ONE
The horizon immediately after the undulation of the earth had ceased, presented a most gloomy and dreadful appearance; the black clouds, which had settled around it, were illuminated as if the whole country to the westward was in flames and for fifteen or twenty minutes, a continued roar of distant, but distinct thunder, added to the solemnity of the scene. A storm of wind and rain succeeded, which continued until about six o’clock, when a vivid flash of lightning was instantaneously followed by a loud peal of thunder; several gentlemen who were in the market at the time distinctly perceived a blaze of fire which fell between the centre and south range of the market.
Earthquake account, Feb 12,1812
The sound of drumming and chanting rolled down from the old Indian mound as the school bus came to a halt. Jason Adams wanted to sink into his seat and die, but instead he stood, put his book bag on one shoulder, his skates on the other, and began his walk down the aisle. He could see the smirks on the faces of the other students as he headed for the door.
He swung out of the bus onto the dirt road. Heat blazed in his cheeks.
“Wooh!” one of the kids called out the window as the bus pulled away. “I can feel my chakras being actualized!”
“Your mama’s going to Hell,” another boy remarked with satisfaction.
Jason looked after the bus as it lurched down the dirt road, thick tires splashing in puddles left by last night’s rain.
Another few weeks, he thought, and he wouldn’t have to put up with them anymore.
Not for the length of the summer, anyway.
The drumming thudded down from the old overgrown mound. Jason winced. Aunt Lucy must have let his mother off work early. There wasn’t going to be a lot of business at the greenhouse till Memorial Day.
It was bad enough that his mom was a loon. She had to drum and chant and advertise she was a loon.
Jason hitched the book bag to a more comfortable position on his shoulder and began the short walk home.
Green shoots poked from the cotton field to the north of the road. The furrows between the green rows were glassy with standing water. Swampeast, they called this part of Missouri, and the name was accurate.
The inline skates dangled uselessly off Jason’s shoulder. Gravel crunched under his shoes. He could put up with the drumming, he thought, if only he were back in L.A. Drumming was even sort of normal there— well, not normal exactly, but there were other people who did it, and most other people didn’t make a point of telling you that it qualified you for eternal damnation.
Jason passed by the Regan house, a new brick place on the lot next to where Jason lived with his mom. Mr. Regan was as usual puttering around Retired and Gone Fishin’, his bass boat parked inside his carport. So far as Jason could tell, Mr. Regan spent more time polishing and tinkering with his bass boat than he did actually fishing. The old man straightened and waved at Jason.
“Hi.” Jason waved back.
“Found a place to skate yet?” Mr. Regan asked.
“No.” Other than the outdoor basketball court at the high school, which was usually full of kids playing basketball.
Mr. Regan tilted his baseball cap back on his bald head. “Maybe you should take up fishin’,” he said.
Jason could think of many things he’d rather do with his life than sit in a boat and wait for hours in hopes of hauling a wet, scaly, smelly, thrashing animal into the boat with him. He really didn’t even care for fish when they were cooked and on a plate.
“Maybe,” he said.
“I could give you some lessons,” Regan said, a bit hopefully.
Regan had made this offer before. Jason supposed that he sympathized with his neighbor’s being retired and maybe a bit lonely, but that didn’t mean he had to assist him in his rustic amusements.
“Maybe after school’s out,” Jason said.
After he finally went crazy from living in the Swampeast, he thought, sitting in a boat next to a stack of dead fish might not seem so bad.
The drum boomed down from the mound behind the houses. Jason waved to Mr. Regan again and cut across the soggy lawn to the old house where he and his mother lived. Batman, the dog that belonged to the Huntleys on the other side of his house, ran barking toward Jason in order to warn him off. Jason, as usual, ignored the dog as he walked toward his front porch.
Jason’s house was very different from the four modern brick homes that shared its short dirt road. A dozen or so years ago, when the farmer who owned this area decided to retire, he sold the cotton fields to the north of the dirt road and created a small development south of it— two new brick homes built on either side of his own house, four altogether. When his widow died, Jason’s mother had bought the old farmhouse, and when Jason first saw it, four months ago, he thought it looked like the house that Dorothy lived in before she went to Oz. It was a turn-of-the-century frame farmhouse, large and spacious, painted white. There were a lot of things that Jason liked about the house: the funky old light switches, which had pushbuttons instead of toggles. The crystal doorknobs and the old locks on all the bedroom doors, some of which still had their skeleton keys. He liked the sashes that made a rustling sound inside the window frames when he lifted the windows, and he liked the screened-in front porch with its creaking floorboards. He liked the tall windows with the old, original window glass that had run slightly— he remembered his science teacher telling him that glass was really a liquid, just a very slow liquid— and which gave a slightly distorted, yellowish view of the world. He liked the extra room, because the house was intended for a much bigger family than the two people who lived in it now, and he liked having more space than he’d had in L.A., and having a room up on the second floor with a view.
