Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

I was having one now. It was not just his death I was grieving for, I realized, but the brief life which had preceded it. Children are vectors aimed at the future. All the doubts and anxieties about how they will turn out are balanced by the knowledge that their course and final destination are ultimately out of your hands. Whatever happens to them will happen when you are different, or dead, and the world an unrecognizable place. But no such perspectives existed in David’s case. The only things that would ever happen to him had already happened. His death seemed to make a mockery of his ever having existed at all, and of my continuing to do so. For the first time, I understood why Rachael had decided that she could not go on.

As we emerged into the open channel, the waves grew steeper. We passed a large unladen oil tanker coming the other way, its high sides towering over us. Later a car ferry crossed our bows, decked out in lights from stem to stern. It was almost eleven o’clock by my watch when Rick finally eased the throttle and the roar of the motor died away to a gentle gurgle. The boat wallowed lazily on the slight swell. A few moments later, I made out a light in the darkness up ahead.

“Are we there?” I asked.

Rick’s head moved in what might have been a nod. He had hardly spoken a word to me the whole way. If the rest of Sam’s friends were as much fun as Rick and Lenny, this was going to be a visit to remember.

The boat crept imperceptibly toward the beacon. It was impossible to tell how far off it was, and I thought we still had several hundred yards to run when the light suddenly loomed overhead and we bumped heavily against something. The boat tipped, the door of the wheelhouse opened and Sam was there, flinging his arms about me.

“Phil! It’s so great you’re finally here, man!”

His manner couldn’t have been more different from his cool response on the phone. He stood there slapping me on the shoulders and grinning delightedly. I smiled at him with real pleasure. Sam’s was the first familiar and friendly face I had seen in what seemed like a very long time. My earlier doubts about the wisdom of coming were swept away.

As we stepped off the boat, I saw that there were three other men standing on the pier beside some kind of hand-truck.

“Get the stuff unloaded, guys,” Sam told them casually. “Bring Phil’s bags too. I’m going to take him straight up to the hall. He must be wiped out.”

I was slightly surprised at this peremptory tone, but the men obediently climbed aboard the boat and set to work. I also thought it kind of strange that Sam made no attempt to introduce me. Still, this was his scene, not mine.

We walked along the pier to a trail winding up a wooded hillside. The only sound was our footsteps, the only light the faint glimmer of the moon behind a screen of high cloud. Superficially, Sam had hardly changed since we met in Minneapolis. His body was as spare as ever, his features as sharp, his hair as long. But something was different. He had a new poise, a gravitas, a centered, controlled energy. The very exuberance of his greeting revealed a confidence that had been lacking on that previous occasion, when he had been so stiff and guarded. Now he could permit himself what seemed like a genuine and spontaneous display of affection. In all our previous dealings, I had always felt older and more mature than Sam. Now the relationship seemed to have been mysteriously inverted.

“How come we had to take a boat to get here?” I asked.

“Because it’s an island.”

I stopped and looked at him.

“An island? You never told me that.”

Sam’s smile was visible even in the half-light.

“There’s a lot of things I haven’t told you, Phil. This way, you get to find out for yourself.”

This sounded more like the old Sam.

“So where the hell are we?” I demanded.

“We don’t usually use the boat to go all the way to the mainland,” he said. “But Rick was doing a Costeo run anyway, so we figured we might as well do it this way instead of hassling around with the ferries.”

I couldn’t decide whether he’d evaded my question deliberately, or was just continuing his earlier train of thought.

“So anyway, how’ve you been doing?” he asked suddenly.

The question startled me. Stupidly, I hadn’t given any thought to how I was going to answer it. The last thing I wanted to do was to discuss what had happened and “how it felt,” but I couldn’t very well avoid the subject. Or could I? Sam’s question had sounded casual enough.

“Oh, not so bad,” I replied.

“Really?”

This time I thought I caught a little edge to Sam’s tone, but I decided to bluff it out.

“And how about you?” I demanded.

He laughed.

“Just great. Everything’s going according to plan.”

“And what plan’s that?”

“God’s plan,” he replied.

I decided this had to be a joke.

“You aiming to crack the televangelist market, Sam?”

