Chapter 13

HIS FATHER ROLLED out in a wheelchair the size of a loveseat. The boy pushing him was Clete’s sidekick, Travis. Everett trailed behind them with that bouncer-blank look on his face.

Travis steered Harlan toward the atrium windows, where Pax sat in the middle of an upholstered guest chair, also chub-sized. His father was slumped in the wheelchair, head back and eyes closed. He looked deflated, a man swimming in a giant’s skin and clothes. Pax leaned forward, and Everett said, “Just keep your seat.”

“I was just—never mind,” Pax said. Rhonda had explained the rules: no touching, no leaving the room, and do whatever Everett says. “Otherwise,” she’d told him, “just be yourself.”

“Is he awake?” Pax asked.

Everett touched Harlan’s shoulder. “Pastor Martin,” he said. “Your son’s here.”

His father didn’t move. Everett said, “Playing possum.” He gently shook the man’s shoulder. “Come on now,” he said. “You’ve got company.”

Harlan opened his eyes a fraction. “Get your hands off me,” he said in a cracked voice.

“Ah,” Everett said. “Grumpy.” He nodded to Travis and they walked to a desk and chairs about ten feet away, where Barron, the security guard, had spread out a newspaper.

Harlan turned his gaze to the windows, paying no attention to Paxton. The bright sunlight turned his father’s skin to rice paper. His arms were stained with liver spots. He seemed decades older than he had two weeks ago.

“It’s me,” Pax said. “Your son.”

His father didn’t move.

Pax leaned back in his giant chair, scratched the side of his neck. The ache burned in him. Inside the Home, and this close to his father, Pax had expected to be engulfed by the scent of the vintage, and he hadn’t been sure how he was going to stand it. But there was only a trace of it, and even that was almost masked by the smell of Pine-Sol.

“So,” Pax said. He tried to make his voice sound relaxed. “How are they treating you?”

“Quit talking to me that way,” his father said.

Pax glanced at the chub men across the room. They were pretending to study their sections of the paper. To his father, Pax said, “What way?”

“I’m not senile.”

But you’re not exactly sane, Pax thought. “Dad, I have to explain—”

“I asked you one thing, Paxton.” Harlan turned his head to look at him, his eyes in that collapsed face bright and hard. “One thing.”

“You didn’t exactly make it easy on me,” Pax said. He told him about the night at the church: the impromptu baptism, the way they had to drag both of them from the water. “You don’t remember any of this?”

“You got what you wanted,” his father said. “So why are you here?”

“This is not what I wanted!” Pax said. Everett looked over at them, and Pax lowered his voice. “I wanted you out of here. I wanted to take you home. I just … can’t.”

His father made a noise of disgust and looked away. Outside the window, a plastic fawn nestled in the grass beside an antique iron water pump. Someone had planted a row of flowers, but at the moment they were headless stalks.

Pax stared at his hands, then at his father.

Harlan reached up, scratched at a cheek, and white flakes of skin fluttered in the sunlight. Dry, dry, dry. Nothing there for him. He was dying of thirst and his father had become a desert.

After several minutes of silence, Pax got up and walked to the security desk. “This isn’t working,” Pax said quietly.

Everett looked up at him. “You saying you’re backing out of the deal?”

“No, I’m not backing out. It’s just not working right now.” He looked back at his father, still staring out the window. “Look,” he said to Everett. “Give me some now, just half, and tomorrow—”

“One more word,” Everett said quietly. “Go ahead. Say one more word.”

Barron and Travis froze, their eyes on Everett. Paxton closed his mouth.

“Now then,” Everett said reasonably. “If you’re done for today, that’s fine. We’ll take you back now. But you don’t get paid unless he produces.”

Pax turned away from the desk. He went back to the big chair opposite his father and sat, leaning over his knees.

They didn’t speak. Pax studied his clasped hands, trying to get them to stop trembling. Jesus, he was a fucking wreck.

“You’ve got bruises,” his father said.

