Part 8 (1/2)

Uh-oh.

It just arrived, between one swallow and the next: the throat-dryness. Not much at yet, but enough for me to break away and get a gla.s.s of ice-water. I've got maybe forty minutes left. And oh Jesus, there's so much I want to tell! About the wasps' nests they found with wasps that wouldn't sting, about the fender-bender Bobby and one of his a.s.sistants saw where the two drivers, both male, both drunk, and both about twenty-four (sociological bull moose, in other words), got out, shook hands, and exchanged insurance information amicably before going into the nearest bar for another drink.

Bobby talked for hours - more hours than I have. But the upshot was simple: the stuff in the mayonnaise jar.

'We've got our own still in La Plata now,' he said. 'This is the stuff we're brewing, Howie; pacifist white lightning. The aquifer under that area of Texas is deep but amazingly large; it's like this incredible Lake Victoria driven into the porous sediment which overlays the Moho. The water is potent, but we've been able to make the stuff I squirted on the wasps even more potent. We've got d.a.m.n near six thousand gallons now, in these big steel tanks. By the end of the year, we'll have fourteen thousand. By next June we'll have thirty thousand. But it's not enough. We need more, we need it faster . . . and then we need to transport it.'

'Transport it where?' I asked him.

'Borneo, to start with.'

I thought I'd either lost my mind or misheard him. I really did.

'Look , Bow-Wow . . . sorry. Howie.' He was scrumming through his tote-bag again. He brought out a number of aerial photographs and handed them over to me. 'You see?' he asked as I looked through them. 'You see how f.u.c.king perfect it is? It's as if G.o.d Himself suddenly busted through our business-as-usual transmissions with something like ”And now we bring you a special bulletin! This is your last chance, a.s.sholes! And now we return you to Days of Our Lives.” '

'I don't get you,' I said. 'And I have no idea what I'm looking at.' Of course I knew; it was an island - not Borneo itself but an island lying, to the west of Borneo identified as Gulandio, - with a mountain in the middle and a lot of muddy little villages lying on its lower slopes. It was hard to see the mountain because of the cloud cover. What I meant was that I didn't know what I was looking for.

'The mountain has the same name as the island,' he said. 'Gulandio. In the local patois it means grace, or fate, or destiny, or take your pick. But Duke Rogers says it's really the biggest time-bomb on earth . . . and it's wired to go off by October of next year. Probably earlier.'

The crazy thing's this: the story's only crazy if you try to tell it in a speed-rap, which is what I'm trying to do now. Bobby wanted me to help him raise somewhere between six hundred thousand and a million and a half dollars to do the following: first, to synthesize fifty to seventy thousand gallons of what he called 'the high-test'; second, to airlift all of this water to Borneo, which had landing facilities (you could land a hang-glider on Gulandio, but that was about all); third, to s.h.i.+p it over to this island named Fate, or Destiny, or Grace; fourth, to truck it up the slope of the volcano, which had been dormant (save for a few puffs in 1938) since 1804, and then to drop it down the muddy tube of the volcano's caldera. Duke Rogers was actually John Paul Rogers, the geology professor. He claimed that Gulandio was going to do more than just erupt; he claimed that it was going to explode, as Krakatoa had done in the nineteenth century, creating a bang that would make the Squirt Bomb that poisoned London like a kid's firecracker.

The debris from the Krakatoa blow-up, Bobby told me, had literally encircled the globe; the observed results had formed an important part of the Sagan Group's nuclear winter theory. For three months afterward sunsets and sunrises half a world away had been grotesquely colorful as a result of the ash whirling around in both the jet stream and the Van Allen Currents, which he forty miles below the Van Allen Belt. There had been global changes in climate which lasted five years, and nipa palms, which previously had grown only in eastern Africa and Micronesia, suddenly showed up in both South and North America.

