Starbucks window, indelible, that staggering goddess-visage: he did not have to see it again to remember it.
Now the whole sky grew dark, ripped through with dark, dark red. Thirty-two seconds remained. It seemed an eternity. These luxurious thirty-two, now thirty-one seconds, would last him the rest of his life. But the timer sped up, cruelly, and the lost boy and lost girl sprinted toward the margin of the little frame. Tim Underhill sent himself
It was to gasp, it was to tremble.
The Media Player rectangle with its buttons and keys vanished into the gray beneath Mark’s charcoal-green. Tim clicked the little x on the top right-hand corner of both screens. The linked website should have zipped away and revealed his e-mail window. Instead, it collapsed into itself to leave no more than an impression of broken glass shattering inward. His screen flashed the flat deadly blue of hard-disk crashes and visits from or to the local computer wizard; it hung there for perhaps another second, then faded away to nothing, to disengaged gray, as if a fuse had blown.
For a while, Tim kept hitting the return key and double-clicking on everything in sight. Then he noticed that the green strip of Gotomypc.com still ran across the top and bottom of Mark’s screen. Trying to control his panic, he managed to back out of the program and get Mark’s computer off-line.
Through the bedroom’s closed window came the sounds of metal scraping on stone and the whining of gears. He groaned, clutched his head, bent over the keyboard, groaned again. His need for drama satisfied, Tim unfurled from the chair and went to the window. Just beyond the flattened wooden fence, a yellow earth-moving machine nearly the width of the alley was pushing its enormous blade into what remained of Joseph Kalendar’s rear wall. The concrete blocks at the edge of the blade shattered into chunks of powder, and the rows above them swooned outward, bulging before they separated, and crashed down into the blade and the alley. Through the dust, a portion of the wide brown strip of exposed earth became visible.
Tim fished his cell phone from his jacket pocket and dialed a number at 55 Grand Street. Since all there were close friends of his, and everybody spent hours in one another’s lofts, it almost didn’t matter who answered. As it happened, he had dialed Vinh’s number, and Maggie Lah answered. He told her to go upstairs and look at his computer, then call him back on his desk telephone. When Maggie called back, it was to say that his computer appeared to be deceased. Expired. Not a single vital sign. He asked Maggie to call Myron, the wizard next door, and tell him he was having an emergency caused by Gotomypc.com, which Myron had installed on his computer.
Down in the alley, the bulldozer was collecting broken concrete blocks in its bucket and depositing them into the back of a pickup truck dropping progressively lower on its wheels. Uniformed policemen, four men in yellow space suits, and detectives in sports jackets milled around in Kalendar’s backyard and the alley. Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus was watching the wall removal from just inside Philip’s ruined fence. To Tim’s amazement, Philip stood next to him.
Myron called to say he was walking up the stairs at 55 Grand.
“You’re the man,” Tim said.
“You’re still out of town, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, I’m in your apartment,” Myron said.“Here we are. Are you sure this thing is plugged in? . . . Okay, it’s plugged in. You were using that program I installed?”
“Yes,” Tim said. “I want to return to the last website I was on. I want to go back to where I was when the computer crashed.”
“Nothin’s shakin’,” Myron said. “Let me undress this thing, see what I can see.”
For a minute and a half, Myron wielded his screwdriver and removed the case. “Now, let me get it turned around. . . . Holy shit. Maggie, look at this.”
Tim heard Maggie giggle.
“What’s so funny?”
“Your hard disk, man. It like . . . squirted out. I can just about wiggle it free, but it’s, like, misshapen. And it’s hot! What did this? The program didn’t do it.”
“I know,” Tim said. “I just said that to get you over to my apartment in a hurry.”
Myron agreed to set up a new hard disk before Tim returned to New York the next day.
“What was that website you wanted to get back to?”
“It’s not important. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, all right?”
Tim hung up and returned to the window. He felt shaken and oddly dispossessed by what had just happened. Mark, Lucy: running barely covered from the storm, like Adam and Eve. Even, it seemed, in that world, safety was fragile and came at a price. Yet their joy had burned through the image on his commandeered monitor, along with their absolute connection.
He watched the bulldozer scrape away and decant into the laden pickup the last of Joseph Kalendar’s eight- foot wall. As docile as a probationer, Philip Underhill had not strayed from Franz Pohlhaus’s side.
Tim let the screen door bang behind him. Philip turned his head to give his brother the glance of a captain to a platoon leader who had arrived late for a briefing. What he had seen must stay with him, Tim realized.
The fat, red-haired man in the cab of the bulldozer shouted, “Excuse me, Sergeant. Sergeant! Excuse me.”
“Sorry,” Pohlhaus said. “Yes?”
“Should I start on the ground now? We got a good clear shot.”
“Nice and slow,” Pohlhaus said. “Plus I want a DM man. Thompson! Pick up a shovel and work alongside Dozier here, will you?” One of the men in yellow space suits and clumsy boots trotted forward.
“The rest of you guys, move in as soon as we find something,” Pohlhaus said.
He gave Tim an unreadable glance. “Little news flash.” He seemed entirely gathered into himself, like a creature enfolded within its own wings. “Lloyd-Jones took himself out.” Anger surrounded him like a red mist. “Out of the game.”
“Oh, no,” Tim said. In his brother’s grim satisfaction, he saw that Philip already knew.
“About an hour ago, Lloyd-Jones killed himself in his cell. He ripped his shirt in half, tied one end around his neck and the other around one of his bars, and he rolled off the bed. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it did.”
“He got off so, so easy,” Philip said. “That sick bastard.”
“I guess he realized your brother wasn’t going to write a book about him,” Pohlhaus said.
The bulldozer snorted and jerked to a halt, rocking on its treads. Thompson, who had been treading backward in front of the machine as it delicately sliced away a thin layer of earth, shouted, “Sergeant! We got one!”
All three men at the bottom of Philip Underhill’s backyard walked over the defeated fence and into the alley. Officer Thompson scraped the blade of his shovel across the strip of earth, then bent down. Using one of his space gloves, he tugged into view a gray-green human hand, then an entire forearm, encased in a white sleeve.
“That’s not Mark’s arm,” Philip said.
Pohlhaus waved them back. The brothers retreated to Philip’s lot line and looked on as the first of the adolescent dead began his journey upward into daylight.
Acknowledgments
For professional assistance in the writing of this novel, thanks go to Visconti pens (Van Gogh and Kaleido), Boorum & Pease journals (900-3 R), and Kathy Kinsner (eighty words a minute); for moral and emotional
