“Yeah. Yeah, I remember.”
My father extended his hands to include the Pattersons. “Forgive me for saying this in the middle of dinner, or at whatever stage we are in this monumental meal, but ElectroPlus also eliminated all solid wastes from daily life. Think of that. A feces-free existence!”
Patience burst out laughing; I think Hopewell smiled a little, too. But Mr. and Mrs. Patterson shifted uncomfortably and looked at their laps. Mickie did not react at all. I’m sure she considered the entire exchange to be dead airtime, but she let Kurt keep shooting and the meal went on.
After the final course, a deadly concoction called “gilded Christmas pudding,” which Patience pronounced “fresh-from-a-landfill gross,” my father proposed a toast of his own. He raised his glass, waited for everyone’s attention, and then announced, “Feliz Navidad.”
Mr. Patterson asked, “Do you speak Spanish, Hank?”
“Sure. A little. I grew up in Miami.”
Mrs. Patterson looked amazed. “I grew up there, too. What part?”
“Kendall.”
“We were in Miami Shores.”
“Miami Shores isn’t as bad as Kendall, but it’s still pretty bad. Have you been back there lately?”
Mrs. Patterson looked at her husband. She answered emphatically, “Oh no. Roy drove us down there about ten years ago. I wanted to show the children the house I grew up in. I couldn’t believe it. The street looked like something you’d see in a war movie. We never even stopped the car.”
My dad pointed to Albert and Herbert. “I wouldn’t go back to my street today without these guys and an armored van. But still, in the spirit of the holiday, La Natividad, let’s all raise up our glasses.”
Everyone around the table raised a glass—some up high, like Patience and me; some barely off the table, like Mickie. My father repeated “Feliz Navidad,” and we all drank. Albert stepped forward to fill Dad’s glass. Then Dad continued, “Okay. Now we need a new toast.” He turned to Mickie. “See if you can guess who said this: ‘The rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind.’”
Mickie shrugged. “Abraham Lincoln?”
“No. Here’s the next part of it: ‘And only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed’”—he shot a glance at me—“‘and the greatness of the human soul set free.’”
Mickie stared at him impassively. She wasn’t about to try another guess.
He smiled at her. “Let me give you a hint: You were in New York, vidding the lighting of a big Christmas tree. I was just standing there, reading this quote off a wall.”
Mickie’s eyes widened behind her red frames. She answered, “Rockefeller Center!”
“Right you are. And the words are from…?”
Mickie shook her head in quick little motions, like a metronome. “I have no idea.”
“Well, the words are from John D. Rockefeller, Junior.”
Nobody said anything for a moment. Mr. Patterson broke the silence by asking, “Where did his money come from, Hank? New York real estate?”
“No. Oil. Standard Oil. Which you and I still consume robustly in our big diesel cars.”
Herbert entered, carrying a tray of coffee cups. He was followed immediately by Albert, carrying a pair of porcelain pitchers. They served coffee to the adults (except for my father, who waved his away) and hot chocolate to the kids.
Mrs. Patterson turned to Mickie and changed the subject. “What are you up to for the holidays, Mickie? Are you doing any shows?”
Mickie gestured toward Lena and Kurt. “We’re doing two shows over the holidays, a week apart. We’ll be at Disney World tomorrow for the Christmas parade.”
“That’s a great parade.”
“We’re flying to Orlando for that. Then we’re flying to New York to do the New Year’s Eve show in Times Square.”
“Oh, I love that show.”
“It’ll be great this year. Lots of exciting guests.”
Mrs. Patterson then turned to my father. “And how about you, Hank?”
“Ah well, it’s the college football bowl season. The biggest week of the year. I’m flying to the SatPub Bowl tomorrow—Florida versus Texas.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Oh yes.”
“And what about for New Year’s?”
