Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  There was something in this confession that Rayner found slightly embarrassing. She was turning the cards over and over in meaningless gestures. He reached over to stop her, feeling that somewhere at the back of all this empty behavior there were tears—but not the kind that might be shed openly. Momentarily he held her hand; the cards slid on the table.

  When she took her hand away, she smiled. “I’m glad you’re here, John. Really. I think I wanted somebody to look at me and say, Jesus Christ, you’ve really changed. And then you wonder if the change is anything more than just a few different behavioral attitudes. Skin-deep? I don’t know.”

  Rayner listened to the rain again. Squalls, breaking off the ocean like cannon shots, rattled the glass panes. He said, “Jesus Christ, you’ve really changed.”

  She laughed quietly, then began to gather the dishes to dump them in the sink. “In the house in Georgetown we had a dishwasher,” she said. “A woman came in every morning to vacuum. My whole goddam life was a clutter, when what I really needed was space and light. Does that make sense?”

  Rayner waited as he felt he had been waiting now for two whole days to hear about Richard, about what had happened that night. He watched Isobel dry her hands with a dish towel. The knuckles, he noticed, were slightly red. Tell me, he thought, tell me what happened.

  “Do you like walking in the rain?” she asked.

  “Sure I do.”

  “Without umbrellas?”

  “Any way you want it.”

  “There’s something good and clean about seaside rain,” she said.

  He put on his raincoat. She wore a plastic mac, blue jeans, no shoes. Outside, wind and rain had conspired to fill the air with grit that stung their eyes. They walked toward the beach, where the spray was violent, vicious. In the distance, far beyond the lights of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a crack of lightning opened a hole in the night sky; thunder drummed miles away. Rayner could feel the salt in his eyes. In a blurry way he saw a thin figure sprinting along the edge of the rough tide. A middle-aged man, arms and legs pumping, was jogging his way out of the coronary season of the heart.

  “Didn’t anybody tell you about Virginia Beach, John?” Isobel asked.

  He could hardly hear her words. They were torn by the wind. Like the music, he thought, the music through the loudspeakers at Wembley, ripped by the wind and blown away.…

  “The place is filled with mind readers, palmists, spiritualists, UFO believers, psychics, food fanatics, health nuts. It’s the freak capital of the eastern seaboard, I swear it.”

  Rayner watched the man turn some distance away. He was barely visible now, far beyond the reach of the lights that burned in the huge hotels. He stopped, lay flat on the sand as if to do push-ups, then jumped once again into a standing position. He began to jog back again in the direction of Isobel and Rayner. He passed them, close to the ragged edge of the tide. Then he was gone down the beach and out of sight.

  “I feel damn tired just watching him,” Rayner said. “Is there someplace we can sit?”

  They found shelter alongside a broken seawall. They sat on the wet sand, and Isobel tried, wasting match after match, to light a cigarette against the squall. Rayner watched her flip the sodden, broken cigarette into the wind.

  “Tell me about this ESP business,” he said. “The cards, I mean.”

  “What can I tell you?”

  “Do you believe in it all?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “A month or two ago I would have said it was garbage. Even now, for someone like me, it’s just a kind of parlor game. I don’t have any talent for it. I play with the cards, like some kind of solitaire or whatever. But I’ve met people who can predict them accurately—”

  “You mean guess them, don’t you?”

  She shrugged in the dark. “No, not guess. It isn’t guessing when you can predict with terrific consistency, is it?”

  Rayner thought for a moment of Dubbs’s friend Professor Chamber. And then of Andreyev. Worthy academics in hot pursuit of the indefinable: the magic of mind. “You say you know people who can predict the cards?”

  He felt her hand touch his sleeve. “One day I’ll arrange a demonstration for you, if you like.”

  He wasn’t sure suddenly; he wasn’t sure if he wanted any such demonstration, any kind of proof. The idea of Andreyev nagged him again, the unsettling intuition that if he hadn’t acquired a certain computer data sheet, Dubbs might still be alive.

