Fear Nothing (31 page)

Eyeshine or no eyeshine, I was going to have to blast the chubby little guy without delay. I couldn’t scoot backward as fast as he could troll-walk toward me, and although I was a little hysterical—okay,
way
hysterical—I could figure the odds well enough to know that even the greediest bookie in Vegas wouldn’t cover a bet on my survival. In my panic, hammered by terror and by a dangerously giddy sense of the absurd, I thought that the most humane course of action would be to shoot him in the gonads because he had taken a vow of celibacy, anyway.

Fortunately, I never had the opportunity to prove myself to be the expert marksman that such a perfectly placed shot would have required. I aimed in the general direction of his crotch, and my finger tightened on the trigger. No time to use the laser sighting. Before I could squeeze off a round, something monstrous growled in the passageway behind the priest, and a great dark snarling predator leaped on his back, causing him to scream and drop the baseball bat as he was driven to the attic floor.

For an instant, I was stunned that the Other should be so utterly unlike a rhesus and that it should attack Father Tom, its nurse and champion, rather than tear out
my
throat. But, of course, the great dark snarling predator was not the Other: It was Orson.

Standing on the priest’s back, the dog bit at the sweat-suit collar. Fabric tore. He was snarling so viciously that I was afraid he’d actually maul Father Tom.

I called him off as I scrambled to my feet. The mutt obeyed at once, without inflicting a wound, not a fraction as bloodthirsty as he’d pretended to be.

The priest made no effort to get up. He lay with his head turned to one side, his face half covered with tousled, sweat-soaked hair. He was breathing hard and sobbing, and after every third or fourth breath, he said bitterly,
“You….”

Obviously he knew enough about what was happening at Fort Wyvern and in Moonlight Bay to answer many if not all of my most pressing questions. Yet I didn’t want to talk to him. I
couldn’t
talk to him.

The Other might not have left the rectory, might still be here in the shadowy cloisters of the attic. Although I didn’t believe that it posed a serious danger to me and Orson, especially not when I had the Glock, I had not seen it and, therefore, couldn’t dismiss it as a threat. I didn’t want to stalk it—or be stalked by it—in this claustrophobic space.

Of course, the Other was merely an excuse to flee.

Those things that I truly feared were the answers Father Tom might give to my questions. I thought I was eager to hear them, but evidently I was not yet prepared for certain truths.

You.

He’d spoken that one word with seething hatred, with uncommonly dark emotion for a man of God but also for a man who was usually kind and gentle. He transformed the simple pronoun into a denunciation and a curse.

You.

Yet I’d done nothing to earn his enmity. I hadn’t given life to the pitiable creatures that he had committed himself to freeing. I hadn’t been a part of the program at Wyvern that had infected his sister and possibly him, as well. Which meant that he hated not me, as a person, but hated me because of who I was.

And who was I?

Who was I if not my mother’s son?

According to Roosevelt Frost—and even Chief Stevenson—there were, indeed, those who revered me because I was my mother’s son, though I’d yet to meet them. For the same lineage, I was hated.

Christopher Nicholas Snow, only child of Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow, whose own mother named her after a flower. Christopher born of Wisteria, come into this too-bright world near the beginning of the Disco Decade. Born in a time of tacky fashion trends and frivolous pursuits, when the country was eagerly winding down a war, and when the worst fear was mere nuclear holocaust.

What could my brilliant and loving mother possibly have done that would make me either revered or reviled?

Sprawled on the attic floor, racked by emotion, Father Tom Eliot knew the answer to that mystery and would almost certainly reveal it when he had regained his composure.

Instead of asking the question at the heart of all that had happened this night, I shakily apologized to the sobbing priest. “I’m sorry. I…I shouldn’t have come here. God. Listen. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Please.”

What had my mother done?

Don’t ask.

Don’t ask.

If he had started to answer my unspoken question, I would have clamped my hands to my ears.

