War in a Beautiful Country

by Patricia Ryan

  She picked up her purse and a heavy sweater. It was too beautiful a day for such upsetting events. As soon as they stepped out of the building into the warm afternoon breeze, they could feel the vague ocean smell that proved winter was gradually turning into spring. In New York City, you could often feel a smell, especially this ocean-created odor, which had an element of satin and salt being stroked across your face. Angela was quiet for the few seconds it took them to get their first whiffs of this sweet air. Then she started abruptly, as if a t.v. had suddenly turned on.

  “Sometimes people do things that are good for you, and sometimes these same people do things to you that are bad. We think because they did the good thing, they can’t be doing the bad.

  We throw away a lot of important information that way.”

  She briefly checked out Regina to see her reaction as they continued down the industrially-zoned street, where there was not one single tree. Fortunately, they could turn a few corners and find a row of old houses with a tree in front of each, and down a couple of blocks more there was a little café with rickety tables outside on a relatively quiet street.

  Still not entirely convinced about eliminating “the husband” as a suspect, Angela continued , “We wouldn’t want to throw away any important information now, would we?”

  Regina knew she had always thrown away good information about Marius. In fact, she had thrown away the piece of information most important of all: that she was only his “good enough wife,” and that throughout the marriage he was merely waiting---whether he knew it or not—for the woman who would fall right into his fantasy vision of the wife he really wanted, the way Cinderella’s foot fell right into the shoe.

  Angela asked, “Can you come up with anything that would show us it’s him?”

  Should Regina tell her, “The way he loved me seemed unshakeable. Turned out that wasn’t the way he loved me.”

  Instead, she answered pointedly. “It’s not him. I told you it’s not him.” She was sure of this.

  Angela finally paused in front of the little neighborhood café they had been walking towards. “Seems warm enough to be outside for a change....” Angela said. “What do you think? You want to keep on walking, or have a cup of coffee and a little something…..?”

  Angela sat down.

  “This is nice, just the two of us, sweetie,”

  Regina flinched. Angela’s loud, overly-resonant voice grated against this unwelcome salutation.

  Det. Vega continued, “I never go out to eat with the guys at the station. It’s awful. Every time we go to a restaurant all they ever talk about is what they are eating while they are eating it. And about every other meal they ever ate in every other restaurant they ever ate in. Or ever will. It’s absolutely surreal. You could go nuts.

  Excuse me, waiter......

  Must be an actor, that guy. We’re the only ones here and he’s so overwhelmingly busy talking to the waitress--excuse me, female member of the wait staff--that he hasn’t the strength to push himself away from the wall he’s leaning against and come over here.

  Let’s just see how long it takes him to become conscious.

  We could just up and leave.

  Ok, no. You’re right. Why should we be the ones put out...

  Oh, finally......

  Excuse me, could we please have menus?

  Thank you.

  Nice selection for a tucked-away little place.

  Not that we’ll ever get to order anything, since he seems to have disappeared, and with his track record so far, maybe never to reappear again.

  Another reason I don’t like to eat with the guys at the precinct is that they are such cowards when it comes to waiters. They take all kinds of abuse.

  Not me. I won’t put up with it. Incompetence and carelessness rob time out of my life.

  But this guy’s not worth fighting with.

  Although I haven’t had a fight in a long time...

  I find that if I don’t have a fight now and then, I’m like a man without sex.....

  What are you going to have, sweetie?”

  Sweetie, again.

  Regina thought. What is it, some sort of code word among law enforcement agents, some way they see anyone needing their attention as children? Regina didn’t know what she wanted to eat since every thought she had about anything was sliced in half by Angela’s interruptions. Trying to bring the halves together again was exhausting, especially in her frame of mind. She didn’t have the strength. Maybe if she didn’t really pay any attention to her.....

  Angela got up abruptly and started looking on all the empty tables. Finally she went inside and came out with some toothpicks. She held one up with great satisfaction. “I never have to worry about being hungry because I always carry a second meal between my teeth.”

  A pale young man with two small briefcases sat down by himself at the table furthest from them. He opened up one case and took out a laptop computer. When a waitress came, he asked for coffee, a Portobello mushroom sandwich on foccacia bread, and an ash try.

  “I hope that guy doesn’t think he is going to smoke,” Angela said.

  “Isn’t it against the law?” Regina asked. “You could arrest him.” She was kidding.

  “No, I couldn’t. And, boy, I hate that! You know, if they put that poison from second-hand smoke in a drink and handed it to you in a glass, they’d be charged with attempted murder.”

  Regina saw she was going to be sorry for encouraging Angela on any subject.

  When the ashtray came, the young man opened his second briefcase, took out a large sheaf of papers held together in various sections with lots of paper clips. As he went through each section, he took the paper clips off and put them in the ash tray until he finished making notes on the computer. Then he clipped that section back together again and put those papers away in the case.

  Since Angela could no longer relish the anticipation of being annoyed by him, she returned her attention to Regina. “You don’t have much to say, sugar.”

  Sugar !

