At The Edge

by David Dun

  It was midnight when she saw him coming down the path. He had been gone a long time. She unlocked the car, grateful for the company but nervous, not knowing what to expect.

  He got in the car, looking completely composed.

  "Well, I did it." He turned to her, looking so relaxed it seemed odd.

  "There is something I always wanted to tell her. But never did."

  "Do you want to tell me?"

  "I don't know." He sat silent for a time. "After we'd been married maybe three years, there were still other women I would think about. Of course everybody thinks about other people. But I just… you know… would think about the possibilities."

  "I understand."

  "And I knew there was this certain closeness that Tess and I never had. So one night in bed, I held her close and I formed this mental image. It was like a mental game and I had to concentrate very hard. I imagined a big beautiful casket with a clear glass top. It sat over a hole in the ground. Tess and I were in the casket together. They closed it. Standing around was everyone we knew, especially the women I thought about. It was hard to focus on those women, to see their faces, to look into their eyes as we were being lowered. But I concentrated and in my imagination I made their faces clear. And the crowd waved and the other women threw flowers. And then they all slowly disappeared. You with me so far?"

  "I'm with you."

  "This hole in the ground was like the Alice-in-Wonderland hole because it had no bottom. In my mind it came out in this Garden of Eden. And we were going there for the night. Just the two of us. So once I had watched everybody disappear, I began concentrating on Tess. My fingers were on her back, lightly, her body tight against mine. I'd say in my mind over and over, 'Just the two of us, just the two of us.' Every millimeter of my body was taken up with sensing her.

  "Now when this was going on in my head I never said a word; I only held her and let my fingers run over her back. The first time I did it, she cried, happy tears, and asked me what I was doing. I said: 'Does it feel different?' She said, 'It's the most wonderful thing I've ever felt. What were you thinking about?'

  "And I said, 'Just the two of us.' She said, "That's all?' I told her I was concentrating on a particular mental image. 'What's the image?' she asked.

  ''And I waited a minute. Then I said, 'If I tell you, maybe it won't work.' I didn't want to get into explaining about the other women. And the looking in their eyes and watching them disappear. Or maybe I thought it would sound too crazy. I think I thought if we talked about it, then it might not work. Anyway, I promised that I would tell her sometime. And it was our anniversary coming up. We had agreed that I would tell her. I'd done this little meditation quite a bit by then and it was as close to magic as I'll ever come. I know it sounds dumb.''

  "No, no. God no. It doesn't sound dumb at all. But you didn't tell her?"

  "I never had a chance. Our anniversary was the day she died. And on that day I knew I should go and pick up Nate. I knew it. It was my turn. And if I had…"

  "And you've been thinking about that."

  ''I lie in bed at night and try to get back that picture of me and her together in the glass-topped casket. Just me and her. But ever since the day she died, I can't. I can only think I should have gone to get Nate. And she would be alive."

  "I'm sure she knew even if she didn't understand. She knew that you were pushing the others out of your heart and leaving room only for her."

  "I can't get her back even in my head." His voice didn't crack until the last word. Then he wept the most profound sobs she had ever witnessed. "I can't get her back."

  Overwhelmed by his sorrow, she forgot who he was, who she was, the many expectations that imprisoned them both. She wrapped her arms around his head and held him.

  Back at the house they each took a sofa in the family room. After Maria had changed into her now-official nightwear for these sleep-overs, she returned to find him trying to put sheets on the couch.

  "A sleeping bag worked fine," she said.

  "Well, that was when we had a tent," he joked, looking at the lumpy sheets.

  "Here, I'll help you fold them back up and we can get the sleeping bags."

  As they were folding, she looked at him and smiled.

  "My face must look horrible."

  ''Just a little bruised. Probably doesn't look nearly as bad as it feels."

  "Forget calling the scientists. I want to go to L.A. tomorrow. We can take Nate. He can stay at my parents' with my mother while we're at the university. We should get out of here and take stock."

  "Your mother?" He looked shocked.

