What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  As required, both Michael and Linda had arrived at the party with someone else. But they left together. Michael’s “date” for the evening had been another student, a sociology doctoral candidate ostensibly interested in real-life research, who had fled the party shortly after three naked and thoroughly aroused men had cornered her, completely uninterested in her schoolgirl questions about why they were there, unwilling to listen to her weak protests as they bent her over. There was an informal request at the party that no one be forced to do anything they did not want to do. This was a concept that lent itself to widely different interpretations.

  Linda’s “partner” for the evening had been a man who called her service, and then, after treating her to an expensive dinner, had told her where he wanted to spend the rest of the evening. He’d offered to pay her more than her regular $1,500 fee. She had agreed, as long as the money came in cash and in advance, without telling him that she probably would have accompanied him for free. Curiosity, she thought, was like foreplay. After they’d arrived at the party the “partner” had disappeared into a side room carrying a black leather paddle and wearing nothing more than a tight black silken facemask, leaving Linda alone but not lacking in attention.

  Their meeting—like all the meetings that night—was chance. It was an across-the-room connection in their eyes, in the languid arc of their bodies, in the silken tones of their voices. A single word, a slight dip of the head, a shrug of the shoulders—some small act of emotional intensity in a darkened room devoted to excess and orgasm, filled with naked men and women coupling in all imaginable positions and styles—were what bought them together. Each was engaged with someone else when their eyes met. Neither was enjoying what they were doing at that very moment. In a room filled with what most people would have considered events that were wildly different, both were a little bored. But they saw each other and something deep and probably frightening sounded within them. In fact, they did not have sex with each other that night. They merely observed each other in the act, and saw some mysterious singleness of purpose amid the groaning and cries of pleasure. Surrounded by displays of lust, they made a connection that nearly exploded. They kept their eyes locked on each other, even as strangers probed their bodies. When Michael finally picked his way through sweaty figures to her side, he displayed an aggressiveness that surprised him. He usually hung back, stumbling over words and introductions, all the time letting his desires echo unchecked within him. Linda was being slobbered over by a man whose name she didn’t know. She saw Michael approach out of the corner of her eye. That she knew instinctively he wasn’t coming to her side to seek out some orifice spoke to her own sea-tossed feelings. She roughly disengaged from her partner, whose clumsy administrations had bored her anyway, leaving him surprised, uncompleted, and a little angry—shutting down his fervid complaints with a single fierce glance. Then, naked, she’d stood up and taken the naked Michael’s hand as if he were someone she had known for years. Without much talk they’d left the party. Just for an instant as they went in search of their clothing, hand in hand, they looked like some Renaissance artist’s rendition of Adam and Eve being driven from the Garden of Eden.

  In the years they had been together since, they had not thought twice about how they met. It had not taken them long to discover in each other passions that went far beyond sex and that, if dark, were also electric.

  The stench of gasoline filled his nostrils.

  He nearly gagged, turning his head, trying to steal a breath of fresh air. The smell made him momentarily dizzy, and he coughed as he splashed more and more of the liquid about. When the corrugated floor glistened with the rainbow colors of the gas, he pushed himself out the door and frantically tore at the air beyond, drinking in darkness.

  As his head cleared he returned to the task. He dripped more gas on the exterior, went around to the front of the van, made sure the front seats were soaked.

  Finally satisfied, he tossed the red container into the passenger seat. He also threw a pair of surgical gloves inside. He had prepared a plastic gallon jug with detergent and soaked a cotton fuse, making a modest napalm-type bomb. He reached into his pocket for a lighter.

  Michael looked around. He was deep in an abandoned place, behind an old, shuttered, and long-empty paper mill. Once it had provided a livelihood for many in the small streamside town. Now it sat sullen as a reminder of times and jobs long lost, its windows broken and shattered from years of passing kids tossing rocks. He had taken care to park the van well away from the building; he did not want to start a fire that would attract too much attention too rapidly. He merely wanted to destroy the stolen van utterly. He had developed some expertise in this. It was not all that difficult.

