Face Blind

by Lance Hawvermale

  But this time, Jonah Cable was wrong. There was no sequel. Ben had spent that year as he had spent the previous four: drifting, false-starting half a dozen novels, and shooting pool with old-timers in local bars. Jonah worked six hundred miles northeast of the city on a NASA-sponsored project that should have been cutting-edge enough to provide even the dullest hack with piles of usable story material. Grist for the literary mill.

  “Yet here we are.”

  He flushed the toilet and washed his hands, drying them slowly. Though his nine-ball skills had appreciably improved here in southern Chile, he’d been unable to provide New York with a follow-up manuscript. His agent had simply stopped calling.

  But now this. Here, at last, was something.

  Damned if he knew what to make of them. Mira Westbrook was a good-looking young professional with more determination in her eyes than Ben had in his entire beleaguered bod. Her brother, her twin, was likable as hell and seemed to handle himself just fine despite the monkey wrench that genetics had tossed into his double-helix machine. But after that, everything fogged up. Until he could wipe himself a clear light of sight, Ben would have to take it on faith that they were legit.

  “No more hiding in the head,” he told the man in the glass.

  As he left the bathroom, he asked himself if he was becoming more than just antisocial. At what point did a one-hit wonder go from media-shy celebrity to grade-A, pasteurized recluse?

  He returned to his small living room to find the two of them waiting expectantly.

  “So…” He rubbed his hands together and then felt foolish for it. What did they want him to say?

  “Do you … have any ideas?” Mira asked. She was blond, her hair pulled back in a practical way, her face nearly free of makeup. “Any suggestions?”

  “Not a one. You’re telling me he can’t read anything else? No magazine, blog, e-mail, article, nothing at all?”

  “Not easily. We have some middle-reader books that he works with, but they’re not high on his list of favorite things.”

  Ben looked at the young man. He had little experience with Down. It was a chromosomal problem, if he recalled. Something about too many copies of the such-and-such gene or not enough protein in the so-and-so enzyme. “What about comic books? You like those? Superman, Wolverine, that sort of thing?”

  “I like the movies. Batman! Iron Man! Front-row tickets!”

  “I see.” He didn’t see at all; it was simply too strange. Luke had read those passages not only fluently but also with a certain amount of eloquence. It was as if he were channeling someone else’s voice, not to mention someone else’s command of vocabulary and inflection.

  “I tried finding more of your work,” Mira said, “a short story in an anthology or a letter on an op-ed page, but—”

  Ben laughed.

  Startled by his own outburst, he clamped his mouth shut. How many weeks had it been since he’d made a sound like that? When was the last time he’d had an actual conversation? Recluse, nothing. He was heading toward full-blown hermitage. “Sorry,” he said. “But you just hit my personal nail on the head. I’m not exactly what you’d call prolific. I laugh on behalf of my agent. Though I suspect he’s moved on to tears by now.”

  In response to that, the poor girl plainly had nothing to say.

  Ben scowled at himself. He was coming off as a freak. “Maybe if I could hear something else…” He looked at Luke. “Would you mind?”

  “Mind what?”

  Ben looked around, grabbed a copy of Pool & Billiard, and flashed through a few pages. Finding an ad with large, easy-to-read words, he handed the open magazine to Luke. “Here you go, son. Give this one a try.”

  “It’s okay,” Mira told him. “Just do your best.”

  Luke brought the magazine close to his face, holding it in both hands. Then he pulled back, his eyes going through a series of squints.

  “You’re stalling,” Mira said.

  Luke stuck his tongue out at her, then went back to his assignment.

  Ben waited. He didn’t know what was happening. He’d entertained no guests since Jonah had visited him two months ago. And now he had the single oddest pair of twins he’d ever met, one of them sitting literally on the edge of her seat, the other sounding out the word ball with the prowess of a six-year-old.

  Luke struggled. He made it past the first two words but, like a climber coming upon a cliff face devoid of handholds, jabbed at the next word forcefully, as if he were driving pitons into rock.

  Ben saw the devotion in Mira’s eyes. In a rare moment of insight, he saw deeper than that, into the layers of patience and the slim stratum of her consternation.

  “Bray … key,” Luke read. Then, a moment later: “Break!”

  “Good job.” Ben offered him a smile. “Breaking is a very important part of pool, you know, and it has nothing to do with getting mad and splintering your cue stick.”

  “I like the eight ball,” Luke said.

  “You do, huh?”

  “Yep. I shake it and it tells me the future.”

  “Ah, of course. Too bad we don’t have one of those right now. I could truly use one from time to time.” His eyes settled on his receipt from the market. He made one visit a week, stocking up on fresh fruit. He might be a hermit, but at least he hadn’t fallen so far that he gave up mango and cantaloupe salad. For ripe strawberries, on certain mornings, he would have charged the guns of Navarone.

  He grabbed the receipt and a pen, and then spent a minute jotting down the first thing that came to mind.

  “I know it’s weird,” Mira said, “our coming here. I would have called ahead, or sent an e-mail or something, but … Anyway, if it seems like this was kind of brash, just getting on a plane and flying down here, it wasn’t actually like that at all. I’ve been planning this for a while.”

