Bathing the Lion (31 page)

“Then why do I still remember everything that’s happened tonight? How come my memory hasn’t been erased?”

“Because I’m here, Kaspar; I came to talk to you.”

“Why?”

Dean waved him over. “Come outside. It’s a nice night and I’d rather talk out on the porch.”

“Wait a minute.” Kaspar went back into his house. After checking the living room he walked to the kitchen, but there was no sign of Jane anywhere. Standing in the hall, hands on hips, he tried to figure out just what the hell was going on. No matter what happened now, at least she had his drawings, his small legacy. It was what mattered most. Hopefully those drawings would eventually lead her to something important, once she was able to decipher them.

When Kaspar returned to the porch Dean was sitting on the top step with his arm around D Train. Kos was nowhere in sight. Kaspar sat down on the other side of his dog. “What’s up, Dean? Why are you here?”

Dean Corbin looked over the top of the dog’s head and smiled at Kaspar. It was a nice smile, the smile of a friend who likes your company and wants only the best for you. “I assume Jane told you everything?”

Kaspar nodded. “Everything she knew, which wasn’t a hell of a lot. We figured out some more stuff together by comparing notes.”

“Did she tell you about us, about you and me? Did she tell you we’re both gonna die before this is over?”

Hearing these words, Kaspar had a peculiar first reaction—he didn’t know whether the fact scared or interested him. “I knew I was going to die soon, yes—just not
how
. Jane didn’t either.”

“I do.” Dean reached into a pocket and brought out a jazzy-looking cell phone. He tapped it a few times. Kaspar started to speak but Dean cut him off: “Hold it a second. Let me just get this working.” He tapped the screen more times and then nodded he was ready. Handing the phone to Kaspar, he said, “Watch.”

An obviously homemade video clip jittered on. The view was jerky at first but quickly steadied. It held on an ugly giant insect, black as pitch, scuttling from left to right across a gray cement floor. When the bug was halfway across the frame, a hand holding a thick brown work boot smashed down on top of it, crushing the bug into instant black and yellow goo. Kaspar winced but what happened next made him gasp: instantaneously hundreds of tiny black bugs streamed out from beneath the boot in all directions—pregnant mama’s surviving babies running for their lives. Kaspar was so revolted he instinctively opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue.

The clip ended and the screen went black. Dean put the phone in his lap. “
This
is what’s going to happen to us, my friend.”

Disgusted by what he’d seen, Kaspar asked sarcastically, “A big boot’s going to come down out of the sky and crush us?”

“We’re disposable, Kaspar, like the bug. They’re going to let us die and then take whatever they need from us. Nice, huh? I don’t know what’s going to happen to the others, but I know this is our fate. No, they’re not going to stomp us with a boot; they’re just going to leave us for roadkill.”

Kaspar looked at the phone in Dean’s lap, remembering what he had just seen there. “How do
you
know about this?”

Dean pulled a folded piece of paper out of a shirt pocket and handed it over.

When Kaspar saw what was on it he started: it was identical to one of the drawings Jane showed him, a drawing
he
had purportedly made in the future.

“Where did you get this? It’s exactly like one I did.”

Dean nodded. “I know; but I made this drawing. In the dream, all five of us copied a map we saw on the side of an elephant. This is what I drew. Now I realize every one of us drew exactly the same map; we just didn’t recognize it in the dream because none of us had the powers back yet.” Dean stopped and touched a temple with his fingers as if to slow the buzz in his head. “We
thought
we’d all drawn different things, different maps. But that was only because each of us was at a different level of conversion back to the mechanic mind. And we still are, Kaspar; it’s like we’re all in different grades at school. Even Jane isn’t complete yet—if she were, if she’d regained her full powers by now, she could have refused this last flip and stayed here.

“I was able to make myself come after I deciphered some of these figures on this paper. It’s like the more you grasp what you were once capable of doing, the more power you have.”

