Switchback

by Matthew Klein

  That night, he dreamed.

  He dreamed of Katherine climbing the switchback at Big Sur, her fingers sliding along the thick chain on the edge of the path. He dreamed of her body, splayed face down on the rocks below, her long blonde hair fanned and floating in an inch of water, her legs broken and akimbo. He dreamed of Dr. Ho, and his tiny spectacles, and the red line they left in his brow, and he dreamed of the man from the parking garage, with the stringy hair and the gleaming knife and the steel-toed boots. He dreamed of Katherine in her parents’ house, of lying with her on her childhood bed, of Katherine leaning over him, performing oral sex, of his fingers stroking her hair, brushing wisps from her face so he could look into her eyes.

  He woke to the sound of footsteps.

  The bedroom was dark. His first thought was of the man with the long hair and switchblade, of his threats to kill Timothy if he continued to fuck Tricia. Timothy whispered, ‘Tricia?’

  He reached his arm to her side of the bed, to reassure himself that she was all right. But the bed was empty. Timothy looked at his nightstand. The digital clock, with comforting amber numbers, said 2.33 a.m. He flipped on the bedside light. Tricia was gone.

  He tried to sit up. He was surprised by the pain in his abdomen, and then he remembered the punch he had received that afternoon. He touched his face and felt the scab on his chin.

  He tried again to get up, more carefully now, sliding his feet to the floor, and then slowly pushing himself to a sitting position using his hands. He rose from the bed.

  He thought about Tricia, and wondered where she was, and if she was all right. He wanted to call out her name. But perhaps that was unwise. Perhaps the long-haired man was there, in the house. Could he have broken in, somehow, through the patio door, or the den window? Did he know where Timothy lived?

  Timothy walked out of the bedroom and peered into the hall. It was dark. He could see nothing. But he did not turn on the light. He knew the hallway better than any intruder could, and the darkness would be his advantage. He stepped into the hall. The floorboard creaked. He stopped, remained motionless, and listened for noise. Was there someone else in the house?

  He saw a dim glow at the end of the hallway, a line of light under a doorframe. It was the door to the attic. He began to walk carefully toward it, through the dark, toe-first, the way he was taught as a child that the Indians walked through the forest, sliding their moccasin feet under branches and leaves to surprise their enemies. He slid his finger against the wall as he walked, to maintain a straight path through the blackness, and he felt the bumps and bubbles of the cool plaster beneath his skin.

  He approached the attic. Even in the dark he knew where the doorknob would be, and he grasped it and turned it quietly. He pulled open the door and was surprised that it did not squeak.

  There was a light shining in the attic.

  He climbed the attic stairs slowly. He expected to see the steel-toed boots first, as he ascended, and then the dirty jeans, and finally the switchblade at the ready, near the man’s waist.

  On the third step, the floorboard creaked again, and Timothy stopped. He listened. There was a sound of paper rustling. He climbed to the fourth step, faster now, and then the fifth, and he no longer cared about remaining silent; he simply wanted to confront whoever was in the attic, and to end his feeling of dread.

  He reached the top of the stairs. At the far end of the attic, Tricia sat on the floor, her back to him, with a pile of Katherine’s journals beside her. She was flipping the pages, reading intently, and then flipping more. It was as if she was looking for some passage in particular.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  If she was surprised by his presence, she did not show it. She continued flipping the pages with her back turned to him. ‘Writing my journal,’ she said calmly.

  ‘Writing?’ he asked. ‘Or reading?’ He climbed the final step now, and began to walk toward her. ‘Trying to brush up on all the details?’

  She turned to him. He was surprised that she had tears in her eyes and streaking her cheeks.

  ‘I came up here to write. But now I’m just reading. Looking at old entries. From years ago.’ She laughed, a quiet, self-pitying laugh.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘Are you Katherine? Or are you Tricia?’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, shaking her head, sniffling. ‘Not again.’

