The Abyss Read online

  Next afternoon, Darrel cut school and went into Mr. Ling's store about two in the afternoon. Didn't shoplift, didn't say anything, just stood there, watching. Finally Mr. Ling yelled at him to go outside or he'd call the cops. Darrel went outside, but he still stood there, right outside the window where Mr. Ling could see him whenever he looked up. It was driving him crazy, until along about three-thirty Mr. Ling got a phone call from his wife. He left his clerk in charge of the store and ran out the back and drove to the hospital because somebody had attacked his nine-year-old daughter on the way home from school and beat her up so bad her arm was broke and so were a couple of ribs and her face was so mashed up it took fifty stitches to pull it back together. She'd have scars all her life.

  Mr. Ling told the police he knew who was responsible. It was Darrel Woodward, getting even. But Darrel had an alibi. Mr. Ling had seen him at his store during the whole time his little girl was getting beat up.

  Maybe you're thinking that I'm telling this story because Hiram heard about this and figured it was time to put a stop to Darrel Woodward and so he went out and faced him and punched his lights out and saved the neighborhood. But that isn't how it happened at all.

  See, Mr. Ling and his daughter weren't us to Hiram Coffey. They were them, as surely as Darrel Woodward was. And what they did to them might be pretty sad, but it was none of Hiram's business.

  A couple of days later, though, Mom stopped by Ling's grocery and found it closed. She had to go ten blocks just to get milk, and by the time she got it home it was warm. "It's a crying shame when you have to own a car just to go grocery shopping," she said. "It just stinks to high heaven when a good man like Ling can't stay in business in this neighborhood just because some vicious teenager gets out of control. The police can't do anything, even though everybody knows the Woodward boy was responsible. So what happens? Ling closes down his store, and who else is going to open up a business here? It's time for somebody to do something about Darrel Woodward. Stop him once and for all. If the law can't do it or won't do it, then it's just going to have to happen some other way, or our lives won't even be worth living." Hiram's mom got all her feelings off her chest and that was that.

  What she didn't realize was that she had just given Hiram an assignment. A mission. Up till that moment, Darrel Woodward had been an annoyance. Now, though, Mom had redefined the situation. Darrel Woodward was a danger to us, and somebody had to do something about him.

  Hiram had watched TV. He knew about showdowns and gunfights where you let the other guy draw first and the hero always shot the bad guy in the hand. He also knew that shows like that were phony as a four-dollar bill. You let the bad guy draw first, he'll shoot you down. You shoot him in the hand, he'll shoot you in the head, "Playing fair" wasn't part of Hiram's plans.

  Not getting caught, that was the important thing. Doing something decisive and final, and then not getting caught, so that the threat to us would be eliminated without causing Mom to worry about a thing.

  It was about two weeks later. It was night. Darrel was all by himself, walking up the stairs to his apartment where his dad the drunk and his mom the screamer were having a fight. Hiram was standing partway up the next flight of stairs as Darrel came up to the landing, all alone, his back to Hiram. Hiram took two fast steps down the stairs and smashed a heavy cinder block into Darrel's head from behind. Darrel never saw it coming, never knew what hit him. Hiram went back up the stairs and out onto the roof, where he'd put the cinder block more than a week ago. Nobody saw him on the roof; nobody saw him climb down the side of the apartment building. He cut through the block, walking calm so nobody'd notice him, and went on back the long way around to his own fourplex, where he climbed up the back way into his room. It worked perfectly. He knew it would. He had rehearsed it a dozen times. He left nothing to chance.

  Darrel Woodward didn't die. But his brain was damaged, and he walked and talked slow and funny. His gang broke up, of course. After he got out of the hospital, he just sort of hung around in the neighborhood, lurching along and making jokes, but nobody stuck around to listen to him. He was like a billboard saying, Don't mess with this neighborhood.

