The Wave (15 page)

34

There was a buff desert that went on forever under a red sun. It was midday. It was always midday. There was only the desert and the heat seething upward. There was no past or future. There was no me. But after many eons of desert and sun, something happened: small bumps appeared along the surface of the land. The bumps grew into mounds that cracked open, and green shoots lanced upward. The bulging heads of the plants flowered as they rose toward the sun, and I came into being realizing that life struggled under the ground. The flowers were yellow and red, and they had voices, loud and shrill voices. A billion billion tiny flower-alarms went off. They were deafening, so I found my hands. I covered my ears. I squatted down and pressed my knees against my hands against my head. But the shrill sound of the yellow and red flowers went on and on. It was a wall of sound, a mountain of sound. I could see it, feel its weight on me. And then he came out of it—GT. Naked again, as he was when I found him. But he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked me.

“What?”

“Killing yourself. Taking your life away.”

“I can’t betray Nella or the Wave,” I said.

“You couldn’t betray us even if you wanted to. But for the girl, if you live, tell them to come to me.”

GT moved away from me, and as he did, the sound subsided. The flowers withered and died as the sun moved toward an infinite desert horizon. It became colder and darker until I was chilled down to the bone, looking into a world so black that I might as well have been blind.

I was a corpse floating in a lifeless ocean. There was no sun. No light of any kind. Just the frigid embrace of the ocean, which was also Death. There was no more Errol. Just the memory of him. That memory held few details, no aspirations, and it was unraveling until soon there would be only the cold.

And then there was light.

It was a cold light far above my eyes. It was as if I had no body, as if my eyes saw only at a distance. I had died and returned into a world where there was no grace or comfort or even pain.

For a long time I wondered if Death was a great mausoleum where the dead were put into long drawers of cold, pure light. This idea made the most sense to me.

But as I watched the light, I began to see irregularities. Fibers and crystal, filaments and pulse.

It was a lightbulb, a mechanical thing hovering above the gurney I was laid out on, in the infirmary of Dr. Wheeler’s XT-1 command center.

“How are you, Errol?” Wheeler asked.

“I thought I was dead,” I uttered. My voice was hoarse and cracked. It hurt my lungs to speak.

“You said that you were in Santa Barbara, but you weren’t, were you?”

“No,” I said, obeying the dictum of a dream.

“Where were you?”

“In a cave where the XT had fully surfaced. A place far in the coastal mountains.”

Wheeler’s smile was maniacal. “And what was your mission?”

“To preserve part of the life-form.”

“So that it could somehow take control in San Francisco?”

“No. It was only trying to survive, to get away from you.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know all of it,” I said honestly. “The Wave had concentrated all of its knowledge into that one sample of itself. Like I said, it wanted only to survive.”

“And where is it?”

“GT knows,” I said.

My body was returning to life. I could feel pinpricks of pain up and down my arms and legs. The ache filled me with a kind of masochistic joy.

“Kill him now,” a voice said.

I couldn’t see him, but I knew it was Dr. Gregory, Wheeler’s partner in genocide.

“No,” David Wheeler said. “We need him to make GT give us what we need.”

I struck a deal with the army’s scientists. I would enter GT’s cell and get him to tell me what they needed. In return, I would be forgiven my treason and allowed to go off with Nella. I accepted their offer even though I had begun to believe that GT had never spoken to me, that it was all just a dream.

GT’s glass cell was empty when they marched me in. They opened his cubicle, locked me inside, and then the back wall rose up, revealing the black youth who claimed to be my father.

“Airy,” he said with a smile.

He walked up and put his arms around me. I returned his loving embrace with a Judas hug.

“Why did they bring you here?” he asked.

“Said that they wanted to see how we interacted,” I said. “I think that Gregory thinks I’m one of you.”

“You are of me,” GT said. “You’re my son.”

“What’s going on, Dad?” I asked. “Why don’t they kill you all?”

The corners of GT’s eyes got tight, just as my father’s had when he suspected that I was lying.

“Don’t you remember, boy?”

“Help me,” I said. “If I don’t find out, they’ll kill Nella. If you love me, you’ll tell them. I don’t want her to die.”

