“I can’t say.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
“I told you. Uncover the real cause of Matt Zimmerman’s death.”
Decker could feel himself losing his temper. The sun in the sky seemed to blacken as the blood bubbled up in his chest, into his neck and his temples. It pulsed and it pounded. It pounded and beat.
Decker leapt up from the wheel and made a dash toward the hedge. It seemed to take him forever to make his way through the sandpit. It was as wide and unwelcome as the desert from Morocco to Egypt, the entire caravan route of the Tuareg as they carried the first zero by camel from India to Spain. The sand turned to molasses, to honey, sucking him in. Like quicksand. By the time he reached the far side, the man in the shadows had slithered away.
“Come back,” Decker said. “Come back. Mr. X. Mr. X! Oh, for crying out loud, what are you so fucking afraid of? Come and face me, you bastard. Who are you?”
“It’s too dangerous, John, to even utter his name, or to explain any further…”
Decker saw the man’s hand appear through a hole in the hedge. The index finger extended, pointing to a house at the end of the street. A saguaro grew just off to the side, swathed in gaudy Mexican blankets, dressed up like a Mexican elf. A trellis of sweet olive lined the walkway, leading to an impossibly periwinkle front door.
“What’s that?” Decker asked. “Is that where he lives?”
The finger withdrew behind leaves. One minute the shadow was there, only a few yards away. The next, it was gone.
Decker looked back at the house. It appeared just like every other stucco house on the block, except slightly elevated, perhaps. And it featured that large saguaro in front, with the tacky Mexican blanket like a matador’s cape draped across one of its arms, and that giant sombrero. How had he missed that sombrero before? It was huge, a good two yards across. The sweet olive was gone too. The trellis was now glowing with tiny wild roses, bright crimson and pink. And the front door was green, like the submarine green hugging Ancient Greek amphorae, full of darker green olive oil, oregano-flavored, in the moody maritime depths of Aegean emerald coves.
Decker found himself at the front door. The door knob was already in his hand. He took a step back and knocked on the door. The echo marked pace with his heart. It pounded and beat. It pounded and beat. He found himself staring, fish-eyed at the doorknob, watched it spin. Slowly. Slowly. Right there, to the right!
Decker stepped backward, almost slipping right off the edge of the stoop. His head felt wooly and stiff, like petrified beer foam, as if he’d been drugged.
“John?” said the woman who opened the door. She looked vaguely familiar, he thought. Wearing a dark blue bandana, a hoody and a pink Playtex glove on one hand, she wiped her brow with the other and blew a lock of wispy blond hair away from her face. “What are you doing here? I’m in the middle of cleaning.”
“Do I know you?” he asked her. “I’m sorry. What’s your name?”
“Very funny. Is this some kind of a joke?”
“Mrs…”
“Really.” The woman was no longer amused. “What the hell, John? Fleming. Mary-Lou Fleming. What’s going on? Are you sick?”
Her name sounded familiar but Decker couldn’t quite place it. “Mary-Lou,” he repeated. It sounded like someone he had dated in high school.
Out of nowhere, a terror both mouth-drying and palpable settled upon him, encasing his shoulders like the cold leathery wings of some giant vampire bat, a roll of Saran-Wrap-thin human skin.
Decker looked up at the sky. The woman in the doorway issued a throat-tightening scream and slammed the door shut.
Somewhere, it thundered. There. And again.
The sun went out like a light bulb. The wind blew a troika of dead leaves in his face. They danced on his shoulders and skittered away. A bone-jangling cold crept down his bare backbone, one vertebra at a time, finally coming to rest in the nest of his hip bones, like a giant white catfish, alone, in that hole, at the bottom of the black sack of the universe.
Decker ran from the house. He didn’t know why or to where he was running. He just ran. He didn’t much care. He simply had to get out of there.
But the farther he ran, the more omnipresent the feeling of dread, the unvarnished bone-gnashing horror of it, like a life-sucking portent of nihilism, a polyp of pain.
A new person entered the world. Decker could not shake the feeling of his powerful presence, like grime on the skin, like fish scales — rogue dried and translucent as moons — found stuck to his forearm hours after gutting those bass on that rock by the sea.
He was a good-looking young blond man in a white tennis sweater with broad shoulders and muscular legs. He wore white shorts and white tennis sneakers. All regulation white. Like a nurse, almost, in starched linens. Fastidious. Self-observed.
Decker found himself breathing hard at the end of a cul-de-sac. Blind alley. No exit. He found himself doubled-over, as if he hadn’t run in a decade and he’d just finished a 15K dash. As if he were old, last-legged, and his skin was all wrinkles, and his lungs had the capacity of a pair of used condoms on Jupiter, and all that he was was simply melting away, pouring down like a putting-hole blob of hot mercury through the center of everything.
“Why do you run from me?” said the man with blue eyes and blond hair. No, it turned out, he wasn’t wearing a sweater. It was thrown across his shoulders and neck, the sleeves bound together in a loose knot at the chest. He was wearing a white Lacoste polo shirt with a pair of tiny gold Klieg lights criss-crossed on his breast instead of a crocodile. He was smiling and handsome and as aerodynamically modeled as the fin of a shark.
Decker felt the air rush back through his lungs. He straightened, lifted up. “Who are you?” he said. “Why are you following me? What do you want from me?”
“I want you to stop worrying, John. I want you to stop killing yourself.”
Decker puffed himself up, trying to look more imposing. “Or you’ll do it for me, I suppose.” He stared back at the laughing blue eyes. They were the kind of eyes you’d expect to find on a Santa Claus at your local department store before Christmas, or in the burnished brown face of some ninth century Viking raider from Iceland.
It was so hard to focus. No matter what Decker did, everything seemed to fall in and out. He took a deep breath. In and out.
“Haven’t you earned a vacation, a respite? After all that you’ve done for the world, John, don’t you deserve some time off? And money? All that you’ve sacrificed and what’s been your reward? The loss of all that you love. Just leave things alone and you’ll be a lot richer for it. Forty million dollars richer, in fact. How’s that? The number of deprivation and sacrifice. How many days have you wandered the wilderness?”
“Forty million dollars?” said Decker. “You mean like Second Life Linden dollars? Monopoly money?”
“Dollars or Euros. Whatever you please. When you leave the Arcade, check your bank balance. You’re now forty million dollars richer.”
“Oh, is that how it works? You just pay people and they do whatever you want? Why don’t you show yourself? Go ahead. Why do you have to hide in this funhouse? Can’t you handle the R in VR? Is it simply too much for you?” He took a step closer and the blond man reared back on his heels. He seemed to ascend, higher and higher, more stretching that standing. Like rubber, he grew giraffe tall.
In contrast, Decker recoiled. He ducked back, he sidestepped, trying to control his overriding desire to get the hell out of there as fast as his little legs could possibly carry him. He turned, only to find himself facing his parents — both of them, right there, in the flesh.