by Keith Thomas
So it begins, Dirk thought. Here we go, bro.
Dirk unfolded a scrap of paper from his wallet. It was a grid with letters in tiny boxes, all done in a microscopic font. He laid it flat on the desk and slowly, methodically decoded the text message from the flip phone.
51’s daughter is Null. Chicago, Marcy-Lansing. 915. They need a path to Dr. Song. Send Childers to meet them at the museum in two nights.
So this is spy craft, huh?
Using the flip phone, Dirk texted the decoded message to the only number in the phone’s contacts. A Chicago-based number but one he wasn’t familiar with. As soon as it was sent, Dirk followed the directions he’d been given and snapped the cell phone in half. He tossed it and the handwritten decoded message into the lockbox under his desk. They’d both be industrial shredded in the morning. Simple.
Dirk leaned back in his chair and nodded to himself. The process was certainly easier than he’d expected. He had to admire the organization’s commitment to secrecy and protocol. He figured, you couldn’t be too careful in today’s screwed-up world. Dirk wasn’t sure if he’d ever get another flip phone in the mail, but if he did, at least he knew how the whole thing worked.
Easy enough.
Dirk grabbed his things and tossed his keys to Billingham as the guard walked in, the zipper on his pants down. Billingham was an old guy, maybe in his late sixties, and Dirk didn’t give him any grief. Reminded him of his father, in a way. Always late and never really pulled together.
On his way to his Passat, Dirk got a text from his wife, Beth.
Dinner’s going to be a little earlier tonight. Ok? Your friend Jeremy stopped by. Said he was in town on short notice.
As he drove home, Dirk thought about the message some more.
Jesus, he thought. Jeremy. I haven’t seen that old bastard in years. What the hell would bring him to Indianapolis? Must be garbage with his wife again. Dude could never keep it in his pants.
Dirk laughed out loud about that. For the twenty minutes that remained of his ride, he didn’t yell at slow cars or honk his way into the exit lane. For the first time in what felt like years, he was actually excited to entertain at home. He just hoped Beth had cleaned the place up. At least a little.
But when Dirk stepped into his suburban ranch home, his face dropped.
Beth had tears running down her cheeks. Hunter was scared pale.
And the man in the hoodie at the dinner table, sitting between his wife and teenage son, wasn’t Jeremy. Dirk had never seen this man before. Not at work, not at the gym. As Dirk walked across the room, carefully dropping his coat on the couch, he studied the man’s face and became instantly incensed.
What the fuck is this? Some guy got the wrong house?
He was ready to lay into the guy when he noticed two things: First, the man at the table with his family was totally bald. He didn’t even have eyebrows. He was tall and thin, maybe in his midforties, but odd-looking, for sure. And two, there was a small, clear box sitting on the hutch behind the table. The box was vibrating, making the sound an old dot-matrix printer made.
“Just who the hell are you?” Dirk asked.
Beth looked up at Dirk. Her eyes trembled in their sockets.
If this fucking guy has touched her . . .
The man at the table stood up. He wore latex gloves, like the kind you see at the hospital, and held a gun. Dirk was no expert, but he guessed it was a Sig Sauer.
“Sit,” the man said.
Dirk sat, panic breaking out the sweat on his forehead.
“Where is Fifty-One?” the man asked.
Dirk shook his head. He didn’t understand just what the hell that was supposed to even mean. He looked over at Beth. She was so pale. So frightened. And Hunter, the poor kid was audibly grinding his teeth. Dirk knew he needed to put a stop to whatever was happening. Clearly, the guy in the hoodie was there to rob them or worse. . . . Thinking back through his security guard training, the conflict-resolution lectures and crisis management slideshows, Dirk quickly formulated a plan of attack. But the clear box sitting on the hutch interrupted his thoughts and timing. It dinged loudly, the way a convection oven would.
“Where is Fifty-One?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” Dirk said. “Seriously. I don’t know who Fifty-One is, and I don’t know who you are. I’m asking you nicely, please get out of my house right now and leave my family alone.”
