From the Corner of His Eye (69 page)

What
didn’t
come as a surprise to Paul was Agnes’s determination that the Whites, during their period of lying low, should stay with her and Barty.

“Paul,” she said, “you’ve got a lovely house, but Celestina and Grace are doers. They need to keep occupied. They’ll go stir-crazy if they don’t stay busy. Am I right, ladies?”

They agreed, but insisted that they didn’t want to impose.

“Nonsense,” Agnes breezed on, “it’s no imposition. You’ll be a great help with my baking, the pie deliveries, all the work that I put aside during Barty’s surgery and recovery. It’ll either be fun, or I’ll wear you down to the bone, but either way, you won’t be bored. I’ve got two extra rooms. One for Celie and Angel, and one for Grace. When your Wally arrives, we can move Angel in with Grace, or she can bunk with me.”

The friendship, the work, and not least of all the sense of home and belonging that everyone felt within minutes of crossing Agnes’s threshold—these things appealed to Celestina and Grace. But they didn’t want Paul to feel that his hospitality was unappreciated.

He raised one hand to halt the genteel debate. “The whole reason I stopped here first, before taking you folks on to my place, is so I wouldn’t have to bring your suitcases back after Agnes won you over. This is where you’ll be happiest, though you’re always welcome if she tries to work you to death.”

Throughout the evening, Barty and Angel—sitting side by side and across the table from Paul—listened to the adults at times and occasionally joined in the larger conversation, but primarily they talked between themselves. When the kids’ heads weren’t together conspiratorially, Paul could hear their chatter, and depending on what else was being discussed around the table, he sometimes tuned in to it. He picked up on the word
rhinoceros,
tuned in, tuned out, but a couple minutes later, he dialed back in when he realized that Celestina, sitting two places farther along the table from him, had risen from her chair and was staring in amazement at the kids.

“So where he threw the quarter,” Barty said, as Angel listened intently and nodded her head, “wasn’t really into
Gunsmoke,
’cause that’s not a place, it’s just a show. See, maybe he threw it into a place where I’m not blind, or into a place where he doesn’t have that messed-up face, or a place where for some reason you never came here today. There’s more places than anybody could ever count, even me, and I can count pretty good. That’s what you feel, right—all the ways things are?”

“I
see.
Sometimes. Just quick. For like a blink. Like when you stand between two mirrors. You know?”

“Yeah,” Barty said.

“Between two mirrors, you go on forever, over and over.”

“You see things like that?”

“For a blink. Sometimes. Is there a place where Wally didn’t get shot?”

“Is Wally the guy who’s gonna be your dad?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Sure. There’s lots of places where he didn’t get shot, but there’s places where he got shot and died, too.”

“I don’t like those places.”

Although Paul had seen Tom Vanadium’s clever coin trick, he didn’t understand the rest of their conversation, and he assumed that for everyone else—except Angel’s mother—it was equally impenetrable. But taking their clue from the risen Celestina, all those present had fallen silent.

Oblivious that she and Barty had become the center of attention, Angel said, “Does he ever get the quarters back?”

“Probably not.”

“He must be really rich. Throwing away quarters.”

“A quarter’s not much money.”

“It’s a
lot,
” Angel insisted. “Wally gave me an Oreo, last time I saw him. You like Oreos?”

“They’re okay.”

“Could you throw an Oreo someplace you weren’t blind or maybe someplace Wally wasn’t shot?”

“I guess if you could throw a quarter, you could throw an Oreo.”

“Could you throw a pig?”

“Maybe
he
could if he was able to lift it, but I couldn’t throw a pig or an Oreo or anything else into any other place. It’s just not something I know how to do.”

“Me neither.”

“But I can walk in the rain and not get wet,” Barty said.

At the far end of the table, Agnes shot up from her chair as her son said
rain,
and as he said
wet,
she spoke warningly: “Barty!”

Angel looked up, surprised that everyone was staring at her.

Turning his patched eyes in the general direction of his mother, Barty said, “Oops.”

Everyone confronted Agnes with expressions of puzzlement and expectation, and she looked from one to another. Paul. Maria. Francesca. Bonita. Grace. Edom. Jacob. Finally Celestina.

