Wake

Chapter 23

Caitlin felt a bit sorry for the Hoser. Trevor had finally worked up the courage to ask her to the dance — or else his other options hadn’t panned out, but she preferred to think the former was the case. The invitation had come via email, with the subject line, “Hey, Yankee, you free Friday night?” and she had accepted the same way.

But now he had to come by the house to get her. Of course, at fifteen himself, he wasn’t picking her up in a car; rather, he was going to walk with her to Howard Miller Secondary School, eight blocks from her house.

Caitlin’s dad was going to return to work this evening. The Perimeter Institute frequently hosted public science lectures, which Caitlin often went to with him, and tonight’s speaker was someone he wanted to see. But he’d come home for dinner, and now Trevor would have to go through that ritual of meeting the parents. Caitlin’s mom was always warm and friendly, but her dad — well, she wished she could see the Hoser’s face!

The doorbell rang. Caitlin had spent the last hour getting ready for the dance. She wasn’t really sure what to wear, and there was no point asking Bashira: her parents wouldn’t let her go to school dances. She’d settled on a really nice pair of blue jeans and a loose but silky top that her mother said was dark red. As she rushed down the stairs, she was a bit nervous about what Trevor’s reaction would be.

Caitlin could smell and feel that rain was possible tonight, but she didn’t want to carry an umbrella in addition to her cane; she needed a free hand in case Trevor wanted to try to hold it. But it was supposed to get cooler later, and she didn’t have anything sexy to wear for warmth, so she’d tied a sweatshirt around her waist; her dad had gotten her a sweet one last month that had a large version of the Perimeter Institute logo on it.

Caitlin’s mom beat her to the door. “Hello,” she said. “You must be Trevor.”

“Hello, Mrs. Decter, Dr. Decter.”

At first Caitlin thought he’d been correcting himself, but then she realized that her dad was standing there, too. Caitlin tried to suppress her smirk. He was tall in an imposing sort of way, and doubtless the fact that he wasn’t saying anything was unnerving poor Trevor. And if Trevor had extended his hand, her dad had probably just ignored it, which would have been even more disconcerting.

“Hi, Trevor,” Caitlin said.

“Hey—” He cut himself off before he called her “Yankee.” She was a bit disappointed; she liked that he had a special name for her.

“Now, remember,” her mom said, facing Caitlin, “be home by midnight.”

“‘Kay,” Caitlin said.

She and Trevor headed out, walking along, talking about—

And that was the part that made Caitlin sad. They really didn’t talk about much of anything. Oh, Trevor liked hockey, but he didn’t know the stats and couldn’t say anything meaningful about trends.

Still, it felt good to be taking a walk. She’d walked a lot in Austin, despite the heat and humidity. She’d known her old neighborhood intimately: every crack in the sidewalk, every overhanging tree that provided shade, how many seconds it took for each traffic light to change. And although she was now learning the topography of these sidewalks, feeling the joins between sections with the tip of her cane, she was afraid she’d be lost again when they were covered with a layer of snow.

They reached the school and made their way to the gymnasium, where the dance was already in progress. She had trouble hearing people talk: sounds echoed off the hard walls and floor, and the music was too loud for the speakers. It always amazed her that people were willing to put up with distortion for the sake of volume — but at least they played some Lee Amodeo along with all the Canadian bands she’d never heard of.

She wished Bashira had been able to come, so she’d have someone to talk to. The Hoser had left her alone at one point, saying he was going to the washroom — but he’d obviously snuck off to smoke. She wondered if sighted people really couldn’t smell very well. Didn’t they know how much they stank after doing that?

She’d been to dances at her old school, but those were different. For one, they always slow danced — which was kind of nice, actually, especially if it was with the right boy. But these kids usually danced by jumping around without being in physical contact with their partners. It was mostly like Trevor wasn’t even there.

But there were some slow dances. “Come on,” Trevor said, as one of them began, and his hand took hers; she’d left her cane by the door.

Caitlin felt a little rush. She was surprised at how far they walked before he finally drew her into his arms; maybe it had taken a while to find an empty spot.

