The Measures Between Us (6 page)

Somehow the arsonist survived unscathed. He had hovered in the middle of the flames, watching them grow. The police, who arrived shortly after the fire trucks, talked him out, their guns drawn. It had always seemed strange to Jack, this detail: to be aiming guns into a fire. Maybe they were worried he was armed with more weapons? After he was arrested, they discovered, underneath his FEMA uniform, a fireproof suit like those worn by race-car drivers. “You sick fuck,” said one of the cops. “How long have you been planning this?”

According to the news reports, they couldn't figure out why he had done it. “Why?” he repeated back to the detectives questioning him. “What do you mean? Do I need a reason?”

They combed his past, tracking down his retired parents in New Mexico and digging into his life; they contacted his brother, a civil engineer in Kansas, married with twin daughters, Ashley and Caitlin. They had him evaluated by psychiatrists from one of the top hospitals. They found past girlfriends, scattered around New England, waitresses and students and mothers and none of them fortune-tellers. They even pressed his old schoolteachers for memories. And what emerged wasn't a portrait of a psychopath. Nearly everyone recalled someone normal, if slightly withdrawn. If I had to bet on someone to do this, one science teacher said, there are a hundred—no, a thousand—people in line before him. I could give you ten names right now.

Jack remembered the case because it riveted the whole state for weeks. Nightly, it was a topic of conversation at the dinner table, eclipsing all other current events. Usually his father liked to talk politics, spurred by the evening news he watched before supper while his wife cooked. Jack often sat on the floor against the footrest and stared at the TV too. He liked the weather reports, the meteorologists holding buttons as if they were detonators, the swirling, baffling nautilus shapes floating across maps. Maybe that was when his interest in the climate had begun to crystallize. His internship now, helping out with a joint project between the school of environmental studies and the psychology department, might have stretched years back, prefigured in those routine evenings.

Cynthia's family was similarly rapt by the crime, only some nights her mother tried to change the subject because she feared it was too violent and too frightening to discuss in front of a child. She worried it would give Cynthia nightmares. “Clark the Spark,” one of the newspapers had nicknamed the arsonist, and
Cynthia, too young to understand the gravity of the crime, used to parade around the house, chanting the name as if it belonged to a cartoon character. Even years later, when they were in high school, the crime continued to entrance. Their parents didn't like to talk about it as much, but Jack and Cynthia could waste hours recounting the lurid details.

She was a familiar enough presence at Jack's house that she helped herself to Cokes from the refrigerator without asking. She knew where the dog leash hung, where the extra paper towels were stored in the garage. In the living room, when they watched TV, she slouched into the overstuffed cushions of the couch, swung her stockinged feet up onto the edge of the coffee table. At her home, Jack did the same, and many nights he stayed long past midnight. Often they rented movies, and occasionally one or both of them would fall asleep before the end. It was nice to wake up next to her, the production credits scrolling by in the dark room. In the blur of just waking up, he always watched for the best boy and the key grip; it was a joke between the two of them, these oddly labeled jobs, and no movie was ever officially over until they knew the names.

He circled her block three times. All the recent rain had turned everything so green it looked almost artificial. Everyone was nervously monitoring the river levels. He knew the neighborhood so well, yet the houses seemed strange, the trees and signs unfamiliar, as if he had driven for hundreds of miles instead of ten minutes. A green Ford passed him. It looked like Cynthia's father's car, and Jack tailed it for a few minutes until he realized it was a different model. He could pull over, or find the interstate, floor the gas pedal and in half an hour be in farm country,
see sheep graze by moonlight and stars float over mountaintops. The world was different out there. There was a dairy farmer, a widower, who carved his cornfield into a labyrinth every Halloween. It got more and more elaborate each year, with robotic scarecrows, mechanical bats, hidden trapdoors. Speakers buried in the ground played sound effects when you stepped on mines. He welded a massive ship's ladder to one of his silos, and he climbed up there alone with a flask of whiskey and watched everyone get lost and scared. He had binoculars so he could see their faces. He watched the first child enter and the last one emerge, and the next year he did it all again.

