Last Gasp (17 page)

“They don’t know. How can they when they’ve never seen the earth?”

“Who has to see the earth?”

“They must, otherwise how can they know?”

“Who? Know what?” She was scared. Her fingers moved tentatively over his forehead, feeling the lines that lately had become deeper, permanently engraved. What was it, this obsession that had taken over his waking hours? And even while he slept—his nightmares told her that.

She was losing the gentle man she had married, whose children she had borne, whom she loved dearly. She couldn’t reach him any longer, and now it had become much worse—that incident on the highway, the police bringing him home, the fuss to keep it quiet, out of the papers, the doctor putting it down to overwork because he didn’t know what else to say. Brad hardly slept but spent hour after hour of the night, every night, sitting by the study window and staring, literally, into space.

“Brad, honey, please tell me what it is so I can help you!” There was a plaintive note of fear in her voice. She felt sick. “Honey, please!” She enfolded him in her arms, but he made no effort to respond to her embrace. He sat indolently and she was reminded of pictures she had seen of mental patients, vacant-eyed, slack-jawed, trapped in mad dreams ... dear God, no, not him, not Brad. Please, not Brad!

“Brad. Darling,” she murmured, holding him, near to tears. “You’ve got to talk about this. You’ve got to tell someone. How can you go on carrying this burden all the time? You need help, Brad.”

“The world needs help,” he contradicted her. He began to tremble violently, his hands shaking in spasm. “I have seen the earth in all its glory, one of the chosen few. There was a purpose in that, don’t you see?” His hand fastened on hers, crushing, hurting. “My purpose is clear,” Brad said through clenched teeth. “I must do what I can. Let me go, Joyce. Let me go!”

“Go where?” she asked in terror.

“Only a few are chosen, and must obey. They have no choice—”

“Let me call Dr. Hill,” Joyce said rapidly. She pried her hand free. “I’ll call him now—this minute.”

In a moment of lucidity, as if his thoughts had suddenly pierced a bank of fog, he said matter-of-factly, “Doctors can only be of help to the sick or the mentally ill, Joyce. I’m neither. I’m the healthiest, sanest person on this planet.”

“Yes, darling,” she soothed him, horribly aware that what she was doing was agreeing with a madman in order to calm him. “Of course you are.” She massaged the back of his neck, which felt to her ice-cold fingers to be on fire. “But wouldn’t it be better to talk to somebody? I mean, this thing that’s worrying you, whatever it is, it could drive you”—she was trapped and plunged on dreadfully—“mad.”

“You’re right, I must do something about it,” Brad agreed. Her spirits rose. “Others must know the way. I’ll be guided by them. Then I’ll know what to do.”

“Yes, honey, that’s it!” She felt reassured. “Talk to people. Tell them what the problem is—talk to Dr. Hill. There’s an answer, I know it.” He was coming back to her. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

Brad patted her hand and got up. He was imbued with confidence. “There
has
to be an answer. I’ll find it.” He strode purposefully from the darkened study and went up the stairs.

Joyce moved after him, though slowly, feeling uneasily that they were agreeing about different things. She mounted the stairs, her hand gripping the rail tightly.

In the bedroom he was throwing things into a suitcase.

Joyce watched him from the doorway, her knees trembling. “B—Br—” She couldn’t articulate. “Brad, what are you doing? Where are you going?”

He was totally involved in what he was doing.

“If there’s an answer I’ll find it.”

“Brad!”

Fear. Grief. Panic. Incomprehension. She experienced them all in the next few minutes. By then he had gone. And she knew he had gone forever, that she would never see him again.

Cheryl Detrick emerged wearily from the long gray tunnel into the arrivals hall of Los Angeles Airport. The metal attaché case dragged at her arm and she had a dull nagging ache in the small of her back. Airline seats were fine for ergonomic dolls, rotten for human beings.

She skirted a group of black youths wearing red bandannas who were playing craps on the worn green carpet, walked determinedly past an old man offering his hat for change, and tried to make it to the door without being accosted. Express bus or cab? The trip to Chicago had been paid for by Scripps, so legitimately she could charge the cab fare, though she objected to the expense: They’d take it out of her lab allocation and she needed every cent.

Oh, what the hell. She was bushed and desperate for a shower. At 6:27 there would be a mad stampede for the bus.

She was almost there, groaning inside at the thought of stepping from the air-conditioned arrivals hall—crowded with weirdos and dropouts as it was—into the late-afternoon steambath, too busy to notice the tall gangling man with thinning cottony hair until he plucked at her sleeve with a bony hand.

“Hi, Sherry, it’s me! Bet you’re glad to see me. I checked your return flight and decided to meet you.” Gordon Mudie beamed down at her. Though married with a couple of kids, Gordon never missed even a half-chance to hang around, ever hopeful. Especially now that she was fancy-free and unattached again.

Cheryl had one question. Had he come in the car? That was settled then. Lead on, Macduff.

Once they were cruising at fifty on Interstate 5 with the radio turned low, Cheryl kicked off her shoes and stretched out in the seat, eyes drowsily half-closed. She didn’t feel like talking, but Gordon of course did.

“I said the usual things and they listened and then made the usual remarks and we shook hands. It was all very routine,” Cheryl told him in a monotone.

“That isn’t like you, Sherry.”

“What isn’t like me?” she said listlessly.

“You make it sound as if you don’t care.”

“I do care.”

“Sure you do.”

“I do. I just said so.”

