Life on the Preservation, US Edition (10 page)

“What can I do that guys like that don’t know how to do?”

“Fly an airplane.”

Kylie laughed. “They want me to fly a Cessna?”

“Not a Cessna. They were modifying a fighter jet they called the
Penetrator
. Some of them thought it might be able to penetrate the Dome, reach Seattle.”

“I can’t fly a jet. Jesus, Billy! I never even got my license to fly little prop airplanes.”

“You won’t have to, trust me. The
Penetrator
is just something to give the boat people hope. Not hope for survival. They’re all sick. The
Penetrator
gives them hope that they can strike back, at least once. A lot of them were military.”

“Strike back at what?”

Billy subsided into the pillows and closed his eyes. He looked drawn and exhausted. It wasn’t just the concussion. Billy was getting sick. “Strike back at the zoo-keepers, I guess.”

Kylie opened her mouth. Excitement, fear, anxiety, confusion – they all passed through her. She closed her mouth, then opened it again and said, “Billy, does your head hurt much?”

“Like murder.”

“I’m going to read to you now, okay?”

“Okay.”

She opened the book and squinted at the contents page until she found
Mending Wall
, but didn’t turn to the page. “Billy, are the SABs real people?”

Billy moved his shoulders in a tiny shrug. “Did I ever tell you that you ask a lot of questions?”

“Why do you always say that?”

“Never mind. Go ahead and read, okay. I don’t want to talk anymore. I feel wore out.”

“‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’” Kylie began, but her mind wasn’t on the poem, not even the non-trespassing apple trees, which were her favorite. She wasn’t thinking about the Big Boat, or the jet airplane she would probably get killed in if she tried to fly it. She was thinking about Seattle.

CHAPTER NINE

SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012

I
AN SAT ON
a bench in the park behind his apartment building, holding Zach’s crazy suicide note. Shock, the anonymous call to the police, and then the call to Zach’s brother (thinking,
Am I really talking to anyone?
) had hollowed him out, but he was here where his friend had told him to be in the note:

Ian, you aren’t going to believe this but you’re fucked if you don’t. Have you felt weird lately, like déjà vu all the time? Never mind, I know you have. This is the reason: You have been here before. I mean right here on October 5, 2012. That’s because the day has been here before, over and over again. But you woke up, man. I don’t know how, but you did. And then you woke me up and I stayed awake, but you went back to sleep, and I’ve been trying to snap you out of it but you don’t want to believe me and you keep doing the same kinds of dumbass things. Over and over. Here’s the basics. The Day starts at 7AM and stops, I think, at midnight. During The Day you have free will and all that, but it doesn’t matter. You can’t leave the city. As soon as you try you wind up in some kind of limbo until it starts again. And there’s this guy I call the ‘Boogeyman’. He isn’t even human, I don’t think. Anyway, he runs the show. What a fucking game. Except there’s no way to score points and jump levels. By the way, I said I stayed awake? That’s not completely true. Some ‘Days’ I’m wide awake, totally sharp. But usually I’m only partly here. I remember some stuff, but not all of it. Mostly I feel anxious and weirded out and I don’t know why. But today I’m in the fucking ZONE, I know what’s happening. That’s why I’m going to kill myself. It’s the only way I can control my destiny. Okay that sounds crazy. I know. But here’s the thing. I’m going to kill myself and leave this letter for you so you’ll take me seriously, so it’ll jolt you out of your trance or whatever it is. This is going to traumatize you, man. That’s the point. Sorry to do it to you, but I’m desperate. It’s hell being the only one who knows. So if this works, then you’ll be awake again.
K
illing myself probably won’t make any difference to me because when The Day starts over I’ll probably start over too. There’s no escaping The Day. Even dead people come back. Remember that chick at the Grill? We’re all Zombies, man. So here’s some proof for you: A few times I hung out in that park across from your building, hoping you’d come back. And I noticed at the exact time every day – 4:06PM – there’s this cool sunbeam that lights up the top of the third tree from the southwest corner of the park, and right when it lights up, this black crow, that you can’t even see until then, jumps into the air and flies away north. It happens every time. It’s like people have free will and can change their actions inside The Day, but nature is totally predictable. The weather, for instance. October 5 starts out cold and clear in the morning then warms up like spring all afternoon. At sunset the clouds move in, and at about 11:00 it starts to rain. That’s nothing but a weather report, man. But the tree and bird, that’s not predictable. Okay, I’m getting sick of writing. But... there’s one more thing I have to tell you. I wasn’t going to, but I guess it’s the main reason I’m doing this. Something happened a couple of Day cycles ago. Something horrible. I can’t remember all of it, but the parts I DO remember I wish I could forget. Aliens. Their ships appeared in the sky over the city. Everybody was staring at them. Then the ships started cutting the city to pieces with some kind of energy weapon. Everything was burning. And I remember giants in the streets. I don’t want to think about them. I saw one of them kill that girl from the Grill. They were killing a lot of people, cutting them up, burning... Anyway, I’m going to do it now. I think it was the shock of that invasion that makes me remember so much this time. So now I’m going to shock you. I have to. And I don’t want to lose my nerve. So I’ll talk to you the next time around. And you know what? If I don’t come back from the dead, that’s cool with me. Because I can’t take it anymore. I can’t.

