APRIL STARED DOWN AT HIM, eyes flitting over his forehead, and then drifting down to his chin, back up to his eyes and down again, as if she were measuring each feature of his face, comparing it to some face in her memory. But there was an expectant look in her eyes, too, and he saw that she was waiting for the answer to a question. This happened sometimes now – people waited for answers to questions he didn’t recall them asking – and he struck his contemplative pose. “Hmm,” Remy said.
She waited. He was lying on his back and she was crouched over him, breathing softly, naked from the waist up. He glanced down at her lovely jutting collarbones, at her cupped breasts and the flat plain of her lovely stomach. Before this moment he could only recall brief glimpses of her – strobe flashes of her face, an arm, a thigh – and so it amazed him to see her so fully, to trace the narrow, lovely terrain of her body. She wore plaid pajama bottoms and nothing else, and he kept thinking that word: lovely. She stared at him inquisitively, as if trying to read him in a poker game. “Hmm,” he said again.
“It’s not a test.” She laughed at him. “It’s a simple question.”
“Right. What was it again?”
“I said… do you want to know what I hate?”
“Oh. Yes.”
April rose and flopped across his lap, so that she was facing the other way. She slapped at the newspaper, which was at that end of the bed. “This.” After a second, Remy sat up. She had the Sunday Times spread out at his feet. He was shocked by the date – could so much time have passed? Could he account for all of those days?
“You hate the newspaper?” he asked.
“No, not the paper. I hate this page.” She held up the Portraits in Grief page, where the Times ran little cross-section obits of the people who’d died that day – four or five every day, presumably until their inventory ran out. “I hate the way I read this page now,” she said. “It’s the same way I used to read the wedding announcements. When I first moved to the city I didn’t know anyone and I’d read the weddings like someone trying to learn a language. I’d look for people I knew – maybe someone I went to school with, or someone I met at a party, someone I sold an apartment to. Then I’d look for attractive people. Where they went to school, where they vacationed, where their parents lived, where they went to college. Like an entire life could be captured in a paragraph. I’d imagine my life in a paragraph: grand ceremony, two sophisticated families coming together, a romantic honeymoon, the couple going back to their fascinating jobs. The bride plans to keep her name. It filled me with such jealousy and self-loathing.” She swallowed. “That’s how I read these portraits now. Don’t you think that’s crazy?”
“I might not be the best judge,” Remy said.
“Of…”
“Crazy.”
“I don’t mean crazy, I guess. I mean shallow.”
“You’re not shallow.”
“How do you know that?”
Remy had no answer.
April turned back to the newspaper. “Reporters still call me all the time.” She folded the paper. “They come across so caring and compassionate; ‘It must have been horrible to lose two people in one day.’ I say, ‘Oh. Do you think?’ I put them off… say I don’t want to talk about it yet. ‘Maybe later.’”
“Why don’t you want to talk about it?”
“You don’t talk about it,” she said, “what happened that day.”
“I don’t really remember it.”
“Oh,” she said. “I remember it.” She looked away, at the place where the floor met the wall. “Lawyers call, too. They’re even more persistent.”
“What do they want?”
“A third.” She looked back down at the newspaper again. “It just surprises me, I guess. Afterward, I really thought that everything would change… I don’t know… that we would be different. Stores would never open again… businesses shut down… lawyers quit their practices and run into the woods.” She smiled wistfully. “I just assumed the newspaper would stop coming out. Instead…” She chewed a thumbnail. “This whole thing… it just became another section in the paper. Like movie reviews. Or the bridge column.”
Remy looked up at the dresser in April’s bedroom, to see if the picture she’d kept up there was still facedown. Her husband. Derek. But his picture was gone.
April was staring at the newspaper, and seemed to be choosing her words with great care. “I just don’t know how we all got so…” And then she stared off again, as if the rest of the sentence were somewhere out the window.
“So… what?” Remy asked.
“Used to it,” she said.
April looked back, one breast peeling off the comforter so that he could see a dark nipple. His eyes traced her neck and her face: dark, serious eyebrows arched over candy brown eyes. She watched him staring at her. “What?” she asked.
“You’re beautiful.”
“You always say that like it’s the first time you’ve ever seen me.”
“It is,” he said.
She turned back to the paper again and read for a few seconds. “Here. Look at this woman.” April slapped the paper. “Allowed herself to be cut in half by a magician for her twin granddaughters’ birthday party. I mean… that’s so… what? Funny and ironic and sad and wonderful. Everything. I don’t know what to feel about that. How are we supposed to feel about that?”
“Alive?” Remy asked.
“Well, I’m tired of feeling like that.”
She reached back with her hand and rubbed his thigh and Remy thought that maybe he could take this skidding life, as long as he landed here sometimes, in this nest of bedding in April’s apartment, glancing down at her body, at her slender back and notched waist. He wondered if this could be enough, if this could tether him, the pressure of another person against his skin. Remy wanted to say something, about them, or her, but he found it impossible because he had no idea what had already been said. Maybe that was normal, too. Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn’t be said; maybe every relationship started over every time two people came together.
She hit the newspaper again. “Or this guy. Bought a vintage motorcycle for himself when he turned twenty-two. Rode it across the country and camped in the Canadian Rockies for a month to shoot photos of migrating geese. Jesus. Who does that?”
April turned to face him again and her long dark hair pooled in his lap. Remy recalled the pictures of March. Her face was wider than April’s, and darker. Their father was right: even though she was older, April seemed younger and frailer than her younger sister had been.
April’s eyes narrowed then as if she were thinking the same thing. “So… do you ever think about what yours would say?”
“My-” Remy opened his eyes.
“Your portrait in grief. They’re not like obits – see. They’re not résumés or tributes. They’re more like crosscuts, a strobe flash on one part of your life. One moment. One theme. So what would yours say?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said.
“I know what mine would say.”
“What?”
“She saw death as just another wedding she wasn’t invited to.”
“AND DO you see them now?” The voice was calm, almost to the point of being alarming.
“See what?” Remy asked. His eyes were closed and he was sitting on a soft couch somewhere. He felt with his hands. A leather couch.
“These… what did you call them… floaters? Flashers?” the calm voice asked. “Can you see them now, with your eyes closed? Yes? Are they here? Are they with us?”
The calm voice made Remy increasingly anxious and he crossed and uncrossed his legs. “Sure. They’re always here. I get used to ’em, but they’re always here.”
“Describe them. What do they look like?”
“Strings. They look like strings.”
“Strings.”
“Right. Little segmented strings.”
“Strings?” The man sounded intrigued.
“Yeah. I said. Strings.”
“And do these strings tie you to the world, Brian? Is that what they do? Are these ropes binding you, or holding you down? Are they keeping you from being who you long to be?”
“No. Not ropes. Strings.” Remy opened his eyes. The man across from him was in his late forties and balding, wore narrow blue-rimmed glasses and had pursed lips like someone sucking a milk shake through a straw. He had a yellow pad of paper open on his crossed leg. The nameplate on his desk read: Dr. Rieux. They were in a small office in an old building, an office with nothing but a desk, a chair, and the couch where Remy sat, his arms at his sides. The rest of the room was taken up with bookshelves, a framed diploma, and a cartoon poster of a boy fighting a huge dragon, the dragon huddling in fear as flames burst from the little boy’s nose.
“Isn’t this what your strings are?” Dr. Rieux asked. “Aren’t these the tethers that keep you from floating away?”
Remy looked back at the psychiatrist. “No. They’re little pieces of tissue floating in my eyes. My ophthamologist says they’re floating in the gel inside there, the vitreous humor. The tissue surrounding it is shredding. He’s worried it could eventually lead to the retinas detaching.”
“Oh. Retinas.” The psychiatrist was noticeably deflated. “Huh.” He frowned and flipped through his notes. His voice lost its smoothness. “Okay, what else have we got?”
“Well,” Remy said, “there are the gaps.”
“The what?” Dr. Rieux didn’t look up from his notes.
“I’m having gaps.”
“You’re having what?”
“Gaps,” Remy said. “I’ll be doing one thing and suddenly-”
“EVERYTHING FADES after a while,” Guterak was saying. “Maybe that’s all it is.” His pool table was heavier than it looked. Remy waited at the top of the stairs to see which direction they were going – in or out. Paul pushed. Okay. They were taking the table out. Remy strained under the weight as he backed it down the wide staircase.
“I mean, it couldn’t last forever, right?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said. Even though it was a small one, and even though the legs were taken off, the slate top was massive and unwieldy, like moving a slab of concrete, like moving a driveway.
“At first, the whole thing felt like a break from the world, like a fuggin’ snow day,” Paul said. “Remember? You know, when you were a kid and it snowed so much they closed the school? Remember those days?”
“Yeah,” Remy said, struggling against the pool tabletop. “Kind of.”
In the kitchen, they turned the tabletop sideways, grunting and huffing. Paul kicked away a plastic football, but it hit the counter and rolled right back in his way. “Just a sec. Hold up.” Paul set his end down to move the ball. Remy looked over at the Guteraks’ refrigerator, which was littered with paper: school lunch menus, report cards, pictures of friends’ kids, even a picture of Edgar. The kitchen had a vague, stale smell, and Remy imagined a crust of bread wedged beneath the dishwasher, or an orange rind behind the fridge. Finally, they got the pool table through the back sliding door and loaded it onto the bed of Paul’s black pickup truck, next to boxes of tools, a television, a dresser, and an ice chest. Paul went back in for the legs of the pool table as Remy stood outside, watching a checkmark of birds dissolve into an ashen sky.
“I really appreciate you helping me,” Paul said when he came back out with the last two legs. “I know I keep saying that.”
“It’s okay,” Remy said.
“I just feel bad. Here you are, your back and eyes too fugged up for you to work anymore, and I make you carry all this heavy shit.”
“My back’s fine, Paul. And my eyes-” Remy closed his eyes and saw paramecia swimming in the diffuse light. He opened them and the world became faded and flat again, filled with static as in an old movie.
They went back in and Remy followed Guterak upstairs, to the bedroom, which was littered with Paul’s jeans and wrinkled button shirts. He piled hangered shirts, jackets, and pants on Remy’s arms and they started back down the stairs.
“I tell you what happened last week?” Paul spoke over an armful of jackets.
“I don’t know.”
“I got a call from an agent,” Paul said. “Out of the blue. A talent agent. The Boss’s guy. Big sloppy bug-eyed fugger who helped him get his movie deal. Guy specializes in stories about that day, right? He says The Boss wants me taken care of, so I take him on a tour a The Zero and tell him my whole story and he says I got one of the best he’s heard. Says I pitch it good, too. Money in the bank. He says there’s gonna be all kinds of entertainment possibilities. TV shows are starting to… what did he call it… stockpile material. It’s going to be a while before anyone writes directly at it, but there’s lots of what he called subtext. And he said I could get gigs in the meantime.”
“Gigs?”
“Sure. Appearances and shit. Malls. Boat shows. Parades. They’re looking for cops and smokers to cut ribbons and salute flags and throw out pitches and read poems and shit. The agent says I’ll do gigs until the movie market matures for my kind of story. He says everything goes through this cycle of opportunity: first inspirational stories, kids and animals, shit like that; then the backdrop stories, he called it the home-front… and then the big money – thrillers.”
“Thrillers,” was all Remy could think to say.
“Oh yeah. Guy says it’s all about thrillers now, says history has become a thriller plot.” Paul shrugged. “After thrillers come anniversaries: five years, ten, and the real money-” Paul dragged it out, took a long drink of coffee. “Nostalgia.”
“Nostalgia?”
“He said a story like mine is like owning a good stock. And that nostalgia is like the moment my little company goes public. So, after he goes through this whole explanation of everything, guy asks, do I wanna sell my stock? Do I wanna sell him my experiences?”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I said, ‘Bet your ass I’ll sell my experiences. I sure as hell don’t want ’em anymore.’” Guterak threw the clothes into the back of the truck. “You want me to see if they want yours, too?”
“My…”
“Your experiences.”
“No. That’s okay. I’ll hold onto mine.”
“Hey, if you change your mind…” Guterak said.
They finished loading Paul’s pickup truck and climbed into the cab. It smelled like cigarette smoke, but otherwise it felt nice, sitting in a truck with Paul. It was like being a kid, Remy thought, riding in a car with no idea where he was going, no expectation of how long the trip would take, just the sun fluttering between buildings.
They turned a corner and Remy looked back to make sure the tarp was tied down and that’s when he noticed a beat-up silver Lincoln behind them, probably fifteen years old. It looked like a gypsy cab, but it had two guys in front. That seemed strange to Remy. Gypsy cabs never had two guys in front. Paul turned the truck twice more and the car stayed with them. At a stoplight, Remy adjusted the side mirror and got a good look at the two men in the car. The driver was a white guy with a mustache, wearing a ball cap, staring straight ahead. The passenger was a heavyset black guy, also staring straight ahead. He looked over at Paul, who didn’t seem to notice the car behind them.
Paul was rambling about women. “And do you know why? Because they don’t really want what they say they want. Look at Stacy. Spends twenty-two years riding my ass: Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking? Why don’t you talk? Then when I finally decide to start talking, she says I won’t shut up.”
Remy looked behind them. The gypsy cab was still there.
Paul stopped at a diner. As he got out, Remy watched the car tool slowly past, the driver – the thick guy with the mustache – glancing in Remy’s direction and nodding. Remy followed Paul inside and they took a booth in the corner. They got a couple of coffees. Paul ordered hash. Remy ordered huevos rancheros. He watched the door.
Paul lit a cigarette. “I tell you they divided The Zero into quadrants?”
“No.”
“Yeah, each quadrant is under a different bucket company. The fuggin’ hard hats are pushing us out. They wanna work faster. Snow days are over, man. Even the smokers – they want those poor shits out, too. But they’re havin’ trouble there. The smokers are in no fuggin’ mood. Some of those guys are total pricks, showboats, like the fuggin’ Yankees of grief, you know? But… I hate to admit it… I know how they feel. I mean, after a while… you start to feel like it’s yours. Like you own it.”
Remy drank his coffee.
“You remember that night, Bri? When we went back down there, afterward? You remember that? How quiet and spooky it was?”
“Not really. No.”
“All of those black smoking shapes… and the searchlights and the glow from the fuggin’ fires… and you couldn’t see the end of it. It was like goin’ someplace where people had never been, like some dark jungle. Remember? You’d be on a street, but all of a sudden it wasn’t a street any more… you take five steps and you’re in some place you can’t imagine, like some hole in a kid’s nightmare. I couldn’t believe the next morning, how gray it all was. That night it really seemed black to me.” Guterak rubbed his scalp.
“Here’s what gets me,” he went on. “Remember, the first morning, the flatbed trucks were already there? They took a hundred-some trucks to Fresh Kills. On the second fuggin’ day, Bri! From the beginning they were already cleaning up the mess… before they even knew for sure what it was. I mean… what is that? Is that right?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said.
“You wanna know what I think?” He looked over his shoulder, and then leaned in closer to Remy. “I think the bosses knew all along that we weren’t gonna find anyone. I don’t think they cared. They wanted to clean it up fast, but they had to pretend that they expected us to find people. Right? All along they’re saying, We will not rest until blah-fuggin’-blah and There is still fuggin’ hope, and all the time what they’re really thinking is we gotta move a million tons of shit before we can rent this fugger out. I mean, how do you move a million tons? You should see it. It’s like a strip mine down there. Like we’re digging for something.”
The words sounded familiar and disturbing, and Remy badly wanted to end this line of conversation. He excused himself to go to the bathroom. He walked past the counter and into the men’s room. He stared at himself in the scratched mirror, through his scratched eyes. Behind him, one of the urinals was overflowing, with the insistent sound of running water. Remy went into a stall, closed the door, undid his pants and sat, his head in his hands.
A few seconds later, the door to his stall flew open.
“Hey! Do you mind?” Remy looked up and saw one of the men from the gypsy cab, a heavy guy with a crooked mustache, teardrop sunglasses, and a baseball cap that bore a single word in block letters: BUFF.
“Have you had time to consider our offer?” the man said.
“I just sat down,” Remy said.
“We’re not going to interfere in your work, if that’s your concern,” the man said. “All we’re asking is that you show us a little… professional courtesy. Keep us in the loop. And, in return, the Bureau keeps you informed about what we find. Cooperation. That’s the key, am I right?”
Remy felt strangely compliant, hunched over in a stall with his pants at his ankles, and this thick man blocking the door to the stall. “Yes,” he said. “Sure.”
“Outstanding,” said the man in the BUFF hat. “See? We’re cooperating. Easy as that.” He put two fingers to his temple and then tipped the fingers toward Remy. “I’ll be in touch.”
The man was gone before Remy managed to say, “That’s not necessary.”
Remy finished his business and came out of the stall gingerly, looked around, washed his hands, had to dry them on his pants because there were no towels, and returned to the restaurant edgily, looking around for the man from the gypsy cab. He didn’t see anyone. When he got back to the table, Paul was chewing his hash. He pointed his fork at Remy, as if he’d been waiting to finish his sentence.
“Look, Paul,” Remy said, “I’m not sure we should be talking about this stuff.”
But Guterak couldn’t stop. “We don’t do many tours anymore. Too many people. They’re building a goddamn observation platform. Like it’s the Grand Fuggin’ Canyon. They got these apartments overlooking The Zero donated for the rescue workers, and the bosses are using ’em for parties, to bang their girlfriends and hand out drinks to celebrities. Billionaires and soap actresses. The whole thing looks different now. Every day, they take shit away and it just never comes back. Take it to Fresh Kills and squeeze it like orange juice until all the paper and blood comes out and then they go back for another truckload.” He spoke in a low groan. “They’re gonna take it all away, Bri. All of it. The paper gets filed, bits of flesh buried, and you know who gets the steel? The mob. Goddamn bosses give all the steel to the mob. Everyone gets a piece a this thing.”
“Listen to me, Paul. You shouldn’t talk like this. Okay?” Remy scanned the restaurant for the man from the gypsy cab. “You have to be careful. You need to be quiet.”
“Yeah,” Paul said, “that’s what this agent of mine says. He says every time I open my fuggin’ mouth I give away what we could be getting paid for. You only got one story, he says, you have to protect it. So I promised him I’d shut up.” Paul shook his head. “But sometimes I think it’s crazy we don’t talk about this shit. Sometimes I think it’s crazy that we aren’t standing up and yelling about it.”
“Paul-” Remy began.
“I just wanna tell ’em, ‘Leave it!’ You know? Leave the shit. Everything. The piles and mounds. What’s the fuggin’ rush? Let me and the smokers spend the rest of our lives going through it one piece at a time if we want.”
The waitress filled their coffees.
“Maybe you should see someone,” Remy said quietly. “A therapist.”
“A what?”
“A therapist. A psychiatrist. I think I might be seeing one.”
Paul shrugged. “They got counselors and priests down there all the time, always trying to strike up conversations, staring at me like I’m a fuggin’ mental. One day I’m pissing and this guy with a ponytail comes up to me and asks me how I’m doing. I say, ‘My stream’s all right, but it looks like I could use a little more water in my diet.’
“And this humorless fugger says, ‘No, how are you doing, friend?’ So I turn to him and say, ‘You really wanna know how I’m doing, friend?’ and he thinks he’s got a live one and he perks up. ‘Yes,’ he says. I say, ‘Not so fuggin’ good, you really wanna know.’
“This jerkoff says: ‘Well, don’t worry. It’s gonna get better.’ That’s it. It’s gonna get better. That’s my fuggin’ counseling. Right? So you know what I said? I said, ‘Fugg you. I don’t want it to get better.’”
They ate in silence. Remy watched the door but he didn’t see the guy from the gypsy cab. “What happened with Stacy?” he asked.
“Come on, Brian.”
“Indulge me,” Remy said.
“Indulge you.” Paul drank his coffee, then shrugged and stared at his fork. “Well… pretty much the same thing. She said maybe it would get better and I said, ‘Fugg you, Stacy. I don’t want it to get better.’” He took a bite of his hash, and stared out the window into the parking lot as he chewed. Remy looked outside, too. The silver gypsy cab tooled past once more, the two men staring straight ahead at-
THE DESK in front of him was smooth, whorls of blond wood like a satellite image of oak storms. He ran his fingers along its mostly empty surface, over a monthly planner with nothing on it, to a nameplate that was turned away from him. He spun it around. The nameplate read REMY. Next to his name was a phone, with buttons for five lines, none of them marked. He picked up the receiver, listened to the buzz of the office dial tone, and set it back. There was a computer, turned off. Remy pushed the button beneath the screen, but nothing happened. He looked around his windowless office. It seemed to be brand new: very little on the walls. It was a good-sized room, with dark-wood walls, two chairs on the other side of the desk, and a lawyer’s glass-fronted bookcase. Remy walked over and crouched to look at the books in the case, hoping they would provide some clue about what he did in this office. But the only thing in the case was a World Book Encyclopedia set from 1974 and two rows of faded old Reader’s Digest condensed books that looked like they’d been picked up at a yard sale. There was also a photo on the wall, of him at The Zero in the days after – The Boss on one side, The President on the other. Remy stared at the picture. He didn’t remember meeting The President. There was nothing else in the office – no file cabinets, no photos of April or Edgar. He went back to the desk and began opening drawers. In the top drawer was a stack of blank paper with the word SECURE written across the top in a bold font. He tried the big bottom drawer next, but it was locked. The middle drawer was empty, except for a manila envelope with REMY written on it in black block letters.
Remy hefted the slender envelope, turned it over, set it on the desk, and stared at it. Was he supposed to open it? Was it some kind of report on him, not for him? Was it a test?
Remy took the report, walked to his office door, and opened it, looking for someone to ask about the report. He stuck his head out and looked both ways, down a wainscoted corridor that stretched about forty feet in either direction. A half-dozen closed office doors lined the corridor, all of them with unlabeled windows of frosted glass. Remy turned right and followed the corridor to its end, where it came to a T with another hallway. Remy turned left this time and walked about fifteen feet, until he came to a pair of swinging doors that opened on a vast room, a maze of soft-walled cubicles bathed in fluorescent light. Again, there were no windows. He could hear the tapping of computer keys, like rainfall, and the low hum of people talking. The cubicles spread out before him like a huge field of crops, broken only by pillars every thirty feet or so. Inside the first cubicle a woman was hammering away at her computer keyboard, a telephone headset perched on her head, a plastic-sealed document in front of her. “Hell he did,” she said into her headset. “Bullshit. Come on now!”
