Classes at John F. Kennedy High School started late that year. It was a miracle, Dex thought, that they had started at all. He gave credit to the principal, Bob Hoskins, and a feisty committee of local parents: they had negotiated an agreement with the Proctors, who probably decided it would be safer keeping restless teenagers penned up during the day than to let them run loose.
The problem (well, one problem, in a sea of trouble) was texts. Like every library in Two Rivers, the school library had been sacked. “Indexed,” the Proctors said. The books had gone out in truckloads last August—not to be burned, it was claimed, but into storage, no doubt into some monkish secret archive, some classified dungeon.
The military consul had even offered new texts, and perhaps that was inevitable, if school went on, but Dex had been appalled by the example he’d been shown: a gilt-edged volume that might have passed for a McGuffey’s Reader of the 1890s, full of crude cautionary verses about the dangers of syphilis and distilled liquor, and fragments of history that seemed dubious even in the context of this weirdly twisted rabbit hole into which the town had fallen: Heros and Heresiarchs, Daniel at Ravensbreuck, What Was Won and Lost at the Fields of Flanders. Handing out such documents to a class raised on Super Mario and the Ninja Turtles was more than Dex liked to imagine.
So he taught his classes informally, as he had always taught them: American history from the Revolution to the First World War. He wrote “chapters” and printed them on an ancient spirit duplicator someone had dragged up from the basement. History, of course, was not what it used to be. Not here. But despite the formidable evidence of the last four months, he could not convince himself that this was meaningless work, that he was communicating to his dwindling classes the folk tales of some lost and impossible dreamland. These events had happened. They were formative, they had consequences: the town of Two Rivers, for instance, and everyone in it.
He was teaching real history. Or so he believed. But his students tended to be listless, and today was no exception; he taught without books, electric lights, a heated classroom, or much enthusiasm; and he was relieved, like everyone else, when the day was over.
He walked home through long shadows. Curfew began at six, but the streets were already deserted. Except for military traffic. Over the last three months Dex had trained himself not to look at the boxy patrol cars. They were always the same, a driver in a black beret and a man with a rifle and fixed bayonet riding next to him, both wearing an expression of bland, bored hostility. It was a kind of face you probably saw a lot of in Honduras or Beijing; it was not a face Dex had ever expected to see in Two Rivers.
But as Dorothy Gale might have observed, he wasn’t in Michigan anymore. He had given up trying to guess what the nature of this place truly was. The only words that applied were words he had learned from The Twilight Zone. “Another dimension.” Whatever that meant.
He climbed the stairs to his apartment. The front room was as dim and cold as it had been all this autumn. The military were supposed to be running in a high-voltage line from the south, but he’d believe that when he saw it. In the meantime it was cold, and the winter would be much colder. Deadly, unless arrangements were made.
His sofa bed was open and tangled with blankets—every blanket he owned. In that brief impossible time last June, between the accident and the military occupation, he had been clever enough to buy a hurricane lantern and a supply of lamp oil. The lamp gave him an extra half hour or so of light each evening. Enough to read by. The Proctors hadn’t confiscated every book in town; there were still personal libraries, including his own seven shelves of paperbacks. He was rereading Mark Twain, a bracing exercise under the circumstances.
He ate cold soup out of the can. The Proctors had distributed “ration coupons” mimeographed on rag paper; you redeemed them for food at the dispensary in the IGA parking lot. Dex had used up his coupons early in the week but was sparing with the nonperishable items. Water came from a truck in front of City Hall: you lined up with your old milk jug or a camping thermos or whatever container was handy. The wait was generally about an hour, and the water tasted of gasoline.
He had not had a hot shower since June. It was possible, Dex had established, to keep himself clean with a cloth rag and a little soap and a jug of water at room temperature, but there was no pleasure in it. He had begun to dream about showers.
He read by the fading daylight until it was too dark, then put the book aside and watched nightfall through his narrow window. A rack of cloud had moved in and the wind was gusting. The street was full of tumbling leaves. Nobody had raked or burned their leaves this year. The town seemed tatty, seemed gone to seed.
Tonight he didn’t light the hurricane lamp. When the room was dark, when the streets were dark, he changed into a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and a navy blue overcoat. He put a can of soup in one pocket, two cans of orange soda in the other. After a moment’s thought, he added a bottle of aspirin.
In Dex’s experience, everybody obeyed the curfew. There had been a few exceptions. In July, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Seagram had been shot when he tried to cross town after dark to visit his girlfriend. The body had been on display in the City Hall courtyard for three ghastly days.
The patrols had eased somewhat since then, but Dex was still careful stepping out the front door of his building into the windy street.
