by Kevin Shay
“Gotta go!” I bolt for the other door. Now back to the den, where a circle of people gathered around Bruce are passing around my little photocopy, having a laugh over it. I swoop down on them.
“Pretty funny, right? Here, ma’am, have one of your own. But you won’t be laughin’ when the earthquakes hit! Magnetic pole reversal, that’s no joke! Some real earth’s-final-fury shit!”
I poke my head into the hallway. Boyd approacheth, his face set in a dangerous scowl. “Thirteen months left! Get right with God, ladies and gents!” I duck out and make for the kitchen.
Nicole is there. She grabs my arm. “Randall!” she says in a failed whisper. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m telling it like it is, sister.” I pull away and run into the living room, where conversation immediately stops.
“I see my reputation totally and completely precedes me.” I grab the remaining stack of pamphlets from my pocket, start handing them out left and right. Not knowing what else to do, everyone accepts them. I keep one for myself, leap up onto the coffee table, and begin to read aloud in my sternest preacher baritone.
Now the whole party crowds into the living room, angling for a glimpse of the emerging debacle that is their host’s family member. Boyd and Nicole flank me on either side of the coffee table.
“Part Two. A Perspective on the Coming Earth Changes,” I declaim.
“Come on, man, get down from there right now,” Boyd demands, trying to keep his voice low, as if there might still be a few guests who haven’t noticed me.
“Randall, please,” says Nicole, a desperate quaver in her voice.
I look at her and have a split second of remorse. This little exercise is far past the point of no return, but I could still stop. Just a performance piece, ladies and gentlemen, something I’ve been working on. But then I turn toward my brother-in-law. And realize this is no longer about my sister, or my family. It’s you, Boyd, and your cronies. Everyone in this room. The people who might stop TEOTWAWKI but never will. Too busy with a sex scandal. You Nielsen whores who make an oxymoron of “journalistic integrity.” With your sound bites, your puff pieces, your softball interviews, your thirty-second glosses. You claim to be purveyors of the news. But if I calmly and coherently told you the news, the truth, you’d take me no more seriously than you take me now as I stand on a table bellowing about the Book of Revelation. You won’t Get It, you can’t, but you must, or we all go down together.
And what exactly would be a sane response to such a situation? Isn’t what I’m doing just as rational as anything else?
“And that, my friends, brings us to the Mayan calendar. Now consider, if you will—”
“Look, pal, just knock this shit off!” Boyd abruptly wraps my waist in a rough hug and yanks hard. I spread my legs for stability, try to push him away with one hand while flailing the other arm for balance, but he’s not messing around. I lose my footing and tumble off the table. Head falling toward the sofa. At least I’ll hit something cushioned.
Wait, that part doesn’t look so soft—
chapter 12
402
Days
Country roads, take me home. Or, at the moment, I’d settle for “Country roads, don’t cause my fiery death.” I knew I should have timed this better. Told myself not to stop for breakfast in Arkansas. But I was curious what the Denny’s crowd in the president’s home state had to say about their boy and his current troubles. And was a little reluctant to reach my destination, to meet the Burseys in the flesh and confront the slenderness of the straw I’m clutching at. So I lingered over my Grand Slam. Now the sun is sinking fast, and this place is going to get dark when it gets dark. Nothing around for miles but trees and brush and this ragged stretch of highway without so much as a line painted down the middle.
This patch of northeast Texas is rural in a way that’s new to me. Most sparsely populated places I’ve seen feel like someone deliberately decided to leave the land uninhabited, for farming or hunting or preservation, or because it’s inhospitable or arid. Here you get the sense the land is undeveloped only because nobody’s happened to claim it. Texas just hasn’t filled up yet.
Has it been eight miles since I left the interstate? I’m supposed to turn onto a dirt road with a multicolored mailbox. I squint into the encroaching dimness, setting off a twinge in my cheek. The pain’s almost gone now, though, and the bruise so close to imperceptible that I probably won’t have to explain it to the Burseys. If they do ask, I have my explanation ready: raking leaves, and I slipped and fell against the porch. “That sounds like something a battered wife would say,” Gene Denley remarked when I called to tell him to cancel my remaining bookings, but that’s my story and I stuck to it.
