The Wave (11 page)

26

Climbing out of the SUV, I found myself at the Beverly Center shopping mall, feeling like an escaped convict but not looking the part. Two weeks before, Krista had bought me a pair of gray cotton slacks and a primarily yellow Hawaiian shirt. She’d put a small leather shoulder bag under the backseat. It contained my wallet, with two hundred dollars in small bills, and a hefty bagged lunch. I had also brought the five-hundred-plus sheets of my memoir.

I walked out of the center and headed for Santa Monica Boulevard. From there I went west until I reached Beverly Hills. There’s a slender park along the north side of the boulevard that goes on for miles. I sat down on a park bench and ate my salami and cheese sandwich and pondered my hopeless predicament.

Two hundred dollars could buy me a bus ticket somewhere. But where? What would I do when I got there? And what about what I knew?

Krista had taken a chance on me. Maybe I should take a chance. Maybe Wheeler could be beaten.

Halfway through my banana, I decided to stay in L.A. for at least a few days. After eating, I went into the public library and set myself up on the computer. I logged on using my I.D., thinking that the government might not be after me quite yet. I was hoping to find everything I could about Wheeler and Gregory and the term
XT
.

I never got that far.

Hi.

The instant messenger was Shellyshell11. I couldn’t have thought of a better person to talk to right then. I answered immediately.

Hi, honey. I know you probably just wanted to say hey but I’ve got some serious problems right now and I could really use some help.

Sure, Err. I’m at my mom’s new house. She’s in Laurel Canyon. On Natterly.

She gave me the address, and I logged off. I remembered then that she had said she was coming to L.A. The thought that I could be with someone I knew exhilarated me. Someone who wasn’t crazy. Someone who cared about me, even if only as a soon-to-be-ex-husband.

I called a taxi. It took quite a while to find her place, since the streets of Laurel Canyon are based on mountain paths originally set down by erosion. There was no sense to them, so it cost forty-two dollars to make it to her house.

“Hey, Err,” Shelly said at the front door of the modest-looking home.

There she was. Mocha skin with straightened bleached-blond hair. She had the most voluptuous figure in high school, but back then she wore loose clothes to hide it. Now her flimsy coral blouse and tight ocher skirt showed off every curve.

She kissed me. Then she kissed me again.

“I’ve missed you, boy,” she said.

I wondered briefly if
boy
was an endearment she used for Thomas. But I didn’t have the luxury of jealousy. There were men out there who wanted to cut me just to see if I might die.

“I need your help, Shell,” I said.

“Sure, Err.”

Her smile turned into concern, and she stepped aside so I could come in.

The house was actually a mansion. The body of it was down in a valley behind the facade, which was like the eyes of a crocodile that broke the surface but whose body lay below. Four steps down, we entered into a basketball court used as a living room.

“This is your mom’s house?” I asked, forgetting my worries for a moment.

“She married this rich guy after my father died—”

“Your father died?”

“Over a year ago. Mom wanted to tell you, but things were so new with me and Tommy, and he came out, so—”

“What did he die of?” I asked, ignoring her indelicate explanation.

“Heart attack. He was on the stationary bike.” Shelly’s voice broke, and I put my arms around her.

It was an instinctual move. I thought about the XTs, how they blended together when they came into proximity.

She cried, and I wondered what Gregory had found in my blood. I wondered where GT was. The image of the bone-dry corpse in my parents’ garage appeared before my eyes, and I cried along with my soon-to-be-ex-wife.

The doorbell rang.

I gasped so violently that my windpipe clenched, sending a pain down into my chest.

“Don’t answer it,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because there’re people after me. They want to take me away.”

“What people?” Shelly asked. “Why?”

“It’s a long story, honey. But you got to believe that I need to hide from them.”

“Get into that closet,” she said, gesturing toward an oak-stained pine door. “I’ll send them away.”

“Don’t tell them that you heard from me. Don’t tell them anything.”

The closet was empty and smelled from varnish. I supposed that Mrs. Larman and her new husband had just moved. I strained to hear any word, but the front door was half a court away. I squatted there with my ear pressed to the wood until it came open. Shelly loomed above me.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“He said that his name was GT,” she said. “He said that he followed you here on a bicycle. I’m going to call the police.”

“No!” I grabbed Shelly by the ankle.

“Ow!”

“Please, baby. Let me handle this. GT isn’t the one after me. They’re after him, too.”

“Why was he following you?”

I didn’t know the answer to that question, so I went to the front door and opened it. He was standing there, patiently waiting for me.

