The power had switched off.
I wouldn’t panic. It happened a lot with these old European power lines. In my last flat, I had spent many black nights in Pigalle when the lights on the red windmill had gone dark.
I dropped my cigarette butt into the water and erected up out of the tub and toweled off. Once in the kitchen, I reached into the cupboard beneath the sink and pulled out three thick candles and a handful of tea lights. I pulled out a matchbook advertising some dank, unmemorable club in Pigalle and I lit them all. The flames made tall shadows. I stood there for a second, hand on hip, watching the smoke play against the darkness. I pulled out my phone.
I dialed the hospital and asked for Dr. Ben Robinson. I told the receptionist to tell him it was a cardiac emergency, which, I reasoned to myself, was technically true since it involved broken hearts.
Ben’s voice was urgent when he got on the line. “Hello?”
“It’s Alice.”
“Alice?” The urgency was gone now, replaced by annoyance. I heard a frustrated sigh leap from his lips. “Let me guess? The Eiffel Tower got old hat, so you skateboarded off the Arc de Triumph while evading the poison arrows shot from a suitor’s bow straight into your heart.”
“Not exactly. But you get an A for creativity.”
“You told the receptionist this was a cardiac emergency.”
“It is, sort of, I mean it’s a heart emergency,” my eyes went up to the ceiling for guidance, “double bypass, actually, my heart and your heart.”
Ben didn’t say anything for nearly a full minute, during which I could hear the buzz of the hospital in the background; a conversation about discharges, and a page ringing over the intercom. “Alice, I’m a doctor, not a miracle worker. I’m not sure I can have any effect on a heart like yours.”
“What kind of heart is that?”
“One that’s been sitting on ice for so long.”
“Ouch. That really stings.”
“You hurt me. It’s like you’re torturing me, calling me after what happened. I felt like such a fool showing up at your place with flowers, only to be shown how little interest you actually have in me. What am I supposed to say, Alice?”
My fingers nervously twisted a strand of my hair into a pink spindle. “Say that you will give me another chance. I mean, you worked a miracle on my arm. It’s healed up already with nary a trace of that metal venom they call a bullet. Maybe the same gentle touch can work on my heart.”
“Okay, Alice. I can give you another chance. I mean, I think you know that I am a bit crazy for you.”
“How about if the second chance starts tonight?” I asked, crossing the fingers that balanced my glowing cigarette. “How free is your schedule?”
“My shift here ends in an hour. After that, I’m wide open.”
“Okay, then I will see you in an hour. You know where I live.”
I hung up and stripped my towel off on the way to the bedroom. I got dressed in my best-fitting pair of jeans and a crisp white T-shirt. It was hell to put on makeup in the dark, so I dragged a candle in front of the bathroom mirror. I drew my eyes out very large with brown liner and black mascara while balancing a cigarette with my other hand. The warm radiance of the candle gave my skin a soft glow, hiding the exhaustion I had come to wear around my eyes. As I glided the pencil along the corners of my eyes, a sensation of calm washed over me. For three years of travelling and hiding, it was only my femininity, the routine of beauty, which had been constant. It was a comfort and a therapy to dress my face in the mirror, to wear the masks outside that I wore within. My spidery lashes blinked at my reflection and I wondered if what I was doing to Ben was cruel. Sure, I liked him. Who could resist him? But I knew this thing between us could never really go anywhere. Meanwhile, I was pretty sure Ben had fallen in love.
I heard a knock and ran to the front door.
“Alice, you changed your hair again.” It was Ben’s reaction when I opened the door. I was unsure if it was a compliment. He kissed my cheek and handed me a brown paper bag, which was stained from the grease of Tai takeout. His other arm was hefting a bag containing wine and beer.
We sat on my couch in the dark, surrounded by the ambience of flickering candles, as Ben carefully arranged the piping hot little white boxes of food over the coffee table. We didn’t waste any time in digging in.
After we had both had our fill, Ben clasped the stem of his wine glass and his eyes seemed intent on studying my face. “Alice, I’m glad you called me tonight.”
