Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  It seems like only a few seconds later when I find myself waking up just as we’re landing. My ears need very badly to be popped. There’s the jolt of the wheels hitting the tarmac. The plane bounces once—leaps back into the air, actually, and I can sense it drifting slightly sideways in relation to the runway, too, which is never a good feeling—and there’s a sound of mild surprise and concern in the cabin, a collective inrush of breath. Then the wheels find the ground again, and a few moments later we’re taxiing lazily toward my fate.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Bangor, Maine,” the captain says over the PA. Like most flatlanders he pronounces it, incorrectly, as Bang ger, and I feel that old reflexive derision toward people from away, until it occurs to me that after living in California so long, “from away” is a designation I almost certainly qualify for myself. “When we arrive at the gate, law enforcement officers will be boarding to escort a passenger off of the plane. It should only be a few minutes’ delay. If you’ll please remain in your seats and keep the aisle clear, we’ll let you know when it’s okay to deboard.”

  Once again, the other passengers in my immediate vicinity take great pains to turn their embarrassed expressions everywhere but at me. There’s a mild forward lurch as the plane comes to a stop at the gate. I decide to preclude the further humiliation of being led through the plane in handcuffs. I grab my bag from the overhead compartment and move toward the door, ignoring Alfredo’s repeated order to “seet down.” He scowls at me (a bitchy, impudent look, so okay he’s definitely gay, I decide finally, and a bit of a queen to boot) and makes slow, exaggerated work of unlocking the hatch. Finally he gets it open, and on the other side there’s another airline employee, flanked by two uniformed police officers. Something flutters in my gut as I’m reminded by their grim expressions of just how serious this is.

  I’m surprised, though, that a couple of patrol cops were sent. I anticipated G-men in Oakleys and dark suits, not a couple of Keystone Kops from the Bangor PD. All the same, handcuffs are handcuffs and holding cells are holding cells, and soon I find myself literally behind bars, rubbing my chapped wrists in the fluorescent twilight.

  I haven’t been processed in any way. No one’s taken statements or fingerprints. My belongings have not been catalogued and stored. I have not been issued a jumpsuit or leg irons. I’m just sitting here on the cot, alone among the room’s three cells, and with each minute that passes without any sort of official, administrative-type activity I get a little taste of what political prisoners, POWs, and others without the benefit of due process must experience: the quite unsettling sense of having disappeared.

  Eventually a G-man does in fact show up. One of the cops who met me at the airport is with him, and in a move weighted with jurisdictional animosity he edges in front of the agent, bumping shoulders, and opens the door to the cell.

  “There you go, chief,” the cop says to the G-man. He steps back and out of the way. “All yours.”

  The G-man ignores him. “Miss Benoit,” he says, sweeping one arm slowly in front of him. I step out on rubbery legs. The cop pulls up the rear, utility belt jangling loudly in the stone hallway.

  We climb the stairs and walk out of the police station. The G-man doesn’t cuff me, or even pay me any attention, just keeps walking without looking back. Outside it’s fully dark but still quite warm. Moths swarm the streetlamps in the parking lot, rising like confetti in zero gravity. When I still lived here this kind of weather was always such a treat. Maine is Maine—meaning the weather can most often be described in one of two ways: cold, or about to get cold—but every year you can count on a two-or three-week period when it will be hot as Hades, warmer even than the usual hot spots of Florida and southern California. It seems I’ve come home in the midst of this year’s heat wave.

  There is the question, though, of how much of it I’ll be able to enjoy. The G-man leads me to a late-model sedan—looks like a Buick but it’s hard to tell in the dark—and we get in. Neither of us speaks until we’re on the interstate heading south.

  “Hi Amy,” he says finally, offering his hand for me to shake. His tone at the police station was businesslike, almost robotic, but now he sounds like he could be trying to pick me up at a bar. “Can I call you Amy?”

