—newsprint.
West Porter Couple Killed In Collision
He felt his eyes swell in their sockets. He read—
(JAY!)
—it again.
West Porter Couple Killed In Collision
It did say what he thought it said. West Porter Couple... He read on.
Buddy Svendsen—Staff Writer
West Porter, Wisconsin—Tragedy struck yesterday at the intersection of Flynn and Woolsey in the West Porter business district when a car driven by Walter Grady apparently ran a red light and was broadsided by—
(JAY!!)
—a police car from neighboring La Salle, resulting in his death and that of his wife, Jean. Their young son Jay sur—
(JAY!JAY!JAY!)
—vived the crash, and the two La Salle officers were injured. Both are recuperating at Langdon Memorial Hospital and are expected to recover fully.
Authorities say that the La Salle unit had its lights and siren active at the time of the collision, and that it had the green light. They are at a loss to explain how Grady could have—
(JAY!JAY!COMEON!JAY!)
—not been aware of either the traffic signal, or the La Salle unit’s warning devices, which were active as it pursued a car stolen by—
(JAY
JAY
JAY)
.....by.....by.....
“JAY!”
And suddenly Mari was there, leaning over him, one hand clamped to each of his biceps.
“Wake up, Jay. Come on. Come on.”
‘Wake up’? Did she say ‘wake up’? Why would she be saying that, urging him from sleep, when he’d been awake and fine just reading the—
His hands were empty. He stared at them, blinking hard. There was no book in them. No Volume S of the 1976 Book Of Knowledge encyclopedia. No news clippings poking from between pages. No nothing. It wasn’t there. He opened and closed his hands once, hands that had just a few seconds before been holding that book. They had. Hadn’t they?
“Jay, are you awake? Are you?” Mari asked excitedly, her voice restrained in a hushed shout. The box of his letters rested on the floor at her feet, its flaps tucked shut.
Awake? Yes he was awake. Now he was awake. Was that all it had been? A dream? Had he been asleep? Lost in the Darvon fog?
“Jay? Jay?”
He looked up to Mari. She beamed at him, her blue eyes glinting not with tears this time, nor even sorrow, but with spirit. Her lips were pulled and curled into a wide smile that seemed the release of a thousand kept smiles, some joy that had come in unexpected ways to free its imprisoned expressions. She was up. Damn up about something.
“Jay, are you awake? Talk to me. Come on.”
“I’m...” A dream? It had been just a dream? “Yeah, I’m awake. I must have dozed off.”
“Jay,” she said, putting her hands to his face now, one pressed gently to each cheek. “You are not going to believe it. You’re not. It’s amazing.”
“What?”
She started to say something, but shook her head almost giddily. “I am starving, Jay. I haven’t eaten all day. I just got so into that...” And her fired gaze blazed at him. “Oh, God, Jay, it is amazing. I’ll tell you, but we’ve got to eat. I’m famished.”
Starving? How could she be starving this early? And what did she mean about not eating all day? “If you want breakfast, I’ve got a hot plate under the bed.” She was shaking her head already. “We can stop by the Rev M Up and get some—”
“Breakfast?” she reacted, letting go his face and bouncing spryly down to a squat before him. “It’s after four, Jay. I want some real food.”
“Four? Did you say four?”
She nodded. “How long have you been napping?”
Wonder bloomed on his face. “I don’t know. I must have just dozed off after I took my pill. I didn’t even know. I thought I was... Mari, I had the weirdest—”
“Jay, I am positively starving. Aren’t you?”
He wasn’t, really, but he nodded anyway. If it was four in the afternoon, he should have eaten by now. He looked at his watch and saw that it was just after four, which meant she was right, and which meant that he had almost certainly been (asleep? entranced?) out of it for six hours. Six hours! If not more.
Mari vaulted up from her squat and leapt a few inches off the ground, spinning in mid air all the way around like some cheerleader gone mad, and landing facing him again, standing now, some energy within her surging right then. “Oh, God, Jay, you are not going to believe it!”
She had not held back any of her voice on that proclamation, and from between the stacks of books a woman emerged. Not the woman from the counter, no. This one was older than her, and wore a knitted shawl over her bony shoulders to beat back the library’s ever-present coolness, and it was an equally bony finger that she put to her lips and shushed Mari firmly.
“Sorry,” Mari said, smiling and cringing, the zing within her hard to contain. “Sorry.”
The bony old woman receded back into the stacks after giving the boisterous patron a last, stern look for good measure.
“Mari, what is this thing that’s got you so excited?”
“You’re not going to...” And she hushed her voice down when it seemed threatening to rise. “...believe it!”
“Believe what?”
“We’ve gotta eat first,” she said, and put her hands out to him. He took them, and she helped him to stand. He gathered his crutches from the table (the table where no encyclopedia had been, it now appeared obvious), and she the box from the floor, wedging it under her arm. “There’s a diner, right? By where we met?”
Met? Okay, he thought, that was a different, if true way to characterize their ‘coming together’. “The Plainview Grill.”
“Right. Good. That’s good. That’ll be great. Good.” The words flew from her like bullets from a Tommy gun. She gripped his left arm with her free hand and began to ‘help’ him toward the exit. “Come on. We’ll eat, and I’ll tell you all about what I found.”
