Intermission

I worked the midnight shift last night, slept until noon and had to go back to work, so I won't get a chance to post the next Triggermen chapter till tomorrow. But I have to say, having not looked at these pages for a couple years, I'm having a lot of fun revisiting it here.

Meanwhile I'm almost done listening to Larry Brown's final novel The Rabbit Factory on audio. With gas going for four bucks a gallon one of the last remaining pleasures of driving is listening to a good book over a matter of weeks. I've lived with his characters for over a month now and I'll be sorry to say goodbye to them.

I've also just acquired the soundtracks to Ratatouille and The Incredibles by Michael Giacchino, who also does the music to Lost and a lot of other cool things. He's the new Danny Elfman and I love his stuff. If The Triggermen was a movie, he'd definitely be doing the soundtrack.

The Triggermen - Chapter Four

For your entertainment, a serialized novella available only here on the Scary Parent.


Chapter Four


In the next twenty minutes, three more planes fall out of the sky.

After the jet that goes down in the direction of Hershey, one drops farther off to the south, perhaps five miles away. By that time the crowds of people in what remain of Boone’s condo community are staring up with the blanched, seasick expressions of spectators at some apocalyptic fireworks display, watching the expanse for whatever will come next. The shock of what’s happening has not yet worn off, and it will still be fifteen minutes before the first mass panic begins.

The next plane is even more distant, just a glint in the eastern horizon. Somebody in the crowd points to it and said, “There’s one,” and there’s another boom. The third crash is almost as far off, this time in the direction of Middletown. As it falls, Boone hears a man’s voice say, “Jesus, that one went down right over TMI.”
Three Mile Island, ten miles from here. More than anything, that’s what does it. Standing far behind the flame-crackling condo with his brother and Mara Wilson, Boone feels panic broadening around him from an eddy to a whirlpool into a maelstrom, a terrible, sloping sense of danger without any perceivable limit. The same panic ripples through the crowd around him. TMI is safe, has been safe since the 70s, but the reassurances of local authorities suddenly mean little as thick black and gray smoke starts pouring upward in the sky, from the direction of the reactors.

Somewhere across the green, a woman shrills, “Get out of my way!” She slams into Boone from behind, clacking his teeth together and knocking him to his hands and knees in the warm grass. Sitting up, he sees it is none other than Lois Crane, she of the bronze velour and neighborly haranguing, car keys already in hand, sprinting faster than Boone has ever seen her move, across what remains of the common area. Her hips wobble furiously in her pantsuit. She cuts through the line of firefighters, around the fire—it has now consumed the entire block of condos—evidently heading toward the parking lot on the other side and the Jeep she keeps parked there. She bought the Jeep a year ago, after her beleaguered husband’s death (privately Boone has always suspected the poor bastard offed himself), and subsequent life insurance policy, allowed her to quit her job and devote all her time to being everyone’s least favorite pain in the ass.

Lois’ flight seems to trigger an almost physical spasm of realization among the residents of Stone Cliff. All at once, people whose condos are still on the safe side of the development begin backing up, a tide of bodies moving in a loose but unified wave. Boone watches them running back to their houses now, or going directly to their cars in the lot on the other side. He already hears engines starting, people shouting at each other, swearing, screaming, a woman squalling, “Just get your brother and get in the car!” Almost simultaneously, two children on two opposite sides of the common begin to cry in high, frightened voices.

He looks down at Andy, who is still standing perfectly still next to Mara, his face still queerly expressionless. “My car keys,” Boone hears himself say. “They were in the house.”

Mara gives him an appalled look. “Why is everybody running?”

“They think Three Mile Island got hit,” he says. “But if it did—”

“What?”

“It won’t make any difference now. It’s too late.”

“Boone, what’s happening?”

“I’m not sure.” Of course there’s only one idea in his mind, and she gets it out before he does.

“It’s terrorists, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.” But this sounds so much like an obvious lie to tell a child that he can’t keep himself from adding, “Probably, I guess.”

“What are we going to do?” she asks, clutching her backpack with both hands. “I want my mom.”

