Gwendy’s Final Task

13

“WHAT—” GWENDY BEGAN, MEANING to finish with either are you doing here or is wrong with you, she didn’t know which, and Farris didn’t give her time.

He put a finger to his lips and whispered: “Hush.” He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. “Don’t wake your husband. Outside.”

He struggled to his feet, swayed, and for a moment she was sure he was going to fall. Then he caught his balance, breathing hard. Inside his cracked lips—and were those fever blisters on them?—she saw yellowish teeth. Plus gaps where some were missing.

“Under the table. Take it. Hurry. Not much time.”

Under the table was a canvas bag. She hadn’t seen that bag since she was twelve, forty-five years ago, but she recognized it immediately. She bent down and picked it up by the drawstring top. Farris walked unsteadily to the kitchen door. There was a cane leaning beside it. She would have expected such a fabulous being—someone straight out of a fairy tale—to have a fabulous walking stick, maybe topped with a silver wolf’s head, but it was just an ordinary cane with a curved handle and a scuffed rubber bicycle grip over the base. He leaned on it, fumbled for the doorknob, and almost fell again. Black suitcoat, black jeans, white shirt: those garments, which had once fitted him with casual perfection, now bagged on him like cast-off duds on a cornfield scarecrow.

She took his arm (so thin under the coat!) to steady him and opened the door herself. That door and all the others were locked when she and Ryan left, and the burglar alarm was set, but now the knob turned easily and the alarm panel on the wall was dark, not even the message WAITING in its window.

They went out on the screened back porch, where the wicker furniture hadn’t yet been taken in for the cold season. Richard Farris tried to lower himself into one of the chairs, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate and instead he just dropped, letting out a pained little grunt when his butt hit the cushion. He gasped a couple of times, stifled a cough with his sleeve (which was caked with the residue of many previous coughs), then looked at her. His eyes were the same, at least. So was his little smile.

“We need to palaver, you and me.”

It wasn’t what he’d said the first time she met him; close, but no cigar. Back then he’d said they ought to palaver. Needing to, she thought, takes it to a whole new level.

Gwendy shut the door, sat down in the porch swing with the canvas bag between her feet, and asked what she would have asked in the kitchen, had he not reminded her that she had a husband upstairs.

“What’s wrong with you? And why are you here?”

He managed a smile. “Same Gwendy, right to the point. What’s wrong with me hardly matters. I’m here because there’s been what that little green fellow Yoda would call ‘a disturbance in the Force.’ I’m afraid I must ask you—”

He began to cough before he could finish. It racked his thin body and she thought again how like a scarecrow he was, now one blown about on its pole by a strong autumn wind.

She started to get up. “I’ll get you a glass of wa—”

“No. You won’t.” He brought the spasm under control. Coughing that hard should have raised a flush in his cheeks, but his face remained dead pale. His eyes were set in dark circles of sick.

Farris fumbled in his suitcoat and brought out a bottle of pills. He started to cough again before he could get the cap off and the bottle dropped from his unsteady fingers. It came to rest against the drawstring bag. Gwendy picked it up. It was a brown pharmacy bottle, but there was no information on the label, just a series of runes that made her strangely dizzy. She closed her eyes, opened them again, and saw the word DINUTIA, which meant nothing to her. The next time she blinked, the dizzying runes were back.

“How many?”

He was coughing too hard to reply but held up two fingers. She pushed the cap off and brought out two small pills that looked like the Ranexa her father took for his angina. She put them in Farris’s outstretched hand (there were no lines on it; the palm was perfectly smooth), and when he popped them in his mouth, she was alarmed to see tiny beads of blood on his lips. He swallowed, took a breath, then another, deeper one. Some color bloomed in his cheeks, and when it did she could see a little of the man she’d first met on Castle View, near the top of the Suicide Stairs, all those years ago.

His coughing eased, then stopped. He held out his hand for the bottle. Gwendy looked inside before putting the cap on. There were only half a dozen pills left. Maybe eight. He returned the bottle to his inner coat pocket, sat back, and looked out at the darkened backyard. “That’s better.”

“Is it heart medicine?”

“No.”

“A cancer drug?” Her mother had taken both Oncovin and Abraxane, although neither of them looked like the little white pills Farris had taken.

“If you really must know, Gwendy—you were always curious—there are many things wrong with me and they’re all crowding in at once. The years I was forgiven—there have been many—are rushing back like hungry diners into a restaurant.” He offered his charming little smile. “I’m their buffet.”

“How old are you?”

Farris shook his head. “We have more important things to talk about, and my time is short. There’s trouble, and the thing inside that canvas bag is responsible. Do you remember the last time we spoke?”

