“Where did you learn how to do that?” I said. “From the BGs?”
“Yeah. I figured it would come in handy someday.”
The small square room smelled of mold and dust from the gash Sean had left in the flowered wallpaper. We carried the goods we’d bought inside and stacked them up by the window. Michael unwrapped a chocolate bar and used the paper to write a note, then fed the whole thing to the Chaos critter.
“Go find José,” he said and tapped the left side of his face.
The critter whined once, then turned transparent and disappeared. We waited out in the living room for about twenty minutes before it returned. It trotted over to Michael, made a disgusting gurgling sound, and vomited an oddly clean note onto his shoes. Michael picked it up, read it, and grinned.
“They’re on the way,” he said.
We all hurried down to the storeroom, but the creature disappeared once we’d gotten well inside. As soon as it left, I felt the room shift. For a moment I could barely stay on my feet thanks to the nausea of seeing double. The violet wallpaper, the cartons of Jimmy’s old collections, everything Aunt Eileen had put into the room existed as semitransparent shapes, as if they’d been made out of scratched-up plastic. Beyond them stood the solid presence of the bright yellow wallboard, the torn sheet at the window, and the boxes of goods that Mike and I had brought in.
“You’d better just wait in here,” Michael told me. “You can look out the window, though.”
He opened the window and climbed out. The last traces of Nanny’s old room disappeared and left me standing in another world. I walked over to the window and leaned on the sill to see it.
The lot that this house sat on was roughly the same size and shape as that belonging to the Houlihan house, but instead of lawn and flowers, I saw row after row of vegetables, strangely distorted and misshapen vegetables. Morning glory plants as tall as trees grew in tangles of vines supported by wooden poles. The blue and purple flowers stood out vividly in the watery sunlight, huge flowers maybe six inches across. Out among big tomato plants studded with lumpy green fruit, two teen boys had grabbed a furious old man and were holding him by the arms. He was speaking Spanish so fast, spitting out the words, that I couldn’t understand him, while the boys laughed and held on tighter every time he tried to wriggle free.
Michael stood by the window talking in slangy English with a blond boy of about his own age, who wore a pair of much-mended brown pants and a dirty Giants T-shirt. He was a good-looking kid, I thought, until he turned his head to say hello to me. I had the crazy thought at first that he’d plastered mushrooms on his face. Whether they were warts or tumors, I don’t know, but growths crusted the entire left side of his face and neck, brown and scabby like layers of old mulch.
“This is José,” Mike said. “That’s my sister, Nola.”
“Hey, hi,” José said. “And hey, thanks. Mike told me you gave him the money for the stuff.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re welcome. Thanks for saving his neck when he was here before.”
“Sure. I knew he was one of us the minute we saw him.” He grinned, exposing a gold front tooth. “Once we got the blood off him, anyway.”
Michael laughed and returned the grin.
“Tell me something.” I pointed to the enormous tangles of flowering vines. “Why does he plant so many morning glories?”
“The seeds get you real high,” José said. “We deal with the old dude here and then sell them.”
“Got it,” I said. “Thanks. I just wondered.” I’d read somewhere that scientists thought morning glories might be one of the few plants that would flourish in high radiation conditions. I was seeing the theory confirmed.
José also had six fingers on each hand. I noticed it when he came into the room with Michael to haul the stuff we’d bought outside. When they were done, they stood outside the window and talked for a few minutes more, then shook hands. José whistled to the other boys, who let the old man go and came running to see what Michael had brought them. Other teens came out of the places where they’d been hiding among the plants and clustered around them. The old man recovered his dignity enough to creep up to the edge of the crowd. When Michael grabbed a two-pound bag of coffee beans and handed it to him, he grinned, his mouth wide and toothless.
While the BGs went through the boxes, I stared fascinated at this glimpse of a shattered and poisonous San Francisco. I could just see over the garden up the hill, where at home, nice looking houses sat in tidy rows. Not here—I saw a lot of unpruned trees and wild clusters of bushes. Among them stood the occasional shack or rambling wooden shelter. Distantly I heard dogs barking.
