The Live-Forever Machine (13 page)

“A little drama, huh?” Chris said, grinning at him. “Just what was missing from our summer holidays.”

Eric was so glad to see him.

“This is getting ugly,” Eric said, and at the same moment, someone shoved him from behind.

“Hey, take it easy, pal!” Chris shouted, whirling around. He towered over a very anxious-looking businessman. “Give us a little space!”

The businessman hung back and let himself be swallowed up by the crowd.

“About time the muscle showed up,” Eric said jokingly, but he meant it. “You hear anything about this leak?”

Chris shrugged. “Everyone’s saying something different. All I heard was that one of the underground gas lines is busted. Under the mall maybe.”

“Can you smell anything?”

Chris shook his head. “Nah. And neither can they,” he told Eric with a wink, nodding to the people around them. “They’re flipping out.”

A Split Second News van pulled up along the sidewalk. Its side door slid back and a woman with a camera balanced on her shoulder sprang out with cat-like agility, trailing cables behind her. Two men stepped out from the front, and Eric recognized the familiar television face of Stuart Daw.

“First rate,” Daw said, nodding appreciatively at the mayhem around him. “Get some shots from here,” he told the camerawoman. “All the police cars and stuff, and then all these guys leaving their homes.”

A buzz went up through the crowd as various people caught a glimpse of the reporter.

“Look, look, look,” some were whispering, nudging their neighbours. “Look, it’s the guy from Split Second News, Stuart Daw.”

“Where does he get those amazing clothes?” Eric heard a boy behind him whisper.

“He’s a great reporter,” a woman said with conviction. “And he has a cute smile.”

A few teenaged girls actually tried to touch him as they passed, and Stuart Daw smiled and waved.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thank you. Please, go on with your evacuation; thanks very much.”

Up ahead, the camerawoman was pointing the snout of her camera into the passing crowd. Everyone was jostling to get on
TV
.

“All right, people,” Stuart Daw was shouting, “we’re going live in a few seconds! Please don’t look at the camera.”

Eric smiled cheerfully and waved into the camera as he passed.

Chris choked back laughter. “Amazing,” he said.

At the intersection, they passed through the police barricade. A recorded message on an endless loop was being piped over a van’s loudspeaker. “The gas leak is not a serious one,” the synthesized voice said blandly. “There is no risk
of an explosion. We’re hard at work and in full control of the situation. In the meantime, please let City Emergency Services take care of everything. The gas leak is …”

“First thing is to find someplace air-conditioned,” said Chris. “This has to be the hottest day ever.”

Eric led the way to the twenty-four-hour doughnut store up the street, and they sat down at a mangy booth by the window. A huge, lint-clogged vent in the wall blew icy air over them. Eric tried to mop up some coffee that had coagulated on the table.

“This is utterly gross,” said Chris. “If I’d known we were coming here, I would have gotten a tetanus shot.”

“Good doughnuts,” Eric told him. “Dad sometimes picks up a box on his way home.”

He leaned his head against the window and looked down the street towards the museum. There were gas leaks all the time in the city. You heard about them on the news, a house suddenly exploding, leaving nothing behind but a charred skeleton of itself.

“You think it’s under the new mall?” he asked. “The leak?”

“If it is, Mom’s going to freak out. Place is supposed to open in a couple of months.”

“You two planning on ordering anything?”
the cashier shouted. “ ‘Cause if you aren’t, out of here!”

Eric fished in his pocket for change and Chris went up to the counter to buy a couple of chocolate donuts.

Eric looked back out the window. From the moment he had gotten up that morning, he’d been nagged by guilt, as if some cartoon angel were perched on his shoulder, whispering into his ear. Alexander’s face wavered in his mind like a heat mirage, intoning, Help me. Help me. Help me.

Why should I? he argued. What kind of craziness was that, letting the things you were supposed to be taking care of just fall apart? What was the difference between that and Coyle wrecking the soldier statue on purpose? Alexander must be going crazy, Eric thought. Wouldn’t anyone? After living for so many years, maybe you’d start to go funny in the head, start doing weird things. A sixteen-hundred-year-old case of senility.

But why the twist of guilt in his own heart then? He watched the police barricade part to let through another
C.E.S
. truck.

“Here.” Chris handed him a doughnut.

