Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  Cold swept over Casper and raised gooseflesh on his arms. He knew the emptiness Reynolds was babbling about. There was a memory of something or somewhere that had been taken away from him the first time he was thrust into the pool.

  “Hold him.” A new voice, deep and dispassionate.

  There followed the confused noise of violent struggle. Men grunted, and I could hear objects being overturned and knocked into.

  “Some of them remember it!” shouted Reynolds. “Some of the Warrens! Remember what we were all supposed to forget! The Pool! The grasshopper isn’t—”

  “Hold his arms!”

  “No! Get back!” cried Reynolds, his voice distant from the telephone.

  Whatever he said next was lost to a sound like a small electric motor revving. Reynolds began to scream incoherently. The motor strained. There was a grinding crunch and a pressurized pop. It was followed by quiet except for several people breathing and a sound as though a cup of water was being slowly emptied onto the floor.

  There was a soft rustling against the phone.

  “Are you still there?” It was the man with the calm, deep voice.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What is your name?”

  “Doug MacArthur.”

  “If you told me, it would spare some trouble,” the man said.

  “That’s not at the top of my list. What did you do to Reynolds?”

  “Pray that we have more use for you.”

  The line went dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Some nights, no matter how hard it is to fall asleep, your body just gives up. Some nights you have to medicate yourself with a few belts of Brown Barrel. I opted for both and woke tangled up in the sheets as if I’d lost a fight with them. Maybe I had. I sure felt as if I’d gone ten rounds with somebody.

  I rolled onto my side of the bed. Gone. Lynn was gone, and I was alone. At least I didn’t have any nightmares about that fucking grasshopper or wake up coughing. It was bright and warm in the bedroom, and I flopped onto my back again and lay with the curtain-yellowed daylight across my chest. I heard Lynn in the kitchen, at the stove. She had something hissing in a pan. Bacon and eggs, by the smell of it.

  She was talking. I could make out her voice but not her words. By the tone of her voice I knew that she was addressing Frank, the black tomcat that slept in the bed when I wasn’t around and stayed out of sight when I was. Not that I ever did anything to that damn cat; it just didn’t like me.

  I leaned my head off the bed so I could see into the kitchen. Lynn was standing at the sink, showered and dressed, her red apron tied around her waist. Stocking lines down the back of her legs. The cat arched its back as it rubbed against one. Patti Page was on the radio in the living room. Lynn rubbed at her cheek with fingers reddened by hot water. She was beautiful; the moment was poured-amber perfect.

  Voices intruded from the backyards outside. A woman was yelling to her child. Cars honked on the street. The moment was slipping away. The more I tried to cling to it, the more acutely I experienced its loss. Lynn began to run water in the kitchen. There was a distant plane flying overhead. The moment was pulled into the turning gears. It was gone forever.

  I sat up, and the muck shifted in my lungs. That started the coughing. Lynn called out to me, but I was already on my feet, stumbling into the bathroom. I choked clotted black and yellow and red into the sink. Ran the shower to cover the noise. When I managed to stop the coughing, I shaved with the Remington and cleaned myself, finally coming awake beneath the hot stream of the shower. I spit a little more into the shower drain. There was blood smearing the phlegm. As it swirled, I recalled Beau Reynolds ebbing away in a hotel shower.

  “I’ve gone through,” I said, repeating his words. “Where did you go, Reynolds? How did you get there?”

  Who was the other man on the telephone? Someone from the government? One of Bishop’s men? I was Bishop’s man. I was the dog he turned loose on the people he wanted hurt. I knew he used the Covenant as an excuse, but I kept taking those fucking envelopes.

  I got out from under the water and wrapped a towel around my waist. I could see the scars on my body even though the mirror was fogged up. Pink and brown across my chest, a hint of darker keloid at my elbow.

  “Ham and eggs,” called Lynn from the kitchen.

  “Be right out.”

  I crossed the hall and closed the door to the bedroom. I dressed in a gray flannel suit with a red silk tie patterned with white flowers. Lynn had bought it for me when we were still dating. Before the war. The first time I slipped the tie around my neck, it was for a date with her. We went to a dance hall in Santa Monica along the boardwalk. She had a pink rose in her hair. We swing danced until my shoulders were sore and my shirt was unfashionably damp with sweat.

