Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  She stood firm, but Lyle moved past her into the room. He gave off a damp smell like old flannel. He went to the bathroom and bent over, door open, faucet running, splashing his face. Alexandra stood looking at him through the doorway, a broken triangle of gazes between them. He gripped the sink, peered in the mirror, his reflection returning the silent, gaping mouth and the droplets catching at his hairline.

  “Where are the excuses for me to shoot down?” she said. “I’m a good shot for someone who plays poorly on a team.”

  Lyle looked down into the drain. “He is probably dead.”

  “Lyle,” she said.

  He sat down on the toilet seat, legs spread, knees balancing elbows, hands balancing head. “I was supposed to be there. Five o’clock. It was decided.”

  “What do you mean probably?” she said.

  “Definitely,” he said.

  Alexandra stepped back. She grabbed at the wall behind her, a sliding surface slipped, and somehow the closet was coming at her, her shoulders hitting the rod. Sideways, dragging hangers, the metal squeal fervent. When she could speak, she spoke from the floor. A pinprick of red light blinked deep in the closet ceiling.

  She righted her body and walked to the bathroom. The floor was off, unresponsive, as though she’d debarked a treadmill. She knelt on the bath mat with her hands on her thighs, supplicant.

  “I sent him an encrypted message through an application when I got off the subway,” Lyle said. “He responded he was working on the sixth floor of the building. I heard something, saw a long lumpy cloud in the distance. When I got to the building, it was bricks. There were pieces everywhere.”

  She could see every yarn bit in the bath mat, feel the blood churning through her body in strange loops of vein. On her own lips she focused. “A cloud,” she said.

  “An explosion.”

  “People survive,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “There were stories blown away.”

  “These accidents, they will say there were so many dead, so many injured.”

  “There is no question.”

  There was energy in her hands. She didn’t know what to do with them. Her fingers rolled, released.

  “Or he left already.”

  “It had only been seconds.”

  “You timed it.”

  “I saw it. A socket that used to be a building.”

  “They find people in the rubble in these accidents. They are hidden survivors.”

  Lyle looked at her finally. “I don’t think this was an accident, Alexandra.”

  “You think. Probably.” Her voice was tight and mocking.

  “Senators will say that black ops have unfettered power under the domestic security provisions, but in secrecy, in invisible budgets and the projects that creep outside documents, they can be eliminated without anyone except a few agency men knowing.”

  “He is only a coder.”

  “I thought he was paranoid. The encryption. The warehouse. He always saw a man.”

  Alexandra pinched her elbows. “They will clear the rubble.”

  “You’re bleeding,” Lyle said. “Your head.”

  “They find people. They wear the masks.”

  “Your head is bleeding,” he said. “Come here.”

  “I would feel it,” she said. “I would have known.”

  A careless flick at a box. Lyle reached at her with a clump of tissue embossed with flowers. Fear rose in her chest, and she slapped his hand away, one hand, another, missed a face.

  “Listen, you want me to do this,” he said. “You hit your head. You’re confused.”

  He came at her. She struck out again. She reached for anything. The ceiling pulled down the wall. For a moment all she could think of were possible weapons beyond her. A trash bucket. A toilet brush. There were eyebrows above. Lips taut in an awful quadrangle strung with saliva. He told her her name over and over, and she kicked and hit out and sometimes she was sure she felt flesh give.

  His voice was strained, toothsome. “Relax,” he said. Or “Alex,” he said. “It’s over.”

  She was swimming, all the long parts of her slapping at surface. Her breath was short, which meant she was alive. Alexandra got something wet and soft, an eyeball. He made a surprised noise, then batted and her head hit the floor. His knees were everywhere. She claimed his chin in her fist, dug in with her nails, felt one snap in half perpendicular to the quick. The bath mat wrinkled beneath her. He was screaming Jesus, he was wrong, he was nearly off her, one more punch. But something turned, and then her vision filled with a red orb and he was kneeling on her, anchoring hands, and there was no scream left in her chest, windpipe without wind, so that when she woke, there was dark blood dried to the tiled floor, matted in stiff hair, and flinch was consequent to light and movement. The only fact then was pain, and she was alone.

  Chapter 6

  Later, when it had been many days since the night at the hotel, Genevieve told Alexandra, “Remember when we were kids our parents told us television would turn our brains to mush.” Watching was supposed to save her from pain.

  But sometimes there was too much feeling even in the screen to take the advice of television. It was possible, she learned, to think for hours of something you couldn’t imagine: dead.

  And so for the first time in her life, there was sleep to look forward to. Only, pleasure-deaf, she faded in linens. Draw the blinds. Cover the head. Sleep to be alone. Sometimes, she would take a cab home from work, tell the driver to hurry. “Got somewhere to be, miss?” would be the question.

  “I cannot be late,” she’d say. She intended it only the way that meant there was no destination for her.

  Convoking dreamlessness, she swallowed roots and herbs. Jeremy came at her with spoons. She didn’t want food, but it was easier to accept the peanut butter or the ice cream, the soups he melted butter into so she wouldn’t disappear. She allowed Han to come to her in bed. There was only the solace of his warm head, alive on her chest.

