Читать книгу A Lunatic Fear - B. A. Chepaitis - Страница 4

Prologue

Home Planet, Ranalli, Connecticut

Mary Lambert’s favorite part of the week was her walk home after work on Fridays.

The rest of her evenings filled up with appointments, seminars, or therapy groups, but she reserved Fridays for herself, and walked the two miles from office to home. It was good exercise, and it took her through a pretty part of town. She particularly liked strolling the pedestrian walkway of the Ranalli River Bridge, sometimes stopping to stare at the water and clear the week from her mind.

This Friday she moved a little faster than usual as she crossed it. She’d been kept at work late with a suicidal client, and by the time she closed her office doors it was almost sunset, with a gibbous moon visible in the northern sky.

She kept her head down, her thoughts focused inward on the case she’d just left. She clipped right past the man sitting on the railing, aware of him only peripherally.

Then, she slowed. Something was odd.

It wasn’t unusual to see people standing on the walkway, leaning their elbows on the railing and gazing down at the river, but she’d never seen anyone actually sitting on the railing. That’s what he was doing. Sitting there, swinging his legs, tossing a stone up and down.

She twisted her neck to look over her shoulder at him.

He didn’t seem upset. He tossed the stone up, caught it, tossed it again. Might as well be whistling, she thought. He had the look of an educated man. Wire-rimmed glasses. Tousled sandy hair shot through with a little grey. Nice face. Friendly. He reminded her of her brother. But her brother had committed suicide.

Her training as a psychologist, and the fact that she’d spent the afternoon talking another man off the cliff gave her pause. It wouldn’t hurt, she thought, to say hello.

She turned back and walked to him, leaned against the railing.

“Hey,” she said, pulling a cigarette from her jacket pocket. “Got a light?”

He caught his stone, held it for a moment, stroking the surface. Then he turned his face to her and pointed up at a sign over their heads. She craned her head back to read.

No smoking, drinking, running, skating or dogs on the walkway.

She shrugged. “Nobody’s around. How about it?”

“Fine by me,” he said.

He pulled a lighter from his pocket, flicked it into flame and held it up. She let the flame touch the tip of her cigarette and pulled in smoke.

“Thanks,” she said, and made herself comfortable, looking out over the river. The setting sun kissed the surface of water and bounced up to them. The moon began to glow in the darkening sky. The silver ribbon of water ran under them as smooth as liquid glass. There was no wind to disturb it today. Pretty river. Pretty sky.

“Nice view,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I thought this would be right.”

“Right?”

“As the last thing I see,” he said, smiling at her.

Mary felt cold run through her. That’s what she thought.

“You’re going to kill yourself?” she asked.

He held up the stone he was carrying, rubbed at it with his thumb. “Yes,” he said. “I’d rather. It’s a lousy world, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” she agreed.

She took a good look at his face. It was young and old at the same time. The smoothness of his skin placed him at thirty, tops. But the smattering of gray in his hair, the brooding in his eyes and heaviness in his mouth made him look older. Like her brother. The same look of mingled calm and despair. The gnawing sorrow of his death relived itself here, in this man’s face and eyes. Too much grief. Too much hopelessness. She turned her head away.

He said nothing. Continued to toss the stone up and down. Up and down.

“Why is it a lousy world for you?” she asked.

He shrugged. “The usual reasons. An absence of love. An absence of hope for anything but stupidity. Look what we’re doing to the ionosphere. The Hague’s decision to allow it. T-waves, and their results. All the people who pour poison into the earth for the sake of a pretty lawn. We survived the Killing Times, but I doubt we’ll survive our own vanity. I doubt we should.”

She took a long drag off her cigarette, flicked it away and watched it hit the water below while her mind busied itself with categories to place him in. He had none of the physical markings of a mutoid – no blue skin patch, no shriveled hand or twitching that revealed the genetic anomalies of those caught in the biobombs of the Serials.

No. Not that. Intergenerational trauma was her first guess. That’s what got her brother. He wasn’t even born during the massive urban violence known as the Killing Times, when serial killing rose to epidemic proportions and murder became the norm in city streets. He didn’t experience the violence, but their parents did, and something of their trauma seeped into him. She saw a lot of that in her practice. She imagined it was the same with this man.

“Maybe you should stick around and try to make things better,” Mary suggested.

He turned the stone over and over in his hand. “What for? All improvement becomes the next point of disaster.”

“That’s how you see it?”

“That’s how it is. Jesus wanted to make change, and we got the Crusades, and genocide for the sake of conversion. Genetic engineering causes new anomalies as fast as it cures diseases. Pesticides, meant to cure world hunger, poison the earth and all its creatures. But maybe none of that bothers you.”

“It bothers me,” she said. “But I don’t despair of change.”

“Yes, you do,” he said.

The words entered her softly, like seduction, like sex. She watched him toss the stone up and down. As it moved through the air it seemed to shed dust that billowed out, moving toward her.

