Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  I bolted out of the bathroom, with Nadia following behind. I didn’t even want to look at her. I dropped some money on the table, grabbed my coat, and fled the restaurant. Taxi!

  The taxi took me to Penn Station, where, a few minutes later, I boarded a train to Leyden. It was two o’clock; the train would get me there by three-forty-five, at which point I’d get in one of the Chariots of Fire, which the local cab company called the green-and-brown junkers loitering around the train station. I’d be home by four; Mandy’s bus came a few minutes after that; Olivia would certainly be home. It would have been better if I could have time alone with Olivia, to dispel whatever Nadia had said, to explain it, or, more likely, deny it, to, at any rate, somehow make it go away. Who knew? Perhaps I would throw myself on her mercy. Was Olivia’s mercy a large enough target to hit? Would it cushion my fall like those immense trampolines firefighters hold for those who must leap from burning buildings?

  The train made its way along the Hudson. I didn’t have anything to read. The Amtrak magazine lasted me for five minutes; the river looked gray and nervous. The train, bound eventually to Niagara Falls, was only half-full. Often, in the past, I had run into Leydenites on the train from New York. I hoped with a fervency that approached the boundaries of prayer that I would not see anyone I knew today. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts—not that I was having any thoughts, but I assumed a notion or two would be forthcoming. I didn’t want to have to make small talk. I didn’t want to have to account for one thing about my life—how my kids were, how my wife was, what I was up to. My life had been irradiated; my tolerance for small talk had been burned out of me.

  Sitting across the aisle from me was a guy my age, at least two hundred and fifty pounds, dressed in outpatient chic: torn trousers, a leather vest, a leather World War I pilot’s cap, goggles, a beard to the third button of his flannel shirt. Despite all that, he was affluent enough to be wearing a gold Rolex and carrying a cellular phone in his backpack. He took it out, unfolded it, took off his tinted goggles and put on a pair of half-frame reading glasses, and dialed a number.

  “Hi, honey, it’s me,” he said. “I just remembered I forgot to tell you how much I love you.” He listened to whatever Honey was saying and then he laughed happily. “That’s right, built for comfort, not for speed.” He listened and squirmed happily in his seat. “I know, I know, it was for me, too. Hey, what do you say? Is Antoine still there? Put him the hell on, will ya?” And then, with Antoine on the line, he began speaking rapid French, this time in a tone that suggested an employer speaking to a subordinate.

  “Would it be too much of an imposition for me to make a call on that?” I asked him, when he was folding his phone back up. “I would of course pay for my call.”

  “You’re not worried about these things giving you brain cancer?” he said.

  “I really couldn’t care less,” I said.

  I thought I was going to phone Ezra, but I found myself dialing Olivia, first hearing my voice and the machine and then calling her again, letting it ring once, hanging up, and calling again. I then indicated to the man across the aisle, using a mixture of shrugs and smiles, that I was going to make one more call, and this time I phoned Ezra.

  “Where are you?” he practically screamed, once his assistant put me through.

  “On the train.”

  “Train? What train?”

  “I’m going to Leyden.”

  “Leyden?”

  “It’s where I live, Ezra. When I’m not you-know-who.”

  “You-know-who? What are you talking about, Sam? This is serious. We’ve got you booked on an eight o’clock flight out of Kennedy—it’ll get you in to Los Angeles at ten, L.A. time, and then a car will take you to the studio. You’re going on ‘The Nash Benton Show.’ You have no idea what it took to get you on.”

  “Yeah? What’ll it take to get me off?”

  A silence. Then: “Nash himself is reading your book, as we speak, Sam, as we speak.”

  “I’m on a train, going in the opposite direction.”

  “Then get off of the train, Sam. What happened with that woman? Did you fix things?”

  “I can’t get off the train. It’s moving. As angry as you are right now, I still won’t jump off a moving train.”

  “Then when the train does stop, Sam, you have to turn around, right away. If there’s not another train, then hire a car. This thing, thirty minutes on ‘Nash Benton,’ Sam, it can be worth fifty thousand dollars, in your pocket, Sam. You only have to be in L.A. for one day, Sam. Okay? Sam?”