Even now, looking back on that moment, I don’t know what I felt. Was I trying to betray GT or doing what I thought was right? I had seen and dreamed so much that I no longer knew what was real and what was not. All I could do was move forward and hope that in doing so, things would work out fine.

“You want me to betray the Wave?” he asked.

“You’ve already lived a long life,” I said. “Please, let us live.”

35

We were both manacled hand and foot. GT’s restraints were three times thicker than mine. I wondered how he managed to walk through the woods with all of that weight on him. As it was, he moved slowly, dragging along like a sloth.

There were three guards armed with the specially built plastic guns used to kill XTs. GT had led us to a place in the woods about three miles from the cave I’d lived in for three months.

For all I knew, he was leading Wheeler to the last vestige of the Wave. But there was nothing I could do about it. All I knew was that I couldn’t let Nella die and that I was powerless between man and monster (though I didn’t know then which was which).

“Where are we?” Wheeler asked GT.

“In the woods,” he said. “In the woods.”

“Don’t play with me, thing. We have your son. I’ll kill him right here if you don’t show us the contagion.”

GT looked at the mad plastic surgeon and then at the soldiers who stood at his side.

We were in a clearing where a stream ran through and two oak trees stood. The sun was high, and there was a mild breeze. I felt a yearning to be alone in that spot, to be free of my manacles and the madman, of buried secrets and guilt.

“I am what you are looking for,” GT said. “I am the memory of a thousand thousand thousand years.”

He stood up straight, seemingly unhindered by the weight of his irons. The soldiers instinctively moved to block GT from Wheeler, raising their plastic weapons. They had no idea that every move they made had been planned for.

“Stand down,” one of the soldiers commanded.

GT moved faster than I would have believed possible, even for one of his kind. He yanked his arms and legs apart, shattering the chains that held his manacles. Then he struck three times, killing each soldier before a shot could be fired.

Wheeler took a step backward and fell, then rose. GT was on him in an instant. He grabbed the doctor by his arm. GT’s fingers clutched at Wheeler’s chest. Our tormentor’s scream made me move toward them. I wanted to end his pain, to save him from the torture that my father was inflicting. But as I approached, there was a shot. GT stopped, and his body went rigid. Cracks appeared in his back and legs, and then he turned to dust.

Wheeler stood there gasping for breath. There was a yellow and red plastic pistol in his left hand.

Wheeler used a cell phone to call for help. I was returned to my prison. The other XTs had been destroyed while we were out in the woods. I was alone in the glass prison, the only survivor of Wheeler’s terrible war. I don’t know how long I was held there. I got meals twice a day, but there was no other way to mark the passage of time. I never saw the guard who brought my food, because I had to go behind the wall before he’d leave the tray in the glass cell.

Afterward I found that I’d been imprisoned for fourteen months.

In all that time, I saw no one, spoke to no one. It was during that period that I lost hope and faith. How could all that I remembered be true? The only proof was my prison cell. But maybe I was just crazy and this was the mental institution that housed me.

I often dreamed about Wheeler. He’d come in and taunt me, telling me that I would never be free because of my relationship with his wife. He’d brag about killing my father and Nella and even Dr. Gregory.

I had those dreams every night. After a while I began to believe that they weren’t dreams at all, that Wheeler really met with me, but I repressed those meetings into fantasies that I experienced again as dreams. I thought that he was my psychiatrist and that the dreams were stories I made up to hide from the reason I was institutionalized. I spent my days trying to decipher Wheeler’s intentions. Maybe I had killed Nella, or maybe I felt guilty for the death of my father. I had resurrected him with the complex fantasy of a life-form deep in the earth, in the earth where my father had been buried.

My hair had grown long again (or maybe for the first time). I ate less every day. I thought about killing myself. I even filled the basin with water once. But the memory of those screaming flowers dampened my will.

After a very long time, Wheeler came to visit me. Green-eyed and tall, he no longer seemed insane.

“Am I cured?” I asked him.

“You’re free,” he replied.

“I’m sane?”

