Fearful Symmetries (35 page)

It takes me a moment to respond. I am tired. So very tired of fighting. And I really can’t think of anything else to say.

“A canister.” My voice sounds dull, even to my ears. “Buried in ice.”

“And then one day . . .” Ethan prompts. They look at me expectantly, with glittering eyes.

“One day,” I agree.

“One day,” Olivia says, her voice rising with excitement, “it gets
out
!”

Joel turns to me and says, “You’ve heard of the wendigo?”

I shake my head. Out of habit I want to stop him; I tend to be bored by Anna’s descriptions of legends and tale-types. But she is watching me closely.

“‘
This is the blue hour / The ravenous night . . .
’” Joel quotes. He pauses, looking at me. When I show no sign of recognition, he moves on. “It’s a Native American legend.” (Anna winces at his word choice.) “A cannibal spirit that possesses a person and makes him want to feed on human flesh. Particularly friends and family members.”

“We always hurt the ones we love.” Anna is smiling sadly to herself.

“Vampire and werewolf stories are similar that way,” Joel reflects. “But I think the wendigo’s scarier.”

“Why?”

“Because of the way it’s transmitted.”

Joel smirks and preens a little. I know he wants me to ask him about the transmission. I don’t want to ask him. I try to catch Anna’s eye, but she isn’t looking at me. And I can’t figure out a way to exit this conversation. So I turn back to Joel, and ask him, “How?”

This, ultimately, is my tragedy. I go along with things.

“Anyone can become a wendigo,” Joel says. “It’s a culturally transmitted madness. That’s actually documented, by the way. Wendigo psychosis.”

“Which means?”

“As soon as you learn about the wendigo, you can turn into a wendigo.” He grins triumphantly, haloed by the amber light of the museum. “Just by listening to this, you’ve been infected.”

I feel a flash of anger. Even now, all these years later, I still want to punch him.

I think I could forgive Joel for telling me about the wendigo. But I can’t forgive him for that grin.

Me, I apologize. I don’t know if that makes it any easier. I was just trying to make sense of things. And it was easier for me to do that on paper.

Even in reading these words, you have been infected.

This is the blue hour. The ravenous night.

I find Macleay in the kitchenette. His body is bent like a broken straw. He looks dead. But I can hear his breath, even above the sound of the wind. The slow pump of blood in his veins.

His eyes slide open as I approach. Puppet’s eyes.

“Still alive, Hui?” He gives a mad, wet giggle.

I sink down in a crouch before him. I’m salivating at the metallic taint of blood in the air. This disgusts me. I wish I didn’t know what was going to happen next.

“It’s the canister,” Macleay says and smiles. His face slides into the same holy-fool expression that Bannerjee’s wore at the end. “Not from this planet after all.”

His smugness irritates me. Like Bannerjee, he thinks he has found an explanation. Bannerjee blamed ghosts. Macleay wants aliens. I suppose it does no harm to let them believe they figured it out at the end. That there was an answer.

“What happened?” I rasp, trying to delay the inevitable.

“Sanderson,” Macleay whispers. He smiles a red smile. “I thought he was all right. But he fooled me. The son-of-a-bitch.”

“Where is he?”

Macleay rolls his eyes towards the door.
Outside. In the death-storm.

I hear a gasp behind me and know that Olivia has trailed me into the kitchen. I motion her back with my free arm. I don’t want her to see my face.

“Get him for me, will you?” The shred that remains of Macleay wants vengeance. I nod, to keep him happy.

The crunch of bone fills my mouth and I try to think about other things. About the line I once came across in an old explorer narrative that Bannerjee had picked up in Anchorage. “The North has induced some degree of insanity in the men.”

The North has induced some degree of insanity in the men.
It’s untrue, of course. One of those annoying stories that southerners like to tell about the Arctic. But we bring those stories with us when we come up here.

My opinion? I don’t think there was anything in that canister. There didn’t need to be. All it needed was our stories.

“Sanderson’s putting gasoline around the building,” Olivia announces in a detached voice. I nod. I can smell it, an ugly, thick stench that corrupts the taste of blood in my mouth. I clamber to my feet, ignoring the stickiness on my hands and face.

I’ve always been good at ignoring uncomfortable truths. The wariness in Anna’s eyes. Macleay’s corpse at my feet. The children.

The only excuse I can make is that, when things descend into nightmare, you cling to the parts of the story you want to believe in.

