Blind Lake

“Maybe at first.”

“Meaning it won’t last. I’m sure you’re right. It has that house-of-cards feeling, like it can’t go on forever. Euphoria with a price tag. I want to enjoy it while it lasts.”

It could end at any time, Marguerite thought. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Thank you, but you don’t need to be sorry. Really, I appreciate you guys coming out here in this awful weather.”

“When I heard it was Ray — that he was the one who hurt you—”

“What about it?”

“I owe you an apology.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Which is why I wanted to talk to you.” She frowned. It made her face seem even more pallid. “I don’t know you real well, Marguerite, but we get along okay, don’t we?”

“I think so.”

“Well enough that I can get a little personal?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I get the impression I’ve had more experience with men than you have. Not necessarily good experience, but more of it. I’m not saying I’m a slut or you’re a virgin, just that we fall on different parts of the distribution curve, if you know what I mean… I’m sorry, I’m a little light-headed. Bear with me. One of the things I’ve learned is you can’t take responsibility for what a man does. Especially if you’ve already kicked him out for being an asshole. So please, please don’t apologize on behalf of Ray. He’s not some pit bull you should have kept on a shorter leash. He’s totally responsible for how he behaved when you guys were married. And he’s absolutely responsible for this.”

She gestured at the bandage bulging under the thin clinic sheet.

Marguerite said, “I wish I could have done something to stop him.”

“Me too. But you couldn’t.”

“I keep thinking—”

“No, Marguerite. No. Really. You couldn’t.”

Perhaps not. But she had consistently underestimated the degree of Ray’s madness. She had jumped over that rattlesnake a hundred times, a thousand times, with only her dumb i

She could have been killed. Sue nearly had been.

“Well… can I say I’m sorry you got hurt?”

“You already did. And thank you. I want to talk to Chris, too, but, you know, maybe I am getting a little sleepy here.” Her eyelids retreated to half-mast. “Suddenly I feel all warm and sort of — what’s the word? Oracular.”

“Oracular?”

“Like the Oracle of Delphi. Wisdom for a pe

Marguerite just stared.

“Now,” Sue said, spectacularly pale against the off-white bedsheet, “I believe I really do need to sleep.”

She closed her eyes.

Marguerite sat quietly while Sue’s breathing steadied. Then she tiptoed into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

Sue had surprised her tonight. So had Ray, in a much more terrifying fashion. And if I can’t figure out these people, she thought, how can I even pretend to understand the Subject? Maybe Ray had been right about that. All her big talk about narratives: it was absurd, ridiculous, a childish dream.

Her server trilled in her pocket — a message from the Eye with a priority tag on it. Marguerite thumbed the ANSWER button, expecting more bad news.

It was a text message, a heads-up from the guys in Data Acquisition: Get to a screen ASAP, it said.

“I understand,” Sebastian Vogel said to Chris, “the wound isn’t as bad as it seemed at first. In all honesty, I thought she might die. But she was talking when I drove her here, almost nonstop.”

Sebastian looked fragile, Chris thought, his round body crammed into the ungenerous circumference of a waiting-room chair. Elaine Coster sat at the opposite side of the clinic’s reception space, scowling, while Tess played listlessly with waiting-room toys meant to amuse children much younger than herself. She ran a train of colored beads around a wireframe roller-coaster. The beads clacked together when they slid from peak to valley.

“She insisted on talking about my book,” Sebastian said. “Can you imagine that? Considering the pain she was in?”

“How nice,” Elaine said caustically from across the room. “You must have been flattered.”

Sebastian looked genuinely hurt. “I was horrified.”

“So why mention it?”

“She might have been dying, Elaine. She asked me if there really was a God, the sort of God I described in the book. ‘From which our minds arise and to which they return’ — she was quoting me.”

“So what did you tell her?”

“Maybe I should have lied. I told her I don’t know.”

“How did she take it?”

“She didn’t believe me. She thinks I’m modest.” He looked at Elaine, then at Chris. “That fucking book! That piece of shit book. Of course I wrote it for the money. Not even a lot of money. Just a small advance from a minor-league press. Something to pad out my pension. No one expected it to take off the way it did. I never meant it to be something people take as a creed. At best, it’s a kind of theological science fiction. A thinking man’s joke.”

“A lie, in other words,” Elaine said.

“Yes, yes, but is it? Lately—”

“Lately what?”

“I don’t know how to say this. It feels more like inspiration. Do you understand the history of that word, inspiration? The pneuma, the sacred breath, the breath of life, the divine breath? Inhaling God? Maybe something was speaking through me.”

“Sounds like your bullshit detector has malfed,” Elaine said, though she said it more quietly, Chris noticed, and with less obvious scorn.

Sebastian shook his head. “Elaine. Do you know why your cynicism doesn’t hurt? Because I share it. If I was ever sincere about the existence of God, I grew out of it not long after I reached puberty. If you call my book bullshit, Elaine, I won’t argue with you. Remember when you predicted I’d write a sequel? You were absolutely right. I signed the contract the week before I left for Crossbank. Wisdom the Quantum Vacuum. Laughable, isn’t it? But, oh, Jesus, the money they offered me! To write a few harmless aphorisms in fancy language. Who could it hurt? No one. Least of all me. My academic career is finished; any credibility I had as a scholar was flushed away when I published the first volume. Nothing left to do but milk the cow. But—”

Sebastian paused. Elaine came across the tiled floor and sat down next to him.

Chris watched Tess play with a crude wooden car. If the girl was listening, she showed no sign of it.

“But?” Elaine prompted.

“But — as I said — I find myself wondering — that is, I wake up some mornings believing it. Believing it wholeheartedly, believing it the way I believe in my own existence.”

“Believing what, that you’re a prophet?”

“Hardly. No. I wake up thinking I stumbled on a truth. Despite myself. A fundamental truth.”

“What truth, Sebastian?”

“That there’s something living in the physical processes of the universe. Not necessarily creating it. Modifying it, maybe. But chiefly living in it. Eating the past and excreting the future.”

Tess gave him a curious look, then rolled her car a little farther away.

“You know,” Elaine said, “that’s like the final stage of lunacy. When you start to actually pay attention to the voices in your head.”

“Obviously. I may be crazy, Elaine, but I’m not stupid. I can diagnose a delusion. So I ask myself whether Ray Scutter might be right, whether Blind Lake has been infected with a contagious madness. It would explain a great deal, wouldn’t it? It would explain why we’ve been quarantined. It would explain some of Ray’s own behavior. It might even explain why Sue is in a clinic ward with a knife wound in her belly.”