Bruce McAllister - Moving On
When John Klinger went out to the Mojave Witness, which he did as often as
he could, he took the Bell 420. Flying it with his one good arm had gotten
easier over the past few months, and he could forget he didn't have two
good ones. That was one reason he took it: He could forget the pink
plastic.
He would set the little helicopter down thirty meters from the shack at
the eastern end of the Witness and close his eyes, waiting for the rotor
wash to die down. If it was daytime, he would get out and check the three
kilometers of electrified chain-link fence for any animals that had
blundered into it in the night and bury them some distance away, thinking
about death. He would stand for a moment in the shack's doorway looking
out at the endless sand the smog still hadn't touched and wonder how much
time he had. He would think about his parents, the quake-loosened bricks
outside his apartment that had hit him, destroying the nerves in his arm,
and what his twenty-six years of life really added up to.
If it was night, he would sit for a moment in the Bell and watch the moths
— like little ghosts — batter themselves against the single bulb by the
shack's front door. If there was a moon, he would remember what the
Witness itself — the kilometer-long, open tank of water — looked like with
the moonlight on its surface and wish he had hovered over it longer. He
would find himself wondering how many weeks or months he had before
Central got the funds for a new detector-translator system and his life
would have to change: With new equipment he wouldn't be able to justify so
many visits, wouldn't be able to come out like this every few days, lying
about "recurrent problems."
Then he would go inside, sit down at the little card table in the shack
and do what no fixer — no one in his position — was supposed to do: He
would read the transcripts of what the Witness — listening day and night
for the voices of the just-dead — had picked up from the Limbo.
Whether it was simply against policy, or a misdemeanor, or a felony to
read the transcripts, he could not remember, but he had been doing it now
for months. It was simply a function of the amount of time he spent at
this station, when other fixers were always on the move. Since he spent as
much time here as he could — attending to the problems of a
first-generation system and fabricating problems when he needed to — his
"crime" had evolved logically enough, hadn't it? He wanted to be out here
away from the city, and so he was — two or three times a week. He'd had a
radio for a while, and a video player small enough to fit on the card
table beside the coffee maker, and later a few books, but these, he'd
discovered, had been "baggage" from the city, and really had no place
here. The transcripts belonged when so many other things did not, and one
day he had begun to read them. He was the living, after all, and they were
the dead, and here at least — at the Mojave Witness — that was all there
was.
Had he been like all the other fixers, the techs who kept the Witnesses
all over southern California working, Davis, his supervisor, would have
moved him from one station to another throughout the Seventh District, all
200,000 square kilometers of it, and he would probably never have started
reading. But Davis knew he liked the desert — needed it in his own way —
and a fixer as good as he was, winner of Central's Troubleshooter Award
three out of five years, got what he wanted. What he wanted was this
station. The voices — the transcripts in front of him on the table — were
the ones that had come here. Not to Camel's Back overlooking San Diego
Bay, or Camp Pendleton's Witness with its view of Pacific breakers, or
Mullholland's, or El Centro's, but here — to the high desert, to the cold
dry peace of its winters, to the dreamy heat of its summers, to a place
where there were no human voices other than these. Even he wasn't a voice
here. He didn't sing. He didn't talk to himself like a desert rat. He
didn't play the radio or VCR. It felt wrong to, so he didn't.
Had he loved the city, as fixers like Corley and Tompai seemed to, the
transcripts wouldn't have interested him either. For people like them —
who liked hanging out in the tech lobby at Central, even had fun playing
with the design software on their assigned terminals in their assigned
cubicles with the fluorescent lighting — the living were very much alive.
And the just-dead — their voices, the transcripts of their ethereal babble
— were just that: ghosts, gone, moving on.
For him, month by month, the opposite had somehow become true.
The Justice Department, under whose legal jurisdiction the Witnesses
operated, required printouts as well as tapes — a hedge against
malfunction or criminal sabotage — and so the transcripts were printed on
a simple Centric printer even as the transmissions were being received and
tapes being made; and one night, alone, reluctant to return the Bell 420
to the Sherriff's Aviation helipad, or himself to his apartment in Corona,
he had started reading.
On August 16, six days before his twenty-seventh birthday, in the meanest
heat of the upper-desert summer, he phoned from his apartment in Corona
and informed Davis that he'd need another overnighter at the Witness.
Davis, of course, swore.
"Jesus Christ, you're spending a helluva lot of time up there, Klinger."
"It's the translator drive, sir. You know how old the boards are." And
then he added: "I don't like spending my nights out there any more than
you would."
He held his breath.
"Bullshit, Klinger, but when the new system comes in, you won't have to.
Try to make it in to Central on Monday at least, will you?"
"Yes, sir."
When the man's image was gone from the phonescreen by his bed, Klinger
started to breathe again.
If Central were expecting the new equipment any time soon, Davis would
have told him, wouldn't he?
He drove through the heat of the Inland Empire to Sheriff's Aviation
headquarters in Rialto, where, if he was willing to listen to McKinney
talk weapons for an hour — over coffee, in the snack bar — the old
pot-bellied bigot would let him take the Bell 420 again, instead of some
county ground vehicle, which was all the JD agreement with the County of
San Bernardino required. It wasn't that he didn't like McKinney. McKinney
was the one who'd taught him — ignoring his prosthesis kindly — to fly in
the days when Klinger would spend his off-hours hanging around the airport
like some PD wannabe. Like some deranged uncle, McKinney seemed to want
Klinger to have the very best, so of course he liked the man. It was just
the constant talking. Sometimes it drove Klinger crazy.
But he listened again, and again McKinney gave him the helicopter, and
again Klinger lifted off into the heat of summer.
That afternoon the air conditioning in the shack went out. He didn't need
to step outside and check the tap lines that ran to the nearest power-line
support tower a quarter kilometer away. Everything else was working. He
got down on his hands and knees and pulled the thing apart. A box of spare
parts he'd collected over the past months was under the card table, and
when he discovered he didn't have the part he needed — an alternator — he
got up calmly and plugged in the swamp cooler, the one he'd bought with
his own money. He closed the one blind, got out the Reynold's Wrap, and
did the window. The equipment could operate at up to 400 degrees
Fahrenheit without any trouble, so the air conditioner was for the living,
and as a consequence, in Central's eyes, didn't really matter. He knew it
was the heat that helped keep other fixers away. "You want the Mojave?"
Tornpai had once said. "You can have it. You're already dead, Klinger."
It wasn't true. He'd never felt more alive than he did when he was out
here under the stars, cool or sweaty, thinking about life and reading the
printouts. It was the morgue of the living — the cities — that made him
feel like a corpse, and the feeling wasn't getting any better. He went to
his apartment — he went to Central — less and less, and the only thing
that really worried him was how long he had before the new equipment
arrived.
The vast swimming pools with their open water and immense cement walls —
the "receivers" large enough to register the oscillation of neutrinos in
which the computers could find the "voices" of the just-dead — would last
forever, but the first-generation hardware, like flesh and bone, was
wearing out.
