Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox (23 page)

“Come on,” she said, “let’s get some lunch. A little fuel to stimulate proper brain function. What do you say?”

Walter stood slowly, brushing an avalanche of cat hair off his sweater and pants. His brain felt as fuzzy as his clothes. He realized that he had slept in his shoes.

Nina took them to a restaurant called the Swan Oyster Bar. It was a narrow, almost claustrophobic place with a long marble counter and some of the smallest stools Walter had ever seen. He perched reluctantly on the tiny round wooden seat, not entirely confident that it would hold his weight.

The guy behind the counter was a jovial and burly fellow whose massive hands were surprisingly deft and delicate with the oysters. He shucked them from their rough shells with a practiced twist of the wrist, smiling and joking with the customers while he worked.

Walter himself was not a big fan of raw oysters, but he loved clam chowder and was pleased to see that they made it there just like they made it back home. He ordered a bowl, along with a large plate of Crab Louie. He tried to remember the last time he’d had a nice bowl of clam chowder, and couldn’t. It was as if his life had not existed before this whole Zodiac thing.

Nina and Bell shared a huge plate of oysters, and while Walter was tempted to make some kind of joke about the supposed aphrodisiac properties of the legendary bivalves, he just didn’t have the heart. In a strange way, this food felt almost like a last meal.

“I’ll tell you one other thing that is bothering me about all of this,” Bell said, pausing to slurp an oyster out of its shell.

One thing?
Walter thought.
More like everything.

“What’s that?” Nina asked, adding a dollop of horseradish to her cocktail sauce.

“Let’s say it works,” Bell said. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the band agrees to help us and the whole plan goes off without a hitch, and we send that bastard back where he came from. We will have saved an unknown number of lives, no doubt about that, but...” He downed another oyster. “We may never know exactly what he was or where he came from.”

“So what?” Walter said. “You’re saying we should be trying to capture him and study him? Try to turn him into some kind of profitable commodity? Or a weapon? Are we no better than Latimer?”

“I’m not saying that studying him is a feasible possibility,” Bell replied. “But aren’t you even the slightest bit curious about him?”

Walter looked down at the pink mess that remained of his Crab Louie, thinking of that heady moment where he’d actually considered going through the gate himself.

“Of course I’m curious!” he replied. “I couldn’t call myself a scientist if I wasn’t. I wonder about him constantly. Is he human? If not, what is he? What sort of world is he from? Another planet? Another universe? So many intriguing questions.”

“So what
are
you suggesting?” Nina asked, giving Bell an intense but wary look.

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Bell said. “I realize that it would be impossibly dangerous to capture and study him. But I’m curious. That’s all I’m saying. I feel as if we’ve stumbled on something really astounding here. Something historic, on the order of splitting the atom. Something that I suspect might alter the course of all our lives, forever.”

He and Nina exchanged a complex look that Walter couldn’t even begin to interpret. He poked at a shred of crab on his plate, but he seemed to have lost his appetite.

He was afraid that Bell was probably right.

What was more, he wondered what would happen to that world on the other side, if they succeeded. Had he been radioactive before he came through the gate? Or were they saving their world by sending a killer to prey on victims in another?

He shook his head, but couldn’t dislodge the doubts.

* * *

They paid their bill at the oyster bar and headed back toward Nina’s house.

“Do you suppose he’s following us right now?” Walter asked, looking back over his shoulder.

“He must be,” Nina replied. “But stop looking around like that. We don’t want him to know that we’re on to him. If we tip our hand, he may go to ground or execute a preemptive strike against us. Possibly even kill us. The key here is to make him think that we are totally naive. Lull him into a false sense of security.”

“Yeah,” Bell said, elbowing Walter in the ribs. “Smile. Laugh. Act like you don’t have a care in the world.”

Walter cringed away from Bell’s prodding and then tried on a tentative smile for size. It seemed way too small, and tight in the corners.

“I just...” He started to look back over his shoulder again, but stopped himself. “It just feels creepy to know that someone is watching me.”

“Remember,” Nina said. “We
want
him to watch us.”

“If he’s not watching us,” Bell said, “then our whole plan goes right down the crapper.”

“Of course,” Walter said. “I understand. I just...”

