Bathing the Lion (34 page)

“Confused.” Crebold did not ask who he was speaking to.

“That’s understandable. Do you have any questions?”

“Yes—why was it necessary for me to be parnaxed?”

“Because they’re gathering data. They needed to see how you and Kaspar would react toward each other after his years as a human. You failed the test and proved you’re not to be trusted.”

Crebold couldn’t help wincing at the thought of what he was about to say. “Is he … is he
in
me along with the others?”

“No, Kaspar is dying; he just doesn’t know it yet. He’ll finish his life here. They’ll strip him of certain memories he has now to make him more comfortable and then leave him alone.”

“He’s
dying
?” Surprising himself, Crebold was dismayed to hear Kaspar was dying and they weren’t going to stop it. “But don’t they need him? He’s one of the few allowed to keep his memory when he was retired. Don’t they
need
his information—all he’s learned here?”

“No.”

The single word and blunt tone in which it was spoken fell like a hammer blow on Crebold’s ear and assumptions.

He was going to say something else when suddenly he cocked his head to one side and looked, as if listening to a distant sound he couldn’t recognize. A sudden clear vision of the magazine store owner Whit Ayres had come to him for some unknown reason. At first he didn’t recognize the man because he’d never seen him before—but in an instant he did. Crebold said out loud what he already knew was the truth. “Ayres was a mechanic too, wasn’t he?”

The voice on the telephone said indifferently, “Yes. Everyone in this room was a retired mechanic. All of you previously worked together in the same group. Even idiotic Barry Rubin who revealed things he shouldn’t have and had to be eliminated. They used Vanessa to take care of him. She did well, although she had no idea who was behind it.”

Crebold pointed toward the bar and asked why Riley Rivers had said before some of the people in the room were
not
mechanics.

“Because she’s not back up to full understanding yet, which is true about many of those who were here.”

Crebold raised his head and looked toward the ceiling as his thoughts gradually lined up and began to make an overall sense. “Vanessa was set up to kill Rubin although she thought it was her own doing. Something about him had gone bad or wrong and he revealed stuff he shouldn’t have. Like a healthy cell in the body that kills another because the second one has become infected and threatens the others.”

“Right again. Sometimes mechanics do go bad when they retire. Then they must be destroyed, like infected cells.”

Crebold put the telephone on the table and reached for his wineglass. He drained what was left and touched the glass to his forehead as if to cool the overheated engine inside it. His mind was working at a ferociously fast speed processing, separating, and divvying up the ideas, truths, and revelations that bombarded it now.

He’d once been in an air traffic control tower at Kennedy airport in New York City, watching what appeared to be hundreds of green blips representing planes approaching and leaving local airspace on the controllers’ crowded screens. At the time, despite being a mechanic, he thought he’d go mad if he had to monitor and manage this constantly changing pandemonium all day long. Yet that’s exactly what it felt like inside his skull right now.

New information kept coming in. He took his head in his hands at one point and muttered, “Wait! Just
stop
a second and let me
process
some of this.” But it did not stop and for a time he was overcome. Crebold saw moments of joy and satisfaction, fear and failure, deaths and births … the countless experiences of countless human lives all roiled together inside his mind. It felt like being swept up in a mountainous tidal wave that engulfed him in its frenzy, power, and roar.

There was no way to judge how long this went on. It might have been a minute or millennia. But it passed and finally like the person who miraculously survives the monstrous might of a tsunami and is tossed up on shore naked, exhausted, and dazed, Crebold slowly opened his eyes and once again saw the empty room. Amazed and agog at what he’d just experienced, he understood what was happening now. He slapped both shaking hands flat down on the table, as if to steady himself from the aftershocks of what he’d just experienced.

Although he grasped so much, there were still questions. He knew he did not need the telephone but picked it up anyway to continue the conversation with … himself.

When he did, the phone voice, which he recognized now as his own, said, “There are more than a hundred trillion cells in a human being. Combine those hundred trillion together and they make a single person.”

Crebold said, “They’re taking retired mechanics, combining all of our experiences, all the years of life, all the worlds we’ve known, all the problems we’ve faced, and mashing them all together to create one—
what
—golem? God or
what
ever is necessary to fight Chaos?”

The other voice said serenely, “I don’t know what they will do. I don’t think it’s possible for the likes of us
to
know.”

Crebold took the telephone away from his ear and tapped it against his chest while thinking things over. He wondered if Chaos had done the same thing—split itself into an infinite number of “cells” and sent them out across the universe. But being Chaos, its cells would
disrupt
life in endlessly different and wicked ways everywhere. And at some point—maybe even now—it would gather those cells with all their new knowledge and experience to form a newer, better, smarter … being? Power? God of Chaos?

The voice said something but Crebold missed it. Putting the pink phone back against his ear he asked, “What?”

“You
can’t
understand how they work so don’t try; it’s a waste of time. Just do your job, Crebold. All the people who were in this room are inside you now. Even Rubin has useful information despite his mistakes.

“All their knowledge
combined
is the only reason why you understand as much as you do about what’s been going on here; you never would have figured any of this out alone. So forget what the big boys are doing or why—it’s beyond our understanding.”

Crebold knew this same thing was happening in many places now and he hated the idea: scores of ex-mechanics being gathered together like iron filings pulled to a magnet. Then somewhere someplace unimaginable they’d be mixed together into one entity. He couldn’t abide it. He knew it was true but could not accept how
demeaning
it was.

“After all we’ve experienced, each of us will only end up a single cell in this big final body? Every retired mechanic, all our different lives, personalities, and experiences … all these completely singular, unique existences kneaded together like
bread dough
and fed to some
superwarrior
who’ll use it to fight Chaos. Is this right? That idea
disgusts
me. It makes me hate the system and what I spent my whole life doing.”

