He braced his feet and took his hands off the window frame.
The roof was old and weathered. It had been designed to carry a calculated weight of snow—barely. In the years since it was erected, dry rot had invaded the studs; ice and water had pried up the shingles and rusted the nails. It could not support more than a fraction of its calculated load.
In particular, it couldn’t support Roch.
His left foot pierced the shingles first. Roch’s eyes widened as he slipped to thigh-level, like a man in quicksand, his right leg buckling under him and the shingles peeling away with sharp, successive snaps. His right knee penetrated similarly, and then he seemed to hesitate for a moment, straddling a joist, hands clawing at open air … and then the joist separated with a sound like a gunshot and Roch simply disappeared.
There was a sickening moment of absolute silence, then the thud as Roch impacted against the loading-bay platform below.
John raised his head.
He could see Susan running toward the building, Amelie not far behind her. Those two were safe. That was good.
He could have joined them. He knew what to do. Let go, tuck and roll, let his momentum carry him away from the loading dock and hope that the snowdrift would break his fall. He was aware of the beat of his heart and the onrushing eagerness of the flames—how could he do anything else?
But he felt himself inching forward, up the angle of the roof toward the hole Roch had made.
He braced his fingers against the shingles at the edge and looked down.
Roch was lying motionless, his hips at an unnatural angle and his eyes closed, the flames advancing from the western end of the loading bay and already hot enough to singe his eyebrows.
One more experiment, John thought.
Just one.
But maybe it wasn’t an experiment. Maybe it was something more important.
He felt himself straddling a cross-joist and wrapping his arms around it, then levering himself out over this high vacant space, swinging down toward Roch and the burning platform, and he understood with a sudden piercing clarity that he wasn’t John or Benjamin anymore. Some new being had grown into the vacuum of his skin, nurtured by his fever and the sudden desert heat of the flames—a fragment of self so fundamental that it had lurked undiscovered beneath all the latticework of words. It had existed even before he learned the word I; an uninvented self.
He let go of the creaking joist and dropped in a crouch next to Roch, feeling a sudden pain in his ankles and knees and spine but still able to stand.
His vision blurred in the smoke. He was aware of the blood on his hands, the cuts circling his wrists, the throbbing in his temple where Roch had struck him with the pipe. He was not sure he had the strength for this.
For this experiment.
He kneeled against the hot floorboards and slipped his arm around Roch.
Roch was not wholly unconscious. His eyelids flickered open as John lifted him up. Briefly, he struggled; but his legs dangled limp and useless and the pain of his injuries must have been excruciating—his eyes riveted shut again.
The flames closed in from the western edge of the loading bay and began to lick out from the warehouse doors. John glanced up and it was like staring into a furnace; his skin prickled and itched. Overhead, the joists were popping their nails with a sound like gunfire. Embers rained down all around him.
He should leave this burden and simply run—
But the thought was evanescent; it vanished into the tindery air.
Roch’s legs would not support him; it was like hefting a two-hundred-pound sack of sand. Roch opened his eyes once more as John hauled him up. He did not struggle; seemed only to watch, almost impassively … his eyes were fixed on John’s eyes and his face, now, was only inches away. His eyes seemed to radiate the single blunt message: “I’m not one of you!”—and John understood, in a final flash of inhuman insight, that Roch had willfully set himself apart; that when he looked at other human beings he saw protoplasm, bags of flesh, vessels that might contain the elements of hatred or contempt … but never anything of Roch.
Roch was only Roch, the only one of his kind, alone in his uniqueness. And across that vast escarpment there was no bridge or road or traiclass="underline" the divide was as absolute as a vacuum. And John perceived that this was not some flaw of character or nurture; it was more profound, a trick of gestation, a stitch in the glial network … somehow, it was built in… My God, John thought, he’s not even altogether human. …
He pinned Roch’s arms in his own and dragged him toward the snow. Roch was stunningly heavy, a dead weight. But the fire was close enough to raise smoke from their clothes and John drew some strength from that. He pulled Roch along with his heels dragging against the steaming floorboards. He felt Roch’s breath against his neck. Roch opened his eyes again, now two blank wells of unimaginable hostility—and maybe something else.
Maybe a question.
“Because I don’t want to be what you are,” John said. The words came out punctuated by his gasping, overwhelmed by the roar of the flames; but patient, gentle. “Because I’m tired of that.”
He carried Roch away from the burning platform of the loading bay, into the steaming snow and beyond into the thick snow that had not yet melted and where the reflection of the fire was gaudy and strange.
In the end, he was only dimly aware of Amelie as she pried at his fingers. His embrace of Roch was fierce and hysterical. But he gave it up at last.
PART 4
RESULTS
31
Spring is the rainy season in Los Angeles, but today the air was cool and clean; the sky was blue; the smog had rolled away in a vast tide of Pacific air. Susan placed a wreath of flowers on her father’s grave and stood up, smoothing her dress. The sun picked out a fleck of mica on the headstone, like the winking of an eye.
Daddy, she thought, what do I do now?
She meant: about John.
For seven weeks after the warehouse fire John had been comatose in a Toronto hospital. Susan had visited him daily; she had helped to nurse him. It hurt to see him silent and still in his hospital bed, contained in a sleep so absolute that it was a fucker away from death. Sleep like another country, Susan thought; some place where he had retreated, miles and miles and miles away.
But it was not his sleep that had sent her fleeing to California. It was his waking up. “John is awake,” Dr. Kyriakides had said, and the announcement touched off in her a fierce, visceral panic. It was impossible to face the prospect of pushing through the door of his hospital room and finding him changed beyond recognition.
So she bought a ticket for the next available flight and stayed with her mother. She kept some secrets, told some lies, moped around in the fenced backyard while the ultraviolet burned her body brown. But there was no avoiding this ritual journey to the cemetery.
Daddy, what now?
Silent earth.
She looked up. A silver dot was traversing the blue sky, probably an airliner out of L.A. International. But Susan didn’t want to think about airliners, which suggested travel, which suggested that this sunny interlude was not any kind of solution … that pretty soon she ought to buy a return ticket, get herself on one of those planes—