  “I used to think I had a lot to say,” Regina replied pointedly. “Then I realized it has all been said before,”

  Regina hoped Angela would come to the same conclusion. It was a hope that would never be realized. She did not get a chance to stop Angela in time, who went on, oblivious that Regina’s silence was censure.

  “So, are you becoming convinced now that finding the newspaper article right under your very door is from someone you know, like the husband or boyfriend? Always the number one suspects. We are right more times than not about this. You should start to believe us. It may not even be about you. I suspect to most guys even you are not about you… because neither the husband or the boyfriend is going to love you for what you love about yourself…the things you love about your life. They can’t. They would never even see it, and if they saw it, never understand it, and if they understood it, they would resent it. “

  Regina wanted to say she resented the way the police kept dropping the ball regarding her possible untimely death, just as this inappropriate and presumptuous conversation was proving. And even though a combination of emotions had left her a little deflated and hesitant, she continued to defend both Marius and Drew.

  “It has to be just ….a bad guy…. ,” she tried, “who picked me out for some unfathomable reason,” Regina said, “It has to be some unknown criminal!”

  “Unfathomable until we know why, and unknown until we know who. Forget criminals. If it turns out not to be anybody you already know, then it could be just anybody. ‘Just people,’ as they say.”

  Regina thought on this point the detective could be right. From her own observations she knew that if you ever wanted to fully understand the extent to which ‘just people’ truly do not care if they harm another, you only have to watch them drive a car.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  “So how come you two are still friends?” Angela asked on their way back to Regina’s loft where she would leave he
r.

  “Who?”

  “You and the....husband.”

  Why indeed. Regina felt she had already shared too much. The last thing she wanted was to encourage a chummy rapport with this rather bizarre, overly talkative woman. She needed Detective Angela’s professionalism, such as it was, but did not want to become her pal.

  Yet this very question of her continued need for Marius in the face of his increasing indifference haunted Regina, went on in her mind in an unending loop. It might be a relief to say its absurdity out loud, let it hit the wall of another person and see if it stopped in its tracks. To hear how it sounded might be enough to spill it out of her head, which couldn’t comprehend it, and out of her heart, which couldn’t let it go.

  “Why are we still friends?” Regina repeated abstractedly, “I often wonder myself. He was unfaithful, and broke promises both big and small. But, as contradictory and crazy as this sounds, I trusted him completely, and still do.”

  Det. Vega smiled. “Yeah. Well. Go figure. You can carve in stone a lie as well as the truth. Anyway, he was wrong about our not trying to help you. The problem in your case is we have no clues at all. That’s why we hate these cases...they are so frustrating. They are slow, time-consuming, costly, and at the end of it, no matter how much good work we do, all the leads can get cold, and all the dots may never be connected...the search can go on for years….”

  “Years…oh, no, please…”

  “But in your case, it’s even harder. We have no bomb and no real reason to think we will ever have one. I’m not saying this can’t escalate into the real thing. It can. But I wouldn’t worry...in your case, if in fact a stranger is behind all this, it’s probably just some thrill seeker.

  Or someone who is merely insane.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  Insane.

  Merely insane?

  Or so Det. Vega had said. Nonchalantly.

  If she shouldn’t be afraid that an insane person was threatening to blow her up, what should she be afraid of?

  Until she received her own death threats, Regina told Marius that she was most afraid of the failure of love and art.

  Now Regina was afraid of everything.

  The more beautiful the day, the worst the fear. You could not trust a beautiful day. Now, on any beautiful day, she was afraid that the ticking in her car was a bomb and not the motor cooling off; afraid of the half-empty water bottle abandoned by a jogger on the bank cash machine; afraid of grocery bags, crinkled, shiny, motionless, formed to a point like a soft ice cream cone and left on the locker room bench; afraid of the dark hallway to her loft; afraid to use her hair dryer; click on her TV; put lights on as she entered her apartment in case someone had gotten in and left the stove gas jets on..…..

  What did he want from her?!

  Her old self trusted other people not to harm her.

  “They wouldn’t do that to me,” she used to say. “They would know it was me.”

  But now she believed others saw her only as a meaningless blob in the familiar form humans take, and of no particular consequence to anyone else, especially if she interfered in some way with whatever it was they wanted for themselves.

  “I’m so expendable I should hardly care about myself anymore,” she said out loud.

  Like most people, Regina could tolerate fear once in awhile, but not this firestorm of panic on a regular basis.

  Still, she knew that some people loved to be afraid. “Nothing is more exciting than being terrified,” they said. Even if science showed that the brain could release pleasurable endorphins at times of great physical stress to deaden pain and alleviate fear, none of that happened to her.

  But it must have worked for others. Even ordinary people clamored for ever-more terrifying rides at amusement parks. And not-so-ordinary folk---those whose own tamped-down brain arousal mechanisms needed extra pumping up--- engaged in ice climbing, cliff diving, free-fall jumping, hang gliding, waterfall hurling, white-water kayaking, radical skiing, sky surfing, deliberately setting off avalanches with snowmobiles, and a whole host of Extreme Sports that people say they do to “confront their own mortality.”

  As if they didn’t have to confront it every day whether they set off avalanches or not.

