by Tim Scott
Had I really bounded into this whole project blind to that? Had it just seemed like a bit of fun? Or had I been too wildly eager to stagger greedily across some virgin piece of scientific ground and stick a flag in it?
And what about Jack?
What about Jack?
The thought swept through me like a cold mountain wind, and I realized that I hadn’t talked about it with Eli. Jack wasn’t at the party, and the realization spread slowly through me like a cold, upturned bowl of ice cream that he wasn’t coming later on either.
However much I wanted him to, however much the aching tightness in me asked God for him to be here, I knew it just wasn’t going to happen. My memory of the crevasse was too real, too hard-edged and vibrant to be anything fake—and there was a deeper feeling too that cast the thing in stone. I didn’t need to ask Eli about her brother.
Jack was dead, and it was all just as I had remembered it.
The frenetic activity of the virus in my head must have knocked the memory slightly so I was suddenly aware of it, just as a startled deer darting across a mountain slope can nudge an avalanche rolling into a valley below.
I breathed in deeply, feeling my way back to the present, and saw Caroline’s face bobbing among the crowd as she laughed with the bouncer from Inconvenient who had OTTER tattooed across his forehead and still wore the huge earrings. I hoped for his sake that the tattoo was not actually real and was just some crazy random detail I had thought up in a drunken moment when organizing this whole bonkers charabanc of an adventure.
I had come so far, covered so much ground to be here, and yet wasn’t I almost back where I had started? What had all this been for? And did I still have control of events or not? I prayed that I wasn’t trying to shut the barn door on this whole thing after the horse had bolted, but something was nagging away at me saying that not only had the horse bolted but the farmhands as well.
And I had a sinking feeling they had taken the entire barn along with them.
“Weirdest party I’ve ever been to,” said Mat, dropping himself down next to me, waving a glass in the direction of the crowd. “I don’t know anyone, and they all know me really well.”
“Yeah. Jack really is dead, Mat. I don’t want you clinging to false hopes. Everything I told you before is true, even though our memories are screwed up,” I said, guessing doubts about Jack must have been playing across his mind too.
“Ohh.” He sighed, swallowing heavily. “I was hoping that he might—are you certain?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. Why that memory came back like that was odd. I think the virus must have dislodged it somehow, because of all the weird stuff going on in my head.”
“So what happens now? Do you know?” he murmured, perhaps, wanting to move on from Jack, not wanting to face up to the prospect of losing him for a second time. Not wanting to admit how much hope he had been nurturing.
“There’s unfinished business with Habakkuk,” I said. “And then it’s all done and we can leave it behind. Forever.”
“Good. I need some head space. We should just drop out and go surfing for a while.”
“Yeah.” I nodded quietly. “I’m still nervous about Habakkuk, although I don’t think there’s anything he can do. He’s just a pen-pushing bureaucrat. Tell Teb and Caroline they shouldn’t worry.”
“Yeah, sure. If you’re certain. There’s one thing I still don’t really understand though…Did you really not see me pull off those one-eighties today?” he asked with a sad grin.
“To Jack,” I said, holding up my drink. “And to your mythical one-eighties, which, actually, I don’t believe.”
“Jack. And to all our friends here even though we don’t have any idea at all who they are,” Mat said, and sank the last of his champagne.
I wanted to just stay here and get drunk like Mat, but I knew I couldn’t.
The time had come to finish this once and for all.
45
I found Habakkuk hunched behind his desk in his office, skimming through a lot of papers; but I sensed he was not taking a lot of it in, and I wondered exactly why I was here and not gunning down to Isla Todos Santos with the surfboards, ready for the dawn paddle out at Thor’s Hammer.
As I’ve said before, I guess I’m way too curious. I can only think one of my ancestors was a cat, or something.
“Ah, good. Good,” he said, jerking his head about, slipping the papers around to no obvious purpose, and I realized it was because he was nervous—there was something he was nervous about saying. There again, maybe he just felt embarrassed about his performance in the atrium now that we were face-to-face. He stopped to wipe the perspiration from his head as his mouth and eyebrows flitted about like yellowthroats in a tree. “So, you’ve had an amazing few days. The whole thing was a triumph, a splendid triumph, and the investment EasyDreams made in you seems to have paid off.”
“In what way?”
“Come on, Mr. X. In every way! We spent a huge amount on this; on offices, helicopters, staff, and we had a deal. You said if you got back safely, you would give me the formula. So here you are!”
“You seem to be unaware that I don’t remember anything about any formula. I don’t even remember my own sister,” I said, hugely relieved I still had control of this. I had built in a safety net, after all.
“But you will very soon, I’m sure,” he said, with a thin smile that I didn’t particularly like. “It was part of the deal. You would write the last bit of the formula on the board in there. I thought that was why you had come to see me now.”
“No, and I have no intention of writing any formulae for anyone till I’ve had time to get my head together. Do you know how dangerous this thing is? What were we thinking?”
“Of course we knew. Please don’t worry. We went through everything. I’m sure you will get your memory back soon.”
And that’s when I felt a skull-splitting crunch that cut through my head like someone was trying to cure my toothache by dropping an anvil on my head. I winced with the shock, which receded in a wave—but only slightly.
