The Chronoliths (17 page)

He had been in and out of psychiatric programs, apprenticeship programs, special learning facilities, and occasionally Juvenile Hall. Not that Adam wasn’t bright. “He reads constantly. Not just storybooks, either. And, frankly, it takes a certain amount of smarts to survive the way he has—on the street half the time. Adam is actually very clever.”

When Ashlee talked about her son her expression was a mixture of pride, guilt, and apprehension, sometimes all three at once. Her large eyes darted from side to side as if she expected to be overheard. She played with her napkin, folding it and refolding it, finally tearing it into long strips that lay on the tabletop like aborted acts of origami.

“He ran away once when he was twelve, but that had nothing to do with this Copperhead thing. I swear I don’t know what Adam imagines this Kuin is all about, apart from the business of destroying cities and making people’s lives miserable. But it fascinates him. The way he watches the news nets is almost frightening.” She dipped her head. “I’m reluctant to say it, but I think what Adam likes is basically just this
crushing
of things. I think he puts himself in Kuin’s place. He wants to lift his foot and obliterate everything he hates. The talk about a new kind of world government is just set-dressing, in my opinion.”

“Did he ever talk to you about Kaitlin or her group?”

Ashlee smiled sadly. “That’s a question and a half. Did your Kaitlin ever talk to
you
about this stuff?”

“We talked. But no, she never mentioned anything political.”

“That still puts you a step up from me. Adam has never confided in me about anything. Anything at all. Everything I know about my own son, I learned from observation. Excuse me, I think I need another coffee.”

What she needed, I imagined, was another smoke. She paused at the counter, asked the clerk for a double-double, then ducked into the restroom for a while. She came out looking calmer. I think the counterman smelled tobacco when she picked up her coffee. He gave her a hard look, then rolled his eyes.

She sat down again, sighing. “No, Adam never talked about his meetings. Adam is seventeen, but like I said, he’s not naive. He conducts his business pretty carefully. But, you know, I would overhear things once in a while. I knew he’d hooked up with one of the suburban Copperhead clubs, but for a while it seemed like that was almost a
good
thing. He was with people who had some, you know, background. Prospects. I guess in the back of my head was the idea that he would make friends and maybe that would lead to something, some opportunities, after all this time-travel shit blows over, excuse me. I thought he might meet a girl, or maybe somebody’s dad would offer him a job.”

I thought of Janice’s plaintive,
What was I supposed to do? Lock her in the house
?

Janice had clearly not imagined her daughter in the company of an Adam Mills.

“I changed my mind when I walked in on one of his phone calls. He was talking about those people—I guess including your Kait, I’m sorry to say. And he was just vicious, contemptuous. He said the group was full of—” She lowered her head, ashamed. “Full of ‘whitebread virgins.’”

She must have seen my reaction. Ashlee put her chin up, and her manner hardened. “I love my son, Mr. Warden. I don’t have any illusions about the kind of person Adam is—or
will
be, unless he turns himself around. Adam has serious, serious problems. But he’s my son, and I love him.”

“I respect that,” I said.

“I hope so.”

“They’re both missing. That’s what we have to worry about now.”

She frowned then, maybe reluctant to be included in the pronoun. Ashlee was accustomed to dealing with her own troubles in her own way; that was why she had bailed out of Regina Lee’s meeting.

But then, so had I.

She said, “I would be very frankly pissed if you were trying to pick me up, Mr. Warden.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Because I want to ask you for your phone number so we can keep in touch about Adam and Kaitlin. I don’t have any hard information, but my guess is that their whole little group is attempting some kind of half-assed pilgrimage, Christ only knows where. So they’re probably together. So we should keep in touch. I just don’t want to be misunderstood.”

I gave her my portable address. She gave me her home terminal.

She finished her coffee and said, “This is pretty much all bad news for you.”

“Not all,” I said.

She stood up. “Well, it was good meeting you.” She turned and walked through the door into the street. I watched her through the window as she strode a half block between islands of lamplight, to a doorway adjoining a Chinese restaurant, where she fumbled with a key. An apartment over a restaurant. I pictured a threadbare sofa, maybe a cat. A rose in a wine bottle or a framed poster on the wall. The echoing absence of her son.

