Life on the Preservation, US Edition (37 page)

He still hadn’t let go of her hand.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe you could drive me home? I mean, we could put my bike in the trunk, or even leave it here, that’s okay, too.”

“After a while, we will do that.”

He started walking toward the glass office. He produced a key and unlocked the door. Inside was a small metal desk, a file cabinet, an office chair, and a cot. The cot was made up with fresh-looking sheets and a wool blanket. There were two pillows, although the cot was narrow, meant for one person.

It didn’t feel like Jim was holding her hand very tight anymore. Kylie pulled on it more aggressively than she had outside, but it wouldn’t come loose. Jim did not bear down harder, or say anything. He simply walked her into the office, swung the door shut with his foot, and drew her down beside him on the cot.

“Sometimes,” he said, after a silence that lasted more than a minute, “God puts two people in the way of each other.” Father Jim set his hat on the desk. The office was so small he could do this without rising from the cot.

Kylie lowered her head. He released her hand and rested his hand firmly on her thigh. He began to caress her in a bluntly mechanical fashion. Kylie closed her eyes. A strange thing was happening in her mind. She seemed to be floating apart from herself, disassociated from her own presence. She wanted him to stop touching her. The word ‘stop’ occurred to her floating-apart-self but couldn’t quite make the transition to the mouth of the girl sitting on the cot next to Jim.

Outside the hangar, a revving engine ripped through the drumming rain. Jim’s hand stopped moving but remained on her thigh. The engine noise racketed up like something running hot and broken then dropped suddenly and quit.

Jim stood and went out of the office, pausing in the doorway to say, “Stay here.”

Kylie said, “Okay.” She could utter the word because suddenly she wasn’t apart from herself anymore. As soon as Jim left the hangar she stood up and followed him out.

Ian Palmer was sitting on his antique motorcycle in the thundering rain. He had his helmet off and his sweatshirt hood up, which was doing him absolutely no good. The rain pounded down hard and loud.

Kylie ran past Father Jim. She yelled to Ian: “Give me a ride back to town?”

He nodded, adjusted something on the engine, stood on the kick-starter and came down hard. The bike failed to start. He tried again, and Father Jim grabbed her arm.

“Don’t be foolish,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”

The motorcycle kicked in, racketing up louder than the rain. Kylie jerked her arm free. Jim wasn’t holding on very tight this time. Ian scooted forward on the bike, and she straddled the seat behind him. In moments they were jolting down the rutted airport road. She looked back once. Father Jim was picking up her abandoned bicycle.

The Lucky Diner was crowded, but after a twenty minute wait they managed to score a booth. Kylie took the time to go into the bathroom and clean up, or at least try to. Her jeans were muddy and soaked, her hair plastered to her head. She looked like something dragged out of a wet hole in the ground. She dried her head with paper towels and tried to do something with her hair. It was hopeless. The weird thing was, the girl in the mirror wasn’t the same girl who had been sitting in the hangar office with Father Jim.

At the table, she looked straight into Ian’s blue eyes and asked, “Why did you come to the airport? Why didn’t you just meet me here, like we said?”

“I knew something was going to happen that you probably didn’t want to happen, so I decided to ride out there.”

“
How
did you know?”

“I remembered it last night at the motel.”

“You–”

“I’m Future Man, remember? You told me about it next year. Only, some of what happens is vague, like pieces of a dream? But all of a sudden I remembered about that priest.” He shrugged.

The waitress set brimming coffee cups before them. Kylie sat back, thinking. “Okay,” she said, finally, “tell me everything.”

Ian dumped some of his coffee onto the saucer and added a gallon or so of creamer. He picked the thick white mug up with both hands and slurped at it, put the mug down, tapped his lip with two fingers, thinking, then said, “In about a year, on October fifth, aliens are going to destroy the world.”

Kylie laughed, then stopped. “Shut up. That’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah, and it’s not even the weirdest part.”