“It was only some goddamn government committee after all.” What was he trying to do? Insinuate himself into her life by showing concern? Gordon had been reading the teenage problem pages again. “How to Gain the Object of Your Desire by Identifying with Their Problems.” But as usual with Gordon (why was that?) her irritation was tempered with contrition. After all, he’d saved her the cab fare and rescued her from a tortuous bus ride. She sighed and said, “Yes, the trip was worth it. But whether it’ll do any good, I don’t know. Gordon, would you mind stepping on it. I’d like to get home before midnight.” The car speeded up at once. Gordon was apologetic. “I was just taking it easy till we cleared the basin. Visibility’s down to two hundred yards today. They’ve had to ground the police helicopters.” Cheryl looked out and noticed for the first time how bad it was, though no worse than normal for this time of year. Headlights on the other side of the freeway appeared like dim glowworms in the thick sulfurous gloom. At one time it had taken about thirty minutes to get clear of the city, whereas now it took the best part of an hour.

The Los Angeles Basin was the most notorious thermal inversion trap in the world. That meant that the warmer air was on top, at about two thousand feet, and the cooler air underneath, so there was no natural upward flow. Sunlight acted on the lethal outpourings of five million car exhausts combined with industrial pollution to produce photochemical smog. This was the “air” that basin residents had to breathe, containing carbon monoxide, aldehydes, ketones, alcohols, acids, ethers, benzpyrene, sulfur oxides, peroxacetyl nitrates, and alkyl nitrates.

No wonder one hundred thousand people every year were advised by their doctors to move out in order to avoid—or at any rate relieve— bronchitis and emphysema.

The irony wasn’t lost on Cheryl that while this earthbound problem got steadily and inexorably more critical, the government was spending thirty million dollars a day on military space systems—the manufacture of which, at NASA’s Space Division in nearby El Segundo, added to the miasma they were plowing through.

It was a relief at last to see the pale golden light of the evening sky, pricked by a few faint early stars. The Carlsbad sign went by. On their right the Pacific was a flat dark mass in the deepening twilight. Gordon switched off the filtration unit and Cheryl wound the window down to breathe in relatively fresh cool air.

“I really admire you, Sherry,” Gordon said, playing the same old tune. “You never stop battering at those doors.”

“Thanks, Gordon.”

“No, I mean it! Really I do. Your father’s work is vitally important, crucial I’d say. I truly believe that.”

“If the people in Washington, New York, and Chicago had your faith there’d be no problem. Well, there would be a problem,” she qualified, “but at least we’d be pulling together and finding ways to overcome it.” Why hadn’t she said “solve it”? Because she didn’t believe there was a solution?

“You get them to listen. That’s got to be important,” Gordon said seriously. He frowned through the windshield. “But action by just one country, one government, isn’t enough; it’s got to be a concerted effort.”

“That’s what I keep telling them,” Cheryl said, watching the dark ocean. “With a really staggering and spectacular lack of success. I’m just one more eco-nut.”

“There you go again! Stop running yourself down like that. You’ve got guts, that’s something I really admire.”

“You mean it isn’t just my body after all?”

“Come on, Sherry, you’re an intelligent woman. I’ve always had the greatest respect for you as a person.” He glanced across at her. “Women with both looks and brains are pretty rare.”

Time hadn’t changed him one whit, Cheryl thought, not knowing whether to be annoyed or amused. Over the years he’d merely retrenched his position as male chauvinist pig first class. She decided she didn’t mind. It was the same old Gordy and she felt safe with him; she knew precisely which keys to press to elicit the desired response. “Gordon, dear, you say the nicest things to a girl.”

But even such blatant mockery sailed past Gordon’s head and vanished in the slipstream—as she was quick to realize when he reached for her hand and said soulfully, “You know damn well how I feel about you, Sherry. Always have, ever since we were on the
Melville
together. Remember?”

Cheryl extricated her hand from his heated grasp. “Yes, Gordon, vividly. But in those days we were single. With no kids.”

“You’re single,” he said, as if pointing out a salient fact that had somehow escaped her.

“Yes, I am. You’re not.”

“Would it make a difference if I weren’t married?”

“I like you, Gordon, and I appreciate your driving all the way to the airport. But let’s leave it on those terms, shall we? As friends?”

He stopped outside the single-story wooden house on Borrego Avenue that she had once shared with her father. Now she lived here alone, since Frank, her live-in lover, had departed for Colorado—possibly the reason why Gordon was showing such concern for her welfare.

He tried again before she could get out of the car, clumsily gripping her elbow and sliding his other arm around her shoulders in an awkward embrace. “I want us to be more than friends. You like me, don’t you?”

“I think I just said so.”

“You need someone. You’re all alone. If only you’d let—”

“Leave it be, Gordon, please.”

“Sherry, I’m crazy about you. You need me.” His face was near hers, his bony fingers on her neck. “Come on, Sherry, you do, admit it.” He touched her ample breast.

Cheryl had to quell a rising sickness. Her body felt weak and she couldn’t find the strength. His groping became more intimate and anger came to her rescue.

“Get your fucking hands off me this instant, Gordon, and go home to your wife and family.” She struggled free, yanked her attaché case from the back seat, almost crowning him with it, and opened the door with such force that the hinges groaned. She got out of the car. “Understand this. Liking isn’t loving. Thanks for the ride.” She slammed the door on his blank hurt face.

Once inside the silent empty house her anger dissolved like instant coffee granules into some other murkier emotion.