Fearless ; The Smoke Child

by Lee Stone

  The adverts ended, and silence crashed in. Rachel exhaled, loudly enough for the microphone to pick up the noise. Loud enough for effect. Her smoke rushed up and swirled and eddied into the air in front of her. The smoke became air, and the air became smoke. Bleeding. The heavy arm of the studio clock thudded forward, inevitably.

  Six minutes and eight seconds to go.

  Behind the triple-glazed window, Rachel’s producer looked up from her papers. She had heard the presenter exhale at the end of the ad break, and on instinct she had looked into the spot lit studio and rolled her eyes. Rachel was smoking in the studio again. Fuck it.

  It would be the producer who would get the call at home tomorrow, from the morning team, complaining about working in a room that smelled like an ashtray. The producer made a mental note to leave her phone on silent when she got home.

  Rachel White had been hosting the late-night phone in for the last three years, and at the start it had been a struggle. It felt plastic. It felt like an act. During the day she had fun, met friends, worked out. At night she became aggressive, argumentative, edgy.

  Eventually though, as sure as water cuts through rock, the nightly outpouring had worn her down. Rachel was lost in the part. Moody, unfair and unkind. Bleeding.

  “David, Line Seven.”

  Husky.

  The wind was blowing into the caller’s face, making his eyes water and sting. Way below him, the bright the neon Staples Center sign glared up at him from the gray corrugated roof of one of L.A.’s most famous addresses. The playoff final had just finished, and jubilant Lakers fans were swarming around the circular building and out into Nokia Plaza and the surrounding streets. David Barr’s military training had not let him down; he had chosen his moment carefully for maximum impact.

  The second hand slammed forward again, but Rachel waited. She had instinct, and she sensed that this would be a good call. He was outside, which meant he’d called the show on a whim. Breathy, which meant he was emotional. Probably going to be a ratings winner.

  Five minutes and fifty-eight seconds to go. Network news wouldn’t wait.

  “David? Hello?” she pressed. Tone was everything; different voices unlocked different situations. Rachel had perfected her armory. Harsh, playful, bored, disbelieving, caring, whimsical, enthralled, enraged, impressed, conspiratorial, furtive. Each emotion that her voice conveyed would unlock a reaction in her callers. They were her marionettes.

  The producer’s note on Rachel’s MSN told her that David Barr was a US Army Captain, and she knew how to deal with military men. With the end of the show breathing down her neck, she needed to keep this caller on a tight leash. Controlled.

  “David, talk to me.”

  Urgent. Instructive. She figured he’d be used to following orders.

  There was a pause as Barr cleared his throat and prepared for the last phone call he would ever make.

  “I’m on the fifty-second floor of the Marriot and I’m about to jump.”

  Fuck. Five minutes and thirty-seven seconds to go.

  Chapter Nine

  Fifty-Second Floor, Marriott Hotel, Los Angeles.

  “And we choked on all our dreams, We wrestled with our fears

  Running through the heartless concrete streets.”

  - Levellers, One Way

  Five minutes and thirty-six seconds to go.

  The smoke from Rachel White’s cigarette still hung in the air but she was already stubbing out the butt and leaning forward towards the microphone. Focused. Why the hell had he decided to jump when she only had five minutes of the show left? Damn it.

  If time ran out, she could offer to head out to the Marriot, to talk to him. It would be a great cliff hanger ending. She could use the old trick of making her producer host the last couple of minutes of the show as she herself began a mercy dash across town. She could broadcast from the back of a cab on a scratchy cell phone en route. She’d done it before.

  Tune in tomorrow to find out if he jumped…

  But even as the idea came into her head, she discounted it. The Lakers had just beaten the Celtics in game seven, and the whole place would be grid-locked for another two hours. Which made her think David Barr was probably an attention seeker, having chosen tonight of all nights to stand on a rooftop next to the Staples Center and call a radio station.

