The Santaroga Barrier

  Restlessly, he climbed down out of the camper, stood on the sand absorbing the mid-afternoon heat. A single crow flew overhead so close he heard the rushing harp sound of wind through its plumage.

  Dasein gazed after the bird thinking how strange to see only one crow. They were not a solitary bird. But here was this one—alone as he was alone.

  What was I before that I cannot return to? he wondered. And he thought if he made the decision against Santaroga he’d be like that solitary crow, a creature without its own kind anywhere.

  The problem, he knew, lay in a compulsion somewhere within him to make an honest report to those who’d hired him. The Jaspers clarity-of-being urged it. His own remembered sense of duty urged it. To do anything less would be a form of dishonesty, an erosion of selfdom. He felt a jealous possessiveness about this self. No smallest part of it was cheap enough to discard.

  This self of his, old but newly seen, precious beyond anything he’d ever imagined, placed a terrifying burden on him, Dasein saw. He remembered the wildness of the Jaspers revelation, the gamut he’d run to come through to this peak.

  The had-I-but-known quality of his immediate past settled on him then like a fog that chilled him in spite of the afternoon’s heat. Dasein shivered. How pleasant it would be, he thought, to have no decisions. How tempting to allow that restlessly stirring something within his consciousness lift up its ancient snake’s head and devour the disturbing parts of his awareness.

  His view of the valley’s people took on an Olympian cast. They stood beside him for a moment in ghostly ranks, godlike, masters of the primitive.

  Are they testing me? he wondered.

  Then why would Jenny say she dared not come here to him?

  And where are the children?

  A coldly rational part of his mind weighed his thinking and found the balance uncertain. How much of what’s in my mind is the drug thinking? he asked himself.

  At the fulcrum of any decision, that was the essential question. Where could he find solid ground upon which to stand and say, “The things I’m to decide about are there … and there … and there … ?”

  No one could help him find this ground, he knew. It must be a lonely search. If he made an honest report to Meyer Davidson’s crew, that would doom Santaroga. But to make a false report would be to plant a cancer within himself.

  He had separated himself from Santaroga in a definite way, like a knife stroke, Dasein realized. The Jaspers package he’d sent for analysis to Selador loomed in his mind. The cutting off had begun there.

  It had been a gesture, nothing more. Symbolic. Some part of him had known even as he mailed it that the package would arrive with whatever Jaspers it had contained completely dissipated. He’d been sending a gesture of defiance to the Santaroga part of himself, Dasein realized.

  Had Burdeaux done that? he wondered. What packages had Burdeaux exchanged with Louisiana?

  The package to Selador—it had been like a thrown rock that could not reach its mark. He remembered as a child throwing a rock at a cat too far away to hit. Gray cat. He remembered the sudden bird silence in his aunt’s garden, the gray cat slinking into view … the rock landing short.

  Piaget was the gray cat.

  The cat in the garden had looked up, momentarily surprised by the sound, weighed the situation, and returned to its hunting with an insulting disdain for distant boys with distant rocks.

  What had Piaget done?

  Dasein experienced a sudden deitgrasp, an act of self-discovery in which the sky appeared to shimmer. He realized in this instant why he felt so terrifyingly lonely.

  He had no group, no place in a hive of fellow-activity, nothing to shield him from personal decisions that might overwhelm him. Whatever decision he made, no matter the consequences, that was his decision. Selador might face the shame of his agent’s failure. The school might lose its munificent grant. The unique thing that was Santaroga might be dissipated.

  All because of a decision, a gesture really, by a lone man standing in a patch of barren sand hills, his mind caught up in fantasies about a solitary crow and a gray cat.

  It was a moment for positive action, and all he could think to do was re-enter the camper and eat.

  As he moved in the confining space preparing himself a powdered-egg mess in the frying pan, the truck emitted protesting creaks. Hunger gnawed at him, but he didn’t want this food. He knew what he wanted—what he had fled here to escape, what his body craved until it was an ache at the core of him—

  Jaspers.

