Brainfire (33 page)

He watched the shadowy outline of Fox, lifting his child up; he watched Fox begin to move slowly across the lawn toward the house. Questions. No answers.

How did it work? Did it come out of the ether? Was it some magical form of telegraph? News from nowhere? How did it work? Or was it just another kind of deceit? A child playing?
How can you think that now
? She had stood up in her twisted way, suddenly a grotesque figure, suddenly as white and as awful as some broken Victorian doll; she had stood up and, clutching the edge of the table with her disfigured hands, had opened her eyes. The whites. Nothing but the whites. A travesty of sight, he thought. But how could you say even that? You don't know what it was she was looking at, do you? You don't know what she was seeing, do you?

Then she had lost control again, slipping, clattering downward, broken dishes and bits of cutlery and half of a table linen wrapped, like some haphazard shroud, around her body. Even now he could see the linen stretched out on the lawn by the water where Fox had left it.

Isobel said she was cold. But he didn't want to go back inside the house, not yet. Too soon, like everything else. He had the feeling that something intensely private was passing between father and daughter and he didn't want to intrude. He slipped off his jacket and draped it around Isobel. They stood together in silence and listened to the water touching the willows. He drew Isobel's face against his shoulder and looked down through the dark, hearing the sound of her quick breathing. I need to know, he thought. I need to know what I saw and heard. Sometimes you just can't ask because the time is all wrong. And sometimes the time doesn't matter. There was a skein of things here, concentric circles of coincidence that stretched back to the impossible death of his brother, to the mystery of Andreyev: too many deaths, too much dying.

The moon was sucked behind cloud. The night darkened. He turned and looked at the light in the kitchen window. The shadow of Fox passed in front of the glass. He took his arm from Isobel and went toward the house.

He stepped inside the kitchen. Then he stopped, thinking again of the way the child had spoken, the incomprehensible sounds of that language, and he realized that what it reminded him of now was the broken language of the dreamer, the outbreaks of meaninglessness you heard in the sleep of other people. Conversations that were not conversations, talk that wasn't talk, cries that could mean something only if you had the ability to step inside another person's dream.

Was that what she had done? Was that what he had listened to? He heard Isobel come inside the kitchen behind him. She reached out and touched his arm, as if to delay him, to stall him, as if this were a way of saying,
It's enough, leave it for later
. He looked at her apologetically. It couldn't wait now; not now.

He was suddenly tense, tense as he had been when the child had—language, where was the goddam language—when the kid had just
slipped away from things
. Slipped away from things, he thought. It could never be enough. Okay, he thought. A time comes, Rayner: either you do a thing or you don't. Either you go ahead or you hang back, and sometimes you hang back too long and the clock has moved on and all at once you're in another place. The Land of Lost Opportunities. The Plaza del Might Have Been. He stepped away from Isobel, thinking of the darkness outside, of how, without her, there was only the cold isolation of knowing that nobody much cared if you lived or died. A man with a gun, smiling faces in the mad room of some company hospital—it was the same card, the same deck.

He crossed the kitchen. The child was stretched out on an old velvet sofa. Fox stood over her, turning his face when Rayner came into the room. The huge eyes were like those of some staring night bird accustomed to the crazy predatory things that lie in the foliage.

“She's going to be all right,” Fox said, answering a question that hadn't been asked. “I think she's sleeping naturally.”

Rayner stood beside the sofa and looked at the girl. He had seen her face before in a million places—drive-ins, fast-food outlets, supermarkets, catching yellow school buses; it was an ordinary teen-age face and sullen in sleep. Then he gazed at the father. “You want to explain?”

Fox took off his glasses. The eyes, without magnification, were like tiny stones you might find on a beach. He rubbed his eyelids and sighed. “Isn't it obvious, Mr. Rayner? Isn't it obvious to you what happened? Can't you overcome your
limitations
?”

