XLIII.

a n o p e n b o o k
w r i t t e n f o r v e r y
d u m b c h i l d r e n

—FIVE WAS IN A bad mood. To be fair, he usually was in a bad mood, but today was one of those days where nearly everything irritated him.

He was pissed at the kid from the strip club, he was pissed at Diego when he heard about his escape from the asylum (despite Five specifically telling him to wait), he was pissed at Dallas for smoking so much it felt like he was inhaling smog all the time, he was pissed at Zara for being so difficult to find, and mostly he was just pissed at himself for being so damn pissed at everyone else.

And he was very, very hungover.

There was a Cities Service station a couple blocks down Fourteenth Street. Five went into the office to ask directions to wherever this "circus" was.

He could hear the whir of an air compressor and the tinny jangle of pop music from the garage bay, but the office was empty. That was fine with Five, because he saw something useful next to the cash register: a wire stand filled with maps. The top pocket held a single city map that looked dirty and forgotten.

There was a newspaper dispenser just behind the gas pump. He took a copy of the Daily News as a prop, and flipped a nickel on top of the pile of papers to join the other coins scattered there. Five didn't know if people were more honest in 1963, but they were a hell of a lot more trusting.

According to the map, Mere was on the western side of town, and it turned out to be just a pleasant fifteen-minute stroll from the gas station. He walked under the elm trees that had yet to be touched by the blight that would take almost all of them by the seventies, trees that were still as green as they had been in July. Kids tore past on bikes or played jacks in driveways. Little clusters of adults gathered at corner bus stops, marked by white stripes on telephone poles.

Dallas went about its business and Five went about his—just a teenager in a nondescript blazer with a white collared shirt, a teenager with a folded newspaper in one hand. He might be looking for a yard sale; he might be going home after school. Certainly he looked like he belonged here.

So he hoped.

Mere was a hedge-lined street of old-fashioned New England saltbox houses. Sprinklers twirled on lawns. Two boys ran past Five, tossing a football back and forth. A woman with her hair bound up in a scarf (and the inevitable cigarette dangling from her lower lip) was washing the family car and occasionally spraying the family dog, who backed away, barking. Mere Street looked like an exterior scene from some old fuzzy sitcom.

Two little girls were twirling a skip-rope while a third danced nimbly in and out, stutter-stepping as she chanted.

"Cinderella, dressed in yell-ah, went upstairs to kiss her fella! By mistake, she kissed a snake! How many doctors will it take?" The skip-rope slapped on the pavement.

It was absurd, Five thought. Everything looked so goddamn normal. He looked round, searching for something—anything—that seemed out of place.

Normal, normal, normal . . .

Wait.

Five's eyes narrowed. Off to one side of the road, parked neatly behind another one of the two-storied houses, was a black car with the windows smashed in. He could just barely make out the shrouded figures of a man and woman talking in hushed tones.

He went closer. Yes, that was definitely a man and woman talking, and, for that matter, one of the two was immediately familiar.

Five sighed. He closed his hands into fists, the blue haze taking him quickly. Within another second he had deftly ensconced himself in the backseat of the black car.

"Alright, here's the plan," Diego was saying. "Oswald comes home at four-thirty in the afternoon. The second he shows up, we force him into the front seat."

"I'm in the front seat," said the young woman next to him. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a swift greyhound-like quality to all her movements. Her fingers played absently with the hem of her grey dress.

Diego gave her a look. "Okay, fine. In the backseat, then. You're gonna pin his arms, I'm gonna cut off his trigger finger and tell him he has twenty-four hours to exit Dallas."

"That's your plan?" said the woman, raising her head.

"You got a problem with it?"

"Well, why don't we just kill him? I mean, you think he's going to kill the President, right? Fine. So we kill him. Put a bullet between his eyes. Problem solved."

"No, no, no." Diego pinched the bridge of his nose. "We are not going to kill a man before he's committed a crime."

"That's stupid."

"Excuse me?"

"In fact, your whole plan is stupid. What, chopping off a guy's finger?" She gave a short, giggling laugh.

"It's not just any finger," retorted Diego sharply. "We're talking about his trigger finger. You can't shoot a gun without a trigger finger."

