Chapter 18

1

Trevor was shaken. Because the reality had hit him, and that reality was on a collision course with his own sanity. That he could not deny. What he could was the very proposal that if he voted nay, if he sought to become the sole dissenting voice in the vote that would send each candidate into the Green or Red box, that the council would look to eliminate his objection.

            He’d gotten home late Sunday afternoon. The council meeting was six and a half hours long. Much of that was the debate and lecture that helped to foment the real threat that was carbon dioxide: twice as dangerous as putting your lips around a tail pipe and sucking, Andy had said to genuine laughter. Barb was sitting in the kitchen, as she so often did. She was alone. She said Patty was down for a nap, that playing outside for most of the day had sapped him.

            “And you?”

            “And me what?” She only smiled. She looked crestfallen. He knew that was fear, and fear could be mean.

            “Anything?”

            She laughed. It was slight and feminine and somewhat inauthentic. “Radiologists don’t work Sunday. People don’t get cancer on Sundays.”

            He didn’t think it was funny. When she saw the earnestness in his eyes she only brushed his arm. “They’ll call, Trev. They will. They cannot sit on it. This is what they do, day in and day out. If they’ve found something, if they have, they’re most likely looking for the most polite way to tell me to spend as much time as I can with the…” She cleared her throat and now Trevor could see the mist in her eyes. And he could think of nothing but the way she looked walking toward him under the Redwoods, when their lives were truly just ahead of them. Before he was so callous. Because Lew always assumed he didn’t care about what he did to this family, that he took the loan from gangsters because he meant to forfeit their comfort as some sort of penance. “—with the kids,” she finished, and now she smiled, quickly wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Think of the difficult spot they’re in.”

            “Only you’d worry about the doctor giving you bad news,” he said. It was partly jest, but he realized over time, and especially since motherhood, that Barb was becoming more and more like Betty, that she was shedding the identity he’d given her when they first met, the revolutionary garb coming off like an old robe to reveal the renewal of a woman Lew would be rather proud to sire.

            Trevor went to the closet in their room. He moved aside some hanging shirts and pulled out an old shoebox, its lid slightly concaved. Inside he found a cassette and he looked at it for a moment; it wasn’t so much a treasure as it was a reminder. He wasn’t sure if Barb even knew he kept a copy. The sticker on the front read 1985. To Adam it might have been the Royals’ World Series win; to Barb a copy of Romancing the Stone.

            But it’s a reminder. Like the guys who keep the bullet pulled from their body if they survive. When you’re wounded, you want to remember. It’s human nature to grow from mistakes, but you never forget them. You can’t. And you shouldn’t. It was a strange thought. But today’s meeting made it credible. Because he learned one truth: behind closed doors people found the fattest shadows and took their privacy to stew in them. It was a rather poetic way of saying strangers’ candid lives proved their public personas were just characters, the world their stage, and the devilry so uncommon to your daily rendezvous reserved to the isolation of home sweet home. Grimwood had given them eight tapes. Eight.

            What Paul Holdren called eight distinct candidates. It was a no doubt strange nom de plume, but he figured it gave the very structure of Stage Two a standing political foundation, something legitimate. The Thief. The Adulterer. The Rapist. The Addict. The Conspirator. The Pedophile.

            “Whom do we elect first?” Paul had asked after having watched snippets of each tape. Trevor had felt sick to his stomach. Just to witness, beyond the elemental basis of the Reedy Creek experiment that had them investigating those with either terminal illnesses or as-of-yet undetected malignancies, the world of secrets laid bare left one’s imagination of inner corruption without the compromising hope that decency can exist. That it has to.

            “The pedophile,” Mary seethed.

            “Grimwood is obviously testing his own limits,” Paul answered her. “Salim al-Taloub is an asset of the council.”

            “An asset?” Mary said, asking just what Trevor had intended, feeling that pit in his gut deepen, feeling it splinter and splay. “He’s a pedophile. We saw what he did.” She gestured toward the television, its screen black now.

            “He minds an important ally of mine, of the council; one might even say he has immunity by association, but on this matter we can ignore him as a candidate. Some may break the law, despicably, but rise above it because of name or standing. Justice, like the intent of this council, can be arbitrary.”

            That wasn’t right, but how was any of this? Trevor had thought. Because he knew once Barb did receive the phone call, once she heard the doctor’s voice give her whatever prognosis, that her death sentence wasn’t conceivably the cancer but the potential of this council ever finding out. “Why do you keep going to Davenport?” Andy had asked him. The answer was none of his business, because once it was Reedy Creek would become even more dangerous.

            They voted on each target. Paul had taken the tape of Salim and a very underage boy (who could have been Adam, could have been any of his friends, Trevor mused) and pulled out the film until it unspooled in its entirety.

