The Glass House

by David Rotenberg

  Yslan looked up.

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “Fine. Let me repeat my question. Care to tell me how he managed to escape from the safe house in New Jersey?”

  “No.” Yslan was icy cold.

  “Okay, but you picked up his trail and tracked him to Cincinnati, Ohio, where you protected him, as a much-valued asset ought to be protected, in his confrontation in a synagogue—of all places—from the head of a pharmaceutical company who evidently intended him some harm.” He looked up. “You want to add anything to this?”

  “No.”

  “Then of course there was you fetching him from Africa to help Viola Tripping with your investigations into the terrorist bombings in upper New York State.”

  Again he looked up at her. There was something wrong with his skin—too shiny, like a frog’s belly. And those soft hands and manicured fingernails.

  “Then that unfortunate incident in San Francisco that sent him running back to Africa.” He closed the folder. “Am I missing anything?”

  Yslan thought, Is it possible they don’t know about the son? About Seth? If he knows, he hasn’t mentioned him. And what about the Rothko Chapel?

  She heard the whisking sound of two photographs crossing the table to her—both spun and landed perfectly so that they faced her. The first was of Seth on a surfboard bobbing on the waves, probably off the coast of Vancouver Island. The second was of her sitting alone in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, where she had followed Decker.

  When she looked up from the pictures she saw Mallory smiling. Why was he smiling? she asked herself, then thought, Men with tiny teeth really shouldn’t smile.

  He picked up another photo and examined it. Then he slowly turned it to her. It showed her sitting on the small cot in Decker’s psycho single dorm room at Ancaster College. She had just undone his handcuffs and the two of them were so close to each other that they were breathing in each other’s expelled breaths.

  He tilted down his reading glasses and looked at her. “Could he tell when you were telling the truth to him?”

  After a sigh that she wished she hadn’t let pass her lips, she said, “Yes.”

  “Then he didn’t care all that much for you, did he? It’s a fact that he’s unable to use his special talent on those he cares about. Isn’t that true?”

  Yslan didn’t say anything.

  “He’s unable to use his special talent on those he cares about. Right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Thank you.”

  He opened another of the folders. “Then there’s Martin Armistaad, born 1952.” He threw three photos of the man onto the table. Perfect spinners again. “Mr. Armistaad’s special talent has to do with pattern recognition, which somehow he always associates with the mathematical realities of pi. He predicted to the day the peak of the yen in 1975, the bottom of the Dow in 2002, the rise of the Tea Party in 2010—and about thirty other world occurrences that he had no right to know. Correct?”

  “To the best of our understanding, yes.”

  “Any idea how he does that?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “And how the others do what they do?”

  “Ditto.”

  “Don’t you think you should have shared this information with us at Homeland Security?”

  “No. I think we have our area of expertise and you—”

  “Are just a bloated government bureaucracy that rides around in chauffeured limos. Something along those lines?”

  “If you say so.”

  He smirked then said, “Well, Martin Armistaad, ex-prisoner number 271403—”

  “Hold on. Ex-prisoner?”

  “Yes, Special Agent Hicks. We believe that thanks to your boss, Leonard Harrison, or someone your boss was working with, Martin Armistaad, ex-prisoner 271403, is in the wind.”

  Is that what he meant when he said, “Things may be in motion”? she wondered.

  “Armistaad is dangerous,” Yslan said.

  “And you know this from—”

  “I’ve interviewed him.”

  “At Leavenworth?”

  “Yeah.” It was hard to forget, but she had a video of their conversation. Not something she’d wanted to revisit, but she thought she might have to now.

  Mallory stood. Just for a moment something that could have been concern crossed the chubby cheeks of his face. “Russian dolls, Special Agent.”

  “You mean—”

  “Matryoshka dolls—one inside another inside another . . .” He paused, and Yslan was pretty sure he was going to say something more, then he added, “That’s how security works.”

  It wasn’t what he was going to say, but she replied, “The NSA is—”

  “Just a subset of us at Homeland? No. I’d never claim that. But the NSA has real overlap with Homeland.” He glanced at the extra files that he hadn’t opened for her. Had he thought about showing her their contents? She didn’t know because now he was on his feet, somehow no longer a soft bureaucrat. Now he was a general giving her marching orders. Then he tossed a set of keys at her, which she caught with an athlete’s ease.

  “And these are?”

  “Keys to Leonard Harrison’s house. Your partner wants to start there.” Before she could respond “I don’t work with partners,” Mallory smiled and pressed a button on his desk console.

  Yslan found it odd that he had such an old-fashioned gizmo.

  The door behind her opened, and the handsomest man she’d ever seen entered. He wore a button-down Oxford shirt, cuffed and pleated taupe slacks, and cordovan shoes that must have cost more than a month’s rent. He moved like an athlete yet was a bit fey—Princeton fey.

  Mallory said, “Special Agent Yslan Hicks, you know—”

  Before he could say the man’s name, Yslan said, “Hi, Emerson.” Then she laughed.

  “I’m disappointed,” Emerson Remi said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “This time you laughed. In times past I believe I’ve elicited more intimate sounds from you.”

