handicap.”
“Nothing has to be done about it right away, right?” Rob said. “Let’s wait on it awhile. See how things develop.” He stared unhappily at the congealing mess on his plate. It looked like library paste studded with carrots and peas. Maybe he should learn another recipe.
“And there was another idea I had.” Julianne speared another chicken wing and transferred it deftly to her plate. “You know how Ike is getting his degree next month?”
“Is he really?” Rob turned his attention to Ike’s problems with relief. Julianne’s younger brother, a perpetual student, had stretched his four-year undergraduate degree program well into his twenties. “What’s his major now?”
“Oh god, some time-waster, I think it’s sociology. The point is, he’ll need a job in the real world.”
“Not easy in this economic climate, Jul. He doesn’t exactly have a stellar resume.”
“Well, I told him to leave the bar gigs off,” Julianne said. “And all those part-time busboy jobs at Shoney’s. But what I figure is, once he decides what field to go into, you could give him a boost.” “Me?” Rob wanted to clutch his forehead with both hands. “And suppose he wants to be a rock drummer, like he did in the eighties? Jul, I don’t know that I can create talent where there isn’t any!”
“Did I say he was going to be a drummer?” Julianne demanded. “We wouldn’t let him do that. I think he’d make a great CPA. Or maybe a lawyer.”
“He’d make a lousy CPA,” Rob said flatly. “Ike can’t balance his own checkbook! How on earth will you talk him into graduate school, and on such a tough track?”
“You can do it.”
“Noway!”
“Oh, come on, Rob,” Julianne coaxed. “We want him to support himself, right? God knows my parents won’t last forever, and once they’re gone he’ll sponge off of us, unless he develops some openings.”
“No. Zero. Nada. Not one cent, not one finger lifted in his direction.
Ike’s only hope is to make it off his own bat.”
“And what about Angie?” Julianne demanded.
“What about her?” Rob asked, caught off balance by the sudden change of subject.
“Her real problem is that lukewarm boyfriend of hers, what’s-his-name,
Jerry. If there’s one thing that gets on my nerves it’s a commitment-phobic man.”
“Good gosh, you don’t want me to stampede Jerry Catharing, do you? Maybe Angie hasn’t made up her own mind about him—have you thought of that?”
“True, but—” At that moment a squall of rage came from the living room. Rob got up to investigate and found the twins wrestling over a toy. “Now, sugar pie, you know that the walrus is Davey’s special friend,” Rob said reasonably.
“No!”
“Where’s Angela’s special pal, huh? Where’s Tigger?” He snagged the toy out of the playpen and thrust it into Angela’s arms. “Okay, now everybody’s ready to go upstairs, right?”
“No upstairs!” Angela said. She hated bedtime.
“We’ll take a bath first,” Rob reminded her.
“Bath,” Davey said happily.
“You’re up for it, huh sport? Jul, I’m taking Davey upstairs for his bath.
And then we’ll read ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff.’ “
Angela wavered. They might squabble, but the twins hated to be separated. And the story was an irresistible lure. “Okay, bath,” she conceded.
Rob hoisted them both up. “We’re all going up for a bath,” he told Julianne as they passed the kitchen.
Julianne was speeding through the dinner cleanup, rattling the silverware into the dishwasher and rinsing plates. “What you really ought to find her, Rob,” she said, “is a better boyfriend. Angie, I mean. A nice rich one, not too old or too flaky.”
Rob didn’t bother to answer that one. On either side of his head the twins were hooting, achieving their famous stereo effect that cancelled all rational thought. He galloped up the stairs with them, shouting, “Gangway!” They screamed with delight. How wonderfully simple it was, to please them!
CHAPTER 7
The next day was Thursday. The West Coast salvage team wouldn’t arrive till this afternoon, so there was nothing for Rob to go in to work for. Julianne took the bus to the station, leaving him to drop off the twins at his leisure. Rob watched her trot off, glancing at her watch, her high heels
clicking. It was a week ago today, exactly, that the bus driver had tried to ignore her. It might have been a decade. Certainly Rob felt as if he’d had ten years’ worth of experiences.
