by S. E. Grove
“We used to come here, you know,” Hoffman said. He rubbed the blond scruff of his chin, smiling a little. “Not here, right here, but the coast. Lila liked to swim in the ocean.”
“Yeah, I know.”
His eyes returned to me, his short voyage to the past ended. “I read about her death in the news,” he said.
I looked down at my walking shoes and then, with effort, lifted my head to face his false sympathy, his expressions of consolation, so heavy with the condescending certainty that God arranged all things for a greater good. He didn’t say them. Maybe he could see the sharp bristles in my eyes.
“She was beautiful. Like you.” He smiled. “And she had soul. She was like the wild elk at the Point. Graceful and sure and totally unself-conscious. Never selfish. Never cruel.”
Never too smart, either, I thought. Those elk are easy prey. “Yup. A real free spirit,” I said. “She would have been right at home in the summer of love.” I could not resist just a little jab, but he seemed not to notice or not to mind.
“That’s right,” he said, smiling. “That’s how she was. She didn’t just belong in it. She was a summer of love. She seemed to bring warmth into the room wherever she went.” He paused. “I was very hurt when I read of her passing. She meant a lot to me.”
I didn’t ask how he could afford either sentiment. Clearly Hoffman’s brand of spirituality came with a heavy dose of emotional indulgence. This was my chance to move in. I had to drop the sarcasm and go for it. “I’m glad to hear you say that,” I said. “It’s why I came to find you.”
His eyes refocused. He looked at me, not wary but prepared: the look of an expert salesman who knows he’s about to get the pitch and knows he’s too good at the game to be worried. “What’s up?” he asked. He put his hands on his hips and stood with an easy slouch. The man in charge. The man people turned to for faith. For healing. For love. For favors.
I didn’t try to pretend otherwise.
“It’s my brother, Calvino. Your son.”
Hoffman listened to my story from start to finish without interruption. His face didn’t change much, except for when I mentioned how Cal and I had found Mom’s body. Then he blinked like he was trying not to wince. When I explained the situation with Cass and Tabby and the looming deadline, he got very focused. He crossed his arms. I could see him thinking.
“So . . .” he finally said, into the silence I left. “You want me to take a blood test to prove I’m Cal’s father. Then sign a document asserting my paternal rights and my willingness to take responsibility for Cal’s parenting.”
“But you don’t have to actually parent him if you don’t want to,” I clarified, cringing at the rushed sound of my own voice. I slowed down. “Cass and Tabby and I have that covered. Cal is a happy kid, really. All he needs is to get out of that place, and this is the best way to do it.”
Hoffman stroked his beard again, the thumb and forefinger running over his jaw in a practiced way. “I’ve never met Calvino,” he said quietly. “Though I knew Lila was pregnant. She shut me out after she learned she was expecting.”
There wasn’t anything in that for me, as Philip Marlowe says, so I waited.
Hoffman’s look grew more remote as he stared into the valley below him, where the fog was wrapping and unwrapping the buildings like Christmas ornaments in tissue paper. “Did Lila ever tell you about how we met?” he asked.
“She never told me much about you,” I said frankly. “I was what—seven?” A little young to be telling your daughter about your lover, dummy, I thought.
“We met at the bookstore where she worked,” he said. He was far away again, in that bookshop eleven years ago, where the shelves were so high you could hide for a few hours in a back corner and no one would notice. Ratty chairs with broken springs. Rugs covered with food stains. Thousands and thousands of books. It was a rat’s warren. A book lover’s dream. “I asked her for a philosophy collection—I don’t even remember which, actually—and she got this scornful look in her eye. ‘Philosophy,’ she said. ‘Unemotion for the unemotional.’” Hoffman laughed. “Like it was so despicable she couldn’t stand it. ‘It’s philosophers who are responsible for the way we worship reason blindly. False idols,’ she said dismissively. Then she walked me over to the philosophy section and said, ‘There is only one author in this section worth reading. Don’t bother with the one you’re looking for. Read this. He has passion.’ She handed me Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard.”