“For New Year’s Eve, I have the Orange Bowl Fest down in Miami. That’s a great party. Then, on January first, it’s football all day: the Cotton Bowl at eleven hundred hours, the Fiesta Bowl at sixteen hundred, and the Orange Bowl at twenty hundred. By twenty-three hundred hours, the Hurricanes will have been crowned the national champions.”
Mrs. Patterson wagged her finger at him like he was being naughty. “Hank, what on earth do you do when there’s no football?”
He held up a finger of his own. “Ah! That’s easy. Golf! There’s always golf.”
Mr. Patterson confirmed this: “That’s true. I play golf with clients all year round. Say, Hank, who’s that new guy who’s tearing up the junior tour?”
Dad looked bewildered. “Who?”
“That young guy. He’s on all the vidscreens.”
“You’re gonna have to give me more to go on than that.”
“The one who’s winning all the tournaments!”
My father shook his head. “There are a lot of young golfers winning a lot of tournaments.”
Somewhere around there is where I tuned them out. I had heard enough about my parents and their plans for the holidays. Especially since I wasn’t included in any of them.
Someone knocked softly on the back of the ambulance. Dessi opened the door a crack. He reached outside and then pulled in two white shopping bags from a store named WorldMart. He opened the fatter of the two bags and dumped out a bundle of clothing that, when untangled, turned out to be a complete outfit for me—jeans, sneakers, a blue T-shirt, a black sweatshirt—right down to panties and an unfortunately accurate AA-cup bra. I gathered up the clothes and folded them. I was slightly embarrassed, but I was also hopeful. Was the plan finally moving ahead?
I said, “Dessi? Are we going somewhere? Are we going outside?”
“We might be.”
“That would make sense, wouldn’t it? My father is bringing the currency somewhere, to some outdoor location. He’s leaving the currency, and you’re leaving me. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“Maybe. I don’t really know.” He dumped out the contents of the second WorldMart bag: a large men’s sweatshirt with a hood and side pockets. I recognized the colors right away—the University of Miami’s orange and green. He muttered, “Looks like I got something, too.”
I had to keep him talking. “Yeah? Do you like the U of Miami? I hear they have a good football team.”
He answered, “I hear they have a good medical school.”
“Yes. That’s right. Is that where you wanted to go?”
“I wanted to go there, yeah. I had the grades to go there, too. That was the plan.” He paused and added flatly, “Now this is the plan.”
I cast about for some way to connect to him right then, as a person, as a good person. I tried, “I wanted to be a doctor, too, like my father. But then he turned out to be such a jerk.”
Dessi pulled the sweatshirt over his tall, thin frame. “Really? Mine did not. He was far from a jerk. He was a great man.”
“What did he do?”
Dessi cocked one eye at me, but then he answered, “He was a teacher, at the Lycée Française in New York. I got to go to school there, too.”
“What did he teach?”
“Biology.”
“Oh.” I knew that the answer to my next question had to be bad, but I asked it anyway: “So what happened to him?”
“He got robbed and killed one night, outside the school, by an ex-student.”
“Oh! I’m so sorry.”
Dessi shrugged.
“So your life changed then?”
He sat back on the bench, frowning. “Yeah. You could s
ay that. My mother had no profession, no real marketable skills. We wound up moving down here to her brother’s house.”
“That’s terrible.”
“No. That’s not even the terrible part.”
He stopped talking, so I prodded him. “What is the terrible part?”
“She went out to get a job, at a hotel or something. They sent her for a physical. It turned out that the sore throat she had, even when we were up in New York, was not just a sore throat.”
He turned around, as if looking through the side of the ambulance. Then he continued. “Her brother tried to get her onto his health-care plan, tried very hard. He even forged a document claiming that she was his wife, but he got caught. He lost his health insurance, too. So she had to go to clinic doctors. Then she died. End of story.”
My eyes were tearing up. “That is a sad, sad story, Dessi. How can you tell it so…coldly?”
“I have no problem talking about my former life. That person, that person it all happened to, is gone. I have a new identity now. A new life.”
I couldn’t believe that. “Come on. As a kidnapper?”
