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He was very aware of the past tense. “Never?”

“Even if we spent every second of fifty years in the same room.”

He understood. “That's a fact people have to live with.”

“It's why I got the crazies,” she said. “I was crashing against my aloneness and taking it out on you.”

She had always felt it to some extent, naturally, but only over the past year had she tried to deal with it straight on. She could even remember the night, the moment, it had come forward in her mind, and instead of replacing it as usual with other less serious ruminations, she had opened it, fold after fold, as though it were an interesting package. She was exploring its contents before she realized she maybe should have left well enough … alone.

Aloneness.

What a maddening realization. All her life she had taken for granted that her common experiences were truly common, the same as those of others. Now she wasn't sure that her senses were not unique. And if they were hers alone, not sharable.…

The most ordinary things became embossed in her observation. Peter eating a peach. Peter painting with blue. Peter going barefoot.

Once at a nighttime outdoor concert, she got to thinking about all the different experiences the thousands of people were having as they listened to the same music. She imagined what a cacophony of responses lay beneath their collective attentiveness. An abstract din. It bothered her. It came between her and enjoyment. She developed a headache and went home.

“What's the matter, Amy?”

“I'm in an emotional valley.”

A chronic case of aloneness was what she really had, that struck and spread to the nerve roots. Poets and such had died by their own hands from it. Of course she didn't suffer from it as intensely as that. Enough, though.

It was the reason, actually, why she hadn't had an abortion. She'd thought perhaps pregnancy might be the one way of overcoming aloneness, at least temporarily. She would be literally connected to another human being. Soon, and too late, she found her body was shared but not her feelings. No, unless she fooled herself, pregnancy wasn't the way to verify her existence.

Now, on Island Four, there had been silence enough for Peter to ask again what her thoughts were.

“I'm figuring out life,” she said, matter-of-fact. She also managed a smile.

“When you do, let me in on it.”

She hushed him. Her mind was going through a colloquy she'd started and stopped countless times before. Now it seemed more coherent.…

“Do you believe in God?”

“I believe in a creator.”

“Why?”

“Because creativity is organization and nature is intricately organized, so it must have been created.”

She didn't stop to consider whether or not that was logical.

“And we are part of nature?”

“Part of the arrangement.”

“The creator had a free hand?”

“Certainly.”

“Why, then, did the creator give us such a dilemma? Aloneness.”

Her mind was racing now.

“There must have been a reason.”

“Purpose.”

“The creator could have made us differently, a more compatible design.”

“Stick a finger in another person's ear to share an experience.”

“Could have.”

“What makes aloneness bearable?”

“Love.”

“Doesn't cure it but makes it bearable?”

“Love.”

“Perhaps, then, what the creator intended was to motivate us to love.”

“Force us to love.”

“Personal choice.”

“Either love or be miserable.”

It made sense.

Amy reached up, traced two fingertips along Peter's cheek, beneath his chin. A look of amazement on her face. She led his face down to hers.

“Open your mouth.”

He did.

“Wide.”

Into his mouth she said, “I love you.”

And kept her words in with a kiss.

Across the way, only seven or eight feet away, Judith Ward and Marion Mercer sat facing one another. Connected by their hands. Judith had her hair pulled back severely, contained with a rubber band she'd found in one of her pockets. In the dim light her eyes appeared exaggerated, dark-socketed, and at times Marion thought the whites looked phosphorescent. It was eerie, and she thought perhaps it was Judith's fear showing or something in her anticipating death.

They had been quiet, had heard everything said by Amy and Peter. They had borrowed those words, emphasized them by squeezing each other's hands.

Knowing how easy it was to be heard, they whispered.

“What would we have done? Tell me.”

“Gone away.”

“Defied everyone?”

“Been together.”

“Yes. We would have made it somehow.”

“I wonder.”

“I was getting ready to tell Fred.”

“Were you?”

“I'd set a deadline for myself. Next Wednesday.”

“Why then?”

“Just an arbitrary day.”

“It surely would have been.”

“Anyway. I couldn't have gone on being deceitful. It was hurting us.”

“I know.”

“Did you ever think that maybe we were using us to escape from other things?”

“Well, I guess that's something we'll never have the chance to disprove.”

A silence.

“Judith?”

“Hmm?”

“I was happy until I met you.”

“Oh?”

“Then I was happier.”

“Darling …”

They leaned forward, placed their heads in the dip of each other's shoulders, Judith giving lover's kisses to Marion's neck. Anyone observing would have thought them merely a pair of distraught women exchanging consolations.

Marion whispered: “The things left unsaid, I also feel that.”

“You do?”

“It's probably natural at a time like this.”

“Actually, I think we communicated more than average.”

“Average meaning normal?”

“Whatever. Even without words we said more.”

“I agree.”

“Because neither of us ever pretended to be a man.”

“Once at Bullocks I came close to buying a boy's suit, tie and everything.”

“Why?”

“To wear for you.”

“I'm glad you didn't.”

“I decided you would be.”

“One of the things that made us special was our being female, our sameness.”

“Likes attract.”

“Yes, and that
was
beautiful.”

Past tense. They both became painfully aware of it, soothed it away somewhat with their silence.

Judith said: “A lot of times when I made love to you I felt that you were me.”

“Don't talk so loud.”

Back to a whisper. “I was both doing and being done. It seemed as though I could feel what you were feeling.”

“I know. It was like that for me when I made love to you. At certain times more than others, but always some. Like being melted, connected.”

“Yes, in every way.”

“Every possible way.”

“Kiss me.”

Judith did, a long kiss on the cheek. And although in its tenderness it conveyed all her affirmations of love, it appeared sisterly.

The inadequacy, the inequity of it was too much for Marion. “No!” she protested, unintentionally raising her voice. “Love is love.”

