Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  Silence.

  Someone was on the other side of that door.

  My hand hovered over the doorknob, frozen with apprehension. Then I heard a familiar and all too comforting sound: ice singing its way around the circumference of a rocks glass.

  Whoever was out there, s/he/it was having a drink.

  I opened the door.

  Across the modern-styled living room, staring out another floor-to-ceiling window, stood an Asian man, maybe midfifties . . . qui faisait la cinquantaine, dark silky hair streaked with gray, a goatee, dressed in black slippers and the photonegative version of my PJs: red material with a white EL insignia over the breast pocket. In his hand a rocks glass, half-filled with amber liquid and two cubes of ice.

  Was this my Michelin Man or Mephistopheles? No way to tell who was who without a puffy coat or a pitchfork for clues, neither of which were in plain sight. Then it hit me, what if Mich and Meph were one and the same?

  “Dang, my apologies. I went and woke you with my goddamn cussin’, didn’t I?” A Texas twang was the last accent I expected to come out of that Asiatic goatee. The devil was from Texas?

  I froze in the doorway. My mind flipped through pages of memory, trying to remember how Ivan Fyodorovich coped in this situation. I drew a blank and opted for nonchalant politeness. “I was already up.”

  “Glad to hear it. You been dead to the world going on three days now. How’d you like the bed?”

  “It floats . . .”

  “Ain’t it sumptin’? Held up by a strong magnetic field. Prototype from a friend of mine. Real wow factor.”

  “Definitely a conversation piece.”

  He shook his drink and cast a glance over to a bar cart that looked like it had rolled right out of the ‘20s. “I’m fightin’ a fierce case of jetlag myself. And we gave you the last of my pills. Welcome to join me in some of my sleep juice if you like.”

  I nodded, while contemplating how many time zones were in hell. I imagined no matter which direction you traveled in, you were always losing an hour.

  “What’s your poison?” He moved to the cart.

  “I feel like I should order a pomegranate martini.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Bad joke. Just being wry.” Apparently bad jokes were my way of coping with the supernatural. “Got any absinthe?”

  The goatee laughed, said he hadn’t gotten around to stocking up on wormwood yet. I deferred to whatever he was having, which turned out to be Laphroaig 21.

  Maybe it was the gravity of alcohol or a subtle slope to the floor, but I found myself drawn across the room, closer and closer to that vertiginous wall of windows.

  In an effort to avoid the dizzying panorama, my gaze kept drifting down to his slippers. They looked like normal feet. A little calloused maybe, but normal. No cloven hoof. No discernible limp either.

  As he handed me my drink, he apologized for not having introduced himself. “Eli Longhorn,” he said, handing me my scotch with his left, while ensnaring my right in a handshake.

  With that introduction, my gaze snapped up to his gray-streaked hair. I was looking for hidden bumps, horns cloaked beneath the thick hair.

  “I’m Danny.”

  “Yeah, I know. The guy who’s been rode hard and put up wet.” He laughed, clinked my glass, and took a drink.

  The Laphroaig tasted like burnt peat soup that had been boiled in a worn leather saddle. All the ice in the Arctic couldn’t have watered that firewater down enough. Still, its burn was at least warming my toes. I traced the EL on my chest. “So you’re EL. Pardon my saying, but you don’t look like much of an Eli.”

  A lone horsefly buzzed past, bumping against the window several times, in search of an escape.

  “My father was Jewish.”

  Elohim?

  Le diable n’existe point.

  I scampered frantically for solid footing. “Longhorn wasn’t the name of your ancestors.”

  Le diable n’existe point.

  “My granddaddy Anglicized it in a blatant and futile attempt at assimilation. The surname had to go, but his yarmulke stayed on his head all day, every day. Assimilation in name only,” Eli laughed to himself. “A rose by any other name . . .”

  “Where am I?” I hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. If I were a betting man, I definitely would’ve placed a C-note on me tiptoeing around that terrifying subject.

  “This is my place.”

  “I thought Purgatory was more of a neutral zone.”

