Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Is this important?”

  The question seemed to clear a shadow. He gave Dex a guilty, odd smile. “I don’t know. Maybe.” He put the spoon in his mouth. “Cold soup.”

  “It’s good for you. How do you feel, by the way?”

  “A little better. I’ve been awake more often. At least, I think so. It’s kind of timeless down here.” And he took another spoonful. “Not so many trips to the shitter. I’ve even been a little bit hungry.”

  “Good.”

  He ate in silence for a time. It seemed to Dex that the soup and the aspirin were working a slow transformation in him. It was heartening to see.

  They listened as the rain picked up its pace, rattling on a tin awning out back.

  Howard put down the empty can and licked the spoon a last time. “I was talking about my uncle. This isn’t just raving, Dex. I know I haven’t been too coherent. But he was the key to this whole event. Maybe our key to understanding it.”

  “You think we have a chance of understanding it?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, maybe.”

  Maybe Howard could figure out what had happened at the research lab. Dex surely couldn’t. He had a hard time understanding the Bohr model of the atom, much less a physical process so catastrophic that it could somehow rewrite history. What had happened here was not Physics 1-A—it wasn’t on any curriculum Dex had ever heard of. He shook his head: “You’re talking to a humanities major, bucko.”

  “Maybe we have to understand it.”

  “Do we?”

  “I thought about it a lot. You lie here in the dark, you do a lot of thinking. It’s our only choice, Dex. We understand it and do something about it, or we just . . . what? Go on like this? Get killed, or imprisoned, or best case, get assimilated?”

  Dex had had these thoughts, too, and so, probably, had most of the citizens of Two Rivers. But no one ever talked about it. It was the great unspoken truce. We will not discuss the future.

  Howard had broken the rule.

  “You are feverish.”

  “Don’t brush me off.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t humor me, either. I’m not that sick.”

  “I’m sorry. If I knew where to begin—”

  “I keep thinking about Stern. I dreamed about him. With the fever—there were times I thought he was here, I mean here in the room. Very real.” Howard shook his head and sank back into the mattress. “It all seemed so logical. It made more sense in dreams.”

  Dex went home after midnight. The weather sheltered him from view and kept military patrols to a minimum, but his clothes were heavy with cold rain and he was shivering helplessly by the time he came within sight of his walkup apartment building. Maybe Howard was right, he thought. Maybe it all made more sense in dreams.

  Maybe dreaming was the only way to approach something so incomprehensible. Dex had coped better than most, because his own life had passed into the territory of dreams long ago. He had been sleepwalking since the fire took Abigail and David away from him. His life since then had been a kind of shadowy anticlimax in which even the events of the last few months had been hardly more than a recapitulation, his own bereavement somehow woven into the fabric of the larger world. He supposed Evelyn had sensed this about him, that even the tenderness that had passed between them—and it had been a real tenderness—was nevertheless eclipsed by something darker. He supposed that was why she had elected to stay in the boarding house with the Proctor Demarch. She had been afraid, of course, but not only afraid. She had known about Dex: what he had been, what he had lost.

  He stood in the darkness under the lintel of the old apartment building and fumbled his wet key into the lock. He thought about Evelyn Woodward and what she had meant to him. For a time she had seemed to be a doorway back into a world from which he had been exiled—not a replacement for Abigail, but a way out of this blind canyon his life had become, into the highlands, the sun-washed places in which he had almost ceased to believe.

  She hadn’t been equal to that aroused need, and who could be? It was better not to want such things. He had arrived at a sort of modus vivendi with his grief, and such deals were best not broken. You wore your grief, and if necessary you ate it and you drank it until it became your substance, until you looked in the mirror one day and there was nothing looking back but grief itself, a man made entirely of sorrow, but still standing, somehow still alive, surviving.

  He left his wet clothes hanging over the curtain rod in the shower stall and went to bed, craving these few hours of oblivion before another dawn.

  The knock at the door startled him awake.

