Gypsies

Alone with a naked light bulb and what seemed like a feast of bread and cheese and faintly alcoholic cider, they talked about the future.

“We have to get back where we can operate,” Laura said. “At least for a while.”

Michael had thought this over. “Soon,” he said. “But we’re all right here for now.”

“He’ll come after us,” Laura said.

“Probably.”

She looked around. “Well. At least it’s a friendly enough place.” She regarded Michael curiously. “Have you been here before?”

So Michael told them about the Commonwealth, the way he had dreamed it, the cities and the wilderness, the flying machines and the highways and the railroads. The kind of place it was—how he had dreamed it, and then dreamed it real, and then dreamed his way out of prison with it. He wanted to tell them what it meant to him, but there were no words for it; he could only enumerate its features and hope they understood.

Maybe they did. He saw the way Laura looked at him, her intensity, and wondered if she hadn’t dreamed of this place herself—faintly, distantly, a door she had never quite managed to open.

2

Karen sat back and listened to Michael talk, the roll of his voice now that the prison spells had been lifted. She wondered again whether he hadn’t grown a couple of inches. A trick of the light or perspective, but she could swear he was taller, and there was something in his voice, a firmness, that was new to her.

The shadow, at least, of adulthood. And she realized suddenly that Michael must have passed his sixteenth birthday back in the prison of the Novus Ordo.

It was a disturbing realization.

After a time Michael went and sat in the broad loft window, surveying the tableland that stretched away into the darkness—standing watch—while Laura and Karen talked in small whispers amidst the hay. Because they had come so far, Karen thought, it was possible to think things that were unthinkable—even to say them. She found herself telling Laura what she had been thinking, about Michael, her failure. “What hurts is that I couldn’t save him. All his life, I would look at him, I would think, I won’t do to him what Daddy did to us … I won’t let him lead that kind of life. But I was fooling myself.” The wheel, she thought. Maybe she had never beaten him but she was as harmful an influence as Daddy had ever been. We bend our children, she thought bleakly; and our children, bent, bend their children; and the wheel turns, and it grinds out broken lives.

“But,” Laura said, “you did save him.”

Karen shook her head.

“I mean it,” Laura said. “The only reason we got this far is because of Michael. His talent, the strength of it. But that’s not a fluke or a mystery. Maybe any of us could have been like him. But we have chains on us… we have all the inhibitions Willis beat into us. I think the only reason Michael’s different is that he isn’t carrying around all that pain. No one ever made him afraid. Maybe you never prepared him for this—well, Christ, who could?—but you never made him afraid of himself. And that’s why they couldn’t cage him.

“So it comes to something,” Laura persisted. “It does matter. You loved him, and that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s the only thing that matters. You loved him and you made him strong.”

Maybe, Karen thought. But…

But she was drifting off to sleep now, leaving behind the loft and the cool air and the silhouette of the barn’s old beam and pulley against a starry sky. She pulled this borrowed woolen blanket over her shoulders and let her thoughts meander.

I would like to believe that, she thought, what Laura said. It was a nice idea, the world as an upward-turning place, at least the possibility of improvement. But it was equally likely that there was some kind of natural law, a conservation of misery. Pain doesn’t disappear, only gets changed into some other kind of pain.

If she had saved Michael from fear maybe it was only by taking that fear onto herself. Certainly she was frightened now. And it was not just the obvious fear, but a whole coterie of fears: mother fears, the fact that her son was in danger: and other fears beyond that, including the final and unavoidable one, that Michael had gone beyond her in some important way, that he was lost to her, a grown man, a separate creature, the last ties of blood and affection sundered by all this violence. That there was nothing more she could do to help him.

Not to matter anymore—surely that would be the worst thing?

But they had found a moment of peace in this curious place, the America Michael had found, and she allowed herself to sleep at last, lulled by the wind sounds and the rustle of an owl that had nested in the rafters.

3

Michael woke in the morning with his cheek pressed into the straw and a faint sunlight prying through the barnboards, and for a moment the only thought he had was that he was here, in the world he had begun to imagine in the old row house in Polger Valley. A safe place. And that feeling of security was so fine that he wrapped it around himself like a blanket and almost fell back asleep.

And then he remembered.

He remembered Walker; he remembered the hard stone prison of the Novus Ordo.

And sat up thinking, How do we run? Where do we run to?

—the only questions left.

He did not doubt that they would be pursued, were already being pursued, that their period of grace might amount to days at most. “They’ll kill you,” Tim had said, and Michael firmly believed it.

But he didn’t want to leave any sooner than he had to. This was a tiny, rural segment of the world he had imagined back in Polger Valley, but it was real— tangible, vast and complex and indefinably familiar. It felt like home.

“Home” had become a pretty ragged word and Michael was reluctant to use it even in his private thoughts, but it was the word he kept circling back on. Home, a place to live, a place to make a future.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe sometime. Maybe even soon …

But he gathered up his Blue Jays cap and his spare shirt and hiked out to the highway with his mother and Laura behind him, a cool morning with frost coming off the casaba vines that lined this old stone wall, feeling nothing but the prospect of a warm day and a ride up to the market cities of the North—his mind empty but humming happily in the fresh sunlight— when suddenly a kind of sour electricity filled the air, and a man-sized space before him seemed to darken and then take shape, and it was the Gray Man, it was Walker, as inevitable as time and as real as the stones, standing there staring, his face looking somehow older and angrier now, his eyes wide and childlike as he reached out his big hands toward Michael.

Chapter Twenty-six

1

So he ran.

He took hold of his mother and his aunt and together they were gone, twisting down the secret corridors of the plenum as fast as he could take them.

2

White light and flickering darkness and this ceaseless motion…it was all Karen could do just to follow.

She felt Michael a step ahead of her and Laura a step behind, links in a chain, and the Gray Man in their wake, a dark presentiment, the shadow of a storm cloud.

She could not calculate the distance they traveled. There were no words for this kind of distance. The world—these worlds—had become a vapor, a mingled landscape too diffuse for the eye to comprehend. She felt disoriented, bodyless, lost in an indefinite betwee

She closed her eyes and held on as hard as she could.

But it was exhausting. It was not only Michael’s effort but her effort and Laura’s. Exhausting, especially, because this was a talent she had not exercised since childhood; without Michael she would not have been able to do it at all. She felt a fatigue that was more than physical, an exhaustion of possibilities—it tugged at her like an anchor.