The Fearsome Particles (3 page)

Now, just what was going on here? What was this dreadful feeling? It was a physical sensation, but not entirely physical, so she couldn’t quickly put it down to having eaten something off. And anyway she hadn’t eaten this morning, she’d been in such a hurry. Sitting on the toilet, Vicki listened to Avis take a call on her cell phone and considered the possibility that the feeling had something to do with Gerald, because he was very agitated about Kyle’s homecoming and when Gerald got agitated, nothing and no one in the house could really settle. You wanted to put a blanket over everything, a thick, heavy quilt, and make everything just
be calm
, but that wasn’t possible. Years ago, when this Gerald sort of feeling pervaded the house she grew up in, her mother used to say, “We’re all in an upset!” which didn’t help, but must at least have given her the satisfaction of being able to label the feeling. It was an upset, and they were in it until they managed to get out.

Was this “an upset”? It seemed like such a paltry term next to the whirligig of Gerald’s anxiety. Something serious had happened in Afghanistan, that was obvious, but it was a mystery to Vicki why Gerald needed to get into such a state about it, since
it was equally clear, thank goodness, that Kyle hadn’t been hurt. “Physically sound,” he said they had told him. After all of Gerald’s uproar before Kyle left – and all her assurances that their son was ready to make such decisions – everything seemed to have turned out so well: Kyle was coming home from his adventure, early (delightful surprise), and he was
sound
. If anything, it should have been a cause for celebration. She wished she’d thought of that before; she would have told Gerald.

Vicki sat up straight, tried to take a deep breath, and brought her hand to her stomach. She slipped two fingers between the pearl buttons of her blouse and pressed them delicately into the soft tissue under the rib cage, not certain she wanted to find something unusual, but no less troubled when she didn’t.

Of course, she considered, it could be that unfortunate cat. What a mistake that was! She should never have agreed to take it in, although that was not something she could ever admit to Gerald, especially since the olive incident. But Lorie Campeau had been in such a panic, and there were so many other things on her mind at the time, the decision about the cat seemed to make itself. She’d just found herself holding out her arms. Really, though, if she had it to do over again, knowing what an annoying little creature it was (and how irrationally Gerald would react to its every move), she would slam the door in Lorie Campeau’s face.

But no, it wasn’t the cat.

“Victoria, darling,” came Avis’s whisper from beyond the door. “Are you at all ill?”

Vicki shut her eyes and pressed her lips tight. Avis was not a young woman, and because of her she’d had to once again climb
all those stairs. “I’m just freshening up,” she called brightly. What she needed to do was simply stand and walk out the door with Avis, into the rest of her day. And yet, just now, it was the last thing she felt up to. “You must be busy, Avis. If you need to go ahead, I’ll be fine.”

“No, no, it’s quite all right. I’ll just … have a peek at the western view.” Avis’s voice, which tended to travel the scale unpredictably, and sometimes seemed designed to keep a two-year-old entranced, offered no indication of the anxiety she was undoubtedly suffering. Vicki, scowling at herself, gave the spot under her ribs a firm press, and sipped a breath.

“I’m almost done.”

“Don’t rush, don’t rush.” Avis was still there at the door; she hadn’t gone to look at any view.

“I’m so sorry about this.”

“Victoria, apologies are hardly necessary. Although, now that I look at my watch, I do see that it’s past nine-thirty.” All over the place, Avis’s voice, like a swallow in the wind. Up, down, up, down. I am not, Vicki said to herself, a child. “And I seem to remember that I have a showing in Forest Hill at ten. For which I have to pick up brochures. Let me just make a call.”

She felt herself wanting to sigh. She closed her eyes, took in as much air as she could, and let it out silently.
Enough
. The feeling wasn’t going away, and soon she was going to put Avis in the terrible position of having to postpone a showing. And for that Vicki could never forgive herself.

As she opened the door, she beamed. “I think they got the inlays just right,” she said. “And I love that grassy green.”

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” agreed Avis. “It makes me think of Burma for some reason.”

“I wish we’d done that in ours.”

When they had descended the stairs and slipped on their shoes, the two women clipped through the foyer and out the door, into the fair metropolitan spring. “It’s going to be a very good season, I think,” said Avis, picking her way along the flagstones that twined through the just-seeded grounds. “It’s been very good already.” She pointed her keys, causing the bronze Jaguar sedan parked in the drive, next to Vicki’s purposely unshowy Camry, to blip. Then she turned to Vicki, took her hand, and gently pressed it between both of hers. As the agent looked up into her eyes, Vicki could feel a large key ring digging into the heel of her palm.

