by Alan Rodgers
He turned and began to head away, back out toward the street . . .
And then he saw the girl.
No, she wasn’t a girl, she was a woman. Her skin was clear and smooth, like a young girl’s, and her eyes were bright and round as though time hadn’t had the chance to wear them. The set of her neck and the line of her bust was full the way a woman’s get as she reaches the complete maturity of middle age. Luke couldn’t have explained that distinction and the line of reasoning that led to it any more than he could have explained the others, but he saw it all the same.
The woman was nude, but she didn’t seem self-conscious of her nakedness. Not even when she looked up and saw Luke watching her.
Something passed on her face. Recognition, maybe — yes, recognition. And for half an instant all Luke could think was Oh no, not another one, not another one who saw me while I was dead and now I’m alive, and now she’s going to scream, oh God please don’t let her scream.
She didn’t scream, and Luke realized that it wasn’t that she recognized him but that she recognized something in him.
And —
And —
And she walked toward him across the moist soft grass, and came to him and took his hand. And led him off deeper into the cemetery.
He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t let her do this to him. What he needed was to be alone, to be alone where he could sort himself out of the confusion. He needed to stop now
now
and pull his hand away from her. If he didn’t he might lose himself forever. There was something in his blood, pushing him, pressing him. Desire. Need that called him more demandingly than pastoral beauty of the graveyard. Need more siren than the quiet faith of the Harrisons.
And when Luke tried to stop, he couldn’t.
Already he could feel the rhythm of her body too close to his seeping into his self, muting it — changing it —
Luke’s heart lurched, and the alien press of the woman’s presence turned to fear and rejection, and the rhythm that held him broke just long enough to let him pull free. And he stopped dead in his tracks, sudden and jolting stopped, and he pulled his hand away even though her grip didn’t want to let him go.
“I can’t,” he said, “please.”
She reached for him, her hand extending quiet and insistent out toward his.
“No,” he said. “Stop that.” He pulled away, stepped backward. “I’m confused half out of my mind right now — I need to be alone. Need to get used to myself. Wherever you’re going to take me right now, it’s got to be the worst possible thing in the world. I can’t go with you — if I did I might never find my way back.”
She smiled at him knowingly and stepped toward him, still reaching for his hand. Luke tried to step farther away, but when he did his left shoulder pressed into the trunk of a tree, and he lost his balance but the tree was there and there was no way for him to fall, and she just kept moving toward him, her naked body pressing against him as she took his hand and pulled it toward her, and the soft warmth of her fingers was so . . . so . . .
And her breasts shaping themselves against his ribs, through the flannel of Robert Harrison’s shirt . . .
And the light faint smell of her, the gentle scent of her skin so close to him . . .
And his body was responding — God it was responding.
no, please God no
Luke almost lost himself, then. Almost but not quite.
He put his free hand on her shoulder, and gently, firmly eased her away from him. And because he’d already said no as many ways as he knew how, he asked her a question, any question, just the first question that wandered through his mind.
“Who are you?” he asked. And because that seemed to give her pause, he said, “Why do you . . . What do you need from me?”
And Luke saw something big and powerful as all of creation rise up to the surface of the woman’s soul.
And burst.
All at once the woman’s body went slack, as though she’d somehow been made from rope that now had come untied. Her hand fell away from his; Luke had to reach out and catch her to keep her from falling too hard into the grass.
desire — God she was beautiful. beautiful. so perfect that even now her presence made a warm fog swirl all around luke. he wanted her, and knew he didn’t dare to have her
He eased her down to the ground, where she sat staring vacantly at the bark of the tree behind Luke. He stepped away and watched her, almost afraid that she’d somehow fall over onto her side and hurt herself. She didn’t, though — she just kept sitting there staring at the tree, or maybe something beyond it.
