A Dark Matter (13 page)

Hayward and Milstrap ushered Mallon and the group through the front door and into a lounge or living room with battered and abraded leather furniture arranged around a cold fireplace. A boy in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals looked up from a game of solitaire and yelled, “What the hell is with these
kids
, Hayward?”

Hayward said, “Kitchen help.”

“You should be kitchen help, you asshole,” said the boy.

Howard was able to speak privately to Spencer only after Hayward had led them downstairs and into a large empty room with a bandstand at one end and a bar at the other. When two young men summoned Hayward and Milstrap from an arched doorway, Howard turned to Mallon and described his dilemma. He was fearful that Mallon would either get angry or refuse to move out of the basement, and he kept hesitating and mixing up his words.

No problem, Mallon said. He had not intended to go back to the store that night, anyhow—he’d crash at Meredith’s. He’d had a little trouble in that direction, but everything was copacetic again. Women, you know, they’re all a little crazy. By the way, there was no reason to tell all of this to the Eel. Okay?

In that direction? Crash? Copacetic?
Was this guy speaking English? “Okay,” he said.

He wanted to say: Forget about tomorrow, forget the whole thing, my love, you may know you’re being watched, but you don’t know what you’re up against. Pay attention to what they told you. Quit while you’re behind.

How could he say these things to Spencer Mallon? It was impossible. For a moment little Howard Bly hovered on the brink of attempting to do that which was not possible to do, and at the end of that moment all choice was stolen from him. The two frat boys who had conferred with Keith and Brett were ordering them into a single line. The boys watched them file through the arch so closely they might have been trying to memorize their faces. Howard was aware that they paid special attention to the Eel and himself. While Milstrap ushered the group into an empty kitchen, Howard looked back and thought he saw Keith Hayward shove folded bills into his pocket.

Milstrap told them that they had been brought in early to avoid inspection at the door. Mallon and Meredith were fine, of course, but as far as the Beta Delts were concerned, the high-school students had been hired as kitchen help. When this turned out to be an ordinary party, just beer, no food, well, sorry, but kiss my ass, okay? So Hayward had forgotten to tell the kids. Big deal, right? Officially, they were supposed to wait in the kitchen until midnight, then go out and start cleaning up the BD Room back out there. In reality, they could wait until the BD Room got really noisy—maybe fifteen minutes after the band started playing—and after that do whatever they liked. If they were nice to the Beta Delts, the Beta Delts would be nice to them. And by the way, the beer was free. Have as much as you like, just don’t puke or pass out.

Mallon and Meredith Bright left with Hayward and Milstrap. For a little less than an hour, the Madison West students flopped around undisturbed in the kitchen. Then a din of voices arose in the party room, a guitar began to play blues over a shuffle rhythm, voices male and female amped up into party mode, and the little band slipped out of the kitchen and filtered into the BD Room. The lights had been turned down. Gyrating, bouncing bodies filled the room. Instantly, the crowd separated them.

Howard realized that he had never been to a party even faintly like this, and neither had any of his friends. In high school, big parties took over entire houses, and you could always escape to a quieter, less crowded room or go out on the lawn. You listened to records and hoped somebody had managed to bring beer. Here, everybody had been jammed into one room, and they were all yelling and screaming. The band was the loudest thing he had ever heard in his life: he felt the bass reverberating in his chest, and the sound vibrated as it passed through his body. Everybody, even the dancers, carried big plastic cups full of beer, and beer splashed onto people’s clothes and all over the floor. Loud, hard, utterly joyous music echoed off the walls and drilled into his ears. Trying to get to the bar, Howard moved down the edge of the dance floor, weaving through the crowd and squeezing past people who never noticed he was there. When finally he made it to the bar, the Eel was standing right in front of him, reaching up to take two of the sixteen-ounce cups from the boy working the taps. It was one of those unexpected times when he became achingly aware that the Eel was a girl, a real girl, instead of a tomboy so successful that he thought of her as just another guy, more or less. Even worse, she was stunning. Astonishingly, as if to console him for the bone-deep ache that accompanied this perception, the Eel turned around and gave him one of the cups filled to the top with foaming beer.

