Third Interlude Gwen, Under the Shadow
Third Interlude
Gwen, Under the Shadow
They got a twenty-year-old Rackham student to Podomaquassy Hospital in the midmorning. She had gone over the front of her
skateboard, trying to grind the rail on the bike path, and smashed her skull in. Gwen didn’t think Amanda French was going
to graduate from Rackham College now. If Amanda was lucky, she might graduate from soft foods to solids someday, assuming
she could figure out how to use a fork and knife again, but Gwen wouldn’t have bet on it.
Gwen held her hand in the back of the ambulance while it ran reds, forced traffic out of its way, and swerved around potholes.
Amanda had a mask clapped to her face to keep her blood oxygen rich and reduce the danger of hypoxia. The big neck brace buckled
around her throat was literally keeping her head screwed on straight. That head was capped in bandages, although her pretty
brown curls hung out from beneath the gauze. They were lathered with a creamy red shampoo of her own blood, dripping onto
the floor.
Amanda’s eyes found hers. The pupil in one eye was a pinprick. The pupil in the other was an enormous tunnel looking into darkness . . . into the Long Dark, maybe.
“Hold—hold—hold—hold—” she said, over and over again, unable to find the next word in the sentence.
“I got you, darlin’,” Gwen said. “I’m right here. Gave yourself a little bump on the head, but we’re going to take care of
you.”
She had always known she would be good at this part of it, and she was. She could meet the eyes of the maimed and the dying
and find her smile for them. She spoke to them like a school nurse putting the Band-Aid on the scrape, letting them know from
the warmth in her voice and the kindness in her eyes that all would be well, they would be ready to climb on the monkey bars
again tomorrow.
Amanda said, “Hold—hole—hole—” and then she stiffened and went silent, and Gwen looked at the heart monitor to see if they
were about to lose her.
When Gwen looked back into Amanda’s face, the young woman was staring at her with an unnerving calm. “It’s not a hole. It’s
a trap. One of them isn’t coming out. I can’t see which one because it’s dark in the hole, it’s so dark. The human carcass
is a sheath and every soul a sword. You already have the blade you need.” Her mouth went slack and she began to shudder in
the grip of a seizure, heels kicking against the slippery plastic of the gurney’s thin mattress.
But by then they were at the hospital. They got her out at speed and passed her off to a pair of male nurses who had come
out to meet them. Gwen had a hard time letting go of Amanda’s hand. She felt that as long as she could hold on to Amanda’s
hand, she could keep her breathing. Gwen yelled information at the nurses, told them to stick her with adrenaline, that they
would lose her if they didn’t get the pressure off the brain in the next few minutes, all things they already knew. Then Amanda
was gone, wheeled away into the depths of the ER.
There was nothing for them to do after that, and Gwen was tired.
The others were too: Ben Hammermill, who had been in the back with her, and Julius Roth, who had been behind the wheel.
It took something out of you, trying to keep a dying person alive.
They made their way to the break room together.
Ben had blood up to his wrists and wanted to wash.
Julius propped open the door to the parking lot and sat in it to smoke a cigarette.
Gwen wanted a cup of tea and to sit alone for a bit.
Maybe if they stuck around, they’d hear if Amanda made it.
She dropped onto one end of a sofa upholstered in leatherette, patched with strips of duct tape. A nurse sat at the other
end with her shoes off, painting her toenails. The smell of the varnish—astringent, chemical—made Gwen lightheaded.
“Well,” Julius said, from his position in the open door. The cigarette wobbled off his lower lip, still unlit. “Look at it
this way. The worst part of the day is behind us.”
Gwen nodded wearily.
On CNN they cut to New York City, where a passenger plane had smashed into one of the Twin Towers.
2.
Colin patted a hand against his chest and said, “That one was on me, guys. I have to own it.”
Snow fell outside in fat heavy flakes. Silence seemed to fall with it, hushing the world.
It was the first time they had been together since they had stood around Van’s grave, holding hands. They had collected in
the study at The Briars, just fourteen hours into the new year: Colin and Arthur, Donna and Allie, and Gwen herself.
Arthur wore a peacoat and a Nepalese smoking hat and looked like he had never laughed in his life.
He had a well-kept beard, thicker than ever, to compensate for the lack of hair on his head, and gold-framed spectacles.
They were all wearing coats except for Colin.
He was just back from the West Coast, had landed the afternoon before in his personal Gulfstream, and the heat was only just coming up in the house.
