As soon as possible, I took Trevor and Jenny aside—once again, Jenny’s tobacco habit gave us an excuse to segregate ourselves in the backyard. I said we should leave for Buffalo as soon as possible. Trev was clearly uneasy about undertaking the trip without an escort, but he didn’t want to alarm Jenny by raising the possibility of a Het attack. Jenny herself was fine with leaving this afternoon. “I’ll pack,” she said, “and we can leave as soon as Geddy gets back.”
I said, “Geddy left?” Trev, simultaneously: “Back from where?”
“My mom’s. I need to know how she’s doing. She really does need to move out of that house and into a care facility, sooner rather than later. I can arrange that through Tau, though, right? Even when I’m in Canada living under an assumed name?”
I managed to nod.
“So Geddy offered to go check on her. She’s always been nice to Geddy, even at her worst.”
“When did he leave?”
“Just now. Said he’d be about an hour.”
But an hour passed. Then two. And Geddy didn’t come back.
CHAPTER 19
I borrowed the keys to Mama Laura’s Hyundai while Trev stood guard at the house. My plan was to check in at the Symanski house and see whether Geddy had been there. I was also prepared to check the local hospital and police station, and Trevor had supplied me with the names and addresses of some local Taus in case I needed help.
The car was well maintained but very old: it had always been hard to convince Mama Laura to trade in a vehicle that was “still perfectly good,” and she had never felt comfortable at the wheel of my father’s Cadillac. Which was actually helpful, because the car’s radio was an analog relic, which meant it brought in the local station, itself an analog relic. The announcer’s voice periodically gnarled into incomprehensibility, but the gist of the news came through. Such as it was.
And it seemed almost preternaturally strange, these rumors of apocalypse whispered against the morning calm of Schuyler, lawns just days shy of needing their first mowing of the season, a few cars on the road, a few pedestrians on the sidewalks, nobody hurrying, as if the blackout had created not panic but a sort of unpremeditated vacation. The most sinister thing I saw on the way to the Symanski house was a Great Dane lifting its leg over a maniacally grinning garden gnome.
It was clear that something dreadful had happened in Mumbai and elsewhere on the Indian subcontinent, though it wasn’t at all clear who was benefiting by it. Our own continent-wide blackout was an echo of that conflict, a reminder that we weren’t exempt from it. Before I left the house we had had a brief visit from our neighbor on the left, Toby Sanderval, who owned the Olive Garden franchise off the highway; he advised us to keep the doors and windows shut “so the fallout don’t get in.” Which terrified Mama Laura, until Rebecca and I assured her that any fallout from a nuclear exchange in India—had there been one—would have to travel across the equator and through nearly a dozen time zones before it presented any danger to the good citizens of Schuyler, New York.
But it was not all bad news that crackled through the car speakers. Municipal power had been restored to parts of Washington, DC. A presidential statement calling for calm and patience had been released to all extant media. There was even a report of intermittent cell phone service in New York State, though not locally—I tried.
As I drove, I kept my eyes open. I had biked and driven from my house to Jenny’s house so often that the route was familiar, even all these years later. I looked for Geddy’s car, an eye-poppingly yellow Nissan Elysium; I saws no sign of it, and it wasn’t in the driveway of the Symanski house when I pulled up.
The house where Jenny’s mother lived had not been well maintained. From the curling shingles to the faded siding, it announced neglect. Jenny’s dad had left enough money for upkeep, Jenny said, but her mom was too far in the bottle to hire a contractor or even a handyman. I parked and went up the three wooden stairs of her front porch and knocked at the door, wondering if she would recognize me.
A couple of minutes passed before she answered. As the door opened, the house exhaled a sour effluvium of tobacco smoke and body odor. Mrs. Symanski stood in that invisible wind, oblivious to it, wearing a stained gray nightdress, a nasty caricature of Jenny’s mom as I had once known her. She gazed at me and said, “Have you come to fix the electricity?”
“No. Mrs. Symanski? It’s me, Adam. Adam Fisk.”
She squinted. “Aaron?”
“No, Adam. Aaron’s brother.”
“Fuck me, I believe it is. Well, well. What brings you here?”
“Actually, I’m looking for Geddy. Has he been here today?”
“What—Geddy?”
“Yes. My stepbrother. Geddy.”
“What would Geddy Fisk be doing here?”
“Well, that’s the thing. When he went out this morning he said he was going to call on you. But that was quite a while ago, and he hasn’t come back. I was wondering if he made it here at all.”
“Why would he come here?”
“He’s in town and wanted to say hello.”
“Well, he didn’t. Say hello, I mean. Is he lost? How do you get lost in a one-horse town like Schuyler?”
“So you haven’t seen him at all?”
“Not since Jenny was a girl.” She gave me a longer look, as if trying to locate me in the crumbling firmament of her memory. “Adam Fisk. Looking for Geddy? Can’t you just, uh, phone him?”
“Unfortunately no. The phones aren’t working.”
“Or the lights. Or my fucking stove. Or the refrigerator. Food spoiling. Nothing works right anymore.”
I guessed on olfactory evidence that her food had been spoiling long before the blackout. Or else she didn’t bother taking out the trash. “Mrs. Symanski, I wish I could stay—”
“You should have married her.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you’d married Jenny she wouldn’t have to live with your brother. I guess it won’t shock you to learn Aaron’s an asshole. But I knew that about him. I always knew that about him, always, always. The way he looks at people. You were different. You didn’t have that, um, assholiness in your eyes. Yeah, but you didn’t marry her, did you? You gave her to Aaron like she was some bicycle you got too big for.”
“You haven’t seen Geddy, then?”
“No, I haven’t seen Geddy Fisk, for better or worse.”
“Then I need to keep looking. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Symanski.”
“Don’t you want to come in?”
It was an invitation to enter the kingdom of futility and despair she had made of her life. The world the Affinities were meant to redeem. “I can’t right now.”
“Should have married her,” she said, closing the door in my face.
* * *
I thought obsessively about Geddy as I drove to Schuyler’s small police station. And the memory that came to mind was of the night he had burst into my bedroom, tearfully demanding to know whether the world was old or young.
So typically Geddy, that attack of philosophical anxiety. So impossibly difficult to anticipate or answer. Moments like this were what had made Geddy an outsider, friendless at school, mocked behind his back and often enough to his face. I loved Geddy dearly, loved him maybe more than I loved my biological brother Aaron, but his strangeness was a constant admonition: There but for the grace of God go I. I had been a solitary kid with a sketchbook and a penchant for keeping my own company, and Geddy was just a few steps farther down the same road—and that much closer to the annihilating loneliness at the end of it.
The police station was on Schuyler’s main street. Downtown traffic was almost nonexistent today, and most businesses were closed for the obvious reason, but I noticed the Sunnyside Diner and a couple of coffee-and-muffin places running on generator power, doors open and decent crowds inside. It was Sunday, and the parking lots at both the Catholic and Methodist churches were full. I pulled into the first vacant space in front of the Town of Schuyler Police Department. Inside, I told the uniformed officer at the front desk that I was looking for someone who hadn’t come home and I wanted to make sure he hadn’t been in an accident.