            Guilt had Trevor put the tape in his VHS. He’d gotten down on his knees. After what he’d watched and what he voted, he knew the coming events would transpire to the same effect that had left his family so undeniably broken. You are the Low Breed now, Trevor. You were ever since you took up Holdren’s offer and came here to Reedy Creek.

            He needed a reminder once and awhile. A reminder why he was so broken.

            Trevor pressed play.

2

It was inside the tall Victorian Gothic building in Cambridge: Memorial Hall at Harvard, built as a Unionist symbol and memorial to the north and its commitment to the abolitionist movement; it represented at its foundation the very virtuous pursuit for truth that had conceived of and propelled the debate that would answer: Is Man Good, or is Man a Blight? The title itself, borrowed from Rachel Carlson’s allegorical tract, was meant as a post-modern, quasi-religious affirmation that the hunt for meaning would be represented and perhaps decided. Woods versus Kramer; it had a specific courtroom dialectic, and he remembered Barb smiling when she saw it, when she saw the advertising and realized it would be nationally broadcast because two men, two up and coming celebrities in their respective fields, were going tet a tet in a no-holds-barred melee. The debate was inside Sanders Theater, the pulpits set beneath John La Farge’s stained-glass masterpiece “Athena Tying a Mourning Fillet”, the hall entombed itself in acoustic wood and the theater packed with students and cameras from CBS, as if night time viewers would elect to turn off Cheers to watch two egg heads.

            Kramer stood to the right and he began: “I think the spirit of environmentalism at its heart is inextricably tied to inductive thought. Francis Bacon is just as important to conservation and materialism as the EPA today, because he insisted on rooting out the Aristotelian traditions and sophistry of Greek philosophy, re-imagined and awakened in medieval thought by a Catholic reconciler in Thomas Aquinas hoping to convene pagan and Christian thought. Bacon wished to engage not in the learning of others or any established doctrine, but to discover ‘the knowledge of causes.’ The Royal Society was founded in 1660, whose motto laid bare Bacon’s dictum: Nullius in verba. Take no one’s word. Before Bacon, kings ruled by divine decree; his political philosophy helped to elect the era of what we call technocrats, those who would revolutionize civilization by, as Karl Popper states, achieving ‘a material self-liberation through knowledge.’ But if we’ve learned anything from science, it’s that our onward march through history has been one of self-perceived progress. We are more fortunate than our ancestors, and they their forebears. But progress is itself not without a cost. As industry created economic growth, and as fortune improved social mobility, families grew, and like eventual locusts we became not the inheritors of the earth but its destroyers. Taking from her what we needed and giving to her the charcoal smoke and choking gases of our creations.

            “Thomas Malthus predicted our unceasing population growth would be our undoing. He didn’t discredit Bacon’s optimism of man’s continued scientific progress, but believed that after a specific peak due to the short-term benefits of industrialization, man in his infinite pursuit of self-interest would tie his own noose. Mankind expands at a geometric rate, his subsistence arithmetically; like government, our own creation, our own species requires checks and balances, requires a regulatory affirmation that our population and food sources remain at a healthy stasis. Malthus was an ordained clergy man, and he understood how what he saw and postulated might sound to his congregation, so his combative argument for checks on population growth, for checks on the binding link between progress and prosperity and all the two entail, was pivoted by the existence of a benevolent God, who oversaw any sort of course correction as the natural solution, and thus enabled his premise to rest on religious stipulations. Our progress is tied to our consumption. And our consumption is the ceaseless depletion of food and resources. Nineteenth century economist William Stanley Jevons focused his efforts on our eventual economic demise due to the exhaustion of coal deposits. Economic prosperity, tied to any specific resource at any given time, like coal to Britons or oil to Americans, is finite because the resource cannot be reproduced or harbor greater yields, as a farm can agriculturally yield crops during each harvest. What man’s progress and enlightened ideas yield is destruction, and the less of something we have, the more we desire to get it back or from others, until the entire military industrial complex, the Cold War, will see us cannibalizing each other for energy and food because we function on the expectation that what we want, what we desire, is a fundamental right. That makes man, in his endless pursuit to be and remain master of the earth, a permanent blight on her ashamed brow.”

            There was applause in the hall. A thousand students, their percussive tattoos stippling the theater, muffling the sound equipment. Even as Trevor watched it now, even as he kneeled before the small television in his bedroom, so often ignored and sitting quiet in a house full of regrets, beamed at having been for that moment a hero for the movement. A goddamn icon. And even then, listening to that applause, he knew the man named Scott across from him was afraid that the standard had been set and he would not live up to it. That Trevor Kramer, the man who wrote The Population Project, the man who’d sold 250,000 copies of a hard cover behemoth, would leave this theater proving his answer that man was an enemy, in spite of the beauty he’d culled and created, the beauty so represented by the very building encapsulating their egos.

