HEX (2 page)

Back inside, they set the table. Steve was unfolding paper containers of chicken chow mein and General Tso's tofu when the kitchen door flew open again. In came Matt's riding boots, rolling over the floor, as Fletcher continued barking nonstop. “Fletcher, Jesus!” he heard his youngest yell. “What's wrong with you?”

Matt entered the dining room with his cap askew and his riding breeches crumpled up in his arms. “Ooh, yummy. Chinese,” he said, hugging both parents as he passed. “I'll be right down!” And, like Tyler, he ran upstairs.

Steve regarded the dining room at around this hour as the epicenter of the Grant family, the place where the engaging lives of individual family members slid over each other like tectonic plates and came to rest. It wasn't just that they honored the tradition of eating together whenever possible, it had to do with the room itself: a trusted place in the house, framed with railroad ties and a million-dollar view of the stable and the horse pen at the back of the yard, with the steeply rising wilderness of Philosopher's Deep right behind it.

He was serving up sesame noodles when Tyler entered the dining room with the GoPro sports cam he'd been given for his seventeenth birthday. Its red
REC
light was now on.

“Turn that thing off,” Steve said firmly. “You know the rules when Gramma's here.”

“I'm not filming her,” Tyler said, pulling up a chair at the other end of the table. “Look, you can't even get her in the picture from here. And you know she hardly ever walks when she's inside.” He gave his dad an innocent smile and switched on his typical YouTube voice (music 1.2, flair 2.0): “And now it's time to ask you a question for my
très important
statistics report, O Worthy Progenitor.”

“Tyler!” Jocelyn shouted.

“Sorry, O Twice Worthy Childbearer.”

Jocelyn looked at him with friendly resolve. “You're going to edit that out,” she said. “And get that camera out of my face. I look awful.”

“Freedom of the press.” Tyler grinned.

“Freedom of privacy,” Jocelyn shot back.

“Suspension of household duties.”

“Cutting allowances.”

Tyler turned the GoPro on himself and assumed a tormented face. “Aww, I get this kind of crap all the time. I've said it before and I'll say it again, my friends: I'm living in a dictatorship. Freedom of speech is seriously jeopardized in the hands of the older generation.”

“Thus spake the Messiah,” said Steve as he served up the General Tso's, knowing that Tyler would edit most of it out anyway. Tyler made clever cuts of his opinions, absurdities, and street footage, which he dubbed with catchy pop and fast-paced video effects. He was good at it. And with impressive results: The last time Steve looked at his son's YouTube channel, TylerFlow95, it had 340 subscribers and more than 270,000 hits. Tyler even earned some pocket money (absurdly little, he admitted) from advertising income.

“What did you want to ask?” Steve said, and the cam swept over to him immediately.

“If you had to let someone die, who would it be: your own child or an entire village in the Sudan?”

“What an irrelevant question.”

“My own child,” Jocelyn said.

“Oh!” Tyler cried with great sense of drama, and out in his kennel, Fletcher perked up his ears and began barking restlessly again. “Did you hear that? My very own mother would mercilessly sacrifice me for some nonexistent village in Africa. Is this an indication of her third-world compassion, or a sign of dysfunction within our family?”

“Both, darling,” said Jocelyn, and then called upstairs, “Matt! We're eating!”

“But, seriously, Dad. Say you had two buttons in front of you, and if you push one your own child dies—
moi,
that is—and if you push the other a whole village in the Sudan dies, and if you don't make a choice before the count of ten they both get pushed automatically. Who would you save?”

“It's an absurd situation,” said Steve. “Who would ever force me to make such a choice?”

“Humor me.”

“And even then, there's no right answer. If I save you, you'll accuse me of letting an entire village die.”

“But otherwise we all die,” Tyler insisted.

“Of course I'd let the village die and not you. How could I sacrifice my own son?”

“Really?” Tyler whistled in admiration. “Even if it's a village full of severely undernourished child soldiers with bulging little bellies and flies buzzing around their eyes and poor abused AIDS mothers?”

“Even then. Those mothers would do the same for their children. Where's Matt? I'm hungry.”

