Jon Edmonds had turned very pale.
“Jon? Are you all right?” Doreen asked. “I’m sorry, you didn’t know, I didn’t know how else to ask you—to tell you—”
“When?” John croaked. That seemed better to him than a specific affirmation or denial. And a legitimate question, as he really didn’t know. “What happened?”
“I—I’m not exactly sure, he apparently had a heart attack at a mall in Los Angeles. But, he was apparently working on some sort of big government project—”
Jon turned a whiter shade of pale. It was becoming difficult to breath. The FBI had already talked to his mom. The CIA. The romantic notions Megan had shared of running from the law, staying in hotels, and finally showing her parents what-for when the FBI came around asking questions—all that suddenly seemed tragically naïve. This wasn’t a game, it was real life, and they were all about to go to jail and the only person who was going to get shown what-for was going to be Jonathan Edmonds.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you like that. I just—I didn’t know if you knew, but—”
“What happened?” Jon asked. “How’d you find out?”
Doreen didn’t seem to notice the not-too-terribly-casual way in which Jon asked her how she had heard. She just continued: “They—I don’t know the whole story, but they found him dead at a store in Los Angeles. I don’t know exactly what happened. It’s—a friend of mine, Rich Mathers called. Do you remember Rich? I guess you were only three or four when we were dating—”
Jon resisted the urge to tell her he didn’t remember who she had been dating last month. Or the month before that. Or the month before that. “I don’t remember him, I don’t think,” he said.
“Did he know Dr. Bernhard?”
“No, no, he—he’s a reporter, he lives in Washington, and he apparently is doing a story on Dr. Bernhard—I don’t know, Jon, it sounds like he was doing some bad stuff. I know you looked up to him, and I’m not trying to jump to any conclusions, but it sounds like he was a spy and he got killed for it, or killed himself, because the government was investigating him—”
Jon blinked. A reporter. That sounded better than what he had been imagining. Like a cop. Or an FBI agent. Or a trained assassin. Although if a reporter was already sniffing around—and sniffing around him, because Doreen had said or done something, he was sure—then others couldn’t be too far behind.
The next part took him by surprise, although, knowing his mom, it really shouldn’t have. “—anyway, he’s coming down tomorrow and is going to stay with us for a couple of days. In Stacey’s room, since she’s in Memphis, and we’ve got the room. He’s got some people at Oak Ridge he was going to interview about Mr. Bernhard but he also wanted to talk to you, he said.”
Jon nodded his head slightly, looking at his lap. A strange reporter had already connected Jon to Dr. Bernhard—through his stupid, mouthy mom, no doubt—and this same strange man was coming to stay in his sister’s room. Others would soon follow his mother’s friend, and they’d be doing a lot more than making moves on his mom. And Megan wanted the both of them to become fugitives. Not from truant officers or mall security guards but the FBI and US military. Holy shit.
Jon glanced nostalgically over at where his Atari 5200 was shoved beside the television set, Pitfall cartridge still in place. Everything had seemed so, so much simpler yesterday.
“—I don’t know, I got a little worried you might or we might get in trouble, you know,” Doreen was saying. “He wasn’t doing anything that you know about, was he? I mean, he didn’t show you anything or tell you anything about what he was doing for the government?”
“Uh, not really,” Jon said. He said it, even though part of him just wanted to tell her everything. Just take her back to his bedroom, show her all the gizmos and gadgets, show her the book. Tell her he didn’t ask for it, didn’t want it, and wanted to give it all back to the government and just wash his hands of the whole mess.
On the other hand, there was Megan.
“Uh huh,” Jon said. “He died in a store? In Las Vegas?”
“Oh, sweety. I’m sorry, I know this has to be hard for you. It was Los Angles, I think. A store or a mall, he said. I don’t remember everything Rich told me. I was a little flustered. But I know this must be tough on you. I’m sorry to bring it up the way I did, just—can I get you anything? Do you want a sandwich? Some tea?”
“I’m okay, Mom.”
Doreen looked at Jon, clearly worried. Most of the time, her little outbursts of maternal concern irritated him. He might barely see her for five minutes, two weeks straight, and then she would get some sort of hormonal imbalance and want to go all mother-hen on him out of nowhere. Normally, that grated. Right now, though, it was actually kind of comforting. “I just know this has to be a shock to you, I mean, it’s a shock to me and I barely knew anything about him, still to hear that he died, just like that, that he was in trouble with the government—I don’t know, it just—it’s scary.”
