One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 61

SATURDAY: HAWTHORNE, Nevada, to Boise, Idaho. Four hundred forty-nine miles. Mostly wasteland, bright sun, but an easy haul.

A cloud of vultures circled something dead in the desert half an hour south of Lovelock, Nevada. Though intrigued, Preston Mad-doc decided against a side trip to investigate.

They stopped for lunch at a diner in Winnemucca.

On the sidewalk outside the restaurant, swarms of ants were feeding on the oozing body of a fat, crushed beetle. The bug juice had an interesting iridescent quality similar to oil on water.

Taking the Hand into a public place was risky these days. Her performance on Friday, in the coffee shop west of Vegas, had been unnerving. She might have gotten what she wanted if the waitress hadn't been stupid.

Most people were stupid. Preston Maddoc had made this judgment of humanity when he'd been eleven. In the past thirty-four years, he'd seen no reason to change his mind.

The diner smelled of sizzling hamburger patties. French fries roiling in hot oil. Bacon.

He wondered what the beetle ooze smelled like.

Several men were sitting side by side on stools at the lunch counter. Most were overweight. Chowing down jowl to jowl. Disgusting.

Maybe one of them would have a stroke or heart attack during lunch. The odds were good.

The Hand led them to a booth. She sat next to the window.

The Black Hole settled beside her daughter.

Preston sat across the table from them. His fair ladies.

The Hand was grotesque, of course, but the Black Hole actually was fair. After so many drugs, she ought to have been a withered hag.

When her looks finally started to go, they would slide away fast. Probably in two or three years.

Maybe he could squeeze two litters out of her before she'd be too repulsive to touch.

On the windowsill lay a dead fly. Ambience.

He consulted his menu. The owners ought to change the name of the establishment. Call it the Palace of Grease.

Naturally the Black Hole couldn't find many dishes to her taste. At least she didn't whine. The Hole was in a cheerful mood. Coherent, too, because she seldom used heavy chemicals before the afternoon.

The waitress arrived. An ugly wretch. The walleyed, pouchy-cheeked face of a fish.

She wore a neatly pressed pink uniform. Elaborately coiffed hair the color of rat fur, with a pink bow to match the uniform. Carefully applied makeup, eyeliner, lipstick. Fingernails manicured but clear-coated, as if they were something sweet to look at, as if her fingers weren't as stubby and ugly as the rest of her.

She was trying too hard to look nice. A hopeless cause.

Bridges were made for people like her. Bridges and high ledges. Car tailpipes and gas ovens. If she ever phoned a suicide hot line and some counselor talked her out of sucking on a shotgun, she'd have been done a disservice.

They ordered lunch.

Preston expected the Hand to appeal to Fish Face for help. She didn't. She seemed subdued.

Her performance the previous day had been unnerving, but he was disappointed that she didn't try again. He enjoyed the challenge posed by her recent rebellious mood.

While they waited for their food, the Hole chattered as inanely as always she did.

She was the Black Hole partly because her psychotic energy and her mindless babble together spun a powerful gravity that could pull you toward oblivion if you weren't a strong person.

He was strong. He never shied from any task. Never flinched from any truth.

Although he conversed with the Hole, he remained less than half involved with her. He always lived more inside himself than not.

He was thinking about the Gimp, brother to the Hand. He had been thinking about the Gimp a lot lately.

Considering the risks that he had taken, he'd not gotten enough satisfaction from his last visit with the boy in the Montana woods. Everything had happened far too quickly. Such memories needed to be rich. They sustained him.

Preston had more elaborate plans for the Hand.

Speaking of whom: Nonchalantly, almost surreptitiously, she slowly swept the diner with her gaze, obviously looking for something specific.

He noticed her spot the restroom sign.

A moment later she announced that she needed to use the toilet. She said toilet because she knew the term displeased Preston.

He'd been raised in a refined family that never resorted to such vulgarities. He far preferred lavatory. He could endure either powder room or restroom.

