The reason the package didn't make the Thursday Fedex delivery, Tomlinson decided, was because Doc had probably gotten caught up in his work, forgot all about the time. Tomlinson could picture the man hunched over his microscope or peering through his thick glasses at some vial, doing-what was it now?-yeah, research on nutrient pollution in water. The projects changed, but Doc's intensity didn't. Ford was compulsive about work. Probably sat there in his lab and forgot all about the clock. Tomlinson could just see him, down there on Florida's Gulf Coast in the autumn heat and tropical squalls, oblivious to the world. All the man's sentient energies being poured into linear problem solving, which wasn't healthy. Really murked up the aura. Made it opaque as used dishwater, like this Boston weather…
Now it was Friday, and Tomlinson was walking along the north bank of the Charles River on the bike path from Watertown to west Cambridge, and he glanced up at the sky. There was no sun, just a pale smear without borders-a cold pale light in a gray meld of smog and haze. Simon and Garfunkel kind of day, that's the way he had once thought of it. Everything gray and black: oaks and maples, mossy wet, twisting in a November wind that swirled down the Charles. In the high trees, a few remaining leaves fluttered, their glow of first frost weeks gone, solitary as brown flags.
Cold, man. Should have stopped in at Musashi's to give Nichola a quick kiss and borrow a coat. Can't be more than thirty-five, forty degrees. Should have just walked right up and pressed the doorbell, let Musashi know I can be assertive, too. Musashi may be the girl's mother, but I'm the father, and fathers have rights, too.
Tomlinson walked along, thinking about what he should have done, carrying the Federal Express envelope under his arm. His hair was pulled back into a pony tail and he wore old frayed jeans and a black oiled wool sweater a friend had brought him long ago from Northern Ireland. Made a present of the sweater to him back in the days when there was so much energy in this town that an outsider could touch the grass on Harvard Commons or stick a toe into the Charles and he would feel a sort of electrical shock. Nothing negative, just a wild kenetic energy that flowed through the whole scene, Cambridge and Boston, even the MIT campus-a kind of kick-butt tribal power created by the coming together of thousands of young souls fired by Beatles music, first-rate intellects, social consciousness, the outrage of Vietnam, and some damn fine drugs. A truly inspiring venue for experimentation and social revolution that grew and fermented, getting stranger and more wonderful until about… what, 1970 or '71?… until the killings at Kent State seemed to stick a pin in their beautiful balloon and reversed the momentum. That was peak tide, and the ebb had been running ever since.
A few nights before, roaming the old section of Harvard's campus, distraught, depressed, nearly loony with Musashi's combative behavior, Tomlinson had fallen into the grips of nostalgic despair, and it seemed he could see the high-water mark of his generation's youth: a faded paisley stain at limb level on trees beneath which he had once made speeches and made love.
I'm the outsider now. Students, they seem all of a type. Snobby and full of themselves, but without grace or tolerance. All they care about is What Bo Knows. Pricey cross-training shoes, MTV, Walkmans, and paying lip service to causes-usually the Environment, capital E-to which they bring anger without understanding. They're all style, man. Style without substance.
He had said essentially the same thing to Musashi, and her cutting reply had hurt and confused him: "Were we any different, Tomlinson? Do you really believe that we were? That we had understanding without anger? That we were substantive and graceful and tolerant? Think back and tell me then if you really believe that."
He had said to her, "But at least we had an honest cause. Vietnam. Vietnam as an issue wasn't substantive?"
And her reply to that had been shocking. "I remember anger. That's what I remember. I remember being angry as hell, absolutely sure that we were right. But now, when I think about it- and I try not to think about it-but, when I do, I have a very difficult time reconciling our self-righteousness with the fact that four or five million Vietnamese and Cambodians were slaughtered when we finally got our way. When we finally made them bring the troops home. It's hard for me to feel righteous about that."
"My God, you're not saying we were wrong to protest-"
"No, of course not! I'm saying that now I see clearly enough to know that the world does not tolerate clarity. That, in those days, maybe we had a lot more anger in us than understanding. Simple answers require the simplicity of youth. We despised complexities-don't you remember? So we took all the hated unknowns and cloaked them with our certainty. We were children, Tomlinson. We were no different."