Jon nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
Doreen eyes narrowed a little. “Are you sure he didn’t tell you anything? Dr. Bernhard, I mean? Something you’re scared about.”
Yes, yes, come back to my bedroom, it’s all right there, Jon thought. For a moment, he almost said it. Instead, he used the ever-faithful roll-of-the-eyes, and said, “Mom, c’mon.”
“Okay, okay, I’m just—worried. I know it might be nothing, but with Richard calling me out of the blue like that, it just sounds like it might be a big a deal, like he was really up to something bad and—you know, I just worry about my kids.”
Yeah, yeah. “I know, Mom. So—this Richard guy—“
“He’s just coming down for a few days. We dated for a while when we were still in Alabama—you remember that old duplex we used to rent? The one that had that pig farmer behind it—”
“So how’d he—I mean, he called—” Jon struggled with how to put it, without seemingly overly-interested in the answer. “Did you guys talk a lot or—”
“I’d still call him sometimes,” Doreen said. So he was on the list of twenty-five or so former beaus she might call when she couldn’t get a date or didn’t have a class. “I mentioned to him before about you hanging around Dr. Bernhard. I’m sorry, a guy that old, it just seemed creepy, to me. I mean, I knew you were into science and I thought it was good for you to have someone who could teach you a lot about that sort of stuff—”
Jon sighed. What had Dr. Bernhard taught him? How to be lied to? Taken advantage of? Turned into a fugitive? The finer points of Dr. Strangelove and Star Trek?
Doreen blinked. “Something wrong?”
“Just thinking,” Jon said. “He really did teach me a lot.”
“Oh, Jon, I’m so sorry. I went about this all wrong. He was your friend and I was just so concerned about what he might have been doing—”
“It’s cool, mom. Really. It’s okay. So your friend is coming to stay to ask me questions, or . . . ?”
“He’s got people he wants to talk to at Oak Ridge and other places, I guess, but wanted to talk to you, too, since I had said that you had known him, and I thought the relationship was strange.” She laughed nervously. “I guess that stuck in his head.”
“Yeah.” Jon wanted to ask more, but he also wanted this conversation to be over. His day had already been full as hell, and this new bit was a little too much to take.
“I’ll try and keep him out your hair. Show him stuff around the town and keep him entertained. Except for a few questions, you probably won’t even know he’s here.”
Jon nodded. Except for the bed posts bumping against the wall and the grunts and groans and his mother’s loud invitations to sexual kinkiness—which, Jon was certain, would later in life require years of extensive therapy to overcome—that would no doubt be true. Still, the fact it was a reporter coming, and not, say, some old FBI agent Doreen had had a fling with in the distant past, didn’t do much to relieve Jon’s uneasiness. Life was full of sticky intersections, and this was just one of them. He hadn’t expected spending a few afternoons a month with some old guy down the street would end up with him sitting on some sort of technology bomb tar baby he didn’t ask for and didn’t want. He hadn’t thought his mom would have talked about Dr. Bernhard to other people, certainly not enough so that one of them would remember. And be a reporter.
And that’s just what had come up in the past two days. What would Sunday bring? Then Monday? Maybe Bernhard had been clever and prescient and this was all some cleverly conceived and executed plan—he had, after all, managed to unlock some sort of alien technology and then steal it right out from under the government’s nose. Then again, maybe he had just been nuts. What had Bernhard left at his house that someone might find? In the Knoxville bus station? What had he told other people? Hell, what had Jon said to somebody or the other and now forgotten? Probably more than he’d like to believe.
What about Megan? What might she say to her parents? Her sister? Carla had driven them to the bus station, and she was certainly known to run her mouth. What had she heard Megan and Jon talking about? What all had they talked about in the back seat on the way there? He had avoided discussing why he wanted to go to the bus station, but had he said something else? Had he left some tell-tale sign? Some clue to help the government zero in on him? He didn’t remember now. But it was certainly possible. Likely, even.
And his mom. What had she told who? It would probably fill volumes. If she had been talking about Jon’s “weird” relationship with Dr. Bernhard to some ex-boyfriend that she talked to once in a blue moon, she had probably talked about it to almost everybody she knew—and with Doreen’s roster of classes and seminars and nights out on the town, that would encompass a hell of a lot of people.
Jon felt his heart sinking in his chest as he thought about it. If he decided to go the Megan route and become a fugitive—and maybe even if he didn’t—there were going to be a lot more sticky intersections. It wasn’t just going to be Jon who was stuck in them, either. It would be Megan—although, in fact, she seemed to relish the idea—and it would be his mom, too. It might stretch to Johnny Two or Carla or beyond. And it would all be on his head. Well, it should all have been on Dr. Bernhard’s head, but the old man was dead and that left Jon.
