On the Fifth Day (2 page)

He had swum a few yards before the initial panic subsided. He could see nothing in the water around him, no sign of any

thing moving, no sign that there ever had been. He breathed, stilled himself, and laughed once into the blackness overhead. His imagination--always overactive, as his superiors were fond of pointing out--was playing tricks on him. He swung around and took two gentle strokes toward the beach, wonder

ing vaguely how far out of his depth he was. He pointed his toes, held his breath, closed his eyes, and thrust himself down as far as he could go, his arms up over his head. He hit something solid about two feet below him, but it wasn't rock, and it wasn't sand. It shifted when he made con

tact, but only slightly. It was big and hard and almost sus

pended motionless beneath him in the deep black water.
Shark?

No. Sharks swim. They move constantly. They have to or 3

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

they drown. This . . . whatever it was, was just hanging there in the water, as if it were chained to the bottom. All his panic returned and he shot up from the water gasp

ing for air as if he had been under for minutes. As soon as he broke the surface he started to swim, harder than ever, turning for the beach and the village beyond.

He struck out as far as he could reach, pushing the water with his hands and pulling back so hard that he lifted chest and shoulders out of the water with each surging stroke. Maybe he should have made for the rocks. The beach was farther and there would be no hurried dragging himself up onto land: This way he would have to swim the whole way, then stagger with agonizing slowness through yards of waistdeep water . . . So he swam, knowing he was already losing energy, that he couldn't possibly sustain this sprint for the shore, that if something was swimming there with him it would be faster than he could ever be. But as each second went by without teeth tearing at him from underneath, he took another breath and kicked forward once more.

The moon lit the beach a soft blue-white, distant and sur

real now that the idyllic tropical scene had shifted into this cu

riously nightmarish register. It seemed impossibly far away, but whatever he had touched did not lunge, did not bite, did not appear to follow, and he kept going, flailing blindly now, all grace gone from his stroke. He had left his composure out there in the open water, and now there was only panic and the desperate will to live . . .

It felt like minutes but it could have been only seconds be

fore his foot hit the sandy bottom. He tried to run, but the wa

ter was chest deep, and with something like despair he returned to swimming, almost crying out with the frustration of it all. Then his knee touched the seafloor and he straightened up, leaping forward with great lumbering strides, each time ex

pecting something snapping at his heels. Then sand, the night air on his body, and he was out, staggering drunkenly up the 4

A. J. Hartley

pale beach, laughing at his escape, finally permitting the idea that there was really nothing out there at all, that he had imag

ined the whole thing. His brain teemed with possibilities: a fallen palm tree, the sunken hull of a small boat, a crippled marker buoy . . .

It was only then that he turned. He wasn't sure why but he didn't like the sense of the sea at his back. It was quickly clear why.

For a second he just stared, unable to believe what he was seeing, and then, with a dull dread mixed with a strange exhil

aration, he began to run toward the distant thatch of the village. He had been right. All the time. He had been right. He was shouting now, fear and excitement merged as he ran from the beach, calling to the firefly lights of the village. Now he would be able to tell them. All of them. Now they would see and the world would change.

He was thinking this, still running in his rapturous terror, as he reached the first bamboo hut, and it was still there in his head as that hut, and every other hut in the village was sud

denly sucked upward in a great white flash that lifted him and every sleeping soul high into the air and then scattered them with an unspeakable violence. The sound came a half second later, a vast cannon shot that shook the very air, turning into a low dragging roar.

When it finally subsided, when the waves lapping at the shore ceased to boil, when silence once more descended on the blackened beach and the once fertile land above it, the vil

lage and everyone in it had ceased to exist.

MY BROTHER'S

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,

Lord, hear my voice.

O let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleading. If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt,

Lord, who would survive? . . .

Because with the Lord there is mercy and fullness of re

demption.

--Psalm 130:1-4,

The Liturgy of the Hours
, Psalter (Grail) version (London: Collins, 1963).

CHAPTER 1

Thomas Knight had his desk cleared out in five minutes. He had never kept much that was personal there anyway. He sep

arated out his own books--a complete Shakespeare, an overly selective sampling of the Romantics, some Austen, Dickens, and the Stephen King and J. K. Rowling with which he lured the kids to reading--and tossed them in a sagging cardboard box which wouldn't close.

At least there was no one he had to break the news to,
he thought.
Not now.

For the same reason that there's now no job?

Not entirely,
he answered himself.
That was a totally differ

ent set of screwups.

Thomas grinned bleakly, got his arms under the box, and walked the interminable length of corridor that took him past the gym and the faculty lounge, eventually dumping him out in the parking lot and unemployment. He said his farewells to Frank Samuels, the impossibly ancient janitor who was smok

ing by the Dumpster, laughing loudly and shaking Samuels's hand with a tad too much vigor in case anyone was watching. Then he walked to his car through the snow, whistling tune

lessly as if it were just another day, as if he hadn't a care in the world--both of which were true, he reminded himself, if not helpfully so. At least the media had gone.

On the way home he picked up a liter of cheap scotch in a plastic bottle at Toni's on Old Orchard and wished the clerk good night.

"Same to you, Mr. Knight," said the clerk, simulating the manner of someone who hadn't seen him for weeks, and might go longer before seeing him again.

Thomas picked up a pizza for dinner at Carmen's and drove home through the deepening twilight of Evanston's heavily wooded streets, his outrage sliding further into a familiar sense 8

A. J. Hartley

of stupidity and failure. He went running to get it all out of his head.

