Malibu
There was a smell in the house; it had always been there. It belonged to time and the salt air and the entropic nature of expensive houses built too close to the sea. Perhaps it was also peculiar to places briefly but frequently uninhabited, houses opened and closed as their restless residents arrived and departed. She imagined the rooms empty, flecks of corrosion blossoming silently on chrome, pale molds taking hold in obscure corners. The architects, as if in recognition of eternal processes, had encouraged a degree of rust; massive steel railings along the deck had been eaten wrist-thin by years of spray. The house crouched, like its neighbors, on fragments of ruined foundations, and her walks along the beach sometimes involved attempts at archaeological fantasy. She tried to imagine a past for the place, other houses, other voices. She was accompanied, on these walks, by an armed remote, a tiny Dornier helicopter that rose from its unseen rooftop nest when she stepped down from the deck. It could hover almost silently, and was programmed to avoid her line of sight. There was something wistful about the way it followed her, as though it were an expensive but unappreciated Christmas gift. She knew that Hilton Swift was watching through the Dornier’s cameras. Little that occurred in the beach house escaped Sense/Net; her solitude, the week alone she’d demanded, was under constant surveillance. Her years in the profession had conveyed a singular immunity to observation.
At night she sometimes lit the floods mounted beneath the deck, illuminating the hieroglyphic antics of huge gray sandfleas. The deck itself she left in darkness, and the sunken living room behind her. She sat on a chair of plain white plastic, watching the Brownian dance of the fleas. In the glare of the floods, they cast minute, barely visible shadows, fleeting cusps against the sand. The sound of the sea wrapped her in its movement. Late at night, as she slept in the smaller of the two guest bedrooms, it worked its way into her dreams. But never into the stranger ‘s invading memories. The choice of bedrooms was instinctive. The master bedroom was mined with the triggers of old pain. The doctors at the clinic had used chemical pliers to pry the addiction away from receptor sites in her brain.
She cooked for herself in the white kitchen, thawing bread in the microwave, dumping packets of dehydrated Swiss soup into spotless steel pans, edging dully into the nameless but increasingly familiar space from which she’d been so subtly insulated by the designer ‘s dust. »It’s called life,« she said to the white counter. And what would Sense/Net’s in-house psychs make of that, she wondered, if some hidden microphone caught it and carried it to them? She stirred the soup with a slender stainless whisk, watching steam rise. It helped to do things, she thought, just to do things yourself; at the clinic, they’d insisted she make her own bed. Now she spooned out her own bowl of soup, frowning, remembering the clinic.
She’d checked herself out a week into the treatment. The medics protested. The detoxification had gone beautifully, they said, but the therapy hadn’t begun. They pointed out the rate of relapse among clients who failed to complete the program. They explained that her insurance was invalid if she terminated her treatment. Sense/Net would pay, she told them, unless they preferred she pay them herself. She produced her platinum MitsuBank chip. Her Lear arrived an hour later; she told it to take her to LAX, ordered a car to meet her there, and canceled all incoming calls. »I’m sorry, Angela,« the jet said, banking over Montego Bay seconds after they’d taken off, »but I have Hilton Swift on executive override.« »Angie,« Swift said, »you know I’m behind you all the way. You know that, Angie.« She turned to stare at the black oval of the speaker. It was centered in smooth gray plastic, and she imagined him crouching back there, his long runner’s legs folded painfully, grotesquely, behind the Lear’s bulkhead. »I know that, Hilton,« she said. »It’s nice of you to phone.« »You’re going to L.A., Angie.« »Yes. That’s what I told the plane.« »To Malibu.« »That’s right.« »Piper Hill is on her way to the airport.« »Thank you, Hilton, but I don’t want Piper there. I don’t want anybody. I want a car.« »There’s no one at the house, Angie.« »Good. That’s what I want, Hilton. No one at the house. The house, empty.« »Are you certain that’s a good idea?« »It’s the best idea I’ve had in a long time, Hilton.« There was a pause. »They said it went really well, Angie, the treatment. But they wanted you to stay.« »I need a week,« she said. »One week. Seven days. Alone.«