Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (29 page)

“He’s a liar!” shouted Veronica Braggman. “A filthy liar!”

Jamie slowly reached into his hip pocket, slowly brought out his ID folder, slowly opened it for the policewoman’s inspection. He saw her face change, and Veronica Braggman saw it, too, for she changed her tactics. “They’re all against me, all the gummint! Just want to keep a poor old lady down so the niggers and the white-trash can walk all over me. They took it all away from me, so I ain’t got nothing. And now they gonna take that, too!”

The policewoman said, “Do you need any help, Mr. Keller?”

He saw the incandescent fury light Veronica Braggman’s face and instinctively backed away from her. But nothing seemed to happen; she slumped back against the wall, muttering, “It ain’t no use, none of it. Can’t never get back my rights. Can’t never get what they stole from me.”

Marie-Gabrielle Parker’s voice said, from the midst of the crowd, a little unsteady but admirably clear, “Keller, we’ve got the evidence we need. And we need to get you back to headquarters before that ill-wishing has time to sink in. I don’t think I can handle it myself.”

He turned back to Veronica Braggman. “You just hexed me?”

Her head came up; there was nothing sane in her eyes at all. “
You stole my life
,” she said, and it was the snarl of an animal goaded past endurance, the wail of a lost child, the cry of a woman who had nothing left,
nothing
, and who sat on the cold tiles of the Langland Street subway station every day, watching people go past, people with jobs and families and homes to go to, people with lives . . . people who saw her, if they saw her at all, merely as a nuisance, as dirt to be cleaned up.

She lunged at him; he had played football from the time he was an eight-year-old bigger than most ten-year-olds, and he could read her body language. She expected him to fall back, to leave her space to twist through the crowd, to throw herself off the edge of the platform like Paul Sinclair. And part of him wanted to let her do it. Even if she didn’t break her neck in the fall, and she didn’t land on the third rail, and a train didn’t kill her, the ghouls would take care of her before she’d gone half a mile in the darkness of the subway tunnels. Like a garbage disposal.

Jamie put his hands out and caught her—and narrowly avoided being bitten to the bone for his pains. And then Parker was there, and they were getting handcuffs on her; she went limp, weeping great maudlin crocodile tears, and Jamie knew no matter how long he spent in the shower, he’d never really get the stink of her off him: madness and hate and despair and the terrible bewilderment of not knowing how she had ended up like this. He did not want empathy with her, but he could not help understanding. Blame the government at first, but the government is faceless, far away. It’s the people who walk by you every day and don’t make eye-contact, who call you names and talk about needing to “clean up” the subway stations; they’re right there, and it must be their fault. They’re the ones with lives they don’t deserve; they’re the ones who have stolen your life. They’re the impostors, because under their clothes and makeup, their cellphones and iPods and the hard shell of security, they’re
just like you
.

Jamie shuddered, and Parker said, with surprising authority, “Come on, Keller, move your ass.”

She was all right, Parker was.

He ended the day where he’d begun it, in the BPI clinic. Mick was awake now, a little owlish still with the sedative and somewhere between mortified and furious at what Veronica Braggman had done to him.

The decon team had lifted the ill-wishing off Jamie, although it had taken them three tries before they were sure they had all of it, and somewhere else in the BPI’s sprawling bulk, that lady was doubtless being fingerprinted and tested and, Jamie hoped, fed.

“Ironic that she’s probably going to end up better off,” Mick said.

“’Less she goes to the electric chair.”

Mick shook his head. “She’ll be found insane, and they’ll put her in Leabrook.”

“You sound awful sure.”

“I was . . . well, I wasn’t in her head, exactly, but something like it. The reverse of it, maybe. She’s insane.”

“And four people are dead.”

Mick raised his eyebrows. “You sound like you think your halo’s a little tarnished on this one.”

“Fuck off, Mick.” He couldn’t leave—they wanted to keep him under observation overnight, and Lila’d had a fit about that, too—but he got up to pace. Up and back, the room not really long enough to accommodate his stride, but it was better than sitting still with Mick sneering at him.

“Jamie?”

He swung round to give Mick a glare, and maybe a piece of his mind, but Mick was looking at him wide-eyed, solemn and a little taken aback, and Jamie’s anger drained out of him.