  The knock was peremptory and fierce, a Proctor’s knock. He woke blinking at daylight, his heart pounding hard.

  He went directly to the door and opened it, apprehensive but not afraid; he was too tired of all this to be afraid.

  The only light in the dim hallway was a patch of pale October morning through the east-facing window. Two junior Proctors, pink-cheeked youngsters only just beginning to master the routine arrogance of the professional religious policeman, looked at Dex and past him into the room. Then they moved to opposite sides of the door.

  A woman stepped forward.

  Bewildered, Dex could only stare.

  She was wearing what he supposed his great-grandmother might have worn in her youth: a black, high-collared, long-sleeved, floor-length dress fixed with buttonhooks over the kind of corset that rendered the female figure as an S-shape, all bosom and buttocks. Definitely not a uniform; there was too much lace at the collar and cuffs. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and swept back to frame her face. She was about as tall as his collarbone.

  She looked at Dex with a fierce determination. But she was blushing at the same time, maybe because he’d come to the door in nothing but briefs and a sleeveless T-shirt.

  She said, “I’m sorry to disturb you . . . are you Mr. Dexter Graham?”

  She spoke with that odd accent he had heard from some of the soldiers. The inflections were European, the vowel sounds almost Irish. She made “Dexter Graham” into something exotic, the name of a North Country highwayman in a Walter Scott epic.

  He overcame his speechlessness and said, “Yes, I am.”

  “My name is Linneth Stone. Lieutenant Demarch sent me to speak to you.” She paused. “I can wait, if you need to dress.” The blush deepened a little.

  “Okay,” Dex said. “Thank you.” And went to look for his pants.

  CHAPTER 4

  Evelyn had been willing to stand in line for water like everyone else.

  She had stood in line before. There were special deliveries to the house every Tuesday and Thursday, and the Proctors were generous with it, but she liked having her own ration. It permitted small luxuries: a private cup of coffee, when there was coffee; or tea; or just a quick extra wash on a hot day. The water line was a small nuisance and she didn’t begrudge the time she spent there.

  Her new dress changed all that.

  The dress was a wonderful gift, and she had accepted it in the spirit in which it was given, but not without reservations. It made the growing gulf between herself and the townspeople too obvious.

  The dress was of some faintly iridescent, dark green material—bombazine twilled with silk, the lieutenant had said. It came with a complement of underclothing so baroque that she had needed an instruction manual, which the lieutenant also supplied: a tiny hardbound volume called Appearance, Its Perfection, for Women, by Mrs. Will. Once Evelyn had deciphered Mrs. Will’s peculiar spelling, sorted out a stay from a buttonhook, and understood that in this place a pin was called a pince, she managed all right.

  She even liked, sort of, the way she looked in the dress. The effect was Victorian, of course. Prim. But it did interesting things for her figure. To be so thoroughly covered and at the same time so completely advertised—it was odd, and oddly interesting. In Boston and New York, the lieutenant said, all the finer women dressed like this.

  But Two
Rivers wasn’t Boston or New York; it hadn’t been even in the old days. And that was the problem. She had already been accused of taking favors from the Proctors who were lodged in her house. Eleanor Camby, the undertaker’s wife, had stood behind her in a ration line and whispered the word quisling over and over again. Evelyn didn’t know the word but understood immediately what it meant. Collaborator. Traitor.

  To stand in a similar line wearing green bombazine and lace collars—no, not possible.

  She could have just worn her old clothes when she went into the street, but Evelyn sensed that this was precisely what the lieutenant did not want. The purpose of the dress, or one of its purposes, was to make her different, to make her unique.

  So when she wanted her water ration she begged a ride from one of the junior officers (Evelyn thought of them all as “baby Proctors”; their ranks were too complex to remember), in this case a young man named Malthus Feliks. Feliks drove her downtown in one of those boxy cars that looked like antique Jeeps.

