‘Hello!’ said the driver, in a British accent. ‘You want to go and look at Monument Valley with me?’
It was the young woman she had seen on the set, still dressed in her cowgirl costume.
‘You’re Shandy, aren’t you,’ Teresa said, realizing that they had never been face to face before.
‘Yes. How do you know that?’
‘I’m Teresa Simons, and I’m glad to meet you.’
* * * SENSH * * *
‘Get in the car, Teresa. Let’s get to know each other. Hey, isn’t it hot? You want to loosen some of those clothes? Me, I’m just crazy about the heat. Phew!’ She pulled at the top of her shirt, and with the sound of ripping velcro she opened it all the way down. Her barely restrained breasts popped into sight. ‘Let’s go somewhere, and—’
‘Listen, this isn’t going to work, Shandy,’ Teresa said.
She looked ahead, and saw the road leading in a more or less straight line across the desert floor, the stunning, magnificent rocky buttes rising on each side.
‘Is this your first time?’
‘I got to go. I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve got a friend called Luke. He’d love to meet you.’
‘No, Shan. Maybe we can do this some other time.’
‘Whatever you want,’ Shandy said, pouting and looking straight ahead down the desert road.
‘Yeah, I got to go,’ said Teresa. She recalled the LIVER mnemonic.
* * *
You have been flying SENSH Y’ALL
* * *
* * *
Fantasys from the Old West
* * *
* * *
Copyroody everywhere—doan even THINK about it!!
* * *
She kept forgetting about that, but didn’t have the energy to kill the music. She heard it through, until at last it faded.
A young woman was sitting at one of the tables in the picnic area, with plastic cups and plates, scraps of food, and several toys spread all about. She was laughing, and her child was running around on the grass, wrapped up in his game.
Teresa was standing at the edge of the clearing, but she stepped back quickly behind a tree. Gerry Grove lurched into view, the gun in his hand. He raised it with a deliberate, wide swinging motion of his hand, then cocked it, working the mechanism three or four more times, relishing the sound.
The noise made the woman turn towards him. She saw the gun levelled at her, and panicked. She shouted in terror to her child, trying to twist round on the heavy log, to get across to the little boy, but she seemed paralysed by her fear. The boy, thinking it was still a game, dashed away from her. The woman’s voice became a hoarse roar, then, after she had sucked in her breath, she was incapable of further sound.
Teresa saw that Grove still didn’t know how to hold or aim a gun. He held it at arm’s length, pointing at the terrified woman, the weapon wavering slightly in his grasp.
This time, Teresa thought, I’m not going to show him how to do it properly.
Grove fired! The gun recoiled back in his hand, and Rosalind Williams screamed in terror. She ducked down, rushing across the clearing floor towards her child. Grove fired at her again. The gun bucked in his hand, this time apparently twisting his wrist. While Rosalind Williams scooped up her little boy in her arms, Grove held his gun-arm against his stomach and leaned over it in pain. Crouching low, holding her screaming boy at an awkward angle, Mrs Williams scrambled past him, heading for the road.
Grove tried firing again, but his gun arm was obviously hurting and the weapon did not discharge. He transferred it to his left hand, took hurried aim at Mrs Williams, fired again. Once more, the recoil made the gun jerk in his hand. The woman escaped through the trees, clutching her child.
Giddy with relief, Teresa breathed in deeply, letting it out with a sob. Grove heard the noise and turned towards her. She was not making any more effort to hide.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ he said.
She began to laugh; she felt the madness of relief rising in her, and she spluttered and coughed, doubling up.
‘I’ll fucking kill you, you stupid bitch!’ Grove shouted.
‘You couldn’t plug the side of a barn!’ she yelled at him, thinking of a moment, centuries before, on a shooting trip with her dad, him yelling at her when for once she missed the target. Hi, she had said to her dad as he passed her on his way out of the living quarters. The last word she ever spoke to him? Hi Dad, you got me into all this, you gun-happy old bastard. She wished she’d said more while she’d had the chance. She was getting hysterical.
‘Shut the fuck up!’ Grove screamed at her, and let off a wild shot with his left hand.
‘Don’t ever say that to me, you creep,’ she said, then recalled the LIVER mnemonic.
She was in a utility yard, in stifling heat, surrounded by cops. The tall side of the mall building loomed over them, casting little shade. One of the cops noticed her.