I called Orson to my side and led him away from the priest, into the maze, proceeding as fast as I dared. The narrow passages twisted and branched until it seemed as though we were not in an attic at all but in a network of catacombs. In places the darkness was nearly blinding; but I’m the child of darkness, never thwarted by it. I brought us quickly to the open trapdoor.

Though Orson had climbed the ladder, he peered at the descending treads with trepidation and hesitated to find his way into the hall below. Even for a four-footed acrobat, going down a steep ladder was immeasurably more difficult than going up.

Because many of the boxes in the attic were large and because bulky furniture was also stored there, I knew that a second trap must exist, and that it must be larger than the first, with an associated sling-and-pulley system for raising and lowering heavy objects to and from the second floor. I didn’t want to search for it, but I wasn’t sure how I could safely climb backward down an attic ladder while carrying a ninety-pound dog.

From the farthest end of the vast room, the priest called out to me—“Christopher”—in a voice heavy with remorse. “Christopher, I’m lost.”

He didn’t mean that he was lost in his own maze. Nothing as simple as that, nothing as hopeful as that.

“Christopher, I’m lost. Forgive me.
I’m so lost.”

From elsewhere in the gloom came the child-monkey-not-of-this-world voice that belonged to the Other: struggling toward language, desperate to be understood, charged with longing and loneliness, as bleak as any arctic ice field but also, worse, filled with a reckless hope that would surely never be rewarded.

This plaintive bleat was so unbearable that it drove Orson to try the ladder and may even have given him the balance to succeed. When he was only halfway to the bottom, he leaped over the remaining treads to the hallway floor.

The priest’s journal had almost slipped out from under my belt and into the seat of my pants. As I descended the ladder, the book rubbed painfully against the base of my spine, and when I reached the bottom I clawed it from under my belt and held it in my left hand, as the Glock was still clamped fiercely in my right.

Together, Orson and I raced down through the rectory, past the shrine to the Blessed Virgin, where the guttering candle was extinguished by the draft of our passing. We fled along the lower hall, through the kitchen with its three green digital clocks, out the back door, across the porch, into the night and the fog, as if we were escaping from the House of Usher moments before it collapsed and sank into the deep dank tarn.

We passed the back of the church. Its formidable mass was a tsunami of stone, and while we were in its nightshadow, it seemed about to crest and crash and crush us.

I glanced back twice. The priest was not behind us. Neither was anything else.

Although I half expected my bicycle to be gone or damaged, it was propped against the headstone, where I had left it. No monkey business.

I didn’t pause to say a word to Noah Joseph James. In a world as screwed up as ours, ninety-six years of life didn’t seem as desirable as it had only hours ago.

After pocketing the pistol and tucking the journal inside my shirt, I ran beside my bike along an aisle between rows of graves, swinging aboard it while on the move. Bouncing off the curb into the street, leaning forward over the handlebars, pedaling furiously, I bored like an auger through the fog, leaving a temporary tunnel in the churning mist behind me.

Orson had no interest in the spoor of squirrels. He was as eager as I was to put distance between us and St. Bernadette’s.

We had gone several blocks before I began to realize that escape wasn’t possible. The inevitable dawn restricted me to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, and the madness in St. Bernadette’s rectory was to be found in every corner of the town.

More to the point, I was trying to run away from a threat that could never be escaped even if I could fly to the most remote island or mountaintop in the world. Wherever I went, I would carry with me the thing that I feared: the need to know. I wasn’t frightened merely of the answers that I might receive when I asked questions about my mother. More fundamentally, I was afraid of the questions themselves, because the very nature of them, whether they were eventually answered or not, would change my life forever.

29

From a bench in the park at the corner of Palm Street and Grace Drive, Orson and I studied a sculpture of a steel scimitar balanced on a pair of tumbling dice carved from white marble, which were in turn balanced on a highly polished representation of Earth hewn from blue marble, which itself was perched upon a large mound of bronze cast to resemble a pile of dog poop.

This work of art has stood at the center of the park, surrounded by a gently bubbling fountain, for about three years. We’ve sat here many nights, pondering the meaning of this creation, intrigued and edified and challenged—but not particularly enlightened—by it.

