Ascending

by Wright, T. M.

  Creed reached around him, pulled the door open, and shoved him out into the squad room. "Billings?" he called to a burly uniformed officer nearby. Billings came over.

  "Escort this man from the building," Creed ordered.

  ~ * ~

  Late that evening, several miles north of Hamilton, Ontario, on his way back to Boston in his yellow Volkswagen Super Beetle, Ryerson pulled onto the shoulder of the road. A hundred feet ahead, up out of the reach of the headlights, a lighted billboard advertised a local McDonald's. On the ground beneath it, two deer watched him. Ryerson, whose night vision was dismal at best, saw the deer only as two pair of bright blue eyes, one pair slightly higher than the other, and two whitish, dully rectangular forms beneath. He knew that they were deer because he could sense a sharp tension in them that quivered on the edge of panic. Soon, he knew, they would bolt. For now, their eyes were a point of focus.

  He had known all day that he'd had a kind of blackout in Creed's office, but the details had remained sketchy. He remembered only the word "birthplace," the smell of cheap after-shave and sweat, remembered being on the street, the stares of the passersby.

  The blackout was a phenomenon he had experienced before, especially if the impressions he received were strong. These impressions had been very strong, as if he had suddenly been encased in someone else's skin, had been using someone else's brain, memory, needs, and passions.

  But now, his gaze on the bright blue eyes of the deer, he remembered more. Much more.

  He remembered being able to fly.

  He remembered speed, agility, strength, freedom. And power.

  The deer bolted. A car passing Ryerson screeched to a halt to avoid them. The second deer froze. The bumper of the car clipped the deer's hind leg, and a scorching pain shot through Ryerson. He stiffened. The pain dissipated. The deer sprang across the road, apparently unhurt, and was gone.

  Ryerson closed his eyes. "My God!" he whispered. On the backseat, Creosote whimpered in his sleep.

  Ryerson put the Beetle in gear and made a U-turn. He was going back to Toronto.

  ~ * ~

  In Toronto, the hangers-on at a late-night cocktail party had turned with enthusiasm to giddy, near-drunken talk about death and dying. There were four men and two women, and it was a remark by one of the women that had sparked the conversation. At the age of forty-eight, Milly Farino, a sometime candidate for various political offices in Toronto, had lost three husbands to divorce, one to a heart attack, and another in a freak plane crash. Everyone jumped on her remark, "Death is the great equalizer," because it was short, catchy, and undeniably true.

  "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust," slurred financial analyst Thomas Payton from his club chair. "All dust is equal, eh?" he added. It was, he decided, one of his most quotable remarks.

  "This," said Jackson Lord, seated in another club chair not far from Payton's—there were several empty glasses on the floor near his chair, and a nearly full glass of Canadian whiskey in his hand—"is what death is all about: Death"—he took a long pull on his whiskey—"is the end of a good time."

  "That's pretty basic, isn't it?" asked Gloria O'Malley, a tall, willowy, oval-faced, high-cheekboned brunette dressed in a shiny, sequin-studded black gown. The gown had somehow gotten ripped at her right hip, revealing lots of snow-white skin beneath. "I mean, it's almost cynical."

  "Logical," countered Jackson Lord.

  "Well, I don't think we're being philosophical enough about this whole thing," said Maurice L'Oreal, a visitor from Quebec.

  "What's philosophical about death?" asked Payton. "It is. It happens. There's nothing philosophical about it." He felt again that he had uttered the profundity of the evening. "You might as well try to get philosophical about . . . tile grout."

  "About what?" asked Gloria O'Malley, smiling very broadly and toothily.

  "Why the hell are we talking about it?" asked a man in a gray suit.

  "Because death is a good topic, Rick," Professor Lincoln Curtsinger said. "It's the only topic, really. Besides life."

  "That's the spirit," toasted Jackson Lord.

  "It stinks," said the man in the gray suit.

  "You watch out there, Rick," teased Maurice L'Oreal. "That's a value judgment."

  "Death stinks," Rick repeated. "So does talking about it.”

  Milly Farino, sensing the grim mood settling in, said, "I'm sorry I brought it up. We can talk about something else. Let's talk about politics. That's a good topic, too."