“Hui!” Somewhere, Sanderson is screaming my name. He wants to test his story against mine. I grin a death-mask grin and click my nails together. I can feel my body stretching to accommodate the life it has devoured.

“Don’t worry,” I tell my silent, ghost-faced children. “I’ll protect you.”

I put my hand on the howling door. I pull it open.

This is the blue hour. The ravenous night.

“Oh bury me not on the lone prairie”

—“The Cowboy’s Lament”

“It’s like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard.
But pretty in the sunlight,” he added.

—Larry McMurtry,
Lonesome Dove

The two ghosts—
impressions
, Lynch corrected himself, that was how Melinda insisted on referring to them—stood considering the wreck. It was some kind of van: Lynch didn’t recognize the make; although its snub-nosed front put him in mind of the space shuttle (time was, he’d known cars as well as anyone). The vehicle had been bulled off the road onto the frozen ruts of the field beside it. It had been struck on the left side. You could see where the doors had buckled under the force of the blow. Funny that it hadn’t rolled, or at least tipped, over. Probably had something to do with the height at which the object that had collided with it had done so (time was, he would’ve known why that was, too, understood the underlying principle if not the exact equations demonstrating it). The roof had been peeled open; rudely, he thought, the way a child tore the foil off a piece of chocolate. Long gouges grooved the van’s crumpled side, its hood. The windshield was a frozen explosion. Scattered around the van were shredded pieces of its seats, a white and red cooler apparently intact, half of a heavy blanket—a quilt, maybe—and assorted articles of clothing: sweatshirt, snow boot, baseball cap. Balanced on the hood, rocking slightly in the wind that whistled like a child trying to find a tune, was a squarish block of plastic. Lynch couldn’t identify anything more than its geometry, wasn’t sure—

“It’s part of a car seat,” Melinda said. She’d noticed him staring. “A child’s car seat.”

Ah, that was why he hadn’t placed it sooner. His own children were . . . Anthony was twenty-four, wasn’t he? He had been at some point. His memory was particularly bad, this moment, the worst it had been in the last three weeks. He tried to concentrate on his family, his children. Anthony the oldest, twenty-four. Katie was . . . what was she? Twenty-one? Maureen . . . . Eighteen? Seventeen? Regardless, his children were all long past the age of car seats. (Though hadn’t there been a grandson? Anthony’s—Jordan, perhaps? He had a sudden vision of a little boy wearing a red sweatshirt and hugging a toy dinosaur.)

“Shall we take a closer look?”

“What for?” he said.

“I don’t know. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

Wasn’t it? “In TV shows,” he said, “in TV shows about the police.” He turned to her. “Were you a member of the police?”

“No.”

“Then we might as well stay here until the real police arrive. Maybe we’ll learn something, then.”

“You just want to stand here?”

“The wind isn’t bothering me.”

“The wind—I’m going to check this out.”

“Wait.” But she was striding away from him towards the—what had been the van.

“It isn’t as if I’ll disturb anything,” she called over her shoulder.

Not because he shared her desire to view the carnage up close, but because he didn’t care to stand over here, across the road, by himself, with nothing but miles of empty field around him, Lynch hurried after her. It was strange to find himself squeamish, now, past the point of all hurt, but he was sick with dread at the prospect of seeing what might be left of the car seat’s former occupant. He had been fond of violent movies, horror movies, war movies—had been watching one when Anthony was born, he remembered, something with Vincent Price, lurid Technicolor—but this: there was blood everywhere, splashes on the hood and roof, streams down the windshield and sides, puddles cupped by the frozen earth. It was as if someone had sprayed the scene with a fire hose of the stuff. He had been the one to tend the kids when they injured themselves, or were vomiting-sick (he had a flash of a nail embedded in the spongy sole of a flip-flop, weeping blood), but who knew, who knew the human body had so much blood in it?

Not to mention, the things he tried to confine to the corners of his vision as he came up behind Melinda, a rope of what might have passed for sausage, a carmine slab of something, a scattering of pale chunks. Could he pass out? He wasn’t sure, but this seemed like the test. He looked at Melinda, who had stopped beside the driver’s door and was leaning forward, attempting to peer around the splotch of blood in the middle of the window. Voice thick, he said, “See anything?”

“Only what you do. How many do you think there were?”

“I don’t know. What does a van like this hold? Four, five, six?” There had been five people in his family.

