by James Smythe
Laurence wakes up. The dream happens, or a variation of it, over and over. Some aspects of it are always the same. Usually he’ll be in their house and he’ll be running and Sean will be gone down the stairs, suddenly disappeared out of the front door, and it will be locked from the inside. Sometimes Laurence is at the lake cabin the entire time, which he remembers so vividly in the dream but can, for some reason, barely remember when he’s awake; and his son will be on the dock and Laurence will see him through a murky window; he will shout but won’t be heard. And sometimes Laurence is at war, crawling through the dust, injured and clinging on; but Sean is still there, and so is the lake house. Those things are the constants, and they never leave.
He reaches over to the complimentary bottle of water on the nightstand and opens it, almost completely draining it, feeling it run down his throat. His mouth is dry from the air-conditioning unit; it’s all he can taste. The water is acidic, almost, cheap and filtered rather than from a spring. He has, over the past god-knows-how-many months of hotel visiting, become a connoisseur of local bottled waters. He looks at the clock. It’s just gone ten here. It’ll be eight back at home. He’s fucked up his sleeping patterns completely, he knows. Typical.
And then, in a rush, he remembers the results from the report. It hits him with a headache. 00% chance of success. Cut and dried, a definite No. Not even a hint of a chance. He wonders what would make anybody vote for him after that, if even his family will see him as a viable contender now. Amit said that it was a mistake, and he has to believe that. He does believe one thing: that he is a good man. He’s always tried to be a good man. He is fractured, he knows, and he is suffering, but it’s been getting easier to be him. Every day, Sean gets further away. He thinks of chasing after him: his dreams as blunt metaphor.
He stands up and goes to the bathroom, uses the toilet, then he rubs his face and looks in the mirror and splashes water over his skin. He thinks about the plane. He doesn’t know what came over him: there have always been the rules about what he shows in public and he’s never broken them before. He’s always composed. Even at Sean’s funeral he didn’t break: he held his reserve, the stoic, immoveable father, keeping his grief at bay when his family needed him to.
He thinks that he should call and let Amit know that he’s awake and that he’s feeling better. He wants to do the meetings this week: even if Amit thinks it’s better to call off a day for recovery, maybe the rest of them can be salvaged. He will forge onwards, only needing a moment to catch his breath before he is back at maximum, back at one hundred percent. As soon as the results from ClearVista are sorted out, this will become much easier, Laurence thinks. That’s when this all works as it should, all of the pieces in their right place.
He picks up his phone to call Amit, and there’s an inundation of messages waiting. There are notifications about emails, about tweets, and a message from Deanna, worried about him. He presses the button to return her call.
Deanna hears the phone ringing, but she’s with Alyx, their hands deep in cookie dough. Alyx loves baking, says that it is what she wants to do when she’s older. She’s got a plan, apparently, and she draws pictures of cakes and biscuits and muffins and the ingredients around them, and her in a baker’s hat. So when they get the chance, this is what they do together. Deanna finds it relaxing: everything today, since the accident, has been about calming herself down. The call goes to the answering machine as she’s washing the dough from her hands and she tells Alyx to keep kneading it. It’s Laurence.
‘Hello?’ he says into the machine. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes,’ Deanna says, before she picks it up. ‘I’m coming, hang on!’ She grabs the handset and says his name, and he’s silent for a second. She thinks that she has missed him and is about to hang up when he finally speaks back.
‘I’m sorry, I was asleep,’ he says.
‘I was so worried,’ she says. Alyx looks over, wondering what she was worried about. She’s at that age of understanding the conversations of others; of listening in and attempting to decode them. ‘I saw the blog and Amit’s statement. You’ve got a migraine?’ It’s posed as a question, because she knows that he’s never had one before. It sparks further worries, a procession of increasingly terrible ailments that such a powerful headache could mean.
‘Yeah, I felt odd. I’m just so tired.’ She hears the lie in his voice. ‘Amit says that I need a break. Some time off, to recover.’
‘Has something happened?’ He doesn’t answer, which means it has. Still, she knows: he doesn’t like to talk on the phone about anything that could be incriminating ‘When will you be home?’ she asks.
‘Still a few days,’ he says. ‘We’re powering through.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Just be safe.’ She thinks about telling him about her accident and the car, but there’s no point. He’s not feeling well and it’ll only make him worry. ‘I love you,’ she tells him instead.
‘I love you,’ he replies. ‘Kiss the girls for me.’
‘Alyx is here. Want to tell her?’
‘Yes,’ he says. Deanna holds the phone up to her daughter’s ear. She can’t hear what Laurence says, but Alyx laughs.
‘We’re making cookies,’ she says. Deanna imagines Laurence asking her to save one for him; predictable, but what she wants from him. ‘I will,’ she says. ‘Bye, Daddy.’
When Deanna goes back to the phone, it’s quiet, the line dead. She thinks about calling him back but decides to let him be. She worries about him, but only briefly; he sounds tired and the story on the blogs suggested an imminent breakdown. That’s the words that they used. Talking to him now, she knows it’s not that bad; but still, she can’t help but worry.
