The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [64]
But there were signs that it was all right. It even seemed at times that people were dying gladly to be able to make some contribution to our progress. Knowing winks. Light rays through the clouds. An old guy in a gas station cashed an old crumpled-up traveler’s check I found in my wallet without asking for any identification or even checking my feeble attempt to remember my signature.
“Simon, let’s go back to the farm.” I was in tears about what people were doing for us. I could do without using the precious last bit of gasoline. I could do without getting a place on the last ferry. I could die without seeing Virginia or my family.
But somehow my willingness to turn back was part of what made me such a good carrier of everyone’s hopes and fears. It seemed they all wanted me to be them. I did the best I could, packing up all their hopes and fears, bruising and pushing them out of shape as little as possible, expecting that somewhere up the line I would run into a better messenger, for whom I would die and pass on all my gathered hopes and fears.
So we kept moving toward Vancouver. I think the basic idea in both our minds was still to find Virginia and hope that that would somehow straighten everything out. I also thought that I had become a hydrogen bomb and that someone in Vancouver could defuse me or fly me to New York or that Simon and I had somehow become capable of traveling backward in time and were going to go back and straighten out the things that were about to result in the end of everything or…or… Simon was also thinking that in Vancouver he’d have a lot more help managing me, and that from there we could get hold of my parents. Neither of us had had any practice with what was going on and were just stumbling along. Vancouver seemed the best direction to stumble toward.
On the way to the ferry, “Mark, you know there’s been an earthquake in California?”
“Yes, I know that, Simon.”
Did I know that? I probably would have answered yes to almost anything anybody asked me if I knew. Almost everything seemed like something I knew. That it was somehow connected to my scream the night before was obvious. That Virginia had been killed in it was also obvious. Simon apparently didn’t know that yet or was trying to keep it from me.
How did Simon know about the earthquake? Was he beginning to be able to know things in my way too?
I was in the land of light without shadows and Simon was in some sort of twilight. He was the link between me and the darkness. I couldn’t deal with the darkness so Simon was in charge of all that. I was afraid that if he caught on to too much then he wouldn’t be able to deal with the darkness either and then someone from the darkness might do something bad to both of us. Simon had to find someone else and bring him into the twilight before he could come into the light. I hoped he understood that.
There were lots of people back there whom I loved, lots of people I wanted to have with me in the land of light, and if I lost Simon there would be no way for me to get back to them or for them to get to me.
We got to the ferry landing in plenty of time. There was only one car ahead of us, a beat-up station wagon with a middle-aged man and a little girl. I wondered if they were traveling backward in time too, but most of the time I spent clutching my knees to my chest, trying to keep my body from turning into light and trying to make the ferry come and trying trying trying.
Things were happening faster and heavier than ever. Every moment an odyssey. I was beating off wave after wave of screaming flesh-tearing and constantly trying to make Simon feel that everything was OK.
I’d feel unbearably hot and sweaty and Simon would say he felt cold. Ten minutes later the situation would reverse. After fighting off the most powerful rush yet and just lying back, completely exhausted, trying to get my breath, I glanced over at Simon. He was looking at me with