“That bag of Moll’s… Is it still up there? I can get rid of it if you want me to.”
I had forgotten about the go-bag.
“I forgot to tell you,” I say. “I asked her about the bag the night of… She told me that she packed it while I was still away. She bought the ticket thinking that if I wasn’t home yet, she’d leave and start a new life.”
“Makes sense,” Longdale says, but something in his tone itches at me. Does it make sense?
Longdale looks around, taking in a breath. “Look, we’re just cleaning the place up. You don’t have to decide what you want to do with any of her stuff just yet. But we can make three piles down here. Trash, giveaway, and undecided. Sound good?”
I turn to look up the stairs. “Sounds good,” I say, but my voice sounds distant in my ears.
The truth is I had been upstairs since the accident just once. When the hospital released me a day after the accident, Gertrude, the longtime secretary for my editor had insisted on picking me up. Upon helping me inside, she took one disapproving look around my apartment and left with my soiled clothes from the night before, promising to return the next day with the dry cleaning and some groceries. I tried to sleep in my own bed that night, but the accident, Molly’s haunting last words, and that damn bag in the closet had driven me away.
That and the voices.
Is it normal to hear voices after a traumatic event? They were more whispers than discernible voices, but they followed me that whole night, from room to room and hour to hour, drifting from shadows that also seemed to follow me around. The night seemed like something out of a nightmare. When Gertrude returned the next morning, she had found me huddled on the couch under a thin blanket. She insisted on dragging me out of bed and cooking me a proper breakfast, but I had refused.
I reach the top of the stairs and turn the corner. The hallway is dark, and a musty smell fills the air. There’s a window at the end of the hallway, but the curtain is shut tight. Only a thin ray of light filters in around its edges. The driving piano of Jungleland is quieter up here, barely echoing up the stairs. I make my way past our shared office, which had quickly become a storage room for books we’d purchased and never read. The PC we had purchased earlier this summer sits in the corner under the office window, collecting dust. Molly was the more technologically savvy between the two of us. I always seem to cause electronics to self-destruct whenever I get too close to them.
I step past the office, reaching the bedroom door. Hand on the door knob. It’s shaking. My palm is sweaty. My breaths are shallow. But it has to be done.
Inside the room, the closet door pulls at me like a magnet, but I ignore it. I’ll deal with that later. The first thing to do is to deal with the remnants of the Molly I knew and remember; the mystery she’d left behind for me can wait for later.
I start with the dresser, and pick up Molly's brush, covered with tangles of her hair. Setting it down, I run my hand across the other items on the dresser. A jewelry tree. A pack of gum. A picture from our honeymoon. I open a drawer. T-shirts, camisoles, underwear. Each item is a tombstone. Each article of clothing a monument. Each one bearing silent testament to her life.
Pulling out each drawer, I empty their contents out onto the bed. Next come the shoes. Dear god, she had a lot of shoes. Once the pile has grown to nearly overtake the bed, I head back out to the hallway.
There’s a small attic—a crawl space, really—where we keep our empty suitcases. I take a step stool out of the bathroom and push up the panel on the ceiling. Reaching inside the crawl space, I pull out the backpack I’ve worn in over a dozen countries, and pause noticing the hole near the bottom of the backpack. It’s a bullet hole from that last trip in Saudi Arabia, right before I was captured. The bullet had been only a few inches from ripping my stomach open. Instead, it had ripped open the thigh of my translator, Ibrahim.
I give the backpack another moment’s thought, remembering Ibrahim’s long brown hair, his easy smile, and then toss it down on the floor, knowing immediately that I am going to keep that backpack for as long as it will hold together. I reach farther back in the crawl space and take out one of our suitcases. It strikes me as odd that I would be so driven to get rid of every memory of Molly, my wife, while a memento of a translator I had barely known had become suddenly indispensable, but to hell with it.
