Blind Lake

When she was little Marguerite used to hang out with a neighborhood boy whose family owned a gentle and long-suffering springer spaniel. The boy (his name had also been Raymond, coincidentally) had once spent an hour trying to ride that dog like a horse, laughing at the poor animal’s yelps, until the dog had finally turned on him and taken a bite out of his right-hand thumb. The boy had looked the way Ray did now, astonished and tearful. For a second she wondered whether Ray would start to cry.

But his face reformed on its familiar lines. He stood up.

Oh, shit, Marguerite thought. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

She backed into the hallway. Ray put his hands on her shoulders and shoved her against the wall. Now it was her turn to be surprised.

“You really don’t get it, do you? In the words of the song, Marguerite, you’re not in Kansas anymore.”

A movie, not a song. One of Tessa’s favorites. Ray, of course, didn’t know that.

He pinched her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I shouldn’t have to tell you how far we all are from that pedestrian little world of divorce counselors and social workers you imagine you’re still living in. Why do you think the Lake is under a quarantine? You quarantine a place because of sickness, Marguerite. It’s that simple. A contagious, deadly sickness. We’re alive on sufferance, and how much longer is that sufferance going to last?”

It could end at any time.

Ray put his face close to hers. His breath smelled like acetone. She tried to turn away but he wouldn’t let her.

“We could all be dead in a month. We could be dead tomorrow. Given that, why should I let you ignore Tess in favor of that freakish thing on the screen, or worse, your new boyfriend?”

“What are you talking about?” Moving her jaw against the pressure of his fingers. Because he sounded like he knew something. Like he had a secret. Ray had always enjoyed knowing something Marguerite didn’t. Almost as much as he hated being wrong.

He gave her a last, almost perfunctory shove — her shoulders co

What Ray didn’t see was the large form of Chris Carmody lumbering down the hallway from the stairs. Marguerite caught sight of him but glanced away quickly so as not to let Ray catch on. Let it happen. For a big man, Chris made very little noise.

Chris put himself between her and Ray and pushed a very startled Ray back against the opposite wall, not gently. Marguerite was terrified — there was real male violence in the air, an actual smell, a locker-room funk — but she was secretly pleased to see Ray’s venomous expression morph back to an incredulous “Oh!” She had wanted to see that look on him for many dry years. It was intoxicating.

“Did you,” Ray stammered when he had sized up the situation, “did you just put your fucking hands on me?”

“I don’t know,” Chris said. “Did you just commit a break-and-enter?”

Now they’ll fight, Marguerite thought, or one of them will back down. Ray made a good show of it. He puffed up like a bantam rooster. “Mind your own fucking business!” But he was talking, not fighting. “I don’t have to go through you to deal with my wife. Do you know who I am?”

“Come on, Ray,” Chris said calmly. “Take it outside, all right?”

Here was something she hadn’t seen from Chris before. Anger, real anger, not Ray’s piss-and-vinegar face-making. He looked like a man preparing to perform some unpleasant task with his fists. She reached out and put a hand on his arm. “Chris—”

Ray seized the opportunity, as she had suspected he might. He stepped back, held up his hands, and began a very Ray-like back-down. “Oh, please. I don’t want to play macho games. I said what I came to say.”

He turned his back and walked away — a little shaky in the knees, she thought.

When he was gone, after she had watched from Tessa’s bedroom window to make sure he drove away in his ugly little black car, what Marguerite felt was not anger or fear but embarrassment. As if Chris had been witness to some shameful part of her life. “I didn’t mean for you to see that.”

“I got tired of waiting.”

“I mean, thank you, but—”

“You don’t have to thank me and you don’t have to apologize.”

She nodded. Her pulse was still racing. “Come on down to the kitchen,” she said. Because it was going to be one of those long, sleepless, adrenaline-charged nights. Maybe this was a habit she had picked up from her father, but where do you a spend a night like that except in the kitchen? Making tea and toast and trying to put your life back in some sort of order.

Ray had said some disturbing things. There was a lot here to think about, and she didn’t want to further embarrass herself by breaking down in front of Chris. So she led Chris to the kitchen and sat him down while she put on the kettle. Chris himself was subdued — in fact, he looked a little mournful. He said, “Was it always like that? You and Ray?”

“Not so bad. Not always. And especially not at first.” How to explain that what she had mistaken for love had turned so quickly into loathing? Her hand still ached where she had slapped him. “Ray’s a pretty good actor. He can be charming when he wants to.”

“I imagine the strain wears on him.”

She smiled. “Apparently. Did you hear much of what he said upstairs?”

Chris shook his head.

“He said he won’t give Tess back.”

“Think he means it?”

“Ordinarily I’d say no. But ordinarily, he wouldn’t even make the threat. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have come here. Back in the real world, Ray was pretty good about respecting legal limits. If only because he didn’t want to leave himself vulnerable. Upstairs, he was talking like somebody with nothing to lose. He was talking about the quarantine. He said we could all be dead in a week.”

“You think he knows something?”

“Either he knows something or he wants me to believe he does. All I can say is, he wouldn’t be dicking around with our custodial arrangements if he thought I’d have legal recourse. I mean, ever.”

Chris was silent for a while, mulling that one over. The kettle whistled. Marguerite focused on making the tea, this calming ritual, two tea bags, a dollop of milk for her cup, none for Chris.

“I guess I never really let myself think about that,” she said. “I want to believe that one day soon they’ll open the gates and restore the data links and somebody in a uniform will apologize to us all and thank us for our patience and beg us not to sue. But I guess it could end another way.” Another deadly way. And, of course, at any time. “Why would they do that to us, Chris? There’s nothing dangerous here. Nothing’s changed since the day before the lockdown. What are they afraid of?”

He smiled humorlessly. “The joke.”

“What joke?”

“There’s an old comedy routine — I forget where I saw it. It’s World War Two and the Brits come up with the ultimate weapon. A joke so fu

“Okay… so?”

“It’s the original information virus. An idea or an image capable of driving someone mad. Maybe that’s what the world is afraid of.”

“That’s a dumb idea, and it was retired during the congressional hearings a decade ago.”

“But suppose it happened at Crossbank, or something happened there that looked like it.”

“Crossbank isn’t looking at the same planet. Even if they found something potentially dangerous, how would it affect us?”

“It wouldn’t, unless the problem arose in the O/BECs. That’s all we really have in common with Crossbank, the hardware.”

“Okay, but that’s still ridiculously conjectural. There’s no evidence anything bad happened at Crossbank.”