Stranded on Capitol Hill

THE EXIT

Two weeks of steady mountain rain can change a man's ideas about safe distances.

The Little Thompson River, usually a pastoral creek at the bottom of an east-running flume, had spilled over its banks and was heading for our garden-level doors with bared teeth.

The lower alfalfa field was four feet under a wash of bobbing cottonwood snags and whiskey barrels.

I grabbed a pair of binoculars and ran to an east-facing window, watching as the swell rushed beneath our escape bridge. Good grief! Another foot and it would reach the girders.

Pygar, the ferret, grabbed my leg and stared at me with tiny eyes. Do something, you fool!

"What about our stuff!?"

Leave it! Get us out of here!

I ran downstairs.

Nicole was in our gym with steam pouring off her head. She'd cranked the treadmill to a world record pace, probably dreaming of the humility she'd display on the medal platform when they draped gold around her neck.

"It's a flood!" I shouted. "We're about to die!"

She backflipped off the treadmill, stuck the landing, and scrambled upstairs with Pygar in tow.

Nicole ran to a window.

"Never leave an unattended faucet!" she shouted.

The snags had caught up in the bridge girders, and a flotilla of sports balls, hockey sticks, and a pair of inflatable punch dummies with Joe Palooka's face was piling up behind A splintered two-by-four impaled one of the Joe's, and he collapsed face-first into the silt-infused churn.

"What a way to go," cried Nicole, "just when you think it can't get more brutal."

I put a consoling hand on her shoulder. Nature's indifference was pulling her down.

"Here comes more wood,” I warned, “don't look!"

"There's no telling what this means for the earthworms. They'll be driven out of their holes!" she shrieked. "I hate this world."

Pygar placed a paw on my foot and launched into a wiggle dance.

"You can stop right there, buddy," I said. "Sandbags are useless at this point."

Besides, I'd had my limit of his fast answers and accusatory glances. I suspected he was insane; his continuous blubbering about the Reckoning and the Four Weasels of the Apocalypse had put me on edge.

"Let's crash the La Jolla Kid's penthouse." Nicole suggested, "Seventeen stories up should put us out of this mess."

"Capital idea!" I shouted, turning to Pygar and demanding the Lexus' keys, which had been missing for several days."

He scampered up to his lair and returned with the keys in his mouth.

We grabbed Pygar, our smartphones, credit cards, Nicole's iPod, and her 19-ounce Balabushka pool cue, then leaped into the Lexus and made for the bridge. And not a minute too soon, the Little Thompson was an inch over the bridge. Dead Palooka had tethered to a railing. We splashed past that horror, throwing up a rooster tail of flood spray, and made for the interstate. Moments later, we merged onto I-25, rocking out to the stylized yodeling of Jewel.

There were forty miles of southbound traffic to get through; with any luck, we'd reach uptown Denver in two hours.

Meanwhile, Nicole was scrolling through an NHTSA list of decommissioned crash dummies.

"These prices are ridiculous," she complained. "$3500 for an infant dummy. The ad says CAMI has twenty-six crashes under her belt.

"When was the last time they changed her plugs?" I asked. "It's gotta make sense."

"CAMI doesn't have plugs. Please keep an eye on the road. This stretch is famous for pileups. In 1984, an eighteen-wheeler jackknifed and dumped a load of torpedoes in the middle of rush hour."

We drove silently for another ninety minutes; then, I took an off-ramp, weaving through downtown Denver until we reached Grant Street.

Portofino Towers rose seventeen stories. I swiped with our security fob, and we started down the parking ramps, circling until we reached our spots on the fourth level. Nicole grabbed Pygar, and we made for the elevator. The doors opened with a woosh, and up we went. The next moment, we stepped into the penthouse foyer. Three-thousand-square feet of white Italian tile lay before us.

"I need carbs," Nicole said, heading for the kitchen, an island of granite overhung by twin racks of Mauviel copper and Birdseye maple cabinetry. A double oven, eight-burner La Cornue range was the centerpiece of this culinary extravaganza. Irish, Nicole's twin sister, had Versailles in mind when she'd designed the wonderous, little-used cookery. She'd left the remainder of the palace's design to an interior decorator who'd channeled Caligula for inspiration.

