Strange Weather Page 9

  I had genuinely forgotten about the weird plate of steel shoved to the rear of my closet until I reached back there and put my hand on it. It was still in its garbage bag, but I could feel the bulges and planes of the metal through the plastic. I lifted it out and held the wrapped bundle in both hands for a long time, in a heavy, suspenseful silence, the sort of silence that settles on the world in the moments before a hard summer thundershower breaks.

  That whispering iron never spoke to me again—not in my waking thoughts anyway. Sometimes it spoke to me in dreams, though. Sometimes, in dreams, I saw it as it had been when it first spilled out of the crushed Solarid: a tarry liquid with an eyeball in it, a weird thinking protoplasm that didn’t belong in our reality.

  I had one dream in which I found myself sitting across the dinner table from my father. He was dressed for work, staring down into a bowl of purple Panama Thrill, the Jell-O quivering and jiggling uneasily in its dish.

  Aren’t you going to have some dessert? I asked.

  He looked up, and his eyes were yellow, with cat’s-eye pupils. In a strained, unhappy voice, he said, I can’t. I think I’m going to be sick. And then he opened his mouth and began to vomit onto the table, gouts of that black goop coming out of him in a slow, sticky gush. Bringing with it a hiss of static and a babble of madness.

  In my final years at Caltech, I began to develop the architecture for a new sort of memory system, crafting an integrated circuit board the size of a credit card. My prototype leaned heavily on components crafted out of that grotesque, impossible metal and it achieved computational effects that I’m sure have never been matched, not in any lab, anywhere, by anyone. That first board was my Africa, was to me what the Congo had been to my mother: a splendid alien country where all the colors were brighter and where every new day of study promised some fresh, thrilling revelation. I lived there for years. I never wanted to come back. I had nothing to come back to. Not in those days.

  Then the work was done. Ultimately I found I could get impressive, if less remarkable results, by employing certain rare-earth metals: ytterbium mostly, and cerium. It wasn’t anything like what I could do with the whispering iron, but it still represented a major leap forward in the field. I was noticed by a company named after a crisp and juicy fruit and signed a contract that made me a millionaire on the spot. If you have three thousand songs and a thousand photos on your phone, you’re probably carrying some of my work in your pocket.

  I’m the reason your computer remembers everything you don’t.

  No one has to forget anything anymore. I made sure of it.

  21

  SHELLY HAS BEEN GONE FOR more than a quarter of a century now. I lost her, my mother, and my father before I turned twenty-five. None of them saw me marry. None of them ever had a chance to meet my two boys. Every year I give away as much money as my father earned in his entire lifetime, and I am still far richer than any man has any right to be. I have had an indecent share of happiness, although I confess most of it only came after I was no longer mentally able to keep up with the latest breakthroughs in computer science. I am a professor emeritus at the company I signed with out of Caltech, which is a nice way of saying they only keep me around out of nostalgia. I haven’t made a significant contribution in my field for over a decade. That weird, impossible alloy has long since been all used up. The same goes for me.

  Belliver House was demolished in 2005. There’s a soccer pitch where it used to stand. The land beyond has been pleasantly groomed and planted, professionally landscaped into meadowy park with winding trails of white stone, a man-made pond, and a vast playground. I paid for most of it. I wish Shelly had lived to see the place. I am as haunted by her dying view of a parking lot and dumpsters as I am by my memories of the Phoenician. I don’t like to think about her last days in that dismal little room—but I wouldn’t erase those recollections even if I could. As awful as they are, those memories are me, and I would be less without them.

  We all went down to the park for the big opening: my wife and our two boys. It was August, and there was thunder in the morning—big, rolling cannonades of it—but come afternoon the skies were stripped clean and blue, and you couldn’t have wished for a better day. The town put on a good show. A thirty-piece brass band played old-timey swing music in the bandstand. There was free face-painting, and one of those guys who makes animals out of balloons, and my old high school turned out the cheerleading troupe to do some jumping and tumbling and rah-rah-ing.

