The Shibboleth (18 page)

By the time we've sat and I've opened my soda, Debbi calls out, “Fifty-three!” and I go back to the counter and take up the tray with what can only be described as a small mountain of meat with a single piece of rye bread perched on top. I assume the other piece is buried underneath the three hundred pounds
of pastrami and corned beef. A massive plate with extra bread and pickles around the edges. I return to our seat carrying it.

For a while, all we do is eat, using our forks to make small sandwiches from the pile. Mustard. Pickles. It's very good. I didn't realize how hungry I was.

Afterward, Jerry says, “So.”

“So?”

“How should we proceed?”

“You need proof.”

“Yes.”

“All right.” I reach out, touching the flames of the nearest minds. No Riders in the building. No knuckleheads, either.

I close my eyes. Out in the ether—
those etheric heights
—and into the fat man at the front of the deli. His name is Massey D'Lainge, born in Podgorica, Montenegro, on New Year's Day, 1960, immigrated to America with his parents at the tender age of six. New York is all he's ever known. Never left the city. It's world enough for him. He weighs in at 337 pounds. Hasn't slept for a couple of days, and his heart hammers away in his chest furiously. In his considerable meatsuit, I stand, painfully—three-hundred-plus pounds is hell on the knees and ankles—and waddle back to where Jerry and the now vacated Shreve meatsuit sit.

I take a chair from a nearby table and sit. Jerry watches MeMassey closely.

“I can tell you anything you want to know about him, Jerry.”

Gotta hand it to him. Jerry doesn't gape or go all agog at the parlor tricks. He says, “What was the game we played in that hospital in South Carolina?”

I laugh. It's a thick sound coming from this guy's meaty throat. “It wasn't South Carolina. It was North Carolina, Jer-bear. And the game was Double Shutter. You kept trying to tell me that your ‘people' invented it.”

“So, you're in there, Shreve? You didn't pay this man to say these things?”

“No.” I say this simultaneously from both MeShreve and MeMassey. This time, Jerry jumps a little at the echo.

“Will he remember this?” he asks, raising a trembling hand.

“Maybe. Some do, some don't. The shibboleth works differently with different people. Some folks I can leave with a ‘suggestion,' and they will forget. Or do what I ask of them if their will isn't too strong, and it's not anything they wouldn't do in normal life. I couldn't, say, tell him to kill the president, and he'd go buy a gun.”

Jerry's eyebrows continue their thoughtful dance. “Let him go.”

I do, diving back in the good old Shreve chassis. I open my eyes. Massey's looking somewhat startled.

“Massey,” I say and bridge the gap between our minds. “I command you to forget this conversation. Also, I command you to go immediately to your doctor and have your heart checked out, and then I want you to go home and sleep. You will have no more trouble sleeping. Also, this isn't an order, more along the lines of a suggestion—lay off the doughnuts. Okay?”

The man nods his head, chins wobbling. He stands and lumbers out the front door.

I turn back to Jerry.

“Oy, vey. It is true.”

“I've never lied to you, Jerry. Well, okay. Maybe a couple of times. But not about anything that really matters.”

“You called it a shibboleth.”

“
The
shibboleth. Quincrux said that to me once. He planted a message in one of the Casimir bulls' memories.”

Jerry rubs his face. Looks out the window onto the street. Before he seemed pretty spry, but now he looks tired.

“You know what it means?”

“I think so.”

“In Hebrew,
shibboleth
literally means ‘grain.' Or sometimes ‘stream' or ‘fluid.' Or ‘torrent.' And it was used as a password by the Gilead men after a battle. It has interesting connotations the way you use it.”

“It just struck me when Quincrux said it. Sort of the phrase I hung all the weirdness on, if that makes sense.”

He nods, and he's about to say something when his phone begins chirping. He holds up a finger and answers the phone, saying, “Ahuvi! Hold on one moment.” He stands and walks away a few paces. After a few moments, he returns and says, “That was my wife. She hasn't been sleeping well lately—like everyone I know—and went down to a spa with some of her friends for the evening in hopes of relaxing. She won't be back tonight, which is good, I think. Because we have many things to discuss, do we not?”

“You tell her about me?”

“I mentioned I was having lunch with a friend, Shreve.” He says this like he's squeezed the last bit of patience out of the tube he bought at the local bodega. “I did not tell her with whom.”

“That's good.”

“You are a wary young man.”

“Being a fugitive with psychopathic telepaths on your ass tends to do that to you.”

“Point taken. For the moment, it is just you and me. But Miriam will return tomorrow, midmorning, and before then we must figure out your final disposition.”

A couple thousand different ways to tell him that I'll be captaining this vessel pop into my mind, none of them as snarky as I'd like.

So I nod like an idiot and say, “You got it.”

“Let's get back to my apartment. We have much to discuss.”

“You'll give me the photo then? I need it to find Jack.”

“We shall see.”

Sitting at his kitchen island, Jerry makes me start again from the beginning. Somewhere in North Carolina, after the Dubrovnik episode, when I was in the hospital. Hearing about my conversation with Quincrux, he exclaims, “That maintenance man was Quincrux? Very polite, yet I sensed something wrong with him. He kept coming in to change lightbulbs or take out the trash or check pipework—even though no pipework was in evidence. Limping, no?”

“Yeah.” A permanent limp, I hope.

A look of creeping horror spreads across Jerry's face. He passes a hand over his eyes.

“You all right, Jer?”

“When I was a boy, a friend of mine went for a vacation in Florida and captured a snake. He would carry it around and feed it mice he bought at the local pet store. All the boys in the neighborhood were wild about that snake, and we'd congregate on Richard's stoop on Saturday morning in hopes of him letting us hold it.”

