Full Spectrum 3 Part 24

He pulled up his collar. A few people stared as he walked past, and he wondered if he was crying again. He felt warmth on his hand, and when he looked down he saw he was bleeding.

He turned off on a side street and was halfway down a claustrophobic alley when-blink-the darkness was back, solid and very close.

"Your money, motherf.u.c.ker," a voice growled.

The darkness that throbbed with the aura of murder smelled of stale cigarette smoke and damp wool.

Something moved in that pressured place. Odd. Cohen didn't think it could. A pain pierced his chest, drawing fire into his back.

His shoulder, his face, smacked against the cold sidewalk. Thick, heavy liquid gushed from his chest.

How stupid, he thought. How clumsy. He tried to get up and couldn't. My G.o.d. What's the matter with me? he wondered. Then he pictured Tunny's bland, marshmallow-pink face. Afraid you can't get it up, Cohen?

Yes, Cohen thought. My body won't work. I can't get up. And I am so afraid.

Close to his face he could see a pair of scuffed work boots, the laces on one broken and untied. He felt something jerk at his coat pocket. Across the alley was a dented garbage can, its load of green, plastic bags like scoops of unsavory ice cream in a cone.

His breath failed in his throat. He was too weak, too frightened, to take another.

Someone would come for him. They'd have to. What he'd touched in his MasterCard didn't have to be.

Hey, diddle, diddle, he thought desperately, forcing his mind to concentrate on something else besides his terror. If he held himself together long enough, someone would come and drag him back from the brink. There would be bright hospital lights and hot coffee. Cohen would be laughing with the doctor and saying how scared he had been.

Wouldn't he?

Cohen drank in precious, temporal visions: the light/shadow, light/ shadow play of the tan work boots walking away from him; the way a pink-tailed rat poised, head inquisitively c.o.c.ked, near a tattered plastic bag; how an oil-slicked puddle shone rainbow-colored in the dim glow from a bulb above a door.

The cat and the fiddle.

Something inside him came loose. The world slipped an inch.

Not yet. Oh, G.o.d, please. Not yet. The cow jumped over the moon. His eyes moved hungrily, memorizing all the parts of the world he could see in the moment he had left. And when he got there...

The glow from the bulb weakened. Going, going, gone. Black opened its doors, and he was sucked through.

Cupboard was bare...

It was dark. And the darkness did not move. An absurd phrase danced on the edge of his consciousness.

The dish ran away with the spoon.

The words sank into the depths without a ripple. He looked around, thinking that he must be blind, but knowing he was not.

He was dead.

So this is what death is, he thought. It wasn't much different from what he'd left behind. He knew now that the spot which had haunted him had not been an overlay. It was the very foundation of his existence.

He'd always meant to go fishing. He'd loved it as a child; but when he was grown he never got around to it. Work had been so large and important a matter that it eclipsed the timer that counted his moments. Before he'd realized it, the clock struck midnight and time had just quietly run out.

A pity. He should have gotten to know Lila better. He'd always meant to marry; he'd always wanted to have children. When young, he thought he needed a pony more than he'd needed breath; and when grown, and with an adult's more subtle desires, he'd wanted a big dog and a house in the country.

Now it all seemed equally important: Every dream, every kiss, every piece of candy he'd been denied. His longing for lost illusion shook the emptiness as a plucked violin string stirs the air. Across s.p.a.ce and time, he cast all his memories and his last coherent thought, ironically the same, selfish pulse of a murderer: I WANT.

His plea tore the thin fabric of the universe. In the abyss a single, faint star flicked on. The glow swelled to the size of a pinhead, the size of a fingernail, the size of a fist.

The light sped toward him in silence and with all the colors that ever were. It rushed joyously as though it knew him, and as if it believed it was coming home.

The light soaked up his knowledge of the Earth, the moon, the rings about Saturn; it drank in the nonsense of a nursery rhyme and the curl of a rat's pink tail.

I want, he thought fiercely.

And in his desire, it became. The light shot through him, the photons a million small bullets from a million small inevitable wars.

Cohen was destined to love b.u.t.ternut ice cream. At thirty-three years old, his eldest child would watch and cheer as he hooked a tarpon off Florida. In fourth grade he would skin his knee and be unable to ride his pony for a week.

Because of Cohen, dinosaurs would stalk the earth and a single, brilliant moment would kill them. In the desert, Georgia O'Keeffe would dream of flowers; and complex organic molecules would discover the heady possibility of life.

