The Wave (13 page)

30

“I think I can hear them,” I said.

All around, humans and cougars, coyotes and bears that had been resurrected by the Wave were readying themselves for battle. They set up barricades. Resurrected humans called upon their memories and armed themselves with clubs and stones.

I had seen the power of the Wave’s zombies manifested. They each had the strength of half a dozen men and could not be mortally wounded by normal methods. But if Wheeler had prepared a toxin that could kill our wolves, all of my friends might soon die.

“I’ll stay and fight,” I told GT.

“No,” Veil said. “You will be better out in the world. They may not find you ath eathily.”

“But they suspect me already,” I said. “That’s why I had to run away.”

“Let them tetht you,” Veil said. “They will find nothing.”

Veil and GT guided me to a passageway that I’d never noticed before. We had already entered when I heard an explosion and then a scream.

Katya—the granddaughter of Russian Jews, a woman who had made love to me almost every night for the past week—turned, revealing a deep gash in her chest. The edges of the wound began to dry and crack like baked mud. The cracks traveled Katya’s whole body; her face was frozen in a paroxysm of pain. Her body became desiccated, then she collapsed to the stone floor and disintegrated into a pile of multicolored dust. Wisps of dry smoke rose from the remains of my long-dead lover.

Soldiers filled the room, carrying gaily colored red and yellow plastic rifles. They were shooting at the XTs without restraint. No one was asked if they wanted to surrender. The attack was meant to be a slaughter.

One of the soldiers pointed toward us. Veil grabbed my arm. “We mutht go,” he said.

I wanted to turn away, but could not.

The soldiers took aim on our position. I stood in front so as to take the first shots and keep my father and my forefather alive.

But then a huge gout of tar shot up from the Wave pit. It stuck to the ceiling and then sent out a dozen tentacles to pierce the bodies of the invaders.

Thousands of gallons of the tar rose up out of the pit and flowed down the way that the soldiers came.

“Run!” GT shouted.

I turned and ran with all my might.

I was able to keep up the pace for a half hour or so. Then I had to slow down. Veil slung me over his shoulder and continued running with no noticeable effect on his speed.

Down the long hall, we heard the sounds of humans screaming. Some were XTs and others not. At one point there was a powerful explosion. Maybe five seconds after that, I felt a pain go through my brain like an intense web of red-hot fibers. I yelled and hit the ground. It was death in my head, the death of the oldest, most intelligent species on the planet. The Wave had been blown out of its hole with Wheeler’s toxin. We were dying by uncountable trillions because of men and their fear of being less.

I awoke in darkness. I felt around until I found GT and Veil. They were unconscious, too. My connection to the Wave was small, and I still felt the pain of its passing. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Veil and GT had died from the trauma of losing their whole race.

After a while Veil came to.

“Do you thtill have the thack, Errolporter?” he asked me right off.

“Yes.”

“Doeth it thtill live?”

We opened the fur pack together. The gleaming egg still shone and throbbed.

GT was up soon after Veil, and we continued our quick pace along the maze of underground tunnels. After many hours, we advanced toward a light. The sun was shining somewhere. I could smell the ocean. We hadn’t spoken in all that time. The sorrow we felt was overwhelming. The oldest being in the world, maybe the oldest creature in the whole universe, had been slaughtered by a fearful beauty doctor.

I made up my mind to kill David Wheeler if ever I got the chance.

We left the cave on a mountainside that overlooked the calm Pacific. There was a beach a few hundred feet below but no people or boats or planes that I could see.

Veil took the backpack, and we scaled down the ridge. It was midday, and the air was cool. We made it to the beach in less than half an hour and almost immediately started marching north.

“Where are we going?” I asked my ancestors.

“To a city, Airy,” GT said. “A place where we can hide our heritage and wait for Farsinger to come.”

“How can that matter now? They murdered the Wave.”

“No,” Veil said. “We are alive in thith pouch. All we ever were and all we have known ith in there. You are in there, Errolporter. Everything ith.”

A shot rang out, and Veil screamed in pain. There was a wound on his calf. He fell to the ground and ripped off the leg at the knee with a sickening sound of rending flesh and cracking bone. He was trying to pull out the wounded limb before the toxin traveled to the rest of his body.