“What did you find?” Jay asked as he was nearly dragged down the aisles of books, trying hard to keep up and keep upright at the pace she was setting.
“It’s so amazing,” she told him as they moved past the front counter once again, heading out this time with the woman staring at them no less curiously over her bifocals. “I can’t wait to tell you, but I am starving. We’ll eat, and I’ll tell you. Okay?”
Okay? Like there was any choice in the matter, he thought as she scooted him out of the building and practically tossed him into the front seat of her Honda.
Thirty Four
Salvation
He had always come alone, and had always taken a seat at the far end of the lunch counter in the dim part of the place, but this time he was with someone, a woman, the very same woman who had nearly run him down to dead, and he had taken a booth with her right near the front door, and when the woman had waved for the waitress with some impatience and ordered for them both—hamburgers and fries and cokes—with nary a look at a menu, well, Chloe Alkan could only lay a nosy and suspicious look upon them through her small round specs.
Jay felt this, and couldn’t meet the gaze she kept upon them even as she took their order to the grill.
Mari saw his reaction and motioned for him to look at her. “Ignore that, Jay. Have I got news for you!”
“You’re so excited,” Jay observed, wondering how a library could bring on the state of near euphoria powering his lunch companion, when all it had done for him was spawn old memories that had twisted into some crazy dream. The encyclopedia, the accident. And all those other vignettes ala newsprint thrown in for, what, spice? Courtesy of the painkillers, he figured, but it was still weird. Cosmically weird. And that last clipping that his numbed brain had conjured—what was that? A taunt? A reminder? Or just medicated neurons firing wildly.
“You would be, too, Jay.” Then she reconsidered what she’d just said. “You will be, too, Jay.
You will.”
“What, Mari? What is it?”
“It all came together at the library, Jay. Well, the biggest parts of it did, anyway. And I was right.”
“Right about what?”
“That it just couldn’t be what you thought. I just knew that. I couldn’t have come all this way just to kill you. You couldn’t have killed anyone because you didn’t want to. I didn’t know what it all really meant, but once you let me read your letters I did know something—I knew what you knew. Your confessions to yourself. All the things that you thought you made happen.”
“I’m not sure about that anymore,” Jay told her, speaking his revelation of that morning. The one that had preceded the fog by a hair.
“Good, because that was not what happened at all, Jay. At all.”
Their cokes came, Chloe leaving with a long, prying look once again, and Mari took a long draw on the straw that sank deep into the glass of crushed ice and soda.
“Then what was it?” Jay asked with quiet eagerness, putting his hands ‘round the cool, sweating glass but not drinking yet.
“Jay, I started with what I knew. With your letters. The dates, and the times, and what had happened, and I looked up all sorts of news accounts of the tragedies. That library is amazing, Jay. Some big cities would kill for something like that, with the computers, and the microfilm, it was so easy to find things out. I’d put information in the computer and I’d be looking at the New York Times for this date, or the Des Moines Register for that date. I looked up each one of the things that had happened, Jay, and I compared the times on your letters to when they had actually happened—Los Angeles is three hours after east cost time, right?”
He nodded, and now took a sip.
“I had to figure out all the times ‘cause yours were all Plainview time. This is Central Time, right?”
“Right,” he said. He hoped the sugar and caffeine she was sucking down right then weren’t going to amp her up any more than she already was, because whatever was in her head was moving at miles a minute, just a bit faster than her mouth.
“So I looked them all up, and your times were just a little bit ahead of the times the things actually happened. You did know they were going to happen. You had it right, Jay.”
His heart sank a bit. He did not want to have it right. Because couldn’t that still mean...
“You had it all right except for one thing,” she said, her blue eyes raging with deep, deep delight right then. “The number.”
“The number?”
“Your number was wrong, Jay. The number you put in your letters. The number of people who were going to die.”
“The number?” he said again, perplexed. He had been so certain. He had known how many people were going to die. Exactly. Were the tails wrong? “I don’t understand.”
“You were one off,” she told him, putting her coke down and reaching across the table to take his cool hands in hers. “One off. If you said thirty people were going to die, only twenty nine did. Forty eight, it was actually forty seven. Do you understand?”
He understood what she was telling him, sure; what he had known was off by one life. But other questions raged from that revelation. Other questions he did not have time to entertain because Mari requested something of him right then.
“Jay, tell me about it. About the visions, or whatever they were. I mean, you said something the other night when you were all drugged up and I was reading the letters. You said that you’d never been eaten by sharks before, but that falling from a hundred and fifty feet was nothing? What did you mean by that?”
Okay, he thought. Now she was getting into rough stuff. Things he had committed in short form to those letters she had researched precisely so he wouldn’t have to think about them anymore. But now she wanted him to, wanted as she held his hands, her thumbs rubbing slowly, reassuringly over the rise and fall of his knuckles. Wanted as her blue eyes urged him on, emoting that all would be okay. She was here. He could tell her.
And he did.
