11

December 4, late night

Vinnie was out of pickles, but he’d brought along the little pickle jar because it had vinegar juice in it. Watching the bank, he drank vinegar juice and nodded to himself sagely.

He said aloud but discreetly, “Yes. Yes, it does appear to be the case. Reality is what is the case.”

After all, what else was there to be said? They were, yes, weren’t they? Certainly they were.

He was standing just under the small porch roof that sheltered the front entrance to the Presbyterian church, behind the bank in Old Town Quiebra, at about one in the morning. He hadn’t been able to sleep, and he often went for walks at night when he was restless. He had come the long way, down the road, around a corner, down another road, around another corner—all in order to avoid the woods. He didn’t wish to take part in the woods; he had seen the wrongness of the squirrel and the wrongness of the blue jay, and he sometimes heard them muttering and conspiring outside his bedroom window. He had once seen, at the edge of town, the crawling man who hadn’t quite grown into himself right—judging from what some of the animals were saying—and he didn’t want to take part in that, either.

And as he wrote in his backwards journal, he did not wish it to take part in him.

He thought about that, as he watched a team of casual, unhurried people empty out the bank. “The world always seems to find another way to be intrusive.”

There they were, emptying the bank, taking all the money from it at one in the morning. There was the nice lady who worked at the front desk of the police department, and there was Mrs. Bindsheim from the Cruller, and there was that old hippie garbage-head Sport, and there was Mr. Andersen the insurance agent, and there was Mr. Andersen’s ten-year-old daughter, and there was a child of about five, a Hispanic child he didn’t know, and there were Mr. and Mrs. Swinchow, and there was that red-haired Malley girl, and there was Mr. Funston, and there was that fat lady who sang so loudly in the Catholic choir you could hear her on the street when they had those special masses, and there was Reverend Grindy, and there was Mrs. Chang, and there was that man from the Sikh temple with the turban who owned the liquor store, Mr. Roi. There was Bubbles Gurston, and there they all were, emptying all the money out of the Bank of Quiebra. They were bringing out money and—he could glimpse this through an open door—they were rifling safe-deposit boxes.

The thing was, Mr. Funston and Mrs. Chang both worked at the bank. So they were in on it. And Mr. Andersen, as Vinnie well knew, hadn’t spoken to Mr. Funston for ten years, but here Mr. Anderson was, cheerfully handing Mr. Funston a bag. Now a policeman came out of the bank, handing a big bag of money to that small child, who didn’t act like any child at all as he took the bag of money and carried it up a ramp to tuck it neatly in the back of the big U-Haul truck along with the other bags and boxes. No one spoke as they went about this work. They seemed friendly and efficient—they even smiled, some of them—but no one spoke.

In eleven minutes and twelve seconds, by Vinnie’s watch, they were quite finished, and they closed the bank—which Mrs. Chang locked back up with her key—and they all got in the back of the U-Haul with the money, except for Mr. Funston who was driving the truck. Even the kids and the policeman, whose name Vinnie didn’t know, got in the back of the truck.

Then Mr. Funston drove the truck away. All without saying a word.

Eleven hours and twenty-two minutes later, Vinnie heard people on the street talking to a Contra Costa Times reporter about how the bank had been looted in the night by unknown persons.

Vinnie told people all about it, of course, saying right out loud, “I saw the whole procession like a pageant with everybody marching together, the people who work at the bank and the cops is what stole it, the red hand was helping, too, but I saw it happen not on TV but in a parade, someone could ask me who did it.”

But they just made those snorting sounds and turned away, or else plain ignored him, like he was babbling. He didn’t get worked up about them ignoring him. He was used to it: people around here made a point of not listening to him, though he was nearly always right.

December 5, late afternoon

Having labored through a thicket of willful student disinterest in his morning class at Diablo, Bert was driving his repaired Tercel through Quiebra’s suburban streets under a diffused-blue sky, the clouds charcoal smudges. Slowing for speed bumps gave him time to examine the reason for the speed bumps: local kids. Baggy-clothed junior-high-schoolers on the sidewalk practicing skateboard jumps, “ollies, grinding”—terms he knew from working at the high schools. He passed them and found himself peering into open garages.

