“That’s a way of looking at it.”
“I’m just glad it isn’t Chase sitting in that chair.”
He left Peter alone. Just five minutes, and the piles of paper on his desk now seemed completely trivial. He swiveled his chair to face the window. The day had begun with clear skies, but now the weather was turning. Low clouds hovered over the city, a heavy gray mass. A gust of wind tossed the treetops, followed by a flash, whitening the sky. As thunder rolled behind it, the first drops of rain, heavy and slow, tapped the glass.
Michael,
he thought,
what the hell are you up to?
43
Anthony Carter, Twelfth of Twelve, had just shut off the mower when he looked toward the patio and noticed that the tea had arrived.
So soon? Could it be noon again already? He angled his chin to the sky—an oppressive summer Houston sky, pale like something bleached. He removed his hankie and then his hat to mop the sweat from his forehead. A glass of tea would surely hit the spot.
Mrs. Wood, she knew that. Though of course it wasn’t Mrs. Wood who brought it. Carter couldn’t say just who it was. The same someone who delivered the flats of flowers and bags of mulch to the gate, who fixed his tools when they broke, who made time turn how it did in this place, every day a season, every season a year.
He pushed his mower to the shed, wiped it clean, and made his way to the patio. Amy was working in the dirt on the far side of the lawn. There was some ginger there, it grew like crazy, always needing cutting back, bordered by the beds where Mrs. Woods liked to put some summer color. Today it was three flats of cosmos, the pink ones that Miss Haley loved, picking them and putting them in her hair.
“Tea’s here,” Carter said.
Amy looked up. She was wearing a kerchief around her neck; there was dirt on her hands and face where she’d wiped the sweat away.
“You go ahead.” She batted a gnat from her face. “I want to get these in first.”
Carter sat and sipped the tea. Perfect as always, sweet but not too sweet, and the ice made a pleasant tinkling against the sides of the glass. From behind him, in the house, came the bright drifting notes of the girls’ playing. Sometimes it was Barbies or dress-ups. Sometimes they watched TV. Carter heard the same movies playing over and over—
Shrek
was one, and
The Princess Bride
—and he felt sorry for the two of them, Miss Haley and her sister, all alone and stuck inside the house, waiting for their mama to come home. But when Carter peeked in the windows, there was never anybody there; the inside and the outside were two different places, and the rooms were empty, not even any furniture to tell that people lived there.
He’d had some time to think on that. He’d thought about a lot of things. Such as, what this place exactly
was.
The best he could come up with was that it was a kind of waiting room, like at a doctor’s office. You bided your time, maybe flipping through a magazine, and then when your turn came, a voice would call your name and you’d go on to the next place, whatever that was. Amy called the garden “the world behind the world,” and that seemed right to Carter.
How the day got on, he thought. He’d have to get back to work soon; there was a sprinkler head needed replacing, and the pool to skim, and all that edging to do. He liked to keep the yard just so for the day when Mrs. Wood would return.
Mr. Carter, what a beautiful job you’ve done taking care of the place. You’re a godsend. I don’t know what I ever did without you.
He liked to think of the things they’d say to each other when that day came. The two of them would have a good talk, just like they used to, sitting on the patio the way any two friends would do.
But for the moment, Carter was content to settle in a spell while the edge came off the heat. He unlaced his boots and closed his eyes. The garden was a place for thinking your thoughts, and that was what he did now. He remembered Wolgast coming to him in Terrell, which was the death house, and then a ride in a van with deep cold and snowy mountains all around, and then the doctors giving him a shot. It made him sick something awful, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the voices in his head.