He had the shack's aluminum door propped open with a rock and the holes in
the screen door covered with tape, but the tape had lost its stick and the
bugs, attracted by his reading light, were getting in anyway. He was
dripping sweat on the transcripts as he tried to read. They were the
usual. The babble . . . the technical recitations . . . the private
memories . . .
. . . Christ died for me I lived for him I died for him he lived for me
. . .
. . . longitudinal studies of the astroglia provide some support for
this idea astrocytes in the rat undergo their final divisions . . .
. . . but when I went back years later and stood on the hillside behind
the house closed my eyes I could see the kids I could hear them playing
the way they did the way they laughed and shouted before Dorothy died .
. .
His eyes were very tired when he came across it:
. . . for when I was writing I was in golden places a golden palace with
crystal windows and silver chandeliers my dress was finest satin and
diamonds sat shining in my black hair then I put away my book and the
smells came in through the rotting walls and rats ran over my feet my
satin turned to rags and the only things shining in my hair were lice
the lice of my life as I knew it then . . .
He read it again, sitting up straighter. It was beautiful. It was poetry,
some of the prettiest he had come across. He had discovered long ago that
in general the dead weren't poets.
They were ordinary people, souls floating free of bodies at last, thoughts
held together for a little while, lodged, as the textbooks put it,
somewhere beyond the electromagnetic, "in one of the particle fields,
making their detectable oscillations in low-energy neutrinos bound to the
gravitational potential well of the Earth." But nevertheless, people.
More often than not they said very unpoetic things, like:
. . . where the hell am I?
Or:
. . . if she had only bought her dresses discount she would have had
more money for the trip but would she listen to me no she would never
listen to me . . .
Or:
. . . and then I slipped her panties off and put my face . . .
This was different. It wasn't even the poetic feeling of the words. Poetry
in books — in school all those years — had never interested him. The Bell
420 had more poetry, he'd told Corley once. Flying was more poetry than
any poem. But here a woman — he assumed it was a woman — had died, and
even in her death (especially in her death?) she could speak to herself so
beautifully. She could think and feel so beautifully about life, even
after leaving it.
She, too, was flying, it occurred to him. Not with a chopper, but with
words.
As he copied it out — on lined notebook paper, with his good hand — he
recalled something in the fixer's manual about this too. Whether it was a
misdemeanor or a felony to copy a transmission, he could not remember. It
was probably a felony.
He went to sleep at last on the cot by the card table, wondering how she
had died. He could see her face, but only vaguely, in the dark.
Two weeks later he found her again. He could not have said what it was
that made him so sure. Maybe the word lice, but probably other things as
well. He couldn't check. He hadn't written down her ID. He wrote it down
now: A266920.
. . . I once slept under a bridge I didn't have lice in my hair like the
woman who wrote that book it was like a river below me but it was cement
with a trickle of water it wasn't the rivers I dreamt of I once slept in
a pipe that time I ran away and that night I dreamt of rivers . . .
Later that day, under the same ID, he found:
. . . laugh child life laugh life is beautiful was written on the wall
under the bridge by the mattress the old blood on it even now I dream
that I am only a dream because when I was alive my dreams were as real
as that blood . . .
Had she been a poet herself — in real life? Someone who'd done well in
English in school, like so many girls did when boys didn't? Was this all
from books, ones she had loved? Had she really run away, been homeless,
slept under bridges? Or were these daydreams, someone else's stories?
She loved words. He could tell that. But that was all he knew.
He thought about her all day, and that night dreamed about a girl who
looked a little like Erika, his last girlfriend — the one two years ago
who hadn't, for some reason, minded his prosthesis — but also like a girl
he had seen years ago in an old photograph from the sixties or seventies:
Flowers in her hair . . . blue eyes . . . an old Victorian house behind
her . . . thinner than Erika would ever be.
All a fixer had to know was the machines, a little theory, and "policy."
But you didn't spend two years at Polytech for a T.A. in Witness
Engineering without picking up the rest. There were a lot of jokes and
tall tales — like the one about the ghost that had followed a fixer named
Nakamura all the way around the world, from one Witness to another, until
he went insane — just because he read a transcript. It was a joke, but
also a warning: Don't fuck with things you don't understand.
The most exciting thing that ever really happened to a fixer was a solar
flare seizure in the photon detectors or an anomalous shutdown of the
translators, and even those got to be routine. You heard about sabotage —
when the cases were big and ongoing — but he'd never met a fixer who'd
actually had to deal with it. And the transmissions behaved the way they
were supposed to behave . . . like any "hard" paranormal phenomenon. The
ghosts didn't communicate with one another, it seemed; the transmissions
came in at random; and finally, a few days or weeks or months after the
body's death, they just stopped coming altogether. The point was to record
what could be recorded before the "ghost" moved on, which they all did. If
the ghost was a murder victim, what a Witness heard might contain enough
to help the prosecution. Legally it was as good as a deathbed confession.
Except in cases of established pre-death insanity, correlations with fact
had been too high for the legal system to ignore.
You could, in other words, testify against your own murderer after you had
died.
The next night he heard the printer start. Something told him he should
look and because he did, he found her once more:
. . . I send you this I send you the night is darkening round me the
wild winds coldly blow but a tyrant spell has bound me and I cannot
cannot go the giant trees are bending their bare boughs weighed with
snow and the storm is fast descending and yet I cannot cannot go clouds
beyond clouds above me waste beyond waste below but nothing can move me
I will not will not cannot go how I wish how I wish I had even once made
words like these for you . . .
He sat amazed. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever read. He copied
it fast — seeing those blue eyes, feeling the brush of a woman's hand on
his — and sat waiting for more.
When nothing else with her code appeared, he got up and made himself some
lunch.
On Monday, after the meeting for all of the fixers at the hall at Central,
he drove out to Sherriff's Aviation, a portable computer — the smallest
and cheapest he could find at Fedco — in a Samsonite briefcase on the seat
beside him. When he arrived, he put the briefcase in the cockpit of the
Bell and went in to give McKinney his hour.
"You ever want to try the new firing range, Klinger — it's automated —
I'll let you fire an H an' K infrared g-launcher, or a galvanic Ingram —"
"Sure . . ."
"You tell me when and we'll do it. You say, Klinger. You'll be the only
fixer who's ever fired a skin-wired machine pistol, believe me."
"That would be great, McKinney. I gotta go. Thanks."
He plugged the old home Osterizer in — the one he'd rewired for the
purpose — set the little jury-rigged timer for random ignition, and over
the next hour watched the static appear intermittently and the printer
turn words and sentences into incoherent letters — the kind Central and
the JD so hated. Then he called Davis, told him the digitizer was acting
up again, and smiled when Davis swallowed it, allowing him a maximum ("A
maximum, Klinger, you hear?") of three overnighters for the upcoming week.
"Thank you, sir."
