by Jim Stark
Lilly was sickened to see the open sore on the back of his neck. It was practically a carbon copy of the horrid mass of poisonous matter that her father had had on his chest, a globule of flesh that didn't just look disgusting, but was a lethal weapon, spawned by his own body, aimed madly at himself. Vomit leapt in her stomach, begged to be thrown out of her mouth. With an effort, she held it back—that and her tears.
She read the note. “I don't know how they did it,” the note said, “but I do think the WDA murdered me. Goodbye.” She felt her stomach clench when she glanced again at the sore. Then she put the tiny note in her mouth and began chewing it into a wet ball. Paranoia? she wondered. “See you ... soon,” she said as she turned and left the room.
"I doubt it,” she heard him say as she closed the bedroom door.
Chapter 60
SUDBURY HARDROCKS
Friday, March 18, 2033—7:40 a.m.
Victor jammed his thumbs into the ear-holes, tore off his helmet and threw it into the mud in front of the bench. Sweat poured down his face, and his breathing was labored. He wished he had an oxygen mask, but those lovely things were reserved for game-day. “Fucking ... cheapo ... Sudbury ... Hardrocks,” he snarled breathlessly in the direction of the coach. “You want us ... to work ... as hard as ... game-day ... with no fuckin’ ... oxygen.” No one paid him any mind, not even the players he'd squeezed in between on the bench.
It was past midnight, and the cheapo fucking Sudbury Hardrocks Football Club had authorized the use of only half of the floodlights for practices—another dumb cost-saver that irritated the hell out of Victor. He was sixty-something ... old, in a word ... and his eyesight was marginal even in mid-afternoon. “Don't know how they expect to keep stars on the team under these absurd conditions,” he brayed to himself. “I can't fuckin’ throw the fuckin’ ball if I can't fuckin’ see what the fuck's going on. Next year I'm trying out for the Dallas fuckin’ Cowboys!"
"Is that your goddam ex-wife again?” hollered the coach.
Victor realized he was now lying on the gummy ground ... how did I get here? ... and that he'd been asleep. He jumped up and squinted at the mid-field stripe. “Oh Christ!” he spit.
There was Winnie Jopps, with her two children, a boy nine and a girl twelve whose names he could never quite recall, walking blindly onto the very middle of the field, as oblivious to the rain and mud as they were to the grunting clutch of three-hundred-pound black football players. Why can't Winnie and the kids play pretend-badminton someplace else? And why now? Don't they know they're spoiling our fun?
Winnie and her children started batting imaginary birds over and into an imaginary net with imaginary racquets. Victor slumped onto the bench and dropped his pounding head into his wet, muddy hands. When he opened his eyes again, he was quite surprised to notice that his uniform was clean, unlike everyone else's. How could that be?
He looked to the left, and saw no one. Same thing to the right. Even the coach had disappeared, as had the fifty or so die-hard fans who never ever missed the team's full-dress scrimmages. Even Winnie and the children had gone. The field was now ... empty! One by one, with strangely metallic clunks, the floodlights were being turned off. Musta fallen asleep again, he figured. I hate it when that happens.
He rose and jogged towards the locker room, windmilling his left arm as he bobbed along. Every time it went up and over, his left shoulder-pad scraped across his ear. Never mind about the ear, he said to himself—his arm ached like fire. Musta slept on it and cut off the damn circulation, he guessed. Serves me right for playing football at my age.
As he opened the heavy green door and entered the hallway, he felt the same visceral thrill he'd known the first time he walked on concrete with his cleats ... forty-five years ago, he realized. “Click, click,” they went as he walked. His chest was puffed out. “Click, click.” His arms seemed to be suspended weightlessly out from his body ... sideways, at thirty degrees or so ... as if his lats were so enormous that it was a physical impossibility for his arms to hang straight down. “Click, click.” He reached the locker-room door, tried the handle, but he couldn't get in.
"It's locked,” he yelled at a diminutive gray janitor who was sweeping in the hall, in slow motion. The man had the tiniest ears, nose and mouth, but he had enormous black eyes ... almond-shaped, like the drawings by those crackpots who claim alien abduction.
