Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  “What if it’s not a scam? What if it’s that they think you’re very clever?”

  “Nah.”

  “You don’t think you’re clever, Tyrell?”

  “Putting words in my mouth, Mr. Jordan.”

  “Why don’t you sort me out then?”

  “‘Sort me out then,’” Tyrell repeated.

  Flat affect. Steady eye. His hands were folded.

  “And how did this idea come to you?”

  “Because it’s not literal. There’s one way and the other way. And they know it’ll seem like it’s the other way when I know, you know, they know: not even close.”

  One day Han would be a teenager. Jeremy imagined dinners in restaurants, the three of them. He imagined going to museums. They would come home after a movie, and he would ask Han whether it was tired, the plot. If it was too neat. And he would want Han to think the neatness was how life worked. He would want him to say, it’s real, Baba.

  “You don’t think they mean what they say.”

  “That’s it.” Tyrell nodded his head and leaned over to rest his arms on his knees. “That’s it.”

  “So if I have it correct,” Jeremy said.

  Tyrell sighed. “They say college so it looks like they’re in it.”

  “In what?” Jeremy said.

  “It, man. Come on. Don’t play ESL with me.”

  He liked Tyrell immensely, and he tried to be patient, tried to see ahead in the conversation, carve it. Jeremy hoped that if something were ever to happen to him, whoever was left to console his son would have something wiser to say than he did now. “There are many its, Tyrell.”

  “I’m saying the image.”

  “Which?” Jeremy said.

  “They can’t wait to get rid of us but talk college so they look like people who care.”

  Jeremy wrote a note in his pad. “Or maybe they just want to see you succeed.”

  Tyrell laughed. He had a giggle still. His voice hadn’t changed, and it was still the laugh of a child. He put his hands on his knees and took big breaths. He looked at Jeremy square, suddenly, serious. “Then how come they pass people that can’t succeed a long division test into the eighth grade?”

  “Sometimes we need to believe in honest mistakes,” Jeremy said. “Sometimes we need to trust the adults in our life.” Jeremy drank from a glass of water. He replaced it on a small table in the corner by his chair. Consistency of space. Consistency of objects. This is the environmental condition for safe sharing. “Do you think this might have anything to do with your father?”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes our brain connects things without us even knowing, Tyrell. Maybe we feel out of control. Maybe we can’t make our sick parent better. And maybe it makes us think something about whether we can rely on grown-ups.”

  Tyrell pushed his lower lip forward, turned his head. His arms were crossed. Self-comfort. The comfort given when it was not anticipated it would be received.

  Or else he was protecting himself.

  “What would you lose if you trusted that people mean what they say?”

  The boy picked a thread hanging off his pants. His nail scratched back and forth on the fabric. “Okay, Mr. Jordan,” Tyrell said. He looked up. “And how I’m supposed to trust adults when you don’t even listen?”

  “You don’t think I listen?”

  “Not even here.”

  “Tyrell.”

  “In your own world, Mr. Jordan,” Tyrell said. “No sight of what’s in front of you.”

  Chapter 8

  They’d married and he had, at times, gotten better, though he had never been best. This, for a hopeful person, might have been a consolation prize. But instead, strange things occurred of his own doing if not—or so it seemed—his volition. There was the mutant yolk cooked sunny-side up, inedible when he saw its yellow doubleness. There was the missed call. Then, he had upended the trash, found what he had not intended to seek, and the hotel receipts were as real as thin was the story.

  She had not even seemed to believe the narrative herself. Of course she wouldn’t. It was an alibi.

  A friend, Alexandra had called him.

  And a diamond is a rock.

  He could not speak the word that Lyle Michaels was.

  Jeremy passed a park shrieking with children, trees imported to gaps in cement. It was a Friday, and a slapping sound was skipping rope. Jeremy kept on. His head hurt with every sound come into it.

  Wright had said, listen to everything in case it’s something. An Intelligence Corps trainer had said, we trained the E4A, but there are dogs that bite the hand who feeds. And Alexandra, she had said soon she must go to Nevada to hire a home health aide for her mother. From somewhere, the jag of a child’s cry cut through the noise, and there was a loss of equilibrium for a moment. In the sky, the sun shone, but even in the light he perceived a loss of center, transitory North Star. There was something rising up his throat. He paused by a trash can to smell the steadying stench of decay.

  “Baba sick?”

  Sometimes Jeremy forgot where he was in space. But he didn’t forget that a body is evidence that you are watched. He must be a man strong enough to be seen by his son. He walked again, and Han was still holding his hand. He walked faster. Just get them home.

  “Excuse me,” someone said.

  He stopped. He turned toward the voice. The voice, he saw, belonged to a young woman in blue jeans. “Excuse me,” she said again. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “What exactly do you think you’re doing with this little boy?” She knelt. Her hand was upturned, pink fingers spread, extended to Han. “Where are your mommy and daddy?” the woman said.

  He looked down at the splash of black hair on his boy’s head, looked down at the blond hair on his own arm. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he said. “This is my son.”

  Black. Blond. This woman’s hair was brown.

