Spin (48 page)

“Come on over, darlin‘,” Fulton said. “Get on up on my shoulders and have a look at the sky.”

She clambered aboard, still puzzled. Fulton stood, hands on her ankles, lifting her that much closer to the glittering dark.

“Look,” he said, smiling despite the tears that had begun to track down his face. “Look there, Jody. Look how far you can see tonight! Tonight you can see all the way to the end of practically everything.”

I stopped back at the room to check the TV for news—Fulton said most of the cable news stations were still broadcasting. The flicker had ended an hour ago. It had simply vanished, along with the Spin membrane. The Spin had ended as quietly as it had begun, no fanfare, no noise except for a crackle of uninterpretable static from the sunny side of the planet.

The sun.

Three billion years and change older than it had been when the Spin sealed it away. I tried to remember what Jase had told me about the current condition of the sun. Deadly, no question; we were out of the habitable zone; that was common knowledge. The image of boiling oceans had been mooted in the press; but had we reached that point yet? Dead by noon, or did we have until the end of the week?

Did it matter?

I turned on the motel room’s small video panel and found a live broadcast from New York City. Major panic had not yet set in. Too many people were still asleep or had foregone the morning commute when they woke up and saw the stars and drew the obvious conclusions. The crew at this particular cable newsroom, as if in a fever dream of journalistic heroism, had set up a rooftop camera pointed east from the top of Todt Hill on Staten Island. The light was dim, the eastern sky brightening but still void. A pair of barely-holding-it-together anchors read to each other from freshly faxed bulletins.

There had been no intelligible link with Europe since the end of the flicker, they said. This might be due to electrostatic interference, the unmediated sunlight washing out aerostat-linked signals. It was too soon to draw dire conclusions. “And as always,” one of the newscasters said, “although we don’t have official reaction yet, the best advice is to stay put and stay tuned until we sort all this out. I don’t think it would be inappropriate to ask people to remain in their homes if at all possible.”

“Today of all days,” his partner agreed, “people will want to be close to their families.”

I sat on the edge of the motel-room mattress and watched until the sun rose.

The high camera caught it first as a layer of crimson cloud skimming the oily Atlantic horizon. Then a boiling crescent edge, filters sliding over the lens to stop down the glare.

The scale of it was hard to parse, but the sun came up (not quite red but ruddy orange, unless that was an artifact of the camera) and came up some more and kept coming up until it hovered over the ocean, Queens, Manhattan, too large to be a plausible heavenly body, more like an enormous balloon filled with amber light.

I waited for more commentary, but the image was silent until it cut to a studio in the Midwest, the network’s fallback headquarters, and another reporter, too poorly groomed to be a regular anchor, who uttered more sourceless and futile cautions. I switched it off.

And took my med kit and suitcase to the car.

Fulton and Jody came out of the office to see me off. Suddenly they were old friends, sorry to see me go. Jody looked frightened now. “Jody’s been talking to her mom,” Fulton said. “I don’t think her mom had heard about the stars.”

I tried not to picture the early-morning wake-up call, Jody phoning from the desert to announce what her mother would have instantly understood as the approaching end of the world. Jody’s mom saying what might be a final good-bye to her daughter while struggling not to scare her to death, shielding her from the onrushing truth.

Now Jody leaned into her father’s ribs and Fulton put his arm around her, nothing but tenderness left between them.

“Do you have to go?” Jody asked.

I said I did.

“Because you can stay if you like. My dad said so.”

“Mr. Dupree’s a doctor,” Fulton said gently. “He probably has a house call to make.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I do.”

Something near miraculous happened in the eastbound lanes of the highway that morning. Many people behaved badly in what they believed to be their final hours. It was as if the flickers had been merely a rehearsal for this less arguable doom. All of us had heard the predictions: forests ablaze, searing heat, the seas turned to scalding live steam. The only question was whether it would take a day, a week, a month.

