The Divide

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He watched as the automobile faded into the night traffic, southbound on Church, all the while thinking to himself: What was that? Jesus Christ almighty!—what was that?

  * * *

  John Shaw stopped off at the apartment to pack a change of clothes and leave a note.

  Within ten minutes he had folded every useful item into two denim shoulderbags, including the bulk of the money he had withdrawn from his private accounts. The note to Amelie was more difficult.

  He hesitated over pen and paper, thinking about the man who had sold him the Corvette.

  He wasn’t proud of what he’d done. It was a skill he had mastered a long time ago, a finely honed vocabulary of body and voice. With the right gestures and the necessary words, he could intimidate almost anyone—play the primate chords of fear, anger, love, or distaste, and do so at will. For a time, when his contempt for humanity had reached its zenith, he did it often. It was a means to an end, as irrelevant to ethical considerations as the shearing of a sheep.

  Or so he had thought.

  That time had passed; but he was pleased by the outcome of the little experiment he had just performed on Tony Morriseau. Old skills intact. So much had been lost, obscured by unconsciousness. But maybe not permanently.

  He had been asleep. Now he was awake.

  He wrote:

  Must leave. Try to understand.

  He wondered how much more he ought to say. He could summon up Benjamin long enough to compose a more serious message. Could even play at being Benjamin without invoking the real, or potent, Benjamin. But he was reluctant to do that now … it was a mistake he had made too often before.

  He debated signing Benjamin’s name, then decided it would be more honest, and possibly kinder, not to. In the end he simply hung the note (two sentences, five words) on the kitchen cupboard.

  Hurrying to escape these small, crowded rooms.

  * * *

  The Corvette protested only a little when he nosed it onto the expressway and into the light midnight traffic northbound out of the city. He had been awake for two days now and some of the old clarity had come back to him. He was able to read the condition of the Corvette’s engine through the grammar of its purrs and hesitations, and his sense was that the vehicle was old but basically sound. Something catastrophic might happen, a crack in the engine block or an embolism in an oil line; but the pistons were turning over neatly, the gears meshed, the brakes were clean. With any luck, the car would get him where he was going.

  The rain that had hovered over the province for the last two weeks had finally drifted off eastward. It was a clear, cold night. Between the glaring road-lights—growing sparse out here in farm territory—he was able to see a scatter of stars. He had always liked looking at the stars and sometimes felt a special connection with them, in their isolation in the dark sky. It was the kinship he felt for all lost, strange, and distant things.

  The road arrowed up a long incline, an ancient glacial moraine, and suddenly the stars were right in front of him. Impulsively, he edged the Corvette’s gas pedal down. It was long past midnight and nothing was moving here but a heavily freighted lumber truck. He took the Corvette past it in an eyeblink. A brief taste of diesel through the cracked wing window, then onward. He watched the speedometer creep up. At eighty-five mph the Corvette was showing some of its age and neglect. He read a whiff of hot metal and oil, the spark plugs burning themselves clean.

  He liked this—the farms and empty autumn fields blurring behind him; the sense of motion. But more than that. It was a private pleasure, uniquely his own. His reflexes and his sense of timing seldom came up against their inherent limits; it was exhilarating to push that envelope a little. He was very far from those limits even now—the speedometer still inching upward—but he was attentive, focused, and energized. Every shiver of the chassis or tremor of the road became significant information, raw data flooding him. He came up fast on a sixteen-wheel Mayflower truck and passed it, left the trucker’s horn screaming impotently down a corridor of cold night air.

  This was a world only he was fit to inhabit, he thought, this landscape of speed and reflex. For anyone else it would be next door to death. For John it was a sunny meadowland through which his thoughts ran in a cool, rapid cascade.

  There was a shimmy now from the rear end of the Corvette.

  And he would have to slow down soon in any case, or risk running some radar trap or pushing the engine past its tolerances. In any case, it was time to fill the gas tank. But he allowed himself one moment more. This fine intoxication.