The man in the hoodie turned and fired. A bullet whizzed just over Dirk’s right shoulder before embedding itself in the wall behind him. A fine plume of drywall dust wafted past Dirk as he reflexively shuddered.
“I’m going to ask one more time. Where is Fifty-One?”
Dirk swallowed hard.
“I honestly don’t know. I’m telling you the truth. . . .”
As Dirk spoke, the man reached back to the clear box and opened its lid. The box was a 3-D printer. An advanced model, not on the public market yet. He reached inside and pulled out two freshly printed rubber gloves. The man in the hoodie held the gloves up to the dining room light.
Dirk could see fingerprints on the tips.
“I’ve been directed to keep things clean,” the man said. “So you’re going to be killing your family tonight. I took your prints off the tumblers in the kitchen and had them printed on these gloves.”
The man pulled the printed gloves over his medical exam gloves.
Dirk pushed back from the table, fast as he could. He was going to take this motherfucker right here, regardless of the costs. He figured that if he could dodge the man’s first shot he could get ahold of the gun, maybe wrestle it out of his hands.
We’ll see who’s the real badass then.
But Dirk was slow.
Before he’d moved a foot, the man in the hoodie turned, the gun barked, and blood Rorschached across Hunter’s chest. The teenager gasped and fell backward. Beth screamed like she would scream forever. The man shot her in the neck and blood drizzled the table as she tumbled backward to the floor.
Dirk couldn’t even move. Could hardly breathe.
Calm as ever, as though he did this sort of thing on any given evening, the man in the hoodie pulled a cell phone from his back pocket and placed it on the table in front of Dirk.
“I need you to enter the phone number you sent a text to tonight,” the man said. “You remember, don’t you? You used a shitty flip phone.”
“I—I don’t think I can—”
Dirk couldn’t help but stare down in horror at the bodies of his wife and son. It had all happened so quickly, he wasn’t even sure of what he was seeing. Those are just dummies, he told himself. Beth and Hunter went out for dinner. I’m just dreaming.
The man in the hoodie snapped his fingers to get Dirk’s attention. Dirk was crying uncontrollably, tears dripping all over his shirt as he picked up the cell phone and, hands shaking, typed in the number as he remembered it.
Dirk handed the cell to the man in the hoodie.
“This is correct?”
“I—”
The man leaned forward and pressed the Sig Sauer to Dirk’s temple. Dirk planned to close his eyes but, once again, he was too slow. The gun kicked, the bullet burrowed through Dirk’s brain, singeing the cerebral cortex as it traveled, and exited the other side of his head enshrouded in a fine mist of blood.
Dirk’s body slumped onto the table.
• • •
“How’s that for clean?” Rade asked the corpses.
He was packing up the 3-D printer when a sudden, urgent pounding on the front door caught his attention. Rade stopped what he was doing and slowly opened the front door to see a middle-aged Indian woman standing on the porch in a sari. She looked quite concerned—frantic, even.
“I’m sorry—I live next door and heard— Is Mr. Bograd here?”
Rade opened the door, and the neighbor stepped inside. She was shaking, her eyes darting. As soon as she saw the bodies, the Indian woman’s face began to cur
l into a mask of horror. Rade shot her in the face before she could scream. The Indian woman stumbled forward and collapsed, facedown.
Shit. Now Rade had a problem.
Dirk couldn’t very well have shot and killed the neighbor because, as an autopsy would determine, he was dead before she arrived.
Rade picked up a leather briefcase he left by the front door and opened it. He removed a pair of stainless steel, surgical-grade forceps and carefully dug the bullet out of the Indian neighbor’s head. Luckily, her skull had fractured and the bullet was relatively easy to find in the resulting mess. Rade walked over to the dining room table and carefully pried the bullet from the wall where Dirk had been sitting.
Rade switched the two bullets.
The scene was set: the Indian neighbor heard the shots, she ran over, and then Dirk, depressed, angry, broken, shot her before he shot himself.
Good enough.
