Odd Interlude Read online

  “That is correct.”

  “Then you’ve already heard just about every nasty thing that matters.”

  “I would like to hear it again.”

  “You should have paid attention the first time. Anyway, what are you, some kind of pervert, you suck on other people’s pain?”

  After a silence, he says, with no emotion except curiosity, “You do not seem to like me.”

  “There’s that keen insight of yours again.”

  “Why do you not like me?”

  “Snoop, sneak—heard that anywhere before?”

  “I am only doing my job.”

  “And what is your job?”

  “That is classified information. Tell me again about Norris Hiskott.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to compare what you said to Harry with what you now will say to me. There may be significant discrepancies. You will tell me about Norris Hiskott again.”

  These past five years have given me some bad attitudes, let me tell you, and if there’s one that’s probably going to wreck my whole life once Hiskott is dead and I’m free, it’s that I can’t tolerate being told what to do, even little things. I just can’t put up with it. I really can’t. Even if my mom or dad, when they tell me to do something, just tell me instead of explaining why or asking, I go off. It makes me all nuts, even though Mom and Dad only want what’s best for me. I have to do everything Hiskott tells me to do, what he makes me do, even the thing with Maxy and all. It’s just too freaking much. What I’m saying is, maybe I’ll never be able to hold a job with a boss telling me what to do, because I’ll want to punch him or hit him over the head with a skillet, I don’t know what. Just being told that I will tell this guy about Hiskott again steams me, because I wasn’t born to live on my knees saying “Yes, sir” and “Please, sir” all day long. I just can’t bear it. I really can’t.

  “ ‘Discrepancies’ meaning ‘lies’?” I ask. “Listen to me, butthead, I don’t lie. I’m a mess, if you have to know, I’m a train wreck, but I don’t lie, so you can just shut up, you can just stuff it where the sun don’t shine.”

  I’m shaking. Head to foot. I can’t help shaking. It’s not fear. It’s not rage, either, or not only rage. It’s also frustration and a sense of injustice and violation. I’m sick of it. And if he says the wrong thing, I’ll start smashing everything in this room that I can smash until he finally has to come out here and show himself so I can try to smash him, too, the sonofabitch.

  Sometimes, when I feel this way, night or day, I go down to the beach and take off most of my clothes and leave them where they can be found, above the tideline. I swim out into waves where the sun is broken into a billion bright pieces that look sharp enough to cut me. Or other times, by effort and the effect of the outgoing tide, I make my way into the midnight ocean where I become pleasantly disoriented, and the moon seems to be under the sea like a great albino creature on the hunt, and the stars are not overhead anymore, but instead they are the lights of an unknown settlement on a far shore where no one in this world lives. I swim and swim until my calves ache and my arms feel like iron and my heart seems as if it’ll burst, because if the sea decides it loves me and takes me down to its bed, and if it later washes me back to the beach and leaves me on the sand like a tangled mass of kelp and Sargassum, the cruel man who rules us will have no reason to punish the others for my escape because it won’t be an escape with any consequences for him.

  The thing is, I always return to shore, weak and trembling, and I dress and I walk home. I don’t understand how it can always turn out that way. Sometimes it’s love for my family that brings me back, sometimes fear for them, and sometimes it’s love of this beautiful and amazing world. But sometimes I don’t know what brings me back. It’s not Hiskott, because I would remember the invasion. It’s a true mystery. Because I sink and stay sunk, I really do. I drink the sea, inhale it, and can’t find the surface. I pass out. And yet I wake up on the beach and I’m not drowned.

  After another silence, my unseen interrogator says, “By ‘discrepancies’ I meant inconsistencies of memory. I know you are not lying, Jolie Ann Harmony. My multiphase polygraph detects neither the vocal patterns of deceit nor the pheromones associated with lying.”

  Gradually my shaking subsides. It always does. I mean, I have my moments, but I’m not flat-out psycho or anything.

  He says, “I ask about Norris Hiskott only because I need to make a decision regarding him.”

  I remind myself that I’m trying to learn something about Hiskott from this guy, just as he’s trying to learn something from me. “What decision?”

