let’s get out of here.”
When Candy was close enough for Bobby to see blue eyes as wild and
vicious as those of a rattlesnake on Benzedrine, he let out a wordless
roar of triumph. He flung himself at them.
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
Pale morning light filtered from a clear sky into the narrow
pass-through between two rotting, ramshackle buildings so crusted in the
filth of ages that it was impossible to determine what material had been
used to construct their walls. Bobby and Frank were standing in
knee-deep garbage that had been tossed out of the windows of the
two-story structures and left to decompose into a reeking sludge that
steamed like a compost pile. Their magical arrival had startled a
colony of roaches that scuttled away from them, and caused swarms of fat
black flies to leap up from their breakfast. Several sleek rats sat up
on their haunches to see what had arrived among them, but they were too
bold to be scared off.
The tenements on both sides had some windows completely open to the
outside, some covered with what looked like oiled paper, none with
glass. Though no people were in sight, from the rooms within the aged
walls came voices: laughter here; an angry exchange there; chanting, as
of a mantra, softly drifting down from the second floor of the building
on the right. It was all in a foreign tongue with which Bobby was not
familiar, though he suspected they might be in India, perhaps Bombay or
Calcutta.
Because of the ineluctable stench, which by comparison made the stink of
a slaughterhouse seem like a new perfume by Calvin Klein, and because of
the insistently buzzing flies that exhibited great interest in an open
mouth and nostrils, Bobby was unable to get his breath. He choked, put
his free hand over his mouth, still could not breathe, and knew he was
going to faint face first into the vile, steaming muck.
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
In a place of stillness and silence, shafts of afternoon sunshine
pierced mimosa branches and dappled the ground with golden light. They
stood on a red oriental footbridge over a koi pond in a Japanese garden,
where sculpted bonsai and other meticulously tended plants were
positioned among carefully raked beds of pebbles.
“Oh, yes,” Frank said with a mixture of wonder and pleasure and relief.
“I lived here, too, for a while.” They were alone in the garden. Bobby
realized that Frank always materialized in sheltered places where he was
unlikely to be seen in the act, or in circumstances-such as the middle
of a cloudburst-that almost ensured even a public place like a beach
would be conveniently deserted. Evidently, in addition to the
unimaginably demanding task of deconstruction-rather than
reconstruction, his mind was also capable of scouting the way ahead and
choosing a discreet point of arrival.
Frank said,
“I was the longest-residing guest they’d ever had. It’s a traditional
Japanese inn on the outskirts of Kyoto.” Bobby became aware that they
were both totally dry. their clothes were wrinkled, in need of an
ironing, but when Frank had deconstructed them in Hawaii, he had not
teleported the molecules of water that had saturated their clothes.
“They were so kind here,” Frank said,
“respectful of my privacy, yet so attentive and kind.” He sounded
wistful and eternally weary, as if he would have liked to have stopped
traveling right there, even if stopping meant dying at the hand of his
brother.
Bobby was relieved to see that Frank also had not brought with them any
of the slime from the narrow alley in Calcutta or wherever. Their shoes
and pants were clean.
Then he noticed something on the toe of his right shoe.
He bent forward to look at it.
“I wish we could stay here,” Frank said.
“Forever.”
One of the roaches from that filth-choked alley was now part of Bobby’s
footwear.
One of the biggest advantages being self-employed was freedom from
neckties and uncomfortable shoes, so he was wearing, as usual, a pair of
soft Rock port Supersports, and the roach was not merely stuck on the
putty-colored leather but bristling from it and melded with it.