7.

Much later, Greta Carman admitted she should never have taken Kate on. It was unprofessional, a rare breach of high standards.

There have been some who blame Greta for everything, but those are the blame junkies. No sensible person would consider her guilty of anything. Her own professional association chose not to discipline her, and she practices in Arlington to this day. What she will say is that their friendship, going back to childhood as it did, gave her a special sense of mission toward Kate, while admittedly blunting her objectivity. What she won’t say publicly is that she had been logging the course of Kate’s celebrity, semi-obsessed with her in the ways a woman who lives alone might fixate on a familiar TV star or an intriguing historical figure.

Not that she was jealous of Kate, that wasn’t exactly it, though there was a resemblance. If you defanged jealousy by taking away the anger you’d be getting close. It was more a fascination with Kate’s personal force, the factor of will that powered her in every situation that required winning, gaining advantage, being seen and known by thousands, millions. She herself was pushed to be successful, but she felt her drive was small compared with Kate’s, and she wanted to know why. It frustrated her no end that she might be pursuing a mystery she’d never crack.

Now, here I have to interject something personal that is unknown to anyone, even to Kate, who knows everything there is to know about me. It is this: Greta was the first woman I had sex with. Not that she was a full woman yet–she had only a hint of the large, plump, developed body she would carry into adulthood–smallish buds rounding her chest, hips newly swelling. She experimented with makeup, unflattering to her, applied by Sally who at age 13 had declared herself the designated makeup advisor to the girls on the block.

Greta, unlike Kate, began to think about sex long ahead of schedule. She not only thought about it, she felt it. I’m not sure whether she will ever admit it in this life, but sex came upon her like a sudden hunger, causing her at age 14 to go a little crazy. She frightened me for a year there. I was 14 too, but my fourteen to hers was more like an 11-year-old to an 18-year-old.

For me it was the year I became curious about why the older guys put such a high premium on having jerked off. I can think back and recall having erections, but not knowing what they were for. I mean, what was one supposed to do with an erect penis beyond wait for it to go down and hope no one saw it? It was Greta who showed me by taking over and stimulating the result, first with her hands, then her lips.

Later she described how years earlier she had come upon her father’s porno DVDs and felt no repulsion at all, only a consuming curiosity. It was no wonder that by fourteen she was skilled enough in the art of the blow job to give me the first orgasm of my life. In the next week or so, me through a course of basic sex as if she weren’t the virgin I knew she was–virgin in name, at least. Not once did she bleed or admit to pain–which I had expected and dreaded–which led me to conclude she must have sacrificed her virginity to herself many times over before coaxing my smallish stick of an erection to do the job.

In memory, that period seems to span an entire epoch, but it was just a summer–and a mere few weeks of summer at that. In August, Greta went to Europe with her parents, and the same day, Kate returned from the math camp she had made her parents send her to. I used to lie in bed at night wondering if it had really happened at all. By the time we started school in the fall, Greta was hanging out with a group of guys two hears older that we were. They were not only older, but tougher, scarier. I wouldn’t walked in the same hall with them, but Greta seemed to dominate them with casual ease, just as she had dominated me. What was it with these Stevens Terrace women? Something in the water? Or maybe it was me. Maybe I was just destined to go through life with a “Dominate Me” sign stuck to my back.

Greta and I didn’t become friends until years after we had both grown up enough to be slightly horrified–as least I was–by what we’d had the mindless audacity to pull off at age 14. By then, the whole event had shrunk to an oddity. Did we REALLY…? Impossible. I ran into her one day in Harvard Square, years after the fact, and wouldn’t even have recognized her had she not called out my name. She was jolly and relaxed, and we went for coffee.

“All the news, please,” she said.

“Mm, there’s so much. What do you know to begin with? I mean, do you know about Kate…?”

“All about her. I read, Mikey. Everything. Great books, trash, gossip. I keep up with the gods and godesses, you know.”

“Of course. A Jungian would.”

She smiled. “Not would, must.”

“And she’s solidly in the Pantheon, I’d say.”

“I’d say. The bold Athena, sprung full grown from Zeus’s head.”

“With a touch of Aphrodite.”

“What? When did she ever have time for a man.”

“When she met my friend Jeff.”

I saw then, in that moment, why she was so successful. She paused, and I knew she was examining something in the way I had said that. Her eyes were steady on me, like a hawks, until her face softened just enough to take on that odd soft radiance healers have. She knew, I knew, she realized in a instant. She knew. What form of intelligence is that? Not IQ. Not exactly what they used to call “emotional intelligence” either. More rigorous and inclusive than either. Wisdom? Maybe. I’m not qualified to say.

I do know that, far from leaving a residue of awkwardness, our childhood history had built a broad platform of complete candor. We had no need to reacquaint ourselves, we were acquainted for life. Our secret (and it was a secret, still) didn’t loom up as a shame we shared. It warmed our exchanges, rid us of any hesitancy to go anywhere, share anything.

I had no problem with even the most private matters. Partly I supposed it was because I no longer saw her in sexual terms. Partly it was her looks–aunt-ish, big bodied, Mrs. Santa. It was the body of a woman whose sexual interests had been tended to and dealt with in the past and now that fire was out. What remained was Dr. Greta Carman, intelligent and humorous in a friendly sea of flesh–flesh not unacknowledged, but consigned, respectfully, to its place. Obviously, Greta did little to flounce herself up, or lose that five pounds. Now she lived in the much vaster territory of the mind, hers and others.’ At the same time, she hadn’t let herself go. The image I saw was that of a neatly dressed, nicely groomed professional woman, dressing down to blue jean level for a day in the Square. In short, Greta looked like, and presented herself exactly as, who and what she was. How many of us can say that?

“Your friend Jeff?” She needed more.

“Gosh, Greta, I guess you don’t watch enough TV.”

Her laugh came back at me frothy and musical, but laced with professional edge.”Don’t be ridiculous. I have every premium channel in the universe.”

“No, no, I mean local TV. Specifically Channel 7 News. The traffic report?”

She looked back at me without expression. “You’ve got me there.”

“Well, that’s where you’ll find him.”

“This guy of Kate’s? Channel 7 News? Mikey what are you talking about?”

This was fun. “Watch tonight and tell me which of the men you’d fall for.”

“I can give you an answer to that without watching.”

“Okay, I’ll have to tell you then. The traffic reporter. The guy in the helicopter.”

She let that sink in. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, I’m serious. Unfortunately.” I saw her frown and quickly added, “For me, that is.”

Again, she paused and watched me while that marvelous emotional computer of hers crunched every nuance of that last phrase. “Oh, Mikey,” she said, after a moment. Her hand slipped across the table and covered mine. It was soft and warm, like new bread. She was nodding slowly, affirming her uncanny intuition. “Some things just stay the way they always were, forever, don’t they.”

“They do,” I said.

And we moved on.

Greta went home and watched Channel 7 News Live at Five for the first time in years, perhaps ever. Live news, she observed, had changed since the days of Chuck and Natalie, Boston’s real-life anchor couple. Now the shows were built around reports of murder, accident, fires, and so on. This was balanced by silly segments of lighthearted weather, sports, and traffic. Ah…traffic. And there he was.

And she had understood. She hadn’t bothered with his words; they went straight through her without leaving an impression. But the moment she saw Jeff she understood the cosmic scale of Kate’s passion.

And now, consequently, the hugeness of her loss.

Greta and Kate had never been close friends, understandably. Their roles, both by nature and by choice, made it hard to coexist. So it was logical, if not advisable, for them to enter into this tabu therapeutic arrangement. Greta said it so much time had flowed by that she almost regarded Kate as a stranger anyway. They began with polite accomodations, the the typical soft formalities with which she won the trust of new patients, But as they continued to meet, the emotional temperature zoomed.

Kate was a paradoxical creature, as Greta had always known. Nothing was straightforward with her. Everything contained its opposite. She knew when she needed help, for example, but she hated the actually process of being helped. On her first appointment, Kate had intentionally scheduled a business meeting immediately following the appointment. This gave her license to fidget, check her watch, and sigh. But her agreement with Mike was that she’d stick with it for at least 10 meetings before she let the process go. Fine.

Greta’s mistake – and it was a mistake had she never made before – was to want. Particularly to want what Kate wanted. She wanted Jeff, not for herself, but for Kate, because she saw with the power and clarity only those schooled in archetypal mythology can achieve, that Kate and Jeff were immortals. Not separately but together.They complimented each other in ways so advanced that only special beings at the top of the archetypal food chain Were capable of such thoughtless splendor.

It is really possible to work with archetypes, as Jungians do, without coming to believe in them?

I don’t think so. Faith in archetypes is only a step away from pagan worship, and the thing about powers is you see them throughout nature, and only in nature. But I had that by necessity developed the capacity to move see values every where, represented not just in the myths, but in certain humans, walking among us at any given time, yet not one of us. Not really.

So how do you do analysis with a non-human? This was Greta’s other miscalculation. She assumed she would be unable to make good on her end of the transference bargain–in fact, she didn’t give it a conscious thought. But in the end, she realized, too late, that she had never been fully sure who or what was on the other end, in the person of Kate. Such a lapse had never happened to her before. She had been trained to sense weakness in regard to a given patient and to withdraw, gracefully, respectfully, before damage was done on either side. But she sailed through this piece of learning effortlessly, as with most cautionary things in life, dealing with it in a breezy manner and moving on. It was almost unthinkable, in her personal world, that Greta Carman should be on the lookout for a mental lapse, an emotional weakness, a softness in the her pliable but tough personna that made her patients feel better just by walking into her office.

So in the end Greta, like so many before her, played her part in Kate’s larger plan, while absolutely certain she was flying above it.

And Kate, without being conscious of it, got what she needed from Greta, permission, blessing, spiritual saction from a priest of the contemporary mind to move forward with the destruction of her personal life and the creation of another life that would grow madly, like a magic vine, twisting around its support, unpredictable, whimsical, inspiring, destructive–and none of it under her control.

The futurist saw her own future, and it was an illusion.

5.

Some people seem to have been programmed to live a life of extremes. Nothing small happens to them. Everything is epic scale. When they win, it’s monumental. When they lose, it’s worse than you can imagine.

Here is how Kate happened to watch the sudden death of her lover.

Covering traffic on a routine day, Jeff got an alert that a disgruntled tax accountant had shot three co-workers and was holed up in his office complex, surrounded by police and holding a hostage. Another employee, in an office down the hall, was in communication with the cops, the TV feed, and the world. Her next move was going to be a break for freedom through the window and across the parking lot. All this was happening on Route 128, near Jeff. TV choppers and crews from all over were heading for the spot. “Get over there,” was the word from Jeff’s boss.

