He lifted off the top half.
And nothing happened. Inside it, laid into a fitted cavity in the glass was…a test tube? A glass vial, with a tapered black-rubber stopper. He put the halves of the glass brick down on his lap and lifted out the vial.
He could see that it was empty. He found that he was disappointed, and he wondered what the vial might once have contained. Somebody’s blood, mummy dust, gold nuggets with a curse on them?
He twisted out the stopper and sniffed the vial.
CHAPTER TEN
Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a starfish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
AS if he had plugged in the wires for the second of a pair of stereo speakers—as if he’d attached the wires when the second stereo channel was not only working but had its volume cranked up high—Kootie’s head was abruptly doubly hit by the the ongoing music from outside now; and he found himself somehow jolted, shocked, by the mere fact of being able to hear.
Dropping the vial, he grabbed the steering wheel and gripped it hard, gritting his teeth, cold with sudden sweat, for he was falling with terrible speed through some kind of gulf—his eyes were wide open and he was aware that he was seeing the dashboard and the motionless windshield wipers and the shadowed sidewalk beyond the glass, but in his head things clanged and flashed as they hurtled incomprehensibly past, voices shouted, and his heart thudded with love and terror and triumph and mirth and rage and shame all mixed together so finely that they seemed to constitute life itself, the way rainbow colors on a fast-spinning disk all blur into white.
It wasn’t stopping. It was getting faster.
Blood burst out of his nose and he pitched sideways across the passenger seat onto his right shoulder, twitching and whimpering, his eyes wide open but rolled so far back into his head that he couldn’t see anything outside the boundaries of his own skull.
PETE SULLIVAN jackknifed up out of the little bed and scrambled for the front seat—but when he yanked the curtain back from the windshield he saw that the van was not careening down some hill. He almost shouted with relief; still, he tumbled himself into the driver’s seat and tromped hard on the emergency brake.
Ahead of him, beyond a motionless curb, half a dozen boys in baggy shorts and T-shirts were strolling aimlessly across a broad lawn. Their shadows were long, and the grass glowed a golden green in the last rays of sunlight.
Sullivan’s heart was pounding, and he made himself wait nearly a full minute before lighting a cigarette, because he knew his hands were shaking too badly to hang on to one.
At last he was able to get one lit and suck in a lungful of smoke. He’d had a bad dream—hardly surprising!—something about…trains? Electricity? Sudden noise after a long silence…
Machinery. His work at the nuclear power plant, at the other utilities? The whole Edison network—Con Ed, Southern California Edison…
He took another long drag on the cigarette and then stubbed it out. The van was in shadow now, definitely not moving, and the sky was darkening toward evening. He breathed slowly and evenly until his heartbeat had slowed down to normal. Should he go find something to eat, or try to get some more sleep?
He had driven the van back down Laurel Canyon Boulevard and parked it here in the La Cienega Park lot, south of Wilshire. He had pulled the curtains over the little windows in the back and dragged the rings of the long shade across the curtain rod over the windshield and behind the rearview mirror, and had then locked up and crawled into the bed. He had apparently slept for several hours.
The boys in the park were at the top of a low green hill now, their laughing faces lit in chiaroscuro by the departing sun. Griffith’s hour, Sullivan thought.
He fumbled in his pocket now for his keys. No way sleep, after that jolt. Dinner, then—but a drink somewhere first.
ON THE Greyhound bus, Angelica Anthem Elizalde had been dreaming of the ranch in Norco where she had spent her childhood.
Her family had raised chickens, and it had been Angelica’s job to scatter chicken scratch in the yard for the birds. Wild chickens that a neighbor had abandoned used to roost in the trees at night, and bustle around with the domesticated birds during the day. All of the chickens, and a dozen cats and a couple of goats as well, had liked to congregate around the trail of dry dog food Angelica’s mother would spread by the driveway every morning. The half-dozen dogs had never seemed to mind.
It had always been her grandfather whose job it was to kill the chickens—he would grab a chicken by the neck and then give it a hard overhand whirl as if he had meant to see how far he could throw it but forgot to let go, and the bird’s neck would be broken. Angelica’s mother had tried it one time when the old man had been in jail, and the creature hadn’t died. The chicken had done everything but die. It was screaming, and flapping and clawing, and feathers flew everywhere as her mother tried lashing it around again—and again. All the kids were crying. Finally they had got an axe from the shed, a very dull old axe, and her mother had managed to kill the chicken by smashing its skull. The meat had been tough.
For the occasional turkey they would cut a hole in a gunny sack—her mother always called them guinea sacks—and hang the bird in it upside down from a tree limb, and then cut the bird’s throat, standing well back. The sack was to keep its wings restrained—a turkey could hurt you if it hit you with a wing.
One Easter her father had trucked home a live pig, and they had killed it and butchered it and cooked it in a pit the men dug in the yard—the giant vat of carnitas had lasted for days, even with all the neighbors helping to eat it. For weeks before that, her mother had saved eggshells whole by pricking the ends with a hatpin and blowing the egg out; she had painted the eggshells and filled them with confetti, and the kids ran around all morning breaking them over each other’s heads, until their hair and their church clothes looked like abstract pointillist paintings.
One of them had finally been for real—late in the afternoon her brother had broken a real, ripe, fertilized egg over Angelica’s head, and when she had felt warm wetness on her scalp, and had reached up to wipe it off, she had found herself holding a spasming little naked red monster, its eyes closed and its embryonic beak opening and shutting.
HER DREAM had violently shifted gears then—suddenly there was clanging and lights, and train whistles howling in fog, and someone was nearly insane with terror.
With a jolt she was awake, sitting up stiffly in the padded bus seat, biting her lip and tasting the iron of her own blood.
It’s…1992, she told herself harshly. You’re on a bus to Los Angeles and the bus is not out of control. Look out the window—the bus is staying in its lane and not going more than sixty.