It seemed to Bert that the occasional open garages displayed cross sections of personalities: this garage immaculately ordered; that one ordered but they never throw anything away; here was one more like his own, a repository for whatever he didn’t want in the house, disarrayed.

He passed the high school, kids with backpacks, others peeling their cars out of the driveway, crossing the street to cadge cigarettes. Mixed couples, but rarely black and white in friendly groups; Hispanics in both groups; Asians mixed, probably only if they had good English. All the kids trying out their posturing, or boldly darting across the street in traffic.

That squat Hispanic kid with the shaved head and the droopy pants—Bert remembered seeing him and his friend there in a “sideshow” he’d stumbled on, when he’d worked late in the Diablo library. The sideshow had taken over a corner of the stadium parking lot, car stereos providing a hip-hop soundtrack for the drunken, laughing crowd.

They were watching six or seven cars spinning donuts, the cars taking turns—sometimes two at once—squealing in tight circles, roaring in and out at one another. Some of the kids darting into the path of the cars like toreadors with bulls and jumping out of the way just in time, laughing, bottles in their hands, all in a cloud of blue smoke from exhaust and burnt rubber.

Bert worried about these kids. He wondered if the ones he was going to meet, Lacey’s niece and nephew, went to sideshows.

He veered with his usual sloppy turn onto the freeway, into the stream of hurtling dusty metal; he went two exits up the freeway, left the freeway for Pinecrest, followed it around past the dark, thicketed ravine the kids called Rattlesnake Canyon.

Two blocks more and Lacey and the kids were there, waiting outside a sun-faded ranch-style house more or less like the others except it was the only one on the block that’d let its grass grow wild and weedy. Lacey and a teenage girl and a boy who looked like he was just about college age. The boy wore a black hooded sweat-shirt and multipocketed black pants; the girl wore a jeans jacket, an untucked white blouse, white jeans that had been elaborately drawn on with a blue ballpoint.

Lacey wore a navy-blue sweater-jacket that zipped up, jeans just tight enough to show some curves.

They crowded into the little car, Lacey introducing Adair and Cal. “You got your car fixed. Was it serious?”

“Serious, no. Embarrassing, yes. I’m still mortified.”

“I had a good time. Eerie but good. Hey, I read the Thoreau biography.”

Lacey and Bert talked about the Thoreau biography he’d loaned her. She had brought it along, to his astonishment. In the back, the kids maintained their distinct silences, Adair tensely listening to the adults; Cal sullen, making it obvious that he’d been dragged along.

They ate at one of those places that decorated with weathered junk nailed to the walls, sleds and baseball bats and antique toys and outdated signs, in an attempt to fabricate a carefree atmosphere. The waitress recited her canned greetings, then the specials—“like a hostage with a gun to her head, reading the kidnappers’ demands,” Lacey said—and that made the kids grin and loosen up a bit. The food seemed to have been prepared, frozen, and then microwaved. But the kids seemed to enjoy their Thai chicken quesadillas—a “contradiction in cuisine,” said Bert—and Lacey seemed amused by the argument two drunken balding men were having at the restaurant bar over the Oakland Raiders versus the 49ers.

“Niners are saggin’ with Rice gone,” Cal said solemnly.

“I wish I knew more about sports,” Bert said, a bit apologetically. “Maybe we could go to a game. You guys could give me a lesson.”

“The Niners’ starting quarterback and the backup quarterback are both learning fast,” Lacey said, and went on exchanging arcane football wisdom with Cal for twenty minutes.

Cal talked about how he was getting back into playing guitar— Lacey had prompted that, showing him some chords she knew—but when Bert asked them about their dad’s diving business, both kids got quiet and glum, and he sensed he’d made some kind of faux pas.

“So how’s school?” Bert asked, somewhat desperately. “Is there a class in school you don’t hate? I mean, I shouldn’t assume you hate school.”

“You can assume that,” Cal said, sticking a finger in the dregs of his virgin strawberry margarita, sucking the syrup off.