            Scott Woods stood at his own podium, staring out at the audience and then back at Trevor. Trevor watched now, that man, remembering how confident he’d felt in that moment. How sure this would be the difference for him.

            “I deal in facts. Your argument is sustained and undergirded by the Spaceship Earth model you so rely upon in your book, and William Jevons’ idea of scarcity. Though your words reveal in you a spectacular aptitude for verbal virtuosity, the facts say otherwise: From 1800 to 1850, censuses prove the English population more than doubled, following a similar trend in the 1901 census. Life expectancy increased from forty to seventy-five with this growth. Farming cash wages rose by 28%; wages in industry by more than 50%, all while prices fell and spending power grew due to our increased mechanization. What you call progress. Do you know what the preface in Malthus’s Essay states? That if his theory should ever be proven incorrect he would gladly, and these are his words, ‘retreat his present opinions and rejoice in the conviction of his error.’ This does not sound like the patron saint of Blight, but rather the words of a man who, incorrectly, sees in his short-term cause and effect findings that we may be eating ourselves out of existence and he fears of that eventuality. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx even argued against the notion of overpopulation because they saw in science something you are otherwise avoiding to stick to your thesis. They saw human ingenuity in progress, and even argued for capitalism, ironically, when confronting Jevons’ economic cynicism. Where you witness unending destruction, I see human ingenuity and the transformation of limits into something new, something innovative. We are not Mother Nature’s enemy; we are each other’s enemy. Not a Blight on the world but a Blight on our own relationships.

            “Consider this: in 1973 global oil production was 58.7 million barrels per day. Output rose by 9 million in 1979. But how could this be? We all remember the rations. OPEC’s standoff and the long lines at the pump. How could this be if we weren’t pillaging nature, because output grew substantially as prices fell? Because the shortages were manmade; in our hubris, we over-regulate and consider the imposed limits will only improve human psychology, when all we’ve done is immorally create price controls that sold goods, that sold products, for less than the market would have allowed. Explain to me why fairness has to always and exclusively punish the producers? Because they are the Blight? Because you see flames and smoke when you burn crude and you figure this somehow serves to scar the earth? Reagan lifted all domestic price controls and the price of oil fell to $18 per barrel only five years later. There were no more line-ups at the pump. No fist fights. The market can be more moral than the government, or do you perceive a green and pastoral wonderland to the east of the Berlin Wall? If your role here is to scorn us for our malcontent, then you’ve wasted your breath when the spirit of Communism betrays by its very essence any harmony we’re supposed to share with this planet. If you see Blight when you see progress, then perhaps the world would look better through an Iron Curtain.”

            The applause was louder. Exhilarating. Trevor watched himself for one moment there, standing on the stage, alone and angry and maybe even a little embarrassed. They both delivered bromides; his were idyllic, Woods’ factual and patriotic in a way Trevor wouldn’t be able to counter-argue without sufficient research. And he was certain the economist banked on that. He was. But that wasn’t the end. The end was his end. The end of the debate, that fucking gotcha, that was Trevor finally slithering back into the hole of anonymity until the world forgot about him. Or so he hoped. Because he found another sort of Blight, the type that broke every one of his fingers and would have killed his wife had Barb not called—

            “Lew. You old bastard,” he whispered, pressing stop just as the applause caromed around the theater, so many young minds expressing learning by their reaction to what they perceived to be right. He ejected the tape and looked at it a moment longer. Knowing it truly represented him; that catapulting shot to stardom, and the sudden but continuous downfall that was a result of one peaking on a fundamental lie. He took the tape downstairs, leaving the shoebox and its lid in the closet where it would most likely remain. He could hear Barb in the kitchen, could hear the sink running. He wasn’t sure if Adam was home. He knocked on the bedroom door.

            “Yuh.”

            “Lew, it’s me.”

            “Okay.”

            Trevor opened the door and stepped inside the old man’s bedroom. And he threw the VHS tape on the bed. It fell with a thud and rolled over twice, settling on the man’s ruffled blanket so that the date: 1985 stared upwards in great blue ink.

            “There it is. The final proposition declaring my failure for all to see. Have at it, Lew. Make me proud.”

            Lewis was sitting at his table; his room was comfortable and threadbare, with only the double bed, a nightstand with a lamp he remembered seeing next to Betty’s reading chair so many years ago, and that table by his closet and dresser, right now cluttered with photos and a large book the man was hunched over, and had been since he left in the morning to pick up the tapes of the candidates.

