You love your son, though.
If I didn't, then who else would?
She looked at him, weighing her thoughts against his, the way he was poised for flight, and suddenly she reached out with the hand on the wheel and touched his hand.
Nobody knows what that love word means. It's not a particularly effective word in any case.
Why not?
Don't you have a bus to catch?
I've got time.
Your little friend going with you?
Maybe.
Do you love him?
I don't know. Maybe.
See? Nobody knows. Truth is, nobody cares except the people that love you. And nobody loves you except maybe the people that you love. Don't have to worry about anybody else. They'll figure it out.
What if the world was going to end tomorrow? Then it would matter, right?
Well, if the world was going to end, I'm thinking you assume you either love everyone or don't love nobody. That's a choice every soul's got to make on their own.
She smiled.
Are you joking me now?
You are in a sorry state, asking so many questions. Y'all better get on that bus and get on your way or you ain't going to make it.
I think I'll make it.
Go on and prove it.
Ricky reached for the door. When he stood out on the sidewalk, the lights of the bus station seemed to take a second longer than was normal to come into focus, as if the woman's words weighed his perception of time down. It was just a momentary shift, a wobble in the spin of the planet, but for a second it made him pause. Then he resumed his ordinary flow of thinking, the kind of thoughts that would get him where he needed to go. There were no more shifts of time perception. They went inside the station. Gabe didn't say anything, careful not to upset Ricky's fragile equilibrium. He bought two tickets to Pittsburgh. The bus didn't leave until the morning. After paying, there was enough money left over to get some food in the Denny’s across the street.
Ricky felt sorry for Gabe. He had no idea where they were going or why. In a way, he guessed that he kind of missed his old life at the farm, even though he'd been abused, probably since he was old enough to remember. But as they crossed the road to the Denny’s, Ricky tried to reach out.
That was expensive, Gabe. I didn't know how expensive it would be.
Good thing you got some money.
That's all I had. We better find my Uncle Tony's house. I know it's in Pittsburgh.
He better be nice.
Oh, he is. Him and my Aunt Ginny. Both very nice.
Ricky ordered quesadilla burgers and Gabe ordered spaghetti and meatballs. They both drank a variety of sodas from the soda dispenser. They were the only customers and stayed as long as they could. Gabe stretched out on the seat and closed his eyes. One person came in and ordered a coffee and a pie. He sat and ate and didn't glance at them, absorbed in the music coming from earbuds coming out of the hood of his sweatshirt. The manager came by and said they were closing. Two black men about forty started mopping the floor by the registers with mops that smelled of stale bread and two buckets that said Cuidado Piso Mojado. Ricky stood and felt sick to his stomach. He’d eaten too much, or maybe it had been too much soda. He shook Gabe by the shoulder gently.
D'you want to use the bathroom?
No.
Well, we're being moved. We need to go.
Fuck that.
No, we need to.
Why?
They're closing.
We could just stay here and be nice and peaceful, dude.
No, that's not allowed, said the manager.
The manager was a man in his twenties who scratched his nose. His skin was florid with acne. Under the fluorescent light of the restaurant with no other people aside from the cleaners, he seemed sad and vulnerable, too easy to pick on. He didn't want to be rude. He had no intention of pulling rank. He just wanted to go home because he was tired. Ricky understood. They were all tired. He was torn between wanting to stay and wanting to help the manager complete his workday with a minimum of fuss.
Come on Gabe. We'll go back to the bus station and just wait. Could I have a coffee?
Yeah.
Thanks.
No problem.
The manager went inside and came back with a tall take-away, courtesy, red Denny's cup filled with lukewarm coffee and cream and three sugar packets.
Ricky mixed the sugar just outside the door. The wind was blowing trash around the parking lot. They walked across the thoroughfare back to the bus station. They wanted to sit in the seats, but a policeman walked over and told them to move on.
Gabe. It's not so bad. We had a nice meal. We'll walk it off until the morning.
