Revolution Number 9 (22 page)

J.P. went back in the trailer, picked up the phone, dialed the number now firmly in his mind. The call was answered on the first ring.

“Hello?”

A woman. J.P. wasn’t prepared for that. He tried out various explanations while the woman said, “Hello?… Hello?”

She had a nice voice.

“Who is this?” she was saying. “Who is this?”

A nice voice, at least it sounded nice to him.
Nice, and maybe a little scared
, he thought, hanging up.
Scared of what?

Ol’ J.P. went to the mirror, had a gander at himself. Time to get cleaned up.

“H
ello?” Emily said one more time, but even as she did there was a click at the other end of the line. She put down the phone and got back to work.

Emily was sitting at her desk in the bedroom, overlooking Cosset Pond. On the computer screen columns of numbers attended her next move, like soldiers at inspection. She backed the hurricane ten degrees by typing “37H” on the keyboard and waited to see what it would do to her beach. The desktop computer waited too. The mainframe at MIT was doing all the work.

It wasn’t a quick job, not even for the Cray. If she was right, her beach would now not only be protected by the jetty she’d angled off the shore almost three miles away, but would also widen ten to twelve feet, padded with sand swept in from the offshore bar. The prospect excited her, not for practical or mercenary reasons, but because she liked solving puzzles, especially those of her own devising: the hurricane, the beach, the jetty, and the sandbar were all just numbers in one of her erosion models.

The phone rang again. Emily answered. “Hello?”

Silence.

“Hello?… Hello?”

Silence; perhaps the faint sound of breathing. That made her angry. “Who is this?” she said, her voice rising. “Who is this?”

Click
.

Emily hung up. She turned back to the screen, annoyed, uneasy, distracted, found herself staring through the numbers into the blackness beyond.
Get a grip
, she told herself. It was nothing but a wrong number, two wrong numbers; probably the
same careless caller. But misdialers usually hung up as soon as they realized their mistake, didn’t they? And this one hadn’t. This one had listened to her for a while; breathing. She didn’t like the breathing. It meant a crank. Or a sicko. Emily’s imagination ran with that thought, as she sat at her desk, waiting for MIT to do the numbers.

“Get a grip.” This time she said it aloud. She was just jumpy. It was all about Charlie of course, off somewhere with his uncle, dealing with a complicated and difficult family she had known nothing about. Charlie’s Uncle Sam had said it might be a few days. “A few” meant three, but that was a possibility Emily hadn’t really taken seriously. She’d expected Charlie back the next day; that was today, and there wasn’t much of it left. Outside the sun was low in the sky, reddening the surface of Cosset Pond. And if he wasn’t coming back today, wouldn’t he call to tell her? She would in his place. Then she tried to put herself in his place, and could not: there were too many sudden unknowns. Did they make Charlie a puzzle too? Emily shrank from that idea, but she was still thinking about those unknowns when all the numbers on her screen changed.

Emily looked at the new numbers. They would have been meaningless to all but a few dozen people in the world. Emily understood them right away. Her beach was gone.

D
ay three.

“It might take a few days, actually,” as Uncle Sam had said.
Few
was the way to say
three
without being tied down.

Day one: Bombo. Day two: Malik. A logical progression, even if it had led nowhere. There was nothing logical about day three, and Charlie couldn’t have explained what he was doing,
not even to himself. It had nothing to do with finding Rebecca, nothing he could see. But late in the afternoon of day three he was back on campus, standing outside Cullen House.
Going backward, Charlie old boy, going backward
.

Day three had begun like days one and two, warm and sunny, but now top-heavy thunderclouds were swelling in the west. A tanned woman came out of Cullen House, saw him looking at the sky, and said, “It’ll hold off. Are you signed up for the mixed doubles?”

“No.”

“We need one more man for the four point fives. What’s your rating?”

“I don’t know.”

“My God, I thought we sorted that out at orientation.” She ducked back inside the building.

Charlie walked away before she could return with racquets and balls and evaluate his game. He followed the crushed-brick path, through the line of oaks, into the central quad, past the chapel. He stood in front of the Ecostudies Center, seeking the skeleton of the old structure. This was difficult; the building and his memory of it had both changed.

