Slumped as I was, bent over and twisted round, all I could see was a new sun of light, bursting out of the mountains like the dawn.
Houma, Louisiana
This is a small motel, and has no room service. I have a small room, out on the end of an arm of equally small rooms stretching out from a dusty office, which is small. The television is old and shit. There is water in the swimming pool, but no one is swimming in it. Least of all me.
Tomorrow morning, early, I will move on. I can remember the name of the town where Bobby's mother lives, and have vague memories of him describing the street where he grew up. I think I might be able to find it. I would like to be able to tell her about her son. What he was like, how good a man he was, and how he died. Perhaps I will even find the graveyard where his father lies buried, and tell him, too. It's the only memorial my friend will ever have.
Ten days ago I sat in a car in Santa Monica and watched as John and Nina walked a girl up to a front door. Sarah was holding one of each of their hands: Nina's left, as her right was in a sling. Sarah was still very pale and weak, but looked a lot better than she had when we got her and Nina to the hospital in Utah. The medic on duty wanted to call the cops. From what he could tell, Sarah had been fed nothing but water laced with lead and a variety of other chemicals, some of them biological agents of a type associated with gene therapy. What was supposed to have been achieved by this, apart from acute poisoning, he wasn't prepared to even speculate. John knew, however, just as he now understood that
— had they read the evidence properly — the bodies of The Upright Man's other victims showed similar attempts to create someone like himself through head trauma and sexual violence.
Nina used her badge, preventing the scene from going nationwide. The doctors checked Sarah and Nina in for a week, but the next morning John and I came and stole them both away. Yes, they still needed treatment. But staying in one place was too much of a risk. Zandt called Michael Becker to let them know he was coming, and then we got in the car and drove.
We headed straight down through Utah, Nevada, and California and then across LA to Santa Monica, Zandt and I taking turns. Though she slept most of the way, I got to know Sarah a little. She was kind, and said I was very different, which helped. In time I believe she'll be okay, and I'll personally lay a bet that next time she's a lady who dines out (probably round about the year 2045, if her father has anything to do with it), she'll be having not a Cobb salad but a burger just the way she wants it.
When they'd reached the step of the Beckers' house, Nina let go of Sarah's hand and rang the doorbell. They looked like a painting for a moment, and then the door opened and there was a flurry of love that I had to look away from. I stared straight out of the windshield for a while, remembering the girl's last words to me.
When I looked back Nina was walking toward the car, her head down. Zandt was still with the Beckers. Sarah finally let go of him and went to her parents. Michael Becker shook Zandt's hand and something passed between them, though I don't know what.
John stepped back and let the family go back inside. He stood there for a little while, even after the door was closed. And then he walked back up the path and got in the car and we drove away. He is down in Florida at the moment, visiting his ex-wife.
When I saw his reaction to the sweater, I wished I had picked up one of the bones instead. I wasn't thinking clearly — it was an unconscious reaction, a realization that he might want something brought back out of the mountains. I guess a bone would have been better, something that had once genuinely been a part of her. But I think the sweater will give them closure enough. We arranged that we will meet again in a while. We have each other's cell numbers. He appears not to hold against me the fact that I was unable to use my gun in The Halls.
But any such reunion should wait for a while, I think. I hope his priority is meeting back up with Nina, after she has cleared her stuff out of LA. Seeing the two of them standing together on that doorstep, I saw something that I hope they come to understand. They're already together.
For long periods while I'm driving I find myself staring straight ahead. Not seeing what's beyond the glass, just allowing rushing images to run through my head like a strip of film. Sometimes I think about The Straw Men, trying to work out what's true and what's not. I want to believe that what underlies all of this is something more intangible than The Human Manifesto: that the ideas within it are merely a psychotic's way of explaining away the divisions that we seem addicted to. But then it occurs to me that the book many claim as the first novel, Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Years, was written in the aftermath of a disease that swept the whole of Europe, and could have been blamed on the way we live together, cheek by jowl; and that our major forms of entertainment, film and television, both burst into true flower immediately after world wars. I begin to wonder if fictional landscapes and aspirational schemes became important as soon as we started to live together in towns and cities, and if this explains the birth of organized religions at about the same time. The more crowded our way of living, the more interdependent we are, the more important our dreams have become — almost as if all of this is there to bond us together, to help us aspire to something missing, and so to edge us toward a humanity that is more than being merely human. Now the Internet is spanning the globe, knitting everyone tighter still, and I wonder if it can be a coincidence that it does so just as we have listed our genetic code, and are starting to tinker with it. The closer we're brought together, the more we seem to need to understand what we are. I do hope we know what we're doing with our genes, and that when we start to take out the parts that seem like faults, like imperfections, we're not removing the things that make us viable. I hope it is our future, and not our past, that makes the decisions. And I hope that now, when I realize something is missing in my life, I will continue to search for it; even if I know that it may only be a promise, and not really there to be found at all. Otherwise we become men of straw, women of shadow, left standing in empty fields where not even the birds come; waiting for an endless summer, when winter is already here. Given how we live, so far from what was once true, it's bewildering that we cope as well as we do. We dream our dreams to keep us sane, and also to keep us alive. As my father once said, it's not a case of winning, but of believing that there's something there to be won.
Often I think about him, and my mother, two people who are not here any more. Their deaths, like any deaths, are not something that can be made better. You cannot catch death and teach it a lesson, just as you cannot catch unhappiness, or disappointment, and as we have not caught The Upright Man or the group he has come to lead. Perhaps we will someday, perhaps not. Maybe someone like them will always be there. It's impossible to tell right now, just as at the moment I do not know whether the timed destruction of The Halls was merely a wholly successful attempt to destroy all its evidence, or whether the explosion was supposed to trigger the vast pool of molten rock that is gathering force beneath Yellowstone — and so annihilate our culture, and the farms of the Western world, returning us to the way of life that The Straw Men so revere. Returning us, or taking us onwards, into the ruins.
Nina thinks so, from something she heard Davids say: she believes that The Straw Men have convinced themselves that they are the better hunter-gatherers, that their wealth has come from some inner 'purity', rather than fate, that they will prevail in any conditions. I don't know. It's not something I can discuss with anyone now.