A Stranger Like You

by Elizabeth Brundage

  He took the drink to his desk and sat there, staring at the computer screen, at the words waiting for him. Something about the alcohol made him able to focus on his work. The images flushed into his mind like fresh cold water. After an hour of intense work, he felt drained, and lay on his bed, counting the tiny cracks in the ceiling. He thought about his days in the insurance business, what it had been like sitting at that desk with his boss looming over his shoulder. Then he thought about Hedda Chase, alone in the darkness of the trunk. Coming to terms with his crime was not easy for him. If she was dead, he thought, then she was haunting him, he sensed her presence everywhere he went.

  He fell into a drowsy stupor and dreamed that the bed was floating. In the dream he sat up and looked down at the carpet, which had turned into a sea of blood. He woke in a cold sweat, hearing the bells of evening Mass, and ran into the bathroom, heaving into the toilet.

  Maybe he was drinking too much after all.

  Hugh called Tom Foster on his cell phone and asked if he could see him. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Sure, Hugh.” Tom told him he was at an editing room in Burbank, with his friend Bruno Morelli. “Come on by,” he said, and gave him directions.

  It was a nondescript building with narrow corridors lit with long fluorescent tubes. Hugh roamed the hallways, poking his head through doors that were ajar, hearing the backward squeal of rewinding sound tape. Most of the editors looked sleepy, he thought. He found Tom in room number eleven, having a sloppy corned beef sandwich that looked delicious. Bruno and the editor were watching something on the small screen. From what he could see of it, a woman wrapped in white cloth was being buried in sand up to her waist. She looked distraught. There were men standing around her, watching her with disgust, their hands curled in fists.

  Hugh knocked lightly and Tom put down his sandwich, wiped his hands on a napkin, took a sip of his water, and came out into the hall.

  “I thought you’d gone back east by now.”

  “I decided to stay for a while. I’m working on something with Ida Kent,” he lied.

  “Good for you,” Tom said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I’ve been thinking about Hedda. Any word?”

  Tom shook his head. “They haven’t found her car yet.”

  Hugh coughed. “I’ve been worried. I’ve really been worried sick.”

  “They’re on it, my friend. They’re all over it.” Tom patted him on the back. “Appreciate your concern.”

  Hugh nodded. “Do they have any idea what happened?”

  Tom nodded, gravely. “They think it has something to do with our film.” He motioned over his shoulder into the editing room. “The previews went well, but we changed the ending. Now that she’s gone missing. We want it to be accurate. We did it for her—for Fatima Kassim too.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl who died in the fire. People should know,” he said. “People should know what goes on.”

  Later that night a story about Chase’s disappearance appeared on the news. Hugh flipped the channels, only to discover that every station was covering it. Suddenly, the whole town was talking about the missing producer, speculating what might have happened to her. Anyone who knew Chase was considered newsworthy and had been scrounged up for a two-minute interview on prime time. There was Armand, her supercilious, flounder-boned assistant in his tidy Arthur Gluck shirts, and the far less well-dressed Harold Unger, who, like a recalcitrant turtle shrugged at the camera, gulping out each word as if he had swallowed a spoon. There were the people who called themselves her friends, who were interviewed on couches, in offices, kitchens, or outside with their dogs. Even Bruno Morelli, the famous director, was questioned on his terrace with his quartet of notorious bulldogs. It seemed like every time Hugh turned on the television there was some sort of story on the Chase Disappearance. Everyone had an opinion about what had happened to her; her car had not been found. They had pictures of the house on Lomita Avenue, roped off with police tape, the cops going through it. There was an interview with her neighbor, Mr. Romeo, standing on her lawn, he hadn’t seen or heard anything. “She’s a real nice lady, keeps to herself.” Shaking his head, arms crossed over his chest. “This is a good neighborhood, quiet. We don’t have any trouble here.”

