The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

  Driving had always helped her think, and all the decisions she remembered having taken were made in a car. Not all were the right decisions, of course, but they were none the less memorable for that.

  She and Andy had decided to get married, one day in a car going through the flat countryside of southern New Jersey while they were looking for a motel for the night. She had not only decided to apply to join the Bureau one day while driving, but had also decided to take leave of absence, again in a car, although that particular car had been parked in the drive outside her empty house in Woodbridge, where the windows were dark and the memories were uselessly and frustratingly of Andy alive and living there with her.

  Her eyes misted as she drove, while she remembered that day and the violent events which had led up to it. They had become the basis of everything, the rationale of all her actions, or so she had supposed. That dread feeling of blankness, spreading out and around her, swamping everything but replacing nothing.

  Life became a series of clichés, some of them mouthed by the people around her who loved her, many more of them forming unbidden in her own mind. Bereavement turned out to be beset with comforting formulae for the bereaved, no doubt springing from the shared unconscious mind, used by every generation that had preceded her and who had lost someone close to them. As much as anything else, it was trying to escape from these easy platitudes that had helped her conceive the idea of the trip. Bulverton, East Sussex, England, a town so appallingly twinned with Kingwood City that it became an irresistible lure.

  At that time the coincidence had beckoned her: she could not find what she needed at home, so maybe it would be there in the English seaside town few people in the US had ever heard of. The vagueness of this attraction made one part of her suspicious, but the pull it exerted on the other half was undeniable. It was not even the unfamiliar, alien quality of Bulverton, as she had imagined it before she got here, because Kingwood City had been just as much an unknown quantity for her before the massacre; if foreignness was the only characteristic pulling at her she might as well have been drawn to that soulless place on Interstate 20 near Abilene. It would have been easier for her to get to, and cheaper too, but Bulverton was where she knew she had to be.

  Now Bulverton’s vagueness had become a specific: it was just a dull, tired, unhappy seaside town, full of the wrong memories and with no conception of its future. The real Bulverton was undermining her resolve, making her think about Andy more than she wanted or needed. Being able to glimpse the losses some of the people had suffered did not help at all. She was not comforted by them, and the stark uselessness of everything that had happened, the pointless waste of lives, the tragic, unintelligent nihilism of the gunman, only underlined her personal tragedy.

  Worse, being here was driving her back to the gun. The ExEx scenarios pandered to that fascination.

  She could not stop thinking about Elsa Durdle. What she thought out loud, so to speak, was her reaction to the hyperreality of the shareware scenario: the wind, the heat, the lovely old car, the sense of an endless landscape. But deeper feelings, ones she had suppressed until now, were more visceral.

  She kept remembering the moment when she opened Elsa Durdle’s glove compartment, found the weapon and took it in her hand. The weight of it, the coldness, the feel of it there. For a few moments she had been reminded of how it felt to be driving to an imminent spree event, with no idea of how it would resolve, but with a loaded gun at her side.

  She drove past a sign that told her she was in Ashdown Forest, and on an impulse she turned into a narrow side road. It led windingly through open, well-wooded countryside. She drove more slowly. The Oasis record was beginning to intrude on her thoughts, so she flicked it off. She wound down the window, relishing the sweet smell of the woodland, the sound of the tyres on the road, the flow of cold air around her. She slowed the car to a crawl.

  Something kept changing her mind about what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go: she told herself it was the old familiar scents of a wet-floored English winter landscape, mild sunshine on grass and branches and pine needles, things rotting away, mould and fungus and moss.

  Teresa saw a cleared space for cars at the side of the road, so she stopped and switched off the ignition. She climbed out and stood for a few minutes on the grassy verge.

  Sometimes driving made her think even when she didn’t want to.

  She had been born into the world of guns: even before she was taken to the USA by her parents she was used to the sight and feel of weapons.

  Her father was obsessive about guns; there was no other word for it. He collected guns as other people collected old coins or books. He talked guns, cleaned guns, disassembled and reassembled guns, fired guns, carried guns, subscribed to gun magazines, sent off for gun catalogues, made friends only with those who shared his obsession with guns. There was at least one loaded gun in every room of the house; more than that, probably. There were two in her parents’ bedroom, both adapted with hair triggers, one on each side of the bed, ready for use the night the supposed intruder came. There were two more in the kitchen, one attached to the wall next to the door, in case someone tried to break in that way, one concealed in a drawer in case the intrusion came from somewhere else. (But who in their right mind would force an entry into a house where a gun fanatic lived?) There were even two loaded guns stored in a locked drawer in the closet of her own bedroom.

  Down in the basement there were more weapons than she had ever been able to count, many of them in pieces, while her dad slowly restored them or cleaned them or customized them in some way. He never went anywhere without a gun either in the car or carried on his belt or under his shirt, ready for use. He belonged to gun clubs and training squads, and four times a year went up into the mountains with a group of his friends, armed to the teeth.

