Elsewhere, page 15
After a pause for thought, she said, “So keep looking. Keep searching for a world to live where you were never born.”
“During the project, before I destroyed all the records of it and fled, I ported to a hundred worlds, actually a hundred and five, maybe six, out of the hundred eighty-seven that my team cataloged. After that, I ported to eighty more.” He spoke as casually as if he were talking about senior-service jitney rides to a series of local malls. “But I can’t handle it anymore, the porting. I’ve got an adventurous mind, but I’m not physically adventurous. Or emotionally capable. Not any longer. I’ve too often been terrified out of my wits. All I want now is quiet and a few friends and books to read.”
He didn’t appear to be the least frightened as he ate cheese and figs, smiling at her as if he were an uncle enjoying the company of his favorite niece.
So she said, “Terrified by what?”
He set aside the stripped stem of a fig, swallowed a bite of fruit, blotted his lips with his napkin, took a sip of wine, blotted his lips again, and during all that, his face paled so much that the candlelight could not conceal the loss of color. His eyes, the pure blue of a deep clear sky, became the blue of the sky reflected on water, as tears brimmed but didn’t spill.
“Some things I’ve seen can’t be discussed at table, not if I’m to keep down the lovely meal you prepared. I’ll describe a parallel world that was hideous, but not as horrible as some others. You may nevertheless need your wine.”
“I already do.”
“I mean, your glass is empty.”
She poured another serving for herself. And one for him.
He stared into the chardonnay, as though the wine, in which swam scintillant shapes of candlelight, could be consulted regarding the designs of fate, as if it were a liquid crystal ball.
With a solemnity new to him, he said, “There is a timeline in which the United States endures a societal convulsion similar to the French Revolution, but even worse. It is led by modern Jacobins, not spawned by the lower classes but by the highest, by privileged young men and women made ignorant by the most expensive universities and schooled in violence by the culture of death that produced them. It is as though Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities had been rewritten by a violence-porn hack, filmed by the most deranged talent in Hollywood. The streets run with blood, as they did in the Dickens novel, as in fact they did in France between 1789 and 1794, during the Reign of Terror. Everywhere, scaffolds are erected in the streets, and the condemned are hung by their wrists to be eviscerated. Children are beheaded in front of their parents, the parents stoned to death by mobs. Tracts of houses and apartment buildings are set afire to exterminate residents who’ve been declared moral vermin. What we think could never happen here happens there, as it happened in Germany in the 1930s, as it happened in China under Mao. Nihilism and irrationality spread like a plague. Crazed, bestial emotion replaces logic and reason. Madness is redefined as moral clarity. The past is destroyed and reinvented to ensure a future of utopian justice, though justice no longer exists, has become mere revenge, often revenge against enemies more imagined than real, even revenge of Jacobin against Jacobin, as the insanity breeds more paranoia. I’ve seen women gang-raped in the streets by men urged on by other women waving banners of female solidarity. I’ve seen the heads of babies, from families of the revolution’s enemies, scattered across a day-care playground like so many spoiled cabbages discarded by a grocer.”
Ed lost the ability to withhold his tears. Lambent light glazed his wet face. His mouth had gone soft, and a tremor afflicted him.
Pushing aside her glass of wine, Michelle not only returned to sobriety in an instant, but she also abandoned the doubt with which she had thus far received his story. In his voice, demeanor, and tears, she recognized a truth that she only wished might be a lie.
She said, “And that wasn’t the worst world you’ve seen?”
He found his voice again. “Understand, many timelines are as hospitable as this one, some even better. But across an infinite multiverse of worlds, you can find all the evil realms that humanity has imagined—and some beyond imagining. I’m burnt out on travel. I haven’t the nerve for it anymore. My heart can’t take it. I was a pacifist once. A pacifist! I’m not anymore. I am armed. I can kill. The things I’ve seen . . . they’ve changed me. I don’t want to be changed more than I’ve already been. I don’t want the multiverse. All I want is a home, books, and the peace to read them.”
Michelle stared at the key to everything, which lay between her and Ed. As the candles pulsed, plumes of light and plumes of shadow seemed to flow across the table to the device, as if it possessed a gravity that would in time draw all things to it.
“You’re terrified of what’s out there, the places this thing can take you, worse even than the terror of that other America you described—and yet you want me to use it.”
“Only carefully, with my guidance. To undo the tragedy, connect with a version of your husband and child who live elsewhere and have lost you, bring back together a family that should never have been torn asunder. During this past year, I’ve come to love you as I might a daughter, Michelle. I want to cure your sorrow, put an end to your loneliness, so you can be happy.”
Maybe it was real—this science, this incredible promise. But if it was a false hope, it would be worse than no hope at all.
She said, “It sounds very nice, a dream, a fairy tale. But if you don’t want to ‘port’ anymore—”
“For you, only to make this happen, I would port again.”
“Yeah, well, with an infinite number of worlds to search, the chances of finding Jeffy and Amity alone, needing me—they’re zero.”