Satisfied, Rade left.
16
9:47 P.M.
NOVEMBER 13, 2018
MEMORY CARE UNIT
STONYBROOK ASSISTED-LIVING FACILITY
BRAIDWOOD, ILLINOIS
EVERY TIME MATILDA walked into the Stonybrook Assisted-Living Facility, she felt a deep pang of regret.
Sometimes, she’d sit in one of the upholstered armchairs near the front desk and watch visitors sign in as the harried receptionist, a young woman with tattoos on her neck, fielded a near-constant barrage of texts from her zebra-cased cell phone.
Most of the visitors were like Matilda, adult children, seeing their frail and forgotten parents. The ones who visited most often, the weeklies, even dailies, had a businesslike demeanor. They were checking emotional boxes, following up on promises they had made when their parents’ minds were stable. The people who came by a few times a year, the children who lived out of state or just couldn’t stomach seeing the destruction Alzheimer’s had wrought, arrived with stuffed animals and flowers. They brought in framed pictures of grandchildren and mementos. Burdened by their loss, these visitors dreamed of somehow shaking their loved ones from their long, long slumber.
Only it never happened. Once gone mentally, there was no coming back.
Matilda didn’t know where she fell on the visitor spectrum. She came to see Lucy three times a week and she often brought meals. Every now and then she’d bring a gift—jewelry, flowers, little things she’d pick up at the Friday art market in Daley Plaza. Yet despite the frequency of her visits, Matilda still reacted emotionally when she came through the front doors. She cringed; a lump would form instantly in her throat. It wasn’t that the fake cinnamon-and-vanilla smell of the place or the dark furniture and dim lighting conjured up nostalgic memories. It was because she knew Stonybrook was a way station—life inside its carefully temperature-controlled walls provided a temporary, gentle easing into the infinite dark waters of death. And everyone who walked through its doors could sense it.
Matilda knew it was different in other countries. People died at home, not in quiet simulacrums of domestic life. Her friend and colleague Tamiko, a neuroscientist at the university, had told her that in Japan, and other Asian countries, the elderly moved in with their children. They cared for their grandchildren, cooked, and cleaned. And when they grew frail or demented, their children took care of them in turn. When the end came, it almost always came at home, surrounded by family.
After Matilda signed in at the front desk, she grabbed a freshly baked almond butter cookie from a tray beside the coffee and water pitcher. She ate it as she made her way through the lobby where two women, Francine and Rosa, frequently sat across from each other and watched TV.
As Rosa knitted, Francine thumbed through a three-decade-old issue of National Geographic with a photo of a scuba diver on the cover.
As she walked past, Matilda waved.
“Any luck on the article?” Matilda asked.
“Not yet.” Francine frowned. “But I think I’m getting closer.”
Two weeks earlier, while Matilda was waiting for Lucy to finish a rehab session, Francine explained that she was going through the seventy-five-plus back issues left behind by another resident. Francine was looking for an article from the mid- to late-1980s about a shooting at a nursing facility. The story had haunted her and she was desperate to read it again. Francine often joked that she had a morbid streak. Thinking on it, Matilda didn’t recall ever reading an article like that in National Geographic; it seemed to be outside the magazine’s purview. She suggested that perhaps the article was in Time or Life.
Francine was certain it was in a National Geographic.
Matilda found Lucy in her bedroom. Lucy was seventy years old, tall, very thin, and had let her hair grow out to shoulder length. She wore smudged glasses. When she was younger, in Matilda’s earliest memories of her mother, Lucy kept her hair cut short around her slightly cherubic face. Lucy had always looked at least ten years younger than she was. Baby-faced, people called it. Lucy hated the phrase.
Lucy didn’t look up when Matilda walked in.
“I can’t find it,” she said, hands scouring the clothing in the top drawer of her dresser. “It was there yesterday. I saw it just before dinner.”
“What are you looking for, Mom?”
