He came back five months later with the first real tan of his life; he was also an inch taller, fifteen pounds lighter, and much quieter. He was still cheerful enough, or could be, but his little-boy exuberance, sometimes infectious, sometimes wearisome, but always there, was gone. He had grown up. And for the first time I remember him talking about the news . . . how bad it was, I mean. That was 2003, the year a PLO splinter group called the Sons of the Jihad (a name that always sounded to me hideously like a Catholic community service group somewhere in western Pennsylvania) set off a Squirt Bomb in London, polluting sixty per cent of it and making the rest of it extremely unhealthy for people who ever planned to have children (or to live past the age of fifty, for that matter). The year we tried to blockade the Philippines after the Cedeo administration accepted a 'small group' of Red Chinese advisors (fifteen thousand or so, according to our spy satellites), and only backed down when it became clear that (a) the Chinese weren't kidding about emptying the holes if we didn't pull back, and (b) the American people weren't all that crazy about committing ma.s.s suicide over the Philippine Islands. That was also the year some other group of crazy motherf.u.c.kers - Albanians, I think - tried to air-spray the AIDS virus over Berlin.

This sort of stuff depressed everybody, but it depressed the s.h.i.t out of Bobby.

'Why are people so G.o.ddam mean?' he asked me one day. We were at the summer place in New Hampshire, it was late August, and most of our stuff was already in boxes and suitcases. The cabin had that sad, deserted look it always got just before we all went our separate ways. For me it meant back to New York, and for Bobby it meant Waco, Texas, of all places . . . he had spent the summer reading sociology and geology texts - how's that for a crazy salad? - and said he wanted to run a couple of experiments down there. He said it in a casual, offhand way, but I had seen my mother looking at him with a peculiar thoughtful scrutiny in the last couple of weeks we were all together. Neither Dad nor I suspected, but I think my mom knew that Bobby's compa.s.s needle had finally stopped swinging and had started pointing.

'Why are they so mean?' I asked. 'I'm supposed to answer that?'

'Someone better,' he said. 'Pretty soon, too, the way things are going.'

'They're going the way they always went,' I said, 'and I guess they're doing it because people were built to be mean. If you want to lay blame, blame G.o.d.'

'That's bulls.h.i.t. I don't believe it. Even that double-X-chromosome stuff turned out to be bulls.h.i.t in the end. And don't tell me it's just economic pressures, the conflict between the haves and have-nots, because that doesn't explain all of it, either.'

'Original sin,' I said. 'It works for me - it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.'

'Well,' Bobby said, 'maybe it is original sin. But what's the instrument, big brother? Have you ever asked yourself that?'

'Instrument? What instrument? I'm not following you.'

'I think it's the water,' Bobby said moodily.

'Say what?'

'The water. Something in the water.

He looked at me.

'Or something that isn't.'

The next day Bobby went off to Waco. I didn't see him again until he showed up at my apartment wearing the inside-out Mumford shirt and carrying the two gla.s.s boxes. That was three years later.

'Howdy, Howie,' he said, stepping in and giving me a nonchalant swat on the back as if it had been only three days.

'Bobby!' I yelled, and threw both arms around him in a bear-hug. Hard angles bit into my chest, and I heard an angry hive-hum.

'I'm glad to see you too,' Bobby said, 'but you better go easy. You're upsetting the natives.'

I stepped back in a hurry. Bobby set down the big paper bag he was carrying and unslung his shoulder-bag. Then he carefully brought the gla.s.s boxes out of the bag. There was a beehive in one, a wasps' nest in the other. The bees were already settling down and going back to whatever business bees have, but the wasps were clearly unhappy about the whole thing.

'Okay, Bobby,' I said. I looked at him and grinned. I couldn't seem to stop grinning. 'What are you up to this time)'

He unzipped the tote-bag and brought out a mayonnaise jar which was half-filled with a clear liquid.

'See this?' he said.

'Yeah. Looks like either water or white lightning.'

'It's actually both, if you can believe that. It came from an artesian well in La Plata, a little town forty miles east of Waco, and before I turned it into this concentrated form, there were five gallons of it. I've got a regular little distillery running down there, Howie, but I don't think the government will ever bust me for it.' He was grinning, and now the grin broadened. 'Water's all it is, but it's still the G.o.dd.a.m.ndist popskull the human race has ever seen.'

