A Dark Matter (41 page)

The world looked
wrong
. No cars swept down Memorial Drive, no joggers or runners moved along the path, the ducks cowered frozen under the abrupt angle of their wings, and what he could see of the city looked dead. The stop signs all glowed red. Out before him, the entire lake had turned the flat dark blue of a bruise.

The thought of sailing away, of escaping, brought with it the memory of unhooking a Sunfish from a private dock and voyaging out in search of his father.

As if a window in space had flown open, the raucous uproar of the floating party blasted toward him as if from thirty feet away: the terrible scream-like laughter, the blaring voice with its mystifying, aggressive statement. The second the speaker had trumpeted his message, the whole thing was cut off again, as if the window had blown shut, or as if a giant radio had suddenly lost the signal from the Party Channel. What followed was not pure silence, but silence threaded with two voices. Although he could not make out the words they were speaking, the voices seemed familiar to him, more than familiar, as dear as the voices of tutelary spirits from his childhood. Long before he identified these voices, he understood that he knew them intimately, and that at this stage in his life, nothing they said could be pointless or unnecessary. That they had returned meant that they had returned
for him
, that they had
sought him out
. He needed to hear what they were saying.

Then the dog stepped forward, and the dying sun turned rusty, and the deeper of the two voices could be heard to say,
Don’t you think …
(indistinct muttering)
… think we need …?
To which the second voice replied,
… I need what you need …

Great movements as of iron walls sliding forward and huge sections of concrete blocks fitting perfectly into place achieved intricate mental alignment, and he knew who was talking, out there on the lake. The first voice belonged to Spencer Mallon, and the second voice was Donald “Dilly” Olson’s.

He’s somewhere new
, Mallon said.

We are what he needs
, said the Dilly-voice.

Without pausing to think for any longer than it took to visualize the actions, Boatman unwound the rope from the staple, stepped from the dock into the boat, and pushed himself away. He saw himself do it, then he did it, step by step, with no regard for the consequences. Just as he was about to drift to a dead stop, the one and only breeze in the strange little world around him puffed out the yellow spinnaker and, astonishingly to Boats, spun the boat out into the lake.

It wasn’t that he was a terrible sailor, for he was good enough to stay upright and get where he wanted to go, and he knew all the basics, but he now labored under two great handicaps. His feelings about his father had kept him from loving sailboats and sailing, so his instincts were crude and sometimes faulty; and he had never been out in a boat equipped with only a spinnaker. As far as he knew, neither had anyone else, at least by choice. Losing the mainsail made the whole enterprise trickier, more difficult by an exponential factor. A spinnaker was an extra sail that let you go faster downwind, and it was not rigged or positioned to do the job of the mainsail.

He had to steer using both the rudder and the spinnaker pole, but first he had to trim the sail, an impossible task when there was no wind. Upon the instant a nice breeze struck up, and he had to scramble to hook up the halyard and sheets to the three corners, and while he tugged at the sheets, the boat listed and hawed, circling around on itself so violently it nearly dipped the deck into the lake. It came to him that three people were really needed, one to steer, one to trim, and one to handle the pole. One guy alone had to battle to maintain a barely minimal level of control. By the time Boats was leaning back and pulling on his lines, the marina had disappeared, and he had no idea where he had drifted. The air had grown bluer and bluer, though it was still transparent. The sun had vanished, and the water looked almost black.

Abruptly, the party noises blared out at him from around what would have been a corner, had corners existed on lakes. The screaming woman, the shouting madman, the tumult of jabbering voices: he welcomed their return. He considered them a summons, a noisy call to arms. As a fresh wind filled the sail, he pulled in the sheet, and like a greyhound leaping from the gate, the boat took off in the direction of the invisible party. In moments, the din ceased, permitting two familiar voices to furl through the silence. He caught their intonations and the cadences of their phrases, but not their words.

Then he saw a length of sandy beach ending at a line of trees. It looked like a cartoon of an island. A dark fog floated like a low cloud through the tree trunks and along the beginning of the sand. Unless he acted quickly, he was going to run aground and do irreparable damage to the boat. Boats thrust at the pole and hauled on the tiller, and the boat swung sideways to the wind. The yellow sail collapsed. Everything stopped moving.