They were passing an open-air newsstand, when all of a sudden, there was a loud rumble that shook the magazine racks. A spill of lurid men’s adventure and nudie magazines tumbled down and scattered across Walter’s path. He nearly jumped out of his skin, clinging to Bell’s arm like a scared little boy.

“My God!” he cried. “Is this some kind of residual telekinetic manifestation from the opening of the gate?”

Nina smiled and put a calming hand on Walter’s back.

“No, silly,” she said. “That’s just a garden variety earthquake. Nice one, probably about a four-point-oh. Welcome to California, boys.”

A pair of tall, broad-shouldered women in extremely high heels had been teetering toward Walter arm in arm when the tremor had hit. They’d paused for a moment, steadying each other against the concrete shimmy. When it was over, they exchanged knowing glances with Nina and the news vendor, an unspoken understanding shared between native San Franciscans and earthquake veterans, and then sashayed away down the street.

Nina and Bell both bent down to help the news vendor clean up his spilled inventory, but Walter had his hands full trying to slow his own panicked heartbeat. He’d never experienced an earthquake before, and couldn’t imagine that it was the kind of thing that he could ever get used to.

He looked up and down the block at the other denizens of the city. They all seemed utterly blasé about the whole thing. It was as if he was the only one who’d been the slightest bit scared.

He couldn’t help but wonder how the Zodiac felt about the quake.

* * *

Back at Nina’s place, Walter was playing with Cat-Mandu, dangling a piece of red and green yarn, when Nina came over to him carrying a shirt on a hanger and a pair of pants folded over one arm. The shirt had brown and purple stripes, big blousy sleeves and a large pointy collar. The pants were brown corduroy with a wale so wide he could have played with Matchbox cars in the grooves.

“You and Roscoe are about the same size,” Nina said. “He won’t mind if you borrow some of his threads for the concert tonight.”

“Oh,” Walter said, frowning at the flamboyant shirt. “Gee, thanks, but I’m okay like this.”

Bell appeared behind her in an entirely new outfit, a western-style shirt with red floral stripes and jeans that were a little too loose in the waist and a little too short in the leg.

“Walter,” Bell said, “she’s just too polite to tell you that you stink. Take the clean clothes and go have a shower, will you? And wash that hair of yours while you’re in there.”

Walter frowned, pulled a pinch of his sweater up to his face and sniffed it. It smelled fine to him, but he figured he’d better humor their hostess.

“I’m still going to wear my own jacket,” Walter warned, accepting the clothes. “It’s lucky.”

Bell rolled his eyes dramatically.

“Trust me,” he said to Nina. “I’ve been trying to get Walter out of that jacket for ten years. It’s a lost cause.”

The Downward Dog was a tiny hole-in-the-wall that was barely visible from the street, and made even less visible by the massive throng of brightly clad men and women waiting to get into the crowded disco next door.

Nina led Walter and Bell down a long, narrow stairway and into the basement club where Violet Sedan Chair would be playing. The powerful funk of old beer and smoke—both legal and otherwise—was as thick as the San Francisco fog in the low-ceilinged venue. A long bar ran the length of the right-hand side, a rococo, turn-of-the-century relic that might have been billed as “antique” if it wasn’t in such sorry condition. Its once sleek wooden hide was now scarred and patchy, disfigured with cigarette burns and scratched-in initials.

Behind it, the bartender looked just as old and just as badly treated.

All four walls and even the tin ceiling were covered by layer after layer of old posters advertising bands like Country Joe and the Fish, Captain Beefheart, Moby Grape, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Mothers of Invention. The posters were nicotine stained and curling at the edges, and the most recent of them was dated five years earlier.

There was something sad about the place, as if it had been shoved aside by its gaudy, more popular neighbor. The disco music from next door thumped through the walls, rubbing it in.

There was a small but devoted crowd waiting for Violet Sedan Chair to go on stage. Primarily single men, but a few couples and one large group of boisterous women who seemed to have come together. The men all had beards and granny glasses and colorful headbands. The women all had ironed hair, handmade patchwork dresses, and blissed-out expressions. This crowd was clearly immune to disco fever.

Walter fit right in.