He herded the kids into the van and drove them to Miss Linda’s. “Going in a little late today, huh, Mr. Rob?” she greeted him.
“I’m sure sleeping in did us all good,” he answered. She was assuming he was going in to the office, and he didn’t correct her.
Instead he drove to Great Falls. It was a less than ideal day to go—he remembered with regret the piercingly mild days earlier in the week. Today was cooler, tending to rain. He wore new jeans and a nylon Redskins warm-up jacket, and hoped the drizzle wouldn’t become a downpour.
The unpaved trail wound through a strip of woodland. Beyond was an infinity of cloudy gray sky between the tall trunks. He came out onto a shoulder of rock the size of an office building. The water-seamed granite sloped slightly downhill, and he picked his way carefully to the verge.
Twenty yards straight down the Potomac River thundered past, sleek and green as glass. Elsewhere on the river you could pretend the water was safe, tame. Its power was hidden. Here, squeezed between the shelves of rock, the current’s strength was like a naked sword. People drowned here every year. One false step and Rob knew that nothing could save him, not the weirdness, not even the U.S. Park Police. Their helicopter would fish
his battered body out of the current ten miles downstream.
The cliff made a perfect right angle. Sitting on it was like sitting on a curbstone. He could look right across the river to the Maryland side, where a lookout platform had been build among the boulders on Olmstead Island. A few Marylanders hung over the rail, snapping pictures and taking in the view. One of them waved. Rob pretended he didn’t notice. He didn’t want to communicate with anyone, even with a gesture.
He had to force himself to face the truth. It had been a terrible mistake to tell Julianne. She was just not the type of person who could handle power over others, even at one remove. It would have been just as bad, Rob sadly supposed, if they had won the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes, or if she had been nominated to be Treasury secretary or something. Julianne had never known when to quit. She had never been able to put herself in someone else’s shoes. He could easily imagine her riding roughshod over all the Treasury undersecretaries, sparking off Congressional investigations and acerbic articles in the Washington Post.
Reluctantly he reviewed his options. How pleasant it would be to have a supportive wife who wouldn’t insist on appalling interference with other people’s lives! The only way to transform Julianne into such a person would be with massive adjustments of her personality. Fiddling with the homeless guy’s head would be a fleabite compared to it. Even the Lorton convicts—he hadn’t known them, been married to them. It felt outrageous, wrong—like
meddling with nature, or stealing her soul.
And suppose he did. Suppose he successfully warped Julianne’s character until she was like—well, like Lois Lane. Then she wouldn’t be Julianne any more. He’d have remodeled her into a stranger, one that he might not even like, might never learn to love. “And the devil of it is, I do love her,” he said out loud. The roar of the tumbling waters drowned his words.
Another, easier, possibility might be to just excise the knowledge from her mind. That would be far less drastic. He could make her forget completely about the weirdness and everything associated with it. If he was going to take this route he had to act soon. He had told her on Tuesday, and today was Thursday. Already she had had two days of thought,
of action, of memory. The longer he waited, the more pruning he’d have to do.
He considered it carefully. The episode about Debra— well, Jul was constantly complaining of Debra’s inconsistency. Maybe her latest about-face could be blamed on that. He had been able to drag his heels on all of Jul’s more grandiose proposals. The whole thing was so wacky she probably hadn’t confided it to any of her friends. Although he realized, now he looked back on it, that he had never told her to keep it secret, She had made no promises, and Rob, his head full of Spider-Man’s home life, had not thought to demand one.
“Damn, I better move on it,” he muttered. Carefully he stood up. A fine mist had been falling all this time, and he was chilled to the core. His jeans were clammy with the wet, and when he ran his hand over his hair droplets fell onto his jacket collar. A baseball cap would’ve been smart.
Maybe the hike back to the car would get his blood moving.
