Odd Apocalypse

Page 8

His green eyes were alien in that boyish face, full of loss and anguish and, at times, bewilderment.
As on the two other occasions when I had sought him out, Henry was reading a book of poetry. On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.
Some will be skeptical of the contention that a security guard—a “rent-a-cop,” in the mocking Hollywood argot of our times—might be immersed in poetry. The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert. But Henry was himself and no one else, and judging by the intensity with which he focused on those verses, he sought from them something profound.
While he lingered over the last stanza of a poem, I leaned against a porch post and waited. He was not rude, merely preoccupied.
I had come here to ask him about Kenny Randolph Fitzgerald Mountbatten, who claimed to be a Roseland security guard even though he hadn’t worn the uniform—gray slacks, white shirt, blue blazer—that the other guards wore and though he was in so many ways more flamboyant than Henry and his colleagues.
Waiting, I watched what appeared to be a peregrine, judging by its immense wingspan and the universal pattern of its underwings. These falcons generally hunted smaller birds, rather than rodents, making spectacular swoops and seizing their prey in midair.
When Henry closed the book and looked up, a lost expression marked his eyes, as if he knew neither me nor where he was.
I said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, sir.”
His confusion, or whatever it might be, ebbed, and in ebbing washed a smile onto his beach-smooth face. He appeared as boyish as any preadolescent in a Norman Rockwell painting—as long as you did not care to see more in his eyes than the green of them.
“No, no,” Henry said. “I enjoy our chats. Sit down, sit down.”
To the left of the door, he had earlier put out a second chair, apparently in anticipation of my visit. I settled in it, deciding there was no point in asking about an eclipse.
“I’ve been brushing up on my UFO history,” Henry said.
He was intrigued by reports of abductions by extraterrestrials and alien bases on the far side of the moon. Although I could not say why I felt so, I suspected that he sought the same thing in UFO lore that he pursued in poetry.
Aware of the irony of a spirit-seer debunking the possibility of visitors from outer space, I nevertheless said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I just can’t buy into flying saucers and all that.”
“Several of those who’ve been abducted have passed lie-detector tests. There’s a lot of documentation.”
“See, it doesn’t make sense to me that a superintelligent race would come all the way across the galaxy just to abduct people and put probes up their rectums.”
“Well, that’s not the only thing they do in their examinations.”
“But it always seems to be the first and most important thing.”
“Don’t you think a colonoscopy is advisable now and then?”
“I can get one from a doctor.”
“Not as thorough as the one the aliens give you.”
“But, sir, why would aliens be interested in whether I have colon cancer?”
“Maybe because they care,” Henry said.
I had learned that to get to a subject that I wished to discuss, I had to indulge Henry’s bizarre fascination with proctologists from other worlds. Indulging him, however, didn’t mean taking a craziness pill and tripping with him, and I remained a skeptic.
“I suspect they’re just very caring,” Henry persisted.
“Coming fifty light-years to give me a colonoscopy is so caring it’s downright creepy.”
“No, Odd, you see, fifty light-years to them might be like fifty miles to us.”
“Coming even fifty miles to force a probe up my butt without my permission is a pretty good definition of a pervert.”
Henry’s face was alight with wonder at the idea of aliens, and dimpled with the amusement that any mischievous boy feels when he gets a seemingly legitimate chance to talk about butts and such.
“They’re probably taking DNA samples, too.”
I shrugged. “So I’ll give them a lock of my hair.”
Smiling dreamily, but turning the book of poetry over and over in his hands as if agitated, he said, “Some UFO experts think the aliens have conquered death and just want to give us immortality.”
“Give it to everyone?”
“They’re so compassionate.”
“Lady Gaga’s cool,” I said. “But a thousand years from now, I don’t want to have to listen to Lady Gaga’s seven hundredth album.”
“It wouldn’t be boring like that. Immortal, you could change careers again and again. Be a singer like Lady Gaga, and she can be a fry cook.”
I grimaced. “I can’t sing, and I have a hunch she can’t cook.”