Raking leaves, indeed. The party, the fall, waking up to a dozen people yelling at me not to move, EMTs strapping me to a backboard. A few X-rays, a hazy overnight hospital stay. Then back to Nicole’s house, the guest room this time, but what an unwelcome guest. My sister grudgingly nursed me back to health for a week, brought me meals and changed my bandage with minimal dialogue. Every morning she asked how I was feeling, but “Do you think you’re up to traveling yet?” is not exactly the sort of tender inquiry one would hope for. I had transgressed unforgivably against propriety and, maybe worse, gotten blood on the carpet, and throughout my convalescence I got a strong sense that Nicole viewed my injury with a certain satisfaction, my just deserts. “You’re lucky you didn’t fall a couple of inches to the left,” she remarked several times, meaning my eye would have popped like a grape against the corner of the sofa’s wooden arm, and I couldn’t help taking the implication that a couple of inches to the left might have better fit the magnitude of my crime.
Oops, there was the mailbox. Set back about six feet from the highway, and I blew right by it. If I’d gotten here any later, I’d be driving back and forth hunting for it in the dark. I find a patch of shoulder where the trees don’t come right up to the pavement and turn around. This little Isuzu is so much easier to maneuver than my late, lamented Custom Cruiser. Nicole clearly wanted to rescind her offer of the car, but that might have delayed my departure, so she opted for getting rid of me. I head back to my Thanksgiving family’s private road.
THE SWISS FAMILY BURSEY, says the mailbox, which gets its whimsical coloration from lacquered-on scraps of tissue paper, that nameless artistic medium unique to arts-and-crafts classes. On the dirt road I slow to a crawl. Not much leeway for my car on either side. The trees on the left and right almost meet across the road at their tops, blocking the twilight, giving me the eerie feeling of being swallowed by the woods. After a hundred yards the road just sort of ends and a gravel driveway branches off. A light shines from that direction.
Well, here I am. The driveway leads to a large cleared lawn dotted with trees. In the middle of the lawn, a big one-story house, with two sheds off to one side and a garage with rooms above it on the other side. Some lights are on outside the main house, but the glow I saw from the road comes from a pair of halogen floodlights mounted on a tall wooden pole.
And here comes the welcoming party. A tall, slender woman wearing jeans and a linen shirt, carrying a two-year-old in one arm. Her straight graying brown hair is done in a pageboy cut, framing a broad expressive face, a welcoming ear-to-ear grin.
“Randall?”
“That’s me. Hi, Hilary.”
“I’m so glad you found us. We turned on our Yankee Stadium lights for you. I was starting to worry.”
“I got a late start. But your directions were perfect.”
“Come in, come in. We can get your things later. This is Taylor. Say hi to Randall, Taylor.” The toddler sucks an index finger, stares at me inscrutably with blue eyes above pinchable cheeks.
We go inside the house, passing through an entranceway with a neat lineup of shoes and boots and into a big open room, dining and living areas separated by a sectional sofa. The kitchen is to the right, and to the left two hallways lead off to the rest of
the house. A homey, inviting place, filled with cooking smells. A lanky blond girl with braces sits at the dining table, cordless phone clasped between her shoulder and cheek. “No, I can’t,” she says into the phone. “I’ll ask them, but, like, I doubt it.”
Hilary sets down Taylor, who toddles over to the sofa, where he lies on his back and begins kicking his legs while chanting something to himself.
“Megan, get off the phone and meet our guest.”
Instead Megan gives me an indifferent wave and takes the phone out onto the patio.
Hilary shakes her head. “Sorry about that. She’s a little oppositional this month.”
“I understand.”
“Hello?” a man’s voice calls from the front hallway. “Is he here, Hil?”
Hilary’s face tightens as her husband comes into the room. I suddenly remember that ominous email. And then I see him.
Claude Bursey is blue.