  "You have gotten the idea that my parents are dead. I called her from here the other night. My mother and I are best friends."

  "What about the log cabin, and the dishwater that froze before it hit the ground, and the cross-country skiing, and all of that?"

  "It's true. I lived in a cabin in the far north."

  "Where were your parents?"

  "Where they've always been. I went to Alaska after college. I got out of high school two years early and got my undergraduate degree in three years."

  ''Well, what are your parents like? What's your dad do?''

  "You're trying to place my family on the old socioeconomic ladder, huh?"

  "You a little touchy about it?"

  ''Actually, I am. What I tell you about myself stays strictly between you and me. Got it?'' She stepped toward him with the sheet and found her finger pointing at his nose.

  "I got it," he said.

  "My dad's a wealthy businessman. So now you know."

  Dan started chuckling. "Well, I'll be damned. And you had a falling-out?"

  ''It all started one day when we were watching a football game. We did that a lot, my daddy and me. I was just about to graduate from Stanford. He was taking an unusually long time pouring his drink. I remember he was wearing a golf shirt with a little polo emblem on it that I got him when I was shopping near school. Funny what you remember. Anyway, he turns around, looks at me, and says, 'I have the law school picked out.'

  "I said, 'I hope it's Yale because I think I'll get accepted.'

  " 'It's Boalt Hall. I don't want you all the way on the East Coast. If we're spending my money,' he said. Well, you know about my temper. And he had been a little overbearing in recent times and there was this edge between us. It felt like a situation that could explode. I looked at him and said, 'Did you say, "spending my money"?' And there were a few more words about money and control and I got up and walked out and packed my backpack. Skipped the graduation ceremony. And flew to Alaska. On my way out the door, I heard my mother talking to my father. It was the only time in my life I have ever heard her use a four-letter word."

  "What did she say?"

  "She said, 'This time, dear, I think you really fucked up.' I had friends in Alaska, a married couple, in Fairbanks."

  Fairbanks was twenty degrees below zero on the November night that Maria arrived. Fortunately, she had the presence of mind to shop in Anchorage and get outfitted with insulated boots, gloves, a parka, and heavy sweaters. Even with all the trappings, the cold still cut through her, made her bones ache, and pretty much pushed her indoors every moment she could get near heat. Standing only moments in the still night air, she took a cab to 2640 Lambert. It was a nice house, Sam Nehi was the manager of a wholesale petroleum outfit, the head of the local office, and Margi, his wife, was a homemaker. They welcomed Maria with open arms.

  Quickly she found a cabin and a job tending huskies for a man named Cotter, whose hobby was racing dog sleds. Her cabin was near the dogs, their yelping, their smell, their food, and their droppings. It was 22'xl4', all one room, no running water, a good woodstove, kerosene lanterns, an outhouse if you could stand it, a bucket if you couldn't.

  There was a sturdy pine table, four chairs, a small sofa, and a brass bed, with a mediocre mattress. Oddly, she found it satisfactory.

  Within two weeks she had enrolled in a correspondence law school.
In the mornings she tended the dogs, exercised them, groomed them, doctored them, and fed them. Afternoons and evenings she studied.

  Cotter was a good man, ran his own feed store, and was greatly amused at the sprightly, well-educated young woman who came out of nowhere to tend and eventually race his dogs. She could mush the dogs as well as any woman around and was better than most of the men.

  Cotter had two homes, one in town where he spent most nights, and one near Maria's cabin at Cotter Hollow. The reason for the town house was that it was not easy to get to Cotter Hollow and once you got there you found nothing but Cotter's compound. In winter, access was by snowmobile and cross-country ski. Unless she was hauling supplies, Maria preferred the skis. It was twenty minutes of hard work to get to the parking lot and the four-wheel-drive Cherokee she ultimately acquired out of her meager wages and some money that her mother required her to accept. Her father wasn't allowed to require anything.

  On all the holidays that Maria could get away for, she went home to visit. Barely speaking to her father, she maintained a rigorous chilly formality that thawed by fractions of a degree with each visit. Her mother was dismayed but stayed out of it.

