The Lab Restored, en.wikipedia.org
I talked with all the women, and they agreed. The next afternoon I was on the launch with Claire and Mr. Higgins cruising towards Papeete. We went straight to the Mandarin, Claire and I, and at the front desk I asked for a room on the second floor. At the same time, I inquired about my good friend Bob in room twenty-nine and how he was doing.
The young Polynesian girl at the desk replied: “Oh, I’m sorry to say that he hasn’t been feeling well at all. He hardly comes out. It’s room service every day. Maybe your visit will cheer him. He doesn’t seem to have any friends. Two people came by weeks ago, and they got into a bitter argument and haven’t been back since.”
“We’ll visit him, thanks for your advice.”
We ate and an hour later we were knocking softly at his door. He answered and recognized neither of us, with a strange stare on his face. But he looked twice at Claire. She’d changed so much since he’d last seen her, losing at least eighty pounds, her face now narrow, her hair straight and bright red but as soon as he heard her voice something clicked. Not to prolong the confusion she said: “Yes, I’m Claire.”
He was awestruck but collected himself and invited us in.
Claire said to him, “I know you have a lot of questions and I’m here to answer them so let’s talk. In fact, let’s get straight to the point.”
She took him by the hand and sat him down next to her on the very same couch where they’d had their last, grotesque ‘tete a tete’.
The next two hours I sat nearby watching them. But there was nothing to see. His eyes were shut, her’s also, their heads inches apart. I don’t know what was passing between their two minds but just the fact that it was continuing so long and so serenely I took as a good omen. At ten I left them and went to the bar for a drink. Who knew how long their session might take. I went to bed alone but hopeful that they were making progress.
In the middle of the night Claire woke me with a kiss.
“It’s done Roland, all done and I’m back, just me, and I have you to thank for that. You saved my life once again my lovely darling. Let’s sleep.”
The next morning as we had our coffee downstairs in the lobby we were greeted by Bob, looking half normal, tired, but with a smile on his face and happy to see us. We invited him to join us and were soon talking about how much all of us missed California, wishing to return and wondering how it was doing.
“I’ve had no communication” he admitted, “but I heard what happened.”
“Neither have we” I replied, “yet there are radio operators here in daily contact with the coast. I think I’ll visit their office this morning and see if they have any news.”
He excused himself and hurried off down the street like a fool, taking up my suggestion as we sat calmly sipping our coffees.
“Claire” I said, “I miss my house, our house. Let’s try and get in touch with the people we know there and see if we can go home, just the two of us. Wouldn’t that be lovely, no one but us? You could take it easy with your pregnancy, tend the garden and lounge most of the day while I put the house back in order and take care of you. We could make a baby room.”
As I said this she clasped my arm in fervent, speechless agreement. So much had changed that we both longed to get back. Papeete was a foreign place. The idea to be alone together at home struck a deep chord, with no one else around to interfere with our peace, our sanity. So many issues would be put behind us, buried. Let the world go on in it’s mad, spiralling out of control ways. She was my wife, with our child inside her and the only thing that mattered. The relief I felt with this clarity of purpose amazed me and I could feel her on the very same wavelength.
Now we were hurrying towards a radio office, like fools. I laid five hundred dollars on the table and told the operator that I needed to talk to someone in the governor’s office in Sacramento right away, that it was urgent. It took him thirty minutes, but the bribe did its trick. We were patched from one shortwave to another to another. But finally, I had Bill on the line.
“Bill, this is Roland. You know where I am, and I need to get back. I have extremely vital news for the governor, world-changing news and we have to talk in person. Does he still have the Learjet?”
“No, it’s out on loan right now. He lent it to the president in Washington. But he’ll have it back in five days. Can it wait that long?”
“Yes but tell him to send it here to pick up Claire and me. And tell him I’ll be bringing him more wafers, but he needs to know something critical about them. Has he given any to others?”
“Just two, as far as I know.”
“To whom?”
“A couple of his staff.”
“Male or female?”