The parking lot was nearly empty as he made his way to the van. A trio of class-cutting teenage girls sat in the only other car, passing a joint around. As Rob went by a spiky-haired head popped out the driver’s window. “Hey mister, do you have any cigarettes?”
“Sorry, I don’t smoke.”
“Then maybe you could give us some money to buy some, instead.”
Her tone was threatening. Rob looked. Surely that was the gleam of a gun barrel in the rear window. But no rush of law-enforcement zeal overtook him. “Oh, for god’s sake.” Tiredly he marched up to the car. “Give me that.”
The window descended. The girl in back meekly put something in his hand—a large silvery tube from a roll-on foundation container. The Revlon insignia was visible on the top. He gave it back. “Don’t ever try that again,” he said, turning away. “Oh, and all of you, quit smoking,” he added over his shoulder. Probably he ought to do more. But he couldn’t deal with it today. Wearily he climbed into the van and drove off.
Halfway to Crystal City it occurred to Rob that he could do the job long-distance. He didn’t have to see Julianne or touch her to edit her memories. He pulled off the parkway onto a side road. There was a coffee shop in a strip mall just up the way.
With a hot mug cupped in his hands Rob felt better. Julianne would never know about the adjustments in her head. Everything would be okay. They could go on being married and life would carry on as it always did. He would never tell anybody else about the weirdness, and maybe someday it would dry up and go away.
He sat in a booth towards the rear, well back from the bustling pastry counter. For further camouflage he spread out the sports page on the table.
A man meditating on the box scores wouldn’t be interrupted.
He let the real world drop like a curtain to reveal the other place behind. Yesterday Rob remembered it had been a vast field of minds, all growing and blowing. Today it was like a crystal or a lattice, still a growing and organic thing but with more dimension, more depth.
Rob walked down glassy corridors lined with clear crystals. Or maybe it was a passageway right through a crystal, a gigantic diamond, perhaps. And each of these hand-sized crystals that made up the walls and floor and ceiling was one molecule of that diamond, a single twist of tightly-knotted carbon atoms.
He stopped and touched one crystal at random. “Why can’t I get my ear pierced, Mom? All the guys at school are doing it.” Unsurprised, he tried another. “Oh, no no, not like that. First you loosen the nuts, like this.
Here, hold the wrench. Take the weight on your shoulder evenly, before you spin the nuts right off …” People, Rob thought. These were all people. He was walking through Mansoul, the entire agglomeration of minds on, say, this half of the continent. How many? Well, how many carbon atoms make up the Hope Diamond?
It didn’t matter. He knew where he was and who he was looking for. After an uncounted time of walking through the cool labyrinth of passageways he found her. The crystal was low down on one wall. He knelt and touched it gently. Julianne.
Here, safely wrapped in crystal, he could be dispassionate. All that there was of Julianne he could hold in one hand. As on his computer at the office, he could call up the directory and see the files without opening each one. When he got to the right file, he knew it immediately. It was the only one with his own mark, his own fingerprint at the beginning, when he had forced Julianne to believe him. He picked it up. It was like a glass bead in his hand, a tiny translucent pearl. Would simply removing the file be enough? If Julianne were a computer he would be sure of it. But she wasn’t. He would have to go through the file’s contents.
There was no point in refinements. This glass pearl was doomed anyway. So
he squeezed it hard between the heels of his hands. It shattered in a smear of moisture, and suddenly he fell.
For a moment Rob thought he was back at Great Falls again, and had slipped on the rocks. A foaming torrent washed over him, tumbling him head over heels in the current. But this couldn’t be the Potomac. The water was warm.
In fact it was downright uncomfortable, warmer than the water in a hot tub.
He tried not to panic. This dark and rather dirty stuff wasn’t real water.
He wasn’t drowning, could breathe perfectly well even though his head was under. All this turmoil was in that pearl, and now he was in the pearl with it. A battering waterfall was just as much of a construct as—well, as crystal corridors lined with computer-gems. He realized the enormous Mansoul diamond had been his own creation, the kind of image he was comfortable with, cool and hard-edged and organized. Julianne’s imagery was obviously very different. He was in her playground, and she had set the rules.
