Weintraub folds his hands together. “Could two million dollars convince you?”
I slide into my cab, give the driver my address, fumble with my cell phone, and hastily dial Mary Rowell’s number at The Gershwin Agency. Samantha had insisted I get a cell phone after the attack of 10/18. I had been a hold-out before then, but on the day of the attack, she had become stranded in her office building. She’d spent hours trying to reach me, calling my apartment every half hour on the hope that I’d made it home. She had finally left her office at 5 P.M., once the lockdown had been lifted, and had walked ten blocks to my apartment. She had a key to let herself in, and had waited for me, growing more and more fearful and uncertain, until I finally arrived. I didn’t make it home until nearly 8 P.M., and by then Samantha was a nervous wreck. It didn’t matter to her that Longdale and I had spent the afternoon helping people. It didn’t matter to her that I had called her office and hadn’t been able to get through. What mattered to her was that I hadn’t come searching for her when I had been able to. She moved all of her things out of my apartment that night, and while we’re still together, she’s never stepped foot back inside. For her, coming to work within view of the ruined Sears Tower has been traumatic enough. Spending time in my apartment, which is nearly at Ground Zero, has been far more than she can handle. As a result, we’d been spending far more time apart. Her solution to all of this—both our slightly more long-distance relationship, and the fact that I hadn’t found a way to contact her on 10/18—was to buy me a cell phone.
I gave in.
Mary answers the phone with even more than her characteristic gusto. She usually does away with the pleasantries, immediately launching into whatever it is she wants to say. This time, she’s all ready screaming when she answers. “You turned them down?” She bellows, causing me to cringe. “Are you crazy? What’s your problem, anyway? Everyone knows you’re not writing for the Journal anymore. You’re not going to teach for the rest of your life, are you? So, what else are you going to do? Start blogging? A deal like this will give you the chance to figure those things out! I can’t believe you turned them down!”
“Mary, hold on. I said I would think about it.”
“Two million dollars, James. My god, two million! You know how many journalists get book deals like that? None. You’re it. You’re the only one. How do you feel about that?”
“Not that great,” I say.
“Why, James? Tell me why?”
I take in a breath, steeling myself. “I’m not going to write about my wife, and I’m definitely not going to write about having to shit in a bucket for six months while I grieved the death of my translator. I want to go back to doing journalism.”
“Both of us know you can’t do that. Horns on the street give you jitters. You need to be in an office somewhere, not running around in a war zone.”
“Maybe I can get an editorial desk. I could call Peter Reston back up…”
“Since you assaulted that reporter at the Times? Nuh-uh.”
I let out a long sigh.
“Don’t you get it,” Mary says. “No one wants you to tell other people’s stories when they know you have your own to tell. Sure, maybe the Journal will give you an editorial desk. Or maybe someone else will. But the offers won’t stop coming in. And someday, you’ll feel worn down enough to say yes. And then you won’t have the fight in you to push back against their demands. So why not say yes now when you have the guts to say no? To write what you want.”
“I won’t write about my wife.”
“Then don’t,” she says. “Make it about yourself. Write about your grief. Your process. Your healing. You do have options, you know. Hell, the whole thing can be half fiction for all I care. You know these things are more about the sentiment than the facts. You do know that, right?”
I set down the phone as Mary continues to rant, staring out the window at the Chicago streets, covered in gray snow, dirtied from the thousands of cars spilling their smoke out onto the streets.
“Bad news?” the driver asks.
I look up to see the cab driver glancing back at me through the rearview mirror, and I realize for the first time that he’s Middle Eastern—Pakistani by the sound of his accent. I can tell from his gaze that he’s a little on edge, and is trying to cut the tension with forced friendliness.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Is turning down two million dollars bad news.”
The driver’s eyes go wide. “You are a stupid man. A very, very stupid man.”
I lean back in my seat and let out a groan and lift the phone back up to my ear.
“—Because my house needs a new roof, James. My kids need to go to college. But forget about me for a moment. You need to get yourself out of that depressing hole of an apartment!”
“Mary,” I try to interrupt her.
“That’s why you should take the deal. To buy a house for you and that lovely lawyer you’re dating. My god, man. Think about yourself for once!”
“Mary, can you guarantee that you and I, that we, can get final say on all major editorial changes? Can you do that for me?”
Mary lets out a long sigh. “The only guarantees in life are death and taxes, you know this. But I can do my best.”
Maybe not death, I want to say. But I don’t.
“Make the call,” I tell her. “I’ll take the deal.”
“AAAAAHHHHHH!” Mary’s scream is piercing even over the call.
I hang up and make eye contact with the driver through the rearview mirror.
He gives me a small nod. “Okay, man. I don’t think you're so stupid anymore.”
I don’t answer, and turn instead to look out the window, at the grey mounds of snow piled around the cars, and the commuters walking to and from their destinations. All of them seem so distant, so alien. I wonder for a moment how long it’s been since I’ve felt a connection. A real connection with—well—with anyone. I’ve been cheating Samantha of that. But what about Molly? Had I ever really been connected to her? Had I ever really let her into my life?
