She opened her eyes in a bed, flattened there by a shaft of hot and hazy yellow sunlight, NorCal sunlight, the kind that suggested a dust storm had only recently passed outside. She blinked three or four times but nothing got clearer. It felt like someone had rubbed petroleum jelly in her eyes. She tried wriggling her fingers and toes and succeeded. She licked her lips and they were dry and papery and seemed they would slough off completely if she kept working at them with her tongue. She thought about turning her head but knew instinctively that this was far beyond her means, something she would have to work up to in the coming days and weeks.
She was still in the hospital, that was clear. In a bed. Tube up her nose. Her room was completely silent, though she could hear the distant clopping of feet in the corridor beyond. It took her a minute or two to remember why she was there, and then she thought of Jesse, and it felt like some red-hot geological fault had opened up in the front of her skull.
She closed her eyes again and drifted in and out of something darker and more foreign than sleep. Hours or days might have passed. The next time she opened them properly she felt a little more lucid. Doctor Heben was standing at the foot of her bed. Behind him there was a painting hung on the wall – one of many hundreds or thousands of reproductions, she was sure – of a lone cowboy atop his horse, looking down from a mesa over the great, wide promise of the open plains. She stared at this for a long time before Doctor Heben said something.
“Together at last!” he said with a grin. “The head trauma twins! Ha ha ha!”
Vivian frowned, felt again that horrid splitting sensation in the front of her head. Three times she’d been knocked unconscious since she’d arrived at Mount Hookey. Three was an energetically significant number. Three points to the Telurian triangle. Forrest had taught her that.
The doctor came forward and obscured the cowboy painting.
“Come on, Vivian, up and at ’em! Your brother will be gone before you’ve had your breakfast!”
He jerked his head to the side, and Vivian looked over.
Jesse was sitting up in bed. He was awake, and looked thin and sad. He did a kind of smile where one corner of his mouth twitched horizontally, not really a smile at all. Vivian studied him. He still had bandages around his head. She raised a hand and felt the fabric around hers. They must have looked completely indistinguishable.
“Pulled a lot of strings to get you two in the same room,” said Doctor Heben. “Technically, Jesse should have been discharged by now. While we’re at it, there is the matter of your insurance…”
Vivian very slowly squirmed herself until she was also propped up in her bed.
“Easy there,” said Doctor Heben, arranging her pillows and her blanket and her tube.
She looked at Jesse, and he looked back with a thousand-mile stare.
“What…”
She dislodged the word like a stone caught in her throat. The doctor gave her a sip of water that dribbled into the cracks of her lips and stung.
“What happened?” she said. “Where are the others?”
“What others? Oh, you mean the nuts?”
She nodded.
“Me and the guys sorted them out, don’t you worry.” He flexed his chest under his doctor’s coat. “I didn’t get the call until after you’d gone down. They were halfway to the parking lot with poor old Jesse!”
“Sorted them?”
“Uh-huh. Should have seen it, Vivian. All that sitting still, vegan diet, all the rest of it – they didn’t put up much of a fight. Those guys need to eat some red meat!”
Her forehead sent two or three waves of pain, like sonar, through her whole body.
“They just left?” she said.
“I wish! Ha ha ha!”
She shook her head. “Then what?”
“They’ve been camped outside for the last five days. Doing their rituals and their seances and what have you. Someone needs to teach them how to play the drums, that’s for sure. Gee whiz. I couldn’t think straight. Police didn’t seem to want to do anything about it, either.”
Five days she’d been out. She hadn’t thought it had been so long.
“Are they still there?”
“Nope. Packed up and shipped out this morning.”
“How come?”
“Must be something to do with what’s happening up at Mount Hookey.”
“What’s happening up at Mount Hookey?”
“The mothership’s calling them! Ha ha ha!”
“What do you mean?”
Dr Heben scanned around the room.
“Give me a minute. I’ll go find you a TV or something. You two got plenty of catching up to do, anyway.”
