Rift (22 page)

“Cameron,” Crystal says as she rolls away from Ivan. “That's enough.”

“Motherfucker,” I say aloud.

“Cameron!” she says again. “Lee is shot. And we need to get the hell out of here in case the cops come.”

Her voice is lucid, the words make sense, but still I cannot move from where I stand. I cannot believe this man, this goon who chased me and tormented me and left me for dead is now lying across the floor in a heap, bleeding and perhaps dying from a head wound inflicted by me. It seems almost too easy. After all, he was shot already. All I did was prematurely end his struggle with Crystal.

“Cameron! Don't just stand there. Get some towels from the kitchen so we can wrap Lee's arm. I think it's just a flesh wound.”

“Right,” I answer and then head for the kitchen. That's when I realize there is another body in the room, one that lies across the entrance to the kitchen. It's Ivan's partner—Ed, if I remember correctly—and I'll have to step over him to get the towels Crystal requested.

The only dead people I've ever seen before have been lying peacefully in caskets, painted with makeup to bring life back into their faces. This man's blood is soaking into the carpet on his left and pooling on the vinyl floor on his right. I know he must be dead, but as I step over him, I expect his hand to shoot out and grab my ankle.

“Cameron, hurry!”

My hands root through drawers until one of them reveals a stash of formerly white hand towels stained brown by years of kitchen use. I grab a handful and bring them to Crystal, who sits on the floor with Lee's torso in her lap. His long-sleeve shirt is ripped and matted red with blood. She folds one of the towels lengthwise until it's about four inches wide and then wraps it tightly around his arm. His muscles twitch beneath the bandage. The smell of blood is heavy and metallic.

“Can you hold this towel while I tie another one around it?”

I do as Crystal asks me, and soon she has fashioned a workable bandage for Lee's wounded arm.

“Crystal, that hurts,” Lee slurs. He appears to be in shock.

“It's okay, honey,” she says to him. And then to me, “We need to get him in the car. Probably in the back where he can lie down.”

“Are we taking him to a hospital?”

“The wound isn't bad enough to warrant that kind of risk. We have to get the hell out of here before the cops come. And there may be more NeuroStor men where these two came from.”

“Don't need a hospital,” Lee adds. “Need computer, though.”

“You know,” I tell Crystal, “I haven't seen anyone else follow me besides these two guys. It might take them a while to send someone else.”

“Cameron, these two may not even be the ones who followed you around the golf course. Here, help me carry him out to the car. You get under his shoulders, and I'll get his legs.”

Together we carefully move Lee out the front door and toward the car. The neighborhood is miraculously quiet, as if no one heard the two unsilenced gunshots. Crystal is forced to lay his feet on the concrete driveway to open the back door, and then I pull him onto the seat. When Lee is comfortably positioned—ranting again about his laptop computer—we close the car doors and hurry back into the house.

“What do you mean these may not be the guys? Believe me when I say I recognize them. Especially that guy you were fighting with.”

“Of course they're the same
people.
They just may not be the same
version
of those people. These two are probably really well trained, so it makes sense that NeuroStor would clone as many of them as possible to get consistent performance out of their covert security ops.”

This is something that didn't occur to me. Possibly because I'm still not sure I believe what they've told me about the transmission machine, even though there seems to be no other explanation for the voice that answered my telephone.

“Are you serious?”

Crystal nods and hands me her keys. “I'm going to get Lee's laptop bag from his room. You go start the car.”

I head outside and get into the Buick's driver's seat. The engine catches on the first try. Crystal appears a few moments later with a black laptop case and another, smaller duffel bag. She places the items in the passenger side floorboard and then walks around to my door.

“Ready?” I ask her.

“I think I'll drive, if you don't mind.”

“Does it matter?”

“It will if you have another seizure while you're behind the wheel.”

This silences me.

“I'm sorry, Cameron. But you have to consider the possibility that—”

“Don't be sorry,” I tell her and get out of the car. “You're right.”

A few moments later I've taken my place as the passenger, Crystal is behind the wheel, and Lee is mumbling in the backseat. She engages the transmission and pulls out into the street.

“We going to Plano?” Lee asks from the backseat.

“That's where we're going, Lee. Lone Star State or bust.”

seven

W
e pass the first few minutes without breaking the tense silence. All the way, in fact, to Winona, where we enter the rough, beaten lanes of I-40. Tractor-trailers stretch to the horizon—great, rectangular beasts bound for Albuquerque or Oklahoma or points farther east, heading in the direction from which I came. Pulled forward by an internal combustion engine. How quaint. And how safe.

We collectively relax as the sun falls into the mountains behind us. Questions fill my mind now, questions about the transmission procedure, about the safety of my wife, about how Ivan could find me again so quickly. I don't know if Crystal has the answer to any of these questions. When you think about it, I really have no idea at all what she knows.

“So you honestly think there could be more of those men who came to Lee's house? More Ivans and more Eds?”

