“But it won’t get better.”
“That, no one can say.”
Christopher had nodded and, closing the window, had said, “Thanks, Dad. Thanks for not lying to me.”
* * *
For all its impotence, the air conditioner roars like the jet engines of the plane that brought him here. With the hot stream lifting the hairs on his forearms and chest, he looks down at his bare feet and thinks of death. There is nothing else left to think about, and now he wonders whether there ever was.
When had it become apparent that there was something wrong with Lily? Even though he has racked his brains for months, he hasn’t been able to quite pinpoint the moment. Perhaps there was no one moment, perhaps, as in all other things in life his wife’s demise was a death by ten thousand cuts. Because, until the very end, she had been the consummate actress. He was uniquely qualified to see her ruse—he who was closest to her, who should not have been able to be objective because she was his wife and his beloved. But she was to him a great, intricate clock, whose every tick, every tock he knew inside and out.
What eventually caught his attention were the tiniest details, so minute that not even Christopher had been aware of them. Only he, who was obsessed by her, who fetishized her—only he knew. But, really, he didn’t know—not at first, anyway. But slowly the tendrils of suspicion took hold of him and would not let him go. So he began to pay special attention.
He recalls the time he went into her closet. He always went into her closet to search on his hands and knees for bits of her—a stray nail clipping or a strand of pubic hair. Eyelashes he loved best, not only for their exquisite scimitar shape but because they were something so intimate he could almost feel her heart beating when he held one on the tip of his finger. She existed in that one tiny follicle, as if she were a genie who had been put back into her lamp, to be with him for all time.
He’d made a light box of mahogany with beveled edges and mitred corners into which he put an 8x10 photo he’d taken of her on their honeymoon. Her eyes looked dewy and, behind the halo of her hair spread the fronds of Balinese palms, slightly out of focus, looking like Tjak, the Balinese bird with a human face. Behind this photo, he placed the ephemera he periodically collected from her closet, and some of them tended to cast unidentifiable shadows across her face.
That day, however, he found something else, a tiny scrap of paper with a mark on it. He thought it must be a bit of writing, though it wasn’t English or for that matter any language that used Roman letters. The mark looked like a rune to him, something ancient and therefore unknowable. Thus his suspicions, having been previously awakened, were aroused.
In some ways, she was too perfect, and in light of his suspicions, her absolute perfection proved the deepest fissure in her simulation. In all ways, she was the perfect wife and mother. She cooked gourmet dinners, provided him with astonishingly imaginative sex, was always there for Christopher when he was ill or low, was so kind to his girlfriends that many of them kept in touch with her long after their liaisons with him had ended. She never complained when her husband went away on business trips and was grateful for the same treatment when she went away on her business trips.
The facade was complete, and life went on precisely as it should have. But nothing in life is perfect and, as Christopher was quick to understand, happiness is as ephemeral as a cherry blossom. In fact, it is his own opinion that happiness is illusory.
Take, for instance, the sex. While it had been true that in college he’d left a string of girlfriends behind him, his serial affairs were not at all motivated by sex, to which he had been indifferent. No, he’d been looking for something. At first, he hadn’t known what it was, he only knew that each girl in her own way had disappointed him. Later on, it occurred to him that he was looking for a shadow, a kind of twin to himself, who possessed the qualities he himself longed for but did not have.
Lily had performed on him the most elaborate erotic rituals. It was not surprising that he came to enjoy them, then to actually crave them, but his burgeoning desire bound him to her, and this bitter revelation plunged him into despair.
As soon as he was able to see through the mirage of happiness everything changed. Lily, as it transpired, worked for the Agency, not Fieldstone Real Estate or, latterly, March & Masson Public Relations. Or, rather, she did work at the offices of Fieldstone and, latterly, March & Masson, but both entities were owned and operated by the Agency, stage sets as artfully aping reality as any of the ones he had designed.
There is a scratching at the hotel-room door, and he turns, facing his fate as if it were the lens of a camera. Let them come, his enemies, he is ready for them now, for if they break in they will find Harold Moss or Max Brandt. It will be of no moment to him and a bitter disappointment to them. He himself is gone, dissolved like candle wax beneath a flame.
* * *
Where was he? Oh, yes, Lily. Of course, Lily. His beginning and his end.
“I know what you want from me,” she had said at the outset of their relationship, and she was right, she could see through to the hollow core of him. In fact, he is convinced this is why she married him. Since his core was hollow, she could fashion him into her ideal lover. She could turn him inside out and it wouldn’t matter, because there’d been nothing there to begin with.
Years later, he had said to her, “What is it you want from me?”
It was night and they were in bed, naked and sweaty from their acrobatic exertions. She was still on top, reluctant to dismount. The night was still, as it always was when they made love, as if it had ceased to exist.
“I should have thought that was obvious. I love you.”
A lie, but not, perhaps, the first one she’d told him, which might have been, “Don’t look at me like that, it gives me the creeps,” or then again, while he was making her up, while he was killing her, “You’re nothing to me. I don’t care whether you live or die.” And then, reborn on stage, she had glanced into the wings at the precise spot where she knew he stood for each performance and had smiled at his shadow.
