Brainfire Read online

  “I don’t know. A rupture? Does that make sense? She was in bad, bad pain, I can tell you that. And I got this real lonely thing.”

  Rayner waited. Maybe the madness was a complete thing, a circle fully formed. Maybe you didn’t even know you were long gone until the circle had snapped shut all around you. A broken frame of wood. Imagine a window breaking, your brother—

  “A young woman? An old woman? What?”

  “Real old,” the girl said. “Real old.”

  Fox, who had been sitting on the arm of the sofa as if to protect his daughter from the obvious menace of Rayner, said, “I think that’s enough, Rayner. She’s tired. Can’t you see that?”

  Rayner ignored the man. He reached out and held the girl’s hand, stroking it lightly. She looked down with a kind of artificial coyness and he suddenly imagined her in the back of a car at some drive-in, her knees angled in the air, a pimply kid trying to stick it inside her.

  “This old woman,” Rayner said. “Where is she?”

  The girl took her hand away from Rayner as if to say, That’s enough intimacy for now. Check me out later, baby. Sweet little thing, Rayner thought. You could blow your old man’s fuses if he really understood you.

  “I don’t know where she is. I get the feeling of a lot of trees. Hills. Cold. I can’t say where she is exactly. But I know she’s pretty damn miserable wherever she is and there’s some people trying to get her to do things. She doesn’t want to do them. Oh, yeah. She had something about a Chinese soldier. And a young American. But I didn’t really catch that too clear. See, she was fading me out, like I told you. She didn’t want me to keep coming in.”

  A Chinese soldier, Rayner thought. A young American.

  “What did she say about the soldier?”

  “I didn’t get that bit—”

  “The American?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rayner realized he was extraordinarily tired now, that he had come to the dark bottom line of fatigue. A Chinese soldier, a young America, an old woman: if you could put that lot together in a way that made sense, they would have to certify you incurable. Killing. What killing?

  “Another thing,” the girl said, as if she perceived she was losing Rayner’s interest. “She was foreign. She wasn’t American.”

  “Foreign?”

  “Yeah—”

  “Like how?”

  “I don’t know. European. I can’t really say.”

  “Europe’s a big place,” Rayner said. “Where in Europe?”

  The girl closed her eyes for a time, trying to think; then she opened them, smiling slightly at Rayner. “I don’t know where in Europe. But there was somebody who had a needle. I got that. Somebody else with a needle. I don’t know what it means. I mean, she’s real old and pretty damn sick, so maybe it was a doctor’s needle, you know? It made her dream, so I guess that was it. And something about a barn, a lot of stuff that didn’t really mean anything. I don’t know what else.”

  Rayner stood up. There was an expression of disappointment on the kid’s face. She didn’t want to lose him now; she didn’t want to give up the brief, curious flirtation she had going. “Her power, though. That’s what I got. With that kind of power, well …”

  “With that kind of power—what do you mean?”

  “Somebody’s making her use it,” the girl said.

  “Use it how?”

  “For killing people.”

  “Killing people?”

  “Blowing them away.”

  “You’re making this up—”

  “I swear. I wouldn’t put you on.”

  “How can she kill people?”

  “She can make them die because of this power—”

  Power, Rayner thought. Force. Okay—it was one thing to admit that some kind of communication, call it telepathic, could exist; but this was a whole new game. Killing people.

  “How does she do it?” he asked.

  “Look, when you’re strong as she is, you can do anything you like with somebody’s head. Because nothing, nothing is gonna stand in your way.”

  “She forces them—”

  “It’s more than that,” Fiona said. She folded her hands in her lap, looking down at them. “She wrecks their heads.”

  “I don’t follow—”

  “She can make them do anything just by thinking it. Don’t you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “I understand.” Rayner glanced at Fox, as if from that source there might be confirmation of this claim. But Fox, caught up in his daughter’s world, made no gesture, said nothing. “I understand,” Rayner said again. “It’s just hard to believe.”

