Quicksilver, page 15
As earnestly as we were able, the three of us assured him that we did not think he was mental.
Hakeem said, “So it’s like somebody just opened a big lid on the day. Through that opening, maybe twelve feet in diameter, we see a night sky, darkness and stars going on forever, just like beyond the magic door. I think we’re about to be sucked up into that night sky. Instead, these concentric circles of blue light come out of the hole, out of the stars, and wash over us. We feel them as well as see them, a tingling sensation in our bones—and something funny happens to time.”
I was pretty sure he meant funny scary, not funny ha-ha.
He finished the beer. “None of us has any memory of getting in our vehicles. The next thing we know, it seems like an instant later, we’re in Peptoe, me with the baby—that’s you—in the power-company truck, Bailie and Caesar following. We all had this terrible feeling that the baby was in great danger, that someone could come for him—for you—at any moment. Hell, not someone. Something. Something that would kill us to get at you. I swear, we were flat-out terrified. It makes no sense how crazy frightened we were. We’d been made terrified. I think that weird blue light, those concentric circles . . . somehow they programmed us to guard you and get you quickly away from that lonely stretch of highway, into the hands of the authorities, eventually to someone who would care about you as if you were their own child. I kept thinking that your vital thread had been broken, that the ends of your vital thread couldn’t be tied together again until you were in loving hands.”
“What does that mean, ‘vital thread’?” I asked.
“I don’t know what the hell it means. But I was in a panic about it.”
He raised the bottle to his lips and seemed surprised that he had drained it.
Bridget’s turn had come to say, “And?”
“No, I’m done. I’m empty. I have no more for you. Bailie and Caesar didn’t see quite the same thing I did. You need to hear their side to get the whole picture.”
“Where are they?” Sparky asked. “How do we contact them?”
“Two months after what happened, Caesar quit his job as pit boss and split from the casino scene. Maybe he didn’t get religion, but he got something. He went to Florida to work in a hospice his sister founded, taking care of people who’re dying. Bailie still lives in the heart of Peptoe. Wife passed away. He’ll tell you his side and Caesar’s. He up and quit the wind farm back when, started making a living with music.”
He put the empty bottle on the table beside his chair. He stared at it as if it were a mystical object filled with recondite meaning, and then he looked at me the way you might stare at a two-headed goat.
He said, “What is it with you, Quinn Quicksilver?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you?”
“Confused,” I admitted.
“Why are space aliens so interested in you?”
“I’m not aware of any space aliens,” I assured him. “We just came here because I was hoping, you know, I might get a lead on who my parents are.”
“Maybe the best way to find out,” Hakeem said with apparent sincerity and no quality of menace in his voice, “is to send your spit to one of those places like Getting to Know Me Dot Com.”
“There’s an idea,” I said. “I’ll definitely look into that.”
While Bridget took a pen and paper from her purse and wrote down the directions to Bailie Belshazzer’s place that Hakeem gave her, Sparky went to the bookshelves to have a look at the titles on the spines of the volumes. He took a clove bud from the little dish and brought it close to his nose and said, “Hakeem, why the cloves?”
“I read somewhere that the smell repels the Grays. It’s like garlic with vampires.”
“Grays?” Sparky asked.
Just then we heard a sudden bass throbbing that quickly became louder, the air-chopping clatter of a helicopter, not a small two-man police helo, but something larger. Through the window behind Hakeem’s chair, I saw it coming, flying low and fast: black, twin engines, high-set main and tail rotors. The big craft roared over us and away. As the sound of it diminished and the mobile home stopped vibrating, I didn’t give the helo further thought. Military bases are a common feature of the Southwest; I assumed that some pilot was engaged in flight training.
“Grays,” Hakeem said, “are the most common type of ETs reported by people who were abducted and taken up to the mother ship. Their skin is gray. You must’ve seen drawings of them. They’re kind of short, sexless, hairless, with big oval heads and huge dark eyes with no whites. The Grays are up to something, and it’s not good. They want something from us that we can’t begin to imagine. I hope to God I never find out what it is. I hope they don’t get what they want from me.”