Replaying the conversation over and over in his head as he walked, Tomlinson caught himself. He was getting hung up in a flow of negative vibes. A whole negative, destructive trip that seemed to be sweeping him along, and Musashi was right at the heart of it. The woman who had asked him to father her child but who now seemed intent on squeezing him out of her life and, worse, their child's life. How could motherhood have changed her so much? Or perhaps she had changed gradually in the years prior to their joining to make the child, but he had been too enamored of their past to recognize her new reality. But one thing was certain: Each trip he made to Boston, Musashi seemed to get a little colder. A little more abrupt. And more obvious that he was not welcome.
She was going by the name her parents had given her at birth now, refusing to answer when Tomlinson slipped up and called her one of the names she had chosen from the old commune days. "Moontree," that had been his favorite. But she couldn't abide it now. Gave him a boiling look when he used it. It was one more way, he thought, for her to cut away the strings of their relationship.
He had hoped it would be different this trip. Instead, it was worse. Started on Friday night when he had called from the airport.
"You expect me to drop everything, open my home to you, just because you arrive on a whim to see Nichola?"
Two days' advance notice was a whim? He had called from the marina on Wednesday and left a message on her answering machine that he was flying in.
"No, two days is not enough notice! Two weeks, perhaps. Two months would be better. Yet you take it for granted that your wishes have first priority. Not everyone lives on a boat, Tomlinson. More to the point, not everyone lives in the past! Some of us have jobs. I have classes to teach. Nichola has her own schedule at the nursery and the day-care center. And the election is only four days away!"
That was the main thing. For now, anyway-the election. Musashi was campaigning for a friend of hers, a man named Niigata, one of her professor buddies who was running for the state assembly. Because of the baby, Musashi didn't have time to be Niigata's campaign manager, but she was one of his first lieutenants. Perhaps the man's lover, too. At least that's what Tomlinson was beginning to suspect. The way Musashi tensed up whenever he mentioned the guy's name. Got so nervous when Tomlinson suggested that he and Niigata meet. Something was going on, and Tomlinson wondered why she didn't come right out and say it. He felt no jealousy-well, not much. But as he had told Musashi, "Because we created one flesh doesn't mean we can't live separate lives."
To which Musahi had said, "I know, I know: Saints don't marry. And please don't be confused. I'm not asking you."
"Bitch!" The word slipped out as he walked, and the nastiness of it stopped him. Tomlinson glanced around. Bare trees, wind, people jogging, people roller-blading, people hurrying through the late-afternoon gloom toward dinner or a late class, or the dorms. If anyone had heard, they made no sign. He might have been invisible, a rut in the bike path to be swerved around. Tomlinson pushed his hands into his pockets, hunched his neck into the sweater, and continued on. Never in his life had he used that word in reference to a woman. Well, not a woman whom he knew, anyway. That word wasn't an oath or an assessment; it was a short cut, a way of avoiding difficult realities. To say it was a piggish stupidity.
Tomlinson thought, Somehow, I've gotten railroaded into destructive currents. I feel as gray as the weather. Feel like my cell walls have sharp edges, cutting me a little every time I move.
A few blocks later, just across the street from the modern marble and steel two-story office complex that was Massachusetts Research Labs, Tomlinson thought, What I've got to do is get my work done, try to help Joseph and Doc's uncle. We've all been karmically linked, and it's bad luck to ignore such things. I'll get my work done, kiss my daughter as much as I can, then get back to Florida on the first flight out. There's something growing in me. Maybe sunlight can cure it.
Tomlinson's friend at Mass Labs-that's what they called it-was Ken Kern, a buddy from the old days, one of the university's founders of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. Back then, Kern had had hair to the middle of his back, wore a silver cross of infinity along with the Star of David, and smoked unfil-tereds. Now, Kern was nearly bald, wore a Freudian black beard and a white smock. He was the lab's senior geneticist, and Tomlinson's daily visits were beginning to make him uneasy. Tomlinson could tell. The way Kern tapped his fingers at the security desk, waiting for Tomlinson to get his own smock buttoned and clip the visitor's pass to the pocket. Kern's habit of saying, when they were alone together, "You know, I'm going out on a helluva limb for you." The way he checked his watch when Tomlinson was around, using body language to say he didn't have a lot of time to spend on private projects. A project they had been working on after hours, four or five hours a night for the last week. A project that could go on for another two weeks, or even a month. That's what Kern was worried about.
Tomlinson never reacted to Kern's uneasiness. Always just smiled kindly-Kern had been one of his closest confidants in college,- a great man with a great brain, but always worried about something. The nervous type, so he and Tomlinson had balanced nicely through five years of weirdness and revolution. What Kern probably remembered as clearly as anything was that Tomlinson had willingly taken the rap on twenty-two counts of possession of illegal substances: fifteen blotters of acid and seven dime bags of truly fine Jamaican ganja the campus cops had found in their dorm room. All Kern's. But as Tomlinson had said at the time, "No sense involving you, Kenny. This is the seventh time I've been arrested, and seven's my lucky number."
