He watched her park. Watched her make a final appraisal of herself in the mirror and then slide out of the car and lift her face to gaze up at the sky and the bunched bruised clouds squeezing down the light. Very slowly, as if he weren't driving at all but floating up off the ground on some untappable current, he drove past her and swung into a parking spot two cars down and just sat there a moment, watching her shoulders and the way her hips rotated over the tight unhurried muscles of her legs and buttocks as she walked toward the station. She didn't have a clue. The bitch. The bitch didn't have a clue and he did, he had the whole puzzle worked out, the final piece in place, and he shut down the ignition and left the car where it was. He didn't bother to lock it. Didn't bother with the keys. And the meter-the meter was a joke.
The air seemed to boil around him suddenly, the heat exploding in his face, and then the breeze and the deadfall of the thunder and here was the train, punishing steel and crowding the scene, and when the rain hit he didn't try to duck it or quicken his pace, because he was focused now-focused on her, on her back and shoulders and the flash of color caught in her hair-and he was walking. With purpose. Up the steps and onto the platform, his face wet, his hair wet, the structure gone out of his jacket with the sudden assault of the rain, and he crowded in with the others, smelling the ferment of their bodies, colliding, shifting, touching. The thunder rolled out and shook the platform. Lightning broke the sky.
That was when he hit her. That was when he lowered his shoulder and struck her from behind, not hard enough to knock her down, not hard enough to do anything other than communicate the one inescapable truth that tore her face out of the crowd and gave it to him as if he were its maker and shaper. He had her. She was in his power. The two of them were face to face, occupying the same square foot of the universe, united, wedded, and he was the one, the only one, who could break the connection.
There was movement behind her, some woman crying out. Another peal of thunder. He watched her eyes, watched her lips, heard the flat toneless echo of her voice, no fear in her, not anymore. “What do you want?”
Everything beat down to that instant, to that question, to her lips moving and the scent of her breath, the heat of it in his face, the actual and the reaclass="underline" “What do you want?” The question took him by surprise. It froze him. Stopped him dead. Because he hadn't really thought beyond the moment and it was weakness and weakness only that had brought him here. He saw that now. Saw it clearly, as truth, the new truth of his life. And he saw that she wasn't afraid and that none of this mattered, not anymore. “Da-na,” Natalia had called him. He thought of Mill Valley, the condo there, the house in Garrison, the face of his daughter stranded on the porch. “Da-na. Da-na. Da-na.” People were jostling, staring at him, at the two of them, and he had the smallest fraction of a second to contemplate the question before the answer came to his lips, and the answer didn't involve her at all-it had nothing to do with her, but with him, Peck Wilson, a jerk, a clown, an imposter in a torn silk suit, worth nothing, worth less than nothing.
He shook his head. Dropped his eyes. “Nothing,” he said, and he didn't know whether she could read that or not and he didn't care. Then he was moving, squaring his shoulders and tugging at the wet lapels of his jacket, pushing through the crowd, striding across the platform and up onto the train. He didn't bother to look back.
EPILOGUE
It was late, past nine by now, but Bridger wasn't going anywhere. He wasn't even hungry, though somewhere in the back of his mind the icon of the Campbell's Chunky Soup can glowed like the figure in a shrine. “Soup that eats like a meal” was the promo line the company had come up with, and he and Deet-Deet had bounced that one around, creating a digital can with stick limbs surmounted by Radko's squared-off head and glowering face-“The producer that eats like a special effect”-and how does a meal eat, anyway? Does it use utensils? Is it autophagic? Does it have a mouth? He was working late because he didn't have a whole lot else to do and he wanted to get on Radko's good side and stay there since Radko, against his better judgment, had brought him back on board. The young woman-girl-who'd replaced him hadn't worked out. Her name was Kate and she was just a tad bit self-obsessed, or so it went in Deet-Deet's recounting, coming in one Monday with a breast augmentation that took her from borderline flat to Graf Zeppelin overnight. She was a prima donna-or a diva, as she liked to call herself-but around Digital Dynasty she was known as Phisher because she was always phishing for compliments. At any rate, she was gone, and he was back. And he planned to keep his head down and make the most of it. The only light in the long sweep of the burnished concrete room descended from the EMERGENCY EXIT sign Radko had put up over the back door to mollify the building inspector when he put in the carrels and computer hookups and transformed what had been San Roque's last machine shop into a special effects studio. It was all right with Bridger. He had his iPod to keep him entertained and the soup was on the shelf by the coffeepot, awaiting the microwave. In the meanwhile, the screen gave him its solace, the solace of the proportionate world, edited, reduced, with the colors enhanced and the blemishes removed. At the moment he was working on a picture to be released for the Thanksgiving weekend, a remake of “The Wild One” starring The Kade in the Marlon Brando role and Lara Sikorsky as the sheriff's daughter, though the role of the daughter had been expanded and modified to reflect the post-feminist realities of the twenty-first century-she was now a motorcycle enthusiast herself, and there were any number of spectacular jumps and mid-air pas de deux that featured Lara and The Kade thumbing their noses at the clueless townsfolk and the smirking models and steroid freaks who'd been tricked up to represent the rival motorcyle club. It was all in good fun. Nothing more than a little reinvention of film history and an attempt to cash in on The Kade while the going was good. Bridger had no problem with that, no problem at all-he was just happy to be working again.
The cast had come off a week ago, but even with it on he'd been able to manipulate the mouse and run his programs pretty effectively-in fact, he'd got so used to propping the thing up on the edge of his desk he felt strange without it, as if his arm were levitating all on its own. There was no pain, though when he took a deep breath he could still feel a premonitory prickling in the place where the two ribs had sustained their hairline fractures, and his voice was huskier now. He hadn't noticed the change himself-you don't really listen to yourself unless you're singing, and he hadn't felt much like bursting into song lately-but when he'd first got back and called Deet-Deet to suss things out and then Radko to offer his services in the absence of the girl with the breast implants, neither of them had recognized his voice, and that told him something.