I return to the bedroom and throw open the closet door, revealing the duffel bag in the back of Molly’s closet. The duffel bag stares mockingly back at me. I ignore it for a moment longer, taking everything hanging out of the closet and throwing them onto the pile, hangers and all.
Finally, I take the backpack from the hallway and go to my closet. I pull out a few items of clothing—the clothing I always wore while on assignment—and stuff that into the packing, tossing the rest onto the pile as well. Everything from our life together will remind me of her, so it all must go. There’s now a mountain of things on the bed. Am I really going to go through it all like Longdale suggested?
I turn back to Molly’s closet. The duffel bag is all that is left to take care of. I bend down and unzip it. Everything is exactly as I had last seen it. The clothes. The cash. The tickets.
I examine the tickets one more time. The date was for November 7, 1998, just two days after the fundraiser, after the car crash. Did I really believe her excuse? Why else would she have been planning on going to Chicago? Maybe there was someone she was planning on meeting there. A lover? She could have met someone while I was gone, and then tried to break it off. Or was she running from something? I shake my head, letting out a breath. And then I see it.
The sweater.
She was always complaining of being cold in our drafty old apartment, so I bought it for her in the fall… Three months after I had been home.
I remember seeing it now when I had first seen the bag this evening, neatly folded at the top, as if it had been added after everything else, as one extra measure.
I swallow a lump down my throat. She lied to me. I’ve been with Molly for five years and this is not the Molly I fell in love with. This Molly is someone else entirely. Someone I barely even recognize. I zip up the duffel bag and throw it into the pile, money and all. Whatever secrets she was hiding from me, it’s about to be buried with everything else of Molly’s. Or I’ll never really let her go. I’ll never really bury her. The realization floods over me like a wave. I can have a funeral, but I still won’t get any closure. I need to get rid of her like I got rid of those rotted clothes. But it wasn’t just the clothes, it was the memories. I need to get rid of all of her. This is how I need to bury her.
I grab a bag under each arm and storm down the stairs. “Which one is the garbage pile?” I ask. Longdale looks up at me with surprise, pointing to a small pile in the corner of the room. I stomp over, tossing the two bags under my arms into the pile. “It all goes,” I say. “Every last thing. Everything of mine and hers. It all has to go.”
“You’re going to want to save something to put in the casket,” Longdale says, as I drop the last bags from upstairs onto the pile. It had taken all afternoon, but we’re finished. The apartment is bare, and the pile of bags and boxes in the middle of the living-room floor has now grown to mountainous proportions.
I don’t respond. Longdale takes a step toward me. “You are going to have a funeral, aren’t you?”
“Neither of us have living family,” I say.
“You have friends,” Longdale says. “Hell, I’ll fly back from California to come to her funeral.”
I shrug. “I’ll think about it.”
Longdale moves to the doorway, taking his jacket from the hook. “Promise me that you won’t throw any of this until you’ve picked out a few things of hers to put in a coffin… for the funeral you are planning.”
I nod.
“Okay,” Longdale says. “How about dinner?”
I move toward the front door, grabbing my own jacket from the hook.
Longdale opens the front door and a b
last of cold air rushes in. “You’re going to want something warmer than that?” Longdale says. “It’s getting cold out there.”
I grab my long wool coat I had worn the night of the accident, still in the dry-cleaner's bag, and rip the plastic off. Locking the door behind us, I take one last look at the pile of Molly’s belongings in the living room. This will be the true burial, I think, and then shut the door.
The cold air cuts through me and I gasp, my breath exploding out in plumes. Glancing up, I see snow drifting lazily in the air, lit by the nearby street lamps.
“Where should we eat?” Longdale asks. “I know this great new Chinese restaurant, a real hole-in-the-wall kind of place.”
“Sounds good,” I say. I reach into my coat pockets, searching for the gloves that are always there; I’m only a little surprised that they had made it through the wreck, the dip in the river, and the trip to the dry cleaners. I pull out the gloves and something else falls out, something small and light, that bounces down the steps and onto the sidewalk.
