“Stop screaming,” I tell him, both arms extended as if through the holes in a puppet theater, holding him fast through the bars. “Talk. Tell me.”
“What?” He says, choking out the word, gasping from pain. “What?”
“The truth.”
“What truth?” Jordan gasps. I ease up slightly on my grip, give him a moment of relief, not wanting him to pass out. The information is more important. I have to know. He’s heaving desperate breaths, clutching at his wound, both of us on the ground in the grime. I give him what I already know, build a bridge of common understanding, Farley and Leonard, Criminal Investigation, chapter 14.
“You abandoned your girlfriend in Concord. You and Abigail were supposed to stay but you left anyway. You made sure you were here on the big day, T-minus one week, when the whole group was supposed to go underground. How did you know that was the day?”
“I don’t know anything. I told you.”
“Liar. Killer. You were here at five on Wednesday the twenty-sixth because you knew that that’s when they’d be going underground and you knew that Nico would leave. Maybe you told her—maybe you told her to leave, to meet you outside the station. And there she was. She had a backpack on. She was happy to see you.”
I twist my finger, work it into the wound, and he writhes away, tries to, but I’ve got him tight, I’m clutching him to the bars, holding him in place.
“The other girl was an unwelcome surprise though, right?”
“What other girl?”
“So you had to kill her first, quick, knock her out and slash her throat and then chase Nico—”
“What the fuck—no—I came here to save her.”
“Save her? To save her?”
Now I’m just twisting at his leg, now I’m trying to inflict as much pain on him as I can. I don’t care if we both die here, locked in our improbable clench for however long is left. He can tell the truth or both of us can die.
“You slashed her throat, and you slashed that other girl’s throat, and you left them. Why, Jordan? Why did you do that?”
“Is that what happened? Is that what happened to her?”
And then he throws his head back and slumps over on his side of the bars. I don’t care, I keep at it, I have to hear him confirm it. I need that, and Nico does.
“Why did you kill her? Why? How does killing my sister fit into your stupid plan to save the world?”
There is a long pause. “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED,” the radio says, and then again. Jordan starts laughing. His eyes are rolled back in his head, and he gives off this weird cold laugh, a gurgling throaty chuckle.
“What?”
Nothing. Dead, dry laughter.
“What?”
“The plan. The plan, Stan. There’s no plan. We made it up. It’s not real. We made the whole thing up.”
2.
Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we’re waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there’s no glittering ore hidden under the dirt.
A massive asteroid really is coming and it will kill us all. That is a true fact, hard and cold and irreducible, a fact that can be neither diverted nor destroyed.
I was right, all along, in my pedantic obnoxious small-minded insistence that the truth was true—the simple brutal fact that I kept explaining to Nico, that I kept trying to use to corral her or cudgel her. I was always right and she was always wrong.
Jordan is explaining it all to me, running down the whole story, laying out the inside scoop on the great underground asteroid-diversion conspiracy, explaining in intricate detail how I was right and Nico was wrong, and I am experiencing no joy in having been proved right. It’s actually the opposite, what I’m feeling, it’s actually the black and bitter opposite of joy: this awful opportunity to say “I told you so” to someone who is already dead, to say “you were wrong” to my sister, who has already been sacrificed on the altar of what she was wrong about. I am wishing in retrospect that I hadn’t told her so, that I had just let her alone, maybe even allowed her the pleasure of thinking for half a second that her brother and only living relative believed her. That I believed in her.
It wasn’t just that the plan would never work, the standoff burst, the precisely orchestrated atomic recalibration of Maia’s deadly course. The plan never existed. Its author, the rogue nuclear scientist Hans-Michael Parry, never existed either. They were pure suckers, the lot of them, Astronaut and Tick and Valentine and Sailor, Tapestry—even Isis. Suckers and saps. They were huddled together out here at the police station waiting for the arrival of a man who never was.
Now she’s dead, so it doesn’t matter. They came all this way for nothing, and now she’s dead.
We’re outside, between the flagpoles. It’s a beautiful afternoon, cool and crisp and sunny. The first pleasant day since I got to Ohio. Jordan is running down the whole story and while he does I am clutching my face and tears are spilling out around my fingers.
Astronaut’s real name is Anthony Wayne DeCarlo and he has no scientific training, no special understanding of astrophysics, no military background of any kind. He is, or was, a bank robber, a retailer and manufacturer of controlled substances, and a conman. At age nineteen DeCarlo drew a ten-year prison sentence in Colorado for boosting an SUV as a getaway vehicle when his older brother robbed an Aurora-area Bank of America. He was paroled after four years and three months, and six months after that he was arrested in a rented apartment in Arizona that he had turned into a laboratory/dispensary of designer narcotics. Five-year bid, out in two on good behavior. And so on, and so on. By the time he turned forty, which was the year before last, he was known to law enforcement in an impressive range of jurisdictions as a good-looking and silver-tongued bad guy, skilled in the manufacture of a variety of illicit substances—so much so that one of his aliases, the one he prided himself on, was “Big Pharma.”
He would have spent a lot more time in jail, over the years, except he had a special knack for gathering acolytes and setting them up to do the dirty work—younger men and plenty of younger women, who frequently ended up serving prison sentences for carrying, for selling, all the stuff that otherwise he would have done himself. One parole officer lamented, somewhere in DeCarlo’s thick case file, that he “would have made a great leader, had things gone another way.”
And then they did, they really did, things went another way. The asteroid appeared, transforming the lives of thugs and drug dealers right along with policemen and actuaries and Amish patriarchs. By the time there was a ten percent chance that Maia would smash into the Earth, Anthony Wayne DeCarlo is living in a basement apartment in Medford, Mass., and he has become Astronaut: leader of a movement, weaver of conspiratorial webs, savior of humanity.
For a restless soul like DeCarlo, paranoid and insecure, Maia was the answer to a prayer he didn’t even know he was praying; a basket in which to put a lifetime of inchoate antiauthoritarian energy. Suddenly he’s on a soapbox in Boston Common, a charismatic voice for the government conspiracy line, a street-corner preacher with a fistful of dubious scientific “findings” and a handgun jammed in his back pocket. And he’s attracting a new constellation of followers: young people, freaked out by death rolling across the sky, looking for something—anything—to do about it.