  ‘What are you doing here, reading her diaries at two o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘I told you. I was writing. In my diaries. They’re mine, Timothy. Mine. Don’t you understand? Don’t you believe me? Why did you put them up here, anyway? Did you think I wouldn’t find them? Are you trying to take everything from me?’

  Her emotion surprised him. This was the sort of hysterical overreaction that was typical of Katherine: turning the tables on him, using verbal jujitsu to direct his own anger back at him.

  ‘I put them away,’ he said, ‘after Katherine … after you died. I forgot about them.’

  ‘Did you read them?’

  ‘No,’ he lied.

  She sniffled again, wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘I just wanted to write about today. About how you got hurt. And I started thinking, and reading, you know, old entries. I almost never do that. I’ve been writing these damn journals for twenty years, and I hardly ever read a word of what I’ve written. But tonight, I guess with everything that’s been going on, I just wanted to read some of the old pages. I wanted to reassure myself that I am … me. God, Timothy, you don’t understand what it’s like. Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy. Imagine waking up in someone else’s body. And if that isn’t bad enough, imagine that your own husband doesn’t believe it’s you.’

  ‘I believe it’s you,’ he said. And at that moment, staring at the tears on Tricia’s cheeks, he did.

  ‘Then why do you constantly question me? Who do you think I am?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Do you think this whole thing is – what? – an elaborate con? That I’m a twenty-three-year-old secretary trying to fool you? In order to do what? Fuck you, Timothy? Do you think I need to go through all that just to fuck you? Looking like this?’

  ‘I said I believe you,’ he said.

  ‘Then stop already. Stop questioning me.’

  ‘Come to bed,’ he said. He reached his hand down and offered it to her. She took it, and he helped her from the floor. His stomach ached when he pulled her up, but he didn’t want her to know and so kept his face still.

  She stepped toward him and fell into his arms, and she hugged him tightly and rubbed her tears into his shoulder.

  ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I do.’

  ‘Then come back to bed,’ he said, and led her back downstairs.

  38

  The next day, he met Frank Arnheim for breakfast at Buck’s, a coffee shop in Woodside.

  ‘Here’s the situation,’ Frank explained to Timothy. ‘You might go to jail.’

  Timothy was eating an egg-white omelet with cheddar cheese. He put down his fork. This was not what he expected to hear. He was meeting Frank to review the testimony he would give to the CFTC about Osiris’ collapse. He was scheduled to fly to Chicago in less than two weeks.

  ‘For two hundred and fifty dollars an hour, that’s the best you can do?’

  ‘A lot of important people lost a lot of money on Osiris. From the CFTC’s perspective, someone’s got to pay.’

  ‘I don’t mind someone paying,’ Timothy said. ‘I just mind the someone being me.’ The thought of jail had never occurred to him.

  ‘Well, that’s my point. Yesterday, while you were being beaten up in the parking garage, I spent some time with your assistant, Jay Strauss.’

  ‘Good kid, Jay,’ Timothy said.

  ‘No,’ Frank said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Really?’ Timothy was surprised.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Frank said. ‘Absolutely. When he testifies in Chicago, he’s going to destroy you.’

  ‘The K
id? I mean Jay? Are you sure?’

  ‘You must have done something to really piss him off. Let me ask you something. How much does he know? Did you ever ask him to lie? Did you ever ask him to tell investors something that was untrue?’

  ‘No.’ Timothy thought about it. He did tell the Kid to lie to Pinky. ‘Yes.’ Then: ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

  ‘Put yourself in Jay’s shoes. He’s a scared twenty-four-year-old kid. He’s worried about the rest of his life. Meanwhile, the government doesn’t care about him. He’s a nothing. They want you. They can make an example of you. They can teach everyone a nice little lesson about how powerful and all-knowing the CFTC is. See where I’m going with this?’

  ‘They’re going to make a deal with the Kid.’