Now the two men were walking down the hall toward Lab Room C-the tile and stainless-steel room where they had been working. That's where the PCR machine was kept-PCR for Polymerase chain reaction, the key apparatus used for amplifying specific units of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid. A second machine, an ABI 4800, automatically sequenced the base pairs.
From his reading, Tomlinson already knew the basic procedures and objectives. But, talking on the phone before Tomlinson left for Boston, Kern had put it even more simply: "All living organisms derive from a single unit that generates complexity. That unit is DNA. From a single strand of DNA-the way its base chemical pairs are sequenced-the researcher can, theoretically at least, determine not only an individual's sex and race, but what that person looked like, how he sounded, and, to a degree, how that person behaved. Take a strand of DNA two to three centimeters long, and it's all there, little dots and dashes. Like a fingerprint, only more telling. Life is nothing more than an expression of the DNA instructions encoded in the genes." Kern had chuckled after he said that, knowing that Tomlinson still saw all things as spiritually fired, constructive or destructive. Kern had said, "Remember that freeze-dried food we took the time we went looking for mushrooms? In those tinfoil packages? It's kind of like that. To create life, you just add water."
Which Tomlinson didn't believe, not for a moment. Though Ford would like it-and would probably accept it-when he told him.
To create life, just add water.
But what interested Tomlinson most was that Kern said it was possible to take the root of one of Joseph Egret's hairs and to isolate a cell that contained strands of DNA. He had also said that if Tomlinson could come up with at least thirty separate specimens of bones from Calusa burial mounds, he might be able to find a DNA sequencing pattern-flags, he called them-found only in that race of people.
"We don't need much," Kern had told him. "Maybe a gram or two from each bone, but they have to be good bone from the femur. If we don't get that, we might end up isolating the DNA of the archaeologist who dug them up and put them in the sack. The outside part could be contaminated by the archaeologist's hands."
So, prior to leaving for Boston, Tomlinson had spent five full days going to Florida's universities and museums, calling in favors from old friends, humoring scientists he'd never met, collecting little nubs of bone-something archaeologists didn't part with easily. Sometimes he nearly had to beg: "Only a gram. Only this much-" Holding his thumb and index finger a quarter inch apart. "And I'll send you all the data we produce."
Even so, it was tough going. Tomlinson had even considered driving back to the mounds at Mango to do a little digging himself. But just the thought of that outraged his personal standards of the human ethic. Defile the sacred artifacts of fellow human beings? It made no difference that they had lived and died hundreds of years before him. They were still people. People who had walked and wept and worried and laughed, people who had scratched their butts and hugged their babies and made love in the same subtropical milieu he called home-Florida. Only scum would impose upon the dead. Someone with a black hole for a conscience.
In the end, Tomlinson gathered nineteen specimens of Calusa bone. Not enough for an ideal survey population, Kern told him, but it would have to do.
"If you had a hundred specimens, we probably wouldn't find anything, anyway," he had said. "Like that saying: Everyone knows what race is, but no one can define what race is. They're always so mixed. The most Irish Irishman in Boston is probably at least twenty-five percent ethnic something. Spanish or Italian or Swede, or any mix in between. The blackest black in Harlem averages about twenty-five percent Anglo-Saxon. A thousand years ago, or today-people mix. That's one thing that makes race su-premicists so laughable. We're not the same people our great-great-great-grandfathers were, genetically or otherwise. Our species is in a constant state of flux. Historically, when strangers of the same sex meet, they make war. When strangers of the opposite sex meet, they make the creature with two backs."
But Kern's enthusiasm for the project had faded as the repetitious nightly work continued. He said his wife was badgering him to get home earlier. He said if they continued to work after hours on the project, it was just a matter of time before the lab's management found out. Kern said that, with just nineteen specimens, there wasn't much hope, anyway.
In reply, Tomlinson only smiled.
Now, on this Friday night, Tomlinson and Kern put on surgical booties, gloves, and masks before unlocking Room C. Kern switched on the lights and said, "Well, the crapshoot continues."
The light in the room was cold white, as sterile as the tile floors and walls.
