by John Darnton
"It's amazing," he said. "The cloning stuff seems so complicated at first, but when you hear him talk about it, it all seems straightforward and simple and doable. You can imagine sitting down and doing it yourself."
"That's the hallmark of a great scientist," put in Skyler.
"Pardon?" said Jude, surprised at the voice from the backseat.
"A scientist takes a complicated process or theory and strips it down to its essentials; he reduces it and experiments with it and makes it basic. And in trying to make it understandable, he may blunder into a fundamental truth. That's the way it works. Karl Popper said it—science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplication."
"Karl Popper—the philosopher?"
Skyler nodded.
"Christ, you don't even know where the hell you were raised, but you know about Karl Popper."
"The simple things first," said Skyler.
They picked their way through Chicago and then to the west, where the Great Plains opened up and stretched before them, and their spirits lifted. They flew along the interstates, whizzing by small towns and fields dotted with cattle.
As they drove, they talked; Jude was increasingly impressed with Skyler, and he could tell that Tizzie was, too. He had learned quickly how to navigate the modern world; he had already mastered many of the minor everyday tasks that were second nature to them—placing phone calls, pumping gas, tipping in the roadside diners—and he was taking on new ones with gusto. His naivete had an optimistic strain to it that was appealing, Jude thought. He also thought it contrasted starkly with his own sometimes weary malaise.
They were barreling through Kansas on Route 70, when Skyler made a sudden announcement.
"I want to drive," he said. "Teach me."
"For Christ's sake," said Jude. "We're in a hurry. We can't stop for that."
But Tizzie, in the backseat, decided the issue.
"Why not?" she said. "It'll give us a break."
So they pulled off the interstate and found a back road between two fields of corn, waist high. Jude stopped the car in the center of the deserted road and walked around to the passenger seat; he felt the heat rising up from the concrete and heard cicadas buzzing in the heavy late morning air. Skyler slid over behind the wheel. Jude explained the controls, outlined the rules of the road, and helped him lift off the hand brake. The car moved forward slowly, tentatively. Skyler rotated the wheel to one side and then the other, and the car swayed gently, stuttering ahead as he gave it a bit more gas.
"Nothing to it," said Skyler, still gripping the wheel tightly. He concentrated on the road, then looked over at Jude and grinned.
"Way to go!" shouted Tizzie from the back.
"Not bad, just take it easy," put in Jude.
Skyler leaned into the gas pedal, and the engine leapt to life with a power that astonished him. He took his foot off, steered for a while, then gunned it, and the car took off at high speed, swerving madly. Jude was thrown into the door.
"Slow down! Slow down!" he screamed.
His head fell below the window, and he could see only Skyler, frozen in place. But he could feel the tires striking rocks and kicking up dirt, and he could hear grass slapping the undercarriage, and then suddenly the car rocked violently to one side, plunging downward but still moving ahead. Above, stalks of corn beat against the windshield.
The car stopped with a shudder. An ear of corn leaned in through the open window and dust circled inside. Skyler sat there, still with two hands on the wheel, stunned and white. Jude turned around to look at Tizzie, who was sitting on the floor, her eyes open wide in alarm. When she saw how alarmed Jude was, she began to giggle and then to laugh out loud, until Jude, too, began laughing. And then finally Skyler joined in, his laugh sounding an awful lot like Jude's, deep and resonant.
Later, they flagged down a farmer on a tractor, who hitched a chain to the car and pulled it out of the cornfield. They paid him ten bucks, then went to a diner for lunch, turkey sandwiches drowning in thick brown gravy. Halfway through, Jude looked across the table at Skyler and knew with an abrupt clarity what he was thinking.
"You want to try it again, don't you?" he said.
Skyler said he did.
"Not on my life."
And they all laughed again.