That got attention from all directions.

Marion held Judith's head. Her mouth took Judith's mouth with passion.

Judith resisted momentarily, a reflex, but then she understood and contributed without shame.

Peter Javakian went over to Brydon. “I've got an idea,” he said.

“What?”

“If we could get up to the office, from there it would be easy to go on up through the ceiling.” He meant the glass-enclosed overhanging management office at the south end of the building.

Brydon had considered it. “The problem is getting up to the office.”

“Let's take a look.”

They went to Island One. Peter shined his flashlight through the window and into the office diagonally above, fifteen feet away. He pointed out how the office was built close up to the ceiling. He explained his idea and asked if Brydon thought it would work.

“Might.” Brydon was still feeling the failure of the scaffold. He thought that might be the reason he couldn't believe in Peter's idea. Maybe, at that moment, it was just impossible for him to be receptive. He gazed up at the office, appeared thoughtful and then nodded. “Why don't you give it a try?”

Peter was encouraged. He hurried to get at it First requirement was material to make a line. Denim was strong. Lois Stevens and Gloria Rand were wearing blue denim jeans. They cooperated, tore off the legs of their jeans. Peter ripped them into three-inch strips. He square-knotted the strips together, like the tail of a kite, twenty-five feet long.

To the end he tied the half-gallon can of liquid floor wax that had been salvaged. It was appropriately weighty, a compact five pounds. He tied the other end of the denim line around his right wrist, so he couldn't lose it. Holding the can of wax like a football, he stepped back and threw it up and across at the office window. It smacked hard against the glass pane, caused a cobweb pattern of cracks, but didn't break through.

Peter recovered the can by taking in the line hand over hand. On his third throw the glass shattered. Still, large hunks of it remained in the window frame. He continued throwing until he had broken away enough of the glass — an opening about ten feet wide by three feet high. Now he untied the can of wax, replaced it with one of the eight-foot planks. He double-bound and knotted the denim tight around the middle of the plank. Using both hands, he tried to toss the plank up through the window. The plank was unwieldy, weighed about twenty pounds, couldn't be thrown accurately.

Peter completely missed the window three times. On his fourth throw he hit the window frame. On his next the plank went up and in.

What he hoped was that the plank might work like a grappling hook, catch and wedge itself against the legs of a desk, behind file cabinets — anything substantial. Then he would be able to shinny up the denim line to the office, find electric wiring and cords that could be used to safely hoist the others up.

He pulled in the slack of the denim line, made it taut. Tried to feel whether or not the plank was caught on something. It seemed to be. He applied more tension, tugged. The board came flying out the window.

Peter flung the board up into the office again. Same result. He kept trying for nearly an hour, until he could barely lift his arms.

Spider also gave it a few tries.

So did Brydon.

It depended too much on luck, and they certainly weren't having any.

22

Captain Royden Dodd looked down at his bare toes and thought,
Old toes
.

The young Newport Beach police chopper pilot, Hackley, was in the dark bedroom screwing a new bulb in the lamp.

“My hometown is famous for a light bulb,” Hackley said. “Livermore, California.”

“Never been there.”

“They've got a light bulb up there in the firehouse that's been burning for over seventy years.”

“Regular bulb?”

“Hand blown, thick carbon filament, made to last. Just keeps on burning.”

The light went on in the bedroom. Hackley came out with the bad bulb that he dropped in the wastebasket by the desk. He said: “Whenever it gets to me how lousy things are, that old Livermore bulb comes to mind.”

“Maybe it's not the same one, maybe it's gotten to be such an attraction they keep replacing it on the sly.”

“I don't think so,” Hackley said.

“It's a possibility.”

Hackley didn't want to think so. He turned off the idea by turning on the stereo, an FM rock station. It came out thumping loud. Hackley lowered it some for Dodd's sake.

They were in Hackley's apartment in Newport Beach. A three-room place counting the kitchen that was only separated from the living room by a barlike counter. The apartment was on the second floor overlooking the inevitable pool. Hackley lived alone, but from evidence such as a couple of string bikini tops and bottoms on the hook on the back of the bathroom door, excess lipstick on a crumpled tissue in a bedside ashtray, one brush but two kinds of toothpaste and a pair of foreign-made bikes hung on the entranceway wall like contemporary art, he wasn't alone much. No reason for him to be. Twenty-two, good rugged looks, a straightforward easiness about him that was immediately likable.

At the moment he was off duty, had on only a pair of well-bleached jeans. No one would ever have guessed he was a policeman. Too relaxed. There was a wound scar on the fleshy part of his back close to his right underarm. Like a large lopsided cleft, the skin there was pinched inward.

Dodd noticed the scar, guessed Vietnam and decided not to ask Hackley about it.

Hackley didn't ask Dodd if he wanted a refill, just took the J&B over and poured into the glass Dodd had in hand.

Dodd was as off duty as he ever was. He'd called headquarters, was told what was happening in the area, including a few things that had become almost routine since the rain: armed quarrels, a family murder, hit-and-runs. No telling what would happen next and no real way to prevent it. Dodd gave Hackley's number, told headquarters he would be calling in.

After his perilous slip down the slide, Dodd had had the choice of returning to headquarters or going home again. He looked and felt horrible, covered with mud. It would be too obvious to anyone at headquarters or to Helen what he'd been up to — disobeying orders. So he was glad when Hackley had suggested the apartment.

There Dodd had gotten out of his clothes — they must have weighed thirty pounds. He shoved them, shoes and all, into a plastic bag, having a flash of guilt because of how quickly Helen's loving care had gone to waste. He took his second shower of the day, had to dig the mud from his ears and was surprised to find that so much of it had somehow gotten packed into the crease of his buttocks.