“And if you had to choose between letting me die or all of the Sudan?”

“Tyler, you shouldn't ask such questions,” said Jocelyn, but without much conviction; she knew perfectly well that once her husband and oldest son were on a roll, intervention stood as little chance of success as … well, as any intervention in the larger political arena.

“Well, Dad?”

“The Sudan,” said Steve. “What's this report about, anyway? Our involvement in Africa?”

“Honesty,” said Tyler. “Anybody who says he would save Sudan is lying. And anybody who doesn't want to answer is just being politically correct. We asked all the teachers and only Ms. Redfearn in philosophy was honest. And you.” He heard his younger brother come rumbling down the stairs, and called out, “If you had to let someone die, Matt, who would you choose: all of the Sudan, or our parents?”

“Sudan,” came the immediate reply. Outside the camera frame, Tyler nodded at the living room and ran his finger over his lips, miming the closing of a zipper. Steve shot a reluctant look at Jocelyn, but he saw from the way she was biting her lip that she was willing to play along. One second later the door opened, and in came Matt with only a towel around his waist, apparently straight from the bathroom.

“Awright, you just got me an extra thousand hits,” Tyler said. Matt pulled a clownish face at the GoPro and wiggled his hips back and forth.

“Tyler, he's thirteen!” Jocelyn said.

“Seriously. That clip with Lawrence, Burak, and me doing a shirtless lip-synch of The Pussycat Dolls got over thirty-five thousand hits.”

“That was close to porn,” Matt said, pulling up a chair next to him with his back to the living room—and to the woman in Jocelyn's Limbo. Steve and Tyler exchanged an amused glance.

“Can't you wear some clothes at the table?” Jocelyn sighed.

“You wanted me to come down and eat! My clothes smell like horse, and I haven't even had a shower. By the way, I liked your album, Mom.”

“What?”

“On Facebook.” With a mouth full of noodles he pushed himself from the edge of the table and tottered on the hind legs of his chair. “You're so cool, Mom.”

“I saw it, darling. Four on the floor, okay? Or you'll fall again.”

Ignoring her, Matt turned his attention to Tyler's lens. “I bet you don't want to know what
I
think.”

“No, I do not, brother-who-smells-like-horse. I'd rather you took a shower.”

“It's sweat, not horse,” Matt said imperturbably. “I think your question is too easy. I think it's much more interesting to ask: If you had to let somebody die, who would it be: your own kid or all of Black Spring?”

Fletcher started up a low growl. Steve looked out into the backyard and saw the dog pressing his head low to the ground behind the wire mesh and baring his teeth like a wild animal.

“Jesus, what's wrong with that dog?” Matt asked. “Apart from being a total nutcake.”

“Gramma wouldn't happen to be around, would she?” Steve asked innocently.

Jocelyn dropped her shoulders and looked around the room. “I haven't seen her at all today.” With feigned urgency, she glanced from the backyard to the split red oak at the end of their property, where the path led up the hill: the red oak with the three security cams mounted to the trunk, peering into various corners of Philosopher's Deep.

“
Gramma wouldn't happen to be around.
” Matt grinned with his mouth full. “What'll Tyler's followers make of that?” Jocelyn's mother, a long-term Alzheimer's patient, had died of a lung infection a year and a half before; Steve's had been dead eight years. Not that YouTube knew, but Matt was having fun.

Steve turned to his oldest son and said, with a severity that was not at all like him, “Tyler, you're cutting this out, right?”

“Sure, Dad.” He switched voices to TylerFlow95. “Let's bring the question closer to home. If you had to let somebody die,
o padre mio,
who would it be: your own kid or the rest of our town?”

“Would that include my wife and my other child?” Steve asked.

“Yes, Dad,” Matt said with a condescending laugh. “Who would you save, Tyler or me?”

“Matthew!” Jocelyn cried. “That's enough of that.”

“I'd save you both,” Steve said solemnly.

Tyler grinned. “That's politically correct, Dad.”

