“I needed to talk to you,” Prescott said. The man had a large mane of gray hair and a matching mustache that bisected his lengthy face. He looked like an author ought to look.
“You could’ve called,” Malloy snapped.
“No, I couldn’t. If somebody had overheard or if you’d told anyone I was alive, my whole plot would’ve been ruined.”
“Okay, what the hell is going on?”
Prescott lowered his head to his hands and didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “For the past eighteen months I’ve been planning my own death. It took that long to find a doctor, an ambulance crew, a funeral director I could bribe. And find some remote land in Spain where we could buy a place and nobody would disturb me.”
“So you were the one the police saw walking away from where you’d supposedly had the heart attack in Vermont.”
He nodded.
“What were you carrying? A suitcase?”
“Oh, my laptop. I’m never without it. I write all the time.”
“Then who was in the ambulance?”
“Nobody. It was just for show.”
“And at the cemetery, an empty urn in the plot?”
“That’s right.”
“But why on earth would you do this? Debts? Is the mob after you?”
A laugh. “I’m worth fifty million dollars. And I may write about the mob and spies and government agents, but I’ve never actually met one…No, I’m doing this because I’ve decided to give up writing the Jacob Sharpe books.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s time for me to try something different: publish what I first started writing, years ago, poetry and literary stories.”
Malloy remembered this from the obit.
Prescott explained quickly: “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think literature’s any better than commercial fiction, not at all. People who say that are fools. But when I tried my hand at literature when I was young, I didn’t have any skill. I was self-indulgent, digressive…boring. Now I know how to write. The Jacob Sharpe books taught me how. I learned how to think about the audience’s needs, how to structure my stories, how to communicate clearly.”
“Tradecraft,” Malloy said.
The author gave a laugh. “Yes, tradecraft. I’m not a young man. I decided I wasn’t going to die without seeing if I could make a success of it.”
“Well, why fake your death? Why not just write what you wanted to?”
“For one thing, I’d get my poems published because I was J.B. Prescott. My publishers around the world would pat me on the head and say, ‘Anything you want, J.B.’ No, I want my work accepted or rejected on its own merits. But more important, if I just stopped writing the Sharpe series my fans would never forgive me. Look what happened to Sherlock Holmes.”
Malloy shook his head.
“Conan Doyle killed off Holmes. But the fans were furious. He was hounded into bringing back the hero they loved. I’d be hounded in the same way. And my publisher wouldn’t let me rest in peace either.” He shook his head. “I knew there’d be various reactions, but I never thought anybody’d question my death.”
“Something didn’t sit right.”
He smiled sadly. “Maybe I’m better at making plots for fiction than making them in real life.” Then his long face grew somber. Desperate, too. “I know what I did was wrong, Detective, but please, can you just let it go?”
“A crime’s been committed.”
“Only falsifying a death certificate. But Luis, the doctor, is out of the jurisdiction. You’re not going to extradite somebody for that. Jane and Aaron and I didn’t actually sign anything. There’s no insurance fraud because I cashed out the policy last year for surrender value. And Jane’ll pay every penny of estate tax that’s due…Look, I’m not doing this to hurt or cheat anybody.”
“But your fans…”
“I love them dearly. I’ll always love them and I’m grateful for every minute they’ve spent reading my books. But it’s time for me to pass the baton. Aaron will keep them happy. He’s a fine writer…Detective, I’m asking you to help me out here. You have the power to save me or destroy me.”
“I’ve never walked away from a case in my life.” Malloy looked away from the author’s eyes, staring at the cracked asphalt in front of them.
Prescott touched his arm. “Please?”
* * *
NEARLY A YEAR LATER Detective Jimmy Malloy received a package from England. It was addressed to him, care of the NYPD.
He’d never gotten any mail from Europe and he was mostly fascinated with the postage stamps. Only when he’d had enough of looking at a tiny Queen Elizabeth did Malloy rip the envelope open and take out the contents: a book of poems written by somebody he’d never heard of.
Not that he’d heard of many poets, of course. Robert Frost. Carl Sandburg. Dr. Seuss.
On the cover were some quotations from reviewers praising the author’s writing. He’d apparently won awards in England, Italy and Spain.
Malloy opened the thin book and read the first poem, which was dedicated to the poet’s wife.
Walking on Air
Oblique sunlight fell in perfect crimson on your face
that winter afternoon last year.
Your departure approached and, compelled to seize
your hand, I led you from sidewalk to trees
and beyond into a field of snow—
flakes of sky that had fallen to earth days ago.
We climbed onto the hardened crust, which held
our weight and, suspended above the earth,
we walked in strides as angular as the light,
spending the last hour of our time together
walking on air.
Malloy gave a brief laugh, surprised. He hadn’t read a poem since school but he actually thought this one was pretty good. He liked that idea: walking on the snow, which had come from the sky—literally walking on air with somebody you loved.
He pictured John Prescott, sad that his wife had to return to New York, spending a little time with her in a snowy Vermont field before the drive to the train station.