The wind was an asset. The tossing of the trees, the rattle of all these dry leaves, disguised any sound he was likely to make. There were no streetlights, only the occasional flicker of candlelight from curtained windows; that was good, too. He followed a line of hedges to Beacon Road and took a good long look before jogging across the intersection to the corner of Powell Creek Park. The park was fine cover but hazardous in the cloudy dark. He followed the faint shine of a footpath.
He ducked behind a willow tree as a military patrol rounded the corner from Oak behind the lightless brick primary school, tires crackling on dry leaf. The soldier in the shotgun seat scanned the sidewalks with a high-intensity lamp. Dex crouched motionless, taking shallow breaths until the engine sound and the flickering light faded.
Then he crossed the street to a small wood-frame house, over a lawn grown wild, to the back, down a short span of concrete steps to a basement door. He had memorized the route; in the dark he could see almost nothing. A tree hissed in the black space of the yard. Drops of rain spattered his coat and the air on his lips was cold and moist.
He opened the door without knocking. When it was firmly closed behind him, he struck a match and touched it to the wick of a candle.
This basement room was windowless. The floor was concrete. There were stacks of blankets, food cans (most empty), a few books, a Primus stove.
There was a mattress on the floor; and on the mattress, Howard Poole. His eyes were closed, his forehead beaded with sweat.
Dex sighed and emptied cans from the pockets of his coat. At the sound, Howard turned his head and looked up.
The younger man nodded. “Thirsty,” he said.
Dex popped a can of soda and pressed two aspirin into Howard’s hand. The hand was hot, but maybe not as hot as it had been yesterday.
Howard was suffering from a flu that had been threatening to turn into pneumonia. Dex believed the crisis had passed, but nothing was certain anymore.
Howard turned his wristwatch to catch the candlelight, then sat up in a slow, pained motion. “It’s after curfew.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Kind of risky, coming here.”
“I didn’t want to be followed.”
“You thought you might be?”
“A couple of Proctors came to the door this morning. They know your name, they know you worked at the plant, and they know you were rooming at Evelyn’s. They were civilized. No pushing. But a guy followed me to work. I thought it would be better to come here in the dark.”
“Jesus.” Howard rolled to one side.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. I didn’t get the feeling they were hunting you down—just putting some hooks in the water.”
Howard sighed. He looked tired of it all, Dex thought: worn out by the sickness, the cold, the hiding.
It was not more than ten days after the tanks rolled into Two Rivers that the military had announced their desire to interview employees of the Two Rivers Physical Research Lab. Howard had refrained from volunteering. Then a lieutenant of the Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse, a man named Symeon Demarch, took over Evelyn’s bed-and-breakfast and turned it into his headquarters. And Howard had gone into hiding.
The house they were in was ostensibly empty. It had belonged to Paul Cantwell, a CPA who had been in Florida with his family when the accident happened.
Howard had lifted an expired Michigan driver’s license from a desk upstairs and used it to pass as Paul Cantwell at the ration lineups. When he came down with the flu (some variant germ that rode in with the tanks: half the people in town had caught it), Dex used the ID to pick up double rations—a risky business, since hoarding was a punishable offense and ID fraud a capital crime under military law.
Howard said vaguely, “I was having a dream when you came in. Something about Stern. He was in a building, a building all covered with jewels. But I don’t remember . . .” The words trailed off.
Stern again, Dex thought. Since the fever set in, Howard had often talked about his uncle Alan Stern—who had been the moving force behind the Two Rivers Physical Research Lab; who had died, presumably, in the accident. The fever seemed to have revived him in Howard’s mind.
“A woman,” Howard said faintly, deliriously. “A woman answered the phone.”
Dex opened a can of soup and put a spoon into the younger man’s hand. Howard’s fingers closed on it in a spasm that was almost reflexive.
“When I phoned him in Two Rivers,” Howard was saying. “A woman . . .”
“Is this important?”
The question seemed to clear a shadow. He gave Dex a guilty, odd smile. “I don’t know. Maybe.” He put the spoon in his mouth. “Cold soup.”
“It’s good for you. How do you feel, by the way?”
“A little better. I’ve been awake more often. At least, I think so. It’s kind of timeless down here.” And he took another spoonful. “Not so many trips to the shitter. I’ve even been a little bit hungry.”
“Good.”
He ate in silence for a time. It seemed to Dex that the soup and the aspirin were working a slow transformation in him. It was heartening to see.
They listened as the rain picked up its pace, rattling on a tin awning out back.
Howard put down the empty can and licked the spoon a last time. “I was talking about my uncle. This isn’t just raving, Dex. I know I haven’t been too coherent. But he was the key to this whole event. Maybe our key to understanding it.”
