“You are stupid to say this. So stupid.”
“And that goes for me, too. I won’t be a traitor.”
“Traitor?’” There was an unfamiliar edge to Seresen’s voice. “Traitor means nothing. I wish you would not talk about these things. It makes the world ugly.”
“But . . .”
“Be quiet.” The alien hunched into a shapeless lump of disgust.
The van stopped. Seresen, as though anxious to get away from DeWitt, opened the back doors and jumped down.
Cautiously, DeWitt followed, and found himself in the brightly lit Torku garage. One last, poignant glimpse of the parking lot and the trees, and the wall slammed to with an end-of-the-world clunk.
The garage stank of exhaust and old oil. Loretta’s Buick was parked at the end of the long row of delivery vehicles. In testimony to how the revolution was faring, his own squad car was there, too.
Squinting in the cold glare of the fluorescents, DeWitt walked to it. The car had been messily hot-wired. He got out his keys.
In the trunk lay a flat, pink box marked BLUSH. A smaller box that had to be lipstick. With a fingernail he scraped some of the crusted blood off the cardboard. A lock of bleached blond hair was snagged in the spare’s balance weight. DeWitt had pushed Foster too far. He should have never given him the keys.
Exhausted, DeWitt crawled into the back seat, made himself a pillow of his jacket, and closed his eyes.
He dreamed he was climbing the Line again, only the energy was sticky as candy. His arm sunk into the glow, and when he pulled his hand out, he saw with horror that his flesh had been stripped to the bone.
A knock by his ear startled him awake. Seresen was staring in the squad car window. “Lunch,” he said.
Mouth filmy with sleep, DeWitt got up and followed the alien down the row of parked vehicles. The Torku had made him an apartment of sorts in an empty bay. A single bed squatted near a wall of graduated hoses. A round Formica table and two chairs stood in a corner festooned with fan belts.
“You will be hungry,” Seresen told him. “You will need a place to sleep since you cannot go home. A phone is on the nightstand. You can call your wife later.”
“Is the town all right?”
“Eat and call your wife.” With that, Seresen walked through the door to the Torku living quarters, locking the door behind him.
DeWitt rummaged through a box on the table. Inside were chilled cans of Coke, assorted sandwiches, chocolate, and six family-sized bags of chips. Fishing out a pimento cheese sandwich, DeWitt tore off the plastic wrap, sat down on the bed, and called Janet.
No one answered.
Chapter Thirty
DeWitt’s bladder was painfully full by the time he got up from the cot. He walked to the door and knocked, but there was no response. After pacing a while, he picked up the phone and dialed 911.
A Torku answered. “Yes?”
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Come in the door,” the alien said and hung up.
The door? DeWitt looked at the garage door, but knew that wasn’t the one the alien meant. Then he turned and stared at the door to the center.
He was both drawn to and repelled by the center, the same sort of ambivalence he felt toward the Line. Things change, Foster had said. Staring at the very ordinary green steel door, DeWitt wondered what extraordinary things he would find behind it.
Timidly he knocked. When no, one answered, he put his ear against the painted metal and listened, hearing only the rush of his own blood in his ears.
The knob was chilly. “Coming in,” he warned breathlessly as he pulled the door open.
It was a bathroom. A white commode sat in one comer; a plastic shower curtain stamped with fish and seahorses was hung in the other. On the tile floor lay a fluffy blue rug. And on the opposite wall was a connecting door of green-painted steel.
He pulled up the fake-fur-covered commode lid, and with a groan of relief urinated into the blue water. On top of the tank, he noted, a Torku decorator had placed a yellow ceramic carp.
When he was done, DeWitt tried the connecting door and found that it was locked. He searched the cabinets. Towels and washcloths were in one, sheets in another. In a closet next to the sink he found six sets of uniforms, all his size.
There was a click as a bolt was shot. Seresen walked in.
DeWitt said, “Don’t you know how to knock?”