“I’m sorry,” Mick said. “You wanna tell me what I did?”

“You were just being your usual charming self. I’m sorry. Shouldn’t’ve flown off the handle like that.”

“I don’t mind. Except you usually don’t. It’s more my speed, isn’t it?”

Jamie thought of some of the tantrums Mick had pitched and grinned reluctantly. “I just . . . she’s not a nice old lady, you know.”

“Parker gave me the highlights,” Mick said, rather dryly. “But I don’t see why that’s got your tail in a knot. You caught her, you know. Justice will be served.”

“Yeah, but she was right.”

“I’m sorry?”

“All those people walking past her every day. Probably most of them ain’t nice, either. Who says they have any right to good clothes and a warm place to sleep? Who says they deserve it more than her?”

“Nobody,” Mick said. He was eyeing Jamie cautiously now. “You still feeling like yourself, Keller?”

“It ain’t that,” Jamie said and started pacing again. “It’s just, how come she ended up the villain here?”

“Because she started killing people.”

“You said it yourself. She’s crazy. And she’s crazy because somehow she got fucked over and spat out in little pieces. Blame The Victim isn’t a nice game, Sharpton.”

“Nor is Pin The Blame On The Donkey.” Mick slid off the bed, gawky and angular in the clinic’s ugly. He approached Jamie slowly, put one bony hand on Jamie’s biceps. “Jamie, it isn’t your fault.”

“I know that. Nobody’s fault, really. Or everybody’s. Just another clusterfuck of modern life.”

“We do the best we can, instead of the worst,” Mick said. “That’s all we can do.”

“I know,” Jamie said, not turning to face Mick, because he knew the particular kind of courage it took for Mick to offer comfort and just how fragile that courage was. “I just hate it that that’s not enough sometimes, you know?”

“Yeah,” Mick said, his hand warm and heavy and vital on Jamie’s arm. “I know.”

Mostly, now, they leave us alone.

We aren’t news any longer; we have been wrung dry of “human interest”; even the tabloids have given up hoping for a miracle to put us back on the front page. Generally, someone shows up around the anniversary, but they are not allowed to see us, and I do not know what they write. Harry asked once if I wanted him to tell me, and I said I did not.

We are the debris left after you save the world: broken bricks and dirty straw. I spent three years waiting to be tidied away, cast into the fire like chaff, but last night I had a dream.

For three and a half months after the flash, I was in a coma.

And for every day of those three and a half months, Harry talked to me.

He did not sit beside the bed and hold my hand—neither he nor I could have borne that, even if they would have let him—but we had been left, like two abandoned walkie-talkies, tuned to the same frequency. The effect has faded with time, though never entirely disappeared; we must converse aloud like ordinary mortals, but I do not have to ask to know how he is feeling.

The only memory I have for nearly six months after the flash that is neither pain nor grief is that interior sound of Harry’s voice: scratchy, careless, tender.

It was how I knew, as soon as I woke, that Harry was no more responsible for what he had done than I was.

Once, almost a year ago now, Harry said in the middle of the night, knowing I was awake, “They let me have a mirror today. I’m like the Elephant Man, only not as cute.”

“Then I won’t be sorry I can’t see you,” I said.

A beat of silence. Then we both started laughing, and it was some time before we could stop.

The day the troubles began—although I would not know they had begun until the next morning—I had a screaming argument with my piano teacher and stormed out into the quad to sulk. I would not have put it that way, of course; I fancied myself an artist, and fancied that my selfishness and temper tantrums were “temperament” when they were nothing but pure childish egotism.

I remember lying on my back in the grass, staring at the pure warm blue of the sky and thinking about the comet that had everyone so excited. We didn’t know then that it wasn’t exactly a comet.

We didn’t know what it was going to do.

Harry and I have different names for the nursing home in which we live. Some days we call it the Bastille or the Château d’If, other days Bedlam or Arkham Asylum. On very bad days, Harry calls it the Gulag, but I don’t think, even then, that he means it. Once, bitterly, I called it the Trianon, and then had to explain to Harry what I meant.

