by Alan Deniro
“I don’t think there are any eels in these waters,” Amar said, looking out at the Bay. “And the lifeguards would kill them on sight.”
“Oh but there are!” his son said, plopping down on the edge of the towel and pushing his feet into the gravelly sand. Amar winced and turned his body so the watch wouldn’t face his son.
“If you say so,” he mumbled, giving a smile. Looking at his watch again at a slant, with the file names cascading on the screen, he wondered whether there was a glitch in the transfer. Nothing of the Eighth Client’s files had ever looked like this before. The enjoyable voices on the beach kept murmuring over him. Surely there were others like him here?
“You’re not working, are you?” his wife said, putting a hand on his shoulder from behind. He flinched.
“You surprised me,” he said, looking down.
“You are working. Amar . . . you need to take that stupid thing off.” She stood over him, blocking the sun, crossing her arms. He met his wife at the Technical Freelance Armory, a few years after Mexico Moon, which in their vendor-conglomerate’s handbook was called the Strategic Reorganization of the Americas. She was in marketing services for a Bengali pharmaceutical company. She was shy but was finding her career voice over the last few years after birthing the two children, traveling all over India and Africa to meet her production teams. She was a team leader in a way that Amar could never be. People thought he sounded like a woman on the phone!
“I really need to . . . sorry,” he said. “Sorry.” He looked toward the Bay, the spires of old Visakhapatnam out in the water. “Where’s Puneet?”
“I thought he was getting rasgulla?” His wife looked back at the beach-house, the snack bar, the Ferris wheel.
“No, no—he was with you in the water?”
“I wasn’t in the water.”
“He’s swimming!” his younger son said. “Way out, near the towers.”
“Puneet!” his wife shouted, running out to the water. Amar struggled to get his watch off, but the strap was caught on a hook. As he was fumbling, his mind drifted backward, into an undertow of time, and he kept thinking: Why am I panicking? Is it because of her? Why is she panicking?
Back in the van—Amar was actually relieved that the trip to the beach was cut short by an imaginary emergency—Puneet was reluctantly explaining how he was swimming out to the tower crowns to impress a girl. Who wasn’t even Buddhist—his wife assumed, thinking out loud, working through the implications, because if this girl was Buddhist, he wouldn’t have had need to impress her, on the breakwalls and ruins of the old port, because of their mutual understanding of their dual nonbeing.
Puneet said nothing as they drove farther up into the hills, trees ripe with mango hybrids overhanging the road. Amar didn’t dare venture into this emotional territory—he really couldn’t care—of course, he was glad his son was safe, but he had no real doubts on this score in the first place. His wife also drifted into silence. But she had larger issues, which soon became clear after Amar glanced at his watch while driving. “I wish you wouldn’t work with devils!” she said, looking straight ahead.
“Father works with devils?” his youngest said. “What are they like?”
“They’re not devils.”
“According to Nichiren they are,” his wife said.
Amar sighed and clenched the wheel of the van tighter. They had met at sangha within the technical college, chanting together. The sanghas were subsidized by the companies; after the Japanese diaspora, Nichiren Buddhism had found a home within the corporations of India. He found it as a way to get ahead, but she fell into Nichiren’s teachings, more and more every year.
“We’re not going to talk about that now,” Amar said.
“America is a poisoned land!”
“I’ve never met them, my beautiful wife,” he said between clenched teeth. “They’re only contracts I have with them. Now let me drive.”
That night, after his children and wife were asleep, he locked himself in his office with the novel. He had managed to survive the sullen hours after they returned from the beach—helping with dinner, chanting together for world peace, doing laundry while his wife helped Prius with his Mandarin homework. Sand was everywhere. Children on motorcycles sped by on their street, which his wife tut-tutted as she was getting ready for bed. Didn’t their parents know this was a good Buddhist neighborhood?
“I can’t sleep,” he said, sitting up after ten minutes.
“Amar, I love you.”
“I know.” He kissed her forehead. The night sky was still. She was asleep when she said this. She would only say these words with such fierceness and warmth when she was dreaming.
He poured a Scotch—bottle kept in a secret drawer—and started downloading the scans from his watch. He had to enter the writer’s world, and this usually wasn’t an enjoyable process. It was never clear what an American writer was ever trying to say. Sometimes it made it easier to move the text along, toward a vision or instinct that Amar felt within the words, but sometimes this ambiguity was a dull wall, too thick to break. Tunneling underneath the text to the other side was the only option, but it was long and painstaking. This novel was, as Amar feared, one of the latter cases.
If it could be called a novel. The beginning picked up in the middle of the action, in the middle of a dinner party. In a castle? Amar wondered if, perhaps, the agent had forgotten to send pages, but no—the author had clearly numbered each page of the manuscript with tiny, fastidious numbers and dates, as if the author was trying to assert a timestamp control that was not there in the text itself:
. . . meeting Mick inside the cathedral was not Mary’s cup of tea. She was afraid of it, how it loomed on the hill, the votive candles in the vestibule. She had been there before as a child. But Mick said it was the only safe place, where his wife wouldn’t discover the true feelings for Mary that he had to keep secret.
