Mercury Man (5 page)

Tom couldn't bear to think about that possibility any longer. He turned on the television and flipped through the channels. There was nothing to settle on, so he surfed endlessly up and down, the remote clutched in his right hand, a magic wand without any magic.

He felt guilty as he did so. “Why don't you read a book sometime,” his mother would say. “You watch too much television. You're becoming a couch potato and you'll end up like Paddy Watson.” (Paddy Watson, a high school friend of Tom's mother's, had grown fat watching television. He did nothing else. It was television and junk food all the way. “Vicarious living,” Tom's mother called it. “You're there but you're not there.” But Paddy had suffered a heart attack and was having to make a few feeble efforts now to get his body in motion, to get off the couch and do something.)

After a while Tom got tired and went to bed. As he lay in the dark his body, his soul, seemed to cry out for something. But he wasn't listening. He was listening for his mother's footsteps in the hall, her key in the lock.

Later, half-swamped by crazy dreams, he heard voices, whispers, but he was too tired to get up. Then suddenly there was light, a show of dawn at the window. He lay waiting for his mother's alarm to go off. It did and he heard her stirring about, coughing, then water running and the kitchen radio at low volume. He knew she would be coming in to say goodbye to him and he steeled himself.

“Did you have a good time?” he growled, as she bent over the bed to kiss him goodbye.

“It was fun,” she told him, her voice cool and contained. “But I'm sorry you and I didn't have a chance to talk.”

He didn't say anything. Her perfume seemed to hover in the stuffy air. He pulled the covers more tightly around his body and waited. A few minutes passed. Noises in the kitchen and living room. It sounded as if she might be going.

“Have a good day,” he called out.

“You too, darling.”

When he heard the door shut he dragged himself up and struggled to the window, wiping the sleep out of his eyes at every step. He watched her walk down toward Hollis Street, then he went to the bathroom, splashed some cold water in his face, fetched a bottle of cold orange juice from the fridge, and nearly emptied it.

He made himself an omelette — it was something he did well — and ate it while he flipped the television channels. He stopped at a show that was featuring famous comic book and pulp heroes and villains. Some smart-assed professor guy was talking about The Shadow, Lamont Cranston, “who clouds men's minds so that they cannot see him.” The professor only had thirty seconds or so to make his point, but he did it pretty well.

“The Shadow is a symbolic figure,” he said. “He understands evil and can deal with it because he's part of it. He acknowledges his own capacity for crime. He walks on the dark side to find the light. The villains can't see him because he looks too much like them. He's really their dark side turning against them.”

End of clip. Tom stood up and flipped off the television. The apartment was penetrated by sunlight, and the hot hazy day was beginning to suffocate the city, but Tom suddenly had a plan, one that involved darkness, shadows, and the night.

He felt excited, on the edge, but confident. He would spend the day getting ready and then he would do some exploring.

He went out and bought some small drink packs, a few snacks, and batteries for his pocket flashlight. He spent some time looking at the city map. He knew the streets and byways very well already, but there was no harm in refreshing your memory.

He called Pete to see if he wanted to play pool, but his mother said he had gone to work at Fabricon. Tom went to the video store and picked up a couple of John
Woo movies and spent the day watching them. By the time he took them back, had a sleep, and tidied up the apartment, it was getting on time for his mother to arrive.

He sat down and wrote her a note, telling her he had gone to play pool and that he might go to a movie after, but he wouldn't be very late.

He had found an old belt-clip into which he stuffed a drink box, some crackers and cheese, the flashlight, a small notepad, and a pen. He locked the door, pocketed the key, and got out of the building as quickly as possible. His mother occasionally got off early and he wasn't taking any chances.

He had to kill some time until nearly sunset, so he went down to the branch library and looked up old maps of the city. Sure enough, he found one showing the amusement park, as well as the milk bottling plant that had been torn down when Fabricon built its new headquarters. He also found some newspaper files that explained why the computer firm had not taken the usual route and located in the suburbs. The city, pushing for new development, had offered them significant benefits to move into the run-down river area. The story was accompanied by a picture of the mayor shaking hands with the company CEO, Dr. Martin J. Binkley, a handsome, youngish man, well dressed and seemingly at ease, smiling at the camera.

