Mike remembers, Dave realized. Maybe it’s not all clear to him, but he’s remembering something.
“…dementia going on,” the blonde woman on Fox said. “We’re getting…just a minute…reports of…I’m sorry, I’ve lost that connection.”
“Hold on.” One of the men also was listening through an earpiece. “We’re putting up a crawl, it should be up in just a few seconds. A bit of odd news, I guess.”
“What’s not odd news these days?” asked the other man, and he gave a nervous laugh.
“Not an emergency,” the first man went on, holding up a hand as if to restrain the audience from reaching for their cellphones in a panic. “Reports coming in of…get this, odd news like I said…multiple sonic booms in the sky over Chicago, Atlanta, and New York…well, I didn’t hear anything, did you?”
“Not me,” said the other man. “There’s the crawl.”
Across the bottom of the screen, the words were as the man had already said: Multiple sonic booms reported over several cities, unknown origin.
“I’m getting…what?” The blonde woman was no longer on her earpiece, but was talking to someone off-camera. She returned her attention to the audience, and she was cool and collected when she said, “We’re getting preliminary reports that the sounds—and they’re being identified as sonic booms—have been heard over Moscow and Helsinki. We’ll be getting more details on this later, I’m sure, but we’ll have to let the scientists figure this one out, folks.”
“I’m no scientist but one thing I’m pretty sure of,” said the man who’d given the nervous laugh. He was smiling, and for the moment he was everyone’s good friend and hand-holder. “It’s not the end of the world. We’re going to go to break and then we’re coming right back with investment tips from Doctor Money.”
“Let’s go,” Cheryl urged. “Mike needs us.”
“Yeah,” Dave said. He turned the flatscreen off. Cheryl was alive. The boys were alive. The world was alive, and there were no Gray Men. A rush of emotion almost knocked him down. Cheryl was moving toward the door, in a hurry to go get their younger son. “Yesterday,” he said before she could reach for the doorknob. “What happened yesterday?”
“What? Yesterday? You don’t remember?”
“Tell me.”
She gave him a look now that told him she was really frightened, and that either he was out of his head—unlikely, for such a steady head as his—or that…she didn’t really know, but she thought whatever it was had something to do with that craziness on TV. And that hooking those things together sounded crazy, too. “We got up,” she said in a quiet voice, “I took the boys to school, you cut down the rest of the dead tree, and then you went to work. You said Hank Lockhart’s new porch was going to be an easy project. I talked to Mom about Ann’s insurance settlement from the wreck. UPS brought that package from Amazon about two o’clock.”
“Oh yeah,” he recalled. “The Civil War book.”
“You came home, we had dinner—meatloaf, turnip greens, and mashed potatoes, if you don’t remember my cooking—and then we watched a little TV. You helped Steven with his math homework. About ten o’clock Randall called to ask you to work at the bar this weekend. Then we turned in. It was just a normal day and night.” Her blonde eyebrows went up. “Am I missing anything?”
Dave looked down at the floor of the house he loved. He thought that if he started laughing he might not be able to stop and then it might turn to tears and…oh Christ, what was he going to do with the memories that were becoming clearer and clearer in his mind? He remembered the pain of that spiked arm going into him; he remembered the helpless frustration of being taken from that nightmare world before he was ready, of not being able to see the thing through with the alien timepiece. After that, he didn’t remember anything…but who knew whether he might recall something of being dead or not?
The peacekeeper had said it: Some will know it happened…some will have their memories of this erased.
He wondered how many would remember. One in fifty? One in a hundred, or one in a thousand? Would the President remember, or the First Lady? And how about the unknown boy who had taken the name of Ethan Gaines? Would he ever know what he had been such a crucial part of? How many would recall that they had died, or found gray splotches on their bodies before the agony set in that transformed their flesh and bones? He hoped no one would remember past that point. He hoped the greater power at least was kinder than that. He was sure he would find out, in time.
Time.
It was what Hannah had asked for. Her request in the bed at the White Mansion.
More time.