In the far corner of the windowless room was the PCR machine-Genesis II, it was called. Genesis was a little high-tech box not much bigger than a stereo turntable, at the center of which were fifty uniform holes punched into aluminum stock to hold bullet-sized test tubes. There were wires and plastic programming keys. Cables connected the machine to computer monitors.
Kern found another key and knelt before the stainless specimen locker. "I'll get the samples out and you can set them in the machine. I think you know the procedure well enough."
Tomlinson said, "Sure, man. In fact, you want to go home to your wife, I think I can manage the wh amp;le thing. Except for maybe identifying the anomalous gene markers right off-"
"No kidding," Kern broke in dryly. "It only took me-what?- three or four years to get the hang of that."
"Hey, no doubt. It's a complicated gig. I'm not saying I don't need you, Kenny."
Kern took a rack containing twenty test tubes from the locker, stood, and said, "I know… I know. Same old Tomlinson. It gets to me, that's all."
"Like preparing the samples," Tomlinson said. "I didn't have a damn clue about that. Drilling to the bone cortex before taking samples. Doing all those little steps so neatly. Purifying, separating, all that stuff. Taking the strands and making them soluble in a water-based buffer. Like you said: Just add water, huh? Even from reading the books, I didn't know about any of that."
"The way you catch on to things so easily," Kern said. "That's what I mean." He was carrying the rack of test tubes across the room so carefully that the tubes might have been filled with hot tea. "It used to bother me. It did."
"Naw…"
"I don't mind being honest about it now. It's not a big deal anymore. Back in college, the way you always just cruised, but I had to work my ass off to keep up."
Tomlinson was surprised to hear that; a little saddened by it, too. "You were brilliant, man! Come on. Everybody said so."
"No, I'm gifted. And I'm a worker. At least, I was when I wasn't hanging out with you eating drugs." Kern was positioning test tubes in the Genesis machine as he talked, thinking in fragments as he did: Why am I telling this man these things? We were students together; now we're strangers… And maybe that's why…
Kern said, "But you, it was like you were born with a trillion bits of data and just needed your memory refreshed every now and then. Like writing all those papers for the journals when you were-what?-just a sophomore? Hell, I've got colleagues now who hold dinner parties when they're lucky enough to get published."
Tomlinson had the main computer on, checking the hardware before punching in the program they'd be using. "You think back, Kenny, you'll remember there was no cable television in those days. Sometimes a guy wakes up at three A.M. and just doesn't feel like watching static. And you always had that typewriter ready to go by the window. No shit, if we'd had 'Gilligan's Island' reruns back then, it woulda been a whole different story. The Skipper? Maryanne?" Hunched over the keyboard, Tomlinson snorted through his gauze mask. "My left hand pretended to be Maryanne so often that-when I hear the theme song?-the damn thing still jumps around like a cat. You shouldn't feel bad about that, Kenny."
"I don't. That's what I'm telling you. I look at what we ended up doing, the way we turned out. My life compared to your life." As the words left his mouth, Kern thought to himself, That's a damn cruel thing to say. Where is all this bitterness coming from? The pressure of running this damn department… the pressure of begging funds and grants every year… the strangeness of living with a woman I no longer even know… And he instantly felt miserable, wishing he could take it back. Wishing he could take back so many, many things.
But Tomlinson was nodding his head, dark goat's beard bobbing up and down as he threw an arm over Kern's shoulder and said, "Don't you be jealous about that, Kenny. You want to live on a sailboat, you should do it. This little bay where I'm anchored, Dinkin's Bay, there's plenty of room. I could introduce you around. Every day, when the fishing guides get back, we sit around the docks and drink beer. Me and this friend of mine… you'd like him. A dude named Ford. He's got a little lab, and he'd probably let you use it when you got the urge."
Kern touched the power button of the Genesis machine, and it began the slow work of cycling temperature up, then down, in preface to decoding the basic life structure of nineteen ancient lives. As he sat himself in the chair, Kern smiled a little and said softly, "Same old Tomlinson."
Four hours later, Tomlinson was taking a break. Sitting on the floor outside Room C, going through the papers he'd received from Ford that afternoon. Among the papers was the memoir of Do. d' Escalante Fontaneda, copied in the original archaic Spanish. In 1545, at the age of thirteen, Fontaneda had been shipwrecked off the southwest Florida coast and captured by the indigenous peoples-indios, or yndios, Fontaneda called them, though they later became known as the Calusa, or Caloosa, for they were dominated by a warrior chief the Spaniards called King Carlos. These were the people who had built the mounds.
