They like it—it makes them feel good.
He never quite noticed that before.
The woman hands over the front section, and Tom does his best to not disturb the kid between them, even though the kid’s noise is disturbing him. But he’s not distracted. He looks at the photograph of Eliza on the front page, feels again the same pang of sadness that he felt last night, when Grayspool called:
Tom only really got swinging with the helmet on Halloween. Even though it had worked on Katherine and even though it worked from the roof, it’s not as though the thing didn’t still scare the bejeezus out of him. And besides, why do it at all? Why run around investigating the minds of other people? There was no goal, no endpoint. There were no more conditions from Herman, there was no next step to the whole process. There was just him and the helmet. Alone in Chicago. Sherry was still gone, he was still fired. He was still stuck being himself, Tom Sanderson, middle-aged sod. There were a thousand reasons to get rid of the thing. Just throw it in the trash.
He didn’t do it.
One time he went to a coffee shop.
But people, it turned out, tended to react poorly to a man wearing something large and complicated over his face, and so Tom tried to be discreet, on the roof, and waited for Halloween to come. What better night to walk about the neighborhoods of Chicago? Free and open?
He had found what appeared to be an ON/OFF switch on the side of the behemoth, which allowed him to spend a few evening hours pacing the streets and smiling at people he passed without blasting his mind with the secret news of their own minds. It wasn’t quite that he was afraid to do it, even though Eliza had been right that night, he had been deeply disturbed by the very concept…
It was just that sometimes…sometimes, it was too much.
He went to a different neighborhood, way up on the far north side, trying to escape the typical rigmarole of his own neighborhood, where it was far less likely to see children and their parents out on the street.
He wanted to find something different, something new.
Where he ended up, in Edgewater, had neighborhoods, houses, and yards. He parked his BMW and began to walk. He strolled up and down Glenwood Avenue.
Tom saw many things that night. First at dusk, and then, after darkness.
Even though it kills him to do it, Tom decides to take a cab from Heathrow. The train to Paddington is cheaper and faster, but he’s still lugging around the helmet, and he’s too exhausted to fight the crowds. Besides, now’s not a time to be cheap.
When he tells the cabbie where he’s headed, the deep-voiced man cranes his neck a bit and says, “Where the building just got bombed, then?”
“Yes.”
“Why you going there?” asks the man, pulling away from the pickup site. “You one of those terrorism tourists?”
“Are you joking?”
“Course not,” says the man. “There’s a whole group out there that goes from site to site. Whenever there’s an explosion, there they are, snappin’ their photos. It’s a whole thing—they’ve got a website and everything. Kind of a club.”
“That’s sick,” Tom says. “Is that a thing?”
“They’re called journalists,” cries the cabby, and he then begins to cackle.
Tom, in no mood to talk, looks out the window at the outskirts of London.
“Terrible, that, though,” says the cabby, once he’s recovered from his own joke. “All that with Pangea. Just when we were getting used to this batty little tart, someone goes and blows the poor girl up.”
“Is there any new news?” Tom asks. “About who did it?”
“Yes, yes. They’re saying that they might’ve found someone. One bloke.”
“Who is he?”
“Don’t know. Just rumors. They don’t think al-Qaeda or any of them, though.”
Tom only got the news last night, from Grayspool. Gone was the lawyer’s typical cheer, replaced by a rattled, quiet distraction. Eliza had been wasting no time making Pangea’s missions and goals public, and they seemed to be even more audacious than she’d intimated on their hike. Status Quo Studies? Perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that some people in England—some people everywhere—took exception to the idea that the status quo had been the thing to doom the Earth, or that some unknown woman in London was starting to throw quite a lot of money around to say it.
“I can’t quite get a sense,” Tom says. “Do people—regular people, I mean—do people like her here? In America, the news all says she’s crazy.”
“Ah, yes. I expect they do. I mean it’s all a little strange, isn’t it? All her talk of revolutions and learning how to parlay with aliens? But right off the bat she goes and drops two hundred million quid into the ocean like she did and you have to admit, something might be a little off with her head.”
Tom remembers reading about the story. The first major action of Pangea, a week after he’d left her there in the car. Eliza, via Pangea, had dumped, in various coinage and currency, within enormous treasure chests, a rather large sum of money into the oceans of the world, weighted down and sunk to the ocean’s floors. No real explanation. And of course there was an uproar when the video of it began coming out on the internet, all of the cargo palettes stamped with the Pangea name and logo. Tom even remembers a chest or two launched into space. Everyone was up in arms. Conservatives: rabid. Leftists: confounded. From all sides, the words poured in: superficial, facile, meaningless, wasteful, immoral, ungodly, dangerous, immature, and deeply irresponsible.
It all got quite a bit of coverage.
And Pangea’s first official press release? As a means of explanation? Two words:
PANGEA University
Well. Obviously.
“So everyone thinks she’s crazy.”
“Absolutely bonkers, yes, but I can’t say that’s necessarily such a bad thing. And besides, she says she has her plans to give all those billions away to the people, eventually. But have you heard about the hot air balloons? And the banana cream pies?”