  We left laughing and touching each other just because we’d reached that point in our relationship. I’d diced away my money, so she bought us ice cream to cool us down. It was humid, and the city smelled like rain. We walked along the boardwalk talking about Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. She had a dynamite monster impression.

  We went down to the beach and played in the moonlit oil of the surf. A Mexican Indian made us a concoction from fresh oranges and tequila, and we got drunk and chased each other in the water. She took off her dress and was in her slip, soaking wet among the breakers, kissing me. It felt strange with the drink seller watching, so we walked back to her friend’s car. I broke into it with a wire, and we tried to make love on the backseat. Too many people. Too many honking cars.

  Lynn Short was catholic and I was a mutt, so we did things her way. While I was on leave from my first deployment we had a big wedding at St. Philomena’s. I wore my dress uniform. Her family packed the church. There were crying sisters, her mom, and a seemingly endless procession of aunts, uncles and cousins. I didn’t have a family, so invited a few buddies from the Corps. Bully was the only one that showed up.

  At the reception Bully and I stood together trying to talk. All the connections we had made were marinated in bad memories. We could joke in the trenches, but standing next to him at the reception made the wedding seem small and unimportant compared to the places we’d already seen together. We stood there sipping Jugheimers and watching Lynn move through her huge, overjoyed family.

  “She’s pretty,” said Bully.

  She was ecstatic, her smile so wide and earnest it was almost painful to think I was responsible. I tried to fix that expression in my memory. I was afraid I might live a thousand years and I wanted that one thing to stick with me through it all.

  I even managed to forget about Annie for a day.

  I tied a half-Windsor and adjusted the length until the tip of the diamond touched the top of my belt. Lynn was already cleaning her plate in the kitchen, so I came up behind her and hugged her and kissed her cheek. The Deco clock above the kitchen table said eight.

  No more time to lounge in the morning. I was already late to meet Mr. Bishop, and I hadn’t even set foot out the door. I put on my hat and overcoat.

  “Please,” Lynn said. “Sit down and have breakfast like a normal human being.”

  “I’m late. Sorry, sweetheart.”

  “Late for what?” She followed me to the door. “You remember what I said, mister detective. No more danger. I need you to stick around.”

  I swept through the screen door, and it closed behind me with a dramatic creak and bang worthy of a film production.

  “Damn it, I mean it this time,” she called out.

  I didn’t answer her.

  The gate was a decorative bramble of black iron, and its tangled vines formed the word CHATHOLM. The drive was blocked by four black sedans and a squad of serious men in serious suits. Their pump shotguns convinced me not to argue when they told me to get out of the car.

  Their leader was a man with a surplus of forehead, little squinting doll eyes, and splotchy sunburn around his hairline. He introduced himself as Agent D’Agostino and held up a badge as proof
.

  “Name?” he demanded.

  “Casper Cord. I’m invited.”

  “I’ll need to see some ID.”

  I handed over my wallet. He took out my license and flipped it back and forth, studying me as if I was a kid trying to buy a carton of Old Glory with his dad’s license.

  “Can I go inside?”

  “Absolutely,” said D’Agostino, “as soon as we’ve searched your vehicle.”

  They went top to bottom and didn’t find the smuggler’s hold. I thought about telling them but just figured they’d keep the heater and maybe never give it back.

  “You guys work for the government?” I asked.

  They did, but they weren’t saying it. Somebody official was inside, and these guys were his detail. Nobody in government was taking any chances since Truman.

  I remember when it happened. I had a paper bag full of groceries in the back of a cab. Heard it on the radio. The driver pulled over to the side of the road, and a long sigh blew out of his mouth. He was a vet too. Regular Army in the bloody Hürtgen Forest. We sat with the rain beating on the roof of the cabbie’s Buick, shipwrecked on the same island by the news. Harry S. Truman shot dead by a Jap anarchist fresh out of the camps.

  “It’s clean,” declared D’Agostino. “I’ll take you in.”