Gwendy does, vividly. She was at Portland South Airpark, sitting on a bench while Ryan went to park the car. Her luggage, including the button box in her carry-on bag, was piled around her. Richard Farris sat down and said they should palaver a spell before they were interrupted. And so they did. When the palaver was done, the button box was gone from her bag. Presto change-o, now you see it, now you don’t. And the same was true of Farris himself. She had turned her head for a moment, and when she looked back, he was gone. She’d thought then she would never see him again.

“I remember.”

“Twenty years ago that was.” He kept his voice low, but the rasp was gone, his fingers were no longer trembling, and his color was good. All just for the time being, Gwendy thought—she had nursed her mother through her last illness, and her father was now in slow but steady decline. Pills could only do so much, and for so long. “You were a lowly House of Representatives back-bencher then, one among hundreds. Now you’re gunning for a seat of genuine power.”

Gwendy gave a quiet laugh. She was sure Richard Farris knew a great deal, but if he thought she was going to beat Paul Magowan and ascend to the United States Senate, he understood jack shit about Maine politics.

Farris smiled as if he knew exactly what she was thinking (an uncomfortable idea, which didn’t make it wrong). Then the smile faded. “The first time you had the box, your proprietorship lasted six years. Remarkable. It’s passed through seven sets of hands just since that day at the airport.”

“The second time I had it was barely the blink of an eye,” Gwendy said. “Long enough to save my mother’s life—I still believe that—but not much longer.”

“That was an emergency. This is another.” Farris toed the canvas bag between her slippered feet with an expression of distaste. “This thing. This goddamned thing. How I hate it. How I loathe it.”

Gwendy had no idea how to reply to that, but she knew how she felt: scared. Her mother’s old saying came to mind: this is NG.

“Every year it gains power. Every year its ability to do good grows weaker and its ability to do evil grows stronger. Do you remember the black button, Gwendy?”

“Of course I do.” Speaking through numb lips. “I used to call it the Cancer Button.”

He nodded. “A good name for it. That’s the one with the power to end everything. Not just life on Earth but Earth itself. And each year the proprietors of the box feel a stronger compulsion to push it.”

“Don’t say that.” She sounded watery, on the verge of tears. “Oh please, Mr. Farris, don’t say that.”

“Do you think I want to?” he asked. “Do you think I even want to be here, tasking you with this—excuse the language—this fucking thing for a third time? But I have to, Gwendy. There is simply no one else I trust to do what needs to be done, and no one else who may—I say may—be able to do it.”

“What is it you want me to do?” She would find out that much, at least, and then decide. If she could, that was; if he left the button box with her, she’d be stuck with it.

No, she thought, I won’t. I’ll weight the bag with rocks and throw it into Castle Lake.

“Seven proprietors since the year 2000. Each held it a shorter time. Five committed suicide. One took his whole family with him. Wife and three kiddos. Shotgun. He kept telling the police negotiator ‘the box made me do it, it was the button box.’ Of course they had no idea what he was talking about because by then it was gone. I had it back.”

“Dear God,” Gwendy whispered.

“One is in a mental asylum in Baltimore. He threw the button box into a crematorium furnace. Which did no good, of course. I committed him myself. The seventh, the last, only a month ago … I killed her. I didn’t want to, I was responsible for what she became, but I had no choice.” He paused. “Do you remember the colors, Gwendy? Not the red and the black, I know you remember those.”

Of course she remembered. The red button did whatever you wanted, for good or ill. The black one meant mass destruction. She remembered the other six just as well.

“They stand for the continents of the earth,” she said. “Light green, Asia. Dark green, Africa. Orange, Europe. Yellow, Australia. Blue is for North America and violet is for South America.”

“Yes. Good. You were a quick study even as a child. Later you may not be, but if you fight it … fight it hard, for all you’re worth …”

“I’m not following you.” Gwendy thought that the effect of the pills he’d taken was beginning to wear off.

“Never mind. The last proprietor was a woman named Patricia Vachon, from Vancouver. She was a schoolteacher working with mentally disabled children, and like you in many ways, Gwendy. Levelheaded, strong-willed, dedicated, and with a moral fiber that went bone-deep. Rightness as opposed to righteousness, if you see what I mean.”

Gwendy did.

“If existence is a chess game, with black pieces and white ones, Patricia Vachon stood firmly on the side of the white. I thought she might even be the White Queen, as you once were. Patricia had lovely dark skin, but she was of the white. The light. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Gwendy wasn’t very good at the kind of chess played on a board, Ryan always beat her on the occasions when she let him talk her into a game, but she had been very good at real-life chess during her years in the House of Representatives. There, she was always thinking three moves ahead. Sometimes four.