Actors were, of course, adept at creating their own reality, but lying, well, that was another matter entirely. It seems to him now, standing on the furthest shore of his life, in the stifling heat of summertime when it should be winter, that Lily became addicted to lying as others become addicted to heroin or cocaine. He suspected she had got high from lying—no, not suspected, knew, because in molding him she had given herself away, and he had known her as deeply and profoundly as she had known him.
Perhaps, in the end, this is how she had come undone—not her lying to him, but the nature of her lies. And when the lies had altered, subtly but definitely, he had known. He’d followed her on one of her business trips and had seen her put something in a painted birdhouse affixed to a crooked wooden post out in the Maryland countryside. She’d left, but he’d stayed to watch. Twenty minutes later, a car had pulled up and a man got out. The man went straight to the birdhouse and when he’d pulled out whatever it was Lily had left for him, he depressed the trigger of his digital camera at 10X zoom.
The resulting photos he showed to the people at the Agency, who became immediately agitated.
Then he showed them the scrap of paper he’d found in Lily’s closet.
“That’s not a rune,” they said, their agitation increasing exponentially. “It’s Arabic.”
* * *
He awakens into darkness and a rude snuffling, as if a large and hostile dog is just outside the door. He’s off the bed in a shot. When had he drifted off to sleep? He cannot remember and, in any event, it does not matter. Time has crept on, but it is still the dead of night.
Reaching under the pillow, he brushes a water bug off the blued barrel of his semiautomatic pistol. Over the years, it has served him well, this weapon. On its grips is a series of notches, one for each of the people he has shot to death with it. In this way, the dead are always with him, like lovers who have disappointed him. In this way, h
e can confirm where he has been, how he has reached the place he is now. To anyone else, this train of thought might seem perverse, even illogical, but then he’s never been foolish enough to put his faith in logic.
He rechecks the pistol, although there’s really no need, his spy-craft is precise, something in which he prides himself. It is fully loaded. He takes out a second clip, puts it in his left pocket, then another for good measure, which he puts in his right pocket.
At that moment, the room is flooded with noise and the door shudders on its hinges. He lunges for the jalousie, pulls it open. The night, fired by a million Buenos Aires lights, comes flooding in, nearly blinding him. He forgets his commitment to remain in the room and flings open the window. Beyond the crumbling concrete ledge is a black metal fire escape, onto which he swings. The noise from inside the room is deafening, and without a backward glance he hurls himself up the metal rungs, climbing breathlessly without pausing for even an instant to take in the high sky, the rearing black mountains. But when he gains the rooftop, the first thing he sees is the spangled ocean running up to spend itself on the wide swath of sand, whose color and curve matches exactly the shape of Lily’s eyelash.
He looks around. The landscape he has ascended onto is flat as a bare stage, smelling of creosote and decayed fish. Here and there rise the squat shapes of ventilator housings, but in fact the rooftop is dominated by the skeleton that holds fast the enormous neon sign advertising the hotel: EL PORTAL, the doorway, as if it were a pleasure palace instead of a water-bug-infested hellhole. This he understands completely. It is nothing more than a stage set, a huge construct of brightly colored fantasy trying to mimic reality. But up close, its ugly black ironwork looms like a depressing image of urban sprawl.
Sounds come from below him, chaotic and harsh, and he backs away. Gun at the ready, he finds the nearest of the blocky ventilator housings and crouches down behind it. Anyone who follows him up will come into his sights. At his back the neon sign perks and sizzles, throwing off colored light like a dying star. He sees pigeons wheeling across the lurid sky. Far below him a dog barks, a forlorn sound he somehow comprehends.
All at once, there is movement above the parapet—a shape, a silhouette darker by far than the glittering night, and he squeezes off a shot. The shape, more visible now, resolves itself into a figure. The figure comes at him even as he squeezes off shot after shot. He throws away the empty clip, retreats to another ventilation housing as he slams home the second clip. Immediately, he begins firing again until that clip, too, is empty. Retreating to the crisscross metalwork of the sign stanchion, he reloads with his last clip. Clambering into the nebula of colored lights as if it were the last remnant of his past, he fires, this time knowing the figure will still come on, unwounded, unfazed and undeterred….
* * *
He awakens into darkness and a cold sweat, half his mind still paralyzed. In a way, the nightmare seems more real than his present reality. It is certainly more real than anything in his past. The pounding on the door comes as if on cue, as if his nightmare was presentiment. But he puts as little faith in the paranormal as he does in the rational.
No dogs snuffling, instead a human voice from beyond the barrier. He flicks off the safety of his gun and makes his winding way through the blizzard of torn, cut and folded magazine pages (he dare not trample them down!) to a spot just beside the door. He’s onto them! He is too clever to stand in front of it, his enemies are all too likely to send a spray of machine-gun bullets through it, having lured him to it with the coaxing voice.
