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was time to fill the gas tank. But he allowed himself one moment more. This
fine intoxication.
He was beginning to ease back on the gas pedal when the Corvette
fishtailed coming around a slow curve.
He was on top of it instantly, manhandling the wheel, feeling the
sudden change from vehicular momentum to deadly inertia. There was a
long spin on the cool night pavement, tire treads fraying and screaming as
the rear end wheeled around and the car tottered, wanting to turn over. John
held onto the steering wheel, focused into this long moment . . . working
with the car s huge momentum, tugging it back from the brink, correcting
and correcting again as the tires etched long V s and Ws on the dark
pavement.
He had the Corvette under control within microseconds. A moment
later it was motionless on the shoulder of the road.
Sudden silence and the ticking of the hot engine. Wind in a dark
October marsh off to the right of him.
A shiver of relief ran up his spine.
He looked at his hand. It was shaking.
He opened the glove compartment, tugged out the Ziploc bag, rolled
an amphetamine cap into his mouth.
He dry-swallowed the pill and angled the car slowly back onto the
highway, carefully thinking now about nothing at all.
* * * *
Fundamentally, it was a question of past and future.
He took the first car ferry of the morning across Georgian Bay to the
northern shore of Lake Superior. The North Shore was a stark landscape of
pine and rock and the brittle blue Superior horizon. Gas station towns,
souvenir stands, Indian reservations; black bear and deer in the outback.
During the last world war, captive German military officers had been
assigned logging duty in this wilderness. There were places, John
understood, where their K-ration tins lay rusting under the pine needles and
the washboard lumber roads. In summer the highway would have been
crowded with tourists; but it was late in the year now and the campgrounds
were vacant and unsupervised. He drove all day through the cold,
transparent air; after nightfall he turned down a dirt track road to an empty
campsite near the lakeshore. He zipped up his insulated windbreaker and
stoked a kindling fire in one of the brick-lined barbecue pits; When he had
achieved a satisfactory blaze he added on windfall until the fire was roaring
and crackling. Then he settled back to rising sparks and stars and the lonely
sound of Lake Superior washing at the shore. The fire warmed his hands
and face; his back was cold. He heated a can of soup until the steam rose
up in the wintery air.
When the meal was finished, he sat in the car with the passenger
door opened toward the fire, thinking about the past and the future.
The past was simple. He contained it. He contained it in a way no
other human being could contain it, as a body of mnemonic experience he
could call up at will his life like an open book.
Excepting the chaos of his earliest infancy, there was not a day of his
life that John could not instantly evoke. He had divided his life into three
fundamental episodes his time with Dr. Kyriakides, his time with the
Woodwards, his time as an adult. Four, if you counted the recent
re-emergence of Benjamin as a new and distinct epoch. And each category
was a vast book of days, of autumns and winters and summers and
springs, each welling from its own past and arrowing toward its own future
with a logic that had always seemed incontrovertible.
Until now. For most of his life he had been running toward the future
as if it contained some sort of salvation. In the last few years, mysteriously,
that had changed. The future, he thought, was a promise that might not be
kept. Now he was running . . . not quite aimlessly, because he had a
destination in mind; not toward the past, precisely; but toward a place where
his life had taken a certain turn. A fork in the road. Maybe it would be
possible to retrace his steps, turn the other way; this time, maybe, toward a
genuine future, an authentic light.
He recognized the strong element of rationalization in this.
Self-deception was a vice he had never permitted himself. But there comes
a time when your back is to the wall. So you follow an instinct. You do what
you have to.
A sudden, bitter wind came off the lake. The fire was dying. He
banked the embers and then shut himself into the car, blinking at the
darkness and afraid to sleep. He looked longingly at the glove
compartment, picturing the bag of pills there. But he had to pace himself.
He felt the fatigue poisons running through his body. No choice now but to
sleep.
Anyway he would need the pills more, later.
He watched the stars until the windows clouded with the vapor of his
breath. Finally, with an almost violent suddenness, he slept.
* * * *
He drove west into the broad prairie land.
Coming through Manitoba he ran into a frontal system, rain and wet
snow that sidelined the Corvette in a little town called Atelier while the
Dominion Service Station and Garage replaced the original tires with fresh
snow-treads. John checked into a motel called The Traveller and picked up
some books at the local thrift shop.
Entertainment reading for the post-human: a science-fiction novel;
The Magic Mountain (the only Mann he d never looked into); a paperback
bestseller. Also a battered Penguin edition of Olaf Stapledon s Odd John
 the joke, of course, was on himself.
He had read the Stapledon many times before. It was a classic of
English eccentric writing of the thirties, the story of a mutant supergenius
born to ordinary humanity. During his adolescence John had adopted the
book as a kind of bible. The story was fuzzy-minded, uneven, sometimes
silly in its literal-mindedness; but he felt a resonance with Odd John s sense
of  spiritual contamination by mankind, his  passion of loneliness. The
John of the book sought out others of his kind! telepaths and
mutants and founded a Utopian colony which the Great Powers ultimately
destroyed. Two unlikely assumptions there, John thought: that there were [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]