Color returned to Ed’s face, and he found again the smile that tears had earlier washed away.
“Just wait,” he said.
“For what?”
“You’ll see!”
Muttering to himself, he fumbled through the compartments of his coat, like the White Rabbit searching for a pocket watch.
“Another book?” she asked. “You carry the Library of Ed with you?”
“No, no. What would a book prove?” He produced a folded piece of paper, opened it, smoothed it flat. “This is from his Facebook page.” He slid the photograph across the table.
“Whose Facebook page?”
The answer was in the photo, and it stunned her speechless.
Here was her Jeffy, older than he had been on the day he died, smiling that goofy smile of his.
The hope that abruptly flooded into Michelle was so powerful that it filled her until her breast ached with the pressure of it, until she could not draw a breath, as if she might drown in hope.
With Jeffy was a lovely girl who looked eleven, a girl who had been four the day that she’d been run down by an Escalade and killed with her father. Spared from death, blessed with life, this Amity had changed so much, so very much, but there could be no doubt who she was.
“I found them,” Ed Casper Harkenbach said.
Michelle couldn’t look up from the photo, for fear that when she lowered her eyes to it again, Jeffy and Amity would be gone, the paper blank.
If this image was not Photoshopped, then they had died, yes, but not in all the worlds where they lived.
The word miracle was inadequate.
“If this isn’t true, don’t do this to me, Ed.”
“In that world,” he said, “you aren’t in their lives, haven’t been for years. He still loves you very much and misses you. And the girl—she’s a wonderful girl, a treasure—she yearns for you. We can do this, Michelle. We can do this. I guarantee you. I have prepared the way.” He picked up the key to everything and came around the table. “Shall I give you a demonstration?”
“What demonstration?”
“You’re not ready to meet them. But a small trip to prove what I’ve said . . . ?”
He pulled her chair back, and with some trepidation, she rose to her feet. He escorted her to the door to the hallway but didn’t pass through it.
“Take my arm,” he said. “Hold tight.”
The screen of his device brightened with pale-gray light.
As she watched him tap a button marked Select and then work with a keypad when one appeared, her doubt returned. She felt foolish for participating in what would certainly result in an assurance that, gee, what a surprise, it always worked before.
“Here we go,” he said.
The kitchen vanished.
They were afloat in a realm without shape or dimension. Blinding light washed over them, dazzled through them, light so intense and strange that they might have been standing for judgment in the brightness of God.
Then they were in the kitchen again, but it was dark. When Ed flipped the light switch, Michelle saw a familiar room yet one with numerous small differences, the absence of her personal things.
“This is Jeffrey’s house on Earth one point ten, a world where he never married, where Amity was never born. He lives alone here, a bachelor. Currently he’s on the road for two weeks, checking swap meets and antique barns, looking for his radios, Bakelite jewelry, period posters.”
As Ed led her through the bungalow, Michelle’s legs felt weak. Her breath repeatedly caught in her throat at one sight or another. The place was stocked with all the things that her lost husband had loved to collect and restore and share with his customers. Because the rooms were so imprinted with Jeffy’s passions, they were warm, cozy, welcoming—yet ineffably sad. She didn’t believe she imagined the air of loneliness that faded the charm of the bright, stylized Art Deco objects and images. Jeffy was outgoing. He thrived on companionship. He had not been born to live alone.
As she, too, had not been born for solitude.
“This is only a demonstration,” Ed said. “This Jeffrey isn’t the one I’ve found for you. He has cancer and expected to have at most a year to live. And there’s no Amity here, as there is elsewhere.”
On the return trip through the house, Ed extinguished the lights behind them. In the dark of the kitchen, he activated his device and pushed a button labeled Return.
The rushing whiteness of purest light inspired in Michelle an awe in which were twined apprehension and hope.
Then she and Ed were once more in her kitchen, her house, where she had passed more than two thousand days haunted by the memory of her dead husband and child.
43
As the universe relentlessly expanded, the stars moved ever farther from Earth, until in a distant time after the end of the human era, maybe the night sky would no longer be richly diamonded, but would offer blackness relieved solely by the moon that reflected the light of the only star that would ever matter, the sun in its thermonuclear decline.
Sometimes the vastness of creation filled Jeffy less with a sense of wonder than with reverent dread, for he felt small and doubted his ability to protect his child.
Because it was just beyond the town limits, Shadow Canyon Lane had no streetlamps. Sitting sideways on the cushioned bench of a bay window, his legs stretched out and his back against the niche wall, Jeffy alternately studied the sky and peered down at the moonlit two-lane blacktop. The night was so still that the scene seemed to be a diorama enclosed in glass, and no leaf so much as trembled on the majestic live oaks.
Beside him on the bench lay the only pistol he owned, a double-action 9 mm Smith & Wesson model 5946 with a ten-round magazine, a four-inch barrel, and Novak LoMount Carry sights. A spare magazine nestled in a jacket pocket.
He hoped not to have to use either the gun or Ed Harkenbach’s key to everything that was tucked into another pocket of the jacket.