Fontaneda lived among Carlos's people for seventeen years before he was finally rescued. Returned to Spain, he had produced the thin monograph from which Tomlinson's copy had been transcribed.
Through other reading, Tomlinson knew that Fontaneda had spent time on the mounds near what was now Mango-if not Mango itself, for it was possible that Mango had been that ancient nation's small capital, and home to Carlos. What Tomlinson wanted to determine was the approximate population of the Calusa in the year's Fontaneda had lived among them. Kern had hammered at the problem of crossbreeding, how it muddled up the genetic flags. Tomlinson hoped to present him with evidence that, year to year, the population of the Calusa was small, probably not more than a few thousand. Which meant there had to be a lot of inbreeding, generation after generation. To a geneticist, that would be good news. Maybe it would help renew Kern's interest in the project-the man seemed so irritable lately.
Legs crossed on the floor, Tomlinson translated as he read, going very, very slowly, sometimes checking other reference books to help him transcribe a line or a single unfamiliar word. Fontaneda had been a bright man, but he'd had little formal education because of the shipwreck, and, worse, he didn't have a writer's sense of sentence. The memoir was convoluted, a bear to read. So far, there had been no estimate of the population, only long lists of the food the Calusa ate (they were hunters and fishermen and divers, not farmers) and descriptions of the thatched common houses built atop the mounds-houses with woven walls upon which were hung the bizarre-looking masks of Calusa demons. It made Tomlinson smile, thinking that atop one mound a thatched house decorated with demons had been replaced by Tucker Gatrell's little ranch house with its rickety porch, brass spitoons, and empty beer bottles. Where the only demons on the wall were a few old photographs-one, a photograph of Marion Ford as a high school football player.
But then Tomlinson's attention vectored as he came to a surprising part in the memoir. The archaic Spanish began: "El Rio jordan que dizen Es bucion de los yndios…" Tomlinson translated the poor spelling as he read: "The River Jordan [the River of Life?] is a superstition of the Indians of Cuba, which they embrace because it is holy. Ponce de Leon, giving credence to the tale, went to Florida in search of that holy river so that he might earn greater fame and wealth… or so that he might become young from bathing in such a river. [Many kings and chiefs, Tomlinson guessed) sought the river which did this work, the turning of old men and women back to their youth. To this day they persist in seeking the water…"
Tomlinson stopped reading, amused. Every school child knew that Juan Ponce de Leon had been mortally wounded by the indigenous people of Florida. Probably by the Calusa, for the attack had occurred on the southwest coast. Sitting on the floor, Tomlinson imagined the pompous little Spaniard, his armor glinting, being rowed to shore, only to be confronted by the physically huge Calusa (not all accounts agreed, but at least some Franciscan priests took time from their religious diatribes to note the unusual size of the Calusa people). Maybe Juan Ponce had tried to land at what was now Mango. Wherever it was, the explorer who had helped destroy the lives of thousands of native people found death on that shore, not life.
Most interesting to Tomlinson was that Fontaneda, who had lived with the Calusa, said plainly that the belief in the River of Life had originated with indigenous peoples. Tomlinson had always assumed the story was one more assault by Hollywood on American history. Or had been invented by some superstitious Spaniard. But not this time. Fontaneda had lived it; he would know.
Tomlinson continued to read. There was more about the River of Life, so he made notes. He had just translated a portion of script that read: "… many people sought this place in the province of
Carlos, so they formed a settlement…" when Kern gave a muted call from inside Room C. "Tomlinson? Hey? Get your ass in here!"
Tomlinson swung the door open, to see Kern's face bright in the glow of the computer screen, his attention fixed. The man didn't even glance at him when he ordered, "Get your mask on; there's something I want to show you."
"You find something?"
"Get in here!"
Tomlinson returned, still tying on the gauze mask as he bent over Kern's shoulder. "What you got?"
Kern touched a gloved finger to the screen. "Take a look at this."
The fluorescent green pixels formed a scrolling line of vertical letters that read: TT-AA-TG-CT-TG-TA-GG-AC-AT-AA…
Kern highlighted the letters. "This sequence," he said. "The double T, double A, TG-CT-TG sequence. We're looking at a mitochondrion D loop. Do you know what that means?"
Tomlinson started to answer that he did know, but caught himself. He said, "Nope. What the hell is it?"
"Its characteristics are passed on only through female lines, and those characteristics vary rapidly from generation to generation. But ten of the last eleven specimens have had this exact sequence. There was a similarly unique sequencing in the HLA genes- which are passed on by both female and male. They might be the flags we're looking for. The genetic marker." Kern returned his attention to the screen. "These people must have been inbred all to hell, I'm telling you."