Amit sits and goes through the results in the PDF, line by line, reading every single one. He makes notes of anything anomalous, anything that might be a red flag, anything that he cannot explain. Laurence was honest about everything: that he still missed Sean and that he always would; that Sean’s death caused stress to his marriage; that he hated being in the army, that the things he was subjected to there scarred him more than he ever thought he would be scarred; that capital punishment is a crime, that torture is something he could never put another human being through. He ticked the boxes saying that his stress levels were at seventy percent, even though that seemed high to Amit (and Amit adjusted them down a few percentage points of his own volition, knowing that Laurence likely wouldn’t remember what number he arbitrarily plucked from the sky); and he ticked the boxes saying that he felt that he was only fifteen percent likely to crumble under the pressure of running the country, even though Amit argued – again – that such a number was maybe too high. Laurence thought that it was better to be honest. Amit flags them all now: anything that could have pushed him underneath a fiftieth percentile. They’re all about mental health, about fortitude, about chances of self-destruction, but there’s nothing as extreme as the final two answers might suggest. Amit cannot see where they have come from: a prediction from a year, two years down the line, and a prediction with no grounding that he can fathom.
After a while he’s distracted by the news on the television, the most right wing of the right wing shows. It mentions Laurence’s episode on the plane, albeit briefly – and then, in a move that Amit thinks is almost sarcastic, prays that he gets better soon, and back into the race – and before Amit knows it there’s a woman at his table, another beer in front of him, some imported British cider in front of her. He’s ordered more wings, and he listens to her talking about herself, both as drunk as each other; and he thinks how nearly erotic this actually is, this woman sucking the thick orange sauce from her fingers when she’s done with a piece of the chicken, stopping before she sucks the bones. Her name is Clara and she’s a local, Texas born and raised. She’s worked for the past few years in telemarketing and is here now for a conference, but she isn’t happy. She wants something more fulfilling: a purpose, of sorts, but she doesn’t know what. Amit doesn’t listen as
she talks, because he’s distracted, and thinking about the video and Laurence’s campaign and also Clara’s body, and she doesn’t notice that he’s tuned out. He’s good at the eye-contact-while-not-actually-being-there thing: something he picked up over the past few years in politics. He checks his phone while she’s talking, but there’s nothing from Laurence. He hasn’t called Amit, or texted or tweeted. Either he’s asleep still – not impossible – or he needs some space. Either way, Amit decides to leave him until the morning.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Clara asks him.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You have my absolute attention.’ He fixes eye contact. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘but I was just dealing with something for my boss.’
‘Who’s your boss?’ she asks.
‘I can’t say,’ he tells her. ‘But he’s important. He’s a pretty big deal.’
Clara has her own room in the hotel, which is useful. She asks him to come with her and he does. They walk through the hotel, stumbling, as she tries to find her way. He stands in the hallway, waiting for her to dig her key out of her bag, and then she can’t find it. She tells him that she’ll be back, that she has to go to the front desk for another, and she rushes off. Amit sits on the floor by her door and shuts his eyes. He hears the ping of the elevators and he opens them. There, at one end of the corridor, in the distance, he sees a man. He’s sure that he’s looking at Amit, that he knows him, recognizes him. And then the man turns away from Amit, and in his hand is the blue jacket. It’s him.
Amit stands, because it seems like too much of a coincidence. He wonders if he’s here to find Laurence, been tipped off about where they’re staying. But why? Laurence isn’t a big deal, not yet: he’s only a few steps above being a nobody. Amit runs down the corridor but there’s nobody there when he gets to the junction; and then the elevator pings again and he hears Clara’s voice beckoning him back. He tells himself to forget about the man. He’s nothing. Coincidences happen all the time.
When he gets into Clara’s room he does what’s expected of him – this being some sort of mutually agreed pact, signed by lips and hands and other parts of their bodies – but he’s slightly too gone to properly be in the moment and he can taste the buffalo wings (Frank’s Hot Sauce) on her lips and it distracts him. She falls asleep when they’re done and he follows, sprawled on her crisp white hotel sheets, the same thread count as every other hotel in this chain.
His phone beeps. Amit wakes up, pushing himself to standing, and he finds his pants on the floor and goes to the pockets for the handset.
Please find attached your predicted video file, the first line of the email reads. They’ve resent the original email; a glitch, maybe, or a result of his repeated calling. He doesn’t want to look at it again and ignores it. He can hear the sound of the maids stacking their trolleys in the storeroom next door, the whispered gaggle of their voices, their accents coming through the walls and underneath the door. This is one of the cheapest rooms, the ones that they comp with conference tickets, when you can’t go complaining about the quality. He sits up and looks for a drink, but there are no bottles of water on the bedside tables. He goes to the minibar and finds it empty, another sign that the room was given away free, purged of anything that might cause accidental charges to be made. He tiptoes to the bathroom and drinks from the tap and then goes back into the room, thinking he’ll get dressed and take a cab to find a coffee place or something. Maybe just go and wait for breakfast to be served. It’s a quarter of five, so it won’t be long. He pulls his trousers on, and his shirt, and then checks for his phone. He finds it in his shoes and he picks them up and carries them with him as he opens the door and sneaks out. The door softly shuts itself behind him and he sees the first of the maids pushing her cart down the corridor, starting on the unoccupied rooms, getting them ready for the day.
