THEY TOOK the same overgrown logging road the truck had arrived on and followed it till it met a highway that might have been the 55, though Vivian wasn’t sure. Jesse went on silently. He had nothing to say about what they’d all seen. His feet made no noise on the weed-cracked asphalt. Vivian and Judy followed, a pair of ragged disciples. The receptionist was sobbing quietly at the back, ashamed of the scene at the lake, or disappointed by the absence of the Crystal City, or missing her drum, or perhaps just bone-tired like Vivian was.
Three bends in the road and things became familiar. They crossed the creek that led to Piotr Blucas’s cabin and came up through the forest and then Vivian saw it, the unhappy bear with his neon sign, and the western corner of the Cedar Lodge Motel. He was taking them back to room 29. Vivian was absolutely certain of that.
It couldn’t have been eight a.m. yet and the streets were quiet, at least at this end of town. No one saw them as they crossed the parking lot and entered the lobby. Inside, Jerome and Minnie were asleep on the sofa. Jesse’s radiance lit their faces and the furniture and they both seemed to give easy, childlike smiles and stirred slightly. Seeing Jesse in this setting, surrounded by normal things, forced another recalibration in Vivian’s brain. No writing it off as her imagination when it was combined with the stink of cigarettes, and cheap furnishings, and the lines and grey hairs that belonged to the Carters. Yes. The light was real, or none of it was real.
She thought, briefly, that she might speak to Jerome and get him to report what they’d seen up the mountain to his police contacts. But her brother wasn’t stopping, and the thing, the answer, was waiting for her. Besides, she’d have to tell Jerome and Minnie that there was a chance their son was decomposing at the bottom of a stagnant lake, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to have that conversation yet.
Troy wasn’t there.
“Who’s been watching reception?” said Judy, and nobody replied, and this started her crying again.
Vivian followed her brother through the double doors and up the steps, the same way she’d come on the morning she’d checked in.
“It’s in your room, isn’t it?” she said. “The thing.”
Yes, he said.
“I have the key!” said Judy, hurrying up the stairs behind them. Jesse answered by producing his own from his pocket. That was two of them, then. And the third, who had that? Mr Blucas?
“I don’t understand,” said Judy. She sounded more despondent than ever. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted something from your room? I could have brought it up for you. You didn’t need to come back here.”
Jesse turned the key to room 29 and opened the door and stepped inside. He didn’t need to turn on the light. The glow from his flesh showed up the walls and furniture, as far as could be seen. For the most part, the room was filled – to the ceiling in some areas – with towering piles of books and papers. Vivian went in after him. She inspected the spines of the books and recognised titles from her conversation with her mother. Perhaps one in four of them were part of the Telos imprint. The rest were a mixture of self-help, spirituality, theology and quantum mechanics. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, next to Feynman’s lectures, next to J. B. Purelight’s The Healing Power of Dogs. Hundreds of them, all well-thumbed and annotated and divided up with bookmarks and coloured Post-It notes.
“These all yours, Jesse?” said Vivian.
He didn’t answer.
“What were you doing in here?”
“What do you think he was doing?” said Judy. She was starting to sound ratty.
“You knew about all this? And you put me in the room next door?”
Why hadn’t she made more of an effort to get in? She needn’t have bothered looking for the key. The walls in the motel were so thin she could have just put a fist through from her room into his.
Jesse manoeuvred through the maze he’d built for himself until he reached the desk in the far corner. He stopped and looked around as if he’d lost something, and he cast kaleidoscopic shapes and blotches onto the walls, and, just to add to the general trippiness of the space, his room also had some complexly patterned wallpaper, its design fibrous and spider-webby and more conducive to madness than mindfulness, Vivian thought.
Jesse opened the drawer in the desk and shut it again. The desktop itself was curiously empty. The kettle had gone. The TV was also missing, and the bracket that had once attached it to the wall.
“What is it?” asked Vivian. “Jesse?”
“Shush!” said Judy. “Why must you keep bothering him?”
He still didn’t reply.
The room was close and stuffy and the light was odd. It reminded Vivian of when she’d had the flu, as a child. She’d been confined to her bedroom for five days, waking and sleeping in a persistent, feverish twilight. Figures who may or may not have been her parents materialising at the foot of her bed with water and boiled sweets, their voices coming to her from some other dimension. That same feeling she had now – that she’d had pretty much since she’d arrived – of being unable to distinguish what was a dream from what wasn’t.