“You must be Claude!”
Dear lord. And not a fun Smurf blue or a rich Blue Man Group blue. His face and neck—and his hands, I see when he extends one for a shake—are a nauseating tint of dull bluish gray. A color I have never observed on a living creature. You’d have to call it gray, if forced to choose a single label. And yet it gives a horrible, overwhelming impression of blueness. I struggle not to gape. The man looks, frankly, dead. Reanimated, zombified, cruelly tampered with by a mad scientist. Blue.
“Don’t be ashamed to stare. Sometimes I look in the mirror and can’t believe it myself. And yes, it’s head to toe, in case you’re wondering.”
“In some light you barely even notice it,” Hilary says. Or was that sunlight?
“No, no, it’s really not too, uh.” I abandon whatever insulting lie I was about to come up with. “So do you mind if I ask—”
“Silver!” he exclaims with a smile. “Colloidal silver. You put silver in water and run a charge through it, silver infuses the water, you drink it. Great for the health, but bad for the old skin tone if you take too much of it, which it looks like I did.”
“I was taking it too,” Hilary points out. “Apparently some people are just more susceptible to this…phenomenon.”
“The silver, it was medicinal?”
“Oh, it’s become very popular,” she says. “They claim it can prevent, I don’t know, everything, viruses to cancer to—”
“One thing’s for sure,” Claude interrupts. “Best natural antibiotic in the world! I wasn’t sick a day while I took it. Great stuff, if you use it right. My own darn fault for mucking up the dosage.” Wow, this stuff did that to him and still he sings its praises? A tiny warning bell tinkles in my inner ear.
I can’t tear my eyes away from Claude, yet can hardly bear to keep looking at the sheer wrongness of his pigmentation. This will take some getting used to. How long has he been like this? Does it ever go away?
Hilary excuses herself to finish getting dinner ready. “Ann! Come set the table,” she calls in no particular direction on her way to the kitchen. Within ten seconds, here comes nine-year-old Ann, bounding in from the rear hallway. A more enthusiastic young table-setter you couldn’t ask for. She dashes to the china hutch and starts grabbing plates without acknowledging my presence.
“Whoa, slow down there, Annie,” Claude says. “This is Randall. Remember we told you he’d be joining us for the holiday?”
“Yes. Hi.”
“Hello, Ann. You need any help setting the table?”
“No!” she says definitively.
“No, thank you,” Claude corrects her. “She takes her chores pretty seriously.” He pats her on the head. “I’d never get anything done around here without this one.” I wonder how the other one feels about that, the one with the braces and the attitude.
I can get the grand tour tomorrow when it’s light out, Claude tells me. We go to the car to get my bags. In the white glow of the floodlights, he’s bluer than ever.
“Megan!” Hilary hollers for the fourth time. Everyone else is present and taking their seats. Me, the Burseys, and the elder Burseys, Claude’s parents, who have been here for several days, installed in the apartment above the garage. They seem like an affable pair who haven’t lost more than a step or two with age. I don’t have much of a read yet on Helen, who’s been in the kitchen with her daughter-in-law. But Ned, the moment they came into the house, started chatting me up with a wise, curious gleam in his eye, a been-around-the-block fellow who wants nothing more than to spend his retirement hearing interesting stories from everyone he meets. If they have any strong feelings about their son’s complexion, they hide them well.
“I’ll get her.” Claude goes to fetch his errant daughter.
“Know what? We’re gonna, um, perserve some apples on Friday,” Ann announces.
“Are you really?” Helen says with a grandmother’s practiced enthusiasm. “That sounds like fun!”
Megan slouches to the table as if to the gallows, with her jailer Claude behind her, preventing her escape.
Now everyone is seated, Claude and Hilary at either end. I’m between the two girls, facing Ned and Helen. Taylor is clamped into his high chair between Mom and Grandma. Everyone falls silent, bows head, folds hands in lap. Saying grace. That’ll be something to get used to. Well, as long as they don’t try to Save me, we’ll be fine.
