“I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” Edwin replied. Oh great, Rob thought. I get it. He thinks I’m a nut.
They bought sandwiches and walked across the campus to a picnic table near the Clinic building. It was a perfect autumn day, with the trees turning saffron and red against a diamond-clear sky. “When you come right down to it,” Rob said, “I know so little about what’s happened to me, it’s pathetic. I do stuff without knowing how. Sometimes stuff happens when I don’t intend it, and I never can break on through to understand how or why.
I spend all my time thrashing around in the dark.”
“So is that your goal? To understand your condition, the how and the why?” Edwin unwrapped a submarine sandwich as long as his forearm, and squirted
mayonnaise from a deli packet onto the cold cuts with a generous hand.
Rob had chosen the smallest sandwich on offer, a Monterey Jack-and-pita which he probably wouldn’t be able to finish. As he poked the alfalfa sprouts around into a more even and biteable layer, he noticed his dirty broken fingernails, revolting crescents of black. He stuck his hands into his coat pockets, and said, “You won’t believe this. It’s embarrassing to admit it. But once, at the very beginning … You ever read comic books when you were a kid? Superman, the Fantastic Four? That’s what I thought I could do. Fight crime. Save the world.”
Edwin stopped in midbite to look at him. “You wanted to do good things. That’s so great!”
Rob’s smile felt as wry and twisted as a lemon peeling. “And look what I actually accomplish. I bully weaker people, and rape teenage girls.”
“But you didn’t actually go through with that.” Edwin spoke gently, without even a tang of condemnation.
A little comforted, Rob took his hands out of his pockets again and bit into his pita. The taste of food reawakened his appetite, and he ate rapidly. “Another thing I thought about,” he said between bites. “I’m so isolated, it drives me crazy. If I just had someone to share this with, an equal! It’s the terrible imbalance of power that makes it so lonely. I wonder,” he added, struck by the idea, “if I could just split it with
somebody? With you, say. It might be interesting to try.”
Edwin was so calm that Rob was sure now he was just humoring him. “Is it the sort of thing—like this sandwich, for example—where if I give you half I only have half lef? Because then giving bits away might be helpful to you. Or is it more like the flu—you give the virus to me and then we both get equally sick?”
“I don’t know,” Rob admitted. “I told you I know squat about this thing. You think it’s even possible?”
“I was putting that question aside, because I don’t think it is. This is part of you, not me. You couldn’t share your hair color with me, for instance. And I don’t believe that equality and friendship work like that.”
“With me it’s different,” Rob said.
“So you’ve got strong gifts. So? Other people will have other gifts.”
“You don’t understand,” Rob said with despair. Damn it. Should he just muscle the belief into Edwin’s head? But that had really bombed, the last time he tried it. Rob realized how desperately he yearned to be believed and understood in his own right, without weird mental meddling—to be treated like an ordinary human being.
Edwin put down his sandwich and set his right elbow on the picnic table between them. “Look. Arm wrestle?” His hands were solid and square, with the clever strong fingers of a musician or surgeon. Black hairs sprouted from the backs of his palms and furred the wrists up to the cuffs of his white coat.
“What for?” But Rob put his arm up.
The other man’s grip was surprisingly warm, and implacable as a table clamp. Edwin pushed his arm over without even straining. “Come on, two out of three.”
“Forget it!” Rob said, laughing. “I’ve lost too much weight this summer!”
“But you see what I mean. In one way you’ve got it on me, but in others I’ve got it on you. It’s a waste of time running around making comparisons.” Edwin took a large bite of his sandwich and chewed. “That’s the unselfish reason why I’d decline the honor,” he said. “The selfish reason is, I don’t want anything to keep me from passing my physical.”
“You need a physical to work here?”
“No, but I’m on the NASA long list for the manned Mars mission.”
“Wow! That’s super! But what do they need a microbiologist for on Mars?”
“Rob! Don’t you read your science fiction? If there’s life on Mars at all it’s at the cellular level. Good grief, if they don’t bring a microbiologist they might as well not go at all!” Rob had to laugh at this lopsided view, and Edwin laughed too. “Actually my chances aren’t so great. But it’s nice to dream about it.”