They swayed along with the music. She liked the feeling of Trevor pressing against her and—

His hand on her ass. She reached down and moved it back up to the small of her back.

The music continued, but his hand slid down her back again, and this time she could feel his fingers trying to work their way into the top of her jeans.

“Stop that!” she said, hoping no one besides the Hoser could hear her.

“Hey,” he said. “Come on.” He pushed his fingers down more aggressively.

She tried to step backward, and suddenly realized that he’d maneuvered her very close to a wall. They were still in the gym — the sound made that clear — but must be in some dark or out-of-the-way corner of it. He moved forward, and she found herself trapped. She didn’t want to create a scene, but—

His lips on hers, that awful smell on his breath—

She pushed him away. “I said stop!” she snapped, and she imagined heads were turning to look at her.

“Hey,” Trevor said, like he was making a joke, like he was playing to an audience now, “you’re lucky I brought you here.”

“Why?” she shot back. “Because I’m blind?”

“Babe, you can’t see me, but I am—”

“You’re wrong,” she said, trying not to cry. “I can see right through you.”

The music stopped, and she stormed across the gym, bumping into other people as she went, trying, trying, trying to find the door.

“Caitlin.” A female voice — maybe Sunshine? “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Caitlin said. “Where’s the fucking door?”

“Um, to your left, ten feet or so.” It was Sunshine; she recognized the Bostonian accent.

Caitlin knew exactly where her cane should be: propped up against the wall near the door, where others had left umbrellas. But some asshole had moved it, presumably to make room for something of his own.

Sunshine’s voice again. “It’s here,” she said, and she felt the cane being passed to her. She took it. “Are you all right?”

Caitlin did something she rarely did. She nodded, a gesture she never made spontaneously. But she didn’t trust her voice. She strode out into the corridor, which sounded like it was empty; her footfalls made loud echoing sounds on the hard floor. The din of the dance faded as she continued along, and she swept the way in front of her with her cane. She knew there was a stairwell at the far end, and—

There. She swung open the door and, using her cane to guide her, located the bottom step. She sat down and put her face in her hands.

Why were boys such jerks? Zack Starnes, who used to tease her back in Austin; the Hoser here — all of them!

She needed to relax, to calm down. She had stupidly left her iPod at home, but she did have her eyePod. She felt for the button, heard the beep that indicated the device had switched to duplex mode, and—

Ahhh!

Webspace blossomed into existence all around her, and—

And she felt herself relaxing. Yes, seeing webspace was still exhilarating, but it also was, in a weird way, calming. It was, she guessed, like smoking or drinking. She’d never tried the former; the smell bothered her. But she had drunk beer with friends — and Canadian beer now, too, which was stronger than the US stuff — but she didn’t really like the taste. Still, her mother enjoyed a glass of wine most evenings, and, well, she supposed that plugging into webspace, seeing the calming lights and colors and shapes, could become her own evening ritual, a visit to her happy place — a very special place that was hers and hers alone.

The Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology was located at 142 Xi-Wai-Da-Jie in western Beijing. Wong Wai-Jeng enjoyed working there, more or less, and the irony was not lost on him that doing so made him a civil servant: the dissident Sinanthropus was an employee of the Communist Party. But the irony of the government supporting this institution devoted to preserving old fossils wasn’t lost on him, either.

Today for his morning coffee break, Wai-Jeng decided to stroll around the second-floor gallery of the museum — the four connected balconies that looked down on the exhibits below. He paused in front of the great glass tank on the granite pedestal that held the pickled coelacanth. There was irony here, too, for the giant lobe-finned fish was labeled a “living” fossil — which it had been until fishermen had netted it off the Comoros a few decades ago. It seemed in good shape still; he wondered if Chairman Mao was faring as well in his mausoleum.

Wai-Jeng turned and walked over to the railing around the opening that looked down onto the ground floor, ten meters below, with its dinosaurs mounted in dramatic poses above beds of fake grass. No school group was visiting today, but two old men were down there, sitting on a wooden bench. Wai-Jeng often saw them here. They lived in the neighborhood, came inside most afternoons to get out of the heat, and just sat, almost as motionless as the skeletons.

