The Man Who Would Not Die

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The Man Who Would Not Die Page 21

by Thomas Page

The door slammed shut behind Daniel Forrester and Hadley.

  Katsy was what he had called her, thinking it a clever pun on her name and her fondness for cats.

  “He’s the one, isn’t he?”

  Dumbfounded, Kate said, “George?”

  “Yes, It’s me, Katsy.”

  “I thought . . . I heard . . . George, it really is you.”

  Hadley had not aged a second. His face was smooth, his hair cut short as it had been nearly twenty years ago. In fact, he wore the same old tweedy sportcoat and penny loafers that were popular then. There was not a line or wrinkle on his features, not a single strand of hair was missing, even his tortoise-shell glasses were the same. Hadley was a man preserved in amber.

  Kate’s stupefaction transmuted into delight. “Daniel, how on earth did the two of you meet?”

  “I know lots of people, Kate. We both do.”

  “Never mind. George, I’m glad to see you.”

  Hadley’s voice was so soft and low she had to concentrate to hear him. “I’m glad to see you, too, Katsy. You look well.”

  “How’re your parents?”

  “They’re fine, Katsy, thanks. I see them occasionally.”

  Kate broke out the bottle of wine from the refrigerator. She poured three glasses and drank half of hers at one swallow. To save her life, she couldn’t tell if she were ecstatically happy or confused.

  “Here’s to us,” she said, raising her half-empty glass.

  Daniel Forrester picked up his glass and drank from it. He was seated on the rattan chair, Hadley on the sofa. After some hesitation and an encouraging look from Forrester, George Hadley drank some of his, too. Finally he smiled, very hesitantly, very shyly, very guardedly, but at least it was a smile. Kate felt her memories rush back from the days when she and Hadley had grappled in the car seat. She knew he was thinking about that, too.

  “Katsy,” he said tenderly in that unnervingly low voice. “We almost got married. Remember that, Katsy?”

  “Yes,” she laughed. To Forrester she explained, “Puppy love and all that garbage. It’s awful. We were actually going to elope over the weekend.”

  Daniel Forrester smiled at her. “We love you, Kate.”

  “George, you missed a real trip down memory lane. There was a college reunion a couple of nights ago.”

  “I know, I saw you there.”

  Feeling a little boozy, Kate topped off her wine glass. There was some kind of mist in the apartment, something that made the two men shimmer a bit. She wiped her eyes. She was hitting the burgundy a little too hard, and her reactions were slow. “You weren’t there, George. I’d have seen you.” She remembered the yearbook was still lying on the bedroom table. “Wait here,” she said, walking into the bedroom. Her legs were unsteady and her eyes were blurring a bit. She returned with the book opened to the picture of her and Hadley at the homecoming parade. Again she refilled her glass.

  Together she and Hadley went through the book and they agreed those were good times; the best he ever had in his life, Hadley averred. All his times with Katsy were great. He hardly stirred on the sofa, his magnified eyes and soft features glowing with pleasure. Kate pigged out on inebriated nostalgia.

  “Didn’t you get married?” she asked Hadley, and he replied self-consciously that he was briefly married, but not anymore.

  And were there any children? “No.” Hadley replied with a sharp twinge of sadness. “No children, we wanted children, but we didn’t have a chance.”

  “Isn’t that something,” Kate laughed. “When you and I were going to get married, we agreed this was no world to bring children into, and besides we just weren’t cut out to be parents. Diapers and baby shit and all that.”

  Hadley replied sharply “We were wrong, Katsy,” and for a second his round face took on a fierce intensity that cut through her fog. Well, never mind, said Kate, she was a little old now for that kind of thing, anyhow.

  And what did Hadley do these days, did he work anywhere? “Oh, I get around,” Hadley evasively replied. “Here and there.” And was he happy? Thinking that over, Hadley replied, “I never looked at it in those terms. I had no complaints, there are some things I wish I’d done with my life . . . things change even for us, don’t they?” He addressed Forrester, who still sat in the rattan chair, wine glass in hand, beaming avuncularly at the two of them, like a pleased matchmaker watching something wonderful blossom.

