The Cradle (7 page)

“Here we are,” she said, looking at him over her shoulder. “Now we start to go up. These stairs will take us to the next floor.”

He nodded.

“And then again.”

He nodded.

She turned back and started to climb.

Fifteen minutes later they’d reached the third floor of the house.

They were in another den, this one far more minimal. An open door led off to a bedroom, and Matt saw more stairs in the far
corner. These were spiral, and went up into a hole in the ceiling. He assumed it was the spire he’d seen from the outside.

“Since Brian knows we’re coming, this shouldn’t be a problem,” said Sylvia, who reached into her dress pocket and pulled out
another cigarette. Slowly she lit it, and Matt waited to see if she would take a drag. Instead she said, “Do you like them?”

“Like what?”

“The pockets,” she said. She pointed down and then tapped the pockets on her dress. They were a different color than the fabric,
Matt saw. “I sewed them in,” she said.

“They’re nice.”

“It was not difficult,” she said. “And I decided there was no good reason to not have pockets. Men have pockets, always. Look
at you. You have pockets.”

Matt looked down at his pockets.

“Now I have them, too, you see,” she said.

They made their way to the next staircase. Then, slowly, they started winding up. The old woman took even longer climbing
these stairs, as they were steeper and required a slight twist of the body. He resisted the impulse to pick her up by the
armpits and carry her the rest of the way.

Once his head had gone over the level of the ceiling, he could see anyway, so he spent the last minutes of the climb taking
in the room. Computers. There were eight computer screens in this room, arranged on a circular desk that wrapped all the way
around its interior. There were cables everywhere—power strips overflowing with other power strips, black and yellow and red
and white cords snaking along the walls, where they’d been stapled sloppily in place. Matt thought he could smell something
rancid in the air, too, like a wet dog’s bed left to mold. There were windows all around the circular room, higher than only
the cords and the desk. There was a small platform around the stairwell where one could stand. The rest of the space was taken
up by Brian.

Brian.

He was a troll. The old woman was right. The man’s long, thin back, hunched, was essentially all Matt could see, save the
bald crown of his head and the ring of dark, greasy hair that hung down past the T-shirt’s collar. The spine stuck up and
ran down the center of the shirt. The skin was inhumanly pale.

“Brian is writing a book,” said the old woman, once they’d both arrived at the landing. “It’s about history.”

Finally the man turned to look. His face was softer than Matt had expected. What had he expected? The face of a monster? At
the very least sharp, angry features. This man looked sad, and his face drooped. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked tired.
He looked at least sixty. The top of his head was sweaty—this was not surprising, as it was twenty degrees hotter in this
room than in any of the others.

“Hello,” he said loudly, as though he were calling to Matt across a great distance.

“Hello,” Matt said, trying to give him an example of a better volume.

“He needs to speak with Mary Landower in Antarctica,” said Ancient Sylvia, also loudly. She leaned toward him and said more
quietly, “Using the
Internet
.”

“All right, Ma,” said Brian, swiveling back in front of his computer monitor. “I know. You said it on the walkie-talkie anyway.”

He pointed to another monitor, and Matt saw a small stool beneath the desk. “She might be there.”

Matt sat down.

“Oh, she’ll be there,” said Ancient Sylvia. “Where else does she have to go?”

“I don’t know,” said Brian. “How about a crevasse somewhere?”

“-Crev-what?”

“She might be somewhere,” Brian said. He looked at Matt. “She might be somewhere. It’s not like this is
Star Trek
.”

He turned back to his monitor and clicked a few times. Matt watched him moving boxes around on the screen. He knew nothing
about computers and only barely knew what the Internet was himself. Not because he’d never had a chance to learn but because
he’d avoided it on purpose.

“She’s there,” Brian said. “Hold on.”

A few more clicks, and a window opened up on the monitor in front of Matt. In the window, for an instant, there was a man,
poorly shaven, wearing an old gray hat. Then Matt realized it was his own picture.

He leaned forward, and the picture of himself leaned forward as well.

“So this is video, then?” he said.

“No,” said Brian. “I just happened to do, like, totally perfect CGI animation last night and it just happens to look exactly
like you.”

