to me.”
Not a hint of irony, not a trace of humor informed Lomax’s voice. It was clear that he actually believed Oslett ate eel heads, alligator embryos, and calves’ brains for breakfast.
Reluctantly, Oslett had to face the fact that there were worse potential partners than the one he already had. Karl Clocker only
In Laguna Beach, December was the off season, and the streets were nearly deserted at a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning. At the three-way intersection in the heart of town, with the public beach on the right, they stopped for the red traffic signal, even though no other moving car was in sight.
Oslett thought the town was as unnervingly dead as any place in Oklahoma, and he longed for the bustle of Manhattan: the all-night rush of police vehicles and ambulances, the noir music of sirens, the endless honking of horns. Laughter, drunken voices, arguments, and the mad gibbering of the drug-blasted schizophrenic street dwellers that echoed up to his apartment even in the deepest hours of the night were sorely lacking in this somnolent burg on the edge of the winter sea.
As they continued out of Laguna, Clocker passed the Mission Viejo Police report forward from the back seat.
Oslett waited for a comment from the Trekker. When none was forthcoming, and when he could no longer tolerate the silence that filled the car and seemed to blanket the world outside, he half-turned to Clocker and said, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“What do you think?”
“Not good,” Clocker pronounced from his nest of shadows in the back seat.
“Not good? That’s all you can say? Looks like one colossal mess to me.”
“Well,” Clocker said philosophically, “into every crypto-fascist organization, a little rain must fall.”
Oslett laughed. He turned forward, glanced at the solemn Lomax, and laughed harder. “Karl, sometimes I actually think maybe you’re not a bad guy.”
“Good or bad,” Clocker said, “everything resonates with the same movement of subatomic particles.”
“Now don’t go ruining a beautiful moment,” Oslett warned him.
In the deepest swale of the night, he rises from vivid dreams of slashed throats, bullet-shattered heads, pale wrists carved by razor blades, and strangled prostitutes, but he does not sit up or gasp or cry out like a man waking from a nightmare, for he is always soothed by his dreams. He lies in the fetal position upon the back seat of the car, half in and half out of convalescent sleep.
One side of his face is wet with a thick, sticky substance. He raises one hand to his cheek and cautiously, sleepily works the viscous material between his fingers, trying to understand what it is. Discovering prickly bits of glass in the congealing slime, he realizes that his healing eye has rejected the splinters of the car window along with the damaged ocular matter, which has been replaced by healthy tissue.
He blinks, opens his eyes, and can again see as well through the left as through the right. Even in the shadow-filled Buick, he clearly perceives shapes, variations of texture, and the lesser darkness of the night that presses at the windows.
Hours hence, by the time the palm trees are casting the long west-falling shadows of dawn and tree rats have squirmed into their secret refuges among the lush fronds to wait out the day, he will be completely healed. He will be ready once more to claim his destiny.
He whispers,
Outside, a haunting light gradually arises. The clouds trailing the storm are thin and torn. Between some of the ragged streamers, the cold face of the moon peers down.
Beyond the car windows, the night glimmers softly like slightly tarnished silver in the glow of a single candle flame.
He now understands that he was drawn to his double by a magnetism which arose because of their essential oneness and which he perceived through a sixth sense. He’d had no awareness that another self existed, but he’d been pulled toward him as if the attraction was an autonomic function of his body to the same extent that the beating of his heart, the production and maintenance of his blood supply, and the functioning of internal organs were autonomic functions proceeding entirely without need of conscious volition.
Still half embraced by sleep, he wonders if he can apply that sixth sense with conscious intention and reach out to find the false father any time he wishes.
Dreamily, he imagines himself to be a figure sculpted from iron and magnetized. The other self, hiding somewhere out there in the night, is a similar figure. Each magnet has a negative and positive pole. He imagines his positive is aligned with the false father’s negative. Opposites attract.
He seeks attraction, and almost at once he finds it. Invisible waves of force tug lightly at him, then less lightly.
West. West and south.
As during his frantic and compulsive drive across more than half the country, he feels the power of the attractant grow until it is like the ponderous gravity of a planet pulling a minor asteroid into the fiery promise of its atmosphere.
West and south. Not far. A few miles.
The pull is exigent, strangely pleasant at first but then almost painful. He feels as if, were he to get out of the car, he would instantly levitate off the ground and be drawn through the air at high speed directly into the orbit of the hateful false father who has taken his life.
Suddenly he senses that his enemy is aware of being sought and perceives the lines of power connecting them.
He stops imagining the magnetic attraction. Immediately he retreats into himself, shuts down. He isn’t quite ready to re-engage the enemy in combat and doesn’t want to alert him to the fact that another encounter is only hours away.
He closes his eyes.
Smiling, he drifts into sleep.
Healing sleep.
At first his dreams are of the past, peopled by those he has assassinated and by the women with whom he has had sex and on whom he has bestowed post-coital death. Then he is enraptured by scenes that are surely prophetic, involving those whom he loves—his sweet wife, his beautiful daughters, in moments of surpassing tenderness and gratifying submission, bathed in golden light, so lovely, all in a lovely golden light, flares of silver, ruby, amethyst, jade, and indigo.
Marty woke from a nightmare with the feeling that he was being crushed. Even when the dream shattered and blew away, though he knew that he was awake and in the motel room, he could not breathe or move so much as a finger. He felt small, insignificant, and was strangely certain he was about to be hammered into billions of disassociated atoms by some cosmic force beyond his comprehension.
Breath came to him suddenly, implosively. The paralysis broke with a spasm that shook him from head to foot.
He looked at Paige on the bed beside him, afraid that he had disturbed her sleep. She murmured to herself but didn’t wake.
He got up as quietly as possible, stepped to the front window, cautiously separated the drapery panels, and looked out at the motel parking lot and Pacific Coast Highway beyond. No one moved to or from any of the parked cars. As far as he remembered, all of the shadows that were out there now had been out there earlier. He saw no one lurking in any corner. The storm had taken all the wind with it into the east, and Laguna was so still that the trees might have been painted on a stage canvas. A truck passed, heading north on the highway, but that was the only movement in the night.
