Second Chance (21 page)

Relief quieted the fear for a moment. He didn't think he could have handled knowing that he had AIDS. He knew that he had been faithful, and the alternative would have been that Eddie had not been. "So what is it, Tom?"

"I'm sorry, Dale, but it's leukemia. Acute
myeloblastic
. Normally I'd offer more hope. It's a treatable disease. But I've never seen it moving as quickly before." He shook his head, and puzzlement replaced the official look of concern. "It's just racing through your body. The lymph is very swollen, as you know. And it's . . .” He shrugged. "It's everywhere."

"Almost," said Dale, "as if it's making up for lost time?"
Tregaski
looked at him oddly. "Almost."

The doctor went on to tell Dale that treatment would be complicated, expensive, and time consuming, and that there was less than a chance in a hundred it would do more than minimally slow the cancer's progression.

"So off the record, Tom," Dale said, "if you were me . . . ?”

“I'd say the hell with it and enjoy the time I have left.”

“And that is?"

Tregaski
shrugged. "Half a year maybe."

"Six months."

"Half a year sounds longer."

Dale thought about how lonely Eddie would be, hoped that if he took another lover it would be one as monogamous as they both had been. "When will I begin . . . how should I put it, my final decline?"

"Well, you'll lose some weight, but with luck you shouldn't be uncomfortable until the last few weeks. You'll know when it happens. You'll have to come into the hospital then."

"No I won't."

'The pain will be considerable, Dale. You'll want to. The drugs can make it pretty easy at the end."

"All right. But there's no shame in wanting to escape pain." The doctor shook his head. "I'm sorry, I really am. I've never gotten used to giving news like this, and God knows I've had the practice." He smiled thinly. "It's probably cold comfort, but I've seen so many people die in the past few years. You look at it in one way, you've been lucky, you and Eddie."

Anger roiled inside Dale. "No, Tom," he said. "We haven't been lucky. We've been faithful."

He walked the thirty blocks that lay between the doctor's office and his and Eddie's apartment. He wanted the time to be alone and think.

Making up for lost time. Maybe that was exactly what was happening. Maybe he should have died seventeen years before, as he had in that time he only vaguely recalled—the lassitude that had overcome him, the trip to the hospital in the ambulance, the poking and prodding, and, so quickly, the fading away, what must have been dying, dying so young and so ignorant, before he had even known what life and he were.

And now restored, if what Eddie and Woody and the others said was true. Restored, like Tracy, into a world in which he had never died, a world in which those who had restored him were alien, a world that was the same as their old one, except for three things—the presence of Dale, the presence of Tracy, and the presence of Pan.

Dale had been astounded when Eddie told him of Pan's absence in the life he had lived without Dale. Dale's memory had contained the reality of Pan for over twenty years, and to know that Eddie's did not was disturbing. They were both quick to come to the conclusion that either Tracy or Dale's survival had somehow caused the existence of the terrorist. But then Eddie had pointed something out.

"What if," he said, "we're not the only ones who've gone through something like this? What if other people have too, and haven't said anything for the same reason we haven't—that people would think they were crazy? I mean, mightn't this world, this life, this . . . track that we're in now be the result, not only of us bringing you and Tracy back, but of somebody else doing the same thing, independent of what we did?"

"It's . . . possible," Dale had said, and he supposed it was, though highly improbable. The odds of what happened to them happening to other people was too great to be considered. People simply didn't walk through time every day as through doorways, bringing their dead friends along with them as easily as picking up the kids at day care. In fact, Dale wasn't so sure it all hadn't been a mass hallucination. That was certainly the simplest explanation.

But now here was this death sentence hanging over him, the same fatal malady that eight people vividly recalled (and he dimly remembered) had killed him years before. Had it lain in wait all this time, remained dormant for the twenty years in which it could not kill him because he had not existed? And if so, were all his memories fabrications, constructs devised in order to rationalize the gap in his existence? Then what would happen to Tracy? Would some explosion seek her out so that a dishonest fate could be expiated?

It was all so confusing, so enigmatic. It had shaken his concepts of life and time and space, had even undermined his thoughts of God. What was reality? And was there a being called God that was a part of it? Dale had been raised staunch Roman Catholic, and had kept the faith all his life, going to Mass twice a week. But since the knowledge had come to him that he had lived two different lives, his attendance had tapered off. If there were indeed two tracks of existence in which he lived, did God exist in both? And if he did, didn't that oddly make God less than he was? Didn't it show that there was something more than just God at work here? Or did it, on the contrary, prove the infinite nature of God, world without end and
worlds
without end? Whatever the answer, it was nothing that he could talk about to his priest. Father Jim would think him mad.

But crisis of faith or not, right now Dale
Collini
felt the need for the church and its assurances of spiritual, if not temporal, constancy. When he reached St. Bartholomew's, he entered its welcoming darkness, knelt near the rear of the chapel, and prayed for a long time. When he walked out again into the sunshine, he had decided that he would not tell Eddie about his sickness, for it would only add cruelty to unfairness. Eddie did not have the strong memories of their shared past that Dale did, so Dale decided to make the time they had left together as happy and free of care as possible. That could happen only if Eddie remained ignorant of the inevitable. There would be enough time, at the end, to say goodbye and speak of love and weep. But for now, they would be happy.

That night, while Eddie was sleeping, Dale kept his arm around him and thought long into the night.