Pax didn’t reply.

“Are they making you do this?”

“No,” Pax said. “They’re not making me do anything.”

His father nodded. Several minutes passed.

“So,” Pax said. “How ’bout them Cubs?”

His father didn’t answer. They spent the next two hours in silence.

The vintage refused to return.

Each night Pax decided that he wouldn’t go forward with the deal. His craving seemed as strong as ever, but it wasn’t getting worse. He could handle it. He’d go back to Chicago, get on with his life.

Yet each morning at 8:45 he was waiting in front of the house for Everett to pick him up.

The visits lasted until noon. Then Travis would wheel his father off to lunch, and either Everett or Barron would give him a ride back to the house.

Because his father declined to talk, and because Rhonda thought TV would interfere with the process, Pax had to find some way to get through the hours. Each morning before he arrived he and Everett would stop by the Gas-n-Go, say hello to Mr. DuChamp, and pick up three papers: the Knoxville News-Sentinel, USA Today, and the Maryville Times. In the atrium Pax and his father would thumb through them, and usually Everett and Barron would join them. Travis sat well away from Pax and surreptitiously played games on his handheld.

One morning in the second week of visits, Pax handed his father the Sentinel and his father said, “How’s Mr. DuChamp’s hair?”

Pax looked up. “What? Oh. Fine.” He smiled. “Still looks as good as the day he bought it.” Twelve years after the Changes, Mr. DuChamp still wore a coal black toupee, never acknowledging that he’d become a beta.

His father grunted. He was silent the rest of the morning. But the next day his father dropped the section of paper he was reading and Pax automatically stooped to pick it up. His father looked down at him, a half smile on his face, but he seemed to be seeing someone else.

“Dad?” Pax asked. Then he smelled it. The vintage.

He glanced toward the desk. Everett was on an errand with Aunt Rhonda, and Barron was out of the room. Travis was engrossed in his handheld.

Pax touched his father’s hand. The skin seemed more moist than it had been. Quietly he said, “Dad, are you okay?”

“You said you wanted red, right?” his father said. “Fire-engine red.” He didn’t seem to be talking to Pax.

Travis still hadn’t noticed the change. Pax returned to his seat but his eyes were on his father’s face, his neck. He could see the skin of his cheek begin to swell, fast as a boxer’s after a vicious punch.

“It’s me, Paxton,” he said.

“You have to promise me to be careful,” his father said. “Don’t ride it on the road. And if your mother ever catches you without your helmet on, it’s going right back in the garage.”

“I promise,” Pax said. His parents had given him the Yamaha ATV when he was thirteen, seven months before the Changes. It was the best Christmas of his life.

The first blister formed just below his father’s right eye. Pax leaned forward, reached up to his father’s face.

Someone slapped his hand away. Pax lunged forward and Everett shoved him back in his chair. Pax hadn’t heard him come back in the room. “Stay put,” Everett said. “Travis, go get an extraction pack.”

The smell of the vintage blossomed to fill the room. Aunt Rhonda came out of her office holding a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. She put one hand on Paxton’s shoulder. “Good boy,” she said.

Half the linen closet seemed to be flapping on lines strung across the front yard. The twins had been cleaning again.

They were waiting for him in the house. They saw his face and one of them said, “Did something happen?” That was Rainy. She seemed years older than her sister, a young woman deigning to act childlike on occasion for the sake of the smaller children.

“Listen, girls,” he said. “I need you to go home tonight.”

Sandra said, “But we’re making supper! Spaghetti and garlic bread.” She wore a billowing green dress. “Plus we need you to unlock the other bedroom. We couldn’t clean it.”

“Enough cleaning,” Pax said. “And we can have the spaghetti tomorrow. Right now I just need some time alone, okay?”

“What’s in the bag?” Rainy asked.

