In the Night Room

Alice blue!—caught my eye, and my heart surged into my throat even before I realized that I was looking across the street at my sister, gorgeous unbeautiful April. Fists on her hips, she stood glaring at me within a small circular space of her own making. The people who approached her made an unconscious adjustment at about four feet away and swerved to pass behind her. She was a little blue fire, a blaze of blue and yellow. If you got too close, she’d singe your eyebrows off. I stopped moving so abruptly that a woman with a nose ring, a sleeveless black leather jacket that showed a lot of tattoos, and Paki-basher boots bumped against my back. She called me an ignorant turd and tried to dust me off the pavement with her fingertips. Without taking my eyes from April, I said, “Sorry.” Acting on an impulse I neither understood nor questioned, I placed my hand just above her hip and pushed her away. She flailed back, swearing at me.

April was on the verge of spitting out lightning bolts. She took her right hand from her hip, held it out fingers extended, and swept it two decisive feet to her left, telling me to move backward. After I had taken two steps back, then another, April returned her hand to her hip and lifted her chin. She appeared to be gazing at the sky above my side of the street.

I looked up and saw a speck tumbling through the air. The speck got bigger as it fell. Far overhead, a dark little head peered down from the top of the nearest building. I staggered backward another couple of steps and yelled, “Look out!” Six feet away, the woman with the nose ring whirled around and opened her mouth to screech something at me. An object moving too fast to be identified cut through the air between us and smacked into the pavement with a hard, flat, ringing sound over a dull undertone faintly like cannon fire. Stony chips flew upward in a gritty haze.

“Fucking hell!” the woman yelled. “Are you kidding me?”

I looked across the street at the place where April had been, then up at the edge of the roof, where the dark little head was pulling back out of sight. On the sidewalk, a broken concrete block rested in the pothole it had made on impact. Cracks and fractures crazed the entire section of pavement where the block had fallen.

“Did you actually hear that?” the woman shouted at me.

I said nothing.

“Did you? Is that why you pushed me away?” For the first time I realized that she had an English accent.

“Something like that,” I said. People had started to crowd in, pointing at the sidewalk, pointing at the sky.

She pulled a cell phone from a zippered pocket. “I’m calling 911. We’d be dead now, if you didn’t have ears like a fucking bat.”

An hour later, a bored police lieutenant named McMenamin was telling me Jasper Dan Kohle had never served in the armed forces, never voted, never taken out a library card, never bought property or contracted to use the services of a telephone company. He had no passport or driver’s license. He didn’t have an address or any credit cards. He didn’t own a car. He’d never been arrested, or even fingerprinted. It also appeared that he had never been born. With that, Lieutenant McMenamin ordered me out of his station.

18

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Yesterday I spent so much time on an entry about what happened after I left Ground Zero that I never got around to what I thought was going to be my principal topic, what’s happening with my work. Today I am determined to put some of this down on paper, because doing that should help me think about what I’m doing— really, what my protagonist is doing, and how I am handling it—but before I get to the main subject, I ought to describe my recent dealings with my brother.

My brother’s reaction to his son’s disappearance damn near drove me crazy. At the earliest possible moment, he gave up all hope. He resigned himself to the supposition that Mark was dead. In another person, that might have been realistic; for Philip, the murder of hope was self-protective. He couldn’t bear to live with anxiety and uncertainty, so he willingly embraced devastation, thereby killing his son in his own heart. I couldn’t take that, I hated it. It felt like a betrayal. Philip chose to give up on the boy, and I wasn’t sure I could ever forgive him for the sheer lazy selfishness of his choice. I certainly had no interest in talking to him or spending time with him during the months when my grief was at its peak. The two times he called me—amazingly, for I can’t remember his ever doing this before—instead of talking about anything personal, he wanted to tell me about certain errors and inconsistencies he had discovered in the bound galleys of my new book. Maybe for him that was personal.

Then came the news that in mid-September, he was going to marry a woman named China Beech, a born- again Christian behind whose previous job description of “exotic dancer” I was sure I discerned a stripper. In a way, it was touching. This tedious, pot-bellied, fifty-three-year-old man with thinning hair and a boring job had been so hypnotized by his tawdry girlfriend that he wanted to seize happiness with both hands and clasp it to his intoxicated breast. What erotic feats China Beech must have inspired in him, what unexplored territories must have opened up before him, all moist, yielding, ready to be conquered! For these services, Ms. Beech would be compensated with the use of an unspectacular but sturdy little house, access to a vice principal’s salary, and the kind of respectability valued by the newly Born-Again.

I had always liked and respected Nancy, Mark’s mother. Her suicide had felt like a wound. My brother should have taken more time before deciding to remarry. In typical Philip fashion, he had wrapped up his grief in resentment and tossed the whole package overboard. With the onset of China Beech, nice, kind, loyal Nancy Underhill had been escorted deeper into the Underworld, a kind of premature zamani. In fact, I thought this was exactly what Pop had done after April was killed. He wanted to forget her, to erase her traces from his life, and after the funeral, he never spoke her name or acknowledged that she had existed.

My book tour brings me to Millhaven right around the time of Philip’s wedding, September 12, and if I am to attend the ceremony, as I suppose I must, I have only to extend my stay there a couple of days, but I cannot say that I feel particularly well-disposed toward the bride and groom.

The first of my telephone calls from Philip came three days ago, that is, about a month after the receipt of the typo-riddled e-mail that announced his upcoming marriage. The message from Cyrax berating me for having lost all civility and kindness had prompted me to think about calling my brother, in fact to gaze at the telephone for extended periods when I should have been working, and when I picked up the receiver and heard his voice speaking my name I had a second’s worth of resentment that he had beaten me to the punch.

“Hey, Tim,” he said. “How are you doing? I just wanted to check in. How’s the new book coming along?”

With these harmless words, Philip broke two lifelong traditions: he spontaneously inquired about my well- being, and he displayed or at least feigned an interest in my work. It threw me so far off balance that my first response was to suspect that he wanted to ask me for money. Philip has never asked me for money, not once, not even in the years when my income must have been ten times his.

I mumbled something innocuous.

“Yesterday I saw your name in print. New Leaf Books sends out a newsletter once a month, and they have you down for a reading two days before the wedding. China and I sure hope you’ll be able to come see us get hitched.”

Come see us get hitched? Who was this stranger? My brother didn’t talk like that.

“Of course I’ll be there. I changed my tickets so I fly out the day after the ceremony.” When the moment had come, I discovered myself incapable of saying “your wedding.” “I thought you already knew.”

“Well, I don’t think you were ever very specific about it. But I know, your schedule must get pretty complicated when you’re out on tour and all that. We’re just really happy to hear that you’ll be able to make it. After all, you’re my only brother. In fact, you’re all the family I’ve got, Tim, and I want you to know how important that is to me.”

“Philip, is that really you? I don’t know who the hell I’m talking to.”

He laughed. “We’re not getting any younger, bro. We gotta get straight with ourselves, with our families, and with God.”

All of this had to be decoded. We’re not getting any younger was pure Philip, who