Mammoth (27 page)

Yes, life was good.

THE
feeling persisted out of the mammoth house and into a slow Oregon drizzle, Warburton carefully holding a big umbrella over Andrea and a bodyguard holding open the door of the pearl-gray 1936 Cord Cabriolet convertible. Howard was about to get behind the wheel when Warburton leaned over and said something into his ear, and Howard’s mellow mood vanished at once. He got in the car and slammed the door and just sat there for a moment, until his fiancée looked at him with a brow wrinkled in a way only Andrea de la Terre could wrinkle an eyebrow.

“Something wrong, darling?” she asked.

For a moment Howard could only sit there, the oversized steering wheel in his hands. It had been five years, five long frustrating years since that face had loomed in his sights, so close he had felt he could reach out and touch it, and in those five years he had never again felt that feeling of utter omnipotence, never held a man’s life in his hands so intimately. And for the first two years he had felt, at best, ambivalence about his decision not to shoot because, after all, there might be answers to secrets locked up in that head, the secrets of how the universe was really put together, if answers there were.

Over the next years, as Matt Wright wandered the globe like some demented Diogenes looking for an honest philosophy, Howard had come to believe the man knew no more than he himself did, that the answers didn’t exist. For the last year, Howard had devoted himself to pure and simple hatred.

At last, he sighed and started the car.

“Andrea, Matt Wright has returned.”

SUSAN
had been contrite about the blow. It was inexcusable for one person to hit another except in self-defense, she said, and he told her he figured if anybody ever had good reason to strike another, she was it. She didn’t have anything to say to that, but after a long pause during which he felt like a specimen under a microscope, and not a very appetizing one, she unlocked the front door and invited him in.

And then it was…awkward.

He had a million things he wanted to tell her and another million things he wanted to ask her, but he had been far from sure he’d even be invited in the door, and, once in, his tongue seemed tied in knots.

So…what have you been up to?
He knew most of that; Susan’s life had been well documented from the time Fuzzy came into her life. She was famous, had been on the television many times in the early years. Hell, she was a character on a Saturday morning animated television show, she had been played by Andrea de la Terre in the movie version of
Little Fuzzy.

How are you doing? What, you mean after you walked out on me and stayed away for five years?
No, let’s don’t go there just yet.

There was only one question worth asking, and he couldn’t just come right out and ask it, certainly not with the cold look in her eye as she sat stiffly on a big cane chair opposite him, one leg curled up under her and the other one, the bad one, carefully extended. No, you’d have to work up to that one, if you ever had the guts to ask it at all, and she sure wasn’t giving anything away.

What little conversation there was soon died away, and she
didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands and neither did he, so finally she asked, in a tone of voice that sounded to him a little like one you might use if your least favorite uncle had plopped himself down in your living room and just wouldn’t go away, if he wanted something to eat. And he wasn’t proud, no sir, he’d use any excuse to stretch his time with her until what he was beginning to feel would be the final and inevitable outcome, himself trudging once more down that lonesome road outside.

So he showered, and hacked away at his unruly and scraggly beard until it was almost presentable, dressed in the only change of clothes he had, and descended the stairs again to find her in the kitchen just pouring spaghetti into a colander.

“You know I’m not a cook,” she said, wiping the condensed steam from her forehead with the back of her hand in a gesture that made him almost weep with longing. “But there’s nobody around here that delivers except a so-so pizza shop, and I did make this sauce—spaghetti sauce is one of the five things I know how to make. Anyway, it’s from the freezer, and so is the bread, and there’s no salad because I’m hardly ever here and I just can’t keep the refrigerator stocked with fresh things.” She shrugged, and set the bowl of noodles and the bowl of bubbling red sauce on the simple pine table. “Anyway, here it is. Do you want some wine?”

He did, and she selected a red from a walk-in cellar with rack space for hundreds of bottles, only a dozen of them occupied.