  The G-men opened the gate and waved me through to the red brick drive shaded by old-growth trees. D’Agostino got behind the wheel of my car and drove. We passed through a forest, and the morning sun took on the shape and rhythm dictated by the overhanging branches.

  “Are you here for Mr. Bishop or someone else?” I lit up a Bravo and blew smoke out the car window. “President Barkley here or something?”

  “No.”

  “You guys aren’t the friendliest bunch, are you?”

  “No.”

  Glad I had the overcoat to keep out the chill.

  D’Agostino circled my car around a bronze statue of somebody familiar and parked on the cobblestones just outside the broad steps leading up to the lodge. I followed him up the stairs to the double doors. Each of the ten-foot doors was a piece of wood elaborately carved with images of wild animals.

  The inside of the lodge was dim and high-ceilinged, reminding me of an English hunting lodge, but everything was elevated to Teutonic extremes, as if someone had covered the wood-paneled rooms in glue and upended an animal mass grave. Severed heads loomed above us, and the bony branches of antlers created ossuary brambles of the walls.

  We descended from the animal kingdom and passed through galleries filled with violent trophies of history. There were tapestries looted from Rhineland castles, paintings of German masters from both wars, and crude, bug-eyed statues from Japan’s earliest history. According to one placard, I passed by a Chrysanthemum datejime dated to 1947 and still stained, supposedly, with Hirohito’s blood. There were artifacts of Rome I’m sure the Vatican dearly missed. Mannequins posed in alcoves wearing military uniforms that looked to date back three-quarters of a century. I’d worn some of them myself.

  D’Agostino led me to a door being held open by a white-gloved attendant. We passed from the dark, castlelike interior of the lodge into the sunlit majesty of a grand dining hall. I’ve got to admit to being a bit taken by the spectacle myself. Bishop’s Berghof was a tribute to American industry.

  A triptych of glass panes, each ten feet wide and thirty feet tall, half-covered by rolling shutters, created a view of azure waters that seemed to merge the huge room with the surface of a lake. The hills surrounding the lake were decorated with trees so dense and perfect, I expected to see a model train come chugging through.

  The hall was filled with enough tables and chairs to entertain a hundred guests and still have room to cut a rug. I’d never seen that kind of money thrown around on a house. Not outside of Europe and all those old palaces. Only one table in the hall was occupied, near the doors to the kitchen, and the voices of the men seated there echoed in the empty space. White-coated attendants swarmed around them offering coffee and condiments from silver trays for what smelled like an extravagant breakfast.

  Harlan Bishop was at the head of the table, gesturing with his cigarette holder and shedding ash all over his plate. He saw us coming, but our approach did not interrupt his conversation. A giant of a man wrapped in a tuxedo stood behind Bishop’s high-backed wheelchair. That was Elias, his footman. The one who’d given me the directions.

  Seated around the table was a well-dressed collection of politicians, potentates, and tycoons. I recognized some, like Ross Ogilvy, the head of Ogilvy Electric, and Stanley Pearce, from the railroad, from seeing their pictures in the newspapers.

  I also knew Eustace DeWitt, a weevil of a man elevated by shady patronage to become the Republican senator from New Mexico. His family and the Gideons went back to the turn of the century when the senator’s father ran New Mexico and helped guide a new artillery depot to the vicinity of Spark.

  There was a small bald man with a pug face and thick spectacles who seemed familiar, but I could not place him. The other men, and there were several, were strangers to me, except for one: Ethan Bishop.

  Harlan Bishop was, as far as I knew, the oldest living Gideon. His hair was almost gone, and his face was wrinkled and spotted with age. As he approached the inevitable end of his life, he had taken to cultivating various Gideon duplicates in the role of his “son,” Ethan Bishop.

  These Ethans only stuck around as long as they were useful. If they stepped out of line or developed too much of their own personality, Harlan would “retire” them and bring in another Gideon to play the role. Harlan Bishop never said it, but I figured his intent was to recast himself as his son and inherit his own business when he died.