In the years since, new regulations, inspired by what happened next, have required more flight automation, more orderly rules for flying in and out of emergency sectors, more precise and streamlined communications among pilots and tower, and levels of accountability that would make any pilot or dispatcher think long and hard before giving the order that caused Jeff’s death.

Jeff relayed the situation back to his boss. The parking lot was small. The area above it was partially obscured by trees. Four or five choppers were circling at different heights and more flew in every few minutes. They were circling high, and from the chatter, frustrated by the poor visibility through the tree cover.

“Find a gap in the trees,” came the order. “She’s in the window now. We need a fly by. Let’s get facial stuff. Close up emotion. Find that gap and get in there.”

This is nothing Jeff wouldn’t have done instinctively, but now he had permission in the form of an order.

Kate was finishing a meeting with the youngish CEO of a surging new enterprise, ZoomTech, the surveillance folks. Twenty years ago, as flush and cocky as they were, they didn’t quite believe in eye recognition technology. Today–you can’t go anywhere without a Zoomtech eye sizing you up, and the critical edge was Kate. She must have been so brilliant in her presentation to Joe ZoomTech that he got all sleazy on her up there in his corporate glass house overlooking Boston Bay.

Kate was used to this. “Do you have a TV?” she asked suddenly, cutting him off in the middle of a come-on. “I want to tell my driver which route to take home, and I just realized my fiance is about to give the traffic report.”

Rocking him back, cooling him off. “Traffic, okay. And your fiance would be…”

“Jeff Rushmore.”

He sagged a bit as he touched a remote panel, summoning a 9-foot widescreen HD image on the wall facing his desk.

“Channel 7,” she said.

The timing was perfect. Except that what they were seeing was not Route 128, or any other highway. Something else was going on. Trees…a parking lot. Jeff’s voice straining. “Going in. Stay back 22. Stay back. Make way, huh?”

There was a long silence. The building was coming closer. Jeff seemed to be manouvering toward a cluster of large clear panes midway up the the brick facade–toward one pane in particular where you could barely see the image of a woman gesturing wildly through the gray thermal glass.

Later Kate would say she’d had a chilling premonition when she heard Jeff’s next radio exchange with someone who wasn’t answering, presumably the pilot of another helicopter.

“You can’t, 22. I’m on top of you. Damn it–!”

Then the picture was a sudden jangle of colors and random pixels, and the screen went black.

The anchor’s face replaced it. Sober. Somber. Kate knew him, of course, Remi Sullivan, a pompous windbag. In this moment, his pomposity had cracked and fallen away. Whatever had happened, she saw in Remi’s face, his eyes, wasn’t the normal phony concern. It was fear.

“That was a replay of the last few moments of Jeff Rushmore’s special report from the scene. The scene of…un, the Tipton CPA shootings and a hostage drama in progress. We’ve had many calls. We consider not airing this…frank footage, but the number of your calls in the last 20 minutes has flooded our incoming system, and, and–” He touched his ear pod, distracted by a message in it, coming from the booth.

Then, looking straight into camera: “We have to report that Jeff’s helicopter went down…when it brushed into another news chopper at the scene. There is no word yet of an outcome there…possible casualties. We’ll break in to update you on this…unfortunate occurance…as soon as we have definitive word on–”

He went on. Another story started. Kate stood motionless, frozen.

“My god, Kate that’s…jeez, that’s awful. Do you me want to–”

“No,” she said cutting him off. “I think..I’ll be just fine. Thank you. I just need to…go now. Now.”

CEO watched her wariy, a robot version of the woman he had just been hitting on. He heard her start to run as she hit the reception area. He had already summoned the executive elevator. Kate didn’t know that. She saw a wall open. She breathed a long sigh. She stepped inside and let the future swallow her whole. 

Jeff’s job at Channel 7 had been so perfect he could hardly believe his luck. He could fly a helicopter every day, and he enjoyed the added prestige of reporting from it. Occasionally, he was involved in some kind of police drama or spectacular disaster: an extended car chase, an industrial fire. He adored his work, he felt a delicious balance between the tricky equation of life and work, and as always, he lived in a state of awe that he had come into possession of it.

It was exactly the way he felt toward Kate’s sudden and complete crush on him, and the mysterious chemistry that made good on it. He came to love more slowly than she did. I understand: that I’m a guy. At first you just glory in her physical presence. Her stunning eyes. The face and body combined with an intelligence so powerful and refined it goes places you could never even imagine. Jeff wasn’t threatened by her mind, the mystery of her intellectual brilliance. It only made her face more beautiful, her body more alluring. He desired her instantly. But desire became a more complex emotion. It was weeks before he realized it had to be what true lovers mean when they say the word “love.” Jeff had never understood it. He had assumed he was in love a couple of times, but both of them had begun in a flush of mutual delight and ended in mutual apathy, even distaste. But now he knew he hadn’t even been close. This was “love.” And what amazing luck.

“I never push for these things,” he said to me once, his voice softening with bemusement. “I wouldn’t know how. They just fall together for me, Mikey. Luck, is all. It’s just blind luck.”

Debatable on its face, but the trouble with luck is it cuts both ways. Jeff was one of the luckiest and unluckiest of men. When luck raised him up, it was to a rare stratospheric place where most of the fortunate don’t don’t even go. When it pulled him down, it was to crush him with a horrible completeness that few, not even the unlucky, could even imagine.

The chopper below, belonging to one of the new webnews outlets was being piloted by some cowboy who was too young, or too stupid, or too lacking in the basic judgement gene to size up the danger he was about to cause. He had one objective, and it was the same as Jeff’s: get up flush with that window. Later, on various cockpit playbacks, you could hear his reporter trying to rein him in. “No, man. Wait…!” But it was too late: the webnews chopper was already swooping upwards, straight into the belly of Jeff’s NewsHawk.

Visuals of what came next were suppressed for a while, but cellphone videos inevitably popped up on outlaw websites and can still be seen, all these years later, if you like that sort of thing. The NewsHawk lifts, or is thrown, sharply up and forward. The webnews chopper shudders in reaction, then tilts over at a crazy angle. Its prop blades careen hungrily into the rear section of the NewsHawk, shearing it off. “Oh, fuck…” Jeff is heard to cry. You hardly recognize the voice as his.

Then come the now-famous, horribly conclusive events. We see the NewsHawk lurch forward, obliterating the office window and slaughtering the hostage, whose horror-stricken face flashes on for a micro secondr. Simultaneously, the webnews chopper loses its blades–they separate and pinwheel into another office several floors below. Without control, with no time to manoeuver, the web chopper bellies over into a spiral it will never complete. The web reporter has already toppled out of his cockpit and plummeted the equivalent of four stories. He’s lying mangled, certainly dead on contact, when his chopper catches up with him to deal the second blow. Incredibly, his pilot, the cowboy who started it all, is still alive in the wreckage. He struggles out and half stands, dazed, only to vanish in the sudden fireball that engulfs him and everything else within 30 feet.

Perhaps Jeff also survived for a few moments, just long enough to consider the irony in this horrific slapstick routine that was ending his life. Maybe even time to reflect how bad his fortune looked, set beside that of, say, even the most victimized sub-Saharan nomad, hunted down, beheaded without mercy by one swipe of a scimitar. Jeff’s head and neck were ripped jaggedly from the rest of him, by a blunt-edged fragment of the building’s concrete reinforcement structure. What was left of the NewsHawk plowed through a heavy archive of accounting records, on through several inner walls, and came to rest imbedded in the remains of the company’s stunned computer servers. Jeff had been low on gas up when it all began, so luckily there was no fireball. But even a small amount of gas will explode. One mini-blast was enough to ignite the office and everything in it, including Jeff.

The death toll was 7. Jeff, his photographer, the two web channel guys, the hostage, and two unlucky gawkers mangled by the propeller three floors beneath.

It’s all history now. Twenty years have gone by, and for most of us, the horror has been dimmed. Only months later was it even possible to reconstruct the event visually, as I just described it. Thankfully, Kate never had to watch it. She would have, had it been put in front of her. She would have thought it would have been a dishonor to him had she shied away in horror from any part of his life, even the leaving of it. But thank God she never got the chance. It’s a horror she would never erased. It would have lived on in her, there every moment, reduced, wall over perhaps, but never gone. She knew what happened. She didn’t have to see it. She was 27. She had a life to live.

Jeff had been a popular addition to the Channel 7 Newsroom team. He appealed across the board, with equal top numbers for young people or seniors, men or women. Wives looked hard at him and wondered what he would be like. Their husbands wouldn’t have felt bad about taking in a Celtics game with him. Teens of both genders found aspects of him to adore, idolize, emulate. There was a light-hearted cult around him, small but something to note. There had even been about him in New York and LA. Those who knew the sociology and politics of the tube were aware of the urgency to get him now, while he was still oblivious to what he had.

Politely, he fended off daily calls from the lords of news TV, film producers, con artists, and politicians, and was even getting feelers from People to be one of their annual “sexiest man” honorees. Kate and I urged him to take one position with them, and never vary it. Whatever he said, just keep backing them off, and wait. It was too soon to make the jump to anywhere. Just back away, back away from anything and everything. Just enjoy it. But wait. See where it’s going.

Jeff was bemused. Fame had replaced comfort and security as the Number 1 American Dream. Kate had called it years ago, still in school. “We’re going to be outworked and out-thought by a new set of world powers. They’re hungry, we’re not. But the one area we won’t lose influence in, is popular culture, American style. They’ve been hating us for so long, but on screen we still look like we know how to be rich, look good, and do whatever we do with energy, freshness, style. Deep down, even the English feel they can match us anymore. They can spell better. They speak nicer. They’ve got refinement on us. They’re subtler. We’re brutes. But we’re the world’s most BEAUTIFUL brutes. Everyone wants to go to the movies, even if they spent all day hating us.”

At the time she’d been 15–but almost out of Wellesley with her double degree in anthroplogy and econ. She skipped graduate school, because she saw clearly, as young as she was, that it was about qualifying for a high-level research job. She loved research, but research for an end, to accomplish something finite and pressing. She wanted to create solutions. And she knew that that kind of aim and function isn’t what graduate school is about. Why waste her time. She already knew the guru level experts in field after field. The gurus were always 6 months to a year ahead of the academics in their field. She knew that because she had seen it. Even then she understood so much more than most faculties about the current edge in their field that she learned to soft-pedal it on the campuses where she was booked to speak on future trends. She was already in business for herself. It wasn’t good business not to leave a desirable impression.

