When she steps through the door, she discovers a chamber half filled with trash stacked haphazardly in one corner. Broken ladders. Fifteen or twenty moldering wooden crates. Rusting five-gallon metal drums. Plastic containers that resemble large laundry baskets. A wheelbarrow with a bent brace and missing wheel. An office chair from the torn seat of which rises a white cobra of foam padding. Large panels of plywood, a scattering of empty burlap bags, opaque plastic sheeting spooling off a four-foot-long cardboard tube.
“We can hide under this stuff, hide behind it,” John says. “I can move things around, make a space for us.”
“The whole mess will shift and fall down around you.”
“No, Mom, I can see how to do it,” he insists. “We’ll ease in behind it, sit with our backs to the wall. They open the door, see nothing but trash, and they go away. They go away.”
“There’s no time.”
“Three minutes is all I need,” he says, propping the Tac Light on an overturned bucket and setting to work. “Maybe four. I see how to do it.”
“Hurry,” she says as she steps out of the room. At opposite ends of the building, each of the gable walls is open to the night where the big roll-ups once were. She pulls the door shut behind her, blocking the spillover from the Tac Light, and though darkness folds her into its cloak, she feels exposed.
WHAT LIFE HAVE YOU IF YOU HAVE NOT LIFE TOGETHER?
Michael remembers the late Shelby Shrewsberry riffing on how, from the human perspective, storms seem chaotic, though they are not because they are the inevitable result of nature’s meteorological laws. The ineluctable influence of temperature on the speed of airflow and the speed of airflow on temperature. The balance between pressure and gravitational force. Friction between the wind and the earth. The intricate action of waves and tides in the atmosphere. The condition of the atmosphere-ocean interface. All of that and much more form a mechanism so complex that we can perceive many of its moving parts and how they interact without ever being able to predict with certitude what weather this machine might produce tomorrow, and even less what it will provide next month. When the sun is in an active phase, Shelby said, the Earth warms, and when the sun is in a phase of very low activity, all life on Earth is driven toward the equator to endure the long centuries of an ice age. The sun is the one and only master of the climate, and though its thermonuclear reactions seem chaotic, they are no more so than the weather on Earth that they affect. The truth is, Michael, the only genuinely chaotic thing in the universe is humanity.
So it seems as Michael quickens along the interstate, for the heavy traffic moves faster than the weather warrants, as if not only he but also everyone on wheels this night is hurrying somewhere to save a life. Although they lack Michael’s enhanced reflexes, the drivers often follow a mere car length or two behind one another and change lanes without signaling. They jockey recklessly for position, as if nothing is more important than arriving at their destinations ten seconds faster than they might otherwise get there if they drove with any recognition of their mortality.
He finds himself mourning Shelby, not for the first time since being resurrected, but more poignantly than before. The big guy was a light in life as surely as the sun. In spite of being the same age as Michael, for thirty-eight years he had filled the role of a big brother. Shelby’s remarkable intelligence ensured he was an outsider from an early age; by middle school, when he became tall and strong, his peaceable nature and humility provided another reason for most kids to ridicule him. In the school they attended and in the streets of their neighborhood, physical power was more honored than wisdom or accomplishment. Any guy as big as Shelby was expected to use his size to intimidate and get his way in all things. Brute strength combined with a determination to dominate was much admired. Shelby’s gentleness invited mockery to which he responded with a smile or a joke. In the small minds of his tormentors, his response confirmed that he was what they mocked him for being—feeb, wimp, coward, loser—even though Shelby frequently broke up fights when a smaller kid was targeted by a bigger one or by a group. On those occasions, he chastised the instigators of the violence and said something that was true but which nevertheless led them to mock him further: What life have you if you have not life together?
In childhood and adolescence, Michael had been an outsider for reasons different from those that condemned Shelby to that status. His mother, Beth, had been known throughout the neighborhood as a mental case. Some adults called her “Batty Beth,” but to most kids, she was Bugshit Beth or worse. She earned the names. Because she didn’t engage in physical violence—only the emotional kind, with her son as primary target—she wasn’t committed to a psychiatric ward, therefore never diagnosed. Maybe she had not always been a colorful eccentric, but Michael had never known her otherwise. She married at just seventeen. Her husband, Lionel—Michael’s father—was seven years older, a city employee in the street department. Shortly before Michael’s first birthday, Lionel was killed when the brakes failed on a flusher, a water-carrying street-cleaning truck, and he was crushed against a building wall. Because the flusher proved to be poorly maintained and obvious negligence was involved, the city avoided a courtroom by promptly authorizing a settlement, part in cash and the rest in the form of an annuity that would pay Beth a monthly sum for the rest of her life. Over the years, she complained that her attorney sold her out and took an under-the-table payment in return for accepting far less than was warranted. Maybe that was the case, maybe not. One thing for sure is true: Michael never heard her say that she loved Lionel or that she missed him. When Beth was in her best mood, she called her son “Mickey” or “Mickey Mouse” or “Mouse.” On those days when her grip on reality unraveled further and her spirits darkened, she either didn’t speak to him or called him “boything” or various obscenities.
That unstable environment, with the heavy burden of humiliation attending it, inspired his interest in the security industry, which to him was all about safety and stability, preventing irrational people from ruining the lives of the rational. Deadbolts, electronic locks, perimeter alarms, motion detectors, bullet-resistant glass, panic rooms, the strategies and tactics of bodyguards: He wanted to know everything he could learn about how to make life safer for others and, in the process, for himself as well. Later than should have been the case, as recently as a year ago, he came to understand that eighteen years of life with his mother had also inspired in him a fear that committing to marriage might trap him in a domestic situation alike to what he had escaped when he was eighteen. There were women in his life, some whom he loved, but when a relationship became too promising, he eased away from it.
Now, as he exits the freeway for a state road, motoring into sparse traffic and away from suburban lights, the night becomes immense. The wind and rain seem to be sweeping everything off the curve of the Earth, into a void. Those long-ago words Shelby spoke come to him again, with greater power than ever. What life have you if you have not life together? Those were not, Shelby said, his own words, but were those of a poet who more than half a century earlier foresaw the evolving isolation that an ever-more mechanized society would impose on those who existed within its coils and circuits. What life have you if you have not life together?