“You think we have a chance of understanding it?”
“I don’t know. Yes, maybe.”
Maybe Howard could figure out what had happened at the research lab. Dex surely couldn’t. He had a hard time understanding the Bohr model of the atom, much less a physical process so catastrophic that it could somehow rewrite history. What had happened here was not Physics 1-A—it wasn’t on any curriculum Dex had ever heard of. He shook his head: “You’re talking to a humanities major, bucko.”
“Maybe we have to understand it.”
“Do we?”
“I thought about it a lot. You lie here in the dark, you do a lot of thinking. It’s our only choice, Dex. We understand it and do something about it, or we just . . . what? Go on like this? Get killed, or imprisoned, or best case, get assimilated?”
Dex had had these thoughts, too, and so, probably, had most of the citizens of Two Rivers. But no one ever talked about it. It was the great unspoken truce. We will not discuss the future.
Howard had broken the rule.
“You are feverish.”
“Don’t brush me off.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t humor me, either. I’m not that sick.”
“I’m sorry. If I knew where to begin—”
“I keep thinking about Stern. I dreamed about him. With the fever—there were times I thought he was here, I mean here in the room. Very real.” Howard shook his head and sank back into the mattress. “It all seemed so logical. It made more sense in dreams.”
Dex went home after midnight. The weather sheltered him from view and kept military patrols to a minimum, but his clothes were heavy with cold rain and he was shivering helplessly by the time he came within sight of his walkup apartment building. Maybe Howard was right, he thought. Maybe it all made more sense in dreams.
Maybe dreaming was the only way to approach something so incomprehensible. Dex had coped better than most, because his own life had passed into the territory of dreams long ago. He had been sleepwalking since the fire took Abigail and David away from him. His life since then had been a kind of shadowy anticlimax in which even the events of the last few months had been hardly more than a recapitulation, his own bereavement somehow woven into the fabric of the larger world. He supposed Evelyn had sensed this about him, that even the tenderness that had passed between them—and it had been a real tenderness—was nevertheless eclipsed by something darker. He supposed that was why she had elected to stay in the boarding house with the Proctor Demarch. She had been afraid, of course, but not only afraid. She had known about Dex: what he had been, what he had lost.
He stood in the darkness under the lintel of the old apartment building and fumbled his wet key into the lock. He thought about Evelyn Woodward and what she had meant to him. For a time she had seemed to be a doorway back into a world from which he had been exiled—not a replacement for Abigail, but a way out of this blind canyon his life had become, into the highlands, the sun-washed places in which he had almost ceased to believe.
She hadn’t been equal to that aroused need, and who could be? It was better not to want such things. He had arrived at a sort of modus vivendi with his grief, and such deals were best not broken. You wore your grief, and if necessary you ate it and you drank it until it became your substance, until you looked in the mirror one day and there was nothing looking back but grief itself, a man made entirely of sorrow, but still standing, somehow still alive, surviving.
He left his wet clothes hanging over the curtain rod in the shower stall and went to bed, craving these few hours of oblivion before another dawn.
The knock at the door startled him awake.
The knock was peremptory and fierce, a Proctor’s knock. He woke blinking at daylight, his heart pounding hard.
He went directly to the door and opened it, apprehensive but not afraid; he was too tired of all this to be afraid.
The only light in the dim hallway was a patch of pale October morning through the east-facing window. Two junior Proctors, pink-cheeked youngsters only just beginning to master the routine arrogance of the professional religious policeman, looked at Dex and past him into the room. Then they moved to opposite sides of the door.
A woman stepped forward.
Bewildered, Dex could only stare.
She was wearing what he supposed his great-grandmother might have worn in her youth: a black, high-collared, long-sleeved, floor-length dress fixed with buttonhooks over the kind of corset that rendered the female figure as an S-shape, all bosom and buttocks. Definitely not a uniform; there was too much lace at the collar and cuffs. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and swept back to frame her face. She was about as tall as his collarbone.
She looked at Dex with a fierce determination. But she was blushing at the same time, maybe because he’d come to the door in nothing but briefs and a sleeveless T-shirt.
She said, “I’m sorry to disturb you . . . are you Mr. Dexter Graham?”
She spoke with that odd accent he had heard from some of the soldiers. The inflections were European, the vowel sounds almost Irish. She made “Dexter Graham” into something exotic, the name of a North Country highwayman in a Walter Scott epic.
He overcame his speechlessness and said, “Yes, I am.”
“My name is Linneth Stone. Lieutenant Demarch sent me to speak to you.” She paused. “I can wait, if you need to dress.” The blush deepened a little.
“Okay,” Dex said. “Thank you.” And went to look for his pants.