The Waning Age Read online

“An awakening?”

  “A religious awakening.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He was a different person afterwards. He said that none of it made sense anymore. Philosophy, I mean.”

  “What did Professor Hoffman teach?”

  “Ethics.” She sniffed. “Moral philosophy.”

  “I’m impressed he managed to make that popular.”

  She looked at me like I had just exposed myself as an idiot by calling London the capital of China. “Moral philosophy is at the very center of every current debate about what emotions are. It’s what organizes the ethical codes by which society functions. His work was absolutely vital.”

  “I see.”

  She shook her head. “And even despite that, he stopped believing in it. He said it was pointless. Even misleading. He felt like he was lying to the students.”

  “So he had to stop teaching.”

  “Yes. He said he had to follow his new calling.”

  “And do you have any idea where that new calling took him?”

  “I heard he became a minister.” She gave a hard little laugh. “That seemed strange to me. But I guess you could say lecturing in front of students isn’t so different from giving a sermon to parishioners.”

  So he liked the sound of his own voice either way. “He was good with an audience.”

  “That’s right,” she agreed.

  “You don’t know where? Or what kind of place?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “A church. One of those trendy ones that’s a mishmash of old and new.” She caught herself, and I could see her trying to figure out if I was trendy myself.

  I gave her a crooked smile of reassurance. “I know the kind you mean. In Berkeley?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think if he were nearby we’d hear more about him. Those types have a presence in the community, if you know what I mean.”

  I did. “Thank you so much . . .” I dangled, waiting for her name.

  “Nora.”

  “Thank you so much, Nora. If I find him I’ll let you know where he ended up.”

  She thought about saying no but instead gave a little nod. “He was a very good professor,” she said, as if this explained the wish to know where the man who had left her hanging had disappeared to.

  * * *

  —

  On my way to San Francisco on the BART, I wrote Joey a long message explaining what I’d learned and where I was going now. While he chewed it over I did some quick research on trendy churches, but I could tell it was one of those things I would have to do on foot. Many of them were premised on a rejection of everything contemporary, so that meant no evangelizing online and in some cases no online presence at all. This was going to be a job for the phone book and my walking shoes.

  Maybe Joey would help.

  He wrote back to say that I was crazy for agreeing to train with Gao. Joey didn’t get along with Gao as well as I did. He doesn’t like hitting things, even in self-defense, and Gao definitely believes in hitting things.

  I agreed with him and asked if he would help me make a list of churches catering to disenchanted philosophers and their ilk. He said he would. He also told me that he’d deployed a trio of unemployed buddies to watch RealCorp.

  I don’t advise it, I typed. They might get eaten alive.

  Don’t worry, he replied. They know what they’re doing.

  If you say so.

  Speaking of being eaten alive, he typed, sorry but you have another problem.

  What?

  He sent me a screenshot. It was a photo: me, glancing over my shoulder as I hurried an old lady off a subway. The white text beneath the image read 10/11, 3ASLTS; 74K BID HERE.

  Uh-oh? I typed to Joey. Should I be worried about you? Why are you browsing Fish apps?

  Not browsing. Searching.

  I sighed. I’d been too occupied to think about the Fish, but Joey had gone to the trouble. It isn’t hard to find the sites where the Fish troll for bait. They are free for all, open seas. It’s either total coincidence or wry cunning that makes the Fish apps an exact mirror of the police listings, where bounties are posted for the most notorious sea creatures. There are plenty of people who aren’t Fish but still glom on to the rise and fall of bounties, the catch and release of prey.

  In case you are curious, he went on, that means there’s a 74 thousand dollar bounty on your head. And growing.

  Maybe I should take myself out? That’s a lot of cash.

  Dimwit, this is real.

  Who has that kind of money to burn? I wondered.

  Small bids. They add up. There’s a related story about your heroics. You’re in tenth place.

  For beauty?

  Highest bounties on the site.

  Well. Can’t be helped.

  Be careful, Joey typed.

  I could do that, to an extent. I kept my eyes peeled on the BART, but the trains were almost empty and there was hardly any talking, let alone uninvited solicitations with a switchblade. I got out at Montgomery and took the bus from there to Pacific Heights, with its breezy perch above the bay, its baroque beauty, its nasty secrets tucked away. Pac Heights is a starlet with rotting teeth: beautiful until she smiles.

  As I climbed the hill to the address Gao had given me, I considered whether it was time to empty my meager savings account and buy a car. It would make all this back-and-forthing a lot easier. And I was probably going to need a getaway car for Cal. Then again, maybe I was going to need those meager savings to pay a 0.1 percent down payment on legal fees. At this point, anything could happen. Better to wait on the car.

  The views from Philbrick’s mansion were, predictably, breathtaking. Also I had just climbed a nearly vertical hill. But from the corner I could see the sparkling water and the toy boats and the low, easy hills of Marin County. The more immediate view wasn’t bad, either: a stucco palace with iron balconies and rampant bougainvillea, a Tudor mansion with shuttered windows and a mysterious flag, a block of glass and cement with an integrated greenhouse and a front door that looked stolen from a Buddhist temple. I could tell this was the kind of crowd that stole stuff but didn’t call it stealing. They were collectors.

