The Chronoliths

When Ashlee talked about her son her expression was a mixture of pride, guilt, and apprehension, sometimes all three at once. Her large eyes darted from side to side as if she expected to be overheard. She played with her napkin, folding it and refolding it, finally tearing it into long strips that lay on the tabletop like aborted acts of origami.

“He ran away once when he was twelve, but that had nothing to do with this Copperhead thing. I swear I don’t know what Adam imagines this Kuin is all about, apart from the business of destroying cities and making people’s lives miserable. But it fascinates him. The way he watches the news nets is almost frightening.” She dipped her head. “I’m reluctant to say it, but I think what Adam likes is basically just this crushing of things. I think he puts himself in Kuin’s place. He wants to lift his foot and obliterate everything he hates. The talk about a new kind of world government is just set-dressing, in my opinion.”

“Did he ever talk to you about Kaitlin or her group?”

Ashlee smiled sadly. “That’s a question and a half. Did your Kaitlin ever talk to you about this stuff?”

“We talked. But no, she never mentioned anything political.”

“That still puts you a step up from me. Adam has never confided in me about anything. Anything at all. Everything I know about my own son, I learned from observation. Excuse me, I think I need another coffee.”

What she needed, I imagined, was another smoke. She paused at the counter, asked the clerk for a double-double, then ducked into the restroom for a while. She came out looking calmer. I think the counterman smelled tobacco when she picked up her coffee. He gave her a hard look, then rolled his eyes.

She sat down again, sighing. “No, Adam never talked about his meetings. Adam is seventeen, but like I said, he’s not naive. He conducts his business pretty carefully. But, you know, I would overhear things once in a while. I knew he’d hooked up with one of the suburban Copperhead clubs, but for a while it seemed like that was almost a good thing. He was with people who had some, you know, background. Prospects. I guess in the back of my head was the idea that he would make friends and maybe that would lead to something, some opportunities, after all this time-travel shit blows over, excuse me. I thought he might meet a girl, or maybe somebody’s dad would offer him a job.”

I thought of Janice’s plaintive, What was I supposed to do? Lock her in the house?

Janice had clearly not imagined her daughter in the company of an Adam Mills.

“I changed my mind when I walked in on one of his phone calls. He was talking about those people — I guess including your Kait, I’m sorry to say. And he was just vicious, contemptuous. He said the group was full of—” She lowered her head, ashamed. “Full of ‘whitebread virgins.’”

She must have seen my reaction. Ashlee put her chin up, and her ma

“I respect that,” I said.

“I hope so.”

“They’re both missing. That’s what we have to worry about now.”

She frowned then, maybe reluctant to be included in the pronoun. Ashlee was accustomed to dealing with her own troubles in her own way; that was why she had bailed out of Regina Lee’s meeting.

But then, so had I.

She said, “I would be very frankly pissed if you were trying to pick me up, Mr. Warden.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Because I want to ask you for your phone number so we can keep in touch about Adam and Kaitlin. I don’t have any hard information, but my guess is that their whole little group is attempting some kind of half-assed pilgrimage, Christ only knows where. So they’re probably together. So we should keep in touch. I just don’t want to be misunderstood.”

I gave her my portable address. She gave me her home terminal.

She finished her coffee and said, “This is pretty much all bad news for you.”

“Not all,” I said.

She stood up. “Well, it was good meeting you.” She turned and walked through the door into the street. I watched her through the window as she strode a half block between islands of lamplight, to a doorway adjoining a Chinese restaurant, where she fumbled with a key. An apartment over a restaurant. I pictured a threadbare sofa, maybe a cat. A rose in a wine bottle or a framed poster on the wall. The echoing absence of her son.

Ramone Dudley, the police lieutenant in charge of local missing persons, agreed to see me in his office the following afternoon. The meeting was brief.

Dudley was an obviously overworked desk cop who had delivered the same bad news too many times. “These kids,” he said (clearly a homogenous mass, in Dudley’s mind: these kids), “they have no future, and they know it. The thing is, it’s true. The economy sucks, that’s no secret. And what else do we have to offer them? Everything they hear about the future is all Kuin, Kuin, Kuin. Fucking Kuin. According to the fun-dies, Kuin is the Antichrist; all you can do is say your prayers and wait for the Rapture. Washington is drafting kids for some war we may never fight. And the Copperheads are saying maybe Kuin won’t hurt us so bad if we bend over politely. That’s not a real bouquet of options, when you think about it. Plus all that shit they hear in the music or learn in those encrypted chatrooms.”

Plainly, Lieutenant Dudley blamed most of this on my generation. He must have met some inadequate parents in the course of his work. By the way he looked at me, he was pretty sure I was one of them.

I said, “About Kaitlin—”

He took a file from his desktop and read me the contents. There were no surprises. A total of eight youths, all involved in the junior arm of Whitman’s social club, had failed to return home from a meeting. Friends and parents of the missing children had been extensively interviewed — “With the exception of yourself, Mr. Warden, and I was expecting you to turn up.”

“Whit Delahunt told you about me,” I guessed.

“He mentioned you briefly when we interviewed him, but no, not exactly. The call I got was from a retired fed named Morris Torrance.”

Fast work. But then, Morris had always been diligent. “What did he tell you?”

“He asked me to give you as much cooperation as possible. This is it, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t have a whole lot more to tell you, unless you have some specific questions. Oh, and he asked me one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“He asked me to tell you to get in touch with him. He said he was sorry to hear about Kaitlin and he said he might be able to help you out.”

Thirteen

Maybe I should have taken advantage of Regina Lee’s communal therapy and admitted my fear for Kaitlin — fear, and the premonition of grief that drifted into consciousness whenever I closed my eyes. But that wasn’t my style. I had learned at an early age to fake calm in the face of disaster. To keep my anxiety to myself, like a dirty secret.

But I thought about Kait constantly. In my mind she was still the Kaitlin of Chumphon, five years old and as fearless as she was curious. Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; mat’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit. Because I had known Kaitlin as a child I had never lost sight of the vulnerable heart of her. Which made it all the more painful to imagine (or struggle not to imagine) where Kaitlin might be now, with whom. The most fundamental parental urge is the urge to nurture and protect. To grieve for a child is to admit ultimate impotence. You can’t protect what goes into the ground. You can’t tuck a blanket around a grave.