by Jamie Metzl
The door is still open. “Knock, knock.”
Martina looks up, sighs, then shifts her gaze down toward the massive screen of her desk.
I wait for her to speak.
“What is it?” she finally says without looking up, as if speaking to an exasperating child.
It’s funny with Martina. I’d have thought the success of the Genesis Code story would have sealed a bond between us. In a way it has. We both got pats on the back and promotions, she to deputy editor. But I sense deep down that Martina is still thoroughly annoyed that I was first offered an assistant editor role, which would have put me in a category of her perceived competitors in the company, that I turned it down because I still wanted to be a reporter and didn’t want to deal with all the politics, and that, worst of all, I may be in my current subservient position in Martina’s internal hierarchy by choice rather than necessity.
“The hospice story,” I say tentatively.
She shakes her head, pretending not to remember what I’m talking about and still not looking up. It was at the bottom of the priority list when she assigned it to me this morning and she’s not about to indulge me now by acting like she affords it the slightest importance. Her gaze shifts back down toward the screen. “Just do the little story I sent you to do, Jorge.”
“The guy disappeared two weeks ago,” I blurt out, knowing I have at most one more sentence to make my case. “The police aren’t doing anything, the security cameras went dead at just the time he vanished, and any record of him in the hospice database has been erased.” It’s a compound sentence.
“An old guy near death goes missing from hospice. I’m sure there are lots of good reasons why a geezer missing a few screws can wander off into the darkness. Why don’t you just do what you were assigned in the morning? All I wanted was a little copy for Metro. A thirty-minute story. Old guy disappears, police looking,” she drones, unimpressed.
“I could,” I say, avoiding Martina’s bait, “but isn’t it at least worth asking a few questions, sitting down with his wife? I thought that’s what we did these days—cats in trees, house fires, potholes.”
“Don’t be a smartass,” she says impassively. No one knows more than she what we’ve traded to stay alive.
I stand obsequiously, starting to get annoyed that Martina has yet to look up from her table screen.
“Shouldn’t you be covering Senator King?”
“I’m covering King’s health-care forum in Lee’s Summit tomorrow morning, Martina.” With the centrist Republican President Lewis reelected and the next presidential election three years away, King is starting to position himself as the inevitable Republican candidate, and then President of the United States, by taking every opportunity to criticize Jack Alvarez, the Democratic vice president in America’s Republican-Democrat centrist national unity government. “And I can chew gum and pat my ass at the same time.”
Martina lifts her head and chuckles. A hint of exasperated warmth crosses her face. “A few questions, Jorge. A few,” she says, clearly in spite of herself.
3
Imposed on vast farmlands one massive subdivision at a time, Overland Park, Kansas, is a testament to the cumulative power of prefabricated parts.
If you saw a photo of almost any home in Overland Park, any strip mall, any restaurant, and were asked where in America these might be located, the only logical answer would be “anywhere.”
But every locality has its unique stories, I think to myself as I knock gently on the front door of the large ranch-style house at 9518 West 146th Street. The whispering November wind brushes my face with the first hints of winter across the vast Great Plains.
Through the crack in the opening door, her intelligent hazel eyes stare at me plaintively. The woman’s erect posture, slender frame, and elegant dress seem almost an act of defiance against advancing age. But even from first glance, it’s obvious a fog of sadness has descended upon Katherine Hart. I can only imagine what she’s been going through.
“May I come in?”
She takes a step back. “Thank you for coming,” she says softly as I enter. “Can I offer you coffee?”
“Thank you, Dr. Hart,” I say, feeling somewhat uncomfortable that she, the one in this terrible situation, is offering me coffee. “I’m okay.”
Katherine Hart may not have had the stature of her husband, but Joseph’s small file on her was impressive enough on its own: private practice neurologist, clinical professor of neurobiology at Kansas University Medical Center, pioneer in the mental resuscitation of stroke victims.
We sit quietly in her living room. The room has high ceilings, a Marc Chagall print, and a few abstract paintings on the walls. A large photo of the Hart family over the mantle. I notice Professor and Dr. Hart surrounded by two younger couples with a gaggle of kids of various ages. “Your family?” I ask, trying to break the ice.
Katherine Hart stands and walks toward the photo.
I follow.
Her voice lifts slightly as she points to the different people. “It’s Ben and me, our two daughters Dalia and Ofira, their husbands Michael and Sanjay, and our five grandchildren, Ava, Daniel, Chloe, Zoe, and little Gabriel.” Reciting the list of names adds a fractional smile to her otherwise deadened face. “I asked Ofira and Sanjay to take their kids to the park when you said you were coming.”
“And this,” I say, pointing. The framed miniature album cover catches my eye. Four tough guys in black leather jackets stare out defiantly from in front of a set of drums. It looks strangely out of place.
She smiles again briefly. “Ben got me that for our fifth anniversary. It’s the album cover for the song ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love,’ from Queen, the old rock band. It came out that year.” Her face holds on to the memory for a brief moment, then collapses under its weight.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry for your …”
Katherine Hart closes her eyes. “At this point, I think we need to accept that Ben is gone. I only wish I knew to where. We lived in this house together for thirty-five years. It was always alive with his presence. Now it feels so empty in his absence.”