  9

  At full dark, Dasein switched on the camper’s wall light, retreated into his notes. He felt he had to keep his mind occupied, but the fetid smell of the campground intruded. The camper was a tiny world with sharp boundaries, but it couldn’t hold off the universe out there. Dasein peered out a window at stars: bright holes punched in blackness. They amplified his sense of loneliness. He jerked his gaze away.

  The notes …

  Always the same items floated to the surface:

  Where were the children?

  What failure of the Jaspers change produced zombies?

  How could a whole community be ignited with the unconscious desire to kill a person?

  What was the Jaspers essence? What was it? What did it do to the body’s chemistry?

  Dasein sensed the danger in putting his hand to these questions. They were questions and at the same time an answer. This probing—this was what ignited the community.

  He had to do it. Like a child poking at a sore, he had to do it. But once he had done it, could he turn then and tell the whole story to Meyer Davidson’s crowd?

  Even if he did find the answers and decided to make a full and honest report, would Santaroga permit it?

  There were forces at work out there, Dasein realized, against which he was but a candle flickering in a gale.

  He grew aware of footsteps crunching on the sand, turned off the light, opened the door and peered out.

  A ghostly blur of a figure in the starlight, a woman in a light dress or a small man in a coat, was approaching along the tracks from the highway.

  “Who’s there?” Dasein called.

  “Gil!”

  “Jenny!”

  He jumped down, strode to meet her. “I thought you couldn’t come out here. You told me …”

  “Please don’t come any closer,” she said. She stopped about ten paces from him.

  Such an oddly brittle quality to her voice—Dasein hesitated.

  “Gil, if you won’t come back to Uncle Larry’s you must leave the valley,” she said.

  “You want me to leave?”

  “You must.”

  “Why?”

  “I … they want you to go.”

  “What have I done?”

  “You’re dangerous to us. We all know it. We can feel it. You’re dangerous.”

  “Jen … do you think I’d hurt you?”

  “I don’t know! I just know you’re dangerous.”

  “And you want me to leave?”

  “I’m ordering you to leave.”

  “Ordering me?” He heard hysteria in her voice.

  “Gil, please.”

  “I can’t go, Jen. I can’t.”

  “You must.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then come back to Uncle Larry’s. We’ll take care of you.”

  “Even if I turn into a zombie?”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “It could happen, couldn’t it?”

  “Darling, we’ll take care of you whatever happens!”

  “You take care of your own.”

  “Of course we do.”

  “Jenny, do you know I love you?”

  “I know,” she whispered.

  “Then why are you doing this to me?”

  “We’re not doing anything to you.” She was crying, speaking through sobs. “It’s you who’re doing … whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “I’m only doing what I have to
do.”

  “You don’t have to do anything.”

  “Would you have me be dishonest … lie?”

  “Gil, I’m begging you. For my sake … for your own sake, leave.”

  “Or come back to Uncle Larry’s?”

  “Oh, please.”

  “What’ll happen to me if I don’t?”

  “If you really love me … Oh, Gil, I couldn’t stand it if … if …”

  She broke off, crying too hard to speak.

  He moved toward her. “Jen, don’t.”

  The crying stopped abruptly and she began backing away, shaking her head at him. “Stay away from me!”

  “Jenny, what’s wrong with you?”

  She retreated even faster.

  “Jenny, stop it.”

  Suddenly, she whirled, began running down the track. He started to run after her, stopped. What was the use?

  Her voice came back to him in a hysterical scream: “Stay away from me! I love you! Stay away!”

  He stood in shocked silence until he heard a car door slam out there on the highway. Lights came on; a car raced back toward town.

  He remembered the soft moon of her face in the starlight, two black holes for eyes. It had been like a mask. He trudged back to the camper, his mind in turmoil. “I love you! Stay away!”