After a while Luke stooped down to look her in the eye, and he said, “Are you okay?” and there was something strange there in her eye, something familiar . . . or not familiar; something alien but recognizable. “Who are you?” he asked her again, even though he knew he shouldn’t, knew that it was cruel — and it was mean, because as soon as he’d asked it she began to cry, and that made him feel like a real louse.
Everything that was sensuous seemed to go out of her when she cried; instead of being sultry and desirable her nakedness became . . . vulnerable. Vulnerable and sexless as an infant’s naked body. He looked at her breasts — guiltily; his eyes had avoided them since he’d first noticed her — and saw them as round lobes of soft flesh not much different from the flesh of her upper arms.
And something inside Luke relaxed, and went easy, and suddenly she was just another confused person, confused as he was, and Luke felt a bond to her.
confused as he was
He leaned back against the tree and let himself slide down toward the ground, sat in among the tree’s thick roots staring into the cemetery facing half away from her.
Not even the cemetery seemed threatening to him, now; Luke couldn’t have said why, but for the moment, at least, he didn’t think it had the power to draw his self away.
The woman cried for five minutes, and then she was quiet, but just as sad.
“Can I help?” Luke asked. “Is there anything I can do?”
She looked . . . not at him, not exactly, but toward him and down, at the grass near Luke’s waist.
“No,” she said. It was the first he’d heard her speak, and her voice surprised him — partly because he’d begun to wonder whether she could speak at all, partly because even in the single word Luke could hear something rich and melodious in y her voice. Something beautiful. Luke kept waiting, expecting her to say something else, but she didn’t.
“Are you okay?” He asked her, even though he knew she was as okay as she was going to be. Asked because he felt a growing tension that he didn’t understand, and words were the only way he knew to break it.
The woman nodded, absently — more absorbed than distracted. Then she seemed to come into focus; she looked around deliberately, as though trying to make sense of where she was. And when she looked Luke in the eye he almost thought for a moment that she was someone else completely. As though something — a demon, or maybe some less sinister spirit — had possessed her. It wasn’t so, of course. Even as confused as Luke was, he could parse that much of reality from fantasy. And when he looked at her more closely he knew that it wasn’t any essential change he saw, only . . . an awakening. Or something like one.
“Where is this place?” she asked. “It doesn’t seem familiar.”
“It’s a cemetery in Brooklyn,” Luke said. “Northeast Brooklyn — Bedford-Stuyvesant, I think. I’m a little vague on the specifics.”
The woman raised an eyebrow, looked at Luke uncertainly. “Are you certain? It’s changed a lot since the last time I was here. If this is the place I think it is.”
Luke shrugged. “I think — I think this place has been this way a long time. At least as long as I’ve been alive.” He sighed. “I don’t know that that’s saying much.”
&n
bsp; She nodded, understandingly; Luke wasn’t sure what it was she understood. He looked away from her, off at the sea of graves in front of him. Her nakedness was beginning to distract him again.
“Are you cold?” he asked, even though the temperature of the day around them was too perfect for anyone to be cool, or warm, or anything but comfortable. “You can have my shirt if you need it.” Big as the shirt was on Luke, it’d cover the woman almost as well as a dress. He had it half unbuttoned before she even had a chance to respond.
She looked down at her breasts for a moment, almost puzzled, as though the concept of nakedness was almost an alien thing. Then all at once her face was full of stress and recognition, and she reddened with embarrassment. So ashamed that she looked away from him as she reached out to take the shirt from him.
Luke handed it to her, and she stood up to put it on. Buttoned it, all the way up to the very top button at the collar. When she was done she reached out to take his hand. And she said, “Come with me. Please.”
Luke wasn’t afraid any more. Wary, maybe. He had a sense of himself, but not an unshakable sense. When he saw her hand reach out for him he hesitated. He might even have said no, but he heard the need in her voice, and it wasn’t sexual — just plain human empty loneliness. He didn’t have it in him to refuse that kind of need; it wasn’t threatening, and anyway he felt too damn much of it himself to deny it in anyone else.