“I have to see you,” he said. “That, or else I’ll leave the city and backpack through Asia. You know, see the world. You may hear back from me or you may not.”
“Fine. It’s a deal, then,” she said.
Mick’s wife had learned to read lips when she was in the foreign service. At the kitchen table, she read her husband’s conversation as if it were like a book. As Marigold walked up the hill to the cathedral—it was a pleasant path, lit with daffodils—she had no idea that Mick’s wife was following twenty paces behind. Mick Solon was already there, lighting a candle and stuffing a dollar in the donation box, supposedly for his dead grandmother.
CHAPTER SIX: Please Don’t Kill Me!
This was written more than twenty years ago. This was depressing, all the more depressing after the second Scotch. The handwriting was frantic. The pages had stains—from alcohol, no doubt. Writers like this one always drank. Amar converted the cursive to type, page by page, once he entered his handwriting algorithms. It would take a few hours.
He worked until morning. Decipherment and understanding were two different things, and he was nowhere near understanding when the morning bell rang six times. He could hear his wife wake, shuffle into the kitchen and then the shrine room. He thought about joining her, but would not. One of his project managers from South Africa who always sent him work gave a head’s up that a two volume commentary on the Lotus Sutra, by some Zulu pop transhumanist he’d never heard of, was going to be coming his way in a few days, just a head’s up.
He was almost falling asleep at his desk, the pages churning with due industry, when his scanner choked and stopped:
“Larissa paused. ‘Do you really expect me to discuss politics, my lord?’ she said, looking downward. And then her favorite Don Henley song started playing.”
White paper on the facing page. The scanner was adjusting to the typography differential. A note was caught in the agent’s original scan,
pressed in the pages of the notebook. Clean, dark printing, could have been from a typewriter. Creased once in the middle. A logo in the upper center—a seal, to be exact. He recognized that seal. He wished he could have smelled the page.
He blew up the page and read the note, and then read it again more quickly, as if blurring his comprehension would somehow change the placement of the words into something far more innocuous. Then he grabbed the wastebasket underneath his desk and vomited into it. He could hear his wife chanting, and the crossing guard’s whistle for school’s first shift. His children were second shift but had half-internships that started at nine. They would be waking soon, and his wife would ready them, and Amar started crying.
Then he paused the scanner and called the agent. He wasn’t even sure what time it was there, but he didn’t care. He waited about a minute for someone to pick up, but it wasn’t the agent. The room on the other side was dark, and he could barely see the shapes: a lamp, a head, a gun. Then the head moved closer to the camera.
“Yes, hi?” the woman said. She was young, thin, had a bandaged face. Was chewing something. Kind of evil-looking, Amar thought. She dipped out of view again until she was just a shadow.
“Where’s . . . where’s the resident of this property?” he said.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I’m a business associate of the woman who lives here. I need to speak to her.”
“Oh,” she said. “Um . . .” She scratched her hair with both hands. “That’s . . . that’s really not going to be possible. She’s been taken to the Lord.”
Marigold wasn’t sure what to do with the man on the other side. The agent’s apartment was given to her as part of the punishment. They kept adding conditions onto the agent’s punishment; Marigold wasn’t sure how she felt about that. First the lancing—Marigold was squeamish about it, but fine, it had to be done. People wanted it done. Then the agent was told she was free to go but then Marigold’s superior put his mask back on and said, wait, Marigold needs some place to stay to recover, to convalesce, and Marigold wasn’t going to make a big deal of it, but the rest of the couriers thought it was only proper. Marigold never really had a place of her own, just a couch in the couriers’ warehouse, on Staten Cape. The concierge—who was quite cooperative during the entire justice operation in the Kinko’s, all things considered—was beginning to balk at this, Marigold could tell. After all, the building was under his charge, and the couriers—even though they had the official backing of Lord Manhattan, with all the opportunities in the boroughs opened up to them—were beginning to press their luck a little, Marigold thought. But they insisted, and Marigold did need to sleep off all the excitement and the dull pain that was everywhere on her face, so she relented, and arrangements to move to the fifth floor were made. The concierge bit his tongue and gave the security card to Marigold. He also said to let her know if she “needed anything” but she knew what he meant to say was: “I’ll have my eyes on you.”
But where was the agent to go? That wasn’t really thought through by the couriers. The agent was sitting in a corner, staring at the hot glue drip and mix in the funnel of the binding apparatus, and the dragon moths buzzing around the ceiling bulbs, as if it all was happening to someone else. In a way, it was; she didn’t seem the type, after what she had been through, to stir up trouble anymore. She wouldn’t have been a recurrent threat, Marigold knew that. But the others didn’t see it this way.
“She just can’t be wandering Queens,” one of the couriers said, as if concerned.
“No, no . . .” Marigold’s assistant supervisor said. “She’ll be safest in the Lord’s custody, wouldn’t she? For her own protection. Marigold, don’t worry. She’s going to be all right.”