  “I’m Rachel,” she said. “I’m a friend. Can you tell me where your mommy and daddy are?” And she was touching him now. She had his hand.

  There were explanations, but Jeremy didn’t have them. There were explanations, but his mind was locked up. His son was not speaking. His son whose hand she’d taken. She wanted to take his son. And before Jeremy knew it, he pulled hard, and he was running. He hugged Han to his chest, heard him cry, and ran.

  Later, after the matter was cleared up, after the police had been satisfied and Alexandra had put Han to bed, after she’d said the woman with the brown hair and blue jeans could fuck off, the woman with her ratty brown hair and ratty blue jeans could go fuck a hydrant covered in dog piss, her voice was very tight and she had to pour out a glass of red wine she’d filled with ice cubes. Jeremy folded the corkscrew, gave her a new glass.

  “But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is why did you run?”

  Chapter 9

  She did what she did when facts were unruly. She used the internet tracking program she’d downloaded to monitor her mother. Alexandra had saved her credit card information on her mother’s computer. Now she could see where the money went, she could see what her mother wrote, and it mollified something to know she could know.

  From a store that sold everything, Janice Chen purchased DVDs of her programs. When there were no more of her shows, she bought movies that came up on the screen as suggestions, dramas in which dangerous women threatened to ruin everyone’s history with secrets. She bought lipsticks: nudes, reds, magenta. She bought thirty-five-dollar perfume. Last week, liquid foundations had arrived via FedEx in glass bottles, and today, an eye set came at 2:33 p.m. She had not needed to sign for the package.

  What occasioned the cosmetics, it seemed, were her mother’s emails with “Victor,” “Victor” who wrote that Janice Chen was a woman who deserved. He call
ed her things like Princess. He asked, What is the fashion of your heart?

  It was surprising how much of herself her mother told.

  I lost a husband, the most beautiful man I ever saw, and no one knows my pain, least of all my hateful babies, her mother wrote. It was the stillness I loved about Mr. Chen, the common sense of his long, beautiful hands slicing raw meat. The money from his store went to his sisters, who never approved of me, even though I was the mother of his child, which means certain rights, a fact obvious as a whitehead pimple. My own mother didn’t like Orientals or Jews, but she knew the rights of a mother.

  On that topic, I was not a mother like my own, Grace Oliver. I never beat my children, who had to grow up fatherless when they should have had that life with the pride of their own store. My two children are:

  (1) Alexandra, who doesn’t even bring my grandson to Nevada and didn’t have her wedding near home when she married an English. She has that civilized Oriental look but didn’t care her own mother didn’t have the nerves to fly and couldn’t sit on an airplane the length of an ocean without pain in the bad hip.

  (2) Shel, who became my son after his father, my brother, died drunk driving the night the United States Olympic Miracle on Ice hockey team beat the Soviets. It was not any different to me that he wasn’t Chen. I never treated my children any different, even though Shel was a public rascal once he started school. I always treated him right as my own, proof being it was my disability checks wasn’t it that went to lunches, which you only need basic human intelligence to see what that means.

  In answer to your questions dear Victor, I have survived on old bread soaked in milk. I am alone, but I don’t need much. I know no one will ever do it for you. I raised my babies on my own, I entertained myself, I made up my own mind. That is who I am.

  Your princess,

  Janice

  “Victor,” Alexandra saw, had already written back.

  I know something you can’t do alone, he wrote. That was when Alexandra decided to stop reading.

  Chapter 10

  She thought of telling Jeremy Lyle’s proposal, and she thought of not telling Jeremy Lyle’s proposal. Not telling Jeremy Lyle’s proposal had its benefits. Suppose Shel wanted to be part of their life, Han’s. Shel would not then be the person to Jeremy who had once been dangerous, had once been a spy.

  Besides, when she tried to formulate her reasons for not telling Jeremy Lyle’s proposal, for how she could keep quiet the loudest thought she had though he was her husband, and she loved him, she did not want specifically to lie, she thought he’d forgive her. There was precedent.

  The precedent was the time he’d told Robert and Cassandra that he had been raised by a single mother.

  Alexandra had nodded along.

  Alexandra had not immediately mentioned Carl.

  It was only later, after they left and Alexandra had waited until the door was locked, that she demanded an explanation.

  Pleaded maybe. But with anger.

  She remembered now how Jeremy’s voice sped up, consonants stampeding. Carl was his dad, but he wasn’t, Jeremy had said. He thought Carl was, but he wasn’t. When Jeremy applied to the army, there had been paperwork to fill out. He had listed the man he’d always known as his father as his father. When his mother saw the forms, she had told him he was an idiot. Carl was his stepfather. His real father was a Hungarian doctor who’d employed his mother to organize his life by the alphabet, and though his mother had raised him on her own until he was five, he guessed he’d just deluded himself a little because when he was young, he’d wanted a dad so badly.

  “I was embarrassed,” he had said.

  And she had said, “I don’t want to not know you.”

  “You do know me.”

  “I didn’t know your family.”

  “You do now,” Alexandra remembered he’d said.

  Delayed gratification.

