Mr. Peanut (54 page)

They were parked along Central Park West, all along 81st Street and in the U-shaped driveway by the Center for Earth and Space. And there were schoolchildren everywhere too, of course, thousands, it seemed, milling at the museum’s entrances, a legion entering or exiting. My God, he thought, I’ll never find my wife. He wasn’t even sure of the best place to enter himself, so he ran up the wide steps on the Central Park West side toward the metal doors between the towering columns.
TRUTH
, it read on the Romanesque façade.
KNOWLEDGE. VISION.
In the distance, he could make out the cupola on the corner of 77th Street, its globed spire colored an undersea green, the tower gargoyled by giant eagles.

In the rotunda, under the vaulted ceiling and the high windows flooded with white light, was the skeleton of a barosaurus, her bones as brown as the wood of ancient galleons, reared up on her hind legs to defend her offspring behind her from an allosaurus. Pepin knew his dinosaurs; Spellbound’s DinAgon I and II had been massive hits worldwide. The ambient noise here befit some great event: heels echoing off the marble floors, multiplied and ramified, as loud as horse hooves; spoken sentences that carried so clearly—“The Blue Whale’s one floor down,” a guide said—it was as if they’d been whispered to you alone; and the reverberant talk transformed by the ricocheted acoustics off the octagonal patterns on the ceiling and walls, the hall turning it all to babble.

In a Hitchcock movie, Pepin thought, I’d be waiting in a line to buy a ticket while my wife appeared behind me. He kept an eye out for her while he shuffled toward the ticket counter and after what seemed an eternity purchased his, grabbing a floor plan and scanning it to get his bearings,
clueless as to how to track Alice down until he heard her voice as close to his ear as if they were playing a game of telephone.

“Anthony,” she said, “put a lid on it,
please.”

Miraculously, she crossed the hall right in front of him, herding her class as they exited the Butterfly Conservatory exhibit at the other end of the rotunda, her kids a ragtag rainbow crew of Hispanics, blacks, whites, Asians, Indians, the girls dressed for a day trip, the boys in baggy pants and T-shirts splashed with words borderline profane, their hats screwed on wrong with the brims off to one side—one species, to be sure, and sharing the same sad traits of violent family histories and brains stormy with dysfunction.

Shadow her, he thought. Keep her in sight. Intercept predator, if he appeared. And then, when the time came, tell her whatever you need to in order to escape.

The class handed their tickets to the guard and entered the Hall of Asian Mammals, Pepin a safe distance behind. It was quieter here and their pace slowed down, the kids breaking out of their tight formation and mingling in front of the exhibits, fogging the glass and busting wisecracks before moving on. His own attention was divided; he’d have to keep an eye out for Mobius too, though now that he had Alice in sight a calm came over him, the lower ceiling seeming to contain and protect them, the smaller hall narrowing and limiting sightlines. It was pleasant, actually, to tail her; a fantasy, rarely acted upon: to see his wife in her world, in her element, to watch her students—ranging in age, he guessed, from twelve to fourteen—responding to her. What a mother she would have been. A Hispanic boy in all black—pants, shirt, basketball shoes—but for the white gothic
A
stitched above the brim of his black baseball cap came up to her and asked a question. She bent toward him and put her hand on his arm, recognizing that the very act of asking was for him a show of vulnerability, out of character, and therefore in need of reinforcement; and as she answered him his face went open and alert, warmed by the gentle beam of her attention. Pepin walked closer, trying to overhear, so touched by the exchange that he was tempted to take her in his arms. But it was risky enough getting this close to her, so he stayed in her blind spot as he had with Mobius.

They turned right now, moving into the Hall of Asian Peoples. Koto music was playing over the speakers, and while it never sounded harmonic or rhythmic to him, the effect was doubly calming and made him hungry for sushi. He’d eaten nothing before he ran out this morning and lately was
always hungry, eating more often, the hunger pains more and more acute, his obesity like a disease. It had to be. Reflected in the display case in front of him, his hair was shocked out like straw, his beard widened his face, the waist of his pants cupped down below his belly like a wide smile. He’d do something about it when he and Alice went away. They would feel good together again, about themselves and each other.