He answered sharply, “As whatever I want to be.”
“You once wanted to be a doctor—for your father, for your mother. And now you want to be a common criminal?”
He looked me in the eye. “That’s right.”
“You don’t care, one way or the other, what people think of you?”
“No.”
“Okay, then. What about God? Do you care what God thinks of you?”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“Come on! I don’t believe that. Not for a minute.”
He replied like he was quoting from a book: “There is only the material world and the struggle for possessions within it. The commodities.”
I shook my head in disbelief. Dessi just stared back at me. I finally asked, “What are you talking about? What are commodities?”
“You don’t know that word?”
“No.”
“Then écoutez: Anything that is useful, or that gives one person an advantage over another, is a commodity. Anything that makes one person hand over large amounts of currency to another is a commodity.”
“You mean, like me?”
“Correct. Kidnapped rich kids are a definite commodity. That’s because people in my world need currency. People in your world don’t. They need other things—like rich, dark tans or sparkling white teeth.” He added, “Your father deals in such commodities. Does he not?”
“He does,” I admitted. “He invented DermaBronze. That’s the main reason I’m here.”
“There you are.” He ticked the next two items off on his fingers. “Education is a commodity. It was available to me up north; it is not available to me down here. Medical care is a commodity. If your little toe gets cut off, you get it sewn up, sterilized; replaced, even. If my little toe gets cut off, I bleed to death. Or some quack clinic doctor sews it up, and I die later of an infection.”
I asked him the big question: “So to you, am I only a commodity? Or am I still a person?”
“A commodity.”
“And if you have to kill me, you will?”
He looked shocked. “No!”
“But someone will?”
“It will never come to that point.”
I didn’t believe that. I was getting scared. “Or someone will mutilate me? Let’s say my father is too slow delivering the currency tonight. As a warning, someone will cut off my ear and send it to him?”
“No!”
“Or someone…Wait! The hell with ‘someone’!” I snapped. “We’re talking about Dr. Reyes, your so-called doctor. Dr. Reyes will cut off my ear, or he’ll cut off the body part that holds my GTD?”
Dessi held up both hands, trying to calm me down. “I don’t know anything about any of that. I only know my own part.”
“Then let me fill you in. My friend’s brother was taken three years ago, and he had his ear cut off. Then he had it replaced with someone else’s ear. It’s not a pretty sight.”
Dessi didn’t say anything for a long while. Then he commented matter-of-factly, “Body parts are a big commodity. You can make a lot of currency by selling a body part. I’ve seen people around here with all kinds of parts missing. I’ve even heard about kidnappers who do it. It’s ingenious, really. They get paid twice. The parents pay them to return the kid, in whatever condition. Then they contact the parents and offer to sell them a replacement body part for the same kid. It’s a win-win scenario.”
After an even longer pause, I asked him calmly, “Was Albert a commodity?”
“No.”
“He had no monetary value?”
“Correct.”
“So you killed him.”
“I did not.”
“Of course not. Dr. Reyes did.”
Dessi’s eyes rolled upward. He declared, “This discussion is over.”
“That’s what happened, isn’t it?”
“You and I are not discussing anything that will upset you further and perhaps drive you to do something foolish. We are in the endgame now. Understand? It’s like the end of a chess game. You and I and everybody else need to play by the rules so it can end…the way we all want it to end.”
“Do you think this is how Albert wanted it to end?”
Dessi tried to meet my gaze, but he quickly turned away.
“Albert was a great chess player! He was a great mechanic! He was great at…putting bandages on kids who got hurt. He was a valuable human being. Do you understand that?” Dessi tried to swat my words away with his hand. “He was more valuable than you, I can tell you that.”
Dessi turned completely away from me and pressed his head against the metal wall. I added, more to myself than to him, “He was more valuable than me, too.”
I pressed my thumb and forefinger over my eyes and thought, That is absolutely true. What good am I? I’m just a rich kid with bad security. I’m just someone to be taken; someone to be exchanged for a bag of currency.
