“I’ve got plenty of self-awareness. I’ve got enough self-awareness to choke on. I can see where you’re going and I am not going to apologize for how I felt about Dad. He died of cancer when I was thirteen. What did I ever do to anyone that was half so bad as what he did to me? So I don’t want to hear any cheap Freudian bullshit about survivor guilt and failing to live up to his glorious example, okay?”
“Nobody said it wasn’t hard on you. Particularly coming at the onset of puberty as it did.”
“Mom!”
“What. I wasn’t supposed to know? Who do you think did the laundry?” His mother lit a new cigarette from the old one, then crushed out the butt in an ashtray. “I knew a lot more of what was going on in those years than you thought I did, believe you me. All those hours you spent in the bathroom jerking off. The money you stole to buy dope with.”
“I was in pain, Mom. And it’s not as if you were any help.”
His mother looked at him with the same expression of weary annoyance he remembered so well. “You think there’s something special about your pain? I lost the only man I ever loved and I couldn’t move on because I had a kid to raise. Not a sweet little boy like I used to have either, but a sullen, self-pitying teenager. It took forever to get you shipped off to medical school.”
“So then you moved on. Right off the roof of the county office building. Way to honor Dad’s memory, Mom. What do you think he would have said about that if he’d known?”
Dryly, his mother said, “Ask him for yourself.”
Hank closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he was standing in the living room of his mother’s house. His father stood in the doorway, as he had so many times, smoking an unfiltered Camel and staring through the screen door at the street outside. “Well?” Hank said at last.
With a sigh his father turned around. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do.” His lips moved up into what might have been a smile on another man. “Dying was new to me.”
“Yeah, well, you could have summoned the strength to tell me what was going on. But you couldn’t be bothered. The surgeon who operated on you? Doctor Tomasini. For years I thought of him as my real father. And you know why? Because he gave it to me straight. He told me exactly what was going to happen. He told me to brace myself for the worst. He said that it was going to be bad but that I would find the strength to get through it. Nobody’d ever talked to me like that before. Whenever I was in a rough spot, I’d fantasize going to him and asking for advice. Because there was no one else I could ask.”
“I’m sorry you hate me,” his father said, not exactly looking at Hank. Then, almost mumbling, “Still, lots of men hate their fathers, and somehow manage to make decent lives for themselves.”
“I didn’t hate you. You were just a guy who never got an education and never made anything of himself and knew it. You had a shitty job, a three-pack-a-day habit, and a wife who was a lush. And then you died.” All the anger went out of Hank in an instant, like air whooshing out of a punctured balloon, leaving nothing behind but an aching sense of loss. “There wasn’t really anything there to hate.”
Abruptly, the car was filled with coil upon coil of glistening Worm. For an instant it looped outward, swallowing up car, Interstate, and all the world, and he was afloat in vacuum, either blind or somewhere perfectly lightless, and there was nothing but the Worm-smell, so strong he could taste it in his mouth.
Then he was back on the road again, hands sticky on the wheel and sunlight in his eyes.
“Boy, does that explain a lot!” Evelyn flashed her perfect teeth at him and beat on the top of the dashboard as if it were a drum. “How a guy as spectacularly unsuited for it as you are decided to become a surgeon. That perpetual cringe of failure you carry around on your shoulders. It even explains why, when push came to shove, you couldn’t bring yourself to cut open living people. Afraid of what you might find there?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know that you froze up right in the middle of a perfectly routine appendectomy. What did you see in that body cavity?”
“Shut up.”
“Was it the appendix? I bet it was. What did it look like?”
“Shut up.”
“Did it look like a Worm?”
He stared at her in amazement. “How did you know that?”
“I’m just a hallucination, remember? An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. So the question isn’t how did I know, but how did you know what a Worm was going to look like five years before their ships came into the Solar System?”
“It’s a false memory, obviously.”
“So where did it come from?” Evelyn lit up a cigarette. “We go off-road here.”
He slowed down and started across the desert. The car bucked and bounced. Sagebrush scraped against the sides. Dust blossomed up into the air behind them.
“Funny thing you calling your mother a lush,” Evelyn said. “Considering what happened after you bombed out of surgery.”
“I’ve been clean for six years and four months. I still go to the meetings.”
“Swell. The guy I married didn’t need to.”
“Look, this is old territory, do we really need to revisit it? We went over it so many times during the divorce.”
“And you’ve been going over it in your head ever since. Over and over and…”
“I want us to stop. That’s all. Just stop.”
“It’s your call. I’m only a symptom, remember? If you want to stop thinking, then just stop thinking.”
Unable to stop thinking, he continued eastward, ever eastward.
For hours he drove, while they talked about every small and nasty thing he had done as a child, and then as an adolescent, and then as an alcoholic failure of a surgeon and a husband. Every time Hank managed to change the subject, Evelyn brought up something even more painful, until his face was wet with tears. He dug around in his pockets for a handkerchief. “You could show a little compassion, you know.”
“Oh, the way you’ve shown me compassion? I offered to let you keep the car if you’d just give me back the photo albums. So you took the albums into the back yard and burned them all, including the only photos of my grandmother I had. Remember that? But of course I’m not real, am I? I’m just your image of Evelyn—and we both know you’re not willing to concede her the least spark of human decency. Watch out for that gully! You’d better keep your eyes straight ahead.”
They were on a dirt road somewhere deep in the desert now. That was as much as he knew. The car bucked and scraped its underside against the sand, and he downshifted again. A rock rattled down the underside, probably tearing holes in vital places.
Then Hank noticed plumes of dust in the distance, smaller versions of the one billowing up behind him. So there were other vehicles out there. Now that he knew to look for them, he saw more. There were long slanted pillars of dust rising up in the middle distance and tiny gray nubs down near the horizon. Dozens of them, scores, maybe hundreds.
“What’s that noise?” he heard himself asking. “Helicopters?”
“Such a clever little boy you are!”
One by one flying machines lifted over the horizon. Some of them were news copters. The rest looked to be military. The little ones darted here and there, filming. The big ones circled slowly around a distant glint of metal in the desert. They looked a lot like grasshoppers. They seemed afraid to get too close.
“See there?” Evelyn said. “That would be the lifter.”
“Oh.” Hank said.
Then, slowly, he ventured, “The lander going down wasn’t an accident, was it?”