The alien tightened his pliant hand into a fist and tapped on the rim of the sink. “I want to talk to you.”
DeWitt turned and went back to the garage. “How’s the town?”
“It is fine.”
“I don’t believe it.” DeWitt sat on the bed next to the phone and tried his home number again. The phone rang fifteen times before he hung up. “I want to talk to my wife.”
Seresen walked out.
After a few minutes wait the phone rang. DeWitt snatched up the receiver. “Hello?”
“DeWitt?” The furious voice belonged to Janet.
Out of the comer of his eye DeWitt saw Seresen coming back.
“Janet, listen to me. Listen to me, honey. I know everything.”
A beat of silence, like the startled pause of a heart.
“I know about your affair. I know what you helped him do. God,” he whispered, “you left tire tracks, Janet.”
DeWitt suddenly understood the helplessness of mothers who begged the police not to take their sons; who fretted that the cuffs were too tight; who asked if there were blankets enough in jail to keep their children warm.
He tried to picture Janet’s arrest. Her trial. Her execution. He knew that if the law took her from him, it wouldn’t seem that she had ceased to exist, but that she had simply gone missing, like his father.
“DeWitt, what are you talking about? Are you trying to blame me for the murder? God! You find out I’m having an affair and this is the way you get back at me? Nobody will believe you, DeWitt. Nobody. The evidence was found in your trunk. “
“Janet, you know your boyfriend put those things in my car. “
“My boyfriend. My boyfriend? You make me sound like a teenager sneaking out of the house.”
Quietly, “Is that how it feels?”
“He’d never plant evidence. He’d never do that.”
“Stop protecting him. Think what he got you into. You may think you’re in love, but goddamn, look what the man did. Go to Bo. Tell him–please, won’t you do what’s right? Foster was in my trunk last night. I gave him my keys–“
“What?”
“Foster got into my trunk. He uses Mary Kay. He must have had some extra boxes. I was bleeding all over myself last night, and he had the bloody towels in his hands. He knows I suspect him, and he had to get rid of me.” Hadn’t she figured it out? But maybe she didn’t help Foster get rid of the body.
“Listen, Janet. Bo’s an honest cop–“
“I know that. Don’t you think . . . “
“Once he starts questioning Foster’s alibi, once he asks himself why Foster lied to me, once he thinks about those tire tracks, he’s going to put it together. And then nothing will stop him. Not friendship, not pity. If you don’t have any knowledge of the murder, tell Bo. Janet, I know you love Foster. You probably always have. But if you feel anything for me at all, at least let me try to help. There were stones from Sparrow Point caught in the tire treads, and no telling what’s in the carpet of that Suburban. Fibers, hairs, traces of blood. I tried to get Foster to say that I loaned him the car, but–“
“Bo told me he found the evidence in your trunk!”
“Janet, think! The squad car was in the driveway all weekend, so low on gas, I took the horse. There’s no way I could have driven to Sparrow Point. Besides, I have Goodyears, not Dunlops.”
She was weeping now, huge gulps of mi
sery. “I can’t believe this. I can’t . . . “ She hung up.
DeWitt put down the phone, lay back in bed, and stared at the ceiling.
Seresen said, “They are well, your people. We will not hurt them. I want you to tell me that the revolt will end. Tell me that your people will be friends with us again, and that everything will be the way it was.”
“I want you to change the Suburban’s tires. Put Michelins on. You go to Bo if you have to. Tell him about Foster getting into my trunk . . . “
Foster in exchange for DeWitt. Would Seresen be able to choose?
“And if worse comes to worse, I want you to protect my wife and kids. Promise me.”
Seresen made a small, odd noise. “This is not the right attitude. All things will go back to normal. Your wife loves you. I want you to say this.”
DeWitt closed his eyes. “Saying things doesn’t make them happen.”
