As Jergen and Dubose step out of their truck and approach the Corrigan house, the front door opens, and an Arcadian named Damon Ainsley descends two steps to a concrete pad that serves as a stoop. He is a robust man with a rosy complexion that has, in this case, paled from ear to ear and gone a little gray around the eyes.
“We’ve got a situation,” Ainsley says. A thin and bitter laugh escapes him. “Situation. Hell’s bells, I’ve become a jackass, more bureaucrat than lawman, politically correct and full of newspeak. The situation, gentlemen, is a shitstorm.”
According to Dubose, Dr. Bertold Shenneck, cuckolded husband of the fabulous Inga, had foreseen two types of sudden psychological collapse that might rarely ensue following the activation of a brain implant, the least dramatic being the disintegration of the ego and the id upon the recognition of being possessed and enslaved. In this case, the subject’s sense of self dissolves. He loses all identity, all memory. He ceases to understand the environment around him and has no capacity for ordered thought. His mind becomes a shrieking bedlam. This is the more benign of the two possibilities.
In the worse scenario, the ego disintegrates but not the id, leaving the latter in charge. What remains in this case is a sense of self, a kind of situational and pattern-recognition memory rather than recollection of personal experience, and a capacity for ordered but primitive thought. However, the id is the aspect of the mind that seeks pleasure at any cost. Without the moderating influence of the ego, which mediates between the primal desires of the id and the social environment in which we live, there is no Dr. Jekyll anymore, nor even Mr. Hyde—but only a pleasure-seeking thing.
Damon Ainsley heads toward one of the Jeep Cherokees. “Got to smoke some weed to float away the nausea. Better prepare yourselves before you go in there.”
“I was born prepared,” Dubose says.
As Carter Jergen learned during his years at Harvard, there are two explanations for what is called the reptile consciousness within the human id, supposing that it exists. A scientist might say human beings are not evolved from apes so much as from all the species that constitute the history of life on Earth’s land masses, which means that the first lizard to venture from sea to shore has left its genetic trace in us. On the other hand, a priest might say our reptilian impulses are the curse bestowed by the father of serpents in the Garden of Eden. In either case, the reptile consciousness has no capacity for love, compassion, mercy, or any other virtues prized by civil societies. It is driven solely by its hunger for pleasure, and one of those pleasures is the thrill of violence.
As Dubose opens the door of the Corrigan house, he pauses and pretends to be profound, a pose he finds appealing now and then. “This is a moment to remember, my friend. Dr. Shenneck thought there was a one-in-ten-thousand chance of a psychological collapse. More than sixteen thousand have been adjusted with implants, and this is the first instance of what he predicted. For you and me, it’s like being there when Edison tested the first successful light bulb.”
Such grandiose declarations, coming from the hillbilly sage, grate on Jergen. “How the hell is it like Edison’s light bulb?”
“It’s an historic moment.”
“Damon Ainsley just called it a shitstorm. A shitstorm isn’t my idea of an historic moment.”
The big man favors Jergen with an expression like that of a patient adult speaking to an amusing but clueless child. “History isn’t just an endless series of triumphs, Carter. History is about the ups and downs. It was an historic moment when the Titanic sank.”
They step into the house.
8
THE RAT-COAT-GRAY TORN-RAG sky over the guld of Mexico creeping across blackening waters, the morning sun steadily retreating from the shore, the coastal plain just twenty feet above sea level, the maze of oil refineries looking flat in the shadowless light of an oncoming storm, like a pencil drawing hung on a wall …
To Egon Gottfrey, on the trail of Ancel and Clare Hawk, the city of Beaumont, Texas, appears to be more detailed than Worstead, where all this began. But the Unknown Playwright is still sketching the locale rather than painting it in fullest depth and color.
Behind the wheel of his Rhino GX, Gottfrey follows Tucker Treadmont’s GMC Terrain through the outskirts of the city into open country, Rupert and Vince close behind in their Jeep Wrangler. This solemn train of black vehicles feels like a funeral procession sans corpse, though it’s easy enough to make a corpse if one is needed.
Along a two-lane blacktop, they come into fields of coarse matted grass and tortured weeds from some of which depend clusters of pale bladders the size of thumbs. At certain times of the year, perhaps portions of this land become marshes from which, at dusk, clouds of mosquitoes rise in such great numbers that they blacken the sky even before the last light has gone from it.
The GMC Terrain slows, signals a right turn, leaves the pavement for the wide shoulder of the road, and comes to a stop. Gottfrey parks behind it, Rupert Baldwin behind Gottfrey.
Treadmont waits in front of his vehicle, frowning at the grim sky, drawing deep breaths and snorting them out, as though he is part hound and can assess the potential of the storm by the scent that it imparts to the air. For whatever reason, the nipples of his man breasts have stiffened against his pale-blue polo shirt, a sight about as erotic as a squashed cockroach.
“Why have we stopped?” Gottfrey asks.
“This is where I left them, the cowboy dude and his woman. This is where they wanted to go.”
Gottfrey and his men survey their surroundings with puzzlement.
Vince Penn says, “This is like the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing. There’s no place they could go. It’s just fields. Just empty fields is all it is.”
Pointing ahead and to the right, toward a narrow dirt lane that branches off the blacktop, Treadmont says, “The last I saw them, they were walkin’ that way.”
In the distance, what might be a house and two outbuildings—or a mirage—imprint their small dark shapes on the landscape.
“Did they say who lives there?” Gottfrey asks.
“I didn’t ask, they didn’t say, and I don’t care.”
“Why didn’t they want you to drive them over there? Didn’t that seem odd to you?”
“Mister, maybe half of everythin’ that happens in life seems odd as hell to me, most of it stranger than this. Now I got a livin’ to make.”
When Treadmont drives away, Rupert Baldwin squints at the distant buildings. “If we drive in, they’ll for sure hear us coming. What do you say we walk it?”
Like Rupert and Vince, Gottfrey is carrying a pistol on his right hip. He also has a snub-nosed revolver in an ankle holster. The three of them set out on foot.
9
THE LIVING ROOM AT THE CORRIGAN HOUSE is furnished for comfort, with a deep sofa of no particular style and three massive recliners, everything aimed at a big-screen television. Otherwise, the theme of the décor is nautical. The reproduced paintings of sailing ships in calm and stormy seas are the quality that big hotel chains purchase by the thousands. One lamp base is sheathed in artfully arranged seashells; another features a porcelain mermaid topped by a painted shade on which porpoises cavort.
Someone in this desert home yearns for the romance of the sea.
A young DHS agent whose name Carter Jergen doesn’t know—one of the Arcadian backup brigade that streamed into the valley during the past thirty-six hours—sits on the edge of one of the recliners. He smokes a cigarette, tapping the ashes into a conch shell, his hands shaking as if he’s a palsied retiree.
Radley Dubose says, “Harry, is it?”
“Yeah,” the agent says. “Harry Oliver.”
“On the phone, you called it a slaughterhouse. To me it looks like Mayberry, U.S.A.”