“If it’s too public for you, I’ll turn out the light.” Which she did.
He kissed her, and she kissed back, and he said, “I’ve been wondering how Elizabeth Haffner kisses. She’s got the mojo.”
“Mmmm. So does Orlando Gibbons.”
As dawn broke, with the boy snoring and the dogs whimpering in their dreams of rabbit chasing, Gavin drove over one last rugged hill and up a slope onto a lonely stretch of Highway 76. He switched on the headlights again and headed southeast toward Lake Henshaw and then Borrego Valley, which was surrounded by Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, there to take refuge with one who called himself “a walking nutbar.”
12
And in the vast wasteland were bones, those of wild burros and of coyotes that had strayed too far from hospitable terrain, bleached to the white of salt and pitted by weather. Also the centuries-old bones of men and women in unmarked ancient graves or massed in as yet undiscovered caves where barbaric slaughter had occurred, and as previously in such caves, the bones of children, too, with caved-in skulls…
Behind the wheel of the Explorer Sport, Jane said, “Something else I remember you saying. ‘Now is it true, or is it not—’?”
Hendrickson finished the line: “?‘—that what is which and which is what.’?”
“Is that also Milne?”
“The first Winnie book. A poem called ‘Lines Written by a Bear of Very Little Brain.’?”
“It means something special to you?”
He stared at the ribbon of highway, which seemed to pull them along with it as it was raveled onto some distant spool.
After a minute, he said, “?‘What is which, but which is what. Those are these, but these are those. Who is what, but what is who.’ That’s the way the world is, you weak, ignorant boy. People aren’t ever who they seem to be, and nothing they say means what it seems to mean. Nothing is only what it is. If you want to survive, you pathetic little shit, you damn well better understand, you better learn the need to be strong like me, learn to crush anyone who gets in your way. Don’t be like your worthless dick of a father. Go down the hole and learn, boy. Down the hole you go. Down the hole.”
He sat trembling, sheathed in sweat.
To the east, the Naval Weapons Station at China Lake, and to the west, the beginning of the Inyo National Forest and rising ranks of pi?on pines…
High overhead an unusually large flock of common ravens with wingspans over four feet glided without the need to oar the air. Jane was reminded of an Indian legend that told of the ravens that had pulled the first light of the world into the sky with their beaks. It was said that one day they would appear in great numbers long before sunset and pull into the world the final and everlasting darkness. This seemed as if it might be the day for that, but the only blackness in the blue was the flock itself, which winged onward, each member an indecipherable cryptograph sent into flight by a creation that teased with meaning but held tightly its secrets.
She said, “Booth, when I snap my fingers, you will forget we ever had a conversation about Milne and the Pooh books. You will forget my questions and what you said in answer to them. The most recent thing we spoke about was Mozart. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
She took one hand from the wheel and snapped her fingers.
Although time would pass before his perspiration dried, his tremors ceased. The anxiety faded from his face. He relaxed in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, as though his mind traveled the byways of a daydream. Jane couldn’t imagine what phantasms and contrivances his reverie might contain, but she suspected that it was of such a character that the ravens of the everlasting night were a part of it and that in the shadows of its twisting streets, there would be a maternal figure who had programmed him long before the nanomachine control mechanism had been invented.
13
The small town of Borrego Springs, in the Borrego Valley, in San Diego County, surrounded by six hundred thousand acres of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, was not one of the top-twenty tourist attractions in California. Most of those who vacationed there were campers, and even those who stayed in the town’s motels and motor inns were drawn by activities related to the desert.
A week from now, perhaps sooner, the largest crowd of the year would arrive to witness the spring flowering of the desert, when thousands of acres blazed with intricate configurations of blooming annuals: red poppies, zinnia in many hues, deep-purple gentians, and a rich variety of wildflowers that transformed the stark meadows and spread into the distance like some immense random-pattern Persian carpet woven by artisans in a state of euphoria.
Gavin and Jessie’s destination wasn’t within the town limits, but farther down-valley, off County Road S22. Two unpaved ruts with a stubble of dead weeds between them served as a driveway to the five-acre property. The single-story pale-blue stucco house, in need of paint, stood in a grove of ragged queen palms, under a white metal roof, surrounded by a yard of pea gravel and specimen cacti. Cement-block steps led to a front porch barren of furniture.
Cornell Jasperson, owner of the property, didn’t live in the house. No one lived there, though it was fully furnished.
Cornell’s residence was a hundred yards behind the house, in a subterranean structure with thick steel-reinforced concrete walls and ceiling, which he’d designed and built without obtaining permits—perhaps by greasing a lot of palms; he would not say—and by using his connections to import Philippine workers who’d lived in trailers on-site, never went into town, and spoke only Tagalog.
The structure was buried under four feet of earth and beyond detection, known only to Cornell, Gavin, and twelve newly rich Philippine workers who had returned home years earlier, telling stories prepared for them, stories regarding what it was like to spend a year working twelve-hour days in Utah, helping to build a mansion for a wealthy eccentric named John Beresford Tipton.
Of connections, Cornell had many, the least powerful being his cousin, his mother’s sister’s son, Gavin Washington. Born out of wedlock, Cornell had never known his father. His mother, Shamira, had been a drug addict and sometimes prostitute who named him after the man who, by her best judgment, was her co-conceiver. Shamira and her family disowned each other when she was sixteen; she died of a drug overdose twenty years later, when Cornell was just eighteen. No one in the family even knew of his existence. By the time he was twenty-four, from the proceeds of ten apps of his creation, he had been worth more than three hundred million dollars.
The rapid accumulation of wealth, in his words, “scared the bejesus” out of him. By his reckoning, something was out of whack when “a walking nutbar like me can go from a net worth of ten bucks to three hundred million in four years.” His success had convinced him that current society was “a mouse of cards,” and that he needed to “bunker down and ride out the coming Apocageddon.”
Cornell’s description of himself as a nutbar was too harsh by far. He had been diagnosed variously as suffering from Asperger’s disorder and different degrees of autism, among other things, and some people whose education came from movies called him an idiot savant, though his IQ was exceptional. It could be said with certainty only that Cornell was eccentric but most likely harmless.
Gavin drove around the house, following the ruts that led past the yard of pea gravel and ended in a turnaround in front of a barn standing between the house and the undetectable bunker that was buried under four feet of earth.
The barn looked as though it might collapse if sneezed on. Sun, wind, and rain had weathered the unpainted wood into a palette of grays. The structure’s north and south walls were concave, and the whole thing canted to the west under a rust-streaked metal roof.
“Does he have horses?” Travis asked from the backseat.