  They never even had a guess who did it. They questioned Ling, but he was in Riverside working as assistant manager at a Lucky's that night and so he was in the clear. Hiram Coffey never even hinted that he was responsible, never tried to take credit even when neighbors stood there looking at Darrel lurch by and said, "Well, I'm sorry, but that boy had it coming. Whoever did that to him did the world a favor. I'd like to shake the hand of whoever it was who did that." Hiram's hand went unshook.

  When Hiram was seventeen, his mom married her boss and they moved to Sherman Oaks. It didn't take Hiram long to figure out what had happened. Mom and him weren't us anymore. She was with her new husband, Burt. She didn't decide things anymore - she waited to find out what Burt thought they ought to do.

  Maybe if Burt had liked Hiram they might have made a go of it. But Burt made it clear he didn't trust Hiram alone with his nubile daughters, age fourteen and sixteen. Burt also made it clear he didn't trust Hiram to stay out of his wallet. And Mom's feeble protests pretty soon faded away into silence.

  That was the first time in his life that Hiram didn't belong to anybody, wasn't part of anything. He hardly even knew who he was anymore, if he wasn't part of that group called Mom and Hiram. He didn't have any purpose in life. His grades went down the toilet his senior year. He never had any close friends, and now he lost even the not-so-close ones, just because he never did anything with them. He hung around the new video arcades but he didn't even play all that much, just listened to the dying PacMan sounds and the music of Donkey Kong and the explosions of Asteroids. He watched the kids playing. And when he did play, I think the only thing he liked about it was that while the game was going on, he and the machine were one. The machine set up the world for him and gave him a task to do, and then he carried it out to the best of his ability. It wasn't much, but it was something.

  When Hiram graduated high school he joined the Navy for reasons he didn't understand himself. But it was the right thing for Hiram Coffey to do. The Navy was something worth belonging to - it was America, wasn't it? Only it was a part of America where there was always somebody to tell you what was the right thing for Coffey to do, where there was always a purpose to fulfill.

  Why are you in the Navy, Seaman Coffey?

  To serve my country, sir!

  And how can you serve your country, Seaman Coffey?

  I will be the best sailor in this man's Navy, sir!

  What?

  I will be the best goddam sailor in this man's Navy, sir!

  I can't hear you!

  I will be the best fucking goddamn sailor in the United States Navy! Sir!

  You're a good. man, Coffey.

  After he was in for a couple of years and did a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf, he volunteered for the SEALS. Sea, Air, and Land. He met their standards. They started him out with a group of twelve men. The training was hell on most guys. Coffey loved it.

  One day early in their training their instructor led them to a twelve-foot length of telephone pole. "I want to introduce you to somebody," he said. "This is your lady. You love her with all your heart. You can't bear to be apart from her. You will carry her with you wherever you go. And I mean all of you, wherever you go. If one of you needs to piss, you all take the lady with you and stand there together while he pees. If I hear that one of you got laid then I better see him picking splinters out of his dick because this is your one and only true love, do you understand me?"

  For weeks the twelve of them carried that pole with them wherever they went. Everything they did, they had to do with one hand on that pole. Anything they had to do that needed two hands, one of their team members had to help them do it. The twelve of them were absolutely, completely together, and they had to cooperate or go crazy trying.

  Coffey felt like he'd come home. The twelve men holding onto that
pole, they were us to him now. Coffey watched all the time, trying to see what was good for the team. As the pressure of training or the strain of having no privacy began to wear on the other guys, it was Coffey who was always there to help out. He didn't give any pep talks but his hand was the one that held the knot for you. He didn't crack any jokes about the bitch - no, excuse me, I mean the lady - but when you felt like you were going to die you were so tired and sore, his was the voice behind you murmuring, You can do it, sailor. And when Coffey said that, you believed him, because you knew that he believed what he was saying, that he really believed you could do it. And you could.

