Mia visibly shuddered. 'I got goose pimples. This is too fucked up, Tommy.'
Thomas stared off into space for a stunned moment.
'Yeah,' he finally said.
They both sat silently.
'This is crazy,' Thomas finally exclaimed, patting his shirt and pant pockets as though looking for keys. 'I gotta call Sam.'
Mia looked at him sharply. 'Hold on, Tommy. Think about this.'
'What's there to think about?'
'You need Neil, right… For Frankie. You said Neil's the only one who can fix him.'
Thomas rubbed his chest. He thought about what Gyges had said the previous day—about hygiene.
'Think about it,' Mia continued. 'Sam's Sam, but what about the others, hmm? If they're so keen to keep everything about Neil quiet, do you actually think they plan on bringing him in?'
'But they gotta,' Thomas said, blinking back tears. Frankie…
'Do they?'
They locked eyes.
Thomas looked away, down to his all-too-empty hands. 'So what the fuck am I supposed to do?'
Mia glanced wildly around the kitchen, as though looking for a utensil that could solve their problem. 'You gotta do it yourself,' he said distractedly, as though the matter had already been settled. Before Thomas could protest, his neighbor strode to the far end of the kitchen and yanked open the basement door. Without a word, he plunged out of sight.
Thomas followed him to the crest of the steps. He heard boxes skidding across cement, but saw only shadows in the dusty yellow light below.
'Here!' Mia called, swinging into view at the bottom of the steps. He tossed something up through the musty air. Thomas caught it despite the helium in his hands. A roll of duct tape.
'What's this? You think Neil has weapons of mass destruction?'
'No. To immobilize him. You need to bring him in alive, right?'
'So what? I sneak up behind him and pounce on him with tape? He's an armed and dangerous murderer, Mia, not an evil fucking Christmas present.'
Was he actually considering this madness?
Frankie…
Screaming and screaming.
'Hold on,' Mia said, disappearing again. This time he returned after only a moment. He began bounding up the steps. Thomas stumbled backward across the kitchen. His neighbor had a gun.
'Mia? What the fuck…'
'Take it,' Mia said, holding it out. The gun-metal seemed curiously leaden in the kitchen light, like a dead animal's eyes. 'Take it, Tommy. This is Frankie we're talking about here. Frankie.'
His heart pounding, Thomas reached out and clutched the revolver. It was sweaty cold, but lighter than it appeared—giddy light, even though it looked like something carved from uranium.
Thomas began shaking. Where had Control gone?
Your pocket, a voice whispered.
'So I give you my daughter,' he said, swallowing, 'and you give me duct tape and a gun?'
Mia began wagging a reproving finger, but dropped it. 'You're right,' he said. Without explanation, he dashed back down into the basement, nearly toppled down the final steps.
'Mia?' Thomas stood at the crest, dumbfounded. 'Mia!'
Moments later, the wiry man came bounding back up the stairs.
'Here,' he said breathlessly, holding out his hands. Bullets lay cupped like pistachios in his palms. 'Ammunition.'
Thomas clutched them, began fumbling them into his blazer pockets. 'Fair trade, I guess.'
I'm holding a gun!
He had no idea what he was doing. But he was doing it. Dead weight on the move.
Mia watched him, his face pale, his demeanor shockingly stern. 'Now tell me,' he said, 'where exactly do you think Neil is?'
Thomas wasn't sure, not exactly, and the lorazepram wasn't making matters any easier—it made his eyes feel like ball bearings. He found it hard to focus on the surrounding traffic. The I-87 stretched like an endless airstrip before him.