"What if he's ambidextrous?" countered the woman. Diego made no reply, and she sighed sympathetically. "How do you get through a day?"

"Get out. I can do this on my own."

"Dr. Moncton was right. This hero complex is no joke."

"That's not what this is about!"

"Of course it is! You want to prove to Daddy that you're a big success."

"No," snapped Diego. "You don't know anything about me."

Again, she laughed. "I know everything about you. You are an open book written for very dumb children. Why else would you be doing all this shit?"

"Because," said Five, growing bored of this pointless back-and-forth, "he is an idiot."

The woman in the passenger seat straightened. "Who the hell are you?"

He gave her one of his best false smiles. "Hi. I'm his loving brother." He waved for good measure.

Diego crossed his arms. "Yeah. My loving brother—who left me to rot in the nuthouse."

Five rolled his eyes. "To protect you from yourself."

"That's . . . quite sweet, actually," commented the woman.

Diego turned his key in the engine and said: "Both of you—out."

"Lose the crazy lady and come with me," said Five, leaning forward. "We have important business."

"I'm not going anywhere with you," Diego said, his chin jutting out slightly, like a sulking child.

Five wished he could've said he expected more, but when it came to his family, the bar was set so low it was a marvel how they seemed to trip over it every other minute.

"Fine." He stuck his head out the window of the car, where a Dallas police officer was conversing with the woman in the scarf who had paused in her labours, the hose in one hand, the big soapy sponge in the other. "Officer!"

In an instant, Diego had jumped forward and grabbed his brother roughly by the collar. "What do you think you're doing?"

"I hear there's a reward out for you two," snarked Five.

The passenger seat woman said: "He's bluffing."

Diego kept his grasp on Five's collar for a moment longer. Then he released him. "No. He isn't bluffing. I'll go with you."

"Good," said Five.

"And I'm taking Lila."

"Who?"

Diego gestured to the woman next to him. She grinned. "The crazy lady."

Five cast a suspicious glance at his brother's new friend. "Lila? That's your name? The Handler mentioned something about a 'Lila'."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. She said her daughter, Lila, was dumb as rocks. That ring a bell?"

Lila clicked her tongue, but said nothing more. She stared at Five, as if daring him to say something more. Five stared right back.

A minute passed.

"Fine," said Five finally. He was speaking to Diego. "Bring her along, if you're so desperate not to be alone with what little thoughts exist in your mind. I don't care. But there's something else I've got to do first."

Or, rather, someone he had to find.

. . .

—ZARA LAY IN BED, wide awake, staring at the ceiling. It was the middle of the night. The moonlight came in through the window of the trailer. The crickets sang in the high grass outside.

She couldn't sleep.

I'm crazy, she thought. Crazy and having a terribly involved hallucination in a mental hospital somewhere. Perhaps some doctor will write me up for a psychiatric journal. Instead of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, I'll be The Girl Who Thought She Was From the Twenty-First Century.

But as she ran her hand over the coarse fabric of the bedspread, which had been given to her by Ralph's mother, she knew it was all true.

Incredibly strange and, honestly, quite stupid, but still very much true.

She sat up on the mattress, dug under her pillow, and took out her silver pistol, a time-travelling gadget that was absolutely worthless here. The stupid thing had jammed itself within a week of being in the sixties, and she couldn't get it fixed for fear that someone might realize it was a much newer model.

Nevertheless, she couldn't resist pointing it up at the wall and pushing the trigger. Nothing happened, of course—what had she expected? A bullet to appear from nowhere and fire? Stupid, superstitious idea. Guns like this one didn't exist yet. Not in a world where colour TV was the biggest technological breakthrough in consumer electronics.

Zara wouldn't be hung as a witch if she was found with it, but she might be arrested by the local cops and held in a jail cell until some of J. Edgar Hoover's boys could arrive from Washington to question her.

She put the pistol on the bed, then pulled all of her change out of a bag on the shelf. She separated the coins into two piles. Those from 1963 and earlier went back into her pocket. She had collected an ample amount of change, thanks to Kiki.