  “You don’t have to justify it to me,” Ben assured her. “Lord knows I’m not in any position to go pointing out eye-specks when I’ve got a veritable redwood sticking out of mine.” He gave the paper to Luke. “Humor me for a moment. See if you can make out what I’ve written here. My handwriting is more along the lines of Egyptian hieroglyphs, but hopefully you can—”

  “‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they are not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’”

  Luke handed the paper back. “‘I have a dream.’”

  Ben stared at him. He knew then, finally, what his father had meant when he talked of how it felt when a ghost walked over his grave.

  “Easy-smeasy,” Luke said. He batted an errant hair from his face.

  Ben opened his mouth, but he had nothing to say that seemed adequate.

  “It’s not the book, Mr. Cable,” Mira said, her amazement evident in her whispered voice. “It’s you.”

  * * *

  One hour passed.

  Ben had no whisky. He could not remember a time when a slosh of Johnnie Walker over three perfectly square cubes of ice was more appropriate than it was now. In its place he worked his way through a third cup of coffee. He’d heard somewhere that decaffeinated varieties existed, but he figured that would be like selling bullets without the gunpowder, so he put no faith in the rumor.

  “No more!” Luke said, pushing the papers away from him.

  “One last time.” Ben banged away on his laptop. The three of them, like kids, sat on the floor. Within easy reach were pretzels and half a bag of chocolate chips. “Here, I’m printing it now.”

  The ink-jet spit out another page. This one contained a trick. Ben had copied a block of random text from the Internet, pasted it into a blank document, and mingled it with his own sentences.

  Mira grabbed it, scanned it, and handed it to her brother. She’d barely stopped smiling.

  Ben knew love when he saw it. Her eyes glittered with it. There was an excitement fused to that love, making the moment so keen with possibilities that Ben, for the first time in the
bluest of blue moons, grinned for no reason other than that it felt so damn cool.

  Luke sighed with great drama and read. “‘One of my favorite recording artists is Dr. Hook. Though I am dating myself by saying this, in … ta-he … the la-tee … late see-va … see-veen—’”

  “Seventies,” Ben supplied. “In the late seventies.”

  “Seventies.” Luke rubbed his eyes. “‘… dah … dac-ta … tor, doctor!’” He pointed. “Hey, that says doctor. That’s a hard word.”

  “It is,” Mira agreed. “But you got it.”

  “It’ll get a lot easier after that,” Ben predicted.

  He was right. Luke said, “‘Dr. Hook impacted young people in America and crossed both genre and racial divisions.’” He lowered the page. “Is that enough, please?”

  “Yeah, son. That’s enough.”

  After the silence had spun out for a while, Mira said, “What are you thinking?”

  “You want my most coherent thought?”

  “Sure.”

  “My most coherent thought is holy shit.”

  Luke giggled. “Shit isn’t holy!”

  Ben looked at Mira, and they both laughed.

  Luke joined them. “You guys.”

  Ben drained the last of his coffee and didn’t even mind that it was cold. Something was upon him, something that had yet to expose its full dimensions but warmed him just the same. He didn’t know what was happening or why he’d been chosen to play a role in Luke Westbrook’s special talent, and perhaps that very not knowing was what so enthralled him. “If you want me to tell you why I think Luke here can read things I write but can’t read much else without difficulty, then I am sitting here on the floor in this gloomy apartment and telling you that I haven’t the damnedest notion.”

  “I sense a but,” Mira said.

  “But I am very interested in learning more. To say the least. And I haven’t been interested in much other than Spanish-speaking snooker halls these last few months. I won’t bore you with the details of my life and times as an underachieving adult, but suffice to say that I don’t feel bored today. In fact”—even as he spoke, an idea came to him—“I have a rather radical proposal, if you want to hear it.”

  “That’s why we came.”

  “Good. My proposal is in two parts.” He glanced at Luke. “Listening?”

  Luke cupped his hands behind his ears to show that he was.

  “The first part is to extract a very serious promise from both of you, swearing that you will refrain from calling me mister. There are no misters among friends, and I would like to think that’s what we suddenly are.”

  Mira smiled. “Done.”

  “Second, how about if the three of us were to visit that particular place that got all of this hullabaloo started?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  Now it was Ben’s turn to smile. He let it slide across his lips, savoring it. “I’m talking about Mars.”

  Luke made a face. “Huh? Mars is too far. Mars is way, way out in space. We can’t go there!” He leaned forward. “Can we?”

  Ben thought that maybe they could. He sensed it was worth a try. For whatever reason, his writing made a connection with this young man, so instinct advised him to take that writing to the shores of its rust-colored heart.

  Luke touched him on the knee. “Are we really going to Mars?”

