The Best of Lucius Shepard (117 page)

Pin sent me
the picture and I e-mailed it to a gearhead friend, Crazy Ed, who lived in
Wilkes-Barre, to see what he could make of it. Though I didn’t forget about the
stars, I got slammed with business and my consideration of them and the late
William Garnant had to be put on the backburner, along with Stanky’s career.
Against all expectations, Liz had not fled screaming from his bed, crying
Pervert, but stayed with him most nights. Except for his time in the studio, I
rarely saw him, and then only when his high school fans drove by to pick up him
and Liz. An apocryphal story reached my ear, insinuating that she had taken on
a carload of teenage boys while Stanky watched. That, if true, explained the
relationship in Stanky-esque terms, terms I could understand. I didn’t care
what they did as long as he fulfilled his band duties and kept out of my hair.
I landed him a gig at the Pick and Shovel in Waterford, filling in for a band
that had been forced to cancel, and it went well enough that I scored him
another gig at Garnant College. After a mere two performances, his reputation
was building and I adjusted my timetable accordingly—I would make the college
job an EP release party, push out an album soon thereafter and try to sell him
to a major label. It was not the way I typically grew my acts, not commercially
wise, but Stanky was not a typical act and, despite his prodigious talent, I
wanted to have done with this sour-smelling chapter in my life.

Andrea, for
all intents and purposes, had moved in, along with a high-energy,
seven-month-old Irish Setter named Timber, and was in process of subletting her
apartment. We were, doubtless, a disgusting item to everyone who had gotten to
know us during our adversarial phase, always hanging on one another, kissing
and touching. I had lunch with her every day—they held the back booth for us at
McGuigan’s—and one afternoon as we were settling in, Mia materialized beside
the booth. “Hello,” she said and stuck out a hand to Andrea.

Startled,
Andrea shook her hand and I, too, was startled—until that moment, Mia had been
unrelentingly hostile in her attitude toward my ex, referring to her as “that
uppity skank” and in terms less polite. I noticed that she was dressed
conservatively and not made up as an odalisque. Instead of being whipped into a
punky abstraction, her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. The raspberry
streak was gone. She was, in fact, for the first time since I had known her,
streakless.

“May I join
you?” Mia asked. “I won’t take up much of your time.”

Andrea
scooted closer to the wall and Mia sat next to her.

“I heard you
guys were back together,” said Mia. “I’m glad.”

Thunderstruck,
I was incapable of fielding that one. “Thanks,” said Andrea, looking to me for
guidance.

Mia squared
up in the booth, addressing me with a clear eye and a firm voice. “I’m moving
to Pittsburgh. I’ve got a job lined up and I’ll be taking night classes at
Pitt, then going full-time starting next summer.”

Hearing this
issue from Mia’s mouth was like hearing a cat begin speaking in Spanish while
lighting a cheroot. I managed to say, “Yeah, that’s.... Yeah. Good.”

“I’m sorry I
didn’t tell you sooner. I’m leaving tomorrow. But I heard you and Andrea were
together, so....” She glanced back and forth between Andrea and myself, as if
expecting a response.

“No, that’s
fine,” I said. “You know.”

“It was a
destructive relationship,” she said with great sincerity. “We had some fun, but
it was bad for both of us. You were holding me back intellectually and I was
limiting you emotionally.”

“You’re
right,” I said. “Absolutely.”

Mia seemed
surprised by how smoothly things were going, but she had, apparently, a
prearranged speech and she by-God intended to give it.

“I
understand this is sudden. It must come as a shock...”

“Oh, yeah.”

“...but I
have to do this. I think it’s best for me. I hope we can stay friends. You’ve
been an important part of my growth.”

“I hope so,
too.”

There ensued
a short and—on my end, anyway—baffled silence.

“Okay. Well,
I ... I guess that’s about it.” She got to her feet and stood by the booth,
hovering; then—with a sudden movement—she bent and kissed my cheek. “Bye.”

Andrea put a
hand to her mouth. “Oh my God! Was that Mia?”

“I’m not too
sure,” I said, watching Mia walk away, noting that there had been a complete
absence of moues.

“An
important part of her growth? She talks like a Doctor Phil soundbyte. What did
you do to her?”

“I’m not
responsible, I don’t think.” I pushed around a notion that had occurred to me
before, but that I had not had the impetus to consider more fully. “Do you know
anyone who’s exhibited a sudden burst of intelligence in the past few weeks? I
mean someone who’s been going along at the same pace for a while and suddenly
they’re Einstein. Relatively speaking.”

She mulled
it over. “As a matter of fact, I do. I know two or three people. Why?”

“Tell me.”

“Well,
there’s Jimmy Galvin. Did you hear about him?”

“The
gardening tool. Yeah. Who else?”

“This guy in
my office. A paralegal. He’s a hard worker, but basically a drone. Lately,
whenever we ask him to dig up a file or find a reference, he’s attached some
ideas about the case we’re working on. Good ideas. Some of them are great.
Case-makers. He’s the talk of the office. We’ve been joking that maybe we
should get him to take a drug test. He’s going back to law school and we’re
going to miss....” She broke off. “What’s this have to do with the new Mia?”

I told her
about Rudy’s cartoons, Beth’s novel, Kiwanda’s newfound efficiency, the
millworker, Stanky’s increased productivity.

