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As I sat in my office that night alone, drinking glass after glass of brandy, I pondered the issue some more. I thought in plain, simple terms, wanting to get to a resolution. The fact was that I feared her and loved her in equal degrees, both passionate. I wondered how much she might love me. Mary and Naomi were telling me it was a love supreme, but that didn’t reconcile with the fact that she’d used me, mangled me, both in developing her skills, then testing them on others while sidelining me. I had to admit that she must have had some strong love for me, as I remembered it in our first days and as she kept coming back, which she never would have if she didn’t feel such love, especially considering the semi-functional state I was in and her important negotiations. But there are other emotions in our human wardrobe that might have kept her coming back, like guilt or regret, love lost, a longing for the few perfect days we shared. I ended my meditation by considering the question that if I loved her with a cup half full and she loved me with a full one, could we ever make it work, our relationship, and if I could ever fully forgive her over time, just as time had resolved the matter of the chips?
Mary and Monique opened their shop and soon the Christmas season arrived. We spent much of the holidays together, the five of us, or seven, when Scout and Rebecca were over, or ten when we were all next door. Scout and Rebecca wanted the latest clothes and cell phones and gadgets for gifts, which they got in embarrassing excess, but such is the life of the rich.
The new phones connected a caller’s mind directly to yours and chain, or group calls were common, linking whole sets of enlightened chip eaters to share their experiences. It was like Facebook and twitter gone wild, playing in your head all the time with no more typing or reading, just thoughts, and with less effort than batting an eyelid. There were range amplifiers for your Wi-Fi abilities, wallet-sized modules you could slip in a pocket and games you could play with strangers anywhere in the vicinity, all in your head as you multi-tasked the priorities of your day. Silicon Valley went crazy as whole new classes of customers and predators and filters and adds sprang up. It started slowly, but just as the number of chip recipients grew, it blossomed exponentially as programs and apps were developed to enhance the wafers further. The computer industry was reborn. Silicon valleys mushroomed all over the globe. It was a thrilling time to be alive, and we were moving closer to becoming a unified whole, with all our minds connected to form a single entity, which fostered the temporary world peace we now enjoyed. If only the good prompts had been made stronger, we might have been singing ‘kumbaya’ now, all of us in harmony, a whole planet.
Christmas evening I made it a point to invite Charlie over for dinner and sat him next to Scout at the Abbotts table. Naomi and Jason came by, revisiting old times in their conversation with him, about our first eagle’s nest. They listened with delight of our adventures last summer, while Scout had the most tortured look on her face. She remembered his past fondness for her but when he came in he wasn’t wearing the freshest clothes and when he tried to give her a hug she was in her Christmas bests. She accepted one pat on the head, but for the rest of the evening she was leaning distinctly towards her mother at the table, unusual for a girl of thirteen. But such is the life of the rich.
It was New Year's Eve, about eight to be precise when I was double teamed. A rare cold weather front had moved in that day, and a light dusting of snow was falling. I sat in my library alone, a fire started on the hearth, sipping cognac and reading a volume of Seneca in Latin, his book ‘on anger’. We’d finished dinner an hour earlier at the Abbott’s. They were cleaning up over there while I was preparing my house for a get together here, expecting them to join me soon. Mary and Monique’s had closed their shop that day and the next.
First Mary came in, kneeling for some strange reason at the side of my reclining chair in front of the fire.
“Roland” she spoke softly, “I’m sorry to interrupt but wouldn’t you like to see Claire again, one more time? I received a call from her today and she’d so much like to see you.”
“I don’t know” I said, ‘I’m debating the matter in my head.”
While I was saying this Naomi came in, kneeling at the other side of my chair and I knew something was up.
“Look” I said, “I’m not a puppet anymore, and if I see Claire I’ll feel like one, so that’s out of the question.”
Mary clasped my arm with both her hands and said passionately: “Roland, I swear to you this will be a good meeting. You won’t regret it. It will change your life.”
I was now beginning to be angry and some sentences in the pages I’d just read came vividly to mind. Then Naomi made a completely inappropriate remark.
“Oh, I wish we could just calm you down, the way we used to.”
“Well if you want me to meet Claire” I said, turning my face back to Mary, “let’s invite Jane over too and we’ll make this a real reunion.”
