by James Grady
Jules whispered: “What are you saying?”
Zane said: “That we gotta go.”
“You taped my son to a fence?”
“We need to leave,” urged Hailey.
“No,” I said. “We should talk.”
“All of us?” asked Zane.
He stared, Russell stared, Jules stared, we all stared at Dr. Yarrow Clark.
She clung to Jules. Shot me with her diamond eyes.
As gently as I could, I told her: “Remember how you asked who we are?”
“Believe me, with 30 years of clinical psychiatric experience plus what I learned in kindergarten, I know exactly who you are. You’re all the way crazy.”
“Finally!” said Russell. “A shrink who gets it!”
“Knowledge is not power,” I told her. “Knowledge is responsibility. And peril. Acquiring knowledge is action. All actions have consequences. If chaos science has taught us anything, it’s that for each action, there are unintended, unpredictable reactions. In the marble at the CIA, they chiseled words about ‘the truth will make you free.’ Wrong: Once you know the truth, you’re stuck with it.”
“The CIA?” was her response. “How far do your delusions extend?”
“Apparently way beyond this room,” I told her. “And you shouldn’t be here with us. But here is where you’re stuck while we go somewhere else to talk. Afterwards, what Jules tells you is on him. And you, if you listen.”
Psychiatrist Yarrow said: “You people are in need of serious medication.”
“Whoa, Baby!” cried Russell. “You got some?”
Jules grabbed my arm: “You… My son taped to a fence! My Leon! Tape!”
Martial arts schooled me on how to break a grip on my arm. Life schooled me on when not to. I’ve not always been a good student. Right then I split my focus to include gently reversing Jules’s grip so that I controlled his arm while I faced Yarrow and Eric.
“Eric, stick with Dr. Clark. Don’t obey her. Don’t say anything. Don’t answer any questions. She doesn’t get to leave or contact anybody, but be nice. Here in the living room you can keep an eye on her and an eye out the window and let us know if.”
Of course Eric’s head bobbed yes: an order was an order.
“My son…!”
“Time for the rest of us to talk,” I said as I gently led Jules out of the room with its circle of folding chairs and wall of windows.
Russell, Zane and Hailey came with us into Jules’s cramped study. We closed the door. He trembled behind the desk covered with school work to correct, with dictionaries that defined words and atlases that showed where you were, with history texts of facts and footprints of forces that let you figure out where you’d been and what could be.
We told him The Whole Truth.
“Fuck you!” snarled the schoolteacher. “Why should I believe anything you say?”
Zane said: “Who could make up a story like that?”
“I teach teenagers! You think The Homework Eating Dog is the only crap I get?”
“What could a wild story like this gain us?” I said.
“You think I’m naïve? Lots of people don’t do what’s in their own best interest—even when they know what it is. And most of them aren’t sickos!”
“Crazy,” corrected Russell.
“Fuck you!”
“That’s fair,” said Russell.
“You taped my son to a fence!”
Hailey said: “We didn’t leave him on the ground.”
“On his feet,” said Zane. “Saying ‘fuck you’ to those who put him down.”
“Bottom line,” I said, “crazy or not: we make sense.”
Zane said: “You have the right to know how your loved one dies.”
“What good are rights when all the world is wrong. What good is sense when it all adds up to crazy.”
Jules paced behind his desk like a panther behind invisible bars. Back and forth until he slumped in his chair. “They said that all they could do was send me his ashes.”
“That was true for them,” I told him. “And it was a lie for you.”
Jules looked at us. “What can we do?”
“Always the question,” I said. “Half the answer is you can help us, then let it go.”
“I don’t like that half of the answer.”
“The other half is that we can’t tell you our plan.”
“In case,” said Russell.
“For operational security,” said Zane.
“To keep you safe,” said Hailey.
“You guys don’t have a fucking clue what you’re doing,” said Jules.
“Maybe you can help us with that,” I said. “With the fucking clue thing.”
Jules stared through us. Past us.
“Leon was never an ordinary kid. Nothing against the work Yarrow does, but when he chose public service, it made me even prouder. I knew he could be a star on Park Avenue or at Harvard, but to choose to work for our government… And he was a star there! He was so excited to be going to work for the NSC! He’d been living out of his suitcase for a year and he’d finally won a dream permanent post. That’s all he’d tell me, those damn initials that run everything: NSC, CIA. We shrink the names of things into initials so they’re easier to say, but then the things get harder to see.”
“What have you seen?” I asked him.
“Anything that felt funny,” said Russell. “Not just wrong, but not right either.”
“Something he said,” Hailey explained. “Something he did. A joke you couldn’t understand. A change in his personal life. Anybody new hanging around or—”
Jules said: “Or a phone call.”
We froze.
“A phone call,” said Jules. “That’s all it was. Didn’t think anything of it. The day he left to go—go up to you and that place in Maine, I know that now but then… Then I got a phone call. At night. A man. From Leon’s office—he said. He asked if Leon planned on coming back to New York. I told him Leon didn’t have time to stopover on the way to D.C. The man said he’d catch him at work, hung up.”
