Magic Time

Chapter Nine

WASHINGTON D.C.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff-or those of them as happened to be in Washington in late summer-arrived at 11:45, according to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clocks that continued to tick smugly in the Green Room and the Blue Room and the Red Room after everyone’s quartz-movement Rolexes froze up. Larry Shango, who’d grown up with a Basin Street boy’s mistrust of the uptown whites who spent more on a pair of shoes than his daddy could make in a week at the restaurant, had to smile.

An inner smile, since it was really none of his business to have an opinion about anything.

By 11:45 there was little else to smile at.

His eyes had been on McKay when the building started shaking-when the Japanese delegates, with the promptitude of long practice, had gone under the furniture or into the doorways and the aides and the folks from the Department of Commerce had tumbled like pins in a bowling alley. He’d seen the look on McKay’s face. Later on, as the FBI and Secret Service cordons snapped into place around the White House and the National Guard started to arrive, sweating from the double-time march through the car-clogged streets, he’d kept nearly as close an eye on the President as on the men and women around him.

And by 11:45 he was pretty sure he was right.

McKay wasn’t surprised.

He was, however, scared damn near shitless. And it was a couple of hours before anyone else got that scared.

“Reports are still coming in via semaphore and other nonelectric sources, but these conditions seem to prevail up and down the East Coast and as far west as Denver.” General Christiansen set his papers on the table and glanced around at the other advisers, civilian and military, with pale, small watchful eyes. He had a hunter’s tan and the air of a man who’d make you remake your bunk three times just to let you know he could. “No word yet from the West, but according to our sources, portions of Mexico and Canada seem similarly affected. We have no launch capability, no defensive capability at all.”

“But what is it?” asked Dr. Perry, the stout, normally jovial physicist who headed up McKay’s recently revived Science Advisory Board. His voice cut across the gasp and stammer of panic that Christiansen’s announcement had triggered. “The things I’ve been hearing are absurd. There’s no way-”

“Once you’ve eliminated the impossible,” Christiansen cut in, “then whatever’s left is probable… only maybe we’d better not eliminate the impossible just yet.” A riff on Conan Doyle and not bad for a crisis, Shango thought. He hadn’t known Christiansen had it in him. He noted, however, that while the general’s mouth formed the ghost of a smile, his eyes stayed cold.

“All right, gentlemen,” McKay jumped in. “Here’s what we have to ascertain, right now or sooner-”

A babble of conflicting opinions, defensive statements erupted, which McKay’s voice rose over, forcing silence. “Is this a natural disaster or man-made? If man-made, is it deliberate attack or accident? From within the U.S. or elsewhere? Is it worldwide, with the same effects? And are those effects strengthening or easing?” He addressed Christiansen. “Ed, with the reports you’re getting in, try to nail down specific times the alteration occurred in the various locales; maybe it’ll help us track its locus, which direction it spread and how fast.”

Christiansen nodded, whispered something to an aide, who jotted a note. McKay opened his mouth to add something, then thought better of it, Shango saw.

And just what aren’t you saying? Shango wondered, dogged by the certainty of the words under the words, the poker hand held but not yet played. His eyes moved from face to face as they responded with the familiar round of finger pointing, before McKay again corralled them back to order.

It was Shango’s job not to have an opinion, but a childhood of watching his mother and her church-lady pals in the tenants association and various neighborhood committees had left him with an insatiable curiosity about unspoken truths, hidden alliances-about who they’d run to and whisper once the meeting let out. His mind touched this and from long practice dodged away again, concentrating on the task at hand.

Watching the men in the room. Never mind that these were the highest brass in the DoD, watch ’em anyway. Watch the windows, the backs of the National guardsmen visible through them. Something massive had happened, and there was no guarantee what was next, and this man, this paunchy balding white guy with the pleasant Oklahoma drawl, was his responsibility.

He knows something.

