“Fuck. Do you remember their names?”
“Jessica,” I said.
Hiromi stared at me.
“They were all called Jessica,” I clarified. “Every single one.”
She turned away again and addressed an audience of butter rum suckers. “That’s very…something.”
“They were versions of me. Why shouldn’t we all have the same name?”
“Because you aren’t supposed to know that when you’reseven.”
“That there’s more than one Jessica?”
“Is there?” she asked.
I placed my palm against her cheek. She felt warm despite the air-conditioning. She didn’t pull away.
“It’s just me now,” I said. “The other Jessicas are all in the graveyard.”
As I broke contact, Hiromi breathed out a little shudder, her pupils wide. Prey responses. I was in full control.
But then she asked, “Is that why you make art with bones?”
For a moment, I couldn’t answer, thinking of Cyrus giving me Peter’s collection, and of the bones in Garrett’s backyard, in the Barrow Marsh, in the Little Graveyard, and under Hiromi’s skin.
“It reminds me that we’re all skeletons in the end,” I said. “I’ll buy you this candy, if you take me to dinner sometime.”
28
Over the next two days, I completed the fiction that was Garrett’s tax returns. The numbers now satisfied the laws of data distribution, if not those of fact.
Tuesday morning came, and I took my place at the gallery’s front desk, making small talk with tourists and guarding the art. Every time the glass doors swung open, my unfamiliar reflection flashed past in them.
My hair was jet black now, in case the man trailing Hiromi ever saw me again.
With the gallery empty and sunlit, Poker Genome Project felt less mathematical, more Victorian, like the patterned wallpaper in the Lesser Tea Room at Helshire. But the probabilities were still there, wrapped around me in the weekday quiet. It was comforting, knowing that every hand I’d ever been dealt was somewhere on these walls.
I remembered one glorious poker game when I was nine, which ended with me beating Aunt Olga, a full house over an ace-high straight. I’d shared my winnings—a pile of sugar cookies—with Sebastian.
My texts to him were still unanswered.
When the gallery was empty, I read a book Arabella had given me, about a therapy cult in last-century Manhattan, a true story of free love and Freudian theory. Ordinaries were preyed on by a cabal of psychoanalysts, who became their saviors, mentors, parent figures.
One of the many reasons Mortons don’t do therapy.
The victims lived together in group homes, pooled their money, fucked each other. All those lost souls, falling under their therapists’ control.
In the end, though, the cult offered only Freudian nonsense. Having killed my own father, I found nothing symbolic in it.
The wisdom of the Mortons was older, plainer, cooler: Give your child a strong hand, a sharp knife, and a big family, then teach them loyalty without care.
A familiar shadow slanted across the gallery floor.
“Jessica, yourhair.”
“Faraday.Yourhair.”