“And that’s—”
“Never happened before,” said Jules. “Why call to see if Leon was coming here?”
Hailey shrugged. “New York is an easy place to make someone die.”
“They had to be sure,” I said. “They would have been cool with him coming to New York, but they needed to know whether or not to trigger Nurse Death in Maine.”
“So that still doesn’t tell us if it was an inside or an outside job,” said Russell. “We can build that phone call into either scenario.”
Jules stared at us.
“But,” I said, “maybe what’s most important is that the call tells us Dr. F had to die before he could get to D.C. Maybe he wasn’t killed because of what he’d done, he was killed because of what he was going to do.”
“Pre-emptive strike,” said Zane. “Always popular.”
“Did I…” Jules couldn’t say what he feared.
“No,” I told him. “Nothing you did or didn’t do made any difference.”
Hailey threw him Nurse Death: “Did he ever mention Nan Porter?”
“No.”
Zane gave him the mastermind of his son’s death: “Or Kyle Russo?”
“No. Did he—”
“TV!” yelled Zane. “I saw TV commercials… Jules, do you have caller I.D.?”
He did, a white plastic box corded to the phone on his desk.
“But it only stores the previous 20 incoming calls,” said Jules as he scrolled backwards through the liquid crystal display of people who’d called. “After Leon died… All the sympathy calls… Call-backs for the shiva… No numbers from before yesterday. But I remember that man’s number was D.C., a 202 area code.”
He leaned
back in his chair. Shook his head.
“One day your government tells you your son is accidentally dead and burned up, then strangers show up to say he was murdered before they taped him to a fence.
“Say I believe you,” Jules told us. “Say I trust you. Still, you’re…”
“Crazy,” I said for him.
“At least that.” Jules shook his head. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Not tell anybody about us,” said Zane.
“Help,” said Russell.
Hailey lifted a thick paperback book from a shelf. Held it up for Jules to see.
A thick paperback guide to medicines and pills. Jules said: “Take what you need.”
“We need everything,” I said.
“I’m fresh out of miracles.”
“How about money?” His New Yorker face darkened and I said: “Operational funds. Clothes. Rations. Meds. Logistical gear, whatever you’ve got. We need—”
“Everything,” said Jules. “I heard you the first time.”
He pulled a wad of bills from his pants. “I maxed out my ATM withdrawal today for the shiva. There should be about $200 left there. Tomorrow…”
“Tomorrow is tomorrow.”
“Well… Tonight there’s the memorial money. Those white envelopes in the basket on the sideboard. I was going to fund a scholarship in honor of him. The kids at my school organized a cash collection in their homerooms, it’s in—”
“STOP!” yelled Dr. Yarrow Clark’s voice from beyond the closed study door.
Into our midst charged Eric, the silver-haired woman’s wrist tight in his hand.
“Don’t hurt her!” yelled Jules as he raced around his desk.
Zane restrained him with a gentle palm on his chest. “He won’t.”
“Eric!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”
Frustration contorted his face. He ran from the room, us hurrying in his wake.
To the dining room. He gave the silver-haired woman to Zane, who put an arm around her shoulders to reassure her that she was fine, to show Eric that he had her.
Eric held his head with both hands. He scanned the food-ladened table. Whirled to face the shrouded wall above the mantle. Let his eyes fall on the mantle with the hammer, wire and tacks Jules had used to cover the mirror and the vase of red roses.
“What did you tell him?” Hailey asked me.
Eric thrust the hammer in his belt, pulled down the sheet tacked over the mirror.
“What are you doing, Eric?” I yelled.
Russell told me: “Don’t bug him, man. He’s on a roll.”
Eric grabbed the cylindrical glass vase off the mantle, swung it so red roses and water flew through the room.
“Wild!” said Russell.
He helped Eric dry the inside of the vase’s glass cylinder. Eric checked to see if its bottom was thicker at the sides or in the center, whether its inner curve was convex or concave. Then he put the vase in my hands and ran from the room.
Hailey didn’t need the nod of my head to tell her to shadow Eric.
Dr. Yarrow Clark said: “He’s like a robot gone mad.”
“’Xactly,” said the man with his arm around her shoulders.
We heard rummaging in Jules’s study. Feet running our way.
Eric was back, Hailey two steps behind him.
She told us: “He got rubber bands and scissors.”
Eric leaned over the table with its vegetable trays, water soaked rolls, its brisket of beef and a turkey carcass under a gasping red rose. His face lit up and he dashed through the swinging kitchen door.
Hailey started after him—had to jump back as the kitchen door swung towards us and Eric ran back into the dining room holding a box of aluminum foil.
Wrapping the length of the glass vase with aluminum foil and using rubber bands to bind the foil to it took Eric less than a minute. He handed me the foil-sheathed vase.
We all watched him do it.
Like some samurai sword master in movie slow-motion, in our eyes and reflected in the glass rectangle mounted over the mantle, Eric plucked the hammer from his belt, cocked it behind his head and with a soundless ‘Kia!’ scream, smashed the hammer smack into the center of the naked mirror.
That BOOM! jerked a glass cracking snap through the whole apartment. The mantle wall shuddered. Ceiling plaster rained on us and the food table.