“O Lord,” Claude begins, “we ask for your blessing on this food that we are about to receive. And we thank you for the blessings you have given us, so that we may have enough to share with family and friends, tonight and throughout the difficult trials that are to come. Amen.”
“Who wants to help serve the soup?” Hilary asks. I open my mouth to offer my services, but Ann is already halfway to the kitchen. Claude uncorks a bottle of white wine and pours for the adults. That’s a relief. Even though I’ve put my guzzling phase behind me for the moment, I’d be leery of facing the year 2000 among teetotalers.
A steaming bowl of soup is set before me, something tomatoey with spinach or kale, and a loaf of freshly baked bread passes around the table. “Bread machine,” Claude says. “Don’t know how we lived without it!” In my family, we used to pick up McDonald’s on the day before Thanksgiving—Wednesday’s cooking resources were maxed out trying to get everything ready for Thursday.
“Really good soup,” I say, trying not to look at Claude while he eats. The deep Christmasy colors of the soup contrast poorly with his pallor. Megan has a few slurps of broth, then pushes things around in her bowl.
“Don’t you like your soup, dear?” her grandmother asks.
“I don’t know. I just don’t really want the rest.”
I see what’s going on. Leafy greens and orthodonture don’t mix. Hilary, about to nudge her to finish the soup, reaches the same conclusion. “Oh, her braces. I’m sorry, honey. We didn’t consider that.”
“It’s OK.” Megan sighs.
“How long until those things come off, Meg?” Ned asks.
“This spring,” she mumbles into her bowl.
“Well, we’ll see about that,” Hilary says. “The dentist recommended—”
Claude takes over. “He says the end of ’99. But we can’t take a chance she still has them on when the trouble starts. Might not be able to find someone to take ’em off.”
This mention of the trouble sombers the table, and we finish the course in silence.
Over meat loaf, rice, and string beans, the Burseys tell me how they wound up in Hopkins County, Texas. They met at the University of Michigan, Hilary’s home state, and were friends in school but lost touch afterward, but then came the five-year reunion. “That was when we sort of rekindled something we didn’t realize was there in the first place,” Claude says. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Hilary says. “He was in New York by that time, and I was still in Lansing, sort of marking time in some job.”
“Personnel manager.”
“You know they didn’t used to say human resources then, Randall.
”
“So I asked her to join me.”
“New York City!”
“She’d never even been.”
“But I was what you’d call smitten, and I didn’t think twice.”
I wish either Claude or Hilary would take a solo on the narrative for a while. My midtable position has me swiveling my head Wimbledonwise to look at whichever one is speaking. Megan looks suitably mortified at the thought of her parents in the flush of young romance. Seeing Claude in this context, I realize he has strong, handsome features beneath the silver poisoning. Anyway, after the honeymoon, Hilary moved into his tiny Manhattan apartment. He sold ad space for magazines, she sold sporting goods. Megan born, Claude promoted, new apartment in Queens. Ann born, Claude to Lehman Brothers, new house on Long Island.
“The inevitable migration to the suburbs,” Hilary says. “That was, what, ninety—”
“Ninety-three. Which was around when I went independent, got my CFP.”
“Certified financial planner,” Hilary explains.
“And you liked Long Island?” I ask.
“I did,” Megan grunts.
“Well, it’s not the most exciting place on earth,” Hilary says, “but we were in a pretty nice little town. Good people.”
“Personally,” Claude says, “I always felt a little too close to Brookhaven for comfort.” Hilary frowns at him.
“Brookhaven being…” I prompt him.
“Oh, come on, Brookhaven National Lab? Where the quote unquote Department of Energy does their thing, next-gen weapons and so forth? Right in the middle of suburbia. You know, a lot of people assume all the top-secret installations are in the desert somewhere, or under a mountain, but if you think about it, of course they’d want a facility out near the ocean. That’s how come they were able to shoot down TWA 800.”
He delivers this outlandish theory as matter-of-factly as you’d tell someone about an annoying policy that management implemented in your workplace. I wait for the laugh, the “Just kidding.”