Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 4

It’s one sad story after another, Wilson thought, riding in a cab out to the airport. And you have to get past that because, after a while, the stories no longer matter. The faces no longer matter. All that’s left is the event. It’s like…

The Arizona! No one thinks about the sailors, burning, drowning, dying in their bunks. Or the good volk of Dresden, incinerated from the air. The streets of Hiroshima, the trading desk at Cantor Fitzgerald – the dead are everywhere. So you can call it whatever you want. You can call it an atrocity. But in the end it always comes down to the same thing. It’s History.

And as for the dead, no one remembers their names. But Manson and Mohammed Atta – they’re a part of us now, as familiar as the dark. The truth is, after a while the shock fades and even a massacre artist like Cortéz is celebrated as a hero. A bringer of culture, a great explorer. Prometheus, drenched in blood.

The past softens. What begins as a massacre is packaged as news and consumed as “infotainment.” Eventually, it turns into a television miniseries.

But not this time. This time, there won’t be any reenactments. Or any news, for that matter. Just the event. Then nothing. The idea made him smile.

No one remembers the yellow ribbons and teddy bears, he told himself. The snapshots and handwritten notes – artifacts that appear out of nowhere, like mushrooms after a soaking rain. All forgotten. In the end, the walls and floors are washed down with hoses. The abattoir turns into a memorial. Tourists gawk.

Like when that English princess died in France. He was in Colorado at the time, locked down as a Level 1 prisoner in Supermax. But there was a program about it on one of the godsquad shows. People stood in the rain for hours, waiting to sign some kind of “book of remembrance,” at her funeral. He wondered about it for a long time. What did they get out of it? Eventually, he decided they wanted a piece of her death, a piece of her celebrity.

“You need a receipt?” the cabdriver asked.

Wilson snapped out of it. “No, that’s okay.” He took a deep breath. Put on the hat.

He had to remind himself, because he almost never wore a hat. But this was different. This was it, and there were cameras all over the place. So he clapped the Borsalino on his head, pushed open the door to the cab, and stepped out into the slush.

A light snow whirled through the air.

Flight crews and passengers were coming and going with suitcases, carry-ons, and kids. Good, Wilson thought. It’s busy. “Busy” is good. “Busy” is what they want. “Busy” is the whole point.

Moving quickly around to the back of the car, Wilson waited as the driver popped the trunk, then he stepped forward. “I’ll get them,” he said.

Seeing his passenger’s arm in a sling, the driver looked surprised, but figured what-the-hell.

Wilson reached into the trunk and, using his “good” arm, hauled the suitcases out by their carrying straps.

“You want a skycap?”

Wilson shook his head. “That’s okay,” he said, handing the driver a couple of twenties and a ten.

He was standing by the curb with his overcoat draped across his shoulders like a cape. A chenille scarf hung from his neck, which served also as a fulcrum for the silk sling in which his left arm was hung. Taxis, cars, and vans pulled in and out around him, disgorging passengers under the “Departures” sign. A few yards away, a young white cop strolled along the middle of the road, slapping the roofs of idling cars, chiding everyone to “Keep it moving! Let’s go!”

The temperature was just below freezing. Wilson could see his breath tumbling in the air as he stood in the slush, staring at the suitcases. Pull them out. Pull the handles out. But…

The cop was looking at him.

What the fuck, Wilson thought and, reaching down, jerked the handle up from the suitcase, half expecting a thunderclap of light and fire. Nothing. He pulled out the second handle. Nothing again! With a sigh of relief, he shot the cuff on his right arm and checked the watch he’d bought for the occasion.

This was not the kind of watch that complements a cashmere overcoat. It was, instead, an inexpensive digital sportswatch with a plastic band the color of graphite. Set to TIMER, it read 10:00:00. Pressing the button at the base of the watch, the one marked START, Wilson watched the numbers begin to morph, forming and re-forming. 9 minutes, 54 seconds… 9 minutes, 51 seconds… 9 minutes-

Looking up, Wilson swung his head from left to right, and caught the eye of a skycap. The man hurried over.

“Where to?”

“B-A.”

“You got it!”

A thin black man with flashing eyes and perfect teeth, the skycap bent to his task, depressing the handles into the suitcases. Then he swung each of the bags onto a cart and turned to go. “First class, right?”