  Actually, Barr wasn’t standing on the rooftop. He was sitting. It had taken him some effort to get where he was, too. He had taken the lift to the top floor and then pulled himself out of his chair at the foot of the stairway that accessed the roof. The chair had toppled as he’d hauled himself out, and for a moment he thought he might wake up one of the penthouse guests, but nobody came.

  His arms had grown stronger over the past year as he had wheeled himself through Santa Barbara each day, and now he used that strength to drag his body up to the top of the short flight of stairs and out into the cool night air. He had crawled across the rough bitumen flat roof which had cut into his hands, but he’d been careful not to rip his new suit. Then he had used all of his energy to pull himself onto the low wall, which guarded the edge of the building.

  He used the last of his strength to drag his useless legs over the edge and then stopped to catch his breath. Gravity would do the rest.

  The second hand on the studio clock slammed forward again.

  Rachel White figured that the next five minutes would be great radio. Maybe she could talk him down; maybe she could keep him talking until the cops arrived. Either way, she was confident that the whole thing would eventually be an anti-climax. If you’re determined to kill yourself, why would you bother to phone a radio station? It seems like overkill. In the last three years, four callers had phoned up threatening to jump. None of them had gone through with it.

  She weighed up her options as shrewdly as she could.

  “If you’re really at the top of the Marriot, tell me what you can see.”

  David Barr looked down below him.

  “What do you want me to tell you? I can see Boston fans weeping. I can see the top of the Staples Center with a massive neon sign on it. A Herbal Life sign. Who gets to read those signs?”

  “People who are thinking about throwing themselves off buildings, maybe?” Rachel offered. She was walking a tightrope, she knew. Trying to engage him, connect with him. Trying to hint at compassion without selling out her audience. Without breaking out of her persona. Shackled.

  “I’m not thinking about throwing myself off,” Barr corrected her. “I am going to throw myself off. There’s a car on fire down there, and people coming out of the Nokia theater, and I can see Lakers fans… Jesus, that’s Jack Nicholson!”

  “Really?”

  “No. How the hell could I see that? I’m fifty-two stories up.”

  Rachel smiled, despite herself. She couldn’t work this guy out. She figured that he had a sense of humor, and he sounded relaxed and confident. So why was she more worried about him than any of the others who had threatened to jump? There was no anger in his voice, no bitterness, no sorrow. He didn’t sound desperate. Her heart sunk as she hit on it. He sounded resigned to it. Not good. Not good at all.

  Four minutes and forty seconds to go.

  Rachel reached for her mouse and dragged the news jingle into a play-out window on her computer. Then she dragged in a Pearl Jam track, just in case this thing finished early. Abruptly. Violently.

  I’m Still Alive.

  Ironic.

  “OK, smartass,” she smiled, “I believe you, and you’re playing around up there on the roof. So, what’s the deal?”

  David Barr thought about how to answer. This moment would be his eulogy, and he had prepared well for it. Earlier in the day, he had poked his finger through the small tear in the seat of his wheelchair and fished around inside it. His fingers grappled with the edge of his plastic card and then pulled it out into the daylight.

  He was a disciplined man, and he hadn’t touched the visa card since before Kandahar. It had molded i
tself to the contours of his buttock over the months, and David Barr laughed to himself thinking he might have created a new form of biometric identification. He wanted to laugh. His heart felt light. He had been playing a losing hand for a full year, and now he felt a strange relief course through him as the end game approached. He had submitted to his least bad fate.

  Tyler and his boss, a gnarled old war dog called General Lang, were well connected. They would watch his bank account for sure. It’s possible that after a few months they had realized he would not pop up on the radar. They might even have wondered whether he had the money at all. But with three hundred million dollars missing from the US treasury, someone would still keep an eye out for David Barr.

  He had withdrawn cash at an ATM in the departure lounge of the Tom Bradley terminal at LAX. At least they might waste a few minutes trying to work out if he got on a plane. He had chosen a machine that didn’t appear to be overlooked by CCTV and taken five hundred dollars out of his account. As he had typed in his pin number, he felt sure he had just alerted someone to the fact that he was still alive, and that he was in Los Angeles. It wouldn’t take them long to find him.