“Don’t fight it, Mr. X. It’s out of your control anyway. Your mind will decide these things for you, because they were written. Come!” I heard his voice echo somewhere, and I didn’t like what he was saying—mainly because I had no idea what he was talking about. I felt reality sway alarmingly under my feet as though it had buckled, like the hull of a ship as it ran into an unseen iceberg. He guided me, staggering, through a door, and it felt like my legs had passed out before the rest of my body.
My vision swooped in and out. On the far wall was an old-fashioned blackboard, scribbled with waves of equations that ran and tipped as I tried to focus.
“Your work. Obvious stuff. But I need the real thing,” he said, and I didn’t like this. There was something going on here and I wanted to get out, but I couldn’t do jack shit.
“I can’t help you,” I whispered, but my head was burning now and I felt like I was falling into an ever thicker darkness.
“Oh, but you will, Mr. X. You see, I wrote another virus. I wrote it, me! And then I slipped it into one of your batches, so you converted it into a disease with your secret formulae. You thought it was one for someone out there, one that you had written; you had so many to do, you see. And I wrote you a virus that would take a little longer to incubate, but would surface like a bolt as the other one retreated. It was one that would make you happily reveal the secrets of the whole project to me. The first symptom of my disease was that you would think it a good idea to see me in private. So you see, Mr. X, there is nothing you can do. Your mind is not your own and the beauty of it is, you did this to yourself!”
My thoughts seemed to sideslip, so that every time I opened my eyes I was somewhere else, yet still in the same place. Time hopped past in great lumps, taking gouges out of reality as it went.
“It’s happening. It’s happening! I thought it might be another few hours yet. Good. This is better than I thought. This is most conveni
ent. I shall leave you to it. I have things to do. Here is the chalk,” he said, picking up the box that was on the blackboard. “Here. Now, soon, you will be writing it all out, I’m sure.”
I saw the shadow of his shape over by the door and tried to say something, but my mouth didn’t seem totally connected anymore. “You always kept something up your sleeve, didn’t you, Mr. X? But I knew about your wife. I knew you didn’t give her the virus. You see, I was always one step ahead. I had cut the strings from your safety nets before they were even in place.”
My head ran with pain, and I knew that the other disease was taking a terrifying hold and I must not give in to it.
I had to be strong.
I looked hazily inside myself, trying to find the pathways to who I really was, trying to make the connections that I knew must be there; but for the moment, I just could not feel them. Even as I staggered wildly, I found that the chalk box was in my hand and my mind was splitting in two—one foreign half, standing off somewhere at the end of a long tunnel, looking in on me somehow. This other half was calm and cool and was willing me to write letters and numbers in strange combinations that meant nothing. I saw my hand pull a piece of chalk from the box and scrape it across the board, but it snapped in two. And while my vision swooped and dived, I caught a glimpse of something strange and glasslike that seemed to be embedded inside the chalk.
With enormous effort, I forced myself to hold the white stick an inch from my eyes as my mind rocked. Then part of me smiled, and my body kicked with silent laughter. I shouted Habakkuk’s name as loud as I could, and the noise from my mouth seemed to come from another part of the room. He appeared blurred at the corner of the door and I beckoned him over, staggering wildly like a drunken tramp, and sweating like the kid at the school disco who never understood why he didn’t get the last dance.
Habakkuk sidled toward me, saying something that I could not hear as I beckoned him closer, until I was near enough to whisper in his ear. Then I simply took his hand and pressed something into it and closed the fingers. He stared at me, then looked down to see what it was. In his palm was a small, slightly chalky glass phial with a shattered neck, spilling out liquid. On the side, in small, neat handwriting, it simply read, “Safety Net.”
I saw the confusion in his face contort into twisted understanding. Then sheer panic.
The next moment, I passed out.
Epilogue
Mat, Caroline, and Teb said I acted like a madman for two whole days. I was constantly asking for a pad and paper and writing reams of stuff and asking when Habakkuk would be there and could they mail it to him, or courier it, or send it by pigeon, or was he in the vicinity and was it worth shouting.
No matter how many times they explained that I should just chill out, I didn’t seem to take it in—although they said they could see something in my eyes that told them I was still in there and battling.
After two days, the virus wore off and the fever passed. I came to in my bed with no real idea which reality I was in, but with Possible Horse, our cat, purring on my stomach. I lay there in the white sheets and looked out between the trembling curtains to the darkness outside, and realized I could hear the sea, gently lapping at the beach with each folding wave, and the cicadas buzzing their legs off about how balmy the evening was. There were soft voices laughing and chatting somewhere, and the crackle of a fire shaking puffs of sparks into the thick night sky.
I swung myself off the bed and shuffled over to the window and peeked out. I saw Caroline, Mat, and Teb, and the Rasta—who was a close friend, Jamie—hunkered down, lying on blankets by the flickering fire, cradling drinks. And even from here I could feel the warm, easy pleasure they felt simply from being in one another’s company.
I walked achingly downstairs, trying to absorb the strangeness of my house being by the sea and piecing images together of how I got here that still lay in a jumble in a box in the back of my mind as though it hadn’t been unpacked yet.
