Stay in. You"re crazy if you go out there. You"ll go sandblind.
That I would chance. This was a golden opportunity to cover it up forever - never in my wildest imaginings had I suspected I might get such a chance, but it was here, and I was taking it.
I had brought three or four extra blankets. I tore a long, wide strip from one of them and tied it around my head. Looking like some sort of crazed Bedouin, I stepped out.
I spent all morning carrying chunks of asphalt up from the ditch and placing them back into the trench, trying to be as neat as a mason laying a wall . . . or bricking up a niche. The actual fetching and carrying was not terribly difficult, although I had to unearth most of the asphalt blocks like an archaeologist hunting for artifacts, and every twenty minutes or so I had to repair to the van to get out of the blowing sand and rest my stinging eyes.
I worked slowly west from what had been the shallow end of the excavation, and by quarter past noon - I had started at six - I had reached the final seventeen feet or so. By then the wind had begun to die and I could see occasional ragged patches of blue above me.
I fetched and placed, fetched and placed. Now I was over the spot where I calculated Dolan must be. Was he dead yet? How many cubic feet of air could a Cadillac hold? How soon would that s.p.a.ce become unable to support human life, a.s.suming that neither of Dolan"s two companions was still breathing?
I knelt by the bare earth. The wind had eroded the impressions of the Case-Jordan"s treads but not quite erased them; somewhere beneath those faint indentations was a man wearing a Rolex.
"Dolan," I said chummily, "I"ve changed my mind and decided to let you out."
Nothing. No sound at all. Dead for sure this time.
I went back and got another square of asphalt. I placed. it, and as I started to rise, I heard faint, cackling laughter seeping up through the earth.
I sank back into a crouch with my head forward - if I"d still had hair, it would have been hanging in my face - and remained in that position for some time, listening as he laughed. The sound was faint and without timbre.
When it stopped, I went back and got another asphalt square. There was a piece of the broken yellow line on this one. It looked like a hyphen. I knelt with it.
"For the love of G.o.d!" he shrieked. "For the love of G.o.d, Robinson!"
"Yes," I said, smiling. "For the love of G.o.d."
I put the chunk of asphalt in neatly next to its neighbor, and although I listened, I heard him no more.
I got back to my place in Vegas that night at eleven o"clock. I slept for sixteen hours, got up, walked toward the kitchen to make coffee, and then collapsed, writhing, on the hall floor as a monstrous back spasm racked me. I scrabbled at the small of my back with one hand while I chewed on the other to stifle the screams.
After awhile I crawled into the bathroom - I tried standing once, but this resulted in another thunderbolt - and used the washstand to pull myself up enough so I could get the second bottle of Empirin in the medicine cabinet.
I chewed three and drew a bath. I lay on the floor while I waited for the tub to fill. When it was, I wriggled out of my pajamas and managed to get into the tub. I lay there for five hours, dozing most of the time. When I got out, I could walk.
A little.
I went to a chiropractor. He told me I had three slipped discs and had suffered a serious lower spinal dislocation. He wanted to know if I had decided to sub for the circus strongman.
I told him I did it digging in my garden.
He told me I was going to Kansas City.
I went.
They operated.
When the anesthesiologist put the rubber cup over my face, I heard Dolan laughing from the hissing blackness inside and knew I was going to die.
The recovery room was a watery tiled green.
"Am I alive?" I croaked.
A nurse laughed. "Oh, yes." His hand touched my brow - my brow that went all the way around my head. "What a sunburn you have! My G.o.d! Did that hurt, or are you still too doped up?"
"Still too doped up," I said. "Did I talk while I was under?"
"Yes," he said.
I was cold all over. Cold to the bones of me.
"What did I say?"
"You said, "It"s dark in here. Let me out!"" And he laughed again.
"Oh," I said.
They never found him - Dolan.
It was the storm. That flukey storm. I"m pretty sure I know what happened, although I think you"ll understand when I tell you I never checked too closely.
RPAV - remember that? They were repaving. The storm almost buried the section of 71 which the detour had closed. When they went back to work, they didn"t bother to remove the new dunes all at once but only as they went along - why do otherwise? There was no traffic to worry about. So they plowed sand and routed up old paving at the same time. And if the "dozer operator happened to notice that the sand-crusted asphalt in one section - a section about forty feet long - was breaking in front of his blade in neat, almost geometric pieces, he never said anything. Maybe he was stoned. Or maybe he was just dreaming of stepping out with his baby that evening.