'I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.'

'I know you don't. But you will. You know what, Howie?'

'What?'

'If the idiotic human race can manage to hold itself together for another six months, I'm betting it'll hold itself together for all time.'

He lifted the mayonnaise jar, and one magnified Bobby-eye stared at me through it with huge solemnity. 'This is the big one,' he said. 'The cure for the worst disease to which h.o.m.o sapiens falls prey.'

'Cancer?'

'Nope,' Bobby said. 'War. Barroom brawls. Drive-by shootings. The whole mess. Where's your bathroom, Howie? My back teeth are floating.'

When he came back he had not only turned the Mumford tee-shirt rightside out, he had combed his hair - nor had his method of doing this changed, I saw. Bobby just held his head under the faucet for awhile then raked everything back with his fingers.

He looked at the two gla.s.s boxes and p.r.o.nounced the bees and wasps back to normal. 'Not that a wasps' nest ever approaches anything even closely resembling 'normal', Howie. Wasps are social insects, like bees and ants, but unlike bees, which are almost always sane, and ants, which have occasional schizoid lapses, wasps are total full-bore lunatics.' He smiled. 'Just like us good old h.o.m.o saps.' He took the top off the gla.s.s box containing the beehive.

'Tell you what, Bobby,' I said. I was smiling, but the smile felt much too wide. 'Put the top back on and just tell me about it, what do you say? Save the demonstration for later. I mean, my landlord's a real p.u.s.s.ycat, but the super's this big bull d.y.k.e who smokes Odie Perode cigars and has thirty pounds on me. She - '

'You'll like this,' Bobby said, as if I hadn't spoken at all - a habit as familiar to me as his Ten Fingers Method of Hair Grooming. He was never impolite but often totally absorbed. And could I stop him? Aw s.h.i.t, no. It was too good to have him back. I mean I think I knew even then that something was going to go totally wrong, but when I was with Bobby for more than five minutes, he just hypnotized me. He was Lucy holding the football and promising me this time for sure, and I was Charlie Brown, rushing down the field to kick it. 'In fact, you've probably seen it done before - they show pictures of it in magazines from time to time, or in TV wildlife doc.u.mentaries. It's nothing very special, but it looks like a big deal because people have got these totally irrational prejudices about bees.'

And the weird thing was, he was right - I had seen it before.

He stuck his hand into the box between the hive and the gla.s.s. In less than fifteen seconds his hand had acquired a living black-and-yellow glove. It brought back an instant of total recall: sitting in front of the TV, wearing footie pajamas and clutching my Paddington Bear, maybe half an hour before bedtime (and surely years before Bobby was born), watching with mingled horror, disgust, and fascination as some beekeeper allowed bees to cover his entire face. They had formed a sort of executioner's hood at first, and then he had brushed them into a grotesque living beard.

Bobby winced suddenly, sharply, then grinned.

'One of em stung me,' he said. 'They're still a little upset from the trip. I hooked a ride with the local insurance lady from La Plata to Waco - she's got an old Piper Cub - and flew some little commuter airline, Air a.s.shole, I think it was, up to New Orleans from there. Made about forty connections, but I swear to G.o.d it was the cab ride from LaGarbage that got em crazy. Second Avenue's still got more potholes than the Bergenstra.s.se after the Germans surrendered.'

'You know, I think you really ought to get your hand out of there, Bobs,' I said. I kept waiting for some of them to fly out - I could imagine chasing them around with a rolled-up magazine for hours, bringing them down one by one, as if they were escapees in some old prison movie. But none of them had escaped . . . at least so far.

'Relax, Howie. You ever see a bee sting a flower? Or even hear of it, for that matter?'

'You don't look like a flower.'

He laughed. 's.h.i.t, you think bees know what a flower looks like? Uh-uh! No way, man! They don't know what a flower looks like any more than you or I know what a cloud sounds like. They know I'm sweet because I excrete sucrose dioxin in my sweat . . . along with thirty-seven other dioxins, and those're just the ones we know about.'

He paused thoughtfully.