“You can squeeze eight people into one of these things,” she said. “Two in the front, three in the middle, three in the rear.” She glanced at him, at his expression, and added, “But I don’t think there were eight people in here. Four, five tops.”

“It’s enough.”

“Yeah.”

The air was full of snowflakes, again, which, he’d noticed, was how it started snowing out here. No gradual increases, no few flakes leading the way down for more and more after that: this was like being inside a giant snow globe you hadn’t felt being shaken. The air was clear, and then it was thick with snow that didn’t fall so much as swirl into existence. These flakes were small, almost freezing rain. Faintly, a siren wailed.

“Finally,” Melinda said. “That guy in the Saab must’ve called them, after all.”

“Let’s stand back,” Lynch said, “and let them do their job.”

“Why? Don’t you want to know what they find?”

“To be honest, I don’t think they’re going to find much. Not any more than we have.”

“You never know.”

“Can we please move away?”

“All right, all right, no need to raise your voice. We’re all on the same side, here.”

“Thank you.”

Through the snow, the source of the siren appeared, a police car, its roof rack strobing red.

Lynch said, “That’s it?”

“What were you expecting?”

“More than a single car. An ambulance, at least.”

“He was probably closest. Besides, what good do you think an ambulance would do?”

“Suppose someone—”

“Someone isn’t.”

He had nothing to say to that.

They watched the police car roar up to the site, its brakes screeching at the last minute. It was a local unit, its driver so overwhelmed by what was visible to him from inside his car that he forgot to shift into Park before opening his door. The car stuttered forward, almost spilling him out of it. He lunged inside, threw the transmission into Neutral, and yanked up the parking brake. For a moment, he sat with his head on the steering wheel, no doubt telling himself that he could handle this. He raised his head and reached for his radio. Lynch could hear him reciting the string of codes that shorthanded the situation. He thought the cop sounded about sixteen. Once he had completed the call, the cop replaced the radio, reached for his hat, and stepped out into the snow. Lynch was surprised to see him wearing a baseball cap instead of the wide-brimmed quasi-cowboy hat he’d assumed was part of the general police uniform in this neck of the woods. The cop had his hand on his gun; although he hadn’t drawn it. He called, “Hello? Can anyone hear me?” as he advanced across the road towards the van, his face draining of color. He started to identify himself, then caught sight of something on the ground before him and threw up.

“Very nice,” Melinda said.

“He’s just a kid.”

To his credit, the cop wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and continued forward on shaking legs. “Hello?” His voice so tremulous a strong gust of wind might have carried it away. “Is anyone . . .” Obviously, he couldn’t decide how to finish the question. Alive? Here? In one piece? As he neared the van, he unholstered his gun.

“Oh, right,” Melinda said. “As if the bad guy’s waiting to jump out at him.”

Gun in his right hand, right wrist grasped by his left hand, both hands out in front of him, down but not too low, the cop surveyed the van’s interior, then began to circle it, stepping left foot across right. His eyes were cartoon-wide. Lynch guessed he was telling himself to focus on the details and finding that none too easy. By the time he had completed his circuit of the van and was backing away from it, new sirens were audible.

“The cavalry arrives,” Melinda said.

There were three more police cars—two local and one state—and an ambulance. The trooper, a wide brim over his startled face, practically leapt out of his car shouting questions and commands. The first cop croaked answers, the remaining two returned to their cars and sped off up and down the road to block it. A pair of EMTs, a tall man with a beard and an even taller woman with a ponytail, emptied from the ambulance and started arguing with the trooper about whether they should approach what he was insisting was a crime scene, what they were calling an accident. The first cop told the trooper to let them have a look, then told the EMTs they weren’t going to find anyone. They didn’t. After they’d made their search, they retreated to the ambulance, on whose hood the woman placed her gloved hands and leaned over, while the man walked into the field on the other side of the road. He walked as if he had someplace to be, some destination in mind, and did not stop walking when the woman raised her head, caught sight of him, and called his name. She abandoned her spot at the front of the ambulance to run after him, reaching him in long strides and catching him in a bear hug that he did not return.

“I see what you mean,” Melinda said. “Just look at the difference they made.”

