He looked up, and saw her drain her glass of wine. He realized it was her third glass, and the bottle sitting beside her was almost empty. She gave him a twisted smile, then tossed her empty glass at the stones, where it shattered.
She laced her fingers around her good knee and leaned back.
"So, Matt. What have you been doing with yourself?"
And the words began to spill out of him.
MATT fled the scene of slaughter that night with only one thought in his mind: He had to find a quiet place to gather his thoughts, order the events of the last hour, write it all down. His grasp on what he had seen in the depths of the time machine was so tenuous it made the waking residual images of a dream seem as solid as a slap in the face. He needed to retreat from the storm he could see coming. He was standing beside a brand-new pickup truck whose door was wide open, the owner fled who-knew-where. He saw the key was in the ignition.
Ten minutes later he was on the San Diego Freeway, heading north.
He didn't sleep, he didn't dare, he knew it would all go up in smoke and blow away if he slept; the only way he could keep it all in his head was to invent mathematical mnemonics to trick himself into remembering, so he sat there in the parking lot of a McDonald's, the first restaurant he had seen, and when it opened he bought six cups of coffee and drove carefully down the street to a Bank of America and waited for it to open. When it did, he went inside and, not without some difficulty, withdrew a hundred thousand dollars from his account, worrying every minute that Howard or some federal agency would be looking for him, putting a flag on his account or his credit cards. But he walked out with the cash in a canvas bag and, gulping coffee, found a large consumer electronics store and purchased three personal computers for six hundred dollars. Then he drove around town looking for a used car lot, abandoned the stolen pickup after wiping the steering wheel and door handles and everything else he might have touched. He knew he must have left DNA traces inside, but hoped that for a routine stolen car the police would only dust for fingerprints. He walked to the car lot and paid four thousand in cash for an anonymous gray sedan that looked reliable enough, then drove it to Ventura, where he checked into a Motel 6 at noon under the name of Kevin Moore, paying an extra hundred-dollar bill for the privilege of not showing his driver's license.
At first it was dense with mathematical symbols, as he tried to document and somehow rationalize the things he had seen in that little metal box on that fateful night twelve thousand years ago... or was it really fifteen thousand years ago? Was that too linear a way of thinking? It made it sound as if the Pleistocene was in some... direction, a place you could point to, or a vector whose length and orientation was the sole possible result of a specific equation.
He knew he had seen something that a human eye is not really equipped to see... and yet how could that be? It was a contradiction in terms, but so was everything else from the moment they went into the past. It could not happen, yet it had happened. Which meant that he, Matt Wright, mathematical genius, was missing something.
On the second day he began to get some inkling of a new direction. At first it was no more than an itch at the back of his mind, something he had experienced before when a new idea was struggling to be born. He knew he couldn't force it to come, so he did what he always did at times like that. He went to bed. Maybe his subconscious mind would give him a boost.
But he woke up no wiser, and knew it was time to move on. He was rested, felt up to driving now. So he checked out and drove on up the coast, up US 101, then California Route 1 until he got to Big Sur, where he pulled over and found a place where he could sit and watch the ocean pounding the shore.
After a while he noticed a collection of buildings not too far away from him. There were tents, yurts, a pool, gardens, a large green lawn, odd-shaped buildings with an impromptu, weathered look, all set in the rugged, up and down, rocky and deeply forested surf-battered terrain for which Big Sur was famous. It looked peaceful, secluded, open to the air and the sea. Some sort of resort, maybe. Possibly just the sort of thing he needed to get his thoughts together.
He got back in his car and soon was driving by a sign that said ESALEN INSTITUTE.
IT took a moment to penetrate, then Susan sat forward.
"Esalen?"
"That's right."
"That place where rich people go to get massages and soak in hot tubs?" "Well, they're not all rich, though it's not cheap. And there are hot tubs and massages, but there are classes, too, and discussions of... well, all sorts of things."
"Let me get this straight. While I was... while I... you were soaking in a hot tub in Big Sur?"
Susan felt she was right on the edge. She had loved him, she had worried about him, she had gotten angry at him as years rolled by with nothing but his maddening monthly postcards. She had briefly thought she hated him, and then she had tried her best to forget him. God knows she had enough to deal with, between Howard, Fuzzy, her unwanted fame, and Big Mama, goddamn Big Mama, who had damn near killed her. Now here he was, and the reason he hadn't come back to her was...
Esalen?
In that moment she felt she could hate him again.
"I couldn't just walk right in the door," he was saying. "You have to have reservations. But I got lucky, there was a cancellation. I got in after waiting three days at a motel in Monterey. I enrolled in
'Gestalt and Evolutionary Psychology' and 'An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy.' "
"What, no massage?"
"Well, yes, in the evenings." He glanced up at her, and hurried on.
"I almost quit after the first day. I had no idea what I was doing there, but I had this persistent feeling that I was on the trail of something important. But the courses were stupid. There was no logic to them. Things were posited with no empirical proof, then accepted as true with no further discussion. Or, none from anyone but me, that is. I began to realize that no one there but myself had any training in math or science... or what I think of as science, anyway. It was another culture entirely, couldn't have been more foreign to me if I'd been dropped off in the fourteenth century."
"Which I guess is no longer just a figure of speech."
"What? Oh, sure, I guess we proved it's possible."
"I didn't prove anything, Matt. I was just along for the ride."
"So was I. More than you'll ever know." He sighed heavily, and drank the last of the wine from
his glass. "Anyway, I stuck it out, and by the third day I felt I was beginning to get a handle on something."
"What, that Buddhism is the true faith? Did we travel with a Zen time machine?"
She had thought he would laugh, but he merely looked thoughtful, then slowly shook his head.
"I began to see that there was a tool there... or maybe a set of tools, that could... what I was looking for, you see, was a new perspective. My scientific one, all my mathematical tools, had failed me.
He stared into the fire for a while.
"Go on," she said. "I'm hanging on the edge here. Did you discover the secrets of the universe?"
"Not right then," he admitted. "On the fourth night they came for me."
HE was never entirely sure just who they were.
Oh, he had a general idea. They were Americans. They represented the government... which theoretically represented the people, but the people would never be consulted on anything this group did, nor informed of the results of their actions.
He gathered that the people he came into contact with had been assembled from the myriad of law-enforcement and hush-hush and they-don't-exist agencies for the sole purpose of investigating this time travel phenomenon... which meant investigating Matt Wright, as he was the only one who seemed to know anything about it.