“Where have you been?” he asked me.
“San Francisco.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Hiding from you.”
“What did I ever do to make you fear me, Errol?” Wheeler seemed almost pained. “You were a guest in my house.”
“Krista told me that Dr. Gregory wanted to classify me XT. I decided to run.”
I could see that David Wheeler was surprised by his wife’s betrayal. He was more hurt by that disloyalty, it seemed, than he was by her death.
“What did you do in San Francisco?”
“Lived in the streets, drank wine, got into fights.”
“Where’s GT?”
“He left me long ago. Before I even met you.”
Wheeler stared at me. He sensed that I was more of an opponent than I had been sixteen months earlier.
“The XTs are all dead,” he said.
“Then how could you be looking for GT?”
“The deaths are absolute. The victims are disintegrated, turned into dust. The dead were never identified.”
“You killed them all?”
“Almost,” Wheeler said with a half-smile. “After further testing, Gregory found out that the infection is not communicable. We destroyed the pit that held the contagion, but we left a few of the ghouls alive to study. Come with me.”
He led me to an elevator that went down to the prisoner level of XT-1. Standing there, I remembered my vow to kill him. But he had said that some of the XTs were still alive. If I attacked him, his soldiers would surely slaughter me. In order to help my father’s race, I held back.
The doors opened in the wide hall of cells that I had witnessed so long ago. On my right was the room where the man had sat in the cage filled with carbon monoxide. All of the cells we passed were empty. Some of them contained piles of multicolored dust, marking the passing of demigods.
After a long walk, we came to a door that led to a smaller hall. Here there were five glass-walled cells. Four of these were occupied by prisoners—two men and two women.
One of the men was GT.
He waved at me and mouthed Airy.
“Here is the last of the infestation,” Wheeler proclaimed. “Broken down and destroyed, unable to leave the corpses they inhabit. Our work here has saved the world.”
“Why did you ask about my father if you knew he was alive?”
“To see what you would say.”
It was then that I recommitted myself to Wheeler’s death. I was about to jump on him, when I was grabbed by four strong men who rushed in behind me. They chained me hand and foot and then threw me into the empty glass cage.
I was ranting, screaming, cursing at Wheeler.
“You’re the criminal!” I shouted. “You’re the one who needs to die!”
“I’m not a criminal,” he said. “I didn’t commit genocide. I merely contained a pathogen. You can see that I’ve left some of the specimens alive, here in my own private zoo.”
He grinned, showing all of his teeth. I realized that somehow along the way, the plastic surgeon had gone mad.
33
“Don’t worry, Airy,” a voice in my head said. “He believes that we are defeated, and so we are victorious.”
The other three inmates—an Asian man who wore a name tag that said MONGOOSE, and two young women named Penelope and Renata—were silent.
By that time I was uncertain about what had really happened with me. There was something about GT that made me nervous and afraid, but I couldn’t remember what. And then there was the Wave. It was somewhere . . . San Francisco, I thought.
“He will test you, son,” GT whispered in my mind. “He will push you hard. But rejoice. He can never win, and you, Errol, can never lose.”
GT’s meaning came clear within the next few minutes. Wheeler returned to the cell block with two men wearing nylon protective suits and carrying a metal canister connected to a corrugated plastic hose. They attached the hose’s nozzle to a conduit on my cell. When one of them turned a knob, I could hear the hissing of gas, and I detected a slight sweet odor.
My heart started beating fast and faster; my head felt as if it were under heavy pressure.
I awoke on the cot in my cell. Wheeler was standing outside, looking down on me.
“You died, Mr. Porter.”
“Then why the fuck am I still lookin’ at your ugly face?”
“Well”—he smiled—“almost died. The gas we gave you has no effect on these other monsters. So I guess you’re still human. How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
“Pull yourself together. You have a guest.”
The other glass cells were empty.
“Where are the others?” I asked Wheeler.
“We make the exhibits go into their dens most of the time. To be out here is a privilege that they rarely enjoy. Gregory wanted to see how they reacted to you. It was, once again, a disappointment.”
“Who’s my guest?”
Wheeler smiled and left the cell block.
While I was unconscious, they had dressed me in pale blue cotton hospital pants and a white T-shirt. Looking in the small mirror that hung on the back wall of the cell, I found that my beard and mustache were gone and that my hair had been cut close to the scalp. My face seemed at once younger and older. I was thinking about that when I caught the reflection of Nella walking into the room.
“Baby!” she yelled.
She ran up to the glass and pressed her body against it.
She was wearing a conservative green dress and white pumps.
“Nella.” I was up against the glass, too. “Are you with that guy now?”
“Roger was only stayin’ awhile,” she said.
