by Jim Fusilli
Still no one comes.
More excruciating minutes slip past until both hands are free. More still before she can stand. She sidles to the door, peers through the bars, expects to see the same bare corridors of her memory, the same numbered cells.
Instead, she sees her own living space.
She stares at her sofa, her bookcases, and her fireplace with stupefied incomprehension.
They never took me anywhere at all.
The door opens without resistance and she prowls the empty rooms, going first to the study where she takes her backup piece, a short-barrel five-shot Taurus revolver, from the safe in the floor.
She finds the air conditioning wound up to high heat, a portable humidifier and a loop tape of background effects. The music they used to torment her has been imported onto her own laptop. She can no longer bear to have a hi-fi system in the house.
Bewildered and disorientated, she retreats into an upstairs closet, clutching both the gun and her phone, and calls it in.
“CLARA! JESUS, YOU OKAY?”
She pulls the blanket the medics gave her a little closer around her shoulders. “What do you think, Dan?” No, I’m not.
It’s been nearly two years since she stopped taking his calls, since she started blocking his emails. He’s aged—it’s a business that puts years on people in months. The once-athletic figure is now blurring into doughy mid-life spread, the jawline beginning to soften, the hair to thin. But he still owns the room the moment he strides in. She waits for the old familiar tingle at first sight of him.
It doesn’t come.
Without it she achieves clarity. He is a high-level spook who’s sweated through too many weekends in the office or the field to ever know his children. Had it been anyone else in charge back then, would she have yielded so easily to pressure from above?
Perhaps sensing this new reserve, he maintains a distance, scans her with cautious, professional eyes.
“The medics said you were in pretty good shape, considering what you’ve . . . been through.”
“Physically? I guess so.”
He doesn’t respond to that, just pulls out his signature Marlboro and shakes a couple loose. The two of them bonded over snatched cigarette breaks, but he doesn’t offer her the pack. She wouldn’t have taken one anyway. She quit the month after she quit the job. The fact that he knows this sends a prickle of unease zigzagging between her shoulder blades.
She wants to tell him not to smoke in her home, but after everything else that’s been done there it seems a minor infringement.
“What did they want? Revenge, maybe?”
“Payback,” she says. “They wanted to make me appreciate what they’d been through.”
He waits again. A good interrogator who knows when to let silence exert its own pull.
“The techniques we used—in Cuba, Iraq. . . . Have you ever experienced them for yourself?”
“Of course,” he says, on safer ground now. “Started with the S.E.R.E. program back in the Cold War—Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape. Anyone with access to the kind of intel the Soviets might want to squeeze out of them went through it.”
“And that included the music?”
“Loud music, stress positions, extreme temperatures, water-boarding, sleep deprivation. The whole nine yards.” He takes a long drag on his cigarette, pinches a flake of stray tobacco from his tongue. “We didn’t do anything to those ragheads we hadn’t been through ourselves. Otherwise, how’d we know how effective it would be to soften ’em up?”
A pulse begins to hammer in her temple. “You went through a what—maybe a twenty-four or thirty-six-hour simulation and you think that makes you an expert? You don’t have the faintest idea what the fuck it’s like!”
“Hey, calm down, Clara! Jesus, girl—”
One of the cleanup team appears in the doorway to the study. They moved her out of the living room and she refused to go sit in the kitchen like a good little housewife.
Dan moves across to him and the two confer in murmurs. The guy’s eyes flick to her a couple of times. She reads pity in them.
Dan turns back all smiles.
“We need you to come in—debrief,” he says. “The boys are finished here. They’ll take the cage back to the lab and take it apart—track down the source materials. We’ll have you look through some names and faces. See if anything jogs loose.”
“Just like old times.”
“Yeah, just like old times.” He moves in, puts both hands on her shoulders and gives her full eye contact for the required time to create trust. “I’ll pull in some favors from Homeland. Don’t worry, Clara, we’ll run these bastards down.”
He indicates the door, that she should walk ahead of him, inclining his head like this is good manners and nothing else.
She stands her ground.
“Why run them down, Dan?” she asks. “What are you going to charge them with?”
