The Caryatids

"Lionel, classic poetry won't help us right now. We had a really bad night, but we're gonna plant our feet, get very steady, and hold all this up. All right? We can do that. I promise you. We'll dead-lift the whole world straight up over our heads. If guys like you and I don't do that, who will?"

"I had to breathe my own breath right into her dead old mouth," said Lionel.

"You did the right thing. Really."

"Am I too stupid to live?"

It meant a lot to her that Lionel would ask her such a thing. His neediness immediately made her strong. "Okay, so listen to me now. We could have all been killed tonight. The software in the whole building might have blown out, like your grandmother's costume. If everyone had died in there, and I had died, and you had died, and your grandmother, the support staff, her audience, everybody-that would have been, like, an amazing, perfect exit for the wonderful Toddy Montgomery. An amazing superstar exit from this world."

Radmila drew a deep breath. "Well, no diva gets a clean exit like that. Nobody. Not me, not you, not even your superstar grandma. So our situation right now is, like: We're completely screwed up. Our town is broken by a quake and parts of it are on fire. People are dying out there tonight. Toddy died. We're crying inside our limo. But the Family-Firm is going to deal." Radmila pushed hair back from her sweating forehead. "You get me? We shuffle all the cards and we deal. First thing tomorrow."

Lionel contemplated this fierce declaration. "You know what?" he said. "I understand why he married you."

Radmila's eyes gushed tears. "What a sweet thing to say."

"No, he's really a smart guy, my big brother. Smarter than me."

"I tried so hard to please him and this Family," Radmila sniffed. "That beautiful old woman...I went to political meetings. I even read Synchronist philosophy. Do you understand that stuff? I don't think anybody does."

"My brother does."

"You think John is truly a Synchronist? He doesn't talk that way just to sound cool?"

"What's small, dark, and knocking at the door?" quoted Lionel. "The future of humanity."

Radmila began to sob aloud.

"You should have another baby, Mila. The Family future needs that."

Radmila howled.

"I know you can't stand John around you anymore," said Lionel, "but in a world as messed up as this world, a guy like my big brother: he is a force for good. It's like he's a plastic surgeon...It's like...one tiny injection, that won't even hurt, and whoa, I can bench-press the whole world...I went for that pitch of his totally, and oh my God, one of these days I swear I'm gonna kill somebody!"

The car made its methodical way toward their home.

"Killing people is too easy a job for you, Lionel," Radmila told him. "Killing people is for suckers. If we take good care of our own Family and we wait awhile, the bad people die all by themselves." She took a measured breath. "'He was just seventeen, you know what I mean, but the way he looked...'"

"That was so beautiful," said Lionel, leaning back at last. "That's what's so great about the classics. They give you that terrific sense of roots."

TODDY MONTGOMERY HAD TAUGHT Radmila many useful things about life. Especially about life as an idol and star. Almost every single thing that Toddy taught about wealth and fame and glamour was grim and dull and dutiful. In the long run, those things always turned out to be the only things that worked.

"Never forget" was Toddy's usual preface: "Never forget that just because you get it doesn't mean you get to keep it." "Never forget that the world expects something from a somebody." "Never forget that Hollywood was built on the backs of us women."

There were dozens of these wise sayings of hers. To her shame, Radmila had forgotten most of them. "Never forget that behind every woman you ever heard of is a man who let her down," that one was memorable. "Never forget that charm and courtesy cost a woman nothing..."

Toddy herself had conspicuously forgotten one important thing. Radmila Mihajlovic was the cloned creation of a Balkan war criminal. That awful fact preyed on Radmila's mind every time that she saw her own face in a mirror, but Toddy never breathed a single word about the subject. She seemed to have simply forgotten it. Toddy was a major star, and Mila Montalban was her handpicked disciple, and that was how things were.

Like all Synchronists, Toddy was rigorously bodycentric. Her philosophy was obsessed about the flow of time through human flesh. It followed that Toddy's cure for every kind of crisis centered on the body: exercise, sleep, nutrition, and determined primping. "Never forget to go to the gym every morning," Toddy would say, "because that's the worst thing that will happen to you all day, and that's such a comfort to know."