H
E TOLD HER
everything – even the part about becoming an android – and she didn’t believe him. Of
course
she didn’t. But by saying it out loud,
he
believed it even more. The future memories cohered, became clear, sharper than dreams. He felt sure of himself, committed to the truth of what would happen.

But Kylie didn’t believe him.

“Listen,” he said, leaning forward. “Promise me you will be in Seattle on October fifth next year.”

“I can’t promise that.”

“If you aren’t there you won’t become an android. That’s the only sure way of surviving, even if it isn’t you surviving. I mean, it is and it isn’t. Anyway, nothing says things will happen the same way this time. I think I changed that by showing up and taking you away from that guy at the airport. You can’t count on flying a jet into the Dome.”

He was talking too fast, too earnestly. Kylie’s face began to close him off. He stopped abruptly, slouched back in his chair. “I know,” he said, “I sound like an idiot.”

“No. But I… Ian, it’s impossible.”

He nodded, not looking at her. “It sounds that way, yeah.”

“Don’t be mad at me, geeze.”

“I’m not mad.”

“If I told
you
that story you wouldn’t believe me, either. I mean, if you didn’t already believe it and everything.”

“Right.”

“Ian? I really like you.”

He looked up, smiled. “I like you, too. What if we went out, would you do that?”

“Like dating, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe. But you don’t even live here.”

“It’s not that far. I’ll come back next weekend. We can even go to the movies, if you want. Something normal.”
And I better borrow some money from Zach and get the Chief up to speed.

She thought about it, sipping her coffee. “Okay. But not the movies. Meet me right here, at the diner.”

“I usually work Saturday nights, so how about like a late breakfast thing?”

“That works.”

The waitress brought the bill. Ian picked it up and reached for his wallet. He drove Kylie home in the rain, following her shouted directions. She pointed at a yellow split-level tract house, and he rolled into the driveway. The engine racket brought Kylie’s mother to the window. Kylie waved at her, swung off the bike, stood awkwardly a moment, then offered Ian her hand. He shook it, wanting to take all of her, wanting it to be like it had been on the Preservation, the two of them almost like one person in the bed.

“What are you going to do now?” Kylie asked.

“Go home and get ready.”

“For what, our date next week?” She laughed.

He laughed, too, though it felt a little forced. “No, the end of the world. It’s only a year away.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

A
T HIS DESK
in Seattle, Ian hunched over a two-foot-long sheet of poster board, working on it with an X-Acto blade. In pencil he had carefully lettered the words: ‘know WHO you are’. He drew the razor-sharp tip of the blade along the pencil lines, cutting out the letters. When it was done, he held the poster board up to the ceiling light, looking for rough edges. It was a clean cut. He stood, grabbed a can of blue spray paint, pressed the stencil to the blank wall next to his desk, triggered the can, sweeping smoothly back and forth, lifted the stencil away, leaving the painted words just as clean and sharp as the razor cuts. Not bad. But the wrong color. He switched to red, experimenting with different shades, finally settling on something that looked like ruby neon light – an urgent, emergency red. Something that seized attention and didn’t let go. Later on he’d include the web addy.

“I
NEED HELP,
” he said to Zach. They were sitting in the Deluxe Bar & Grill on Broadway, drinking beer. Ian waited until Zach was deep into Fat Tire number two before bringing up the help thing.

“Yeah, I know, but the men in white coats get Sundays off.”

“I want to set up a webpage. Something text heavy, nothing fancy. A direct address, also a Facebook page with the same text, and I want to get it on as many local list servers as possible.”

“That’s simple. What do you need me for?”

“It has to be that no one can trace it back to the point of origin, like if they were looking for me. It has to be secret. You can set that up, or you probably know guys who can. Do a proxy server or something. Mostly I don’t want the site killed. I want to get the word out about something, and I’ve got a pretty aggressive idea about how to point people in the right direction. I’m talking about Seattle people, very local. You know, a couple of big ads in the local weeklies wouldn’t be a bad idea, either, only I don’t have any money.”

Zach drank his beer, set it down, drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Get the word out. You planning a revolution or what?”

“Man, it’s an
evolution
.”

