The Radio Magician and Other Stories (7 page)

“Do you want to know why we’re here?”

“Sure.” His head swam a little. The incense was strong, even stronger than he’d first thought. He could taste it, an exotic flower coating the back of his throat. “Can I have a glass of water?”

Jennifer filled a cup she took from the strainer. He sipped it gratefully.

“It’s about the bombs,” she said. “It’s about duck and cover, and confronting the sword of Damocles.”

“I’m sorry?”

She leaned toward him, her hands clasped now, elbows on her knees. “Don’t you remember? Didn’t you have nuclear nightmares?”

For a second he relived being ten (or was it last week?), where he looked out his windows at the orange glow climbing in the sky, and the sick, lost feeling of recognizing it, too late. Rushing toward him, like in those Civil Defense films, a death wall filled with long glass teeth ready to shred him in an incinerator of instant motion. And he couldn’t move, not in the dream. It was always too late. He remembered hiding beneath his desk in third grade like all the other kids, rumps poking out of one side and hands-covered heads poking out the other. Even at the time he thought that his desk would be poor shelter if the roof came down. He sucked his breath in sharply. He had had that dream last week! The illusive dream he never recalled.

“I never knew where my family was, in the dreams. I couldn’t help them,” Jennifer said sadly.

Trellis leaned against the sun-warmed wall. His head swam with incense and the weirdness of the conversation, but what troubled him more were all the nuclear war images he’d ever stored up trying to leak out, every mushroom-clouded nightmare he’d ever dreamed. Nobody talked about nuclear bombs anymore. Atomic bombs were a part of the ’60s. They were yesterday’s fears. Weren’t the bombs locked up safely or destroyed now? “Really, ma’am, this is . . . interesting . . . but I think you’re going to have to move the trailer.” He stood, being careful not to thump his head on the ceiling. “Um . . . what was that you said about the sword of Damocles?”

She considered him for a moment, still leaning forward. “You came all the way out here to see us. Most people can’t come this far. You should see the rest. Come downstairs. Would you tell the folks outside that we’ll be a few minutes?”

Trellis opened the door. Sunlight glinted off windshields, and he could hear automobile traffic again. “The lady asks you to be patient.” The Marine Corps guy shrugged. The line looked like it had gained a few more people since he’d come in.

The closing door shut out all noise.

Jennifer opened the curtain. “Watch the step,” she said as she started down. “There’s no bannister.”

A long flight of stairs lit by a light at the bottom fell before him.

“How can you have stairs in a trailer?” After a few steps, he knew he was below the surface of the parking lot. “You’ll get in trouble for excavating on mall property.” But the roughly-carved rock walls didn’t look new, nor did the rock stairs worn to a groove in the middle appear freshly quarried. His fingers trailed down the stone as he descended, and patterns cut into the cool rock passed beneath them, like hieroglyphs or maybe something even older: cave carvings perhaps. When he came back, he decided, he’d look at them more closely with his flashlight.

“The mall’s a Johnny-come-lately,” said the woman. “Besides, the stairs come with the trailer.”

The descent emptied into a round chamber fifty feet across with a domed ceiling lit by a large chandelier dangling from chains in the middle and four muted lamps mounted on wall sconces. Chilly, dry air moved across Trellis’s face. The hooded man and Chastity sat on a long stone bench in the middle of the room, facing them. A shadow fell across the man’s face, so Trellis couldn’t see his expression, but he was breathing hard. Chastity’s head hung low, and her hands rested flat on the bench, like a woman so tired she’d never get up again.

“Where’s the lady who came down here with you?” Trellis couldn’t see a door or any place where someone could hide.

Jennifer said, “She made a blessing for all of us.”

The man on the bench swept back his hood to reveal a black border of hair around his mostly bald head. He had a vaguely Arabic cast to his skin. “We’re suicide bombers,” he said, his hand draped loosely over the knife.

Trellis wondered if his walkie-talkie would work underground or if it wasn’t already too late for him to think such thoughts.

“Nobody covers us on the ten-o-clock news, though,” said Jennifer. “People don’t even see us unless they are already looking.” She walked across the room to her sister. “Your turn to work the trailer. Maybe a cup of tea would do you some good.”