But the view was of the wrong part of the world, and that was what spoiled everything.
Jason bounded across the porch, unlocked the front door with its fan-shaped window, and dumped his book bag on the table in the foyer. The house welcomed him with the smell of fresh-cut flowers that his mom brought home from Aunt Lucy’s greenhouse. He passed through the dining room— Austrian crystals hung in the window, spreading rainbows on the wallpaper— and into the small, old kitchen that his mother was always complaining about. More crystals dangled in the windows there. Jason opened the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of water from the plastic jug, careful not to pour out the large quartz crystal that his mother had placed in the jug.
“The crystal expands the energy field of the water from one foot to ten feet,” his mother had explained, “and then you can drink the energy.”
He had never asked why he would want to drink energized water. The explanation would only have made his eyes glaze anyway.
He drank half the glass of water and refilled it, then returned the jug to the refrigerator. He took an orange from the refrigerator drawer, used a knife to cut it into quarters on the ancient zinc countertop, dropped the knife in the sink, and then— his stomach presumably radiating powerful metaphysical energy ten feet in all directions— he went up the narrow back stair from the kitchen to the second floor.
He went into the corner room he thought of as his study, with his computer, desk, and skating posters, and flicked the switch on his computer’s power strip. The sound of his mother’s drumming came faintly through the closed windows. Jason sucked the juice from a slice of orange while he looked out the side window.
To the east, the dirt road dead-ended against the green wall of the levee, the huge dike that kept the Mississippi from flooding into their front yard. The river was normally invisible, hidden by the cottonwood thicket that stretched almost a half-mile from the levee to the riverbed, but the river was unusually full right now, with the spring melt and a long series of rains, and had flooded partway up the levee. Through the tangled trees, Jason could glimpse an occasional patch of gray water.
He had thought, when told he would be living near the Mississippi, that he would at least be able to watch the boats go by, maybe even big white stern wheelers like on television, but the combination of the impenetrable underbrush and the levee’s big green barricade had blocked any view from the flat ground. Even when he climbed onto the old Indian mound behind the house to see well over the levee, he could see water only here and there.
He turned his eyes to the north window, where the rain-soaked cotton field stretched on to a distant row of trees on the horizon. The cotton field was mostly brown earth marked by the wide rows of young green cotton, but here and there the soil was stained with circular pale blooms, as if God with a giant eyedropper had splashed white sand down onto the rich soil. Jason had sometimes wondered about those circular patches, but he hadn’t thought to ask anyone.
The land was so flat that the trees at the end of the cotton field seemed to mark the edge of the world, hedging it to the north just as the levee did to the east. The only thing he could see past the trees was the tall water tower in Cabells Mound, the town where he went to school. The modern tower, all smooth curved metal, looked like a toilet plunger stuck handle-first into the ground.
He narrowed his eyes. He had plans for the water tower.
He wanted to climb the spiral metal stair that wound to the top, put on his skates, hop on the metal guard rail, and wheelbarrow down to the bottom: back skate in the royale position, crosswise on the rail, front skate cocked up so he was rolling only on its rear wheel.
He’d go down the spiral rail, fast, with centrifugal force, or whatever it was called, threatening to throw him off the tower at any second.
And then he wanted to do something cool and stylish on landing, like landing fakie, a 180-degree spin on the dismount to land moving backward; act as if zooming at high speed a couple hundred feet to the ground, right on the edge of wiping out the whole time, wasn’t anything, was just something he did every day, and required a little flourish at the end to make it special.
That, he thought, was Edge Living. Edge Living was something to aspire to.
His mouth went dry at the thought of it.
The only question, of course, was whether he’d ever dare try it. He’d done the wheelbarrow on rails before, but the rails were all straight, not curved outward, and he’d never wheelbarrowed more than a single story.
