She was aware, from a curious warmth in the back of her head, of her brother standing behind her.
It’s not here, he said.
Vivian turned and had to squint in the glare that came from his forehead.
“What’s not here?”
The thing, he said. I wrote it down, and now it’s not here.
She looked again at all of his wild annotations and calculations.
“And you say it’s, what, a shape?”
Yes. It’s the shape.
“And this shape is, like, a spiritual thing? Or a scientific, quantum-physics-type thing?”
Both.
“Both.”
There’s no difference. They’re the same. It’s all the same. It’s all one thing. You’ll understand when you see it. He paused. Only it’s not here.
“Where did you write it? Or draw it? Or whatever.”
He put his thumbs and forefingers together. On a circle.
“Of paper?”
Yes.
“The thing they put the glasses on?”
“Oh, please,” said Judy.
Yes, said Jesse.
Vivian felt herself trying to smile. It had been a long time since that had happened. It manifested as a dull ache at the corners of her mouth.
“All this, Jesse,” she said, gesturing at the walls and the books and the sheaves of paper, “and you wrote the answer on the back of a coaster?”
“Why are you smiling?” said Judy, and her voice was shrill with desperation. “Where’s the coaster?”
Vivian looked at them both. She had a pretty good idea where it was. She heard a door opening down at the other end of the motel. Someone roused by Judy’s screeching. Soon afterwards, a clanging of feet on the steps that led up from the lobby. Urgent muttering, something about someone never bothering to use a comb.
Judy and Vivian turned to look at the door and saw Shelley on one side, with Chason strapped to her chest, Jerome on the other. Minnie hobbled in between them to complete the triptych. A few moments of mute incomprehension passed, then a gasp, then a lot of talking.
“It’s him! It’s really him!”
“Vivian? That you?” “Decided to wake up, did you? Great job watching reception.”
“What is this? Some kind of shenanigan?”
“Should we call a doctor? Sir, are you sick?”
“No, he’s not sick, for goodness sake.”
“Where’s Nathan?”
“I can’t believe it’s really him. Is it him?”
“Oh yes, dear, did you find Nathan?”
“I don’t understand what I’m seeing here.”
“Did you take a coaster from this room?”
“We haven’t taken anything, please just calm down, ma’am.”
“Did you see Nathan at all?”
Vivian didn’t contribute to any of this. The questions and accusations and counteraccusations reached a chaotic pitch before she stepped in.
“Can you drive us to the end of Vista?” Vivian asked.
“Who?” said Jerome. “Me?”
“Anyone,” she said.
“Now, just hold on a second—”
“I haven’t seen Nathan,” said Vivian. “I don’t know where he is. He might be in Sacramento. He might be…” In her mind’s eye she saw the bodies flopping heavily into the lake, their descent marked by a quiet gurgling. “I don’t know. I did find Jesse, though. This – this is Jesse. I don’t know why he looks like this. He found something out, and the thing did this to him, and the thing is somewhere down that turning at the end of Vista. In Mr Blucas’s place. On a coaster. I think.”
More silence followed.
“I don’t understand,” said Jerome.
“I don’t understand either,” said Vivian, “but I’d appreciate the ride. I can tell you about the mountain and about Nathan on the way.”
“Well, alright,” said Jerome. “But—”
“Now, hold on,” said Judy. “We can’t all go to Telos, can we? This isn’t fair. This isn’t fair! I found him! I should be the one to go. I’ve had enough of all this, Jesus, I’ve had enough, I want out. I’m so tired, I can’t take it anymore…”
She descended into gibbering and Minnie came forward and put a consoling arm around her. Vivian pushed ahead and left the room, and this time Jesse followed her. Shelley and Jerome parted in silence, awe on one side, confusion on the other.
“No Troy?” Vivian asked.
Shelley stared and stared.
“Shelley? Did Troy come back?”
She blinked and came to.
“Oh. Yes. Bless you. He came back late last night. But he went off again.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Said he had some things to do.”
They all trooped down to the Carters’ Buick. Jerome got behind the wheel and started the engine but had nowhere to go. Nobody knew what to do with Jesse. The four women stood around the car in a loose semicircle, until Minnie opened the passenger-side door and gestured inside.
“You take it, dear,” she said.
Vivian climbed in the back. Minnie helped Shelley into the middle, then Judy, and then got in herself. Vivian looked around the interior of the Buick. Seven of them, including Chason, still strapped to his mother’s chest. It was very tight.
“Wait, we don’t all need to go.”
“That’s what I was saying!” said Judy.
“I’ll follow wherever your brother leads us,” said Shelley.
“I’ve got to drive,” said Jerome.
“I’ve got to keep an eye on Jerome,” said Minnie.
The car was moving before she’d even shut the door. They pulled out of the motel and headed into town. Jerome had his window open so he could lean on one elbow, away from Jesse. One eye was half-closed in the violet light, and he kept glancing to the right and making the Buick swerve.
“You might want to buckle up, boy,” Jerome said, and Jesse just stared straight ahead. “You sure he’s okay?” he said to Vivian, over his shoulder.
I’m okay, said Jesse.
“They dress you up like this? The cult, I mean?”
