Warp (10 page)

“What, you have a date?” she said.

“It's a long story.”

That's my favorite kind.

“What kind of a story?”

“What kind?” He sat up and swung his legs down off the bed. He put his head down onto his hands. “I don't know. I guess you could say it's a dramedy.”

She propped herself up on her elbows behind him. She was disheveled, halfway out of her slip, and looking at her Hollis felt a pulse of renewed desire.

He explained what he and Peters were doing.

“Dover?” She seemed a little unnerved. “What's in Dover? Whose house is it?”

“Just these people's. Their name is Donnelly—Peters knows them.”

“Oh.”

Hollis found his boots and tied the laces with big, loopy bows. When he stood up, his weight came down on the shot glass he'd been drinking out of, and it squirted out from under his boot across the hardwood floor.

“Forget about it,” she said. “You can't break those things. Come on, I'll walk you out.”

She pushed the strap of her slip back up and heaved herself up off the bed, giving Hollis a momentary flash of dark hair as it rode up over her white thighs. He found his coat in the bedclothes and picked it up. She led the way as they walked back along the length of the long room and through the kitchen, she pulling him along by one hand, he tagging along behind.

Her roommate was still asleep, an old T-shirt folded across her eyes. They made their way through her bedroom to the outer door.

Hollis went ahead of her out into the hall, carrying his coat. Alix stayed behind in the doorway. Her lipstick was mostly gone, and her face looked unfamiliar in the harsh light. He noticed for the first time that she had a small tattoo on her neck, a simple blue-green circle.

She kissed him on the cheek.

“Good night, Alix,” he said.

She shook her head slowly.

“I was lying,” she said. “You were right the first time. I
am
Xanthe.”

Then she closed the door, and Hollis stood there for a few seconds, blinking, before he turned and walked slowly back down the hall toward the elevator. It was cold on the way down, after the warmth of her apartment: the rest of the building didn't seem to be heated. He shrugged into his coat. The air smelled like wet paint.

Back outside in the street the night was quieter than before. The moon was finally visible, with a thick, cream-colored ring of refracted light around it. Hollis looked around the edge of the door for a nameplate or a mailbox, but there was absolutely nothing to show that anybody lived there. He jumped down off the loading dock and backed away from it, looking up, trying to find even a lighted window, but there was only darkness.

Quite a three-pipe problem, Watson.

It was all a dream.

A miniature maelstrom of leaves formed nearby. It wandered over to Hollis, whirling around him for a few seconds, before it dispersed into nothingness again.

 

CHAPTER 5

FRIDAY, 3:30 A.M.

The bus stop was opposite the one he'd gotten off at before. The street was quieter and darker now, and the marquee over the movie theater where he'd met Peters had been turned off. A few leaves lay scattered across the brick sidewalk. There was no traffic, and the little park was deserted now. A young Hispanic-looking man ran past Hollis going the other way, his hands jammed into the pockets of a satin varsity jacket.

The stop was on a corner in front of an office building, and the company that owned the building had turned the sidewalk into a little brick plaza with a greenish bronze sundial in the middle, lit up by an orange-pink streetlight. A couple sat waiting on one of the benches, both wearing black leather coats, and Hollis recognized one of them: she worked behind the counter at a used-clothing store near his apartment in Allston. She was a tiny woman, barely five feet tall, with an almost shockingly thin waist. Her complexion was deathly pale. She wore stockings with fat horizontal Dr. Seuss stripes on them. The two talked quietly, and the man kept snapping his fingers excitedly whenever he made a point.

Nay, my brothers. She is not the one we seek.

Hollis sat down on the other bench. He didn't have to wait long: in a couple of minutes the bus appeared at the corner, its tires squeaking and grinding against the curb. The pavement sparkled in the headlights. The lights were on inside—it was almost empty. He paid and walked back to an empty row of blue plastic seats towards the middle, and the bus whined and heaved itself forward.

There were hot-air blowers in the ceiling, and Hollis shivered and opened his coat. He felt exhausted. He could see his reflection in the opposite window, looking slightly bleary-eyed. His face was getting stubbly, and his coat collar was standing up on one side. Outside, behind his reflection, shadowy buildings slid by, followed by the headlights of a car waiting at an intersection, and then the bus reached the bridge and there was a view of the Charles River: a wide expanse of dark water and white reflected light broken up into tiny wavelets. On one side was a huge Victorian boathouse that belonged to Harvard. The other side was overgrown with a dark mass of shrubbery.

Upstream Hollis could see the lights of Mt. Auburn Hospital, buried among the trees.

In 1873 the body of an unidentified young woman was recovered from the Seine River in Paris. A plaster death mask was taken of her face, and under the name L'Inconnue de la Seine it became one of the most striking and popular icons of nineteenth-century French Romanticism.

The woman from the clothing store got up unsteadily from where she'd been sitting next to her boyfriend. She staggered to another seat, dropped into it, and looked back at him coyly.

“I can't sit going sideways,” she said, primly crossing her legs.

There were only five or six other passengers. The change-sorting machine at the front of the bus was clacking and jingling loudly. The digits of a giant LED clock flew by outside, in front of a bank. It was a quarter of four.

The bomb is set to go off in fifteen minutes. You must stop this insanity before it goes any further.

Past the bridge Hollis saw the huge Harvard sports complex. A giant inflated tennis Quonset loomed in the distance, across a dark plain of playing fields. The bus stopped at a traffic light.

Hollis closed his eyes.

The tide had come in while they were sitting talking, and the only path back to the beach was six feet underwater. The rest of the rocky point was fenced off by a private estate. Hollis wanted to swim back across the cove, but Eileen thought it was too choppy—they'd never make it out through the surf. Neither of them could remember how long it took for the tide to go out again.

