The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  Rostock was listening intently.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m ranting.”

  He didn’t seem to mind, only shook his head and made a sympathetic expression. And when their drinks arrived, he raised his glass towards her and said, “To better days.”

  “Prosit,” she said, and sipped, enjoying the slurry burn of it, the settling of it into her, the settling of herself into the chair. Then, looking across the table at Rostock, she said, “I sort of don’t know what to say. Us sitting here.”

  He nodded slowly, setting his glass down delicately on the white linen tablecloth. “Let me start then with thank you, again, for coming. I can only imagine what you thought of me when I first called. Very forward. Impolite even.”

  He had a tiny defect in his left eye, Catherine noticed. A sickle trace of black across the lower iris, as if the eye had once been injured there and scarred.

  “I don’t know about impolite,” she said. “Maybe what you’re doing is healthy.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, since the accident I haven’t talked much about it, even though it’s been impossible not to remember and think about. Dreams. Nightmares, really. The first year wasn’t so bad. This second year, seems like things have been moving somehow. Things going on. Things getting…” she stumbled here. Things getting what? “Complicated.”

  “Yes,” Rostock said. “I sense that and I’m not at all surprised.”

  “So you’ve been in touch with the others,” Catherine said. “Tell me about them. Tell me what you’ve learned.”

  But before Rostock could answer, the waiter sidled in to run through the specials. He was bearded and plump with floral tattoos on both wrists and tight red jeans. He told them about tempura soft shell crab and an elk loin poached in duck fat. Catherine registered only then that the place did smell great, delicately herbed and charred. She was hungry.

  “To your question,” he said, when the young man had left. “I haven’t actually spoken with any of the others although I have been calling. But I haven’t actually gotten through to anyone but you.”

  Catherine frowned. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood.”

  “Well, you couldn’t have known this next part.”

  Catherine was nearly finished her drink already, which was mildly alarming. She said, “And what next part is that?”

  “They’re gone, Catherine.” Rostock cleared his throat and looked distinctly uncomfortable. Then he gathered himself, tightening his own resolve. He looked across the table at her evenly, unblinking. “The other four survivors,” he said. “They’re all dead. And in each case, it was suicide.”

  Catherine’s eyes went briefly wide. As the waiter passed nearby she held up her hand, and when he came over she ordered another Gibson.

  “Since this isn’t a date,” she said to Rostock, “I’m not going to worry about you thinking I’m a lush.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I’ve just shared strange and troubling news.”

  “Four suicides,” she repeated.

  Rostock nodded, expression grim. He had the facts. He’d done his research. He’d been working his way down the list, trying to make contact with the survivors one by one. “I had a seat plan,” he said. “Economy, Business, First. I didn’t know how else to tackle it.”

  So it was that when Catherine picked up the phone, Rostock knew those other stories. On the lower deck of the A380-800, 12B was Nancy Whittle. She was from Kent, England, took Ryan Air to Paris for a cheaper flight over to see relatives in Illinois. 18E was Adrian Janic, thirty-three, a Serbian carpenter hoping to work under the table. 20F was a student named Patricia Langston returning home from three months of European travel. 63B was Douglas Marshall, just ahead of Rostock in the upper-deck business cabin, an insurance executive based in Paris.

  Catherine, who had so deliberately avoided knowing the names prior, leaned forward into the table now. Nancy, Adrian, Patricia, Douglas. There was a quality to this kind of news. Catherine fished around for it a minute, wondering what experience she’d had before that seemed similar. Then she had it: news of family members. What Valerie had been doing after they’d been unable to speak for a while. News of the kids, even Mark. People bonded to you through no choice of your own, and in whose health you were somehow organically invested.

  “Go on,” she said to Rostock.

  They had a range of injuries afterwards, Rostock had discovered. Pat Langston by far the worst, with what he learned was lower spinal cord damage that kept her in a wheelchair for the remaining months of her life. For the others he didn’t have specifics.

  “Medical records are confidential, obviously. And you don’t want to ask families about these sorts of things. Even as a doctor…” Rostock’s voice trailed off.

  “But the families told you,” Catherine said to him.

  They did, eventually. “That’s part of what really gripped me about this coincidence. In each case, when the families found out I was a doctor and that I’d been on that plane and survived, they wanted me to know that something had gone terribly wrong with these people they loved. After being lucky, after defying the odds, after all of that came something else. Lives going off the rails. Some terrible wrong turning.”