“Give it to me, then we’ll talk about the secret server shit.”

Ian ordered two more beers then he told Zach everything. Zach listened, not interrupting, then said, “Why don’t you want to tell me what it’s really about?”

“I just did tell you what it’s really about.”

“Aliens are going to destroy Earth and then we’re all going to turn into androids?”

“Kind of like that, yeah.”

“And you want to be like some kind of Messiah and clue everybody in.”

“I didn’t say Messiah.”

Zach rolled his eyes. “What’s this website?”

“Like I said, it’s a text block. Same thing I just told you. I’m going to stencil the city red. I’m going to be everyfuckingwhere. People will go to the site. Maybe they’ll think it’s a movie gimmick or video game teaser. Doesn’t matter. The idea is to go local viral, get it
out
there, plant it in as many minds as I can before the Hunters attack and the Preservation starts. My sister had this idea – I mean her android did – of hypnotizing so many Seattle droids that something called, ah – called morphogenetic resonance, would happen.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Well, with mice it means if you teach
some
mice something important, other mice will just sort of... know it without being taught. On the Preservation, Ness and I came up with this thing where if you could convince a certain number of androids that they weren’t who they thought they were but were real anyway, that the idea would spread through the population. That’s what I want. Get it into as many heads as possible before the end of the world, so the android people remember it, like it’s not a totally bullshit concept, so when Ness starts morphing everybody it will have a better chance of
working
. Get it?”

“You are seriously fucked up in the head.”

“Will you help?”

“You don’t want it traceable because you’re going to graffiti every wall in the city, that it? Because it will get locals to look at the site? Something real-world, guy seriously hanging it out there. So it must be important, at least to him.”

“Yeah. I want to start something.”

“I’ll get back to you on the proxy server. Who’s buying the beer tonight?”

“Oh, you are.”

I
T WAS HARDEST
telling Vanessa, but he wanted the idea firmly planted on the first Advent. He would need his sister to make the evolution work. He began to cultivate their neglected relationship, meeting her once in a while for lunch or drinks at The Pink Door. Eventually he accepted her invitation to dinner at her apartment, where she cooked spicy stir-fry and they killed a couple of bottles of Riesling before dragging out their father’s box of family stuff. Ness cracked a third bottle. They laughed, and cried a little over the old memory-junk, the pictures, the family Bible, their mother’s jewelry. When they finished sorting through it all, Ness stretched out on the sofa with a water glass half full of white wine. Ian took a deep mental breath, put his glass down and sat forward on his chair.

“I got something to tell you, and you aren’t going to believe it.”

She smiled. “Maybe I will, you never know.”

“Yeah, well, I doubt it.”

Holding the glass in the fingers of both hands, she brought the wine to her lips, sipped, lowered the glass. “It’s all right, Icky. Speak, brother.”

He cleared his throat. “On October fifth something really bad is going to happen.”

She stopped smiling, watched him, her expression neutral.

“Ness – I swear to God this is true. The world is going to end.”

“Icky, don’t.”

Don’t
what?
he thought. Don’t ruin the night by dragging her into Crazyland? Don’t tell her what he was about to tell her? Just don’t.

But he did.

She listened, didn’t interrupt, didn’t get mad. She lay on the sofa and drank her wine and listened and looked progressively sadder. When he finished, she said, “Okay, Icky,” and sounded very tired.

“Okay? That’s it?”

“What else do you want? I don’t believe a word of it, of course. I can see you’re serious. I can see you mean it. But that makes it worse.”

“In a couple of months, when the Hunters attack, you’ll know it’s all true. Then you won’t know again, because on Preservation Time the big attack won’t have happened. But they–”

She threw both hands up, palms out, as if fending off an attack. “Icky,
stop
.”

He stopped.

“I know all about the fucking Preservation. I
read
about it.”

“Oh.”

“You’re the ‘know WHO you are’ guy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t been arrested yet. That message is everywhere. How do you even cover so much territory by yourself?”

“It’s not only me. Some of my old posse is helping.”