In retrospect, he should have stopped at the bank on the way home to withdraw a few thousand dollars. He’d kept some money in a cash box, a little over five hundred. That wouldn’t get them far if they had to go on the run or hide out for a while.
He couldn’t believe it had come to this, the world turned upside down. A part of him clung to the hope that all would be well.
His mom and dad lived a few towns up the coast, in Huntington Beach, but he dared not call them for help of any kind. If he was still under suspicion, his folks were likely being monitored.
From the bed, where she lay fully clothed in the dark, Amity said, “You’re sure the extra food and water we left for Snowball will be enough?”
“More than enough, sweetheart.”
“I wish I had him with me. We should go back for him.”
“He’s safer in his cage.”
“It’s not right to leave people behind.”
“We haven’t left him behind forever. We’ll get him later.”
“I love him.”
“I know. And he knows. Now try to sleep.”
“Are you going to sleep?”
“Not if I can stay awake. And I will.”
Shadow Canyon Lane, a dead-end street with only seven houses, was a few minutes from the bustling coast where tourists flocked from spring through autumn, and yet it felt like a country road, shielded from the curious by live oaks, quiet and little trafficked.
The day’s adventures had taken such a toll on Amity that she soon slept, snoring softly.
Hour by hour, the moon sailed across the sky on a westward course, like a luminous galleon. In time it passed below the highest branches of the live oaks, its light snared in the leafy boughs as if it were a magic egg swaddled in a nest, waiting for its mystery to hatch, and the night grew yet darker.
The twelfth of April melted into the thirteenth.
They must have been here much earlier, must have been watching perhaps since well before midnight. They had come on foot and with great stealth, stealing closer through the oak groves to take up sentinel positions. A few minutes before one o’clock in the morning, as choreographed as dancers in a dance, they seemed to materialize out of nothing, shadows rising from shadows, hooded and masked and dressed in black. From the second-story window of Marty and Doris Bonner’s residence, which he’d been caring for while they were on vacation, Jeffy had a clear view of his bungalow, diagonally across the street, when suddenly it was besieged by phantoms. They swarmed the house, coming along the lane from the east and west—and no doubt from Oak Hollow Road to the north—at least twelve of them.
The sole sound he heard was the sudden hard knocking of his heart as he slid off the window seat and got to his feet. He stepped back from the glass, removing himself from what meager moonglow might pass through the panes and paint paleness on his face.
They apparently didn’t break down any doors, but entered his house silently, using some quick-acting lock-defeating technology. He had an alarm system, and it was set; but evidently they defeated it with a radio-wave jammer or some other device, because no siren announced an intruder. Light bloomed in every window simultaneously.
The sudden invasion of the bungalow was conducted so furtively that no neighbors farther along Shadow Canyon Lane seemed to have been awakened. Their lights remained off, their houses quiet.
Jeffy hesitated to disturb Amity. There might be no need to wake her. Falkirk and his strike force would likely believe that father and daughter had fled not only their home but also from Suavidad Beach, because immediately after dinner he had moved his Explorer into the Bonners’ garage.
He hadn’t wanted to leave in the SUV if it wasn’t necessary. In the event that his concern proved to be overblown. Besides, a vehicle registered to him would be quickly found if indeed Falkirk wanted to get his hands on them; they couldn’t drive to any lasting safety, not with their meager resources, not when using credit cards would leave a trail that deep-state agents, with their technology, could follow as easily as rats following the Pied Piper’s music out of Hamelin.
The Bonner house was a just-in-case place, where they could wait and watch and, if necessary, use the key to everything to effectuate the only escape that would foil Falkirk.
44
In Coltrane’s home workshop, where restored Bakelite radios were displayed on shelves, where a Deco poster for a travel agency depicted a streamlined train racing out of a tunnel in the Alps, John Falkirk stripped off his mask and slid his hood back. He warned himself to keep his cool, to remain calm and give no indication that the emptiness of the house concerned him; he couldn’t tolerate his inferiors seeing him frustrated and perhaps being amused by his pique.
The house swarmed with spectral figures, like spirits that had manifested in other than their usual white ectoplasm, haunting every room in search of a clue as to the Coltranes’ current whereabouts. One by one they came to him with nothing to report, nothing but the presence of a mouse frantically spinning its exercise wheel in a cage—and the absence of a vehicle in the garage.
Falkirk was certain that Coltrane had the key to everything and that if only he had been able to assemble his team and move faster, the transport device would now be in his possession.
He went onto the front porch and stood looking at the pair of rocking chairs. One of the vagrants tenting in the wilds farther up the canyon, whom they had arrested and interrogated earlier in the day, reported seeing Harkenbach in one of these rocking chairs, Coltrane in the other, on two or three occasions. Falkirk hadn’t acted on that testimony at once because the same vagrant claimed to have seen four-foot-tall gray-skinned extraterrestrials from another galaxy and, on another occasion, Jesus walking down the sky on a golden staircase. He should have remembered that, like a broken watch, even a drug-addled hobo could be right twice a day.