I thought for another minute about Albert. I thought about my own life ending in an instant, like Albert’s. I felt myself sliding down into self-pity, and fear, and paralysis. I couldn’t let that happen! I banged my fists down on the stretcher. I took three deep breaths. I shook out my arms and stretched my neck.
Then I forced my mind back to Christmas Eve.
Once we had struggled through the ten gross courses of an Edwardian Christmas dinner, Mickie announced, “Attention, everyone! We have a special treat. We will now have after-dinner fun, just as they did in King Edward’s time. My producer, Lena, has researched some authentic nineteenth-century parlor games.” Mickie held up a stack of cards and fanned them out as Kurt maneuvered for a close-up.
Patience whispered, “I did research on this, too. King Edward was this big fat slob who tried to have sex with all his friends’ wives. These games should be pretty good.”
I whispered back, “That’s a hor-ish thing to say.”
“I know.”
We giggled as Mickie flipped through her cards and then announced, “The first game is called Blowing the Feather.”
Patience and I lost it immediately, turning red and laughing.
Mickie waited a moment, then continued. “Here’s what we do. We sit in a circle and try to keep a small feather in the air by blowing at it from different directions.”
Patience and I waved our hands and moaned aloud, “No! No!”
“Whoever lets the feather fall gets a forfeit.”
Patience made herself stop laughing long enough to tell Mickie, “Sorry, but no. No blowing. No. Not ever.”
We giggled even harder, but Mickie did listen to our plea. She put that card in the back of the pile. “Okay. How about this next one. It is called The Courtiers. One of us is the king, or queen, and the rest of us are the courtiers. The courtiers must do everything—and ‘everything’ is underlined—that the king or queen does. Like yawning, sneezing, scrat
ching, et cetera. Anyone who does not, or”—she stopped to look at us—“anyone who giggles during the game, receives the forfeit.”
My father, who I thought was too drunk to speak, interrupted her. “What’s the forfeit?”
“It’s the penalty for losing.”
“Why does somebody have to lose?”
“Because it’s a game.”
He persisted, “Why does there have to be a penalty in a game?”
Mickie looked into Kurt’s roving camera and smiled. “Because that’s what makes it fun. Now, who wants to be the first king or queen? Hopewell? Patience? Charity?” We all reverted to our best Mrs. Veck avoidance maneuvers. “No? Mr. or Mrs. Patterson?”
Mrs. Patterson spoke for both of them: “We don’t play a lot of games.”
Mickie didn’t even ask my father. She plunged on. “All right. Just to show you how it works, I will be the first queen. Now you have to copy whatever I do.” Mickie sat back and raised up the fingers of both hands until they were even with her cheeks. Then she fluttered them as one unit, as if she were fanning herself.
None of us moved.
“Come on, you courtiers.”
For some reason, Patience raised her hands and fluttered her fingers, so I did, too. We burst into laughter as we wiggled our fingers around goofily.
My father then raised his hands up, but he turned his fingers toward Mickie and fluttered them, as if waving goodbye. He turned to the Pattersons and mumbled, “Resistance is futile, you know. The only way out is death.”
Mr. and Mrs. Patterson looked at each other again. Then they reluctantly raised their hands and did a weak imitation of wriggling their fingers.
Hopewell remained slouched forward in his Mrs. Veck avoidance pose, steadfastly refusing to move a muscle.
Mickie continued her fluttering, looking at each of us in turn with a huge, phony smile. “Now let me check my courtiers. It looks like they’ve all got it except one. Hopewell, honey, I’m afraid you get the forfeit.” Mickie lowered her hands, so we did, too. “Okay, everybody? That’s how it works.”
She selected another card. “Now, the next game is called Squeak, Piggy, Squeak! In this game, a blindfolded person walks around the table, places a cushion on someone’s lap, and sits down on it, saying ‘Squeak, piggy, squeak!’”