Lightning (55 page)

“Yes,” Stefan said, “I read it. Three times.”

“The same book three times?” Jason said. They were all sitting around the Christmas tree, eating junk food and drinking cocoa, and Jason was in his cheeriest mood of the year. “Laura, beware this man. He sounds like an obsessive-compulsive to me.”

“Well, of course,” Thelma said, “to you Hollywood types, anyone who reads
any
book, even once, is viewed either as an intellectual giant or a psychopath. Now, Laura, how
did
you come up with all these convincing-looking, phony papers?”

“They’re not phony,” Chris said. “They’re
real.”

“That’s right,” Laura said. “The driver’s license and everything else is supported by government files. In researching
Endless River,
I had to find out how you go about obtaining a new identity of high quality, and I found this interesting man in San Francisco who runs a veritable document industry from the basement beneath a topless nightclub—”

“It doesn’t have a roof?” Chris asked.

Laura ruffled the boy’s hair and said, “Anyway, Stefan, if you look deeper into that box, you’ll find a couple of bank books as well. I’ve opened accounts for you under your new identity at Security Pacific Bank and Great Western Savings.”

He was startled. “I can’t take money from you. I can’t—”

“You save me from a wheelchair, repeatedly save my life, and I can’t give you money if I feel like it? Thelma, what’s wrong with him?”

“He’s a man,” Thelma said.

“I guess that explains it.”

“Hairy, Neanderthalic,” Thelma said, “perpetually half-crazed from excessive levels of testosterone, plagued by racial memories of the lost glory of mammoth-hunting expeditions—they’re all alike.”

“Men,” Laura said.

“Men,” Thelma said.

To his surprise and almost against his will, Stefan Krieger felt some of the darkness fading from within him, and light began to find a pane through which to shine into his heart.

In late February of the next year, thirteen months after the events in the desert outside Palm Springs, Laura suggested that he come to stay with her and Chris at the house near Big Bear. He went the next day, driving there in the sleek new Russian sports car that he had bought with some of the money she had given him.

For the next seven months he slept in the guest room. Every night. He needed nothing more. Just being with them, day after day, being accepted by them, being included, was all the love he could handle for a while.

In mid-September, twenty months after he had appeared on her doorstep with a bullet hole in his chest, she asked him into her bed. Three nights later he found the courage to go.

The year that Chris was twelve, Jason and Thelma bought a getaway house in Monterey, overlooking the most beautiful coastline in the world, and they insisted that Laura, Stefan, and Chris visit them for the month of August, when they were both between film projects. The mornings on the Monterey peninsula were cool and foggy, the days warm and clear, the nights downright chilly in spite of the season, and that daily pattern of weather was invigorating.

On the second Friday of the month, Stefan and Chris went for a beach walk with Jason. On the rocks not far from shore, sea lions were sunning themselves and barking noisily. Tourists were parked bumper to bumper along the road that served the beach; they ventured onto the sand to take photographs of the sun-worshiping “seals,” as they called them.

“Year by year,” Jason said, “there’s more foreign tourists. It’s a regular invasion. And you notice—they’re mostly either Japanese, Germans, or Russians. Less than half a century ago, we fought the greatest war in history against all three of them, and now they’re all more prosperous than we are. Japanese electronics and cars, Russian cars and computers, German cars and quality machinery of all kinds... Honest to God, Stefan, I think Americans frequently treat old enemies better than they do old friends.”

Stefan paused to watch the sea lions that had drawn the interest of the tourists, and he thought of the mistake that he had made in his meeting with Winston Churchill.

The old fox had spoken so casually, as if the question was one that had occurred to him by chance, as if he might as likely have asked whether the cut of men’s suits would change in the future, when in fact his query had been calculated and the answer of intense interest to him. Operating on what Stefan had told him, Churchill had rallied the Western Allies to continue fighting in Europe after the Germans were defeated. Using the Soviets’ land grab of Eastern Europe as an excuse to turn against them, the other Allies had fought the Russians, driving them back into their motherland and ultimately defeating them entirely; in fact, throughout the war with Germany, the Soviets had been propped up with weapons and supplies from the United States, and when that support was withdrawn they collapsed in a matter of months. After all, they had been exhausted after the war with their old ally, Hitler. Now the modern world was far different from what destiny had intended, and all because Stefan had answered Churchill’s one question.

