Army regrouping, rumblings abroad. From the White House, words of calm assurance, the crisis was in hand, the best minds were at work, but nobody was fooling anybody. A nationwide declaration of martial law was sure to come within hours. CNN was reporting that NATO warships were churning toward the coasts. The door would slam on the North American continent. The world might despise us, Guilder thought; what will it do when we’re gone?
As he drove, he kept a watchful eye on the rearview. He wasn’t being paranoid; it was just how things tended to unfold. A roar of tires, a van pulling in front of him, men in dark suits emerging. Horace Guilder? Come with us. Amazing, he thought, that it hadn’t happened already.
He pulled into the garage and sealed the door behind him. In his bedroom, he packed a small bag of essentials—a couple of days’ worth of clothes, toiletries, his meds—and carried it downstairs. He fetched his laptop from the study and placed it in the microwave, sizzling its circuitry in a cloud of sparks. His handheld was already gone, tossed from the window of the Camry.
In the living room he doused the lights and peeled back the drapes. Across the street, a neighbor was loading suitcases into the open hatch of his SUV. The man’s wife was standing in the doorway of their townhouse, clutching a sleeping toddler. What were their names? Guilder either had never known or couldn’t remember. He’d seen the woman from time to time, pushing the little girl in a brightly colored plastic car up and down the driveway. Watching the three of them, Guilder was touched by a memory of Shawna—not that last, terrible encounter but the two of them lying together in the aftermath of lovemaking, and her quiet, whispering voice, tickling his chest. Are you happy with the things I do? I want to be your only one. Words that weren’t anything more than playacting, a bit of cheap theatrics to crown a dutiful hour. How stupid he’d been.
The man accepted the child from his wife’s arms and gently lowered her into the backseat. The two of them got in the car. Guilder imagined the things they’d be saying to each other. We’ll be all right. They have people working on it right now. We’ll just stay at your mother’s a week or two, until this all blows over. He heard the engine turn over; they backed from the drive. Guilder watched their taillights vanish down the block. Good luck, he thought.
He waited five more minutes. The streets were silent, all the houses dark. When he was satisfied he wasn’t being watched, he carried his bag to the Camry.
It was after two A.M. when he got to Shadowdale. The parking area was empty; only a single light burned by the entrance. He stepped through the door to find the front desk unmanned. An empty wheelchair sat beside it, a second in the hall. There were no sounds anywhere. Probably there were security cameras watching him, but who would examine the tapes?
His father was lying on his bed in darkness. The room smelled awful; nobody had been in for hours, perhaps as long as a day. On the tray by his father’s bed, somebody had left a dozen jars of Gerber’s baby food and a pitcher of water. A spilled cup told him his father had attempted the water, but the food was untouched; his father couldn’t have opened the jars if he’d tried.
Guilder didn’t have long, but it was not an occasion to rush. His father’s eyes were closed, the voice—that hectoring voice—silenced. Better that way, he thought. The time for talk was over. He searched his memory for something nice about his father, however meager. The best he could come up with was a time when his father had taken him to a park when Guilder was small. The recollection was vague and impressionistic—it was possible it had never happened at all—but that was all he had. A winter day, Guilder’s breath clouding before his face, and a view of bare trees bobbing up and down as his father had pushed him on a swing, the man’s big hand at the center of his back, catching him and launching him into space. Guilder recalled nothing else about that day. He might have been as young as five.
When he slid the pillow from beneath his father’s head, the man’s eyes fluttered but didn’t open. Here was the precipice, Guilder