Seize the Night

“How far in the future?” I wondered, almost able to smell the hot, rancid air that had blown through the egg room.

“Ten years, a century, a millennium. Who cares? No matter how far they went, something totally quashed them.”

I recalled the ghostly, radio-relayed voices in the egg room: the panic, the cries for help, the screams.

I shuddered. After another pull at my beer, I said, “The thing…or things in Hodgson’s suit.”

“That’s part of our future.”

“Nothing like that exists on this world.”

“Not yet.”

“But those things were so strange…. The entire ecological system would have to change. Change drastically.”

“If you can find one, ask a dinosaur whether it’s possible.”

I had lost my taste for the beer. I held the bottle out of the Jeep, turned it upside down, and let it drain.

“Even if it was a time machine,” I argued, “it was dismantled. So Hodgson showing up the way he did, out of nowhere, and the vault door reappearing…everything that happened to us… How could it have happened?”

“There’s a residual effect.”

“Residual effect.”

“Full-on, totally macking residual effect.”

“You take the engine out of a Ford, tear apart the drive train, throw away the battery — no residual effect can cause the damn car to just drive itself off to Vegas one day.”

Gazing at the dwindling, vaguely luminous riverbed as if it were the course of time winding into our infinitely strange future, Bobby said, “They tore a hole in reality. Maybe a hole like that doesn’t mend itself.”

“What does that mean?”

“What it means,” he said.

“Cryptic.”

“Styptic.”

Perhaps his point was that his explanation might be cryptic, yes, but at least it was a concept we could grasp and to which we could cling, a familiar idea that kept our sanity from draining away, just as the alum in a styptic pencil could stop the blood flowing from a shaving cut.

Or perhaps he was mocking my tendency — acquired from the poetry in which my father had steeped me — to assume that everyone spoke in metaphor and that the world was always more complex than it appeared to be, in which case he had chosen the word solely for the rhyme.

I didn’t give him the satisfaction of asking him to elucidate styptic. “They didn’t know about this residual effect?”

“You mean the big-brain wizards running the project?”

“Yeah. The people who built it, then tore it down. If there was a residual effect, they’d blow in the walls, fill the ruins with a few thousand tons of concrete. They wouldn’t just walk away and leave it for assholes like us to find.”

He shrugged. “So maybe the effect didn’t manifest until they were long gone.”

“Or maybe we were hallucinating everything,” I suggested.

“Both of us?”

“Could be.”

“Identical hallucinations?”

I had no adequate answer, so I said, “Styptic.”

“Elliptic.”

I refused to think about that one. “If the Mystery Train was a time-travel project, it didn’t have anything to do with my mother’s work.”

“So?”

“So if it didn’t have anything to do with Mom, why did someone leave this cap for me in the egg room? Why did they leave her photo in the airlock on a different night? Why did someone put Leland Delacroix’s security badge under the windshield wiper and send us there tonight?”

“You’re a regular question machine.”

He finished his Heineken, and I shoved our empty bottles into the cooler.

“Could be that we don’t know half of what we think we know,” Bobby said.

“Like?”

“Maybe everything that went wrong at Wyvern went wrong in the genetic-engineering labs, and maybe your mom’s theories were entirely what led to the mess we’re in now, just like we’ve been thinking. Or maybe not.”

“You mean my mother didn’t destroy the world?”

“Well, we can be pretty sure she helped, bro. I’m not saying your mom was a nobody.”

“Gracias.”

“On the other hand, maybe she was only part of it, and maybe even the lesser part.”

After my father’s death from cancer a month earlier — a cancer I now suspect didn’t have a natural cause — I had found his handwritten account of Orson’s origins, the intelligence-enhancement experiments, and my mother’s slippery retrovirus. “You read what my dad wrote.”

“Possibly he wasn’t clued in to the whole story.”

“He and Mom didn’t keep secrets from each other.”

“Yeah, sure, one soul in two bodies.”

“That’s right,” I said, prickling at his sarcasm.

He glanced at me, winced, and returned his attention to the riverbed ahead. “Sorry, Chris. You’re totally right. Your mom and dad weren’t like mine. They were way…special. When we were kids, I used to wish we weren’t just best friends. Used to wish we were brothers so I could live with your folks.”

“We are brothers, Bobby.”

He nodded.

“In more important ways than blood,” I said.

“Don’t set off the maudlin alarm.”

“Sorry. Been eating too much sugar lately.”

There are truths about which Bobby and I never speak, because all words are inadequate to describe them, and to speak of them would be to diminish their power. One of these truths is the profound depth and sacred nature of our friendship.

Bobby moved on: “What I’m saying is, maybe your mom didn’t know the full story, either. Didn’t know about the Mystery Train project, which might be as much or more at fault than she was.”

“Cozy idea. But how?”

“I’m not Einstein, bro. I just drained my brain.”

He started the engine and drove downriver, still leaving the headlights off.

I said, “I think I know what Big Head might be.”

“Enlighten me.”

“It’s one of the second troop.”

The first troop had escaped the Wyvern lab on that violent night well over two years ago, and they had proved so elusive that every effort to locate and eradicate them had failed. Desperate to find the monkeys before their numbers drastically increased, the project scientists had released a second troop to search for the first, figuring that it would take a monkey to find a monkey.

Each of these new individuals carried a surgically implanted transponder, so it could be tracked and ultimately destroyed along with whatever members of the first troop it found. Although these new monkeys were supposedly unaware that they had been put through this surgery, once set loose they had chewed the transponders out of one another, setting themselves free.

“You think Big Head was a monkey?” he asked with disbelief.

“A radically redesigned monkey. Maybe not entirely a rhesus. Maybe some baboon in there.”