  Like the complicated choreography of a dance, Hugh reviewed his actions inside her house, both on the occasion of the abduction and the second time, with Tom Foster. Foolishly, he’d drunk from a glass upon which he’d left behind his prints. Well, if they came to inquire he’d tell them that, yes, he’d been there. Of course he had. He and Tom had had a few drinks, waiting for Hedda to get home. They were all friends; what did they expect?

  Hedda’s parents were interviewed. They came from New Jersey, two elderly academics in Thanksgiving colors, they’d had their daughter late in life, they were now in their eighties. Psychiatrists by profession each had segued into teaching, the father a professor emeritus at Rutgers. Hedda, born Hedda Chastowsky, had grown up an only child in a wealthy suburb—of course he already knew all this. Her mother had named her after a character in a Henrik Ibsen play.

  A day later, after the premiere of her film at Cannes, a rumor began to circulate that Chase had been abducted by Shiite terrorists. The film had instigated a protest. During the scene he had glimpsed in Bruno Morelli’s editing room in which a woman—an adulteress—is stoned to death, people in the audience had thrown their programs at the screen. The FBI had been called. Charlie Rose did a show about the Muslim student, Fatima Kassim, who had, months before, brought the story on which the film was based to Tom Foster. The girl had been found dead in her dorm room. On the program, Tom and Bruno sat around the famous wooden table. They showed pictures of the girl when she was little, growing up in Iraq. They showed pictures of Baghdad before the invasion, and afterward. They showed pictures of the girl’s mother, who had been killed in a car bombing on a street near her home. They interviewed the girl’s aunt in Syria, who cried into a handkerchief. Hugh supposed it was possible—that what had happened to Hedda Chase was a form of political retaliation for her film. The fact that she was a woman—an extremely powerful woman—who’d been abruptly silenced, sent a certain message to people, one that, in this country anyway, inspired rage.

  But it wasn’t the truth.

  And yet maybe the truth didn’t matter anymore.

  On Monday afternoon his cell phone rang. It was Tom. “You never told me about your script,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The script you wrote. The Adjuster.”

  Hugh hesitated. At length he said, “What about it?”

  “I’m over in her office, poking around. Digging through stuff. Imagine my surprise finding it there.”

  “That old piece of crap? I’d forgotten I’d even sent it. Where’d you find it?”

  “Buried in some file.” Hugh could hear Tom flipping through the script. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about some asshole in the insurance business. It’s crap. It’s fucking embarrassing. Do me a favor, Tom. Trash it for me, will you? I don’t want anyone seeing that garbage.”

  “I hear you,” Tom said and hung up.

  Hugh turned on the TV. He needed to think. So what he had found the script? It didn’t prove anything.

  He sat there staring at the screen. Another show was on about Hedda Chase and the film. Experts on Middle East relations were giving their opinions, and yet they were perplexed that none of the terrorist organizations had claimed responsibility for her disappearance, nor for the death of the girl, Fatima Kassim. Watching the coverage gave Hugh pause. It got him thinking.

  He roared out loud with laughter. He roared and roared. The situation couldn’t have been more perfect.

  It came to him that he needed to start thinking like a terrorist.

  The realization prompted Hugh to become an observer of life. He walked the sidewalks with his head down, his hands clasped behind his back. To imagine tha
t he was partially responsible for all this hoopla thrilled him unspeakably; he felt superior. He had to wonder: What was it like fighting for something that was more important than your own survival? He found the subject compelling. To be willing to risk everything to make a political statement that would affect millions of lives. To sacrifice yourself in that way.

  He found it awesome and inspiring.