At least six more shots rang out. I dove for the underbrush while GT dragged Veil behind me. Because of his superior strength, GT was able to climb higher into the shrubbery. After a few moments, we heard the fast and hard footsteps of soldiers. I could see them from my hiding place. In full fighting uniform, each one carried the bright yellow and red plastic rifles used to kill XTs.

Suddenly, a dozen feet above me, GT leaped up and threw two stones, one with each hand. These missiles struck two of the three soldier-boys in the head. I ran out with a stone in my hand and tackled the third soldier, whose attention had been diverted by the death of his friends. Once he was down, I began hitting him with the stone. He was dead long before I tired of striking him.

I had crushed his temples, but his face was still recognizable. It was Jerome, Krista’s guard and lover. I vomited on his chest and then dragged myself away.

GT and I hid the bodies while Veil sat guard from higher up in the shrubbery. His leg had stopped bleeding but he was still feeling pain from the wound. We suspected that the toxin had made its way past the knee before his self-amputation.

We climbed up into the hills, using the cover of the coastal forest to hide from our pursuers. GT supported Veil by the shoulder while we made our way northward. We traveled through the night and into the next day. It was during our flight that I realized I had become stronger, hardier. I wasn’t tired in the least.

Late the next morning, we came to the outskirts of a mountain resort community.

We stole into an empty home in the hills. There was a car in the driveway and a key hanging from a bulletin board in the kitchen.

We also raided the closets for clean clothes that would make us less suspicious. I took a shower and shaved. So did GT. But Veil was in too much pain to do anything.

For hours we drove the back roads, hoping that Wheeler and his killers weren’t waiting for us behind barricades.

31

Late that afternoon we were just south of San Francisco. By that time Veil’s leg had disintegrated up to the hip socket.

“You will have to bury me,” he said.

“We can’t do that,” I said.

“We must,” GT said.

So we climbed back into the hills near San Mateo and dug a shallow grave for a man who had already been dead for ten thousand years. I remember throwing the dirt on his face. He didn’t wince or grimace. He was passive to the last, saying nothing—at least not in words.

“He was at peace,” GT told me as we drove our stolen car down along Lombard Street. “The life of the Wave and he are one. If the Wave continues, then he continues. His soul will rise in the sky, as will yours and mine when Farsinger comes.”

We ditched the car and then registered at the Galaxy Motel on Lombard. GT had a pocketful of money that we used to pay for the room.

“Where’d you get the money, GT?” I asked when we were finally alone. The room had two double beds and a small TV set upon a dark brown bureau.

“I took it from the bodies of soldiers I killed,” he said with little, if any, emotion.

“Soldiers that attacked you?” I asked.

“No. They were looking for the cave, but they wouldn’t have found it. They never saw me coming.”

“Then why kill them?” A prickly feeling was running under my scalp.

“To learn how.” GT turned his face to me. His eyes were galaxies; his skin, the void.

“Wh-why?”

“It is hard for us to commit violence,” he said. “But we knew, we feared, that our survival might depend on the ability to murder. The mission was given to me to gain this ability, and then, if it was necessary, to share my experience with the Wave.”

“You murdered for practice?”

GT nodded the assent of a cosmos.

“How many?” I asked.

He closed his eyes as if maybe he could blot out the number.

“Thirty-three,” he said. “Stabbed, shot, strangled, dismembered. Some I killed slowly and others with great speed.” Tears welled in his eyes.

“For no reason?”

“The reason is there,” he said, gesturing at the leather backpack that held the Wave.

“Does that now contain your knowledge?” I asked.

GT gave me a wan smile.

“It has heard what I know, but it has not incorporated that knowledge physically,” he said. “It knows my experience but is as yet unaffected by it.”

I stared at my father, the murderer, and at the god, also a killer. I knew that it was only self-defense on the part of the Wave. It had to learn to kill in order to protect itself. I wanted to forgive, but could not. I wanted forgiveness for my lack of faith, but there was no one who could grant my wish.

“It can hear your thoughts?” I asked, not able to bear the silence.

GT nodded.