“This is the really, really insane part coming,” he warned her, but she only held his hands more tightly. He swallowed, his gaze moving from her to the tabletop and back very frequently as he spoke. “A long time ago I could pick stocks, with that ability I mentioned. You see—really insane thing coming here—I’d get change sometimes, and all the coins would come up heads, and from those I’d get this...knowing. Which stock to pick.” She was still holding his hands, and still watching his as she spoke, and not a hint of shock or disbelief had come to her face. “And then one day, one night, actually, the heads turned to tails. And something new came from the tails.”
“The visions of death,” Mari said, and Jay nodded.
“It would hit me,” he began, looking her in the eye now, and he matched her grip upon his hands. “Like a wave. It would pound into me, the death that was coming for those people in the vision. I felt it all. Their pain was my pain. Their agony was my agony. I drowned with them, I burned with them, I fell with them. I knew their death, and in knowing it I died with them.” He paused there, testing her reaction, but she only waited for him to go on. “I died, Mari, and then I lived again. I know that’s impossible, but it happened. It happened again and again. Whenever there were tails I knew death was right around the bend.
“Then yesterday the tails were gone, and the heads came back, only this time they were showing me numbers. Thirty two and—”
“Two five five one one,” Mari interjected, her deduction getting an affirming nod from Jay.
“You remember,” he said.
“The day I turned thirty-two my car hit you when the mileage read twenty five thousand, five hundred and eleven. The mark of death for you, right?”
“That’s what I thought. I believed, Mari, really believed that I had killed all those people. Your family was among those people. Last night especially when you had the bottle at my throat it seemed even more true, more intended.”
He stopped, and she waited, looking at him, making certain he had told all he would tell before she spoke. “But, Jay, don’t you see now what was really happening?”
He shook his head.
“You weren’t killing, Jay. You were saving. Saving one life from certain death. You were dying for that person. You were suffering the death meant for them, so that they could live.” A wet sheen spread over her eyes now. “So that I could live.”
“I did what?” Jay asked, dumbfounded by what she was saying. By what she was proposing. This thing that was the complete opposite of all he had believed, of all he had feared the past eight years.
“Jay, when the plane I was on crashed, I knew I was going to die. There was no doubt in my mind. All there was around me was blackness, and noise, and screaming, and heat. And then flames. I couldn’t find my husband, or my little boy. I felt the heat, and the flames came at me, and I got burned.” She let go his hands then and pulled the left sleeve of her sweatshirt up, revealing the inside of her forearm. It was a long strip of gnarled and plasticky skin, twisted and discolored with a sickly, inhuman shine upon it. And for a reason he did not know, Jay reached out and very, very gently put his fingers to it, feeling her wound, her scar.
Mari eased her sleeve back down and took the hand he had touched her with in hers. “Jay, I was a dead woman, and then I felt myself getting out of the fire, and out of the wreckage, as if something was pulling me to safety. And now I know that that something was you.”
Creases stretched across his brow, lines of doubt, of puzzlement. Lines of desire, the desire to believe. He had saved?
“You saved one person for each letter you wrote,” she told him. “More even, for each time before you started ‘confessing’ your crimes. Only there were no crimes, Jay. Only acts of salvation.”
“I saved you?” Jay said, not truly doubting, just thunderstruck by the presentation of a new reality he had lived without knowing.
“You saved one person from each of those terrible tragedies, Jay. All of the
things that happened were things that didn’t have to happen. The cruelest kind of death—unnecessary death. The articles I read said that each and every one of the things that happened were either proven human error, or strongly suspected to be human error. Utter wastes of human life, Jay. Life like my husband’s and my son’s.”
Chloe came to their table again, bringing their orders on two plates and setting a bottle of ketchup between them. Mari stared hard at her until she was gone.
Jay shook his head slowly at the table, digesting what he’d been told.
“It’s true, Jay,” she said to him. “And isn’t it a better truth than the lie you believed?”
“Of course,” he said. How could it not be? “So this is why you found me?”
“I don’t know,” she said, letting go his hand with one of her own and slipping a fry past her lips. “To ease your pain, to make you see the truth, to—”
“To get my attention,” Jay interjected.
“Yeah,” Mari agreed, smelling the food now, her hunger gurgling in her stomach. “I got it, didn’t I? You mind if I...”
“Go ahead,” Jay told her, and she dug into the food as though she hadn’t eaten in days. And maybe she hadn’t. How easy could life on the road be? And her jeans were a bit big on her, weren’t they? Yes, but...
...but why would she have been put through all that to come and set him straight? Why set him straight at all? Was it over? Not his part in this, but the realities of the big wide world? Were there to be no more senseless tragedies? Were no more people going to die in that way?
Of course more people would die senselessly. That was life. Bad things happened in life. So why stop saving? And why had anyone been saved at all? It was life after all, and death was a part of that. A cruel part, even.
So how could this be it. Bing, bang, boom, thank you for your good work Mr. Grady, you can punch out now. What, was there some rotation or something? Would someone else jump in? Were there other crazy bums about who passed out magic to others just so it would bend and weave its way to some kind of knowing that would save people? Was it that?
God, Jay thought, feeling like Mari had the night before, this can’t be all it’s about.
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