"You'll have to crawl in through the air conduit, or a drainage pipe,” the janitor said languidly. “Everybody's gone home."
Victor marched over to the little gray man—click, click, click, click—grabbed him by the throat with both hands and let snot drip from his nostrils by virtue of heavy breathing. “The keys!” he demanded.
The terrified janitor held out a big ring with a couple of dozen keys on it, and Victor loosened his grip. “They don't even let me go in direct,” the wee gray guy explained, “but if you go through the Great Hall and out the far end, there's a blue door there that goes to the kitchen, and at the very back of the kitchen there's an orange door to the other end of the locker-room. Just try all of those keys till you get the right one—that's what I have to do."
It all sounded a bit contrived to Victor, a bit reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, truth be told, but he let the poor man go, took the keys, and jingled them gaily. The little gray man with the almond eyes immediately jumped into a broom closet, and closed the door on himself.
After a good deal of profanity and nine wrong keys, Victor managed to open the door to the Great Hall. “Finally,” he bellowed. He walked through—and almost bowled over a waiter carrying a huge silver tray high aloft with one hand.
"Crab?” asked the waiter as the orchestra stopped dead in the middle of a minuet.
"You got any lobster?” asked Victor.
The waiter lowered the tray to eye-level. Victor grabbed an over-sized pink claw and began gnawing on the fat end, shell and all, as he elbowed his way through the crowd.
All the men in the Great Hall were exactly thirty-six years old, he observed, and all the women exactly twenty-three—how Victor knew these “facts” was uncertain. All the men wore identical black tuxedos, and all the women wore identical red cocktail dresses ... with carnation-and-baby's-breath corsages on their wrists. “Oh ... my ... God!” they all said, the men and their womenfolk, in perfect unison.
"Snobs,” shouted Victor, as bits of meat and claw showered all over nearby clones. “You think you're so fuckin’ together, but I got the fuckin’ keys, ya bunch of losers!"
"Oh ... my ... God!” they all repeated as he click-clicked his way through the human passageway that opened up before him.
"You don't even know what the fuckin’ keys are for, jerks,” he shouted as he kicked open the blue door on the far side of the Great Hall. Safe at last!
"Oh ... my ... God!” they all said again as the string orchestra restarted discreetly.
The kitchen was pulsating with multi-colored strobes, and somebody had a Sniffer on, pumping out tinny drummic on its pathetic little speaker. All the stoves and countertops had been removed, and the entire black football team was in there, clustered around each other, freshly showered and dressed in expensive civvies, looking uniformly forlorn. The coach—he was extremely white—was hollering at them, trying to bully them out of their stupor. “So what if no girls came?” he shouted, turning up the volume on the tiny Sniffer. “Dance with each other, furfucksakes."
This didn't seem right to Victor. He threw the remains of the lobster away and jingled his ring of keys expectantly, sensing that these big black guys would understand the fuller significance of his newfound power. No one even looked his way.
Suddenly the orange back door of the kitchen burst open ... and out poured a hundred or more well-endowed and scantily-clad extremely white cheerleaders, doing cartwheels, and shaking their oversized paper pom-poms—among other things—to the drummic, and chanting something about the painful injuries and real death that would surely befall their enemy, the o
ther team, meaning any team that dared to do battle with the cheapo fucking Sudbury Hardrocks Football Club. Every player attracted four or five cheerleaders, and in seconds these rather excitable women were touching muscles, showing off their cleavage and offering sneak peeks...
...except not to Victor, who stood alone. “Hey, what about me?” he yelled, but no one seemed to hear. “I'm the fucking quarterback ... and I got the fucking keys, too!"
Who am I shouting at? he asked himself. The last he knew, he'd been in the kitchen-cum-dancehall of Laurentian University with a bunch of big, burly, black footballers, an endless gaggle of nubile, extremely white cheerleaders, and one jubilant coach. But now he found himself back in the hallway where he'd started, just outside of the locker-room, looking into the confused face of that little gray man, the janitor with the almond eyes ... and he evidently wanted his keys back.