“Come on.” He grabs Andy’s hand and gestures Mara in the direction of his retreating neighbors. On the far side of the lawn, just within the range of perceptible detail, Boone sees a silver-haired man in a pale green cabana shirt and khakis. The man is walking swiftly around the front of a white SUV, talking into a cell phone with the studied perseverance of a man who spends a great deal of time doing exactly this.

“Grant!” Boone shouts, pulling Andy and Mara with him. Mara is keeping pace with him easily but Andy lags, stiff-legged, unresponsive, practically staggering to keep up.

Grant St. Pierre glances up from his cell phone, with no recognition in his eyes. He is the real estate agent that sold Boone the condo here, six years ago, and a resident of the community as well. He and Boone often see each other driving up and down Oxford Court and give each other the wave.

“Listen,” Boone said, catching his breath, “can we ride out with you? My keys were in our house.”

“I’m headed west,” Grant says. His civilized gray eyes are fixed on the sky and never stop moving, though his voice is still relatively calm, and he sounds like he might actually remember who Boone is. “My daughter’s in Pittsburgh. I’m meeting her halfway there.”

“What did she say it’s like there?”

“The same. More planes down. They’re saying it’s nationwide.”

“What do you think it is?”

Grant still doesn’t look at him. “Some kind of attack. Somebody jamming the navigational systems or something. I heard one landed on the White House lawn. Probably bullshit but...” He opens the driver’s side door. “You can ride with me if you want but I’m not stopping till I find Jess.”

“Where does your mother work?” Boone asks Mara.

“The Hotel Hershey.”

“I’ll drop you at 422,” Grant says, “but I’m not going any further out of my way.” He doesn’t wait for Boone’s reaction before starting the engine, and Boone opens the back door so Mara could jump in.

“Andy, let’s go.” He shoves his brother into the back and climbs in next to him, still pulling the door shut as Grant swings the SUV around backward so fast the headachy smell of hot rubber comes seeping up through the floorboards. Around them the lot behind Grant’s part of the development has already become one gigantic circuit board of cars blasting their horns and trying to get around each other. Up ahead Boone sees traffic bottlenecked at the exit, people slamming bumpers and rear-ending one another, nobody waiting his or her turn.

“Hold on,” Grant says, reversing until they face the far end of the lot and the cornfield beyond it. He floors it, following the half-dozen other vehicles that have opted to drive overland through the field out to High Meadow Road.

“What that?” Boone says.

And then he sees. Across the field, through the cloud of dust kicked up by the cars, a long line of black vans have stopped to form a blockade in front of High Meadow Road. From here Boone can see a man in a long black leather coat and sunglasses standing on top of one of the vans. “Who the hell is that?”

Grant doesn’t reply, but Boone can feel him slowing down already. Two of the other cars driving through the field have also slowed, but the other two, a silver Taurus and a beige Jeep that looks fresh from the showroom, are still barreling straight at the row of vans, faster than ever. He doesn’t know who owned the Taurus, but he knows Lois Crane is behind the wheel of the Jeep. In what cannot possibly be mere happenstance, the Jeep’s gleaming bronze color matches her velour pantsuit perfectly.

That’s when the man standing on top of the van raises his rifle and brings the stock to his shoulder, siting down the scope at the oncoming cars.

The Triggermen - Chapter Three

A new and exciting way to waste time at work...continued...!

Chapter Three

The bedroom is empty, but the computer’s switched on, the monitor showing a cartoon clip of a man in a long black coat firing a high powered rifle, good old John Bard, the man who doesn’t count to ten. Boone has just enough time to register that the whining sound Andy complained about earlier is back, only this time it sounds as loud as a power drill over the low thunder of the fire outside.

“Andy!” Boone runs down the upstairs hallway to his own bedroom but it too is empty and the bathroom as well. At the last minute he stops and goes back into Andy’s bedroom to his closet and opens the door.

It takes a moment for his vision to adjust. Then he sees his brother crouched in the far corner, hands wrapped around his knees, eyes shut.