Man. You got some more money. Why don't we find a hotel somewhere?
There is a hotel two blocks from here, said the policeman. The Doubletree Hilton.
Sounds good, said Ricky.
Back on the street, he confessed to Gabe that they had no more money. Easy it had come, easier still it had flowed away, but some good had come of it. He tried to explain the ethics of using ill-gotten gains for good purposes. He remembered his mother and father having a similar argument. It was not a hard argument to make if you were hungry enough, he realized now. His father had said that money was like water; it would always flow along the path of least resistance. Ricky wondered why people who had no money also did the same, as if in mimicry of the very object they sought.
Gabe, are things getting better or worse or staying about the same? What do you think?
They were sitting around the corner from the entrance of the Doubletree, in the doorway of an exit to the parking lot of the hotel.
Things are definitely getting better, dude.
Okay.
Ricky thought that perhaps under the surface things were falling apart. There seemed to be an abandoned aspect to the night, as if most of the good people had fled somewhere more amenable to convergence. He thought of the things he owned and they didn't amount to much. There was the tablet. He took it out of the backpack and ran his finger along the grain of the stone and the carvings and thought of the work that had gone into it and the intelligence behind it. It had been in honor of his mother that he had sought it. Now it all seemed very far away, the original impulse in the surf shop. And Coconut Juan murdered and Governor Harris likewise and his father gone into the vastness of a secret slavery. If he could only hear his mother's voice he thought all that could be erased, a soundtrack that was only a rehearsal. But that was another thing his dad liked to say. Life was an improvisation and there were no second chances. You had to hit it the first time you tried. There was no soundtrack. There was only the infinite white noise of the galaxies spinning in space, and the people, buzzing like flies on the lip of this, the only life there was.
The bus they rode was partially filled with a church group of older people talking about the last time they went to the Ryman Auditorium and how to get their photographs taken on stage. Then they changed in Columbus, and it got dark. Gabe slept with his head in Ricky's lap. At some point Ricky got up and went and sat in the front and listened to the driver's radio giving a play-by-play description of a college football game somewhere out West. The cars on the highway were far off and then were gone. Ricky woke up in a cold sweat. It was Pittsburgh sometime in the middle of the night. Outside, the station's lit columns and arches looked like the Roman Coliseum. They climbed the stairs and sat at the top and watched police cars cruise by with their lights flashing on the crisscrossing streets. Behind them were some high-rise office buildings, and Ricky remembered being there before. He thought he could find his way.
This is a big place, Gabe. But I'm sure I remember how to get there. Just let's try. What have we got to lose?
Ah, man. I am so tired right now.
I know. Just a little longer. Got to hang in there.
They walked through neighborhoods. Some of the houses had yards and others were squeezed together with no
space in between. There was a restaurant on one corner called Arcangeles Pizza. Ricky thought he remembered eating there with Uncle Tony and Aunt Ginny and his mom the last time they'd visited. He'd been almost as tall as his mother and he’d walked down this same sidewalk behind them listening to them talk about politics. His mother was always on the losing side. Tony believed technology would solve all the world's problems. His mother had a firm belief that everything had started to go wrong with the Donation of Constantine, when the true Church had gone from resistance to an embrace of the world's allure.
Gabe kept asking if this was the house. Finally Ricky got tired and snapped at him. Then he saw a red clapboard house on one corner and thought they were near. A cream-colored row house with a front step of concrete and iron railings looked right. The sun was coming up, and there was a garbage truck going down a parallel side street. They could hear the clanking of the grate as it opened to take in the garbage and then the motor roar as it ran down the street away from them. Ricky went up the steps and rang the bell. A couple of minutes went by. He heard something and blew on his hands and ran his fingers through his hair quickly. The door opened and an old man in a bathrobe peered around the edge of the half-opened door. The hall light behind him mostly hid his craggy facial features in silhouette, but it was definitely not his uncle.
What is it? Better be good.
