"The queen, despite her troubles,
is moved by a desire to hear your tales
about her lord."

"The Odyssey," Fitzgerald Translation. Book 17, Lines 728-730.
Used without permission.
 

ALLY:

I've gone through every possible model I could put together for whatever data Dana is sending over with Kelly tonight. I'm at a standstill here.

Patrick's on his computer and Miranda's not back from her babysitting job yet, and I have the pool to myself. I think about throwing off my skirt and diving in when the familiar four-cylinder engine of a Corolla slams into the driveway.

I'm still a little irked from earlier in the day when he tossed me out like an oily rag, although I'm certain it wasn't my doing.

When I see his face, I know that one line on the phone wouldn't have been sufficient to get him this pissed.

Normally, he runs over, slips a hand in my hair and the other one down my back, and we moisten each other's lips as I place my own hand on the small of his back and the other one on his arm. There is both excitement and comfort in this small routine.

Which he conveniently manages to forget tonight.

"I need a beer," he snaps.

"And hello to you, too," I hiss back.

I'm not going to ask if it was a bad day. That much is obvious.

If I have half a functioning brain-and I think I do-I'm not going to allow this to escalate.

Go ahead, call me a wimp, call me an idiot, but I hate arguing.

I go inside, grab two Dos Equis, and come back out, handing him one with the top already popped.

He hasn't said anything else yet. I'm this mishmosh of concern, irritation, and anxiety.

I need to show him what I received today. Somehow I don't think this would be the moment.

I light up a cigarette and drag on it silently. We sit, not looking at each other, but not leaving the other. I wait for him to pull himself sufficiently together before I'll say anything. I have no problem staying silent. It's natural for me.

Patrick, never inclined to miss a beat, has discovered that Langly's home, which for him is the high point of the day. Every afternoon, without fail, the drill begins at 3 o'clock, and continues until Langly arrives. The positive upshot of this is that Patrick is now capable of telling time. The downside is, by the time Langly does arrive, I'm ready to throttle Patrick. He can tell time, but has no concept of it yet.

Patrick does the usual body-slam into Langly, but unlike most nights, where Langly will toss him around and hug him and match his preschooler enthusiasm ounce for ounce, tonight, he just says, not now.

Patrick, of course, is utterly mystified by this. And upset. I pick him up in my arms and he begins to cry. I think this might be a good time to head in the house.

Now that pissed me off. I'm an adult. To a certain extent, I can understand and forgive such miserable behavior. But Langly forgets that Patrick doesn't have that kind of experience and sense that this, too, shall pass. For a four-year-old, all there is is the moment. And this moment for Patrick is one that has him totally shaken.

About two minutes later, a contrite, depressed looking Langly appears.

Good. He ought to be.

He picks Patrick up and says, sorry, dude, didn't mean to go off on you like that.

Patrick's still crying, and it takes a while to get him calmed down. Langly settles into his chair with him and just cuddles him. I think it comforts both of them. Patrick snuggles up against his heart, and once again, for him, all is well. And Langly looks somewhat less irritable, if no less depressed.

"I thought Nathanson was a bastard," Langly says, fluffing Patrick's hair with one hand and drinking a beer with the other.

"He was."

"Not compared to the new kid on the block."

"Let me guess. You got a new boss. King of the assholes."

"Fucking emperor of the universe of assholes." We probably shouldn't talk this way around Patrick-I've noticed he's picked up more than a few unsavory vocabulary words-but for some reason, we aren't very good at restraining ourselves.

"Describe." I sip my own beer. I had stubbed out my cigarette when I brought Patrick in, and I'm jonesing for another.

"Let's just say, whatever happened to Nathanson, should happen to this dude, only raised to a power of 10."

Langly didn't like Tom Nathanson. But I never heard him particularly wish ill upon him, and after his disappearance, he was sincerely troubled.

This guy must be a real piece of work.

"Got a name?"

"Zupancic. Spelled P-R-I-C-K."