That sounded like Mom. Not so subtle with the reading recommendations. And I’d heard the line about worshipping reason before. A few months into high school I asked her about whether the rules of moral reasoning changed with time or if they had been the same when she went to school. She looked at me with interest; something flickered in her eyes. “Of course they were different. None of these things are set in stone.” I tried to wrap my head around that.
“They want you to worship reason, Talia,” she said, “but only their reason. Why do you think that is? Though I can’t persuade you that they’re wrong, maybe I can try to persuade you to listen to your instincts. Do you think reason can solve everything? Do you think our instincts are so awful that they drive us to do terrible things?” I gaped at her. It was all way beyond me. “It’s okay,” she said with a smile, putting her palm on my cheek. “You’ll figure out your own answers. I’m just asking you not to believe theirs without thinking about them yourself.”
What was perplexing to me seemed sweet to Hoffman. He smiled at the memory. “I knew the book, of course. But it was different, having it handed to me by a beautiful, imperious woman who said my entire life’s work, my entire field of study, was meaningless with the exception of this volume. I read it many times in the months that followed, while Lila and I were together. After she left me, I kept reading it. She could not have known the significance it would have.”
Hoffman turned to look at me, and his blue eyes burned. “It’s the book that brought me to God.” I hadn’t noticed him do it, but he had stepped nearer. He was only a couple feet away from me now. “Do you know it?”
I shook my head and resisted moving away. “Kierkegaard rings a bell.”
“It’s about Abraham. In the Old Testament. Who was asked by God to sacrifice his son. ‘God tested Abraham and said to him, take Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering on the mountain that I shall show you.’ Kierkegaard tries to fathom what Abraham must have felt, as he took the slow journey to the hilltop, agonizing the loss that awaited him. Only to find that God would not require the sacrifice of him after all. The book is about hope. And about finding faith in resignation.”
I looked back at Hoffman, letting him see into me. I understood he was looking for hope, and I could hardly tell if the thing I felt would pass for hope or not. My fragile high wire through the fog, made of stretched logic and brittle persistence. I couldn’t remember the feel of real hope, the hope I’d known as a child. But I could recall the effect: the way you are lifted upward with a great swell of near-dread, as if someone were holding you suspended over a cloud. Hoffman stared at me, his gaze both promising and demanding.
It was compelling. I could see why all those people in bonnets followed him around.
“I would love to be Calvino’s father,” Hoffman said, the intensity dropping abruptly like a wave that has finally crashed and left you standing, not drowned. He smiled. “Not just on paper. To really be his father. When Lila vanished from my life, I thought I had to give him up, the way Abraham had to give up Isaac. But now I find that God has had mercy on me.”
I didn’t know what to say. Part of me was imagining a torrent of events that began with dragging Hoffman down the hill to Cass and Tabby’s car and ended with pulling Cal out of a padded room at RealCorp. But another part of me was wondering if in Hoffman’s mind, the series of events ended with Cal
here, at Mordecai’s Hill, gazing at him adoringly from the front row of the pews. It doesn’t matter, I said to myself firmly. It really doesn’t matter. New Puritans are a better fate than vivisection at RealCorp.
“Thank you,” I said aloud to Hoffman. “Thank you so much.”
He basked in it for a couple seconds: my gratefulness and his sense of—what?—religiously reasoned vindication?
I was about to segue from profound gratitude to businesslike haste when something down the hill caught Hoffman’s eye. Throughout our conversation, I’d been facing the splintered church and he’d been facing the valley. Now I saw his eyes narrow. “Is that smoke?” he asked. I turned.
It was hard to see them because of the fog, but then the fog shifted and they stood out clearly: slow-moving mounds of smoke, piled high like dark batting over the Victorian house. As we watched the smoke build and slowly dissipate, a long scream suddenly cut into the air. High and winding and agonized. It was not a scream of surprise. It was a scream of anticipated pain.