“You have to ask? Kidnapping, what else?”
She shrugs. “But they didn’t take me anywhere.”
“Okay then, they held you against your will. They tortured you, for God’s sake.”
“How?”
“What? You’re not making sense.”
“We here in the good ol’ US of A do not condone or actively take part in the use of torture on detainees.”
“What’s that got to—”
“They did nothing to me that hasn’t been done to them. By us.”
“Yes, but that’s different—”
She rides over him again. “We tortured them, Dan. I tortured them. And, through me, so did you.”
“Clara, I . . . have those fuckers been onto you about the Senate hearings again?”
And then she knows. She’s always been a risk to them. Ever since she left—ever since she told them why she was leaving. So they’ve been watching her.
The way you do with a weak link, keeping track, keeping check. Waiting for it to fail. And when it does, you cut out the ruined pieces and rejoin the chain so nobody can tell what once was there is now gone.
He stalls, lighting another cigarette. She doesn’t remember him putting out the first.
Eventually, he looks up narrow-eyed through a smoky exhale and says, “Yes, we did, Clara. We tortured them. And you know what? Faced with making the same fucking decision over again, right now, I’d do it over again. In a heartbeat.”
“So you can look me in the eye and swear—can absolutely swear—that it was worth it? That whatever intel we forced out of those prisoners was genuine, high-grade, twenty-four-karat gold and not just whatever they thought we wanted to hear?”
But he can’t do it. His silence speaks for itself.
She nods as if he’s spoken anyway. “Some of them were innocent.”
“Bullshit. They were all legitimate enemy combatants, radicals, fanatics.”
“If they weren’t going in, they certainly were coming out. It wasn’t just the sheer acoustic bombardment we subjected them to, was it? Those songs bragged about the supremacy of the West. They were violent, provocative, or just goddamned annoying. We saturated them in an unwanted culture. It would be enough to turn anyone against us.”
“Oh, so now who’s the expert?”
She shoots back, “The one who’s been on the receiving end.”
She sees him take a pull on his temper, take a breath.
“We need to go, Clara.”
Reluctantly, she moves, out along the hallway. By the entrance to the living room she pauses, eyeing the empty space where her makeshift prison cell has been taken down and taken away.
“Have you wondered,” she asks, “why they picked on me?”
He shrugs. “They must have known, with the hearings coming up, we need for all of us to hold the line. Anyone breaks and it leaves the rest of us with our asses swinging in the wind.”
“But weren’t you the one who told me that everyone breaks in the end?”
“Yeah, and some break sooner than others.”
“So you thought I’d break.”
He sighs. “You were pretty damn close to it before you left.”
She leans against the door frame and closes her eyes. The darkness frightens her. The music is back pounding inside her head. She has to raise her voice over it.
“And now?”
Another sigh. “I’m sorry, Clara.”
She looks at him. There’s a blunt semiautomatic in his hand. She doesn’t recognize the model but it looks cheap. A throw-down piece, designed to be used once and left alongside the body.
“So am I,” she says.
She sees the realization dawn in his face a split-second before she fires, through the blanket still around her shoulders. The Taurus kicks in her hand and a small dark circle appears on Dan’s shirt, just to the right of his tie.
He drops the gun and staggers back, hitting the side wall and slithering down as his legs give way. He lands sprawled against the skirting, touches the wound and stares at the blood as if he can’t quite believe she’s done it. A half-gasp, half-laugh escapes him.
“You’re prepared . . . to kill me for what . . . I made you do to those bastards?”
“No.” She lets the blanket drop and stands over him. “I’m prepared to kill you for what you made me do to myself.”
LOOK AT ME/DON’T LOOK AT ME
BY REED FARREL COLEMAN
FIVE MINUTES TO STAGE, MR. LAKE.
Terry James Lake remembered a time when his nerves were reserved for the confessional. And for the entire decade of the sixties, with a year of grace and spillage into the seventies, Terry had had much to confess. A darkly handsome man in possession of a bushel full of Southern charm and an Aw Shucks country smile, Terry had a way with the ladies and, upon occasion, when the drugs and the spirit moved him, with the men folk, too. The thing was that Terry James Lake—Terry Jim to his fans—was about as country as the D train and his Southern charm was strictly South Brooklyn.