Maybe this book—these three books—will be a good thing. Maybe they will finally allow me to start that healing process. Maybe they will finally allow me to admit that Molly is gone…
The lie catches in my mind like a splinter because Molly isn’t gone. I saw her, and my photograph, though damaged like the others, still survived clearly enough to tell the truth. It was her. She is alive. And I can never stop remembering that.
The door to my apartment is unlocked. I open it, stepping slowly inside. For a moment, I am back in my old apartment on the Upper West Side in New York, stepping through the door to find that the place has been ransacked. This time my apartment isn’t torn apart. My bedroom is its usual mess of an unmade bed and my dirty laundry is strewn across the floor, in everything but the laundry basket. It all looks right, but it still feels wrong.
I hear a noise in the other room and move quickly down the hallway, imagining all sorts of scenarios as I go. Thieves, standing in the middle of my living room, pointing and laughing at the lack of things to steal. FBI agents, clad in black suits and black sunglasses, pouring over my collection of photographs—asking questions about them. And then a surge of hope as I picture Molly herself, sitting casually in my arm chair, and waiting to greet me as if no time at all has passed. How would I react? Would I run to her? Would I wrap her in a hug and shower her with kisses? Would I have any thought of Samantha at all as I did so?
Samantha…
It pains me to think that, while the last two years had been a living hell, Samantha’s kind, humorous, and insightful presence in my life had done little to improve it. None of that was her fault, of course. She may have been able to guess at my pain. A piece of me believes that my pain was part of what attracted her to me. But I couldn’t know for sure. I had walled away my grief to the point that I would never talk about it. Since that first date, we had never once spoken Molly’s name to one another.
I pause at the end
of the hallway, seeing a shadow cast across the living room floor. I take in a breath, steeling myself, and step into the living room.
“Samantha?” I say, feeling a mixture of shock and relief.
She is standing in the room, facing away from me. It takes a moment to register the scattered photographs lying around her feet.
“What is this?” Samantha asks. She’s standing at my desk, holding a file folder in her hand. Tipping it over, she dumps the rest of its contents onto the floor. More photographs spill out. She turns to look at me as they fall. “What the hell is all this?” She asks again.
In the months since seeing Molly, I’d become obsessed, taking pictures of every women that looked even remotely similar to her, writing detailed notes for each picture. I had also reignited my search to prove that Molly could have survived the crash. Every scrap of evidence and conspiracy theory I’d collected over the years, from tabloid clippings about covert government agencies, to medical journal articles on the length of time someone could survive in water at near freezing temperatures, had been collected, collated, and filed away. But over the weeks, I’d taken to leaving things out. I’d started arranging the picture and articles all across the floor of my living room. It was a way to make sense of everything. To see it from a different angle. It only now occurs to me how insane it all must look.
“You just left all this stuff out for me to find?” She asks.
“You haven’t been here in months,” I say, feeling a rush of anger and embarrassment.
“Is that really your explanation”—she grabs another folder from the desk, thrusting it in my face—“for all this?”
“Of course not,” I say, taking a step back.
“Then go ahead,” she waves her arm, still clutching the folder, as if to gesture at the mess. “I’m waiting.”
I look at the photographs and am stuck by a sudden terror. They had been organized carefully by date and location, with the picture of Molly on the top. But now all the photographs are scattered across the floor.
“Where is it,” I say under my breath.
“Where is what?” Samantha asks.
“The picture,” I say. “It was on the top of the pile.”
“There were many piles,” Samantha retorts. “Dozens of piles!”
I bend down, rifling through the photographs. “You don’t understand,” I yell, feeling all the rage and loss build up inside of me. “I saw her. I saw my wife!”
“Your wife?” A wry laugh escapes her mouth. “Your dead wife?”
I stand up, photographs gripped in each hand. “Don’t say that.”
“She’s dead, James.”
I shake my head. “Why did you even come here today? You never come here!”
“I was hoping to celebrate your fucking book deal.” Her voice goes soft as I see sadness wash over her face. “That, and something else. But that’s not going to happen now.”
She throws the folder that had been clutched in her hand onto the floor, and a stack of photographs slide out of it. In the midst of the pile is the picture of Molly. I can only stare, letting the silence wash over me. There is no response that seems appropriate, so I say the first thing that comes to mind. “You don’t even know if they bought the book.”
“Well, did they?” She asks.
“Two million dollars,” I whisper, looking down at the mess on the apartment’s floor. “It’s a three-book deal.”
Samantha nods. “Do you know what this is?”
“What?” I ask.
“Sad,” she says. “That’s what this is. It’s all just very, very sad. I hope your two-million-dollar book deal makes you happier because I certainly won’t be around to help with that.”
Samantha walks over the photographs, moving down the hallway toward the front door of the apartment.
“Samantha, please.” But my voice sounds hollow in my own ears.
She pauses, turning back to me. “Just… don’t.”
“Can you at least tell me what the other thing is that you wanted to celebrate?”
She hesitates, staring at me, before finally saying, “I’m pregnant.”