            “What?” He seemed genuinely surprised, and he only looked at the tape, making no gesture to pick it up. Something about this angered Trevor. The morning started with their bickering. It always did. And sometimes that led toward the sort of introspection that had him gauging his worth and understanding it really didn’t matter because he failed.

            “You wanted it for your project. I’m not sure what’s going through your head, Lew, I’m not, but if your intention is to tar and feather me to take away the heat on what you did to the Tercel, there it is. My fucking debate.”

            “Calm down, Trevor. Christ.” Lew stood up from his chair and his back creaked. “You always suspect the worse of me.”

            “Lew, you always give me your worst.”

            Lewis laughed, patted Trevor’s back and then sat on the bed. “I fucking hate you.” Still laughing. “You know that. From the moment I met you. From the moment you wouldn’t eat Betty’s roast.”

            “And you’ve never let me forget it.”

            “You stole my baby girl, Trev. If we’re not at each other’s throats, then there’s a balance in the universe that will have the Buddhists killing Muslims. Because shit ain’t right. But I didn’t ask for your tape because of how you messed up. It might sound funny to you, but…shit, I don’t even care. You told me my baby girl might be sick. I haven’t broken that trust, and I won’t, but it’s gotten me thinking about a lot of things. About my age. About what we leave, and in the end what happens, to you, to Barb, to me, it doesn’t amount to anything but what happens to Adam and Patty. Those two are our world. I think you knew that once. And I think I saw that man when I watched the debate. I didn’t understand a goddamn thing either of you were saying, and anybody who did might as well shit books, cause it was all gobble-di-do to me. Even if you think this is your biggest mistake,” and now he picked up the tape, shaking it for a moment as if to emphasize his point, “even if you think you can trace your fall to what happens on this tape, I see what happened as a result. I see a man who might have been guilty. I’ve read your book. I promised Barb I would, and though it’s something that would have had Betty slapping you red for your cynicism, I thought it was something a young guy would spit out before he ever truly saw the world, he ever truly experienced it. The debate took that guy, took that writer, and made him something different. I didn’t see you defeated, I saw you transformed. Because maybe you agreed with the other guy. Maybe not. But you didn’t agree with yourself, and I don’t think it was guilt or self-pity, but realization. Yes. There’s always that point when you realize you’re something you’re not. And for some time you might try to remain what you thought you were, but the truth is a hell of a lot stronger. It always is. Hell, maybe I’m just talking out of my ass. I just fucking crashed into a van. Maybe the whiplash concussed me or something.” Lew chuckled. “What I know is this debate, what you’re keeping on this tape, it brought me into this family again even if the motivations were impure. I don’t even think that matters. What matters is what we were, that bitterness I held onto for so long because of what I didn’t like about you, it couldn’t have changed to become this, me living here in your house with my two grandsons, if you hadn’t fucked up on CBS.” Now he laughed. Because it was that last jab. Not a knockout, but a tough enough punch to leave Trevor without a retort.

            Trevor could only exhale. He looked at the old guy. And he was old. Somehow even older now than he was just a few days ago. As if he’d taken on more years in just a matter of hours; or as if something heavy, some burden, still lay on his heart and it was consuming him. It was a strange thought, but somehow real.

            “Look at me talking your ear off.”

            “No. No, I appreciate it, Lew. I do. I would have never guessed, twenty years ago, that I might be sitting on the edge of your bed for a pep talk. I feel like I should offer the Black Panther salute and storm off. For old times.”

            “Okay Brother. Look, Reedy Creek is messed up. We both know that. Our minds are with Barb right now, understandably. My baby girl and your wife. A strange triangle but strong enough to make this family what it is today. And looking at these pictures, looking at what’s built us to this point, I don’t think I would have changed anything. Knowing how it all turned out. Would you?”

            Trevor looked down at the tape in Lew’s hands. “I would have won that debate.”

            “Happiness isn’t always at the end of what you can achieve.”

            “That’s deep. You write it?”

            “If I understood it then I know you didn’t.”

            “Touche.”

            “It doesn’t always have to be a fight. We may have started that way, but we’ve learned to tolerate one another. And I think that’s a win. Because you’re not this guy anymore,” he tapped the tape. “And I think Reedy Creek may be helping you to figure that out.” Lewis smiled and went back to his table, plopping the 1985 tape next to a stack of pictures.

3

“You okay, kiddo?”

            Adam was playing one of his Nintendo games. He’d shown it to Lew a few times, saying something or other about an elf in a green tunic going around killing monsters to save a princess. Or something. He didn’t quite get it. No matter how hard he tried to relate and be the cool one, kids and their gadgets were beyond him. Adam only slightly turned; he was sitting on his bed, playing the game on that old TV he got the boy, understanding he would need some sort of privacy or oasis in his room when all else in the home failed to give him any comfort. Adam didn’t say anything.

