into the room from outside.
As Paige tucked the blankets around Emily's shoulders, then around
Charlotte's, she kissed each of them goodnight. The love she felt for
them was so intense, like a weight on her chest, that she could not draw
a deep breath.
When she and Marty retired to the adjoining room, taking the guns with
them, they didn't turn off the nightstand lamp, and they left the
connecting door wide open. Nevertheless, her daughters seemed
dangerously far from her.
By unspoken agreement, she and Marty stretched out side by side on the
same queen-size bed. The thought of being separated by even a few feet
was intolerable.
One bedside lamp was lit, but he switched it off. Enough light came
through the door from the adjoining unit to reveal the larger part of
their own room. Shadows attended every corner, but deeper darkness was
kept at bay.
They held hands and stared at the ceiling as if their fate could be read
in the curiously portentous patterns of light and shadow on the plaster.
It wasn't only the ceiling, during the past few hours, virtually
everything Paige looked at seemed to be filled with omens, menacingly
significant.
Neither she nor Marty undressed for the night. Although it was
difficult to believe they could have been followed without being aware
of it, they wanted to be able to move fast.
The rain had stopped a couple of hours ago, but aqueous rhythms still
lulled them. The motel was on a bluff above the Pacific, and the
cadenced crashing of the surf was, in its metronomic certainty, a
soothing and peaceful sound.
"Tell me something," she said, speaking softly to prevent her voice from
carrying into the other room.
He sounded tired. "Whatever the question is, I probably don't have the
answer."
"What happened over there?"
"Just now? In the other room?"
"Yeah."
"Magic."
"I'm serious."
"So am I," Marty said. "You can't analyze the deeper effects that
storytelling has on us, can't figure out the why and how, any more than
King Arthur could understand how Merlin could do and know the things he
did."
"We came here shattered, frightened. The kids were so silent, half numb
with fear. You and I were snapping at each other--"
"Not snapping."
"Yes, we were."
"Okay," he admitted, "we were, just a little."
"Which, for us, is a lot. All of us were . . . uneasy with one
another. In knots."
"I don't think it was that bad."
She said, "Listen to a family counselor with some experience it was that
bad. Then you tell a story, a lovely nonsense poem but nonsense
nonetheless . . . and everyone's more relaxed. It helps us knit
together somehow. We have fun, we laugh. The girls wind down, and
before you know it, they're able to sleep."
For a while neither of them spoke.
The metrical susurration of the night surf was like the slow and steady
beating of a great heart.
When Paige closed her eyes, she imagined she was a little girl again,
curled in her mother's lap as she had so seldom been allowed to do, her
head against her mother's breast, one ear attuned to the woman's hidden
heart, listening intently for some small sound that was not solely
biological, a special whisper that she might recognize as the precious
sound of love. She'd never heard anything but the lub-dub of atrium and
ventricle, hollow, mechanical.
Yet she'd been soothed. Perhaps on a deep subconscious level, listening
to her mother's heart, she had recalled her nine months in the womb,
during which that same iambic beat had surrounded her twenty-four hours
a day. In the womb there is a perfect peace never to be found again, as
long as we remain unborn, we know nothing of love and cannot know the
misery that arises from being deprived of it.
She was grateful that she had Marty, Charlotte, Emily. But, as long as
she lived, moments like this would occur, when something as simple as
the surf would remind her of the deep well of sadness and isolation in
which she'd dwelt throughout her childhood.
She always strived to ensure that her daughters never for an instant
doubted they were loved. Now she was equally determined that the
intrusion of this madness and violence into their lives would not steal
any fraction of Charlotte's or Emily's childhood as her own had been
stolen in its entirety. Because her own parents' estrangement from each
other had been exceeded by their estrangement from their only child,
Paige had been forced to grow up fast for her own emotional survival,
even as a grammar-school girl, she was aware of the cold indifference of
the world, and understood that strong self reliance was imperative if
she was to cope with the cruelties life sometimes could inflict. But,
damn it, her own daughters were not going to be required to learn such
hard lessons overnight. Not at the tender ages of seven and nine. No
way. She wanted desperately to shelter them for a few more years from
the harsher realities of human existence, and allow them the chance to
grow up gradually, happily, without bitterness.
Marty was the first to break the comfortable silence between them.