“Both men. Why what’s up? Is there something wrong with them? I feel fine, and I’ve been doing the work of ten people, twelve hours a day. So has everyone else who took them. He’s saving the rest. He told me personally last week that he's used to making the biggest decisions involving millions of people but what you put into his hands makes all those seem puny. So he’s just holding on to them for now.”
“Good man” I replied. “But it’s critical he sends us the jet. Get word to this operator when it’s coming, fly us into S.F. and have someone there to drive us to Roland house and we’ll either meet him there or wherever he wants.”
“Will do. He’s in a meeting now. I’ll talk to him within the hour and get back to you right away.”
“By the way, how’s my neighborhood doing, and the state?”
“Your district is fine. There’ve been a few fires, and some ghettos are a mess, but we’ve managed to maintain order surprisingly well. Almost all the people are still in the valley, living off of whatever they’re growing. See you soon Roland.”
I turned to Claire. “See how easy it is to book a flight when you have the right chips.”
“But we don’t have the chips” Claire replied.
“Jaime will give us some” I said, “but that’s not even important for the two of us. We’re on that flight in a week. We’ll have to go back to the island before we leave. We’ll say goodbye and resolve a few questions before we go.”
Claire kissed me and said, “I’m happy with that, so happy. I’d like to say goodbye but even more to get away. Let’s spend some days here before we return to the island, just the two of us; I hate long farewells.”
We took a brief stroll to a nearby cafe, had lunch and then revisited our radio operator who said everything was set for a plane to land a week from today, at noon. He was quite impressed with our influence and kept asking us who we were. I told him it’s not who you are but who you know.
Claire and I spent the next four days just wandering about town, hand in hand, almost mindlessly I might add because after all we’d been through that was the state we most desired.
We were on a perfect parity, an equilibrium, and we relished it. In fact, we nourished it. With every nod I gave to one of her ideas as to what to try at a restaurant or what to do next, she insisted I send her suggestions till they balanced out. Our minds were intact from each other, independent, the only chain joining us, our pure affection.
I posed her questions each night and she willingly, lovingly, gave answers. She taught me codes to sing lullabies to her, which I practiced on her, and she fell asleep. About the loop she told me many other things, how versatile it was, how omnipotent, how soothing.
I asked her, “Why didn’t you just do this to yourself, to feel better when you were almost losing your mind?”
Her answer was this: “It’s like rubbing your belly. You can do it to yourself, but when someone else does it for you, it feels so much nicer because that someone cares for you, loves you. Rub my belly now Roland; our baby’s inside.”
And this was why I loved her so much.
We returned to the island the next day to gather our things and tell everyone that we were headed back to California on our own. It was a bittersweet parting that lasted two days. All the women were glad that she’d recovered, the children too, so glad that they showered her in kisses. I appropriated from Jaime a package of forty chips to be delivered to the governor. We had long talks, walking along the strand of the beach and decided that no one party should control them all. He was perfecting some twenty a week and the production was only going to increase.
Better yet, we were all happy with our choices. I told the women that things were still not settled in California but they might be in another month and when I had my house back in order with the power on, they should visit us, all of them, for a prolonged stay.
On our last day on the island, I saw something very encouraging . Claire and I spent a portion of the morning with Scout saying one final goodbye, more in hugs than in words. It was a Sunday, and everyone was taking a break from the lab. We stepped out of our hut and beheld the sand angels, only now Jaime and Ken were included, holding hands with the girls, in deep meditation. After their session, Jaime and Samantha took a walk with us, all of us hand in hand, down the beach.
I could hear Samantha singing into Jaime’s ear, so I began singing into hers.
“Roland, you have a very nice song. How did you learn that?” she telepathized me.
“Claire taught me.”
“She taught me also, and I’m glad she taught you. Can we be friends again?”
“We already are. Just take care of Jaime the way I’d want you to, with loving respect.”
So we parted on a good note. Claire and I spent two more nights at the Mandarin. The jet was a day late, but it did arrive. We invited Bob to join us for a few meals, and I asked Claire why he seemed content, having lost his lab, his purpose here.
