WHEN had Brock ever possessed her? There might have been about a minute and a half, just after the events at College of the Surf, the death of Weed Atman, and the fall of PR.3, though he was no longer sure. He remembered a morning drizzle, at first light, at the camp up north, pulling in in a motor-pool Mercedes with his partner, Roscoe, at the wheel, cruising past the cloudbeaten rows of barracks, stopping out on the asphalt, waiting in the cyan glare of the security lights. Officially he was up to have a look at the physical plant and inspect the population of his Political Re-Education Program, or PREP, Brock's own baby, his gamble on a career coup, his thin-ice special, just about to be put in as a rider to what would be the Crime Control Act of 1970 by a not-so-neo fascist congressman from Trasero County, a friend of friends in returning whose several kindnesses this solon had more than once found himself creeping within squinting range of the chain-link perimeters of Allenwood, Pa. But then again — Brock could get excited just thinking about it — suppose the gamble paid off. The law, his law, would provide that detainees in civil disturbances could be taken to certain Justice Department reserves and there examined for snitch potential. Those found suitable might then be offered a choice between federal prosecution and federal employment, as independent contractors working undercover for, but not out of, the DOJ's Political Intelligence Office. After undergoing a full training curriculum that included the use of various weapons, they could be transferred — the contracts essentially sold — to the FBI and under that control be infiltrated, often again and again, into college campuses, radical organizations, and other foci of domestic unrest. So that in addition to immunity from the law, another selling point for hiring on would turn out to be this casual granting of the wish implied in the classical postcollegiate Dream of Autumn Return, to one more semester, one more course credit required, another chance to be back in school again — yes, as long as it was paid for in services useful enough to them, the FBI could even put you on the time machine if that's what you wanted, is how heavy those coppers were even back in those days.
Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep — if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching — need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.
This morning at PREP, there would be no breakfast call — the mess hall wasn't yet up to speed, so only staff ate regularly, leaving the "guests," in endless negotiation, to eat as they could... as they did. Brock had not come to see that. He'd come for Morning Assembly, Morning Reports. Whether they would wake hungry, however they had slept, warm enough or not against these North Pacific fronts, the reveille on the PA would bring them outside . . . then he would see. What even he knew he'd really come for was the sight of Frenesi among them, the long-haired bodies, men who had grown feminine, women who had become small children, flurries of long naked limbs, little girls naked under boyfriends' fringe jackets, eyes turned down, away, never meeting those of their questioners, boys with hair over their shoulders, hair that kept getting in their eyes ... the sort of mild herd creatures who belonged, who'd feel, let's face it, much more comfortable, behind fences. Children longing for discipline. Frenesi might not — short of torture, anyway — believe that he could ever imprison her. He knew she would try to keep guarded what she thought to be some inner freedom, go on imagining herself secure, still whole . . . but there he'd be, her inescapable witness, watching her in a context she couldn't deny — the rest of them, all she had for human company, as they were. Cold comfort for Brock Vond — though back in the deep leather upholstery, with one eye on the "Today" show and an ear to the tactical frequencies patched to front and rear speakers, breathing the steam of his decaffeinated coffee, he wasn't all that surprised to find himself with a hardon.
Roscoe knew that this A.M. visit was confidential. So far, officially, with the enabling and money bills still making their way through Congress, this place didn't even exist. He could tell how nervous Brock was — the rearview mirror was full of furtive gestures. Here they were, him and the Hotshot, in DOJ transportation, on DOJ time, playing out one more of young Vond's confusing power-and-sex games, which he would have denied if Roscoe'd been fool enough to bring it up. Roscoe sure 's heck wouldn't be here himself if his time were his own, which it hadn't been since that fateful four in the morning the Internals had shown up all Kevlar and Plexiglas, and blacked gunmetal at the ready. "Fellas!" he tried to protest thickly through the last mouthful of free L.A. cheeseburger deluxe he would know for a while. "Jeez I know I'm bad but —" He wanted to quote the Shangri-Las and point out, "But I'm not evil," but had inhaled a piece of burger roll and started to cough instead.
Since he'd been with Brock, Roscoe had come to see himself not as sidekick so much as Cagey Old Pro, passing on all kinds of useful lore if the pup would ever bother to listen. These birds in this facility here, for instance — "Don't know," he'd muttered, "you've been out there on the line, seen these kids close up — some of 'em's in it for real, all right, and they're tough cookies, long hair and all. Never turn 'em — never trust 'em if you did."