Kaspar pointed to what he recognized on the page. “But these symbols—these exact three—say
I’m
going to die and the rest of what’s here is a list of things
I’ve
learned about life as a human; not you,
me
.”

Dean nodded in agreement. “I totally agree—it
is
the same map, believe me, but we perceive the images differently. Every one of us interprets it in their own way because we have all lived different lives both here and before.

“For example I saw the fact of my death down here.” Dean pointed to figures and numbers on the bottom right corner of the paper, far away from Kaspar’s three. Then he pointed to other things on the paper. “
These
say something about
fruit
, which I don’t understand, and these are about you, me, and Edmonds all dying. It doesn’t say how or when, just that we will and soon.

“
This
group of figures told me specifically how to come here.” He pointed to the middle of the page where a bunch of what looked like ancient runes and Internet icons were lined up.

“What about the women, Dean? What about Jane and Vanessa? Does it mean they’ll die too?”

Dean shook his head. “I don’t know, Kaspar. I only understand some of what’s on my map. I don’t know what’s going to happen to them.”

SIX

Vanessa Corbin never told her husband, Dean, she’d once killed a man and gotten away with it. That’s not to say she didn’t want to tell him; it’s just whenever a moment arrived when it would have been suitable to make the admission, to tell, to come clean to the one person on Earth who understood her better than any other, something always stopped her. After their third year together she decided
not
to tell. The right moment had come and gone at least ten times but she’d always found excuses not to do it. Her reasons for that failure varied from the reasonable to the very selfish, but the result was the same. So once and for all she chose to stay mum and let her deepest secret live on the skin of their relationship like a precancerous lesion, and hope nothing ever caused it to turn malignant.

Looking at her now, Crebold said the dead man’s name, “Barry Rubin,” then waited to see how she would react to the verbal hand grenade dropped in her lap.

She didn’t. To his dismay, although it was the first time she’d heard the name in years, Vanessa’s expression remained placid. Nor had it changed earlier when Crebold walked up to her table in the restaurant and asked if he could sit down. She said nothing but gestured lazily with a finger at the empty chair across from her.

He sat but kept silent, waiting to hear what she’d say about his abrupt reappearance in her life. After a few seconds of staring coldly at him, the chubby woman went back to eating the piece of pecan pie in front of her. Vanessa’s clear indifference offended Crebold, so he chose to do away with any niceties and just drop the Barry bomb on her and watch the smithereens it blew her into.

Nothing—not one smithereen.

With a fork she cut off a small piece of pie and brought it up to her mouth. She paused it there to admire the deep caramel color and sugary glisten over the shard of nut. Then she slid the sliver into her mouth and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t be distracted from giving her tongue’s full attention to the tasty treat.

“Did you hear what I said?
Barry Rubin.
Doesn’t the name ring a bell, Vanessa?” This time Crebold pronounced it slowly and precisely, as if repeating his own name to the maître d’ of an exclusive restaurant who had just asked him to repeat it because there didn’t appear to be a table reserved in that name.

Vanessa put the fork down and patted her lips with a green napkin. “Crebold, you have learned nothing—absolutely fuck-all
nothing
. What is it like to always,
always
come in last? My God, if you had a soul it would look like an old shriveled potato chip by now.

“I have something for you; it’ll make you feel good for five minutes.” She pulled a large black leather purse onto her lap and rummaged around inside it. “Here you go. I assume it’s what you came here for.” Vanessa handed him a piece of paper—the map she’d copied off the side of the elephant in the dream.

When Crebold saw what it was he hesitated to take it, as if the paper itself might be poison-coated or booby-trapped in some way. “Why are you giving this to me?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Because it’s what you came here for, right? I don’t need it anymore.”

“Why not? Do you know everything on there now? Are you
enlightened
?” His arrogant, mocking voice said he didn’t believe her for a minute.

Instead of answering, she put the map on the table. “You’re a mechanic, or at least you were once. Do
you
know what all of these things mean?”

