Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [13]
She must live here. Not a good neighborhood.
He expected her to veer off toward one of the residential districts, but instead she kept going into the heart of downtown, where the street fair had been held on Saturday night. Oracle Road was called Main Street here. At the corner of Main and Sixth, Elizabeth Palmer parked her car.
Cray cut down a side street, then circled around to Main, a block south of the parked car, and found a spot at the curb. He was in time to see Elizabeth Palmer emerge from the Chevette and jaywalk across the street.
There were no apartments nearby, no motels, only a bar with a neon sign.
He knew that bar. He’d stopped there last Saturday and tossed back two fingers of dark Caribbean rum before prowling the crowded streets.
And now Elizabeth Palmer was here, for only one imaginable reason.
She had not headed straight home, as he’d assumed. She was still hoping to find him, the persistent little bitch.
Having seen him in the bar two nights ago, she was revisiting it on the chance that he had returned.
Cray watched her hurry to the front door and step inside. She’d thrown on a jacket, he observed, some sort of cheap zippered thing that looked too big for her. Master of disguise, he thought with a slow shake of his head.
By the end of the night, all her disguises would be stripped away, even that most personal and intimate disguise known as the self.
Then she would not be Elizabeth Palmer at all. She would be the primal essence of the human animal—the bundled nerve cells of the brain stem, the autonomic functions of the body.
She would be pure, liberated, and absolutely honest for the first and only time since infancy.
It was a wondrous transformation. He’d written about it in his book. Not everything, of course. He’d omitted the more dangerous ideas. Still it was remarkable, the things a person could write from behind the cloak of disinterested scholarship.
Imagine if he were to approach a stranger and tell him that his life was worthless and meaningless, his most cherished virtues a lie, his aspirations and convictions a stupid joke. Cray would be lucky to escape a fistfight.
But write it in a book, and the world turned upside down. Tell people, as he had, that their personalities were an illusion, their every conscious thought only an irrelevant by-product of biological processes, and that they were apes, or lower than apes—automatons, robots—and they shook his hand, requesting his autograph and wanting more.
He spat in their faces, and they licked it up like candy. He had expected angry denials, defensive ridicule—anything but what he’d received.
Money.
Acclaim.
The Mask of Self was in its fourth printing. There was a trade paperback edition in the works, with a new foreword by the author. His book had not quite achieved bestseller status, but he had earned enough to pay for the Lexus and to fund a comfortable portfolio of diversified investments.
Yet in retrospect he saw that his amazement was misplaced. He had spoken the truth, and it had filtered through the layers of deception people wove around themselves. He should not have been surprised. In their instinctive, visceral responses—in the bodily wisdom that the ancient Greeks called thumos—people knew what they essentially were. They knew and, hating the disease of consciousness, they instinctively sought a cure.
The door of the bar opened, and Elizabeth Palmer emerged. She’d spent only a couple of minutes inside, enough time for a quick look around, perhaps a question asked of the bartender—Have you seen a man in here, all dressed in black? She hurried to her car, her steps nimble and fast.
When the Chevette pulled away, Cray followed.
She would keep looking, of course. Though she must be tired and hungry and scared, she would not give up.
That was all right. Cray had time. He had all night.
And, like her, he could be persistent in the chase.
6
Cray stayed well behind the Chevette, keeping the hatchback just within sight, counting on Elizabeth Palmer not to check her rearview mirror too