Oakland Noir

by Jerry Thompson

  She didn’t apologize. She was not a woman used to apologizing.

  I brushed it away. I was as curious as a cat about them so I asked how they had met.

  He said, “That’s a funny story,” and pulled her to him, kissing the side of her luminous face. She made the tiniest movement then, so subtle that he missed it. But I recognized it. It was how my husband used to move, ever so slightly, away from my kiss. I hadn’t thought about it for months but now a hairline crack reopened on the surface of my mending heart.

  “I wanted to marry. I was ready. So I went to Romania looking for a wife.”

  She said, “He wanted a mail-order bride.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not? I was sick of meeting women here and having it go nowhere. I knew what I wanted, and I knew where to get it. Dating in America is a terrible thing.”

  I turned to her. “And you . . . were the mail-order bride?”

  “No! I was the interpreter.”

  “I took one look at her and here we are,” Michael finished the story.

  I stayed late as they got drunker and drunker. She sat on his lap and they kissed as if I was not there. Then I too, like the children, was dismissed. I walked the short distance to my own door, went into my red room, and shivered all night on my mattress. I was alone, abandoned, unloved. It was the worst night since my husband had told me we were finished.

  * * *

  I got close to them after that. They needed someone to watch the kids and I was right next door. What could be easier? They had this idea that the girls were attached to me. I bought them toys, courted them in the way you are supposed to do with children, and they—used to a succession of brown-skinned nannies, Costa Ricans, Guatemalans, Mexicans—did not complain. I had lost my job some time before and was glad of the money they tossed my way.

  I watched the girls while they played in the garden and at the park. We went for walks in the woods with the dog. There were trails everywhere. Huckleberry Trail, Redwood Regional, and Tilden Park were close. One could walk for miles and not run into a soul. Once the dog led us, panting, straight to the carcass of a stag. It lay at the edge of a cliff on its side, its antlers tangled in the undergrowth, its hoofs pointed at us. Its stomach had been slit and there were organs strewn in a jumble next to it, a bloated mint-green sack, dark viscous puddles of blood.

  The children squatted, their eyes large. “What did this?” they asked me. Something big, I thought, something voracious. We looked at it for a while. Then they got bored and wanted to leave, and I walked after them.

  In all that time, the kids kept getting thinner, paler. No one could understand it. They ate at mealtimes, their mother hovering over them, cooking their favorite foods, begging them to take just one more bite. But however hard she tried, the girls did not thrive. She watched them like a hawk, she said. They did not throw up, they did not purge, and yet the shadows loomed large under their eyes, their limbs got more sticklike. It was uncanny.

  * * *

  It was months later that I came upon Michael in his study. The girls were in their bedrooms putting away toys. I had heard his car arrive and went looking for him. His hair was bedraggled, and when he saw me he waved me into a seat and said, “I need to talk to you.” I sat. He paced up and down the room behind his desk, running his fingers through his hair. I kept silent until finally he spoke: “I don’t know how to say this . . . Have you ever . . . seen Galina do anything to the kids?”

  I was shocked. “What?”

  “They get sick all the time. I think it’s Galina. I think she’s sick in the head, I think she’s hurting them.”

  “Why would you think that? And no, I’ve never seen her be anything but good to them.”

  “I don’t know what to think. We’ve taken them to every doctor, done every test. But you see how they are? The doctor asked me if it might be her. He said sometimes mothers . . .” He paced some more. “But why else would they look like that, like little ghosts?”

  Then he sat at his desk, leaned his head back on the leather, and I watched as tears ran out of the corners of his eyes and along the planes of his face. When he spoke again his voice was broken: “She’s fucking someone else. I know it.”

  He put his head on his arms and sobbed in great, painful gulps. It was startling to see a man express pain in this way, but I knew exactly how he felt. There is no dagger more cold than betrayal. There is no wound more terrible than the thought of your lover with their lover. The idea of their two bodies together takes over, becomes the entire pulsing world.