“Let me hold you for a minute,” Dave said, and he took a few steps and put his arms around Cheryl, and he thought he could squeeze her so hard she could merge right into him, become so close heart-to-heart and soul-to-soul that never for a moment would they ever truly be apart again. He would hug the boys the same way, and they were going to travel and do some things that were fun, things they’d wanted to do and been putting off, because what was the point of getting a second chance if you didn’t use it? He would have a good long talk with Mike, and he would make sure the boy knew those things were not coming back, not ever, and he had the promise of a very special Spacekid that it was so.
“I love you so much,” he told her, and his eyes filled with tears but he didn’t let her see; that would send her way over the edge. He was able to wipe his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket and then he kissed her cheek and her forehead and her lips, her body warm and alive against his, but it was time…time…time to go get their boy.
As they walked to the pickup truck from the house, hand in hand, Dave heard the tolling of a distant church bell. It carried through the bright, clear air. Someone else remembers, he thought. They are telling the world, in their own way. It was not a funereal sound, it was not a sound of sadness or loss or surrender. It was the sound of a new beginning.
Just like Ethan said, Dave thought as Cheryl got behind the wheel and he climbed into the passenger side…this was going to make for an interesting and challenging future.
He wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Olivia and Victor Quintero were riding horses on their ranch just after ten o’clock in the morning. They had a dinner party to attend tomorrow night, a group of friends they got together with every couple of months. It was going to be at The Melting Pot on East Mountain Avenue. Olivia and Victor were talking about planning a cruise to the Greek islands in the autumn, because both of them had always wanted to see the blue Aegean and the home of the heroes.
They stopped for awhile and sat under some trees that were just about to start blooming. The world was waking up again from what had seemed like a very long winter. They had so much to look forward to. Tonight they were looking forward to lighting up the chimenea and watching the stars come out, having a glass of wine and just talking about life in the way that lovers who are also great friends do.
Simple pleasures were very often the best. Both Olivia and Victor understood that time was a gift to be cherished. And if anyone doubted that, they could always get a straight answer from the Magic Eight Ball.
At eighteen minutes after ten, Dr. John Douglas was doing paperwork in his office, catching up with insurance forms, when one of his nurses knocked on the door and looked in.
“Can I get you some coffee?” she asked.
“No, thanks. I’m fine. Just have this stuff to do. Oh…will you do me a big favor and call Deborah for me? Ask her if she wants me to stop by the Whole Foods and pick up some pasta for…no, check that…I’ll call her myself, in just a few minutes.”
“All right.” She frowned, and he knew something was wrong.
“What is it, Sophie?”
“Well…it’s strange. It’s on TV, on all the stations. They’re saying people are hearing these sonic booms everywhere. Like all around the world. Just sonic booms, and that’s all.”
“Hm,” JayDee said. “I’ve never heard of anything l
ike that before.”
“I know, it’s really strange. It’s getting people freaked out.”
“Could be a meteor blowing up in the atmosphere, I guess. But that wouldn’t be all around the world, would it? I don’t know, I’m just an old doctor.”
“Do you want to come take a look? They’re playing videos people have taken, and you can hear the sounds.”
He surveyed the dreaded paperwork. Any excuse to get up and away from his desk. But…no.
“I’d better stick with this for right now. Maybe later, thank you.”
Sophie hadn’t been gone but a few minutes when the phone rang. It was Deborah, calling from home. Her younger sister in San Francisco had just phoned with the weirdest story she’d ever heard in her life, something about spaceships and aliens and a war being fought and…it was just weird. Deborah said she thought the two hits of LSD Sissy took back at Berkeley must be showing up now, after all these years.
“I wouldn’t doubt that,” JayDee said. “Listen…I may be home early. Do you want me to stop by Whole Foods and pick up some pasta?”
Deborah said that would be great, and she was going to call Sissy back to try to settle her down.
“Good for you,” he told her. “And tell her if she’s smoking pot, to cut back on that too.” Then he said he loved her, and he hung up the phone, and there was still all that darn paperwork to get done.
When the ungodly blast went off in the sky almost over her head, Regina Jericho dropped the pistol in the grass and looked up.
There was nothing. Only sky, with a few slowly drifting clouds.
Jefferson sat in the blue Adirondack chair, overlooking the pasture and his kingdom of New Eden. The shadows of the big oak moved in a soft wind. He looked at the gun and then into Regina’s face, and she thought that something was different about his eyes…something…but she didn’t know what it was, because she thought she had never really known this man at all. She thought about reaching for the gun again and finishing the job. That hadn’t been the voice of God up there saving Jefferson Jericho from paying for his sins; it had just been an Air Force jet or something breaking the sound barrier.