  Philbrick’s house gave me a crystalline impression of the man’s self-regard. It was a stone castle with turrets. Ivy and climbing roses covered most of the walls. The picture of medieval authenticity was a little marred by the massive windows—easily ten feet tall and just as wide—but I guess you can’t blame Philbrick for wanting more than the occasional peephole from which to admire his view. Besides, if he wanted to throw burning tar from an upper story on his visitors, the big windows would work as well as little ones.

  The streets were quiet. Eerie quiet. No one walking a dog. No one playing music a little too loudly. No one getting in or out of a fancy car. The only sound was the occasional whine of a leaf blower. I took out De rerum and leaned against a high garden wall so I wouldn’t look quite so suspicious standing there on the corner staring at Philbrick’s house.

  Besides, while Pac Heights napped, I had more work to do. I read the articles Joey had sent me by and about Hugh Glout. He had been in the business for decades. Stanford boy twice over, with a five-hundred-page dissertation on pupil dilation. Really scintillating stuff, believe me. As for the later publications, it was like reading a book with half the words cut out. I could see that a lot of the RealCorp work was proprietary—couldn’t be written about, couldn’t be referenced—and yet it was there, by insinuation, signaled by the blank spots and the surrounding words. I could also see that there was a handful of scientists who would have liked to see Glout chopped up and pickled in his own juices. I think the in-house term is “scholarly dispute.” As far as I could tell, this seemed to revolve around methods, not results. They thought Glout jumped to conclusions from small trials, and Glout had
some indignant things to say about their ethics. He’d even gone so far as to advocate the expansion of some regulation called the “common rule” so that minors had greater protections. A lot of people didn’t like that. So the articles told me that Glout was kind of an outsider, maybe even a scientific loner. Well, I had already deduced that from the long fingernails.

  Time passed. The white lace in the windows of the stucco palace billowed in and out, reminding me of Marlowe’s office: net curtains puckering like the lips of a toothless man sleeping. The muted wails of ship horns drifted up on the ocean breeze. A landscaping truck roared down the street, the equipment bouncing noisily in the back. More whining from the leaf blower. After an hour I came to the conclusion that gardeners were the only living people in Pac Heights.

  Almost an hour after I arrived, the iron gate of Philbrick’s house rolled aside on its motorized wheels, and a small car peeled out of the driveway. It was painted blue with big white bubbles, and the lettering on the sides said CRYSTAL CLEANERS. I was standing close enough to see the driver as she zoomed by, but she didn’t see me. A bit older than I was, leaning forward in her seat, jaw clenched. She looked like she wanted to get out of the stone castle in a hurry. The motorized gate groaned shut. I stared at it a while longer, my own wheels turning, while the monotonous silence of Pac Heights settled in once more around me.

  After a few minutes’ deliberation I looked up Crystal Cleaners. Their central office was in Chinatown. I chugged down the hill a little ways and caught a bus heading east that crossed Van Ness and carried me to the edge of Chinatown. The streets were not quiet. Every other store had vegetables in crates on the curb, crowding the pedestrians. These were a lively lot. In the span of a block, I saw a heated argument in Cantonese, an attempted seduction that ended badly, and three children chasing a live chicken. There were no landscapers.

  Crystal Cleaners was on the second floor above a dumpling shop. I climbed the steps, knocked on the open door, and walked into the surprisingly spacious office. There were more than twenty-five screen decals on the otherwise blank wall to my left, arranged in three tidy rows. They honked and roared and jabbered away at half volume. All but one were streaming people in China. The last was the same prison inmate in Nevada battling lung cancer. I guess he was getting to be as popular as the Fish.

  Three women sat at their desks against the wall, and from the contents of their work screens I could see that they were juggling schedules, supply orders, and employee files. Another woman, tiny and round, slept upright in an armchair upholstered with red damask. The fifth woman sat facing me at the reception desk and was on the phone. She had an air of fidgety efficiency: neat hair cut short, ironed shirt, fingernails bitten down to the quick, polished shoes peeping out underneath the desk. “Yes,” she was saying expressionlessly into the phone. “Yes, very well.” She glanced at me. “Yes,” she said again. “Good, thank you.” She put the phone down, made a note on the pad of paper she was holding, swatted quickly at the screen decal pasted onto her desk blotter, and looked up.

  “How can I help you?”

  “I’m here about a job,” I said. “I used to work at the Landmark and then I worked at RealCorp for a while, but I’m looking for a job with more flexible hours, since I’m going back to night school. Mr. Philbrick said I might ask you.”

  The woman looked at me with the same expressionless face she’d used on the phone. I knew I’d said something significant because the three typists, engrossed as they were in their work, turned around and stared at me. The tiny sleeping woman didn’t budge. I waited for a clue. None of them were on synaffs, so I could read nothing on their faces. Only curiosity. One of the women looked me up and down a few times, as if considering what I’d look like in my underwear. That was interesting, but it didn’t help me much. Then one of them muttered something in Mandarin that was uncomplimentary to Mr. Philbrick. I was familiar with the phrase thanks to Gao, who used it often and translated it, when asked, as “malignant son of a pernicious goat.” I don’t think that’s the real translation, but I got the gist.