He had the air conditioner going in forty minutes and the mini-PC from his
apartment sexing the recorder in twenty, its "applepie program" doing
exactly what he hoped it would, the PC set to block the Osterizer ignition
when her ID registered. As long as no one else got assigned to the Mojave,
the PC would be able to work day and night in peace, checking the
transmissions for her ID and copying only those transmissions.
That was all he wanted — to have all of her transmissions, his own tapes
of them, and to copy them out with his good hand.
On a Wednesday, the next time he went to the shack, he found two:
. . . when I was child on Wiegkland Avenue just across the street from
Jordan High School there was a tree that smelled funny and had stiff
leaves and everyone carved or sprayed names on it I remember buying a
packet of seeds I remember looking for a place to plant them and I
remember thinking you can't plant seeds in cement can you —
Real interference from a solar flare or gravity shift had lost the rest on
both the shack's receiver and his own PC, but the second was intact:
. . . when I went to see my brother up north when he wrote me to tell me
where but don't tell anyone else and I got there he said no one knows
where I am and I said I know I know where you are and he said that
didn't matter because no one knows where you are Linda I said I do he
said yes you do and we laughed and that was the last time I saw him ever
. . .
He copied them, hand shaking, refolded the continuous printer sheets and
taped the copied transmissions to the wall over the printer. The first one
he had ever copied was in his wallet. He got it out and taped it up too.
That night, when he closed his eyes, he saw the buckled asphalt and
concrete of the Great Quake of '95. When his mother's and father's faces
appeared, he handled it as he always did — making himself see moonlight on
the surface of the Witness and nothing else. But this time saw her, too,
and found himself wondering what those days had been like for her. He saw
her running down a street, buildings falling. He saw himself holding her —
both of them standing still in the middle of everything, barely breathing.
He saw them kneel on an endless park lawn where nothing — nothing at all —
could fall on them, where nothing could hurt them.
His sheet was wet in the morning, but he left it. It would dry in the heat
by noon.
The next morning, coffee in his good hand, he picked up the night's
printouts from the tray under the printer and began to read. He found one
and it made him dizzy.
. . . why do you ask for poetry why do you ask for words less real than
those you send me on blind air when I am not sure I even remember when I
waked I saw that I saw not cold in the earth and the deep snow piled
above thee come live with me and be my love but thank you for asking . .
.
He stared at the words and when the chill, moving through him like winter
wind on the sand, faded away, he knew why he'd felt it.
Perhaps it was only a voice speaking to the nothingness, trying to keep
itself company. Perhaps she was only speaking to herself, to someone from
her past, someone who had loved poetry as much as she had. Perhaps it was
only one of these things
But as he read it again he felt the chill again —
He felt that she was answering him —
That she had somehow heard him and was answering him.
That night he got up suddenly from the cot, turned on the light and stared
at the printer. There was no transmitter — there was no transmitter at any
Witness as far as he knew. But there had to be one somewhere.
Others had tried. The original experimenters had transmitted messages to
particular names, particular IDs (syntactic personalities and photon
configurations) and to the Limbo at large, and answers had, at least on
occasion, indeed come back. They had come back tomorrow, or yesterday,
five weeks ago, a year from now. Like telepathy in the old dream
experiments at the Maimonides Dream Center, the afterlife had no reason to
respect time and space. And the ghosts themselves often had a sense of
humor, dark as it was. Asked about the assassinations of presidents and
premiers, they had sent back:
. . . Kennedy and Castro and Elvis are alive and working at Johnny
Rocket's . . .
Asked about the murder of a little girl named Mary, they had answered:
. . . Mary had a little lamb little lamb little lamb Mary had a little
something someone wanted . . .
They had even sent back a bad limerick:
There was a physicist named Fred
who tried to talk to the dead
but try as he might
he got it wrong
One of the senders was of course named Fred.
Somebody had a transmitter somewhere. If she were answering him, he would
find it and use it —
Because she was answering him —
Because by answering him she was making sure he would look for it, making
sure he would find it, and send a message to her.
He spent much of the next week at Central — asking gently about it, joking
about it, making fun of the original experimenters, the foolishness of
trying to talk to ghosts. There was no such equipment at Central, he
learned from the other techs. Only the R&D geeks at Justice had such
things, and maybe even they didn't anymore. In any case, it would have
been such an outrageous crime for a fixer to try that it wasn't even
listed as one. It was Tompai who said this, laughing. Klinger laughed with
him.
It was the poet William Wordsworth she was quoting, he discovered. And
Stephen Spender, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes. He had found them
in the indexes of first and last lines of poetry — indexes he hadn't even
known existed — on a computer in the university library in Riverside. It
was Emily Brontë she had sent to him last. It was the poetry of others,
yes, but it was poetry she had loved.
Without the ID, he would never have recognized it two days later as hers:
. . . when he told me to lie down I said listen motherfucker I've laid
down for you for ten years I'm not going to lay down again when he hit
me my teeth broke my head snapped back against the wall I put my hands
to my face and screamed I was going to cut his balls off before I'd lay
down for him for him again when he pulled out the razor and told me to
get down on the bed on my hands and knees or he'd cut my lips and nose
off like he'd done to someone else I did it I did I got down on my hands
and knees and he cut my legs I screamed I tried to get away but he was
cutting into my stomach and I screamed cocksucker and then I couldn't
scream anymore I couldn't see all I could feel was that tugging in my
stomach and I let go and I died . . .
When the printer stopped, he stared. He didn't want to look at the words
again. He didn't know what he was feeling. It was her, but it wasn't.
How stupid could he have been? No life was just poetry — a string of
beautiful moments in time. Every life had pain and rage. She wasn't an
angel. She was a human being, and as he realized this, he knew he loved
her.
He read it again, trying to make his body stop shaking. It would not, and
as it continued to shake he felt something shift inside him, the way it
did when he'd look at the stars at night and feel free and then, all of a
sudden, remember his mother and father.
When he began to cry, it amazed him. What it felt like — after so long.
As he copied the transmission by hand, he watched another begin:
. . . a shudder in the loins the broken wall the burning roof and tower
I remember the burning I was a little girl and the city burned for days
in all the papers it was history and I was living it but I was a little
girl do you remember the fires were you even born then?
She'd been intelligent. That was clear to him now. She'd been well read.
She'd been a romantic, but she'd known the harsher side of life, too. A
man — a man she had known — had killed her. Why? The man had killed
another woman, too — the same way he had killed her. Wasn't that what the
transmission meant?
The computers had flagged her by now. They had put together razor and I
died and all the rest multivariately, had a pattern, knew it was a murder.
They'd be back — searching the transmissions for the ones with her ID,
compiling rapidly.
That night, in the shack, Klinger tried to remember his father's eyes —
not closed, in the coffin, but back before the Quake.
As he lay in the darkness, he saw for the first time that when he'd first
started reading the transcripts, he had actually been looking for any
"voice" that had sounded like his father's . . . or his mother's . . . and
how insane that had been.