"Mid-life crisis?” the man asked as he picked the keys surreptitiously from Victor's confused hand.
"I'm the backbone of the fuckin’ team,” cried Victor, “and all the girls ... they just ... ignored me!"
"Look,” said the janitor as he clipped the huge key ring to his belt, “it's probably time somebody told you the truth. You're not even on the team, sir. They just sort of let you ... you know ... hang out, and pretend, because you're rich. Go home, Mr. Helliwell. Go home and make love to your wife or something."
"I—uh—don't have a wife,” he admitted sheepishly.
"You never know,” said the little gray man. “Maybe by the time you get home, you'll have one."
"Were those my kids out there playing pretend-badminton?” Victor asked.
"You don't have any babies,” said Julia as she mopped his burning forehead with her hand.
"What!?” screamed Victor as he sat bolt upright in his bed.
"Yet,” whispered Julia as she gently eased him back down onto a lightly bloodstained pillow. “You were ... dreaming a bad dream, that's all. You could still be a daddy if you wanted to.” She covered him up with the comforter and lay again beside him, rubbing the top of his chest. “Mr. Wu said that guy I got seminated with could even be dead, he told me."
Victor smiled vacantly, and decided not to relate his bizarre dream to Julia. He also faintly remembered making a sperm deposit several years ago, at Mr. Wu's suggestion. “Why did he ask me to do that?” he said aloud, but the memory wouldn't come to the surface. Julia said nothing—she had no idea what he was talking about. “What time is it?” he asked.
"There's lots of time before your meeting,” Julia assured him as she lifted his arm and burrowed her blond head under his good arm and onto his shoulder. “I wish I could go,” she said, meaning to the meeting. “You want some nice cranberry juice with ice in it, just the way you like it best?"
"Were you here all night?” Victor asked.
"I'll get you some nice cranberry juice,” said Julia, getting up, “and your pill."
Chapter 61
RETREAT
Friday, March 18, 2033—8:00 a.m.
Michael had slept reasonably well the first night in his little no-tech cabin on Wilson Lake, in spite of a biting overnight frost. He had bundled up on the sofa in his clothes, wrapped in two fat comforters, and he'd lit fires. He had awakened twice to feed the fireplace and the wood stove—he'd have to chop more wood when he got up—and he had thoroughly enjoyed the manly inconvenience of it all. Life is what happens elsewhere when you're at work, he'd tried on for size during the second feeding. It sounded as if his daughter were preaching inside his head, and like most truisms, it felt suspicious.
Now it was morning, and he was kneeling down, blowing gently onto the remaining embers in the fireplace, sticking in crumpled paper, cross-piling kindling, and shivering. In days long past, he would have run naked down to the dock and dived off the end ... consequences be damned. If a lake wasn't totally covered in ice, then you could swim in it—that was his teenaged rule of thumb. “His” lake, at this time, was a solid mass of ice, on top anyway. He longed for his oversized jacuzzi back at the manor, where he'd spent so many hours lolling deliciously with Becky in better days ... or the Bahamian beach, where he had lolled so sensually with Lilly only two days ago ... and three days ago, and four days ago, and...
"Later,” he whispered to himself as the bulging grab bag of griefs and grievances threatened to fence in his entire mind. That was part of the plan: to confront himself with unavoidable chores and a demanding environment. Michael wanted to just percolate his problems, not nuke them.
The two things that had kept his shoulder to the boulder for the past fifteen years were gone now. Well, the company was gone to him until all the lawyers and the C.S.E. got their pounds of flesh, and that could take a year, even in a judicial system now aided by the LieDeck. But Becky wasn't gone, exactly. In fact she had encouraged him to make this solitary retreat, for however long it took to sort himself out, and she did that out of love. Maybe I should pull a Victor and hide out here incommunicado for a few years, he thought with a chuckle as the kindling caught fire and started giving up its meat to make heat.
Michael went out on the deck and pissed over the railing. He actually preferred the “big bathroom” to the little chemical outfit he had indoors ... except in mosquito season, and especially late at night in mosquito season. Getting stung on the weenie was his least favorite thing about the little cabin. He resolved to get the wood stove boiling water for coffee before he took a shower ... at least that was the plan before he remembered there was no shower out here. He'd have to tap into the “big bathtub"—either that or break his long-standing habit of bathing daily. A sponge bath would have to do.