“Andy, thank God.” Boone crawls in and pulls him up in his arms, lugging his bulk out of the bedroom and down the stairs. By now the fire’s distant roar has become a steady, shapeless booming that makes the walls shake around them and he can feel the heat pressing against his face, filling his lungs as he breathes. He jumps off the last step and runs through the living room and out the back door, into the yard. The area behind the porch has been cleared—he can see people and firemen on the far side of the stream—and he keeps running, running.

“Are you okay?”

Andy doesn’t move, doesn’t nod, just stares blankly over Boone’s shoulder at their row of condos. The flames are halfway across now, engulfing the first three units, leaving only Boone’s and the one next to it. In another five minutes, the entire block will be on fire. If he hadn’t gone in when he did—

Boone makes himself stop thinking about it. Around him, firemen start spraying the blaze with big feathery blasts of water along with nearby condos that haven’t yet caught fire, in attempt to keep them from burning too. In the opposite direction, the fire in the jet’s ruined fuselage has gone down and he gets his first glimpse of the bodies of the passengers, black rows of burnt corn kernels still strapped in their seats. The reek of cooked flesh mixes with jet fuel and a veil of gagging smoke. Boone feels his stomach flip over. Hand plastered over his lips, he turns away but the vision clings to the inside of his lids like a nightmare he already senses will never truly fade from view.

Across the commons, beyond the burning trees and the boiling stream, his neighbors are out singly and in clusters, a masquerade ball of familiar faces glazed into unrecognizable fright-masks. Here is stolid, flat-assed, fifty-something Lois Crane, recently elected to the condo association board and a neighbor from three doors down, who routinely comes knocking on Boone’s door telling him when he needs to take down his holiday lights and bring in his recyclable containers. Now Lois stands alone like the totem pole of frigidity that she is, defrocked of all power, gazing at her burning home with the immigrant eyes of a woman without the right naturalization papers. Behind her, Amy Tatsumi and her husband Roy stand side-by-side with identical expressions of glazed disbelief. Amy is clutching a stack of scrapbooks while Roy holds their daughter Emily in his arms. He gives Boone a dull how-ya-doin’ nod.

Boone is worried about Andy. His brother’s breathing and doesn’t look hurt, his color is good and his heartbeat steady, but he hasn’t spoken or even moved his head since Boone rescued him from the closet. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Andy. It’s me, man, it’s Boone. Can you hear me?”

Still nothing, not even a nod. Off to the side of the common area Boone sees Mara Wilson, standing by herself with her arms crossed, cupping her elbows.
He puts his arm around Andy, leading him through the crowd to Mara. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Her voice is tight and scared, but she’s trying really hard to hide it. “Is Andy—”

“I think he’s all right. He’s not really talking.”

“Boone, do you have your cell phone? I want to call my mom.”

Boone shakes his head. “I don’t, but one of those guys could help us.” He nods at an EMT talking into a radio. “I’ll ask.”

Looking back on that particular moment, Boone thinks it’s probably the first time he noticed the black vans coming. They’re still off in the distance, on the far side of the cornfield that abutted Stone Cliff, traveling down High Meadow Road in a long convoy of shining black steel. It doesn’t necessarily strike him as out of the ordinary, compared to what was going on in front of him, though the detail does stick in his mind, and he will think of it later with a prophetic little chill.
“Hey, excuse me,” he says, approaching the EMT, the guy looking up at him with a distracted frown. He puts his hand on Mara’s shoulder. “Do you think somebody could have a look at my brother? I got him out of there but he’s in shock.”

“Ambulances are on their way.” The EMT isn’t even looking at him anymore. “Gonna need you to move all the way back to the far side of the development.”

Boone glances at Mara, standing there next to him scared out of her mind. “Is it possible for her to call her mother? She’s still at work.”

“Gotta keep the frequency clear. Emergency traffic only. Move on back.”