* * *
On the outskirts of Denver, they turned south on Route 25 and saw a blinking neon lasso, a Frontier Motel sign. They pulled up before a two-story lime green fake facade whose front entrance was flanked by wagon wheels missing three and four spokes. A young heavyset black woman in a checkered blouse with a gray cowboy hat sat behind the desk and slid registration cards over to them.
"Two rooms or three?" she said.
"Three," said Tizzie.
They filled out the small white cards with phony names—Skyler leaning over to crib the same surname as Jude—and carried their luggage down a claustrophobic hallway, turned a corner past an ice chest and Coke machine, and came to their rooms, side by side. Jude's was in the middle. Slipping the punch-coded cards into the slots at the same time, they heard three clicks in succession and opened their doors one after another—a sequence that struck Jude as vaguely comical.
"I'm beat," said Tizzie, looking at them. "See you tomorrow."
They exchanged good nights.
Jude's room was a standard L, built of cinder blocks painted a pale yellow. It contained a double bed without a headboard, polyurethane curtains of white and silver thread, and a long dresser of fake oak veneer under a mirror stuck to the wall with clear plastic fasteners. On the dresser, next to a metal beer bottle opener screwed into the wall, was a TV set. Light from a bedroom lamp cast an oval upon the ceiling.
Jude sat on the bed, reached for the phone receiver, and punched in a long sequence of numbers that he knew by heart. Six rings—it was slow this time of night in the city room—and a voice finally answered.
"Metro."
"Hello—who's this?"
A clerk paused—suspicious, but recognizing a certain authority behind the question—and gave his first name.
"This is Jude. I'm just calling to check in... to say, you know I've been out for a while, sick, and I'll probably be out for a while longer."
He thought he sounded a little too uncertain.
"I'll be in touch, when I'm feeling better, I just—"
"Jude." The clerk had finally cottoned on. "That you?"
"Yes."
The line went muffled, the sound of a receiver being covered. It lasted quite a while, maybe a minute or longer. Jude was about to hang up when the voice came back on.
"Where are you?"
"I'm here. Home. Still sick. I don't need anything. Just checking in, to let you know that, ah, I'm getting a little better."
The receiver was covered again, and this time Jude did hang up.
Afterward, he felt stupid. He shouldn't have called—or he should have called someone else, a reporter at home, to pass on the message. Could they trace the call? Why would they do that? Now you're really turning paranoid.
Still, the call preyed on him, made him feel exposed. Up to now, he had felt protected in that great anonymity of the vast American heartland, another piece of flotsam on that big prairie ocean. One phone call had ruined that—it had made him feel connected again to the whole damn nightmare.
He kicked off his shoes and lay on the bed to watch television. It didn't help. A vague depression settled over him, a mood of anxiety to which he was unaccustomed. He thought of knocking on Tizzie's door, or even Skyler's—inviting them out for a drink. He walked to the window, lifted an edge of the curtain and looked outside. A traffic light was blinking on a street across the parking lot—the night was gloomy, uninviting, a little threatening. He turned away, undressed and climbed into bed.
Night sounds came in from all sides. A murmur of conversation, the canned laughter from a TV. He strained to hear something from Tizzie's room, but without success. He shut the sounds out as best he could and
then, mercifully, drifted off to sleep. But it was not a peaceful sleep because it was split with nightmares playing off his claustrophobia—long, harrowing dramas of running away from unspeakable horrors, crawling through tunnels, dashing across dark underground caverns. He awoke with a start, sweating, one sheet wrapped around his left leg.
Gradually, his heart stopped racing. He leaned over and looked at the numbers on the clock, gleaming like red cat's eyes: 3:00. He settled back, his head on the pillow, able now to distinguish shapes in the darkness, and he thought he heard something, a light tread in the corridor outside. He listened intently: was that not the sound of a doorknob turning slowly, a door creaking open? He leapt out of bed, put his ear to the door. Nothing. It was gone—but had it been there?
