CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Holy shit,” I said to Rovil. Ollie and I stood side by side in his foyer, surveying his apartment. “This is like a fucking Sims house.”

He smiled hesitantly, not getting the reference.

“The Sims,” I said. “Computer game when I was a kid.” Supposedly the point was to guide your virtual self into getting a job and falling in love and starting a family, but I spent all my time using cheat codes to get virtual dollars which I then used to build the coolest house and fill it with the coolest gadgets and furniture.

Rovil was playing it in real life. The apartment was overcrowded with trendy objects: white leather couches, a La Cornue gas range, white walls that became video screens and video screens that acted as walls, a sleek steel dining room table that appeared to hover over the floor, a glass-encased samurai sword … Each item was tremendously expensive, and each looked like it belonged in a different house.

Just like the twelve-year-old me, Rovil had no taste.

“How much is Landon-Rousse paying you?” I asked.

“It’s only two bedrooms,” Rovil said.

“It’s two bedrooms on the Lower East Side with that fucking view,” I said. The floor-to-ceiling windows were the classiest things about the apartment. We were on the twentieth floor, looking across the sparkling night city toward the Williamsburg Bridge, which glowed and pulsed with the lights of traffic. If it were me, I would have emptied the apartment except for a single couch and then set it in front of the window.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” Dr. Gloria said. “I need to see the city.” She slid through the window and flapped into the night.

Rovil said, “LR does compensate me a little better than Little Sprout did.”

“What do you do for them?” Ollie said. She was scanning the room as if it were a vault to unlock. She’d barely spoken during the ride south, and I was growing nervous about her mental state.

“I’m a product owner,” Rovil said.

“Which means…?” she asked.

“I’m responsible for overseeing everything to do with a product during its entire life cycle, from R&D to testing to marketing.”

“What product is that?”

“Ollie, leave him alone,” I said.

Rovil smiled, embarrassed. “It’s not out yet. I would have to have you sign a nondisclosure agreement.”

Ollie bristled. “After all we’ve shared, you’re going to ask us to sign an NDA?”

“I’m sorry,” Rovil said, truly apologetic. “I didn’t mean—”

I stepped between them. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s get settled. I need a shower, and then Rovil’s going to take us out for dinner, right, Rovil?”

I hadn’t mentioned this to him, but he grinned. “Yes, of course.”

“Great,” I said. “Now show us where we’re bunking.”

Ollie and I carried our shopping bags into the second bedroom, which Rovil didn’t seem to use. There were cardboard boxes stacked in the corner, a small desk, and a futon. He found us towels and bed linens, and then showed us the guest bathroom.

I took the first turn in the shower. When I got back, Ollie was crouched over one of the boxes.

“What are you doing?” I said, whispering and laughing at the same time.

She showed me the open box, which was lined with several white plastic bottles. “Rovil brings his work home with him,” she said.

“Are those drugs?” I kept my voice low. “What kind?”

“The bottles aren’t marked,” she said. “But the boxes are all Landon-Rousse.”

“Well put ’em back. Most of what they make are cancer drugs. The side effects are killer.”

“What’s he doing with them?” she asked.

“I dunno. Factory seconds?” I opened the shopping bag full of clothes that Rovil had bought for us. I’d made him stop at a mall on the way home. “I can’t see Rovil as a drug dealer. Though, hey, he is loaded.” I lifted out a pair of new black jeans and a gray sweater.

“You shouldn’t have told him all that stuff,” Ollie said. She closed up the box. “He can testify against us now.”

“Nobody’s testifying against anybody. He’s in the same boat as us, now.” I pulled the sweater down over my head. “Besides, Rovil’s god wouldn’t let him harm us.”

She leaned against the desk, her arms wrapped about herself as if she were cold, and stared at the Persian rug (a beautiful piece, with the price tag still attached by a string to one corner). Her eyes flicked across its surface as if reading fast-moving messages. “Now that we’re in the US, we’re vulnerable. He lured us—”

“I called him,” I said. “I dragged him into this.”

“But still—”

“You’re doing it again, Ollie. This is exactly how you felt at the Smokes’ house. You didn’t trust them; you didn’t know why they’d help us. But that worked out, didn’t it?”

“This is different.”

“Honey, it’s time.”

She looked up, squinting. “No. Not yet.”

“You did your job; you got us across the border. You need to start getting these meds into your system.”

“We still haven’t gotten to Edo,” she said. “Until that happens, you do not want me off my game.”

“I’m just saying, you need to start loading up. There’s no jumpstart for going the other way.”

“What about you? Are you going to take your meds?”

