by Andrew Post
Nathan sighed. “And besides that, I’ve still got a notebook full of questions for you. Naturally, without said notebook with me, I can’t remember a single one of them for the life of me.” He looked at Brody for a few seconds, his eyes bloodshot. “I called Thorp. He’s coming to pick you up.”
“Thanks.” Brody turned on his heel and walked to the reception center door and waited to be buzzed through. “See you back in Minnesota?”
Nathan nodded.
The metal door slid aside and natural light flooded in, the sound of snow falling in a whispery, wet hiss. Brody faced the cold and went through the three layers of fence—all topped with razor wire—to the outside.
He blinked at the cold, his eyes sensitive to the new lenses, and saw an idling cab on the corner with a couple of familiar faces looking out the back window. Brody couldn’t help but smile as Thorp and Nectar got out and rushed over to him.
Thorp hugged him, nearly squeezed the breath out of his lungs with a bear hug.
“Easy now,” Brody said. “I still got some stitches.”
Nectar also hugged him but it was much weaker. Brody patted her back. Her spine was still easily felt through her shirt, but it wasn’t to the degree it had been when he’d last seen her. She looked much better.
She winced, tucking her hands into her jeans pockets. “I hope you didn’t get in too much trouble.”
“No, it wasn’t because of this—it was because of previous convictions. Nothing major.” He watched Nectar sweep a band of hair behind her ear. “Just some old stuff that had to get squared away.” He said it and a moment later it caught.
Nectar naturally missed it. As she thanked him, Brody looked to Thorp who looked back at him with an appreciative smile. They nodded at one another.
“It was really great of you to do that for me,” Nectar continued. “I don’t normally take pills unless I know what they are. And you know how it can be, you’re in Tokyo having fun with your friends and one thing leads to another and you don’t want to be the one not getting high—and, well, I just have to ask: How did you know to look for me at the bus station of all places?”
Brody turned to Thorp. His friend shrugged, stared at the sidewalk. Brody glanced back at Nectar and smiled as genuinely as the whirling confusion in his head would allow. “Lucky guess, I suppose.”
Thorp still peered down at the sidewalk, his face screwed up tight.
“Lunch?” Brody suggested.
Thorp smiled. “Yeah. Sure.”
The three sat in the back booth at America’s Favorite Automat across the street from Nectar’s former apartment building.
Nectar kept looking out the front window at her stoop, where she used to call home. “I can’t believe those assholes evicted me. I was just a couple of weeks late on rent. People go through hard times, right?” She looked to her brother, then to Brody.
Neither of them said anything.
She went back to glaring out the window for a few more seconds, then slid out of the booth, claiming, “I’m going to go look at the pies.”
When she was out of earshot, Brody turned to Thorp across the table and leaned forward. “She doesn’t remember anything?”
“Not a thing.”
“What happened in the hospital? Did she wake up talking about going to Tokyo and accidentally taking a bad pill and you and me finding her at a bus station? Where did she get all this?”
Thorp shrugged. “I never left her side. No one ever came into the room except for the doctor. He told me that sometimes the mind will build a story for itself to fill in gaps, that the narrative of memory needs to be continuous and all blank spaces need to be filled in with something, even if it sounds ridiculous to other people.”
“So no one supplied this Tokyo story?”
“No.”
“Jesus, that’s strange.”
Thorp scoffed. “What hasn’t been strange about this past month?”
“Do you suppose it was what they wanted her to think?” Brody asked after a moment. He waved a hand next to his ear, “So if she got free or something she wouldn’t actually remember where she was or anything?”
“Beats me.” Thorp watched Nectar over Brody’s shoulder. “Beats the hell out of me.”
When Thorp grinned, Brody turned to watch as Nectar twirled in front of the slices of pie, doing some sort of ballet with hands raised and spinning on her toes. She caught her balance on the plastic wall of the pie display case, looked around, then went back to dancing.
Brody turned back around and hunched over the table. “Detective Pierce, the one I e-mailed the information to? He told me to leave it alone and move on with my life.”
Thorp sipped his coffee. “That’s a good idea.”
“I think you should do the same.”
Thorp took his napkin and wiped the coffee foam from the tip of his nose. “Not to worry about that. After we got home, I wanted something to do with my hands and started working on the Terrapin …”
Brody lit a cigarette to hide his displeasure with the direction Thorp’s story was taking.