He shifted focus. A golden Buddha sat in the exhibit before him, his eyes closed in meditation, his hands laid gently over each other, his palms up and resting on his crossed legs, his head nimbused with cobras. The plaque read:

But he never understood the function until it was too late and was thereby always living incorrectly, so what would his next form be if he were to die now? Certainly something lower than human—a fearful creature, not predator but prey. Chubby, hairy. Mating a problem. A panda, Pepin thought. Yet the truth of the plaque’s description arrested him
—an endless cycle of lives
—and the promise of a way out, the Escher Exit, lifted his spirits.

I will not swerve, he thought.

He lost the group and panicked, so he trotted, then ran, turning a corner and nearly colliding with several stragglers from the class, hugging the walls behind the Semai hunter exhibit in front of which they’d gathered, Pepin shuffling to hide in plain sight behind Alice herself, close enough to reach out and touch her, to smell her, almost. The hunter, nearly naked but for a woven-cane bandanna and a noble-savage knapsack, had a blowgun as long as a pole vaulter’s pole aimed out of his mouth.

“Check out that swimsuit he’s wearing.” It was the same boy who’d asked her the question before.

“That’s a loincloth, Anthony,” Alice said.

“That’s a
loincurtain
, is what that is.”

Everyone laughed, even Alice.

“Ta-dah!
It’s my dick!”

“Boys,” she said, “no cursing, please.”

The aboriginal people of Malaya, the plaque read, were admired for their commitment to nonviolence.

Malaya was somewhere off the tip of Thailand, Pepin thought. So after diving for days along the Great Barrier Reef, he and Alice could head due north out of Brisbane, take a hard left over Indonesia, and cross over Malaysia to land in Kuala Lumpur, then settle for a while with the Semai. Think of all the weight he’d lose blowpiping. It’d be hard to get fat on just rice, let alone on food you had to hunt with a weapon like that. Think of how little there would be to worry about. Live in a pole house together. Tend the rice paddies. Renew their bonds of mutual liking and respect. Those would be their rules.

He thought he saw Mobius’s black form reflected in the glass, but when he turned around no one was there.

“Downstairs,” Alice said at the landing. “Stick together, please.”

“It says dinosaurs is up,” Anthony said, holding up the floor plan.

“The dinosaurs
are
up, Anthony, but first we’re going to see the hominids.”

“The fuck’s a homonid?”

His friends doubled over in laughter.

“You are
, Anthony.”

The class busted out in high fives and exclamations, the girls covering their mouths at the dis.

“And
I’m
a hominid. We’re
all
hominids. But if you curse once more,” she said, waiting for the class to pass by, “you’re going to go sit in the bus with the hominid driver.” She put a hand on Anthony’s shoulder. “You understand?”

The boy waited for the rest of the class to descend out of earshot. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Apology accepted,” she said.

Downstairs and past a huge canoe, a giant dugout at least fifty feet long, hung from the ceiling to better display the artwork on its underbelly, the bird designs a kind of paleocomic book in reds and blacks, and the images running from its prow reminding Pepin of the fanged mouths and squinting shark eyes by the props of P-51 Mustangs. He then followed along into the Hall of Human Origins, its entrance also the exit, and his sightlines into the Hall of Meteorites were good, so anyone appearing there would stand out brilliantly, though Mobius was nowhere to be seen.

Alice called the class to gather before an exhibit of skulls of various shapes and sizes, the dotted lines interconnecting them and then branching off to terminus, extinction, and while the boys and girls huddled, Pepin read:

“Have a look at this,” Alice said to the class. “Do you understand what these are? They’re our cousins—”

“Not mine, they ain’t.”

“Eugene,”
she said, and shot him a look. “They’re
versions
of us—
Homo sapiens
—that came before we did but didn’t survive. See? They’re grouped by region, but follow the lines to where they end. Look at the different sizes and shapes of their skulls compared to ours. What does that tell you?”