Shango perceived that McKay was searching the faces of the men and women who flowed in succession into the Oval Office-group after group-for some sign as to who else knew.

The lights weren’t on by noon. The White House command post sent over every available agent as soon as they showed up-most had started walking toward Foggy Bottom the minute the ground quit shaking-and there were anti-sniper posts in every building that overlooked the White House, but it still put Shango’s teeth on edge when McKay insisted on opening the windows. The men loosened their ties and took off their jackets and the women looked like they wished they could shed their pantyhose. Having grown up in New Orleans without benefit of air-conditioning-or indoor plumbing, until he was five-Shango wasn’t much bothered by the heat. But while mentally calculating sight-lines from the windows every time McKay moved and watching each flicker of motion outside, he was deeply conscious of time’s passage. The emergency generators should have come on-line long before this. First in the White House, then in the government buildings all around it.

He didn’t hear helicopters, sirens, nothing, though the humid air was laden with the far-off tang of smoke. Only the voices of the National Guardsmen and a growing clamor of distant voices in the Mall and in the streets.

Things were down too long. Way, way too long.

The gang from FEMA came and went, then came back with horrifying preliminary reports typed on old manual typewriters or printed by the clerk with the neatest handwriting. A squad of reporters, who asked every kind of damn-fool question and had the frightened look of people who didn’t want to believe what they’ve been hearing. Lobbyists from two major oil companies and a multinational arms firm demanding explanations right now. The House Majority Leader and two or three senators who, Shango knew, were high up in the councils of McKay’s party, responsible for his election-the men who truly set party policy, who pulled the strings. Anyone who could possibly work himself into the schedule did: Al Guthrie and Nina Diaz were worn to a frazzle, trying to triage priorities when everything was vital. McKay listened to them patiently: baffled, angry men, men deeply concerned with the long-term goals they’d worked all their lives to achieve. The heat became unbearable. Someone came in with jugs of water that tasted like metal and the unwelcome information that there wasn’t a toilet in five miles that would flush.

And everything the President said, every plan and motion he requested, was aimed at stockpiling, digging in, guaranteeing stores and supplies. In the eighteen months McKay had been in the White House, Shango had observed that he wasn’t a survivalist and wasn’t inclined to panic.

Yet he had the air of a man who knew for certain that the lights weren’t going to come back on.

NEW YORK

She had been there, on the broken curb in front of St. Augustine, solemn and watchful. As Cal had prayed.

Tina lifted her head at his approach, and he read in her eyes not relief but confirmation. She knew he would come. Wordlessly, she rose swanlike and fell into step with him for the long walk home.

From block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood, the city rearranged and reasserted itself. Those newly returned home assayed the damage, cleared out shattered crockery and picture frames, righted rockers and bureaus. TVs that had pitched off tables and stands or had remained stock still, undamaged, were unresponsive and mute. As was every automobile, refrigerator, light bulb, electrical device of any kind.

Against their silence, a deluge of voices roiled up and overflowed onto the streets, full of shaky speculation, edged with fear and bafflement, leavened by uneasy, occasionally boisterous humor.

As they reached Eighty-first and Amsterdam, Cal felt the tension in his shoulders ease, the tightness of breath release. It was a scene they had encountered on dozens of blocks, but the faces here were familiar, the buildings known.

At the crown of the street, Elaine Jamgotchian was sweeping litter and dead leaves out to the gutter, while Sylvia Feldman leaned on her walker in the shade of an anemic maple, complaining (as she had on so many thousand other days) that her useless son Larry hadn’t yet shown up where could he be no doubt with that useless half-blind mulatto wife of his what did he see in her.

Cal smiled at the prosaic simplicity of it, and the toughness underlying it. He murmured greetings, received assurances they were all in one piece. Tina stood by, all huge eyes and attentive distance. Like heat-seeking grandmother missiles, the women turned their attention on her. Under prodding that brooked no evasion, she finally offered the intelligence that, while she herself was unmarked by the day’s experience, Mallory Stein had suffered three broken ribs and several other students had gone MIA.