Still, Colin didn’t seem to mind the chill, had on gray denims and a white waffle-knit cashmere Henley.
Gwen had read an article about him in Fast Company, and apparently he had a closet full of white Henleys and iceberg-colored skinny jeans. It was all he ever wore now. He said
it was one less decision to make and that it was important to avoid decision fatigue. Gwen didn’t get it. How tired did it
make you to pick out a sweater? Did he wear the waffle-knits to the beach? To weddings? What about if you were eating spaghetti?
It was shit, trying to get red sauce out of white cashmere.
“What are you talking about?” Arthur said.
“Nine Eleven,” Colin said. “Bin Laden’s been on our Enemies List for years, but he never got to the top. I never took him
seriously. He took a pass at the World Trade Center a few years ago, with a bomb in a truck, and to be honest, I thought it
was laughable. We all did. Like trying to burn down the White House with a pocket lighter. I figured when Clinton went after
him in ’98, it was only to make people look away from the whole Monica Lewinsky thing—”
“Fucker,” Donna spat. “Sleazy fucker. Not that she didn’t want it. Monica. She couldn’t wait to get down on her knees and suck his dick. At least he didn’t have her bumped
off. Like some of the others.”
Everyone went silent for a moment. It came to Gwen that they were waiting for Van to reply—no one had been better than Van at responding to Donna’s mouth and Donna’s rage.
But the days of Van fencing with his sister were behind them now, and Donna had grown accustomed to sharing her angriest thoughts with a receptive audience.
She recorded an AM radio show out of Portland now, three days a week.
It had been picked up all over the country.
A lot of stations ran her right after Rush Limbaugh, and some days she did better numbers than him.
She was even, Gwen had learned, coming out of satellites somehow.
People listened to her on something called XM radio that was broadcast all over the world.
The thought was faintly alarming: Donna McBride’s hate being fired down upon the earth from outer space, like a sci-fi death ray.
“No one is to blame for 9/11,” Allie said, “except for the men with box cutters who were on the planes.”
Colin shook his head, but he didn’t seem distressed. He spoke of the whole matter as if he had gone to the supermarket to
get eggs and had somehow come home without them.
“It won’t bring a single person back to get him now. But it might prevent us from getting mired down in Afghanistan. After
we finish him, we’ll want to turn our focus to Iraq. We can’t undo 9/11, but maybe we can stop it from happening again. Saddam
is working to get enriched uranium from Nigeria . . . he may already have enough to build seven bombs. The intel on that is
unshakable. So we’ll do Osama this year—an unfortunate but necessary makeup call—and next year we can send the iguana after
key members of Saddam’s—”
“No,” Donna said.
They all stopped again. Colin smiled at her in a puzzled sort of way.
“Donna, why wouldn’t we go straight after Bin Laden?” Colin asked her, his voice gentle. “After what he did? Innocent people
leapt from the towers to escape the flames behind them. Innocent people held hands to jump together.”
“I don’t know how innocent they were,” Donna said. “They elected a sexual predator. Clinton won New York by how many points?
They all voted for him.”
Gwen couldn’t take it. “I love you, girl, I do, but I never heard such a pile of trash. That creepy Bin Laden motherfucker
burned a few thousand people alive. Now it’s his turn. I never felt less guilty about sending King Sorrow after anyone. Let’s
cook his ass and call it a good day’s work.”
“It’s not a vote. It’s my turn to pick. You didn’t take a vote when you decided to kill Colin’s grandfather, Gwen.”
Gwen felt her stomach knot, as if she had gulped down her whiskey all at once. It was a cheap shot, and like a lot of cheap
shots, it struck hard. Allie stroked Donna’s hand, as if she were the one who had just absorbed a blow.
“I think Donna needs to feel what she needs to feel,” Allie said.
“Arthur? Want to jump in here? Any thoughts?”
Arthur held his tumbler in one hand. The whiskey had caught some of the wan afternoon sunshine, and as he rocked the glass
back and forth, the light dashed this way and that. “Yeah. I think I miss Van.”
Donna’s chin wrinkled as she struggled down a convulsion of emotion. Her eyes brightened but didn’t spill. Arthur didn’t look
at her but went on studying his glass.
“Yes,” Colin said. Gwen thought he sounded almost irritable. Had she ever heard Colin irritable about anything? “So do I.
Every day. But I was asking about the question before us. We have to choose who dies next. I’m of the mind we need to act
together, now, to wipe out a monstrous evil.”