He had on black trousers that fit him, and a long-sleeved white dress shirt with the tails out and the cuffs unbuttoned. His mane of matted hair had been cut down to an acceptable length. He was smiling, and I couldn’t hold back from hugging him.

“Dad.”

“So what is it you’re telling me?” Shelly was asking me.

Her mother and her new husband, Rinaldo Smith, were in Baja California on a camping trip with a group of seniors. The kitchen, where we were standing, looked onto bare hillsides leading down into the valley.

I was drinking coffee. Shelly looked to me for the answers, but now and then she’d cut frightened stares at GT. When we were just kids, she and my father were close, so GT’s manners and ways with her were unsettling. She could see the man inside the boy.

We tried to explain everything, GT in his way and me in mine.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The government guys think that GT is inhabited by a virus or something that wants to infect the entire world.”

“Are you contagious?” Shelly asked the boy.

“Only if I want to be,” he said with a smile. “And I’d have to want to, really bad.”

“Did you cure my fingers?” I asked him.

“They were infected, and I wanted you to see what I saw so that you could know me.”

“So I have those XT things in me?”

“The Wave, Airy,” he corrected. “Far beyond anything you’ve ever known or seen or believed was possible. But now you have seen it. I can tell that you have. You’ve been floating in the granite, passing through stone toward the chorus of the infinite.”

“What is he talking about, Errol?” Shelly asked.

It was too large to explain by just talking. “I don’t know. I really don’t. Somehow GT here is related to my old man. He knows things and he can do things. That’s why the government is after him. All I can tell you is that I saw them murder a girl who was like him. They cut her to pieces for no reason at all.”

“What are you talking about?” Shelly asked. “The government murdered a child?”

“I saw it with my own eyes.”

“I can’t believe that,” she said.

It was true. I saw in her face that she couldn’t accept what we were telling her. There was a web of worry-wrinkles between her eyes. For a few more hours, she’d listen and try to believe, but sooner or later, she would have to pull away. We were obviously crazy, and she had never disobeyed the law in her life.

Realizing this, I said, “Shelly, we have to go. I don’t want you to tell anyone that we’ve been here. I mean, don’t tell them unless they threaten you. Then tell them everything.”

“Where will you go?” she asked, sounding a little relieved. “You can’t just run from the government.”

“It’s either that or die,” I said.

“The government wouldn’t kill an innocent person.”

“They’d slaughter all of Los Angeles to keep GT and his kind from seeing another sunrise.”

27

At GT’s request, Shelly drove us up into the Malibu Hills in her mother’s new Lexus. Standing at the foot of a dirt path, I kissed her good-bye.

“When are you going to come back?” she asked me.

“Soon, I hope.”

“Oh, Errol.”

Shelly loved me at that moment. On the ride down, she had talked about her and Thomas. It was the only time she had to tell me about her life. They were having a trial separation. She wanted to get away and see what she was like on her own. They’d probably get back together, she said. But she loved me right then at the foot of that nameless dirt road. I was sure of that.

GT led me into the hills, heading north and east. We traversed the rough and rocky terrain at my pace, because GT didn’t get tired. We scuttled over big stones and through dense brush. Every now and then we came to a street or dirt road, but for the most part, we were outside the range of man-built structures. We ascended into sparse forest and then into thicker woodlands. A few times we crossed cultivated rows of farm acreage. GT was following a path that might have been paved and inlaid with gold. He never seemed to wonder where he was going.

He talked to me about things I had done as a child. He said that my mother and he would worry because sometimes I would forget to breathe.

“You mean hold my breath?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “You’d just be sitting there not breathing. Maddie would say, ‘Are you breathing, Errol?’ and you would inhale and say, ‘I am now, Mama.’ Damnedest thing.”

When he spoke like that, he was an exact replica of my father. It broke my heart with yearning at first, and then it made me mad. He wasn’t my real father. My father was an old man who had died of cancer, who never would have been leading me through the wilderness to escape hostile government agents.

“What are you?” I asked him.

“You know,” he said.

I felt a flash in my mind, and I saw the XT creatures again. This time they weren’t on a microscope slide but floating all around me. They moved gracefully, gesturing with their long tentacles, which had small protuberances like fingers all around their tapered tips.

A tentacle’s hand reached out for me, seeking a gentle touch, it seemed. But the “hand” broke through my skin and went deep into my chest. The pain was extraordinary. I made to yell, but one of the tentacles jammed itself down my throat. The appendages entered my spine and thigh; one came up under my left sole, while still another entered my rectum. Inside me the alien arms expanded, inflating my body until I was sure that I’d explode.

