Asterisk (24 page)

She:
I don't believe Alexis has house-trained her mutt
.

He:
How so?

She:
I found a little pile of poop in the master bedroom
.

(Laughter)

Their heads inclined at the same time as if set on a collision course.

Thorne finished his drink and once more saw his image, this time reflected in the mirror behind the bar. A young man who has had too many late nights. A little worn around the edges. A blunt instrument. The Beatles played on as if they had been wrapped in cellophane.
Penny Lane you're in
.

He signaled the barman, ordered a second drink, turned around and looked across the bar.
Passengers for Rome. This is the last call for TWA flight …
Where is he? Thorne wondered. Where is the fat man?

He sipped his Bloody Mary.

She:
Alexis always thinks she has a way with dogs
.

He:
What makes you think so?

She:
My dear, look at the men she's been married to
.

(Laughter)

Thorne picked up his glass, moved away from the bar. He went to the back of the cocktail lounge and, screened by people, watched the front door.

Escalante—

He was dreaming. In a moment he would wake.

Marcia would be sitting on the edge of the bed.

He would get up. Have coffee. Dress. Briefcase. Car. Office. Home. Marcia.

This part is the dream, he thought.

You play ball, John
.

My dear congressman.

You scratch my back
.

How could he?

Pictures, flashes, Anna Burckhardt lying face down in that sleep from which there is no awakening, an old man floating in a pool, Marcia hauling her suitcases—

Last call for passengers for …

Through the open doorway of the bar he saw a straggle of newly arrived passengers drifting across the main lounge. Texans, garrulous men in garish leisure suits, broadbrimmed hats. Their women looked as if they should be carrying white poodles.

And there, across the lounge, sitting with a newspaper folded in his lap, there he was. The fat bland face, the expression one of a complete lack of curiosity such as you might expect to see in the eye of a profound retard. Thorne heard the ice cubes click in his Bloody Mary.

He stepped back against the wall.

The beautiful woman brushed past him on the way to the toilet, leaving a trace of perfume in the air. He couldn't imagine her pissing. He couldn't, by the same token, imagine her breathing the air he breathed. He saw the fat man get up, leave the newspaper on the sofa, and walk to a glass case that contained a replica of Washington in the year 1876. Fastidiously modeled dwellings in miniature. Tiny people in the streets, stuck, going nowhere.

He went to the telephone and pushed in coins and dialed a number; his hand adhered to the receiver. He heard Erickson's voice at the other end, a note of irritation. The beautiful woman passed him again, the perfume stronger now, cloying, like the scent of a thousand sick petals opening for one final outrage.

Erickson, understandably, was not pleased.

“I'm sorry about the job,” Thorne said.

“Yeah,” Erickson said. “No more sorry than me. They said nothing. There was just this note from McLintock. Thanks a lot, here's your check, goodbye, sorry it didn't work out. I know better.”

“It was because of me,” Thorne said.

“What else is new?” Erickson said. “If you want nothing more than to proffer your apology, Thorne, then excuse me while I get back to the help-wanted column—”

Thorne said, “Wait.”

Erickson was silent.

“Have you ever heard of Asterisk?”

“It doesn't ring any bells.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure.”

“You'd tell me if it did?” Thorne asked.

The fat man's nose was pressed to the glass case.

“I don't like how you sound,” Erickson said. “Go home and lie down in a darkened room, man.”

“Erickson, listen to me, they've been following me around for God knows how long—”

“John, give me a break.”

“Erickson, please listen. It's because of the Asterisk Project. You understand? That's what it's all about, that's why Burckhardt was killed—”

Erickson was silent.

“Are you listening to me?” Thorne asked.
I sound perfectly insane
, he thought. A disembodied voice gone crazy on a telephone line.

Erickson was still silent.