A few at a time, the gang members picked up boxes and drifted away until only José and a brown-haired girl with dark circles under her eyes stayed to talk with Michael. She wore a faded red tank top, a denim skirt way too short even for my taste in clothes, and a pair of heavy brown ugly shoes, one of which looked distinctly orthopedic—Lisa, I assumed. She said little, just stared at Michael while she ran one skinny finger up and down the glass bottle of perfume he’d given her. Looking at her arms, nearly fleshless, and prominent clavicle, I realized for the first time that, yeah, someone really could be too thin. Finally she turned and walked away with an odd rolling gait. The foot must have pained her. I’d never seen anyone with a club foot before. In my world, after all, babies had those problems corrected rather than being dumped in empty lots.
Michael shook hands with José one last time, then climbed back through the window. For a moment I saw double again, only this time the ghostly shapes belonged to José’s world and the solid ones, to mine. When Michael shut the window, José’s world disappeared. By the time we walked out into the hall, the gate had completely closed, and I saw nothing but Jimmy’s old collections in their cartons, the proper shade at the window, and the violets on the torn wallpaper. Michael slammed the door behind us.
“Tell me something,” I said, “do you think José and crew will try to use the gate?”
“They can’t, not without me to open it.” Michael picked up the board he’d left against the wall. “Nobody else in the BGs is a world-walker.”
“Do you think you’ll ever go back there again?”
“I dunno.” He shrugged. “It’s a pretty dangerous place.”
“It’s probably also radioactive. It takes a long time for the leftover death from a nuclear war to decay. I’d hate to have you lighting up Geiger counters for a hobby.”
Michael shrugged again and fished in his jeans pockets. He brought out the nails he’d taken from the door and began sliding them back into the board. It took him several minutes to line the board and the nails up with the holes in the door, but eventually everything looked just like Uncle Jim had left it.
“The prospect of a long slow death from radiation poisoning may not mean much to you.” I took up my cheery little theme again. “But it’s not exactly a cool way to go.”
“Yeah.”
“Mike—”
“Just shut up!” he snapped, then softened his voice. “You’re right, okay? I just don’t like thinking about it, what’s going to happen to all of them.” He turned around to look at me, and I could see tears in his eyes. “They’ll be dead before they’re thirty. If the cops don’t get them, the rads will.”
“I should have thought of that. I’m sorry.”
“Well, maybe some of them will be okay. Some people do live a long time even with all the rads, like the old guy who owns the house. But no one knows why.”
“Look, I’m real sorry I mouthed off.”
“It’s okay.” He sighed and took the padlock out of his shirt pocket. “It’s thinking about Lisa that really bums me out.”
“I kind of wondered if that was the case.”
He shrugged. I waited. He slipped the padlock back onto the staple, then closed it with a click.
“The Lisa here, you know?” Michael said at last. “I don’t think I can see her again.”
“She broke up with you already?”
“No, not what I meant. I don’t think I can stand to see her again. I just don’t know how to tell her.” He turned around and looked at me with eyes full of real distress. “Hey, there’s this other girl just like you, Lisa, but she’s a cheap whore in another world, and she’s gonna get real sick, too, one of these days, and here you are, okay and everything, but I can’t look at you without seeing her, too. That’s not going to go over real well.”
“No, it isn’t.” I thought hard, but nothing came to me. “I don’t know what to suggest, Mike, except to play for a little time. You were beaten up pretty bad. Tell her you’re still kind of concussed, and you have to stay home and rest, doctor’s orders, and then see what you feel like later.”
“Okay. I’m beginning to see what you and Pat meant, when you talked about how fucking hard it is to be an O’Grady. I just didn’t see it before.”
“We all learn, and it’s always lousy.”
Michael said nothing more while we went outside. We got into the truck so he could drive me home, but rather than starting it, he leaned back in the seat and rested his hands on the steering wheel.
“Ah, hell,” he said finally. “At least I got them some cool stuff. Thanks, Nola. I’ll pay you back. Uncle Jim told me last night that he’ll pay me for yard work. He wants to build some new back steps.”
“Well, you don’t have to.”
“I want to.” He managed a smile. “I don’t want Inspector Nathan thinking I’m sponging off his girlfriend.”
