Now and Again (49 page)

Now that that was solved, Le Roy could get back to work on his simulation. He felt good about the arrangement, but he knew that encryption programs and even keys weren't the most important link in any security chain. People were.

W
hen the stapler misfired for the third time, Danny threw it across the room. “Who bought this piece of shit?” he wanted to know, but Kelly was printing out documents and Le Roy was deep inside his simulation. They had their headphones on, happy in their separate bubbles of isolation.

As Danny watched them, his irritation was replaced by an unfamiliar sense of belonging, and when he walked over to retrieve the stapler, he put a hand on Le Roy's shoulder and left it there for a moment before getting back to work on his epic. He had changed the beginning several times, trying to get it right. A possible title was “The Mars Hoax,” which referred to both the Roman god of war and to a widely believed but erroneous report about the planet that was based on a misread email. “Are Ares and Mars the same?” he had asked the captain a week or so before he left. “Or are there subtle differences between them that will color the meaning of whichever one I use?” The captain had studied classics as well as philosophy and seemed to have been placed right there across the room from Danny in order to answer his questions about the two ancient gods of war.

“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?

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.

L
yle'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.

He willed her to turn around, but she pushed off with her feet, and then she just kept coming, the angle of the hill and gravity causing the wheels of the bike to spin faster and faster until he thought for sure that she would crash. He couldn't give anything away just in case the police were surveilling the parking lot from the south-facing windows of the station. He couldn't show he had seen her by any movement of his body, so he just observed the scene woodenly, as if he were watching a news clip of a disaster that had already occurred.

And then the pocket of gas caught fire, and Lyle was filled with a great and liberating inspiration. As he revved the engine of the truck and aimed it at the sidewalk outside the bus station, he thought of the man pushing the Plunge-O-Sphere to the edge of Niagara Falls and getting in. He pictured the improbable orb spinning along in the current and then barreling over the edge as he aimed for the empty bench on the sidewalk, for the weedy shade tree, for the plate-glass window behind which he was sure the men in their bulletproof vests were waiting for Maggie and the bus.

But now a woman was easing her bulk onto the bench, looking expectantly down the road in the direction the bus would come from and shifting from side to side to settle her skirt around her knees. Lyle couldn't sound the horn or he would alert the police too early, before Maggie had a chance to see him. Before she had a chance to see that something was wrong. And before she could turn into the side street just uphill from the station house and pedal out of sight. Woman-in-a-skirt or no woman-in-a-skirt, there was no stopping what he had started. It was as if Lyle was running on gasoline or the truck was running on rage when he hunched into the wheel and shouted out the open window, “Get the hell out of my way!” At the last second, the woman saw him coming and jumped clear, and at 11:59 by the clock on the dash, Lyle rammed the truck right through the rickety bench, right through the skinny tree and into the metal awning supports, where it came to a stop only inches from the glass.

Out of the corner of his eye, Lyle saw Maggie's bicycle veer into the side street. The bicycle skidded and she almost fell, but then it was safely around the corner and Maggie was gone and the police were streaming out of the bus station, swarming like hornets, aiming their guns and shouting at Lyle to put his hands in the air. Lyle had to laugh to see the look on Ben's face when he said, “What the fuck, Lyle.” He had to laugh when the sheriff said, “Lyle Rayburn, you're under arrest.” He had to laugh to see the disappointment on the SWAT team's faces as they realized they weren't going to get a chance to fire their military-style weapons after all. And he had to laugh because it had never occurred to him that anger could feel so good.

M
aggie was glad to see the bicycle leaning against the shed. She had left her empty duffel in the house, but she kept her backpack with her as she mounted the bike and started pedaling. The crunch of the gravel beneath the tires brought to mind the free, almost floating feeling of heading off to Phoenix all those months ago. This was entirely different. With every revolution, the front tire rubbed against the fender, which was rusted and bent, and the brakes squealed whenever she slowed down. Even the wind generated by the bicycle was dusty and seemed to suck at her rather than blow. But the tires were new, and they bounced obligingly over any potholes or stones they encountered.

When she turned onto Main Street, she kept her head down in case there was traffic, but even though it was nearly lunchtime, everything was quiet. It was as if the town had shrunk in her absence, or she had somehow grown. She passed the town's lone office building, although now, from the looks of things, they were getting another, and the Main Street Diner had a freshly painted sign indicating it was now called the Main Street Café. She peered at the window as she went by, but the glass storefront only reflected her image back at her, and if any of the customers were watching her from the leatherette booths, she couldn't see them. She thought of eating dinner there with Lyle and Will and wondered if she was having a memory of the past or a happy premonition of the future.

An oil truck whizzed past, frightening her because she hadn't seen it coming. It was as if the film of her life had been spliced, leaving out the vehicle's approach and also its departure, for just as suddenly, it was gone. Even the air seemed jumpy, as if it were attached to her nerves and images were painted on it in thin colors rather than seen through it, or as if the town she had lived in for her entire life was only a mirage or an elaborately constructed set that could be changed at the whim of an unseen director, someone she envisioned smoking and laughing at her from a canvas chair with his name stenciled on the back or flirting with a winsome assistant rather than caring about what was taking place on stage.