a flood of information.
in fact, there was too much information for Candy to make sense of it, a
babble of words and images. He tried desperately to sort through it for
clues to Thomas’s identity and location.
Dumb People, Cielo Vista, The Home, everybody here has bad eye cues,
Care Home, good food, TV The Best Place For Us, Cielo Vista, the aides
are nice, we watch the humming birds, the world is bad out there, too
bad for us out there, Cielo Vista Care Home…
With some astonishment, Candy realized that the visitor was someone with
a subnormal intellect-he even picked up the term
“Down’s syndrome”-and he was afraid that he was not going to be able to
sort enough meaningful thoughts from the babble to get a fix on Thomas’s
location. Depending on the size of his IQ, Thomas might not know where
Cielo Vista Care Home was, even though he apparently lived there.
Then a series of images spun out of Thomas’s mind, a well linked chain
of serial memories that still caused him some emotional pain: the trip
to Cielo Vista in a car with Julie and Bobby, on the day they first
checked him into the place. This was different from most of Thomas’s
other thoughts and memories, in that it was richly detailed and so
clearly retained that it unreeled like a length of motion-picture film,
giving Candy all he needed to know. He saw the highways over which they
had driven that day, saw the route markers flashing past the car window,
saw every landmark at every turn, all of which Thomas had struggled
mightily to memorize because all through the trip he kept thinking, if I
don’t like it there, if people are mean there, if it’s too scary there,
if it’s too much being alone there, I got to know how I find the way
back to Bobby and Julie anytime I want, remember this, remember all of
this, turn there at the I, right there at the 7-11, don’t forget that
7-11, and now go past those three palm trees. What if they don’t come
visit me? No, that’s a bad thing to think, they love me, they said they
would come. But what if they don’t? Look there, remember that house,
you go past that house, remember that house with the blue roof Candy got
it all, as precisely a fix as he could have obtained from a geographer
who would have spoken precisely in degrees and minutes of longitude and
latitude. It was more than he needed to know to make use of his gift.
He opened the trap and let Thomas go.
He got up from the rocker.
He pictured Cielo Vista Care Home as it appeared so exquisitely detailed
in Thomas’s memory.
He pictured Thomas’s room on the first floor of the no wing, at the
northwest corner.
Darkness, billions of hot sparks spinning in the void, velocity.
BECAUSE JULIE was in a let’s-move-and-get-it-done mood they had stopped
at the house only fifteen minutes, long enough to throw toiletries and a
change of clothes in an over night bag. At McDonald’s, on Chapman
Avenue in Orange she swung by the drive-through window and got dinner to
on the way: Big Macs, fries, diet colas. Before they reach the Costa
Mesa Freeway, while Bobby was still divvying the extra packets of
mustard and opening the containers that held the Big Macs, Julie had
clipped the radar detector to the rear view mirror, plugged it in the
Toyota’s cigarette lighter and switched it on. Bobby had never before
eaten fast food high speed, but he figured they averaged eighty-five
miles hour north on the Costa Mesa to the Riverside Freeway to the
Orange Freeway north, and he was still finishing french fries when they
were only a couple of exits away from the Foothill Freeway east of Los
Angeles. Though the rush hour was well past and the traffic unusually
light, maintaining that pace required a lot of lane changing and nerve.
He said,
“We keep this up, I’ll never have a chance to from the cholesterol in
this Big Mac.”
“Lee says cholesterol doesn’t kill us.”
“Is that what he says?”