“He wouldn’t approve of that, no.”
If he ever finds out, I thought. If either of us ever see him again. Fat chance of that.
I was trying to reconcile myself to Ari being gone forever, but every time I logged on to my regular e-mail, I scanned down the list, dreading to see his final good-bye. I did get a second letter a couple of days later, announcing that Interpol had cleared him of any wrongdoing in his use of deadly force. He ended that one mysteriously, “further developments to come.” I assumed he meant the news that our affair was dead and gone. As the days passed and I received no dismissal, I could put some distance between us in my mind. After all, I’d only known the man for a couple of weeks. He couldn’t matter that much to me.
I had a lot of work to keep me busy, reports to file about the Silver Bullet Affair, research into the Peacock Angel cult, further discussions with Y about Michael and his talents, and the problem of the Houlihan house. Whether Washington would want to seal that gate, I couldn’t say, though Aunt Eileen worried about it daily. I could see why, of course, even beyond the rational reasons against having a radioactive back door. Now that I’d gotten a good look at it, I sensed a real peculiarity about that deviant world level. Nothing about it added up in my mind. Yet the thought of asking Mike to take me there for a good look around made my stomach twist.
I took refuge in my other work. I also went back to Morrison Marketing one last time to clear out my personal belongings. The Agency was shutting that cover story down. I returned to Chaos watch and regular dice walks, too, while I tried to decide if I should ask for a transfer out of San Francisco. It would depend on whether my family would be safer with me there or elsewhere. Certainly my sister Kathleen expected me to stay. We had lunch one day, and she mentioned that she was giving a party soon that she wanted me to attend. Aunt Eileen had no qualms about letting me know that she wanted to keep me in San Francisco.
“Michael needs you,” she told me one night on the phone. “It’s very nice of your agency to take an interest in him, and heaven knows the scholarship money will help with his college, but he needs a member of his family here with him. Sean can’t help much.”
“He needs help himself.”
“It’s not easy, being an O’Grady.”
“Yeah. I should know.”
“Well, that’s very true, of course. Anyway, Michael probably won’t ask outright, but he really wants you to stay.”
That sealed the deal. “Okay, I’ll put in for a permanent assignment tonight over the Internet. It’s not a hundred percent certain that I’ll get it. Most likely I will, but you never know what Washington will decide. I’ll contact my handler tomorrow.”
When I linked up with Y in the trance state, he had a surprise of his own for me. It’s a good thing I recognize the touch of his mind, or I’d have been convinced that he was an impostor. Instead of a blue-eyed blond, his image appeared Japanese-American, with thick but heavily gray hair and glasses. In his youth, though, he must have been good-looking, and he still had a distinguished air.
“Wow,” I said, “this is quite a change!”
“Yes,” Y said, “I thought over what you said about appearances. It was time I showed you the truth. There really was no reason for me to look like Tab Hunter.”
“Who?”
“A Fifties movie star. His career was over before you were born. Now, about this assignment request, I take it you want to stay close to your family.”
“Yeah, that’s part of the motivation.”
“Well, it won’t be a problem. I have news for you, good news, I hope. The Agency’s decided to establish a San Francisco bureau.” He rolled his eyes. “The higher-ups are calling it the Apocalypse Squad.”
“Say what? Why?”
“The big boss thinks it’s funny. Why else?”
“I thought maybe someone had a vision.”
“No, nothing so sensible. At any rate, I’ll start the paperwork for your new assignment and send it to you via TranceWeb. You’re getting an offer to head up the new bureau. Don’t be too flattered, though. No one else particularly wants the job.”
I laughed. “I can see why,” I said. “Does this mean a raise?”
“Yes, and a better expense account. I’ll send you the details.”
The details arrived that night at my home computer. I looked them over while I ate a couple of cold-storage apples for dinner. The new salary, if everything went through, would allow me to move out of Mrs. Z’s and find a decent apartment. Best of all, I’d be in charge with no supervisor to make my life miserable, though of course I’d continue to report to Y. I finalized my end of the agreement and sent it off right away, then called Aunt Eileen to share the good news.