He was hungry, he hadn’t had anything since an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, having spent the whole day pacing or sitting on her front deck, and the food was good, when he could bring his attention to it, but most of the time it tasted like nothing in his mouth, just something to choke down until they could move on to the next stage, which was finding out if she was at all interested in listening to his story or if she’d shake his hand on the way out the door.

It was the tensest meal he ever ate, consumed in absolute silence.

Then they retired to the vast living room with glasses of wine and she invited him to sit on a plush couch with some sort of Indian art pattern, facing the fire ring, which was an
artful arrangement of native stones, no mortar, set on glistening white beach sand in the center of the room. A copper funnel hung from the ceiling high above to catch the smoke. She struck a long match and touched it to several places around the stack, then sat in the same chair she had been in before she had invited him to dinner.

She reached over to the small table beside her chair and picked up a small stack of postcards, shuffled them idly through her fingers before tossing them onto the small coffee table that separated them, where they fanned out in accusation. He reached out and picked up the topmost card, saw the picture of the Big Sur coast, waves crashing on huge rocks. He turned it over and could barely read his own indecipherable scrawl:

His face flushed as he flipped rapidly through them. Had anything ever sounded so lame? But he didn’t know how else to say it.

He looked up, and saw her drain her glass of wine. He realized it was her third glass, and the bottle sitting beside her was almost empty. She gave him a twisted smile, then tossed her empty glass at the stones, where it shattered.

She laced her fingers around her good knee and leaned back.

“So, Matt. What have you been doing with yourself?”

And the words began to spill out of him.

MATT
fled the scene of slaughter that night with only one thought in his mind: He had to find a quiet place to gather his thoughts, order the events of the last hour,
write it all down.
His grasp on what he had seen in the depths of the time machine was so tenuous it made the waking residual images of a dream seem as solid as a slap in the face. He needed to retreat from the storm he could see coming. He was standing beside a
brand-new pickup truck whose door was wide open, the owner fled who-knew-where. He saw the key was in the ignition.

Ten minutes later he was on the San Diego Freeway, heading north.

He didn’t sleep, he didn’t dare, he knew it would all go up in smoke and blow away if he slept; the only way he could keep it all in his head was to invent mathematical mnemonics to trick himself into remembering, so he sat there in the parking lot of a McDonald’s, the first restaurant he had seen, and when it opened he bought six cups of coffee and drove carefully down the street to a Bank of America and waited for it to open. When it did, he went inside and, not without some difficulty, withdrew a hundred thousand dollars from his account, worrying every minute that Howard or some federal agency would be looking for him, putting a flag on his account or his credit cards. But he walked out with the cash in a canvas bag and, gulping coffee, found a large consumer electronics store and purchased three personal computers for six hundred dollars.

Then he drove around town looking for a used car lot, abandoned the stolen pickup after wiping the steering wheel and door handles and everything else he might have touched. He knew he must have left DNA traces inside, but hoped that for a routine stolen car the police would only dust for fingerprints. He walked to the car lot and paid four thousand in cash for an anonymous gray sedan that looked reliable enough, then drove it to Ventura, where he checked into a Motel 6 at noon under the name of Kevin Moore, paying an extra hundred-dollar bill for the privilege of not showing his driver’s license.

He holed up in the motel for three days, and someone looking over his shoulder as he worked his computers would have been utterly mystified as to what he was doing.

At first it was dense with mathematical symbols, as he tried to document and somehow rationalize the things he had seen in that little metal box on that fateful night twelve thousand years ago…or was it really fifteen thousand years ago? Was that too linear a way of thinking? It made it sound as if the Pleistocene was in some…direction, a place you could
point to, or a vector whose length and orientation was the sole possible result of a specific equation.

He knew he had seen something that a human eye is not really equipped to see…and yet how could that be? It was a contradiction in terms, but so was everything else from the moment they went into the past. It could not happen, yet it had happened. Which meant that he, Matt Wright, mathematical genius, was missing something.

