“Arms race,” Pax said, suddenly getting it. Or maybe he wasn’t understanding it on his own, he was … syncing up. Andrew’s thoughts seemed to be spilling into his own. “Argos versus chubs versus blanks.”
“Yes!” Andrew said. “And them versus us.” He hopped up, excited now. “Think about how weird it is that three distinct species came out of the Changes. It’s almost as if … Okay, say that the argos discovered the trick first. Maybe they even did it by accident. But anyway, they replicate into the universe of the betas. Then the betas figure it out—they engineer the virus to work for them. Now argos and betas are together in one universe, and together they invade the universe of the charlies. And so on and so on, across the universes, until they get to us. We’re at the front wave of a three-part war.”
“Wow,” Pax said.
“Yeah, wow.”
“So this is what your Homeland Security guy thinks? We’re at war?”
“He’s not in Homeland Security,” Weygand said. “He’s only nineteen. He writes about them.”
“Oh. Sure.”
For some reason they both laughed. Weygand sat down next to him. “This is the crappiest couch in the world,” he said.
“I should throw it out,” Pax said. Weygand’s arm was a few inches from his own, radiating heat.
A minute passed, maybe two.
Weygand said, “So, Paxton. What are you thinking right now?”
“I … I don’t know.”
Weygand laughed kindly. “Fair enough.” He leaned forward, knees on elbows. Pax regarded the architectural curve of his back, the frets of his spine. “I’ve been down this road before. Listen, why don’t you sober up and we’ll talk some more.”
Pax lifted his hand, then set it down between Weygand’s shoulder blades. Pax felt both his hand against his skin and the heat against his back; touched and toucher at the same time.
After a moment Weygand shook his head, laughing to himself. Or maybe laughing at himself. Then he started to get up, and as he rose Paxton’s palm slid down his back, each knuckle of his spine delivering a gentle tap. And then the contact was broken.
“I’ve got to get downtown,” Weygand said. “Maybe by the time I get back the twins will have shown up.”
Pax nodded.
“And get something to eat, okay, Pax?”
The twins didn’t come all that day, or the next.
They’d stayed away before, sometimes for days at a time, but this was the first time Paxton had waited for them, worried for them. The atmosphere in town had grown tense over the weekend. Friday afternoon a dozen beta women had driven to the Lambert Super Wal-Mart for their weekly Co-op shopping trip and walked into a line of pro-quarantine protesters. No one was hurt, but there’d been pushing and shoving; the betas had been forced to leave without their groceries. The store manager said that he’d arranged for the food to be delivered to the Co-op, but he’d made it clear to the reporters that he preferred that the Switchcreek people stayed at home until the protests died down.
Aunt Rhonda kept appearing on his TV screen, pushing for support of her new relief fund: Helping Hands to Babahoyo. She’d announced an 800 number; a software company in Memphis had already put up a supporting website. Three times Pax had seen her give what Weygand started calling the Azzamurkin speech: “As Americans, we’ve always been the first to reach out to those struck down by tragedy. As Americans, we must share the hard-won knowledge we’ve gained about TDS. As Americans …” The flag pin on her lapel and the green ribbon—for the victims in Ecuador, she said—had become permanent accessories.
Weygand said, “You see what she’s doing?” Pax thought, Running for office? But Weygand didn’t wait for an answer. “At the same time that she says she’s supporting the Ecuadorians, she’s saying, They aren’t us. We are Americans, we are Christians. They’re just brown people who live far away and happen to have the same disease. She might as well be raising money for earthquake victims.”
“I bet they’d rather have had an earthquake,” Pax said. The death toll had stalled at 6,500, but only because the Ecuadorian government had clamped down on reporters. Babahoyo had been quarantined “for their protection and ours.” Rhonda announced that one of the first tasks of her charity would be to send volunteers to the city—and some of those volunteers would be Switchcreek citizens, led by the mayor herself.
“I’ll say this,” Weygand said. “She moves fast.”
Nothing sexual had happened with Weygand; they never even touched each other after that moment Thursday afternoon. By the time Weygand came home from Rhonda’s press conference Paxton was asleep on the couch, and when he awoke Weygand was in the kitchen burning soy burgers and the attraction Pax had felt had vanished. For perhaps an hour he’d been someone Pax desired, someone he understood—and then he wasn’t.
The next day Weygand helped Pax work on the yard. Pax kept trying to apologize and Weygand repeatedly told him not to worry about it. Pax wanted to explain that he wasn’t like one of those gay-for-a-day frat-party lesbians—he’d slept with a couple of men. A few women too. And it wasn’t the vintage that made him suddenly want Weygand—or not just the vintage. He’d been this way since leaving Switchcreek. Most of the time he wasn’t attracted to anyone at all, and then he was—for a few hours. His desire for whatever body ended up next to him never seemed to last longer than it took him to put on his pants.
Women thought he was gay. Men thought he was straight but playing tourist. And Pax thought he was … waiting. The last time he’d felt anything real—the last time he felt real—was with Jo and Deke. The three of them had been perfect together, a completed circuit. Everything since had been pantomime.
On Sunday afternoon Weygand told him that he was driving back home in the morning—friends in Amnesty International were organizing a group to drive into Ecuador from Colombia and record what was happening inside the city. Pax thought he was crazy; he could end up in a South American jail. Weygand shrugged it off. “What about this laptop thing? Are we going to do this or not?”
Paxton had no phone number for the twins, and he didn’t even know where they lived inside the sprawl of trailers at the Co-op. Nothing to do for it but go over there and ask. “How about you drive?” Pax said.
The gates to the Co-op—the Whitmer farm’s old iron cattle gates—were closed. Two teenage girls in white scarves, perhaps a few years older than Rainy and Sandra, sat on the other side in lawn chairs.
“Everybody’s getting paranoid in this town,” Pax said to Weygand, and got out of the car.
The girls looked at him but didn’t get up. A small black music player rested on one of their laps, and they were sharing a single red headphone cord, one earbud apiece.
“Hi, girls,” he said. “I’m looking for Sandra and Lorraine—the Whitehall twins?” Stupid: of course they had to know who Sandra and Rainy were.
“Nobody told us you were coming,” one of them said.
“I didn’t know I needed reservations.” He smiled. They watched him with small tight mouths. “So. Can I come in?”
The girls looked at each other. One of them pulled the bud from her ear and walked off toward the center of the compound. She could at least run, Pax thought. The remaining girl inserted the other earpiece and immediately lost interest in him.
Pax looked at Weygand through the windshield, shrugged.
He rested his forearms on the top of a gate and looked up at Mount Clyburn. It was the first week of October, but the afternoon sunlight was still summer-strong. It wouldn’t be long until the leaves began to turn, crowning the mountain, then seeping down in a months-long wave until the valley was drenched in color. He’d forgotten how long spring and fall were in Tennessee—in Chicago those seasons went by in a blink, just a couple weeks to toggle the thermometer between Too Damn Cold and Too Damn Hot. Why in the world had he stayed up there? When he turned eighteen he could have moved south, could have moved anywhere. For some reason he’d made the choice binary—Chicago or Switchcreek.