“We coulda had some small-ass heads,” Eugene said.

Anthony smacked the boy’s cap forward. “Listen to Mrs. Pepin,
fool.”

“Boys,”
Alice said. “Now, seriously, what does this chart tell you?”

Everyone stood looking, and then Anthony raised his hand. “That we’re lucky,” he said.

“Really? That’s interesting. What do you mean?”

Anthony looked at Eugene threateningly before he spoke. “Well, look at all those Homo … whatevers that didn’t make it. It doesn’t say why, does it?”

Alice looked. “No.”

“And we don’t know why, right?”

“I don’t think so.”

“See, we’re just lucky to be here.”

“And what does
that
tell you?”

“We gotta make the most of it!”

Alice smiled. “I agree.”

“Can I ask something else?”

“Sure.”

“How you pronounce that one?” Anthony pointed at the skull shaped like a hammer’s head.

“Homo heidelbergensis
. Why?”

“’cause she looks just like Eugene’s mom.”

Like a firework, the class burst from the middle, the boys and girls covering their mouths as they ran laughing from the center. Alice shook her head at Anthony, who stood facing her. “You’ll never change,” she said.

It was time to eat.

Alice led the kids down to the lunchrooms on the lower level. Pepin couldn’t help stopping in the food court to buy a chicken and Swiss wrap, which he snarfed down, looking over his shoulder all the while, like a hunter being hunted. Alice was sitting at a table off to the side, away from students and the other teachers, her eyes glazed; she appeared saddened, even decimated, the woman he knew emerging now that no young people were engaging her immediate attention and yanking her out of her own mind. She seemed in despair, and this was the best time to tell her, he thought, his best opportunity for success. Let her know he was here and why he had to take her away. He was about to walk toward her when he saw Mobius standing at the end of the hall.

Rather than run, he turned when Pepin approached and walked down the hallway leading to the 81st Street subway station, then ducked left into the men’s bathroom. There was a yellow folding sign in front of the door, with a figure whose feet were sliding out from underneath him and
CAUTION
painted in red.

The tiled room, smelling of ancient urine, was empty but for the two of them.

“You’re making this unnecessarily difficult,” Mobius said.

“That’s the idea.”

Like Alice’s student, he was dressed all in black, though his form-fitting clothes were made for athletics, with the same Under Armour logo at his neck as Alice’s top the night before: U locked with inverted U.

“But you can’t stop it,” he said. “The end’s already determined. I’m just following the beginning’s vector—the arrow’s arc. And
you
dreamed that part, remember? You called
me.”

Pepin looked around for a weapon. There was a trash can in the corner, silver, shaped like a bullet. Throwing that at Mobius would be very troglodyte. “So what happens now?” he said.

“We fight, I knock you out, you come to. You realize some things that make this really tragic. There’s a little more after that, but I don’t want to spoil it.”

Pepin stepped forward, took a swing, and whiffed. He’d never hit anyone in his life and still hadn’t. Mobius’s black eyes glinted but didn’t blink.

Pepin swung again, losing his balance and falling forward with the miss, sliding on the floor.

Mobius had him by the neck in a flash, straddling his back and pushing his face against the white-tiled wall. “Go to sleep,” he said.

He felt a blow.

Pepin woke.

The back of his neck was sore, his forehead too, and he wasn’t sure how much time had passed. But he was up, if unsteadily, on his feet and out the door into the lunchroom, but Alice and the class had already left. Panicked again, he ran upstairs, through the Grand Gallery and the New York State Environment and the Hall of North American Forests and into the Hall of Ocean Life, its entrance guarded by three sharks.

The blue whale took his remaining breath away, gigantic, hanging there impossibly as if it were floating in the sea. And in this sea-blue room, feeling as submerged beneath the ceiling’s domed blue glass as if he’d just walked onto the deck of the
Nautilus
itself, he saw Alice and her students wandering along the jeweled dioramas in the hall’s recessed level, and then his pants pocket vibrated. It was a cell phone—another plant—and now it rang.