“Forgive him,” Clive said. “The coffee bar is his baby. That’s a twenty-one-thousand-dollar machine. Italian. There’s usually a line but there’s practically no one here right now. Vadis and I didn’t want to freak you out.”
One thing that had never changed about Clive was that twinkling look in his eyes that said, you’re the experiment, I’m the control.
“I can’t imagine what you’re thinking,” he continued. “Will you sit? Please?”
I pulled out a chair across from Vadis, who was pretending to inspect her pussy willows for phantom abnormalities. Overcome with annoyance at her, I reached across the table and chucked them to the floor. Then I sat back. She folded her hands in her lap. There was a knock on the glass. Errol was back, gesticulating at the briefcase by Clive’s side.
“I think it’s a good idea,” Errol shouted, his voice muffled.
“Okay,” Clive snapped. “I know.”
Clive flicked open the latches of the briefcase and removed a piece of paper and a pen, both of which he slid in my direction, but not quite far enough. I reached for them. The paper had the same bowler hat logo in the corner as I’d seen on the card Vadis gave me. The paragraphs that followed forbade me from divulging “any proprietary information related, but not limited to, development projects to be performed by the Undersigned and those clients, customers, and entities now and in perpetuity.”
“An NDA? Are you serious?”
“Just sign it,” Vadis snapped. “I did.”
“That’s a comfort,” I said. “Is Errol your lawyer?”
“Errol manages this place,” he explained.
“Ah, yes. Someone to do all the work while you piss off to do radio appearances. Old habits die hard, I guess.”
Vadis snorted. Clive shot her a look. I scrawled my name.
“Welcome,” Clive said, lifting his arms in victory, “to the Golconda.”
“The who?”
“It’s the name of a very famous impenetrable seventeenth-century citadel in central India.”
“Not that famous.”
“It also happens to be the name of this…”
Clive swiveled and gestured at the painting behind him, at the men in bowler hats, arms at their sides. Dozens of men were spaced equally apart so that the effect was more like wallpaper. The eye had nowhere safe to land and so it was forced to treat the men as a natural phenomenon, like rain or dust. I preferred the one with the pipe.
“Neither floating nor falling,” Clive spoke to the painting. “Suspended. Paralyzed. Unable to move forward.”
“That’s not a print, is it?”
“It’s on loan.”
“Call it a rental?”
“Exactly. And now I have given the Golconda a third association. It’s the name of our little club or society, however you prefer to think of it.”
“I don’t prefer to think anything.”
“It will transcend genre. And no, it’s not a ‘cult.’ And no, you’re not being sold into ‘sex slavery.’”
“Why are you using air quotes around sex slavery?”
Vadis was beaming, as if Clive’s words were confirmation of her existence.
“Really?”
“I don’t know why you’re being pissy with me.”
“Well, I’m not joining your cult-non-cult secret rich-person association, so you can forget about initiating me. Or making me sniff quartz or whatever. I don’t even belong to a gym. This is a waste of a perfectly good kidnapping.”
Clive got up from his seat, strolled over, and put his hand on my shoulder. The comfort of it threw me. I’d seen him put his hand on a lot of people’s shoulders, strangers on TV who would break down at a mere “what’s this really about?” from Clive. They had felt the same weight of the same hand. I hated how effective it was. Boots was the only person I knew who was immune to it. Once, when we were all at dinner, he wondered if Clive had a limp. When I asked what had led him to this conclusion, he said it was because Clive kept leaning on his shoulder every time he got up from the table.
“He’s not using you for help,” I explained, “he’s trying to own you.”
I don’t know why I never listened to my own advice.
“Do you remember Soren J?rgensen?” Clive asked.
“Another surrealist painter?”
“An elevator repairman who founded a TM-based thought movement. I interviewed him for the magazine. J?rgensen had no formal education but in the early seventies, he began theorizing the human mind was similar to the pulleys and wheels of a traction elevator like the one that brought you up here. When you call for an elevator, it seems as if the cab is being pushed up from below or down from above. Just like when you have a new thought it seems like it’s being pushed from the inside out. Even if that thought is triggered by outside stimuli, your brain parses those stimuli and acts accordingly. But according to J?rgensen, our thoughts don’t always come from where we think they come from.”