Had he eyes to close he would have closed them, for the conquering radiance hurt. Until the interval of cooling, darkness was chained in the deep.

And yet darkness held alternative promises. It always had. Creation was his for the asking; that was the lesson he'd had to die to learn. With calm astonishment he realized how wrong, how deluded, he had been. The prophetic black had not been the lights-out at the end of the play; merely an expectant dimming for act one.

Cohen breathed his life into the script of the nascent universe. It would be eons before he had learned his new walk-on part and Cohen the director permitted him to draw breath again.

Nothing in creation, even private creation, was hurried. But he could wait.

Tracking the Random Variable.

MARCOS DONNELLY.

T.

UESDAY EVENING, Ronald Barr sat wifeless on the sofa in his darkened living room, sipping a gla.s.s of scotch and warm water. While he waited, he sketched histograms on graph paper: x-axis, timeline; y-axis, number of minutes Jessica spent away from home on weekdays outside of working hours. Last Thursday, 425 minutes; last Tuesday, 260 minutes; Monday before last, 315 minutes...

He never asked where she went, couldn't bring himself to ask. She had stopped offering the excuses of evening faculty meetings at the elementary school and late conferences with parents from two-career homes.

Two-career homes. He and Jessica had been a two-career home just ten weeks ago. Now she had a career, he worked a job.

There had to be a pattern-control the variable, control the situation. He arranged the data as a pareto chart. Nothing. A scattergram correlating days of the week and the time she spent away. Nothing. A range graph, a deviation chart, a double bar-x control chart.

He sat tapping the pencil point against his wrist, then resorted to sketching a fishbone diagram for cause-effect a.n.a.lysis. He winced; low, very low for a statistician.

Ex-statistician.

* EFFECT: Wife spending excessive time away from home.

* DESIRED STATE: Wife's time away from home brought under control.

* MAJOR CONTRIBUTING FACTORS: Communication with wife Appreciation shown to wife Financial support of wife s.e.xual relations with wife Financial support. Not really significant. His current salary at her Uncle Luke's garage was only a thousand less than his second-year salary had been at Resotech. He had balanced the difference by taking over her coupons and organizing them for cost efficiency.

s.e.x. Well, maybe. He'd only made love to her twice in the past four weeks. Just twice? He dug through his memory but couldn't recall more than two times. It was, in fact, a variable he hadn't yet taken into account.

Jessica arrived home at 10:17 P.M.

"h.e.l.lo, Ronald." Her voice had the chill in it.

He hid his statistics under a stack of invoices from Luke's service station. Careful, he thought. Look casual.

"Hi, honey. You must be exhausted. About ready to hit the sack?"

She stared at him as she stepped out of her heels. She was quiet for a moment, and he was afraid she wouldn't speak to him. That would be bad -broken communication, too many variables to bring under control.

But she did speak. "I was out until half past ten. Don't you care where I was?"

Ronald breathed relief; there was still communication. She looked beautiful standing there in the foyer glaring at him, her straight red hair touching each shoulder of her white blouse, one strand tangled in the 33-inch gold chain he had given her on their 333-day wedding anniversary. He almost said so, that she looked beautiful, but a shiver of panic ran through him before he did. Too many variables.

"You were working, right?" he finally said. "You must want to go upstairs and kick back a little." Don't press her; that would cause tension. "Would you like a gla.s.s of wine?"

"Jesus, Ronald." She threw her purse on the sofa. He walked to her and kissed her neck gently, grimacing for a second from the sharp taste of fresh perfume.

He tried to fashion a boyish grin. "What do you say we go upstairs together?"

Their lovemaking was brief, and she was silent. When it was over, she rolled away with her back to him. Ronald was certain she would start getting home on time.

He should not have lost the position with Resotech Corp.

He could not have lost it.

Ronald Barr had been prepared the day the "Please report to Personnel" note came. The odds were in his favor. Of the 300 employees whom Resotech was laying off that afternoon for the statewide Reduction in Force, the top 205 had been from middle management. He was in the bottom third, the white-collar office workers who did real work for the company. Out of that group, he was part of the 44 percent who had completed a four-year college education. When he took into account that only 25 percent of Resotech employees with college degrees actually worked in the area of their undergraduate studies, and added to that certain emotional factors which couldn't be readily calculated-he and Jessica had just closed on their first home, were planning to start a family, those sorts of things that would add a sympathetic nuance to his otherwise purely logical argument-it left him as one of about ten and a half employees who had a good shot at talking Personnel into reconsidering their termination.

