Read Online Spin by Robert Charles Wilson - Free Book Online Page B

the Spin was rapidly
becoming
his life. And it was, I suppose, relatively easy for me. I had been leaning toward medicine anyway, and it seemed like an even wiser choice in the current atmosphere of simmering crisis. Maybe I imagined myself saving lives, should the end of the world prove to be more than hypothetical and less than instantaneous. Did that matter, if we were all doomed? Why save a life if all human life was due to be snuffed out? But physicians don’t really
save
lives, of course, we prolong them; and failing that, we provide palliative care and relief from pain. Which might prove to be the most useful skill of all.
    On top of that, college and med school had been one long, relentless, grueling, but welcome, distraction from the rest of the world’s woes.
    So I coped. Jason coped. But many people had a much rougher time. Diane was one of them.
     
     
    I was cleaning out my one-bedroom rental at Stony Brook when Jason called.
    It was early in the afternoon. The optical illusion indistinguishable from the sun was shining brightly. My Hyundai was packed and ready for the drive home. I had planned to spend a couple of weeks with my mother, then drive across country in a lazy week or two. This was my last free time before I started interning at Harborview in Seattle, and I intended to use it to see the world, or at least the part of it bracketed between Maine and the state of Washington. But Jason had other ideas. He barely let me get out a hello-how-are-you before he launched into his pitch.
    “Tyler,” he said, “this is too good to pass up. E.D. rented a summerhouse in the Berkshires.”
    “Did he? Good for him.”
    “But he can’t use it. Last week he was touring an aluminum extrusion plant in Michigan and he fell off a loading platform and cracked his hip.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “It’s not serious, he’s recovering, but he’s on crutches for a while and he doesn’t want to ferry himself all the way to Massachusetts just so he can sit around and suck Percodan. And Carol wasn’t that enthusiastic about the idea to begin with.” Not surprisingly. Carol had become a career drunk. I couldn’t imagine what she would have done in the Berkshires with E. D. Lawton, except drink some more. “The thing is,” Jase went on, “he can’t back out of the contract, so the house is empty for three months. So I thought, with you finishing med school and all, maybe we could get together for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe talk Diane into joining us. Take in a concert. Walk in the woods. Be like old times. I’m headed there now, actually. What do you say, Tyler?”
    I was about to turn him down. But I thought about Diane. I thought about the few letters and phone calls we had exchanged on the predictable occasions and all the unanswered questions that had stacked up between us. I knew the wise thing would be to beg off. But it was too late: my mouth had already said yes.
     
     
    So I spent another night on Long Island; then I crammed the last of my worldly possessions into the trunk of the car and followed the Northern State Parkway to the Long Island Expressway.
    Traffic was light and the weather was ridiculously pretty. It was a tall blue afternoon, just pleasantly warm. I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second. I felt as stupidly, corporeally happy as I’d been in a long time.
    Then I turned on the radio.
    I was old enough to remember when a “radio station” was a building with a transmitter and a tower antenna, when radio reception flooded and ebbed from town to town. Plenty of those stations still existed, but the Hyundai’s analog radio had died about a week out of warranty. Which left digital programming (relayed through one or more of E.D.‘s high-atmosphere aerostats). Usually I listened to twentieth-century jazz downloads, a taste I’d picked up rummaging through my father’s disc collection. This, I liked to pretend, was his real