Ian consulted his watch. Almost four o’clock. 4:06 was the magic moment. It had to be a natural event, Zach had written. The actions of people were variable, but the weather never changed. Cold in the morning, sunny afternoon, clouds at dusk, rain starting in the night around eleven. Generalities you could get on the morning news. But from the vantage of this particular park bench at the particular approaching minute, something specific was supposed to occur. It wouldn’t, though. Of course it wouldn’t; Zach had been suicidally out of his mind. Just like Ian’s mother.

Tony, the guy who lived down the hall from Ian, came striding up the sidewalk with a pair of drumsticks in his fist. Tony ‘the tiger’ he called himself – totally, simplistically, a drummer. Ian privately mocked his flaming red mohawk and weight-lifter’s pointless physique (just how heavy were a couple of sticks?) but simultaneously envied him his apparent sense of unwavering identity. Tony jogged up the steps and disappeared into the building.

At 4:06, low in the western sky, a crack opened in a pink billow of cloud. A sunbeam lit the upper branches of the third tree from the southwest corner of the park, and from the new-lit place a crow jumped into the air and flew off.

“No fucking way,” Ian said. A panhandler shambling by in a grimy duffel coat stared at him then moved on. Ian scanned the suicide note, looked at the tree again.
Coincidence
. Except the sunbeam/bird acted as a memory toggle. Ghosts appeared on his conscious horizon, like images from a forgotten dream
. (XXX GIRLZ.)
He couldn’t quite see them, and when he tried harder they vanished.

The clouds moved, shutting off the sunset. All afternoon had seen a resurgence of summer. Now autumn was back. As twilight came on, the park emptied. Ian folded his arms, hands tucked under his armpits, the sheet of printer paper crackling in his fist. A profound loneliness overcame him.

Suicide.

His mother lifeless in cold bath water twelve years ago. Zach’s blood and brains sprayed across the hardwood floor of his condo as the stupid fish tank bubbled placidly. Ian hadn’t actually seen his mother dead. She had taken pills that time. His father, months later, reported the detail of the cold bath water, and it had stuck with Ian like something he’d witnessed first hand. But even though he hadn’t seen his mother dead Ian
had
been in the house when his father discovered the body. His father came out of the bathroom, his face ashen, and said, “She’s dead.” Ian had run out of the house, into the night, and didn’t come back for almost two days. In some ways, he had never come back.

This is going to traumatize you, man. That’s the point…

Fuck you, Zach.

I
AN’S SISTER
V
ANESSA
practiced hypno-therapy in an office on Second Avenue in the Bell Town neighborhood of Seattle, just a couple of blocks north of the Pike Place Market. It was a tiny space, the glossy red door and brass shingle tucked between the Lava Lounge and the Suite 100 Gallery. Ian was not at all sure he wanted to talk to Ness. But she was the only person who might understand. As he pulled into the curb Vanessa was letting an old man out the door. The man wore a blue seersucker sport coat, gray slacks, and one of those foxy-old-man caps, like what Sean Connery would wear. Vanessa, fifteen years older than Ian, wore a knee-length red skirt and pearl gray blouse. She looked good. Ian hadn’t seen her in well over a year. He killed the engine, removed his helmet, and shook his hair out. The seersucker guy said something to Vanessa.

