Blind Lake

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, “it could end at any time, that’s the truth. You’re staying at the community center, Ari tells me?”

  “For now, anyway.”

  “You want a ride back? I’m basically done here for the day.”

  Chris checked his watch. Almost five o’clock. “Sounds better than walking.”

  “Assuming they plowed the road.”

  A good couple of inches of fresh snow had come down while Chris was inside the Alley, and the wind had picked up. Chris flinched from it as soon as he stepped outside. He had been born and raised in Southern California, and despite all the time he’d spent in the East, these harsh winter days still shocked him. It wasn’t just bad weather, it was weather that could kill you. Walk the wrong way, get lost, die of hypothermia before dawn.

  “It’s bad this year,” Charlie admitted. “People say it’s the shrinking ice cap, all that cold water flowing into the Pacific. We get these supercharged Canadian fronts rolling through. You get used to it after a while.”

  Maybe so, Chris thought. The way you get used to living under siege.

  Charlie Grogan’s car was parked in the roofed lot, plugged into a charge socket. Chris slipped into the passenger seat gratefully. It was a bachelor’s car: the backseat was full of old QCES journals and dog toys. As soon as Charlie pulled out of the parking compound the tires slipped on compressed snow and the car fishtailed before it finally gripped the asphalt. Harsh sulfur-dot light columns marked the way to the main road, sentinals cloaked in vortices of falling snow.

  “It could end at any time,” Chris said. “Kind of like the quarantine. It could end. But it doesn’t.”

  “Have you turned off that little recorder yet?”

  “Yes. You mean, is this for the record? No. It’s conversation.”

  “Coming from a journalist…”

  “I don’t work for the tabloids. Honest, I’m just mumbling. We can go on talking about the weather if you like.”

  “No insult intended.”

  “None taken.”

  “You got a little burned on that Galliano thing, right?”

  Now who’s pushing? But he felt he owed this man an honest response. “I don’t know if you can say that or not.”

  “I guess if you say unflattering things about a national hero, you’re taking a certain risk.”

  “I didn’t set out to tarnish his reputation. Much of it is deserved.” Ted Galliano had made national news twenty years ago by patenting a new family of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. He had also made a fortune founding a next-generation pharmaceutical trust to exploit those patents. Galliano was the prototype of the twenty-first century scientist-entrepreneur—like Edison or Marconi in the nineteenth, also products of the commercial environment of their day, also brilliant. Like Edison or Marconi, he had become a public hero. He had attracted the best genomic and proteinomic people to him. A child born today in the Continental Commonwealth could expect a lifetime of one hundred years or more, and no small part of that was due to Galliano’s antiviral and antigeriatric drugs.

  What Chris had discovered was that Galliano was a ruthless and sometimes unscrupulous businessman—as Edison had been. He had lobbied Washington for extended patent protection; he had driven competitors out of the market or absorbed them through dubious mergers and leverage schemes; worse, Chris had uncovered several sources who were convinced Galliano had engaged in blatantly illegal stock manipulation. His last big commercial effort had been a genomic vaccine against artheriosclerotic plaque—never perfected but much discussed, and the prospect of it, however inflated, had driven Galtech stocks to dizzying heights. Ultimately the bubble had burst, but not before Galliano and friends cashed out.

  “Could you prove any of this?”

  “Ultimately, no. Anyhow, I didn’t think of it as a muckraking biography. He was a brilliant scientist. When the book came out it got a good initial reaction, some of it just schaden-freude—rich people have enemies—but some of it balanced. Then Galliano had his accident, or committed suicide, depending on who you listen to, and his family made an issue of the book. Yellow Journalism Drives Benefactor to His Death. That makes a nice story too.”

  “You were in court, right?”

  “I testified at a congressional inquiry.”

  “Thought I read something about that.”

  “They threatened to jail me for contempt. For not revealing my sources. Which wouldn’t have helped, anyway. My sources were all well-known public figures and by the time of the inquiry they had all issued statements siding with Galliano’s estate. By that time, in the public mind, Galliano was a dead saint. Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.”