He thumbed repeatedly, insistently through the pages of the book without looking at it, making a sound like shuffled cards. “Enhanced by alien technology, we’ll all be able to do everything perfectly.”
“Then why do anything at all?”
“What do you mean?”
“If there’s nothing to learn because we know it all, what’s the challenge, why would the effort matter, what would be the point?”
For a moment he continued riffling the pages of poetry, but then his hands grew still and the smile flatlined.
I waited for his reply, but he didn’t make one. After a while, he said, “I’m supposed to be on vacation. Eight weeks in Hawaii.”
Noah Wolflaw didn’t seem like a guy who would play Santa Claus to his employees, but I didn’t remark on the generosity of a two-month vacation.
Henry gazed now at the falcon as it circled lazily, patient in its quest for prey. Subtle but unmistakable, his look of desolation was so unsuited to his boyish face, I suspected that he was in some emotional distress and that, into my silence, he might say something revealing and useful to me.
“I spent two weeks in Hawaii and just couldn’t stand it anymore. Flew to San Francisco for a week, and that was no better.”
The peregrine glided silently, and I as well felt falconish, in my mind circling above the guard, waiting patiently for him to speak words that might be meat to me.
“It wasn’t those particular places,” Henry continued. “Wherever you go these days, it’s all wrong, isn’t it? I don’t know why, but it is.”
I didn’t believe that he wanted any comment from me. He seemed to be thinking out loud.
“People are so different from how they used to be. So fast. There’s an endless opening of possibilities.”
Fearing that he might wax as cryptic as Annamaria, I sought a little clarification: “You mean the Internet, technology, and all that?”
“Technology changes nothing. People were people before and after the steam engine, before and after the airplane. But … not quite now. Walls. That’s what it is. The problem is walls.”
I waited, but he said nothing more, and at last, with some exasperation of which I’m not proud, I said, “Walls. Yes. How true. We have to have walls, don’t we? Or maybe we don’t? You start with walls, and then you need a ceiling. And floors. And doors. It just never stops. Tents. That might be the answer.”
If he heard my words, he didn’t detect my sarcasm. “Five weeks of vacation left, but I just couldn’t stand being out there anymore. I hate the wall around Roseland, but the gate in it is a gate to nowhere.”
When after a while he didn’t continue, I prodded him by saying, “Well, as I see it, that gate is a gate to everywhere. The whole world’s beyond it.”
I figured he was ruminating on my sage comment, but he wasn’t. He flew off on what seemed to be another line of thought.
“ ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.’ ”
Although I recognized those words, I didn’t at once know from what source he was quoting.
Before I could ask, Henry recited the famous lines of poetry about the falcon and the falconer, a metaphor for man and God, the former flying ever farther from the latter, the pagan cruelty of the human heart breaking loose from civilizing tradition.
“Yeats,” I said, naming the poet, and might have been pleased with myself if I had understood what the hell he was talking about.
“I hate it here, this Roseland without roses, but at least there’s a wall, and with a wall the center might still hold.”
He wasn’t hysterical, just enigmatic, but I really wanted to slap him until he made sense, the way the hero sometimes slaps the raving hysteric in the movies. But no matter how frustrated I may be, I never slap a man who is carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster under a blazer tailored to allow a quick draw.
Henry shifted his attention from the falcon to me. In his Huck Finn face, his eyes were as bleak as those of Hamlet.
His vulnerability could not have been more obvious. I sensed that the ease with which he opened himself to me was an indication that he was friendless, sought friendship, and could be cultivated to such an extent as to reveal secrets of Roseland that would help me understand why I was here and what I must do.
True friendship, however, is a sacred relationship even if it doesn’t involve formal vows. The friends I’ve made in Pico Mundo and everywhere I’ve gone since leaving home have kept me from despair, have nurtured hope. When I considered how I might cultivate Henry, I meant manipulate. There’s nothing wrong with manipulating bad men in pursuit of truth, but I didn’t think Henry Lolam was bad or deserved the contempt that manipulation represented. To pretend friendship here would be to devalue all the real friendships in my life.