The Quake had happened five years before he became a fixer.
No ghost ever transmitted for more than a year.
The next morning, bright and early, he called Davis from the shack and
told him he was sick and wouldn't be making it in. When Davis asked him
how the problem was, Klinger told him he thought he'd finally gotten it
straightened out. "Good, Klinger," Davis said. "We've got a meeting
tomorrow. Get well, guy." Davis would find out what was happening if
Sheriff's Aviation records ever passed his desk; but they hadn't yet, and
it was worth the risk.
She was broadcasting a lot now. There might be a dozen of transmissions on
any given day. He wanted to be there for all of them.
The first came in at 11:00 A.M.
. . . who are you to tell me you hear me who are you to speak of love to
me?
He felt the chill again. All that was missing was his name. If she would
only say it: John. John K.
He waited.
There were no more transmissions.
As all of the fixers waited the next morning for the meeting to start,
Corley played with a portable digitizer in the folding chair beside him
and a new kid, just out of Poly, leafed through a medical-benefits
brochure. When the kid went out to use the bathroom, Klinger said to
Corley:
"Corley, any way I could get a name to go with an ID?"
Corley looked at him.
"You really are fucking crazy. Don't you ever listen at these meetings?
Reading a transcript is a fucking misdemeanor. Anything to do with an ID
is a fucking felony!"
"Don't get so tracky about it, Corley. I just saw a TV episode where they
had this guy, this fixer, finding out who a transmission belonged to and
nothing happened to him. . . ."
"Sure, Klinger. You're out of your fucking mind."
Corley gave him a good-natured shove and got back to work diddling the
portable as Davis began his check-in, the new kid following him around
like a puppy, asking questions as if it were the end of the world.
When the meeting was over, Klinger said to Corley: "Don't tell anyone I
asked?"
"Asked what, asshole?"
Klinger gave him a smile. "Thanks."
"Jesus Christ, Klinger, don't thank me. That's as good as accessory."
Corley had been in law school once. He was a talker, knew a lot and had
balls. Klinger liked him.
"Sorry, Corley."
"I don't hear you, Klinger. Go fix a mixer, will you?"
When he got back to the shack that evening, the cassette ribbon on the
printer had torn and the ribbon alarm was screaming faintly. For one
insane second he thought he'd lost transmissions, and then he remembered
the PC.
The PC had recorded three. Something was garbling them, but it wasn't the
Osterizer — it was something out there — and they were intact enough that
he could for the first time hear her voice in them:
. . . you could have been the man who killed me you could have been
(garbled) you could have been (garbled) and never said what I needed to
hear in the rooms where (garbled) but you didn't you could have been one
of a hundred who said nothing (garbled) when dreams meet and I have
known rivers my love . . .
And:
. . . but sometimes I think of myself as Snow White and God or the man
whose hand He chose to take me the swan taking me a sudden blow the
great wings beating still above me I do not feel special I have wings
but these mean nothing I fly but it means nothing nothing at all John K.
. . .
As he stared at his name — John K. — he knew he had been right.
He knew what he needed to do. He had known it all along, of course.
That night, on the cot, he dreamed about her again. In it he saw her face
clearly for the first time. Not a flower child's face, willowy and
ethereal, but the big hands of a country girl from Oklahoma or Kansas,
hands that opened a book of poetry one day to find the voices of angels,
which she memorized so she would have them forever. Blue eyes, yes, but
hair full of grit, blown by the wind, killed by a boyfriend she would
never, in a fairer universe, have ever had.
Seeing her clearly now, he loved her even more.
And wasn't that why he had dreamed it?
The phone message was waiting for him the next day when he returned to his
apartment for some tools and his checkbook. Davis wanted to see him
immediately. In his office.
The new machine had come, Klinger told himself. He could feel it in his
stomach and the feeling only got worse as he drove the two hours to
Central.
"One of your codes is being duped," Davis said.
"I don't understand."
"Someone's been duplicating the transmissions from one of your IDs,
Klinger. The system in Sacramento has registered it. Have you noticed any
tampering with the fence or the gate, with the machine itself?''
"No, sir."
Davis stared at him. He was a big man who always looked tired and he
looked especially tired today.
"Have you noticed any tampering with the recorder itself?"
"No, sir. I'd have mentioned it to you if I had."
"Yes, you would have." Davis paused and looked out the window at the
skyline. "I'm going to meet you out at the Mojave at three today. I'm
going to have to have a JD investigator and one of their techs with me and
they're going to have to ask you questions. They're going to have to give
you a polygraph or a voice-stress analyzer, or both — I'm not sure which."
"Yes, sir."
Davis looked at him again. "What do you do out there, Klinger?"
"What do you mean, sir?"
"You know what I mean. What do you do with all that time?"
Klinger didn't answer.
"You like being alone out there? Is that it?"
"Yes."
"There's nothing wrong with a young man being out on the desert alone
doing whatever he wants to do in a shack, as long as he's not breaking the
law. You wouldn't be doing that, would you?"
"I don't understand. . . . Why would a fixer want to duplicate an ID's
transmissions?"
Davis looked away.
"That's the question. There was a fixer last year in San Ysidro who made
duplicates of a particular ID's transmissions and sold them — sold them to
the people who were being incriminated. No one like that has approached
you, have they, Klinger?"
"No, sir."
"I'm just asking. That's the kind of question you're going to hear,
Klinger."
Klinger was standing now. His arms were stiff, to stop the shaking; his
knees locked. He moved his weight to one leg and balled his good hand,
watching Davis's eyes.
The eyes stayed on his.
All he could think to say was, "Thank you, sir." The man meant well. He
did feel thankful.
Davis nodded.
"If they don't find any tampering with the gate or the fence, they're
going to ask you a lot of questions. They're going to check everyone who
could've gotten a key to the gate and to the shack, but they're going to
start with you. I'll be asking security staff if they know of any way the
dupe alarm can be triggered by accident. I'll do what I can."
"Thank you, sir."
He took the Bell to the Witness. They'd find out about the chopper record
and any sudden change on his part would look bad. He got there by noon,
knowing that Davis had given him a head start, that the shack would be
untouched. He removed the PC and the Osterizer from their connections,
checked the connections for telltales of any kind, removed the hand-copied
transmissions from the walls and from the floor (where he'd laid them
out), put everything in a black plastic garbage bag and buried it a
hundred meters from the shack, looking around for figures or cars in the
distance. He'd considered tampering with the gate or the shack's door —
Davis had practically told him to, hadn't he? — but decided against it.
Davis and the other two — both somber men — arrived an hour later. Klinger
showed them the gate, the shack's door and window, and told them he'd
walked along the fence the full three kilometers and hadn't found a thing.
They asked him to walk it with them again. As they did, Davis kept looking
at him.
Back in the shack, while one investigator began to dust the equipment for
prints — using a pink powder Klinger had never seen before — the other
began the questioning: Had he given anyone a key to the gate or the shack?
