by James Smythe
She looks on the counter for his wallet and keys – every house that they have lived in, that’s been his routine, put the wallet and keys on the kitchen counter or a mantle or a table, whichever’s most convenient – but she can’t see them. She can’t see his jacket either, which would be the next most likely place. His bag is here. She opens it, praying that the keys – or, next best, the gun – might have been left inside it. But there’s nothing of any use: a shirt, a vest, a change of underwear, and his wash bag. Everything he might need for a stopover on the campaign trail. She opens the back door, sliding it to one side, steps out onto the decking. Plant boxes line the sides, built from the same wood, overgrowing with nothing that looks as if it’s actually meant to be inside them. And the dock, or what they called the dock. The same wood as the deck. Where the ground drops away, a steep incline from the grass to sand, the dock stays level, two foot above the water. It’s perfect for a small boat, Laurence once said. Think of the summers we can have when all of this is over.
It’s incredible how still the water is. Every step makes the wooden struts move slightly and ripples come from them, like a finger breaking the surface. She reaches the end of the dock and looks down and sees the reeds below, and the creepers, like hands.
Everything reflects when the water is finally completely still; even Deanna, as she peers into the darkness below her.
She leaves the dock and heads around the side of the house, to the car. She prays that he’s left the doors open and the keys inside it. Then she sees him, asleep in the passenger seat. It’s jacked backwards as far as it can go and his eyes are shut. He is a sentry, waiting at the only road out of this place. But there are fields, and there are woods – other ways out of here – and if he doesn’t see them, maybe they will have a chance.
She goes back inside and up the stairs, worrying less about the noise. It’s still so early and, if they’re lucky, Laurence will be asleep a good while yet. She tells the girls to get out of bed.
‘What’s happening?’ Alyx asks, rubbing her eyes.
‘We’re leaving,’ Deanna says. ‘We have to be very quiet though.’ She looks out of the window here at the side of the house. If they can get to the woods, they can make it back to town. It will only take them an hour or so. She gets them dressed, and she doesn’t make a game out of this or pretend that there’s anything other than escape occurring. There’s no point, not now. She packs everything into the bag; but actually, she thinks, she should leave the bag, because when he wakes up and looks for them, that will be a distraction. It will make him think that they’re there still. She looks through to see if there’s anything that she needs, and there’s the phone; the broken shell, cheap shattered plastic, the innards visible and the battery rattling inside. She leaves it with the clothes. All of this, now, is detritus.
‘Down the stairs,’ she says. They rush down, and there he is.
‘You’re all up early,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she tells him.
‘I fell asleep,’ he says. ‘I was out there, on the dock, and I just went off. I was watching in the night and I saw a light across the way; I was trying to work out what it was, because maybe there was something on the other side of the lake. I don’t think there were people living there when we were here before. But now, I could see it; at least, reflecting in the water, I saw it. I think I saw it in the air as well. But then I fell asleep. I think it’s the sound of the lake. It laps, you know, against the beach. I hadn’t thought.’
Deanna thinks about how still the water was when she was out there. The lake is landlocked. There’s no tide.
‘So I lay back and I listened to it and I watched the light. I haven’t done anything like that in years and years. Just let myself relax, you know. Then I got cold, so I slept in the car.’ He looks at the girls. ‘I feel better here,’ he says. ‘We should eat something. There’s bread in the freezer. Lots of other stuff as well. And jars in the pantry. Jelly and peanut butter.’ He waits at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Then I’m going to go swimming.’
They eat because they feel that they should, and because Deanna makes eyes at them. When their father is in the pantry, Alyx asks if they’re still going, her voice low, buried by the background noise.
‘Not now,’ Deanna whispers. When Laurence comes back he has got his boxer shorts on, his shirt pulled off. Deanna cannot look at him; he is so thin she can see through his skin, almost. His bones look almost as if they are on the outside. He puts the suit on the sofa, laid out like an empty man, and he opens the back door.