He takes a breath, lets it out slowly and evenly in precisely the same way he will soon squeeze the trigger of his weapon. Then he whips around the upper part of his torso so that he can put his eye to the peephole. He looks out, blinks, looks again, then whips his body back to safety. He hears the voice again—the familiar voice of his son.
“Christopher?” His voice is eerily thin, cracked from disuse.
“Dad, it’s me. Please open the door.”
He takes another breath, lets it out, striving to calm his mind. But it’s no use, his son is here. Why?
“Dad?”
“Stand away from the door, son.”
Risking another look through the peephole, he sees that Christopher has done as he asked. In the peephole’s fish-eye lens he can see all of him now. Christopher is dressed in a lightweight linen suit over a white polo shirt. Polished loafers with tassels are on his feet. He looks as if he’s just stepped off the plane.
“Dad, please let me in.”
He wipes sweat off his face. Hand on the chain across the door frame, he pauses. What if his enemies have captured Christopher and are using him against his will? He’ll never know, standing on this side of the door. He slides the chain off, unlocks the door and says, “All right, son. Come on in.” Then he steps back, waiting.
Christopher comes through the door and, without being asked, shuts it behind him.
“Lock it, son,” he says.
Christopher complies.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to get you, Dad.”
His eyes narrow and his hand grips the gun with more force. “What d’you mean?”
“You killed Mom,” Christopher says.
“I had to—”
“You had no orders.”
“There was no time. She was a double working for—”
“Dad, you’re mistaken.”
“Certainly not. I saw her put the intelligence—”
“In the birdhouse,” Christopher says. “That was you, Dad. You put the intelligence there.”
He takes one terrible staggering step backward. “What?” His head has begun to hurt. “No, I—”
“I saw you do it myself. I took pictures—”
“That’s a lie!”
Christopher smiles sadly. “We never lie to one another, Dad. Remember?”
His head hurt all the more, a pounding in the veins that cradle his brain. “Yes, I—”
“Dad, you’ve been ill. You still are.” One hand held out in entreaty. “You thought Mom was onto you and you—”
“No, no, I found that scrap of paper with the rune on it!”
“The Arabic letter, Dad. That was yours. You’re fluent in Arabic.”
“Am I?” He presses his fingertips into his temple. If only his head would stop pounding he might be able to think clearly. But now he is unsure of the last time he’s thought clearly. Could Christopher be right?
But then something odd and chilling occurs to him. “Why are you talking like this? You know nothing of your mother and me—of our secret life. You’re a designer of computer software.”
Christopher’s eyes are soft, his smile all the sadder. “You’re the software designer. That’s why you were recruited to the Agency, that’s how you were doubled—on one of your trips to Shanghai or Bangalore, they don’t really know where, and right now it’s not important. What is important is that you give me the gun so that we can walk out of here together.”
A spasm of irrational rage causes him to lift his weapon. “I’m not going anywhere, with you or anyone else.”
“Dad, please be reasonable.”
“There is no reason in the world!” he shouts. “Reason is an illusion, just like love!”
And as he levels the gun at Christopher, his son whips a snub-nosed Walther PPK from behind his back and shoots him neatly and precisely through the forehead.
* * *
Christopher looked down at his father’s corpse. At this moment, he was interested in what emotions he would feel. There were none. It was as if his heart had been muffled under so many layers of identity no event, no matter how traumatic, could reach it.
Agency protocol dictated that all evidence of terminations be immediately destroyed. This would be done, of course, his spy-craft was precise, something in which he prided himself.
Looking around, he saw all his father’s children, re-created in intricate and loving mini
aturized detail from the pages of magazines he’d bought and scrounged from the hotel lobby.
Here was the set for The Merchant of Venice, here the one for A Streetcar Named Desire, there the set for the revival of Carousel, acclaimed for his father’s innovative design. All the many shows were represented in miniature, so cleverly fashioned that for a moment Christopher was astonished all over again by his father’s genius.
It was in the shower that he came across the set for Death of a Salesman. He stared at it for a moment, lines from Arthur Miller’s pen running like an electronic news ribbon through his mind. After an unknown time he reached down. Retreating, he threw it on his father’s body. Producing a bottle of lighter fluid bought for just this purpose, he poured it over the mass, soaking the corpse. Then, his back to the door, he threw open the lock and lit a match, watching it arc toward the end of all things.
Everything changes. But it won’t get better.
He went out the side door of the hotel into the stinking dawn, the stench of lighter fluid and burning hair masking the reek of human excrement and decay. As he craned his neck, looking for the first gray tendrils of smoke, he decided to create a new legend for himself. When he passed through customs on his way home he would be Biff Loman.
The idea brought a smile to his face, and for that moment he looked just like his dad.
* * * * *
Author Biography
Eric Van Lustbader is the author of more than twenty-five bestselling thriller and fantasy novels, including the Nicholas Linnear series and the Jason Bourne novels, plus a host of short stories. He graduated from Columbia College in 1968 and spent fifteen years in the pop music industry. He has also been a New York City schoolteacher. For more information, visit him at ericvanlustbader.com.
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