            Lew sat on the bed next to him. The mattress sank beneath him. “Which game is this again?”

            “Zelda.”

            “And what are you trying to do here?”

            Adam exhaled. “Trying to get the Master Sword. But these stupid wizards keep picking me off.”

            Lewis chuckled. “I’m not sure what any of that means. Look, Adam, I know you’re mad at me.”

            Adam paused the game. He didn’t turn to look at Lewis, he just stared forward at the frozen image on the screen.

            “I don’t blame you. I would be too.”

            “What’s happening to you, grampa?”

            Lewis understood the implications of that question. He knew where it was coming from, yet an answer wasn’t readily available. It wasn’t quite on the surface to be grasped at.

            “You had that pack of smokes. Then you hit Lazarus’s van. Everybody’s talking about it. Everybody. Saying you’re crazy, that you lost your marbles…and when I did want to see you, cause I was scared, grampa. Am scared. But when I wanted to see you, you flat out left me hanging. Danny saw it too, so it’s not just in my head.”

            Adam was crying. Lew saw it. Could hear it. He wanted to take the boy by the shoulder, give him something, anything, but he realized that might just make it worse. You can’t be honest with him. Completely honest. He wouldn’t understand. He didn’t understand. He wasn’t sure if it was real. Not yet. He just remembered the man in the fedora. Grimwood. He just remembered the first words he said when he finally spoke to him: “It is you. Isn’t it?” And he looked at the man’s eyes, under the brim of his hat, and they were the eyes of that man in the hospital, so long ago now, the man at the hospital the night Betty finally found peace. You thought then that the man was a doctor, but you never knew for sure.       

            “You asking me if I’m nuts?”

            “Yeah,” Adam nodded. “I kind of am.”

            Now Lew did rub the boy’s shoulder. “I’m old.”

            “That’s what mom says.”

            “Yeah. Well she’s right.”

            “Mom says you’re always thinking about grandma.”

            “And she’s right about that too.”

            Now Adam looked at grampa, his eyes glazed beneath that fine scrim of tears that were and always would remain a sign of love, and maybe calm as well. Maybe Lew had given Adam a little dose of calm. “I want you to be honest, grampa. I was with you. About everything. About Reedy Creek. Would you have done any of this if I didn’t show you the tapes?”

            “Adam…”

            “I need to know. Is this my fault? Mom can pass off what’s going on with you as old age. But I don’t buy it. I really don’t. That isn’t you. I don’t care how old it says you are on your driver’s license, cause you’re just, you’re like us boys, you can think like us and you’re cool like us. So I don’t believe it’s the years piling on…that just sounds like bullshit. Like one of those excuses people use when they expect it’s the easiest answer. I need to know if this is because I pulled you into the crazy. I showed you the tapes, I showed you the dead animals and the farmhouse…is this because of me?”

            Lew closed his eyes. He saw himself standing in that hospital; he saw himself holding a half-drunk coffee from the cafeteria, cold now, but he was still nursing it because it gave him something to do. Even while Betty was asleep he could still imagine the world with the both of them in it. He could still see his life as it remained with her by his side. Because she was still here. He had a feeling that comfort, that reliance, was at a close now. Because he felt something different at that moment, something outside himself. Maybe it was the universe giving him the composure he required to face the awful truth, but standing there, he felt so alone, so indescribably meaningless; the future is always a void, that’s just something you begin to understand as you get older. You can throw things at it, hope they grow into something usable and functional, you hope you find some utility in the years ahead, but for Lew at that moment, the future was just a void, just a darkness into which he was heading. It was not dissimilar to the inexplicable void into which Betty would soon find herself. And then the man in the surgical mask and cap came to him, his gown somehow pristine and lineless, his eyes stark and both cold and kind. Gentle and dangerous. Lew would remember that. He would never tell anybody, but he would remember (and maybe you would have dreams. Maybe some nights you would see this doctor again). The man pulled aside the mask and his mouth was almost leering: “Are you Lewis Forsmythe?” Lew only nodded his head, feeling his hands tremble, hoping to God he wouldn’t drop his coffee and stain this man’s spotless scrubs. “I’m so sorry, sir, but your wife just passed.” But now he did drop the coffee. Or he thought he did. He wasn’t sure. The world fell away from him; he stood in spot as reality pulled away in one effortless vacuum, and it was only the doctor standing there, kind eyes but cold, studying him: “She said she loves you. You and Barb and Adam. She wants you to mind them, sir.” The man only brushed Lew’s arm, and when he gathered his wits about him, when he truly realized the weight of that conversation, he ran to her room, he ran to Betty and found her the way a part of him wished to find her every time he came to that hospital: at peace.

