Warp (5 page)

“Relax. I have a key. If we're careful they'll never find out—they're overseas.” He yawned. “Well, they're in the Caribbean.”

Hollis watched him, feeling with one foot for the opening of a pair of jeans. Peters stood up and went back over to the bookcase. He took out a book and looked at it in the half-darkness.

“Did you know that J. D. Salinger has two whole novels, brand-new, locked up in a bank vault somewhere in Vermont? He won't publish them.”

“Why not?” Blake said, from the couch.

“I don't know. Some hippy-dippy Zen-type reason.”

“What's their name?” said Hollis. “The family friends, I mean.”

“Donnelly.”

Hollis thought for a second.

“Didn't we use their Cape house once? Why don't we go there?”

“No.” Peters made a face. “I'd never go there now. There's something about beaches in the fall—I can't stand it. Dead horseshoe crabs. Old people with metal detectors. Heaps of fucking … I don't know. Whatever it is. Kelp. Makes you want to kill yourself.”

He looked up. His glasses flashed in the light from the desk lamp. He put his hands in his pockets and took out a pack of Marlboros and a book of matches. With a tricky little sleight-of-hand gesture, he opened the matchbook and lit a match with one hand.

“Besides, I hate that stupid prefabricated cottage. It looks like a displaced motel room. You start feeling like fucking Alfred J. Prufrock out there. Life's passing you by, I'm so insignificant, etc., etc. There was a movie I saw once, about these guys who were desperately trying to kill this alien who was morphing weirdly all over the place in this research station somewhere up above the Arctic Circle. Some really revolting special effects. It was a trip. Anyway, at the way end there's just these two guys sitting in the middle of nowhere, in this Arctic wasteland, with their whole camp destroyed, and you basically know they're going to die, even though they've just saved the world from this alien. It's Kurt Russell, actually. Kind of like a metaphor for his whole career, in a way.”

“Not since
Stargate
,” Blake said. “Now he's B-list again.”

“You don't mind if I smoke, do you?”

“No,” said Hollis.

“Knock yourself out,” said Blake.

Peters watched the match flame meditatively, as it dwindled down to a little blue pearl and finally vanished in a puff of smoke.

“I need something to ash in,” he said.

“There's a can next to your foot.”

“Anyway, it's probably all closed up,” he went on. “The cottage. Besides, I doubt if I could get the key, except if it's in the Dover house.”

“I don't know,” Hollis said. “The whole thing sounds a little weird.”

“Well, look, go or don't go, I don't care. Don't spoil it for me with your, like, moral qualms.” He rolled his eyes. “What else do you have to do? Anyway, think what Mr. Donnelly made last year—probably about five hundred thousand? You probably live on about
ten
thousand a year, at this point. Is that social justice? These are troubled times, Hollis: we have to look at the underlying causes. Is it for us to settle questions of right and wrong? Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out.”

He dragged on his cigarette.

“Besides,” he said, exhaling, “it's not like they'll press charges or anything if they catch us. They know me.”

“Close that window, would you, Blake?” Hollis said. “It's fucking freezing in here.”

A muscle in his chest started to twitch involuntarily, under the bathrobe, and he pulled the lapels around him more tightly.

He looked up at the white Arctic sky.

“That's what we get for trying to save the world,” he said wryly.

Powdery snow swirled across the white crust.

“How're you going to get a key?”

“We have to sneak in and get it. That's the catch. There's one door in the back that they always leave unlocked. It's their Achilles' heel. Their tragic flaw. We'll have to get kind of pumped up for this, Hollis, it's a punk thing. Sid Vicious, man.
Épatez les bourgeois. Ne travaillez jamais.
Anyway, aren't you sick of hanging around this fucking slum? I sure as hell am.”

Peters turned around and faced the other window, with his hands clasped behind his back. He was broad enough that his shoulders filled the frame, obscuring Hollis's view. His hair made a wavy silhouette against the light outside.

“What do you pay on this place, anyway?” he said, after a while.

“Four twenty-five.”

“That's not bad,” said Blake.

“Anyway, what else do you have to do?” Peters turned back around to face them. “You need something to tell your grandkids about, when you're old and horrible and drooling and nobody loves you anymore. They'll have a spare set of house keys somewhere—we'll just take those and then go back tomorrow night when they're gone. They'll never catch us. ‘All that which is necessary for life is the rightful property of the people.'
Comme a dit
Robespierre.”

“Oh,
très bon,
” Blake said. “Did you just make that up?”

“You know, Vanessa Redgrave used to leave the door of her house unlocked when she went out. She said all her stuff was supposed to belong to the people.”

“Why don't you just go over to her place?”

“Who's Vanessa Redgrave?” said Hollis.

“Their son is doing some kind of internship or something at Hallmark, too,” Peters went on. “As in Hallmark cards. I hear he's going out with the heiress to the Honeywell fortune, or whatever's left of it. A real fucking comer, anyway. He and I were playfellows, in our youth.”

He looked up.

“Anyway, if we're going it has to be tonight. Don't you want to get out of your bubble for a change?”

“We fear change.”

“What ever happened to boys in bubbles?” said Hollis. “Aren't they news anymore? Are you going, Blake?”

He shook his head.

“I shouldn't even hang around with you guys. This is the kind of stuff that comes up at confirmation hearings.”

Hollis went back into the anteroom to finish dressing. He let the robe slip off his shoulders. Looking through a heap of clean clothes on the floor of the closet, he found a white tuxedo shirt with the collar ripped off and a dark red suit jacket. As he put on the jacket, he felt something in the inside pocket and took it out: a piece of onionskin typing paper folded in thirds. There was a block of text on it, typed with a manual typewriter—the whole rectangle of words was palpably impressed into the paper.