Three metal-guitar chords thrummed from the computer. “I am at your service, master,” it said.
Jason turned his attention to the screen. His friends in California, he thought, wouldn’t be back from school for another couple hours.
He’d browse the Web, he thought, and check out all the chat lines devoted to skating.
*
For most of the eleven hundred years since the time of the Sun Man, the old Temple Mound had seen little change. The area remained a wilderness, low-lying and marshy and flooded every few years. The Mississippi flung itself left and right like a snake, carved a new course with every big flood. Every time it shifted course, it deposited enough silt over the next few years to raise the area through which it traveled. Then another flood would spread the river wide, and the river would find an area lower than that which it had built up, and carry its silty waters there.
Over the years the Mississippi had carried away the Sun Mound, the big mound where the Sun Man had built his long lodge and where he had lived with his family. Many of the smaller mounds had also been flooded away during inundations, and the rest had been plowed under by farmers, who saw no reason why some aboriginal structure should impede the size of their harvest.
Only the Temple Mound remained, the huge platform from which the Sun Man had witnessed the destruction of his people. The Mississippi had spared it, and the white men and their plows, daunted by its size, had spared it as well. The Cabell family, who had grown corn and wheat on the land for three generations, and had gamely held on through deluge and drought and civil war, had built their home on one of the mound’s terraces, safe from the floodwaters that regularly covered their corn fields. But even they had given up in the end, abandoning their home in the 1880s after too many floods had finally broken their spirit. The Swampeast had finally defeated them, just as it had defeated so many others. Nothing was left of the home now, nothing but some old foundation stones and a broken chimney covered with vines, and the mound was overgrown, covered with pumpkin oak and slippery elm and scrub.
It was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who finally made the Swampeast habitable. Just south of Cape Girardeau the levee line began, to continue 2,200 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. The long green walls, supported by a mammoth network of reservoirs, floodways, flood gates, flood walls, pumping stations, dikes, cutoffs, bendway weirs, and revetments, were unbroken save for where tributaries entered the Mississippi, and the tributaries were walled off as well, some for hundreds of miles. The levees kept the flood-waters out and finally permitted the farmers to clear the land and till their soil in peace. Cotton replaced wheat and corn in the 1920s, and the farmers grew wealthy on the rich alluvial soil.
During the decades of prosperity, the farmers had forgotten that the conditions under which they had prospered were artificial. The natural state of the land was a swampy, tangled hardwood forest, subject to periodic inundations. The People of the Sun, whom the whites later called “Mississippians” or “Mound Builders,” had altered the land for a while, had changed its natural state from a nearly impenetrable hardwood thicket to corn fields dominated by huge earthen monuments, but the land reverted swiftly to its natural state once the Sun Man’s time had passed. Now the cotton fields, graded to perfect flatness by laser-guided blades, stretched west from the levees, but they had been imposed on the land, and so had the titanic earthworks that protected them. The condition of southeastern Missouri was as artificial as that of the Washington Monument, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, or the space shuttle, and, like these, existed as a monument to the infinite ingenuity of humankind. The land, like the space shuttle, had been manufactured.
But that which is artifice occupies a precarious position in the world of nature. Artificial things, particularly those on the scale and complexity of the space shuttle, or of the levee system of the Mississippi, are manufactured at great cost, and must be maintained with great vigilance. Their existence is dependent on the continuation of the conditions under which they were designed. The space shuttle Challenger was destroyed when one of its systems was unable to react with sufficient flexibility to an unseasonable frost.
The levee system, on the other hand, was built with the understanding that two things would remain constant. It was understood that flood waters would not rise much higher than they had in the past, and that the land on which the levees were built would not move of its own accord. If either of these constants were removed, the levee system would not be able to prevent nature from returning to the highly artificial landscape which the levees were built to preserve.
The first of these constants was violated regularly. The epic flood of 1927 made obsolete the entire levee system, which was reengineered, the levees being built higher, wider, and with greater sophistication. The flood of 1993 again sent water to a record crest right at the juncture of the Mississippi and the Missouri, and briefly threatened to make St. Louis an island. The inevitable result was a greater commitment to reinforced levees.
The second constant, the requirement that the earth not move, had not been tested.
Though such a test, as history showed, was inevitable.
INLYNE: I’M JUST BUMMIN CUZ I GOT NOPLACE TO SK8.
