Justin Cronin - The Passage

Wolgast leaned back in his chair and realized how exhausted he was. It always came upon him like this, like the sudden unclenching of a fist. These trips left him physically and emotionally hollowed out, and with a nagging conscience he always had to apply some effort to squash. He was just too damn good at this, too good at finding the one gesture, the one right thing to say. A man sat in a concrete box long enough, thinking about his own death, and he boiled down to milky dust like water in a teapot forgotten on a stove; to understand him, you had to figure out what that dust was made of, what was left of him after the rest of his life, past and future, had turned to vapor. Usually it was something simple-anger or sadness or shame, or simply the need for forgiveness. A few wanted nothing at all; all that remained was a dumb animal rage at the world and all its systems. Anthony was different: it had taken Wolgast a while to figure this out. Anthony was like a human question mark, a living, breathing expression of pure puzzlement. He actually didn’t know why he was in Terrell. Not that he didn’t understand his sentence; that was clear, and he had accepted it-as nearly all of them did, because they had to. All you had to do was read the last words of condemned men to know that. “Tell everyone I love them. I’m sorry. Okay, Warden, let’s do this.” Always words to that effect, and chilling to read, as Wolgast had done by the pageful. But some piece of the puzzle was still missing for Anthony Carter. Wolgast had seen it when Carter touched the side of the glass-before then, even, when he’d asked about Rachel Wood’s husband and said he was sorry without saying it. Whether Carter couldn’t remember what had happened that day in the Woods’ yard or couldn’t make his actions add up to the man he thought he was, Wolgast couldn’t be certain. Either way, Anthony Carter needed to find this piece of himself before he died.

From his seat, Wolgast had a good view of the airfield through the terminal windows; the sun was going down, its last rays angling sharply off the fuselages of parked aircraft. The flight home always did him good; a few hours in the air, chasing the sunset, and he’d feel like himself again. He never drank or read or slept, just sat perfectly still, breathing the plane’s bottled air and fixing his eyes out the window as the ground below him slipped into darkness. Once, on a flight back from Tallahassee, Wolgast’s plane had flown around a storm front so huge it looked like an airborne mountain range, its roiling interior lit like a crèche with jags of lightning. A night in September: they were somewhere over Oklahoma, he thought, or Kansas, someplace flat and empty. It could have been farther west. The cabin was dark; nearly everyone on the plane was sleeping, including Doyle, seated beside him with a pillow tucked against his stubbled cheek. For twenty full minutes the plane had ridden the edge of the storm without so much as a jostle. In all his life, Wolgast had never seen anything like it, had never felt himself so completely in the presence of nature’s immensity, its planet-sized power. The air inside the storm was a cataclysm of pure atmospheric voltage, yet here he was, sealed in silence, hurtling along with nothing but thirty thousand feet of empty air below him, watching it all as if it were a movie on a screen, a movie without sound. He waited for the pilot’s drawling voice to crackle over the intercom and say something about the weather, to let the other passengers in on the show, but this never happened, and when they landed in Denver, forty minutes late, Wolgast never mentioned it, not even to Doyle.

He thought, now, that he’d like to call Lila and tell her about it. The feeling was so strong, so clear in his mind, that it took a moment for him to realize how crazy this was, that it was just the time machine talking. The time machine: that’s the name the counselor had given it. She was a friend of Lila’s from the hospital whom they had visited just a couple of times, a woman in her thirties with long hair, prematurely gray, and large eyes, permanently damp with sympathy. She liked to take her shoes off at the start of each visit and sit with her legs folded under her, like a camp counselor about to lead them in song, and she spoke so quietly that Wolgast had to lean forward from the sofa to hear her. From time to time, she explained in her tiny voice, their minds would play tricks on them. It wasn’t a warning, the way she said it; she was simply stating a fact. He and Lila might do something or see something and have a strong feeling from the past. They might, for instance, find themselves standing in the checkout line of the grocery with a packet of diapers in their cart, or tiptoeing past Eva’s room, as if she were asleep. Those would be the hardest moments, the woman explained, because they’d have to relive their loss all over again; but as the months passed, she assured them, this would happen less and less.

The thing was, these moments weren’t hard for Wolgast. They still happened to him every now and then, even three years after the fact, and when they did, he didn’t mind at all: far from it. They were unexpected presents his mind could give him. But it was different for Lila, he knew.

“Agent Wolgast?”

He turned in his chair. The simple gray suit, the inexpensive but comfortable oxford shoes, the blandly forgettable tie: Wolgast might have been looking in a mirror. But the face was new to him.

He rose and reached into his pocket to show his ID. “That’s me.”

“Special Agent Williams, Houston field office.” They shook. “I’m afraid you won’t be taking this flight after all. I’ve got a car outside for you.”

“Is there a message?”

Williams drew an envelope from his pocket. “I think this is probably what you’re looking for.”

Wolgast accepted the envelope. Inside was a fax. He sat and read, then read it again. He was still reading when Doyle returned, sipping from a straw and carrying a bag from Taco Bell.

Wolgast lifted his gaze to Williams. “Give us a second, will you?”

Williams moved off down the concourse.

“What is it?” Doyle said quietly. “What’s wrong?”

Wolgast shook his head. He passed the fax to Doyle.

“Sweet Jesus, Phil. It’s a civilian.”

Sister Lacey Antoinette Kudoto didn’t know what God wanted. But she knew He wanted something.

As long as she could remember, the world had spoken to her like this, in whispers and murmurs: in the rustling of the palm fronds moving in the ocean wind above the village where she was raised; in the sound of cool water running over rocks in the stream behind her house; even in the busy sounds men made, in the engines and machines and voices of the human world. She was just a little girl, not more than six or seven, when she’d asked Sister Margaret, who ran the convent school in Port Loko, what she was hearing, and Sister laughed. Lacey Antoinette , she said. How you surprise me. Don’t you know? She lowered her voice, putting her face close to Lacey’s. That’s nothing less than the voice of God .

But she did know; she understood, as soon as Sister said it, that she’d always known. She never told anyone else about the voice, the way Sister had spoken to her, as if it was something only the two of them knew, told her that what she heard in the wind and leaves, in the very thread of existence itself, was a private thing between them. There were times, sometimes for weeks or even a month, when the feeling receded and the world became an ordinary place again, made of ordinary things. She believed that this was how the world felt to most people, even those closest to her, her parents and sisters and friends at school; they lived their whole lives in a prison of drab silence, a world without a voice. Knowing this made her so sad that sometimes she couldn’t stop crying for days at a time, and her parents would take her to the doctor, a Frenchman with long sideburns who sucked on candies that smelled like camphor, who poked and peeked and touched her up and down with the ice-cold disk of his stethoscope but never found anything wrong. How terrible , she thought, how terrible to live like this, all alone forever . But then one day she’d be walking to school through the cocoa fields, or eating dinner with her sisters, or doing nothing at all, just looking at a stone on the ground or lying awake in bed, and she’d hear it again: the voice that wasn’t a voice exactly, that came from inside her and also from everywhere around, a hushed whisper that seemed not made of sound but light itself, that moved through as gently as a breeze on water. By the time she was eighteen and entered the Sisters, she knew what it was, that it was calling her name.