  He pulled his cap a little lower over his brow and checked the balance which had grown to over $110,000 as his various pensions and allowances has dripped into the account untouched over the last thirteen months. He withdrew another five hundred, just because he could.

  After stuffing the cash in his pocket, he had wheeled back through the terminal feeling more acutely than ever that he was on borrowed time. Outside the airport, he picked up the Green Line bus to Union Station. The bus driver helped him through the indignity of boarding public transport, kneeling his vehicle and then helping the veteran to truss his chair safely to the inside wall of the transport.

  Barr was grateful that the driver didn’t fuss. He was too busy being embroiled in a good-natured argument with a vivacious woman on a seat further back.

  “Now you just’ listen to me, sugar pie,” she hollered at the driver as he went about his work. She had a melodic voice that rang out theatrically. She would have made Aretha Franklin jealous. She didn’t care who was listening. She was playing up.

  “I think there’s something wrong with your head if you think the Lakers are gonna win tonight!” she shouted down the aisle, goading the driver as though he were her big brother.

  “Nyesha, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard” he shouted back over his shoulder, all smiles as his hand held tight to the wheel. The bus rattled and juddered as they journeyed along the elevated airport ring road. “You keep saying things like that, and I will put you right off this bus!”

  “Who’s this Kobe Bryant anyhow?” she roared back at him. She looked around the bus at her fellow passengers who had been listening to the debate for a few stops. She was no shrinking violet, but she was infectious. Most of the passengers were quietly encouraging her.

  “Woman, I’ll put you off this bus, and you’ll have to walk home!”

  “Ko-bee Bryant!” she emphasized. “The man’s got plasters all over his fingers, he looks like Michael Jackson!”

  People around her laughed.

  The bus driver eyed her up in his mirror. He shook his head. She was loud, argumentative, opinionated, distracting; and he hated the days when Nyesha didn’t get on his bus. Sometimes he’d take a bit of extra time loading his passengers’ heavy suitcases, if he knew she was about to clock off. He didn’t know where she lived or what she did once she got off his bus. He didn’t know much about her at all, if he stopped to think about it.

  “Hey you!” she called, her throaty voice slicing effortlessly through the noise of the bus. “Hey, army man!”

  David Barr was warming to her. Maybe it was because he had a thousand dollars in his pocket, or maybe it was because he knew that he’d set his end game in motion and that time was limited and precious, but he thought her voice sounded like birdsong. Usually, he’d spit an insult back at anyone who shouted ‘hey you’ at him, but not today. Not on this bus.

  He turned his head and gave her his full attention, fixing his cornflower eyes on her.

  “You’re a Boston fan with me, right?” she implored. He was getting dragged into the game, but he didn’t mind. His blue eyes twinkled back at her. Nyesha thought he could have been handsome, if he’d cut his hair.

  “Ma’am, I’m a long way from home but I will support the Lakers all the way just to see how mad you get!”

  She shrieked.

  “Everyone I meet today is a damn fool,” she called, emphasizing the word ‘fool’ as she looked into the driver’s mirror, laughing. She started to gather up her belongings.

  “Nyesha, you’ve gone too far now with this Celtics nonsense. I’m putting you off this bus at the very next stop; I don’t mind how far you’ve got to walk!”

  The driver brought the bus to a stop. The hydraulics hissed, and the doors opened as Nyesha navigated her wide hips like a metronome between the rows of seats towards the front.

  They both knew that this was Nyesha’s stop. David Barr had the feeling that she got ‘thrown off’ the bus on a fairly regular basis. She ruffled the driver’s hair on the way past him and called her goodbyes over her shoulder to nobody in particular.

  “See you tomorrow, Mr. Lincoln,” she said as she breezed past the man at the wheel, all charm and lashes and perfume.

