The Fearsome Particles (31 page)

It seemed for a moment, at least to Gerald, as if Sandy was all around them, bodiless. So it was a shock when a high-powered flashlight came on at the front of the room, and Sandy pointed its ferocious, pencil beam at Trick. “Your wife is being held at knifepoint.”

“What the hell?” said Trick, shielding his eyes.

“Your wife!” shouted Sandy. “A home invader’s got her! The only thing you can do to save her is give up your
SUV
! Will you do it?”

“Well, sure,” said Trick, squinting manfully. “I guess so.”

Sandy turned the beam on Phil. “Your son’s being attacked by a giant cockroach!”

“No problem,” said Phil. “Beat it off with his squash racquet.”

“What if he was asleep” – Sandy crept up to him, her voice low – “and the cockroach’s pinchers were about to chop off his head, and all you could do to stop it was give up all your passions, your entertainments, your music.” She shone the light down on top of him. “Would you do it?”

“How fast is a nanosecond?”

She aimed the flashlight at Doug, who shrank back. “Your daughter’s contracted a deadly virus! Will you give up your sailboat to save her?”

“Well,” Doug cringed helplessly, “I don’t own a sailboat, but –”

“Your cottage!”

“Okay! Yes, I would, of course!”

Gerald braced for the flashlight’s beam to fall on him. He had his answer ready:
Yes!
But Sandy had other ideas. She charged to the front of the room, slammed on the overhead fluorescents, and strafed them with a lunatic stare. “What if you didn’t know for certain that someone in your family was in imminent danger. What if it was only probable? Even just
possible?
Would you be willing to give up something you didn’t absolutely need to keep them safe?”

She grabbed an envelope from the edge of the table and held it up. “In each of the envelopes I’ve given you, there is a tool for calculating something no one else has been able to quantify before. It’s a finely calibrated instrument, and what it measures … is love.”

Like a lioness pouncing on injured prey, Sandy lunged
forward and stabbed a button on her laptop, and up on the screen shone an image of a father, holding a newborn child.

“The world,” she said softly, “is a threatening place, full of frightening things. And right now, at this moment, your family is vulnerable.” She began to walk the perimeter of the boardroom, around the table, pausing as she passed by each man. “As we speak, as you sit here, your wives, your daughters and sons, are being exposed to perils they don’t understand. Dangers they can’t see or touch. What are you going to do, before it’s too late?” She came to Gerald’s chair, stopped and gazed down with what seemed to him a knowing empathy, almost pity. She put a hand on his shoulder. “How are you going to protect them?” Then she turned away, and four precise steps took her to the front of the room.

“Each of you loves your family,” she said. “The only question is, how much?” She held up her envelope. “What’s in here, and how you use it, will tell you.”

Then Sandy smiled, sweetness tinged with triumph, switched off the projector, and clasped her hands in front of her. “That’s the marketing campaign, gentlemen. Any questions?” None of the men in the room answered Sandy. They were all staring at the envelopes in their hands. “We can do a thirty-second and a sixty-second version for
TV
,” she continued, “and a full version like this for trade shows and product knowledge seminars. We could even videotape it for smaller markets. And this” – she flapped her own envelope as she walked to her seat – “is the perfect direct-mail component. What we do is run regional teaser ads that talk about the envelope just like I did, and then we send it out to targeted households.”

At the table she sat and looked around at the men in their apparent stupors. “Come on, open it up! It’s only a flyer.”

Gerald was looking at his envelope, but he wasn’t thinking about it. He was thinking about Kyle and the way he sounded on the phone. There was something odd about it, there was a mistiness that frightened him. As he heard the sound of ripping paper around him, he pushed himself out of his chair.

“Nice presentation, Sandy,” he said.

His sales and marketing director, which was how he now thought of her, beamed.

“I’m afraid I have to go.” He looked at the men around the table. “Boys? For the next hour or so, Sandy’s going to lead a discussion on how we implement this plan. Get other people in here if you need to. Work out the details and we’ll go over them on Monday.” He looked at Sandy. “All right?”

“Yes, sir!” she said.

Trick and the others nodded in silence. Gerald started for the door.

“Wait!” Sandy rushed his envelope to him. “Don’t forget the payoff.”

He took it without a word.

D
uring his taxi ride home, as interminable traffic light delays and poor shortcut choices killed him incrementally, Gerald kept thinking about one thing. He kept revisiting in his mind the nights of Kyle’s childhood, when he would look in on his son, hours after he’d gone to sleep. Of the time he shared with Kyle, this was his favourite, because it entailed none of the erratic
moods and movements of a child’s waking hours. There were no unexplained crashes in the basement, there was no absurd bouncing in the hall. No need to order an end to a ten-year-old’s frightening, drunken joy at being allowed to play with one of his rowdier friends. No inevitable anger to regret.

It was as pure a moment as he could find, in any of his days. Not that he ever came away unscathed. When he crept into the plum-stained dark of Kyle’s bedroom – and it didn’t matter what age his son was, two, eight, fifteen – the pattern of feelings was always the same, a sequence that came at him in waves. He’d see his boy’s pudgy fist tucked into his neck, or his fingers, wet with spit, half in, half out of his mouth, and he’d feel the first one roll into him – that rush of joy, and then awe that he was allowed such joy – that he assumed was any father’s privilege and due. He handled the first wave just fine; he cherished the first wave. But he could never enjoy it for long, because the second wave came fast. That white crest of fear – the certainty that he would screw it up, that it would all be snatched away – crashed down on his joy and pulled it out from under him every time. Vicki once asked him, as he was closing the door to Kyle’s room, why he looked so upset.

“Ach!” The taxi driver hit the wheel with the flat of his hand as they pressed into the back end of another slowdown. He turned halfway around: “Everyone getting a start on the weekend, I think.”