"It didn't help Juan Ponce de Leon."
"What?"
Tomlinson was following the scrolling screen. "I said, you know, the explorer. Ponce de Leon? All that inbreeding didn't help him. The people we have mushed up in the test tubes, they could have been the ones who killed him." That's the way Tomlinson thought of the specimens, as people. Tiny somnolent lives suspended in time but indifferent to the drops of water that had temporarily freed them. "And you found the same pattern in Joseph?"
Which was how they refered to the strands of DNA Kern had isolated from Joseph Egret's hair: Joseph. A test tube with a name, for it contained all the codes and biological keys that had choreographed the man's living form.
Kern said, "I haven't got to that yet. Joseph's still waiting." He turned to look at the lone test tube remaining in the rack, then looked at the digital clock on the desk. "That'll take. another two, three hours. And I've still got to do the remaining eight unknown specimens. We don't have a large-enough population as it is; we can't skip any."
Letting his enthusiasm hide his disappointment, Tomlinson said, "Oh yeah, for sure. We've got to do it right. And it is getting late. Let's go. I'll buy you a beer or two, then hit it again tomorrow afternoon. Oh… hey, wait-"
"Lab's closed," Kern said. "Tomorrow's Saturday."
"Exactly. That's just what I was going to say."
"Sunday, too. I'd have to explain why I wanted in."
"Whenever you can get to it, Kenny. I'll plan around you, and glad to do it, too."
Kern sat silently for a moment, looking at the clock but no longer thinking about the time. "You were hoping to be back in Florida by Monday, weren't you?"
"I booked the red-eye out for early Monday morning, just in case. But no big deal. I've already said that. There's this meeting I'd like to go to-I tell you about that? Yeah. But you can't hold discovery to a schedule. And you need to get home to your wife."
Kern tapped his fingers on the desk, looked at the screen again, then looked at the clock. Then he looked into Tomlinson's eyes, and he was reminded of something he had once pondered in college: How can such a happy man have such sad, sad blue eyes? Kenny Kern started to agree. It was much too late to continue. But then the words slipped out: "Hey, man. When's the last time we pulled an all-nighter together?"
Had he said that? Yes, undoubtedly. Kern recognized an old and almost forgotten energy in his own voice.
"You mean it?" Tomlinson had his hands on Kern's shoulders, shaking him a little, excited.
"Hell yes I mean it. But you know what we need?"
"Damn right, man." Tomlinson was almost shouting now. "Mescaline! Just a couple of blotters to add some nice backlighting. Keep us interested. Hey-" He stopped for a moment, scratching his head. "I don't even know where to buy that kind of stuff anymore. But beer-I know where to buy beer! They sell it almost everywhere!"
Kern had a high, dry laugh, as if he was having trouble getting air. He had almost forgotten what that sounded like, too. "No. No beer. Not in the lab, anyway. I need coffee. That's what I meant. You go get us some coffee. A lot of it. We've got eight or nine more hours of work to do."
Two nights later, Sunday night, Tomlinson found himself sitting in his rental car outside Musashi Rinmon's neat brownstone apartment. Dr. Musashi Rinmon, respected professor, the woman to whom he had once written poetry during their on-the-road hitchhiking and back-to-the-earth commune days. The woman who had popped in on him out of the blue decades later, and who was now the single working mother of their child-Nichola, a daughter. That's the way Musashi described herself: single-working-mother, saying it as if it was a one word declaration of pride, but tinged a little with anger, too.
Tomlinson sat at the wheel exhausted, bleary-eyed. The radio was on, AM, the tail end of a jazz program. He sat listening to the final set, trying to decide whether he should go up and see Musashi and Nichola. Say good-bye. Risk one last scene before he caught the early-morning flight back to Florida. Since Friday morning, he'd had-what?-maybe three hours' sleep. Which would have been okay if he'd had time to do his meditation, let his brain cells settle down and catch a whiff of universal energy. But he and Kenny Kern had been too hard at it for even that. All night Friday, then right into Saturday, and finally finishing late that afternoon. Kern broke only to call his wife, then again to hop into Tomlinson's rental car to track down food or a few beers for breakfast. The two of them sitting in the parking lot of a Circle K, the one just across from Joey's Used Car sales at the corner of Kennedy and Beacon. Little paper bags around their sixteen-ounce tall boys, giggling like kids and talking about old times. Then back to the lab and more work. "I lied about not being able to come in on Saturday," Kern had admitted. "You know, it's weird. I never used to lie much at all, back when I was a bum and not respectable. Now that I'm important, I find myself doing it all the time.