Then came the dumpsters with their fresh loads of gravel, followed by the spreaders and rollers. After them the big tankers would arrive, the ones with the wide sprayer attachments on the backs and their smell of hot tar, so like melting shoe-leather. And when the fresh asphalt had dried, along would come the lining machine, the driver under his big canvas parasol looking back frequently to make sure the broken yellow line was perfectly straight, unaware that he was pa.s.sing over a fog-gray Cadillac with three people inside, unaware that down in the darkness there was a ruby ring and a gold Rolex that might still be marking off the hours.
One of those heavy vehicles would almost surely have collapsed an ordinary Cadillac; there would have been a lurch, a crunch, and then a bunch of men digging to see what - or who - they had found. But it really was more tank than car, and Dolan"s very carefulness has so far kept anyone from finding him.
Sooner or later the Cadillac will collapse of course, probably under the weight of a pa.s.sing semi, and the next vehicle along will see a big broken dent in the westbound lane, and the Highway Department will be notified, and there will be another RPAV. But if there aren"t Highway Department workers right there to see what happens, to observe that the heavy weight of a pa.s.sing truck has caused some hollow object under the road to collapse, I think they will a.s.sume the "marsh-hole" (that is what they call them) has been caused by either frost, or a collapsed salt-dome, or possibly a desert temblor. They will repair it and life will go on.
He was reported missing - Dolan.
A few tears were shed.
A columnist in the Las Vegas Sun suggested that he might be playing dominos or shooting pool somewhere with Jimmy Hoffa.
Perhaps that is not so far from the truth.
I"m fine.
My back is pretty much okay again. I"m under strict orders not to lift anything which weighs over thirty pounds without help, but I"ve got a good bunch of third-graders this year, and all the help I could want.
I"ve driven back and forth over that stretch of road several times in my new Acura automobile. Once I even stopped, got out, and (after checking in both directions to make sure the road was deserted) took a p.i.s.s on what I was pretty sure was the spot. But I couldn"t produce much of a flow, even though my kidneys felt full, and when I drove on I kept checking the rearview mirror: I had this funny idea, you see, that he was going to rise up from the back seat, his skin charred to a cinnamon color and stretched over his skull like the skin of a mummy, his hair full of sand, his eyes and his Rolex watch glittering.
That was the last time I was on 71, actually. Now I take the Interstate when I need to head west.
And Elizabeth? Like Dolan, she has fallen silent. I find that is a relief.
The End of the Whole Mess.
I want to tell you about the end of war, the degeneration of mankind, and the death of the Messiah - an epic story, deserving thousands of pages and a whole shelf of volumes, but you (if there are any "you" later on to read this) will have to settle for the freeze-dried version. The direct injection works very fast. I figure I"ve got somewhere between forty-five minutes and two hours, depending on my blood-type. I think it"s A, which should give me a little more time, but I"ll be G.o.dd.a.m.ned if I can remember for sure. If it turns out to be O, you could be in for a lot of blank pages, my hypothetical friend.
In any event, I think maybe I"d better a.s.sume the worst and go as fast as I can.
I"m using the electric typewriter - Bobby"s word - processor is faster, but the genny"s cycle is too irregular to be trusted, even with the line suppressor. I"ve only got one shot at this; I can"t risk getting most of the way home and then seeing the whole thing go to data heaven because of an oHm drop, or a surge too great for the suppressor to cope with.
My name is Howard Fornoy. I was a freelance writer. My brother, Robert Fornoy, was the Messiah. I killed him by shooting him up with his own discovery four hours ago. He called it The Calmative. A Very Serious Mistake might have been a better name, but what"s done is done and can"t be undone, as the Irish have been saying for centuries . . . which proves what a.s.sholes they are.
s.h.i.t, I can"t afford these digressions.
After Bobby died I covered him with a quilt and sat at the cabin"s single living-room. window for some three hours, looking out at the woods. Used to be you could see the orange glow of the hi-intensity arc-sodiums from North Conway, but no more. Now there"s just the White Mountains, looking like dark triangles of crepe paper cut out by a child, and the pointless stars.
I turned on the radio, dialed through four bands, found one crazy guy, and shut it off. I sat there thinking of ways to tell this story - My mind kept sliding away toward all those miles of dark pinewoods, all that nothing Finally I realized I needed to get myself off the dime and shoot myself up: s.h.i.t. I never could work without a deadline.
