Текст книги "The Divide"
Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson
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PART 2
CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTS
12
Maxim Kyriakides paid the taxi driver and watched as the automobile sped away, leaving him alone in the gravel driveway of the house north of Toronto in which he would be spending the next few months.
The house was a whitewashed pseudo-Georgian structure, isolated from its neighbors by groves of trees. Maxim had never seen it before. It belonged to a colleague, a University of Toronto professor named Collingwood, who was a member of what they had called “The Network” many years ago. The house was to have gone up for sale a week ago, but Collingwood had offered it to Maxim when Maxim explained the problem he was facing.
The house was suitably large. Maxim walked up the driveway to the big portico, fished a key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock on the double doors. Open, they admitted a wash of December sunlight into the tiled foyer. The house was cold; the heat had been turned off for some days.
But the electricity had been restored yesterday. Maxim flicked a switch and the lights winked on. The entrance hall yielded to a kitchen, a living room, a library. These were furnished, though sparsely—valuables had been removed and there were blank, pale spaces where paintings had been taken from the walls.
Well, he thought, that was appropriate, too. We shall all be entering a new, unfamiliar space. All three of us … all four, counting the French-Canadian girl Susan had mentioned. No, even more than that. Five, he thought, if you allowed Benjamin as a separate entity.
Maxim ascended the staircase carefully. He was healthy enough to pass for ten or fifteen years younger than his age. He was large but not fat; he had always walked for pleasure, sometimes great distances, and he supposed that habit had helped preserve his health. Still, he was conscious of his age. At sixty-eight, stairs were a chore to be undertaken with some seriousness. He remembered his Uncle Constantine moving through the house in Macedonia at this same solemn, considered pace. Constantine had been a schoolteacher and a cynical Communist, a friend of the rebel Veloukhiotis. Maxim was then a teenager and already an ideologue; he had read Marx with great determination. Now … is it possible, he wondered, that as children we’re already learning how to be old? Had he been studying for infirmity under his uncle’s slow tutelage?
The second floor of the house on the outskirts of Toronto exuded a closed-in, musty atmosphere. He wanted to open a window but dared not; that would only make it more difficult to heat these rooms when the furnace kicked on again. He stood by a bedroom window and gazed through its double panes across a wooded ravine. The ravine was stark and bare, a swath of perhaps a hundred yards between the house and a housing project crowded up against a major highway. The ravine afforded at least a little privacy, and that was good. The house, he thought, was as close to stateliness as one could achieve in such a prefabricated landscape.
He paused to scold himself for this momentary class snobbery, to which he was not even entitled. Maxim, though no longer a Communist like poor dead Constantine, had once considered himself a socialist; certainly he had never been wealthy.
But the important thing, he thought, is that I can work here.
It was John who had insisted on staying in Toronto. Maxim had wanted him to fly to Chicago with Susan. But John believed he would be safer on this side of the border—which might even be true, though Maxim had no evidence to suggest it—and certainly he would be more comfortable, less disoriented, in a familiar setting. So Maxim had arranged a sudden sabbatical, ostensibly for reasons of health (no one inquired too closely—one of the advantages of seniority and tenure), and borrowed this house from his friend.
Everything was in place except for the people, and they would be arriving tomorrow. Susan, this young woman Amelie … and John, whom Maxim had not set eyes upon for many years.
Resting a moment in the darkened hallway, he silently framed the forbidden words:My son.
Not literally, of course. Maxim had never married, never produced any children. Even his most intimate friends—possibly excepting those in the so-called Network—took him for an elderly bachelor of the generic sort, married to his research and his teaching. And that was, in fact, largely true. But no one’s life is as simple as his friends believe.
In a real sense, Maxim thought, I created John. What else is fatherhood? This was, if anything, even more profound. A virgin fatherhood.
He thought, I could have raised him.
It was one of those thoughts that came to him periodically, unbidden and unwelcome. Ordinarily, he would have shunted it aside. It was not useful. But now, with the prospect of facing John once again, there was no avoiding it.
If they hadn’t taken him away—
If I hadn’t allowed them to take him away—
But, no. He was too old to regret his life. You do what you do. And then you do what you can.
He sat down in a chair in the entranceway to wait for the deliveries he had been told to expect: a few pharmaceuticals, a tape recorder, his notebooks. Bundled in a huge coat and away from the wind, he was warm enough—except for his feet. Warm enough, anyway, to drift toward sleep.
