Relentless (5 page)

This time, I roamed a vast and dimly lighted library, where the shelves soared high overhead. The intersecting aisles were not perpendicular to one another, but serpentine, as if reflecting the manner in which one area of knowledge can lead circuitously and unexpectedly to a seemingly unrelated field of inquiry.

This library of the slumbering mind was buried in a silence as solid and as sinuous as the drifted sands of Egypt. No step I took produced a sound.

The wandering passageways were catacombs without the mummified remains, harboring instead lives and the work of lifetimes set down on paper, bound with glue and signature thread.

As always in a lost-and-alone dream, I remained anxious but not afraid. I proceeded in expectation of a momentous discovery, a thing of wonder and delight, although the possibility of terror remained.

When the dream is in a labyrinthine train station, the silence is sometimes broken by footsteps that lure me before they fade. In a department store, I hear a faraway feminine laugh that draws me from kitchenware through bed-and-bath and down a frozen escalator.

In this library, the thrall of silence allowed a single crisp sound now and then, as if someone in an adjacent aisle was paging through a book. Searching, I found neither a patron nor a librarian.

An urgency gripped me. I walked faster, ran, turned a corner into what might have been a reading alcove. Instead of armchairs, the space offered a bed, and in it slept Penny, alone. The covers on my side of the bed were undisturbed, as though I had never rested there.

Alarmed at the sight of her alone, I sensed in her solitude an omen of some event that I dared not contemplate.

I approached the bed—and woke in it, beside her, where I had not been lying in the dream. Gone were the nautilus spirals of books, replaced by darkness and the pale geometry of curtained windows.

Penny’s soft rhythmic breathing was a mooring to which I could tether myself in the gloom; her respiration should have settled me but did not. I continued to feel adrift, and anxious.

Wanting something, not knowing what I wanted, I eased out of bed and, barefoot in pajamas, left the master suite.

Moonlight through skylights frosted the longer run of the L-shaped upstairs hallway. Passing a thus twice-silvered mirror, I glanced at my reflection, which appeared as diaphanous as a ghost.

I was awake but felt still dreambound. This venue, though it was my own house, seemed more sinister than the deserted library or than the department store haunted by an elusive laughing spirit.

My rising anxiety focused on Milo. I hurried the length of the main hall and turned right into the darker short arm.

From the gap between the threshold and the bottom of Milo’s bedroom door, a fan of radiance continuously fluttered between a sapphire-blue intensity and an icy gunmetal blue, not the light of fire or television but suggesting mortal danger nonetheless.

We have a policy of knocking, but I opened the door without announcing myself—and was relieved to find Milo safe and asleep.

The dimmer switch on the bedside lamp had been dialed down to an approximation of candlelight. He lay supine, head raised on a pillow. Behind his closed eyelids, rapid eye movement signified dream sleep.

With him lay Lassie, her chin resting on his abdomen. She was as awake as any guardian charged with a sacred task. She rolled her eyes to watch me without moving her head.

On the U-shaped desk, intermingling clouds of color—each a shade of blue—billowed in slow motion across the computer monitor, like a kaleidoscope with amorphous forms instead of geometric shapes.

I had never seen such a screen saver. Because Milo’s computer had no Internet access, this couldn’t have been downloaded from the Web.

The Internet is more a force for evil than for good. It offers the worst of humankind absolute license and anonymity—and numerous addictive pursuits over which to become obsessive. Kids are having innocence and willpower—if not free will itself—stolen from them.

When Milo wanted to go online, he had to use my computer or Penny’s. We have installed serious site-blocking software.

The wing of the desk to the left of the computer was covered with circuit boards, carefully labeled microchips in small plastic bags, a disassembled alphanumeric keypad, a disassembled radio, dozens of
arcane items I had purchased for him at RadioShack and elsewhere, and a scattering of miniature tools.

I had no idea what my boy might be creating with any of those things. However, I trusted him to obey the rules and to avoid doing anything that might electrocute him, burn down the house, or transport him to the Jurassic Era with no way of getting back to us.

In movies, raising a prodigy is always an exhilarating and uplifting journey to triumphant accomplishment. In reality, it is also exhausting and even sometimes terrifying.

I suppose that would not be true if his genius expressed itself as a talent for the piano and for musical composition. Even Mozart couldn’t play the piano with such brilliance that it would explode and kill bystanders with ivory shrapnel.

Unfortunately—or fortunately, as only time would tell—Milo’s talent was for theoretical and applied mathematics, also theoretical and applied physics, with a deep intuitive understanding of magnetic and electromagnetic fields.

This we were told by the experts who studied and tested Milo for two weeks. I have only a dim idea of what their assessment means.

For a while we hired graduate students to tutor him, but they tended only to inhibit his learning. He is a classic autodidact, self-motivated, and already in possession of his high-school GED.

I am as proud of the little guy as I am intimidated. Given his brainpower, he’ll probably never be interested in having me teach him a pastime as boring as baseball. Which is all right, I guess, because I’ve always been rotten at sports.

The wing of the desk to the right of the computer held a large tablet open to a working drawing of some device requiring an array of microprocessors, instruction caches, data caches, bus connections, and other more mysterious items—all linked by a bewildering maze of circuit traces.

If microsoldering was required, neither Milo nor I would be permitted to do it. Such work must be left to Penny. She has, after all, the steady hands of an artist, the emotional maturity that Milo lacks, and a mechanical competence of which I can only dream.

The ever-changing forms on the monitor, like a churning mass of blue protoplasm, had begun to seem ominous to me, as if this were a living thing that, by applying pressure, might crack the screen and surge into the room. I wanted to switch off the computer, but I did not. Milo had left it on not inadvertently but for some reason.