“Please watch the road, Jerome!” said Minnie.
“What is it, some kind of make-up?”
Nothing from Jesse this time.
“I don’t think it is,” said Vivian.
“I saw something like that once,” Jerome continued. “At a carnival in Carson City. I was just a kid. They said they had a real, honest-to-God angel in one of the tents, who’d crash-landed in the desert or something.” Vivian saw him frown and shake his head, as if the memory still brought him disappointment. “Turned out it was just some special paint and a couple of spotlights. I saw him behind one of the trucks when the carnival was packing up. Just a regular guy. He was trying to get a feel of one of the lady acrobats.”
“Oh, Jerome, please,” said his wife.
“Still had some of that paint on his ear.”
“It’s not paint,” said Minnie.
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re into all of that – what’s it called? – genetics stuff. Maybe they’ve been experimenting on him.” She stuck her head between the two front seats. “Jesse, dear, did they do a, you know, science experiment on you? Honey?”
No, said Jesse.
“How do you feel?”
I don’t feel anything.
Didn’t think, didn’t want, didn’t feel. Just what were they going to find on the back of that coaster, Vivian thought. And did she want to find it at all?
“Oh,” said Minnie. “Well. At least you’re not sick. Don’t you want a jacket?”
No, said Jesse.
She turned to Vivian, tried to look at her over the three other heads that were between them. “You found him up the mountain? Like this?”
Vivian nodded.
“Just walking around?”
“More or less.”
“But no one else?”
> “No.” She saw the vision of the bodies again. “I mean… no.”
“But Nathan might be… where? San Francisco, did you say?”
“Sacramento.”
Shelley, who’d been watching Jesse in a trancelike state since they’d got in the car, suddenly straightened up and blinked. Chason opened his eyes, too.
“Sacramento,” she said. “That’s where Troy said he was going.”
She went back to gazing at Jesse. Chason looked around as if unsure of where he was, and his huge, brown eyes were drawn back to the purple glow from the front seat. He was the calmest Vivian had ever seen him.
25
VISTA STREET was still virtually deserted. One of Mount Hookey’s regular citizens – though, of course, you could never tell they were regular until you started talking to them – was checking his mailbox. Someone opened the door of the video rental store and stood on the step with a cigarette. No inkling of what was in the car, or what was up the mountain, or what was written on a coaster somewhere in Mr Blucas’s archives.
They were coming up on Shelley and Troy’s house when Vivian heard sirens and saw three police cars appear in the rear-view mirror. Jerome glanced up.
“Jesus, would you look at that. Years without even visiting the place, and now they’re behaving like it’s goddamn Miami Vice.”
“Did you call them?” said Vivian.
“I told them about the vandalism, is all. Look at it!” They happened to be just passing the graffitied front of what had been the House of Telos. “Don’t know why they need their sirens on, anyhow.”
They kept on to the end of the road. Vivian looked over her shoulder. The police cars didn’t stop outside Shelley’s house. They caught up with the Buick and one of them curved around in front with a squeal of tyres. Jerome slammed on the brakes.
“Goddamn it! What is this?”
The other two squad cars pulled up behind their rear bumper. The doors of the car in front opened and a pair of police officers stepped out and adjusted their belts.
“Jerome?” said Minnie. “What did you tell them?”
Vivian had a premonition.
The first officer was a young man with a young face, but he had a kind of middle-aged fatness around his waist. He had a healthy crop of pimples, too, and it seemed he couldn’t yet grow a beard thick enough to conceal them, though he was trying. He approached Jerome’s window, studied Jesse for a long time, then peered past his shoulder to see Vivian squeezed into the back seat.
“Glad you boys came,” said Jerome. “Was beginning to think this place wasn’t on any of your maps.”
Vivian relaxed slightly to hear him speak like that. An ex-sheriff was a good card to have in the deck.
The officer wasn’t convinced. He leaned forwards to get a better look at Jesse. The top button of his shirt was undone, and Vivian saw, hanging from his neck, a purple crystal shard.
“I need you all to step out of the car,” he said.
“I think there’s been a mix-up here, Officer…” Jerome looked at his badge. “…Gallardo? Say, I used to work with an Esteban Gallardo, you’re not—”
“Step out of the car.”
“Listen, I’m po-lice. I’m the one that’s been radioing you.”
Officer Gallardo’s hand went to his gun.
“Now hold on, there’s no need for that, we’re getting out, my God…”
Jerome opened his door and raised his hands. The four women on the back seat shuffled out after him. Jesse didn’t move.
The second officer came over. This one looked wiry and mean. Humming with steroids or amphetamines or both. The sinews in his forearms stood out like he was under some invisible torture. He tapped on the passenger-side window with the butt of his nightstick.
“What’s with him?”
Nobody answered.
“Hey. You trying to be funny? Turn off the lights and get out.”
Jesse was off in his own universe.
“Hey. Out, motherfucker.”
“That’ll do, officer,” said a voice behind all of them. “Need that one in one piece.”
They turned. The doors of the other two police cars were open. Half a dozen men had got out. Four of them were police. Glenn and Shiv were there, too.