  "Death stinks," Rick said again.

  "You're stuck, my friend," said Maurice L'Oreal. "Death doesn't stink, you see. It is, simply. Is. Tile grout stinks." He laughed.

  "I suffocated a puppy once," said Anson Wyler, bringing the conversation to a nasty halt.

  "You what?" Milly Farino whispered.

  "I had to," Wyler explained. "It was in pain. It really was in tremendous pain." He was pleading with them. "It was very weak, and it was in a lot of pain, and I had a decision to make." He took a sip of his drink, coughed. "So I suffocated it. I put a plastic bag over its head, and I put my hand around its throat. Hard. Very hard. Not as hard as I could, but hard enough. And it died." Another nervous sip of his drink. "Eventually."

  "Eventually?"

  He nodded. "It took a long, long time. Christ, it took a hell of a lot longer than I thought it would. I was screaming at it. ‘For God's sake, die. Please die!' " He stopped, clearly embarrassed.

  Rick said, "You did it wrong. That's why it took as long as it did. You prolonged its suffering. But of course you know that."

  And, of course, Anson did know it. He had known it forever. "You can't plan something like that, Rick," he explained dismally.

  "No," said Rick, "not something like that. I know." He sipped his ginger ale, his drink of choice and necessity. "You can plan other things."

  "What other things?" asked Milly.

  Rick nodded. He had been standing all the while. Now he sat on the couch next to Gloria O'Malley, who grimaced a little. He was a heavyset man, and when he sat, he spilled some of his ginger ale onto his black pants. "Death," he explained. "You can plan the quickness of it."

  "Are you talking about suicide?" Milly asked.

  "I could be." Rick's words were slow and thoughtful. "You can plan the quickness of your own suicide. No one who chooses suicide chooses something slow and agonizing. Suicides want to exit life quickly, instantaneously, though that's not possible, of course. Nothing is instantaneous. The word itself is a misnomer. If anything were actually 'instantaneous,' per se, then time would not exist. And, of course, time does exist. We're all swimming in it." He leaned forward, set his glass on the floor between his feet, put his elbows on his knees, clenched his hands, and smiled a flat, humorless smile. "We're all dancing in time," he whispered.

  "A two-step," Jackson Lord quipped.

  Rick stared hard at him. "We can plan the quickness of other deaths."

  "This," said Gloria, "is getting a little thick for me," She stood, looked momentarily at sea, then wandered toward the kitchen.

  "I'm sorry," Jackson said to Rick, "but I think you're talking about murder."

  Rick nodded. "Does it upset you?"

  "Of course it upsets me. It would upset any caring person."

  "Not the mere talk of it, Jackson," said Rick. He picked up his glass, looked down into it, said, "The mere talk of anything at all should upset no one."

  "That's sophistic," said Professor Curtsinger.

  "What's that?" said Maurice L'Oreal, who, if he had not been drunk, would never have admitted to an ignorance of the word "sophistic."

  "Words explain our insides," said Curtsinger. "So they are our insides and they rule us."

  "That there, I mean," Maurice said drunkenly. "On the rug. Is it a spider?" He pretended to sink back into his club chair.

  "We dance in time," said Rick, who, though he hadn't touched alcohol in five years, could easily and convincingly mimic the mood of the drunken people he was sittin
g with—it was a way of keeping himself a part of the group, and sometimes he played the role so well he fooled even himself. "Time dances in us," he rephrased, and suddenly the group was off on another line of conversation.

  ~ * ~

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING

  Ryerson, standing in Inspector Creed's office doorway, said, "I can help you, Dan."

  "With what?"Creed grumbled.

  "With the man in the cocoon," Ryerson answered. Creosote squirmed to be let down. Ryerson ignored him. "Dan, I want to help, I need to help."

  "I'm sorry about what happened the other day, Rye, but at the moment I really don't know—"

  "The man in the cocoon!" Ryerson cut in.

  "Oh, shit!" Creed whispered.

  "I can help you find the man who did it," Ryerson said.