  The rest of the journey had passed with little excitement; Barr had transferred between the bus and the subway with minimum fuss, passing through the airy East portal of Union Station under the watchful gaze of the ten colorful Angelinos in the gigantic City of Dreams mural.

  A red line and a cab journey later, he was outside Prada on Rodeo Drive. Captain Barr had worn the same clothes for most of the last three hundred and eighty days. It was the price he had paid for anonymity. For safety. But now that someone knew where he was there was no need to pretend. No need to hide. It would all be over soon enough now, and he might as well look good when the end came.

  So, he wheeled himself towards the door, with his year-old clothes, his long hair, the bad smell and his creaking wheelchair. The security guard was hesitant. There was no way that a man who looked as bad as David Barr should be coming into the store, and yet he didn’t want to be the bad guy manhandling a crippled war veteran in the street. Barr decided for him. As the guard went to open his mouth, Barr reached out to him and handed him a fifty-dollar bill.

  While the guard tried to work out why he’d just been given the best tip of the month by someone who looked like he hadn’t bathed for a year, Barr wheeled past him and into the store, the chair creaking and straining over the threshold of the doorway.

  Inside, he thought it best to take control of the situation. His combat training had taught him it was prudent to tackle the biggest and strongest first, so he approached the most experienced (and most horrified) looking assistant, wheeling his chair between her and any obvious means of escape.

  “I need a suit, what can you do?”

  The woman looked him up and down, her gaze settling on the fleshy end of his thigh sticking out of his trouser leg, and the gap below it where most people would expect to find their lower leg. Everything that ought to be below David Barr’s left knee was buried in a cardboard box in a desert somewhere outside Basra.

  She pointed timidly at his leg, and at his wheelchair. “Will you need…” she looked perplexed, “pants?”

  “Of course I’ll need pants, for Christ’s sake!” he barked. “And stop looking at me like I’m Julia fucking Roberts.”

  After that, the woman was relatively helpful and together they found a sharp suit in next to no time. He got the feeling that she was keen to conclude their business as quickly as possible, and he couldn’t blame her. As he sat in the middle of the perfumed boutique, he glimpsed himself in one of the many mirrors, and he realized how far he had sunk. The price he had paid just to stay alive. To stay hidden.

  “Are we taking the suit home, or wearing it?�
� she asked, in the airiest tone she could muster.

  David Barr was direct. “Ma’am, let’s be honest. We both know that I smell of sweat and piss, and I’d prefer not to transfer that smell to my new suit. Perhaps you could double-bag it for me?”

  The suit cost considerably more than a thousand dollars, so he was forced to pay by card. It wouldn’t matter now. All six sales assistants clustered around the visa card reader, and none of them disguised their shock when the sale went through without a problem. They thanked him, and he wheeled his way out of the shop. He hadn’t reached the door before he could hear air freshener cans behind him.

  The security guard was quick to hail a cab for him; partly because a man who looked like David Barr wasn’t good for business, and partly because he was keen to earn the fifty-dollar tip he’d picked up from a guy would didn’t look like he had fifty dollars to his name. Guilt is a great motivator, thought Barr.

  The cab took him to the Marriot after a short stop at an electrical store where he grabbed a pre-paid mobile phone. He knew he wouldn’t find a salon keen to tackle his tangled hair, so he bought a pair of clippers and did the job himself once he got to his hotel room.

  He shaved and scrubbed. As the stubble and the grime came off, his cheeks looked hollow after his time on the streets, but he didn’t look so bad. The cleaner lines on his face framed his cornflower eyes much better, and when he shaved off thirteen months of matted hair from his scalp, he became the man he remembered. He looked in the mirror at an old friend. Out of hiding, for one night only.

  And now, up on the Marriot roof, the night was nearly over. It was time to pay the price.

  Four minutes eighteen seconds to go.

  The woman on the end of the phone was waiting for an answer. She obviously had listeners in Los Angeles because a crowd had gathered below him, with some people pointing up towards him. The plaza below was filling up with cop cars too.