  And she was tired. Awake, yes, but tired.

  “There is a sort of fact so heavy it drags the speech out of you, makes everything unspeakable,” she said to Jeremy.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Jeremy.

  “I thought what if he was right,” she said to Jeremy, and she didn’t finish.

  She was tired with confessing. She was tired with telling him all the secrets that had kept no one happy. The dead could not be happy.

  “Say something,” she said.

  “Rest,” Jeremy said.

  On nights the pills worked, she would, in dreams, sit at a restaurant with Lyle, a burgundy tablecloth hooded between. He’d eat his steak with enthusiasm, then, when her mouth was too full to say no, pull back a stretchy membrane from the meat, and she knew to turn away from the reveal. She woke up in sheets confused by tossing in her sleep.

  In the mornings, all the seeped substances were dried to her face, and her eyelashes adhered. As she dressed, Jeremy would speak to her of stages and symptoms. He would say there were professionals. It didn’t have to be him.

  “It is possible to do both at once,” he said. “To seek help is not a betrayal of grief.”

  Where there was good blankness was within the rote declarations of work. She said, we believe in the power of storytelling as a growth strategy. She said, we craft brand narratives that repeat, catch. We at Amica Malmot will make the plot of your company viral, she said, and we thank you for your time. But then the script ended, and sometimes her boss, Carver Ellington, would touch her bicep, say, “You can go now.”

  “Is everything okay at home?” Carver Ellington said.

  “Why wouldn’t it?” she said.

  “Andrea and I stayed at a really wonderful resort in Hawaii two years ago,” he said. “Just you, the beach, and your thoughts. I could send you the informatio
n.”

  It sounded like a nightmare to Alexandra.

  But she agreed to two weeks because it suggested that there had been a choice at all. She asked Carver Ellington to please send her the information about the resort. She pretended to be happy to use her frequent flyer miles. And, truly, she still must return to Nevada.

  But she did not buy the ticket, and she did not call. She sent the wire transfers and paid her mother’s bills, the numbers somehow a code that said, life still goes. There was no body to burn or bury. There had not even been a pronouncement.

  To Jeremy she explained, “It is not something to say on the phone.”

  “Sometimes, how is less important than that,” Jeremy said.

  “I’m not a patient,” Alexandra said.

  “Of course you aren’t,” he said. “You’ll let no one take care of you.”

  She perceived that he regretted the words immediately. It was like the way betrayal once made her contrite, the way she had allowed Jeremy to hold her when she used to return home after lying, pliant with shame, wanting to substantiate the goodness he saw. She knew now he removed the local section of the newspaper, where it was reported that people shot themselves smiling in pictures in front of a building blown out three weeks before by a gas explosion in Brooklyn, where, inexplicably, no body had been found. And still, like a child, she said, “You can’t make me.”

  Chapter 7

  Once, he would have made a list of dangerous names. He would have considered prison geographies, potential new relations. Now the task was count the days between his last meeting with Wright and the death. It was decide whether the correlation was spurious. And most of all, it was decide whether to confer with Lawrence.

  What was relevant: The position and velocity of an object cannot be judged by another moving object.

  What was relevant: Listening is not opening the ears. It is quieting the mind. Jeremy could not quiet his mind, and he did not pull the sheets up until the pitch of night began to bleed up past the horizon, paling to gray.

  Another thing he knew from Belfast: Admitting a lie was not admitting the truth. At its best, it was a dent in the process of elimination. You were told it was not nature but a bullet. You were not told who shot the gun.

  What was relevant: He must temper information. You could not revise what you told someone like Lawrence. Your rue afforded nothing.

  Chapter 8

  One day, she was home in the afternoon when Jeremy finished up with his clients. She’d bought six bags of groceries, and she stood over the sink in the kitchen surrounded by red cabbage and long wands of bread, plastic baskets of cherries. It was like coming home to a thought forgotten mid-clause. There were scissors in her hands, and he heard the edges on her hair, saw ends going muddy in the damp drain.

  She did not sit to tell him. Her bangs were still between two fingers as she spoke. She had been at a meeting with the other senior brand strategists and a man from a company called Dstil that specialized in targeted advertising. This man was saying he thought it was cute the concerns about discrimination, considering discrimination was the point of targeted advertisements. An event occurred in her skull, and suddenly she was screaming. The last thing she remembered was Carver Ellington picking up the phone and calling for security. Someone grabbed her arms. She was airborne.

  She looked at Jeremy as she told him, her hand hanging down with her fingers still strung through the looped handles of scissors. Her bangs were too short, and it made her look younger.

  In the days that followed, the firing made her linger as she never before had at home, sipping and thoughtful or distracted, pantless. It was strange to see her this way: same face, same quietness, but bereft. He didn’t know what was in her anymore. She stared. She blinked. It scared him to see her without any future in her eyes.