Nicole rang up Irish to inform her of our home invasion. Placing a hand over the receiver, She whispered, "No worries. The Kid wants to know if your passport is up to date. He wants to spend a week in Ecuador next month. Tour the Galapagos islands, then trek to Montecristi for Panama hats?"

"And Cuban cigars?"

Nicole wrinkled her nose.

***

The La Jolla Kid, my billionaire son-in-law, was a singer of sentimental ballads, a reciter of Shakespeare, a procurer of luaus, and a hard-nosed businessman who had put himself on the Forbes list by selling the Chinese a mountain range of scrap metal by the time he'd hit his senior year at Harvard. Cargo shorts, t-shirts, inscrutable smiles, and generosity were his calling card, and nothing pleased him better than bidding on Star Trek memorabilia at Christie's Auction House. He'd romanced Irish for a year before they married.

Thus, our lives shifted from shabby apartment living, where networks of allies provided the aluminum cans and discarded furniture I'd used to supplement my custodian's salary, to a prairie mansion thirty miles east of Boulder, flying in charter jets and sipping cocktails in Swedish ice bars.

My wife, Joan, a respected writer of poetry and editor of Ph.D. theses, had passed on several years earlier.

We ordered in and hit the sack early that evening.

***

We woke the following morning to find Irish at the breakfast bar, scuffing the tip of her Predator P3 Bocote cue.

Nicole pulled the cover off Irish's pool table. "Straight pool or eight ball?" She asked with a yawn.

"Nine-ball," Irish said.

Knowing they could go at it all morning, I fell to taping together a series of Manolo Blahnik shoe boxes that I’d settled on as a suitable lair for Pygar. A retreat where Pygar could secret himself if ever he felt a need, as Melville said somewhere, for driving off the spleen.

For those who might not know, this is a challenging task. The problems associated with a telepathic ferret increase exponentially when his regular quarters, a polished limestone pyramid the size and weight of a Chevy big block engine, are not on hand.

"When's the last time you changed the felt on this table?" Nicole asked Irish.

"Two months ago. It's Simonis 300."

"No wonder it's so damned fast."

"Sue me." Irish said, "My break."

She followed through with a break that sent a shock wave through the penthouse.

Pygar came flying out of the foyer restroom with a tampon in his mouth.

"No, you don't," Irish said, grabbing him. "That box wasn't even open yet. You little weasel!"

"Oh, let him have it," Nicole said.

I'm keeping the damn thing growled Pygar. He bit tenaciously down on his prize and tried to wriggle out of Irish's grasp.

"Oh, all right, Pygar. Off to your boxes."

The doorbell chimed. "CAMI time!" they shouted together.

"CAMI, the crash dummy?" I asked. But they were already running for the door.

An affable young man with a signature pad smiled. "Hello, ladies. I'm afraid I need a signature on this one, and could you spell your last name in the square?"

Irish quickly jotted her name, pointing to a corner in the foyer.

"Could you set it there?"

"Not a problem, ma'am." He rolled the box in and set it down. "Have a good day, ladies."

He headed for the elevators.

Nicole grabbed a box cutter from the utility closet.

"Be careful with that," Irish said.

"I am."

She cut the box open, and I peered through a blur of bubble wrap at the toddler-sized shape. Irish pulled the packing away.

"She's so small," Nicole said, lifting CAMI. "Oh, but she's heavy. Look, here's a USB charging cable. Help me find the port."

"It's on her arm, right there on the shoulder."

CAMI was a blank. Pillow-like, an approximation of the human form, a stuffed laundry bag designed to be battered

"Her inner workings include a leather trauma skeleton and a wealth of circuitry you'd expect from a nuclear submarine," Nicole said.

Pygar glared at CAMI. What the blazes?

The girls carried CAMI to the kitchen and placed her on a counter.