Charlie circled the building. At the back a gardener watered flower beds, a cigarette drooping from his lips. The gardener’s hose ran from a square hatch at the base of the wall. He squinted through cigarette smoke at Charlie. Charlie moved on, around to the front. The door of the Ecostudies Center opened and a woman, this one pale and nonsporty, emerged, eating trail mix from a paper bag. When had he last eaten? Charlie couldn’t remember.

He took the crushed-brick path to the edge of the campus, walked along College Street to the Catamount Bar and Grille. In 1970 it had been a dive with a cat’s-head sign and cheap greasy food. Everything had changed but the sign. Charlie took a seat under a small painting of an alienated nude, priced at $250, listened to the list of specials, ordered something with sun-dried tomatoes because he’d never had them, and chose a beer he’d never heard of. A book of Catamount Bar and Grille matches lay in the ashtray. Charlie put them in his pocket.

The beer came first. He tasted it. Not bad, but all at once he
didn’t want beer, didn’t want food, either. He got up and walked to the phone by the men’s room. “A few days,” Uncle Sam had said. “A few” would mean three to Emily, a firm three. He picked up the phone and dialed his home number.

She answered on the first ring: “Hello?”

The sound of her voice choked up Charlie’s throat. He knew immediately, too late, that he couldn’t speak to her. He had nothing to say but lies.

“Hello?” she said again.

It wasn’t just the lying; there was more to it than that. He was like a character in a time-travel story, who could move through different epochs and observe, but enter none. He had traveled back in time, all the way back to Blake Wrightman.

“Hello? Hello? Who is this? Why do you keep—”

Charlie hung up, leaving his palm print in sweat on the receiver.

He walked back through the restaurant, almost out the front door before remembering he was a customer. He returned to his table, where the food had arrived. He asked for the check.

“Is something wrong?” asked the waitress.

“No, I—” Charlie stopped himself; his speech sounded strangled. To him and to the waitress: she was staring openly at him now. “Not feeling well,” Charlie said. A lie. He saw himself at that moment naked and revealed to this stranger. He’d been a liar for twenty-two years, a denizen of the unhealthy world portrayed in the $250 painting above his head. He was sick of it.

“Would you like a doggie bag?” the waitress said.

No. Yes. What difference did it make? Charlie nodded. The waitress removed the plates, returned with doggie bag and bill. She didn’t hover but didn’t go far, either, until he had paid. “Hope you feel better,” she said as he left.

Out on the street Charlie took a deep breath. Then he walked back to the campus, dropping his sun-dried dinner into a trash can at the wrought-iron gate.

Night was falling now, and it was quiet. Charlie could hear soft sounds from far away: a guitar, a laugh, a ball smacking into a glove. But it was too dark for playing catch; that last must have been imagined.

Charlie wandered the campus until it was fully dark. The heavy clouds had covered the sky. There was no moon or stars. A breeze quickened in the west, blew harder. Charlie stopped walking. He stood in the shadows behind the Ecostudies Center.

Charlie waited there, waited for someone to stroll past or shine a light or cough in the darkness. None of this happened. He moved forward, knelt in the grass, felt for the square ground-level hatch, found it. The hatch opened at the side and was fastened by two simple bolts. There was no lock. He drew the bolts and opened the hatch. He listened once more for human sounds, heard none, and squeezed inside. His hands explored the earthen floor, encountered a cement piling. Down here at the foundation, nothing had changed. Charlie pulled the hatch closed, once more in the darkness of the crawl space under the house by the chapel.

Charlie took out the Catamount Bar and Grille matches and lit one. In the unsteady globe of yellow light it made, he saw the gardener’s coiled hose, watering cans, a spade, a hoe, and two flats of pink flowers he didn’t recognize. Beyond that, darkness. He blew out the match and crawled forward on his belly.

The floor felt damp at first, then dry, as before. After a minute or two, Charlie paused, reached for the matches, lit one. Ahead he saw a small pile of cement blocks. Three of them, to be exact. His heart beat faster; he could feel it against the earth. He blew out the match, crept forward, his right hand extended. It touched the nearest block. Charlie felt again for the matches. At that moment a footstep sounded on the floor, directly above him. Charlie froze.