Another figure in the photo caught Tom's attention. Just to the left of Binkley he saw a short, round, bald-headed older man dressed in a plaid jacket and facing the camera with an expression that lay somewhere
between disdain and suppressed amusement. The caption identified the man as Dr. Willis Tarn, head of Fabricon's Research Division.

Tom had checked out the company's Web page, a glossy site that emphasized Fabricon's economic importance for West Hope and its boast that “Progress is our biggest priority.” There were pictures of impressive laboratories, clean-cut young scientists, and space vehicles, and quotations from Newton and Einstein.

Yet Tom remembered some of the things he had read or heard about Dr. Tarn — that he was a research genius and a disciple of the greatest of the MIT computer gurus. That he was a fast liver who liked expensive houses and cars and the company of beautiful young women. That he had predicted that religion and spirituality would soon vanish from society, to be replaced by the brotherhood of the Web.

Dr. Tarn was known as a man who didn't mince words. In an exchange with a local Episcopalian minister he suggested that the minister's warnings about technology were the result of “insufficient brain wiring” and he offered to fix the problem in his laboratory. He suggested to the local Social Welfare Council that the only way to cure poverty was to eliminate the unfit. This would be done, he explained, once genetic engineering had been perfected. Dr. Tarn claimed that Fabricon was about to put West Hope on the map, and he was constantly denying rumours that the firm would relocate to California, Carolina, or Mexico as soon as it reached a certain sales volume.

Tom didn't like the sound of Dr. Tarn at all and wondered how Fabricon could be so popular with a man like that behind it. He was glad to put the files away and to escape into the streets, even though the heat made him catch his breath and soon slowed his steps to a slow walk.

He knew exactly where he was going, though.

Avoiding Morris and Hollis and the whole main drag, he headed north toward the river, choosing the back streets of Mechanicstown, picking his way through the old Italian section (which was now mostly Vietnamese), past Precious Blood Church, scene of the funeral of one of his friends, past the Beth-Israel Synagogue and the shooting gallery, then into a maze of several blocks of rundown warehouses, which the kids called Rat City.

This was a locked-in, suffocating part of town, and since most of the businesses had shut down long ago the streets were almost deserted. He and Pete had walked over this way a few times and he knew that if he just kept a wary eye on the alleys and the cars cruising by, if he moved along quickly without seeming to notice anybody or anything, he would be OK.

After walking a few blocks past the boarded-up wrecks of buildings, crumbling facades with blank windows and graffiti-smeared walls, he reached the ancient wreck of the railway station and saw it was nearly time to turn west. Here the polluted river flowed into an old basin where barges must have once moored.

Gulls flapped and shrieked above the stinking water, above the ruins of the storage depots, deserted truck havens, and abandoned warehouses. The old railway line
had been nearly choked by foul undergrowth, and the tracks ran along between the spikes of an iron fence, amid a riot of rambling bush, spindly trees, and poison ivy. A huge rusty crane sat near a row of shacks, a ghoulish monument, and the way ahead was littered with paper and bits of old tires. Even the street signs were bent and battered, as if someone had taken his revenge on them for having to find his way through such a place.

Still, it was a good way to go — he wasn't likely to meet any of the gang here. And sure enough, as he approached River Street with its weathered row houses and apartment buildings, he came on a different scene: a few old men walking dogs, women chatting in small backyards, little kids playing handball. When he passed one or two corner stores with outside fruit stands and newspaper racks, he knew that the worst of the walk was over.

He had timed it perfectly, too, since the light was fading and darkness was beginning to take over the cavernous streets.

Now he had a wide view of things. He could see the river, snakelike and sombre, as it turned away to the north, its three iron bridges sinking into shadow, its barges heaped with scrap and garbage. Warehouses ran along the bottom of Harbour Street beside the jetty. Beyond the main thoroughfare lay the amusement park, a grim Xanadu with spearlike gates and fence, an onion-domed main building, and the remains of an old roller coaster with a car immobilized on the top of the run, as if time had stopped in the middle of the last ride.