“How do you mean?”

“Those smoothareno sleazebags with toops and bad dye-jobs you see on TV They’re always talking about God’s plan for humanity and stuff like that.”

“We don’t have TV here, man. That shit just fucks up your head.”

This was a great relief. It now made perfect sense that David’s kidnapping hadn’t penetrated this lost colony of born-again hippies. I could remain anonymous, instead of having to play the hackneyed role I’d been dealt by fate.

“But there’s a plan all right,” Sam added softly. “It’s just that those suckers don’t know what it is.”

“And you do?”

“That’s the only thing I know,” he replied in the same quiet tone. “And the only thing I need to know.”

“Keats,” I retorted pertly. “‘Ode to Beauty.’”

Sam stopped and turned to me. For a moment I thought he was angry. Then he smiled.

“Still the same old Phil. You were always so fucking smart, man! I was amazed at the stuff you knew. Like just then. I didn’t even know that was a quote, but you spotted it right away. Awesome, man!”

I felt embarrassed by his effusiveness, embarrassed for him.

“Everything we say these days is a quotation,” I replied. “Just like everything we think is a rerun of an idea someone’s had before. These are the latter days, Sam, the end of history. The new’s all mined out. All we can do is recycle postconsumer materials.”

“Right!” he cried. “That’s so right!”

He clapped his hands together in his enthusiasm.

“Jesus, I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you here, Phil! You’re someone I can talk to about this stuff. You really get it. The latter days, the end of history, that’s it exactly!”

My embarrassment redoubled. I had meant the whole thing as a joke, but Sam had taken it literally. I shrugged.

“That wasn’t original either. The idea that everything’s been said before has been said before.”

Sam leaned toward me and touched my chest with his forefinger.

“But what if there was something that hadn’t been said before? What if there was something which no one had ever even thought before? Imagine the power of something so fresh and original in a world where everything else is grubby and secondhand! It would be like a nuclear explosion!”

He gave a sharp laugh and started to walk again. To the right, a light had become visible through the trees.

“I care not whether a man is good or evil,” Sam remarked in a stilted voice. “All that I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool.”

He looked at me expectantly.

“Another quote?” I murmured.

Sam smiled and nodded. I’d traveled a long way that day and was in no mood for party games.

“Beats me,” I said.

Sam didn’t reply. We had emerged onto a gently sloping clearing. I could just make out what seemed to be a number of huts and other buildings. We made for the largest of these, a long structure made of roughly hewn tree trunks with a steeply pitched roof. The light I had seen, a dull yellow glow, came from two small windows in the wall facing us. We walked around to the other side, where there was an imposing doorway with three steps leading up to it. Sam pushed the door open and ushered me inside.

The interior of the building seemed at first sight to consist of one huge room. The flooring was worn wooden planks and the walls made of the same tree trunks as outside, only painted white instead of dull red. The only light was provided by two naked bulbs which dangled on their cords from the ceiling some twenty feet apart. At the back of the room, opposite the door, a wood fire smoldered in an enormous fireplace made of beach rock. The air was drenched with the pungent smell of cedar smoke.

I took in all this at a rapid glance, but the feature of the room which most struck me was a large television set standing against the right-hand wall. A group of about five men and three women were sitting and lying in front of it, watching a movie featuring Sylvester Stallone blasting away with a weapon the size of a rocket launcher. They mostly looked to be in their early thirties, and were wearing the sort of cheap and durable clothes you can see on any street in the country. I was relieved to see that there was no sign of homespun fabrics or hippie regalia.

Sam picked up a remote control unit from the arm of a chair and stilled the video. Instead of protesting, the people who had been watching it all greeted him loudly, breaking into wide grins. Sam waved like a star restraining excess adulation with a mixture of appreciation and hauteur.

“This is Philip,” he said, turning to me. “He’s an old friend of mine. An old, old friend.”

They all stood there, studying me with expressions I could not exactly gauge, envy perhaps, or awe.

“Phil’s going to be staying with us,” Sam went on. “I’m really happy he’s here, and I want him to be happy too.”

The men and women all got to their feet and came toward me, smiling and holding out their hands.