And you couldn’t tell me this? Cal thought fretfully but said nothing.

He had gotten her home.

Mr. J., Elaine’s husband, sidled up in the standard-issue workpants and pajama tops he’d worn ever since they’d downsized him from the dockyard. His deep-grooved face was brown and sweaty, which accentuated the white of his beard and thinning hair. “We’re doing all right, God bless you,” he told Cal in his soft Armenian accent. “It will all be fine soon as they get everything going again.”

Soon as they get everything going.

Cal didn’t say what nagging intuition, or dream logic, kept hammering at him. Instead, he glanced at his sister, saw her paleness in the lowering sun, felt weariness radiating off her. It surprised him to see her stripped of her usual vibrancy. Normally, the walk they had just endured wouldn’t have taken a notch off her stamina. But then, it had been a day of surprises, and the emotional toll had undoubtedly worn on her.

Cal excused them, and together they headed toward the sturdy, weathered welcome of their fourth-floor walkup. An Amoco tanker truck lay diagonally across the street where it had quit, its cab door open, the driver apparently long gone. Not like anyone’s gonna steal it. The two of them had to step up onto the opposite curb to ease around it.

“You there!” The voice sliced through the humid air.

Tina groaned. Cal turned to Sam Lungo as the smaller man bulled up, still in his long-sleeved white shirt buttoned tight at the wrist. Cal saw that Lungo’s woolen suit pants were dirt-stained at the knees, a fine patina of dust on his face and body. He seemed unaware of the dustpan he held, with its shards of what looked to Cal like something that once been a Hummel.

“I need you to get my bookcases back against the wall. I’ve asked everyone, and no one will help me. My house is a shambles.”

And the rest of New York, incidentally. Cal thought fleetingly of Mr. Stern, that similar, unnerving tunnel vision.

Cal looked to his sister. Her eyes beseeched, beckoned toward home, and he felt his own exhaustion like a shroud.

“We’ve been walking for hours. Maybe later. .” Cal nodded to Tina, and they turned to move off.

“Problem with you is you’re selfish!”

Cal turned back.

“I’m giving you a chance to make amends!” Lungo’s voice was that of a pleading, petulant child.

Cal struggled for calm. “Did it ever occur, did it ever dawn on you there might be something in this world-” Exasperation overcame him, and he fell to silence.

Lungo’s gaze faltered, slid off Cal to sweep over the street. Piles of wreckage. Empty cars. Neighbors helping neighbors, some bloodied, some in shock.

“Is that yes. . or no?”

Ingrates, petty little ingrates, so self-involved, so important.

It was every bit what he had expected, Sam thought, watching Griffin vanish into the brownstone with that pasty girl. Why, he looked like he’d just swallowed vinegar. And no word of parting, whatever had happened to manners? Holier Than Thou just yanked that Bound for Juvie sister of his and hustled off to his no-doubt crack-den hovel. It was pathetic, really, the sorts one was forced to live with, the insults one had to bear.

Sam waited a moment, with the strange hope-one he didn’t even admit to himself, really-that the young man might come back, might help him, after all. But nothing happened, of course, nothing at all. Slowly, eyes still on the building, Sam withdrew pad and pen from his shirt pocket and began to write.

At last, they found their way to their apartment, by the light of a donated candle. Cal unlocked the deadbolt, swung the door wide.

Muted light filtered through the blinds. Several framed prints were askew, and three Perma-plaqued certificates had tumbled to the floor. All else seemed pretty much intact.

Cal looked at his sister. She sagged on the doorframe. The consummate performer, she had retained her composure until out of her audience’s sight.

“Let’s get you to bed.”

“No,” she said grumpily. “I’m okay.” Then, cutting off his protest, offered a compromise. “Couch.”

