Текст книги "Gypsies"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Chapter Two

1

Michael skipped breakfast next morning.

“Straight to school,” Karen said. “And straight home. All right? I don’t want to be worrying about you.”

“Straight home,” Michael said—offhandedly, but with a seriousness under that, maybe even a little fear.

But that was good, wasn’t it? It would make him cautious.

She stood at the window with the curtain tucked back and watched her son walk down this empty suburban street until he was lost from sight, down beyond the intersection of Forsythe and Webster, where the McBrides’ big maple tree was shedding its leaves.

The mailman dropped a letter through the slot in the door: the letter was from Laura.

Karen carried it downtown, beside her on the front seat of her little Honda Civic, to the restaurant where she had agreed to meet Gavin. When he was late—predictably late—she took the letter out of her purse and turned it over in her hands a couple of times. The envelope was of some thick, clothy paper, like vellum; the return address was a P.O. box in Santa Monica, California.

California. She liked the look of the word. It radiated warmth, security, sunshine. Here in this Toronto restaurant everybody was dressed in fall grays and fall browns, fashionable downtown people scattered among these mirrors and tiles like leaves. Cold air prickled on her arms whenever the door swept open.

She opened the envelope slowly, with a halting motion that was eager and reluctant at once.

Dear Karen, the letter began.

Open loops and dark fountain-pen ink. The words as she read them took on Laura’s throaty contralto.

I got your note and have been mulling it over. Since you ask—and I know it’s none of my business– here are some thoughts.

First off, I am sincerely sorry about you & Gavin. Is it any consolation to say I think you are 100 percent correct on this? (Even if the divorce isn’t—as you say– your own idea.) We gypsies aren’t cut out for middle-class life.

I know the whole thing must come as a blow. And of course there’s Michael. Fifteen years old—dear God, is that possible? I really would like to meet my only nephew. Is he as cute as his pictures? (Don’t tell him I said that) But I take it for granted. A heartbreaker. Is he adjusting?

I’m convinced that we ought to be more than Christmas-card relatives. It would be nice to see both of you again.

Yes, big sister. These are hints.

Karen, listen: they play old songs on the radio and I think of you. “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” Remember? It’s better advice than you think.

I’m serious. Auntie Laura could use your company.

I can put you up for a week, a month, whatever. On short notice or immediately.

If you can’t say yes, say maybe. Ask and I’ll send directions, but RSVP.

It was signed in Laura’s unmistakable, overflowing script. Karen smiled in spite of her misgivings, reading it.

P.S., it said, under the bottom fold of the paper. The age of miracles is not over. Her smile faded.

She looked up and saw Gavin standing across the table. He gazed at her loftily and said, “You look like shit.”

She sighed. It was the kind of opener he seemed to prefer these days. “Well,” she said, “you don’t. You look impeccable.” It was true.

Gavin was nervous about clothes. He studied the fashion columns in Esquire as solemnly as a general planning a military campaign. He was tall, with a build he had developed at the racquetball club across the street from his office; he smelled of Brut and antiperspirant. “Seriously,” he said, pulling up his chair, peering at her. “Are you sleeping okay? You look tired.”

“Well, I am… hell, yes, I am tired.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No,” she said. “I know.” It was just his way of talking. Truce, she thought desperately. What was important now was that Michael was in danger. “We’re here to talk.”

To talk. But it sounded ominous, so they ordered lunch instead. It was a restaurant Gavin knew, close to his office. He was in his element here. He ordered a seafood salad and a light beer. Karen ordered cottage cheese and fruit. Gavin talked a little about his work; Karen told him how Michael was doing in school. They were talking, she thought, and that was a beginning, but they were not talking—she didn’t mention the Gray Man.