“I’ve finally got a computer science teacher who knows more than I do,” Adair said. “For years, every time any of us took one of those classes we always knew more than the teachers, and they made us do stupid stuff we’d already done when we were, like, babies.”

“I use a computer for work, and when I try my hand at a little academic criticism,” Bert said, “but I understand them about as well as a cargo cultist understands an airplane.” The kids looked at him blankly; he decided not to explain what cargo cultists were. “What is it you like about the class?”

“Computer science?” Adair smiled, staring off to the side at a fakily rustic NO SWIMMIN’ AT THIS HERE SWIMMIN’ HOLE sign, hung cockeyed on the wall above her. “I like how you can write code, and it’s all, logical, or it’s like communicating with something. I don’t know, it’s like we have this artificial-life program where you make these fractal patterns react with each other in certain ways, and you set up actions and reactions and it just gets a life of its own and it comes from math, from numbers—from just the way things are.”

Cal grimaced at Adair; Bert and Lacey smiled at each other. “That’s a great way to think of it. Computer science giving life to math—or finding the life in math.”

Adair shrugged and Cal snorted, as if to say, The adults are patting us on the head, oh, how nice. But Bert could tell Adair was pleased, and even Cal seemed surprised by what went on in his sister’s head.

Bert thought, They’re so caught up in technology. Computers, MP3s, CD burners, downloading whole movies, laptops, augmenting their own videogame platforms with chips ordered on-line, doing most of their homework research on-line, spending hours in chat rooms and instant-messaging — he’d heard kids talk about all that and more. Not to mention television, cars, portable CD players.

He wanted to quote Thoreau. We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled. He wanted to talk about the idea of a higher nature and a lower nature. He wanted to ask them when they’d last looked beyond the digital landscape; when they’d really opened up to the sky and the sea and the forests, and to one another—and ask if it were possible that their obsession with the technology of distraction was deafening them to the message of God’s creation.

But Bert kept quiet. He kept his mouth shut because he knew he’d just come off pompous, and because teenagers justly despised self-righteous lecturers. Too, teenagers knew that if they were addicted to all these things, it was because they’d been conditioned to them by adults who were just as bad, or worse; who reduced them to a consumer demographic.

So Bert just smiled and nodded and said they did well to hone their skills.

After dinner, it was just getting dark when they drove to the Quiebra waterfront park for a view of the predicted meteor showers. As the sun moved toward the ocean, they walked along the sandy path between clumps of muck-reeds and stiff spare beach grass, watching for the legendary green flash in the otherwise neon-tangerine sunset.

When the teens had walked on ahead a little ways, Lacey asked, “Bert, you know that metallic stuff we saw the other night, that seemed . . . like it was moving by itself ?”

“Well, yeah. I remember. It did sort of seem—I’m not sure.”

“Have you seen any more of it? Or anything else strange?”

“Lots of strange things. Well, that night when my car died on us, there were some things. I thought we were being followed a couple of times. Just a feeling of being watched. But my imagination was working overtime out there.”

She chuckled. Then she became thoughtful, her voice hushed as she went on. “You know, the Bank of Quiebra was looted. I heard a weird story about it. Something someone saw out their window. And Adair . . .”

She told him about Adair coming to her with stories of her parents’ strange behavior. Mom’s behavior in the garage. Reinstall? Reinstall.

“I told her that it was probably something perfectly normal going on—and she was just, you know, misinterpreting. That she should talk to her parents about it. She said she was . . . scared to. Not uncomfortable talking to them—scared.”

“Scared to talk to them? Why?”

“She said it was hard to explain. She seemed so sincere. And it’s not like I didn’t notice a lot of strange things lately about Suzanna and Nick myself. I did. I feel like I let Adair down. Like I turned my back on her when she needed me, Bert, by not taking it seriously enough. Now I wonder if it could be to do with all this other stuff.”

“All what other stuff, exactly? What do you think it is?” Privately wondering if the other shoe was dropping here—if he was finding out Lacey was actually a bit crazy. That would be his luck with women, all right.

“What is it? I don’t know. There’s so much secretiveness around here. I don’t think it was like that last time I was here. And weird things stolen all over town, and a woman at the café this morning said that someone was torturing animals around here. I asked her what made her think so, and she said she saw a bird with machine parts in it, like someone had shoved these things into its body and let it go.”