“I don’t take any meds,” I said. My heart rate had revved like the throttle on that fucking ro-boat.

“The antiepileptics you were taking in the NAT,” she said. “The ones to keep your hallucinations in check.”

“Those don’t work. I lied to Counselor Todd about ’em.”

“You never took them—you palmed them and threw them in the toilet. So how do you know they don’t work?”

Fuck. I didn’t know that Ollie had sussed that out.

“This isn’t about me,” I said, doing my best impersonation of a calm person. “You’re deflecting.”

“I’m deflecting?” Ollie said. “You are bullshitting me, right now, to my face.”

“Ollie, please…”

“It’s not your job to manage me,” Ollie said.

I sat down on the futon and tried to steady my breathing. Right about now Dr. G would have made some comment about the likelihood of two brain-damaged patients holding it together during the world’s craziest road trip. We both needed professional supervision.

“Okay,” I said. “We just both need to keep our shit together for a little while longer.”

*   *   *

I hadn’t been in New York for over a decade, so I asked Rovil to pick a place we could walk to. He chose an Egyptian restaurant that he said had the highest aggregate score across the major social networks of any establishment that was (a) in SoHo, and (b) did not require reservations. “Have you ever been there?” I asked him.

“Oh yes.”

“Did you like it?”

“I’m not a good enough judge of food to disagree with the scores.”

Dr. Gloria was waiting for us at a street corner, looking happy after a couple hours of sightseeing. “Have you noticed how clean the city is?” she asked me.

It was true. The sidewalks were swept, and I didn’t spot a single homeless person on the three-block walk to the restaurant. Was it just Rovil’s neighborhood, or the entire city? Times Square had already been Disneyfied by the time I first visited as a teenager, back in the 2000s. Perhaps they’d been pushing the circle of cleanliness wider and wider, an event horizon of money that made ordinary reality disappear. The economic collapse that had knocked my father out of the workforce for half a decade was long forgotten. The new boom had made Manhattan into an island of millionaires.

My mood improved as soon as we walked into the restaurant. The dining room was crowded and noisy. I got the hostess to seat us at a sheltered spot in the corner where we could talk more easily. We sat at a low table on padded stools, and soon I was scooping piles of unidentified vegetables and beans onto the wide, floppy Egyptian bread. I said to Rovil, “Do you want me to rate it dish by dish, or only when we’re done?”

“When we’re done is fine,” he said.

*   *   *

A while later I asked him, “How’d you do it, Rovil? The car, the job, the apartment…”

“I try to work hard.”

“Do your bosses know about your condition?”

“I told them it was a bicycle accident.”

I laughed. “Not the bruises. I meant your other condition.”

“Oh! Yes, of course.” He looked embarrassed. “But not exactly. They think I am cured.”

“But you’re not, are you?” Ollie asked.

“Oh no,” he said, not taking offense.

“Because I don’t see your eyes jumping around,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“When Lyda talks to her angel, she can’t help but look at it,” Ollie said.

Rovil glanced at me, surprised.

Dr. Gloria said, “I hadn’t noticed that.”

“See?” Ollie said to me. “You just did it.” To Rovil she said, “But you, you’re steady, all the time. You’re not distracted by it?”

“Ah,” Rovil said. He wiped his mouth and sat back. “My god and I have … I guess you would call it an agreement. It was important to me that no one suspect that I was different. People would not understand. So, my god stays out of sight unless I desire him to appear.”

“I wish mine would do that,” I said.

“Ahem,” Dr. Gloria said.

Rovil smiled. “I feel Ganesh with me all the time. But only rarely does he speak in words.”

“Again, jealous.”

Ollie said to Rovil, “It doesn’t bother you that he came to you only after you overdosed on a drug?”

“It’s a fair question,” Rovil said. “I of course understand your skepticism. It’s logical to think that I’m experiencing a hallucination. But the overdose awakened me; it didn’t put me to sleep. I believe that this sensitivity to the godhead, this facility, exists in all humans, but we cannot access it on demand. The higher power is waiting there for us to reach out to it. The drug simply tore down all those defenses, all the walls that kept God out.”

“But your god has an elephant head,” Ollie said. “Hers is an angel. Gilbert sees some kind of organic, plant-like structure, and Edo—”

“I need to stop being impressed every time you know something about my life that I haven’t told you,” I said to Ollie.

“The trial was covered in the news,” she said. “The transcripts are all online. I read them the day you came to the hospital.” She shrugged. “Don’t take it personally. I did a backgrounder on everyone back then.” Then meaning in the hospital, when she was off the meds, paranoid and determined enough to run a search despite being allowed no access to pens or the internet. She said, “From what I read, all of you were exposed to the drug, but you all had different experiences.”

