Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  I looked up. Samantha had been quietly summoned to the edge of the stage by the corporate relations woman. Samantha spotted me but our eyes did not meet. Then she gave her instructions and the young woman bent close, nodded, and headed my way.

  “What did you say, some guy killed himself?” a reporter next to me asked, flipping over a page of his notebook.

  “I just saw it.”

  The corporate relations woman returned to me.

  “Ms. Pipes says you’re going to have to move to the back,” she told me with icy pleasantness. “I’m afraid that—you have . . . is it blood on your suit?” she said in surprise and disgust. “Sort of sprayed?”

  It wasn’t so much. “I was planning on getting up on the stage,” I told her. “I can do it so that—”

  “Oh, you can’t, I’m afraid, we’ve started.”

  “Who is he?” said the reporter. “The name’s Whitman, is that what you said?”

  “We’re not giving interviews now,” the corporate relations person jumped in. “This is not—”

  “. . . and are confident that the formation of the world’s foremost communications company will presage an era of increased . . .”

  The Chairman was watching me now as a multimedia presentation flickered on the large screen behind him. He frowned. A couple of reporters turned around. They’d heard me.

  “Who are you?” one asked me.

  “. . . we are extremely pleased by the intersection of these new markets . . .”

  “Jack Whitman. Vice president for corporate development and planning,” I answered dutifully.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked loudly. “Are you sup-posed to be up there?”

  “Well—”

  “You seem to have blood on your suit, you know that? Something happen somewhere?” His eyes brightened with an idea. “Something happen in the building?”

  “Yes . . .” I began. “A very strange thing just happened to me—”

  He was paying attention now.

  “It happened in the building, you say, where?”

  “No, no, not here . . .” I looked toward the front of the room. Samantha was standing next to the Chairman, her bad eye focused inward as she whispered in his ear, directing his gaze in my direction. He frowned and then he nodded and leaned back toward the microphone.

  “Excuse me!” The room boomed with sound. “We have some unauthorized . . . yes, you, sir, halfway back, right there. Please let us continue with the program. I apologize to the media for the interruption.” The Chairman stared right at me, as if we were strangers on a bus. “Thank you,” he said conclusively.

  “Please move to the back,” the corporate relations person urged me.

  Perhaps I resisted. Just a little, with my arms. That would be understandable. I don’t remember doing that, really. But I might have. I do remember that I wanted only to say that I was content just to listen. But Samantha was still watching and she saw that I had not moved. She took one graceful, long-legged step toward the microphone and the room froze for just a moment as we looked at one another. The members of the board were watching impatiently. Waldhausen was watching. She was going to say my name. The room started to murmur with irritation. I think everyone sensed that we knew each other. Maybe it was only five seconds. It felt longer.

  “You, sir,” Samantha said in a cold voice to the room. “Will you please leave these proceedings?” She lifted her pretty pink hand and summoned the forces. “May we have some people from corporate relations escort the gentleman from the room, please?” Samantha appeared to be looking at me or just over my head. Or perhaps her skewed eyes confused me. I didn’t seem to know her. She certainly didn’t know me. She gave a reassuring smile to the audience. Then the corporate relations people appeared and cordoned me to-ward the door. Instantly the presentation resumed.

  “Who is he?” asked a reporter getting out of his seat to follow us.

  “Nobody,” the corporate relations woman said graciously, as if accepting sugar in her tea. “No pictures.”

  “What’s that blood on him?” came another voice after me.

  But I was out of the room. Falling. Gone.

  They took me into some secretary’s office I’d never seen before and politely hovered about me. “I think we should put him in a cab or something,” I heard a woman say. “Where do you live, Mr. Whitman?”

  She bent close to me and I could only stare into the strange pretty face, one of the faces of the Corporation. She was pretty in a gum commercial sort of way, which is how the Corporation likes its corporate relations people.

  “Where do you live?” another one repeated helpfully. They seemed so civil, so professional.

  Another one whisked into the room.

  “Ms. Pipes said that we have to get him out of the building right away. I told her he was totally disoriented. She asked me if it looked like a lot of blood on him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Well, look at him.”

  “She say what to do?”

  “She said the press conference should be almost done, so we may have to use the service elevator. Mary, will you call building services and get them to send it up here?”

  “May we see your wallet, Mr. Whitman?”

  They found my address and sent me home. A young man with a boy’s neck inside his crisp collar was instructed to see me out of the lobby all the way to the curb.

  “Make sure he gets in the cab,” he was told.

  In the taxi I lay back on the seat watching the buildings go by. The driver looked up at his mirror. “Don’t get sick in my car,” he said.