Good odds, even if he took the liberty to round the half-employee up to the nearest whole number.

He was valuable; he was the one who could see the hidden variables. He had shown statistically that removing car stereos from the sales reps' company cars would reduce speeding; tickets dropped 68 percent. He had demonstrated that the addition of hot cocoa and chicken soup to coffee vending machines would correlate significantly with employee honesty measures; petty theft of office supplies dropped 32 percent statewide.

He saw the variables; he could control any system. He should not have lost the position with Resotech Corp.

He could not have lost it.

It was the Sunday morning after the Tuesday night that s.e.x with Jessica hadn't worked. Thursday and Friday evenings, she had stayed out until 9:28 p.m. and 10:12 p.m., respectively.

She sat down across the kitchen table from Ronald, cupping her hands around the sides of her coffee mug. She was quiet for a while, and then asked, "Don't you care?"

Ronald kept sorting the Sunday-morning coupons. He set a 35-cent Charmin off to the left, and dug out the 35-cent Maxwell House from the unsorted pile. As he set it on top of the Charmin coupon, an article in the local section of the paper caught his eye: the Pittsfield district had just elected a third woman to its school board. The last time three women had been elected to the Pittsfield school board, he remembered, was January of 1982. The very next day, the Guinness world record for crawling had been broken in Newton Abbot, England. He would need to check tomorrow's paper.

"Honey," Jessica said. She reached across the table and set her hand on top of his. The tenderness in the touch felt like guilt. Good. Of course he cared. If she had any idea, if she was going to throw everything away- dammit, what right did she have to make him feel guilty for her actions?

Wrong approach. Control the situation, don't become a variable.

He could control anything.

"I'll get out of your uncle's garage," he said, establishing the communication. He fought the desire to pull his hand away. "I'll get a white-collar job. It's just a tight market now. I'll keep trying, if only you'd be a little patient."

She sat back in her chair and brushed a strand of loose red hair from her face. "I'm talking about us, Ronald. I didn't say anything about the color of your collar. Do you really think I'm upset with you about your career status?"

He added a Cheerios coupon to the 35-cent pile. The way she kept the coupons in such disarray irritated him: 60-cent toilet tissue mixed together with 15-cent drain cleaner and 50-cent cleansers. In the last week he had managed to arrange most of them by descending value of discount. Sometimes she seemed as haphazard as the third graders she taught. But she was trying to be kind, at least, pretending that his career setback didn't matter to her.

"Jessica, it's a tight market."

"You already said that."

"Well, it is! The odds against me finding work-"

"Odds!" She shoved herself away from the table and walked to the sink. Ronald knew what she would do: (A) dump the coffee; (B) thrust the cup in the dishwater; (C) put her right hand on the refrigerator, standing with her back to him; (D) remain silent for ten to fifteen seconds; (E) produce an exaggerated sigh; and (F) turn to face him.

Which she did. Steps A through F, in that order, in that way. If he could figure her out down to her d.a.m.ned sighing...

"When I do get you to say something, all you talk about anymore are the odds, the numbers, the variables." Her voice had become subdued and even. The chill was coming, and he knew it could last for days if he didn't respond at her level. "Please, Ronald, can't you just talk with me the way you used to?"

There was no way, no way he should be losing her.

He stood and took hold of her bathrobe sleeve. Without a word, he walked her through their living room and out the front door.

"The lawn," he announced.

"Which you said you were going to weed yesterday." Sarcasm; it was part of the chill.

"I was doing coupons." He reached under the forsythia bush to the right of the front steps and pulled a stone from below its drooping branches.

"A stone."

She crossed her arms.

"I'm going to throw this stone on that lawn. I want you to choose the one blade of gra.s.s that you think it will hit."

She turned her back to him, so he walked a semicircle around her to see her face.

"Come on," he said, "I'm trying to explain what I'm feeling. What blade of gra.s.s will it hit?"

She glanced sideways toward the lawn. "It'll probably hit a weed."

"Not probably! There is no such word as probably." He smiled and nodded; just maybe she was understanding. He tossed the rock in a high arc and chased it onto the lawn, almost slipping once on the cold dew. "This one!" he shouted to her. He pulled a blade of gra.s.s from under the stone and ran back to the porch. "This was the one, Jessica! And there was no probability about it. The bend in my wrist, the angle of the trajectory, gravity, the wind, everything working together made it so this was the blade the stone hit. There was no chance involved!"