Lightfall (3 page)

How could she blame them for feeling secure? They'd made a collective stand against eventuality, just being here. They had the deeds to prove it.

Yet the feeling was so strong she could not keep it checked. A tightness gripped her skin till she thought it would rip like fabric. Palms flat out on the booth's glass door, her lips pulled back against her teeth, she looked for a moment like someone about to be buried alive. Though her heart was all stripped bare from leaving home, she seethed with dread and pity for these people, living out the rag end of their lives in a place where time was running out.

For none of these ordered ways would last. If the instruments of pain were limp and harmless now, tomorrow all the penalties would double. Iris felt a throb of joy to think that she could flee. This town was a burning house. The death that hadn't come to pass fed beneath the surface like the yellow in a sore. And no one dared to look it in the face. No one had a plan.

The more she took it in, the more her pity faded. A murderous logic beat against her temples. Clearly, they had brought it on themselves, these dim and buttoned people. Their gods and devils were one with their indifference to the dark. A wild, anarchic hunger seized her, to let them see how short the distance was between an autumn day and the end of the world. She pounded the walls of the phone booth. She remembered nothing.

Then all of a sudden she froze.

A boy and girl had met beside the obelisk. So hypnotized were they by love, it might have been a fountain spouting water out of dolphins. All they required was a rendezvous. The roll of the dead was nothing to them. He touched her hand and made some plea. The girl looked off and shook her head. They weren't yet twenty. It seemed they had only a moment more before he had to go back to work and she to her aged mother. Their hearts beat fast, like birds in flight. She tossed her hair as he took her hand. His chest puffed up like a rooster while he promised her the moon.

Which one would she follow, Iris wondered dreamily.

The grocer's porch was empty. All she had to do was dart across and snatch the shears and slip them under her coat. If she went for the girl, she'd kill her in her room, surrounded by her keepsakes. Iris knew just how this would feel—like throwing a stone at a mirror. With the boy, she would have to lure him into an alley. They would start with the act of love and go on from there. With the barest flick of an eye, she watched them back and forth, first one and then the other, as if she were pulling petals off a flower. If only she could do them both at once.

With a terrible will she fought it. She opened her mouth to tell them to run and found she couldn't breathe. In a panic, she beat back the accordion door of the booth and reeled out into the street. As the startled couple glanced at her, she lurched away to the right. “Mrs. Ammons?” the girl called out, as if to try to wake her. Iris turned and ducked between two buildings. She raced along the alleyway, one hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. If she had to wreak some vengeance, let it be on strangers.

But somehow she'd gone the wrong way. Thinking to reach the parking lot, she emerged in another street, beside a florist's thick with underbrush. She took another right to double back. She averted her eyes from everyone she passed so as not to seek out victims. She read the notices in shops, reeled off the numbers on license plates, took note of every sign. Including this, in a whitewashed doorway, etched on a bright brass plate:
Iris Ammons, Ph.D., Private Consultations.

For all she knew it was a trap. She'd never been here before. But after all, she had this extra hour. Mostly, perhaps, she lifted the latch and went on in because she wanted to know what she did it with. Tea leaves? Tarot? The parlor room she entered was quite cheerful. Dimity curtains and chintz-covered chairs and a copper bucket filled to the brim with pinecones. No sign of paraphernalia, clinical, psychic or otherwise. A slightly rumpled man sat hunched on a footstool, gloomily reading the daily
Times.

“I knew you wouldn't disappoint me,” he said, with a certain smug assurance.

Careful, she thought. She looked around to try to figure where she was meant to sit. Not clear. And where were her
things
, whatever they were? She replied with a quiet, noncommittal “No.”

“You should have seen your nine o'clock,” he said as he stood up. “She was fit to be tied.”

“Who?”

“The girl with the sensible shoes. You just missed her.”

