by Jim Nelson
"It doesn't add up," I said. "Clift's no dummy. If Gannon stole the brick at the party, Clift would have figured it out right away. He would have sicced Brill on Gannon." I thumped a finger on the surface of the breakfast nook table. "And Aggaroy was no dummy either. Having Gannon steal the brick would tip his hand to Clift. It's too pat. There has to be more to it."
"Like I said, Gannon didn't steal the brick. We never even planned that."
"So who did? Wait—" It landed all at once on me. "Aggaroy stole it, didn't he?"
She nodded. "It's just like you said. If Gannon stole it, Dr. Clift would know right away. So Mr. Aggaroy played a trick. He had Gannon crash the New Year's Eve party—"
"Your boyfriend wasn't invited?"
"Dr. Clift said it was only for his 'inner circle.' That included me for some reason."
For some reason.
"Mr. Aggaroy's idea was for Gannon to show up and wander away from the party, to plant the idea he might have stolen the brick. Brill did come into the city the next day. He searched this apartment—" She motioned about the room. "Made a mess of the place. That's why I moved in with Gannon. We weren't safe. Brill could break in at any time."
"You knew it was Brill?"
"The man who owns the store downstairs saw him leaving the front door. When I came home, the place was a complete mess."
I sized her up. "Why weren't you living with your boyfriend before?"
She paled. "Gannon wanted me to. He'd been asking for a long time. He even proposed to me."
"And didn't you accept?"
"I told him I needed to think about it."
"How long were you thinking about it?"
"A year," she said, soft and guilty-like.
Leigh was brilliant with the computers. Dealing with humans, she needed more practice. She reminded me of a lot of programmers I knew.
"So how did Agg steal the data brick?" I asked. "How did he get on the island?"
"Mr. Aggaroy was working for Dr. Clift," she said. "Didn't you know?"
It bore repeating. "Aggaroy worked for Clift."
"About a month before the party, he convinced Dr. Clift to hire him," she said. "Mr. Aggaroy was responsible for keeping the Old Internet safe. Dr. Warwick is smart and all, but…" Her voice trailed off. She did not need to finish the thought. "Well, then Mr. Aggaroy went out to the island. We had to pretend we didn't know each other. Gannon at the party was only misdirection. New Year's Day, the day after the party, Mr. Aggaroy brought the data brick to the city."
The questions were exhausting her. Leigh had reached her breaking point. She excused herself and stumbled from the breakfast nook table to the bedroom. After a moment, I followed. She was curled in a fetal position on the bare mattress with her eyes closed.
“One more question before you conk out,” I said.
“So tired.”
“Did you or Gannon ever meet the director of the film? Cline Mayall?”
Nuh-uh came the soft denial.
I found spare blankets stored on the upper shelves of the bedroom closet. I snapped open two in succession and spread them across her lifeless body.
"It would be best if you stayed here," I said. I had no idea if she was awake or not. "The police are looking for you. If they do pick you up, don't answer a question. Tell them you want to talk to your lawyer."
I softly closed the bedroom door behind me. I retreated to the kitchen and ate the remaining pasta. I washed the dishes and pots and left them to drip-dry on a bathroom towel spread across the counter.
I'm not proud of what I did next. Towering over Leigh's slumbering body, I sidestreamed her memex.
Memories unlocked during REM sleep unspool like quick cuts of a movie trailer. Her mind assembled fragments from her past into new forms, just as Detachment had been recomposed into music videos and memes and Lord of the Rings parodies. She dreamed of times with Gannon in city parks. They rode space-age trains and hiked through forests of street light poles as grand and tall as sequoias. Standing under one of these light poles, she kissed Gannon. When their lips separated, Gannon had become Max. In her mind, Max was less refined than Gannon, coarser and rough-hewn. A chill of revulsion ran down her when she realized it was Max. In her dream, she softened and accepted the transformation.