“Oy gevalt, we’ve got to do something about that fucking accent of yours. You sound like an extra from Guys and Dolls, for chrissakes!” was the first thing the General had said to Terry over a beer after Terry’s set at Folk City. He gave Terry a soft, avuncular slap on the cheek. “Such a punim. With a face like that, the chicks, you’ll have to beat them off with a stick once we ditch this folk music crap, clean you up, and get you a fancy electric guitar.”
Terry was already a bit of a chameleon, so he had no problem with the notion of rearranging himself into any shape if it meant steady money and steady pussy. He’d already done a transformation of sorts from Geraldo Colangelo—Italian father, Puerto Rican mother—to Jerry Cole, the folkie with soul. It wasn’t like he really loved folk music, anyway. He found a lot of it to be hokey crap that had as much to do with his life as a pizza pie with a wagon wheel.
He had even less patience for the purveyors and consumers of it. He had no love for the café owners who liked to think of themselves as Bohemian impresarios, but were more like backstreet pimps. They loved you like a son, a younger brother, as a talent supreme. They loved you backstage and on stage. They loved you right up until payday. Then they grew alligator arms and stiff fingers that never quite reached deep enough into their pockets. Every night for them was a rough night. Every week a rough week. Every month rougher than the last. Yet somehow they managed to stay in business.
Then there were the silly goofballs who sat out there in the dark “feeling it” and finding the deeper meaning in the traditional songs.
“‘Jimmy Crack Corn,’ my balls,” he’d once shouted out in drunken disgust at a pal’s rent party in the East Village. “And is Michael’s boat ever getting to shore or what?” He just couldn’t bear all the hushed and phony reverence. It was one thing when Lead Belly sang “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” but it was something else when three milk-skinned Princeton grads with matching plaid short-sleeve shirts, chinos, penny loafers, and five-dollar haircuts sang it.
He laughed now, remembering that night in February of ’62. Talk about silence. All the people in the cold water flat in Alphabet City turned to stare at him after his outburst, a mixture of shock and contempt in their eyes. But not quite in everybody’s eyes. One Beat chick with long straight brown hair that came to the waistline between her black turtleneck and black tights, smiled at him with her eyes. For the benefit of the other partygoers, she’d kept her mouth neutral. But there was nothing neutral about her mouth twenty minutes later in the stairwell.
He reserved his greatest contempt for his fellow performers, those Princeton grads with their standup basses, banjos, and Martin guitars. Them and the girl singer escapees from the Seven Sisters who de-sexed themselves in some bizarre, over-earnest gesture of martyrdom to Woody Guthrie, the Rosenbergs, and the working man. He called bullshit on them.
When his discharge from the service in ’60 was greeted with substantially less fanfare than a certain other handsome, dark-haired singer’s, Geraldo Colangelo didn’t have many prospects lined up. His father got him a job unloading produce trucks at the Brooklyn Terminal Market. On a night off, he went into the Village with this girl from the old neighborhood and they stumbled into an open mic set at Café Wha? Some guy was strumming on a Sears acoustic and croaking out songs Terry used to sing in Thursday morning assemblies at PS 58. It didn’t escape Geraldo’s notice that the singer, a scruffy, pimply faced stick figure, was receiving enthusiastic applause, female adulation and money in a hat being passed through the crowd. That was the moment Geraldo Colangelo shed his name, his skin, and his sore back for a new name and a used acoustic.
Folk music was a means to an end, a way to get into a holding pattern to see what was what and to figure an angle. The folk scene was strong, though Jerry sensed it wouldn’t last. There were limits to its appeal to the wider teen audience, who, as far as Jerry could tell, didn’t give a shit about the Bomb or segregation or tradition. But Jerry also knew he wasn’t cut out to be a pretty white boy crooner like Paul Anka, Bobby Vee, or Bobby Vinton. He had the looks, but not quite the voice to carry off that type of thing. Besides, those guys struck him as Sinatra wannabes who were more suited to singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs than at a hop. The one thing folk afforded him was the chance to write his own songs. That much, he liked about folk. Not much else.
