Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  Now I know how Duvalier must have felt—exile could’ve been worse.

  We played it safe for a few days. Cloistered ourselves away and kept busy wandering the grounds of our own Little Elba, as Lorelei and I came to call it. We had to make sure we were free and clear, not that either of us had any counterespionage training to speak of. Not that that would even help against the likes of NBs. Still, it made us feel better. As luck would have it, we were blanketed with low-lying fog and gray skies, so at least Predators weren’t going to be an issue. A Bergman-esque setting with an Ian Fleming plot.

  We took walks, counted starfish, harvested mussels, “caught” lobster, and cooked feasts. Lorelei was actually a pretty adept chef. I managed to impress her with my knife skills. She went gaga for my trick of halving a dozen cherry tomatoes at once.

  “That’s ingenious, Tri-Me. Delivery soup lids. I would never even have thought to save them.”

  I tried not to beam from her attention, but my shit-eating grin clawed its way right up my jawline and latched onto my ears for at least three hours. It was almost enough to make me forget what we were doing there in the first place.

  “What other tricks you got?”

  The twelve-year-old boy in me was spouting a Tourette-ian litany of bad innuendos. Somehow I managed to shout the horny little brat down long enough to coolly slide out, “I can zest the hell out of lime. Makes for one killer gimlet.”

  Which is what led to us taking a polar bear swim down at Little Elba’s beachhead. Which is what led to Lorelei noticing my scar.

  “Is that a birthmark?” Lorelei asked, perched on a boulder that jutted out of the water, pointing just below my right ribs. Steam smoked off her body in the cold air.

  “More of a birthright,” I quipped, and changed the subject. “I’m freezing. Let’s head back in and make some hot toddies.”

  I followed her up the path, watching her damp sweatpants cup her flawless ass in the moonlight, my hand unconsciously drifting up the side of my own wet sweatshirt, rubbing my scar to make sure it didn’t reopen after all these years.

  We talked about work, crustaceans, our best and worst vacations (Lorelei’s were Naples and a Caribbean cruise, respectively, mine were both Peru), our parents, exes—of which she had a plethora whereas I only had tales about halfhearted hookups on futons in Brooklyn with the type of women who fake British accents and overfeed their cats.

  “What do you mean she had a fake British accent?” Lorelei asked, leaning back against the arm of the leather couch, her feet tucked under my leg while blowing lightly on her recently topped-off hot toddy.

  I balanced mine on my lap, sitting left of center on the couch, my feet resting on the edge of the leather trunk/coffee table. In my head, I pictured grandmothers playing baseball in an effort to preclude an ill-timed boner.

  “Like it was bad?” she asked.

  “No, no. It was good. Like I-thought-she-was-British good.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I mean, no. I had met her at a party in Park Slope.”

  “Oh, that’s right, they do call Park Slope the Little London of New York,” she said sarcastically, and shoved my leg with her foot playfully.

  Electricity shivered up my thigh right through my chest. Nanna rounds second, but gets her walker tied up on the bag. “I mean I had just met her at some house party, she was a friend of a friend. She had a British accent and talked about her old job in London. So I connected the dots.”

  “You didn’t investigate with your friend?”

  “Why would I? When would I? As I was getting my coat? Thanks buddy, it’s been a great party, by the way is that bitch really British?”

  “Oh, you went home with her from the party!” Lorelei singsonged at me with a knowing and slightly judgmental tone. “’Cause you’re a he-whore.”

  I shrugged. “She asked me if I wanted to ‘meet her cat.’” That last bit I said in my own fake British accent.

  Lorelei broke out in hysterics. “Of course she did.”

  “How was I supposed to know she actually had a cat?”

  Lorelei snarfed her hot toddy. “No?!”

  “Fat fucker too. And obstinate. She would not get off the futon. As far as she was concerned, it was her territory and we were the interlopers. She was willing to tolerate our presence but was not about to move.”