The horror was stuffed in between these flashes of dreams, packing Styrofoam that had turned black and stunk of rot. Hands were on Leigh in these flashes of dreams. The hands of a grandfather rubbing her inner thigh. The hands of professors down her sides, their fingers tickling the straps of her bra. Eyes were upon her wherever she went. Men with no names and greedy expressions and hungry fingers sought out her flesh and warmth and scent. In these brief snatches of dream, she was paralyzed and shivering.
She cried on Max's shoulder. They danced on a moon bridge in a Japanese garden. Gannon's absence made her sad but not unhappy. In one dream saturated in Technicolor, Max lifted her by the waist and she flew across the still sun-flecked bay waters to Alcatraz Island. When she landed, she stood on the cliff at Lands End. With the dry electromagnetic storm raging as backdrop, she cupped Max by the back of his neck and gave him a full, passionate kiss. Her face was scratched raw by his stubble. The grease on his hands soiled her dress. It all electrified her. I only now realized when she told me of someone special right under her nose, she was speaking of Max and not me. And she did not dream of me as I stood over her, not once.
The sidestream was beginning to magnetize me to her subconscious. I broke free and stumbled from the bedroom with my memex in hand. I stood over the kitchen sink swaying and feeling the need to vomit.
*
Cline did not answer my memex call immediately. I left a message and waited. She returned my call ten minutes later. It was voice-only.
“Mr. Naroy?” she said. “Have you found the movie?”
“No, but there have been developments on that front."
"I hope you've reconsidered what you'll do when you find it," she said. "I hope you'll consider destroying the film. For my sake and the sake of my family."
"Are you still directing? Or are you acting these days?”
After a pause, she said, “I’m not active in the industry any longer. Why?”
“Every time I talk with you, it sounds like you’ve been handed a script to read from. I imagine you took acting classes when you were in film school? Didn’t I read that right, that directors will often take acting classes as well?”
After another uncomfortable pause, she said, “I did take acting classes, but I don’t see how that—”
“Where are you now." I snapped my fingers. "Wait, I know—you’re staying at the Palace Hotel.”
After a long, empty pause, she said, “How did you learn that.”
I told her to meet me in the Palace lobby in twenty minutes. I locked the apartment door on my way out.
29.
It was a Sunday night and the Palace Hotel lobby was at its quietest. Bellhops leaned on their brass luggage carts waiting for their next cash tip. The concierge behind his desk yawned while reading from a digital tablet. The gilded chandeliers were dimmed. The lobby’s baby grand tinkled Gershwin.
The shift manager stood behind the long main desk attending to digital paperwork. As I passed, our eyes met. I suppose I smiled and nodded. I don’t recall exactly. Whatever I did, it caused her to cock her head and dim her eyes.
“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked me.
“Ms. Darren,” I said in acknowledgment. “Have the press asked you for—”
I cut the banter in an instant. I realized my mistake.
“Are you a guest?” A measure of aversion weighed down the final word of her question. My suit was crumpled and I was in need of a shave. The image of myself in Leigh's dream was well-lit in my mind. To her, I probably came across as an overly forward businessman from out-of-town.
“My mistake,” I said and kept walking.
She was the same woman from Gannon’s memex. I’d
talked with her while mainlining my final day. Rather, Gannon had talked with her the morning of his death. Mainlining those few hours of Gannon’s life had rubbed off on me like a press-on tattoo. When I crossed the Palace threshold, for a snap moment, I was Gannon. When I spoke to her, I was speaking as though I had Gannon’s swagger and reserve. For her, I threw back my shoulders and stood upright and spoke with the best baritone I could muster. In a flash and a clap, I was Gannon, not a gray-haired creep being overly familiar. Another flash and clap, and I returned to C.F. Naroy, mild-mannered computer security consultant.
Cline waited in a padded chintz chair facing a rather large Goya mounted on the wall. An egg-shaped glass of chilled butter-white wine stood on a marble end table within reach. Condensation coated the bulb up to the wine’s level. When I approached, she rose and smoothed her long dress.
“Mr. Naroy,” she said with an offered hand. "If you want, we can discuss this somewhere more private."