Unlike Jason or Thelma or Laura or Chris, Stefan was a man out of time, a man for whom this era was not his destined home; the years since the Great Wars were his future, while those same years were in these people’s past; therefore he recalled both the future that had once been and the future that had now come to pass in place of the old. They, however, could remember no different world but this one in which no great world powers were hostile toward one another, in which no huge nuclear arsenals awaited launch, in which democracy flourished even in Russia, in which there were plenty and peace.

Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be. But sometimes, happily, it fails.

Laura and Thelma remained in rocking chairs on the porch, watching their menfolk walk down to the sea and then north along the beach, out of sight.

“Are you happy with him, Shane?”

“He’s a melancholy man.”

“But lovely.”

“He’ll never be Danny.”

“But Danny is gone.”

Laura nodded. They rocked.

“He says I redeemed him,” Laura said.

“Like grocery coupons, you mean?”

Finally Laura said, “I love him.”

“I know,” Thelma said.

“I never thought I would... again. I mean, love a man that way. ”

“What way is that, Shane? Are you talking about some kinky new position? You’re heading toward middle age, Shane; you’ll be forty before too many moons, so isn’t it time you reformed your libidinous ways?”

“You’re incorrigible.”

“I try to be.”

“How about you, Thelma? Are you happy?”

Thelma patted her large belly. She was seven months pregnant.

“Very happy, Shane. Did I tell you—maybe twins?”

“You told me.”

“Twins,” Thelma said, as if the prospect awed her. “Think how pleased Ruthie would be for me.”

Twins.

Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be, Laura thought. And sometimes, happily, it succeeds.

They sat for a while in companionable silence, breathing the healthful sea air, listening to the wind sough softly in the Monterey pines and cypress.

After a while Thelma said, “Remember that day I came to your house in the mountains, and you were taking target practice in the backyard?”

“I remember.”

“Blasting away at those human silhouettes. Snarling, daring the world to tackle you, guns hidden everywhere. That day you told me you’d spent your life enduring what fate threw at you, but you were not just going to endure any more—you were going to fight to protect your own. You were very angry that day, Shane, and very bitter. ”

“Yes.”

“Now, I know you’re still an endurer. And I know you’re still a fighter. The world is still full of death and tragedy. In spite of all that, somehow you just aren’t bitter any more.”

“No.”

“Share the secret?”

“I’ve learned the third great lesson, that’s all. As a kid I learned to endure. After Danny was killed, I learned to fight. Now I’m still an endurer and a fighter—but I’ve also learned to accept. Fate is.”

“Sounds very Eastern-mystic-transcendental-bullshit, Shane. Jeez. ‘Fate is.’ Next you’ll be telling me to chant a mantra and contemplate my navel.”

“Stuffed with twins, as you are,” Laura said, “you can’t even see your navel.”

“Oh, yes, I can—with just the right arrangement of mirrors.” Laura laughed. “I love you, Thelma.”

“I love you, Sis.”

They rocked and rocked.

Down on the shore, the tide was coming in.

NEW AFTERWORD BY DEAN KOONTZ

AFTERWORD

Most publishers are happiest with a successful novelist when he or she writes the same book every time. They don’t care if he bathes only on the summer solstice, drinks himself into a stupor every day by 2:00 P.M., lives in sin with a llama, thinks SpongeBob SquarePants is the greatest actor of his generation, and spits on the floor—as long as, at the keyboard, he can slavishly repeat himself manuscript after manuscript. From story to story, if the writer always features lead characters who are lawyers, for example, the publisher will smile and pat him on the head. If each of these lawyers (or cops if the writer is a cop novelist, or boiler repairmen if the writer spins boiler-repairman tales) is like all the others, in terms of his world view, psychological makeup, and narrative voice, then the publisher will beam with delight at the mention of the writer’s name. If, in fact, the lawyer (or cop, or boiler repairman) is the same lawyer (or cop, or boiler repairman) by name—in other words, a “series character”—the publisher will not only
swoon
at the mere mention of the author, but will pretend, with convincing earnestness, to like the author as an artist and as a human being, no matter how thick his disgust and how poisonous his hatred for the author may actually be.

