Conspiracy Theory(20)

“I’m going into the house,” Tony said. “There’s no point standing around out here. That’s what we hired the extra help for. You ought to come in yourself before you catch the flu and lay yourself out for a couple of weeks.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Charlotte said.

And then, everything got strange. The new car pulled up at the curve. The next two queued behind it. The sky was very clear and very black. People began getting out, women in ball gowns, men in dinner jackets. Tony turned his back to them and headed for the front door.

Charlotte felt light-headed and sick to her stomach. Maybe I’m coming down with something already, she thought, and then Tony twisted backwards and he was in the air. His feet came right off the ground. One of the newly arrived women put her hand out to steady him. It was as if he had slipped on some ice and needed to be protected from a fall. Tony put his hand out too, but not to the woman, not to anybody, just out into the air and the dark and the cold and the nothing at all.

A second later, Tony Ross’s face exploded into a mess of blood and skin and bone, and everybody started screaming.





9


At 8:15, Father Tibor Kasparian got off the bus at the corner of Cavanaugh and Welsh, pulled his collar up around his neck, and started walking the five blocks home. The bus stop was not on what he thought of as Cavanaugh Street proper. The real neighborhood didn’t begin for another block, although it might, someday, with the way they’d all been expanding. He put his hands in his pockets and chided himself for not taking a cab. He always had enough money for cabs these days, and taking the bus one time would not give him enough spare change to really help out at Adelphos House. Besides, he was helping out at Adelphos House. He had just committed himself, the church, and the Ladies Guild to one thousand hours of volunteer work, manning phones, packing and delivering food baskets, serving in the soup kitchen, organizing mailings. It was hard to know what else he or the women of Cavanaugh Street could do. He was impressed with Anne Ross Wyler’s forays into the red-light district. He remembered a time in his own life when he had been willing to go places and do things that put him in direct physical danger, and thought nothing of it, because what he wanted to do was so very important to the world. Now he did not feel that way about anything, and it made him guilty. How can they live the way they do and not be ashamed of themselves? he had wondered, back in Armenia, when all he’d really known about America was what he saw in the movies. Now he knew the answer. He wasn’t ashamed of himself either. It was easier than he’d ever realized to drift through every day unaware that there were people hardly an arm’s-length away who needed more than you had to give. They got too complacent, Americans. Now that he was an American, he got complacent with them. He wrapped his arms around his body and told himself not to be ridiculous. He might be rich by Armenian standards, but it was nothing here. Most Americans would consider him a relatively poor man—“middle class” the way they all were, but at the lowest rung of middle class, without a home he owned, without a car. It wasn’t the luxury that had gotten to him but his age, and it did no good to tell himself that Anne Ross Wyler was no more than two years younger than he was. Maybe he just wasn’t making sense anymore. Maybe he should give up the superfluous things, the walk-in shower, the good coat, the hot and cold running books that lined every wall of his apartment. Maybe he should just accept the fact that he was not a saint, and that Anne Ross Wyler was, in spite of the fact that she had a sign up in her bedroom that said Freedom From Religion. He’d lived long enough to know that saints came in every conceivable package, including atheist ones.

The newsstand on Lida and Gregor’s block was still open. Father Tibor had to remind himself that it wasn’t even nine o’clock. The night was so dark, it felt later. His heart was dark too. He went in and said good evening to the incommunicative man who was the only person he had seen inside this store in the six months since Michael Bagdanian had sold it and moved to Florida. He’d tried a few times to strike up a conversation, to find out the man’s name and where he came from, but he’d never been able to do it. Even Lida hadn’t managed to do it, and she’d brought a huge plate of honey cakes for bait. Ti-bor got some change out of his pocket and picked up a bedraggled copy of the New York Times. He got the Philadelphia papers delivered every day. He didn’t much like news magazines, because they were too preachy. Lately, he didn’t much like CNN, either, because it seemed to have become one long commercial for pop music. Why was it that Americans had so many television stations and all of them were alike, more commercial than content, as if life was about nothing but buying things? Tibor had actually liked commercials when he’d first come to the States. He’d spent so long living in a place where there was nothing to buy and no point in advertising it, commercials had been a novelty. Now it was not so much the commercials he minded as the noncommercial commercials that ate up everything else: the five minutes of every half hour on Headline News devoted to movies and CD albums; the incredible clutter of hype on AOL’s version 7.0 that was one flashing huckster cry after another; the “sponsorship” announcements on PBS that were commercials in everything but name. Even the advertisements in newspapers and magazines had gotten bigger and brighter and worse. He had only been a United States citizen for four years, but he had been careful to vote in every election he was eligible to vote in. He knew that the United States government could not ban advertising, because it would be a suppression of free speech. He still thought he’d vote for any candidate that promised to do something about it, if only to provide every citizen with special viewing glasses that would block out the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes on the breakfast table in the latest sitcom and the banter about Coke and Pepsi in the hot new dramatic series that everybody praised for its “realism.” Seriously, Tibor thought, in real life, people do not argue about Coke and Pepsi. Maybe he ought to stop watching television and change his ISP to something that did not belong to a company that not only owned half the planet, but was trying to sell it.