Magic Time

Chapter Five

WEST VIRGINIA-8:14 A.M. EDT

Glancing through the ground-floor window, half-screened by the honeysuckles that seemed sometimes as if they would devour the big white house on Applby Lane, Wilma watched Arleta Wishart sponge her son’s face and thought, I’ll give her a call as soon as I’m back from the Piggly-Wiggly.

Since the collision that had broken her son’s neck, Arleta, who had never dealt particularly well with the world, had barely been out of the house. Even as a child, Wilma had been aware that Mrs. Wishart Next Door didn’t like to be outside. Playing in the yard, she’d see the small, sloppily stout young woman in her white uniform hurrying to the bus stop to go to her job, then hurrying home again in the evenings as if she didn’t dare pause. As if there were snipers in the trees, ready to shoot her if she didn’t get to a safe place quickly.

Later, as a teenager, Wilma made it a point to drop by in the afternoons, or ask her to go shopping or to a movie on those frequent Saturdays when the twins would be at Little League and her husband, Dr. Wishart Sr., was working at the hospital. Like the boys-who were seven years her junior-Wilma had come to accept that this was the way Mrs. Wishart was. Her husband always answered the telephone or the door, always took her shopping. When she wasn’t with him, she looked confused.

The summer Wilma graduated from high school, a movie house opened in Beckly that had deliciously icy air-conditioning and fifty-cent matinees. She and Mrs. Wishart-whom she was calling Arleta by that time-would spend at least one afternoon a week there and hit Farrell’s for ice cream afterward. But at three o’clock Arleta would always say, “I have to get home now.”

If asked, she’d come up with a good reason concerning the boys or her husband. But from the way she said it, Wilma understood that Arleta was afraid.

Call Arleta, she made a mental note to herself, as soon as the nurse gets there. In the hurly-burly of graduation and the closing-down of the school year, followed immediately by the family uproar surrounding her sister Siobhan’s third divorce, it had been weeks since Wilma had been able to make sure her friend got out of the house. Arleta had never been a churchgoer, and, with no brothers in the mine, she’d never made friends in the Women’s Club that went hand in hand with the union. Wilma knew there was no one else in town with whom Arleta went anywhere.

An odd family, she reflected, without judgment. The twins wrapped up in one another almost to the exclusion of anyone else, the mother wrapped up in the boys, particularly after Dr. Wishart’s death. One of the other young teachers at Allegheny High School had dated Bob for a while-past Arleta’s shoulder, through the open windows, Wilma could see the beautiful photo Bob had taken of the woman. But talking to her later, Wilma gathered that Bob’s story was pretty much the same as his mother’s. The mind always just slightly elsewhere, and at ten o’clock, I have to get home.

Nothing weird or perverted, as far as she knew-and the way the teachers and the other volunteers at the Senior Center gossiped, Wilma knew pretty much everything that went on in Boone’s Gap. No ugly secrets or bloodstained bed-linen hidden in closets. Just fear. Fear so great that it excused them, in their own eyes, from participation in the pain of real life.

Then Bob had driven down to Beckly late one night to pick up some medicine for Arleta and had come around a curve into the path of a semi heading for State Highway 64.

Call Arleta, she thought. And call Fred. And though she didn’t exactly phrase it thus to herself, it went through her mind, watching the graying, chubby woman minister to the corpselike man on the bed, that if Arleta were Fred’s sole source of information about Bob’s condition, he might not be getting the whole story. Not that Arleta would deliberately lie to the son who had deserted her twenty years ago, who had visited so seldom since. But seeing her, in her pink-and-green warmups-she had at least two dozen sets of variously colored sweat garments, which had, Wilma mused, pretty much replaced housecoats in American culture- chatting about the latest doings of the vengeful Veronica and the manipulative Christine and all the other characters of the mythical town of Springdale, it struck Wilma how terribly alone Arleta seemed.

Only her and her son. He trapped in a coma since May, she trapped by her love for him. And her fears.

Isolated, just the two of them, in that big bright machinery-cluttered room.

NEW YORK-8:14 A.M. EDT

It was early morning, and already they were out. Ruining everything.

