The Wave (14 page)

32

I went to work for a fishermen’s collective just south of San Francisco. My job was to help unload boats every morning from four-thirty to noon. Within five weeks, I had enough money for a suit of used clothes and a bus ticket to L.A. The Wave dreams subsided, and I could pay attention to my surroundings. I kept my long hair and beard, figuring that Wheeler’s agents might not notice me if I looked older and thin.

I bought a short-handled shovel and a bag to hold it in and then, the night before I was to leave, I took a BART train over to Berkeley. Under a light of the crescent moon, I climbed up into the semi-wilderness of Pioneer Park. My night vision had improved under the influence of the Wave, so it was easy to find my way to a place that was mostly isolated. There I climbed deep into the bushes and began digging my hole.

When the pit was maybe three feet deep, I took out my journal, which I had wrapped in an oilcloth. It was now a thousand pages long, ragged and uneven, filled with incomprehensible space languages that I now spoke with some fluidity. I refilled the hole, then covered it with leaves and branches, even though it was unlikely that anyone would ever come across it.

In the morning I headed to the Greyhound station and made the daylong journey back home.

I got to Nella’s apartment building at around eleven on a Thursday evening. I felt nervous there, knocking on the door. Her phone had been disconnected. She had probably moved, too.

A big man who wore only jeans answered. He was black and heavily muscled, with dreadlocks and a clean-shaven young face.

“Yes?” he said as a challenge.

“Nella,” I replied.

“What you want wit’ her?” he asked me.

“Nella,” I said a bit louder.

“Who?” she said from somewhere beyond the young African godling.

“It’s me, Nella. It’s Errol.”

“What?”

Nella ran to the door, pushing aside her new man. She looked at me with wide bright eyes and then folded me into her arms.

“You’re so skinny,” she said. “And what’s all this hair? Where have you been, baby?”

“Who is dis man?” Nella’s new man friend asked.

“Not now, Roger,” she answered. “Not now. This is an old friend who I t’ought was dead.”

“Well, you need to tell him that it’s too late to be droppin’ by people’s houses,” Roger said.

“When you get your own house, you can tell your guests whatever you want,” she snapped. “But until then, move out of my way so I can show this man a seat.”

Roger wanted to hurt me, I could see that in his face. But I wasn’t worried. There were tears in my eyes as I looked upon Nella. She meant as much to me as did GT or even the Wave. That moment might have well been my first true experience of adult human love.

“Where have you been, Errol?” Nella asked after seating me at the kitchen table. “Can I get you some water? You need something to eat.”

“Have you heard from my sister?” I asked.

“She’s fine, and so is the baby. She named her Aria after she came out of the hospital, and she was so sick, too.”

“But she’s better now?”

“She’s an angel.”

“That’s good.”

“Now, where have you been?” Nella asked me.

I didn’t know where to start, so I just looked at her.

When the front door broke open, I knew instantly what was happening.

Nella screamed. Roger came running out of the bedroom, where he had retreated. Six or seven men in dark suits, carrying guns, ran in on us. I was thrown to the floor, and so were Roger and Nella.

They put handcuffs on me and covered my head with a bag while Nella cursed at them.

I didn’t know what they were doing with me, but it didn’t matter. I was safe from their machinations, their plans to murder a superior being. All of the kicks and punches were reminders that I had defeated mankind and saved the Black God of Earth.

I was thrown into a dark, damp cell. They took the bag off my head, but my hands remained chained behind my back. At one point three men came in and took blood samples from my arm. I didn’t fight them. I didn’t worry about the darkness or the cold. Many a night in San Francisco, I had slept on the street when the fog brought a chill in that went right through me. My hands hurt only until they went numb. And the Wave returned to me. It whispered rousing tales of dung beetles and crocodiles. I flowed through a dozen life-forms before the door to my cell opened again. I immediately recognized the silhouette in the hall.

“Dr. Wheeler,” I said.

“Hello, Errol.”

Two soldiers came and in and pulled me to my feet. They took off my chains. I squinted past them at the green-eyed mass murderer.

“How’s your wife?” I asked him.

“Thank you for asking,” he said pleasantly. “She was killed in an automobile accident two months after you escaped.”

The next day found us in the secret bunker where I had first seen the atrocities that Wheeler had committed. We were sitting in a comfortable room with wooden chairs and a long Formica-topped table. Wheeler served me coffee and sweet buns. He was smiling in a most self-assured manner.

“Where have you been?” he asked me.

“San Francisco.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Hiding from you.”

“What did I ever do to make you fear me, Errol?” Wheeler seemed almost pained. “You were a guest in my house.”

