My first instinct is to fight back. Cut all the strings. Time for us to grow up and go it alone. If the Little Mothers want to be abusive, I say we can play that game, too.
But the fact is, I’m tired.
I’m not sleeping well. I’m living in a crummy apartment in Los Angeles, Culver City actually. So now you know. The air conditioner is broken and I live out of Safeway cans. I shop for them in different stores, and I clean the can opener with boiling water and soap each time I use it.
I still have my incomplete list of proteins, still think now and then of the shining path to the Long Haul. I remember the blue strips of paper in the package from Rob, slipped into the airmail envelope. Maybe they were the other half of the secret—Rob’s half. Maybe he was willing them to me in case he failed.
Doesn’t matter. They’re gone now.
I still convince myself I have the dream, that history hasn’t stolen my life from me. But I can’t work, can’t get work, and Mom has run out of money, she says.
Then, last week, her phone was disconnected. I don’t have the cash to go see where she is or what she’s doing. I think she’s probably fine, but I don’t know why I think that.
Owen Montoya is in the hospital. I read the headlines at a newspaper stand. A nervous breakdown. He tried to stab a visiting scientist.
I keep waking up late at night. I’m having dreams about Rob, frequent and nasty. He’s chasing me. He blames me for his death. He’s mad that Lissa had sex with me. I try to tell him it wasn’t my fault, and he just gives me his most infuriating smile.
My phone bills scare me. (I can’t pay them, but someone is paying them, because the phone hasn’t been cut off.) I’m making long-distance calls to numbers I don’t know, and if I try calling them again, I’m not recognized, or I get answering machines, or a modem line and all I hear is an electronic raspberry.
The last few weeks I’ve been answering so many dead calls. I pick up, and nobody’s there. Just silence, or a hum from another galaxy.
I can’t just let it ring.
Maybe it’s part of this election, thousands of political phone banks, they dial hundreds of numbers at once, I answer, my voice triggers the computer to bring in an operator, but all of the operators are busy . . .
That sort of thing. Common, really. Nothing to worry about.
But eighty or ninety a day? To a guy with an unlisted number, who isn’t registered to vote and has a lousy credit rating? I forget who I am some days, the phone cuts away so many chunks of my time.
Last night around midnight I answered on the third ring. This time there was a voice on the line, but I can’t remember whether I was awake or asleep.
It was Rob. He said he was calling from Lee Stocking Island. He said, “Hal, old boy, I’ve got some news. Do you have the final clues? Shall we visit Dr. Seuss?”
“Goddamn it,” I said. “Leave me alone.” But I couldn’t hang up the phone. After he made sure I was still on the line, he read me a list of numbers.
I still remember those numbers. Every damned one of them.
We kept the coffin closed. I never saw the body. Rob was running Ben, had control of him even at the last, made him see what Rob wanted him to see.
Rob’s list—chopper, piecework, regulus—did not stop the others from being tagged on Lemuria. But it could have protected me. Maybe, in his way, he loves me. He wants to keep me around, especially if I’m under his thumb.
Is this crazy thinking or have I finally figured it out?
Rob found a way to turn the tables. He finished his work while everyone thought he was dead, even his brother. After all the different factions had exhausted themselves, he moved in. Cut deals, made promises. Took over. Replaced Golokhov.
But his hands have the puckering, Irina’s disease, Stalin’s madness.
This morning, I found a pistol under the mat on my front porch. A Glock with a fifteen-shot law-enforcement clip. Lissa’s gun.
Do I use it on someone else, or on myself?
History is my brother’s fist smashing into my face forever.
My stomach hurts.
Learn to live well, or fairly make your will;
You’ve played, and loved, and ate, and drunk your fill:
Walk sober off; before a sprightlier age
Comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage:
Leave such to trifle with more grace and ease,
Whom Folly pleases, and whose Follies please.
—Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace
