Or (
God, no, please no
) had he done it to himself?
And, more frightful yet, like the heads had come back again and again, would the tails? And the death that this night they foretold?
No, no, God, please no
, Jay prayed. Openly prayed as he walked out of the park and through the city. Through the neon night of Times Square, and on beyond that. South down Broadway for hour upon hour, puzzled gazes washing over him as strangers wondered just what the hell had happened to the filthy young man. A filthy young man who did pause once at a store window where a television played behind glass. A television showing scenes of death on the river. Boats and divers and helicopters, all efforts at rescue that would be futile, because what was there to rescue?
And on he pressed, knowing what he would do now when he found Sign Guy. Not confront him, nor accuse him. No. He would fall to his knees and beg him. Put his hands together and pray the bum to make it better. To fix his gift. To take it away or charge it anew, just make it not what it had become. Make it so no more death would come to him. Never. Ever. Please.
Yes, he would beg. Would kiss the ground the bum walked on. Because he could not take this. Could not. Not death again. And again. And again.
He reached Trinity Church just as the new day was a blue-orange glow in the east.
The bum was not there.
And his sign was not there.
And his can was not there, and his bucket was not there.
All there was was the breeze whistling up Wall Street, and the faint pulse of the world spinning on. And no one to beg. No one to beg that death should come to him no more.
Jay fell to his knees where Sign Guy had sat, where it all had begun, where the gift had been given, and he looked to the sky and wept at the spire, its usual beauty right then a slender black gash upon the rising dawn.
Seventh Interrogation
August 15...2:51 a.m..
Mr. Wright sat silent, thoughtful, his gaze set upon Jay, one solid finger tapping on the file until the percussive display ceased abruptly, the drumming digit stopping on the upstroke and straightening so it pointed at his prisoner. “What happened to you in that park?”
“I died. And then I lived again. So I could die once more.”
The finger folded slowly down. “You’re saying it kept happening, just like with the heads and the stocks. Only now it was tails and...what? Death?”
“That’s right,” Jay confirmed, his voice quiet, the long hours, the long days of the past three weeks, maybe the whole eight years before this, working on him. Possibly the hours ahead, as well. “I’d see death not long before it happened. The death of many. And I’d suffer that death with them.”
Mr. Wright slowly nodded. “And you believe that? That you died? Actually died?”
“Mister, I drown when that van and that bus went into the East River. I was crushed when a crane toppled onto a pre-school in Minnesota. I suffocated in a West Virginia mine collapse. I died in flames many times—in plane crashes, house fires, an oil rig explosion. I could feel my skin scorch and peel away from the flesh underneath as it cooked. I learned about death from the
inside
, and there’s no way I can prove that to you, so unless you have an EKG strip in there showing me flatlined, you’re just going to have to take my story as it comes. And then decide whether to believe me or kill me. It’s your call.”
The display of spirit seemed not to trouble his captor now, Jay thought. He seemed simply to consider it silently as any man might a reasonable explanation—even though this was beyond a line of reason that the man had been reluctant, even unwilling, to venture across as yet. It was odd. Maybe it was the length they’d come already, this far into the tale. Halfway, nearly. But to a defining point, for certain. Maybe this man felt part of the journey now. Connected to it. It seemed possible to Jay, in any case, because there
was
a subtle change in the man’s demeanor. In his look, a certain...relaxation to it now. As if some threshold had been crossed and some test passed.
But not a test telling enough that the cuffs were off his hands as yet.
“So you saw this thing happening on the bridge, this...accident, and you felt what those people’s death was going to be?”
Jay nodded. “Something like that. I think I felt their death coming. I felt the water surrounding me, and going into my mouth, and it was so cold, and numbing, and—“ Jay stopped, noticing that his captor’s gaze had ticked off of him, just a bit, but enough so that he seemed disconnected. “What?”
Mr. Wright looked back, came back to the moment quickly. His hands folded atop the file, fingers laced but thumbs twiddling. Was something bothering him? “Nothing. Go on.”
