Dan smiled tightly. ‘Well, that’s very interesting. Thanks for your time. And your unbiased opinion.’
‘The questions are always different, but the answers are always the same.’ The angel rolled its shoulders, as if preparing to leave. ‘She cares about things. Who do you think we’re in favour of, those who do, or those who don’t?’
Dan said nothing.
‘And the colds,’ the angel added. ‘Who do you think they’re worse for, her or you?’
‘I’ve got to go,’ Dan said. ‘I assume you will let yourself out.’
He headed back toward the metal door to the hotel, sloshing straight through the puddles. He didn’t want this any more. Sometimes the person you love is a pain in the ass. He wished he could have left it that. The rain drummed on the roof like the turning of a million dusty pages. He felt tired suddenly, fifty years of coffee gone sour. With each step it became harder to remember what had just happened, or to believe it, or to remember why he’d wanted to know.
He was reaching for the handle on the door when the angel spoke again. It sounded different, quieter, further away.
‘When she cannot sleep she lies awake and hopes you still love her.’
Dan stopped dead in his tracks, and turned. ‘Of course I do,’ he said, stricken. ‘She must know that.’
The angel was fading now, the steady flap of its wings turning back to rain, the grey of its skin becoming cloud once more. As it stood it blew slowly into rising mist in front of his eyes, its words coming to him as cold wind, blown his way by the beating of those wings.
It said: ‘For her, the two of you talking is like the smell of books. Do you think that she doesn’t notice when you think you’re being good about being bored? Sometimes that’s why she keeps talking, because she panics when she fears you might not find her interesting any more.’
It said: ‘This “peace” you think you want: what is it for? What thoughts do you harbour, so valuable they are worth wishing someone quiet? Meanwhile she fears for all the ways that things can go wrong and become still and lose strength and fall apart.’
It said: ‘When she dies before you do, which she might, will you wish you’d spent more time in silence? When you live in that endless quiet after, in those years of deadening cloud, what will you be prepared to promise, to hear just one word more?’
Then the wind dropped and it was gone.
Dan stood on the roof a full five minutes longer. When he stepped back through the metal door into the hotel, he found the book was gone. He hurried down the stairs, through the store cupboard, and ran to the elevator and stabbed at the button.
When he let himself back into the room, he heard the sound of Marcia in the bath.
‘Dan?’ she said quickly, ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Got caught out in the rain,’ he said, carefully, not yet wanting to go in, not yet ready to see her face. ‘I’m sorry. Had to wait somewhere while it passed over. I called the room. You weren’t here.’
‘Fell asleep,’ she said, sheepishly. There was silence for a moment. Then she said: ‘I missed you.’
‘I missed you too.’ He took his jacket off and hung it up in the wardrobe to dry. ‘You okay?’
‘You know, I think I’m going down with a cold.’
Dan rolled his eyes, but called room service to bring up tea, lemon and honey, before going to help her wash her hair. She told him about the spa in the hotel. He told her about his walk, leaving out Pandora’s Books. The two of them sat with their words in the warm bathroom, the world cold and wet outside. They decided to order in room service. They watched TV, read a little, went to bed.
In the small hours of the night, while Marcia fitfully dozed, the listening angel came into the room and touched her head, whispered to her to worry no more for a while.
When Dan woke in the morning, she was asleep next to him. It rained a little as they ate breakfast together, but after that it was fine.
Hell Hath
Enlarged Herself
I always assumed I was going to get old. That there would come a time when just getting dressed left me breathless, and I would count a day without a nap as a victory; when I would go into a barber’s and some young girl would lift the remaining grey stragglers on my pate and look dubious if I asked for anything more than a trim. I would have tried to be charming, and she would have maybe thought to herself how game the old bird was, while cutting off rather less than I’d asked her to. I thought all that was going to come, some day, and in a perverse sort of way I had even looked forward to it. A diminuendo, a slowing down, an ellipsis to some other place.
But now I know it will not happen, that I will remain unresolved, like a fugue which didn’t work out. Or perhaps more like a voice in an unfinished symphony, because I won’t be the only one.
I regret that. I’m going to miss having been old.
I left the facility at 6.30 yesterday evening, on the dot, as had been my practice. I took care to do everything as I always had, carefully collating my notes, tidying my desk, and leaving upon it a list of things to do the next day. I hung my white coat on the back of my office door as always, and said goodbye to Johnny on the gate with a wink. For six months we have been engaged in a game that involves making some joint statement on the weather every time I enter or leave the facility, without either of us recoursing to speech. Yesterday Johnny raised his eyebrows at the dark heavy clouds overhead, and rolled his eyes—a standard gambit. I turned one corner of my mouth down and shrugged with the other shoulder, a more adventurous riposte, in recognition of that fact this was the last time the game would ever be played. For a moment I wanted to do more, to say something, reach out and shake his hand; but that would have been too obvious a goodbye. Perhaps no-one would have stopped me anyway, as it has become abundantly clear that I am as powerless as everyone else—but I didn’t want to take the risk.