Just then Ralph DeLeon stepped into the office and before Malloy could hide the book, the partner scooped it up. “Poetry.” His tone suggested that his partner was even more of a loss than he’d thought. Though he then read a few of them himself and said, “Doesn’t suck.” Then, flipping to the front, DeLeon gave a fast laugh.
“What?” Malloy asked.
“Weird. Whoever it’s dedicated to has your initials.”
“No.”
DeLeon held the book open.
With eternal thanks to J.M.
“But I know it can’t be you. Nobody’d thank you for shit, son. And if they did, it sure as hell wouldn’t be eternal.”
The partner dropped the book on Malloy’s desk and sat down in his chair, pulled out his phone and called one of their snitches.
Malloy read a few more of the poems and then tossed the volume on the dusty bookshelf behind his desk.
Then he, too, grabbed his phone and placed a call to the forensic lab to ask about some test results. As he waited on hold he mused that, true, Prescott’s poems weren’t bad at all. The man did have some skill.
But, deep down, Jimmy Malloy had to admit to himself that—given his choice—he’d rather read a Jacob Sharpe novel any day.
THE THERAPIST
ONE
I MET HER BY CHANCE, in a Starbucks near the medical building where I have my office, and I knew at once she was in trouble.
Recognizing people in distress was, after all, my profession.
I was reading over my patient notes, which I transcribe immediately after the fifty-minute sessions (often, as now, fortified by my favorite latte). I have a pretty good memory but in the field of counseling and therapy you must be “completely diligent and tireless,” the many-syllabled phrase a favorite of one of my favorite professors.
This particular venue is on the outskirts
of Raleigh in a busy strip mall and, the time being 10:30 a.m. on a pleasant day in early May, there were many people inside for their caffeine fixes.
There was one empty table near me but no chair and the trim brunette, in a conservative dark blue dress, approached and asked if she could take the extra one at my table. I glanced at her round face, Good Housekeeping pretty, not Vogue, and smiled. “Please.”
I wasn’t surprised when she said nothing, didn’t smile back. She just took the chair, spun it around, clattering, and sat. Not that it was a flirtation she was rejecting; my smile obviously hadn’t been more than a faint pleasantry. I was twice her age and resembled—surprise, surprise—a balding, desk- and library-bound therapist. Not her type at all.
No, her chill response came from the trouble she was in. Which in turn troubled me a great deal.
I am a licensed counselor, a profession in which ethics rules preclude me from drumming up business the way a graphic designer or personal trainer might do. So I said nothing more but returned to my notes, while she pulled a sheaf of papers out of a gym bag and began to review them, urgently sipping her drink but not enjoying the hot liquid. I was not surprised. I kept my head pointed straight down at my own table, but with eyes aching from oblique spying I managed to see that it was a school lesson plan she was working on. I believed it was for seventh grade.
A teacher…I grew even more concerned. I’m particularly sensitive to emotional and psychological problems within people who have influence over youngsters. I myself don’t see children as patients—that’s a specialty I’ve never pursued. But no psychologist can practice without a rudimentary understanding of children’s psyches, where are sowed the seeds of later problems my colleagues and I treat in our adult practices. Children, especially around ten or eleven, are in particularly susceptible developmental stages and can be forever damaged by a woman like the teacher sitting next to me.
Of course, despite all my experience in this field, it’s not impossible to make bum diagnoses. But my concerns were confirmed a moment later when she took a phone call. She was speaking softly at first, though with an edge in her voice, the tone and language suggesting the caller was a family member, probably a child. My heart fell at the thought that she’d have children of her own. I wasn’t surprised when after only a few minutes her voice rose angrily. Sure enough, she was losing control. “You did what?…I told you not to, under any circumstances…Were you just not listening to me? Or were you being stupid again?…All right, I’ll be home after the conference…I’ll talk to you about it then.”
If she could have slammed the phone down instead of pushing the disconnect button I’m sure she would have done it.
A sigh. A sip of her coffee. Then back to angrily jotting notes in the margins of the lesson plan.
I lowered my head, staring at my own notes. My taste for the latte was gone completely. I tried to consider how to proceed. I’m good at helping people and I enjoy it (there’s a reason for that, of course, and one that goes back to my own childhood, no mystery there). I knew I could help her. But it wasn’t as easy as that. Often people don’t know they need help and even if they do they resist seeking it. Normally I wouldn’t worry too much about a passing encounter like this; I’d give a person some time to figure out on their own they needed to get some counseling.
But this was serious. The more I observed, the more clear the symptoms. The stiffness of posture, the utter lack of humor or enjoyment in what she was doing with her lesson plan, the lack of pleasure from her beverage, the anger, the twitchy obsessive way she wrote.
And the eyes. That’s what speaks the most, to me at least.
The eyes…
So I decided to give it a try. I stood to get a refill of latte and, walking back to my table, I dropped a napkin onto hers. I apologized and collected it. Then laughed, looking at her handiwork.
“My girlfriend’s a teacher,” I said. “She absolutely hates lesson plans. She’s never quite sure what to do with them.”
She didn’t want to be bothered but even people in her state acknowledge some social conventions. She looked up, the troubled eyes a deep brown. “They can be a chore. Our school board insists.”