  Was it just my imagination, or was Ezra overusing my name, sort of slapping me across the face with it, to bring me to my senses?

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “You have to be there. I don’t want to say this—”

  “Then don’t.”

  “—but you’re—”

  “Contractually obligated?”

  “That’s right, Sam.”

  We went back and forth a few more times, and at the end, naturally, I promised I’d be at the airport by seven. It would give me a half an hour to see Olivia. I handed the phone back to the man across the aisle, along with a twenty- dollar bill, which I thought might be too much for the use of his phone, but which he accepted, keeping his eyes averted, stuffing the twenty into his backpack and then turning away from me and looking out the window.

  A wave of exhaustion washed over me; I felt as if I had just been injected with flu virus. I rested my head against the cool window and immediately fell asleep. When I awoke, I was filled with fear. A light rain was falling, and the train was just pulling in to the station in Leyden.

  I bounded off the train. I took the slippery, rusting steps from the platform up to the station two at a time, huffing and puffing; this author’s tour and all that room service had taken its toll. The river fell away from me, the train whistle howled, and steam from the engine rose up like a ghost, blending with the rain.

  One of the trusty Chariots of Fire was waiting in the upper-level parking lot, a battered old Chrysler dappled with rust, and when I got in I was surprised to see that my driver was Greg Pitcher.

  “Greg!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m working, Mr. Holland.” His voice was thick; there was the smell of booze in the car.

  “You dropped out of school?”

  “No, after school. Two-thirty to nine-thirty. You’re my first fare.” His blond hair was dirty, unevenly cut. His normally cheerful expression now looked tentative, shortchanged. Greg had always been such a handsome, self-possessed kid, but today he seemed on the skids, dissolute, windswept; it made me feel as if I’d been away for a long, long while.

  “You remember where I live, don’t you?”

  “Um…not really.”

  “You lived with us for a week, Greg. Red Schoolhouse Road.”

  He nodded, shrugged. He turned on the ignition; the engine blew a plume of black smoke out of the tailpipe. Sniffling, clearing his throat, Greg put the car into gear and steered out of the parking lot.

  “Mike hasn’t made it back to school yet, huh,” said Greg, glancing at me for a moment in the rearview mirror. All I could see then were the tops of his light brown eyes, but I sensed in them a dull, double-thinking glimmer of guilt. Had he some news of Michael that he was withholding? Was he somehow responsible for Michael’s disappearance? Or was it just adolescent guilt, the kind connected to a sexuality so omnivorous that you end up feeling guilty about everything?

  “I’m afraid not, Greg. He’s called a couple of times, so we know he’s all right. But still…any ideas about where he could be?”

  “Around here? I don’t know, Mr. Holland. I’ve lost six friends in the past two years. Soon as I can, I’m getting out of here.”

  “And going where?”

  “I don’t know. Someplace safe.”

  We were on the outskirts of town, passing the Leyden Antiques Barn, a ramshackle wooden structure with a bronze weathervane on the
roof; behind that, in the distance, Holsteins grazed on the new grass—they looked like bloated black-and-white saddle shoes scattered over a carpet. Was this the danger from which Greg dreamed of escaping?

  We drove in silence. We were in town now, driving on Broadway, past all the symbols of Michael’s discontent— the rinky-dink stores, the hi-how-are-you old-timers, the seething rural hoods jammed into Pepperoni Pete’s Pizza Parlor. Except for searching for Michael, I hadn’t been in town since my son disappeared from Pennyman’s office; I had barely been Sam Holland since that day, and as we rolled through town and out toward Red Schoolhouse Road, with the rain beading on the windshield, and the alcohol in Greg’s breath mixing with the gassy fumes coming from the car’s shot exhaust system, and the sound of the tires hissing over the blacktop, I stretched my legs out and breathed as deeply as I could, and for a moment the nervous nature of my mission and my utter indecision over what I would say to Olivia, how I would make things better—all of it receded, and I reveled in the simple animal pleasure of just being alive, myself.