I thought it was funny that, after all we had gone through, our first words were so petty. But it seemed right that we were talking about jealousies and insecurities in spite of our suffering.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“They arrested me when they got you,” she said. “They brought me here to betray you, Errol. They want me to find out the secret of your father. I told them I would, but it was only so I could get in here to tell you that I love you. I loved you ever since you first came to work at Mud Brothers. You know that, don’t you? I used to stand there next to you, hoping you would ask me out. I always wanted you. I broke up with my old boyfriend the day after our first date. I never told you, because I thought it would scare you off. And then, when you disappeared, I thought you would never know.” She was still up against the glass, her breasts pressed flat under her green dress.
“They arrested me, honey,” I said. “They took me. I tried to call, but your phone was disconnected. I thought you had gone away.”
Her tears rolled down the glass barrier.
“You fool,” she said. “I needed a cell phone, and I didn’t want two bills. You shouldn’t have come back.”
“Oh yes, I should have, too,” I said.
I could see my brown face in the glass, superimposed on Nella’s dark grief. My heart swelled. Three men came. They grabbed Nella and pulled her from the glass wall. With all of her weight, she tried to defy them, but they were the superior force.
Her screaming my name was both pain and hope for me.
Nella knew nothing of what I had been through, but she was still brave and unflinching, risking her own freedom just to tell me that I was her man.
Wheeler came in a few minutes later.
“You must have some kind of power over women, Errol,” he said. “My wife, this girl. What do they see in you?”
“An innocent man being tortured by a fiend,” I said.
He laughed. I had the feeling that he was taking in his own reflection, as I had done when looking at Nella. Maybe all we could see was ourselves, I thought. Maybe that was why the Wave had to flee the planet.
Flee the planet. The words seemed to be right, but I no longer knew what they meant.
“Where did you go, Errol?”
“I already told you.”
“You didn’t show up in the Bay Area until almost four months after you escaped my house.”
I was silent then. The connections were too close to the cave where I sojourned with Veil. And GT? Where was he during that time?
“Where were you before then?” he asked.
“I moved up the coast,” I said. “Hitchhiking and camping.”
“Tell me the places where you stayed.”
“Santa Barbara.” Sweat was running down my back. “On the beach. I begged in the mall downtown for money to eat with.”
“Who did you hang out with?”
“I didn’t have any friends.”
“I don’t believe you, Errol.”
“All you have to do is send your spies up there,” I said. “They’ll prove it.”
“Yes,” the madman replied. “But you better not be lying. Nella is going to be staying here with us—as a kind of a material witness. She’s going to be staying until we get the truth out of you.”
“You can’t hold her,” I said.
“I can do a lot more than hold her, Errol. I can do a lot more than that.”
The wall at the back of my cell rose up, revealing a tiny chamber with a single cot, a toilet, and a sink. Wheeler told me to go in, and I obeyed, quailing in my heart over Nella and my helplessness.
I didn’t know where the Wave was hidden, but I was pretty sure it was in San Francisco. That knowledge alone was too dangerous to hold.
I couldn’t let them hurt Nella.
I couldn’t let them destroy the oldest being in the world.
When the wall came down, I screamed in the dim light of my small cell. Then I sat down on the bunk and brought my head to my knees.
For over an hour, my heart raced and my mind tried to find some way out of my troubles. Once Wheeler found that there was no one who’d seen me in Santa Barbara, he’d come down on Nella or make me detail my days in the cave. I didn’t think I could come up with a believable lie. And he could use drugs to force the truth from me.
I rolled up into a ball on the floor, hating myself for being so helpless. Why had I come back to Los Angeles? I was a fool. A fool.
I fell asleep for only a moment, and the solution came to me: I’d kill myself. That was the only way.
My first thought was to hang myself, but there were no sheets or blankets on the mattress. My cotton pants might have made a good rope, but I couldn’t find anything to hang them from. There wasn’t even enough room for me to run headfirst into the wall. Wheeler had put me in a suicide-proof room.
I sat on the floor, looking at the dull gray wall under the minimal lighting. I must have been sitting there for hours before I came up with the answer.
There was no plug for the shallow zinc sink, but my T-shirt stuffed down the drain did the trick. I filled the basin with warm water and washed my face. Then I plunged my head down and took a deep liquid breath, thinking of the mackerel I had been in a previous life held over in my DNA.
I grasped the sink and stood as long as I could, refusing to exhale the water from my lungs. At first it was almost unbearable, but then everything became pleasant and warm. The light faded, and I felt my feet slipping to the side. Still I held on, and then everything seemed to stop.
34
There was a buff desert that went on forever under a red sun. It was midday. It was always midday. There was only the desert and the heat seething upward. There was no past or future. There was no me. But after many eons of desert and sun, something happened: small bumps appeared along the surface of the land. The bumps grew into mounds that cracked open, and green shoots lanced upward. The bulging heads of the plants flowered as they rose toward the sun, and I came into being realizing that life struggled under the ground. The flowers were yellow and red, and they had voices, loud and shrill voices. A billion billion tiny flower-alarms went off. They were deafening, so I found my hands. I covered my ears. I squatted down and pressed my knees against my hands against my head. But the shrill sound of the yellow and red flowers went on and on. It was a wall of sound, a mountain of sound. I could see it, feel its weight on me. And then he came out of it—GT. Naked again, as he was when I found him. But he wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked me.