Chastity sighed and gathered herself. “That woman had kids, she told me. An eight-year-old girl and four-year-old boy. I begged her not to go through with it, but she did. I don’t like the ones with kids.”

“Where is she?” Trellis asked again.

Chastity said, “Over 2,300 people are reported missing every day. Some never turn up.”

The hooded man looked at her, clearly annoyed. He turned to Trellis. “Didn’t you ever wonder how suicide bombers could do it? Strap the explosive around their chests. Give up everything they ever will have for what? To kill a handful of people. Even the most successful ones don’t get more than a score or two. Doesn’t the trade seem inequitable? Everything for a few lives, and they have to know that their single sacrifice won’t make the difference. Most of the time they aren’t even killing their enemies. They’re just killing. They have to have seen the results of the other bombers’ work. A line or two in the newspaper. Maybe a poster in their neighborhood celebrating their gesture. That’s it. Conditions don’t change. So how do they do it?”

“Are you saying that woman blew herself up? I didn’t hear an explosion.”

“It’s for the magic,” said the hooded man. “There’s magic in the sacrifice, they figure. If they make the sacrifice, then the gods will smile at them to drive their enemies away. They do it to better the world. They think they are saving lives in the long run, making the world a better place.”

“But it’s evil. What kind of motivation is that, suicide for evil?” asked Jennifer. “And their magic doesn’t work. They don’t really have magic.”

Chastity walked past him toward the stairs. “Over 2,300 people a day. Almost 900,000 a year. Some vanish for sacred reasons. I’ll bring the next one down.”

The hooded man checked his watch. “Good. We’re running late.”

“Late for what?” Trellis glanced from one to the other. Nothing made sense.

“The clock’s ticking. It’s just a few minutes to midnight,” said the hooded man. “It’s always ticking.”

“No, it’s the middle of the afternoon.” Trellis took a step toward Jennifer and the hooded man, not sure of what to do. This situation certainly wasn’t a part of mall security training. Behind them, on the other side of the bench, he saw a pit. He sidled around the bench, keeping his distance from the two of them, and the pit’s dimensions became clearer. Eight or nine feet across and deep, so deep that he knew now where the breeze he’d felt when he entered the chamber came from.

“We have real magic,” Jennifer said, “and better motivation.” She turned on the bench so her feet nearly dangled over the drop. “That is the throat of the world.”

“Sort of the ultimate wishing well,” said the hooded man. He crossed his arms, still holding his black-bladed knife. “We don’t toss in coins.”

Trellis felt stupid and so weirdly out of place that he wondered if he wasn’t still dreaming last night’s dream. The air rising from the well tasted like a museum, a clean and dry library breeze that had traveled across a long desert, brushing the tops of dunes and rows of books for hundreds of miles before funneling to his face.

“Magic’s like life,” said Jennifer. “It’s all a trade.”

Trellis stood on the well’s edge but he didn’t feel vertigo or the normal nervousness he had about heights. At his feet, though, a dark wet stain marked the stone, and he knew before he dipped his finger in that it was blood. “What happened to the lady who came down with you?”

“Do you still have nuclear nightmares, Trellis? Do you know how many nuclear warheads there are in the world?” Jennifer stared at him intently. “Twenty-eight thousand, give or take several thousand.”

The hooded man said, “She made a trade. I told you, we’re suicide bombers. We’re anti-war wizards and witches.”

The sound of footsteps came down the stairs. Trellis turned from the pit. Chastity led the Marine Corps patch man toward them. Her hand held his as they walked into the chamber. The man’s knuckles were white. His eyes were closed. Trellis imagined how hard he must be gripping.

“You might not want to see this.” The man with the knife pulled his hood over his head.

Trellis backed away until his hands met the wall.

Chastity stood on her tiptoes to whisper into the Marine Corps man’s ear. He mouthed something back to her, and with evident difficulty, let go of her hand. She directed him to the edge of the pit, then faced him toward Trellis, his eyes still closed.

Without a word, the hooded man drew his knife across the candle, as if he were coating the blade. He stepped around the bench to stand beside the man. Their breathing filled the room along with the thudding rush of Trellis’s pulse. The hooded man met Trellis’s eyes. “It’s a one to one trade. One life. One bomb.”

He plunged the blade into the man’s chest and then pushed him over the edge in a single move.