  He was beginning to ease back on the gas pedal when the Corvette fishtailed coming around a slow curve.

  He was on top of it instantly, manhandling the wheel, feeling the sudden change from vehicular momentum to deadly inertia. There was a long spin on the cool night pavement, tire treads fraying and screaming as the rear end wheeled around and the car tottered, wanting to turn over. John held onto the steering wheel, focused into this long moment … working with the car’s huge momentum, tugging it back from the brink, correcting and correcting again as the tires etched long V’s and Ws on the dark pavement.

  He had the Corvette under control within microseconds. A moment later it was motionless on the shoulder of the road.

  Sudden silence and the ticking of the hot engine. Wind in a dark October marsh off to the right of him.

  A shiver of relief ran up his spine.

  He looked at his hand. It was shaking.

  He opened the glove compartment, tugged out the Ziploc bag, rolled an amphetamine cap into his mouth.

  He dry-swallowed the pill and angled the car slowly back onto the highway, carefully thinking now about nothing at all.

  * * *

  Fundamentally, it was a question of past and future.

  He took the first car ferry of the morning across Georgian Bay to the northern shore of Lake Superior. The North Shore was a stark landscape of pine and rock and the brittle blue Superior horizon. Gas station towns, souvenir stands, Indian reservations; black bear and deer in the outback. During the last world war, captive German military officers had been assigned logging duty in this wilderness. There were places, John understood, where their K-ration tins lay rusting under the pine needles and the washboard lumber roads. In summer the highway would have been crowded with tourists; but it was late in the year now and the campgrounds were vacant and unsupervised. He drove all day through the cold, transparent air; after nightfall he turned down a dirt track road to an empty campsite near the lakeshore. He zipped up his insulated windbreaker and stoked a kindling fire in one of the brick-lined barbecue pits; When he had achieved a satisfactory blaze he added on windfall until the fire was roaring and crackling. Then he settled back to rising sparks and stars and the lonely sound of Lake Superior washing at the shore. The fire warmed his hands and face; his back was cold. He heated a can of soup until the steam rose up in the wintery air.

  When the meal was finished, he sat in the car with the passenger door opened toward the fire, thinking about the past and the future.

  The past was simple. He contained it. He contained it in a way no other human being could contain it, as a body of mnemonic experience he could call up at will—his life like an open book.

  Excepting the chaos of his earliest infancy, there was not a day of his life that John could not instantly evoke. He had divided his life into three fundamental episodes—his time with Dr. Kyriakides, his time with the Woodwards, his time as an adult. Four, if you counted the recent re-emergence of Benjamin as a new and distinct epoch. And each category was a vast book of days, of autumns and winters and summers and springs, each welling from its own past and arrowing toward its own future with a logic that had always seemed incontrovertible.

  Until now. For most of his life he had been running toward the future as if it contained some sort of salvation. In the last few years, mysteriously, that had changed. The future, he thought, was a promise that might not be kept. Now he was running �
�� not quite aimlessly, because he had a destination in mind; not toward the past, precisely; but toward a place where his life had taken a certain turn. A fork in the road. Maybe it would be possible to retrace his steps, turn the other way; this time, maybe, toward a genuine future, an authentic light.

  He recognized the strong element of rationalization in this. Self-deception was a vice he had never permitted himself. But there comes a time when your back is to the wall. So you follow an instinct. You do what you have to.

  A sudden, bitter wind came off the lake. The fire was dying. He banked the embers and then shut himself into the car, blinking at the darkness and afraid to sleep. He looked longingly at the glove compartment, picturing the bag of pills there. But he had to pace himself. He felt the fatigue poisons running through his body. No choice now but to sleep.

  Anyway—he would need the pills more, later.

  He watched the stars until the windows clouded with the vapor of his breath. Finally, with an almost violent suddenness, he slept.

  * * *

  He drove west into the broad prairie land.

  Coming through Manitoba he ran into a frontal system, rain and wet snow that sidelined the Corvette in a little town called Atelier while the Dominion Service Station and Garage replaced the original tires with fresh snow-treads. John checked into a motel called The Traveller and picked up some books at the local thrift shop.