Had anyone — anyone not working for Central — been asking him about the
Witness recently? Had he seen anyone — ground vehicle, chopper, hikers —
in the vicinity of the Witness over the last month? How was his social
life? Did he have a girlfriend? Had anyone appeared in his life recently —
over the last two months — if so, who? Did he go out drinking — if so,
with whom? Did he know of any fixer who seemed "troubled"? Had anyone —
any fixer — confided in him . . . about personal problems, resentment over
work, financial worries?
When they asked him how he felt about his own life — his parents' death,
his lack of family in the southern California area, his isolation in the
desert — he stiffened and was sure they noticed.
They'd check his bank account, any credit purchases, and would make a
visual inventory of any recent acquisitions like a car or boat or
expensive home entertainment system. He knew this.
They would have someone watch him. He was their prime suspect, whether
they were sure he was guilty or not.
When they pulled out the polygraph — and right after it, the Mark IV
voice-stress analyzer — and began to ask him a list of very precise
questions like, "Do you harbor any resentment toward your employers?", "Do
you have financial problems you feel are not your fault?", "Do you find
your work unchallenging?", "Has the man who has been loaning you the
Sherriff's Aviation helicopter been asking you for anything in return,
hinting that there might be something he'd like?", and finally, "Have you,
in whatever fashion and for whatever reason, been duplicating the
transmissions being received by this Witness?'" — he stiffened again but
kept repeating silently to himself the one message he had composed so long
ago for her. The message he would, somehow, send — to her.
As they were leaving, Davis nodded to him and said they would be getting
in touch with him again when they had interviewed others at Central —
other fixers.
"Is he staying here?" the tall investigator asked.
"I don't know." Davis turned to him. "It might be a good idea, Klinger, if
you didn't stay here tonight. . . ." Davis was doing his best to smile.
"I'd like to stay and work on the printer, sir. The ribbon keeps breaking,
and the sound-synthesizer on the alarm is weak. Would that be all right?"
"Is that all right?" Davis asked the men.
"I don't know. . . ." the tall one said.
"He'll be out of here in a couple of hours, won't you, Klinger?"
"It shouldn't take any longer than that, sir."
"All right," the shorter one said, frowning. "Just don't touch the dust."
"And, Mr. Klinger," the other one added, "make sure that from now on the
arrangement with the SA chopper goes through your supervisor."
"Yes, sir."
Outside, as he walked them to their car, Davis fell behind and said: "I
happen to think you're innocent, Klinger." He let the words hang, the
sound of sand, of gravel below them. "But this is a very big case. You
need to understand that. The ID was a nobody, but the people she touched —
one of them anyway — had fingers up into Vegas."
Klinger wanted to ask Who was she? — wanted more than anything in the
world to ask this — but instead found himself saying stupidly, "So it was
a murder?"
"Don't ask, Klinger. I just wanted you to know how big it is, that I don't
happen to think you're involved. That's all."
"Yes, sir."
As he spoke, his father's face came to him and the old feeling with it.
"By the way, Klinger," the voice was saying beside him, "the arrangement
with the Bell is fine. I talked to McKinney about it today. But do let me
know from now on when you're planning to use it. . . ."
They walked together to the car. Klinger wanted to say something, but
didn't know what. He could see them — his father's eyes; he wanted to tell
Davis something, and couldn't find the words.
As he made his way back to the shack, the sound of wheels turning on
gravel somewhere behind him, he realized that they never would have let
him stay — never would have spoken to him as they had at the end — if he
hadn't passed the tests —
That he had indeed somehow passed them —
As if she had been there helping him, helping him lie, because she wanted
it too:
That he be free to find what he needed — that he be allowed to speak to
her.
When the car was out of sight, he dug up the bag and brought it back to
the shack. Reconnecting the PC, he set the alarm to her code again, and
began to wait. When nothing had come by sunset, he lay down on the cot,
wondering if the just-dead could see the stars, if they could see anything
other than what they had already seen during their lives. When he fell
asleep it was easier than he'd thought it would be.
He awoke at dawn, checked the printer, unplugged the PC, and put
everything in an old backpack he hadn't used in months. McKinney needed
the Bell back at 6:30 — for a routine check. He had thirty minutes.
He got there with ten minutes to spare, using them in the main office to
make a Xerox of the hand-copied transmissions so that he'd have a second
set — so that no one could take them all from him regardless of what
happened.
No one paid any attention to him at the machine.
McKinney pointed the way to the lockers, giving him a key and joking about
desert bums with their backpacks full of drugs. When he'd stashed the
backpack, Klinger sat with him in his office and tried to stay awake. All
he wanted was to get the bag back out of the locker, get in his car, and
return to his apartment.
"In Nam they had a gunship, Klinger, a chopper that could turn a hamlet
into matchsticks — one round per second per square foot. They called them
Vulcan mini-cannons, Klinger, and I've got one of them sons-of-bitches
right here."
McKinney was beginning to blur. Klinger closed his eyes.
"Now, you can't go flying over cities with a mini-cannon, Klinger — that's
against every law there is — but we've got one assigned to whatever
chopper we want as 'Riot Control Study #14.' " McKinney laughed, the
crow's-feet crinkling at the comers of his eyes. "I take it out to Joshua
every Saturday and do a little controlling of the jackrabbits there. . . .
How's this Saturday look for you, Klinger?"
"I don't know, McKinney . . ."
"Shit, Klinger! You owe me a Saturday. You keep stringing me along like
this" — he laughed again, but it was serious — "and I'll think you don't
love me. What about it? Saturday. The floor is covered with them. You'll
be the only fixer in candy-assed Justice who's ever fired a Vulcan."
Klinger got up unsteadily, feeling he was going to throw up.
"I'll have to let you know. . . . Something's come up at Central and
they've got me on call. Something's been going down."
"You steal something?" McKinney was grinning.
"Yeah. A Witness — " Klinger was smiling back.
"— piece by piece," McKinney finished for him.
It was one of their jokes, Klinger remembered foggily. If they don't pay
you enough, Klinger, McKinney had said one day, you can always steal a
Witness —
— piece by piece, Klinger had said.
"They hassle you too much, boy," McKinney was saying, "you can always use
the Vulcan on them." He grinned. "Saturday?"
"I'll do my best, McKinney."
When he got back to the apartment, he looked around, saw nothing had been
touched, and rolled a joint, smoking it on the porch and looking out at
the sky high above the buildings. Then he went back in to clean the grease
from the pink plastic of his prosthesis. The grease wouldn't come off. He
tried to cut his own hair in the bathroom mirror. It looked worse. Nothing
was going right. Nothing at all. He put the backpack under the sink with
the PC and the Osterizer in it and then flattened both the hand-copied
transmissions of her voice and the Xeroxes he'd made so that they would
fit inside the pillowslip on the one pillow he used at night.
That evening, he dreamed of touching her breasts, making her gasp and hold
on to him hard, as if he could protect her from everything in the world.