It took a second for the odd interruption to fade before Jay could pick up once again. “And I knew that it was coming. That death was coming. For all those people.”
“So you tried to go there?”
“I was compelled to go there,” Jay clarified. “To stop it. I could see it coming, this mass death, and I was sucked toward it. That’s how it felt, like I was being pulled to it. I don’t know, maybe it was just death coming at me, but I had to get there. I had to.”
“But you didn’t make it.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You...died.”
Jay nodded. “Yes. I choked on water that wasn’t there. My legs wouldn’t work, but they were fine. I was clawing for the dim surface of a river that was miles away. The lights went out, and everything was black, and...”
“What? ‘And’ what?”
A knot rose in Jay’s throat, receding only when he swallowed it down. Put it away. Because it was over, right? It was never going to happen again, right? “And it had me.”
“Death?”
He nodded. “And don’t believe the brochures the gurus try to sell. There’s no light, no warmth, no sense of freedom and safety. There’s none of that.”
Now Mr. Wright swallowed. “What is there?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Can you imagine nothing, Mr. Wright? Can you?”
Again the man swallowed, the table momentarily turned. “No.”
“Consider yourself lucky,” Jay told him. “It’s a million times harder to be there than to imagine it. It’s like...infinity emptied out.”
Mr. Wright looked purposely away and scribbled something in his notebook. It was a long moment before his eyes rose to Jay again.
“The stocks never came back to you?”
Jay shook his head. “It was time for tails. Death on parade.”
“Whenever the coins came up tails,” Mr. Wright said. “Why didn’t you just not look?”
Jay sniffed a gleeless chuckle. “I lost everything, mister. Apartment. Possessions. Money. Stocks. Bonds. Do you know how hard it is to live in that kind of state without ever having to be in the presence of a few measly coins? A few quarters for a cup of coffee, some nickels and dimes for a donut? It’s impossible
not
to have to look.”
“Could you have?” Mr. Wright asked, the question visibly troubling Jay as he considered it. “Not looked if it had been possible? If you hadn’t needed the change.”
Uh, sir, your change. I believe you are going to
need
your change.
Could he have? Or
did
he need the change?
Or did it need him?
Still so much he didn’t know, didn’t understand, after all these years.
“I don’t know,” Jay answered, wondering what reason it was that slunk around this bit o’ his existence, afraid or unwilling to show itself. Why couldn’t he
not
look? Why couldn’t he have run from the bum? Why, why, and why again? More why’s than you could shake a stick at, and not an answer to be had. “I really don’t know.”
“So you looked, and you saw,” Mr. Wright recounted. “You saw death coming. The death of a lot of innocent people coming.”
Jay was quiet for a moment, thinking how difficult it was to make words convey what his life had been. How vile some parts of it had been. “I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I tell? Why didn’t I warn? Why didn’t I try to stop what I saw from happening?”
“You tried that first time, you said. To get to the bridge to stop it. What about after that? Did you ever think of maybe making a phone call? Of warning someone?”
Jay jerked his head at the file. “If you have in there what you say you have in there, then you know I did, and you know what I got for my trouble.” Six months in the Fairfax County Detention Center was his reward for attempting to avert a tragedy, the crash of a corporate Learjet into a Baptist church in Virginia. He had tried to warn of that, had run into a police station on a Sunday yelling at the desk officer that a jet was going to crash into the Zion Fellowship Baptist Church, and that it was going to happen soon, God, soon. Told the sergeant that he could already smell the stench of jet fuel spraying over the congregation, and could taste the acrid black smoke that would be stealing life from seventy-eight people so very soon unless someone did something, and did something
NOW!
And to his ranting, and his wild refusal to leave the premises, the police put him in cuffs and dragged him off to a cell, where he lay for ten minutes before feeling his skin tighten and crack and crinkle, and his lungs gulp for air that had become fire and soot and things unbreatheable. Where he died and dissolved into that unimaginable nothingness, tasting its screamless terror for the eternity of an instant before gagging back to life on the cold concrete floor.
Death had come, and it had left, taking near four score lives with it, leaving Jay to answer the inevitable questions, the sorts of inquiry directed at one so plainly suspect.