“I thought she was perfect,” Farris continued. “That she’d be able to take care of the box for years, perhaps even until we were able to decide how to dispose of it once and for all.”

“We? Who is we?”

Farris paid no attention. “I was wrong. Not about her, but about the box. I underestimated its growing power. I shouldn’t have, not after what happened to the others who came after you, Gwendy, but the Vachon woman seemed so right. Yet in the end the box destroyed her, too. Even before I put a bullet in her head, she was destroyed. I’m responsible.”

Tears began to trickle down Farris’s seamed cheeks. Gwendy observed them with incredulity. He was no longer the man she knew. He was …

Broken, she thought. He’s broken. Probably dying.

“She was going to push the black button. She was struggling mightily—heroically—against the impulse, but she actually had her thumb on it when I shot her. And pushing down. Luckily, one might say providentially, the buttons are hard to push. Very hard. As I’m sure you remember.”

Gwendy certainly did. The first time she tried to push one—it was the red button, as a kind of experiment—she thought they were dummies and the whole thing was a joke. It wasn’t, unless you considered the hundreds dead in the South American country of Guyana as a joke. How much of the Jonestown massacre was actually her fault she still didn’t know, and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“How did you get there in time to stop her?”

“I monitor the box. Every time it’s used, I know. And usually I know when the proprietor is even thinking of using it. Not always, but there’s another way I can keep track.”

“When the levers are pulled?”

Richard Farris smiled and nodded.

There were two levers, one on each side of the box. One dispensed Morgan silver dollars, uncirculated and always date-stamped 1891. The other dispensed tiny but delicious chocolate animals. They were hard to resist, and Gwendy realized that made them the perfect way to monitor how often the proprietor was using the box. Handling it. Picking up its … what? Cooties? Germs? Its capacity to do evil?

Yes, that.

“Proprietors who pull the levers too frequently to get the chocolates or the dollars raise red flags. I knew that was happening with the Vachon woman, and I was disappointed, but I thought I had more time to find another proprietor. I was wrong. When I reached her, she had already pushed one of the other buttons. Probably just to take the pressure off for a little while, poor woman.”

Gwendy felt cold all over. The hair on the back of her neck stirred. “Which one?”

“Light green.”

“When?” Her first thought was of the Fukushima disaster, when a tsunami caused a Japanese nuclear reactor to melt down. But Fukushima was at least seven years ago, maybe more.

“Near the end of this October. I don’t blame her. She held on as long as she could. Even while her thumb was on that light green button, trying to overcome a compulsion too strong to resist, she was thinking, Please, no explosion. Please no earthquake. Please, no volcano or tidal wave.”

“You heard this in your head. Telepathically.”

“When someone touches one of the buttons, even the lightest caress, I go online, so to speak. But I was far away, on other business. I got there as quickly as I could, and I was in time to stop her before she could push the one you call the Cancer Button, but I was too late to stop her from pushing the Asia button.”

He ran a hand through his thinning hair, knocking his little round hat askew, making him look like someone in an old-time musical about to start tap-dancing.

“This was just four weeks ago.”

Gwendy spun her mind back, trying to think of a disaster that had occurred in one of the Asian countries during that timespan. She was sure there’d been plenty of tragedy and death, but she couldn’t think of a mega-disaster strong enough to displace Donald Trump from the lead story on the evening news.

“Maybe I should know, but I don’t,” she said. “An oil refinery explosion? Maybe a nerve gas attack?” Knowing either would be too small. Things like the red button handled the small stuff.

Jonestown, for instance.

“It could have been much, much worse,” Farris said. “She held back as well as she could, and against mighty forces from the black side of the board. But it’s bad enough. Only two people have died so far, one of them the owner of what in Wuhan Province is called a wet market. That’s a place where—”

“Where meat is sold, I know that.” She leaned forward. “Are you talking about a sickness, Mr. Farris? Something like MERS or SARS?”

“I’m talking a plague. Only two dead now, but many more are sick. Some are carrying the disease and don’t even know it. The Chinese government isn’t sure yet, but they suspect. When they do know, they’ll try to cover it up. As a result it’s going to spread. It’s going to be very, very bad.”

“What can I do?”

“That’s what I’m going to tell you. And I’ll help, if I can.”

“But you’re—”

She doesn’t want to finish, but he does it for her. “Dying? Oh yes, I suppose I am. But do you know what that means?”

Gwendy shook her head, for a moment thinking of her mother, and a night when they looked up at the stars.

Farris smiled. “Neither do I, dear girl. Neither do I.”