Yes, by secret procedures utterly changed.
He’d never been able to remember, conjure up, the day he’d first met Yvonne. That was because it hadn’t happened yet. It was happening now.
“Hey.”
“Hey, shit.”
“That ain’t no car I know.”
“Damn!” somebody said as if having touched a flame.
“It’s the man, it’s the man, it’s the man, it’s the man.”
One person went quietly toward the doorway and stood in it, but they pushed him aside. They looked like travelling salesmen, all alone and riding on good thoughts.
“Who we got here today?”
“You got a warrant?”
“I have several to serve, yes I do. Michael Edwards.”
“Warrant for what?”
The man sighed. “Take a guess.”
“Search warrants?”
“Arrest. Failure to appear. Yes, we got Edwards here, Sally Anne Kent. I see my personal favorite, Cranky Slaw. Maxwell Slaw—Maxwell? Will you put down that beer and come in here please?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Do you recall running an amphetamine factory on Faro Road? And getting busted, and being arraigned, and having a date set? I guess your calendar broke. And your map. You weren’t supposed to set foot outside Ukiah. Failure to appear. Now everybody listen to me. I’m not about to do this four individual times. Are you Thomas James Anderson?”
“Nope.”
“Yep. Yep. You sure are. Listen, you four: You have the right to remain silent, all of that. Give ’em the cards. You all sign these cards.”
“What for?”
The other man put a gun to someone’s head. “Goddamn you motherfucking piece of shit.”
“Do you know your rights? Then sign the card. Turn around, gimme your hands. How do they look, Jim. Do they look rowdy? I don’t want anybody scratching me, biting me, et cetera. You’ve all got AIDS. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you,” he said to Frank.
The man stood them up all in a row with their hands cuffed behind them, all but Frank.
“What’s the pooch’s name?”
“Uh…” Frank said. “Truman.”
“Yeah? Truman? Where’s your bandanna around your neck, Truman? How come they didn’t name you Kilo or Roach like all the other dogs? And who’s that sitting on the couch with those big feet and no fucking shoes on, Truman? What’s your name. You. You tall fucker. Identify.”
Frank rubbed his palms vigorously across his knees. He cleared his throat and ran his tongue around his mouth and reached up and removed his bridge and two false teeth and looked at them. “I’m Frank,” he said. He felt insulated by the fragilest membrane from a tragic ugliness.
“Listen, Frank…” The man thought about his next words for an extraordinary, a truly extraordinary interval.
Uh-oh, thought Frank, I’ve fallen down a time-chasm.
The car doors banged outside. The man looked out through the door frame, stepped sideways beyond the threshold as if to get a better view, and fell either into one of the numerous time-chasms around here or down a random gravitational well.
An hour after he’d left Frankenstein, as he drove north toward Point Arena, Van Ness noticed a figure on the grassy slope above the highway. Some ranchhand, hatless, walking away from the shadows where the horses were slowly killing the trees.
He now recognized the man as Frankenstein cutting a diagonal across the meadow, northeast, uphill. Mr. Natural himself. Very decidedly on the march. Van took his foot off the gas. And then immediately replaced it. Frankenstein faded from his focus.
Van Ness perused the oncoming traffic. His own alertness intrigued him. Entering Point Arena two miles later he found himself reacting with shock to the echo of his own car’s engine off the buildings, as if it might be the sound of Fairchild’s Porsche.
Now his strategy failed him. He’d started at the county’s southern line and had intended to go north as far as Manchester, then double back. If Fairchild were anywhere between, they’d rendezvous. But a tour of Arena Cove, where Fairchild might as likely turn up, required a jog of nearly a mile off the Coast Highway; he had to choose.
He turned left toward the cove.