He had double-checked Neil's 'x' against the road atlas, and sure enough, it fell north of the Catskills near a village called, appropriately enough, Climax. Back in their Princeton days, close friends of Neil's grandparents had owned a large cottage near there, which he and Neil had visited three or four times with different women. For an entire summer, drunken one-liners like, 'Would you like me to bring you to Climax?' had been their pub-crawl weapon of choice. Despite the eye-rolling and the indignation, more than a few had taken the bait. (The key, Neil would always say, was to make them feel as though they were on the outside of a friendly inside joke). Thomas had enjoyed many climaxes in Climax. The party ended when Neil's grandmother found several used condoms (which, the story went, she had actually picked up, mistaking them for shed snake-skins) behind one of the beds. He and Neil used to jokingly blame each other, but they both knew they had belonged to Neil.
That had been a long time ago. Climax itself was just off the I-87. Thomas had passed the exit on several occasions in subsequent years, each time struck by the strange vertigo of passing a road once taken, the sense of breezing past something better revisited. The question was one of where to go once he reached Climax—his memories of the route had the sound-stage sketchiness of a passenger's. His only hope was that he would remember on the way.
He found the drive at once calming and unnerving, and he distracted himself by pondering this paradox. He had never liked driving, but there was something about the freeway, the surreal quality of whisking through city, field and forest untouched and anonymous; the sense of power exercised, encumbrances shed, of skating along life's catastrophic edge. At a poker game years back, a volunteer firefighter had once horrified him with tales of rural car crashes, of limbs stretched like Play-Doh through twisted metal. Tn the physics of car accidents,' the man had insisted, 'our body is little more than a rubber bag filled with blood. Go fast enough, and it's like throwing water-balloons.' At the time, the comment had made Thomas positively paranoid. But as years passed and the traffic—despite drunks, faulty wheel-bearings, and reckless teenagers—continued to flash by in orderly little rows, his paranoia became a strange euphoria. Somehow freeway driving had become stealing—or a winning streak that could not end.
Small wonder the road had become the symbol. On the road, everyone was unencumbered, powerful, fearless. On the road, everyone was an American. What unnerved him, Thomas realized, was the destination.
Neil Cassidy.
His morning revelation had been a reprieve of sorts. Before, Neil had seemed something elemental, more principle than human being. Every year Thomas began his freshman courses by reading aloud from The Iliad and pointing out that Hector, the great hero of Troy, wasn't struck down by Achilles' hand as most people assumed, but rather at Achilles' hand by blazing-eyed Athena. For the ancients, he would explain, you did not own your words and actions—at least not the way freshmen college students thought they monopolized theirs. For the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerians, what have you, one was as much a waystation as a point of departure, a channel through which the acts of other, more elusive agencies might be expressed. This was why they regarded madness with as much awe as ridicule. Some madmen were fools certainly, but some were prophets as well. Some spoke in the god's own voice.
This was what Neil had seemed to Thomas: a madman in the ancient sense.
Someone possessed.
Neil had embraced the implacable truth of his existence, and by embracing this truth, he had embraced not only the materiality upon which all experience depended, but all the processes, evolutionary, geophysical, cosmological, that had compelled that materiality. He became the expression of a billion suns winking out, the manifestation of a million wailing births over a million unwitnessed years. He became the conduit of something utterly aimless, indifferent, and incalculably vast.
Before, Neil had seemed the terminus of a line that reached back beyond the limits of the observable universe—to the very beginning. A man at one with his myriad and mindless conditions.
A delinq
uent and horrifying communication: thou art false.
And now? Now he simply seemed a sad and dangerous fool.
Or so Thomas told himself.
Most signs—highway, street, storefront—dissolved into the rat-race humdrum of day-to-day life. Everything was For Sale or Next Left or 65 Maximum; everything had a finger you could follow. But for some reason,
EXIT 21-B
CLIMAX
2 MILES
scored in white across generic green, seemed altogether different to Thomas. Not simply ambiguous or fraught with associations, like an ancient parable, or graffiti above a urinal, but slippery in the manner of things sentient and cynical. If it had possessed eyes, he was certain it would have winked.