There had been a time when talking to Gavin was easy. They had met at Penn State, where Karen was a year behind him in a B.A. course. Gavin was dissatisfied—not randomly rebellious in the way that was fashionable then, but looking for a way to inject meaning into his life. He was a Canadian, and he had resolved to go back home and study law. Law, he said, was a point of entry into people’s lives. It was where you could apply leverage, make a difference, change things for the better. We all want to change the world, Karen thought, recalling the Beatles tune, lately a TV ad for Nike shoes. Maybe Nike was one of Gavin’s clients.

The divorce was still pending. They were, in Gavin’s preferred language, “separated.” “Separated” meant he had left her last May to live with his girlfriend in her lakefront apartment. It had come as a shock: the separation, the girlfriend, both. Gavin cheated as impeccably as he dressed; Karen had never suspected. He just told her about it over breakfast one morning. It’s not working between us. I know that, you know that. Very cool. I’m moving out… Yes, I have somewhere to go… Yes, there is a woman.

She hated it. All of it. She hated the fact of his infidelity and she hated this feeling that her role had been defined for her: the jealous wife. Well, she told herself, to hell with that. I can be as cool as he can.

So she had gone along blithely: no yelling, no major scenes. Now she wondered if that was not simply another kind of surrender. Gavin, a lawyer, understood life as gameplaying, rough sport played in earnest, and what he had achieved with Karen was a kind of checkmate. Because she concealed her feelings he wasn’t forced to deal with them.

She had been bluffed and outmaneuvered.

No more. Too much at stake now for fuzzy thinking. She had made a list before she left the house: Questions to ask. Gavin was pressing to begin the legal proceedings, and she knew she shouldn’t agree to anything before seeing her own lawyer—as soon as she found one—but she wanted to raise the question of the house.

She wanted to move. She needed to move. Not only did the house contain what had become sour memories, but there was the problem of the Gray Man. She was vulnerable and alone in the big suburban house; she felt encircled there, besieged. For Michael’s sake, it was vital that they leave… and she wondered if they should not move out of the city entirely. The problem was that she had no independent income. Last week she’d gone to see an employment counselor and when he asked for a resume Karen was forced to admit she hadn’t worked outside the home for as long as her son had lived. Her prospects, the man informed her, were limited.

And now the household money was low and she didn’t want to ask Gavin, again, for cash. Come the divorce, she guessed he would be paying support. But that was in the future.

So she had worked out a plan. They would sell the house. With her share of the income Karen could relocate and take a vocational course, programming or something. And the support payments, when they finally began, would keep her and Michael fed.

It had seemed like a good plan when she worked it out at home; now, here in the restaurant, she was less certain. Gavin embarked on some story about the firm, office politics, it was endless; the waiter stole away with her half-eaten cottage cheese and replaced it with coffee and she realized, panicking, that lunch was almost over, time had run out, her courage had failed. “The house,” she said abruptly.

Gavin sipped his coffee, rested a knuckle thoughtfully against his chin. “What about it?”

She stammered out her plan. He listened, frowning. She didn’t like the frown. It was his patient look, his concerned look, the look she imagined him exercising on his clients. She thought of it as his yes, but expression: Yes, but it will cost more than you think. Yes, but we’ll have to go to court.

“It’s a good idea,” he said when she finished. “But not practical.”

He sounded so sure of himself. The finality of it was crushing. She mumbled something about common property, the divorce laws—it wasn’t his house, not entirely—

“Nor yours.” He drained his cup. “I explained this years ago, Karen. The house is a tax write-off for my mother. She bought it out of Dad’s estate. In the eyes of the law, we’re tenants. The house doesn’t belong to either of us.”

She had some vague memory of this. “You said that was a technicality.”

“Nevertheless.”

She sat upright, shocked at her own disappointment, the depth of the frustration welling up in her. “Don’t tell me it’s impossible. We could work something out.” But this was too much like pleading. “Gavin—I made plans—”

“It’s not up to me.” He added, “It’s the way things are. But you always had trouble with that, right? Dealing with reality—it was never your long suit.”

Her coffee cup twisted in her hand. The coffee spilled out; the cup crashed against the saucer. She pushed herself away from the sodden table.

