He opened the glove compartment, tugged out the Ziploc bag, rolled an amphetamine cap into his mouth.
He dry-swallowed the pill and angled the car slowly back onto the highway, carefully thinking now about nothing at all.
Fundamentally, it was a question of past and future.
He took the first car ferry of the morning across Georgian Bay to the northern shore of Lake Superior. The North Shore was a stark landscape of pine and rock and the brittle blue Superior horizon. Gas station towns, souvenir stands, Indian reservations; black bear and deer in the outback. During the last world war, captive German military officers had been assigned logging duty in this wilderness. There were places, John understood, where their K-ration tins lay rusting under the pine needles and the washboard lumber roads. In summer the highway would have been crowded with tourists; but it was late in the year now and the campgrounds were vacant and unsupervised. He drove all day through the cold, transparent air; after nightfall he turned down a dirt track road to an empty campsite near the lakeshore. He zipped up his insulated windbreaker and stoked a kindling fire in one of the brick-lined barbecue pits; When he had achieved a satisfactory blaze he added on windfall until the fire was roaring and crackling. Then he settled back to rising sparks and stars and the lonely sound of Lake Superior washing at the shore. The fire warmed his hands and face; his back was cold. He heated a can of soup until the steam rose up in the wintery air.
When the meal was finished, he sat in the car with the passenger door opened toward the fire, thinking about the past and the future.
The past was simple. He contained it. He contained it in a way no other human being could contain it, as a body of mnemonic experience he could call up at will—his life like an open book.
Excepting the chaos of his earliest infancy, there was not a day of his life that John could not instantly evoke. He had divided his life into three fundamental episodes—his time with Dr. Kyriakides, his time with the Woodwards, his time as an adult. Four, if you counted the recent re-emergence of Benjamin as a new and distinct epoch. And each category was a vast book of days, of autumns and winters and summers and springs, each welling from its own past and arrowing toward its own future with a logic that had always seemed incontrovertible.
Until now. For most of his life he had been running toward the future as if it contained some sort of salvation. In the last few years, mysteriously, that had changed. The future, he thought, was a promise that might not be kept. Now he was running … not quite aimlessly, because he had a destination in mind; not toward the past, precisely; but toward a place where his life had taken a certain turn. A fork in the road. Maybe it would be possible to retrace his steps, turn the other way; this time, maybe, toward a genuine future, an authentic light.
He recognized the strong element of rationalization in this. Self-deception was a vice he had never permitted himself. But there comes a time when your back is to the wall. So you follow an instinct. You do what you have to.
A sudden, bitter wind came off the lake. The fire was dying. He banked the embers and then shut himself into the car, blinking at the darkness and afraid to sleep. He looked longingly at the glove compartment, picturing the bag of pills there. But he had to pace himself. He felt the fatigue poisons running through his body. No choice now but to sleep.
Anyway—he would need the pills more, later.
He watched the stars until the windows clouded with the vapor of his breath. Finally, with an almost violent suddenness, he slept.
He drove west into the broad prairie land.
Coming through Manitoba he ran into a frontal system, rain and wet snow that sidelined the Corvette in a little town called Atelier while the Dominion Service Station and Garage replaced the original tires with fresh snow-treads. John checked into a motel called The Traveller and picked up some books at the local thrift shop.
Entertainment reading for the post-human: a science-fiction novel;The Magic Mountain (the only Mann he’d never looked into); a paperback bestseller. Also a battered Penguin edition of Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John—the joke, of course, was on himself.
He had read the Stapledon many times before. It was a classic of English eccentric writing of the thirties, the story of a mutant supergenius born to ordinary humanity. During his adolescence John had adopted the book as a kind of bible. The story was fuzzy-minded, uneven, sometimes silly in its literal-mindedness; but he felt a resonance with Odd John’s sense of “spiritual contamination” by mankind, his “passion of loneliness.” The John of the book sought out others of his kind!—telepaths and mutants—and founded a Utopian colony which the Great Powers ultimately destroyed. Two unlikely assumptions there, John thought: that there were others of his kind, and that such people would constitute a perceptible threat to anyone.
But the biggest mistake Stapledon had made, John thought, was his character’s self-sufficiency. Stapledon compared his Odd John to a human being among apes. But a human being raised by apes isn’t a superior ape. In all the qualities that matter to apes, he’s not much of an ape at all. And if he feels contemptuous of the apes, it’s only the automatic contempt of the rejected outsider.
Still—in this desolate prairie town—some of that contempt came welling up.
After dinner he went walking along the narrow main street of Atelier where the Trans-Canada passed through. Atelier was a grain town; its landmarks were a railway depot, a Chinese restaurant, and a five and dime. Nobody much was out in the weather except for a few sullen leather-jacketed teens occupying the Pizza Patio. He pressed through the sleet beyond the local mall and discovered signs of life at a tiny sports arena. An illuminated Port-A-Sign announced:
John gazed awhile at the sign; then—curious, sad, and entirely alone—he joined the small crowd in the overheated lobby, indoors and away from the rain.
The auditorium was three-quarters full when the ushers closed the doors.
It was an elderly crowd, with a few earnest young couples scattered around the arena. He counted several wheelchairs, a great many crutches. A woman in a gingham skirt moved down the aisles, stopping here and there to exchange a few words with the audience. She paused at the row in front of John and chatted with a hugely overweight man about his gall bladder troubles. She caught John’s glance and moved toward him; when he did not look away she asked, “Are you here for healing?”
He shook his head in the negative.
“Are you sure? You look like a man with a need.”
He gave her a long, focused look. The woman in the gingham dress tugged at her earlobe, stared a moment longer, then shrugged uneasily and moved away.
The audience hushed as the lights dimmed. A local choir performed a hymn, and then Reverend Belweather took the stage. He was a squat, compactly fat man in a sincere Republican suit. His hair was cut to Marine length; he wore rings on his fingers. He began in a low-key fashion, whispering into the hand mike—you had to strain forward to hear him—but he was good, John thought. He read the crowd well and he was good with his body, with his aggressive strut and upraised palm. He preached to the crowd for forty minutes under the fierce klieg lights, rising to thunderous crescendos of damnation and salvation, the sweat rivering off the slope of his forehead. John closed his eyes and felt the crowd around him as a single, physical thing—an animal, aroused to some terrible confusion of eroticism and fear. The human odor was as physical as heat in the confined space of the auditorium and it beat against him like a pulse. I pity them, John thought. And I hate myself for my pity. And I hate them for provoking it.