And I"ve sure-to-G.o.d got one now.
Our parents had no reason to expect anything other than what they got: bright children. Dad was a history major who had become a fun professor at Hofstra when he was thirty. Ten years later he was one of six vice-administrators of the National Archives in Washington, DC, and in line for the top spot. He was a h.e.l.luva good guy, too - had every record Chuck Berry ever cut and played a pretty mean blues guitar himself My dad filed by day and rocked by night.
Mom graduated magna c.u.m laude from Drew. Got a Phi Beta Kappa key she sometimes wore on this funky fedora she had. She became a successful CPA in DC, met my dad, married him, and took in her shingle when she became pregnant with yours truly. I came along in 1980. By "84 she was doing taxes for some of my dad"s a.s.sociates - she called this her "little hobby." By the time Bobby was born in 1987, she was handling taxes, investment portfolios, and estate-planning for a dozen powerful men. I could name them, but who gives a wad? They"re either dead or driveling idiots by now.
I think she probably made more out of "her little hobby" each year than my dad made at his job, but that never mattered - they were happy with what they were to themselves and to each other. I saw them squabble lots of times, but I never saw them fight. When I was growing up, the only difference I saw between my mom and my playmates" moms was that their moms used to read or iron or sew or talk on the phone while the soaps played on the tube, and my mom used to run a pocket calculator and write down numbers on big green sheets of paper while the soaps played on the tube.
I was no disappointment to a couple of people with Mensa Gold Cards in their wallets. I maintained A"s and B"s through my school career (the idea that either I or my brother might go to a private school was never even discussed so far as I know). I also wrote well early, with no effort at all. I sold my first magazine piece when I was twenty - it was on how the Continental Army wintered at Valley Forge. I sold it to an airline magazine for four hundred fifty dollars. My dad, whom I loved deeply, asked me if he could buy that check from me. He gave me his own personal check and had the check from the airline magazine framed and hung it over his desk. A romantic genius, if you will. A romantic blues-playing genius, if you will. Take it from me, a kid could do a lot worse. Of course he and my mother both died raving and p.i.s.sing in their pants late last year, like almost everyone else on this big round world of ours, but I never stopped loving either of them.
I was the sort of child they had every reason to expect - a good boy with a bright mind, a talented boy whose talent grew to early maturity in an atmosphere of love and confidence, a faithful boy who loved and respected his mom and dad.
Bobby was different. n.o.body, not even Mensa types like our folks, ever expects a kid like Bobby. Not ever.
I potty-trained two full years earlier than Bob, and that was the only thing in which I ever beat him. But I never felt jealous of him; that would have been like a fairly good American Legion League pitcher feeling jealous of Nolan Ryan or Roger Clemens. After a certain point the comparisons that cause feelings of jealousy simply cease to exist. I"ve been there, and I can tell you: after a certain point you just stand back and shield your eyes from the flashburns.
Bobby read at two and began writing short essays ("Our Dog", "A Trip to Boston with Mother") at three. His printing was the straggling, struggling galvanic constructions of a six-year-old, and that was startling enough in itself, but there was more: if transcribed so that his still-developing motor control no longer became an evaluative factor, you would have thought you were reading the work of a bright, if extremely naive, fifth-grader, He progressed from simple sentences to compound sentences to complex ones with dizzying rapidity, grasping clauses, sub-clauses, and modifying clauses with an intuitiveness that was eerie. Sometimes his syntax was garbled and his modifiers misplaced, but he had such flaws - which plague most writers all their lives - pretty well under control by the age of five.
He developed headaches. My parents were afraid he had some sort of physical problem - a brain-tumor, perhaps - and took him to a doctor who examined him carefully, listened to him even more carefully, and then told my parents there was nothing wrong with Bobby except stress: he was in a state of extreme frustration because his writing-hand would not work as well as his brain.
"You got a kid trying to pa.s.s a mental kidney stone," the doctor said. "I could prescribe something for his headaches, but I think the drug he really needs is a typewriter." So Mom and Dad gave Bobby an IBM. A year later they gave him a Commodore 64 with WordStar for Christmas and Bobby"s headaches stopped. Before going on to other matters, I only want to add that he believed for the next three years or so that it was Santa Claus who had left that word-cruncher under our tree. Now that I think of it, that was another place where I beat Bobby: I Santa-trained earlier, too.