  The goatee laughed bigger this time. “I don’t know about Purgatory, but as far as I’m concerned, the Mandarin Oriental is as close as you can get to heaven on earth. Right below my ranch in the Bitterroot Mountains.”

  It took my lacuna-addled mind a few moments to parse all this new information. For some reason, mundane reality was much harder to accept than flights of deistic fancy. “The Mandarin Oriental . . .”

  “Columbus Circle.”

  “Like where Per Se is?”

  Eli laughed, “Well, it’s a few dozen stories down, but yep. That’s here all right. Not my kind of fare. Seems like the more you pay, the less you get.”

  His words buzzed around my ears, background noise. The world outside shifted as I defenestrated my focus out the window and down several hundred feet, back to the massive, grave-shaped portal into hell that I first saw when I woke, the one that seemed to have swallowed up the center of the city, the bottomless rectangle of darkness dotted with brimstone bonfires. Suddenly I was looking at a life-sized optical-illusion puzzle, like one of those where you focus past the picture, and a shape jumps out at you. The grave-shaped blackness of hell dotted with bonfires of brimstone morphed into Central Park with street lamps winking through the trees. The territory devoured by the map.

  Eli caught me as my hand squeaked across the window, having lost my balance. I made some joke about his sleep juice as he helped me to the white leather couch. He sat on the other leg of the L shape and watched me with concern. I downed another slug of Laphroaig. Lucidity seeped through as I watched the bloody-fingered night wane back into the harmless red glow of the Hotel Empire neon sign.

  Eli had to reassure me several times that he wasn’t the devil, didn’t work for the Department, and had never even owned one of those puffy, Michelin Man coats. As the stupor of sanity sank in, he filled me in on his backstory: his mom was a Taiwanese emigrant who, while plying her trade as a chemical engineer in Dallas, met and married an exec (his father, Ruben Longhorn) who worked for the same energy company. Eli himself never took an interest in the energy sector. Instead he built himself his own little empire exporting steel to China. In fact, most of the towers that scraped the Shanghai skyline were his steel.

  It was all very impressive and interesting, but none of it explained how I had ended up in his guest room. Eli apologized, after I explained how my short-term memory had been folded over and over and then cut up like a paper snowflake.

  Lorelei, long familiar with his jetlag issues, had called him in the middle of the night seventy-two hours prior, asking if he could help out a friend of hers.

  “You didn’t wonder why she didn’t just bring me back to her place?”

  “She didn’t offer,” he said. “And I didn’t ask. This ain’t my first rodeo. Her place is pretty small, and from what your friend . . .”

  “Toby?”

  “Right, Toby. From what I could glean from him, we needed to hide you like a crazy aunt in the basement.”

  I took in the large living room again. Not too bad a place to hide out. And it’s certainly the last place anyone would think to find me.

  “So, you and Lorelei, are . . .”

  It took Eli a second to fill in the ellipsis in his head. When the dots finally connected, something halfway between a guffaw and a whistle erupted out of him. “Just because a chicken has wings doesn’t mean it can fly.” When he saw that cleared up nothing for me, he explained, “No. Little Li-Li and I are not. I have much more of an avuncular a
ttachment to her. Her daddy and I were at business school together. I introduced him to her mother. I was at the hospital when she was born. Taught her to fly cast when she was four, to shoot when she was eight, to kick ass when she was thirteen. Over the years, Little Li-Li has developed a lifelong habit of hiding out in my various sanctuaries whenever she’s needed to step out of the normal ebb and flow of life.”

  Eli swirled his ice around in his glass and took me in. “Funny thing, I was eventually going to get around to asking you the same thing.”

  I did my best to emulate his guffaw whistle but just ended up coughing. Eventually I managed to squeak out a no, we’re just friends and coworkers.

  “But you’d like it to be more than that,” he said, not so much as an accusation, more like a tracker reading the signs a wounded deer has left behind.

  Put on the spot, I did what I always do, I prevaricated. “Who wouldn’t? She’s a great girl. Woman. Specimen.” Fuck.

  Eli let it go with an easy shrug. “Makes sense. She rarely introduces me to the men she dates.”