And then she’s gone. The door closes behind her, leaving me alone in my apartment with the photographs, and my memories, and nothing else. I slowly clench and unclench my fist. The thought of the book deal is gone. The thought of ever finding Molly again is gone. All that’s left is emptiness. Dull, emptiness. I close my eyes, sit down on the floor, and begin to weep.
And then I see it.
That damn horse-shaped flash drive that Longdale had given me on 10/18. I had stuck it in with my files later that night and had forgotten about it. But here it is, thrown onto the floor by Samantha in her anger. The irony isn’t lost on me. This flash drive is literally the only thing I still have from before leaving New York. In some ways, it’s an even more tangible connection to Molly than the photograph, since I had gotten it on the night she was killed. I lean over and pick up the drive. I had spent so much time since that night vacillating between forgetting completely about the drive to wondering what its contents might be, that I had completely forgotten the manner in which I’d received it. Who was that man, anyway? What was his name? It was Peter something. Peter Windsor. He’d been a British man, I remember, and strangely out of place in the New York scene that night. Almost as if he was from another time. And what had Longdale said about the drive? That it hadn’t even been invented yet?
No…
I push aside the thought. As desperate as I might be, I’m not that desperate. Whatever mysteries have led to my wife disappearing on the night of December 5, 1998, and then reappearing the morning of the world’s worst terrorist attack in modern history, I still have to hold on to the belief that those mysteries would have a logical and comprehensible reason behind them. I tuck the flash drive into my pocket. That way lies madness, I say to myself as I survey the mess of my apartment, staring at the hundreds of photographs strewn about the floor.
That way lies madness.
February 11, 2005
“Wouldn't it be easier to lose hope?” The young woman asking the question is slender with a streak of purple in her short-cropped hair. In the Camton University auditorium packed full of quirky students, she is hardly remarkable, and yet the question catches me completely off guard. I take in a breath, scratching the nearly all-white stubble across my chin, and sink back into my chair. After a long moment, I lift the microphone to answer.
“I don’t want to be flippant here,” I say. “But the whole book is the answer to your question. That my wife could have disappeared in the way she did, with all evidence pointing to her death, would lead any normal person to accept the facts. It would also be understandable for any normal person to write off the experience I had on 10/18 as some kind of hallucination, or wishful thinking. Can you believe I’ve talked to a hundred crowds like this and no one’s ever asked me the question in that way? Everyone assumes from the title that the question of hope is a done deal for me.” I hold up the book, displaying the cover image, a beautiful painting of the East River with the words Still I Hope printed in bold san-serif lettering across the entire width and height of the cover. “In a sense, it would be easier to lose hope. And every single day I think about that question. But as to why I don’t give up? Why I don't lose hope? Who the hell knows. Read the book and give me your best guess.”
I hear scattered laughter mixed with a smattering of applause for the young girl. I turn to the moderator, Evelin Juarez, a smartly dressed middle-aged woman and the head of the Journalism department. She holds her hand up for one more question. A young man with long, tangled hair, a rash of acne, and a sad excuse for a beard slouches up to the microphone clutching a copy of As the Ashes Fell in his greasy hands. “Dear God,” I mutter under my breath, knowing what’s about to come.
The young man leans into the microphone. “My name’s Alan, and I want to know who you think was actually responsible for the two planes that crashed into the Sears
Tower on 10/18.”
Evelin glances at me and I give her a slight shake of my head to tell her that it’s okay.
“So, I take it you don’t think the JAS was responsible?”
“I’ve seen the evidence, man. The way the tower collapses was too fast. The structure below it would have to have be destroyed as well. The only explanation is bombs, which means it was an inside job. Was your historic book deal a payoff to keep this secret?”
“I saw the second plane hit with my own eyes, and I heard no explosion before the tower collapsed.”
The young man’s face is a livid hue of red. I can picture him in his bedroom, obsessively reading one online forum after another. Part of me wants to call him out. To take him to task for living only in online videos and conspiracy theories and only setting foot in the world to spew his hateful rhetoric. Ellis Claymore would have a monologue of Shakespearean quality to shout at him without a moment’s thought. But I’m not Ellis, and I have my contract to consider.
“I’ve seen those videos too,” I say, “and my freshmen journalism students would be lucky to get an F if they ever turned in work like that.”
“That’s because the mainstream media will never tell you the truth!” The young man’s voice is rising now. Evelin moves to stand, but I hold a hand up to stop her.
“The mainstream media, as you call it, is responsible for walking into danger and capturing those images that were used in making those videos.”
“Those videos were faked!”
I lift the microphone back to my mouth. “Was the video faked or was there a bomb that really caused the tower to collapse? Because it can’t be both. Once again, I was at Ground Zero, and I can assure you it really happened. And if it didn’t, my doctor would love another explanation as to why my lungs look like that of a pack-a-day smoker’s, thanks to the ash that I inhaled. So respectfully, young man—” before I realize it, I’m on my feet, a heat rising in my chest— “why don’t you take that conspiracy theory of yours, and shove it right up your skinny little, zit-covered—”
Incursion: Book Three of The Recursion Event Saga Page 10
