The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott (20 page)

"Hey, they're probably watching Lifestyles of the Bitch and the Ignoramus by now." Crackling static submerged
Etherton's
chagrin into a watery
diegesis
. "You know, I figure if it was IK
Pegasi
that blew instead of Rho
Cassiopeiae
, half our ozone layer might have burned off by now. But then again, it's too early for that one to go critical. Might have to wait a while. Million years or two, give or take. If we're still around, and haven't killed off the ozone ourselves, that is."

"Or blown each other up," David added.

"Right. Well, listen. I better go, but I'll be in touch." A sputtering electrical pulse. "Hope you come visit me on the mountain, buddy. Might even have a job for you, who knows. I know the budget doesn't justify it right now, what with
Nasheed
gone, but this supernova scare is bound to boost public interest in astronomy, and
Shakil
might have left us in his will, too."

He didn't respond, remembering all his nights on the mountain, alone, with the vast and empty darkness.

"It's something to sleep on, at least, isn't it?" Doug asked, from the ether.

"Sleep would be nice," he replied, finally. Then he thought, ironically, about his lifestyle experiment--his intension to wallow in excess, the way the top one percent did it, in order to see if that would make him come back alive. "But then again," he added, "last night I had a dream we were the ones who went up to
Seacrest's
penthouse with those weapons. The guy tried to escape in his helicopter, so we put some bullets into his gas tank. Caught it on fire. He jumped off the roof when we cornered him, too. Then he got to watch his reflection in all that glass and chrome on the way down. Just like those people who jumped off the World Trade Center did. Only, I think the person in the reflection wasn't really
Seacrest
, Doug. It was me. Like I was looking through his eyes."

He waited a full minute for Etherton to say something in response, but there was only the fitful crackle of static, now, like the lifeless radio signals emanating from the galactic core. And then, when he was sure the connection was gone, he replaced the handset as a new loneliness swept him.

What happens now?
he wondered, finally.

"Bye, dear," her mother finally said, then hung up.

A moment later, when the phone rang again, Valerie sighed. She wondered what crumb of matronly advice she'd missed in consuming this week's half-baked mincemeat pie. Glancing at her kitchen phone's Caller I.D., though, she was surprised by the unfamiliar number there.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Val. It's me."

"I'm sorry,
who?"

"It's Trish! Long time no hear, girl."

"Patricia. . .Slater?"

"Well, it ain't been that long since we shared a dorm room, has it?"

Only half a lifetime
, Val calculated,
since that regrettable semester
. "What do you. . . I mean, where you calling from, Trish? Are you in Tucson?"

"No, I'm still in South Carolina," the somewhat huskier voice of her former roommate now lamented. "After my divorce I got stuck with an old house in a housing slump, and only this month managed to sell it. Lookin' for a place to start over fresh, again. How you
doin
' out there in the wild west, these days? Hear you're a celebrity of sorts, can that be true?"

There was a trace of astonishment in the distorted phone voice that also belied hopefulness, against all odds. At a loss for escape, Val replied, dully, "Not really. I'm producer of a local TV talk show. Co-producer, actually."

"Sounds pretty cool to me."

"Just local politics, local heroes. I'm not on the air much. Not the host or anything." Val paused, trying to think of an out. . .
an errand to run? Someone at the door?
"So you're already divorced? I didn't even know you'd gotten married."

"Second divorce, tell the truth. Got two kids from Eric, none from Alex. The bum." Now Trish laughed a husky, braying bark against any show of bitterness. "Sole custody of Jimmy, who's seven, and
Tonja
, my sweet little three year old, who's a cute
lil
' angel. . .ain't you, sweetie?" A brief sound like mewing in the background. "Eric told the judge I drove '
im
to drink, but I never touched the stuff myself, so he dug his own grave, there. That, and three DUIs." She cackled the scoff of a longtime smoker. "Now, I'm
dyin
' to hear it, girl. Don't keep me
waitin
'. You ever find your doctor? Got you some rug rats of your own
runnin
' round?"