Cal ushered her into the room. They moved past the bulky old Grundig phonograph, an icon from their childhood still resting solidly atop the scarred oak end table by the sofa. He was relieved to see it unharmed. Mom had disdained television, refused to have one in the house, but had played endless LPs of Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, the magic rhythms that had first set Tina to movement, making a world to shut out the cold.

But for now, like the lights, like every mechanism across the city, it was only an icon of the past.

Cal moved to open the blinds. From the couch, Tina cautioned, “I’ve got this monster headache.”

He glanced back. In the dimness, he could see the clammy sheen on her forehead and cheeks, the pain crease between her brows. And the air in here won’t help any. It was leaden and still. Keeping the blinds closed, Cal reached around and opened a window. “You eat lunch?” he asked.

Tina hesitated. “I lost it somewhere.”

He headed for the kitchen. “I’ll make you a sandwich.”

She nodded absently, seized the remote. She aimed it at the TV, pressed useless buttons, then let her arm fall, a dead weight.

In the kitchen, light sifted through the gauzy curtains, making it easier to see. Cal turned the taps on the faucet, switched on the range. No water, no gas.

“This is so weird.” Tina’s pained voice was barely audible from the living room. “Everyone in the world with a direct line to everyone else. . Now it’s just the street where you live. We can’t even see if Luz is okay or anything.”

Cal nodded, said nothing. He opened the ancient, defrost-it-yourself fridge and saw that it had done a pretty good job of defrosting itself, water dripping from the freezer and inundating most of the food. There was some veggie baloney, though, sealed up tight. He tore it open, sought out bread and lettuce.

Reaching for a dull bread knife from the drainer, he recalled the sword from his dream. Whatever that was, you ain’t it. As he laid slices of rye on the breadboard, tore hunks of lettuce, the tumult of the unseen dream crowd again pressed into his consciousness. Certainly it had been a day of tumult. And earlier, leading all those people safely through the darkness, there was that strange sense of being exactly where he belonged, becoming who he-

“Cal?” Tina stood in the doorway behind him, a paler shadow in the gloom. “You think it’s just here, or bigger?”

“I don’t know.” He smelled the mayo; it was still okay, so he started slathering it on the sandwiches.

“Think it’ll last long?”

“I don’t know, Tina.” He managed a reassuring tone. “Let’s hope not.”

She nodded, hugging herself. He laid aside the knife and went to put an arm around those delicate shoulders. “It’s okay to be scared. You’d have to be crazy not to be.” Then he added, “And you’d need your bookcases put back against the wall.”

She smiled. He gestured at the two identical sandwiches. “Any preference?”

Her smile faded. “Sorry. Guess I’m not hungry.”

Cal almost said, But you always are. Instead, he offered, “Probably the heat.”

“Yeah.” As she averted her eyes from the kitchen window, Cal felt her shudder. “The heat. .”

WEST VIRGINIA

It was Ryan Hanson who said it first. “What if they don’t come?”

“What if you just shut the fuck up, asshole?”

“You shut the fuck up for a change.” Ryan’s voice was sharp in the darkness. “Look, I mean, let’s face it. Somethin’ weird’s goin’ on.”

“No shit, Sherlock, when’d you get the first clue?”

“Sonny,” Hank said wearily, “cool it, okay? I think you’re thinking what I’m thinking, Ryan. Anybody else thinking that?”

There was silence, as if their thoughts were in danger of bringing their fears to pass.

Every one of them guessed that no ordinary power outage, no Arab terrorist or Chinese bomb, could account for the failure of the radio, the headlamps, the electric power of the tram. After three hours of waiting in darkness at the foot of the downcast, every one of them guessed, too, that whatever was wrong was wrong up top as well.

Most of the Cokes and coffee in their thermoses had been consumed. Gordy had gone out and unscrewed one of the water pipes in the tunnel, refilling as many thermoses and cans as he could. The men were saving their SCSRs, but Hank felt dizzy and sleepy and knew they’d have to start using them soon.