“Burckhardt was killed because of it—”

The line went dead. Thorne held the receiver in his hand, put his forehead against the wall, he could feel the perspiration on his brow stick to the paneled wood. You couldn't blame Erickson, you couldn't blame him. He put the receiver back in place, finished his drink, and realized, with a start, a consciousness of horror, that he had just left Erickson with the verbal equivalent of twenty-five pages of blank manuscript. Only the word Asterisk had been added. Just that.

He put his hand to his forehead.

Passengers for Chicago are boarding at gate number …

Marcia, he thought.

The fat man was scratching a jowl.

Thorne put his empty glass down beside the telephone.

I expect to die, he thought. Is that what I expect?

Funny, Tarkington thought. Funny how people will go to all the trouble of making a replica like this. He couldn't personally see the point to it. All that work and then you stick it in a glass case and people come and they look a while and they go away and they forget. All that work for nothing. Making those tiny models. I never had a hobby, never had the time for it.

He turned his face in the direction of the doorway of the cocktail lounge.

There was one joker who wouldn't humiliate him again.

Expecting to die. No. One more death. What difference. Passengers for Chicago. Another drink. Two beautiful people in embrace. Phony. Didn't fit. Look right. What would you have done, Senator Thorne? What would your solution have been? Dying of brain cancer. Incoherent in the last months. The brain gone. No more committees, meetings, policies, no more thoughts. John, is that you? Is that you? I can't see, headaches blind me, come closer. They've been watching me, John. Did I ever tell you? It started in the war with Stalin. He isn't dead. Did I ever tell you that, no? He's still alive. They put a wax doll in a coffin so the people could pay homage, but he's alive. Stalin sent the order down on me personally, John, personally. His own hand. I had a copy of the order. Watch Thorne, it said. I lost the paper. Come closer, John. Closer. Who are you? You're not John. You're too old.

Passengers for Chicago
.

Thorne gripped the edge of the bar, finished his drink. Was it a genetic thing? Did it pass from father to son like some inexorable poison?
This fear
.

No.

The fat guy is out there. You couldn't make that up. A solid fact, a thing in the real world.

He put his empty glass down.

He went out into the main lounge.

He passed the airlines desks, the pretty girls who stood in gleaming rows and made out tickets or surveyed the weight of baggage on scales. There was a good-looking one behind the Air-India desk; she had her hair pulled tightly back, accentuating the height of the cheekbones, as if in drawing the hair back she had also somehow tightened the skin.

The old man losing his grip during those last months, the profound deterioration that took place—it was utterly pathetic. He looked up at the fluorescent lights on the high ceiling. The Air-India girl was smiling at him. He was conscious of the fat man, some fifty feet behind.

He went toward the exit.

The fat man followed.

Outside in the darkness he began to sprint toward the parking lot, surprised all at once by what his own body was capable of performing. Then he could no longer feel himself. He was no longer aware of the complex moving parts of the mechanism. This dislocation—was this the fear of death? Had Anna Burckhardt felt something like this? And her husband?

The night sky was alive with lights.

An airplane just beginning its climb; roaring along the runway, ascending, looking like some massive silvery sword. He felt the ground vibrate beneath him. Another plane was descending, a DC-10, he saw its lights grow brighter, brighter, as it came whining toward the runway.

The VW.

He couldn't remember where he had parked the VW.

There were thousands of cars, row after row after row. Thousands. Where had he left the bug?

He stopped running a moment and tried to catch his breath. Across the spaces of darkness he could hear the footsteps of the fat man. Trying to run, to keep up.

Tarkington went from one car to the next. His lungs felt oddly raw. You put too much strain on the old pump, he thought. Kaput, just like that. He had seen it happen before. He remembered old Bill McWilliams, who always looked strong as an ox, and how, suddenly, just like that, just like a snap of your fingers or the crack of a straw, old Bill had keeled over in the heat of Istanbul. A massive coronary, they said. Now, leaning against the side of a car, straining to catch his breath, he saw himself as if from above: a mass of jelly quivering. Steam rooms, the rubber suit, he would have to find time to work this burden off.