  “Sure.” I look at his hand a minute, then shake it kind of hesitantly. His grip is firm enough to let you know he’s there, but it’s not like other guys who treat handshakes like a competition and squeeze so hard that you worry about whether you’ve been getting enough calcium. His palms are soft and uncallused, his nails filed and buffed. I notice the scent of sandalwood on him, so faint I think it could be my imagination.

  He pushes the power knob on the stereo. “Any preference?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “C’mon, really,” he says. “Don’t be polite. Anything you want to listen to. Have at it.”

  I try to read his face, but he’s looking at the road and in the dark of the car’s interior it’s hard to pick up on anything. “Listen,” I say. “I certainly don’t want to sound ungrateful, because this is much better treatment than I imagined I would get. But what exactly is this about, here?”

  He laughs. “You’re wondering why I haven’t slapped the cuffs on you, roughed you up a little?”

  “I’m wondering why I’m sitting up front instead of back there behind the bulletproof glass. I’m wondering why you’re letting me run the radio and chatting me up like we’re at a singles club. I’m wondering, also, since we’re on the subject, where it is you’re taking me.”

  He turns to me, flashes a Tom Cruise smile. “Well if you prefer the authentic experience, I could pull over and bounce your head off the hood a few times. But I’ll skip the cuffs, since it looks like they already had you wrapped up three times too tight.”

  I rub at my wrists. “I complained about it. But they said they were just as tight as they needed to be.”

  The G-man scoffs. “Bumpkins,” he says. “Listen, Amy, really? We’ve got a fairly long drive here, and it’s not like you committed a capital crime, so I figure why make it any less pleasant than it has to be? This is mostly formality anyway. The federal government loves its paperwork, I can tell you. But that’s pretty much all this will amount to. A ride to Boston, some paperwork, sign here, fingerprint there, and you’ll be on your way. No biggie.”

  “I’ve got a funeral to attend,” I say.

  “I’m sorry. When’s that?”

  “Two days.”

  He waves a hand. “No problem. You could make it tomorrow. It’d be tight, but you could make it.”

  “Just one more question, then, if that’s okay.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why do we have to go all the way to Boston?”

  He sighs. “Again, formality,” he says. “We’ve got resident agencies in Bangor, Augusta, and Portland, but the nearest full-service FBI office is in Boston. So that’s where we go, like it or not.”

  “That’s . . . inconvenient.”

  “Stupid, is what it is,” he says. He lowers his voice to a conspiratorial stage-whisper. “To be honest, I think I’m just about done with the Bureau anyway. I’m fed up with this sort of crap. Running people in for smoking cigarettes. Seems like there’s got to be a better use of an agent’s time. In today’s world.”

  I don’t know anything about it, so I keep quiet.

  “I’m thinking I might get out and start my own consulting business.”

  “Consulting for what?”

  “Stuffy in here. You okay if I turn on the AC?”

  “ ’s fine.”

  “Thanks.” He fiddles with the climate control knobs. “There. Okay, what were we talking about?”

  “Your consulting business.”

  He snaps his exquisitely manicured fingers. “Right, right. Well, I’ve got a pretty extensive background in combatives, security, that sort of thing. More so than your average agent. It was a specialty. It’s what I enjoy. And there are always people who need to l
earn how to apply an arm bar to someone twice their size, or to effectively use an Mk-19 grenade launcher against infantry assault. It’s like being a barber or an undertaker. Always work to be had.”

  “Sounds like you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  “I have. Like I say, I’m tired of dealing with the Bureau’s crap. Plus I’ve got an MBA from Stanford that’s been collecting dust for the better part of a decade. Why not use it?”

  “You went to Stanford?” I ask.

  “For graduate work, yeah.”

  “I spent six years there,” I say, smiling in spite of myself. “Bachelor’s and master’s.”

  He flashes the grin again. “No kidding!” he says. “When?”

  “I finished my master’s in ’98.”

  “Weird,” he says. We laugh.

  “Were you there at the same time?” I ask.

  “Some of it, yeah. Took me three years to get my MBA, for reasons too boring to go into. But that was ’95 to ’98.”