Initially we believed that the meaning was clear. The scimitar represents war or death. The tumbling dice represent fate. The blue marble sphere, which is Earth, is a symbol of our lives. Put it all together, and you have a statement about the human condition: We live or die according to the whims of fate, our lives on this world ruled by cold chance. The bronze dog poop at the bottom is a minimalist repetition of the same theme: Life is shit.

Many learned analyses have followed the first. The scimitar, for example, might not be a scimitar at all; it might be a crescent moon. The dice-like forms might be sugar cubes. The blue sphere might not be our nurturing planet—merely a bowling ball. What the various forms symbolize can be interpreted in a virtually infinite number of ways, although it is impossible to conceive of the bronze casting as anything but dog poop.

Seen as a moon, sugar cubes, and a bowling ball, this masterwork may be warning that our highest aspirations (reaching for the moon) cannot be achieved if we punish our bodies and agitate our minds by eating too many sweets or if we sustain lower-back injury by trying too hard to torque the ball when we’re desperate to pick up a seven-ten split. The bronze dog poop, therefore, reveals to us the ultimate consequences of a bad diet combined with obsessive bowling: Life is shit.

Four benches are placed around the broad walkway that encircles the fountain in which the sculpture stands. We have viewed the piece from every perspective.

The park lamps are on a timer, and they are all extinguished at midnight to conserve city funds. The fountain stops bubbling as well. The gently splashing water is conducive to meditation, and we wish that it spritzed all night; although even if I were not an XPer, we would prefer no lamplight. Ambient light is not only sufficient but ideal for the study of this sculpture, and a good thick fog can add immeasurably to your appreciation of the artist’s vision.

Prior to the erection of this monument, a simple bronze statue of Junipero Serra stood on the plinth at the center of the fountain for over a hundred years. He was a Spanish missionary to the Indians of California, two and a half centuries ago: the man who established the network of missions that are now landmark buildings, public treasures, and magnets for history-minded tourists.

Bobby’s parents and a group of like-minded citizens had formed a committee to press for the banishment of the Junipero Serra statue on the grounds that a monument to a religious figure did not belong in a park created and maintained with public funds. Separation of Church and State. The United States Constitution, they said, was clear on this issue.

Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow—“Wissy” to her friends, “Mom” to me—in spite of being a scientist and rationalist, led the opposing committee that wished to preserve the statue of Serra. “When a society erases its past, for whatever reason,” she said, “it cannot have a future.”

Mom lost the debate. Bobby’s folks won.

The night the decision came down, Bobby and I met in the most solemn circumstances of our long friendship, to determine if family honor and the sacred obligations of bloodline required us to conduct a vicious, unrelenting feud—in the manner of the legendary Hatfields and McCoys—until even the most distant cousins had been sent to sleep with the worms and until one or both of us was dead. After consuming enough beer to clear our heads, we decided that it was impossible to conduct a proper feud and still find the time to ride every set of glassy, pumping monoliths that the good sea sent to shore. To say nothing of all the time spent on murder and mayhem that might have been spent ogling girls in bun-floss bikinis.

Now I entered Bobby’s number in the keypad on my phone and pressed
send.

I turned the volume up a little so Orson might be able to hear both sides of the conversation. When I realized what I had done, I knew that unconsciously I had accepted the most fantastic possibility of the Wyvern project as proven fact—even though I was still pretending to have my doubts.

Bobby answered on the second ring: “Go away.”

“You asleep?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sitting here in Life Is Shit Park.”

“Do I care?”

“Some really bad stuff has gone down since I saw you.”

“It’s the salsa on those chicken tacos,” he said.

“I can’t talk about it on the phone.”

“Good.”

“I’m worried about you,” I said.

“That’s sweet.”

“You’re in real danger, Bobby.”

“I swear I flossed, Mom.”

Orson chuffed with amusement. The hell he didn’t.

“Are you awake now?” I asked Bobby.

