"What would
you
do?"
Rob looked away at the kid playing with his toy soldier. "Okay, Livvie's stuck in that big empty house on her own, year in, year out, and when you're home she's on hormones that make her feel like shit. Just give the baby thing a break and focus on her. It's you who wants a kid most." Rob could be brutally frank and kind in the same breath. "You'll drive her away. Don't end up on your own like me. It's fucking grim. "
Mike didn't know if it was what he wanted to hear or not, but it was what he
needed
to hear. His heart deflated slightly and he felt it would never be full again.
Yes, it's me. Might as well face it.
He tried to look away from the little boy. "You're right."
"Think about adoption," Rob said. "You'd have to beat them off with a shitty stick. Even kids with families would run away from home to get a billet at Zombie Towers."
Mike nodded. It felt painfully final, but it was easier to hear it from Rob. "I'd worry that it'd be like buying an accessory. Celeb style."
"Not to the kid you give a home to. It'll be a lifeline. And you'll love them like your own flesh and blood, believe me."
Rob had the ability to switch into profound mode in a heartbeat and pronounce universal truths. It was one of the things that made him so reassuring.
"Come on." Mike put a tip on the table. "Let's go. I'm a weird bastard, aren't I? I'm sorry."
Rob followed him out to the parking lot. "Zombie, humans always want more than they've got. If you've got everything money can buy, and you're smart, you're bound to want things that have meaning instead."
He opened the car door to let the hot air out and start the aircon. Mike tried to imagine Rob forming any kind of friendship with some of the guys he'd known at school. Rob would probably have punched them out within five minutes and not felt remotely minimized by the experience.
Before they drove away, the little boy with his GI Joe came out of the diner ahead of his dad and ran into the arms of a woman who'd just parked. Mike didn't need to know anything about them to put the story together. The little boy was the spitting image of his mom.
But it didn't need to be that way, did it? Rob said so, and Rob was always right.
DUNLOP RANCH, ATHEL RIDGE, WASHINGTON
JUNE.
A FedEx truck trundled up the track, as exotic a visitor as a camel train as far as Ian was concerned. The ranch didn't get many deliveries. He watched from the barn as Gran signed for the package, which was probably more dollar bills.
Last time the money had arrived by DHL, the time before that had been via UPS, and occasionally Gran went to the post office in Athel Ridge to collect it. Whoever sent the payments liked variety. Ian knew enough about the way the outside world ran to realise that things like pensions and donations didn't arrive that way, so while this was regular, it wasn't routine. Gran didn't trust banks. She was strictly cash-only.
"Here, Ian." She sat at the kitchen table, counting banknotes like a teller and bundling them into small wads and rolls with elastic bands. "Stow this away."
It was part of the emergency plan. Gran hid the cash around the ranch in case some disaster stopped them from accessing a central location. Ian had seen enough storms and forest fires on the news to understand how easy it was to lose everything you had in a matter of minutes, so it seemed like a reasonable precaution. He'd given up asking where it came from years ago. Gran said it was all legal, a regular gift from someone she'd done a very big favour.
Well, she knew best. She'd raised him and he thought she'd done a good job. But he was eighteen, and he'd begun to accept that Gran was also getting older and wouldn't be around forever. He couldn't bring himself to talk to her about it. She was fit and well now, perfectly capable of looking after the ranch, but she was in her sixties and her health wouldn't hold out forever. He had to be ready to take care of her. He couldn't think beyond that to a time when he'd be completely on his own.
How will I cope?
Ian felt like two separate creatures, a grown man who was old enough to vote and had girls on his mind most of the time, and a useless, scared little boy who didn't know the first thing about dealing with the wider world. He had to shape up. He wasn't too crazy to shoulder responsibility.
But I don't even have a driver's licence.
Gran went on counting. "We'll have to talk about this and plan for the future," she said, not looking up. "I need to make sure you won't need to worry about money or a roof over your head."
It didn't sound like she meant right now, but at least that opened the door enough for him to feel okay about mentioning it the next time. He took some of the rolls of banknotes and placed them around the ranch — the pantry, the gun locker, the grab bag in the hall, the steel tool cabinet in the barn — and then went to weed and water the vegetable patch at the back. If he kept busy, he wouldn't waste time worrying about things he couldn't even imagine. He needed his routine. It helped him pretend he had things under control.
When he scrubbed up afterwards, he steeled himself to use the mirror that was usually folded out of sight. He ran the clippers through his hair and tried to remember if it was still the same dark brown that it had been three months ago, which might have been the real colour or just his imagination. He had no way of knowing. He kept staring, waiting for the inevitable distortion to kick in, but nothing happened. Even the hair on his forearms stayed the same. He felt quite pleased with himself for braving the reflection.
People learn to cope with mental problems. OCD. Panic attacks. I've seen it on TV. Maybe I'm getting this under control.
But what if it's neurological? Something wired wrong in my brain, like face-blindness. There's nothing I can do to cure that.
Gran had a doctor friend who came to see them every few years, a guy about her age called Charles Kinnery. He'd always check Ian over as a favour, because Gran didn't trust physicians or dentists either.
Yeah, I can ask Kinnery. When's he coming again?
Ian had never had the nerve to ask the guy before, in case Gran hadn't mentioned that he was crazy. Maybe it was time.
He shook the hair from the clippers into the toilet bowl, flushed it, and folded the mirror back against the wall. It hadn't felt quite so bad this time. Perhaps he'd been doing this all wrong. Maybe he could teach himself to accept what was really there just by forcing himself to look every day rather than avoiding it. Willing it to stop hadn't worked at all.