  Daniel Forrester nodded in vigorous agreement. “There’s a logic to everything. I never realized that, couldn’t put it into words . . .” And Hadley asked abruptly if Kate were happy. He hoped so, he truly hoped she was okay, he’d always been quite fond of her.

  “A certain logic to what, Daniel?” Kate interrupted, trying to hold onto one thread of conversation at a time. It amazed Kate how Forrester seemed to grow in size everytime she saw him. He dwarfed the chair he sat upon and to her bleary, buzzy eyes he seemed to brush the ceiling with his head. Except for that weirdly pulsating smile he was more like the old Daniel than he had been yet, back from the edge, happy to make her happy.

  “To feelings, Kate,” he replied grandly. “To you, to me, to Hadley. Feelings are everything . . .”

  Kate tried to think up an appropriate response, when she realized her phone was ringing. Both men looked fearfully at it. Hadley was actually on his feet and standing in the kitchenette; she did not realize he had gotten up, much less made it so fast to the other side of the room. “Excuse me,” she said.

  It was Steve, still high from being alone in the darkroom with her, reminding her of his presence. “Kate? Hi, what’s wrong with the phone?”

  “Just a bad connection. I’ve got company, Steve.”

  “I can guess who, can’t I?”

  “You hit it on the head.” My, my, her lovers were swarming out of the woodwork tonight. “Where are you now, Steve?”

  At the mention of Steve’s name, Daniel Forrester’s face curled from beaming satisfaction to absolute fury. His teeth set and his eyes became sharp, demonic slits.

  Steve answered, “Oh, I’m home. Diane’s coming up a little later. Thought I’d invite you over for chips, beer, and lieder.”

  “Thanks anyway, call me tomorrow, will you?”

  “Oh, sure, let me know how everything goes.”

  As she sat down, Forrester growled, “Where is he?”

  “He’s home,” she answered, pouring out more wine. Now where did Hadley get to? She spotted him close to the door. “George, where are you going? What are you doing over there?”

  “We have to be going,” said Hadley. “Me and Mr. Forrester.”

  “The night’s still young. And Mr. Forrester is a jealous man. Apparently I’m not allowed to speak to my own husband. I wish Mr. Forrester would grow up. Sit down, George.”

  “I think I’d better get Mr. Forrester out of here.” Now Hadley was standing beside her in the lamplight, which washed over his pale, near-translucent skin. Little remains of adolescent acne were on his cheek just as they had been when he graduated. Christ, he is pushing forty, he’s too old to get pimples, Kate thought.

  She drank her wine as Hadley walked over to the chair where Forrester steamed like a bottled-up volcano. Kate muttered, “Love makes the world go round.” Watching them, she thought, oh, goody, they were going to fight over her. Why in hell did these men behave like such infants? She hoped they wouldn’t tear the place to pieces and get her evicted.

  She spilled wine on the coffee table. “Great. It’s maple, too, red wine on wood, very classy, very antique.”

  As she rose to go back to the kitchenette, Forrester also climbed to his feet to follow her. Hadley intercepted him, while Kate peeled some paper towels from the rack. All this she did not see clearly. Her mind was stuck on removing that wine stain. She wondered if salt would also damage the wooden finish.

  Hadley said,
“Take care of yourself, Katsy. I’ll see you soon.”

  Daniel Forrester growled, “Get away from me, Hadley.”

  From the kitchenette, Kate said, “You know George, the thing that’s so nice about this evening is, everybody thought you were dead. Now there’s the classic example of a rumor for you. Some little remark made years ago sets things snowballing . . .”

  A concatenation of cold blue light, as thick, solid, and palpable as lightning, sent a blast of frigid wind hurtling through the apartment, exploding every unattached object into the air. Pictures, chairs, cups and saucers, the papers on her desk, all clattered and tumbled across the rug. The sliding windows blew out into glittering razored fragments that tumbled down the side of the building.

  When Kate’s senses stabilized, she found herself lying on the kitchenette floor, listening to Mr. Fudd shrieking behind the bathroom door. She figured a gas line blew. The apartment could be filling with poisoned air. She climbed to her feet and looked around.