“I’m just happy you would even see me after the way I’ve acted. I don’t know why I do it. It’s just that whenever I feel myself getting close to someone, I shut them out. I acted like a jerk, Ben, and I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I was coming on too strong. I was moving entirely too fast. I see it now. I had no right showing up at your apartment unannounced, or always asking you questions about your ex-boyfriend or badgering you about the identity of the mysterious Heather Gilmore.”
“I’m going to try and open up to you more,” I told him. “But I will admit, none of those topics are things I especially care to discuss.”
Ben pushed away the empty takeout containers, as if to clear open the spaces of my heart. “I’m willing to go as slow as you need, Alice. Take our time. Really get to know each other. I want to know all about you.” His eyes studied me in the dark. ”Tell me about your work. That’s a mundane enough topic, right?”
I choked a little on my beer. “My work? Oh, it’s boring mostly.” I reclined my legs up onto the couch and let my eyes fall to the ruins of takeout boxes.
Ben began rubbing my ankles. “But you get to travel around seeing the world. That must be so exciting.”
“It’s just a blur. The airplane lands, I get out, buy a postcard to send to my mom from the airport gift shop, then we take off again.” I wasn’t sure what a flight attendant did, really. I wiggled my toes as Ben’s fingers dug in and smoothed out the cramps. Ben lifted my foot up and pressed it to his lips and kissed my toes, one by one.
“What about you?” I asked, melting into the surge of tingles crackling up from my toes. “I mean, you’re a doctor. You get to help people, heal lepers, stitch up clumsy girls who fall out of national landmarks, all that good stuff.”
“It’s usually not that exciting. I’m just working as an ER doctor right now because there’s a shortage. Really my specialty is geriatric diseases.”
“Old people?” By this point the ankle rub had been promoted to a back rub. I took a breath and sunk into the digging of Ben’s gentle, yet thorough, finger work.
“Yeah, old people.”
“Why old people?” I was rolling my shoulders along to his massage. “Do they have a penchant for falling out of the Eiffel Tower, too? That seems to be irresistible to you.”
“If anyone over the age of fifty showed up on my ER cot wearing a shredded mini skirt with Technicolor stockings, I’m not sure I would find that irresistible.”
“I suppose those are the people they build the psych wards for.”
“The truth is, I worked in a nursing home facility in college, pre-residency, and I sort of fell in love.” I let my eyes roll back into my head in utter relaxation and told myself, of course Ben would fall in love with old people. He was Ben. Sweet, show-up-with -flowers-and-takeout, Ben. Sweet, ankle-rubbing Ben. Killer back-rub-giver Ben. Probably he was a teddy bear or Mother Teresa in a previous life. It made me wonder, what did he see in me? How could someone so pure like anything about double-crossing, lying Alice? Ben was honest, trustworthy, a pillar of society. Me? You couldn’t trust me as far as you could throw me. And the farthest I had ever been thrown was fourteen feet, when I pissed off the wrong martial artist moonlighting as a stolen software runner in the basement of a gentleman’s club in Bali. I felt terribly guilty about letting Ben fall in love with me.
Ben pulled me in with both arms. “Alice, I know I said I would take things slow at first but - .”
I touched my finger to
his lips.
“I like you, Ben. A lot. Tonight is perfect. Let’s not get all hypothetical, let’s just enjoy this for what it is.” I buried my lips inside the crook of his neck.
He lifted my chin with a finger and brought my eyes up to meet his. “I know,” he said, “it’s perfect for me, too. But how long before you just take off again? And I don’t hear from you for days at a time?”
“I told you, it’s just my line of work.” I wiggled my shoulders free from him and pounded back the rest of my beer.
“I know traveling is part of your job, and I can deal with that. But I hate never knowing where you are. I worry.” He intertwined his fingers inside mine and searched my eyes. “If we are going to be together, can you please at least tell me when you leave Paris? I don’t like the idea of not knowing what strange country you’ve landed in. It’s like dating Carmen Sandiego. Plus, how do I know you aren’t off having a romp with that jealous ex-boyfriend of yours, the one who shot you on the Eiffel Tower?”
