newspaper, and they fancy themselves tireless crusaders for enlightened
public policy, which means they think most citizens are either too
selfish to do the right thing or too stupid to know what is best for
them. They expected Bobby to share what they called great issues their
“passion for and of our time,” but Bobby wanted to escape from his
family’s influence and from all the poorly concealed envy, rancor, and
egotism that was a part of it. All Bobby wanted was peace. His folks
wanted peace, too, for the entire planet, peace in every corner of
Spaceship Earth, but they weren’t capable of providing it within the
walls of their own home.
With the cottage and the seed money to launch the business that now
supported him, Bobby found peace.
The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap,
and every timepiece with a digital readout blinks us toward
implosion.
Time is so precious that it can’t be purchased. What Corky had given
Bobby was not time, really, but the chance to live without clocks,
without an awareness of clocks, which seems to make time pass more
gently, with less shearing fury.
MY parents tried to give the same thing to me. Because of my XP,
however, I occasionally hear ticking. Maybe Bobby occasionally hears
it, too. Maybe there’s no way any of us can entirely escape an
awareness of clocks.
In fact, Orson’s night of despair, when he had regarded the stars with
such despondency and had refused all my efforts to comfort him, might
have been caused by an awareness of his own days ticking away. We are
told that the simple minds of animals are not capable of encompassing
the concept of their own mortality. Yet every animal possesses a
survival instinct and recognizes danger. If it struggles to survive,
it understands death, no matter what the scientists and the
philosophers might say.
This is not New Age sentimentalism. This is simply common sense.
Now, in Bobby’s shower, as I scrubbed the soot off Orson, he continued
to shiver. The water was warm. The shivers had nothing to do with the
bath.
By the time I blotted the dog with several towels and fluffed him with
a hair dryer that Pia Klick had left behind, his shakes had passed.
While I dressed in a pair of Bobby’s blue jeans and a longsleeve, blue
cotton sweater, Orson glanced at the frosted window a few times, as if
leery of whoever might be out there in the night, but his confidence
appeared to be returning.
With paper towels, I wiped off my leather jacket and my cap.
They still smelled of smoke, the cap more than the jacket.
In the dim light, I could barely read the words above the bill: Mystery
Train. I rubbed the ball of my thumb across the embroidered letters,
recalling the windowless concrete room where I’d found the cap, in one
of the more peculiar abandoned precincts of Fort Wyvern.
Angela Ferryman’s words came back to me, her response to my statement
that Wyvern had been closed for a year and a half Some things don’t
die.
Can’t die. No matter how much we wish them dead.
I had another flashback to the bathroom at Angela’s house: a mental
image of her death-startled eyes and the silent surprised oh of her
mouth. Again, I was gripped by the conviction that I had overlooked an
important detail regarding the condition of her body, and as before,
when I tried to summon a more vivid memory of her blood-spattered face,
it grew not clearer in my mind but fuzzier.
We’re screwing it up, Chri’s . . . bigger than we’ve ever screwed up
before . . . and already there’s no way . . . to undo what’s been
done.
The tacos-packed with shredded chicken, lettuce, cheese, and salsa-were
delicious. We sat at the kitchen table to eat, instead of leaning over
the sink, and we washed down the food with beer.
Although Sasha had fed him earlier, Orson cadged a few bits of chicken,
but he couldn’t charm me into giving him another Heineken.
Bobby had turned on the radio, and it was tuned to Sasha’s show, which