And then what?

“So what do you think?” asked Llewellyn the engineer.

Hank said quietly, “I think we maybe need to think about ways to get out of here.”

“What’re we gonna do, climb the fuckin’ elevator shaft?” demanded Sonny. “Be like fuckin’ Bruce Willis and go up hand over hand for a fuckin’ mile?”

“You rather stay down here?” retorted Hillocher. In the past hour or two the camaraderie had worn thin as the darkness had seemed to thicken, weighing on every man. The close, stale air of the tiny vestibule stank now of sweaty coveralls and machine oil, of coal and the cigarette smoke that permeated the hair and clothes of half the men.

“Bite me, asshole.”

“Hey!” Hank interposed, for the dozenth time. “Whoa! We’re in enough trouble; let’s not start taking pokes at each other.”

“Well, this guy’s an asshole.”

“So don’t talk to him.”

“I don’t even wanna breathe the same fuckin’ air as him.”

“So don’t,” snapped Hank, feeling as if a steel ball bearing were growing like a cancer somewhere in the middle of his brain. “Get the fuck back into the tunnel if you’re so goddam picky about who you want to sit next to.” Hank’s bones ached as he crawled to the manual door crank again, and there was a quick burst of yellow light as Gordy, who had a lighter, rekindled the little torch so he could see.

Grimes, shrinking back from the flame, seemed even more repellent to Hank than ever.

“You stupid fucker, you want to blow us all up?”

“You can blow me. .”

“Shut up!” roared Hank. He got the door open a crack, and Grimes was through it like a roach under a baseboard. “Anybody else want out?”

“Yeah,” grumbled a man-Dayton-“I gotta breathe better air or I’m gonna die.”

Three or four others joined them, crowding and pushing from the back of the group while others cursed or muttered. Hank doggedly cranked the vent door shut, then cranked open the next set, and so shut and open to the next, all the while wondering why the hell he got suckered into doing work like this for assholes. He’d been eating aspirin until he was nearly sick to his stomach, for all the good it did him, it was as if the part that hurt wasn’t a part that any medication could touch.

He itched, too. The conversation in the tiny room had gotten on his nerves, and in his heart of hearts he was annoyed that Sonny and the others had had the idea of going outside before he did. Damned if he was going to sit out there in pitch darkness in that company.

He cranked the doors shut, but it was a long time before he opened the next set to rejoin Ryan and Llewellyn and the others in the vestibule before the elevator doors.

Until Ryan had spoken, Hank had been half-dreaming about Wilma. Dreaming about the sixties: the summer before she left for college, the summer when it had seemed, for a time, that they really would get married. The Summer of Love, people called it later. And he’d been so sure of her love. The last time he’d been really sure about anything. Maybe the last time he’d been dumb enough to think he knew what was going on in another person’s head, just because he wanted so badly for her to be thinking the way he was thinking.

Dreaming about the tunnels. About being alone in the cool darkness with the tommy-knockers. When Hank dreamed about being in the mine-really dreamed-more often than not it was the old Green Mountain pit he dreamed about and going down the steep-slanting galleries with the skip cars heaving and rattling on their narrow-gauge track to the top.

Crouching in the darkness between one set of doors and the next, Hank realized that there was a part of him that didn’t really want to leave the mines. That didn’t want to go back and deal with whatever was happening above the ground.

Let’s not go there, he told himself grimly. When Wilma had gone away to college-when he’d faced the fact that she’d been trying to tell him, most of that summer, that she didn’t really want to settle into the life of a miner’s wife- he’d gone through a bad time, a time when it had been hard to even get himself out of bed in the morning.