  Teresa was target training by the age of ten, and was recognized as an above-average shot by the time she was eleven. Her dad enrolled her into the junior section of his club, made her show what she could do, entered her for every competition. She won and won; shooting came naturally to her. At fourteen she could out-shoot her older cousins, most of the men at the training camps she went to during the summer vacations, and even her father. It was the thing she did of which he was the proudest.

  Her accuracy with a weapon thrilled her. She recognized as natural the weight of the weapon in her hand, the way it balanced there, and the jolt of adrenaline that flowed when the recoil kicked at her arm and shoulder, and because these were exciting to her, the condition of gun ownership and use was integral to her personality and identity. Every time she pulled the trigger she felt total power, fulfilment, certainty.

  Standing there by the side of the woodland road, thinking of guns, feeling gorged with her family memories, Teresa was tempted for the first time since her arrival in England to pack her bags and go home. She had friends in Woodbridge, a career in the Bureau, a house, the remains of a life, a certain place in a culture she understood. England was full of mysteries she didn’t want to have to deal with right now. She had made the trip in an attempt to move forward, away from her old itinerant father-dominated past, yet immersion in the quiet sorrows of Bulverton was stirring up too many memories of what she had wanted to leave.

  She knew if Andy could have been there with her he would have gone into one of his sessions of criticizing her—their marriage, though happy overall, had had its tensions—and brought up a dozen similar incidents when she had dithered helplessly about which direction she should take. She deserved it, because making her mind up had always been hard.

  She kicked loose pebbles against the wheel of the car, and she thought, This is silly. Why do guns still exert their fascination?

  Her love of guns, the hold they had over her, had reversed in the instant she received the news of Andy’s death. It was as if she had suddenly been able to see her life from a different direction: her life was the same, but her view changed. From right to left, from looking down to looki
ng up, whatever it was.

  That skill she had with guns, the facility, the deadly accuracy, suddenly became a curse to her. In her hand was the object that ultimately had killed the person she loved most in all the world.

  She hated the way her father’s personality had changed when his gun friends were around, or when he was practising with his weapons: it was as if he grew several inches in all directions, taller, broader, rounder, thicker. His voice was louder, he moved with more energy. His physical stance became threatening or confrontational, became that of someone who could only cope with the complexities of the world by putting out a challenge to it. And she had hated the way her own skill converted to the dark side: a deadly efficiency, the side of her that gave pain, the unyielding side of her.

  Also in the long moment of the news of Andy’s dying she had thought, for the first time in many years, about Megan.

  That shocking instant of childhood had been effectively camouflaged over the years. It was so long ago she could barely remember it, and whenever she did try to remember it she could not find the truth. She had never really disentangled what had actually happened from the lies and evasions her parents told her.

  They said she had dreamed the whole thing; Megan was an imaginary friend; all little girls had imaginary friends. But surely she had been born a twin? said Teresa, prodding for the truth, knowing this at least was so. Yes, there had been a twin sister; yes, and her name was Megan. But Megan had died at birth, so frail, so small, such a tragedy. You wouldn’t remember Megan, they said. What she thought she remembered was untrue, unreliable.

  If it had happened the way she remembered, and not the way they told it, how could they have covered up such a death? A small child, killed by gunshot? Even if they had found a way, why had they done so? It was surely an accident? But they never admitted anything. What Teresa remembered as a shattering mirror-image of herself, a dying friend, a gun whose recoil had twisted her arm so painfully it had hurt on and off for more than a year, was changed by them into a tragic delusion, a persisting error.

  Then decades later Andy died, and in her moment of penetrating grief and understanding, Teresa had known at last what must be the truth about Megan’s death.

  Her father’s house was full of guns, in every room in any place they lived. The guns were always loaded, always ready for this chimera of expert self-defence. She, like any other child, explored and tested, and did what she was told she must not do. The greater the warnings of danger, the more attractive were the temptations of ignoring them.

  From this, the greater truth: the more there were people who owned guns, who made themselves expert with guns, who prepared to defend themselves with guns, who went on hunting trips with guns, who mouthed slogans about freedom and rights being dependent on guns, the more those guns were likely to be abused and to fall into the wrong hands.

  Just once, that time when she was seven, her little hands had been the wrong ones.

  So, finally, Andy was dead, and that had been hard enough, but it was not entirely unexpected. The risks went with the FBI territory.

  She grieved, she mourned, she was prescribed medication, she took a vacation to see friends in Oregon, she joined self-help groups, she underwent counselling. She was a widow, but life eventually began to cohere once more around her. What she was unready for, though, was the other consequence of Andy’s death: the profound reversal of her trust in guns.

  All her life until this point seemed to be a deceit. Everything she had grown up with, and all the work and training she had done as an adult, she now turned against.

  During this period a word, a name, a place, kept circling somewhere on the fringe of her awareness. Bulverton, England.

  What did it mean? Andy’s death had swamped everything, and for weeks she had stayed away from newspapers and TV news. For a day or two she herself had been the news. Media celebrity distracts, no matter what the reason. Even so, the name of Bulverton crept into her consciousness, and although from the start she had known on some buried, unarticulated level what the link was, what the coincidence was, she could not take it in.

  Denial, her bereavement counsellor told her. You are blocking everything to do with your husband’s death.

