by J. G. Sandom
Lulu slipped off the windowsill. “’Sup?” she replied.
He was a young black man, barely in his twenties, wearing a lab coat that seemed far too big for his build. He stared down at the package. “You Chin Loo?”
Lulu laughed. “Xin Liu. Yep. That’s me.”
The young man walked over and slipped the package onto the counter beside her.
“Sign here,” he said, pulling out a clunky brown PDA.
She did as she was told. “That it?”
The young man looked puzzled. “What d’you mean? What else?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just this package? I thought...Never mind.”
He slipped the PDA back into his coat pocket. “Y’all have a nice day,” he said, moving off.
Lulu waited for the young man to disappear before she picked up the package.
“What the hell?” Decker said. “I thought we were busted.”
“Me too,” Lulu said with a grin. She began to tear at the paper. “But I have a hunch we’re about to find out why Mr. X sent us here.” Inside the wrapping was a large bundle of bubble wrap. Lulu tore it open with some effort and a pair of goggles slipped out. There was a note at the heart of the package. “Look familiar?” she said, pointing down at the goggles.
They did, Decker realized. They looked just like the VR goggles they had spotted in Zimmerman’s house and in Braun’s cabin—with dark wraparound lenses and an odd circuit board over the nose section. Two thin electrical cords dangled down from both arms leading to a pair of earbuds. Lulu plucked out the note. She read it and began to look around the lab.
“What is it? What’s it say?” Decker asked.
“We need to connect them somehow. Hold on.” She spotted an electrical transom at the far end of the lab. A similar pair of goggles lay on a table nearby. She examined the console and flipped a couple of switches. “Bluetooth or WiFi, I guess,” she suggested, handing the VR goggles to Decker. “He said you were the one to jack in.”
“Me? Why me? You’re more of an expert on these sorts of things. Clearly.”
Lulu shook her head. “Read it yourself. It says you.”
Decker took the note from her hand. That’s what it said, alright. He watched as Lulu flipped on a switch, powering up the controls.
“Are you ready?” She held out the goggles.
Decker put the note back on the counter and stared at the goggles. “I’m not so sure about this.”
Lulu sighed. “What is it now? They’re just VR glasses.”
“Are you sure that they’re safe?”
“Nope.”
“That helps.”
“Look, I’m not going to kid you. But what choice do we have? And why would Mr. X tell you to put them on if they’re dangerous. He’s been nothing but helpful so far. If he’d wanted to hurt us, he could have done so already. It’s up to you, John.”
Decker took the goggles from Lulu. He looked down at the lenses, at the flat circuit board over the nose bridge. A whole series of contacts was arrayed along the arms of the glasses, near the temples, as if to send electrical signals directly into the brain. Two earbuds hung down from the arms. “I just don’t feel very comfortable doing this.”
“Then, don’t do it.”
“You saw Braun. He wasn’t all there. What if whatever happened to him was a result of wearing these glasses?” He shook his head. “I know that when you die in your dreams, it doesn’t mean you die in real life. Obviously. What I mean is, I’ve died in my dreams hundreds of time. I’ve fallen from skyscrapers, been shot. I’ve even been blown up a few times. Yet I’m still here. Like Groundhog Day. You may not die in real life when you die virtually but you may do some real and permanent damage to your brain. Frankly, you may wish you were dead.”
“Then, don’t do it, for crying out loud. If that’s what you’re afraid of, don’t—”
“It’s not.”
Lulu didn’t respond. She simply stood there and waited.
“That’s not what I’m afraid of,” Decker continued. “It should be, but it isn’t. You were right...what you said before. I do have PTSD. From my car accident when I was a boy. And because of other events, from the job. You know. Bad things.”
“And?”
“And Doctor Foster, the shrink at the Center where I work...where I worked, he used to prescribe VR simulations to help me get over them. At least, that’s what he said they would do. Help me. He said that if I lived through them again, I’d be able to make them less scary so I could handle them better.”
“Did it work?”