  He laid his head back against the damp wall, conscious now of the runner coming back along the tide. There was no holding the guy back, he thought. A gluttony for punishment; or fear of an early eclipse? Rayner watched him through the dark. Another sliver of lightning, forked, misshapen, broke above the bay. In the stunning silvery light, brief as the flash of a malfunctioning firework, Rayner could see the man’s face—the gaunt jaws, the shadows of the eyes. It didn’t make sense to him all at once: there was something absurdly out of place, so ridiculously incongruous that he wondered if he were hallucinating. He reached across to touch Isobel. “Did you catch a glimpse of that guy?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t help it exactly—”

  “Did you ever see somebody jog in a suit before?”

  “No—”

  “I mean, an average two-piece off-the-peg behind-the-desk suit? Did you ever see that before?”

  Isobel shrugged. “I told you, John. It’s a funny town.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is.”

  He watched the man, still running, disappear in the spray ahead. No, he thought, it doesn’t make the best possible sense. Figure, maybe, a drunk. A guy who’s just had a knock-down rolling-pin fight with the wife. Somebody working off the heat, the anger. He narrowed his eyes and tried to see through the spray—but the figure was out of sight now, and so far as he could tell, the beach was empty. Relax, Rayner. Too many deaths make you suspicious. Too many upsets and sadnesses and you dwell on them—which only leads you to reach for Dr. Whatsisname’s downers. He took Isobel’s hand and hauled her to a standing position. A fraction away, he thought, from an embrace. That close. He stepped back, feeling wet sand clinging to his hands, inside his shoes. The wife of your dead brother, for God’s sake. Okay, she isn’t the old Isobel, she’s going through the changes—but some things you don’t touch, after all.

  “You want to get back?” he asked.

  “If there’s wine to finish,” she said.

  “We’ve got lots of wine,” he answered. We, he thought. Don’t take it this far; it’s almost as if you’ve moved in on the ghosts.

  They walked back quickly, bent against the rain, toward the house. Shivering, Isobel opened the front door and Rayner followed her inside.

  “Don’t you ever lock up when you go out?” he asked.

  She laughed. “What’s to steal? A few plants? Some cushions? I don’t even have a key for the place.”

  They went into the kitchen and opened a fresh bottle of sauterne. Isobel poured two glasses and they sat at the kitchen table. They knocked their glasses together and she said, “I forget, don’t I? Your world’s filled with keys and locks and secret combinations. Like Richard’s used to be. You know, he had this briefcase with a combination lock. I’m not laughing at him, John, just at the world that makes these things so godawful necessary.”

  “Sometimes—”

  “Ah, sometimes, of course, the other team might actually filch a few of the game plays, right?”

  “Something like that,” Rayner said. He wondered why he felt a sudden sense of shame. It was as if she had punctured the surface of him, revealing something of almost inestimable worthlessness. Or was it what he had felt a moment before on the beach—the closeness of her, a nearness that in itself had seemed immoral to him? He looked across the kitchen, thinking again of the running man on the beach. And then he was beset by the strange feeling that there was somebody else, other than Isobel and him, in the house. No, he thought, you’re trying to get away from that world of bugs and eavesdro
pping devices and gadgets. Why the fuck can’t it leave you alone?

  He stood up. Isobel opened her mouth to say something and he pressed his index finger against her lips for silence.

  Puzzled, she pushed his hand away. “John—”

  “It’s nothing,” he said. The layout of the house, he thought. Remember it. A living room they had just come through. This kitchen. A bedroom. A bathroom. The basic accommodations of life. Shit, Rayner, there’s nowhere for someone to hide.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  He shook his head. A man running in a storm. A man in a two-piece suit. Street clothes. The equations that never made sense until the last possible moment. Someone on the stairs outside Sally’s flat. Figure it out, he thought. Make it work somehow. Why was Dubbs killed at Wembley? Why had they been followed to Wembley? And by whom? You know a man’s name, his identity, you understand he wants to switch sides. Where does that take you?

  “John, for God’s sake,” she was saying.