  She had asked, “Is there something else you’re keeping from me?” and in the immediate days that followed they had been a little smaller, a thinner unit. But in time, they’d grown back, become more expansive again. They’d pretended nothing was wrong, and then nothing was.

  Chapter 11

  All afternoon he and Han had been cartographers. There was a cardboard atlas bigger than Han that Alexandra bought at a children’s store one day. Han had needed Jeremy to turn the page. Or sometimes he had put it on the floor and crawled over continents. England. Ireland. China.

  She could be anywhere now.

  And so now he was too awake and, too awake, he paid the sitter, left the apartment building, passing between stone animals guarding their doorway. The streets were drowning with data as he walked. He saw pregnant women yelling for their already born to slow down, police officers writing tickets, and leashes on every corner. He went all the way downtown, past the open stores with crates of produce tilted for display. He turned back near the Manhattan Bridge, and someone was always shouting after a beautiful woman.

  He was walking it off.

  Or he was walking, minimally.

  His legs gained rhythm as they forgot streets, all the garbage bins slackened of meaning. He was able to stop extrapolating off faces. In theory, the stroll was a way to remember the horizon, throw off the buildings converging, the mass of information that was this city. De facto, it was a way to reduce the landscape to the background of a problem called Lyle Michaels, stare through the pinprick.

  Gather information. Listen. There is always something more. It is a contest of exhaustion.

  The night before she met with Lyle Michaels, there had been an unfamiliar smell in the house. Nail varnish. He had watched her read gossip websites as she painted her nails. Red Dahlia was the name of the bottle’s color. She would not have believed him if he said that the flower signified betrayal. He watched the slow drag of gluey polish, the brush spreading. She painted just one of Han’s fingernails.

  “You can tell the stories?” she had said.

  So Jeremy had tucked in Han. He had read the picture book with the fox and the picture book with the duck. He told Han about the nutcracker and Clara. He told him about the rat. He made his mouth firm in the shapes, so his son would learn, so his son would have language and always tell him.

  Alexandra was packing in the living room when he finished. He looked at her from the hallway, and it occurred to him there was always a frame. Even together, they were part of a composition that ended. He’d found ways to extend the panorama, but even vistas carried edges. He went to the bedroom to lie down.

  When she came to look in on him, he blamed clients. There was a young boy. He would get up in the middle of the night, take every item out of the refrigerator. He set a rabbit on fire. The two parents were in prison, aggravated battery and manslaughter. His aunt wanted to know he could get better, but do the math of his fate. It made Jeremy’s head heavy.

  “You’re afraid for him,” Alexandra said.

  It was like a Russian book he’d read once, he’d told her. The author said all wrestlers cheated for bookies, but there was a place in Hamburg, a back room where wrestlers brawled in earnest. Only there could you know what a man was capable of, what the Hamburg score was. He thought about that book, and he thought how there was no Hamburg score in real life. He needed to think. He said he wasn’t feeling like himself.

  “Who are you then?” She smiled.

  “Your husband,” he said.

  She had gone to the doorway, rested a finger on the light switch. “Since when do you speak Russian?” she had said.

  Now he took a left and headed west. The sky was clear, and in the streets, women in tall shoes jangled with weekend jewelry. Passing groups was meditative. He thought of what Alexandra was doing now. What she’d done. She had been taking strange trips since before they were married. It suggested choreography, tactics. Maybe she was in love with this man
, always had been.

  From his research, elementary stuff, Jeremy knew in 1999, Lyle Ross Michaels had taken the same class as Alexandra, The Odyssey Then and Now. Ostensibly, this was where they had met. Ostensibly, a visit to Lyle Michaels was the real reason for the trip years ago attributed to the New York University reunion, the one Genevieve had not attended, and the one that was not archived on the internet.

  Lyle Michaels was not married. The danger was that he was ready to be.

  Somehow, he’d forgotten to snap into the SIGINT stance, the ear turned toward secrets, codes, and clear and present danger—enough to forget the vague dangers of fractionally requited love. But she had not left him. There were actions ahead. Jeremy could secure their life, but he knew this was a time for carefulness. It was a time to ask before answering, consider before doing. He would walk it off until his appointment with Wright. He would wait for the facts to speak.

  Chapter 12

  A problem: facts had a way of hiding other facts. The facts of Northern Ireland had been good water for fish, mild weather from the Gulf Stream. And that it was a temperate place had not meant the sectarians were any more moderate than elsewhere. The last year he was a spy, the whole city was redolent with umbrage turned to blood, hoax peace, and pretty political verbiage. Only driving approached truth to Jeremy, everything flooding by him, the whole country running away with complications of animus.

  “An bhfuil feall eile le teacht?” Gerry Adams would ask—is there another betrayal coming?

  And Jeremy might have believed it was only paranoia—not paranoia, perhaps, but the logic of sectarian war, fathers for fathers, a country of wrong places at wrong times—if it had not been for Wilmington.

  That night, in Lisburn, Jeremy drank with FIFA in the background, the green turf washing down, and in all the legs, he couldn’t keep straight the teams. He had lost count of the Guinness. Someone sat next to him. There was a penalty kick. People leapt in the stands. He heard his name, the weight of a hand on his shoulder.