Our Country Friends(70)

    The statement shocked the colonists. They were both isolated and exposed. They were on their own.

“But you said the truck you saw was black?” the trooper said to Senderovsky. “Not gray or green like the two young ladies said.”

“Yes,” Senderovsky confirmed. “No. I don’t know.”

“Anyone you think might plan to do you harm,” the trooper asked. He looked around the many structures of the property. “Maybe someone that did work for you.”

“Many people work on this property, but they are all handsomely paid,” the landowner said. “No, I would have to agree with Karen. This sounds like a bias crime. Oh, also, some of our visitors are prominent.” He mentioned the presence of the Actor and Karen’s occupation. The trooper nodded and proffered Senderovsky a card with one of his gloved hands.

As the cruiser drove down the driveway, pops of gravel tickling its underbelly, Masha turned to her husband and said, “Well, thanks for letting us know that we’ve been stalked for the past three months.” She walked back to her office, noticing the shouting of the new lovers upstairs and the fact that she didn’t give a damn about their problems.





8


He was locked in the bathroom with his publicist, his agent, and his manager on the line. They were taking their turns with him. The electronic world had been churning all day, a new discovery popping up every minute, as tens of thousands of the Actor’s underemployed fans began their own unpaid investigations. One social media sleuth had figured out that the Actor was staying on Senderovsky’s peculiar estate and, using social media, also deduced the identities of the other bungalow colonists of note. The newspaper article about Senderovsky’s bungalow colony (title: “A Dacha of His Own”) was dug up, reposted, and ridiculed en masse. People were asking on social media: “Are you a Sasha, a Dee, or a Karen?” Dee’s original Tr?? Emotions–enhanced photo was somehow resurrected (she had erased it shortly after posting), and this led the agent, the manager, and the publicist to ask a new series of questions. Was the Actor in love with Dee under duress? Was this all Karen’s fault? Was she holding him hostage with the app? Did the Actor need to be exfiltrated under cover of night? Because there was no way, they surmised, that he could have given up Elspeth for “someone like her.”

“I know you like a brother,” the manager was saying, “and there’s not a racist bone in your body.”

“There’s not a racist bone in her body.”

“I’d like to bring up your Turkish grandmother,” the publicist said. “You come from a Muslim background. That’s a fact.”

“I don’t want people to dig too deep into that,” the Actor said.

“What do you mean? You’ve mentioned it in tons of interviews.”

“Let’s leave that alone for now,” the Actor said, cryptically.

    He had to call Elspeth right away, his agent said. (She now represented both the Actor and the activist-model.) The window was closing on her forgiveness. Given the Tr?? Emotions of it all, given the fact that he had acted (“correct choice of words,” said the manager) under duress, his former girlfriend was amenable to a face-to-face meeting. She was hurt and angry, there were words she would have to say which were not words he had heard in a long while from a human person, but this was the only way out for him now. They had to lean on “technology run amok” as an excuse for him falling in love with a racist. The agency owned fractional membership in a plane that was currently parked about an hour and twenty minutes south of the Actor. Because of the virus, the roads were nice and clear. All he had to do was get into his little red Lancia and drive a tiny bit.

“Or,” said the manager, “let’s try this on for size. You were never lovers, merely friends.”

“You made a friend and she betrayed you,” the publicist said.

Yes, they all agreed, that was good. He had made a bad friend under duress.

There was a knock on the bathroom door. “I have to go,” the Actor said.

“One last thing,” the agent said. She had been a dramaturge in a previous, less remunerated life and had remained a fan of spoken gravitas.

“What?” The Actor sighed.

“You have to remember that you’re not just a man. You are not just a ‘person.’?” The agent paused for effect. “You are a responsibility onto this world.”



* * *



—

As they sat down to a dinner of swordfish and finocchio, the thunder, a known overactor, couldn’t help itself and rang out in a succession of monstrous bursts, scaring sound-sensitive Nat and confusing the newly frightened diners who mistook some of the thunderous peals for gunshots. Karen and Vinod, whose chairs both faced the driveway, periodically checked for incoming pickup trucks.

After ten minutes of silent chewing had passed, Dee began to talk. She put her hands beneath her chin in the manner of her author’s photo and then spoke calmly and brightly the way one talks to the British.

    “I was watching Nat and Karen set out the place mats today,” she said, “and I just got to thinking. We pretend we’re so diverse around here. As Sasha himself announced so proudly back when we had our first dinner, ‘I have almost no white friends!’ But, still. I have to ask: Where are the Black people at this table? Where are the gay people? The noncisgendered people?”