Second Chance (16 page)

"Don't know it," Keith said. “Just new in town."

"Yeah, we all work there," said Bob. “Just got off our tours. A whole week of
lazin
' around now."

"Tours?"

Freeman spoke again. "We work for two weeks at a time, live there and everything, then have a week off."

"That's pretty weird," Keith said.

"It . . . aids in concentration. So," Freeman went on, abruptly changing the subject, "where are you from, Pete?" He used the name Keith had given them.

Keith told them he hailed from Galveston, but hadn't lived there for many years. When Bob Hastings asked where he'd been recently, he merely responded, "Up north," and smiled bitterly.

"Finally figured out back down here's where I belong.”

“Didn't like it, huh?" Bob asked.

"Didn't like seeing other people
eatin
' my lunch is the truth of the matter." He waved a hand. Don't rush it, he thought. Don't look too anxious. You have time. "No point
talkin
' about what's done," he said. "Don't
wanta
sour you
fellas
' time off. So tell me," he went on, "what's the high school football team here like?"

~*~

That night in his apartment, on a mattress that smelled of stale beer, Keith Aarons lay awake in the darkness, writing in the book of his mind.

It was a book that he had started over twenty years before, after he had dedicated his life and begun his work. He knew, then and now, that he could not yet put anything down on paper. But perhaps someday, when people came to their senses, when the earth was pure again, and there was no need for his work, he could write it all down, tell his story, make them all understand, even the parents and the children of the innocents. He could show them how no one had died in vain.

But on paper? No. Words on paper were a confession, and if he one day made a mistake, if his deeds were less than flawlessly planned, if he were anything less than perfect, they would search and find and condemn. His words would burn him. And though he did not fear death itself, for he had seen too many die to think it terrible, he feared that death would claim him before he had completed his work, and that thought was unbearable.

He was not unlike other men. He needed to talk, to communicate, to tell what he had done, what he thought. Above all, he needed to rationalize his actions. So he wrote in his mind, saw his hand write the words, etched them into the convolutions of his brain, remembered all, and would someday write everything down on paper so that the world would not only know what work it had been, but also what pain it had cost him.

A double fire had burned inside him all these years. He had tried to quench the flames of guilt, while at the same time he strove to keep the coals of purpose burning red. It was hard. It had been hard from the very first. And he knew it would be harder still. But he worked on. And wrote on:

May 31, 1993
:

They work for the lab. It's remarkable that Bob should have called me over, made it so easy for me. I'll be inside the place within two months. After I fill them in on the background, all I need is an incident.

It took me a long time to find them, but this has to be the place. Goncourt Laboratories. God, how many company files did I have to hack into, how many records until I finally found them, with their incoming shipments and their outgoing products not quite meshing, a little more coming in than going out. A cover, but not a cover for controlled substances.

Not the usual controlled substances, at any rate, but very, very controlled substances. Controlled. Until it's time to release them.

And then they become uncontrollable.

Like influenzas, viruses, AIDS.

It's unlikely, but maybe if I could trace them back far enough, they'd be responsible for the bubonic plague. Probably wanted it to just kill the Jews, and it got out of hand.

Well.

If things got out of hand once, they can get out of hand again.

Chapter 14

Woody Robinson continued to do what Frank McDonald had suggested. He put the instrument of death named Pan out of his mind, and concentrated on life.

The plans for the Japanese tour took much of his time, particularly since Michael Lester, his bass player, had been hit with a new strain of summer flu that the doctors claimed needed three weeks to run its course. The Japanese tour began, inconsiderately, in two. So Woody and the others spent much of their time auditioning bassists, finally selecting Ivan
Redburn
, who was twenty years younger than the rest of the band, but brilliant nonetheless. The plan was for Ivan to stay with them for the entire two weeks in Japan, giving Michael plenty of time to rest up for their late July invasion of Europe.

They rehearsed heavily the last week of June so that Ivan could lock in to the twenty-odd numbers in the repertoire. During a break, Woody flipped through a month-old copy of
Newsweek
in the studio's waiting area. When he read of Pan's killing of Mrs. Naomi Weeks in L.A., he felt a nauseating tingle in his throat. He finished the article, closed the magazine, looked at his watch, and went to one of the pay phones in the hall. He dialed directory assistance for the 412 area, got the number for Iselin University, called it, and asked for the Alumni Office.

"I'm trying to find the address of an old classmate of mine," he said when a woman came on the line. "His last name is Aarons, first name Keith. Class of '70."

"One moment, please," the woman said officiously, and put Woody on hold. A minute later, she spoke again. "I'm sorry, but the only student by that name is listed as deceased."

"Deceased?" Woody tried to sound surprised. "My God. Does it say when?"

The woman sighed in exasperation. Woody heard the click of fingers on keyboard, and the woman's next words were the date that Woody had etched in his heart, the date that in some other life had seen the death of the girl he loved.

"Thank you," he said, and hung up.

All right then. Keith Aarons was dead, and he had proof of it, not just some warped memories of people who were there in one lifetime or another. It was on paper in this lifetime, here and now. Keith was dead. And if Keith was dead, he couldn't be Pan. And if he wasn't Pan, Woody was not responsible.

When Woody heard the door to the studio creak open, he gasped.

"What's the matter?" Jim Columbo said. "I scare you?"

He made himself laugh. "No
 
. . . the door
 
. . ." He was about to say,
It reminded me of another door, a door opening and closing
, but he didn't.

"You ready?" Jim said. "You wanted to get through those other two numbers today."

