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He shrugged. Shrugging was the lingua franca. She remembered that too. ‘Okay,’ he added.
‘Good. Who’s that you’re listening to, anyway?’
Josh blushed faintly, as if his mom had asked who this Connie Lingus was, that everyone was talking about.
‘Stu Rezni,’ he said, diffidently. ‘He …’
‘Used to hit sticks for Fallow. I know. I saw him at the Astoria. Before they knocked it down. He was so wasted he fell off his stool.’
She was gratified to see her son’s eyebrows shoot up. She tried not to smile.
‘Can you keep the volume sane for a while, honey? There’s a show I want to watch. Plus people are staggering up the street with bleeding ears, and you know how that lowers the tone.’
‘Sure,’ he said, with a genuine smile. ‘Sorry.’
‘No problem,’ she said, thinking I hope he’s going to be okay. He was a nice boy, polite, a slacker who still got (most of) his chores done eventually. She hoped without a trace of egotism that he’d taken on enough of her, too, along with the big old helping of Bill he’d absorbed. This young man already spent a lot of time alone, and seldom seemed more content than when taking something apart or putting it back together. That was cool, of course, but she hoped it wouldn’t be too long before she saw evidence of his first hangover. Man cannot live by coding skills alone, not even in these strange days.
‘Later,’ she said, hoping it didn’t sound too lame.
The doorbell rang.
As she hurried downstairs she heard the volume drop a little farther, and smiled. She still had this expression on her face when she opened the front door.
It was dark outside, the street lamps at the corner spreading orange light over the fallen leaves on the lawn and sidewalk. A strong breeze rustled those still left on the trees, sending a few to spiral down and around the crossroads where the two residential streets met.
A figure was standing a couple of yards back from the door. It was tall, wearing a long dark coat.
‘Yes?’ Gina said.
She flipped the porch light on. It showed a man in his mid-fifties, with short, dark hair, sallow skin in flat planes around his face. His eyes seemed dark too, almost black. They gave no impression of depth, as if they had been painted on his head from the outside.
‘I’m looking for William Anderson,’ he said.
‘He’s not here right now. Who are you?’
‘Agent Shepherd,’ the man said, and then paused, for a deep cough. ‘Mind if I come inside?’
Gina did mind, but he just stepped up onto the porch and walked right past her and into the house.
‘Hold on a second there, buster,’ she said, leaving the door open and following him. ‘Can I see some ID?’
The man pulled out a wallet and flipped it open at her without bothering to look in her direction. Instead he panned his gaze methodically around the room, then up at the ceiling.
‘What’s this about?’ Gina asked. She’d seen the three big letters clearly enough, but the idea of having a real live Fed in the house didn’t even slightly compute.
‘I need to talk to your husband,’ the man said. His matter-of-factness made the situation seem even more absurd.
Gina put her hands on her hips. This was her house, after all. ‘Well, he’s out, like I said.’
The man turned toward her. His eyes, which had appeared flat and dead before, slowly seemed to be coming alive.
‘You did, and I heard you. I want to know where he is. And I need to take a look around your house.’
‘The hell you do,’ Gina said. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but …’
His hand came up so fast she didn’t even see it. The first she knew was when it was clamped around the bottom of her face, holding her jaw like a claw.
She was too shocked to make a sound as he began to pull her slowly toward him. But then she started to shout, substituting volume for the articulation denied her by being unable to move the lower half of her mouth.
‘Where is it?’ he asked. Matter-of-fact had become almost bored.
Gina had no clue what he was talking about. She tried to pull away, hitting at him with her fists, kicking out, jerking her head back and forth. He put up with this for about one second and then whipped his other hand around to smack her across the side of her head. Her ears rang like a dropped hubcap and she nearly fell, but he held her up, wrenching her jaw to the side in the process, making it feel like it was going to pop out.
‘I’m going to find it anyway,’ he said, and now she knew she could feel something tearing at the side of her head. ‘But you can save us both some time and trouble. Where is it? Where does he work?’
‘I … don’t …’
‘Mom?’
Gina and the man turned together, to see Josh at the bottom of the stairs. Her son blinked, a deep frown spreading across his face.