DOOD S: I’M ALMOST THE ONLY AGGRESSIVE SK8R HERE.
Where, Jason typed, is here?
He was almost holding his breath. Assuming that Dood S was female, which was likely if the online handle was intended to be pronounced “dudess,” Jason might have found himself a potential girlfriend. So far Jason discovered that he and Dood S were the same age. They agreed on bands, on skate brands, and on the study of history (“sux”). They were both reasonably advanced skaters. They could royale and soyale, they could backside and backslide, they could miszou, they could phishbrain and Frank Sinatra. They were both working on perfecting various alley oop maneuvers, but Dood S was making more progress because she, or possibly he, had a place to skate.
The answer flashed on the screen.
DOOD S: SHELBY MONTANA
INLYNE: BUMMER
Jason’s answer was heartfelt.
DOOD S: WHERE RU?
INLYNE: CABELLS MOUND MISSOURI
DOOD S: WHERE IS THAT?
Good question, Jason thought.
Between Sikeston and Osceola, he typed, feeling sorry for himself. If he were feeling better about living here, he might have mentioned St. Louis and Memphis.
DOOD S: HAHAHA LOL I’M SORRY
INLYNE: ME 2
Jason heard the door slam downstairs. His mom must be home.
RU a girl? he typed. Flirtation was fairly useless if they lived a thousand miles away from each other, but what the hell. He was lonely. It never hurt to stay in practice.
DOOD S: CAN’T U TELL?
Your pixels look female to me is what Jason wanted to type, but he couldn’t quite remember how to spell “pixel,” so he typed, I think you are a girl.
DOOD S: IM 85 AND A PEDDOFILE HAHAHAHA LOL. WANT TO MEET ME IN THE PARK LITTLE BOY?
INLYNE: VERY FUNNY.
This was not lightening Jason’s mood. He heard his mother’s footsteps on the front stair, and turned as she passed by the door. She was wearing jeans and a tank top. Her cheeks glowed, and there was a sheen of sweat on her chest and throat.
“Hi,” Jason said. “Have fun?”
“It was exhilarating!” she said. “I really felt actualized this time! I could feel the energies rising from the mound!”
“Great,” Jason said.
Catherine Adams was tall and trim and blonde. One of Jason’s friends had once described her as a babe, which had startled him. He hadn’t thought of his mother in those terms. But once it was pointed out to him, he had realized to his surprise that she was, indeed, an attractive woman. At least compared to the mothers of most of his friends.
Catherine walked into the room, her drum balanced on her hip. “Talking to your friends?” Her voice was husky from chanting.
“Yes.” He turned and saw Dood S’s last statement.
DONT MIND MY JOKES HAHAHAHA IM TOKING AS IM TYPING
Jason looked at the screen and concluded that this really wasn’t his day. Catherine looked over his shoulder at the screen and he could hear a frown enter her voice. “Is this anyone I know?”
“No,” Jason said. He was tempted to say, He’s a pedophile in Montana, but instead said, “Someone I just met. Some little town in Montana. Don’t worry, she’s not going to sell me any grass.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” Catherine said. There was an ominous degree of chill finality in her tone.
“Right,” Jason said.
*
About 8 o’clock, a fifth shock was felt; this was almost as violent as the first, accompanied with the usual noise, it lasted about half a minute: this morning was very hazy and unusually warm for the season, the houses and fences appeared covered with a white frost, but on examination it was found to be vapour, not possessing the chilling cold of frost: indeed the moon was enshrouded in awful gloom.
Louisiana Gazette (St. Louis) Saturday, December 21,1811
Supper was not a good experience. Jason ate chicken soup left over from the weekend and day-old homemade bread while his mother quizzed him on the temptations of the Internet. “You spend too much time online,” she said.
“My friends are online,” Jason said. “It’s cheaper than calling them long distance.”
“You need to make new friends here,” Catherine said. “Not hang out with druggies on your computer.”
“I can’t get high online,” Jason pointed out. He could feel anger biting off his words. “I was just waiting in the chat room for Abie and Colin. I can’t ask everyone in the chat room whether they do drugs before I talk to them.”
“Drugs are a black hole of negativity,” Catherine said. “I don’t want you around that scene.”
“I’m not into drugs!” Jason found himself nearly shouting. “I couldn’t skate if I took drugs, and all I want to do is skate!”