Over the drumming of his heartbeat, Boats heard Spencer Mallon say,
The tiger IS the lady, and the lady IS the tiger, and that’s the part that nobody …

Understands? Thinks about?

Boatman slid into the water. His skin went numb and shriveled, and he felt his penis retract. He touched down on a squirmy, slimy substance like rotting weeds that wrapped about his ankles and burned the soles of his feet. Only great effort extracted his feet from the grip of the weeds, and he had to repeat the effort with each step as he moved, guiding the boat toward the beach and the gliding fog. When the keel rasped along the bottom, he pulled himself free of the weeds, stepped up onto sand, and moved to the front of the boat and dragged it three-fourths of the way out of the water.

Boats was almost certain the voices had come to him from within the woods. Subtle low sounds that easily could have been the voices pitched at a lower volume continued to drift out from between the trees.

As soon as he moved forward over the sand, the low-lying fog swept over and engulfed him, obliterating everything before him. He cried out, “SPENCER! SPENCER MALLON! HELP ME!”

No voice came to him, and he stumbled forward, his mood falling with hideous speed from expectancy into despair. He had been lured to this part of the shore, which must have been an island because it certainly did not exist anywhere on the shoreline of Lake Michigan between Milwaukee and Chicago, no, it did not. The world had turned sour and dead, and the dead world had captured him within it. His arms outstretched, he took a step forward, then another.

Knowing it was useless, he cried out, “MALLON? CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

The fog chilled his skin and threaded into his nose and mouth. He had never felt more lost in his life. What had happened to him?

Ever since the insane voices had come across the water, the world around him had warped and darkened. Grass that was not grass died at his footstep, the lake became a giant bruise, the sun cooled and turned the color of rust, one of the awful dogs was merely an unliving animated thing. The darkening world had coaxed him into a boat without a mainsail and blown him to its wretched heart, this maybe-island where he could see nothing because of fog that smelled like ammonia and tasted like chlorine when it trickled down his throat.

He told himself to keep moving, at least. Groping with his hands, coughing, Boats stepped forward and felt his fingers touch the tree bark. He was a fool, and he had come to the end of the line. That he had stolen one of his father’s boats seemed like part of the cruel joke.

The unmistakable timbre of Spencer Mallon’s voice came to him from deeper in the woods, and he swung toward it. A thick branch scraped his face, and a fistful of twigs dug into his hair. Boats forced himself not to scream, though screaming was what he most felt like doing. While he fingered his hair free of the twigs, he could hear Mallon going on, obviously conversing. Holding his hands about his head like a cage, he took small steps toward the unspooling voice. He squinted through his burning eyes and saw only the fog’s heavy wool.

Mallon’s voice said,
… picked up that severed hand and threw it into the corner … dog … carried the hand outside, the wounded man’s wrist … having a drink from a glass …

“Sticky with his own blood!” Boats shouted, remembering what his hero had said in the downstairs room of the Italian restaurant. “The glass was sticky with his own blood!”

The scene in the lower room had come back to him complete and entire, as if fixed beneath a bell jar. He could see vulpine, ridiculously handsome Mallon at his table, flanked by those gorgeous women. As Boats looked on in the clarity of returned memory, Mallon snapped his head to the left and squinted at something visible only to him: a figure that had flashed into being and almost immediately disappeared.

Boats said, “You saw one of the dog-things, didn’t you?”

Dilly’s voice floated toward him from between distant trees that seemed to clothe themselves in the fog, thinning its substance as theirs increased.

… what he needs, what we all needed, what we need now …

“DILLY!” Boats shouted. “MAN, YOU TWO ARE EXACTLY WHAT I NEED!”

… Sticky with his own blood, kiddo … while the dog tore that hand to shreds …

Boatman’s eyes still stung, and his throat felt raw from the fog he had swallowed. He could see fog twining around the stout trees before him, hanging between them like spider webs, thinning out as he moved deeper into the woods.

… shreds … knuckle and gristle … dripping down the black muzzle …

Boats felt himself gripped by two contradictory, utterly paradoxical feeling-states. He was elated, nearly joyous; and he felt like vomiting. All his elation seemed mocked by some underlying falsity, a cynical darkness momentarily epitomized by the image of a mutilated human hand dripping blood from a terrible muzzle.

