by Owen Sheers
In comparison to Michael, the others in the booth appeared disinterested in the women onstage, familiarity defusing the potency of their display. The dynamics of the group, it seemed, were more powerful than any performance beyond it. But then the women had begun to join them, and everything had changed. Some had just been on the stage, from where they’d sensed the weight of the group’s wealth in the room. The Mexicans ordered bottles of champagne as the women introduced themselves with false names and foreign accents—Croatian, Romanian, Nigerian. As they did, the group’s focus quickly fragmented. Each man, within the radius of a woman’s attention, became individual again. Within minutes the group was breaking up, the Mexicans being led away, sometimes by one woman, sometimes by two, through a velvet curtain and into the private rooms beyond.
When they’d returned, Josh and his colleagues began pairing off with the women too. As Josh took the extended hand of Bianca, a tall Serbian brunette wearing a parody of a green evening dress, he’d called across the table to Michael.
“Hey, Mike! You wanna dance?”
Michael raised a hand and shook his head to show he was fine. Crystal, a petite blonde sitting beside him, leant in to whisper to him, a Russian childhood shadowing her voice. “No, come on,” she’d said. “You must have fun, too. Please.” As she spoke she’d tapped the stem of her glass with her flat-cut nails, chequer-painted.
“Ah, c’mon, Mike!” Josh said, as Bianca drew him away from the booth. “It’s on me.”
When Michael, smiling, shook his head again, Josh had raised his own hands in surrender and shrugged towards Crystal, as if to say, I tried, but he won’t learn. Allowing Bianca to lead him on towards the curtains he’d pointed a finger at Michael, like a coach reminding his young charge his training was far from over.
After going for another two dances, one with Crystal and then another with Bianca, Josh had kept his word. Putting on his jacket he’d leant down from behind Michael and given him a tap on the shoulder. “C’mon, soldier,” he’d said. “Let’s get you out of here.” He seemed suddenly more sober and Michael wondered, not for the first time, how much of the night had been an act on Josh’s behalf, a display, like the girls onstage, for the benefit of the Mexicans.
As they’d made their way out of the club, the host enthusiastically shook Josh’s hand with both of his. While they’d talked, Michael looked back at the booths, where the Mexicans continued to drink and talk with a new set of girls. Their earlier polish had left them and they seemed newly exposed, like children almost, under the glitter balls and the lights. The power with which they’d entered the club had been transferred to the women for whom they’d bought drinks, whom they’d paid for minutes of their time. The Chinese-speaking engineer, Michael noticed, sat on his own to one side, his tie undone, absentmindedly turning his wedding ring with his other hand. Michael watched as, with a sigh, he drank from the champagne flute before him, its rim smudged with pink lipstick.
“Don’t worry about them,” Josh said, as they’d collected their coats from the cloakroom. “They’re big boys. They can look after themselves.”
The next time Michael saw Josh after that night had been in his kitchen, a few days later. Samantha was giving the girls their dinner. Lucy, as she ate, was overseeing another battle of wills between Molly and Dolly, both of whom had received recent and drastic haircuts. Michael had come round to give Sam a couple of books—a treatise on photography and the proof of a friend’s new novel. They were sharing a pot of tea when Josh entered, dropping his briefcase in the hall and giving each of the girls a peck on their heads. Drawing a bottle of red from the wine rack, he began to open it.
“So what did you think of those Mexicans?” he asked Michael as he’d poured the wine. “Pretty interesting guys eh?”
“Certainly more lively than my old professors,” Michael said.
“You bet they are,” Josh said. “Very interesting guys. Very interesting. And smart businessmen, too.”
“Did it work out?” Michael asked, as Josh pulled up a chair between his two daughters. “The bank side of things?”
“Too early to say,” he’d replied, reaching out and stroking Lucy’s hair. “But that’s where it’ll be coming from soon enough. Mexico, Brazil. They’re bucking the global trend. Christ knows, they’re doing it better than us.”
Whether Samantha had picked up on the subtext of Josh’s comments, or whether she’d just chosen to ignore it, Michael couldn’t tell. But whichever, Josh had seemed to enjoy the private knowledge he and Michael were sharing in his home. As if, in however small a way, he’d initiated him into his life beyond this kitchen, this house, and in doing so had carved out a bit of Michael for himself alone.
Josh’s reaction a week later, when Michael came across him and Maddy at a wine bar in Belsize Park, couldn’t have been more different. There had been, in itself, nothing suspicious about what Michael had seen. He’d been returning from the supermarket with a couple of bags of shopping when he’d seen them through the bar’s window. Had Josh not been looking directly at him, he wouldn’t have disturbed them. But as it was, their eyes met and Josh had waved him inside. They were just finishing up, so Michael sat with them only long enough to ask Maddy how she and Tony were settling in, and for her to enquire after the progress of his new book.
Throughout the conversation Josh seemed on edge, looking at his watch twice in the same minute. Maddy, however, maintained the same distanced interest she’d always held on every occasion Michael had met her. As if the person with whom she was speaking was just one of many in an invisible receiving line on either side of her.