“It fits perfectly with our Green Beret theory: seek out loyal subjects and build yourself an army.”

Can it really be true? Is the transmission machine really a
cloning
device? The idea is impossibly difficult to swallow, and yet how else can you explain my voice on the other end of the telephone?

I reach forward and turn on the air conditioner. For some reason the car interior is already too stuffy.

I don't know where to go from here, what to think or what to say. The idea of simply refusing to believe it appeals strongly to me. If I don't believe, perhaps the scorching fear will go away. Perhaps there is still a chance that all this is a mistake, that if I can just get back home everything will be okay.

“Do you feel betrayed?” Lee asks in a voice that sounds somewhat off-kilter.

“Betrayed?”

“That your company used you to test their machine? That your original is back at home, millions of dollars richer and no worse for wear, while you're left on the run with no place to go?”

“Lee!” Crystal says. “Why don't you lie down and get some rest?”

“You're just a casualty, Cameron. A casualty of the war being waged between true Aryan Americans and the multiculturalists. Between white storm troopers and politically correct robots. That's what the crazy investors behind NeuroStor would say if they were here.”

“Well, I don't understand that sort of bullshit rhetoric. Really, I'm not sure I even believe these neo-Nazi types are helping fund the machine. Why would they hire Batista? He's not white! And how does the transmission machine really benefit them? How would they even arrange the expertise to develop it?”

“You'd be surprised how easy it is to line up funding when the potential payoff is so high,” Crystal says. “More than anything else in the world—except sex, I guess—people want to make money. The poor want to be rich. The rich want to be richer. The difference is that rich people have enough power to get it done. To do just about anything they want.”

“But what you're talking about is a multimillion—no, multi
billion
—dollar conspiracy. I just can't believe anyone could secretly organize something so complicated.”

“Our lives are controlled by giant corporations,” Lee nearly yells. “Manufacturers sell you goods and media conglomerates sell you lies. Arrogant monsters control your life and you don't even know it. You're told what to like, what to wear, who to idolize, what to think. You're helpless to stop it, because the endless procession of pretty people on television and in the movies is too impressive for the average, plodding American to ignore. We celebrate the best actors instead of the best fathers! We celebrate the best quarterbacks instead of the best engineers! Celebrities are the secret weapon of the media conglomerates, Cameron. They use these friendly faces to lead the herd.”

This is where I should voice opposition, the place where I point out the weaknesses in his theory. Only this particular theory sounds dangerously similar to my own desperate life. Isn't it me, after all, who can't enjoy golf anymore because I don't play like Tiger Woods?

“Why do you think so few people in this country help choose their leaders?” Lee rants. “Because at some point the American public realized their votes no longer mattered. If they
ever
mattered. Politicians speak in evasive half-truths designed to be both media-friendly and ambiguous enough to be altered at any moment. Congressmen who veer to the left or right stand no chance of achieving significance without eventually shifting their platforms to the middle. The goal today is to be politically correct. Alienate no one. And hope the media picks you to become the next president of the United States.”

It's ridiculous to have a debate like this right now. I'm tired and nauseous and not at all in the mood. But Lee doesn't seem to realize this.

“By the way,” he says, “you never answered my question.”

“Which one?”

“Do you feel betrayed? That you had no idea you were a clone?”

“You're an asshole.”

         

I sit quietly for a while after that. It must feel good to be Lee and Crystal right now. All unique and everything. They don't have to worry about the “other,” the one living in my house, sleeping in my bed, making love to my wife. That must be really neat for them.

“Highway patrolman,” Crystal says.

Her hands squeeze the steering wheel, and the muscles in my neck tighten under an epidermis of gooseflesh. I look out the window, my eyes searching across the median for the patrol car. At seventy-five miles an hour, and with the cop driving toward us at a similar speed, we ought to pass each other quickly. The equivalent of approaching a still object at 150 miles an hour.

“I don't see him,” I say.

“He's coming up behind us,” Lee answers. “He'll pass us in thirty seconds.”

I turn around to look for the patrol car. Although tractor-trailers rumble toward Flagstaff in steady numbers, the eastbound traffic is thinning. We're the only car in the vicinity. Nothing else to distract the officer's attention. When he changes lanes to pass us, our car will be mere feet from his. Maybe he'll have a police sketch on the seat next to him. Perhaps he'll recognize me.

“Look away, Cameron,” Crystal says. “Don't move suddenly or try to duck. Just look away.”

My initial, knee-jerk thought to that is, What difference does it make? What difference does any of this make? Why bother to go on when I have no home and no wife waiting for me?

And why are Crystal and Lee even bothering to take me to Dallas, anyway? All I am is a liability to them now. They'll be implicated as accessories to murder if the police catch them with me. Who knows if I'll have another seizure or bout with nausea? I don't understand why they think they have to drag me across hundreds of miles of desert.