‘Stand back, ma’am!’ he said at once, raising his arms. ‘You’re in danger there! Please leave this area at once!’
‘FBI,’ Teresa said simply, and flicked her ID at him.
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ said the cop, evidently startled. ‘But we have an armed suspect in there, and—’
‘That’s OK. Get back under cover. Is Agent Simons here with you?’
‘You best speak with the Captain, ma’am.’
Teresa backed off quickly. She was trying to remember which way Andy had gone, after leaving the mall administrator. She hurried away, following the side of the building. Ahead of her, Andy let himself out of a small service door. He was carrying his gun. Before continuing he quickly cased all directions. He saw her at once, and raised his gun.
‘Andy!’ she shouted.
‘Tess! What in hell are you doing here?’
‘For God’s sake, Andy!’ She rushed towards him, wanting to hold him more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.
‘I’m on a case, Tess,’ he said, touching her arm with quick affection, but brushing her aside. ‘You want to hang around here for a while, and we’ll talk later?’
‘Andy, you’re in danger! Don’t go on with this!’
He looked sharply at her. He said, ‘Shit, how the devil you get down here to Texas?’
He strode on in sudden rage at her, heading back towards the utility yard.
Teresa said, ‘Andy, this isn’t your case. You’re just liaising with the police. Let them finish it. That’s their job.’
‘I’m on assignment. Wait here!’
He thrust her back and away from him, and stepped round the corner into the yard. At that moment, someone shouted through a bullhorn:
‘Freeze, Aronwitz! Throw down your weapon!’
Teresa darted round behind Andy, and collided with his back. He lurched slightly, and Aronwitz/Grove noticed the movement. He was standing on a slightly raised shelf of concrete, one of the outlet ducts where service trucks collected their loads. His gun hung loosely in his right hand. He saw the huge encirclement of armed police, crouching down, ready with their guns. Looking at Andy, he made a circling motion with his gun, a deliberate, wide swinging of the arm. He cocked the weapon, the click audible in every part of the yard.
Andy stood frozen. Teresa watched in terror as Grove levelled the gun at Andy, holding it one-handed at full extent.
He fired, and the gun bucked back in his hand. The bullet went past, missing Andy by several feet.
Grove died instantly in the explosion of police bullets that followed.
‘Tess, don’t you ever follow me on an assignment again. Why in hell did you do that? You know what we agreed. We never work together.’
‘Andy, you were going to die.’
‘No way! You saw how that hairball handled a gun. He was just a kid.’
‘Just a kid who’d killed a lot of people.’
‘He was no threat to me.’
Andy Andy Andy. How do I tell you? How will you ever know? What’s the p
oint?
She wanted to hold him, have him, roll him on the ground, but instead he was justifiably furious, this big angry man, humiliated by her presence, not knowing what he had missed, never ever going to know.
They got to his car and were about to drive off when Andy’s partner, Danny Schneider, turned up in the parking lot.
‘’Scuse me, I gotta work,’ Andy said grimly, and left the car to go over to talk with Danny. Danny, seeing her there, nodded politely to her. Andy stood with Danny a long time, over by the car, talking in the sun, pointing this way and that, a lot of nodding. Danny wrote something in his notebook.
Andy, I had to do this. Andy, how do I tell you? Fuck it, Andy! I saved your goddamn life!
But she loved to see him, loved his big old body and the way he held his funny head, resting a hand loosely against his side, sometimes making amusing gestures when he spoke. He and Danny had worked together for fifteen years, knew each other as well as any two straight men ever could. Andy and Teresa sometimes made jokes about Danny: he’d go and live with Danny and his wife, if Teresa ever left him.
Maybe he should do that now, Teresa thought, looking at the man she loved in the bleaching glare of the sun.
Andy Andy Andy…stop this. Come here!
In the end he did, and he climbed into the car and started the engine.
‘I’ll drop you off where you want to be,’ he said, not looking at her. ‘We’ll talk about this tomorrow. I’m going back to Abilene, and I’ll have to put in a report. Too many country cops saw what you did, and I’ve got a project to defend.’
‘Andy, don’t do this by the goddamn book. I saved your life.’
‘Hell, you didn’t.’
‘Hell, I did. That wacko was going to kill you.’
