“I know,” said Vivian. “You went to Brown.”
He nodded. “This Telos thing. Goddamn. The whole thing is crooked. Fraud, coercion. Unlawful imprisonment. No one gets to leave – not that anyone wants to. You know they get their initiates to give them power of attorney? Can you believe that? They take your phone. Then they give it back to you when you get here, but they’re listening and reading everything that goes through it. You were right about the cops, too, Dad. They’re part of it.”
“Then why are you still here?” said Minnie.
“I’m gathering evidence, Mom.”
Minnie looked unspeakably proud again.
“I’m sticking around here long enough to get a case together and bring them down. Everything we’d need to get them to court is in that office.” He laughed. “Shit, I really thought I was going up the mountain when they said I was ascending. Couldn’t believe it when they put me in a minivan and brought me here.”
“Where are you living?” asked Jerome.
“They put us all up in hotels. And Telos own the hotels, so that means they control the phones and the TV and the internet. Which is why I shouldn’t really be here. People will talk if I’m not back in my room soon. They’re probably already talking.”
He worked at some stuck bit of food with his tongue, slowly, thoughtfully, as if just now realising the extent of his mistake.
“What happened to Joy?”
“I don’t know. She’s back in Mount Hookey, I think. Never made it past the Sixth Stone. I mean, come on, she worked in bakery. There’s no way she’s paying to get further than that.”
“A case?” said Vivian. She’d been worrying at the word. She hadn’t forgotten what Shiv had said to her on Vista Street. That the Telos family was her family, figuratively and literally. That a challenge to the Telos brand would compromise all of them financially.
The three Carters looked at her as if they’d forgotten she was there. Nathan nodded.
“The guy I’d really like to get in a courtroom is the one who started it. Classic narcissist guru type. Called himself John of Telos. He’s the one who put the whole system in place. The guy must be in the Fortune 500, but I can’t find his real name on any of the paperwork. I bet he’s got the private jets, the yachts, all of it. Like that Osho guy. Remember him? Up in Oregon? Must be some piece of work.” Jerome smiled at this. “Anyway, he’s not been on the board since last year, looks like. Maybe he’s already dead.”
Vivian chewed all the way through her straw, accidentally inhaled it, and then spat it out onto the vinyl tabletop. Jerome and Minnie glanced at each other. Their son sensed something was amiss.
“What?” he said.
“It’s just—” said Minnie.
“I think I want to go,” said Vivian.
To hell with it. To hell with all of them – Glenn, Shiv, her dad. To hell with the Carters, too, and their all-American, white-picket-fence, swing-chair-on-the-veranda, meat-loaf-making happy family. Nathan could do what he liked. She didn’t care whether Telos made front page news or it carried on duping sad, lost Gen Z-ers for the next hundred years. She just wanted out. She wanted to get back to Jesse, and to get home, and to never have to think about any of it ever again.
“We’ve only been here twenty minutes, Vivian,” said Jerome.
“It’s been an hour, with the drive.”
“No, it’s okay,” said Nathan. “I need to get back. It feels kind of edgy being here, anyway.”
“But you can’t just go back! When will we see you again?”
“Give me another few weeks? A month? I need to pick my moment.”
“Vivian, you still got that pager I gave you?” said Jerome.
She dug into her coat pocket and handed it over. It felt good to be rid of it. Nathan laughed.
“You been hanging onto this, Dad? Surprised they still work.” He inspected the screen and pressed the buttons experimentally, and then looked up at his father. “You reckon you can hook me up with the Feds? Would be good to know they had my back. Before I make a run for it.”
“FBI?” said Jerome. “Yes, I suppose I can.”
Vivian got up out of the booth.
“What is it, dear?” said Minnie.
“Are we going or not?” said Vivian.
She couldn’t stop thinking of Jesse, now. Visions of him came to her in waves, like a migraine. Perhaps he was awake, and that psychic bond she’d always thought was such horseshit was pulling her back to him. The Carters reluctantly started to move.
“We’re going, we’re going,” said Jerome.
“Dad said you were at the Sanctuary, right?” Nathan said. “Looking for your brother? We should talk when I get out. It would be great to have you as a witness. And tell me if I’ve missed anything. I wasn’t at the Sanctuary – I went through the Telurian Mission. Same kind of thing, of course. All roads lead to Telos.”
There was a whole lot he’d missed, about her dad, and bodies up on the mountain, but she didn’t want to get into it now.
“I’ll let you know,” she said. Then she turned to Jerome and said, “I need to get back to the hospital.”
“Okay, Vivian, we hear you.” He seemed a little annoyed at her insistence.
“Maybe I can drive,” she said.
“You’re not on the insurance.”
“I’d prefer it if I drove.”
She held out her hand for the keys.
* * *
They had to drop Nathan off somewhere near the business park so he could get back to his accommodation. It was a detour Vivian could have done without. She kept seeing Jesse’s hotel room, from the perspective of his bed. The migraine was getting worse. She could barely see the road in front of her.
She drove fast, ignoring Jerome and Minnie’s protests. They’d been on the road ten minutes when the sirens and flashing lights appeared in the rear-view mirror.
