The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson
He looked pretty young for a tenured professor, but he talked liked someone accustomed to an audience. He had issues with the way InterAlia exercised control over Affinity tranches and sodalities. “If being a Tau is a legitimate identity, aren’t we entitled to self-determination? I mean, InterAlia may own the algorithms, but it doesn’t own us.”
Lisa smiled as she interrupted him: “‘When in the course of human events…’”
“Don’t laugh,” he said. “A declaration of independence might be exactly what we need.”
“If not precisely a revolution.”
Damian looked at me and gave Lisa a quizzical glance. She mouthed something back at him—it might have been the word “newb.” I introduced myself and shook his hand.
As we walked away Lisa said, “Damian’s been with us for more than a year now. He’s one to watch. Pay attention to that one, Adam.”
* * *
A kind of happy exhaustion eventually set in. I made more friends over the course of an evening than I had made in the last six months, and every connection seemed both authentic and potentially important—the escalation from hi-my-name-is to near-intimacy was dizzying. Even the conversations I overheard in passing tugged at my attention: I kept wanting to say yes, exactly! or me too! Eye contact felt like a burst of exchanged data. Maybe too much so. I wasn’t used to it. Could anyone get used to it?
I had lost track of Lisa, but when she found me again she said, “You look like your head is swimming. I’m sure it is—I remember the feeling. Handed around like a new toy. It’s great, but if you need to get away for a few minutes—”
She showed me a room in the basement, furnished with a leather sofa and a big-screen TV. The only person in the room was a young woman who appeared to have Down syndrome. She wore a blue sweatshirt and drawstring pants, and she was watching SpongeBob SquarePants with the sound off.
“This is Tonya,” Lisa said. “Everyone calls her Tonya G. Her mother is Renata Goldstein—you met her upstairs. Tonya’s not actually a Tau, but we make room for her at the tranche gatherings. Because we like her. Right, Tonya?”
Tonya hollered out, “Yes!”
“Hey,” I said. “Enjoying the show?”
“Yes!”
“Can you hear it?”
She turned her head and fixed her eyes on me. “No! Can you?”
“Mm … no.”
“Watch it with me?”
Lisa gave me a you-don’t-have-to-do-this look, but I waved her off. “Sure, I’ll watch it with you. Some of it, anyway.”
“All right.”
Lisa patted my shoulder. “I’ll let Renata know you’re down here. She’ll check in in a little while. But Tonya will understand if you want to get back to the party—right, Tonya?”
Tonya nodded emphatically.
So we watched SpongeBob with the sound off. It wasn’t clear to me why Tonya preferred to see it in silence, but she rejected an offer to turn up the volume. And it was still funny this way. Tonya seemed startled when I laughed, but she inevitably followed with a big peal of laughter of her own. After a while I started making up my own dialogue for the characters, doing crazy voices, which she liked. “You’re joking!”
“I’m a joker,” I admitted.
“What’s your name?”
“Adam.”
“Adam’s a joker!”
Among other things.
The credits were rolling when I noticed that someone had come into the room. A woman, maybe my age, leaning against the doorframe, watching us. South Asian features. Close-cropped dark hair. A Chinese dragon tattooed in three colors around the meat of her upper arm. She wore a sleeveless blouse and faded blue jeans. A belt with a purple metallic buckle.
“Getting late, Tonya,” she announced. “Your mom’s upstairs saying good-bye. I think you’d better go find her.”
“Okay,” Tonya said.
“Say good-bye to Adam first.”
“Good-bye, Adam Joker!”
“Bye, Tonya SpongeBobWatcher.”
Tonya ran from the room giggling. Her summoner stayed behind. I said, “You know my name, but—”
“Oh, sorry. I’m Amanda. Amanda Mehta.” She put out her hand. I stood up and took it. “You’re Adam. Lisa told me you were down here keeping Tonya company. Sorry, I couldn’t resist having a look at the new guy.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that, given that I’d probably never see Amanda Mehta again. I just smiled.
