Ahead of him, Brettigan saw the red-haired and freckled young man who’d been sitting across from him on the light rail, making odd zigzag motions as he sauntered forward, first toward another shuttered store, Shirtz-and-Shooz!, then toward the courtyard, where he seemed to be inspecting the floor while beside him his girlfriend opened up her flip phone before tapping out more text messages. She had a determined, unhesitating stride. Her hair was done up and covered with a red scarf, and periodically she would look over at the young man as if seeking cues from him, and as she did, her eyes narrowed, giving Brettigan the impression that the two of them were engaged in some sort of clandestine activity, though perhaps what he was witnessing was just love, clandestine in its own way. They had all the raggedy charisma of youth and its attendant health. They seemed to be up to something, but Brettigan couldn’t tell what their mission was. The boy still clutched his stack of pamphlets tightly, and the Thundering Herd moved on past them, turning another corner in front of Hare Today, a sports outlet for runners, and My Back Pages, a bookstore. The food court lay ahead of them at the end of their first circular lap. At its center was a coffee shop, Caf Fiend.
Beside Brettigan, Elijah, the pediatrician, huffed and puffed. Brettigan could see tiny beads of sweat on the old man’s brow. “How’s Alma?” the pediatrician asked. “And any sign lately of your son?”
“Tim? Sometimes I think I see him everywhere, in every street person. His friend Rusk told me that he’s around. He’s not missing, exactly. More like misplaced. Alma’s okay. How’s Susan?”
“Sometimes,” Elijah said. “Sometimes I don’t have an opinion. Forty years we’ve been married. Can you imagine? I can, because I lived it. Our history says that we’re married, you know what I mean? And sometimes we’re not? We have a connection, fine, we have it, and then it’s gone, dissolved, and we’re strangers. No ties holding us together at all, bingo, we’re staring at each other—who is that? What is she doing, having breakfast, and talking to me and making no sense? She gets strange, like from Mars. Well, I get strange, too. Of course, I love her, and everything.”
“Right.”
The pediatrician looked up. “This place is like a cathedral.”
“It is?”
“Sure. Look at how high it goes. It’s awe-inspiring. The gods live here.”
“They do?”
“I’m pretty sure—” His thought was broken off by what sounded like an explosion at the other side of the mall.
“Terrorists!” the drug dealer announced excitedly, pointing in no particular direction. “Let’s go see the mayhem. Come on.” He picked up his own pace and seemed to be herding the group toward the source of the noise. “They probably have their assault rifles out right now.” He thought for a moment. “We’ll stop them. We’ll be heroes. We’re old and have got nothing to lose. This is our time. Let’s roll.”
When they rounded the next corner, past a Minnesota-themed restaurant, Cry of the Loon, they saw that some workmen up on a scaffolding had inadvertently dropped a piece of equipment whose crash landing on the floor had been the source of the noise. The equipment resembled a mechanical squid that was now in its death throes ejecting bile or ink. While several other workmen rushed toward the scene with maintenance equipment—mops, pails, and another machine with a long tube apparently designed to suck up anything in its path—the Thundering Herd stopped and gazed at the mess that was almost instantaneously being cleaned up and obliterated by this group of men, all of them speaking excited Spanish.
“They should do this at night,” the mechanic said. “This is for the janitorial staff. They don’t do this kind of work in the daytime. Somebody could’ve been hurt, with that falling gizmo.”
“I guess it’s emergency maintenance,” the drug dealer said, sounding disappointed.
“Look.” Brettigan gestured toward a shaded corner where several sheets of thick paper had been deposited. At that moment he realized that the boy and his girlfriend, the ones he had seen on the light rail, had been walking around the mall unobtrusively dropping these pieces of paper here and there in the corners. Nobody in his group of friends seemed particularly interested in Brettigan’s discovery. Ignoring him, they had set off again. He went over to pick up one of the sheets, and even from a few feet away, he could see that the top of each one contained a headline printed in bold lettering.
A Survival Manifesto!!!
Well, those two were just unripe kids, entering the age of death metal, all-night sex, and three-exclamation-point manifestos. They would get over it. They would calm down. Everyone did, eventually. And the mall’s silent and mostly invisible security staff would pick up their pamphlets soon and if possible escort the kids to a holding jail in the mall’s sub-basement where they would fester and age. Brettigan folded the sheet of paper. He then forced it down into his pocket next to the business card he had acquired from the doctor and set off to catch up with the Thundering Herd.
- 3 -
The telephone was ringing when Brettigan returned through the back door. He let it peal away while he wiped his shoes on the unwelcome mat, a novelty item he had once acquired with the words GO AWAY in raised rubber lettering on it. Alma had not bothered to answer the phone either—that is, if she happened to be home. He wondered where his wife was. She hadn’t told him whether she’d be running errands, so he called her name, but the house answered with a returning moment of silence before he was greeted at the entryway by the dog and the cat, Woland and Behemoth. Reaching down, he scratched the dog behind the ears and patted the cat on the head. The dog closed his eyes with pleasure, and the cat answered his gesture by raising her tail, giving him a quick meow. As if he’d just heard something at the front of the house, the dog trotted off, trailed by the cat.
They were inseparable, those two, and presented a queasy-making cornball spectacle. After his daughter had grown up and left the house, and after their son, Timothy, had found some temporary gainful employment as an actor, Brettigan and his wife needed help filling the hours. After considering the matter, they found at the Humane Society a nondescript mongrel puppy and an equally nondescript mongrel kitten, both from the slums. They were the offspring of shiftless vagrant animals. These two pets would be employed to keep Brettigan and his wife company, provide them with caretaking responsibilities, and populate the empty nest with themselves. After seeing to their vaccinations and the subsequent neutering and spaying, Alma set up the foundlings in different geographical sectors of the house.
Thinking that the dog and the cat would never get along, Brettigan house-trained the puppy in the back hallway and the kitten in the front rooms, giving her the living area and the half-bath, where her litter box was located under the sink. If she so desired, she could sit on the front windowsill and contemplate the birds she would kill if she were ever allowed outdoors.