Chapter 14: Goin' Down

Forward to Chapter Fourteen:

To everyone who had hoped their names would appear in this Chapter, I apologize for the relative shortness of Fourteen and PROMISE them for Fifteen, just as soon as my mood improves. (Well, whaddaya expect for free fiction?)

"..have been speaking with The Monkees, who are currently in Paris. Coming up on Three-W-E, biologists working in a Brazilian rain forest have reportedly identified and captured the butterfly that, it is believed, causes rain to fall in Chicago..."

o, Mike," said Peter, "what do you think of that business about the Monkees getting into the Hall of Fame?"

"I think Ward's been working overtime, is what I think. Hyping the movie way too early. The Hall of Fame ain't gonna happen, buddy."

"You don't think so? Sometimes I'm not too sure, Mike." Micky dodged around a telephone booth. "There seems to be a pretty good groundswell, if what's-his-name from the radio is right."

"Forget it, Mick. There's thousands of groups with lots more reasons to be inducted than The Monkees. We were a TV show, not a band. We pissed everybody off when we forgot that, or ignored it. Yeah, we tried to be, to be a real group, but..." Michael uncharacteristically stumbled for words, then shook his head. "We were actors then."

The sound of someone running up behind them made him turn. "Michael," shouted a well-dressed man in his mid-fifties. "Michael! It's Simon. Wait up."

"Hold on a moment here, guys. Simon? What's the matter?" He turned back to the others. "Wait, it's my lawyer. I'll be back in a second."

Simon and Michael walked a short distance away. Micky couldn't hear their words, but they were both making frantic gestures at each other. Whatever it was they were discussing, it couldn't have been good.

After a few minutes, Michael walked back to the group.

"Look, you guys go on ahead without me. Something's come up with that PBS thing again; I'll try to catch up to you in a little while, alright? The Louvre's gonna close pretty soon anyway, I'll try to meet you in the lobby."

They agreed, and the remaining three continued on their way.

At length they came to the end of l'Avenue de la Opera. Dodging traffic on Rivoli, they walked in the relative dark along the outside of the Louvre and entered a lit archway that opened into the Cour Napoleon, and to the courtyard's I.M. Pei pyramid that was the public entrance to the museum. Davy had run ahead, chasing a small chipmunk that had darted out from the base of the wall; at length, the chipmunk veered into the archway and through into the moonlit plaza. Davy waited there until the others had caught up, stepping aside momentarily as an Elvis impersonator passed him on the way to the pyramid.

Peter shielded his eyes from the lights in the archway and squinted out into the courtyard. "I didn't know Christo was doing an exhibition here."

The others looked quizzically at Peter, and then out into the plaza. In the middle of the courtyard was the pyramid, completely wrapped in what appeared from this distance to be blue Saran Wrap.

The kombucha tea was finished, and the mason jar lay on its side on the grass. The blob had taken the opportunity to escape and was moving, amoeba-like, into the forest.

"It's time, Nick" the Recycle Babe said. "There's some work you've got to do."

We stood, and Zan led me around the right side of the Shrine. The bright reflection of the sky on the glass of the pyramid prevented me from seeing the interior, and though I ached to know what was inside I trusted the Recycle Babe and in what she was doing. At one point we passed a glass panel that was misaligned with the others, and the sudden reflection of the sun temporarily blinded me. We continued around to the back, and using my peripheral vision I saw, set into the sloping side, a triangular entryway into the Shrine. We entered.

It was darker than I had anticipated from the glass walls; evidently the glass was mirrored, which explained my previous difficulty seeing inside. After a few moments my eyes adapted somewhat to the lower light level, and I found myself in an atrium. The interior of the pyramid was exactly what would be expected: a glass atrium about a hundred feet high, without apparent interior walls or architectural details at all. Just an empty oddly-shaped glass room with a terrazzo floor. I was greatly disappointed. I'm not sure what I expected; perhaps the inside of the Close Encounters mothership, or one of those Dr. Who deals where the inside of the Shrine is bigger than the outside. Something, but something more than this. The sun was still visible through the wall on my left, but noticeably dimmer, and the wall of the Shrine darkened the sky to a deep blue-violet. Besides our footsteps on the tile, the only sound was an unlocatable crackling, like a small campfire, and an occasional distant growl coming from outside, possibly from the forest from which I'd come.

"Familiar?" asked Zan. No, I thought. Not at all. All right, maybe a little like the Hyatt Regency lobby on Broadway, without those really cool glass elevators..

"I dunno," I said. "The Tower of Light pavillion at the New York World's Fair? The Imagination building at Epcot? No, wait. The forest in Silent Running."

"Look closer," she smiled.

I should mention here that all of this I saw marginally; my eyes still held the blue afterimage of the sun from the reflection outside, which rendered invisible anything that I looked upon directly. So it shouldn't have come as a surprise when I looked to the left in the direction that Zan was pointing and saw, darkened in silhouette, a rough-hewn cedar door set into a wood-paneled wall.

Yes, she was right. It did seem familiar, but in a way that I couldn't nail down. I walked to the door, and in a moment of hesitation turned to step away; but the place where I had been was gone. In the direction that I had come was a hallway, and a wide flight of stairs that led down to what appeared to be a common room. To my left was a window that looked out into the night; the moon, in a gibbous phase maybe two days short of full, was the only thing visible in the blackness. I could smell the unmistakeable odor of a fireplace downstairs, mingling with the Christmas smells of nutmeg and cinnamon, the same smell familiar to anybody who's been in any gift shop in New England. The light had changed from the electric blue of the Shrine to a warmer, orange glow from the fixtures set into the hallway.

My heart was pounding hard, throwing off PVCs with every beat. I turned back to the door, twisted the brass lever, and opened it into a room barely lit with a flickering blue light. I heard breathing, the labored sort of breathing that comes when reflex fails and each aspiration is by conscious thought.

There was a bed, an old four-poster, with the headboard hard up against the wall opposite the doorway in which I stood. The light that illuminated the room was from an old black-and-white TV; on the screen was an episode of The Monkees, the one with Peter and the scientists. The light from the TV was shining on a child lying in the bed, almost invisible under the down comfortor that he had pulled up over his ears. As my eyes continued the process of dark adaptation, more details became visible; the fetal position; the shivering; the white-blond hair, matted down with sweat... The hair...

It was my son. Or rather, I realized, my son in about six or seven years; the boy looked about ten or eleven, but of the fact of his being Nicholas, there was no doubt in my mind. And he was sick.

He was dying.