Roy did not appreciate such talk. The implication was that any Utopia was also Hell. Eager to convince Mondello of an alternate view, he said, “Perfect beauty exists in nature.”
“There’s always a flaw. Nature abhors symmetry, smoothness, straight lines, order—all the things we associate with beauty.”
“I recently saw a woman with perfect hands. Flawless hands, without a blemish, exquisitely shaped.”
“A cosmetic surgeon looks at the human form with a more critical eye than other people do. I’d have seen a lot of flaws, I’m sure.”
The doctor’s smugness irritated Roy, and he said, “I wish I’d brought those hands to you—the one, anyway. If I’d brought it, if you’d seen it, you would have agreed.”
Suddenly Roy realized that he had come close to revealing things that would have necessitated the surgeon’s immediate execution.
Concerned that his agitated state of mind would lead him to make another and more egregious error, Roy dawdled no longer. He thanked Mondello for his cooperation, and he got out of the white room.
In the medical building parking lot, the February sunshine was more white than golden, with a harsh edge, and a border of palm trees cast eastward-leaning shadows. The afternoon was turning cool.
As he twisted the key in the ignition and started the car, his pager beeped. He checked the small display window, saw a number with the prefix of the regional offices in downtown Los Angeles, and made the call on his cellular phone.
They had big news for him. Spencer Grant had almost been chased down in Las Vegas; he was now on the run, overland, across the Mojave Desert. A Learjet was standing by at LAX to take Roy to Nevada.
Driving up the barely perceptible slope between two rushing rivers, on a steadily narrowing peninsula of sodden sand, searching for an intruding formation of rock on which to batten down and wait out the storm, Spencer was hampered by decreasing visibility. The clouds were so thick, so black, that daylight on the desert was as murky as that a few fathoms under any sea. Rain fell in Biblical quantities, overwhelming the windshield wipers, and although the headlights were on, clear glimpses of the ground ahead were brief.
Great fiery lashes tortured the sky. The blinding pyrotechnics escalated into nearly continuous chain lightning, and brilliant links rattled down the heavens as though an evil angel, imprisoned in the storm, were angrily testing his bonds. Even then, the inconstant light illuminated nothing while swarms of stroboscopic shadows flickered across the landscape, adding to the gloom and confusion.
Suddenly, ahead and a quarter mile to the west, at ground level, a blue light appeared as if from out of another dimension. At once, it moved off to the south at high speed.
Spencer squinted through rain and shadow, trying to discern the nature and size of the light source. The details remained obscure.
The blue traveler turned east, proceeded a few hundred yards, then swung north toward the Explorer. Spherical. Incandescent.
“What the hell?” Spencer slowed the Explorer to a crawl to watch the eerie luminosity.
When it was still a hundred yards from him, the thing swerved west, toward the place where it had first appeared, then dwindled past that point, rose, flared, and vanished.
Even before the first light winked out, Spencer saw a second from the corner of his eye. He stopped and looked west-northwest.
The new object—blue, throbbing—moved incredibly fast, on an erratic serpentine course that brought it closer before it angled east. Abruptly it spun like pinwheel fireworks and disappeared.
Both objects had been silent, gliding like apparitions across the storm-washed desert.
The skin prickled on his arms and along the nape of his neck.
For the past few days, although he was usually skeptical of all things mystical, he had felt that he was venturing into the unknown, the uncanny. In his country, in his time, real life had become a dark fantasy, as full of sorcery as any novel about lands where wizards ruled, dragons roamed, and trolls ate children. Wednesday night, he had stepped through an invisible doorway that separated his lifelong reality from another place. In this new reality, Valerie was his destiny. Once found, she would be a magic lens that would forever alter his vision. All that was mysterious would become clear, but things long known and understood would become mysterious once more.
He felt all that in his bones, as an arthritic man might feel the approach of a storm before the first cloud crossed the horizon. He felt more than understood it, and the visitations of the two blue spheres seemed to confirm that he was on the right trail to find Valerie, traveling to a strange place that would transform him.