  “Bad luck,” Charlie said. “Or bad timing.”

  Chris watched the curtains of snow beyond the passenger-side window, snow trapped on the car’s exposed surfaces, snow piling up behind the mirrors. “Or bad judgment. I took a tilt at one of the biggest windmills on the planet. I was naive about how things worked.”

  “Uh-huh.” Charlie drove in silence for a while. “You got a good one this time, though. The story of the Blind Lake quarantine, told from the inside out.”

  “Assuming any of us ever get to tell it.”

  “You want me to drop you in front of the community center?”

  “If it’s not too far out of your way.”

  “I’m in no hurry. Though Boomer’s probably getting hungry. I thought they were getting all you stray day-timers billeted with locals.”

  “I’m on the waiting list. Actually, I’ve got a meeting tomorrow.”

  “Who’d they set you up with?”

  “A Dr. Hauser.”

  “Marguerite Hauser?” Charlie smiled inscrutably. “They must be putting all the pariahs in one place.”

  “Pariahs?”

  “Nah, forget it. I shouldn’t talk about Plaza politics. Hey, Chris, you know the nice thing about Boomer, my hound?”

  “What’s that?”

  “He doesn’t have a clue about the quarantine. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care, as long as he gets fed on a regular schedule.”

  Lucky Boomer, Chris thought.

  Eleven

  Tess woke at seven, her usual weekday morning time, but she knew even before she opened her eyes that there wouldn’t be school today.

  It had snowed all day yesterday and it had been snowing when she went to bed. And now, this morning, even without pulling back the lacy blinds that covered her bedroom window, she could hear the snow. She heard it sifting against the glass, a sound as gentle and faint as mouse whispers, and she heard the silence that surrounded it. No shovels scraping driveways, no cars grinding their wheels, just a blanketing white nothing. Which meant a big snow.

  She heard her mother bustling in the kitchen downstairs, humming to herself. No urgency there, either. If Tess went back to sleep her mother would probably let her stay in bed. It was like a weekend morning, Tess thought. No jolting awake but letting the world seep in slowly. Slowly, willfully, she opened her eyes. The daylight in her room was dim and almost liquid.

  She sat up, yawned, adjusted her nightgown. The carpet was cold against her bare feet. She scooted down the bed closer to the window and drew back the curtain.

  The windowpane was all white, opaque with whiteness. Snow had mounded impressively on the outside sill, and, inside, moisture had condensed into traceries of frost. Tess immediately put out her hand, not to touch the icy window but to hover her palm above it and feel the chill against her skin. It was almost as if the window were breathing coolness into the room. She was careful not to disturb the delicate lines of ice, the two-dimensional snowflake patterns like maps of elfin cities. The ice was on the inside of the window, not the outside. Winter had put its hand right through the glass, Tess thought. Winter had reached inside her bedroom.

  She stared at the frost patterns for a long time. They were like written words that wouldn’t reveal their meanings. In class last week, Mr. Fleischer had talke
d about symmetry. He had talked about mirrors and snowflakes. He had showed the class how to fold a piece of paper and cut patterns into the fold with safety scissors. And when you opened the paper up, the random slashes became beautiful. Became enigmatic masks and butterflies. You could do the same thing with paint. Blot the paper, then fold it down the middle while the paint was still wet. Unfold it and the blots would be eyes or moths or arches or rainbow rays.

  The frost patterns on the window were more like snowflakes, as if you had folded the paper not once but two times, three times, four…but no one had folded the glass. How did the ice know what shapes to make? Did the ice have mirrors built into it?

  “Tess?”

  Her mother, at the door.

  “Tess, it’s after nine…There’s no school today, but don’t you want to get up?”

  After nine? Tess looked at her bedside clock to confirm it. Nine oh eight. But hadn’t it been seven o’clock just moments ago?

  She reached out impulsively and put a melting palm print on the window. “I’m coming!” Her hand was instantly cold.

  “Cereal for breakfast?”