'The North American nipas all died before 1900,' Bobby said, 'but they're alive and well below the equator. Krakatoa seeded them there, Howie . . . the way I want to seed La Plata water all over the earth. I want people to go out in La Plata water when it rains - and it's going to rain a lot after Gulandio goes bang. I want them to drink the La Plata water that falls in their reservoirs, I want them to wash their hair in it, bathe in it, soak their contact lenses in it. I want wh.o.r.es to douche in it.'

'Bobby,' I said, knowing he was not, 'you're crazy.'

He gave me a crooked, tired grin. 'I ain't crazy,' he said. 'You want to see crazy? Turn on CNN, Bow . . . Howie. You'll see crazy in living color.'

But I didn't need to turn on Cable News (what a friend of mine had taken to calling The Organ-Grinder of Doom) to know what Bobby was talking about. The Indians and the Pakistanis were poised on the brink. The Chinese and the Afghans, ditto. Half of Africa was starving, the other half on fire with AIDS. There had been border skirmishes along the entire Tex-Mex border in the last five years, since Mexico went Communist, and people had started calling the Tijuana crossing point in California Little Berlin because of the wall. The saber-rattling had become a din. On the last day of the old year the Scientists for Nuclear Responsibility had set their black clock to fifteen seconds before midnight.

'Bobby, let's suppose it could be done and everything went according to schedule,' I said. 'It probably couldn't and wouldn't, but let's suppose. You don't have the slightest idea what the long-term effects might be.'

He started to say something and I waved it away.

'Don't even suggest that you do, because you don't! You've had time to find this calmquake of yours and isolate the cause, I'll give you that. But did you ever hear about thalidomide? About that nifty little acne-stopper and sleeping pill that caused cancer and heart attacks in thirty-year-olds? Don't you remember the AIDS vaccine in 1997?'

'Howie?'

'That one stopped the disease, except it turned the test subjects into incurable epileptics who all died within eighteen months.'

'Howie?'

'Then there was - '

'Howie?'

I stopped and looked at him.

'The world,' Bobby said, and then stopped. His throat worked. I saw he was struggling with tears. 'The world needs heroic measures, man. I don't know about long-term effects, and there's no time to study them, because there's no long-term prospect. Maybe we can cure the whole mess. Or maybe - '

He shrugged, tried to smile, and looked at me with s.h.i.+ning eyes from which two single tears slowly tracked.

'Or maybe we're giving heroin to a patient with terminal cancer. Either way, it'll stop what's happening now. It'll end the world's pain.' He spread out his hands, palms up, so I could see the stings on them. 'Help me, Bow-Wow. Please help me.'

So I helped him.

And we f.u.c.ked up. In fact I think you could say we f.u.c.ked up big-time. And do you want the truth? I don't give a s.h.i.+t. We killed all the plants, but at least we saved the greenhouse. Something will grow here again, someday. I hope.

Are you reading this?

My gears are starting to get a little sticky. For the first time in years I'm having to think about what I'm doing. The motor-movements of writing. Should have hurried more at the start.

Never mind. Too late to change things now.

We did it, of course: distilled the water, flew it in, transported it to Gulandio, built a primitive lifting system - half motor-winch and half cog railway - up the side of the volcano, and dropped over twelve thousand five-gallon containers of La Plata water - the brain-buster version - into the murky misty depths of the volcano's caldera. We did an of this in just eight months. It didn't cost six hundred thousand dollars, or a million and a half; it cost over four million, still less than a sixteenth of one per cent of what America spent on defense that year. You want to know how we razed it? I'd tell you if I had more thyme, but my head's falling apart so never mend. I raised most of it myself if it matters to you. Some by hoof and some by croof. Tell you the truth, I din't know I could do it muself until I did. But we did it and somehow the world held together and that volcano - whatever its name wuz, I can't exactly remember now and there izzunt time to go back over the ma.n.u.script - it blue just when it was spo Wait.

