As he watched his waist spread, his hair fall out, his tragic resemblance to Elmer Fudd deepen, he tried to find words to tell himself in the mirror, some formal token of surrender of the last and greatest dream of his sad little life.
And then, long past the eleventh hour, it came.
True love, sealed in the first clash of eyes. Two hearts beating in tandem, two minds shedding cold cocoons of loneliness to join together in a Tiepolo sky of bold, infinite possibility, all before he even knew her name.
Francine Klowden sat in the front row of his third-period Junior English Composition & Literature class. She would be sixteen in October.
He was forty-eight.
It could have been a scandal, with a man more forceful, a student less modest, but he held himself back as much for fear of rejection as the impropriety of it, and told himself the signs she seemed to send him were wishful thinking.
Francine was plain and chubby, and favored unflattering sweaters and skirts, and was twice as shy as he. She loved Elizabethan and Romantic poetry, and wrote well. He let her compose sonnets for extra credit, and was shocked out of his paralysis by what he read. They were self-conscious and unsure of their imagery, and took frightful liberties with the rigid Petrarchan meter, but they burned with a submerged metaphysical lust that stoked the dead coals of his own love of language, and his love of love.
They were for him, she said. And she wrote more. He replied, taking up his old fountain pen and chewing up fine Venetian paper journals in search of the words he’d given up hope of ever getting out. John Donne he was not, but his fumblings somehow found their mark.
All the rest of that year and through the summer, they met and read and discussed poetry. He sent a few of her less ardent pieces to an amateur journal edited by an old schoolmate, who printed them. Her gratitude knew no bounds. She ran out of words, and a week before her seventeenth birthday, she offered herself to him.
The Loser weeps now, as the sweetness of those days and nights came back to him. The meetings in secret; trips taken under forged school field trip documents; the things they shared, the poetry that flowed from them as they helped each other to grow. Senior year was torture, until she arranged to take an independent creative writing period with him. They were almost caught so many times, a delicious game for her, but the terror of exposure nearly killing him every afternoon. When she was eighteen next fall, he would quit teaching, and they would marry.
They redecorated his bachelor pad, consecrating a well-lit storage room as an office for her to begin her brilliant career. Every moment of every day, he looked over his shoulder for the inevitable blow; discovery and scandal, blackmail, or, worst of all, a change of heart. For though he had never known a girl so strong of mind or anyone so passionate, he knew she was young.
Her poetry grew surer and broader in its themes, incandescent footprints in her path to womanhood. She still wrote him love poems, and they still nailed his heart, but they seemed paler, less mature, than the blossoming body of her serious work.
Just before graduation, she sold a poem to a prestigious small-press literary journal, about a caterpillar. He thought it a bit trite, but never told her so; what really gnawed at him was the pensive stillness of the piece, that suggested Francine had no idea what changes the transformation would bring. It had not yet come.
When she turned eighteen, they dropped the facade. Her mother threw a tantrum, but ultimately acceded, as he vowed to put her through college. There was a brief uproar at the high school, which he undercut by tendering his resignation. When she moved in, they made love all night, and at sunrise, he gave her the ring he’d made for her.
They honeymooned in Paris and Acapulco. He bought her a Mercedes, paid her tuition for USD, set her up with credit cards, sailing and riding lessons. Everything she could want, everything she asked for and more. With all the things he gave her, he never saw he was building a wall, until he saw all of them together in one place, when she disappeared.
He was at a gem show in Phoenix, when the police called him. Francine’s car was found parked at the mall, where it had sat overnight. Inside, they found her wallet, with all her credit cards, her ID, her cash, and all the pieces of jewelry he’d made for her, neatly wrapped in the Hermes Water Lilies scarf he bought her at Giverny.
Of Francine herself, no sign. No witnesses saw her at the mall, no activity on her cards, nothing missing from the house. By elimination, he deduced she was wearing an old sweater and some jeans from high school, not any of the fine clothing he’d bought for her.
The police were very conciliatory as they explained to him that there was no theft, no foul play, and no trail, so they had to conclude that Francine had voluntarily absconded. They would follow up on the missing persons report, but unless he wanted to hire a private detective, he was not liable to find her, because she clearly didn’t want to be found.
They looked at her poetry, their love letters, his alibi. They tracked his finances for big cash payments, probed his former colleagues, and decided he couldn’t kill a fly. They stopped looking.
He went home and sat in his empty nest for days, with no disturbance. He didn’t have to unplug the phone, because it never rang. Mail piled up at the front door, but none of it was addressed to him. He wandered from room to room, looking from one Francine-shaped void to another, and crying silently, touching things and trying to conjure her up.
Gone, and nobody was looking. Gone, because—well, just look at him! With her whole life ahead of her, with her talent just starting to take flight, she would have been a weakling or a fool to stay under his wing, this lecherous old goat who snatched her out of her teenaged insecurity and raped her with his authority and his smutty doggerel and his lavish bribes. Too shy, too sweet to make a scene, yet she had to escape him, or he would smother her to death, before she ever truly knew life.
Had he done that? Had he crushed her into a cage? Had he left her no choice but to abandon her whole life and flee? He knew her, as he knew no other human being. He trusted her with his life. She would never—would she?