After a few seconds, the nose of the patrol car overtakes the trunk of ours, and then he is driving by. It seems to take forever. As his front windows come even with ours, I imagine his eyes boring into the back of my skull. He can tell somehow. He recognizes me from the side—it's the shape of my head, no doubt—and now he's on the two-way, calling for backup. Before you know it, I'll be handcuffed in the backseat of his car, on my way to Flagstaff again.

He goes by and by and by. Forever he goes by. But then, after forever, the patrolman moves back into the right lane, and drives away toward the darkening horizon.

Silence again.

I keep thinking about that other Cameron Fisher, the one who is really me. He doesn't know about any of this. How will he and Misty reconcile their different perspectives on what happened?

“What do you think they told my wife?” I ask Crystal. “When that other Cameron showed up? Wouldn't she have asked questions, wondered why I couldn't remember anything about Arizona?”

“I'm sure they had something figured out,” she says. “About how the scan must have altered his memory somehow. You signed a waiver, of course, so it's not like she has any legal recourse. And beyond not remembering the transmission, everything about you would be fine anyway. Maybe she's just happy you're back safely.”

I try to remember my visit to NeuroStor that day, to guess what the other Cameron must remember. I stepped into the portal, took off my clothes, and then waited. My next memory is waking up in Arizona. I don't remember the scanning process, and I certainly don't know what happened to the other “me” after the transmission. What would they have done with him while they waited to evaluate me?

I guess if I really wanted to know, I would have to ask him. But when I try to picture myself talking to, well, myself, I realize just how unbelievable this whole story really is.

         

Darkness overtakes the last rays of orange daylight, and the car grows quiet again. For a while I sit with my eyes closed, hoping to will myself to sleep, but of course that doesn't work. Strobelike images flicker behind my closed eyes. Running from Ivan through a thundering rainstorm. Batista's greasy smile when I agreed to volunteer. Misty's confused tears as I climbed into the transmission portal and out of her life.

That's what I am now, isn't it? With the other Cameron there, the original one, what am I? Where do I fit in?

Nowhere.

I've been so worried about the state of our relationship, about whether we are better off staying together or trying to find happiness with someone else, and now it appears my feelings are irrelevant. I'm not her husband anyway. Not anymore.

I can't even picture that man in my house. With my wife. Do they still argue about transmitting? Does Cameron feel vindicated in his decision to go through with it? Is his life changed for transmitting?

“Where are we?” I ask.

“We just went through Gallup,” Crystal says. “I guess we're two hours from Albuquerque.”

“Oh.”

“What were you thinking about, Cameron?”

“Nothing, really.”

“Were you thinking about your wife?”

For some reason I don't want her to know that I was.

“You can't try to see her until we do something about NeuroStor, you know. They'll be waiting at your house in Houston.”

“So what
are
we going to do about NeuroStor?” I ask. “How do you plan to confront them or get the story on television?”

“Well, we could go to the media with what we have now, but I think the story would be much more explosive if we got someone from NeuroStor on videotape. This Batista, for instance. We need to confront him with our proof and see what happens.”

“What proof?”

“Well,
you
, of course. You and the original Cameron.”

Ah. This is why they need me, why these relative strangers are so willing to put up with my naïveté and frustration and bouts of nausea. Because I'm their best piece of evidence.

“How are we going to get Batista on tape?”

“We'll have to get inside their Dallas office.”

“And what happens if they capture us in the process?” I ask her. “They would kill us. Then we'd never get to tell what we know.”

“I won't argue that. It's a game show now, Cameron. We can take our sixty-four thousand dollars or try for the million. What do you say?”

“I don't know. We've got a long time to talk about it, I guess.”

“About twelve hours to Dallas. How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good right now.”

“From what you've told me, it seems like all of your episodes have come during times of high anxiety or stress. If that's the case, maybe you'll be okay when all this is over.”

“Sure I will. I've lost my wife and my job. About the only thing left of any interest to me is golf, and I don't know if I can even do that anymore.”

“Why can't you play golf?”

“That's the first thing I noticed after the transmission. Tom and I played the next morning and something was wrong with my coordination. I couldn't hit the ball.”

“Maybe you could relearn. Practice a lot and be able to play again.”

“I don't think practicing is going to change the problem with my balance or my hand-eye coordination. The transmission effects are intermittent. One moment my dexterity is there and the next my hands and arms and legs don't do what I tell them. I'm certainly not going to keep playing golf if I can't compete.”

“Are you a pro or something?”

“No. But . . . I don't know. It's complicated.”

“Complicated how?”

“I'm almost good enough to play on tour. Not the PGA, but maybe one of the semipro tours. Except that really I can't play on any of them because being almost good enough and actually good enough are light- years apart in golf. It doesn't matter that I can beat almost anyone I play. What matters is that I can't beat tour players.”

“Have you ever played against professional golfers?”

“Not directly, but Tom and I once tried out for a tournament in Austin together. I shot eighty-one and he shot eighty in the qualifier. Ben Crenshaw won the tournament with an average score of sixty-eight.”