Chapter 37
We shared french fries and a vanilla milkshake.
We ignored the scandalized expression of the waitress I’d seen watching through the window. Then we drove up the mountain guided by my phone. The voice coaxed us through switchbacks, along carriage roads, past a derelict gatehouse.
Lyon had bought the abandoned resort five years ago.
It hailed from the age of Catskills family summers—a swimming pool and ice rink, a ballroom, a bowling alley, all in ruins when Lyon’s reconstruction had begun.
As we crept toward the resort’s main building, we saw that the outer structures were broken and deserted.
Here on the west side of the mountain, sunset still angled through the trees. Manhattan seemed more than a few hours away. Like Helshire’s Old Campus, or the tumbledown brickyards near Upper Falls, the resort was a different era, a lost world.
When the main building came into view, the sense of ruin vanished.
The windows were ablaze, the eaves lined with colored lights that pulsed in time with calypso playing from hidden speakers.
Another vintage car—some kind of Daimler—was pulling away, leaving behind a couple in party clothes, who climbed the porch stairs and disappeared through the doors of the resort.
As we pulled into the turnaround, a young woman in capri pants and kitten heels came down the stairs to greet us. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she wore cat-eye glasses and soft pink lipstick.
She looked up from her clipboard. “Hiromi Kennedy and Jessica Anderson?”
“That’s us,” I said.
“Welcome to Visage. If you’d be so kind as to give me your keys, your car and luggage will be waiting at Cabin Sixteen.”
“But we haven’t dressed,” Hiromi said.
“The pre-party is casual.” The woman glanced at the clipboard again, then gave us a kindly smile. “This is your first Visage, I see.”
I handed over Uncle Orrin’s keys. “Be careful. It’s a family heirloom.”
Another woman had appeared, with the same outfit and makeup, holding a tray of champagne. I took a glass, then looked at Hiromi.
“A special drink for Ms. Kennedy,” the woman said, rotating the tray a quarter turn—one of the glasses was a pearly color.
Hiromi took a sip. “Lychee juice? I love it.”
The woman smiled in apology. “Mangosteen.”
She ushered us toward the entrance, the sounds of party chatter building. Two young men in golf shirts opened the doors for us.
“I wasn’t expecting this level of theme,” I said softly.
“We didn’t even RSVP. How’d they know your name?”
“Uncanny,” I said.
The lobby of the old resort was built of granite, like the stones around Helshire—the scree left by ancient glaciers. But the decor had been restored to its 1950s glory.
Everyone was fresh out of their cars, halfway through their second glasses of champagne. We were soon fortified with new friends for the real party, which began after dinner. The milkshake now seemed ill-advised. Food was plentiful.
All the people here were the sorts my family incorporated.
A pair of married intellectual property lawyers, working to reclaim the rights of actors who’d been scanned—bodies and faces now owned by movie studios.
A cosmetic surgeon who wore a sixty-thousand-dollar watch and specialized in making white teenagers look Korean.
A fashion photographer whose latest work was shot in shipping containers on cargo ships at sea, using only sunlight from holes drilled into the corrugated metal walls.
Everyone was successful, connected, and yet somehow rudderless—part of nothing except the machineries of money and of Dr. Lyon’s court.
He was nowhere, and everywhere. People talked about his theories, his parties, and his art collection. Hiromi found herself celebrated. Random people, even a few established artists, knew her name, her robots, her headstones.
She began to glow, her anxiety lifting. She told stories of out-of-control machines, of parts flying off at crucial moments, of the knife-throwing robot arm almost sending a nine-inch Bowie through her foot.
“It wasn’t that close,” I said.
“Hush, Jess. It was millimeters.”
She had another of her special drinks—lychee, this time—and regaled the coterie around us with stories of asking rich people for their favorite Martin Luther King quotes. For a moment, I thought she’d forgotten my blunder the day we met. How evil flourishes, when good does nothing.
But then she winked at me across the group.
I smiled back, pretending to slip from my glass of champagne.
“Ms. Anderson,” a voice came softly in my ear. Yet another of the perfectly put-together young women.
“Yes?”
“There’s been a small incident. As a courtesy, we like to make sure the guests’ cars are topped up.”
“Oh shit,” I said. Uncle Orrin, future-proofing against the rickety world beyond the estate, had converted the fleet to biofuels. “That car takes diesel.”
“Everything should be fine. We just need some technical advice.”
“Right.” One drop of unleaded, and Orrin would have my skin.
I put my still-full glass on a passing tray, gave Hiromi an apologetic look, and mouthed ten minutes.
She nodded back, her latest story still in full flight—the time she pilfered a set of Thermomix blades from a certain TV chef girlfriend: the rpms, the damages, the recriminations.
Beyond the front doors, the party chatter faded into cicadas and wind in the leaves, the sudden vastness of the dark. A Bentley SUV waited in the turnaround. The still apologetic young woman opened its rear door for me.
There were two men in the front. They weren’t valets or mechanics.
The woman saw my hesitation. “Cabin Sixteen is twenty minutes’ walk from here. Only a few minutes by car.”
She’d been ready with that line.
“Perfect,” I said, getting in. “The party was getting boring anyway.”