The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(35)

What do you think it’s supposed to mean? I guess it’s just a coincidence that Bobbyboy has got you sequestered away up here all by your lonesome.

Coincident to what?

You know coincident to what. Or do you want me to spell it out for you?

My personal life is none of your business.

Really? Well the small one is all but dumbstruck. What is it that you think I’m doing here, Hortense?

I’ve no idea.

Yeah, right. Jesus it’s cold in this place.

So I can see your breath. Big deal. It’s all just a big act. I’m not impressed.

Yeah, okay. So what else would you like to discuss?

Your departure?

I just got here.

What time is the first show? I think it’s too late for a matinee.

Yeah? Well, who knows. I may do a few steps on the boards myself. You’re not so easy to entertain, you know.

I cant really imagine you dancing.

Yeah, well. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when a chap is dancing. Could be a number you’re not familiar with.

The Kid had paused and was standing in the dormer window looking out over the darkening countryside. The wind sheared thinly along the tin eaves and the glass rattled in the sash and was still again. The girl watched him. My grandmother is going to be calling me to supper, she said. But the Kid seemed distracted. Yeah, he said. Okay. She turned to the mirror and for a moment she thought he was gone but he was there in the glass, his small figure framed in the last light. Watching her.



* * *



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The purpose of all families in their lives and in their deaths is to create the traitor who will finally erase their history forever. Comments, anybody?

I had good reason. Anyway, I was twelve. Find anything else?

Genealogies are always interesting. You can trace the whole thing back to some stone tracks in a gorge if you like. You’re about to doze off and then all hell breaks loose. When you peer into the glass these vergangenheitvolk are peering back. They at least didnt come on the bus. You’ll be happy to hear. I think. Where does your stuff stand in these histories? Do reflections also travel at the speed of light? What does your buddy Albert think? When the light hits the glass and starts back in the opposite direction doesnt it have to come to a full stop first? And so everything is supposed to hang on the speed of light but nobody wants to talk about the speed of dark. What’s in a shadow? Do they move along at the speed of the light that casts them? How deep do they get? How far down can you clamp your calipers? You scribbled somewhere in the margins that when you lose a dimension you’ve given up all claims to reality. Save for the mathematical. Is there a route here from the tangible to the numerical that hasnt been explored?

I dont know.

Me either.

Photons are quantum particles. They’re not little tennisballs.

Yeah, said the Kid. He dredged up his watch and checked the time. Maybe you’d better go eat. You need to keep your strength up if you aim to wrest the secrets of creation from the gods. They’re a testy lot by all accounts.



* * *



—

He closed the watch and put it away. He shook his head. Jesus, he said. Where do the days go?





In the evening he went down to the bar and got a hamburger and a beer. No one spoke to him. When he went out Josie tilted her chin at him. I’m sorry, Bobby, she said. He nodded. He walked up the street. The old paving stones wet with damp. New Orleans. November 29th 1980. He stood waiting to cross. The headlights of the car coming down the street doubled on the wet black stones. A ship’s horn in the river. The measured trip of the piledriver. He was cold standing there in the fine rain and he crossed the street and went on. When he got to the cathedral he went up the stairs and went in.

Old women lighting candles. The dead remembered here who had no other being and who would soon have none at all. His father was on Campa?ia Hill with Oppenheimer at Trinity. Teller. Bethe. Lawrence. Feynman. Teller was passing around suntan lotion. They stood in goggles and gloves. Like welders. Oppenheimer was a chainsmoker with a chronic cough and bad teeth. His eyes were a striking blue. He had an accent of some kind. Almost Irish. He wore good clothes but they hung on him. He weighed nothing. Groves hired him because he had seen that he could not be intimidated. That was all. A lot of very smart people thought he was possibly the smartest man God ever made. Odd chap, that God.

There were people who escaped from Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.