‘Come and watch me,’ he says. He opens the back door and laughs, as if this is the most natural thing in the world. ‘I’ll bet the water is freezing,’ he says. ‘Oh my God.’
They can see him through the windows, as he struts onto the dock. He raises both arms above his head into a perfect dive pose, his ribs a ladder up the length of his body. ‘Okay,’ he says, and he breathes in, a suck of air that makes his chest swell; and he almost draws back for a second before going forward, a one and a two and then up into the air. Then down into the water, and the ripples spread out as he goes deeper. From where Deanna is standing she can’t see him; only the water rushing out in lapping waves. She thinks about what happens if he doesn’t resurface; if he calls for her help.
There’s a gasp, and then a scream; and then he laughs. ‘It’s so cold!’ he says. ‘That is the coldest.’ He swims around and then climbs out, hoisting himself up, his skin blue from the water and from how cold he is; and then he does it again, and again.
He tells Deanna that they need food. He says, ‘You should go and get it, I think.’ He sits at the table, dressed again, his suit on. She sees his hand playing with the pocket of the jacket, the weight of the gun inside it pulling it down. He throws her the car key and he looks at the girls. ‘Get enough food for a few days,’ he says. ‘Then we can work out where we’re going to go after this.’ He hands her money, crumpled banknotes. She wonders if he knows how threatening this is, or if this is all accidental. Maybe he just trusts her; or maybe the children are a bargaining chip. They’re insurance.
‘Okay,’ Deanna says. She’s fine while she goes to the car and gets in and adjusts the seat and the mirrors; and then all the way down the dirt path, and through the woods. It’s not until she gets in view of their old house that she stops the car and screams to herself, and beats the steering wheel and cries.
There’s a crowd of cars outside Henderson’s. People doing their shopping, trying to avoid trekking to Walmart (or, if they’re feeling sanctimonious and daring, Whole Foods). As people load their cars they look at her, but she doesn’t make eye contact. She wonders what she should do here; because he has the gun, and her daughters. There’s a television in the corner of the shop, mounted up on the wall. It’s showing the news. She thinks, All of this is inevitable. Even seeing this now. There’s a snippet of Laurence’s video, the first one, from ClearVista. The newsreaders don’t seem to even talk about it afterwards, as if it’s a commercial being shown out of context. They say that Laurence is wanted for questioning. This is just a part of their daily programming schedule. Laurence, the newsreader says, should be considered armed and dangerous. They use a screen grab of him as the main image, rather than an older publicity photograph; it’s slightly off angle, as he looks away from his video family. It all feels inevitable. Homme recreated his video to fulfil a prophecy and Laurence is a crashing airplane, a collapsing building of a man.
She turns away, and she sees Trent Henderson watching her from behind the counter. He leans over, both hands flat on the wood – he made this shop’s fittings himself, he tells anybody who will listen, chopped and whittled and sanded and made appropriate for the purpose – and he bends forward.
‘Deanna, are you okay?’ he asks. He speaks quietly, so that he can barely be heard.
‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Just getting some food.’
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘So do you need help?’ He suggests so much. Ju
st tell me, his voice says, and I can do whatever you like. I can call the police. I can have them come here. Deanna hesitates, which she knows is a mistake; it’s what will get him wondering. Treat him as a man who said what he did about your husband. Remember that you love Laurence, and act it.
‘I know where everything is,’ she says. She picks up a box of cookies, as proof of this, and puts it into the basket she’s carrying around the shop.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Didn’t mean to imply otherwise.’ He nods. She turns away and goes to the chilled section at the back, picking up burgers and chicken fillets and mince for chili, and she gets vegetables to go with it all. This is all for show: five a day, protein and vegetables, playing house. She takes chips and cookies and other things that will keep, because she doesn’t know how long they’ll be there. Bagels, milk. All the stuff they might need. She takes the basket to the counter and heaves it up, and Trent starts unpacking it. ‘Need bags?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ she says. He whips a paper bag through the air, sending air into it, inflating it, and he stands it on the counter. He looks closely at her, and he takes the items out of the basket and puts them straight into the bag, not running them through. He speaks quietly and she notices that it is barely moving his beard, that’s how subtle he’s being.