I found my car amongst the diminishing number which still park there, and left the compound for good.
The worst part, for me, is that I knew David Ely, and understand how it all started. I was sent to work at the facility because I am partly to blame for what has happened. The original work was done together, but I was the one who had always given creed to the paranormal. David had never paid much heed to such things, not until they became an obsession. There may have been some chance remark of mine that made him open to the idea. Just having known me for so long may have been enough. If it was, then I’m sorry. There’s not a great deal more I can say.
David and I met at the age of six, our fathers having taken up new positions at the same college—the University of Florida, in Gainesville. My father was in the Geography Faculty, his in Sociology, but at that time—the late Eighties—the departments were drawing closer together and the two men became friends. Our families mingled closely, in countless backyard barbecues and shared holidays on the coast, and David and I grew up more like brothers than friends. We read the same clever books and hacked the same stupid computers, and even ended up losing our virginity on the same evening. One Spring when we were both sixteen I borrowed my mother’s car and the two of us loaded it up with books and a laptop and headed off to Sarasota in search of sun and beer. We found both, in quantity, and also two young English girls on holiday. We spent a week in courting spirals of increasing tightness, playing pool and talking fizzy nonsense over cheap and exotic pizzas, and on the last night two couples walked up the beach in different directions.
Her name was Karen, and for a while I thought I was in love. I wrote a letter to her twice a week, and to this day she’s probably received more mail from me than everyone else put together. Each morning I went running down to the mailbox, and ten years later the sight of an English postage stamp could still bring a faint rush of blood to my ears. But we were too far apart, and too young. Maybe she had to wait a day too long for a letter once, or perhaps it was me who without realising it came back em
pty-handed from the mailbox one too many times. Either way the letters started to slacken in frequency after six months and then, without either of us ever saying anything, they simply stopped altogether.
A little while later I was with David in a bar and, between shots, he looked up at me.
‘You ever hear from Karen any more?’ he asked.
I shook my head, only at that moment realising it had finally died. ‘Not in a while.’
He nodded, and took his shot, and missed, and as I lined up for the black I realised that he’d probably been through a similar thing. For the first time in our lives we’d lost something. It didn’t break our hearts. It had only lasted a week, after all, and we were old enough to start to realise that the world was full of girls, and that if we didn’t hurry we’d hardly have got through any of them before it was time to get married.
But does anyone ever replace that first person? That first kiss, first fierce hug, hidden in sand dunes and darkness? Sometimes, I guess. I kept the letters from Karen for twenty years. Never read them, just kept them. Last week I threw them all away.
What I’m saying is this. I knew David for a long, long time, and I understood what we were trying to do. He was just trying salve his own pain, and I was trying to help him.
What happened wasn’t our fault.
I spent the evening driving slowly down 75, letting the freeway take me down towards the Gulf coast of the panhandle. There were a few patches of rain, but for the most part the clouds just scudded overhead, running to some other place. I didn’t see many other cars. Either people have given up fleeing, or all those capable of it have already fled. I got off just after Jocca, and headed down minor roads, trying to cut round Tampa and St Petersburg. I managed it, but it wasn’t easy, and I ended up getting lost more than a few times. I would have brought a map but I’d thought I could remember the way. I couldn’t. It had been too long.
We’d heard on the radio in the afternoon that things weren’t going so hot around Tampa. It was the last thing we heard, just before the signal cut out. The six of us remaining in the facility just sat around for a while, as if we believed the radio would come back on again real soon now. When it didn’t we got up one by one and drifted back to work.
As I passed the city I could see it burning in the distance, and I was glad I had taken the back way, no matter how long it took. If you’ve seen what it’s like when a large number of people go together, you’ll understand what I mean.
Eventually I found 301 and headed down it towards 41, towards the old Coast Road.
Summer of 2005. For David and I it was time to make a decision. There was no question but that we would go to college—both our families were book-bashers from way back. The money was already in place, some from our parents but most from holiday jobs we’d played at. The question was what we were going to study.
I thought long and hard, but in the end I still couldn’t come to a decision. I postponed for a year, and decided to take off round the world. My parents shrugged, said ‘Okay, keep in touch, try not to get killed, and stop by your Aunt Kate’s in Sydney.’ They were that kind of people. I remember my sister bringing a friend of hers back to the house one time; the girl called herself Yax and her hair had been carefully dyed and sculpted to resemble an orange explosion. My mother just asked her where she had it done, and kept looking at it in a thoughtful way. I guess my dad must have talked her out of trying it.
David went for computers. Systems design. He got a place at Jacksonville’s new centre for Advanced Computing, which was a coup but no real surprise. David was always a hell of a bright guy. That was part of his problem.
It was strange saying goodbye to each other after so many years in each other’s pockets, but I suppose we knew it was going to happen sooner or later. The plan was that he’d come out and hook up with me for a couple of months during the year. It didn’t happen, for the reason that pacts between old friends usually get forgotten.