He moved to the side and caught sight of Dill dancing with a great-looking girl with long, straight blond hair, huge eyeglasses, and wonderful white legs. Dill was grinning like an idiot. Then the crowd closed in front of them, and Howard saw leering Keith Hayward whisper into another student’s ear. The feeling that Hayward had been talking about him filled Hootie with revulsion, and instantly he whirled away.

He and the Eel clung together for half an hour, chugging beer and letting the music pound into them. When he was drunk enough to forget about his inhibitions, Howard spun into the crowd and began to dance by himself, wildly, throwing his arms about and bobbing to the beat. Laughing, a college girl moved aside to give him room, and in seconds she and another girl were bopping around in front of him, being both his partners and his audience. A squat guy with hairy arms moved up alongside the girls and started making corny rowboat gestures, then held his nose and pretended to drown. He was a friend of Hayward’s, but Howard couldn’t remember how he knew that. Someone passed him another sixteen-ounce beer, his third, and he squirted some of it through his nose, laughing at the cornball guy who was a friend of Keith Hayward’s. Oh, yeah! They had been talking together, that was how he knew.

His hands on the waist of the blond girl, Dilly grinned at him and pumped one fist in the air. When Howard copied the gesture, the cornball guy grasped his hand and spun him around, making him laugh all the harder. Most of his beer slopped onto the ground. For a second, he caught a glimpse of the Eel babbling away to two guys who looked like football players. The Eel made him laugh, and he laughed a delicious Eel-laugh, watching a compact man in a gray suit weave across his field of vision.

Unstrung by shock, Howard’s legs dissolved beneath him. Before he had time to melt into a puddle on the wet floor, someone caught him around the chest and pulled him upright. His legs returned, though they felt like stilts.

The music went rubbery. He thought it had been indistinct for some time, though he had failed to notice the moment of decay. The individual dancers had turned into blurs. Whoever was in front of him lowered him into a chair. Eel’s football players stepped on by, though the Eel was not with them. Then he, too, was traveling down the hall, and being assisted through the doorway into a dimly lighted room with mattresses and huge soft pillows instead of sofas and chairs. The cornball guy with hairy arms settled him down into one of the gigantic pillows and was just stretching out beside him when Spencer Mallon swooped down, spun the guy off the pillow, sank a booted foot into his stomach, and helped Howard scramble to his feet. “Hope you’re enjoying your first fraternity shindig, Hootie,” he said, and walked him back toward the throbbing party room.

“Only old people say ‘shindig,’” Howard informed him.

In the enormous room down the hallway, the band was taking a break. The crowd had refocused on the bar, from which it radiated out along both sides of the room and knotted together again in front of the bandstand. Howard realized that Spencer Mallon had set him free and wandered, not quite so unsteadily as before, over to a sagging old couch pushed against the wall and sat down next to a drunken boy wearing madras shorts. The drunken boy looked him over and said, “Shane, come back! Come
back
, Shane!”

Inspired, Howard told him that only old people said that. Then he looked across the room and forgot all about the boy in the madras shorts.

On the other side of the empty dance floor, a man in a gray suit was bending over the Eel, who was sprawled out over a baby blue beanbag chair criss-crossed with duct tape. A fraternity boy touched the man’s arm, but he paid no attention. The boy grasped his elbow and yelled something. Without seeming to move in any way except to straighten up by a few degrees, the man in the suit caused the frat boy to flail backward across the beer-stained, cup-strewn floor, flapping his arms until he collapsed into a messy tangle of elbows, knees, and feet. Two other fraternity boys had noticed the backward flight of their brother, who presently lay on the wet barroom floor, apparently bleeding a little from his nose and eyes. One of those who had seen the man deflect his brother had the vast chest and squared-off head of a football player; the other was simply so large he looked impervious to assault. These two turned to the dog, the agent: the killer angel, in Hootie’s drunken estimation. He wanted to say,
Leave that guy alone, you don’t want to screw with him, no matter how big you are
. They were going to die, Hootie knew, they’d be torn to bloody shreds. Terror so unmanned him that he closed his eyes.