He ran badly--even when he had been in the best shape of his life--and he hated every step, lumbering along the treach

erous sidewalks like a sloth on skates. Running bored him and always had, though he usually got the payoff of feeling vaguely virtuous. This time he couldn't shake the day, the memory of which lumbered after him like a lost wolfhound. His firing had been coming for a long time. Peter, the high school principal (Thomas thought of him as a cartoon squir

rel: Peter the Principal) had given him chance after chance, and he had blown each one like a man carefully dynamiting bridges behind him. Maybe Peter wasn't the only cartoon character in the scenario.

He wheezed his way home; showered; ate the pizza, which was by far the best part of the last twelve hours; and started on the whiskey. By eight o'clock he had drunk almost a quarter of it, a dangerous amount. He drank from good crystal, two rocks per glass, and he sipped rather than throwing it back, but did so steadily, with barely a pause between mouthfuls or, for that matter, between glasses. The glass had been part of a wedding present, he thought, considering it, like some appraiser on
An

tiques Roadshow
speculating about some lost era. At ten o'clock he stumbled into the bathroom, collected every pill he could find, and dumped them all into another whisky tumbler, which he set on the coffee table beside his leather armchair. The mundane--white and brown and red and yellow--were mixed with the exotic--translucent, iridescent caplets of neon blue and green. They were mainly ibuprofen and aspirin, but some were of more obscure purpose which he had long forgotten. Cold medicine? Laxatives?

"Oh, this is going to be fun," he said aloud. For several minutes he just sat there and looked at the glass, musing: no wrestling with eternal verities, no despair, no angst-ridden consideration of what yet might be. The deci

sion, he thought, would be driven by a whim, like choosing which coat to wear in uncertain weather.

9

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

That's not really good enough, is it? And besides, it's
bound to look like a response to losing your job. Worse, it will
look like a "gesture."

"God," he said, "not that. Anything but that."

He picked up the glass of pills and rattled it, putting it down slowly but with conviction. No cheap melodrama for him, not tonight anyway, even if he had no conceivable reason to get up in the morning.

At that he began to laugh quietly to himself. Then he set his teeth, splashed water on his face at the kitchen sink, and tipped the pills into the garbage disposal. Only after the ma

chine's deafening crunch had turned into the familiar whine that said the contents had been ground to nothing and flushed away did he think that he would probably want some of them in the morning.

He stayed in the house all the next day reading distractedly from
Paradise Lost
because he found the rhythm of the lines familiar, even comforting. He had no time for Milton's God these days--or anyone else's for that matter--but rereading the poem took him back to his high school years, removed the sense of accumulated failure. The following day he watched a pair of bad movies on TV and went out to a steakhouse, re

turning home to drink because it was cheaper and less humili

ating than sitting alone in a bar. And he ran, of course, punishing his body for the inadequacies of what Peter the Principal called his "character."

He was thirty-seven, though he felt older, a large, rangy man with untidy limbs and a ponderous way of moving. His ex-wife had called him by every animal name she could think of, sometimes affectionately, particularly those clumsy, un

dramatic zoo beasts that most people skipped to get to the big cats: bulls and camels, water buffalos and rhinos.
And mules,
he thought.
Don't forget mules.
Because it wasn't just about his body and how he used it. It was also his temperament. There was nothing mulish about his 10

A. J. Hartley

mind. Kumi had been fond of saying he was too clever for his own good, in fact. But he had a stubborn streak, a dull-edged defiance that could turn belligerent if sufficiently goaded, and, if he was going to be really honest about it, a distinctly mulish insensitivity where other people's priorities were concerned. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he had lived by himself for the last six years, long enough to be almost used to it. In that six years he had woken up alone every single morning so that it had come to feel quite normal, and not because he had never had the opportunity to take someone to bed with him. All drunken melodrama aside, he told himself, he was comfort

able alone.

Which is handy, because no one can put up with you for
long . . .

Another of those bleak, self-deprecating smiles that were becoming his habitual expression.

The house was dark and cold and it occurred to him that he should start economizing as far as heating the place was con

cerned, so he stacked a couple of logs on the fire and poured himself another shot of the Cluny, which he warmed in his hands till the vapors made his nostrils tingle. His mind was still replaying the interview with which his career had ended.

"When you first came here," the principal had said, "we thought we'd hit the jackpot. The kids loved you. The parents loved you. The school board, hell, even the media loved you. Your students were acing tests and winning scholarships and starting their own reading and writing clubs.
Their own clubs!

It was amazing. You were always opinionated, but you were also principled, hardworking, and--frankly--the best teacher I'd ever seen."

Thomas nodded, smiling softly, remembering as if it had all happened to someone else. Of course, that was not how the conversation had concluded.

"But five years or so ago," Peter had continued, "it all started falling apart. All of it. Now . . . I don't know. It's not your damned causes or your bluster, Thomas. You complain 11

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

about all these . . . these
issues,
but at bottom I'm not con

vinced you really care about any of them."

Thomas sat there as he had sat in front of the principal, still no nearer an answer. In the end he had said, "I don't know how to fix it. It's who I am, I guess. It's what I do."

To which Peter had replied with a finality that was the day's only real surprise:

"Not anymore, Thomas. Not here."

And so it had ended.

When the phone rang Thomas was barely conscious and his first response was to ignore it.

Probably Peter, calling to explain the pressure he was un

der, hoping that Thomas wouldn't hold it against him. Peter the Principal was not, after all, a bad guy.

No sir. Peter's an upstanding citizen, a prince among men.
Thomas moved to the phone slowly and stood for a second looking at it, thinking of nothing, feeling only a blankness and a dull exhaustion. He picked it up to stop its ringing and, he supposed, to bring about some kind of closure. If he left it to the machine he'd have to listen to Peter's earnest apologies here in the dark and then again when he inevitably called back and Thomas could dodge him no longer.