“I thought the ex-boyfriend was on our list of restricted topics. Besides,” I said brightly, “my travel routes are going to be a whole lot less international soon. My job description has changed.”
“A promotion, Alice? That sounds wonderful. Tell me all about it.”
At that moment, a surging sound of wires being pumped full of buzzing currents resonated all around us and the lights blinked back on.
“Hey, it looks like the power is back on.” I stretched my arms over my head and squeaked out a yawn. “I’ll tell you about the promotion another time. I’m dead tired.”
Ben helped me clear the takeout boxes from the coffee table and blow out all the candles. “Tonight was really special,” he told me. The way he was leaning into the doorway made it clear he hated to leave.
“I agree.” I scooted onto the balls of my feet to kiss his lips.
“Goodnight, Alice.”
After I shut the door behind him, I leaned back against it and my legs felt like they were floating above the floorboards. I sauntered to the bedroom and collapsed into bed. I closed my eyes and felt my heart fluttering inside the cage of my chest. Thoughts that were vibrant and dreamlike were whisking my mind off to sleep, when, suddenly, I was startled by something like a crash of thunder on the other side of my tightly-shut eyes.
I startled awake. My eyes trailed across the dark room.
It was just my phone buzzing on the table beside my bed. My hand emerged from the sheets and dragged the phone back under with it. “Hello?”
Chapter Twenty-four: The Reporter
“THERE’S A JOB tonight.” It was Rabbit’s voice on the line. He sounded excited.
“Tonight? Can’t it wait? I finally just crawled into bed. My flat didn’t even have power most of the evening.”
“Yeah, how did you like that?”
“How did I like what?” I asked, sobering awake and losing my grip on the magical, twilight feeling of falling asleep.
“The blackout. That was all me. I had to tinker with the city’s electrical grid to disrupt some routers to wireless connections.”
“You caused the power outage? Whose internet did you make go kaput?”
“The answer ties into the job you have tonight.”
“How is it possible for me to have a job tonight? We’ve already got the dynamite stick, remember?”
“This is a smaller job, Alice. There’s a small nerd convention happening in Paris tonight, an informal coming together, if you will, of hackers who have been searching for the dynamite stick. I hacked their connections to get a list of the players involved and their meeting place.”
I tossed the covers asunder and planted my feet on the cold floor. “Cut to the chase. Why am I getting out of my warm bed in the middle of the night for this?”
“Well, one notable guest at the convention is a reporter. His name is Skip Hask. He’s from one those techie magazines called Zipped, and he’s been doing a decent job at chronicling the possible whereabouts of the dynamite stick. His articles don’t get loads of attention, since the existence of a master disk with all the Social Security numbers is pretty fringe theory in media circles.”
I clasped the hooks on my bra while standing in the center of my bedroom. The space around me was filled with blue moonlight spilling in from the thin curtains. “I still don’t see where pulling me out of bed in the middle of the night fits into this.”
“Here’s where you come in. Motley wants to make sure that none of the geeks are on his tail, and for you to show up and throw them off his scent if they are, and even if they aren’t, he just wants you to screw with the nerds. We’re too close to the finish line now to let some geeks in glasses muck it up.”
I stood in front of the closet, pressing hangered shirts up against my body, tossing the rejected ones onto a pile on the floor. “Rabbit, don’t I get enough face time with nerds hanging out with you all the time? Isn’t there some kind of quota for this?”
“Alice, quit it.”
“Alright. Where do I find these geeks?”
“They’re congregating at a lounge on rue Juliette Dodu in fifteen minutes.”
I clicked Rabbit off without saying goodbye and twisted my physique into a pair of striped mini shorts and clunky mud-green military boots. I selected a black halter top with threads of shimmer worked into the fabric. In the bathroom mirror, I piled on thick black eyeliner and swiped a healthy coat of iridescent blue shadow on my eyelids.