The Hole stood, allowing her daughter to slide out of the booth.

As the Hand got clumsily to her feet, she whispered, "I really gotta pee."

This, too, was a slap at Preston. The Hand knew that he was repulsed by any discussion of bodily functions.

He didn't like to watch her walk. Her deformed fingers were sickening enough. He continued exchanging stupidities with the Hole, thinking about Montana, tracking the Hand with his peripheral vision.

Abruptly he realized that under the RESTROOMS sign, another had indicated the location of what she might really be seeking: PHONE.

Excusing himself, he got out of the booth and followed the girl.

She had disappeared into a short hall at the end of the diner.

When he reached that same hall, he discovered the men's lavatory to the right, the women's to the left. A pay phone on the end wall.

She stood: ii the phone, her hack to him. As she reached for the receiver with her warped hand, she sensed him and turned.

Looming over her, Preston saw the quarter in her good hand.

"Did you find that in the coin return?" he asked.

"Yeah," she lied. "I always check."

"Then it belongs to someone else," he admonished. "We'll turn it in to the cashier when we leave."

He held out his hand, palm up.

Reluctant to give him the quarter, she hesitated.

He rarely touched her. Contact gave him the creeps.

Fortunately, she held the coin in her normal hand. If it had been in the left, he would still have been able to take it, but then he wouldn't have been able to eat lunch.

Pretending that she had come here to use the lavatory, she went through the door marked GALS.

Maintaining a similar pretense, Preston entered the men's lavatory. He was grateful it wasn't in use. He waited inside, near the door.

He wondered who she'd intended to phone. The police?

As soon as he heard her exit the women's restroom, he returned to the hall, as well.

He led her back to the booth. If he had followed her, he would have had to watch her walk.

Lunch arrived immediately after they were seated.

Fish Face, the ugly waitress, had a mole on the side of her nose. He thought it looked like melanoma.

If it was melanoma and she remained unaware of it even for a week or so, her nose would eventually rot away. Surgery would leave her with a crater in the center of her face.

Maybe then, if the malignancy hadn't gotten into her brain and killed her, maybe then she would at last do the right thing with a tailpipe or a gas oven, or a shotgun.

The food was pretty good.

As usual, he didn't look at his companions' mouths while they were eating. He focused on their eyes or looked slightly past them, studiously avoiding the sight of their tongues, teeth, lips, and masticating jaws.

Preston assumed that occasionally someone might look at his month while he chewed or at his throat as he swallowed, but he forced himself not to dwell on this. If he dared think much about it, he would have to eat in private.

During meals, he lived even more inside himself than he did at other times. Defensively.

This posed no problem for him, required no special effort. His major at Yale and then at Harvard, through his bachelor's and master's and doctoral degrees, had been philosophy. By nature, philosophers lived more inside themselves than did ordinary people.

Intellectuals in general, and philosophers in particular, needed the world less than the world needed them.

Throughout lunch, he upheld his end of a conversation with the Hole while he recalled Montana.

The sound of the boy's neck snapping.

The way the terror in his eyes darkened into bleak resignation and then had clarified into peace.

The rare smell of the final fitful exhalation that produced the death rattle in the Gimp's throat.

Preston left a thirty-percent tip, but he didn't surrender the quarter to the cashier. He was certain that the Hand hadn't found the money in the pay phone. The coin was his to keep, ethically.

To avoid the government-enforced blockade of eastern Nevada, where the FBI was officially searching for drug lords but was — in his opinion — probably covering up some UFO-related event, Preston turned north from Winnemucca, toward the state of Oregon, using Federal Highway 95, an undivided two-lane road.

Fifty-six miles inside Oregon, Highway 95 swung east toward Idaho. They crossed the Owyhee River, and then the state line.

By six o'clock, they arrived at a campground north of Boise, Idaho, where they hooked up to utilities.