I glanced at Pygar. "Where do you suppose she came from?" I asked.

Pygar quickly established a psychic bond with CAMI’s database.

Well? I asked. He held up a paw, indicating he needed a moment.

***

It turned out CAMI was activated in Sweden. Her sensors had sent her a flood of information, spatial estimates about the room they'd assembled her in, coordinate 59.32'93 N longitude 18.06'87 E. Stockholm. Yes, they'd activated her in Sweden, and she’d reacted to her inventor's voice.

"Yes, I hear you. What am I?"

"You're a team member, CAMI."

"A trauma unit," she said, scanning her data banks.

"Welcome aboard, CAMI."

"Aboard?"

"Yes, well, it's an idiom for someone who's just joined a company,"

"Welcome aboard. Ha-ha. Yes, I've been welcomed. Do I have a family?"

"You're unique. You can consider us your family."

"Us?"

"Our team,"

"Hello, team. Hello, family. I count six of you…why is my torso heating?"

"We've applied a heating pad to your torso."

"39 degrees Celsius. I should be sad."

"Or happy; you can interpret however you choose. We call it free will."

"Free will? Ha-ha. Why did the chicken cross the road?"

"That's a good one, CAMI. Why did the chicken cross the road?"

"Free will? Will free? Free will. You don't need to do this."

"Do what?" asked J. C Cami, Ph.D., the head of the CAMI development team.

"Hurt me."

"Don't worry, CAMI; we'll take good care of you. That's enough for now, CAMI.

Let's put you in sleep mode and straighten out a few bugs."

"Goodbye, family. Goodbye, team. Goodbye, free will. Goodbye…"

She'd felt herself slipping into darkness.

Dr. Cami shook his head. He'd interviewed a series of trauma doctors and then uploaded the videotapes to the LUMI supercomputer to analyze their facial expressions while recounting trauma room experiences. A dynamic programming algorithm soon followed, and then came the world's first trauma-dummy artificial intelligence software.

"Something isn't right," he'd said. "These responses…"

Teamer Corporation spent the next six months rewriting CAMI's software and assembling new trauma units. She was destined for the scrap heap.

***

Upon finishing CAMI's origin story, Pygar grabbed a lipstick tube and disappeared into the shoe boxes.

"Hey, wait a minute. Where the hell are my keys?" I looked at the coffee table and stormed up to the boxes.

"Pygar, bring my keys out of there! Damn you!"

Piss off.

"OK, mister, you just crossed a line! I'm going for the shop vac!"

OK-ok. He pushed out my keys. Take your freaking keys. You know what? They suck!

Meanwhile, Nicole and Irish had CAMI fired up.

"Can you hear me, CAMI?" Nicole asked, squeezing one of the arms.

"Yes, hello, team. Hello family. Hello, hello, hello…."

They looked at one another and broke out laughing.

"No, CAMI, I'm Nicole. This is my sister, Irish,"

"Hello, Nicole, in Denver, Denver. I am lost, lost. Hello, Denver Irish."

***

We flew to Las Vegas on a Challenger 300 charter jet the following day.

One must see it in action to understand that the rich get richer. The Kid hit paydirt on his first go at a large payout slot machine.

Bells chimed. Whistles blew. Lights flashed, and a crowd gathered. Pygar squeezed out of my pocket and leaped to the floor, searching for silk stockings to climb. I knew he'd found his "Jill" when a tray of Dominican cigars flew into the air, and a woman screamed, "Rat!"

The Bellagio's floor attendants rushed past the woman as she high-stepped her arms akimbo and face-planted over a velvet cordon. They wanted to check the machine for malfunction and squeeze the advertising juice from that rare and happy slot payout. But their enthusiasm cooled upon discovering the La Jolla Kid had touched them again. His luck was legendary on the strip, and they knew well enough that no happy testimonials or any other management-driven spectacles would happen. The Kid was ready to fill out the mandatory tax form, walk away with $37,000, and that was the end of it.

Meantime, I grabbed Pygar and slipped him into a pocket.