Upstate New York
Thirty-four years previously
Boy knew Pop must be dead, of course. No one could survive that much damage. He’d lasted a few days, though. And after the screaming, after the threatening, the promising and the begging he’d suddenly gone quiet and not spoken one more word. He had just watched Boy silently. Boy didn’t care to look back. Their eyes had met a couple of times and Boy didn’t like what he’d seen there. Pain, fear, that was to be expected, but there was a gleam that looked a little bit too much like pride.
It had started with a headache again, but this time, it was different. He had been a passenger in his own body when he’d taken Pop to see the old mine. When he’d hit him with the rock. When he’d dragged him down into the tunnel. When he’d used a heavier rock to smash first one knee, then the other. The first knee, Pop had woken up fast, screamed then passed out. The second, he’d just lain there. It made an odd sound when that rock came down. It sounded like when Mom broke a handful of dry spaghetti before boiling it.
Boy had watched it all play out like a movie. As Pop had followed him up to the mine, Boy tried desperately to move his own limbs, run away. Nothing worked. The worst thing was, he knew who was in control now. He recognized him. It was his own fault. He had let it grow, given it its power. All these nights lying in bed, listening to Pop hit Mom, waiting for his turn for a beating, he had started to dream of hitting back, hurting Pop. Maybe even killing Pop. Mom had taught him right from wrong, sure enough, and even Huck Finn had a conscience, preventing him doing whatever he pleased with no regard for the consequences. Huck had never thought about killing anyone. But Boy had. And now that part of him was in charge and all he could do was watch. Watch and wait until he got control back.
Halfway home from the mine that first day, his body had stumbled, stopped and leaned against a tree, his head hanging, breathing fast. When he’d looked up, he was back in control. He’d sat down heavily on the forest floor, only just managing to lean to one side before throwing up. He’d sat there for two hours. Thought about calling 911. Maybe Pop could recover from what he’d just done to him. Then what? He’d report Boy—have him arrested? No. He’d kill him. Maybe torture him first. More likely, he’d take it out on Mom and make Boy watch.
Finally, he stood up, wiped dried vomit from the side of his mouth and went home. He said nothing to Mom. When Pop didn’t come home, even after the bars had closed, she just assumed he’d gone off again. It happened every few months. It was good and bad. It was good because Mom and Boy got to spend a few days and evenings together talking, reading—even laughing. It was bad because when Pop came home, he was worse than usual for a while. Last time he came back, he’d broken three of Boy’s fingers with a pair of pliers. One at a time, making Mom watch. Because “you two don’t look like you missed me any”. Mom had taped Boy’s fingers together with a popsicle stick. He’d told his teacher he’d been playing baseball and had messed up a catch. Mrs Breckland had looked at him questioningly that time—he had been limping the week before and she’d see him wincing when he moved around during class. She hadn’t asked him outright, though. Boy was more careful still after that. It wouldn’t be good if anyone ever found out. Not for Mom. Not for Boy. Not for Mrs. Breckland, maybe.
He was floating on his back. He could feel warm sunlight on his face. He had a straw in his mouth, sunglasses perched on his nose. His eyes were closed and he could hear the “beep beep beep” of a garbage truck reversing somewhere nearby. He was so relaxed, he didn’t want to open his eyes. He heard voices, but they seemed far away at first. Then they got closer and clearer. He recognized Mom’s voice. Her voice was small and shaky. The other voice was authoritative, calm. They were talking about him, about…
Boy bit down on the straw slowly. It moved slightly and he realized it went all the way down his throat. His instinct to gag kicked in and he fought it, keeping his breathing steady. He remembered the headache suddenly coming on in the classroom. The cop in the corridor had looked at him. Boy knew it was over. They must have found Pop.
He opened his eyes a tiny bit, then shut them again. Not sunglasses—a piece of tape across the bridge of his nose, securing a tube which went up his right nostril. The sunlight was a powerful lamp. The sound of the garbage truck was the machine next to his bed. He ached all over, felt terrible. And he needed a drink.