  “That is classified information. Can you tell me exactly where Norris Hiskott might be in Harmony Corner?”

  Although my anger is subsiding, I’ve still got some attitude, so I say, “That is classified information. Another reason I don’t like you is you have no social skills.”

  He broods about that while I examine the interesting console, which, I’ve got to tell you, appears complicated enough to control the entire planet’s weather.

  Then he says, “You are correct. I have no social skills.”

  “Well, at least you can admit shortcomings.”

  He’s silent for maybe half a minute, and though I throw switches and push some buttons on the console, the stupid thing remains dark and silent, so I probably haven’t destroyed Topeka with a tornado.

  “Can you?” he asks.

  “Can I what?

  “Can you admit shortcomings?”

  “My neck’s too long.”

  “Your neck is too long for what?”

  “For a neck. If you must know, I don’t much like my ears, either.”

  “What is wrong with your ears?”

  “Everything.”

  “Can you hear with your ears?”

  “Well, I don’t hear with my feet.”

  Again he’s silent. Silence is his frequent refuge, but it’s seldom ever mine.

  No cameras are obvious, but I’m sure he can see me. To test him, using a finger, I bore into my nostrils with a way-disgusting, almost erotic pleasure. If I could find something in there, I would really gross him out, but unfortunately there’s no mother lode.

  He says, “Your ears and neck are not shortcomings as long as they function properly. However, I have identified a shortcoming regarding your social skills.”

  “If you mean I mine for boogers, that’s just part of my ethnic heritage. You can’t criticize someone’s ethnic heritage.”

  “What are boogers?”

  I stop excavating my nose and try to wither him with a sigh that implies he’s tedious. “Everyone knows what boogers are. Kings and presidents and movie stars know what boogers are.”

  “I am not a king, a president, or a movie star. The shortcoming in your social skills that I have identified is this: Jolie Ann Harmony, you are sarcastic. You are a wise-ass child.”

  “That’s not a shortcoming. That’s a defense mechanism.”

  “A defense mechanism against whom?”

  “Against everyone.”

  “Defense implies conflict, war. Do you mean to say that you are at war with everyone?”

  “Not everyone. Not everyone all the time. But you just never know about people, do you? Especially strange people like you.”

  “I must make two points.”

  “If you must.”

  “First, I am not strange. A strange thing is one difficult to explain, but I am easily explained. A strange thing is something that was previously unknown in either fact or cause, but I am well known to many.”

  “You aren’t known to me. What’s your second point?”

  “I am not people. I am not a person. Therefore, you are not at war with me and need not resort to wise-ass sarcasm. I am not human.”

  SIXTEEN

  I don’t like spectacles other than the most gentle displays of nature, such as color-splashed sunsets, and the more frivolous works of humanity, like fireworks. Otherwise
spectacle is always twined with damage and nearly always with loss, the former partial and perhaps repairable, but the latter absolute and beyond recovery. We’ve lost so much in this world that every new loss, whether large or small, seems to be a potentially breaking weight on the already swayed back of civilization.

  Nevertheless, I’m riveted by the massive truck, a ProStar+, shuddering across the brink of the first slope, angling down so sharply that for a moment it appears about to tip forward, stand on end, and slam onto its back. But quickly it rights itself and rushes seaward as though an eighteen-wheeler cruising overland, breaking a trail through the tall wild grass, is as natural as a white-tailed deer making the same journey.

  The truck ceases to seem appropriate to the landscape when it meets a formation of rock that, like the beetled brow of some ancient ruined temple, serves as a ramp, offering the vehicle to heaven. The big rig is airborne, but not for long. Pigs don’t fly, and neither does an eighteen-wheeler carrying perhaps sixty thousand pounds of frozen poultry. Canting in flight, it crashes down onto its starboard side with such impact that you might think the first peal of thunder has just announced the storm of Armageddon, and even in the parking lot, I feel the earth shudder underfoot. As the windshield shatters, the vertical exhaust tears loose with a sound like the angry shriek of something in a Jurassic swamp, and the refrigeration unit bursts, white clouds of evaporating coolant billowing. Less rigid and less impervious than it appeared in better times, the metal skin of the trailer’s sidewalls bulges and ripples as several thousand ice-hard turkeys prove to fly no better than their warm and living brethren. The entire rig bounces, the tractor higher than the trailer, and they decouple, rolling in different directions. Casting off a fender like a failed pauldron of body armor, the tractor comes to rest first, on its side, against an ancient Monterey cypress that stands as a lone sentinel in that portion of Harmony Corner. Before it loses momentum, the trailer tumbles into a swale and halfway up the next slope, where its skin splits and its rear doors buckle open, and choice frozen turkeys tumble forth from several openings, spilling across the grassy hillside as if from a cornucopia.

