Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  The night before the wedding, Genevieve brought Alexandra to a restaurant with fat, seeping steaks and velvet curtains. The waiters wore starched garments. They replaced forks. For a long while, Genevieve and Alexandra remembered being younger and stupider, the romance of even ordering a drink. Whiskey and Coca-Cola.

  Someone cleared the dishes. There were flakes of light in the rounds of their wineglasses. Genevieve spun the delicate stem of a flower between them.

  “Never thought you’d end up across an ocean, married,” she said.

  A squat, tense pyramid of panna cotta came, served on a plate with mint leaves and berries. There were two little spoons on the plate. Alexandra concentrated on pulling a neat scoop. “Who says I’ve ended up?” She winked. “Maybe this is just the beginning.”

  “The beginning of your husband spree?”

  “Yes, serial wife Alexandra Chen on the loose. Authorities say Chen is unarmed and dangerous.”

  “They will put you on the channel with the face-eaters,” Genevieve said.

  “There will be terrible reenactments.”

  “They’ll call you the Spousal Slut of the West.”

  Alexandra scraped a bite of panna cotta. “And you’ll call me?”

  Genevieve reached across the table for her hand. “Often, and also my most infamous friend.”

  Alexandra wished then that there was an architecture sophisticated enough to breach latitudes between London and New York, that distance could be miniaturized for more than representations: words, images. She would be unable to corroborate the substance of her friend’s hand on another continent.

  Chapter 7

  Inside the pub, everyone was shouting, and no one was heard. People crowded around them in the charade of feeling young. He found Wright with a beer and tried to slide beneath the noise. There were fists in the air around them. Glowing halos. They nodded, hissed under the crash of metal, and a woman slithered atop a table. Wright began pacing.

  “Mum’s got a secret admirer,” he said.

  Meaning: he was sure he was being followed ever since he’d started scratching away at the ties between Sinn Féin and Tyle. Ever since he’d begun looking into Thomas for Jeremy. Wright’s thought was the IRA memory was long, and now they could retain the mercenaries from private security firms like Tyle, firms populated with men of their own training. He had disappeared, and so he’d be simple to disappear. In the bar light, his teeth glinted blue.

  “I am not so lost I couldn’t be found,” Wright said. “Bill, it’s them.”

  Jeremy began to look at everything except Wright. Wright could exact sanity from you. He bore newspaper clippings, waggled rumors, advanced theories. He thought the one thing to trust was there were ways men like them were questioned that could leave you in a padlocked room babbling.

  “What they can doesn’t augur what they will,” Jeremy said.

  “You want to sleep at night; you don’t want to see in the dark. Gerry Adams can shake the hand of an American president on camera, but in the background, Tiocfaidh ár lá, our day will come, Sinn Féin is saying. There is someone following me, Bill.”

  Too long Jeremy had thought he could keep a small compartment for Wright, the odd, ruined brotherhood of semper vigiles carried around a clean life with a well-appointed flat. But that was when it had seemed she would not be willing to follow him entirely into the desirable clichés. Somehow, after the night she’d caught him letting himself back into the flat, he and Alexandra had recovered in days passing and speaking nothing of their fight, the silence stretching out discontent like an image pulled until it blurred. He behaved as though nothing had happened, and the hard outline between them thinned, and he needed only to stand with her tomorrow, speak aloud the promise already deep in himself that they’d not end up quotients.

  “Appropriate would be request new cover at HQ, then,” Jeremy said.

  “We’re classified, Bill. We don’t exist. Not in declassified documents. Fifty-fifty, it was someone in HQ that leaked.”

  “Were it, you’d be dead already, Ray. You said you knew it was former PIRA.”

  Wright’s fist hit the table. He folded his arms, looked over his far shoulder, back. A song like machinery came on. Right hand to pocket.

  “I said it was them. When the borders have fallen between public and private, between countries, them can be anyone. By the time you find out who someone is, it’s too late.”