  “Did I misunderstand his referral?” I asked innocently.

  The three women slowly swiveled back to their screens, and the receptionist motioned to a chair. “Sit down,” she said. I sat in the wooden chair and shimmied it across the floorboards to the edge of her desk. She tapped the tips of her nail-bitten fingers together. “This is new,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to herself. She scrolled through her screen decal and moved her teeth around, thinking. Experimentally, she chewed on her left pointer finger. “Philbrick recommended you to work at his house, right?”

  “He didn’t say exactly, but since I was a good cleaner at RealCorp, I guess that was the implication.”

  She chewed some more. When she was done with that finger she moved on to the next one. All the while she studied me with what she probably thought was discreetness. There was a calculating look to her appraisal, as if she was trying to figure out how I’d do in the ring against some imaginary opponent. She was having an internal argument about the odds.

  Then, to my surprise, the tiny sleeping woman spoke without opening her eyes. Five or six words in Mandarin, slow but assured, like a master painter with a brush.

  The receptionist looked at her and nodded. “Okay,” she finally said. The argument was over. “Fine.” She shook her head quickly with the air of someone who has decided to wash her hands of a sticky situation. “Can you drive?” she asked me.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “All the cleaners use company cars. The cleaning equipment is in the car. You pick up and return to the garage off Van Ness. Absolutely no use of company cars for personal matters.”

  “Understood,” I agreed.

  “When do you want to start?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Tomorrow?” she asked. Now that the decision was made, she was eager.

  “That would be great.”

  “Good. Fill out this form, we’ll run a quick background check, but assuming everything is fine, you’ll be expected at the residence at nine tomorrow morning.” She handed me a screen decal on a clipboard. It took me only a few minutes to fill in all my details, and I had to hope that they wouldn’t actually call the Landmark. Usually employers just settle for the license and credit check—those tell them everything they care about anyway. When I was done she scrolled to another form, this one a rather daunting collection of legal disclaimers. Basically, Crystal Cleaners could send me in to clean up after an Ebola outbreak or a nuclear waste spill, and it would not be their fault if anything happened to me. I signed. Last of all, the nail-biter handed me a sheet of paper with Philbrick’s address and directions to the parking garage where the cars were kept. There was a handwritten phone number at the bottom of the paper.

  “Is this the Philbricks’ number?”

  “No. That number is for emergencies. Real emergencies,” she said, giving me a hard look. “That is Ma Ling’s number.” She pointed at the tiny sleeping woman. “If something happens that is truly an emergency, you may call her. Not otherwise.”

  Ma Ling opened one eye to look at me sleepily. I nodded at her. “Okay,” I said. It wasn’t too clear to me what Ma Ling could do in an emergency of any magnitude, other than maybe sleep through it, but possibly she had hidden talents.

  I looked down at the sheet again. One hundred dollars per day—not bad.It was interesting that they hadn’t talked to me about a regular schedule, as if the first day was the only thing worth planning.

  I didn’t comment on it. “Thanks for this opportunity,” I said, getting up from the wooden chair.

  The receptionist looked a little uncomfortable at that. “Good luck,” she said.

  After I closed the door there was silence, a rapid volley of Mandarin, and grim laughter from all corners of the room.

  Yeah, they had thrown me to the wo
lves.

  What kind of wolves they were, I would have to find out for myself.

  16

  CALVINO

  oct-12

  8:30 a.m.

  hglt: Good morning, Calvino. Here’s your first essay for the day. I’ll be back in about an hour to check on your reply. Essay: What do you anticipate will be the most challenging thing about waning?

  calvinopio: I don’t want to think about this right now, Dr. Glout. I have tried answering your questions and they are going nowhere. Am I supposed to be learning something from writing them? Or are you supposed to be learning something from my answers? Are they just to keep me busy?

  I get the feeling that the idea with these questions is not so much getting an answer as having me do something that is supposed to be “normal.” But just giving me an assignment that looks like homework is not going to make things “normal.”

  I don’t understand why I can’t leave. Are you giving my sister my letters like you said you would? If you are, why hasn’t she come to get me? Why can’t I talk to her if everything is “normal”? Nat would not leave me here. Did something happen to her? Are you hiding some kind of accident or something that happened to her and Cass and Tabby? I know that you probably think I can’t handle it because of how I am, but I can. You should tell me if something has happened to my sister or someone else.

  You said that if I answered your questions and took the tests I could go home. When? How many questions and tests? I have already answered questions and taken tests. Is there one answer you are looking for?? What do you want me to say? How long are you going to keep me here?

  hglt: Hi there, Calvino. I’m back. To answer your questions, as far as I know, your sister is fine. She’s not here because this test has to be conducted in isolation.

  calvinopio: You said that already, but that doesn’t explain why she wouldn’t reply to my letters.

  hglt: It’s better for the test results if you only interact with me for the time being.