'Although I must confess I was careful to, uh, sweeten myself up a little tonight. Ate a box of chocolate-covered cherries on the plane - '

'Oh Bobby, Jesus!'

' - and had a couple of MallowCremes in the taxi coming here.'

He reached in with his other hand and carefully began to brush the bees away. I saw him wince once more just before he got the last of them off, and then he eased my mind considerably by replacing the lid on the gla.s.s box. I saw a red swelling on each of his hands: one in the cup of the left palm, another high up on the right, near what the palmists call the Bracelets of Fortune. He'd been stung, but I saw well enough what he'd set out to show me: what looked like at least four hundred bees had investigated him. Only two had stung.

He took a pair of tweezers out of his jeans watch-pocket, and went over to my desk. He moved the pile of ma.n.u.script beside the w.a.n.g Micro I was using in those days and trained my Tensor lamp on the place where the pages had been - fiddling with it until it formed a tiny hard spotlight on the cherrywood.

'Writin anything good, Bow-Wow?' he asked casually, and I felt the hair stiffen on the back of my neck. When was the last time he'd called me Bow-Wow? When he was four? Six? s.h.i.t, man, I don't know. He was working carefully on his left hand with the tweezers. I saw him extract a tiny something that looked like a nostril hair and place it in my ashtray.

'Piece on art forgery for Vanity Fair,' I said. 'Bobby, what in h.e.l.l are you up to this time?'

'You want to pull the other one for me?' he asked, offering me the tweezers, his right hand, and an apologetic smile. 'I keep thinking if I'm so G.o.ddam smart I ought to be ambidextrous, but my left hand has still got an IQ of about six.'

Same old Bobby.

I sat down beside him, took the tweezers, and pulled the bee stinger out of the red swelling near what in his case should have been the Bracelets of Doom, and while I did it he told me about the differences between bees and wasps, the difference between the water in La Plata and the water in New York, and how, G.o.ddam! everything was going to be an right with his water and a little help from me.

And oh s.h.i.t, I ended up running at the football while my laughing, wildly intelligent brother held it, one last time.

'Bees don't sting unless they have to, because it kills them,' Bobby said matter-of-factly. 'You remember that time in North Conway, when you said we kept killing each other because of original sin?'

'Yes. Hold still.'

'Well, if there is such a thing, if there's a G.o.d who could simultaneously love us enough to serve us His own Son on a cross and send us all on a rocket-sled to h.e.l.l just because one stupid b.i.t.c.h bit a bad apple, then the curse was just this: He made us like wasps instead of bees. s.h.i.t, Howie, what are you doing?'

'Hold still,' I said, 'and I'll get it out. If you want to make a lot of big gestures, I'll wait.'

'Okay,' he said, and after that he held relatively still while I extracted the stinger. 'Bees are nature's kamikaze pilots, Bow-Wow. Look in that gla.s.s box, you'll see the two who stung me lying dead at the bottom. Their stingers are barbed, like fishhooks. They slide in easy. When they Pull out, they disembowel themselves.'

'Gross,' I said, dropping the second stinger in the ashtray. I couldn't see the barbs, but I didn't have a microscope.

'It makes them particular, though,' he said.

'I bet.'

'Wasps, on the other hand, have smooth stingers. They can shoot you up as many times as they like. They use up the poison by the third or fourth shot, but they can go right on making holes if they like . . . and usually they do. Especially wall-wasps. The kind I've got over there. You gotta sedate em. Stuff called Noxon. It must give em a h.e.l.l of a hangover, because they wake up madder than ever.'

He looked at me somberly, and for the first time I saw the dark brown wheels of weariness under his eyes and realized my kid brother was more tired than I had ever seen him.

'That's why people go on fighting, Bow-Wow. On and on and on. We got smooth stingers. Now watch this.'

He got up, went over to his tote-bag, rummaged in it, and came up with an eye-dropper. He opened the mayonnaise jar, put the dropper in, and drew up a tiny bubble of his distilled Texas water.

When he took it over to the gla.s.s box with the wasps' nest inside, I saw the top on this one was different - there was a tiny plastic slide-piece set into it. I didn't need him to draw me a picture: with the bees, he was perfectly willing to remove the whole top. With the wasps, he was taking no chances.