He glanced at his four-legged companion, hoping that Rocky was staring toward where the second light had vanished. He needed confirmation that he had not imagined the thing, even if his only reassurance came from a dog. But Rocky was huddled and shivering in terror. His head remained bowed, and his eyes were downcast.
To the right of the Explorer, lightning was reflected in raging water. The river was much closer than he expected. The right-hand arroyo had widened dramatically in the past minute.
Hunched over the wheel, he angled to the new midpoint of the ever narrower strip of high ground and drove forward, seeking stable rock, wondering if the mysterious Mojave had more surprises for him.
The third blue enigma plunged out of the sky, as fast and plumb as an express elevator, two hundred yards ahead and to the left. It halted smoothly and hovered just above the ground, revolving rapidly.
Spencer’s heart thudded painfully against his ribs. He eased off the accelerator. He was balanced between wonder and dread.
The glowing object shot straight at him: as large as the truck, still without detail, silent, otherworldly, on a collision course. He tramped the accelerator. The light swerved to counter his move, swelled brighter, filled the Explorer with blue-blue light. To make a smaller target of himself, he turned right, braked hard, putting the back end of the truck to the oncoming object. It struck without force but with sprays of sapphire sparks, and scores of electrical arcs blazed from one prominent point of the truck to another.
Spencer was encapsulated in a dazzling blue sphere of hissing, crackling light. And knew what it was. One of the rarest of all weather phenomena. Ball lightning. It wasn’t a conscious entity, not the extraterrestrial force he had half imagined, neither stalking nor seducing him. It was simply one more element of the storm, as impersonal as ordinary lightning, thunder, rain.
Perched on four tires, the Explorer was safe. As soon as the ball burst upon them, its energy began to dissipate. Sizzling and snapping, it swiftly faded to a fainter blue: dimmer, dimmer.
His heart had been pounding with a strange jubilation, as though he desperately wanted to encounter something paranormal, even if it proved hostile, rather than return to a life without wonder. Though rare, ball lightning was too mundane to satisfy his expectations, and disappointment brought his heart rate almost back to normal.
With a jolt, the front of the truck dropped precipitously, and the cab tipped forward. As a final arc of electricity crackled from the left headlight rim to the top right corner of the windshield frame, dirty water sloshed over the hood.
In his panic, as he had tried to avoid the blue light, Spencer had swung too far to the right, braking at the brink of the arroyo. The soft wall of sand was eroding beneath him.
His heart raced again, his disappointment forgotten.
He shifted into reverse and eased down on the accelerator. The truck moved backward, up the disintegrating slope.
Another slab of the bank gave way. The Explorer tipped farther forward. Water surged across the hood, almost to the windshield.
Spencer abandoned caution, accelerated hard. The truck jumped backward. Out of the water. Tires eating through the soft, wet ground. Tipping back, back, almost horizontal again.
The arroyo wall was too unstable to endure. The churning wheels destabilized the gelatinous ground. Engine shrieking, tires spinni
ng in the treacherous muck, the Explorer slid into the flood, protesting as noisily as a mastodon being sucked into a tar pit.
“Sonofabitch.” Spencer inhaled deeply and held his breath as though he were a schoolboy leaping into a pond.
The truck splashed beneath the surface, fully submerged.
Unnerved by the calamitous sound and motion, Rocky wailed in misery, as though responding not only to current events but to the cumulative terrors of his entire troubled life.
The Explorer broke the surface, wallowing like a boat in rough seas. The windows were closed, preventing an inrush of cold water, but the engine had gone dead.
The truck was swept downstream, pitching and yawing, riding higher in the flood than Spencer had expected. The choppy surface lapped four to six inches below the sill of his side window.
He was assaulted by liquid noises, a symphonic Chinese water torture: the hollow paradiddle of rain on the roof, the whoosh and swish and plash and gurgle of the churning flow against the Explorer.