"When Vera Conner had the stroke and we spent so much time that week in
the lounge outside the intensive care unit, there were a lot of other
people, came and went, waiting to learn whether their friends and
relatives would live or die."
"Hard to believe it's almost two years Vera's been gone."
Vera Conner had been a professor of psychology at UCLA, a mentor to
Paige when she had been a student, and then an exemplary friend in the
years that followed. She still missed Vera. She always would.
Marty said, "Some of the people waiting in that lounge just sat and
stared. Some paced, looked out windows, fidgeted. Listened to a
Walkman with headphones. Played a Game Boy. They passed the time all
kinds of ways. But--did you notice.--those who seemed to deal best with
their fear or grief, the people most at peace, were the ones reading
novels."
Except for Marty, and in spite of a forty-year age difference, Vera had
been Paige's dearest friend and the first person who ever cared about
her. The week Vera was hospitalized--first disoriented and suffering,
then comatose had been the worst week of Paige's life, nearly two years
later, her vision still blurred when she recalled the last day, the
final hour, as she'd stood beside Vers bed, holding her friend's warm
but unresponsive hand. Sensing the end was near, Paige had said things
she hoped God allowed the dying woman to hear, I love you, I'll miss you
forever, you're the mother to me that my own mother never could be.
The long hours of that week were engraved indelibly in Paige's memory,
in more excruciating detail than she would have liked, for tragedy was
the sharpest engraving instrument of all. She not only remembered the
layout and furnishings of the I.C.U visitors' lounge in drear
y
specificity, but could still recall the faces of many of the strangers
who, for a time, shared that room with her and Marty.
He said, "You and I were passing the time with novels, so were some
other people, not just to escape but because . . . because, at its
best, fiction is medicine."
"Medicine?"
"Life is so damned disorderly, things just happen, and there doesn't
seem any point to so much of what we go through. Some times it seems
the world's a madhouse. Storytelling condenses life, gives it order.
Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And when a story's over, it
meant something, by God, maybe not something complex, maybe what it had
to say was simple, even naive, but there was meaning. And that gives us
hope, it's a medicine."
"The medicine of hope," she said thoughtfully.
"Or maybe I'm just full of shit."
"No, you're not."
"Well, I am, yes, probably at least half full of shit--but maybe not
about this."
She smiled and gently squeezed his hand.
"I don't know," he said, "but I think if some university did a long-term
study, they'd discover that people who read fiction don't suffer from
depression as much, don't commit suicide as often, are just happier with
their lives. Not all fiction, for sure. Not the human
beings-are-garbage-life-stinks-there-is-no-God novels filled with
fashionable despair."
"Dr. Marty Stillwater, dispensing the medicine of hope."
"You do think I'm full of shit."
"No, baby, no," she said. "I think you're wonderful."
"I'm not, though. You're wonderful. I'm just a neurotic writer.
By nature, writers are too smug, selfish, insecure and at the same time
too full of themselves ever to be wonderful."
"You're not neurotic, smug, selfish, insecure, or conceited."
"That just proves you haven't been listening to me all these years."
"Okay, I'll give you the neurotic part."
"Thank you, dear," he said. "It's nice to know you've been listening at
least some of the time."
"But you're also wonderful. A wonderfully neurotic writer. I wish I
was a wonderfully neurotic writer, too, dispensing medicine."
"Bite your tongue."
She said, "I mean it."
"Maybe you can live with a writer, but I don't think I'd have the
stomach for it."
She rolled onto her right side to face him, and he turned onto his left
side, so they could kiss. Tender kisses. Gentle. For a while they
just held each other, listening to the surf.
Without resorting to words, they had agreed not to discuss any further
their worries or what might need to be done in the morning.
Sometimes a touch, a kiss, or an embrace said more than all the words a
writer could marshal, more than all the carefully reasoned advice and
therapy that a counselor could provide.
In the body of the night, the great heart of the ocean beat slowly,
reliably. From a human perspective, the tide was an eternal force, but
from a divine view, transitory.
On the downslope of consciousness, Paige was surprised to realize that
she was sliding into sleep. Like the sudden agitation of a blackbird's
wings, alarm fluttered through her at the prospect of lying unaware
therefore vulnerable in a strange place. But her weariness was greater
than her fear, and the solace of the sea wrapped her and carried her, on
tides of dreams, into childhood, where she rested her head against her
mother's breast and listened with one ear for the special, secret
whisper of love somewhere in the reverberant heart beats.