“Is that how you knew I’d be at Shelly’s?”

“I didn’t know you’d be there until you arrived.”

“That makes no sense,” I said. Inside I was battling numbness.

“Every night in the cave, did you have dreams?” GT asked.

“Yes.”

“Dreams about confabulations between angels and celestial councils, gods and intellects, comprised of light?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe those dreams to be the product of your imagination?”

Gazing into his eyes I could still see vestiges of the cosmos. I shook my head and looked away.

“There is among the stars a unity,” GT said. “A knowing and a language that is at once life and the expression of life. You, all of humanity, are the space before the first word in that dialogue. Your idiom is like the babble of an infant when its only notions are of hunger and of pain.

“I followed you to the orchard where Wheeler kept you prisoner. I didn’t try to free you because your life is precious to me and to the Wave. I sensed you leaving with the soldier and the wife. I heard you climbing in the canyons and arrived at the same time. You are a part of me, Airy, a part of the Wave. I could follow you beyond the solar system, on to galaxies neither one of us could imagine.”

“But why would you?” I asked.

GT grinned and reached out, touching my chest with his fingers, now the digits of a killer.

“Until we arrived at the detritus of genes toward the surface, we were unaware of life devouring itself. We had no concept of struggle or evil. Our discovery of life led us to try and understand. Veil was our first human. As we resuscitated others, we were amazed at their feelings and fear, and the violence in their hearts.

“Then other men captured our chosen. They imprisoned them, tortured them, and most of all, feared them.

“This body,” GT said, touching his own chest with his other hand, “had already been washed by the Wave. It was set free to find one among humanity that would help us. You were that one.”

“But why?” I asked again. “Why not someone smarter or more powerful? I can’t help you.”

“But you have,” GT said. “You have loved us and seen through our eyes. You decided to help us even though we might have hurt you with our power.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. Why didn’t you just kill Wheeler and Gregory and the people who plotted against you?”

“We didn’t know how to kill except in self-defense. And even then, our violence had no plan, no logic.”

“You had to learn if you were to deal with humans,” I said.

“Yes.”

We sat there staring at each other. I had never been closer to my father. He had never been so far from me.

“That was my mission,” he said after a while.

“What was?”

“To find you and learn the ways of humans. To learn to fight them once they decided we should die.”

“Why let them find you in the first place?” I asked.

“Veil didn’t have the wherewithal to fight us. His kind would fear us, but they couldn’t hurt the Wave. It wasn’t until after we had resuscitated hundreds that we realized humans might be a threat.”

“It’s just that they’re afraid you’ll take over the earth,” I said, feeling that I had to defend our stupidity.

“But Wheeler must know that we multiply very slowly. If we grew one percent in a million years, that would be amazing. And often our numbers recede. The Wave is everlasting. Population is not our priority. He knew at least some of this from his studies. You told us as much.”

“Maybe he thought there were many more of you, enough to take over all the people of the world.”

“He was afraid that we wanted to be human? That would be like you wanting to crawl into a snail shell, like a whale wanting to inhabit a pond.”

“Humans believe they’re the most important creatures in the universe,” I said. “It’s hard for us to think that you wouldn’t want what we have.”

“Or maybe they know that the Wave is superior to man. Maybe we present an end to the dream of humankind as the rulers of all they see.”

“But they had to wonder why you would take human form in the first place,” I said. “I mean, was it only a posture of defense?”

“Not only; we also wanted to experience the human equation,” GT said. “To share with you what we knew of life. We were coming to the surface anyway. At first we wanted to show you how far you might go. We see now that it was a great mistake.”

“Wheeler and his people thought you wanted to take over the world.”

“The Wave is not vermin, Airy. That province is held solely by man.”

There was nothing about XTs or the slaughter in the caves on the news. Bush was still threatening war in Iraq. The North Koreans were saying that they had the bomb. Millions were dying of AIDS in Africa, and Norah Jones had won five Grammys.

I woke up once in the middle of the night. GT was hunkered down next to the backpack. He had taken the metal scoop from the ice machine in the parking lot. With this he ladled out a large portion of the Wave. This he was pouring into his mouth.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

The sounds he made were like the strangulation of a whole herd of bison. He waved me away and then went back to his feast. His gesture brought on a great exhaustion in me. I staggered back to the bed and collapsed.