  “I prefer laughing.”

  “Now why is that?”

  “Because knowing that you have been working for Homeland Security all this time, a lot of things that didn’t make sense now do.”

  Then Hendrick H. Mallory dismissed her. At the door he called to her. “Special Agent Hicks?”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t bring herself to add the word “sir.”

  “By the by, a cadre is a group—often a secretive group, but a group nonetheless.”

  Of all the shocks she had received in that room, this was somehow the most shocking.

  11

  VIOLA TRIPPING

  “GO AWAY!”

  Sora, Viola Tripping’s nurse and protector for almost thirty years, was startled into waking by her charge’s tearful, “Go away!”

  Sora slipped out of her bed. She knew better than to turn on the overhead light. She had no idea what time it was, but through the opening in her bedroom curtains she saw the deep darkness of the rural Nebraska night.

  “Go away! Please go far away,” Viola cried.

  “Why Viola? What’s happened?”

  Sora saw Viola straining to get words from her brain to her mouth. She’d seen her have this struggle before and had read about it in the Cassandra myth. After the god spat in her mouth she was able to see into the future, but when she went to tell anyone, out came nothing but gobbledegook.

  “Come on, Viola, tell Sora what’s wrong.”

  Something in the room crashed to the ground. Sora assumed it was her antique full-length stand-up mirror. She steadied herself, then stepped out into the darkness. She felt the glass cut deep into her feet, but she didn’t care. The girl/woman she’d looked after for all this time was clearly coming apart.

  “I’m going to turn on a light, Viola, so cover your eyes. I know that light hurts your eyes, so cover them with your hands, sweetie.”

  She waited, but Viola didn’t say a word.

  “You
ready? Cover your eyes.”

  Sora punched the wall switch and the overhead snapped on.

  And there Viola was.

  Curled up in a ball in the far corner of the room, her long hair a rat’s nest—and wet. Wet and matted with blood, which seemed to be pouring out of her in dozens of places.

  Then Sora saw it—the razor blade.

  Viola squirmed to a sitting position. She raised the blade to slash down at her exposed thigh.

  Sora threw her body at the girl/woman and the razor skittered a few feet away.

  A beat.

  Then Viola, slick with blood, lunged towards the blade, but Sora kicked it across the room and flopped on top, trapping the girl/woman’s hands beneath her body.

  Sora heard Viola breathing hard beneath her and felt her blood seeping up through her nightgown.

  Slowly Viola gave up the fight and at last lay still beneath the weight of her caregiver.

  Finally Sora said, “Enough?”

  Viola nodded.

  “If I let you up you’ll behave?”

  After a breath, Viola nodded again.

  “All right, but first tell me what this is all about.”

  And Viola tried, but all that came out of her mouth was, “Go away. Go far away. Go far away now.”

  “Yes, I hear you, Viola, but why? Why should Sora go far away now?”

  Viola took three trembling breaths and finally managed, “Kill. He—will—kill—you.”

  It took the rest of the night for Sora to clean up her diminutive charge, but she was unable to get from Viola who exactly was supposed to kill her.

  As the sun rose, Viola, with bandages on every limb and six stitches on her upper arm, finally closed her eyes and slept.

  Sora saw the girl/woman slowly shallow her breath, and then her eyes began to move rapidly beneath her barely closed eyelids. Although Sora had seen this hundreds of times before, it always shocked her—eyes in motion, lids partially open, fast asleep.

  Sora reached down and pulled the antique crazy quilt up to Viola’s chin. As she did, Viola slid her tiny hand into Sora’s and said, “Don’t hate Viola, please don’t hate Viola.”

  “Never, sweetie, never would I hate you—ever.”

  Viola sighed deeply and turned towards the wall.

  The quilt slipped a little and a wound on Viola’s neck opened, allowing a thin stream of crimson to work its way down her back.

  Sora took a tissue and blotted it, but the cut was stubborn and would not clot. She contemplated getting her sewing kit again to stitch it up, then she saw Viola’s left hand snake around and feel for the gash. When she found it she put her index finger deep into the wound, and the bleeding slowed, then stopped.

  Why not? Sora thought. Considering the other things I’ve seen her do, why shouldn’t she be able to stop her own bleeding?

  Sora returned to her room and began to clean the mirror glass from the floor. When she went to right the antique oval frame it came apart in her hands. She held back tears. The mirror had been the very last gift her mother had ever given her.

  It was Viola’s reading of her mother’s final thoughts before her death—Tell Sora that I will always love her and I’ll be waiting for her—that had convinced Sora to commit her life to looking after the diminutive speaker for the dead. She hadn’t planned to, it just happened. As if it was meant to happen. Meeting Viola Tripping had completely changed the path of her life.

  Little did she know that everyone who was close to one of the Gifted had his or her life profoundly altered. And not always for the good.

  As the dawn came, she found the razor blade that Viola had used to cut herself and wondered where she had gotten it. She’d bathed Viola for years and had never used a razor on her silken skin. What few strands of hair she had on her arms were almost transparent against the blanched whiteness of her skin. Her legs were hairless, as were her private parts. Sora had wondered what she would do when Viola began to menstruate—but that eventuality had never come into being.

