Shift: A Novel

Wheeling, WV

November 17, 1963

Even before Chandler opened his eyes he had a sense of himself in a moving vehicle. This was strange, because he was also lying down. The first thing he saw was a ceiling of tufted white silk a scant eighteen inches above him, stained here and there from old drips. Two rows of windows flanked either side of the long, narrow compartment, covered by drawn curtains.

It hit him. He was in a hearse.

He was dead.

A voice chuckled somewhere in front of him.

“Back among the living?”

Chandler rolled onto his stomach—he wasn’t tied up, which all by itself was a good thing—and he wasn’t in a coffin either. An even bigger plus. The rearview mirror was angled so that the driver could see the bed of the hearse. Chandler could see the driver as well: a white man, a few years younger than him. His haircut looked military, but his black suit was almost rakishly mod, the lapels barely an inch wide, the tie equally narrow.

Suddenly the memories crashed down on him. Running from the Phillips station, the smell of smoke in his nostrils, roasting flesh. He’d barely made it to his car before passing out. It was three hours before a Highway Patrolman inspected the vehicle. Chandler remembered the sound of the billy club tapping the window, a voice calling through the glass, the door opening, the cop shaking his shoulder, the twenty-minute wait for the ambulance to arrive and the forty-five-minute ride to the hospital and the battery of tests the doctors had performed on him—tests to which he had remained unresponsive, even as he recorded everything that was happening through the eyes and ears of the people around him. He’d spent a day in the bed—twenty-three hours and fourteen minutes—and then this man had arrived and taken him away; they’d been on the road for almost twenty hours.

He looked back at the face in the mirror.

“Agent Querrey?”

A look Chandler had only ever seen in religious frescoes and Cecil B. DeMille movies came over the FBI agent’s face. A look of beatific gratitude, as if Chandler were an angel confirming BC’s election among the holy.

“Orpheus,” BC whispered.

“No,” Chandler said. “Chandler.”

They set up camp at the Star-Lite Motor Lodge, just across the highway from the Bowl-a-Rama, which, according to the hotel clerk, was the only place still serving food within a twenty-mile radius. BC loaned Chandler one of his new suits—burgundy sharkskin, black piping over the pockets, a tapered waist that made Chandler feel as though he wore a corset—but it beat the tattered remains of Sidewalk Steve’s clothes, not to mention an open-backed hospital gown sans skivvies. He squeezed his feet into a pair of Italian loafers—BC was about an inch taller than him but had rather small feet—and, feeling like a cross between a Mod and Little Lord Fauntleroy, followed the detective across the highway to the bowling alley.

“Lucky it’s not league night,” said the pin monkey, who could’ve been the twin of the clerk at the motel, if not the same person. He handled BC’s and Chandler’s dainty shoes like newborn kittens, slotting them into cubbies as though putting them in a sack to drown, then gave them mimeographed paper menus. “Y’all have to circle what you want. Chang don’t speak no English.” Ten minutes later, they were seated at a small Formica table at the head of a lane, paper napkins spread over their laps and tucked inside their collars, Chinet plates mounded with rice and glutinous-looking foodstuffs set between.

“Chinese food in a bowling alley in West Virginia,” BC said. “Go figure.”

Chandler wasn’t particularly hungry, but (semi-) solid food was enough of a novelty after two weeks of a mostly intravenous diet that he shoveled down the greasy but flavorful fare.

“So,” he said between bites, “how’d you find me anyway?”

BC looked at him quizzically. “You really don’t know?”

Chandler didn’t understand at first, then got it. “It’s not like a radio. Things don’t just come to me. Or, rather, it is like a radio, but it has to be plugged in first. Switched on.”

“You mean LSD?” BC said even as he reached into his pocket, brought out a folded piece of newsprint. It was the cover of one of those supermarket tabloids specializing in Hollywood gossip and alien abductions and divine—or demonic—apparitions.

THE DEVIL IN DALLAS?

The headline was a bit misleading, given that Chandler’d been 250 miles north of the city, and the burning boy, despite his flame-engulfed body and gargantuan size, was clearly human, and adolescent to boot.

Chandler stared at the artist’s rendering, which was remarkably accurate, save for the snarling face and the horns jutting from the forehead. Then he noticed the insets at the bottom of the page, the photographs of Dan Karnovsky, Janet and Jared Steinke, and pushed the paper away. The two men finished their food and sipped at their beers until Chandler, not knowing what else to do, stood up and grabbed a ball.

“Loser pays for dinner?”

BC shrugged. “Take off that jacket first. I don’t want you splitting the seams.”

Chandler was only too happy to comply, although the shirt underneath, a dark green number with French cuffs, was only slightly less form-fitting. He’d bowled maybe a half dozen times in his life but understood the principle. It was all in the wrist, as everyone said. He lined up his shot, took two steps, swung the ball in a pendulum arc, and released it with a sharp quarter turn. The ball shot toward the right edge of the pyramid of pins, waiting like penguins staring down a polar bear, but Chandler could see from its marbling that it was twisting counterclockwise, and slowly it began to list to the left. It hit between the 3 and 6 pins, demolished the entire stack in a fraction of a second. As the grate swept the still-quivering pins away, Chandler turned back to see BC eyeing him querulously.

“I think I’ve been played.”

Chandler couldn’t quite keep the grin off his face. “Didn’t know I had it in me.”

Since the game was a pro forma affair—BC rolled a respectable 182, but Chandler knocked strike after strike on his way to a perfect 300—and because they were running from the CIA—running from them, yet running after them as well—they started to talk.