  What my boys liked most was a roaming magician, a guy with slicked-back hair and waxed mustaches. He wore a purple tailcoat and a ruffled green blouse, and his great trick was making things disappear. He juggled burning torches, and somehow, as each one came down, it vanished as if it hadn’t been. He held an egg in one hand and smashed his fist into it and it was gone—shell and all. When he opened his fist, a chickadee sat chirping in his palm. He sat on a straight-backed chair and then collapsed into the dirt, because the chair was gone. My boys, six and four, knelt in the grass with dozens of other children, watching raptly.

  Me, I mostly watched the sparrows. There was a flock of them settled on the slope above the pond, picking contentedly. My wife took pictures—with her phone, not a Polaroid. Tubas and trombones blatted in the dreamy distance. When I closed my eyes, the past seemed very close, only the thinnest of membranes separating yesterday from today.

  I was close to dozing off when one of my sons, Boone, the younger boy, tugged on my shorts. The magician had walked behind a tree and dematerialized. The show was over.

  “He’s all gone!” Boone cried in wonder. “You missed it.”

  “You can tell me about it. That will be just as good.”

  The older boy, Neville, laughed scornfully. “No it won’t. You should’ve kept watching.”

  “That’s Daddy’s magic trick. I can close my eyes and make the whole world disappear,” I said. “Anyone want to see if we can make some ice cream vanish? I think there’s a place selling soft-serve on the other side of the pond.”

  I got up and took Neville’s hand. My wife took Boone’s. We started away, crossing the greensward and startling the sparrows, which took off in one great rustling swoop.

  “Dad,” Boone said, “do you think we can always remember today? I don’t want to forget the magic.”

  “Me neither,” I said—and I haven’t yet.

  LOADED

  October 14, 1993

  AISHA THOUGHT OF HIM AS her brother, even though they weren’t blood.

  His name was Colson, but his friends called him Romeo, because he had played that role in the park last summer, getting fresh with a white Juliet who had teeth so bright she should’ve been in a chewing-gum ad.

  Aisha had watched him perform on a hot July evening, when dusk seemed to last for hours, a line of glowering red light on the horizon, the clouds shavings of gold against the dark sky behind. Aisha was ten and didn’t understand half of what Colson said, up there on the stage, dressed in purple velvet like he was Prince. She couldn’t follow the words, but she didn’t have any problem making sense of the way Juliet looked at him. Aisha didn’t have any problem figuring out why Juliet’s cousin hated Romeo either. Tybalt didn’t want some smooth-talking black kid crowding in on any white girl, let alone someone in his family.

  Now it was fall, and Aisha was getting ready for a performance of her own, the Holiday Vogue, which meant modern-dance classes twice a week after school. Practice didn’t end on Thursday nights until six-thirty, and her mother wasn’t there to collect her when it was done. Instead Colson showed up, twenty minutes late, after all the other girls had left and Aisha was waiting alone on the stone steps. He looked good in a black denim jacket and camouflage pants, coming up the path, out of the dark, in long strides.

  “Hey, Twinkletoes,” he said. “Let’s dance.”

  “I already did.”

  He bumped his fist on the top of her head, grabbed her school backpack by one strap. She had the other and did
n’t let go, so he towed her along after him, into the darkness, which smelled of grass and sun-warmed asphalt and—distantly—the sea.

  “Where’s Mom?” Aisha asked.

  “At work.”

  “Why’s she at work? She’s supposed to get off at four.”

  “Dunno. ’Cause Dick Clark hates black people, I guess,” he said. Her mother worked the grill at a Dick Clark’s Bandstand Restaurant, an hour-long bus ride south in Daytona Beach. On the weekends she vacuumed at the Hilton Bayfront in St. Augustine, an hour’s bus ride north.

  “How come Dad didn’t pick me up?”

