Elsewhere, page 14
Selena had edited sequential bits of video into a twitchy stream of images. Falkirk stood behind her, watching her computer screen, as the radio repairman and his mouse-keeper brat eventually made their way to the town library on Oleander Street.
“They were there for eight minutes,” Selena said. “And here they come.”
Coltrane and his daughter exited the library and turned north on Oleander. He seemed to be carrying a book. A traffic cam at the first major intersection showed them turning east on Oak Hollow Road. They were heading home to their funky house on Shadow Canyon Lane, about a mile from where the last camera lost track of them.
“For some reason, Ed Harkenbach entrusted the key to Coltrane,” Foot-Long Frankfurt said, “and Coltrane used it, and they were under attack by the Bestpet when they ported back to Prime. I’d bet my dick on it.”
“Winning that bet,” said Falkirk, “would be like taking home the throwaway from a Brith Milah.”
Selena laughed, and Foot-Long asked what a Brith Milah was, and she said, “The Jewish rite of circumcision.”
To his credit, Foot-Long laughed and said, “Man, I owe you for that.”
Falkirk wished he hadn’t said such a thing, not because he gave a shit about hurting Frankfurt’s feelings, but because it might be mistaken for camaraderie, might suggest he was one of them. He was not. He was singular. He’d known he was better than all of them, better than the ruck of humanity, had known it for twenty-one years, ever since he was fifteen, when he murdered a classmate at boarding school and got away with it, attracting no suspicion whatsoever.
Without further comment, he stepped out of the motor home and walked to a black Suburban parked nearby. Vince Canker sat behind the wheel, Louis Wong in the front passenger seat. Both men were eating deli sandwiches, washing them down with beer.
Falkirk slid onto the back seat. “We’re going to move hard on Coltrane. But not for hours yet. Finish your meal. I need to put the best team together and take the bastard when he’s least expecting it. We’ll slam him when he’s sleeping, after midnight.”
Canker, who had the body of a mob enforcer and a face hard enough to break the ram of a junkyard auto compacter, believed that he possessed a low-burning psychic power that one day would suddenly flash brighter. He said, “I got a funny thing going here, like a far voice from the Other Side, from beyond the veil, you know, telling me this here is the night, this here is the time, we find the key tonight.”
Wong swallowed a wad of sandwich. “You heard a voice before.”
“Not this here voice. No. This is another voice.”
“You recognize who it is?”
“It’s real faint, but I think it’s my mother’s voice.”
“Your mother’s dead?”
“She’d have to be, wouldn’t she, if she’s on the Other Side?”
“It’s just you never mentioned she’s dead.”
“It was only a week ago, a shitty thing. Opioids.”
“An overdose, huh? Sorry, man. That’s a tragedy.”
“It is what it is. She wasn’t big on self-control.”
“Only a week on the Other Side and she’s trying to reach you.”
“She was always a talker, never shut up. Death won’t likely change that.”
On his new world, with the key to everything at his service, Falkirk would have a good chance of becoming not only the richest man on the planet but the ruler of all. If he achieved totalitarian power, he would make stupidity a crime, and conversations like that between Canker and Wong would be sufficient evidence to impose the death penalty.
39
In the burnt-orange radiance of the westering sun, the shadows of the tall palm trees reached eastward, from which the night would come, as if welcoming the dark by casting onto its path the images of their fronds.
In one of the rocking chairs on the porch of the sandstone bungalow, Michelle Coltrane sat with her guitar, playing a song she’d written many years earlier, when she entertained dreams of wealth and fame, before she had been mature enough to understand that money and celebrity were not guarantees of happiness. What mattered most in life couldn’t be bought with a pot of gold. That wisdom had come at a terrible price.
She earned a living now by teaching guitar and piano, and she played three nights a week at Johnny’s Beachside, a restaurant and bar. The place wasn’t actually on the beach, but half a block back from it, with no water view, and it was owned by a guy named Norman, who had bought it from Johnny twenty years earlier. No stage was provided for her performance, only a corner between the bar and dining room. Her job wasn’t to wow the crowd, but only to provide soft dinner music. She played mostly other songwriters’ tunes that had made already-famous singers richer, though once or twice in each set, she slipped in one of her own. The gig gave her pleasure even when, at the end of the night, the tip jar contained only one-dollar bills, no fives or tens.
On this balmy April evening, she waited for a gentleman whom she’d invited to dinner. No romance was involved, only friendship. Anyway, by choice she hadn’t shared her bed in more than seven years, for she intuitively knew that such intimacy wouldn’t relieve her loneliness and sorrow, but only make them worse.
As the orange light purpled in the east and crimsoned in the west, he came along the oak-flanked lane, plump and rumpled, his back straight and his white-wreathed head high, with the confident yet jaunty stride of a wise and beloved headmaster of a boy’s school from the era of Goodbye, Mr. Chips. The pattern of his bow tie did not match that of his shirt—in this case, polka dots over stripes—but he so routinely mismatched these items that the effect had to be intentional, a quiet assertion of eccentricity.