He tried to say Mom’s name, but nothing happened. His lips wouldn’t shape the words. He tried to open his eyes again. Nothing. He’d lost control again.
“- Didn’t tell us anything, really. But the biopsies from last week, combined with the blood work are conclusive, I’m afraid.”
Boy tried to speak again, but again he failed. How long had he been unconscious if they were talking about last week? He’d read through enough medical journals to know what a biopsy was.
“When can I take him home? And please, please, take that thing off of his wrist.”
Mom’s voice was so tired. Boy’s arms moved. He tried to stop them. It didn’t work. When his left arm had moved a few inches, it stopped suddenly. He felt metal on his wrist. He was handcuffed to the bed.
“I’m sorry, that’s a police matter. Once I’ve passed on my conclusions, I’m sure they’ll release him. But you need to prepare yourself for a rapid decline in your son’s condition. The cancer is too far advanced for us to operate.”
“What do you mean?” said Mom. Her voice rose a little. She stopped herself and Boy sensed she was looking over at him. Her voice dropped to a whisper again. “That’s my son. I want to know exactly what’s wrong with him and what can be done about it. Don’t sugar-coat it, I need to know what’s happening. I’m not going to get hysterical, you needn’t worry about me making a scene. Just give me the facts.”
The doctor sighed. He wasn’t the first man to underestimate Mom. Because she was quiet, pale, a little jumpy, nervous in company, people often made poor assumptions about her intelligence. She rarely put them right, but this young-sounding doctor was quickly recalibrating his treatment of her. Wisely, he decided to dial back the patronization a whole bunch.
“It’s brain cancer. The tumor is so large that trying to remove it would kill him. It’s grown even since he was admitted. Nothing we can do can stop it now. His condition is terminal.”
If he expected an outburst of grief or anger, he was disappointed. Mom’s voice was level and quiet.
“Will he wake up?”
“It’s highly unlikely. Theoretically, it’s possible, but at this stage, his body is using all its resources to fight the tumor.”
“How long?”
Boy heard a scrape as the doctor pushed his chair back and stood up. There was a rustle as he consulted the charts at the end of the bed.
“Don’t prevaricate, just tell me.”
The doctor coughed. He probably hadn’t expected ‘prevaricate’ to feature in Mom’s vocabulary. Boy sensed some more hasty recalibration going on.
“A few days. Possibly a week.”
The silence lasted about a minute. The doctor cracked first.
“It’s probably not my place—wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, but—,”
Another silence.
“Go on,” said Mom.
“Well, I - I’m beginning to specialize in brain surgery. I keep on top of all the latest research. The new computers at some of the bigger hospitals, they can show images of the brain in more detail. We are starting to understand which regions of the brain are used to control motor functions, which are associated with memory, which respond to optical or aural stimuli. Some of the work done has been tremendously exciting. In Austria, they’ve managed to—.”
He broke off again. “Sorry, I’m rambling,” he said. “It’s an exciting field.” He coughed again, nervously, remembering who he was talking to. “I stayed behind after a few of my shifts. Took a closer look at your son’s x-rays. The tumor is pushing at the medial prefrontal cortex and angular gyrus regions of his brain. No one can s
ay with complete confidence what that means, but it’s likely that empathy, accountability and morality are being affected.”
The scraping sound. He’d sat down again.
“What I’m saying is, I don’t think he could be held responsible for his actions. If the tumor was effectively ‘turning’ off significant areas of his brain, we could no more blame him for his actions than we could blame a bear for killing a salmon. The tumor did it. Not your son.”
Another long, long silence.
“Thank you,” said Mom. “And Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“There’s something else I need to ask you about. Is this hereditary? Have I—or my husband—passed this on to our child? Would it pass on if—,”
Boy heard no more. He realized he must have slept again. He woke at one point and heard Mom crying softly. Then her breathing deepened and she began to snore. He had no idea how much time passed after that, but when he became aware again, there was another voice in the room, a female voice.
“You pray, ma’am?”
“These days, yes. Yes, I do. Too little, too late, maybe.”