“What’s on the Web that’s so wonderful?” Catherine demanded, her own anger flaring. “Drugs and porn and advertising. Nothing but commercialism and materialism—”
“Talk!” Jason waved his hands. “Conversation! Information! My friends are online!”
“You need to make friends here,” she said. “We live in Missouri now.”
“I don’t need to make friends here! I’ve already got friends! And the second I can get back to them, I will!”
She looked at him from across the table. The anger faded from her expression. She looked at him sadly.
“You can’t go back to California,” she said. “You know why.”
“I know, all right,” Jason said.
Concern filled her eyes. “If you go back to California,” she said, “you’ll die.”
Jason looked at the framed photograph of Queen Nepher-Ankh-Hotep that sat on the side table between two sprays of Aunt Lucy’s irises. The Egyptian queen looked back at him with serene kohl-rimmed eyes.
“So I hear,” he said.
*
Back in 1975, an Oregon housewife named Jennifer McCullum was informed by a vision that in a previous life she had been Queen of Egypt. So benevolent and spiritual had been her reign that she had since been incarnated many times, always with her consciousness located on a higher celestial plane than most of the other people stuck on this metaphysical backwater, the Earth. Subsequent visions instructed the reincarnated monarch in spiritual techniques which she subsequently taught to her disciples. According to her own account, around the same time as the “Nepher-Ankh-Hotep Revelations,” as they were subsequently called, McCullum also began to experience another series of visions terrifying in their violence and destruction: communities ravaged by earthquake and fire, flood and tidal wave. These visions were first experienced in black-and-white, like an old newsreel, but by 1989 McCullum was receiving in full color. Eventually, with the aid of a disembodied Atlantean spirit guide named Louise, McCullum was able to piece together the narrative thread of her visions.
In the near future, McCullum reported, a series of natural disasters would strike North America. California would be leveled by earthquakes and would then drop into the sea. Other bits of the American continent were also doomed, either by quake, submergence, tornadoes, volcanoes, or “poisonous vibrations.” Atlantis would rise from the Atlantic, and Lemuria from the Pacific, causing tidal waves that would wash most coastal cities out to sea.
Few places on earth would be safe from this apocalypse.
Among them, the former Queen of Egypt asserted, were several states in the American heartland, among them Missouri. Positive vibrations emanating from the Memphis Pyramid would exert a spiritually calming influence on the surrounding countryside.
Which was why Catherine Adams moved herself and her son Jason to Cabells Mound, where her Aunt Lucy, recently widowed, needed someone to help out in her greenhouse business.
And which was why city boy Jason, skilled at urban pastimes like inline skating and speeding packets of data along the Information Superhighway, found himself among the watery cotton fields of the Swampeast.
“Have you ever thought,” Jason said, “that Queen Pharaoh Nepher-Whatsis is just plain crazy!”
“How can you say that?” Catherine asked. “She’s only trying to help people. She wants to save our lives. Nepher-Ankh-Hotep means ‘Gift of a Beautiful Life.’ She is the most actualized being I have ever met.”
Actualized. There was that word again. Every time he listened to his mother talk about metaphysics, she’d use a term like actualized or negative thoughtform or color vibration, and Jason’s brain would simply shut down. It was as if his understanding had run smack into a linguistic wall. What did these words mean, anyway?
They meant whatever his mother wanted them to mean. They all meant, You have to stay here and like it.
“And it’s not just Nepher-Ankh-Hotep,” Catherine said. “Lots of people have received catastrophe revelations. They all agree that California is going to be destroyed.”
“So Colin’s going to be killed? And Aunt Charmian. And Abie?” He looked at her. “Dad is going to be killed?”
His mother gazed at him sadly. “It’s not up to me. It’s karma. California has so much negative karma that it can’t survive, and it’s going to be wiped out for the same reason Atlantis was destroyed. But we can always hope that our friends will survive, the way the people from Atlantis survived and went to Mexico and Egypt. But if they do die, it’s because they chose it, they chose this incarnation in order to experience California’s destruction.”
Jason could feel his brain de-focusing under this onslaught— he couldn’t understand why people, or even disembodied spirits, would choose to experience mass destruction, why they’d line up to get annihilated like people paying for the earthquake ride at Universal Studios— but he gathered his energies and made the attempt.