“Lisa said she already showed you around. But I bet you didn’t see the roof.”
“The roof?”
“Come on.” She tugged my hand. “I’ll show you. And maybe you can tell me what’s bothering you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Just come with me. Come on!”
What could I do but follow?
* * *
“What makes you think something’s bothering me?”
Amanda didn’t answer, just gave me a hold-your-horses look. She led me to one of bedrooms on the third floor, where a dormer window looked south over a wooded ravine. The window opened onto the part of the roof that connected the house to the garage. She climbed out deftly—obviously, she had done this before—then turned back and said, “You won’t fall. If you’re careful.”
So I stepped out onto the shingles. The slope was gentle enough that there was no real danger, but we were high enough to see across the backyard and over the ravine to the city—condo towers on Bloor Street, the headstone apartment slabs of the Cabbagetown district.
“Safest thing is to lie down,” Amanda said.
She stretched out with her head butting the low sill of the window. I did the same. “You know the house pretty well,” I said.
“I lived here for a few months.”
“Are you related to Lisa or—” I had forgotten the name of Lisa’s partner.
“Loretta. No, but they put me up when I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I finally got my own place last May.”
“They put you up because you’re a Tau?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not the only one they’ve helped out, and they liked having me here. Loretta inherited this place back in the eighties. The house is too big for them, really, so they’re always putting people up. It’s a place to go when you don’t have anywhere else to go. If you’re in the tranche. Or at least a Tau.”
“Must be nice.”
She gave me a searching look. “Of course it’s nice.”
“I think—”
“No, hush, be quiet a minute. Listen. I love the way it sounds out here. Don’t you?”
I would have said there was nothing to hear. But there was, once I paid attention. The tidal bass note of the city, the massed noise of air-conditioner compressors, car engines, high-rise ventilator fans. Plus animal sounds from the ravine and human voices from this or the neighboring house. Homely sounds that hovered over the dark backyard like phantom lights.
“And the way it feels,” Amanda said. “Late August, you know, even on a hot day you get that little chill after dark. The leaves on the trees sound different in the wind.” A wind came up as if she had commanded it. “This corner of the roof is completely private. No one can see you. But you can see the city.”
“That’s why you like it here?”
“One reason.” She unzipped a pocket on her vest and took out a glass pipe, unzipped another pocket, and extracted a tiny plastic bag. “Do you smoke?”
“Not often.”
“But you have smoked.”
“Sure.” In high school, in the back of a friend’s beat-up Ford Taurus, out at the quarry, and occasionally with Dex, my erstwhile roommate—more than occasionally if you count secondhand smoke.
She used her fingernails to pick apart a nugget of weed and fill the bowl. “So do you want to smoke now?”
“Lisa and, um, Loretta don’t mind?”
“They don’t like people smoking anything indoors, but if they weren’t so busy they might have joined us out here.”
I didn’t want to disappoint her. And how many chances would I have to smoke weed on the roof of a Rosedale mansion? So I took the pipe and the lighter and even managed to hold down a toke without coughing. At which point, in the ordinary course of things, I would have succumbed to my usual cannabis-induced self-consciousness; but for whatever reason I remained reasonably coherent—though the night seemed to inflate like a party balloon and the chorus of crickets became operatic in its complexity.
“So,” she said, “you want to talk about what’s bothering you?”
“Why does everyone say that? How do you know something’s bothering me?”
“You spent a half-hour watching TV with Tonya, for one thing.”
“I like Tonya.”
“Of course you do. She’s a sweetie. But she’s not a Tau.”
“You’re reading a lot into—”
“It’s also your body language, how you react when you shake hands with somebody, things like that.”
“You must have been watching me pretty closely.”
“It’s just tranche telepathy. I mean, that’s what people call it. It isn’t really telepathy, obviously. We read each other better than ordinary people. So we can tell you’re worried about something. You don’t have to tell me about it, but we’re tranchemates. Maybe I can help.”
