Yes, that's right. You remember what I said that night in your living room, standing over Allen Campbell's corpse. "I made his selves disbelieve in himself."
That's what I did to my Oksana. I can't tell you how: I don't know, and if I did there are no words. If it helps to think of it as pulling memory cores from Hal 9000, be my guest. In some manner I dispersed the communications between all those interlocking systems, dis-integrated them, made each doubt the existence of Oksana Besher, their self.
She ceased. She was gone in less than a second. I think.
It is possible to feel infinite regret and infinite relief in the same instant. To be grateful to the universe in the moment of despair. To be ashamed of being proud, and proud to be ashamed. Incredibly enough, it is even possible to experience those paradoxes while running full-tilt through the forest in the dark.
What I had done for Oksana was mercy . . . and at the same time it felt like ultimate obscenity. Perhaps even Original Sin: not to lust for forbidden knowledge, but to forbid knowing. Paradox generated more paradox. With all my heart I wanted to go directly to Hell and stay there; I felt I deserved to. And at the same time, I never stopped being aware that a demon from Hell was coming for me—specifically to take me to that very place, where I would spend my life being used for disgusting purposes by the man who had killed Oksana's body. I agreed I had that coming, but that didn't mean I accepted it. The moment the last particle of her essence departed from this plane of existence, I pushed her head off my lap like an old pair of gloves she wouldn't be needing anymore, took off her backpack and slung it over my shoulder, got to my feet, and started running.
If I had wasted as much as a whole minute mourning, I think Agent Pitt would have had me that night. It was that close. He must have had to come some distance—how could he know my range wasn't as long as a few miles?—but he came fast. When his alarms went off, he must have rolled out of bed and hit the ground running. What saved me was, he knew woodscraft, knew the area well and was extremely physically fit, and I was clueless and totally out of shape. He had trained to hunt other wolves, not cows. Nothing I did made sense to him.
He came close enough for me to read him. For maybe a minute.
I've spent every minute since running from him. Almost forty years, now.
Now I'm going to go out for a short walk, to check a few security arrangements, and let you process this.
I was grateful for his tact. There certainly seemed to be a lot to process, and it's easier to process stuff of that level of profundity without anyone looking over your shoulder. I sat there thinking a dozen thoughts at once, feeling a dozen emotions at once, while he got up and left. Some monitor component of my mind noted how the door was opened from the inside and stored the information. A minute or two later, my mouth—I think it was my mouth—caused me to get up and go make yet another cup of coffee. I was halfway to the kitchen end of the room when I stopped in my tracks.
That's how long it took for it to hit me, for the implications to sink in. For it to dawn on me why Zudie had thought I might need some time to process his story.
Nearly ten years earlier, at her request, I had helped my wife Susan end her life.
I had been with her, done what was necessary. When her body died, I felt it happen. And then I'd sat beside her for half an hour or so, taking what comfort I could from the knowledge that her suffering was over, telling myself that now it was finally all right for me to be selfish, and give in to self pity: go indulge in some exhilarating, stupid, self-destructive behavior for awhile.
And all the while, if Zudie was right, my beloved lay beside me—utterly helpless, totally terrified, absolutely alone. For an hour, or a hundred million years. In that range.
Thanks to me.
My son Jesse had never forgiven me for that act. I'd only really managed it myself in the last four years or so.
I dropped the coffee cup. It landed on my bare left foot, hurting so much I nearly noticed, and skittered crazily away across the floor. I turned around and went back to my chair and sat down and stared at Electric Fire on the laptop for half an hour or so without moving, until I had finished rewriting the story of my life to date in light of the new information I now had, in a way that would let me continue. I think I sang to myself from time to time, but don't remember what songs. Oddly, it never occurred to me to drink any of the brandy in the bottle sitting next to the computer.
