“Anything! Anything!”
He took a dusty tape from the top of the stack by the TV, untouched for months. No label. He plugged it in.
It was the last thing his mother had recorded, and it was nothing special, a Friday installment of The Tonight Show she had meant to watch Saturday morning, back in June.
The theme music startled him. It sounded amazingly realistic. He was afraid someone outside the house might hear it—but that was stupid. All over town, people must be playing videotapes or records or CDs or whatever noisy thing they felt like.
The colors on TV were supernaturally vivid. Clifford sat mesmerized by the screen. He didn’t listen to the talk, just relished the sound of the voices. It was all so boisterous, so carelessly happy.
The sound of the TV was like Christmas in a box, and Clifford didn’t understand why it made his mother cry.
Evelyn wore her new dress upstairs and looked at herself in the standing mirror.
She liked the way the new light reflected from the peaks and shadowy valleys of the cloth.
“It looks very well,” Symeon said. Not good or nice but well. She liked the way he talked. He was very courteous. Very old-world.
“Thank you.” She tried to sound demure, not too brazen. “I feel like I haven’t thanked you enough.”
“The dress,” Symeon said. His smile was enigmatic, his eyes obscure.
She said, “The dress—?”
“Take it off.”
“You’ll have to help me with the stays.”
“Of course.”
His hands were large but deft.
CHAPTER 5
Linneth Stone followed Dex to the High School and sat at the back of his morning classes, flanked by the sullen Proctors in their brown woolen uniforms. (She called them pions—according to Dex’s French–English dictionary, a “checker” or “pawn,” but she used the word respectfully.) For two days Dex discussed the Civil War while this petite woman in Victorian dress took notes and methodically filed them in a calfskin binder. Each day, attention in the classroom migrated away from Dex and toward these apparitions seated at the rear.
Dex had hoped the situation would improve now that electrical power had been restored, but it didn’t; the fluorescent ceiling lights only made her presence seem more exotic. Today, at lunch, he told her so.
They sat in the staff cafeteria. There was no hot food, but the artificial light dispelled some of the gloom of the cavernous space. Dex had brought a bag lunch. Linneth, flanked by her guards, sat without eating and listened to his complaints.
“I understand the problem,” she said. “I didn’t mean to create a distraction.”
“You have, though. And that isn’t the only problem. It’s not clear to me what you’re hoping to achieve here. Obviously,” a nod at the Proctors, “I can’t stop you from sitting in on classes. But I’d like to know what the purpose of it is.”
She paused a moment, her expression angelic and distracted, collecting her thoughts. “Only to learn from you. Nothing more sinister. To study Two Rivers and—I don’t know what to call it—the place Two Rivers came from. Your Plenum.”
“All right, but to what end? If I cooperate, who am I helping?”
“You’re helping me. But I see what you mean. Mr. Graham, it’s really very simple. I was asked to write a social study of the town—”
“Asked by whom?”
“The Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse. The Proctors. But please remember, I’m a contract employee. I work for the Bureau but I don’t represent the Bureau, not directly. There are several of us in town, civilian workers I mean, mainly academics. For instance, there is a surveyor, an electrical engineer, a documentary photographer, a medical doctor—”
“Each one writing a report?”
“You pose the question with too much malice. If the circumstances were reversed, Mr. Graham, if one of our villages had appeared in your world, wouldn’t your government do the same thing? Compile records, try to understand the miracle that had happened?”
“People have died here. In good conscience, I don’t know if I can cooperate.”
“I can’t speak for your conscience. I can only say that my work isn’t harmful.”
“In your eyes. It’s certainly a nuisance to my work—we’ve already established that.”
“Lieutenant Demarch sent me to you because he thought a teacher of history would have a broader grasp of cultural issues—”
“Did he? My guess is that he was hoping to piss me off.”
She blinked but forged ahead: “I won’t attribute motive. The point is that I can go elsewhere if I’m interfering with the school. I really don’t care to cause trouble.”