This was a haunted man, a troubled man, his life forever sent off the rails because he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had seen something that he could neither understand nor forget. If I had found him amusing, it was because I tend to find most people amusing. Not least of all myself. After all, each of us is an eccentric in one way or another, to one degree or another. However, I was beginning to feel that Hakeem was a tragic figure, a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder who was trapped in a spiral staircase of dread with no exit at the top or bottom, ceaselessly racing up and down and up.
I indicated the scanning device that he had left on the coffee table. “Is that a Gray detector?”
“No, no. Grays aren’t shape changers. I got this from a techie flying-saucer guru in Arkansas. He builds and programs them himself. It’s based on a Chinese facial-recognition system, LLVision, but without the usual glasses. And it’s not about facial recognition, but about scanning for structural anomalies, anything that might indicate the human form is merely a costume. I’m not mental.”
“Of course you’re not,” I said. “Have you ever scanned anyone who’s set off an alarm?”
“Not yet. But with UFO activity increasing, it’s bound to happen one day. Thank God for Miles Bennell. He’s a genius.”
“Miles Bennell?”
“He’s the guru techie in Arkansas who sells these things.”
Bridget said, “Is UFO activity really increasing?”
Springing up from his chair with the kinetic energy of a jack-in-the-box, Hakeem Kaspar said, “It always has been, ever since the 1940s. It’s always accelerating—the activity, number of sightings—toward some end. Who knows what end? Many nights, I sit out in the yard, in a lawn chair, and I watch the sky. Many nights. If you do that, you’ll be surprised at what you’ll see. You’ll see things that never took off from an earthly airport and will never land at one, immense craft without running lights, dark forms that blot out the stars as they pass. I’ve seen them. I watch, and I see them, and I’m not mental.” His feverish gaze slid from Bridget to me to Sparky. He took a deep breath. “Don’t tell anyone what I said. My job at the power company depends on this being secret. My interest in . . . in these things is something they wouldn’t understand.”
After we promised to keep his secret, we departed.
I was the last to leave. At the door, I put a hand on Hakeem’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry.” I looked around at the hundreds of UFO photos papering nearly everything. “I didn’t leave myself in the middle of that highway, but I feel responsible for what you’ve been through, for what you’re going through.”
His eyes at last narrowed. He squinted at me, as if scanning for structural anomalies. Then he startled me by throwing his arms around me and saying, “No, no, no. No, no, no.” He released me. His eyes were owlish again and now glimmering with unshed tears. “Before you, before baby you, before that door in the day and that hole in the sky, I was just marking time, just existing. There was no wonder in my life, no magic, nothing to believe in except a paycheck and a six-pack. That day, what happened on that stretch of highway—after that, I understood the world wasn’t just a movie screen, wasn’t just flat, there was depth to it, strangeness and meaning. I don’t know what meaning, but it’s something big, and I’m a part of it. If there are evil Grays—and there are!—then there must be other ETs, good Blues or some other color. Whatever’s out there, it’s anything you could imagine, everything you could imagine, because the universe is that big. I owe you, Quinn Quicksilver. I owe you for my happiness.”
Well. Even I, for all my limitations, discerned two lessons from Hakeem’s heartfelt response. First, it is a mistake to presume to know anyone’s internal emotional landscape based on what external emotional signals they seem to be sending. Second, you can apologize for something you have done, but only a fool apologizes for things that other people have done, for he has no authority to do that. And so I felt like a fool as I left the trailer, though like a fool with the best intentions. I took solace in the fact that, although I had inspired Hakeem to pursue profound meaning where he would never find it—UFOs, Grays, Blues, mother ships, abductees given rectal exams by freaky aliens—at least I had inspired wonder in the poor guy. In time, wonder might lead to that more elevated feeling that is awe, the yielding of the mind to the reverence of what is supremely grand and true.