            “Of course not,” Lew finally said, but he realized there was some truth there. He realized what Adam was feeling wasn’t guilt as much as it was fear and that deranged hatred of this place, of Reedy Creek, that characterized them both and entwined them. “I’m damn happy you showed me. Wait, you know what…I did smoke Lazarus because of the tapes. If I’m going to be honest, Adam, I might as well lay bare why I’d even do it. That hippie is above the law here. You sometimes watch TV shows and you see bad people who have weird relationships with the police; it’s because you sometimes have to keep your hand in the cookie jar before dinner. If you’re going to have any sort of law and order, you have to swim in the deep end and play poker with chaos.”

            “Grampa?”

            Lewis smiled. It was so kind and grandfatherly, something he’d grown rather fond of. “When I was a cop, on the beat,” he laughed, “I kept my own Lazarus because he filled a void. Every town has its upstanding citizens and its criminals. If you know the criminals, that void’s been filled and you can hope you have some control over it. That’s what’s happening here. The Reedy Creek PD has Lazarus on some kind of leash. And that angered me cause of what I saw on those tapes. So I thought I’d do something about it. If I were put on the stand about the accident, I’d say I was off my pills. But you know I don’t take any beyond the Glucosamine and Vitamin D’s. I’d claim old age when in reality it was me trying to do something. Just like you were trying to help. But you’ve gotta realize, the world of adults, it can be messed up. The choices we make to try and make the world a better place for you, it means inviting opportunities of ill will. Guys like Lazarus,” (Henry) “for example.”

            “So you’re not going crazy? You were scrapbookin’ today cause you enjoy it?” Adam smiled now. It was his first genuine smile, and Lew no doubt believed the boy would return to his video game and hopefully all would be well. Do you really believe that? It was Betty’s voice, and it was sad. So sad. He could only think of the way she looked on that bed after she was gone, after those machines stopped living for her.

             Not Barb, Betty, not our baby girl, too.

            “I’ve always been crazy. Your dad drives me nuts. But believe it or not, kiddo, he’s a good man. This place is making him that way, I think. You make mistakes so you can learn from them.”

            “Yeah. We made the mistake of playing gumshoe for that last part of the summer. And for what?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “We wasted a lot of efforts on that farmhouse, grampa. I think we realized we were making it into something bigger than it is, some adventure we’d always talk about as we got older. But life’s not like that, right? You’re a kid, you have fun, and then you get older and you have responsibilities.”

            “Oh, you can still have a whole lot of fun when you’re old. People sometimes just think you’re crazy when you do. So I say enjoy it while you’re young. Cause some folks get insecurities that make fun a lot harder to be had.” He ruffled Adam’s hair.

            Please go back, Lew. For me. Please. It doesn’t have to be this way.

            It’s not any way yet, Bets. It’s not. Right now it’s just an idea. A pipe dream.

            “You want me to take you to school tomorrow? Pick up the Jew, Pug, and Croak? Make a morning of it?”

            Adam’s smile beamed. “Isn’t your car bye bye, you old bastard?” The boy laughed. Lew loved the sound of that laugh.

            “Good point. Couldn’t very well carry you four, especially with Pug taking up the rear and giving me scoliosis. I’ll take mom’s car. Might be nice to check out the cute girls. I’m old, but I ain’t blind.”

            Adam laughed until there were tears in his eyes. Happy tears. Not sad ones. No, the sad ones would come later.

4

“Wake up. Wake up.”

            He heard somebody snapping. Ned slowly opened his eyes. His head was groggy and his lower back killed. He was still sitting against the furnace, on the cold concrete floor. His hand was still cuffed to the gas line; he knew trying to wrench it free could conceivably break the valve and stream natural gas into his face, and who knew what kind of booby traps were set as a result of that attempt at heroism?

            “Are you hungry?”

            He was. Even rousing from an uncomfortable nap reminded him that as he’d fallen in and out of sleep, staring at the empty plate, at what was once filled with bacon and eggs, delectable treats he’d finally relented to eat in spite of his greater principles that meant to tell Norris Serkis to fuck himself. No, sometimes the stomach ruled the mind. And this was one of those instances.

            Norris was crouched down in front of him, far enough away so that if he reached out, testing the range of his cuffs, he would not be able to touch him. “You drugged me…” It was a mutter. It sounded nearly incoherent, and he realized he hadn’t spoken a word in hours. When he did finally fall asleep, there were still thick beams of sunlight scattered about the basement floor, lighting motes of dust and convincing Ned that even though he was down here, a prisoner, a world still lived on above him where all was still privy to the light. Now it was dark. Those spots on the floor were indigo now, tattoos of moonlight perhaps. Norris was huddled under a light bulb; it lit his face into cragged shadows, and he only stared concernedly at Ned, gauging him.

