by Dale Bailey
—you should—
—seemed to reverberate endlessly, frightening not so much because of what it said as because of what it implied about his own hard-won equilibrium. He didn’t believe in ghosts, couldn’t imagine ever believing in ghosts, even if Ramsey Lomax whipped up a thousand spook stories over the next two weeks. But the prospect of some kind of emotional collapse seemed suddenly all too plausible.
He shouldn’t have come back here.
“Earth to Ben,” Lara said. She snapped her fingers. “You there?”
Ben forced a smile. “Sorry. I’m distracted, I guess. I was trying to write.” Which wasn’t entirely a lie, anyway.
“Oh. Hey. I can come back if—”
He waved a hand dismissively. “No. It was for crap anyway. Trust me. I could use a break.”
Inside, she sat on the love seat. He reversed the desk chair in front of her and lowered himself into it, crossing his arms across the back. Looking at her, he was struck once again by her appearance: a sinewy fitness that seemed somehow willed into being, a deliberate front for some deeper vulnerability. She gazed back at him frankly, her eyes a washed-out blue in her too-thin face. The heat kicked on, wafting to him a faint lilac hint of her perfume.
“So to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“That scene upstairs.” She made a face. “What a mess. I’m sorry that happened, Ben.”
“You don’t need to apologize for them.”
“Yeah, well, maybe, maybe not. Still. You okay?”
“You get used to it. I’ve been writing professionally for nearly a decade—I’ve published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s. And you know what? I’m still a ‘black’ journalist. No matter what I do, that’s always the deciding factor. The color of my skin. Like I said, you get used to it.” He shrugged. “The horror show go on after I left?”
“For a little while, anyway. You didn’t miss much.”
“No?”
“The roof,” she said. “You missed the roof.”
“Ah. So you got to hear the story of Dante Morris, then?”
“I got to hear it, all right.”
“How old were the kids that tossed him over the side? Do you remember?”
“Nine,” she said. “Nine and ten. That’s what Lomax said.”
“Right. And to listen to him tell it, you’d probably think black kids around here routinely chucked five-year-olds off roofs.” Ben shook his head. “You know what really gets to me, though? You put a bunch of white kids in a place like this, the same exact things are going to happen. But people like Lomax, they’re never going to believe it.”
“Yeah. Well.” She pursed her lips, hesitated, and then looked up at him. “Anyway. I just wanted to see if you were okay.”
“I am. I’m fine.”
“You sure? Because you know what, you don’t look so hot, Ben.”
“Is that your medical opinion?”
“Nope.” She lifted her hands. “Just that of an interested acquaintance.”
“Well, I appreciate that. But you needn’t be concerned. I’m fine. Really, I am.”
“Okay.”
At an impasse, they retreated into silence—a fraught, uncertain silence. Ben’s thoughts circled relentlessly back to the phrases floating on the computer screen at his back. What would Lara think if she could see them? Or better yet, what would the doctor Lara had trained to become think of them? He probably didn’t want the answer to that one, did he? Still pondering that, he looked up, back into that narrow face, its blue eyes intent.
They spoke at the same time.
“What are you writing?” she asked, the question tangling with one of his own—
“What brings you here, anyway?”
They laughed together, but to Ben’s ears there was something strained about it. There was in his case anyway, because, let’s face it, her question cut a little too close to the merciless arc of his own anxieties. So he smiled, and said, “Nothing, really. Finger exercises, just trying to keep the muscles toned. I’m not even working on a story”—and if she detected the lie, she wasn’t letting on. “Really, though,” he added. “I have to admit, I’m curious. What made you decide to tag along on this little expedition?”
Now it was her turn to smile, and there was something forced about that. “It’s boring,” she said too abruptly, clearly wanting to move on.
But Ben had been a journalist too long to let anything die that easily. “Let me be the judge of that.”