Wilson faked a chuckle, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I wish,” he said. His voice sounded hollow, even to himself. A soft guffaw from the skycap as the man leaned into his cart, and pushed off toward the automatic doors. Then a whoosh of air, a burst of noise, and they were in the terminal, engulfed by the chaos of the place. The skycap nodded toward a line of passengers that serpentined inside a maze of ropes, curling back and forth in front of the ticket agents’ counter.

“You could be here awhile.”

Wilson shrugged.

“I’ll put these up front,” the skycap told him. “That way you won’t have to kick ’em through the line.”

Wilson fumbled a five-dollar bill from his pocket, thanked the man for his help, and joined the winding queue in front of the British Airways counter. There were fifty or sixty people ahead of him, bored and impatient, tired even before their trip began. With their luggage and carry-ons, they looked like refugees. Wilson watched as the skycap made his way to the front of the line, where he stopped and dragged the suitcases from the cart, using both hands. Then he called out something to one of the ticket agents, and nodded in Wilson’s direction. The agent looked up, saw the sling, and nodded.

Wilson’s shirt was damp with sweat, which gave him a chill, but his face was flushed and hot. His stomach was waltzing in his gut and, worst of all, a moiré pattern was beginning to form in the corner of his right eye, a silver flutter that amounted to a hole in his peripheral vision. Soon, he knew, the glitter would spread from one eye to the other, and then he’d be blind. Or almost blind. Bedazzled, in any case.

Like a dance troupe, the people in front of him lifted their suitcases. Stepped forward. Stopped. Set their bags down, and fell back in conversation.

The first time it happened, when he was nineteen or twenty, Wilson didn’t know what it was, or what to do. He’d been scared to death. Thought he had a brain tumor. Thought he was going blind for real. But no. They gave him a CAT scan at the hospital, and the results were normal. The doctor called it an ophthalmic migraine, a rare condition that seemed to be stress-related. There wasn’t much in the literature about it, but they thought it had something to do with intelligence, because the only people who “expressed” a migraine in quite that way were “off the charts.”

So the eye thing wasn’t a problem, really. Just an inconvenience. And the trade-off was that, while he ended up with a migraine, it didn’t hurt. And it wouldn’t last long. Half an hour at most, and only a couple of times a year. Often enough that by now Wilson knew what to do: Ride it out.

Which wasn’t so easy, really. Because the only time he ever got these things was when he was under a lot of stress.

Not that he couldn’t handle it. In high school, his senior year, he caught three passes in a game with a herringbone pattern undulating in the air between him and the ball. Years later, in a meeting with the government’s lawyers – when they told him they were fucking him – he had one then, too. And no one noticed. No one saw what he’d seen: the gleam in the air, dancing between them. So he sat there, blind as a bat and surrounded by lawyers, listening as the guy from the Pentagon explained what he called “the facts of life.” 35 USC 131. Eminent domain as it applies to intellectual property.

The next time it happened was… when? At his sentencing! And, after that, on the Con Air flight out to Colorado. Where they buried him alive for what amounted to wishful thinking. (Or as the court put it, for “solicitation of murder.”)

But no one knew about his eyes, no one ever guessed. Not the guards, and not the other prisoners. So, really, it was just one of those things, one of those “Here we go again” kind of things.

Still, it wasn’t something you could ignore. And now it was taking over, glazing everything in the corners of his eyes. His peripheral vision was almost gone. People and things were beginning to disappear. Soon-

“-time?”

Wilson blinked. “Sorry?” The woman in front of him, a girl, really, was asking him the time.

“I just asked, ‘Is this your first time?’”

He tried to focus, to see around the aura or through it, but of course he couldn’t. Even so, he could tell she was young, maybe twelve or thirteen, with henna-colored hair, cut short. And a backpack. Green earrings, which snapped into focus for a moment. Gumbys. “First time for what?”

“Flying.”

The question was so naïve, so very much out of left field, that he almost laughed. “No,” he said. “I’ve been up a couple of times.”

She nodded thoughtfully. After a bit, she asked, “Is it scary? I’ve never actually flown before.”

“No kidding!”

He glanced at his watch. 5:48… 5:45… 5:43. “It’s a lot more dangerous on the ground,” he said. “Planes are pretty safe.” The line edged forward a couple of steps, and he saw that she moved awkwardly, leaning on a cane and dragging her left leg.