In high school Cynthia liked to get stoned, something Jack learned after a pep rally when she and her friends invited him out on a ritual they would end up repeating on many weekends. They'd pile into a car and drive out to an isolated creek or river and idle away an afternoon, drinking and getting wasted. They would play a new CD over and over and mangle the lyrics and dance once they were high enough to shed their self-consciousness. To cool down, they found the deepest spots of the water and dove under.

They scoured the shoreline for flat rocks to skip, and Cynthia asked Jack to teach her how to throw the stones. He told her you had to keep it low and that it was all in the angle of the wrist. Three or four jumps were the most she could get, and then she would give up and splash into the water and frog-kick down to the bottom. Jack watched her disappear: first her head, then her shoulders, her back and legs. Then, finally, her feet, and for ten or twenty seconds she was no more than an afterimage. She would come up in a different spot, breaking the water's surface with her hair slicked to her head, her T-shirt pasted to her skin.

Sometimes he worried he was staring too much, that the others—and especially Cynthia—would notice his watching and
say something, turn him small with embarrassment. Or, worse, she would pull away. But everyone was too drunk or too high to care, or too wrapped up in their own fearsome, insatiable longing.

Gradually they separated themselves. They would take walks deep into the woods, finding old logging roads, hidden brooks, and noisy waterfalls, and when they returned there were insinuating smirks from everyone else, even though nothing had happened. More often they had simply ventured through the trees, slapping away low-hanging branches and crunching twigs underfoot. Chipmunks and squirrels darted across their path, and they might see deer. “Let's lie down,” Cynthia said once, spotting three of the animals. “Let's see how close they'll come.” Jack lay next to her, trying to remain as still as possible. “How long?” he whispered. She squeezed his wrist and said, “Till they come.” But they never did.

During one of these times, they discovered several steel boxes, half buried in the dirt. Each was locked with a thick metal chain. Jack crouched down and swept away some leaves, uncovering a black power cord. They followed it several hundred feet, at which point it disappeared into the ground. Jack scooped some dirt away from the sides, and Cynthia warned, “Be careful. Don't get electrocuted.”

The cable ended far deeper than he could dig with his hands, so he gave up. From another of the boxes, a separate cable emerged, snaking along the ground and then up a tree, clamped to its bark with blue plastic cleats. That cable vanished too, into a canopy of leaves. He walked the circumference of the tree, hoping to find branches he could climb. Yet all the low ones had been sawed off.

“What do you think all this equipment is?”

Cynthia shrugged.

The boxes had no markings, and there were no signs hanging on the trees declaring that the area was restricted or private property.

“Do you think it's government stuff?” she asked.

“What would they want out here? There's nothing important here.”

“Studying kids on pot,” she said, smiling. “The war on drugs.” Jack laughed. “I wish we could break one open.” He looked around for a sharp rock and found one several yards away. He banged it against one of the locks, but the tip shattered before the metal gave.

“Something tells me we're not getting into those things without some serious machinery,” said Cynthia.

He tried a few more times, with different rocks, before deciding she was right. “I guess not,” Jack conceded. “If only JR was still here, maybe he'd have something. I get the feeling he'd be good at stuff like this.” JR was their pot dealer, a man who never took off his sunglasses, wore exclusively plaid shirts, and whose initials stood for something different every time Jack or Cynthia asked.

“Did you hear that?” Cynthia asked.

Jack shook his head. He was still crouched at one of the boxes, looking for some kind of identifying mark. “What?” he said.

“I thought I heard something,” she said.

“It's probably just an animal,” he said, cocking his head.

Thirty seconds later, the noise resurfaced, and it wasn't an animal. An ATV was revving through the forest. “Shit,” said Cynthia, grabbing Jack's forearm. “Let's get the fuck out of here.”

They ran away from the approaching four-wheeler, Jack in front, looking back to make sure Cynthia was keeping up. They didn't stop for five or six minutes, until they were out of breath and doubled over. They paused by a huge boulder and slumped along its cooling face. Damp patches of moss clung to the rock. The right knee of Cynthia's jeans was torn from a fall.