The two women stared at each other, and at last Celestina said, “Good Lord, what’s happening here?”

Chapter 79

ON THE FOLLOWING
Tuesday afternoon in Bright Beach, across a sky as black as a witch’s cauldron, seagulls flew out of an evil brew toward their safe roosts, and on the land below, humid shadows of the pending storm gathered as if called forth by a curse cooked up from eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog.

By air from San Francisco south to Orange County Airport, then farther south along the coast by rental car, one week in the wake of Paul Damascus and his three charges, following directions provided by Paul, Tom Vanadium brought Wally Lipscomb to the Lampion house.

Eleven days had passed since Wally stopped three bullets. He still had a little residual weakness in his arms, grew tired more easily than before he’d wound up on the wrong end of a pistol, complained of stiffness in his muscles, and used a cane to keep his full weight off his wounded leg. The rest of the medical care he required, as well as physical rehabilitation, could be had in Bright Beach as well as in San Francisco. By March, he should be back to normal, assuming that the definition of
normal
included massive scars and an internal hollow space where once his spleen had been.

Celestina met them at the front door and flung her arms around Wally. He let go of his cane—Tom caught it—and returned her embrace with such ardor, kissed her so hard, that evidently residual weakness was no longer a problem.

Tom received a fierce hug, too, and a sisterly kiss, and he was grateful for them. He had been a loner for too long, as a hunter of men pretty much had to be when on a long hard road of recuperation and then on a mission of vengeance, even if he called it a mission of justice. During the few days he’d spent guarding Celestina and Grace and Angel in the city, and subsequently during the week with Wally, Tom had felt that he was part of a family, even if it was just a family of friends, and he had been surprised to realize how much he needed that feeling.

“Everyone’s waiting,” Celestina said.

Tom was aware that something had happened here during the past week, an important development that Celestina mentioned on the phone but that she declined to discuss. He didn’t harbor any expectations of what he’d find when she escorted him and Wally into the Lampion dining room, but if he’d tried to imagine the scene awaiting him, he wouldn’t have pictured a
séance.

A séance was what it appeared to be at first. Eight people were gathered around the dining-room table, which stood utterly bare. No food, no drinks, no centerpiece. They all exhibited that shiny-faced look of people nervously awaiting the revelations of a spirit medium: part trepidation, part soaring hope.

Tom knew only three of the eight. Grace White, Angel, and Paul Damascus. The others were introduced quickly by Celestina. Agnes Lampion, their hostess. Edom and Jacob Isaacson, brothers to Agnes. Maria Gonzalez, best friend to Agnes. And Barty.

By telephone, he had been prepared for this boy. Strange as it was to find a Bartholomew in their lives, given Enoch Cain’s peculiar obsession, Tom nonetheless agreed with Celestina that the wife killer could have no way to know about this child—and could certainly have no logical reason to fear him. The only thing they had in common was Harrison White’s sermon, which had inspired this boy’s name and might have planted the seed of guilt in Cain’s mind.

“Tom, Wally, I’m sorry for the brusque introductions,” Agnes Lampion apologized. “We’ll have plenty of getting-to-know-each-other time over dinner. But the people in this room have been waiting an entire week to hear from you, Tom. We can’t wait a moment longer.”

“Hear from me?”

Celestina indicated to Tom that he should sit at the head of the table, facing Agnes at the foot. As Wally lowered himself into the empty chair to Tom’s left, Celestina picked up two items from the sideboard and put them in front of Tom, before sitting to his right.

Salt and pepper shakers.

From the far end of the table, Agnes said, “For starters, Tom, we all want to hear about the rhinoceros and the other you.”

He hesitated, because until the limited explanations he’d made to Celestina in San Francisco, he had never discussed his special perception with anyone except two priest counselors in the seminary. At first he felt uneasy, talking of these matters to strangers—as if he were making a confession to laity who held no authority to provide absolution—but as he spoke to this hushed and intense gathering, his doubts fell away, and revelation seemed as natural as talk of the weather.