Tom tunes out as the cabby chatters on, cycling through a few more of Pangea’s new initiatives. It is possible, he thinks, that Eliza is certifiably insane. Was insane all along. Perhaps it’s not even true that she was caught off guard by Uncle Herman? Or that she knew, her entire life, what was coming, and Tom was the only one in the dark? At this point he’d believe anything. He can think of nothing, from their short time together, that might prove any of this, and besides, he’d been preoccupied with his own concerns in those days. His initial appraisal of Eliza was succinct and happened very fast: He’d noticed that she was beautiful; he’d noticed that there was something to her, some substance that he liked, but that she was young, she was predictable, she was a liberal idealist, and in that sense, an idiot. By the end of their time together, perhaps he had shifted his thoughts. Somewhat. But in either case, he’d never had much reason to think she was nuts.
It takes them 45 minutes to get to the Pangea offices. Tom can see, through the cab’s window, the damage on one side of the building, and he has trouble imagining how anyone could have survived such a blast in the first place. He pays the cabby, who thanks him, then steps out of the cab. The cabby deals with the steamer trunk. It’s raining; Tom’s wearing his trench coat. There are a few cameras around and a noticeable police presence, but the story is no longer BRAND NEW, and there are regular people about, too, going about their business, ignoring it all.
“All right then, sir,” says the cabby. “Have a fine visit.”
“Thank you,” Tom says, still looking up at the hole in the building. After a moment, the cab pulls away.
“Rather disturbing, isn’t it?”
He turns. Grayspool, holding an umbrella, yellow flower in his lapel.
“No more jokes about glory holes, are there, Tom?”
“No,” he says. “Not at all.”
“It seems your great uncle’s experiment is a failure.”
“Oh, I don’t know why you say that,” Tom s
ays, looking back up at the hole.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Hey,” Tom says. “You need the helmet, I bring the helmet.”
Grayspool’s driver has appeared, and Tom sees Grayspool give a nod. The man—the same Pakistani from Manchester—is lifting the steamer, apparently intent on loading it into the car. Tom can’t say that he cares. He’s done with it. Seeing the kid get stabbed was too much. There are some experiences he doesn’t want to understand.
“Yes, that,” Grayspool says. “It may be useful, but I doubt it.”
“Then why am I here?”
Tom looks at him, suddenly angry. Not because he’s in England. Because of what’s happened. Because of everything.
“She’s asking to see you,” Grayspool says.
“Is she going to die?”
“Yes,” Grayspool says carefully. “But she’s stable. For the moment.”
“Why would she want to see me?”
“I’ll explain in the car,” Grayspool says, motioning with his arm. “We have to get to Lancashire. There are only so many ferries.”
After Halloween, he began experimenting with the many lenses on the helmet, and had quickly discovered a previously unknown detail about its operations. Move the different lenses around, line them up in different ways, and you could increase the helmet’s power. You could turn it up.
He had a rather intense experience, in mid-November, pointing the wand at a businessman downtown.
He did it from across the street, leaning against a hot dog stand. The man was not well, it turned out. And with the power turned up higher, Tom was pulled in deeper, and had far more trouble extracting himself, or even lowering the wand. The smell of hot dogs got mixed up. It was as though he were being electrocuted; he couldn’t move, and could only feel the guy. Maybe not just that. He got the distinct impression that the experience had not necessarily been a one-way affair, either, that maybe the guy could feel him. Rather than reading the man’s mind, he felt, for a moment, that he was in it, thinking along with him, participating, maybe even introducing his own ideas to the small storm of consciousness. How else would the man have gotten the word “pangea” into his head? Magic? No—more likely, from Tom.
That one took a whole day for Tom to get over.
But of course he went back.
He kept going back.
Day after day, person after person.
Winter came, then, and he went back once, and that’s when he saw the murder.
So fast, and in such a cloud of confusion—people moving and running and screaming—that he had no time to warn the kid, even though he saw it coming, knew what was about to happen. What would he have done? Yelled down, “Behind you!” at the top of his lungs? Tom was up on his roof, Thanksgiving alone had depressed him, he had started to drink again, and this was better, to go up here and watch, almost like channel-surfing on the tube, but a deeper link to the heart. Letting the wand drift from mind-to-mind. Here was a frustrated mother, there was a lonesome father. It felt good to see it. Not because it felt good to see the pain of others and compare himself to them, to rank his lot alongside theirs. Harder to see; more that other people were real. Other consciousnesses—they existed.
About an hour into this session, beer in left hand, Tom focused on a man—a white-haired man, hands in his pockets—and instantly felt something different, something far darker and far more divorced from reality than anything he’d ever felt before. To be this man—this normal-seeming man—was to live permanently immersed in a psychic scream of pain.
This man was dangerous.
And just like that, it happened.
The man may as well have been pulling change from his pocket to give to the homeless vet nearby. Instead, he withdrew a knife, and just like that, he stabbed someone.
A young man.
No sound.
A boy, really.
Tom saw it all. He saw the cops, he saw the chase. He had the perfect vantage point.
After that, he quit the helmet altogether.
