Mending the Moon (22 page)

Waste of a good shot glass, but if this works, it will be worth it.

She packs the dart carefully into a paper bag, tip up to prevent the venom being rubbed off, packs herself a small picnic lunch to carry in another bag, inserts her earplugs, and sets out for the Mayor's rally.

The Mayor throws himself a rally almost every day. He loves rallies. He loves hearing people cheering for him. Usually the people cheering are people he's paid to cheer. The rallies are poorly attended, and the Mayor hasn't yet figured out how to make attendance compulsory, since the townsfolk who don't come always claim to be working on the Mayor's mandatory rebuilding projects.

Security tends to be lax. The Mayor, in his delusion, believes that everyone loves him, and hasn't yet descended into justified paranoia. So Archipelago has very little trouble strolling behind his podium, gleefully tossing the dart at his back, and then running like hell before anyone even realizes what's happened.

She goes straight home, takes out her earplugs, and turns on her radio. She expects to hear that the Mayor has been stung by a bee, which is how she believes he'll interpret the attack. Instead, she learns that the Mayor has gone into anaphylactic shock and been rushed to the hospital, where he's in critical condition.

Evidently the good Mayor is allergic to scorpion venom.

The radio explains that the Mayor has been poisoned, that doctors are desperately trying to determine the nature of the toxic substance to administer an antidote. Anyone with any information is to call the following number.

Fuck. This is
much
further than Archipelago meant to go. Panicking, she tries to decide what to do. They could trace the landline in her apartment, and maybe her cell phone, too, couldn't they? How long does a trace take? Can she risk it?

E-mail. She can go to the library, create a fictitious Google account, and send an anonymous e-mail. They'll trace it to the library, but lots of people use the library. Although fewer people use the library now than used to, before the fire, and are there security cameras? Archipelago can't remember.

Just as she's resolved to attempt the library anyway, the radio announcer interrupts himself with “devastating news.” The Mayor has died.

Also, a bar dart has been found behind the rally grandstand. With fingerprints on it.

Shit. Shit shit
shit
. Why didn't she think of that?

It's the lack of sleep. It's the migraine. It's the fact that for all her sneering bravado, Archipelago has never been an actual criminal, and has no idea how to go about it properly.

She's an actual criminal now, isn't she? Wanted for murder.

Of course the police know that the perpetrator will be trying to get out of town. There will be blockades. She can't run on her Harley; it would be too conspicuous.

Think, Archipelago. Think. It's the beginning of the month. The rent's just been paid. Barring some compulsory roll call, which Archipelago wouldn't put past the current power structure for a second, she has about four weeks before anyone will notice she's gone.

She opens her closet door, extracts a small backpack, puts Erasmus into a large jar with holes in the lid, puts another jar with all her crickets and cockroaches next to it, piles all her cash and coins into a pocket, and sets out on foot, whistling down the stairs as if she hasn't a care in the world, as if she's merely out for a Sunday stroll on this lovely day. She cuts across lawns and through alleys, angling away from any lights or noise that might be police, and in due course finds herself, miraculously, in open country.

Archipelago Osprey is now a fugitive.

 

12

“Don't throw that out, please.” Anna, wrapped in wool and Gore-Tex against the damp March cold, has just come in from walking the dog. William's standing at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, going through the mail, quickly sorting it into Real and Junk. He's put the latest
CC
issue on the Junk pile.

“What?” He picks up an envelope, waves it: some zero-interest credit card offer. “You need another card?”

“No, William.” She unclips Bart's leash; he shakes himself, shedding water, and ambles up to William for a pat.
“Comrade Cosmos.”

“Oh, okay.” She's on the living room side of the breakfast bar. He slides the shrink-wrapped issue across to her. “Somewhere in there it should explain how to cancel the subscription. We should have done it ages ago.”

“I don't want to cancel it.” She tries to keep her voice mild. She usually gets the mail, so he doesn't realize she hasn't been tossing the issues. “I'm reading those.”

William looks at her, eyebrows raised. “Really.”