The table shuddered as a subway train passed beneath the street. They ate in silence. Eric felt
awkward, as if they were both suddenly afraid to talk to each other.

“You still don’t believe any of it, do you?”

Chris looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know; I can’t—it’s just not enough, what you’ve told me.”

“So what’s your version, then?” Eric asked irritably.

“I told you. Alexander’s just stealing this stuff, and maybe he had some deal with Coyle—maybe he owed Coyle for something, I don’t know—and he backed out. So now Coyle’s come to collect, and Alexander wants to unload it on you.”

“And everything Alexander told me about his past?”

“Crap.”

Eric rolled his eyes. “Well, that’s just brilliant.”

“Yeah, well,” Chris said defensively. “If you’re so utterly sure, why didn’t you take the scroll?”

“That’s not—” Eric sighed. He didn’t know how to explain. It had nothing to do with whether he believed Alexander. He did. But Alexander didn’t care what happened to Eric, as long as the live-forever machine was safe. So forget it. If Alexander really loved the museum,
he could save it himself by unmaking Coyle. The precious past. He was just like Dad. So go ahead, let it wreck you, let it make it impossible for you to write or talk to your son or be happy. The real answer? He didn’t take the scroll because Alexander reminded him of Dad. Try telling that to Chris.

“Forget it,” Eric said.

“You haven’t told your Dad any of this?”

Eric hunched his bony shoulders.

“Wow,” said Chris. “That bad, huh?”

“Dad’s a mess,” Eric blurted out. “He’s distracted all the time, and we don’t talk very much. It’s just been really awkward. We can hardly wait to leave the dinner table and get away from each other.” He paused, checked the anger in his voice. “It’s because of Mom.”

Chris watched Eric, waiting for him to go on.

“He spends all his time thinking about her,” Eric stumbled on. “All those stories he writes—they’re about her. He has pictures of her that he never showed me, but I found them a couple of days ago in the attic. When I told him, he took me to the necropolis and showed me where she was buried. He goes there all the time without telling me. He remembers everything about her, Chris. He just thinks and thinks about her. But he never tells me any of it. Thirteen years.”

He wanted to tell Chris the truth about his
mother, to spill it out. But he couldn t. What would Chris think, that she was insane, selfish, weak? How could he explain why she was depressed? Chris would say his mother took one look at him and threw herself in front of a train. It put a sickening thought in his head. Maybe he did have something to do with her suicide. The timing certainly made it look that way, didn’t it? He’d never know. His father sure wasn’t going to tell him.

“I don’t get why he doesn’t talk to you about it,” said Chris. “I thought you guys talked about everything. I always thought it was—” he looked awkward for a moment “—kind of cool.”

“Well, now you know,” Eric said curtly. “It’s always been a big wrench in the works.”

“Nothing special,” Chris said, and Eric was startled by the harshness in his voice. “I mean, my Mom and I hardly ever talk—she’s hardly ever home, and even when she is it’s always business, business, business. Call the office, drag some work up on the modem, make a few last-minute deals.” He snorted. “Always thought you guys had some kind of utterly perfect television life. Quality time and all that garbage.”

Eric didn’t know what to say. He carefully lined his fingers up on the edge of the table.
He’d never thought about Chris’s life that much, what happened in his home. He felt disgusted with himself, wallowing like a hippo in self-pity. Like father, like son.

“You know what I do?” Chris said. His face had hardened. “It works best this way. I just stop thinking of her as a parent, and think of her as just another person. That way, it doesn’t really matter what she does. If she’s not around, or whatever.”

“Do you miss your Dad a lot?” Eric asked.

Chris rocked his head from side to side, as if thinking it over. “Yep,” he said. “Don’t know why sometimes, but I do. Good memories, I guess.”

Eric nodded thoughtfully. He looked towards the museum. It held a lot of good memories—the dinosaur gallery, the Egyptian mummies, the rooms and rooms of artifacts he’d wandered through with his father over the years. Those things, at least, wouldn’t change. But all at once Alexander’s words resounded in his head.

You will watch all this burn.

His eyes flickered nervously over the emergency vehicles lined up in front of the museum. Gas leak. Happened all the time.

“They said it was just a small one, right?”