Fuck my limitations, Rayner thought. I am sick and tired of hearing about them. Especially from you, Jack. Especially out of your mouth. He tried to be patient; he tried to catch his patience like a swimmer coming up from a deep place and lurching for air. “Obvious to me? Uh-huh. You tell me, Mr. Fox. You explain it.”

“It's happened before,” Fox said. “Not often. But it's happened.”

“What's happened?” Rayner asked.

Fox, like a priest who alone has had revealed the arcane name of the deity, smiled benignly. “She had an encounter.”

“What does that mean?”

“I could explain for days and you still—”

“I don't have days, Fox.”

Fox put his glasses back and said, “I tolerated you because you're a friend of Isobel's. I don't have to put up with your rudeness—”

Rayner thought: A velvet glove, something soft. “I don't mean to be rude but I don't understand, that's the problem.” Slow and nice and a snow job: the brown-nose route.

“Understanding isn't always easy,” Fox said. “It was hard for me too, Mr. Rayner.”

Good, Rayner thought. Now we have established a common denominator. “What's an encounter? That's what I don't get exactly.”

“She talked with somebody, that's all.”

“Talked with somebody. Okay. But not somebody in this house.”

Patiently Fox shook his head. “Somebody elsewhere, of course.”

“How? How does that happen?”

Fox stared a moment at Rayner. Rayner thought: This isn't my world. Processing Eastern Europeans through intelligence computers and security data:
Is Herr Folweiler really a stonemason from Dresden
? You pressed a button. Decoded a telex or two. Checked birth certificates. Records were available; information could be turned up. This is some other place and I don't believe I like it.

“I could throw words out, Mr. Rayner. I could talk of telepathy. But that would only be a beginning—”

“Okay. Let me see if I've got it. The kid had a telepathic encounter? That's what you're saying?”

“An encounter of minds, yes—”

“Then what about the things she was saying?”

“I could talk about a kind of linguistic overflow, if you liked. I could tell you that even though she wasn't communicating in any way
you
could understand—she was using channels of mind—nevertheless she's a creature of the habit of speech—”

“Speech? That wasn't speech. I didn't hear—”

“You heard, Mr. Rayner. You just didn't understand.”

Linguistic overflow. Crap, Rayner thought. You could smell it around Fox and it was yards thick and highly fermented. What could he extract from this nut? He had to get the girl. He had to wake the girl. He reached down and shook her quietly, repeating her name over and over.

“Leave her,” Fox said. “She needs to rest after her experience.”

Isobel had come around the sofa and was staring at Rayner in an alarmed way. She doubts my mind too, he thought.

“John, please. The kid's exhausted.”

“I want to talk with her, that's all.”

“No,” Fox said. He tried to step between Rayner and the girl. Rayner, angry, impatient, shoved him aside.

“John, for Christ's sake,” Isobel said.

Fox's glasses slipped down his nose. Preposterous, upset, he tried to push his way back between Rayner and the kid.

“Look, Fox. I want a couple of minutes, okay? I'm not going to hurt her.”

Fox looked at Isobel and said, his voice a whine, “I don't know why you brought this man here, Isobel. For the sake of our friendship, I must ask you to take him away from my house. I offered him my hospitality—”

The girl had opened her eyes and was looking up at Rayner. There was a faint smile on her mouth, as if she had come out of some pleasant dream. Pleasant, Rayner thought: stuck in this house with the harp-playing madman, poor kid, stuck here with his mysticism, forced to perform her mind tricks for all and sundry, dragged around psychic research circles like some freak, probed and prodded by idiot professors—Jesus Christ, he
hoped
she had some pleasant places of escape, even if only in dreams.

“Are you tired?” he asked.

“A bit,” she said. “I guess I flaked out, huh?”

“Fiona, you should rest,” Fox said.

She sat upright, hugging her knees, looking at Rayner. “I don't want to rest.” She glanced at her father. It was a defiant
Screw you
look. “I swear, I'm okay.”

“Can you tell me what happened?” Rayner asked. “Can you remember?”