“Brian,” scolded Ancient Sylvia. “Sass.”

Brian ignored her. “You should appreciate this. Do you know how amazing this is? This is nineteen ninety-seven. You are dealing
with two thousand three technology here, my friend. She has it down there because of the government. I have it up here because
I am a master of the universe.”

Another box opened up in front of Matt then. The picture, at first, was a number of small colored boxes blinking in and out,
and only after several seconds did the boxes start to meld together into somebody’s face. Once the video settled, he saw the
woman. She was squinting, and behind her he could see the blinking lights of other computers and machinery. She was wearing
a bright red cap; her face was thin and angular, and she had a certain cold beauty to her. Matt thought of her as an Ice Queen,
sitting high atop her throne in a faraway castle. Something flapped over her right shoulder.

“Hello, Syl,” she was saying, but then she frowned. She appeared to be looking away from the camera. Then Matt realized she
was looking at his picture on her end. “Who’s that?”

“Hello?” Matt said.

He looked at Brian, who nodded sarcastically.

“Hello, Mrs. Landower?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Matt Bishop,” he said. “I’m sitting here at Sylvia’s house. I came here to ask her a question.”

“You seem to be talking to me!” The woman was yelling.

Matt realized now the wind was blowing on her end, and the wall behind her was rattling.

“Well, the question—”

“We have a storm coming!”

“The question—”

“Does this have something to do with me?”

“It does,” Matt said. He found himself starting to talk louder, too. “My wife—my wife is the daughter of your sister Caroline.”

The woman sat quietly for a moment on the other end of the line—her eyes ticked up and went to the camera, which made it seem
as though she were looking directly into his eyes.

The picture flickered for a moment. Then she said, “Marissa?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. Someone walked past then, behind her. Matt saw only a man’s torso, hurrying somewhere. Mary yelled, “Caroline
has always had a problem with...staying in one place!”

“So she’s alive.”

“Yes,” yelled Mary. “She’s alive!” There was a loud bang, and Mary looked over her shoulder.

“Where can I find her?” Matt said.

“What?”

“Where can I find her?”

“You can’t. She’s too far away.”

“How far away?”

“She’s...do...nesia.”

“What?”

“Indonesia!”

“I’m looking for a cradle,” Matt said.

“A what?”

“A cradle!”

“A cradle?”

“For Marissa! It’s—we’re having a baby!”

“Is it something she used to have?”

“Yes!”

“Everything that...her...Darren...sota!”

“What?”

“Everything that she...with Darren in Minnesota.”

“Darren?”

“Yes! Her husband!”

“In Minnesota?”

“Yes!...Anything...take...that sonofabitch!”

“Do you have an address?”

“Hold on!”

She disappeared. Matt looked over at Brian, who had stopped paying attention. Ancient Sylvia, behind him, was rapt. She nodded
her encouragement to him. “You seem to be doing quite well,” she said. “If I speak to her for too long, she often switches
to different languages.”

Mary came back on the screen, now holding something in her lap and looking down at it. “If you go to find him,” she yelled,
“do me a favor!”

“Okay,” Matt said.

“Tell him Mary says he’s an asshole!”

Matt was halfway across Wisconsin before the night caught up with him and he decided he needed to sleep. He had a long way
to go, and he wasn’t going to be getting anywhere near Walton, Minnesota, anytime soon. He didn’t want to go all night. A
few miles after he decided, he came upon a rest stop. He pulled the truck in, found a distant parking spot, killed the engine,
leaned his head back, and put his hat down, arms crossed. After a few minutes he opened his eyes. He opened the glove compartment
and removed one Twinkie, unwrapped it, and ate it slowly. He looked at the Gazetteer, a dark shape on the seat beside him,
then looked toward the bathrooms and saw a pay phone and thought of calling Marissa. She would know, however, that he was
still looking. She wouldn’t be worried about him. He could call and say, “I’d like to come back now.” No. Through the windshield,
in the distance, he could see the bright white glow of a light hanging above the bathrooms. Far away, there were a few other
cars around and the cab of a semitruck. A woman, a lone hooker maybe, leaned against the cab of the truck and talked up to
the window. Even at this distance, he could see the black spots of insects crowded around the huge light above it all. Thousands
of them.