Without answering her, Lynch turned away and began walking north along the road, towards the town. The fear, horror, that had flared in him had burnt out, leaving ashy sadness. Right now, he wanted nothing more than to put as much distance between himself and the blood and ruin that had been a family on their way somewhere. Was it Christmas? Were they driving to a grandparent’s house to exchange presents? He hadn’t noticed anything that resembled wrapping paper, boxes . . . while it was snowing, he didn’t think it was Christmas. He thought the snow was more because of where they were, which he couldn’t quite name but which he was pretty sure was somewhere in the broad middle of the country, someplace like South Dakota or Wyoming, a state where they had snow more often than they didn’t.

Melinda followed him. “Hey,” she said. “Where’re you going? The professionals are here. Don’t you want to watch them work, see what we can learn?”

He kept walking. He had a feeling he had been the one to do the teasing in his family. He recalled Anthony, frustrated to the point of tears because the zipper on his jeans was stuck open. They were cheap jeans—K-Mart special, or maybe Marshall’s—but Lynch hadn’t been able to resist cracking wise about his oldest’s inability to zip his pants. How old had his son been? Thirteen? Fourteen? The years of maximum self-consciousness. No surprise to find it wasn’t as pleasant on the other side of the barb.

“Ah, never mind,” Melinda said, falling into step beside him. “We already learned what we needed to.”

He couldn’t help himself. “What was that?”

“You tell me. What did you notice?”

“Notice? You mean, aside from the blood, the carnage, the parts of people I don’t have names for?”

“I’m sorry. It was pretty rough, wasn’t it?”

“Pretty rough, yeah.”

“So what did you notice?”

“What . . .” He stopped. “What—all of it. I saw all of it.”

“Then you saw what was missing.”

“Besides whoever did this?”

“They’re long gone. I told you that.”

“I don’t know, nothing.”

“Nothing’s right.”

Tumblers fell into place. “They were. The family . . . their ghosts.”

“Impressions, and they weren’t. They should have been there, all of them. We shouldn’t have had to speculate about how many of them there were. We should’ve been able to count them, ourselves. Don’t know that they would have been all that much fun to talk to. Anyone who’s gone through something like that—well, sometimes they never come out of it. But even if every last one of them had been standing there screaming, we should have seen them.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means things just got a lot more serious.”

The bar, whose name hadn’t registered, had a plain wooden floor scattered with sawdust, onto which patrons at the dozen or so tables around it dropped the broken and empty shells of the peanuts they scooped from the bowls in front of them. Lynch was fascinated by this, didn’t think he’d seen anything like it before. A jukebox whose contours were drawn in yellow and red neon finished singing in the big voice of a man who kept insisting that ladies love country boys and switched to the softer, slower sound of a woman wrapping her rich voice around her funny Valentine. Lynch sat up straighter.

“What is it?” Melinda asked.

“I know this.”

“What?” She nodded at the jukebox. “Ella?”

“Yes,” he said, “Ella. Ella Fitzgerald.”

“Funny, I didn’t tag you as a jazz fan.”

“Yes.”

“Not that I figured a jukebox in here would have Ella Fitzgerald on its play list.”

Lynch supposed she meant the men with their cowboy hats and boots, the women in their flannel shirts and jeans, but the contrast that impressed Melinda skated over him. His wife had given him an Ella Fitzgerald CD for Valentine’s Day, a compilation. He could see the picture of Ella on its front, a sepia photograph that showed her from the waist up, wearing an off-the-shoulder gown, her generous mouth open to utter the lyrics of some song or another, the members of a big band out of focus on the risers behind her. Had he freed it from its plastic wrapping? He couldn’t recall, didn’t think so. He was going to wait until he was home from the hospital, wasn’t he?

Melinda remained silent for the rest of the song, while Lynch drank in Ella’s almost-girlish voice, the saxophone tracing her words, the steady whisper of the brushes across the drums. How long ago . . . he had been standing in a friend’s basement den; the friend’s name was a blank but his almost comically broad face, broad forehead, curly hair, square jaw, and square glasses were vivid in his memory. The two of them—three, Anthony had been there, too—the three of them had stood in the dim den in the late afternoon light while Lynch’s friend, who seemed like an old friend, someone he’d known for decades, eased a record from its sleeve, positioned it on his turntable, and lowered the needle into place. The hiss of the needle tracing the vinyl had given way to a brash, bright trumpet, which had yielded to a man’s voice, deep as a well, rough as gravel, which had been succeeded by Ella’s (
I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’
)—Armstrong, Louis Armstrong, Louis and Ella. Anthony had surprised him by turning to show a huge grin. “This is great,” he had said, and Lynch had felt suddenly, unexpectedly close to his son.