  "Why don't you sit down. I'll get us both some coffee—"

  "He'll do it again," Ryerson cut in. "He's done it before, more than once. He can't help himself."

  "Rye, I really don't know what in the hell you're talking about."

  Creosote hopped out of Ryerson's arms and hit the floor face first. His front legs buckled, he flopped to his side, and for a moment looked as if he were dead. Then he pushed desperately at the air with his hind legs, righted himself, and scurried under the narrow opening at the front of Creed's desk.

  "Oh, hell," Creed whispered, bent over, and looked under the desk. "Well come here, dog!"

  "I'll get him," Ryerson said and went around to the front of Creed's desk, got down on all fours, and cooed, "It's okay, fella." Moments later, he scooped Creosote into his arms and stood.

  A detective came in and put a file folder on Creed's desk. Creed opened the front of the file folder. An 8x10 of the body that had fallen through the false ceiling of the Commerce Court West Building lay beneath.

  "That's him!" Ryerson shouted. "The man in the cocoon!"

  EIGHT

  It's like having fourteen-hundred-foot-long legs," Harry Lamb—who was himself very tall and thin—said.

  His computer-matched date, short, chunky, round-faced, pleasant-looking Loretta McPhee, standing with him on the space deck—the highest observation level of the 1,815-foot-tall CN Tower—murmured her assent, then managed a quivering smile. It was a little past eight in the evening. Below, the lights of Toronto twinkled like tiny quartz chips on a gray sidewalk. Some 125 miles to the south, the horizon was visible only as a change in the texture of the darkness rather than in its color, from matte to smooth.

  The cement observation deck, which looked like a huge tire placed horizontally on the tower 800 feet from its tip, had windows around its interior so viewers could look straight down the long, curving, lighted superstructure of the tower to the ground. Hence Harry's remark about having 1,465-foot-tall legs.

  "You're scared, aren't you?" he said now to Loretta McPhee. "Don't be scared. This damned thing will be here for another million years. It's sunk into the bedrock; it's a part of the earth itself. God, but that's impressive."

  "Yes," Loretta managed, her voice slight and quivering, "I am scared, Harry. Can we go back down to the restaurant?" The revolving restaurant, and the disco—Sparkles, the Sky-High Nightclub—were on the 1,150-foot level.

  "What for?" he asked.

  "Dessert," she answered. Actually, it was the farthest thing from her mind. At this height, the idea of a hot fudge sundae, an apple turnover, or raspberry cheesecake—her favorite—made her stomach feel as if it were on ball bearings and rolling crazily about.

  "Sure," Harry said. "We can do dessert." He patted his flat belly beneath his green silk shirt. "The old food bin's about set for some more input."

  Loretta burped.

  "Ah," he said, putting his arm around her chunky shoulders, "but not yours, I think, my dear. I think this altitude is a little dizzying."

  "I just don't have the faith that you have, Harry."

  "What faith is that?"

  "In other people. In the people who built this tower, I guess. You have to have unquestioning faith in them to comfortably stand up here. I just don't have it. I'm sorry. I know the tower's not going to fall—"

  "But your heart's not convinced, eh?"

  "Or my head. The deep insides of my head. Do you understand?"

  "Yes." He smiled, amused. "Harry Lamb understands just about everything, my dear."

  She burped again. "Thanks," she said. "Let's go back down now."

  "Sure," he said. And they did.

  ~ * ~

  Getting into Commerce Court West at this hour of the evening wasn't particularly difficult for Ryerson. The combination to the pushbutton-style lock that released the elevator was known to some 200 people, each of whom used the lock at least once or twice a week, when overtime demanded that they work late. So the set of five numbers was, almost literally, floating about in the air, like dust.

  The guard was watchful, of course. If Ryerson spent too long at the lock, then, naturally, he had no business in the building. Getting past the guard himself had been a piece of cake. A woman named Barbara Ebert worked at the building and had left it recently. Her perfume still lingered in the air. The guard couldn't get her out of his mind. He also couldn't get out of his mind the fact that she had been married recently. The guard had never met her husband, but his jealousy bordered on rage. It was that rage—a rage he fought very hard to keep in check—that Ryerson played on.