‘Let go of my mom.’
Gina tried to tell Josh to get back upstairs, to just run, but it came out as desperate, breathless grunts. The man stuck his other hand in the pocket of his coat, started taking something out.
Josh hit the ground running and launched himself across the living room. ‘Let go of my …’
Gina just had time to realize she’d got it wrong before, that her son wasn’t a man after all but just a little boy, stretched taller and thinner but still so young, when the man shot him in the face.
She screamed then, or tried to, and the tall man swore quietly and dragged her with him as he walked over to the front door and pushed it shut.
Then he pulled her back into the room where her son lay on the floor, one arm and one leg moving in twitches. Her head felt like it was full of bright light, stuttering with shock. Then he punched her precisely on the jaw and she didn’t know where she was.
A second or several minutes passed.
Then she was aware again, sprawled on the floor, half-propped against the couch she’d been curled up in ten minutes before. The plate of food lay upside down within arms’ reach. Her jaw was hanging loose, she couldn’t seem to move it. It felt as if someone had pushed long, thick nails into both of her ears.
The man in the coat was squatted down next to Josh, whose right arm was still moving, lazily smearing through the pool of blood seeping from his head.
The smell of gasoline reached Gina’s face. The man finished squirting something from a small metal can over her son, then dropped it on him and stood up.
He looked down at Gina.
‘Last chance,’ he said. His forehead was beaded with sweat, though the house was not warm. In one hand he held a cigarette lighter. In the other he held his gun. ‘Where is it?’
As he sparked the lighter up, holding it over Josh and looking her in the eyes, Gina knew that – whatever this was – it wasn’t a last chance to live.
Part 1 (#ulink_0da856ae-ddc3-5107-a096-000a4739e1c1)
The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc – is sure to be noticed.
Søren Kierkegaard
The Sickness Unto Death
Chapter 1 (#ulink_17a17f2b-29fe-525a-b5c2-c988c74bb9df)
There was this girl I knew back in high school. Her name was Donna and even that was wrong about her, as if she’d been mislabelled at birth. She wasn’t a Donna. Not in real terms. She made you realize there must be an underlying rhythm to the universe, and you knew this purely because she wasn’t hitting it. She walked a little too quickly. She turned her head a little too slow. It was like she was dubbed onto reality a beat out of true. She was one of those kids you saw at a distance, toting a pile of books, standing diffidently with people you didn’t realize were even at the school. She had friends, she did okay in class, she wasn’t a total loser and she wasn’t dumb. She was just kind of hard to see.
Like all schools we had a pecking order of looks, but Donna somehow wasn’t on the same scale. Her skin was pale and her features fine-boned and evenly spaced, faultless except for a crescent scar to the side of her right eye, legacy of some toddling collision with a table. The eyes themselves were inky-grey and very clear, and on the rare occasions when you got to look into them you received a vivid sense she was real after all – which only made you wonder what you thought she was the rest of the time. She was a little skinny, maybe, but otherwise slightly cute in every way except that she somehow just … wasn’t. It was as if she released no pheromones, or they operated on an inaudible waveband, broadcasting their signal to sexual radios either out of date or not yet invented.
I found her attractive, nonetheless, though I was never really sure why. So I noticed when it looked like she was hanging out with – or in the vicinity of – a guy named Gary Fisher. Fisher was one of the kids who strode the halls as if accompanied by fanfare, the group that makes anyone who’s been through the American school system instantly wary of egalitarian philosophies later in life. He played football with conspicuous success. He was on the starting basketball line-up, played significant tennis too. He was good-looking, naturally: when God confers control of sport’s spheres he tends to give the package a buff too. Fisher wasn’t like the actors you see in teen movies now, impossibly handsome and free of facial blemish, but he looked right, back in the days when the rest of us stared dismally in the mirror every morning and wondered what had gone wrong, and whether it would get better, or even worse.