The parrot, sleeping quietly on a perch Zara had rigged up in the corner, was a source of enormous amusement to everyone in the camp. Not all the circus folk spoke English, but most of them could get a vague understanding of Kiki's antics, and they laughed at everything she said. They brought her all kinds of food, and when they found that she was fond of raspberries, they raided the shops for tins of it.

Zara got up, careful not to wake Ralph. The boy was snoring quietly on a separate mattress about a foot away. The moon cast a soft light across his bare shoulders and one side of his face. She looked at him enviously. How that kid could sleep so peacefully was truly beyond her.

There was a little desk drawer next to the beds, and Zara dug around. She found a few envelopes (along with a dusty Bible and a Chinese takeout menu) and placed her coins from the future inside. The currency was similar, but some of the shopkeepers would give her strange looks.

It wouldn't do to have anyone suspicious of her. Not if she might have to stay here for the rest of her life . . .

Stupid Five.

Her thoughts were cut short. Quickly, Zara stuffed the envelope in her pocket and snatched up the gun. She had heard a noise—somewhere outside the trailer.

She went quickly to Ralph and nudged him insistently. "Wake up, Ralph. Wake up!"

His eyes opened. Zara was sitting cross-legged beside him, her face a pale blur. "What? What time is it? What's the matter?"

He propped himself up on one elbow and tried to look out the window. It was still dark and the wind was high.

"It's well past midnight." She paused and said fearfully: "I heard a sound. What do you think? Serial killer?"

"Or worse," whispered Ralph, "draft collectors?" There was the scrape of a match and his face was momentarily illuminated as he lit a cigarette.

The noise came again, far off in the field. In the middle of the night, a noise. It was a strange, animalistic sound. Then clanging, like someone was banging against steel.

They stared at each other.

Ralph put his cigarette in the ashtray, sat up, and opened the window of the trailer. A cold rush of air came in.

"What is it?" asked Zara.

He remained staring out for a moment longer. "I can't see anyone. It's the bears, I think. I daresay something's startled them good."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Maybe they're just hungry." The fear was wearing off, and now his voice was rusty from sleep. He got back in bed.

"Hungry?" Zara ran a hand fretfully through her sleep-frizzled hair. "But they were fed just this afternoon. What could be the matter?"

"No idea." He buried his face in his pillow. "Check it out, if you like. And take a jacket. It's cold."

"Yes, I should check it out, shouldn't I? The animals aren't like this usually. There's got to be something going on. Here, can I borrow your jacket? I can't find mine in the dark."

But when she looked over, Ralph was snoring quietly once again.

Zara got up. She closed the window, startling Kiki, who woke up and flew quickly to her shoulder. The girl felt around for the black leather jacket from where it lay discarded by the door, and shrugged it on. It was at least three sizes too big. She stepped out of the trailer.

The crickets were much louder outside. A broken piece of moon hung in the sky. Away from its glow, the stars had never seemed so bright or close. A truck droned past on 196, and then the road was still. This was the countryside, and the countryside was sleeping. In the distance, a freight train whistled through the night.

There were seven other trailers in the field, and all were dark. So were the vans with the sleeping animals in them. Feeling like a criminal, Zara walked into the courtyard behind the trailers. High grass whisked against the legs of her pink rayon pyjama pants. 

There was a smooth wire fence marking the edge of the circus' property. Beyond it was a small pond, what rural people called a tank. Nearby, half a dozen horses were sleeping in the windy night.

One of them looked up at Zara as she worked her way under the fence and walked to the tank. After that it lost interest and lowered its head again. It didn't raise it when her silver pistol splashed into the pond. She sealed the envelope with the coins inside it and sent it after the gun.

Zara sighed. She knew better than to believe that she'd ever be accepted as a townie on such short notice.

When people asked her what she was looking for, she'd give a shrug and a smile. When people asked her how long she'd be staying, she told them it was hard to say.

She learned the geography of the town, and she began to learn the verbal geography of 1963. She learned, for instance, that the war meant World War II; the conflict meant Korea. Both were over, and good riddance.