  He never asked you a question, never corrected you if you were wrong. If you made a mistake in something like explosives or setting a diving mask, something that really mattered, he just set it right, without a word, and when he'd fixed it, he'd look at you as if to say, "Got it now?" And if you had the slightest uncertainty he'd do it again, and again, until you got it. And yet through the whole thing you never felt like he was putting you down. It was like he was saying, "This is a job that has to be done right, and I happen to know how, and you need to know how, so I'll help." You never felt ashamed of being taught by Hiram Coffey. But when you got it right, and he gave you that little nod, then by God you were proud.

  At the end, they used their demolition training to lay a charge to blow up the pole. When it came time to set it off, the instructor handed the detonator to one of the men, a guy named Monk. Monk didn't say a word, not a single word, he just knew what they all knew without speaking. He walked over to Coffey and handed the detonator to him.

  Coffey didn't smile or anything. He just looked around to make sure the whole team was safely out of the way, and then he blew that bitch to hell. Only then, with the rest of the men cheering and shouting and hugging him and each other, only then did he smile. Did he know how much they loved him in that moment? Did he know those men would die for him? I think so but I don't think it meant that much to him, because that's just what he expected. They were a team, weren't they? When you're a team, dying for each other's just what you do.

  You think the instructors didn't notice? This was the most perfect, smooth-functioning team that ever passed through SEAL training, and Coffey was why. When they sent Coffey's team out on assignments, they never screwed up, they never lost a man. That was unheard of. The kind of assignments SEALS got were the kind of assignments where you were damn lucky to get away with only thirty percent casualties.

  SEALs never got public credit for their successes, never got public funerals when they died in the line of duty. Their work was always done by invisible hands. That got to some of them. They got hungry for recognition. But not Coffey's team. If they had his approval, that was worth more than medals. And as for Coffey, he'd settled that question long ago. He didn't work for glory. He worked for America. The Navy told him what America needed, and he and his team did it. That's what he lived for. He never wrote to his mom until an officer told him to, and then he never missed a week. He always had a supply of about thirty letters to her prewritten and sealed in envelopes, so that when he was on assignment, a SEAL from another team could mail them for him every Friday, just like clockwork. She never realized that he didn't love her anymore.

  With his team, Coffey had no secrets. He told them both the stories I've told you here, about the time Darrel Woodward took his pants down, and about mashing his head in with a cinder block. Both stories, though, had an immediate point. He told the first story as he took a four-man squad with him into Beirut, on a mission where there was a good chance of getting captured. The point of his story was that you can stand any amount of torture. "Pain is nothing. What gets to you is humiliation, the sense of helplessness. But they can't humiliate you, they can't break you, if you don't care. If they cut off your balls, so what? The only reason you had those balls was to serve your country, and this is the moment when your country needs them." Maybe it sounds funny to you, in your safe, peaceful lives. But to men like Coffey and his SEALs, it was no joke. They put everything on the line, body and soul, time after time, so you could sit home and watch TV and bitch about how much you have to pay in taxes.

  And that other story, the one about hitting Darrel in the head, he told that story after word got around that one ex-SEAL who ran a bar in Florida had gotten to bragging about some of the stuff he used to do and some of it got in the papers. Lieutenant Coffey didn't have to explain the point of the story. They all understood. Part of your job, he was saying, is to keep your mouth shut. Part of your job is to never get any glory for what you do. The papers will all talk about how the Marines landed on some dumb little Caribbean island - they'll never say a word about the team of SEALS who went in first and took out the radar installation at exactly four A.M., just before the first American ships came over the horizon. And that's right. That's what SEALS do. Marines whoop it up and say semper fi all the time. SEALS keep their mouths shut and do the job.

  It was the work Coffey was born for. He made his whole team feel like they were born for it too. They were absolutely loyal to each other, absolutely obedient to their orders, the absolutely perfect team.

  Except one. Funny thing is, he didn't even know it. The one who loved Coffey best, he wasn't really one of the team, not down deep, and he never guessed.