So when the General, Izzy Gettleman, offered to buy Jerry a beer after his set at Folk City, he couldn’t get to Vinny’s Tavern on Sullivan Street fast enough. Izzy was a famous manager, the Kike Colonel Parker, as he was called behind his back. Izzy was renowned for picking up talent wherever he could. The thing was that once the General took you on and you put your name on the dotted line, you belonged to him, lock, stock, and amplifier. You sang the songs he told you to sing, dressed the way he told you to dress, dated the people he told you to date. It was a deal with the devil, if a benevolent one.
WE NEED YOU ON STAGE NOW, MR. LAKE.
Terry stared into the mirror in the makeshift dressing room, fussed with his now unnaturally black shag-cut hair, finger-combed his dyed mustache and shook his head at the desiccated, made-up face of the man looking back at him. He didn’t like what he saw. Didn’t like the ridiculous white polyester suit with the high-waisted flared pants and the red-acetate shirt in which he had been outfitted. Especially didn’t like the sparkly plastic stars pasted onto the broad lapels of his silly jacket. He didn’t much like the chunky platform shoes either, though they were the least embarrassing piece of his costume.
“And they said sixties’ fashion was a joke,” he muttered to himself, derisively flicking his left lapel in disgust. “Yeah, right. Fucking clown suit for a clown.”
He grabbed his signature guitar, the one Izzy had picked out for him at Manny’s all those years ago, a ’63 surf-green Fender Telecaster that had taken on a robin’s egg blue patina over time. He hated that he wasn’t actually going to play it. That he wasn’t even going to plug in when lip-synching that hideous fucking song yet again. A song that had come to define him
, overshadowing everything else he’d done before or since.
Izzy had done to Jerry exactly what he’d said he would do during that first meeting. They ditched the folk music scene, bought him the aforementioned Fender, recast him as a Southern boy, but not too Southern.
“From the south, sure, but not too country. Anybody asks, you say you don’t like talking about your childhood. Just say you grew up poor and hungry. I think we both know from this, so it’s not so much a lie.” He patted Terry’s face as was his wont. “Put some twang in your voice, but not too much twang. You’re a white boy who loves Chuck Berry tunes and R&B. You’re gonna write maybe some tunes of your own with that kinda feel. We’re gonna get you some gigs up here in the north until you perfect that down-home accent because up here they don’t know from down there.”
And it had worked. It had worked better than either the General or Jerry cum Terry Jim would have believed. It didn’t hurt that the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion legionnaires also loved Chuck Berry and R&B. And Terry Jim proved to be a pretty respectable songwriter. By ’66 he was a Top 40 fixture, even making his way into the Top 10 on three occasions: twice with cover tunes and once with his own hit, “Look At Me/Don’t Look At Me.” It was still the biggest hit he’d ever penned and the single thing he was most proud of. But no one wanted to hear a slow ballad about a facially disfigured war vet writing a goodbye letter to his girl, especially not these days. Vietnam was a recent bad memory everyone wanted to bury and forget. These days it was all disco all the time or that punk rock shit.
No, the only thing people ever wanted to hear from him whenever they bothered to want to hear from him was the stupid theme song from the TV show Thriller Man, one of those peculiarly sixties success stories. First a hit in France as L’Agent Dangereux, the hour-long show about a hunky American espionage agent named Gabriel and his stunning French sidekick, Gigi, was shot on location all over the world. CBS bought it and showed it on Saturday nights at nine. But because the French title didn’t work, neither did the original French theme song. Enter Terry James Lake, his guitar, and a song written by Deptford and Clark. The show lasted one season on American TV, but the theme song had become a radio staple. When he did the occasional sixties rock revival show, the one song they demanded he play was “Thriller Man.” No Chuck Berry covers. No hits of his own. Not “Look At Me/Don’t Look At Me.” Just that one fucking song.