“Looks like you’ve been skiing.”

A soft, regretful chuckle. “No, I’ve never been skiing.”

He thought she was going to say something else, but the moment passed. Then the line inched ahead again, and so did she. No cast. Just the cane. Something congenital, then.

“What about you?”

At first, he didn’t know what she meant. Then he remembered the sling, and – “Oh, you mean this! Yeah, I was at… Killington.” He could see Gumby’s awkward smile floating behind the moiré pattern. In five or six minutes, the girl would be gone. Almost all of them would be.

He could almost see it: the blood and the glass, bodies wet and smoking on the marble floor. People staggering through the rubble, shell-shocked, deaf and bleeding. And the silence – like after a car crash. Everything would be silent, if only for a couple of seconds. Then the quiet would give way to a wail of recognition. The air would fizz and the cries would go up, filling the vacuum with noise until it exploded into a long, collective scream.

Restraining the impulse to glance at his watch, Wilson lowered his head toward the girl, and said, “Excuse me?”

She turned and looked up at him.

“Would you mind holding my place?”

“No,” she said. “I mean, sure! I’d be happy to.”

“’Cause I’ll just be a minute.” A hint of embarrassment in his tone.

“No problem!”

“Thanks.”

With a wince that was meant to be a smile, Wilson set off in the direction of the newsstand, leaving the queue, the girl, and the suitcases in his wake. It took all the willpower he had not to look over his shoulder and not to break into a run, but to walk slowly toward the restrooms-

And keep going.

An escalator delivered him, sweating and out of breath, to the baggage area below. He looked at his watch, but the glitter in his eyes made it impossible to read. 2:40? 2:10? 39 seconds? He couldn’t be sure.

Walking faster now, he went through a passageway to the outside, then quickly crossed the road to the short-term parking lot. Row 15.

The Jeep wasn’t there. Wilson’s stomach did a backflip, and a sizzle of panic shot through his chest. They’d fucked him.

He was looking around – there was nowhere to go – waiting for the world to explode, when he heard a horn and, turning, saw the Jeep, one row behind him. And there in the Jeep, Bo was laughing, waving him over. Wilson dashed between a phalanx of parked cars, yanked open the door to the passenger seat, and dove in.

As the car began to roll, Wilson realized that they weren’t alone. There was a guy in the backseat who looked like an Arab – an older guy he’d never seen before. And he was smiling. Nodding approval.

Likewise Bobojon, who was good to go, with the parking chit in his lap and dollar bills at the ready. Even so, it was taking a long time to get out of the lot. A BMW sat in front of them at the parking attendant’s booth, while the woman behind the wheel rummaged through her purse, babbling apologies. So they sat there in the Jeep, waiting for the terminal to blow, waiting for all hell to break loose, while this crazy bitch rooted around for her Platinum card.

The guy in the backseat leaned forward, a pack of cigarettes in his hand. Wilson took one and, doing his best to conceal the trembling in his hand, accepted a light.

Blowing a stream of smoke at the windshield, he squinted at his watch. 1:12… 1:08… 1:04

The woman continued to paw through her purse.

He wanted to kill her. He wanted to scream. He wanted to kill her and scream.

Not Bo. He looked from Wilson to the woman, and back again. Said something to the other guy in Arabic. And laughed.

A moment later, so did the woman. She threw back her head with an exclamation they couldn’t hear, and pulled a wedge of plastic from her purse. Voilà! The bored attendant swiped the card through the long slot in his credit-card machine and waited for the receipt to print. It only took about thirty seconds, but every one of them seemed like a long, torturous minute. Finally, the woman grabbed the chit and sped off, wiggling her fingers out the window. Toodle ooh.

Thirty seconds later, Wilson and his friends were behind her on the Dulles Toll Road, heading into Washington. Bo was so loose he was practically whistling, but Wilson was hardwired to the watch on his wrist – as if he was the one who was going to blow. 0:04… 03… 02… The hair on his arms was standing on end, and the muscles in his back began to spasm.

Bo threw him a glance, then looked away, eyes on the road. Wilson’s heart was crashing against his chest when the watch beeped and, out of nowhere, Bo lunged at him with a shout: “BAMMM!”

The guy in the backseat chuckled.