  The girl looked at him, sulking now. “Believe what you want. I’m only telling you what I got.”

  She got up from the sofa and picked up her flute from the table and blew a couple of random notes. It’s like nothing ever happened, Rayner thought. Change worlds as easily as changing shoes. Skip from one side of the barrier to the other at will. How could you live with that kind of insight? How could you ever possibly consider it a gift, a talent? He looked at Isobel, who was watching him in a cold way, distantly, her face without expression.

  He listened to the discordant sounds of the flute and he was reminded of the cries of birds in pain. She stopped playing after a moment, and tilting her head to one side, looking across the room at him, she said, “I get the feeling she’s going to kill again.”

  Rayner watched her. She tapped her flute against the side of her leg; a single drop of saliva fell against her jeans, glistening.

  “Kill who?”

  The girl shrugged. Rayner was cold again, feeling the draft that came in through the open kitchen door. He shivered.

  “Kill who?” he asked again.

  “If I knew I’d tell you, wouldn’t I?”

  She blew on the flute once more. He recognized the opening phrase of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”; incongruities, he thought. A mad mixture of the darkness and the light. An old woman who can kill with her mind, a few notes of an irrepressibly happy tune. The fine line dividing things, the normal from the abnormal—where had that line gone?

  He watched as she put the instrument on the table, where it rolled a few inches before stopping.

  Fox, rising from the sofa, said, “You should get some sleep, child.”

  “I was thinking that. Funny coincidence.”

  Fiona smiled at Rayner, went to the door, then turned on her way out. The smile was still there, as if she had known all along that there was something to be saved for the very last, for the final curtain; as if, with the instinct of an actress, she knew how to make her exit. “I got the hills and the sense of green and cold,” she said. “And the feeling it was a place like Pennsylvania. That was the strong impression I got.”

  She paused.

  Rayner stared at her.

  “I can’t figure you out,” she said. “You don’t want to believe any of this stuff, do you? You just wish it would all disappear. Like go up in a puff of smoke.”

  He said nothing. He watched her as she closed the door. And then he felt Isobel come up alongside him, touching his arm, drawing him toward the kitchen. Pennsylvania, Rayner thought. He looked at Isobel, who was still wearing his jacket. In the kitchen she said, “You really fucked it up as far as your safe house goes. What are you, John? Self-destructive?”

  Me and Richard both, he might have said. He might have come out with a morbid joke like that, but he let it go. He was thinking of the dark outside now. He was thinking of the sports pages of the newspapers. There were equations but only if you could accept the symbols on either side of the plus sign. Have I come this far? he wondered. Am I ready to accept them?

  “We’re not exactly welcome here as of now,” Isobel said. “What do you propose? A night on the old beach?”

  He said nothing. Links in a chain, cogs that turned wheels. It could all flash suddenly through your head but you had to grasp it before it finally evaporated. The sports pages of a n
ewspaper, a newspaper he had left behind somewhere. Think think think. The soccer team. The goddam soccer team.

  “I remember a time when I had this garden growing,” Isobel said. “I was looking forward to the harvest.”

  She sighed, putting her hands inside the pockets of his jacket.

  6.

  It was just after dawn when the bus rolled up in front of the Lehigh Lodge—a gray morning light, everything green touched with frost. Oblinski ushered the sleepy players onto the bus. Their breath hung on the chill air; they grumbled about having to get up so early to go to the airport. Charek made his head count, ticking off the names on a sheet of paper clipped to a board. Then the old woman was wheeled out of the lodge, her body wrapped in blankets, her face white, her lips purple from the cold. Katya and Oblinski, moving her gently, moving her as though now she was fragile and precious, lifted her from the wheelchair and carried her onto the bus.

  Koprow was the last to board. He took one last look at the lodge, pulled on his fur gloves, adjusted his astrakhan hat, and closed the door of the vehicle.

  4

  1.