When he finished the chores, he settled down to watch TV, his only glimpse of a world he'd probably never be part of. It was also his sole guide to how to behave around the kind of people he'd never met, like girls, police, bullies, and bartenders. Wasn't that how normal people learned to fit in as kids, though, by watching others? Ian rehearsed his lines, mimicking the actor as he offered to buy a woman a drink, right down to matching his accent.
Normal people probably didn't notice that kind of detail. Ian knew he had to soak it up, every bit of it, every pause, every rise in pitch, every mannerism, because he hadn't spent years absorbing it gradually by mixing with others.
"What are you having?" He tried out the words. Maybe everybody needed a script in real life. "What are
you
having? So what can I get you?"
Well, that was how impersonators did it. He'd seen a comedian interviewed about how he got his impressions right by watching videos of celebrities for hours on end, dissecting every blink and syllable. As far as Ian was concerned, there was no difference between working out how to talk like the President and learning how act and sound like a regular guy.
Perhaps he could play the role of a sane person long enough to make something of his life.
This
wasn't a life. Life was the thing he saw on TV. Some of it looked as bad as Gran said it was, but the rest seemed to be the things he wanted, necessary human things – friends, interesting places, movie theatres, ball games,
girls.
Ian sometimes dared to think about going into Athel Ridge, getting a job, and making friends. But that wouldn't happen unless he could ignore his hallucinations. All he had to do was keep telling himself they weren't real, but if anyone looked at him too closely, he knew he'd wonder if they could see that he wasn't quite right in the head.
They'll know I'm crazy. They'll smell it. People are still animals, deep down.
"You feel like coming into town with me today, Ian?" Gran felt in her pockets. "I need to pick up some gentian spray for the sheep."
Ian found it easier to venture into town in the winter. If he turned up his collar and pulled his beanie down tight, he didn't feel that people were staring at him. Summer was more of a challenge. He relied on sunglasses and a baseball cap. You could buy stuff without needing to say a word, and if you paid cash and got out of the store fast, nobody would even look at you. But today he felt like he had
freak
stamped on his forehead. He wanted to hide.
"I think I'll check the fences," he said, instantly ashamed of chickening out. "Will you explain all the tax stuff to me one day?"
Gran took the truck keys off the hook. "Sure. But it's all written out in the folder for when you need to do it yourself." The folder was almost a person in its own right, a battered manila thing bound with heavy four-way elastic bands that Gran said had come from a lawyer's office. She put her arms around him for a moment. "You're a good boy, Ian. I just wish I could give you a better life. This isn't much fun for a young guy."
"I'm fine. Nobody could do more for me than you have." Ian had worked out years ago that his alternative with a feckless mother would have been life in an institution or worse. Gran had done what was best for him, however lonely he felt. "I know what would have happened to me if you hadn't been around."
Gran swallowed hard. It always upset her, but he needed to talk about it. The older he got, the more it had grown into a vast, silent black cloud that neither of them could really discuss but that was gradually blocking every bit of light from his existence.
"You're different, Ian," she said. "And humans don't like what's different. Animals are a lot more tolerant."
"Is there something I don't know about myself? You'd tell me the truth, wouldn't you? It won't hurt me."
She concentrated on her keys, examining them too carefully and blinking fast. That was her I-have-to-pick-my-words face.
"I think you know yourself pretty well," she said. "You're very self-aware. Not many people are."
"I meant would I know if I was crazy enough to be a danger to people. Do mad people know how sick they are?" Ian watched a lot of news. Sometimes he'd follow murder trials and wonder how serial killers saw the world, whether they knew just how weird they actually were or if they simply thought everyone else was abnormal. "Is that what you try not to tell me?"
Gran shook her head a few times, more like she was trying to stop herself thinking about something than just saying no.
"You're not a danger to anyone," she said. "They're a danger to you. I don't just mean all the assholes waiting to take advantage of you. I mean the do-gooders and government busy-bodies who'd think they knew what was best for you. But I'm going to get things sorted out for you, I promise. Now — key check."
Gran treated a trip into Athel Ridge like being inserted into enemy territory, a country full of people with credit cards and all the other recorded, numbered, cross-checked, and monitored things that tethered their lives to the scrutiny of government and corporations. She always wanted to get in and out as fast as she could. There were probably SEAL teams that didn't plan missions as obsessively as she did. Ian went through the checklist with her as he'd done for as long as he could remember.
Was it really that hostile out there, all surveillance and conspiracies? Sometimes he found it hard to believe, but then he'd switch on the radio or TV again and Gran's diagnosis was confirmed. The world was a rough place that would have no patience with someone like him. The radio was the worst. He could hear the hate spilling out of it. He stuck to NPR these days, where everyone was rational and polite, the way the world probably wished it really was.
"Bye, Gran." Ian waved her off. He didn't usually do that. "I'll fix dinner."
He watched her truck kick up dust down the track until it disappeared from view, then collected his tools and drove up to the boundary to check the fences with Oatie.
The greyhound was a lonely, clingy kind of dog who seemed to need someone to follow. He lay watching while Ian worked, occasionally sitting up and looking around when he heard something beyond the range of human ears. Ian spent an hour or two knocking posts straight with a hammer and fixing wires in place with the staple gun. Eventually Oatie jumped up, ears pricked, and looked towards the house.
That usually meant he could hear Gran's truck. But he didn't go racing down the hill this time; he just stood staring. Ian stopped to listen. The rattle of tyres on gravel carried a long way in the still summer air, and the greyhound's expert assessment was that it wasn't Gran's pickup. It'd be a delivery, then, something Gran hadn't been expecting, a rare event. Ian jumped in the truck and headed back to the house.