I was looking for somebody. Got the wrong house, I guess.
What address?
I, not this one.
Look, kid. I'm packing a Tec-9 in case you try anything funny. Tell all your pals.
No, I just thought my uncle lived here. I am sorry, sir.
What's his name?
Anthony Lyons. He’s a professor.
And you don't remember where he lives.
I swear I don't.
I'm going to call the college and find out. What was his name?
Lyons. Anthony Lyons.
All right. Well, it's been nice talking to you.
Where do you think I can find him?
The man looked at him with an exasperated, unbelieving stare. Then he gestured down the street.
Campus is about two miles from here. Get a move on, the two of you. Goddamned kids.
He slammed the door. Ricky walked back down the steps.
That's the meanest bitch we seen so far. We should come back and burn that bitch down, Ricky.
No. Just move on. Kill the serpent. Crush his head. Forgive him.
Who said that? The wise guy?
No, my mother.
What? Your Mom was crazy.
Yeah.
They walked on, looking for the college where Uncle Tony worked. The mid-morning traffic in the avenue was in full force, and the sun was beating down in a summer-like heat, despite the lateness of the season. The spires of a church marked the corner of a green, and then diagonally across the green they could see straggling groups of what could only be college students with laptops out and carrier bags slung across shoulders, exiting a massive, low-slung building. Ricky started out towards the building and tried to stop some of the students. It took him several tries, probably because of how funky he and Gabe looked by then, but finally a girl stopped.
Excuse me. Do you know Anthony Lyons? The professor?
No. What does he teach?
Computer science.
Try Excelcis Hall. That's the building over there.
She pointed and rushed on her way.
We're getting closer, Gabe.
Man, she smelled good. Like pizza or bagels or something.
Yeah, that's what college is, man. Pizza and bagels. All about the food.
Okay. Take me to college, Ricky. I'm so hungry.
They approached a building about fifteen stories high, a massively constructed tower of desert-colored masonry with tiny slits of windows, possibly, thought Ricky, so as not to let any of the wisdom exuded inside escape into thin air free of charge. The top floors were some kind of research facility. The rest were classrooms and offices. It was the science building, judging by the titles of the offices. But no doors had Uncle Tony's name. Ricky sat and stared dejectedly at the board. He had run out of ideas. The students streaming in and out annoyed him with their perfunctory, business-like similarity to lemmings.
Is he here?
I don't know.
He’s a teacher?
Yeah.
Well. Let's look around in the classrooms, dude.
Okay. Ricky agreed without much enthusiasm.
They followed the latest group of students, a mob of androgynous kids in duffel coats. The class was just getting started. It was a large lecture hall with fold-over, wood-veneered desks at each seat. The professor walked out on the stage and adjusted the podium and looked at the far wall over everyone's head and grimaced under his beard.
That him?
No.
Well, let's go.
Gabe took over as the guiding force, and they wandered from class to class and up and down the elevators, pushing open doors and interrupting lab presentations. But no Uncle Tony in any classroom. Finally on the seventh floor, they seemed to have exhausted all the possibilities. They walked together back to the elevator bank wordlessly, sapped of all their strength.
Let's get out of here and go rob a house, Ricky.
No, we can't do that. We'll go to the campus police.
Hold on. Who's that?
There were no more students wandering the halls. The classes were well underway. But the elevator pinged and someone got off, a thin figure in a trench coat, carrying a single loose-leaf piece of paper between two claw-like fingers. He disappeared around the corner, and Ricky and Gabe followed like veteran hounds on the trail of a familiar prey. The Rasputin look-alike disappeared inside an unmarked door at the end of the hall. They'd figured it was a supply closet and skipped it once before; but as they approached they could hear the drone of a voice inside. Ricky pushed down the simple knob and leaned with his shoulder. Inside the darkened little room, at a chalkboard against the far wall was Uncle Tony, spinning out some fantastical, multi-colored web of symbols and numbers on the board.