  The faces of the building flew past above me and I heard Samantha’s voice again, you, sir, summoning the guards. I was now the man who had disrupted the most important press conference in the Corporation’s history, a man in a bloody suit. Samantha had ordered my removal. With ease. I realized without purposefully thinking of it that it could only have been Samantha who had suggested to Morrison that I be assigned to the Chairman in the first place. Who else could it have been? That was where the coldness in her voice from the podium had come from, the brutal dispatch. She’d believed that Morrison’s gambit would work. By getting me assigned to the Chairman, she shuffled me aside and set herself up to benefit from Morrison’s ascendance. Now Morrison was gone, and she was not. Samantha was very good, she was a survivor, she was playing the game at a higher level. I doubt she hated me; in my shock I understood that only someone who had nothing would want everything.

  Back at the house I climbed out of the cab and looked up the steps at my house. I opened the door and listened. Then I saw Dolores standing at the window with her daughter.

  “Maria,” Dolores directed in a calm voice, “I want you to go upstairs for a minute.”

  The child ran past me and climbed a few steps, then looked back. I could see the terror in her face and I wanted to hold her and protect her.

  “Go on, you heard me.”

  Maria climbed the stairs solemnly, her knees lifting her little skirt. Dolores turned to me. “We’re leaving now.”

  “Back to the hospital?”

  “He’s dead. I said good-bye to him back there.”

  Her expression was distant.

  “Then where?” I asked.

  “Away.”

  I couldn’t think. “Your old apartment?”

  She didn’t want to answer, pressing her lips together tight. “I don’t know,” she said “finally. “No, not there. Anyplace but that.”

  “Why not just stay here a bit, and figure out—”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “But you and I, we’re—”

  Maria was coming down the stairs and Dolores looked up at her.

  “I want you to stay, Dolores. You and Maria. I don’t have anybody else, that’s the thing. We can work all this out, we could—”

  “Was it true what Hector said?”

  “About what?”

  “About how he kept trying
to talk to me? He said he was trying to call—”

  “Yes.”

  This seemed to be infinitely sad for Dolores. “You should have just let me talk to him. I could have talked to him. It would have been different.”

  “I didn’t think he’d—”

  “No, of course not!” Dolores cried out. “How could you? You didn’t know him!”

  “But I was only—”

  “He got all angry, thinking about everything. You can’t just do that to Hector, he gets frustrated.”

  “Jesus, Dolores, I’m sorry. But he came here with a gun in his pocket, he—”

  “He did a stupid thing!” Dolores exclaimed bitterly. “And he was stupid to love me so much!”

  We stood in silence while Maria fingered some of the toys on the coffee table. She understood something of what her mother was saying. No one had turned on any lights in the living room. I could see by Dolores’s distracted expression that she was playing it all back to herself, the decision to leave Hector, the decision to move in with me.

  “Come on, Maria,” Dolores finally said.

  “Can I call you a cab?”

  “No, I don’t need a cab.” She pulled on a coat over her bloodied dress.

  “You don’t know where you’re going?”

  “No.”

  “It would be better for Maria to stay here. Keep things stable.”

  “No.”

  She had nothing. “Let me give you some money or something. Just so—”

  “I don’t want anything. Come on, Maria.”

  Dolores gathered up a few toys and clothes for Maria, just enough that could be carried, and then handed me her copy of the house key. She pushed open the front door and motioned for Maria to follow.

  “Dolores, don’t go. Please. I want you here, I want you to stay.”

  She turned back toward me and I realized that if she had left Hector, then of course she could leave me. Her dark eyes brimmed for a moment as she played it all back to herself. Her lips were swollen. Then she blinked the tears away and her face hardened again. She gathered Maria’s hand and the two of them walked down the worn steps of my stoop. Maria insisted on closing the black iron gate in front of my house and Dolores indulged her this.

  “I don’t want to leave,” Maria cried out, dragging her shoes.

  “Let’s go, Maria,” Dolores whispered sternly to her daughter, not looking at me.

  “Bye, Jack,” the child called to me sadly. They turned up the street in the direction of the subway, the old brownstones rising high and mute to either side. Maria looked up at her mother once or twice, but Dolores walked resolutely forward. The breeze moved the new green tree leaves over their heads. I wanted to believe that only good things would come to them.

  SIXTEEN

  I AM SOLITARY. IN MY WANDERINGS ABOUT THE CITY THESE days, I’ve developed an odd habit. Perhaps that’s expectable, for I am now a man of park benches and windows in cheap luncheonettes. A man who lingers on the sidewalk, striking up conversations with the street vendors. Sometimes I stand in bookstores for hours, flipping through volume after volume. Other times I go sit in the public library in midtown Manhattan and read the magazines. Yes, perhaps it is only expectable. My new odd habit is this: when I get dressed each morning in my apartment, I slip a small three-by-five notecard into my breast pocket. It’s the same card each day, softened around the edges and corners by now, and it sticks up about a half inch above the pocket. On the card is taped a smudged rectangle of newsprint, a short paragraph from the first lengthy story on the Corporation’s merger that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The piece was absolutely complete, laying out the merger rationales for Volkman-Sakura and the Corporation and how the financial analysts liked the deal. The article recounted the Chairman’s long tenure, the “sudden ouster” of Morrison, Samantha’s “new prominence,” Waldhausen’s increasing power at VolkmanSaukura, and so on. The expectable, the usual. The one short paragraph that I clipped out appeared toward the end of the story, far enough down that it could be cut out by an editor if space required. The paragraph read: “The announcement was briefly interrupted when an executive of the company, John Whitman, caused a disturbance. Whitman, a vice president for corporate planning and development, had apparently been a witness to a suicide in his home an hour prior to the announcement and had arrived at the press conference in a disoriented state, said a company official. ‘It was just one of those weird events no one can predict,’ said Jessica McGillis, a company spokeswoman. ‘It has no relevance to our very important and most exciting news.’ ”

  It was on the morning after Dolores and Maria left, the morning the piece appeared in the paper, that Helen phoned.

