Sclerosis, perhaps.
* * *
II
And then there’d come this recent call from Tesla, asking about sightings of Fletcher, and he’d finished the exchange with such an emptiness inside him, he was almost ready to take the overdose there and then. Why could he not bear the notion of her coming to see him? Because he looked too much like his father now; legs like sticks, hair gray and brittle? Because he was afraid she’d turn away, unable to see him like this? She’d never do that. Even in her crazy times (and she’d had more than her share) she never lost her grip on the feelings between them.
No, what he feared was regret. What he feared was her seeing him in decline, and saying: Why didn’t we do better with what we feel for each other? Why didn’t we enjoy what was in our hearts, instead of hiding it away? What he feared was being told it was too late, even though he already knew it.
Once again, the Reef had saved him from utter despair. After her call he’d brooded for a while—thinking of the pills, thinking of his stupidities—and then, too weary to think any more but too stirred up to sleep, he’d gone back to his place in front of the monitors, to see if he could find any convincing reports of the Fletcher’s presence.
It was not Fletcher he found, however. Sifting through the reports logged in the last couple of weeks, he came across a tale that had previously gone unread. It came from a regular and, he thought, reliable source: a woman in Illinois who printed up crime-scene photographs for a local county sheriff’s department. She had a horrible account to make. A young couple had been attacked in late July, the female victim, who was seven months pregnant, killed outright and then opened up by the attacker, who had taken his leisurely time to examine her in front of her wounded lover, then removed the fetus and absconded with it. The father had died a day later, but not before he passed a strange description along to the police, which had been kept out of the newspapers because of its bizarrity, but which Grillo’s informer felt needed relating. The killer had not been alone, the dying man had said. He’d been surrounded by a cloud of dust “full of screams and faces.”
“I begged him,” he’d gone on to say, “begged him not to mess up Louise, but he kept saying he had to, he had to. He was the Death-Boy, he said, and that’s what Death-Boys did.”
That, in essence, had been the report. Having read it Grillo sat for half an hour in front of the screen, as confounded as he was intrigued. What was happening out there in the real world? Fletcher had died in the mall at Palomo Grove. Cremated; gone to flame and spirit. Tommy-Ray McGuire, the son of the Jaff, the Death-Boy, had died a few days later, at a spot in New Mexico called Trinity. He too had been cremated, but in a more terrible fire than had consumed Fletcher.
They were both dead, their parts in the tangled tale of humanity and the dream-sea over. Or so everyone had supposed.
Was it possible everyone had been wrong? That somehow they’d defied oblivion and each returned to pick up the threads of their ambition? If so, there was only one explanation as to how. Both had been touched by the Nuncio during their lives. Perhaps evolution’s message was more extraordinary than anyone had guessed, and it had put them beyond the reach of death.
He shuddered, daring to think that. Beyond the reach of death. Now there was a promise worth living for.
He called California. A bleary Tesla answered the phone.
“Tes, it’s me.”
“What time is it?”
“Never mind the time. I’ve been going through the Reef, looking for stuff about Fletcher.”
“I know where he’s headed,” Tesla said. “At least I think I know.”
“Where?”
“This town in Oregon, called Everville. Has it ever turned up in the Reef?”
“It doesn’t ring a bell, but that doesn’t mean much.”
“So why are you calling? It’s the middle of the fucking night.”
“Tommy-Ray.”
“Huh?”
“What do you hear about Tommy-Ray?”
“Nothing. He died in the Loop.”
“Did he?”
There was a hush from the other end. Then Tesla said, “Yeah.”
“You got out. So did Jo-Beth and Howie—”
“What are you saying?”
“I’ve found a report in the Reef about a killer calling himself the Death-Boy—”
“Grillo,” Tesla said. “You wake me up—”
“And he’s surrounded by a cloud of dust. And the dust’s screaming.”
Tesla drew a long breath, and expelled it slowly. “When was this?” she said softly.
“Less than a month ago.”
“What did he do?”
“Killed a couple in Illinois. Ripped a baby out of the woman. Left the guy for dead.”
“Careless. Is that the only report?”
“It’s the only one I’ve found so far, but I’ll keep looking.”
“I’ll check in on my way up to Oregon—”
“I was thinking—” Grillo began.
“You should talk to Howie and Jo-Beth.”
“Yeah, I will. I was thinking about Fletcher.”
“When did you last talk to them?”
“A couple of weeks ago.”
“And?” Tesla pressed.
“They were fine,” Grillo replied.
“Tommy-Ray had the hots for her, you know. They’re twins—”
“I know—”
“One egg, one soul. I swear, he was crazy about her—”
“Fletcher,” Grillo said.
“What about him?”
“If he’s there in Everville I’m going to come meet him.”
“What for?”
There was a short pause. Then Grillo said, “For the Nuncio.”
“What are you talking about? There is no Nuncio. I destroyed the last of it.”
“He’s got to have kept some for himself.”
“He was the one that asked me to destroy it, for God’s sake.”
“No. He kept some.”
“What the hell’s all this about?”
“I’ll tell you some other time. You find Fletcher, and I’ll try tracing Tommy-Ray.”