GT was gone when I woke up. He had left me a note before going this time.

Airy,

I’m going now because I can only bring you trouble. They’ll be looking for me a little harder than you. So take our Soul and put it somewhere Wheeler and his soldiers will never find it. Then run, son. Run deep into the world and keep your head down. Remember, God is in you now. You are forever and the light.

Your father

I wandered the environs of San Francisco for the next few days. There was no reason to believe that Wheeler and his band of murderers knew I was there. I looked everywhere for a place to secret the greatest treasure in the world. I went from Coit Tower to the San Francisco Zoo to Fisherman’s Wharf.

Finally, I came upon the statue of a lion in Golden Gate Park. It was six feet high and over nine feet long, standing upon a great marble dais. It was a hollow bronze icon that had been there for over a hundred years. I waited until late at night and then sneaked up on the regal metal beast. There were holes where the nose was. I opened my backpack near the snout, and the black tar began to tremble. Suddenly it gushed forth and into the great sculpture. For thirty seconds, I watched God slither into hiding, and when he was gone, I feel down on my knees, exhausted from what seemed like a lifetime of hard labor.

For nearly a year after that, I lived in and around the Mission District, washing dishes when I had to, crashing at various homeless shelters when I couldn’t raise the money for a five-dollar room. My hair got long, and for the first time in my life, I grew a beard. I lost a lot of weight and took up the habit of drinking wine after the sun went down.

I wasn’t a real wino, like some of the people down there. I’d take a few slugs to be sociable and to cut the edge on all that I’d lost. Every now and then I thought about Nella Bombury. Once I even called her, but her number had been disconnected.

The saving grace of my life was the dreamtime that the Wave brought me. The XTs in me sang of all their history. A thousand beings arisen from the dead chanted to me every night and day, telling me their stories. Housewives and cave bears, scientists and jellyfish, all together, alive inside me. They moved together with my own consciousness. I was the many and the one.

Every now and then, some tough in the street would pick a fight with me. Sometimes it was to steal what little money I had, other times just because he didn’t like the way I looked. But as the days passed, the Wave made me stronger. I could hold my own against most enemies, and even if I lost against a gang, I healed quickly.

The days went by without much to mark them. I got thinner and stronger and often could be found wandering down along the wharves, talking to one of the souls that inhabited my mind.

I never went near the bronze lion in the park. I never went to the park at all, just in case one of Wheeler’s agents was on my trail.

As the days passed, I became lighter in my heart. My wife’s infidelity and my father’s crimes lost meaning. I worried about my sister at times, but I knew going to her would only get me arrested.

The newspapers, which I read almost every day, had nothing to say about XTs or mass exterminations of that ancient species. GT never appeared in the news; nor did any other strange being with extraordinary powers.

Twelve months from the day that I had poured the Wave into that bronze lion, I had a waking dream.

Liliane Modesto, a young woman who had died of AIDS in 1996, came to me. She wore a sheer slip and no shoes or makeup. It was the way she thought of herself. I suppose she looked about twenty.

“You can go back to your life whenever you want,” she said to me.

I was sitting on a stone bench in front of the opera house in San Francisco, but she and I were perched on a red rock at Joshua Tree National Park on a bright day when no one else was there.

“You are free now,” Liliane said.

“But what about the Wave?” I reasoned. “What if they capture me and find out where it is hidden?”

“You don’t remember,” she said, and I realized it was true. Part of my memory had been blocked, temporarily, as it turned out. I knew nothing of the Wave’s whereabouts. I couldn’t betray my God.

Liliane came over and sat on my lap. She kissed me, and I was ashamed because my clothes were filthy and I hadn’t bathed in over a week.

“You’re beautiful to me,” she said. “You are our hero. The greatest hero in the longest history on earth. You have even saved the Farsinger, who surely would have died of loneliness if we were not here awaiting her.”

I don’t know what the people around me thought. Some bearded black bum pretending to be holding a woman, sticking out his tongue in a show of pitiful passion.