Patra looked up from her empty Pepsi bottle. She had been attempting to blow a note over the top of the bottle, like her father had taught her before he had become President, back when he was simply her Daddy. Before he had lost her. She had not been successful; her lips were of course not as human as once they had been. She pursed her lips, squinted her eyes, noted to herself how remarkably like pressing her face against a screen door these actions made her face feel. West was standing by the old jukebox. The initial cognac was long gone, but it had been supplemented by another. West had a silly not-quite-drunk-but-wanting-to-be grin on his face.
“Dance?”
“Yes, dance. You know, two people standing close to each other moving their legs around and trying not to step on each other’s toes? Do you dance?”
“I, well, I haven’t danced in a long time. I think the last time was grade school, when they made us.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think I can dance.”
West raised his right eyebrow in suspicion. He reached out with a shifted left hand, swatted open the jukebox coin slot. A shower of quarters spilled onto the floor. He reached out with his mind, and one of the quarters danced up to his thumb and index finger. He promptly placed it back into the jukebox, which of course did nothing. The electricity had been out for weeks.
“Well, hell. That’s too bad.” West looked downtrodden. He scooped the quarters from the floor and piled them on the bar. “I miss music.”
Patra couldn’t help but laugh at the both pathetic and somehow touching display. West joined her in laughter, shaking his head. When they had quieted, West pulled another Pepsi from beneath the bar. “So, Ms. Jennings, how did you disappear?” He popped off the cap of the bottle for her.
“You mean ‘The Kidnapping of the Century’?”
“You had the whole country looking for you, Patra.”
“No. Not the whole country. My father wasn’t looking for me.”
“We were at war. I’m sure if—”
“He was at war. He didn’t need me after my mother died. I was an inconvenience.”
West poured himself another glass of cognac and pushed the soda bottle towards Patra. “Tell me.”
She did.
Sand. Everywhere.
A childhood spent with primary-colored Legos and plastic dinosaurs and a stuffed monkey puppet nonsensically referred to as Popo Magicmonkey who had one eye and a ratty coat of brown fleece and a mean old cat named Fred who had in his possession a collar made of woven hemp rope and two too many toes on each paw and afternoons of sunlight dripping in the side window where a storm-shattered tree trunk had playacted nightmare monsters by moonlight and ancient analog television images flickering with B.A. and Murdoch and Hannibal and the Face Man as they fought for justice and peanut butter sandwiches cut diagonally in suburb style with suburb butter-knifes and a pile of dirt sandy dirt where bloody battles were fought and sometimes yellow plastic construction equipment built pyramids and tunnel systems where Evil Franks played by little green army men killed our Sons and Daughters played by more little green army men in the War and where he had been playing when the black car pulled into the driveway and Mommy started screaming as she fell faintly to the floor of the front porch and a little boy innocently asked questions of when and why and where Daddy had gone off to die for his country our country in the war to end all wars—
Richter sat up in the wash of freezing morning light, shaking from memories of parents and a cat and a monkey puppet now long dead. A sheen of sweat covered his brow, a somehow defiant gesture in this frigid landscape. Where had he lost his happiness? Perhaps somewhere along the straight and narrow Milicom command path he had walked for three decades he had dropped it in the gritty sandy dirty gravel ground.
He had found it once, he thought. In the light. The heaven in the orb of stars.
Richter closed his eyes, and when they opened, a ring of silver fire swept out in a circle from where he sat. It illuminated the stark landscape in a growing ellipse. He stood but did not stand, rather, he rose into the air, suspended by the power of his will. He thrust his arms at the black sky above him, threatening to tear down the heavens. A great white sphere of energy formed around him, and his eyes blazed with an unearthly fire. He screamed with all his might at no one and nothing.
Richter returned to the ground, and the sphere of energy around his body faded. A dull ache formed behind his eyes, and his fists shook with his fury.
He would destroy that which had destroyed his reality.
He would destroy the Enemy.
Richter walked north.
West rested his face in his hand, the elbow propped upon the top of the bar, his pinky finger bracing his teeth apart as he gnawed at the nail. Bad habit.
Patra had told him about her past: her childhood, her escape from the Rodham School and disappearance, her life as a waitress and sculptor in Roanoke. Her words trailed off as she began to describe the invasion of the aliens, her capture in the church, the transport to the black tower, and she fell silent.
West cleared his throat, but sat on the other side of the bar, saying nothing. After a prolonged awkward silence, he looked up, smiled sheepishly, looked back down at his empty glass. He put it under the bar. “I think I’ve had enough for tonight… today… whatever the hell it is.”
Patra grinned. “Enough to drink or enough of my past?” Her fingers tapped out a metallic tattoo on the top of the bar.
“Patra,” he reached out, held her hand in his, “Please don’t think that I—It’s just… I had no idea. No one did. You disappeared, and we all assumed you were dead. Just the fact that you’re sitting here, it’s like finally seeing the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot or…” She frowned, but he could see a glimmer in her silver eyes. “Well, it’s amazing that you’re here, talking to me. It’s unreal.”
“That’s very flattering. You’re acting like I’m a celebrity or something, and you don’t have to. I’m not the President’s daughter anymore. I’m just Patty Jennings, and he’s dead just like everyone else.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Was he a Styx, too? That would explain a lot of things.”
“No… No, he wasn’t one of us. But I bet you never knew that he had us look for you everywhere. He thought that the Quebs had gotten you. I don’t know how many of those bastards we questioned. I don’t know how many died from our questioning, either.”
Patra’s eyes teared up as best they could, and she sobbed. She stood, walked over to the door, looked out onto the murky gray expanse of dawn, or twilight, or whatever it was. She stood in the open doorway, arms crossed over her chest, head leaned against the side of the door. “I never meant to hurt him like that. I never wanted to…” She trailed off to silence. “I saw the broadcasts; I saw how much I’d hurt him. I saw how old he looked, how gray and wasted and… Have you ever seen someone hurt like that, West?” She waited, and when she received no answer she turned around to find West sitting behind the bar, eyes covered with the palms of his hands. In the faded light, he was cast into shadow. His tired hands withdrew from shielding his face from her sight, and she saw eyes that were red from their own inner turmoil. He began to speak from the dark, and his voice broke her heart. Patra knew then that she was not the only person who had loved and lost and survived.
Lips. Parched.
Richter pursed his ragged lips and blew air through the opening they created, and a pathetic sound that in no way resembled whistling emerged. He frowned, tried again. His efforts to entertain himself with music had been thwarted once again.
Thirsty.
Day or night? He walked into the black landscape, guided only by his instinctual sense of direction. What did he expect to find hundreds of miles to the north?
He would find Diablo.
Then what? What are you doing, James?
Father, do not speak to me. Give me back the stars and the sun and the lost lost children of the night and then you may speak to me. Then and only then.
Sky blended into horizon. Day blended into night blended into days blended into nights.
He walked. North, north, north. Walk, walk, walk.
She joined West in the shadows of the Diablo Tavern. They could no longer tell day from night; each was a