He was also, oddly, not too much of an asshole. I knew him a little from track, where I had a minor talent for hurling things a long way. I’d gathered from the jock grapevine that a realignment had taken place among the ruling classes, principally that Gary’s girl Nicole was now going with one of his friends instead, in what appeared to be an amicable transfer of chattels. You didn’t have to be too keen an observer of the social scene to perceive a degree of interest in taking her place – but the truly weird thing was that Donna seemed to believe herself amongst the runners. It was as if she had received intelligence from somewhere that the caste system was illusory, and actually you could fit a square peg in a round hole. She couldn’t sit at the same table at lunch, of course, but would wind up on one nearby, close to Gary’s line of sight. She would engineer bumps in the corridor, but manage nothing more than nervous laughs. I even saw her a couple of Fridays out at Radical Bob’s, a burger/pizza place where people tended to start the weekend. She would stop by whatever table Fisher was sitting at and deliver some remark about a class or assignment which would fall to the floor like a brick. Then she would wander off, a little too slowly now, as if hoping to be called back. This never happened. Other than being mildly perplexed I doubt Fisher had the slightest clue what was going on. After a couple weeks a deal was done in some gilded back room – or the back seat of a gilded car, more likely – and one morning Gary was to be found in the company of Courtney Willis, textbook hot blonde. Life went on.
For most of us.
Two days later, Donna was found in the bathtub at her parents’ home. Her wrists had been cut with determination and only one testing slash on the forearm. The adult consensus, which I overheard more than once, was it could not have been a fast way to go – despite a last-ditch attempt to hasten progress by pushing a pair of nail scissors deep into her right eye socket, as if that crescent scar had been some kind of omen. There was a hand-written letter to Gary Fisher on the floor, the words blurred by water which had spilled over the edges of the tub. Lots of people later claimed to have seen the letter, or a photocopy, or overheard someone saying what was in it. But as far as I know, none of this was true.
News spread fast. People went through the motions and there were outbreaks of crying and prayer, but I don’t think anyone was shaken to their core. Personally, I was not surprised or even particularly sorry. That sounds callous but the truth was it felt like it made sense. Donna was a weird chick.
A strange girl, a dumb death. End of story.
Or so it seemed to most of us. Gary Fisher’s reaction was different, and at the time it was the most surprising thing I had ever seen. Everything was new and strange back then, events backlit by the foreshortened perspective of a fledging life. The guy who did something halfway cool one time became our very own Clint Eastwood. A party that happened a year before could take on the status of legend, generating nicknames that would last a lifetime. And when someone went haring out into the farther reaches of left field, it tended to stick in your mind.
On the following Monday we heard Fisher had quit the team. All the teams. He withstood being bawled out, and walked away. Maybe these days you’d get some kind of slacker kudos for that kind of shit. Not in the 1980s, and not in the town where I grew up. It was so out there it was disturbing – the Alpha Teenager Who Resigned. Fisher became the guy you’d see wandering across the campus in transit between the library and class, as if he’d slipped into Donna’s slot. And he worked. Hard. Over the next months he hauled his grade point average up, first a little, and then a lot. He went from being a C student – and some of those had been massaged through sports prowess – to Bs and some regular As. Maybe he was getting parent-funded extra tuition after school, but actually I doubt it. I think he just jumped tracks, decided to be some other guy. By the end you hardly ever saw him except in class. The masses dealt with him warily. No one wanted to get too close, in case the madness was catching.
I did see him this one afternoon, though. I’d been out training for our last ever track meet, and stayed on after the rest of the team left. Theoretically I was practising the javelin but really I just liked being there when no one else was around. I’d spent a lot of hours running that track and it had started to dawn on me that the end was coming and some things were happening for the last time. As I pounded up the approach, back and forth, refining my run-up, I saw a guy walking from the far end. After I while I realized it was Gary Fisher.
He wandered the periphery, not headed anywhere in particular. He’d been one of our star sprinters before he quit, and maybe he was there for the same kind of reason that I was. He wound up a few yards away and watched for a little while. Eventually he spoke.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Not going to win, though.’
‘How’s that?’
I explained that a guy from another school had recently revealed himself not only to be good at throwing, but to care about it also. After easy wins had stopped being a given, my interest had waned. I didn’t put it in those terms, but that was the bottom line.