“We must have tripped some alarm or something,” Cynthia said. “Maybe one of the cables had a sensor on it.”

Spent from the run, all Jack could do was nod.

“Do you know where we are?” he finally asked.

Cynthia looked around. The treetops dappled the sunlight into stars. Two squirrels chased each other around the fat trunk of a maple. “No idea,” Cynthia said. “Middle of nowhere, if I had to guess.”

“Except someone seems to own this nowhere,” Jack said. “Someone who doesn't like anyone touching his boxes.”

They learned later that they had wandered onto the Kingman land, a vast tract owned by a reclusive multimillionaire. The mysterious metal boxes and black cables were part of a huge network of data collection; the rumor was that there were hundreds of them, strewn randomly throughout the forest. Every November, during deer season, several hunters would venture onto the property unknowingly, as Jack and Cynthia had, only none of them ever tried to tamper with the instruments.

“Why would he have that stuff in the middle of the woods?” Jack asked Cynthia once they knew what they had stumbled across.

“My mom says he's studying artificial intelligence,” Cynthia said.

“In the forest? I thought that stuff was all done with computers. I thought it was like the opposite of nature.”

“I'm not sure of the details. She says the ones here are just a fraction of them, actually.”

“Really?”

“He has them all over the world—the rain forest, the Arctic, some desert in Chile.”

It was late at night, and they were on the phone. They frequently spoke after their parents had gone to bed, marathon conversations that could stretch to two hours and more. Slowly their town was falling asleep around them. The lights in the houses were going dark, murmuring good night.

“She says the point is to get data on as many animals as possible, especially ones we don't usually see,” Cynthia said. “Then he feeds it into computers and at some point it'll add up to something.”

“How does she know all that?” Jack said.

“She reads all the articles about him. He's been here a while, you know. He was here when we were kids—we just didn't hear about him.”

“I know,” said Jack, recalling some of the rumors about him. “I just thought he was a secretive old hermit.”

“He is,” Cynthia said, “but things seep out. You can't hide forever. Not with all that money and all those ideas.”

“He must have so much information about things,” Jack said.

Jack heard the noise before anything was visible, a faint sound that built steadily. Cynthia always located the source before he did, as if she were an animal with ultrasensitive hearing. Soon the helicopter appeared, and initially it was no bigger than a bird, one more distant speck against cloud and sun. In the space of a few minutes it grew larger as it approached the landing pad. Its arrival flushed birds from the trees, their branches bending and twisting with the wind it swirled up. Finally, just before the copter landed, the grass bowed down.

Frank Kingman lived on a 250-acre estate just outside of town. Two decades earlier he had been working in Boston, at MIT, and had invented a way of storing huge amounts of information on microchips, technology that he sold to a computer company for a fortune. With his windfall, he had bought the acreage and built a house on it, rumored to have twenty-five rooms. No one knew much about him or his property; thick stands of trees hid it from view, and every foot of the perimeter was fenced. He refused to give interviews to reporters, and in the vacuum of knowledge, the stories about what he did in his compound multiplied. Some people thought there was a robotics lab in a bunker underground. Others theorized that he was doing cutting-edge
medical research, self-funded so he wouldn't have to abide by the FDA and other agencies. When he was once spotted at a local store with a cartful of light bulbs, the hypothesis was that he was working on alternative forms of electricity.

One corner of his property was anchored by a heliport, and Jack and Cynthia liked to go there and watch him fly in. The helicopter looked like a giant bug, all bubble eye and long tail, the body far more delicate than its viciously turning blades. The first few times they went, they never made it close enough to see the chopper land. Security guards in shiny black pickups sprang from hidden roads in the woods and forced Jack to stop the car. “Private property,” they barked. “You're trespassing.” Jack didn't quite believe Kingman's property line extended out to where they halted him, but the guards were big and imposing, and it seemed unwise to argue with them.