  “He’s cleaning up after the drunks tonight.” Her father was an orderly at a blue-collar rehab facility for alcoholics, work that combined the pleasures of janitorial labor—there was always puke to mop up—with the invigorating effort of wrestling hysterical junkies in the throes of withdrawal. He often came home with bite marks on his arms.

  Colson lived with Aisha’s father and Aisha’s stepmother, Paula. Colson’s mother was Paula’s sister, but Paula’s sister couldn’t look after herself, let alone anyone else. Why she couldn’t look after herself had never been adequately explained to Aisha, and in truth she didn’t much care. If Colson Withers had a Coca-Cola and she wanted a sip, he’d let her have one, no hesitation. If they were out where there was a video game and he had a quarter in his pocket, it was hers. And if he didn’t listen to her when she told a long, rambling story about the stupid things Sheryl Portis said in dance class, he also never told her to shut up.

  They trotted along Copper Street to Mission Avenue. The east-west streets in that part of town were all colors: copper, gold, rose. There was no Blue Street, and there was no Black Street (although there was a Negroponte Avenue, which Aisha suspected might be racist), but the whole area had always been called the Black & Blue. Much as it had never occurred to her to find out why Colson didn’t live with his own mother, she’d never thought to ask anyone why she lived in a part of town that sounded like a beating instead of a neighborhood.

  Mission Avenue was four lanes wide where it intersected with Copper. A big strip mall, the Coastal Mercantile, ran for a few blocks along the far side of the road. The lot was desolate, only a handful of cars parked there.

  The night was warm—almost hot—perfumed with exhaust from the passing traffic. A police cruiser flew past, blowing through a yellow light just as it turned red, the darkness stuttering with blinding blue flashes.

  “ . . . and I said over in England ‘pants’ means ‘underwear,’ and Sheryl said English people ought to use the right words for things, and I said if they use the wrong words, how come we go to school to study English instead of American?” Aisha was especially proud of this riposte, which she felt had properly put Sheryl Portis in her place, at the end of a long, wearying argument about whether or not British accents were real or just faked for movies.

  “Mm-hm,” Colson said, waiting for the WALK light. At some point he had wrestled her backpack away from her and slung it over his own shoulder.

  “Oh! Oh! That reminds me. Cole?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “How long are you going to live in England?”

  Aisha had England on the brain, had been thinking about the place all week, ever since she heard that Colson had sent an application to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He hadn’t heard back yet—wouldn’t hear back until spring—but he hadn’t bothered applying anywhere else, acted like he’d already been accepted, or at least wasn’t worried about being turned down.

  “I don’t know. However long it takes to meet Jane Seymour.”

  “Who’s Jane Seymour?”

  “She Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. She also going to be my first wife. First of many.”

  “Doesn’t she live out west? That’s where the show is set.”

  “Naw. She from London.”

  “What will you do if she doesn’t want to marry you?”

  “Pour my sadness into my art. It’d be tough if she didn’t want me, but I’d just take all that heartache and use it to be the best Hamlet ever stalked the boards.”

  “Is Hamlet black?”

  “He is if I’m playing him. Come on. We going to run for it. I think the walk light is busted.”

  They waited for an opening and beat feet across Mission, holding hands. As they slowed and stepped up onto the curb on the far side, they heard the ugly squall of a police siren, and another cruiser slammed past. Aisha started singing the reggae song that began every episode of Cops, hardly aware she was doing it. It was not at all uncommon for the police to kick up a racket this time of the night, booming along the streets with their disco lights pulsing and their sirens scaring the bejesus out of people. You never knew why or even wondered. It was like the hum of crickets, just another night sound.

