Ten Miles One Way

by Patrick Downes

  “Mr. Justice?” Nothing. Firth knocked. “Mr. Grayfield Justice? Please open the door.”

  Firth turned to his assistant, McCarthy, who slid the master key into the lock.

  The key didn’t work.

  Mr. Firth and Mr. McCarthy frowned at the door. The door right here. In front of us.

  Firth spoke up. “Justice, if you’re in there, open up. Otherwise, I will call the police.” No answer. Firth tried the master key himself and got nowhere. He tried the knob, and—.

  Nope.

  Firth called the police. A quick investigation turned up nothing about Grayfield Justice, and why would it? As far as the constabulary could figure, no such man ever officially existed.

  Firth and McCarthy accompanied a small force of the Five-O to this room.

  The police knocked and then banged on the door.

  Silence.

  The police shouted; they hammered: nothing. They had no choice. One of the junior officers put his shoulder to the door and.

  Empty. Clean. Not a smudge, not a thing out of place. Room 802 felt a little cold, a few degrees low, but the window was open. It’s not a crime to leave the window open, is it?

  Firth nodded at McCarthy. “Would you close that, please?”

  Simple enough: close a window. McCarthy, though, died trying.

  Let’s take the elevator back down. It’ll take us longer than the stairs. It shakes and groans the whole time, like you’re riding an old man’s back, but it’s part of the experience.

  Don’t you love the paper on the walls? The burgundy flowers and gold stems. This will all go, and the faux gas lamps, too. Who knows what money will do to this hotel? I’m sure it will be swanky. It’ll have a lounge with metal chairs and a glass bar and cool blue lighting. The rooms will have every luxury. Just what you want out of a woman named Miranda. A gorgeous, perfect, luscious wonder at five hundred a night.

  But what will they do about room 802?

  I never think about how dimly lit the Miranda is until I’m back outside. It really is almost dark in there. That sun. Maybe if the police, Firth, and McCarthy had had more light, something to let them see deeper into the room, a light as bright as the sun, then McCarthy wouldn’t have died. Maybe, but unlikely. No amount of light can let you see through a wall.

  At first, the four policemen and Firth couldn’t move. Fully five seconds went by without anybody doing anything. They simply couldn’t understand how McCarthy had fallen out of the window, or where the dog had come from.

  Once the dog’s barking broke through the five thick skulls, everything changed. The junior officer with the broad shoulders shot the dog, and, finally, the men could think. Firth looked out the window at McCarthy, eight floors down and broken in the alley. A senior officer called for backup, and two more officers checked the bathroom.

  In the bathroom, there were dog bowls and an open cage. And in the bathtub, behind the curtain, ten stacked black suitcases. In eight of the suitcases, investigators found more than nine hundred thousand dollars. The last two held four neatly wrapped human heads.

  This city, like every city, has its unsolved mysteries, and the mystery of room 802 at the Miranda went unsolved. No one named Grayfield Justice ever appeared. No one found the source of the money. The heads went unidentified. And the dog’s keeper—tipped off?—never showed up. Absolutely no one could figure out how a healthy, giant dog could be kept hidden in a residence hotel.

  And what about housekeeping? Were they paid to stay away? Or were they bored visiting a room they never needed to clean? Wouldn’t housekeeping have discovered the changed lock? How long ago had the lock been changed?

  Justice had arranged with the head housekeeper never to send anyone to 802. She claimed she accepted the scheme over the phone and admitted to receiving a cash payment in an envelope tucked inside a newspaper left for her weekly. She was no help, and it didn’t matter anyway.

  The Miranda never used 802 again. There have been claims: a man screaming and the sound of a body hitting pavement, a black dog loping down the hall. The dog the police killed was white, but. People have heard a dog barking and panting, scratching at the wall, even howling. Standard paranormal activity. Nothing special.

  Oh. My. God.

  String art. I think it’s one of Nelson’s ships. It’s beautiful and totally ridiculous.