Hoffman stepped forward, about to burst into a run, and I stopped him. “No,” I said. “No. You cannot go down there. Look.” I pointed, and in a moment he saw what I saw. Behind a thin layer of mist, chasing across the footpaths and through the tall grass, dozens of Fish swam across the valley.
They had followed me.
28
NATALIA
OCTOBER 14—AFTERNOON
I took out De rerum. First I sent Joey a message that said Dozens fish. Hide. Then I tapped my location on the map and sent it to Officer Gao with another message: Need help. Fish. Estimate 30+.
It took me about seven seconds. In that time, Hoffman remained standing with a look of paralyzed indecision. As I put De rerum away, another scream pealed out across the valley, piercing through the fog.
“I have to go,” Hoffman said.
“Do you have a clone army? Or a tank? Because that is about the only thing that might stop them.”
“I can’t just let them . . .” He trailed off, not wanting to name the horrors he was imagining.
“If you go down there, you won’t be able to stop them, either. You’re doing as much here as you would do there.” I took his arm. “We should take cover. They’ll come this way at any moment.” I put my hand up to his face and turned it toward me. His eyes were wide and haunted. “Dylan,” I said. “I am good at calculating these kinds of odds. We don’t have a chance. Please believe me—we will not make a difference.”
For a moment he just stared. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “If they’re all going to die I have to be there.”
He pulled away from me and began running down the hill. I watched him. I watched him go like he was Cal himself, plunging downhill into a lake full of merciless Fish.
Then I ran after him. I tucked my bag against my side and put my walking shoes to work. My quads protested; they were still getting over those eight-minute miles. As I pounded down the grassy slope I considered that Hoffman had surprised me. Two acts of generosity in the span of five minutes: one probably somewhat self-interested, the other one entirely not. I had to admire him just a little. Maybe Mom wasn’t such a sucker after all.
When I caught up to him, he gave me a look. “You should stay in the church,” he panted. “Cal needs you.”
“Cal needs you,” I said. “I’m no use to him without you.”
Hoffman didn’t say anything to this. Maybe in his confused analogy to Abraham and Isaac, he’d decided God was pulling another trick on Abraham.
We reached the bottom of the hill, and I pulled Hoffman to a stop. “Behind me,” I said, showing him the baton I was holding.
He nodded and stepped in beside me. We jogged along the dirt road that led to the cluster of buildings, letting our breathing settle. Now that we’d arrived, there strangely didn’t seem to be anything going on. The air around us was silent. I didn’t like that. As we came to a low point before the rise that led to the Victorian house, we saw a smear of blood in the dust, along with the remnants that had caused it. Two hands, cut off at the wrist, one facing up, the other palm down like it was patting the dirt.
“Good God,” Hoffman said. His fingers seized my shoulder and gripped hard.
I stopped. “We can go back.”
“No,” Hoffman said sharply, on a quick release of breath.
I heard running footsteps behind us, but the fog obscured the runner. I drew Hoffman aside into the tall grass and pushed him down. A lone Fish came into view, probably back from the pursuit of some quarry who had fled the buildings. He was young, with a muscle shirt and camouflage pants and military boots. He carried a short sword in each fist, pumping them back and forth as he ran. When he was a foot past me, I jumped out, slamming the baton down on his neck. Before he could turn I used the lipstick, right where his kidneys would be. The soldier crumpled, the swords still clenched in his fists, and he lay in the road folded up on his knees like a warrior-monk at prayer.
Hoffman was watching with a look of glazed shock. The hands in the dust had already thrown him; nothing would make much of a difference now. “We can stay here,” I offered. “Or go back to the church.”