He sits on a sofa down the corridor and pulls his shoes on while he checks his phone. The video is still up in the browser app. With the maid gone into the room, the hotel seems to fall silent. There’s just Amit and the video. The elevators are silent and there’s no distant murmur of televisions or the rumble of dragged suitcases. He opens the email and presses play, watches it one more time. He wonders if anybody at ClearVista saw this before they sent it out; what dream they hoped it would realize when it landed in Laurence’s hands.
Laurence. The email. Amit goes to it and looks to see who it was sent to – and there’s Laurence’s email address right next to his. He stands and rushes to the elevator, hammers the button for their floor; the elevator seems to take forever. It stops two floors down, to let some British tourists on – early morning, a family of four woken by jetlag and forced to get on with their day – and then carries on its descent. When he’s out he goes to the room and he breathes deeply outside, then he opens the door quietly, hoping to repeat the trick from last night and delete the email before Laurence even has a sniff of its existence, but the lights are on in the room: Laurence is awake. There’s a moment – brief, unexpected, terrifying – where he expects to see Laurence’s body strung from the ceiling, not swinging but perfectly still, the face bloated and purple, too gone to be saved.
But Laurence is lying on the bed, propped up by pillows. He’s got his laptop open, the sound of slight crying coming from the tinny speakers. He looks up at Amit and he turns the screen, frozen on the terrified and distorted faces of his family.
‘What the hell is this?’ he asks, his voice small and quiet. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t know,’ Amit says. Laurence shuts his eyes for a second, holding them tightly closed, and then reaches out. He swipes the air over the keyboard and the video begins to play again.
6
The original plan is that Lane will look after Alyx while Deanna collects Laurence from the airport, but Deanna changes her mind as she’s almost out of the door. She asks them both to come with her.
‘No,’ Lane says. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’
‘We’ll get food,’ her mother says. ‘We’ll go and get some dinner and then you can do whatever it is that’s so urgent when we get home.’ She looks at Alyx. ‘Go get in the car, honey,’ she says, opening it with the fob, and then she turns her attention to Lane. ‘I don’t ask much of you,’ she says. ‘Please, just do this for me.’ And she stands to one side so that Lane can get past, because it’s not even really a request. Amit has texted her, telling her that Laurence needs to relax. Stress at a maximum, he wrote. All of his appearances have been cancelled. Might be a mistake, he had written, because we flew all the way out here, but I think he should come back. He needs some time. Deanna agreed. Nothing to worry about.
In the car, which smells so new and clean, she tunes the radio to Alyx’s choice, some pop station full of songs that sound like every possible type of music all at once. Deanna likes it, though, because the songs are all so slight as to be immediately catchy. They fade rather than being overwhelming and she catches herself singing along with tunes that she’s only now hearing for the first time. Or, it could be that she’s heard them before and they’re just forgotten. She keeps looking at her youngest daughter in the rearview mirror: watching her bouncing in her seat, mouthing the words wrong, occasionally becoming distracted and forgetting about the lyrics entirely. It’s a stark contract to Lane, who stares outside the entire time, only pausing to look down at her phone to furiously tap on the screen. She doesn’t even look while she’s writing some of the texts or tweets or whatever they are. She also mouths the words, sometimes, which makes Deanna smile. Lane would deny it, of course, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
The drive to the airport at this time of day is okay, the traffic just starting to quieten down, and they manage to find a space in one of the short-stay car parks. Laurence’s flight is on time and they wait at the barrier to greet him. Alyx writes his name on an unfolded napkin taken from the closest coffee shop and she and Deanna whoop and cheer when they see him. Amit’s stayed behind in Texas to s
mooth things over, to go and meet the investors himself and keep them sweet. Laurence smiles when he spots them, but it’s false. Deanna sees through it straightaway: he’s a ghost. If the kids notice, they don’t show it. They follow him to the end of the barrier. He holds Alyx first – Deanna notices his arm wrapped around her, his hand gripping her shirt with an almost claw-like grip – and then Deanna and Lane.
‘You never come to collect me,’ he says. ‘They would have sent a car.’
‘We’re just pleased to have you home,’ Deanna tells him. She looks into his eyes, and they’re vacant and spare. ‘We missed you,’ she says. She kisses him, and he kisses her back, and she thinks how dry it is.
‘What is this?’ Laurence asks as Deanna tells him to close his eyes as they walk through the garage.
‘Just, go on,’ she says, ‘keep them shut.’
‘I don’t want to,’ he tells her. ‘What is this?’ She sighs and holds up the fob, and beeps the lights on the new car. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says.
‘I got a deal on the SUV. I traded it in with Ann for this. We didn’t need it any more and we’d been talking about getting rid of it.’ She doesn’t mention the accident. ‘I wanted to do something,’ she says, ‘and it was about time.’