Perhaps sensing Remy behind her, the woman turned. “Oh, hello, sir.”
Remy held up the envelope with his name on it. “Do you know-” he began.
The woman gestured to the phone headset, and Remy nodded and backed away. Leaving the room, he followed the T-shaped corridor in the other direction. It ended at another, more impressive pair of doors, the word SECURE lettered on the frosted glass. Remy opened the door and peeked inside. A woman sat behind a round desk reading a furniture catalog; behind her a big dark-wood door led to another office. Remy backed out, eased the door shut, turned left, and followed this hallway until he found himself back at another entrance to the huge maze of cubicles. He looked back over his shoulder. On the wall above the doorway he’d just come through was another sign like the ones he’d seen in the airplane hangar and the Quonset huts: “Our enemies should know this about the American people, which will not rest until Evil is defeated.”
Finally, Remy backtracked again down the T and down the corridor toward his office. Inside, the phone was ringing. He walked in and picked it up. “Hello?”
“Oh, good, you’re still there.” It was a woman’s voice.
“I’m still here,” Remy said.
“Did you get the envelope Shawn sent over?”
Remy set it on the desk. “Yes.”
“What do you think? Any of it helpful?”
“Uh… Probably too early to tell,” Remy said.
“Sure,” she said. “I tried to tell them it could wait until he got back from Washington, but you know those assholes in Partials.”
“Do I,” Remy said, surprised that it didn’t come out like a question.
“I know it. They’re all so mystical. I swear they could find significance in a used scrap of toilet paper. I guess it’s the training they get.”
“I guess,” Remy said
“Have you noticed how everyone in Partials eventually stops speaking in full sentences?”
“I hadn’t noticed that,” Remy said.
“Anyway, they’re ready for you now.”
“Right. Who’s that again?”
“Isn’t that the truth?” She laughed and hung up.
Remy hung up and opened the envelope. Inside were two sheets of paper sealed in Ziploc bags. The first was a crumpled empty letter-sized envelope addressed to Lisa Herote – the name Assan had offered him at the interrogation – at an address in Virginia. There was a coffee cup stain on the envelope and a stain that might have been yogurt, as if it had been found in a garbage can. There was no return address on the envelope, but someone had affixed a yellow flag: “CKed w/Bishir’s hw sample – positive.”
Remy heard footsteps in the hallway. He looked up from the letter and saw the silhouette of a man standing behind the frosted glass.
Remy waited for a moment, then said “Hello.”
The silhouette moved on.
Remy looked back at the documents on his desk. The second plastic bag contained a half sheet of burned paper, its corners like burned toast. Remy carefully picked up the document and read it through the plastic, his fingers instinctively avoiding the blackened edges to keep from crushing them. It was a printout of an e-mail from MSelios@ADR to a BFenton at the same company. The right-hand corner of the paper was burned, leaving only the left side readable.
So guess who calls last ni
asleep. What am I suppose
around makes me fee
sex is good, though and I
part of the attraction
worried about t
scared to March
Remy turned the page over, but there was nothing on the other side. The yellow flag indicated that a copy of the e-mail had been “Forwarded by Markham, Investig. Unit. Doc. Dept., reconstruction under way from Partials.” It was initialed three times; he didn’t recognize any of the initials.
Remy put the two baggies back in the envelope, walked back to the door, and looked once more down the long, empty corridor. The last time, he had ventured right; this time he turned left, following the corridor to another T and another right turn. He walked a short distance and knew, even before he went through the swinging doors, that he would find himself again in-
THE SKY, impossibly close, shimmered like the surface of a lake, giving Remy the perverse impression that if he stepped off this fire escape he wouldn’t fall, but float up instead into that perfect autumn blue. Every summer when he was a kid Remy took swimming lessons at a camp upstate; the instructor had always told him that he would float if he’d just lie back and trust the water to hold up his body. Finally, one summer at a family reunion for his mother’s side in West Virginia, Remy tried it. And he floated. Not the way he expected: He didn’t float on top of the water, but rather seemed to become the water, to float within it. Maybe that was the answer. To float in this life, like paper on a current. Just lie back and let himself be.
Remy looked down at the barbecue tool in his hand and he knew to lift the cover on the little charcoal grill. There were three thick steaks and a veggie burger, all sizzling above ash-white coals. He didn’t question it, just flipped them. Perfect: black lines like prison bars across the steaks. The smell was so precise, so not-Zero that he simply stood there, inhaling. Right. This is what cooking steaks are supposed to smell like. Maybe this was not some condition he had, but a life, and maybe every life is lived moment to moment. Doesn’t everyone react to the world as it presents itself? Who really knows more than the moment he’s in? What do you trust? Memory? History? No, these are just stories, and whichever ones we choose to tell ourselves – the one about our marriage, the one about the Berlin Wall – there are always gaps. There must be countless men all over the country crouched in front of barbecues, just like him, wondering how their lives got to that point.
Remy glanced around – he was kneeling on April’s fire escape. Looking down the block, he saw a couple walking below him on the sidewalk, holding hands, leaves cartwheeling before them. Their low voices rose on the air to the fire escape, the man saying “…and the lucky bastard found the last beater in Park Slope.”
There was a glass of red wine next to the little charcoal grill. Remy grabbed it and took a drink, relieved that it tasted just like wine. Cause met effect. Good wine. Shiraz? Yes, this felt better. There were places – in bed with April, here on her fire escape – where he felt grounded. Real. The steaks, as steaks tended to do, needed a few more minutes.
He crawled through the window into April’s living room. A man in his late forties, with thick brown hair, black glasses, and a sports coat, was sitting on one of April’s dining room chairs in the cramped living room, sipping a glass of wine. He straightened up a bit when Remy appeared. April sat on one end of the couch, and at the opposite end sat a sharp-featured woman with short, spiky blond hair. The woman was attractive in the way that women of a certain age could be, with the post-foreplay directness of someone who was finished wasting time. She engineered a smile for Remy. A red scarf was tied at her neck in a real-estate ascot, blooming as if someone had cut her carotid. There was nowhere to sit but between the two women. Remy sat.
“The meat will be just a few more minutes,” Remy said.
“I can’t wait,” said the woman.
“Smells great,” said the man.
“You get to taste Brian’s secret marinade, Nicole,” April told the woman.
“Oh! What’s in it?” asked Nicole with mock interest, turning her unblinking blue eyes on Remy like prison spotlights.
“You know,” Remy said, “I couldn’t tell you.”
“I told you it was secret,” April said.
They all laughed, like real people. They stared at their drinks.
Nicole cleared her throat and spoke as if reading from a script. “Well, April, we are just so excited to have you back.”
“Thank you.”
“It must have been such a difficult time for you.”
“Yes,” April said.
“I suppose we can’t imagine what it was like,” Nicole said.
“No,” April said.
“So awful, losing two people like that.”
“Mm,” April said.
“Must have been harrowing.”
“Mm.”
“Yes.” Nicole seemed to finally understand that the subject was closed. “Well, it’s great to have you back. Our group is hanging onto fourth in gross commissions right now, and with you back in the mix we really believe we’ll be third by the end of the quarter.”
“I hope so,” April said unconvincingly.
“Associates like April are playing a bigger role all the time,” Nicole confided in Remy. “The growth is all under forty right now.”
“Oh,” Remy said.
“I’m just sorry it took this long for me to come back,” April said, and she reached for Remy’s hand.
“Oh. My God! No.” Nicole leaned forward, her round eyes big with concern. “No, no, no! I told you to take as much time as you needed. We got along fine. And with what you’ve been through… no, it’s good that you didn’t rush back.” She sipped her wine. “Honestly, April, for those first couple of months, there was very little movement anyway. But now… we’re almost back to the number of listings we had before. In fact-” She leaned forward as if spreading rank gossip. “Everything points to an upsurge. An explosion. It’s taking off again, April. It’s about to get white hot.”
“White hot,” the man in the dark glasses repeated, staring directly at Remy.
“The downtime is looking like nothing more than a blip,” Nicole said.
“A blip,” said the man in dark glasses.
“It’s a very exciting time for you to be coming back,” Nicole continued. “There are going to be innovations… partnerships with developers… buying our own stock… options and hedges. Louis says the whole country is about to leverage its best asset.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Our optimism.” Then she sipped her wine and shook her head. “You watch. There will be a feeding frenzy. People will be buying product based on nothing more than models. People will be buying artists’ sketches. Ideas.”
“Ideas,” April said weakly.
Remy took this opportunity to rise. “I’ll bet the steaks are done.” He smiled at Nicole. “And your soy burger.”
April had kept his hand in hers when he stood, and now she squeezed it. And only then did he realize how nervous she’d been, about her performance tonight in front of this woman who must be her boss. He let go of her hand and walked toward the window, thinking again that perhaps life had returned to normal, and that normal was a string of single moments disconnected from one another. No reason to think that anything had ever been different. You worked in an office all week. Your girlfriend’s real estate broker boss came over with her husband and you cooked them dinner. And when it came time to eat, it wouldn’t matter whether you remembered planning the dinner. A meal doesn’t care about the cook’s intention; it just gets eaten. All over the city, all over the country, people rose from bed and scurried and fought and returned at night to sleep, independent of any meaning except the rising, scurrying, fighting, and sleeping. They drove cars made in places they’d never been, used cell phones and computers and a thousand pieces of technology with tiny pieces collected from factories all over the world, in places whose existence they could never be sure of, technology they couldn’t begin to understand. The news played whether they watched it or not. And none of them ever stopped to say: Wait! I don’t understand how this car got here! Why this telephone takes pictures! They answered their phones. Ate their steaks. And if they woke up one morning divorced or with cancer, or if they found themselves at war, they assumed the reality of irreconcilable differences, malignant tumors, premonitions of evil.
This is a life, he thought, smooth skipping stones bounding across the surfaces of time, with brief moments of deepened consciousness as you hit the water before going airborne again, flying across the carpool lane, over weeks at a desk, enjoying yourself when the skipping stopped, and spending the rest of your life in a kind of drifting contentment, slipped consciousness, lost weekends, the glow from television sets warming placid faces, smile lines growing in the glare of the screen. He drained his wine.
It was cool on the balcony. Remy drank in deep breaths of city air. The steaks smelled so good he could barely stand it, and his eyes watered as he reached for the cover of the grill as-
HE SAT in his car, disoriented, wondering if the gaps were somehow widening. Maybe it had to with the car, because the worst skips often occurred like this, when he was on the road, or waiting in traffic, only to look up and find himself in a tunnel or on the turnpike, with no clue where he was going or where he’d been (one time he found himself wet to his waist, reeking of sewage) or when he’d suddenly find himself in an unfamiliar neighborhood, parked outside a building, a notebook open in his lap and binoculars around his neck.
This time, he immediately looked around the car for his binoculars, figuring that he was on some kind of assignment he’d have to piece together later, or simply abandon. But he quickly realized that he had no binoculars and no notebook. He was in the suburbs somewhere. And that’s when he became reoriented and recognized the neighborhood, and Carla and Steve’s big house, in a herd of similar big houses grazing in a cul-de-sac on a gradual hillside, this neighborhood that couldn’t be more than two years old, where, Steve had once confided, there were four basic models, and his – the one with brick façades and pillared front porches – was the most expensive, an extra hundy thou.
Remy checked his watch. Quarter past three. Okay, so what was he doing here at three fifteen in the afternoon? He was wearing khaki slacks and a zippered jacket. He wasn’t in front of Edgar’s house, but four houses down the block. He looked around the neighborhood. For the most part, the lawns were obscenely green, like wet moss; in some of them you could still see the seams where new sod had been rolled out – perfect little patches like felt on a pool table. How many turns of a lawn mower? Four? Five? And yet, in front of some of the houses, this little patch of grass was already beginning to die in places, brown circles like age spots where the roots hadn’t been able to take hold. And there were sickly trees, too, in most of the yards, still young, lashed to stakes and bundled in burlap turtlenecks. Little yellow ribbons were tied around the thin trunks, like scarves above sweaters.
Remy heard the squeak of hydraulic brakes, and watched in his rearview mirror as a school bus stopped at the corner behind him; then came the sigh of the bus door, and Edgar and another boy stepped off the bus, trudging off in different directions, without saying a word to one another, like duelers who forgot to turn and fight. The stop sign came in, the lights blinked off, and the bus rumbled on, Edgar bouncing to the beat in his tiny headphones as he walked on the sidewalk toward Carla’s house on the other side of the street. He looked good, though it was hard to tell in his baggy clothes, the hooded sweatshirt and pants bunched up at the ankles of his floppy tennis shoes. Remy thought he saw Edgar steal a glance toward his car, but the boy just kept walking toward his house as if he hadn’t noticed his dad. He paused at the mailbox, took out some catalogs, and continued to the house, up the steps to the pillared porch, fished in his pocket for a key, put it in the door, and disappeared inside. Remy thought he saw the boy’s face appear briefly in one of the windows, but it was gone too quickly to be sure. A few minutes later the boy came out, wearing the same clothes, and loped off again, without a glance in the direction of his father’s car.
Remy sat there a moment, trying to imagine what he’d wanted to say to the boy, but he couldn’t come up with anything. Hell, that didn’t seem so strange either, now that he thought about it – a father unsure what to say to his boy, haunting his kid’s adolescence. After a minute he started his car and drove away.
SOMETHING FAMILIAR in the flow of people past him, something he recalled from that day, moving against the current, a barely civilized rush on tight stairs, but reversed, like a photographic negative: They were climbing the stairs he descended. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” Remy said, his shoulders turned, hands and arms and knees grazing him as he passed, although no one paid him any attention, either before or after he begged their pardon. They looked past him with pleading eyes, their hands high, as if ready at any moment to begin pushing to escape this subway station. They were intimately familiar, these faces, with their constrained lust for escape, barely held panic, an underground face, an elevator face, a train station face. He’d seen people hold their breath in crowds; now he saw it again, as they came up, clutching their handbags and briefcases and shopping bags like they were babies, pulling at their actual kids’ arms like luggage on the way to a late flight, muttering Come on come on come on, and craning their necks to see what was taking so long at the top of the stairs, where others emerged onto the rain-spackled street and… Air! Did any city value air more than this one now? Near the bottom the faces were more frantic; tears streamed down a woman’s face as she held her little pigtailed girl high against her chest. “Please,” was all she could manage. “I have a child. Please.”
As Remy neared the bottom of the stairs, on the dark final landing, the crowd thinned until it was only stragglers, subway workers and a homeless woman playing a saxophone that looked like it had been in a hailstorm. She held her hand open for money, even as she was evacuated, and Remy managed to slip her a dollar as they brushed past one another. Her hand was rough and calloused. “Bless you,” she whispered, and when she had the money, “ass munch.”
There were smells he associated with newsstands and subway maps, although Remy wondered how these things in themselves could stink. As he descended, though, for just a moment the atmosphere of the subway replaced the acrid flour of The Zero, and he breathed in the burning brakes, roasted chestnuts, and spilled coffee as if it were a beautiful garden.
The subway cages were empty; Remy had no tokens, but found an open gate. A nervous transit officer, a fat cave cop, was standing on the platform, shifting his considerable weight on black shoes, breathing through a paper surgical mask. He removed the mask and spoke without inhaling. “You the expert?”
“Why not,” Remy said.
“Over ’dere,” the cave cop said, replacing the mask. Remy looked down the line to a small staging area, where two other cave cops were putting up police tape while two space-suited agents stood nearby, taking photographs of a backpack leaned against a pillar. White powder appeared to have spilled out from the backpack. “Civilian spotted it. Twelve minutes ago.” The cave cop quickly replaced his mask again. He reached in his pocket and held out a paper mask for Remy, who ignored it, looking back toward the white powder.
“Maybe this is what it feels like to be a soldier,” Remy said. “That you just move forward because if you stop to think about the context, what it all means, you’ll just go crazy.”
“What are you talking about?” the subway cop asked through his mask.
“Nothing.” Remy walked toward the backpack.
As he got closer, the guys in the space suits approached him. There was a click and a voice came from somewhere in the left suit. “You must be the guy Documentation sent.”
“I must be,” Remy said.
The space suit nodded. “Stupid question. Sorry.” He winked. “We found some papers in the bag, near the USUM.”
“USUM?” Remy asked.
“Unidentified suspicious materials,” said the other space suit. “There was some cryptic writing in the papers; we think it might be a manifesto of some kind, so they said we had to call you guys in.”
“Manifesto,” the other agent agreed.
Remy stepped between the agents and toward the backpack.
“Hey! What are you doing? Shouldn’t you wait for… someone?” one of the space suits called after him.
Remy said, “I am someone.”
As he got closer, he could see the white powder piled on the ground next to the backpack. He bent down, dipped his finger in the powder, and put it on his tongue.
“Jesus! What are you doing?” the space suit asked.
“Creamer,” Remy said, surprised at the disappointment in his own voice. He could hear sirens on the street above. “French vanilla.” He hoisted the backpack and dumped it out on the platform. He poked through the remains: a spiral binder, a bagel in cellophane, a circular birth control pill dispenser, a pack of cigarettes, some matches, and a report on a book: In the Labyrinth. Remy read the report. She didn’t like the book very much. She said it was too diffuse, too hard to follow. He opened the binder. The girl’s name, Ailea Mendez, was in the upper right-hand corner, along with a phone number. He carefully put Ailea Mendez’s manifesto back in the backpack, then straightened and walked over to-
THE MAN was a lawyer, a good one, if Remy had to guess. He wore a dark suit and tassled loafers, and there was something in the way he leaned his big-assed slacks across the conference table – like a kid showing off a new car to buddies – using a pointer to gesture at the PowerPoint presentation on the wall, a blue screen with red letters that promised to lay out the basic facts of “Applying for Federal Victims Compensation.”
April was sitting in the chair next to Remy, holding his hand and practically crushing his knuckles in her sweaty fist. She was wearing a white lace sweater buttoned once over a plain shirt and Remy imagined that perhaps that one button was the only thing keeping her from coming apart. She breathed in fits and starts.
The PowerPoint screen: 1. Survivor/victim agrees to drop any claim against airline, city, federal government, etc…
“And you’re sure about this part-” the lawyer began.
“Yes,” April said quickly. “I think so.”
“Good,” said the lawyer, “because that’s the first step. It’s probably going to be close to ninety-eight percent of victims by the end. So… you’re in good company.” The lawyer smiled with his big picket teeth and clicked to the next screen: 2. Pain and Mental Anguish: a quantifying formula.
A noise escaped April that was like something between a grunt and a sigh, as if the air had been knocked out of her. She tried to pretend she was clearing her throat. Remy took her hand.
“Everyone starts with a base of two-fifty,” said the lawyer. He stuck his jaw out and rubbed the right side of his neck, which was covered with a purplish shaving rash the size of a tangerine. “For pain and mental anguish. That’s what the guidelines have determined each life is worth, essentially, at a base level of grieving. Now if we get to the appeal process, we could always plead some special circumstance, but in your case, given the recent estrangement between you and the decedent, we’re probably better off taking the two hundred fifty thousand and not opening up that can of worms.” He stroked the rash on his neck tenderly.
“There is one issue we need to discuss,” the lawyer said. “And it’s going to be difficult, but it’s necessary. And understand: I have to ask. Is there any chance… someone else… might step forward to make a claim?”
“Oh.” April’s hand began shaking a little. “Do Derek’s parents want the money? Because I wanted to-”
“No. No. Not his parents. That’s not what I mean. They could challenge, of course, but since Derek left no will, this falls under the state’s intestacy laws, which reward the entire estate to the spouse, and therefore the entire settlement is yours.”
“Even though we weren’t together?”
“Estrangement is not the same as divorce. You could have gotten back together.”
“We wouldn’t have,” April said quickly.
“I understand your feelings, but if I may… you don’t know that. Mr. Kraft’s mother and stepfather certainly don’t know that. And the hearing examiner and special master can only follow the Compensation Fund rules, which clearly stipulate that the spouse is entitled to full compensation for pain and suffering. Now, the parents can appeal some aspects of pecuniary loss, especially if the decedent was supporting them or contributing to their income. But no, when I asked if someone else might make a claim what I was talking about was a… woman, a girlfriend…”
“Oh.” April looked down at her shoes. “There was someone,” she said quietly. She glanced up at Remy, and then looked back down.
“A woman,” the lawyer said, not a question.
“Yes.”
The lawyer turned his body a bit and stopped stroking his rash. Remy thought he seemed… titillated. “Do you think she’ll make a claim?”
“No,” April said.
“I understand this is difficult, but I need you to tell me about their relationship just in case some children miraculously appear, or some document in which he agreed to-”
April seemed to be straining with every word. “There were no children. And she won’t make a claim.”
The lawyer glanced at Remy. “Nevertheless, I should have the information-”
“She worked in his office,” April said. “She died, too.”
“Oh,” said the lawyer, and Remy could tell that the lawyer was somewhat pleased to have this wrinkle out of the way. “Office romance. Sure. Oldest story.” Then he remembered his client. “I’m sorry.”
“But I do want Derek’s parents to have some of the money,” April said, trying to change the subject.
The lawyer looked back at April disapprovingly through his bifocals. “I wouldn’t advise that.” Then he looked at Remy, as if hoping he might talk some sense into her. “If you give them money, it doesn’t preclude them from taking action to get more… and in fact, it sends a message that you believe they are deserving.”
“They are deserving.”
The lawyer was becoming frustrated. “It is my responsibility to tell you… that you are entitled… to his entire estate. All of it. What you do beyond that, well…” Then, as an afterthought, “But you should know that even if you give his family some money, my fee comes out of the full settlement, and not simply the portion you choose to keep, so you should-”
He clicked to the next screen. “Remember that.” The screen read: 3. Factoring in Dependents. He swung his head back to the wall.
“Now. Dependents. You would also be entitled to one hundred fifty thousand for each dependent… but you and your husband had no children, is that correct?”
“Yes,” April said meekly. “That’s correct.”
“But at one time you were planning to have children.”
“No. We weren’t.”
“I just mean, at one point, there was certainly talk of children,” he said, as if dropping a hint. “Young couple… that kind of thing.”