It is a comfortable prison, ours. “One of the best private care facilities in the country,” the lawyer my mother hired said proudly. The fees are paid by the federal government, which wants to keep Harry where they can see him, and does not want (with careful prompting from Mother’s lawyer) to appear ungrateful toward me. Our room is spacious, more than big enough for the two of us, with windows everywhere; I can still feel the sunlight, even if I cannot see it. There are gardens in which we do not walk, a swimming pool in which we do not swim. For my twenty-first birthday Mother sent a grand piano, and the staff very obligingly cleared a room for it. I told them to let the other inhabitants use it—and it was only Harry’s warning nudge in my mind that kept the word from coming out “inmates.” I would not even let Harry take me to inspect it. I have not touched a piano since that last screaming argument with Madame Vautelle.

The nurses are cheerful, kind, and efficient. We know them all by name; they talk to us, sometimes, like human beings.

I asked Harry once, on a very bad day, why he had talked to me when I was in my three and a half month coma. “Wouldn’t it have been better to let me die?”

“Maybe,” said Harry, “but how was I supposed to know that?”

“But why did you care?” The selfish, spoiled child I had been, demanding attention, answers, never letting go of what she wanted.

But before I could open my mouth to say,
I’m sorry. Never mind
, Harry answered me.

“Everyone I loved was dead, kid. Everyone. And I probably killed them, although I don’t remember it. Don’t remember much, in case you were wondering.” Bitter sarcasm, and I could not quite control the flinch of my hands. “I remember the smell of blood and ozone. I remember the screaming. God help me, I remember what it felt like to crush a man’s skull between my bare hands.”

He stopped, and I didn’t dare say anything. After a moment, he said, “Sorry. You didn’t deserve that. But the investigators found
pieces
of my wife’s body.
Pieces
. I didn’t ask them which ones, and they were nice enough not to tell me. They wouldn’t let me out of the hospital to go to my daughters’ funeral. You know, I still have dreams that I’m buried with them—and then I wake up and realize that the coffin I’m trapped in is my body.”

He came closer. Not close enough to touch, for we do not do that unless we have to, but close enough that I could feel his body, hear his labored breath. “I talked to you because you were the only one left.”

I can’t cry any more. The flash burned that out of me, too. But I said, “I know, Harry. I’m sorry.” And just for a second, his scarred, lumpy fingers brushed across my hair.

I understand that the scientists and the philosophers, the mystics and the UFO-chasers, the psychiatrists and the madmen, still argue about what they were: demons, aliens, mass hallucinations, spaceborne viruses, gods. A hundred thousand theories, none more implausible than any of the others.

I gave my theory in my testimony, when I was finally well enough to speak. The Commission liked my theory well enough to bury it in political doublespeak and jargon and call it their own. I am a little bitter about that, but not as bitter as I am about the fact that I told them the truth, and they listened because the truth happened to be convenient.

Templates. That’s what we were infected with, Harry and me and the woman in India and the two men in South Africa and all the others whose names I never learned. We were reformatted, like computer disks. Set to run a series of programs and then, like something out of an old spy show, to self-destruct.

It might have been carelessness, or the deterioration of very old technology, or some other mistake, that kept Harry and me from dying like the others. It might have been my fault for refusing to complete the program. When he sank to his knees in front of me, weeping, and cried in a voice that was nothing but ashes and pain, “Kill me!” and I did not. Could not. Perhaps that was what the flash could not consume: Harry’s guilt and my compassion.

Or maybe it was simply the punchline of a very cruel joke.

In the early days, when they were still trying to find a new template to fit us into, the reporters tried to make a romance between Harry and me. The idea made us both feel slightly ill, and not merely because we could neither of us bear to be touched. “It would be like screwing my sister, if I had one,” Harry said later, after everyone had gone, “and pardon me for saying it, princess, but you just aren’t my type.”

“You aren’t my type, either, Harry,” I said, and I felt his affection like the smile his scarred face could not make and my scarred eyes could not see.

I saved the world.

Nineteen years old and I saved the world.

Very heroic, except for the fact that it wasn’t me. The hero wasn’t me, any more than the villain was Harry McLaughlin, forty-year-old forest ranger and father of two. We were just the matrices that held the pattern, the straw and clay from which the myth was built. And now that we are only straw and clay again, the world does not know what to do with us.