  Entertainment reading for the post-human: a science-fiction novel;The Magic Mountain (the only Mann he’d never looked into); a paperback bestseller. Also a battered Penguin edition of Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John—the joke, of course, was on himself.

  He had read the Stapledon many times before. It was a classic of English eccentric writing of the thirties, the story of a mutant supergenius born to ordinary humanity. During his adolescence John had adopted the book as a kind of bible. The story was fuzzy-minded, uneven, sometimes silly in its literal-mindedness; but he felt a resonance with Odd John’s sense of “spiritual contamination” by mankind, his “passion of loneliness.” The John of the book sought out others of his kind!—telepaths and mutants—and founded a Utopian colony which the Great Powers ultimately destroyed. Two unlikely assumptions there, John thought: that there were others of his kind, and that such people would constitute a perceptible threat to anyone.

  But the biggest mistake Stapledon had made, John thought, was his character’s self-sufficiency. Stapledon compared his Odd John to a human being among apes. But a human being raised by apes isn’t a superior ape. In all the qualities that matter to apes, he’s not much of an ape at all. And if he feels contemptuous of the apes, it’s only the automatic contempt of the rejected outsider.

  Still—in this desolate prairie town—some of that contempt came welling up.

  After dinner he went walking along the narrow main street of Atelier where the Trans-Canada passed through. Atelier was a grain town; its landmarks were a railway depot, a Chinese restaurant, and a five and dime. Nobody much was out in the weather except for a few sullen leather-jacketed teens occupying the Pizza Patio. He pressed through the sleet beyond the local mall and discovered signs of life at a tiny sports arena. An illuminated Port-A-Sign announced:

  REV HARMON BELWEATHER REVIVAL TONIGHT 9.00 MIRACLES! HEALING!

  John gazed awhile at the sign; then—curious, sad, and entirely alone—he joined the small crowd in the overheated lobby, indoors and away from the rain.

  * * *

  The auditorium was three-quarters full when the ushers closed the doors.

  It was an elderly crowd, with a few earnest young couples scattered around the arena. He counted several wheelchairs, a great many crutches. A woman in a gingham skirt moved down the aisles, stopping here and there to exchange a few words with the audience. She paused at the row in front of John and chatted with a hugely overweight man about his gall bladder troubles. She caught John’s glance and moved toward him; when he did not look away she asked, “Are you here for healing?”

  He shook his head in the negative.

  “Are you sure? You look like a man with a need.”

  He gave her a long, focused look. The woman in the gingham dress tugged at her earlobe, stared a moment longer, then shrugged uneasily and moved away.

  The audience hushed as the lights dimmed. A local choir performed a hymn, and then Reverend Belweather took the stage. He was a squat, compactly fat man in a sincere Republican suit. His hair was cut to Marine length; he wore rings on his fingers. He began in a low-key fashion, whispering into the hand mike—you had to strain forward to hear him—but he was good, John thought. He read the crowd well and he was good with his body, with his aggressive strut and upraised palm. He preached to the crowd for forty minutes under the fierce klieg lights, rising to thunderous crescendos of damnation and salvation, the sweat rivering off the slope of his forehead. John closed his eyes and felt the crowd around him as a single, physical thing—an animal, aroused to some terrible confusion of eroticism and fear. The human odor was as physical as heat in the confined space of the auditorium and it beat against him like a pulse. I pity them, John thought. And I hate myself for my pity. And I hate them for provoking it.

  Wishing, at the same time, that he could be a part of it. He understood the profound comfort here. To be not alone. But he could not wholly grasp the beatitude beneath this stink of human sweat. He had read too much history. It smelled like Torquemada and his chambers; it smelled like Belsen and the killing fields of Cambodia.

  The healing came last. Reverend Belweather called up the afflicted by name or disorder. “God informs me there’s a Michael among us … Michael with a gall bladder!” And the fat man in the forward aisle stood up and ambled toward the stage, shocked into obedience.