  He made a final check, making sure he had left nothing behind. It took only a few seconds for him to unscrew the license plates. These he intended to toss in a nearby pond. Then he stripped off all his clothes. He bundled them up, made sure they, too, were soaked in flammable fuel, and tossed them into the panel van. He shivered as the cold crept over him. Then he lit his homemade bomb and tossed it into the open van door. He quickly turned away and started running, his feet crunching against the gravel and packed dirt, hoping that he wouldn’t hit a piece of stray glass and slice up the sole of his foot. Behind him there was a thump as the makeshift bomb went off. He slowed, took a single glance over his shoulder to make sure that the stolen van was engulfed in flame. Yellow-red streaks of fire curled through the windows and the first billowing clouds of gray and black smoke streamed skyward. Satisfied, Michael hurried, picking up his pace. He wanted to laugh out loud—the sight of a naked man running through the darkness away from an exploding panel truck was something he would have liked hearing some shocked and tongue-tied passerby explain to a skeptical policeman.

  He could still catch the scent of the fire with its intoxicating subtext of incendiary smells on the light night breeze. Who was it in the movie? he asked himself suddenly. Colonel Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Well, he thought, in the evening it was just as seductive and it meant the same thing: victory.

  His clothes were waiting on the driver’s seat of his old, beat-up pickup truck. The keys were underneath the seat, where he’d left them. A small package of disinfectant wipes—he favored the sort used by old people with hemorrhoids—were right on top. They had less of a perfumy smell than others, but they eradicated the leftover gasoline scent rapidly. He pulled open the door and within a few seconds had rubbed himself all over with the soaked tissues. It took only a minute to pull on jeans, sweatshirt, and baseball cap. He took a last look around. No one. This was as he expected. A hundred yards away, concealed behind the building, he could see a spiral of smoke like a lighter shade of night curling into the sky, a fire glow burning beneath. He shoved himself behind the wheel and started up the truck. He took a long sniff of the interior—as expected, the stench of gasoline was gone, killed by the sanitizing wipes. Still, he plucked an aerosol can of odor-removing stuff from the glove compartment and sprayed the entire interior. This, he thought, was probably a precaution he didn’t need to take. But if he were to be stopped by a policeman for speeding or rolling through a stop sign or failing to yield the right of way or for any other simple reason, he didn’t want to smell like an arsonist.

  Thinking through matters, seeing all the angles in advance, imagining each possible variable in a sea of possibilities was what Michael enjoyed almost more than everything else. It made his heart beat faster.

  He put the truck in gear, pulled the cap down close to his eyes, and fiddled with a set of earphones attached to an iPod. Linda liked to make him special mixes of tunes for when he went off to do some of the grunt work associated with their business. On the menu screen he saw a play list: Gasoline Music. This made him laugh out loud. He leaned back as something by Chris Whitley that had a nasty bit of steel guitar in it powered through the speakers. He listened to the singer hit a f
ew strings. “. . . like a walking translation on a street of lies . . .” True enough, he thought as he pulled out of the abandoned warehouse parking lot. Linda always knew what he liked to hear.

  In a plastic bag on the seat next to him was the credit card belonging to some woman named Riggins that he’d taken from Number 4’s wallet. One or two quick tasks on the road and in Boston and then he’d get back to Linda. The truck had warmed up and heat was pouring through the vents, wafting over him. It was still nasty cold and damp outside. He decided that their next Web broadcast should originate in Florida or Arizona. But that was getting ahead of the current series, which he knew was a mistake. Michael prided himself on a singularity of focus; once they were engaged, nothing got in the way, nothing was allowed to obstruct, derail, or distract from what they were doing. He believed any successful artist or businessman would say the same thing about his or her work projects. Can’t write a novel or compose a song, can’t swing an acquisition or expand an offering without complete devotion to the task at hand, he spoke inwardly to himself.

  Linda knew the same.

  It was why they loved each other so much.

  He thought: I am incredibly lucky.

