Beyond the bed, the bathroom door is ajar. He drifts toward it. Within, a woman stands before the mirror, brushing her hair with long languid strokes. Her back is to him but the set of her shoulders, the curve of her hips, is instantly recognizable. There is a faint crackle of static electricity as the brush glides through her hair.
He looks into the mirror and his ex-wife’s reflection stares back.
“Shirley. Why are you here?”
“I’m just back to collect a few things. I’m going on a journey.”
“A journey?”
“Of course.” She speaks with the authority of dreams. “Look at the clock. It’s past midnight, it’s a new day.”
The brushing sound has now morphed into something else: something slow, rhythmic, like regular pulses of static from a radio. “Where are you going?”
“Where do you think?” And she turns to face him. Only now it is Diana Mirren’s face looking into his. “Every day is a journey.”
“Every day is a journey,” he repeats.
She nods. “And the journey itself is home.”
As he stares, he realizes something else is wrong. The voice isn’t Diana’s. And it is no longer his ex-wife’s. With a shock that is not quite horror, he realizes it is the voice of Liza. Liza, speaking through Diana’s face.
“Silver!” he cries.
“Yes, Christopher. I can hear you.” The dream-figure smiles faintly.
The strange rhythmic sound is louder now. He hides his face. “Oh, no. No.”
“I’m still here,” Liza says.
But he will not look up, he will not look up, he will not look up…
“Christopher…”
Lash opened his eyes to darkness. For a moment, in the black night, he thought himself back in his own bed. He sat up, breathing slowly, letting the rhythmic rise and fall of the nearby surf wash away the tattered pieces of his dream.
But then the exotic midnight scent of hyacinth blossoms, mingled with eucalyptus, drifted through the open window, and he remembered where he was.
He slowly rose from the bed, drew aside the gauzy curtain. Beyond, the jungle canopy ran down to the tropic sea, a dark-emerald blanket surrounded by liquid topaz. Thin clouds drifted across a swollen moon. Sometimes, he reminded himself, dreams are just dreams, after all.
He returned to bed, gathered up the sheets. For a few minutes he lay awake, gazing at the bamboo ceiling and listening to the surf, his thoughts now in the past and half a world away. Then he turned over, shut his eyes once more, and passed into dreamless slumber.
SIXTY-FOUR
Although it was only four o’clock, an early winter twilight had already settled over Manhattan. Taxis jockeyed for position in the rain-washed streets; pedestrians milled about on the busy pavements, heads bent against the elements, umbrellas thrust forward, like jousting knights.
Christopher Lash stood among a throng of people at the corner of Madison and Fifty-sixth, waiting for the light to change. Rain, he thought. Christmas in New York isn’t complete without it.
He hopped from foot to foot in the chill, trying to keep the large bags he was carrying dry beneath the canopy of his umbrella. The light changed; the crowd streamed slowly forward; and now at last he allowed himself to peer upward, toward the skyline.
At first glance, the building seemed no different. The wall of obsidian rose, velvet beneath the overcast sky, enticing the eye toward the setback where the outer tower stopped and the inner continued. It was only then — as his eye crested the inner tower — that the change became clear. Before, the smooth rise of the inner tower had been interrupted by a band of decorative grillwork before continuing a few additional stories. Now those top floors, the ribbonlike line of grillwork, were missing, leaving empty sky in their place. The scorched remains — the ruined tangle of metal Lash had seen in newspaper photographs — had been whisked away with remarkable speed. Now it was gone, all gone as if it had never been there in the first place. And as he looked down again and let himself be borne ahead with the crowd, Lash ached for what had gone with it.
The large plaza before the entrance was very quiet. There were no tourists snapping pictures of family members beneath the stylized logo; no would-be clients loitering around the oversize fountain and its figure of Tiresias the seer. The lobby beyond was equally quiet; it seemed the fall of Lash’s shoes was the only sound echoing off the pink marble. The wall of flat-panel displays was dark and silent. The lines of applicants were gone, replaced by small knots of maintenance workers and engineers in lab coats, poring over diagrams. The only thing that had not changed was the security: Lash’s bags of gift-wrapped presents were subjected to two separate scans before he was cleared to ascend the elevator.
When the doors opened on the thirty-second floor, Mauchly was waiting. He shook Lash’s hand, wordlessly led the way to his office. Moving at his characteristic studied pace, he motioned Lash to take the same seat he’d occupied at their initial meeting. In fact, just about everything reminded Lash of that first day in early autumn. Mauchly was wearing a similar brown suit, generic yet extremely well tailored, and his dark eyes held Lash’s with the same Buddha-like inscrutability. Sitting here, it was almost as if — despite the changes he’d just witnessed, despite the whole appalling tragedy — nothing about this office, or its inhabitant, had or ever could change.
“Dr. Lash,” Mauchly said. “Nice to see you.”
Lash nodded.
“I trust you found the Seychelles pleasant this time of year?”
“Pleasant is an understatement.”
“The accommodations were to your liking?”
“Eden clearly spared no expense.”
“And the service?”
“A new grass skirt in my closet every morning.”
“I hope that was some compensation for having to be away so long. Even with our, ah, connections, it took a little longer than we expected to get your past history back to normal.”
“Must have been difficult, without Liza’s help.”
Mauchly gave him a wintry smile. “Dr. Lash, you have no idea.”
“And Edmund Wyre?”
“Back behind bars, once the discrepancies in his records were illuminated.” Mauchly passed a few sheets across the desk.
“What’s this?”
“Our certification of your credit history; reinstatement papers for your suspended loans; and official notification of errors made and corrected to your medical, employment, and educational records.”
Lash flipped through the documents. “What’s this last one?”
“An order of executive clemency, to be served retroactively.”
“A get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said, whistling.
“Something like that. Be sure not to lose it — I don’t believe we missed anything, but there’s always a chance. Now, if you’ll just sign this.” And Mauchly pushed another sheet across the desk.
“Not another nondisclosure form.”
Another wintry smile. “No. This is a legal instrument in which you witness that your work for Eden is now complete.”
Lash grimaced. Time and again — as he’d sat on the porch of his little cottage on Desroches Island, reading haiku and staring out over the avocado plantations — he’d replayed the final scene in his head, wondering if there was something he could have done differently, something he should have seen coming — something, anything, that could have prevented what happened to Richard Silver and his doomed creation.