“Try sleeping first, Grillo. You sound like shit.”
“I don’t sleep much these days, Tes. It’s a waste of time.”
SEVEN
Howie had started working on the car just after eight, intending to get his tinkering over and done with before the sun got too hot. This was the fifth blistering summer they’d lived in Illinois, and he was determined it would be the last. He’d thought returning to the state where he’d been born and raised would be reassuring in a time of uncertainty. Not so. All it had done was remind him of how radically his life had changed in the last half-decade, and how few of those changes had been for the better.
But whenever his spirits were down—which was often since he’d lost his job in March—he only had to look at Jo-Beth cradling Amy and he would feel them rise again.
It was five years since he’d first laid eyes on Jo-Beth in Palomo Grove; five years since their fathers had waged war on the streets to keep them apart. Years in which they’d lived under an assumed name in a suburb where nobody cared about your life because they’d given up caring about their own. Where the sidewalks were littered and the cars dirty and smiles hard to come by.
It wasn’t the life he’d wanted to give his wife and his daughter, but D’Amour had put it to them this way: If they lived in plain sight as Mr. and Mrs. Howard Katz, they would be found within months and murdered. They knew too much about the secret life of the world to be allowed to survive. Forces sworn to protect that life would silence them, and call themselves heroes for doing so. This was certain.
So they had hidden themselves away in Illinois, and only called each other Howie and Jo-Beth when the doors were bolted and the windows locked. And so far the trick had kept them alive. But it had taken its toll. It was hard, living in shadow, not daring to plan too much, to hope too ha
rd. Once every couple of months Howie would talk to D’Amour, and ask him for some sense of how things were going. How long, he’d say, before they’ve forgotten who the hell we are, and we can get out into the light again? D’Amour was no great diplomat, but time after time Howie could hear him doing his best to prettify the truth a little; to find some way of keeping them from despair.
But Howie was out of patience. This was the last summer they’d be in this God forsaken hole of a place, he told himself as he sweated under the hood; the last summer he’d pretend he was somebody he wasn’t to satisfy D’Amour’s paranoia. Maybe once he and Jo-Beth had some part to play in the drama they’d glimpsed half a decade before; but that time had surely passed. The forces D’Amour had evoked to intimidate them—the murderous heroes who would slaughter them in their beds—had more urgent matters on their minds than pursuing two people who’d chanced to swim in Quiddity once upon a time.
The phone was ringing in the house. Howie stopped work, and picked up a rag to clean his hands. He’d skinned his knuckles, and they were stinging. He was sucking at the bloodiest when Jo-Beth appeared on the step, squinting in the sun just long enough to say, “It’s for you,” then disappearing into the darkness of the house.
It was Grillo.
“What’s up?” Howie said.
“Nothing much,” came the reply. “I was calling to see if you were okay.”
“Amy’s keeping us up most nights, but otherwise—”
“Still no job?”
“No job. I keep looking, but—”
“It’s tough.”
“We’re going to have to move, Nathan. Just get out there and start a proper life.”
“This . . . may not be the best time to do it.”
“Things are going to look up.”
“I’m not talking economics.”
“What then?” Silence. “Nathan?”
“I don’t want to alarm you—”
“But?”
“It’s probably nothing—”
“Will you spit it out, for God’s sake?”
“It’s Tommy-Ray.”
“He’s dead, Grillo.”
“I know that’s what we’ve assumed—”
Howie lowered his voice to a fierce whisper. “What the hell are you telling me?”
“We’re not exactly sure.”
“We?”
“Tesla and me.”
“I thought she’d disappeared.”
“She did for a time. Now she’s on her way up to Oregon—”
“Go on.”
“She says your father’s up there.” Howie was a heartbeat from slamming the phone down. “I know how this sounds—” Grillo said quickly.
“It sounds like shit is what it sounds like,” Howie said.
“I wasn’t ready to believe it either. But these are strange times, Howie.”
“Not for us they’re not,” Howie replied. “They’re just a fucking waste, okay? We’re wasting our fucking lives waiting for somebody to tell us something that makes sense and all you can do—” He wasn’t whispering any longer, he was shouting, “all you can do is tell me my father—who’s dead, Grillo, he’s dead—is wandering around Oregon, and Tommy-Ray—” He heard Jo-Beth let out a sob behind him. “Shit!” he said. “Just stay out of our lives from now on, Grillo. And tell D’Amour to do the same, okay? We’ve had it with this crap!” He slammed down the phone, and turned to look at Jo-Beth. She was standing in the doorway, with that woebegone look on her face she wore so often these days. “What do they fucking take us for?” he said, covering his eyes with his hand. They were burning.
“You said Tommy-Ray.”
“It was just—”
“What about Tommy-Ray?”
“Shit. That’s all it was. Grillo’s fucking shit.” He glanced up at her. “It’s nothing, sweetie,” he said.
“I want to know what Grillo told you,” Jo-Beth said doggedly.
She would worry more if he didn’t tell, he suspected. So he gave a précis of what Grillo had said.
“That’s it?” she asked him when he was done.