“What’s wrong with California’s karma, anyhow?” he asked. “And how can a whole state have karma anyway? And why,” warming to the subject, “is Missouri’s karma supposed to be all that great? They had slavery here. And all those Cherokee died just north of here on the Trail of Tears.” The Trail of Tears had been the subject of a field trip the previous month.
It had rained.
Jason, stuck in an alien land, in lousy weather, shoes filled with rainwater, and far from his spiritual home, had taken the Cherokee experience very much to heart.
“I am trying to save your life,” Catherine said.
“I’ll take my chances in L.A.! My karma can’t suck that badly!”
“We were talking,” Catherine said, narrowing her eyes, “about the Internet. I don’t want you spending all your time online— I want you to restrict yourself to an hour a day.”
Jason was aghast. “An hour!”
“One hour per day. That’s all.” There was a grim finality in Catherine’s tone. “And I want you to make some effort to make friends here.”
“I don’t want to know anyone here!”
“There are good people here. You shouldn’t look down at them just because they don’t live in the city. You should get to know them.”
“How?” Jason waved his hands. “How do I meet these good people?”
“You can stop radiating hostility all the time, for one thing.”
“I don’t radiate hostility!” Jason shouted.
“You certainly do. You glare at everyone as if they were going to attack you. If you met them halfway—”
“I am not interested! I am not interested at all! One minute after I’m eighteen, I’m out of here!” Jason bolted from the dinner table, stormed up the stairs to his study, slammed the door, and turned the skeleton key that locked it.
His mother’s voice came up from below. “You better not be online!”
Jason paced the room, feeling like a trapped animal. His life was one prison after another. He was a minor, completely dependent on other people. He was in an alien country, walled off by the levee, with nothing but soaked cotton fields to look at. His school, with its red brick, concrete, and windows protected by steel mesh, even looked like a prison.
And now he was in a prison cell, on the second floor of his house.
And the worse thing about this cell, he realized, was that he had turned the key on himself. He had to get out of here somehow.
As he paced, his eye lighted on the telephone, and he stopped in his tracks.
Ah, he thought. Dad.
*
“Well,” Jason said, “I'm bummed. I sort of had a fight with Mom.”
“Have you apologized?” said Frank Adams.
This was not the initial response that Jason had hoped for. “Let me tell you what it was about,” he said.
“Okay.” Frank sounded agreeable enough, but over the phone connection Jason could hear his father's pen scratching. The pen was a Mont Blanc, and had a very distinctive sound, one loud enough to hear over a good phone connection. Frank was working late at the office, which was normal, and Jason had called him there.
“Mom says I have to restrict my Internet access to one hour per day. But the Internet is where all my friends hang out.”
“Okay.”
“Well,” Jason said, “that's it.”
“That's what the whole fight was about?”
“There was a lot more about karma, and how yours sucks so bad you're going to get washed out to sea along with my friends, but keeping me offline is what it all came down to.”
“Uh-huh.” There was a pause while the pen scratched some more. Then the pen stopped, and Frank Adams's voice brightened, as if he decided he may as well pay attention, “It wasn't about your grades or anything?” he asked.
“No. My grades are up.” The Cabells Mound school was less demanding than the academy he'd been attending in California. Also far more boring— but that, he'd discovered, applied to the Swampeast generally and not just to school.
“So if it's not interfering with your schoolwork, why is she restricting your Internet access?”
Jason's dad was very concerned with grades and education, not for themselves exactly, but because they led to success later on. Frank was big on hard work, dedication, and the rewards the two would bring. Jason's mom, by contrast, thought of this goal-oriented behavior as “worshiping false, non-integrative values.”
“She wants me to spend more time doing stuff here. But there's nothing to do here, so—”
“She wants you to try to make friends in Missouri.”
Jason could not understand how his parents knew these things about each other. Were they telepathic or something?
“Well, yeah,” Jason said. “But there's, like, no point to it. Because the second I'm eighteen, I'm checking out of this burg.”
“You've got a few years till then,” his father pointed out.
“But I'm going to be spending as much time in L.A. as I can between now and then.”
“Jason.” His father's voice was weary. “Where are you going to be spending most of your time between now and your graduation?”
Jason glared out the window and realized he was trapped. “Here,” he said. “In Missouri.”
“So isn't it, therefore, a good idea to get to know some people where you live? Maybe date a few girls, even?”
Jason never liked it when his father started using words like therefore. It meant he was doing his whole lawyer thing, like he was talking to a witness or something. It was as bad as when his mother talked about negative thoughtforms.