"They'll get remanded someplace else — we always knew what to do with them. I'm counting on that other 90%, amateurs, consumers, short attention spans, out there for the thrills, pick up a chick, score some dope, nothing political. Out in the mainstream, Roscoe, that's where we fish."
No point in pursuing it when Brock could always shut him up by finding a way to remind Roscoe how much he would forever owe, but also because he'd let himself believe that young Vond was profound enough to interpret his silences, some of them eloquent as lectures. Brock, for his part, valued Roscoe's silences, all right, and the more of them the better. They were part of his conception of the perfect underling, whom he imagined as a sort of less voluble Tonto. And to the extent that he tried not to bother the Prosecutor with details of how, often semimiraculously, he got things done, it may also have been how Roscoe imagined it. Who, after all, besides teaching him every Indian piece of know-how, had saved the Lone Ranger's life?
Yet not even that ultimate favor had wiped out his debt to Brock, who once, exactly when it had swung the most weight, had intervened for him. The payback was to be in units of unconditional loyalty, including but not limited to lifesaving, one shift after another till retirement, with the question of his pension still up in the air, and with lawyers on both sides looking into it. Not only had he literally saved Brock's life, but more than once this job he knew he was lucky to have as well, making this unhappy phase of his own career out of covering the backside of Vond's. In that memorable dope-field shoot-out, Brock had followed Roscoe dumb and terrified as a recruit obeying his sergeant, through the dense resin smell, as a great nation pursued its war on a botanical species, rounds whinging and burring hotly by through shade leaves, breaking stems, knocking seeds out of colas, Brock following every move of Roscoe's stuck like a shadow, till they made it to the chopper and rose so swiftly, like a prayer to God, like a pigeon to the sky — "Roscoe," Brock Vond was babbling, "I owe you, oh boy do I, the very biggest one, the Big L itself, and maybe I don't always know when I do, but this time I swear —" Roscoe still breathing too hard to ask him to put it in writing. When he did speak, wheezing, it was to holler over the beat of the blades, "Feel like we been in a Movie of the Week!"
In the clarity of that crisis, at least, the Prosecutor had nailed it. He really didn't know always how much, or even when, he owed anybody. In their first days together Roscoe, mighty annoyed, had taken it for such snot-nosed ingratitude that he nearly decided to hell with it, he'd put in his papers and go find some security-consultant hustle, far from our nation's capital — who needed this? Only after more scrutiny did he find out how dirt-ignorant his boss actually remained, on quite a number of occasions, of real-world steps being taken on his behalf. It wasn't that Vond was following any moral code of his own, though he might have wanted it to look that way — but Roscoe recognized it as simple, massively protective insulation. Some things in life had just never touched this customer, he would never have to think about them — which could only give the kid an edge, but maybe not begin to account for Brock's supernatural luck, the aura that everybody, winners and losers, picked up, which Roscoe swore under oath he'd observed during that pot-plantation run-in as a pure white light surrounding Brock entirely, which Roscoe believed would keep him, then and after, immune to gunfire. Who had been sticking close to whom, that fragrant morning long ago?
Iron speakers up on stripped fir poles crashed alive with the national anthem. Brock got out of the car and stood, not at attention but leaning one elbow on the car roof, watching as one by one the detainees began to appear out on the assembly ground. They only came as close as they had to to make sure Brock wasn't bringing something to eat — then they withdrew into small clusters at the margins of the asphalt, speaking together, at this distance inaudible.
Brock scanned face after face, registering stigmata, a parade of receding foreheads, theromorphic ears, and alarmingly sloped Frankfurt Horizontals. He was a devotee of the thinking of pioneer criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), who'd believed that the brains of criminals were short on lobes that controlled civilized values like morality and respect for the law, tending indeed to resemble animal more than human brains, and thus caused the crania that housed them to develop differently, which included the way their faces would turn out looking. Abnormally large eye sockets, prognathism, frontal submicrocephaly, Darwinian Tipped Ear, you name it, Lombroso had a list that went on, and skull data to back him up. By Brock's time the theory had lapsed into a quaint, undeniably racist spinoff from nineteenth-century phrenology, crude in method and long superseded, although it seemed reasonable to Brock. What really got his attention was the Lom-brosian concept of "misoneism." Radicals, militants, revolutionaries, however they styled themselves, all sinned against this deep organic human principle, which Lombroso had named after the Greek for "hatred of anything new." It operated as a feedback device to keep societies coming along safely, coherently. Any sudden attempt to change things would be answered by an immediate misoneistic backlash, not only from the State but from the people themselves — Nixon's election in '68 seeming to Brock a perfect example of this.