‘Get real, Tess.’
She laughed, a short sardonic noise. ‘Get real, you say!’
‘Yeah, we’ll do all this later. I got to get back to Abilene, right now. This mess isn’t over yet.’
‘No it isn’t.’
He swung the car round and drove off, squealing his tyres on the hot tarmac of the parking lot. The car bounced and bottomed out with a noisy underside scrape on the steep exit to the road, and as they headed down towards the freeway Teresa stared around, glorying in the endless detail of this boring Texas town: the supermarkets, the steak restaurants, the plazas, the multiplex movie houses, the office stationery warehouses, the malls, the car rental offices, the filling stations, the flower sellers at every main intersection, the shacklike houses, the bug exterminators, the hamburger joints, the thinning trees, the broken soil of plots cleared for development, the scrubby grassland, the unending road. Finally they hit Interstate 20 and joined the unknowing traffic, cruising sedately into the west, the sun beating down on them. They drove along through the unchanging scenery. Andy turned on the radio, and there was country music. All you can pick up around here, he said. He always said that when he was away from base. He liked country music, really. The first track finished; another segued in, a song about love and betrayal and men with guns; Andy muttered about country music all sounding alike, goddamn steel guitars, and switched to another station; Stevie Wonder came on with one of his old hits. Remembering a drive years ago, Andy and she when first in love, Philadelphia to Atlantic City, listening to Stevie singing in the night, Teresa reached across and gripped Andy’s hand, wanting to cry, wanting to hold him.
Andy pulled his hand away.
‘Where do you want me to drop you?’ he said brusquely.
‘Anywhere you like. I guess it doesn’t matter.’
‘You want me to leave you here? On the side of the highway?’
‘As good a place as any.’
‘Then what do you plan to do?’
Andy, you’re going with me. None of this is real. I can’t tell you that, and you’d never believe it, but we are at the edge, where reality ends. Where’s Abilene? You’re going to ask me that in a minute. We’ve been driving for half an hour, and those cars in front haven’t changed, or those behind, and Abilene is no nearer. We’ll never get there, because Abilene isn’t in the scenario. Not even bolted on by a computer geek. The road goes on and on, to the edge, to where it runs out of memory. We can’t go there, because at the edge there is nothing more.
He braked the car, still angry with her. It hauled over to the side of the road, swirling dust around them. The Stevie Wonder track died away; three quiet chords then silence. The rest of the traffic continued to sweep by on the interstate. There was no noise from the tyres or engines.
‘This the place you want to be?’ he said.
‘No, Andy.’
‘Then what? What do you want? Where do you want to be?’
Andy Andy Andy.
‘Finland,’ she said, and recalled the LIVER mnemonic.
She was naked, and Andy was on top of her. His strong hairy body touched and embraced her everywhere, leg sliding between hers, pressing gently into her cleft, caressing her with great weight and a wonderful deftness. His hand rested on her breast, and his fingers lovingly teased her nipple. His mouth lingered on hers, and their tongues played lightly against each other. She could smell his hair, his body. Stretched full-length they just about filled the row of three cushioned seats, but whenever they shifted position their elbows and hips and knees knocked roughly against the hard undersides of the arm-rests, which were raised erect to make this temporary couch.
As Andy slipped into her, pushing and thrusting, she craned back and started to turn, moving over so that Andy rolled to her side, facing her. She braced herself against the wall of the aircraft. The oval window was by her head, and she moved around, turning her face a little more with every thrust he made. Soon she could see through the strengthened glass, down towards the ground, where the trees and lakes were moving deliriously by. The great turbine engines roared, and the low evening sun glinted off the wing. The aircraft banked, turning to and fro, swooping low over the lakes, following the winding courses of rivers, its nose lifting to take them across the ridges of mountains, round and round, endlessly on, nothing but trees and water, green and silver, reflecting the light, soaring through the placid air, out to the extremes where all memory ends and life begins anew.
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST was hailed by John Fowles as “one of our most gifted writers.” He is the author of many novels and stories, including The Glamour and The Affirmation. His last novel, The Prestige, was honored with both the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Award. In addition to working on his next novel, The Gloss, he has also recently written the novelization for the new David Cronenberg film, eXistenZ. He lives in England with his wife, novelist Leigh Kennedy, and their twin children.
The Extremes Page 34