  What do I really know about Jenny? he asked himself.

  Nothing … except that she loved him.

  Stay away?

  Could that have been Jenny demanding, begging, ordering?

  This speared his mind with a touch of madness. It transcended the irrationality of people in love.

  “You’re dangerous. We all know it.”

  Indeed, they must.

  In the Jaspers oneness he’d experienced at the lake, they must know him for a danger. If he could stay away from the stuff, kick it—would they know him then?

  How could they help but know him then? His action would be the ultimate betrayal.

  He thought of Santaroga then as a deceptive curtain of calmness over a pool of violence. Olympian-like, they’d surmounted the primitive—yes. But the primitive was still there, more explosive because it could not be recognized and because it had been held down like a coiled spring.

  Jenny must sense it, he thought. Her love for him would give her a touch of clarity.

  “Stay away from me!”

  Her cry still rang in his ears.

  And this was how the other investigators had died—releas—ing the explosion that was Santaroga.

  Voices intruded on Dasein’s reverie. They came from the other side of the camper away from the road. One voice definitely was that of a woman. He couldn’t be sure about the other two. Dasein stepped around the camper, stared off toward the dank pools and sand hills. It was a shadowed starlit landscape with a suggestion of a glow in it.

  A flashlight came into view across the hills. It wavered and darted. There were three black, lurching figures associated with the light. Dasein thought of Macbeth’s witches. They walked and slid down a hill, skirted a pool and came on toward the campground.

  Dasein wondered if he should call out. Perhaps they were lost. Why else would three people be out here in the night?

  There was a burst of laughter from the group, vaguely childlike. The woman’s voice came clearly out of the dark then: “Oh, Petey! It’s so good to have you with us.”

  Dasein cleared his throat, said: “Hello.” Then, louder: “Hello!”

  The light stabbed toward him. The lilting woman’s voice said: “Someone’s in the campground.”

  There was a masculine grunt.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Just a camper,” Dasein said. “Are you lost?”

  “We’ve just been out frogging.” It sounded very like the voice of a young boy.

  The trio came on toward him.

  “Pretty poor place to camp,” the woman said.

  Dasein studied the approaching figures. That was a boy on the left—definitely a boy. He appeared to be carrying a bow and a quiver of arrows. The woman had a long gigging pole, a bulky bag of some kind on one shoulder. The men carried the flashlight and a string of bullfrogs. They stopped beside the camper and the woman leaned against it to remove a shoe and pour sand from it.

  “Been out to the pond,” she said.

  “Hunh!” the man grunted.

  “We got eight of them,” the boy said. “Mom’s gonna fry ’em for breakfast.”

  “Petey had his heart set on it,” the woman said. “I couldn’t say no, not on his first day home.”

  “I passed,” the boy said. “Pop didn’t pass, but I did.”

  “I see,” Dasein said. He studied the man in the light reflected off the aluminum side of the camper. He was a tall man, slim, rather gawky. Wisps of blonde hair protruded from a stocking cap. His eyes were as vacant as two pieces of blue glass.

  The woman had put the shoe back on, now had the other one off emptying it. She was wrapped in a heavy coat that gave her the appearance of having been molded in a corrugated barrel. She was short, wouldn’t stand any taller than the man’s shoulder, but there was a purposeful air about her that reminded Dasein of Clara Scheler at the used-car lot.

  “Bill’s the first one in his family in eight generations didn’t make it,” she said, restoring the shoe and straightening. “They think it was something in his mother’s diet before he was born. We were engaged before … Why’m I telling you all this? I don’t think I know you.”

  “Dasein … Gilbert Dasein,” he said. And he thought: So this is how they take care of their own.

  “Jenny’s fellow!” the woman said. “Well, now.”

  Dasein looked at the boy. Petey. He appeared to be no more than twelve, almost as tall as the woman. His face when the flashlight beam brushed it was a carbon copy of the man’s. No denying parenthood there.