She led him a long way through the cemetery, to a quiet place where Luke could hear the sound of a stream burbling — though when he looked to find the water he saw no sign of it. God knew what that meant. Twice along the way to that place they crossed service roads; tiny, badly paved things that made Luke think of someplace deep in the backwoods. One time they even had to pass through a tall archway that told them they’d moved from one cemetery to another, though for all Luke could see it made no difference.
She hardly spoke at all along the way — the only time she did speak was when they passed a eerie monument sculpted in the form of a withered, bone-thin little girl. The woman stopped and frowned when she saw that, and she said, “Yes, this is that place.” Said it so softly that even in the hush that surrounded them Luke only barely heard her.
When they reached the woman’s destination she lay herself down on the reclining slope of a grassy knoll, and after a while Luke lay down beside her. And a long while after that they both drifted off to sleep.
He woke when the moon was high overhead. It was a full moon, more than light enough to see by, and there were people laughing hard somewhere far off in the distance. The woman was sitting up, leaning over him. Looking into his eyes.
“Make me warm,” she said. There wasn’t any mistaking her meaning.
Luke . . . Luke wasn’t inclined. She attracted him. There wasn’t any question of that. But the desire he’d felt for her had faded away hours back. Perhaps that was because he felt too much for her, too much sympathy and pain — he’d long since guessed at the nature of the bond that was between them.
Or maybe the absence of desire was just because of the doughy fog that followed him up from sleep.
Maybe. It wasn’t a thing he could be certain of, not even while he felt it.
He responded anyway, because of the bond he felt for her — even though it didn’t seem right, or even good. Maybe he shouldn’t have done it. But how could he not have? She needed him, honestly needed him, and Luke wasn’t made of anything cold enough to let him ignore a need like that.
Whether it was the right thing or not, it worked out well enough. And better than that. Luke reached up, and kissed her, and after a moment his heart followed him into the kiss . . . and after that the night was a perfect-warm moonlit blur.
³ ³ ³
MONDAY
July Eighteenth
EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL
Transcript of a conversation between
Herman Bonner and our agent.
Recorded the evening of 7/18.
H.B.:I’ve failed, Tim.
Agent:Failed, Dr. Bonner? I don’t understand.
H.B.:Yes, failed. Roll up your window. The wind . . . bothers me. I need a President. We need a President. Paul Green was critical to our plans —
A.:I did my best with him, Dr. Bonner. Followed your instructions to the letter. And it went just like you said. I put the . . . preserved . . . appendix into the nutrient bath with the germ culture you gave me, and just like you said, it grew. And kept growing until it was the President, whole and untouched as though he’d never died. Absolutely incredible, even if. . . . How did you get ahold of his appendix, anyway?
H.B.:I took it from his desk. (Laughs.) Paul was such a sentimentalist. After the operation he had it sealed in alcohol and used it as a paper weight.
A.:Ugh.
H.B.:I had little hope of resurrecting Paul. I do not count the mindless, vegetal thing we grew as my failure. I suspected that there was too little of his self to resurrect preserved in the refuse of that operation. It was necessary to make the attempt, but neither of us can be faulted for the result.
A.:Then how did you fail?
H.B.:I failed just now. At Arlington. While you waited for me in this car.
A.:I still don’t understand. What were you trying to do there at the cemetery?
H.B.:I was trying to find a President to replace the one we’ve lost, of course. Last night I sprinkled the graves of seven great men with the bacteria that would recreate them from their remains. And today I returned, and. . . .
(Five minutes of silence on the tape, here.)
A.:(Tentatively.) What happened when you went back to the cemetery?
H.B.:I freed them from their graves. They owed me their lives, damn them! But of the four who woke with their minds intact, none would abide my will. Not even one.
A.:Oh.