"And when did you get to make the acquaintance of said fuckrag?"

This almost gets a smile. However, the slight upturn of the mouth vanishes when Patrick asks, "Who's a fuckrag?"

"Patrick, you're not supposed to say that," I tell him wearily.

"You say it."

"Right. And Mommy smokes, but that doesn't mean you oughta do it." Langly doesn't generally bug me about my tobacco habit. Only the alcohol one. I do cringe slightly at this criticism.

"'Randa says Mommy should quit."

"'Randa says a lot of things. Why don't you go play Legos?" I'd really like to have this conversation without a minor child in our midst.

"Want you to play, too," he tugs on Langly's arm. Langly pulls back somewhat abruptly-it's the arm he injured in the tornado, and it still hurts him, mostly when it's being stretched out by a stubborn and insistent small boy.

"Later. Need to talk to Mommy."

"Talk to Mommy later."

"No." He meets Patrick's stare. Both of them have those same pale watery-blue eyes. "Go and play."

"Don't wanna."

"Patrick. You want me to have Uncle Frohike come and yell at you?" Langly says sharply. This is sufficient for Patrick to jump down and disappear.

"I'll have to remember that one," I say dryly as I light a new cigarette. Langly motions for me to hand him the pack, and he joins me.

"Actually, Frohike doesn't yell at him. He just gives him this look and Patrick pretty much just screams and runs."

"I think it's the same look he uses on Michael."

Finally, I get a smile from Langly. "Yeah. Works on Junior, too. Ever noticed that? All Frohike's gotta do is give him The Look, and he's like, okay, whatever you say."

"Maybe we should work on The Look," I suggest, kiddingly. We stare at each other, trying to do the best Stern Parent Look we each can muster...

And burst out laughing.

This is one of the things I cherish about Langly. He can always make me laugh. No matter how sucky things are, it's never so sucky that there isn't something that's good for a round of giggles.

"How's about another beer, Ally?" He says when we've finally calmed down enough.

"Surprised you can face one after last night, let alone have another."

"Hey, problem wasn't that I drank last night. Problem was that I didn't keep drinking this morning."

"Tell me about it. Let's just say it was a pretty low-rent day."

"How much destruction did the little guy do this time?"

"None, actually. No, let me get something. I want you to read this." I once again retrieve my latest correspondence from CU, and hand it to him silently.

He finally looks up, shakes his blonde mane of cornrows. He's got to lose those things. Soon. I'll pay Miranda if she'll do something about them.

"This is bizarre."

"That's one way of putting it."

"Jesus...I mean, I was kind of hoping-"

"Hoping what?" My tone comes out sharper than I'd intended.

"Well...you know, they keep your slot open for two years and all, and I was sort of thinking-well, you know, Patrick's doing better, I think that's because of you, and I was thinking you'd maybe put it off for a little while-"

"Langly, I'm not getting any younger here! I was not planning to put it off!"

"Hey, let me finish, okay?" He's still edgy. "I was just saying, I know you wanna do this, Ally. Why, I got no idea. But I know you do, and I was just thinking maybe you'd put it off one more season or something-but I mean, this really bites and all. You call anyone there?"

"Oh, only everyone I could think to call, and e-mails to everyone on the graduate admissions committee. Nobody will talk to me, and as of five p.m., no one had seen fit to respond to my e-mails."

He nods. "I mean, I got to admit, Ally. You know I'm not nuts for this idea."

Well, no kidding. I've known that all along.

"But I know you want it, and I mean, it really sucks that you get something like this. I just don't get it. I mean, you met all the criteria, they accepted you, you accepted them, you've been getting stuff ever since, then all of a sudden, you get this. It's weird."

"To put it mildly."

"Any process in place to challenge something like this?"

"I think so. I need to talk to Jo, but I don't want to bother her right now."

"She's probably feeling better."

"I don't think so, babe. She got her pathology results. It wasn't what she'd hoped. She didn't win this round of Jeopardy."

This silences him. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. "Shit."

"Uh-huh."