  It’s just sitting here—.

  People are nuts. Giving away treasures. You want to carry that home for us?

  —?—

  What? The velvet and the string, all the colors of midnight: you don’t like it? A three-masted ship rolling on the high seas? What’s not to love?

  —?—

  You don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it. So true.

  But I think we’ll regret leaving this behind. I’m serious, Q. If we don’t see anything better, we’re coming back for this. I swear. And if it’s gone, you’ll be sorry.

  So, ants are the worst people. They’re vicious, hungry for land, and they kill and plot to kill. Not much to like about ants.

  On the floor of a Costa Rican rain forest, there lives an especially bloodthirsty species of ant. They are at war almost all their lives. And along the edges of the battlefield, a species of fly, the phorid, waits out the war between colonies while rubbing its skinny legs. When the flies see injured ants, they buzz on over, say a little prayer over the soldiers, and tear off their heads. Turns out ants don’t have much of a brain, but they have muscles in their heads to work their massive pincer jaws, and they have nutrients important to fly health. Their heads are chunks of meat.

  Go figure: ant heads are delicious. The phorids eat and drink. Then, as if that weren’t enough, the flies go ahead and lay eggs in the skull and corpse. Sometimes, up to eight flies will lay their eggs in one ant.

  The man who told me this was a friend of my father’s, an entomologist named Dr. M—I won’t tell you his full name. He whispered the story of the ants and flies to me just after he kissed me. I was fifteen.

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I said to him, “Will one of those flies attack an uninjured ant?”

  Dr. M pushed my hair off my cheek and hooked it around my ear. He kissed my forehead.

  “Never,” he whispered and kissed my ear. “If you put an ant and a fly in a room together to sort things out, the ant would win every time. The fly, Nest, wouldn’t survive ten seconds.”

  I’m pretty sure Dr. M is the reason my father doesn’t talk directly to me anymore. Not because I did anything to ruin their friendship. Dr. M did that all on his own.

  He used to come to dinner once, sometimes twice a week. He even stayed for a little while at our house, but I was really young then. He and my father were the best of friends, roommates once, all that jazz. Dr. M married and divorced twice in less than six years. He lost three houses. He was miserable at life, and miserable at getting along with everyone except my dad. My mom, I don’t think, ever liked him, which is saying something. He flirted terribly with her, awkwardly, which my dad swallowed. But he would also say awful things at dinner, rude things, and curse, and my mother finds poor behavior at the table unforgiveable. Let that be a warning to you.

  I grew up with Dr. M coming and going, and he—. I got used to hearing about this insect and that. One moth and another beetle, and the soap opera of the beehive. He kept his hands to himself.

  I know, this is all summary, not a lot of detail, but I’m trying to get somewhere without getting distracted. The night he kissed me.

  The whole event couldn’t have been more than two minutes, and I don’t, to this day, know how it could have happened. I think this is one of the frightening things about certain crimes: they can happen so fast. You can slowly build a crime, like Grayfield Justice in the Miranda, or you can start and end it in a breath. No one will ever be able to explain to me how I ended up behind th
e bathroom door with Dr. M. And no one will ever be able to explain to me how I ended up back in the hall, kissed for the first time by a man, the prickles of his mustache still in my nose, scared and confused and less than ten feet from my mother and father. Where does a girl find a Chimaera when she needs one?

  And why are baby strollers so huge? Babies are small, but their vehicles—. It’s totally stupid. Did you see that woman with a double stroller trying to get into the coffee shop? She had to have both doors opened. I’m sure she took up the entire counter. She could barely steer it.

  Money buys room. Money buys freedom from the undesirables always pressing in. Money buys strollers the size of baby elephants. And the tires? That stroller could cross the Outback, even if the mother pushing it dies trying.

  But the mothers, I guess, would say, “Just look at everything we have to carry.”

  Really? It’s a baby. You’re not the supply train for an army regiment. You’re not Hannibal crossing the Alps. Why do you have more than people who have smaller strollers, people who can’t afford your stroller?