Nina spotted Abby sitting on the corner of the stage at the far end of the room, smoking a joint and talking to another pregnant woman, a plump and pretty brunette with pale freckled skin and very pale blue eyes. She wore a white macramé halter-top under a weird, shaggy blue coat that made her look like she had skinned one of the monsters on Sesame Street. There was a peace sign painted on her exposed and swollen belly.

“Oh, hey,” Abby said when she saw them. “So great that you were able to make it. Roscoe will be thrilled.” She leaned in. “You know how he gets if there aren’t enough people at a show.”

She held out the joint. Nina waved it away, but Walter accepted it.

“Thanks,” he said.

“This is my friend Sandy,” Abby said. “We’re both due at the same time, around the end of next month. We were just wondering if we would have Libra babies or Scorpios. I’m hoping little Bobby will be a Libra. Scorpios can be so resentful.”

“Yeah,” Sandy said. “But Scorpios are so brooding and sexy! Charles Bronson is a Scorpio.”

“That just proves my point,” Abby replied. “Look how he went and killed all those criminals after his wife was murdered. That’s such a total Scorpio thing to do.”

“So,” Nina interrupted, looking vaguely annoyed. “Is the band set to go on soon?”

“They should be,” Abby said. “Chick is late again.”

All this talk about astrology was making Walter think of the Zodiac Killer, and how desperately they needed their crazy plan to work. It seemed like the marijuana was making him feel more edgy, and not less. He passed the joint to Bell.

Bell took a hit off of it and passed it back to Abby.

“You ladies want anything from the bar?” Bell asked.

“No, thanks,” Abby said.

“You should have a beer,” Sandy said. “The hops are supposed to help you produce more nutritious breast milk.”

“Really?” Abby said. She turned back to Bell. “Well, then, we’ll take two beers.”

“Nina?” Bell asked.

“Whisky sour,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Want a beer, Walt?”

Walter shook his head.

“No thanks, Belly,” he said. “I’m fine.”

Bell headed over to the bar to get the drinks while Abby wet her fingers, put out what was left of the joint and dropped the roach into her tiny beaded purse.

“Oh, look,” she said, pointing to a doorway at the back of the stage. “Here they come.”

The band took the stage to enthusiastic cheers from the small but vocal crowd. Roscoe was dressed in a dragon-print Oriental jacket with no shirt underneath and white bell-bottom pants. He winked at Abby as he sat down at the keyboard and adjusted the mike to the level of his smirking lips. Behind him, Chick Spivy was wearing a dark green suede suit and snakeskin boots, slinging his famous hand-painted Les Paul over his shoulder and waving, a big stoned grin on his beaming face.

Next up were Oregon Dave and Alex, dressed twinlike in jeans and matching shirts. Dave’s shirt was blue with red stars and Alex’s was red with blue stars. Last up was Iggy, resplendent in royal purple bell-bottoms and a ruffled white shirt, open to his navel to unleash his thick, brambly chest hair.

He sat behind his drum kit and looked over at Roscoe, who in turn looked over at each of the other members, then nodded. Iggy clicked his sticks together and then they broke into a slower, dirtier, funked-up version of “She’s Doing Fine.”

Walter cheered freely, so happy in that moment in such a pure and uncomplicated way. It was a miracle to him that something as simple as music had the power to take away all his worries and anxiety, and transport him back to a better place. He’d been a college freshman when he first heard Violet Sedan Chair’s seminal album
Seven Suns,
and it had opened his mind as surely as the acid he’d dropped for the first time that same year.

Life had seemed so different back then, so full of magic and potential. He’d been convinced that things were really going to change for the better, that love and music really could defeat fear and war. But then, somehow, it had all turned dark and ugly. Acid, mushrooms, and marijuana had been replaced with speed, cocaine, and heroin. Hippies were replaced by Hell’s Angels. The gentle, open-minded spirituality and self-exploration of the late sixties had degenerated into the hard-partying glitter and hedonism of the seventies.

Their musical idols were dying, and being steadily replaced by plastic corporate pop stars and super groups.

Yet here Walter was, basking in the musical genius of one of his personal heroes, on a par with Tesla and Einstein. The incomparable Roscoe Joyce was in rare form on stage, coaxing new resonance and meaning from old hits and exploring uncharted territory in selections from a complex and profoundly spiritual rock opera that Walter had never heard before.