“Krista told me that Dr. Gregory wanted to classify me XT. I decided to run.”

I could see that David Wheeler was surprised by his wife’s betrayal. He was more hurt by that disloyalty, it seemed, than he was by her death.

“What did you do in San Francisco?”

“Lived in the streets, drank wine, got into fights.”

“Where’s GT?”

“He left me long ago. Before I even met you.”

Wheeler stared at me. He sensed that I was more of an opponent than I had been sixteen months earlier.

“The XTs are all dead,” he said.

“Then how could you be looking for GT?”

“The deaths are absolute. The victims are disintegrated, turned into dust. The dead were never identified.”

“You killed them all?”

“Almost,” Wheeler said with a half-smile. “After further testing, Gregory found out that the infection is not communicable. We destroyed the pit that held the contagion, but we left a few of the ghouls alive to study. Come with me.”

He led me to an elevator that went down to the prisoner level of XT-1. Standing there, I remembered my vow to kill him. But he had said that some of the XTs were still alive. If I attacked him, his soldiers would surely slaughter me. In order to help my father’s race, I held back.

The doors opened in the wide hall of cells that I had witnessed so long ago. On my right was the room where the man had sat in the cage filled with carbon monoxide. All of the cells we passed were empty. Some of them contained piles of multicolored dust, marking the passing of demigods.

After a long walk, we came to a door that led to a smaller hall. Here there were five glass-walled cells. Four of these were occupied by prisoners—two men and two women.

One of the men was GT.

He waved at me and mouthed
Airy.

“Here is the last of the infestation,” Wheeler proclaimed. “Broken down and destroyed, unable to leave the corpses they inhabit. Our work here has saved the world.”

“Why did you ask about my father if you knew he was alive?”

“To see what you would say.”

It was then that I recommitted myself to Wheeler’s death. I was about to jump on him, when I was grabbed by four strong men who rushed in behind me. They chained me hand and foot and then threw me into the empty glass cage.

I was ranting, screaming, cursing at Wheeler.

“You’re the criminal!” I shouted. “You’re the one who needs to die!”

“I’m not a criminal,” he said. “I didn’t commit genocide. I merely contained a pathogen. You can see that I’ve left some of the specimens alive, here in my own private zoo.”

He grinned, showing all of his teeth. I realized that somehow along the way, the plastic surgeon had gone mad.

33

“Don’t worry, Airy,” a voice in my head said. “He believes that we are defeated, and so we are victorious.”

The other three inmates—an Asian man who wore a name tag that said
MONGOOSE
, and two young women named Penelope and Renata—were silent.

By that time I was uncertain about what had really happened with me. There was something about GT that made me nervous and afraid, but I couldn’t remember what. And then there was the Wave. It was somewhere . . . San Francisco, I thought.

“He will test you, son,” GT whispered in my mind. “He will push you hard. But rejoice. He can never win, and you, Errol, can never lose.”

GT’s meaning came clear within the next few minutes. Wheeler returned to the cell block with two men wearing nylon protective suits and carrying a metal canister connected to a corrugated plastic hose. They attached the hose’s nozzle to a conduit on my cell. When one of them turned a knob, I could hear the hissing of gas, and I detected a slight sweet odor.

My heart started beating fast and faster; my head felt as if it were under heavy pressure.

I awoke on the cot in my cell. Wheeler was standing outside, looking down on me.

“You died, Mr. Porter.”

“Then why the fuck am I still lookin’ at your ugly face?”

“Well”—he smiled—“almost died. The gas we gave you has no effect on these other monsters. So I guess you’re still human. How are you feeling?”

“Like shit.”

“Pull yourself together. You have a guest.”

The other glass cells were empty.

“Where are the others?” I asked Wheeler.

“We make the exhibits go into their dens most of the time. To be out here is a privilege that they rarely enjoy. Gregory wanted to see how they reacted to you. It was, once again, a disappointment.”

“Who’s my guest?”

Wheeler smiled and left the cell block.

While I was unconscious, they had dressed me in pale blue cotton hospital pants and a white T-shirt. Looking in the small mirror that hung on the back wall of the cell, I found that my beard and mustache were gone and that my hair had been cut close to the scalp. My face seemed at once younger and older. I was thinking about that when I caught the reflection of Nella walking into the room.

“Baby!” she yelled.

She ran up to the glass and pressed her body against it.

She was wearing a conservative green dress and white pumps.

“Nella.” I was up against the glass, too. “Are you with that guy now?”

“Roger was only stayin’ awhile,” she said.