  No wonder the terrorists hate us.

  You see? I got distracted anyway.

  After the bathroom kiss, I went back to the dinner table, and Dr. M, a minute later, took his seat at the opposite head of the table, across from my father.

  “Dessert, yes, Martha?” Dr. M said.

  “Of course,” my mother said and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Well, it’s really more like two desserts for me.” Dr. M put his hand over mine and smiled at my father. Had he lost his mind completely?

  I think my father felt like the police and Firth at the door of room 802. One second, McCarthy is headed to close a window; the next, he’s falling eight stories to his death. A dog barking. And they simply don’t know what to do. Complete silence and stillness until.

  But my father didn’t wake up. My mother had gone to put together dessert, and my father sat and blinked at his friend, not even toward me. The unthinkable had occurred, and my father rammed right into the end of his brain. He just couldn’t add it up.

  Dr. M pulled his hand away when my mother came in from the kitchen with a tray. She stood for a moment, watching all of us. She didn’t know anything. How could she? Even so, my mom said, “Kenneth, it’s time for you to go.”

  “Oh, Martha,” M said. “Don’t I get my tarts?”

  “Here,” my mother said and handed him the tray. “All for you. And nothing else.”

  Dr. Kenneth M ignored the dessert tray. He pushed out his chair and leaned on the end of the table. “Vladimir,” he said, “you have everything. And I have nothing. But I’ve tasted what’s yours.”

  My father had started talking to me less when my breasts started showing. I must have been eleven, sixth grade. He stopped holding me in his lap, and he never came into my bedroom alone. Did he spy on me through keyholes? Did he imagine himself in my bed, see himself with a pen in his hand, tinkering with a formula on my bare skin? How did he avoid an aneurysm, his brain exploding with impure thoughts? Red wire of lust connected to one terminal, yellow wire of conscience connected to the second terminal: the bomb set and ticking. Could that be possible? I loved him, and he loved me. My handsome father, with his Angers and Minotaur: couldn’t he trust himself?

  Of course he could. My father is good and decent, the best, even if he fell in love with a teenager named Martha when he was already a grown man. He and my mother are very much in love, and their story is pure.

  No. My dad? He simply can’t stand watching me get older. He’ll talk to me when I’m all growed up. He’ll laugh with me and come back to me, take a walk with me, my father, when he can look me in the eye, as a man meets a woman. A woman with her own Angers and a Chimaera, a woman with her own life and body and destiny. This in-between, teenager thing? He wants no part of it. It makes him nervous.

  Like my mother’s Between sleep. My father can’t stand anything that’s not one thing or another. One reason I’m sure he hates his Minotaur: between man and bull. Let him be a man, or make him a bull forever. The torture of being both?

  My father is afraid of me. And he worries about me, but he has no way to cope. My mind upsets him, I’m sure, since he doesn’t want me caught between human and—.

  He’s afraid. For all sorts of reasons. And that’s the way it is. He’s abandoned me, but it won’t be forever. He’ll come back. I believe it.

  And I miss him.

  The night Dr. M kissed me and left our house for good, I lay in bed biting my hand and crying. I knew my father was gone from me. And I knew I’d have to deal with real men from then on. Dr. M only started the game. I went to sleep all sorts of upset; but at some point during the night, for the first time in almost four years, my dad came and sat on the edge of my bed, his hands clasped in his lap and his head low. Maybe he was calming down, trying to catch his breath after the outrage of the evening. Maybe he was thinking or gathering his strength. I almost couldn’t believe he hadn’t become the Minotaur after the whole mess and gone off to murder his old friend, Kenneth M.

  But there he sat, silence and the blankets between us, while I pretended to sleep.

  Then, as if he knew—of course he knew—he started counting backward, so quietly and gently.

  “One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven—.”

  Darkness.

  Maneki-neko.