“Yes it does.” A squeak as the alien sat down on a chair. “Saying makes things so. What occurs is of no importance. What is important is perception. It is belief, not the act, that creates resonant patterns. You don’t have the right attitude. I try to make happy policemen. I don’t know why you insist on making unhappy ones.”
There was a screech of metal as Seresen pulled his chair to the side of the bed.
“We worship universes, and universes leak. They leak thought. They leak dream. The pattern of the tree is in the leaf. All things affect the spin of the electron.”
DeWitt pulled the covers around him.
“What appears to be random is pattern: flights of birds, schools of fish, dust floating in sunlight. We worship everything. Your attitude is wrong. I tell you that somewhere a happy policeman with a happy family understands this. And somewhere that policeman explains to his friends. This is important to us.”
“Seresen, the town’s falling apart. People are going to get hurt. Just do what I tell you.”
When no response came, DeWitt opened his eyes. The alien was looming over him, shapeless hands clenched as though they wanted to throttle. His skin had turned color: not pale but amber, the hue of a warning light.
Gradually Seresen mastered his frustration. His fists relaxed. Amber turned to brown. “I will be back when you see things better.”
Rapid footsteps as the alien stalked away, a bang as he shut the door behind him.
Chapter Thirty-One
Seresen didn’t return. Under the ceaseless noon of the garage’s fluorescents, hours blurred into days. Days into weeks. DeWitt paced back and forth before the garage door, feeling for air leaks and not finding any.
In the Buick’s trunk he found a pink basket labeled in Loretta’s rounded, exacting script: Kol Seresen. The basket was filled with Mary Kay samples: face cleanser, hand lotion, a mask for oily skin.
That was why she had wanted to see Seresen. The meeting hadn’t been about Foster at all.
The news didn’t cheer him.
DeWitt ate all the sandwiches in the cardboard box. The Torku didn’t bring him more. When he dialed 911, no one answered. No one answered at his house, either.
He tried to think happy thoughts, but knew that outside, war continued. That Seresen never changed Janet’s tires and never talked to Bo. He pictured the Kol’s body lying half-in and half-out of the center, flies enjoying an exotic feast.
And down Main, the bodies of humans would be stiffening, eyes open to the watery sun. Stray dogs, gone feral, would be gorging themselves on the soft parts first: the anus, the belly.
Nobody would come get him.
He found a ballpeen hammer and used it against the wall, but the alien material neither chipped nor dented. The shock of the blows, after a few minutes’ work, made his body ache.
It was in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, elbows on thighs, door closed to the illumination of the garage, that he witnessed Torku change.
The strip of light on the floor was not to his right where it should have been, but in front, where light was impossible. Frightened, he got up from the toilet, not taking the time to wipe, pulling his pants up with him. He fumbled for the light switch and flicked on the overhead fluorescents.
Flamingos. The shower stall now had glass doors instead of a curtain. And on the doors were pink flamingos.
DeWitt fled. He waited, and peeked inside again. The flamingos were still there. He stayed in the garage, going into the bathroom only when he absolutely had to, and quickly.
In the garage, he paced.
One day, in the middle of a step, there was Seresen standing in the open doorway of the bathroom.
“Everything is quiet. We will make deliveries now.”
Six other Torku walked into the garage and loaded boxes into a UPS van. Seresen approached. “And you will come with us.
The wall of the garage rose, letting in a cold breeze. Slowly, as though any sudden move might bring back his solitary confinement, DeWitt turned. In the parking lot it was snowing.
The Kol pressed a sandwich and a root beer into his hands. “I hope you have thought about what I said.”
Things change. That was the lesson DeWitt had learned. The universe was unreliable. Blink, and the world is transformed. He tore open the package. The sandwich was chicken salad and it nearly came apart in his frantic hands.
With a motherly gesture the alien drew a blanket around DeWitt’s shoulders. Seresen himself was dressed head-to-toe in what looked like a poncho. His huge, shapeless feet were stuffed into fuzzy boots.