At the bed once more, I gazed at him for a while in the low lamplight. A beautiful child.

Although blessed with a vivid imagination, I could not begin to envision the topography of Milo’s mindscape.

I worried about him a lot.

He had no friends his age because kids bored him. Penny, Lassie, Vivian Norby, Clotilda, Grimbald, and I were his social universe.

I hoped he could live as normally as his gifts would allow, but I felt inadequate to show him the way. I wanted my son to know much laughter and more love, to appreciate the grace of this world and the abiding mystery of it, to know the pleasure of small achievements, of trifles and of follies, to be always aware of the million wonderful little pictures in the big one, to be a humble master of his gift and not the servant of it. Because I could not imagine what it must be like to be him, I could not lead on every issue; much of the time, we would have to find our way together.

I loved him enough to endure any horror for him and to die that he might be spared.

No matter how much you care for another person, however, you can’t guarantee him a happy life, not with love or money, not with sacrifice. You can only do your best—and pray for him.

I kissed Milo on the forehead without disturbing his sleep. Impulsively, I kissed Lassie on the head, as well. She seemed to be pleased by this affection, but I got some fur on my lips.

The bedside clock read 5:00 A.M. In seven and a half hours, the dog would be sitting in the living-room window seat, watching the street and wondering when I would return with her cherished companion— and Milo and I would be having lunch at Roxie’s Bistro, spying on the nation’s premier literary critic.

   At 12:10, the lunch crowd in Roxie’s Bistro was slightly noisier than the dinner customers, but the ambience remained relaxing and conducive to quiet conversation.

Hamal Sarkissian seated us at a table for two at the back of the long rectangular room. He provided a booster pillow for Milo.

“Will you want wine with lunch?” Hamal asked the boy.

“A glass or two,” Milo confirmed.

“I will have it for you in fifteen years,” Hamal said.

I had told Penny that I was taking Milo to the library, to an electronics store to buy items he needed for his current project, and finally to lunch at Roxie’s. All this was true. I don’t lie to Penny.

I neglected, however, to tell her that at lunch I would get a glimpse of the elusive Shearman Waxx. This is deception by omission, and it is not admirable behavior.

Considering that I had no intention of either approaching the critic or speaking to him, I saw no harm in this small deception, no
need to concern Penny or to have to listen to her admonition to “Let it go.”

Only once before had I deceived her by omission. That previous instance involved an issue more serious than this one. At the start of our courtship, and now for ten years, I had carefully avoided revealing to her the key fact about myself, the most formative experience of my life, for it seemed to be a weight she should not have to carry.

Because Milo and I arrived before Waxx, I was not at risk of running a variation of my garage-door stunt, accidentally driving through the restaurant, killing the critic at his lunch, and thus being wrongly suspected of premeditated murder.

Having conspired with me earlier on the phone, Hamal pointed to a table at the midpoint of the restaurant. “He will be seated there, by the window. He always reads a book while he dines. You will know him. He is a strange man.”

Earlier, on the Internet, I sought out the only known photograph of Shearman Waxx, which proved to be of no use. The image was as blurry as all those snapshots of Big Foot striding through woods and meadows.

When Hamal left us alone, Milo said, “What strange man?”

“Just a guy. A customer. Hamal thinks he’s strange.”

“Why?”

“He’s got a third eye in his forehead.”

Milo scoffed: “Nobody has an eye in his forehead.”

“This guy does. And four nostrils in his nose.”

“Yeah?” He was as gimlet-eyed as a homicide detective. “What kind of pet does he have—a flying furnal?”

“Two of them,” I said. “He’s taught them stunt flying.”

While we studied our menus and enjoyed our lemony iced tea, in no hurry to order food, Milo and I discussed our favorite cookies, Saturday-morning cartoon shows, and whether extraterrestrials are
more likely to visit Earth to enlighten us or to eat us. We talked about dogs in general, Lassie in particular, and anomalies of current flow in electromagnetic fields.

With the last subject, my half of the conversation consisted of so many grunts and snorts that I might have been the aforementioned Sasquatch.

Promptly at 12:30, a stumpy man carrying an attaché case entered the restaurant. Hamal escorted him to the previously specified window table.

To be fair, the guy appeared less stumpy than solid. Although perhaps half as wide as he was tall, Waxx was not overweight. He seemed to have the density of a lead brick.

His neck looked thick enough to support the stone head of an Aztec-temple god. His face was so at odds with the rest of the man that it might have been grafted to him by a clever surgeon: a wide smooth brow, bold and noble features, a strong chin—a face suitable for a coin from the Roman Empire.

He was about forty, certainly not 140, as the online encyclopedia claimed. His leonine hair had turned prematurely white.

In charcoal-gray slacks, an ash-gray hound’s-tooth sport coat with leather elbow patches, a white shirt, and a red bow tie, he seemed to be part college professor and part professional wrestler, as though two men of those occupations had shared a teleportation chamber and— à la the movie
The Fly
—had discovered their atoms intermingled at the end of their trip.

From his attaché case, he withdrew a hardcover book and what appeared to be a stainless-steel torture device. He opened the book and fitted it into the jaws of this contraption, which held the volume open and at a slant for comfortable hands-free reading.

Evidently, the critic was a man of reliable habits. A waiter came to his table with a glass of white wine that he hadn’t ordered.

Waxx nodded, seemed to utter a word or two, but did not glance up at his server, who at once departed.

He put on half-lens, horn-rimmed reading glasses and, after a sip of wine, turned his attention to the steel-entrapped book.