“You dropped something,” Longdale says. I follow his gaze to the small box lying in the snow. He walks down the steps and bends, picking it up.
It takes me a moment to realize what it is. The horse trinket from the night of the car accident.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Some gag gift I got at the fundraiser the other night.”
“Huh,” he says.
“What?” I ask, but Longdale doesn’t respond. I descend the steps and move next to Longdale, following his gaze. The horse trinket has broken into two pieces. Except, it’s not broken. The lines on the two pieces are clean. Intentional. I hadn’t noticed it before. The half of the horse containing the head is hollowed out, a sort of cap. The other half has a small, metal protrusion. The protrusion is a flat, rectangular shape, not much larger than a stick of gum, extending only a centimeter or so from the back half of the horse.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Longdale mutters. But his voice is thoughtful. He turns it over a few times, looking at it closely. “You said this was a gag gift?”
I nod. “Someone gave it to me at the fundraiser. Why? Am I missing something?”
“This connector right here,” Longdale says, pointing to the metal protrusion. “It’s for USB plugs.”
“English?” I ask.
“Universal Serial Bus. Newer PCs are coming standard with them. But it’s for plugging in keyboards and zip drives. This is… something else. I’ve never seen something like this before.”
“Do you think it could be some kind of storage device?” I ask.
“None that I’ve seen,” Longdale responds.
“Military, maybe?”
Longdale lets out a small laugh. “People always think the government has these amazing technologies. But let me tell you, it’s not like that anymore. What’s happening in Silicon Valley is outpacing anything some government hacks could cook up. Trust me, if it was possible for the government, I would know about it. Do you mind if I hold onto this? I’d like to take a closer look at it.”
I shrug. “Works for me.”
Longdale tucks the trinket into his pocket. We turn, and that’s when I see the car, lights off, two figures inside dressed in suits with the telltale posture of former military, and everything strange about the car crash comes rushing back. The driver being former military. The fact that he had made several remarks about car crashes, or similarly disturbing potentialities. And then there was the moment when he and Molly had seemed to be talking. Who the hell was that driver anyway?
“You okay?” Longdale asks.
I nod. “Chinese sounds good.”
December 2
Mark Gaffigan, the lean, grizzled reporter from The New York Times who had been with me in every war zone I had been in since the late eighties is waiting under an awning to escape the drizzling rain outside the Time’s auspicious Midtown headquarters when I arrive. We were together in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia at the attack that killed my translator and led to my capture. I hadn’t spoken to him once since my rescue. The exclusive club of war correspondents isn’t a place where one makes friendships easily. And the ones you do make are the friendships of shared trauma, the kind of friendships where you grab a silent round of drinks after running into each other in a hotel lobby, and not much else. But our shared trauma goes even deeper. I’d expect Mark to feel more than a little guilt over coming out of that trip unscathed, while I had been shipped off to a JAS prison for months. Hell, that’s how I would feel if our positions had been reversed. So I’d been a little surprised that he’d taken my call and actually shown up.
“I’m glad you agreed to meet me,” I say.
“Molly was a great woman,” responds Mark in his Irish brogue. Mark is, you might say, the ideal image of a war correspondent. The rugged man of action that people tend to think of when they think about the job. When people meet Mark they light up and cling to him as if they’ve stumbled into the war zone themselves and he’s their only way out. I, on the other hand, always seem to disappoint people when they find out what I do.
“It’s pissing rain out here,” Mark says. “Let’s go up to my office.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t want anyone asking questions.”
“People know we go back. Why would they ask questions?”
I look away. “I don’t want anyone to think you’re writing a story on me.”
Mark raises an eyebrow, pointing to a slim portfolio that he’s been carrying tucked under one arm. “You don’t want a story written on the accident? What did you want with this shit, anyway? Don’t tell me it’s personal.”