Hell, if I couldn't work on Saturdays and Sundays, I'd have no excuse for getting out of the damn house."
A lot of pain in the man, Tomlinson could hear it. A spirit as flawed and gray as the sky, which made him feel unwell, for, to Tomlinson, the pain of others was palpable as vapor and contagious as a virus. It seeped into his brain, then his soul. He didn't just empathize; he absorbed and shared. Tomlinson loved people for their faults-not because there was comfort in weakness but because flaws were the conduits of humanity.
"Kenny," Tomlinson had said, "I'm not being judgmental here-hell, you know me, man-but if you're unhappy with your wife… I mean… if you don't like her-"
"But I do like her," Kern had cut in. "See, that's the thing. I like her; I admire her; I respect the hell out of her. She's a good human being. I think I'm a good human being. But we don't… we just don't… it's like all the years and secrets we've shared have made us strangers. When you come to know the blood and bones of a person, there are no illusions left? Something like that. I can't explain it. Things just… changed."
"Check me if I'm wrong here, Kenny, but I get the feeling you're telling me you've called it quits. Given up. You can't be afraid of change, man-"
"Me? Hah, that's a laugh." Sitting beside him in the rental car, Kern had drained his beer, then crushed the can. "Look at yourself, Tomlinson. I mean it. Go look in the mirror. At least I hung in there and tried to change. I'm still trying in some ways. But you still look like you did in 1969. Just older, that's all. And you wonder why you're having trouble relating to Musashi?"
That had stuck with Tomlinson all day, even when they were working, even as they finally got Joseph's DNA sequencing up on the computer screen. You still look like you did in 1969. And you wonder why you're having trouble relating to Musashi!
Back in his motel room, Tomlinson had stood naked in front of the mirror, taking an interest in his own appearance for the first time in
… how long? Since back in high school, maybe. He couldn't remember. He had touched his own long hair, holding a length of it out in front of his eyes to see. Golden hair sun-bleached blond, and the cells at the very tips of the hair could be ten, fifteen years old. He rarely even trimmed it. Not like his beard, which he kept neat. Well, sort of neat… oh, hell, his beard was a mess, too, and Tomlinson wondered why he had grown the thing in the first place.
Well, maybe Kenny had been right…
Tomlinson had stepped out of the motel bathroom to check the clock by the bed-he didn't own a watch-and saw that it was half past eight. In a city this size, even on a Sunday, there should be a clothing store open somewhere. He stood and thought for a moment, then said aloud, "I wonder if they still sell Nehru jackets?" Then, in a rush, he had dressed and driven to the nearest shopping center-Walden Mall-where a salesman persuaded Tomlinson that a gray silk Brooks Brothers was better suited to both his dignity and the current decade.
Tomlinson was a little disappointed. He had always wanted a Nehru jacket.
Later, he shopped for a hairstylist. But the only thing he found open was a little place in Boston's industrial section called Benny's Quick Cut. There, a startled man in a blue smock studied Tomlinson's scraggly hair and beard for a moment, grinned as he recovered his composure, and said, "I'd do this one for free, buddy!" And he waved him into the old Koken barber's chair.
Now it was nearing midnight, and Tomlinson sat outside Musa-shi's apartment building, wondering whether he should go in and say good-bye.
He would, of course. That's why he'd done the shopping. But he wanted to gather his spiritual reserves first. Didn't want to face the woman while negative vibes still controlled his spirit. Finally, he stepped out of the car and walked up the steps to the door, where he took a deep breath, straightened his tie, touched the doorbell, and waited.
No answer.
He was about to touch the button again when he remembered that the bell didn't work. So he tapped on the door, three soft raps, then knocked a little harder when no one answered.
The door swung open on its own.
Tomlinson stepped into the apartment, worried that something was wrong. But then he saw the empty champagne bottles on the counter, the two empty wineglasses, the ELECT JOHN NIIGATA signs in a stack on the floor, the CONGRATULATIONS JOHN! banner tacked to the wall, and Tomlinson knew it was okay. Musashi had had a little party and forgot to lock the door. Probably a private celebration-her man had won last Tuesday. Tomlinson already knew that.