“Yes, really.”

He frowns now. “Huh. You okay?”

That, she thinks, has to be the stupidest question anyone has ever asked her. “Of course I'm not okay. Neither are you. But that's beside the point.”

He shakes his head. “Speak for yourself. I'm fine.”

She just looks at him. She doesn't even know how to respond to this, but his head's cocked in the attitude that means he's waiting for an answer. She chooses her words carefully. “You're functioning. We're both functioning. You're back at work. We're paying the bills. We get up every morning and eat breakfast and do what's necessary. But we're not fine. Not individually, not together. Our only son killed himself four months ago after raping and murdering a stranger. If we were fine, something would be very wrong.”

William's staring at her as if she's speaking Martian, perhaps because this is the longest set of sentences she's directed at him since Percy died. Then he frowns, almost imperceptibly. “Percy wasn't fine. We are, Anna.” Individually, or together? She doesn't dare ask. “We can't blame ourselves.”

She feels like she's juggling ten-ton weights. Her eyes ache. “With or without blame, there's still grief.” And now she feels like a fortune cookie. Great. “Don't you miss him?”

He's frowning again. “Of course I miss him. Dwelling on it won't do any good. You need to get out of the house more. It really helps.”

I was just out of the house, she thinks. I'm the only one who walks the damn dog anymore. “Maybe I do, William. But joining clubs and committees wouldn't fix this, even if they'd have me.” He knows Blake kicked her off the board. She hasn't had the courage to attend her knitting group, since the woman who hosts it is another Blake parent. “I'll plan Kip's opening, and I'll probably enjoy it, but that's it. When is the opening, anyway? Has he scheduled it yet?”

“He went to another gallery.”

“He
what
?” Anna's genuinely shocked. “How could he do that? You gave him his first show when no one else would, and now he pulls out when the stuff's selling? Oh, Will, I'm so sorry!”

It occurs to her in a dizzy rush that she and William have shared ground again: they've both been rejected by their peers, and maybe that will bring them closer together. But William's staring at her with the baffled expression he wears so often these days. “It's all right. People move on. I always knew he wouldn't stay forever.”

Anna blinks away the eerie sense that William's really talking about Percy. She hopes Kip had the decency to fire William in person, at least, and not to write a letter. “When did you find out? Why didn't you tell me?”

“It wasn't important. I didn't want to bother you with it.”

Anna closes her eyes. She remembers when William told her everything that happened at the gallery, when he sought her advice and used her as a sounding board. How have they arrived here?

She reaches across the breakfast bar to touch William's hand. It's a calculated gesture. “Will, I wish you'd told me. If you want me to get more involved with life again, you have to talk to me.”

He shakes his head. “I don't want to talk about Percy. You don't want to talk about anything else, and you won't talk
to
anyone else, and I can't take that weight, Anna.”

She tightens her grip on his hand. “You can't pretend everything's normal. You can't pretend you aren't sick over this, don't miss him, don't wonder why—”

“Stop.” He pulls his hand away. “I told you, I don't want to hear it. I wish I did. I wish I was able to. But I can't. Find a therapist, Anna.”

She swallows hysteria, takes a gamble. “If I do, will you come with me? Couples counseling—”

“No.” He turns away from her. He is, she can tell, poised to leave the room. “That won't change anything.”

“It won't change what happened to Percy,” she says. It might change the vacuum in the house, the hollow roar where there used to be a marriage, but if she's going to say that, she wants it to be when they're both sitting down, facing each other. Not to his back. “It might change what happens to us.” She doesn't know if this is oblique enough or not; in any case, William's walked away from her, down the hall to his study. She doesn't even know if he's heard her. Bart, following him, turns around to look at her inquiringly. “Go on,” she tells the dog, and he trots happily after William.

Trembling, she picks up the
CC
issue and turns to walk the other way, to Percy's room, where she's been spending more and more time. The boxes the police brought back are all unpacked, the computer on the desk and the clothing laundered and folded and put in drawers and closet. She knows she should donate the clothing, and she will, but not yet.

