“They’re different,” said the captain. “Ares was destructive and destabilizing, whereas Mars saw war as a pathway to peace.”
“Awesome!” crowed Danny. “Just what I was looking for!”
Sometimes he wanted to zero in and sometimes he wanted to telescope out, and the word “Mars” allowed him to do both. It was a vast red planet with impact craters and frozen polar caps, but it was only visible from earth as a pinprick of light. Not only was the entire solar system swept up in those four little letters, but also the color red, which was the color of anger, the color of passion, the color of blood and lust and love. The word was tailor-made for his purposes, and finding out about the opposing war connotations had given him a sense of order and control he had never experienced before. He thought how time was like a funnel for events, where everything in the past made the present seem ordained: the World Trade Towers had led to the war, which had led Danny to his unit and the IED and the warehouse and the epic, and finally to just the word he wanted—“Mars.” It might be an illusion, but it all felt inevitable and fated. And then he wondered if inevitability was the same as determinism, which didn’t allow for choice. Choice seemed just as real as inevitability did, but they couldn’t both be true.
“Do you believe in free will?” he asked, but no one heard him, and even if they had, free will wasn’t something Kelly or Le Roy thought about. The three of them were as close as human beings could be, but the truth was, the only thing they had in common was the war.
The epic had to work on several levels at once, with particular words, like “Mars” and “red,” acting as bridges between worlds that existed simultaneously, that could be sensed but not inhabited by a single person all at once. How did a linear and specific string of words portray both vastness and minuteness, simplicity and complexity, possibility and finality, choice and inevitability, self and other? How did he indicate that horror and beauty coexisted — in the same moment, in the same heart?
The Mars thread was finally working, and he had devised a system of footnotes to indicate that not only were there layers to the epic, but there were layers upon layers. He just needed to find a synonym for “help”—or did he?
War, war, what’s it for
Help the rich and draft the poor.
Whether he needed it or not, the perfect word was out there, and he was going to find it. It was in the air. Could be it was already in his head — he could feel it hovering, somewhere between his ear and his eye. He knew it was there, but he couldn’t quite catch it, and now for some reason Le Roy was trying to get Kelly’s attention by making faces and jumping up and down. Kelly was standing in a corner with his headphones on and his back to Le Roy, working on what he was going to say at the meeting. Kelly didn’t want to be distracted, and Danny didn’t want to be distracted either. He wanted to hold on to the sense that things were falling into place. He arranged the pens and pencils on his desk and squared the edges of his manuscript. Then he set the blue mechanical pencil he had been using down in the very center of the top page. Vertical or horizontal? He left it where it was. What was it? What was going on? Why was Le Roy opening and closing his mouth like a fish? Was it because the website was about to be sold and he didn’t do well with change? Why did he look like he was going to fly out of his chair and grab Joe Kelly by the neck?
“Chill, man,” said Kelly, heading to the printer. “The buyers will be here in ten. We need to be collecting our thoughts and I need to copy these spreadsheets, so don’t bug me now. I’ll talk to you later, K?”
But Le Roy wasn’t making any noise. His neck bulged above his collar and he seemed to be choking. Danny thought he was having a heart attack or some sort of seizure. Then he thought that a train must be coming through, but if the clock was right, it wasn’t due for another five and a half minutes — and anyway, Le Roy wasn’t bothered by the train.
Then he heard breaking glass and boots on the porch, and when he turned, kind of in slow motion, he saw men swarming into the room and weapons being drawn and sited. Black bulletproof vests, legs squared and braced, helmeted heads held low like battering rams, barrels burnished and menacing.
“Everybody on the floor! Everybody on the fucking floor!”
Mars had been the perfect choice. When the captain had told him that Mars was complex and peace loving, whereas Ares was pure aggression, Danny knew it was just the sort of gossamer filament that would float over his epic, that would weave through it, inform it, give it shadow and lightness and depth. A crimson thread running right through the black-and-white words and tying them together.
Kelly had taken off his headphones and Le Roy had shut his mouth and dropped to the floor, but Danny looked instinctively for the captain before he remembered that the captain had gone back to Iraq. It was just the three of them now, unless he counted E’Laine, who had come to visit them a few times — but she wasn’t there now so he guessed he shouldn’t count her. He wished Le Roy would pay more attention to her, but E’Laine thought she was making progress in that regard, and who was he to disillusion her? He didn’t know if things would work out with Dolly — she deserved better, but he was beginning to think they had a fighting chance.
“You, you! Face down! I’m giving you ten seconds! Nine seconds! Eight!”
The meeting with the buyer was coming up. He’d changed his mind and now he thought they should sell. They’d have money. They could do anything they wanted — or almost anything. Anything but go back in time to what Danny thought of as before. The three of them — five if you counted E’Laine and Dolly — could get a fresh start somewhere else or stay where they were and start a new venture, or Danny could finish college, which was an old dream of his, one he had lost hold of but might be able to reel back in once the sale of the website went through. The captain had bought the building and put it in their names, so they could stay there by the railroad tracks as long as they wanted or they could sell the building and move on — alone or separately. Everything was up to them. “The sky’s the limit,” Sinclair had said.
12.6 Lyle
Lyle’s hands gripped the steering wheel as he sped through town. The clock on the dashboard ticked like a quiet bomb. His nerves tingled, and something flared in his guts as if he were the one with the threadbare tires and an internal combustion engine fueled by petrochemicals and a series of tiny explosions. He powered around the corner and past the muffler shop, gathering speed down the hill and past the bus station before skidding into the parking enclosure and wheeling around a row of cars so the truck was facing out again before ramming the gearshift into park. But he didn’t kill the engine. Instead, he let the car idle, and while the truck chugged unevenly and the minute hand on the dashboard notched forward, Lyle felt the thing inside him continue to get bigger, as if a fuse had been lighted, as if a combustible pocket of gas had started to expand.
He was sure Maggie was coming. He blasted out another mental warning, but he guessed that all those days of wishing Maggie home had set things in motion, and it was too late to stop the dominoes from falling. He sensed the police presence. They could be hiding inside the cramped waiting room with its wooden benches and ticket window or in the alley behind the boxy brick station house. The sun was ricocheting off the cars lined up along the chain-link fence, and even the unwaxed surfaces of Lyle’s truck emitted a dull, unnatural sheen.
By the clock on the dashboard, it was two minutes before noon when Lyle saw Maggie coasting around the corner onto Hill Street and pausing at the top of the hill. His heart almost broke. No, Maggie, no! He had expected her to come by bus, and he had planned to drive by and scoop her out of the disembarking crowd of passengers even though that would only initiate a high-speed chase if the station was as filled with police officers as he thought it was. He imagined them arrayed in their surplus military gear, crouched behind the plate-glass window or creeping along the sides of the building, waiting for the bus to arrive. But she wasn’t on a bus, and that gave him an advantage.