Then the hobo vomited. Just to prove Jocko’s knees really were sick-making.
Erika was a good driver. Focused on the road. Staring hard.
She was thinking about driving. But something else, too. Jocko could tell. He could read her heart a little.
His first night alive, he found some magazines. In a trash can. Read them in an alleyway. Under a lamppost smelled like cat pee.
One article was called “You Can Learn to Read Her Heart.”
You don’t cut her open to read it, either. That was a relief. Jocko didn’t like blood.
Well, he liked it inside where you needed it. Not outside where you could see it.
Anyway, the magazine told Jocko how to read her heart. So now he knew something troubled Erika.
Secretly he watched her. Sneaking looks.
Those delicate nostrils. Jocko wished he had those nostrils. Not those particular nostrils. He didn’t want to take her nostrils. Jocko just wanted nostrils like them.
“Are you sad?” Jocko asked.
Surprised, she glanced at him. Then back at the road. “The world is so beautiful.”
“Yeah. Dangerous but pretty.”
“I wish I belonged in it,” she said.
“Well, we’re here.”
“Being and belonging are different things.”
“Like alive and living,” Jocko said.
She glanced at him again but didn’t reply. Stared at the road, the rain, the wipers wiping.
Jocko hoped he hadn’t said something stupid. But he was Jocko. Jocko and stupid went together like … like Jocko and ugly.
After a while, he said, “Are there pants that make you smarter?”
“How could pants make anyone smarter?”
“Well, these made me prettier.”
“I’m glad you like them.”
Erika took her foot off the accelerator. Eased down on the brake. As they stopped on the pavement, she said, “Jocko, look.”
He slid forward on his seat. Craned his neck.
Deer crossed the road, in no hurry. A buck, two does, a fawn. Others came out of dark woods on the left.
The trees shook in the wind, the tall grass thrashed.
But the deer were calm under the trembling trees, in the lashing grass, moving slowly but with purpose. They almost appeared to drift like weightless figures in a dream. Serene.
Their legs were so long and slender. They walked like dancers danced, each step precise. The grace.
Golden-brown coats on the does. The buck was brown. The fawn was colored like the does but with white spots. Tails black on top, white underneath.
Narrow, gentle faces. Eyes set on the sides of their faces to provide a panoramic view.
Heads held high, ears tipped slightly forward, they stared at the Mercedes, but only once each. Not afraid.
The fawn stayed near one of the does. Off the road once more, no longer directly in the headlight beams, it capered in a circle in the half-light, in the wet grass.
Jocko watched the fawn caper in the wet grass.
Another buck and doe. Rain glistening on the male’s antlers.
Jocko and Erika watched in silence. There was nothing they could say.
The sky black, the rain rushing, the dark woods, the grass, the many deer.
There was nothing they could say.
When the deer were gone, Erika drove north again.
After a while, she said softly, “Being and belonging.”
Jocko knew she meant the deer.
“Maybe just being is enough, it’s all so beautiful,” Jocko said.
Although she glanced at him, he didn’t look at her. He couldn’t bear to see her sad.
“Anyway,” he said, “if somebody doesn’t belong in the world, there’s no door they can throw him out. They can’t take the world away from him and put him somewhere different. The worst thing they can do is kill him. That’s all.”
After another silence, she said, “Little friend, you never stop surprising me.”
Jocko shrugged. “I read some magazines once.”
CHAPTER 61
Victor was in the dark night of his soul, but he was also in a Mercedes S600, arguably the finest automobile in the world. The suit he wore had cost over six thousand dollars, his wristwatch more than a hundred thousand. He had lived 240 years, most of the time in high style, and he had known more adventure, more thrills, more power, and more triumphs of a more momentous nature than any man in history. As he considered his current situation and the possibility that he might die soon, he found that making the fateful decision he needed to make was easier than he had expected when he parked in this rest area. He had no choice but to take the most extreme action available to him, because if he died, the loss to the world would be devastating.
He was too brilliant to die.
Without him, the future would be bleak. Any chance of imposing order on a meaningless universe would die with him, and chaos would rule eternal.
He used the voice-activated car phone to call the household-staff dormitory at the estate in the Garden District.
A Beta named Ethel answered, and Victor told her to bring James to the phone at once. James had been third in the hierarchy of the staff, behind William and Christine, who were now both dead. He was next in line to be the butler. If Victor hadn’t been so pressed by the events of the past twenty-four hours, he would have appointed James to his new post the previous day.
When James came to the phone, Victor honored him with the news of his promotion and gave him his first assignment as butler. “And remember, James, follow the instructions I’ve just given you to the letter. I expect absolute perfection in everything a butler does, but most especially in this instance.”
After leaving his umbrella on the terrace and after thoroughly wiping his wet shoes with a cloth that he brought for that purpose, James entered the house on the first floor, by the back door at the end of the north hall.
He carried the mysterious object that had obsessed him for the past two hours: a crystal ball.
After proceeding directly to the library, as Mr. Helios had instructed, James carefully placed the gleaming sphere on the seat of an armchair.
“Are you happy there?” he asked.
The sphere did not reply.
Frowning, James moved it to another armchair.
“Better,” the sphere told him.
When the crystal ball initially spoke to him, two hours earlier, James had been minding his own business, sitting at the kitchen table in the dormitory, stabbing his hand with a meat fork and watching it repeatedly heal. The fact that he healed so quickly and so well gave him reason to believe he would be all right, though for most of the day, he had felt all wrong.