  As a result, he took a keener interest in the world around him. He had to stretch his mind beyond its usual mental boundaries. Watching things closely, analytically—scrutinizing the way people talked to one another in the street, the way they walked, their gestures. He became critical of the culture—the enormous billboards on Sunset Boulevard with their underwear ads—the way women dressed on the streets—the carelessness exhibited by the tourists. In a bar he lingered over a glass of beer, watching CNN on the television, images of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He eavesdropped on a drunken couple who had begun to kiss, their sloppy tongues flashing. On a whim, he picked up a prostitute. He let her blow him in his car, in a supermarket parking lot. He put his head back against the seat, straining as if he were in pain. He shoved her head down. He held her there, hard, and threw the money at her afterward. She ran away from him, crying. You’d better run, he thought. He sought out a local mosque and attended a service. He removed his shoes and lingered in the back of the enormous space. It was interesting to him, hearing the chanting of prayer, watching the men fall to their knees all at once.

  The public library had a row of computers with Internet access. You had forty minutes at a time. Hugh discovered a profusion of information about terrorism on the Web. Of course their methods were predictable, easy to simulate. What he realized about terrorism was simple; it was useful because it played on the worst fears of ordinary people. Fears that people had and didn’t discuss. Fears that had become as routine as brushing your teeth. The fear of getting on a plane, because nobody really understood why it stayed up in the sky in the first place and there was always the very real possibility that it might crash, planes crashed all the time. The fear of getting into a taxi, that the driver might take you somewhere else and kill you. Every time you pulled out of your driveway there were certain odds that you’d get into an accident. Driving anywhere, on any road, at any time of the day or night could lead to your demise. Anyone you happened to meet, any stranger, could end up being your killer. You could step onto a bus, having left the dishes unwashed in your sink, and never see your apartment again. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Fear was the essential ingredient. And life, survival, became an arbitrary concept, like a squirrel crossing the road. Therefore, it would not be difficult to terrorize Bruno Morelli—the next logical target. It would not even be the slightest bit challenging to make it look like the work of some extremist Muslim organization, the members of which had the same fundamental beliefs as any honorable patriot: a devotion to their country and their God.

  Just before midnight, he drove over to Ida Kent’s and knocked on her door. “What do you want?” she asked, without opening it.

  “Can’t we talk?”

  She seemed to hesitate, but then let him in. The TV droned in the other room, another report about Chase; he caught a glimpse of her publicity photograph, the same one they used every time. Ida stood there waiting to see what he had to say.

  “I’m sorry about the other night,” he said. “I wasn’t myself. I was thinking it might have had something to do with hitting my head at Foster’s party. Those painkillers maybe.”

  “Is it better?”

  “What?”

  “Your head.”

  “It still hurts.”

  “Let me see it.” He sat down in a chair and she stood over him, looking at his head like a mother, gently pushing the hair aside to see the wound, her breasts grazing his chin.

  “I’m getting divorced,” he told her.

  “Should we celebrate?”

  She opened a bottle of wine and they sat at her tiny kitchen table drinking it. She smoked a cigarette, tapping the ashes into a clamshell.

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  “Did I tell you I play the piano?”

  “I think you may have mentioned it. Are you any good?”

  He nodded, suddenly distressed.

  She reached out and took his hand. “My neighbor has one. Do you feel like showing me?”

  She took him next door to her neighbor’s apartment. The neighbor was away performing an opera somewhere; Ida was feeding her cat. “There.”

  The upright piano was in a small alcove, piled up with books of music. He sat down at the piano and began to play. First he played a nocturne. But really Brahms was the only thing to play at a time like this. He played a section from the Rhapsody in B Minor, something he’d been practicing before he’d left home. He could feel the chords coming up through his fingers, the dark vibration rushing up his wrists. The whole time he could feel Ida’s presence, watching him. Maybe she would understand something new about him, he thought. Maybe she would forgive him for all that he was not. At least he hoped she would. At one point he realized that his hands were wet. He hadn’t even realized he was crying. That was all right, he supposed, a little water wouldn’t hurt the keys.

  She let him sleep there. She held him in her arms. “Let me hold you,” she said in a soothing voice, as though he were ill. She held him with great care and tenderness. He didn’t deserve it. Her affection rendered him useless.