I want to hand her something to wipe her tearing eyes, but she takes a handkerchief from her pocket before I can.
“The police don’t seem to be doing anything,” she says softly, shaking her head. “I talk to the wonderful people at the hospice every day. They don’t know anything. I just don’t understand how someone in his condition could just disappear into thin air. That’s why I called the Star this morning. No one seems to be doing enough. It doesn’t make any sense. My biggest fear is that he wandered off into the night somewhere and died all alone.” Her body begins to cave forward. “We’ve been together for fifty-one years. He couldn’t tie his shoes without me. I worry his body is all alone, that it’s being eaten by animals.” She holds her hand over her eyes, then seems to straighten her body by sheer force of will. “The rabbi wants to start shiva, but I keep telling him to wait another day. Somehow I need to know where he is, where his body is, before I can …”
“I’m so sorry, Dr. Hart,” I say.
“Please, call me Katherine.”
I nod slightly.
“It’s funny,” she adds wistfully. “I’m a scientist, but I can’t help being a sucker for hope at a time like this.” She pauses a moment, then her shoulders begin to curl inward.
I feel I should do something to break the oppressive silence, but I feel helpless.
Katherine Hart stares at me plaintively. “I’ll give you any information you need, just please, I beg of you, find Ben … even if it’s just what’s left of him. I need to be with him one last time.”
“I promise I will do my best.”
Her intense stare makes clear that’s not good enough.
I feel the overwhelming urge to say something, anything. My mind cautions me about making blind promises but the words are already escaping my mouth. “I will find him. You will be together.” I regret them
immediately. If the police and the hospice can’t locate Benjamin Hart, who am I to promise more?
Katherine Hart’s eyes lift with an infusion of hope as she takes in my words. “Thank you, Mr. Azadian.”
“Rich.”
“Thank you, Rich. I can’t tell you how much this means to me and my family.”
My calm face betrays my inner turmoil. I’m already dreading the likelihood I will let her down. I plod on. “Can I ask you a few questions?”
Her eyes remain locked on mine.
“Was Professor Hart in any condition to get out of bed by himself in the middle of the night?”
“He is … was,” she says, clearly struggling to keep her composure as she weighs the possibilities, “a very strong-willed person. He had so little strength left, but I have to believe that if a tiny neuron fired somewhere in the depths of his cerebral cortex, he could have pulled himself out of bed through will alone.”
“But it would have been hard?”
“Of course. I know a lot about what mental decline looks like. We can track it on fMRI and MEG machines. He was terribly close to the end when he arrived at the hospice.”
“Was his mind together? Could he have become disoriented and just wandered off?”
“It certainly is one of the possibilities. At times I would see the spark of recognition, of his brilliance in his eyes, and then just as quickly the fog would settle back in. What cancer didn’t steal from him seemed to go after the experimental treatment regimen failed. But science doesn’t always explain everything. Somewhere in there I knew he was, on some level, the same compassionate genius I fell in love with.”
“Could the cancer treatment have disoriented him in some way?”
“Maybe, but he’d already been off the trial for three months at the time he—he … disappeared. We’d had a lot of hope for a miracle, but maybe miracles never …”
“How old was Professor Hart when this photo was taken?” I say, pointing at the family portrait and trying clumsily to steer the conversation to safer ground.
“That was five years ago. He was seventy-eight then. A lot has happened these past five years. He hasn’t looked much like that for some time now.”
“Do you have any more recent photographs I can see? I’d like to get a sense of how he might look today. So I can know what … whom … I’m looking for.”
“Yes,” she says softly, placing her hand on her coffee table. The tabletop screen lights up. “Photos. Ben. 2020 to 2025,” she dictates.
The now all-too-familiar words flash across the screen. NO ITEMS MATCH YOUR SEARCH.
“That’s impossible,” she whispers. “How could they have disappeared? 2020 to 2025,” she repeats desperately, as if a few lines for compassionate override might have been embedded somewhere in the billion lines of code.
She looks up at me with wide, unbelieving eyes. Then her face collapses into her hands.
4
“Jerry, it’s Rich,” I say into my dashboard screen as my silver Tesla XY streaks toward Toni’s. “Can I get your quick advice on something?” I say.
Jerry Weisberg’s gaunt, pale, and perpetually sweaty face peers out from my screen, his brown hair seeming slathered on as an afterthought. From the strained look on his face, I get the feeling he is fighting the urge to lock himself away in his cave-like basement office in the University of Missouri–Kansas City Computer Science Department, where he is a professor, so his wall-to-wall screens can immunize him from human interactions through the intimacy of distance.
Jerry may be a bit awkward, I think to myself, but he really came through for me when I needed him a couple of years ago, and I’ll be forever grateful for that. So grateful I can’t help pestering him for more assistance.
“Um, sure,” he mumbles, making intermittent eye contact.
I tell him of the missing surveillance feeds and data files at the Wornall hospice and the missing photos on Katherine Hart’s home computer. “How can we know if this is just a chance blip or if something more is going on?”
