Reamde

The gambit had worked. But Richard had not been comfortable in that avatar, to the point of wondering where the hell it had come from. What had come over him? Only later, after talking to Bud and meditating on the story behind the Medal of Honor, had he understood that he had been manifesting, not as an avatar of Richard, but as an avatar of his whole family.

THE FOOTBALL GAME did not exactly end but, like most of them, reached a point where it was simply unwatchable. Almost everyone left. Richard pulled up a chair and sat at his father’s left hand. It was just the three of them then: John, Nicholas, and Richard. Patricia was fourteen years dead. Jacob had been born much later than the others, when Mom had been at damn-near-menopausal age, and everyone understood that he had been an unplanned pregnancy. He was neither dead nor here, but in Idaho, a state often confused, by bicoastal folks, with Iowa, but that in fact was the anti-Iowa in many respects, a place that Iowans would only go to in order to make some kind of statement.

Richard had practically no idea as to his father’s true state of consciousness. Since the last storm of ministrokes, he’d had little to say. But his eyes tracked things pretty carefully. His facial expressions and his gestures suggested that he knew what was going on. He was pretty happy right now sitting there between his two oldest sons. Richard settled back in his chair, crossed his ankles atop the bearskin, and settled in for a long sit. Someone brought him a beer. Dad smiled. Life was good.

RICHARD AWOKE AND made efforts to silence his phone, only to find that the local climate had sucked all moisture out of his fingertips, which could not obtain virtual purchase on the tiny affordances of its user interface. Through some combination of licking and breathing on his fingers he was able to get them damp enough that the machine now grudgingly recognized them as human flesh, responded to his commands, and became silent.

He groped for his reading glasses and tapped the Calendar button. A green slab rushed out of the darkness and made his white chest hairs glow in viridian thickets. His eyes came into focus and read its label: ROAD TRIP: SKELETOR.

Zooming out to a longer time scale, he saw good color omens: no red at all for the next fortnight, and four solid days of green—the color of business—coming up.

Blue was the color of family and other personal activities. Yesterday, for example, had been a sixteen-hour blue tombstone labeled RE-U.

Following ROAD TRIP: SKELETOR were other enormous green slabs labeled → IOM, which, as Richard knew only too well, was the airport code for the Isle of Man. Then PAY FEALTY D2 and finally → SEA.

Red was for things like medical appointments and doing his taxes. A week that was even lightly spattered with Red was pretty much a write-off when it came to getting anything accomplished. Blue wasn’t as bad as Red, but it did tend to infiltrate neighboring regions of Green and mulch them. Rare indeed were the moments when Blue time could be converted to Green; for example, yesterday when he had realized that Zula ought to be working for Corporation 9592.

Waking up in Green mode, then spending the whole day there, was really the only way to get anything done. So color physics now dictated that he must steal out of the hotel without having any interactions whatsoever with the re-u crowd that would already have filled the Ramada’s breakfast room and spilled over into the lobby.

He checked out over the phone and stood in perfect silence, eyeball to peephole, until he could no longer see miniature Forthrasts in bathing suits, going to or from the pool. He then stole out of the motel through a side exit and gunned the Grand Marquis to a gas station half a mile down the road, just to get decisively clear. He pumped a bathtub-load of gasoline into the thing and bought a cup of coffee and a banana for the road. He fired up the car’s onboard GPS device and began coping with its user interface.

The Possum Walk Trailer Court was no longer listed in its “Points of Interest” database, so he had to settle for browsing the greater Nodaway region of northwestern Missouri. Expecting to see nothing more than a post office and maybe a county park, he was dismayed and fascinated when it hurled up a low-res icon of a pointy-eared humanoid with long blue braids, labeled KSHETRIAE KINGDOM. Further browsing informed him that it was part of a larger K’Shetriae-themed complex that included an amusement park and a retail outlet. He could not bring himself to choose this as his destination and coyly allowed the machine to vector him to the county seat.