  I opted not to share my knowledge on the subject.

  Eli finished his drink, gestured his glass at me, asking if I’d like another. I surprised myself, shaking my head no. He dropped two cubes in his glass.

  CLINK, CLINK.

  Took the cork top off the Laphroaig.

  OMP.

  As he poured, he mused out loud, “Well, you might have some hope just yet. Way she’s been dotin’ on you these last few days. Regular Florence Nightingale.”

  You think I would’ve smiled at that little revelation, but all I felt was sadness. My dreams had finally come true. My head on Lorelei’s lap, her fingers pulling through my hair, and I couldn’t remember a damned thing. Not the texture of her Lululemon leggings stretched across her taut thighs, nor the slightly musty smell of her favorite old, stretched-out cotton J. Crew sweater that somehow still showed off her slight frame and the rolling topography of her perfect tits. I wonder if the soft weight of her breast had flattened against my cheek, a thrilling caress of incidental contact when she’d lift my head to shift her arm beneath me. Still, she had cradled me. She had cared for me. Her long curls had turned umber, backlit by the recessed lights, filtering the incandescents that glowed against their silken strokes, warming my neck. Her soothing susurrations fluttered against my earlobes. Instead of comfort, I felt loss. All the more accentuated by my keen and constant awareness of the absence of my briefcase—like a black-market organ-harvesting victim waking up in a bath of ice with scars where his kidneys used to be.

  It’s been three days.

  She confiscated my mother’s briefcase from me as I mumbled through muddled plot points. Confiscate might be the wrong word. Excised? Amputated? Cleaved? That’s it—cleaved. Then locked it away, down in Eli’s storage unit, when she left to go home. Appearances had to be maintained after all: sleep at home, work at Anomaly. All the while, keeping it trussed up, safe in the basement, while I writhed in agony on a hovering bed in the sky, jonesing for my heroine.

  According to Eli, Toby hadn’t been around since that first night. Again, appearances. While it might make sense that Lorelei would spend a few evenings at her godfather’s, it would be more than a little curious for her and Toby to be hanging out, at all, let alone three nights in a row.

  It didn’t take much to convert her to the cause, though. A day and a night by my feverish bedside, reading through my mother’s tome and my annotations: paranoia can be highly contagious. The next day, she paid cash for three burner mobile phones and had a courier deliver one to Toby at his office. Through texts and short phone calls in loud public spaces, the two of them plotted our next move.

  “You’re leaving Purgatory for Providence,” Eli said with a wry smile.

  I smiled back, more to make him feel like his attempt at levity had successfully cheered me up than anything else. It hadn’t. The last thing I wanted was to pull my friends down the rabbit hole with me. It wasn’t quite as magnanimous a sentiment as it seemed. I was more concerned that they would slow me down, get me caught, or worse, turn me in.

  “What about work? How can she leave work?” It was a desperate ploy, sure, and probably pretty damn apparent. Still, I was not sharp enough to carve out any sense of subtlety.

  It was all for naught. Apparently, Lorelei’s been covering for me at Anomaly quite successfully. Going on and on about my Chameleon campaign. How I’ve been working nights, employing guerilla, viral techniques throughout the city. She even brought in my sketches that I kept drawing that first night Toby brought me over. Page after page of twisted ribbons, infinite eights, Möbius strips, and ampersands. Her stroke of marketing genius, however, was hiring a couple graffiti artists to tag my doodle all over SoHo and the Lower East Side. They added their own bit of genius, transforming the curves into the Norse serpent, Jörmungandr, biting its own tail.

  It’s now the Chameleon brand.

  Not only that, the boys down at the store loved it so much they agreed to fund an R&D expedition that I, along with Lorelei, apparently needed to take to Indiana to work with this semiotics guru, Carlos Colón. At least that’s our cover. And a fairly in-depth one. She’s rented a car, made reservations at the Day’s Inn in Bloomington, and even hired some actors to drive out there and check in as us. I still thought her explanation for why we weren’t flying was weak—had to meet with a molecular architect at Carnegie Mellon to help formulate and fabricate Chameleon’s tech specs. I think she sold it with her extension of the metaphor, though, emphasizing how the best way to fly under the competition’s radar was to drive. The bosses bought it. Even though, as far as I know, there’s no competition for a fictional ad campaign of my hypothetical product/project.