Ramone Dudley, the police lieutenant in charge of local missing persons, agreed to see me in his office the following afternoon. The meeting was brief.

Dudley was an obviously overworked desk cop who had delivered the same bad news too many times. “These kids,” he said (clearly a homogenous mass, in Dudley’s mind:
these kids
), “they have no future, and they know it. The thing is, it’s true. The economy sucks, that’s no secret. And what else do we have to offer them? Everything they hear about the future is all Kuin, Kuin, Kuin. Fucking Kuin. According to the fun-dies, Kuin is the Antichrist; all you can do is say your prayers and wait for the Rapture. Washington is drafting kids for some war we may never fight. And the Copperheads are saying maybe Kuin won’t hurt us so bad if we bend over politely. That’s not a real bouquet of options, when you think about it. Plus all that shit they hear in the music or learn in those encrypted chatrooms.”

Plainly, Lieutenant Dudley blamed most of this on my generation. He must have met some inadequate parents in the course of his work. By the way he looked at me, he was pretty sure I was one of them.

I said, “About Kaitlin—”

He took a file from his desktop and read me the contents. There were no surprises. A total of eight youths, all involved in the junior arm of Whitman’s social club, had failed to return home from a meeting. Friends and parents of the missing children had been extensively interviewed—“With the exception of yourself, Mr. Warden, and I was expecting you to turn up.”

“Whit Delahunt told you about me,” I guessed.

“He mentioned you briefly when we interviewed him, but no, not exactly. The call I got was from a retired fed named Morris Torrance.”

Fast work. But then, Morris had always been diligent. “What did he tell you?”

“He asked me to give you as much cooperation as possible. This is it, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t have a whole lot more to tell you, unless you have some specific questions. Oh, and he asked me one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“He asked me to tell you to get in touch with him. He said he was sorry to hear about Kaitlin and he said he might be able to help you out.”

Maybe I should have taken advantage of Regina Lee’s communal therapy and admitted my fear for Kaitlin—fear, and the premonition of grief that drifted into consciousness whenever I closed my eyes. But that wasn’t my style. I had learned at an early age to fake calm in the face of disaster. To keep my anxiety to myself, like a dirty secret.

But I thought about Kait constantly. In my mind she was still the Kaitlin of Chumphon, five years old and as fearless as she was curious. Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; mat’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit. Because I had known Kaitlin as a child I had never lost sight of the vulnerable heart of her. Which made it all the more painful to imagine (or struggle not to imagine) where Kaitlin might be now, with whom. The most fundamental parental urge is the urge to nurture and protect. To grieve for a child is to admit ultimate impotence. You can’t protect what goes into the ground. You can’t tuck a blanket around a grave.

I spent much of every night awake, staring out the motel window and drinking, alternately, beer and diet cola (and peeing every half hour), until sleep broke over me like a glutinous wave. What dreams I had were chaotic and futile. Waking up to the brutal irony of spring, of sunlight in a bottomless blue sky, was like waking from a dream into a dream.

I had figured my contact with Ashlee Mills was a one-shot, but she called me on my pocket phone ten days after Kaitlin’s disappearance. Her voice was businesslike and she came to the point quickly: “I arranged to meet someone,” she said, “a man who might know something about Adam and Kaitlin, but I don’t want to meet him alone.”

“I’m free this afternoon,” I said.

“He works nights. If you call what he does work. This might not be pretty.”

“What is he, a pimp?”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “He’s a sort of a drug dealer.”

I had spent much of the last week on the net, researching the phenomenon of “haj youth” and the Kuinist movement, tunneling into their hidden chatrooms.

There was, of course, no unified Kuinist movement. Lacking a flesh-and-blood Kuin, the “movement” was a patchwork of utopian ideologies and quasi-religious cults, each competing for the title. What they had in common was simply the act of veneration, the worship of the Chronoliths. For the hajists, any Chronolith was a holy object. Hajists attributed all sorts of powers to the physical proximity of a Kuin stone: enlightenment, healing, psychological transformation, epiphanies great and small. But unlike the pilgrims at Lourdes, for instance, the vast majority of hajists were young. It was, in the twentieth century term, a “youth movement.” Like most such movements, it was as much style as substance. Very few Americans ever made a physical pilgrimage to a Chronolith site, but it was not uncommon to see a teenager with a Kuinist logo on his hat or shirt—most often the ubiquitous “K+” in a red or orange circle. (Or any of the subtler and supposedly secret signs: scarred nipples or earlobes, silver ankle bracelets, white headbands.)