Mary kept her hands on me. She was adamant. Something was up. Then the doorbell rang.
I knew it was Claire. I felt like a trapped animal, but at the same time my head was clear. I decided I could confront her, with allies.
They practically had to lift me from my chair, one on each arm, and lead me to the front entrance. Jason and Scout and Monique were standing there, all pre-planned and waiting. As I came up they parted, Scout slowly opening the door, and there stood Claire, radiant in her beauty, in the porch light, the snowflakes crowning her hair like diamonds on a diadem. She was dressed in some rich winter outfit, chinchilla furs perhaps, with long black gloves and a fancy leather skirt and high leather boots. But as my eyes focused down on her right hand she was holding a child, a boy between the ages of two and three in a funny little winter costume, a miniature brown overcoat and pants and black shoes.
She knelt down and said in his ear, softly, “this is your father, Roland. He has the same name as you have. Say hello to your daddy.”
The sight of the child overwhelmed me. My head swam, but I was able to say: “Please come in, it’s cold outside.”
As she stepped over the threshold, she gave me a quick kiss, unlike the last hundred. It was pure, with no strings attached. And I returned her the same. Scout was on her knees clasping the boy with both arms, saying excitedly: “I have a baby brother now, a real baby brother. This is the best Christmas present ever.”
We proceeded to the living room. Claire sat beside me on a couch placing the little boy right in my lap. I was looking at him curiously, just as he looked back at me, saying nothing. The whole room was deathly silent.
He did seem to have a remarkable resemblance to me, the same brown hair and brown eyes, the same oval face and small chin, a dimple in his chin right where mine was. But the idea that she could have concealed her pregnancy from me humbled credulity. She saw this pained question in my look, or perhaps she was reading my mind, when she answered, soothingly.
“Roland, in that first year when I had the baby you were in no shape to notice anything. I had you all wound up in dreams of my making, so I had the child in the Capitol, far away. I hired three nannies to help me take care of him there, over the last two years, until the time came when you could be his father, and now that time has come.”
There was another long, pregnant pause.
Naomi broke the silence with the kind intention of easing the tension, but once again with the most impolitic of remarks.
“Claire’s right Roland. The first nine months you were back here you were out of it. I’d drop by to see you and most times you’d walk right past me without saying a word or with a quick ‘hello’ at best. You were constantly rearranging your books.”
“So you were all complicit in this grand deception?” I replied, glancing around the room.
“I wasn’t” Mary said. “I wasn’t here. I had no idea until the phone call today.”
“I suspected something” Jason added, “because we never visited you. But Naomi told me you had a falling out with her and that we’d better give it a break for a while.”
I threw a stone cold glance toward Naomi.
“Yes, I knew everything but it wasn’t up to me to reveal such a secret” she replied. “It was between Claire and you. And she told me why it had to be done.”
Now I looked at Claire, not with hate in my eyes, only questions.
“Roland” she began, “I know I have a lot of explaining to do, perhaps a lifetime of explaining. But that’s the one thing I want the most, the chance to talk to you and tell you everything. And this child is yours. We can take tests to prove it, and I’ll prove the love I’ve always had for you, with love.”
Naomi began to speak: “Roland.”
I cut her off.
“Naomi every time you’ve opened your mouth this evening you’ve said something disastrous, so please shut up.”
She blushed. I turned to Claire again looking deep into her teary green eyes.
“Can I, and our child, stay the night?” She pleaded.
“I suppose so. I do need to hear an explanation.”
The little boy in my lap, my son, was already starting to fall asleep, so we made him a bed at the far end of the living room on a sofa and dimmed the lights in that area. We even spoke in hushed tones the rest of the night, sipping liqueurs and listening to Claire’s tales of diplomacy and adventure around the globe, until well past midnight. Scout fell asleep an hour before the new year arrived, cuddled up beside the child under a blanket. Then we took the boy upstairs to our bed, Claire’s and mine, Naomi and Jason staying over in one guest bedroom and Mary and Monique in theirs, leaving Scout where she was.
As we turned out the lights Claire began to cry on the pillow, long and hard, I don’t even know how long. We didn’t talk. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was just next to her and fell asleep in the dew on her pillow.
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