Clumsy, but at least it broke the ice and we had a bit of a conversation.
“I’m Martin Kobel.”
“Annabelle Young.”
“Where do you teach?”
It was in Wetherby, a good-sized town in central North Carolina about an hour from Raleigh. She was here for an education conference.
“Pam, my girlfriend, teaches grade school. You?”
“Middle school.”
The most volatile years, I reflected.
“That’s the age she’s thinking of moving over to. She’s tired of six-year-olds…You put a lot into that,” I said, nodding at the plan.
“I try.”
I hesitated a moment. “Listen, kind of fortuitous I ran into you. If I gave you our phone number and you’ve got a few minutes—I mean, if it’s no imposition—would you think about giving Pam a call? She could really use some advice. Five minutes or so. Give her some thoughts on middle school.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve only been a teacher for three years.”
“Just think about it. You seem like you know what you’re doing.” I took out a business card.
Martin J. Kobel, M.S., M.S.W.
Behavioral Therapy
Specialties: Anger Management and Addiction
I wrote “Pam Robbins” on the top along with the home phone number.
“I’ll see what I can do.” She slipped the card in her pocket and turned back to her coffee and the lesson plan.
I knew I’d gone as far as I could. Anything more would have seemed inappropriate and pushed her away.
After fifteen minutes, she glanced at her watch. Apparently whatever conference she was attending was about to resume. She gave a chill smile my way. “Nice talking to you.”
“The same,” I said.
Annabelle gathered the lesson plan and notes and stuffed them back into her gym bag. As she rose, a teenage boy eased past and jostled her inadvertently with his bulky backpack. I saw her eyes ripple with that look I know so well. “Jesus,” she whispered to him. “Learn some manners.”
“Hey, lady, I’m sorry—”
She waved a dismissing hand at the poor kid. Annabelle walked to the counter to add more milk to her coffee. She wiped her mouth and tossed out the napkin. Without a look back at me or anyone she pointed her cold visage toward the door and pushed outside.
I gave it thirty seconds then also stopped at the milk station. Glancing into the hole for trash, I spotted, as I’d half expected, my card, sitting next to her crumpled napkin. I’d have to take a different approach. I certainly wasn’t going to give up on her. The stakes for her own well-being and of those close to her were too high.
But it would require some finesse. I’ve found that you can’t just bluntly tell potential patients that their problems are the result not of a troubled childhood or a bad relationship, but simply because an invisible entity had latched on to their psyches like a virus and was exerting its influence.
In a different era, or in a different locale, someone might have said that the teacher was possessed by a demonic spirit or the like. Now we’re much more scientific about it, but it’s still wise to ease into the subject slowly.
* * *
ANNABELLE YOUNG had come under the influence of a neme.
The term was first coined by a doctor in Washington, D.C. James Pheder was a well-known biologist and researcher. He came up with the word by combining “negative” and “meme,” the latter describing a cultural phenomenon that spreads and replicates in societies.
I think reference to meme—m version—is a bit misleading, since it suggests something rather more abstract than what a neme really is. In my lengthy book on the subject, published a few years ago, I define a neme as “a discrete body of intangible energy that evokes extreme emotional resp
onses in humans, resulting in behavior that is most often detrimental to the host or to the society in which he or she lives.”
But “neme” is a convenient shorthand and every therapist or researcher familiar with the concept uses it.
The word is also beneficial in that it neutrally describes a scientific, proven construct and avoids the historical terms that have muddied the truth for thousands of years. Words like ghosts, spirits, Rudolf Otto’s numinous presences, revenants, Buddhism’s hungry ghosts, rural countrysides’ white ladies, Japanese yurei, demons. Dozens of others.
Those fictional legends and superstitions were largely the result of the inability to explain nemes scientifically in the past. As often happens, until a phenomenon is rationally explained and quantified, folklore fills the gaps. The old belief, for instance, in spontaneous generation—that life could arise from inanimate objects—was accepted for thousands of years, supported by apparently scientific observations, for instance, that maggots and other infestations appeared in rotting food or standing water. It was only when Louis Pasteur proved via controlled, repeatable experiments that living material, like eggs or bacteria, had to be present for life to generate that the old view fell by the wayside.
Same thing with nemes. Framing the concept in terms of ghosts and possessing spirits was a convenient and simple fiction. Now we know better.
Growing up, I’d never heard of these things that would later be labeled nemes. It was only after a particular incident that I became aware: the deaths of my parents and brother.
You could say that my family was killed by one.
When I was sixteen we went to one of Alex’s basketball games at our school. At some point my father and I hit the hot dog stand. The father of a player on the opposing team was standing nearby, sipping a Coke and watching the game. Suddenly—I can still remember it perfectly—the man underwent a transformation, instantly shifting from relaxed and benign to tense, distracted, on guard. And the eyes…there was no doubt that they changed. The very color seemed to alter; they grew dark, malevolent. I knew something had happened, something had possessed him, I thought at the time. I felt chilled and I stepped away from him.
Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3 Page 27