  I turn in my seat to face him. “How did we never meet each other?”

  “Big school. Besides, you weren’t in the business program, were you?”

  “No,” I say. “Fine arts.”

  “Well there you go.”

  “Still,” I say, “after six years I would have sworn I knew everyone on that campus.”

  “We must have known some of the same people,” he says. “We could play a little six degrees of separation. Pass the time.”

  “First,” I say, holding out my hand for him to shake again, “I should probably know your name.”

  “Hey, good point,” he says. “How rude of me. Eric Fuchs.”

  “Pleasure to meet you.”

  He laughs. “Even under these circumstances?”

  “So far it’s been better than I expected,” I titter and toss my hair a little bit before I have a chance to realize what I’m doing, which, evidently, is flirting with the FBI agent who has arrested me. This whole thing, it seems, will only get weirder.

  “Still, it stinks,” Eric says. “But anyhow. Stanford. People at Stanford.”

  “Jesus, I don’t know where to begin,” I say. “Like I told you, I feel like I knew everyone.”

  “What about organizations?”

  “Which ones?”

  “Greek?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Sorry. Should have pegged you as a GDI.”

  “A what?”

  He smiles. “God Damn Independent.”

  “And I should have pegged you as a frat boy.”

  “Guilty as charged,” he says. “Tau Gamma Rho. Though I’m not one of those guys who wears his ring everywhere and calls complete strangers brother and breaks spontaneously into the fraternity chant. So you know.”

  “That’s a relief,” I say.

  “What else, though?” he says. “I don’t suppose you were part of the Ai kido Club.”

  “Nope. I did yoga.”

  He snaps his fingers again; apparently that’s kind of his thing. “I know you were in at least a few political organizations.”

  I eye him skeptically. “Were you?”

  “Sure,” he says, feigning insult. “What, just because I’m an FBI man? . . .”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Sure it is,” he says. “It’s okay. But yeah, I did Amnesty International. And the Stanford Civil Liberties Union, even though I was the only member who wasn’t a law student. Which is sort of funny, when you consider how things have turned out. I can see you’re impressed.”

  “Surprised,” I say. “Closest I came to either of those was the Friends of Tibet. And the CJME.”

  Eric whistles low. “That’s our connection right there,” he says.

  “Which?”

  “The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East. Did you know Eisa Jabar?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “What?” Eric says.

  “I dated Eisa. He’s how I got involved with CJME.”

  “You two dated?”

  “Briefly. Is that so strange?”

  “Just an odd couple,” Eric says. He turns the air conditioning down a notch. “And before you say it, no, I don’t mean that in an interracial kind of way. Eisa just struck me as one of those guys whose entire life is political. Like he’s such an activist there’s no room for a personal life. He sort of ends up being asexual, in your mind.”

  “Who said anything about sex?” I ask.

  “You understand what I mean.”

  “Sure. But how did you know Eisa?”

  “Indirectly,” Eric says. “I saw him at a few rallies, of course. Met him, twice I think. Once through Paul Sukarnoputri, at a joint fund-raiser for CJME and the Stanford Indonesian Club.”

  I can’t help but smile, picturing lily-white Eric at such an event. “And you were doing what, there?”

  “Oh, I was just a friend of Paul’s. An acquaintance really. We were both officers in SCLU, plus we happened to work out around the same time each day. We got to know each other a bit. But whatever happened to Eisa?”

  “Don’t really know,” I say. “You mind turning the air conditioning back up? I’m dying.”

  He flips the dial. “You’ve got no idea where he went? Seemed like he just up and disappeared.”

  “Like I said, we only dated for a short time. I assume he got his master’s and moved on.”

  “You mind my asking a personal question?”

  “Depends.”

  “Why didn’t it work out? Between the two of you?”

  It’s been so long, and it was such a footnote of a relationship, that I’m finding it hard to remember details. “His whole life was political,” I say.

  “Seriously,” Eric says.

