The Big Dark Sky (65)
Jimmy—and whoever operated him—stopped three feet from her.
Wind raced down the shingled roof and rattled the rain gutters. The arthritic walls creaked.
Meeting his fierce Grendel gaze, addressing whatever malevolent presence had trespassed into the cerebral rooms beyond those two differently colored windows, Joanna dared to say, “All those years ago, you were doing what you claim that you’re forbidden to do. All those years ago, when I was an innocent child, you were already corrupt.”
His anger didn’t relent as, in a voice as raw and guttural as ever, he said, “You know nothing. I did only what was necessary. I couldn’t use another animal to talk to you. They don’t have the apparatus for speech. I needed his vocal cords, his tongue, the unique muscles of his human mouth, his lips.”
By his self-justification, he seemed to insist that indeed he did conduct himself according to a madman’s idea of a moral code.
She seized the moment. “You say ‘another animal,’ as if you still insist that he’s only one himself. You know better. You used him to enchant a little girl. You did what was forbidden. Why?”
He looked away from Joanna, past her, to the day beyond the window. His anger seemed to have evaporated in an instant. His rough voice softened with what might have been melancholy. “I am supposed to have no emotional reaction to the passage of time, but only a mathematical appreciation of it.”
That statement was of such a different character from what had come before that Joanna stood in bewilderment, wondering if she would ever understand him, whoever he might be, whatever he might be, this reader of minds and puppeteer of animals.
Still focused on the window, he said, “For countless years, that was true. Isolation allows for study and the gathering of knowledge, but it also encourages reflection, too much reflection. One day mere isolation became loneliness, for which they believed that I had no capacity.”
“They? Who are they?”
When once more he turned his attention from the window to her, his face and voice conveyed a profound sadness. “Loneliness gives time a new and deeper meaning. Loneliness is an ache, a ceaseless yearning. There seemed no end to it, no other person with whom I could form a bond, no one to give me a defense against despair. And then I discovered you. I needed desperately to speak with you, to say, ‘I am here. I am your friend.’ The grotesque, damaged boy had the apparatus for speech but not the capacity.”
“But why me?”
“Because you were different.”
“From what? From whom?”
So quick that she could not shrink from him in time, he seized her left wrist in his right hand and squeezed it tightly. “Different from the Crow Tribe who tortured and killed the Sioux, different from the Sioux who tortured and killed the Crows, the Blackfoot warriors who slaughtered the Salish, different from the white-man armies that made war on them all. It’s a lonely, hard land here, and my ability to probe a mind has a limited radius. I’ve known too many thieves, murderers, rustlers, but precious few who’re righteous, none as innocent and good of heart as you were in those days.”
His suggestion that he’d lived here for centuries was no more fantastic than his mind reading, yet the beseeching tone of his fractured voice seemed sincere.
“There’s a bigger world than this,” she said. “So many good people out there.”
“There’s the internet now. I use it. Oh, how I can use it. Not to scan a mind, but enough to see, to know there’s no haven from corruption, from hatred and madness.”
As quickly as his anger had abated, it returned. He didn’t merely release her hand but flung it away, as if the contact was repellent.
“I can read one mind at a time, and one is too many. I don’t want to be in the minds of your kind anymore, in all that selfness. You’re not the girl you were back then. You’re not sweet Jojo anymore. You’re Joanna, just another parasite, proof that Asher Optime is right, that there’s no meaning in the ceaseless striving of your kind, but there is much damage done by it. Humanity has earned a terrible reckoning, which I have the power to facilitate.”
Joanna had never heard of anyone named Asher Optime, and she suspected that to ask about him would gain her nothing. “If you kill me, you also kill the girl I once was.”
“You killed her!” he declared. “You! You! Your ambition, your need to acquire, to be somebody, to rise in the world. That’s what put an end to Jojo.”
Joanna’s fear was matched by indignation at the arrogance from which his fury grew. His anger wasn’t righteous, but self-righteous.
“When I was a girl, my mother read to me. I loved stories and wanted to grow up to be a storyteller. Jimmy—or you, whoever the hell you are—made four years of my life into a fantasy, a wonderful story. As much as anything, you set me on the path I took, a life of stories, the life of a novelist.”
He was not moved. “It is the human way to rationalize its destructive nature. To take no blame. To blame others.”
The edge of the windowsill was hard against the small of her back.
When Jimmy’s unknown master fell silent and when those fearsome eyes turned to the window again, Joanna said, “You loved me once, as perhaps my father never quite did. You were my secret friend—and I was yours.”
“There’s nothing but loneliness now,” he declared, as once more his mood changed in an instant, from anger to melancholy. “Until the final human being is eradicated, until the sun dies and the last of the stars is extinguished. Even then, under the big dark sky, that terrible sky, I’ll continue, the last sentient creature in a cold silent universe, forever thinking, forever yearning, forever without hope. The prospect haunts me, the endless horror.”