  As it happened, the police were crisscrossing the Black & Blue looking for a stolen Miata. Forty minutes before, out on the north edge of St. Possenti—where there were mansions with stucco walls and roofs of red Spanish tile—a couple had been followed into their house by a man in fatigues, wearing a woman’s stocking over his face. William Berry had been stabbed twice in the abdomen. His wife had been stabbed nineteen times in the back as she tried to run away. The assailant then calmly helped himself to her purple Hermès purse, the jewelry in the bedroom, their DVD player, and some admittedly pornographic DVDs. The man with the knife whistled while he took what he wanted and occasionally chatted to Bill Berry while the forty-two-year-old investment banker lay on the floor groaning. He complimented them on their interior decoration and particularly admired their drapes; he promised he would pray for both of them to recover. Cathy Berry did not, but Bill Berry was expected to survive, although he was in intensive care with a perforated large intestine. Bill had been coherent enough to report that the killer “sounded black” and smelled of alcohol. The Miata had been spotted by a crossing guard, entering the Black & Blue not twenty minutes before.

  The lot spread out around Coastal Mercantile was pitched and cracked, the fissures badly sealed with scribbles of tar. The strip mall housed a check-cashing joint (open), a liquor store (open), a tobacconist’s (open), a dentist’s office (closed), a Baptist church called the Holy Renewal Experience (closed), a jobs office called Work Now Staffing (permanently closed), and a coin-op Laundromat that was open now, would be open at 3:00 A.M., and would probably continue to offer the use of its overpriced, underpowered washers and dryers right through the Rapture.

  Colson slowed alongside an Econoline van with a desert scene painted on it and tugged on the handle of the driver’s-side door. Locked.

  “What are you doing?” Aisha asked.

  “This looks like the kind of van kidnappers drive,” Colson said. “I want to make sure there isn’t a girl tied up in the back.”

  Aisha cupped her hands around her face and pressed her nose to the tinted bubble window. She didn’t see anyone tied up.

  Satisfied that the van was locked and empty, they walked on. Soon they would pass around the corner of the building, down along one side of the Mercantile, over a fence, and into the Tangles: four acres of buttonwood, cabbage palms, anthills, and beer bottles.

  Colson slowed again as they passed a blue Miata, too nice for Coastal Mercantile—black leather interior, glossy cherry dash. He tugged on the latch.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Had to make sure the lady locked her doors. Anyone who’d park a car like this in the Black & Blue don’t have the sense to look after their stuff.”

  Aisha wished Colson would stop yanking on door handles. He didn’t worry about getting in trouble, so she had to worry for him.

  “How do you know it’s a lady’s car?”

  “ ’Cause a Miata look more like a lipstick than a car. They won’t even sell you a car like this if you’re a man, less you turn your balls in first.” They walked on.

  “So after you marry Jane Seymour, when you going to come back to Florida so I can meet her?”r />
  “You’ll come to me. Come to London. You can study dance same place I’m going to study being famous.”

  “You’re studying acting.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Are you going to get a British accent while you’re there?”

  “You bet. Pick one up in the gift shop at Buckingham Palace, first day I’m there,” he said, but in a distant, disinterested voice.

  They were passing a battered Alfa Romeo, the driver’s-side door painted an ashy matte black, the rest of the car the too-bright yellow of Gatorade. CDs were scattered across the dashboard, a collection of reflective silver Frisbees. When Colson tested the driver’s-side door, it sprang open, one Romeo welcoming another.

  “Oh, lookit,” he said. “Someone has not been putting safety first.”

  Aisha kept walking, willing Colson to come with her. When she’d gone five steps, she dared to look around. Colson remained back by the Alfa Romeo, ducked down and leaning inside, a sight that gave her an ill feeling.

  “Colson?” she asked. She meant to shout it, to say it like a scold—Aisha had a fine voice for scolding—but it came out in an unhappy waver.

  He straightened up, looked back at her with blank eyes. He had her purple backpack balanced on his knee, half unzipped, and was rooting around inside.

  “Colson, come on,” she said.

  “Just a minute.” He dug a spiral-bound notebook out of the backpack, felt inside for a pencil. He tore a sheet out, spread it on the roof, and began to write. “We got to do an important public service here.”