He came up the front walk and climbed three of the four porch steps and stopped and regarded her with a kind of amused solemnity. He stood listening to her song for maybe half a minute and then said, “Obviously a composition from your early days, full of verve and charm, but short on grace and lacking all substance.” Although she couldn’t sing for smiling, she continued with her guitar as he finished his critique. “If I were fourteen, I might stand here quite enthralled while you played it yet again. However, I’m sixty-four, and older than my years, so I beg of you to spare me from more of this celebration of young-adult angst while my admiration for your talent is still intact.”
Rising to her feet and propping her guitar in the rocking chair, Michelle said, “You are quite a piece of work, Ed.”
“I have always strived to be such,” he assured her, as they hugged each other.
Although Ed Casper had been visiting for nearly a year and had become dear to her, sometimes—as now—she still wondered that she had, without much hesitation, developed a friendship with a guy who lived in rough circumstances, in a tent among the trees beyond the dead end of Shadow Canyon Lane, who walked into town each day to shower in a public facility.
Of course Ed wasn’t one of the alkies or druggies made homeless by substance abuse, and he wasn’t one with a mental illness that led to an addiction or ensued from it. Neither a hobo impoverished by laziness nor a pitiable vagrant condemned to poverty by a low IQ, he was an uncommon member of the society of the homeless. Some turn of events left him without ambition, robbed him of faith in the future, causing him to seek a life of few possessions, the solace of a clockless existence without appointments or driving purpose.
Ed wouldn’t say what loss might have transformed him. He never seemed to be troubled by depression, and he certainly never indulged in self-pity. Michelle knew, however, that a loss of one kind or another had broken him; because in an instant she’d lost everything that mattered most and, in the losing, had for the first time truly understood the value of what had been taken from her. Whatever else she and Ed Casper might share, the condition of their isolate souls, more insistently haunted than any house could ever be, was what had brought them together in mutual mild melancholy.
“Play something new you’ve written,” he said.
“Maybe later. Right now I need a glass of wine, and you’re always more amusing after a martini.”
They went into the house as the last light of the day bled away and the night rose out of the storied land, like spirits ascending from the graves of history.
40
Their moods for music were always synchronized, whether Beatles or Beethoven, Glenn Miller or Glenn Gould. This night, they settled on the clear and nimble piano work of David Benoit, his soft jazz rather than anything too progressive.
A three-beet salad followed by pappardelle with scallops in a light saffron sauce was a dinner to be lingered over, accompanied by a dry white wine as bright on the tongue as the music on the ear.
They ate at the kitchen table, for the small house offered no formal dining room. Crackled amber-glass cups, which matched the globes on the porch lamps, held the table candles, fracturing the flames into sinuosities of light and shadow that flowed unceasing across the table and up the walls. In this atmosphere, Ed Casper’s uplit face seemed like that of a mysterious medium or magician with knowledge of real magic rather than tricks.
Their conversation always ranged over a wide array of subjects, literally from cabbages to kings, although music and literature and art and history were those that most enlivened Ed. On this occasion, he soon turned the talk to modern physics, quantum mechanics—hidden dimensions, spooky effects at a distance, parallel worlds—about which Michelle had no understanding and of which she assumed that she had little interest.
Ed was, however, both a splendid raconteur and gifted with the ability to make the complex simple. Soon Michelle was captivated by his portrait of a universe stranger than anything Hollywood could ever splash across the screen. In a while she realized that he was not engaged in the usual casual conversation, that he’d come here intent upon explaining—and convincing her—that an infinite multiverse existed, filled with parallel Earths. She had never before seen him so intense—or intense at all.
For dessert, she served each of them a plate with two cheeses and six fresh plump figs, along with a final glass of wine.
After a bit of cheese and a single fig, Ed extracted an object from a pocket of his sport coat and put it on the table. It somewhat resembled an iPhone.
“This,” he said, “is the most valuable but also most dangerous technology in history. A quantum miracle. The key to everything. It can undo tragedy. It’s an instrument of evil in the wrong hands, but it can also make you whole again, dear girl. You and your precious family, whole again. It can bring them back to you.”
41
A life could be snuffed out as suddenly as the candle flames in the amber-glass cups on the kitchen table.
Michelle blamed herself for the deaths of her husband and only child. She had lived with guilt for a long time, although over the past seven years, the acute pain of grief had settled into a less acute but more enduring sorrow.
On the day it happened, she had been obsessing on her music career, or lack of one, bemoaning that her life had, as she thought, gone far off the tracks. In truth, there were no tracks of destiny through the chaos of life, only paths forged by decisions. She had dreamed of riding a fast train to stardom, but the rails and ties of those tracks had never been carefully laid. At the time, she thought her decision to marry Jeffy and conceive Amity had derailed her, but they were not to blame. She sabotaged herself by writing songs that were, like the one Ed earlier critiqued, a “celebration of young-adult angst,” cliché-ridden and jejune; indeed, the tune that he dissed was the least puerile of them.