“But—”

The EMT shakes his head and walks away, bellowing something to one of his coworkers across the green. Boone kneels down and puts his arm around Mara. He hopes he sounds better than he feels. “It’s okay. We’ll find somebody with a cell phone.” He turns to Andy and squeezes his arm hard. “Andy, you need to talk to me here, all right?”

Andy doesn’t look at him, and doesn’t reply.

“Andy?”

His brother raises one hand and points up into the sky. Following his finger, Boone sees a commercial jetliner, blue and silver, descending with a stately, implacable massiveness over the eastern horizon in the direction of Hershey. Its shadow passes over all of them for just a moment, a flash of darkness like a bird across the sun.

“Oh my God,” Boone says.

The jet disappears behind the low hills and a moment later there comes a thunderclap that sends fresh fire into the high morning clouds.

The Triggermen - Chapter Two

An ongoing novella serialized here for your time-wasting enjoyment...


Chapter Two

The next thing Boone knows he’s sitting on the asphalt in his running shorts with two skinned knees and a long scrape that runs from elbow to wrist, staring down the long shallow green bowl of the common area to the flames and smoke rippling into the mid-morning air. He still can’t hear any sound at all, as if his ears are stuffed with cotton. What if I blew my eardrums out? is his first, stupid-selfish thought. Dear God, I’m supposed to be Pennsylvania’s answer to Waylon Jennings and I can’t hear music, what am I going to do?

Looking down, the first thing he sees that makes any sense is a child’s bicycle, lying crookedly on the pavement with the colored tassels tangled together. The tassels are familiar, the way they flap, and Boone realizes numbly that it is Mara Wilson’s bike. She was riding alongside him with her backpack on her back, saying something, when—

He looks up the road. Mara is crouching by the side of the road, her wire-thin eighth-grader’s body, dressed in khaki shorts and a white sleeveless top, bent over, carefully picking up the items that spilled out of her backpack, notebooks, pencils, sun block, her little palmtop computer, a Blackberry is what it’s called. Boone moves toward her, feeling like he’s floating along on a slowly melting block of ice.

“Hey,” he says, or tries to say. His voice is still inaudible to him. “Are you okay?”

She turns around and looks up, holding her palmtop in her hand. The right side of her face is scratched and covered with tiny bits of gravel from the road, but she doesn’t seem badly hurt. She blinks at him slowly, her large green eyes sharpening into focus. “Boone? What happened?”

He stares past her, unable to answer, until she turns around and looks in that direction too. Beyond the road in the distance, where his condo is, a roaring tornado of fire has risen up, cooking the air and warping the sky with heat. In the midst of the flames, Boone thinks he sees vast pieces of wreckage, burning twisted steel.

“Plane crash,” he says, and for the first time he’s able to hear his own voice, just a little. It doesn’t sound like him at all. It sounds like an answering machine version of himself: Boone isn’t here right now, please leave a message at the sound of the tone. “It came down right over there, I think. Just behind those houses.”

Looking at the fire, Mara’s face sags into a washed-out windsock of dismay. Her mouth opens and closes but she doesn’t appear to be speaking, or even making the effort. Boone thinks he see the colors of the fire painted faintly on her skin, or it might be the way the blaze has already imprinted itself on his retinas, or just his own simple shock. Does it matter? He feels as if his mind has been taken apart and reassembled by clumsy hands that left out a few crucial pieces, but even so, it takes only a moment longer for the realization of what happened to penetrate his stupor.

“Andy.” It’s the first word he fully hears himself say that sounds like him. “Andy’s back in the house.”

“I better get home,” Mara says, but as she steps forward to get her bike, a pickup truck comes tearing down the road in front of them, blasting its horn. An American flag flaps from its oversized aerial. Boone reaches out and grabs her by the shoulder, yanking her back at the last moment. The truck shoots past, less than five feet from where they stand. It runs over Mara’s bike, flattening it and spitting it out the back in a jangle of chains and broken spokes, without so much as slowing down.

Distantly, sirens begin to rise in the background. Boone doesn’t think they sound like typical fire engine sirens. They sound more like civil air alerts, drawn-out, slow-rising glissandos that repeat endlessly long after everybody who could’ve heard them is dead.