“The lawyers said I could keep all the money from Hark they had given me over the years. I said I wasn’t planning on giving it back, anyway. And then they told me someone was going to remove the wires at my house. Apparently, even though they had shut down the source at the shipyard, more units might still be sending out the signal and they didn’t want to chance it. They don’t want me to sue is what it sounds like. Either way, I got the Terrapin running. Me and Nectar did, actually. And we ripped that tower out of the ground ourselves.”
Brody smiled, pleased to see the story ended differently than he expected. “So, it’s over. You won’t be getting your checks anymore. Is that fine with you?”
“Yeah,” Thorp said. “I could stand to return to the hustle and bustle of the city, get out among people again. No man is an island, right? Got a job interview downtown Monday, crane operator and maintenance.”
“Handyman.”
“You know it.”
Nectar approached the table, picked up the cigarette Brody had in the ashtray, took a deep drag, and released the smoke slowly. “Good Lord, that’s wonderful.” She sighed.
She caught Brody looking at her and took another drag, her eyes lighting up. She pulled out the collar of his shirt and blew the smoke into the material. As the smoke drifted up between their faces, she stepped back, looked at her handiwork, and laughed, giving the mark a swipe with her thumb to ensure a job well done.
She sat down. “I’m sorry. Don’t worry about it—it’ll come right out. It’s just something I do to people on a lark.”
“It’s fine,” Brody said, smiling. He studied the ovalshaped nicotine stain on his shirt, the death kiss, and looked at Nectar. She had selected a piece of blueberry pie.
The Artificial server came to the end of their table and sized them up. She kept her gaze on Thorp, her expression flat. “Sir, will you be paying today? It seems that within your party, you are the only one with a bank account currently in the positive. You can pay at the counter when ready.”
Thorp leaned to one side to retrieve his wallet, took one last sip of his coffee, and left the booth.
Brody watched Nectar eat her pie, one large forkful at a time. He continued to look at her until she met his eyes. She set the fork down and plucked some napkins from the dispenser. “What?”
Brody pointed at his collar, the death kiss, and raised his eyebrows.
Her face remained flat. She folded the napkin in half, set it aside. “Not in front of him, okay?” she said, keeping her voice low and subtly cocking her head in Thorp’s direction where he was struggling to insert his jigsaw into the nautilus. “If he knows I know, then he’ll never let it go. This way it’s a clean break.”
“You remember everything?”
“Yeah. But as long as I say I don’t remember any of it, he won’t talk about it. And if he won’t talk about it, then we’ll be able to move on and just … live our l
ives.” She glanced Thorp’s way, and so did Brody. He was getting his receipt for the meal. Speaking fast, “I want him to go to the doctor, get on some kind of pill to fix whatever they did to his head.” She smoothed the napkin’s folds out to its original square shape. “And be done with it.”
Thorp began walking back, scrutinizing the receipt.
He had to ask. “What about Axiom? Did you hear anything about—?”
She stared at him. For a moment, it was hard to read what her eyes were telling him. Was she surprised he knew the name? Did the mere mention of him frighten her? She held that strange look for a few more seconds. Just as Thorp’s shadow fell across their table, she nodded, nearly imperceptibly, even going so far as to scratch her ear as she did it. But she did nod; Brody saw it. She had at least heard him say Axiom, whoever he was and whatever role he had played in all this.
“All right,” Brody said. He had a bevy of questions, but this wasn’t the time or place. He wasn’t about to screw up what Nectar was already doing, this stellar job of playing ignorant in front of her brother. The whole bit about Tokyo and the bus station, he had to admit, was convincing.
Thorp put his hand on Nectar’s shoulder after he’d sat down beside her. She leaned into her brother’s chest, closed her eyes, and seemed to go to sleep immediately. Thorp shifted a strand of hair out of the corner of her eye. He looked up and saw Brody watching them and gave him a grateful smile.
Brody returned it.
37
It took some finagling to get Amtrak to let Brody use his old ticket when he had missed the scheduled return trip by well over a month. He assumed they caved because of his limp and the condition of the right side of his face, which was green and purple. Despite getting passage for the 12:10, the train was late, delayed heading out of Chicago due to ice on the tracks. He sat on their uncomfortable benches, closed his eyes, and thought about nothing but sleeping in his own bed.