“HEY! I’M HERE!” Boats shouted, wondering why they seemed not to hear him. Whipped by thin, low-lying branches, he took two steps forward, and had to stop moving, open his mouth, and bend over. His stomach convulsed, but nothing came up. It was the poisonous fog, he thought (and immediately said to himself,
no, it wasn’t, fog isn’t poisonous, and it doesn’t make you want to puke)
. His nausea passed.

… this foolhardy young idiot
, said the Mallon-voice
…. wisdom, some of it just came through
.

“No,” Boats said, “that’s not what you meant.”

Violence is woven right into the fabric of our time …

Birth is violence
.

“The divine sparks yearn to be reunited,” Boats quoted. He ducked beneath branches and the thinning fog. “That’s right, too, isn’t it?”

Mild light, tinted a faint blue, filled a clearing about twenty yards through the woods. In that clearing, visible only in the flashes granted by the intervening trees, moved a man with blond hair who was saying,
We live in a time of profound transformation
.

Boats’s heart expanded with love. “Spencer! Spencer Mallon! Look behind you!”

Though he must have heard his voice, Mallon paid him no heed. Boats moved faster, more recklessly, bumping into tree trunks and stumbling over raised, snakelike roots. He scraped his forehead on a branch, and quick blood slid down past his eye and over his cheek. The swipe of his hand smeared the blood across the entire side of his face. He wiped his hand on his shirt and left a ragged stain. Boats moved to within ten feet of the clearing and saw the source of all the meaning in his life, Spencer Mallon, turned away from him in jeans, a chambray shirt, a safari jacket, and Dingo boots. His hair, rough looking and a touch too long, tended to bob when he moved. Even from behind, he looked shockingly young. Jason “Boats” Boatman had reached the weary age of forty-five: some long and equally weary years later, he would run into Lee Harwell, the once-famous author, on the sidewalk just outside the side entrance of the Pfister Hotel. Donald “Dilly” Olson was even more shockingly youthful. Seated with his back against a tree, a cigarette, most likely a Tareyton, dangling from the first two fingers of his right hand, and clothed in his high-school uniform of T-shirt, worn jeans, and moccasins, Don Olson looked youthful because he was only eighteen years old.

Boats had forgotten what a handsome kid Dilly had been. Really, he should have gone into pictures, or something.

“Yeah, sure,” Olson said. “By the way, this stuff never happened.”

“Not to you,” Boats said. “To me, it did.”

Making a more concerted effort to wipe the blood off his face, Boats moved up to the edge of the clearing and stood between two maples. Blue sunlight devoid of warmth fell in spangles on his arms and legs. He pressed his dirty handkerchief to the wound pulsing on his forehead.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “You know what? I’m pretty weirded out by all this shit. What did we do, go back in time?”

Dilly looked across at him and raised the smoking cigarette to his lips. He inhaled and blew out a thin, fast-moving stream of smoke. His face was a mask of boredom.

Mallon turned around, slowly, with an almost balletic self-awareness. Now that Boats was much older than the Spencer Mallon who had so entranced him, he could see in the man’s face all the qualities that had escaped him in high school—laziness, vanity, selfishness, and a willingness to deceive. Something else, too: the innate watchfulness of the true show-off. All these traits were visible in him, but they were not all that was visible. As Mallon crossed his arms and tilted his head, causing his hair to dip charmingly to one side, Boats saw that Mallon really did have the
extra
quality, the aura of being in possession of
more
, also of being slightly larger than his body, that he found he now remembered with a helpless love. The man was a born magician.

“Well, no, actually, Jason,” said smiling Mallon. He had registered every one of Boats’s instant perceptions. “It’s good to see you again, too. But that isn’t possible. No one can go back in time. Time isn’t linear, not at all. Instead of going backward and forward, it goes
sideways
. Time is a vast field of simultaneity. One member of my happy little band has learned this lesson, well, I could say the
hard
way, but perhaps it is best to say that he has learned it
profoundly
. That would be Brett Milstrap, of course, Keith’s roommate. Keith had a spectacular amount of promise, I thought, being so wicked, but I never much cared for Brett. I imagine you’ve seen him now and then, as you make your rounds.”