“I envy you,” Rob admitted. “Not Mars, but having a dream, a future. I guess—to answer your question—I don’t know what I want any more. This summer I’ve been lost, drifting without an anchor.”
“Well, we haven’t even begun to work on you yet. Have you finished your lunch? Let’s go back up to my lab and begin.”
When they went through the outer office Dr. Lal was still motionless at her microscope. Rob wondered if she ever budged at all. Edwin cleared a chair in his nook by moving a clutter of slide trays to another stack. “There’s some seltzer water behind those books there,” he said, turning the music on again. “Help yourself. I just want to look something up. Do you remember your old phone number in Fairfax?”
“Sure, it was 246-2741.” Rob found the water bottle and poured while Edwin dug into a cupboard. Then he saw that Edwin was consulting a Northern Virginia White Pages. “You’re not going to phone Julianne, are you?”
“Oh no—I’m just seeing if she’s still listed.” “Checking up on my story?”
Edwin tossed the book back into the cupboard. “I want to help you, Rob, truly I do. But I don’t know if I’m the right person.”
Rob smiled without humor. “Maybe you know a reputable psychiatrist.”
“Well, that’s certainly an idea. Rob, just now you said you didn’t know what you wanted. But I think I hear what you want, loud and clear, all through everything you told me. Understanding your problem, doing things with it, giving chunks of it away—those are just side issues. Your central desire is: you want to return home, to your wife and family. Am I right?
And if a little Thorazine would get you there—”
Rob didn’t hear any more. “That’s true,” he whispered. “My family. Oh god, it’s true.” Suddenly he was choking with tears, the iron fingers digging mercilessly into his throat and chest. Julianne. Angela. Davey. Memory and loss ambushed him, piercing him through and through.
The twins would be coming up on their second birthday, and he wouldn’t be there. Did they still demand nightly readings of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”? Would they still yell in stereo? How had Jul made ends meet on just her salary? He had told her not to worry, but how long could that command hold? The leaves would need raking, the gutters clearing. Every emotion that he had suppressed since spring, that he had been so safe from when he
was just telling it all to Edwin, seared him now. He was so close to them, so damn close! Not even a toll call away, and yet the distance was unbridgeable. He leaned his face on his hands and wept.
And through his pain it came to him. I was looking for my real self. This is me: the father and husband. As long as I’m separated from my family, this anguish will be an essential part of my being. When I denied that, I became a stranger.
From far away Edwin was shouting in his ear. “Rob! Rob, drink this!”
He pushed the seltzer cup into Rob’s hand. The liquid looked like water but went down like a hand grenade. “What the hell?” Rob sputtered and coughed.
“Topped it off with ethyl alcohol from the lab,” Edwin said. His face was ghastly pale under the olive skin tone. “Oh, holy Jesus. Rob—this is not all just in your head, is it.
It’s not a delusion. It’s real.”
“You idiot,” Rob said without heat. He wiped his wet face on his coat sleeve. “What convinced you?”
“Listen.” Edwin went to the window and hauled the sash up. From somewhere not very far away came the howls of the damned—shrieks and ululating bellows and the pounding of metal on metal.
“Is that your lab animals?” Rob asked, coughing. “Wait till the animal rights people nail you.”
“It isn’t us, Rob. It’s you. The chimps went absolutely nuts just a minute ago. You’re transmitting something that they can feel.”
“Not just the chimps, Ed,” Rob said. “Look at you.”
Beneath the thick dark hair Edwin’s face had gone the color of cold chicken gravy. “I can’t deny it,” he said with a weak smile. “It was like—I don’t know, being hit by an invisible truck. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. Oh Lord, and your poor children! You did the right thing leaving them. Forgive me, for poking at the scars.”
“It’s okay.” Rob was shivering with reaction. “I guess I thought if I muffled the wounds up, time would heal them. But time doesn’t do much for an amputation. You know, I still have my house keys there, in my bag.”