“You’ll call me if you need anything.”

“Of course.”

“I’d be very angry if you didn’t.”

“I’m fine.”

Avis squeezed her hand, then released it, and the women were in their cars.

I
mostly keep to myself. But nineteen hours, including the stopover in Dubai – it was asking a lot. If I could have slept, that would have helped. But sleep wasn’t happening. And reading didn’t work either. I needed visuals and sound. Otherwise stuff I didn’t feel like thinking about started to climb in through the cracks of my brain like those lizards and cockroaches you get in your hotel room in Mexico. And I was so stupid, because what I should’ve done was buy some game thing off somebody at the camp before I left. But I didn’t think of it in time. Anyway the batteries would’ve died pretty soon, and then I would’ve been in the same situation, stuck on a plane, surrounded by soldiers, with nothing to focus on. So, under the circumstances, what else could I do?

I leaned out of my aisle seat and looked back. “Lieutenant Jayne?” Lieutenant Jayne didn’t need batteries. Legg used to call him a windup toy. “Lieutenant?”

He was four rows behind, sitting in his pixilated
CADPAT
camouflage, reading a Stephen King novel (a lot of military guys like Stephen King; I don’t know why). He said something to the sergeant next to him, which I couldn’t hear because of the drone of the airplane, then he unbuckled himself and stepped into the aisle.

“What’s up, Kyle?”

I waited until he was hulking over me – he’s a big guy, he could’ve played football – gripping the back of the upholstered seat to keep steady. “I’m worried about my tattoo,” I said.

“Your tattoo?”

“Yeah. I got it in Dubai, at this place near the airport.”

The buzz of the plane seemed to be making his squared-off glasses slide down the bridge of his nose. He narrowed his eyes at me. “What about it?”

“I’m thinking I mighta caught hep C or something.”

Jayne studied me for a second and shoved his glasses back up with a finger. “Why?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s all puffy and red.”

Lieutenant Jayne glanced back in the direction of his seat as if he wished he’d never gotten out of it, then he frowned down at me. “Well, I dunno. Did you want me to look at it or something?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s on my ass though. Don’t you have to be, like, a captain before you can look at a guy’s ass?”

The muscles around the lieutenant’s jaw clenched and unclenched, and his eyes went kind of squinty. “You don’t even have a tattoo, do you?”

“Yeah I do! It’s on my ass, I swear! If you were a captain I could show you.”

Lieutenant Jayne bunched up his mouth as if he had bees in there trying to escape, and he stared at me for, like, half a minute, holding back the bees. Then he leaned down to murmur into my ear. “Don’t go turning into a dickhead, Woodlore.” I could feel the breath from his mouth tickling my earlobe. “See a chaplain when you get home.”

I blinked at him as he straightened up. Soldiers sometimes forget things aren’t the same outside the forces as they are inside. “You only find chaplains in institutions like the army, Lieutenant,” I told him. “I’m not in an institution.”

Lieutenant Jayne clenched his jaw again, three times. Clench. Clench. Clench. “I could say something,” he muttered. “But I won’t.” He turned away and walked back to his seat, shaking his head.

I just had to lean back and grin. Not because I’d wanted to give Lieutenant Jayne a hard time for the fun of it (although it was fun), but now I had his big, red face, looking all pissed-off and confused, in my mind, and I figured I could focus on that until they got around to running a movie or something. I knew I could count on the lieutenant. Because guys like Jayne, they have no idea they’re sitting ducks.

The problem with these guys, and you don’t have to look hard to find it: They haven’t given in. Do you know what I mean? They haven’t said, “Fuck it.” They still care about stuff. And, I’m sorry and everything, but that’s trouble.

It’s hard to explain to people, because when they hear “give in,” they think you mean “be lazy,” or “take the easy way out.” But that isn’t it at all. Giving in is hard. It’s caring that’s easy. Because caring about things is wired into us, just like jealousy
and anger and lust and all the stupidest parts of human nature. It’s all selfish survival shit and most people can’t help themselves. Imagine not eating for a whole day – how could you not care about food? But what I’m saying is, what if you were stuck in Africa during a famine? You’d have to learn how to not care. It’s the only way you could live.