He slipped out of the room and left Vivian and Jesse looking at each other. For a long time neither of them spoke.
“Hi,” Vivian said.
Jesse’s mouth did its strange sideways twitch.
“You okay?” Vivian said.
He nodded.
“Do you remember what happened?”
He shook his head.
“I mean, Jesse, do you remember anything about, you know…” What exactly was she angling at here? Was she still hoping he would just tell her? Was she, in fact, just as lost as the initiates, just as desperate for answers? “The thing.”
This time he didn’t move at all. He looked at her, then through her. His eyes were light-years away. There was nothing to read there. She wondered whether it was better for him to remember or to forget what he’d found. Perhaps it was a relief to be free of it. Or perhaps it was hell. She suspected the latter. To have known, and understood, and to lose it all. To have been fished out of the deep, calm waters of cosmic understanding and dumped back on this squalid bit of earth to gasp and flounder.
“Do you know what I’m talking about?”
He nodded again.
“Do you want to go back for it?”
He shook his head again.
Doctor Heben came swaggering back into the room with a tablet in one hand and a protein shake in the other. He found them staring at each other in silence and laughed.
“Take it easy on the psychic twin telepathy thing,” he said. “Your head still needs a good old rest. Both your heads.”
“I didn’t think that was a thing,” said Vivian.
“Oh trust me, it’s a thing! And I’m saying that as a brain surgeon.” He came between the two beds and showed Vivian the screen of the tablet. “Here,” he said, apparently seeing no need to elaborate on his most recent remarks. “This is the story.”
The article was from ABC7, a local news website. ET Visits Mount Hookey, Steals Burrito, read the headline.
“Lot of reporters going up to Mount Hookey these days, after the shooting and the nuts coming down here. And the fire in Sacramento? You hear about that?”
Vivian was watching some grainy footage from a phone. A figure was drifting down the main street of the town, emitting a violet light that illuminated the shopfronts. She recognised the shuttered front of Wing’s, and the thrift store, and the luridly decaled windows of Mount Hookey Crystal Visions.
“When’s this from?”
“From today,” said the doctor. “I said – must be why those nuts hot-footed it back to their mountain.”
She checked the date on the article. It was from seven o’clock that morning. It wasn’t Jesse, that was for sure, but whoever it was moved with the same grace that seemed at once deliberate and totally aimless. They shone. Someone had found the coaster. The shape. The thing. But who’d found it? Blucas? He was meant to be dead. Shiv? Glenn? One of the police officers? Or someone else entirely?
“Pretty clever, right?” said Doctor Heben. “Wonder how they did it. My brother works in CGI, in Hollywood – does all the big movies – he says it’s pretty easy to do that. Can just do it on a cell phone these days.”
“Jesse,” she said. “You want to see this?”
She held out the tablet, but Jesse had rolled over onto his side, and was pointedly showing his back to
both of them.
30
THEY WERE both discharged after another five days, during which Jesse continued to communicate only through nods and shakes and peculiar facial tics. Doctor Heben said it was nothing to worry about.
“Scans are all fine,” he said. “Cognition is fine. His brain’s as good as it ever was. Chattering away in there!” He tapped him on the top of his bandages. “He’ll talk when he’s good and ready.”
Jerome and Minnie came to visit, unannounced, on the afternoon of their departure. Minnie seemed buoyant. She was wearing a new T-shirt from Sacramento that just said: “I’ve been to Sacramento”. She was glad to see Vivian, and Jesse, and it soon became apparent why she was in such a good mood.
“They dropped the charges!” she said, and touched Vivian’s wrist with her warm, grandmotherly fingers. “Whole thing got thrown out. Poof! No evidence, no nothing. The only two witnesses were the officer, Gallo, what was his name?”
“Gallardo,” Jerome corrected her. He had a dark look about him that worried Vivian.
“Gallardo and the Indian gentleman. Neither of them showed up. Judge didn’t seem to know what we were doing there. Tell her, Jerome.”