  Obscure in the shadows, John followed him down.

  An experiment.

  He stood in this cluster of diseased, dying, and broken individuals and felt a second wave of paralyzing contempt. Contempt for their sheeplike vulnerability; contempt for the man who was shearing them. I hate them, he thought, for cooperating in this … for their stupidity, he thought; because I cannot forgive them for it.

  The healing act itself was anticlimactic, a tepid discharge of the tensions that filled the auditorium. A hand on the forehead, the hot breath of blessing, the command to shed those crutches and walk—at least as far as the wings, where the Reverend Belweather’s muscular stage crew redistributed the crutches and wheelchairs as needed. The woman in the gingham dress lingered there, also.

  John edged his way to the stage.

  Reverend Belweather regarded him with a certain amount of suspicion—this odd bird among the flock—and said, “Quickly, son, what exactly is your ailment?”

  “I have a headache,” John said.

  Reverend Belweather turned his eyes toward heaven, as much exasperation as prayer in the look. “Dear God,” he said to the microphone, “we join together in begging an end to this young man’s discomfort.” And the hand on the head.

  Reverend Belweather’s hand was fleshy and moist. John imagined something pale and unwholesome, a dead thing touching him.

  He concentrated for a moment. He could not say why this impulse had overtaken him. Some marriage of cruelty and distaste. One more experiment; there had been many before. But there was no restraining it.

  Reverend Belweather yanked his hand away from John’s head as he felt the skin writhing there.

  Spontaneous scars and wounds that appear in a religious trance are called “stigmata.” The phenomenon occurs in faiths from Catholicism to Voodoo; an interaction between mind and body triggered by religious ecstasy.

  John was able to do it at will.

  Reverend Belweather stared with honor at the cross of raised, feverish skin that had formed on John’s forehead.

  He managed, “Who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” John said. “What matters is that your wife has a radio transmitter built into her hearing aid and that you’re using it to defraud
these people. You’re in violation of three federal statutes and you’re committing a sin. You should cancel tomorrow’s performance.”

  Reverend Belweather staggered back as if the floor had shifted under his feet. He looked for his stage crew—the big men in the wings. They had already sensed a ripple in the flow and moved forward. “Get him the fuck out of here,” the Reverend Harmon Belweather said, his voice suddenly shrill and petulant. “Just get him the fuck out—now!” But he had clutched the hand-mike to his chest in an involuntary spasm of panic, and the words rang and echoed through the big Tannoy P.A. speakers like an invocation, or a failed and panicky exorcism.

  It had been, of course, a stupid and dangerous thing to do. John turned and merged into the crowd of the crippled and the ill as the Reverend Belweather’s henchmen advanced. They were large but slow and they hadn’t had a good look at him; he was out a Tear door and into the cold rain before they realized he was gone.

  * * *

  He arrived back at the motel wet, cold, and rank with amphetamine sweat, but the girl behind the desk smiled at him as he passed; and the smile provoked an old response. He stopped and turned to face her. Eighteen or maybe nineteen years old, broad bones, an aggressive blur of lipstick. And that smile. She returned his look. “318, right?”

  His room number. He nodded. “You were here when I checked in.”

  “Right, that’s right. I’m on till midnight. Shift’s just about up.”

  He watched her eyes and her lips. The smile was tentative but provocative, an offer half made. He surmised that she had allowed guests to come on to her in the past and that she had mixed feelings about it, guilt colored with arousal; that she liked him because he looked a little dangerous coming in hollow-eyed from the rain; that she was scared of him, too, a little.

  The possibility was tantalizing. She was a sheep, a goat, an ape, a human animal—but I’m human too, he thought, from the neck down. She shouldn’t have provoked him with that smile. Nobody ever smiled at him. The rain and the tension had disguised some obvious clue to his nature:she doesn’t recognize the devil. Horns and tail don’t show in this light. Reverend Belweather, I am a stronger persuader than you are.