            “I considered it was the more humane route. I had a baseball bat in my closet. For some time I thought about smashing you in the back of the head. But there were variables I could not account for: your blood, and your recovery. If I hit you too hard, I might break your neck, or the contusion might give you brain injuries. A conversation, then, would be far too difficult and frustrating.”

            “You mother…muh—motherfucker…” Ned whispered, clenching his fists, feeling the tingle in his legs that was restlessness.

            “There’s no need to be crass, officer. Are you hungry?”

            “You’ll just drug me again.”

            Norris smiled. Under that light, that swinging bulb, his eyes screamed madness at him, and his smile faded beneath the splintered shadow of his nose, marring his unusually white teeth. “I haven’t the need for that. Surely you have other things to say. More helpful things. Are you hungry?”

            “I’m starving you cocksucker…”

            Norris’s smile widened. “I’m not quite sure if you’re being derogatory, officer, especially in light of our evening and its intentions. You followed me for most of the day yesterday, did you not? After meeting with your friend the reporter. Cole Moore. You either followed me because you expected you might end up in my home with a cock in your mouth, or you followed me because you didn’t quite like the answers you received when you came to my door in uniform, accusing me of murder before I’d gotten a chance to have my morning coffee. Have you ever been called a faggot before, Ned?”

            Ned looked away.

            “As a doctor I can wilfully extend to you the latent dangers of a lifestyle that would lead one to go from the bar to a stranger’s home and expect those few hours of fun might not mean anything in the long term. I speak not of you and that pretty little thing who so wanted your accompaniment last night. No, Ned, I speak of the concessions you made while tailing me that might presume and hope I would stick something in your tail. Yes, a little word play. Always fun, isn’t it?” Norris leaned forward. “I’ve wanted to ask men of your persuasion this question for some time. I know you figured your sexuality wasn’t relevant, or even apparent. But I am a spectacular read of people, Ned, I am. I didn’t need you to turn down the pharmacist’s assistant at the bar, nor did I require to catch your eye flirting when I opened my door to you yesterday morning. Even as you accused me of something, I can bet right now with full confidence had I convinced you of any suggestive mutual attraction, you would have probably dropped your line of questioning to join me for coffee. Wouldn’t you, Friend of Dorothy?”

            “I played you,” Ned said, still looking to the side, still keeping the doctor out of his sight line. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

            “Yes, maybe so. Or maybe what you feel, whether it’s your own refusal to admit certain truths, to yourself, to others, isn’t because you’re particularly ashamed of who you are, what you are, but scared of the risks.”

            “What’s your question?”

            “If you knew of a plague without cure, a plague transmitted without prejudice, would you consider the risk of going home with a stranger, a strange man willing to accede to your odd sexual proclivities, outweighs the potential for incurable sickness?”

            “Fuck you.”

            “Yes, a typical answer, I’m sure. Have you heard of Gaetan Dugas? Patient Zero, they’ve called him. He worked with the inevitability of a plan. A natural plan. Whether or not he was aware of it. A borderless man, really, swept into the skies on Air Canada flights from here to there, Africa to America, a typhoid Mary of the sorts bringing with him the inclination for unconscionable slaughter. A reputable Adonis, but a host for mayhem, carrying inside him the seed for your destruction, and here you are, having gone home with a stranger so willing to lay aside any qualms of indecency for just the sake of a little fun, and perhaps you too, like Dugas, would carry in you that same seed until the exponential spread of a disease turns your kind into a paragraph in a history book. Here temporarily, a biological abnormality. Death fascinates me, Ned Stevenson, as it must you if you’re willing to risk not just your life and limb, but your kind’s for what you considered might have been a little play time.”

            Ned looked up at Norris. He’d heard of Gaetan Dugas. The flight attendant. Back home in Michigan, that name might not have meant much but the disease he carried did: AIDS. And maybe that was partly the muffle on his own admission. Not what his mother might think. Not what his fellow deputies might think. But rather the tactical fear that emotes itself through hate as a result of what Norris called the plague. That was enough to provide a sizable muffle. Because fear provided a sizable hammer, and the fear of something very real but very invisible like AIDS was enough to provoke the blind swing.

            “I quite admire Gaetan Dugas. But his perspective was far too narrow.”

            “Are you going to kill me like you killed Clayton Miller?” Ned whispered. It was really all he could muster.

            Norris had already settled on one knee, his clean shoe perched beside the tape recorder Ned had listened to over a dozen times as he watched the sun beams stipple the floor in a constant stream of the sun’s gradual arc in the sky. “Who is Cole Moore?”