  * * *

  It got worse after that. They had screaming matches; they threw things. They sobbed and hurled accusations. Some of it happened in my presence because by then I had become indispensible. I’ll spare you the details—everyone has gone through heartache, everyone knows what the end looks and sounds like.

  In December I needed a break so I went to my parents’ place in Florida for some weeks. My folks were happy to see me. We hadn’t been together since my wedding in Colombo, and we had a pleasant and uneventful visit. When I got back to Montclair and went next door, she was gone.

  “Where’s Galina?” I asked.

  “She’s left me. She’s gone back to Romania,” he replied.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “What about the children?” I asked, because that’s what you are supposed to say in these sad circumstances.

  “They’re with my mother in Houston. They’ll be okay.”

  I looked into his handsome face and said, “I went through a divorce. At first you think it’s the worst thing in the world, but it really isn’t. It might even be the best thing.”

  “You know, you might just be right.” He smiled then, and I felt the hairline crack in my heart begin to knit itself together.

  * * *

  There was an investigation, of course. You can’t lose a rich white woman in America and not have an investigation. They suspected Michael. There was a trial, and it took a long time, but he had expensive lawyers and finally they cleared his name. There was no body and you can almost never convict without a body, so I knew it would be okay.

  I see Chloe, Shahid, and Dina every now and then, but I don’t really talk to them. My life is different now. We don’t have anything in common anymore, so what would we even speak about? The girls live with their grandmother in Houston. It’s a more stable environment for them. She says they’re putting on weight, the shadows under their eyes have receded. They are normal kids now. I’m so glad. I never had anything against those girls.

  * * *

  It was easier than the first time. My husband’s lover had been young and fierce. She had fought me until I managed to stick the needle into her neck and push the plunger. Did I forget to tell you what my job was? The one I lost in the midst of that terrible year? I was a nurse. At San Francisco General, where the motto was, As Real As It Gets. The things I saw there, they were real. If every now and then I helped a tortured soul to their rest with a certain cocktail, who could blame me? If you were suffering and miserable in your final hours, would you not welcome an angel of mercy?

  Anyway, that’s not important. I lied when I said I hadn’t come out to Oakland before I moved here. I used to come and hike the dark trails all the time. I drove my husband’s lover to a cliffside close to here and pushed her into a ravine. It was a spot not far from where we stumbled upon the dead stag. Whatever it was that ripped the deer open must have taken her too, because she was never found.

  It was easier with Galina. She wasn’t strong and she wasn’t sober. We went Christmas shopping for the children on a dark December evening. On the way home she sobbed about Michael and drank from her flask of whiskey. I drove up the hill and stopped the car. I jammed the needle into the flesh of her elbow, and then, to be sure, I put a plastic bag over her head and gripped my belt around her neck while it inflated and deflated. There was a struggle and then she was gone. I pushed her out of the car, into th
e deep growth, and that was that.

  * * *

  When I moved in, the first thing I did was take the shock collar off the dog. At first he cringed away from me. But then, in the way of sweet creatures, he opened his canine heart wide and let me in. He’s fiercely protective of me now—even Michael is a little nervous of his teeth and his size—but I won’t let anyone collar him ever again. He’s sitting by my feet as I write this. The fire is blazing; Michael will be home soon. I have finally found my place, my house, my love. I rest my feet against the dog’s furry side. Both of us, survivors of heartbreak.

  PROPHETS AND SPIES

  by Mahmud Rahman

  Mills College

  Waiting for Keisha to show up at his door, Gholam regrets he isn’t more into kink. He would have had the proper accessories—handcuffs and a ball gag. It would be easy to truss her up, and it would keep her from screaming. So he’ll just have to be sneaky, act fast before she wakes.