Lara didn’t bother disguising her feelings this time. Her smile withered. Her face closed like a safe. “Trust me. You don’t want to hear about it. It’s brain-numbing, it’s so boring.” She stood, smoothing her jeans over her thighs.
Ben got to his feet after her. “You leaving?”
“Yeah. I got a lot to do,” she said from the door, the bald falseness of the statement—the utter inadequacy of the lie—momentarily paralyzing them both. For the truth was, none of them had much of anything to do, not for the next two weeks anyway. And both of them knew it.
Ben, weighing his options, decided to let it ride. For now anyway. “Well, thanks for coming by,” he said.
Another smile, this one almost genuine, broke through the china-brittle set of Lara’s face. “You bet,” she said. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
5
After the door closed, Lara stood in the corridor, her shoulders aching with tension. Ben’s footsteps retreated on the other side, and then music came on: the portable stereo in the corner, a tangle of horns, the steady throb of a bass line, unstructured, almost tuneless. It was meaningless to her. Her musical interests—such as they were—didn’t extend much beyond whatever happened to be playing on the car radio. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually bought a CD. Ben, on the other hand, seemed to have dozens of them, in stacks on the coffee table and the spare cushion of the love seat, a precarious tower of them on the floor by the desk. Thinking of that, she had a glimmering of the gulf yawning between them, an ocean of difference, a universe of it, far transcending mundane matters of musical taste: gender, profession, race most of all; the colors of their skin, black and white, the insurmountable and opaque barrier of the other.
Whatever had possessed her to try bridging that gap?
Lana would have known the answer. You’re the maternal one. You’re the one likes to take care of everybody.
Right. And what a goddamn disaster that life strategy had turned out to be.
Sighing, Lara studied the hallway. To the right, it lengthened in narrowing perspective, carpeted, well lit: the elevator bay and the cluster of common rooms, the distant suites belonging to Abel and Ramsey Lomax. To the left, it terminated abruptly in a slanting wall with a metal fire door, the dividing line between Lomax’s comfortable living quarters and the unrenovated wing beyond. Two hallways, two worlds, she thought, and Ben’s words came back to her: You brought a little piece of white America with you.
Shivering a little, she stepped closer, angled one hand over her eyes, and peered through the wire-reinforced window set in the center of the door. Everything beyond was shadowy and desolate, obscured by the tempered glass and the gloom on the other side. What little she could see—a rusting kitchen range, an ancient set of box springs leaning precariously against one wall—looked pretty much like every other square inch of Dreamland: a blasted and hopeless ruin. Why on earth had Ramsey Lomax come here? Why had she? Which, come to think of it, was more or less what Ben had just asked her.
Secrets, she thought. Everyone here had secrets.
Even her.
6
Alone in his suite, Abel Williams was nursing a secret of his own:
He’d been hearing things.
His hardcore clientele—the true believers who had watched Messages with a near-religious devotion, had actually bought his book, and who even now, in this brave new post-celebrity post-Messages era, waited months for his high-dollar consultations—might not have been surprised. Yet to Abel
himself, this new sensitivity came as a hard trial indeed. His professional life, if he was to look himself in the mirror every morning, required him to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously in mind: the certainty that he could not actually do what he claimed to be able to do, and an equivalent conviction that he was not exploiting his customers. In Abel’s view, it was Susie all over again. He returned solid value on the dollar: his clients heard what they needed to hear. Ergo, he wasn’t a con artist.
But he never—never—believed he could speak with the dead.
Someone—Fitzgerald, maybe? Keats?—had called this kind of conflicted thinking the mark of genius. If that was the case, what did it mean when the paradox unraveled? Abel had a sneaking suspicion that Fitzgerald, the crafty old drunk, might have called it insanity.
And he might have been right.
