White Apples (27 page)

The only sign of its effect on him was that he lost his good posture and bent five inches forward, as if someone had put a heavy package on his shoulders that he must carry into what was left of the rest of his life.

The men in the barbershop had disagreed on just how uninter•esting he should appear. Bruno had no say in the matter. They talked around and through him as if he were not there. But that didn't bother him though because just listening to how much they knew and the intelligence of their debate more than confirmed he was in expert hands.

He was transformed five times over the course of the night. They permitted him to leave the barber chair only to piss and throw up once in the sink when, in their eagerness, they altered him too fast and his inner organs revolted.

What was most surprising was that he did not feel any of these changes. From one moment to the next he would be an entirely different man in height, weight—everything. But he did not sense these things taking place, outside of the time they did it too fast and made him puke. The fact he felt nothing was almost more astounding than looking in the

mirror and seeing each new version of himself sitting in the chair. It was bizarre times ten. After all, he
was
the clay they were working with.

His barber's name was Franz and eventually Bruno got up the nerve to ask why none of this affected him.

Franz was washing his hands. "Because all the ones we're giving you are dead. We're just trying their bodies on you like costumes. Since they don't feel anything anymore, neither do you."

"Where are you getting them?" Bruno was squeamish about cer•tain things. He did not like the idea of human corpses dug out of graves, brushed off a few times with a whisk broom, and then put on him like some used sports jacket from a thrift shop.

"Don't worry. We catch the ones we want as they die—like the safety net under the trapeze at the circus." The barber dried his hands on a red towel. The others stood behind Bruno conferring. "The guy you are now just drove off a cliff outside Dubrovnik. A German tourist going way too fast in his brand-new Opel. Every•thing we try on you is fresh, Bruno. There are always people dying."

Did that explanation make him feel better? He didn't know.

The man who brought the donuts said, "Franz, we all agree on one thing—He's got to look like he's walked a few miles of night.

Do you know what I mean?" All of them were staring at Bruno now. The speaker put four fingers to his chin. "This guy sells mag•azine subscriptions over the phone, or some other crap no one wants. He lives alone and cooks all of his meals in a forty-dollar microwave oven. He's not completely invisible yet but you can already see through him."

"Why is it important that I be invisible?"

The tap dancer answered. "There are two categories of invisible people: The old, and the nonentities like Dean just described. Grow•ing old here is a process of gradually turning invisible. Haven't you noticed that yet? The only time old people are ever noticed is when they make trouble, or they're difficult, or they die. Otherwise no one sees them because they're of no importance. They have nothing to contribute except what they learned from life and who wants to sit around hearing about that?

"Losers are the other kind of invisibles. Like old people, they add nothing so they mean nothing. Their whole lives are like scraps of paper blowing down the street—you only notice them when they cross your line of vision. Then you forget them a second later. And why shouldn't you? We call them 'night walkers' and use them all the time because no one notices them. And for good reason—their lives mean nothing. They live and they die and the only difference between the two is a moment later there's one less piece of paper on the planet.

"Ettrich will be suspicious of you now after that stupid false alarm you gave about people knowing you're dead. Bad move, Bruno. You weren't thinking. You should have had everything in place before you made that phone call. But you were too eager to show off your clever idea. You should have waited and done your homework first. So his girlfriend outsmarts you by calling Ettrich's wife immediately and finds out the truth. You can't afford more mistakes like that. No more mistakes, no more Pemmagast, no more fuckups. We don't have time. We're going to turn you into a night walker and then you can do whatever you want to them because they won't even know you're there most of the time."

The others nodded their agreement or crossed their arms as if to say the discussion was finished. "No."

"What? Did you say no?"

"That's right. No." Bruno rubbed his nose. Or rather the German motorist's nose. "I won't do it like that. I don't want to."

Dean the donut man looked at the men and asked their ques•tion. "And why is that, Bruno?"

"Because I hate Vincent Ettrich. When I get him, I want him to know that it's me doing it, not some German clod he's never seen before."

"Hate? What's there to hate about him? He just seems like a shallow pussy chaser. Why expend all the effort hating him?"

Bruno shook his head. "No, it's more than that for me. Ettrich's ex-wife once said he was like a pigeon on the street just before a car hit him. Forever an inch away from being squashed, he always manages to escape at the last second. He's lucky and I hate luck. Plus he doesn't deserve it. He doesn't deserve to escape, doesn't deserve to be back here... How did he end up being the father to that kid? Can someone tell me that? How did this clown end up father of
that
kid?"

"Don't go there, Bruno," Franz said softly.

"What do you mean? Is it against the law to ask a question?"

"Because even unborn, that
kid
is more dangerous than you, or us, any King of the Park, and whoever else you can think of. If he's born and learns what he is capable of, then we are all in deep shit.

"There's no way to know what he's doing or thinking... He could be here now and we wouldn't know it. So I really strongly recommend you stop talking about Anjo. The less said the better."

Bruno looked around the room. It was plain by their expressions that none of the men was comfortable with this topic. "All right, but I've got to ask one last thing: If Anjo's so strong, how can we beat him?"

"We
can't, but his parents can. We're going to convince them to kill him."

Anjo was there, all right. He was in the green comb Franz used to smooth Bruno's ugly new hair. Then he was a piece of chewed chocolate donut sliding slowly down someone's throat. He flitted, he spun, he danced on Bruno's optic nerve a while to see how much spring it had.

He heard everything the men said. He heard they wanted him dead. He wanted his father to hear it too and

understand, but Et•trich's mind was forever closed to him. There was so much Anjo wanted to tell his father but he could never get through. Why was that? He had tried so hard. With his mother it had been easy from the start. But with Ettrich nothing worked.