  “Why didn’t you just shove her off?”

  “She was really, seriously fat. I tried to nudge her off while the faux-Brit was in the bathroom, but she gave me a can-I-help-you look and then slapped a warning claw at my hand. The last thing I wanted to do was get in a fight with this chick’s cat.”

  “Not when you were about to get some pussy.”

  She said the word pussy. “Exactly. So there she stayed, right on the pillow next to me, cleaning herself and periodically eyeballing me with this unimpressed look like she had seen way better.”

  “While you’re doing the deed?”

  “Like an Olympic judge from Feline-land.”

  “Wow. That sounds bloody spectacular,” Lorelei said in her own British accent.

  “That wasn’t even the worst part.” I took a nice long sip after that little lead of the witness. I knew I had her. And I was in full-on performance mode. I was freebasing Lorelei’s attention and damn well going to savor it. I might be relationship kryptonite when it comes to closing, but I was a hell of a fucking storyteller. It was the only game I had, so I played it to the hilt.

  Lorelei, though, was all too familiar with my skill set. She kicked my thigh. “Come on, Tri-me, give it up.”

  “Hm?” I raised an eyebrow and took another sip. “These hot toddies really are delicious.”

  Lorelei rolled her eyes and finally asked like a dutiful Borscht Belt audience, “How worse was it?”

  “She growled.”

  “The cat growled at you?!” Lorelei was literally holding her sides now, laughing at me. “During sex the cat just—”

  “No. Not the cat.”

  “No!”

  I nodded.

  “No?! The Brit Chick growled! At you?”

  “Yup.”

  “Growled growled? Like sexy growled?”

  “I’m not altogether sure what sexy growling sounds like, maybe if you demonstrated.”

  “There’s sexy growling. Like maybe purring or some sort of a guttural animalistic, I dunno.”

  “These were more like an eight-year-old’s impression of a lion.”

  Lorelei threw her head back, her belly laugh shaking her entire body, her toes digging deeper under my thighs.

  “What was even more disconcerting was that the growls also seemed to be completely independent from the stuff I was attempting. I mean not at all related to this rub or that lick. No causality or timing whatsoever. Just random roars. It was”—(British accent)—“rather disconcerting.”

  Lorelei squealed a delighted Noooo and kicked her feet against my leg in rapid succession. Quick little bunny kicks that launched me up onto cloud nine—grandma baseball was not working—and then she hyperventilated some joke about my animal magnetism, before asking how I finally discovered her accent was fake.

  “It was while I was getting dressed.”

  “‘Cause you sure as hell weren’t about to sleep over at that little den of iniquity.”

  “Well punned.”

  “It’s the least I could do. My taunts are the Tiger Balm for your soul,” she snickered. “So you were dressing, as quickly as possible.”

  “Which was awkward.”

  “Of course.”

  “And I was making small talk. About her cat. Asked if it was difficult to get the cat through customs or something like that. To which she said no, because her cat had just stayed with her parents in LA while she was in London. It was only then that I came to learn that she had grown up in Los Angeles. And no, her parents were not British, her dad was from the Valley and her mom grew up in Madison. She had spent a semester abroad at Oxford and lived there
for a couple years after University.”

  “So she picked up their mannerisms.”

  “And kept them up for the three-plus years she had been back Stateside.”

  Snort. Her snorts were intoxicating. Who knew? “So her accent . . .” Lorelei connected her own dots.

  “Was a choice. A linguistic accessory.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Bloody hell indeed.”

  “There’s no graceful exit from that one. What’d you say?”

  “Just said it’d been a blooming good chin wag, but my arse was tired and I’d give her a bell in a fortnight. God praise the Queen.”

  “GodpraisetheQueen,” Lorelei echoed in mock-seriousness.