Sam Lungo sat on his front-porch glider, in the shade of his scraggily elm, watching the world go by, or, at least, his part of it, the rectangle bordered on the west by Amsterdam, the east by Columbus, the familiar country beyond whose borders he did not venture. And why go anywhere? It was all the same, every place. He knew, he saw. Sally Jesse, Jerry, Ricki, the endless parade of vulgar people in black-and-white splendor on the old Dumont his mother had kept all those years, and which he had maintained since. Illuminated through the oil bubble in front of the screen, their grotesque faces distorted and true. Monsters, they were all monsters.

It was no different for the denizens of the block. He knew all of them, their comings and goings, their trashy little lives, their ugly, secret selves. And he knew their names, not just what they called themselves, but their real names, discovered by close appraisal over patient time. Mr. Blotches, the Varicose Lady, Yellow Teeth, Loose Ways. .

They never came through his gate, into his front yard, onto his porch. His rambling Victorian Easter egg of a house was an anomaly on this block of brownstones, a gaudy interloper, like some odd trinket dropped by a careless god from the heavens. The adults never came, anyway. Their brats stole onto his property in the dead of night, threw rotten fruit and worse at his windows, scrawled their initials on his door.

Looking out at the front yard, Sam sighed, feeling the familiar churning in his stomach. Try as he might to keep it pruned, manicured, subdued, the devil grass would keep encroaching, the weeds and thistles smothering the careful order he fought to maintain. The gate and fence were showing signs of ruination, too, growing ever more splintered and worn.

He felt, as he had so often since Mother had gone, a sense of cataclysm coming on, rushing toward him, chaotic and malevolent. There was nothing he could do to stop it. Except watch, take note, remember. Mother had said there would be an accounting. If so, she hadn’t lived to see it. And in the forty-nine years he’d been on this earth, Sam had grown ever more hopeless that justice would come.

“You there! You stop that!” Sam always tried for an authoritative tone, but more often than not it came out higher and more nasal than he intended. The Slave to the Mottled Terrier was out again, tethered to that nasty little wretch that sniffed at his rhododendron and squatted where it was least wanted.

The Slave acted like he didn’t hear. But he heard, all right. “You are breaking the law!” Sam shrilled. “I’ve seen you before!”

Reluctantly, the Slave tugged the protesting dog away. Glaring, Sam pulled the notepad from his shirt pocket, jotted in his cramped chicken scratches the specifics of event and time and day. It was all there, the microscopic history of this place, all the petty crimes they would want forgotten. But that would not happen.

He was the witness.

It was one of those glorious summer mornings, in which the splash of sunlight against the buildings and the lulling breezes made New York seem both exquisite and livable. But to Cal Griffin, it spoke only irony. His mind was a battlefield, and he felt the previous night’s dream like a black truth within-the choking stench of burning and blood, the screams that tore at him, his stillness, his failure of nerve.

Spurred by these, Cal had embraced an action he knew to be undeniably, shamefully right and set Schenk free.

But his masters would not concur.

As Cal emerged with Tina from their fourth-floor walkup along Eighty-first toward St. Augustine Middle School, the street was alive with joggers, folks walking their dogs, kids heading for school. An image intruded on him, of a chill evening not long ago. Mr. Stern had lingered beyond his usual departure time and gestured Cal into his cavernous, intimidating office. Stern was in a strangely reflective mood and drew Cal into conversation. They spoke of the prairies, so familiar to Cal and alien to Stern, of Tina and of death. Eager to impress, Cal had ventured onto the subject of tactics, of will and action, had become talkative, even expansive. Stern’s eyes grew hooded. Then, frostily distant, he pointedly severed their brief intimacy, saying that frequently the most powerful action was inaction, that silence could be a blade.

Recklessly, Cal had jettisoned both. Stern would learn of it, of course, and the consequences would be grave. He’d never be able to match this salary, and word would spread like a black stain. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have cared. But now, he was afraid.

He glanced at his sister, pacing beside him in her school grays, book bag with its toe-shoe insignia slung over her shoulder. What could he possibly do, say, to maintain the sanctuary he had so carefully constructed for her? Tina had been only four when her world had been blasted away, and he had stepped in to be her anchor, her rock. Now he felt perilously seamed and cracked. And most alarming, a voice inside seemed to be calling him to release, to shatter, to see what emerged.

His eyes lingered on Tina as she glided weightless beside him, her face a mask of indifference, counsel only to herself. With a shock of recognition, Cal realized that-outside her protective world of dance-she had duplicated his own stony mien, the impassive barrier he used to shield himself from the sea of humanity.

“You there! Yes, you!” The voice cut across Cal’s thoughts like a scythe-a man’s voice, but querulously high.