  Regina thought they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by just knowing they lived in the wrong place. They could get it all here on an ordinary New York day. On any given day, they might be able to look forward to being randomly shot while talking on a pay phone; pushed in front of a speeding subway train by a known psychotic who “just felt like it;” killed sitting near a restaurant window by the car that jumped through the pane glass; or getting electrocuted by a sewer cover. They could be gunned down by a co-worker; have their skulls shattered with a concrete block by strangers just for crossing the street in front of them; or they could be swallowed up by sink holes from collapsing sewers; be hit by a tour bus and dragged to death in the crowded theater district; crushed by a falling construction crane; find bleach in water bottles and Clorox in ice cubes; have manhole covers explode in their faces; crash in a helicopter; be a victim in a fast food restaurant massacre; get burned by an erupting steam pipe; have chemicals thrown in their eyes; die unnecessarily in a world class hospital; get terminally ill in a dirty diner; be in the way of a careening fire truck; drop at 18miles an hour in a skyscraper elevator; find themselves hurled into the air by a bike messenger; be on a bus when the driver has a heart attack ; get caught in a gang hit; or be in a coffee shop when a disgruntled cook runs through swinging a meat cleaver. Buildings collapse, gas leaks demolish rows of houses, ferries crash, subways catch fire. Trucks carrying rocks turn over on bystanders, suicides land at their feet. Even the Mayor’s car crashes. Highway off-ramps are not named for heroes but for those who have died violently on an ordinary day.

  And in a city where there is hardly a tree, they could get a deadly tropical fever in a concrete jungle located in the temperate zone. Not to mention being directly in the path of a predicted mega-tsunami. So why are we not running for our lives, instead of frozen like a deer in headlights, Regina wondered.

  “It’s New York. You live with it,” everyone says. Millions of New Yorkers went about their business every day as if none of this were going on.

  Regina too was not afraid of any of these things, accepting them as easily as changes in the weather. On the other hand they didn’t arrive at her door with her name on them.

  So she couldn’t understand why some people deliberately put themselves in the middle of dangers that were nearly suicidal. Apparently, it gave them an agitated love of life by facing death and coming out the other side. Never mind that their notion of being victorious and powerful was chiefly the result of luck and circumstances. Still, the Extreme Sports people would say: “It makes you feel alive!” Regina wondered how alive the many dead dare devils felt. The ones who died on the sides of mountains already littered with corpses. Did the spouses and children left behind have an agitated love of life?

  They say they want life to be hard, a challenge. What is wrong with these people? she asked herself, brooding over her own fear, and seeing them with their empty heroics simply as grown-up brats with enough money to take their own lives and often the lives of others. Don’t they know how hard life already is? If they want life to be really hard, they could try fixing it: the poverty, pain, hunger, loneliness, crime, evil, prejudice, injustice, pollution, species extinction. Now there are the true challenges, if they really want them. They could try being police officers, firefighters, wildlife photographers, vulcanologists, researchers, surgeons, social workers, volunteers with the Red Cross. They could try being single working mothers. Or old.

  In spurning the ordinary, the thrill seekers missed the point that everyday life is dangerous, that you have to be brave just to stay alive.

  On the other hand, maybe it was not to feel more alive, but less. To put the unanswerable questions of life away as they concentrated only on the clarity of w
hat was in front of them.

  For that, they could just play golf.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  It was getting to him, prison life.

  His S.C.A.R.E.D. project was one way he tried to cope. But right now it wasn’t working. Ever since the cafeteria uprising, most of the small freedoms the inmates were granted had been taken away from them. Whether or not he had engaged in any part in the fight, like everyone else, he was now forced to spend too much time locked in his cell.

  And, like everyone else, it was making him crazy. And restless. And angry.

  He knew that wanting to smash his fists through the walls of his narrow cell was only because he couldn’t punch some woman to get relief from his rage and inner poisons the way he used to. He remembered how they cowed and tried to cover their faces when he aimed for them. He could still see their frightened eyes through the fingers they had hoped would protect them

  The memory gave him some comfort. He knew that the notes he sent from prison had some of the same affect….if not the hands to the face, at least the frightened eyes.

  But he needed more.

  His lust to harm overtook him. He was still on “R.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Dear Regina,

  You have had too much time. I am tired of letting you live.

  Love, God

  It would be just a fast, hard, sudden slap.

  With the strangling new prison rules, it would be almost impossible to get the note out. But he knew that as time went on and the prison remained calm, the rules would eventually ease.

  He would wait.

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  When she eventually received the note from Florida, there was no hiding from the debilitating concern she could see on her face every time she looked into the mirror.

  She was exhausted from lack of sleep.

  Det. Walker again tried to make her realize the threats were bogus. After all this time, there had been not one shred of hard evidence to suggest that anything would really happen to her. True, this note had escalated in tone, but his gut and experience told him it was still an empty rant.

  Nonetheless, he was aware in a rare moment of empathy that this note was harming Regina without even touching her. He urged her to take a break to get a hold of herself and go somewhere she felt the threats were unlikely to follow her.