“No. I told you. We were separated.”
“Right. I understand. We’ve established that. But surely at some point you talked about having children.”
“No. It never came up.”
He turned his body again, wearily, as if it were a strain to look away from his PowerPoint presentation, and his hand went quickly back to the rash on his neck. “Look. Mrs. Kraft. I don’t mean to tell you what to say, but what couple doesn’t at least talk about having children? See? These are the kinds of details that can influence the examiner and the special master and have an impact on compensation-”
“We had no plans for kids.”
“-a young, attractive couple, their lives ahead of them, who had once planned for a family but were going through a difficult period, a temporary trial separation-”
“I can’t have children,” April said quietly. “I had a hysterectomy when I was nineteen.”
“Oh,” Remy and the lawyer said at the same time. April looked over at Remy.
The lawyer stuck his jaw out. “Okay. Right.” He opened his mouth, and Remy thought he was going to find some angle to exploit, but perhaps he sensed that he shouldn’t because he simply nodded and flipped to the next PowerPoint screen: 4. Computing Future Earnings.
The lawyer took out a pair of glasses, put them on, and looked through the bifocals at the chart on the wall. “This is going to be woefully less than the decedent actually could have earned… that’s just the way these settlements are being paid out… but you should know that in your case, we’re going to try for more because, frankly, this is one of the few areas where we can make up some ground. Now, the tables, based on age and income put…” He looked down at his legal pad to find the name. “…Derek’s total future earnings at two-point-two million, but we’re going to ask for three based on the high-risk high-reward nature of business law, and his potential for making partner based on evaluations from his personnel records. They won’t give you that much, but we need to ask. Now, if you could bring pay stubs, W-2s, copies of your income tax, any bonus letters he might have gotten… that will help us greatly.”
April nodded without looking up from her shoes.
“As far as other supporting documents: any medical bills, funeral expenses, counseling you may have undergone, any after-tax income that your husband might’ve received. And we’re going to make the argument that as a contracts lawyer with a degree in finance Derek had virtually no risk of unemployment.” He smiled at April. “This is when you get paid back for him spending all that time at work.”
Remy coughed and they both looked at him as if it had meant something. He looked away from them to his shoes and eventually the lawyer turned back to the wall and then thought of something else. The lawyer spun back around to face April and Remy. “Can you bring photos to the hearing?”
“Photos?”
“Yes. Wedding photos, vacation photos, holidays, that kind of thing. Pictures are tremendously effective… you can have the best sob story in the world, but what really sells it are photographs.” The lawyer began to turn back to his presentation, but then thought of something else. “Oh. And bring pictures of your sister, too. You’re not entitled to any compensation for her, obviously, but it doesn’t hurt to have the pictures handy.”
“Excuse me.” April jumped up and left the room, covering her mouth.
The lawyer stuck out his jaw again, stroked his neck again, and sighed. “That happens a lot. It’s… difficult.”
They waited quietly for a few minutes and then the lawyer checked his watch. “I have a noon, so I’m going to go over the rest of this with you and you can explain it to Ms. Kraft afterward, okay?” He began flipping through PowerPoint pages, pausing on the important ones.
Remy looked down the hall to see where April had gone.
“Now these are the breakdowns of deductions that the compensation board will factor from the total: for life insurance, pension plans, social security, and workers’ compensation, the sum of which we’ve calculated to be about one-point-six million, which we subtract from the two-point-seven we arrived at to get…”
“I don’t remember things too well,” Remy said, his voice a low croak.
“Don’t worry. It will all be included in the report that Mrs. Kraft gets.” He spun through several more pages before the lawyer arrived at a page with smaller writing than any of the others. It was a breakdown of the fees the law firm would take. He said that they were taking a reduced rate, but the lawyer pointed to two columns on the bottom of the page, deductions for “Vicarious Trauma” and “Compassion Fatigue.”
Remy leaned forward. Compassion fatigue? “Are those for… you?”
“Yes. For the lawyers working on the case. As you might imagine, these are difficult cases… emotionally.” He removed his glasses and wiped his dry eyes. Then he seemed to think of something else and put the glasses back on. He looked hard at Remy. “Oh, in case you are wondering, April can remarry without affecting her settlement in any way. You wouldn’t have to wait, in other words.” He smiled as if he and Remy were in the same profession. “So that’s good. For you. Obviously.” He smiled and reached in his pocket, pulled out a tin of mints, and offered Remy-
A BIG truck, the biggest he’d ever seen, sat on risers in front of him. It was a pickup as high as a two-story building, on tires taller than a man. At first Remy thought his sense of scale had been thrown off, that his eyes were playing some kind of trick, but this was, in fact, a giant truck. Remy looked around. He was in an arena of some kind – empty and dark – except here in the center, where spotlights shone down on the dirt floor and on this giant truck. He looked closer at the pickup. It was painted red and blue, airbrushed with American flags fluttering in an unseen wind, with an angry-looking eagle perched on the hood and, on the doors, a long list of familiar names, cops and firefighters, Italian, Irish, and Latin, like the roster of a Catholic school football league.
“So what do you think?” Guterak came around the truck and stood next to Remy, gaping at it. He was wearing a suit without the tie and his hair was forcefully parted to the side. He seemed nervous. His voice seemed to disappear in the empty arena.
“Big truck,” Remy said.
“Yeah,” Paul said. “It’s pretty cool. Hey, thanks again for coming down.”
“Sure.”
“Impressive up close, isn’t it?” A woman was speaking behind them. Remy turned and saw her approach from an open door on the floor of the arena. She had curly brown hair, blonded at the tips, and wore a tight denim skirt, like a country music singer. A cell phone earpiece sat perched on her head as if she’d just walked away from a fast-food drive-through window.
When she was closer, the woman handed Guterak some papers. “Here you go, Paul. Countersigned contracts, as Michael promised. And the schedule for next week. Tractor pulls at seven each night, followed by the demos, and then before the finale we’re going to have a moment of silence. That’s where you come in.” The woman was in her thirties and her thin legs disappeared in elaborate cowboy boots. She smiled. “We’ll announce the Eagle Truck, Hero-One, and that’s when you come out with the firefighter-” She looked down at her notes. “ – Davie Ryan, both of you in uniform. The two of you walk out, wave to the people, look… you know… serious or whatever. Then you climb that staircase over there and stand on that platform in the dark. Take off your hats. We have a moment of silence and then Bam! The lights come up and we play ‘America the Beautiful’ and then Hero-One comes out. People go ape-shit and the truck runs over a bunch of shit and everyone goes home. Easy, right? I’ll bet it’s much easier than chasing bad guys.” The woman handed Paul a brochure, which he read and handed to Remy.
WE’RE TURNING VETERANS ARENA
INTO A GIANT MUD PIT
TO HONOR OUR DEAD HEROES!*
*Ten percent of all proceeds to go to the widows and orphans fund.
Tractor pulls, monster trucks, demolition derby!
And for the first time anywhere: The Eagle Truck, Hero-One
With its haunting display of airbrush artistry featuring America’s lost heroes.
“When do I talk?” Paul asked as he leafed through the program.
“Talk?” the woman asked. “About what?”
“Well.” Paul looked around the arena. “I don’t know. Maybe I misunderstood. I thought I was going to get to talk.”
“No, no.” The woman smiled. “We don’t need you to talk.”
“Oh. Yeah. See, I was under the impression that I would get to talk.”
“No. There’s no talking.”
Paul took a couple of steps and looked at the truck. “No. See that’s what I do… I talk. You know… about what I saw?”
“No,” she said. “No talking.” She leaned forward. “Honestly, I don’t think people want any more talking. For a while they did. But I think they’ve had enough of that kind of thing. I think we get it. No, all we need you to do is… look appropriate.” The woman shrugged, opened her handbag, and handed Paul an envelope. He held it for a moment before opening it.
While Guterak stared at his paycheck, Remy walked toward the truck and read the names, and indeed they were airbrushed with such artistry that the shadows seemed real and the letters had a disquieting depth. The names – all that was left of good people – rose like bruises from the metal-flake paint.
THE DOCUMENT looked just like Australia; in fact, in a way it was Australia, its edges burned into a perfect representation of the coastline, in that distinctive, thick oblong shape of the continent, bent in the middle, with a hole at the top corresponding perfectly with the Gulf of Carpentaria. Helpfully, someone had paper-clipped an actual map of Australia to the file; he glanced from the burned page to the map and then back again, and at the yellow flag on the plastic baggy in which the paper was placed: “Forward to SECURE. Isn’t this uncanny? Doesn’t it look like Australia? – SM.”
Remy looked around. He was back behind his desk. There was still nothing on the walls except the photo of him between The Boss and The President, nothing to make this office look like anyone actually worked here. He opened the top drawer, found a pen, and wrote, “Yes,” on the flag. Then, after a moment, he initialed it. Before that day, when it became Australia, the page had been a simple expense report from a lunch meeting between March Selios and a man named Bobby al-Zamil, identified as “vice pre-” (the rest burned away down near the Great Sandy Desert) of a business called “Feynman-Mid-Ea-” something (burned away down in the populous regions near Melbourne and Sydney).
Remy glanced around his office. He turned the nameplate around again, just to be sure. It said REMY. Good. He’d begun to feel he could manage the skips with nonchalance, and he thought it best to treat this burned piece of paper with the same knowing shrug. He picked up the phone and hit zero, and a few seconds later an operator’s voice came on line.
“This is Diane.”
“Uh. Hi. Diane. This is Brian Remy.” He looked around again. “I’ve got this piece of burned paper that looks like Australia. Am I supposed to do something with-”
“Let me see if I can get him on his car phone.”
A few minutes later, Remy heard the buzzing of a phone and Markham picked up, apparently in traffic. “Markham.”
“It’s Remy.”
“Hey, buddy. We’re just on our way back. So… did you get the Australia document I sent over? Isn’t that wild?”
“Yeah,” Remy said, holding it up again.
“I wanted you to see the original before the probability companies started fighting over it.”
“The probability companies?”
“Yeah. We’re getting bids already.”
“Bids?”
“You know, to study the burn patterns?” Markham just kept going, as if all Remy needed was a little more information and then the whole thing would click. “Applying models of randomness and linear motion probability to the patterns in paper burns?”
“I don’t-”
“You didn’t see the story in the Times? The whole booming randomness industry… partial documentation recovery and interpretation… the old thought experiment about the drunkard’s walk?… Inevitability and random patterns, assuming unreversed trajectories and nonpreferred directionality? Applying that to burn patterns? You know.”
“No, I guess… I don’t-”
“The whole partials pedagogy… Jesus on a Fish Stick?”
Remy was afraid this would go on forever, and so he said, “Oh. Jesus on a Fish Stick. Sure. Look, do you need me to do anything with this?”
“No, I just wanted you to see it, that’s all. We got everything else handled. We’re on al-Zamil right now – should be ready to work him tonight.”
Something in Markham’s voice made Remy uneasy. “Work him?”
Markham laughed. “Would you relax. We’re following the protocols you wrote. We adopted ’em. No more sloppiness, I promise.”
“Wait. What protocols?”
Markham laughed again. “Come on, don’t test me. I swear: no more screwups.” Over the phone, Remy could hear a man saying something in Markham’s car, perhaps He’s moving. “Hey, I gotta go,” Markham said. “I’ll call you when we’re ready.”
“Wait!” Remy said, but Markham was gone. He dialed the operator again, but after a moment she came back on the phone and said that Markham was unavailable.
Remy hung up and looked down at his desk again. Had he written protocols? He tried the desk drawers but they were empty except for some blank paper, a letter opener, and a few pens. The big bottom file drawer was still locked. Remy yanked on it, then looked around the office for something to pry it open with. He tried the letter opener, but it just bent the metal blade. Wait – this was his office. Remy pulled his keys from his pocket, and separated a small one he didn’t remember having. The key turned the lock and he pulled the drawer back.
The files were alphabetized and primary color-coded under different titles, which were typed on the tabs. Some of the tabs (AGENCY, BUREAU, FLORIDA, ICEMAN) were intriguing to Remy, but he was worried about losing the moment, so he skipped ahead to the file called PROTOCOLS, and was about to open it when he saw the titles of the next two files, RECIPES, and the one that really intrigued him, near the end of the drawer, a tab marked SUBJECT A.
It could be anything.
He pulled out the file. It was thin, just two dated reports four months apart, each no more than a few short sentences. The first read, simply: “Made contact with Subject A. Continuing deep cover.” It was signed with his initials – BR. Remy read the second report, which was slightly longer:
Subject A remains reticent, possibly suspicious, could be deep grief… too early to determine if subject is concealing information… Recommendation: continued recon, deep cover and intel gathering.
Again, the document was initialed by Remy. He swallowed. This wasn’t necessarily April. Subject A could be anything.
Or anyone. He turned the report over. There was a handwritten note on the back, dated what he thought was just a few days earlier.
Took Subject A to attorney to file claim on dec. husband. Continuing to gain trust – recomm. extend cover…
Remy’s head slumped. He opened the top drawer and found a pen. He scribbled across the top of this second short report: Cancel. Then he thought better of it, balled up the two reports, and threw them in the garbage. He tossed the empty folder away, for good measure. He felt breathless. He had convinced himself that that if he just abandoned himself to this skidding, lurching life, without questioning it, things would turn out okay. Once you started down a road, what good did it do to question the road? But maybe that only worked, he thought now, if you can trust yourself in the moments between bouts of consciousness. What am I doing in those moments I don’t remember? He fell back in his chair, closed his eyes, and felt the moment leak away.
HE FOUND notes like this sometimes, notes written to himself, pointed questions on index cards that he’d unearth in his briefcase or his pocket: “What did you do today?” and “Where did you go?” But he never seemed to answer the notes, or if he did, it was such a cryptic response – a partial number or an acronym or some other obscure piece of work product – that it almost seemed like a taunt. He stared at this particular note, written in his normal block letters on the back of a business card that he found in his wallet behind his credit card. It said, simply: “Don’t Hurt Anyone.” He looked up.
A bartender was staring at him.
“Did you say something?” Remy asked.
“I just asked if you want the usual, Brian?”
“Oh. Okay.”
Don’t hurt anyone. Remy slid the card back in his wallet and looked around. It was late afternoon and he was sitting in another downtown hotel lounge. He often found himself like this in the afternoons, sitting in some hotel lounge or restaurant bar. He tried to differentiate in his mind between these lounges but they all seemed vaguely similar, like this one, and it was only when he saw their odd, one-word names on his credit card bill later – Affair and Hedge and Nine and Chain, as if the words had been chosen at random in a dictionary – that the places became different in his mind. And even though the names were all different, he couldn’t help imagining them as one lounge that changed its name and its décor every few days. All of the bartenders in these places seemed to know him intimately, and he seemed to have a usual in each place – generous pours of scotch or bourbon or gin that arrived magically on paper coasters before he even had time to take off his suit coat. He could usually get in two or three drinks before April showed up, and then they had dinner. They ate quietly, without feeling the need to chatter. He appreciated this. Sometimes she’d ask about his day and he’d say it was good, or that he couldn’t remember, or that it had simply flown by. When he asked about the real estate business, she rolled her eyes and took so long to chew the food in her mouth that he often forgot the question. At dinner, he found himself ordering the same thing whenever it appeared on the menu, duck marinated in a red wine sauce and spiced with wasabi, and since he seemed to find it at so many restaurants, he thought it must be the recipe of the moment. He’d find himself wondering how the duck tasted, and so he’d order, forgetting each time what it had tasted like the last time.
How’s the wasabi duck? April would always ask.
He’d shift the bite to the other side of his mouth. Mm. But he seemed to forget after each bite what it had tasted like.
Remy thought about April as he looked around tonight’s version of the lounge, with its high ceilings and spinning fans, its smoke-mirrored walls. He picked up the restaurant’s menu; wasabi duck marinated in red wine, never failed. Twenty-eight bucks. The hostess smiled at him as she walked past. “Hi, Brian. Meeting April tonight?”
“I sure hope so.”
The bartender reappeared. “Looks like you’re ready for another, Bri.”
“You know me,” Remy said, and set the empty glass on the bar.
April came in two drinks later, wearing black pants and a short green jacket that stopped at her ribcage, like something a bullfighter might wear. It made her look long and exotic, and Remy felt that exhilarating embarrassment that he imagined was experienced by middle-aged guys with beautiful, younger girlfriends. “You look great,” he said. He stood and kissed her.
She smiled nervously. “Thanks for doing this.”
“Oh.” He reached for his fourth whiskey sour. “Sure.” Remy took her hand and followed her into the restaurant, listing a bit from the booze, and taking in the open stares from the tables, shadowed faces peering up in the harsh light of tabletop candles. They all seemed to be trying too hard to have a good time, to be casual, and it crossed Remy’s mind that they might be spirits of some kind, the ghosts of people who used to go out to dinner, before it became a form of patriotism. The candles agitated the flashers and floaters behind Remy’s eyes, but he couldn’t look away, the bits swarming like summer insects around flickering candlelight. Finally he closed his eyes and let April pull him through the maze of tables.
When he opened his eyes, Remy saw why April had thanked him for coming. The sharp, older real estate broker who’d been at April’s apartment, Nicole, was sitting at a corner booth, waiting for them. Nicole wore a smart pink suit that made her seem like a design on a sketchpad. The first time she blinked, her long lashes snapped like castanets.
“Troy couldn’t make it?” April asked.
“Uh… no,” said Nicole, and she sized up Remy as if considering a purchase. “I didn’t ask him. I thought it was just going to be the two of us, April.”
“Oh, really?” she said. “I must’ve misunderstood.”
Remy had already taken his jacket off and draped it over the chair back. “Oh,” he said. “Should I-” April grabbed his hand.
“No.” Nicole sighed. “That’s okay. You may as well join us… as long as you don’t mind a little shop talk.”
“I don’t mind,” he said.
He sat and they all sipped at their waters, Remy momentarily startled by the taste of liquid that wasn’t distilled. “I trust you saw this?” Nicole asked April, and slid across a real estate listing from another company showing a photo of the balcony of a high-rise apartment. Remy read the words concierge and glass conversion before April took the slick sheet of paper and read it. “Six to eight rooms,” Nicole was saying. “Both fulls and halves. This would have been perfect for Morgan. But the assholes at Klinerman Davis used the long weekend to hide the listing; they were at forty-eight hours before anyone had any idea the building was open. And then on Monday they didn’t answer their phones until four. Look, we can’t whiff on a building like this, April. This is exactly the kind of thing we need our associates to bird-dog for us.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“We can’t sit around waiting for these sharks to share their listings, because their goddamn clients will be unpacking boxes before we’ve even heard about it. We have to have a heads-up when something like this is about to come on line, whether it means paying secretaries or blowing someone at the real estate board. But whatever we need to do, we need to do it now. Do you understand? There is no more honor out there,” Nicole said. “It’s a war, now, honey. This is about defending our values. Because they will beat you to death for a dime on the sidewalk. And the only way to deal with that kind of aggression is to beat them to death for a nickel.”
There was more of this talk, and Remy found himself drifting as Nicole ranted. April held her menu to her chest like a shield, but she couldn’t look away from Nicole, whose menu remained folded in front of her while she criticized April’s work, while pretending at the same time to be concerned (“The partners all agree: it’s just not like you to let things get away from you like this”). Drinks came and Nicole turned to the inspirational part of her speech, rambling on about the great opportunities and the new listings that April should be getting. More drinks came and Nicole’s voice rose to cover the restaurant din – higher and faster, speaking with a frenzy that seemed to make April even edgier: competing brokers were snakes, clients idiots, developers thieves, “and April, honey, we need to know that you can handle every one of them,” April nodding slightly and reaching for her empty water glass as Nicole warned about partners who would cheat her out of commissions, a broker at the firm who was known for hoarding the ’burbs and a seemingly cooperative agent uptown who wouldn’t think twice about spreading rumors to potential clients that April had AIDS.
April coughed in her hand and looked around the room, as if trying to find an escape route.
“Listen, dear,” Nicole said, “the bottom line is that we’re going to look back at this period as the dawn of a new age, an unprecedented period of growth in real estate wealth, and I don’t want you to miss it. I won’t allow any of my brokers to miss it. I won’t allow my group to miss it. And I won’t allow the firm to miss it.”
April said she understood, thanked Nicole, and changed the subject, twice, but even when Nicole talked about other things – she told a long story about her son Milo getting into a prestigious preschool – Remy realized that she talked about her son the way she talked about real estate, as if there were a thriving market somewhere in which Milo’s development could be tracked and profited from, and getting him into the right school was just another function of waiting for market forces and gentrification and favorable interest rates. At one point April tried to speak, but she made the mistake of referring to the market as a bubble and Nicole came out of her seat, arguing that this was “the triumph of the concentrated work of generations.”
They ordered wine and appetizers and Nicole talked about real estate, about her secret hope to partner with a developer looking to “furb and flip fifteen boxes in the Heights.” They ordered entrées (Remy ordered the wasabi marinated duck) and a wine bottle came and went and its brother came and went, and this seemed to mellow Nicole a bit, because she shifted to an easier subject – real estate fables, stories about people who got the last great deal, who chanced upon the next Williamsburg or got a foothold on an undiscovered street, or the last unrehabbed building in the Bowery, or the only quiet block in the meatpacking district. And maybe it was the booze, or maybe it was the stories coming out of Nicole’s pinched little mouth, but it seemed to Remy that she was describing a world in which everyone was in the process of moving, and he had the image of a colony of disturbed ants scurrying back to their hills. Everyone was in the market to buy apartments and condos and houses, whether they knew it or not. Everyone was the agent of his own destiny, shifting from one place to another, and he imagined an historic migration, Okies closing up dusty family farms and cashing out 401ks, climbing in their Benzes and driving sixty blocks uptown to five-room walk-ups with river views. Remy took a long pull of wine and looked up at April and smiled – didn’t it all sound… sort of… nice? Food came and went, and still Nicole talked, her voice rising in a kind of poetic incantation as she recited wondrous new listings from memory, or produced them out of the air, and Remy thought she must know every apartment in the city by heart, or perhaps all she had to do was imagine them and they became real: a three-bedroom with a wrap terrace in the West Nineties, a northern exposure with a doorman in the East Twenties, the Village building about to go co-op with the little Montessori school across the street. And Remy understood that every conversation now was really about real estate, and that a conversation about real estate was really a conversation about progress – the blossoming of civilization, the spread of democracy. This neighborhood had turned or was turning or was on the verge of turning. No neighborhood ever went down in Nicole’s estimation. In police work, there had only been decline; in real estate, there was only ascension. He found himself drifting happily as Nicole described a world in which the wealthy selflessly tried to save the city, maybe the whole country, maybe the whole world, one neighborhood at a time, cleansing blocks and doubling property values. If the city before had seemed to him always on the verge of decay, strips of lawless, decrepit neighborhoods in danger of being overrun by criminals, now it was being transformed through a million tiny regime changes – nice professional couples cleansing blocks with shutters and window flower boxes, with curbside Saabs and Lexuses.