How did you know, Mr. Grady? That plane went down; did you do something to it to make it crash? Had you been to that airport that day? Near it? Had you known the crew? Seen them? Been close to them? The mechanics? The fuelers? Did you have a grudge against the company that owned the plane? Operated it? Cleaned it? Painted it? Do you like fire, Mr. Grady? Did you like fire as a child? Do you like to see things
burn
? People burn?
And without answers to satisfy, one more thing had been said.
You’ll be staying with us for a while, Mr. Grady? Until we nail you or clear you.
They could do neither, and it was a judge that had finally ordered his release.
But not before those six months behind bars. With criminals. Real criminals. Killers. Rapists. Molesters. Robbers. Eating with them, sleeping with them, showering with them. Running from them, from what they wanted from him. From what they were willing and capable of taking from him. What they took from others whose screams Jay had listened to as their bodies and minds were violated. A hundred and eighty four days he had been locked in with the animals, fearing death at their hands, dreading the death that did come twenty one times during those terrifying days and nights, dragging him down to nothingness only to surface again, ready for more.
“I had my fill of jail, mister,” Jay said. “If I was going to die again, and again, and again, I wasn’t going to do it in there. I tried telling, but who listens to a crazy man?”
“Some might say I am,” Mr. Wright offered, but the barb was mild.
“Then you’re member of an exclusive club,” Jay responded.
Mr. Wright opened the file and moved through a few pages, scanning the contents with a downward look as if reading through nonexistent bifocals. The aging process had got him somewhere, Jay thought. But not in those hands, unless years could chisel muscle and bone into those menacing mounds of dexterity.
“What happened to your friends?” He looked up. “Your girl?”
“I never saw them again,” Jay answered. “I heard nothing about Bunker or Steve. Christine? I suspect she hitched herself to another star.” After all, that’s all he’d been to her: a rising star she could ride to earthly heavens. “In fact, I’m sure she did.”
“And Jude?”
“Before I left the city a few weeks later I was buying a cup of coffee, and there was a radio playing behind the counter of the diner I was in, and I caught a blurb on the news that said some guy had put a gun in his mouth and jumped out a window of a building on Wall Street, and that he pulled the trigger just before he hit. They told his name, and I wasn’t surprised.”
“Interesting way to go,” Mr. Wright commented.
“Nothing ordinary for Jude,” Jay agreed, surprised for just a moment at the concurrence that had just occurred between them. Yes, something was different about his captor now. A captor—if the cuffs hadn’t been on still—that he might have begun considering some sort of host. “I guess he thought I was his ticket to the top, and without that there was only the grind. I don’t think he could handle the grind after having what we had.”
Mr. Wright nodded through a thought right then. “You ever think of it, Grady? Checking out? Ending heads, and tails, and the visions? Saving yourself the agony? Did you ever consider it?”
“I thought about it,” Jay replied. “But I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“That’s the golden question, isn’t it?”
“It appears to be,” Mr. Wright asked. “Still, to see death again and again and not be able to prevent it? Some might say that was an exercise in futility.”
“Do you?”
Mr. Wright did not answer. He glanced down at the file again, briefly, moving on. “You said you left the city. Why?”
“You can’t run away in place.”
“Running from death, were you?”
“I though maybe I could,” Jay admitted. “I was wrong. It wasn’t in a place. It was in me. When I figured that out after a few dozen more times dying, I just went searching.”
“For what?”
“A place where I could be a nobody. Not noticed. Not cared about.” Jay snickered dryly. “A place to die in peace, you could say.”
“And you found it in Plainview,” Mr. Wright prompted.
Jay nodded. “I wandered for two years after they released me from jail. Passed through just about every noplace east of the Mississippi.”
“So, was it a success?”
“Being a nobody? For almost six years it was. I lived with my nightmare. I died and I lived again. And again. And again. I swam in that nothingness so many times that I prayed one of the times it would just swallow me up and keep me. But it never did.” Jay paused. “Then, a week or so ago, something happened.”