EPILOGUE:
I Have No Idea
The close hangars and parked single-engine Cessnas and Beechcrafts swept past on the edge of the runway at the Yucca Valley Airport, and as the sleek C37A jet lifted off and gained altitude, Joel Finehouse was able to look past the three-mile-wide cluster of small houses to the rugged hills of the Mojave Desert.
Agent Yoneda and Vilko Cendravenir were seated two rows behind him, both silent. Finehouse had talked with both of them, but had not decided which of the events he had seen out there today were ones he would accept as having been real.
He had had a phone conversation with Commander Lubitz this afternoon. Lubitz was being transferred immediately to the American Embassy in Helsinki, and Finehouse was being restored to his previous position at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C., back to developing alloys for vehicle armor. He was strongly looking forward to it.
The expenses of Operation Pleiades were being quietly stripped of itemization and specifics and shuffled into the accounts of the Materials Science and Technology Division.
The operation itself had been retroactively recast as a response to illegal GRU activity. It seemed clear that the deaths of six Sensitive Assignment Specialists on Sunday had in fact been the result of an actual rogue GRU operation, and two men who’d been killed in a grenade blast in Huntington Beach last night had—probably and fortuitously—been a part of it.
Agent Yoneda was already negotiating an agreement by which she would corroborate Finehouse’s report that the injuries of three agents today were incurred during the ONI’s fictitious counter-GRU operation. If anyone were to discover and correlate the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented record of the operation, they wouldn’t find much, and there would be no mention of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena.
Vilko Cendravenir would be paid as a cvilian consultant on crowd management. A team from the Office of Naval Intelligence was already at work establishing falsifying details for today’s events out by Giant Rock, and anything Cendravenir or anyone else might say about it all would be preemptively discredited.
Cendravenir had admitted that his chrome balls had got away from him and apparently accelerated whatever it was that had happened this morning—which seemed pretty clearly to have been the destruction of the UAPs, the end of Lubitz’s hopes for establishing communication with an alien life-form.
Lubitz had mentioned reports of catastrophic “hail storms” in England and Germany. More reports, with more appalling details, would surely follow soon from other nations. An enduring mystery.
Finehouse turned away from the view of the desert through the airplane’s window to look behind him. Agent Yoneda met his gaze and looked away. Cendravenir was asleep in a seat across the aisle, looking like some morbid commedia dell’arte marionette, and Finehouse considered getting up and leaning over the man and simultaneously shouting and yanking on his ridiculous goatee. But Cendravenir’s reaction might be to propel Finehouse through the cockpit door, or even tear the plane in half.
Finehouse relaxed in his own seat. They had all certainly failed.
But maybe sometimes, he thought, it’s a good thing, on the whole, to have closed a knife that someone else had opened.
A police car and a big plywood-sided truck were parked in the driveway of the derelict ranch-style house at the end of the cul-de-sac, and Santiago stopped his 125-cc Honda at the corner of Woordruff Avenue and flipped down the kickstand to watch. One of the few neighbors he’d been aware of was talking to a policeman next to a Century 21 real estate sign, and Santiago decided that this had nothing to do with the blown-up boat or the spacemen raising hell out by Giant Rock this morning. He had known that the day would come when he would lose access to his hideout.
For the first time, he pulled from his pocket the envelope Plowman had given him, and opened it. He counted twenty-five worn twenty dollar bills inside, and closed it and tucked it back into the inside pocket.
He glanced at the sky, which of course was empty now of anything but a few feathery clouds; but he shivered, wondering how the things he had seen today, particularly Mr. Plowman’s slide into nowhere, might join the other memories that appeared in his dreams—his parents rebounding from a speeding car and tumbling to the shoulder of the 5 Freeway south of Oceanside, and old Isaac Laquedem, his eccentric surrogate father, lying in a puddle of blood on an L.A. sidewalk.
He nudged the kickstand back up and turned the bike around. He could have used the fake IDs in the house, and sold the handguns. The nearly empty bottle of peppermint schnapps was a memento of an evening he had spent with a young lady a few months ago, and he had been saving the last swallow in the bottle—he wished now that he had not sentimentally refrained from finishing it the next morning.
At least he had taken Laquedem’s medallion, and given it to a man who, like Laquedem, had shown courage when it had proved to be necessary. And always on his wrists were the leather bands that contained the subsumed ghosts of his mother and father.