As she promised herself in January, she's been going steadily through the
CC
archives, reading from the beginning. She's started to allow herself to read the new weekly issues as they arrive, though, even if sometimes she doesn't quite understand what's happening. That way, she doesn't have the suffocating sense of continuously falling farther behind.

That suffocation, she knows, is the Emperor's work.

She began the series expecting to scoff at it, to be bored and annoyed. Instead, she found herself being pulled deeper into the story, found resonance of it everywhere she turned. Since November, she has been engaged in a struggle with the Emperor of Entropy, with despair and meaninglessness and mortality, with decay. It amazes her that such a huge pop-culture phenomenon can speak so directly to a middle-aged woman.

She wonders how it spoke to Percy. When he first started following the series, he tried to tell her about it a few times, but she could never keep herself from changing the subject out of sheer boredom. Now she aches to go back and redo those conversations.

She wonders, though, what the series has to say to anyone Percy's age, to all those youngsters obsessed with dating and mating and money and jobs and clothing. At that age, she'd simply have found it odd and unfathomable. When she was twenty, twenty-two, twenty-five, her most serious experiences with entropy were traffic jams and dirty laundry.

Anna closes the door to Percy's room. She'd leave it open if she were alone in the house, so Bart wouldn't feel abandoned. She can't stand his whining when he's in the house and lonely, which has been happening more often lately. She's once again begun to entertain fantasies of selling Bart or giving him away or leaving him somewhere or having him put down, but the image of him pulling against his leash as Percy wades into the water always stops her. And, she reminds herself, he's an old dog now. Eight is ancient, for a Wolfhound. She'll lose Bart, too, soon enough. In the meantime, since William's home right now, she can keep the door closed. Bart still prefers William to Anna, which is fine with her.

She really needs to talk to William about the dog-walking issue, even if he won't discuss anything else. If he doesn't want to walk the dog, maybe they can hire someone. Maybe that someone will fall in love with Bart and run off with him.

No. Anna glances at Percy's desk, at the framed photo of him with the puppy. Percy loved this creature. In a way, he's all of Percy they have left, the best of Percy. Maybe that's why William now has so little to do with the dog. In any case, it's why Anna is irrevocably tied to the animal, for better or worse, bad breath and shedding and all, which is more at the moment than she can say for William.

A Stanford 2009–2010 academic calendar hangs over the desk. Percy never wrote on it, but Anna has. She blinks at today's square. Wednesday, March 10: Melinda Soto's birthday.

Her throat constricts. That poor woman. Those poor people. Riding a wave of rage at Percy, she forces herself to stare at the photograph, to remember him as the sweet child who played with his dog.

Melinda Soto had a son. She'd have understood, surely.

When the rest of the world hates your child, with reason or without, you cling to your love for him. You're his mother. Loving him is your job.

Trembling only a little, Anna sits on the bed and opens the plastic wrapping around the issue, taking pains not to tear the cover. Percy was very careful with
CC
as a physical object, and so she is, too. She has a sudden, vivid memory of Percy telling his father—who was marginally more interested in the topic than Anna, or at least willing to pretend he was—about the Comrade Cosmos Club at Stanford. Anna should write them, find out if any of them knew Percy, see if someone might be willing to speak at the memorial service.

This is the first bit of planning she's done for the event. Marjorie, ever efficient, booked the local Unitarian church for that day before she and David flew back home. “July 24 is a Saturday, Anna. We need to grab the building before someone books it for a wedding.” No one in the family's religious, but holding memorial services in a church is What's Done. Marjorie has an acute sense of such things, which she's passed down in modified form to William. Anna could care less.

She's avoided even thinking about the service since Marjorie and David left; it's some kind of irony that
Comrade Cosmos
brought her back to it. She starts to ponder a possible guest list, but this quickly becomes painful, another reminder of how isolated they've been. She'll put a notice in the paper, and anyone who wants to be decent can come; surely everyone knows that a funeral isn't the time for privacy.