“Boone?” Tears shine in her eyes now. “What’s going on?”

He shakes his head. “Is your mom home?”

“I told you, she’s still at work. She works first shift today.”

“You should stay with me. You’ll have to run.”

Mara nods and they cut across the long stretch of common area, over the low rolling hills leading back toward the other side of the loop. As they get closer to the wall of fire, Boone begins to see pieces of the jet’s wreckage scattered in the grass around them, the pieces getting larger as they get closer, many of them still burning, like some infernal sculpture garden. One large metal shard is implanted directly in a rock. There are letters painted on the side of it in blistered white paint, but Boone can’t tell what they are. In truth he doesn’t look all that thoroughly.

Up ahead the trees are on fire, big oaks and maples blazing orange and red like autumn come early. The grass up there is brown, going on black. He can see the thin creek that runs through the common area behind his house. Part of the burning fuselage lies across it, and that portion of the creek is actually boiling, steam seething off its surface like mist. The bridge that runs across it, where he and Andy sometimes stood and threw pebbles into the water—that’s on fire too.

The sirens are getting louder now.

From somewhere up ahead a bald man comes running up to them, moving with a scrambling, panicked crookedness. He’s wearing a red T-shirt and as he gets closer Boone sees that the shirt was originally white. Both the man’s arms are missing, sheared off at the shoulder. Pale bits of flesh shiver from the tatters of the shirt, gleaming in the odd combination of light.

“What happened?” the man asks in a flat monotone, his eyes fixed on Boone. “I was watering my flowers. I saw a light. Did you see it? What was it?”

“Oh my God,” Mara says, clutching her mouth. “Oh my God, Boone—”

Boone catches the armless man just as he falls, the surprising weight of him almost bringing them both to their knees. The sirens he hears now are fire sirens, and when he turns around he sees a row of long red trucks coming down Oxford Court with their lights flashing. He can’t tell if they’re moving slowly or if that’s just his perception but the whole thing has a stagy, parade-like quality that makes the moment feel even less real, certainly less real than the bald man bleeding to death in his arms.

“Help!” Boone shouts, waving in the direction of the trucks. “Help, over here! Someone’s hurt! Help us!” Even as he says this, he’s looking at the fire in front of him. It’s spread across the first row of condos toward the units where he and Andy live, but he can’t tell exactly where the flames stop. Certainly Andy knows enough to get out as the fire got closer, but Boone wonders if Andy’s circuits would be fried by the immediacy of the thing, no previous experience to give it scale, no comparison available. He sees his brother standing in his bedroom, frozen in front of the window, as the fire creeps up the stairs pinning him against the far wall until the roof gives way.

The fire trucks don’t stop. They are still moving, circling around the far side of the condos that have already caught fire. No, Boone thinks, that’s not enough to take care of what’s happening here, not nearly enough—

Beneath him, the man with no arms lies on the grass, still trying to tell him about how he was watering his garden when he saw a light, and what happened? His chin goes up and down, the motion growing more mechanical until it looks like his teeth are chattering. Throughout it all, his eyes are fixed on Boone even as the awful, lacquered glassiness creeps up to envelope them like bad taxidermy.

“Just hold on,” Boone said, “hold on, they’re coming to help you, okay?” He sees now he’s going to have to leave the man, not in a minute, not in a little while but right now, because now he can see the fire from the wreck shifting northward, toward their condo. If Andy isn’t out by now then Andy is going to cook in there. Boone knows that with the clarity of a man in a corner he’s never been in before. You can’t talk to people about something like that but in the end it’s what makes the difference. The difference between what? You almost have to be standing at death’s door to look backward and see the real dimensions of it.

Across the gap between condos the first group of firemen, three or four men in long black coats and helmets, are charging toward him. Seeing them, Boone puts his hands underneath the armless man’s back and lifts him up. He wants the armless man to see that help is on the way, that these men are going to do their best to save his life, because the moment he perceives the armless man gets this, Boone fully intends to leave him here. Whatever his appreciation of the armless man’s current scenario—or Mara Wilson’s scenario for that matter—he is willing and able to walk away from both of them at this moment in order to ascertain the safety of his brother.