“She's still writing you poems?” Eileen looked over at him, then reached out and took the piece of paper.

“It's not to me just because she gave it to me.”

“Don't you think it's time you and she had a frank conversation, Hollis? I'm trying to make an honest man of you here.”

She walked over to the couch, sat down on the arm, and flopped backwards onto the old vinyl seat cushions. Air whooshed out of them, a little maelstrom of dust in the sunlight from the window. Her dress slid part of the way up her pale thighs. The folded piece of paper rested on her stomach.

She stared up at the ceiling, blankly.

“I can't read it,” she said.

“Is there anything to drink?” Peters said. He stepped out of the bedroom into the kitchen alcove. Blake was looking through the stacks of tapes on the floor.

“You just asked me that,” said Hollis. “There's water.”

He heard the sound of water running and Peters shifting dishes in the sink. Then it stopped. Peters opened the freezer.

“Jesus,” he said. “You're holding out on me, Hollis—there's gin back here.”

“Oh. Sorry, I forgot it was there.”

“Look at this stuff: Crystal Palace. You want some?”

“Maybe a shot. With some water.”

“The police are so weird,” Peters said, over the sound of his mixing drinks. “I was watching some of those transit police guys the other day. Just hanging around. Pounding the beat. I have this theory that about a hundred years from now it's just going to be different kinds of police, fighting it out in the nuclear rubble—nomadic tribes of highway patrolmen and state troopers, roaming around in the ruins of our nation's shattered infrastructure. Troglodyte subway police who surface at night to steal our children and raise them as their own.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“Or not,” Blake said, from the bedroom.

“Police are on the way out,” said Hollis. “I read it on Usenet. In the future it's supposed to be all multinational corporations.
Zaibatsus.
Then they'll all have their own private paramilitary forces.”

“Yeah. True.” Peters stirred. “I guess that nuclear holocaust stuff is pretty
passé
anyway.”

He did a fake computer-voice:
“Let's play … Global Thermonuclear War.”

When he came back into the room he brought the drinks with him, a gin and water for himself and a shot and a glass of water for Hollis. He sat down heavily on the futon next to Blake, and Hollis came in from the anteroom and sat at the desk. From outside in the street the sound of the trolley drifted in, rumbling past with its bell ringing.

“What are you thinking about, Hollis?” said Eileen.

He looked up at the ceiling without answering.

“You know,” he said, after a few seconds, “whenever you say something incredibly clich
é
like that, I can't help thinking about all the other people you've probably said it to after you had sex with them.”

“Well, I never think about them.”

“I think my favorite's that one you met on the subway.”

“Christ, Hollis, must you be so psychotically fucking jealous all the fucking time?” she said, sitting up, the sheet slipping down off her bare breasts. “God knows you've slept with some lovely individuals in your own time, and you don't hear me whining about it!”

She flopped back down again, and the bed creaked.

“Besides, I haven't seen him in years.”

“You're right you haven't seen him,” Hollis said. “He's dead. I killed him.”

Blake yawned.

“Damn,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I didn't go to bed till around five this morning. I saw a roach in my room and I couldn't go to sleep. The sun's rising, and I'm completely naked, on my hands and knees under the kitchen table, with a rolled-up newspaper.”

“That's a pretty picture.” Peters sipped his drink. “Look, are you coming tomorrow?”

“Why don't we ask some girls?” said Hollis.

“Girls ruin everything.”

“There's no point without any girls.” Hollis was buttoning his shirt slowly, with one hand, staring off into space.

“Let's ask Sarah and Ashley and them,” he said.

“We'll talk about it later. Come on, we're going to catch
Metropolis
at nine. You want to come?”

“Seen it. Look, we're going to have to call them tonight if we want them to come.”

“They won't come anyway, Hollis. Forget it. Think about something else. Take your mind off it. Look, why don't you meet us after the movie? We're all going to the GT.”

“What about Emily?”

“Emily? That girl.” Peters snorted. “She's too cheap to meter.”

As they walked over to the door, something heavy hit the floor upstairs with a
bang,
and the light fixture rattled.

“Jesus!” Peters said, looking up. “Look, why don't you call her yourself? You're coming, though, tonight? To Dover?”

“Tonight?” Hollis frowned. “Why?”

“Why? How soon they forget. To get the key, that's why.”

“I guess so.”

He snapped open the locks.

“Don't fall asleep,” said Peters, stepping out into the hall.

In the darkness of the garden I could dimly make out rows of giant pods, each one visibly beginning to take on human form.

“Don't fall asleep!” he shouted. “That's when they get you!”

“Why don't you call Alison?” Blake said.

“Oh, that was a droll little affair,” said Peters. “Forget about it. You know what women are like? They're like those long, skinny blocks you get in Tetris, the ones made out of four blocks straight in a row. First when you need them you can't get any, then when you don't need them anymore they're fucking everywhere and you don't know what to do with them.

“Every once in a while I ask myself if Alison and I are ever actually going to get together, and of course the answer is no, and it's upsetting, so I quit thinking about it, and soon I get back some of my self-esteem, and then I squander it all again running around after her. It's kind of a cycle. Good thing I'm getting wasted tonight or this might actually start to bother me. Midnight, right? The movie's at the other theater, down on JFK Boulevard. Not the main one.”

“She ain't worth the salt in yer tears,” Blake said.

“Courage,” I said. The young adjutant came up with his horse.

He glanced back at me piercingly—his vision was unusually acute—and a little sadly.

“As for that, mon vieux,” he said, “je n'en ai rien.”

He swung up into the saddle. It was the last time I was to see him alive.

Hollis waited at the door while Peters and Blake walked away down the hall, backwards, facing back towards him, their shoes echoing loudly on the tiled floor.

“See you there,” he said.