The Tetradome Run

by Spencer Baum

  She picked up the paper. It looked like a handwritten letter. She stood there, on the other side of the fence, calmly, and read it.

  “I’m calling for help,” Arnold said. “I’m alerting the guards where we are.”

  She approached him calmly, reaching back behind the jacket she was now wearing. She pulled something from the waist band of her shorts. A gun? No, a Taser. Where the hell did she get…and then he realized that, moments earlier, his own Taser had been loose on the floor.

  She zapped him with a blast of purple lightning, his second Tase today.

  “Oww..gawd..” he muttered, then he fell back to the floor.

  “I’m sorry about that, Arnold,” she said. “I just need a little more time before you call for help, okay?”

  Arnold said nothing. The nausea he’d felt earlier, the whole-body ache—why was everybody Tasing him today?

  “If you feel like you need to tell everyone the truth about what happened down here,” Jenna said, “I suppose there’s not much I can do to stop you. But I know a different story you can tell, one that benefits you and me both.”

  Arnold felt like his blood was frozen in his veins.

  “There’s a bomb in the Tetradome, Arnold. Every flower pot in the Underdeck is part of a live explosive. Your company will be looking for someone to call the hero because the bomb didn’t go off. I’m leaving now, and if you let me go, you could tell a story to your boss where that hero is you.”

  Arnold didn’t talk, but, almost without meaning to, he nodded his head.

  Then he watched Jenna Duvall, disguised in a jacket, hat, and glasses, walk to the far wall, where a large ventilation fan was standing still. She stepped between the blades of the fan, and disappeared.

  CHAPTER 86

  Gabe hit the livestream button and spoke to his phone.

  “So, um…hi. This is Gabe Chancellor. I’m inside the Polaris, and we’re evacuating the hotel. The fire alarm is going off. Going off because I pulled it…”

  It had taken a few minutes for Gabe to convince hotel staff that the threat was legitimate. During those minutes of conversation, people from the upper floors came down and a giant cattle call was set in motion. By the time Gabe cut himself loose from an animated conversation with the head of security, a huge crowd had already formed near the exits.

  That crowd was shuffling forward, slowly. Gabe was near the back of it.

  “…The woman I wrote about in my article—Sunny Paderewski, and also Sparrow Hollister—she was in the casino tonight. She was putting suspicious objects in the trash and…you know what? There’s a trash can up here. I’ll just...”

  With one hand, Gabe aimed the camera on his phone towards the trash. With the other hand, he dug through the can, pushing aside half a dozen plastic cups to find a full bottle of water inside.

  “This is what she was throwing in the trash,” he said, showing off his find for the camera. “A full bottle of water, the lid still screwed on, she tossed one in each trash can of the place then rushed to leave.”

  It didn’t sound good to his ears as he said it. A waitress throwing water bottles in trash cans? That was why he insisted to security there was a bomb in this building?

  “It ties in to what we saw happening in the Tetradome tonight,” he added. “When Jenna screamed about a bomb, and then Nathan Cavanaugh gave the speech from the end of Spartacus Jones and the Serpent’s Mouth.”

  He knew he sounded crazy. Fortunately for him, no one was watching this stream. Yet. Either he was right, and this livestream would become a piece of history, or he was wrong, and just one of a million cranks spouting off on the Internet.

  He frantically searched for the water bottle as he spoke, aiming the camera, begging for it to validate his claim.

  Should he open the bottle? Pour out its contents?

  Or was this some highly sensitive chemical that would ignite as soon as he unscrewed the lid?

  “You guys, all I know is that a woman who I swear looked just like Sunny Paderewski was dropping these bottles in the trash and…look! Right there!”

  He tried angling the camera better to show it.

  “Do you see it? Inside the bottle. Next to the label. There’s a little circuit assembly.”

  It was no larger than a thumbnail. A microchip, some wires…

  “Those wires,” he said. Look at those wires. “Do you see how those wires make a flower petal shape? In Jenna’s memoir…”

  Dear God look at those wires.