  “Only adversaries.”

  “Vetting fails, Bill.”

  “Especially when there is no one to vet.”

  A snort that appeared to throw Wright’s head back with its force. “Don’t play cover ID with me, Billy. The hedge fund naïf turned do-gooder. There’s no way you believe that. You’ve got to be not looking if you don’t see it.”

  “And now a tautology from the philosopher of the mind.”

  “Think of Gunner.”

  “That was Belfast,” Jeremy said.

  “Everywhere is Belfast with a different flag.”

  Now, Wright looked at Jeremy, but Jeremy did not return his gaze. He should not have come.

  “Do you remember when we first met?” Wright said.

  It had been breakfast at the barracks. He remembered Wright, Wilmington at the time, saying, “They’re terrorists, but they’re our terrorists now. You make sure they’re eating right. You don’t keep them alive with a foot out the door and a soft heart.” Wright was grayer now.

  “I had to tell you eyes went three hundred sixty degrees there, that we might call ourselves the Fishers of Men but we were in an aquarium, right down in the depths with them trying to pretend we weren’t getting wet.”

  “I didn’t understand what you were saying,” Jeremy said.

  “You needed to know your knickers ought to be soiled. You didn’t know a good informer for the RUC was gunned down by men at his door dressed in RUC uniform. You didn’t know the scope could slink out. You were wearing the white sheet and still were spooked. Do you remember what you said to me then?”

  Jeremy shrugged.

  “You said, ‘Be seeing you,’ Bill. That’s what you said.”

  “So?”

  “So here it is, Bill. Here it is: I told you you’d have to see me. I told you there’s nowhere to hide from men like us. And it’s still true.”

  The night was intolerable. It didn’t matter that they’d been parallel handlers in Lisburn. Ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent of the time, the tours had been counting minutes, running down hours in Thiepval Barracks muttering about Palestinian flags on republican houses. A reasonable man would have left the deprivations behind by now. Wright was a man deranging.

  “Sometimes what looks like spying is only the company of men,” Jeremy said. “The man marooned on an island doesn’t have privacy, Ray. He’s only alone. I’m leaving.”

  “But the night’s so young, Bill.”

  “Leaving wider than that,” Jeremy said. “New York. For her.”

  He would not wait for Wright to finish his drink. He would not finish his own. Even the night was lighter than here in the bar, and he could feel it pull him away from Wright back to her sweet coppery smell. Long, thin shins. “I can’t help you, Ray.”

  “You forget there’s an us in this room,” Wright said. “You forget that if they know about me, they know about you.”

  In the bar, the clothes were black and the music was loud growling. Green light cast over a barkeep screaming what she was owed, the cloy of fry oil rising from somewhere in the back. “We are not important enough to be followed,” Jeremy said. “Only paranoid enough.”

  “Or maybe it’s nothing to worry about for you. Maybe you’ve got contact with Lawrence.”

  “He is as to be found as any of us.”

  Wright leaned over the table. “You’re getting privileged information. Else how is it you’r
e always out just in time? You leave Lisburn before Thiepval is bombed. You quit Strategic before Bear Stearns or Lehman goes down. Terror. Markets. How is it nothing touches you, Bill? Too late for anyone else is just the beginning for you.”

  “I guess I’m lucky,” Jeremy said, standing in the shuddering light, looking diagonally away from Wright, in the direction of home.

  Chapter 8

  Too late for anyone else is just the beginning for you. Jeremy could not understand the sentiment. He walked home, and he thought of how he had always been too late.

  Even Gunner had known it.

  He had warned him.

  Impossible Wright had forgotten, for example, that they were too late for the woman shot dead in her driveway at Dortmund. Impossible Wright had forgotten that they were too late for the family optimistic enough to have repainted their walls before the lot of them was gunned down at home. Impossible that Wright had forgotten that they were too late at every turn.

