Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

The cat tries once again to leave, and this time, when Henrietta intervenes, Jiji swivels his head and nips. Henrietta flips the cat over onto his back and pins him down to the floor by his throat. Jiji’s eyes grow so wide that, even in the dim light, Henrietta can see the whites like slices of twin moons shining from behind his pupils, and as he hisses and growls and spits, Henrietta smiles.

The hologram of Henrietta’s father watches his daughter, nodding in paternal approval. The power of neural networks has always been that they can detect patterns that humans have been missing for years. But their authority can also be misused when they are induced to tell us exactly what it is that we want to hear.

30

  DEAD ON ARRIVAL

JAMES “CLAY” CLAIBORNE is not real. His virtual presence is the result of interference patterns caused by the intersections of emissions from laser diodes mounted to the ceiling in all four corners of the hospital room where Quinn is lying semi-prone in a pink, paper-thin gown with an IV drip in her arm.

She has never seen a MediPresence system before. Back when she had Molly, hospitals were still competing on privacy, in-room TV size (that was before everyone had their own personal screens glued to their faces every waking moment), and personalized farm-to-tray meal prep. But as demographics shifted, hospital administrators realized that the primary source of patient discomfort was loneliness. Children moving far away from home was nothing new, but increasingly, they were either unwilling or unable to take time off to comfort their sleepless and heat-flushed mothers during the hormonal turmoil of their hysterectomies, or to commiserate with their unshaven, bed-headed fathers putting up cantankerous resistance to their new post-triple-bypass existence.

James is heavier than she remembers him. He used to carry the extra weight common to all suburban fathers who love their bratwurst, microbrews, March Madness, and Xboxes—and who pay for gym memberships they keep meaning to use but seldom do. Not long after Molly was born, James slimmed down as a result of someone at the agency introducing him to whatever the popular fanatical exercise regimen and dietary plan of the day was. Something like “FAF” (officially “Fit, Able, and Focused,” but for those in the know, “Fit as Fuck”) or a system based on medicine balls with handles on them called “Balls Out!” He started getting up at four a.m. every morning (usually waking Quinn in the process) to have time to train, shower, and blend himself a protein shake for the road. Quinn was jealous of his success and of all the comments people were making about his weight, so she went down into the basement and tried the videos a few times when he wasn’t home, but the bald, bug-eyed, bombastic buffoon who led the workouts was way too intense for her.

A year and half later, he was back to sleeping in most mornings and had regained at least half the weight. And the second half was apparently not far behind. But the thing is, it kind of suits him. Everything suits James Claiborne. Thin or heavy. Long hair or short. Beard, stubble, or clean-shaven. Ripped jeans and a T-shirt, or crisp fitted slacks and a button-down. Today it is dark denim, black buckled wingtips, and a slate-gray V-neck beneath the rain-speckled Burberry trench coat she found at Costco. With the possible exception of the time he tried sporting a fedora he spontaneously bought at an outlet mall, James is the type of guy who can make just about anything work. His silver hair, matching beard, dark complexion, and piercing pale blue eyes that border on pewter only seem to make him increasingly handsome as he ages.

Quinn recalls her ex-husband’s tattoo. After everything happened, he decided to get a sound wave of Molly’s first words on the inside of his forearm. She imagined that, once things got better, she’d run her finger along it and play the audio in her head after he put his arm around her while they watched TV in the evenings, or as she lay against him in bed after sex. That was her favorite place to be in the entire world—that spot at the intersection of his shoulder and his chest and his neck. But things did not get better, and Quinn can’t recall if she ever got a chance to run her finger along it at all.

Maybe it’s the fact that cancer runs in her family and she is lying in a pre-op hospital room, but Quinn cannot remember how things got so bad between them. She can’t tell whether her situation is obscuring her line of sight, or whether it is granting her exquisite clarity, but for the first time, it occurs to her that arguing with someone you love is a form of hubris—a kind of baseless, arrogant confidence that you have so much control over your future and so much time ahead of you that you can afford to squander an entire day of emotional connection, or an hour, or even one goddamn minute. She thinks about how mad she used to get at James when he claimed to have done the laundry even though all he did was put it in the washing machine, move it to the dryer an hour later, and then transfer it from the dryer to a laundry basket that he then left at the foot of the bed for her to fold. (There’s no way you can legitimately claim to have “done the laundry” unless you’ve seen it all the way through the folding phase.) And how she used to get mad at him for getting mad at her for taking his fries without asking. (He offered to get Quinn her own fries, but she said she didn’t want any, so why, he would ask, was she now eating his? Because she didn’t want her own fries. She