While I hesitated, the moment of opportunity passed, and Henry said, “Guests in Roseland are rare.”
“The lady I’m traveling with seems to have … charmed Mr. Wolflaw.”
“She’s not his type. She’s not low or flashy, or cheap.”
By insulting his employer, Henry raised my hopes that he might treat me as a confidant without requiring that I fake friendship.
Silence seemed to serve me best, and after a moment, Henry said, “You’re not her lover.”
“No.”
“What are you to her?”
“A friend. She’s alone. She needs protection.”
He held my stare as if he meant for the intensity of his gaze to drive his next words deep: “He doesn’t want her. It may be the baby.”
“Mr. Wolflaw? What would he want with the baby?”
Having raised the issue, he retreated from exploring it. “Who can say? Maybe he needs … something new.”
I could tell that he didn’t mean anything as innocent as that the baby was a new experience, a novelty, so I said, “New? New what?”
“Sensation,” he said, looking away from me to the hunter gliding in the high blue day. “Thrills.”
Those two words evoked such an array of horrifying possibilities that I meant to press him for an explanation.
Before I could speak, he held up one hand to stop me. “I’ve said far too much and not enough. If you want to protect her, you should leave now. This is … an unhealthy place.”
I couldn’t tell him that my supernatural gift and Annamaria’s mission—whatever that might be—had brought us here. To reveal my sixth sense to anyone but a friend of long acquaintance might cause considerable trouble.
According to Annamaria, someone in Roseland was in great danger, perhaps the boy about whom the dead blonde worried. I didn’t feel the endangered person was Henry. I still had to find who needed my help.
“We can’t leave today,” I said. “But soon, I hope.”
“If it’s money, I can give you some.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir. But it’s not money.”
“I tell you it’s an unhealthy place, and you aren’t surprised.”
“A little surprised.”
“Not at all. What are you, I wonder?”
“Just a fry cook.”
“But you have no job.”
I shrugged. “This rotten economy.”
He looked away from me and shook his head.
Like an angel suddenly thrown down and remembering its wings only at the penultimate moment, the peregrine plunged, with its fearsome talons seized a smaller bird in flight, and swooped up, away, toward a tree where it could perch in feathered splendor to feed upon its terrified, feathered catch.
Henry gave me a meaningful look that seemed to ask if I dared recognize that the falcon had been a sign that portended my fate if I remained long in Roseland. “I know you’re not stupid, Odd Thomas. But are you a fool?”
“Less than some folks, sir, but more than others.”
“Surely you fear death.”
“Not really. Not death. Just how it might happen. Like being locked in a garage with a hungry crocodile and being eaten alive. Or being chained to dead men and dropped in a lake. Or having a hole drilled in my skull, and then the guy who drilled it drops a bunch of fire ants through the hole, into my brain.”
I don’t know whether Henry punctuated every conversation with reflective silences or if only I inspired that response.
He shifted restlessly in his chair and searched the sky, as if hoping for another sign that might convince me to leave Roseland.
Finally I got around to the reason I had come. “Sir, is there a guy named Kenny on the security team?”
“We don’t have a Kenny, no.”
“Tall, muscular guy with bad scars on the face, wears a T-shirt that says ‘Death heals.’ ”
The slow turning of Henry’s head, the long look before he spoke, told me that Kenny was known here even if not by name.
“You’ve been warned to stay inside, behind locked doors, between dusk and dawn.”
“Yes, sir, but I was warned about mountain lions, nothing else. Anyway, I didn’t run into him at night. It was this morning.”
“Not after sunrise.”
“More than half an hour after. Up at the stables. Who is he if he’s not a guard?”
Henry rose from his chair, went to the gatehouse door, opened it, and glanced back at me. “Take her and leave. You don’t know what kind of place this is.”
Getting to my feet, I said, “So tell me.”
He went inside and closed the door behind him.
Through a window, I saw him picking up the telephone.