“Here they come,” he tells the armless man. “You’re going to be all right. See that? You’re going to be okay.”

The man gapes up at him, in all likelihood already gone. The last things in his face that hold color are his eyes and even they seem to dim, the sucked-out depths paling in increments to match the flesh surrounding them. His fish-gray lips move up and down one last time. They look as white as paper and the whiteness makes them look flat and the flatness makes them look dead.

Dropping him, Boone cuts across the last of the common area toward the blazing horror that has overtaken a full quarter of his world, the quadrant that consists of his life with Andy. He is fifty yards in front of the blaze, and from his new perspective he can see, thank God, that his condo was not yet burning. Theirs is an end unit, the last in a row of five. The townhouse on the far end is much closer to the jet’s wreckage. The broken tailpiece juts alongside it. It looks like those last units might be on fire, the flames spreading this way, rising as they come. But they haven’t reached here yet.

The roaring heat is intense, enough to dry his eyes and parch his lips. Running for the back porch where he was sitting earlier that morning with his guitar, Boone feels a hand taking hold of his shoulder. For some reason he’s sure it’s Mara.

“It’s okay!” he shouts, not looking around. “I’ll be right back.”

“You can’t go in there,” a man’s voice says.

Boone turns. One of the firemen grips him, a tall man in a yellow helmet with the face-shield reflecting Boone’s own face back at him. “My brother’s in there. This is my house!”

The fireman shakes his head and moves Boone away. “We’ll take care of it.”

Tearing free, Boone opens the back door and runs inside. Except for a low rumbling noise, and the increased heat, his house feels oddly peaceful—untouched by the chaos outside. His guitar is still leaning against the couch, the morning paper spread out next to his coffee cup on the kitchen table.

“Andy!” he shouts, running upstairs. “Andy, come on!” At the top of the steps he sees the other bedroom door closed, and Boone grabs the knob and swings it open. “Andy—”

The bedroom is empty.

The Triggermen

Other than my sister-in-law, I have no idea who reads these stories. But I do feel bad for starting that last story, posting two pages and then stopping. And I like the idea of free fiction online, posting a chapter a day for people to read while they're at work or just surfing around while the baby naps. I like putting something up that you know you can go back to for a couple weeks, if you want. The Triggermen is a long story I wrote a couple years ago. Due to its length, it's one of those neither-fish-nor-fowl stories...a novella, I guess. I hope it helps you kill some time at work.

Chapter One


Life as we know it comes to an end one fine Saturday in early May, not long after Boone Handler has given up trying to write a song. The morning air is warm and clear and Boone can hear kids playing on the far side of his condo development along with the rattle of a woodpecker and the staticky splutter of a single-engine plane doing circles above the nearby airport. All the sounds he can ask for, in other words, except the one he wants—the deceptively simple three-chord progression that woke him in the first place and drove him downstairs to make coffee and pick up his guitar.

It is a little after nine when, with a kind of inner shrug, Boone thinks what the hell and decides to go for his morning run. He is upstairs putting on his running shoes when Andy wanders into his bedroom, still in his pajamas, clutching his Sixers pillow sleepily to his chest. Andy’s blonde hair is sticking up in a bright yellow bird’s nest, his green eyes not quite open, and the whiskers on his face are badly in need of a shave. It has been a week. Boone makes a mental note to help him with that this very afternoon.

“Hey, bud,” Boone says, “I didn’t hear you get up. You want some breakfast?”

Andy shakes his head like a dog shaking off water. “Something’s wrong with the computer, Boone.”

“Oh yeah? What’s it doing?”

“Making noises,” Andy says. “Like, eeeeeeee. It woke me up.”

“Well, I’m going out for a run. I’ll have a look at it when I get back.”

“It doesn’t work,” Andy says. “I’ll show you.”