  His twisted scheme was designed to weave through the loopholes in the Covenant and did not violate any specific provisions, except for the fact that Harlan and Ethan often shared a room. That was an offense worthy of my Stillman. Hard to put a bullet into the old man when he’d been running his Ethan racket back when he picked me to be the Judge.

  Ethan Bishop—the current Ethan Bishop, for however long he’d held the office—motioned for me to sit at his side. Such a gap of decades separated Harlan from Ethan that their resemblance to an outsider was more familial than remarkable.

  “Father,” said Ethan, interrupting the conversation around the table. “Your man is here from Los Angeles.”

  “Mr. Bishop,” said D’Agostino, who was behind my seat, “I’m sorry to interrupt you all here. Mr. Cord has arrived. He was on the guest list.”

  Harlan Bishop turned his rheumy eyes to D’Agostino and blinked once. D’Agostino nodded, as if that was enough of an acknowledgment, and left the way he’d come. The conversation resumed with no introduction or mention of my presence.

  “So did you give him the televisions?” The question came from a DeWitt.

  “Yes,” said Harlan. “Six Lumilux 50s. Top of the line. Had them flown from California to Washington and sent out technicians to set them up for the staff and in two of the bedrooms. He loved them, I’m told. Too bad the only broadcasting in color is out of a CBS shop in Albany.”

  There was scattered laughter.

  “Technology is the hope that will see this nation through the darkness of war.” Harlan put a serious point to it. “Those televisions and washers and air-conditioned automobiles are worth a squadron of bombers. The dream of tomorrow is what we’re selling now. People need to believe in the future for America to work.”

  Those who laughed before now saluted the point with raised glasses and a chorus of, “Hear, hear.”

  “What about you, Ronald?” Ethan asked the man sitting to DeWitt’s left. “Have you any interesting follies from South America?”

  The man seated to DeWitt’s left was younger, handsome, with blond hair, a strong jaw, and blue eyes. He actually looked like a younger, healthier version of me, though he was for certain no Warren.

  “Nothing amusing, I’m afraid,” said Ronald. �
��The matter grows more serious by the day. The workers have been infiltrated by Communists, and they have notions of revolution.”

  “Mr. Whiteacre runs our South American enterprise,” explained Ethan. “He’s father’s protégé, but I’m afraid he’s run afoul of the natives.”

  “There are enough good Americans down there to deal with any insurrection,” said Whiteacre. “We’ll hold the line with arms if need be.”

  “No, no,” said Harlan, and he wiped at the crumbs around his mouth. “Violence against the workers is antithetical to our goals. The Germans, the Russians, they invade and conquer. We must convince the people to volunteer their labor and resources.”

  “There has been talk, serious talk, of nationalizing our factories,” said Whiteacre. “If this coup business succeeds, I’m afraid we will have no alternative.”

  Harlan shook his head, “War is reserved for governments—not people—who stand in the way of progress. States and ideologies seize assets and nationalize our privately-owned factories, not people.”

  “Unrest here, as well,” said the bespectacled man who was familiar to me.

  “Will Paulus,” Ethan introduced. “He’s the senator here in California.”

  “Acting,” said Paulus. “Until they sort things out in the special election.”

  Paulus was terse, rising to shake my hand but clearly not to be distracted. He was short and paunchy and had dark eyebrows and hair. Greek, maybe, but far enough up the family tree to pass for white.

  “The economy,” Paulus continued, “still hasn’t recovered from the crash of ’29, and there’s been a great deal of agitating for worker movements. The Socialist party has several viable men up for congress.”

  “I’m sure you’d know all about that, being a Democrat,” said Harlan.

  “You start shooting in South America, and there will be solidarity protests,” said Paulus. “Maybe a boycott or worse.”

  “It won’t come to that,” said Harlan.

  “If it does?”

  “So they’ll boycott.” Harlan seemed amused by the thought. “They’ll have their pickets and burn their effigies and go home in automobiles we built and brag on telephones we sell that use lines we laid. They’ll eat food picked on our plantations because it’s cheaper. Because it’s easier. Because we are the engine of progress and efficiency, the provider of the American way of life, and their short-sighted sanctimony is nothing but a stone tied ’round this country’s neck.”