  He improvises: Inside his toolbox he finds plastic cable ties of different lengths and selects the longest ones. He worries they will cut into her wrists, he doesn’t want her to feel unnecessary pain. Grabbing an old T-shirt, he cuts the fabric and wraps it around the ties as a cushion. One piece he rolls into a ball to stuff in her mouth. He considers a roll of duct tape, but it would stick too strongly. Masking tape makes better sense. Carefully, he puts everything inside the nightstand drawer, stuffing it behind the condoms, lube, and silk ribbons, and while he waits for Keisha, he cradles a heart about to burst.

  * * *

  On the gated campus, where the hills slide into the flats of East Oakland, the fall semester had begun four months ago amid meadows manicured by a small army of Mexican laborers. New students wore excited faces, returnees were happy to reunite with friends, and faculty geared up to start a new year. Only the staff who worked year-round were ambivalent, some among them blue that the summer of an empty campus had ended too soon.

  Not Gholam. Tasked with keeping the computers humming on campus, his job takes him everywhere. He meets interesting people and enrolls in a class now and then. In a literature class last spring he had met Keisha, a resumer student. They had a blast working on a project together, and over the summer they cemented into a couple.

  The pair spent their Labor Day weekend together, one day at the beach, another on a Berkeley excursion, the third at home, mostly in bed, their lovemaking mixed with conversations over tea. On weekends Gholam keeps a samovar going, with a ready supply of tea, sugar cubes, and mint. They eventually fell asleep, thoroughly exhausted.

  When the phone woke him, Gholam’s eyes barely opened. The clock read 1:13 a.m. Calls this late scared him. Such a call had brought news of his father’s death. And that of the execution of a boyhood friend in Evin Prison. If his placid life here in Oakland was yin, his past in Iran was yang. Always a phone call away.

  He picked up the phone and swung his body out of bed. When he needed to jot something down, he reached with his free hand to switch on the nightstand lamp. In the soft light, Keisha’s red-brown face glowed. Though he kept his voice low, she woke up. She didn’t understand Farsi but her eyes reacted to the tone of his voice—first quizzical, then alarmed, eventually patient.

  Hanging up, he stroked Keisha’s arms. “I have to go back.”

  “For good?”

  He shook his head. “For a visit. Mother’s in the hospital. I’ll go during winter break.”

  “Shouldn’t you leave sooner?”

  “That’ll be soon enough. Let’s go back to sleep.” He put his head down on the pillow.

  “Promise me you’ll be safe.”

  He turned, pulled her close, and whispered, “One never knows. But more than anything else in the world, I want to come back to you.”

  “Inshallah then,” she said, hugging him tight.

  He nodded, but as he drifted back to sleep, he thought how people used that phrase to suggest hope, but it meant more like, It might take a miracle.

  * * *

  In the morning, Gholam drove to work in a meditative state. At eighteen, lurching from life as a teenager in Tehran to a foreign student in Detroit, he had wanted nothing more than the fall of the shah. Twenty years after the revolution, its dreams hijacked by the mullahs, his own yearnings for a socialist outcome long buried, Gholam now wanted nothing more than the love of a woman.

  Midmorning, he trod out of his office to answer a call about a jammed printer in Reinhardt Hall. In the computer lab, a stocky man with a shaved head greeted him. With a class starting soon, he needed to print a dozen copies of a document. The man wore a black T-shirt that screamed out, Don’t Mess with Me—I’m from Detroit. He could have been more badass if he wore the hard-core version. While Gholam labored on the jam, the man introduced himself as Michael T., a visiting lecturer. The college had put him up in this residence hall that housed graduate students. He said he was fine with it, which meant he wasn’t.

  “I’ll let you work,” he said, as he walked to the living room. Gholam heard the television go on and soon Michael T. broke out into full-throated laughter, chased by snorts and chuckles.

  The printer fixed, Gholam walked over to Michael T. The visiting lecturer pointed to the television screen. “Dude, ever see anything like this? I’d totally forgotten you had this here in Oakland. I used to catch them late night in Detroit. They called it Soulbeat Oakland Detroit.”