When I joined Sparky and Bridget in front of the Explorer, she said, “Winston is going to be so excited. We smell like hams baking in an oven. What was that all about, the huggy thing?”
“He says he owes his happiness to me. Baby me, to be specific.”
Sparky frowned. “Happiness?”
“It’s contagious, isn’t it?” I said. “I went in there glum, and I came out so carefree I want to dance. Now we better go see Bailie Belshazzer. There’s still plenty of daylight left, but I want to be sure to be out of Peptoe before the curtain opens on the bugs-and-bats show.”
Looking past us toward the trailer, Sparky said, “What’s this?”
“This” was Hakeem, hurrying toward us, holding his smartphone high overhead, as if carrying the Olympic torch. He enjoyed phone service out here. His connectivity must have had something to do with one of the satellite dishes on his roof.
“John Ching just called. You can’t go to Bailie’s place,” Hakeem warned. “Not now. Not ever. That helicopter was carrying ISA agents. Eight or nine of the bastards. They’re already at Bailie’s house. They’ve commandeered his SUV and two of the sheriff’s patrol cars. No doubt they’ll be here as soon as they can get anyone to tell them how to find my place, which won’t be right away because the people of Peptoe don’t traffic with their kind. You’ve got to go straight to Panthea. Bailie would have sent you to her after you’d visited with him. Panthea has been expecting you for weeks.”
“Weeks?” Bridget said. “We didn’t know we were coming here until yesterday.”
“Yes, but Panthea sees.”
“Sees what?”
“What a seer sees when a seer dreams.”
“Well, of course. Silly of me not to understand.”
“You must go to Panthea. She’s waiting for you. You’ll be safe with her. No one will think to look for you there.”
I was sure that was true, because even I would never have thought to look for me there, wherever “there” might be. “Yeah, okay, but I don’t know anyone named Panthea. Panthea who?”
Hakeem regarded me with frustration and amazement, unable to comprehend how the miracle baby from the stars could be so clueless. “Panthea who? Panthea who? Panthea Ching, of course!”
| 22 |
Winston had arrived at an understanding of the purpose of a toy. During our trip from Hakeem’s outpost to Panthea’s home, to which the UFOlogist had directed us with extravagant gestures, the pooch lay on the back seat, beside Sparky, incessantly squeaking the white lamb, all the while happily slapping the seat with his tail.
“I knew a guy,” Sparky said, “wanted to protect his children, he had an attack dog that lived up to its name. If you’d tried to give it a toy, it would’ve taken off your hand and eaten it.”
“Seems dangerous, a dog like that around little kids,” I said.
“Not these kids. They were tough little bastards. The dog had profound respect for them.”
With afternoon light slanting across the still and colorless land, short shadows of low cacti and mesquite prickled the earth; but the usually reliable sameness of a desert day would not sustain until nightfall. A tide of dark-gray thunderheads stacked on squall clouds was surging in from the southwest, soon to drown the sun. In advance of the storm, the hot air began to cool, and its faint alkaline scent faded.
Panthea, the daughter of John Kennedy Ching, didn’t occupy one of the family’s five houses in the vicinity of Ching Station. She lived beyond the vaguely defined limits of Peptoe, in that otherwise unpopulated suburb that, I knew from my research, locals referred to as Dead Dan’s Wasteland, though Dan was so lost in the dust storms of history that no one remembered who he’d been, when he’d lived, or how he’d died. Panthea’s place was at the end of a gravel road, in a large, insulated Quonset hut that she’d converted into a residence. The structure dated to early World War II, when the government had conducted secret experiments here that no one dared speak about, resulting in thirteen deaths and the toxic contamination of the soil that took over half a century to resolve. Rumor had it that an unintended consequence of the experimentation had been the mutation of six-legged Jerusalem crickets into terrors as big as dachshunds, with teeth that would shred bone as easily as flesh, creatures that had to be exterminated with flamethrowers and submachine guns in a desperate three-day bug war. Eighty years had passed since then, and no one had seen such a fearsome beast. So whatever else had happened here, the cricket business must have been an apocryphal story with no more substance than the rumor that, in the same decade, an atomic bomb had been developed elsewhere in a program called the Manhattan Project.