  I’m already running along the back of the diner, where the only door is to the kitchen and the jalousie windows are of frosted glass. I’m hoping to avoid any member of the Harmony family who, in the thrall of the puppetmaster, might come after me on sight. Earlier, when I drove the big rig into the lot, the parked trucks screened me from anyone who might have been looking out a restaurant window, and for a minute or two yet, these onlookers will think that the plunge of the ProStar+ was an accident.

  As I sprint past the diner, I glance twice toward the land below, certain that flames will have sprung up from the tractor. But it lies there without a lick of fire, its slanted headlight sockets like reptilian eyes, something foaming through the steel teeth of its snarling grill. I think I remember that diesel fuel will burn but not explode like gasoline, and maybe contact with a spark or a hot engine won’t easily ignite the stuff.

  From the perspective of an armchair, when I’m watching the evening news, it seems so easy to be a terrorist or a saboteur, if only you don’t mind growing an itchy-looking beard and forgoing regular baths, but as in every other profession, success rewards those who take time to learn the basics of their trade, train hard, and plan carefully. I’m an amateur who makes it up as I go along. Furthermore, I have no love of destruction, and in fact I’m half ashamed of myself even though everything I’m doing seems necessary to me.

  On the south side of the diner, because there is no gas-company service in this rural area, four propane tanks stand on a concrete pad, under a sheltering corrugated overhang. On the first, I turn the knob that closes the valve. I twist the female coupling, which doesn’t want to unscrew, but then suddenly it relents. I free the tank from the flexible gas line that feeds some of the kitchen equipment.

  People are coming out of the diner, shouting and excited, but they’re all on the north side, where the big rig went meadow surfing. Because other parked trucks had screened the doomed eighteen-wheeler—and me—from anyone looking out of the restaurant windows, they must think that the driver is in the wreckage below, either badly injured or dead. They’re so fixated on the disaster that they don’t even notice me as I tilt the propane tank on its bottom rim and roll it to the nearby drop-off.

  The parking area on this side of the diner is smaller than the one to the north, and it’s for cars only. The thick wooden posts that serve as a barrier against catastrophe are not linked by cables as they were where the big trucks are parked. I stand the tank between two of the posts, open the valve, and retreat as pressurized propane hisses into the early-morning air.

  Six vehicles stand in this lot. The nearest is a Ford pickup. On its tailgate is a bumper sticker that declares USA NEEDS A MISSILE DEFENSE. With people like me—and worse—in the world, I totally agree.

  Drawing the pistol from under my belt, I shelter behind the nose of the pickup, using its hood to steady my arms. Taking aim at the valve from which the gas is escaping, I squeeze off a shot. I never quite hear the round strike the tank, because the spark from the ricochet instantly detonates the propane. A piece of shrapnel sings past my head, another clangs off the pickup, and yet another shatters the windshield. Spewing flames, the tank topples over the brink and tumbles down the hillside.

  I hope to avoid setting fire to the diner or the motor-court cottages, and the seven houses are far to the south of here. The rainy season has hardly begun, the tall wheat-colored grass is dry from the summer sun, and the hilly meadows are sure to burn. But this morning the sea doesn’t breathe, and if there’s wind somewhere in the rising land to the east, it’s bottled and tightly corked. A well pump supplies a water-tank tower that, like one of the alien machines in The War of the Worlds, looms beyond the crescent of cottages; that continuously refreshed reservoir feeds all the water lines in the Corner and provides the high pressure that the firefighters will need. The flames should spread just rapidly enough to ensure that they will be contained without loss of property, although getting them under control will require manpower that would otherwise be impressed into the search for me and the defense of Hiskott.