  Chapter 4

  Contact

  The Earth isn't much as planets go, but small as it is, most of human history has taken place in a space that's smaller yet, a thin layer starting in the dirt and sticking up maybe twelve feet into the air - about as high as a man on horseback can wave a sword. Now and then a building would punch a hole in that twelve-foot ceiling. Now and then a miner's tunnel would drop down a little. But after a few years or decades or centuries, the people would abandon their works. Then the wind and rain would tear down whatever stuck up and fill in whatever went deep, until the Earth was healed again.

  We could always see a little outside that layer - clouds rolling in, sunshine in the sky, stars at night. We could guess at what was going on under us, when the earth shook, or when big old fish swam up and beached themselves to die. But the height of the heavens and the depths of the sea, they were so far away that whole civilizations could have been going on there and we'd never have known it.

  They were, and we didn't.

  There's no telling how long ago they first came to Earth. No human being was capable of noticing when they arrived, but that means only that they got here sometime before high-grade telescopes and radar. They don't even know how long ago they got here, or how long the voyage took, because they don't measure time except the way a little child does: This happened before that, and this other happened after. Why should they keep track of years and seasons? When you live four miles under the sea, there's no spring and fall, and even the tides are like a faint daily breeze if you feel them at all. And why should they measure the passage of years? When you can't die, there's no reason to count how long you've lived.

  And yet they do care about the past. Their name for themselves is "Builders of Memory." They cling to everything that has happened to them since their first consciousness. That vast memory is their very self. They remember their arrival on Earth, and before that their arrival on each previous world, back to their planet of origin. If we had ever mattered to them, they would have remembered all of our history, too.

  They might have noticed us if we had shared the same habitat, the way we take note of ant colonies and migratory birds. But our thin layer of the Earth's crust is as hostile to them as the moon is to us. Our atmosphere is only slightly thicker than the near vacuum of space. The only part of our planet they cared about was down so deep in the ocean that the water presses like the hands of cruel giants. Only there did they feel at home, and at that depth, the human race did not matter.

  Until we began to intrude. The sludge of our polluted rivers began to flow out onto the continental shelves and then seep down to the unfathomable depths, where they noticed the stink of it,
the nasty taste. The fish began disappearing from the ocean, so that less and less of their detritus drifted down to where the builders were used to harvesting and using it. Torpedoes and mines made underwater explosions whose shockwaves cracked the foundations of their spindly towers.

  At first, because most of their communication is chemical, they thought these things were messages, and for some time they tried to decipher them. Then, when our pollution began to make them sick, to infest and infect them like a plague, when there was a famine of skeletal remains of fish and even microscopic plankton slackened, killed by radiation passing through the depleted ozone layer - then they began to think that we, the creatures living in that thin layer between the sea and the sky, were enemies, trying to poison or starve them.

  Yet they were careful. We might even say they were patient with us, though that was not their motive. For a long time they merely avoided the places where our poisons flowed, while they watched us, to try to understand who we were, what we were doing. Even though nothing we sent into the sea was a message, they finally understood that the radio waves we emitted were messages, if only to each other. Since they had little language, at least as we understand it, it took years for them to decipher, sorting our messages by wavelength and then gradually discovering units of meaning.

  If the concept of language was hard for them, the idea that members of the same species would have different languages was almost unthinkable. Nations? Famines? War? All within the same species? What kind of creatures were we? Like a family whose parents have died. Like a cancer that devours the body that is its only source of life. The more they learned of us, the more alien we seemed - the more repulsive, insane, monstrous.

  Now they regretted the many centuries they had ignored us. Instead of devoting a relatively small part of their attention to studying us, they turned all their energies in our direction. How dangerous to the builders were we? How could they stop us, if they needed to? They were not equipped for war. They had only developed the weapons needed to defend against dangerous but stupid predators. We, however, had developed weapons that could outwit and overpower enemies every bit as intelligent as we were, because our greatest danger always came from other humans. In order to learn the art of war, so they could eliminate the threat we posed to them, they had to study us.