By the time I arranged for Jeff and Kate to meet, Kate was every bit the kind of celebrity she wanted to be–respected, held almost in awe by some, her name known, yet her face never recognized. Jeff had no idea who she was, nor she him (since she didn’t have to drive herself, she didn’t have to worry about making traffic decisions). In the post mortem of the meeting, which had been a quick hello-goodby sort of “eyeball,” Jeff, who had picked up the hint of by paying close attention when she and I talked shop. “Is she some kind of doctor?” he asked.

And predictably Kate checked in later, to find out more about Jeff.

“Is he famous?”

“Oh, come on. If he was famous, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“Don’t do that. He could be a famous snowboarder and I wouldn’t have a clue.”

“He’s not a snowboarder.”

“Mikey, you’re a shit.”

“He’s famous if you drive and watch TV, neither of which you do.”

“I watch TV.”

“You watch Tivo. It’s different.”

“Are you going to tell me, or is this call over?”

I had had my little fun. I got real and gave her what she wanted, with a mixed sense of satisfaction, pride, and anguish. I knew I had made a great thing happen, for both my friends. And I knew I had lost Kate, really lost her now, and maybe forever. Fuck it, I told myself

“He’s a TV reporter. Local. Channel 7.”

“Oh, my god,” she muttered.

I knew how she felt about local TV news, and the “face people” who reported it. “He reports on traffic. From the air. He flies his own helicopter.”

“Oh.” Her tone had brightened. This was different. This was a man doing a man’s job, and it was adventurous. Kate liked adventurous men. “Hm.”

“More?”

“Not right now. But…good work, Mikey.”

Because of the profile of these two, their shared celebrity, and the spectacular notoriety of the accident, any ceremony honoring and mourning Jeff had to be planned with great care. What was left of Jeff was cremated. There was a public memorial. Kate endured it graciously, with as low a profile as possible. I wanted to be the one who escort her, but we were both media-savvy enough to realize that was impossible. “Genius Lays Hubby to Rest, Accompanied by Mystery Man.” Sure, we’d really like to see that headline.

So she went with the senior Evening News anchor, Bart Edwards. She had never met Edwards, but he was a silver haired Boston icon, a kindly man old enough to be her grandfather. Jeff’s mother was on her other side. She had heard the news and made the trip from New Mexico, a sad-looking woman with the air of once having once been a beauty queen. And actually, I remembered hanging out at Jeff’s one time when she came home late, a little drunk, with man she had just met at work–she was a hostess at an Italian restaurant that reputedly had mob connections. I was confused by the strangeness of her animation and flrtateousness, as well as a certain kind of flashy beauty that, at age 9, I felt, but didn’t understand yet. But time had worn her down, and what I saw now was a woman who had declared defeat long ago. She and Jeff hadn’t spoken for years, and she had not attended the wedding. This occasion, in fact, was her first meeting with Kate, and both seemed strangely elated by it. They they walked together and sat together, and along with Edwards, projected the public message that everyone wanted to see. But I could tell that Kate quickly tired of her.

The real goodies to Jeff were said down on the Cape, in the back yard of the summer cottage where they had spent the few brief vacations they could steal together. It wasn’t really a cottage; rather it was an old brick summer mansion that had been in Sally’s Brahmin family for generations, barely used now but kept open and ready. It was on the quiet north shore outside of Yarmouth, surrounded on either side, through the trees, by other distinguished houses and grounds, and people who, if they were home, minded their own business.

It must have been impossible for gawkers to find them here. The house was set far back from the road, half hidden in a brace of maples. You approached the front entrance on a long, bumpy semi-circular drive, dodging gardens no doubt tended in perpetuity by some faithful Parker family retainer. In the back was a ramshackle brick patio, perfect for martinis in the afternnon, with a sweeping view over perfectly mown grass, to a marshy cove, and the Bay beyond.

It was a stunning spring day, the kind that promise endless good days to come, a safe and prosperous future. The kind that tempt you to be someone, do something. At least until clouds gray the sky and breezes begin to blow. Just a few of us stood around the hole–besides me, there were only Kate, Sally, and Mark Elliot, another traffic reporter who had become friends with Jeff. Mrs. Wright had opted to go home–she had stressed to the limit her ability to cope. It was fine. It was better than fine: she had started to drink, after staying sober through the funeral and after. She had said enough of a goodby to the son she never really knew. No need to do it yet again. Good decision. She would have ruined Jeff’s real sendoff.

Everyone had something to say that was at least semi-prepared. I talked about how much fun it was to play basketball with Jeff. Let’s face it, I loved the guy, but our relationship was complicated–to me at least. Nothing really seemed complicated to Jeff. Mark, a converted sports reporter, read his few remarks, with a nervous tremble in his voice, odd for a on-camera guy. Sally said her piece spontaneously. She was a confident talker and used words easily to speak her feelings. She kept her gaze on Kate as she spoke. Kate was obvously her concern. Like me, Sally had somewhere in time devoted herself to Kate. The personal assistant’s job was paltry, an afterthough, compared to the friendship that had evolved early in both girl’s lives, at school and before. Kate was attracted to Sally’s instinctual worldliness, her ease with her self, socially, with men. She was a learner, and she wanted Sally around as a model for what she could acquire by observations and osmosis. Sally. For her part, saw her as the awe-inspiring soul mate she had never had, growing up the only child of divorced diplomat who lived in 6 cities around the world. Stability was a big thing for Sally. Her mother had died in a plane crash, a loss she never got over. As graceful as she was–and she was our hostess–he was still stunned by what had occurred, still reeling. And would probably take it hard for quite a while.

Kate, as always, was the mystery. I knew it wasn’t true, but still she seemed to be more in control, less affected than would be expected of anyone in her position. I knew what it had done to her because I had seen her in the moments of dark panic, when the feeling had been as though she had been pushed off a high cliff in the dark and was plummeting through black night into a place where morning, daylight, breath had no existence.

What she said was not about Jeff, it was to him, and I think it made us all a little uncomfortable. She wasn’t saying goodby. As she talked of things they must have said to each other, there was a sense that she and Jeff were in on something the rest of us were not. Kate wasn’t a believing Christian, so when she talked about his new life it was no metaphor. When she said, “I’ll be waiting where we said,” she meant not in heaven but in some specific place–some part of their house, or a park, a bar, where they had agreed to meet.

But then she shifted gears. How could any scheme to bypass eternal loss bring back what she and Jeff had had so briefly? She spoke about missing him, but the subtext was her inescapable understanding, even just in flashes, of the grief she was carrying. She was no idiot. She made a spectacular living with her mind. She spotted big money trends. She could, in effect, see into the future. And she knew that grief follows sudden loss like thunder follows lightning. Yet still, the lingering taste of those few moments of denial, and our shared knowledge of how powerful an intellect she packed–and was not afraid to use–kept us, me certainly, uneasy.

What we saw next I’m sure those who were there will not forget, ever. It happened just as she was about to bend forward, with a handful of Jeff’s ashes, to release them, giving him backto the earth. It would be the final farewell, symbolically–ashes to ashes, dust to dust–and she knew it. She hesitated–it was unexpected, unlike her, as if, for the first time in her life, she didn’t know how to finish a gesture she had begun. Her body began to shake, reminding me of slow motion pictures I had once seen of an earthquake in progress. She bowed her head, and simply followed the gesture down to the ground, resting on one knee, then, unintentionally, on both knees, a posture of desperation. The contractions we saw then revealed what they were, sobs. Big, raw, hot, hoarse sobs that started in the back of her throat and rolled forward, like bowling balls, to her half-closed mouth, where they were ejected as rough, jagged, disturbing sobs, so elemental that they almost sounded like barks.

Sally stepped forward, but Kate’s hand shot out, warning her off. This had always been one of Kate’s most frustrating characteristics–try to comfort her and she would block you off with such explosive vehemence it was like an attack. So we waited, watched her heave and sob, on both knees, resting her face in both hands until the emotional firestorm subsided. It was the natural response of course, but in Kate, it was frightening. After she had been motionless for a good 60 seconds, she lifted up her face, turning it to us. She half smiled, exhausted and wounded looking, and rose to her feet. The others were crying now, set off by the shock of Kate’s outburst.

I don’t think I had ever seen Kate cry. Why am I saying “think”–I’m sure of it. If I had seen it once, it would be burned into my memory for good, and it would certainly be the only time, beyond age 7 or 8, that I ever saw it. I didn’t see it again over the following days and weeks and wasn’t surprised. Others expected it, however, and over time, without the ceremonial show of tears, their admiration for her pluck turned, in some cases, to a suspicion that she was heartless, lacked feeling, was “out of touch with her emotions,” and so on. The truth is she was handling the worst moment of her life with the strongest tool she had available–her raw intelligence, her rationality, her particular kind of imagination, which was fact-oriented, and her way of dealing with her emotions, which was to study them.

“I spent hours doing research on myself,” she told me years later. “I took notes. I floated hypotheses.”

“An experiment.”

She broke into a harsh, humorless laugh. “Yeah, me. A science experiment.” The ironic grin subsided and her face dissolved into the Madonna-like blankness you see when she “studies” her emotions. “It was how I survived.”

It was, and I can bear witness. That and work. Just days after Jeff’s funeral, she was scheduled for a conference in Doha with the Emir and key advisors, including some European and Chinese heads of banks. Graciously, the Emir himself called her, offering a postponement. She politely refused.

I’ve left out any reference to my own grief. Some people are all feeling; it’s who they are and all we see. I’m at the other end of that scale. It’s not that I suppress my emotions out of fear or shame. There may be some North European ideal of restraint in there somewhere, but it’s too far from conscious for me to know. Let’s say that normally I’m not a person whose feelings are right there for me. If you ask me whether I’m happy or sad, I have to think about it. And so I get the reputation as cold, unfeeling. Clueless. Shallow. And to a certain extent I suppose it’s true. My feelings come in a muted range that normally excludes extremes. When I’m happy it’s a feeling of mild pleasure. I don’t have a quick fuse, which makes me reliable on the heat of trial or on the basketball court. Joy is not something I’ve ever felt, I don’t believe.

Nor is depression–though people have told me I’ve been mildly depressed my entire life. And maybe so, but what does that mean if I can’t feel it? I seem to have a particularly effective avoidance mechanism when it comes to negative emotions, including grief. Perhaps I hide the extent of it from myself–who knows what the mechanism is? Who even wants to know? When my mother died, I reacted appropriately, as the good son, and regretted it. I felt for her, how her life had given her so little of what she had hoped for. How she had believed in all the wrong things, and developed none of the skills that might have fitted her to become the person she had once desired to be. Nor was she particularly pleased with me. Nothing pleased her, really, but I was already grown before I realized that.