  I think for a minute. “Okay,” I say. “Seriously?”

  “Indeed.” His face glows spooky green in the light from the gauges.

  “I got the feeling that for Eisa I was a last-temptation sort of thing. I think he was pretty sure he was done with being American, and then I showed up, and I was smart and different and had nice creamy white girl thighs, and he used me to test his convictions. Like Gandhi and his teenage virgins.”

  “Or Mohamed Atta and his strip clubs,” Eric says.

  “Exactly. That’s exactly it.”

  “Huh. So how did that feel?”

  “Didn’t really feel like anything,” I say. “Eisa had a fuckload more invested in it than I did.”

  “And then, when it was over . . . he just disappeared.”

  “For all I know.”

  “Huh.” He seems to contemplate this.

  For a while we just listen to the radio. It’s late, and we’re the only car headed south on the interstate. I’m surprised to see the sign for the Kennebunk rest area; it’s two-plus hours from Bangor to Kennebunk, and the time has flown.

  “You need to stop?” Eric asks. “Food? Bathroom?”

  “Both,” I say. “If that’s okay.”

  “Of course. I just hope you don’t mind Burger King, because that’s your only option.”

  “Make this trip a lot?” I ask.

  “You know it.”

  Eric pulls into the rest area. The parking lot’s empty except for a couple of semis with drivers sleeping inside, so we’re able to park right in front. I go into the bathroom, and not only does Eric not follow me to make sure I don’t try to get away, but when I come out he’s nowhere to be found. I just stand there in the lobby, waiting. The girl behind the Burger King counter stares at me with sleepy eyes. Three or four minutes go by, and finally Eric comes out of the men’s room. He sees me, smiles, walks over.

  “You’re lucky I didn’t steal your car,” I say.

  “You’re not exactly an escape risk,” he says. “What do you want? I’m buying.”

  We take the food to go, and we’re already a mile down the road by the time I realize there’s something wrong with my drink.

  “This always happens,” I say. “Take it to go,
you get screwed.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not really sure. Coke tastes funny. It’s bitter, like Moxie or something.”

  “That’s the triazolam,” Eric says around a mouthful of burger.

  “The what?”

  He wipes the corner of his mouth with a finger. “Triazolam?” he says. “Brand name Halcion? I put it in your Coke.” He shoves several French fries into his mouth and chews. “I put a lot of it in your Coke.”

  It takes a second for what he’s said to register. It’s like I want to be scared, but the fear shorts out and instead for some reason I feel like laughing. So I go ahead and laugh, but it sounds strange and tinny to my ears, as though I were inside a giant, empty beer can.

  “Not very elegant, triazolam,” Eric says. “Pretty low-rent, in fact. The bitter taste, for one thing, is a serious problem. But it does the job in a pinch.”

  I try to understand what he’s saying, but it’s not sinking in. The world inside the car tilts violently and every lighted object develops a strange aura. Next thing I know I’m in an empty kitchen with an old circular fluorescent blazing overhead, my wrists and ankles cuffed tight to a chair. The linoleum floor is cracked and stained. Tree branches claw at the window over the sink. My head pounds.

  The front door opens and Eric comes in, trailed by a warm night breeze. He’s carrying what looks like a small blanket, which he sets on the counter and unfolds to reveal several shiny metal implements, none of which looks like it was designed with good intentions. I’m having no trouble, suddenly, feeling scared.

  “You’ve probably figured out by now,” Eric says, “that I was lying about the Stanford thing.”

  I’m pretty transfixed by the implements, and I don’t respond.

  “In fact, you probably think I was lying about everything,” he says. “And you’re right, naturally. I lie for a living. That’s my job.”

  “Eric,” I say.

  “Not my name,” he says. “Sorry. Also a lie.”

  “I don’t really know what’s happening here,” I say. “But please, listen—”

  “I am hopeful,” not-Eric interrupts, “that you maybe will forgive me all my little fibs. You know, as one liar to another. Glass houses, and all that.”