Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  031593.doc

  Things have been confused, more so than normal. The WTC bombing threw everyone for a loop. Craig vanished. I wonder if they’re shutting it all down, burying things like they did in 17927. Been in now what … thirteen years. Active nine of that. Now nothing? I wonder how much of this is political, if this goes all the way to the top, and how much a new regime changes things. I wonder, briefly, who I am really working for. Or, at least, who I was. For now it seems I work for myself. At least until they find me, or I find them.

  I have a few places to run to, but no plans. A few contacts, but nobody I really like, some of whom feel the same about me. I did manage to reach one of my old 17927 connections. The conversation was brief. Stay out of the way. Keep your head down. Money is your problem. Someone will find you. Eventually. Then just a dial tone. Another burned phone.

  Freedom sounds great, until you have it. Then what? No idea where to go now. Centralia? I wonder if anyone still lives there. As much as I hate Pennsylvania, maybe visiting home will inspire me. If nothing else I can look for some new places to hide a body.

  • • •

  When I first arrived in Centralia, PA, it immediately felt like something Edison had had a hand in, immense yet surreptitious. I couldn’t help imagining that it had been he who had lit the slow-burning fuse that slowly ate up everything from below. The hidden and unseen and smoldering mine fire that had gotten the town legally wiped off the map.

  I had to park a mile away and walk there, past the heaps of dirt, fragments of fence. I didn’t have maps of the fire, couldn’t see how it crept below, stretching out like cancer. I could only imagine it was everywhere I walked, waiting for the right moment to reach up and crack open the earth beneath my feet. The number 17927—the town’s old postal code, rescinded by the post office over a decade ago—was painted, carved, taped on everything, but at that point there was little left. If you didn’t know there was once a town here, you might not realize it ever was. Just funny graffiti. Almost every building gone, most minor avenues covered in brush, quick-growing trees converting the area to forest. Erasure.

  It was foolish to be there, of course. Not just because of the dangers, the things the signs warned of as I wandered through the trees, imagining houses, children, him. More because there was obviously nothing there to be found. It was a graveyard, a place where secrets went to die. Whatever it was that got buried there, it was gone. Like he was gone.

  Some things, when you dig them up, they try to pull you in.

  I walked back to the car, disappointed in myself. He’d come back here once, but not recently enough to help. A false lead. Where else had he gone? Back somewhere in New York?

  Open laptop, Command-F.

  • • •

  091101.doc

  Nothing to watch on television. Same shit about New York on every channel. Makes me wonder what they really have going on, with a distraction this big. Could be anything, with the whole world looking one way. Banks, perhaps. Whatever it is, they are involved. Otherwise, why would Marc have called me just last night, after five years of nothing? No details on a job yet, but maybe soon—going to try to connect me with a different cell in Buffalo. I can only imagine what the job might be, there. Do not really care. Work is work.

  Laptop is dying. Maybe I will get a PowerBook. Worthwhile investment—if I might be working again, soon, I might have more to say to myself. And this is all that keeps me sane. Note to future self: that was a joke. You are not sane.

  Not bad timing, anyway. I need to go shopping anyway. Marc says I need to pick up a new clock. Something about birds. Whatever.

  • • •

  “Come on, you bastard,” I said aloud, “give me something I can actually use.”

  I read through the last entry again. Marc? Who was Marc? Command-F returned hundreds of results. I opened a few at random, scanning through the text for something more relevant to my current interests. And found it, at last, in the most obvious of places.

  Not at the beginning of my story, but just before, in the prologue.

  • • •

  043008.docx

  I get the call in the middle of the night. I would complain about being woken from a sound sleep, but I have not slept soundly in months. And I cannot ignore this one. It is the first call I have gotten on this particular phone, and of course the last one I ever will.

  “Tom.” I recognize the voice immediately, though it has been years since I last heard it, angry, accusing. Five years? Six? I am surprised, uncertain, but immediately willing to listen, no matter what the words. One syllable is all it takes to get my blood flowing, anticipation or something similar. Finally.

  “Marc?”

  “How you been? Still on the west coast? How’s the job market?” Marc, never one for small talk, dropping immediately into code. Thinly veiled, but appropriate, considering the state of the economy. The best kind of lie.

  “Not great.”

  “You want to come to DC? Got some work, maybe.” Interesting. Bush one was barely out the door last time I had a job there.

  “You still working, uh, at that same place?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Same shitty office. Come on out and interview. Dress up, bring your fancy briefcase. The Black one. We can ride the Metro down to the Mall.”

  “Yeah,” I say, decoding. Briefcase bomb, September, subway. “Sounds good.”

  “Great. Just, Tom, you gotta promise me something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t blow this like last time.”

  And silence.

  Unsure, again. Hateful uncertainty. It worries me a bit, the timing, this no doubt being political somehow. And why me? I have done some good work over the past few years, but nothing I can take credit for—even if I wanted to. Am I expendable? Stupid thought. Of course I am. And perhaps that is reason enough.