Drifting, he was briefly assailed by a dream-image of John standing before him, John grown unnaturally tall, pointing a finger of accusation and pronouncing the word “Liar!” The vision was disturbing and it startled him awake; he sat up blinking.
The afternoon light had dimmed. The house was dark.
He rubbed his face, sighing. Traitorous sleep. But he supposed there was some truth in his dream. He had implied to Susan that there was some treatment available for John; presumably she had passed this implication on. Poor trusting Susan, who believed in his miraculous powers. In fact there was nothing for John in this house but a warm bed in which to endure his crisis. And my notebook, Maxim thought. My obdurate curiosity, and my guilt.
Tests would be run, of course, and there was dopamine, which had relieved some symptoms in the animal studies. But there was nothing to forestall the ultimate resolution. Unwillingly, Maxim recalled his laboratory chimps, the animals prostrate and comatose or consumed by fever. In the initial tests—before John was born—the beasts had not been allowed to live long enough to exhibit symptoms; they were grotesques, capable of understanding a few words of written English and copying the alphabet from children’s books; they were destroyed as a potential embarrassment. But Dr. Kyriakides had allowed his second animals, his private experiment, to live to maturity—caged homunculi with enlarged skulls and wizened, cynical faces. He had watched them live out their truncated lives, scratching apple and orange onto yellow copypaper or probing their fur with the pencils, and dropping into recurrent fevers which he mistook at first for some form of malaria; then battering themselves against their cages and screeching, as if they had suffered some unendurable insight into their own condition—collapsing at last into a febrile unconsciousness.
Most died. Some recovered, but never fully. Never regained their facility with the pencil, never remembered how to operate the infant toys. The ones who survived lived on as lab animals, caged and listless … though an x-ray or an autopsy might reveal certain unusual cerebral lesions. Whatever its outcome, the affliction was universal.
And now John.
I didn’t mean this to happen.
But it had happened anyway.
Maxim stood up, groaning. Old bones. But his feet were not as cold as they had been, and he realized that the gas must have been turned on while he slept; the house had begun to warm around him.
13
Roch said he was going out for the day—looking for work, he said. Amelie watched from the kitchen window as he drove off in his battered green Chevy van. Then she telephoned Susan.
“Today,” she said. “Can you pick me up?”
“All right,” Susan said.
Amelie hurried to pack her things.
Not that there was much to pack. A suitcase full of clothes; the stereo, the TV set. None of the furniture was worth hanging on to; if there had been time she would have sent it back to the Salvation Army depot where she’d found it. But the arrangements had to be made in secret, and quickly, so that Roch wouldn’t find out. He had been in a tolerable mood through Christmas and Amelie didn’t want to provoke anything before she left. Above all, she didn’t want him to find out where she was going.
Susan had said she would come by with the car around noon. At eleven forty-five Amelie hiked her belongings out to the curb where they sat in a small, unimpressive heap. She wrapped herself in a jacket and stood shivering next to the luggage. It was a cold January day and the clouds had begun to wring out a few flakes of snow. The sidewalk was clear but cold; ice stood in pockets in the grassy verge. It was at least not one of those hideously cold days you sometimes get in January and February, when the air steals your breath and even the short walk to the bus stop is an endurance test—but it felt like those days were coming. Amelie decided she would need a new winter coat, not just this jacket. She used to own a parka (from the Thrift Village over on Augusta), but she’d thrown it away when the seams ripped under the arms.
She looked up and down the street anxiously, but there was no sign of Susan’s car.
It felt funny, leaving the apartment behind … leaving it to Roch, who would probably have to be evicted. But she’d left so much behind already. Her job at the restaurant, for instance. Susan claimed that Dr. Kyriakides would be able to find her another job soon, and maybe that was true or maybe not; but she couldn’t stay on at the Goodtime, because Roch would be sure to find her there. She had no illusions about Roch. She had lived with her brother for most of the past month and she understood that whatever was wrong with him—she thought of it as a kind of broken wheel inside him—was getting worse. The wheel was running loose; it had come free of all the gears and governors and pretty soon it might wreck the machine entirely. You could tell by the noise, by the smell of hot metal and simmering oil.