With the salt and pepper shakers, Tom walked them through the why-I’m-not-sad-about-my-face explanation that he’d given to Angel ten days previously.

At the end, with the salt Tom and the pepper Tom standing side by side in their different but parallel worlds, Maria said, “Seems like science fiction.”

“Science. Quantum mechanics. Which is a theory…of physics. But by
theory,
I don’t mean just wild speculation. Quantum mechanics
works
. It underlies the invention of television. Before the end of this century, perhaps even by the ’80s, quantum-based technology will give us powerful and cheap computers in our homes, computers as small as briefcases, as small as a wallet, a wristwatch, that can do more and far faster data processing than any of the giant lumbering computers we know today. Computers as tiny as a postage stamp. We’ll have wireless telephones you can carry anywhere. Eventually, it will be possible to construct single-molecule computers of enormous power, and then technology—in fact, all human society—will change almost beyond comprehension, and for the better.”

He surveyed his audience for disbelief and glazed eyes.

“Don’t worry,” Celestina told him, “after what we’ve seen this past week, we’re still with you.”

Even Barty seemed to be attentive, but Angel happily applied crayons to a coloring book and hummed softly to herself.

Tom believed that the girl had an intuitive understanding of the true complexity of the world, but she was only three, after all, and neither ready nor able to absorb the scientific theory that supported her intuition.

“All right. Well…Jesuits are encouraged to pursue education in any subject that interests them, not theology alone. I was deeply interested in physics.”

“Because of a certain awareness you’ve had since childhood,” Celestina said, recalling what he’d told her in San Francisco.

“Yes. More about that later. Just let me make it clear that an interest in physics doesn’t make me a physicist. Even if I were, I couldn’t explain quantum mechanics in an hour or a year. Some say quantum theory is so weird that no one can fully understand all its implications. Some things proven in quantum experiments seem to defy common sense, and I’ll lay out a few for you, just to give you the flavor. First, on the subatomic level, effect sometimes comes before cause. In other words, an event can happen before the reason for it ever occurs. Equally odd…in an experiment with a human observer, subatomic particles behave differently from the way they behave when the experiment is unobserved while in progress and the results are examined only after the fact—which might suggest that human will, even subconsciously expressed, shapes reality.”

He was simplifying and combining concepts, but he knew no other way to quickly give them a feel for the wonder, the enigma, the sheer spookiness of the world revealed by quantum mechanics.

“And how about this,” he continued. “Every point in the universe is directly connected to every other point, regardless of distance, so any point on Mars is, in some mysterious way, as close to me as is any of you. Which means it’s possible for information—and objects, even people—to move
instantly
between here and London without wires or microwave transmission. In fact, between here and a distant star, instantly. We just haven’t figured out how to make it happen. Indeed, on a deep structural level, every point in the universe is the
same
point. This interconnectedness is so complete that a great flock of birds taking flight in Tokyo, disturbing the air with their wings, contributes to weather changes in Chicago.”

Angel looked up from her coloring book. “What about pigs?”

“What about them?” Tom asked.

“Can you throw a pig where you made the quarter go?”

“I’ll get to that,” he promised.

“Wow!” she said.

“He doesn’t mean he’ll throw a pig,” Barty told her.

“He will, I bet,” said Angel, returning to her crayons.

“One of the fundamental things suggested by quantum mechanics,” Tom proceeded, “is that an infinite number of realities exist, other worlds parallel to ours, which we can’t see. For example…worlds in which,
because of the specific decisions and actions of certain people on both sides,
Germany won the last great war. And other worlds in which the Union lost the Civil War. And worlds in which a nuclear war has already been fought between the U.S. and Soviets.”

“Worlds,” ventured Jacob, “in which that oil-tank truck never stopped on the railroad tracks in Bakersfield, back in ’60. So the train never crashed into it and those seventeen people never died.”

This comment left Tom nonplussed. He could only imagine that Jacob had known someone who died in that crash—yet the twin’s tone of voice and his expression seemed to suggest that a world without the Bakersfield train wreck would be a less convivial place than one that included it.