That night the men broke into his apartment.
They began in his living room. He woke to the sound. While one kept at it,
turning things over, the other one appeared in his bedroom doorway and
kept the light on him, blinding him like some animal caught in headlights.
Even in the stupor, even in the blinding light, he knew who they were. One
found the backpack easily under the sink. The other one grabbed him,
pulled him off the bed and laid him down on the floor, kneeling over him.
This one — the one he could see — wore a dark leather jacket, the kind the
LA gangs liked. The blinding light went away. The bedroom light came on.
The man by the doorway wore a nice suit. Both of them were wearing goggles
— not unlike the kind McKinney had shown him, the kind you wore for seeing
in the dark, but smaller, lighter-weight.
He didn't try to move, but the kneeling man hit him anyway, the blur of
the hand passing into Klinger's brain and making him cry out. He'd never
be able to identify them with the goggles — which was the point. Or one of
them.
"What we want to know," the man in the nice suit standing by the door said
calmly, "is where the duplicates are and who exactly you're making them
for. . . ."
Before he could answer the kneeling man hit him again, this time on the
ear, and Klinger made another sound.
"I don't —"
The hand came again — on the same ear — and he knew they weren't going to
let it go, that they didn't need some voice-stress analyzer to feel sure
they knew who had made the copies, and why.
"So you don't get paid enough. So someone approaches you one day and tells
you how much he's going to pay you to dupe some ID —"
"I really don't —"
He was pulled from the floor and put against the wall. He was held with
one forearm while the other arm, with its fist, broke his nose, then
struck his left eye, then hit him just below where he imagined his heart
was, moving lower and lower as he blurted:
"Just . . . the handwritten stuff."
He had to repeat it because his mouth was a mess, because the man was
hitting him even as he tried to get the words out.
"What the fuck does that mean?" the man in the nice suit asked.
Klinger didn't know, so he thought hard. "I don't have them here. . . .
I've got them at the Witness. . . ."
The man holding him let him fall, and as Klinger lay on the floor he felt
— as if it were happening to someone else — his lungs pulling at wet air
in a cage too small for them. The man by the door gave him a moment to
catch his breath.
"You haven't made a delivery yet?"
"No." Something was drooling from his mouth. He wiped at it with his good
hand.
"We're in a hurry, John," the man in the suit said. "You understand."
Below the insect-like eyes of the goggles there was a grin.
He couldn't get up. He was sliding back down the wall, taking forever.
"I . . . buried them," he said.
"We'd like you to dig them up."
What scared him most was that they might see the pillowslip, how fat it
was, and he would get sick, and, as he got sick, having found what they
wanted, they would simply kill him or put him in the hospital for a long
time and he wouldn't be able to do it. What he needed to do.
He was sitting up at last.
"There's a pickup . . . the day after tomorrow."
"We don't understand, John."
"At the station . . . the Mojave station. . . . At ten A.M."
"The buyer will be alone?"
"That's . . . what he said."
"Who?"
"I don't . . . know. I was contacted by phone . . . by telephone."
The man with the leather jacket was moving toward him.
"Jesus Christ," Klinger heard himself say. "He told me he'd pay. . . . I
didn't care who he was."
The man in the leather jacket looked at the man in the nice suit.
The man in the nice suit sighed. The man in the leather jacket didn't
move.
"We really hope," the man in the suit said, "that you're not fucking with
us."
Klinger shook his head, the pain making pretty explosions.
"If you can keep our little meeting a secret, John," the man in the suit
was saying, "we'll have fewer problems, John."
They were turning to leave.
"They teach you this in law school?" Klinger heard himself say.
The man in the leather jacket looked at the man in the suit. The man in
the suit looked back. The man in the leather jacket walked over to Klinger
where he sat on the floor and hit him in the nose, which was suddenly
heavy enough to pull him into a darkness where there was no woman, no blue
eyes, no brush of his fingertips on her soft breasts to make her hold him
tightly against the pain of the world.
When he awoke, it was night. He didn't want to move but he made himself
get up, find the bathroom, and, fumbling, relieve himself. He took three
extra-strength Excedrin IB — stuff with caffeine — and somehow got into
his car and drove to the emergency room at Corona Community.
When they asked him how he'd gotten it, he told them a mugger on Tyler
Avenue. When they asked him if he'd filed a police report, he told them
yes. They called his HMO for approval of the treatment and took two hours
to bandage his nose.
He filled the prescription for codeine in the pharmacy at the hospital and
went home, setting the alarm for noon.
His face felt huge, as if two people were wearing it. He drove to
Sherriff's Aviation fighting the edgy dreaminess of codeine, and when he
arrived, McKinney took one look at him and laughed:
"Jesus Christ, who worked you over?"
"I need a gun, McKinney." He could still taste the blood, though there
shouldn't be any. He wondered if his gums were bleeding, a tooth, a tooth
turning gray as it died. "I drive out to the Witness last night because
Davis asks me to and some ethnic asshole jumps me at the gas station. I
need a gun."
"No reason we can't arrange it, Klinger," McKinney said at last.
He had him in the snackbar, showing him off — bandage and all — over their
usual cup of coffee. Everyone was looking, even the veterans who'd seen a
lot worse. McKinney was having a great time. "God Almighty. The Justice
Department of this fine nation tells us we're supposed to give you boys
whatever you need, and, as it happens, my boy, I've got a personal weapon
— a beautiful Colt Phantom — sitting gathering dust in a case. No
paperwork. No fuss. How does that sound? A gift from your old friend
McKinney to his best friend Klinger . . ." Less loudly, he asked: "Did
Davis see you like this?"
"No. . . . I phoned him."
The old man shook his head, whistling. "You got the Phantom as of fourteen
hundred hours today, Klinger, but try not to grease anyone. Just wave it
at them. When are you going to get that nose fixed?"
"Davis gave me two days off."
"That was white of him."
"I want to see your mini-cannon do its thing, McKinney," Klinger said.
McKinney sat back and frowned. "You sure got a fucking weird sense of
timing, Klinger." He was quiet for a moment. "I don't know . . ."
"You're always talking about it, McKinney. I'm in the mood, now."
McKinney squirmed a little.
"Me and the old lady are supposed to go to Lake Perris with her brother's
six kids and I'm supposed to get off early. She's not going to like this
at all."
"Talk's cheap, McKinney. You want to show me what it can do — I may not be
in the mood later."
McKinney stared at him and grinned finally. "You want to get it out of
your system, right? Every jackrabbit some ethnic son-of-a-bitch, right?"
"Right."
"Okay. We take the Huey. And get that nose fixed. It's enough to make a
person puke."
McKinney laughed. Klinger laughed, too, though it hurt.