  Just after Maria passed the California bar exam, days before she was due to leave Alaska for the offices of Patty McCafferty, something happened. During the almost three years that Maria lived at Cotter Hollow, she had come to know the Prestons. They lived in a beautiful and grand log house situated adjacent to the trailhead to Cotter Hollow, where Maria parked her car in one of Cotter's three garages. Maria, who had a natural affinity for kids, got to know Amy Preston on short winter visits over hot chocolate.

  Amy's father was a trapper who never ran a line or stretched a pelt. Her mother called herself Sarah Preston (although her native name was different and mostly unpronounceable) and was a successful weaver who made custom blankets that were really art.

  Maria arrived several times a week at the Preston home on her skis. In front of Cotter's nearby garage, she would remove her skis, load them onto her Jeep Cherokee and — with a heater efficient enough to raise the temperature slightly above freezing on a cold day — drive to Fairbanks with something less than a certain conviction that she would make it.

  Passing the Preston house day after day on her way to town, Maria became familiar with the place: when the lights came on in the morning and went off in the evening, that Thursday was garbage day, that Mr. Preston heated the engine blocks on the cars at about 6:00 on those mornings when he wasn't alcoholically incapacitated, that Mr. Preston usually shoveled snow on Saturdays when the inebriation exception didn't apply — and in that event he waited until Sunday.

  Eventually she got to know Mrs. Preston and her beautiful blankets, and the story of Mr. Preston before he became a morose drunk. One late evening, as she passed by the Pres-tons', she noticed the house dark except for a shimmering strange light in the windows. And she thought she heard a cry. Shuffling closer on her skis, she became certain of the sound and rushed to the front steps.

  There by the side of the steps, frozen solid in a dirty T-shirt, bottle still clenched in an icy hand, was Mr. Preston — stone dead. She threw off her skis and dashed to the heavy oak front door. It was locked. Through the window she saw that the dancing light was a roaring fire. Maria took a flying leap through the living-room window; protected by her thick parka, she landed on the inside floor unscathed.

  "Is anyone here?" she screamed.

  Amy appeared at the top of the stairs, shaking and screaming long screams, her hair wild and mussed, holding out her arms as if she wanted to be picked up. The stairway was an inferno. Unlocking the front door, Maria ran back outside, only to be chased by flames looking for oxygen. Hoping to contain the fire, she slammed the door. A ladder, a tree, she couldn't think. There was no way up. Over the front porch was a slanted roof, above that roof a window. There was no way to make it to the roof. "God help me," she muttered, desperate, the little girl's face filling her mind.

  Then she saw her semifaded red Cherokee. Running through the knee-deep snow on the walkway, she made it to the Jeep, jumped in, and drove for the front porch. Pushing the wheels up the steps, she drove until the front end of the vehicle was a foot from the front door. By climbing onto the top of the Jeep cab, she was able to pull herself atop the porch roof and dive through a window into the master bedroom.

  Flames were everywhere. Her parka caught fire and she yanked it off while staying flat on the floor. Crawling forward, she found the door, the hallway, the top of the stairs. Amy lay unconscious, the smoke thick and dirty. Maria hadn't bothered to breathe and was running out of air. Grabbing the little girl, she got out of the house by leaping from the second story into a snow bank. But not before a falling timber had caught her midriff and burned in a permanent six-inch scar across her belly.

  "I showed you mine," Dan said as she completed her story. They had bedded down on the two family-room couches that nearly converged in an L shape. His head was a couple feet from hers.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I spilled my guts; you should show me your scar so I can tell you it isn't a big deal."

  "I'm not showing you my scar."

  "You want to."

  "Go to sleep, Dan."

  They were in the bowels of a USC science lab in the section devoted to zoology. The large, somewhat haphazard work space lay under a maze of old pipes wrapped in something that looked like plaster-cast material. Evidently, the bat people weren't graced with the best digs. Dr. Michael Sanford welcomed them into his office and brought out the photos.