On the second day he began to get some inkling of a new direction. At first it was no more than an itch at the back of his mind, something he had experienced before when a new idea was struggling to be born. He knew he couldn’t force it to come, so he did what he always did at times like that. He went to bed. Maybe his subconscious mind would give him a boost.

But he woke up no wiser, and knew it was time to move on. He was rested, felt up to driving now. So he checked out and drove on up the coast, up US 101, then California Route 1 until he got to Big Sur, where he pulled over and found a place where he could sit and watch the ocean pounding the shore.

After a while he noticed a collection of buildings not too far away from him. There were tents, yurts, a pool, gardens, a large green lawn, odd-shaped buildings with an impromptu, weathered look, all set in the rugged, up and down, rocky and deeply forested surf-battered terrain for which Big Sur was famous. It looked peaceful, secluded, open to the air and the sea. Some sort of resort, maybe. Possibly just the sort of thing he needed to get his thoughts together.

He got back in his car and soon was driving by a sign that said E
SALEN
I
NSTITUTE.

IT
took a moment to penetrate, then Susan sat forward.

“Esalen?”

“That’s right.”

“That place where rich people go to get massages and soak in hot tubs?”

“Well, they’re not all rich, though it’s not cheap. And there are hot tubs and massages, but there are classes, too, and discussions of…well, all sorts of things.”

Susan sat back again.

“Let me get this straight. While I was…while I…you were soaking in a hot tub in Big Sur?”

Susan felt she was right on the edge. She had loved him, she had worried about him, she had gotten angry at him as years rolled by with nothing but his maddening monthly postcards. She had briefly thought she hated him, and then she had tried her best to forget him. God knows she had enough to deal with, between Howard, Fuzzy, her unwanted fame, and Big Mama, goddamn Big Mama, who had damn near killed her. Now here he was, and the reason he hadn’t come back to her was…

Esalen?

In that moment she felt she could hate him again.

“I couldn’t just walk right in the door,” he was saying. “You have to have reservations. But I got lucky, there was a cancellation. I got in after waiting three days at a motel in Monterey. I enrolled in ‘Gestalt and Evolutionary Psychology’ and ‘An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy.’”

“What, no massage?”

“Well, yes, in the evenings.” He glanced up at her, and hurried on.

“I almost quit after the first day. I had no idea what I was doing there, but I had this persistent feeling that I was on the trail of something important. But the courses were stupid. There was no logic to them. Things were posited with no empirical proof, then accepted as true with no further discussion. Or, none from anyone but me, that is. I began to realize that no one there but myself had any training in math or science…or what I think of as science, anyway. It was another culture entirely, couldn’t have been more foreign to me if I’d been dropped off in the fourteenth century.”

“Which I guess is no longer just a figure of speech.”

“What? Oh, sure, I guess we proved it’s possible.”

“I didn’t prove anything, Matt. I was just along for the ride.”

“So was I. More than you’ll ever know.” He sighed heavily, and drank the last of the wine from his glass. “Anyway, I stuck it out, and by the third day I felt I was beginning to get a handle on something.”

“What, that Buddhism is the true faith? Did we travel with a Zen time machine?”

She had thought he would laugh, but he merely looked thoughtful, then slowly shook his head.

“I began to see that there was a tool there…or maybe a set of tools, that could…what I was looking for, you see, was a new perspective. My scientific one, all my mathematical tools, had failed me.

“You ever heard of the guy who proved that a bumblebee couldn’t fly? I’m not sure it’s a good analogy; his math was bad, or the proper math hadn’t yet been developed to expose the flaws in his reasoning. But I was feeling like him. All my figures added up, I couldn’t find any flaw…but I had seen something, I had been somewhere, or sometime, and the goddamn bumblebee was
flying.
Obviously, the bee knew something I didn’t know, and every day I became more convinced that mathematics, or at least mathematics
alone
, could never get me into the air again.”