“I don't mind making new friends,” he said. “But I want to keep the ones I've got, too, and I can't do that unless I stay in touch with them.”
“I will speak to your mother about your Internet privileges, then. But I won't do it for another week or ten days, because I want you to soften her up between now and then, okay? Try to make an effort? Take someone home? Play a game of baseball? Something?”
Jason glared at his reflection in the blank computer screen. “I'll see what I can do,” he said.
“Good.”
Jason made a grotesque face into the computer screen. Snarled, bared his canines, made his eyes wide. His distorted reflection grimaced back at him like a creature out of a horror film. “I was wondering,” Jason began, “if I could come and stay with you after you and Una get back from China.”
Jason heard a page turn over the phone, and then heard his father's pen scratching again. “I don't think that's such a good idea,” Frank said. “I'm going to be working sixteen-hour days to catch up on the work I've missed. I wouldn't really have a chance to spend time with you. It wouldn't be fair to Una to have to spend all her time looking after you.”
“I wouldn't bother her. I can just hang with my friends.”
“You'll still be able to visit in August, like we planned.”
“I could house-sit for you, while you're gone.”
Frank's pen went scratch, scratch. “I don't think so,” he said. “I don't want to leave you alone in the city all that time. What if you got into trouble?”
What if I didn't? Jason wanted to respond. “Or I could fly to China and join you there,” he said instead.
His father gave a sigh. Jason could hear the pen clatter on the desktop. “This is my first vacation in almost ten years,“ Frank said. “I'm a partner now. It used to be that partners took it easy and waited for retirement, but that's not how it works anymore. Partners work harder than anyone else.”
“I know,” Jason said. He remembered the last vacation, ten years ago in Yosemite. He didn't remember much about the park, he could only remember being sick to his stomach and throwing up a lot.
“Una and I have never had much time alone together,” Frank said. “We're going to be meeting her family, and that's important.”
And a step-kid, Jason thought, would just get in the way. Una, whom Frank had finally married a few months ago, was half Chinese. The Chinese part of the family was scattered all through Asia, and Frank and his new bride were going to travel to Shanghai, Guangzhong, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur, seeing the sights and meeting the relatives.
Jason made another grotesque face into the computer screen.
He did not dislike Una, who had made a determined effort to become his friend. But she troubled him. For one thing, she was young enough, and pretty enough, for him to view as desirable. That she sometimes figured in his fantasies made him uncomfortable. For another, her moving in with his dad made it that much less likely that Jason would himself be able to move in with Frank.
And thirdly, she was monopolizing Frank's first real vacation in a decade, and going to places Jason very much wanted to see.
“I wouldn't get in your way,” Jason said. “I'd just go off and, like, see stuff.”
Frank's pen kept scratching on. “You don't do that in Asia,” he said. “You don’t just go off. Besides, we're going to be spending most of our time with a lot of old people who don't speak English, and you'd be bored.”
“No way.”
Frank sighed again. “Look,” he said. “We need this trip, okay? But we'll go to Asia another time, and maybe you can come along then.”
In another ten years maybe, Jason thought. He made a screaming face into the video monitor, mouth open in a hideous mask of anguish.
“Okay,” he said. “But you'll talk to Mom about the Internet, okay? Because if I can't visit China, I want at least to visit their homepage.”
“I'll do that,” Frank said. His tone lightened. “By the way, I bought your birthday present today. It's sitting right here in the office. I think you're going to like it.”
“I'll look forward to seeing it,” Jason said. Perhaps the only benefit of the divorce had been that, in the years since, the size and expense of Jason's presents had increased. “I don't suppose you're going to tell me what it is.”
“That would spoil the surprise.”
Jason could hear his father's pen scratching again, so he figured he might as well bring the conversation to an end. After he hung up, he sat in his chair and stared across the sodden cotton field to the line of trees on the distant northern horizon.
No Shanghai, no Hong Kong, no Internet. No California till August.
The Cabells Mound water tower stood beyond the line of trees, the setting sun gleaming red from its metal skin.
Jason looked at the tower for a moment, then at the Edge Living poster on the wall, the extreme skater, armored like a medieval knight, poised on the edge of a gleaming brushed aluminum rail. He turned his eyes back to the water tower.
Yes, he thought.
If he couldn't escape his fate, he could at least make a name for himself here.