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Marina leaned her head against him and sniffled. It was common in this day and age, when waiting someplace, to look around at your involuntary companions and imagine you were trapped with them someplace more dire: a hostage situation or a building on fire, something requiring teamwork and survival. Could you build the camaraderie promised in movies about such times, or would you fall apart? Phil Needle looked around and realized, quietly but sharply, that he and his wife would not survive this. Gwen's disappearance would slaughter them.
YOU WANT IT WHEN? was the caption on the poster. It was talking about office work, and the sad fact, true at the time, that people want things right away and that other people don't care about that. The poster reminded people that it didn't matter what you wanted. Where was she? Where did somebody put her? Where were those ragged thumbs of hers, and her odd, tiny earlobes? Was he about to become one of those guys, clutching a photograph of Gwen, on the news every year in support of an extreme new crime law? Were they becoming one of those families used as a murmured example of the wickedness of the world, as a worst-case scenario to comfort those whose daughter was merely pregnant or paralyzed? Would there be a funeral, everyone sweating in black clothes in the summer and squinting in sunglasses? Oh God, would there be a hasty peer-group shrine, wherever she was found, with cheap flowers and crappy poetry melting in the rain? Would her college fund sit forgotten for a while in the bank, like a tumor thought benign, and then be emptied impulsively on some toy to cheer himself up? He had seen in a magazine a handsome automobile some months ago, shiny as clean water.
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