Wheeler smiled. “Freedom and sanity have never really gone hand in hand, my boy.”

“Where is Nella?” I asked Wheeler.

“Living her life somewhere, I suppose.”

“Where are the others?” I asked.

Wheeler seemed sad, as if he regretted the senselessness that had been his life for so long.

“You are all that’s left,” he said.

“And what now?” I asked.

“You’re free,” the doctor said again.

He led me down a long empty hallway that was minimally lit. There were no other inmates, soldiers, scientists, or guards. The whole complex seemed deserted.

“Is Dr. Gregory still around?” I asked Wheeler.

“He died.”

“Died of what?”

“Natural causes, they say. He had been given a promotion. He moved to the Bay Area, and then, two days after being in office, he had a massive coronary. It’s funny. He never had heart problems before.

“They called me to take his place. I told them they’d have to let you go if I agreed.”

We had come to a door labeled
PROPERTY
.

“Why?” I asked. “I was part of the enemy. At the very least, I was a traitor.”

“A boy’s father defies death and returns home, and his son loves him. That’s not treason.”

Wheeler opened the door. There were hundreds of boxes with various XT codes written across their sides. Property of the dead. I remembered then the place where we had buried Veil. It was the first time I’d had that image in my mind since I had experienced the partial amnesia that kept the bronze lion hiding place from my mind.

But now, all of a sudden, I remembered everything.

Wheeler handed me a small cardboard box containing the few belongings I’d left behind.

“There’s a little money in your wallet,” Wheeler said. “And Nella Bombury’s cell phone number.”

“Why are you letting me go?”

“Because it’s over, Errol. Your part in this is over. The entity is destroyed. We’re still studying the aftereffects. And we’re scouring the planet to look for other deposits. But we think that this was the only one.”

“I slept with your wife.”

“I abandoned her long before she ever strayed. And you weren’t the only one.”

“I killed Jerome,” I said. “I beat in his skull with a rock when he was shooting at Veil and GT.”

“We lost dozens of soldiers when the battle came. Every one of them has a fiction built around his demise. I think that Jerome Mathers died in a rock-climbing accident.”

Wheeler’s green eyes gazed upon me until I turned away. At first I walked, but then I ran from that building. I was the sole survivor of a war that had nearly slaughtered an entire race.

36

Nella took me back. She had been living with Roger again, but between the time I called her and the time I got there, he had been moved out. I told her it was okay that she’d had another man.

“That means you have another girlfriend,” she said. “And where is she?”

“It was more than one, honey,” I said. “But they’re all dead now.”

“What have they done, baby?” she asked.

“They killed God because he smiled on them.”

GT proved to be part of my life even after he was destroyed by Wheeler. He’d been caught because he came to see my sister after finding out that her daughter was so sick. He went by the house and sprinkled sand on her. After a few hours, all of Aria’s bodily functions normalized, and she became the perfect child.

When I saw Aria, I knew that she was like me, lightly dredged in the Wave, mildly aware of the Rapture that once thrived beneath our feet.

My mother had died while I was gone. She’d become despondent. She had buried Bobby Bliss next to my father’s grave, in the plot that had been meant for her. Then she began to lose her memory. Angelique and Lon took her in until one day she tried to walk Aria on a leash. Then they put her in the same nursing home where my father’s mother ended her days.

I was sorry I never got the chance to talk to her again.

Nella and I had twins. They have black skin and curly golden hair. One a boy named Arthur Bontemps Porter IV, and the other a girl named Luna, after the mistress who calls in the waves.

Nella and I started our own pottery production line, and life became steadier than it had ever been. Shelly went back to New York and married Thomas. Nella and I attended the wedding on Long Island.

More than two years after I got back into my life, I started having dreams again. I would be in the cave with Veil and Dick Ambler. They were telling me things about the Farsinger and the moment of alignment.

“You know that I’ll always be a part of you,” my father told me in a dream.

“It’s just so crazy, Dad,” I said.

“Alignment is in two weeks,” he said. “You should be there.”

“But what if Wheeler is still following me? I mean, he might figure out what’s going on and kill the last Wave.”