(There is no small measure of fear in our agent’s voice at this point, but Bonner does not seem to hear it. This is especially peculiar in light of the fact that Bonner seems to have a sixth sense about these things; every other agent we have planted in his camp has disappeared, thoroughly and untraceably.)
H.B.:Now, while I think of it. There is something we must discuss.
A.:What’s that, Dr. Bonner?
H.B.:(Hesitates.) I know that I can trust you, Tim. Know, in fact, that there is no one else I can trust as I can trust you — not even Reverend George. You alone have faith enough never to doubt me. What I am to say to you now you must share with no one, not even the Reverend. Do you understand me?
A.:Sure, Dr. Bonner. If you say so, I won’t tell another living soul.
H.B.:Good. You understand, don’t you, Tim, that in order to save this world we must destroy it — totally and utterly? You understand that only a world that no longer exists is utterly free from evil?
A.:(A pause. The fear is showing through the agent’s voice again.) Never actually thought of it in exactly those terms. Now that you mention it, though, it does make an awful lot of sense. Still — how could we do a thing like that? We only have a couple dozen missiles, and even those aren’t working just now. Not nearly enough to blow up the world.
H.B.:They’ll be enough. You’re going to help me.
A.:(Confused.) Me? Gosh, Dr. Bonner, I don’t know anything about blowing up the world with a couple-dozen nukes. I’m only a computer technician. Until you helped me find Jesus I was just a tech for the Air Force. I had good clearances, because I used to do maintenance down in the silos, but —
H.B.:Yes. Exactly. I have a plan. Listen closely: this earth is made of geologic plates — plates that are, in comparison to the size of the planet, relatively thin. And these thin plates float atop a vast sea of molten rock. No?
A.:Why, sure. It’s the kind of fact you pick up if you listen close in junior high.
H.B.:And these plates are unstable, a
re they not?
A.:I seem to recall something along those lines. Guess I wasn’t listening that close, back in school.
H.B.:What I need from you are the exact locations of the world’s most unstable spots — the twenty spots which, if they all were simultaneously struck with atomic explosions, would send the world’s crust falling in against itself. We must bathe this world in its own molten fire. And cleanse it.
(There is something unsettling about Herman Bonner’s voice as he speaks these words. He does not sound entirely human.)
A.:Oh Jesus.
H.B.:What?
A.:Nothing, Dr. Bonner. Just a little confused. How am I supposed to get ahold of this information? I’m really not a geologist. Just a computer tech.
H.B.:Your clearances give you access to all sorts of information in the Air Force’s computer network, don’t they? Surely you can find what you need to know.
A.:(A long pause.) I guess they do.
H.B.:Good. Begin the moment we return to Lake-of-Fire. Work as quickly as you can.
A.:Yes sir. Oh, damn — a detour. We’re going to have to get off the Beltway. Hope the access road will get us where we’re going. Well, it’s not like we’ve got any choice — they’ve got it blocked off with tanks. Dr. Bonner, can I ask you a question?
H.B.:Certainly.
A.:You — you’re not really just a person, are you? I mean . . . you aren’t human, are you?
H.B.:(Pleased.) No, Tim. I’m not. (Grunts.) What is that — there on the side of the road?
A.:You mean that man crawling around on his hands and knees?
H.B.:Yes, that man. Stop the car. Pull up alongside him.
A large Post-It note covers the bottom of the final page of the transcript. It reads as follows:
General, we have to stop this man. Stop him now. I know that we don’t want to get involved in fighting here on American soil. I know that there’s no one to give us orders, and that we have no standing orders to cover situations like this. We don’t have a lifetime to sit around contemplating the moral and ethical questions: this guy is crazy. And he’s serious. And there’s a reasonable chance that this scheme of his — the one that involves bombing along the Pacific ring of fire and the Mid-Atlantic ridge — there’s a chance that it just might work. I sure don’t want to be around to find out the hard way. Send in a couple of divisions now. Take these people out, put the whole lot of them under arrest before it’s too late.