  That would be good to take home, and it’s not too heavy. Look at her. You know what breed of cat she is? A Japanese calico bobtail. They’re all Japanese calico bobtails, all the maneki-neko, the waving cats. But she’s not waving, she’s beckoning. She’s saying, “Come in, come in to our Laundromat and leave your dry cleaning.”

  This cat looks ceramic, not plastic. Don’t you love the red collar and the gold bell?

  Here’s the problem. We’re not allowed to steal anything. It’s a found object we can take home. Not only is it wrong to steal, it’s stupid to steal a good luck charm, since it will probably bring bad luck to the thief. Though, if you get away with stealing it in the first place, I guess it could be considered good luck after all—.

  Another one of my moments. I’m sorry.

  All I’m saying: this kitty belongs to this business; she’s not ours. We didn’t so much find it as catch it in the window. She’s not sitting and waving, or beckoning, on the curb.

  I’m still regretting the string art, but we’ll keep going.

  We have to—.

  Check it out. From this corner, you can see the four tallest buildings this city has to offer. And they go in size order, shortest to tallest, right to left, starting with Locke and Bowles. Then the Eastman Building, Spectator Tower, and the Honey Building. On the day of the summer solstice every year, the sun comes up between Spectator and Honey and fills the whole thin street, east/west, with blinding orange light.

  Is Dr. M the kind of man who should have his feet broken after he dies, so he can’t walk back into the world as a ghost? Should his coffin be weighed down with extra stones?

  Is he a criminal pedophile?

  Dr. M might be a great entomologist—I don’t know—but for sure he’s a failure at real life, and he’s angry and sad about it. Pedophile? I don’t think so.

  I’ve thought about this for two years. Dr. M is no Humbert Humbert, and I’m no Lolita. He kissed, if you could call it that, the fifteen-year-old daughter of his best friend behind the bathroom door and all but admitted it two minutes later, an action that in a strange way is exactly as safe as it is dangerous. He didn’t shove his tongue in my mouth, and he didn’t even touch me with his hands, except my hair. He whispered about phorid flies and ants at war, which was—.

  Frightening for sure, but also desperate.

  I’m not excusing him. He ruined me. He destroyed my mouth forever. I’ll never have the first kiss I should have had.

 
; And.

  I haven’t let anyone kiss me since Dr. M stole his. That’s the truth. But you know this already. Of all the things people at school make fun of me for, what’s the thing I hear the most? Not that I take drugs. Not that I’m weird or a nerd or totally crazy or everything a girl shouldn’t be. Not for how I dress, or my infrequent school attendance.

  I get made fun of most regularly for being, or seeming, asexual. Uninterested. Private. People tell me I don’t look like I should be uninterested, whatever that means. They tell me I could be sexy. I’m not exactly ugly, they say, and I’m not stupid. I’m even funny. So why don’t I go out? Why don’t I see anybody, boy, girl, man, woman? Why don’t I take selfies and fall in love with myself at least? What’s my problem?

  That’s what I hear almost every day I show up at school: “What’s your problem?”

  But you know me. I do look: I look at you. And you look at me. You like how I walk, and you’re dying to touch me. You’re walking and walking, mile after mile with me. The bridge, the university, the cemetery, a homeless man, poetry, quotes, Darwin, rain, trivia; a pregnant, dying dog; the mysterious Miranda; Vladimir and Martha; the Minotaur and Chimaera, and. You’re not allowed to speak. You killed a mouse. But through everything there’s koi no yokan. Inevitable love.

  This is it. Stop where you are. Even you can’t resist. Maybe it isn’t string art or taxidermy, but it’s better than a figurine of a waving cat, and a sink and faucets. Someone’s a genius. When have you ever seen a spaceship in a bottle?

  And the Millennium Falcon?

  Come on, now. I want it. We just have to find a new cork.

  Are you kidding me—? No way. You can see Han Solo and Chewbacca in the cockpit.

  Hi, Han. Hi, Chewie.