  “Cornflakes!” She almost said, Snowflakes.

  At breakfast Tessa’s mother reminded her that there was a boarder coming by today—“Assuming they clear the roads by noon.” This interested Tess immensely. Tessa’s mother was working from home today, which made it even more like a weekend, except for the possibility of this new person coming to the house. Her mother had explained that some of the day workers and visitors were still sleeping in the community center gym, which wasn’t very comfortable, and that people with room to spare in their homes had been asked to volunteer it. Tessa’s mother had moved her exercise equipment, a treadmill and a stationary bike, out of the small carpeted room in the basement next to the water heater. There was a folding bed in there now. Tess wondered what it would be like to have a stranger in the basement. A stranger sharing meals.

  After breakfast Tessa’s mother went upstairs to work in her office. “Come and get me if you need me,” she said, but in fact Tess had seen less of her mother than usual the last few days. Something was happening with her work, something about the Subject. The Subject was behaving strangely. Some people thought the Subject might be sick. These concerns had absorbed her mother’s attention.

  Tess, still in her nightgown, read for a while in the living room. The book was called Out of the Starry Sky. It was a children’s book about stars, how they first formed, how old stars made new stars, how planets and people condensed out of the dust of them. When her eyes got tired she put down the book and watched snow pile up against the plate-glass sliding door. Noon inched by, and the sky was still dark and obscure. She could have fixed herself a sandwich for lunch, but she decided she wasn’t hungry. She went upstairs and dressed herself and knocked at her mother’s door to tell her she was going outside for a while.

  “Your shirt’s buttoned crooked,” her mother said, and came into the hallway to fuss it into place. She ruffled Tessa’s hair. “Don’t go too far from the house.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And shake off your boots before you come back in.”

  “Yes.”

  “Snow pants, not just the jacket.”

  Tess nodded.

  She was excited about going out, even though it meant struggling into her snowsuit in the warm, sweaty hallway. The snow was so deep, so prodigious, that she felt the need to see and feel it up close. Overnight, Tess thought, the world beyond the door had become a different and much stranger place. She finished lacing her boots and stepped out. The air itself wasn’t as cold as she had expected. It felt good when she drew it deep into her lungs and let it out again in smoky puffs. But the falling snow was small and hard this afternoon, not gentle at all. It bit against the skin of her face.

  Rows of town houses stretched off to the right and left of her. Next door, Mrs. Colangelo was shoveling her driveway. Tess pretended not to see her, worried that Mrs. Colangelo would ask her to help. But Mrs. Colangelo paid no attention to Tess and seemed lost in her work, red-faced and squinty-eyed, as if the snow were her own personal enemy. White clouds leapt from the shovel blade and dispersed in the wind.

  The undisturbed snow on the front lawn came up almost to Tessa’s shoulders. I’m small, she thought. Her head rose above the mounded dunes only a few feet, making her feel no taller than a dog. A dog’s-eye view. She restrained an urge to leap and bury herself in whiteness. She knew the snow would get down the collar of her jacket and she would have to go back inside that much sooner.

  Instead she walked in big labored moonsteps to the sidewalk. The main road had been plowed, though fresh snow had already deposited a thin new blanket over the asphalt. The plows had pushed up windrows too tall to see over. The tree in the front yard was so freighted with snow that its limbs had drooped into cathedral arches. Tess pushed her way underneath and was delighted to find herself in a sort of perforated cavern of snow. It would have been a perfect hideout, except for the cold air that wormed its way under her snowsuit and made her shiver.

  She was under the tree when she saw a man walking up the street—the sidewalks were impassable—toward the house.

  Tess guessed at once that this was the boarder. He wasn’t dressed very warmly. He paused to check the snow-encrusted, semilegible numbers of the town houses. He walked until he was in front of Tessa’s house; then he took his hands out of his pockets, wallowed through the windrows, and made his way to the door. Tess shrank back in the tree shadow so he wouldn’t notice her. By the time he rang the bell there was snow up past the knees of his denim pants.