Lucy looked up, a bit confused. Her eyes played across Matilda’s face, as if she were trying to sync the features with the few memories she still had. For a split second, it looked as though Lucy was going to smile, to walk over to Matilda and melt into a hug, but the look of recognition passed just as quickly as it had arrived. Frowning, shaking her head, Lucy turned back to the task at hand.
“Can I help you?”
“It’s a brooch,” Lucy said. “My aunt gave it to me—”
“Aunt Deborah,” Matilda said. “It’s at the bank.”
Lucy looked up, eyes quivering.
“Matilda . . . You’re here?”
Matilda took Lucy’s hands in her own, squeezed them.
“The brooch is at the bank, in a safety-deposit box with Grandma Helen’s jewelry and Dad’s papers. It’s all there. All protected. Have you eaten dinner?”
Lucy glanced over at the clock on her wardrobe.
“I wasn’t hungry earlier,” she said before turning again to the dresser. “I just was so certain I saw my brooch this afternoon. You wouldn’t believe some of the problems we’ve been having here recently. The woman next door . . .”
Lucy lowered her voice.
“The woman next door has been stealing things—”
“Mom, no one is stealing from you.”
“She has been. I woke up in the middle of the night. There was a noise in my room. And I saw her. She was right here, going through the drawers, looking for valuables. I got up and I yelled at her. She screamed back at me and scratched my arm. Right here, scratched me with her nails. . . .”
Lucy pulled up the sleeve on her sweater to show Matilda. Her arm was very thin and her skin mottled with aging bruises, but there was no visible scratch.
“It was here. Must have healed already.”
This was exactly the thing that killed Matilda. This was why she sometimes stopped and sat at the entrance to Stonybrook to catch her breath. These horrible moments, running on five years now, crushed her. Seeing her once-strong, once-brilliant mother reduced to a paranoid shell filled Matilda with sadness. It went beyond mourning the loss of the woman who shaped her life. Matilda had many years to deal with that loss, and she’d worked through it as gracefully as she could. No, a lot of the exquisite despondency that made her chest tighten came down to seeing her own future. Truth was, she knew that unless she could unlock the chemistry of how memories were formed, stored, and protected, she would follow Lucy into the inescapable maze of forgetting.
“Why don’t we get something to eat? The café is open for another fifteen minutes or so. When I was coming in, I saw they’re serving roast beef tonight.”
Lucy considered.
“I do like the roast beef.”
&nb
sp; As Matilda placed her purse and coat on her mother’s bed, she noticed a pile of clothing in the corner of the room. The closet door was open and the hangers were bare. Every article of clothing—coats, dresses, scarves, and hats—had been unceremoniously dumped onto the floor. Momentarily lucid, Lucy noticed Matilda’s worried gaze and walked over. She placed a hand on her daughter’s shoulder.
“I suppose I got a little carried away,” she said, “I was sure I saw that brooch.”
It took Matilda five minutes to get her mother out of the room.
Lucy insisted on finding a purse to carry, protesting that she was going to pay for the meal. Matilda couldn’t convince her otherwise. Though the purse was empty, save for a few tissues, Lucy happily put it over her shoulder and followed her daughter down a hallway to the dining room, where they sat alone at a table beside a large window. Outside was a small courtyard where medical assistants smoked and checked their cell phones.
They made small talk until Lucy detoured into a tirade about the thief she was certain had been stealing stuff from her room. Matilda listened, appreciating her mother’s wit and word selections but ignoring the mentally unbalanced rage and nonsensicalness of it all. She knew Lucy just needed to vent—this was her mother’s new reality. It may have been paranoid and confused, but Matilda needed to respect that, for Lucy, the emotions were very real.
When they’d finished eating, Matilda escorted her mother back to her room in the memory unit. She helped Lucy into her nightgown and then brushed her hair while Lucy sang old French folk songs, songs she still remembered vividly from her sabbatical in Toulouse in 1984.
After tucking her mother into bed, Matilda curled up in a chair.
There, she fell asleep watching Lucy’s frail chest rise and fall, rise and fall, as her mother drifted into a nostalgia-haunted REM sleep.