Boy knew Mom had been raised Catholic, he’d seen the Bible hidden in one of the cooking pots, but Pop ‘didn’t hold with that preachy crap’ so it was rarely discussed. She didn’t go to church, and when Boy had occasionally asked about religion, she’d said he would have to make his own mind up about it when he was older. She had grown up questioning many of the beliefs her parents had instilled in her, but she said she couldn’t dismiss faith entirely. Now, she’d brought a Bible into his hospital room. The doctors had given up; science had failed her son. Boy wasn’t surprised she was turning back to God. He’d never told her he’d jettisoned the idea of a deity years ago. Mom might be hoping for a spell in purgatory followed by eternity in heaven for him, but he was a hundred percent sure his consciousness would turn off like a lightbulb and that would be that.
“There’s always hope, ma’am, always. Hope, faith and charity. The power of Jesus to heal his children is a wondrous thing. A wondrous thing indeed. Amen.”
Boy found himself disliking the unknown woman. He tried to open his eyes, but his body wasn’t interested in cooperating.
“You go to church, then?” Mom didn’t really sound interested. She sounded exhausted. Boy guessed she had been at his side ever since he’d been admitted, however long ago that was. She was probably grabbing a few hours’ sleep at a time, between visits from nurses and doctors. Maybe she was glad of any kind of conversation.
“Yes, ma’am, I surely do. A beautiful place. Proclaimerz congregation of Light and Love. That’s Proclaimerz with a ‘z’.”
Mom obviously couldn’t think of an appropriate reply. She made a noncommittal sound.
Boy had heard of Proclaimerz, of course. It had started a few years back when Rev Jesse Newman had arrived. He was an evangelist preacher fresh out of a midwest seminary, full of ideas, energy and according to Pop, bullshit. Boy suspected Mom agreed with Pop, as she never spoke up for Rev. Jesse in Pop’s absence. Jesse Newman arrived with some significant financial backing, that much was clear. He’d rented an old industrial building, converted it to a church that could hold nearly 1,500 people. It was a mile out of town in a run-down area—he could hardly have picked a worse location. No one thought he would attract more than a handful of church goers. But then he started appearing on TV commercials every night offering praise, prayer, healing and a reminder of God’s eternal wrath against the wrongdoer Wednesday evenings, Saturday mornings and three times on a Sunday. Wrongdoers, according to Rev. Jesse Newman, were those who didn’t attend Proclaimerz Mega Church on at least one of the aforementioned occasions on a weekly basis, and ponying up a decent chunk of change to support the “ongoing mission”.
If Boy could have rolled his eyes, he would have. When he was a little younger, he assumed the “ongoing mission” referred—like his favorite show—to a continuing search for other civilizations, other galaxies. But Rev. Jesse showed no signs of boldly going anywhere. Which was a pity, because something about the evangelical preacher’s smiling tanned face always gave Boy the urge to punch it. At the time, he couldn’t have explained why. But he didn’t need to be able to spell ‘hypocrite’ without feeling uncomfortable whenever he saw Rev. Jesse in the back of his chauffeur-driven car, making his way to church, driving past the poor folk walking the half-mile from the nearest bus stop, their last few dollars saved for the collection plate. No one could deny the incredible energy and charisma of the man though, and those qualities seemed to convince vast numbers of people to turn off their rational and critical faculties in his presence.
“Rev. Jesse is a real man of God, ma’am, a preacher like I’ve never heard in all my years. And he has the true gift of healing.”
Boy knew what was coming next, and his heart sank. Surely Mom wouldn’t? He had heard his own death sentence pronounced and it had almost been a relief. His life had often seemed hardly worth living before the tumor changed him. After it had taken control, he had committed terrible acts, done things he could barely have imagined. Whether he or the tumor was responsible for the violence was hardly the point. There was only one sure way to make it stop.
“A healer?” Mom’s voice sounded just a little brighter. Boy felt suddenly, crushingly sad for her. She wasn’t ready to give up yet. She hadn’t been able to accept the inevitable as he had.