I thought the problem was me. I wanted her to admire me, but she took no interest in the few things I was good at. Basketball left her cold. She almost never came to a game. There was always something a little wrong with any friend I brought home, any club I joined, and later, any girl I dated. She kept herself aloof from the other families on the block and reacted with hurt puzzlement as she watched my childhood obsession with Kate grow into into a more physical adolescent yearning. Desire of any kind had left her long ago, so she regarded it with distaste, and when she saw signs of it in her own son, it was just another of the mounting insults life was piling up at her door. She knew the meaning of the word, but had lost the sense of it.

Only much later, when I discovered a cache of old letters, photos, and yearbooks, did I realize that, unlike me, Mom had once fed happily on her own youthful desire and defined herself by the intensity of her exuberance. There was the proof–a pretty girl, vivaceous, a cheerleader. People had written things like, “hey Miz Happy, your smile makes my day, don’t ever change!” And in a letter she had apparently to a boy but never sent: “I just read some stuff by that crazy Jack Kerouac and he reminds me of you…please keep smiling when you see me, darling, I want to be with you forever.”

Now she was in the ground, and only now she finally made sense to me. Desire, all by itself, had nourished her and given the days meaning. No wonder I disappointed her, with my small, measured feelings and my undemonstrative ways. She had run as long as she could on pure jet fuel. When it dried up and was gone, her life was over.

By contrast, my signature view has always been that life goes on. Moment by moment by moment. It’s never over. One day after the happiest or saddest day of your life, you will still get up, brush your teeth, pull your pants on. To me the most profound, enduring, and constant question posed by life is: what next?

So we did everything we could for Kate, that night, everything she’d let us. We’d sat up drinking until we had nothing left to say, no reason left not to think about the morning, the days ahead, the rest of our lives. Feeling there was nothing left to say or do and it was time for my exit, I rose and bowed satirically to my friends. “Ciao,” I said, making the little backwards Italian hand wave, and I started up the stairs to my room, alone. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I’ve been overcome by emotion, and what happened next is one of them. At the top of the stairs, I stopped and froze, as though I had heard a distant gunshot. Heat broke out, like a sudden fever, and I sat heavily on the landing, weak and breaking into a sweat. it was though someone somewhere had thrown a switch that turned on and all the sadness I was capable of, and it welled up at once, into my chest and throat. I lay on the floor, trying to be silent, not to freak out the others with the sound of behavior they would never had though possible in me. I managed to get to my knees, then my feet, and half walk, half-crawl the rest of the way to my room, falling on my bed, weeping in harsh convusions, painfully, silently until the momentum of it began to lag. Dimly I understood it. This was my goodby to Jeff, to youth, to the lives my Mom and I had never lived, and to the Kate, my tomboy pal, my teenage crush, the pulse of my days. Tomorrow would be another day. Unlike Kate, I had no notions about it. I could no more predict what was to come than I could add 50 seven-digit numbers in my head. I knew only that Kate would be there, and so would I. Life would go on. That was sufficient, it was all the knowledge I needed to go on. I stopped there.

A week or so later, after the national coverage of the event, the funeral, the Emir, and yet another conference in San Diego or someplace, she was home. Alone. Nothing on her agenda. And of course I was there for her, Mr. All Purpose Companion, to be whoever or whatever she wanted. To do for her, to give her whatever she needed. We drank a lot. We played music. We ate the spectacular meal she concocted. We talked about Jeff. We talked about gigs upcoming. And I talked about an active case or two I was involved in. She only paid half attention to the municipal land dispute down on the Cape, or the product safety class action against Microsoft, but the mention of LifeClone focussed her sharply, and she listened intently to every detail.

Later, much later, in the heady swirl of too much table wine on top of too much champagne, not to mention the martinis that had started the evening so much earlier it seemed like last week, she suddenly grasped me by both wrists and stared into my eyes with an intensity that was electric. “Listen,” she said.

I nodded, my eyes wide, probably looking like an idiot. “I’m all ears.”

“Okay…” she said, obviously struggling to keep an important thought linear and whole, “Mikey, Mikey…be my friend, okay? I mean, really be my friend.”

We held mutual stare until she pulled me toward her, into a close but Platonic hug. He could feel the moist heat of her breath on my neck.

“That and more,” I said, in spite of myself. But I could already feel her head wagging from side to side.

“No, Mikey. Not that.” She pushed me away gently. “I don’t want more. I want, I need…just that.”

She was searching my face again with extra intensity, as if a clue was hidden in it that, should she find it, would unlock the entire gigantic puzzle of her pain and confusion.

“Mikey,” she said. “This is not over.”

“What’s not over, hon?”

“He’s coming back.”

I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly. “He’s…what?”

“We agreed on this. We actually talked about it.”

“You talked about it?”

“Yes–come on, Mikey, stop just repeating my words. Catch up with me. We both knew how dangerous his job was. We didn’t keep our heads in the sand.”

“Okay, you and Jeff talked about…what exactly?”

She sighed theatrically. “Ways he would come back, if…if something like this ever happened.”

I didn’t know where to go with this. It was way out of my range.

Kate went on. “The range of possibilities isn’t infinite. You start on one end with symbolic messages–an unlikely event, a certain look from a bird or a squirrel, that sort of thing, and you go all the way to the other–physical, bodily manifestation. He’s there. We can talk. We can make love. I’ve gamed it all out, of course–”

Of course. Of course she would have. This is what she did. Why was I surprised?

What surprised me was this: that she would fall for such a cheap, low rent fantasy.

What were the movies? Warm and fuzzy he’s-not-REALLY-gone classics like Ghost, Contact, or less comforting chillers, like The Departed or The Sixth Sense. Ghost, in particular, she watched over and over. Sometimes with Sally, who never failed to start to blubber at the classic moments. Sometimes I sat through it with her, but more often, when you did the math, she watched alone.

Her reactions, while watching, were curiously muted, and she had little to say about it. But her eyes were barely off it, ever, as if she were a sentinel searching for hidden subtext. I say “as if,” but as it turned out, that is literally what she was doing–watching for a coded message from Jeff in a movie made over 25 years in the past.

This was the closest Kate ever had or ever wold come to losing her mind, and it was alarming to watch.

She told me she had found a psychic whose candor and reasonable approach impressed her. He was an older man, with no intellectual credentials, and seemed to be too naive to run the typical scams. He had no idea who Kate was, and she liked that. She had never taken an interest in the supernatural, she disdained it. Now she began to ease it into the wider context of her future projections. Nothing shocking. Just a suggestion here and there that smart planners concerned with the shape of things to come would be wise to keep up with psychic research. One or two key breakthroughs could unleash a torrent of new possibilities and as always, it would be those positioned to understand the benefits and potentials and so on and so on.

“Jakob,” had no interest in visions of the future. Outside his savant-like abilities, he was a blobbish, unassuming, unambitious couch potato, who never read and spent most of his spare time watching reruns of TV shows from the 80’s. He had contacted Jeff, he said, and Kate immediately set up an appointment. She was uneasy about it and asked me to come with her. Jakob’s first reaction was no, but you don’t say no to Kate. I went, but had to stay in his front room, fending off his several cats, while the seance, or whatever you call it, went on in a study at the rear of his apartment.
Nothing seemed to happened for a while–at least I heard nothing. Then Kate was in the room, pale, shaken, angry.

“Let’s go.”

“What happened?”

She didn’t answer, didn’t look at me. Throwing her coat half on, she headed straight for the door.

I caught up with her outside. “Are you okay?”

“He’s a phony.”

I have to say–though I didn’t then–this news didn’t exactly knock me out. “They’re all phony.”

I should have kept my mouth shut. “All of them?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You’re there’s nothing in it, nothing there.”

“Well, I guess I am.”

“I see, and anyone, not just the fakers, but anyone who claims that there is…that there is a Jeff.”

“Kate–”

“Is a what? A charlatan? A moron? Whistling up their ass?”

“Come on, Kate, don’t do this to me.”

“Am I whistling up my ass when I say I KNOW I can have him again? Is that what you think?” Something in her voice was softening. “Is it?”

“No.”

She backed off then, not wanting to hear anything else. We crossed the street to the Stop ‘n’ Shop where we had parked.

“He’s not used to people like me. I tested him and he didn’t even know it. I told him Jeff’s sport was hockey. So when Jeff started to speak, guess what he talked about?”

“He hated hockey.”

“Is this an aha moment?”

On the way home, Kate buried herself in business calls.

6.

Any attorney who defends or prosecutes a scientific or technical industry in a class action will become a lay expert in that industry. That’s a good part of what you pay him for. Of those who specialize in that form of litigation, the best of the best are brilliant enough to not only master the available knowledge, but think creatively in the language and concepts of the industry. They also have full understanding of the emotions surrounding the case. They have to be. Emotions, and manipulating them, are like super fuel, which can power or destroy by fire.

It’s hard to remember now the horror and vehemence that reproductive human cloning inspired just 20 years ago. Clones are, after all, twins, and though twins are remarkably similar, anyone who knows a twin well can see that a totally independent human identity inhabits the soul of the other sibling. And so it is with clones. I remember seeing an internet replay of a BBC interview with an impassioned English genticist. It was back around the turn of the Century, when the debate was in full fire. This guy roundly denounced reproductive cloning this way: “Imagine a little girl reaching up to take the hand of her mommy, and seeing literally her twin sister.”

Scientists are odd birds. Their intellect is so spectacularly developed you expect them to be geniuses at emotional thought as well. Yet, give them a passionate cause, or make them angry, and suddenly you see raw emotion erupt, expressed with an immaturity that can only be called “whiney” or “shrieky.” Anyone who pays serious attention to passion and emotion (and scientists shun this sort of thing), can see the fallacy in the BBC scientist’s example right away: the little girl was raised by her clone-mother. Even if you told her the truth, she would still need her, still accept her comletely, as “Mom.” A mammal needs its mother, and the real mother is not around, any likely candidate will do–an adoptive parent, a clone, a big warm peace animal of a different species, even a warm pillow.

Nowadays, of course, clones of different kinds are routinely built (“built” has become the word) from any of several techniques. Fear of deformities, once a hot issue, has evaporated, as it always does in science when new research refines the process and keeps improving it at an ever-increasing rate.