Pax looked down at the black plastic baggie. He hadn’t realized he was carrying it in his hand. “Look,” he said, “tomorrow before you come, why don’t you go to the grocery store.” He put the bag into his front pocket, then handed Sandra two of the twenties Rhonda had given him. “Buy us some food. Get whatever snacks you want.”

“We need baby food,” Sandra said.

Rainy glared at her. “We have to show you something first,” she said, and then went into the kitchen.

“Oh, right,” Sandra said. Then, “We don’t really need baby food.”

Pax said. “Rainy, I don’t have time for games tonight, okay? You can show it to me tomorrow.” The refrigerated bag felt cool against his thigh.

The girl came back into the room carrying a thin white laptop. She handed it to him. “We need you to open this,” she said.

“Whose is this?” he asked, even though he was sure of the answer. Taped diagonally across the lid was a black-and-white bumper sticker of two fish: a Christian fish symbol, and right behind it, a larger Darwin fish with stick-figure legs, its mouth wide open to swallow the fish in front of it.

“It was Mom’s,” Rainy said. “It’s ours now.”

He sat on the couch and put the laptop on the coffee table. “Where did you get this? Your house?”

They didn’t answer. He looked up, and Sandra was looking at Rainy. “Can you open it?” the girl said.

He thumbed the latch and lifted the lid. “Okay, what next?”

“No, unlock it,” Rainy said. “It has a password.” She sat next to him and pressed the power button. The computer started booting up.

“Why did you hide this?” he asked.

“We didn’t hide it,” Sandra said. “Reverend Hooke took it. Her and Tommy.”

“What? When?” Pax asked.

“The morning after,” Rainy said. “We saw her take it, and Tommy saw her too, but he didn’t say anything.”

“Why didn’t you speak up? This is important. It could have Jo’s—” He started to say “suicide letter,” but thought better of it.

“Can you open it?” Rainy said. On the screen was a prompt for a password. “We can’t get past this part.”

“How would I know the password?”

“Just try,” Sandra said.

He shook his head, put his fingers on the keyboard. He thought for a moment, then typed “BrotherBewlay” and pressed return.

“Incorrect password,” he said.

Rainy was looking at him intently, but as usual he couldn’t read her expression. “You’re not even trying,” she said.

“Okay, fine,” he said. He tried “BewlayBrother,” then several variations with different capitalization and spaces and plurals. Then “hunkydory” and “changes” and “prettythings.”

Pax said, “If we keep putting in bad passwords we may lock it up permanently.”

“But you could hack it, right?” Sandra asked. “You know about computers and everything.”

“What? No. I mean, I’ve used computers, but I don’t even own one right now. I use my roommate’s.”

“But you’re from Chicago!” Sandra said.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Forget it,” Rainy said, and slammed the lid down. Pax put a hand over hers.

“Wait. Leave it with me.” He looked at both of them. “I can call some people who are good at this kind of thing. Maybe we can figure out how to boot it without the password.”

“Really?” Sandra said, sounding relieved. Rainy seemed less sure.

“It’s ours,” Rainy said. “The laptop belongs to us now.”

Pax said, “I know that. I promise you I won’t let anyone else have it. Let me try some things, okay?” The twins didn’t reply. “But right now I’m exhausted. How about you come back tomorrow.”

He closed the door behind them and walked to the guest room. The vintage, frozen when he’d gotten it from Aunt Rhonda, had warmed to liquid again. He sat on the bed and swirled the plastic container, proving to himself that he didn’t need to rush into this. He could wait even longer if he wanted to.

He pried off the rubber cap, then lay back on the bed and tilted the vial over his mouth. The serum seemed to take forever to slide to the lip of the container; the first drop reached the edge and hung there, swelling.

He didn’t know what dose to use; most of his experience had been accidental, and at the extremes. Just a drop now, he thought. There was more in the vial if he needed it. Later he could even swab out the inside with a Q-tip if he needed to, or add water and rinse it into his mouth. And, he reminded himself, there was more where this came from.