  It was against the glass, briefly, quickly, nothing more than a shadow that interfered with the dripping of rain upon the pane. He had forgotten how quickly he could move. He pushed the woman out of her chair and lay on top of her, all this in one fast move, one continuous chain of activity. He heard the glass shatter and then he rose, ducking, rushing to the kitchen door, feeling the rain break hard and cruel against his face, blinding his eyes. The running man. Now, turning, barely visible in the light, the man fired a second shot. It was with a silenced weapon, an automatic that in the reflection of the kitchen light looked like stainless steel. Rayner threw himself forward but the man was moving backward already, retreating across the garden, trampling over the wooden stakes, breaking them, clumping through the shrubbery that lay beyond the vegetable patches. Rayner watched him go, then hurried inside the kitchen again, where Isobel was standing beside the fallen chair. There was an expression on her face: not fear, for he would have recognized fear. Not anger. He could read it anyhow: When does it ever stop? Does it ever stop?

  All she was looking for, he thought, was peace. Peace and sand and withdrawal. And I bring something else, something as rank as a dead dog, as grubby as a piece of some old skeleton, into her dark cool green world.

  He went across the floor and put his arms around her. He wondered how sorry you could ever really say you were.

  6.

  Patrick Joseph Mallory liked to conduct his Cabinet meetings before breakfast but immediately after taking a brisk swim in the White House pool. He arrived at these sessions—a young man, his black hair wet and slicked back—with a kind of brightness that the older members of the Cabinet found irritating. Invariably, these were men who had risen late and managed to gulp down coffee before making it to the White House, men who sat in tetchy silences, fidgeting, wanting to smoke, wanting to eat, while the President, with that firmness of purpose which had first endeared him to the electorate, ran speedily through the agenda. It was rare for Mallory to encounter any genuine opposition to this or that statement of policy because he had close and workable relationships with both the House and the Senate; there was a charm to Mallory as well as a certain strength of mind. Even the skeletons in his closet were said to be so well greased that they never once creaked.

  On this morning’s agenda there were several trivial items that he dealt with summarily. He also passed out copies of Kimball Lindholm’s report—belatedly written—on his visit to the Soviet Union. Mallory had not himself read this ninety-eight-page document except to glance at it for tone, which, as he had suspected, was predictable. “There is very little difference,” the Vice President had written, “between a Russian farmer and one from Kansas.” There was a sense of universal brotherhood. There were the same concerns with soil and climate and fertilizer. (In fact, so much of Lindholm’s report concerned fertilizer that it became known in inner circles as “The Shit Manifesto.”) The President passed the documents out and advised his Cabinet members to read the Vice President’s report as soon as possible.

  The final item on a short agenda concerned the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency in supporting the push for human rights in the countries of Eastern Europe. It was the opinion of the Secretary of State, Rieckhoff, that while the effort should be continued as a matter of simple humanity a line ought to be drawn between the kinds of matériel the United States should supply to Communist dissidents. Furthermore, he had obtained new information from the CIA concerning the presence of Soviet “advisers” in the Republic of Ivory Coast, in the Republic of Botswana, and in the United Republic of Cameroon. The suggestion was made that various pressures—mainly economic—be brought against these African nations. It was Rieckhoff’s opinion, and one supported by Mallory, that “Soviet advisers” had the odd habit of transmuting into “Soviet military experts.”

  Kimball Lindholm was the only dissenting voice. He didn’t personally give a damn about some sandy wastelands halfway across the world and he didn’t give a damn what other people thought of him for holding that opinion. Mallory smiled at his Vice President with an expression that might have passed for one of tolerance. The old fella’s entitled to his opinion. What the hell. But Mallory perceived more than a simple insularity in Kimball Lindholm; he saw what he thought of, on the bottom line, as an extreme form of prairie asshole. And on those few occasions when he had taken one Martini more than necessary, he had been heard to speak both badly and indiscreetly of his Vice President. But there were times when the price you paid for votes was higher than you might have liked. Kimball Lindholm bullshitted, Mallory thought, ergo, he existed. A Cartesian travesty, perhaps, but he was saddled with a philosophical reality for the next three years in the form of the little man whose opinions had been formed, somewhere around the age of ten, in the shadows of Kansas silos.