What is hardest to recall or even explain, is the moral revulsion toward using cloning as Kate wanted to. It was thinking from the last century. Retro thinking. Dynosaurs sitting down in the road on our way to the future. One generation younger and their passion was replaced by a casual neutrality. That generation had grown up in an atmosphere of conditionality everywhere. Things were true until proven to be unhelpful to an influential force: then they never had been true. Statements by politicians, always under suspicion, were never thought to be true or false, only code that hinted at what a politician might or might not want voters to assume–and certainly didn’t stand for sincere convictions or intentions. The same was assumed about public statements by any pubic figure, since public knowledge about techniques of evasiveness, and their use, had become commonplace, at least to those who wanted to know.

The generations split not so much along the lines of behavior, vernaculr, and style, as had once been the case, but along simpler lines: the generation that still believed in true things, and true speech, my mother’s generation, looked across an unfathomable chasm at those of us who had grown up comfortable with the absence of belief. Kate’s generation. My generation.

“Clone him?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know how to clone him.”

“But you’re working with people who–”

“No.”

“–who know other people who do.”

She was right. They were out there. Some were even experimenters reknown for the subtlety and brilliance of their science, who had been kidnapped by their emotions. They had “lost their minds,” as my philosophy professor used to say–and when he said it, the phrase had a subtle double-meaning: both gone insane and traded in his Maserati of an intellect for a horse-and-buggy. Some were sheer idealogues, from the pure to the frightening. Some just saw the opportunity to turn a buck. What the public didn’t know, at that time, was that plenty of cutting edge science was going on in the dark. There had always been the assumption that if a breakthrough were made, the scientist, wanting to lay the groundwork for his Nobel, would rush to publish it. But as scientists were regarded less as a class of esoteric gods, more as intellectual super slaves in the service of shadowy masters, and as the possibility grew that new discoveries might be resented, anyone engaged in controversial research shunned publicity.

In other words, yes, it could be done, and was being done. Cloned babies were all over the place. And yes, I knew those who knew those who could and would clone Jeff, because they were doing it already and it had made them rich as hell.

Reproductive cloning technology, in fact, had improved steadily and quietly, ever since the breakthrough in 2007 that enabled getting stem cells directly from skin cells, bypassing the need for cloned embrios. This in effect let the air out of one of the religious primitive’s favorite anti-science arguments by separating off stem cell technology from cloning.

Ironically, it also took the heat off the reproductive cloners. Attention passed to the new, morally innocent, technology. Religious militants relaxed. If cloning went on somewhere, it was no longer the threat to their God centered universe it might have been. Cloning overnight lost its political charge and much of the public attention that came with it. By 2010 reproductive cloners were simply thought of as kooks, nuts. Anti-cloning laws were still on the books, but with a minimum of kickbacks from the richest most prominent cloners, public officials turned a blind eye. Babies were being cloned without the glare of publicity. Babies who would in no time be grown children, grown men and women.

Already there were the beginnings of a body of law around cloning disagreements and mishaps. Remnents of the Christian anti-cloners were still filing suit against doctors who assisted in creating clones, researchers who continued to improve the technology, make the results more predictable and safer. A similar phenomenon was seen a few years later, when the anti-conception morning-after pill made abortion a dead issue. We’ve had two decades of “AntiCon Overnite,” so now, in 2025 it’s how controversial the first morning-after pill had been–ad for the same reason, it destroyed a fertilized embryo and thus (they said) a person. AntiCon, of course, weakens the sperm and makes the egg temporarily impermeable, rendering the point moot by “aborting” a possible foetus, in effect, before it becomes one.

The case my firm was handling wasn’t very interesting, in my opinion. A pernicious remnant of the anti-abortion movement had decided to mount a rear guard attack on the most visible and successful of the cloners, Encore Labs. Encore had gotten some unwanted publicity when a cloned baby died and the post-mortem revealed “rare genetic irregularities.” The anti-clone outfit, KlonNoWay, filed suit, and it was as if the clock had been turned back 20 years.

KlonNoWay was California based, small and shrill. Once thriving, they had been fatally wounded when when the new technology was annunced. Overnight they saw their relevancy, and their base, shrink almost to nothing. Suddenly they were an organization without a purpose, except to keep several hundred employees drawing their salaries all over the country.

At the time, the smart anti-cloning splinters regrouped and repurposed, announcing new missions, using the turn of events as a reason to push for new funds from their members. Some merged with larger anti-abortion groups, still fighting that battle. But KonNoWay was different. Their attitude was Hell No. They had locked horns with the anti abortion establishment and come out bloody but proud. In their view, they stood alone, beset on all sides not just with the media and progressive forces, but also anyl socialistic- ethical-relativist-humanistic population whose view of the future clashed with theirs. Internally, they had develkoped a comeraderie and a sense of mission not to different from the mythical Japanese outfits who refused to surrender years after WWII had ended, and kept the war going for years in the depths of various island jungles, living in caves, completely out of touch with the rest of the world.

So while the rest of the primitive right saw the science news that week and moved on, Klon-No-Way saw it and bored in, finding a core base in people willing to get mad over the few remaining clonings, even though the danger of a trend had evaporated. With such a tiny remnant of their base, they were in budget crisis nearly all the time. What they had to do, they realized, and quickly, was launch a high profile lawsuit, thus projecting their brand and possibly winning a fat settlement on a judgement in court. It was a suicide play, of course, since if they lost, they were gone.

And they were going to lose.

Not that Encore was much better, morally. But they had hired us. I was a professional and so I strapped my guns on for Encore. I wasn’t exactly in love with the Encore people we met with a couple of times, the meet & greet in the 22nd floor boardroom. They company had been founded by two Russians. Vlad and Oskar. Genial, venal, richly attired, sporting multiple rings and accents, they came with two Americans, a thin, colorless young legal guy and their all purpose contract watchdog, a middle-aged woman with the air of casual brutality you sometimes see in professional football players. None of them, I realized, must have been popular in high school, so they had learned how to be comfortable enough in the non-popular sector. It didn’t matter to them what people thought–KoNoMore, the world at large, even our firm, their legal counsel. With the exception of Vlad, none of them went out of their way to be personable. Oskar carried an air of dark distrust, the thin legal guy was what psychologists called “affectless,” meaning you could stick him with a pin and he wouldn’t react. And Lucia, the bull dyke administrative officer, seemed always on the verge of punching someone. Not a pleasant crew. Normally we take clients to lunch at La Pomme de Terr. It’s an elegant spot atop the Wu Tower, across the river alongside the Harvard “B” School. We dined the Encore folks in-house, in the comfortable, but not sumptuous anonymity of our Partners Club.

Talk at lunch with clients rarely dives into facts and aspects of the case. It’s a time to socialize a bit, relax, show your genial side, get to know theirs. As far as I could see, they had left their genial sides back in Rhode Island, where they maintained their research facilities, corporate offices, and a demonstration clinic. So there would be no talk about sports, entertainment, business news, or politics (I wasn’t sure about their political leanings, and didn’t want to go there.). The one subject they seemed comfortable was the one that had landed them here in the first place, cloning itself and the ferver with which they practiced it and hope to spread it everywhere, to make it, in Vlad’s heavily accented words, “a social option so casual nobody even thinks much anymore bad about it. Today like you say, ‘they can’t conceive so they will adopt now, or go in vitro, yes? Or to sperm bank, you know. All the same, nobody lifts eyebrow, is just not a big deal. And so why not clone? Why not?”

“Why not indeed,” I answered, and gazed back at him as though he had just proposed allowing the sun to rise, or making water legal. Why not indeed. Who would ever oppose such a no-brainer. It wasn’t my job at this point to argue the philosophy of it. Once my colleagues and I strapped on our guns, we were beyond philosophy.

I played with my napkin ring, trying to look as nonchalant and random as possible. I raised my head and glanced at Vlad and Oskar. “And if one wanted to clone…someone. Make a clone of them. In theory. And turned to you. How would it go?”

I had purposely dawdled with my desert and coffee, knowing that Eddie Parker would skip dessert, swill his coffee and be back at his desk by now.

“How would it go?” Vlad’s professional grin dimmed a bit. This was not something he expect to hear from me. “Well, you know, of course–”

“Not the science. I know that part. But supposing I came to you as a possible client. Say I wanted to clone myself…or a friend, let’s say. How would it begin? How do you proceed How does it unfold?”

Vlad’s grin returned. Oskar was looking at me now as well, with a peculiar interest he hadn’t shown before.

“I assume your clock isn’t running at this moment?” said Vlad.

I smiled. “No.”

Kate had tried other means. People don’t generally know this, nor I’ve come to believe do they really want to know it. Kate Edmonds, or an image of her, has existed in so many minds for so long, that she no longer controls who she is, publically. She can shape that image, and does–at considerabe expense to Cowles & Cowles, the world’s premiere image makers–but negate that image or reinvent the world’s commonly held perception of what she has done and why…? She might as well try to convince all America that the faces on Mt. Rushmore are actually the janitorial staff at a local Montana middle school.

In short, the Ms. Boldness reconstitutes her lost lover, a blow of the light sword against the dark drag of Nature. Of course, it’s also common wisdom that “you don’t mess with Mother Nature,” so the most recent crisis and denoument of the past months was also welcomed–with a touch of sadness and horror, perhaps, but also as affirmation. Certain people rise above is all to live certain stories–not their own, necessarily, but the ones that go with the territory, the ones they inherit from the ages. They have no choice. Once you step on one of those great paths forbidden to the rest of us, you don’t get off; you live your story to its end, and the end is beyond your control. This has been Kate’s weakness and her sin (also seen as perfect for the story). She thought she was controlling her story. In mythic terms she had the blindness of all heros afflicted with hubris. Her hubris was to see the future. Her punishment was to never see her own future.

She had tried several times to conceive, using sperm Jeff had stored by chance (a story Bob Markham had done on sperm banks, using Jeff–by then hugely popular with Channel 7 viewers–as guinea pig). Each time she failed to conceive, and mourned each failure secretly and bitterly, with a particular grief that was spiked by shame at having failed at something–anything, but unimaginably, this. It was at that time–and the only time in her life–that she saw a “shrink.” Shrink was hardly the word for Dr. Greta Mullanney, an expansive, broadfaced woman, whose smile never disappeared, nor did the glints of intelligent humor and high mischief in her eyes.