Jude dressed by the light of the bathroom. He opened his curtains, then checked to pat his pocket and make sure that he had put the door card inside, and slipped out into the hall. He paused before Tizzie's door to listen: nothing. He walked down the corridor, past the ice machine and into the lobby. The young black girl was still there, reading a thick book under a night light, surprised to look up and see him standing there.
"Forgot something in the car," he muttered, making for the door.
The air outside was pleasantly warm. He walked around the front into the parking lot, down the length of the building. The sky overhead was clear and glistening with stars. And as he walked across the tarmac behind the darkened cars, he counted the windows of the rooms and finally came to his own, the one with the curtains open. He stopped and looked at the windows on either side, glancing, as if casually, and saw that they both were dark.
Inside, in the lobby, he smiled at the girl, but she barely looked up from her reading.
They were passing through the town of Wagon Mound, New Mexico, on the way to Santa Fe, when Jude, driving, turned to Skyler in the seat next to him and told him to recount his life on the island.
"Everything you haven't already told us," he said. "From start to finish. Don't leave anything out. Tell us everything you can remember, no matter how small and unimportant it seems. There may be a clue in there, something we've overlooked that can point us in the right direction."
It was evening. For hours, the sky off to the east had been darkening with a gathering thunderhead, and now in the far distance they could see slanted gray steaks of rain pounding down on the plain. Tizzie was in the backseat, lying on her back with her feet propped up on the window jamb. Jude thought she was asleep, but he was not sure.
Skyler looked out the window, as if he were mulling over Jude's request, then opened the glove compartment and pulled out Jude's Camels.
"Mind if I try one?"
Jude frowned. "Don't be stupid. Why get started? They'll kill you."
"You're one to talk."
"Yeah, well..."
Skyler lighted up, drew smoke into his mouth and let it out in a cloud that enveloped his face. He tried again, this time sucking the smoke deep into his lungs, and was seized by a coughing fit. He looked at the cigarette in his hand.
"How can you smoke this?"
"It's an acquired taste."
"Christ," said Skyler, stamping it out in the ashtray.
Tizzie poked her head up.
"Not very smart," she said, lying back down.
Skyler stared out the window again, still coughing and clearing his throat. Then he began his narrative. He talked slowly and quietly and unemotionally, laying out the details of his life on the island as carefully as if he were putting down cards in solitaire. As he talked, he continued looking out the window, drawing a kind of strength from the foreign landscape of dark brown and red earth and rolling hills and scrub brushes.
He told of his earliest memories and Raisin and camping out and leaving the goats in the secret pasture to run through the woods. He told about the day they had met Kuta and Raisin's epileptic fit and the snake bite, and how Raisin had become a renegade.
He told about the bad things, too, the frequent physical examinations, the shots and the pills, the discipline and the Orderlies, and how members of the Age Group would suddenly disappear.
"Didn't it seem strange to you that all this was going on?" interrupted Jude. "That people could be perfectly healthy and then suddenly turn so sick that they would have to be operated on?"
"Not at all. That's just the way it was. I didn't know anything else. Don't forget—we didn't have much... much information. That was the way things happened. Growing up, I never had any reason to think my life was unusual. I never really thought about it one way or the other—not for a long time."
The rain caught up with them. It came in a sudden onslaught, falling on the windshield in loud, thick drops and making the roof rattle. They felt cut off from the landscape, snug in the car's interior. Jude switched on the wipers, which smeared the front windshield, but gradually cleared it, so that they could look out and see the raindrops pelt the road ahead.
It made Skyler think of his escape through the swamp.
Then he told of Raisin's escape and his death.
"At his funeral service, Baptiste and the others spoke with such feeling that it almost seemed like they meant it. But I knew they didn't. After all, they had practically caused it."
"Did you see—did anyone see—Raisin's body?" asked Jude.
"No, it was in a coffin. That would have been too cruel—I expect he was bloated and ugly."
Jude lighted a cigarette and cracked the window to let out the smoke; a spray came in and struck him in the side of the neck, but he ignored it.