Remy listened to Nicole as if he were listening to music, drifting in and out and not always catching the lyrics, but entranced by the melody. Another wine bottle came and went and he closed his eyes, the images washing over him: a two-bedroom prewar, lofts with cook-kit, Hudson River alcoves and meat-pack rehabs with ten-foot ceilings and restored box beams, six rooms with a library and city views and frontage and pet friendly – Nicole’s voice settled over him like fog, until it seemed to him that she was describing a different city, an infinite city, each block a solar system in neighborhoods of galaxies in universes of boroughs: a big bang of five-room walk-ups and remo’d townhouses and partial park views, elegant, sumptuous, grand. And when April, pale and shaking, stood up to take a cell phone call, Remy found himself drunk and unable to look away from Nicole, who just kept talking (“luxe lofts” in Hell’s Kitchen, a Bryant Park “shut-and-gut”) and even when Remy was too drunk to understand the words, he found he could still intuit the world Nicole described, a world of glittering wealth and endless beauty, where there was no longer a need for cops or firefighters, only pink real estate agents, floating above the city on gusts of possibility.
THIN LIPS against his, and then teeth biting his bottom lip, and maybe it was the tug of those teeth that caused Remy to open his eyes and see Nicole, kissing him, her right hand frisking the front of his pants like someone looking for her car keys. They were sitting in his idling car in front of her apartment. “No, no,” he said. “Wait.” The leather scoffed as he settled back into the driver’s seat. “This is not a good idea,” he said, his voice thick from too many drinks. “I shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Hey, you kissed me,” Nicole said.
“Oh.” Remy rubbed his head. “Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that. I haven’t been myself lately.”
“Okay,” Nicole said. “The cake wasn’t exactly rising anyway,” Remy looked down and saw that she was right. Nicole flipped the visor down and checked her face in the mirror. “I suppose it’s for the best,” she said. “I’ve got a crazy morning tomorrow.” She flicked at the corner of her mouth with her pinky fingernail. “And I’m sure I’ll appreciate the six extra minutes of sleep.” Nicole smacked her lips together and closed the visor. Then she looked over at Remy, as if seeing him for the first time. “Tell April I hope she feels better. And I’ll see her on Monday.” Then Nicole climbed out of the car, tugged at her tight skirt, centering its seam. She reached for her jacket and then walked away without looking back.
No, no, no, Remy thought as he drove fast down the black avenue, cabs swirling around him, back toward April’s building. He tried to piece together what had just happened. At least he had stopped himself. Maybe he always stopped himself before he went too far. Yes, he was in control; this is just what happened to men. They did things they regretted. That’s all. Remy found a parking spot on the street near April’s building and jogged the rest of the way, abandoning the sidewalk for two couples walking abreast, holding hands.
He could see April’s window from the street. The light was out. He went to the door, wondering if he should ring her, and was surprised to find the door propped open with a menu from the restaurant where they’d eaten that night. Remy picked up the menu and slipped through the door, which locked behind him. He climbed the stairs and eased down the hall. Her door was unlocked. Remy came in and walked into the bedroom. He stood above her bed. She was asleep, curled up on one side of the bed, hair spilled out on the pillow, mouth open a little, as if some tiny thought – some plaintive fragment of a dream – had pried open her lips and crawled out. He began to undress and then turned again to watch her sleep. Finally, he turned back and hung his suit coat on the closet doorknob and began unbuttoning his pants.
“Thanks for driving Nicole home,” April said without opening her eyes.
“Sure,” Remy said.
“I’m sorry you had to sit through my evaluation.”
“It’s okay.”
“And I’m sorry you had to deal with Nicole.”
Remy turned. Her head was nestled deep into the pillow. He opened his mouth to say that it was okay, that he’d enjoyed himself, but thought he might be able to find a better choice of words.
“Did I tell you who was on the phone?” she asked.
“The phone?”
“At dinner?”
Remy tried to remember her phone ringing at dinner. “No,” Remy said. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Gus.”
“Oh.”
“He’s coming through town and he wants to see me.”
“Really? Huh,” Remy said, as he finished undressing. He was relieved when April’s breathing became heavy again, so they wouldn’t have to talk about Nicole anymore, although he wouldn’t have minded asking who Gus was.
THERE WAS a mark, a stain of some kind, on one of his shoes. Remy stood in the entryway of his apartment, looking down at the stain. His shoes were next to the door, right where he always slid out of them when he came home.
Remy picked up one shoe. The stain was reddish brown, kind of glossy. He touched it and it flaked off in his hand. There was more of the reddish brown stain on the sole and on the heel. He turned the other shoe over and found more of the dried red stuff on the sole. Remy put the shoes back on the floor and backed away from them, rubbing his jaw. Okay. He looked outside. It was still dark. Must be three or four in the morning. Okay.
There were any number of explanations, he thought; it would do no good to go crazy imagining things again, trying to find some meaning. He went to get a dish towel from the kitchen. No, he thought, there were no good explanations. Remy looked over, to where his jacket was hanging on a kitchen chair. He pulled it off the chair and fumbled through the breast pocket until he found his wallet. He slid out the card, on which he’d written: “Don’t Hurt Anyone.” Below that, in his own handwriting, was written: “Grow Up.”
Brian Remy stood in the entryway, holding the card in one hand, the dish towel in the other, thinking that this couldn’t go on, but the moment and the thought slipped before he had a chance to wipe the blood off his shoes.
THE CAR was familiar, a silver Lincoln, pocked and key-scratched, a shit bucket of a gypsy cab (a bit too ragged, Remy thought on seeing it again) driven by one of the men Remy had seen following him and Guterak, the man who had barged in on him in the restroom of the restaurant, a fat white guy in mirrored sunglasses, thick-necked, with a bushy mustache longer on one side than on the other, as if the thing had been trimmed by a blind man. Remy stared at the car again and understood why it hadn’t seemed quite right: It was a shitty old car, but the tires were brand new. The back door of the car was thrown open. “Get in,” the man said.
Remy looked around. He was standing in front of an old six-story brownstone, not his building or April’s. The façade was covered with scaffolding, which was topped with razor wire and sided with plywood, which in turn had been tagged with graffiti. A tunnel beneath the scaffolding led to a doorway. He was the only person on the sidewalk. He crouched and looked inside the car. The driver was definitely staring at him, even though his black sunglasses hid his eyes. He wore a flannel shirt and old jeans – not so much what a gypsy cabdriver looked like, Remy thought again, but what someone thought a gypsy cabdriver might look like. He also wore the baseball cap that read BUFF. And, whether or not it was his name, it seemed to fit.
“Get in,” grumbled the buff man again.
“What?”
“Get your ass in the goddamn car, Remy,” said Buff. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Fair question, Remy thought. He looked around and finally sank in. He had just settled into the worn vinyl backseat when the car bolted like a spooked horse. The back door swung closed and Remy lost his balance, falling sideways, and then righting himself as they swerved through traffic.
“So,” Buff said. “So… you wanna tell me what the fuck you’re doing?” He veered in and out of traffic like a particularly bad cabbie.
“What… I’m doing?”
“You’re making side deals with the agency, aren’t you?”
“What agency?”
“Don’t play stupid with me, Remy.”
“I’m not.”
The man stopped at a traffic light. He had a manila envelope and he reached in and removed a photo. He tossed it into the backseat. Remy picked up the picture; in it, he was in a parked car with a thin, aristocratic man that he recognized at once: Braces. Caramel macchiato. Khakis.
“Dave,” Remy said.
“Yeah. I know his name, asshole,” said Buff. “What I want to know is what you’re doing meeting with him.”
Remy had no idea. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Buff glanced up at Remy in the rearview mirror, and with his mirrored sunglasses, Remy saw the man reflected in his own eyes. “You arrogant fuck.” Buff suddenly cranked the wheel without slowing and Remy slid all the way across the seat as the car squealed onto a side street without slowing. The car cut around a double-parked truck and seized to a stop, Remy’s hand curled white on the door handle.
The driver removed his sunglasses and slapped at the rearview mirror so that he was staring Remy in the eye; the man’s left eye was slightly crossed, on the same side his mustache was crooked. “Come on. What do I look like, a fuckin’ moron?”
“Well…” Remy said, and looked away from the man’s reflection.
“We had a deal, Remy. The bureau provides you with information… and you keep us apprised of what your gay little secretarial outfit is up to. I went to bat for you, Remy. How does it look when my director comes to me with these pictures of you meeting with this agency queer? How do you think that makes me look?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“What did you possibly think this would accomplish?”
“I don’t know… maybe help me find this girl, March-”
“Come on,” Buff said. “We both know that’s not what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?”
“You’re trying to get a fuckin’ foothold. You’re playing the bureau against the agency, figuring that Dave would never find out you’re working with me and that I’d never find out you’re working with him. Well, that, my friend, is a dangerous fuckin’ game. Do I need to show you the other picture I got in here?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“Come on. You can’t guess what’s in here?”
“No.”
The man tossed Remy the manila envelope.
Remy stared at him in the rearview mirror before opening the envelope. The photo showed a man crumpled up on a sidewalk, a Middle Eastern man with a thick beard and short hair, wearing tan slacks and a white shirt. The man was facing sideways, his legs cocked as if he’d just fallen off a bike. A slick of blood spilled out from his neck and head.
“Remember him?”
“No,” Remy said. But he did remember the blood on his shoes and he swallowed.
“Oh, so you’ve never seen this guy before, is that it?”
“No,” Remy said again. “Never.”
“And I suppose the name Bobby al-Zamil doesn’t ring a bell?”
Remy covered his mouth. The lunch reimbursement report, the man who’d had lunch with March before she died, the man Markham was going to work. Remy looked back at the photo again. “Is that him?”
“Fuck you, Remy.” Buff sped off again and Remy fell back in his seat. “I told you we were working al-Zamil. So what? Then you happen to meet with an agency field supervisor, and the next thing we know al-Zamil gets depressed and takes a walk out his apartment window?” He caught Remy’s eyes in the rearview. “You tell your little friend at the agency that if he thinks this gets us off the case, he’s fucked in the head.”
“I swear, I don’t know anything about this,” Remy said. “I saw his name on a piece of burned paper that looked like Australia. That’s all.”
Buff spit laughter. “Australia. You’re a fuckin’ piece of work, Remy. You know that?” He stomped on the gas again and the car took off.
Remy stared at the photograph and covered his mouth. “I swear-”
“Look,” Buff said. “I’m gonna give you another chance – you’ve been getting us solid stuff, and we might need you.” He shrugged. “And we hadn’t turned al-Zamil yet anyway… But you made me look like a horse’s ass. You gotta give me something to take back to the director.”
“I don’t know what I can give you.”
“Gimme your source.”
“My source for…”
“You’ve been one step ahead of us on this cell, Remy, and I need to know how. Give me the goddamn name of your source.”
“What name?”
“Yeah, and who’s on first, you smug son-of-a-bitch,” the man said. He put his sunglasses back on. “Okay, tough guy. Fine.”
The car’s tires chirped again as they skidded around another corner, and then the brakes jammed and the car came to a shuddering stop against the same curb where they’d started. “Get out,” Buff said.
Remy opened the car door.
The man turned and faced Remy for the first time, his face wide and uneven. He spun his cap around so that it faced forward, so that Remy could see the word BUFF again. The man held up his right index finger, which bent sideways at a thirty-degree angle. “You go ahead, play your little games. But if I was you, you calm, cool motherfucker, I would keep this one thing in mind-”
“HALLUCINATORY IMAGES,” Remy’s psychiatrist, Dr. Rieux was saying. “What you’re describing is textbook PTSD. Visions. Stress-induced delusions. Dissociative episodes. Maybe even Briquet’s syndrome. Look-” He laughed. “I’m pretty sure you’re not working for some top-secret department, investigating whether or not your girlfriend’s sister faked her death.”
“I’m not?”
“I don’t think so, Bri. Secret agents interrupting you on the toilet? Yelling at you in gypsy cabs, buying you lattes? Mysterious Arab men in wool coats?”
“That’s all… hallucinations?”
“Sure. Why not. It’s very common, Brian. I see it all the time.”
“You do?”
“Well… no, I haven’t personally seen it. But it’s all right there in the literature. Survivors can expect to experience delusions, persecution, paranoia. Delirium. Hell, after what some of you guys went through that day… I’m surprised you don’t have flying monkeys drive you to work.”
“So… the paper? The blood on my shoes?”
“You got a better idea?”
“I don’t know. It just… doesn’t feel like that. Are you sure?”
“Am I sure?” He spun in his chair and pointed at the diploma hung on the wall. “Do you think they give these out for masturbating? Well…” He laughed again and then assumed a serious face. “Listen. I don’t mean to be condescending, but some of the real issues you’re describing – not this fantasy stuff, but your son growing away from you, your inability to commit to a monogamous relationship, concerns about the ethics of your profession, alcohol abuse… this is pretty standard stuff for a man your age.”
“Are you saying,” Remy asked, “this is some kind of midlife crisis?”
“I don’t mean to minimize it. But you are a certain age. You’ve been through this severe trauma. Lost friends. Coworkers. And then, when you should be coming out of it, you had to suddenly abandon a successful career with the city because of back problems-”
“No, it’s not my back,” Remy protested weakly. “It’s my eyes.”
“No. I don’t think so.” The psychiatrist spun in his chair, opened a drawer, flipped through his files, and came up with a short report. “See, it’s right here.” He handed over the report, which read clearly Disability due to chronic back pain.
“No, this is a cover story,” Remy said. “For the work I’m doing.”
But Dr. Rieux pulled a prescription pad from his desk and scribbled something on it. He tore the sheet out and held it up for Remy. “Here.”
Remy read the prescription. “What’s this?”
“This will help,” he said.
Remy held up the medical report on him. “How come there’s nothing in here about the gaps?” he said.
“Gaps?” Dr. Rieux held out the prescription. “What gaps?”
“The gaps,” Remy said, as he reached for the prescription sheet and-
A MIST hung in the air, fine droplets suspended as if on strings from the sky, distorting distance so that the grand house seemed miles away, across rollers of wet mounds and wild grasses. The house sat between two massive oaks; at three stories it was half their full height, with shutters and a wraparound front porch – a beautiful colonial country house with a fenced horse corral and barn beyond it. Remy stared at the house through the mist, which flattened everything and made the world appear sluggish and slow. Two hundred yards beyond the house Remy could see cars crawling along a narrow highway, slowing to make the switchback like mourners pausing over a coffin. It was dawn and he was sitting alone in this field two hundred yards from the house. He looked down. There were binoculars in his hands. He held them up and zeroed in on the top floor of the house. An attractive woman in her thirties was eating a cup of yogurt. Remy had a headset on – a small earpiece and mike – but he couldn’t hear anything. He watched the woman walk around the top floor, from window to window. She was wearing workout clothes, bicycle tights maybe, with a collared shirt.
At one corner of the house he could see her turn from side to side, as if checking herself in a mirror, the cup of yogurt in her hand.
Remy dropped the binoculars and looked down at himself. He was wearing camouflage pants and a black jacket. He pulled a black stocking cap off his head and stared at it. Did he own a black stocking cap? A green camo backpack was spread out in the grass. Remy opened the backpack and began flipping through it. He found a notebook and pen, gloves, a semiautomatic handgun, and a box of Dolly Madison Zingers, like Twinkies with yellow frosting. Remy opened the box, took one out, and had a bite. It was good: spongy yellow cake with filling and frosting. Then he cracked the notebook. There were two listings written in the notebook, in his handwriting: 0645 – light on. Subject Herote awake. Alone. 0724 – Subject out of shower, dressing in workout clothes. He glanced over at the backpack and saw, at the bottom… a full prescription bottle. Remy set the Zinger down, looked around the field, and then pulled out the bottle. He opened it and swallowed two of the capsules. He closed his eyes and curled up on the ground, hoping his psychiatrist knew what he was talking about and that this hallucination would dissolve. But with his eyes closed Remy could only see streaks and floaters, and when he opened his eyes he was still in the field. He fell back in the grass, discouraged.
“Fresca Two. This is Fanta One. Do you copy?”
Remy wedged himself into the deep grass, hoping the medication would kick in and this would all go away.
“I’m gonna make the call now.” It was Markham’s voice. “Wish me luck.”
Remy raised his head and looked all around the field. It was all still there, the house, the oak trees, the barn and corral, the highway behind, a creek bed to the right, lined with bushes, and on his left, a ridge, its base ringed by shade trees whose branches moved in the soft wind like fingers on a piano.
A few seconds later, Remy could hear a telephone ringing in his earpiece. He held the binoculars to his eyes and saw the woman in the big house skip across a room and pick up the phone on the second ring.
“Helloo,” her voice chirped in his ear.
“I’m looking for Lisa Herote,” he heard Markham say.
“This is she.” He watched her through the binoculars, her lips moving just slightly ahead of the words.
“Hi, this is Mike Brady, with Brady Florists here in town,” Markham continued. “We have an arrangement we’re trying to deliver for you from a…” Papers shuffled. “…Bishir Madain.”
“Oh,” she said, and through the binoculars Remy could see the woman put a hand against her chest, as if she’d just received a compliment. “Bishir? Really?” Her head cocked and she said, “Oh,” again.
“Yeah, sorry to ruin the surprise,” Markham said. “Unfortunately, our computer was down when he called and my kid wrote the information on a piece of paper and then spilled Dr Pepper on it… so we don’t have Mr. Madain’s credit card number or any contact information for him. We can’t deliver without-”
“Oh, I’ll pay for it,” she offered quickly, as if she were used to paying for Bishir.
Clearly, this hadn’t occurred to Markham, who coughed and cleared his throat. “Yeah, that’s against our policy. But if you just could give us Mr. Madain’s phone number, we can clear this all up.”
“I don’t have it,” she said. “I haven’t talked to Bishir in months. I have no idea where he is. That’s why it’s such a pleasant surprise that he’d send me flowers.”
“Oh. No idea where he is?”
“No. None. We had a difficult breakup,” she said. “He wasn’t exactly… committed to the relationship.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Markham said over the earpiece. “And you have no idea-”
“No, none. I’m sorry.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I mean… I assume he’s still in San Francisco. Is that where the call came from?”
“San Francisco,” Markham said, perking up. “Yes.”
“That’s where he said he was moving.”
“Okay, well-”
“Do I get my flowers?”
In his earpiece, Remy heard the line go dead and then:
“Fresca Two, this is Fanta One. How was that? Pretty good, huh?”
Remy ignored him.
“Come on, Brian. I did okay, right? Come on. I know you’re down there. I’m staring right at you.”
Remy wedged himself down in the grass again.
“Hey, did you open those Zingers yet? I’m starving up here, man. I ate all my corn nuts already. You were right. I shouldn’t have gotten corn nuts. Can I have a Zinger?”
Finally, Remy said, “They’re all gone.”
“No they’re not,” Markham said. “No way you eat a whole box of Zingers before eight in the morning. It’s physically impossible. Come on, man.”
“Leave me alone,” Remy said again. “This isn’t even real.” He took off the headset and threw it down in the grass.
It was quiet in the field, but for the rustle of deep grass. Remy looked at the prescription bottle again; then ate another bite of Zinger instead. He couldn’t believe how good it was. He grabbed the box to see the ingredients. There was no mention of the things he could taste: cake, cream, and frosting… it was as if those things didn’t really exist, as if what he believed was a piece of frosted yellow cake was really nothing more than this list of sugars, acids, preservatives, sulfates, and yellow dyes.
“I saw that, you stingy jerk.” Markham’s voice was a tiny whine from the headset lying in the wet grass. “I know you’re-”
LYING NAKED on the queen-size bed, on top of the covers, Remy looked around the hotel room. It was a big room, with a window overlooking a park. He wasn’t sure where – it didn’t look like anyplace in the city he’d ever been. A grove of willows stood guard outside the window, above a meandering river. Remy’s clothes were piled on a chair and a wine bottle sat on the nightstand, half-full, next to a glass with nothing but the dark red rim around the stem. He sat up and poured himself another glass of wine.
Then he heard the toilet flush. He looked at the bathroom door, which was closed. Behind the door, the water ran.
Remy pulled the cover across his lap. A few minutes later, she came out of the bathroom. It was Nicole, April’s boss.
“Oh, Jesus,” Remy said.
“That’s better,” she said. She was wearing a short, red silk robe, tied at the waist. She was holding a glass of wine, the same color as her painted finger and toenails.
“Whew boy,” she said. “I’m not used to the sex taking that long. With Troy it’s more like getting a flu shot.” She took a slug of wine.
“Oh, God,” Remy said. “I didn’t… did I?”
“Oh, I think you did.” She smiled, and then cocked her head. “Oh, no. Are we having second thoughts, hon? I was afraid of that.”
“No. I can’t do this,” Remy said.
“Well, probably not for a few hours, no.”
“Look, I’m sorry but this was wrong… I shouldn’t be here.”
Nicole stood staring at him, and finally took a sip of wine. “Look, if it’s any consolation, no one wants to have done it right after they’ve done it.” She shrugged. “Except maybe teenagers.” She winked. “And women of a certain age.” She set her wine down on the nightstand. “I’ll tell you what… I’m going to go now… I’m not really into the whole… regret part.”
She returned to the bathroom and began getting dressed. Remy caught flashes of her in the mirror, as she wrestled her way back into a pair of unlikely string underwear, and thrust her legs into a pair of black pants. She came out buttoning a pink suit jacket.
Remy was trying to figure out how to explain himself. “Listen, I’m not myself these days. I shouldn’t have… I’m not… entirely in control.”