People worried about Russia and the so-called "missile gap," but not too much. People worried about juvenile delinquency, but not too much. There was a recession, but people had seen worse. Candy shops were cheap and numerous. So were the guys who whistled at her in the street, or the ones who called Ralph gu*nea behind his back. In the South, Jim Crow ruled. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev bellowed threats. In Washington, President Kennedy droned good cheer.

It wasn't all bad. Different, of course, but she could adapt quickly. Some of it was rather fun. Going to the nickelodeon, blasting Presley songs through the radio, staying up to watch Lucy on the television with Ralph. Certainly nothing like 2019 . . .

Zara let out a quiet, agonized breath, and rubbed her hands together.

Come now, she mustn't start thinking about 2019. If she started thinking about 2019, then she'd start thinking about the apocalypse, and then about the Umbrella Academy, and then, inevitably, about one particular person she had made an effort to forget. The thing to do now was get on with life.

Right, then. The bears. Zara went up to the van with the three little black bears and peered inside. Nothing. All had gone back to sleep.

Zara frowned. This was odd. What had happened to whatever it was that had woken them up in the first place?

Anyway, no point hanging around out here at this hour. It wasn't cold, but there was definitely a breeze. She shivered under the cold leather jacket. Kiki, who had made a valiant effort at staying awake, now tucked her beak under her wing and went to sleep on Zara's shoulder. They really ought to go back to the trailer.

But still she stood there motionless.

It was the middle of the night, but Zara wasn't tired. There was another feeling rooting itself within her—excitement, maybe? Restlessness? Nerves? No, that wasn't quite what she felt . . .

Anticipation!

That was the word for it. Zara knew suddenly that she was waiting for something, though she couldn't, not for the life of her, imagine what it was. Something was going to happen.

And there shot into her mind the thought: I want to go home.

It astonished her. Where had that thought come from? And what did it mean? Home? The Commission was no longer home. She had hardly lived at the Academy for a week. The first somewhat permanent home she'd had, she supposed, was Ralph's trailer in the circus.

Did she think of the circus as home? Zara shook her head. She knew she didn't.

But her curiosity was aroused. What had she meant by that phrase that had flashed out suddenly in her mind?

I want to go home . . .

There must be something—some image . . .

She half bowed her head—there must be some background.

And very clearly, rising up in her mind, she saw the deep blue of the ocean, the palms, the cactus and the prickly pear; she smelled the hot summer dust, and remembered the cool feeling of the water and the heat of the sun-baked sand.

South Africa. Twenty-five years ago.

She was startled—a little disturbed. She had been only four years old at the time. She certainly didn't want to go back there. All that belonged to a past chapter in her life. It was the chapter that had been lost—stolen—torn away from her.

If she ever met the asshole who killed her parents . . .

Zara shivered.

It was odd to think about killing someone. She didn't like it much. But Zara knew, suddenly, that if she were ever to meet her parents' murderer, she would take a savage satisfaction in cutting their throat.

Or maybe she'd ask Five to do it—if he ever thought it wise to show up. You had to hand it to him, the kid was one hell of an assassin.

She walked a few steps, as if to distance herself from the intruding thoughts. Then she stooped and pulled roughly at a twining bit of green on the ground. Hateful stuff, alligator weed. Worst weed there was. Smothered all the other plants. Choking, entangling—and you never could get at it properly, running underground.

With her heel, she crushed a handful of leaves viciously beneath her green light-up Skechers.

Somewhere, not very far away, a quiet whooshing sound came—like a gust of wind on a chilly evening. Zara's head snapped up.

That noise . . .

She listened, but the sound did not come again. There was only the vague echo of a barn owl hooting in the distance. The wind was picking up. She pulled Ralph's jacket closer to her body.

She looked back at the trailer. It really was time to go back. Must be nearing four in the morning, by this point.

But she hesitated.

Then, very near her, a twig snapped with a sharp cracking noise. Someone gave a little cough, as if to announce their presence.

Ah, thought Zara, that's what I was waiting for.

She smiled and turned around, knowing full well who it was standing sheepishly behind her.

"Nice of you to drop in, Five," Zara said sweetly.

Still smiling, she punched him in the face.