Jagged spider web lines lightninged out from the pulverized center of the mirror. What had been a smooth, coherent reflected image of us now trembled as dozens of fragmented planes with borders and angles. Our image was in pieces.
Yarrow Clark, M.D./PhD./Harvard-Harvard-Harvard whispered: “Holy fuck!”
Zane said: “Neighbors had to hear, feel that.”
“Fuck ’em,” said Russell. “Jules pays his rent.”
Eric frowned at the mosaic of mini-mirrors clinging to the wall above the mantle.
Smashed the mirror’s starred epicenter with his hammer again!
Chunks of mirror flew off the wall. Plaster rained. Glass shattered on the floor.
“OK,” said Russell, “that might have pushed a few neighbors over the line.”
“Eric,” said Zane, “there’s no one behind that mirror watching us.”
Eric’s eyes measured the sections of mirror still clinging to the wall. He pried off a torso-sized survivor and ran to the living room, all of us on his heels.
Folding chairs in the living room still stood in a circle like settlers’ wagons waiting for the Indians to attack. Eric put the broken section of mirror on one chair, peered out the wall of windows to the night and the street six stories below. He eased sideways along that glass pane—hammer in his hand.
“Ahh…”
“Don’t worry, Victor!” said Russell. “This is some kind of beautiful.”
And my dumb mistake. I’d split my focus between directing him and controlling the mourning father. I double-weighted my intent instead of centering to face one force at a time, no matter how instantaneously “short” of a time I devoted to each thing. In a Taipei T’ai Chi push hands battle, such double weighting would have gotten me slammed against a stone wall. Here, in this West Side Manhattan sixth story apartment, it got me watching Eric walk along a wall of night windows with a hammer.
Eric stopped. Stared out the window. Raised the hammer—
Laid it on the floor by the windows, just so. Eric held his hand palm down. Slid his hand along his body to establish a certain measure of height.
“Don’t touch anything!” said Hailey. “Remember, he’s an engineer.”
“And not the train driver kind,” said Russell.
Eric closed the heavy curtains over the wall of night windows.
“I don’t see what we’re doing!” said our host Jules.
Eric snapped on a table lamp. He moved one end of the foil wrapped vase to a point on the closed curtains in line with the hammer. He pressed the bottom of the vase against the curtain at the height he’d judged with his hand, circled a felt pen around the vase on curtain—and scissored that drawn hole from the heavy cloth.
“Hey, I need to live here after you’re gone!” snapped Jules.
“Don’t worry about that.” Yarrow Clark jerked her hand to cover her mouth.
Eric penetrated the curtain hole with the bottom of the foiled vase. Had me hold it. Peered down the open cannon end and angled the vase tube up. He steeled me into a locked solid position with an urgent grip.
“Just tell us what you need!” said Hailey.
Eric grabbed his head like it was going to explode. Glared at me.
“OK!” I said. “Sorry I somehow made you mute! Just… Go! Do it!”
He closed the living room door. Turned out the ceiling lights. Picked up the chunk of mantle mirror. Edged through the circle of
chairs to snap off the table lamp.
Darkness swallowed us, darkness pierced only by a shaft of light flowing through the vase poked through a hole in the curtain.
The shaft of light hit a mirror thrust in its telescoped path and bounced up to the white ceiling. That light refracted in reflected glory as a flat plane of illumination.
The mirror tilted as Eric stepped closer and further back, each motion adjusting the swirl of light’s focal length bounced to the ceiling until an illuminated patch of ceiling above us took on form and substance, shape and sense.
“Wow,” whispered Hailey.
Ghost movie. The city street below projected onto the ceiling like a diorama from heaven. The scene played live with intense crime lights from the Korean grocer across the street, open then at 9:35 p.m., open with a glow fed by a full moon, by a streetlight, by green-yellow-red winks from a traffic signal. Sound, no sound in that movie or in our room. Above us danced waves of the outer night where a parked car sat across the street from Jules’s apartment building, where a person in the driver’s seat of that car rested his arm on his lowered window and watched Jules’s front door. Sound, no movie sound as specters of two men appeared next to that driver’s window, as one of them shaped his hands in what we recognized as making a cell phone call.
“That’s about us,” I whispered.
What I’d told Eric: “Stick with Dr. Clark. Don’t say anything. Don’t answer any questions… keep an eye on her and an eye out the window and let us know if.”
Don’t say anything. Don’t answer questions. Keep an eye out. Let us know.
Finally, orders accomplished, Eric could use his voice.
“Oh-oh,” he said as in the silent movie on the ceiling, the two men outside the car split up and vanished into the darkness. “Oh-oh.”
27
The rooftops of New York under a full moon are a glorious sight even when you’re running for your life.
We’d grabbed Jules’s cash, all the money from Yarrow’s purse, envelopes from the basket on the sideboard table, said fuck it, threw open the apartment door and found the hall empty. We took an elevator, used Jules’s building key to get on the roof.
“What then?” he’d said as we rushed through his apartment gearing up to bolt. “You so crazy you think you can fly?”