“Jesus! What a grotesque—” He broke off, thinking. “Unless, maybe it was some kind of tracking device. Zoologists use them.”

“The way she described it, I don’t think so. I guess I just think . . . there’s a story in this town. There’s something going on. I keep getting the feeling that people are hiding something. I’m going to look into it. Either it’s my journalist’s intuition, or I need to see a doctor.”

Bert considered. “I have felt as if some people seem—weirdly distant. Like they’re doing something together, and they’re not including me—and I’m glad to be out of it. I mean, beyond my usual alienation. But . . .” He shrugged. “It’s just a feeling. Nothing, really.”

“Maybe it’s more than nothing. But if you see anything—”

Cal dropped back to them. “Hey, I saw that green flash thing! That flash that’s in the sunset sometimes.”

He pointed and they peered at the setting sun, but the flash had passed; no one else saw it. They watched the seabirds, small black coots bobbing on the water; the coots were contrasted by elegant white seabirds vanishing into the surf, to come up half a minute later with small crabs in their beaks. The ever-present gulls rose and dipped.

When the sky darkened enough so they could see the evanescent blue-white streaks of the meteor shower, Bert found himself reciting, “ ‘Who falls for love of God shall rise a star.’ ”

Cal looked around. “Yeah, it’s all pretty and stuff.” Deliberately teenagering it up. “It’s sav CGI.” He grinned at his sister. “It’s good graphics.”

Bert thought, The kid knows how a guy like me thinks even when I don’t say it out loud. It’s a mistake to underestimate these kids.

Still, tell them the story. “When I lived back east,” Bert said, “I went to an art museum in Concord where they had a touring exhibition of the greatest impressionists. Some people came down to see it and they videotaped it. And they looked at the van Gogh through the camera lens—never once looked at it with their naked eye. Though they were there in the room with the original.”

Lacey laughed and shook her head. “Yeah. I hear you.”

Cal shrugged and looked annoyed. Sensing he was being lumped in with those clueless tourists.

They walked on, and suddenly Lacey said, “Ben Jonson?”

“What?” Bert said. “Oh, that line I quoted. Yes. You get a gold star,” and he patted her head.

“Ha, ha, a gold star,” Cal muttered. “Fonn-ee.”

Lacey took Bert’s arm, then, and for a while, after that, he felt that all was right with the world. So what if she might be a little crazy.

She watched the falling stars. “They say meteors brought life to the earth—amino acids, proteins, or something that life is built up from probably came from some other world, and dropped into the ocean.” She looked out at the sea. “But was it by accident or design?”

“I’ve always wondered. Maybe when you look close enough there’s no difference. There’s that whole ‘intelligent design’ controversy. But who knows.”

Bert watched another blue-white scratch appear on what seemed the dark surface of the sky, another meteor. It seemed to him, for a moment, that the heavens were dramatizing the oneness of things, the above taking part in the below, the sky unifying with the earth. Below among the wet rocks a gull tugged at the decaying remains of a small manta ray, death cycling back into life again; the usual duality, separation of the individual from the whole, seemed removed for a moment.

Was Lacey his last chance, and would she treat him, finally, as Juanita had done? Was he stuck, mired in his work? Had he made one too many fatal missteps in his life?

Those doubts were always with him and had become part of him. Yet for a moment, feeling connected to some immeasurable wholeness glimpsed in the sky and horizon, stars and stone, he was set free.

Lacey looked at him, as if sensing it. Her eyes were shadowed, but he could feel her regard.

Then Adair broke the spell. So quietly Bert could barely make it out, she said, “Falling stars can be something else, too. Planes crashing or—satellites.”

“There’s a great mystery about a fallen satellite,” Lacey explained, seeing Bert’s puzzled look.

“Oh?”

“They’re not supposed to talk about it. Something to do with their dad’s salvage work.”

“Everything’s been fucked up since then,” Cal said suddenly, stopping to stare angrily up at the knitting clouds.