Amelie, who smoked cigarettes very occasionally, fished one out of her purse now and lit it. It made her feel warmer. But then she coughed and felt mildly guilty—felt the pressure of all those Public Health ads on TV. She took a last drag and butted out the cigarette against the icy ground. Her watch said 11:58. She whispered, “Come on, Susan!” Her breath made clouds in the cold air.
She tried to remember what Susan Christopher was driving these days. She had seen the car a couple of times: a rented Honda, she recalled, some drab color—beige or brown? Kind of box-shaped. Maybe that was it, at the corner?
But no, the distant grey automobile rolled on without turning. There was a stillness in the air, the eerie calm of a cold weekday noon. Everybody was inside having lunch. Amelie thought randomly of the Ecole in Montreal, bag lunches in the dingy cafeteria and pale winter light through the mullioned windows. Dead hours like this. Behind closed eyes she pictured the Honda, willing it to arrive. Susan, goddamn! This was dangerous.
She opened her eyes then and looked down the street. A vehicle turned the comer. But it was not Susan’s Honda.
It was Roch’s green van.
She stood up, panicked. But what was there to do? Hide in the apartment? How was she supposed to explain this—the little Sony TV, the stereo, taped Tourister luggage, all sitting at the curb in a neat pile? She wanted to run but couldn’t make her feet move. Susan will come, she thought, and I’ll jump into the car and we’ll zoom away…
But Susan didn’t come. The van rolled to a stop beside her.
Oh, Amelie thought, oh, shit!
Roch cracked open the door on the passenger side. She saw him peering out from the dimness inside, and the expression on his face was stony and opaque. He said, “Going somewhere?”
It was like being back in school. Latin class, she thought dizzily. Inevitably, the Sister would ask her to decline some verb. And Amelie, who could not get a grip on Latin, would stand beside her desk in mute humiliation. This same wordlessness overtook her now. She could not run. She could not speak.
Roch said disgustedly, “Get in.”
Meekly, Amelie obeyed.
* * *
Susan turned the corner and saw Amelie’s possessions piled on the curb … then registered the green van idling ahead. It was Roch’s van. Susan had seen it parked at the building before; Amelie had pointed it out. No, she thought—and pulled the Honda over before she could be spotted.
She watched Amelie climb into the van.
Susan’s mind was racing. She wished John was here, or Dr. Kyriakides. She remembered the bruise Amelie had showed her … remembered Amelie’s description of Roch.
She was what, five minutes late? She shouldn’t have stopped for coffee at the hotel. Shouldn’t have come up Yonge Street; the traffic was bad. Shouldn’t have—
But that was stupid. Not helpful at all.
She watched the green van roll away. It turned right at the next comer.
Now or never, Susan thought.
She gunned the Honda down the street.
* * *
Pretty soon, Amelie understood where Roch was taking her.
When she was young and on the street in Toronto she had heard about Cherry Beach. It was a bleak strip of shoreline east of the harbor, and if a cop picked you up after midnight, for vagrancy, say, or trespassing, or prostitution, and if you said the wrong thing, then the cop might drive you out to Cherry Beach and do some work on your attitude. It was called Cherry Beach Express, and although Amelie had never experienced it she knew people who had. She was always afraid it was Roch who would end up out there—permanently damaged, maybe, because he did not know when to shut up and lie down.
Now Roch was driving her past the peeling towers of grain silos and the shadows of lake freighters, down industrial alleys and across rusted railway sidings. Cherry Beach Express. Because Roch understood how punishment worked. Obviously it was punishment he had on his mind right now.
But it’s daylight, she thought, someone will see us—
But that was stupid. She knew better.
She looked at Roch, a careful sideways glance. His lips were compressed and pale. He was nodding to himself, as if he had expected this all along, ratty old Amelie showing her true colors at last. This was not even hatred, Amelie thought; it was something much colder and vaster than that.
She said, “Roch, I—”
“Don’t talk,” he said. “Shut up.”
She bit her lip.
The van rolled to a stop far along the isolated shoreline, obscured from the road by a stand of leafless maples. Roch reached across and opened Amelie’s door, then pushed her out. She stumbled onto the cold, compacted sand. The air was brittle with moisture and she could hear the waves lapping at the shore. Far off, somewhere in the harbor, a freighter sounded its horn.
Roch climbed down after her. Amelie fought the urge to run. There was nowhere to go; Roch was fast and she would only make him mad. She stood with her hands at her side, breathing hard.