Someone else entered the picture.
I did my grand tour. I saw Europe, started to head through the Middle East and then thought better of it and flew down to Australia instead. I stopped by and saw Aunt Kate, which earned me big brownie points back home and wasn’t in any way arduous. She and her family were a lot of fun, and there was a long drunken evening when she seemed to be taking messages from beyond, which was kind of interesting. My mother’s side of the family was always reputed to have a touch of the medium about them, and Aunt Kate certainly did. There was an even more entertaining evening when my cousin Jenny and I probably overstepped the bounds of conventional morality in the back seat of her jeep. After Australia I hacked up through the Far East for a while until time and money ran out, and then I went home.
I came back with a major tan, an empty wallet, and still no idea of what I was going to do with my life. With a couple months to go before I had to make a decision, I decided to go visit David. I hopped on a bus and made my way up to Jacksonville on a day which was warm and full of promise. Anything could happen, I believed, and everything was there for the taking. Adolescent naiveté perhaps, but I was an adolescent. How was I supposed to know otherwise? I’d led a pretty charmed life up until then, and I didn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t continue. I sat in the bus and gazed out the window, watching the world and wishing it the very best. It was a good day, and I’m glad it was. Because though I didn’t know it then, the new history of the world probably started at the end of it.
I got there late afternoon, and asked around for David. Eventually someone pointed me in the right direction, to a house just off campus. I found the building and tramped up the stairs, wondering whether I shouldn’t maybe have called ahead.
Eventually I found his door. I knocked, and after a few moments some man I didn’t recognize opened it. It took me a couple of long seconds to work out it was David. He’d grown a beard. I decided not to hold it against him just yet, and we hugged like, well, like what we were. Two best friends, seeing each other after what suddenly seemed like far too long.
‘Major bonding,’ drawled a female voice. A head slipped into view from round the door, with wild brown hair and big green eyes. That was the first time I saw Rebecca.
Four hours later we were in a bar somewhere. I’d met Rebecca properly, and realised she was special. In fact, it’s probably a good thing they’d met six months before, and that she was so evidently in love with David. Had we met her at the same time, she could have been the first thing we’d ever fallen out over. She was beautiful, in a strange and quirky way that always made me think of forests; and she was clever, in that particularly appealing fashion which meant she wasn’t always trying to prove it and was happy for other people to be right some of the time. She moved like a cat on a sleepy afternoon, but her eyes were always alive—even when they couldn’t co-operate with each other enough to allow her to accurately judge the distance to her glass. She was my best friend’s girl, she was a good one, and I was very happy for him.
Rebecca was at the School of Medical Science. Nanotech was just coming off big around the, and it looked like she was going to catch the wave and go with it. In fact, when the two of them talked about their work, it made me wish I hadn’t taken the year off. Things were happening for them. They had direction. All I had was goodwill towards the world, and the belief that it loved me too. For the first time I had that terrible sensation that life is leaving you behind and you’ll never catch up again; that if you don’t match your speed to the train and jump on you’ll be forever left standing in the station.
At one a.m. we were still going strong. David lurched in the general direction of the bar to get us some more beer, navigating the treacherously level floor like a man using stilts for the first time.
‘Why don’t you come here?’ Rebecca said, suddenly. I turned to her, and she shrugged. ‘David misses you, I don’t think you’re too much of an asshole, and what else are you going to do?’
I looked down at the table for a moment, thinki
ng it over. Immediately it sounded like a good idea. But on the other hand, what would I do? And could I handle being a third wheel, instead of half a bicycle? I asked the first question first.
‘We’ve got plans,’ Rebecca replied. ‘Stuff we want to do. You could come in with us. I know David would want you to. He always says you’re the cleverest guy he’s ever met.’
I glanced across at David, who was conversing affably with the barman. We’d decided that to save energy we should start buying drinks two at a time, and David appeared to be explaining this plan. As I watched, the barman laughed. David was like that. He could get on with absolutely anyone.
‘And you’re sure I’m not too much of an asshole?’
Deadpan: ‘Nothing that I won’t be able to kick out of you.’
And that’s how I ended up applying for, and getting, a place on Jacksonville’s nanotech program. When David got back to the table I wondered aloud whether I should come up to college, and his reaction was big enough to seal the decision there and then. It was him who suggested I go nanotech, and him who explained their plan.
For years people had been trying to crack the nanotech nut. Building tiny biological ‘machines’, some of them barely bigger than large molecules, designed to be introduced into the human body to perform some function or other: promoting the secretion of certain hormones; eroding calcium build-ups in arteries; destroying cells which looked like they were going cancerous. In the way that these things have, it had taken a long time before the first proper results started coming through—but in the last three years it had really been gathering pace. When David had met Rebecca, a couple of weeks into the first semester, they’d talked about their two subjects, and David immediately realised that sooner or later there would be a second wave, and they could be the first to realise it.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 7