The K+ symbol abounded in Ashlee’s neighborhood, chalked or painted on walls and sidewalks. I pulled up outside the Chinese restaurant at the appointed time, and Ashlee scurried out of her apartment door and into the passenger seat. “It’s good you have a cheap car,” she said. “It won’t attract attention.”

“Where are we going?”

She gave me an address five blocks farther into the city, where the only surviving businesses were stock-houses, window-service fast-food outlets, and liquor stores.

“The guy’s name,” Ashlee said without preamble, “is Cheever Cox, and he’s tied into pretty much all the trade you can’t report on your IRS form. I know him because I used to buy tobacco from him.” She said this in a carefully neutral tone but glanced at me for signs of disapproval. “Before I got my addict’s license, I mean.”

“What does he know about Kait and Adam?”

“Maybe nothing, but when I called him yesterday he said he’d heard about a cut-rate haj and some new rumor about Kuin and he didn’t want to talk about it over an unencrypted line. Cheever’s kind of paranoid that way.”

“You think this is legitimate?”

“Tell you the truth? I don’t really know.”

She rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, almost defiantly, waiting for my reaction. Minnesota had some of the harshest tobacco laws in the country. But I was from out-of-state and old enough not to be shocked. I said, “Ashlee? Did you ever consider quitting?”

“Oh, please.”

“I’m not passing judgment, I’m making conversation.”

“I don’t especially want to talk about it.” She exhaled noisily. “There hasn’t been a whole lot holding me together the last few years, Mr. Warden.”

“Scott.”

“Scott, then. It’s not that I’m a weak person. But… did you ever smoke?”

“No.” I had been spared the anti-abuse vaccines that were pushed on so many young people in those days (and the resultant risk of adult antibody disorders), but tobacco simply wasn’t my vice.

“It’s probably killing me, but I don’t have much else.” She seemed to struggle after a thought, then let it go. “It calms me down.”

“I’m not condemning you for it. Actually, I always liked the smell of burning tobacco. At least from a distance.”

She smiled wryly. “Uh-huh. You’re a real degenerate, I can tell that about you.”

“You miss California?”

“Do I miss
California
?” She rolled her eyes. “Is this a real conversation or are you just nervous about meeting Cheever? Because you don’t have to be. He’s a little shady but he’s not a bad person.”

“That’s reassuring,” I said.

“You’ll see.”

The address was a run-down semidetached wood-frame house. The porch light was out, probably permanently. The stairs sagged. Ashlee pulled open the rusty fly screen and rapped at the door.

Cheever Cox opened up when Ashlee identified herself. Cox was a bald man of about thirty-five, wearing Levis and a pale blue shirt with what looked like marinara sauce dribbled down the collar. “Hey, Ashlee,” he barked, hugging her. He gave me a brief glance.

Ashlee introduced me and said, “It’s about what we talked about on the phone.”

The front room contained a faded sofa, two wooden folding chairs, and a coffee table with ashtray. Down the dim hallway I could see a corner of the kitchen. If Cox made a lot of money in the illicit drug trade, he wasn’t spending it on decor. But maybe he had a country house.

He spotted the pack of cigarettes sticking out of Ashlee’s shirt pocket. “Shit, Ashlee,” he said, “you on a script, too? Fucking government’s taking away my business with those little pussy prescription sticks.”

“I’ll lose my script next year,” Ashlee said, “if I’m not on a patch or a program. Worse, I’ll lose my health insurance.”

He grinned. “So maybe I’ll see more of you then?”

“Not a chance.” She glanced at me. “I’ll get my teeth whitened and find a good job.”

“Be a citizen,” Cox said.

“Damn right.”

“Marry your boyfriend, too?”