The moment I had the ridiculous thought that perhaps I should go yell out the door that it was okay to come back now, Zudie came back in with an armload of firewood, opened a thigh-tall bin with a foot-pedal, dropped in the wood and lowered the lid again. I didn't see a woodstove anywhere, but did see several areas where one could be concealed. And when I thought about it, he'd have been a fool to depend on electricity here on Coveney, no matter how he was getting it—which I also didn't understand. Hell, on Heron Island we lived with blackouts for at least a dozen days out of every year, and often much longer. And B.C. Hydro was aware we were paying customers.
He brushed wood debris from his bare chest, got a pitcher of cold water and clean cups, brought them over and sat by me.
"Have you ever read Heinlein?" he asked me.
"Name rings a bell."
"Dead science fiction writer. Considered the First Grandmaster of that genre."
I nodded politely. "I'm colorblind in that range, sorry. 'Stranger' something?"
". . . In A Strange Land,' Yes. Among many other achievements, some of his stories inspired the development of cryonics, freezing dead people in hope of future resurrection."
"To tell you the truth, I always kind of wished I had the kind of money it takes to make that bet," I said. "I mean, sure, it's lousy odds—but look at the payoff!"
He nodded . . . but oddly, as if I'd said something very sad. "Well, one of the first cryonics firms offered him a free freeze to thank him. Heinlein turned them down and wouldn't say why. Drove them crazy. After his death it turned out exactly one of his friends had had the nerve to ask him why he would reject even a long shot at extended life, when it was free."
"Okay, Mr. Bones, what did he say?" I said, trying to lighten things up.
Zudie's voice was as bleak as if he'd been delivering a death sentence. "He said, 'How do I know it wouldn't interfere with rebirth?'"
"Oh. Oh." Suddenly I saw what he was driving at. "Oh, wow . . . "
He spoke with his head down, absurdly as if he were addressing his penis. "I have no opinion about what happens after death. Maybe we go to the Christian Heaven and, if we've been good, get to spend eternity in a drab white robe playing the harp without food or drink or sex, content to adore the guy who invented pain and aging. Maybe we go to the Muslim Paradise and spend eternity getting smashed with inexperienced lovers and adoring the same guy played by a different actor. Maybe we reincarnate Buddhist style, or Hindu style, or New Orleans style. Anybody who says he knows is lying or crazy."
Again I made a feeble attempt at levity. "Or dead."
He looked up. The pain in his eyes was shocking. "Whatever happens . . . how do I know I didn't fuck it up for Oxy?"
"Hey Zudie, man, come on—"
"I'm pretty sure what I did to her never happened to anyone before. Certainly not as often as people get hit by meteorites. There can't be a protocol for it in the system—"
"Come on, brother, what about the most likely answer, okay?"
"What's that?"
The question was exasperating. "That nothing happens. That we don't go anywhere when we die, we just end, and are gone, from everywhere but human memory anyway, and as James Taylor said, life goes on without us, all around us. That you fucked up nothing. That all you did was shorten a really horrible last moment for someone you love. You stupid fat bastard, I should only be so lucky as Oxy was. I wish to God you'd been there for Susan!"
He gaped at me, looking more than ever like Baby Huey.
"Jesus Christ," I said, "Nobody ever looks as hard for anything as
a person looking for something to feel guilty about."
He got a quizzical look . . . and then his features began to relax. The pain started to leave his face. "Thank you, Russell," he said.
My own irritation was gone. "You're welcome."
"You really think that's the most likely answer?"
"Seems to be the one with the least amount of wishful thnking in it."
"Maybe so. I've always felt it was the least likely answer, myself. I mean, I see the flaws in all the other ones—I just have trouble persuading myself a) that random chance produced matter, music and Oksana's eyes, and b) that none of them matters at all."
"I know what you mean," I agreed. "Substitute Susan's eyes for Oxy's and I'm right with you. But see, I want those things to matter, with roughly equal intensity, so my opinion is suspect."
"Doesn't make it wrong."
"Makes it suspect."
He sighed. "I don't disagree."