Standing, Abel moved across the room toward the window. The suite was spare, neat, impersonal as a hotel room—no books, no knickknacks, no photographs. His presence had left no mark here. Unlike the others, Abel had shipped almost no personal effects to Lomax, partly from a desire to protect his privacy, mostly because he knew that success in this little enterprise hinged upon his absolute focus on the problem at hand: deducing Ramsey Lomax’s reasons for coming to Dreamland.
Everything—the stage he longed to reclaim, the glare of klieg lights, the applause of millions—was riding on his success. Oh, Lomax was paying him, and well—Abel wasn’t naive about money. But he knew himself well enough to know that money wasn’t what he really wanted. What he wanted—what he’d always wanted, from the moment he had opened his eyes and stared for the first time into that cage of shadows above his boyhood bed—was the romance of celebrity. And Lomax—with his connections in the industry—could give it all back to him. All Abel had to do was find the key and fit it to the lock of Lomax’s needs. It was that simple: the tumblers would fall into place, the safe would swing open, and all the treasures of the world—the life he had lost—would be Abel’s for the taking. The last thing he needed was distractions.
The voices were a distraction.
Brushing aside the curtains, he stared out the window. His suite faced the plaza—or what had been the plaza. Gazing out into the blighted twilight, he tried to imagine the plaza as it might have been, a bucolic pocket in the heart of the city—or failing that, to envision the place it had finally become, a wasteland of cracked and weed-blown asphalt, abandoned cars, the limbs of a dismembered jungle gym jutting like a praying mantis above the pavement. But even then, at its worst, Dreamland had been a human place: a place where children played beneath the watchful eyes of nervous mothers, where laundry flapped from open windows, drying in the arms of the August sun. But it was human no longer. Now it was a maze of sundered girders and shattered concrete, here a tumulus of debris, there the gaping socket of an abandoned foundation, like a blinded eye, aswim in dregs of ashen snow.
Dead. All dead.
Just like the voices.
He’d been able to ignore them at first—to attribute that first echo of Theresa Matheson’s death—
—please no—
—and the accompanying glimpse of the black kid working himself between her legs, to an overactive imagination: the stress of a difficult situation, the pressure of an unfamiliar environment. But yesterday, in the lobby with the others, he’d felt yet another whisper of energy. And as the elevator doors slid closed before him, he thought he’d heard voices—faraway, nearly inaudible, an incoherent babble like the disembodied echo of a badly tuned radio station, but voices all the same. Last night, adrift in that paralyzed half-dreaming state that is the near frontier of sleep, an assembly of whispers had contended with his thoughts; and though, as the night deepened, he had fallen into a deep and dreamless slumber, he had woken late and unrested, his ears attuned to that odd vacuum that is the aftermath of sound. And it seemed to Abel in that moment fuzzy with sleep, that someone, or something, must have spoken his name, and it was that which had awakened him.
Remembering that eerie certainty, he clutched the window ledge with whitened fingers. He stared out into the darkening plaza for another moment, and then he turned away, letting the curtain fall back into place.
This afternoon, during Lomax’s little tour, things had taken a turn for the worse.
No one had noticed; Abel could be thankful for that much. But that didn’t alter the basic fact: something had happened in apartment 1824, and not just a twenty-seven-year-old police raid either. Abel knew about that, of course—that and Theresa Matheson’s death in the lobby and Dante Morris’ fatal plunge and half a dozen less-publicized horrors. He’d long since learned the value of preparation. But he’d been listening to Lomax anyway, less out of interest in the events themselves than in what the telling of them might reveal about his host.
Yet in apartment 1824, not long after Prather’s melodramatic little exit, Abel’s attention had drifted. It was a mystery to him. One minute, he’d been utterly focused—Lomax had been saying something about the second shooter, hiding in the bedroom during the opening salvos of the firefight. In the instant that followed, Abel found his gaze drawn back to a drift of debris he’d hardly noticed in his first quick glance around the room: a rat’s nest of shredded newspaper, rusting beer cans, and something else, something it had taken his brain a moment to process. What was it?
He stepped closer.