I felt a little tingle when she called me her tranchemate, though it was the first time I had heard the word. Did she know that about me, too? Something in her smile suggested she did. We had quite a complex little silent conversation going on, in fact.
So I gave her a quick summary of the family curse. I told her about Grammy Fisk’s stroke, my awkward relationship with my father, the tuition money. I told her I had dropped out of my Sheridan courses and given notice at my apartment—I had to be out by the end of the month. No money and nowhere to go but back home. I had been curious about tonight’s meeting but I was embarrassed to admit that I’d never be back.
“Not worth worrying about, Adam. You’re a Tau, you’re welcome even for one night. But the thing about going back home—I gather you’d prefer to stay in Toronto?”
Before I came here for school I hadn’t given the city a second thought. I had wanted to study in New York City, but my father was convinced that even a brief exposure to Manhattan would turn me into a gay-marrying Democrat-voting liberal, and not even Grammy Fisk could overcome his objections. He had agreed to Toronto because he imagined Canada to be a well-mannered country, suspiciously socialistic but hardly radical. I had agreed because Sheridan offered world-class graphics and media curricula. Did I want to stay here? Sure. But no job, no work permit, no crib. She said, “You’re studying graphic design?”
“Was, before I dropped out.”
“So you should talk to Walter.”
“Who?”
“Walter Kohler. Lisa must have introduced you. Big guy? Six foot, two hundred fifty pounds, in his forties, wears a suit?”
I vaguely recalled such a person. He had smiled and shaken my hand, that was all.
Amanda tucked away her pipe and baggie. “Really, you need to talk to him.”
“Do I?”
“Walter used to work for one of the big ad agencies in town, but he’s starting his own business—come on, we’ll go see him.”
“What, now?”
“Of course now. Come on!” She practically vaulted back inside the dormer window. I was a little reluctant to leave the roof—it was a good place to be stoned: safe, scenic, undemanding—but I staggered after her.
* * *
Kohler was in the game room in the basement, knocking balls around a pool table for his own amusement. He was big enough that the cue looked small in his hands. Amanda re-introduced me and, mortifyingly, told him I was looking for a job.
“Actually I’m not,” I said. “I mean, I can’t. I have a student work permit, but I’m not a student anymore. I don’t even have a visa.” I explained again about my family situation.
“Finished three years at Sheridan?” Kohler asked.
“Yeah, but—”
“Tell me what courses you took.”
I listed them.
“Okay,” he said. “Promising. What kind of grades were you pulling down?”
I told him.
“Sounds like someone you could use,” suggested Amanda.
Kohler said, “What I’m setting up is basically a media-access and marketing business. People come to us, we give them what they want at whatever price point they can afford—TV, Internet, direct mail, anything from a full-court integrated ad campaign to a guy handing out leaflets on a street corner. So yeah, Amanda’s right, I’m looking to hire folks with the appropriate skills. If you’re up to speed on CSS and JavaScript, I can start you next week.”
“That’s amazingly generous, and it’s tempting, but like I said, I don’t have a valid work permit—”
“I have a legal guy who can expedite the paperwork. And I’m willing to advance you your salary until you’re authorized. Do you want to talk about salary?”
He cited numbers that seemed ridiculously generous. I nodded and said, “But, wait—I would love to do this but I’m kind of—”
“He’s new,” Amanda said, as if this explained something.
“I’d have to find a place to stay—”
“Lisa!” Kohler roared. He was a big man. Big chest cavity. He could roar pretty impressively. I tried not to flinch. “Loretta! Amanda, are the Sob Sisters upstairs?”
Lisa Wei came into the room before she could answer. “Keep your voice down, Walter; I’m sure they can hear you in Vancouver. What is it?”
“Homeless waif. A loose Tau.”