“Huh?” Chris followed Eric’s gaze out the window. “Oh, yeah. No big deal. Remember the
pipes we saw in the tunnel? They were already kind of leaking. They’re utterly ancient.”

Another train rumbled by. Eric watched his hands tremble on the shuddering table. And then it all came together in his head.

“He’s underground.”

“What?”

“Coyle.” His mouth had gone dry. “Yesterday, where did he go? He disappeared. He must have gone into the subway tunnels.”

“You don’t know—”

“It’s Coyle,” Eric insisted. “He’s broken the gas line. He’s down there.” He could feel the short hairs on the back of his neck tingle. “You said all those tunnels were connected: subway, manhole shafts, storm drains. He’s down on the shore of the main storm drain. That’s his machinery we heard. ‘You reek of machinery.’ Alexander said that to him in the armoury. And the smell—Coyle smelled the same as that underground smoke.”

“You sure?”

“Jonah must have known all along. That’s why he was yelling at Coyle.” Eric’s heart made a sickening lurch. “He wanted me to tell Alexander. I thought he was just crazy. I didn’t even tell him, Chris!”

“Shhh,” said Chris, looking around the doughnut shop. “You’re freaking everyone out.”

“I’ve got to tell him, at least,” Eric said, sliding out of the booth. “He doesn’t know.” He stumbled out into the heat.

“I don’t get it,” Chris said behind him, walking fast to keep up. “They’ve found the leak; they’ll close it off. Nothing’s going to happen to the museum.”

“It’s not that,” Eric gasped. “Alexander doesn’t know he’s down there. He’s right on the other side of the cellar wall! Where Alexander keeps the scroll! The gas leak was just to get everyone out of the building.”

The heat was unbearable. Every ragged breath Eric took burned his lungs. The sky was the colour of lead, the clouds so low they seemed to brush the peaks of the highrises.

“We’re not going to get through,” Chris said as they neared the police barricade. A large crowd of spectators had gathered at the intersection. Street vendors had set up concession stands and were selling evacuation coffee mugs and T-shirts.

“Now just keep back,” said a police officer at the barricade, taking a bite of a hot dog. “There’s nothing to see here. Excuse me, sir, you’ll have to come down immediately.”

Someone with a video camera had climbed up on the roof of a police cruiser to get a better shot.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to come down from there.” The man with the video camera didn’t budge. The officer shook his head in annoyance and handed his half-eaten hot dog to Eric. “Would you hold this a second, please?” He turned and climbed onto the cruiser.

“Here.” Eric plunked the hot dog into someone else’s hand. “Come on,” he said to Chris, and ducked under the yellow tape. Crouching low, he darted between parked police cars towards a firetruck pulled up along the sidewalk. He could hear Chris’s rapid footsteps behind him.

“You’re nuts!” he hissed. “The front steps are crawling with cops. We’ll never get inside. Let’s go back before we get caught.”

Eric slumped against the huge wheels of the firetruck. They were out of sight—for a while, anyway.

“There must be some way inside.”

A warm drop of water hit him on the forehead. As he looked up, a heavy rain all at once began to fall, clattering against the pavement. The torrent fell against Eric’s face, mingling with his sweat, soaking into his shirt, his jeans. He watched, amazed, as a small puddle formed in a shallow depression near his feet.

“I know,” he said. “Jonah.”

They found Jonah near his storm drain grate on Astrologer’s Walk, wrapping himself in plastic garbage bags.

“Batten down the hatches!” he cried out as he lashed another bag around his leg with fishing line. “And take in the sails, for it’s God’s own wrath this time, you can mark my words.”

“You sure about this?” Chris asked suspiciously as they moved closer. “I don’t think this guy’s brain is fully operational.”

“If anyone knows how to get in, he will.”

The rain was coming down even harder now, and Eric’s clothing clung to his skin. He felt as if he were breathing steam into his lungs.

“You’ll catch your death of water,” Jonah shouted at them, peering through the plastic hood he’d rigged for himself. He beckoned them with broad sweeps of his arm. “Come here, my Phoenician sailors.”

“Oh geez,” mumbled Chris.

Jonah was handing them plastic bags and fishing line.

“Is there any way to get inside?” Eric asked awkwardly, pointing at the museum wall.

“The noise it made down there, Ishmael!” he said to Eric. “The crumbling and crashing, the rumbling and roaring!”