NOS4A2(73)

“It is a truth serum?” Sig said. It took a profound effort to verbalize this question; each word was a bucket of water that had to be laboriously drawn up from a deep well, by hand.

“Not exactly, but it sure relaxes your intuitions. Opens you up to suggestion. You wait till your wife starts to come around. She’ll be gobbling my cock just like it’s lunch and she missed breakfast. She’ll just think it’s the thing to do! Don’t worry. I won’t make you watch. You’ll be dead by then. Listen: Where is Vic McQueen? I’ve been watching the house all day. It doesn’t look like there’s anyone home. She isn’t away for the summer, is she? That’d be a pain. That’d be a pain in the brain!”

But Sigmund de Zoet didn’t answer. He was distracted. It had come to him, finally, what he was hearing, what was producing that hiss, that scratch, that thump.

It wasn’t inside his head at all. It was the record he had been listening to, the Berlin Orchestra playing the Cloud Atlas sextet.

The music was over.





Lake Winnipesaukee


WHEN WAYNE WENT TO DAY CAMP, VIC WENT TO WORK ON THE NEW book—and the Triumph.

Her editor had suggested maybe it was time for a holiday-themed Search Engine, thought a Christmas adventure could be a big seller. The notion, at first, was a whiff of sour milk; Vic flinched from it reflexively, in disgust. But with a few weeks to turn it over in her mind, she could see how brutally commercial such an item would be. She could picture, as well, how cute Search Engine would look in a candy-cane-striped cap and a scarf. It never once occurred to her that a robot modeled on the engine of a Vulcan motorcycle would not have any need for a scarf. It would look right. She was a cartoonist, not an engineer; reality could get stuffed.

She cleared a space in a back corner of the carriage house for her easel and made a start. That first day she went for three hours, using her blue nonphotographic pencil to draw a lake of cracking ice. Search Engine and his little friend Bonnie clutched one another on a chunk of floating glacier. Mad M?bius Stripp was under there in a submarine crafted to look like a kraken, tentacles thrusting up around them. At least she thought she was drawing tentacles. Vic worked, as always, with the music turned up and her mind switched off. While she was drawing, her face was as smooth and unlined as a child’s. As untroubled, too.

She kept at it until her hand cramped, then quit and walked out into the day, stretching her back, arms over her head, listening to her spine crack. She went into the cottage to pour herself a glass of iced tea—Vic didn’t bother with lunch, hardly ate when she was working on a book—and returned to the carriage house to think about what belonged on page two. She figured it couldn’t hurt to tinker with the Triumph while she mulled it over.

She planned to bang at the motorcycle for an hour or so and then go back to Search Engine. Instead she worked three hours and was ten minutes late to pick Wayne up from camp.

After that it was the book in the morning and the bike in the afternoon. She learned to set an alarm so she’d always be on time to get Wayne. By the end of June, she had a whole stack of pages roughed out and had stripped the Triumph down to the engine and the bare metal frame.

She sang while she worked, although she was rarely aware of it.

“No one sleeps a wink when I sing this song. I’m gonna sing it all night long,” she sang when she worked on the bike.

And when she worked on the book, she sang, “Dad been driving us to Christmasland, just to ride in Santa’s sleigh. Dad been driving us to Christmasland, just to pass the day away.”

But they were the same song.





Haverhill


ON THE FIRST OF JULY, VIC AND WAYNE PUT LAKE WINNIPESAUKEE in the rearview mirror and drove back to her mother’s house in Massachusetts. Vic’s house now. She kept forgetting.

Lou was flying into Boston to spend the Fourth with Wayne and see some big-city fireworks, something he had never done before. Vic was going to spend the weekend going through the dead woman’s stuff, and trying not to drink. She had a notion to sell the house in the fall and move back to Colorado. It was something to talk about with Lou. She could work on Search Engine anywhere.

Traffic was bad on 495. They were trapped on the road, under a headache sky of low, fuming clouds. Vic felt that no one should have to put up with a sky like that cold sober.

“Do you worry much about ghosts?” Wayne asked while they were idling, waiting for cars in front of them to move.

“Why? You creeped out about staying the night at Grandma’s? If her spirit is still there, it wouldn’t wish you any harm. She loved you.”

“No,” Wayne said, his tone indifferent. “I know ghosts used to talk to you, is all.”

“Not anymore,” she said, and finally traffic loosened up and Vic could ride the breakdown lane to the exit. “Not ever, kid. Your mom was screwed up in the head. That’s why I had to go to the hospital.”

“They weren’t real?”

“Of course not. The dead stay dead. The past is past.”

Wayne nodded. “Who’s that?” he asked, looking across the front yard as they turned in to the driveway.

Vic had been thinking about ghosts, not paying attention, and hadn’t seen the woman sitting on her front step. As Vic put the car into park, the visitor rose to her feet.