Her meekness was maddening. Also deceptive. She was relentless, Dex thought. He looked at her over the trestle table, searching for something in the composition of her features: a glimpse under the porcelain exterior. She came from the world outside Two Rivers, but she wasn’t a Proctor or a soldier—and that made her nearly unique, potentially interesting.
Too, her curiosity seemed genuine. She might or might not be a tool of the Bureau, but there were obviously questions she wanted to ask. Fair enough. He had a few questions of his own.
He said, “Maybe we can compromise.”
“In what way?”
“Well, first of all—you’d be a lot less conspicuous if you lost your bookends.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The gentlemen attached to your elbows.”
Both guards gave Dex a stony glare meant to intimidate him. He smiled back. He was tired of the Proctors. They dressed like Boy Scouts and swaggered like hall monitors: pions, a good word, he thought.
“I will have to talk to Lieutenant Demarch,” she said. “I can’t promise anything.” But the idea seemed to appeal to her.
“You might consider changing the way you dress, too. It draws attention.”
“I have considered that. But I’m new here, Mr. Graham. I’m not sure what would be appropriate, or appropriately modest.”
“You’re staying at the Woodward Bed-and-Breakfast?”
“Nearby. The motor hotel.”
“You’ve met Evelyn Woodward?”
“Briefly.”
“She’s about your size. Maybe she can lend you something. She seems to have a new wardrobe these days.”
“Yes. Well, perhaps. Do you have any other requirements?”
“Certainly. A quid pro quo. I want something for my time.”
“And what would that be?”
“A map of the world. An atlas, if possible. And a good basic history.”
“Your history for mine?”
“Right.”
She surprised him by smiling. “I’ll see what I can do.”
His fever broke the night the lights came back to Two Rivers, and Howard Poole emerged from his sickness feeling fragile but immensely clearheaded. It was as if the disease had starved all confusion from the bone of logic.
He waited a day for Dex to show up, but the schoolteacher didn’t come. That was all right, Howard thought. It wasn’t always easy for Dex to get away; he might have been followed. It didn’t matter. It was time to take some initiative on his own.
At noon, when the ration lines opened and the streets were most crowded, Howard packed some food and bottled water and a camp knife into the ample pockets of a big Navy jacket and stepped out into the biting October air.
Maybe he had been in hiding too long, or maybe it was the autumn weather, but everything he looked at seemed to have been cut from a luminous glass. Sidewalks, windows, the tumbled leaves of the trees, were all thin as ice under a cellophane-blue sky. He wanted to take it all in at once, to hoard these colors against another dark season. He forced himself to walk with his head down. He didn’t dare attract attention.
He was carrying identification, actually Paul Cantwell’s ID. Lucky Paul, Howard thought, on vacation when the roof of the world fell in. It was good documentation, but there was obv
iously no photo ID; and the cards, if you looked closely, were all out of date—except for the ration card. He might pass muster if the military questioned him. But he might not. He didn’t want to run that risk. It was better not to arouse suspicion.
He crossed the intersection of Oak and Beacon and walked east past lifeless businesses, shop windows shadowy and haunted by ghosts: by cameras, computers, fashionable clothes, big-screen TV sets. No one had stolen these things even in the chaotic first days of the military occupation. Nobody wanted them. They were useless to the natives and frighteningly foreign to the soldiers, the trinkets and ornaments of a lost race.
The town had been in a kind of trance, Howard thought, ever since the tanks rolled down Coldwater Road last June. There had been some gestures of resistance, all futile. A couple of NRA types had taken some ineffectual shots from their upper-story windows. Both men were apprehended and executed publicly and without trial. Two Rivers was a hunting-fishing town, and Howard supposed there were a great many people with their Remingtons still primed and hidden. But what could one rural county do against the weight of a nation? Declare independence?