On Sunday night Galvan had asked Santiago to find Vickery for her. I’ll pay you a hundred dollars and a month’s free food at any of my taco trucks, she had said. He wondered now if anything he had done during these last two days had constituted finding Vickery for her. Worth looking into, once she got over the loss of the Dodge and the floor jack.
He clicked the bike into gear. He could disappear into the freeway-side gypsy nests for a while, until he found another den. Los Angeles was a maze of hidden chain-blocked stairs and boarded-up theaters and forgotten rooftops.
He let out the clutch and sped away toward the 605 Freeway.
Ingrid Castine could feel sand inside her blouse and her shoes. She set her glass down on the roof planks beside her deck chair. “When does your . . . landlord go to bed?”
“Around seven, usually,” Vickery said, leaning over to refill his own glass from the bourbon bottle. Castine noticed that he didn’t wince as he lifted the glass and sat back.
After Galvan had sold him a null license plate for his truck, which fortunately hadn’t been towed from the parking lot around the corner from her lot, Castine had insisted that they stop at a CVS drugstore and buy bandages and a lot of Terrasil Wound Care ointment, and when they had got here she had cleaned the gash over his rib and dressed and bandaged it. She was hopeful that no infection would develop—though he’d certainly be left with a big scar. They both agreed that it would be unwise to go to an emergency room with an obvious gunshot wound.
She judged that it must already be about five o’clock—the sun was silhouetting the hills to the west, and the early evening breeze was chilly enough to make the heater Vickery had carried up onto the roof useless.
“I’d pay a hundred dollars for a hot shower right now,” she said, hugging herself in a borrowed overcoat.
“You haven’t got a hundred dollars.”
“I bet I could use my ATM card.” She began to cast her mind back over the events of the last three days to identify instances when they had broken laws—but opening the memories let images crowd forcefully into her mind: the misshapen giant in the L.A. River bed on Sunday night, dead but groping blindly in the moments before it fell apart, and the great freeze and the failures of gravity that had followed; the tumult around Giant Rock six hours ago, gunshots and blood and ice-boulders crashing to the ground everywhere, huge crumbling hands clenching and flexing on the ends of spindly arms made of sand, Plowman and Frankie Notchett’s ghost sliding away into a hole to an impossible world that she had for a moment seen clearly spread out below her; and, worst of all, the endless ego-negating moments in which she had physically occupied the sea-water form of the dead alien on the deck of the Ouranos last night.
Without having intended to move, she realized that her elbows were suddenly pressed hard on her knees and her fingers were knotted in her hair. She tried to take a breath, and remember what she had been saying, but she could breathe only in gasps, and she was shaking. She had no idea what she had been saying.
Her chair tilted on the planks as Vickery knelt beside her, and she felt his arm around her shoulders; and she restrained the reflex to spring away from him.
“Hey,” came his voice. “You okay?”
“I—don’t know,” she whispered. “I have no idea.”
She was grateful that he had the sense not to say anything.
After a few moments she straightened up, and her fingers found her glass and brought it to her mouth; and a swallow of the warm bourbon let her begin to breathe steadily again.
“I want to say,” she began carefully, “that it’s been a long time since lunch.” She sighed deeply. “But I said that on Sunday night, and the next thing that happened was your bowl of scrambled eggs hit the ceiling.”
“I remember.”
“You still got any . . . what was it, beef stroganoff?”
“Yeah. Or lasagna. I can heat up a couple and bring them up here.”
“No, I—it’s getting dark. I don’t want to be up here when the stars come out.” She waved aside the obvious point. “I know the things weren’t from our space at all, but I don’t want to see lights in the sky.” She laughed softly, then bit her lip.
He got to his feet and walked to the ladder.
She stood up, gripping the chair and frowning at the top of the ladder and wondering if she would ever again trust her balance.
“I’ll go first,” he said, “and catch you, if necessary.”
She found herself thinking, I’d rather hit the ground. Than what? she asked herself a moment later. And she wasn’t able to evade the answer: Than overlap with anyone, in any way.
“That’s okay,” she said. “But I can stay here, at your place? For a while?”
“As long as you like. As long as we can.” He cocked his head. “Under what circumstances do you think you might want to . . . return to the real world?”
The real world and I never did get along, she thought.
“I can’t imagine,” she said.