the Prius has nice trunk space to store rifles.”
Staring at me is a ruddy face, a few years older than me, or aged poorly or baked by years in the sun, thick jaw, big shoulders, doughy nose that’s been broken more than once. He’s got an edgy toughness men instantly respect and some women wouldn’t appreciate.
“What’s your title at Biogen? Chief Mauling Officer?”
“Guess again.”
He’s got a mild accent. English? Australian?
I divert my eyes from him so that I can look at the servers. On the side of the racks there is a sign with initials: “HMC.” I’ve seen the initials before — on the piece of paper I took from Adrianna’s office.
“I get it,” I say.
“I doubt that.”
“Human Memory Crusade.”
He cocks his head to the side.
“You’re recording people’s memories. You’re recording my grandmother’s memories. You’re storing them here. Why?”
He doesn’t respond.
“Would it be easier if I asked true/false questions?”
“Sure.”
“You’re studying the pace at which people lose their memories.”
“True.”
“You are?” I surprise myself sometimes.
“Sounds very sinister, doesn’t it? Recording people’s stories. Alert the Marines.”
“Vince is involved? And the nursing home?”
He stops tinkering with his box
“You’re getting warmer.”
I pull out my phone.
“I’m calling the police.”
“I wouldn’t. Listen. We made a mistake. We were wrong.”
“We?”
He’s got my attention. He goes back to tinkering.
“We want to get the truth out of her as much as you do. We need the truth. Without sounding too dramatic, it has major national security implications,” he says. “We thought you were going to be able to help us get the information out of her head.
“Adrianna?”
“But you didn’t come through. So we’ll get it from her ourselves.”
“Her?” I repeat.
He shakes his head without looking up.
“What’re you working on?” I ask. It strikes me he’s stringing me along, stalling for time. Maybe he’s erasing some evidence.
“Mr. Idle, if I were you, I’d be wary of trusting anyone — your family members, your closest friends, lovers, the police. Anyone. People have a way of looking out for themselves, even the ones you share your secrets with — especially them.”
“My grandmother?”
“Like I said, you’re getting warmer.”
He looks up and at the monitors behind me showing scrolling text. Periodically, a word pops out and takes up a quarter of a screen in large font. On one monitor, I happen to see the word “Cadillac.” On another, the words “butter churn.”
On the top right edge of each monitor is an image of the globe. Within each image, a red dot located in a different spot within the globe.
“You’re experimenting around the country, around the world.”
He looks down and fiddles intently with the box in his hand. His eyes fall to the ground. He looks at a wire that extends from the small object he’s holding to the servers.
“You’re not just warm. You’re hot,” he says.
“This thing is everywhere.”
“You’re about to get scorching.”
He presses a button on the box he’s holding. He stands, walks away from me, towards the back of the room. I take a step to follow.
The servers and the monitors explode. I feel intense heat. My phone flies from my grasp. I picture Grandma, sitting alone in the car, vulnerable, keeping some great truth.
Surrounded by fire, I grow woozy, then succumb.
Chapter 32
“Grandpa looks like a retard.”
“That’s a horrible word, and keep your voice down,” Grandma says but I can’t tell if she’s really upset.
“He’s flailing his arms around like a gorilla.”
Now she laughs. She whispers: “Now ‘flailing’—that’s a good word.”
I’m ten, and visiting my grandparents. It’s a hot day in their backyard. Grandma and I stand on the concrete porch while Grandpa Irving, wearing paisley shorts and a white tank top that betrays his farmer’s tan, waters the grass. And he dances, more or less. The radio is on, and he’s moving his arms and the hose — distinctly not in time with the music.
“Your grandfather has no rhythm. He’s not like us.”
“You mean like he can’t dance good?”
“Well. That’s not just it. We’re more colorful — you and I. It’s in our bones. He has different bones.”
“You and I share the same bones?”
“Precisely.”
“Well then how can we both walk at the same time?”
She laughs. But I sense Grandma is communicating something serious that I can’t quite understand.
The conversation stuck with me. I remember that it made me feel Grandma and I belonged to a special club and no one else in the family was a member.
And that happens to be the anecdote passing in an eye-blink through my mind, dreamlike, as death beckons me on a concrete floor of an industrial building. My proverbial white tunnel is a backyard from twenty-five years ago, and my angel of death is my grandfather, watering his lawn.
Then I cough. It’s a violent spasm, sufficient to wrench me to consciousness. My first sensation comes from my legs, which pulse from the scorching heat. My eyes flutter, but I can’t fully open them because of the waves of searing air.
Staying on the floor, I yank the bottom of my shirt to my face and cover my mouth and nose. I know that what will kill me first is not fire, but smoke inhalation.
Then, from above, I feel something remarkable — a burst of frozen air. I think for a moment I’m dead and this is part of the passage. Then I realize the cool relief comes from the air conditioner. The place must be highly climate-controlled to keep the servers from overheating — though the designers of the system never contemplated this. The air-conditioning system must be freaking out to cope with the explosion in heat. Where are the sprinklers?
The burst of air allows me to fully open my eyes. I can make out that the fire is localized in two spots — on the rack of servers to one side and on the rack of monitors to the other. I stand in an ever-shrinking island without flames. The air smells oddly fragrant, like a campfire, but it’s doubtless toxic and filled with melted computer innards. Every few seconds, another circuit explodes, like high-tech popcorn kernels.