On the row of stools along a marble bench lined with Bunsen burners sat two men, the owlish figure who had just entered and a crew-cut, thick-chested, older man with a military air who licked a pencil and watched with rapt attention as Uncle Tony whirled at the board. Ricky read the title written at the top of the board in smudged yellow: Computational Algorithms in the 11th Dimension. No wonder there weren't many students for this one, he thought. Ricky remembered his father complaining about the strange direction Tony's research had taken him, the reason he had lost his chaired post in materials research at UVM and found his way to the relatively less prestigious, non-tenured position at the University of Pittsburgh. He had lost much of his hair, wore thick spectacles and now cultivated an outlandish handlebar moustache that gave him a kind of absurdly unpredictable air. Ricky thought that as far as first impressions went Gabe would not be as impressed with the man before them as he would have been with the Uncle Tony he remembered, an earnest, energetic guy who had loved to swim and hike and ski in the Green Mountains of Ricky's not-so-long-ago infancy.
Tony stopped his lecturing momentarily, upset at their intrusion, and stared at them. Ricky looked at Gabe and motioned with his head for him to follow. They took seats on stools at the bench and Gabe proceeded to put his head on the marble top and fall asleep. Ricky lost himself in the words Uncle Tony spun forth: dark matter, wormholes, Lambda, the Schwarzschild metric. The two students, the older military man and the younger eccentric, said nothing. Instead they sat there as if in a rapture, until Uncle Tony clapped his hands and said: Well, that's it. I think we've given the space-time fabric enough of a shake. Let's have lunch.
The two students sank into themselves as if the air had been let out. There was something unreal about them. Perhaps it was a setup and they had been put there to make Uncle Tony believe he actually had an audience of real live st
udents, albeit only two. Ricky felt sorry for him. His father had never trusted his younger brother to get serious about life. The fact that he and Ginny had never had children had often been held up by Al as proof of his brother's innate imprimatur for feckless irresponsibility. But now Ricky thought he was majestic in his pursuit of what seemed unattainable heights of theoretical vision. His uncle put the chalk down, the green and blue on one side of the tray and the yellow and white on the other, and stepped back to look at his handiwork. The two students had left together just as wordlessly as they had sat through the lecture.
And you two. Are you waiting for the wave function to collapse or what?
Uncle Tony. It's me. Ricky.
He dropped his air of professorial abstractedness and walked over, his hand on the tabletop to steady himself.
Ricky. It is you. You look like Al. I should have recognized you. I. . .Are you okay?
I'm okay.
Tony put his hands on Ricky's shoulders and stared him in the eyes.
We've been everywhere. The State Department. The embassy in Guatemala. The FBI. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You are an international enigma, my young friend. I have an idea your appearance is something we're going to need to keep to ourselves.
That's probably a good idea, Uncle Tony.
Are you guys hungry?
Gabe groaned.
We ain't eaten in a couple of days, man. We're starvin'.
And who is this?
This is Gabe, said Ricky.
This is a surprise. I. . .don't know quite what to make of it. Well, we'll just have to see. I won't ask any more questions until you get some food in you.
They walked across the quadrangle, where students in mock battle paraphernalia were protesting the university's stake in defense research, and by extension, the US military's growing involvement in policing the globe. Another group of students with fake facial tattoos in solidarity with the laboring, state-less underclass, announced on a megaphone their solidarity committee's recent positions on Wall Street collusion with the corporate elites.
They skirted the demonstrations and found Tony's car, a Nissan Sentra, parked a couple of blocks away from the green. They got in and drove to a quiet diner closer to Tony's neighborhood. After a plate of lasagna, a side dish of French fries, a desert of chocolate chip ice cream, and some awkward small talk about nothing in particular, Ricky began to tell Tony about Al's kidnapping in Guatemala, the tablet, the military base in Florida, the farm in Tennessee, and about the fact that there was a war going on and nobody seemed to notice.
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