  He looked up from the phone and yelled at the people ahead of him.

  “Hurry up we need to get out of here!”

  Eyes back on the water bottle.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be holding this,” he said.

  He moved to set it on the ground next to a slot machine, but a flurry of panicked thoughts, from the heat of the machine to the kicking feet of people behind him to some child picking it up and trying to drink it…

  “I want to scream at everyone in here to go faster but I don’t want to cause a stampede,” he said.

  Another trash can ahead of him. Gently, as if it were a mini tub of nitroglycerin, which it might well be, he set the water bottle inside. At the current shuffling pace of the crowd he was still a good 45 seconds away from the front doors.

  If this is it Gabe, if you are about to die, how do you want to go out?

  He looked at his phone. “I need to say a few things, just in case…”

  What could he possibly say? A message for Myka, for his parents, his older brother, his uncle in Phoenix? Was there time for any of that?

  “The story I wrote for Logic Lighthouse,” he said, “if something happens in here tonight—that story will explain it. Sunny Paderewski is Sparrow Hollister. She went to college with Nathan Cavanaugh. They--”

  The first explosion interrupted him. A deafening, concussive burst from the back of the casino, near the private club.

  What had been an orderly line turned to bedlam. People screamed and scattered. A mad push from behind Gabe—it knocked him over. He rolled to the side to avoid being trampled.

  He was on the carpet, lying between two rows of slot machines, when the second explosion went off.

  “Jesus!”

  His phone in his hand, he trusted it was still recording, and kept talking.

  “I’m at the Polaris casino and bombs are going off! Again, bombs are going off at the Polaris! We’ve had two explosions so far, one on the west end of the casino, and-”

  Another burst, this one so close the screens on the slot machines above him shattered. Dust and fire and smoke, water pouring down from the ceiling, screaming and moaning and death around him.

  Gabe wiped at his eyes, saw the light still shining on his phone.

  “Shit. This might be the end for me.”

  Another explosion. Gabe pressed his body close to the floor as the air above his head caught fire. Were it not for the steel casings of the slot machines, that one would have roasted him.

  “If this is gonna be the end for this reporter,” he said, “he has one final story to file. It’s about Kyle Duvall. I’ve been thinking about Kyle a lot tonight. I don’t think his death-”

  Three quick bursts in succession, each one sending debris flying, blasting holes in the floor and ceiling, bringing down dust and piping and a shower of sparks from above. A huge section of ceiling fell and Gabe lost what little light was left. Seconds, he told himself. Only seconds left to tell the world this one last thing.

  “I’ve been in Kyle’s apartment!” he yelled at this phone. “The blood stain was on the right side of the couch! But in the memoir, Kyle talks about accidentally striking the thumb of his left hand with a hammer! Kyle was right-handed but-”

  The next explosion ended the livestream.

  CHAPTER 87

  Daydreaming

  Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall.

  Rudy and I sit together on the back porch at my house. We drink beer from bo
ttles. We watch afternoon pass into evening. We talk.

  “I feel like it’s going the wrong way,” I say.

  “It’s absolutely going the wrong way,” says Rudy.

  We’re talking about the Blue Brigade, an organization I joined because I wanted to do my part to promote justice in the world, and instead found myself consorting with vandals, agitators, and insufferable armchair philosophers.

  “I’m thinking of quitting,” I say.

  “I’d support you if you did,” says Rudy.

  It’s a lovely spring day. I’m deep into my second semester at Hillerman. I have an uneasy sense that change is coming in my life whether I want it to or not. Rudy and Sunny’s conflict hasn’t come to a head yet, but it’s brewing.

  “Being a good citizen, a good person—it’s more complicated than I thought it was,” I say.

  Rudy and I have spoken on this topic a few times before. Rudy believes that the activism of the Blue Brigade accomplishes little if anything. He thinks it might do more harm than good.