  Feliks wasn’t talkative, but he was courteous to her—and that was refreshing. She had learned to expect contempt or at best indifference from the junior officers. They were trained that way, she supposed; too, they must be intimidated by the strangeness of Two Rivers. The town had become a terrifyingly strange place no matter which end of the glass you peered through. Today Feliks drove along the leaf-choked streets at a less than bone-bruising clip, and even smiled once (an acrid Proctor’s smile, but genuine) when she commented on the particular blue of the sky. Last night’s rain had cleared the air. October skies, Evelyn thought, were the bluest of all.

  It was the dress, she thought, that made Feliks more courteous. If not the dress itself, then what it represented. His commanding officer’s imprimatur. A mark of possession, if not rank.

  No, she scolded herself. No, don’t think about it that way. Even if Feliks does.

  She was dismayed to discover that the water truck had been moved. Today it was parked in the lot behind JFK High School. Of all places. She considered telling Feliks to turn around, it wasn’t worth the risk of being seen—not here. But Feliks might tell the lieutenant, which would leave the wrong impression. And what, fundamentally, was she ashamed of? Nothing. She had nothing to hide.

  Water was dispensed to ration card holders between the hours of noon and six; the truck had only just arrived. Feliks exchanged words with the militiamen lounging in the cab of the tanker. The Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse wasn’t a branch of the armed forces; Feliks didn’t officially outrank these men, but Evelyn had noticed the way the military deferred to the religious police. The powers of the Bureau were vague, hence enormous, the lieutenant had told her. It was easy, he said, perhaps too easy, all things considered, for a Censeur or a senior Proctor to make trouble for an enlisted man. So, naturally, the soldiers were wary of them.

  A surly militiaman unlocked the spigot at the back of the truck. Evelyn took her camping thermos from the car. Feliks wouldn’t fill it for her and she knew better than to ask. It was her water, her chore. She stooped to fit the thermos under the steel faucet and swept her dress out of the way with one hand. The water gushed out and spattered her shoes. It looked clean but smelled faintly of oil. It always did.

  She filled the thermos to the very top and capped it.

  As she walked to the car she risked a glance back at the school—specifically, at the second-floor room where Dex taught history to his dwindling classes.

  Was there a shadow there?

  Was he watching her?

  Had he seen the dress?

  She turned away and walked with her head high. She didn’t care whether he had seen her. She told herself so. There was no reason anymore to care what Dex Graham thought.

  The military forces had occupied a Days Inn on the highway east of town. All the civilian automobiles had been bulldozed out of the parking lot and replaced with military machines—tanks, troop carriers, “Jeeps.” The flag of the Consolidated Republic flew from a newly installed wooden staff, snapping in the brisk October breeze, and Evelyn gazed at it while Feliks performed his own chore: delivering a dossier to one of the military commanders.

  The flag was blue with white bars and a red star in the middle. It might have been any country’s flag, Evelyn thought; it was not the American flag but it was not threateningly strange. She had gradually grown accustomed to the idea that Two Rivers had somehow traveled by standing still, that it had arrived in a place where things were substantially foreign. As an idea it was incomprehensible; as a fact of life—one adjusted. Or at least one ought to.

  She had adjusted to other changes. Evelyn had been married for three years to a man in Traverse City, a notary public named Patrick Cotter. She had believed that would last forever, too, and it hadn’t; her connection to Patrick had been as fragile as the connection between Two Rivers and the United States of America. And her engagement to Dex: that had foundered just as quickly when the lieutenant moved in. The lesson? There was no reliable glue to bind the parts of the world. Nothing was certain except change. The trick was to land on your feet.

  Dex had not adjusted; that was his problem. He was still chewing some old bone of self-loathing. It had made him eccentric and stern.

  Feliks drove her home. In contrast to the military, the Proctors were relatively few and had chosen a headquarters by the lakeshore. Most of them were bivouacked in the Blue View Motel; civilian employees of the Bureau de la Convenance had a wing to themselves. The highest-ranking Proctors, including the lieutenant and his pions, had lodged at Evelyn’s B&B.