I am Babcock. I am Morrison. I am Chávez Baffes Turrell Winston Sosa Echols Lambright Martínez Reinhardt …
He saw pictures too, horrible things, people dying and such, like he was dreaming someone else’s dreams. He’d been to school for a bit, and they’d read a book by Mr. William Shakespeare. Carter hadn’t actually read much of it himself. The words in the book were like something chopped up in a blender, that’s how confusing it was. But the teacher, Mrs. Coe, a pretty white lady who decorated the walls of her classroom with posters of animals and mountain climbers and sayings like “Reach for the stars” and “Be a friend to make a friend,” had showed the class a video. Carter liked it, how everybody was always getting in swordfights and dressed like a pirate, and Mrs. Coe explained that the main guy, who was named Hamlet, and was also a prince, was going crazy because somebody had killed his daddy by pouring poison in his ear. There was more to the story, but Carter remembered that part, because that’s what the voices reminded him of. Like poison poured in his ear.
Things had gone on like that for a while, Carter wasn’t sure how long. The others were whispering away, saying various things, ugly things, but mostly what they said was their names, over and over, like they couldn’t get enough of themselves. Then they fell quiet like the air before a storm and that was when Carter heard him: Zero. “Heard” wasn’t exactly the word. Zero could make you think with his own mind. Zero came into his head and it was like taking a step that wasn’t there and tumbling down a lightless hole and at the bottom of the hole was a train station. Folks were hurrying in winter coats, and the voice over the loudspeaker was calling out the numbers of the tracks and what was going where. New Haven. Larchmont. Katonah. New Rochelle. Carter didn’t know those places. It was cold. The floor was slick with melted snow. He was standing at the kiosk, the one with the four-faced clock. He was waiting for someone, someone important. One train arrived and then another. Where was she? Had something happened? Why hadn’t she called, why did she fail to answer? Train after train, the anticipation intense, then, as the last passengers hurried by, the cruelest dashing of his hopes. His heart was shattering, yet he couldn’t make himself move. The hands of the clock mocked him with their turning.
She said she would be here, where was she, how he longed to hold her in his arms, Liz you are the only thing that ever mattered, let me be the one to hold you as you slip away …
After that, Carter had gone plain crazy. It was like one long bad dream in which he was watching himself do the worst kinds of things and couldn’t stop. Eating folks. Tearing them to bits. Some he didn’t kill but only tasted, no rhyme or reason to it, it was just a thing he did because that’s what Zero wanted. He remembered a couple in a car. They were driving somewhere in a hurry and Carter had come down on them from the trees.
Leave those people be,
he was telling himself,
what they ever done to you,
but the hungry part of him paid this no mind, it did what it liked, and what it liked was killing folks. He landed hard on the hood and gave them a good long look at him, his teeth and claws and what he was about to do. The two of them were young. There was the man at the wheel and the woman beside him who Carter guessed was his wife. She had short blond hair and eyes that were wide and staring. The car began to fishtail. They were sliding all over the place. The man with yelling,
Holy shit!
and
What the fuck!
but the woman barely reacted. Her eyes slid right through Carter, her face as blank as paper, like the sight of a monster on the hood was nothing her brain knew what to do with, and it stopped Carter flat, that’s how weird it was, and that was when he noticed the gun—a big shiny pistol with a barrel you could fit your finger in, which the man was trying to aim over the steering wheel.
Now, don’t be pointing that,
the one part of him, the still-Carter part, was thinking;
you don’t ever point at gun at no one, Anthony;
and maybe it was the memory of his mama’s voice or else the way the car was swerving in long looping arcs like a kid on a swing pumping higher and higher and faster and faster, but for a second Carter froze, and as the car began to roll the gun went off in a blast of noise and light and Carter felt a sharp little sting in his shoulder, not much more than a bee might do, and the next thing Carter knew, he was rolling on the pavement.
He came up in time to see the car banging down on its side. It spun in a 360 and crashed down on its roof with an explosion of glass and a shriek of tearing metal. It began to roll down the asphalt like a log, over and over, bright bits of things hurling away, until it flopped one last time onto its roof and came, at last, to rest.