  At night, from bed, the new Alexandra reached her arms toward him until he came to her. It was not necessarily sexual even when it was sexual. In the mornings, her thinning T-shirt caught the early sun, as she sat with a mug by the window. It wasn’t that she didn’t move. It was that it was as if she were blown.

  To help, he walked Han to the park. In the game they played, everything could be spied. A tree, a duck, a father.

  “I spy with my little eye,” he said. “Something scary.”

  Chapter 9

  Lyle met Alexandra at the hotel at the designated time, hunching with a duffel bag full of paper and memory cards. To his eye, she took up less space than before. He removed a leather bracelet and whipped it in circles on his finger while she looked at the papers, a basement smell coming up from the opened zipper.

  She lay each sheet down carefully. She counted CDs. She wrote a list with each item and its date. Lyle knelt beside her on the floor. “I wanted him alive as much as anyone,” he said finally.

  “You’re sure about that?” she said.

  “The book is dead, if it makes you feel any better.”

  She stared. “My brother is dead, and now you sit here talking about your dead book.”

  Lyle rose and moved toward the door. His feet strode past her knees on the carpet. He had come because he knew what he had cost her, but there was nothing he could offer beyond records, and now she would not look at him.

  “Tell me one true thing about him,” she said. He had thought the conversation was over.

  Lyle held the doorknob at the threshold and twisted his head over his shoulder. She was very small, the way she folded herself on the floor.

  “He wanted to be loved.”

  Alexandra’s face quivered, stilled. “I did,” she said.

  Chapter 10

  To set a date, Lyle had fielded Cain’s supposed illnesses. The flu, cancer of a dog. Now, Barry Cain was there with a pink drink he said his wife drank when pregnant.

  Once Lyle would have asked if it was true what he supposed: that the body had been removed prior to the law enforcement sweep, that perhaps, even, the investigation had been led by agency men embedded in the police. But there was no book, no scoop left. There was only making that clear.

  “You probably know why I asked you here,” Lyle said.

  “Confess I don’t.”

  “It isn’t for the book I’m not writing,” Lyle said. “Which maybe you didn’t know. What I’m not doing.” The beer was spit warm in his hand, a craft selection in a precious stein. “Maybe that’s why you were hesitant to meet.”

  Cain flopped his hand over and ran through the diseases again, vet bills. “They get old, and it breaks your heart,” he said. “Because they can’t help themselves. They’re only animals.”

  “What I’m saying is, you don’t have to worry,” Lyle said. “Because I am standing groundless without my source.”

  “I’m a source,” Cain said.

  “McCreight was my source.”

  “Too crazy to manage?”

  “He thought more than friends or family, in algorithms we trust, and yet everywhere you look, it’s incursions. What is so crazy about that?”

  “Liked the guy enough to hire him,” Cain said, “but he had his proclivities, and they were the kind of proclivities you intake enough, everyone is out to get you.”

  “I’m dropping the book and keeping my nose clean,” Lyle said. “Do you understand?”

  Cain’s fat hands were folded in his lap. He kept them there and leaned into the bar to sip the pregnancy cocktail. “And why would you do that?”

  “Because,” Lyle said. “I have a daughter too.”

  Chapter 11

  The drink he bought Bri was ruined with time, watery whiskey warm with minutes. “Holy fucking nachos,” a girl said, and he thought he’d be sick. He looked at the newspaper he’d brought, but he couldn’t read.

  A little after ten, a thin body, head and arms and legs forming a droopy star, came in through the doorway. She came to his table. She
flopped down and threw her backpack in the booth.

  “Back from the dead,” Lyle said.

  It wasn’t funny to Bri Freeman.

  “Why not?”

  Why not was because Bri Freeman had had a visit from two men in suits. These were not academics.

  Why not was because think about men in suits showing up in her office, these people with badges that superseded the security people in the building.

  “We happened to read your very interesting article in the Journal of Middle Eastern Political Economy,” one had said.

  “No one happens to read anything in the Journal of Middle Eastern Political Economy,” she’d said.

  “We’re just here to talk.”

  “As fans,” she had said.

  So why not was because the one who said they were only here to talk observed, “Foreign affairs must be personal for you.”

  Why not was because she was stopped at LAX on the way to New York. They turned her bag inside out, denim and literature and tampons on a counter, picked up and examined as potential exhibitions of culpability. They ran a device over her and when it beeped, they brought her to a private room. They took the gloves out. “Routine and random, they say.”

  “Fuck them,” he said.

  She drank her terrible drink. She said, “They shared a face.”

  “Who?”

  “The passengers.”

  “Fuck them,” he said.

  She looked at the table of other people’s friends. “Every single one.”

  He could hear someone coughing or choking or laughing, human sputtering.

  “You see, they were grateful,” Bri continued.

  “Grateful.”

  “Someone was making sure they were safe.”

  He cursed for her. Options lit him up. Petitions. Calls. He specified various elected officials. He specified civil rights groups. His speech picked up speed. It was beyond him, bigger, and he couldn’t remember how many drinks he’d had. He looked at Bri Freeman, and she was a smear in his vision.