“Right,” she said, and swilled her wine. “Isn’t that… kind of the point?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt April. So… if I try to… sleep with you again… I would really appreciate it if you just ignored me.”
She flinched. “Sure. Will do.” Then she smiled wistfully, slid her feet back into a pair of high heels, and looked back at him, her face red. “You fly me here, feel me up like goddamned airport security, and then, the minute the gun goes off, fall back in love with your girlfriend. I’ll tell you what – it’ll be a huge relief when everything down there finally dries up. Then maybe I can ignore assholes like you.”
Remy put his head in his hands.
She’d regained herself. “You can go back to being a good boyfriend now. I’ll see myself out.” She slipped out into the hall and the door eased closed behind her. After a minute, Remy got to his feet. He fumbled in his pants for the pills his psychiatrist had given him, wondering how long they took to kick in. He opened the bottle and took two more pills. Then he put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the hotel room doorknob, slid the deadbolt shut, and his head fell against the door.
REMY DRIFTED down the jetway. He fell in behind a couple in matching cargo shorts and backpacks and a woman with a huge baby balanced on her hip, and they all spilled out into the clean terminal, which was mostly empty, a couple dozen travelers waiting at gates, furtive behind newspapers or hunched over cell phones and cups of coffee, as two soldiers moved like shepherds among them, M-16s aimed at the ground. Remy made eye contact with one of the soldiers, who looked him up and down, glanced once more at his eyes, and finally moved on.
Remy stood beneath the sign announcing forks for ground transportation, baggage claim, and ticketing. He chose a direction at random, walked down the stairs and out the door, and was relieved to see Guterak, leaning against his car, talking to a traffic cop. The sun was setting, the sky behind him a smear of humiliation.
“You have a good time?” Paul asked, as the cop moved on.
“I don’t know.”
“You come back from vacation and you don’t know if you had a good time? What’s the matter with you? You got luggage?”
Remy looked back at the airport. “I don’t think so.”
“Doesn’t look like you got any sun to speak of,” Paul said. “Probably wore sunscreen. That’s the hardest thing for me now – putting on sunscreen. Or fastening my fuggin’ seat belt. All these things that used to seem like common sense… now… I mean… come on? I gotta slather on SP-fuggin’-80? I gotta stop for red fuggin’ lights? I gotta put on oven mitts to take out a hot pan? I mean, come on… oven mitts?” He showed Remy burns on the sides of his thumbs.
They climbed into Paul’s unmarked. He swerved into the crowd of waiting taxis and gypsy cabs and curbside loaders and began angling away from the airport.
“So how you doing?” Paul asked.
“Not so good,” Remy said.
“Back bothering you?”
“My back? No. My back is-”
“Did I tell you the agent sold my story?” Paul asked.
“No,” Remy said. “That’s great.”
“I suppose. I’m not gonna get rich anytime soon, but it’s still a good deal,” Guterak said. “They optioned my story, but it could really pay off if we actually go into production.”
“So… a movie?” Remy asked.
“Well, no… not exactly,” Paul said. He put on his blinker and looked over his shoulder, drifting across lanes. “This company makes all sorts of products. DVDs. Cigarettes. Food. Cereal.” He glanced over.
“Cereal?”
“Yeah. That’s what they want me for. This new cereal called…” Paul hesitated, then just spit it out. “First Responder.”
“First Responder?”
“Yeah,” Guterak said. “They needed one smoker and one cop for ads and PR and shit. They were gonna go with actors, but they decided they wanted true stories and real guys on the boxes. The smoker’s a guy named Brad. I like him. He’s a solid guy. He’s on the flakes and I’m on the one with marshmallows. My agent says I was real lucky to get the marshmallows.”
“Yeah, I could see that.”
“Yeah.” Paul shrugged, a moment of unusual circumspection.
Remy looked over at his old partner and friend. He thought about confiding in Paul that he’d cheated on April, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to admit it to himself. Paul’s hair covered the peak of his head like spring snow, cut high above the ears and melting on his forehead. He turned the steering wheel gently with one hand and the car listed that way, and Remy felt as if he were on the ocean again. He grabbed the armrest and held onto it, trying to fix himself in the moment.
Remy closed his eyes and the streaks did a slow waltz for him, bits gently circling one another in the dark, like a choreographed fight. He opened his eyes and looked out the windows at the flattened landscape slowly dragging alongside the turnpike – brush-lined riverbanks and ledges of condos, freight cars stacked and lined like old shoeboxes, river-flat refineries, and, across the gray slick of water, the brick, steel and glass anthill of the city. April was there, in one of those buildings. And that’s when Remy had an idea.
He fell back against the headrest. “Paul. Can you do something for me?”
“Anything, buddy. You know that. I’d do anything for you. I mean… within reason. You know, obviously I wouldn’t eat garbage off a sidewalk, or sleep with a man… well, I mean, if it meant your life or something… you know, depending on how much shit. And I guess what the dude looked like.”
“I need you to follow me.”
“Follow you.”
“Right.”
“Follow you?”
“Yes.”
Guterak scratched his head. “You mean… like keep track of what you’re talking about? That kind of follow?”
“No. I want you to physically tail me. Follow me around and see where I go. What I do. Keep track of it. Don’t let me see you.”
“You don’t want to see me.”
“Yeah. I don’t want to know you’re doing it. And then write down everything I do and tell me about it afterward. Make up a report.”
“Who do I give the report to?”
“Me.”
“And why am I doing this?”
“So I can figure out what I’m doing.”
“Uh-huh. You want me to follow you so you can figure out what you’re doing.”
“Yeah. I need to see if I’m hallucinating or if I’m really involved in something… something bad.”
“Oh,” Paul said. “Okay then.”
“You’ll do it?”
“Of course I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll use my black helicopter. I’ll shove one of them fuggin’ GPS transmitters in your ass, put a wire in your teeth. Get one of them Air Force drones to track you. Or… remember that movie where they shrunk those guys and put ’em in the president’s body? I’ll do that.” Guterak shook his head and laughed as he steered the car through traffic. “You fuggin’ kill me, man.” He looked over at Remy and shook his head. “You know, you get funnier every day.”
“WAIT. WAIT.” A stout woman wearing jeans and a bulging fanny pack came into April’s living room. “Look, that was great, but we didn’t quite get it. Do you think you could repeat that exchange?” Remy was sitting on the couch with April, across from a young man sitting on a chair in front of them, leaning across his knees as if he were breaking something to them. The young man had olive skin and thick eyebrows that ended just inches from his bushy hairline. But it was in this boy’s eyes that Remy saw April and especially March and old Mr. Selios, eyes that made him realize right away that he was staring at Gus – April’s brother Augustus Selios.
Behind Gus, a man with a television camera on his shoulder and a utility belt around his waist was scurrying to change positions as the woman with the fanny pack moved the power cords and a bundle of audio equipment. The lights in the room were blinding.
“We need to get this again in a two-shot,” said the fanny-pack woman cheerily. She and the cameraman both wore windbreakers reading From the Ashes. “That was amazing, Gus. Really powerful.”
Gus smiled in spite of himself and then worked to clear his face.
“Okay,” said the producer in the fanny pack. “When I say go, I want you two to repeat what you just said. Just like you did it before. Natural.”
“Sure, Tina,” said Gus. Remy searched Gus’s face for connections to April, but they seemed to have less in common the longer you looked at their faces. Behind him the cameraman moved into position in the dining room.
“Mike pack,” said the cameraman, and Tina the producer adjusted the microphone pack strapped to the back of Gus’s belt so that it wouldn’t be visible in the shot. “I wish we could use a boom.”
“Well, we can’t use a goddamn boom,” the producer snapped, and then smiled, and asked, “Ready?” She pointed to Gus, who nodded and took April’s hands in his.
“Look, Sis.” Gus stared into her eyes. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you, then. Afterward, I mean. I just… couldn’t face it. I guess I was…” He stared out the window, and took a practiced pause. “…angry. Angry at myself for not being here.”
April glanced at the camera through the corner of her eye and then looked at Tina the producer. “Don’t look at me,” she said in a stage whisper.
“What am I supposed to say?” April asked.
“Say something like, ‘That’s okay, nothing you could’ve done would’ve brought March and Derek back, anyway,’” Tina said helpfully.
“I don’t think I can say that,” April said. She looked at Remy, who tried to look supportive, even though he felt like he’d been banished to the farthest corner of the room.
Tina the producer and her cameraman huddled for a moment near him but Remy could only make out a few words: first unit and truck and boom and editing bay.
Then Tina turned and smiled. “You know what? Okay. That’s okay,” she said. “Pete says we have the audio and we can cut away. No… we’re good. Why don’t you just do your goodbyes and we’ll take care of it in editing.” She chewed a thumbnail and shrugged to the cameraman as if that were all she could do.
April and Gus stood awkwardly, like actors in a scene that’s just broken. Gus drank water from a plastic bottle and rolled his shoulders while April looked around the room, as if looking for some place to hide. Tina grabbed April’s arm. “Look, April, I totally get your discomfort. Totally. And I respect it. In fact, I don’t want you to do anything that makes you feel phony. That would be creepy. Do you know why we call it ‘reality’? Do you? Because it’s best when it’s… real. The realer the better. That’s what our show is about. Taking these stories of tragedy and letting people inside.”
April looked at Remy again.
“So… you just forget we’re here. Just say goodbye… to your brother,” Tina said. “Just say goodbye, whatever you feel like saying… that you love him, whatever… that it’s just the two of you now, you know… talk about your grief… and pretend we aren’t here.”
“It’s kind of hard,” April said.
“Sure. I understand. Just try to be as natural as possible. You know, give him a hug. Cry if you want to. The most important thing is that you act as if we’re not here. Just do exactly what a normal person would normally do… when seeing your last living sibling for the first time since your sister… died such a horrible, unbearable death. This is reality; what we want is real emotions.”
Gus shifted his weight and looked around the apartment. “Maybe we could just, like, hug at the door… and I could say something like-” His face melted in sorrow. “You look so much like her.” When he was done his face returned to normal.
“Yeah, that’s good.” Tina pulled a piece of thumbnail off her tongue and stared at it. “Or… I have an idea.” She walked to the window and looked down. “Pete.” The cameraman came over, holding the camera by its handle like a suitcase, as Tina pointed out the window to the street below and they spoke in hushed voices. Pete shrugged as if it would be okay.
“Listen,” she said. “Let’s do this downstairs. We’ll shoot it two ways. First, I want you two to go down there and say goodbye and we’ll shoot it from up here. You can have some privacy right there on the sidewalk below us. We’ll get audio from the mike packs and you two just… be yourselves. Just make sure you stand just to the right of the stoop down there. You know… just talk for a second and then hug… maybe grab her head, Gus, like you’re consoling and convincing at the same time. And then, Gus, you walk away. Don’t look back. Then we’ll come down and get it again close in a two-shot. Okay? Everyone ready?”
April looked once more at Remy but he didn’t know what to say, and finally she and Gus walked out the apartment door and started for the stairs. Remy was left with Pete the cameraman, who seemed infinitely bored, and who began setting up by the window while Tina the producer looked him over. “Your girlfriend seems a little uncomfortable.”
Remy didn’t say anything.
Tina shrugged. “Well, this is going to be a great segment. Her brother is… really… really something. We’re gonna run it over the holidays.”
“Ready,” said Pete, and Tina moved over to the window. Remy walked over too, and looked down on the street as Gus took his sister in his arms and they hugged on the sidewalk below. She looked so tiny down there. She started to glance up at the camera, at Remy, but Gus took her face in his hands. Then he said something to her and walked away without looking back, the camera tracking him every step.
THE HANGAR didn’t appear to be emptying at all. Remy stared out at the alphabetized signs – above him, AM-AZ – hanging over tables covered with paper, stacks and stacks of white paper. The white space-suited technicians were going over each piece, giving them out one by one to other people who filed them in the rows of filing cabinets beneath the strings of fluorescent lights. At the end of the hangar, two forklifts were moving palettes of filing cabinets.
Something was different about the paper, though, and it took Remy a moment to realize what it was. He walked over to the nearest table and saw what it was: These pages weren’t scorched or bent or wrinkled. In fact, they were neatly stacked. Remy took a page from one of the stacks and was surprised to see that it didn’t smell at all like The Zero. It was an electric bill from a house in San Leandro, California, dated months after the attacks.
Almost out of habit, Remy patted himself down for his medication.
“You shouldn’t be handling that without gloves,” came a woman’s voice from behind him.
Remy put the power bill back in the stack. “These aren’t even from that day.” He walked over to the woman, who was standing between two signs, one reading PARTIALS, the other PERSONAL/MISC.
The woman’s head tilted slightly; her voice took on a rote quality. “The Liberty and Recovery Act mandates the recovery and filing of documents. It doesn’t specifically limit us to those documents recovered that day.”
“So… you go through garbage cans… or what?”
The woman’s face flushed. “Perhaps you should have this discussion with someone higher than me, Mr. Remy. I’m following my job description. I understand why you’re in a bad mood, but taking it out on me is not going to make the mistake go away.”
Remy felt awful. “I didn’t-”
She shook her head. She was tall and thin, with adult acne scars. “Trust me. This is embarrassing enough without you mocking me,” the woman said.
She handed Remy a piece of burned paper in a plastic baggie. “The reason the note was misfiled was that we mistook the signatory for the beginning of the date it was written.” She winced. “I know. It’s a bonehead mistake and there’s no way, after all this time, that we should still be making mistakes like this.”
Remy looked down. He was holding a note written on the letterhead of March Selios’s law firm, scribbled in felt-tip pen. Most of the right side of the note was burned away, and he could see why someone might’ve thought it was the beginning of a date.
Hey -
We need to talk. I changed my mi
I can’t to go through wi
you understand.
March
Remy turned the note over. There was nothing on the other side. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t implying that you’d done something wrong.” He laughed. “I couldn’t do that. I don’t even know what you’re supposed to do.”
Her eyes welled with tears. “Now you’re belittling me.”
“No.” Remy reached out and touched her arm. “No. I promise I’m not. I didn’t mean anything. Look, can I just… ask you something?”
The woman shrugged.
“Do you think…” He laughed. “Is it at all possible… that this is… all an illusion, that this is all in our heads?”
The woman looked around the vast airplane hangar, crews of workers filing millions of pages of documents. Her face flushed again and her eyes welled with tears. “Oh, go to hell,” she said.
EDGAR WORE clothes so similar to the ones he’d been wearing the last time Remy had seen him – baggy pants, hooded sweatshirt, tiny earphones – that Remy wondered if they actually were the same. And yet, there was something different about him; he seemed… bigger. Had Remy been away so much lately that he’d missed a kind of growth spurt? He was parked a block behind Edgar, and on the other side of the road, watching him through binoculars as he moved down the suburban street, with that hip-hop bounce.
When he got out of sight, Remy started his car and drove a few blocks, until he was in front of the boy again. He parked at the crest of a hill, in a dentist’s office parking lot, across from the back entrance to a mini-mall. He trained the binoculars on the sidewalk across the street.
Edgar came loping up the hill. Then he suddenly stopped, climbed over a retaining wall, and dropped out of sight into the mini-mall parking lot. Remy turned the key, pulled out, and drove around the block, finally turning into the back of the lot. The sky was low and overcast, as if a gray tarp had been thrown over the local suburbs.
Remy tooled through the parking lot, trying to find his son. The mall was shaped like a U, with a courtyard in the center and small stores clinging like barnacles to both the inside and outside of the U. As he drove, Remy ran his eyes over the storefronts – cell phone services and guitar sales and Army recruiting and bagels and ice cream and tanning beds and golf supplies and rattan imports and Remy could feel his blood pressure rising. Where was Edgar? Chiropractic and party supplies and maternity clothes. And Remy could feel something snap inside of him: I’ve had enough of this strobe-life, he thought. Fuck this! Why am I doing these things? Car stereos and tacos and espresso and computer repair. Why am I sleeping with April’s boss? Why am I haunting my own son? Tax preparation and futons and insurance.
“Goddamn it, Edgar. Where are you?” If there was something he wanted to tell the boy, then goddamn it, he was going to tell him. He could feel his face flushing. And just then he felt powerful enough to simply decide to throw off this strange jerking life, whatever it was – hallucinations or an illness or just the way life was lived now. A life is made up of actions, and if he wanted the world to be different, then he only needed to act differently. Every minute of every day was an opportunity to do the right things, to make something of this mess. He didn’t need to be unfaithful to his girlfriend. He didn’t need to be involved in some shady investigation that may have hurt innocent people. And he certainly didn’t have to drive around wondering what he wanted to say to his own son. When he found the boy, he would just open this car door and climb out, grab the boy by the shoulders, and say… something. Windshield glass and physical therapy and copies and-
THIS TIME, Remy didn’t bother protesting, or asking what had happened, or taking his medication, or even pleading with her to leave him alone. His skin was covered with a slick sheen of sweat, not all of it his own, and even though he couldn’t quite remember exactly what had preceded this moment, as he watched Nicole climb out of the big king-size bed and pad off to the bathroom, he knew it was too late. “Whew,” Nicole said. “You do understand that the root of quickie is supposed to be quick, right?”
The sheets were twisted around his ankles. He looked around the room, apparently Nicole’s bedroom: in each corner was a four-foot-tall Asian pot with a burst of dead sticks and flowers coming from it. On the wall in front of him was a triptych of abstract paintings, all with smears of pink on them. Next to that was a family photo of Nicole, her husband, and their son. When he heard the shower come on, Remy rose and slid into his pants, put on his shirt and his socks and his shoes, pulled his jacket off a chair, and slinked out of Nicole’s apartment. He took the elevator with a woman holding a terrier. The dog sniffed at him and then looked up at the woman as if to confirm her suspicions. On the first floor, the doorman was reading the Daily News, but he looked up in time to wink. Remy hurried past him, out the door.
On the street he saw a car that looked like Guterak’s, but it sped away from the curb. Remy watched cabs slide down the avenue toward midtown, and wondered if he had enough cash for one. He pulled his wallet out to see how much money he had, and he saw the edge of his “Don’t Hurt Anyone/Grow Up” card. He slid the card out, read it, and slid it back into his wallet. And that was the first time it crossed his mind that there might be another way to consider this problem, that there might, in some way, be two Remys, one he knew and the other he didn’t, and that these two men might be as different as-
HE WAITED as the old man was helped off the bus, which bore lettering on its side reading Englewood Senior Services. The driver, who had a shelf of long hair in back, nodded and spoke to the man in his loud senior citizen voice. “How’d you do today, Mr. Addich? You win all that money?”
“I always win all the money,” the old man said. He was small and impeccably dressed, in a suit without a tie. He clung to a black day planner as big as a motel room Bible. “I’m a winner!”
“What about them old ladies? You hittin’ any of those ladies, Mr. Addich?”
“I would never hit a lady. Unless she hit me first.” The old man winked.
This made the driver laugh as he got back on the bus. The doors closed, the bus began to pull away, and Mr. Addich made his way toward his son’s suburban house.
“Mr. Addich?” Remy climbed out of his car and hurried across the street. “Excuse me. Are you Gerald Addich?”
The old man turned slowly and looked at Remy without recognition. “Yes. Who are you?” The old man was all ears, two big handles divided by a spit of gray curly hair that lapped onto his forehead. His mouth was a pinched hole. He spoke with a gravelly third-generation Irish borough accent. “What can I do for you?”
Remy walked up to the man. “Do you know me?”
He took a moment. “I don’t believe so, no. But if I had to guess I’d say you look like a cop.”
“I’m the guy who found your planner downtown,” Remy said.
“Oh, thank you,” he said. “That was nice of you to return it. I’d be lost without this thing.” He turned back toward his house.
“Your son said you weren’t downtown that day…”
The old man turned back and cocked his head, as if he didn’t understand.
“So I was wondering how it got down there.”
The old man said nothing.
“See,” Remy said and he tried to laugh nonchalantly, “the funny thing is that your day planner had a meeting listed on that day… with me, or a meeting with someone with my name.”
Addich looked down at the planner in his hands. “What’s your name?”
“Remy. Brian Remy.”
“I’ve never heard of you,” the man said. “So I don’t know how I could have had a meeting with you-”
“Could I just look in there?” Remy asked, pointing to the planner.
“In here?” Mr. Addich held up his day planner.
Just then, the door opened and Tony Addich came out, in suit pants, a white tank top and socks. “Come on, Dad. It’s almost dinnertime. We’re having salmon.”
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” Gerald Addich said to Remy. “We’re having fish.” He stared at Remy for a moment before moving toward the house.
Tony Addich came out and helped the old man up the sidewalk. “Leave him alone,” he said over his shoulder, through gritted teeth. “He can’t help you.”
REMY STOOD on the second floor of what appeared to be an old warehouse, in front of a heavy door, a kind of roughed metal, brushed and polished until it gleamed like a rocket. He looked around, then opened the door and stepped in the entryway of a huge loft apartment, unfurnished and mostly unfinished: exposed bricks and beams, joists and pipes hanging above stained wood floors, the whole thing feeling cold and exposed, lacking the civility and cover provided by basic drywall and carpet. “Hello?” he called out. “Anyone here?”
“In here,” came a man’s voice. Remy made his way through a long narrow living room, rough brick on the opposite wall and two big windows at the far end of the room. A small kitchen was on the right, with an angled slate counter lined with corrugated aluminum and a metal hood resting above a gas stove and oven. A young couple was standing next to the stairs, the man in faded jeans and a ski cap, the woman in form-fitting black pants. They both had the kind of windswept blond hair that made Remy think of places in Colorado he’d never actually seen.
“ – not that I think holding out for a six-burner is worth losing this place,” the woman was saying. Then she and her husband both looked up at Remy.
“Oh, hey,” the windswept man said. “She’s up there.”
“Up there?” Remy asked, looking at the open staircase.
“Yeah, man,” he said, “she was showing us this apartment and she got a phone call about something and she just lost it, man.”
“She didn’t seem right even before that,” the woman said to her husband.
“She was fine,” the man snapped, as if they’d been arguing the point. “But after the phone call she seemed really… spooked.”
“She locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out,” the woman said.
“We didn’t know what to do,” said the husband. “We told her through the door that we were going to call the agency, and that’s when she said she was going to call someone else instead. I’m assuming that was you?”