And so we broke windows and took what appealed to us, any trinket life had denied us; men attempted to rape women, some discovering that the loss of inhibition worked both ways, the intended victim endowed by the same events with unexpected powers of eye-gouging and testicle-crushing; old scores were settled by gunshot and guns were fired on a whim. The suicides were legion. (I thought of Molly: if she hadn’t died in the first flicker she was almost certainly dead now, might even have died pleased at the logical unfolding of her logical plan. Which made me want to cry for her for the first time in my life.)

But there were islands of civility and acts of heroic kindness, too. Interstate 10 at the Arizona border was one of them.

During the flicker there had been a National Guard detachment stationed at the bridge that crossed the Colorado River. The soldiers had disappeared shortly after the flicker ended, recalled, perhaps, or just AWOL, headed for home. Without them the bridge could have become a tangled, impassable bottleneck.

But it wasn’t. Traffic flowed at a gentle pace in both directions. A dozen civilians, self-appointed volunteers with heavy-duty flashlights and flares out of their trunk emergency kits, had taken on the work of directing traffic. And even the terminally eager—the folks who wanted or needed to travel a long way before dawn, to reach New Mexico, Texas, maybe even Louisiana if their engines didn’t melt first—seemed to understand that this was necessary, that no attempt to jump the line could possibly succeed and that patience was the only recourse. I don’t know how long this mood lasted or what confluence of goodwill and circumstance created it Maybe it was human kindness or maybe it was the weather: in spite of the doom roaring toward us out of the east the night was perversely
nice
. Scattered stars in a clear, cool sky; a quickening breeze that carried off the stench of exhaust and came in the car window gentle as a mother’s touch.

I thought about volunteering at one of the local hospitals— Palo Verde in Blythe, which I had once visited for a consultation, or maybe La Paz Regional in Parker. But what purpose would it serve? There was no cure for what was coming.

There was only palliation, morphine, heroin, Molly’s route, assuming the pharmaceutical cupboards hadn’t already been looted.

And what Fulton had told Jody was essentially true: I had a house call to make.

A quest. Quixotic now, of course. Whatever was wrong with Diane, I wouldn’t be fixing that, either. So why finish the journey? It was something to do at the end of the world, busy hands don’t tremble, busy minds don’t panic; but that didn’t explain the urgency, the visceral need to see her that had set me on the road during the flicker and seemed, if anything, stronger now.

Past Blythe, past the uneasy gauntlet of darkened shops and the fistfights brewing around besieged gas stations, the road opened up and the sky was darker, the stars sparkling. I was thinking about that when the phone trilled.

I almost drove off the road, fumbling in my pocket, braking, while a utility vehicle in back of me squealed past.

“Tyler,” Simon said.

Before he went on I said, “Give me a call-back number before you hang up or we get cut off. So I can reach you.”

“I’m not supposed to do that. I—”

“Are you calling from a private phone or the house phone?”

“Sort of private, a cell, we just use it locally. I’ve got it now but Aaron carries it sometimes so—”

“I won’t call unless I have to.”

“Well. I don’t suppose it matters.” He gave me the number. “But have you seen the sky, Tyler? I assume so, since you’re awake. It’s the last night of the world, isn’t it?”

I thought:
Why are you asking me
? Simon had been living in the last days for three decades now. He ought to know. “Tell me about Diane,” I said.

“I want to apologize for that call. Because of, you know, what’s happening.”

“How is she?”

“That’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t matter.”

“Is she dead?”

Long pause. He came back sounding hurt. “No. No, she’s not dead. That’s not the point.”

“Is she hovering in midair, waiting for the Rapture?”

“You don’t have to insult my faith,” Simon said. (And I couldn’t resist interpreting the phrase:
my
faith, he had said, not
our
faith.)

“Because, if not, maybe she still needs medical attention. Is she still sick, Simon?”

“Yes. But—”

“Sick how? What are her symptoms?”

“Sunrise is only an hour away, Tyler. Surely you understand what that means.”

“I’m not at all sure what it means. And I’m on the road, I can be at the ranch before dawn.”