Same thing here. You go along in your job or your life or your marriage and it’s fine, but the minute you start caring about it, you try to control it or protect it. And right then you’re screwed. Because as soon as you care about
this
thing, you turn your back to
that
thing. That thing you don’t expect, that thing nobody ever warned you about. As soon as you want one thing to happen, some other thing happens, and it’s never good. People won’t admit I’m right. They nod and look worried, but they don’t believe me. I try telling them what Legg told me: The world moves randomly, the survivors are the ones who just go along. If I had to pick one word for it, it’d be
whatever
. I’m telling you, if you keep repeating that to yourself, if you keep that idea in your head, you’ll be fine.

There’s fragmentation mines all over the place.
Whatever
.

People are washing their clothes in the ditch.
Whatever
.

Some friendships aren’t meant to last.
Whatever
.

As long as you give in and don’t care, you’ll make it through. It’s kind of a Zen thing. But fuckin’ try and tell that to people.

Jayne can’t hear it. (I mean, I never tried to tell him, but he’s one of those guys, you just go, Why bother?) The big thing for him – there’s no missing it – is he’s a lieutenant who wants to be a captain. Sure, that’s normal for somebody in his position, but it means that, sorry, he’s screwed. He’s big, right? He could’ve
pounded me in a second. But if he’s going to make captain, he has to keep everything under control, stay on the path, check off the rules. One of them being: Don’t pound the
COF-AP
kid they’re sending home, because he can’t help himself. He’s Officially Fucked Up. And now Jayne’s so full of rules, so tied up in protecting and caring, he can’t even let loose when he has the chance. He can’t even yell at some jerk who’s pissing him off who he’s never gonna see again for the rest of his life.

I have to feel bad for him, because it’s only his natural human inability to give in that makes him an easy target. Not everybody gets the lesson they need, like I did. Most people wouldn’t want to. But it’s really the only way you learn. Even Legg, he talked about it, and he sounded like he could do it. But when it came right down to it, he couldn’t. And then look what happened.

Some people might think that’s my fault. Maybe I would too, if I cared.

B
ishop wasn’t paying attention, you could tell.

In the bruise-blue light of the darkened boardroom, Gerald saw his boss fold his arms, rest his wattley chin in his hand and act as though he was watching Trick Runiman fumble around with his projections. But Gerald could read Bishop well enough to know he wasn’t in the boardroom at all – he was in Cincinnati.
Bishop
, he wanted to say,
you can’t be in Cincinnati right now, you have to be here, listening to Trick
. Bishop’s wife, Susan, was in Cincinnati, costing Bishop a fortune seeing specialists. Gerald didn’t know what Susan’s difficulty was, because his boss hadn’t confided details about her trip, but it was obviously a grave matter because Bishop’s eyes had the faraway look of a man with troubles.

Gerald regretted that Bishop had troubles. Partly because Bishop was a good and significant man, the founder and protector of Spent Materials Inc., who had hired him and after only two years promoted him to Chief Operations Officer, and who
had told Gerald that he saw in him a detail man capable of bigger things (“
COO
with
CEO
potential” was how Gerald, in a splurge of self-confidence, had taken it). But Gerald also regretted Bishop’s troubles because this meeting was important. The trends for Spent Materials were not encouraging, and up at the front of the room Spent’s sales and marketing director was saying things, however ineffectually, that Bishop needed to hear. A sales and marketing meeting was like a foreign film; it had the threads of a plot but you had to keep up or you could miss the climax altogether. That this was a Trick Runiman meeting, featuring a sequential progression that bored in on itself like a freakish sea creature, just made keeping up all the more vital.

Sitting at the side of the long rosewood veneer table, Gerald leaned forward on an elbow and reached his free hand deep, deep into his pants pocket. It was a delicate, painful matter exploring one’s injured testicles, made all the more difficult for having to be done surreptitiously. But he felt an itch that worried him. Probably it was nothing, but possibly it was leakage. There was a thumb-length gash there that hadn’t seemed deep at the time (more of a scratch, really – an agonizing, ridiculously unnecessary scratch), and of course he’d slathered on the liquid bandage as if he were buttering Brussels sprouts, but who knew what happened down there in a situation like this? Maybe it was like a piñata, and once a seam was created all it needed was a whack in the right place to get the whole parcel of contents spilling out. What he had to do was check for leakage through the lining of his pants as if he were reaching for a piece of gum. At the same time he had to keep an eye on Trick’s slides.