“Shut up,” I say. I look past Mark, noticing a car parked across the street with the window cracked. When he sees me watching him, the man rolls the window up, starts the car, and drives away.
“Someone you know?” Mark asks.
I shake my head no. Or was it that same car from the other night when Longdale came over? Hard to say…
“You want to get a drink?” I ask, feeling anxious.
“Sure, I know a great bar just up the street.”
Of course he does. Mark can be in any city in the world and know a great bar just up the street.
“Let’s go,” I say.
We dash into a nearby sports bar, a graveyard compared to the hubbub after the Yankees World Series win a few weeks ago. We find a quiet corner booth and each order a glass of Redhook Ale. After the beers come, Mark takes a swig and then stares off past me, his eyes distant. “I was just thinking about the last time I saw Molly,” Mark says. “It was that party a few years back.”
I glance at the portfolio sitting between us. “Right… Clint Howard had just won his, what, second Pulitzer?”
“That’s right,” Mark says.
“That was good reporting.”
“And it was a good party,” Mark says.
I nod, unable to muster any more energy than that.
“Look,” Mark says. “I know we’re not a bunch that gets personal very often, but since I knew both of you, and since I was with you when…” he trails off, shaking his head. “It was a hell of a thing what happened back in Riyadh. I should have said that before now.”
“Well, thanks.”
“So, how are you doing?”
I shake my head. “You know…”
Mark stares at me in unnerving intensity. “You’re not staring down the barrel or anything like that, are you?”
I shake my head. “God no. Nothing so dramatic.”
Mark nods. “You and I have both talked to enough survivors of real tragedy to know what it can do to a person. But, Jesus Christ, man. You had just gotten home from six months of hell. Six months of rotting in a JAS prison. And then this?”
“Shit can happen anywhere.”
Mark grimaces. “You know it’s not the same. There are no daily bomb strikes in Hoboken, and you’re not going to be randomly kidnapped off the street in New Jersey just for being a member of t
he press.” He shakes his head again. “You were home. You were supposed to be safe.”
I turn to Mark, taking in a breath. “Do you have the files?”
Mark puts his hand down flat on the portfolio and meets my gaze. “You’re not going to find what you’re looking for.”
I lean forward. “The file.” Mark sighs. He opens the portfolio, takes out a manila file folder and slides it across the table. I snatch it up and scan the first few pages. Hiring applications. Employment review forms. I flip through them, feeling impatient. “Police reports?”
“Last page,” Mark says.
I flip to the back and stare at the photocopied report. “An illegal lane change? That’s it?”
Mark shrugs.
“What about fake names?”
“Come on, Jim.”
I set the file down, glaring at Mark. “Did you not check for fake names?”
“The driver of the truck is a forty-year-old father of five, married for over a decade, with nothing but that lane change to tarnish his good name. When I got him on the phone, he started treating me like a priest. Confessing everything he’d done from writing a bad check to looking at dirty pictures on the World Wide Web. But all he had to confess was missing the sign to redirect him onto the FDR, and he confessed that too, by the way. I spoke to his wife, and she said all the same stuff, including the porn. So, help me out here. You already dropped the vehicular manslaughter charges. What more do you want from this guy? I mean, the man’s only crime is being boring as hell.”
“What about the limo driver?”
“Right, right. The dead limo driver.” Mark takes the portfolio and removes a second file.
I open the file, finding a grainy, black-and-white enlargement of driver’s license. A round-faced man with a thin mustache stares back at me. The name reads Dan Gaines, and the address is in Long Island. I flip through the rest of the file quickly.
“The car service sent me all the info on him,” Mark says. “Married and living on Long Island with three kids. No criminal record. Nothing worse on his driving history than a few parking tickets. And he’s been with the company for over a decade without a single negative performance review that I could find.” Mark leans forward. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but there’s nothing here. Even if there was, the guy is dead.”
Incursion: Book Three of The Recursion Event Saga Page 4