“Can’t you take Merrivale?” Gerald asked.

The driver shook his head in disgust. “Merrivale is no good! It’s all construction!”

Gerald felt the clench of rising panic in his chest. To distract himself, he dug into his pocket and brought out the envelope
Sandy had insisted he take with him. Inside was, as she’d said, just a mock-up of a flyer she’d roughed out on her computer and printed on orange paper. Her love-measuring instrument, folded into three panels:

Maybe it was a little over the top; Gerald couldn’t be sure. It was situations like this when he didn’t trust his instincts. That was the problem with having no strategic vision; you were lost in the forest and you couldn’t tell the way out from the path that
took you deeper in. But he liked the fact that on the back of the flyer, Sandy had drawn a rough facsimile of a $50-off coupon (good for orders of twenty filters or more). He trusted a sales and marketing director who hedged her bets.

For a while he studied the flyer, or maintained the posture of studying, as the cab crawled like sepsis from the fingertips of the city to its residential heart. But there was only so long he could stare at the flyer before the staring became as obsessive as the worrying it was supposed to forestall, and eventually he let it slide from his hand to the seat beside him and made do with noting all the roadside signage he would never have had the opportunity to read if his cab driver had made better off-ramp decisions.

Finally, when it was almost five by Gerald’s watch, the car turned onto Breere Crescent. The driver looked back.

“What’s the number?”

“Ninety-three,” stressed Gerald. “It’s around the curve.”

The cabbie took them at an unnecessarily solemn pace past the stucco-smooth Victorian townhouses with their sunken garages that Vicki had once reliably clicked her tongue at, and past the pair of Hall & Ehrlich-designed French Country houses she’d transformed three years before. They skirted properties hemmed with shrubbery and properties walled with brick, and it was taking so long Gerald wanted to toss all his cash into the front seat and run the rest of the way.

“It’s right there,” he said, pointing over the driver’s shoulder to the turreted house beside the Linders’ shagbark hickory.

“Which one?”

“Just stop the car.”

He paid the fare and opened the door at the same time, and he told himself as he ran through the tender spring air, down the sidewalk and up the drive, that he had no earthly reason for running. Out of breath, he went to the garage first, saw Vicki’s car was still gone and surveyed his own for ominous indications. He found, to his scant relief, none; it was parked in its proper spot, if a little off-line, and there were no marks on it that he could see. Which meant nothing.

The door from the garage led to the mud room, and he wiped his feet out of habit. “Kyle?” he called, expecting no answer. “Son?” He found the kitchen empty, the breakfast nook hollow, and abandoned further downstairs searching. It was a straight path up he needed to take, to the door of his son’s room, and though he tried to stay calm as he climbed the stacked staircase, he still hated each landing and turn.

Outside Kyle’s door, he forced himself to slow down. Even if his son seemed fine, he really wasn’t, and no good could come from bursting in. He took a breath and flattened his tie, then called in a soft voice, “Kyle?” His son didn’t answer, but it wasn’t for that reason he pushed open the door. It was because he heard something else. A meow.

He saw Kyle lying on his back, on his bed, over at the far side of the room. He was apparently asleep. And for a minute it all seemed normal, the old joy wave came rolling in, except the damned cat was there too, sitting on the bed beside his son. It was licking the outside of what appeared to be a bag of candy, butterscotch and grape and cherry sweets, that Kyle was holding on his stomach. Gerald went in quietly like he always had, this
time to shoo the cat away. When he got close enough to see it wasn’t a bag of candy at all, a surge of dizziness knocked him to his knees.

He was suddenly swimming. It seemed he was swimming across the floor, through a tide that kept pushing him back. He was required to swim against the current to his son.

“Kyle!” he shouted.

He grabbed hold of the side of the bed and pulled himself up. The hissing cat he swept away. “Son!”

Kyle opened his eyes sleepily. “Dad,” he said. “Don’t.”

Gerald’s response was to grunt, because he was trying to pick his son up. It was clear to him what he needed to do. But his legs weren’t working, he couldn’t get leverage, and his son was so much heavier than he looked. “I need your help, son,” he gasped, in between his attempts to shove his arm underneath Kyle’s shoulders. “We’re going to the hospital.”

“No,” said Kyle.

“Come on, son.” He felt strangely calm. “Can you stand?”

“Stop,” yelled Kyle. Gerald thought he yelled
stop
. Which made no sense so he kept working. He kept trying to lift his little boy.

And then Kyle started flailing with his good hand. “No! Let me go!” He started to push and to hit. Gerald took a popping fist on the ear and began to understand something else was wrong. He backed away so that his son’s mangled hand wouldn’t be hurt any more.

“Kyle,” he said from his knees, his chest heaving, “we have to get you to the hospital.” He spoke slowly, in case his son was drugged or drunk, though no signs or smells told him that was
true. He began to see that Kyle had other marks on him, bruises and cuts to his face and neck. It occurred to Gerald – it seemed logical, it seemed complete – that here were the effects of the unexplained off-camp event, the physical manifestations, that they’d somehow been delayed until now. His son had been in a
war
. And though he tried not to see the hand, its dried blood and swollen flesh, the knobs and crooks of broken bones, he couldn’t help but look. And when he looked he couldn’t breathe.

“I’m not going,” said Kyle. “You can’t make me go.” He said it in a way that seemed rational, not crazy. Which made it harder to comprehend. Kyle pushed himself up with his good hand until his back was against the wall. As if his father were the enemy.

Gerald’s mouth hung open but he was having trouble getting air. It didn’t matter what had happened; he had to think about what was next. He pressed his skull with his hands to quell the panic, so he could figure out how to speak, to make his son understand.

“Your hand, son.” He had to do better. Had to try again. “Doctors have to see to your hand.”