  How can I refuse? I have been west for too long. Grown soft like old flannel. I have fallen into deadly patterns in hibernation, lazy, sleepy. Have stopped caring enough to try and change things. Perhaps this will be good for me. Get the fire going again, make things happen. Things that need to happen …

  I think about it for the rest of the night, write out the pros and cons on index cards and paper towels, and come up with more cons by far. But it is really all a waste of time. I do not need to think about this. This is inexorable. This is inevitable. This is already happened. I have been waiting for this moment to arrive, and it has arrived, and though my body has not yet caught up, I have already decided. My mind is already out the door and flying east, into a growing fire.

  Behind me, nothing but ashes and black.

  Edison North

  09/14/2018

  On my way back to where it began I missed an exit and wound up in my old neighborhood. I knew my family was not there anymore, but it wasn’t true until I saw it with my own eyes, saw the strange children on the front lawn, vinyl siding slapped over peeling paint, a new roof, all of it in different colors. I wondered how long they waited. How long they looked for me. Probably not very long.

  The park where I’d spent so much time as a child had grown in all the wrong ways, new landscaping, a new fence where I used to be able to cut through the neighbor’s yard. I took off my shoes, wandered through fresh-cut grass, trying to make a connection. Walked barefoot on blue moss beside what used to be the playground. Nothing was recognizable, myself most of all. I wasn’t the same me anymore.

  Maybe that’s why I never thought to look harder for my family. They weren’t mine any more. And I wasn’t theirs.

  I left and took surface streets from there, sick of the traffic on 66. Why had he taken that Metro job? Why had they given it to him? DC needed all the mass transit it could get. Or maybe that was the reason; shut that down, shut everything down. Gridlock. And somewhere in the midst of that, something else, something small, but meaningful. What? I had no idea. Would never know. Wondered if anyone alive knew. Besides him.

  One person, at lea
st. Whoever hired him for that job, whoever had arranged for him to be in town that day, had pulled the strings to place him in my path.

  • • •

  It felt strange to be in the restaurant again, as if my presence corrupted the memory. But of course memory was no match for reality anyway. Remodeling had been done. New construction, new menus, more parking. Streets had been widened. There were new shadows. Larger trees and more of them. It felt wrong but still familiar, in an uncanny way. It seemed to fit the fact that I’d taken my time, had avoided the anniversary by about a week. It was all a near miss. Close, but not quite the same as it had been. Like me.

  I forced myself to go through the motions, as if this would somehow help me find him again. Parked in the same spot he had—back behind the dumpster, facing the next street over—walked back the way we’d come, through the glass door and into the lobby. It was still early afternoon, and there was no sign of a crowd, so I walked right up to the counter and ordered a medium Diet Coke, big enough to give me time to think. The cashier was twice my age, the sort I’d normally expect to be running the place. Economy’s a bitch.

  “Do you want a large? It’s only twenty cents more.”

  “N—” I started to say, a kneejerk reaction to his upselling. But it occurred to me that I might be a while, and the more I had to drink the longer I’d be a customer.

  “Yes, thank you, Willem,” I said.

  “Do you want anything else?”

  I sighed. A million responses went through my head, a thousand reactions, some over. “No. Thank you.”

  I tried to remember which booth Edison had sat in, then realized I hadn’t seen him sitting, and picked one quite at random, a corner near the door. It seemed like where he would be—everything visible, no one behind him. Safe, for him. Not for anyone else.

  And then I sat and waited. Waited for … I didn’t know what. A feeling? Ghosts? Whatever it was I expected, I was disappointed. There was not going to be a revelation, a chill down my spine. Had I come all this way for nothing? Was this—this nothing—what I needed? There had to be more. So I brought out the laptop, woke it up, and checked to see if the store had an open wireless network available. I was surprised to find that there were two.

  I chose the one named “17927.”

  There wasn’t much to see. One single network connection, one damned login window that would not accept the stored username and password no matter how many times I tried. I blamed the computer, I tried rebooting, I tried changing network settings, I tried everything I could think of with a laptop running an obsolete operating system.

  I looked for clues. Whose network was this? Why had the laptop connected to it before? Who was in DC? Marc? Was he still around? Was this his? Where was he located? Nearby, if it was wireless. But what was nearby? A few restaurants, a supermarket. There were some tall buildings and an apartment complex several blocks away, but it was way too much ground to cover. And the moment I moved from this corner of the restaurant, “17927” went away. Whatever it was, it was intended for just this place. Just this booth.

  I needed to talk to Marc. He, of all people, would know where to find Edison. He might not tell, but I had to ask. And so I sat like a fool, typing in no end of different usernames and passwords, connecting and ditching. I tried the obvious—Edison, Thomas, Vanilla—along with every bit of code I’d heard Edison, or Abe, or Nick, or any of them speak. Then I got creative and vulgar. Then I got a hotel room and slept, and came back the next day for three meals, two hours at a time, and pretended I was writing the great American novel when in fact all I was typing was this irrelevance in-between his recollections.

  The best I could hope for was that someone was logging this mess. That they would notice my failure, and come find me. I was right.

  It took three days.