“I want a drink,” I said. “How about you?”
“I-I have one, actually.”
“I mean a real drink,” I said.
I led her down a lengthy hallway of hardwood paneling and marble floors. She followed me into the Pied Piper with an expression of pained trepidation.
The Pied Piper was the tonal opposite of the Palace’s lobby. Even on a Sunday night, the bar business was brisk and the tables bustling. San Francisco is a drinker’s town. It’s a town that needs no excuse for drinking. It’s a town that will make the excuse to drink if it has to.
You could’ve held a track meet on the Pied Piper’s bar. It was long enough to run a 40-meter dash. I could have triple-jumped down its top to the sole vacant bar stool at the far end. Without another free seat at the bar, Cline could only stand behind me with her meager Chardonnay in her cupped hands looking lost.
“Old Fashioned,” I told the bartender.
The bartender knew better than fill the rocks glass to the rim with soda water the way a garden-variety happy-hour bartender would. An Old Fashioned is unassuming and furtive. The measure of whiskey and bitters forms a still puddle at the bottom of the glass. It surrounds rather than submerges the cubes of ice. The lemon peel rises from the pond like a golden lantern offset from center. An Old Fashioned demands reflection. An Old Fashioned is America’s answer to the Japanese garden.
“Tell me something,” I said to her. The cocktail was tangy and sharp. “That’s not bad,” I said to the glass. I smacked my lips. “Tell me something: Why does the director of an independent film—a weird, grotesque viral video called Detachment—why would she want to destroy her opus?”
Taken aback at my display, she needed a moment. “It’s embarrassing. I have grown children. I’m going to be a grandmother.” She whispered grandmother. “You don't have to destroy it. Let me purchase it from you. That's really all I'm asking.” She added, "Think of it as returning it to its rightful owner."
“I searched you out on the Old Internet,” I said. “You never had another piece of fame. You wanted to be the edgy, arty, transgressive director that was going to shake up America. But you never produced another film again, did you?”
“I did some work in advertising—”
“Why would a glory hound like you want to destroy the one piece of glory you can claim?”
“‘Glory hound?’ Excuse me?”
“I’m sure you find it embarrassing today,” I said. “Some people might have even found it embarrassing back then. But why now? Nearly thirty years have passed. Why are you so concerned today, right now, at this moment? What took you so long?”
I tapped her on the shoulder with a rigid finger, the cocktail in my fist sloshing about. She retracted as though I held in my hand a dead fish.
“Or did someone come to you?" I asked. "Someone even more embarrassed? Someone who stands to lose more than their dignity and the respect of their children?”
The Old Fashioned was as good as I’d let on. I drank a little more, waiting for her answer. She started a couple of phony excuses. She retracted them when my weathered, pruned face grimaced. Without a word, I told her I wasn’t buying.
“Let’s try it this way,” I said. “How did you know I was searching for your movie?”
It was delicious to watch Cline struggle with words. In such command at my audition, it now seemed she could barely assemble a complete sentence.
"It’s Melody, isn’t it?” I said. The name jumped up and bit Cline. “Faye Melody Justin, wife of Mayor Justin.”
Reddening, she shook her head. “We should never have come to you.”
“You came to me more than once,” I said. “What will it take for you to remember me?”
I returned to facing the bar so she could see me in profile. I lowered my shoulders and adopted a hunch easily recalled from my youth. I pushed my jaw forward, simian-like, and bulked my arms and strained my belly out to simulate body fat under layers of bulky clothes. With a thumb behind my right ear, I pushed forward my lobe into a radar dish projecting forward.
At first, she was confused. Gradually, her face relaxed and her jaw loosened. With each subsequent hammy addition to my transformation, the reality dawned. She whispered No.
I returned to my current incarnation. “First you came to me to make the film. Now—twenty-seven years later—you come to me to destroy the film.”