Who wouldn’t?
It was obvious to the police and the rest of the world, but he could never accept it. He read the poems she wrote for him, the insatiable fire of their forbidden love turning yellow and mildewed in the dank corners of his empty house. He read them until they smoldered under his gaze, and he knew in his bones, that she would never leave him, not like this.
She was not on the run; she was lost. She was taken by someone who knew that the world would look at him and give up the search, who knew how to bury his trail so no one would ever see any crime but his, in trying to keep her.
He wandered from room to room amid the junk of his life, and looked for clues. He looked so hard, his beady eyes straining his bifocals until he saw through the walls, the furniture, the stacks of unread books, to the world outside. He looked for some sign of her, and where she went, where they took her, where she must be now, waiting, wishing for him to find her.
He looked and looked, and he has been looking so long that he can only see lost things, and dream only of the dark where all the lost things go when nobody is looking, all the things the world has forgotten but still pines for, and all he has dreamt of is building a bridge, a door, to that lost place, because, he believes, that is where she is, so that is where I will go.
The Loser reached into the cooler and brushed off the shaggy black carpet of mold that softened the angles of the contents. His hand dug down into ossified sludge and insect casings, pried loose something that gave way with a gasp of outraged delicacy, and lifted it out of the cooler. Green-black and caked with slime, yet unmistakable. A skull.
Rope had not been idle during the Loser’s tearful reverie, backing up to the cage door to recover the shotgun, but having it gave him no new answers. The shotgun only had one idea, and he wasn’t ready to try it, yet. He had never shot a man, but he always believed that he could, just not a small, strange helpless man who was crying ov
er a box of bones.
Which left him standing there in the cage doorway again, unsure which way to turn, and the emptiness behind him beckoning him to look, look closer, he didn’t have to go through if he doubted, he had only to stick his head in, and he’d see—
The Loser shut the cooler and put his hat back on. His flushed face looked like wet hamburger, and his mouth worked silently, like he was reciting a rosary.
Rope’s brain tried to catalog his options, but he knew nothing about what anyone wanted, or what would happen when they got it.
There was no one between him and the hole. None of this was his problem. His problems could all be solved right here, right now—
The Loser got to his feet and bent over the cooler. Behind him, something blocked the watery green sunlight from the door, then stumbled into a case filled with an odd assortment of fine china.
Boom! A gunshot, and sparks and a howling ricochet off the chicken wire fence. “Goddamn you!” Igor screamed. “Is that what you came for?”
Rope dove into a branching aisle, away from the cage and the Loser and the shooting, of which there was much more.
“Fine then, fucker! Take it and go!”
Rope duck-walked back along the aisle, catching a glimpse of the Loser through cracks in the wall of junk.
The little man grunted and lifted the cooler, arms straining as if it was much heavier for him than it would be for anyone else. A bullet slapped his left shoulder blade and came out his chest, but seemed not to bother him at all.
“I found her!” Igor shouted as he reloaded. “I didn’t do anything to her, I just found her in the dump just like that, same as the others! Nobody claimed her, Loser! Finders, keepers—”
Rope ducked lower and nearly jumped out of his skin as someone stepped on his fingers.
He bit back a scream and looked at the gun in Igor’s remaining hand. Igor kicked aside towers of treasure for a clear shot at the Loser, who began to walk towards the cage. “Finders keepers,” Igor kept saying, as he stepped over Rope, “Losers, weepers.”
Rope crawled to the door, trying not to touch anything. The bunker and everything in it thrummed with the stored energy of a million ghosts of lost, beloved things. It was like a big can filled with nitroglycerin, clamped in a gigantic paint-shaker. And with every step the Loser took, with every curse Igor howled, the tension escalated.
“I made it!” Igor roared. “It’s mine! Don’t you go in there, or you’ll see what happens—” Igor emptied the gun into the Loser’s back, but didn’t knock him down.
The Loser paused at the door to the cage and turned to look over his shoulder. Rope couldn’t see his eyes behind his spectacles, but tears still streamed down his face, and his mouth still worked.
The walls of the aisle quivered as Igor lurched after the Loser. Igor threw the gun at him, but it sailed by his head and disappeared into the hole.
Rope shouted, “Boss!” too late to do any good. The whole roomful of junk seemed to lift up a little bit, tired old soldiers rising to attention, then slammed together, closing over Igor’s head. Like logs in a whirlpool, the junk floated and circled counter-clockwise round the cage.
“I found you,” the Loser said, and stepped into the hole.
Rope let the shotgun tumble out of his hands and clung to the doorframe. There was no one left to tell him what to do, except the hole.
He could go in after the Loser. He could reject everything the world had refused to give him, and go to the other side, where his lost family and a real life waited for him, where the Loser’s dead woman might rise up and make him human with a kiss, where Igor had been dumping barrels of toxic waste for years and years—
The hole became the eye of a cyclone that yawned and swallowed the cage as whirling junk smashed it in. The concussion sucked the air out of his lungs, the vacuum engulfed the contents of the bunker in one endless, howling gulp. The hole would not need to persuade him, now, to do what it wanted. It was coming for him.