“Oh—no, that’s not good—no, I—”

“Why not? If it’s the end of the world, why shouldn’t I be there?”

“You don’t understand. What’s going on isn’t just the world ending. It’s a new one being born.”

“How sick is she, exactly? Can I talk to her?”

Simon’s voice became tremorous. A man on the brink. We were all on the brink. “She can only whisper. She can’t get her breath. She’s weak. She’s lost a lot of weight.”

“How long has she been like that?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it started gradually…”

“When was it obvious she was ill?”

“Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well— months.”

“Has she had any kind of medical attention?” Pause. “Simon?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It didn’t seem necessary.”

“It didn’t seem
necessary
?”

“Pastor Dan wouldn’t allow it.”

I thought:
And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself
? “I hope he’s changed his mind.”

“No—”

“Because, if not, I’ll need your help getting to her.”

“Don’t do that, Tyler. It won’t do anybody any good.”

I was already looking for the exit, which I remembered only dimly but had marked on the map. Off the highway toward some bone-dry cienaga, a nameless desert road.

I said, “Has she asked for me?”

Silence.

“Simon? Has she asked for me?”

“Yes.”

“Tell her I’ll be there soon as I can.”

“No, Tyler… Tyler, there are some troublesome things happening at the ranch. You can’t just walk in here.”

Troublesome things? “I thought a new world was being born.”

“Born in blood,” Simon said.

I came up toward the low ridge overlooking the Condon ranch and parked out of sight of the house. When I switched off the headlights I was able to see the predawn glow in the eastern sky, the new stars washed out by an ominous brightening.

That’s when I started to shake.

I couldn’t control it. I opened the door and fell out of the car and picked myself up by force of will. The land was rising out of the dark like a lost continent, brown hills, neglected pastureland returned to desert, the long shallow slope down to the distant farmhouse. Mesquite and ocotillo trembled in the wind. I trembled, too. This was fear: not the pinched intellectual uneasiness we had all lived with since the beginning of the Spin but visceral panic, fear like a disease of the muscles and the bowels. End of term on Death Row. Graduation day. Tumbrels and gallows approaching from the east.

I wondered if Diane was this frightened. I wondered if I could comfort her. If there was any consolation left in me.

The wind gusted again, washing sand and dust down the dry ridge road. Maybe the wind was the first harbinger of the bloated sun, a wind from the hot side of the world.

I crouched where I hoped I couldn’t be seen and, still trembling, managed to peck out Simon’s number on the keypad of the phone.

He picked up after a few rings. I pressed the receiver into my ear to block the sound of the wind.

“You shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.

“Am I interrupting the Rapture?”

“I can’t talk.”

“Where is she, Simon? What part of the house?”

“Where are you?”

“Just up the hill.” The sky was brighter now, brighter by the second, a bruised purple on the western horizon. I could see the farmhouse clearly. It hadn’t changed much in the few years since I’d visited. The outlying barn looked a little spruced up, as if it had been whitewashed and repaired.

Far more disturbingly, a trench had been dug parallel to the barn and covered in mounded earth.

A recently installed sewer line, maybe. Or septic tank. Or mass grave.

“I’m coming to see her,” I said.

“That’s just not possible.”

“I’m assuming she’s in the house. One of the upper-floor bedrooms. Is that correct?”

“Even if you see her—”

“Tell her I’m coming, Simon.”

Down below, I saw a figure moving between the house and the barn. Not Simon. Not Aaron Sorley, unless Brother Aaron had lost about a hundred pounds. Probably Pastor Dan Condon. He was carrying a bucket of water in each hand. He looked like he was in a hurry. Something was happening in the barn.

“You’re risking your life here,” Simon said.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

Then I said, “Are you in the barn or the house? Condon’s in the barn, right? How about Sorley and Mclsaac? How do I get past them?”

I felt a pressure like a warm hand on the back of my neck and turned.

The pressure was sunlight. The rim of the sun had crossed the horizon. My car, the fence, the rocks, the scraggy line of ocotillo all cast long violet shadows.