Here Van drove slowly. He didn’t see Fairchild’s car around; however, when he reached the pier and stopped, shifted to reverse, was backing up, Fairchild himself appeared, dancing toward him in the forward view with his hand doubled back at the level of one of his big ears, and, balanced on the palm of it, a large rock, which he launched in Van’s direction so that it thundered on the Volvo’s hood as the car lurched backward, Van jamming the gas; and now Fairchild went into reverse as Van Ness applied the brakes and levered into first and bore down on the attacker. Fairchild skitted left and right before turning his back and sprinting some twenty feet to the pier and up onto it, where the car, as it fishtailed on the sandy asphalt and its rubber caught and it shot forward almost catching and crushing him against a piling, couldn’t follow, and slid to a stop. The fool had brought himself to bay. Van Ness tried backing up, giving him room in which to try for escape, but Fairchild only waited, catching at oxygen, slack-jawed, half-crouched, his hands on his knees. Van Ness, from the bottom of his spine and out through the pulse in his temples, the pulse in his fingers, in the pits of his eyes, felt something crimson and golden and filthy rolling. He inched the Volvo to the foot of the pier and parked sideways and opened the door, intending to sit there regarding and hating this entity for a while; but as soon as his hand felt the latch he was setting forth, leaping onto the boardwalk and chasing Fairchild down and aiming now to grapple with him and drag him off into the water and if necessary drown them both. Fairchild stumbled back, keeping the distance of a few yards between them, and caught up a length of two-by-four and stood waving it back and forth in an arc. Van stopped out of reach of the club. He circled to his left until each waited on the boardwalk almost opposite the other, and each with his back to the water.
Fairchild stretched his arms forth and sighted along his weapon at Van’s face. “Let me ask you something, maestro. If you come back to life in a future universe after dying in this one, why should it be a universe you’re accustomed to? Why this same one with the single difference being that you didn’t die?”
“You thinking about dying? Good. It’s time you did.” Van Ness went into a crouch. To his left, out of arm’s reach up the pier, the end of a length of one-inch metal pipe jutted from a pile of ropes and guys. Yet if he moved the necessary yard or two in its direction, he wouldn’t be able to cut off Fairchild’s escape down the pier.
Fairchild lowered the tip of his weapon to rest, like the head of a golfer’s driver, between them.
Van said, “I feel hungry when I look at you. I wanna tear you up with my teeth and eat you. I really do.”
“I make some people feel that way. It’s my fate.”
“You’re being flip. But fate is. It is. It’s vast—the pattern threads through the whole succession of universes. Take a swing at me, and see.”
“You know what Wilhelm Frankheimer told me today? Not one hour ago? He described you as free.”
“You’re stalling.”
“And when I first met you, you were full of talk—big talk about being a man of will.”
Van stepped once to his left and Fairchild raised his cudgel and hexed him with it.
“A man of will,” Fairchild said. “But now you go on about fate. Like it imprisons you.”
“You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric. If I like the design, then I follow the warp and the woof. When the pattern doesn’t suit, I’m free to die.”
“You don’t come at these ideas in the context of world thought.”
“You mean I didn’t go to prep school.”
Van leapt sideways atop the heap and grasped the pipe and pulled it free. Fairchild, rather than running, seemed to think it best to ke
ep his weapon pointed at his foe and only pivoted, following the movement.
He faced Van and Van’s metal pipe, a sturdy staff, shorter but heavier than his own, and more easily wielded.
Fairchild sighed. His lips trembled. “What now?” he asked.
“A fight to the death. One of us dispatches the other one to another realm.”
Van shifted his feet for purchase amid the ropes and rubble. He bent at the waist and craned to present his jaw as if to a barber’s razor. “Take your best shot.”
“No, no, you didn’t answer my question. If there’s some future world in which you didn’t die, then why isn’t everything else different too?—in the future universe. A different president, a different population, different history altogether? Why not a universe where elephants rule the earth and all the trees are purple?”
“It usually is. Most realities differ vastly. You just don’t know it. The one you resume in is the one you were born into. It’s the only one you know, the only one you recognize.”
“So the one you died in is gone.”
“Surely.”
“So a universe dies when you die.”