“I assume so,” Remy said. He started up the staircase, which was lined with cast iron poles topped with what looked like bowling pins. Remy stepped closer and looked upstairs, where he saw a mural painted on the ceiling, a kind of sunspot, dark in the center with yellow drips of flame leading away.
“Excuse me,” said the man. Remy turned and looked down at him, leaning on the railing in the kitchen. “Listen, we’re kind of… we’re worried about losing this place. If she’s okay, do you think you could tell her that we want to move on it before someone else gets it?”
“Okay,” Remy said.
He walked up the stairs and found her in the bathroom, sitting in the dark against the counter, still holding her cell phone. “April?” Remy turned on the light. He stared at the phone in her hand, wondering if Nicole had called her and said something. His stomach felt tight, as if it were folding up on itself.
“You think, at first,” she said, distantly, “that it’s a kind of penance you’re being forced to pay. You think that after you’ve suffered long enough, that the people you’ve lost can just… come back.” April’s eyes drifted down. “But they don’t. They never come back. That’s the trick. They die all over again for you, every few months.”
Remy removed his coat and tried to put it over her shoulders but she held up her hand.
“I dream about them… sometimes. I keep expecting them to say something profound or comforting. But they’re too busy to talk. They’re running around, late for things, and they won’t even meet my eyes. And I think… what’s the rush? You’re dead. Where could you possibly have to be?”
She looked up and met his eyes. “There’s something I probably should have told you. The reason I don’t like to talk about Derek. Do you remember the night we met at the bar and I told you all about him?”
Remy nodded, even though he didn’t.
“I said that when he died, I hadn’t spoken to him in four months…” she trailed off. “Well… that wasn’t entirely true. I don’t know why I lied about it… I guess I wanted you – or maybe me – to believe that I totally was over him.”
April rubbed her mouth and stared at a fixed point above Remy’s head. “Right at the end of summer, he called… he said he missed me. He wanted to get back together. So we talked about it… all through August and the first week of September. And then, one night…” She trailed off.
“You slept together,” Remy said.
She nodded.
“You were still married,” Remy, said and he shrugged as if it were no big deal, which it shouldn’t have been, and yet he could feel a tug in his chest, like he was snagged on a fishing line. He thought of Nicole again and stared at the floor.
“A couple of nights later he spent the night again.” She cleared her throat. “And it was… nice. The next morning… The next morning was that morning…”
She looked at him pleadingly, hoping he wouldn’t need any more information, and he didn’t. It seemed to him sometimes that that was the last morning; every day now started at noon.
“He left for work. I was lying in bed, thinking about him, and about us getting back together, and I saw that he’d left his cell phone on the bedstand. The light was blinking. There was a message. I wasn’t going to listen, but I was curious about whether he’d changed the password on his phone. Of course… he didn’t, the big idiot.” She smiled. “So I listened.”
Remy remembered the meeting with the lawyer. “It was the other woman,” he said. “The one from his office?”
“Yes.” April nodded.
Outside the room, Remy could hear someone climbing the stairs. Then he heard the Colorado guy’s voice: “Excuse me?”
“Just a second,” Remy said to April. He went out into the hallway and saw the man’s head, just peaking at the midpoint of the stairs.
“Sorry,” the guy said, “but my wife is really freaked that we’re going to lose this place. Do you think you could tell your girlfriend that we’re going to call someone else from her office about it?”
“Sure,” Remy said. “Go ahead.”
When he returned to the bathroom, April was staring out the window. After a moment, the cell phone slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor. April stared at it as if she’d never seen one before.
She took a deep breath. “The lawyer called,” she said quietly. “While I was showing this place. He got my settlement. Six hundred twenty thousand.” Her body seemed to hang from her spine like a robe on a hook. “I guess that’s what you get for a slightly used, cheating husband these days. Six-twenty. I guess that’s fair.” She looked down. “I should’ve asked, just for comparison, what a sister was worth.” But the joke was flat, and she covered her mouth with her fist and spit a kind of self-loathing laughter.
He began to move toward her, but bent and picked up her phone instead.
“I’m sorry, Brian,” she said. “But the worst part has always been how much I miss him. I don’t want to… but I do.”
“I know,” Remy said, and he handed her the-
BAR IN an Upper West Side restaurant, where he sat alone, staring through a full glass of whiskey, caramel colored and distorting everything in the room. Behind him, couples sat in red-tucked booths beneath beaded floor lamps; it was a jointy and comfortable place and Remy felt at ease here. He looked out the window. It was dark outside, that surprising early winter darkness that descended like a drawn blind. He looked back at the small glass of amber liquid on the bar in front of him, lifted it, hesitated, then brought it to his lips and downed it. So warm. He wondered if April was meeting him tonight. He pulled out his phone and thought about calling her and realized that he couldn’t come up with her number.
“That’s a fane whiskey, boyo.” The bartender spoke with an affected Irish accent, but Remy didn’t mind because it was, indeed, a fane whiskey. “D’ya know what you want to ate, than?”
Remy put his phone away and picked up the menu. Sure enough, there it was. He could take comfort in that, at least. “I’ll have the wasabi duck marinated in red wine.”
“Have way goat that?” The bartender took the menu and opened it. “Aye, thar ’tis. Moost be new, eh?” The bartender took the menu and snapped it against his leg. He winked, and slid another whiskey in front of Remy, who drained it.
“Excuse me. Mr. Remy?” There was a man at his shoulder, wearing the white shirt of a chef, buttoned at his shoulder.
“Yes?” He looked up, wondering for a moment how the chef knew his name.
“Brian Remy?”
“Yes. That’s me.”
“I have been instructed to tell you-” the man looked around the restaurant before bowing even closer. “This is reather embarrassing.” He stared hard into Remy’s eyes: “There is no wasabi marinated duck.” When Remy didn’t answer, he said, “Do you understand?”
“I think so,” Remy said, pulling away from him. “Can I get something else?”
“You do understand what I’m saying?” the chef asked.
“There’s no duck.”
“Actually-” The man shuffled his feet nervously. “It’s beginning to look like there never was any wasabi marinated duck.” He tried to laugh this off, as if it had all been a funny misunderstanding, but his laugh was edgy and raw.
“O-o-okay,” Remy said. “Can I get… a steak, maybe?”
“Of course,” the man said, relieved. “Is that the course you’d like us to take?”
“I… I guess so. Yeah.”
“Excellent,” the chef said. “What kind?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said. “A ribeye?”
The man’s eyebrows shot up. “A ribeye!”
“Yeah… I think so.”
“I’ll tell them,” the chef said. He slipped Remy a matchbook and spun to walk away. Remy looked at the matchbook. He opened it. Written on the lip of the matchbook was one word: WALK.
Remy reached in his pocket, found the bottle of pills from his psychiatrist, and fumbled with the lid. Finally he got two out and swallowed them with a long drink of lemon water as he read the matchbook again.
“How did you want that?” The man was at his shoulder again.
Remy jumped. “What?”
“The ribeye, sir? How do you want it?”
“I don’t know.” Remy looked around for help. “Medium…” he said, but when the waiter looked concerned, he added, “…rare? Medium rare?”
“Excellent.” The chef bowed. “I will let them know.”
His steak arrived one whiskey later, steaming on a plate of potatoes, with a quiver of asparagus. The meat was lightly marbled and his steak knife glided through it. He jabbed it with his fork and it bled profusely, and he put it in his mouth. It was incredible, the best thing he’d ever eaten. The meat had a blue cheese glaze and the blood and cheese gave his plate a purplish tint. There were garlic mashed potatoes, too, and they turned purple from the blood, and the asparagus spears, too, the whole plate swimming in dark blood. Remy couldn’t believe how much this steak bled and how good it was, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he ate. Another whiskey came, and it, too, was better than he could ever recall a whiskey being.
And when he was done, Remy put on his overcoat and began walking, across glaring traffic, down blocks with empty stoops, bags of garbage out for collection, across another street and into the park. It was a pleasant surprise, finding himself in the park, cutting across its northwest corner, and he was well into the park when he suddenly stopped and wondered why he didn’t have his car, or why he didn’t take a cab. What was he going to do, walk home forty blocks? Still, it was nice: a great steak, some whiskey and a walk through the park, especially this corner, his favorite part of the park – less traffic here, buildings that lurked over the tree line. He turned and began walking again, and had the warm feeling of being at the end of something, of being cradled by these warm buildings, by civilization. As the sidewalk curled past a dark stand of trees, Remy noticed that two streetlights here were burned out. He slowed. There was someone waiting in the shadows.
“Do you want to know what I find interesting?” asked a familiar voice.
Remy came closer and saw that it was the old Middle Eastern man in the long wool coat. He was leaning against a shadowed tree. Remy couldn’t quite make out his face, but it was him, he was sure. “The way people here mock a religion that promises virgins waiting for martyrs in the world after this one. Your own culture would seem to indicate that there is nothing more profound than sex, nothing more humbling or graceful or suggestive of the mystery of creation. And yet the idea of virgins in paradise somehow seems to draw your greatest scorn. Do you honestly imagine yours is a sexless heaven? What kind of paradise is it that has harps and angels but no orgasms?”
Remy took a step back.
“What’s the matter? You seem disappointed to see me.”
“I was kind of hoping you were a hallucination.” Remy reached in his pocket and emerged with the bottle of pills again. He popped the cap and two capsules spilled into his hand. He swallowed them. “My psychiatrist told me you didn’t exist.”
“That’s not surprising.” The man smiled warmly and spoke in a soft, mellifluous voice, like a professor giving a lecture. “You’re always convincing yourselves that the world isn’t what it is, that no one’s reality matters except your own. That’s why you make such poor victims. You can’t truly know suffering if you know nothing about rage. And you can’t feel genuine rage if you won’t acknowledge loss.
“That’s what happens when a nation becomes a public relations firm. You forget the truth. Everything is the Alamo. You claim victory in every loss, life in every death. Declare war when there is no war, and when you are at war, pretend you aren’t. The rest of the world wails and vows revenge and buries its dead and you turn on the television. Go to the cinema.”
The man moved away from the tree, so that his legs – and the bottom of that heavy wool coat – were bathed in light from the nearest street lamp. “Entertainment is the singular thing you produce now. And it is just another propaganda, the most insidious, greatest propaganda ever devised, and this is your only export now – your coffee and tobacco, your gunpowder and your wheat. And while people elsewhere die questioning the propaganda of tyrants and royals, you crave yours. You demand the propaganda of distraction and triviality, and it has become your religion, your national faith. In this faith you are grave and backward fundamentalists, not so different from the grave and backward fundamentalists you presume to battle. If they are barbarians knocking at the gates with stories of beautiful virgins in the afterlife, then aren’t you barbarians too, wrapping the world in cables full of happy-ever-after stories of fleshy blondes and animated fish and talking cars?”
Remy closed his eyes. Streaks and floaters swam against the current behind his lids, tiny birds rising endlessly against the stream. “You’re going to give me something again, aren’t you?” Remy asked. “A manila envelope or something?” He opened his eyes.
“No. I’m not,” the man said.
And then he took a manila envelope from his coat and handed it to Remy. “And I think you have something for me?”
“I do?” Remy shifted the manila envelope to his other hand and felt in his pocket. Behind the bottle of pills he felt a thick envelope, half as big as a brick. How had he not noticed it before? Did someone in the restaurant give it to him? He pulled them both out. He handed the thick envelope to the man, who opened it and began counting bills.
“Can I see those?” The man nodded to the pills, without looking up from the money he was counting.
Remy looked down at the bottle of pills in his hand. He held it out.
The man stopped counting. He stepped out of the shadows, took the bottle, and read the label through the bifocals of his glasses. “For back pain.” He looked up. “So do these help?”
Remy took the pills back and read them for the first time. He felt deflated. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “My back doesn’t hurt.”
“Then they must work,” the man said, and he resumed counting.
Remy opened the manila envelope he’d been given. There was nothing in it but a phone number. Remy didn’t recognize the area code. He felt exhausted. “What is this?”
“It’s the number you asked for.”
“But whose is it?”
The man didn’t look up from his counting. “Don’t be so suspicious.”
“I’m not suspicious. I don’t know whose number this is.” Remy had always felt a strange urge to confide in this man. “Look… I’m not kidding here. I’m a mess. I’m drunk half the time. I cheat on my girlfriend when I don’t even want to. In fact, I’m not even aware that I’m doing it until it’s over. I apparently have this job where I file paper and chase down dead people, but I don’t have the first idea what it means. I do these things that make no sense, and people get hurt. I come home with blood on my shoes and…” Remy laughed bitterly. “…my son won’t even acknowledge that I’m alive.”
“Morning in America,” the man muttered, without looking up.
Remy felt himself slipping. “Look. Can you please tell me what I’m doing?”
The man was almost done counting.
“Please,” Remy said. “Can’t you tell me anything?”
The man held up one finger and stuffed the bills back in the envelope. “Did I tell you that Jesus is mentioned ninety-three times in the Koran?”
“Yeah.” Remy slumped against a tree. “I think you said that.”
“Oh,” the man said. He slid the envelope into his coat pocket. “Well… it bears repeating now.”
MAHOUD SHOOK. He licked his lips, holding the cell phone weakly in one hand while, in the other, he held a piece of paper. Remy looked around. He and Markham and Mahoud were sitting in a shiny red booth in Mahoud’s restaurant, which was empty, lights out except in the kitchen, chairs stacked on the center tables.
“Calm down,” Markham said. “Nice and easy. You’re almost done.”
Mahoud nodded as he pressed the buttons on the phone, looking back and forth from the sheet to the phone. He cleared his throat. “Hello,” he said. “Do you know who this is? Yes. I am ready. I want in.” He listened. “I know what I said, but I’ve changed my mind.” He looked up at Markham. “Because someone has to do something.”
The other person said something and Mahoud began writing.
Remy’s head snapped, as if he’d awakened from a dream. “What is this?” he asked. “What are we doing?”
Markham looked and put his finger to his lips.
“No. No, I’m not going to do this anymore,” Remy said. “I quit.” He stood and walked to the door of the restaurant. It was locked, so he turned the deadbolt, burst out into the street, and began running. He ran down the sidewalk until-
REMY RODE the elevator up alone. There was no music. He looked down at the bank of buttons – two rows as long as his forearm. This elevator was apparently going to the twenty-first floor; he’d gotten used to elevators telling him where to go. So he waited until the 21 light flashed overhead, and when the doors opened he stepped out into the lobby of Shannon Phelps Breen, April’s real estate company. Behind a curved desk, the receptionist was standing and facing away, tethered to her desk by the curling cord from her telephone headset. She was staring at a bank of glass offices, where some kind of argument appeared to be taking place. Other people were standing in the lobby, men and women in business suits, leaning against walls and staring into the same glass office, like kids in the playground gathering to watch a fight.
And that’s when Remy heard April’s raised voice, coming from the glass office. “I don’t need to settle down!” she shouted. “Leave me alone!”
And then he saw her, through the glass, standing behind a desk. Two men approached her from opposite sides of the desk, their hands up, as if they were trying to disarm a suicidal person.
“Thanks for coming.” Her voice.
Remy turned and saw Nicole, arms crossed, wearing a dusty pink suit that appeared to be made of fabric from a vintage couch. She had a spot of blood under her nose; Remy must have stared at it a moment too long, for she touched her middle finger to the blood, pulled it away, and looked at it. “I’m afraid she needs some help,” Nicole said.
“Oh, God. This isn’t about-”
Nicole dropped her chin and stared at him as if he were accusing her of being an idiot. “Come on,” she said in a stage whisper. “Give me some credit. Do you think I would tell an emotionally disturbed subordinate that I fucked her boyfriend? Please. To my knowledge she is still unaware of that little fact. And a word of advice: If you’re thinking of coming clean, I think this might not be… the best time.”
Remy turned back to watch April through the glass. She was crying and waving something around; at first Remy worried it was a gun, but it was a stapler.
“She snapped,” Nicole said. “I called her in for a conference call with an unhappy client, who said she wouldn’t sell him an option on a hedge he wanted to buy. She just lost it, started yelling at him and throwing things. She broke a twelve hundred dollar vase. I hung up and got out of there, but she just kept screaming.” Her voice settled into a dull monotone. “I suppose I should blame myself. She wasn’t ready to come back to work. I thought it would help her, but I guess-”
There was no need to finish the thought as the men moved closer and April yowled and threw the stapler at one of them. The man ducked; the other one reached her and caught her in a bear hug. She tried to slip out of his grasp, but he had her. Only then did Remy move across the room, toward the offices. The other agents in the office, with their assistants and secretaries, stood along the walls staring, many of them with their hands over their mouths, as if they’d just witnessed a hit-and-run accident. Remy stepped between desks and arrived at the glass door of Nicole’s office. A tall Japanese-American man in a navy blue suit was restraining April, standing behind her, his arms wrapped around her so that her arms were pinned. “Come on. Settle down, April.”
She struggled against the man. “Goddamn it, let go of me! I’m fine.”
“I’ll let go when you settle down,” the man said patiently.
April made a guttural noise and threw her head back but missed the man’s face by inches.
“April?” Remy said from the doorway.
She looked up then, met Remy’s eyes, and went slack.
“It’s okay,” Remy said. “You can let her go now.”
The man stared at Remy like he was crazy, but something in his tone, or his stare, convinced him and the man let her go. April pulled away and looked around, saw everyone outside staring at her, and slumped to the floor, crying in little huffs of breath. Remy looked around the office. Photos and paintings were strewn everywhere, and broken glass. The desk was cleared of books and plants and family pictures, as if a bad magician had tried pulling a tablecloth out from under the whole room.
The two men backed away slowly. “I’ve never seen anyone go off like that,” said one of them. He straightened his perfectly straight tie. “We were afraid she was going to hurt herself. Is she on something?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said. He stepped around the desk, to where April was sitting, hugging her knees to her chest. He crouched down. “Are you okay?”
She looked up and met his eyes. She swallowed. “Apparently not.”
“What happened?”
Her head fell to one side and her face scrunched up as if she were going to cry. But she didn’t. “I’m not sure. I just… I guess I had enough. I couldn’t walk around pretending any of this made sense anymore. Everyone is acting crazy, Brian. Here and…” She looked up at him. “Everywhere. Is everything okay with us, Brian?”
And suddenly, Remy thought he could see the world clearly. He had tried to go along, waiting for the fog to clear, for the terrain to make sense. But what if it never cleared? Then a word spoke itself in his head, as if not from him, but from outside.
Act, it said. Act. “Yes, everything’s okay,” Remy whispered. And then he said, quietly, so that maybe he wouldn’t hear, “Let’s go somewhere,” and he was pleased at the way the thought seemed to catch its thinker, him, off guard.
She cocked her head. “What?”
“You and me. Let’s… go somewhere. Just drop everything and leave the city. Why not?” He felt thrilled, in a way; that he could surprise himself seemed like an option he hadn’t even considered.
“When?” she asked.
Don’t think. “Right now,” he said. “Tonight.”
“Tonight?” She looked up, eyes rimmed with tears. “Really?”
“Sure. Let’s just go.”
“Where?”
“You pick,” Remy said.
She stared at him, saw that he was serious, and wiped her wet eyes. “We can do that?”
“I think so,” Remy said. “I think we can do anything. Can’t we?”
She covered her mouth. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“Look, I’ll be right back,” Remy said. “Don’t move.”
He left her crouched behind the desk, obscured from the people in the lobby, and came back out of the office. “I’m gonna get her out of here,” he told Nicole, the last onlooker left waiting for them outside. “But do you think you could clear everyone out? This is hard enough.”
“Of course,” Nicole said.
“We’ll pay for any damage that was done,” he said.
“You think?” Nicole smiled. “That’s certainly a fatalistic way to look at it. If that’s the case, maybe we should do some more damage.” She ran her index finger along the waistband of his pants.
Remy pulled back. “I mean the damage April did to your office.”
“Oh, that.” Nicole shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”
Remy started to turn back, then stopped. “What set her off?”
“Honestly, I have no idea.” Nicole looked around him to her trashed office. “This young stock analyst wanted us to make an option offer on a hedge for a potential studio in a proposed rehab on some regrade land possibly slated for rezoning down in BPC. And for some reason April just… refused to do it. She just kept saying it was crazy. That it made no sense. That it was too much money and that we were selling air. She said someone had to put a stop to it. She was crying and screaming, This makes no sense. We’re all pretending it does, but it doesn’t. As you might guess, this is not the best position for a real estate broker.”
“I’m sorry,” Remy said. And he had a thought. “How much was the apartment?”
“It wasn’t an apartment. It was an option. Actually, it was more like an option on an option.” She paused. “On an option.”
“How much was it?”
“That’s the crazy thing. It was only six twenty. A steal.”
Remy closed his eyes. Six hundred twenty thousand dollars. Right. “Okay. Thanks.” He turned to walk away.
“Will you call me?” she asked.
“I hope not,” he said, without turning. He returned to Nicole’s office, the broken glass crunching beneath his feet. He knelt down and took April in his arms again. When he looked over the desk, he saw that Nicole had cleared the lobby. Remy helped April to her feet and led her out of the office, his arm around her, her head against his shoulder.
“We can go anywhere?” she asked.
“Anywhere.”
“How about-”
“Shhh,” Remy interrupted. “Don’t tell me. I’d rather be-”
WEDGED INTO the round window at the back of the plane, Remy saw what looked like toy ships on the bay below, their wakes like chalk scratches on a blackboard. The jet banked and Remy felt himself pressed against the door, and in a glance he could see where the water ended and then the rough line of shore and the city lay suddenly before him like a grid of transistors, gray and white rectangles and reflected bits of sun, rising in the center of the peninsula like a mound of sifted sand. San Francisco. He’d never been to San Francisco. At least, not that he knew. He’d always wanted to go to California.
The jet leveled. “Excuse me, sir.” A flight attendant took Remy’s arm and smiled at him. “The captain has turned on the fasten seat belt sign. You’ll need to return to your seat. We’re about to land.”
Remy looked ahead at the full rows, a hundred heads bobbing above the cloth seats. He could hear low conversations but he couldn’t see a single pair of lips moving, and for a moment the roar of the jet and the murmur of people seemed like the same noise, as if this plane ran on empty talk. Should he just walk forward until he found an empty seat? Remy felt his back pants pockets hopefully, and was relieved to come up with a folded ticket. Seat 2A. First class. Well, that was good. But something seemed wrong. If he was in first class, why was he in the back of the plane?