When he opened them, the two giant Beta Delts were picking up their stunned, bleeding friend, and the creature in the suit had disappeared like the unseen beings who had overseen their rehearsal. Hootie wondered if he actually understood anything at all.

When he remembered that Spencer was going to leave them the next day, sorrow again overtook him. The Beta Delt in the madras shorts said something about babies and walked away. Through his tears, Howard saw a blurry Eel slide up to blurry Boats and grip his shoulders. Like him, she was in tears, which were shed, he understood, for the same reason.

Mallon said:

One day, probably far in the future and certainly when you least expect it, you will find yourself in some totally impersonal, anonymous space, and the most important choice of your life will be before you. You’ll be on a business trip, or on vacation, getting off an elevator or walking into a hotel lobby. It could be anywhere, but let’s stick with these nice, neutral possibilities. And it won’t happen like this, but let’s say it does. Let’s say … let’s say for some reason you know I’m in Nepal right then, or you know I’m in the hospital. Or you know I’m dead! For whatever reason, I’m gone, I can’t be there, but there I am anyhow. You see me walking across the lobby, or getting off the adjacent elevator. Can’t be him, you say to yourself, Spencer can’t be here, and yet despite all the reasons to the contrary, it’s me, all right, and you know it. So the question is, what am I doing there? Because you can sure as hell see that I’m doing
something
, I’m not just out for a stroll, I’m
going
somewhere. And the next question is even more important: Why did you see me? Did I just wander into your field of vision by accident? How likely is that? No, there’s a reason you saw me, and it’s gotta be something pretty important
.

So you take off after me—you don’t say anything, you just follow along to see where I’m going. Because I’m not just going there, I’m taking you with me—it’s your goal, too, not just mine. And the second you start following me, I step up the pace and make it harder for you to do what you have to do
.

Is it clear that all this is a kind of parable? Parables don’t mean one thing and one thing only, you know, which is the reason people still argue about them, two thousand years later
.

I walk you around the block, I duck down alleys, I go into stores and leave by the back door, but you manage to stick to my tail no matter what I do. In the end, we’re back in that hotel lobby, so you could say our destination is the place where we started. I get there before you, and when you make it into the lobby, you see me getting
into an elevator just before the door closes. You watch the needle swing up and see it stop on the fifth floor. Did I get off there, or did someone else? There’s no time to debate about it—the next elevator comes down and opens its doors, and you jump in and push five and the Close Door button before anybody else can get on. The elevator chugs upward, going slower than seems possible, but finally it gets to five, and the doors slide open, and you charge out, trying to look in both directions at once. I’m way down to your right and at the end of the hallway, just turning a corner. You break into a run, because you don’t want me to vanish through a doorway without you seeing which one it is
.

A door slams shut the second you make it to the bend in the corridor. You barrel around the corner and realize that I must have disappeared through one of the first two doors on the inner side. There are doors on the street side, too, but if I had used one of those you would have seen it closing
.

All right, this is the point at which you have to make a choice. But now you face a dilemma. The meaning of your choice became clear to you about a second after you turned to face those two doors, and an immense amount is riding on your decision
.

If you knock on the door to my room, I’ll open it and invite you in for a long talk. As long as you like. You will have done exactly what you should, and your reward is that you can ask me anything you want—I’ll answer all the questions that you’ve wondered about, all the questions that have plagued you. And believe me, there’ll be a lot of questions—once you’ve had time to think about everything we’ve done and are about to do, you’ll be overflowing with questions. The answers you get will be the explanations you have needed, in fact really hungered for, all your life
.

But you realized a second ago that if you pick the wrong door some terrible personal catastrophe will happen to you. This dreadful recognition came to you right out of the blue—guess what, there are consequences to making the wrong decision, and in this case those consequences could be really horrible. And what makes this deal even worse is that the catastrophe will happen not to you personally, although it’s still going to be personal, all right, but to someone you love. If you make the wrong decision, something terrible is going to happen to some person you care for with all your
heart. Could be a crippling stroke, a hideous mutilation in an auto accident; could be a horrible lingering death, with screams of pain and shit all over the sheets
.