Something squeaked overhead, a swivel chair perhaps. A second footstep drummed once on the floor. Then footsteps began moving, back and forth, back and forth. Charlie thought he heard a groan. After that came a man’s voice, intimately close and distinct: “I’ve got to think.” Something squeaked again. There was a sigh. Then silence.

Charlie lay without moving in the crawl space, his hand on the edge of the cement block. Time passed, whole minutes surely. When he could wait no more, Charlie reached for the
matches, monitoring every movement. He lit one. The snick of the match head on the striking surface sounded like the cracking of a whip. Charlie lay still, not breathing, the match burning down between his fingers. Something—a spider?—ran quickly across the back of his neck, paused, bit him. He did nothing about it. It bit him again. Above, there was only silence. Charlie reached behind his neck, pressed hard. He crushed a hard little body and dampness spread across his palm.

He crawled forward a few more inches, examined the blocks. A pyramid, two at the base, one on top. The match burned his fingertips. He dropped it. It went out, giving off a last invisible plume of smoke that curled up into his nose.

Charlie twisted sideways, felt for the topmost block, got both hands on it. In that position he could use none of the strength of his legs, back, or even upper arms. With just his wrists and hands, he raised the block off the pile and lowered it to the ground behind his head.
Quiet, Charlie boy, quiet and slow
. But the blocks scraped together just the same. How loudly? As loud as shifting tectonic plates on a fault line, as soft as batting eyelashes? Charlie didn’t know. He listened for sounds from above and heard none, no footsteps, no groans, no sighs.

He felt for the two remaining blocks, pushed one a foot or two away, dragged the second in the other direction. He listened again. Silence. Then, with his fingernails, he began scraping at the earth in front of him. Moving bits of earth at a time, he dug a small depression, an inch or two deep, a foot or two in diameter. Nothing more was necessary. The tip of his index finger touched something man-made, knew what it was: a buckle, a brass buckle.

Charlie lit one last match. Lying in the depression, the depression he’d now dug for the second time in twenty-two years, was a knapsack, the kind found in army surplus stores. It was coated in mold, slick and dirt colored. Charlie ran his thumbnail across it and saw it was still khaki underneath. If biodegradable, it was degrading slowly: Malik’s backpack.

Charlie stuck the match in the loose earth he’d shifted. With both hands free he drew the pack toward him, feeling the weight inside, and unfastened the buckle.

Charlie looked inside. Down in the shadows of the pack lay coils of insulated wire, a stick not much bigger than a cigar tube, a rusted alarm clock. “Big Ben” was gone, all except the second
B
. He checked the red wire, saw—yes!—how it was wrapped all around the electrical tape. He’d made a symbolic bomb, as he’d thought, a bomb that could never explode, could never hurt a little boy, could never bring his mother to her knees, could never make a father cry. This was nothing but the raw material for a bomb, added, it was true, to the idea of bombing. But someone else’s idea.

The match went out. Charlie lay in the crawl space, the bomb in his hands, his heart beating against the earth. His personal Big Bang, the beginning of the universe of Charlie Ochs: he hadn’t understood it at all. The first roll of thunder sounded in the distance.

“I
s this part of the plan?” Svenson asked.

“What are you talking about?” Goodnow said. He could no longer cope with the allusive, the roundabout; he was in too much pain for anything but precision and hard fact. Signing out of the hospital wasn’t the same as being cured.

“Him flipping out, or whatever this is,” said Svenson.

Goodnow had no answer. They stood like medieval sentries on the crenellated platform of the campanile. Lightning flashed overhead, a crooked white stick with spiky branches, illuminating for a moment the rear of the Ecostudies Center and Charlie Ochs crawling out from underneath. He straightened, glanced up, directly at the campanile, although he couldn’t possibly have seen them, then vanished with the lightning.

“Did you see the look on his face?” asked Svenson.

Goodnow had: wild and strange. Maybe it was just the lightning. He hoped so: the only other explanation that came to mind involved Charlie blowing up the building again.