him with the coffee bill and the grilled cheese.

It didn't matter. I had to get away. Somehow, my parents had found me, yet they weren't even here-the worst of outcomes. I was fast becoming my visionary mother, and had expressed my most hated word-"whatever"-the nauseating watchword of my emotionally absent and slothful father.

I ran.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

THREE DAY SLATER.

TAXICABS ARE portable toilets on wheels, filthy mobile germ pits that consume and disgorge humans like a disease vector. That's Xavier's view of it: Seattle's gasoline-powered mosquitoes and rats, spreading infection with raunchy seat covers, virus-laden handles, and tobacco-tainted air.

Frankly, I enjoy their convenience-like a portable toilet; when you need one, you're glad you've got it.

A taxicab was my only form of conveyance. After the Ice Rocket was totaled, slamming into a rock wall at a mile a minute, it would be a long time before I went on two wheels again. If ever. I stopped the cab a block before Consolidated Aerodyne, just in case Xavier might be watching. He'd delouse me and demand that I bathe in bleach if he ever found me in the clutches of a cabby.

"Welcome back, Kate," someone said from across the lobby as I walked into the main reception area early on Monday. The place seemed so shiny, so new. I realized I'd not entered by the front door in so long that I barely recognized my own company. Was my memory fading, too? I couldn't identify the receptionist as she approached me.

"What are you doing back so soon?" she said, gushing with the energy of a hyperactive Wal-Mart greeter. No wonder they gave her this job.

"Back to work. Why else?" I looked around. I didn't recall any of it, but the logo over the desk did say Consolidated Aerodyne. I shrugged, forced a smile, and dashed into an elevator that threatened to close. I raised my hand in a little wave. "Bye!"

The reaction to my arrival repeated itself on the fifth floor, a location I did know. What had Xavier told them? I might have been at home, but I didn't die. Andrea met me halfway down the hall, skipping across the carpet like her best friend forever had just returned from the hinterlands.

No hugs, please. She read my mind and spared me that pain.

"Thought you were out again today," she said, casting a glance over her shoulder. Justus trolled a few paces behind her. Nothing had changed.

"This is my world, Andrea. It's where I belong." I kept walking, and she matched my stride. "The doctor said one week bed rest. One week, not two."

Andrea lowered her voice. "Xavier's pretty wound up, girlfriend. Better watch out," she warned, nodding in the direction of the corner office. "He asked about you this morning, and we told him you were still at home." She pulled me back, leaned near me, and whispered. "Just watch your step."

Andrea served as the aural version of flypaper. If news buzzed, she caught wind of it and it stuck. I could depend on her intuition when bad vibes ran strong in the front office. On occasions like today, when trouble threatened, she forged ahead into the wilderness of Xavier, my ever-dependable scout. I'd keep my eyes open.

Again, something inside, like a little alarm clock going off told me I had reason to be concerned. That mental alarm warbled away that a product or presentation might be due. My "inner voice"-what Mother used to call it-always got it right. I couldn't shake the feeling of something amiss as I set up my laptop and went about the business of the day.

Xavier ruined it all, just as the memory of the forgotten task hit me. I wished, at that moment, I was lying in the bed back in the hospital.

"Where have you been?" the familiar voice asked in the gruff tone that I knew meant business. You'd think he'd forgotten every curve in my body at times like this, so easily did he shut off intimacy and transform into my boss.

"I spent the last week at home, Xavier. Doctor's orders. But you knew that." I tried not to look up, afraid my eyes might give me away. I could feel the hot wetness of an uncontrolled tear. He'd not set foot in my condo since he drove me to the failed sushi dinner a week ago Sunday . . . and that hurt.

"'Bout time you're back. Who's got the nine o'clock pitch with Boeing?" he asked.

I shrugged, my head down, pretending to fiddle with some problem while docking my computer. "I'm ready." I lied. "You'll love it."

Xavier's scalpels sliced across his watch's face, splitting seconds. "I'd better. The Boeing deal is too big to lose over some stupid head problem."

I stood up to confront that comment, but he left my office as he said it. Andrea calls that kind of appearance a "drive-by shooting." Drop in, discharge the verbal weapon, and run. My head pounded and I felt red flushing my cheeks. I took a deep breath to slow my heart, ready to scream, but the boss escaped. I slammed the door, glancing at my watch. I had fifty minutes.

A couple of heartbeats later a gentle knock at the door announced Andrea, who poked her head in and waved a sheet of paper. "Go away," it read, our solution to drive-by shootings and office gossips. She winked, pasted the sheet on my door, and closed it. I had forty-nine minutes left.

If Boeing was an animal, it might be a dinosaur. The huge ones with the long necks and monstrous bodies that move with glacial slowness. Their managers thrive on long presentations, mountains of words, and armies of bloated process teams. I had forty-eight minutes to build something that would impress them. That would be hard to do. I was too direct.

Acid rose in my throat, and my stomach roiled as I booted the computer. A gut-busting nausea and burning throat wrapped up in one, my cla.s.sic reaction to stress. Anyone else would call it panic. I plowed into my keyboard with a vengeance, sweat beading on my face as I clicked "dismiss" on my daily task and meeting reminders. No time for e-mail, for staff meetings, or for the Consolidated Aerodyne "word of the day." At the precipice of crunch time, I had to show Xavier my worth.