As the two women talked, he faded away into sleep. Last he remembered, they were plotting to get him out of the hospital and over to the church. Boy offered up a small prayer of his own, to the god he didn’t believe in: please let me die first.
20
Mexico City
Present Day
Seb woke at 5am. Beside him, Mee had moved past the high-decibel snoring stage into the barely discernible breathing that meant she was deeply asleep. She had a wonderfully pragmatic approach to problems. If they could be solved, she’d try to solve them. If not, she wouldn’t. Either way, she never lost sleep over it.
Seb got out of bed, stretched and walked slowly around the small apartment. He had struggled to get to sleep, and when he finally had, images of Felicia and her children snapped into his mind, their faces distorted, burning, screaming, looking to him for help. He knew the only sane response to his current state of mind would be to sit, to contemplate. To enter into that alert, compassionate state of mind he had first practiced in his teens, and allow his thoughts, fears and regrets to surface and be acknowledged, losing much of their power over him in the process.
He glanced at the meditation stool leaning against the piano. Turning his back on it, he pulled on some clothes and walked out into the pre-dawn city. He wasn’t in the mood for forgiving himself.
Walking in the gray-blue light, the streets as quiet as they ever were in Mexico City, he allowed his thoughts to center on his limitations. He was as close to a super-being as Earth had ever known. Invulnerable, able to travel huge distances almost instantaneously and manipulate matter at a sub-molecular level. All without breaking a sweat. And he had saved lives since escaping from Mason with Mee. Many lives. And yet, the reality of the multiverse meant that unimaginable numbers had died at the same time as he saved others.
He realized with a guilty shock that he was much more upset about the death of this universe’s Felicia than he was about the others who must have died while he was helping in this—his home—universe. The earthquake in Honduras, for instance. The families he had saved from the rubble would have been buried alive in countless other universes. He had not been there to save them. And yet, somehow, the loss of life in other universes didn’t seem quite as real to him. Then he remembered the family he had saved hours before. They were in a neighboring universe, but because he had been there, had met them, they were now every bit as real to him as anyone else.
Seb turned into the warren of alleyways leading into the Iztapalapa district. Iztapalapa had grown from a few houses in the 1970s, to one of the most densely popul
ated areas in Mexico City. No real urban planning meant some residents still didn’t have access to clean water. Crime was a problem, drugs, prostitution and murder a part of life for the two million people crammed into its streets. Yet Seb loved walking through the district, talking to people, drawn to the intense sense of community he found there. His own reluctance to belong was thrown into sharp relief by the families he met for whom their community was—literally—central to their survival.
Seb remembered watching the Semana Santa parade the week before Easter. Three million people had squeezed into the streets of Iztapalapa to celebrate the passion of the Christ. Some had dragged full size wooden crosses, even going so far as being nailed onto them when they reached their destination. Groups of sweating men carried floats bearing religious icons, flowers and statues, so huge and heavy they needed forty or more people to lift them. Seb had watched it all with a mixture of horror, envy and hope. Something in him was drawn to the powerful feeling of love between these people. It was palpable. And yet, why torture themselves in the name of religion? Why deny themselves food—when they already had so little—to pay for the extravagant floats, colorful clothes and overpriced plastic relics?
As he walked, Seb looked up into the scaffolding around a ramshackle building. The building was so unsafe-looking, he wondered if the scaffolding was the only thing holding it together. Five stray dogs had made their home on the wooden planks above him. They watched him pass, curious, but not interested enough to bark at the stranger. A few yards behind him, two figures peeled away from the shadows and quietly followed the tall, fearless figure who had so casually decided to walk through their territory.
Seb thought back to his adolescence, growing up at St Benet’s, the Catholic orphanage. He had stopped attending Mass in his early teens, but he was familiar with the Bible, and saw how the Sisters and Father O’Hanoran had tried to live their lives guided by that old, much edited, mistranslated, badly interpreted, poetical collection of stories, history, poetry and parables. He respected their dedication and their obvious love of humanity, but could never bring himself to embrace a tradition that he found, at an institutional level, to be judgmental and forbidding, rather than loving and welcoming.
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 49