Woody nodded and followed his percussionist back into the studio. Yes, Keith was dead. Everybody said so.

But why had he heard the goddamned door? And why did he hear it still?

Chapter 15

When the ROTC building exploded in the fall of 1969, Keith
Aarons's
first reaction was one of horror, not because the building blew up, but because of the person he knew was inside the building. As pieces of rubble fell all around him like charred, smoking snow, he struggled to keep from vomiting in terror. Then he turned and ran toward where he had parked his car, anxious to get in and drive away, far away from Iselin, somewhere where they would never find him.

But just as he was about to open the door, he stopped, made himself think. If he ran now, revealing that he was still alive, the charges brought against him would put him in jail for more years than he cared to think about. And then he realized that with any luck the remains in the rubble might be thought to be his own.

And he could be a dead man.

The thought aroused him like a young man's glimpse of his naked lover. A dead man. A man with no identity. A man who could be anyone, go anywhere, a man who could never be a fugitive because no one even knew he was alive. Oh Jesus, a dead man.

There was far more to it than his romantic imaginings, but he did not pause to consider the consequences. He opened the door, put the keys in the ignition, slammed it shut, and ran into the night, as he would run into so many other nights.

Now, he thought as he ran down tree lined streets, clinging to the shadows, ran away from where the sirens were starting to scream, now he must be a ghost, unseen, must live as a spirit, with no friends to help him, no one who would know he still lived.

The first night was the worst night, the first week the worst week, the first year the worst year. He learned quickly that it was not as much fun being Zorro as he had thought it would be. In fact, there was no fun in it at all. The only joy he felt in those first few weeks on the run was reading in a discarded newspaper that Keith Aarons was thought to have been killed while causing the destruction of a campus building. When he read that, he somehow felt that everything else would fall into place.

But that first night Keith slept in the woods near the reservoir. It was cold on the ground, and he awoke before dawn and took inventory of what he carried. In his pockets were a Swiss army knife, a comb, and a handful of change. In his wallet were twenty-three dollars and a number of identification cards, including his social security card, all of which he tore into small pieces and buried beneath a layer of dirt and dead leaves.

There was also a photograph of his mother and father, taken at a picnic table his father had built in the back yard. He thought he could have been no more than five when the shot was taken. His father's hair was dark, his physique full, as yet
unravaged
by black lung disease. His mother was slim and pretty. They smiled out at him in black and white, and he realized with a grief that choked him that they were now as dead to him as he must be to them.

That moment was the closest he ever came to changing his mind, to going back and turning himself in. He cried for a long time, looking at the picture through a haze of tears, knowing that he could not keep it, that he could keep nothing that would in any way connect him to his past.

He could have no parents now. He must be Adam, sans past, sans navel, born of rage and fire and whatever else his God was, and he cried as he tore the photograph into fragments, placed the bits beneath the heel of his boot, and ground them into the dirt. Then he walked south, through the woods, knowing that he would eventually come out on Route 22, twenty miles away from Iselin, where he could hitch a ride into Pittsburgh. He didn't know what he would do when he got there, but it was the nearest city, and you could be anonymous in a city.

There were so many things he would have to do. He knew what they were, but didn't know how to go about doing them. If he wanted to live he would have to work, and he could not work without identification—a new name, a new history, a new social security card. But how were these things done? He remembered reading a book about a spy or assassin or someone getting a name from a tombstone, but then what? He would either have to find out or figure it out on his own.

As he hiked through the woods, the understanding of what he would have to endure became crushing, and he found himself nearly hysterical over the utter hopelessness of his situation. He giggled when he thought that he did not even have a change of underwear, and, when his bowels started to roil, walked for several more miles before defecating, gingerly used maple leaves for toilet paper, and felt uncomfortably unclean as he walked on. It was not romantic or exciting. It was unpleasant, tiring, difficult, and sordid, and it was the life he had chosen.

But as he walked he began to think about other things to drive his mind from his dilemma. He began to think of the war an invisible man could wage, the damage a ghost could do, the problems of catching a shadow. It would take weeks, months, even years. He would have to live in filth, go without so many things he had grown used to, but he could live his dream now, live his dream and give
Amerika
nightmares.

A trucker heading toward Pittsburgh picked him up on 22, and took him to the outskirts of the city, where he got out and thought about where to go first. He knew the area around the Pitt campus best, but there were people who knew him there, and they would have heard about the ROTC building. So he took a bus to Shadyside, averting his gaze from the other passengers, as if everyone would recognize his face.

Then he thought, what if they did? What if his photograph had been on the TV news, or in the papers? What if they knew he had escaped, knew that it wasn't the shreds of
his
body that lay amid the ashes?

He felt suddenly conspicuous, as if he were wearing a sign that said,
Hippie Fugitive from Justice!
, and bowed his head, looked down at the dirty floor of the bus. When it stopped, he exited it furtively, and saw people looking curiously at him through the windows of the bus as it drove away.

Keith was fast to learn a lesson that many fugitives never did, a lesson he remembered. By trying to appear invisible, he had made himself conspicuous. So, by making himself neither more nor less conspicuous than anyone else, he should prove to be invisible, and it was so. He never skulked again.

However, he did hide when it suited his purposes. He did a great deal of hiding that first year, spending several weeks with a commune of sorts who lived in an abandoned factory. They were homeless hippies, most of whom were hooked on heroin. When they asked him his name, he told them Rocket J. Squirrel, and they accepted it without question.