  “Wait here,” I said to Greg when we finally reached my house. The sky was sinking under its own weight. I knew in a glance there was no one home. The windows were dark; there was no car in the driveway.

  “Hello?” I cried, like countless fools before me, into the empty darkness of the house. “Hello?” I closed the door behind me and breathed the familiar air of home, looking now at the old tavern table in the foyer to see if there was a note, or perhaps some interesting mail, and then at the diminutive chandelier, which Olivia said looked like an Edwardian earring, and which now shined a bleak, irregular light because two of its four Ping-Pong-ball-sized bulbs were dead. And then I saw the parlor walls.

  At first I thought I was hallucinating. I switched on a lamp and stared at the walls, feeling sick, stranded.

  Scrawled onto the walls were the gloomy, lost rantings of a soul in prison, a spirit catching the whiff of its own decay. At first I thought we’d been attacked by vandals, but then I recognized Olivia’s writing—the demure U in “FUCK,” the T with its hat blowing off in the wind in “NOTHING,” the E’s shaped like pitchforks in “HELP ME.”

  Some attempt had been made to clean away the damage. On the western wall, where the mahogany grandfather’s clock stood and the nineteenth-century silhouettes of wa- terbirds hung in their barn-board frames, the explosion of scribbles and X’s had been sponged to a smear, but the task had been abandoned.

  I walked with real fear in my step. I heard the furnace straining in the cellar. The house was boiling hot and I turned the thermostat down from ninety to sixty-five. Somewhere within me, I realized that most of the life I had been living a month ago was now completely over, gone. My sense of myself as a man with some basic core of decency was evaporating; my son was missing, my wife had gone mad….

  I walked through the house. In the kitchen, I found a note from Olivia.

  Dear Windsor Cleaning Service,

  Do whatever is necessary to take care of the mess. We’ll be gone for a couple of days, but I’ll call your office this evening to see how things are going. Good luck!

  Olivia Wexler

  She was alive. I went upstairs and wrote her a note— “Where are you?”—and placed it on the pillows of our unmade bed, and, fighting back tears, got back into the Chariot of Fire. I offered Greg two hundred dollars to drive me to the airport. It was time to be John Retcliffe again, and I realized as we pulled away that after a day as Sam Holland, I was relieved to make the change.

  CHAPTER

  13

  IN COLUMBUS, OHIO, A NURSE WHO WAS WORKING IN the West Side Women’s Health Collective was bludgeoned to death by a young Elvis-haired “pro-life” activist who called himself Mr. Baby. He murdered her in the clinic’s parking lot, got into his Nissan, and drove home, where he was arrested a few hours later. The cops found him in bed, dozing, and at his side was a copy of Visitors from Above, a detail that was repeated in nearly all the newspaper accounts of the crime. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, fifteen- year-old twin sisters leaped from the roof of their low-rise, adobe-style apartment building, wearing red dresses, holding in their long, skinny arms Boston terriers and copies of my book. Both survived the fall, and when they were interviewed they insisted, “We knew we wouldn’t die.” On the ABC nightly news, there was a thirty-second story headlined “Visitor Mania,” in which the out-of-nowhere provenance of the book was commented upon, the lack of author photo, the possibility that John Retcliffe might be, for all we knew, a Man in Black. “To some, it is a book of prophecy, a guide to the upcoming apocalypse. As the second millennium draws to a close, we are likely to see more and more of this sort of thing,” said the news reader. “And in the meanwhile, now as never before, it is Buyer Beware, as a whole new breed of charlatans prepares to take advantage of our cosmic jitters as we approach the year 2000.”

  After a one-day trip to L.A., I was back on the East Coast, going from mall to mall, radio station to radio station, moving south through Washington, Baltimore, and on down—Richmond, Norfolk, Greensboro, Charlotte. It was a tour out of the annals of the Benny Goodman Orchestra. The spring days went from mild to sultry; flowers I saw in full bloom one day would be decayed the next, two hundred miles south.