  Rudy, using a phrase he got from his grandpa, believes that people should “tend to their own garden.”

  “But don’t you feel like we should do more to make the world better?” I say.

  “We all have a responsibility to be our best selves,” says Rudy. “That’s how we make the world better.”

  “Shouldn’t that best version of ourselves be one who helps those less fortunate than us?” I say.

  “Do you think the Brigade is helping those who are less fortunate?” says Rudy.

  A few seconds of quiet. I know the answer to Rudy’s question, but I don’t say it.

  “Here’s how I like to think of it,” says Rudy. “If everyone lived their lives the way you lived yours, would the world be better or worse?”

  “If everyone lived like me the world would be full of starving clarinet players.”

  “I’m thinking in a more general sense than that. You’re developing a skill so you can share it with the world at the highest level.”

  “I’m developing a skill no one needs. Seriously, does the world need another clarinet player?”

  “Does it need another activist?”

  Another pause in the conversation while Rudy’s words settle in. As his displeasure with Sunny and Seth has grown, so has his antipathy towards my activism. Whatever balance there is to strike between tending my own garden and helping other people tend theirs, it’s clear the Blue Brigade isn’t meant to be a part of it. The Brigade is going in a direction I don’t want to follow, and it’s driving a wedge between me and my boyfriend.

  A few days after this conversation is over, I will go to the Brigade and tell them I’m too busy to continue planning the Festival of Ideas. Seth will take my place on the planning committee. I will think that I’m done with them.

  I will have no idea what’s coming for me.

  “I had an interesting conversation with Doctor Church,” I say, changing the subject. “He says that, if we’re interested, there are instructor spots for both of us at Mountain Music this summer.”

  Mountain Music is a summer camp in Colorado where first chair college musicians, like we are now, teach cream-of-the-crop high school musicians, like we used to be.

  “Well that sounds interesting,” Rudy says. “How much does it pay?”

  I tell him the meager wages Doctor Church offered. Rudy smiles. I can tell he doesn’t like the idea, but, to his credit, he doesn’t dismiss it. He can sense this is something I might want to do.

  A summer at a cabin in the mountains; a select group of serious students; a few hours of quiet practice time every day, and hiking time, and swimming in a lake; a chance to network with the other instructors, all of them music majors from the best colleges in the country…

  A chance to get away from the madness my life in Albuquerque is becoming.

  It’s a good opportunity. For me.

  For Rudy, not so much.

  Summer is the best time for Rudy’s family. Their band plays weddings every weekend. The money he can expect to make playing with his family is at least double what he’d make as a music instructor at a summer camp.

  He doesn’t seem to care. “I want to be with you this summer,” he says. “Let’s go to Colorado.”

  Have I mentioned this is all a daydream?

  Yes, it’s rooted in reality, but still a daydream, a slightly fictional one, the kind of daydreaming one does a lot of in prison.

  Some of this conversation really happened, but some of it didn’t.

  It’s not that Doctor Church never offered me a spot at Mountain Music. He did. Spots for me and Rudy both.

  And it’s not that I didn’t have a conversation with Rudy on my back porch that spring of freshman year. I did.

  But I didn’t tell him about the offer to teach at Mountain Music. That’s where the story I’ve just written for you shifts from reality to fantasy.

  The reality is too painful to think about.

  Had Rudy and I accepted teaching positions at Mountain Music, we would have driven to Colorado for training and orientation during the third weekend of May. But I was fearful that Rudy would go to Colorado even though he didn’t want to. I was fearful he would do it for me. I was fearful about a lot of things, too many things, and I never told Rudy about Professor Church’s offer.

  And so, during the third weekend of May, Rudy and I didn’t drive to Colorado. Instead, on that same weekend, Rudy drove south from Albuquerque, headed towards El Paso, and died in a car wreck.