  "We'll start with the bat. There are about one hundred species of bats that we know of. Nearly one quarter of all mammal species worldwide are bats." His eyes glistened with enthusiasm. "Bats belong to the order Chiroptera. But they defy generalization because their dietary habits and habitats vary so widely. Now this fellow here looks like a hoary bat. Notice I said 'looks like.' He isn't quite. Coloring around the neck is a little different. I had to do quite a bit of comparing to figure that out. Almost classifies as a subspecies. It's always exciting to find something new." He sighed and took off his glasses. "I don't suppose you know where I could get a carcass?"

  "No," Dan said. "If you knew they were in a particular area, would you know how to find them?"

  "Oh yes. They live in trees, come out at night, and feed on insects. Any relative would be very interesting, especially if its behavior differed."

  "Do they ever come out during the day?"

  "Never. Unless you kick them out of the tree, but then they'll go immediately to another and roost again."

  ''Anything odd about this one other than this neck color?''

  ''Not that I can see. But there could be all kinds of things if we actually had a carcass."

  "What about the math? And these chemical equations?"

  "You know, these pages are electro-chemical equations on one side and quantum neural mechanics on the other. The chemistry and applied math seem completely unrelated. I showed this around to some chemistry professors and applied math men. The fellow who did this math in the photo is expert in artificial intelligence. The math guys got a kick out of it, wrote a sort of informal memo for me. Here it is," he said, handing it to Dan with a wink. "You can read it later, when you're having trouble falling asleep." Dan folded it up and put it in his pocket. "Enjoy," the professor said. "I hope it helps. It's written for a layman. Sort of. The gist of it is that this guy was doodling in quantum mathematics. The man who wrote this equation has a theory that quantum mathematics is the best model for describing intelligence or artificial intelligence if you were trying to replicate what a mammal does. The same math we use for describing the universe. In layman's terms we could say it's a richly descriptive language for that purpose. Whoever did this was interested in quantum neural dynamics, otherwise known as quantum consciousness. You want me to explain that?"

  "Yes, please."

  "Using Hilbert math or quantum math, we can better describe tho
ughts because a thought may be more than the sum of its parts. A thought is the sum total of a pattern of neural firing. In traditional math a thought could never be more than the sum of its parts. Not so with quantum neural mechanics. In that realm the sum of the parts could be much more than the whole. Hence, a thought. Or thoughts about a thought. Or, for a nonhuman mammal, an image associated with a feeling. You're furrowing your brow. Read the paper. It'll help. We can simplify for our discussion. Judging from what we see here, we can assume this fellow was very interested in solving some riddle about brains."

  "How could bats relate to all this?"

  "Any evidence of bats behaving strangely?"

  Maria and Dan looked at one another. "You say that bats never fly in the daytime. We observed one do just that."

  "So the person who wrote this equation may have been a specialist in mammalian neural networks. In the context of your situation, perhaps he was pondering bat behavior. He may have been a zoologist who knew a lot about neural networks and this was just some of his chicken scratch. Thinking on paper, so to speak. Contemplating odd bat behavior would be consistent with his training."

  "If he was a zoologist with a picture of this bat, he would have been interested in the new species aspect as well."

  "Anybody in that line of work would."

  ''If this is a bat that's merely like a hoary bat, is it possible that it flies around in the daylight?"

  "It would be the only known bat species that does that and it would be terribly fascinating."

  "So if the scientific community knew of a forest habitat where they could find a colony of these bats, what would happen?"

  "Army of zoologists, that's what. You don't know of such a forest, do you?"

  "No. We saw one bat flying in the daylight."

  "Where?"

  "You don't want to go there," Maria said.

  "Try me."

  "No way. Now what about the chemistry?"

  "I'll call my colleague. He's standing by in his office." While they waited, the professor told them all about bats, more than they expected to hear, and tried to wheedle information about the location of their bat sighting. They remained firm. About fifteen minutes later the chemistry professor showed up. He reminded Dan of Jack Nicholson without hair.