“I can’t
help wondering,” I said, “if it’s somehow related to the stars. I know it’s a
harebrained idea. There’s probably a better explanation. Stanky ... he never
worked with a band before and that may be what’s revving his engines. But that
night at the Crucible, he was so polished. It just didn’t synch with how I
thought he’d react. I thought he’d get through it, but it’s like he was an old
hand.”

Andrea looked
distressed.

“And not
everybody’s affected,” I said. “I’m not, for sure. You don’t seem to be. It’s
probably bullshit.”

“I know of
another instance,” she said. “But if I tell you, you have to promise to keep it
a secret.”

“I can do
that.”

“Do you know
Wanda Lingrove?”

“Wasn’t she
a friend of yours? A cop? Tall woman? About five years older than us?”

“She’s a
detective now.”

The waitress
brought our food. I dug in; Andrea nudged her salad to the side.

“Did you
hear about those college girls dying over in Waterford?” she asked.

“No, I
haven’t been keeping up.”

“Two college
girls died a few days apart. One in a fire and one in a drowning accident.
Wanda asked for a look at the case files. The Waterford police had written them
off as accidents, but Wanda had a friend on the force and he slipped her the
files and showed her the girls’ apartments. They both lived off-campus. It’s
not that Wanda’s any great shakes. She has an undistinguished record. But she
had the idea from reading the papers—and they were skimpy articles—a serial
killer was involved. Her friend pooh-poohed the idea. There wasn’t any
signature. But it turned out, Wanda was right. There was a signature, very
subtle and very complicated, demonstrating that the killer was highly evolved.
Not only did she figure that out, she caught him after two days on the case.”

“Aren’t
serial killers tough to catch?”

“Yes. All
that stuff you see about profiling on TV, it’s crap. They wouldn’t have come close
to getting a line on this kid with profiling. He would have had to announce
himself, but Wanda doesn’t think he would have. She thinks he would have gone
on killing, that putting one over on the world was enough for him.”

“He was a
kid?”

“Fourteen
years old. A kid from Black William. What’s more, he’d given no sign of being a
sociopath. Yet in the space of three weeks, he went from zero to sixty. From
playing JV football to being a highly organized serialist. That doesn’t happen
in the real world.”

“So how come
Wanda’s not famous?”

“The college
is trying to keep it quiet. The kid’s been bundled off to an institution and
the cops have the lid screwed tight.” Andrea picked at her salad. “What I’m
suggesting, maybe everyone
is
being affected, but not in ways that
conform to your model. Wanda catching the kid, that conforms. But the kid
himself, the fact that a pathology was brought out in him ... that suggests
that people may be affected in ways we don’t notice. Maybe they just love each
other more.”

I laid down
my fork. “Like with us?”

A doleful
nod.

“That’s
crazy,” I said. “You said you’d been plotting for months to make a move.”

“Yes, but it
was a fantasy!”

“And you
don’t think you would have acted on it?”

“I don’t
know. One thing for certain, I never expected anything like this.” She cut her
volume to a stage whisper. “I want you all the time. It’s like when we were
nineteen. I’m addicted to you.”

“Yeah,” I
said. “Same here.”

“I worry
that it’ll stop, then I worry that it won’t—it’s wreaking havoc with my work. I
can’t stop thinking about you. On a rational level, I know I’m an animal. But
there’s a place in me that wants to believe love is more than evolutionary
biology. And now this thing with the stars. To think that what I’m feeling
could be produced by something as random as a wavefront or a supernatural
event, or whatever ... It makes me feel like an experimental animal. Like a
rabbit that’s been drugged. It scares me.”

“Look,” I
said. “We’re probably talking about something that isn’t real.”

“No, it’s
real.”

“How can you
be sure? I only just brought the subject up. We can’t have been discussing it
more than five minutes.”

“You
convinced me. Everything you said rings true. I know it here.” Andrea touched a
hand to her breast. “And you know it, too. Something’s happening to us.
Something’s happening to this town.”

We stepped
back from that conversation. It was, I suppose, a form of denial, the avoidance
of a subject neither of us wished to confront, because it was proof against
confrontation, against logic and reason, and so we trivialized it and fell back
on our faith, on our mutuality. Sometimes, lying with Andrea, considering the
join of her neck and shoulder, the slight convexity of her belly, the compliant
curve of a breast compressed into a pouty shape by the weight of her arm, the
thousand turns and angles that each seemed the expression of a white simplicity
within, I would have the urge to wake her, to drive away from Black William,
and thus protect her, protect us, from this infestation of stars; but then I
would think that such an action might destroy the thing I hoped to protect,
that once away from the stars we might feel differently about one another. And
then I’d think how irrational these thoughts were, how ridiculous it was to
contemplate uprooting our lives over so flimsy a fear. And, finally, having
made this brief rounds of my human potential, I would lapse again into a
Praxitelean scrutiny, a sculptor in love with his stone, content to drift in
and out of a dream in which love, though it had been proved false (like Andrea
said, an animal function and nothing more), proved to be eternally false,
forever and a day of illusion, of two souls burning brighter and brighter until
they appeared to make a single glow, a blazing unity concealed behind robes of
aging flesh.