A Dark Matter (27 page)

“I was waiting for you to come back, so I could ask you.”

“I’ll go along with whatever you say. As long as you say the right thing.”

I gave him a look of exasperation. “I hate to say it, but I want to take the car.”

“You said the right thing. Let’s get going.”

I said, “All right,” and realized that I could not simply walk off. The family behind me was wrangling again, so I asked the people ahead of me if they were getting on the flight to Milwaukee.

The man of the first couple said, “No, Green Bay.”

The woman of the second couple said, “Terre Haute. Why?”

The man who resembled a retired soldier smiled and said, “I’m going a lot farther than these other people.”

I asked if he were changing planes in Milwaukee.

“St. Louis.”

I turned around to face the couple. They must have weighed a total of at least seven hundred pounds, and they had big, grouchy faces. Their children were waddling in circles, whining. The couple saw me looking at them from a foot away and fell silent in wondering amazement. No one ever talked to them, I realized.

“I’ll make this brief,” I said. “Are you traveling to, or changing planes in, Milwaukee?”

“Are we what?” asked the wife.

“No,” said her husband.

“No
what?”
she asked him. You don’t tell him our. He didn’t. He doesn’t. You don’t, you always, you never.

Don and I walked away from the squabbling couple, through the wide empty space, and outside to the parking lot.

“I’m almost tempted to say …” Olson began, and I told him not to.

Once we got on the long, straight highway to Milwaukee, Olson switched on the radio and tuned it to Newsradio 620 WTMJ, the Milwaukee NBC affiliate, just then and for the next two hours broadcasting
Midday with Joe Ruddler
, a call-in show that very few people called in to, because the host, Mr. Ruddler, formerly a sports newscaster in Millhaven, Illinois, much preferred talking to listening. (Ruddler also fancied SHOUTING, BELLOWING, and RANTING. He liked to refer to his career as a television sportscaster as “When my name was in lights” or “When I was in the BIG LEAGUES.”) Don had learned that attending to such programs in his off-hours, or while in transit, provided a bottomless well of local information that often proved useful to him during his residencies in the communities where he plied his unusual trade. Mallon, he said, had done the same.

Joe Ruddler was outraged about his phone bill. On his landline, he had made only five calls, for which the total cost was twenty-two cents. Yet his bill was for the amount of thirty-two dollars and seven cents. How did these CLOWNS manage a trick like that?? Joe Ruddler’s outrage flowed out from a self-replenishing fountain.

When we were about forty miles from Milwaukee, Ruddler dialed his voice way down and said, “We just got some grim news here, friends, and I want to take the liberty of sharing it with you. I’m jumping the gun on the official announcement, but to an old broadcaster like myself the news is news, and ought to be reported straight and true in a timely fashion, not sifted and filleted and spun this way and that until black turns into white and vicey-versy.”

“No,” I said. “It can’t be.”

“Can’t be what?”

“So pardon me for shaking up your day, my friends, forgive me if you can for bringing Mr. Death into our conversation here. We’d prefer to keep him out, I know, but when Mr. Death walks into the room, people tend to give him all their attention, because our Mr. Death is ONE GOSH-DARNED SERIOUS FELLOW. Well, prepare to pay attention, folks.

“About twenty minutes ago, a plane fell out of the sky and crash-landed on a farmer’s field near the little hamlet of Wales, not far from highway I-94. There were no survivors, at least no OBVIOUS ones.”

“No, no,” Don said, shaking his head. “This is …”

I shushed him.

“EZ Flite Air Flight 202, on its regular journey between Madison and our fair city, BIT THE DUST, you could say, AUGURED IN, as the fly boys once had it, killing everyone on board, passengers and crew alike. They add up, ladies and gentlemen, to seventeen souls.”

Don moaned and put his face in his hands.

“There have been BIGGER air crashes, killing MORE souls, but that’s not relevant. Here we have a genuine opportunity for thought, for philosophy, and I think we ought to SEIZE it. Now think of this—seventeen people, turned into crispy critters, bones broken, bodies all smashed up—why THEM? Huh? Right? Are you HEARING me? These people DIED TOGETHER. My question to you is, did anything unite them BEFORE they met their fates? Did they have ANYTHING IN COMMON? Because they sure do now! If you were to look back into those seventeen fragile human lives, really look, turn a magnifying glass on them, a MICROSCOPE, do you think you’d see some common threads? You bet you would! Jenny knew Jackie in grade school, Jackie used to babysit for Johnnie, Johnnie owed a lot of money to Joe. There’d be a TON of that. But go deeper.

“There is another side to this question. Fourteen passengers died, and three crew members. But SIXTEEN tickets were booked for that flight, and TWO of them were never paid for. TWO PEOPLE decided no thanks, I’m not gonna GET on good old Flight 202 from Dane County Regional Airport to Mitchell Field, thanks anyhow, but no. They were GOING to take that flight, but they CHANGED THEIR MINDS, both of em. Why? I wanna know, I really do. WHY? Huh, right?”

I gave Olson an uneasy, unhappy look and found the same thing coming back at me.

“The question is, what does this MEAN? We’re allowed to think about MEANING, aren’t we?”

“I’m pulling over,” I said. “I can’t take this anymore. My hands are shaking, and it feels like my guts are, too.” I drove the car into the breakdown lane, turned it off, and slumped down in my seat.

Joe Ruddler roared on. “Because let me tell you this, the truth as I see it is THE TRUTH, period. Full stop. Take my word for it, heck, you can take that to the bank. JOE RUDDLER DOES NOT LIE TO YOU, folks. He CAN’T. Joe Ruddler happens to be too darn simple-minded to do anything but speak the TRUTH, and he’s been that cotton-pickin’ way his whole durn LIFE! That’s what he DOES, he tells THE COTTON-PICKIN’ TRUTH! Yowza!

