Odd Apocalypse

“Give it to everyone?”

“They’re so compassionate.”

“Lady Gaga’s cool,” I said. “But a thousand years from now, I don’t want to have to listen to Lady Gaga’s seven hundredth album.”

“It wouldn’t be boring like that. Immortal, you could change careers again and again. Be a singer like Lady Gaga, and she can be a fry cook.”

I grimaced. “I can’t sing, and I have a hunch she can’t cook.”

He thumbed repeatedly, insistently through the pages of the book without looking at it, making a sound like shuffled cards. “Enhanced by alien technology, we’ll all be able to do everything perfectly.”

“Then why do anything at all?”

“What do you mean?”

“If there’s nothing to learn because we know it all, what’s the challenge, why would the effort matter, what would be the point?”

For a moment he continued riffling the pages of poetry, but then his hands grew still and the smile flatlined.

I waited for his reply, but he didn’t make one. After a while, he said, “I’m supposed to be on vacation. Eight weeks in Hawaii.”

Noah Wolflaw didn’t seem like a guy who would play Santa Claus to his employees, but I didn’t remark on the generosity of a two-month vacation.

Henry gazed now at the falcon as it circled lazily, patient in its quest for prey. Subtle but unmistakable, his look of desolation was so unsuited to his boyish face, I suspected that he was in some emotional distress and that, into my silence, he might say something revealing and useful to me.

“I spent two weeks in Hawaii and just couldn’t stand it anymore. Flew to San Francisco for a week, and that was no better.”

The peregrine glided silently, and I as well felt falconish, in my mind circling above the guard, waiting patiently for him to speak words that might be meat to me.

“It wasn’t those particular places,” Henry continued. “Wherever you go these days, it’s all wrong, isn’t it? I don’t know why, but it is.”

I didn’t believe that he wanted any comment from me. He seemed to be thinking out loud.

“People are so different from how they used to be. So fast. There’s an endless opening of possibilities.”

Fearing that he might wax as cryptic as Annamaria, I sought a little clarification: “You mean the Internet, technology, and all that?”

“Technology changes nothing. People were people before and after the steam engine, before and after the airplane. But … not quite now. Walls. That’s what it is. The problem is walls.”

I waited, but he said nothing more, and at last, with some exasperation of which I’m not proud, I said, “Walls. Yes. How true. We have to have walls, don’t we? Or maybe we don’t? You start with walls, and then you need a ceiling. And floors. And doors. It just never stops. Tents. That might be the answer.”

If he heard my words, he didn’t detect my sarcasm. “Five weeks of vacation left, but I just couldn’t stand being out there anymore. I hate the wall around Roseland, but the gate in it is a gate to nowhere.”

When after a while he didn’t continue, I prodded him by saying, “Well, as I see it, that gate is a gate to everywhere. The whole world’s beyond it.”

I figured he was ruminating on my sage comment, but he wasn’t. He flew off on what seemed to be another line of thought.

“‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.’”

Although I recognized those words, I didn’t at once know from what source he was quoting.

Before I could ask, Henry recited the famous lines of poetry about the falcon and the falconer, a metaphor for man and God, the former flying ever farther from the latter, the pagan cruelty of the human heart breaking loose from civilizing tradition.

“Yeats,” I said, naming the poet, and might have been pleased with myself if I had understood what the hell he was talking about.

“I hate it here, this Roseland without roses, but at least there’s a wall, and with a wall the center might still hold.”

He wasn’t hysterical, just enigmatic, but I really wanted to slap him until he made sense, the way the hero sometimes slaps the raving hysteric in the movies. But no matter how frustrated I may be, I never slap a man who is carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster under a blazer tailored to allow a quick draw.

Henry shifted his attention from the falcon to me. In his Huck Finn face, his eyes were as bleak as those of Hamlet.

His vulnerability could not have been more obvious. I sensed that the ease with which he opened himself to me was an indication that he was friendless, sought friendship, and could be cultivated to such an extent as to reveal secrets of Roseland that would help me understand why I was here and what I must do.

True friendship, however, is a sacred relationship even if it doesn’t involve formal vows. The friends I’ve made in Pico Mundo and everywhere I’ve gone since leaving home have kept me from despair, have nurtured hope. When I considered how I might cultivate Henry, I meant manipulate. There’s nothing wrong with manipulating bad men in pursuit of truth, but I didn’t think Henry Lolam was bad or deserved the contempt that manipulation represented. To pretend friendship here would be to devalue all the real friendships in my life.

While I hesitated, the moment of opportunity passed, and Henry said, “Guests in Roseland are rare.”

“The lady I’m traveling with seems to have … charmed Mr. Wolflaw.”

“She’s not his type. She’s not low or flashy, or cheap.”

By insulting his employer, Henry raised my hopes that he might treat me as a confidant without requiring that I fake friendship.

Silence seemed to serve me best, and after a moment, Henry said, “You’re not her lover.”

“No.”

“What are you to her?”

“A friend. She’s alone. She needs protection.”

He held my stare as if he meant for the intensity of his gaze to drive his next words deep: “He doesn’t want her. It may be the baby.”

“Mr. Wolflaw? What would he want with the baby?”

Having raised the issue, he retreated from exploring it. “Who can say? Maybe he needs … something new.”

I could tell that he didn’t mean anything as innocent as that the baby was a new experience, a novelty, so I said, “New? New what?”

“Sensation,” he said, looking away from me to the hunter gliding in the high blue day. “Thrills.”

Those two words evoked such an array of horrifying possibilities that I meant to press him for an explanation.

Before I could speak, he held up one hand to stop me. “I’ve said far too much and not enough. If you want to protect her, you should leave now. This is … an unhealthy place.”

I couldn’t tell him that my supernatural gift and Annamaria’s mission—whatever that might be—had brought us here. To reveal my sixth sense to anyone but a friend of long acquaintance might cause considerable trouble.

According to Annamaria, someone in Roseland was in great danger, perhaps the boy about whom the dead blonde worried. I didn’t feel the endangered person was Henry. I still had to find who needed my help.