  I laughed into my hot toddy, sucked down a little more and tried to keep my mind from wandering further down memory lane and following me on my journey home that night. I didn’t want to revisit the icy borough streets, past the warmly lit brownstones, not a cab in sight, down into the empty subway station save for the homeless woman on the bench who kept throwing herself back against the wall muttering It’s not me but I’ll have the soup. I didn’t want to relive the eternal wait for the F train, nor hear the sound of my keys hitting my marble tabletop clattering around my empty apartment, nor remember sitting on the floor of my shower trying to keep the hot water from falling into my beer, nor look across the plane of my mattress at the unused pillow and wonder if maybe I’d like to get a cat of my own.

  “I shouldn’t laugh. My dates normally start with the guy ‘casually’ dropping the keys to his luxury vehicle on the table, and end with me calling a car service.”

  “What they lack in quality they make up for in quantity.”

  “Thanks,” Lorelei said, and shoved my shoulder with her foot, pushing me over.

  My smile climbed its way from my earlobes up the scaphas to the helixes. “What? I’m not judging you. I’m very pro-slutbags.”

  Lorelei guffawed. It was aural ambrosia.

  “Wow. Not simply a slut, I’m a slutbag,” she said with a tone of disbelief. “A bag made of slut.”

  “I was thinking more of the purse that sluts use to carry their slut products around. Like condoms, Viagra, bananas.”

  “You’ve really thought this through.”

  Gobs of research. “I have, actually.”

  “And it never occurred to you that a slutbag might actually be the sack in which sluts are carried around?” she proffered.

  “Sluts aren’t carried in sacks, silly. Whores are. Sluts are carried around in Range Rovers.”

  This time she threw a pillow at me. Then she shook her head, downed the rest of her hot toddy, and refilled both of our glasses from the teapot.

  Lorelei leaned back again, blew ripples across the surface of her tea, and spaced out at the coffee table. “I do date a lot of guys,” she said, still staring through the coffee table/trunk.

  “A lot of IBs,” I corrected her.

  Lorelei rolled her eyes at that. “Yeah, ’cause hipsters aren’t every bit as pretentious as investment bankers. They’re just as superficial and carefully coiffed, they simply wear a different uniform. Tight jeans, mustaches, and a plaid shirt they picked up in a designer ‘vintage’ store so they can look every bit as unique as all their neighbors on the Lower East Side and Williamsburg. At least with the IB guys I get to go to better restaurants. You think Dude-ly McThickFrameGlasses is going to take me to Del Posto on his longboard skateboard? Sorry, I prefer a Tuscan Chianti to an ironic Pabst Blue Ribbon.”

  Lorelei took a sip of her drink. I considered saying something, but I felt like I had already inadvertently pushed her back on her heels, and I didn’t want to say something else wrong. And I had no fucking clue whether I was supposed to pull her teetering heart back to neutral or push her to let go and fall.

  Lorelei shrugged. “You’re supposed to play the field. In your twenties. Find out what you like, don’t like. I guess somewhere in my brain I think I need to date everybody so that I know what’s out there and I can finally make an informed decision and pick the perfect choice. I’m the same way with TV. I’m the kind of girl who, even if I find something I like, I have to open the guide and hunt through all the channels to make sure that out of all my options, this is absolutely the show I want to watch.”

  “I’m like that too, except for sumo wrestling. Sumo wrestling is always a showstopper, no matter what.”

  “Agreed. There’s no bigger game to hunt. You can even take the batteries out of the remote at that point. Sumo wrestling or one of those shows about someone who’s gotten so fat they need a television show to pay for a construction crew to cut through the bedroom wall and a forklift to pick them up, put them in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital for an immediate gastric bypass.”

  Is this what true love is like? “Thank God for the Learning Channel.”

  “Clearly, for us, obesity and flab make for riveting television.”

  “Just not dating.”

  She laughed. “Not dating. I guess I suffer from the-grass-is-always-greener syndrome.”

  “It’s a symptom of the twenty-first century and New York. Used to be you could only date the people you knew. Now with online dating sites, you literally have thousands and thousands of options to sift through.”