“Well that’s great, girl,” said Jerome. “Just great! Now we’re all for it! Why you got to drive like a goddamn maniac?”
Vivian slowed slightly, one eye on the speedometer’s needle. The police car came up hard on the driver’s side, and then sped past her. It was followed by another three emergency vehicles. They blared through the traffic and were soon out of sight.
“Okay,” said Jerome, shaking his head, “you got lucky. Now, pull over and let me drive. You even got a licence?”
She ignored him and pressed on the accelerator and moved ahead through the wake of the police cars.
Before reaching the labyrinth of the business park, they all noticed the orange glow on the horizon. The smoke found its way into the currents of the air con. Minnie was holding her nose, and Nathan leaned forward between his father and Vivian to see what was happening.
“That happened quickly,” he said. “Didn’t notice it on the way out here. Anyone?”
Nobody said anything, and Vivian suspected they were all, at that moment, having exactly the same premonition. Another couple of fire engines came screaming up the freeway and took the same exit that the satnav was suggesting. The fire and the business park got closer. Nathan had wanted Vivian to drop him somewhere far from the office building, but he didn’t protest when she drove them all through lots A4, A3, A2 and back to the spot where they’d first seen him. Just as she’d thought. Telos was going up in flames.
They pulled up behind the police cordon and got out. The heat was incredible. Firefighters yelled at the onlookers to keep back, but there were so many, too many, like a festival crowd, like Woodstock, the initiates clearly distinguishable by their humming, and by the triangles they were making with their fingers, and by the looks of utter desolation on their faces. There were half a dozen hoses directed at the fire but it was nowhere near under control. Now and then a window exploded and the initiates began a new round of wailing.
“Shit,” said Nathan. He folded his arms on the open car door and rested his chin there, like he was watching the sunset. A good few minutes passed.
“How should I know?” he said. “But like Nathan said – it’s gone up pretty fast. Doesn’t look like an accident to me.”
They all watched a bit longer, transfixed. No, it wasn’t an accident, Vivian thought, and she thought of the palm trees, and the shadow among the palm trees.
“Does that mean you can come home now?” said Minnie, hopefully.
Nathan didn’t reply.
“Son?” Minnie came up behind him and rubbed his shoulder. “What do you say?”
He turned around.
“Huh?”
“You going to come home?”
He looked back at the blaze, and then back at his mother.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose so. Case is done.”
“What do you mean?”
“The amount of evidence in there? Come on.”
“Oh,” said Minnie. “Well, never mind. You’ll get more cases.”
Nathan looked at her and blinked away the ash.
“You could always help us,” Minnie suggested.
“What do you mean?”
“With our case.”
“What case?” “Your father and I…” Minnie said. “We’re here on bail.”
“On bail?”
A heated discussion ensued. Vivian tuned them out. She wanted to get back in the car and on the road back to Lewiston. She watched Telos going up like the Hindenburg and wondered whether this in itself would be enough to unravel the whole operation. Possibly. She was strangely apathetic about it. It was just Jesse she worried about, now.
She felt another throb in her temples, and the vision of the hospital room materialised again. A projection on the cinema screen behind her eyes. She turned away from the burning building and blinked hard and tried to look beyond the illusory image. With her back to the fire the darkness of the parking lot congealed and another illusion seemed to appear in the background of the first. A giant and two dwarves, it looked like. She squinted. Two regular-sized police officers were leading an inhumanly tall man to their car. The man clinked as he walked. He saw Vivian.
“Hey Viv,” he said, and he grinned and raised his cuffed hands and flicked her a “peace” sign.
It took several moments of configuring his limbs and head before he’d fit in the back of the police officers’ car.
29
VIVIAN DROVE back to Lewiston without the Carters. Nathan didn’t think it was a good idea to just walk away from Telos, even after the fire. Perhaps something could be salvaged from the office once the whole thing had burned out, he thought. Perhaps he would wait for another six months for the franchise to get back on its feet, and start the process of gathering his evidence all over again. Minnie and Jerome wanted him to go back with them to Gazelle in the meantime. Vivian had gotten in the car and driven away before they’d reached any kind of agreement.
She drove on through that vast American darkness, nothing on the radio, the film reel of Jesse’s hospital room playing on and off across the windscreen. She thought she saw faces crowding around him, faces she didn’t recognise as the taut and characterless oval of Doctor Heben. She felt Jesse’s total disorientation, and silently apologised to him, over and over again, knuckles white on the steering wheel. She felt it, and she felt him.
It was after midnight by the time she arrived at the hospital, and she was worried about visiting hours. She knew he was awake, and knew she needed to see him, but it was surely too late for her to be allowed onto the wards. She tried calling the hospital from her mobile as she entered the outskirts of Lewiston but predictably only got Doctor Heben’s answerphone.
The drop-off point outside the hospital was empty and she left the hire car there, half on the kerb, and headed for the main entrance. The automatic glass doors were open, but only enough to admit one or two people at a time, giving the impression they had been forced or short-circuited in some way. Vivian slotted herself through the gap and found the reception empty. There was an unattended mop and bucket in one corner. Two of the phones were ringing and not getting answered.