“And this is what I’m here to tell you, my friends. Those two folks that backed away from EZ Flite Air 202 have a DESTINY. Yes, they DO! They were SAVED FOR A PURPOSE. In all LIKELIHOOD, they just suppose they got lucky. Yes, they DID, they SURE did, and do you know why? The reason they got LUCKY is because—”

“Is that,” I whispered.

“—they have a DESTINY! Only one thing in the world is more POWERFUL than the possession of a DESTINY. That one thing is MEANING. There is MEANING in their lives, they are wrapped in a MEANING!”

Unable to bear this stuff a moment longer, I struck a button, and the radio went dead.

“Am I in possession of a destiny?” Olson twitched on his seat, as if he had been prodded or poked. “Oh, Christ, look at that.”

He jabbed his index finger at the right-hand edge of the windshield, and when I shifted my gaze to look out, I saw for the first time what should have been apparent for at least a couple of minutes, and would have been, had we not been so claimed by loudmouthed Joe Ruddler. Miles away in a distant field, a narrow column of dense black smoke coiled up into the air, widening out as it rose.

“OmyGod,” Olson said.

“Oh, my God,” I said, a moment behind him. “Oh, Jesus.”

“How many people did he say?”

“Seventeen, I think. Which includes three crew.”

“Oh. Oh. This is terrible. Did we see any of them, do you think?”

“Not at the ticket counter. Though some of those people way ahead of me must have been … I wonder if those two girls … And that guy who was going bald …”

“Lee, I can’t look at that smoke anymore. All right?”

“I feel sick.”

“Drive away. Let’s get out of here.”

I followed orders, and we fled.

Fifteen minutes later, Olson asked, “Feeling better now?”

“Yeah. I am. Weird, but better.”

“Same here. Weird but better.”

“Relieved.”

“Really
relieved.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You too, huh?”

“It’s like the reverse of survivor guilt.”

“Survivor euphoria.”

“Survivor bliss.”

“Hah!”

“Jesus, man, we could be lying dead back there. Or smashed up, or
burned
up into, what did he say, crispy critters?”

“We almost were.
So
close.”

“Missed us by fuckin’ inches.”

“By millimeters.”

Don punched the dashboard, then planted his hands on the roof and pushed up. “Whoa. Is it okay to feel like this?”

“Sure! We’re not dead!”

“Those seventeen poor sons a bitches are all dead, and we’re still alive!”

“Exactly. Yep. That’s it, exactly.”

“Being alive feels pretty fuckin’ good, doesn’t it?”

“Being alive is great,” I said, with the feeling of uttering a profound but little-known truth. “Just
… great
. And we owe it all to that guy. If he
was
a guy. Maybe he was some kind of angel.”

“Your angel, anyhow.”

I gave him a questioning look.

“What do we know about him? Two things. He knew who you were, and he didn’t want you to die in an airplane crash.”

“So he was my guardian angel?”

“One way or another, yeah! For sure! Hey—remember what you were saying about a woman Hayward never got to kill because
he
was killed? Or her child, or her grandchild? A ripple effect?”

I nodded.

“That talk-show guy, Joe Ruddler, was yelling about destiny. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“Did that guy ask if you were on Flight 202?”

“I think so. Sure, he did. Hold on. No, he just came up and told me he had a precognition that if I took Flight 202, the consequences would be terrible.”

“So he already knew what flight you were on.”

I slumped a bit. Perhaps after all I would be required to be in possession of a destiny.

“One way or another, it’s about you, Harwell. Face it.”

I wished Olson had not mentioned my speculations. Most of my joyousness at still being alive had evaporated, though I had a vivid memory of its taste.

“I’m going to read my copy of
Vanity Fair
right now,” Olson said.

He leaned over the back of the seat, fished around in his bag until he had dug out the magazine he had purchased in the airport, and thumped himself down again while he riffled through its pages. “Beautiful ads in this thing,” he said, and spoke no more until we reached the exit for downtown Milwaukee, where he told me to get off the highway and drive to the Pfister.

“I should have known,” I said. “You guys think there’s only one hotel in Milwaukee.”

“My surprise isn’t a guy,” Olson said. “When you get to the hotel, go into the lot.”

After Don had made a call from one of the phones behind the concierge desk, we took adjacent armchairs in the Pfister’s lobby and watched clusters of people come down the hallway from the elevators to the newer, Tower part of the hotel complex, descend the lobby steps, and gather before the long front desk. They were usually in families. Sometimes small groups of men bunched up as they registered, punching their friends’ shoulders and laughing open-mouthed at jokes.

“They’re all doing something together,” Don said. “And they came here to do it. Are they in some association, some club? Or do they all work for the same company?”

“There sure are a lot of them,” I said. “Are we waiting for this surprise of yours to come down here? Why don’t you tell me who it is?”

“Because that would spoil the surprise. We’re waiting for someone to leave.”

“So we can follow this person. This woman.”

“Nope. Completely, hopelessly wrong. Why don’t you just wait?”

I crossed my legs, canted sideways, and leaned on the chair’s armrest. If I had to, I could have waited there forever. Whenever we got hungry or thirsty, we could order sandwiches and drinks from wandering waiters. The Pfister was a gracious old grande dame. The studly concierge wore a cavalier’s pointed mustache, and the composed and deferential registration clerks would have looked at home behind the desk at the Savoy. Only the sport shirts, khakis, and boat shoes of the guests located the lobby in its time and place.