Gypsies

Later he thought, How do you build a cage for an animal you’ve never seen?

It was an interesting question.

Well, you build according to what you know. Michael’s grandparents—his natural grandparents—had once escaped a place like this. Tim had said so and there was no reason to disbelieve him, at least about this. So this room must be a bigger, stronger cage; they must have fortified their spells and their magic. But, still, wasn’t that like building a wolf trap when you set out to trap a tiger? He thought, Hey, they don’t know me.

But it begged the question: How strong am I really?

He was new to his talent. It was not something he had much practiced. He felt the imprisoning magics around him like physical bonds, and he experimented, one night, fighting against them, exerting a counter-force.

But it was fruitless. Nothing yielded. He was alone and empty and all the countless doors of time and possibility had been brutally slammed shut.

So maybe he wasn’t such a tiger after all.

He put all this out of his mind for a time. He slept, and when he woke he tried not to think about anything at all.

It was easy enough. The confining spells made it easy.

But then another thought drifted into his mind, not a thought so much as a daydream: it was the world he had envisioned at the Fauves’ house in Polger Valley, and often since then.

Thinking about it made him feel better. It was a place, Michael felt certain, without prisons like this one.

He allowed himself to dream about it.

He drifted on the edge of sleep. It was a place and a daydream both. It was everything he felt when Laura talked longingly about “a better world.” Maybe it was the kind of place she had been looking for when she found Turquoise Beach, a world she had reached for but could not grasp. And Michael discovered that he knew things about this world. He knew about the highways stretching from the watery French villes of the South up to the big northern cities of Tecumseh and New Amsterdam and Montreal. He knew about the rail lines ru

But he knew this world best by its landscapes: geographies teased out of the air, as faint and unmistakable as the smell of rain. Salt marshes still in calm, empty southern noons; icy northern midnights bathed in radiant aurora glow. He had occupied these places in his dreams, walked these streets in his sleep. There was an affinity—an attraction. He thought, A homing instinct.

He knew all this as effortlessly as he knew his own name. He knew, moreover, that he could make himself a life in this place… that it was a place you could live without the quotidian threat of nuclear a

A place where the Novus Ordo couldn’t reach him.

A place where he would not be a freak.

And oddly it was this daydream—and not any struggling against his bonds—that made him feel suddenly freer, that opened his horizons for a tantalizing moment. He blinked and thought, This is what makes me different: this is what they didn’t expect.

But then the walls and the ceilings closed around him and he was back in this room, which was only a room, and which contained him.

He stood up when he heard Tim talking about him. “You’re wrong,” he said. “I am different.” And he understood by the expression on Tim’s face that he had said something important.

Tim recovered fast. He drew back and stood up straight and made his face a bland mask of endurance. “I didn’t mean to insult you, Michael. Sure, you’re important. But so is Laura and so is your mother. And so am I.”

Michael moved back toward Laura. Instinctively, he reached for her hand. She looked at him quizzically. But they touched and there was a flash—brief but significant—of real power.

Now, Michael thought. Now, while they’re unprepared, or never.

“We’re leaving,” he said.

It was not an argument, just a flat declaration of fact, but he surprised himself by saying it. Laura’s eyes widened and then she looked at him and made a tiny nod.

He reached for his mother’s hand. Tim said, “I don’t think that’s realistic. I don’t think you’ve considered your position here.” Michael said, “But I have.” There was a kind of circuit going now, the three of them touching. He felt Laura’s wounded vanity, his mother’s passivity and resignation. And under that— buried but potent—these small, faint surges of power. Gather that, he thought. Put it together. A better world. Those forests and those cities. It was only a step away.

And Tim, sensing something now, said, “Hey—oh, Christ, wait a minute—”

No more waiting, Michael thought. The room filled with a curious odor, hot motor oil and charred metal, like some huge machine gone into terminal overload. Far away, Michael thought he heard a savage and barely human howl of pain.

And the prison magic loosened a little around him.

Tim said, “God damn you, stop it!” Karen reached out toward Tim with her free hand. She understood now what was happening; it was obvious. Tim backed off a step. Karen said, “Come with us.” Adding, “It’s going to be dangerous for you here.”

But we don’t have time for this, Michael thought.

He wasn’t sure he could sustain the critical effort. An alarm bell was clattering in the corridor; he saw shadowy figures beyond the doorway.

Tim shook his head. “No!”

“They might kill you. They could do that.”

Tim said defiantly, “Listen, they’ll kill you! They won’t let this happen! They’ll send him after you and this time they’ll let him fucking have you!”

The Gray Man, Michael thought.

“Timmy,” Karen said, “it’s not a game. You should have learned that a long time ago.”

But Tim only shook his head, and Michael thought, He looks like Willis … it was odd, but you would swear they were blood relations. That anger. That fear …

Karen shook her head no.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

And Michael thought, Now! But hesitated in spite of himself and felt the moment slipping away, a sudden recoiling.

I can’t do this!

It was the voice of the frightened ten-year-old and Michael was paralyzed by it.

I can’t do this! They’re too strong for me! I want somebody to come get me—I want to go home—

But there was no home. He knew that now. Only his mother in this cell, his father living in bliss and ignorance by the side of a very distant lake. And Tim, of course, had lied; the Novus Ordo was nothing like a home.

The clangor of alarms. Feet in the hallway.

Laura’s hand tensed against Michael’s.

And he had then what he identified—a moment of lucidity among this shrilling noise—as a genuinely adult thought: that home is not a place after all but a thing you make, a territory you stake out. It was an act of will: a thing you did.

Karen sensed his hesitation, shot him a fearful look.