He said quietly, “Don’t throw your life away, Regina.”
She paused with her hand outstretched to retrieve the pistol. But then she straightened up, because he was right.
“I’ll ruin you,” she said. “I’ll call every lawyer in Nashville, I’ll get the detective’s testimony, I’ll tear you to pieces. I won’t let you hurt anybody else, Jefferson. You’re done. Do you hear me? You are done.”
He gave her the faintest trace of a smile.
“All right,” he said.
“I mean it! I’m going in and make some calls and there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop me, you bastard! I know where all the skeletons are buried!”
“Yes, you do,” he agreed. When she started to pick up the pistol again, to take it back to the desk in his office because she realized killing him that way would be suicide and there were other ways to kill him, he said, “You can leave the gun where it is.”
“You’re going to be so sorry!” she promised. “So sorry you were ever born!” Without looking at him again, without soiling her eyes on his dirty presence, she turned away and walked back along the path to the English-style mansion of his dreams, in the land of his crooked rainbows, and when she was on her cell phone in the hallway she heard a small pop that might have been—must have been—a car backfiring down in New Eden, where the sunlight made the copper-accented roofs glow like heavenly gold and the Church of the High Rollers might have been made of white wax, on the verge of melting.
“Kevin Austin,” said Mr. Novotny. “You’re up!”
The boy stood up from his desk. His heart was beating hard. He was nervous, even after all his careful work and preparation. He picked up the model of the Visible Man and took it to the front of the classroom to begin.
Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart.
It had occurred to him, as he’d constructed the model and put the project together, that the Visible Man was lacking something very important, and it was such a vital part of a human being but it could never be shown in any science class because it was a thing intangible, unable to be weighed or measured, yet without this component Man was truly an empty shell.
That intangible thing was called a soul. When any of these organs were damaged and life was threatened, it was the power of the soul that kicked in to keep the flesh going. It was the driving force that said a person either lie down, gave up hope and died, or had the strength to live one more day…and one more…and one more again.
For some reason Kevin had had strength of purpose on his mind lately. He had been thinking about the soul, about how some people fell under hardship and some people got up dusty and bloody and kept going no matter what. His mom, for instance, after the very tough divorce. The Visible Man could show all the wonders of the human body, all the magnificent constructions and connections, but it could not reveal what made up a hero, who fought the good fight from day to day and never gave up.
He was talking about the brain, the seat of intelligence, when the door opened and Mrs. Bergeson looked in. She wore a frightened expression, which put Kevin and the entire class instantly on edge.
“Something is happening,” she told Mr. Novotny. “It’s on all the news, everywhere. Something is happening.”
“What is it?”
“Strange sounds in the sky,” she said. “Sonic booms. Hundreds of them, all around the world. I thought…you being a science teacher, you might want to come look at the newscasts.”
Mr. Novotny paused, his hand up to his chin and a finger tapping. Then he said, “I’m sure there’s a rational explanation, and I’m sure the news people will work it to death. Right now, Kevin’s giving his presentation.”
“You mean you—”
“Will catch it later, yes, and thank you for the information,” he said, and when she’d retreated he told Kevin to continue.
Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart.
Not nearly all that made up a human being.
Not nearly all.
He’d never thought about what he was going to do with his life, but he wondered what being a doctor would be like. He seemed to remember somebody saying—and maybe this was on TV—that Every kid who ever grew up to be a doctor probably put that thing together.
He couldn’t remember exactly where he’d heard that said, but it sounded right.
As Kevin continued—the report was not long enough to be boring nor short enough to be skimpy on the facts, his mom had helped him time it—he had a strange experience.
Some part of his brain said he ought to go bowling one Saturday night. And he ought to go up to Fort Collins, to the Bowl-A-Rama there.
Now that was strange.
When he finished, he didn’t know what else to say. He thought he’d done well; he’d done the best he could, and what more could anyone ask?
Kevin picked up the Visible Man. He said, “I guess I’m done.”
Then he went back to his seat, and the day went on.
Robert R. McCammon, The Border
(Series: # )
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