  "Can I help you, sir?" the guard had asked when Ryerson appeared.

  "Yes." A pause; he probed about in the man's mind, sensed the lust and anger there. "Barbara left some papers here. She asked me to pick them up."

  "And you are?"

  "Her husband."

  "Her husband?" Ryerson felt the man successfully fight his rage down, and sublimate his caution with it. "Oh. Of course." And the guard had let him through to the elevators, where Ryerson encountered the combination locks. He looked back. The guard was watching. Ryerson tried to probe his mind for the combination. The man's anger blocked him. He breathed one of his rare curses, "Damn!" and set to work on the lock.

  The numbers themselves came easily to him. They were 8, 9, 3, 0, 18. That was not, however, their correct order. This, he realized sinkingly, would be a matter of trial and error. He quickly pressed 0, then 9, 3, 8, and 18. Nothing. He tried 9, 3, 8, 0, 18. Still nothing. He knew this could take a long time. There were hundreds of possible sequences of those five numbers.

  "Trouble?" he heard the guard call.

  He glanced back. "No. No trouble." He paused. "Barbara gave me this combination—"

  "She's not supposed to do that," the guard said, and Ryerson realized that the man's caution was finally winning out over his jealousy.

  "Well, she did," Ryerson shrugged. "I'm sorry. But I forgot the sequence. Isn't it eight, nine, three—"

  "Three's first," the guard called. "Then eight, nine, eighteen, and zero."

  "Thanks," Ryerson called back, and pressed the numbers.

  Minutes later, he was on the fifty-sixth floor.

  ~ * ~

  Moving through the corridor where the body of Leonard Peters had fallen through the false ceiling was like moving through a stew. The air was thick not only with Leonard himself—with his fears and regrets and memories (he had worked alone in the building for years)—but also with images of Leonard's killer. And that was the nasty spice of the stew. It stank, made Ryerson's eyes smart, clogged his senses. Images came and went as if on a swiftly revolving wheel—buildings, women, hair, naked backs, the smell of sweat and the smell of tar, shouted curses like huge, dung-colored flies. There was another image, too. One that seemed at once a part of all the others but somehow removed, as well, as if it were a part of the man, the murderer, and a part of something else, too—Ryerson had no idea what. It was the image of people shouldering closer to him, people hunched over and shouldering closer to him in the darkness. It was an awful, stifling image, and it was many minutes before Ryerson realized that he was not moving in the corridor, that th
e whole psychic stew boiling up here had stopped him cold.

  Then, at once, the images ended. The wheel came to a halt, dissipated, and Ryerson found himself breathless, in shock. His psychic sense had overloaded and shut down.

  He crumbled to a sitting position against the wall. He had never before experienced such an overwhelming flood of psychic input. It made him fearful—Good Lord, such a creature as could leave behind that awful residue is loose in this city! He shuddered and felt very cold.

  ~ * ~

  Jason Granger, alone on the 1,465-foot level of the space-deck observation level of the CN Tower, his eyes on the rough blanket of darkness that stretched 125 miles in all directions, whispered, "This is very nice here." It makes a person feel so. . . insignificant, he thought, and wondered what appeal there was in being made to feel insignificant. He decided that it made his mistakes in life seem insignificant. In the great and grand scheme of things, it made him somehow blameless. It was nice to feel like that, especially after the way he had treated Laura and the kids. God but he'd have to do something about his temper. Lord knew what. What could he do about something like that? Something that was so controlling and, ironically, so out of control. Count to ten? That didn't work—he'd tried it. Professional help? Half of those guys were crazy as bedbugs themselves. And there was something. He wasn't crazy so much as . . . frustrated. He wasn't foaming at the mouth, wasn't running around on all fours and howling at the moon. He was frustrated. Life had dealt him a bad hand, and he had to play it.

  So it was really nice being up here where none of that shit mattered, where it all amounted to far less, even, than one of those specks of light below. That was com-forting. That made him feel good inside.

  He closed his eyes. He sensed the sheer bigness of everything around him: the tower, the land below, the sky. The emptiness of this place.

  He thought it would be nice to stay here forever.