Alyzon Whitestarr (32 page)

I looked at his handsome round face lit up by the ghastly blue-green light from the dashboard.

“Jesse, what if you had the power to help humanity change for the better? Would you feel like you ought to do it?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On lots of things. On what I had to do to make them change, for one. I mean if you said I had to run over some kid or he’d grow up to be a monster and kill a whole lot of people, I’d say no. But if you said I had to stand by a dam and stick my finger in it to save a village, even though the whole bank might break open and kill me, I hope I’d say yes. But
it’s also the old power question in disguise, isn’t it?” Jesse added.

“Power?” I echoed, puzzled.

He shrugged. “If you have power and use it, and power inevitably corrupts, then by using your power, you would be allowing yourself to be corrupted. But would the corruption be worse than the harm you could prevent?”

“Do you think power
always
corrupts if it is used? Might there not be a way to act and not be corrupted? Let’s say you have some trusted advisers and you listen to them.”

“A devil’s advocate would say that they would then have power and would be corrupted by it to the extent of the power you gave them.”

I sighed. “So what is it? No action is best or action is best?”

“I don’t think you can make a rule. I think it has to be that you decide these things in the moment on a case-by-case basis.”

“Wouldn’t you still be corrupted?”

“There is always the danger, but I think if you are aware of that and make your goals humble and never let yourself get really sure or certain about anything, and if you also have trusted friends whose advice you listen to, then you’re less likely to be corrupted.” He flicked me a look. “That must have been some video game you were playing tonight.”

I laughed.

On Sunday I was in the living room doing homework when Jesse came in and asked me to tell Serenity to run to the store for something he needed. He was babysitting Luke, and weekend Luke-sitters were always assigned a gofer for the day. If I hadn’t been in the middle of a train of thought in an essay I might have offered to go instead. As it was, I was only irritated slightly at having to run upstairs.

I padded barefoot up the stairs, still inside my own head when I pushed open the bedroom door and saw Serenity on her knees by the bed. My first absurd thought was that she was praying, but then I realized she was pushing something under the bed. Then the door creaked a little and she spun round.

“You’re always spying on me,” she snapped. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“I wasn’t,” I said indignantly. “In case you’ve forgotten, this is my bedroom, too! But I only came in to tell you that Jesse wants something from the store.”

Serenity’s eyes blazed with a loathing that shocked me and made me step aside as she stalked past, leaving me enveloped
in a waft of licorice and burning hair. Shaken, I resolved to tell Da that I thought she needed help. I heard the front door slam and crossed to the window to watch her go out the gate and up the street, a string shopping bag dangling from her hand. Turning away from the window, my gaze fell on her bed and, without thinking, I crossed the room and knelt down to look. All I could see under the bed was a thin book with a yellow cover. I pulled it out. The title of the book was
The Way
, and from its size, it looked to be a poetry book. The first page had a list of what I thought must be poems, only when I ran my eye down them, they didn’t sound much like poetry. The first one said, “The Way to Proceed,” and turned out to be a chapter heading. The chapter began by saying that it was impossible to know one’s true path if one’s life was full of attachments. “The first step in learning one’s path,” it went on, “is to divest oneself of connections to humans and to material things. Only then is one truly naked in body and soul.”

The language reminded me a bit of the stuff I had read about the
bushi
, and as I read on, it seemed to me that this was a kind of code, too. The next chapter was titled, “The Poetics of Thought and Action.” Racy, I thought with a jab of humor, but at the same time I crossed to the window to keep an eye out for Serenity, knowing she would be incandescent if she caught me snooping. I did feel guilty, but my curiosity overrode it.

“To act is an expression of thought,” the book said. “To act on an ideal is to live an ideal rather than merely talking and thinking about it. Courage is shown when we act upon our
thoughts. Courage is making thought a reality. An ideal which is not acted upon is nothing. It is less than nothing, because it is a hollow thought with no intent. Those who profess ideals and do not act upon them are cowards and deceivers.”

The last sentence jolted me a bit because it was the sort of thing Serenity had been saying, and it had the same venom I had seen in her eyes as she had stormed from the room. I flicked through the book, reading a sentence here and there and finding more of the same oddly religious-sounding philosophy with the occasional unexpectedly sharp accusatory passage. Then I came to a bit that struck me as having a different tone from what had gone before. I went back a little and read it more slowly.

Somewhere in the house a door banged, and I gave a start and nervously listened, but there was no sign of Serenity. There was another bang, and I guessed that she must have left the screen door unlatched.

I knew I ought to put the book back before I was caught, but I turned to the last chapter, wanting to get some sense of what the book was leading to. The chapter heading was “Commitment.”