Shocked, she said, “We thought you were in Japan. Or dead.” Under her breath, she said, “You're banned from the Internet. And the Nexternet.“
It was everything I could do to maintain myself. The bar was popping with business. The businessman seated beside me was inches away, absorbed with a young woman to his right, to be sure, but we were rubbing elbows. It was not a time or a place to raise my voice or make threats. But it was all I could do to keep a lid on.
“You destroyed my life.” I stood a good foot over her. “You drove me from my home. You have no idea the hell I endured because of you.”
“How can it be you? This can’t be a coincidence—”
She stared up at my jagged face with a dumbfounded mouth loosely open.
“Take me to Faye Justin,” I said. “Take me to her right this goddamn minute.”
*
Cline made a harried call from a lobby courtesy phone. When she hung up, she said we could go up and see her. She used a keycard to enter the only elevator car capable of reaching the top floor. Without touching a button, the doors closed and we were whisked up.
On the ninth floor, we faced two security men in suits at a folding table. It was a makeshift hallway security desk. On a side table, closed-circuit monitors and computer displays tracked entrances, stairwells, and fire exits.
“Faye is expecting me,” Cline said.
One of the men filled out the time and date on a pen-and-paper guest register affixed to a clipboard. He swiveled it around. Faye signed in. He pushed the register toward me. I shook my head once.
“Sign for me,” I said to Cline.
“Who is your guest?” he asked Cline.
“Please,” Cline said to him. “It’s urgent we see Faye.”
He set aside the clipboard with a little bit of a huff. “I’ll need both your memexes.”
From his tone, this was a stipulation I could not talk my way around. I placed my memex on a tray beside Cline’s. Its neural tendrils were limp and cold before I set it down. Cline’s tendrils, hot and stiff, wilted on the tray like a ballerina folding to the floor.
We were led down the hotel hallway, one private security man leading and the other bringing up the rear. We passed a dozen hotel room doors, most closed due to the hour. On each hung a simple printed sign indicating the room’s purpose, offices and meeting rooms and the like. In rooms with open doors, campaign personnel burned the oil dictating memos or hashing out strategies on electronic whiteboards. Some campaign workers looked up as we passed their room. Some were too preoccupied to bother.
A large computer display at the end of the hall bore a running countdow
n with banner-sized characters:
50 DAYS 6 HOURS 22 MINUTES TO MARCH 9TH
The man leading the way pushed open double doors to a corner suite. We stepped into a tastefully appointed antechamber with trim Edwardian furniture and modest personal touches. An ample bouquet of fresh-cut begonias filled the center of a coffee table. Their perfume made the room sickly sweet. Framed photos on the walls showed San Francisco as it was before the great climate change of 2031, the year the unceasing rains and electromagnetic storms arrived and never left.
We waited.
“You with Dakota Security?” I asked the men escorting us. "Or Krupa?"
“Krupa.” The one who led jutted a chin at me. “Why?”
“I know Rick Krupa.”
“Senior or junior?”
“Rick Junior.”
“How long?”
I thought back. “Rick Junior and Michael Aggaroy used to pal around. I think Agg got his start with Rick Senior. I met Rick Junior through Agg.”
“You know Agg?” the other security man asked.
I took a second to think about it. “I always considered him an ex-boss and nothing more,” I said. “Lately, I’m beginning to realize he was the best friend I had in this town.”
The sentiment earned a single unblinking nod. “Agg was a good guy. He was around here a lot the last couple of months. He always treated us real well.”
“He’ll be missed,” the other one said.
A powder blue door swung open. A mature woman entered with a kind of business-like grace you don’t see much of anymore. She was ten years younger than me but carried herself as my superior. She wore her platinum hair up in a conservative ball held in place by an aquamarine hairpin. Her smooth sleeveless royal blue dress ran to her shins.
She approached me with one hand out. “Mr. Naroy. So good to finally meet you.”
With one look, she dismissed the security. They closed the antechamber doors behind them.
“I want to apologize for the cloak-and-dagger," she said. "I should have guessed you would discern my involvement in all of this. After all, seeing through people’s facades would be your stock-and-trade.”