Above all the competing sounds, a drizzling noise drew Spencer’s attention, because it was intimate, not muffled by sheet metal or glass. The maracas of a rattlesnake wouldn’t have been more alarming. Somewhere, water was getting into the truck.
The breach wasn’t catastrophic—a drizzle, not a gush. With every pound of water taken aboard, however, the truck would ride lower, until it sank. Then it would tumble along the river bottom, pushed rather than buoyed, body crumpling, windows shattering.
Both front doors were secure. No leaks.
As the truck heaved and plunged downstream, Spencer turned in his seat, snared by his safety harness, and examined the cargo hold. All windows were intact. The tailgate wasn’t leaking. The backseat was folded down, so he couldn’t see the floor concealed under it, but he doubted that the river was getting through the rear doors, either.
When he faced front again, his feet sloshed in an inch of water.
Rocky whined, and Spencer said, “It’s okay.”
Don’t alarm the dog. Don’t lie, but don’t alarm.
Heater. The engine was dead, but the heater still functioned. The river was invading through the lower vents. Spencer switched off the system, closed the air intakes. The drizzle was silenced.
As the truck pitched, the headlights slashed the bruised sky and glistered in the mortal torrents of rain. Then the truck yawed, and the beams cut wildly left and right, seeming to carve the arroyo walls; slabs of earth crashed into the dirty tide, spewing gouts of pearlescent foam. He killed the lights, and the resultant gray-on-gray world was less chaotic.
The windshield wipers were running on battery power. He didn’t switch them off. He needed to see what was coming, as best he could.
He would be less stressed—and no worse off—if he lowered his head and closed his eyes, like Rocky, and waited for fate to deal with him as it wished. A week ago, he might have done that. Now he peered forward anxiously, hands locked to the useless steering wheel.
He was surprised by the fierceness of his desire to survive. Until he had walked into The Red Door, he had expected nothing from life: only to keep a degree of dignity and to die without shame.
Blackened tumbleweed, thorny limbs of uprooted cacti, masses of desert bunchgrass that might have been the blond hair of drowned women, and pale driftwood rode the rolling river with the Explorer, scraping and thumping against it. In emotional turmoil equal to the tumult of the natural world, Spencer knew that he had been traveling the years as if he himself were driftwood, but at last he was alive.
The watercourse abruptly dropped ten or twelve feet, and the truck sailed over a roaring cataract, airborne, tipping forward. It dove into the rampaging water, into a diluvial darkness. Spencer was first jerked forward in his harness, then slammed backward. His head bounced off the headrest. The Explorer failed to hit bottom, exploded through the surface, and rollicked on downriver.
Rocky was still on the passenger seat, huddled and miserable, claws hooked in the upholstery.
Spencer gently stroked and squeezed the back of the mutt’s neck.
Rocky didn’t raise his bowed head but turned toward his master and rolled his eyes to look up from under his brow.
Interstate 15 was a quarter mile ahead. Spencer was stunned that the truck had been carried so far in so little time. The currents were even faster than they seemed.
The highway spanned the arroyo—usually a dry wash—on massive concrete columns. Through the smeary windshield and heavy rain, the bridge supports appeared to be absurdly numerous, as if government engineers had designed the structure primarily to funnel millions of dollars to a senator’s nephew in the concrete business.
The central passage between the bridge supports was broad enough to let five trucks pass abreast. But half the flood churned through the narrower races between the closely ranked columns on each side of the main channel. Impact with the bridge supports would be deadly.
Swooping, plunging, they rode a series of rapids. Water splashed against the windows. The river picked up speed. A lot of speed.
Rocky was shaking more violently than ever and panting raggedly.
“Easy, pal, easy. You better not pee on the seat. You hear?”
On 1-15, the headlights of big rigs and cars moved through the storm-darkened day. Emergency flashers threw red light into the rain where motorists had stopped on the shoulder to wait out the downpour.
The bridge loomed. Exploding ceaselessly against the concrete columns, the river threw sheets of spray into the rain-choked air.