“Sort of, I guess. They use the same thing for soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Simulations of driving along some dirt road in a Humvee. An IED going off. Some even have sensory simulators: the ground shakes and they emit smells like smoke and burning rubber and...Well, you know.”
“Are you going to put them on or not? I don’t know about you, John, but I want to go home. I’m tired of being chased and attacked and blown up. I’m fussy that way.”
Decker sighed. He looked down at the goggles in his hand. “Me too,” he said. He put the earbuds into his ears, slipped the goggles over his head, and the whole world went dark.
CHAPTER 42
Friday, December 13
As his vision cleared, as the landscape fell into focus, Decker found himself in a traditional-looking, Southwestern American suburb, with row upon row of neat little white houses, each with its own patch of grass, its own driveway and two-car garage. They unwound in a fractal suburbia, forever unfolding, forever unfolding, forever unfolding. For a moment, he felt dizzy. For a moment, the world started to spin. Decker reached out for support from a mailbox nearby, black with white stenciled numbers, nearby, but his hand missed. It was still a few feet away. He closed his eyes for a moment and the world seemed to settle. He opened them again when someone shouted his name.
“John. John, over here!”
Decker turned. The houses went on to the distant horizon, each almost identical to the one right beside it. It was Christmas, he noticed. Many of the homes featured Christmas decorations: faux-snow-covered trees lit with tiny red lights; reindeer and snowmen; and Santas, some resplendent in full-blown regalia, decked out in fur, felt and filigree.
“John. Over here. John!” The voice was insistent. He knew that voice. Mr. X?
Decker spun about. There. It was coming from just past that hedge, right there, between those two houses. He moved closer when the voice said, “That’s far enough.”
“Who is that? Mr. X, is that you?”
“Welcome home, John.”
“What?” As Decker took another step closer, he sensed more than heard the figure start to slither away. “What are you talking about? Wait, come back! I won’t hurt you.”
The man on the far side of the hedge seemed to laugh. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”
Decker turned and looked back at the street—when he realized he was no longer anywhere near the street. The street was a good hundred yards distant, and he was now poised on the edge of a playground chock-full of colorful see-saws and slides, monkey bars and plastic tubes of all sizes, in impossible shapes and contortions, twisting back and forth, slipping in and out of themselves in vexing regurgitations, like an Escher drawing gone mad. Once more, Decker felt dizzy. He closed his eyes. The playground was empty, devoid of all life.
Not a fly, not a bee, not a single black desert wasp.
Not a sparrow nor starling.
No infants. No toddlers.
Not a soul.
“You were right, John. Ali Hammel’s Jihadist cell is not who’s behind this. Never was. And not the Koreans.”
Decker spun about and the hedge lined the playground again. It was just out of reach, on the far side of that sandpit. He could see the dark shape of a man obscured by red leaves. They were impossibly lurid, like buckshot of blood.
“Who is it then?” Decker asked. He sat on the edge of a roundabout—a huge
spinning wheel. He pushed himself forward and felt his whole body pitch to the side. Although he was spinning quite leisurely, the world whirled at breakneck speed, a veritable blur. He dragged his right foot on the ground and the suburb fell back into focus. “Is it our guys? NSA? Is it Riptide, some private enterprise group?”
“I can’t say.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
“I told you. Uncover the real cause of Matt Zimmerman’s death.”
Decker could feel himself losing his temper. The sun in the sky seemed to blacken as the blood bubbled up in his chest, into his neck and his temples. It pulsed and it pounded. It pounded and beat.
Decker leapt up from the wheel and made a dash toward the hedge. It seemed to take him forever to make his way through the sandpit. It was as wide and unwelcome as the desert from Morocco to Egypt, the entire caravan route of the Tuareg as they carried the first zero by camel from India to Spain. The sand turned to molasses, to honey, sucking him in. Like quicksand. By the time he reached the far side, the man in the shadows had slithered away.
“Come back,” Decker said. “Come back. Mr. X. Mr. X! Oh, for crying out loud, what are you so fucking afraid of? Come and face me, you bastard. Who are you?”
“It’s too dangerous, John, to even utter his name, or to explain any further...”