Yes you do. You despair of change. You just keep yourself so busy you won’t feel it except in the odd Friday afternoon when the sun slants a certain way and you know you’re alone in the world.

“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t. There’s – there’s good things in the world. Even just walking home on a day like today, or talking with someone like you, people helping each other.”

He held the stone up. It was so near her face she could almost smell it, a cool, metallic scent. “And when you leave here?” he asked. “Then what?”

“I won’t leave until I know you’re safe,” she said, touching his arm lightly, infusing her voice with sincerity and compassion.

He smiled, gazed at the river. “Once I’m safe - will you go home?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

He turned his face to hers. “Alone?” he asked.

She saw her apartment as if it was reflected in his eyes. The empty refrigerator. The frozen dinner waiting for her. Last night’s leftovers still on the coffee table in front of the TV. Alone.

Alone. Utterly and absolutely alone is how you’ll live and die, and you will die after coursing out your meaningless life trying to kid yourself that you matter at all. That anybody matters. But deep down you know there’s an abyss waiting for you, waiting for us all.

A spiral of darkness began to unwind in her belly. She knew what he meant. Friday afternoons when she was done with her last client, looking forward to her walk, and suddenly the emptiness of home seemed an appalling wasteland representing not only the whole of her life, but the whole of life itself. Every client she saved would only die someday. Every hope of happiness would only be dragged into loneliness sooner or later. Not love or money or a friend or a cause to fight for made a dent in knowing how pointless it all was. There was an abyss waiting for her. The hole in the middle of the universe that spit life out at random for no apparent reason, sucking it back into nothingness for reasons that were equally random. She would fall into it and disappear, as if she’d never been.

She pretended otherwise. She did her job, went out with friends, took her walks and told herself she felt good, good good. Then, the hollow place inside her would open, and she knew herself for a liar. The sorrow she expressed for this man was really sorrow for herself, and maybe that was true of all the clients she pretended she could help. But she couldn’t help. There was no cure for the sorrow of existence. There was only compassion, and companionship among those who shared the tragedy.

“Nothing ever gets better,” he said. “It looks like it might for a while, then you see it never will.”

“Yes,” she whispered. He was right. The news this week was about too many suicides, a Pesticide bombing in the mall, and the Death Sisters – three women arrested for gruesome murders. This town hadn’t seen so much destruction since the Killing Times, and everyone was nervous, eyeing each other with suspicion.

So many dead, and it was so horrible, yet they were all destined to die anyway, so did it matter? Did this clinging to life matter?

She reached over and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, pressing the stone into her palm, then pulling away.

“I’d like you to have this,” he said. “To remember me by.”

She stared down at it. It was very plain. Smooth and oval, a greyish white. It was small, but it had substance, the weight of it pulling her into a centered place. A calm place where this despair didn’t matter.

“You’re going to jump,” she said, not trying to talk him out of it. He had his reasons, and as far as she could tell, they were good.

“Yes,” he said. “Will you sit with me for a few minutes before I do?”

She swung her leg over the rail and joined him. Sat next to him, stroking his arm. The dying and the newly born both needed touch. No words meant anything to them, really.

They sat together like this, while the sun blazed its last red and slipped below the horizon. Holding the small stone he’d given her, the warmth from his hands still palpable in it, she recognized the truth of all he’d said as if a mystic revelation had made itself known.

She was grateful to him. She’d spent too many years fighting to save what could not possibly be salvaged, too many years cheerleading for the already damned – including herself. She didn’t have to do that ever again.

He placed a hand gently on her arm. “We could go together.”

She blinked over at him. Go together. The stone in her hand was weighty, and as comforting as his words.

Go together. Yes. Of course. She should have thought of that herself. She should have done that with her brother. He asked her to, didn’t he? Said he didn’t like to go alone, but she’d refused him, and felt guilty ever since.

That’s what she longed for on those Friday afternoons. Someone to go with.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Let’s do that.”

He nodded at her. “It’s better that way, isn’t it?”

He held her hand and helped her to stand on the railing next to him, each of them clutching a girder as they got their balance and looked out one last time at the silver of the river, the rising moon, the recession of light into darkness.

“Take a good look,” he suggested. “Let it all be in your eyes for the ride.”

She laughed. “Yes. All of it, in my eyes.”

He squeezed her hand. “Ready?”

“Ready,” she said. They stood, just touching fingers and spread their arms wide. She swallowed moonlighit into her retina, and dove toward the rushing water, the cement parapets, the rocks, the currents, the end of her life.

The ecstatic freedom and horror were so great she didn’t even notice that the young man still stood on the railing, clutching the girder of the bridge.

He watched her swan dive into the cement parapet, saw her skull crack like an egg on the side before the water took her. He could imagine the rest. Her body floating down to the bottom of the river, her hand loosening its grip on the stone which would float beside her, down and down into that slowness, into that silence.

He lowered himself slowly to sitting, then swung his leg up over the side of the railing and walked down the footpath. Kept walking down the road.

He pulled a stone out of his pocket, tossing it up and down as he moved forward, looking for the next bridge