I would stand alone. Independent. And I'd win.

"I'm going out, Andrea," I said four hours later. "A long lunch."

"Thigh and calf ma.s.sage, or just a shoulder quickie?" she asked with a laugh. "You earned a full body job today, by the way."

I smiled. She was right. Xavier had stood speechless, Boeing had departed here thrilled, and before he could ask how I'd wowed them, I slipped out for a well-deserved break. Another one of my guilty pleasures, reserved for special occasions. Like today. Even if it was just a Monday.

"Shoulders," I replied, tossing a copy of my presentation on her desk when I walked out. "I'd probably sleep all afternoon if they gave me the full body works." Today, with the aeros.p.a.ce dinosaur vanquished, I intended to play. Play a lot.

There's something about panic that brings out the best in me. Some people work best when they have a long time to prepare, with days and weeks to think through a problem, to form and critique a solution. I can honestly say that working under pressure is one skill and personality quirk that did not come from my parents. Dr. Cook had brought it out in me. He used to say, "I've done so much for so long with so little, I can do everything forever with nothing." It became his preamble to the impossible request of the day, the pa.s.sionate demand that we needed a new program or web interface or graphics design completed for a customer that very minute. In the web-centric "dot-com" world of Sunnyvale in which we lived at the time, we probably did need it that fast. And I always delivered.

Give me too much time and I flounder. I try thirty different paths and have a hard time deciding which to follow. When there's no deadline-and I mean DEADline: a challenge that will kill someone or cost me my job-then it's almost impossible for me to focus. But put my neck in a noose, threaten my job, or put millions of dollars on the line and measure success in seconds . . . then, I can work magic. I'm the best there is under pressure. Today, with forty-eight minutes to go and tens of millions of revenue on the line, I'd found instant clarity. Boeing discovered, in that same clarity, a vision for their new v-mail-enhanced seat-back designs. Three hours of discussion later, we were on the road to a sole-source forty-million-dollar contract. My focused panic won us about a million dollars a minute. At this point, everything else at the office could wait, paling in comparison to this win.

Now I could recharge.

"Kate?"

Xavier's gruff tone-his raw "how dare you" voice-set off my mental alarm. My muscles tensed and I looked up from the coffee shop table that afternoon.

Xavier's little worm was up to its old tricks, his temples leaping in a fit of vibrating arteries. His face and scalp shone red and wet-mad with sweat. Not the kind of perspiration you get in a workout, cascading off in rivulets while on the exercise bike or the spa treadmill. This was furious sweat, explosive beads that squirted out of their pores and hung in place like giant salty pimples. Gramps used to say that people at the point of a meltdown could squeeze body juices out of their pores from the stress. Xavier was near "critical ma.s.s," and I backed up, just in case he took a nuclear swing at me. He'd tried that once before.

"What are you doing here?" he asked with a clenched, twitching jaw, the little globules of perspiration swelling at each pore of his bald pate, none of them yet on the run.

I wanted to laugh. I was drinking coffee at ISIP late on a Monday afternoon. People go to coffeehouses to drink coffee, and this was Seattle, after all. Coffee capital of America. The I'm-thrilled-with-the-Boeing-deal Xavier had been hideously transformed. Laughing at his ridiculous question would only inflame him more.

"I'm celebrating, I guess," I said, hoisting a gla.s.s of a special roast from the mountains of New Zealand. A new taste for me.

"Celebrating what?" he asked. "Your stupidity?"

How to respond?

I looked down at my watch on impulse. Had I missed something? Was I dreaming again, slipping into one of those dreaded hallucinations that the web doctor said came from excessive stress or drug overdose? I grabbed the coffee cup, staring at the dregs of my New Zealand caffeine experience. Maybe it was the coffee, not hallucinations. Every cup seemed to be followed by some disaster.

"I'm sorry, Xavier. I-"

"Shut up. Don't apologize. The damage is done, and there's nothing you or I can do to repair it at this point." He spun about and stomped toward the door without an explanation.

Clueless, I jumped up, leaving laptop and coffee at the table, and ran him down at the door. I grabbed at his black overcoat, but he shrugged me off, his powerful frame quivering beneath thick wool material. Xavier shed people like a grizzly shaking water off when he stood on the verge of "killing mad," ready to tear a person's head off. He could do it. Fortunately, he kept walking. I followed him into the cold afternoon air.

"Answer me," I yelled. "What have I done?" I struggled to come to grips with whether this moment was another of my crazy-woman mental disasters. As the last words slipped my lips, he turned on me and pinned my arms against my side. His hands were vise grips on my upper arms, and I tensed, ready for the backslap, the hard bony hand across my face I'd suffered before. Anger surged, shoving my doubt aside. If he dared hit me tonight, in public, I'd jam a knee into his groin. He'd remember that for a long time.

"The j.a.panese?" he screamed. "Their special invitation to Consolidated Aerodyne? Does that ring a bell with you?" His eyes bulged and flecks of spittle struck me in the face. White froth lined his quivering lips.