In a way, they were lucky. As occupations go, this one had not been exceptionally brutal—at least not yet. He remembered reading about Phnom Penh under the Khmer Rouge, where civilians had been shot to death for wearing European eyeglasses, or for no reason at all. There had been no such slaughter here, maybe because the battle had been so one-sided and the prize so peculiar.
So the town had capitulated to its occupation with a dazed shrug. Howard was no exception. He had gone into hiding almost gratefully; hiding was something he was good at. He had grown up fragile and chronically thin. Beaten for his awkwardness, he had learned to take his beatings and go home; he had never complained or even plotted revenge. There had always been the solace of a book.
The name of this behavior, Howard thought, was cowardice. He had stopped denying it long ago, had even acknowledged it as a fundamental component of his character. He knew two essential facts about himself: that he was smart and that he was a coward. It wasn’t the worst draw in life’s lottery.
A memory came wafting up from his childhood. Often during his illness he had been surprised by these gusts of memory, and maybe he was still sick, because here came another: he was ten years old on the porch of the house in Queens, listening to the rumble of his parents’ voices, to one of their winding, pleasantly silly marathons of talk.
“Some people believe,” his father had said, “in reincarnation—that we live again and again, and in each life we have a task. A thing to do or a thing to learn.” He had reached out absently to ruffle his son’s hair. “What about you, Howie? What is it your business to learn this time around?”
Howard had been young enough to take the idea seriously. The question plagued him for days. What was he supposed to learn? Something difficult, he guessed, or else why dedicate a life to it? Something he had resisted in all his other lives; some Everest of knowledge or virtue.
Let it be anything, he thought—the names of all the stars, the origin of the universe, the secrets of time and space. . . . Let it be anything but courage.
Past midtown, the streets were mostly empty. It was harder to be inconspicuous here. He shuffled with his hands in his pockets; where possible he took suburban roads, winding his way through the newer and bleaker housing projects that marked the western extremity of Two Rivers. The military patrols would not likely come this way; there was nothing here to draw them. Still, he had to be careful. The soldiers had made a barracks out of a Days Inn on the highway, midway between Two Rivers and the ruins of the Physical Research Laboratory—not far from here.
Howard had pored over a map of the town in the days before the tanks came, and he had a good memory for maps; but these curving roads and culs-de-sac confused him. By the time he found an obscure and plausible way east—following a line of electrical towers where the trees and scrub had been cut back—it was nearly curfew.
He had planned for that. He crossed the highway where it met Boundary Road and followed it a quarter mile north, staying close to the drainage ditch on the left. The shadows were already very long. There were no houses out here, nothing but junk maples and the occasional crumbling gas station. He reached his first objective before dark: a tiny bait and camping gear shop close to the border of the old Ojibway reserve.
He had stopped here with Dex Graham last June. Dex had bought a map and a compass, both long since lost. The store was a tar paper shack with a shingle out front. Uninhabited, as Howard had supposed it would be.
He took a long look up and down the highway. He listened for a time. There was no sound but the rattle of a solitary cricket in the chilly dusk.
A fat, rust-red padlock protected the front door. Howard picked his way through a scatter of bald tires, past the rusting hulk of a ’79 Mercury Cougar to the rear door. This door was also padlocked, but one brisk tug separated the latch from the rotting wood of the frame.
A powerful stench wafted out of the dark interior. Howard hesitated, repulsed. Then he thought: The bait. Jesus! There had been two big freezers full of herring roe and dew worms in here. Over the summer the contents must have fermented.
He stepped inside, breathing through his mouth. The only light was the last blue of the sky through a dusty window. Howard moved cautiously down an aisle of bulk goods.
He selected three items: a frame backpack, a double-insulated sleeping bag, and a one-man tent.
He carried them outside and paused to take three cleansing gasps of air.
Then he stuffed the folded tent into the backpack and tied the sleeping roll underneath. He shouldered the pack and adjusted its straps on his shoulders. Then he walked north along the highway until he found a trail into the woods.