Preston bought takeout for dinner. Mediocre Chinese this time.

The Black Hole loved rice. And though she was wired again, she was nevertheless still compos mentis enough to eat.

As usual, the Hole directed the conversation according to her interests. She required always to be the center of attention.

When she mentioned new design ideas for carving her daughter's deformed hand, he encouraged her. He found the subject of decorative mutilation stupid enough to be amusing — as long as he avoided looking at the girl's twisted appendage.

In addition, he knew that this talk terrified the Hand, though she hid her fear well. Good. Fear might eventually burn away her delusion that she had any hope of a normal life.

She had chosen to thwart her mother by shrewdly playing along with this demented game. Listening to the Black Hole enthuse about going at her with scalpels, however, she might begin to realize that she had not been born to win any game, least of all this one.

She had come out of her mother broken, imperfect. She was a loser from the moment that the physician slapped her butt to start her breathing instead of mercifully, discreetly smothering her.

When the time arrived for him to take this girl into the forest, perhaps she would have come to the conclusion that death was best for her. She should choose death before her mother could carve her. Because sooner or later, her mother would.

Death was her only possible deliverance. Otherwise, she would have to endure more years as an outsider. Life could hold nothing but disappointment for someone so damaged as she.

Of course, Preston didn't want her to be entirely pliable and eager to die. A measure of resistance made for memories.

Dinner finished, leaving the Hand to clean the table, he and the Hole took evening showers, separately, and retired to the bedroom. Eventually, reading In Watermelon Sugar, the Hole passed out. Preston wanted to use her. But he couldn't discern whether she'd been hammered by drugs into deep unconsciousness or whether she was just sleeping soundly.

If she were merely sleeping, she might awaken in the middle of the action. Her awareness would ruin his mood.

Waking, she would be enthusiastic. She knew that the deal they had made didn't permit her active participation in physical intimacy. Yet she would be enthusiastic nonetheless.

The deal: The Hole received everything that she needed in return for this one thing that Preston wanted.

He was mildly nauseated by the thought of her enthusiasm, her intimate bodily participation. He had no desire to witness the functions of anyone.

And he was loath to be observed.

When suffering from a head cold, he unfailingly excused himself to blow his nose in private. He didn't want anyone to hear his mucus draining.

Consequently, the prospect of having an orgasm in the presence of an interested partner was distressing if not unthinkable.

Discretion was underrated in contemporary society.

Uncertain as to the nature and reliability of the Hole's current state of unconsciousness, he turned off the light and settled on his own side of the bed.

He contemplated the babies that she would bring into the world. Little twisted wizards. Ethical dilemmas awaiting firm resolutions.

SUNDAY: BOISE TO NUN'S LAKE. Three hundred fifty-one miles. More-demanding terrain than what Nevada had offered.

Usually he didn't hit the road until nine or ten o'clock, with the f Black Hole still abed, the Hand awake. Although they were seeking a close encounter, their mission wasn't as urgent as it was dramatic.

This morning, however, he hauled the Prevost out of Twin Falls at 6:15 A.M.

Already the Hand was dressed, eating a granola bar.

He wondered if she had discovered that all the knives and sharp utensils had been removed from the galley.

He remained convinced that she lacked the guts to stab him in the back while he drove the motor home. In fact he didn't believe that she would prove capable of making a serious effort to defend herself when the two of them were alone in the moment of judgment.

Nevertheless, he was a careful man.

North out of the broad chest of Idaho into the narrow neck, they passed through spectacular scenery. Soaring mountains, vast forests, eagles in flight.

Every encounter with Nature at her most radiant gave rise to the same thought: Humanity is a pestilence. Humanity doesn't belong here.

He could not be counted as one of the radical environmentalists who dreamed of a day when a virulent plague could be engineered to scour every human being from the earth. He had ethical problems with the systematic extermination of an entire species, even humanity.