When Michael picked up his bags to leave, Josh waved him off casually enough. “Sure, I’ll be there,” he’d said, confirming their jog on the Heath the next day. “See you by the ponds at eight.” But when they’d gone for that jog the following morning, it was as if their meeting in the bar had never happened. Michael wouldn’t have expected Josh to bring it up, but he’d interviewed enough people to know when the omission of a subject was enough to conjure it.
At the end of that jog, as they’d sat on their regular bench on Parliament Hill, Michael had thought Josh was about to mention his drink with Maddy. He’d taken an intake of breath like the beginning of an explanation, or perhaps a request for Michael to keep what he’d seen to himself. But no such request had come. Instead, he’d just leant back against the bench and stared out over the city, as if, after all these years of working at its heart, he was still trying to figure it out.
―
Sitting on that same bench, months later, Michael folded Daniel’s letter back into the pocket of his shorts. As he did, a couple of girls jogged past on the path behind them. They wore hats, fluorescent bibs, and Lycra leggings. Josh followed them with his eyes for a moment, then, as if taking his cue from their dropping below the hill, put his hands on his knees, took a deep breath, and stood up. “I’d better get home,” he said. “I gotta be in the office at ten.”
Together they’d walked down the path in the direction of the jogging girls. Neither of them spoke. From thousands of miles away, Daniel and his letter had silenced them both. Turning off the path, they’d passed through a copse of young ash and a huddle of blackberry bushes and onto a track that met the nearest street, its tarmac starting abruptly at the Heath’s edge.
As they’d walked on between the terraced houses, morning lives stirring within them, Josh had begun to talk again. Michael heard little of what he said. The letter in his pocket was rubbing at his mind as it had against his leg during their run. A white noise behind his temples. He felt isolated by its words. Underwater in a vast and darkening ocean. And yet at the same time he felt strangely connected by them, in the most intimate of ways, to the man who’d written them. As if they’d eaten from the same plate, or shared the same woman.
Turning into a narrow alleyway, they came out into South Hill Drive and walked down its incline, past the gardens and gates of the houses higher up the street. Michae
l tried to catch the drift of what Josh was saying. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, Josh was angry with the Lehman’s Manhattan office. Something about real estate, sub-prime and toxic derivatives, college boys making bonds bets that had left him “fucking exposed with my balls on the wire.”
At times, when Josh talked about his bank like this, Michael wanted to stop him, there and then in the street, and tell him about the missile that had killed Caroline. Its name, he wanted to tell him, was the AGM-114 Hellfire, a “fire and forget” weapon manufactured by Lockheed Martin. Since 1999, he’d explain, the Hellfire has been the Predator’s missile of choice. In 1997, two years before the first pair were fitted to a Predator’s wings, a limited partnership led by his employers, Lehman Brothers Holdings, bought a 50 percent stake in a new company called L-3 Communications. L-3, in turn, had been formed from ten high-tech Lockheed Martin units. L-3 became the manufacturers of the Predator’s sensor and optic equipment, the same equipment that had, in all likelihood, filmed Caroline from 20,000 feet as she’d sat in the back of that white minivan. And it was L-3 equipment, too, that would have fired a targeting laser at that minivan’s hood.
This is what Michael wanted to tell Josh. How with every drone flown, L-3’s profits had soared. How his wages and bonuses, along with the wages and bonuses of banks and companies across the world, were fuelled by deaths in faraway places, out of any conventional camera’s focus. How Caroline, in doing her job, had also been “fucking exposed,” sitting as she had been at the brilliant centre of that Hellfire’s 5,000-degree thermobaric blast. How, at that heat, flesh melts instantly, bone is vaporised, and the person you love goes, in less than a second, from being to not. How, despite its “fire and forget” name tag, once a Hellfire had been released there would always be someone who never would.
But Michael didn’t stop Josh, and he didn’t say anything. Daniel’s letter had pulled his world tight, drawn in its threads so that once again, like a man gifted with X-ray vision, he could see the full array of the causal web spiralling towards Caroline’s death. But he no longer wanted to see. He no longer wanted to be sensitive to how lives rubbed against lives, and greed rubbed against death, across the distances of oceans and continents. So instead of exposing Josh to his thoughts, he’d just carried on listening to him as they’d walked on down South Hill Drive, its sycamores budding above them. When they reached their homes, side by side in the street, Michael had turned towards his front door, pulling out his keys from a string round his neck.
“So what you going to do?” Josh said, as he’d approached his house next door.
Michael slid his key into the lock. “About the letter?”
“Yeah,” Josh said. “You should inform the inquiry.”
Michael looked down at his feet.
“You can’t let him get away with this.”
Michael looked back up at him, realising how in some ways his neighbour was a child in this world. “He’s already got away with it, Josh. They all have.”
Josh nodded in appeasement. “Sure, I know,” he said, giving Michael one of his older-brother looks. “But this is specific. You can do something about this.”
Michael said nothing. He shouldn’t have shown Josh the letter.
“So you’re going to, right?” Josh said.
“Maybe,” Michael replied. “I don’t know.”
“Well, just let me know if I can help.” Josh looked down at his watch. “Shit,” he said, opening his front door. “I’ve gotta run. See you later.”