DeWitt’s hands shook so much that he spilled half of the root beer, opening it. He downed the rest in three swallows.
“There is more food and drink inside.” Seresen walked to the truck, DeWitt at his heels.
There were blankets on the floorboard, and a cooler filled with canned drinks and fruit. Grabbing an orange, DeWitt tore a hole through the peel and sucked the sweetness out. Juice dribbled down his chin.
“You understand the nature of the universe now?” Seresen asked.
“Yes.” DeWitt tossed the orange away and picked up an apple. There was no order. Bathrooms changed from blue to pink, and fish became flamingos.
Seresen started the van and drove out of the garage. The tires fought for traction in the calf-deep snow. DeWitt devoured the apple and opened a Dr Pepper. “What day is it?”
“If you understand me, then you know time is arbitrary.”
“Arbitrarily, then, what’s the day?”
“Wednesday.”
“The date?”
“December twenty -eighth.”
DeWitt had been locked up sixteen days, and had missed Christmas. It didn’t matter. Time was arbitrary. Bathrooms sailed through mutable truth. DeWitt leaned his cheek against the chill door until his face grew numb. In another universe, he supposed, a happy policeman had opened presents.
The van slid to a stop, and everyone climbed out. Curtis’s bait house was wrapped in swirling white.
DeWitt followed the aliens inside the convenience store. The heat was off. The store was stocked but for the spots where flammables once stood. There was no lighter fluid by the charcoal, no scented lamp oil next to the candles.
Pulling the blanket around him, DeWitt slogged through foot-deep snow to Curtis’s house. He knocked and got no answer. After a while he opened the door.
“Curtis?”
His breath emerged in ghostly wisps of fog. Stepping quietly, he made his way to the kitchen. Dishes jutted from the sink’s opaque ice like fruit in dishwater Jell-O. Pipes behind the cabinets had burst, and ice made a glistening rink over the scarred linoleum. Hunched in his blanket, DeWitt stood, afraid to explore farther. At last Seresen came and led him away.
His legs were weak; his feet tripped over themselves. In the yard the Kol had to pause so DeWitt could regain his balance.
“What did you do with Curtis
?” DeWitt asked.
“Nothing. We did nothing. He is at a neighbor’s.”
“Where’s my wife? My kids?”
“At a friend’s home.” Seresen patted his arm.
Three Torku came to help DeWitt into the truck.
“Please. I want to see my family,” DeWitt asked uncertainly.
“Yes, yes.” Seresen started the truck and drove out of the frozen yard. “I know.”
The van moved slowly down the broad white river that was Guadalupe Street. In a yard to the right was a black lump. As DeWitt stared, it moved. Irma Jenkins was boiling a pot over a charcoal grill. She looked up as they passed, her face set into lines of hatred.
DeWitt watched her until they were out of sight. “Why?”
“Why what?” Seresen was concentrating on the road.
“Why is Irma Jenkins outside? What is she doing?”
“Cooking. I told you we would take the gas.”
Comprehension hit, as blinding as the light from an arc welder. “No propane? None at all?”
“As I said, no gas. Those with electric heat are taking their neighbors in.”
“You can make electric heaters,” DeWitt said.
“We have made some.”
“But not for everybody. Why?”
“We make them for those who ask. Electric stoves also. Not many ask. Perhaps they do not feel the cold.”
“How cold has it been?”
“Very. “ Seresen steered carefully toward Main. “What can we do if your people do not want heat?”
“You’re letting them die.”
“No one is dying. I ask you not to say such things. We do not allow anyone to die. If they want heat, we give it. You and I both know there is a universe where humans have warmth, and, given time, that universe will share its pattern.”
DeWitt pulled Seresen’s hands off the wheel and held the alien hard by the wrists. “Explain why you’re doing this.”
The van wandered like an unleashed and curious dog from side to side until it slewed to the right and softly nosed into a pyracantha bush.
Happy Policeman Page 13