Just then, Matt leaned back too far on his chair legs. He flapped his arms wildly in an attempt to regain his balance, red sauce flying off his spoon, but the chair fell backward with a crash and Matt rolled onto the floor. Jocelyn jumped up, startling Tyler and causing the GoPro to slip out of his hands and fall into his plate of chicken chow mein. Steve saw that Matt, still with the flexibility of a child, had caught his fall with an outstretched elbow and was giggling hysterically, lying on his back and trying to hold the towel around his waist with one hand.

“Little bro overboard!” Tyler whooped. He aimed the GoPro down to get a good shot, wiping off the chow mein.

As if he'd received an electric shock, Matt began shaking: The expression on his face turned into a grimace of horror, he knocked his shin against the table leg, and he uttered a loud cry.

*   *   *

FIRST: NO ONE
will ever see the images that Tyler's GoPro is shooting at that moment. That's unfortunate, because if anyone were to study them they'd be witness to something very odd, perhaps even unsettling—to put it mildly. The images are crystal clear, and images don't lie. Even though it's a small camera, the GoPro captures reality at an astonishing sixty frames per second, producing spectacular clips taken from Tyler's mountain bike racing down Mount Misery, or when he goes snorkeling with his friends in Popolopen Lake, even when the water's cloudy.

The images show Jocelyn and Steve staring with bewilderment past their youngest son, still on the floor, and into the living room. In the middle of the image is a spot of congealed noodles and egg yolk. The camera jerks the other way and Matt is no longer lying on the floor; he rights himself with a spastic twist of his body and shrinks back, bumping into the table. Somehow he has managed to keep the towel around his waist. For a moment it feels as though we're standing on the undulating deck of a ship, for everything we see is slanted, as if the whole dining room has come apart at the seams. Then the picture straightens up, and although the splotch of noodle hides most of our view, we see a gaunt woman making her way through the living room toward the open French doors to the kitchen. Until then, she has stood motionless in Jocelyn's Limbo, but suddenly she's right there, as if she has taken pity on the fallen Matt. The dishcloth has slid off her face, and in a fraction of a second—maybe it's only a couple of frames—we see that her eyes are sewn shut, and so is her mouth. It all happens so fast that it's over before we know it, but it's the kind of image that burns itself into your brain, not just long enough to pull us out of our comfort zone but to completely disrupt it.

Then Steve rushes forward and slides the French doors to the living room shut. Behind the half-translucent stained glass we see the gaunt woman come to a halt. We even hear the slight vibration of the glass as she bumps up against the pane.

Steve's good humor has vanished. “Turn that thing off,” he says. “Now.” He's deadly serious, and although his face is hidden from view (all we can see is his T-shirt and jeans, and the finger of his free hand stabbing at the lens), we can all imagine what it must look like. Then everything goes black.

*   *   *

“SHE CAME RIGHT
for me!” Matt shouted. “She's never done that before!” He was still standing next to the fallen chair, holding the towel around his waist to keep it from sliding down.

Tyler started laughing—mostly from relief, Steve thought. “Maybe she's got the hots for you.”

“Ew, gross, are you kidding me? She's ancient!”

Jocelyn burst out laughing, too. She took a mouthful of noodles but didn't notice how much hot sauce she had put on her spoon. Tears sprang from her eyes. “Sorry, darling. We just wanted to shake you up a little, but I think you shook
her
up. It really was strange how she came walking up to you. She never does that.”

“How long was she standing there?” Matt asked indignantly.

“The whole time.” Tyler grinned.

Matt's jaw dropped. “Now she's seen me naked!”

Tyler looked at him with a mixture of absolute amazement and the kind of disgust that borders on a sympathetic sort of love, reserved only for big brothers toward their younger, dim-witted siblings. “She can't see, you idiot,” he said. He wiped off the lens of his GoPro and looked at the blind woman behind the stained glass.

“Sit down, Matt,” Steve said, his face stiffening. “Dinner's getting cold.” Sulkily, Matt did what he was told. “And I want you to erase those images now, Tyler.”

“Aw, come on! I can just cut her out.…”

“
Now,
and I want to see you do it. You know the rules.”

“What is this, Pyongyang?”

“Don't make me say it again.”