Three satellite dishes were fixed to the curved roof. Like Hakeem, the resident considered connectivity a high priority.
Now thirty, Panthea had moved at a distance from her family when she was eighteen because she had foreseen that eventually she would be murdered in the night by unhuman assassins, and she didn’t want her relatives to be collateral damage. As he’d finished giving us directions, Hakeem Kaspar, who’d seen a door in the day and a hole in the sky, who had shaped the previous twenty years of his life according to the belief that the territory hereabouts served as a hub of extraterrestrial activity, had winked when he told us about the unhuman assassins and said, “Panthea is a bit of an eccentric, but this territory produces more than a few. All in all, in spite of the unhuman assassin silliness, she’s a great lady and true seer.”
Having heard the Explorer approaching, Panthea was waiting for us in the open door of the Quonset hut. She was five feet one and weighed maybe ninety-five pounds, prettier than any desert flower, of which there are many that dazzle. If her ears had been slightly pointed, I would have been convinced that she had elf DNA, for her blue eyes were quite large and so limpid that you could see the radiant pleats of the layered muscles in her irises.
Although she had the physique of an adolescent and the innocent face of a child, she was an undeniably powerful presence, standing spread-legged, wearing a blood-red tunic and gray jeans tucked into black combat boots. Her black hair was chopped in a short shag, her hands fisted on her hips, as if she was confident of being able to Jackie Chan us all if we proved to be a threat.
As we got out of the Explorer, she told us to bring Winston. When he was freed from the SUV, he raced across the hardpan, past Panthea, and into the Quonset hut, as if he had once lived here and was excited to return home.
Panthea looked each of us in the eyes, nodding as if confirming our identity by some sixth sense. “Quinn, Bridget, Silas who calls himself Sparky. I knew you would come. The squad is now complete.”
“Squad?” I said.
“One squad of many but no less important than the others. Each of us is an aluf shel halakha, with a great responsibility.”
“We’re on a quest,” I said.
“It’s nothing as simple as a quest,” Bridget said.
“Isn’t it a quest?” I asked Panthea the seer.
“Perhaps a quest, but not only a quest.”
I was having none of that. “We find the equivalent of the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the elephants’ graveyard, and then it’s done.”
Sparky said, “What does that mean—aluf whatever?”
“When you know why you are,” Panthea Ching said, “you will know what those words mean.”
“Why I am? My mom and dad wanted a baby. That’s why I am. Now, please, Ms. Ching, what does aluf shell halibut mean?”
“It means nothing to you now. In time it will.”
Frustrated to be on the receiving end of the kind of enigmatic statements that he and Bridget had often dished out to me, Sparky said, “It was a simple question.”
“There are no simple questions,” the seer replied, “only simple answers, some of which it’s best you discern for yourself. Anyway, some squads prefer to say aluf shel teevee chok. Still others say Legis naturalis propugnator. The sentiment is the same.”
“And what is the sentiment?” Bridget asked.
“Resist,” said Panthea.
“Resist what?”
“You need not ask what you already know. Come in, come in. The ISA will be saturating the county with agents, but we have a few hours yet before they’ll be breaking down my door. You must see what I paint in my sleep. You will recognize it.”
I began to realize that this was not going to be the date on my calendar when I would learn the identity of my parents or even the least thing about them. The theme of the day was instead about the strange, cognizant Destiny that links human lives in unexpected ways. The Ching-Rainking-Quicksilver squad had been drawn together by something more than psychic magnetism; however, any attempt that I might make to define “something more” would lead me nowhere except to the insolvable mystery of human existence or into the cold waters of Hakeem Kaspar’s obsession.