  Tessa’s mother answered the door. She shook hands with the stranger. The man brushed off the snow and went inside. Tessa’s mother lingered on the doorstep a moment, tracing out Tessa’s footprints. Then she spotted Tess under the tree and aimed her finger at her, pistol-style. Gotcha, cowgirl, Tessa’s mother always said at times like this. This time she mouthed the words.

  Tess stayed under the sheltering tree for a while. She watched Mrs. Colangelo finish shoveling her driveway. She watched a couple of cars come down the street at a careful, tentative speed. She decided she liked snowy winter days. Every surface, even the big front window of the house, was opaque and textured, not at all reflective. And in this dearth of mirror surfaces she was not afraid of suddenly seeing Mirror Girl.

  Mirror Girl often posed as a reflection of Tess. Tess, caught unawares, would find Mirror Girl gazing back at her from the bathroom or bedroom mirror, indistinguishable from Tessa’s own reflection except in the eyes, which were questioning and urgent and intrusive. Mirror Girl asked questions no one else could hear. Idiotic questions, sometimes; sometimes adult questions Tess couldn’t answer; sometimes questions which left her feeling troubled and uneasy. Just yesterday Mirror Girl had asked her why the plants inside the house were green and alive while the ones outside were all brown and leafless. (“Because it’s winter,” Tess had said, exasperated. “Go away. I don’t believe in you.”)

  Thinking about Mirror Girl made Tess uneasy.

  She began to make her way back to the house. The front lawn was still full of unspoiled white expanses of snow. Tess paused and pulled off her gloves. Her hands were already cold, but since she was going inside it didn’t matter. She pushed both hands into the paper-white unbroken snow. The snow took the imprints impeccably, mirror images of her hands. Symmetrical, Tess thought.

  When she got to the door she heard voices from inside. Raised voices. Her mother’s angry voice. Tess eased inside. She shut the door gently behind her. Her boots dropped clots of icy snow on the carpet runner. Her woolen cap was suddenly itchy and uncomfortable. She pulled it off and dropped it on the floor.

  Her mother and the boarder were in the kitchen, invisible. Tess listened carefully. The boarder was saying, “Look, if it’s a problem for you—”

  “It creates a problem for me.” Tessa’s mother sounded both outraged and defensive. “Fucking Ray—!�
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  “Ray? I’m sorry—who’s Ray?”

  “My ex.”

  “What does he have to do with this?”

  “Ray Scutter. The name is familiar?”

  “Obviously, but—”

  “You think it was Ari Weingart who sent you here?”

  “He gave me your name and address.”

  “Ari means well, but he’s Ray’s puppet. Oh, fuck. Excuse me. No, I know you don’t understand what’s going on…”

  “You could explain,” the boarder said.

  Tess understood that her mother was talking about her father. Usually when that happened Tess didn’t pay attention. Like when they used to fight. She put it out of her mind. But this was interesting. This involved the boarder, who had taken on a new and intriguing status simply by being the object of her mother’s anger.

  “It’s not you,” Tessa’s mother said. “I mean, look, I’m sorry, I don’t know you from Adam…it’s just that your name gets thrown around a lot.”

  “Maybe I should leave.”

  “Because of your book. That’s why Ray sent you here. I don’t have a lot of credibility in Blind Lake right now, Mr. Carmody, and Ray is doing his best to undermine what support I do have. If word gets around that you’re rooming here it just confirms a lot of misperceptions.”

  “Putting all the pariahs in one place.”

  “Kind of. Well, this is awkward. You understand, I’m not mad at you, it’s just…”

  Tess imagined her mother waving her hands in her well-what-can-I-do? gesture.

  “Dr. Hauser—”

  “Please call me Marguerite.”

  “Marguerite, all I’m really looking for are accommodations. I’ll talk to Ari and see if he can set up something else.”

  There was the kind of long pause Tess also associated with her mother’s periodic unhappiness. Then she asked, “You’re still sleeping in the gym?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, sit down. At least get warm. I’m making coffee, if you like.”