Jon slumped down further in the sofa. The weight on his shoulders was suddenly overwhelming. It was pressing down on him mercilessly and there was nothing he could do. His head buzzed. Tomorrow, reporters. The next day, the army. And then what?
What if the aliens know he turned it on? Jon’s mind asked him. What if it’s a homing signal? A radio transmitter? What if they’re coming back for it? What if they’re coming because of it? We figure it out and think we’re so clever but it’s really just an interstellar meat thermometer. We’ve popped it out and now they know we’re ready.
Jon shivered. The idea seemed at once absurdly improbable and entirely too real for comfort. A month ago TV 8 had run an all night Twilight Zone marathon and Jon had, natch, stayed up for almost all of it. Early the night, when Johnny Two had still been over hanging out with him, they had shown “To Serve Man”, which Jon hadn’t seen in years and Johnny Two had never seen at all. He and Johnny laughed throughout and cheerfully pronounced it a big hunk of stinky cheese, but now it no longer struck him as particularly humorous.
What seemed delightfully absurd a month ago now seemed decidedly less humorous. He hadn’t thought much about it until now—there hadn’t been that much time after all—but what if nosy reporters and government men were the least he had to worry about? Jon remembered thinking at the time that he should mention that Twilight Zone episode to Dr. Bernhard sometime, to see if he had seen it. It had seemed to fit much better with Bernhard’s idea of a “doomsday device” than Star Trek’s planet eating space carrot.
To Serve Man, Jon thought. It’s a cookbook!
“Jon, are you okay?” Doreen was asking. “You don’t look so good.”
“Yeah. I just—I don’t know. I mean, it wasn’t like Dr. Bernhard was my best friend or anything, I—I’ve never known anybody who died. I—I dunno, it’s just hard to get my head around, I guess.”
Doreen took Jon’s hand. “I’m so sorry, Jon. I didn’t mean to break it to you this way, I really didn’t, I was just so scared and I guess I got thrown for a loop—”
Jon arched an eyebrow. Did she really feel it necessary to share how surprised she was that her son had been alone with an attractive young woman again? But she left it alone.
“—but there’s no excuse, I’m sorry I said it that way. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. That he hadn’t said anything to you or—those chores, did you run errands? Did he ever make you deliver packages?”
Jon rolled his eyes. He knew that irritated her, but he also knew it was an easy way to throw her off the scent. “Mom, c’mon,” Jon said. “I would have thought he was, like, trying to get me to run drugs for him or something. You raised a smarter kid than that.” He nodded at her.
Doreen regarded Jon thoughtfully. Like she was actually thinking about him. When he was younger, he had really wanted that, and had sometimes acted up to get that sort of attention. These days, it just made him uncomfortable and right now he really wanted his mom to return to her normal, distracted, absentee self.
“You’re sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
Jon sighed, another tried-and-true maneuver. “I just hung out over there and did chores. Raked leaves and moved boxes. That’s it. What do you want me to do? Swear on the Bible?”
“No, no,” Doreen said. “I don’t mean anything, Jon, I’m just worried. I’m always so busy trying to build a life for us, I know I don’t spend enough time with you—”
You’ve been trying to “build a life for us” since I was born and we really aren’t any closer now than we were then, are we? Jon thought. In response, though, he just nodded. “I know, mom, I know you’ve got to work. It’s okay.”
Doreen smiled. “You’re a good kid, Jon.” She paused. “Can I make you a sandwich?”
“I’m all right, I promise,” Jon said. “I’m just a little tired. I’d like to just hang out in my room and read awhile, if that’s okay with you.”
Doreen nodded. “It’s all right with me, sweety. If you want to talk I’ll be right here. My singles group doesn’t meet until eight tonight, and I won’t stay out past eleven. If you just want to sit and talk or whatever, I’m here.”
Except between eight and eleven, Jon thought. But given everything that was going on, that was probably for the best.
Jon got up and started walking towards his room. “I think I’m probably going to hit the hay pretty early tonight. I didn’t sleep that good last night. I don’t think I’m going to be up past eleven tonight.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, I’m going to get ready—if you need anything, you just let me know, okay?”
“I will, mom,” Jon said.
“I’ll check and see if there’s anything you need before I go, okay?”
“Okay, thanks, Mom,” Jon said, opening the door to his room and stepping inside. “I’m gonna lie down for awhile.”
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