Directly below him, an allosaur was dispatching a stegosaur. The latter had fallen on its side, and the carnivore’s great jaws were biting into its neck. The postures were dramatic, but the thick layer of dust visible on the tops of the bones from this vantage point belied the sense of movement.

Wai-Jeng looked off to his right. The great tapered neck of Mamenchisaurus snaked up through the giant opening from the floor below and—

And there was Dr. Feng, over by the metal staircase, accompanied by two other men; they’d presumably just come down from the labs upstairs. The two men didn’t look like scientists; they were too burly, too sharp-edged, for that — although one of them did look familiar. Feng was pointing in Wai-Jeng’s direction, and he did something he never did — he shouted: “There you are, Wai-Jeng! These men would like a word with you!”

And then it clicked: the shorter of the two men was the cop from the wang ba; the old paleontologist was warning him. He turned to his left and started to run, almost knocking over a middle-aged woman who was now standing in front of the coelacanth tank.

There was only one way out; modern fire codes were new to Beijing and this museum had been built before they’d been instituted. If the two cops had split up, one going left and the other right around the large opening that looked down on the dinosaurs below, they would have caught him for sure. In fact, if one of them had just stayed put by the staircase, Wai-Jeng would have been trapped. But cops, like all party minions, were creatures of knee-jerk response: Wai-Jeng could tell by the sound of the footfalls, echoing off the glass display cases, that both were pursuing him down this side of the gallery. He’d have to make it to the far end, take the ninety-degree turn to the right, run across the shorter display area there, make another right-angle turn, go all the way up the far side, and round one more bend before he’d reach the staircase and any hope of getting downstairs and out of the building.

Below him, the duckbill Tsintaosaurus was mounted on its hind legs. Its skull poked up through the giant opening between the floors, and its great vertical crest, like a samurai’s raised sword, cast a shadow on the wall ahead.

“Stop!” yelled one of the cops. A woman — perhaps the one who’d been near the coelacanth — screamed, and Wai-Jeng wondered if the cop had taken out a gun.

He was almost to the end of this side of the gallery when he heard a change in the footfalls, and, as he rounded the corner and was able to look back, he saw that the cop from the wang ba had reversed course, and was now running the other way. He now had a much shorter distance to go back to the staircase than Wai-Jeng still needed to cover.

The one who was still running toward Wai-Jeng was indeed brandishing a pistol. Adrenaline surged through him. As he rounded the corner, he dropped his cell phone into a small garbage can, hoping that the cops were too far back to notice; the bookmarks list on its browser would be enough to send him to jail — although, as he ran on, he realized evidence or lack thereof hardly mattered; if he were caught, his fate at any trial had doubtless already been decided.

The cop from the Internet café rounded the corner back by the staircase. Old Dr. Feng was looking on, but there was nothing he, or anyone, could do. As he passed cases of pterosaur remains, Wai-Jeng felt his heart pounding.

“Stop!” the cop behind him yelled again, and “Don’t move!” the second cop demanded.

Wai-Jeng kept running; he was now coming up the opposite side of the gallery from where he’d began. On his left was a long mural showing Cretaceous Beijing in gaudy colors; on his right, the large opening looking down on the first-floor displays. He was directly above the skeletal diorama with the allosaur attacking the stegosaur. The ground was far below, but it was his only hope. The wall around the balcony opening was made of five rows of metal pipe painted white, with perhaps twenty centimeters of space between rows; the whole thing made climbing easy, and he did just that.

“Don’t!” shouted the cop from the wang ba and Dr. Feng simultaneously, the former as an order, the latter with obvious horror.

He took a deep breath, then jumped, the two old men below now looking up as he fell, fear on their lined faces, and—

Ta ma de!

— he hit the fake grass, just missing the giant spikes of the stegosaur’s tail, but the grass hardly cushioned his fall and he felt a sharp, jabbing pain in his left leg as it snapped.

Sinanthropus lay face down, blood in his mouth, next to the skeletons locked in their ancient fight, as footfalls came clanging down the metal staircase.