Lombroso had divided all revolutionists into five groups, geniuses, enthusiasts, fools, rogues, and followers, which in Brock's experience about covered it, except for the unforeseen sixth, the one without a label Brock was waiting for, who at last came striding toward him now through the drizzle, a few pounds thinner, her hair full of snarls, barelegged, her camera taken away, no weapon of witness but her eyes. She stopped a few feet from him, he stared at the glistening of her thighs, as he moved closer she shivered, tried to cross her arms, hug herself into an invisible shawl or the memory of one she used to wear . . . but he was too close. He reached with one finger to lift her chin, force her to look at him. They faced each other in light from which all red was missing. She looked in his eyes, then at his penis — yep erect all right, creating pleats in the front of the pale federal trousers.
"Been thinking about you too," her voice ragged from a pack and a half of jailhouse smokes a day.
Smart mouth. One day he would order her down on her knees in front of all these cryptically staring children, put a pistol to her head, and give her something to do with her smart mouth. Each time he daydreamed about this, the pistol would reappear, as an essential term. But now, as his heartbeat picked up a little, he gave career advice instead. "How do you like our campus?" He waved around going mine-all-mine. "Full athletic program, chaplain's office with a minister, a priest, and a rabbi, maybe even a few rock concerts."
She started to laugh, coughed a while instead. "Your taste in music? It's outlawed by the Geneva convention. Not a selling point, Cap'n."
"Did you think we were negotiating?"
"I thought we were flirting, Brock. Guess it's one more disappointment I'll have to live with." She caught herself watching his cock again, then saw he was grinning at her, amorously, he must've thought. "The commandant here has my number. Don't delay, operators are standing by." He brought away his finger with a flip that sent her chin a half inch higher.
She breathed through her nose and glared at him. The politically correct answer would have been "When your mother stops giving head to stray dogs." Later she would think of others she might have used. But just then, when it could have still made a difference, she said nothing at all, only stood, head up, watching the old heartbreaker's ass till he'd taken it back inside the Germanic sedan. She had a vivid, half-second hallucination of Brock in the Oklahoma stormlight, the hard blued body, the unforgiving shore against which, on breaking waves whose power she felt but would never understand she had ridden, would ride, again and again. . . .
Roscoe started up the car. Watching the bedraggled girl in the stained miniskirt, he hit the gas pedal to make the engine sing in a rising, suggestive phrase. "Don't blow my effect here," Brock Vond leaning forward from the back, more than a little annoyed, "OK? All I need right now is one of your old-time comedy routines, to undo all the work I just did out there. Trying to destabilize the subject, not serenade her."
"Only to let 'em know we've been here's all," muttered Roscoe, hooking a U and peeling away, halfway to the gate getting into a skid, leaving behind a set of big S's that remained awhile on the wet blacktop.
A provincial whiz kid called early, brass choirs on the sound track, to power in the white mother city, where he would become, as he had dreamed, the careful product of older men, Brock, of medium height, slender and fair-haired, carried with him a watchful, never quite trustworthy companion personality, feminine, underdeveloped, against whom his male version, supposedly running the unit, had to be equally vigilant. In dreams he could not control, in which lucid intervention was impossible, dreams that couldn't be denatured by drugs or alcohol, he was visited by his uneasy anima in a number of guises, notably as the Madwoman in the Attic. Brock would be moving through rooms of a large, splendid house belonging to people so rich and powerful he'd never even seen them. But while they allowed him to stay there, it was his job to make sure that all doors and windows, dozens of them everywhere, were secure, and that no one, nothing, had penetrated. This had to be done every day, and finished with before nightfall. Every closet and corner, every back staircase and distant storeroom, had to be checked, till at last there was only the attic left to do. The day would have grown, by then, quite late, the light almost gone. It was that phase of twilight, full of anxiety, when mercy in this world and the others is apt to be least available. Energies were on the loose, masses could materialize. He climbed the attic stairs in the dusk, paused in front of the door. He could hear her breathing, waiting for him — helplessly he opened, entered, as she advanced on him, blurry, underlit, except for the glittering eyes, the relentless animal smile, and accelerating leapt at him, on him, and underneath her assault he died, rising to wake into his own rooms, the counterpane white and neatly folded as butcher's paper around a purchase of meat — face up, rigid, sweating, shaken by each heartbeat.