  Even this puzzled her: how was Bulverton linked with Andy’s death? What am I supposed to be denying? What is being assumed that I am unaware of?

  Finally, the grief and confusion lifted sufficiently for her to be able to think for herself once more, and soon afterwards she began to ask her colleagues, she looked up Bulverton on the web, she searched the newspaper files for the story.

  There the coincidence was laid before her: Bulverton, Kingwood City. Two massacres by outburst gunmen. Same day of the year, same time of the day.

  The parallels were not exact: twenty-three people died in Bulverton, only fifteen in Kingwood City. (Fifteen? Is that not enough, when one of them was Andy?) The general circumstances were different: Aronwitz was obsessed with God, while Grove was apparently not. (But Aronwitz’s spree began in a church and ended in a shopping mall; Grove’s began when he stole a car from outside a shop and ended inside a church.)

  Fifty-eight other people were wounded in Kingwood City, and fifty-eight were wounded in Bulverton. The same number of law-enforcement officers were killed or injured in both places. The guns carried and used by the killers were the same make, although different models. The same number of cars were damaged, or so it was said; did they count and include the two police units that accidentally scraped bumpers on the way to North Cross mall? And more coincidences: someone with the surname Perkins was killed in both places; someone with the given name Francesca was killed in both places; both gunmen had previous convictions for robbery, but not for firearm abuse.

  Coincidences make good headlines for newspapers, they feed the suspicious minds of conspiracy theorists, they open up debates for philosophers about time, perception, consciousness and reality. But to most ordinary people they are only remarked upon, thought about or discussed briefly, then forgotten.

  There were superficial coincidences between the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. Were they significant? How could they be, except on some cosmic or metaphysical level of no concern to most people?

  In a more general arena, criminal lawyers are aware of the surprising coincidences that crop up regularly in even the most straightforward of cases: the two men destined to collaborate in a major crime who come together only by chance; the killer and his victim whose lives are almost exact parallels until the day they meet; the innocent bystanders and the guilty perpetrators who happen to look amazingly alike. None of these coincidences, nor hundreds of others like them, is significant in any way.

  They signify only that coincidences occur all the time in ordinary life, but only when one’s attention is focused by something like a crime do they become apparent.

  How could the series of coincidences between Kingwood City and Bulverton be explained away, or disregarded, once everyone had remarked upon them? To Teresa, they seemed to have been placed for her to find.

  As the immediate loss of Andy began to recede, the need to make sense of what had happened became increasingly important.

  The trail ultimately led to here, and to now, to this levelled space by the side of a minor road, the winter-shorn trees of Ashdown Forest around her, the lightly drifting rain, the traffic rushing by in a flurry of tyre noise and road spray.

  Teresa breathed the air, relished the chill dampness of the woods, and spread her hands on the highly polished paintwork of the car, feeling the standing droplets of rain running out from beneath her fingers.

  It was impossible to accept the metaphysics of coincidence in an ordered universe, because only by believing that the emergence of killers like Aronwitz and Grove were random events could you ever come to terms with what they had done.

  You could only accept their murders by believing in the harmony of chance, believing that the tragedies they inflicted were so to speak unique,
unlikely to be repeated.

  To think they were part of some pattern that could be understood and interpreted, and therefore predicted, made reality less real.

  Yet that was what Andy had been trying to show, before Aronwitz ended everything for him. Andy ultimately believed in predestiny, even if he had not put it that way himself; she had to overturn that belief to be able to get through the rest of her life.

  CHAPTER 20

  She arrived in San Diego on a blisteringly hot day, a sea wind bending the palm trees, making the dust fly at the street intersections, puffing the canopies of shops and swinging the overhead traffic signals precariously. Shiny, rounded cars moved in a leisurely fashion through the streets. A DC3 of Pan American circled overhead, moving down towards the airfield; the brilliant sunshine glinted off the unpainted wings and engine cowlings.

  She had a key in her hand, and she was hurrying towards a row of cars parked diagonally against the sidewalk. She was out of breath, and her back and legs were hurting. She reeled mentally, perhaps physically too, at the impact of the sensory overload from the collectively remembered scenario. She was too hot, the wind took her breath away, something in the air flew into her eye. She wanted to maintain her own individuality, her own reactions, and turned back quickly enough to see one of the buildings beside her flicker into solidity as her vision persisted in that direction.

  She was moving towards a silver-and-blue Chevrolet station wagon, but again she resisted and went instead to the green Ford saloon parked alongside. The driver’s door was locked, and the key she was holding would not even slide in. She gave up and went to the Chevrolet instead. The door of this was unlocked, and after she had slid on to the bench seat, comfortably spreading her large body, she got the key into the ignition at the first try.

  A few moments later she was driving north along 30th Street, and at the intersection with University she took a right. Shortly afterwards she came to the large intersection with Wabash Boulevard, and here she took a left, driving on to the highway and accelerating to keep up with the rest of the traffic. The sun was shafting in through the driver’s window, making her arm and face tingle. She wound up the window, and pulled the visor over to help shade herself.