He shook his head obstinately and climbed out of the grassy rut beside the road. Silently cursing Hoffman’s misguided impulse to martyrdom, I walked beside him toward the buildings. The Victorian house was burning in a slow, smoldering fashion, like damp wood in a stove. The fog kept the flames from leaping to the grass all around it, but I could see that the fire would eventually get adventurous and make the jump, and then all the hills around us would be ablaze. As we neared, another scream erupted, startling in its closeness. It came from the barn.
We came upon the building on silent footsteps, and the sounds from inside began to reach us. Sobbing. A thrashing sound, as if someone was tossing and turning in a pile of hay. A saw biting into wood. When we stood a few steps from the door, I turned and stopped Hoffman in his tracks. “We can’t just walk in there,” I whispered.
“I have to,” he said blankly.
“Do you want to help them, or do you just want to die with them?”
He blinked at me like he was trying very hard to understand the meaning of the question. If Glout were here he’d be telling Hoffman about the chemistry of shock, I thought. “I want to help them,” Hoffman said, his voice barely audible.
“Do you have any weapons, any explosives? Gasoline?”
Hoffman shook his head over and over. “No. Nothing.” He paused. “We have candles.”
I refrained from rolling my eyes. “Great,” I said. “Perfect. Can you get them?”
He turned to look at the Victorian house. “They’re in there.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
“To get the candles?” He blinked at me again.
“That’s right. I have a plan. The candles are going to help.”
It was a little underhanded, I reflected, as I steered Hoffman away from his intended self-sacrifice in order to pursue an utterly useless bundle of candles, but there was no way I was going to let him get chopped up into pieces. We walked over to the porch, which was still untouched by the fire; it had started at the rear of the house.
I opened the tattered screen door for Hoffman and followed him into a foyer heavy with dark wood. “Let me go first,” I whispered. He nodded. “Which way?” Hoffman pointed to a corridor. I took it, and as we moved on I realized we were spared the worst of the smoke because the fire had started on an upper floor. A large dining room with more wood—wainscoting, long tables—met us halfway. Then a kitchen with wooden countertops and wooden cabinets. In the middle of the room was an island with three-inch butcher block. The fire was going to have a real blast when it discovered the first floor.
“They’re in the pantry,” Hoffman whispered, pointing. Past the kitchen island, where someone had been chopping scallions, stood an open door to a room wit
h white shelves and neatly stacked jars. I took a step toward it.
That’s when the kitchen screen door opened. Bad Lipstick and two buddies: the cowboy and the cane cutter, both of whom had seemingly not changed a fragment of their attire since our rendezvous in Japantown. This time, I noticed, Bad Lipstick was playing it safe. In addition to her usual little switchblade, she carried a handgun.
I pushed Hoffman down toward the floor so that the kitchen island stood between him and the Fish. “Hey,” I said to the girl.
She smiled. Both the gun and the blade hung by her sides, relaxed. “Hey,” she replied.
“Nice of you guys to show up,” I said.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
I considered her easy posture. Her two sidekicks seemed to have no interest in talking, but they were eyeing me and the kitchen island like a pair of cats drooling at the canary cage. “I’ve gotta hand it to you,” I said to her. “You really know how to hold a grudge.”
“I’m only in it for the cash,” she said pertly. “You’re worth a lot more than my last kill, only five thou.”
“Oh, was that someone else who managed to leave you scrambling on the subway?”
She didn’t bite. Her smile widened. “I’m just glad I was the one to find you,” she said. “Everyone else is scoring low in the barn.”
“Yeah, we heard,” I said, looking past her at the door. “But they’re still looking to score high.”
This time she did bite. She glanced over her shoulder at the screen door and I threw the knife I’d taken from the counter. It hit her in the ribs. She flailed as she fell, shooting the automatic with no aim at all. The two men stepped forward, but I had already swung onto the island and caught the cowboy in the neck with the full force of my right foot. The cane cutter had more lead time and he used it. He raised the machete and brought it down toward me hard, and I rolled away, letting it thwack into the wooden butcher block. I swear I felt the breeze on my back.