I thought it was funny that, after all we had gone through, our first words were so petty. But it seemed right that we were talking about jealousies and insecurities in spite of our suffering.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“They arrested me when they got you,” she said. “They brought me here to betray you, Errol. They want me to find out the secret of your father. I told them I would, but it was only so I could get in here to tell you that I love you. I loved you ever since you first came to work at Mud Brothers. You know that, don’t you? I used to stand there next to you, hoping you would ask me out. I always wanted you. I broke up with my old boyfriend the day after our first date. I never told you, because I thought it would scare you off. And then, when you disappeared, I thought you would never know.” She was still up against the glass, her breasts pressed flat under her green dress.

“They arrested me, honey,” I said. “They took me. I tried to call, but your phone was disconnected. I thought you had gone away.”

Her tears rolled down the glass barrier.

“You fool,” she said. “I needed a cell phone, and I didn’t want two bills. You shouldn’t have come back.”

“Oh yes, I should have, too,” I said.

I could see my brown face in the glass, superimposed on Nella’s dark grief. My heart swelled. Three men came. They grabbed Nella and pulled her from the glass wall. With all of her weight, she tried to defy them, but they were the superior force.

Her screaming my name was both pain and hope for me.

Nella knew nothing of what I had been through, but she was still brave and unflinching, risking her own freedom just to tell me that I was her man.

Wheeler came in a few minutes later.

“You must have some kind of power over women, Errol,” he said. “My wife, this girl. What do they see in you?”

“An innocent man being tortured by a fiend,” I said.

He laughed. I had the feeling that he was taking in his own reflection, as I had done when looking at Nella. Maybe all we could see was ourselves, I thought. Maybe that was why the Wave had to flee the planet.

Flee the planet.
The words seemed to be right, but I no longer knew what they meant.

“Where did you go, Errol?”

“I already told you.”

“You didn’t show up in the Bay Area until almost four months after you escaped my house.”

I was silent then. The connections were too close to the cave where I sojourned with Veil. And GT? Where was he during that time?

“Where were you before then?” he asked.

“I moved up the coast,” I said. “Hitchhiking and camping.”

“Tell me the places where you stayed.”

“Santa Barbara.” Sweat was running down my back. “On the beach. I begged in the mall downtown for money to eat with.”

“Who did you hang out with?”

“I didn’t have any friends.”

“I don’t believe you, Errol.”

“All you have to do is send your spies up there,” I said. “They’ll prove it.”

“Yes,” the madman replied. “But you better not be lying. Nella is going to be staying here with us—as a kind of a material witness. She’s going to be staying until we get the truth out of you.”

“You can’t hold her,” I said.

“I can do a lot more than hold her, Errol. I can do a lot more than that.”

The wall at the back of my cell rose up, revealing a tiny chamber with a single cot, a toilet, and a sink. Wheeler told me to go in, and I obeyed, quailing in my heart over Nella and my helplessness.

I didn’t know where the Wave was hidden, but I was pretty sure it was in San Francisco. That knowledge alone was too dangerous to hold.

I couldn’t let them hurt Nella.

I couldn’t let them destroy the oldest being in the world.

When the wall came down, I screamed in the dim light of my small cell. Then I sat down on the bunk and brought my head to my knees.

For over an hour, my heart raced and my mind tried to find some way out of my troubles. Once Wheeler found that there was no one who’d seen me in Santa Barbara, he’d come down on Nella or make me detail my days in the cave. I didn’t think I could come up with a believable lie. And he could use drugs to force the truth from me.

I rolled up into a ball on the floor, hating myself for being so helpless. Why had I come back to Los Angeles? I was a fool. A fool.

I fell asleep for only a moment, and the solution came to me: I’d kill myself. That was the only way.

My first thought was to hang myself, but there were no sheets or blankets on the mattress. My cotton pants might have made a good rope, but I couldn’t find anything to hang them from. There wasn’t even enough room for me to run headfirst into the wall. Wheeler had put me in a suicide-proof room.

I sat on the floor, looking at the dull gray wall under the minimal lighting. I must have been sitting there for hours before I came up with the answer.

There was no plug for the shallow zinc sink, but my T-shirt stuffed down the drain did the trick. I filled the basin with warm water and washed my face. Then I plunged my head down and took a deep liquid breath, thinking of the mackerel I had been in a previous life held over in my DNA.

I grasped the sink and stood as long as I could, refusing to exhale the water from my lungs. At first it was almost unbearable, but then everything became pleasant and warm. The light faded, and I felt my feet slipping to the side. Still I held on, and then everything seemed to stop.