“I've heard this one before. But it was a coral snake, right? And eventually it bit the boy and killed him.”

“No, this is a true story, though your expression makes me think you do not believe me. Trust me, this is the story that
created
your story.”

“Okay. So, what happened?”

“You said you know the story.”

“I've heard it. He's showing off the snake, but then someone who knows something about snakes realizes, as he sees the boy handling it, that it's not a milk snake, it's a coral snake. And as the boy freaks, the snake bites him and he dies.”

Jerry shakes his head. “Unfortunately, no. He was showing the snake off at the local park—it
was
a gorgeous creature. And some herpetologist happened to spy it and ‘freaked out,' as you say. But it was not the boy who died. It was the snake. They snatched up sticks and killed it right then and there on the spot, even with a herpetologist present. Poor, beautiful creature.”

“No way.”

“I was there.”

“I don't believe you.”

“I have never lied to you, Shreve. Well, except for a couple times.” He winks at me.

“Jerry, sometimes you really surprise me.”

Jerry raises his eyebrows. “I do not celebrate death, nor should you.”

Good point. “But why'd you bring it up?”

“Eh? Oh.” He stands, not looking at me, as if he's ruminating on something, and toddles over to a cabinet and withdraws a plate. He uncaps a cookie jar and places some cookies on a plate. Jerry's got his own speed.

He sets the plate down, and I take one of the wonderful little vanilla cookies and pop it in my mouth. He picks one up and chews very thoughtfully, very slowly. Finally, he says, “Sometimes, learning one little thing can change your whole view of the world.”

“Like learning that a snake is poisonous.”

“No. Like the world suddenly changing its whole opinion about
you
.”

“I don't get it.”

He looks at me. “You will, someday, Shreve. You might have lived a hundred lives, yet you are still a boy. It's all about sweat equity.”

There's a thundering boom that shakes the building, and the lights flicker off and on. We move to the bay windows and look out at New York's nighttime skyline, close-up, over Gramercy Park. A car has exploded, as far as I can tell, down the block. Trash fires spew living embers that make intertwined patterns as they rise. Shadowy figures rush along the streets, casting long shadows like wolves skirting the edges of campfires. Jerry pushes open the windows.

The smell of burning rubber on the wind and the scream of sirens reach us.

Jerry says, “This is not good.”

No shit, Sherlock.

“Come, there's no need to stare out at the signs of our time. We are on the brink. But you must finish the story.”

We return to the kitchen. The electricity remains on, though the lights flicker. The clock on the microwave blinks 12:00, over and over.

I take up the thread of the story. The cookies are gone, and I've reached my stint in the Tulaville Psychiatric Hospital and the sad end of Rollie. It's hard to talk about, her inglorious end.

“You liked this girl, did you?”

“In what way? I thought she was smart, I guess. But I didn't know her very well. I wasn't even attracted to her.”

“Then why did you kiss her, like you said?”

Dammit. Why can't he just shut up?

“Because she asked me to.”

“That's not a reason.”

I probe the hard, steely surface of his mind. Still like a ball bearing.
He gets right to the heart of it.
But I say, “Because I needed her help.”

“So you used her. Is that right?”

I can just stand up and walk out the door. I can do it right now.

Jerry frowns. “You just looked twice at the door. You are going to leave?”

“Hey, what is this, psychoanalysis?”

He waves a hand at the door to his apartment. “Go ahead. Leave. Run away. It is what you do, is it not?”

“You don't really know anything about me.”

“I know more than most. It's okay to feel bad about the way you treated this poor girl.”

“It wasn't my fault.”

He remains silent for a long while, looking at me.

“No. Her death is not
on
you, I don't think. But you should have treated her as a human. Not as some …” His eyebrows do more interesting things. “As some
pawn
in a game. Do you understand?”

“I don't need this, Jer-bear.”

“You obviously wanted it.” He sighs and looks ineffably tired. “I worry about you. And I thank the Creator that you cannot get inside me. Not with your mind. Not with your words.
You are a problem, a cipher.”

“Don't worry about me,” I say. “I'll be just fine.”

“Oh, Shreve. This ability will separate you from the rest of humanity. We will all become pawns to you. Tools for you to use. Like your Rollie. Despite her obvious imbalances. Her—how do you say? —‘iffy' state. No, you are not to blame for her death. But you were a factor. A catalyst. In that sense, you bear some responsibility.”

“I—” I have nothing to say for myself.

I think of the roof again, the burning sun and the taste of birdshit-tar soup and the countless little match heads beneath me waiting to be lit as I sat upon that great height. I think about the shibboleth and my power now. About Quincrux and Ilsa Moteff and their ability to play people on the board. And Rollie. The ammonia taste of her mouth and how her tongue wormed against my teeth, trying to enter, desperate and lonely.

My heart expands in my chest. It's the burn in the back of the throat that hurts, trying to keep the sobs from coming. Jerry watches me, placid and calm. If I can just choke it back and forget about everything, I'll keep control. I need to keep control.

It's like a flood. And when the sobs hit, I double over on the kitchen seat. And weep. For Rollie. For myself. For Jack and Vig and Booth and Moms. For us all.

You're born into pain. Never a moment free of it.

Jerry watches. He doesn't pat me on the back or coo comforting words to me. He doesn't offer sympathy. He just watches.

Finally, when I'm done, he snatches a paper towel off the roll by the sink and hands it to me. It's rough against my face.

He walks to the bar, takes out a bottle of wine, pops the cork, and then surprises me when he pours me a glass. I wipe my streaming eyes, my running nose. I feel husked out by the crying jag. And I hate that he saw.