He glanced up over the frozen, puddle-spotted lake to the lodge on the far side, and he shivered. Partly it was the cold; partly it was the stinging memory of the day many years ago when, as a teenager, he had sped across that lake in his boat to see what the RCMP plane was doing, only to see the lodge explode. He went back inside, lit the fire in the wood stove, and faced the ignoble facts of 18th-century life. Then he went trudging out to the mudroom and got the ice-auger, a tiny pail and a bucket. He put on his nylon hunting jacket and his “bubbaroots"—funny how childhood nicknames stuck—and walked down to the dock and then out to the end.
The ice was still two feet thick, he estimated, but watery on top, and thinner near the shore. It looked dangerous, but wasn't. He eased his way on the slippery surface with one hand on the dock and the other holding the bucket and the auger out from his body, like the balance pole in a high wire act. He set down the big bucket with the small pail inside, braced one rubber boot against a supporting log of the dock, and slammed the spike end of the auger into the ice. He put his left hand on the loose wooden top-knob, leaned his chest and his weight against that hand, and started cranking with his right hand. He was anxious to get the job done, but he was also mindful of keeping his balance on the wet surface.
It pleased him greatly to see ice crumbling under his will. He loved that splintering sound, and he enjoyed the relative ease with which a simple tool could shatter the hard face of nature. Who invented this thing? he wondered as he turned the handle and leaned and listened. The spiral blade sank further and further into a sloshing mound of ice-chips. Technology was fantastic, and he'd made a fortune out of it, but it was a double-edged auger. As he cranked the handle, it occurred to him that of all the gizmos and gadgets that Whiteside Technologies had ever produced, the LieDeck had become the main basis of the family's wealth. And just as that pesky device had inflicted cavernous wounds and disfiguring twists onto history, it was now the principal cause of his emotional debt. His future decisions—all of them—had to be taken only after factoring the LieDeck into the equation, and they would be determined as much by that hyper-modern brain-auger as by his personal circumstances or his free will. It felt unfair. If only we could dis-invent the LieDeck, he pondered as he leaned and cranked.
The auger punched through—the ice was thinner than he'd guessed—and he
lost his balance when the thing gave. His feet fled like rogue skis on an Alpine hill, and he landed on his buttocks in about an inch of water. And he laughed heartily—laughed at the liquid nitrogen that burned him from beneath, laughed at the absence of engineers, accountants, secretaries, Patriot agents and chauffeurs.
Then he struggled to his knees, pulled out the auger, and stuck his bare hands into the maw to remove the larger chunks of ice. It was apparently easy to forget how the passage of time could make a person stupid. He knew better than this once upon his younger days, and now his hands burned more than his knees and his ass. He was making a mess out of a relatively simple job. He glanced across the frozen lake once again, towards the lodge, and wondered if anyone was watching him make a fool of himself ... through binoculars. Of course they were. If Patriot didn't watch, and he injured himself seriously, real heads would be lopped off willy-nilly. Maybe Victor's watching, he even considered—until he recalled how sick the man was ... and how disinterested he is in anybody but himself, he added, meanly ... and wrongly, he knew.
Michael grabbed the little pail out of the bucket and began loading the latter with the former, ice shards and all. It didn't take long—twenty or so quick dips and pours—and his hands and knees were rebelling against the full court press of acid pain. He stood up gingerly, using the auger as a cane to keep his balance, and headed for shore, for warmth, for safety, for healing ... and away from nature's early-warning system. Water had gotten in his rubber boots when he took the tumble, so his feet stung as much as his knees and his butt. But the worst by far were the hands. They were so cold he wanted to drop the bucket and auger and just run. Any more idiotic bumbling along these lines, and next would come hypothermia ... then death. He laughed again. He was in no danger, but Ma Nature had punished his ineptitude and lack of forethought, rather severely. Not only that, but a bucket of water seemed a lot heavier today than it had been half a lifetime ago.