  It was a motel of sorts set well away from the sea; cheaper streets, meaner houses, where the resort yielded to residences, the transient to the permanent. It would be safe, Rayner thought, for a time. He checked in with Isobel, using a fictitious name—Fox, curiously enough, the first that had popped into his mind: Mr. and Mrs. Fox. The motel clerk gave them a key to Room 20. Here, Rayner thought, was enough sleaze to last one a lifetime. Ants busily went back and forth across the chipped porcelain sink, some of them sticking to a wet bar of soap, struggling and dying; cockroaches, brazen enough not to flee, clung to the walls. A palace, Rayner thought, as he dropped face down on the bed and shut his eyes. Isobel sat in an armchair and watched him.

  How can I even think of sleep? Rayner wondered.

  He turned over and looked at her. “Okay,” he said. “You tell me. What did we run into back there? A young kid’s presexual fantasies or what?”

  “She’s the real thing,” Isobel said. “She’s been through all the tests they were smart enough to devise and she came out with her colors flying. No fantasies, John.”

  Rayner sat up. Sleep, he thought. My kingdom for. He rubbed his eyes and realized that what he had been doing was to avoid the recent experience, relegate it into some darker area where even the mysteries had deeper puzzles within them. But there wasn’t time, there just wasn’t time; even the concept of a few hours of sleep was some extravagant luxury. There were the pieces of the picture to assemble, and ridiculous as they might have seemed, he saw too many correspondences to reject the ideas that, like hornets, kept swarming back to him. Pennsylvania—but where could he find a newspaper from the day before? Where could he check his memory against the facts? That damn soccer team—

  He got up from the bed, went to the door, opened it.

  It was silent out there; a sense, through all the disintegrating dark, the flying moon, of dawn coming up in tiny bars of light.

  “Stepping out?” she asked.

  He turned to look at her. “I need a trash can,” he said.

  “I should have thought of that,” she answered. She closed her eyes and sighed with feigned impatience. “I mean, what the hell else could you possibly need at this time of day?”

  He went out, crossing the parking lot to where, against a crumbling wall, a bunch of trash cans stood. A young American, a Chinese soldier, an old woman with some force—and now this, scavenging through the detritus of a scuzzy motel for a copy of an old newspaper. The things people threw away. Used sanitary napkins, crumpled tissues, dilapidated sneakers—you could expect such things; you could expect all the fast-food trash as well, the soggy Big Macs, the lumpy leftovers of Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips, the bones of what had once been poultry covered over with the Colonel’s secret recipe. But how could you expect to find a set of discarded Polaroid snapshots of a pretty girl, each ripped meticulously in half, each snapped in provocative pose—a lovers’ tiff in the motel bedroom? Odd what people cast off. He moved from can to can, picking out pages of a newspaper here, there, some of them greasy and dripping, some of them crumpled, others thrown away unread. He assembled a collection and took it back into the room and dumped the pages on the floor.

  “Sports pages,” he said. “Help me find the sports pages.”

  “Can I guess? You made a wager on a horse and you want to find out?” She got down on her knees on the tatty rug and placed her hand across the backs of his fingers. “John. It’s late. It’s been a shitty day, if you like understatement. I’m tired. Can’t it wait?”

  “Just the sports pages, nothing else.”

  She sighed again and began to sift, stopping every so often to make a noise of disgust when she encountered something unspeakable attached to the newsprint. Inside a folded-up copy of The Charlotte Observer she found a pair of used surgical stockings, shredded, filled with holes.

  “John, for God’s sake—”

  “Just look for that piece you saw yesterday. The Soviet soccer thing, that’s all.” He was folding and unfolding sheets madly, knowing how it must appear to her, how it would appear to anybody who might step inside the room. “I need to see it, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to see it, then maybe I can explain—”

  “I hope it’s one of your better explanations,” she said.

  He found all kinds of newspapers that had been transported across state lines—even, oddly, a copy of The Toronto Star which had a January dateline. Then, when he had sifted almost to the bottom, Isobel pushed a crumpled sheet toward him.

  “I think that’s what you’re looking for.”