Then he saw it: an old photograph, one corner peeking from underneath a crumpled Big Mac wrapper. Hunkering down, Abel brushed the grease-stained wrapper aside, and plucked the picture out of the morass. It was water-stained and blurry, bleached almost to illegibility: a washed-out snapshot of a black kid, a girl of maybe nine or ten, suspended forever in that awkward moment of transition between childhood and adolescence. He lifted it higher, scraping at a patch of dirt with his thumbnail, only half-listening to Lomax—
“…almost the whole family died in the cross fire. Only the little boy survived unscathed.…”
That’s when it had happened: a voice inside his head, a moment of stark and heartbreaking clarity, like one of those trick atmospheric acoustics that sends an AM radio signal bouncing halfway around the world, so that for the space of a startled breath, spinning down a dial on the far side of the planet, you catch a fragment of some utterly enigmatic transmission bearing down upon you from the black, black sky—a single haunting phrase, or a melody of such surpassing beauty that you despair of ever hearing its like again. It was like that, or like a garbled broadcast from the stars, snatched by chance from the background crackle of the universe. It was like a voice on a party line, overheard by chance, and what it said was,
I’m here, Abel.
And in that moment, Abel knew without the faintest shadow of a doubt that it was the voice of the girl locked inside that photograph, and that she had been speaking from the world beyond the fence.
That was when Lara had touched his shoulder. “What’d you find?”
Somehow, Abel had managed a shrug. “Nothing,” he’d said, holding it out for her inspection. “Just an old photograph.” Yet when Lara had turned away, he hadn’t discarded it, had he? No, he’d tucked it into the pocket of his jeans, and as he had ascended the steep and winding metal stairs to the roof, apartment 1824 falling away beneath him, that phrase—
—the world beyond the fence—
—had echoed in his thoughts.
Yes, and it came back to him again as he crossed the room and sat down on the love seat. The world beyond the fence. What the hell did it mean? he wondered. And why did it make him think of his father?
Such were his thoughts as he sat there among the slow-encroaching shadows, staring down at the hands twisting in his lap as he might have stared at a stranger’s hands, fearing that at any moment one of them might creep inside the pocket of his jeans and pull the photo out where he could see it.
Working Out
1
In the long restless hours before dawn, Fletcher Keel dreamed of w
omen.
There had been a time when he had not lacked for female companionship. He’d had more than his share during his army years. At twenty-three, he had almost married. The girl—and that’s what she had been, a girl, both of them hardly more than children, really—had been a honeyed blonde named Lisa. They had met of all places in a bar at JFK in 1979, Lisa headed home from Columbia for the holidays, Keel just headed home, his four-year stint in the service behind him. After a pleasant half hour’s flirtation, Keel paid for their drinks and struck off to find his gate, suffused with a dreamy ache of nostalgia for an imagined life with a stranger he would never see again.
Forty minutes later, stowing his carry-on in the overhead bin of a crowded 737, he caught a glimpse of honeyed-blond hair ten rows back. Negotiations with a flight attendant ensued: a change of seat, a moment of shared laughter at the coincidence, another drink. By the time they began their descent, Keel had coaxed free her number. By year’s end he’d managed a date. And during a stolen weekend in April, she had accepted a ring. Summer arrived at last: Lisa graduated, plans for the wedding commenced in earnest.
And then, in a span of seconds on one steaming August afternoon, Keel’s dreams came apart around him. Like everything else in his life—like his career and his self-image, like his father’s legacy of honor—the relationship disintegrated during the long months of investigation and the trial that followed. By the time he emerged from the process a free man, paralyzed by shame, Lisa was gone. There had been other women in the months and years that followed: a plethora of brittle moths attracted by the flame of his notoriety to start with, and then, during his aimless drift south and west, a series of women he picked up in bars, a calculating, aging, bitter lot for the most part, gaunt with drink and desperation, distaff mirrors of his own enervated soul.