"Listen, Trish. . ."

"Yeah?"

"Who was it told you how to find me? I mean, my number, it's unlisted."

"Oh. . .well, I have a friend who's a private investigator. Knows all kind of tricks. He's the one found out my first ex was
cheatin
' on me."

"I see."

"Owed me a favor, too,
considerin
' the favors I done him!" Another bass note chuckle. "You should think about usin' a P.I. on your own hubby, if ya suspect something. Come in pretty handy, settlement time."

"I'm not married, Trish. Never been."

"Oh my god. Really?"

Went to the zoo the other day, in lieu of lunch, and saw my boyfriend there, though, cuddled up with some blond bimbo on the bench next to the otter exhibit.

 
"Yup."

"Oh my god."

A pause as Val imagined putting the receiver quietly down, wondering guiltily how such a desultory act would feel.

Then a child's cry in the background. "No," Trish said, her voice muffled. "No!"

"What?" Val asked.

"Sorry, just being a mom. Go on."

Go on. What was this, now--confessional?

"Not much else to say. We'd talked on the phone for hours at the beginning, and then, months later, we were suddenly talked out. Just like people you see on cell phones at the mall, jabbering on and on without really having anything to say. Of course the technology is there, so you have to use it, right? Pick up your cell, dial an old acquaintance. Are you bored too? Did you see that new show on TV? How's it looking for coffee next week, or reunion next year? Have a nice day. Bye."

Another pause while Trish attended to a muted whining. Val opened her mouth to apologize. To explain how the call had caught her at a bad time. Off guard. But then the phrase
can you hear me now
came to mind, with the idea of a dropped connection, and she hung up instead.

Suddenly, impulsively. Just like she'd hung up on her boyfriend.

A moment later, frozen by what she'd done, she felt a tear form in one eye. She resisted letting it fall, waiting for the phone to ring again. When it didn't, she lowered her head, and let the tear land onto the back of her hand.

~ * ~

Bad things happen in threes,
Val recalled the adage, when her Taurus suddenly stalled on the way to the store. As dusk deepened, she fingered her now dead cell phone, and reckoned the quote was true, too. Pausing before one last try at the ignition key, she recalled again the look on David's face as he'd turned to see her. . . Betrayer surprised by betrayed. Classic. Just moments before the look, she'd witnessed him kissing the blond woman, overlooking those opportunistic otters with the same playful antics and questing snouts. Then, just like that, she'd turned away from them both. On her way out, as she'd walked past chattering monkeys, it had felt as if the world had turned feral somehow. Colors paled. The air inexplicably filled with allergens, and she found it hard to breathe.
Led down the garden path.
That was one way she might have put it. As though a lightning bolt had exposed the chasm between reality and what she believed, she'd seen things in stark clarity, then. With her lunchtime iced coffee spilling onto the sidewalk beneath her, she also saw the anteater, its long snout rooting everywhere, and was reminded of her boss, KTAT's station manager. Saw, too, the lazy lion, the bored elephant, and the trapped yet restlessly pacing polar bear--creatures that reminded her of still others at work. For herself she'd identified with one lone parrot, a solitary caged bird near the exit that did not sing, but instead was forced to witness several strutting peacocks nearby, whose freedom she imagined it envied.

Back to the moment at hand, Val gripped the ignition key once more, and turned it. Only a few clicks emitted, this time.

Nothing ever turns out the way you expect, Trish.
 

She got out, locked up, and looked around her. Grim rows of warehouses flanked the other side of the street. Abandoned warehouses, since this was late Saturday, with the towers of downtown Tucson office buildings only a distant backdrop. What she needed now was to get out of the area, and find something that actually worked for a change.

She began to walk, wary of movement around her. When a vehicle slowed from behind, she glanced back to see a lone man with a beard driving a pickup.
 