  Jeremy thought of the afternoon Gunner had warned him not infrequently. Gunner’s hand long and white on the horseshoe latch, the tension around the mouth. Jeremy had agitated something hard in his pocket, change or keys, as Gunner said, “There’s a witchy air around our rooms these days. I’ve a mind to disappear, Allsworth.”

  And because, at the time, he had not known they were too late, Jeremy had slid an unimpressed screen over his own unnerving. He had returned warning with warning: they’d find him. They had before.

  “There are places you won’t follow.” Gunner had grinned, then let the smile fall off his face. And was it memory or some retrospective flourish: that space between Gunner’s eyes closing like a fist, how something had passed overhead, drawing a shadow? “There are few places to begin anew and many to end, Allsworth. Maybe I want to do the democratic thing and die.”

  Jeremy could not unconvince Gunner of the sense blood remembered, that he was born knowing to scream for air, ancient indecencies—so why not the other thing? His sense was his father died so his son would be a freedom fighter who’d die for his son to be a freedom fighter, death his antecedent. “From wee boys on, it is sixers in our streets, vehicles of war driving by our doorsteps. We were Fianna Éireann when we could walk.”

  On that afternoon, they had volleyed. Morbid sentiment. Official craic. Irish platitudes. You were not born a soldier. An alibi. I will not have someone thrown in the ditch for my body, and you’re somewhere in London drinking gin and tonic. No one asked you to smuggle Barrett Lights. Sure of that now, are you?

  They had gotten tired.

  They had reached a point that Gunner had laughed quietly, or shook noisily. His eyes squeezed and his jaw hinged, a little askew, and Jeremy had stared.

  Gunner had been quiet a moment, thumbing a fingernail beneath the edge of his lower lip. “Feeling’s not right, Allsworth. It’s nothing you can put a name to, but I feel it on my neck, in endless smiles. The circumference constricts. You could get me out of here.”

  Too late for anyone else. Yes, Gunner had known it was too late.

  And of course Gunner had been right. Gunner had known the push of history was already beyond them.

  Because too late was just the beginning. In those days, One Rock had had a mostly unrequited penchant for information on Terrence Feeney, a Sinn Féin man with ties to the Social Democratic and Labour parties and a proselytizing touch. Feeney had shown himself dangerous at the last ardfheis. Feeney could light fire through a microphone, that big voice that made ideas big, individuals big: you can be a terror of a hero with a homemade spectacle and a free heart. He was less careful than Adams, presented as the great stylist of street warfare with his everyman pathos and dirty fingernails. But it was still unclear whether Feeney was only a starlet party whip or whether his orations included operations commands, still unclear how directly he killed.

  One Rock had pressed Jeremy, and Jeremy had pressed Gunner. He had told Gunner the way out of informing was bringing home a human trophy. There were tactics passed from One Rock. Jeremy looked at Gunner and told him to bait Feeney with botched ops. Lay on the rue and missed opportunities. Shake your head. Feeney will say next time. They are so hopeful, soldiers. The soldier will want to have learned better. The soldier will share a new plan.

  “Or he will think I’ve turned tout,” Gunner said.

  And so it went, the regular argument over whether Jeremy was trying to get Gunner killed. How they do it: You lose your sight first. They just drive you over a border with a bag over your head. Maybe over the radio Phil Lynott is singing. Maybe you hear the car door slam or open. There is a sound to the end of brotherhood coming out of a gun. Feeney was too beloved, Gunner believed. Mistakes are seminal in his proximity. They cascade in the gazers and fans.

  “He’s protecting Feeney,” One Rock had said. “His own fear being the alibi.”

  “He was quaking.”

  One Rock tilted his head. “They could have been movie stars.”

  In the quiet notches of days that followed, Gunner had repeated party lines, and Jeremy had called silence an insult to the deal. He had offered scant flattery for the rumors that trailed off, and he had bottled up his face so that it emitted no light. Air compressed, released. Someone was always holding his breath.