  As attested to by my truculence, I wasn’t so concerned with the bosses’ faith in me or the project. I was more nervous about the Department and Beimini. Lorelei brushed off my worries with a shrug. I had never seen her like this before. No humor, no perfected nonchalance, no performance at all. My situation had somehow snapped her into hyperfocused, survivor mode. I foolishly thought it was somehow about me. How far gone I was, how much she truly cared. While that might be part of it (fingers crossed), my situation had apparently struck a chord from Lorelei’s childhood.

  “Her uncle was Abbie Hoffman,” Eli shared, with a tone that suggested I should know who that was. Lorelei was out picking up supplies at the time. “He was a big deal in the protest movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Sort of their media guru. Part of the SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and cofounder of the Yippies, Youth International Party. He was the avuncular left Yin to my right Yang in Lorelei’s childhood. Always filling her head with bedtime stories about his triumphs and defeats: his exposé on the Diggers in his book Fuck the System; the arrest in ‘68 as one of the Chicago Eight for conspiracy to incite a riot and how the trumped-up charges were overturned; his interruption of The Who’s performance at Woodstock; his book Steal This Book; and, of course, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.”

  Eli went on to explain how that last one was never officially tied to Abbie, but everyone knew it was him. In 1971, he and a few other left activists broke into the FBI’s office in, aptly named, Media, Pennsylvania. They stole over a thousand classified documents, including several about the COINTELPRO operation (Counter Intelligence Program). As Hoffman uncovered, the FBI had been conducting a series of covert, illegal projects involving surveillance, infiltration, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. They had files on everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Albert Einstein. Once exposed in the media, Hoover had to shut down the operation, especially since the documents also exposed how the FBI illegally used postmen, switchboard operators, and the likes thereof to spy on American citizens.

  While I found Eli’s history lesson engaging, I still didn’t see the connection. I mean, yeah, Lorelei’s uncle was a radical who liked to stir the pot and then shit in it, but why g
et invested in my mother’s disappearance and some bullshit conspiracy theory about DARPA?

  Eli’s shoulders dropped, along with his voice, as he let me know I was never to directly bring this up with Lorelei. I could acknowledge it, if she ever mentioned it, but under no circumstances was I to dredge up what he was about to share with me. I nodded in assent, hoping I would keep the promise.

  “The FBI neither forgave, nor forgot, Abbie. They kept a close eye on him. In ’73 they planted cocaine on him and got the local cops to charge him with intent to distribute. Shook him up so much, he underwent cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance and hid out for several years. Unable to get him directly, after that, the FBI took an extreme tack, even for them. They kidnapped Lorelei. She was four. It was never publicized. When her parents went to the police, it was immediately kicked up to the very bureau that had taken her.”

  “What, they wanted to trade prisoners?” I naïvely asked.

  Eli shook his head. “No. They were too smart for that. They merely wanted to send a message—even when we can’t get to you, we can get to you. Within a week, Lorelei wandered in the back door of her parents’ house. She couldn’t tell us much, just that they fed her a lot of ice cream and told her her parents and uncle were in danger, and they were keeping her safe.

  “She didn’t sleep alone for the next two years,” Eli went on. “Abbie got the message and disappeared from public life for almost a decade. Until he got arrested for trespassing at Amherst, protesting the CIA’s recruitment actions there, citing their illegal activities and thereby unlawful presence on campus. Then he published Steal This Urine Test, exposing the hypocrisy of the war on drugs.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “By the spring of 1989, he was dead. Overdose. Swallowed a hundred and fifty phenobarbital tablets and washed them down with a bottle of rye.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yeah, especially since he hated rye. Said it was the swill scotch distilleries use to sterilize factory bathrooms. Never touched the stuff. Certainly never would’ve bought a bottle of it.”