“There’s also a thread that is this universe, identically, changed only enough to account for your continuing presence, and no more changed than that. Eventually you get every conceivable universe and every conceivable variation of each, including the variation of the tiniest action of a single molecule. Listen, sport, we’re talking about quite a few universes here. And in every one?—you’re miserable.”
Fairchild charged him. Had his sights on, was driving toward, the man’s midriff when his leftward field of vision exploded in a great light. His feet rolled out from under him and the sea approached, touched, engulfed him, and he went blind. He said, “This is bullshit,” but in somebody else’s voice.
People wanted to get up close. They filled the front pew of the Holy Cross Chapel before any of the other pews, a sign, as Carrie interpreted it, of their enthusiastic belief. Carrie sat on the left aisle seat in the second row with little Clarence tucked against her ribs. Well before the designated hour the building had filled with fellowshippers of all sorts, in T-shirts and flannel shirts and long denim skirts like her own, with large Bibles prayerfully ruined and swollen with bookmarks like her own; old ladies and young women and big fat men in overalls with beards and men in ten-gallon hats lacking nothing to be cowboys except spurs on their boots; people who stank of sweat, some with whiskey-breath, some sorrowful, some perplexed, some suffused with self-congratulation and gratitude, others drunk on grace. Men carried in folding chairs and set them up in back, men in rubber boots and some in thick socks who’d left their spiked logging calks in the vestibule.
The preacher, Mike, was young and awkward and short but seemed to know, much less than Carrie knew of herself, how he’d got there exactly, in front of everyone and responsible now for guiding this medley as one body. He welcomed them and led them in a prayer of thanks with his hands clenched together and his eyelids fluttering.
“Psalm twenty-two sixteen,” he said, and the Bibles whispered as everyone turned to the passage, “Dogs are round about me…twenty-two twenty. Deliver…Do you see it? Deliver my life,” he read, his voice ascending to magisterial registers, “from the power of the dog!”
He set his Bible on the podium behind him and stood at the head of the aisle, almost between the two front pews. “Family that had a big, a great big dog,” he said, and paused, put his left hand to his mouth and coughed, cleared his throat—“part Saint Bernard, part husky—not a Doberman, I don’t want to bolster any prejudice. Not a pit bull. Big dumb friendly dog. Well, he was one of the family, romped with the children, had his own bed right inside the back door under the coathooks with everybody’s name on ’em, Sally and Sam and Mom and Pop and little Joe. You get the picture? Friendly, friendly dog. But he took a tumor in that big old dumb happy head of his, a tumor nobody knew about until it put pressure on his cranium and his signals crossed all around and he—suddenly—turned—mean. He had that family, family that raised and loved and trusted that dog, cornered in a bedroom for an hour till the sheriff got out there and put that dog down. Shot him right in the house. Otherwise that beloved family member would have torn, them, up. Because a few cells went haywire, blitzed out—made PRESS-sure on his CRANE-ium and he ROSE UP AN ENEMY.
“This is the deal, you see, this is the absolute deal. That dog the psalmist is scared of is the same one that feels like a friend most days. Lot of you knew me just three years ago. Lot of you saw me sleeping on the beach with sand on my face, in my ears, in my hair, wandering around all the time with one shoe on looking for the other one. Boy, that booze was good to me! That bottle was my only friend. When my neighbors on Sunday morning were heading down the walk to church, I was alone in my living room scrambling around on the floor after that bottle, down on my knees, and I’d raise it up before my eyes and say—I, love, you. And down in the city while the church-bells rang on Sunday there were other guys, still are, walking into those X-rated movies and sitting all hushed and quiet in the pews. And when that screen lights up they find their only comfort. Oh yeah, you know—you know—I see by your face, Jim knows, don’t you Jim? Jim: ever look around and notice that everybody was about three feet taller than you? Because you were down on your knees? Begging? Begging on your knees for a fix of heroin? Yeah, Jim knows. He knows. My buddy James knows. He knows too well—and when you got it, when you got that fix, you felt like Mommy just took you in her arms. Felt like your friend was beside you, that kindly old dog who’s always there and always understands.