Roch stood in front of her, close enough for her to smell his breath.
He said, “You don’t trust me.”
She said, “That’s not true!”
He slapped her. It was a hard, stinging, open-handed slap; it rocked her head to the right. Roch was strong … he still worked out in the gym twice a week. Amelie knew this, because he had borrowed money from her to keep his membership current.
“You don’t trust me,” he said, “and you’re lying to me. What kind of thing is that to do? Christ, I’m your brother! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
He expected an answer. Amelie was rigid, frightened. “Sure it means something to me.”
“Liar,” Roch said sadly.
“No, I mean it! I mean—Jesus Christ, Roch!”
He grabbed her wrists; his grip was powerful. “You were running away.”
Amelie could not hold his gaze. She looked at the lake, instead, grey under grey clouds.
“Running away from home,” Roch elaborated. “Look at me, goddammit!”
He took her jaw in his right hand and forced her to face him. His hand traveled up along her cheek in a gesture that was almost a caress; then he took a handful of her hair and twisted it. Amelie said, “Ow!” and began to cry.
“You were going somewhere,” he said.
“I was moving out,” she said. “All right? I’m sick of that place!”
“You didn’t tell me,” Roch said patiently. “You could have told me.”
“I thought you’d get mad!”
He seemed puzzled. “Why? Why would I get mad? I mean, maybe you’re right. We need a bigger place. Hey, I’m reasonable.” His grip tightened on her hair. “But that’s not all of it—right?”
“Shit,” Amelie said.
“Don’t use bad language,” Roch said. “It makes you sound cheap.” He was thinking; his face was contorted with the effort of it. “You wanted to get rid of me. That’s it, isn’t it? Or else—it’s that guy you shacked up with, right? He’s back—right?”
Amelie hated it when Roch talked about Benjamin. Dirty, dangerous words. “Shut up,” she said.
He slapped her again. This time, with his left hand firmly tangled in her hair, it was worse.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” he said.
She moaned.
“He’s back—right?”
After a long pause, Amelie nodded.
“You were going to stay with him.”
Pause, nod again. Snow was falling gently now. She felt the flakes against her burning cheek.
“Well, you can go,” Roch said. Amelie looked up. Roch smiled. “You can go if you want to. Sure! Go with him! I’m on your side! All I want—I just want you to prove you trust me. I just want you to tell me where I can find you.”
“No,” Amelie said instantly.
“No? You won’t tell me?”
“I—I don’t know, Roch, we haven’t—”
But she did know. Susan had given her the address of the house; Amelie had written it down and hidden it in her purse. Roch understood this, of course. He always knew when she was lying.
This time, though, he didn’t slap her. This time he jerked his knee up into her belly and at the same time released her hair, put his hand in a frightening grip around her face and pushed. Amelie fell to the ground, doubled over and gasping for breath. The pain was enormous.
Roch said, in a tone of weary patience, “All you have to do is tell me.”
Amelie blinked. She felt like throwing up. She rose to her knees, and then—past Roch, a great distance back the way they’d come along the shore road—she saw a flicker of light. It was a reflection from a car window, and the car was rolling along in slow motion, and it was grey—a grey Honda.
It was Susan, Amelie realized, who must have followed them from the rooming house.
She looked up at Roch, trying hard to disguise her emotion.
He took her hair and dragged her up. Amelie grabbed a double handful of cold, gritty beach sand … and then she was on her feet.
She had seen this in movies. You took a handful of dirt—
Roch frowned. “What now?” Reading her face.
Amelie brought both hands up and thrust them forward, spraying the beach sand into Roch’s eyes.
“What the fuck—!” he screamed.
Amelie ducked past his groping hands toward the Honda. She saw Susan accelerate suddenly down the gritty tarmac. Hurry, Susan!
But the sand-in-the-eyes thing was not as paralyzing as it looked on TV. Roch turned and scrambled after her. She could hear the thump of his big feet against the beach. The sandy beach slowed her down; it was like running in a dream … but maybe it would slow Roch down, too. Amelie saw the Honda speeding toward her as Susan realized what had happened. Amelie drew in great ragged gasps of frigid air.