Lacey looked at him but said nothing, and after a long, pensive moment they walked back to the car. Bert wondered what wasn’t being talked about; what hung in the air like a meteorite, refusing to fall where it should.

They drove back to the Pinecrest area without talking much, slowing now and then to look at the Christmas lights shining in strings of blinking charismatic colors against the houses. Car culture was big in Quiebra, and at one house a classic 1940s Plymouth was outlined in Christmas lights; just the car, not the house. And here was the O’Haras’ house, Adair said. It was like a starburst of lights—and as they stared, Bert realized it wasn’t just overdone, it was strangely done. The Christmas lights seemed randomly strung, or like the scruffy webs of black widows, lacking beautiful spiral symmetry but with their own arcane design. And the same strings of lights looped from the O’Haras’ to the house next door, which was completely dark, the blinking light-chains crisscrossing like scribbles. Yet almost in a recognizable pattern, a cryptic message of some kind, like the mutterings of a lunatic.

Bert felt increasingly uneasy, looking at the patterns in the strings of lights. It was just as if a message was written there, in some language he couldn’t quite read.

“Better get you kids home,” Bert said.

He drove them right there, without any more delays.

December 6

Half an hour after school, Waylon found Mr. Morgenthal at his workbench in the electronics shop tinkering with some kind of radio receiver, it looked like.

Waylon stepped in close to look at what Mr. Morgenthal was working on—curious about what he’d managed to salvage after the vandalism and theft. And then stepped back again. It was the smell. Mr. Morgenthal had a harsh smell about him, which wasn’t usual. It was like he hadn’t bathed. There was also a burning smell, like a toy train transformer that’d been left on too long. But maybe that was from the project—looked like he’d done some soldering.

Waylon realized that Mr. Morgenthal was staring at him. But smiling. What was that look, like, all ironic? Had he forgotten some assignment?

“So,” Waylon began, “you got a new project going after all, there?”

“After all? It’s a satellite dish. It’s modified.”

Waylon saw that it was one of the smaller satellite dishes that people put up, but Mr. Morgenthal had changed it, had soldered a lot of little parts to it in a mesh of wires. Hella sketchy, he thought.

Mr. Morgenthal went on. “Modifying a satellite dish for greater power. There was a diagram in Popular Science.”

He said it with that smile and that stare, as if testing to see what Waylon would think of the explanation.

Waylon just nodded.

“Was there something you needed, Waylon?”

It really was like the guy was mad at him or something but had made up his mind not to say so. “No, I didn’t need anything special. Um, I guess you got some of your stuff back?”

“My stuff ?”

“That was stolen?”

“Stolen?”

“Uh, yeah? You know, the vandals and the stuff that was stolen?”

“Nothing was stolen.” Mr. Morgenthal turned back to his tools. “That was just . . . a misunderstanding. I had given permission for the materials to be used and forgot about it. I have everything I need. However, class is going to be suspended for a while.”

“Suspended? This one? Where do I go when I used to go to shop?”

“Wherever you like.”

“Yeah, well—” Waylon laughed. “—the principal might have some different ideas.”

“Oh, you’ll find that Mr. Hernandez is completely in agreement. Now if you will excuse me.”

“Sure.”

No one would care where he went? That was cool. But then again, it sucked.

Every kid he knew had picked up some sense of what you needed, to grow up healthy. How could you not get that, when they talked about it all the time in sitcoms and shows like Boston Public and TV movies and HBO specials and all that shit? “Yo, man, I got no role models, my uncle is all I got and he’s always fucking up and at home we’re all stayin up till three in the morning and shit, knamean? What? I’m sorry, I mean he’s always screwing up.”

But, whatever. No electronics class, that was one more hour a day he could use for his investigation. Maybe it was all, destiny and shit.

But still, it was fucked up.

Waylon turned and walked slowly to the door of the classroom. Looking around as he went. Almost nothing was left in the room except the workbenches. All the students’ tools were gone along with the electronics.

He looked at Mr. Morgenthal—and he got a feeling. Just a sad feeling.

He went into the hall. Yes, definitely feeling sad and not knowing why. Like somebody had died but he didn’t know who.

But then again, he did know: Mr. Morgenthal had died.