Out in the waking world, of course, he was an entirely different fellow, so thoroughly personable, in fact, that maintaining even dislike for the Prosecutor was always a chore, even for the criminal degenerates he helped put away. He projected a charm that appeared to transcend politics, and was known both inside the Beltway and out in the field as a sought-after raconteur and bon vivant who appreciated fine distinctions in food, wine, music. Women found him intensely appealing for reasons they later could or would not specify. Colorful little third-world grandmothers tending flower stalls on forlorn city street corners would rush to embrace him and present, curtsying, bunches of violets to Brock's invariably impressed dates, usually beautiful high-fashion packages to the memory of whose merest peripheral appearance in the street that day any number of men would already have rushed back into some kind of privacy to masturbate as quickly as possible, without asking too many questions.
Well, what a life, you'd ordinarily say. But Brock coveted more.
He'd caught a fatal glimpse of that level where everybody knew everybody else, where however political fortunes below might bloom and die, the same people, the Real Ones, remained year in and year out, keeping what was desirable flowing their way. Prosecutor Vond wanted a life there, only slowly coming to understand that for someone of his background there would be no route to this but self-abasement, fawning, gofering, scrambling for tips and offering other such hints of his eagerness to be brevetted on life's battlefield to a rank higher than he would ever, by the terms of his enlistment, have deserved. Though his defects of character were many, none was quite as annoying as this naked itch to be a gentleman, kept inflamed by a stubborn denial of what everyone else knew — that no matter how much money he made, how many political offices or course credits from charm school might come his way, no one of those among whom he wished to belong would ever regard him as other than a thug whose services had been hired.
But Brock didn't feel like any thug or, more important, look like one either. Whenever he shaved, the humming small life solid in his hand, what he saw was Lombrosian evidence of a career plausibly honest enough to sell his ideas, his beliefs, to anybody, at any level. And the same went for his body image, Brock in those days being known as something of a recreational-area Don Juan, for whom sport and sex were naturally connected. Over time he had learned to extend his Lombrosian analysis from faces to bodies, and discovered that there were such things as criminal bodies. He would see them often in his line of work and would also, less consciously, look for signs of transgressor status in women he met and even desired, the guilty droop of head, the bestial turn of an ass-cheek, the spine furtively overflexed. Some of these women turned out to be "'great fucks," as Brock later described them, mainly for the sake of his reputation, because secretly, though he enjoyed and even got obsessed about sex, he was also — imagine — scared to death of it. In nightmares he was forced to procreate with women who approached never from floor or ground level but from steep overhead angles, as if from someplace not on the surface of Earth, feeling nothing erotic but only, each time it was done, a terrible sadness, violation . . . something taken away. He understood, in some way impossible to face, that each child he thus produced, each birth, would be only another death for him.
When news of Frenesi's escape from PREP reached him back in the great marble plexus, Brock went right around the bend — flew back to L.A., came storming into the fortress at Westwood with this out-of-control mind-hardon, and for a brief time acted like a terrorist holding the place hostage. Nobody knew anything. At that point they were all running around trying to manage the public-relations overtime arising from his "success" at College of the Surf. All the files on the 24fps film collective, including Frenesi's, seemed to be temporarily out of the building. The case was no longer Brock's, and he couldn't find out whose it was. By the time he might have, he'd driven himself past exhaustion, adrift in the unsleeping clockless iterations of some hotel near the airport, where men in wrinkled suits, jet-lagged and aimless, populated the corridors and the uproar in the sky never took a break. He cried, he beat himself with his fists on head and body, did all that old stuff, feeling like a skier on an unfamiliar black-diamond slope, seized by gravity, in control, out of control. . . this descent took him all night and wore him at last into unconsciousness. On the plane back to Washington, the little girl he sat down next to got one look at his face and started screaming. "He's gonna molest me, Mom! We're all gonna die!" Brock, croaking something about being a U.S. Attorney, went fumbling for his ID, though some onlookers thought it was for a weapon and began wailing and crossing themselves. The plane wasn't even moving yet. Too depressed to believe he had anything to lose, Brock doggedly proceeded to bully flight attendants and crew into ejecting the little girl and her mother from the airplane. "Snotty bitch," he whispered as, trembling, the child arose and had to slide the backs of her thighs past his knees.