Edwin shut the window and turned on the heat. “I know some folks at the Mental Institute who’d kill to meet you,” he remarked.
Suddenly Rob was swept with paranoia. As long as Edwin thought he was crazy it was safe. But now Edwin knew—what would he do? Who would he tell? Had that cup contained only seltzer and ethyl alcohol? Rob jumped to his feet.
“You don’t see me,” he gasped. He could make Edwin forget, wipe all the knowledge out—
“No!” Edwin shouted. He barreled past Rob and stood in the open office doorway, his broad-shouldered frame blocking it almost completely. “It’s all right! I would never sell you out. Rob, you swore you were going to give this up! You can’t cop out now, or you’ll always do it!” He couldn’t see Rob, of course, but he glared stubbornly around the tiny room.
Exasperated, Rob let the tarnhelm effect drop. “You seriously think you can block that door against me?”
“Can’t I?” Edwin grinned faintly and raised an eyebrow. “Show me.”
With a short sigh, Rob pushed aside Edwin’s control of his own limbs and pre-empted them himself. He walked Edwin like a marionette to his office chair and dropped him into it before releasing him.
For a long moment Edwin stared down at his own arms and legs. “So I didn’t really beat you arm wrestling, huh? Wow, that was weird. I didn’t like it.”
“Shall I make you forget it?”
“No … ! Can you really do that?”
“I can. I don’t have to trust you, Edwin. Everything we did or said today is written on sand. I don’t have to take any risks. I could wipe today
right out of your brain, like erasing a videotape. And more—I could dig deeper, pull your neurons a handful at a time, drive you to idiocy or perversion or screaming madness. You see what I mean, about an imbalance of power.”
“God help you, it must be unbearable. Rob, you poor fellow!” He jumped up and clapped Rob on the shoulders with both hands.
This close, face to face, eye to eye—touching—it was almost impossible not to read his mind. But Rob held back. I have to trust a little, he told himself. Besides, his face is as open as a book. Only sympathy there, not a trace of fear for his own safety. He trusts me, even though I could destroy him with a gesture. Of themselves the words came out: “Ed, help me. What shall I do?”
“Oh boy. That’s a tough one. I’m going to have to think hard about it. But we’ll come up with something, don’t you worry.”
“Nothing invasive, okay?”
Edwin laughed. “You don’t fit under an electron microscope, so you’re safe from me! But seriously, I won’t say or do anything without your full consent. Cross my heart.”
“Good, I’m glad.” Suddenly Rob was exhausted. Too much emotional turmoil, too much contact. A step at a time is easier, the hairstylist had said, and
that applied to more than haircuts. “Ed, I have to go. I’ll come back, okay?”
“Make it soon. Phone me. Hey, but where are you going? Are you staying anywhere?”
“I’m homeless, remember? But I’ll be fine.” Rob turned and went quickly out through the connecting rooms, shutting the office door behind him.
Acres of green space surround the NIH buildings. Rob curled up in his coat in a thicket behind a parking garage, and slept for twenty-four hours straight. When he woke it was raining, a cold steady drip from thick, flat gray clouds like carpet padding stretched from east to west. A gloomy day for a gloomy situation. Tramping down Wisconsin Avenue, Rob thought about his own foolhardiness yesterday. He knew zero about Ed Barbarossa. The fellow could be calling a press conference right now, or notifying the CIA.
The picture made his empty stomach jump. Something had to be done.
It was about three in the afternoon. He turned in at the Pizza Hut on Wisconsin and ate a very early dinner, or a very late lunch. But a fast-food joint with its Muzak and bustle was too noisy for what Rob had in mind. He looked in the phone book, but the Bethesda library was already closed for the day. Annoyed, he continued on down the street. A cold
trickle of wet went down his collar and onto his shoulder blade, and his sopping jeans flapped annoyingly around each ankle. I need quiet, he thought. And to get out of the rain, of course.