“No.”

“I don’t think you were asleep in the first place.”

He was silent. Then: “Well, there’s been a way spooky movie on all night since you left.”

“Planet of the Apes?”
I guessed.

“On a three-hundred-sixty-degree, wraparound screen.”

“What’re they doing?”

“Oh, you know, the usual monkeyshines.”

“Nothing more threatening?”

“They think they’re cute. One of them’s at the window right now, mooning me.”

“Yeah, but did you start it?”

“I get the feeling they’re trying to irritate me until I come outside again.”

Alarmed, I said, “Don’t go.”

“I’m not a moron,” he said sourly.

“Sorry.”

“I’m an asshole.”

“That’s right.”

“There’s a critical difference between a moron and an asshole.”

“I’m clear on that.”

“I wonder.”

“Do you have the shotgun with you?”

“Jesus, Snow, didn’t I just say I’m not a moron?”

“If we can ride this barrel until dawn, then I think we’re safe until sundown tomorrow.”

“They’re on the roof now.”

“Doing what?”

“Don’t know.” He paused, listening. “At least two of them. Running back and forth. Maybe looking for a way in.”

Orson jumped off the bench and stood tensely, one ear pricked toward the phone, a worried air about him. He seemed to be willing to shed some doggy pretenses if that didn’t disturb me.

“
Is
there a way in from the roof?” I asked Bobby.

“The bathroom and kitchen vent ducts aren’t large enough for these bastards.”

Surprisingly, considering all its other amenities, the cottage had no fireplace. Corky Collins—formerly Toshiro Tagawa—had most likely decided against a fireplace because, unlike the warm waters of a spa, the stone hearth and hard bricks of a firebox didn’t provide an ideal spot to get it on with a couple of naked beach girls. Thanks to his single-minded lasciviousness, there was now no convenient chimney to admit the monkeys.

I said, “I’ve got some more Nancy work to squeeze in before dawn.”

“How’s that panning out?” Bobby asked.

“I’m awesomely good at it. Come morning, I’ll spend the day at Sasha’s, and we’ll both be at your place first thing tomorrow evening.”

“You mean I’ve got to make dinner again?”

“We’ll bring pizza. Listen, we’re gonna get slammed, I think. One of us, anyway. And the only way to prevent it is hang together. Better get what sleep you can during the day. Tomorrow night might be radically hairy out there on the point.”

“So you’ve got a handle on this?” Bobby said.

“There isn’t a handle on it.”

“You’re not as cheerful as Nancy Drew.”

I wasn’t going to lie to him, not to him any more than to Orson or Sasha. “There’s no solution. There’s no way to zip it shut or put a button on it. Whatever’s going down here—we’ll have to live with it the rest of our lives. But maybe we can find a way to ride the wave, even though it’s a huge spooky slab.”

After a silence, Bobby said, “What’s wrong, bro?”

“Didn’t I just say?”

“Not everything.”

“I told you, some of it’s not for the phone.”

“I’m not talking about details. I’m talking about you.”

Orson put his head in my lap, as if he thought I would take some consolation from petting him and scratching behind his ears. In fact, I did. It always works. A good dog is a medicine for melancholy and a better stress reliever than Valium.

“You’re doing cool,” Bobby said, “but you’re not being cool.”

“Bob Freud, bastard grandson of Sigmund.”

“Lie down on my couch.”

Smoothing Orson’s coat in an attempt to smooth my nerves, I sighed and said, “Well, what it boils down to is, I think maybe my mom destroyed the world.”

“Solemn.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“This science thing of hers?”

“Genetics.”

“Remember how I warned you against trying to leave your mark.”

“I think it’s worse than that. I think maybe, at the start, she was trying to find a way to help me.”

“End of the world, huh?”

“End of the world as we know it,” I said, remembering Roosevelt Frost’s qualification.

“Beaver Cleaver’s mom never did much more than bake a cake.”

I laughed. “How would I make it without you, bro?”

“There’s only one important thing I ever did for you.”