The Honda veered away from the road and ran a few yards along the verge. It wavered, and Amelie saw Susan groping across the passenger seat to unlock the far door. The door swung open as the Honda curved back to the road. Amelie focused all her attention on that door. It was her only way out of here. Because Roch was mad enough now that he might kill her … maybe not on purpose; but he was strong; she was not.
He was right behind her now. She could hear his angry breathing. She didn’t look back, because surely that would be the end; because he might be right there with his arms outstretched; she might freeze in her tracks, seeing him. She watched the Honda roll forward in lazy dream-time and thought, Here I am, okay, right here, Susan!
Then she felt a tug as Roch closed his hand on her jacket. She pulled away, but only briefly. She stumbled, and Roch tackled her—a football tackle; she went down winded and breathless.
When she opened her eyes he was kneeling over her. But the look on his face was not triumphant; it was queerly mechanical, a vacant gaze that was focused on her only approximately. But his fist was raised and it was obvious what he meant to do. Amelie tried to squirm away but his other hand was clamped in a fierce grip around her neck.
Amelie twisted her head to one side in time to see the front tires of the Honda spitting sand as the car braked beside her. Susan! Amelie thought. But it wasn’t Susan who saved her, really; it was the passenger-side door, which flew open as the Honda stopped and caught Roch across the head and shoulders. Roch slumped forward and his weight was immense, but the grip around her neck had loosened and Amelie slid out from under the limp bulk of her brother.
Susan pulled her inside the car. Amelie slammed the door and hammered down the lock. Susan stepped down on the accelerator. The little car revved against the sand for a long, heartstopping moment; then the rear wheels seemed to bite down and the Honda shot forward. The car missed a leafless maple by inches … Amelie cringed … then they were back on solid tarmac and rocketing down the lakeshore road.
Amelie knelt on the vinyl carseat and peered through the rear window. She saw Roch stand up. He shook himself—she thought of a wet dog shaking itself dry—then stumbled toward his van.
“He’s coming after us,” she said.
Susan said, “Relax,” though she was breathing hard. The Honda turned left and roared through the industrial wasteland. Amelie watched vigilantly but saw no sign of Roch. Then they were into traffic and there was no chance of him following; Amelie sighed and slumped down in the seat.
“Thanks,” she said.
“It’s okay,” Susan said.
* * *
Amelie stared vacantly through the window. The snow was falling harder now. The afternoon was turning dark.
“Are you all right?” Susan asked.
Amelie touched the sore part of her cheek. It would swell and bruise; it would look shitty. She was bruised down around her belly, too. But it was nothing terrible. She told Susan so.
“Nice guy,” Susan commented.
Amelie shrugged.
“I guess he wanted to know where you were going?”
“Yes,” Amelie said.
“Did you tell him?”
“No.”
“That’s why he hit you.”
Amelie nodded.
Susan said, “That was pretty brave—not telling him.”
“Brave?” Amelie said. She almost laughed. “Jesus, Susan!—for a smart person, you’re not very bright sometimes.”
* * *
They took a long route back to make sure Roch hadn’t managed to follow. Coming up on Amelie’s rooming house, Susan slowed. There was no sign of the van… Roch wasn’t here.
But he had been. He must not have tried to follow at all; he must have come straight back. Amelie’s things had been trashed. “Oh, no,” Susan said. She waited for some response from Amelie, but there was none. Amelie only looked morosely at the pile of wreckage that had been her stereo, the little TV, a suitcase full of clothes. “Stop,” she said, as the Honda rolled past. She opened the passenger door and leaned out to collect a couple of blouses, some tapes, a pair of Levis from the snowy gutter. She held these on her lap.
“All that other stuff,” Susan said, “you know, we can replace all that.”
Amelie shrugged and closed the door. She did not look back as Susan drove away.
* * *
Amelie was silent during most of the ride to the house Dr. Kyriakides had rented, seeming to watch the snow that had begun to accumulate across the brown farm fields and the cold marshes north of the city. Susan drove carefully, grateful for the silence and the chance to begin to assimilate everything that had happened. That terrible man … and, my God, she had almost killed him, slamming the car door into him … !
“The thing is,” Amelie said quietly, “I just don’t know.”
Susan looked across at her. “Know what?”
Amelie studied her fingernails.
“About Roch,” she said. “I don’t know whether we can do something like that to him. I mean, and get away with it.” She turned her large, shiny eyes on Susan. “I don’t know if he’ll let us.”
