He went over to it and picked it up. It was probably a satellite phone; it was the size of a large old-fashioned receiver, not like the modern cell phones at all. Underneath the buttons for dialing was a two-inch LED screen. There was a message on the screen. Its arrival must have been the source of the beep. It was in Hebrew, something Aharon supposed was encryption enough in most parts of the world. It said:
23
“Yaakov called the name of the place:
Peniel/Face of God, for:
I have seen God,
face to face
and my life has been saved.”
Calder was crawling across the face of the globe. That’s the way it felt. In his mind he was crawling, grasping fistful of earth by fistful of earth, moving one bloodied knee at a time. It was like crawling into his own cerebellum. Every hour, every moment, brought new memories. Few of them were pleasant.
Once, asleep sitting upright in the airplane, he’d had a memory-dream. He remembered himself—Calder Farris—screaming at his father. Calder remembered growing up with the hard man, and that he’d been beaten often. In this particular instance he had had enough, and in an unspeakable rage he’d shoved his father against the wall and pounded his face with his fist again and again. Then he had put back his head and howled. He awoke with the woman shaking him, a murmured whine still on his lips.
It occurred to him that the boy in the dream, Calder Farris, himself, had lived with that howl inside him for a long time. That was what had enabled him to do certain things, like almost kill his father and slaughter that Silver male and then cut him up like an animal. Perhaps it was the damage that had happened to his mind, but somewhere along the way he had lost the howl.
He didn’t want that rage, but losing it made him weak.
The woman was weakening him, her presence alone. Bringing her had been a mistake. It was hard enough just trying to cope, trying to hold it together against a flood of memories that were as sharp and painful as the pins and needles of an awakening limb.
What did she want from him? Why couldn’t she just leave him alone? It felt like his old job, his old life, was being foisted upon him before he was ready. He was sick; couldn’t she see that? She had tried to talk to him, early on, while they were in an airport restaurant in Poland. She had been talking about some weapons and her words had so disturbed him, had caused such black ripples to burn in his mind, that he had allowed a glass to tumble from his hand and shatter on the floor. She had shut up then.
After they left Poland, he had so much to deal with that he had stopped pretending she was his prisoner. He had even tried to ditch her, but she had stuck to him like glue. She looked at him with such concern, asked about his head, gave him pills that eased the pain. He had no idea why she was doing any of it, but he was too confused to resist.
All he could do was try to hold on as information flew at him. Planes, for example. At first they had seemed exotic, almost spooky, even though he had known what they were. But traveling on them, sitting in the cramped seats, feeling annoyed at the quality of the food, even the feeling he got in his ears on landing—these sensations were very familiar.
And the sun—the sun! It had been cloudy in Poland, and he hadn’t even remembered about the sun until it came out at sunrise on their flight to Paris. He’d stared out the window at it, felt its heat on his face, and known real joy.
It was not that he’d ever liked Centalia. He had survived there, nothing more. But once he saw the sun he felt a sense of possessiveness, of happiness, of pride for this world. He felt that he was home.
The hardest thing to reconcile was the people. How many people there were in this world, of every shape and size! There was no uniformity at all. And everyone moved without passes, with no one caring where they went, no one taking down their name on a logsheet or asking questions. There was basic security at the airports, but otherwise no one monitored their progress. The disorderliness of it scared him. How could society function with such liberties, with no one in control? How did things keep from simply flying apart?
He was not like them. Watching them, he felt hard and rigid where all around him was turmoil. He was like a stiff log in a churning river. Just as the sun had made him feel that he was home, the people made him doubt he had ever belonged on this world.
By the time they arrived in Paris, he had fallen back in love with chocolate chip cookies. And he was starting to feel that there could be a kind of fascination in the chaos. People-watching in the airport on their long layover, he could almost appreciate the flagrant willfulness of the disorder, was enchanted by the magic trick, that all the comings and goings and pairings and teeming could work without any visible means of structure. It was like a toy he remembered—a kaleidoscope. The thing always made amazing patterns no matter which way the random pieces fell.
When they boarded the flight to Washington, D.C., the idea of it, that he would soon be home, produced tremendous anxiety. He knew there would be many answers there—and that stepping back into his old life meant he had to be 100 percent. On the plane, the woman sat beside him, as she always did. But she had not tried to speak to him again.
If she was completely stupid she might just follow him right into his superior’s office and give herself up. In fact, when they landed in Washington he thought he just might be well enough to grab her arm and make sure that was what happened. She had dogged the wounded hunter. Big fun. It was time she learned that he still had teeth.
He was staring at a couple across the aisle and one row up. They were young and attractive, whole and undeformed. Both had pale skin and dark hair. The male had his arm around the female and they were looking into each other’s eyes. Some emotion swirled around them that Farris did not quite get. He didn’t get it, but he still felt envious.
“Lieutenant Farris?” The woman spoke his name. He turned his eyes to give her a cold look. “Sometimes it helps to talk about things. Would you like to tell me about it? About what happened to you when you went… somewhere else?”
He sneered. “I’m not telling you anything.”
“I understand. You don’t trust me. In that case, would you like to hear what happened to me?”
He didn’t. He didn’t want to talk. But then, she was as good as offering a full confession. And then he recalled that this woman might hold the answers to his own experiences. With all he’d had to deal with on the journey, he’d forgotten why he’d wanted her along in the first place.
“Speak then.”
She talked to him with simple words. She explained how they had been in the woods that night and how five of them had gone through a type of black hole. She began to tell a story about the world she had seen. He tried to stay with her, to hear everything without emotion, but it was hard. There was so much to think about, so many directions the mind could turn off, like a freeway with slippery exits, dark eddies pulling him down. Black hole. And then the battlefield.
She got to a place in her story that she must have thought important, for she put her hand on his sleeve to focus his attention. He stared down at her hand.
“Lieutenant Farris, did you hear what I said? I was talking about the weapon we learned about on Difa-Gor-Das.” She repeated the information about a machine carefully, her eyes locked to his to keep him with her.