The place had been closed for years now, but Tom vaguely remembered being taken there as a kid. He had been afraid of the roller coaster but intrigued by the fun-house, which included distorting mirrors, skewed floors that made one stagger, dark passages echoing with eerie voices, figures that appeared and disappeared as mysterious doors opened and closed.

That was a lost world, but what about Mercury House? Tom walked a little farther up the street and found number 221 Harbour — an old clapboard building, ramshackle and neglected, flanked on either side by grimy sheds. It looked, as his grandfather had said, as if any day now the city would step in and tear it down.

Embarrassed at having sent a letter to such a place and wishing now that he could take it back, Tom continued up the street. Mercury Man had vanished forever; he was gone with the old days and the old dreams — and it was no good pretending otherwise.

Farther up Harbour Street another sight undermined his confidence and almost made him doubt the whole point of his night's mission. He saw a tall white building, sleek and modern, its windows gleaming with the poetry of the fading sunlight. Fabricon. The place was impressive, clean, and modern, classically simple and reassuring. And, by all accounts, wonderful discoveries were taking place inside. Emblazoned across two sides of the building near the top were two big signs, illuminated every night. “FABRICON INC.” the topmost one announced, and just below it, in slightly smaller letters the second advised: “READ THE FUTURE IN US.”

Was it really likely that anything weird could be happening in such an efficient and clean-lined setting? The building shone like a white beacon and its many windows seemed to insist that this was a place with nothing to hide.

Tom gritted his teeth and decided that, whatever his doubts, he had to go through with his plan. The idea of a Mercury Man ring and a porthole might be a bit dumb, but he knew what he'd seen with his own eyes. The kids had been acting strangely. There was too much sudden enthusiasm for Fabricon. No harm in checking things out.

He knew that just opposite the computer firm, along Harbour Street, there were several renovated office buildings that had sprung up in the wake of the new development. Behind them, running parallel to Harbour, lay Water Lane, and Tom figured he could approach the building by that route. All he had to do then was hang out in the little park opposite Fabricon. From there he could size the place up and get a sense of anything weird that might be going on.

He turned and made his way back to Water Lane. It was a narrow but relatively prosperous thoroughfare, with lawyer's offices, architecture firms, trading companies, and other professional outfits occupying the brownstones that had miraculously survived the many changes in this area of town.

Tom kept a steady pace, taking note of the houses with their added-on studios, their clever landscaping, the parked BMWs, and the well-dressed men and
women who materialized in the doorways. They had worked late, he supposed, and were anxious to be getting home. They all looked so clean and cool — everything was air-conditioned here — while Tom, drenched in sweat, felt dirty and out of place. He was sure that, if anyone had noticed, they would have found his clothes pathetic, the belt-clip ridiculous, and the whole idea of a sinister Fabricon absurd.

“Get yourself a life, kid,” they would have said, which in a way was what everyone was telling him.

He walked on, and after a while he turned west to get to Harbour. He found the park, an open space with a fountain and trees, a few benches, washrooms, and a bus stop shelter. Occasionally a fish and chips or sausage vendor would set up there, but at that moment it was deserted. Tom breathed a sigh of relief. It should be the perfect place from which to keep an eye on Fabricon.

Tom stood in the darkness between a beech tree and some withered bushes and gazed across at the front entrance of the computer firm. A pity he couldn't have brought Grandpa's binoculars, but he'd been afraid they would attract attention.

Luckily, his eyesight was good and he had a direct view of the place.

The brass door, beneath the elegant awning, shone now like a polished shield. From his brief spring visit, Tom remembered what was behind it. He pictured the huge hall with its tiled floor, its walls hung with historic scenes of West Hope. He remembered the small brass fountain discreetly set off by potted cactus plants, a display case
illustrating “Fabulous Fabricon” (this included pictures of successful personnel, trophies, plaques, and the like), and, somewhat to the rear of the fountain, a security desk that barred entrance to all but the invited. Tom and Pete, however, had actually made it to a waiting room before being politely but firmly kicked out.