Her assistant supervisor might have noticed a look of concern on Marigold’s face as she watched the agent trying to stand up, say something. The agent couldn’t get her footing though.
“I think she’s going into shock,” Marigold said, forcing herself to look at her assistant supervisor, who plucked her from the street, literally, when she was ten, in a neutral-car derby on the old Brooklyn Slags. Marigold was ten, and steered the Acura chassis down the 500 foot incline. The car came in third, even though it crashed into the breakwalls. In the wreckage, her future assistant supervisor had snatched her out and splinted her broken leg. She wasn’t really hurt; he didn’t know that her brother was the brake operator in the compressed trunk and had died on impact. Marigold had never told him that. She didn’t remember much about that day. But the need to protect him from her own awful truths was slipping away from her.
“I know, I know,” he said. “She’ll have doctors in the detention facility.” He snorted. “She’ll have better medical benefits than we do.” That was the Lord’s line. “All right, get her out of here. Hook that gurney up to my cycle. And Marigold, go to her building now and rest.”
Marigold nodded. She looked for the concierge, but he was gone. When she got the key from him later, in his little lobby booth, she was going to tell him about the agent being taken to Lord Manhattan (who wasn’t even in Manhattan; White Plains, rather), but he gave her a look that said, I already know, and I’m not taking this lightly.
She thought that the phone call might have been the concierge buzzing her—to play a trick on her, maybe?—so it was a genuine surprise to find Amar on the other end. She didn’t know that the agent was an agent. Did something with books, of course, but books weren’t really up Marigold’s alley. There was a five second delay in the transmissions, so after a few minutes of meaningless back-and-forth, during which the agent’s predicament was not established to Amar’s satisfaction, Marigold asked him:
“Are you from Albany?”
“What?”
Albany was one of the few freestanding cities around the area she could think of, and also the farthest away she’d ever been. To deliver heart medicine. She biked all the way up there and took the river back and lived to tell about both trips.
“You have a nice office,” Marigold said. “And you sound far away. So I was thinking you were maybe from Albany.”
Amar licked his lips and closed his eyes. He was sweating. He said, with his eyes still closed: “Could you tell me when she’s coming back?” When he opened them, he wanted the agent to be there, to have willed the agent into existence in that room, speaking to him.
Marigold was still there. “Well, that’s kind of hard to say,” she said. “It depends on how long they treat her.”
Amar took a lot longer to speak than the normal delay. “Please tell me she’s not hurt.”
“Well, a little. But she’ll really be all right.” She wasn’t sure if she sounded convincing.
“Okay . . .” He took a deep breath. “What about the notebook? You have to have the notebook there, right?”
“I . . . Wait, well, was that . . .” She didn’t know why she was trying to be so helpful. Maybe she wanted to see his office a little longer—the mahogany desk, the office supply dispenser, the window overlooking what she thought was Albany. But of course it wasn’t Albany—the trees and grass, even in Albany, would not have been that green, and the wind shaking those trees would not have been so clear (without specks), and the children’s bicycles on the curb would not have been so unstolen.
“You have to tell me!” he said.
“Well, she was going to the Kinko’s to scan something—”
Amar leaned back in his chair and sighed, relieved. “Yes, that is the document.” For the first time he gave the impression that they were speaking the same language. “Yes, thank you. So where is it?”
“I’m not sure.” Marigold knew, however, that her supervisor had discarded it. Maybe that was part of the agent’s punishment as well.
A woman entered the office. She was in a dark suit and wore sunglasses with whirling blue lights on the sides. “
Amar, is everything all right?”
He turned around and waved both of his hands. “Not now—get out!”
“I heard you screaming, the children—”
“Out!” He stood up from his chair. “Out!”
She saw the wastebasket, the vomit. “Are you sick, Amar?”
“Please . . . please . . .” He opened the door wider and pushed her backward. It took her a few seconds to realize what was happening—Amar never did things like that—but by that time he had shut and locked the door.
“You have a really beautiful wife, Amar.”
He squinted. “How do you know my name?”
“She said it. Plus it’s on the bottom of the screen. Listen, do you mind if I pee?”
He leaned forward. “Fine. But believe me, I’m not going anywhere. The notebook is—”
She ran to the bathroom, locked the door (not sure why) and sat down on the toilet, and tried to think of what to do next. Amar was too far away to hurt her—she was pretty sure of that—but all the same she didn’t want to get other couriers in trouble. If he knew the agent, maybe he knew others in Queens? She was stupid to think that he came from Albany—her mouth couldn’t be trusted.
Think, she said to herself, looking at herself in the mirror. Think before you say anything. Think.
When she sat down again, she saw that Amar was staring straight at her. Wouldn’t break his eyes away.
“They threw the notebook away,” she said.
He didn’t get angry; not in a way that was immediately visible to her. He was resigned. “Can I tell you what was in the notebook?”
“Sure,” she said.
He laughed. “No, no. You know, I thought about telling you, but . . .”
“Fuck off!” she said, nearly shoving the screen off the desk, kicking it. “You need to leave.”