A coldness crept through me, because hadn’t the bouncer type who had stopped Harrison from going into Serenity’s poetry meeting said something about commitment? And the name of the group—the Morality Complex—almost sounded like it could have been a chapter heading in the book. I read some of the last chapter.

The door slammed again. Suddenly panicking, I dropped to my knees, but in trying to close the book to put it back under the bed, I managed to flip open the last page.

What I saw made me freeze in disbelief, for here was the swastika with snakes that I had seen before. Only this one was not graffiti or a doodle. It was printed.

And there were words under it: “Beyond this point there is only action.”

“How dare you touch my things,” Serenity hissed.

I spun around in fright, leaving the book on the ground. Serenity darted across the room and snatched it up.

“Jesus, calm down,” I said, my words languid enough to belie my pounding heart. “What is it, anyway? Your diary?”

She actually looked as if I had hit her. The blood drained from her face and she looked deathly ill or else terribly old, except for her eyes, which seemed to go from molten dark blue to stony black hardness. “You have no idea, do you?” she asked in a low, passionate voice. “You’re like some cow in a field, chewing on its cud.”

“You need help, Serenity,” I said.

“Fuck you,” she said, and walked out, closing the door behind her with contemptuous care.

I stared at the closed door for a long time, shocked by her swearing. Not by the word itself, but by her use of it.

As a family, we didn’t swear. It was not forbidden so much as regarded as dull-witted. Da had gently drummed into us that a person with a good vocabulary could say anything and everything with great precision and emphasis. A swearword was like throwing a lump of dung at someone by comparison. It might connect, but it was dull and imprecise and you got dirty using it. I had grown up, as we all had, to see swearing as a form of stupidity.

But something more frightening than stupidity was going on. What did it mean that Serenity had a book with a swastika
in it that was supposed to be the emblem of some violent gang in Shaletown? And what had the book to do with the poetry group at the library?

“A pretty weird sort of poetry group,” Harrison had said after following Serenity that night, and I cursed myself for wallowing in premature relief. What sort of poetry group had tough-looking skinheads minding the door? What sort of poetry group demanded commitment to ideals from its members?

* * *

Da still hadn’t returned by dinnertime, so we ate his celebration dinner without him: me, Jesse, Serenity, and Mirandah, who had made pumpkin ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta cheese. I barely tasted the food. I was desperate for Da to come home, not just because I wanted to see he was safe, but because I had to talk to him about Serenity.

I had expected to smell rage on her, but her face was wiped clean of all emotion. Her thin pretense of eating seemed to come from habit rather than from any real desire to seem normal. When she got up from the table, I didn’t go up after her, because I was determined not to go to bed until I had spoken to Da.

But it got later and later, and my thoughts swung from worrying about Serenity to worrying about Da. Close to eleven, Mum drifted into the room, looking fresh and alert. She kissed my cheek and said, “He’ll be here before morning.” Just as if she had read my mind.

“Mum,” I said, hardly able to believe I was going to say it, “I’m worried about Serenity.”

She nodded, and the movement sent her glorious red curls tumbling softly about her shoulders. “I am thinking of painting her, my darling.”

I felt a surge of anger toward her. I wanted to scream at her to pay attention to the real world for once instead of only ever seeing it in terms of her paintings. There were things going on that needed taking care of, and people—Da and Serenity, and me too, maybe. I wanted to ask what kind of mother she was if you could never have a proper conversation with her. What good, I wanted to rage, was all that beauty and talent to us?

My brief fury faded, because what would have been the use of my rant? Mum would probably just suggest painting me.

She touched my cheek as she went out, and I saw a fleeting vision of flames that frightened me until I realized they were only painted. I went up to my room, feeling depressed and anxious. Serenity was already in her bed, of course, and turning to face her humped form, I focused my hearing on her breathing and heartbeat to reassure myself that she was asleep. But it was a long time before I slept.

Madness
, I thought, and realized that it was the first time I had allowed myself to think the word, and yet it was what I had seen in Serenity’s face when she had snatched up the book earlier. Madness or something very close to it.

* * *

That night I dreamed of myself as a wolf, but for the first time I felt myself hunted, or at least watched by hidden, malevolent eyes. And for the first time the unease I had occasionally
felt during the wolf dreams coalesced into the distinct feeling that time was running out.

Time for what?
I wondered upon waking. Then I remembered Da and hastened out of bed with fear drubbing through me to find out if he was home. He wasn’t in the kitchen as he usually was, having a cup of tea in sweaty clothes after his morning run, and my heart sank. Then I saw Serenity in her school uniform standing by the window and staring out.