* * *
I got off at the Colonel Fabien metro stop and found my way to the bar on foot. It was past midnight and the streets of Paris were clad with bohemian-looking men, starving artists starved of all but alcohol and beautiful women. The women, all instinctively clad in scarves and stilettos, sipped cognac from glasses the size of thumbs, as their silhouettes shined elegantly beneath the candescent light of café windows. The streets were serenaded with whispers of accordion music as if to a movie soundtrack.
The doorway to the bar on Rue Juliette Dodu was choked with people. I stepped inside, where apparitions of smoke from clove cigarettes existed all around me. A quick sweep with my eyes concluded that the club was filled with twenty-somethings, looking like recent university graduates, likely travelling through Paris on the backbreaking mattresses of cheap hostels. No sign of the nerds yet.
I bounced my shoulders along to the techno beat that was pumping though speakers on the wall and told myself that maybe tonight’s job wouldn’t suck. Already, it was better than playing accountant at Cibix World Boring Headquarters. I settled at the bar and asked the bartender for a cognac.
I had just taken my first sip when a slender man in a gray suit, wearing eyeglasses held together with tape, and a laptop case poised in the crook of his arm, dodged in through the doorway and headed straight for the back of the club. I slinked off my stool and followed him to a table, where five guys were already seated. They all had laptops open in front of them. Well, actually, all but one of them. This other guy looked like an outlier and he was using a notepad and pencil to jot down notes. He had on an argyle sweater vest and pinstriped pants, and he had black spiky hair that was made notable by a streak of spearmint green running through it. I told myself that he was probably Skip Hask, the reporter Rabbit had told me about.
I strutted over to the table. “Hey, boys? Is this a closed meeting or can anybody play?”
Five sets of eyes were now contemplating me. The glare from laptop screens made everyone’s eyes shine ultramarine blue. The guy with the taped glasses who I had followed to the table cleared his throat. “This isn’t a video game convention,” he informed me. “There is no such thing as playing here. This is serious business.”
I pulled over a spare chair and planted it backwards-facing and straddled my legs around it. “I know all about serious business. I’m here for the hacker’s convention.”
They all laughed. “You’re not a hacker,” insisted the man with the taped glasses.
“Yeah, you’re not one of
us,” another one agreed, but this guy was cooler, nicely dressed with a Rolex strapped to his wrist. “If you’re a hacker, where’s your laptop?”
I tapped a finger to my head. “It’s all up here. I don’t need a machine to play.”
Skip finally said something, well, the guy I had pegged as Skip. With the clichéd pencil tucked behind his ear and ink-stained fingers, what else could this guy be but a hungry reporter? “Okay, if you’re the real deal, then why don’t you tell us what you know?”
I cleared my throat and announced with pomp, “What I know is that you’re all desperately looking for the dynamite stick.” At the mere mention of the sacred object, they all locked their eyes on me and I knew I had their attention. “Of course, you all have your individual reasons for wanting to get your hands on the dynamite stick. Some of you think finding it will lead to millions of dollars, Steve-Jobs-level notoriety, and girls all up on your modems. Others among you just love the thrill of the chase. You’re in it purely for the love of the hack.” I swore that I saw the geek sporting the nice watch lick his lips. “But more importantly, I know that you’re all totally off track.”
“Off track?” asked one of the geeks. He had unwashed hair and bad skin.
The one with the taped glasses folded his fingers into a temple. “Elaborate,” he instructed me.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said, leaning my body into the table, “we compare notes, share what we know, and then I’ll let you guys know just how wrong you are about everything. My name is Alice, by the way.”
“Alright, Alice, you can stay,” the man in the glasses ordained. “My name is Paul.”
They went around introducing themselves and I met, Lars, the well-dressed software developer by day, hacker by night, who had a love of designer watches. Next was Chris, he was an Art History major studying a semester in Paris, but really he was more interested in manipulating history with his computer than studying it. The one named Evan was the only one polite enough to offer to buy me a drink. He was twenty-seven-years old and lived in a skyscraper in Bon, but had acne like a freshman.
Generation of Liars Page 20
