Those That Wake (27 page)

Mal's strength had been used against him. But Mike had used his own weakness against Man in Suit. Mike had taken a sense of worthlessness that had been forced on him his entire life and turned it into selfless sacrifice. He had found strength in his own hopelessness and overcome it. Man in Suit's outlook allowed only for strength that could be subverted into vulnerability. It was his failure not to understand that it could work in reverse, as well. That was the nature of human beings.

The door pinged open onto a room of doors.

"Which one?" Laura said after they had come out.

Mal nodded over to one.

"Open it," she said, pulling Annie along to the doorway.

And sure enough, it was true, just as everything else Mal had told them had been true. The door opened into a space, a dimly lit basement that was larger than the space beyond the door could possibly allow.

"Go," she said.

Mal carried his brother into the other place, and Laura pulled Annie in after. She held the detonator in her hand and looked back into the room of doors.

"Your life was worth something, Mike," she said out the doorway. "Your life was worth everything."

She pressed the red button with her thumb. There was a thunderous roar and a searing flash of fire, and she slammed the door shut on it. And then there was only the cold, dark basement.

THERE WAS A WOMAN
named Claire Westlake, who lived a quiet and lonesome life. As her husband, Ron, worked during the day and she lacked the enthusiasm for her own work any longer, Claire looked for ways to divide the long days into individual parts, to make each hour endurable, each goal seem within reach. Even the smallest things could be scheduled as events, of sorts: taking out the garbage, fixing herself a snack, unloading the dishwasher. Or walking down the yard to check the mail.

Only packages were hand-delivered anymore, and Claire was expecting nothing. But the thirty seconds it took her to walk down and check was thirty seconds she needn't concentrate on anything else. The box was not empty, however. It contained a single, puzzling envelope. It bore her name and Ron's but not their address, postage, nor return address, either, as if the sender had come to the mailbox and slipped it in. With an unfamiliar sense of curiosity piqued, she tore it open, and she extracted the contents while standing on the grass in the wash of sunlight pouring between the tree limbs of her suburban street.

Within it was a handwritten note on a single card, so unusual to receive in this age of instantaneous electronic transmission, but somehow made more solid, more real because of it.

"
A daughter and her parents lost each other,
" the letter began without preamble.

The daughter thought she had nothing without them: no strength, no love, no future. She found out that the parents had given her the power to make those things on her own. But when they did, they lost the power to do it for themselves.

A child without her parents becomes an adult. But what do parents without their child become? I think that, like the child, they need to make a future they believe in.

You taught me how to fight for everything that matters. You may not remember that. But I will never forget.

Laura

Claire's jaw was trembling and her knees were weak.

The writing was on the reverse of a photograph, the slick surface so unfamiliar to her fingers. How long had it been since Claire had held an actual photograph instead of scrolling by one on her cell? It was a picture of a little girl on a swing, leaning forward and smiling at the camera with bright blue eyes. Those eyes—they made Claire's head light. She didn't recognize them, not exactly. At least not the person they were a part of. But she remembered them because they were the same eyes—brimming with that same curiosity and brightness—that used to look back at her from the mirror.

Tears ran down Claire's face. They came with such intensity that they began to fall on the photo. She brushed the moisture away gently and carefully, as if the image were the most precious thing on Earth.

The words, the picture, were as foreign to her as a world she had never known. But they found a place beneath all the numbness in her chest, where a sense of longing, of something missing had lodged itself.

Laura? Who could this possibly be? She had no memory of a student she'd ever taught named Laura. Certainly it was not Laura Silvers, Paul Silvers's wife. These were not sentiments likely to come from that bitter old shrew.

She walked back in, studying the child in the picture, her mind distracted from the day's rigid schedule of events. She had to show it to Ron when he got home. The words seemed so sad, they should have taken her own despair and multiplied it. But there was something else in them, too; the same thing as in the bright eyes of the little girl in the picture. They were filled with such a sense of ... what was the word? It was on the tip of her tongue, just tickling at the edge of her mind.

There was a young lady named Annie, sweet-tempered and kind. She worked in a boutique during the day and then, tired but unbowed, got on the subway, went way, way uptown, and worked for another six hours at a clinic. Her fella—it was too late to call him boyfriend, too early to call him fiancé, and the English language didn't have a word for what was in between—was starting trade school soon, to become an auto mechanic, and she was putting him through it and keeping him there. He had just come out of a difficult time, associating with the wrong people and getting caught up in the wrong business. This was their chance now, and she couldn't afford to let either of them falter. She was prepared to work these hours another few years to get them on their feet, then Tommy would support her while she worked her way to a degree in education.

They were long hours, though, and when she was done, her eyes were blurry and she could easily nod off on the train home. It was a surprise, then, that she was alert enough to realize that she was being watched.

It was a cumulative realization. She didn't see the guy one day and say, "He's watching me." She kept seeing him, waiting on the platform of the station she transferred at every day, until it finally added up.

Not one to think the worst of a person or a situation, and certainly not wanting to worry her fella with this, as he could be quick-tempered and leap into things—conclusions as well as trouble—before thinking them through clearly, Annie walked right up to the guy, big and broad and notable for the way his face was both sad and stubborn at the same time. Did he look like Tommy, or was it just the expression?

Surprisingly, he didn't turn away or try to run from her. He waited for her to approach as if he had been waiting for her to spot him and do something about it since he had started watching her.

"What's up, dude?" she said, her chin pointing to the middle of his chest as her head tilted backwards to look up at him. She intended it to sound determined, at least, though not uncharitable. There were a lot of people in this city who were unwell in a lot of different ways, and showing them anger, which was more or less all they ever saw, didn't help anyone.