“It’s great!” one of them said.

“Fantastic!” echoed another.

“We’re really happy you’re here!”

“Cool having you around!”

“Good to meet you!”

It all sounded crude and forced. Why were they coming on so strong to someone they’d only just met? They reminded me of salesmen welcoming a newcomer to the “team” under the beady eye of the manager.

“Way to play!” cried a tall man, gripping my hand forcefully. “You’re the man!”

Sam’s smile broadened.

“Andy used to be a baseball coach,” he said. “He treats everyone like they’re in the Little League.”

The others laughed uproariously at this quip.

“Hey, some of us are playing in the Majors now!” the tall man remarked in mock protest.

One of the men had stayed behind, munching on a package of corn chips and drinking beer from the bottle. He was staring at the frozen frame from the video, which showed Rambo in midburst, trembling as though from the pent-up frustrations of this enforced coitus interruptus.

“Hey, Mark!” called Sam. “Come and say hi.”

Mark got up with obvious reluctance and shambled over. He looked older than the others, more Sam’s age. He was a big guy, six one or two, and built to match. He wore a long beard divided into nine tiny pigtails tied up with silver bands, while his head was shaved almost bare, leaving just a dark stubble showing on the scalp. He wore a silver ring in his right ear and another in his left nostril, and glowered at me in a way I found physically intimidating.

“Hi,” he said with deliberate flatness.

Sam slapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey, loosen up, man!”

He turned to me.

“Mark’s kind of pissed because I kicked him out of his room so you’d have somewhere to sleep.”

“You didn’t need to do that!” I protested. “I could have slept anywhere. I don’t want anyone to have to give up …”

“Hey, it’s OK!” Sam replied. “Not a big deal. Right, Mark?”

Mark shot him a look, shrugged and walked back to the TV. I wasn’t the only person who was embarrassed by this, I realized. Several of the others shuffled about and looked at the floor as though they wished they were somewhere else. I found myself looking especially hard at one of the women.

I hadn’t noticed her the first time around, but now something about her struck me. She seemed different from the others, in a way I couldn’t quite pin down. She was dressed equally shabbily, in a pair of old khakis and a baggy gray sweater, but she managed to suggest that this was meant to conceal a great body, and had almost succeeded. Her face looked tired, but her brown eyes had an intelligent wariness which contrasted strongly with the flat, vapid expressions all around.

Our eyes met briefly. There was definitely a flicker of interest there, an intensity that made me realize that the facile smiles of the others had been directed at Sam, not at me. If I existed for them, it was simply as an extension of him.

“Come on, Phil,” Sam said, putting his arm around me. “I’ll show you where to bed down. We can talk in the morning.”

He led me around a massive rectangular dining table to a door at the end of the hall. The small room inside was furnished with a bed, a chair, a chest of drawers and an empty bookshelf. There was no window, and the air felt cold and damp.

“The Hilton it ain’t,” said Sam wryly. “This place was an old summer camp used to belong to some nutty sect. We’ve made a few improvements, but everything’s still kind of basic.”

“It’s great,” I murmured. “I just wished you hadn’t inconvenienced that guy for my sake.”

“It wasn’t just for your sake,” Sam replied, lowering his voice. “Truth is, Mark had it coming. He’s been getting out of line lately. This’ll be a good lesson.”

I wondered which line Mark had been getting out of, and why such a mean-looking dude would let someone like Sam push him around.

“Anyway, it’s just for now,” Sam went on. “Later on we can make other arrangements.”

“Oh, I won’t be able to stay long,” I said quickly “I’ve got to be getting back in a week or two, and there’s a couple of other places I want to see first.”

I wanted this established right away. I planned to stay a few days, a week at most. It would be something to look back on later as an “interesting experience.”

“If you need the can, there’s one across the yard,” Sam continued, ignoring my comment. “It’s kind of primitive, but you’ll get used to it.”

He stepped forward and grasped my hand.

“You’re going to find happiness here, Phil. A happiness you never dared dream would come to pass. I know that may seem kind of strange now, but it’s true. I’ll prove it to you.”

I smiled weakly and nodded.

“Great. Thanks a lot for inviting me.”