"Fro know yet?"

"Frohike gets the bad news tonight. I found this out from Michael. Apparently he saw her today, and she told him."

"Great. Fro's gonna be a real doll to be around now."

"Well...I got some interesting...insights from Michael on that subject today."

"What, that he's bummed because he's in download hell? We all know THAT!"

"No, it goes...beyond the cyber and into the flesh."

"Ally, that's usually where it goes for guys after the cyber girls."

"You are so disgusting, Langly." I rumple my nose.

"And you love me for it."

"I do. Now tell me about your boss from hell."

He leans back, sighs in the way that only Langly can sigh-and Miranda. For two people genetically unrelated, they have some shockingly similar mannerisms. And these are not recent acquisitions. They were in place when they met for the first time what seems like a thousand years ago.

Eyes closed, he drags on one of the cigarettes he's scammed from me, and begins his litany of woe-is-me. Langly does good woe-is-me. Only Michael can do it better.

"Okay, well, like I get in, and I'm so wasted I end up getting up late."

This part I knew. I nearly needed dynamite to blast him out of bed this morning.

"And traffic sucks, 'cause it's Monday and everything, but I'm still, like it's only ten minutes. And I mean, I'm not usually late, which for me is real good, 'cause I'm late for everything."

Not one of his more endearing habits, I'll confess. At least he does make the effort to be on time to work. Langly can do what he has to. Now that's one of his more endearing traits.

"So I get in, and I'm expecting like, big fucking deal, I'm ten minutes late, nobody ever says boo to me, not since Nathanson vanished into thin air. I do my work, and nobody bitches at us, we get the job done. So anyway, I get in, and this dude-and he's decked out like Nathanson would come in, all in uniform-he starts yelling at me, like what the fuck time do you think we start around here and what'm I doing coming in wearing shorts and my hair is for faggots...some people, man, they just don't know how to say hello."

"So he really rolls out the welcome mat here."

"And I'm like, who the fuck are you?"

"And he's like, you don't speak to me that way, I'm your superior officer, and I'm like, excuse me, I'm a fucking civilian, I don't have a superior officer, so get off it! I mean, Jesus fuck. Did he expect us to salute or something? We got told that civilians don't salute, didn't someone give him the message?"

"So he's like, you're insubordinate, and he goes and writes me up! I mean, I'm there five minutes, he fucking writes me up! Even Nathanson never goddamn wrote me up. Threatened to a bunch of times, but never did it."

This makes me uneasy. Langly is currently the only breadwinner we have-and being written up is fairly serious. Three of them can, at best, force you into some sort of remediation, or at worst, can get your ass fired.

"Langly, if he's going to worry about you guys being insubordinate, entire forests will fall, because I think you four invented insubordination." Or at least perfected the concept.

"Yeah, well, he doesn't get it. He's supposed to be some kind of computer god, but he's so busy telling us how stupid we all are that we haven't seen him work out yet. And if he's not gonna show his stuff, we can't respect him. It's such a fucking waste of time, Ally. I mean, with Sheridan-" and I think I hear a catch in his voice-"you came in, you did your work, if you didn't do your work he'd kick your ass and tell you to get busy. That was it. It was all about the work. Which is how it oughta be."

"Agreed. But you work for the government, babe, and it's never all about the work." Eight months at the FBI and scattered consulting jobs there have taught me that much.

"Which is really stupid."

"Well, sweetie, that's the way it is." Working in a government organization, unlike what Langly naively believes, has very little to do with the actual work. It's about politics and gossip and empire-building and who you know and how well you can massage the system.

Langly, at the age of 38, has had very few day jobs...and I think the world of work is still something of a mystery to him. Plus, in his position, he has been very cloistered. The people he works with, along with himself, have little contact with anyone in the organization, out of necessity for what they do. And they like it like that. These guys are not the most socially adept creatures on the planet, even if they probably are among the most brilliant.