Then there was a pop. Suddenly I was fully inflated like a huge human balloon. I was the size of the hill we were ascending.

Even though I was under the spell of the powerful hallucination, I was also aware of moving along with GT, climbing toward a wooded mountaintop.

Inside me, things were happening. The fingertips connected to nerve clusters. Pulsing energy began to chatter throughout my body. These pulses were counts that added up—I don’t know how—to ideas not unlike the communiqués in my daydream under the blanket in Wheeler’s SUV.

Unity was a recurring theme. Onetwothree was another concept, a triangular form that interconnected in all directions, a three-dimensional counting system that somehow moved forward and backward through time.

I knew things that I had known when I was five and six and seventeen but that I had forgotten later on.

I was a three-year-old standing in front of my mother, looking up at her cranberry-colored housedress. While she was telling me that I was bad, bright forms of the XTs floated around her head.

I glanced to my right and saw that GT and I were coming to the top of a rise. Before us stretched a forested valley that led to another mountain. How long had I been in the dream?

When I turned back, I was six and on a fishing barge with my father. He was teaching me to gut mackerel. I grabbed a ten-inch fish with my left hand, holding the knife awkwardly with my right. I tried to press the point of the blade into the white underbelly, but the mackerel writhed and bucked. It leaped from my grasp and fell to the deck. At that moment I stared into its eye, where I saw my reflection. Then I was the fish looking out at me. I twisted my sleek body and fell through an opening under the guard wall.

I fell into the water and swam down quickly.

Moving through the cold Pacific elated me. But there was something missing. I went deeper and then up toward the light, along the surface and then down again.

Far off there was a cloudy, undefined figure emerging from the murky deep. As it moved closer, I held my breath and flipped my tail. And then I was in the cloud, one of many hundreds of fish like me. I was me and all around me, elated and strong.

I turned away from the school and found myself looking at a black computer screen filled with hexadecimal symbols.

Math, I thought. It’s all numbers.

By that time the mackerel was trapped in the beak of a snow-white seagull, being carried to an island beach.

It was nighttime, and GT and I were still walking. I was staggering but without complaint. I wasn’t walking through a eucalyptus forest at midnight but soaring at midday, a seagull gliding with fourteen other birds like me.

The ocean spread out forever, and the sky beat against our feathered wings, making a music that I loved more than flight itself.

“GT,” I gasped.

I was now a larva burrowing into the flesh of the dead seabird.

“What, Airy?”

“I can’t stop seeing these things. It’s driving me crazy.”

“Then stop doing it,” he said, and the visions ceased.

I fell to my knees and took a deep breath. When I looked up, I saw the sun rising over a mountain crest. The light was like God on the first day and I was a firmament. Then things went black.

When I opened my eyes again, the air was very cold. The sun shone brightly, but my feet and hands hurt from the chill. GT squatted next to me, looking into my face.

“You awake?” he asked, once again mimicking the man whose genes he wore.

“It’s cold.”

“I’ve called for help.”

“What kind of help?”

“You’ll see,” he said, and I lost consciousness again.

When I awoke the second time, I was warm, though the night air was freezing. All around me were coarse furry bodies, each one like a furnace. They smelled of wild animal, feral and sharp. Mixed in among the hot bodies was GT. I caught a glimpse of his face. His eyes were closed, but then they opened, revealing dark spaces that reflected the crowd of stars above us.

The next time I opened my eyes, the russet-colored, prehistoric wolves that had warmed me were milling around a mountain crest. GT was down on all fours with them, licking up dirt from the ground.

When I came up to them, he got to his feet, rubbing the gravelly dirt from his chin.

“Dirt is your food?”

“Sand and sun,” he said. “Sand and sun.”

“Where are we?” I asked my father, the alien guide.

One of the wolves howled.

“Near the cave,” he said. “Cave of the Wave.”

“How far did I walk?”

“Twenty miles, maybe twenty-five. What it took the Wave ten million years to pass. And then I carried you for a long time.”

“Are they after us?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “They have been passing over this place with airplanes and helicopters for months now. They look, but they do not find. They rummage around in and among the trees, but they are blind to what we are and where.”

One of the wolves rubbed up against me. She was warm, and I knelt to embrace her for the heat.

“Do you remember when I took you horseback riding, Airy?”

When I just listened to his voice, I knew that he was my father. The pang of that realization, along with one of my fondest memories, made my chest rise.

“Yes.”

“That was nothing next to what you will soon see.”