The Fool's Run

slip. She pulled the slip over her head and tossed it negligently on a side chair. “You were on the computer, and he didn’t want to bother you,” she said. “He said you were in a fugue state. Undo me?”
    She sat on the edge of the bed; I propped myself up and unsnapped the brassiere, and kissed her between the shoulder blades. She arched her shoulders and pivoted on her butt and lay back on her pillow, her hair spreading out.
    “Haven’t heard anything about the kiddie porn yet,” I said.
    “Ah. Dace said something was happening. He attached his video recorder to the TV and set the timer for the news programs. It’s running now,” she said.
    “Jesus, I didn’t even see it. I’ve been out of it.”
    She rolled on her side facing me and slid her hand down inside my shorts. “Aw, has you been aw wonesome and sulking since mama’s been gone?”
    I groaned. “God save me from women who talk baby talk to my dick.”
    “Oh yeah?” she said.
    Later that night we were lying in spoons, my arm over her hip, her butt against my stomach. When she had been breathing deep and steady for ten minutes, I got up and padded out of the room and quietly closed the door behind me. I had the computer up a minute later, and I was out on the phone lines, looking around. Sometimes, nothing will stop the code in your head.
     
    THE NEXT DAY was the peak of the programming. I sat on the computer for nine straight hours, working out one piece after another, checking, debugging, rechecking. When I got out of the chair I could barely walk.
    “You need a Fuji,” Dace said as I hobbled out of the office.
    “What’s that?”
    Fuji’s Water-Gate was a thoroughly westernized Japanese bathhouse not far from the Pentagon— westernized because the patrons wore tank suits and bathed in private groups. The bathing pools were not much bigger than good-sized hot tubs, but the water was infinitely hotter. Dace and Maggie dropped into it, moaned for a few seconds, then relaxed, and watched LuEllen and me test the water.
    “C’mon, you’ll live,” Maggie said. “No guts?” With that, LuEllen dropped in like a stone, went completely under, gasped, and tried to crawl back out. Dace, laughing, grabbed her around the waist and held her squealing until she settled down. “Get your ass in here, Kidd,” she said.
    The water was hot enough to boil lobsters. I slipped in, an inch at a time, to my hips, supporting my weight with my hands.
    “That’s the worst way,” Dace said snidely. “You get ten minutes of pain instead of ten seconds.”
    “I’ll do it my way,” I said.
    “You’ll boil your balls, is what you’ll do,” Maggie snorted. LuEllen and Dace looked at her strangely, and she blushed, then all three burst out laughing.
    “All right, all right.” I took a breath and dropped the rest of the way in, up to my chin. LuEllen, who is as strong as an ox, reached over and pushed my head under. For a moment, I thought my heart had stopped. When it started again, I huddled up next to Maggie until all the nerve endings died and I could straighten out.
    “Jesus. How long do we have to stay in here?”
    “An hour or so,” Maggie said, grinning.
    “We’ll be dead in an hour.”
    “Nonsense. In two minutes, you’ll feel fine.”
    She was right. Two minutes later I felt fine. We floated around the pool, talking, not touching, never mentioning Whitemark or the attack. LuEllen had been to the Smithsonian and—Dace laughed—had been looking at the display of locks. Dace, LuEllen said, had been closing down his apartment, and she had been helping. When she cleaned out the front room, she found a sack lunch behind the couch. Dace admitted that it was probably two years old, from a tough time when he was making his own lunch. There was a little plastic container of green grapes, LuEllen said, that had gone past raisinhood and had reached petrification.
    Maggie told the other two that when I thought she was asleep, I snuck out of the bedroom and went back to the computer. “I can’t compete, I guess.”
    “Of course you can,” Dace said, ogling her thinly concealed breasts.
    “Down, boy,” said LuEllen.
    Maggie threw back her head and laughed and lay back in the water, and she looked like a medieval swan queen come to life. Sometime during the forty-five minutes we spent in the pool, the code stopped running through my head.
     
    THE HEAD OF the Whitemark systems department, his wife, and twenty-three-year-old son were