Skyler talked about his disillusionment.
"It came gradually, like the dawning of an idea that won't go away. I can't tell you how upset I was. I remember reading about the late fifteenth century, when Europeans came to accept that the earth was no longer flat. I think it was like that for me. Gradually, the most basic assumptions of my existence—the very ground I was walking on—shifted beneath me. It crumbled and I felt like I was falling. I no longer knew anything."
For the second time, Tizzie spoke up from the back—which startled Jude. He hadn't realized that she was listening.
"Tell us about Julia," she said in a thin voice.
And so Skyler did. He told of what she'd been like as a young child and how he'd always looked for her in lectures without even realizing it, a quick once-over to make sure that that precious head of tousled hair was somewhere around. He talked about the bond between Raisin, himself and Julia.
"I think on some level I was secretly jealous," he said. "I thought she must love Raisin more than me—I mean, that made sense, he was so much bigger and stronger and smarter. So when she got sick, when she was operated on and got that big scar on her back and I snuck into the sick bay to see her and we held hands—that opened up a whole wonderful world to me."
He told how they had consoled each other when Raisin died. And then finally he told the story of how they had come to have sex—how they'd stopped taking the pills and felt a new vigor. He described the signal for a rendezvous—the rock under the oak tree—their secret meetings in the old lighthouse with the flapping of the birds' wings, the rush of excitement when they'd first touched each other's bodies. As he talked, an emotion welled up inside and closed off the back of his throat and so he had to stop.
He felt a hand on his shoulder—Tizzie's. Her touch was light, but it felt heavy, charged.
"But what was she like?" she asked.
Skyler drew a deep breath.
A lot like you.
He thought it but didn't say it. He turned to look at her and felt she could read his mind. He didn't answer right away, because he was afraid of what he might blurt out.
Then he told of the day Dr. Rincon and an assembly of dignitaries had come from the mainland. The Jimminies and everyone else had prepared for days. The Campus had been spruced up, the lawns mowed, even the Big House looked presentable. They'd been amazed as planeload after planeload had arrived and disgorged well-dressed guests who'd f
iled into the manor. Then Rincon himself had arrived—but the Jimminies were not allowed to see him; they were confined to their barracks. That evening, Skyler and Julia had formed a daring plan: they would sneak out and spy upon the gathering. They'd climbed a tree next to the Big House and looked in an upper-story window, but they couldn't see Dr. Rincon. Then they'd stolen into the basement. Julia had climbed into a dumbwaiter and ascended to the first floor, where the assembly was underway. She'd pried open the doors an inch or so and peered through as the founder was speaking, but she couldn't get a good look because of her poor eyesight. Skyler had cursed himself for letting her take the risk, but she'd soon come back down and they'd run back to their barracks.
"She heard him talking over and over about 'the Lamb.' And we thought he was talking about Christ—we had heard the expression 'the Lamb of God.' We thought he must have gone crazy with religion. Now I know he was talking about Dolly. They must have been afraid that the news about cloning was going to affect them."
The rain lessened and then stopped altogether as suddenly as it had started. Jude turned off the wipers. The black tarmac ahead was streaked with puddles and sent up puffs of steam.
Skyler told about their growing doubts and suspicions, the trip to the Records Room and the discovery of Patrick's body and how Julia had learned the computers and become convinced she had discovered the passwords to unlock the files.
And then at long last, he came to the part he had dreaded, the final chapter. Speaking haltingly, he told about Julia's death—how she'd disappeared and he had run in desperation from Kuta's shack to the girls' barracks and then to the Big House, how he'd found her body in the basement morgue, lying on the slab, serenely white and beautiful but grotesquely maimed, cut open, her insides missing.
And when he finished with that description, he finished with his tale and could not bring himself to talk about his escape or anything else.
The car was silent. Jude lighted a cigarette, and Tizzie sat with her knees raised, hugging them, her head to one side, staring through the raindrop-streaked window.