She broke into a run and headed down the corridor. She passed a solitary nurse walking in the opposite direction, who skidded to a halt and opened her mouth and raised a hand as if to try and stop her. Vivian kept on. She took the stairs instead of the elevator up to the third floor. When she came through the double doors at the top she heard a good deal more commotion. Doctors and nurses and clerical staff rushing in all directions, shouting over Vivian’s head as she made her way towards Jesse.
“What the hell’s going on? Are we evacuating or what?”
“Don’t go down there. Do not go down there.”
“Is it a shooter? Someone said it was a shooter.”
“Religious nuts.”
“Should we be helping?”
“Has anyone called the cops?”
“How’d they get in?”
“Some of them are cops!”
The doors ahead of Vivian were flung open dramatically. She stopped. They all stopped, the doctors and nurses and janitors. There was a procession up ahead, moving with a weird solemnity through the mayhem of the corridor. Twenty people, or thereabouts, most of them in robes. A few in police uniform. One of them was ringing a handbell, the tone of it so familiar to Vivian, even after all this time, that it felt like someone hammering a masonry nail into her forehead. The twenty-ish people were carrying Jesse aloft like a funeral bier. His eyes were open, but his body was limp, and he was dragging a saline drip along the floor behind him. Some of the nurses were pleading with the initiates to put him down but were quickly hustled away with much humming and finger-triangle-making. The procession halted when Vivian wouldn’t move out of its way.
Forrest was at the head of the group. There were others Vivian recognised: Peace, Officer Gallardo, the man from Mount Hookey Crystal Visions. Was that the woman who had been asleep in the back of her car when she’d gone to visit Telos Now?
“Put him down, Forrest,” Vivian said.
Forrest shook her head. “I won’t let you take him from us. Not again.”
“Who told you he was here?”
Forrest didn’t answer.
“Who told you?” Vivian repeated.
“He told us. We felt it.”
“Did you tell them, officer?” said Vivian, turning to Gallardo. He looked embarrassed.
“He needs to go back to the mountain,” said Forrest. “Look at him! Look what’s happened to him!”
“He’s sick, Forrest. You need to put him down and let the doctors look after him.”
“The doctors? Lord have mercy, have you seen the job the doctors have done on him already?” She picked up the saline drip, which was still attached to Jesse’s arm, and flapped it about.
“You’re confused, Forrest,” said Vivian. Then she spoke over the top of her. “You’re all confused. My brother doesn’t have any answers for you. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. Honestly.”
“She’s a liar!” She recognised the voice. It was Judy. “I was there, Vivian! On the mountain! You know he knows! You know he has the answers, and you took him from us and hid him here because you want the secrets of Telos all to yourself!”
Vivian felt the heat flaring in her face.
“Look, fine, he found something, but—”
“She admits it!”
“—it’s not what you think. There’s no Telos. There’s no Crystal City.”
“You saw him Vivian!” crowed Judy. “You saw his light!”
“We all saw his light!” said Forrest.
“But it’s not like that. He thought his way to the answer. He just thought, and thought, and thought, for his whole life, until he was miserable, just fucking wretched, and that’s how the answers came to him. You saw his room, Judy. You know what he went through to get to wherever the fuck it was he got to. And you can bet it was an answer that only he understood. It wasn’t even an answer! A shape,
he said! He found a shape, that could only be described by itself! Do you think that’s going to help you?”
“She’s talking a whole lot of nonsense,” said Judy. “His room is covered in Telurian runes, and it’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”
“They’re not runes!”
“Then what are they?”
“I don’t know. Calculations or formulae or something. If you really want the answer, you don’t need him. He wrote it down. Or drew it, or whatever. It’s out there, somewhere in all that garbage. You go to Mr Blucas’s barn, and take your time, and you’ll find it. You don’t need Jesse. Leave him here. He needs to get better. Please. He’s ill, he’s so, so ill.”
“Out of the way, Vivian.”
“Please put him down,” said Vivian. She was sobbing, now.
“We’re taking him back to Telos!” said Forrest. “We’re taking him home!”
The procession started moving again.
“Please,” she said, “put my brother down.”
“The Master is returning!” said Forrest, and she clanged her bell, and the initiates started humming again. Jesse’s head lolled to one side, but Vivian couldn’t tell if he had moved it himself or if it was from the jostling beneath him.
“Jesse? Can you hear me?”
“He is coming home!” shouted Forrest.
“Jesse…”
“He is returning to Telos! Praise be!”
Vivian shoved her way through the bodies and tried to get an arm around her brother.
“That’s enough, girl,” said Officer Gallardo. “You don’t know what’s best for him.”
She tried again, pulling at Jesse’s arm. He ragdolled to one side again, and then blinked, very slowly, and there was something in his eyes that was closer to boredom than to fear.
“I said that’s enough,” said Gallardo.
He pushed her backwards. Vivian heard the tone of the bell behind her, Forrest’s bell, and she whirled around, and in a near perfect déjà vu the brass rim came down between her eyes and she crumpled and tasted the antiseptic linoleum of the hospital floor as the procession moved on around her.
* * *
The Follower Page 25