There"s so much I could tell you about those early days, and I suppose I"ll have to tell you a little, but I"ll have to go fast and make it brief. The deadline. Ah, the deadline. I once read a very funny piece called "The Essential Gone with the Wind" that went something like this: " "A war?" laughed Scarlett."Oh, fiddle-de-dee!"
Boom! Ashley went to war! Atlanta burned! Rhett walked in and then walked out!
" ""Fiddle-de-dee," said Scarlett through her tears, "I will think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day."
I laughed heartily over that when I read it; now that I"m faced with doing something similar, it doesn"t seem quite so funny. But here goes: "A child with an IQ immeasurable by any existing test?" smiled India Fornoy to her devoted husband, Richard. "Fiddle-de-dee! We"ll provide an atmosphere where his intellect - not to mention that of his not-exactly-stupid older brother - can grow. And we"ll raise them as the normal all-American boys they by gosh are!"
Boom! The Fornoy boys grew up! Howard went to the University of Virginia, graduated c.u.m laude, and settled down to a freelance writing career! Made a comfortable living! Stepped out with a lot of women and went to bed with quite a few of them! Managed to avoid social diseases both s.e.xual and pharmacological! Bought a Mitsubishi stereo system! Wrote home at least once a week! Published two novels that did pretty well! "Fiddle-de-dee," said Howard, "this is the life for me!"
And so it was, at least until the day Bobby showed up unexpectedly (in the best mad-scientist tradition) with his two gla.s.s boxes, a bees" nest in one and a wasps" nest in the other, Bobby wearing a Mumford Phys Ed tee-shirt inside-out, on the verge of destroying human intellect and just as happy as a clam at high tide.
Guys like my brother Bobby come along only once every two or three generations, I think - guys like Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, maybe Edison. They all seem to have one thing in common: they are like huge compa.s.ses which swing aimlessly for a long time, searching for some true north and then homing on it with fearful force. Before that happens such guys are apt to get up to some weird s.h.i.t, and Bobby was no exception.
When he was eight and I was fifteen, he came to me and said he had invented an airplane. By then I knew Bobby too well to just say "Bulls.h.i.t" and kick him out of my room. I went out to the garage where there was this weird plywood contraption sitting on his American Flyer red wagon. It looked a little like a fighter plane, but the wings were raked forward instead of back. He had mounted the saddle from his rocking horse on the middle of it with bolts. There was a lever on the side. There was no motor. He said it was a glider. He wanted me to push him down Carrigan"s Hill, which was the steepest grade in DC"s Grant Park - there was a cement path down the middle of it for old folks. That, Bobby said, would be his runway.
"Bobby," I said, "you got this puppy"s wings on backward."
"No," he said. "This is the way they"re supposed to be. I saw something on Wild Kingdom about hawks. They dive down on their prey and then reverse their wings coming up. They"re double-jointed, see? You get better lift this way."
"Then why isn"t the Air Force building them this way?" I asked, blissfully unaware that both the American and the Russian air forces had plans for such forward-wing fighter planes on their drawing boards.
Bobby just shrugged. He didn"t know and didn"t care.
We went over to Carrigan"s Hill and he climbed into the rocking-horse saddle and gripped the lever. "Push me hard," he said. His eyes were dancing with that crazed light I knew so well - Christ, his eyes used to light up that way in his cradle sometimes. But I swear to G.o.d I never would have pushed him down the cement path as hard as I did if I thought the thing would actually work.
But I didn"t know, and I gave him one h.e.l.l of a shove. He went freewheeling down the hill, whooping like a cowboy just off a traildrive and headed into town for a few cold beers. An old lady had to jump out of his way, and he just missed an old geezer leaning over a walker. Halfway down he pulled the handle and I watched, wide-eyed and bulls.h.i.t with fear and amazement, as his splintery plywood plane separated from the wagon. At first it only hovered inches above it, and for a second it looked like it was going to settle back. Then there was a gust of wind and Bobby"s plane took off like someone had it on an invisible cable. The American Flyer wagon ran off the concrete path and into some bushes. All of a sudden Bobby was ten feet in the air, then twenty, then fifty. He went gliding over Grant Park on a steepening upward plane, whooping cheerily.