Jerome was still standing, leaning on the wall, while his wife took the seat between the two hospital beds. He hitched up his jeans with his thumbs, glanced at the painting of the cowboy and said, absently, “Whole thing’s unravelling, seems like.”
“How do you mean?” said Vivian.
“Did you see the news? With the shining man?” Minnie interjected again.
“I did.”
“Just like you, dear!” Minnie said, turning to Jesse. “Same colour, same everything. Did the doctors find out what caused it?”
“No,” Vivian said quickly.
“Oh,” said Minnie. “Well. Looks like you’re not the only one they’ve been messing with, Jesse. Maybe someone will have some answers. Something in the water? Who knows! I just thank God that Nathan didn’t end up in the same position.” She put a hand over her mouth. “I am so sorry! What a terrible, selfish thing to say. And I haven’t even asked you how you’re feeling. You better, Jesse?”
Jesse nodded.
“Good.” Minnie paused, as if unconvinced. “Few good meals and you’ll be right as rain, I’m sure. Your mom a good cook?”
“She’s okay,” said Vivian. In fact, she’d never seen any evidence of their mother cooking in twenty-five years.
“I’ll bet she is,” said Minnie. “You know what, you two could switch beds and no one would ever notice. Aren’t they just the spit of each other, Jerome?”
She smiled broadly at the pair of them. There was an awkward silence. Jerome was studying the painting again.
“Where’s Nathan?” Vivian asked.
“He’s gone back to Mount Hookey. All this hoo-hah with the shooting and the shining man and such. Thinks he can do a lot of investigating while everything’s so up in the air. Which reminds me, Vivian – he asked me to ask you, would you mind telling him what you saw up there? In detail? With the mountain, and the…” she crossed herself, and spelled out “…B-O-D-I-E-S.”
Vivian didn’t want to think about it. She wanted to be gone.
“Alright,” she said. “I’ll tell him what I can.”
“You’re a good girl,” said Minnie, and tapped her wrist again. “He thinks it could really help with bringing these bad men to justice. You’ll see. Didn’t he say that, Jerome? Corporate manslaughter, or… what was it?”
Another pause. She sighed.
“You’ll have to excuse him, dear, he’s still got a bee in his bonnet, even after all this.”
Vivian looked at him. He fingered the frame of the painting and then muttered, “You could have taken the car back.”
“Could have what?” said Vivian.
“Oh, Jerome! She’s had more important things to think about!”
“The hire car! Thing got towed, and it was in my name! You have any idea the charges for that? On top of the late return fee from the hire place?”
“Oh,” said Vivian. “That.”
“Yes, that.”
“Don’t be such a grouch, Jerome. Today’s a good day.”
“It’s costing us a fortune!”
“I’ve still got the rest of your money,” said Vivian. “It’s in my coat. I can pay you back when they bring me my stuff.”
“Well, then,” said Jerome, wrong-footed. “That’s a start.”
“You won’t accept a dime from her Jerome,” said Minnie.
“It’s fine,” said Vivian. “But it would be good if I could borrow enough to get to the embassy.”
“Don’t need to even ask, dear,” said Minnie. “All that money’s yours, as far as I’m concerned. You were the one that found our Nathan in the end. You sure you don’t want to come and stay, before you go home? Get back on your feet? You could see Nathan and chat about, you know, the situation.”
“That’s kind,” said Vivian. “But we’re going to try and get back today or tomorrow, I think.”
“So soon! Well, ring him, anyway. And you must write. Both of you!”
She turned and smiled at Jesse again, but Jesse was still staring into some hidden corner of the universe.
When the nurses had brought their old clothes, Vivian handed over the envelope of cash, far slimmer that it had been when she’d received it. She kept two hundred dollars to get her and Jesse to the consulate in San Francisco. They all hugged and said their farewells and exchanged telephone numbers. Minnie reminded Vivian to call Nathan, and Vivian said she would, but the promise was half-hearted.
“One thing you could do,” Vivian said, just as they were leaving.
“What’s that, dear?” said Minnie.