  ‘Maybe they already have, for all we know. They tell him: give us Van Bender and you can walk away. You can keep working in the industry, no public censure, nothing on your record. In fact, I’ll give you five to one that he makes up stuff about you, exaggerates the things you said, makes you seem much worse than you are.’

  ‘That’s hard to do.’

  ‘I know.’ Frank bit into his toast, ripped it in half with his teeth. ‘My point is, you have to assume the worst.’

  ‘So what can I do?’

  ‘You could always kill him.’ Frank laughed. ‘Just kidding, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I think you need to have a talk with him. See where he stands. Once you feel him out, we can decide what to do.’

  Before he could feel out the Kid, to see if he would betray him, Timothy had another betrayal to think about. He returned to his office and called his wife on the telephone.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ he asked nonchalantly.

  ‘Just cleaning up around the house.’

  ‘You have lunch plans?’

  ‘I was going to meet Ann Beatty at noon. But I can cancel.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You should meet her. It’s important that Tricia gets to know people around the neighborhood. I’ll stick around here.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  When he hung up, he knew what he was going to do. At noon, when Tricia left the house for lunch, Timothy went home.

  He no longer believed her. It wasn’t merely the episode the previous night, in which he found her studying Katherine’s diaries in the attic at two o’clock in the morning. It was a series of strange incidents: her using the word awesome, knowing that the necklace was an anniversary present, forgetting that first sexual experience in her childhood bedroom, bringing up marriage but rejecting a prenuptial agreement …

  Now, in the daylight, without a drop of alcohol in him, without the buzz of sexual desire clouding his judgment, he thought maybe he had been a fool. Maybe the woman sharing the house with him, the woman inhabiting Tricia’s young body – maybe it was simply Tricia after all. How long ago had she started planning this game? Did she take a job at Timothy’s firm knowing all along that she would try to marry him? Or did the plan come to her when she learned of Katherine’s suicide?

  She had known that, as Tricia, she might be able to seduce him, but that he would never trust her completely, and she would never be able to get her hands on his money. But as Katherine, his wife of twenty years, the woman he loved and missed, the woman he trusted, it could be different. That was the reason for the rush to marriage, and the anger over the prenuptial agreement.

  It was brilliant. The story was convincing, but only because he wanted to be convinced. He wanted his wife back. He wanted a second chance. At the same time, he desired Tricia. And in a fit of genius, she made it all possible – to have another chance with his wife, while simultaneously possessing a beautiful twenty-three-year-old girl. The plan itself required almost nothing – a rented office on Sand Hill Road, some cheap computers stuffed into racks, a Chinese actor playing a scientist – and he had fallen for it. Because he wanted to fall for it. Because he was weak. And because he missed his wife. And because Tricia was beautiful.

  What gave it away were the diaries, of course. It was a stroke of luck for Tricia that Katherine had kept such detailed journals. How had Tricia known? Timothy must have mentioned it to her, as he did to others – a flip remark about his wife’s bizarre obsession with recording the details of her life. He couldn’t remember telling Tricia about the diaries, but it was certainly possible.

  And when Tricia found the diaries in the attic, she made the most of them, studying them, like a legal student poring over case law before the bar exam, learning the citations, memorizing the important facts.

  Perhaps she had even entered his house to read them, before coming back as Katherine? It was possible. And then, once she had the opportunity, she studied them every day, learning more about Katherine and her life, until, finally, she could become Katherine.

  But the simulation was only as good as the material she had to work with. And that was the problem with her plan: she only knew the things recorded in the diaries.

  The sex gave it away. Katherine recorded how many pieces of toast she ate for breakfast, but about sexual matters she was very private. That was why Tricia ‘remembered’ certain details about Katherine’s life – the time they received a speeding ticket and Timothy tried to bribe the police officer – but not other details – not sexual details, for example, like the first time she fellated him in her childhood bedroom. Tricia didn’t know about it because Katherine didn’t write about it.

  Now Timothy needed to make sure. He needed to read the diaries for himself, to prove that his theory was correct, that Tricia could only recount incidents that had been written about, and not others.