  “This is very disturbing,” Catherine managed.

  Rostock nodded. “In Nancy Whittle’s case, the family, four children, all healthy and with families of their own, didn’t tell me it was a suicide at first. But as it happened, I called the eldest daughter after the others. So I knew what had happened to the other three. Honestly, I was making that phone call with a significant degree of dread. I wanted to stop. But I had to know. So I called, and when I learned she’d died—she said natural causes—I mentioned that at least three of the other survivors had since died as well. All in quite a narrow time frame. And that really struck her. I could hear it on the phone. She asked me: How? How did they die? Then I told her, and she broke down in tears and out came the story. Her mother had been severely depressed. She’d developed paranoid delusions. Thought she was being followed, that her phone was being tapped. She’d begun to isolate herself, cutting off family members.”

  “And the others?”

  “Variations on a theme,” Rostock said. Patricia Langston and Adrian Janic had apparently been hit by depression soon after release from the hospital. Depression, delusions, paranoia. They were both gone in a few months.

  Catherine was struggling to process this information, staring at Rostock, shaking her head. “So by the time you got to me,” she said finally, “you were wondering what you’d find.”

  “I knew you were alive from Google News,” Rostock said. “And, I’ll be honest, your story felt different. You seem to have a lot on the go. I’m not a psychiatrist, but distractions are probably a blessing in the face of these things.”

  Catherine was watching him closely. It occurred to her then that Rostock was, in a sense, right. What really filled her mind, outside those moments when she looked at that seat plan and recited the numbers, gazing over the lip of the day and into blackness? She thought about the second prototype. She thought about mooring tech and being behind schedule. She thought about timetables and flow charts and the reasons why she was holding back. She thought about Morris and Kalmar, Yohai, Hapok, and most recently she thought about Mako and Kate Speir, a distraction that Catherine imagined growing more significant with each passing hour. She was long on distractions, she thought, they were her central project.

  Rostock was looking at the table. Catherine leaned forward. “I’m glad you told me. It’s terrible news. I don’t understand it. But I’m still here,” she said. “Most important, I’m okay. Really, I am. I’m stressed but not depressed.”

  He nodded. “Well, good. Of course I wondered. But I’m relieved and encouraged to see you healthy and optimistic.”

  “I’m not sure about optimistic,” she said. “But I’m alive and realistic with fight in me yet.”

  He smiled, finally. “All rig
ht,” he said. “I’m glad to hear it. I really am.”

  A moment of silence fell between them. She refolded her napkin on her lap and he twirled his flute of prosecco. Then he sat forward sharply, hands folded precisely in front of him.

  “63B, Douglas Marshall,” Rostock said. “His story was especially interesting to me.”

  There was something beyond depression and paranoia in the insurance executive’s case. Even his family seemed to sense it. Marshall had become extremely volatile and angry, even violent on occasion. He was gripped by fear.

  “In the end, he cut his own throat with a box cutter.”

  Catherine’s hand shot up involuntarily to cover her own throat. “Oh my God.”

  “They found him several days later. But here’s the important thing. He seems to have left a suicide note.”

  Catherine waited for it, vague dread mounting.

  “I’m following myself. I will catch myself. And then we’ll see who wins.”

  Catherine squinting, trying to make sense of it.

  Rostock nodded grimly, poised to say something further. And Catherine processed the hesitation, feeling the evening turn as if on a pivot.

  “Go ahead,” she said to Rostock. “This is leading somewhere. The thing you really wanted to tell me. It’s something that happened to you.”

  Catherine sat quite still, waiting for it. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was going to stay there and listen to Rostock’s story, because she could not bear the thought of not knowing it.

  The waiter was there, at her elbow. He provided the punctuation mark required by the moment. A breath, a quick scan of the menu, the music in the room ramping a degree in volume, the door to the kitchen swinging open and disgorging plates that dispersed throughout the room. The light seemed to green out slightly, deepening in texture and tone, as if the restaurant were an enormous glass submarine that had just slipped soundlessly beneath the waves, carrying them all downward.

  ION DUBH

  THEY FUSSED WITH THE MENU, disappearing into that for several ritual moments. It had descriptions of the farms where ingredients were procured, pictures of smiling farmers over short bios and quotes. Catherine read one aloud.