It took some driving, but soon he discovered a back-road concession he recognized. He found the lane shortly after, a dark opening between radial skirts of vegetation. He turned slowly, listening to his tires snap gravel. Shade swallowed him and the wooded hollows opened, cool yet arid beneath late-summer skies. Though the ground was level, it seemed the Acura rolled forward of its own volition. Magnetic hill, he thought inanely. As he remembered, the lane curved to the left, gradually pinched out of existence by screens of greenery. He looked away, to the canopy scrolling along the polished hood—glimpses of sky through tattered black-green. He braked.
Have to stop. Have to surprise him. Have to…
He hefted the gun in a sweaty palm.
Frankie.
He wasn't strong enough. Was he?
No. Oh-my-God, no…
He leaned his head against the steering wheel. Perhaps one or two sobs escaped him.
My boy. Gotta remember my boy. He rubbed away snot and tears.
But what if things went wrong? Disastrous images cascaded through his thoughts. Thomas wasn't stupid or weak, but in all the years he'd known Neil, he had lost everything to him. From chess to squash to… Nora.
Neil always won. Plain and simple.
But not in this!
He was the righteous one, wasn't he? A father fighting to save his son? A father fighting…
He pushed open the door, paused. The surrounding woods seemed mossy with humus and motionless undergrowth. The trees defeated the distances, obscuring any glimpse of the cottage.
Thomas turned off the car. Clutched the revolver.
'Please,' he whispered. 'Please…'
Everything would be okay. He was a father fighting to save his son.
More images of disaster assailed him, but he clenched his teeth and swung his feet from the car. Fuck it! he thought. Fuck it! He'd simply sprint through the trees—fucking charge the cabin. Kick in the fucking door! Rush headlong into catastrophe! Who fucking cared what happened? At least it would be over. Wouldn't it?
Not for my boy.
A life of horror. A life spent gagging on screams.
Frankie. How had his name become a prayer?
Thomas pulled his feet in, reached out and slammed shut the door.
Such a fucking idiot!
He dropped the gun on the passenger seat. It seemed he could taste its metal, smell its oily threat.
Idiot! Idiot! The world was a great mindless thresher. Every second, spirits broken, cancers missed, daughters raped, wives beaten, children murdered. Every fucking second, the rules of narrative annihilated. Every second for a thousand years—for a million! Even his hominid ancestors had wept, hadn't they? Raised hapless hands against the dust-rimmed misery of their lives. Even the australo-pithecines had screamed.
Where was the Book of their Names?
Think clear. Think straight… Reason this through for Christ's sake!
With a shaking hand, Thomas tugged his Acura into reverse. He retreated from the lane, barging through bushes like shredded parasols.
Every second some father failed his son.
The world wasn't a fable or an epic or even a comic tragedy.
It was a psychopath.
A red Acura, idling at the side of a country road. Inside, a man leans into a palmtop. He covers his other ear as an eighteen-wheeler roars past.
'Sam… Yeah, it's me.'
He looks down to his lap.
'I'm just outside a place called Climax.'
Glances nervously out his windshield, smiles nervously.
'No. I'm not joking. It's a town upstate, north of the Catski—'
He scowls, scratches his chin.
'You alone?'
He blinks tears from his eyes.
'Just following up a lead. Dead weight chasing a dead end.' Another blink. 'You should meet me, though. I could use your help.'
He draws a sleeve across his cheeks.
'No. Not over the phone.'
Again he looks down—an ancient gesture of concentration.
'You're calling me paranoid? That's rich. Look, it could be important. Likely not, but it could be. Either way, you need to check it out.'
His eyes unfocus, as though he's counting his pulse.
'Only two and a half hours. North on the 87.'
He glances at a silver sub-compact that flashes past.
'Sure, I'm okay. Just meet me, please. Have a little faith, for Christ's sake.'
Scratches the side of his nose.
'Like I said, go north on the 87, turn off at exit 21B. You'll see me. I'll be waiting in my car.'
He shakes his head from side to side.
'Yes, yes. Look, I gotta go. See you in a bit, okay? Oh, and Sam?' He leans back, seems to glimpse himself in the rearview mirror. 'I… I love you.'