The truck had attained a fearful velocity, shooting downstream. It rolled violently, and waves of nausea swelled through Spencer.
“Better not pee on the seat,” he repeated, no longer speaking only to the dog.
He reached under his fleece-lined denim jacket, under his soaked shirt, and withdrew the jade-green soapstone medallion that hung on a gold chain around his neck. On one side was the carved head of a dragon. On the other side was an equally stylized pheasant.
Spencer vividly recalled the elegant, windowless office beneath China Dream. Louis Lee’s smile. The bow tie, suspenders. The gentle voice: I sometimes give one of these to people who seem to need it.
Without slipping the chain over his head, he held the medallion in one hand. He felt childish, but he held it tightly nonetheless.
The bridge was fifty yards ahead. The Explorer was going to pass dangerously close to the forest of columns on the right.
Pheasants and dragons. Prosperity and long life.
He remembered the statue of Quan Yin by the front door of the restaurant. Serene but vigilant. Guarding against envious people.
After a life like yours, you can believe in this?
We must believe in something, Mr. Grant.
Ten yards from the bridge, ferocious currents caught the truck, lifted it, dropped it, tipped it half onto its right side, rolled it back to the left, and slapped loudly against the doors.
Sailing out of the storm into the eclipsing shadow of the highway above, they passed the first of the bridge columns in the row immediately to the right. Passed the second. At horrendous speed. The river was so high that the solid underside of the bridge was only a foot above the truck. They surged nearer to the columns, bulleting past the third, the fourth, nearer still.
Pheasants and dragons. Pheasants and dragons.
The currents pulled the truck away from the concrete supports and dropped it into a sudden swale in the turbulent surface, where it wallowed with filthy water to its windowsills. The river teased Spencer with the possibility of safe passage in that trough, pushing them along as if they were on a bobsled in a luge chute—but then it mocked his brief flicker of hope by lifting the truck again and tossing it passenger-side-first into the next column. The crash was as loud as a bomb blast, metal shrieked, and Rocky howled.
The impact pitched Spencer to his left, a move that the safety harness couldn’t check. The side of his head slammed into the window. In spite o
f all the other clamor, he heard the tempered glass webbing with a million hairline cracks, a sound like a crisp slice of toast being crushed with a sudden clench of a fist.
Cursing, he put his left hand to the side of his head. No blood. Only a rapid throbbing that was in time with his heartbeat.
The window was a mosaic of thousands of tiny chips of glass, held together by the gummy film in the center of the sandwiched pane.
Miraculously, the windows on Rocky’s side were undamaged. But the front door bulged inward. Water dribbled around the frame.
Rocky lifted his head, suddenly afraid not to look. He whimpered as he peered at the wild river, at the low concrete ceiling, and at the rectangle of cheerless gray storm light beyond the bridge.
“Hell,” Spencer said, “pee on the seat if you want to.”
The truck sank into another swale.
They were two-thirds of the way through the tunnel.
A hissing, needle-thin stream of water squirted through a tiny breach in the twisted door frame. Rocky yelped as it spattered him.
When the truck soared out of the trough, it wasn’t thrown into the columns after all. Worse, the river heaved as if passing over an enormous obstruction on the floor of the wash, and it slammed the Explorer straight up into the low concrete underside of the bridge.
Braced with both hands on the steering wheel, determined not to be thrown into the side window, Spencer was unprepared for the upward rush. He dropped in his seat as the roof crumpled inward, but he was not quick enough. The ceiling cracked against the top of his skull.
Bright bolts of pain flashed behind his eyes, along his spine. Blood streamed down his face. Scalding tears. His vision blurred.
The river carried the truck down from the underside of the bridge, and Spencer tried to push up in his seat. The effort made him dizzy, so he slumped again, breathing hard.
His tears swiftly darkened, as if polluted. His blurred vision faded. Soon the tears were as black as ink, and he was blind.
The prospect of blindness panicked him, and panic opened a door to understanding: He wasn’t blind, thank God, but he was passing out.