He grabbed the doorknob and yanked against the mounting vacuum. His shoulders popped, almost ripping out of their sockets, but the hole seemed to lapse for just a moment to take another breath of everything, and he slammed the door shut.
Rope backed away from the door, afraid to take his eyes off it, though the noises from behind him clamored for his attention. Rat-jackals chased each other around the bunker, rending each other’s cancerous polyvinyl hides apart. The meat-trees gyrated and tried to tear their fleshy roots out to get to higher ground.
Rope ran for the truck, got in and reached for the ignition. No keys. He must have given them back to Igor, or they were lost.
The bunker screamed. The walls buckled and the corrugated tin roof went all concave, the mortar between the cinderblocks spiderwebbed with cracks.
He got out of the truck and ran.
The ground shook. The sky boiled, and rain that had nothing to do with water splattered the valley, burning his skin. A chill wind roared down into the hollow, scooping up debris and lofting it at the bunker, the walls of which were caving in brick by brick, so it seemed to whistle a dozen deafening tunes as it was devoured from within.
Rope clawed at the ground, but it crumbled in his hands or broke open and showered him with garbage. When he looked behind him, the bunker was gone, and the hole was eating up the hollow. The truck balked on its creaking parking brake, but the gravel beneath its tires subsided and the wind hurled it end over end into the hole.
Crawling, he reached the top and climbed over a hillock of black plastic bags, where the wind was only a noise and a tugging on his shirt. The roaring void abruptly cut out, like a vacuum cleaner sucking its own plug out of the outlet.
For a long while, as the blue shadows of the abandoned Navy housing projects shrank away and left him broiling in the sun, he lay on the bed of trash, just breathing.
Something dug into his hip. He took out the iPod. His fingers fumbled over it, unable to decipher the smooth surface or the inscrutable icons on the bumps that stood in for buttons. Igor told him never to touch the Loser’s stuff, and he winced at the memory of his boss’s arm rotting off when whatever he tried to do with the baby had backfired.
It bleeped, and the screen lit up, said, “HAILEY’S IPOD” and showed a list of songs he’d never heard before. Somebody’s favorite song started to leak out of the earphones.
He looks closer at it and sees the queasy sheen Igor talked about, the haunting rainbow glow of latent magic. He can see it now, and if he can see it, he can gather it, and wield it. He can build another bridge to where the lost things go, and cross it, and say goodbye to all this—
He cocked his arm to throw the iPod back into the hollow.
This was bad magic, chasing after lost things. He was not a lost thing, not trash. He was right here, and he was all that he had, all that he needed. There was nothing lost for him to find, and nowhere else for him to go, and that was all good news.
He slipped the iPod back in his coveralls and walked to the nearest fence, bus fare jingling in his pocket. He would find the owner, and return it; maybe face to face, maybe as a secret delivery. He had no idea what would happen then, but he knew that some new kind of magic would reveal itself in the deed.
Municipal Grid 17 wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where they went berserk and smashed windows when the lights went out, but Morton still bombarded Stu Fiedler with panicked phone calls while he was getting the batteries recharged. Fiedler told Morton that if he had a brainstorm for how to rush the job without going to the gas chamber, he was all ears.
The new cold fusion system used the first truly clean-burning, inexhaustible fuel, but there were still major supply issues.
The power station itself was lit by a cranky dinosaur of a backup generator that still burned biodiesel. It was the only light for two miles in any direction.
Morton waited at the door for Fiedler’s truck. Sweat plastered his sole surviving lock of hair into an inverted question mark on his ruddy forehe
ad. “What kept you? Are they rioting?”
Fiedler pushed the loaded dolly into the control room and over to the primary generator. Even with all the insulation and tanks of liquid nitrogen, the new model took up less than half the space of the turbines from the old system. “Relax, Mort. There’s not even traffic. I got the runaround, though… I had to try five hospitals.”
“Ridiculous! They’ve got to clean up these snarls in the distribution, or they’re just setting us up to fail.” Morton pulled on gloves and donned a welder’s mask, then turned to the hatch in the belly of the generator. Black frost crumbled as he wrenched the hatch open with a pair of long tongs. The cold that wafted out was like Christmas on Pluto.
Fiedler averted his eyes and pushed the dolly up to the yawning mouth, then backed away to suck on a nicotine pop.
Morton slotted the batteries into the generator and slammed the hatch. “Where did you get these?”
The batteries had been warm, like loaves of aluminum bread, like newborn babies. Fiedler scrubbed frost from his eyebrows. “Does it matter?”
Morton flipped the mask up. Spiky puffs of crystallized breath floated out of his mouth. “Sure, it matters... not the way you’re thinking, but... well, if we have to listen to it all night...” His hands shook as he tugged off the gloves.
Fiedler tossed the spent pop stick in the trash and went over to the board. “It still bugs you?”
“I won’t pretend it doesn’t.”
Fiedler threw the big switch. “Nothing gets to you, unless you let it.”
The generator hummed and the batteries squealed as the circuit closed. Both men looked at each other, then at their feet as, like steam pouring off the big, frigid machine, the voices leaked out.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 19