“Yeah,” Michael replied, stepping into his own communal hallway. “See you later.”
―
But Michael did know what he was going to do. He’d already decided on the Heath, as they were running through the bare woods beyond Kenwood. He would write back. He would write to Daniel and ask him for more. He would ask him to live that day again, to tell him what it had been like. What had he dreamt? How had he woken? What was the weather? What did he eat and drink? And what, afterwards, did he do in those few hours when he still didn’t know that he’d killed her, and Michael didn’t yet know she was dead? How, in that caesura of distance and time zones, as Michael had worked in the garden, his grief coming for him from the other side of the world, had Daniel occupied himself? What had he done and what had he thought? As 8,000 miles away a mud-walled compound had slipped into shadow and a thinning plume of smoke had blown through the leaves of a fig tree, a scattering of chickens stabbing at the earth at its roots.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MICHAEL WAS COMING back out onto the landing when he sensed her again—a change in the air’s texture, a fleeting intuition. He stopped and turned towards the door opposite the stairs. A seam of light ran the length of its frame, and he realised it wasn’t fully closed. A scooter’s engine, high and insistent, rose and fell on the street outside. Michael listened to the house in its wake, but again there was nothing. Just the sound of his own breathing and this penumbra of Caroline, refusing to let him go.
He pushed the door open with his foot. It swung easily, revealing a bathroom. A broad window, its blind half drawn, looked out over the pear tree in the garden and the crowns of the trees around the ponds. A cushioned seat inlaid in its sill was piled with women’s magazines, their pages warped by moist air. In front of him was a toilet and a wooden cabinet above its cistern. To his right, a sink with a collection of toothbrushes in a mug and a rolled tube of toothpaste beside it. Above the sink a mirror reflected the window’s light, while beyond it, along the far wall, was a deep enamel bath, a showerhead resting in its cradle, its steel hose curling into the tub. In a corner of the bath were Lucy’s water toys. A purple floating octopus, a My Little Pony sponge, and, beached on its side, a plastic goldfish with which, just a few days earlier, she’d squirted Michael from her paddling pool.
―
Ever since that first party, Lucy and Rachel had often been the conduit to Michael’s spending time with their parents. When Sam took them for walks on the Heath, or shopping in Hampstead, she frequently called Michael to ask if he’d like to join them. Similarly, when Josh had the girls for the day he’d begun to ask Michael along too, to fly a kite on Parliament Hill or visit a museum in the centre of town. Like Sam, he’d noticed how the girls tended to be better behaved with Michael present, their attentions to each other diffused to accommodate his as well.
The girls accepted Michael into their domestic orbit quickly. Rachel, at seven years old, was beginning to aspire to a maturity beyond her reach. For her, having Michael around meant an opportunity to experiment with projections of her older self, to practice expressions of speech and face, postures and poses, with an adult who was neither her family nor her teacher. A serious girl, Rachel had a tendency to want to take Michael aside to talk with him. Approaching him with a frown, she’d lead him silently into the conservatory or pull a stool up close beside him so he had to turn and talk to her and her alone. When she did this, Rachel often conducted herself as if her affairs—her drawings, her books, her tales of school—were of an importance far beyond the trivialities of family life or her peers. There was no pretence, and Michael never doubted her sincerity. She would, he thought, most likely maintain a similar course as a teenager, until hormones or a boy proved to her otherwise. But until that happened Michael could imagine her as an earnest academic or a campaigner, a powerfully strident woman, quietly confident that the world would, eventually, bend to her way.
In contrast to her sister’s desire to escape the limits of her age, Lucy revelled in the licence of hers. At four years old, her toddler’s solipsism had recently been grafted with a nascent awareness of the privileges of being a child. To her, Michael was someone for whom she could perform, and with whom she pushed the limits of what she could get away with, without fear of parental retribution. When they walked on the Heath she often insisted on being carried on his shoulders, his height thrilling her with an adult’s perspective and a safe breed of danger. Samantha would tell her to leave Michael a
lone, and Rachel looked on with an expression of wise disapproval. But Lucy remained impervious to either her mother’s requests or Rachel’s judgement. She inevitably got her way, and when she did she rode Michael’s shoulders with unbridled glee, one hand clasped around his forehead, the other reaching for the lower branches of the trees.
For Michael, it was impossible to spend time with the girls without a low, settling sadness gathering below his throat. In time he barely noticed it, associating its resonance with the climate of their company. But there were other occasions, when Caroline was present in his thoughts, or an object or song brought a memory to the surface, when it became more discernible. At these times Michael was reminded of the conversations they’d had about having a child of their own. Michael had felt more ready than Caroline. For her part, she’d said, although she’d wanted a child intellectually, instinctively the thought scared her. Not the child itself, but her possible failure as a mother. Her life had been independent, self-centred. Which is why she’d asked him for more time. To allow her to grow that part of herself that might accommodate an infant, to learn, again, to see her hours and minutes as no longer hers, but theirs as well. Had Caroline returned from Pakistan, they would have begun trying that summer. This is what they’d hoped. A spring baby to come into the world with the early blossom, when the trees across the valley were coming into leaf.