Greta was one therapist who deserved the “Dr.” in front of her name. She was an M.D. a graduate of the Harvard Medical School no less. She had born last in a large family of prosperous Irish American Catholics. The Mullaneys were strict about religious belief, but Greta, being last in line, plus cute, unpredicatable, and precocious, had been allowed to go her own way. That way took her to Harvard Square, as a teen dropout, then to semi-prominence as a folk musician who somehow developed a loyal following in Spain. Certain visions (decidedly not Catholic) in her recovery from from a car crash on the German autobahn led her to make a personal pilgrimage to Zurich, where she earned a Swiss university degree and then completed the seven-year program at the Jung Institute in a record-breaking five. She was now, at age 25, a fully qualified Jungian Analyst. But Jung, she knew, unlike Freud, had been an M.D. and a practicing psychiatric physician. With out that final experience to give her understanding the depth she sensed she lacked, she would always be (as she later told Kate and me) half-blind, or at best the kind of therapist she dismissed as “lightweight.” So she came home, where Harvard was more than delighted to have her, earned the M.D. and immediately set up practice in, of all places, Arlington.

And if you think “Arlington” is what attracted Kate to her, you might be only half-right. The other half was the key for Kate. In the tower of her celebrity, only three of us–two, now that Jeff was gone–held her complete trust. I was one. Sally was the other. And Dr. Greta Mullaney? Kate decided to trust her too, as I always had and always will, and accept my referral without reservation. No other formal vetting was necessary because, in a fundamental if random way, Kate already knew who she would be sharing secrets with.
Greta Mullaney had grown up on the block.

She had been one of us from toddlerhood to the high school years, when we began to take the divergent paths that would lead us so many places. In just the same way we had been one of hers. I say this because we were in those years just a blob, a collective mass of little shared egos, without much differentiation that we could perceive. Others could–the grownups were already observing us, comparing and contrasting, predicting our futures–but we were oblivious to it as we roamed the block playing German Spotlight after dark, or careened wildly down the asphault in phalanxes of Big Wheels.

We were bold kids, in a good way. Honest to a fault. There were older bad kids on the block, but they ignored us. We had watched them from infancy, however, and had seen up close how “badness” was neither romantic nor heroic. It produced misery, misfortune, and added to the awfulness we knew existed beyond the little world of Stevens Terrace, the world in which the “bad” McGregor brothers came and went from–the world that sometimes invaded our block to take them away, in Police Cruisers flashing and whooping in front of the McGregor home as the rest of us waited for the school bus.

No, that way was not going to be for us. We weren’t particularly virtuous, just practical. Where others might see the McGregors as dashing rogues (we knew there were girls who did–who sneaked onto the block and into the McGregor house, making sure to leave while the grownups were still at work), we saw them as jerks, stuck on a path that had only one end: ruin and shame, period. Why take that one? In our games, the heros were all Robin Hoods, dashing nonconformists whose deviance was only a form of brilliance, and whose rebellion was only intended to help people and make the world better.

We obsessed on one particular Coke commercial that ran when most of us were about ten. In it, a bully type goes through the neighborhood scaring people but actually righting wrongs and aborting accidents about to happen. A complete reversal of the “gangsta” images of cool behavior also popular at the time. We were not Pollyannas; we wanted to be that guy, that good-guy bully– gangstas of goodness.

Of us all, it was Greta Mullaney who seemed to have taken the literal demands of that image way farther than any or the rest of us. Kate watched her, studied her, as she studied every developing phenonemon, and had already concluded that Greta’s return to Harvard and then to Arlington–only around the corner from the Terrace–mirrored Kate’s own perfect closing of a radiant circle of development.

But here it got tricky. With all her accomplishment and celebrity, Kate felt somehow that her own achievements were of a lessor order that Greta’s. She admired Greta–no, she held her in awe–so much so that sharing her carefully guarded secrets with Greta was only one short step for Kate to make, and she willingly chose made it. Of course, by now she knew very well that, where there is a quid, there is a quo. She would learn Greta’s secrets in return. That closed the deal.

3.

Women loved Jeff. He was the impossible man–smart, funny, athletic, Greek statue looks, but hardly aware of it. Or more precisely, aware, but but detached, just not interested. He didn’t need to remind himself what a hunk he was. It was incidental in his scheme of things. He felt good enough just being in the world. He had the serenity of an animal, and no human ego to thrust forward, just an enveloping charm that amounted to no more than his basic natural self. Women couldn’t believe it: they never saw men like this. And to add to it, he was a celebrity–Channel 7’s flying traffic reporter.

Kate got a kick out this. Long before I introduced them, she had noticed him on the news, even pointed at the screen once when we were having an afternoon beer at Sports & Brew.

“Now that’s a real guy.”

I almost told her the truth then, but decided it wasn’t time. Jeff could wait. Let me be the man in her life just a while longer.

So I played dumb. “Will there still be guys like that in the future?”

With a stagey leer, she leaned across the table toward me. “Maybe even more of them.”

“Really. How’s that, cloning?”

“Hah!” One eyebrow flew up in a mock-disdain. Kate enjoyed this kind of arch repartee–it was the closest she came to play. “Social evolution, Mikey. Too many moral considerations for cloning.”

Kate could clown around as if cloning was beneath her interest, but in truth there was no backwater of culture she wouldn’t explore, and she had been all over human reproductive cloning for a while. Once she understood it was only being pushed by fringe characters, however, she consigned it to her “don’t go there” list, and in true Kate fashion she’d never thought much about it again. Actually, I knew far more about the issues around cloning than she did, not out of any intrinsic interest, but because it was my job.

“My firm has a case right now. A contract dispute over the first commercial order of cloned humans.”

“That? That’s your firm, Mikey?” Suddenly her focus had shifted. “It’s such a quiet case. I bet 90 percent of the general public aren’t even aware humans are being cloned on order.”

“For good reason.”

She nodded, her brow swooping upwards. “Liability, for instance. Suppose a clone goes crazy and kills some people?”

“That’s one of their arguments. But it’s easy to knock down. I know, because the firm we’re representing clones and sells humans for future delivery. So I could give you three counter arguments to the “Frankenstein” scenario and not even breathe hard. But I won’t.”

“Thank you, dear.”

“Yep, fringe characters,” I said, drinking up. “But they’ve got deep pockets.”

It got her attention that day, so many years ago–27 to be exact. Not for long, of course–Kate Edmonds wasn’t about to push reproductive cloning center stage in her mounting of the future and its forces. But like so many other passing oddities, it did catch her interest–for what seemed like almost three or four minutes–before she cast it to the side and moved on.

Jeff, by contrast, was a more pressing interest, and sensing I knew something I was holding back, she nagged at me until I had no choice but to identify him and tell her that, yes, yes, he and I played on the same rec league basketball team and had known each other for years–so there. It was something I had avoided, hoping, I suppose, it would go away. Kate wasn’t the only person who could predict outcomes–I knew exactly what would happen if Kate ever met Jeff. I had always maintained the hope that one day she would wake up and, like a smack in the head, suddenly realize what a good man I was, how perfect for her in every way, and so on. But the sun was setting on that fantasy. Jeff was the guy, Kate’s “perfect” match, Mr. Right. I had always looked out for her, so now I struggled, trying to balance two powerful urges: to make the match that would otherwise be made only in Heaven, and to keep that match from ever taking away what little piece of Kate’s devotion I could still cling to.

But reality, as inexorable as a weather front, took care of that. From middle school on, she’d never had the slightest inclination to see me play basketball. Now she came to one of my games. That night Jeff had the hot hand; he was our go-to guy, by design, but that night it looked as if he were pulling a spectacular scoring performance out of his ass. At least half of his baskets came on assists from me (always a spectacular passer, a master at supporting others, giving them what they needed), but that went unnoticed. What Kate saw was the rain of baskets from this gorgeous man.

We beat our opponents easily, but so what–what I saw was a chapter in my life ending.

Jeff had learned to fly helicopters on his own dime. It was all he’d ever wanted to do, from the time he was old enough to conceive the thought that he had a future and could choose it. He went to flight school, got his license, and worked at a series of jobs, piloting choppers for construction companies, hospital emergency services, custom couriers, anyone who’d hire him and give him a chopper to fly. He was one of those lucky people who want something simple in life, and know from the get-go what it is. Other things were like an afterthought, girls, cars, even basketball.

Ironically, Jeff and I had met years earlier, at basketball camp. We were 13, and though we went to different middle schools, we ended up playing on the same high school team. We were an odd couple on the court. No one was ever surprised to see him there, but they’d look twice at me. A girl I had a blind date with once told me later that the first time we went out, she’d said yes because she’d heard my name when the jocks she hung out with talked about school ball. When she saw me she thought it was a practical joke, that I wasn’t the guy whose name she’d heard. I remember the first half of that date being remarkably awkward. And the second half–when she realized it was true–remarkably smooth. You couldn’t blame her really: I looked like a nerd. A little taller than the average nerd, a little rangier maybe. In videos I’ve seen of myself I have that rolling walk I picked up from a couple of black players who were my friends, and it looks a little ridiculous.

Jeff and I had another common factor: neither of us had fathers. We had fathers, but in my case, I was a product of a couple who only saw each other on “dates,” and when my mom turned up pregnant,”dad” wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Jeff’s dad, a pilot himself (helicopters, come to think of it), was shot down in Iraq. Neither of our moms remarried or had any more kids. We were it. But there the similarity ends. In Jeff’s house, he was the little prince, the future king. Everything revolved in concentric circles around his life, his future, the limitless potential for a kid like him. By contrast, in my house, the future didn’t exist. There was only one time frame and that was now. There was only one royal, and that was Mom. Far from prince, I was consort to the queen. To the extent I had a life, it was defined by my role in hers. We were all about her.

As I look at this, I realized I could almost be talking about Kate. But is that any surprise?

On the court our play was a reflection of who we were. Jeff was the scorer, the guy you watched. What would he do next? I was the point guard. Coaches loved me because, even though I wasn’t anywhere near the athlete Jeff was, my hand-eye coordination was excellent, I had good judgement, listened well, supported the game plan. I could set picks, I could drive, I could hit the 3-pointer when called on, but my greatest value was in setting up scoring opportunities for the others–dishing the ball off, threading impossible needles, turning defensive stops into easy fast break baskets for one of the other guys. I was a confident ball handler and when pressured, could always find away to get the ball down the court and into the right hands, usually Jeff’s. I was his enabler. I still hold my high school’s record for assists, and most of them involved his scores.

Two more similarities: we both gave up the game after senior year to get serious about what we were really into. And we both took it up again, five years on, for sentimental reasons.

On the court our roles hadn’t changed. All that was different in me–and I don’t think Jeff ever got this–was that five years of living had ripened my awareness of of the degree to which sports are a projection of personality. And within a year I had proved it, by setting Jeff up for the most satisfying slam dunk of his life…Kate.

4.

Kate. Ah, Kate. What a girl she was. What a woman she is.