He got to his private car and carefully eased into the seat. The cot in the county jail had done his bruises and aches no favors. After the doctor had referred Brody to a physician in the Twin Cities who could remove the stiches in his gut, he informed Brody that the gouge in his shoulder had gotten infected and the tube of antiseptic salve he gave him would make the pain stop. The opposite was true. Brody shouldered off his coat and applied the cream, cramming his hand down the collar of his shirt, gritting his teeth against the burn the salve created. He paused, feeling something land on the back of his wrist. He pulled his hand out: a single red dot.
He sniffed and dabbed at his nose, then looked at his fingers. A smear of red.
The collar was loosened, stretched out from trying to get his arm inside. It didn’t stop him from hooking two fingers and tugging at it, though.
On his home voice mail in Minneapolis, Brody had close to seventy-two messages. Samantha at the community center expressing worry. Chiffon trying numerous times to get a hold of him. His bank notifying him of severe overdraft charges. A few possible clients sobbing and saying, “I heard about you from a friend. Do you think you can help me?” His landlord reminding him that it was past the first of the month when rent is normally paid.
Brody went to his couch and sat down with his coat still on, looked at the dead face of his TV screen. He tugged at his collar and let his gaze trail up and down the walls, looking for any sign, any mismatch in the color of the polished cement, any irregularity at all.
He splashed cold water on his face. He looked into the expanse of glass making up the entire wall of the bathroom and in it he could see nothing, even with the new lenses from Nathan. Staring back at him: a face. A man. Bruised flesh and battered bone, a newly crooked nose. And as much as Brody didn’t want to admit it, he saw a puppet. The strings were cut, but he still bore the eye hooks, screwed in tight. Titian’s words came back to him. He slapped off the light.
In the living room he found his peacoat on the floor, lifted it just enough to get what he sought from the pocket, and dropped it again.
His fingers found their way into the knuckleduster with ease.
He wasn’t sure where to start, so he decided to just pick a place.
Looking up toward the wall next to his TV, he saw the smooth layer of new cement, a smooth-cornered square. It had been patched a few times when pipes froze or something needed fixing. He knew something had been altered whenever he came home and smelled the lime and congealing agent of the cement. Never even so much as a note regarding a work order from his landlord.
No reason to be suspicious, then.
The first punch resounded against the cement with a clang. The vibration trailed up his arm and dug into the fresh hole in his shoulder—the antiseptic cream that was supposed to subdue any pain proved yet again to be a bunch of bullshit. Brody punched once more, a puff of gray dust breaking free. When he twisted in order to throw a clean jab, the delicate flesh still held together by stitches screamed. A hairline crack an inch long formed in the wall. Another strike and the crack grew by two more inches. Another, the first crack lengthened and a new one started—a rough divot began to take form.
Wiping the grit from his forehead and nose, he peered into the hole he’d made. There, a dense collection of wires—most of them small and narrow—electrical, more electrical, a water filtration line, electricity. Brody sorted through them all, grunting, coughing at the dust.
He plunged his hand deeper into the hole and found it. Rubbery, thick as a wrist. He pulled it out of its nest of fellow wires. No markings or laser-etched codes at all, entirely black.
Brody let the wire hang there, the long loop nearly touching the floor, while he got a knife from the butcher block. He returned with the knife and stared at the black snake, ashy in a patina of cement dust in most parts and fiercely dark in dots here and there from his sweat.
So many years doing it, unaware. The community center, all the battered women he had helped. The urge to go out and act upon it, that persistent pecking to exact, settle, solve, fix. And the restraint he considered his biggest asset—the ability to stop once they’d had enough.
What if he had never learned of the wires and their frequency, of the project at all? Would he have continued to carry on, getting healthy doses of the stuff every minute he was in his apartment, forever solidified as an involuntary vigilante? Would he continue to be able to stand firm, knowing when to stop without it? Would he accidentally go too far and kill the next wife beater he got hired to rough up? He was certainly capable of it, he now knew. Titian’s words again. Not what Brody could be but what he would be, without it leashing him.
Brody held the knife by its handle and rolled it around in his grip, looking at the waiting belly of the black snake. Despite it being freed from its cement enclosure, he could hear the gentle thrum of the energy still coursing through it, droning. A cold prickle on his skin. A tug at the collar of his shirt.
He stared, standing in his living room with the knife in hand, resisting.
A very special thanks to Dr. Lyudmila Trut, whose research I came across through the NOVA documentary “Dogs Decoded.”