She put down the book she was idly thumbing – Mein Leiben, Meine Weltansicht, all in German, its margins crammed with more text than the body of each page – and took a couple of paces towards him. From this distance she saw that the pattern on the walls did not repeat. In fact, it wasn’t a pattern at all. It was all tiny numbers and letters from the Greek alphabet, interspersed with brackets and mathematical functions and symbols she didn’t recognise. Thousands of equations, or perhaps just one enormous equation, or perhaps not an equation at all, perhaps the scrawlings of a madman. Vivian had only studied mathematics as far as GCSE and as far as she was concerned she could have been looking at the runes Judy had used to embellish her posters, or the “sacred geometry” Forrest had talked about non-stop back at the Sanctuary. As well as the symbols and numbers, Jesse had written notes to himself in the same minuscule handwriting. They were like the notes she’d found in his coat. Some were very simple. Try cutting out sugar, said one. Another said: renormalisation group running of the three gauge couplings in the Standard Model does not meet at EXACTLY same point if hypercharge is normalised so that it is consistent with SU(5) or SO(10) GUTs i.e. GUT groups which lead to a simple fermion unification.
She was aware, from a curious warmth in the back of her head, of her brother standing behind her.
It’s not here, he said.
Vivian turned and had to squint in the glare that came from his forehead.
“What’s not here?”
The thing, he said. I wrote it down, and now it’s not here.
She looked again at all of his wild annotations and calculations.
“And you say it’s, what, a shape?”
Yes. It’s the shape.
“And this shape is, like, a spiritual thing? Or a scientific, quantum-physics-type thing?”
“Both.”
There’s no difference. They’re the same. It’s all the same. It’s all one thing. You’ll understand when you see it. He paused. Only it’s not here.
“Where did you write it? Or draw it? Or whatever.”
He put his thumbs and forefingers together. On a circle.
“Of paper?”
Yes.
“The thing they put the glasses on?”
“Oh, please,” said Judy.
Yes, said Jesse.
Vivian felt herself trying to smile. It had been a long time since that had happened. It manifested as a dull ache at the corners of her mouth.
“All this, Jesse,” she said, gesturing at the walls and the books and the sheaves of paper, “and you wrote the answer on the back of a coaster?”
“Why are you smiling?” said Judy, and her voice was shrill with desperation. “Where’s the coaster?”
Vivian looked at them both. She had a pretty good idea where it was. She heard a door opening down at the other end of the motel. Someone roused by Judy’s screeching. Soon afterwards, a clanging of feet on the steps that led up from the lobby. Urgent muttering, something about someone never bothering to use a comb.
Judy and Vivian turned to look at the door and saw Shelley on one side, with Chason strapped to her chest, Jerome on the other. Minnie hobbled in between them to complete the triptych. A few moments of mute incomprehension passed, then a gasp, then a lot of talking.
“It’s him! It’s really him!”
“Vivian? That you?” “Decided to wake up, did you? Great job watching reception.”
“What is this? Some kind of shenanigan?”
“Should we call a doctor? Sir, are you sick?”
“No, he’s not sick, for goodness sake.”
“Where’s Nathan?”
“I can’t believe it’s really him. Is it him?”
“Oh yes, dear, did you find Nathan?”
“I don’t understand what I’m seeing here.”
“Did you take a coaster from this room?”
“We haven’t taken anything, please just calm down, ma’am.”
“Did you see Nathan at all?”
Vivian didn’t contribute to any of this. The questions and accusations and counteraccusations reached a chaotic pitch before she stepped in.
“Can you drive us to the end of Vista?” Vivian asked.
“Who?” said Jerome. “Me?”
“Anyone,” she said.
“Now, just hold on a second—”
“I haven’t seen Nathan,” said Vivian. “I don’t know where he is. He might be in Sacramento. He might be…” In her mind’s eye she saw the bodies flopping heavily into the lake, their descent marked by a quiet gurgling. “I don’t know. I did find Jesse, though. This – this is Jesse. I don’t know why he looks like this. He found something out, and the thing did this to him, and the thing is somewhere down that turning at the end of Vista. In Mr Blucas’s place. On a coaster. I think.”