"I didn't mean to frighten you, Annie," he said, looking down at her with such obvious affection and hope that she didn't even ask him how he knew her name. "I needed to make sure."

"Make sure of what?"

"Make sure you were all right, I guess. I've—I've got this picture. It's..."

She waited for a long time on the subway platform for the rest of the thought, but he didn't seem capable of completing it.

"Are
you
all right?" she asked.

He smiled, but it somehow made his sadness deepen.

"I need you to make sure Tommy keeps going, you know? He can turn things into a big fight for himself sometimes, just get angry instead of pushing on."

She nodded, not surprised that he somehow knew Tommy so well.

"I know you can keep him going, even if it seems like sometimes you can't or even don't want to. But I really need you to."

"I'm going to," she said, and not for his benefit, but simply because it was true.

"Also," he said, "could you just tell him something? Could you say that, ah, that he's not—he's..."

"Say it. You can just say it. I'll tell him whatever you need me to."

He seemed to gather it together then, put some height into his shoulders, not sag quite so much under the weight of that unknowable something or other that was sitting on his back.

"Tell him he's not alone anymore."

"Not alone?"

"Yes," he said.

"Why not tell him yourself?"

"No. Not yet. He ... we both need time."

Annie squinted curiously.

"I'll tell him," she said.

"Thank you. I should probably stop spying on you."

It was a ridiculous thing she was going to say, but it was how she felt and that's what she did: she tried never to hide how she felt.

"You don't have to," she told him.

He smiled again, not so sad this time.

"I wasn't going to." He smiled and looked much younger then, and Annie realized that he was barely older than she was. He nodded and turned and walked to the stairway, where a pretty girl with bright blue eyes and a Mets cap was waiting for him. The girl smiled at Annie and then took the guy's hand in hers. They walked up the steps and off together into their future.

There had been an explosion in midtown some time ago. People walking the street heard it and their necks snapped to as they saw a space in the city that none of them had ever really seen before. For an instant, the bloom of yellow and black was visible, and many started screaming and some started running because, as they would later swear to reporters or relate to friends and family, there was suddenly a building where there had been none a moment before. For its astonishing arrival, it was not such an unusual-looking building; just a sort of generic edifice where Corporations Did Things, with corporate coffee shops in the lobby and banks of mirrored elevators to take faceless people to nameless places.

People screamed and ran, hoping to avoid injury from falling debris, glass, concrete, metal. Firefighters and emergency workers appeared on the scene to find a crowd of shocked and shaken bystanders and, bizarrely, not quite enough building. Confirmed by later investigation, the debris accounted for the outer structure of the building but not for anything that might have been inside it, such as office furniture, interior walls, or, most importantly, people.

There were some inquiries made in the neighboring buildings, where many on the upper floors allowed that they had certainly heard an explosion. On the other hand, none of them could recall in particular what the neighboring building looked like, or what it housed, or even speaking to anyone who worked in it on a cigarette break or a coffee run.

The immediate assumption was yet another terrorist attack, of course. But why that building, which no one could name, no business claimed, no institution spoke for? And why, then, had no terrorist group taken credit for it?

Eventually, the matter of practical disposition was dropped into the lap of a gray-suited man named Meed, who worked for the city. He inspected the scene, did his research, and determined that the lot, zoned for skyscraper construction like the lots all around it, was owned by no one at all. There was a record of the lot, of course, in city files, and of construction by a now-defunct contracting company, but the building had no history of ownership or tenants. It was, in the end, a mystery to be filed away and recounted over dinner with family friends every few years, a story to be retold and perhaps included in an anthology of urban legends someday.

Most practically, Meed determined, what it meant was that the city owned a piece of the most prime business real estate in the metropolitan area, free and clear. Someone else apparently determined this, too, as one morning Meed walked into his office and a man wearing an extremely expensive suit and a cold, sharp expression was waiting there. With the bearing of a lawyer who was doing something absolutely within the confines of the law, he told Meed to shuffle around some papers and arrange for the lot of land to be placed in the name of a certain company that he, the lawyer, represented. Things would, subsequently, go well for Meed.

It was only the first such offer. They came in the form of phone calls, notes, and another visit from a small party of lawyerly-looking men who found Meed outside City Hall one day at a hot dog stand.

Construction of a new edifice would cost enough on its own. Far better to pay a small bribe then the full price of the land. Cut losses, maximize profit, swallow more of the world: death by corporate agenda. Each offer was increasingly lucrative.

Meed was a bureaucrat by trade and by temperament. He detested the chaos of a world that lived outside the rules. Add to that an almost total lack of imagination and a sense of honesty born of the work ethic handed down by his father, who worked in a supermarket from the day he had graduated from high school to the day he died, and Meed proved impossible to influence.

Two hours before a few people in a boardroom decided to kick the pressure up by threatening Meed's wife and two daughters, Meed informed his superiors that the lot was the city's free and clear and could go up for auction.

So there was an auction, and someone bought it. Within a year of this purported explosion, construction began anew.

It was going to be the headquarters of some multinational conglomerate with a complicated name, the sort of company that people invested in or didn't because their brokers knew something about it, but few people ever really understood, or cared to understand, what it actually did.

It was going to tower up there, just a story or two taller than its neighbors, all metallic and gleaming, infinitely reflecting the similarly reflective multinational headquarters on either side of it. Coincidentally or not, it appeared very much like the structure that had occupied the lot just before it, though nobody knew it, for the last one had escaped their notice altogether. People had been too busy looking down at their cells or blinded by the haze inside their own heads. This one, at least, they could see, if they would just raise their eyes and look.