  God, I wish I had told him. I wish we had gone to Colorado together that summer, and maybe fallen so in love with the scenery that we decided not to return. I wish Rudy and I could get married, have kids, live in a quiet neighborhood, and play our music. I wish we could grow old together, and if it was meant to be that I had to say goodbye to Rudy when he died, I wish I did it when he was 90, rather than when he was 20. I wish I could be the old woman, grandmother to Rudy’s many grandchildren, who goes up to the podium at his funeral and speaks for the great man who just died, allowing my words to help him pass into memory in the way he was meant to go.

  “Being our best selves.” That would be the theme of my eulogy for Rudy. I would ask everyone the same question Rudy asked me.

  If everyone lived their lives the way you lived yours, would the world be better or worse?

  That question was such a clarifier for me.

  In the Blue Brigade, we all started out with the best intentions, but somewhere along the way, we stopped fighting for a better world and started fighting against the people we didn’t like. We weren’t working to resolve our differences with the domer crowd; we were angling to fight them. We were so addicted to the righteous feeling that comes from the fight that the fight became an end in itself.

  In my daydream, Rudy and I live a long life, he dies peacefully in my arms as an old man, and then, at his funeral, I eulogize Rudy the man, Rudy the musician, Rudy the boyfriend, Rudy the father, and Rudy the husband. I say that in every facet of his life, Rudy tended a garden that produced a surplus. I tell a church full of Rudy’s admirers that he had a clear vision of what his purpose was in life, and that purpose was to bring beauty into the world. I say, “Rudy knew this was his purpose because he knew he had an endless store of beauty inside of him.”

  The eulogy for Rudy is one of my favorite daydreams, and thank God for daydreams in a world where reality sometimes sucks. In reality, I didn’t get to speak at Rudy’s funeral. In reality, I always had the sense that Rudy’s parents blamed me, at least in part, for the way he died. In reality, I watched Rudy’s parents put him in the ground as I cried on Kyle’s shoulder. In reality, I said goodbye to Rudy’s family at the cemetery, and I never spoke with them again.

  My time’s almost up. For real. It’s not just the prison librarian looking at her watch; it’s the calendar marching forward to my execution date. Tomorrow morning they’re taking me from my cell, giving me an hour-long visit with Kyle, then putting me
on the lethal injection table.

  I still can’t believe this is happening. The way a tiny mistake, some registration forms I turned in late, kicked off a sequence of events that derailed everything in my life. Is this my purpose? Am I here to write a memoir that’s a cautionary tale to everyone who thinks they are in control? Am I here to remind you that, at any time, the forces of fate can strike with a ferocious power that steals your ability to control the path of your life?

  As if to reinforce this message about the power of fate, the prison librarian is standing from her desk and walking towards me. You know what? Fuck it. I’m going to keep writing. I’m going to stay at this desk until they drag me away from it. It’s not like the solitary hole or revoked exercise privileges or any of the other punishments they use here mean a damn thing to me now. This is my last session. My last day! And I have so much more to write. I’ve never told you about my father, about the day he walked out. I’ve never told you about the letter my mother left for me when she died. I’ve been focused on telling you the truth about my arrest and imprisonment, but my life has been so much more than that, and if I’m going to die tomorrow I want to write it all down. I want my life to have more meaning than this. I want to have a purpose—Rudy and I were going to bring beauty into the world!

  The librarian and I have just had words. I told her I’ve got more to say and I need more time. She’s phoning the guards. I would take paper and pencil to my cell with me, but they won’t allow it because they’re afraid I’d hurt myself. Afraid I’d hurt myself when tomorrow they’re going to kill me!

  And now I can hear the guards coming. I guess this is it. My goodbye to the world. Kyle, I love you. I’m sorry this happened.

  Pen Pal, I love you. Thank you for being my lifelong friend.

  Rudy, I’m coming to find you. If the trumpets of heaven sound half as sweet as the music you made, then I’m looking forward to eternity.

  CHAPTER 88

  Where were you when Chanelle Devlin gave her infamous press conference?