He squeezed the black bulb. Two drops of water fell onto the nest, making a momentary dark spot that disappeared almost at once. 'Give it about three minutes,' he said.

'What - '

'No questions,' he said. 'You'll see. Three minutes.'

In that period, he read my piece on art forgery . . . although it was already twenty pages long.

'Okay,' he said, putting the pages down. 'That's pretty good, man. You ought to read up a little on how Jay Gould furnished the parlor-car of his private train with fake Manets, though - that's a hoot.' He was removing the cover of the gla.s.s box containing the wasps' nest as he spoke.

'Jesus, Bobby, cut the comedy!' I yelled.

'Same old wimp,' Bobby laughed, and pulled the nest, which was dull gray and about the size of a bowling ball, out of the box. He held it in his hands. Wasps flew out and lit on his arms, his cheeks, his forehead. One flew across to me and landed on my forearm. I slapped it and it fell dead to the carpet. I was scared - I mean really scared. My body was wired with adrenaline and I could feel my eyes trying to push their way out of their sockets.

'Don't kill em,' Bobby said. 'You might as well be killing babies, for all the harm they can do you. That's the whole point.' He tossed the nest from hand to hand as if it were an overgrown softball. He lobbed it in the air. I watched, horrified, as wasps cruised the living room of my apartment like fighter planes on patrol.

Bobby lowered the nest carefully back into the box and sat down on my couch. He patted the place next to him and I went over, nearly hypnotized. They were everywhere: on the rug, the ceiling, the drapes. Half a dozen of them were crawling across the front of my big-screen TV.

Before I could sit down, he brushed away a couple that were on the sofa cushion where my a.s.s was aimed. They flew away quickly. They were all flying easily, crawling easily, moving fast. There was nothing drugged about their behavior. As Bobby talked, they gradually found their way back to their spit-paper home, crawled over it, and eventually disappeared inside again through the hole in the top.

'I wasn't the first one to get interested in Waco,' he said. 'It just happens to be the biggest town in the funny little non-violent section of what is, per capita, the most violent state in the union. Texans love to shoot each other, Howie - I mean, it's like a state hobby. Half the male population goes around armed. Sat.u.r.day night in the Fort Worth bars is like a shooting gallery where you get to plonk away at drunks instead of clay ducks. There are more NRA card-carriers than there are Methodists. Not that Texas is the only place where people shoot each other, or carve each other up with straight-razors, or stick their kids in the oven if they cry too long, you understand, but they sure do like their firearms.'

'Except in Waco,' I said.

'Oh, they like em there, too,' he said. 'It's just that they use em on each other a h.e.l.l of a lot less often.'

Jesus. I just looked up at the clock and saw the time. It feels like I've been writing for fifteen minutes or so, but it's actually been over an hour. That happens to me sometimes when I'm running at white-hot speed, but I can't allow myself to be seduced into these specifics. I feel as well as ever - no noticeable drying of the membranes in the throat, no groping for words, and as I glance back over what I've done I see only the normal typos and strikeovers. But I can't kid myself. I've got to hurry up. 'Fiddle-de-dee,' said Scarlett, and all of that.

The non-violent atmosphere of the Waco area had been noticed and investigated before, mostly by sociologists. Bobby said that when you fed enough statistical data on Waco and similar areas into a computer - population density, mean age, mean economic level, mean educational level, and dozens of other factors - what you got back was a whopper of an anomaly. Scholarly papers are rarely jocular, but even so, several of the better than fifty Bobby had read on the subject suggested ironically that maybe it was 'something in the water'.

'I decided maybe it was time to take the joke seriously,' Bobby said. 'After all, there's something in the water of a lot of places that prevents tooth decay. It's called fluoride.'

He went to Waco accompanied by a trio of research a.s.sistants: two sociology grad-students and a full professor of geology who happened to be on sabbatical and ready for adventure. Within six months, Bobby and the sociology guys had constructed a computer program which ill.u.s.trated what my brother called the world's only calmquake. He had a slightly rumpled printout in his tote. He gave it to me. I was looking at a series of forty concentric rings. Waco was in the eighth, ninth, and tenth as you moved in toward the center.