“He’s still in a muddle. That chip he took fills your head with all sorts of irrelevant matter. He’s like a person looking for a particular book in a large library but all the titles have been erased off the covers and they’re in no order. When I restored all the files that I’d taken from his head, I left out the details of us taking his lab away. He doesn’t clearly remember it right now. That’s why he stays here just wandering around the hotel.”
“I feel bad about that” I said. “Let’s take him back with us and ask the governor to give him the task of repairing the lab on the hill. I know it’s an almost impossible chore and will probably take years, but it will keep him busy, give him a purpose in life, and that’s what makes a person happy. I think that’s why Jaime and Samantha are now on a better plane. They both have work to do, and they can do it together. You don’t need lullabies when you’re busy. You fall asleep at the end of the day because you’re tired.
“Occupation is the secret to being content so let’s go home and tend our garden, as Voltaire so famously said in the last line of ‘Candide’. We’ll repair the house and prepare it for the new arrival and at the end of each day have candlelight dinners on the deck.”
“I’d love nothing more than that” Claire replied.
The next evening we were being driven in a jeep back to Roland house. The neighborhood looked just as we’d left it, much to my relief. We spent the next few days cleaning the place up, putting things slowly back in place. Bob was with us, not the best help as we’d give him a simple task but his mind would wander, and we’d find him in another room staring out a window. We still had the stock of food hidden in the panic room and the soldier on our jeep ride home told us we could drop by the station at the university and pick up all the supplies we needed, on the governor’s orders, so on our second day home we took the Mustang for a spin and loaded up. It took me half a day with the cutting torch from next door to get my wine cellar open again. But I did it, everything safe and sound inside.
That evening we had our visit from the governor, with the same jeeps and limo as before. Bill and Natalie, his secretary, were with him. After greetings in the living room, we sat down to talk, telling them of Mr. Tanaki’s island and our lab there. Claire brought out the manila envelope of wafers, which impressed them duly, then she gave me a nudge, and I remembered that I wanted to talk privately with just the governor and Bill. I took them to the library and began the long story of how we found Bob, by the most amazing coincidence in Papeete, sitting at a patio bar in the middle of the day, dishevelled and distraught.
“When he saw Jaime” I told them, “he almost jumped for joy, told us about his laboratory in the hills and took us there. But to our surprise, it was a rundown house, the front door wide open and nobody there. We entered the lab and that saw even the door to the safe was open. We were beginning to guess that Bob was not in his right mind. He’d had all the equipment and a supply of chips flown in and delivered just days before the war. But he said he couldn’t get proper staff to help him start production. He fired those he had and that to remedy the situation he’d eaten one of his own chips, a programmed one, thinking it would enable him to do all the work himself. This is what I wanted to warn you about privately, how dangerous those programmed chips can be. Look at him now. He can’t focus for more than a few seconds. That’s why we decided then and there to move his operation to the island. I hope you’ll agree we did the right thing. But I also think we can get the lab on the hill up and running again if we can find some of the people who staffed it before.”
The governor agreed to the project. We rejoined Claire and Natalie in the other room, now sitting next to each other holding hands.
They left, but the very next day Natalie returned, telling us she’d been put in charge of the project and would be given all the assets available to make it work. Four soldiers in two jeeps were stationed in the empty house across the street to run any errands for her, and she asked if she could stay with us for a while.
In the following days, Clair and Natalie became close friends, almost inseparable, often visiting the lab together while I puttered around my library slowly putting all my books back in place. This chore took weeks and weeks, as every time I had it nearly done, Claire and Natalie would come in and make some suggestions for a better arrangement, and they were always right, so I’d begin all over again. But I was happy at my work, content and beaming, even more so to spend each night in the warm arms of Claire.
Experts were brought in to repair the lab and chip manufacturers in the Southern Hemisphere were contracted, with supplies flown in using the governor’s own jet, that’s how high a priority he placed upon the project. Naomi and Jason were also brought on board, staying with us and chip production soon resumed. It was wonderful to see the three women sunning themselves on a Sunday on my back deck again, holding hands all afternoon. I was finally living the life I always dreamed of.