“Really?” Lisa took my hand and gave me a motherly look. Or what I imagined was a motherly look. I didn’t remember my own mother very clearly. “Well, then, you have to stay with us! There are a couple of rooms you can choose from. Tonight isn’t too soon, you know, if you don’t have anywhere to go.”
“My lease is good to the end of the month, but—”
“Then you can move in anytime. Welcome home, Adam! I’ll tell Loretta we have a new roomer.”
The next sound I heard was Amanda, laughing at the expression on my face.
* * *
“We call them the Sob Sisters,” Amanda said, “because they don’t mind if you cry on their shoulders. You don’t need to worry about imposing. Lisa and Loretta love having company. Tau company, anyway. So maybe I’ll see you next time, Adam.”
“Are you leaving?”
“Soon. It’s pretty late. I need to say my good-byes.” She hugged me and walked away.
But that was fine. A small miracle had taken place: somehow, over the course of a few hours, I had internalized the idea that I was among family—not the messy modus vivendi my Schuyler relations had arrived at, but family in a better and truer sense of the word. And for another forty-five minutes I drifted through the thinning crowd with a sheepish and slightly stoned grin on my face, striking up conversations that inevitably seemed to begin and end in mid-sentence. “Newbie euphoria,” someone called it. Fine. Yes. Exactly.
I caught a last glimpse of Amanda Mehta as she left the house. Dismayingly, she was on the arm of someone I hadn’t been introduced to. A big guy—huge, actually—with a shaved head and black Maori-style tattoos all over his face.
“Is that her boyfriend?” I asked Lisa Wei, who had come to stand beside me, looking at the end of the evening like a slightly tattered apple doll.
“That’s Trevor Holst. Amanda’s roommate.”
Lisa registered my questioning look but wouldn’t say more. Amanda waved to the room as the door was closing—at everyone, but I chose to take it personally.
“I should have thanked her,” I said.
“Thank her next time.”
“And, I mean, you, too. And Loretta. And Walter. For, well, everything.”
“You’d do the same in our place,” Lisa said calmly. “And sooner or later, you will.”
The first big storm of the winter announced itself on a Friday in December. For two days a low-pressure cell rotated over the city like a millstone, grinding clouds into snow. All weekend, those of us who lived in the house and a handful of our tranchemates took turns excavating the driveway. Lisa and Loretta could have afforded a removal service, but we wouldn’t let them pay for labor any able-bodied Tau could perform. By Monday morning the streets were mostly passable and I was able to get to work; at the end of the day I made my way home under streetlights that bled a muddy orange glow, the color of pill bottles and chronic depression.
But I wasn’t depressed, just tired. Tired enough to slow down for the familiar quarter-mile walk from the subway; tired enough to be, as Amanda liked to say, in the moment, thinking about nothing in particular and paying casual attention to the street, the sidewalk, the few flakes of snow silting from a cloud-locked sky. I cataloged the cars parked by curbside, some still cloaked in the white burqas of the weekend blizzard. Which is how I happened to notice a Toyota Venza idling in the curb zone not far from the house. The skin of snow adhering to it suggested it had been in place for at least an hour. Much of its glass was opaque with condensation, but the moisture had been swiped from the side windows and windshield. Which meant I could see the shape of the car’s sole occupant: a man in a navy-blue parka who quickly turned away when he saw me looking.
There was nothing very unusual about this, but the long shadows of the streetlights gave it a film-noir ambience, a hint of mystery, enough so that I mentioned it to Lisa when I came into the house and found her in the kitchen fixing a paella de marisco so fragrant I wished I had something better in store for my own dinner than ramen and bagged salad. “There’s enough for three,” she said, tranche telepathy operating at optimum sensitivity, but I shook my head and asked whether she knew anybody who drove a green Venza.
She put her spoon on the counter and gave me her full attention. “Why do you ask?”
Which caused my own tranche telepathy to emit a cautionary buzz. “Because it’s outside idling, and the guy at the wheel looks,” I tried to make this light-hearted, “furtive.”