  “I’m here,” I said. “Still here.”

  “They sort of asked me if I’d call you,” Helen began.

  “It’s that bad, huh?”

  “I don’t understand,” Helen protested.

  Helen was being kind. I stared out my window into the garden. Hector’s black coat still lay on the bricks. I didn’t dare touch it yet. “I mean,” I said, “that after what happened yesterday, no one wants to call me.”

  “I think everyone should understand that you were—that something had happened . . . everyone seemed quite pleased overall by the announcement.”

  “You’re being very kind, Helen. I suggest that you ask as soon as possible to be assigned to someone else. That would be the advisable thing, Helen.”

  “Jack—”

  “Helen,” I broke in. “I wonder if perhaps you could box up everything in my office that is somewhat personal and just send it to me here.”

  “What’s—”

  “Just box it up. Please do it.”

  “But, Jack,” came her voice, betraying her exasperation now, “you were supposed to make a presentation for the Chairman to the board and everyone is basically shocked, to be honest about it, and—”

  “Did the Chairman ask after me?”

  “Well, no, I don’t believe that he did, he’s been working with Samantha mostly, she ended up being the one who—”

  I replaced the phone on the hook.

  That same day the police sent over two detectives from Brooklyn’s Seventy-eighth Precinct to talk to me, a young hound of a guy named Westerbeck along with an older man with graying hair who watched me with detached professional scrutiny. They rang the doorbell and we sat down politely in my living room.

  “We’re just trying to get some answers to wrap this up,” Westerbeck explained. “It’s sort of an unusual case, ’cause usually the guy’ll kill the wife and the kid first or maybe kill the other guy. He usually kills somebody else and then sometimes he kills himself. That’s usually the way it goes, we got one the other day like that where the guy killed all his children first. Four of ’em, boom-boom-boom.”

  I said nothing.

  “So what kind of guy was this Hector?” the detective asked.

  I couldn’t think of an answer. “Beaten,” I finally said.

  “Guys beat him up?”

  “No. I mean things kept beating him down.”

  “Did you know he had a gun yesterday?”

  “I guess I worried about it but I wasn’t sure.”

  “So you didn’t try to talk him out of it.”

  “It was too fast.”

  The detective nodded noncommittally. “His wife told one of our guys that he was upset because he wanted her and the little girl to come back.”

  “Yes. That’s true.”

  “She said you sort of tricked this guy, made it so he couldn’t talk to her.”

  I glanced at the older detective’s patient eyes. He waited.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s also true.”

  “You took this woman and her little girl in and you were going to live happily ever after, that it?” the younger detective asked.

  “I didn’t have exact expectations.”

  The detective looked around the room, at the chandelier, the furniture. “It was a
n act of charity? You’re a charitable guy?”

  “I had my reasons for helping her. Dolores and Maria had no place to live.”

  “So you liked her?” he said. “The way she looked?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were popping her?”

  The older detective’s expression was unchanged.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “And it was just chance that the husband and you worked for the same company?”

  “Yes.”

  He took notice of the toys all over the rug, which I still had not picked up. The older detective simply watched. He seemed to understand that the fact that Jack Whitman had committed no crime did not mean that he was free of guilt.

  “You worked it out so that he couldn’t talk to her and then he broke in and—”

  “Yes.”

  “You two guys, you and this Hector guy sort of had something going, a little angry jealous thing, right? You thought you were smarter than him, you thought you could sort of manage him out of the picture?”

  “Yes.”

  “He loved her.”

  “Yes.”

  “She still loved him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where this Dolores Salcines woman and her daughter are now?”

  “No.”

  “She just left?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re telling us you have absolutely no idea where she is.”

  “No. And if you find out, please tell her I’d like to talk with her.”

  “You ever own a gun?” the detective continued.

  “No.”

  “Never owned a handgun?”

  “No.”

  “We gotta find out where this Dolores Salcines woman is just so we could see how her version of things matches up.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  My answers seemed shavings of the truth, which, gathered into a pile, resembled nothing of the whole matter. The detective shifted in the seat. “See, Mr. Whitman, it’s unusual where the guy doesn’t kill the other guy. The usual thing is for somebody else to get it. You two guys didn’t fight or anything, roll around with that gun?”

  “No.”

  “You get a hand on that gun?”