  She heard the girl/woman cry out from her bedroom, the words painful but piercingly clear: “Please don’t hate Viola, please don’t hate me! Please!”

  An hour later Sora took the cell phone from the shoe box in the back of her closet and dialed the number again—and again that hum in the background and the too-cool voice.

  “Something’s happening,” Sora said, trying her best to control the scream that was building in her chest.

  “Yes, yes it is. I know it is,” the cool voice responded. The line went dead.

  Sora dialed the number again, but this time no one answered—just that odd hum. When she tried again there was no dial tone on her phone.

  12

  A TAPE OF MARTIN ARMISTAAD

  “TURN LEFT,” YSLAN SAID.

  “Georgetown’s to the right,” Emerson said.

  “I want to see Harrison before I see his house.”

  Emerson turned left. Yslan sat back and switched on her iPad.

  “Whatcha’ gonna watch? Cat videos?”

  She shot him a look. “How far to the hospital?”

  Emerson’s deep grey eyes turned to her. “It’s a long-term facility, not a hospital.”

  Yslan pulled herself away from the depths of his eyes. “Already? Already they moved him?”

  “Apparently he didn’t warrant the expense of a hospital bed.”

  “But they need to do tests.”

  “They’ve done the tests. They’re stumped.”

  Yslan smacked her palm against the window. “How long?”

  “Till we get there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ten minutes or an hour.”

  “What—”

  “D.C. traffic, ten minutes or an hour.” He shrugged.

  Yslan turned back to her iPad and summoned up the last prison shots of Martin Armistaad. They’d been taken two days before his unexpected release. He was smiling, clearly knowing he was being photographed. His teeth were surprisingly good for a convict six years into his sentence. She saved the pictures in a file of their own, then switched to the video of her last interview with the man—and hit play. She braced herself. Before his arrest Mr. Armistaad was number one on her Gifted file. She had met him twice before his incarceration and had thought of him as a vital, and charismatic, if eccentric, individual.

  But the creature on the video who ambled into the prison interview room appeared to be nothing more than a thin, balding man with a greying beard and a vicious case of psoriasis that coated his left arm and shoulder and reached up to his cheek.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Armistaad,” she heard herself say.

  She steadied the tablet on her lap and activated the split-screen function.

  The man across the table from her sat and hung his head. He scratched a red patch on his flabby left forearm, and it extruded a yellowish fluid.

  “I know you didn’t have to agree to this meeting, sir.” She remembered feeling queasy then. Now she just wanted to vomit.

  Armistaad said nothing.

  Finally Yslan asked, “How’s the food in this joint?”

  With his head still hung low Armistaad said, “The restaurant leaves something to be desired, but if you’re really bad you get room service, so . . .” Armistaad allowed his remarkably light voice to trail off as he raised his eyes to meet Yslan’s. “Pretty eyes,” he said, then corrected himself: “hider’s eyes.” His voice was deepening, no longer light. His head no longer down but rather held proudly.

  Yslan watched herself do her best not to be repulsed. And although she obviously wanted to deny this man a view of her eyes she remained facing him straight on.

  “You don’t know, do you, Special Agent Yslan Hicks?”

  “Know what, Mr. Armistaad?”

  He winked at her then said, “About the clearing.”

  “The what?”

  “Nothing. Nothing that I could tell you. Something you’ll just have to figure out for yourself.” Before she could
respond, he added, “So what do you say we start again. You pretend that I didn’t have to agree to this meeting—I believe we were at that lie, weren’t we?”

  The man’s eyes blazed. The old magnetism was back in full force.

  Armistaad reminded her of Hannibal Lecter, but she dismissed the thought, reminding herself that Hannibal Lecter was a fiction. Then she stopped herself from such sophistry—the man on the iPad screen was as otherworldly as Thomas Harris’s nightmare creation. And he clearly knew it.

  For a moment she wished that she’d never been introduced to the idea let alone the reality of synaesthetes—that the ground she walked on was the solid terra firma that she thought it was before she met the likes of Martin Armistaad. That the world was a real place with real rules. Not the shifting miasma of Martin Armistaad, Viola Tripping—and Decker Roberts.

  Yslan watched herself on the screen take a breath and then say calmly, “Thanks for taking this meeting, Mr. Armistaad.”

  He opened his arms and then laced his fingers behind his head, shimmying down in his chair so that his pelvis was aimed more directly at her face. “What can I tell you, Ms. Hicks? My social calendar is very full, but I was able to sneak it in—as I did the last time we met.” He smiled, the antecedent for his “it” obvious to both of them. He was missing a front tooth.

  “Thank you for seeing me again.”

  “Not a problem.” More scratching.

  “In your early essays you state that all your thinking is purely mathematical. That there are natural cycles in the world that are generated from the mathematical reality of pi.”

  He stared at her. No more scratching.

  “Do you still believe that, sir?” To her ears, she sounded way too much like Jodie Foster—no, Clarice Starling.