We were almost exactly he same age. I was a month or two older. That summer–2000, the Millenium year, our moms had hung out on the street together, waiting for their babies. It’s hard to think it’s been almost a half-century. That here it is 2045 and everything on that little street, all 100 yards of it, is just as it was then. We lived in Arlington Heights on Stevens Terrace, a cul de sac in a quiet upper middle class section of Arlington Heights, even though we had both been born at Beth Israel Hospital in Brookline, because Kate’s Mom said they had “state of the art obstetrics.” State of the art or not, my mom’s labor was one of the longest on record. I did not want to come out. Kate on the other hand blew out like a watermelon seed.

Kate was always ahead in everything. She walked long before I did. She skipped the baby talk stage and was prattling in complete sentences before I had uttered anything more erudite than “doggy!” She was athletic, and could beat even the older boys in our little Stevens Terrace rat pack. When we played at dusk in the sheltered little world of that street she always called the game. You have to know something about Arlington Heights to realize how sheltered we were. It is intentionally laid out in dead ends and cul de sacs to discourage through traffic. Cab drivers despaired because their maps would sometimes show a connecting street that turned out to be nothing more than a steep rocky path. The “Heights” were truly high, and we lived on a steep decline overlooking Boston miles away. At night the distant lights sparkled like those famous views of LA from the Hollywood Hills. Our back yards were so steep we had that view from any window. One of my earliest visual impressions is of that twinkling back carpet from Kate’s basement window. I’m not kidding, that’s how steep it was–and from the grownups point of view, what a luxury it was.

Most of my early memories, now that I think of it, involved being at Kate’s house. I don’t remember much at all about my house. I guess I grew up there, but in a way, the place I really grew up was next door, in Kate’s playroom, Kate’s basement, Kate’s wood-chip back yard, Kate’s huge deck, surrounded by a riot of wisteria, and Kate’s bedroom, where once in ancient times, Kate demanded to see my “thingy,” took a long look at it, and went “ewww,” causing me confusion that lasted months–and months can be ages when you’re eight. Later, talking abstractly about “the penis,” I remember her pronouncing that organ’s doom: “It’s going the way of the dinosaurs, you know, Mikey. There are so many other ways to get babies started these days, and there’ll only be more.” This at age 10.

When Kate’s mom died, she inherited 82 Stevens Terrace. The demand for Boston suburban homes had long ago gone through the roof–she could have sold it for at least a couple of million. “But why sell?” she said. “I don’t need the money. And it’s perfect. I had a perfect childhood here, and I want Jeff Jr. to have exactly the kind of childhood I had. The same emotional triggers, the sights, the physical associations, everything. I’m staying.”

Now, when Kate is beginning to learn, for the first time, why getting what you want might be a curse, when the “situation” she created and set into motion 17 years ago is defying all her expectations and taking her life in a direction she can no longer control, how ironic is it, in a closing-the-circle sort of way, that she’s back in that same house, the house of all our memories.

Of course, Kate could have lived anywhere in the world. By 2028 her celebrity had ripened, and it would wear well. At that time, she had the juice of youth to add her intellectual status. In recent years that’s abated somewhat––mellowed is the word most often used–although men will often observe to other men she’s still “hot.” Some might even think hotter, since what’s been lost in raw adolescent sexiness has been replaced by the allure of the movie diva who can play the sexy female lead well into her 40s.

But her bedrock uniqueness is this: after 20 years, the name Kate Edmonds still radiates edginess and genius. As a futurist and trend spotter, she holds a rare eminence in the small club of top corporate advisors. Not just brilliant and a woman, she’s charismatic and a source of endless curiosity among the powerful men (and women too) she advises. Time has only added to her near-cult status.

She now heads a team of junior consultants who work worldwide out of a suite in the vast new Harvard Corporate Tower Complex that overlooks the Charles, the B-School, Harvard Stadium, and beyond. In recent years there have been more books, more elite consulting contracts. These days she will only meet personally at the Fortune 100 CEO level. Occasionally she’ll testify on Capitol Hill or meets quietly with top echelon government officials from a number of countries. She travels anywhere, anytime, in the Edmonds corporate jet and keeps a full staff busy handling her expenses, accomodations, and investments. For convenience Edmonds Inc. maintains small offices in New York, LA, Peking, Teheran, Paris, and London.

On the block, the young mothers know she’s somebody significant, but they’re not sure exactly what it is she does. They don’t see her face on TV or the Web, so that’s about as much thought as they give it. She’s nice, kind of cool, a MILF–too old for their husbands, thank God–and she always has something interesting to say when she appears at block picnics, or steps out to meet her driver in the morning. (“Wow. That’s no wedding limo. I think she must own it. And maybe owns the dude, too. Just kidding.”)

No one really knows her in the street and Kate likes that. She says,”I know they gossip about me, but if they like me, what do I care? What they really know about me you could load into a doll’s thimble.”

Jeff Jr., meanwhile, will be a senior at Milton Academy this year. He’s a nice kid, and all I can say, choosing my words carefully, is that yes, he’s the image of his dad, and I’m one of the only people around who can vouch for that. He’s a little slimmer and more wirey than the Jeff that I introduced to Kate almost 20 years ago, but already the resemblance is startling.

Word has it he managed to avoid the druggy crowd at Milton, and is a nice, clean kid. I would almost say virginal, except he has a girlfriend, Tamara, who disables that notion on sight. We met once, and I would have to say she makes quite an impression. In looks she’s the opposite of Kate: she’s dark and Latin-looking (though she’s from Irish and Jewish stock) and possesses a remarkable physical confidence. I know it sounds like I’m trying NOT to say “she projects sexuality,” but I have a reason: her total effect transcends sex. It’s hard to describe, but when she enters a room, she owns it without even trying. The only other woman I’ve ever known who carries this charge with her is Kate. It’s not surprising that they don’t have the warmest relationship.

The one time I met Tamara was at a 75th birthday party for a lady on the Terrace, whose kids we all grew up with. Tamara made a quick appearance, was bright eyed and charming, and let Jeff Jr. introduce her around. Then the two of them were suddenly gone, off the catch a concert downtown.

Kate was uncharacteristically mute, watching them cut through Mrs. Fiske’s driveway, toward the bus stop. She also saw, and I knew she saw, Jeff Jr. clap a hand on one of Tamara’s attractive hips. In the growing darkness we were standing off to the side of the party in somebody’s unkempt lilac jungle, and it was just the two of us. I had the physical illusion of traveling silently through space with her. We too, alone in the universe, sailing through an endless vacuum. If ever there was a moment to let me in on the struggle she was in silently, this was it.

In earlier years, I had made it a practice to drop by with my basketball and whisk Jeff Jr. off to the courts up the hill. Even then, at 10 or 11l, he was beginning to resemble Jeff, though Kate never allowed herself to make the slightest mention of it. You’d have thought she didn’t notice it–you’d have thought that perhaps if you weren’t me. I knew better. However, it’s just not in me to thrust a subject forward–unless it’s in the courtroom. I react, I support. That’s what’s always made me a good team player.

Once, unconsciously, after Jeff Jr. had left the room, something made me shake my head and murmer, “Goddamn, that’s Jeff.” But the look I got back from her put me permanently on guard against ever doing that again. And to this day that’s pretty much the way it is.

1.

Kate said to me more than once, over the years, “Mikey, why couldn’t you have been gay?”

Sure, that would have been great for her. Maybe even for me. But the thing is, I wasn’t. Not even close. Too bad for us all, I guess, but from the very first time I noticed new curves in the girls I hung out with, I was hetero all the way. Achingly so. And in love with Kate.

I’ve never had a moment of not being in love with her, I suppose. Not in 30 years. We grew up in the same cul-de-sac outside Boston, we played on the block together, we went to school together, and we told each other things nobody else knew or ever knew. And this went on for years. It’s still that way, and probably will be till one of us dies. We were so intimate, at every stage of life, it’s like I was her oldest and best girlfriend.

And even though periodically I’ve felt new tides of possibility rising in me and tried to convince her to make us more than friends, I’ve been content to take what I could get–the crumbs that fall from her table, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it. I’ve been her confidante, her advocate when she needed a male voice, her babysitter, her and, okay, her slave. I’m old enough now to count back and count forward and calculate the fact that, regardless of whatever momentary ambitions or fleeting visions I’ve had for myself, my life has been not about me so much as it’s been about her. She rules me. I love her. It’s never changed. It never will.

Funny, too, because you wouldn’t think I’m the kind of guy who devotes himself to a lifelong Platonic friendship with a woman. I’m aggressive enough in my job – I work for a law firm that specializes in litigation. I’m a hired gun and I’ve gunned down many an opponent in the courtroom. I just recently stopped playing basketball, but for years I was one of the toughest competitors on any one of several outdoor courts around Boston, and started at forward for my Rec Team (we were Bay State Champs 8 years ago).

I love basketball. I always will.

I said that about Kate, didn’t I…? Yes, sometimes I notice these things. Sometimes not. Kate would never catch the irony, or if she did, she’d cast it aside as a worthless observation. Intellectually––and for Kate, intellect is her major thrust–she’s hardnosed, a utilitarian. If it’s not useful, don’t waste time on it. She’s always gone for the nugget of gold in the garbage most people fester in when they think, or spew when they talk. The one or two solid facts that can be used to build an intellectual road with, a kind of VIP highway for those whose mental qualifications give them a priviledge shot at the future. She was always this way. When she was eight, for instance, she told Miss McGrath, our 3rd grade teacher, that she would be transferred to a new school, probably in 3 years. She did it in a spirit of helpfulness. I can still hear her.

“Miss McGrath, you should make some plans, like look at houses over in Steadway now, while they’re cheap.” She actually liked Miss McGrath, which itself was odd, since she hardly ever liked dim witted adults. Miss McGrath shook her head in wonder at the strangeness of this beautiful little girl. Now I realize she must have been thinking, “How will this girl every get along with men when she’s grown?” It was after school, a quiet fall day. I had volunteered to help Miss McGrath clean up for the PTA meeting that evening, and Kate stayed only because of me.

“Thank you, Kate, but I’m very happy right where I am, and I don’t see much chance that I’ll be leaving Lexington anytime soon.”

Kate looked at her with mild contempt–I knew that’s what it was, anyway, but Kate had a way of hiding the harshness in any of her facial expressions, so to Miss McGrath it must have looked more like a combination of befuddlement and acquiescence.

“But you will, Miss McGrath. Do you want to know how I know?”

Miss McGrath’s indulgence, thin enough, evaporated. “Oh well, how?”