  • • •

  “You can stop now,” said a voice. I peeked over the laptop as a woman slid into the booth opposite me. A bit younger than Edison, graying through the blonde at her temples. Dressed smartly but not overly so, business casual a bit heavy on the casual. Honest eyes, deceitful lashes. Tray full of burger and fries with which she knocked my empty salad container aside, plastic fork skittering to the floor.

  “Every time you do that, I get a text message,” she said, voice as crisp and thin as her fries. “Do you have any idea how much that costs on a prepaid phone?”

  “Sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t. She glared as I shut the screen to conserve what little battery I had left, then started peeling open condiment packets, lots of them. Long, delicate fingers, fingernails just long enough to be feminine, not quite long enough to make me itch with unease and try to bite them down.

  “I had to shut off my cell. That was quite inconvenient.” She pointed at me with a cluster of fries, dipped them in ketchup and crammed them in her mouth all in one go. Chewed, swallowed, spoke. “And you know, once would have been enough. Really. One time. I still would have come. I leave town for three days. Three days. And …” She shook her head, took a long sip of her drink, wiped her mouth with a napkin, and suddenly appeared to get over it all, smirking.

  “I’m amazed that relic is still running,” she said as I turned the laptop over in my hands and finally set it down on the table. “Tom got sick of chasing upgrades, said he’d only replace something when it broke or died.”

  The way she looked at me, it was clear this also included me.

  “You’re …?” I asked, somewhat bewildered.

  She took a large bite of burger, immediately wiping her mouth. Fastidious. She waited until she was done chewing before answering. Polite, too.

  “Marcella,” she said crisply, emphasizing the soft c that couldn’t possibly come across in a text file without a cedilla attached.

  “Ed— Tom’s fixer,” I said, using the name she’d used. She didn’t react to the slip-up.

  “Former. But yes. Kind of ironic though, when you say it like that. Tom is unfixable.”

  “I’m C— Nichole.”

  “I know all your names. We don’t need an introduction. We already met. Not that you would remember. You were asleep.”

  But, suddenly, I did …

  • • •

  Half-awake. Words. Shouting.

  “Didn’t I say not to do anything stupid? Didn’t I? Why is she still here?”

  A shrug. Shadows under the door.

  “Why not?”

  “Did you kill her parents?”

  “No. They weren’t there.” A long pause, then: “I’ll figure it out.”

  “Get rid of her.”

  “There’s nothing stopping her from leaving.”

  “Isn’t there. Why hasn’t she left already?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to. When she leaves it’ll be her choice.”

  “Well, you be sure and let me know when that happens.” Movement, pacing back and forth. Angry. “I am so sick of cleaning up your messes. What is this now, the third time? This is not why I woke you up. This is not part of the job.”

  ”I—“

  “I swear to god, Tom. The office will recover, but if you fuck up this job because of a fucking child, I will fucking end you. I will end all that you are.”

  “And what exactly am I?”

  A pause for thought, not nearly lengthy enough.

  “An asshole.”

  • • •

  “This was your office,” I said. “This is the office.”

  “An office,” she said. “Sort of. Not that Tom had any respect for it.”

  I looked around the lobby, needlessly. It was all new, but it was all the same. I think that was part of the reason Edison had been so fond of places like this. Familiarity.

  “Technically, the stuff that matters is a mile away and several stories up, but there’s nothing there but a desk, a server, a fax machine, and directional wifi. Pointed here, and a half-dozen other places nearby: coffee shop, library, park bench. It’s a hundred square feet of empty behind a locked door. We
don’t use it much anymore. It’s obsolete, like that thing.”

  No wonder he never worried about the cameras here. It was safe. And suddenly I got a much better sense of how deep this thing went. The conspiracy sites liked to talk about how some secret agency controlled every single camera in the country. Maybe it was true. And maybe, just maybe, if you have the ability to see everything, you can also decide when to look the other way.

  “I’d forgotten about this place, frankly,” she said, eyes narrowing as she conjured up an unpleasant memory. Sour gaze. “He got in touch with me, I guess it was the day he left Columbus? A lot’s happened since then, most of it not in his favor. He thought things got bad after SFO …”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much. Mostly he talked about how you sold him out in Seattle.”

  He knew.

  It was like an ice pick in my chest. All along, he knew what I had done. And yet he went along with it, watched me stumble over my lies, for years. I hated him for it, hated myself for lying, for not knowing better, for not assuming he’d see through it. I wanted to be dead, ten years ago, dead on the floor of this restaurant, by his hand.

  “He did?” I managed to croak.

  She nodded as if we were discussing the weather.

  “He told me everything. How you gave him up, how they took him to the motel and tortured him, for fun or for information, he wasn’t really clear on that. Or who they were.”

  “Do you know who they were?”

  “Yes,” she said. Period. She maintained eye contact with me as she reached for a french fry and bit it in half. Clearly that was the end of that line of inquiry.

  “I guess you don’t want to talk about that sort of stuff here,” I said.

  “They don’t care,” she said, waving her hand towards the counter as if brushing away a fly. “They don’t know to care. Morons. Some of them don’t even know what went down here ten years ago, and there’s a memorial plaque on the wall.”

  I hadn’t noticed it when I came in, and decided I would continue not noticing; I had no desire to see who was deceased. I was sure I’d known some of them.