Recklessly, Cal had jettisoned both. Stern would learn of it, of course, and the consequences would be grave. He’d never be able to match this salary, and word would spread like a black stain. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have cared. But now, he was afraid.
He glanced at his sister, pacing beside him in her school grays, book bag with its toe-shoe insignia slung over her shoulder. What could he possibly do, say, to maintain the sanctuary he had so carefully constructed for her? Tina had been only four when her world had been blasted away, and he had stepped in to be her anchor, her rock. Now he felt perilously seamed and cracked. And most alarming, a voice inside seemed to be calling him to release, to shatter, to see what emerged.
His eyes lingered on Tina as she glided weightless beside him, her face a mask of indifference, counsel only to herself. With a shock of recognition, Cal realized that-outside her protective world of dance-she had duplicated his own stony mien, the impassive barrier he used to shield himself from the sea of humanity.
“You there! Yes, you!” The voice cut across Cal’s thoughts like a scythe-a man’s voice, but querulously high.
Sam Lungo, their neighbor, sat on his porch like some Buddha gone to seed, glaring at them, domed head glinting in the sun. Tina groaned. It was a familiar sight, and normally they would have continued on, Lungo’s abuse splintering against their backs. But surprisingly, Cal stopped and turned. Tina paused, uneasy.
“You wadded that.” Lungo brandished his gangrenous walking stick in the direction of a spot on the sidewalk just beyond his yard. “The other day. You wadded that up and just-just excreted it.”
Cal gazed near his feet and spied the crumpled Snickers wrapper. He hadn’t tossed it, of course. Nevertheless, he scooped up the offending paper and started off again.
“No.” Lungo surged up to them with his odd, hunched crow’s stride. “No. You apologize.”
Tina murmured incredulously. But Cal peered back at the little man, walled against the world, insulated from empathy, and saw himself.
“I’m sorry,” Cal said, for Sam, for the futility of years.
But Lungo, unused to pity, took it for mockery. He flushed, and his mouth twisted to a vinegary scowl. “Get out of here,” he hissed. “Go on!”
Cal turned and walked stiffly away, as if bearing a wound. Tina dogged after him and, when she was able to catch his eye, gifted him with a smile.
Lungo saw none of this, busied instead transforming them into one more outrage in his pad, as he whispered his venomous, as-yet-unanswered prayers.
WEST VIRGINIA-8:35 A.M. EDT
“Fred, what’s going on?” Bob reached out, grasped his brother. . not exactly by the hands, because in addition to being entangled in the equipment that kept him alive, Bob- the physical part of Bob-was closed down. Not dead, but on hiatus, like an engine barely ticking over. His mind and thoughts and soul, the Bob that Fred had protected all through their insular childhood-the vague, helpless, gentle little photographer, the voracious reader of everything from Aeschylus to Wolverine who could barely speak to anyone he hadn’t known all his life-these were trapped in that body, entangled in it the way the body was entangled in its machinery.
The way Fred was entangled by distance, by obligation to be elsewhere. By the walls around the Source in its gloomy complex of bunkers and Quonset huts and the mazes of barbed wire. By his colleagues’ endless squabbling.
“I’ll take care of you,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”
Illusion? The self-delusion of an exhausted man, dozing at his desk and wishing with everything in him that he was home where it was safe? That he was with the only person in his life he’d ever truly loved? The fantasy that Bob was able to talk to him again, rely on him again for help and support as he’d done all his life?
The comfort of forgiveness for leaving Bob alone?
Would this room be so clear to him if he hadn’t known the house from birth? He could get up-he knew he could- and walk out into the downstairs hall, with its gloom and its smell of mildewed carpets, turn right to the living room with its curtained shadows or left down the hall to the kitchen, sunlight, clutter, burnt toast and Mom’s TV perched on the untidy counter and the view across the weedy yard to Wilma Hanson’s blackberry bushes.
Like the old commerciaclass="underline" Is it real or is it Memorex? Was all this-including Bob’s hand, warm and trusting in his-something he was creating for himself, no more real than a computer game or a stage set?
For he could clearly see his office around him. Feel the pressure of his buttocks on the gray-and-black desk chair. Glimpse the orange and green glint of computer lights and surge suppressors, the steady blink-blink-blink of the red lights on his phone, and hear the low subliminal humming of the Resonator locked behind the maze of walls.
No, he was there. And he was here.
And that was what the Source was about, too.
Healing Bob. Maybe in time healing Mom, leading her gently back to the real world that she’d always feared. He’d deserted Bob, deserted Mom. He was a better driver, better at coping with the world in general. He, not Bob, should have been in the car that night. But now everything was possible. Everything was going to be possible.
“Fred, I’m scared. All this stuff-Mom didn’t even hear me when I talked to her. I feel so cold. What happened to me?”
“You’re going to be all right.”
“She didn’t even see you. She looked right at you sitting there and she didn’t see you.”
“That’s because. .” How to explain it? He could feel the Source right now, the curious, elusive energy that seemed to permeate the air. He was breathing it into his lungs. No, that wasn’t right. Maybe just absorbing it into his flesh. Drinking it like sunlight. And that vibration was what let him be here, holding Bob’s hand.
And what let Bob be aware of him.
“That’s because Mom’s tired,” he finished. “Don’t you worry. I won’t let anything happen to you, and I won’t go away.”
Chapter Six
NEW YORK-8:52 A.M. EDT
Cal Griffin was drowning.
The multitudes surged about him, overwhelming, pressing in, jostling him as he struggled along Fifth, a phantom mirrored in the dispassionate glass of Saks and Versace and Dior. The unseen, massed humanity of his dream was garishly replicated in the morning sun. Snatches of Italian, French, Japanese and every mutant strain of English whipped by amid an endlessness of Carnegie Tech T-shirts and Bernini, body piercings and haute couture. The delicate, luxuriant weather had proved fleeting; the humidity was coming on now, air thick as tar, pregnant with the promise of storm. Cal felt sapped, every breath a labor.
He remembered a time when, newly arrived from Hurley, he had acknowledged all who met his gaze with a smile and nod of greeting. Recently and so long ago. When, how, had it faded to anonymity and silence?
Now, today, he searched the faces hungrily for connection as they blurred past. But their eyes evaded, and in their kaleidoscopic jumble of dress and manner, their forced hilarity and dynamism, he read artifice and fear.
He thought again of the dream, the screaming ones in the blackness. If light were suddenly to flash bright across that scorched plain, what might those faces reveal?