More silence followed.
“I don’t understand,” said Jerome.
“I don’t understand either,” said Vivian, “but I’d appreciate the ride. I can tell you about the mountain and about Nathan on the way.”
“Well, alright,” said Jerome. “But—”
“Now, hold on,” said Judy. “We can’t all go to Telos, can we? This isn’t fair. This isn’t fair! I found him! I should be the one to go. I’ve had enough of all this, Jesus, I’ve had enough, I want out. I’m so tired, I can’t take it anymore…”
She descended into gibbering and Minnie came forward and put a consoling arm around her. Vivian pushed ahead and left the room, and this time Jesse followed her. Shelley and Jerome parted in silence, awe on one side, confusion on the other.
“No Troy?” Vivian asked.
Shelley stared and stared.
“Shelley? Did Troy come back?”
She blinked and came to.
“Oh. Yes. Bless you. He came back late last night. But he went off again.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Said he had some things to do.”
They all trooped down to the Carters’ Buick. Jerome got behind the wheel and started the engine but had nowhere to go. Nobody knew what to do with Jesse. The four women stood around the car in a loose semicircle, until Minnie opened the passenger-side door and gestured inside.
“You take it, dear,” she said.
Vivian climbed in the back. Minnie helped Shelley into the middle, then Judy, and then got in herself. Vivian looked around the interior of the Buick. Seven of them, including Chason, still strapped to his mother’s chest. It was very tight.
“Wait, we don’t all need to go.”
“That’s what I was saying!” said Judy.
“I’ll follow wherever your brother leads us,” said Shelley.
“I’ve got to drive,” said Jerome.
“I’ve got to keep an eye on Jerome,” said Minnie.
The car was moving before she’d even shut the door. They pulled out of the motel and headed into town. Jerome had his window open so he could lean on one elbow, away from Jesse. One eye was half-closed in the violet light, and he kept glancing to the right and making the Buick swerve.
“You might want to buckle up, boy,” Jerome said, and Jesse just stared straight ahead. “You sure he’s okay?” he said to Vivian, over his shoulder.
I’m okay, said Jesse.
“They dress you up like this? The cult, I mean?”
“Please watch the road, Jerome!” said Minnie.
“What is it, some kind of make-up?”
Nothing from Jesse this time.
“I don’t think it is,” said Vivian.
“I saw something like that once,” Jerome continued. “At a carnival in Carson City. I was just a kid. They said they had a real, honest-to-God angel in one of the tents, who’d crash-landed in the desert or something.” Vivian saw him frown and shake his head, as if the memory still brought him disappointment. “Turned out it was just some special paint and a couple of spotlights. I saw him behind one of the trucks when the carnival was packing up. Just a regular guy. He was trying to get a feel of one of the lady acrobats.”
“Oh, Jerome, please,” said his wife.
“Still had some of that paint on his ear.”
“It’s not paint,” said Minnie.
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re into all of that – what’s it called? – genetics stuff. Maybe they’ve been experimenting on him.” She stuck her head between the two front seats. “Jesse, dear, did they do a, you know, science experiment on you? Honey?”
No, said Jesse.
“How do you feel?”
I don’t feel anything.
Didn’t think, didn’t want, didn’t feel. Just what were they going to find on the back of that coaster, Vivian thought. And did she want to find it at all?
“Oh,” said Minnie. “Well. At least you’re not sick. Don’t you want a jacket?”
No, said Jesse.
She turned to Vivian, tried to look at her over the three other heads that were between them. “You found him up the mountain? Like this?”
Vivian nodded.
“Just walking around?”
“More or less.”
“But no one else?”
“No.” She saw the vision of the bodies again. “I mean… no.”
“But Nathan might be… where? San Francisco, did you say?”
“Sacramento.”
Shelley, who’d been watching Jesse in a trancelike state since they’d got in the car, suddenly straightened up and blinked. Chason opened his eyes, too.
“Sacramento,” she said. “That’s where Troy said he was going.”
She went back to gazing at Jesse. Chason looked around as if unsure of where he was, and his huge, brown eyes were drawn back to the purple glow from the front seat. He was the calmest Vivian had ever seen him.