He tapped the plastic with one finger and the drop broke loose, fell onto his tongue like a dollop of honey. He swallowed, and the warmth slid down the back of his throat. He put the cap back onto the vial and lay on the bed, waiting.

“And he returns,” his father said each time Pax arrived for his visit. He sounded both sad and relieved.

Rhonda had decided that the optimal interval was every other day. Pax would arrive with his armful of newspapers and they would sit by the big atrium windows. Harlan was most lucid and in control in the first hour. As they shuffled through the pages one of them would try to make small talk. It didn’t matter which one of them spoke first; it never went easily. One morning Pax said, “Did you know that some scientists think that the clades are an alternate strain of human evolution?” Harlan didn’t look up from his paper. He didn’t believe in evolution. “It’s got to do with quantum mechanics,” Pax went on. “These things called intron mutations prove that the disease is teleporting in from a parallel universe. They can prove it.” He tried to sound like he hadn’t learned this from an Internet weirdo a few weeks before. “People who went through the Changes are a whole different species. Technically, you and I may not even be related anymore.”

His father chuckled without looking up. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

The conversation went better when Pax had specific questions—about the house, the car, the finances. Harlan could coach him through the bank statements and bills, tell him how to light the oven’s pilot light, or how to jumpstart the Crown Vic and get it started without flooding the engine.

Harlan would grow more remote as the morning wore on. His gaze would shift to the middle distance, or else suddenly alight on Paxton’s face as if seeing him for the first time. Sometimes Pax seemed to be a beloved child, sometimes a rebellious teenager. “I won’t have this in my house!” he shouted during one extraction, and Travis had to put up a hand to stop Harlan from slapping the needle away. “Thank God your mother isn’t alive to see this, it would kill her. I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

“I know, Dad,” Pax said. He leaned forward but did not touch him. That was still against the rules.

When the extraction began Pax would watch the serum color the body of the syringe, and then he would catch himself watching and look away.

“Oh law,” Rhonda would say when Travis delivered the syringes. “He’s like Old Faithful.”

Pax took his payment on Tuesday mornings with the rest of the employees. The chub boys started rolling in around 9:30, then sat around talking and looking at their hands until the clock struck 11:00 and Rhonda opened her office door.

Pax kept his distance, trying to hang back until the rest of them had been paid, but Clete went out of his way to get next to Pax, hugging him, slapping his back, punching his shoulder. “Looking a little rough this morning, Paxton,” he’d say. “Can’t wait to get that shot of ol’ Grandad, huh?”

Each time Pax resolved not to flinch, to give nothing away. Weeks after the beating both men’s bruises had faded, but Pax was still aching: the ribs along his right side still grated like a tire rubbing at a sharp fender; the headaches still woke him at night. So he smiled tightly and said nothing, waiting for Clete to become distracted by another conversation, or for Rhonda to tell them to line up.

The chubs were anxious to receive their checks and the little frozen vials they called the bonus, but their need seemed less immediate than Paxton’s. To hear the younger chubs talk, it wasn’t about getting high themselves, it was about impressing women and partying. “But you skips, man,” Clete said, circling an arm around Paxton’s neck. “You freak for it like the ladies, don’t you?”

Pax smiled his fuck-you smile.

The twins had become disappointed in him. He hadn’t been able to get past the computer’s log-in screen, and hadn’t even tried to find someone who could. “Never mind,” Rainy said, and the laptop vanished from his house.

They didn’t like how long he slept in the afternoons; they didn’t like how little he ate. They disapproved of his long, stringy hair, the way he’d go days without shaving.

“You’re starting to stink,” Sandra said.

“It’s September,” Pax said. “Don’t you have school?”

“They’re not teaching anything that’s important,” Rainy said. “Our mother taught us biology, evolution, physics. Quantum physics.”

“Little Miss Einstein,” Pax said, but his tone was light.

“That’s Rainy,” Sandra said.