  Michael settled in for the two-hour drive to the city. Back at the rental farmhouse she would have everything going. They were probably almost rich already, he thought. But it wasn’t about the money for him or for her. The start of Series #4 excited him and he could feel overwhelmingly pleasant warmth coursing through his core, warmth far different from the heat coming through the truck system. It beat time to the music that filled the truck compartment.

  6

  Inside the black hood that covered her head, Jennifer’s entire world had narrowed to just what she could hear, what she could smell, and what she could taste and each of these senses was limited—by the pounding of her heart, the throbbing headache that lingered behind her temples, the claustrophobic darkness that enveloped her. She tried to calm herself but, beneath the silken black cloth, she sobbed uncontrollably, salty tears running down her cheeks, her throat dry and raw.

  She wanted desperately to cry out for help although she knew none was close by. The word Mom slipped through her lips, but beyond the darkness she could see only her dead father standing just beyond her reach, as if he were outdoors and unable to hear her cries because they couldn’t quite penetrate some glass wall. For an instant she felt dizzy, as if she were teetering on a cliff’s edge, just able to keep her balance, with a strong gust of wind threatening her equilibrium.

  She told herself, Jennifer, you’ve got to keep control . . .

  She was unsure whether she spoke these words out loud or merely shouted them inwardly to all the warring confusions and hurts that were racing about within her. It was almost impossible for her to tell whether she was in pain or whether she was in doubt. Each seemed to hurt equally, but she knew she needed to make some sense of what was happening beyond the hood.

  She told herself to take deep breaths. Jennifer! Try!

  There was something oddly reassuring in speaking to herself in the third person. It reinforced her sense that she was alive, that she was who she was, that she still had a past, a present, and maybe a future.

  Jennifer, stop crying!

  She gulped at the stale, hot air inside the hood.

  Okay. Okay.

  It wasn’t as easy as that. It took minutes for her to calm down, but the gasps and sobs of fear finally slowed and nearly stopped, although there was nothing she could do to halt the uncontrollable quivering that infected each muscle, especially in her legs. They were twitching fiercely, spasms that made her whole body feel Jell-O-like. It was as if there was something disconnected between what she could think, what she could perceive, and how her body was reacting. Nothing was synchronized. Nothing was coordinated. Everything was out of focus and out of control. She could not find any mental grip within her that she could seize so she might try to understand what had happened and what might still happen.

  She shivered, although she wasn’t cold; in fact, it was very hot in the room. For the first time she became aware that she was nearly naked. Once again, she shuddered through her entire body. She could not remember being undressed, nor could she remember being brought into the room. The only thing she recalled was the man’s fist coming at her like a bullet, and the sensation of being thrown into the back of the truck. It all confused her; she was unsure whether it had really occurred. For a second, she imagined she was dreaming, and that all she had to do was stay calm, and then she would wake up in her bed at home and she could go down to the kitchen and fix herself some coffee and a Pop-Tart and remind herself of all her plans to run away.

  Jennifer waited. Beneath the hood, she squeezed her eyes shut and told herself Wake up! Wake up! But she knew this was a hopeless wish. She wasn’t nearly lucky enough to have it all dissolve into a dream.

  All right, Jennifer, she told herself. Concentrate on one thing. Just one thing. Make one thing real. Then go from there.

  She was suddenly terribly thirsty. She ran her tongue over her lips. They were dry, cracked, and she could taste more blood. She pushed against her teeth with her tongue. Nothing loose. She crinkled her nose. No pain. All right, now you know something useful: no broken nose, no fractured teeth. That’s good.

  Jennifer could feel something near her stomach that itched. There was also an odd sensation on her arm that she could not place. These confused her more.

  She knew she had to take two different inventories: one of her self, one of where she was. She had to try to make some sort of sense out of the darkness and come up with some kind of clarity. Where was she? What was happening to her?