Chapter 19

And very early the following morning, Keith Aarons, his arm around Sally, lay awake thinking about how hard it was to wait.

He had done a lot of waiting in his life, waiting for conditions to be right, waiting for the moment when the gun could speak, the knife could strike. His life was a series of peaks and valleys, periods of inaction punctuated by mighty climaxes that shook countries, awed populaces. Still, he was never bored. Even sitting for four days in darkness, waiting for Reagan, he had not been bored, for he had written and read and written again on that endless ream of convolutions, the parchment of his brain, the book of his mind.

He read it now, as the sun pressed its first, insistent rays around the edge of the trailer's curtains. He had been reading it a great deal in the two weeks he had been waiting to hear from Goncourt. When Sally was at Red's, he went to his apartment and continued to absorb the contents of the technical books and journals he had brought to Bone. But that information was now loaded within his mind as tightly as a full clip in an automatic pistol. When he grew bored, he again hacked into computer networks, learning more about the friends who had returned him to life, and what they were doing with their own lives.

But there was little else to do that was constructive except to read his book again, read it and thus impress it even more firmly into his brain.

He enjoyed the looking back. Since the time was coming when it would end, he found it pleasant to gaze backwards upon a life well lived, years full of noble goals finally coming to ultimate fruition.

The beginning had been difficult. After the assassination of Mrs. Thomas
Feeley
, he had almost changed his mind about his vocation. The reaction to his statement left with the body had been unthinking and unreasoned. The Pittsburgh press named him Pan as a result of the symbol with which he had signed the note, and both the media and the authorities assailed him as the worst kind of murderer, playing up the two young children left motherless. Keith was appalled to see that there was not a word about the lives of entire generations to come who would be left far worse than motherless by the depredations of Thomas
Feeley
and his kind. They would be left landless, airless, waterless, and there was no double indemnity life insurance to assure their survival.

He had not expected to be hailed as an ecological Robin Hood, but neither had he expected the universal outcry against him as a merciless slayer. The papers had not even printed his message, but had described it in the words of a police psychiatrist as "the ravings of a violent paranoid revolutionary with a persecution complex, extremely dangerous and likely to strike again."

What Keith's note had said was:

>
This act grieves me, but it is necessary. There must be no safety for those who dishonor the earth, or for their families. As they would kill without thinking let them be killed. It is no longer safe to defile Gaia.

And he signed it with the symbol that was taken to be a hoof print, and for which he was named Pan.

What was even more disheartening than the response of the public was the fact that the assassination seemed to have no effect on either Thomas
Feeley
or his associates. Six months later
Feeley
was taken back into court, where he pleaded guilty on charges of pollution, and paid his fine. This time, however, he made no comments to the press as he left the courtroom.

Slowly, Keith Aarons grew to realize that people like Thomas
Feeley
could not do what they did if society—the courts, the government, and the people who approved and elected those leaders—did not allow them to.

~*~

December 19, 1972
:

Everyone is guilty. Everyone who stands by and allows these things to happen must bear the guilt.

But some people are more guilty than others.

The store owners who stock the paint that Thomas
Feeley's
company produces, the clerks who sell it, even the people who use it, must share in the guilt. The executives in Detroit who decide to make big cars that devour the world's fossil fuel and spew out carbon dioxide are aided and abetted by the people who buy those cars and drive them.

Attacking those who actively pollute—people like
Feeley
and his family—does nothing to change the attitudes of the typical consumer. But what if there was a risk to the consumer himself, or to those just further up the chain, the individual auto worker or car owner, the salesman, the clerk, the delivery boy?

What if no one was safe?

What if the most tenuous supportive connection between the citizen and the despoiler was punished with death, and what if people were made aware of that, given fair warning?

Then it wouldn't take long for things to stop.

Look at it this way—if you have a bag with a thousand pieces of candy, and just one of those pieces is filled with cyanide and will kill you a few seconds after you eat it, will you have a piece of candy? I don't think so. So if you are one of a thousand store owners who stock a certain brand of paint, and one of those store owners has been assassinated for that very thing, and the person who did it is still at large, will you continue to stock that paint?

That remains to be seen. I don't think people are that stupid, but I might be wrong. They may like the candy so much that they'll just keep eating.

There's only one way to find out.

~*~

There was another, more practical reason for Keith Aarons to lower his sights to the merchant and working class, and that was that the anonymous and weak were far more accessible targets than the well-known and powerful. However, he was not willing to admit that to himself until much later, when he decided that the pawns were victims rather than malefactors, that their collaboration was born of ignorance, not greed, that the only people truly worth killing were the vultures who profited directly and obscenely from their crimes.

These future revelations did not come, however, until
some time
after he killed John
Reyminster
.

~*~

February 8, 1973
:

I tried to keep in mind what the Duke yells at the end of the film of
Romeo and Juliet
: "All are punished!" to remember that the man was guilty. But it really didn't work.

I pitied him. I almost spared him, but it had gone too far by then. He saw my face, he could have identified me. But it was so hard to do. I never used a knife before today. It's quiet, but that's all I can say for it. I thought he would die quickly, but it must have struck bone. He howled so, even through the gag, that I had to pull it out and cut his throat right away, and that was very unpleasant, with all the blood. And even then he didn't die right away. It's not at all like the movies, even the
Peckinpahs
. There's nothing really pretty about it. I guess it's what being a butcher must be like, killing an animal because it's your job.