“It’s my brother,” she said. “Hello there, Icky. Where have you been hiding?”

The seersucker guy nodded to him and walked away.

“All the usual places,” Ian said. “Mostly under rocks. Can we talk? I’ll buy you a drink.”

“You’re lucky you caught me,” she said. “Let me lock up.”

At The Pink Door, a funky Italian restaurant and bar in the Market, Vanessa ordered a green apple Martini. Ian had a bottle of Moretti, no glass. The bar was not too crowded yet. A waiter went around lighting candles in red glass cups on each of the tables.

“So how’s everything going?” Ian said.

“Splendidly. Icky, what’s wrong? I haven’t heard from you in forever. You don’t look well.”

“Zach’s dead.”

“Your friend, the game guy? I’m so sorry.”

“He killed himself this morning.”

“Oh my God, Ian.”

She reached across the table and touched his hand. He had to resist the urge to pull away from her. Generally, Ian didn’t like to be touched, and it was especially true today.

“There’s more,” he said.

Vanessa withdrew her hand and sat back.

“Tell me.”

Ian sighed, looked away, then said, “Nothing’s what we think it is.”

After a while, Vanessa said, “And...?”

He looked at her, cleared his throat, and plunged in. “This day is the same day, over and over again. It repeats. Endlessly. There’s a bubble over the city. If you go outside the bubble you get trapped in some kind of limbo until the day starts over. That’s what Zach believed. He wrote it all down in his suicide note.”

Vanessa sipped her drink, never taking her eyes off Ian. She set her glass down. “Well. He must have been very disturbed.”

“Maybe.”

“What else could it be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Icky.”

Ian slid his beer bottle around on the table top. “Some stuff has happened to me, some strange stuff.”

Vanessa nodded slightly, her expression neutral.

“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t feel completely rational.”

“What did your friend’s note say?”

“I have it here.” He took it out of his coat pocket and handed it to her.

“I’m surprised the police didn’t want to keep this,” Vanessa said.

“I took it with me before I called them.”

“Icky, I doubt that’s legal.”

“I doubt it, too. But if the note’s true, it doesn’t matter. If the note’s true,
nothing
matters. Anyway, the original is probably on Zach’s hard drive.”

Vanessa smoothed the crumpled paper out on the table top, put on her glasses and read it carefully. She removed her glasses and said:

“You believe this might be
true?
”

“Not in my mind I don’t.”

“Where else do you believe things?”

“Gut? I don’t know. That sunbeam really did touch the third tree at exactly the minute the note said it would, and the crow jumped off and flew north. I’m just saying.”

Vanessa sipped her green Martini.

“Look, I
don’t
believe it,” Ian said. “I think Zach must have been out of his mind. But after the crow flew I sat on that bench and sort of remembered things. Vaguely. I’m not even sure I saw what I saw. I don’t know. Did the tree light up at that exact minute? You see what I mean? My mind feels slippery. But it always does. For instance, I know Mom overdosed. I know that. But I saw this movie once where a woman used a razor on her wrists. Since then I keep thinking of Mom that way. I even dreamed it. Like the real thing is mixed up in my head with fantasy. Then when Dad described her–” Ian choked up, paused, went on. “–described her in the cold bath, it’s like I saw her myself. It’s like a memory of seeing her.”

Ian’s hands were cold. He worked them together nervously, not meeting Vanessa’s eyes.

“Ian,” Vanessa said. “I think I understand.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

She seemed a little cool all of a sudden. Ian felt confused.

“Anyway, I had this idea that maybe you could hypnotize me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know, to find out something? Find out if I’m nuts, I guess.”

“I see.”

“What?”

“You’re in Crazyland,” Vanessa said. “So naturally you come to me. The expert. Otherwise you keep your distance. Like I’m a plague sister. It’s all right, I do understand.”

“Come on.”

“Mom freaked you out, I had a breakdown, then Dad left as soon as you graduated high school. You didn’t want to catch ‘it’ so you stayed away. Now you think you’ve caught ‘it’ anyway.”

Ian blushed.“Something like that, I guess.”