Decker saw the man’s hand appear through a hole in the hedge. The index finger extended, pointing to a house at the end of the street. A saguaro grew just off to the side, swathed in gaudy Mexican blankets, dressed up like a Mexican elf. A trellis of sweet olive lined the walkway, leading to an impossibly periwinkle front door.
“What’s that?” Decker asked. “Is that where he lives?”
The finger withdrew behind leaves. One minute the shadow was there, only a few yards away. The next, it was gone.
Decker looked back at the house. It appeared just like every other stucco house on the block, except slightly elevated, perhaps. And it featured that large saguaro in front, with the tacky Mexican blanket like a matador’s cape draped across one of its arms, and that giant sombrero. How had he missed that sombrero before? It was huge, a good two yards across. The sweet olive was gone too. The trellis was now glowing with tiny wild roses, bright crimson and pink. And the front door was green, like the submarine green hugging Ancient Greek amphorae, full of darker green olive oil, oregano-flavored, in the moody maritime depths of Aegean emerald coves.
Decker found himself at the front door. The door knob was already in his hand. He took a step back and knocked on the door. The echo marked pace with his heart. It pounded and beat. It pounded and beat. He found himself staring, fish-eyed at the doorknob, watched it spin. Slowly. Slowly. Right there, to the right!
Decker stepped backward, almost slipping right off the edge of the stoop. His head felt wooly and stiff, like petrified beer foam, as if he’d been drugged.
“John?” said the woman who opened the door. She looked vaguely familiar, he thought. Wearing a dark blue bandana, a hoody and a pink Playtex glove on one hand, she wiped her brow with the other and blew a lock of wispy blond hair away from her face. “What are you doing here? I’m in the middle of cleaning.”
“Do I know you?” he asked her. “I’m sorry. What’s your name?”
“Very funny. Is this some kind of a joke?”
“Mrs...”
“Really.” The woman was no longer amused. “What the hell, John? Fleming. Mary-Lou Fleming. What’s going on? Are you sick?”
Her name sounded familiar but Decker couldn’t quite place it. “Mary-Lou,” he repeated. It sounded like someone he had dated in high school.
Out of nowhere, a terror both mouth-drying and palpable settled upon him, encasing his shoulders like the cold leathery wings of some giant vampire bat, a roll of Saran-Wrap-thin human skin.
Decker looked up at the sky. The woman in the doorway issued a throat-tightening scream and slammed the door shut.
Somewhere, it thundered. There. And again.
The sun went out like a light bulb. The wind blew a troika of dead leaves in his face. They danced on his shoulders and skittered away. A bone-jangling cold crept down his bare backbone, one vertebra at a time, finally coming to rest in the nest of his hip bones, like a giant white catfish, alone, in that hole, at the bottom of the black sack of the universe.
Decker ran from the house. He didn’t know why or to where he was running. He just ran. He didn’t much care. He simply had to get out of there.
But the farther he ran, the more omnipresent the feeling of dread, the unvarnished bone-gnashing horror of it, like a life-sucking portent of nihilism, a polyp of pain.
A new person entered the world. Decker could not shake the feeling of his powerful presence, like grime on the skin, like fish scales—rogue dried and translucent as moons—found stuck to his forearm hours after gutting those bass on that rock by the sea.
He was a good-looking young blond man in a white tennis sweater with broad shoulders and muscular legs. He wore white shorts and white tennis sneakers. All regulation white. Like a nurse, almost, in starched linens. Fastidious. Self-observed.
Decker found himself breathing hard at the end of a cul-de-sac. Blind alley. No exit. He found himself doubled-over, as if he hadn’t run in a decade and he’d just finished a 15K dash. As if he were old, last-legged, and his skin was all wrinkles, and his lungs had the capacity of a pair of used condoms on Jupiter, and all that he was was simply melting away, pouring down like a putting-hole blob of hot mercury through the center of everything.