He turned to open the door beside the fireplace. He made a knightly bow, so Iris would precede him. She passed on through, suspiciously. They were in an inner office now, with books around the walls and a desk she could repair to. The young man didn't seem to need his cues from her. As she slipped off her coat and sat in the desk chair, staring down at a blizzard of papers without the slightest clue, he settled himself across from her. He sprawled on the tweedy sofa and talked a mile a minute.

“You know what I was thinking, Iris? You know what my big problem is? My mother never let me cry. She said it was weak. I'd grow up to be a girl, she said.” And he heaved a sigh. “Jesus, it's a wonder I can feel at all.…”

She listened with half an ear. Spotting her daily calendar, she ran a finger down to find out who he was.
10:15—Donald Sand.
It didn't ring a bell, but he seemed content to sit there, saying whatever came into his head. She scanned the memos and riffled the stacks of mail. Nothing struck her. She poked at a pile of dreary-looking books. A three-panel frame stood open beside it, with pictures of Tim and the boys out sailing. She closed this up and slid it into a drawer.

She began to think there was nothing here to which she still had access. All her work had simply disappeared—slipped through her fingers like the long road home. Strangely, she didn't much care. The age of books was over. Quaint and slightly ridiculous, like the longing to live in old houses. She was fidgeting through a washed-out journal, wondering how she would ever get rid of Donald Sand, when she caught her own name in a list of contents. She zeroed in on the title.
The Cultist Adolescent
, by Iris Ammons. Page 118.

She flipped ahead to find it, at the same time pulling the left drawer open and taking out a jar of candy. It faintly amused her to think how earnest she used to be. She'd filled up twenty closely printed pages. Subheaded under the title, she read: Sexual Growth and Mind Control: The New Monastic Order. This seemed so oddly irrelevant that she nearly laughed out loud.

“Sometimes,” said Donald Sand, “I think I ought to go back to the farm. At least they let me cry. I mean, so what if I have to give up the real world? Some people aren't
equipped
for reality. I'd rather be following orders, Iris. I'm tired of all this thinking.”

It was as if the clouds had lifted a bit. All morning long, she hadn't been able to string two words together. Now she could read a whole paragraph through without a break. There was a jumble of terms she couldn't grasp, and the
I
of the piece was a woman of whom she wouldn't have asked the time of day, yet she sorted out the drift of it immediately. It was as if, for the space of an empty hour, the forces didn't know what to do with her. Or else they meant to let her see just how pointless her information was.

From what she could gather in the first few pages, she'd worked one day a week in a clinic in New Haven. It had fallen to her to set up a course of treatment for students who were coming out of cults. She'd personally been in charge of half a dozen runaways, all of these from a single sect. There was never a question of anyone's being kidnapped: this lot
wanted
out. They'd escaped in the dead of night. They'd hidden out for months before they turned up at the deprogramming unit. They believed they were marked for certain death. At first they would not even go into separate rooms, preferring to sit and hold hands in a ring. One stood guard while the others slept.

“I don't think you really care, you know that?”

“Care about what?” she asked abstractedly, running ahead two pages to find a specific case.

“
Me
,” said Donald Sand, in a flurry of self-defeat. “You don't know any more than I do. Why don't you admit it?”

“Listen, Donald, I'm not your mother.”

This, like the strains of an old song, sent him off in a gale of reminiscence. Iris put a knuckle of horehound in her mouth and began to read the account of a girl called Linda S., who'd been with the Revelation Covenant eighteen months before she fled. She sold leaflets on the streets of Houston. She subsisted on rice and green tea thick with honey. Slept on a flattened cardboard box. They gave her pills four times a day, for what she did not know or ever ask. Sex was forbidden. When asked what she felt like all those months, she replied: “I didn't mind. I thought I must have died or something. Like somebody pulled the plug.”

She was seventeen. Her hair was mackerel gray. On her one day out for a Sunday drive she had pumped four bullets into her brother's cat. The last few weeks she spent in Texas, they swathed her in white and fed her cactus boiled in a soup. She first met the Reverend Paradise the night before she ran.