It was February. Adam had been gone for six weeks and he was there, on the ground.

She didn’t know what he did day to day. Bill knew. As far as dealing with information went, she saw two paths—on one, she
was demanding news, always, as though seeking some kind of omniscience or overhead view of the battlefields and the cities.
She was scouring the Internet for articles and spending time looking at maps. She was trying to know everything.

On the other, she was disconnected and blank.

For the first month she’d chosen the godlike path and tried to look down from above. She read the news daily and chatted online
with other mothers of soldiers late at night, did almost nothing with her long days, slept late. Wrote little.

Now she’d gone to the other edge. Now she exercised, ate well, enjoyed Adam’s calls when they came, and with all her other
time pretended there was no such thing as war. If he was in danger, Adam never told her. They talked about his friends, the
weather, and the football games the soldiers played. For all she knew, he was either playing catch or napping on a cot somewhere,
always. This is how she thought of him and this is how she planned to think of him until he came home. There was no other
way she could deal with it.

“Your pills,” Bill said, his toast in hand. “You have your sleeping pills?”

“I do,” she said. She’d decided not to bring the whole bottle and had simply shaken six of the tablets into a baggie for the
flights. No need to be tempted to sleep the entire vacation away.

The doctor had told her two would knock her out for the duration of the flight. She planned on taking three. Bill didn’t know
this and she wasn’t going to tell him. He would be concerned, but he had always been afraid of doctors and what they advised.
She was not that way. She was the kind of person who altered doctors’ suggestions when it seemed like the right idea.

What she wanted from the pills was this: they’d drive to O’Hare, park, move through security, read the newspaper, and board
the plane. She would close her eyes as the engines warmed up, there would be a darkness, a lifting feeling, and when she opened
her eyes, it would be nine hours later, and they would be in beautiful Hawaii.

Bill had convinced her the trip really was, after all, a good idea. A week on the beach, bright sun, far away from the depressing
muck landscape of the dark Midwest.

“There is nothing more deadly,” Bill liked to say, “than February in Illinois.”

And there was something to this, she had to admit. She had been thinking of all the green they would see. Even though there
were more deadly things.

Bill held out the second piece of toast toward her. “Do you want it?” he said.

The first part of her plan went as scripted, and she waited until they were seated at the gate before digging into her purse
and finding the pills. The doctor said about twenty minutes after she took them. She looked at the screen to be sure there
would be no delays; everything appeared to be right. The two gate clerks in their red vests and white blouses tapped busily
and happily on their keyboards as though they were Muppets, and behind them, the red dotted lights of the board spelled out
honolulu, 12:15. As Renee watched, one of the Muppet clerks picked up the black phone and announced they would begin boarding
in only a few moments.

“I’m going to take the pills now, I think,” she said to Bill.

Bill glanced up from the paper. “Don’t you want to wait until we get on the plane?”

“I want as little plane as possible,” she said. “We’re going now anyway.” Bill looked up and watched the people milling about
in a quasi-line chunk. “They take a few minutes to kick in.”

“All right,” he said, shrugging. “Whatever.” He folded his paper. “If we have to make an emergency landing, I’ll do my best
to drag you into a raft.”

“Don’t joke.”

“Not a joke,” he said.

She spotted a water fountain across the wide concourse and stood. The airport was not busy, something that seemed almost impossible
for Chicago. Most of the gates were sparse; there were seats everywhere. She saw a family all sitting together in a circle
at a nearly empty gate. They were playing UNO.

Across the concourse hallway, she placed one pill on her tongue and sipped the water. What dreams will I have? she wondered.
Probably none at all. Probably a black curtain. The last time she had taken sleeping pills, it had been just as she hoped
it would be. A big fuzzy God hand reaching down out of the sky, taking hold of a lever in her mind, pushing it down into the
total shutdown position, some more severe setting than even sleep. false death, she thought. Whatever it was that Juliet had,
whatever fake poison that had been. That’s what she wanted now. When I wake up, she thought, I will be somewhere else. I will
be almost as far away as Adam.