'Now look at this,' he said, and put a transparent overlay on the printout. More rings; but in each one there was a number. Fortieth ring: 471. Thirty-ninth: 420. Thirty-eighth: 418. And so on. In a couple of places the numbers went up instead of down, but only in a couple (and only by a little).

'What are they?'

'Each number represents the incidence of violent crime in that particular circle,' Bobby said. 'Murder, rape, a.s.sault and battery, even acts of vandalism. The computer a.s.signs a number by a formula that takes population density into account.' He tapped the twenty-seventh circle, which held the number 204, with his finger. 'There's less than nine hundred people in this whole area, for instance. The number represents three or four cases of spouse abuse, a couple of barroom brawls, an act of animal cruelty - some senile farmer got p.i.s.sed at a pig and shot a load of rock-salt into it, as I recall - and one involuntary manslaughter.'

I saw that the numbers in the central circles dropped off radically: 85, 81, 70, 63, 40, 21, 5. At the epicenter of Bobby's calmquake was the town of La Plata. To call it a sleepy little town seems more than fair.

The numeric value a.s.signed to La Plata was zero.

'So here it is, Bow-Wow,' Bobby said, leaning forward and rubbing his long hands together nervously, 'my nominee for the Garden of Eden. Here's a community of fifteen thousand, twenty-four per cent of which are people of mixed blood, commonly called Indios. There's a moccasin factory, a couple of little motor courts, a couple of scrub farms. That's it for work. For play there's four bars, a couple of dance-halls where you can hear any kind of music you want as long as it sounds like George Jones, two drive-ins, and a bowling alley.' He paused and added, 'There's also a still. I didn't know anybody made whiskey that good outside of Tennessee.'

In short (and it is now too late to be anything else), La Plata should have been a fertile breeding-ground for the sort of casual violence you can read about in the Police Blotter section of the local newspaper every day. Should have been but wasn't. There had been only one murder in La Plata during the five years previous to my brother's arrival, two cases of a.s.sault, no rapes, no reported incidents of child abuse. There had been four armed robberies, but all four turned out to have been committed by transients . . . as the murder and one of the a.s.saults had been. The local Sheriff was a fat old Republican who did a pretty fair Rodney Dangerfield imitation. He had been known, in fact, to spend whole days in the local coffee shop, tugging the knot in his tie and telling people to take his wife, please. My brother said he thought it was a little more than lame humor; he was pretty sure the poor guy was suffering first-stage Alzheimer's Disease. His only deputy was his nephew. Bobby told me the nephew looked quite a lot like Junior Samples on the old Hee-Haw show.

'Put those two guys in a Pennsylvania town similar to La Plata in every way but the geographical,' Bobby said, 'and they would have been out on their a.s.ses fifteen years ago. But in La Plata, they're gonna go on until they die . . . which they'll probably do in their sleep.'

'What did you do?' I asked. 'How did you proceed?'

'Well, for the first week or so after we got our statistical s.h.i.t together, we just sort of sat around and stared at each other,' Bobby said. 'I mean, we were prepared for something, but nothing quite like this. Even Waco doesn't prepare you for La Plata.' Bobby shifted restlessly and cracked his knuckles.

'Jesus, I hate it when you do that,' I said.

He smiled. 'Sorry, Bow-Wow. Anyway, we started geological tests, then microscopic a.n.a.lysis of the water. I didn't expect a h.e.l.l of a lot; everyone in the area has got a well, usually a deep one, and they get their water tested regularly to make sure they're not drinking borax, or something. If there had been something obvious, it would have turned up a long time ago. So we went on to submicroscopy, and that was when we started to turn up some pretty weird stuff.'

'What kind of weird stuff?'

'Breaks in chains of atoms, subdynamic electrical fluctuations, and some sort of unidentified protein. Water ain't really H2O, you know - not when you add in the sulfides, irons, G.o.d knows what else happens to be in the aquifer of a given region. And La Plata water - you'd have to give it a string of letters like the ones after a professor emeritus's name.' His eyes gleamed. 'But the protein was the most interesting thing, Bow-Wow. So far as we know, it's only found in one other place: the human brain.'