But it was all there—just very foreign, unreal, and shuffled.
“Hey, look who’s here!” said Caroline, as I stepped out of the back door, feeling the sand under my toes and breathing in the night air from a sky that spread out above like the mind of God—twinkling and sinking away with infinite, incomprehensible depth. Caroline skipped over and reached up. I felt her soft, warm hand touch my unshaven face, and I could see she could tell the disease had passed and all my memories were my own. I ran my fingers through her long hair, watching the sparkle of the fire in her eyes and smelling the sweet perfume of the pine branches as they burned, spitting and crackling excitedly, as though in some sort of hurry.
But there was no hurry.
At last, my mind stilled and I could clearly see everything that had happened, reaching back into the past in a long line like a river, twisting and turning miles and miles from its source, until it reached the sea. I kissed her tenderly, feeling the soft warmth of her slender body beneath my hands, and wondered how I could be so lucky to be here now, with this remarkable woman. And with such good friends.
“You know what the date is?” She smiled.
I shook my head playfully.
“October 18.”
I looked at her, and she waited to see if I understood.
“Happy anniversary,” I whispered in her ear, and slipped a bottle of champagne I had plucked from the fridge under her nose. Then, putting my arm around her waist, I swung her over to join the others. I could sense they were so chilled out, their bodies seemed loose and heavy with contentment.
“Hey, Teb, Mat, Jamie!”
“Hey! Hey! Hey!”
“You are one mad motherfucker,” said Mat. “The first person I have ever met who struggled to give up smoking before he had ever even started.”
“Good to have you back, Moose,” said Jamie, slapping me on the back.
“Good to be here. Better than good. So great to see you all. That was a crazy adventure! I’m never ever doing anything like that ever again.” I smiled. “Ever.”
“Ahhhhhh! We’ll see,” came Mat’s voice.
“No, I’m serious. What was I thinking? That was way too serious to be getting tangled up in.”
“Yeah, but that’s what you’re like, Jonny. We all know that.”
“Well, I’m officially retiring from all that kind of stuff as of now. Anyway, I have an announcement. It’s our wedding anniversary today. Six years to the day since we were all gathered under the acacia tree for that photo.”
And they all applauded, like we were a pair of enthusiastic street acrobats.
Later, lying there wrapped in a blanket by the fire, with Caroline nestled into the folds of my body, I told them everything. I told them how Habakkuk had realized that I had squeezed a phial containing a virus into his hand. He didn’t know exactly what sort of Dream Virus it contained, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew it meant when he caught it he would lose his past, probably forever, and he ran in a fit of panic, hoping he could get away.
“He passed out in the atrium,” said Mat. “Came screaming out of the office and tried to squeeze through the band at the back of the stage. The guitarist yanked him forward to take a bow and he just blacked out. Everyone thought he was drunk or fooling around except Caroline—who hit his office like an express train and found you.”
I became aware of the curving shape of her body close to me again and sank into the feeling, kissing her lightly and offering her an awkward swig of champagne. Then I began to explain how Habakkuk had made some kind of breakthrough, but he didn’t have the knowledge to make the final leap of dream theory, which I was able to do. I told them my doubts about the project all along; I told them how I thought testing out the virus was a way to find out what Habakkuk’s motives really were and whether he could be trusted.
And now, finally, Habakkuk was not a threat. He had caught a hugely powerful virus from that phial I gave him as he had feared, and now he had a different past forever.
“He’s working in an
orphanage in Mexico City. Those are the only memories he has, of wanting all his life to work in that orphanage.”
“Is that fair?”
“I don’t know. It’s a tough one, but I think so. The whole project is so dangerous. He has lost his past life, but it means many others will not lose theirs. I think, in balance, it’s justified—and he should be content there, because I wrote that into the virus. But you can be sure I’m burying the whole thing forever now, and I hope nobody else stumbles on it for a long, long time.”
I looked back in my head at the past days, and as Jeff said it would, it felt like gazing back at the memory of a holiday in some wildly different place that had slipped away too quickly, before I had time to get my hands around it. I’d laid clues in the adventure as I’d written the viruses—having people make me perfect cups of coffee; visiting our winter bolt-hole cabin in the mountains; pushing my credulity with the idea of a limpet encyclopedia salesperson or Four Riders wanting to assassinate God.
I never twigged that they were the bad guys and that the good guys were called Mat (Matthew), Mark (St. Mark’s Encyclopedia), Luke (the Belgian assassin), and John. I guess it was all pretty obscure, and it wasn’t like they were all obviously on the side of good anyway. I even planned to end the story here at Todos Santos: “All Saints.”
I sure as hell didn’t see the symmetry of the four Riders being balanced by Eli, Caroline, Emma, and Sarah; the four women.
The night it started, I went on my own to the bar, got extraordinarily drunk, then broke open the phial I had written for myself. My fictitious girlfriend Emma hadn’t even been there. The virus knocked me out cold, and I woke with a hangover and a whole set of new memories. The virus tended to do the same thing to everyone, whether they had been drinking or not. I’m certain that was why Mat woke with a hangover that day too.