She had started a quarrel with Jeffy, blaming her failure on him. But Jeffy, being Jeffy, would not argue, a failure to engage that further infuriated Michelle. Amity was four at the time, and Jeffy said the tension in the house was upsetting her. He wouldn’t even blame Michelle for frightening the girl, as if the problem were some tension arising from an architectural error in the structure.
To give Michelle time to cool off and compose herself, he took a walk into town with Amity, to get the girl a cone of her favorite flavor at an ice cream shop. He was carrying the child in his arms, crossing a street, when a drugged and drunken driver in a speeding Cadillac Escalade struck them, knocked them down like tenpins, drove over them, and dragged the battered bodies more than two hundred feet before coming to a stop.
Now she frowned at the so-called key to everything, which lay on the table. She raised her head to stare at Ed Casper, wondering how she could have failed to suspect that he was as unbalanced as any other broken soul who tented in the wilds beyond the end of Shadow Canyon Lane.
As she held a fig by its stem, turning it around and around on her plate, she wondered at her gullibility. But in fact she knew the explanation for it. Her mother had died in childbirth. Twenty-two years later, the day after Amity’s birth, Michelle’s special father, Jim Jamison, had been electrocuted as he was overseeing maintenance of a power-company transformer in a subterranean vault. Ed Casper looked nothing like Michelle’s father, but he was now the same age as her dad when he died. The two shared a certain spirit, a joie de vivre, and the timbre of their voices was similar; Jim Jamison, like Ed, loved music and art and history. In each man, an inherent kindness revealed itself in countless small ways. Long alone, she had needed a touchstone against which to test the mettle of her heart and mind. One day when her melancholy was at high tide, Ed stopped by the porch to listen to her play guitar, and in need of a friend who was also a mentor, she’d set aside all doubts about him.
Until now.
It was crazy but also cruel to claim that the dead could be brought back to life by some gadget that resembled a cell phone.
He read her expression and her eyes correctly, and before she could express her dismay, he withdrew a paperback book from an inner pocket of his sport coat. He displayed the cover—Infinite Worlds: Parallel Universes and Quantum Reality by Dr. Edwin Harkenbach. He turned the book over and tapped a small photograph on the back of it. Although the author in the photo was younger than Ed Casper, with a mustache and beard, they were undeniably the same person.
“As Edwin Harkenbach, I was a famous physicist and prolific author. As Ed Casper, I am the quirky old duck who lives up the canyon, in a tent, just another homeless guy, though cleaner than many and never without a tie.”
Michelle still felt betrayed. “Anyone can self-publish a book these days.”
Sliding the volume across the table to her, he said, “It’s not from a vanity press. Look at the publisher’s name. One of the oldest and most respected for nonfiction.”
The publisher was indeed of high caliber. However, the book alone didn’t confirm the validity of his claim to be able to undo tragedies, nor did it certify his sanity, although it gave him a measure of credibility.
“But why would you lie to me about your name?”
“Not just to you, dear. These days, I lie to everyone about my name. After destroying all records of his revolutionary work, which the government had generously funded, and after setting his lab on fire, Edwin Harkenbach crashed his twin-engine Cessna into the sea during a desperate attempt to escape to a Caribbean sanctuary before authorities discovered what he had done. His body was never found, nor will it ever be, I hope.”
42
The cheese and figs held no interest for Michelle, but she was in need of the wine.
The paperback book of forbidden knowledge, the glimmering key to everything, a haunting melody conjured by Benoit, the candles candling Ed’s eyes for any sediment of deception: the moment was eerie beyond her experience.
Her smiling guest had not lost his appetite, devouring another fig with evident pleasure.
“How generous?” she asked.
“You mean the government? Billions and billions.”
She raised one eyebrow. “And you live in a tent.”
“I have money stashed away in a safe place. To support myself in my apparent penury. Until too late, I didn’t realize that by inventing the key to everything, I was ensuring that I’d ultimately have no option other than to fake my death and live in hiding.”
He described the good that could be achieved with the key, spoke of the fearsome power that corrupt men and women could acquire through the use of it, and explained some of the seemingly infinite dangers to which the device could expose its user. The details were impressive in their complexity, convincing in their consistency, and totally crazy.
“If this is all true,” she said, “with a hop, skip, and a jump, you could find a world where no one’s hunting you, where you can live openly and in peace.”
He sighed. “If only. In numerous timelines, I seem to have failed to convincingly fake my death. I’m still hunted by ruthless people with bottomless resources.”
As if this were a weird parlor game, Michelle found herself suggesting alternatives. “Maybe a world where you were never born?”
He nodded. “During the project, I explored a few where that might be true, but they weren’t worlds where I would want to live.”
“Why not?”
His expression darkened. “Certain conditions . . . threats . . . horrors unspeakable.”
Michelle still wasn’t sure if they were having a rational conversation or were the equivalent of UFO enthusiasts discussing the style of aluminum headgear that best foiled extraterrestrial mind readers. She resorted to her wine.