Motionless.
'What do you mean?'
He pulls a hand through his hair.
'No-no… We'll talk about it later. Drive safe.'
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
August 30th, 6.44 p.m.
From the passenger seat of Sam's Mustang, the drive back to the cottage possessed a surreal, theatrical quality for Thomas. The angling afternoon sunlight, revealing the inner complexities of trees. The war of gravel and thistled grasses along the rushing verge. The epileptic gallop of tires across cracked and quilted asphalt. It all seemed like some impossible show, sharp because it was so blunt, intense because it was so mundane. Cinema verité. He could almost believe that Gerard, who sat directly behind him, nursed a bag of popcorn.
The lie he'd told them had come easily, thanks to Control. Shouting above the gust and roar of passing transport trucks, he had even managed to apologize to Sam with his eyes. No more dead weight, his look had said. No more Nora. But now, as the world parted about the windshield and they drew closer and closer to him, the implications of his deception began to accumulate. Nothing matters except Frankie, he told himself, over and over, like a curse or a fervent childhood wish. Nothing. Not Gerard. Not Sam. Not me…
The sunlight followed them a short distance down the wooded lane, but was quickly defeated by the accumulation of shadows. Suddenly late afternoon had become evening. They crawled around the bend and Thomas saw the cottage, almost identical to the way he remembered it: the deep porch, the gabled second floor, the fieldstone foundation. There was light in the windows.
'Someone's home,' Sam said, slipping her Mustang into park. She glanced at Gerard in the back seat, then looked at Thomas skeptically. 'So who's this guy again?'
Thomas had told them some bullshit about remembering an old friend of Neil's, someone called Danny Marsh, who now lived outside of Climax. He'd been deliberately vague as to why he thought this significant, insisting that he had a rare but reliable 'gut feeling'. But he had tried to throw in enough trivial details (such as giving the man a fictitious nickname, 'Perko-Dan') to at least defer their suspicions.
The idea was to simply get them to the cottage.
Here.
'Helloooo?' Sam chimed. 'Professor?'
Somehow, Thomas knew his relationship with Sam, whatever it was, would not survive this latest deception. Perhaps it was already dead. Control did its best, but he had to clutch his slacks to keep his hands from trembling.
&nb
sp; 'I lied,' he said.
'Here we go,' Gerard muttered from the back.
Sam frowned and smiled at once, as though unwilling to believe what she had just heard. Never, it seemed to Thomas, had she looked so beautiful.
'You what?'
'I lied,' he repeated, his voice far more calm than he felt. 'I needed to get you here.'
'I told you,' Gerard said to Sam. 'I fucking told you. Check the best before date, because this Twinkie is out of code.'
'What's going on, Tom? Why did you need to get us here?'
He nodded to the cottage. 'Because Neil's here.'
A speechless moment.
'Jesus-fuck-fuck-fuck!' Gerard cried from the back.
'Neil's here?' Sam snapped scathingly. 'What do you mean? How do you know?'
'You fucking fuck!' Gerard continued shouting, genuinely panicked.
Thomas found himself staring at the dashboard. 'He marked this place on my map, just as he wrote the website address on my lamp… I think he wants me to find him.'
'Then you go knock on the door,' Gerard said.
'Why?' Sam asked. 'Why would you do something like this?' Unlike Gerard, she was all business, and for some reason, this made him absurdly proud. Control slipped enough for him to blink at the sudden hotness in his eyes.
'F-for m-my boy,' he stuttered. He looked at Sam directly. 'I don't trust the others. Not Atta… Not even you, Gerard.'
Gerard sneered. 'Funny you should—'
'Shut up, Danny!' Sam snapped. 'You think the idea is to kill Cassidy, not apprehend him. Is that it?'
Thomas nodded, swallowed. 'You said it yourself, Sam. You said you knew these people, remember? If you got on the phone and told Atta you had your SUB cornered, what do you think would happen, huh?'
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