"And I'll tell you the truth, in a way it's the answer I prefer. I mean, I don't think I want to spend eternity in Catholic Heaven even if Susan is there. Or learn to read the Koran in Arabic, or stop eating beef, or pork, or enter the Void, or any of that crap. Beautiful brief flickers in the darkness that the universe was too dumb to cherish . . . I can live with that."
"I hear you, my friend," he said. "But . . . isn't that a hell of a thing to be the outcome you prefer?"
He had me. "Yes, it is." I finished the water in my cup and replaced it with brandy. "I wish someone would invent a sane religion."
"I'm working on it," he said.
"Go, cat, go."
"But there is more pressing business before the house."
The brandy hit me. "Yeah, I'm coming back up to speed, now. You figure it was Agent Pitt who took out Nika's cousin."
"I can't think of anyone else alive—assuming he's alive—who would both be capable of following a nonexistent link to Nika all the way to your house, and interested enough to bother, after all these years. The CIA has been out of the ESP business for over thirty years now."
"Okay. You've been in his head. You know more about how he thinks than I do. What do you think he'll do now?"
"Dig around until he finds a really good handle on Nika or you or both of you. Then squeeze you hard."
"Is that his best move?"
"Yes. Think about it. He wants to capture a telepath. He knows I'm almost as smart as he is. There's no way he's going to sneak up on me, on my home turf, even if he can find out where that is. He needs to get one of you to call me up or email me, and sucker me into a preset trap he can spring from well outside my range. Tricking you into it is too complicated, and how can he be sure he's succeeded? Easier and more reliable to hold some kind of metaphorical gun to your head."
Jesus Christ in a teddy. "And my son is somewhere on the same fucking island with him!" I gulped more brandy. It didn't help enough.
Then I saw the faint smile on Zudie's face.
"I'm almost as smart as Agent Pitt," he said softly. "And I know he's coming for me, and he doesn't know I know."
"You have a plan."
"Well, the beginnings of an outline of one, yes."
"Tell me more," I started to say. But just at that moment, a penny dropped in my head, and I suddenly remembered something. Something horrible. I opened my mouth, tried to speak, failed.
It didn't matter, of course. Zudie went just as pale as I must have done. "Oh God, Russell, that's bad," he breathed. "You really fucked up."
10.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Heron Island, British Columbia, Canada
When McKinnon woke up the bedside clock said it was 12:13 AM. His watch agreed. He checked: he had set the watch for midnight. He always set his watch when he wanted to wake at a particular time—and never needed to, always waking a minute or so before it could go off. So basically he had failed to wake up twice. No, three times: the watch alarm repeated after five minutes if he didn't switch it off.
The fake fire was the only light besides the clockface. The room's overhead light had a dimmer switch, he remembered . . . but had recently been supplied with one of the new low-wattage fluorescent bulbs, which do not work with a dimmer. He sat up, turned on the bedside lamp (also flourescent, and therefore of only one wattage: too bright), and looked around at a room furnished in a style he thought of as Quaint Misbehavin', with a 50-inch flatscreen TV above a fireplace so realistic he couldn't stop noticing how realistic it was. It took a whole fifteen seconds for the flame-flicker sequence to repeat, and the accompanying loop of crackle sounds was only ten seconds long. Genius.
He sighed, shut off the fire with a realistic-looking bedside fireplace wall-switch, and tried to recall just how he had come to be here, in this silly room on this silly island in this silly country, on this silly-ass mission. He reviewed the path from birth to here to try and spot just where he had gone wrong—
—realized he was reviewing not his history but that of one of his more memorable cover identities—
—promised himself to be scared by that just as soon as he had the time, and started over.
Born at a rest stop just outside Tampa. Childhood shuttling between warring parents in East Baltimore and Drama City, until he was old enough for acting out to turn into a rap sheet. Very high IQ and reading scores bought him some slack, but two years into state college, he graduated to felonies. Vietnam a way out that didn't involve choices or decisions, until suddenly it did.
