Read Online The Methuselah Gene by Jonathan Lowe - Free Book Online Page A

the cleaver Paul used to cut up chickens.
    Night, when it finally came to Zion, might have been as dark as my prospects for marriage to a supermodel, were it not for the stars.   I’d never seen so many with my unaided eye, anywhere near Washington.   Those constellations that I recognized seemed filled in somehow, here.   As if the Jolly Green Giant in Earl’s posse had used his shotgun on Bear and Ram, and so had punctured all the way through to that mystic brightness which you only got to see at the end of a tunnel when you died.
    I stood up within the corn, my head level with the tassels that stretched toward the silhouettes of a farm house and grain elevator on the western horizon.   Standing there, I thought about Emily Danville for the first time in years.   I wondered what she would make of my present situation.   We’d dated steadily through our senior year in college, but I’d gotten cold feet as graduation approached.   And so I’d resisted having my next fifty years planned out for me, as my roommate’s girlfriend had done for Joel.   As it happened, the question I popped wasn’t the one Emily had expected, and so she’d left me in tears that night.   Left me alone, with beach sand in my shoes.   Ironically, I now found myself asking the same question again, only to myself this time.
    Do you know where you’ll be, or who you’ll be with, in ten years?
    Here it was, fifteen years later, and I still didn’t know the answer.   All I knew for sure now was that Emily Danville knew the answer to that question, wherever she was.   While I was still asking it.   Among other questions.
    As I finally stepped out of the corn, it was almost like leaving the past behind.   My decision, my intention, was to be shut of this before it ballooned out of control.   My hope was that in exchange for a show of good will, the Sheriff would favor me with an answer to the question I had with Walter Mills’ name on it.   I owned some trepidation in the matter, but saw no other way out.   An hour and a half sitting in a corn field had brought me no new insights, for sure.   What it all came down to was facing my fears.   Fear of the company’s disappointment in me, and fear that the cards dealt me ever since that night on the beach in Atlantic City with Emily would continue to be losers.   Add to this the fear of being caught up in a lie.   And not just those I told to myself.
    Â 
    The luminous dial of my watch read 8:21 p.m. as I walked back onto that darkened main road that was lit by no streetlights, only the softer lumination emanating from inside the few businesses still open.   The five diners inside the Slow Poke, who I spied though the plate glass from across the street, were unknown to me.   Although I saw Edie beaming as she moved among them over there with amiable grace, she didn’t look in my direction, and so she didn’t see me approaching the post office opposite her.
    The postmaster’s office was long closed, but the outer door remained unlocked, allowing access to the box section at any time.   The spring that kept the door closed squeaked as I entered the lobby, but I prevented the door from banging behind me with a hand positioned behind my back.   The fly-specked globe overhead cast an eerie twilight radiance on the narrow alcove.   Its bulb couldn’t have been brighter than 25 watts when it was new and not caked with burnt dust.   So it was difficult to validate my suspicion that the young Hannibal Lecter was indeed Walter Mills.   Stooping and then squinting into the tiny box window, past the stenciled white number 16, I was greeted with a small square of darkness framed by the faint outline of an empty oblong metal box.
    Two hours ago you had mail, Walter, I confirmed, and now you have none.
    I stepped softly back outside, in stunned silence.   Immediately, a truck