And that's what they were hired for. Their brains. For the government to pick them, capitalize on them, and use them until there's nothing left. Yeah, it sounds barbaric. That's because it is.

I couldn't work in this sort of environment. I would be too distressed having a boss that was so utterly detestable.

But these guys are different. They'll be upset about the boss's behavior, but what will really get them is if they think the guy's a moron. As long as they can respect him, he can be as much of a bastard as he wants. Guys seem to have this hierarchical nature to them-they will respect the El Supremo, no matter how nasty he happens to be, as long as he can show he's got the stuff.

God help this fucker if he doesn't show he's got elephant balls in the world of high-tech, and pretty soon.

In the meantime, we have to eat. Yeah, I know, I've got a trust fund. We could live off it.

Langly'd rather work for Hitler, I think, than live off my trust fund.

Plus there's the fact that the way we go through money around here, we could eat up my little nest egg pretty rapidly. Langly and I don't live cheap. There's our household expenses, which are high, and our mortgage, which is not chump change, and Langly's taste for new equipment in the offices, which isn't trivial. We have two kids and god knows how many hangers-on. I was planning to go back to school, which, while I was going to pay for it out of the money my mother left me, still involved a good chunk of lost income on my part. And we like nice vacations, good liquor, books and CD's, and lots of creature comforts. These do not come cheap.

Langly wants me to not be working. I think, with some irritation, that he is not unduly bothered by the letter I received today. He thinks the kids need me, and he counts himself as one of the kids in that regard.

He's going to have a problem if he doesn't find a way to knuckle under. No, it's not fair. But if he wants to keep the job he has, he's going to have to play it their way.

Of course, he could find another job. He's got talent. His prison record is well in the past. And now he has a work history.

"You know what was real creepy, though, Ally?" His voice brings me back.

"No."

"Well, Goldie, I think after Zupan-prick's 20th anti-Semitic comment or so-" Goldie is Jewish, and he keeps wondering why I married a goy. He never passes up an opportunity to hit on me-"decided, fuck this. And typed up his resignation letter, and puts it on Zupan-prick's desk."

"You'll miss Goldie."

"No, I won't. 'Cause about ten minutes later, asshole comes out, closes the door, and holds up Goldie's note. And he's like, see this? And we're like, no, we're fucking blind, at least that's what we're thinking, but yeah, we can read. And he's like, just remember, we own you. Quitting's not your choice here. You quit when I say you can, and guess what? You don't get to quit."

"Hold it there. You're saying, you're not permitted to resign of your own free will."

"I knew you were a smart girl, Ally." I bristle. I always feel like the village idiot with these guys.

"So...they can fire you, but you can't fire them."

"She shoots, she scores."

"Langly, contrary to what you believe, I'm not totally stupid!"

He frowns. "Hey, Ally, get off that already. I mean, I know you're a smart girl, you don't have to beat me over the head with it. I KNOW it. You're the one who has a problem with it."

"Well, let's face it, I'm kind of at the low end of the education scale around here."

He shakes his cornrows. "Ally, I dunno why you get so caught up in that. I mean, you think you need a PhD for people to respect you around here?"

"Actually, yes."

"You're wrong."

"Really. And from the looks of things, I'm being forced to stay that way!"

"Hey, Ally, don't you think what you do is important?" He glares at me.

"I do. But I resent having the choice taken from me!"

"Yeah, well, now you know how I feel."

We're both silent for several moments. I grab two more beers, pop the lids, and hand him one.

"Miranda gonna be around tonight?"

"I think so. Shelby's coming over later. Why?"

He shakes his blonde beaded locks. "Need to do something about the hair. I'm not gonna spend my day getting ragged on about the hair."

"You're not going to cut it, are you?" I feel my guts ache.

"Nah, no way. But you know how you got it right now, looks like you got short hair but it's not?"

"Yeah. It's easy. Even I can do it." I'm inept with hair. I learned this from my daughter.

"I gotta have 'Randa pull the braids out, show me how to do it."

Well, at least one good thing came out of all this.

END OF PART 5