  In the morning, he left without waking her. He drove out to the beach and lay in the sand, under the shy white sun. It came to him that he had lost everything: his wife, his home, his job, his dignity. On the other hand, he had nothing left to lose. Nothing at all.

  PART FIVE

  FINALE

  16

  “We lived in her car,” Daisy says, her voice groggy, a little drunk. “It broke down a lot.”

  The road is dark, no streetlamps, and the moon is low. Nothing out there but sand.

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “Some piece of crap. All rusted out. We didn’t have much. My mother was an escape artist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She could steal something right off your body, you wouldn’t even know it.”

  “That’s a talent.”

  “People were nice to us. She didn’t even care. She’d take anything that wasn’t nailed down.”

  He doesn’t know what to say to this.

  “I used to get my shoes from the church. They had this bin of shoes they’d put out on Sundays. You had to sit there first for the service. You shoulda seen people goin’ through those shoes. Sometimes they fit, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes I got blisters.”

  “Where’s your mother at now?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “She got a boyfriend. I used to call him Mr. Slick. He used to put this cream on his hair, stunk up the whole car. He was vain as a woman. Anyway, he tried to touch me, you know?” She goes real quiet. Tears roll down her cheeks. Then she clams up, twists away, looks out at the darkness.

  He reaches over and puts his hand on her back and her eyes close again. For a moment he watches her sleep, capturing a dream, and he feels content. He’s tired too, but he can’t sleep now. That would be a mistake. They have to keep moving. Just as soon as he can he needs to open that trunk and deal with what’s inside.

  One way or another, he’ll figure it out. You’d get this feeling in the war, like you can deal with things. Just about anything. You have to, you have no choice. Either deal with it, or be done. This part now, this part right now is just a brief period of time. It’s going to end pretty soon and the leading up part doesn’t matter all that much, just so long as he can be with her. That’s all he wants. There’s an ending in sight and he knows it, he has come to terms with it.

  Ten minutes to five and it’s still dark, as
if the sky’s been filled in with pencil. A strange time, he thinks, neither day nor night, but somewhere in between. Like the way he feels in his life an awful lot of the time. Like he’s waiting, been waiting a long time. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think he was back in Iraq. The same two-lane highway splitting the desert in half. The same dull fear in his belly. Once, he’d seen some Bedouin women dancing in a circle, braiding the open space with their legs and arms, but it had been very hot that day and he thought he may have imagined the dancing and singing, the joy. The heat could play tricks on you. You saw things and wondered if they were real.

  He had said some things to Daisy about the war, what it had done to him. Nobody ever wanted to hear his stories, but she just sat there, listening. She was someone you could cry with. She didn’t make any judgments. She had said, “You’re wearing that war like a favorite shirt. Maybe it’s about time you took it off.”

  Wise beyond her years, that’s how he would describe her. Plays the harmonica, says her grandpa taught her when she was little, before things went wrong. She’s pretty good at it, too. Even knows some Bob Dylan. She let him try it once, the metal still warm from her lips, only he sounded like a car horn or a sick goose. She just laughed and showed him how. It felt good, blowing into something that made music come out, but it reminded him of something else, too—the day Ross died and he’d tried to give him mouth to mouth. Take my breath, man, breathe!

  But it hadn’t done any good. He could deal out his ghosts like a hand of cards, a losing hand. He tries not to think about it because it doesn’t make them go away. The memories are scary. They make his eyes tear. Sometimes, she’ll look over at him and asks him what’s wrong, and he just says, “Nothing.” Because what’s the point? Sometimes, he gets a feeling. Like God is right there. What do You want from me now? he thinks. Prepare to be deployed to the gates of Hell! If there’s one thing he knows it’s this: No matter how good a soldier he was over there, no matter how justified, no matter that he was just following orders, he’s still going to hell when he dies. There’s no getting around it. ’Cause killing is against the rules.