  The apartment was neat and undamaged, no debris, no cracked walls or broken windows. The papers were stacked neatly, the windows tightly shut, and the dishes and furniture undamaged. All that was missing were Hadley and Forrester.

  For an appalling second Kate thought they must be lying broken and shredded with glass outside on the pavement. But they weren’t blown out the window, the window was shut and intact. In fact, it was impossible to see how there could have been an explosion at all.

  Someone was pounding on the door. Kate staggered over and opened it. Half the residents of the floor were crowded round. The girl who babysat her cat gasped, “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. What was it?”

  “You’re asking me? I thought it came from here, it nearly blew my door in.”

  Kate let them inside. They looked over the pristine place and shrugged. A man said, “It must have been the wiring in the walls or something. I swear I heard glass falling down the building.” The girl asked Kate, “Did you see anything?”

  “I saw a light,” Kate admitted. “But it must have happened outside, it knocked me down.”

  This was turning into a genuine kaffeeklatsch. Men and women in robes, pajamas, T-shirts, and underwear were opening doors up and down the hall. Kate overheard snatches of conversation. “It felt like an earthquake . . .” “I saw the light, it came from outside . . .” “. . . gas main, I’d swear it.” A check of the floor revealed no smoke, scorches, wreckage or damage of any kind. Just another strange event in Southern California.

  After everybody mumbled back into their apartments, Kate made herself an icepack, gulped down two vitamin pills and three glasses of water, then stretched out on her sofa. Mr. Fudd stalked the room, his hackles up, his mood distinctly unaffectionate.

  “Fudd, let’s get straight now. There was an explosion, everybody heard it. It happened right in this room, next to the TV table.” The last thing she saw while pulling down paper towels was Hadley walking up to Forrester, hand raised . . . and Forrester had both his hands up as if he didn’t want to be touched. Then there was a very peculiar blast, a thick, columnar burst of flame from both men that blew the apartment to kingdom come, knocking her to the floor . . .

  The blast came from the men when they touched. Yet everything was exactly the same as it had been before they arrived.

  Kate sat up with a jab of phobic fear, the kind of instinctive revulsion that is triggered by a snake being dangled before one’s face.

  She looked at the coffee table. Upon it rested three glasses of wine. Two were untouched, Hadley’s and Forrester’s. Only hers had been drunk.

  Kate picked up Hadley’s glass and examined the stem. Not a trace of a smudge from his fingers was on it, nor were there any traces of prints on Forrester’s glass. She sniffed them. Then she set them back down.

  She remembered both had drunk at least half of the wine.

  She gathered up Fudd and carried him into the bedroom. She lay fully dressed on top of her bed, stroking and calming the cat on her chest. It was only nine-thirty. Think, Kate, think.

  What was Daniel Forrester doing in that goddamned house?

  At nine-thirty Jordan looked a lot more chipper than Dutton did at noon. Bondine and his men were still in the physics lab when they came in. Bondine was smiling, with a fresh cigar in his mouth and a half-finished plate of cottage cheese on the table. He said, “We’ve been working like hell and we’ve done everything you asked us to do, and I can’t figure out if it’ll work or not.”

  Jordan said to Dutton, “I can’t either. Lawrence my boy, I have decided—along with Jones, I hope—that the name of the game is wave interference.”

  Dutton took a chair by the oscilloscope and lit a cigarette that added considerably to Bondine’s cigar fog. “That sounds fine with me.”

  “Fourier was a chap who devised a type of calculus which would turn patterns into sine waves on an oscilloscope,” said Bondine. “The calculus is used to prove that the human brain is a frequency analyzer that transforms stimuli of the senses into sine waves inside the brain which then cries ‘house’ or ‘Chopin music’ or whatever else wiggles its way from the world into your head. In short, our eyes and ears break stimuli down into electrical frequencies. All right, so far?”

  “So far,” Dutton answered.