“What’s that?”

“Taught you perspective.”

I nodded. “What’s important and what isn’t.”

“Most isn’t,” he reminded me.

“Even this?”

“Make love to Sasha. Get some solid sleep. We’ll have a bitchin’ dinner tomorrow night. We’ll kick some monkey ass. Ride some epic waves. A week from now, in your heart, your mom is just your mom again—if you want to let it be that way.”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully.

“Attitude, bro. It’s everything.”

“I’ll work on it.”

“One thing surprises me, though.”

“What?”

“Your mom must’ve been really
pissed
about losing the fight to keep that statue in the park.”

Bobby broke the connection. I switched off my phone.

Is this really a wise strategy for living? Insisting that most of life isn’t to be taken seriously. Relentlessly viewing it as a cosmic joke. Having only four guiding principles: one, do as little harm to others as possible; two, be there always for your friends; three, be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; four, grab all the fun you can. Put no stock in the opinions of anyone but those closest to you. Forget about leaving a mark on the world. Ignore the great issues of your time and thereby improve your digestion. Don’t dwell in the past. Don’t worry about the future. Live in the moment. Trust in the purpose of your existence and let meaning come to you instead of straining to discover it. When life throws a hard punch, roll with it—but roll with laughter. Catch the wave, dude.

This is how Bobby lives, and he is the happiest and most well-balanced person I have ever known.

I try to live as Bobby Halloway does, but I’m not as successful at it as he is. Sometimes I thrash when I should float. I spend too much time anticipating and too little time letting life surprise me. Maybe I don’t try hard enough to live like Bobby. Or maybe I try too hard.

Orson went to the pool that surrounded the sculpture. He lapped noisily at the clear water, obviously savoring the taste and the coolness of it.

I remembered that July night in our backyard when he had stared at the stars and fallen into blackest despair. I had no accurate way to determine how much smarter Orson was than an ordinary dog. Because his intelligence had somehow been enhanced by the project at Wyvern, however, he understood vastly more than nature ever intended a dog to understand. That July night, recognizing his revolutionary potential yet—perhaps for the first time—grasping the terrible limitations placed on him by his physical nature, he’d sunk into a slough of despondency that almost claimed him permanently. To be intelligent but without the complex larynx and other physical equipment to make speech possible, to be intelligent but without the hands to write or make tools, to be intelligent but trapped in a physical package that will forever prevent the full expression of your intelligence: This would be akin to a person being born deaf, mute, and limbless.

I watched Orson now with astonishment, with a new appreciation for his courage, and with a tenderness I had never felt before for anyone on this earth.

He turned from the pool, licking at the water that dripped from his chops, grinning with pleasure. When he saw me looking at him, he wagged his tail, happy to have my attention or just happy to be with me on this strange night.

For all his limitations and in spite of all the good reasons why he should be perpetually anguished, my dog, for God’s sake, was better at being Bobby Halloway than I was.

Does Bobby have a wise strategy for living? Does Orson? I hope one day to have matured enough to live as well by their philosophy as they do.

Getting up from the bench, I pointed to the sculpture. “Not a scimitar. Not a moon. It’s the smile of the invisible Cheshire cat from
Alice in Wonderland.
”

Orson turned to gaze up at the masterwork.

“Not dice. Not sugar cubes,” I continued. “A pair of either the grow-small or grow-big pills that Alice took in the story.”

Orson considered this with interest. On video, he had seen Disney’s animated version of this classic tale.

“Not a symbol of the earth. Not a blue bowling ball. A big blue eye. Put it all together and what does it mean?”

Orson looked at me for elucidation.

“The Cheshire smile is the artist laughing at the gullible people who paid him so handsomely. The pair of pills represent the drugs he was high on when he created this junk. The blue eye is his eye, and the reason you can’t see his other eye is because he’s winking it. The bronze pile at the bottom is, of course, dog poop, which is intended to be a pungent critical comment on the work—because, as everyone knows, dogs are the most perceptive of all critics.”