  The President proposed that the Secretary of State direct the Central Intelligence Agency to consider new ways of assisting Eastern European dissidents; after all, if the Soviets were scrambling around Africa with “technical advice,” why shouldn’t the United States of America, in a game of global tic-tac-toe, offer “technical advice” of another kind to those people who wanted to shape democracies in countries resistant to the notion?

  At the close of the meeting, the various Cabinet members left. Only the President and his Chief of Staff, Callaway, remained behind in the Cabinet Room. Callaway had been with Mallory since the early days in Maine—the State Senate, the gubernatorial campaign, the House of Representatives, and now 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Of all his virtues, fidelity was the greatest. There were those who said that if Mallory were to go blind, Callaway would go on his knees to beg that both his corneas be transplanted into the President’s eyes.

  Now, in the empty Cabinet Room, the President said, “Do you ever have nightmares, Jim?”

  “Sometimes,” Callaway said.

  “Real bad nightmares?”

  “You’re getting at something,” Callaway said. “I don’t need two guesses at it, do I?”

  Patrick J. Mallory clasped his hands together in front of him on the table—it was as if he meant to pray but had changed his mind. He stared at his Chief of Staff for a time in silence, then said, “I’m watching my own funeral. Okay? I’m with the angelic band up there somewhere. It doesn’t feel so bad. After all, I’m not stoking the old fires, right?”

  Callaway, smiling, nodded.

  “I’m floating on a nice old cloud. I see them lowering the box into the grave. I don’t feel too bad. It isn’t all blackness and horror.”

  “Then it changes?” Callaway asked.

  “Damned right, it changes. Because all of a sudden I see Kimball Lindholm being sworn into office and I wake up and it’s cold sweat time. It’s cold, cold sweat time.”

  “I wouldn’t worry, Mr. President,” Callaway said. “You’ll outlive him.”

  “I wonder if it’s a contradiction in terms to say that anybody can outlive Kimball Lindholm,” Mallory said. “Ah, what the hell. You pay a certai
n price. And Kimball comes with the property.”

  Callaway, gathering his papers, turned toward the door. There he paused and looked back at the President, as if suddenly remembering something. “You haven’t given a reply to Leontov yet, and his office called this morning.”

  Mallory stood up now, hands in the pockets of his dark suit. He rattled a key loosely for a time. “That’s the game where they have men in shorts who kick a ball into a net?”

  “Yes,” Callaway said.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s your decision, Mr. President. It’s the first time a soccer team consisting entirely of native-born players will be playing a full international against the Soviet Union.”

  Mallory thought for a moment. “What I can’t stand is saying yes to anything, anything, from that little shit Leontov.”

  Callaway shrugged and turned toward the door. “I’ll do the regrets then.”

  “No, wait.” Mallory looked across the room at his Chief of Staff. “Accept. I’ll go. Tell Leontov that I’ll go. If Kissinger could sit through soccer games, what the hell. Besides, there’s the patriotic angle.”

  Callaway smiled. “I’ll tell Leontov.”

  “Do we have a chance of winning?”

  “According to the press, no. According to the team coach, yes.”

  “It would be a drag to have Leontov turning smug on me if his side wins,” Mallory said. “It would be a real drag.”

  2

  1.

  Shortly after dawn he woke and went out onto the balcony of the Ramada Inn and looked at the calm Atlantic—hardly moving, gray and sluggish, lifeless after the night’s storm. The morning air was chill against his skin. He slid the door closed, reentered the room, and watched Isobel as she slept. He sat down in the chair by the balcony door. The sea was a whisper. Last night, he remembered, it had been his idea to move here out of the cottage; it had been his idea to park the old station wagon several streets away and check into the Ramada in the hope that somehow, in all its gaunt plastic splendor, its curiously lifeless quality, you could contrive to lose yourself.…