The ferry to the Isle of Man takes two hours, and Tom spends most of it on deck, in the mist, looking north across the dark and frigid waters of the Irish Sea. It smells like fish. Seagulls have been following the boat. Tom, grim, feels empty.
On the drive, they’d heard more news about the man—the bomber—captured in Bulgaria. Two items, actually. First: he was dead. He killed himself with a cyanide tooth.
Second, he was thought to be a private contractor. An American mercenary.
“Mmm,” Grayspool had growled thoughtfully, frowning at the radio. “Surprising. Of course that means very little. There are so damned many of them. We’ll never know who hired him, I doubt.”
Tom can’t say he cares too much about the details or the intrigue surrounding the assassin, a nameless tool of the larger forces. If not this bomber, another bomber, no doubt. Eliza, and Pangea, could not be abided, not with the power of those finances. More important than how it happened: Tom, right now, is increasingly terrified about actually seeing Eliza. To see her, yes—he knows her face is horribly burned, Grayspool told him as much, but it’s not that. He is terrified to talk to her. What could she possibly say? And what might he say back?
Grayspool eventually finds him out on the deck.
“Have you ever been?” he asks.
“Where?” Tom asks. “The island? No.”
They can see it, now, but it’s still far off.
“They used to think it was Avalon.”
“You don’t say.”
“Either way, the island’s god was called Manannan.”
“Fantastic.”
“Among other powers—most of the magics, you know—he had a great cloak of mist which he’d draw around the island to protect it from invaders. Irish, English, Scots, Norse, Welsh. Anyone out looking for trouble.”
Tom, for a second, pictures an enormous figure made of dark clouds—or made of a collective imagination—hovering above the island, drawing this misty cloak into a cylinder, a shield.
There’s something beautiful about it, he supposes. Something that’s just right. And how alone we all are, how locked in that same way within our own camouflages, and how much difference it might make if we had better knowledge of those cloaks as well. All of us.
“Protection from invaders,” Tom says.
“Indeed.”
Tom thinks long and hard about that massive figure, about that cloak. It’s a few minutes later when he finally speaks again.
“How could he not have guessed what would happen to her?” Tom says quietly.
“What?”
But there is anger at the root of this—he feels it growing. He doesn’t care that it’s not Grayspool’s fault. Grayspool will have to receive it. “You can’t just give someone a fortune like that and expect it to be all fun and games,” he says, his voice rising. “I mean what is this? A joke? A big game for Herman? Go and do good in the world? You can’t encourage someone to spend money on the craziest batshit shit they can think up, Grayspool, and then just stand back and watch great things happen in the world. Do you think it’s easy? Do you really think it’s easy?”
“Tom—”
“No, listen. That’s not how it works. That’s sophomoric. It’s not
FIGURE 24.7k8: MANANNAN CLOAKS THE ISLAND IN MIST
goddamned practical. But beyond that, it’s dangerous. It killed her. And we’re talking about whimsy.”
“Yes,” Grayspool says, after a moment of calm and silence comes between the two men. “You’re probably right. And I suppose eccentricity is not much of a defense. Now.”
There’s something in his voice—Tom hears it, but it’s far away, veiled as well, like some old personal god of Grayspool’s invention has let loose its shawl, too, to keep an old thing hidden.
Tom shakes his head. “You know something odd, Grayspool?”
“What’s that?”
“After I stopped wearing the helmet around—after I saw th
is kid get killed—things went back to normal for a few days. Got myself together. Started thinking about finding a job somewhere. I started thinking okay, yeah, maybe it was all right to have this thing. Maybe I learned something, maybe it was good Herman gave it to me. Why the fuck he did, I don’t know. But maybe it was okay.”
“That’s nice, Tom. I know he believed in you.”
“Then I was watching TV,” Tom says, “and that kid’s mom was getting interviewed. She was crying, talking about the day, talking about what the kid was like, how God had a plan for everyone. And I sat there looking at her, just listening to her talk. And I felt it anyway.”
“Felt what?”
“Just for a second,” Tom says, “but I felt what it would be like—well, no—what it might be like, to be her. To find out that your kid just got killed. By some crazy fuck.” Tom looks at him. “And this without the helmet.”
Tom looks back at the island, which seems to be growing. What would be the point of that? To teach someone that lesson?
He looks back at Grayspool.
“Don’t you find that interesting?”
4
PROGRESS & CATASTROPHE: THE ISLE OF MAN
Eliza’s family’s country house is very normal. There are no magical or fantastical aspects to it at all—just a really nice view of the sea. A private road leads up to the house itself, back and forth, back and forth, switchback and gravel up through the bluffs, and at the end of the road, the Georgian home stands quiet and still, looking westward toward Ireland. Eliza’s parents were successful people, no doubt; her father was an English investment banker with Pendragon & Wilperstein, and he made millions as a young man—he was far more successful (and focused) than the likes of a Tom Sanderson. He’d met his wife, a Pakistani woman named Nita, in Hong Kong, of all places. And it was Nita, after a trip to the Isle of Man, who insisted on a country home. Nothing too excessive, but something private, and something that looked out over the water.
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature Page 25