“Jees, don’t be so hard on yourself, Mr. C—”
“Just now, for instance, my reference to the Eden story. Right over your head. A primal metaphor like that. But of course, how could you have known it? Spontaneous generation in the brain? It has to be passed down. The oral tradition, Max.”
“Oral tradition, sure.”
“There are so many stories I could have told you by now.”
Cortez rises off the trunk, but holds out a hand to indicate that Max should stay seated.
“So many nights, up in my balcony at Club 62 with my bullhorn and spotlight. And I could have been with you, Max, lights out, seated in a rocker next to your bed, yes? I could have told you stories until you fell off to sleep.”
“I was with you in the balcony a lot, boss—”
“And the funny thing is, it would have proved even better training, I think. I truly believe that.” Cortez starts to walk a small circle around the steamer. “Better even than observing my actions firsthand. We could have sculpted the imagination. Taught you to think in terms of legend and myth. Larger than life. Wouldn’t you have liked that, Max?”
Max hesitates, then mumbles, “Yeah, I guess,” and Cortez reaches from behind him, places his hand on the boy’s forehead, and pushes him slowly down until he’s reclined on top of the trunk.
“It could have been just like this, Max. You’re not quite ready for sleep. I’m tired from an endless day, but regenerating, finding a second wind in what’s to come. Close your eyes, Max.”
Max looks up at Cortez, visibly uncomfortable, but not knowing what to do. He closes his eyes. His legs hang over the end of the trunk. Cortez continues his circle.
“I could have transferred all the classics to you, Max. Chronicles of war. Stories of gods and monsters and long ocean journeys. We could have learned together. Just a voice in a dark room. A father’s voice. Comforting. Protecting. Full of hidden knowledge and ancient stories. Homer, Max. Hesiod. Terence. Virgil. Ovid. All the names, Max. And the Bible. All the stories. We could’ve worked our way through. From ‘In the beginning’ to the last ‘Amen’ of Revelation.”
Cortez talks and walks another circle, comes to rest at Max’s head. The boy’s eyelids are fluttering. He wants to open the eyes, but he doesn’t dare. Cortez squats down, puts a hand on Max’s forehead, lowers his voice.
“I could’ve taken you from the six days of creation to the visions of John. But there’s a price for everything, son. And some opportunities only come our way once. A single chance.”
Cortez reaches inside his jacket and pulls from an inner breast pocket a long, pearl-handled dagger. An antique. Handmade. A gift from people whose faces he’s never seen. He grabs the handle tight in his hand, raises it above his head, squeezes it as he leans down and kisses Max on the forehead.
The boy’s eyes come open, shocked and wide. They stare at each other for an aching, impossible second.
And then Cortez brings the dagger down. Plunges it into the steamer trunk all the way down to the handle. He pushes Max up to a standing position and yells, “Get out!”
The boy runs, stumbling, out of the library. Cortez stands up and runs to the fireplace, grabs the phone from the mantel, holds it up to his mouth, and yells into the receiver, “Two words. Fuck you,” then heaves the phone like a speedball, the length of the room, until it smashes against a wall in an explosion of black plastic and colored wires.
He takes the dagger from his pocket and places it on the mantel, then puts a hand on either side of it to steady himself. He takes a few deep breaths, swallows, and says aloud, “I’m a dead man.”
Chapter Nineteen
Lenore would give almost anything to know what Woo is dreaming about. She wishes there were some process she could tap, some gift of science that would allow her to bring in a Sony Trinitron, strap a few cables and electrodes from TV to forehead in the manner of every cheaply made 1950s science-fiction movie she’s ever stumbled upon at 4 A.M., sitting cross-legged in her bed, zapping through the cable channels with the remote control and pumping a ten-pounder with her free hand, her Magnum in her lap.
If she could make the connection, adjust the volume, and hone the contrast, what would she see among the static and sparks of Woo’s synapse pictures? The stale air and dull faces of a college classroom as Woo’s hand draws root words and clever, pointy symbols on a slate blackboard? The milk-white skin of the latest eighteen-year-old co-ed he’s seduced on the couch of his linguistics office? Or just maybe her own face, spitting smug insults his way as his hand slides inside her silk chemise and cradles her breast and his fingers run over a rapidly hardening nipple?
Maybe it’s nothing like that. He’s breathing easily, not making any noise. Maybe it’s some simple pastoral dream from his grand-father’s narrated past. Something about rice paddies or the slow lapping sound of water against the sides of a sturdy junk bobbing near a shore, riding out the mild, endless waves of the family village. Maybe she should wake him suddenly and ask him, demand that he spit out his imagery before it fades. Interrogate him for every detail he can save from the deteriorating land of REM sleep.
Lenore’s own dreams were horrible and she’s grateful to be awake. The first thing she did after opening her eyes and getting a bearing on her surroundings was to pull a hit of crank from her pocket and pop it. There’s no water available, so she had to swallow it dry. It went down hard and her throat still aches.
But she’s happy to be awake and even this filthy basement is better than what she went through in the nightmare: She was the sole passenger on this endless subway ride. The subway car was this broken-down bullet, windowless, graffiti-covered, floors filled, for some reason, with old, yellowed, crumpled-up newspapers. The graffiti was in either code or some new inner-city slang or an obscure foreign language, but there were crudely drawn illustrations next to it that gave her an idea of its meaning. Like some subterranean Rosetta stone. Both the forward and rear doors were jammed shut. Every now and then the lights would go out and she’d sit in the darkness for what seemed like an hour. The car seemed to be gradually but consistently picking up speed. Her feet vibrated on the floor and her hands, gripping the edge of her seat, began to shake. There was an awful and incessant electric-sounding hum in her ear. At one point she panicked and ripped open her coat to look for her gun, but her holster was empty. Cold air began to fill the car. Every now and then she moved to the front and back doors and yelled, first calling out full sentences like Is anyone down there? or Can anyone stop this thing? Then she shortened to calls for Help, and finally, just before giving up, she made guttural, animal noises, howls and barks. She collapsed back onto the cream-colored molded plastic bench and began to imagine the cinematic possibility that some bomb had fallen and decimated the city. That the radiation had seeped into the tunnels and killed the driver, the only other person in the subway, in this terrible strangulating manner. She fell sideways on the bench, curled into a fetal hunch, and wondered which would be worse — to be choked out in the near future by the radiation making its way toward her, car by car, or to be immune to the radiation and live, trapped on this perpetually moving vehicle, circle the city over and over, until dehydration alone turned her car into a mobile grave. She could probably have hurled herself out of one of the shattered windows and under the wheels, but suicide was out of the question for more than one reason. As she crowded in further on her own body, the hum in her ears increased until it became painful. She woke from the dream with her hands at the sides of her head.