“It’s true,” Rovil said. “God appears differently for each believer. He—or She, this higher power—takes whatever form that the believer can understand. It’s always been this way, which I admit has caused some problems. Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists—they perceive Him differently, but it’s all the same God.”

“Amen,” the doctor said.

“The Divine Asshole hypothesis,” I said. “God’s fucking with us, putting on masks, changing His name, hiding dinosaur bones in rocks—just to test our faith.”

Rovil laughed. “You are as profane as always. Our misunderstanding of God is not His fault. Our job is to seek Him out.”

“He’s sure not making it easy,” I said. “At this point there must be some evidence for the existence of God. But where’s the proof?”

“This isn’t about proof,” he said. “It’s about faith. Science and religion do not have anything to say—”

“Spare me the NOMA bullshit. God is a testable hypothesis.”

He smiled. “You’re quoting Victor Stenger.”

Ollie frowned, not following us.

“A physicist,” I said. “One of the old New Atheists, like Dawkins and Hitchens.”

“They’re in Hell now,” Dr. Gloria said.

“And NOMA?” Ollie asked.

“Nonoverlapping magisteria,” I said. “Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, which was just him trying to pussy out of the argument and declare a truce. But he was wrong. If God created the universe, then He ought to at least be detectable. Even if He’s some deist god who set the clockwork in motion and then left the scene, never to interfere again, we ought to be able to see a few of His fingerprints on the Big Bang. But no, not even there. And don’t get me started on the anthropic principle or Intelligent Design.”

“I will not defend ID,” Rovil said.

“How about prayer, then?”

“You want me to defend prayer?” he asked.

“You believe in it, don’t you?”

“Of course. I commune with God every day, even if not in words. Don’t you?”

“I’m talking intercessory prayer. People all over the world pray for God to heal their loved ones. They’ve been doing that for thousands of years—millions and millions of prayers. Surely one of them had to be answered in a verifiable way. Just give me one double-blind, placebo-controlled trial where those prayers healed a sick person, and we’re done here.”

“Please don’t bring up amputees again,” Dr. Gloria said.

“Oh, and amputees!” I said. “Why does God hate them? He’s hell on curing cancer, but if you happen to be a vet with your leg blown off, you’re shit out of luck, no matter how hard you pray. How do people still believe in this shit?”

Rovil said, “You can’t just dismiss—”

“Let me finish. The only thing that gives me hope is that the fundamentalists are on the ropes here. When I was a kid, they were this scary political force. Remember the Tea Party? Right-wing, Christian, and white. But then gays started marrying, minorities started outvoting them, the climate kept throwing hurricanes and floods at us. Their agenda fell apart, mostly because no young person could buy into their narrow-mindedness.”

“There’s still a right wing,” Rovil said.

“But now they’re way out on the fringe, and they’ve turned feral. They eat their young. Yeah, they’re still vicious, but now they’re a little ridiculous, like coyotes poaching the occasional poodle.”

“You can be religious without being narrow-minded,” Ollie said.

“The open-mindedness is almost worse,” I said. “All this vague, wishy-washy spiritualism. People going to church just to feel better. You ask them what god they worship and they don’t even know. They’re morons.”

Rovil glanced at Ollie, then frowned. I followed his gaze. Ollie was staring at her hands, her lips tight.

“Oh, Lyda,” Dr. G said. “Have you ever asked Ollie if she believes in God?”

Fuck.

“I didn’t mean you were a moron,” I said.

She pushed back from the table, started to turn away, then said, “You don’t have to be so … so…” She raised a hand, then walked away, toward the restrooms.

I thought about following her, then decided to give her some space. “Speaking of morons,” I said.

Rovil nodded, not objecting.

I said, “I keep forgetting that people take this God stuff personally.”

“This is why people don’t like atheists,” he said. He raised his bandaged hand to signal for the check. “The rudeness.”

“It’s the stress of being outnumbered even though we’re right.”

“That’s what I don’t understand,” Rovil said. “You’re not an atheist, though you pretend to be one. You know the truth as well as I do.”

“Sorry, no.”

“You’re a smart gal,” he said, failing to keep the smile from his face. “You’ve been trained as a scientist. Why do you ignore the evidence of your own experience?”

The Rat Boy, busting on me. I liked it.

“Because personal experience is the crappiest evidence of all, kid. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, the brain is one lying son of a bitch.”

When Ollie returned I tried to apologize, but she brushed it aside. Her face was composed. “Let’s talk about how we’re going to reach Edo,” she said.