On the other hand, using public policy to halve the number of human beings on the planet was a laudable goal. Benign neglect of famines would delete millions. Cease the exportation of all life-extending drugs to Third World countries where AIDS raged epidemic, and additional millions would pass in a more timely fashion.

Let Nature purge the excess. Let Nature decide how many human beings she wished to tolerate. Unobstructed, she would solve the problem soon enough.

Small wars unlikely to escalate into worldwide clashes should be viewed not as horrors to be avoided, but as sensible prunings.

Indeed, where large totalitarian governments wished to expunge dissidents by the hundreds of thousands or even by the millions, no sanctions should be brought against them. Dissidents were usually people who rebelled against sensible resource management.

Besides, sanctions could lead to the foment of rebellion, to clandestine military actions, which might grow into major wars, even spiral into a nuclear conflict, damaging not just human civilization but the natural world.

No human being could do anything whatsoever to improve upon the natural world — which, without people, was perfect.

Few contributed anything positive to human civilization, either. By the tenets of utilitarian ethics, only those useful to the state or to society had a legitimate claim on life. Most people were too flawed to be of use to anyone.

Soaring mountains, vast forests, eagles flying.

Out there beyond the windshield: The splendor of nature.

In here, behind his eyes, inside where he most fully lived, waited a grandeur different from but equal to that of nature, a private landscape that he found endlessly fascinating.

Yet Preston Claudius Maddoc prided himself that he possessed the honesty and the principle to acknowledge his own shortcomings. He was as flawed as anyone, more deeply flawed than some, and he never indulged in self-delusion in this matter.

By any measure, his most serious fault must be his frequent homicidal urges. And the pleasure he took from killing.

To his credit, at an early age, he recognized that this lust for killing was an imperfection in his character and that it must not be lightly excused. Even as a young boy, he sought to channel his murderous impulses into responsible activities.

First he tortured and killed insects. Ants, beetles, spiders, flies, caterpillars.

Back then, everyone seemed to agree that bugs of all kinds were largely a scourge. Perhaps the ultimate grace is to find one's bliss in useful work. His bliss was killing, and his useful work was the eradication of anything that creeped or crawled.

Preston hadn't been environmentally aware in those days. His subsequent education left him mortified at the assault he had waged on nature when he'd been a boy. Bugs do enormously useful work.

To this day, he remained haunted by the possibility that he had known on some deep level that his activities were unethical. Otherwise, why had he been so secretive when pursuing his bliss?

He'd never bragged about the spiders crushed. The caterpillars dusted with salt. The beetles set afire.

And without quite thinking about it, all but unconsciously, he had escalated from insects to small animals. Mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, birds, rabbits, cats.

The family's thirty-acre estate in Delaware provided a plenitude of wildlife that could be trapped for his purposes. In less fruitful seasons, his generous allowance permitted him to get what he needed from pet stores.

He seemed to spend his twelfth and thirteenth years in a semi-trance. So much secretive killing. Often, when he made an effort at recollection, those years blurred.

No justification existed for the wanton destruction of animals. They belonged on this world more surely than people did.

In retrospect, Preston wondered if he hadn't been perilously close to losing control of himself in those days. That period held little nostalgic value for him. He chose to remember better times.

On the night following Preston's fourteenth birthday, life changed for the better with the visit of Cousin Brandon, who arrived for a long weekend in the company of his parents.

A lifelong paraplegic, Brandon depended on a wheelchair.

In Preston's inner world, where he lived far more than not, he called his cousin the Dirtbag because, for almost two years between the ages of seven and eight, Brandon had required a colostomy bag until a series of complex surgeries ultimately resolved a bowel problem.

Because the mansion boasted an elevator, all three floors were accessible to the disabled boy. He slept in Preston's room, which had long been furnished with a second bed for friends on sleepovers.

They had a lot of fun. The Dirtbag, thirteen, possessed a singular talent for impersonation, uncannily reproducing the voices of family members and employees on the estate. Preston had never laughed so much as he had laughed that night.

