The Sensory Deception
the others and shook his head. “Well, we got her attention, I guess.” He shook her again and she kept snoring.
    Ringo asked again, “What do we do?”
    Farley said, “We make her comfortable and turn out the lights.”

C hopper’s favorite time was dawn. He liked to see civilization wake up, liked the way it disrupted the peace with loud, smelly diesel engines. He scoffed at himself, at the irony—civilization was the enemy, and those diesel engines were its weapons. Still, laid carefully over the rhythm of the waves crashing on the beach, it wasn’t a bad tune.
    Sitting on a bluff with the sky still dark over the ocean in front of him, he waited for the first rays of sunlight to warm the back of his neck and signify the day’s start. He considered himself one of the lucky insomniacs. He liked to be awake. He liked it best when he was the only one who was.
    Except for Farley Rutherford, Chopper had no use for
Homo sapiens
. And at this instant, he particularly didn’t like people who wanted to talk when the world ought to be asleep. He didn’t have to turn around to recognize the shuffle of Gloria working her way down the bluff. For a second, he hoped she’d continue along the path down to the beach. When she was a few steps behind him, he motioned with his hand for her to be quiet, or to stay where she was, or to go away.
    “Good morning, Chopper! What an incredible view. Do you come out here every morning? Should I go get some coffee? Ringo has a pot on.”
    She stood between him and where the sun was trying to rise behind them. He sucked down the last hit of his first Marlboro of the day, suffocated the butt in some dirt, and put the remains in his pocket. He scanned the horizon looking for scattered sunlight, auras, chromatic aberrations—the first hints of a migraine. There were none, so this was his horoscope: today wouldn’t hurt too much.
    “Come on,” Gloria said, so damn bright and cheerful he wanted to choke her. “Show me how to get down to the beach.”
    He turned slowly, taking his time so that he could scan his consciousness. He found two sets of thoughts. His own confused him, crowded with worries about things big and small: a planet in peril and his place on it; how to get through the day without feeling too much pain or making too many mistakes. The second set of thoughts was clear with purpose; these were Farley’s thoughts, Farley’s needs. As a neurologist, Chopper understood how it worked. The model of Farley that lived in Chopper’s brain provided calm that Chopper could never find on his own. Farley’s unspoken commands gave him a role, a place safe from his own errors.
    Farley needed Gloria, so Farley needed Chopper to get Gloria on their side. So Chopper needed Gloria.
    He shifted over a foot or so and motioned for her to sit next to him. He looked up and smiled. He forced the smile up to his eyes so that it would look sincere. He looked her over and tried to generate warmth the only way he knew how. The smooth line of her cheek, the hint of flesh below her chin, the gentle upward slope of her breasts, and the subtle curve of her belly above the waistline of her fancy white pants—she was soft in all the spots a woman ought to be soft. Not one of those women on the far side of twenty-five fighting to stay lean at any cost. He could work with that; it almost resembled respect.
    “Shhh,” he said.
    She sat down beside him, crossing her legs in front of her the way his were. He gave her points for sitting in the dirt with those pants on.
    “Thanks for putting out towels,” she said. “I feel silly for falling asleep. I guess I just—”
    “Shhh,” he repeated, louder this time. If she kept babbling, he’d say the wrong thing, it would upset Farley, and the day would be ruined.
    She was quiet, but he could still hear thoughts churning in her head, disrupting the peace almost as much as if she were speaking them.
    “Can I have a cigarette?” she asked.
    He felt a genuine

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