  But no matter the approach, no matter the slices of persona Jeremy applied, Gunner had become less reliable. Sometimes, Jeremy waited at the tree or the lot or the back room, and Gunner didn’t show. Later, Gunner would ask how he’d have explained why he wasn’t at the garage or the shebeen.

  “Use your artistic sensibilities,” Jeremy had said.

  “Like Patrick Mayhew’s as he declares Britain neutral on Northern Ireland?”

  “Or the ones involved smuggling guns,” Jeremy had said.

  There had been, too, the time that Gunner changed the place of their meeting to Andytown, placing Jeremy on the same block as the May murder of a Sinn Féin member named Alan Lundy. There was the time a bullet smashed through a window less than a meter from Jeremy’s gullet; they both dropped beneath the desk, Gunner’s face blank as milk. And there was the time that, waiting in the alley behind a hair salon, it was not Gunner who came but Brendan Kelly, mouth curled like sideways question punctuation.

  “Of all the places in all the world,” Jeremy had said the next day, speaking quickly to mitigate the tremble.

  “This isn’t Casablanca,” Gunner had said.

  “What reason had Brendan to be at the salon where you should have been?”

  “Yourself is not the only one who wonders.”

  The ominous matches persisted. It was a time of echoes. It was a time of double down. It was a time death came cheaper with big bombs, those bloody protest fireworks rearranging the composition of buildings. It was too late. Wright must remember that it had been too late.

  Now, almost two decades removed with London beneath his feet, what did Jeremy remember though? Jeremy remembered that when, on television, they watched the president of the Republic of Ireland shake Gerry Adams’s hand, Wilmington had spit on the floor. He remembered that Gunner’s step lost its buoyancy. He remembered that one afternoon he had gone to St. Malachy’s, found himself surrounded by all that brightness, the thick white filigree that seemed to drip off the church ceiling, and he knelt and did not know whether to hope there was or was not a god. He remembered that. But most of all, what he remembered was the green philodendron falling down behind One Rock as he said that Gunner was dead, that Jeremy was too late.

  “Was it fast?” Jeremy had asked.

  “Dead on arrival,” One Rock had said.

  “And the boy?”

  “Went home with the grandmother.”

  “And painless?”

  One Rock had tilted his head. “No one ever does report back.” Jeremy had been too late.

  Chapter 9

  When they had their quiet wedding, she
kissed him, her cheeks bouncing up in a smile when she pulled away. There were miniature flowers white against her hair, as Genevieve Bailey popped a loud, cheap cracker that smacked the smell of sulfur into the air. His parents drank their sherry in the restaurant with them after, and after that, in light linen clothes, he and Alexandra took a weekend at the sea. They looked out on the ocean pulling away from the shore, returning.

  In the weeks following, she took to the planning of the move, and the performance of everyday life gave him something to believe in. Morning coffee. Side-by-side teeth brushing. Anything on the couch, and most of all, food. Here is the slice with preserves. Young raspberry unspoiled. They would be preserved. After a bad movie, she said, “That was not a rip-roaring good time, but the gladiator will live.”

  Now home, theirs, he said, “Hungry?”

  “You cooked?”

  “No,” he said, “but I am very clever with a knife, preserves, and a piece of bread.”

  So they went to the kitchen. He told her to choose. A carrot. Lettuce. Box of biscuits. Anything. He would give her anything. And once she had her toast and milk in the living room, washing dishes was a good tedium, round motions, elements on the hands. You could assimilate good patterns with the slip of sponge, circles. A vague citrus fruit scent rose up with the steam. Hot faucet water.

  “If cozy is tiny in the code of realtors,” she shouted from beyond the threshold, “what is ‘shabby chic’?”

  “How many screens do you have open?” There was an intimacy to shouting through doorways, trust. You believed your message would be delivered to the person you couldn’t see, that they were there without verifying the body.