Sam Lungo, their neighbor, sat on his porch like some Buddha gone to seed, glaring at them, domed head glinting in the sun. Tina groaned. It was a familiar sight, and normally they would have continued on, Lungo’s abuse splintering against their backs. But surprisingly, Cal stopped and turned. Tina paused, uneasy.

“You wadded that.” Lungo brandished his gangrenous walking stick in the direction of a spot on the sidewalk just beyond his yard. “The other day. You wadded that up and just-just excreted it.”

Cal gazed near his feet and spied the crumpled Snickers wrapper. He hadn’t tossed it, of course. Nevertheless, he scooped up the offending paper and started off again.

“No.” Lungo surged up to them with his odd, hunched crow’s stride. “No. You apologize.”

Tina murmured incredulously. But Cal peered back at the little man, walled against the world, insulated from empathy, and saw himself.

“I’m sorry,” Cal said, for Sam, for the futility of years.

But Lungo, unused to pity, took it for mockery. He flushed, and his mouth twisted to a vinegary scowl. “Get out of here,” he hissed. “Go on!”

Cal turned and walked stiffly away, as if bearing a wound. Tina dogged after him and, when she was able to catch his eye, gifted him with a smile.

Lungo saw none of this, busied instead transforming them into one more outrage in his pad, as he whispered his venomous, as-yet-unanswered prayers.

WEST VIRGINIA-8:35 A.M. EDT

“Fred, what’s going on?” Bob reached out, grasped his brother. . not exactly by the hands, because in addition to being entangled in the equipment that kept him alive, Bob- the physical part of Bob-was closed down. Not dead, but on hiatus, like an engine barely ticking over. His mind and thoughts and soul, the Bob that Fred had protected all through their insular childhood-the vague, helpless, gentle little photographer, the voracious reader of everything from Aeschylus to Wolverine who could barely speak to anyone he hadn’t known all his life-these were trapped in that body, entangled in it the way the body was entangled in its machinery.

The way Fred was entangled by distance, by obligation to be elsewhere. By the walls around the Source in its gloomy complex of bunkers and Quonset huts and the mazes of barbed wire. By his colleagues’ endless squabbling.

“I’ll take care of you,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”

Illusion? The self-delusion of an exhausted man, dozing at his desk and wishing with everything in him that he was home where it was safe? That he was with the only person in his life he’d ever truly loved? The fantasy that Bob was able to talk to him again, rely on him again for help and support as he’d done all his life?

The comfort of forgiveness for leaving Bob alone?

Would this room be so clear to him if he hadn’t known the house from birth? He could get up-he knew he could- and walk out into the downstairs hall, with its gloom and its smell of mildewed carpets, turn right to the living room with its curtained shadows or left down the hall to the kitchen, sunlight, clutter, burnt toast and Mom’s TV perched on the untidy counter and the view across the weedy yard to Wilma Hanson’s blackberry bushes.

Like the old commercial: Is it real or is it Memorex? Was all this-including Bob’s hand, warm and trusting in his-something he was creating for himself, no more real than a computer game or a stage set?

For he could clearly see his office around him. Feel the pressure of his buttocks on the gray-and-black desk chair. Glimpse the orange and green glint of computer lights and surge suppressors, the steady blink-blink-blink of the red lights on his phone, and hear the low subliminal humming of the Resonator locked behind the maze of walls.

No, he was there. And he was here.

And that was what the Source was about, too.

Healing Bob. Maybe in time healing Mom, leading her gently back to the real world that she’d always feared. He’d deserted Bob, deserted Mom. He was a better driver, better at coping with the world in general. He, not Bob, should have been in the car that night. But now everything was possible. Everything was going to be possible.

“Fred, I’m scared. All this stuff-Mom didn’t even hear me when I talked to her. I feel so cold. What happened to me?”

“You’re going to be all right.”

“She didn’t even see you. She looked right at you sitting there and she didn’t see you.”

“That’s because. .” How to explain it? He could feel the Source right now, the curious, elusive energy that seemed to permeate the air. He was breathing it into his lungs. No, that wasn’t right. Maybe just absorbing it into his flesh. Drinking it like sunlight. And that vibration was what let him be here, holding Bob’s hand.

And what let Bob be aware of him.

“That’s because Mom’s tired,” he finished. “Don’t you worry. I won’t let anything happen to you, and I won’t go away.”