Sighing, Boone follows his brother across the hall. Andy is independent enough, but there are times when he needs something to be addressed right now, especially when it deals with the computer.

Boone bought him the laptop last summer. Since then Andy has spent an almost worrisome amount of time online, downloading music, burning CDs and soaking in untold hours of his favorite online show, The Triggermen. The Triggermen is an animated action show featuring the adventures of “the world’s most courageous underground anti-terrorist unit.” Andy loves The Triggermen with an awestruck reverence reserved for precious few things in life. Boone knows his brother sometimes leaves the web episodes running in a constant loop, even while he sleeps like a combination screensaver and nightlight. If he could, he told Boone, he’d watch The Triggermen in his sleep.

Stepping into Andy’s room, Boone walks past the immaculately organized shelves, CDs on top, graphic novels on the bottom. Next to the window overlooking the front driveway is a life-sized poster of a man in a long black leather cattleman’s coat with a high-powered rifle in each hand. This man is John Bard, former government agent and now head of the Triggermen, otherwise known as the world’s most courageous blah-blah-blah. Should the sneering lips, heavy-duty firepower and downright homicidal gleam in John Bard’s oddly gleeful eye not be sufficient, the word balloon floating over the man’s head sums up whatever might need clarification: “We have business, you and I,” the balloon says. “Pressing business.” It is his tagline and he says it almost every episode.

Boone bends over the keyboard and looks at the screen. He clicks on the icon for Internet Explorer and an error message pops up. At the same time the CPU begins making a high whining noise, a sound that reminds him rather unpleasantly of a dentist’s drill.

“That’s it,” Andy says. “That’s the noise!”

“Hold on. Let me check something.” Reaching around behind the CPU, Boone locates the cable line where it feeds into the communications bus. He disconnects it, tightens it again and tries the Explorer icon. This time the homepage springs up immediately, though the steady whine persists. After a moment the screen flickers and the noise goes away.

“You fixed it!” Andy grins. “You’re the best at computers!”

“Don’t tell Bill Gates that.”

Andy bursts out laughing and looks at him puzzled. “Who’s Bill Gates?”

“Nobody.” Boone turns and starts out. “Hey listen, I’m just going out, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, okay? You want waffles when I get back?”

“Sure, okay.” Andy has already started to type in slow, deliberate taps, then almost as an afterthought, he leaps up to plant a wet kiss on Boone’s cheek. “Thanks again, Boone.”

“No problem.” Heading downstairs, his cheek still moist with his brother’s kiss, Boone can hear the familiar Triggermen theme music cranked to maximum volume. Even through the laptop’s tinny speakers it sounds to his discerning ear like an electric guitar being played through the biggest pair of testicles on the planet.

He goes downstairs to stretch. As he steps outside, he hears a dog barking and a woman’s voice saying, very clearly, “Stop it, Ben,” but Ben only gives another hooting howl, triumphantly, louder than ever. Heading down the sidewalk toward the parking area, Boone begins to trot, working himself into an easy, open-handed jog. His cul-de-sac is connected to the larger loop of Oxford Court that runs through Stone Cliff Townhouse community in a large, lazy mile-long oval. For the last year since quitting smoking, he has tried to run the loop at least twice a week, sometimes more if the weather is warm enough. It clears his head and helps him focus. Focusing is something he’s had a lot of trouble with over the last year, as things have gotten ostensibly better for him and Andy.

Ever since their parents died, he’s taken care of his brother, working odd jobs and giving piano lessons to put money on the table while continuing to try to write music. Then, just eight months ago, after years of getting his hopes up and having them smashed, playing in bars and sending out demo tapes, Boone’s manager actually sold one of his songs, a mid-tempo rocker called “Red Dog,” to Tricia Yearwood for her latest album. Against all odds, the song became a hit, and the belated fairytale began for Boone Handler. The money started rolling in, the offers of work, of new opportunity. His manager wants him to move to Nashville, or better yet, LA. Boone has yet to discuss any of these things with Andy, but it is getting harder not to talk about it.