She watched him a moment. She had a plain face; only the eyes suggested something other than plainness—light, alert, alive now.

“What do I remember?” she said. “Let me think. Let me get it straight in my head.”

Rayner saw: she was playing a little game with him, a form of teasing, a vaguely coquettish thing. He had the absurd feeling that he had just invited her to the high school prom and she was stalling her answer.
I gotta check my calendar first
. He was trying, desperately, to hold on to his patience again: a matter of nerve, of doing that strange thing people described as
steeling yourself
. He leaned down, a supplicant, and smiled at her. Bait, he thought. Play her little game. Please come to the prom with me, only me.

“A woman,” she said.

“What woman?”

“She was trying to lose me. I can't explain that. She was like trying to say something but she was trying to lose me at the same time. She wanted to fade me out.” The girl paused. “She was having a real hard time. That's what I got. A lot of stuff about killing.”

Killing, Rayner thought. He had the unsettling feeling of having stepped through some curious barrier, of having drawn aside a curtain, expecting daylight, but finding instead a black window, a world suddenly without sunlight.

“Killing who?” he asked.

The girl shrugged. “I don't know.”

“What did you mean when you said something about a broken frame of wood?”

“I don't remember saying that,” the kid said. “She was too much, whoever she was. She was about the heaviest thing I ever ran into. All this power, I mean.”

“What power?”

“She was strong, I mean. I couldn't reach her. She could block me out anytime she liked.”

Rayner paused, looking at Isobel. This conversation, he thought—the underlying absurdity of it touched him strongly. What the hell are we talking about? A faulty telephone connection?
All this power, I mean
.

“What else?” he asked. “What else do you remember?”

“I know she was bleeding—”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know it. It wasn't like she was cut or anything. She was bleeding. Not a period.” The girl blinked at him:
I'm older than you think
. He could feel it, the undertow of teasing, of how she was coming on to him, the casual reference to menstruation. Okay, he thought. You're a big girl. You're a big girl, love.

“If it wasn't a period what was it?”

“It was from inside, I guess.”

“Like how?”

“I don't know. A rupture? Does that make sense? She was in bad, bad pain, I can tell you that. And I got this real lonely thing.”

Rayner waited. Maybe the madness was a complete thing, a circle fully formed. Maybe you didn't even know you were long gone until the circle had snapped shut all around you. A broken frame of wood. Imagine a window breaking, your brother—

“A young woman? An old woman? What?”

“Real old,” the girl said. “Real old.”

Fox, who had been sitting on the arm of the sofa as if to protect his daughter from the obvious menace of Rayner, said, “I think that's enough, Rayner. She's tired. Can't you see that?”

Rayner ignored the man. He reached out and held the girl's hand, stroking it lightly. She looked down with a kind of artificial coyness and he suddenly imagined her in the back of a car at some drive-in, her knees angled in the air, a pimply kid trying to stick it inside her.

“This old woman,” Rayner said. “Where is she?”

The girl took her hand away from Rayner as if to say,
That's enough intimacy for now. Check me out later, baby
. Sweet little thing, Rayner thought. You could blow your old man's fuses if he really understood you.

“I don't know where she is. I get the feeling of a lot of trees. Hills. Cold. I can't say where she is exactly. But I know she's pretty damn miserable wherever she is and there's some people trying to get her to do things. She doesn't want to do them. Oh, yeah. She had something about a Chinese soldier. And a young American. But I didn't really catch that too clear. See, she was fading me out, like I told you. She didn't want me to keep coming in.”

A Chinese soldier, Rayner thought. A young American.

“What did she say about the soldier?”

“I didn't get that bit—”

“The American?”

“I don't know.”

Rayner realized he was extraordinarily tired now, that he had come to the dark bottom line of fatigue. A Chinese soldier, a young America, an old woman: if you could put that lot together in a way that made sense, they would have to certify you incurable. Killing. What killing?

“Another thing,” the girl said, as if she perceived she was losing Rayner's interest. “She was foreign. She wasn't American.”