I flipped open the laptop. I’d read through McAvoy’s file, but I went back now, hoping for—I don’t know. Some insight, something I’d missed before.
He’d been in Indiana, GH9. The psych reports were pretty much par for the course, that way; GH9 had been the perfect place to lose your sanity. They’d worked people alternate shifts, one week on, one week off, trying to “normalize” the situation. With that, and a heap of tranks and antipsychotics, they’d kept the whole place functioning until a stray god blew it all to kingdom come, a detail which had failed to feature in official versions of the story. What was interesting here was McAvoy’s own correspondence. He’d come back from his week off, full of accusations; his colleagues were inept, crooked and fraudulent. Some of it was as ridiculous as quibbling over who’d used his shelf in the fridge; some of it, accusations of falsifying figures, lying and theft—smart, since that was just what he was up to himself. None of it had ever been investigated, and having visited the place, I wasn’t too surprised. But I thought I’d got a picture of the man now: scheming and self-righteous, seriously paranoid.
Angel said, “So how do you want to tackle it?”
“I want the bugger locked up. And whatever he’s still got from us, I want that locked up, too. Somewhere very, very safe.”
“Not enticing.”
“It’s enticing to me.”
“You,” she said, “are not the one needs enticed.”
I have enemies, he’d written.
I wrote back: I understand.
And once more: I can help.
Ten minutes passed. We waited. I ordered more scotch.
He wrote: Have you come to take me home?
I looked at her, and she mouthed, “Yes.”
By this time, it was nearly dawn.
And there was nothing else.
Perhaps I’d said the wrong thing after all.
Chapter 54
Echoes from Nowhere
Have you come to take me home?
I was back in our room. Staring at the conversation on the screen, as if it were a code to be unraveled, or a poem that wouldn’t yield its meaning.
This wasn’t poetry. Or any code that I could crack.
Home. That was a good thing, surely? So where was “home”? And what was it?
And why the hell would he assume I’d take him there?
I checked my phone. I put off doing anything, just waiting for the call, the message.
Angel brought us sandwiches. We ate them in our room. The strain was telling on her: gray-faced, and dark rings under her eyes. I’d told her she should sit this out, go back to her mum and dad a while, get well.
She’d told me: no chance.
“I’m better when I’m busy. Besides, if this is what we have to deal with—” and she sat down on the bed “—I’m dealing with it. Right?”
“You’re in a bad place now.”
She curled up, arms around her knees.
“There’s lots of people in a bad place, Chris. But they take their kids to school, do their jobs, fill out their tax returns. Bad place is no excuse.”
“That’s not the same.”
“How not the same? If you’re a doctor? A soldier? A cop?”
Because they’re not you, I thought.
I could have said it. Instead, I held my hands up, turned away, pretended to be watching something out the window . . .
And then, I was watching, because what was out the window was just slightly—very slightly—off.
It was the light.
We were ten floors up. In the street below, people were gathering for the parade. They had their sun hats and their toy balloons, their flags and banners . . . But I was watching through a fog. A thin mist seemed to have collected in the air, sparkling sometimes, as if struck by some stray beam of light, invisible for moments, then shining like a film, stretched across the void . . .
I said, “Your situation’s not good.”
“No. But, there you go.”
I wiped a hand across the glass. It made no difference to the view.
“Tell me about it.”
“Boring. Kid’s stuff, really.”
I looked skeptical.
“I’m dealing with it!”
“Tell me.”
I glanced out again. Police were clearing the stragglers off the road, herding them back to the crowd, behind the barriers.
A flash, then, in the middle air. A flash, a flicker— Did anybody notice? I couldn’t tell.
“It’s just . . . yeah. It’s trivial, you want to know. It’s kid’s stuff. And I’m over it, I am so over it. But . . .”
She leaned back on the bed. She wasn’t looking at me.
“It’s like when you’re a kid, you know? And people say, what do you want to be when you grow up? And you think you just decide, and, that’s what you do. Yeah?”
“I was going to be an astronaut.”
“Exactly!”
“But I didn’t.”
“No.”
“On the other hand, the school careers teacher said, get a job in a bank, and I didn’t do that, either. One up, I suppose.”
“This is hard for me to talk about,” she said. “Please, Chris . . .”
“Sorry.”
She sighed. She stretched her legs.
“It was always one thing for me. Always the same thing. It was always music.”