  “You really from Detroit?”

  “Went to college near there, and grad school. I’m finishing my dissertation.”

  So he attended Michigan, lived in Ann Arbor, and went slumming into Detroit. Maybe he didn’t even do that, satisfying that urge by watching WGPR-TV 62. Gholam knew the channel—it specialized in music videos, religious programming, late-night Italian B-movies, a dance show imitating Soul Train, and yes, late in the night, there had been a Soulbeat slot. It usually featured folks jabbering away outside a sun-soaked mansion that must have been in the Oakland Hills.

  Learning that Gholam had lived in Detroit, Michael T. asked if he would hang around while he finished printing. They talked about Gholam’s Detroit days, and Michael said Gholam might find his “manifesto” interesting.

  “I need to get back.”

  “I can e-mail you a copy. The contents are delicate. You use PGP?”

  “Sure.”

  “I could tell you’re one of us.” He winked while ripping one of the mangled sheets of paper in two. They exchanged e-mail addresses and PGP encryption keys.

  * * *

  It ended up being a busy day: more printer jams, virus infestations, and one hard drive crash.

  At home Gholam finished dinner and checked his e-mail. Michael T.’s document had arrived. Gholam had acted as if he used PGP all the time but it had been years since he’d needed to encrypt or decrypt anything.

  The title read, Y2K: Time to Throw Down. The document aimed to provoke discussion about preparing for a social collapse. It was now September 1999, only months short of the end of the century. Decades prior, government and corporations had chosen to code years in two digits instead of four—70 instead of 1970—citing the expense of computer memory. It had since become clear, however, that this shortcut was spectacularly shortsighted. When the calendar advanced to the year 2000, the two-digit coding could make systems assume it was now January 1, 1900.

  The corporations and state were dithering. T’s manifesto boldly predicted that at midnight on New Year’s Eve, computer systems would fail, power grids would come down, ATMs would lock up, planes might crash, and nuclear plants could face meltdowns. Without money, heat, or power, people would resort to looting and mayhem. The state would respond with force.

  The population needed to prepare, although it might already be too late. Michael T.’s document proposed that his class work to develop an “action plan” appropriate for Oakland.

  The manifesto slammed Gholam back some ten to twenty years. When the revolution broke out in Iran, he had been an engineering student at Way
ne State. In his free time he devoted himself to “revolutionary work”—writing articles, engaging in debates, communicating with comrades back home. Their student federation shattered into factions, each believing the mullahs’ seizure of power would not last and that soon it would be their comrades’ turn.

  It wasn’t just Iranians. When the 1980s began, many believed Something Big was about to happen. Gholam remembered a poster that went up everywhere: The ’80s will make the ’30s look like a picnic. In multiple tongues—English, Spanish, Farsi, Arabic, Amharic—pamphlets spoke of “sharpened contradictions.” And what did the world end up with? In the US and UK, Reagan and Thatcher. In Iran, Khomeini.

  Still, some held out. If you were desperate to believe, you could always find signs auguring Something Big. Otherwise, disillusionment seeped in. Some counseled that people needed to become better students of history. Despite casualties, most managed to cope. Gholam embraced this one piece of advice: he began studying ancient worlds, and learned to measure history, not in years or decades, but in centuries. In the meantime he had to make a living. He wasn’t going anywhere as an engineer, but he had learned his way around computers. When the Internet age dawned, he headed for the promised land, the Bay Area, and secured a job on this Oakland campus.

  It took him four years to settle down, though it had brought him to Keisha, another refugee from the Midwest. She was fleeing a family she could no longer be near without doing harm to her spirit. She worked a couple of part-time retail jobs while finishing up a BA in liberal studies. She was smart, her dimpled smile could light up a room, and she was fierce the way you’d expect someone to be if they grew up in the heart of Cleveland. The campus drew in folks like her. Until he met her, Gholam’s life—sex, camaraderie, friendship—had been rather empty. With her, he felt recharged.