Everything was very still; they were deep in the country, miles from any town. Debris littered the roadway in a wide, glittering plume. He smelled gasoline, and something hot and sharp, like melted plastic. He knew he should feel something but didn’t know what. His thoughts were all mixed up inside him like single frames from a movie he couldn’t put in order. He scuttled his way to the car and crouched to look. The two of them were hanging upside down from their seatbelts, the dashboard crunched up against their waists. The man was dead, on account of the big piece of metal in his head, but the woman was alive. She was staring forward, wide-eyed, blood all over her—her face and shirt, her hands and hair, her lips and tongue and teeth. Black smoke was coiling from under the dash. A piece of glass crunched under Carter’s foot and her face swiveled toward him, slowly, no other part of her moving, tracing the source of the sound.
“Is somebody there?” Bubbles of blood formed at her lips as they curved around the words. “Please. Is … any … body … there?”
She was looking right at him. That was when Carter realized she couldn’t see. The woman was blind. With a soft
whump
the first flames appeared, licking under the dash.
“Oh, God,” she moaned. “I can hear you breathing. For the love of God, please answer me.”
Something was happening to him, something strange. Like the woman’s sightless eyes were a mirror, and what he saw in them was himself—not the monster they’d made him into but the man he used to be. As if he were waking up and remembering who he was. He tried to answer.
I’m here,
he wanted to say.
You’re not alone. I’m sorry about what I done.
But his mouth would not make words. The flames were spreading, the cabin filling with smoke.
“Oh God, I’m burning, please, oh God, oh God …”
The woman was reaching for him. Not
for
him, he realized.
To
him. Something was clutched in her hand. A hard spasm shook her; she had begun to choke on the blood that was pouring from her mouth. Her fingers opened and the object fell to the ground.
It was a pacifier.
The baby was in the backseat, still strapped in its carrier upside down. Any second the car was going to blow. Carter dropped to the ground and slithered through the back window. The baby was awake and crying now. The carrier would never fit—he’d have to take the baby out of it. He released the buckle, guided the child’s shoulders through the straps, and just like that the soft crying weight of a baby filled his arms. A little girl, wearing pink pajamas. Holding her tight to his chest, Carter wriggled free of the car and began to run.
But that was all he remembered. The story ended there. He never did know what became of that baby girl. For Anthony Carter, Twelfth of Twelve, made it all of three steps before the flames found what they were looking for, the gas in the tank ignited, and that car was blown to smithereens.
He never took another one.
Oh, he ate. Rats, possums, raccoons. Now and again a dog, which he always felt sorry about. But it wasn’t long before the world went quiet, and there weren’t so many people around to tempt him, and then one day after more time had passed, he realized there weren’t any people at all.
He’d closed himself to Zero, too—closed it to all of them. Carter wanted no part in what they were about. He built a wall in his mind, Zero and the others on one side and him on the other; and though the wall was thin and Carter could hear them if he chose to, he never sent anything back.
It was a lonely time.
He watched his city drown. He’d made a place for himself in that building, One Allen Center, on account of it was high and at night he could stand on the rooftop, among the stars, and feel close to them for company. Year by year the waters rose around the bases of the buildings, and then one night a great wind came barreling down. Carter had been through a hurricane or two in his day, but this wasn’t like any storm he’d ever seen. It set the skyscraper swaying like a drunk. Walls were cracking, windows popping from their frames, everything was in an uproar. He wondered if the end of the world was coming, if God had just grown sick and tired of it all. As the waters rose and the building rocked and the heavens howled, he took to praying, telling God to take him if that’s what he wanted, saying he was sorry over and over about the things he’d done, and if there was a better place to go to, he knew he didn’t deserve it any but hoped he’d get a chance to see it, assuming God could forgive him, which Carter didn’t think he could.
Then he heard a sound. A terrifying, heart-rending, inhuman sound, as if the gates of hell had opened and released a million screaming souls into the whirlwind. From out of the blackness a great dark shape emerged. It grew and grew and then the lightning flashed and Carter saw what it was, though he could not believe it. A ship. In downtown Houston. She was headed straight for him, her great keel dragging along the street, bearing down upon the towers of the Allen Center like God’s own bowling ball and the buildings were the pins.
Carter dropped to the floor and covered his head, bracing for the impact.