The Dirtbag fell asleep around one o'clock in the morning.

At two o'clock, Preston killed him. He smothered the boy with a pillow.

Only the Dirtbag's legs were paralyzed, but he suffered from other conditions that resulted in somewhat diminished upper-body strength. He tried to resist, but not effectively.

Having recently recovered from a protracted bout with a severe bronchial infection, the Dirtbag's lung capacity might not have been at its peak. He died much too quickly to please Preston.

Hoping to prolong the experience, Preston had relented a few times with the pillow, giving the Dirtbag an opportunity to draw a breath but not to cry out. Nevertheless, the end came too soon.

The bedclothes had been slightly disarranged by the boy's feeble struggle. Preston smoothed them.

He brushed his dead cousin's hair, making him more presentable.

Because the Dirtbag died on his back, as he always slept, there was no need to reposition the body. Preston adjusted the arms and the hands to convey the impression of a quiet passing.

The mouth hung open. Preston firmly closed it, held it, waited for it to lock in place.

The eyes were wide, staring in what might have been surprise. He drew the lids shut and weighted them with quarters.

After a couple hours, he removed the coins. The lids remained closed.

Preston switched off the lamp and returned to his bed, burying his face in the same pillow with which he had smothered his cousin.

He felt that he had done a fine thing.

During the remainder of the night, he was too excited to sleep soundly, although he dozed on and off.

He was awake but pretending to oversleep when at eight o'clock, the Dirtbag's mother, Aunt Janice — also known as the Tits — rapped softly on the bedroom door. When her second knock wasn't answered, she entered anyway, for she was bringing her son's morning medicines.

Planning to fake a startled awakening the instant that the Tits screamed, Preston was denied his dramatic moment when she made only a strangled sound of grief and sagged against the Dirtbag's bed, sobbing as softly as she had knocked.

At the funeral, Preston heard numerous relatives and family friends say that perhaps this was for the best, that Brandon had gone to a better place now, that his lifelong suffering had been relieved, that perhaps the parents' heavy grief was more than balanced by the weight of responsibility that had been lifted from their shoulders.

This confirmed his perception that he had done a fine thing.

His endeavors with insects were finished.

His misguided adventures with small animals were at an end.

He had found his work, and it was his bliss, as well.

A brilliant boy and superb student, the top of his class, he naturally turned to education to seek a greater understanding of his special role in life. In school and books he found every answer that he wanted.

While he learned, he practiced. As a young man of great wealth and privilege, he was much admired for the unpaid work he performed in nursing homes, which he modestly called "just giving back a little to society in return for all my blessings."

By the time that he went to university, Preston determined that philosophy would be his field, his chosen community.

Introduced to a forest of philosophers and philosophies, he was taught that every tree stood equal to the others, that each deserved respect, that no view of life and life's purpose was superior to any other. This meant no absolutes existed, no certainties, no universal right or wrong, merely different points of view. Before him were millions of board feet of ideas, from which he'd been invited to construct any dwelling that pleased him.

Some philosophies placed a greater value on human life than did others. Those were not for him.

Soon he discovered that if philosophy was his community, then contemporary ethics was the street on which he most desired to live. Eventually, the relatively new field of bioethics became a cozy house in which he felt at home as never before in his life.

Thus he had arrived at his current eminence. And to this place, this time.

Soaring mountains, vast forests, eagles flying.

North, north to Nun's Lake.

The Black Hole had resurrected herself. She settled in the copilot's chair.

Preston conversed with her, charmed her, made her laugh, drove with his usual expertise, drove north to Nun's Lake, but still he lived more richly within himself.

He reviewed in memory his most beautiful killings. He had many more to remember than the world realized. The assisted suicides known to the media were but a fraction of his career achievements.