“If you go back to Mount Hookey—”
“Oh, I doubt we will.”
“Well, if you don’t, maybe ask Nathan to check in on Shelley. Remember Shelley? From the motel?”
“Yes, poor love.”
“I think someone should make sure she’s okay. And her son. Remember her son?”
“The beanpole!”
“He could do with some help, too. Legal help, I mean.”
No chance of his charges getting dropped, Vivian thought. Caught red-handed next to a burning office block with a coat full of petrol bombs.
“I’ll mention it,” said Minnie. “But you can just ask him when you call him, can’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Vivian. “I suppose I can.”
That afternoon, Vivian and Jesse left the Lewiston Hilton in matching coats and matching bandages, with combined medical bills just shy of half a million dollars that Vivian had no means of paying. Whole thing’s unravelling, Jerome had said, and that was truer than he’d known. Despite her promise to Minnie, it really wasn’t in her interests to ring Nathan and help put the final nails in the coffin of her own inheritance. If Telos collapsed, and their father’s annuity stopped paying up, they’d have to get jobs. They would have to work. She struggled to see Jesse as a barista, or delivering flyers, or entering data in an office somewhere. Although, perhaps this would be different, since his enlightenment. Perhaps it no longer mattered to him what he did. Perhaps, even after his surgery, he didn’t feel or think or want anything.
The grass outside the hospital was still scrubby and littered from the initiates’ encampment. Vivian saw the remains of incense sticks, prayer flags, one dirty, purple robe. She didn’t dare think what might have happened if they had successfully smuggled Jesse back to the mountain. She looked back at her brother, a few paces behind her, scowling slightly to be out in the sun. He still hadn’t said anything. She held out her hand, and he took it, and they hung on to each other like two small children until they reached the bus station.
They took a Greyhound bus to the British consulate in San Francisco. Someone gave them temporary passports and – grudgingly, Vivian thought – a loan to cover the cost of their flights home. Vivian’s story went no further than the mugging in Lew
iston. She didn’t want to tell them everything that had happened in Mount Hookey. Not all over again.
They spent the night in a hotel, Jesse still not speaking.
After they’d turned out the lights, Vivian asked, into the darkness, “Jesse? Did you know it was Dad? All along?”
There was a rustling of Jesse’s pillow, but she had no way of knowing whether he was nodding or shaking his head.
* * *
The next morning they were both sitting in the departure lounge of San Francisco International airport watching their plane getting delayed for the third time. Vivian was studying the board. Jesse was trying to open the packaging of a club sandwich Vivian had bought for him.
“We’ve got to wait for information,” she said. “Will you be okay if I go look around?”
He nodded, barely distracted from the task at hand.
She went off to explore the duty-free, keeping Jesse in her eyeline. She spent the last of the Carters’ cash on a silk scarf and a chocolate Mount Rushmore for their mother. Then she found a quiet corner near the terminal window and called home. Nobody picked up, which perhaps wasn’t a surprise given the time difference. But then, Mrs Owens was a light sleeper and, historically, could be brought to full alertness by the sound of a light switch getting flicked in a different wing of the house. The phone rang off and went to answerphone. Vivian listened to her mother fumbling through the recorded message, and could have listened to it another ten times. She left a brief message of her own, which said only that she’d found Jesse and they were coming home and mentioned nothing about their respective head trauma or their medical bill or the suitcase of pharmaceuticals she was bringing back from the hospital.
She hung up and worried a little, then came back and sat next to Jesse. He was still hard at work on the sandwich. She watched him picking at the cellophane, putting the seams of the packaging under various kinds of stress from various angles. He turned it over in his fingers and lifted it to the light. Studied its form and nature as if he had unearthed some precious artefact, bringing all the power of his intellect to bear on the thing. There was nothing in the world that deserved less than that, as far as Jesse was concerned. He held it before him and he looked and frowned, as if he knew, with enough time and enough thought, it would give up answers to much more than just itself.
The Follower Page 26