I went running after him, screaming for him to come down, visions of his body tumbling off that stupid rocking-horse saddle and impaling itself on a tree, or one of the park"s many statues, standing out with hideous clarity in my head. I did not just imagine my brother"s funeral; I tell you I attended it.
"BOBBY!" I shrieked. "COME DOWN!"
"WHEEEEEEEe!" Bobby screamed back, his voice faint but clearly ecstatic. Startled chess-players, Frisbee-throwers, book-readers, lovers, and joggers stopped whatever they were doing to watch.
"BOBBY THERE"S NO SEATBELT ON THAT f.u.c.kING THING!" I screamed. It was the first time I ever used that particular word, so far as I can remember.
"Iyyyy"ll beeee all riyyyyht . . . " He was screaming at the top of his lungs, but I was appalled to realize I could barely hear him. I went running down Carrigan"s Hill, shrieking all the way. I don"t have the slightest memory of just what I was yelling, but the next day I could not speak above a whisper. I do remember pa.s.sing a young fellow in a neat three-piece suit standing by the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt at the foot of the hill. He looked at me and said conversationally, "Tell you what, my friend, I"m having one h.e.l.l of an" acid flashback."
I remember that odd misshapen shadow gliding across the green floor of the park, rising and rippling as it crossed park benches, litter baskets, and the upturned faces of the watching people. I remember chasing it. I remember how my mother"s face crumpled and how she started to cry when I told her that Bobby"s plane, which had no business flying in the first place, turned upside down in a sudden eddy of wind and Bobby finished his short but brilliant career splattered all over D Street.
The way things turned out, it might have been better for everyone if things had actually turned out that way, but they didn"t.
Instead, Bobby banked back toward Carrigan"s Hill, holding nonchalantly onto the tail of his own plane to keep from falling off the d.a.m.ned thing, and brought it down toward the little pond at the center of Grant Park. He went air-sliding five feet over it, then four . . . and then he was skiing his sneakers along the surface of the water, sending back twin white wakes, scaring the usually complacent (and overfed) ducks up in honking indignant flurries before him, laughing his cheerful laugh. He came down on the far side, exactly between two park benches that snapped off the wings of his plane. He flew out of the saddle, thumped his head, and started to bawl.
That was life with Bobby.
Not everything was that spectacular - in fact, I don"t think anything was . . . at least until The Calmative. But I told you the story because I think, this time at least, the extreme case best ill.u.s.trates the norm: fife with Bobby was a constant mind-f.u.c.k. By the age of nine he was attending quantum physics and advanced algebra cla.s.ses at Georgetown University. There was the day he blanked out every radio and TV on our street - and the surrounding four blocks - with his own voice; he had found an old portable TV in the attic and turned it into a wide-band radio broadcasting station. One old black-and-white Zenith, twelve feet of hi-fi flex, a coathanger mounted on the roofpeak of our house, and presto! For about two hours four blocks of Georgetown could receive only WBOB . . . which happened to be my brother, reading some of my short stories, telling moron jokes, and explaining that the high sulfur content in baked beans was the reason our dad farted so much in church every Sunday morning. "But he gets most of em off pretty quiet," Bobby told his listening audience of roughly three thousand, "or sometimes he holds the real bangers until it"s time for the hymns."
My dad, who was less than happy about all this, ended up paying a seventy-five-dollar FCC fine and taking it out of Bobby"s allowance for the next year.
Life with Bobby, oh yeah . . . and look here, I"m crying. Is it honest sentiment, I wonder, or the onset? The former, I think - Christ knows how much I loved him - but I think I better try to hurry up a little just the same.
Bobby had graduated high school, for all practical purposes, by the age of ten, but he never got a BA or BS, let alone any advanced degree. It was that big powerful compa.s.s in his head, swinging around and around, looking for some true north to point at.
He went through a physics period, and a shorter period when he was nutty for chemistry . . . but in the end, Bobby was too impatient with mathematics for either of those fields to hold him. He could do it, but it - and ultimately all so-called hard science - bored him.
By the time he was fifteen, it was archaeology - he combed the White Mountain foothills around our summer place in North Conway, building a history of the Indians who had lived there from arrowheads, flints, even the charcoal patterns of long-dead campfires in the mesolithic caves in the mid-New Hampshire regions.
But that pa.s.sed, too, and he began to read history and anthropology. When he was sixteen my father and my mother gave their reluctant approval when Bobby requested that he be allowed to accompany a party of New England anthropologists on an expedition to South America.