In Washington again, scrambling to explain his behavior and protect his back, Brock really might have had no time to track Frenesi down, as he told it later, but it didn't stop him having fantasies about her. Pretty soon he was jerking off every night to images he remembered of her, lying in bed, sitting on the toilet, walking down the street, on top and bottom, dressed and naked, Brock lying all alone in the air-conditioning on a rented psychedelic-print sofa in his new apartment out on Wisconsin, in the sullen Tubeflicker, straining into his past, feeling the pressure of tears he was confident would never come. It wasn't that things weren't fine on the job, the compartments in his brain were all Frenesi-tight as far as work went, though now and then lust's drowsy watchman left a latch open, usually around the full moon, when he'd find himself heading down to Dupont Circle and other gathering spots of the young and uncritical, trying to mingle with the hippies, blacks, and drug abusers, to put up as sportingly as he could with their music and closeness, looking for strong slender legs, a fine rain of hair, with luck, fatally, those eyes of Pacific blue, hoping in light cooperative enough to find a girl to project Frenesi's ghost onto, someone who'd hand him a flower, offer a joint — groovy! — agree to be led back here, to this come-stained couch, and be taken, and — Brock, Brock, get a grip on yourself! But some other adviser lay coiled in ancient shadow, whispering Kick loose. Brock knew how much he wanted to, feared what would happen if he couldn't contain the impulse. Once, not too many years ago, sober, wide awake, he'd begun to laugh at something on the Tube. Instead of reaching a peak and then tapering off, the laughter got more intense each time he breathed, diverging toward some brain state he couldn't imagine, filling and flooding him, his head taken and propelled by a supernatural lightness, on some course unaccounted for by the usual three dimensions. He was terrified. He glimpsed his brain about to turn inside out like a sock but not what would happen after that. At some point he threw up, broke some cycle, and that, as he came to see it, was what "saved" him — some component of his personality in charge of nausea. Brock welcomed it as a major discovery about himself — an unsuspected control he could trust now to keep him safe from whatever his laughter had nearly overflowed him into. He was careful from then on not to start laughing so easily. All around him in those days he was watching people his age surrendering to dangerous gusts of amusement, even deciding never to return to regular jobs and lives. Colleagues grew their hair long and ran off with adolescents of the same sex to work on psychedelic-mushroom ranches on faraway coasts. Stalls in the glass-block and travertine toilets of the Justice Department itself boomed and echoed with Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix. Everywhere Brock looked he saw defects of control — while others, in their turn, were not so sure about Brock.
Internal review boards within Justice had had him under surveillance at least since his early gypsy jury days, when he was spreading around the smart-assed charisma on local TV news, call-in radio shows, and speaking engagements before "private" groups in the banquet rooms of suburban eateries known for forms of red meat. When Frenesi came into the picture, interest perked up. Here was entertainment — a federal prosecutor carrying the torch for some third-generation lefty who'd likely've bombed the Statue of Liberty if she could. Weeks' salaries were wagered and lost over how long Brock could hold on to his job, with the over-under line usually reckoning his longevity in days. Brought in, at length, for the Basic Little Chat, he was exactly as forthcoming as he knew he needed to be to quiet the Board, but not a word beyond. If inside a certain radius all lay camouflaged and deeply fortified, nonetheless he did deny her, joked about her with his interrogators, about her tits, her pussy, refusing to react, to seem to defend her. "Next time, Brock, just come on in, let us know, we can punch you up anything you want, you like radical snatch, hey, no problem, bro." He got crazy enough once in a while to take them up on it. They offered a wide choice of sizes, colors, and ages, not to mention neo-Lombrosian face and body types. But he chose women most likely from their files to have crossed paths with Frenesi, living for the off chance of finding her name tucked casually into small talk over drinks. With a patience and gentleness that cost him, Brock tried to steer the dialogue always toward that one dim star.
Still, eyes were upon him, and if he'd actively initiated any search after the Gates woman's whereabouts, most easily through her mother in L.A., a longtime Person of Interest, Brock's overseers would have known about it immediately, and what the memos referred to as a fecoventilatory collision might very well have ensued. It was the old, unhappy tale, Brock would insist, of romance versus career. He didn't want to choose and so he temporized, pursuing his PREP master plan, clearing the brush and leveling the lots. By the time things were solidly enough in place and he could finally get back to California for an extended season of mischief, the ache was no worse than a Beltway sinus, the lunar prowls among the hippies had all but ceased, and sometimes a week would go by in which he only took hold of his penis for pissing.
In the year that had elapsed, Frenesi had met and married Zoyd and given birth to Prairie, none of which Brock had known about, none of which she volunteered when at last they were face-to-face again. The year before in Las Suegras, standing at the edge of a gas-station apron watching DL in the Camaro ascend to the freeway and vanish, rolling blind into her own future, Frenesi had considered calling Brock, going back into PREP. There was no way back to 24fps, or to the person she'd been — beyond any way to clear it she had set up Weed's murder and was in the federal law-enforcement files now and forever, shared with every last amateur cop groupie in the land, listed as a species her parents had taught her to despise — a Cooperative Person.
"It's what you want, isn't it?" the dark apparition of Brock ............