The voice on the phone waited a few beats before saying gently, “Remember your analogy of the ant colony—everything is sacrificed for the community; like ants, the individual doesn’t matter for us.”

“
Screw
the community—we matter. I matter. The individual
does
matter.” Crebold jabbed himself again and again in the chest with his thumb. The tiny sound was the only one in the cavernous empty room.

Kaspar Benn sat contentedly on the top step of his front porch, flanked on either side by D Train and Kos. There was nowhere else he wanted to be and with no better company. He’d had a lovely visit with Vanessa where the two ate themselves silly while talking and laughing their way through a splendid late fall afternoon until it was time for her to go sing at the bar. The fact they hadn’t slept together didn’t matter. They hadn’t for a very long time. There seemed to be an unspoken tacit agreement between them now that the physical part of their relationship was finished, which was just as well. Vanessa was a lazy unimaginative lover, despite her boasting and big talk about being crazy for sex. But even without it he really did enjoy her company as long as it came in small doses. Especially when it came to food, because Vanessa was a superb cook who enjoyed eating as much as he did. Kaspar willingly sat through her monologues and self-absorbed rants if they were at a table covered with delicious food and drink and a limited amount of time to spend together.

While savoring the memory of the different cheeses and wines they’d consumed with such gusto earlier, he noticed someone walking down the sidewalk toward his house. It was dark out so Kaspar couldn’t see the man’s face clearly until he stopped and stood at the front gate. When he did recognize the guy, Kaspar was amazed.

“
Crebold!
Good lord, what are
you
doing here?”

His old nemesis shuffled up the stone path to the house, eyes moving apprehensively back and forth between the two dogs, arms stretched and tensed at his sides, ready for anything.

Although they watched the stranger approach with keen interest, neither dog budged from their places next to Kaspar.

“Don’t worry about these boys—they’re friendly. Both of them are big pussy cats.” Kaspar hadn’t seen Crebold since before retiring. He was genuinely surprised to see
him
here both because mechanics
never
revealed themselves to “civilians,” plus the two had such bad blood between them going back, well, a very long time.

Kaspar climbed down the stairs to greet his visitor. He extended a hand and the two men shook. After several seconds Crebold tried to take his hand away but Kaspar held on longer, the whole time smiling and nodding. His smile grew bigger and bigger until it was almost disconcerting.

“I
never
thought it would be you, Crebold. Will wonders never cease? Can I get you a drink, or how about something to eat?”

“A glass of wine would be nice if you have it, thank you.” Crebold stopped at the bottom step, leaned against the banister, and slid both hands into his pockets. It was getting chilly out there. He looked exhausted and sad.

Kaspar went into the house and returned shortly with an expensive bottle of Prager Grüner Veltliner he’d brought back from a business trip to Austria. It took him a while to open the bottle, pour without spilling a drop, and hand a glass over to his longtime exasperating colleague whom he’d once hoped never to see again—until now. The men clinked glasses in a toast that silently said, “Well, here we are together again; let’s try and make the best of it.”

“Don’t you want to sit down? You look very tired.”

Crebold eyed the dogs and shook his head. “I’ll stand. I need your help, Kaspar. I know you never expected to hear me say that, but it’s true now. I’ll probably get hammered for having come back here, but I don’t care—it’s the only thing I could think of to do. You were always the best at this. I never wanted to admit it, but it’s true.”

For the next half hour Crebold told Kaspar Benn everything, including the news Kaspar was dying. Crebold had flipped himself back to the night months before when both Jane and Dean visited Kaspar. But when both people left, Kaspar’s memory of meeting them was erased because he would not regain any of his mechanic’s powers for months.

So when Crebold arrived to ask for help, Kaspar was just sitting on his front porch with the two dogs enjoying the sights and smells of an autumn evening in Vermont while remembering the fine gluttonous afternoon with Vanessa.

When Crebold finished talking, the two men shared a companionable silence drinking the good wine. Kaspar topped off Crebold’s glass twice when he noticed it was almost empty. At one point D Train got up and walked slowly down the steep porch steps to investigate something intriguing-looking in the yard. Crebold stiffened when D passed. Kos watched but did not move. Kaspar began scratching Kos’s ear. The dog tipped his head slightly toward the man to offer more area to scratch.

“Are they anything?” Crebold pointed his glass at Kos.

“You mean are they anything
more than
plain old animals? Nope: just two good furry fellows. This guy lives a few doors down but spends a lot of time with us. He and D Train are best buddies. I’ve grown very fond of dogs since I’ve been here; they’re wonderful friends.”

Crebold made a sour face and sloppily slurped his wine.

Kaspar smiled, remembering the other’s great dislike of all animals. “You never asked why they let me keep my memory, Crebold.”

The tired man put his glass down on a step and wiped a corner of his mouth with the back of a hand. “I wasn’t there when they made the decision. I assumed you wouldn’t
tell
me. We were never good friends or anything.”

Kaspar wiggled his eyebrows a few times. “That’s true. But I’m going to tell you now because you need to know: They let me keep my memory because of
this
moment, old comrade; because of this very meeting we’re having right here on my porch. They knew it would happen sometime or other.”

Just north of drunk now, Crebold put up a hand to stop Kaspar. “Wait a minute! Hold it! How did you recognize me before?” He gestured toward the sidewalk. “I just realized it—how could you possibly recognize me when I first walked up the path a few minutes ago, Kaspar? You knew me in an instant but you’re a
civilian
now.”

It was true—to the world Crebold looked like any Bob you’d pass on the street and forget a moment later. He had absolutely no distinguishing features, including the clothes he wore, which were all dreary shades of beige and gray.