He ran a hand down his necktie. “No, because some of them are human.” There was no reason to lie to her, plus Crebold wasn’t aware of how much mechanic knowledge she had regained by then. If she was already up to a certain level, she would see through any lie he told now anyway.

“Do you recognize this little fellow?” With her finger she tapped on a symbol toward the middle of the page that looked vaguely like a fire hydrant. Crebold said nothing.

Vanessa nodded. “I didn’t think so.” She placed her hand over the symbol. Seconds later it rose up off the page until it became a solid three-dimensional figure beneath her open palm. Picking it up, she turned her hand over so the thing was held in the middle of her bunched fingers. She moved the hand toward Crebold. “Eat it.”

“What?”

“Take this and eat it.” Seeing the incredulity in his eyes, she asked, “Are you afraid it’s poison?”

He answered too loudly: “How should I know? I don’t know what it is.”

“You never were a big adventurer, were you, Crebold?” Without another word, Vanessa popped the figure into her mouth and chewed while looking straight at him. In a while she swallowed and smacked her lips. “I
really
like the taste of that one—sort of cinnamony.”

“What is it?” He’d been watching her mouth and not seen what her hands were doing. She lifted an identical “fire hydrant” up to him from the paper. “Here’s another one just like it—
try
it. I promise it’s not poison.”

He took it slowly from her, like a shy dog taking a treat out of a stranger’s hand. “What
is
it?”

“Just put it in your mouth and then I’ll tell you. Go on, Crebold—show you have at least one ball.”

Still dubious, he opened his mouth and cautiously licked the thing once, twice: nothing. Vanessa had said she liked the taste but this one had none. He licked it again. “Nothing—I don’t taste anything.” His already suspicious mind raised more red flags.

Vanessa sighed, snatched it out of his hand, and popped it into her mouth. Crunch crunch crunch—swallow. Then she offered him yet
another
one. Crebold took it without hesitation, put it in his mouth, and bit down. Or tried to but it was like biting a stone—nothing, no give at all. No taste, no give—it really
was
like trying to eat a rock. He took it out of his mouth and shook his head. “I can’t.”

She showed no surprise.

“So what is it, Vanessa? You said you’d tell me.”

“Humor.”

“What?”

“Try this one.” She held out a different figure she’d lifted off the paper. He tried but it was impossible too.

“
That
one’s grace.” She took it out of his hand and placed it on the table although it was still wet from his mouth. “I could give you hope or generosity or a bunch of others off this map but the same thing would happen: you can’t eat any of them, Crebold; you couldn’t even bite into them.”

“But you can?”

Vanessa nodded. “Yes, because I’m human, or most of me still is.” She rubbed the paper with her fingers. “These maps are records of what we’ve seen and experienced and what we find most important about this second life we’ve been living. Some of what we’ve seen has been through the eyes of the mechanics we once were, but we weren’t aware of it until now.”

Crebold said nothing because Vanessa was right.

She held out another figure to him. “Now try
this
one.”

“This is a waste of time—”

She made an exasperated/amused face. “Just
do
it—trust me.”

If Crebold had been Bill Edmonds he would have instantly recognized the figure she offered now as Keebler, the netsuke sumo wrestler Lola Edmonds had owned and loved for years.

Crebold took it but again first licked the figure before putting it in his mouth. Delicious! Startled, he bit off the head of the little sumo. It was as soft as a piece of jellied candy. He couldn’t resist gobbling down the rest of what was in his hand. Scrumptious.

Vanessa said approvingly, “Great, huh?”

“Fantastic! But why can I eat this one and not the others?”

“Because it’s made of only mechanics’ food—
udesh
and other things. They planted one in Edmonds’s life when he retired. You’re still mostly mechanic so you can eat their food. There are other things on this map you could eat too because they were also planted in our lives.

“But watch this now—” Again Vanessa put her hand on the paper. Another Keebler materialized beneath her fingers. She held it up a moment for him to see before slipping it into her mouth. As if knowing what was going to happen, she gingerly tried to bite it but could not.