“What is all this, then?” said Shiv. “You all going for a hike? Family picnic? Dangerous up the mountain. Judy, you of all people should know that.”
Judy was shamefaced and silent.
“Who are you?” said Jerome. “You’re not po-lice.”
“Nope,” said Shiv.
“Well, listen up, son, because I am po-lice.”
“Nope,” said Shiv again. “You’re retired. These fellas filled me in. Lewiston’s finest. They’re sick to death of you nosing around, by the way. They say you come in and use their coffee machine. Finish it up half the time.”
Jerome breathed heavily through his nose.
“You going to arrest me for stealing coffee?”
“I can add that to the list of charges, if you’d like.”
“The list?”
“Are you kidding?” said Shiv. “I don’t even know where to start with all of you. How about attempted murder? Glenn? Do you want to fill them in?”
Vivian looked at Glenn. His head was heavily bandaged, and she could see the yellowing edge of a bruise underneath. He had a slight speech impediment, from swelling or a lost tooth.
“She beat me,” he said. “Left me to die.”
“It was self-defence.”
“Beat me with a sacred rod of Telos.”
Officer Gallardo seemed to take particular offence to this, and his jaw began to work hard on something.
“I had to,” said Vivian. “He was going to—”
“Going to what, dear heart?”
“I don’t know. You were going to do something.”
“I was going to ask you about your brother, Vivian. That was all. We all just want your brother to be safe. We want everyone in our family to be safe.”
“There’s bodies up on the mountain,” said Vivian to the other officers. “They’re dumping them in the lake.”
Minnie and Jerome looked at each other. The police didn’t seem to hear her, or they heard her and didn’t care.
“You want me to cuff her?” said Gallardo.
Shiv nodded at the Carters. “And these two. They helped.”
“Says who?” said Jerome.
“Says the owner of the restaurant you picked her up from. He got the licence plate, everything.”
Officer Gallardo clopped forwards in his leather boots and spun Vivian around so she was facing the car and wrestled her hands behind her back.
“Now just hold on a minute!” Jerome cried.
The handcuffs bit into her wrists and she looked down into the Carters’ car and there it was, the same rod she’d used to beat Glenn, just lying there in the footwell. Gallardo’s mean partner saw it at the same time. He went around her and reached into the car and held it triumphantly over his head. Its tip was still speckled with dirty, brown blood.
“I had to,” she said. “Listen to me, I had to. They threw me in a truck and took me out into the desert and they were going to do things.”
“Threw you in a truck!” said Shiv. “Against your will! Unthinkable! You want to talk kidnapping, let’s talk about kidnapping. Where are you planning on taking that radiant young man in the front seat there?”
He nodded at the Carters’ car. No one answered.
“You thought you could just walk into town with him and no one would notice?”
“He’s an Ascended Master, asshole,” hissed the officer holding the rod. Vivian looked into his eyes. He was deadly serious. They were all in on it. No need to even pay them off.
“Take them in, officers,” said Shiv. They all began unhitching cuffs from their belts.
“This is absurd,” said Jerome. “We haven’t done anything.”
The wiry officer waggled the bloodstained rod in his f
ace, then spun him round.
“Look here, junior, I am a county sheriff! Get your damn hands off me!”
They began to frogmarch the Carters back to one of the cars. One of them tried to get Shelley into bracelets, too, and Chason started screaming.
“No, forget her,” said Shiv. “She’s done.”
They left her alone but Chason kept going. Some of the residents of Vista Street had come out of their front doors to watch what was going on, standing in their robes with cups of coffee.
“Get these people back in their houses!” Shiv hissed at two of the officers. “They’ll see who we’ve got in the car. Judy, you’re going home. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. Jesus Christ. You got someone watching the motel?”
“Shiv, I—”
“My God, Judy. I give you one job.”
The officers herded the onlookers away from the scene. Gallardo began to manoeuvre Vivian towards the patrol car behind the others, but Shiv grabbed him by the arm to stop him. Vivian smelled his aftershave, the leather of his jacket. His silver hair was heavily gelled. A salesman, just as Troy had thought.
“Let me talk to her a second, officer,” he said abruptly. “Alone.”
Gallardo let her go and went to the other car. Shiv took her to one side.
“Has he told you?” he said.
“Told me?”
“Jesse. Has he told you. What the thing is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I guess you don’t. Otherwise you’d look like him, right? You’d be giving us the full Cirque du Soleil performance.”
Vivian looked back at the Buick. Jesse was still sitting in the passenger seat. He was exploring the intricacies of the air conditioning.
“You know about the thing?” she said.
“Of course I know. Why do you think I’m looking for him? I mean – I know of it. Obviously I don’t know what it is. Jesse is the only one that knows that. Could be anything. Some kind of equation. A theory. A diagram. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just words. A sentence, that explains everything. Maybe it just says, ‘drink eight glasses of water a day’. Maybe that’s the secret. Right?” He smiled again and it made him look ugly. He looked around to check that he was out of earshot of the police and then lowered his voice. “Whatever it is, Vivian, if it gets out it’s going to make a lot of people very unhappy. You understand? If he’s found something, then that poses a significant challenge to Telos as a, uh—”
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