At intervals in the ensuing years he’d gone through similar times. Times when all the people in the town had seemed to him distant and trivial; when he drank a lot, watched a lot of TV. Only the concerns and conversations of those idiots in the 4077th or the Hill Street police station had proven equally unreal and unimportant, equally unable to pierce the darkness inside. The staff therapist, after Applby Mining had gotten a staff therapist, had pointed out to him that it was during such times that he signed on for a lot of overtime. But she’d connected this fact with a desire to lose himself in the only work he knew.

What he’d sought, he understood now, was being in the mine itself. Being in the darkness. Not having to deal with anything but the dark, and the rock, and the silence.

With a sensation like waking up, he realized he’d been dreaming again. He cranked the door open and wormed through to the warm room that smelled rankly of his friends and fellows.

“I think I can get us through the old part of the mine to where it connects up with the Green Mountain works,” he said. “The air here’s bad, and we’ve got, what, three or four SCSRs apiece? That’s three or four hours, and I’m willing to bet there’s not gonna be anybody coming down that shaft. Gene,” he said to the engineer, “what’s the gas situation in the old part of the mine? Do you know?”

“Pretty good, as far as I know, there’s been no seepage reported,” Llewellyn’s voice came through the close darkness. “But we’re talking about miles of tunnel down there.”

“Then we take turns being canary,” Hank said quietly. “We use the respirators as long as we can and work our way in the dark as long as we can. I’m pretty sure I know the way: there’s only a couple of long mains, since they robbed out the last of the rooms and brought the ceilings down. If our canary passes out, we backpedal like hell. If he doesn’t, we light up every now and then and see where we are.”

Greg Grant said, “You’re shittin’ us. You know your way around in the dark like that?”

“Kid,” Hank said softly, “I was born in the mine.”

“Besides,” said Ryan, “you want to end up like those cats you read about, where somebody dies and they starve to death in the apartment or wherever because nobody’s remembered they’re there?”

Of course Ryan would think about cats, Hank thought resentfully, his bitterness surprisingly strong, even after all these years. Sneaky little vermin. And with the bitterness, the old sense of angry bafflement, that Wilma would rather be a sour spinster living in a houseful of cats than have a real marriage and a real husband.

Who has days and weeks when he can’t get out of bed, he thought. And who doesn’t want to put two words together to talk to anyone he hasn’t known since he was a kid.

Llewellyn asked wonderingly, “You think you can do it?”

Hank considered for a moment, tracing his memories of all those years underground. In spite of his feeling of fever, they were clearer in his mind than ever before. Each area opening into each older area. What mains had been collapsed, what mains only abandoned when the digging had moved on. Even the really nasty areas they’d worked back in the seventies, where there’d been three feet or less of seam, where they’d dug those god-awful tiny rooms and scraped coal bent nearly double-they were all as vivid to him as the rooms in his apartment, in the trailer he’d occupied before that, in his dad’s cheap little company-built shack.

“Yeah,” he said, amazed a little at himself. “Yeah, I think I can.”

Hank had a drink of water, the thermoses were low again and would have to be refilled before they started their hike. Most of the men took a final pee into the elevator shaft (“Hey, you shoulda thought of that before you left the house!” joked Gordy), and Hank turned his attention to the tedium of cranking the manual controls on the doors once more. The air in the vestibule was sour and stale, and there seemed little point in conserving air that wasn’t moving anyway, but the locks that prevented air loss were still in place: crank open, through, crank shut, crank open, through, crank shut. .

It had been at least an hour since he’d put Grimes and his like-minded pals out into the tunnel. They’d gripe, almost certainly, about the long trudge ahead of them, and Hank found himself looking forward to knocking Sonny’s head against the nearest wall.

The third door opened, and Hank thought, Just say anything, Sonny. Anything at all.

But there was only silence as the doors opened. Hank stood, trembling, wondering if they were dead of methane gas and then wondering, as he lit the spill again, whether he’d go up in a bellowing blast of flame.

But there was no gas. And there were no bodies. In the light of the single flickering flare, the tunnel outside was empty. Sonny Grimes and his five companions were gone.