(To be fair to all publishers, it is an undeniable truth that a great many successful writers are so egomaniacal, so temperamental, so consumed by envy of other writers who earn even two dollars more per book, so stubborn, so humorless about themselves, and so mean-spirited that if they were elephants, their fellow pachyderms would turn them over to criminal poachers with instructions to make knickknacks from their tusks and umbrella stands from their feet.)

Most publishers—not all—believe that a successful writer must produce always in precisely the same genre, delivering characters and plots and themes that are comfortably familiar to his readers, working reliably in a narrative voice that strikes the same note in story after story. This desire for sameness springs partly from the publisher’s need to develop and sustain a market niche for the writer, “branding” him in the same sense that Campbell’s soup or Log Cabin syrup is a brand. In truth, however, it also springs from most publishers’ conviction that the reading public is composed of well-defined herds of sheep, each of which can—and must—be driven to the same pasture from which it has grazed previously.

(To be fair to publishers, there is evidence that a portion of the reading public does indeed enjoy being herded to the same pasture day after day, to graze upon a single flavor of grass. Consequently, the forty-ninth installment of Author X’s series about a vegetarian homicide detective with two thumbs on his right hand is a reliable bestseller. In the film industry, especially in the TV branch, there is a widespread contempt for the viewing public, which explains why the great majority of films are boring and stupid. I’m always shocked to discover that a similar contempt for readers infects some in the publishing community, although the situation is far better than in the film industry. Some readers want the simplicity and the comfort of sameness, yes, but in my experience most are in search of—and are invigorated by—fresh storytelling with unexpected qualities.)

Except in recent years, I have been at odds with publishers throughout my career because I find it too dreary to deliver the same book over and over (being easily bored, I must first keep myself entertained); furthermore, my average novel does not fall entirely into any single genre. I write cross-genre books—suspense mixed with love story, with humor, sometimes with two tablespoons of science fiction, sometimes with a pinch of horror, sometimes with a sprinkle of paprika.... Until I delivered a novel titled
Watchers
(my original and preferred title had been
Guardian,
but that’s another story), my publisher was frustrated with me and ceaselessly lectured me to the effect that my failure to embrace a single genre and to write within its narrowest confines would ultimately—and soon—destroy my career. (There is no exaggeration in the use of the word “ceaselessly,” for those lectures barely allowed me time to eat.)
Watchers
was a cross-genre novel that broke many of the publisher’s own rules, but she liked it so much that she put aside her usual objections.

After
Watchers,
I delivered
Lightning,
and the proverbial dung hit the radiating blades of the air-circulation device.
Lightning
not only broke most of the publisher’s rules, it pulverized them. I was told that the book was
unpublishable
because (1) it was a suspense novel unfolding over more than thirty years of the lead character’s life, though common publishing wisdom (henceforth CPW) insists that taut suspense cannot be sustained in a story with such a long time arc; (2) the first quarter to a third of the novel took place during the lead’s childhood, though CPW insists that this makes it a
young-adult
novel of no interest to the adult reading audience; (3) the book contained more than a little humor, though CPW insists that readers will not abide the combination of suspense and humor; and (4) the themes, according to my publisher, were “too complex and profound for popular fiction, and most readers will be unable to understand them.” I was told that
Lightning
could not be published after
Watchers
because it would chase away the steadily growing readership that I had developed with
Whispers, Phantoms, Strangers,
(none of them my original and preferred titles, but that’s another story),
Watchers,
and other books. For my own good, I was told to put it on the shelf and write another novel. My publisher said, “In seven years, after you’ve built a bigger and more loyal audience, we can risk publishing
Lightning
without doing too much damage.”