He lay on the couch, eyes half-closed, on the verge of bursting into tears or laughter. After a visit to his father he rewarded himself with a dab of the vintage, just enough to move himself a few inches out of his body, but even with that small amount it was all too easy to let his emotions run away with him. He knew Rainy and Sandra weren’t his daughters—weren’t related to him at all—but when they fussed over him and complained and told him their stories he saw right past their masklike faces, right into their wounded hearts. He knew how they yearned for Jo Lynn, and he began to understand how Jo must have ached for them. When they ran their smooth hands over his rough cheeks, tut-tutting at his lack of hygiene, he felt himself losing track of where he ended and the world began. He was both a man stretched out on the couch and a little bald girl regarding him with narrowed eyes.

“So tell me,” he said. “If the argos and betas and charlies are alternate forms of humanity, where are the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals?”

“Tals,” Rainy said. “Not thals.”

“Whatever.” He scratched under his T-shirt. “My point is, if apes are our nearest cousins, where are the grunting, hairy clades? Where are the cavemen?”

The girls looked down at him, then burst into laughter.

The nights he took the vintage the house became alive with ghosts. He heard them clinking coffee cups, talking in low adult voices, assembling Christmas bicycles. He drifted asleep to the sound of “I’ll Fly Away” sung slow in two-part harmony.

The headaches persisted. One night he woke curled up and shivering under the open window. Summer had ended while he’d slept, and chill autumn air had refrigerated the room. He shuffled in the dark to the bathroom, not willing to wake up completely. He peed, swallowed a few ibuprofen, went back into the hallway.

Light silvered the edge of the door to his old bedroom.

He watched the light for a long time, listening. Then he went to the door and touched it lightly. It glided silently away from his fingertips.

His mother lay on the big hospital bed the government people had delivered. The guest bedroom was too small for it, the master bedroom too full of furniture. Paxton’s room was just right.

She looked tiny in it, a shrunken ancient or a newborn. Her skin, blotchy with stains like coffee, seemed too tight for her. Nothing remained of her hair but a few wispy patches.

“My son, my son,” she said. The fingers of her right hand lifted from the bed, summoning him forward. She smiled up at him. “Still handsome.”

She wore the lightest of nightgowns; anything heavier caused her terrible pain. He sat on the floor and carefully put his hand in hers. Her palm was velvety, but her fingers were rough and chapped, as if her body couldn’t decide which direction it wanted to go.

“How is Jo?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said. He didn’t want to tell her. She loved Jo like a daughter.

“And Deke?”

“Still growing,” Paxton said.

“Good.”

A minute passed. Then she said, “When you were born the nurse put you in my arms and … oh my.” She smiled through cracked lips. “The future just rolled open. Years and years. And I could see you, all grown up. Just like this. And I thought, I will know this little man the rest of my life.”

“Yeah?” She’d told him this story before. He used to ask her to tell it.

“The first and only time in my life that happened. Don’t tell your father.” She smiled again and closed her eyes. Minutes passed, but he knew that she hadn’t fallen asleep. He shifted his weight and she said apologetically, “You can go.”

“No, I wasn’t—”

“It’s okay, Paxton.” She opened her eyes again. “I don’t mind that you don’t like to come in here. I’m not too pretty. And you were just a boy. You’d already seen more than your share.”

He shrugged. “Now that I’m here …”

“Off to bed,” she said. “You need your sleep.”

“In a little bit,” he said.

He was still talking to her near dawn when a thick arm fastened around his neck and a voice spoke into his ear. “Hate to interrupt your conversation, Cuz.” The arm yanked him to his feet and dragged him backward out of the room. A moment later he was dumped to the floor. Three chubs loomed over him like planets: Clete, Travis, and the redheaded chub girl from the clinic—Doreen. She wore a pink hoodie open over a black tank top that exposed sweeping vistas of cleavage.

Clete stood with his hands on his hips, a black pistol tucked ostentatiously into his waistband. Travis held a big roll of silver duct tape.

“Just in case you were wondering,” Clete said. “This is not a hallucination.”