Chose to live. Months as a Shadow Company security contractor, with a necklace of ears and a price on his head.
Recruited into CIA's Operation Phoenix by the Major, a Truman appointee. Under his tutelage, traded necklace and rap sheet for a new name, a new personality, a philosophy and a purpose. Morphed from wholesale to retail killer: from a soldier who matched himself against other predators with wolfish joy, to a soldier who accomplished exponentially more by passionless assassination of selected civilians or their loved ones. More important: became politically aware, on a global scale, and for the first time in his life truly pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stood.
Finally too hot to remain in Southeast Asia. Back home to Drama City, which was called Washington when you were wearing a suit and tie and a name with no priors attached to it. Two years of training, indoctrination, grooming and college culminating in a BA in History, then finally he was ready to do real work . . . just in time for him to get in on MK Ultra. A long series of events then that made leaving a village mayor's dead wife outside their hooch seem like a clean way to make a living. All of them were necessary, all in service to an end that justified any means: truth, justice, and the American way. But all of them were hard just the same. They didn't get any easier, and that was the good news.
Felt his allegiance begin to waver . . .
Got himself reassigned to the Funny Farm—the ESP project—as a kind of vacation that he knew would be temporary. And there, to his astonishment, he encountered the man who would change the course of his life even more than the Major had . . .
His bladder interrupted his life review . . . just as he had recapitulated himself to the point of remembering why he didn't have time for this shit. Just as well, probably—the next forty years would have been dreadful to relive. He shook his head, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and had a disheartening amount of difficulty getting up. On his way to the bathroom, he told himself that perhaps tomorrow would be a little better . . . and realized he had been doing that for an awful lot of consecutive mornings now. So he passed the time it took for the "coffee" machine to cycle by working out. He couldn't do his usual morning routine without waking anyone below him or next door, but he did manage enough to get his heart pumping and his joints better oiled. When he was done, he felt fifty again.
Over coffee he started his laptop, confirmed that no one else was using the B&B's wifi connection, and did some research. The property owner's name was Russell
Walker. Mr. Walker was an Op-Ed columnist with the more liberal of Canada's two conservative newspapers. A widower, less than a decade younger than McKinnon himself. An ex-American—no, he saw on closer inspection: a dual-citizen, who'd been born in the U.S., and moved to Canada after, not before, Vietnam, subsequently becoming a Canadian citizen without renouncing U.S. citizenship. Not a lot of those.
Shortly, McKinnon found himself wondering if Mr. Walker actually existed. The more he searched the more skeptical he became.
One living family member: a grown son living on the opposite end of the continent, in the U.S. Organizations belonged to: none. This guy was supposed to be pushing sixty, and belonged to no clubs, societies, leagues, guilds, associations, religious groups, political parties, twelve-step groups, boards of directors or porn websites. He paid for the minimum cable package: no specialty or movie TV channels at all. The same cable package also provided barely adequate internet access, slightly better than smoke signals: max download speed 50 Mbps, max upload speed 30 no more than 10 e-mail addresses, and a data transfer limit of 60 gigs a month that his records showed he rarely approached.
Phone records showed that the man almost never used his phone—save for short flurries of calls over a two- or three- day period, every three weeks, plus a few holiday and birthday calls a year to the distant son, who almost never called back. An odd interval—what actual human activity was on a three-week cycle? It added to the growing impression that this Walker was a phantom. Wait a minute—the comic strip character The Phantom had often used the name Walker as a pseudonym, because the Africans he lived among called him The Ghost Who Walks. If a Phantom Walks in a forest but isn't really there, do the leaves Russell?
But the Heron Island Credit Union believed Walker was real enough to give him a mortgage. A mainland bank might have been conned by a Potemkin Man, as long as the checks kept clearing . . . but this rockheap just wasn't big enough: everyone on it must know each other.
Very Hard Choices Page 12