Anjo was outside when the men left the barbershop. He was a black and brown pigeon standing in the middle of the street waiting for a car to come along and squash him. He wanted to know what it felt like to dive upward and escape at the last moment. He wanted to know the experience because that's how Bruno had described his father. Anjo wanted to know everything about Ettrich, even what other people said about him. But it was very early in the morning and the streets were empty. He strutted stiffly around, bobbing his head and making odd little sounds—coos and glubbles. So this is what it's like to be a pigeon.

The men stood outside the building, talking and smoking. Clear•ing his throat, Franz spit into the street and saw him. For a few delicious seconds the barber watched the bird. Did he recognize him? Did he know the boy had heard everything and was already planning on how to defeat them in the most crushing way?

Pecking and cooing, the bird walked in a small circle, all the time watching the man in the white smock ten feet away.

Some•where down the street the rumble of a truck coming their way grew louder. The bird heard it but continued to look at the barber.

Of course Anjo waited until the last second, until the truck's shadow was across his body and he had only a second to leap into the air or be killed by the wheels. And he did leap, he did escape, but then something happened that threw everything else into the air as well.

At the exact moment the bird fluttered up, the early cell groups in Anjo's brain reached the miraculous moment when mid-brain structure begins to develop. From one second to the next he became completely human and forgot everything. Gone was the green comb, the dog in the restaurant that had protected Isabelle, and Abraham Lincoln. The pigeon flying away was only a pigeon now and Anjo was back inside his mother for good, just another baby waiting to be born.

"For men, sex is gym. For women, it's church."

"Did you really write that, Vincent? You're a pig." But Isabelle was smiling. She sat with her back to the wall, knees drawn up as far they could go to her chest. On the other side of that wall Ettrich was sitting inside his closet with a flashlight, reading things to her he had written on the wall in there. This had been her idea. Maybe he wrote something there that might help now. Neither of them had any better idea of what to do at the moment.

"Only the ridiculous survive."

"Why would you write that on your wall? In the dark, in a closet?"

"Because I thought it best to write everything that came to mind so when I was trying to find my way back, something there might ring a bell."

Isabelle suddenly felt a big
glump
in her stomach. Alarmed, she looked down at it. She'd never felt anything like that before—as if someone had dropped a big stone into a still pool. She asked Anjo if he was all right but got no

response. That was strange, but some•times he didn't talk to her for days. It made her wonder if he was going to be a moody child.

Vincent crawled out of the closet on his hands and knees. "Do you remember my five questions?" "The ones you asked in Krakow that time?"

"Yes. Do you remember them?"

She raised her head and closed her eyes. "What three meals from your past would you like to eat again? What two objects would you like to possess again? What is the one act in your life you wish you could take back or erase?

Umm, I don't remember the other two."

Ettrich crawled over to her and arranged himself against the wall in her same position. "What one person would you like to see again, and what one experience do you wish you could repeat?"

"That's right. I love those questions. They're great to play with. They really make you go back and rethink your life, like doing a big housecleaning. Had you written them in there?"

"No, which is very strange because they're exactly the kinds of questions that would stir up my memory." She put her hand on his knee. "What are you saying?"

"That I think someone's been in here and erased some of what I wrote. I'm almost sure of it. Like those questions.

But more importantly when I remembered them, I remembered something else too." "What, Vincent?"

His face lit up like he was about to tell a wonderful story. "When you're dead they teach you how to make a water sandwich."

"Huh?"

"Would you like to see?" "Well, uh, yes. I guess."

"Come on." He stood up and took her hand. "It came back to me the minute I remembered those five questions."

He led her into the kitchen and gestured for her to sit at the small table. When she did, she thought again how sad it must have been for him to sit here alone those months eating his Chinese take•out food.

Ettrich went to the sink and turned on the tap. When the water was running, he cupped his hands beneath the jet and raised them. The flow of water broke perfectly in two and formed swirling trans•parent pinwheels in the air. Ettrich slowly lowered one of his hands and turned off the tap. The water he had raised remained in the air, turning and turning. Isabelle slapped a hand over her mouth like a child and watched, mesmerized.

Vincent put his hands beneath the two pinwheels and began to prod and form the water as if it were very soft clay. In a short time he had sculpted it into what looked roughly like a large sandwich. But a water sandwich, transparent and glassy.

"My God, Vincent, how did you do that?"

"That's what I was saying: They taught us how to do it. That was one of the first things I made. Isn't it crazy, a water sandwich? But it was the only thing I could think of then."

"Where? When?"

"When I was dead, Fizz. And just now I suddenly remembered how to do it." "It's wonderful, but what's the point?'

"The point is that I remembered something from the time I was dead."

Isabelle looked interested but unimpressed. "That's what hap•pens when you die—they teach you how to shape water?" The only thing she could think of was one of those arts and crafts classes where the teacher, a middle-aged woman in a smock and beret, taught other middle-aged women how to oil-paint. "But it's
death,
Vincent. There's got to be something more—"

Ettrich heard the skepticism in her voice and responded force•fully. "There is: They teach you that everything you once thought was
only
this is also this and this... and this." He lifted his water sandwich toward her. "Now watch." He ran a hand over the top of the sandwich. Blue flame rose up from it. "You can make water burn. You can make it hard as stone or soft as silk. When you're alive you think water is just water. But that's wrong. And it's one of the things that you learn there.

"I remembered something else too." "About death? What?"

"Here, take this." He moved forward with the sandwich so that he was almost upon her before she began to rise. She was about to say "How do I hold it?" when he threw it in her face. Blinded momentarily by the water, she was more shocked than anything else. Why did he do that?

When she opened her eyes and rubbed the water away, she was no longer in the room with him. Instead she was in another room she recognized instantly. It was a place of great happiness for Isa•belle.