“For Christ’s sake,” Gavin said tightly.

He had always hated scenes.

She drove away dazed.

Home, she felt feverish. She poured herself a drink and sat down with her notebook. Her mind felt busy but blank, a motor revving in a motionless car. She turned to a clean page and wrote:

Dear Laura.

It was like automatic writing, unwilled, a conspiracy between pen and fingers. She surprised herself by continuing:

Invitation accepted. Michael & I arriving by the time you get this. We’ll be staying at that hotel in Santa Monica, you remember the one, same as last time. Or I’ll leave a message at the desk if there’s no room. Look for us there.

Love—

And signed it. And put it in an envelope, and addressed the envelope, and marked it SPECIAL DELIVERY and loaded it with stamps.

She would mail it later. Or maybe not. Well, she thought, probably not. It was a dumb idea, an impetuous idea; she was only disappointed because of Gavin.

She crumpled the envelope. Then, “Well, damn,” she said, and unfolded it and put it in her purse. Outside, the light was failing. She looked at her watch. It was after six o’clock. Michael was late.

2

Michael left school at a quarter after four and began the walk home alone.

He had evaded Dan and Valerie on his way to the lockers. He didn’t want company, he didn’t want a ride. It suited his mood to be alone.

He wondered, not for the first time, whether solitude might not be his natural condition.

It was only September, but autumn was setting in in a serious way. He lived six long suburban blocks from the school and the shortest route home took him down two winding residential streets and across a power company right-of-way, past high-tension towers that sang in a demented high-pitched buzz whenever the weather turned cold. He walked that way now, no buzzing today but only a silence, the sound of his feet in the brown summer grass.

He liked this place, the isolation of it, the trees and wild meadows and high steel towers. On the left, there were box homes under construction, beams like naked ribs; on the right, an old stand of wild maples. Down the middle ran this meadow, gently rolling pastureland gone to seed at the foot of the power-line gantries. Walking here, he felt suspended between worlds: school and home, tract and countryside.

Real and unreal.

He pushed his hands down into his jacket pockets and rested a minute against a length of Frost fence. Off among the trees, a cicada began to hum. The wind, already an autumn wind, tousled his hair.

He felt sad for no reason he could understand.

The sadness was connected with his mother and connected with the divorce—a word Michael had only just permitted into his vocabulary. No doubt, it was connected somehow also with the Gray Man.

The worst thing, he thought, was that there was nobody to talk to about it. Especially not at home, especially not these days. You just couldn’t say certain things. Everything was fine, until somebody said the wrong word—literally, a word, like “divorce”—and then there would be a chilly silence and you understood that this terrible thing, this obscenity, must never be mentioned again. He couldn’t say “divorce” to his mother: it was taboo, an unword.

On TV, he thought, it would be easy. She would ask him how he was feeling, he would admit something—guilt, pain, it wouldn’t matter, something– maybe cry a little—there would be that release. Roll credits. Out here, however, here in the real world, it wasn’t practical.

And it wasn’t just the divorce. Michael didn’t have much trouble with the idea of divorce; half his friends had divorced parents. Much more problematic was the notion of his father living with someone else, a woman, a stranger—trading his family for that. It was hard to imagine his father’s life meandering on like a river, with Michael and his mother becoming something abandoned in the course, an elbow lake or an overgrown island. Michael wasn’t angry—at least not yet—but he was bewildered. He didn’t know how to react.

Hate him for leaving? It didn’t seem possible.

Hate his mother for driving him away?

But that was not an allowable thought.

Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe he wasn’t affected by it. That was possible. He had, God knows, other problems.

But he recalled the moment last week when he had crept into his mother’s bedroom, opened the top drawer of her desk, and copied out the telephone number she had written on the last page of her address book… the number of Michael’s father’s new home, the lakeside apartment Michael had never seen.

Strange thing to do, for someone who wasn’t affected.