He felt dizzy a moment. There were spots, rather like frail mosquitos, darting around in front of his eyes. This guy Thorne was young, looked fit and healthy, he could never outrun Thorne no matter what.

A white station wagon went past slowly, looking for a space. Tarkington saw the silhouettes of a crowd of kids in the back of the vehicle. Noses pressed flat and grotesque against the glass.

Then he looked across the parking lot. Thorne would be going for his little red car. Tarkington went in that direction.

Thorne continued to run. When finally he saw his car he remembered all along where he had left it; squeezed between a Continental and a Honda Civic; it looked to him like three generations of automobile sizes, as if the large one had spawned the VW and the bug, in turn, had put forth its own progeny. He fumbled his keys, found the lock, hauled the door open, got inside. When he put the car in first, nothing happened.

That clutch—

You procrastinate, you always pay for it.

He got it into second, and it shuddered as he moved it forward. He turned on his full beams. He saw the fat man coming down through the bright lights toward him. He was like a toad, an astonished toad. He was reaching inside his jacket for what could only be a gun when Thorne put his foot down on the gas pedal and thrust the bug forward straight at the guy. The fat man, as if he could not believe the testimony of his own eyes, hesitated a moment, then sidestepped, and Thorne could hear the whistle of his tires as he turned the bug away from the other parked cars at the last moment.
Kill
, he thought. You want to kill. They've brought you to this, finally.

He slowed the car at the cashier's booth, watched the barrier rise to let him through after he had blindly shoved some bills into the cashier's hand. Now, where now?

He had the feeling that he no longer controlled his own actions, that his destiny was something which had been preordained, set in motion by forces and events he could not comprehend; that he was no more than a glove puppet at the ultimate mercy of whoever's fingers were making him dance. And he could not answer the question of Where? Where now?

Dilbeck had gone home. He thought he might sleep. He thought that if anything happened, if anything changed, he would be wakened by telephone. But his daughter was clattering the piano keys like a lunatic. When he went inside the living room he sat for a time before the fire she had lit in the fireplace, and he closed his mind to her playing. There was an innocence and a naïvety in what she did that he did not want to touch him. She finally stopped and crossed the room and sat on the rug at his feet.

“You look worn out, Daddy,” she said. “And miserable.”

“It's been a difficult day,” Dilbeck said, his voice flat. He felt a thickness at the back of his throat like a clot of mucus.

She stared into the firelight.

He looked at her face and wished she had been pretty and wondered why it was easier to love someone who looked good. After all, what were appearances? He put his hand on her shoulder.

“I'm learning ‘The Merry Peasant,'” she said brightly.

“Really,” he said.

“You know it?” She began to sing it for him; her voice was a close approximation to her virtuosity on the keyboard.

“I think so,” he said. When could he get her married off? Why didn't young men call on her? She had been born to put forth babies and make a home for some man; some women perceived that as their destiny, others did not. Emily did.

She stopped singing. She touched his knee with her fingers. She was smiling at him in her openmouthed way. She had begun, he realized, to irritate him. It was not a feeling he enjoyed. He got out of his chair and went into the conservatory and closed the door behind him.

The last place left, he thought.

He switched on the lights and had the strange feeling he had just missed something that had been moving around in the darkness; it was as if he had caught the tail end of a perception of something scuttling off into shadows. He moved from plant to plant, as a surgeon moves from one bed to the next of those he has recently operated on.

Shit, Dilbeck thought.

There were mealybugs everywhere. Everywhere he looked.

The green car was behind him on the Jefferson Davis Highway. He turned on his radio. There was a cheerful voice that came to him from another world. It eulogized Alberto VO-5 hair shampoo. And then there was a country singer. He switched the radio off. He peered through the darkness at the lights coming toward him in the opposite lanes. He was going south, toward 495.

And to whatever lay beyond.

Whatever.