  “Well, son … it may not be exactly like the real McCoy, but it is positively the closest thing to Mars you’ll find on Earth.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The setting sun blurred the Atacama’s horizon like melting glass. Gabe stared into the glow. Eighteen hours had passed since the Midnight Messenger had swept across his field of vision and lured him into this puzzle where half-boys were smuggled in backpacks and head-shot bodies faded like the day giving way to night. Gabe was overdue for sleep and felt it in his eyes. As he watched the system’s primary star irradiate the western hills, he spoke his thoughts aloud. “I’m still not ruling out Gigante.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Vicente agreed.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting home?”

  “Sergio is staying at a friend’s tonight.”

  “And your wife?”

  “Artemis is in Rio, selling textbooks to teachers. Not a bad place for a business trip. You know, sometimes I think I’m too much for her.”

  “Sometimes you’re too much for me.”

  “Other way around today, amigo.”

  “Point taken. Her name is really Artemis?”

  “Goddess of hunting and fertility. That’s my old lady, and then some. Her father was … eccentric. He also happened to be a disgusting excuse for a human being, the devil take him.”

  “Sounds like we better change the subject.”

  “Yeah.” Vicente spat into the dirt. “You sure you want to do this? Drive out there?”

  “It was your idea.”

  “I’ve had bad ideas before. Rubat is going to come unglued.”

  “I don’t have much of a choice.”

  “The hell you don’t. You go out there, he’ll kick your ass out of the program. And it’s dangerous. People die out there. The desert eats them from the inside.”

  “I wouldn’t have much luck convincing the cops to check it out based on a hunch.”

  “So you have to do it yourself?”

  Gabe sighed. “That runner last night, he was trying to save that kid. And now there’s not even a body left behind to prove that he existed. I’m the only one who knows he was even alive. So, yeah. I have to do it myself, and hopefully Rubat won’t find out.”

  Vicente rubbed the black stubble on his cheeks and glanced at his friend. “I’ll get the truck.”

  * * *

  The truck turned out to be a 1986 Isuzu P’up with oversized tires and one headlight. Vicente called it Cyclops.

  Gabe settled himself onto the tape-patched seat. The sun continued to flash-fire the distant hills. Though it looked red at this time of day, Gabe knew this perceived color was due to a photon effect known as preferential scattering. There wasn’t anything romantic about a sunset. The peril of being a scientist was losing your myths.

  “Cyclops,” he said, liking the sound of the name, “let’s get rolling.”

  The desert altered form at dusk. The shadows spilled from jagged rocks like running oil, tar pits in which the truck might get lodged like some prehistoric animal caught outside the cave after dark. They had packed well for the trip so that a breakdown wouldn’t end up getting them killed. In a wilderness with neither shelter nor cell service, survival was always foremost on everyone’s mind. During the daylight, the place was scarred and desolate. At night it would be a vacuum. But in the time between, the half-seen shapes took on menacing forms, like gargoyles dipped in wax.

  “You’re the navigator,” Vicente said. “You better check the map.”

  Gabe handled the chart carefully, as it was old enough that the folds were soft and ready to tear. Dated 1955, it depicted the locations of what were once the desert’s booming mine towns and rail lines. Over half a century had passed since then. Gabe had assumed that nothing remained of the nitrate towns but husks.

  “Maybe I should have brought a gun,” Vicente said.

  “So you could shoot your foot off? Or mine? No, thanks.”

  “Think about it. You say you saw a man get shot. Are we driving out here looking for the shooter? Is that what we’re doing? Because if that’s the case, then maybe I’m about to come to my senses.”

  Gabe hadn’t considered it. But perhaps the greatest danger wasn’t Rubat’s wrath.

  Vicente shifted gears. “I don’t hear you telling me to turn around.”

  “We’ll just … take a look, okay? We’ll start at the point where we found the boy, and from there we’ll try the closest set of ruins and look around. If we see anything untoward…”

  “Untoward? Who the hell says untoward?” Vicente, half Canadian, spoke English as well as any Canuck, but appare
ntly he preferred to keep things simple.

  “If we see anything suspicious we’ll come back.”

  “Shouldn’t the cops be doing this? They have planes, you know. They can scout the entire area.”

  “I’m not convinced that they really want to. Besides, they still have to do lab work on the blood and probably an autopsy on the boy. I don’t know anything about the process except what I see on TV. But as far as they’re concerned, they don’t have a crime. They have a kid who likely died of exposure, and that’s it.”

  “Yeah, one really messed-up kid. Damn, I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  Gabe fought the images, but they came back: arm and legs cut away, hand reaching for the pinwheel’s stem …

  He gladly dove back into the map, using a flashlight to find his way around it. After locating the general area where they discovered the boy, he traced his finger outward in concentric circles. He stopped when he encountered the word Aceda.

  “Acid?”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s something here called Aceda.”

  “Aceda? Not acid, exactly, but when something turns sour, that’s aceda.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a very friendly place.”

  “How far?”

  “Uh … maybe seven or eight kilometers.” At some point in his graduate work he’d started defaulting to the metric system, as did 95 percent of Earth’s population. “Try a heading that’s more”—he pointed—“that way.”

  “Westward ho.” Vicente turned the wheel, causing a peacock’s tail of dust to rise and capture the setting sun in its motes.