Okay. A little better. Digitalin. Bobby had it. Heart's beating like crazy but I can think again.

The volcano - Mount Grace, we called it - blue just when Dook Rogers said it would. Everything when skihi and for awhile everyone's attention turned away from whatever and toward the skys. And bimmel-dee-dee, said Strapless!

It happened pretty fast like s.e.x and checks and special effex and everybody got healthy again. I mean.

Wait Jesus please let me finish this.

I mean that everybody stood down. Everybody started to get a little purstective on the situation. The wurld started to get like the wasps in Bobbys nest the one he showed me where they didn't stink too much. There was three yerz like an Indian summer. People getting together like in that old Youngbloods song that went cmon everybody get together rite now, like what all the hippeez wanted, you no, peets and luv and wt Big blast. Feel like my heart is coming out thru my ears. But if I concentrate every bit of my force, my concentration - It was like an Indian summer, that's what I meant to say, like three years of Indian summer. Bobby went on with his resurch. La Plata. Sociological background etc. You remember the local Sheriff ? Fat old Republican with a good Rodney Youngblood imitashun? How Bobby said he had the preliminary simptoms of Rodney's Disease?

concentrate a.s.shole Wasn't just him; turned out like there was a lot of that going around in that part of Texas. All's Hallows Disease is what I meen. For three yerz me and Bobby were down there. Created a new program. New graff of circkles. I saw what was happen and came back here. Bobby and his to asistants stayed on. One shot hisself Boby said when he showed up here.

Wait one more blas All right. Last time. Heart beating so fast I can hardly breeve. The new graph, the last graph, really only whammed you when it was laid over the calmquake graft. The calmquake graff showed ax of vilence going down as you approached La Plata in the muddle; the Alzheimer's graff showed incidence of premature seenullity going up as you approached La Plata. People there were getting very silly very yung.

Me and Bobo were careful as we could be for next three years, drinke only Parrier Water and wor big long sleekers in the ran. so no war and when everybobby started to get seely we din and I came back here because he my brother I cant remember what his name Bobby Bobby when he came here tonight cryeen and I sed Bobby I luv you Bobby sed Ime sorry Bowwow Ime sorry I made the hole world ful of foals and dumbbels and I sed better fouls and bells than a big black sinder in spaz and he cryed and I cryed Bobby I luv you and he sed will you give me a shot of the s.p.a.cial wadder and I sed yez and he said wil you ride it down and I sed yez an I think I did but I cant reely remember I see wurds but dont no what they mean I have a Bobby his nayme is bruther and I theen I an dun riding and I have a bocks to put this into thats Bobby sd full of quiyet air to last a milyun yrz so gudboy gudboy everybrother, Im goin to stob gudboy bobby i love you it wuz not yor falt i love you forgivyu.

love yu.

sinned (for the wurld).

Suffer the Little Children.

Miss Sidley was her name, and teaching was her game.

She was a small woman who had to stretch to write on the highest level of the blackboard, which she was doing now. Behind her, none of the children giggled or whispered or munched on secret sweets held in cupped hands. They knew Miss Sidley's deadly instincts too well. Miss Sidley could always tell who was chewing gum at the back of the room, who had a beanshooter in his pocket, who wanted to go to the bathroom to trade baseball cards rather than use the facilities. Like G.o.d, she seemed to know everything an at once.

She was graying, and the brace she wore to support her failing back was limned clearly against her print dress. Small, constantly suffering, gimlet-eyed woman. But they feared her. Her tongue was a schoolyard legend. The eyes, when focused on a giggler or a whisperer, could turn the stoutest knees to water.

Now, writing the day's list of spelling words on the board, she reflected that the success of her long teaching career could be summed and checked and proven by this one everyday action: she could turn her back on her pupils with confidence.

'Vacation,' she said, p.r.o.nouncing the word as she wrote it in her firm, no-nonsense script. 'Edward, please use the word vacation in a sentence.'