            “Writer at the Post. Did you kill Clayton Miller? Did you kill Colin Perkins? Did you kill Robert Wilson? I’d imagine you might have sheared Wilson’s brakes…cut them just enough so that when he started pumping them the fray snapped. Are you killing people because they’re sick?” He spat out each question with a definitive edge, an accusatory bite he saw marked in Norris’s eyes after each name.

            “You’ve been busy, Ned Stevenson. Haven’t you?”

            “What is the council doing here…doing in Reedy Creek? I’d imagine you didn’t just bring me down here to interrogate me. I feel like you’re a balloon ready to pop and you need to let out a little air.”

            “Maybe you’re right, Ned. Maybe you are. But there are so many questions being thrown, it’s hard to keep straight what is truly being said. Wouldn’t you agree?

            Ned didn’t say anything.

            “We’ve already established that you’re hungry. So am I. I plan on making Veal Orloff tonight. Do you like veal?”

            “Did you kill Clayton Miller, leave the needle in his arm and leave his door unlocked?”

            “Did you ever meet Clayton Miller?”

            Ned only shook his head. He wasn’t sure why that mattered.

            “Then you’ve created an ideal version of what he could have been, and not what he was. That’s the problem with the judgment of an act without having learned the merits of intent.”

            “Are you saying he deserved to die?”

            “Nobody deserves to die, but nature decrees it inevitable. Nature sometimes works far too slow. Do you think one who is terribly sick, far too weak to take care of himself and thus a burden on the State, is entitled to, both legally and morally, endure unending pain because nature hasn’t yet closed his eyes for good?”

            “That sounds like an excuse.”

            “It sounds like compassion. It does. Sometimes you have to square the circle because what’s supposed to happen isn’t right. Or are you confined in your thinking? It would be quite hypocritical considering your penchant for homosexuality, would it not? That act requires the confirmation of one thinking outside the box.”

            “Did you murder Clayton Miller?”

            “I helped Clayton Miller. I only did what I’d hope somebody would do for me under similar conditions.”

            “Did you murder him?” Ned lunged forward and the cuffs clinked against the gas line. Moving so fast nearly made him black out, but he didn’t care. He was here, down here in chains, because he was onto something he should not have been. He knew that, and he knew Norris knew that.

            Norris was startled and fell back. Ned could tell this was a reaction in which the man had very little practice, and it angered him; he could see the fury in the man’s eyes, could see the seething rage lit in his beaded pupils. “He would not have called me if he didn’t want to die. Suffering is a prerequisite for making that choice, Ned. And you know nothing of suffering.”

            “Is that why I’m down here? To suffer?”

            Now the doctor laughed. Ned couldn’t tell if it was genuine or just another of the man’s tactics. “I would like to make dinner now, Ned. I think we both deserve a bite to eat. The council meeting took a lot out of me today. It’s funny how coincidences work, isn’t it? We were just discussing that pretty little thing who works at the General. Sarah Darling. Well, we watched video of her today at our meeting. She’s a bad girl, Ned. It was only appropriate you should have denied her requests last night. Every choice made in one’s life causes an event in an entire web of actions, and that web is so interconnected that if one were to pluck a string down here, the vibrations would affect you way up here.” Norris stood up, glowering down at Ned now as his legs splayed out toward the empty plate and glass, and the vase of flowers. The tape recorder was gone. “Suffering is a relative term, Ned. It requires a basis of comparison, and for you that basis rests on the laurel of your freedom. Something you’ve taken for granted until it was snatched away at the sip of red wine. I can see you are fond of Cole Moore. I do not believe that is his name. I’ve answered your question, no matter how rude, and I would like an answer to mine. Who is Cole Moore and why does he have you following me? It isn’t worth it to plead ignorance. Not here. Have you read Konrad Heiden? I doubt it. You didn’t know who Gore Vidal was. Heiden wrote an excellent article for LIFE a few years after World War II, when the pieces were being picked up of such terrible atrocities in Europe and Soviet Russia. He wrote about the forced confession of Nazi propagandist Hans Fritzsche in ‘Why They Confess’, in which he compared the man’s treatment by the Soviets to his treatment by the good guys in Nurnburg. The west, the Allies. The good guys brutalized him during his captivity and the Soviets didn’t. They did not overstep the boundaries of corporeal punishment. No Gestapo methods. Heiden stated that Fritzsche admitted, after his collapse, ‘that hope is stronger than fear. Therefore hope is more willing to make concessions.’”

            “So you’re giving me hope?”

            “I’m giving you Veal Orloff. The rest is up to you, Ned Stevenson.”