  Heather was no longer on the case. I didn’t know if she had herself transferred off because of some weariness with me or if, as her replacement, Phil Baz, said, she had a longstanding commitment to work on another account. Phil Baz was a stocky young kid with a moist, frantic face. He wore an Oscar Wilde suit, parted his hair in the middle; he smelled of Tic Tacs and garlic. He ran my tour as if we were a football team trying to mount a comeback in the final quarter: we were always racing for a plane, an interview; he sweated in traffic, tapped his feet frantically in elevators, thrust his fist up in the air and said “Yes!” whenever we arrived on time. I took to having most of my meals in my hotel room, to avoid having to eat with him, and at night, after trying to call Olivia, watching a little TV, trying to call Olivia again, and raiding the minibar, I often fell asleep obsessing pointlessly over how much I disliked him.

  Even with trying to find my family, and being constantly on the move and having to go to book signings, press interviews, and radio programs as John Retcliffe, I found myself hitting air pockets of empty time that would send my spirits plummeting. I called the Leyden Police looking for news of my family. I called the Windsor Cleaning Service. I called Michael’s school; I called Russ; circumspect to a fault, I called the Wexlers; I called Allen, Connie; I called, over and over, my own home. Cursing the unanswered phone and slamming the receiver down was better than the vortex of nothingness I experienced sitting alone in my room for the fifteen minutes before the car came to take me to the Crossgates Mall.

  I needed to be doing something. I needed to eat, or watch TV. If there was a gymnasium at the hotel, I used it. If we were not stuck on some beltway, I walked. I went to movies, bars, nightclubs. I struck up conversations with strangers, something I’d never been able to do before, but now— behind my Retcliffian mask?—no problem. In fiercely air-conditioned southeastern bars, I held court, as voluble in my new incarnation as I had been reticent in my former life. I was insatiably curious about the lives of the shifty, middle-class drinkers around me. So what does your lawyer say? Maybe you need to see an orthopedist? So why don’t you hang on to it until real-estate prices come back to their ’88 level? Hey, this one’s on me: what are you drinking?

  Adding to what I will charitably call my loquaciousness was that law of emotional economy: Adversity Loosens the Tongue.

  “I’ve got troubles at home,” I told Ken, or Kip, or Kit.

  “You and me both,” K. said. He raised his stout eyebrows, as black as electrical tape.

  “I had an affair. In fact, for a while, I fell in love— whatever the fuck that means. You know what I mean?”

  “Tell me about it,” K. said, in that way that means, When it comes to this particular subject, I’ve forg
otten more than you’ll ever know.

  “My wife son daughter house life guilt anger fear.”

  “What are you drinking, John?”

  “Too much.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Now we were far from New York, and my publisher and Phil Baz convinced me it would be perfectly safe for me to make local TV appearances. We zigged west to Knox- ville and I went onto a local show called “Tennessee Temptations,” which was a half-hour things-to-do show hosted by a jovial woman in a Hawaiian shirt named Abby Carter. I no longer cared very much about showing my face on TV. My picture had already appeared in several newspapers. There was no way to control this any longer. And as for John Retcliffe somehow getting in the way if I wanted to do promotion for one of my own books—I realized I would never write a book under my name that became as successful as Visitors, and that I would never, ever want to.

  I was on with a restaurant “critic,” the new U. Tenn basketball coach, and another author, a handsome, unstable guy named Ed Bathrick, who had written a book of advice for people coping with an addiction to gambling. In the greenroom before going on—it was nine in the morning and we were live—I chatted with Bathrick.

  “Dostoevsky was crazy about gambling,” I said.

  “I believe so,” said Bathrick, rather noncommittally.

  “The way he crawled across the floor and kissed his wife’s feet until she gave him two more rubles for the roulette table. God, the poor man.”

  “The poor man?” asked Bathrick. “What about her?”

  On the show, I heard Bathrick tell Abby Carter that in many marriages it was a battle between the better half and the bettor half. “John here,” he said, jerking his thumb in my direction, practically putting my eye out, “tells me that the famous Count Leo Tolstoy and his lovely wife, um, Betty, I believe, had absolutely horrendous fights over his gambling addiction.”