He felt uneasy standing in her apartment. Japanese pen drawings on the walls; screens made of rice paper; shelves with rows of books. It was Musashi's private space, and it was wrong to invade that space without invitation. But then he began to wonder whether she was home. It was so quiet. There was a light on over the sink and a night-light in the bathroom. That was all. Even Nichola's little room, down the hall to the left, looked dark.
She's my daughter, Tomlinson thought. If she's here, I should check on her.
He crossed the carpet to the hall, past the master bedroom… then stopped. Through the wedge of open doorway, he could see the outline of Musashi's sleeping face. Beside her was a man, a black-haired man with, a neat black beard.
Tomlinson touched his own bare face, now so smooth after his visit to the barber.
Damn it. I shaved for nothing!
In his abdomen, deep within, he felt a growing spasm of jealousy. It was so abrupt and strong, he stepped away from the door in an attempt to dull the feeling. He stood in the dark hallway, breathing slowly, rhythmically, wanting the hurt to fade, wanting to access the calm that was at the very core of him.
I have no right to be angry. I've been wrong all along. Kern could have been describing Musashi instead of his own wife: She's a good human being. All she has been trying to tell me is that I have no claims on her life.
Quietly, very quietly, Tomlinson reached out and pulled the bedroom door closed, then entered Nichola's room. His daughter lay beneath soft blankets, asleep. There was a night-light plugged into the wall-a plastic bird in flight-and just seeing the infant's small form, asleep, at peace, caused Tomlinson to sag a little at the weight of the love he felt.
"Little daughter, my dearest child…" He whispered the words as he bent to kiss her: tiny warm creature, butt hunched up beneath the covers, blond curls, with little wrinkled hands that grasped and held his big fingers reflexively. "Somehow, we will work this out. I promise."
He turned quickly then and fixed the lock on the open apartment door, pausing briefly when he thought he heard the whispered words "Good-bye, Tomlinson." He hesitated, looking toward Musashi's bedroom. Had he imagined her voice, or had the words been muted by plasterboard and dry-wall?
He choked out a reply: "My loves… good-bye," then stood motionless in a silence too repellent to endure.
Quickly, he stepped out onto the stairway and closed the door behind him.
Outside, the city night was as cold as the leaf-strewn concrete. Above the haze of sodium lights, scudding clouds gave the illusion of a few frail stars adrift in a wind that, to Tomlinson, seemed to blow right through him.
He started the car and drove numbly toward the airport, his small suitcase on the backseat, the sheath of lab results in a ma-nila envelope on the seat beside him. Musashi's apartment was miles behind before he realized the radio was still on. The jazz program had been replaced by a talk show, the volume turned so low that it could not pierce the roar of Tomlinson's own thoughts. He reached to touch the radio's scan button, but then something that was familiar about one of the voices caused him to pause.
Oh, it was Larry King, the interviewer. Tomlinson turned the volume up and sat back to listen. If he no longer had the power to still his own thoughts, perhaps he could divert them.
King was saying, "… who claims to have made a startling discovery, is our guest this hour on the Mutual Broadcasting Network. He's controversial, eclectic-you may have seen him on CNN a few nights ago with newswoman Margaret Lowery. We have him on the phone, live from his home. Before the break, you were talking about some of the famous people you have known-"
The next voice Tomlinson heard was even more familiar: "Yep, I knew 'em all. Well, most of 'em that come to fish this coast of Florida. I was telling you about the fat one, the rich man from Hollywood."
Tomlinson leaned forward and whispered, "Good God, that's… Tucker Gatrell!"
"I'll remember his name in a minute-"
"Samuel Goldwyn? Louis B. Mayer?" Larry King was always so helpful.
"That's it! He's the one! Mr. King, he says to me, he says, 'Boy, go fetch me a cup of water.' That's just what he said, Mr. Louie B.
Mayer, the moviemaking man. 'Boy'-called me that on my own boat. So I says to him, 'Boy? Boy! I hope to hell you said Roy.' Hah! Then I says, 'How'd you like to go home and tell Clark Gable some boy just whupped your fat butt to a frazzle? After that, he didn't want to use me in the movies no more."
Tomlinson began to smile… then he began to laugh… laughed until the tears came and he was no longer certain whether he was laughing or crying.
On the radio, Tucker was saying to Larry King, "… what you ought to do is come on down. Hell, I got plenty a room at my ranch. Sleep in my bed, if you want-I slept in barns before, by God, and liked her fine. See for yourself this little town of mine ain't so little no more. Fact, thanks to nice people like you, Mango's getting bigger by the minute…"