“Hey, BT,” Mr. Memz called out. “Dude’s got sniper’s eyes! I know ’em when I see ’em, man, so watch your skinny ass!”
As soon as he entered the code to the front door lock and stepped inside, Geiger saw the boy sitting at the desk. Three of the black binders were spread open before him.
Ezra slowly turned to Geiger, his eyes ablaze. “This is what you do? This? ”
The pressure in Geiger’s head was almost unbearable, but he had the presence of mind to reach for the keypad and punch in the interior code.
“What’s wrong with you?” cried the boy, rising from the chair. He was frantic, panicky, his body swaying and his arms waving, like a jack-in-the-box set free of its coil. The boy’s movements left stuttering trails across Geiger’s vision.
“Don’t talk now,” Geiger said. His voice reached him from somewhere far away. The visitation was very close now; the tiny lights had come calling. The textbooks called it the “aura”-a rare, warping prognostic of the migraine.
“If this is what you do, then why didn’t you do it to me?”
The boy was yelling now, the volume ramping up the pitch of his voice and whetting it. His words cut like a knife.
“Don’t… talk,” Geiger said.
Geiger started toward him, but the movement triggered a vertiginous light-headedness and he stopped. He heard his own gathering breath; it roared in his ears as if coming from a stranger standing behind him. He dropped the bags and turned for the CD rack. He’d need the music before he went into the closet. He tried to focus on the countless shimmering jewel cases, but the slightest shift of eye in socket rendered the titles on their spines indecipherable. The aura’s magnitude was beyond his past experiences-the degree of distortion, the recasting of light into barbed stars, the conversion of symmetry into chaos and flux. When he reached toward a shelf, the assault began, an incendiary device going off in his skull, near the crest, sending white-hot tendrils down toward the backs of his eyes.
But Ezra, his fear running wild, was not finished. “Why did you save me?” he shouted.
“Stop!” Geiger yelled, and then the migraine hit him full force. He howled and fell to his knees as if smitten.
Ezra stumbled back against the desk. “What… what’s the matter with you?!”
Swaying, Geiger grabbed hold of his temples. He made a noise that might have been a word.
“I’m sorry!” said the boy. “I’m sorry! Please don’t flip out on me!”
Geiger started crawling for the sanctuary of the closet, his fingers feeling the smooth marquetry, his eyes shut tight to keep the light at bay. He extended his right hand until it brushed against the closet door, then turned the cold brass knob and dragged himself inside. He pulled the door closed and let the darkness come.
Gradually he became aware that Ezra was calling to him.
“Geiger! Say something!”
“Music,” Geiger croaked. “Put on the music.”
He lay in the dark, his right forearm a pillow for his head, his left arm holding his knees up close to his chest. His brain was on fire. Something had been breached. The pain was breathtaking, and now it had a face. Geiger could see it: a phantom gaining flesh and blood.
Then he heard music. A single strand of it-elegant, melancholy, consoling. He closed his eyes. He could see the colored puddles of sound, taste the notes, feel them falling on him like a cold rain, cooling the fire in his mind.
When Ezra had heard Geiger’s plea for music, he had dashed for the CD rack but then swerved to the couch when he caught sight of his violin case. Now he stood at the closet door, his trembling fingers drawing the bow across the instrument’s strings. Nestled beneath his chin, the violin was more than a comfort; it felt like crucial ballast, the weight of something known and good that could prevent him from being tossed about by the maelstrom all around him. He closed his eyes, and as he played, there came a flicker of understanding-he, too, needed the music to ease the pain and take him to his own place of peace.
14
Harry had always steered clear of Internet cafes. He didn’t want somebody sitting next to him, craning a neck. And he didn’t trust these places-even if they had online security, it would be useless. But desperate times called, so here he sat at a counter in Charlotte’s Web Cafe, at one of its six laptops. Lily sat to his left, her spindly fingers picking walnut crumbs off a scone, holding each up close to her eyes like a forty-niner admiring a shiny, newfound nugget.
Outside, the sun was a shimmering white wafer turning the city into a skillet. It was the kind of heat that turns a driver’s honk into an insult, a frown into a threat. But the cafe was well air-conditioned, which made Harry inclined to forgive the low-fat jazz that simpered from the wall speakers. And the coffee he’d bought from the Asian guy working behind the counter wasn’t bad either.
Harry rolled a sip of coffee around in his mouth and thought about how to word his plea to Geiger. He had logged on to AIM as Stickler and checked out the status of GGGG. Geiger was active. What should he write? How about “I’m about to lose it, man. I hurt all over and I’ve got a crazy person in tow and those fuckers are following me. Just tell me your address.” How had it come to this? He didn’t even know where the one person he considered a comrade lived.
He’d thought about calling Carmine and asking for help or at least a place to lie low, but the man gave him the creeps. He’d last seen him a year ago, at a session. The Jones had been supplying Carmine with bathroom fixtures for some townhouses, and Carmine had been tipped off that, as he’d put it to Harry, “the prick likes to spell ‘refurbished’ N-E-W.” The Jones had caved within minutes while Carmine watched, sipping Chartreuse VEP Green that cost one hundred and eighty-five dollars. After Harry had repacked the Jones for transport back to one of Carmine’s safe houses-an oxymoron if Harry had ever heard one-Carmine had come to him, squeezed his shoulder, and said:
“Harry, Harry. Our boy’s a thing of beauty, isn’t he? It’s like watching a chess match in a boxing ring.”
“Nicely put, sir.”
“Kasparov and Ali rolled into one. He’s a genius, our boy.”
Harry still remembered the chuckle that had finished the exchange; it was as smooth as the perfectly folded silk handkerchief that peeked from Carmine’s suit pocket. Carmine served as a reminder to Harry that some people did exactly what they pleased and got everything they wanted, usually because they had eyes in the back of their heads, a seemingly endless supply of aces and dirks up their sleeves, and no qualms or guilt about using them.
Right now, the only person who seemed knowable to Harry was Geiger. Even though yesterday’s bizarre act had sent Harry’s world off its axis, Geiger was still his only hope, the one hand that could pull him out of free fall. Geiger was all he had left.
Harry’s fingers went to the keyboard.
Ezra was still so frightened he couldn’t sit still. He wandered through Geiger’s loft, staring at the intricate floor as a way to control his panic. Geiger had been in the closet long enough for the CD player to finish a Honegger sonata and get halfway through Faure’s Sonata in E Minor. But Ezra had no idea whether the music was helping. The attack had come so suddenly and looked so violent that to him it seemed entirely possible that death would be the final result.
Ezra opened the closet door. Geiger’s fetal position made it difficult to tell if he was breathing, so Ezra gently nudged Geiger’s shin with his sneaker’s toe. Geiger’s left arm instantly pulled his knees in tighter against his chest; he curled up like a pill bug expecting an imminent attack.
“Are you asleep?” Ezra whispered.
He took a step inside and sat down beside Geiger. Leaning back, he stared at himself in the mirrors. That