The sky was clear as crystal and Klinger wasn't paying much attention to
the rabbits two hundred feet below. The distinctive whump-whump-whump of
the Huey filled the air and the Vulcan was a mechanical belt-fed cannister
that fired a hundred M-60 rounds a second. When they weren't knocking
rabbits away like rag-dolls, the rounds were raising little plumes of
dust, sand and gravel. The rabbits kicked and kept kicking, lying on their
sides, becoming specks as the Huey flew on. McKinney made him listen to
stories about "the highlands," the "offensive of '68," "armor at Lang
Vei," and "black syphilis." Klinger asked him every question he could
about the Vulcan and McKinney answered every one. When Klinger asked if he
could fly, McKinney said sure. When he asked if he could fire the Vulcan —
why were they up here if he wasn't supposed to fire the thing? — McKinney
stalled, but said yes at last, and Klinger felt the gun roar like the
biggest zipper in the world. He had to fly with his one good hand, but the
grip and trigger for the Vulcan fit his prosthetic crab perfectly. Even
McKinney was impressed. They got back at five on the button, Klinger took
another codeine for his face, and McKinney handed him the Phantom proudly.
Klinger thanked him and slapped him on the back with his good hand. The
old man seemed sorry — truly sorry — that their little adventure was over.
Driving ten miles up the Santa Ana wash, Klinger parked the Honda in a
stand of eucalyptus, the backpack with its PC and Osterizer and the
pillowslip full of its paper beside him. The sun would wake him at dawn.
It always did in the desert.
He didn't dream about her.
He knew he wouldn't until it was over.
He got to Sheriff's Aviation at eight the next morning. McKinney never
arrived until nine. The vehicle-release sergeant at the helipad looked at
his nose as if wanting to ask, but only said: "You want the Huey,
Klinger?"
"Yes, sir. We took it out yesterday with the Vulcan. Someone in Tidwell's
office has this theory, McKinney's supposedly testing it, but I don't
think his heart's in it. He wants me to make the run for him today. . . ."
Klinger sighed as if to say This is what you do for a good friend — and
forced a smile.
The man nodded, unsure. He picked up the phone, pushed the buttons,
waited, and set it back down slowly. "You'll be needing a cartridge belt .
. . ?"
Time seemed to stop. It was the belt. McKinney and all his eccentricities
were one thing, but a belt to a kid? Klinger sighed again and said:
"Why do I get the feeling McKinney didn't get the paperwork done on it?"
"Because he didn't," the sergeant said, but the confiding tone was there:
We both know what McKinney is like, don't we.
"Shit." Klinger sighed again.
The sergeant looked at him for a moment and finally sighed too.
"All right . . . I'll consign you a belt, but make sure he fills out the
A-202 sheet when he gets in."
"Thanks, sir."
"Have a good run," the man said, and then added: "Just don't shoot
anyone."
It was the best joke the man could think of that early in the morning.
Klinger laughed at it.
As he left, he knew she had been there with him again. Even this — the
belt — had gone too easily.
As he neared the Witness, backpack and pillowslip beside him, the sun
blinded him for a moment to the east and he banked, pulling over the
access road that drove for ten straight kilometers across the Mojave
floor. It was 9:45. Two minutes later he spotted the car below him — the
gray-blue paint job and black tire walls of a Justice car. He pulled
ahead, squinting toward the Witness, and when he was almost on top of it
saw the second car — a big white Seville parked behind the shack, front
and rear license plates missing.
Two figures were out, standing beside it.
Banking south, he watched the two closely, and when he was sure they had
seen the Huey, he nosed toward them just as McKinney had shown him to,
firing.
The sound of the gigantic zipper filled the air.
He let it chew the sand and gravel ten meters from the car for three full
seconds while the two men dove, scrambled, looking like roadrunners with
absolutely no place to go.
When he zeroed in on the car at last, it took only a second. The car
collapsed, the doors blowing sideways, the roof disappearing, fragments of
metal flying after the men wherever they tried to run.
He banked, circling them, and knew at last why McKinney liked those
jackrabbits on the desert floor.
He chased them. He sent short bursts every couple of seconds right behind
them and the faster they ran, the slower they seemed to go, tiring,
circling back toward the shack because there was really no other place to
go. One of them fell as he fired. The figure jerked. Little plumes rose
around it. The figure began to crawl on its hands and knees, stopped, fell
over, jerked some more, and finally lay still.
Klinger wondered what the man would transmit over the next few days, weeks
and months, what word or phrase a Witness somewhere would pick up in the
neutrinos and transcribe.
And then the bullets hit me?
I tried to crawl, but couldn't, and then I died.
Just like her: And then I died.
Klinger thought of the message he had composed — the one for her, the
big-boned girl he could only meet in dreams, because that was what life —
and death — had dealt them. He repeated it to himself for the thousandth
time as he tracked the other running figure, firing until it too was down,
and, without looking at the body, flying on, putting the Huey down at last
not far from the shack.
When the rotor wash had died away and he could see again, he watched the
cloud of dust from the company car getting larger on the access road.
The car stopped. None of the doors opened. With the backpack and
pillowslip under his bad arm and the Colt Phantom in his good hand, he got
out of the Huey, stood for a moment, and took aim. Gravel flew a few
meters in front of the blue-gray car and the car shot into reverse,
fishtailing wildly until it had turned and was speeding back down the
access road. Stopping about a kilometer away, it turned back around to
face him like a bull. They were probably radioing for backup.
He went inside.
With the PC reconnected and the handwritten pages and the Xeroxes — all he
had of her — laid out on the floor, he propped open the door and waited.
There was one transmission — only one:
. . . but when I waked I saw that I saw not cold in the earth and the
deep snow piled above thee come live with me and be my love John who
knows me so well . . .
He did not understand. How could she be answering him? He had never sent
the message. And now he never would.
He wanted to cry, but found he could not.
He heard the bullhorn before he heard the choppers. And then the choppers
drowned the bullhorn out and he got up to go to the door.
A black-and-white sat a few hundred yards down the access road, doors
open, a bullhorn — what he assumed was a high-powered bullhorn — peeking
around one of them.
For some reason they imagined he could hear the thing over the noise of
the choppers and he had to point at his ear again and again — standing in
plain sight in the doorway — before they got the idea and radioed for the
choppers to stand back.
"Klinger!" the bullhorn said. It wasn't Davis. "We know what you've got
and we know what you can do. This is as far as it needs to go. If we can
reach some agreement before the SWAT boys get here, things will go a lot
easier. Signal if you understand."
Klinger waved the Phantom.
"We see the weapon, Klinger. We've received your signal. We want to know
what you want — we want to hear what's on your mind."
He wondered if it was too soon for the marksmen to be there. He didn't
have hostages. He wasn't even in the Huey with the Vulcan. They actually
had, he realized, no idea what he really "had" or what he wanted. They
really didn't.
"I want to talk to Davis," he shouted.
The words were lost in the wind.
Someone had binoculars. He could see them. He could see something shaped
like a dish too.
"We can't hear you, Klinger," the bullhorn said.
"Davis!" he shouted. "I want to talk to Davis."
"You want to talk to Mack Davis?"
The dish was a directional mike.