  “Turn the light over here, Bill,” the woman said. She spoke carefully and distinctly as one might to a very young child. “Over here, hon.”

  “Over there, Pop.” The boy directed the man’s uncertain hand.

  “That’s it, love,” the woman said. “I think I got the gigging hook caught in my coat.” She fussed with a length of line at her side.

  “Hunh,” the man said.

  Dasein stared at him with a cold feeling of horror. He could see himself there, Jenny “taking care” of him, their children helping.

  “There,” the woman said, pulling the line free and attaching it to the gigging pole. “Turn the light down toward the ground now, Bill. Toward the ground, hon.”

  “Down this way, Pop,” the boy said, helping.

  “That’s a love,” the woman said. She reached out, patted the man’s cheek.

  Dasein felt something obscene in the gesture, wanted to turn away, couldn’t.

  “He’s real good, Bill is,” the woman said.

  The boy began playing with his bow, drawing it, releasing it.

  “What you doing out here, Dr. Dasein?” the woman asked.

  “I … wanted to be … alone for awhile.” He forced himself to look at her.

  “Well, this is a place to be alone all right,” she said. “You feel all right? No …flutters … or anything?”

  “Quite all right,” Dasein said. He shuddered.

  The boy had knocked an arrow into the bow, was waving it about.

  “I’m Mabel Jorick,” the woman said. “This is Bill, my husband; our son, Petey. Petey’s been … you know, with Doc Piaget. Just got his bill of health.”

  “I passed,” the boy said.

  “Indeed you did, love.” She looked at Dasein. “He’s going outside to college next year.”

  “Isn’t he kind of young?” Dasein asked.

  “Fifteen,” she said.

  “Hunh,” the man said.

  The boy had drawn the bow to its full arc, Dasein saw. The arrow tip glittered in the light from the flash.

  Up, down … right, left the arrow pointed.

  Dasei
n moved uneasily as the tip traversed his chest—across, back. Sweat started on his forehead. He felt menace in the boy.

  Instinctively, Dasein moved to put the man between himself and Petey, but Jorick moved back, stared off toward the highway.

  “I think he hears the car,” the woman said. “My brother, Jim, coming to pick us up.” She shook her head wonderingly. “He has awful good hearing, Bill has.”

  Dasein felt a crisis rushing upon him, dropped to his hands and knees. As he fell, he heard the bow twang, felt the wind of an arrow brush the back of his neck, heard it slam into the side of the camper.

  “Petey!” the woman shouted. She snatched the bow from him. “What’re you doing?”

  “It slipped, Ma.”

  Dasein climbed to his feet studying these people narrowly.

  “Hunh,” the man said.

  The mother turned toward Dasein, the bow in her hand.

  “He tried to kill me,” Dasein whispered.

  “It was just an accident!” the boy protested.

  The man lifted the flashlight, a menacing gesture.

  Without looking at him, the woman said: “Point it toward the ground, hon.” She pushed the light down, stared at Dasein. “You don’t think …”

  “It was an accident,” the boy said.

  Dasein looked at the arrow. It had penetrated halfway through the camper’s wall on a level with his chest. He tried to swallow in a dry throat. If he hadn’t ducked at just that instant … An accident. A regrettable accident. The boy was playing with a bow and arrow. It slipped.

  Death by misadventure.

  What warned me? Dasein wondered.

  He knew the answer. It lay there in his mind, clearly readable. He had come to recognize the Santaroga pattern of menace. The means might differ, but the pattern carried a sameness—something lethal in an apparently innocent context.

  “It was just an accident,” the woman whispered. “Petey wouldn’t harm a fly.”

  She didn’t believe it, Dasein saw.

  And that was another thing. He was still connected by a tenuous thread to the Jaspers oneness. The warning message along that line was unmistakable. She’d received it, too.

  “Wouldn’t he?” Dasein asked. He looked once more at the arrow protruding from the camper.