As he walked forward, Remy’s shoulders slumped. Ten rows from the back, Markham was reclining in the aisle seat, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, and reading an airline magazine. How did he find out? As Remy approached, Markham stood and pretended to be looking in his overhead bin for something. Remy edged past and Markham turned and bumped him, pressing a cell phone into Remy’s hand.
Remy put the phone in his pocket and walked toward the front of the plane. He looked over his shoulder once, but Markham was hidden behind his magazine. At the bulkhead Remy stepped through the open curtains into first class, relieved to see April in 2B. She had a glass of red wine. Another mini-bottle of Syrah was waiting its turn on her seat tray. Remy eased in, latched his seat belt, and looked out the window. They were south of San Francisco, circling back toward the airport.
“You’re right,” she said, toasting him with the wine. “This does help. This helps a lot.” She filled her glass. “To more help.”
Remy looked back over his shoulder.
“So why’d you go to the back of the plane?” she asked.
“I guess to meet someone.”
“Really?” She laughed. “You a member of the mile-high club now?”
“No,” he said. “It was a guy I know. He gave me a phone.” He held up the flip phone for her to see.
“Someone gave you a phone?” She took his arm and nestled in. She laughed. “That makes absolutely no sense.” She laughed again. “I like being drunk.”
The new cell phone rang.
“Hey!” she said, delighted.
Remy stared at it before opening it. “Hello.”
“Hey, so here’s something funny,” Markham said. “You know how people are always describing the exciting part of a movie as a race against time? Like, say at the end, they’ve got to discover a vaccine before the virus wipes out everyone, or they’ve got to cut the wires on the bomb before it blows up, or find the ruthless killer before he strikes. But think about how stupid that is: a race against time. You can’t race time. It’s like trying to swim faster than water. No matter how fast you go, time is the thing you’re moving in; it’s the thing against which your speed is measured. How can you race time? I guess Einstein showed how time bends at certain speeds, or that it slows down or speeds up, but that still isn’t like racing time, and anyway, the truth is, we can’t go those Einstein speeds anyway… they’re science fiction, right? I mean… you can’t go faster than time. It doesn’t even make sense. It’s like being taller than faith, you know? Or smarter than hope. Anyway, I just knew that’s the kind of thing you’d get a kick out of, you know, given the situation.”
Remy looked over at April, who was nestled into her first-class seat, holding her wine and smiling at him.
“Who is it?” she mouthed.
Remy didn’t know what to say.
“Sir,” said a male flight attendant. “You are not allowed to use your cell phone while we’re in flight.”
“I gotta go,” Remy said into the phone.
“Oh yeah,” Markham said. “Sure. I just wanted to tell you how that thing about racing against time occurred to me. It just cracked me up, that’s all. And I knew you’d see the insanity in a phrase like that. Although, honestly, I don’t know what you’d substitute: A wrestling match against fate?” Markham laughed. “A game of cribbage against lethargy?”
“Sir,” the flight attendant said again.
Remy snapped the phone shut and the flight attendant moved on.
“Who was it?” April asked again.
Before he could answer, the plane shuddered against a wave of turbulence and April grabbed his hand and closed her eyes. “Oh, I hate this,” she said. She drained the last of her wine and the flight attendant cleared the glasses.
“It’s okay,” Remy said.
Sometimes Remy knew things without specifically remembering how he knew them, and in this way he knew that this was the first time that April had flown anywhere since that day. He looked back at the faces on the plane, sets of wide eyes glancing around, one woman holding a string of beads and mouthing prayers. The couple across the row from him rocked with shared anxiety.
Remy turned back. “Really. It’s going to be okay,” he said again as the plane banked and lurched.
“I just hate it,” she said. “I close my eyes and I see-”
“I know,” Remy said, and he patted her hand and looked back again at the rows of imploring eyes. “We all see it.”
The jet bore down, grinding and moaning, toward the runway, then seemed to hover a few feet above it, before it lurched and skipped, fell several feet, and leveled, the hydraulic landing gear spitting, spinning, and catching and then the frantic clutch of elevators, strain of thousands of rivets, and the seize of brakes, and a thousand technological miracles later, Remy and April were walking down a jetway, Remy looking nervously over his shoulder. Act, he thought. Just do what you have to do. This is your life. She paused to switch her carry-on bag to the other shoulder, but Remy hurried her along, weaving in and out of the crowds.
“Ooh,” she said, “we’re in a hurry.”
They made their way downstream and were outside baggage claim when Remy saw a flash of Hawaiian shirt behind him and suddenly pulled her toward the door and outside. “Come on.”
“What about our bags?” April asked.
“Leave them,” he said.
They stepped into the giant horseshoe of the airport turnaround, the air buzzing in the late afternoon with cars and vans like insects on a carcass. Remy could hear his new cell phone chirping as he hustled April toward a cab. He opened the door for her and she told the cabbie the address of their Union Square hotel. “Just a sec,” Remy said.
He ran back and pitched the ringing cell phone into a garbage can.
THEY UNDRESSED quietly, and began making love, and at first Remy found himself hurrying, afraid that he would lose track before they finished. “Hey, hey,” she whispered. “Slow down. I’m not going anywhere.” And indeed, there was a syrupy languor in this hotel room in the late afternoon that caused him to believe her, and they fell into a rhythm that seemed to go on all afternoon, until Remy found himself experiencing a kind of overwhelming sentience that was disconnected from what they were doing, his body moving on its own while he found himself thinking pleasurably about the sounds of car horns and trucks on the street outside, and the San Fran! tourist magazine on the nightstand (with a photo of that famous, stupid crooked street on the cover) and tracking the drops of sweat on his own face, and listening to someone watching television in the room next door and, finally, with the sun setting through the open curtains and casting a fevered glow across their bodies, he fixated on the inside of her ear, a pink curling seashell of cartilage that amazed him with its delicacy and its utter efficiency – skin stretched over it like a drum, and somehow, all the sound in the room (Oh yes mmm yes) flowed into it, to be sorted, defined, and acted upon instantaneously. And this made him wonder about the other human miracles he took for granted: speech and smell and his own shattered vision, and at that very moment, such thoughts were vanquished by the sheer tyranny of nerve endings, those in his fingertips and, of course, those in the suddenly intense elsewhere, which was the only feeling right then, a wet hot friction that caused a low groan to rise in his throat and finally…
“Well,” she gasped when he fell off her. “That was certainly… a lot of sex.” She rubbed his belly and pulled a sheet across her own midsection as they lay on the big king-size bed, breathing deeply. She put her head on Remy’s chest. “What’s the opposite of premature?” she asked. “Postmature?”
“Sorry,” he said, and he remembered Nicole, and squeezed his eyes shut to make her go away, lost in the swirl of failing tissue.
“Were you going for some kind of endurance record? Or just seeing if you could make me taller?”
“I was distracted,” he said. “Sorry.”
“No, it was nice,” she said. “I always wondered what it would be like to have sex with an oil derrick.”
Remy stood next to the bed.
“Go get me a wheelchair and we’ll go to dinner.”
He walked to the window and looked outside. The sidewalks were full of people with briefcases, making their way down the city’s hills, leaning back as they walked, as if they were being sucked down into the creases of the city, as if they were winding down a drain.
“Every man has the same ass,” April said, leaning up in bed. “When you’re young they’re all different, but by the time you get to a certain age… same ass. So why is that? There are a thousand varieties of women’s asses, but you all have the same one.”
Remy came back to bed. April had gotten a little bottle of wine from the minibar, and she drank from it with one hand while she held the remote in the other, running through the channels faster than Remy could register the programs.
“I can’t see anything,” he said. “What are you watching?”
“Electrons,” she said.
So he watched electrons with her, the screen flickering with transient images, and every once in a while he caught one, but they all seemed like pictures from an older America: a woman drove a farm truck; someone ran on a soccer field; a house burned; a couple was married; and then there were the faces, thousands of faces that failed to register anything but the idea of a single shifting face. Aside from the speed, there was something hypnotic and familiar, something intoxicating in this view of life, something that he recalled knowing. But finally the fluttering television was too much like the disorder in his eyes and Remy had to turn away. He reached for the room service menu. “Want to get a real bottle of wine?”
“That,” she said, patting him on the thigh, “is exactly what I want.”
Remy was flipping past the dinner menu toward the wine list when he suddenly turned back. The menu was contained in a three-ring binder, and a separate page had been slipped in, handwritten, and showing that day’s specials.
“We have to leave.” Remy got up and began dressing, the menu open on the bed below him to the dinner special: wasabi marinated duck.
AT NIGHT the homeless in San Francisco operate like cabbies, she explained to him as they hurried down the block. “Trust me, I know this city. If you make eye contact, they’ll offer to give you directions or walk with you to where you’re going. There’s a whole underground city of the homeless and they come up at night to get money for wine and slices of pizza. And there is always one willing to show you to your hotel for a buck or two, or take you to the best club or restaurant. They all know each other and they wave at each other when they pass, and sometimes roll their eyes, just like cabbies with bad fares. I think there’s even a union,” April said, “like the Five-One-Six or something, the international brotherhood of the homeless and indigent.”
She talked as they hustled down the street with only their carry-on bags, Remy occasionally looking back over his shoulder. He saw what looked like a flash of Markham’s Hawaiian shirt a block back, in a crush of people waiting to cross Geary. Remy and April walked two blocks to Sutter, doubled back, and ducked into a dark corner hotel, the lobby bustling with a Japanese tour group waiting to go to dinner.
“We should go with them,” April said. “Pretend we don’t speak English. Take pictures of everything. Buy postcards and snow globes.”
Remy pulled her through the lobby and out a side door, where they were met by a black man in torn jeans and an engineer’s cap. His teeth were gray and placed at random, a handful on top, fewer on bottom.
“You folks need directions?” the man asked. “I know this city better’n you know your wife’s poodum.”
“We’ll need to see your union card,” April laughed.
The man ignored her as Remy fumbled in his pocket for cash. He handed the man a five-dollar bill. “There’s a white guy in a Hawaiian shirt. Brown hair, really young looking. If he comes this way, I need you to stall him. Ask him for money, knock him down, anything.”
They kept moving, zigging up streets and down their crosses as April turned and read the marquees of theaters and the names of stores and bars. Finally, Remy pulled her into a hotel lounge and they sank low into a table in the corner. “We’ll just sit here for a while and then I’ll go check in,” Remy said.
“That sounds nice,” said April sweetly, drunkenly. “We can wear wigs and grow mustaches so no one recognizes us. And I’ll learn to sew. I’ll sew all our food. We’ll live off the grid, in a cabin built from empty wine bottles.” When the waitress came he ordered whiskey for himself and a glass of red wine for April. Remy looked back over his shoulder to the street outside. Faces moved past like the flickering images on the TV.
April rubbed her foot against his leg. “We could take off all our clothes and crawl under the table,” April said. “They’ll never think to look for us there.”
The waitress brought their drinks and Remy drained his whiskey and gestured for another.
April raised her wineglass. “Just for the record, Mr. Remy, I am having the time of my life.”
Remy smiled. “Good.” But then he had a troubling thought. He picked up his menu and leafed through it quickly, running his index finger down the rows of appetizers and entrées. When he saw that it wasn’t there, he sighed, set the menu down and fell back in his chair.
“Relax,” April said. “You’re doing a great job, whatever it is you’re doing.”
“Have you decided?” The waitress was standing over them.
“Yeah. I have,” he said, and with a relief that bordered on joy, Brian Remy ordered the yellow pepper, black bean, and artichoke quesadilla.
THEY MADE love in the new hotel room, too, and when they were done Remy took a long shower. He closed his eyes and let the hot water cascade over his face, pelting his eyelids and his forehead. He opened his mouth and it filled with water and he spat it out, over and over. When he came out April was sleeping and he watched her for a moment, the slow rise and fall of her breasts.
Finally, Remy dropped his towel and climbed into bed, nestling in behind her and staring into the tangle of her dark hair. He kissed the top of her head and she stirred slightly. She looked back over her shoulder at him, smiled, and faced the other way again.
“How was your shower?” she whispered.
“It was good.”
“Good. I like showers. I like to let the water run right over my face like I’m standing in a waterfall.”
They lay there quietly for a while, until her breathing caught up to his and for a moment they were inhaling and exhaling together, and then her breathing began to pull away again, with those cute little puffs of air. It occurred then to Remy that they had no clothes except the ones they’d arrived in, which were now lying on the floor. They’d either have to go back to the airport to get their luggage or go shopping.
“Listen, tomorrow-” Remy began.
“Shh,” she said. “No tomorrow.”
HE WOKE at ten to the sound of a light knocking at the door. April was still asleep. He looked up. The walls in the room were off-white, and the room had a light oak armoire that contained the television, refrigerator, and stereo. The door was still deadbolted shut. “Yes?” he said.
“Housekeeping,” said a voice on the other side.
“Can you come back?” Remy said.
“Chure. I comb back.”
Remy sat up and looked around the room. It was smaller than the other hotel room, nothing in this room but a bed and a small desk with a business phone. He called downstairs for coffee, fruit, and bagels.
“We could stay here forever,” she said from the bed.
“You think so?” Remy asked.
“Just run from hotel to hotel, screwing and pretending someone’s after us.”
Remy didn’t say anything.
“We’ll change our names every day. Today… I’ll be Monique. Who are you?”
“What?”
“Who are you going to be?”
“Uh… Steve,” Remy said.
“Steve and Monique. Good. Okay, who are we? What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said.
“Monique is a jewel thief. She’s fifty-two. A former actress and figure skater from the old Soviet Union who defected as a teenager, but after the Cold War ended she missed the old intrigue, so she works for an international cartel stealing jewels from wealthy industrialists and other assholes who capitalize on poor workers.”
Remy looked back at her. “Monique doesn’t look fifty-two.”
“She’s had a lot of surgery.”
“So who’s Steve?” he asked.
“A dentist. From Akron, Ohio.”
“Yeah… I don’t think I want to be Steve.”
“Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll be Steve. You be Monique. Come here, Monique, lie on your back and show me your mouth.”
And then a thought bobbed to the surface and he had to ask it. “April,” Remy said. “If Derek hadn’t died… is there any chance you and he-”
She looked stung and her eyes moved almost imperceptibly to a point just beyond him. “No.”
“But you still loved him. You said so.”
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
“Was it the other woman?”
“No… I don’t think there was really anything between them,” she said quietly. “In some ways it was… incidental.”
“So what… you just couldn’t forgive him for doing that?”
“Something like that,” she said. “Look, I don’t-” She sat up and reached for her shirt, tugged it on without a bra and pulled the sheet up around her waist. “We were having so much fun, Brian. Why’d you have to-” But she didn’t finish. She picked up the remote control and started running through the channels again. Remy watched the TV go from one reality to another and again – it was mesmerizing – and he thought about how familiar this was, the way the television skipped from news to sports to music videos, the way these imperceptible gaps led from sorrow to humor and pathos, from a game show to televised real estate listings to a panel talking about books. But this time, the pictures moved too slowly for April and after a minute of trolling inanity she turned off the TV and hurled the remote across the room. It hit the wall and fell in pieces of plastic and double-A batteries.
THEY BOUGHT new clothes in a store called Fugue. She got tight leather pants and a little spaghetti strap tank top, and Remy bought faded jeans and a powder blue dress shirt. Remy carried their old clothes in a shopping bag. They went to a boutique shoe store and picked out a pair for each other: hers had straps that wrapped around the backs of her ankles and he got low-cut boots with square toes.
“Wow. We look hot,” she said when he came out in his new shoes. “I kind of want to screw us.”
They hopped in a cab and April told the cabbie to take them to a romantic restaurant, so he dropped them off at a little place in North Beach, where they had lunch and a bottle of Chianti in a sidewalk café. The wine was gone before their entrées arrived, and they had another carafe and lingered over a split bowl of spumoni.
“What’s your names?” asked the walnut-eyed Italian waiter.
“I’m Steve,” April said. “And his name is Monique.”
“Steve,” the waiter said, looking at Remy. “Monique. Can I tell you something?”
“You can tell us anything,” she said.
The waiter proceeded to tell them how he’d been raised in a vineyard and hotel on the western coast of Italy and how he’d gone into debt over some gambling expenses and escaped to the United States to work for an uncle, who had kept him in a kind of indentured servitude at the restaurant ever since. Remy didn’t know if he believed the story, but he liked it very much.
“How old you think I am, Steve?” He put his face close to Remy’s. He looked to be about fifty, Remy thought.
“I don’t know… forty?”
“Come on,” the man said. “I look sixty easy, yes? Well what I am, I tell you, is thirty-eight, Steve. That’s all. Thirty-eight. An’ you know why I look so old, Monique?”
She was resting her chin in her hand, smiling. “Why?”
“Because I never fall so much in love like you two.” The waiter held his hands out between Remy and April, as if he were performing a wedding. “I never find no one make me so happy.”
“You’ll find someone,” April said.
“No. Not me. No more.”
“Sure you will.”
“No. It’s okay.” He seemed to be looking for words. “In America,” he said, “everyone thinks every story have a happy end, yeah? You’re not happy about one thing, what do you do? Sue each other. It’s so stupid. How can every story be a happy end? Someone got to be sad.”
A SIGN on a light pole advertised an End of the World Party at a club near the Haight, and April wanted to go somewhere in their new clothes, so they took a cab and waited on line with people at least a decade younger, overgrown boys in sideburns and girls with lower back tattoos rising from their pants like bursts of hair, all of them bouncing on the balls of their feet and yelling into their cell phones. Remy and April stared at the door and listened to the thumping for about thirty minutes until a thick bouncer took twenty bucks and waved them past and they walked through an awning, around an iron gate and down a staircase into a cavernous basement with pillars, floor lighting, and a low ceiling. A disc jockey was playing punkish electronic music on a simple turntable set up on milk crates, the sound a slush of guitars, synthesizers, and sibilant voices, punctuated by that same thud of drums, merely suggestive from the outside, insistent now that they were on the pulsing dance floor.
It was so crowded that all they could do, all anyone could do, was bounce up and down, jerking their heads, everyone occupying his own airspace – and for such a writhing, wriggling mass of people, Remy was surprised how little they touched each other. He tried to place the music, but his points of reference seemed more than dated, possibly anachronistic – David Bowie covers played by robots? Inside, the crowd wasn’t as young as it seemed on line, but it felt to Remy as if these people had all been given some sort of manual before they arrived explaining how to act in such a club. They all danced the same, heads jerking, bodies coiled, no partner in sight, and they raised their hands at the same time, but most of all they knew how to communicate with each other, bobbing in to the left ear of the listener so that, from a distance, every conversation looked like a mother bird feeding her chick.
There were no tables, and everyone along the walls was dancing, and yet people seemed to have drinks, so Remy began to search for the bar, and that’s when he saw a staircase to the left of the stage, lined with people trying to get a drink.
April was dancing with her eyes closed, her body snapping like a stiff whip, her head nodding as if she were being forced, over and over, to agree with something she found distasteful. When did I forget how to dance? Remy thought. When did I lose track of music and what you’re supposed to do with it? “Let’s get a drink!” he yelled, but her eyes didn’t open, so he did the mother bird and yelled in her ear. “Drink!” and she opened her eyes and grabbed his arm, shaking her head no.
“I’m going to get one,” he said and pointed to the stairs.
He read her lips. “No. Stay here. Dance. Unless your back’s bothering you?”
“My back is fine,” he yelled. And so they danced for more than an hour, until Remy’s back did ache, and his head swam with the unceasing drums, and finally he couldn’t dance anymore and he just stood in the middle of all those swirling young bodies, watching as April – eyes closed – snapped her body over and over, from her tight leather pants to the tendrils of black hair that lashed her face unmercifully.
MORNING AND Remy sat up cold and naked in the hotel bed, all the covers wrapped around April, who slept peacefully facing away from him. He looked around the bright room. Two empty wine bottles sat on the table with two red-rimmed wineglasses and their new clothes were strewn around the floor in front of the bed.
There was a light knock at the door. “Housekeeping.”
Remy looked at the clock. It was 9:45. “Can you come back later?”
“Chure,” the man said. “I comb back.”
Remy padded off to the shower and after a minute she joined him and soaped him into making love, and when they were done they went back to bed.
It was two in the afternoon before they made it out of the hotel room. They had gyros at a little Greek stand that April said reminded her of her father’s cooking. They bought more new clothes – April got a tiny denim skirt and high boots, and she even talked Remy into loosening up and he got a shirt with wild cuffs and jeans with manufactured rips in the thighs, and when he said he felt stupid in them, she took him to a bar and made him down three whiskeys in quick succession and, he was forced to admit, he didn’t feel stupid any longer.
“Where you folks from?” asked the female bartender.
“British Columbia,” answered April. “A little town in the Rockies at the foot of this glacier. We hike up and carry buckets of ice down for our drinking water. There’s no electricity or phone service and Dustin here has to cut logs for us to burn in our woodstove to cook and keep us warm.”
“Maggie makes all our clothes,” Remy said. “We eat only roots. In the summer we’re always naked. I have a pet moose.”
“Wow,” the bartender said. “How’d you end up there?”
“Dustin was a draft dodger,” April said. “Conscientious objector. He moved up to Canada and I went and joined him. Fucking government, you know? We just got so sick of America we couldn’t take it any more. At some point, a place loses enough of itself that you have no choice but to abandon it.” She leaned in as if sharing a secret. “And frankly, I think it’s gotten worse.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” the bartender said as she loaded glasses in the dishwasher. But then she looked up at the couple and Remy could see that she was calculating their ages.
“You went up there to avoid serving in Vietnam?” the bartender asked.
“No,” April said. “Panama.”
“Oh,” she said. “Sure.”
On the advice of the bartender, they took the train to the baseball stadium and walked to a nearby pier, where they found a man with striking gray beard renting kayaks and wetsuits from a huge shipping container. The man asked if they had experience with sea kayaks.
“Not specifically,” April said, “but I was a river guide in the Grand Canyon the summer after I got out of the Peace Corps, and Toody here rowed crew at Princeton.”
“JV,” he said.