"Yes!" he shouted.
They were talking to each other now. One of them had to be a negotiator.
"Davis is a good man, Klinger," the bullhorn said at last. "He's treated
you well — just like a father. He's a true friend."
Davis was with them. That was obvious. The negotiator knew what he was
doing.
"Yes. He's the one I want to talk to."
"What?"
"Davis is the one I want to talk to."
There was more talking behind the open car doors, figures scurrying. He
could see Davis stand up, two uniforms shielding him.
"Davis is your one true friend, Klinger. Remember that."
"Yes, he's treated me well!" Klinger had, he discovered, started to cry at
last.
Everything fell silent at that moment. The wind was gone.
"Davis is the only one I'll talk to," Klinger said again, sure that they
could read his lips — even if the mike couldn't pick him up. They had a
lip-reader. With binoculars. They had to.
Then, because he thought he heard the ID alarm go off on the printer, he
went inside again.
He'd been staring at the printer for what seemed like forever — it hadn't
been the alarm at all, but something else, a sound from somewhere in the
desert — when he heard Davis's voice on the bullhorn.
Stepping outside, wondering if a rifle round would hit him in the forehead
before he could say a word and he would join her where words didn't matter
— he shouted: "I can't talk like this, Davis. You gotta be in the shack.
I'm not going to hurt you, but you've got to be in the shack with me."
More discussion behind car doors and then, through the bullhorn, Davis
answered: "I'm coming in, Klinger. I am not armed and I really don't think
you want to hurt me. I think you care about me as much as I care about
you." More negotiator words. "I think this is something that's simply
gotten out of hand. We're good friends and I'm coming in because I think
you want and need a friend right now."
"I won't hurt you," Klinger found himself saying. He said it quietly. His
eyes were blurred. He didn't want them to be.
When the big man, sweating in the heat and his own nervousness, was
inside, Klinger couldn't look at him, couldn't keep the Phantom aimed at
him. He was looking at the printer instead, while the big man — he could
hear him doing it — sat down slowly and carefully on the old cot. He was,
Klinger was sure, looking at the hand-copied pages and the dark Xeroxes
laid out so neatly on the floor.
"Klinger?"
"Yes."
"What do you want? People have gotten hurt, but I think I know who they
are, and the people out there in the cars and choppers are willing to
agree. They just need to understand. If they aren't able to understand,
Klinger, and understand soon, they're going to have to come in. If they
have to come in, they're going to have to view this as a hostage
situation."
"I want to stay here," Klinger said, his back still turned. It wasn't what
he wanted to say, but he couldn't think.
"That's what you want to tell me?"
"No . . ."
"Did you make those dupes, Klinger?"
"Yes."
"Is that why you wanted me here — to tell me why?"
"Yes . . ."
"I'd like to listen — "
"I didn't want to lose her, sir," Klinger heard himself saying. "You don't
know what she is like."
He could hear the big man shift his weight on the cot, searching for the
right words — his own, or someone else's.
"She's dead, Klinger," Davis said at last.
Klinger looked at him. "No, she's not, sir. She's been answering me."
The big man was shaking his head, blinking. Klinger could see it.
"She's dead and she's sending, Klinger. That's all. That's what we do,
Klinger: We listen to what the dead send us."
"Could you tell me her name?"
Davis closed his eyes. Klinger looked away.
"Please," Klinger said.
"I don't think so, John. I don't think that would help. . . ."
Klinger took a deep breath. "Please tell them that's what I want. I want
to know her whole name and I want the right equipment to transmit a
message to her. Tell them that."
The big man didn't seem to be breathing. He was shaking his head. "Klinger
. . . Klinger . . ." The big man took a breath at last. "Her name was
Semples . . . Linda Semples. She was a black prostitute, Klinger. A smash
junkie. Her pimp killed her. He killed her because she was threatening to
tell the police about his lab, his friends, the distribution from
Victorville to Vegas. She fucked for money, Klinger. Or she did once. She
was getting old. She was forty years old and the only thing that kept her
in business, Klinger — I'm sorry to have to say this, but you've got to
understand and accept it or this isn't going to end — was the kinds of
things she'd do in bed with a man —"
Davis was looking at his hands, which were clenched white. He would not
look up. Klinger knew it must have felt cruel for him to say these things,
and he was not a cruel man. Klinger realized then how much he loved the
man.
"You're doing this over a dead hooker, Klinger — a dead hooker with a mean
pimp. You're doing this over a forty-year-old whore who liked honkies like
you about as far as she could piss. I think you can be helped, Klinger,
but it's got to stop here. She's dead, Klinger. You didn't really
understand this — you didn't know a thing about her — otherwise, you
wouldn't have done all of this, am I right?"
Klinger was looking at him. He was holding the Phantom, not aiming it,
just holding it.
"I'd like you to leave now, sir," Klinger said. "I'll be staying here
waiting for her next transmission. I don't know how long I'll be here, but
I'll signal when I'm ready to leave. I'd appreciate it if you'd tell
them."
Davis got up slowly, as if reluctant to leave. He opened his mouth to say
something, but nothing came out. He wasn't blinking now. Neither of them
was.
When the big man was gone, Klinger sat down at the card table, closed his
eyes and recited to himself once again the message, letting the fingers on
his good hand move as if he were typing on a keyboard somewhere:
. . . to the woman who slept under a bridge who loves poetry who dreams
I know you better than you were ever known in life I love you please
answer me John K. . . .
His fingers typed it again and again — although there weren't any keys —
although there never would be.
When the door to the shack flew open and three men with shotguns exploded
into the little room, Klinger's head was down on the card table, almost
asleep. He managed to raise the Phantom just enough to let them know what
he wanted them to do, and they obliged.
The blast from the weapon to his right raised him in the air, filled his
left shoulder with a winter frost, and set him down on the floor not far
from the card table. Lying there, looking up at the corrugated metal of
the ceiling and feeling the frost move into his arms and legs, he knew the
ID alarm on the printer had never gone off. That was the terrible thing.
The pain in his shoulder was nothing.
She had moved on.
They always do, he remembered someone — Tompai or Corley or Whirley —
saying years, years ago.
He thought of the fixer Nakamura who had fallen in love with a ghost and
finally gone insane.
Then he let them help him up in all the blood and get him to the car.
That night, in the medical ward of the county jail, he had the very last
dream. Her skin was dark, of course, and she was older, much older than he
was. But how could it matter? They talked. They talked about his life and
about hers and when they were through, they both fell silent. They didn't
touch. They didn't touch each other.
This is the last, she told him.
I know, he said.
You didn't need a machine at all . . .
I know that now.
I love you, too, John. I always have, John, she said. And I always will.
When he repeated the same words back to her — feeling them more than he
had ever felt them in his life — he awoke in the darkness of the hospital
room and saw clearly how it would all go.
He would heal. There would be a trial. There would be a few months in
another kind of ward. Then there would be a new job, a very different
kind, and, in the end, everything would be right again.