  “Even more if you broaden your search to other cities.”

  “You do not do that!”

  “Maybe once or twice, after a particularly mediocre outing, I might have searched LA or London.”

  “I can see how that would make auditioning suitors a Sisyphean task.”

  Lorelei took another sip then sort of half smiled. “I dunno what I’m doing, really. Most of the time I feel like I’m auditioning myself, like different versions of me. And all I know for sure is how good I am at getting people to talk, about anything, everything. Guys fucking love to open up to me and I love to see how quickly I can crack them open. But at the end of the night, all I’m left with is a shattered shell and a handful of nuts.”

  It was my turn to guffaw. Lorelei’s smile crept up on her as she realized her inadvertent pun.

  Another shrug set off another avalanche of words. “Sometimes I feel like I’m taking the long way around to finding out who I am by crossing who-I-am-not off the list. Only I feel like the list is endless. Hopeless even. So I distract myself with little private games: how far can I take this guy who doesn’t get sarcasm, how many times can I get that dude to start another new topic about himself, how quickly can I get this former frat boy to admit to some questionably homosexual act from the good ol’ days. And sometimes I just push through horrible dates, hoping they’ll get even worse so I’ll have a better story for you the next morning.”

  Lorelei’s eyes fluttered up from her tea to meet mine; she gave me a half smile.

  And I fucking panicked.

  The room spun, the couch dropped out from under me, and my lungs refused to inflate. The only thing that held me together was the pull of her half smile.

  Somehow, in spite of me keeping just this side of chaos, I managed to lean forward, clink our mugs together, and nonchalantly joke, “Cheers to us. May our lonely futures be filled with sumo wrestlers.”

  “Now that would be a great first date.”

  “A sumo match? In Japan?”

  “Wherever.”

  “It would make me look svelte,” I noted.

  Lorelei laughed.

  And that’s how it went. We kept joking, talking, drinking, until we conked out on the couch together, her at one end, me at the other, our feet tucked under one another. It snowed on the beach that night.

  * * *

  Video .mp4 file found on Reidier’s personal hard drive created on July 2, 2007

  Reidier sits in his basement laboratory. He appears to be lost in work, spinning his chair from one surface to another, scribbling down one thing or another, cross-checking some measurement stored within an Excel sheet.

  A few distracted keystrokes, while he writes somethin
g down in one of Leo’s Notebooks. Reidier presses “Enter.” Nothing much happens. Reidier writes more down.

  The video blinks and skips a second.

  Reidier stops working, leans back, listens. He hears nothing.

  Reidier: It sounds quiet. Are we alone now, Kai?

  (Pause)

  Female Voice: Yes, Kerek.

  *

  * * *

  * “Ever heard about how Borges got his start?” Lorelei asked.

  I shook my head no while devouring another spoonful of soup. Our test run from Little Elba has taken us into town. We blended in with the throngs of tourists, bought saltwater taffy, took in the mansions, poked our noses into the Tennis Hall of Fame, and wandered down a cobblestone street that dead ended in a pier with a restaurant on it called The Black Pearl, no irony intended. It was an old colonial-style structure, dark wood, big exposed beams, claustrophobically low ceiling, and paned windows. It couldn’t decide if it was an old inn or the cabin of a three-masted ship.

  We didn’t find any Department spooks on our tail, but we did find the best clam chowder of my life.

  “What is this, dill?” I asked the waitress as she passed by.

  She was a young blonde girl with big Irish freckles. The waitress nodded and whispered conspiratorially, “And a splash of rum.”

  Lorelei waited for the waitress to get out of earshot and just shook her head at me. “What is it about guys and waitresses?”

  “They smile a lot and are extra attentive to us.”

  “For a bigger tip.”

  “Which they deserve. Holy shit, this chowder is better than sex.”

  Lorelei raised an eyebrow.