Still wearing a set of headphones, Drew Oslett woke to gunfire,
explosions, screams, and music loud enough and strident enough to be
God's background theme for doomsday. On the TV screen, Glover and
Gibson were running, jumping, punching, shooting, dodging, spinning,
leaping through burning buildings in a thrilling ballet of violence.
Smiling and yawning, Oslett checked his wristwatch and saw that he had
been asleep for over two and a half hours. Evidently, after the movie
had played once, the stewardess, seeing how like a lullaby it was to
him, had rewound and rerun it.
They must be close to their destination, surely much less than an hour
out of John Wayne Airport in Orange County. He took off the headset,
got up, and went forward in the cabin to tell Clocker what he had
learned earlier in his telephone conversation with New York.
Clocker was asleep in his seat. He had taken off the tweed jacket with
the leather patches and lapels, but he was still wearing the brown
He wasn't snoring, but his lips were parted, and a thread of drool
escaped the corner of his mouth, half his chin glistened disgustingly.
Sometimes Oslett was half convinced that the Network was playing a
colossal joke on him by pairing him with Karl Clocker.
His own father was a mover and shaker in the organization, and Oslett
wondered if the old man would hitch him to a ludicrous figure like
Clocker as a way of humiliating him. He loathed his father and knew the
feeling was mutual. Finally, however, he could not believe that the old
man, in spite of deep and seething antagonism, would play such
games--largely because, by doing so, he would be exposing an Oslett to
ridicule. Protecting the honor and integrity of the family name always
took precedence over personal feelings and the settling of grudges
between family members.
In the Oslett family, certain lessons were learned so young that Drew
almost felt as if he'd been born with that knowledge, and.a profound
understanding of the value of the Oslett name seemed rooted in his
genes. Nothing except a vast fortune was as precious as a good name,
maintained through generations, from a good name sprang as much power as
from tremendous wealth, because politicians and judges found it easier
to accept briefcases full of cash, by way of bribery, when the offerings
came from people whose bloodline had produced senators, secretaries of
state, leaders of industry noted champions of the environment, and
much-lauded patrons of the arts.
His pairing with Clocker was simply a mistake. Eventually he would have
the situation rectified. If the Network bureaucracy was slow to
rearrange assignments, and if their renegade was recovered in a
condition that still allowed him to be handled as before, Oslett would
take Alfie aside and instruct him to terminate Clocker.
The paperback Star Trek novel, spine broken, lay open on Karl Clocker's
chest, pages down. Careful not to wake the big man, Oslett picked up
the book.
He turned to the first page, not bothering to mark Clocker's stopping
place, and began to read, thinking that perhaps he would get a clue as
to why so many people were fascinated by the starship Enterprise and its
crew. Within a few paragraphs, the damned author was taking him inside
the mind of Captain Kirk, mental territory that Oslett was willing to
explore only if his alternatives were otherwise limited t
o the
stultifying minds of all the presidential candidates in the last
election. He skipped ahead a couple of chapters, dipped in, found
himself in Spock's prissily rational mind, skipped more pages and
discovered he was in the mind of
"Bones" McCoy.
Annoyed, he closed Journey to the Rectum of the Universe, or whatever
the hell the book was called, and slapped Clocker's chest with it to
wake him.
The big man sat straight up so suddenly that his porkpie hat popped off
and landed in his lap. Sleepily, he said, "Wha? Wha?"
"We'll be landing soon."
"Of course we will," Clocker said.
"There's a contact meeting us."
"Life is contact."
Oslett was in a foul mood. Chasing a renegade assassin, thinking about
his father, pondering the possible catastrophe represented by Martin
Stillwater, reading several pages of a Star Trek novel, and now being
peppered with more of Clocker's cryptograms was too much for any man to
bear and still be expected to keep his good humor.
He said, "Either you've been drooling in your sleep, or a herd of snails
just crawled over your chin and into your mouth."
Clocker raised one burly arm and wiped the lower part of his face with
his shirt sleeve.
"This contact," Oslett said, "might have a lead on Alfie by now.