Her heart beat faster at that. Yet she purposefully ignored the man, willing him to drive on. When the man finally beeped, startling her again, she kept walking determinedly until he roared by, accelerating at the dismissal.
    

Now she considered how she'd looked, in her gray business suit and black shoes. Resembling Maria Shriver in facial features and hair style, she wondered if the man might have recognized her from her occasional appearances on the show. Yet
Tucson This Week
aired on Sunday morning, so probably not, she decided. She was just a skirt. Somebody to pick up. Didn't matter to him if she'd not been deemed sexy enough for a news anchor job, or that viewers preferred blond over brunette, and early thirties over late. Those things only mattered to the station owner, and apparently also to David. If she wasn't in the habit of dressing impeccably to overcome her supposed flaws, maybe even a trucker wouldn't notice her. Without a sense of style, maybe she would have been shuffled off camera and conveniently replaced long ago, just as anchor Cheryl Atkinson had been upon getting pregnant.
   

There was an unexpected chill to the desert air now, with the sun gone. Val shivered, and quickened her pace. Glancing over her shoulder compulsively, she saw street lights flicker to life against a mounting invasion of darkness. High palm treetops swayed in a breeze that didn't quite reach the ground. When she heard another clicking sound, she imagined that someone was following her, back from around the curved wall where her car had stalled.
 
But then she told herself it was just that--imagination. Shadows of the mind. If she could make it under the bridge, there was a taco franchise with a pay phone on the other side. Not far at all.

Going under the bridge, though, would be like entering a tunnel. She saw that. The tunnel was lit and wide, but it was a tunnel nonetheless. One that arched downward and turned slightly to the right, with two overhead roads and a train's tracks spaced out in three massively reinforced spans above, a hundred feet apart. The nearer she got, the higher the wall beside her became, too. Soon it was over twenty-five feet high, its long straight lines of rough concrete making a washboard pattern designed to deaden and defuse the echoes of traffic. When the first overpass blotted out the sky above her, she realized that the clicking she'd heard was actually from tires somewhere above, crossing sections of elevated roadway.
  

This subterranean world was one of harsh stone. Acres of it amassed in pillars and walls and road and sidewalk. The vast slabs didn't seem to absorb all of the thunder made by a van that roared by in a sudden swooping assault, but perhaps the effect was heightened in her mind by the industrial grade lighting--stark and unearthly yellow in hue--cast by the recessed silver fixtures glowing beneath each bridge. When she began to feel uneasy, the mercifully distracting thought came to her that such a project was probably a boondoggle. Something she might even pitch to Greg as a story, given how few cars traveled here. But perhaps Tucson city planners had the future in mind, when a larger link into downtown made it more cost effective. She imagined that future, next, when these elevated bypasses might whisk late carloads of city workers, their destination the untainted subdivisions of suburbia. Rushing headlong, car windshields would mimic what higher windows saw, and then from a dozen ramps and multi-tiered downtown parking lots a conjured python of traffic, reflecting the dying sun, would be shunted north.
 

    
When the second stilted ribbon of concrete thrummed above her, Val walked quickly under it, glancing apprehensively into the shadows of the concrete pillars. And that was when she passed the girl.
 

A teenager, dressed in black, was leaning against the inside of one of the hard, gray stanchions. Except for a startling flash of bust line, she might have been mistaken for a troll instead of a child.
 

A child. . .
 

The impression registered with Val too late, since she'd paused in surprise only long enough for one step to be out of rhythm. Her mouth had opened to ask the obvious question, but then she hadn't asked it. Or stopped. Perhaps it was the glimpse of the skull tattoo on the back of the girl's neck, she reasoned, along with the realization that her business suit probably represented authority, something that such a girl was likely to be disaffected toward. Perhaps it was the unexpected distraction, too, at seeing someone--anyone--willingly lingering in such an austere and cheerless environment.