  She still liked the way the house looked, three stories of Victorian gingerbread with a view of Lake Merced. She had paid for a great deal of restoration when she bought the building and it was still clean despite a summer of neglect. The white paint hadn’t faded from the siding, or the robin’s egg blue from the trim. She left Feliks to tend his car and hurried inside. It was almost time for lunch. She didn’t serve lunch; there was a kitchen at the Blue View with a gasoline-powered generator and provisions shipped in daily. Most noons, she had the house to herself. She opened a ration can, one of the military rations the lieutenant had brought her, contents nameless but not bad if you were hungry enough, and she heated a kettle of her new water over a Coleman stove on the back porch. Tea bags, her last two, went into the china pot. She added hot water and inhaled the earthy fragrance. Would there ever be more tea?

  Yes, she thought, there would. Things would be normalized. She would adjust. There was always a reward for adjusting. Small pleasures. Tea.

  She took a careful, precious sip and gazed across the water. Lake Merced was choppy in the autumn wind, empty under a blue sky . . . as empty as Evelyn wished she could be, utterly empty of all thought.

  The lieutenant came home at dusk.

  She still thought of him as “the lieutenant,” though she knew his full name: Symeon Philip Demarch. Born in Columbia, a town on the Chesapeake River, to an English-speaking family with long-standing Bureau connections. Forty-five years old. Symeon, Evelyn thought. It sounded almost like Simon. Like the flag of the Republic, his name was strange but not completely foreign. She had adjusted to it.

  He came to the kitchen and asked her to brew coffee. He gave her a bag of military-issue ground coffee, almost half a pound, Evelyn guessed, and whispered to her, “Save some for later.”

  He finished business with two of his adjutants and sent them out of the room. The house was dark now and Evelyn began rummaging for lamp oil.

  “Don’t,” the lieutenant said. (Symeon.) She put the bottle back on its high shelf and waited for him to explain.

  He smiled and went to the dining room table, where there was a military radiotelephone in a scuffed black case. He took up the receiver, cranked the handle, and said a single word: “Now.”

  “Symeon?” She was bewildered. “What—?”

  And then a remarkable thing happened. The lights came on.

  Clifford Stockton was in his room when t
he electricity came back.

  He had gone to bed early. He went to bed early most nights. What else was there to do? Under the blankets he was at least warm.

  But now the ceiling light winked on—tentatively, at first, as if distant turbines were struggling with the load; then brightly, steadily. And Clifford winced at the sudden glare and wondered whether everything had changed again.

  He climbed out of bed and went to the window. Most of the town of Two Rivers was hidden behind the near wall of the Carrasco house next door, but the glow in the sky meant that all the lights were on, including the downtown signs and the big spotlights in the mall parking lot, all reflecting from a shelf of low cloud that had rolled in with sunset. The corner of town Clifford was able to see looked like a constellation of new stars, a handful of fire scattered over the earth beyond Powell Creek Park. He had forgotten the way it looked. It looked like Christmas, Clifford thought.

  “Cliffy!” That was his mother’s voice as she hurried up the stairs, choked with excitement. She opened the door of his room and stared wide-eyed at him. “Cliffy, isn’t it wonderful?”

  She looked feverish, he thought, her eyes too bright, skin flushed red—or maybe it was just the sudden light. She waved her hand and he followed her downstairs. He was wearing his pajamas. He hadn’t been downstairs in his pajamas in a long time. It hadn’t seemed safe.

  She danced through the kitchen, opened the microwave oven to see the light come on, ran a finger along the gleaming white enamel of the refrigerator. “Coffee!” she said. “I think we have some left. Stale, but who cares? Cliffy, I’m making a pot of coffee!”

  “Great,” he said. “Can I watch TV?”

  “TV! Yes! Yes! Turn it on!” Then, a soberer thought: “It probably won’t get any stations, though. I don’t think we’re really back home. I think they just hooked up the electricity.”

  “We could watch a tape,” Clifford said.

  “God, yes! Play a tape! Turn it up loud!”

  “What should I play?”