Donald was crying. He leaned across, pulled open a drawer, and drew out several tissues. He stared at the wall of books just opposite, rather as if they'd betrayed him. Iris, meanwhile, turned to the cabinet under the window. She tried to think where her research was. She had boxes of file cards, some of them yellow with age, but none addressed to the matter at hand. On the top shelf was a wire tray full of bits and pieces clipped from magazines. Next to that, an index of the world's religions, living and dead together. There was even a bowl of charms: crosses and relics and dashboard saints. But none of this was any use. The connections were far too indirect, or the target much too large.

On the bottom shelf was a tape recorder with microphone, a stack of cassettes beside it. Iris reached down and grabbed up three or four of these. Affixed to each was a strip of white adhesive, bearing a name and date in boldface.
Joe Weir, May 3. Linda S.—7/29-31. 12 Sept., Ross.

She felt a sudden rush of power to think she'd tracked the past to its lair. If Donald would only go, she thought, she could play it all start to finish. There was something here.

Hurriedly, she turned back to the printed page and read ahead. She skimmed ten lines at a stretch till she reached the name a second time: The Reverend Roman Paradise, chief officer and prophet. He hadn't been seen, except by his close associates, in six or seven years. Most of his flock knew him only by way of a fuzzy sepia photograph of a turbaned man in a trance, which hung on all the walls. In the last three years his followers had signed over to him the sum of their worldly goods—thought to be in excess of eleven million dollars. Nobody knew his real name. It was rumored that he'd started his whole operation out of a cell in the Georgia Penitentiary.

But this was just the numbers. What did they believe in? What did they want? She turned another page, her expectations high, only to find she'd gotten to the end. “As of this writing,” the paragraph ran, “four of the original group have taken their lives.” Ross Cochran threw himself under a train. The girl called Linda downed a bottle of oven cleaner. Two others leapt from the clinic windows, not five minutes after a session with Iris. “In no way,” she had written, “would the casual observer have thought to call them depressed.” Except for the fear of recrimination, they were cheerful, bright and helpful, determined to resume the lives of nicely turned-out college kids.

The surviving pair was placed under constant supervision, but there was only so much the clinic could do. It seemed they were set to go off like time bombs, no matter how far they recovered.

On the facing page was printed the votive photograph of Paradise—so dark in its present reproduction, Iris could hardly see the face. A man of indeterminate age, puffy about the eyes. The trance he was meant to be in the throes of looked to her more like sleeplessness. The mouth was slack. The skin was pocked. His turban had the feel of gauze, as if he'd needed bandaging. It was the most sullen state of rapture Iris had ever seen. As if he'd made his way to some innermost temple, and all he could think to do was tear it limb from limb.

There must be a separate file, she thought, and began to rifle the drawers on either side. But she didn't get very far before the weight of the vanished life began to twist her up in knots. Each drawer was like the corner of some attic, filled to bursting with idiosyncrasy. Endless insipid mementos, peculiar to the single self she'd walked in circles all her life. At first she was merely annoyed, as she cleared her way through birthday cards and sweets for the dog, the random stones from country walks. Embarrassed, almost—as if she were sorting the last effects of somebody suddenly dead. When she turned up the three-faced frame again, with the three men safe at sea, she could feel the wave of irritation curdle into rage.

If she didn't go now, she'd be late.

She threw the tapes down on the desk, then stood and grabbed her coat. She was halfway across the room when Donald called her name. She turned with a vast indifference.

“We're not
done
yet,” Donald protested.

“But you haven't said a word for the last ten minutes.”

“So what? I
pay
for this hour.”

“Ah, well it's simple, then. Don't pay.”

She opened the door to the outer room with a certain trepidation, for fear there might be more of them still waiting. Luckily, no. She passed on through, wincing at all the cozy touches. If only it had been tea leaves after all. She would have done much better—she and Donald both—with a crystal globe and a jabber of incantation. She paused on the threshold, putting a finger up to the sunstruck brass. She only wished she could cover up her name before she left. It was too like something chiseled on a tomb.