* * * * *
The earliness of the day still felt unreal. When my eyelids were telling me it that had to be at least two in the afternoon, it was still only eleven in the morning. When my restless legs suspected a sunset, it was hardly three o’clock—and still over 250 miles to Chicago.
The tiny car seemed to grow smaller and more cramped by the hour, a speeding purple time capsule with no means of communication to its only destination. I called Jesse frequently to leave messages, knowing he wouldn't answer, and grew more and more anxious with every mile. Jackson dozed, off and on. Corin theorized out loud. I worried. Ghi fidgeted. And all of us talked.
Corin talked about traveling, overseeing the projects his father had financed, detailed long stays in places like Papua New Guinea, Laos, Tibet, Johannesburg, and Bengal—just one marvelous feat after another. Listening to him was like listening to a James Bond audio book, complete with the accent. He’d gone to the same prep school as Prince William, claimed two masters degrees, dated a duchess-to-be, swam the English Channel, and surfed five continents. He'd been treed by an Alaskan grizzly, broken a femur halfway up Mt. Everest, and had assisted the successful emergency landing of the rescue helicopter. With a fractured femur.
Which stumped me even more as to why he drove like a one-eyed centurion, but I digress.
When Jackson took the wheel somewhere in Ohio, Corin spent about an hour answering all the emails that had accumulated on his Sabre, canceling appointments and penning apologies. When he was done, he was done. I guess if you own just about everything, you can disappear anytime you like.
As for Ghi, no one could think of a disaster-proof way to account for his sudden disappearance, so it was decided that he should contact no one at all. That was a debate I stayed out of. I didn't know how long they all planned to be absent from their normal lives, and I didn't ask. I just knew that Ghi likely represented a national threat by that time, and that he was traveling in a car that was rented under my name. Which meant I was potentially harboring a terrorist—not something I wanted on my résumé.
Jackson didn't make any calls, either. He told us about the incident with Khan, and about wrecking the fire truck. He'd told everyone back home that he was visiting a friend in Maine, just taking a little vacation to clear his head after both ordeals, and no one had questioned him. Which was good, since he didn't actually know anyone in Maine.
"They don't worry about me. We're not the worrying kind, not where I'm from. And by the way, I haven't always lived at home, you know," he said, jabbing a mustard-flecked finger over at me. "I went to college on a football scholarship. Was gonna aim for the pros, study engineering in case that didn't work out. But I tore a knee ligament my freshman year and that was that."
He went on to describe his family's beef range in the Ozarks. How he was content just to help them with the farm and volunteer at the fire house a few days a week. His saintly parents and their twelve children.
"Wait," I said. "Twelve? Counting you?"
Jackson confirmed this with a proud nod, then snapped his fingers. "No, no—thirteen. Bill. Goddamn, I always forget Bill ...."
Thirteen kids? I bit into a sandwich—my third—with renewed respect for its maker. Popped out thirteen kids. "Is your family Catholic? Mormon?"
"Nope. Just big." Jackson winked. "Kids are cheap labor."
"I'm guessing you don't all go by Jackson," Corin mused. His phone beeped and he plucked it up involuntarily.
Jackson shook his head. "Yeah, Whitney was Mom's idea of a handsome name. Some soap opera star or something."
Ghi nodded mystically. "Whitney Garret. Passion Seasons."
A mildly uncomfortable silence followed, of which Ghi was wholly unaware. Jackson continued without comment.
"Eh, I forgive her. I'm her favorite, after all," he said, thumbing his shirt collar. "I'm the only one who came out looking like her. The rest all look more like my dad."
Corin didn't look up from prodding his phone as he spoke. "Well, that makes sense. He’s not technically your father."
That presumption shocked me, especially since it came from Corin, who was in all ways the opposite of presumptuous. I braced for outrage on Jackson's part, but if anything he looked vaguely thrilled. His jaw dropped with a kind of gratified awe.
"Hey, I forgot about that part," he said, tapping the wheel. "Well that's weird to think about ...."
"What part? What's weird?" I demanded, sitting forward. Before either of them answered, my memory answered for me. In the voice of Jesse Cannon, reciting from his ancient dream: Men, born of woman’s flesh but constructed of the divine forces ....