“Why do you run from me?” said the man with blue eyes and blond hair. No, it turned out, he wasn’t wearing a sweater. It was thrown across his shoulders and neck, the sleeves bound together in a loose knot at the chest. He was wearing a white Lacoste polo shirt with a pair of tiny gold Klieg lights criss-crossed on his breast instead of a crocodile. He was smiling and handsome and as aerodynamically modeled as the fin of a shark.
Decker felt the air rush back through his lungs. He straightened, lifted up. “Who are you?” he said. “Why are you following me? What do you want from me?”
“I want you to stop worrying, John. I want you to stop killing yourself.”
Decker puffed himself up, trying to look more imposing. “Or you’ll do it for me, I suppose.” He stared back at the laughing blue eyes. They were the kind of eyes you’d expect to find on a Santa Claus at your local department store before Christmas, or in the burnished brown face of some ninth century Viking raider from Iceland.
It was so hard to focus. No matter what Decker did, everything seemed to fall in and out. He took a deep breath. In and out.
“Haven’t you earned a vacation, a respite? After all that you’ve done for the world, John, don’t you deserve some time off? And money? All that you’ve sacrificed and what’s been your reward? The loss of all that you love. Just leave things alone and you’ll be a lot richer for it. Forty million dollars richer, in fact. How’s that? The number of deprivation and sacrifice. How many days have you wandered the wilderness?”
“Forty million dollars?” said Decker. “You mean like Second Life Linden dollars? Monopoly money?”
“Dollars or Euros. Whatever you please. When you leave the Arcade, check your bank balance. You’re now forty million dollars richer.”
“Oh, is that how it works? You just pay people and they do whatever you want? Why don’t you show yourself? Go ahead. Why do you have to hide in this funhouse? Can’t you handle the R in VR? Is it simply too much for you?” He took a step closer and the blond man reared back on his heels. He seemed to ascend, higher and higher, more stretching that standing. Like rubber, he grew giraffe tall.
In contrast, Decker recoiled. He ducked back, he sidestepped, trying to control his overriding desire to get the hell out of there as fast as his little legs could possibly carry him. He turned, only to find himself facing his parents—both of them, right there, in the flesh.
They were wearing the same clothes th
ey had worn the day of his track meet, the day they had died in the car accident. His father, his light gray serge suit, with the gray pencil stripe. And his mother, her charcoal jacket and black skirt, and her best leather pumps. They were smiling at him, looking up with broad grins on their faces, as if he’d just run up to them with a blue ribbon fluttering right there in his hand, flushed with victory.
“Look,” he found himself saying, glancing down at his hand. There it was. The blue ribbon. It was actually there. Right there in his fingers!
“Congratulations,” said his father. “We’re so proud of you, son. But not if you don’t stop this tomfoolery.”
“What?”
“You know,” said his mother. She brushed his hair back from his face. “All this rushing about, digging up things best left alone”
Decker wiggled away with a sigh. “No, I don’t know. I don’t know who or what you are.”
His mother looked stunned. “You don’t know us? Your own flesh and blood.”
“There’s nothing flesh and blood about any of this,” Decker said. He turned back toward the blond man. “None of this is real. Not even you.”
“I’m offended,” he said.
For a moment, the street opened up, and Decker found himself sliding down a decline on his knees, into scalding hot pitch bubbling upward like magma. It was as if he were trapped on La Palma in the Canary Islands again, as tectonic forces ripped the island apart, as volcanos heaved and pitched toward the sky...until there was nothing but silence.
Now, he stood at the foot of a long, sloping hill, covered in wild flowers and grasses and grain. Butterflies filled the air. Blue, purple and gold. Teal, cyan and cinnamon. They bobbled and bubbled and bounced all around him. In the distance, at the top of the hill, was a small grove of trees, a Druid cluster of oaks swathed in mistletoe. She was standing at the base of a tree. She was holding a songbird, some kind of bright, jewel-like shimmering thing.
Emily!
Decker took off his smoking jacket, swung it over his left shoulder, and climbed up the hill, slowly, languorously, drinking in every second. Emily was standing in a white, almost translucent slip, with straps thin as mermaid hair, with a shine hovering over the silken material as lustrous as pearls. “Emily,” Decker said, as he came up behind her.