“Go.”

That’s how I ended up in front of the bronze lion. It was a clear afternoon, and San Francisco was buzzing with the unexplained appearance of the Northern Lights in its daytime sky. The waves of light, like multicolored curtains, didn’t surprise me; they spoke. They talked about a long journey from a place so small that I couldn’t imagine it and about a place she had come from that was nothing like anything she’d ever witnessed except the Wave. It was a song that made me tremble. Through the magic of Farsinger, I could see past the edge of the universe.

That afternoon the lights got stronger. Hundreds of people were pointing upward, taking photographs. I sat on a park bench across from the big bronze lion, feeling that if I died that very instant, my life would be remembered beyond the lifetime of most stars.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” David Wheeler said.

I hadn’t heard him come up or felt him take a seat at my side.

“I expected you, David.”

“Call me Papa, Airy,” he said in a tone that I could not mistake.

“You took over his body before he could shoot you,” I said.

He smiled in response.

“But I thought that once the Wave had resurrected you, you couldn’t do that.”

“You remember seeing me eat from the Wave?” he asked in answer.

I remembered seeing him pour the black tar into his mouth in our motel room.

“I carried it inside me,” he said. “And when I was taken to our cell, it migrated from my body and hid until they took us to the woods that day. When I grabbed him, the tar went into him through my fingers, and so even as I died, I was also reborn.”

“Is that why you learned how to murder?” I asked. “To prepare yourself to kill those soldiers?”

“Partly,” Wheeler said with my father’s inflections. “I also taught the Wave in the cave to kill with the logic of humans.”

“And Wheeler?” I asked. “Is he dead, too?”

“No. He’s still around.”

“Do you control him?”

“Only inasmuch as I relieve the pressure he feels. He was a tortured madman, and now he feels good most of the time, reflective. I think he’s a little suspicious of why he let you go. But after a dozen tests, he hasn’t been able to find any XT activity in his system.”

“And so you follow him around? Hiding in his skin?”

“I follow you and Angelique and Aria. I’m in contact with those whom Wheeler’s men never found. We’re looking for others like us in the earth. And we’re trying to have a good influence on the world.”

“But what about—”

“Sshh,” Wheeler/Dad said.

He pointed at the sky above the bronze lion. I felt a thrill go through me. It was like an electric shock. The curtain of light seemed to open into blackness right above the statue. The lion’s head glowed red. People around began shouting and running. The shock to my system was so great that I fell to the concrete and shook uncontrollably. Wheeler/Dad was standing over me, laughing. The lion’s head exploded, and the Wave gushed up into the hole presented by Farsinger’s light.

I could feel and see every cell as they rose and expanded to incredible sizes. My mind was sucked up into the vast being that was so large, only the smallest portion of her celestial body could be contained in our solar system. Trillions of what Wheeler called XTs flew up at incredible speeds, becoming the size of elephants, whales, small hills, and later on, even planets. My head was as large as the moon out past the farthest planet. The pulsating, spinning joy of the Farsinger tore me apart and then reassembled me. GT was there, and Veil, and so was I.

The Wave absorbed the radiant being of this alien life-form, and together they transformed into something completely different. The XTs changed their structures, and Farsinger altered her song. They formed into a long chain of interconnected notes that moved away with greater speed than either had known was possible. Their departure felt like a great suction through my mind, my soul. I screamed, and so did Wheeler.

When I awoke, we were lying in hospital beds side by side.

“What were you doing there, Errol?” was his first question, and I knew that GT was letting him be in charge.

“I don’t know, David. I just had an urge to come to Frisco. I wanted to see those lights.”

“Why were you in the park?”

“I saw you go there,” I lied. “I followed you, wondering if the light had something to do with the XTs.”

I was discharged in a few days. Nella had come up with Luna and Artie. They took me back home, and I told them the secret story.

David calls on me now and then. He’s suspicious at first, but then he transforms into my father, and we talk about the deep caverns of earth.

Someday soon I will join Wheeler in the search for undiscovered deposits of God. And late at night, he will transform into my father and we’ll laugh at the good times that never fade away.