  He smoothed the sheet and stared at it. It wasn’t the same report as he had read before. This one was printed in The Roanoke Times and had come through a wire service. Its headline read: “Will America Be Good Enough?” It was a snide piece of syndicated journalism concerning the Soviet team’s dedication, but all that interested Rayner was the fact that the item had been datelined Lehighton, Pa. He sat back, the sheet of paper wilting in his hand, and he stared at Isobel.

  “Pennsylvania,” he said. “That’s what the kid said.”

  “What are you getting at, John?”

  He stood up and, still holding the paper, walked around the room. By the window he stopped. It was fully dawn now, the sky a congregation of thick lines of light. Pennsylvania, he thought. Okay, that one adds up. That’s another piece of the problem. What’s the next step?

  “John. What is it?”

  He didn’t answer her. He looked at the column again, reading and rereading the last paragraph:

  Trainer Charek thinks that his team will beat the American National side Saturday in D.C. Stadium. He says this with great confidence, even if he says it through an interpreter. We hope he’s wrong, of course—especially if, as expected, the crowd will include Patrick J. Mallory.

  Saturday.

  D.C. Stadium.

  Patrick J. Mallory.

  Saturday. The day that had just lit the sky: today.

  “Do you believe what the kid said?” he asked.

  “I told you—”

  “Think again. It’s important. Do you believe in her?”

  “You’re hurting my wrist, John—”

  “Do you believe in this story of some old woman with this—whatever you call it—power, force? Do you believe in that?”

  Isobel took her hand away from him. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but I don’t exactly like it, John.”

  “Answer my question—”

  “Okay. If it’s so goddam important to you, sure, sure, I believe Fiona wasn’t making it up. There. Satisfy you?”

  He watched her face. How could you ever know? he thought. They could get carried away; all this psychic stuff was easily digestible, opening up promising vistas that led all the way from mind reading, from telepathy, to possibilities of a nifty afterlife where you sat arou
nd in a wonderful spiritual glaze, where—if you wanted to party—you just hopped from cloud to cloud. No, Rayner, come on. You saw it. What if it’s true? D.C. Stadium, Saturday, Patrick J. Mallory. There’s going to be more killing. Hadn’t the kid said something like that? More killing?

  Turn it around.

  Andreyev defects because of this old woman. This—how do you phrase it?—witch. He wants to blow it. Nobody much cares for the notion and so he receives the treatment. Leaving yourself and Dubbs with the knowledge of his identity. Leaving, alas, yourself.

  Andreyev—he doesn’t want anything to do with it.

  It?

  No, come on, surely not, surely not something so beyond the realm of the likely. But all that’s as thin as a wafer now. That realm has cracks in it.

  Andreyev doesn’t want any part of it, because it—it is a plot to kill the President of the United States, using a means that is undetectable, improbable, insubstantial. No weapons, therefore no proof. She could take somebody’s head and wreck it. Maybe the way Richard—

  He turned to see that Isobel, sprawled across the bed now, had fallen asleep. He went and lay down beside her. My own brother. He wasn’t Richard, John. He wasn’t anybody we knew. Was that it? Was that the same force that had driven Richard Rayner into the final absurd act of his short life?

  And Gull, fucking Gull, must have known all along. The death of Richard: I’m so sorry, John. The killing of Andreyev. The man’s identity. And poor little Ernest Dubbs. George Gull must know, he thought, a whole lot of things.

  And me, he thought, I’m mad and manic-depressive and probably melancholic into the bargain. I am making it all up. I am piling fictions on fictions, improbabilities on improbabilities; I am going, like they say, off the deep end. Chip. I have to tell you, there’s this plot to kill the President. I know it sounds fantastic, but it’s true, and it’s going to be done by this old woman, a great plot, no guns, no physical contact—just the Old Man’s death: a whammy. Isn’t that the greatest you’ve ever heard? And what with Gull being a Soviet agent and everything—

  He closed his eyes. Rest. Think. Run it through again. But don’t sleep.