Trellis blinked. Except for a runnel of blood creeping down the hooded man’s wrist and a single drop that fell to the stone floor with a hollow plink, there was no motion and no sound. The rush of Trellis’s beating heart seemed to have stopped. No one breathed.

“What did you do?” asked Trellis, his voice a dry squeak.

Jennifer said, “Made the world safer.”

Pushing himself away from the wall, Trellis approached the pit’s edge. The hooded man and Jennifer moved aside. From the pit, air continued to push steadily out, just as clean and dry as before.

The hooded man crossed the chamber and knelt at a small chest. He took out a towel and carefully wiped the knife blade. A hand touched Trellis’s wrist. Jennifer stood beside him. “Somewhere in a Kansas silo or a Russian submarine in the Atlantic or an arms depot in India, what used to be a warhead is now an inert hunk of metal, and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people are a little safer. You need the right knife, the right spell, and the throat of the world.” She swallowed hard. “And a suicide bomber.”

“Did you really kill him?” Nothing about the scene struck him as real. The feeling that he could still be dreaming came to him again. In a moment, he would be back to pursuing starlets, and maybe this time they wouldn’t be too slippery to hold. He clenched his fingernails into the palm of his hand, but the pain did nothing to wake him. Was the Marine Corps man still falling? Trellis thought about the line of people waiting outside the trailer, all the people he’d seen gathered at the trailer since yesterday.

“Not killing,” said Jennifer. “He allowed it himself. There’s a difference.”

Blood rushed from Trellis’s face. He swayed, and for a second he wondered what would happen if he fainted. “You’re monsters.”

Jennifer’s eyes teared up. “Yes, I suppose we are. It’s hard to live with. I won’t have to for long. There’s a bomb with my name written on it in my future.” She still held his wrist. “There may be no forgiveness for us, what we do here, but we’re small monsters stopping giant ones, and the victims here are volunteers.”

Chastity’s voice came down the stairs. “Are you ready for the next?” She sounded profoundly tired.

Trellis twisted his wrist away, covered his nose and mouth as if the air were poisonous, a contagion to be blocked. Half way up the stairs, he nearly knocked over an old man wearing a bathrobe holding Chastity’s hand. In a blink Trellis stood inside the mall, gasping for breath. Soft music washed over him. A young mom balancing a toddler on her hip put a dollar in quarters into the rent-a-stroller display. Three teenager girls wearing ear phones talked animatedly as they looked into each others’ bags from The Gap. “That color would look so good on me,” said one. “Oh, you can borrow it whenever,” said her friend.

Trying not to stagger, Trellis found an empty table in Café Court. Shoppers came and went carrying trays filled with pizza or hamburgers or rice bowls. Conversations babbled around him. After he’d sat for over an hour, his breathing settled but his muscles hung without an ounce of strength. The mall music played an instrumental version of Barry McGuire’s “The Eve of Destruction.” A string and piano rendition of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” followed.

In the music he could hear the stone chamber breathing before the man with the Marine Corps patch pitched backward, the solid thud the knife made when it connected, like a fist hitting a watermelon. But he also heard air raid sirens and the chant of “duck and cover.” And for a long time his thinking locked into a droning mantra,
the light of a thousand suns the light of a thousand suns the light of a thousand suns
(It was murder, wasn’t it, what he saw? Surely murder!). He caught himself sobbing. Seek safety now, he longed to shout to the patrons around him. SEEK . . . SAFETY . . . NOW, and he wondered how he could have gone day to day for all his years with such denial, such forgetfulness.

How would he go on from today?

Time passed. He knew it did. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was what he should do. All that mattered waited in a silver Airstream sitting on the edge of the parking lot, ten feet from passing traffic, a block from a Starbucks to the north, a block from Barnes and Noble to the south, and directly above the throat of the world, a deep, dry and hungry well.

The night guy sat in the chair opposite Trellis. “Mall’s closing in twenty minutes, bud, and you haven’t started the evening check list. You all right?”

Trellis leaned back. His vertebrae crackled. How long had he been hunched at the table? He looked around. A couple of the restaurants had pulled their security gates part way from the ceiling, even though they weren’t supposed to close up before the end of the day. The dark blue of twilight filled the skylights above.