Now there was a possibility, across the street: a fur salon. Rob jaywalked across the avenue, adjusting his tarnhelm trick, and pushed through the heavy glass revolving doors under the green awning. Inside, squelching across the deep plush carpet past racks of fur coats, he found a long sofa in a large mirrored dressing lounge at the back—the sort of area laid out for husbands and sugar daddies to relax in while their women shopped. An elegant sales clerk strolled by without looking at him. Rob sat down, dripping onto the upholstery.
For months now he had deliberately kept his weirdness on the surface—no thought, no analyses, just using it. It had grown to be almost mechanical, pushing buttons and turning dials in people’s heads. But Rob remembered clearly now that it had been different at the beginning. The power had been far more deeply real then, with an entirely more organic flavor, images of gardens and growth. He particularly recalled an episode with crystals.
Suppose now he searched out Edwin’s crystal? It would be a way of checking him out at one remove, metaphorically, without actually rooting through his head. He leaned back on the luxurious sofa cushions.
It was different, of course. So far he had never come to the same inner landscape twice. What’s the rule that governs what it looks like? Rob wondered. Is it sunspot activity, or the Dow Jones Industrial Index, or
just my own emotional weather? This time it was very different indeed: a broad featureless plain at twilight, shrouded in blowing mist. A fitful wind blew without ever blowing the fog away. Rob could scarcely see three yards ahead through the skeins of gray and yellow. This is no better than Bethesda in the rain, Rob thought as he walked along. And it would help if I knew where I was going or what I was looking for.
Nevertheless he kept walking, stumbling every now and then on rocks or unevennesses of ground hidden by the fog. There didn’t seem to be any road, and the weather hid any stars or moon. Boring, Rob decided. Not fun. Didn’t it used to be scary, but a little fun too?
Suddenly through a clearing in the mist he saw something. It looked like a fence post. For lack of a better destination he walked towards it. As he got closer it looked more like a milestone, or an oddly proportioned grave marker. Finally he stood right in front of it. It was a midget Washington Monument, an obelisk about eight feet high.
Was it made of stone? He touched it, just a casual brush of the fingertips, and instantly letters appeared on one side. They were carved deeply into the stone, as both eyes and fingers told him, but he was certain they hadn’t been there a second ago. “This is really bizarre,” R
ob said aloud.
It came to him that this was a foreign object, quite alien to his inner landscape. Someone had put it here. To tell him something? “Well, it’s a bust if I can’t read the writing.” The letters weren’t alphabet, but half a
dozen wedgy and angular shapes like cuneiform.
Maybe he could look up the word at the library. Anyway it was an occasion, the very first communication of any sort he’d received here in the realm of his power. Impulsively Rob felt in his pocket for the notebook and, with mild astonishment, pulled it out. Well, if his clothes and shoes came along on these journeys, why not the notebook too? He sat down cross-legged on the gritty bare ground and set about copying the inscription.
When he was done he had another thought. With his palms he brushed away the sand beneath his knees. Underneath was stone, big blocks laid without mortar. This was no natural plain, it was a pavement. But there was nothing else, no inscription or painting or anything. He stood up and dusted off the ragged seat of his jeans, stuffing the notebook back into his shirt pocket. It was very quiet and cold here in the half-dark, and Rob felt a twinge of doubt. Could he find his way back? It had never been a problem before, but then it had never been so gloomy and joyless here before either. Had he gotten to the right place? When he came here with an end in view, a way would turn up to achieve it. The inner travels were always indirect and dreamily odd, but never random.
He pushed tentatively at his environment, and it gave way like paper. This is nothing but a stage set, Rob thought. A detour into a dead end. As the reality came roaring in, he knew this was where he had been going.
Rob found himself on a rocky sea shore. White-tipped breakers pounded
against wet brown rocks, as picturesque as a travelogue. He picked his way down the slope to the water. The wind smelled of salt and the sea, reminding him of very early in the morning in Pacific Grove when he was a boy. The sun was still behind the hill, but farther out the ocean danced with light, sapphire with purple shadows in the hollows of the waves.
How Like A God Page 11