“Because there was this big downward trend in childbirths about 15 years ago in the upper-middle demographic, but the lower-middle and borderline poor folks kept on having more babies, and they all live in Steadman. Houses are really expensive here, and getting more expensive, so nobody but upper-middle people will be here in few years, and they don’t care about Home Ec. So they’ll send you to Steadman, knowing you might retire instead, but if not, you’ll fill a need there–all those Home Ec type girls–” She glanced at me. “And boys.”

Miss McGrath stared at Kate as though there were a spider on her forehead. Her head shook in a short spasm and she made shooing motions with her hands. “Thank you both. This will be fine. And Kate, I don’t know where you got this…little story, but–”

“It’s not a little story,” Kate said, reddening.

“It is, and you have no way of knowing any of that…malarky.”

When Miss McGrath was under great pressure, the Boston Irish in her would come forth in the form of a words like that, words she never used. Malarky. I could see Kate preparing another comeback. “Kate,” I said. I tugged at her shoulder until she turned.

“Goodby, Mike, and thank you both,” said Miss McGrath with finality, from inside a bubble of officiousness.

“She’s a gorp,” Kate said, after we were in the stairwell. “I’ve never liked her. She’s not like you and me, Mikey. She can’t see the future coming.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t see the future coming, and I knew Kate couldn’t either. Not the real future. Not that she wasn’t brilliant–she certainly had a weird insight into demographic trends. She read science fiction and was a good card player, able to beat adults because she could figure out what cards they had and how they would play them. She was a phenomenon, all right. But as for the real future. The future that’s a product of not just of empirical data and statistical trends, but also misplaced passions, emotional decisions, human denial, and pure chance. Even then I had an inkling that though she was brilliant, that didn’t make her really smart. Wise, I would have said a few years later.

All of which is ironic to an infinite degree, so ironic that the irony underlies, and is the reason for, this story. And especially ironic in that she became of all things a futurist. Not just any common garden variety futurist either. By the age of 26 she was (as she still is) one of the country’s leading future consultants, addressing corporate CEO retreats, advising Boards of Directors, consulting with marketing managers and product officers on trends likely to make or break their companies’ futures. And it didn’t hurt, of course, that the beauty even Miss McGrath had noted unfurled into the kind of spectacular presence that not only lights up a room, as they say, but also makes every man want you, and every woman want to be you.

She was Kate Edmonds, Future Consultant, and I was Michael Belson, her executive assistant. I traveled with her on her magic carpet. In meetings I was “Michael” or occasionally “Mike.” But I was still “Mikey” back at the hotel room––we shared one in those early days, the pre-Jeff days–because she needed me close. I soothed her. I held her up. I “talked sense” to her. I rubbed her back. And she could–and did–tell me anything. So of course we shared a room. And never once, never once in those years, did I touch her in any way other than sisterly.

I take it back, once I did touch her as a man. I pulled her to me and kissed her. And for a minute or so she kissed me back. Then I felt her stiffen, then slacken, then she laughed–not in a hurtful way, but a charming, silly way that made me laugh too, and that moment was over. Over, we both half-knew, for good. It should not have happened, she told me once years later. It was a procedural mistake, and not even a big one. It had to be erased, that’s all.

2.

We all have two clocks. One is the outer clock that we all agree on. It tells us we’re late or the game is starting or it’s time for a cocktail. The other is an inner clock, and it’s different for everyone. For some people, no matter how old they get it’s still morning. Others seem to be born into darkness, somewhere near midnight. My own clock doesn’t differ too much from the world’s. I’m 46 years old and if you ask me what time it is inside, on my inner clock, I’d say 4 or 5 pm. The day is getting on. The sun has begun to soften and glow and there’s a feeling I’d better make the most of what’s left of the afternoon light before dusk draws the first layer of curtain on my day, and before I know it, it will be evening moving toward deep night.

The other day I did some hard thinking–about myself, for a change. For a number of years now, I’ve reserved that kind of thinking for my clients, for Jeff, Jr., and for Kate, and the other day it struck me that I’ve spent a good 20 years without the slightest sense that any time at all had passed. I’ve operated as though time would begin for me sometime in the future–maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, next year–but until then, I was off the clock. I had no need to become anything beyond what I was. My legal career, as successful as it has been, was a kind of cover. It was what I did: tending to Kate’s welfare was what I was There’s a perfect word for it, one you don’t hear much anymore. To “husband.” The verb. It means to manage with care and solicitousness, and that’s what I’ve been able to do for Kate all these years. I’ve “husbanded” her in every way but the one I used to desire most, and occasionally still do. In philosophical moments, I can say I’ve had what I wanted–to be near her, to have a place in her life all these years. I’ve been her closest confidant, her oldest friend, her advocate, her shield. With Jeff suddenly gone and no new husband in sight, I saw her stagger, realizeing for the first time that life could deal you serious hurt. Later, with Jeff Jr. to raise, and wounded as she was, she might fallen for good. The way I saw it, there was no choice: Jeff’s function, by default, came down to me.

So now, at four or five o’clock, my sun no longer high and white hot, and my time–the time on my inner clock–limited, what have I spent “my day” doing? One thing: being the indispensable man in Kate’s life. Without knowing exactly when, I made that key border crossing, from “what I will someday be” to “what I am.” Nowadays I never give it a thought, because in my case, it never mattered. There were moments of personal vision when I was a kid, flickers of ambition, but they just don’t come up anymore. I’m what I always was, provisional–and I had to be. Anything else would have been bad for Kate. If I’d “had a life,” I wouldn’t be able to stand by for her, now or then.

So who does that make me, or what? Tell me, if you want, if you can. It doesn’t matter; it’s not important. Frankly, the question carries no charge for me, and while I can’t say I’m thrilled about that, I’ll take it.

My epitaph, if I wrote it today, would have to say something like: “He loved another more than himself.” What’s nobler, really? We admire that in a man. I seem spontaneous. I live as if every day were Day 1–the first day of my life. We admire that too. Women in particular are attracted to that in me. But it’s an illusion. There’s no reason I should inspire anyone’s admiration. Virtue doesn’t have the slightest thing to do with it, because even if loving and caring for Kate the way I do were despised, illegal, taboo, I would still live my life for Kate and die for her too, one day at a time. No one understands this….

These days, with Jeff Jr. finally a man, and Kate’s emotions in free fall, it’s difficult for me to help her. For once, she’s suffering for a terrible failure in futurecasting–she completely botched her own futurecast, and it’s just dawning on her, and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. I rise for work and everything around me tries to remind me I’m a success. It takes me a while to get out of bed. From where I have my coffee I can look out over the Charles River and down toward the Harbor where the vaulting new towers split the horizon line. It’s a vision of earthly power, but it does nothing to shake out the gloom that lines my brain. More coffee and the mood starts to brighten. By the afternoon, the day hasn’t been all that bad. Add it up and I can honestly say I’m not hurting. Not really. Even if I have to share it, I own my own soul. Even having lived as half a man, I’m free.

* * * * *

Kate was only 26 when she fired her first shot across the corporate establishemnt’s bow. Random House knew damn well what they had when they published her now-classic first book, “The Far End of Now.” They’d had the good sense to picture her front and center on the cover, radiating youth and brilliance. She was wearing a sexy Jason Woo that barely covered her strategic places, yet still managed to project chastity and the deadly serious business of the boardroom. That cover alone almost immediately made her a star on the corporate playing field, but ultimately it was the book inside, a gracefully muscular intellectual performance–that announced the arrival of a new kind of consultant. She was the total package, so brilliant, so good lookng, so young, so right that institution planners and managers everywhere had to have Kate Edmonds for their brand strategy meeting, Kate Edmonds for their marketing conference, Kate Edmonds for their top management retreat.

She took to it without surprise because she’d always known it was coming.

She knew it at age 11 or 12 when she told me, “Mike, I know the future. Don’t ask me why, I just do.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“It’s like being able to fold your tongue when no one else can. They try and try, but it doesn’t work. I don’t even try and I’m doing it.”

She knew it a few years later when she went to Wellesly. Everything she studied there she tolerated since, given her broad purview, it was part of building models for possible futures. That’s the way she put it.

I remember years later, after Jeff’s accident, how Sally Bomar had gotten a little drunk at his memorial service and whispered sloppily in my ear, “Why didn’t she stop him. She let him do that. If she can tell the fucking future, why couldn’t she DO something about it?”

“She did,” I said.

Sally adored Kate almost as much as I did…but not LIKE I did. She was a woman, and from time to time there came those moments when her adoration almost showed itself as competitiveness. Moments like this.

Sally had once said to me, “She’s everything I could every hope to be. Only…why does she talk about it in such alien terms?

We had been drinking, out of boredom and loneliness. Kate was in Singapore or someplace and neither of us was in the mood to improvise an independent social life. Rather than end up in bed together, which would have been silly, we kept mixing martinis, and talking about Kate.

I knew what she meant–we had probably had 89 variations of this conversation over the years. “Alien’s the wrong word, Sal–”

“Then what, for crapssake?” she slurred. “Or why?”

“She’s been so used to having what she’s got. Plus every gift she has, everything that impresses and amazes the rest of us, she’s always taken for granted that it was coming.”

Sally’s cheeks ballooned a little, betraying a silent belch. Then her eyes widened and her face paled and went blank. I knew what was coming.

“Sal, let’s move closer to the bathroom.”

“But you know what she told me,” Sally went on, not budging,”and she believes it–she doesn’t just know what’s coming, she can control it.”

I had noticed. It was a new wrinkle in Kate’s brain, and I didn’t particular like it. But I wasn’t about to give Sally’s little fire any more fuel.

“Look Sal, that’s just a…you know, one of those playful notions she gets. It’s not a belief, it’s hardly even an idea–”

She waved me off. “Yes it is, Mikey. And it could even be true.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, no–Mikey, why do we feel like this? Like she’s from the Planet Krypton instead of being like us? Maybe she is?”

I laughed out loud, and Sally mirrored me, grinning, but she hadn’t finished. “No, Mikey, think about it: wouldn’t it actually have to be real because it’s so creepy, so unlike her? This is not Kate–there’s no logic to it. She always, always, always makes sense, right? And this doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

She looked at me steadily, deeply sober for a moment. “Because nobody who could realy make their life happen would need me. Or need you.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

She stared back at me as if slowly translating my words.

“She needs me, she needs you, she needs Jeff. Trust me. Erasing one of us would be like pulling off a limb.”

Sally’s face softened, then hardened again. “I’m gonna cry,” she muttered. Later, in the bathroom, Mike heard her puking quietly but insistently, right on schedule, as predicted.