“Well, Skipper,” she said, getting up from where she was sitting and dusting sand off her thighs, “I say we climb that fence and get the hell out of here.”

“Hang on,” Hollis said, from where he was lying. “My Spidey-sense is tingling. That means trouble.”

Eileen sat down on a boulder.

The sun was only about an hour above the horizon. The sea was a dark blue. The air was cooling, but the rocks were still warm, and from where they were sitting they could see the beach and the row of summer mansions that ran along behind it, and the tiny beachgoers laid out in ragged parallel rows along the sand.

Half an hour went by.

“Okay,” said Hollis finally. He sat up and stretched. “I give in.”

Eileen's eyes were closed. She wriggled a little where she was lying.

“I was just getting comfortable,” she said. “Gimme another sec.”

“You can have all the sex you want.”

The bus stopped every few blocks, but no one got on or off. Hollis let his head lie back against the hard back of the seat, with his legs stretched out across the aisle. He felt the bus turn a corner and climb up a bridge which ran over an abandoned railway yard. He knew what it looked like in daylight: brown steel rails and brown wooden sleepers with weeds poking up between them. There were complicated mechanical shunting devices at the intersections, now rusted into place. A few blasted-looking old railroad cars still stood on the tracks, painted bright primary toy-colors.

Here lies the wasteland of X, where once the mighty wizard Y did battle with the mighty wizard Z.

The bus turned a sharp corner, and a collection of candy wrappers and Styrofoam cups slid out from under the seats and across the floor. An oversized can of Foster's rolled after them in irregular, sloshing jerks.

At that moment, the futility of his existence was suddenly borne in upon him.

Hollis slid down even farther in his seat, until he could see the streetlights opposite him going by overhead, linked to one another by power lines that resembled long rising and falling swells. The sky behind them was a mist of orange and gray. The tiny woman and her boyfriend were sitting next to each other again. At the back of the bus a thin black man sat bolt upright, listening to a Walkman.

After ten minutes they were almost at Hollis's stop, and he got up and went to stand at the front of the bus for the last block. A trio of twentysomething women were getting off at the same time, tipsy secretaries having a night out.

“Please retrieve your baggage from under the seats,” said one of them, giggling. “Before exiting the airplane.”

I am not capable of human emotion, Doctor. I am unable to “laugh” at what you call “humor.”

The whole intersection was lit up with floodlights, and a crowd was milling around noisily on the sidewalks—mostly college students from Boston University and Boston College. A few bars and clubs were still open, and a Store 24. Hollis pushed through the crowd as fast as he could. The night was quieter and darker after he got a few blocks up Commonwealth to where the residential buildings started. For some reason, the roofs were all crenellated, and silhouetted against the sky they looked like one single unbroken fortified wall. He passed a lamppost festooned with yards and yards of magnetic ribbon from an unwound cassette tape.

On May 21, 1991, while campaigning in Sriperumbudur, south of Madras, former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was approached by a young woman wearing a loose-fitting green-and-orange robe. As the woman bowed to Mr. Gandhi in a traditional gesture of respect, she apparently detonated a bomb made of plastique mixed with steel ball bearings which she wore strapped to her body beneath her clothing. All that remained after the explosion was her head, which was found nearby almost perfectly intact.

The street in front of Hollis's building was divided by the trolley tracks, and someone had gotten stuck in one of the lanes going the wrong way. Now the driver gingerly tried to back up to where he'd made the mistake, in the glare of the headlights of the oncoming cars. A group of partygoers watched from the sidewalk.

“Now I've seen everything,” said a woman's voice.

The trolley had stopped running hours earlier. He could hear the wind blowing in the trees, and there was a crisp smell of snow in the air. A plastic upright fan stood leaned up against a tree in front of his building; for some reason the trash people wouldn't collect it.

In the elevator, Hollis leaned back against the wall and took a deep breath. The door opened. He walked mechanically to his apartment and unlocked it—it took him a few tries to get both locks undone. His futon was still folded up into a couch. There were no messages on the machine.

As he unlocked his bicycle outside her apartment, he noticed he was having trouble breathing.

“I'm dead,” he thought. “I'll never survive.”

The square dial of the clock on his desk read 3:55. Hollis went into the bathroom and sat down on the cold tile floor, still wearing his green corduroy overcoat. The radiator hissed crazily.

One night Hollis came back to his building late. He was surprised to see a man standing in the hallway outside his apartment—it was unusual for anyone else in the building to be up at this hour. The man was dressed in a gray suit, somber but expensively cut. For some reason he struck Hollis as strangely familiar.

“Hollis Kessler,” said the stranger. “Do you know who I am?”

Hollis stopped.

“I don't think so.”

“I'm here to ask for your help. There isn't much time. I've come a long way to find you.”

They faced each other.

“Our world is dying. Only you can save us.”

For some reason the bathroom light was incredibly bright. Hollis ran some cold tap water into a glass and drank it. It tasted like old toothpaste.

My hands were unsteady, and a drop splashed onto the white linen of the tablecloth.

Same old Caulfield. When are you going to grow up?

Hollis closed his eyes.

It was very late. Lying on the bed, Hollis watched Eileen take off her jewelry. Her back was to him, but he caught glimpses of her face in the mirror.

“Nadia's mother looked like hell tonight,” she said.

“She had that huge pin on her dress,” said Hollis. “What was that thing, the Hope Rhinestone?”

When she was done Eileen came over and lay down on top of him, still in her evening gown, with the back unzipped down to the small of her back. They kissed.

After a while she pulled back and wrinkled her nose at him, smiling.

“You sweat like a pig,” said Eileen. “Whenever you wear a suit.”

“But I smell like a man.”

“You smell like several men.”

The sun is going down on a salt marsh. The tops of the reeds are all but drowned in seawater. A post marks the channel out to the ocean.