‘I don’t know if he’s watching,’ he says, ‘but I will help you, Deanna. I can help. We can do something.’ He moves his head to make eye contact with her. ‘This isn’t your fault, and there is no guilt here. You hear me?’
‘Okay,’ she says. She nods. She nearly bites, but only nearly. He keeps filling the bags. ‘You haven’t put them through the till.’
‘Oh,’ he says, as if he hasn’t noticed. ‘So you listen to me, and answer me this: where are you staying? In the Roadtel?’
‘No,’ she says.
‘Somebody was in here yesterday saw you out that way.’
‘We were there,’ she says.
‘So now you’re back at home.’
‘No,’ she says. She looks at the television, and she sees the video again. She can’t even be sure it’s on the screen there and then; that this isn’t an echo, a memory of it. Lights tracing in the darkness. ‘We’re at the lake,’ she says. Everything rushes: relief and panic, all in one. He nods and reaches out his hand, and he squeezes her hand.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry.’ She doesn’t tell him what she wants, or what to expect. He will tell the police, and they will turn up at the lake house, likely; and they will take Laurence away. It will be the end of this. ‘You take this stuff and we’ll worry about it later.’
‘I have to give you the money,’ she says, and she takes out the money from her pocket and passes it to him.
‘Whatever you want,’ he says. He stands and watches her load the car and then drive away, his arms folded across his chest. He stays there until she has gone completely from view.
When she gets back, Laurence runs out to help her carry the bags in. He is still in his suit. He leans in to pick up the bags, and he moves to her sharply, kissing her cheek.
‘It’s good to have you back,’ he says.
15
Amit queues to leave the airport for some reason, a train of people lined up to show their ID cards and get themselves verified. He is inspected, and he is asked his intentions in the Great State of California. He says that it’s pleasure, because that’s so much easier than even attempting to explain any of this. Because he doesn’t know what this is, he thinks. He’s here to go to ClearVista. He’s here to try and track down Hershel. He’s here to get an answer about how this happened, and maybe get something resembling an end to this. That’s all he wants, he thinks. Closure.
The cab driver asks him where he’s going. It’s getting late, too late to do anything tonight, and so he asks for the nearest hotel he has a chain membership of. Might as well start spending the points, he thinks. There’s no campaign trail to worry about now.
The hotel is what he expects. They hand him a warmed cookie with his key, and they say the same phrase as always to him. The room itself is the perfect temperature, and it’s quiet. The television is on, tuned to the channel that he most watched in his last few stays. It’s predictable, and predictive.
He takes everything out of his satchel, and he streams all the videos to the TV one last time. They’ve become even more unsettling to him, escalating in their terror, in the violence that they show. He orders room service, a burger that arrives and tastes the same as every other burger he’s ever eaten in one of these hotels; and he watches TV, the paid channels that he doesn’t pay for at home because he’s never there. He is drifting off, the TV show in the background a shouted soundtrack to whatever it is he’s thinking of as he goes, when his phone rings. It’s Jessie.
‘So: Thomas Gabriel Hershel the second. Arrested for gambling scams in Vegas, June 2013. Arrested for – wait for it – blackmail in August of 2015. Ran some scam, sending letters to a government representative out of New Orleans. Didn’t do time, but paid out large.’
‘He didn’t tell me about that.’
‘I’m not done. Arrested again, November 2016, running an online gambling scam. He did some time in Virginia State, came out, went back to working for ClearVista; and then he purchased it a month later.’
‘Purchased it?’
‘He bought out the shareholders.’
‘With what?’
‘He had a portfolio, that much is clear. He was probably running things that he wasn’t caught doing. You know how it is.’
‘Yes.’
‘So,’ Jessie asks, ‘big question is, why make the video he did?’
‘You think he made it?’