The trail was mossy and overgrown but seemed to take him in approximately the right direction. He walked for twenty minutes into the wooded Ojibway land; then it was too dark to go any farther.
He pitched his tent on stony soil and managed to cover it with a nylon fly as the last light faded. Finally he tossed his bedroll inside and climbed in after it.
It would be cold tonight. Maybe cold enough to snow if the clouds thickened. October snow, he thought. He remembered early snowfalls in New York: those brittle, small flakes. Groundwater frozen into crusts of ice, old leaves crisp as dry paper.
He had chosen the sleeping bag blindly, but it was a good one, a winter bag. He was warm inside it. He had walked a long way, and he fell asleep before the last light was gone from the sky.
The dream came as it had come every night for weeks, less a dream than a recurring image that had insinuated itself into his sleep.
It was an image of his uncle, of Alan Stern, but not as Howard remembered him: this Alan Stern was emaciated and translucent, naked, his back to Howard and his spine cruelly visible under the faint, taut flesh.
In the dream he knew that his uncle was bound or connected to an egg of light larger than himself. Howard thought it looked like a nuclear explosion captured by a still camera as the shock wave began to expand, a static moment between nanoseconds of destruction; and Stern was either held by it or holding it, or, somehow, both.
He turned his head to look at Howard. His thin face seemed unutterably ancient, wizened under a wild rabbinical beard. His expression was a combination of agonizing pain and a fierce preoccupation.
Stern, Howard tried to say. I’m here.
But no sound came, and nothing registered on his uncle’s tortured face.
Maya, Stern used to tell him. A Hindu word: it meant the world as illusion, reality as a veil of deception. “You have to look behind the maya. That’s your duty as a scientist.”
It came naturally to Stern. For Howard, it was much more difficult.
One summer on a beach in Atlantic City, family vacation: Stern picked up a stone and gave it to Howard and said, “Look at it.”
It was an ancient pebble polished by the sea. Smooth as glass, g
reen as the shadows under water, shot through with veins of rusty red. The pebble was warm where the sun had been on it. Underneath, it was cool in his hand.
“It’s pretty,” Howard had said, idiotically.
Stern shook his head: “Forget pretty. That’s this stone. You have to abstract its essence. Learn to hate the particular, Howard. Love the general. Don’t say ‘pretty.’ Look harder. Gypsum, calcite, quartz? Those are the questions you have to ask. Pretty is maya. ‘Pretty’ is the stupid man’s answer.”
Yes. But he didn’t have Stern’s razor intellect. He put the stone in his pocket. He liked it. Its particular color. Its coolness, its warmth.
Howard woke in the deep of the night.
He knew at once it was late—well past midnight, still a long time before morning. He felt breathless and weak in the grip of the sleeping bag. He had slept with his left arm bent under his body and the arm was numb, a useless weight of tissue. But he didn’t move.
Something had woken him.
Howard had gone camping once before, a week-long expedition in the Smoky Mountains with his parents. He knew there were noises in the forest and that any odd sound was liable to wake a sleeper in the dark. He told himself there was nothing to be afraid of: the only real danger was from the soldiers, and they were hardly likely to be out in the woods at this hour.
Still, he was afraid of what he might have heard or sensed, the fear like a door that had opened in some deep chamber of his body. He gazed into the darkness of the tent. There was nothing to see. Nothing to hear, either, except the rattle of wind in the trees. Branches groaning in the cold. It was cold outside. The air was cold in his nostrils.
There was nothing out there, Howard told himself, except maybe a raccoon or a skunk wandering through the brush.
He shifted onto his back and let the blood pump into his dead arm. The pain was at least a distraction. He closed his eyes, opened them, closed them again. Sleep was suddenly closer than he would have guessed possible, cutting through his anxiety like a narcotic. He took a deep, shuddering breath that was almost a yawn.
Then he opened his eyes, one last blink of reassurance, and saw the light.
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