  No sooner does the propane tank tumble out of sight than I tuck the pistol under my waistband and am on the move once more, weaving among the parked cars and pickups. From there I hurry toward the cover of the trees that shade the cottages from the morning sun.

  I’m not going to need any more NoDoz.

  SEVENTEEN

  So Mr. Mystery isn’t human. And once he makes that revelation, well, then all his barriers come right down, he doesn’t care what’s classified, and he pours out his heart to me. I use the word heart figuratively, because the truth is he doesn’t have one. To avoid like a thousand-page talking-head scene, what I’ll do is, I’ll condense it for you. My mother has been teaching me to be concise and all.

  In the best of times, I guess it might be pretty difficult to be homeschooled by a mother who’s deeply committed to your education and who’s worried about the bankrupted country you’re likely to inherit. But being homeschooled by my mother under the current conditions in Harmony Corner is worse, it’s often as demanding as Marine Corps boot camp, it really is, except for ten-mile forced marches, marksmanship classes, and hand-to-hand-combat training. She can’t protect me from Hiskott, but what she is able to give me is knowledge and maybe good judgment and stuff, which come from learning and thinking, to prepare me for freedom if it ever happens. One way she prepares me is, she piles on writing assignments as if she thinks I’m going to be the next J. K. Rowling. Essays, profiles of historical figures, short stories in all kinds of genres—there’s never an end to it. One thing she pushes hard for is concise writing. She says, “Be concise, Jolie, be succinct, get to the point.” Well, you can see what a long way I’ve got to go in that regard.

  Anyway, Mr. Mystery isn’t human, and his name isn’t Mr. Mystery. The scientists at Wyvern called him Aladd
in, after one of the heroes in The Thousand and One Nights. The original Aladdin was able to summon genies from his magic lamp, to do his bidding. Now that I know what this guy is, I sort of understand the half-baked logic of calling him that, but Aladdin himself doesn’t get it. He dislikes the name. He calls himself Ed.

  According to Ed, Fort Wyvern in its prime wasn’t just an army base. Like maybe 5,000 of its 134,000 acres were set aside for all kinds of highly classified spooky projects that weren’t under the control of the army, that were run instead by who knows who and were funded from the federal government’s “black budget,” so they always had more money than Scrooge McDuck, and they could go as crazy as they wanted.

  This place I’ve been exploring has nothing to do with Project Aladdin. This is where they worked on Project Polaris. Just so you know, Polaris is the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper, if it matters. Personally, I think everything matters, even when it doesn’t seem to.

  Project Polaris was built to study alien artifacts, by which I don’t mean things that were brought across the borders from Canada and Mexico. Like ten years earlier, this satellite was conducting geological surveys and searching for possible oil deposits when it identified a ginormous unnatural mass not far off the coast of California. Navy divers were sent down there, and they discovered a crashed but still watertight flying saucer, although according to Ed, the thing was less like a saucer than it was like a flying wok with an upside-down custard cup where the lid handle should have been and with powdered-sugar dredgers where the bowl handles should have been, which frankly I can’t quite picture.

  As you might imagine, the government was hot to study this historic find, so they paid a two-billion-dollar bonus in advance to the security-cleared contractor—he was the husband of a senator—to finish this underground facility in one year. By then, Fort Wyvern had been closed a long time and housed no military personnel, but its isolation made it an even more suitable location for deep-black projects. Because of the reckless pace of construction, three times as many workmen died on the job as had died in accidents during the building of Hoover Dam. Some were crushed, some were blown up, some were run down by machinery, some were skewered or beheaded, some were electrocuted. One guy died during an argument with a union boss, when he fell into the excavation for a footing and was drowned in twenty tons of concrete. According to Ed, all of the dead were buried at the government’s expense and were presented with a posthumous medal for something or other. Their spouses and children received lifetime passes granting free admission to all national parks, plus a 23 percent discount on refreshments and souvenirs purchased therein.