Being one of the most controversial and one of the most highly regarded bioethicists of his day, Preston had a responsibility to his profession not to be immodest. Consequently he'd never brag of the true number of mercies that he'd granted to those in need of dying.

As they sped farther north, the sky steadily gathered clouds upon itself: thin gray shrouds and later thick thunderheads of a darker material.

Before the day waned, Preston intended to locate and visit Leonard Teelroy, the man who claimed to have been healed by aliens. He hoped that the weather wouldn't interfere with his plans.

He expected to find that Teelroy was a fraud. A dismayingly high percentage of claimed close encounters appeared to be obvious hoaxes.

Nevertheless, Preston ardently believed that extraterrestrials had been visiting Earth for millennia. In fact, be was pretty sure that he knew what they were doing here.

Suppose Leonard Teelroy had told the truth. Even suppose the alien activity at the Teelroy farm was ongoing. Preston still didn't believe the ETs would heal the Hand and send her away dancing.

His "vision" of the Hand and the Gimp being healed had never occurred. He'd invented it to explain to the Black Hole why he wanted to ricochet around the country in search of a close encounter.

Now, still chatting with the Hole, he checked the mirror on the visor. The Hand sat at the dinette table. Reading.

What was it they called a condemned man in prison? Dead man walking. Yes, that was it.

See here: Dead girl reading.

His real reasons for tracking down ETs and making contact were personal. They had nothing to do with the Hand. He knew, however, that the Black Hole would not be inspired by his true motives.

Every activity must somehow revolve around the Hole. Otherwise, she would not cooperate in the pursuit of it.

He had figured that this healing-aliens story would be one that she would buy. Likewise, he had been confident that when at last he killed her children and claimed they had been beamed up to the stars, the Hole would accept their disappearance with wonder and delight — and would fail to recognize her own danger.

This had proved to be the case. If nature had given her a good mind, she had methodically destroyed it. She was a reliable dimwit.

The Hand was another matter. Too smart by half.

Preston could no longer risk waiting until her tenth birthday.

After he visited the Teelroy farm and assessed the situation there, if he saw no likelihood of making contact with ETs, he would drive east into Montana first thing in the morning. By three o'clock in the afternoon, he would take the girl to the remote and deeply shaded glen in which her brother waited for her.

He would open the grave and force her to look at what remained of the Gimp.

That would be cruel. He recognized the meanness of it.

As always, Preston forthrightly acknowledged his faults. He made no claim to perfection. No human could honestly make such a claim.

In addition to his passion for homicide, he had over the years gradually become aware of a taste for cruelty. Killing mercifully— quickly and in a manner that caused little pain — had at first been immensely satisfying, but less so over time.

He took no pride in this character defect, but neither did it shame him. Like every person on the planet, he was what he was — and had to make the best of it.

All that mattered, however, was that he remained useful in a true and profound sense, that what he contributed to this troubled society continued to outweigh the resources he consumed to sustain himself. In the finest spirit of utilitarian ethics, he had put his faults to good use for humanity and had behaved responsibly.

He reserved his cruelty strictly for those who needed to die anyway, and tormented them only immediately before killing them.

Otherwise, he quite admirably controlled every impulse to be vicious. He treated all people — those he had not marked for death— with kindness, respect, and generosity.

In truth, more like him were needed: men — and women! — who acted within a code of ethics to rid an overpopulated world of the takers, of the worthless ones who, if left alive, would drag down not merely civilization with all their endless needs, but nature as well.

There were so many of the worthless. Legions.

He wanted to subject the Hand to the exquisite cruelty of seeing her brother's remains, because he was annoyed by her pious certainty that God had made her for a purpose, that her life had meaning she would one day discover.

Let her look for meaning in the biological sludge and bristling bones of her brother's decomposed body. Let her search hopelessly for any sign of any god in that reeking grave.

North to Nun's Lake under a darkening sky.

Soaring mountains, vast forests. Eagles gone to roost.

Dead girl reading.