“You’ve got to admit,” Chandler said, “it really is a bizarre organization. It invests enormous amounts of money and manpower into every possible way of achieving a goal—psychic aptitude studies, chemicals to create superheroes, disinformation campaigns and covert armies and assassination plots—and yet, where’s it gotten us? They couldn’t keep the Rosenbergs from stealing our nuclear technology and selling it to the Soviets, they didn’t discover Khrushchev’s missiles in Cuba until they were already there, and they can’t keep Communism from spreading like wildfire across Asia and South America. I mean, something’s not working.”

BC let out a little chuckle when Chandler finally came up for air. “You’ve given this some thought.”

“It’s not thought as much as it’s breathing. My uncle was one of the architects of the agency. When I stayed with him at his house, people would discuss nuking the thirty-eighth parallel over breakfast and trading Poland for East Berlin over lunch. I was supposed to follow in his footsteps, but my best friend, Percy Logan, went to Korea at seventeen and was dead a month later. Then Eddie …” Chandler shook his head. “I’ve spent my entire adult life running from that world, yet somehow all I managed to do was run straight into it.”

“I think it’s fair to say that it ran after you,” BC said, then added quietly, “About Eddie …”

Chandler’s eyebrows shot up.

“I’m just wondering if you know what happened at Millbrook. I mean, if you know how he actually died. That is, do you think it’s possible Miss Haverman—”

“Naz had nothing to do with Eddie’s death!” Chandler said vehemently. He jammed his finger on the pictures of the people who’d died in Texas. “I killed him, just like I killed these three. The Company killed them, using me as the weapon.”

BC glanced nervously at a couple of polyester-shirted men two lanes over, who’d turned at Chandler’s exclamation and were staring at them with confused, slightly hostile expressions.

“It’s okay,” Chandler said, following BC’s eyes. “They just think we’re fairies.”

“Did you …?”

Chandler shrugged his emerald shoulders. “I didn’t have to read their minds to figure that out.”

BC colored. “But you will admit Miss Haverman is an unusual girl. When we were at Madam Song’s, I felt something. Something I’ve never felt before. Not because it wasn’t my emotion, but because it was Naz’s.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I think you weren’t the only person changed by the drugs Agent Logan gave you.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Chandler looked more distraught than when he’d noticed the pictures of the people who’d died at the gas station. “Does Melchior know?”

“I’m not sure. Song was there too, but I don’t know if she understood what was going on.”

Chandler smacked the ball in his hands. “What the hell does he want, anyway?”

“I don’t think he knows,” BC said. “But it’s obvious he’s angry and frustrated, and now fate’s thrust you into his hands and he sees an opportunity. He might end up destroying his life rather than saving it, but in either case he’s going to take a lot of people down with him.”

“So tell me again why we’re going after this guy instead of running far, far away?”

“Because he’s the closest thing to a lead we’ve got to Naz.”

“Oh right,” Chandler said. “Naz.”

At the word, something clicked in BC’s brain. A flash of light, a whispered voice. Tell Chandler I’m pregnant.

“BC?”

BC stared at Chandler’s face, at the desperation there, and couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Chandler already had enough to deal with. Naz could tell him herself, when they rescued her.

Suddenly he felt a curious sensation, like the beginning of a tension headache. It felt as though someone had slipped his hands between BC’s skull and his brain and begun to squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze. Chandler’s eyes had narrowed to slits and his lips were white with effort.

“Chandler,” BC said hoarsely. “Don’t.” But if Chandler heard him, he didn’t acknowledge it.

The pressure in BC’s head wasn’t painful as much as it was weird, and wrong. You shouldn’t feel someone else touching your brain. It took all of BC’s strength to lift up his hand and put it on top of Chandler’s. “Don’t.”

And just like that it was over. Chandler’s face relaxed and his shoulders slumped slightly. BC’s head felt light as a balloon. He peered at Chandler, trying to tell if he’d seen anything, but it seemed pretty clear he hadn’t.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“That was …” BC shook his head gingerly. “I don’t know what that was, but I wouldn’t want to feel it when you’re juiced up.”

“Speaking of which,” Chandler said, “I don’t suppose you have any?”

BC shook his head. “The easiest thing would probably be to go to Millbrook. Wait. Leary said he had a partner. Alpert. Richard Alpert. He goes on regular buying runs to Europe. Flies in and out through Idlewild, usually stays with Billy Hitchcock’s sister in New York City.”

“What if he’s not around when we go looking for him? Millbrook’s only a few hours on from New York.”

“Yes, but if Melchior’s watching anything, it’s going to be Leary’s place. If we don’t manage to find Alpert, we can decide if it’s worth risking a trip upstate.”

“It sounds like we have a plan then.” They sat quietly for a moment, and then Chandler drained the last of his beer. “Last frame?”

“Be my guest.”

Chandler picked up his ball, rolled three more strikes, and then the pinsetter laid BC’s final frame. In a hurry to get the evening over, BC fired off his shot too quickly, handed himself a 10–2 split. It was hard not to see the two pins as emblematic: Melchior and Naz, too far apart to get both at once. You had to connect with one and hope that would get you the other. It could be done, he told himself. All you had to do was aim right.

He picked up his ball. This time he spent a good minute lining up his shot. But just as he released it he heard Naz’s voice again—Tell Chandler I’m pregnant—and the ball sliced down the alley right between the two pins, and BC realized that sometimes when you go after two targets, you don’t get either.