Chuck went up the porch steps, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and took the plate with the piece of meat loaf that the woman held out to him.
“You shouldn't have,” said Chuck in an unconvincing tone, growing more and more alarmed by the presence on his porch. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Mr. Kopinski waving from one of the windows of the house across the street. “But I do appreciate it, of course.”
There was a moment of tense silence, much more tense if one stopped to think what might be going on. Chuck cleared his throat and opened the screen door.
“Well, I guess it's getting late,” he said.
Mrs. Kopinski didn't move. Chuck tried to decide what he could do. He didn't have any weapons on him because he knew that They had ways of knowing such things. And as if that weren't enough, the way that smiling old woman was looking at him now gave him the impression that she knew perfectly everything that was going through his head.
“Would you like to come in and have a cup of tea?” he said, aware that his tone was sounding desperate. He had the vague sensation of being watched from behind every curtain on the street.
Mrs. Kopinski responded to the invitation by widening her smile even further.
The lights inside the house were turned off, which didn't keep the old woman from stopping for a moment in front of the door to the living room to take a good look around in the half-light before entering the kitchen. Chuck felt himself becoming gripped by fear. He knew very well what the woman was looking at. Almost all the living room furniture had been taken down to the basement to leave room for the enormous table where he had been putting together his models of famous buildings. A whole week's work of hiding his thoughts. Something started to change in Mrs. Kopinski's expression. Her features seemed to harden. Was it possible that some of Them had already sounded the alarm after discovering that the models had been stolen from the store? Chuck remembered what the women in the basement had told him about keeping his mind blank when They were nearby. As he filled the kettle and put it on the stove, he went through the multiplication tables in his mind.
The kettle seemed to take forever to start whistling. Chuck was already finishing the nine times table and was about to start again when he noticed Mrs. Kopinski's reflection in the kitchen window. She was standing in front of the garbage can, with that blank expression again. What was she looking at? Chuck turned around. And then he saw it. Mrs. Kopinski was looking at the empty model boxes piled up in the kitchen garbage. And then he understood. It was too late to continue pretending. They had found him out.
Without letting the conscious idea of what he was about to do stay in his mind, Chuck smacked Mrs. Kopinski in the head with the kettle. The woman staggered. He hit her one, two more times, until the woman backed up a couple of tottering steps and finally collapsed on the counter, her face full with blood and some kind of horrible dent in her forehead.
An intense pain in his temples left him instantly stunned. They had been watching. They had been listening. The collective mind was tuned in at that precise moment to the kitchen in Chuck's house. And he could feel it in his head. Like a furious scream.
There was no time to lose. He left the house running and entered the shed through the still open window. Through the corner of his eye he could see people coming out of their houses. He got into the minivan and turned the ignition key. He stepped hard on the accelerator and charged at the large wooden door, which broke open with a tremendous crunch. The minivan made it to the street in the midst of a rain of splintered wood.
As he drove down the street, he had time to see something. Something that was flying over the rooftops of the neighborhood. Something too low and too slow to be a light aircraft. He stepped hard on the accelerator, pushing it all the way to the floor, and turned down Main toward the outskirts of town.
PART II. “And the Sun Turned as Black as Sackcloth”
CHAPTER 16. A Step Too Far
Pavel looks at himself in the mirror — which is too low and too small — above the sink in his jail cell, which was designed for four prisoners and is currently occupied by eight. He's definitely satisfied with the texture of his dreadlocks, but not with the length. His dreadlocks are now as long as Bob Marley's were in 1973, when he recorded “I Shot the Sheriff” and appeared smoking a gigantic spliff on the cover of Catch a Fire. Which is to say, dreads that still defy gravity and extend lionlike in all directions, so that someone seeing him from afar could come away with the impression that his dreads were actually an Afro. The kind of dreads that Pavel wants are the ones that cascade down his back and can only be partially contained by a wool hat, like the dreads Bob Marley began sporting toward the end of the seventies, in the Exodus period. Pavel is infuriated by how slowly dreadlocks grow. He has a very precise idea of the personal image he wants to have, within the Rastafarian aesthetic, and he doesn't want his stupid scalp ruining that image.
“This mirror is for midgets,” he says in Russian, screwing up his face and looking at it in the mirror. “And for pinheads. And it's broken.”
Besides Pavel, the cell holds six Ecuadorians with bandannas on their heads and a guy from Minsk who's locked up for lighting a restaurant owner's bathroom on fire, with the restaurant owner inside. The way to fit eight prisoners into a cell originally designed for four reflects an ingenious institutional strategy that consists of placing foldout beds in every nonessential area of the cell. The guy from Minsk sticks his head out from his bunk, where he's reading a pornographic novel in Russian from the collection of Russian pornographic novels that circulate in the prison library, and takes a quick look at Pavel.
“I'm not surprised they left you here to rot,” the guy from Minsk says to Pavel. With his Belarusian accent that always makes Pavel think of farmers with sun-toasted faces. “You're the biggest pain in the ass I've ever seen in my life. This is fucking jail, not a five-star hotel. I wish I was like those guys and didn't understand Russian.” He points with his pornographic novel to the group of Ecuadorians with bandannas on their heads, who are seated at a folding table on the other side of the cell and betting rolled-up bills on cards. “It's obvious you've never been in a Russian jail. I'm going to ask them to put me in solitary.”
Pavel looks in the mirror at the rest of his appearance, his Wailers T-shirt and his black sweatpants, and deems them satisfactory. What would please Pavel most right now would be to give the guy from Minsk two smacks. It's difficult for Pavel to reconcile the teachings of Rastafarian philosophy with people like the guy from Minsk. He knows that a real Rastafari lives for the people and with the people in universal love. He knows that Rastafari have to work biblically, universally and spiritually for the redemption of humankind. And yet, every time he meets up with some representative of humankind, all the universal concepts fall apart. Someone knocks on the door of the cell from outside and the main elements inside rearrange themselves as fast as possible. The Ecuadorians with the bandannas hide their rolled-up bills and their cards in several types of pockets, drawers and hiding places around the cell. The guy from Minsk sticks his Russian pornographic novel under the mattress of his bunk and puts his hands behind his head in the universal body language representing the act of “resting” from all activity. Pavel turns and watches as the door opens.
There are two guards at the door. The one who's just opened the door looks first toward the group of Ecuadorians with bandannas. Now that there are no cards or rolled-up bills in sight, the Ecuadorians are just seated at the table with their hands on top of it. Or standing with their hands in their pockets. Not looking anywhere in particular. Showing profuse signs of inactivity with their body language. The way the Ecuadorians are spread out around the cell gives the impression that they are posing for one of those group photographs of Hollywood celebrities. Or one of those group photos of pop bands. The guard looks the other way, toward the Russian-speaking side of the cell.