“Still,” the kayak guy said, “you should have no trouble.”
They set out awkwardly from the pier, where the water was still, and quickly figured out the balance required. Remy loved the way the edge of his paddle disappeared in the dark water and the way he could thrust the boat forward, the muscles in his arms and shoulders burning from the work. They developed a quick rhythm, April in front, digging with her paddle, her little shoulders beginning to quake with the effort, and when Remy tried to slow down, for her sake, she just pushed harder, and so he did too, their leans and pushes working together until they got going so fast that it felt as if they were carving the water, as if their wake might go for miles, across the bay to the rest of the world. And only then did April stop and look around, at the diffuse clouds battered by light blue sky.
“Why did you ask me about Derek?” she said without turning.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“He was from here,” she said. “From San Francisco. Did you know that?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe it was wrong to come here. But I haven’t been thinking about him… if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“I’m not. It’s fine.”
She didn’t say anything else. They drifted around the point and out into the heart of the bay, into heavier chop, the spray stinging their eyes as the wind pushed them toward deeper water and the shadows of sailboats glided past, bending on the waves like shimmering apparitions.
“Goddamn it,” she said.
IN DREAMS, at least in this dream, Remy’s eyesight was perfect, the world clear and crisp and devoid of the static that he’d grown accustomed to. And even asleep, he noted to himself that he hadn’t been dreaming very much since…
He looked around, amazed by the clarity and the quiet of everything he saw. He was standing outside Edgar’s old primary school, waiting for the boy to get out of school, watching the stream of familiar faces as they came out of the building: Edgar’s old babysitter, followed by Guterak, and then Billy Joel, who became the gyro guy who used to set up outside Midtown and then the gyro guy from San Francisco and finally April’s father, who stood shaking his head disapprovingly. But while the buildings and trees and everything within his vision was clear, when he looked up Remy could see flashers and floaters in the sky, which was a gray slate, clouds of ash and dust flowing overhead like a river of debris, and when Remy looked down, the flecks came down to the world, too. Edgar’s school had become 1 Police Plaza – police headquarters – and Remy was standing outside the barricade as cops ran out of 1PP in a panic, and now Remy was terrified for Edgar, who must still be inside. He could hear someone crying and then Remy was jerked awake, sat up and opened his eyes. April was sitting at the end of the bed, still wearing the little denim skirt, but nothing else. She was sobbing, her eyes dark, wet swaths worn along her cheeks. Remy stirred to come toward her but she held up her hand to keep him from coming any closer.
“I went along with everything, didn’t I?” she asked. “We were having a good time, right? And even when you acted all crazy and paranoid, I just pretended it was normal.”
“April-”
“But then you had to ask about Derek.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She turned. “If I tell you… everything, will you promise you’ll never ask about it again? Promise that we’ll never have to talk about it.”
“Okay,” Remy said. “I’ll try.”
She stood and walked to the window, opened the curtain and looked out on the dark street. He could see the glow from the streetlights on her pale skin like a halo.
“We talked all that weekend and we went to dinner that Monday night,” she said to the window, “and I let him spend the night… and he even went to work Tuesday in the same clothes. He thought that was so funny… and it felt so natural, like before he left. I kissed him goodbye at the door of our apartment. And I think that’s the first time I really allowed myself to realize how much I missed him, and to think that we might be back where we were.” She turned back to face Remy and it reminded him of the way she’d kept paddling the kayak, her shoulders straining with the effort. “It was after Derek walked out the door that I saw his cell phone on the bookshelf, with the message light blinking. So I listened-”
“The woman from his office,” Remy said.
“March.” She spit the name as if it had been caught in her throat, her voice cracking. April turned away again and seemed to realize for the first time that she was naked above the waist. She pulled a towel off the floor and wrapped it around her shoulders. “March was the woman he-”
“Ah Jesus,” Remy said.
April smiled sickly. “I had talked to her on Monday… and I told her that Derek was coming over… that we were thinking of reconciling. She was so quiet. And I thought-” She laughed bitterly. “I thought she was just worried about me, worried that I would get hurt. So I told her not to worry about it, that Derek was a different man. And that I knew what I was doing.”
April seemed unaware that tears were streaking her cheeks. “She and Derek had always had this… flirtation. I always thought it was aimed at me… you know, the way sisters try to make each other feel off balance? Jealous? But as soon as I heard her voice on his phone I knew. I knew. I wanted to throw the phone across the room. I wanted to hang up. But I couldn’t. I just listened.”
Remy asked what the message had said.
“She was rambling, freaking out. She wanted to know if it was true that Derek was thinking of getting back together with me… she said that he’d lied to her. And she felt awful. She never would have slept with him if she’d known he still had feelings for me. She said she’d been vulnerable because of her breakup with the married guy and Derek had taken advantage of that, and I don’t know-” April laughed again. “She said that if Derek hurt me, she would kill him. If he hurt me… do you believe that? Goddamn her.”
“What did you do?”
“I called her at work. I yelled at her.”
“That morning?” It was as if the ground gave way beneath Remy’s feet. “You called her? That morning?”
– March taking the phone call, crying at her desk-
“I told her she was a whore and that she wasn’t my sister and I never wanted to talk to her again. I told her that I was going to tell Dad she was a whore.” April shook her head. “March said I had it wrong, that it only happened once, that they were drunk, whatever… She kept trying to whisper, I guess because she was at work.” April slumped back into her chair. “And that pissed me off, that she could still be thinking about what people thought of her. I hung up the phone… listened to the message again and then I called her desk. But she was gone. So I called Derek’s office and…” April twitched. “…March was there. In his office. That was the worst part: that she was there with him. I was all alone in my apartment and they were twenty blocks away, in another room. Together. Forever, as it turned out.”
“Was Derek’s office on the same floor?” Remy asked quietly.
“No. Four floors above.”
– March, agitated, hanging up the phone, running to the elevator -
“I knew she was there. He was talking, telling me to settle down, but there was… nothing. I just felt totally empty. Like I’d been hollowed out.”
She stared past him for a long time and then laughed bitterly. “So… I hung up. I wanted to say something clever. Or mean. But I just took the phone off the hook and went back to bed. I didn’t go to work. And it was an hour later… I heard people screaming in my building and… I turned on the TV and saw-” April began to buckle but caught herself. “I think of them… up there at the end… together… and I hate them most of all for that… that at the end, they had each other.”
She was right, Remy thought.
They could’ve just lived in this hotel room forever.
Everything a person needed was in a hotel room.
It was the peak of civilization, a culmination of fire and the wheel and digital cable radio. It was all here.
If he’d just never mentioned Derek they could’ve just kept at this for years, making love and buying new clothes, eating in restaurants and kayaking around the bay, changing their names every few days.
“I’m sorry,” Remy whispered.
She covered her face with her hands and the towel fell away and she shook with sobs again. Remy stood up, brought her back to bed and curled up around her tiny back until the shuddering stopped and she was breathing easily.
“Do you know…” She caught her breath. “What I kept thinking?” She looked back over her shoulder and met his eyes. She smiled. “For months afterward, I kept thinking: Wouldn’t this make a fucking great portrait in grief?”
“HOUSEKEEPING.”
Remy started. He looked back at the door of the hotel room and then at the clock on the nightstand. It was seven-thirty and April was sleeping more heavily than he’d ever seen. He kissed her lightly on the crown of her head, rose and got dressed, and walked to the door.
Markham’s smooth smiling face filled the doorway. “Hi, Brian.”
Remy edged out and closed the door behind him.
“You ready to go?” Markham was wearing a sportcoat and blue oxford shirt and carrying his thin brown briefcase. He did an exaggerated double take on Remy’s new shoes.
“Wow! Look at the kicks!” Markham said. “Are those new? They have to be new. Look at you, Mr. Hipster. You know, I can’t wear sweet kicks like that, those big square-toe clunkers. And I’m a shoe guy. But my feet are so long I’d look like Frankenstein in those.” Markham took on his standup comic voice. “In fact, I’d look like a gay Frankenstein, like Frankenstein on his way to get a pedicure and meet his boyfriend the Wolfman for a caramel half-caff at Starbucks. Metrostein or something. Right, right?”
Remy felt beaten. “How’d you find me?”
“Housekeeping,” Markham said again. “‘Chure, I comb back.’ Hey, I’m sorry about the cell phone. You were right to pitch it and lose me for a few days. I could’ve blown your cover. I get impatient. It was stupid of me. Especially with us being so close.”
Remy looked back at the door to the hotel room.
“So… did the change of scenery work? You get anything new?”
“Look, I don’t want to do this anymore,” Remy said. “Whatever… this is – I’m done. I’m just going to go back into this hotel room and…”
“Oh, I know what you mean. I’ve been jet-lagging since we got here.” He leaned in closer. “Have you taken a dump? Because I haven’t. Goddamn airplane food. Like eating paste.”
“Look,” Remy said. “For what it’s worth, I don’t even think March is alive.”
Markham nodded. “Yeah… the whole March thing looks like a dead end. Excuse the pun. But no, you were right all along. March probably is dead. Unless old Bishir is a tougher cut of steak than he looks.”
Remy couldn’t help his curiosity. “You found Bishir?”
“Well… yeah. What do you think we’ve been doing here? Sightseeing?”
“And you talked to him?”
“Yeah, while you worked the girl, I thought we’d pick Bishir up and spend a couple of days softening him up before-”
“No… please.” Remy put a hand out. He thought of the blood on his shoes, and of Assan, and of the photo of March’s dead lunch date, al-Zamir. “Don’t… soften anyone else up.”
Markham smiled like a kid who has gotten into his parents’ booze. “Oops,” he smiled. “My bad.”
“Jesus, what did you do?” Remy asked.
“Actually,” Markham began, “that’s kind of a funny story.”
A HEALTHY chunk of pecan encrusted sole rested on the tines of a fork inches from Bishir Madain’s open mouth. “Unbelievable,” he said, and slid the fork into his mouth. “Mmmph,” he said, and when he could talk again, “You were absolutely right. This is great. You wouldn’t think it would be so flaky and moist. And the pecans!”
“What’d I say? Huh? What did I tell you?” asked Markham, who wore a blue cloth apron with salt-and-pepper shakers stitched on the pocket. “Nutty but light. So often you incorporate walnuts or pecans and you have to use something to bind it that makes it sweet or syrupy and it ruins the fish. But this is perfectly balanced. That’s what I like about it. You can see why we went this direction.” Markham held his spatula like a wand. “It’s really a nice recipe.”
They were in a huge hotel suite, with motorized curtains and colonial furniture, Bishir sitting in a fluffy white robe in a high-backed chair, over a plate of pecan encrusted sole, buttery green beans, and what looked to Remy liked mashed sweet potatoes. In the small kitchen Markham had two stainless frying pans sizzling and the oven door hanging open, wafting sweet fish.
“You sure you don’t want some, Brian?” Bishir asked.
“No,” Remy said. He was done, unable to make sense of anything anymore. He looked around the room for the bar.
“You want to know the secret to the whole thing?” Markham asked Bishir.
“Mmm,” Bishir said through a mouthful.
“Tell him, Brian,” Markham said.
No matter what he did, it seemed to Remy, this insanity was going to grind along and take him with it. He wandered around the room, looking on every flat surface for a key to the honor bar. “Honey,” he said. “The secret is honey.”
“Bullshit. Honey?” Bishir asked and took another bite. He had a precise, cultured manner that Remy found surprising. He nodded, as if… yes, now that Markham mentioned it… honey. He finished chewing, his fork near his temple. “I wonder…”
“What?” Markham asked.
“Nothing.”
“No,” said Markham. “What?”
“I was just wondering if a person could substitute corn syrup.”
“Fair question.” Markham pointed at Bishir with his spatula. “Bri?”
Remy had gotten the honor bar open and was crouched in front of it, rifling through the small bottles. He looked back over his shoulder. “Too syrupy. The honey cooks off better. Leaves a glaze without gumming it up.”
“Sure,” Bishir said, “I can see that.”
A knock came at the door and they all looked up, except Remy.
“That’s probably our friend,” Markham said, a bit nervously. “Okay. Are we ready for this, Brian?” Markham walked to the door and opened it. “Come in,” he said. “Thanks for coming down.”
In came a tall, regal-looking man with braces and brushed hair, wearing a pressed golf shirt that hardly moved as he walked into the room. Remy wasn’t terribly surprised that it was Dave, the caramel macchiato agent.
“Hello, Bishir,” Dave said.
Bishir nodded.
“Shawn Markham,” said Markham, offering his hand to the agent.
“Dave,” said Dave.
“That’s my partner, Brian Remy,” said Markham.
“Good to meet you, Brian,” said Dave carefully, as if they’d never met. “So, what are we serving this morning?”
“Pecan encrusted sole,” Markham said.
“Of course,” Dave said to Markham. “I’ve heard some good things about this recipe. Heard you used it to justify sticking your noses where they don’t belong. You’re not eating… Brian, was it?”
Remy ignored him. He cracked a tiny bottle of gin and downed it.
“Yeah, Brian Remy,” Markham said. “He’s doing some contract work for us.”
Dave settled in at the table. He unwrapped his cloth napkin with a snap of the wrist. “So how is it going, Bishir? Are these minor league spooks treating you okay?”
“Can’t complain,” Bishir said, his mouth full of sole.
Markham slid a plateful of fish in front of Dave, who took a bite and nodded his approval. “So would you mind telling me what this is all about, Brian?” Dave asked. “Why two rogues from the paper department are holding my CI hostage?”
Remy ignored the question. He felt oddly at ease, nonplussed. He would just drink until this all went away. This seemed like a good strategy, although he noticed that the big flake was in front of his left eye again.
Dave waited, and then became agitated. He shot a glare at Markham, who looked away. “I don’t even get an answer?”
“I just want to be left alone,” Remy said.
“Oh, really. You want us to stay out of your way. Is that it?”
Markham chewed nervously on his thumbnail.
“So you really want to endanger this investigation, the security of the nation, over what… turf?” Dave stared at Remy.
Remy was getting dizzy crouched like this, so he dropped to his knees. Turning back to the drawer of tiny booze bottles, he was momentarily dazed by scale: Gulliver on a bender. He decided on Crown Royal and it went down like an easy compliment.
Bishir broke the icy quiet. “These guys thought I was holed up with an old girlfriend – this chick, March.” He pointed his fork at Markham. “It was a crazy-ass theory, but you know what, if I could’ve warned one person, it might’ve been her. She was a sweet girl. Good lay, too.”
Markham shrugged. “Yeah, we kind of whiffed on that one.”
Dave set his fork down and spun in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Let’s cut to the proverbial chase.”
“You know, I don’t think that’s an actual proverb,” Markham said.
“What?” Dave asked.
“You said proverbial chase. No such proverb.”
Dave stared at Markham with disbelief before turning to Remy. “What is it you guys want… was it, Brian?”
“Yes,” Markham said. “His name is Brian.”
“I told you,” Remy said. “I don’t want anything.”
Dave leaned his head back and his Adam’s apple moved up and down like a freight elevator. “Come on. We both know you didn’t pick up Bishir accidentally. So what do you want?”
“All I want is for this to go away,” Remy said. “All of this. All of you.”
“Oh, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Dave sputtered, his angular face reddening. “Look. We have been piecing together the members of this cell for more than a year. If you think for one second the agency is going to step aside so you can hijack our investigation…” His lips formed a thin scowl. “We need this! You want to screw the bureau, fine. But I don’t think you fully appreciate the pressure we’re under.”
Vodka, Remy thought, and the pattern appealed on some basic level: clear, brown, clear, brown, clear. He cracked the seal, tossed the little cap, and drank it, like rolling a tiny red carpet down his throat. “Leave me alone.”
“Leave you alone?” Dave crossed his arms defiantly and the anger seemed to be percolating in his red ears. “Fuck you, Brian. You want to go over my head, fine. I suppose you think that you’re going find some people on the Hill or some holdover in the media eager to hear that the agency might be operating slightly-” He looked for the words.
“Out of bounds,” Markham contributed.
Dave winced as if those weren’t the words he wanted.
The room was quiet for a moment. When Dave turned back to Remy he was smiling solicitously. “So we’re at an impasse. Okay. But I have to believe we can come to an agreement. Right? That we can work together? Otherwise, you wouldn’t have called us. I mean – we have a common enemy, right? The bureau? So, just tell me. What do you want?”
Remy wanted brown. He opened a bottle of Glenlivet.
“We want our piece,” Markham said from the kitchen, looking at Remy for approval. “We want credit. We don’t want our work to go to waste.”
“And that means-” Dave said.
“Joint task force,” Markham said, still looking at Remy, as if for approval. “Operational, tactical, command… we want our half of the pie.”
“Your half? You’re out of your mind,” Dave said to Markham and then turned back to Remy as if he were the reasonable one. “Come on, Brian. You hassle my informant, stumble across a cell we’ve been investigating for months, endanger a deep intel project, and now you expect to get-”
“Joint. Task force,” Markham repeated. “Or we go to Congress. Maybe even the press.”
“Press?” Dave laughed. “Who you gonna call? Morley Safer? Edward R. Murrow? Come on. There is no press anymore.”
“Joint task force,” Markham said. “Final answer.” He untied his apron.
“Wait. I know what this is.”
“Yeah?” Markham said. “What is this?”
Remy drank.
“This is a shakedown,” Dave said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “That’s all, a half-assed, political stab at creating a permanent seat at the table. You’ve finished your mandate and your funding is going away so you’re pulling paper out of garbage cans while you try to get a foothold… turn yourselves into some kind of an actual investigative operation. You’re like the bureau eighty years ago, under that swish Hoover. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to write your funding for next decade. No way. Key investigative assistance,” Dave said. “My final offer.”
“Are you serious?” Markham laughed from the kitchen. “‘Key investigative assistance?’ Why not just say we answered the phones? Got coffee for you guys? Come on. You’re offering us a handjob, Dave. You come in here on your knees offering us a handjob? What is that?”
“He’s the one on his knees,” Dave said, pointing to Remy, who was indeed genuflected before the most holy drawer of plastic booze bottles. But then Dave’s mouth twitched and he smiled at Remy, and stepped toward him. He spoke under his voice. “Come on, Brian. Be reasonable here. Take a minute and think about what you’re asking.”
“I am not asking for anything,” Remy said, and he took a plastic bottle of Gilbey’s and drained it. His head felt like it was moving in tiny figure eights. The fleck in his left eye seemed to be growing.
“So, it’s screw-with-the-agency day, is it? Fine. You want to screw with me? Screw with me?” Dave’s voice screeched. Then he laughed bitterly and stepped in close, so that he was standing directly over Remy. “I know things, Brian. And I won’t hesitate to start talking about what I know.” When Remy said nothing, he spat, “Do you think I’m bluffing?”
Remy looked up through the flashers and floaters into the flared nostrils of the older man. “I have no idea what you’re doing.”
Dave hissed, “Goddamn you.” But then he stepped away, rubbed his mouth, and looked up at Markham for a long moment, and then back down at Remy. “Okay,” Dave said finally. “I can’t give you Joint Task Force. I just can’t. But here’s what I can give you: Cooperating Agency. Solid second chair. You get one suit standing in the back at the presser and you can print up your own release about your involvement. But that’s it. That’s all you get.”
Markham shot a what-do-you-think glance to Remy, who couldn’t seem to get drunk enough fast enough.
“Cooperating agency,” Markham said, pointing with his spatula, “two suits at the presser, joint release, and our logo on the dais.”
“Your logo!” Dave boomed. “Your fu-!” His jaw fell. “Your…”
Markham continued. “And we make it clear that we developed our intelligence on this cell independently, through the Loose Materials section of the Liberty and Recovery Act,” Markham said. “If you think about it, it’s a good deal for you. There might be some information you gathered that might make some people uncomfortable, which we could provide some cover on. Some information that might even be seen as… illegal under the old rules.”
Dave’s eyes narrowed, as if he were considering this.
Markham could see this was his move. “Sure. You can attribute anything… uncomfortable… to us. Take advantage of the temporary latitude we’ve been granted for domestic intelligence gathering.
“And,” Markham continued, “we all still get to fuck the Bureau.”
Remy couldn’t remember if he was on clear or brown, so he went with a tiny bottle of designer raspberry vodka. But it was too sweet. He looked over at Bishir, who was ignoring all of this, concentrating on the pecan fish on his plate.
“But… and this is important…” Markham said. “We get second mike at the press conference.”
“Second mike!” Dave screeched again. “Come on! Be reasonable. Do you want our cars, too? Our sat-phones? Our chopper? You want my office?” He rose out of his chair and bent down so that he could see into Remy’s eyes. “Come on, Remy,” Dave said, all spotty and streaky. “Be reasonable. You got us over a barrel. We both know that. But for the good of the country-”
Markham and Bishir both laughed at this, Bishir choking for a second on his sole.
It was quiet. Dave straightened up, stared off into space, and finally sighed. “Fine. Cooperating agency, but there’s no question that we’re lead, right?”
“No question,” Markham said. “Of course.”
“We maintain operational and tactical control… we’ll provide daily briefings to you on everything. And you can have a guy there when it goes down,” Dave continued. “We make a joint release and you get your” – he choked on the word – “logo on the dais. But all I can guarantee is third shot at the mike during the presser. Third mike. That’s all I got, fellas. I’m not giving you our spot no matter what you say.”
Markham glanced over at Remy, who looked away and reached for another bottle. He was dizzy, and his hand missed. He stumbled and fell sideways… and in that moment it was as if something popped behind his left eye: a piercing pain shot through his skull and he leaned forward and clenched his eyes tight. He fell forward, against the minibar, then curled up in a ball, and rolled on the floor, moaning.
“Brian?” Markham asked.
He cried out in pain, his hands covering his face as he crawled across the carpeted floor toward the other wall.
“Fine!” he heard Dave snap above him. “You can talk second at the press conference.”
Remy reached the wall, leaned against it, and opened his eyes. This wasn’t right. There was a big problem with his left eye, a dark shadowy band across the middle of his field of vision. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened only the left one, but the black band was still there, as if the center of the room had been torn away, like a page in a magazine. And then the pain seemed to gather at the base of his skull and make another advance, until it was nearly unbearable and it doubled him over, the anguish blossoming outward and from within, like black water bubbling up from the earth. Like blooms of smoke roiling into a clear day.