“When that dog took my throat in his teeth, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because it drove me to the arms of my one true friend, our Lord Jesus Christ who laid down his life for me. That’s what it took, because I was lost, man—I! Was! Lost!”
Now the preacher looked worried, might have forgotten what he wanted to say, or thought no one liked him. His face took on a sheen, it glowed like the sun, and his tongue sounded thick in his mouth and he began drawling like an Okie. “We are deaf, dumb, blind, retarded, and crazy!” People in the congregation laughed and shouted Yes, Yes, Yes, or wept in silence, or shut their eyes and raised their right hands as if to touch some hovering thing delicately with their fingers. “We think up is down, black is white, true is false. No wonder we die!—something’s abound to kill somebody like that sooner or later!
“Even when we mean to tell the truth there’s only poison coming out of our faces. It’s happening right now unless praise God I’m suffused, and I hope I am, with the Holy Spirit. Nothing on my own power. Nothing on my own power.” Suddenly his face popped as if with shock and he shouted, “Praise God!” and then stood looking down at his feet and breathing. He looked up:
“You think action will save us? You really think there’s anything we can do?
“Philosophy?—are we going to think our way out of this one? We’ve gotten ourselves in such a jam that this time God alone can help us.
“That’s the position this world is rigged to put us in in the first place! This race is fixed so we come out losers. Destitute. Flat broke.”
“Amen! A-men!” voices cried.
A great sadness bore down on him and bowed his neck and he swayed like a mourner. “Yes, I too am a fool, I turn to Jesus with these broken birds in my hands…”
“Amen! Yes God!”
“God’s love, God’s love…” Mike squinted, eyes closed, as if trying hard to hear something somewhere. “The Old Testament shows Him as almost a dragon, and we’re dandelions gone to seed, and the best way He can love us is by not even breathing on us. By leaving us be. And that’s love the hard way…”
“Praise God! Praise him!”—Carrie herself was shouting.
“He lets us—lets us—he lets us take on burdens we can’t carry but maybe two-three steps and then boom! And we’re just groaning under the weight of it. Groooaaning—Romans now,” he said brightly, “Romans eight
twenty-six and twenty-seven: ‘Praying with groans that God understands.’ You got it there? Groooaaaning. Groaning under the weight of sin. God leaves us grooooaaaning…” He stooped down low as if bent beneath some massive burden…as if completely crushed…
A small answering thunder emanated from somewhere in the pews, and two women stood up with concern on their faces and stumbled over one another, moving into the aisle as a big man slumped sideways on the bench. He moaned until the air was crushed from his lungs in a muttering gasp. The two women, sharp, well-turned-out ladies perhaps originally from L.A., fell both to their knees at the pew’s end beside this collapsed logger, and one took his face in her hands.
Little Clare tried to stand up in his seat, grabbing at the back of it and squirming like a monkey. Carrie pushed him down by his shoulders and felt herself rising, standing, straightening up to ease a sudden burning in her solar plexus.
“God understands! God understands!” Mike shouted. “God knows!”
He doubled over, clutched at his belly, and let out a moan that ascended as he lifted himself up straight and then halfway over backward, until he wailed like an infant.
Then everyone began to groan. She’d never done this before but she was doing it now, letting it all go. If there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit, this had to be it, or the sound of it, or the Spirit tearing the voice of Satan from her heart, the music of his lies and nightmares flying out of her, and she didn’t care where they went.
An hour passed in the time-chasm. The door, better than halfway ajar, feinted and stuttered on its hinges. Frank became aware too of physical changes, a silence, a cloud that disturbed the daylight. He understood at last; and would have laughed but his neck ached, his jaws were exhausted, he couldn’t laugh:
Failure to Appear.
“Guilty,” Frank said.
He rubbed at his face and stood up, moved quickly in an onslaught of disequilibrium to the door frame and its right angles. Its verticals and sensibles. He put his teeth back in his mouth. Stood massaging his groin through his pants. Nobody out there.
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