But “divorce” wasn’t the only unmentionable word around Michael’s house. Deeper and more disturbing was this business of the Gray Man.

Michael thought of him as the Gray Man. He had come up with the description when he was six, back when the Gray Man started to appear in his dreams. Gray because of the slate-gray clothes he always wore; gray, too, because a kind of grayness seemed to radiate from him, like an aura, a gray aura. Even his skin was chalky and pale. Michael understood very soon that talking about these dreams disturbed his mother, that any other nightmare might elicit a hug or permission to sleep with the light on, but that the Gray Man would only invoke these frightened looks and frightened denials. No, there’s no such thing. And stop asking me.

But it was a lie.

He did exist. Out here in the world, out in the real world, a real Gray Man.

Michael had seen him for the first time when he was ten years old. They were driving cross-country and they had stopped at a gas station along the highway somewhere out in Alberta. A hot day, car windows down, nothing but blank space and blue horizon and this shanty filling station, some old guy pumping gas, and in the shade of the plankboard souvenir store, obscure amidst all this clutter and dust: the Gray Man. The Gray Man peered out from under a gray slouch hat with a fixed, attentive look Michael remembered, too vividly, from his dreams.

Terrified, Michael looked to his mother, but his mother had seen the Gray Man at the same time and she was terrified, too. He could tell by the way she was breathing, tight little gulps of air. Dad was paying the pump jockey, attention focused on his credit card as it ratcheted through the stamper in the old man’s hand, worlds away. Michael opened his mouth to speak but his mother laid a warning hand on his arm. Like a message: Your father won’t understand. And it was true. He knew it without thinking about it. This was something he shared with his mother, and only with his mother. This fear. This mystery.

The Gray Man didn’t move. He just watched. His face was calm. His eyes radiated a profound and scary patience. He watched as Michael’s father started the car, watched as they accelerated down the highway. I’ll wait, the eyes promised. I’ll be back. And Michael returned the stare, kneeling on the rear seat, until the Gray Man and the gas station both had vanished in the sun haze.

The horizon made him feel safe again. The Gray Man lost in an ocean of space: it was like waking up.

He knew better than to ask about it. What bothered him most was seeing his mother so scared. Her fear persisted all that day; she was not reassured by distance. And so he was carefully silent. He didn’t want to make things worse. “You’re awfully quiet today, kiddo,” his father said. “Sure you’re feeling all right?”

“Yes.”

No.

He was confused. How did he feel? Frightened, obviously.

But there was something else: he recalled it all these years later, here in the power company meadow. He felt it again.

Curiosity? But that was too mild a word. More like—

“Fascination.”

The word hovered in the cool September air like some dark bird.

Startled, Michael turned.

Briefly, the world seemed to go in and out of focus.

He thought, I should have been safe here. This was home turf, his own territory. It was certainly not a place for the Gray Man, who was a lurker, an alley person, a shadow person. But here was the Gray Man only yards away, slouch hat pulled down against the sunlight, the same man Michael had seen at the gas station in Alberta five years ago, not appreciably older but maybe—it was a sour joke—maybe a little grayer.

Michael took a shocked step backward and felt the fence press into his spine.

The Gray Man spoke. “You don’t have to be afraid.” His voice was rough, old, but deep and calming. He smiled, and the smile made his angular face seem less scary. His eyes, small in their battlements of brow and cheekbone, remained fixed. A thin line of scar tissue ran from brow to ear and up into the shadow of the hat. “I only want to talk.”

Michael suppressed an urge to run. With animals, they said, you should never show your fear. Did the same rule apply to nightmares?

“Going home?” the Gray Man asked. “Home to your mother?”

Michael hesitated.

“Your mother,” the Gray Man said, “doesn’t talk much, does she?”

Michael reached out and wrapped his fingers in the links of the fence, steadying himself. He felt weak, bewildered. His legs felt tremulous and distant.

The Gray Man stood beside him. The Gray Man was tall and calm. The Gray Man put a hand on his shoulder.