Without commenting, Tom continued: “And worlds just like ours—except that my parents never met, and I was never born. Worlds in which Wally was never shot because he was too unsure of himself or just too stupid to take Celestina to dinner that night or to ask her to marry him.”

By now, all here assembled knew Celestina well enough that Tom’s final example raised an affectionate laugh from the group.

“Even in an infinite number of worlds,” Wally objected, “there’s no place I was
that
stupid.”

Tom said, “Now I’m going to add a human touch and a spiritual spin to all this. When each of us comes to a point where he has to make a significant moral decision affecting the development of his character and the lives of others, and each time he makes the less wise choice,
that’s
where I myself believe a new world splits off. When I make an immoral or just a foolish choice, another world is created in which I did the
right
thing, and in that world, I am redeemed for a while, given a chance to become a better version of the Tom Vanadium who lives on in the other world of the wrong choice. There are so many worlds with imperfect Tom Vanadiums, but always someplace…someplace I’m moving steadily toward a state of grace.”

“Each life,” Barty Lampion said, “is like our oak tree in the backyard but lots bigger. One trunk to start with, and then all the branches, millions of branches, and every branch is the same life going in a new direction.”

Surprised, Tom leaned in his chair to look more directly at the blind boy. On the telephone, Celestina had mentioned only that Barty was a prodigy, which didn’t quite explain the aptness of the oak-tree metaphor.

“And maybe,” said Agnes, caught up in the speculation, “when your life comes to an end in all those many branches, what you’re finally judged on is the shape and the beauty of the tree.”

“Making too many wrong choices,” Grace White said, “produces too many branches—a gnarled, twisted, ugly growth.”

“Too few,” said Maria, “might mean you made an admirably small number of moral mistakes but also that you failed to take reasonable risks and didn’t make full use of the gift of life.”

“Ouch,” said Edom, and this earned him loving smiles from Maria, Agnes, and Barty.

Tom didn’t understand Edom’s comment or the smiles that it drew, but otherwise, he was impressed by the ease with which these people absorbed what he had said and by the imagination with which they began to expand upon his speculation. It was almost as though they had long known the shape of what he’d told them and that he was only filling in a few confirming details.

“Tom, a couple minutes ago,” Agnes said, “Celestina mentioned your…‘certain awareness.’ Which is what exactly?”

“From childhood, I’ve had this…awareness, this perception of an infinitely more complex reality than what my five basic senses reveal. A psychic claims to predict the future. I’m not a psychic. Whatever I am…I’m able to
feel
a lot of the other possibilities inherent in any situation, to
know
they exist simultaneously with my reality, side by side, each world as real as mine. In my bones, in my blood—”

“You feel all the ways things are,” said Barty.

Tom looked at Celestina. “Prodigy, huh?”

Smiling, she said, “Gonna be especially momentous, this day.”

“Yes, Barty,” Tom said. “I
feel
a depth to life, layers beyond layers. Sometimes it’s…scary. Mostly it inspires me. I can’t see these other worlds, can’t move between them. But with this quarter, I can prove that what I feel isn’t my imagination.” He extracted a quarter from a jacket pocket, holding it between thumb and forefinger for all but Barty to see. “Angel?”

The girl looked up from her coloring book.

Tom said, “Do you like cheese?”

“Fish is brain food, but cheese tastes better.”

“Have you ever eaten Swiss cheese?”

“Velveeta’s best.”

“What’s the first thing comes to your mind when you think of Swiss cheese?”

“Cuckoo clocks.”

“What else?”

“Sandwiches.”

“What else?”

“Velveeta.”

“Barty,” Tom said, “help me here.”

“Holes,” Barty said.

“Oh, yeah, holes,” Angel agreed.

“Forget Barty’s tree for a second and imagine that all these many worlds are like stacked slices of Swiss cheese. Through some holes, you can see only the next slice. Through others, you see through two or three or five slices before holes stop overlapping. There are little holes between stacked worlds, too, but they’re constantly shifting, changing, second by second. And I can’t see them, really, but I have an uncanny feel for them. Watch closely.”

This time he didn’t flip the quarter straight into the air. He tipped his hand, and with his thumb, he shot the coin toward Agnes.