“That’s it,” he said. “I told you it was nothing.” She nodded, shrugged, and turned away. “It’s all going to change, sweetie,” he said. “I swear.”
He wanted to get up and go to her. Wrap her in his arms and rock her till she melted against him. So many times in the past they’d ended up entwined after hard words. But no longer. Now when she turned from him he kept his distance, afraid she’d refuse him. He didn’t know why or where this doubt had originated—was he reading some subtle signal in her eyes that told him to keep his distance?—but it was too strong to be overcome; or else he was too weak.
“So fucked up,” he murmured to himself, his hands returning to cover his face.
Grillo’s words circled in the darkness.
These are strange times . . .
Howie had refuted it at the time, but it was true. Whether Fletcher was in Oregon or not, whether Tommy-Ray was alive or not, when a man could no longer put his arms around his wife, they were indeed strange times.
Before returning to work on the car he headed upstairs to take a peek at Amy. She’d been sick the last couple of days—her first summer on the planet she’d caught a cold—and she lay exhausted in her cot, arms splayed, head to one side. He took a tissue from the box beside the bed and wiped a little gloss of spit from her chin, his touch too gentle to wake her. But somewhere in sleep, she knew her daddy was there, or so he believed. A barely perceptible smile appeared on her bow-lips, and her cheeks dimpled.
He leaned on the railing of the cot and gazed down at her in unalloyed bliss. Fatherhood had been unexpected—though they’d talked about children many times, they’d decided to wait until their situation had improved—but he didn’t regret for a moment the accident that had brought Amy into their lives. She was a gift; a simple sign of the goodness in Creation. All the magic in the world, whether wielded by his father, or the Jaff, or any of the secret powers D’Amour talked about—weren’t worth a damn in the face of this simple miracle.
The little time spent with his sleeping beauty thoroughly invigorated him. When he stepped out into the heat again, the problems of a sickly car seemed piffling, and he set to solving them with a will.
After a few minutes of work a light wind started to get up; cooling gusts against his sweaty face. He stood clear of the hood for a moment and drew a deep breath. The wind smelt of the green beyond these gray streets. They would escape there soon, he told himself, and life would be good.
Standing chopping carrots in the kitchen, Jo-Beth paused to watch the wind shaking the unkempt thicket that choked the yard, thought of another yard in another year, and heard Tommy-Ray’s voice calling her name out of the past. It had been dark that night in the Grove, but she remembered things having an exquisite luminosity: dirt, trees, reeling stars all filled with meaning.
“Jo-Beth!” Tommy-Ray was yelling, “Something wonderful!”
“What?” she’d said.
“Outside. Come with me.”
She’d resisted him at first. Tommy-Ray was wild sometimes, and the way he was shaking had made her afraid.
“I’m not going to do anything to hurt you,” he’d said. “You know that.”
And she had. Unpredictable though he was, he had never shown her anything but love.
“We feel things together,” he’d said to her. That was true; they had shared feelings from the beginning. “So come on,” he’d said, taking hold of her hand.
And she’d gone, down the yard to where the trees churned against a pinwheel sky. And in her head she’d heard a whispering voice, a voice she’d been waiting to hear for seventeen years without realizing it.
Jo-Beth, it had said. I’m the Jaff. Your Father.
He had appeared then, out of the trees, and she remembered him looking like a picture from Mama’s Bible. An Old Testament prophet, bearded and absolute. No doubt he had been wise, in his terrible fashion.
No doubt if she’d been able to speak with him, and learn from him, she would not now be living in the grave, drawing only the tiniest breaths for fear of depleting what little supply of sanity remained to her.
But she had been parted from him, the way she’d been parted from Tommy-Ray, and she’d fallen into the arms of the enemy.
He was a good man, this enemy, this Howie Katz; a good and loving man. And when they’d slept together for the first time, they had each dreamed of Quiddity, which meant that he was the love of her life. There would be none better. But there were affections that went deeper than found love. There were powers that shaped the soul before it was even born into the world, and they could not be gainsaid. However loving the enemy was, and however good, he would always be the enemy.
She hadn’t realized this at first. She’d assumed her unease would disappear as the traumas of the Grove receded, and she learned a new normality. But instead it grew. She started to have dreams about Tommy-Ray, light pouring over his golden face like syrup. And sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, when she was at her most weary, she’d seem to hear her father speaking to her, and she’d ask him under her breath the question she’d asked in Mama’s backyard.
“Why are you here now? After all this time?”
“Come closer,” he would say, “I’ll tell you . . . ”
But she hadn’t known how to get closer, how to cross the abyss of death and time that lay between them.
And then, out of nowhere, hope. Sometimes she remembered how it had come to her very clearly, and on those days she would have to hide herself away from Howie, in case he saw the knowledge on her face. Other times—like now—when she knew he was in pain, and her heart opened to him the way it had at the beginning, the memory became confounded. Her thoughts lost focus, and she would spend hours staring out of the window, or at the sky, trying to catch hold of some elusive possibility.
No matter, she told herself. It would come back. Meanwhile, she would chop the carrots and wash the dishes and tend the baby and—