My spine prickled. I felt like a stranger to myself even saying the words. "Immaculate conception?"
"More or less." Jackson grinned, then spoke over his shoulder. "Mind handing another Gatorade up here?"
"It sure makes a lot of sense in my case." Corin pulled a bottle of fluorescent orange liquid out of the duffel bag. He thoughtfully unscrewed the top before handing it up to Jackson. "My parents tried for years to have kids, never could, and then I came along. My mother was fifty-four."
I tried to wrap my head around the physics of that statement, only to conclude that there were no physics. No sane biology either. There was only magic, for lack of a better word. I looked over at Jackson, who had declared himself the Vessel of all things earthen earlier that morning, and forced myself to recognize that I was sitting next to a guy who had been sired by dirt. Dirt.
How in the hell were they coping with all of this? How could they be sitting here talking about their mothers and drinking Gatorade?
Corin turned to Ghi, and, realizing just in time that Ghi would have nothing to contribute on the subject of parentage, spared him the question and addressed me instead within the same breath:"What about Jesse?"
"What about him?" I asked.
"His parents. What do you know about them?"
I shrugged. Jesse was forever interested in the first-person present tense. He didn't expound upon much else. I'd learned more about his past from Wikipedia and tabloids than I had from him personally. But I offered what little I knew to be true.
"Well, I know his mother was some famous Russian ballet dancer. She was in a handful of movies, too, I think, and she died when he was in high school. Car wreck. It made international news. She had a lot of affairs, from what I’ve read. And if she ever told Jesse who his father was, then he's never mentioned it, not to me. But if what you guys are saying is true, then I guess it was never any of them ...."
Corin nodded, adequately sated. Jackson took a pensive swill of Gatorade. Ghi sneezed, and I offered a blessing.
Evening developed slowly across Illinois, painfully slowly. The sun, which had chased us out of New York so many hours ago, did its ancient disappearing act somewhere near Springfield. Flat farmlands gradually relented to small townships, then into a sprawl of suburbs, where the straight highway left the ground to become a long series of tunnels and bridges, mergers and overpasses. We were getting so close, less than an hour to go, but the remaining miles seemed to stretch out ahead of us like a chain of cheap rubber bands, tense and uncertain.
The night itself was a clear one, but an orange haze blotted out the stars—the lights of Chicago, still too far ahead to see. I took over for the final stretch of driving, and Jackson almost immediately began to snore in the passenger seat. Behind me, Ghi and Corin spoke in lowered voices, their quiet tones probably more for my benefit than Jackson's. Ghi was trying to explain how the light now appeared to him, how each one made a different sound, like separate streams of sonar. How street lamps, fluorescent bulbs, stars, the wiring through walls and the headlights of passing cars all buzzed and clamored for his attention constantly. And yet he didn't have a clue what to say back to a single one of them, how to command them, to move them.
Corin nodded knowingly. I thought about the frozen blast of water, how it had hardened, moved as if with its own life, behaved in such an impossible
way—all to defend him.
And then I thought about what Ghi had said earlier, wondering what it would be like to wake up one day without a reference point, without an ounce of self inside. How could anyone be prepared for that? And where do you go from there? You arrange your life into this sturdy composition, but all it takes is a bullet to the head or a divine vision or one courier mission to Manhattan to demolish it all. You get handed another blueprint and told to build elsewhere.
"This is our exit," Corin spoke up, startling me.
I opened my mouth to argue otherwise, but he was right. There it was, in big white letters: Exit 51D, Madison Street. Frowning at my own negligence, I hastened to get into the correct lane.
"Thank you," I said, glancing up at the rear-view mirror. Corin smiled at me.
"You're taking all of this in remarkable stride, you know," he said, leaning against the side of the passenger seat. "If I were you, I'd have written us off as complete lunatics hours ago."
I shrugged, not quite knowing what to say. I did think they were complete lunatics. Corin didn't know jack about my threshold for dealing with lunacy. He still hadn't met Jesse Cannon.
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Vessel, Book I: The Advent Page 34