Memory Wire

He understood it was something he enjoyed, the rush of it, something he had missed all this time. An old and profound pleasure. But it was not a thought worth dwelling on.

Loose ca

The boy was wide-eyed and pale.

“Tell me where you got them,” Oberg said.

The boy said, faintly, “Fuck you!”

Oberg let the blade draw out a line of blood. The blood was bright and oily in the stark light. He felt the boy twisting against his restraint. “Tell me,” he said.

It took time, but in the end he extracted four names and four approximate canal addresses. It would be useful, an approach to the woman, especially if Tate failed to produce any useful information. The boy relaxed, sensing that Oberg had what he wanted: the ordeal was over.

And it was. But not the way the boy expected. Oberg drew the knife deeply across the boy’s throat and in a single motion levered the body over the railing and down into the waste canal. There was a momentary thrashing, a choking sound, silence immediately after.

It felt good. It was deeply gratifying.

He used a handkerchief to clean the blade of the knife, and threw the handkerchief after the body.

The knife he took home.

The past is dead and gone, he thought. That was the way it should be.

He had trouble sleeping sometimes. Tonight, for instance. In part it was the adrenaline that had rivered through him at the death of the boy. In part, a more obscure stimulation.

In his worst dreams he was back in Brazil, back in the war, ru

In Virginia he had touched Tavitch when Tavitch was touching the stone; and Tavitch had looked into his eyes and had seen these same dreams. But they were not dreams. That was the terrifying thing. Somehow, through Tavitch, through the Pau Seco stone, it had actually happened. The dead had risen stubbornly; the dead had pronounced his name.

He lay in the darkness and was haunted by the memory. It was u

With this new thought he achieved ease and finally a sleep as calm as that vast and silent ocean; he did not dream; he woke strengthened in his resolve.

In the morning he made a second call to Tate.

“Keller is an Angel,” Tate said. “He’s working for an independent producer name of Vasquez. He’s in L.A. now, probably downloading at the Network compounds.” He regarded Oberg guiltily. “I assume this is what you wanted.”

“Yes,” Oberg said.

“You’re crazy, Steve, you know that? You’re fucking nuts.”

It might be true. It didn’t matter. The monitor blanked, and Oberg stared a long moment at his own reflection in it.

CHAPTER 21

1. Byron knew he was losing her. The knowledge was unavoidable.

He didn’t talk about the pills. They didn’t talk much at all. Talk was superfluous; worse, it might have required lies. He was watching when she tossed her pill bottle into a waste canal, and the act kindled a flare of hope in him. Later he found the pills themselves hoarded in a corner of her dresser; it was only the bottle she had discarded. It was a gesture he had been meant to see.

He understood that this was the old Teresa, the Teresa he had found on his doorstep years ago, dying and frightened of dying and wanting to die. The part of her that needed to survive had been silenced—silenced, he guessed, that day in the hotel room off the Ver-o-Peso—and he was helpless to call it back. He could not touch her that way, because she did not love him.

He was not accustomed to thinking about these things so bluntly, but the facts were as obvious as they were painful.

He ate di

Alone with her pills, he thought. Alone to watch the Floats light up, alone to watch the waves roll in. She closed $ the door behind her, and he was left by himself in the float. A shack with the ticking of the bilge pump and the moan of the floorboards moving in the swell.

He thought of Keller.

Keller on the mainland. Keller drifting back into his | Network career, surrendering to the momentum of it.

Keller, whom she loved.

Keller, who might have helped her.

The thought was galling, but he could not resist it.

He used to feel sorry for Keller. Keller was the thing Byron might have been; victim of, Christ, a catalogue of things: his childhood, the army, his own cowardice. Forgivable sins, Teresa said one time. But now Keller had walked out, and that was inexcusable.

And here was the irony. Teresa was hurting… and the only thing I can do for her, Byron thought bitterly, is to call up Keller and beg him to come back. Beg him to take her away from me. It was galling. But he thought about the Angel tattoo on his arm and what it meant, and he was on the verge of doing it—getting a message to Keller through Keller’s Network producer, Vasquez—when there was a knock at the door.

He opened it cautiously.

Cruz Wexler stood outside. In the dusk he might have been a thousand years old. He labored at the salt air as if he could not draw nourishment from it. “I want to talk to her,” he said.

2. Teresa found him waiting when she came in from the boardwalk. Her reaction was an instinctive and immediate happiness: he was a link to a better time in her life.

She hugged him and sat down across from him, and only then realized how much these past weeks had aged him. He had been fading for years up in Carmel, of course, gone from celebrity to local eccentric, and she understood that the part of him that was showman and con-artist— maybe a large part of him—had resented this decline. But she had always believed he was sincere about the oneiroliths, sincere in the conviction that they belonged to the world, not just a coterie of government scientists. He was always talking about what he called the gnosis, the Mystery, a kind of conquering wisdom: his optimism had been as vast as it was naive. These last days must have shocked him.

They talked into the night. She had taken a pill while she was out walking, but only one, and the effect was a mild buoyancy which disguised her fatigue. (But she wouldn’t think about that.) Byron excused himself and took his bedroll into the back room. Then Wexler asked her about Brazil, and she found herself telling him about it—the story spilling out of her. She told him about Ray. Maybe because of the pill, she was able to say things that surprised her. She talked about the new oneirolith, its potency, the terrible memories it had provoked in her and in Ray. The wedge of knowing it had driven between them. She expressed her pain and surprise, was astonished when a tear trailed down her cheek: strange. She wasn’t sad. She felt all right.

Wexler nodded thoughtfully. His beard had grown out into gray stubble and his breathing was noisy and forceful, as if breathing were not automatic but a task he had to consider and perform. His eyes were full of gentle concern.