“It all sounds suspicious but it’s hard to know,” Jerry replies, warming as the conversation bends toward his home turf. “It would be an odd coincidence that two files about the same person disappear from two different systems in two different places. I’d need to get inside the two networks.”
“Can you?”
A look of nervous consternation crosses Jerry’s face.
“With their permission,” I add.
Jerry has proven he’s a master of breaking into electronic networks designed to keep him out, but he still probably believes at his core that good guys don’t violate network privacy unless they really have to. “Um, well, I guess—”
“Great, Jerry. I really appreciate it. What do I need to do?”
“Umm,” Jerry murmurs. We both know I am railroading him but I hope he trusts I wouldn’t push him like this for no reason. “I’d need their universal network identifier codes and they’d have to request access while connecting through their biometrics.”
“Can I have Joseph work with you to help make that happen?”
Jerry nods tentatively.
“Great. Thanks,” I say quickly, locking in my gains before caution can convince him to retract. “I’ll have Joseph call you.” I tap my u.D and his face vanishes from the dashboard.
One more quickie call as my Tesla glides itself effortlessly around Meyer Circle.
“Yo, Mo,” I say as he answers.
Maurice Henderson eyes me cautiously, not responding to my provocation. Nobody else would ever address Kansas City Police Department Deputy Chief Henderson with “yo,” and the idea that any abbreviation of his full name could ever legitimately be used to address him is virtually unthinkable.
“May I help you?” Maurice says formally after a long pause.
Maurice doesn’t really do humor, or informality, or small talk, or man hugs, or any of the expressions of human connection the rest of us struggle to carry out. He is, however, one of the most upright people I know, even if I often have the impression he’s holding a silver dollar between his butt cheeks.
“May I have the pleasure of inviting you for coffee tomorrow morning?” I say, matching his formality with a small dose of irony.
I’ve learned to see through Maurice’s tough exterior over the past two years. Maurice would have probably lost his job instead of being promoted had it not been for my part, with his help, in exposing the Genesis Code genetic enhancement program and stopping the fanatical murderer who had snuffed out so many pregnant women. But then our connection cooled for a while until Maurice’s son, Maurice Jr.—MJ—started taking a shine to Hellenic philosophy at the Kansas City Classics Academy charter school. Maurice is the type of person who hates asking for things, but how many other people did he know with a PhD in philosophy who could walk MJ through Aristotle’s reflections on the essence of happiness from the Nicomachean Ethics or push him to take a side in the great debate between Plato and Aristotle on the universality of forms? To Maurice, it was just Greek.
“What do you want, Dikran?” he says in the same warmly exasperated tone more and more of the key people in my life seem to use with me these days.
Only a few people know how much I dislike being called by my given name, which is perfectly normal in Armenian but sounds alarmingly like “dickwad” in English. As a child, I’d switched immediately to the English version of Dikran, Rich, in the face of puerile harassment on my first day after switching from Armenian day school to public school. “I need to talk with you about something in person. Something important.”
Maurice waits almost ten seconds before the words leak reluctantly from his mouth. “Eight a.m., twenty minutes, Broadway Café. I’m drinking water.” He’s probably as close to smirking as his physiognomy will allow.
“See you then, deputy sir,” I say cheekily as I tap out, wondering why I always feel like I’m herding iguanas, straddling the line between inviting people to do the right thing and outrig
ht harassing them, albeit lovingly.
But deep down I know, as I pull into Toni’s driveway, that the most elusive iguana is still probably me.
5
“Honey, I’m home,” I announce, reveling in the cliché as I push open the door to her kitchen from inside the garage.
She looks up from her bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream, and I know it’s not going to be good. “Are you sure? Aren’t you the guy who lives in Hyde Park?”
The words carry with them the distance that has slowly crept between us these past months. “Are you feeling any better?” I ask.
Toni’s eyes don’t afford me an opening, but then her mocking half smile softens the blow. “If wanting to eat grass until I throw up is a sign, then definitely yes.”
Even when she’s upset, there’s always been something irresistible about Toni. Her graceful, slender frame, sharp green eyes and olive skin, the quirky bob of her charcoal hair, and her ever-so-slight dimple are all alluring to me, but it’s the kindness exuding from her every pore that’s what ultimately draws me to her. I have to admit it’s all just a tad more resistible when she’s as annoyed with me as she’s been these past months. “Can I get you anything?”
Her eyes widen, inviting me to answer my own question.
Two years ago, she and I probably each realized the other carried a little piece of ourselves we hated to admit we were missing. Now, we’ve somehow settled into a pattern of being together but not fully connecting. It doesn’t take much to not notice a new dress or fail to decipher a hidden brood. Each transgression is hardly a crime. But little by little it adds up until you find yourself in a new place, not quite sure how you got there. Our magic feels a bit more distant. There, but just beyond our reach. “Was your day okay?”
The simple question almost feels like papering over the real issues hanging in the air. We’ve now been together for nearly three years, with one seven-month break toward the beginning, but we’re not engaged, we still have two separate houses, and I’ve even been resisting getting a dog together. And Toni, shot up with hormones as she prepares to have her eggs and a small skin graft extracted and frozen, is not happy.