  He arrived home at five minutes past noon. Tricia’s car was gone from the driveway. He knocked and rang the doorbell, to make sure no one would answer. He wanted time to study the diaries on his own, without interruption.

  He turned the key and entered the house. In the foyer, he called out, ‘Tricia?’

  The house was empty.

  He went immediately to the staircase and climbed to the second floor, then opened the attic door at the end of the hall. The air inside was warm and humid. He turned on the lights, and climbed the staircase. It smelled musty. At the far end of the space he saw the journals, piled neatly where Tricia had left them the night before.

  He looked at his watch. He decided he had about an hour before Tricia would return from lunch. And so for the third time in his life, he sat down on the floor, and he began to read his wife’s diaries.

  He was right, of course.

  The incident about the bribe and speeding ticket was there, as he knew it would be:

  ‘When the police officer pulled us over, Timothy smiled at him and tried to bribe him. He did it in his usual charming way, so that it hardly seemed like a bribe. It was, of course, typical of him. Why does he feel that he is above all rules, that he can get away with anything, that the laws of the universe do not apply to him? I suppose it gives the people who work for him a kind of comfort – that this man is so clearly in charge, and able to navigate the world without impediment. But, truthfully, it disgusts me.’

  The passage was familiar, because he had read it years before – the first time he sneaked around the house to read her journals. There it was, the word ‘disgusts’ underlined twice, the second line harder than the first, the pen pushing through the vellum.

  Now, he needed to confirm his theory about the sex. He would search the diary for a mention of the sex in her childhood bedroom. He was sure that he would not find it.

  He tried to think back: when had she done that? It was years ago, when they were first married … in 1979. They had traveled back east to visit her parents. He scanned the pile of journals on the floor, with the years handwritten on the fabric binding: 1977, 1978 … there. 1979.

  He lifted the volume and began to flip through. It didn’t take long to find it. It was November. Yes, they were visiting her parents for Thanksgiving. Reading her descr
iption of those days, the memories came back to him: their arrival at Logan; Mr. Sutter shaking Timothy’s hand and calling him ‘Son,’ the cold wind snapping in their faces when they stepped out of the airport; Katherine showing him upstairs in her Cambridge house, to her old bedroom. It happened the first night there:

  ‘November 20, 1979. I’m in Cambridge, back home with Timothy. I showed him around Mom and Dad’s. It is strange to have the man I married sleeping in the tiny bed where I used to sleep as a girl, before I even knew about men, or sex, or marriage. He is snoring now, under my pink covers. We just had sex. How strange.’

  That was it. Six words about sex. But she did not describe the act in detail, did not note that it was the first time she had fellated him; did not remark upon what it felt like, or what she thought.

  Which was why, Timothy understood, Tricia did not know about it. She couldn’t, because it was not in the journal.

  He continued reading the journals, and lost track of time. He could not stop himself. Once he began, he needed to continue, to follow the arc of her story, from her girlish excitement when he proposed to her, to her realization that Timothy was not who she thought he was, to her ultimate loneliness and despair. It happened gradually over the course of volumes, interspersed between details about what she wore and what she ate. It was a story told in static still-lifes, like a cartoon book with hundreds of individual sketches that, when you flipped the pages, revealed a smooth motion from one side of the page to another.

  He read about her depression when she miscarried, her excitement when she finally carried to six months – and then her despair when she miscarried again, that final time.

  He read about her growing realization that he was selfish, and egotistical, and did not consider her feelings.

  But what Timothy did not read was anything about his affairs. At first, it was remarkable to him. He kept reading the pages, waiting for the shoe to drop, to finally see the passage where she described her fears that he was cheating, to read about himself as an unfaithful cad.

  It took him some time to realize that he would never read such a passage. He would not read it for the same reason he would not read about explicit sexual details: because it embarrassed her to write about them. And so the angry words about his affairs were mysteriously missing from those pages. Posterity would never learn about his philandering.