“Walk with me,” the Gray Man said.

Michael’s attention was tied up now in the Gray Man’s voice, the sweep and cadence of it; he wasn’t conscious of the route they were following, the places they passed. By the time he thought to look around they had left the power company meadow far behind.

“You feel different,” the Gray Man said. “You’re not like other people.” His hand on Michael’s shoulder was firm, fatherly.

The words brought back a flicker of fear. “Because of you,” Michael said accusingly. “You—”

“Not because of me. But we can start there. What is it you call me?”

“The Gray Man.” It was silly. It was a childish thing to say out loud in the cool September air. But the Gray Man’s laugh was indulgent, amused.

“I have a name. Well, I have lots of names. Sometimes—” His voice lowered a notch. “Sometimes I’m called Walker.”

“ Walker,” Michael repeated.

“ Walker. Tracker. Finder. Keeper.”

Like a song, Michael thought absently.

“What matters is that I know things about you. The things your mother won’t talk about.”

Michael asked in spite of himself, “What things?”

“Oh, all kinds of things. How lonely you feel. How different you feel. How you wake up sometimes… you wake up sometimes in the night, and you’ve been dreaming, and you’re afraid because it would be so easy to wake up inside a dream. As if dreams were real, a place you could go, maybe a place you visited once.”

And Michael nodded, strangely unsurprised that the Gray Man knew this about him. It was as if he had passed beyond fear and surprise into an altogether stranger realm. Sleepwalk territory, Michael thought.

They walked past darkened houses and brittle, silent trees. There was no wind. He didn’t recognize the neighborhood; he wondered fleetingly how far they had come. Nowhere near home, anyway. There was no neighborhood like this near home.

“We don’t go to the obvious places,” the Gray Man said, and Michael felt included in that we: a brotherhood, a special few. “We don’t walk where other people walk. You know that already. Deep inside yourself… you know that.”

He had never spoken about it. Seldom even thought about it.

But yes, it was true.

“You could walk out of the world if you wanted to.” The Gray Man stopped and bent at the waist and looked into Michael’s eyes. “The world has angles other people don’t see. Corners and doors and directions. You could step sideways and never be seen again. Like this.”

And the Gray Man moved in a direction Michael could only just perceive. Not away, exactly, but somehow… beyond.

And Michael took a tentative step after. “This,” the Gray Man said, smiling now. “This. This.”

A step and another step.

Michael felt an electricity flowing in him, a tingling sense of power. He was dizzy with it. Angles, he thought. Angles and corners and doors. A door in the air.

He could see the place the Gray Man was standing now, a cobbled hilly street, a horizon of hard blue sky and old industrial smokestacks, a faint smell of fish and salt in the air. He could not hear the Gray Man’s voice but saw him beckoning, a subtle but unmistakable motion of his pale hand. This way. This way. Only a step, Michael thought. This quiet miracle. It was only a step away …

“Michael!”

The sound came from far away. But his attention wavered.

“Michael!”

Closer now. Reluctantly, with a sense of opportunities lost, faltering, he turned away from the Gray Man, the cobbled street, the cold blue sky.

The sky he faced now was dark. A few stars blinked above the blue nimbus in the west. He did recognize this neighborhood: old houses and a slatboard grocery store on the corner, a mile or more from home and school.

His mother’s Civic was at the curb. The door opened and she was framed in it, breathless and frightened, beckoning him in. It was like the gesture the Gray Man had made. He wondered how much she had seen.

But he turned back to look for the Gray Man and the Gray Man was gone … no blue sky, no cobbled street, only a tattered hedge, this cracked slab of sidewalk.

Strange, he thought. Strange. He was so close.

His mother tugged him into the car. She was trembling but not angry. Shaking his head, still dazed, he buckled the shoulder strap around himself in an automatic motion as she gunned the car away from the curb.

“We’re leaving,” she said between her teeth. “We’re leaving tonight.” “Leaving?”

“We’re going to California.”