‘You think he didn’t?’ She’s exasperated. ‘Amit: blackmail, scams. He’s a criminal.’
‘That black and white?’
‘That black and white, yes. Certainly.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘Publicity? Look how much screen time ClearVista has gotten out of this. Look at what the Homme campaign has achieved. He’s basically the next president of the United States, and all because he paid a hundred grand for some bullshit video.’
‘It doesn’t change anything.’
‘Of course it does!’
‘I knew him.’ Amit looks up at the ceiling. He realizes that this hotel is different. A tiny, tiny thing. The others have plain, smooth ceilings with in-set light fittings. Nothing breaks the line of the room. This one, there’s a pattern in the paint. Like you see in old houses, in older hotels, soft lines drawn into it, into concentric circular patterns.
‘What are you going to do?’ Jessie asks.
‘Go to ClearVista, see if he’s there. Try and talk to him.’
‘You give me the story when you’re done?’
‘You clear Laurence’s name, it’s all yours.’ He doesn’t mean Laurence any more, he thinks. He means Deanna and the kids. He wants them to have a life again, because this could ruin them. And himself; he wants to know that he was validated. That he didn’t back the wrong horse.
‘I’m one of the good guys,’ Jessie says.
‘So was Hershel.’
He sleeps. He dreams of something, and wakes up drenched in sweat, again and again; turning over, finding a cool part of the bed, sleeping again, and then repeating himself.
Breakfast is a croissant smeared with jelly and two thick espressos thrown down his throat. He orders a cab and waits outside in the sun, hopelessly ill-prepared for the weather here. He didn’t bring his sunglasses or his lighter suit, so he takes his jacket off and rolls up his shirt sleeves and he lets himself sweat, surrounded by planted palm trees and pale burnt cacti. He tries to call Deanna again, but there’s nothing; and he searches Twitter for Laurence’s name. The cycle hasn’t moved on yet. Everybody in political office around the country is doing their best to disown him if they’re feeling kind, or smear his name if not. Some claim to have known what he was like; telling stories about the kind of
man that they believed him to be. People who were photographed with Laurence, who thanked him for his contributions or support, who shook his hand before, and now they’re jumping ship. Amit sees an interview with the Texan investor. He says that he never met with Laurence, because there was always an excuse. Man like that, you can’t trust. He had demands, and he wanted money and support. But he couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me that he was a good person. I didn’t contribute, in the end. Didn’t trust Senator Walker, not one little bit. Amit’s name has been left out of all this. He’s barely mentioned. This was all Laurence, it seems; a lone operator, gone rogue, accountable for his own actions and nothing else.
The cab pulls in and takes Amit down the highway. He winds the window down and moves his head close to the window, and he feels the wind – the rush – of California going past. This was part of the dream, once. A month after Texas, this was where they were going to be, drumming up support. It’s red state heartland, so both Laurence and Homme were desperate to get its support. Nothing else mattered so much: a knockdown, drag-out fight between the two men to take this state’s support and likely the nomination with it. Now, Amit can’t fathom being here for that.
The view turns from trees and slickness to more run-down buildings, and then to desert, briefly; and then, in the distance, the shimmering silver and glass of the corporations and tech companies. They glimmer like a mirage in the distance, reflecting the sun. The cab driver turns on the GPS and says, ‘ClearVista,’ and the computer adjusts and points them down street after street of buildings that tower over them. Amit doesn’t see another human being. Instead, there are signs advertising low-cost lease options; padlocked doors; empty parking lots. Then the GPS says that they are approaching their destination, and Amit spots it on a junction ahead. They likely wouldn’t have missed it, Amit thinks. It’s curved, a filled-in archway of dark-mirrored glass, the company logo deep-set into the glass. On the floor, the same glass surrounds it, making a circular base that reflects the building and the sky both. Everything reflects itself. Amit pays the driver with his card, praying it’ll go through – in his worst nightmares he is suddenly stranded, relying on his wiles, which feel worn away and too tired by far – and it does. The driver asks if he should stay.