  But these simple tasks eluded her. And the more she insisted on control, the more elusive it seemed. The blackness inside the hood seemed like it was taking over within her, as if the hood did more than merely prevent her from seeing out; it prevented her from seeing in. She had the sense that her entire world was descending into her stomach and painting over her mind; all she could imagine was a fierce terror of nothingness. And then, as this despair swept over her, she understood a truly awful idea: Jennifer, you’re still alive. Whatever it is that is happening to you, it’s not going to be anything you’ve ever known before or ever even imagined taking place. It’s not going to be quick. It’s not going to be easy. This is just the beginning of something.

  She could feel herself spiraling down. A vortex. A whirlpool. A hole in the emptiness of the universe. Her legs shook and she was powerless to prevent the sobs from returning. She gave in to the fear, and her entire body was wracked with agonizing spasms right until the moment she heard the muffled sound of a door opening.

  She bent to the sound. Someone was in the room with her.

  She thought in that split second that being alone created the terror echoing within her. But in truth being alone was far better than knowing that she was not. Her back arced, her muscles tightened; if she could have seen herself, she would have imagined that her body reacted to the sound in the same way it would have to an electric current.

  I have become an old man, Adrian told himself as he stared in the mirror above his wife’s bureau. It was a small, wooden framed mirror and over the years she had used it to do little more than make a final check of her appearance before heading out on a Saturday evening. Women liked that last-second examination, making certain that things matched, blended, and complemented each other before they sallied forth. He was never that precise in how he’d appeared to the world. He affected a far more haphazard look—rumpled shirt, baggy pants, tie slightly askew—in keeping with his academic life. I always looked like a caricature of a professor, because I was a professor. I was a man of science. He reached up and touched the streaks of white-gray hair that fell from his scalp and rubbed his hand across the gray-flecked stubble on his chin. He ran a finger down a line creased in his flesh. Age had sca
rred him, he thought; age and all the experiences of life.

  From behind he heard a familiar voice.

  “You know what you saw.”

  He looked into the mirror.

  “Hello, Possum,” Adrian said, smiling. “You said that already. A few minutes ago.”

  He stopped. Maybe it had been an hour. Two. How long had he been standing in the bedroom, surrounded by images and memories with a weapon in his hand?

  He used his wife’s nickname, one that had been shared only with the closest members of the family. She had acquired it as a nine-year-old, when a crew of the slightly more than rodents had moved into the attic of the family’s summer home. She had insisted to her brothers, sisters, and parents that any attempt to oust the unwanted invaders would be met with all the retaliatory resources that a dedicated child could muster, from tears to tantrums. So, for that one summer, at least, her family had put up with the nocturnal scratching sounds of clawed feet racing through the eaves, undefined threats of disease, and general distaste for the beasts, who had the unsettling habit of staring intently at the family members from the shadows. The possum family, for its part, had not taken long to discover the many wondrous attractions of the kitchen, especially since the creatures instinctively seemed to understand the unique status that their nine-year-old protector had bestowed upon them. Cassandra was like that, Adrian thought. A fierce defender.

  “Adrian. You know what you saw,” she repeated herself, this time far more forcefully. Her voice had a familiar rhythmic insistence to it. When Cassie had wanted something done in all the years of their marriage, usually it had been expressed in tones more suited to a 1960s folk song.

  He turned to the bed. Cassie was stretched out, languid, with a come hither look on her face. She was the most beautiful hallucination he could have imagined. She wore a loose-fitting cornflower blue shift with nothing underneath, and it seemed to him that a breeze pulled it invitingly tight to her body although there wasn’t a window open, nor even a hint of wind within the bedroom. Adrian could feel his pulse accelerate. The Cassie looking at him from her perch on the bed couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight, as she was at the beginning of their first year together. Her skin glowed with youth; each curve of her body—her slight breasts, narrow hips, and long legs—seemed like memories he could feel. She shook her dark mane of hair and frowned at him, her mouth turning down at the corners in a small way that he recognized; it meant that she was very serious, and that he needed to pay attention to each word. He had learned early in their life together the look that spoke to something more important.