He is jogging around the first bend of the loop when he sees one of his former piano students, Mara Wilson, coming the other way on her bike, her backpack strapped over her shoulders. Mara is a pretty girl with long black hair and braces that only seem to bring out the winning sweetness of her smile. Once she gets older and the braces come off, Mara isn’t just going to be a heartbreaker, Boone thought; she’s going to be a heart-stopper. Guys are going to be writing plenty of songs about her.

“Hey,” he calls out. “Where you headed?”

“Down to Redner’s to pick up some stuff for my mom. She’s working at the hotel till two but then we’re baking a birthday cake for my uncle.”

“Aren’t you old enough to drive yet?”

“Shut up.” She rides up close enough to punch him in the shoulder. “Ew, you’re all sweaty.” Pedaling faster, she pulls ahead and then glances back. “How’s Andy doing?”

“Fine.”

“You ever think—” Mara starts, and her voice breaks off. Later Boone will recall these as the last words ever spoken before the world changed. You ever think.

Overhead, a screaming comes across the sky. He hears the distorted shriek of a jet engine growing louder until its sonic jabbering actually seems to fill up the space around them, pounding it to pieces with its garbled roar. He stops running and Mara stops pedaling her bike, and they both stare straight up. Mara’s mouth is moving, asking him a question he can’t hear. Then a huge, bullet-like shape, far too large for the background, is plunging down out of the sky over Stone Cliff and Boone feels himself actually pushed back by the appearance of the jet coming down toward the rooftops of his part of the condo development. What comes next is an eardrum-rending explosion that sets the whole world on fire. The ground disappears beneath Boone’s feet. His legs go with it.

Nothing after that is ever the same.

Synechdoche

I love Charlie Kaufman's screenplays. Imagine my delight when I found a PDF of his new script Synechdoche, New York online last night. I only read about 15 pages of it -- it's 159 pages long -- but it was already great, and I planned on posting a link to it this morning. But this morning, the script has been taken down. Why didn't I just save it when I had the chance? Now I have to wait and see the movie, which is of course better, but I have no self-control. This isn't exactly a state secret.

Speaking of self-control, I've decided to stop posting pages of "my new novel" for a while. Not because it's not going well but the opposite. It actually is turning into my next novel. It's a complete departure from anything I've ever done and I think I'm going to have to work on it in private for a while, maybe even until it's finished. I promise you I'm only doing this because I actually want to take it seriously and make it the best it can possibly be.

Meanwhile, I do plan to post some fiction on this blog soon, if anybody thinks they might read it.

I've been listening to Warren Zevon's My Ride's Here and reading Stephen Sachs' The End of Poverty and William Easterly's The White Man's Burden. Jack is still feverish on and off, but I think he's getting better...at least I hope so. It's been four days now.

I hope you're all well.

You're a Whole Different Person When You're Scared

You worked a midnight shift Sunday night and go back in on Monday with three hours sleep. Sometime that afternoon the kid gets sick, 103 degree fever and your wife calls you at the hospital to tell you his heart is beating 120 beats per minute at rest, he's had a constant headache and can't stop shaking. Should she be worried? Immediately you start thinking strep and then meningitis, the one thing he should be treated for urgently, but there's not a lot of options because you're down to one car and you've got it with you here at work. You can't leave because you've got patients on the table and you're running two hours behind. Down in the ER they're swamped and even if you do go home and pick up your son and drive him back in you'll be waiting hours just to be seen. Just because you work here doesn't mean you get special treatment. You call your wife and she says the boy can move his neck and touch his chin to his chest without any stiffness or pain so it's probably not meningitis. The radiology resident down the hall weighs in on the heartrate issue and you call your wife back telling her to force fluids until you can get home. At ten forty-five you get your last patient off the table and blast to the supermarket for Gator Aid and a gallon of milk, and by then the boy's sleeping and he broke his fever. The strep test can wait till morning. You're exhausted but you can't sleep. Sometime around one you finally crawl into bed and the world goes away for a while. It'll be better in the morning, you think, and when you wake up, it actually is.