Was this really a river? Or was it a closed sphere of turbulence, a salad dressing shaken in its bottle? Up, he thought. If I can get up and out, it’s a river. For some moments he struggled against the currents, which seemed to batter at him from all directions. Then he was through, up above the turmoil like a seagull in a storm.
“It’s a river,” he said with satisfaction. The obvious next step was to find the source. The air was thick and supportive, and he had no trouble
dog-paddling along in it. The torrent below soared down from a high cliff.
At the top he saw floodgates, like the gates on the spillways of big dams.
The gates were wide open, so that the muddy water gushed out unimpeded. He swooped lower. There was just room to stand on that rock by the open gate.
From this vantage point Rob could relax a little and survey the situation.
A shock of recognition hit him. This flood was familiar, though he had never seen it as water before. It was another image: the torrent of Julianne’s ambition. His tumbling struggle in the undertow just now was the exact analogy of his struggle with her in real life. And there was another proof of the parallel, right here. He surveyed the floodgates beside him.
They seemed to be made of poured concrete, gleaming wet and festooned with slimy green weeds. About halfway up the farther gate was a whiter splotch—a handprint, sunk deep into the concrete. Rob didn’t bother to go up and fit his hand against it. He knew it was his own mark. He had thrust open these gates himself.
And now he had to close them again. But first, where else had the water run? Now he realized the usefulness of the river metaphor. The computer-crystal picture would have been much less convenient. From here he could track exactly where the water was going.
He kicked off again into the thick soupy air. The stream was fast and strong but surely couldn’t be very long yet. He glided above as it fountained over rocks and rushed through a gorge. “Oh boy,” he exclaimed.
The river split into several smaller streams—Julianne had indeed told people!
Suddenly the humid thick air was intolerably oppressive. How much more pleasant crystal corridors were! Enough— he wanted out of this tiny worldlet. Rob made a gesture of reaching, pushing, and broke right through. Panting a little, he found himself sitting in the back booth again, clutching a cold mug of coffee.
As
soon as he caught his breath Rob got up and made for the pay phone. It was in the back corner by the men’s room. Let’s keep this simple, he thought. His fingers were cramped and clumsy as he punched out the number. “This is Rob,” he told the secretary. “Is Julianne there?”
She picked up. “Hi hon, are you at work?”
“No, I didn’t go in. Julianne, who have you talked to about this weird thing of mine?”
It was only yesterday, wasn’t it? When he had told her he couldn’t exert the weirdness over the phone? Well, a day was a long time in Rob’s life these days. He could tell now that she was lying. “Only Angie, this morning. But how on earth did you know?”
He didn’t answer that. “And who else?” “Well … I did ask Ike about his career plans.”
“And?”
For a moment she hesitated. “You know my secretary, Pat? She has a daughter Nadine in junior high. Well, Nadine is going out for the cheerleading squad, and—”
“No,” Rob interrupted. “Is that everyone, Jul?” She didn’t say anything, but he knew that it was all. “This is the end, Julianne. Forget it all: everything I told you about these powers, everything that you’ve thought and done on the subject. I’m wiping the slate clean.” Still she didn’t speak. Of course—she couldn’t, not on this subject, not now. He hung up the receiver quietly.
Rob’s knees felt a little shaky. He was glad to slide back into his booth.
The waitress brought the pot over. “Hot that up for you, dear?” She topped off his mug.
He had drunk so little of the first cup that the mixture was scarcely lukewarm. He sipped it anyway. His hand trembled so that the cup clicked against his teeth, and he set it down again with a grunt of annoyance.
There was no need to get upset about this. Julianne would be exactly as she was before. Nothing would be different, except—
Except that there was nobody now to turn to. He’d have to carry this thing alone, however huge it got, however long it took. Rob stared down into his cup, his shoulders bowed with the weight of it. Maybe it would be easier to drive to someplace like NIH and hand himself over to the research doctors. At least then he could talk to people about it—probably more than he would want to, after a while.
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