Quicksilver(27)
At first Sparky spoke dispassionately, as though reciting a doctor’s diagnosis that he had memorized. “Not a severe case. You wouldn’t know it to look at her. No physical deformities. No organ damage. Just attention deficit disorder, spells of hyperactivity, mood swings. She was often argumentative for no good reason.” He hesitated. When he continued, his voice was softer, and a thread of sorrow raveled through it. “But there was a goodness in her, too, a sweetness that I think was the true Corrine, that would have been the only Corrine if she hadn’t been warped by FAS.”
I said, “Bridget hoped that Getting to Know Me might take her cup of spit and find her father. But, Sparky, didn’t Corrine give even a hint of who the father might have been when she left her baby with you and split?”
“Two important things,” he said. “First, she didn’t look pregnant until the last two months of her third trimester, and then only slightly. She was one of those rarities who gain maybe ten or twelve pounds max. When she told me she was pregnant, she said she hadn’t realized it for the first seven months. I don’t see how that could be, but she was quite adamant. Although Corrine didn’t drink alcohol, there was concern that the baby would be underweight and have birth defects. No need to worry. Bridget popped out at seven pounds, fourteen ounces, as lovely a baby as you’ve ever seen.”
She had grown lovelier over the years. I didn’t say as much, because I thought that might sound as dopey as “sweetums.”
Instead, I reminded Sparky that he’d said he had two important things to reveal.
“Well, you have to consider how Corrine was. When she was in a hyperactive state, which could last hours or weeks, she could become obsessed with odd ideas. Like that there’s a city on the dark side of the moon. Or that the Titanic never sank and the whole story was invented to cover up a conspiracy of some kind, though she couldn’t figure out what that conspiracy might be. So when she brought the baby to me a week after the birth, said she was going away for a while, and then insisted that she’d not had relations with any man for fourteen months, that she’d become pregnant without coitus, I figured this was another fantasy. She wasn’t a virgin. She didn’t claim that an angel appeared before her to announce the birth of a savior. She was more inclined to believe that this had something to do with those who lived on the dark side of the moon or with a new protein drink that she had tried. She was always half-lost, the poor girl. But one thing I’ll swear to at the cost of my soul—Corrine didn’t lie. She had fantasies, or call them delusions if you will, but she did not lie. The day she left her baby with me, she wasn’t hyperactive, only bewildered and fearful. She believed what she said, though I knew it couldn’t be right. Then as the years went by and Bridget proved to be so gifted . . . Well, like I said, Corrine didn’t lie. And maybe in this case, somehow, she wasn’t delusional, either.”
For several miles, that stunning revelation crowded everything else out of my mind. Yet in spite of all the undivided consideration that I gave to the idea, I could make no sense of it.
As we passed the town of Cortaro, on the outskirts of Tucson, Bridget broke our mutual silence when she said, “Well, if my father came down out of the stars, I hope he was Luke Skywalker rather than Jabba the Hutt.”
|?13?|
Surrounded by four mountain ranges, the city of Tucson occupied a high desert valley that was once the floor of an ancient sea. The first people settled there along the Santa Cruz River about twelve thousand years before the night that I arrived riding shotgun, with Sparky in the back seat once more and Bridget Rainking at the wheel. We were relying on her mojo to draw us to a vehicle that could replace the soon-to-be-hunted Buick.
Just as the sea became a desert, so in a few millennia, the city would become something other than a city, perhaps a sea again, or a jungle, because all things pass. Earth convulses violently when its magnetic poles shift, continental plates thrusting over or under one another, lowlands abruptly surging up, mountains crumbling, three-thousand-foot-high walls of seawater racing several hundred miles inland and scrubbing away everything in their path. Then there’s also the fact that to remain livable, the planet depends entirely on solar activity, which can decline and induce ice ages that last thousands of years, or which might one day flare violently enough to boil oceans and incinerate an entire hemisphere. Yet we humans have the hubris to think we can build eternal cities, stop the aging process, control the climate, and create utopia at the point of a gun. I used to believe our subconscious recognition of our true helplessness in the face of cosmic forces was what explained the insane lust for power that makes so many into murderers, rapists, thieves, and raving-mad ideologues. For their kind, such mean control allows the illusion of greatness, inspires even the foolish hope of immortality on Earth.
However, now that I was aware that there were monsters in the world with diabolical intentions, I wondered what percentage of human misery might be a product of our own actions and how much was the work of the silent Screamers. Since time immemorial, the world’s legends and faiths had included demons and other malevolent spirits, so perhaps in our postmodern rejection of the past, we cast aside more wisdom than ignorance. If envious humanity sought godlike power and fell from grace, it might be true that some race before us did the same, that we share this broken world with predators who were once beings of light and promise, but transformed themselves into creatures that worship the outer dark and wish the world to be one vast graveyard.