“What?”
“Killing yourself. Taking your life away.”
“I can’t betray Nella or the Wave,” I said.
“You couldn’t betray us even if you wanted to. But for the girl, if you live, tell them to come to me.”
GT moved away from me, and as he did, the sound subsided. The flowers withered and died as the sun moved toward an infinite desert horizon. It became colder and darker until I was chilled down to the bone, looking into a world so black that I might as well have been blind.
I was a corpse floating in a lifeless ocean. There was no sun. No light of any kind. Just the frigid embrace of the ocean, which was also Death. There was no more Errol. Just the memory of him. That memory held few details, no aspirations, and it was unraveling until soon there would be only the cold.
And then there was light.
It was a cold light far above my eyes. It was as if I had no body, as if my eyes saw only at a distance. I had died and returned into a world where there was no grace or comfort or even pain.
For a long time I wondered if Death was a great mausoleum where the dead were put into long drawers of cold, pure light. This idea made the most sense to me.
But as I watched the light, I began to see irregularities. Fibers and crystal, filaments and pulse.
It was a lightbulb, a mechanical thing hovering above the gurney I was laid out on, in the infirmary of Dr. Wheeler’s XT-1 command center.
“How are you, Errol?” Wheeler asked.
“I thought I was dead,” I uttered. My voice was hoarse and cracked. It hurt my lungs to speak.
“You said that you were in Santa Barbara, but you weren’t, were you?”
“No,” I said, obeying the dictum of a dream.
“Where were you?”
“In a cave where the XT had fully surfaced. A place far in the coastal mountains.”
Wheeler’s smile was maniacal. “And what was your mission?”
“To preserve part of the life-form.”
“So that it could somehow take control in San Francisco?”
“No. It was only trying to survive, to get away from you.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know all of it,” I said honestly. “The Wave had concentrated all of its knowledge into that one sample of itself. Like I said, it wanted only to survive.”
“And where is it?”
“GT knows,” I said.
My body was returning to life. I could feel pinpricks of pain up and down my arms and legs. The ache filled me with a kind of masochistic joy.
“Kill him now,” a voice said.
I couldn’t see him, but I knew it was Dr. Gregory, Wheeler’s partner in genocide.
“No,” David Wheeler said. “We need him to make GT give us what we need.”
I struck a deal with the army’s scientists. I would enter GT’s cell and get him to tell me what they needed. In return, I would be forgiven my treason and allowed to go off with Nella. I accepted their offer even though I had begun to believe that GT had never spoken to me, that it was all just a dream.
GT’s glass cell was empty when they marched me in. They opened his cubicle, locked me inside, and then the back wall rose up, revealing the black youth who claimed to be my father.
“Airy,” he said with a smile.
He walked up and put his arms around me. I returned his loving embrace with a Judas hug.
“Why did they bring you here?” he asked.
“Said that they wanted to see how we interacted,” I said. “I think that Gregory thinks I’m one of you.”
“You are of me,” GT said. “You’re my son.”
“What’s going on,
Dad?” I asked. “Why don’t they kill you all?”
The corners of GT’s eyes got tight, just as my father’s had when he suspected that I was lying.
“Don’t you remember, boy?”
“Help me,” I said. “If I don’t find out, they’ll kill Nella. If you love me, you’ll tell them. I don’t want her to die.”
Even now, looking back on that moment, I don’t know what I felt. Was I trying to betray GT or doing what I thought was right? I had seen and dreamed so much that I no longer knew what was real and what was not. All I could do was move forward and hope that in doing so, things would work out fine.
“You want me to betray the Wave?” he asked.
“You’ve already lived a long life,” I said. “Please, let us live.”
35
We were both manacled hand and foot. GT’s restraints were three times thicker than mine. I wondered how he managed to walk through the woods with all of that weight on him. As it was, he moved slowly, dragging along like a sloth.
There were three guards armed with the specially built plastic guns used to kill XTs. GT had led us to a place in the woods about three miles from the cave I’d lived in for three months.
For all I knew, he was leading Wheeler to the last vestige of the Wave. But there was nothing I could do about it. All I knew was that I couldn’t let Nella die and that I was powerless between man and monster (though I didn’t know then which was which).
“Where are we?” Wheeler asked GT.
“In the woods,” he said. “In the woods.”
“Don’t play with me, thing. We have your son. I’ll kill him right here if you don’t show us the contagion.”
GT looked at the mad plastic surgeon and then at the soldiers who stood at his side.
We were in a clearing where a stream ran through and two oak trees stood. The sun was high, and there was a mild breeze. I felt a yearning to be alone in that spot, to be free of my manacles and the madman, of buried secrets and guilt.
The Wave Page 15