  “Now for the blip. Your lunatic was gambling that another little branch of physics was correct—namely that the universe itself consists of waves. All reality, all we touch, see, and feel is ultimately a collection of waves that collide with each other to form what we call matter. Normally, the human brain picks up some of these waves through certain sense organs and thus perceives reality. But this little blip went directly past Jones’s senses and hit the dream center of his brain. Show him what happened, Bondine.”

  Bondine had transferred Jones’s brain waves to a new cartridge which was attached to the oscilloscope. On the opposite side he had wired the oscillator housing with the antenna sticking straight up. The whole thing looked like a portable television complete with antenna. “The way your buddy designed these things is kind of like a modular system. We didn’t tear anything up, we just put it together the way he designed it.” Bondine switched on the oscilloscope screen, then pulled another switch to send the cartridge tape in motion. The green screen jumped and writhed with Jones’s brain waves again.

  Bondine said, “Let’s assume you’re carrying the oscilloscope around with you. The thing is on. In the event a contact similar to the one Jones discovered comes anywhere near you . . . presto.” Bondine switched on the blip tapes.

  Dutton watched the blizzard on the screen suck lengthwise into a hard, burning horizontal line whose center contracted upwards into a conical shape like an inch-worm. Dutton’s trigonometry was years old but he knew a sine wave when he saw one.

  Jordan mused. “Fun with numbers, you might think. A bunch of eggheads playing checkers. But that little line, Lawrence, is as close to true reality as a human will ever get. In physics there’s long been a theory that matter itself and the human brain both vibrate to the sine wave. That blip is no bigger than a unit of magnetism or a quark but it set off a very powerful reaction inside Jones’s brain.”

  Powerful indeed, Dutton thought. A six-foot man who could pick up a Stendhal Homes Life Support System and dump it on his head, who could walk into a party and badger an old man to death. A molecule, an atom, a tiny piece of creation itself who walked and talked, who smiled and raged and exercised all the volition a human did. Here was Daniel Forrester as seen by Jones’s cortical cells, broken up, reassembled, and stretched into a line on an oscilloscope.

  Jordan said, “It’s an anomaly, Lawrence, and it’s been around a long time. Heraclitus said the true state of matter is fire. Constant motion, constant tension, constant collision of elements. That’s not bad for a man who never heard of wave mechanics. The whole universe, all that we see—sta
rs, planets, chairs, nude centerfolds, trees—is colliding waves that interact to form matter. Some we perceive with our senses. Some we don’t and we have to devise whole sciences and complicated instruments like this oscilloscope to get at them.”

  Dutton remembered that Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty stated that the exact makeup of the cosmos was as unknowable as the face of God. So much for Gareth Jones’s mighty achievement. He only got half of Daniel Forrester on tape, the half that went off in his own brain. The other half? The other particle or wave or soul? No one could say. Dutton sighed. “For a minute there I thought Jones was really onto something. But we’re right back where we started from.”

  Jordan said, “He was in the right place at the right time. That takes brains. A door opens, one enters dark tunnels with all kinds of fancy equipment and ideas only to end up going in circles that bring you back to the same door. Don’t put him down too much.”

  Bondine had been busying himself with the oscilloscope. Out of courtesy he had not wanted to intrude on their conversation, but finally his curiosity got the better of him. “I don’t suppose either of you know what made this contact, do you?”

  “A goblin,” answered Jordan standing up. “A white rabbit with a watch in his pocket.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “Thanks for your help,” said Dutton.

  “My pleasure. This is a neat little gadget. I love neat little gadgets, nothing like a neutrino to make your day.” Bondine handed Dutton the oscilloscope. “Don’t drop it,” he warned.

  Outside, the night air had cooled down to dampness. Jordan laid a hand on Dutton’s sleeve. “Lawrence. Will I be seeing you again soon?”

  “I hope so. Sir, do you believe this machine will pick up a real ghost?”

  “Why not? It’s a complicated world, that’s a complicated machine. Not many physicists subscribe to the belief that the universe works completely by chance.”

  “I know. God didn’t play dice with the universe. A wise-ass engineer once said the same thing to me. He called it justice.”

 

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