He shrugged. ‘Never know. Could be Friday’s going to be your day. Be cool to go out on a win.’
For a moment then, I found I did care. Maybe I could do it, this last time. Fisher stood a while longer, looking across the track, as if hearing the beat of feet in races gone by.
‘She was provisional,’ I said, suddenly.
It was like he hadn’t heard me. Then he slowly turned his head. ‘What’s that?’
‘Donna,’ I said. ‘She never really … locked in, you know? Like she was just renting space.’
He frowned. I kept going.
‘It was like … like she knew it might just not work out, you know? Like she came into the world aware that happy-ever-after was a long shot. So she put all her chips on one bet to win. Came in red instead of black, so she just walked away from the table.’
I hadn’t rehearsed any of this, but when I’d said it I felt proud. It meant something profound, or sounded like it might – which is plenty good enough when you’re eighteen.
Fisher looked at the ground for a minute, and then seemed to nod faintly. ‘Thanks.’
I nodded back, all out of words, and went thudding down the track to hurl my spear. Maybe I was showing off, hoping to impress the Gary Fisher of eight months before. Either way I pulled my arm over far too fast, reopened an old split on the tip of my middle finger, and wound up not making the last meet after all.
The end of school came and went. Like everyone else I was too busy rushing through celebrated rites of passage to pay much attention to people I didn’t really know. Tests, dances, everything hurried as our childhoods started to run out of gas. Then – bang: out into the real world, which has a way of feeling like that super-test you never got around to studying for. It still feels that way to me sometimes. I don’t think I heard Fisher’s name mentioned once during the summer, and then I left town to go to college. I thought about him every now and then over the next couple years, but eventually he dropped out of my head along with all the other things that had no relevance to my life.
And so I was not really prepared for the experience of meeting him again, nearly twenty years later, when he turned up at the door of my house and started talking as if no time had passed at all.
I was at my desk. I was trying to work, though a time management study would probably have suggested my job consisted of staring out the window, with only occasional and apparently random glances at a computer screen. The house was very quiet, and when the phone rang it jerked me back in my chair.
I reached out, surprised Amy was calling the land line rather than my cell, but not thinking much more about it than that. Being on the phone to my wife meant a break from work. Then I could make more coffee. Go have a cigarette on the deck. Time would pass. Tomorrow would come.
‘Hey, babe,’ I said. ‘How stands the corporate struggle?’
‘Is this Jack? Jack Whalen?’
It was a man’s voice. ‘Yes,’ I said, sitting up and paying more attention. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Hang onto your hat, my friend. It’s Gary Fisher.’
The name sent up a flag straight away, but it took another second to haul it up through the years. Names from the past are like streets you haven’t driven in a while. You have to remember where they go.
‘You still there?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just surprised. Gary Fisher? Really?’
‘It’s my name,’ the guy said, and laughed. ‘I wouldn’t lie about something like that.’
‘I guess not,’ I said. I had question marks right across the dial. ‘How did you get my number?’
‘A contact in LA. I tried calling last night.’
‘Right,’ I said, remembering a couple of blank calls on the machine. ‘You didn’t leave a message.’
‘Thought it might come across kind of weird, getting in touch after nearly twenty years.’
‘A little,’ I admitted. I found it hard to imagine Fisher and I had anything to discuss unless he was running the class reunion, which seemed unlikely in the extreme. ‘So, what can I do for you, Gary?’
‘It’s more what I might be able to do for you,’ he said. ‘Or maybe both of us. Look – where is it you live, exactly? I’m in Seattle for a few days. Thought it might be cool to meet up, talk about old times.’
‘Place called Birch Crossing. Hour and a half inland. Plus my wife’s got the car,’ I added. Amy has claimed that if you could get enough unsociable people together in a room to vote, they’d make me their king. She’s probably right. Since my book came out I’d been contacted by a few other people from the past, though none as far back as Fisher. I hadn’t bothered to reply to their emails, forwarded via the publisher. Okay, so we used to know each other. What’s your point?
‘I’ve got a day to kill,’ Fisher persisted. ‘Had a string of meetings cancelled.’