  “We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.”

  She looked up. Rostock was listening. Curious and amused.

  “Like during the Irish potato famine,” Catherine said. “Or the Dark Ages.”

  He laughed. It was good to hear.

  Glasses of wine arrived. Rostock sipped and murmured, “Very nice.” And when the bread came, he took a piece, holding it gingerly before placing it on a silver-rimmed side plate.

  “I’m sixty-two,” he began. “Sixty when it all happened. I had reason to be in Paris for a conference before Christmas. I hadn’t been there since my last time with Angela, my wife. She loved Paris. We took other holidays, but that was the one place she really always wanted to return to. We stayed on Le Rue Serpente. Walked everywhere. Had our set of favourite cafés and restaurants.”

  That first trip back since Angela’s death had been melancholy, Rostock admitted. He was busy during the day. But at night, his feet found their own rhythm. The feet remembered. And so they took him down the streets where they knew to walk, all the places he and Angela had been together. From the square outside Saint-Sulpice, up through the gardens and into the Avenue de l’Observatoire. Around the corner and down the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Le Select was of course open and bustling, one of the old favourites. It was cold out. And Rostock said he was tempted go in, sit down to the smoked salmon salad, the côte de veau à la Normande.

  “What we called our prom date dinner,” Rostock said with a smile, which then faded. “But that would have been too much.”

  Rostock ate some bread. He was in new territory talking about all this, Catherine could tell. Perhaps he had few close and trusted friends himself. Perhaps he was like her in that way too, surrounded largely by the complications of hostile colleagues and worried family.

  After a few days, Rostock said, the conference wrapped. He’d presented a paper, gone to bed and woken early as planned. He remembered a gorgeous Parisian morning, rose light, the hum of early traffic in the streets and the café below his window.

  “A real threshold moment,” he said. “I was booked to fly out. But everything seemed to be perfectly arranged to convince me that I should extend my stay. Reclaim Paris, as it were. Angela would have loved for me to do that.”

  But he didn’t. He woke that morning and smelled the coffee and fresh-cut narcissus in the vase on his bedside table. He thought of his wife and this only sped up his thoughts about home. He packed up quickly, hurrying. He rode the train to Charles de Gaulle and arrived feeling as though the right thing had been done. And on the plane, on that doomed flight, he sat with a smile of satisfaction on his face. He felt unified, he said, the most accurate way he could think to describe it. He felt wholly himself again.

  Both of them were now thinking of themselves in their seats, waiting for takeoff. When that seatbelt light winked on, they weren’t even that far apart. Poised together before all that would follow. The surge of the huge jet turbines, the flattening of their spines into their seats, the rake of the nose as it vaulted from the runway, then the steep climb. Up and up, then rolling north and westward, out over the U.K. towards the Irish Sea. Half past ten in the evening.

  “Then what happened, happened,” Rostock said.

  “Yes,” Catherine said. “It did.”

  His expression sharpened. His voice dropped. “And by the time we were in the afterwards, something had happened to me. I felt it in my blood and bones. That unity I’d felt was gone. I’d been split and scattered. As if I’d been separated into parts and was quite possibly missing some.”

  He was looking away from Catherine now, out through the front window and into the flowing, darkened street. While in front of him, as if controlled separately, his hands worked at his bread in furtive tears and twists, dismantling the piece of baguette into smaller and smaller bits until there was nothing for his fingertips to grasp at all. Just crumbs. And his fingers went limp and trembling, his voice trailed off.

  Catherine thought she knew exactly what he meant.

  His eyes returned to hers, the nick in his iris catching mercury street light. He straightened, adjusting his position in the chair minutely so that he was returned all at once to some elegant balance that she understood to be a matter of surfaces and projections as opposed to what was real.

  “In the water, I was lucky to get a hold of some floating debris. That’s where they found me,” he said. “I was in the hospital for six weeks. Collapsed lung, right side. Both ankles broken.”

  Her throat was dry, listening. Rostock too was still drifting.

  “I was in the water a long time,” he said. “It was terrible.”

  “I know,” she whispered.

  “More people might have lived if it hadn’t been for the fires.”

  Catherine doubted that, but was now frozen remembering. Explosions and an eerie absence of cries for help. A section of the tail sinking from view in the shining black bay. Flames licking across the surface of the water, heads bobbing and disappearing. Seat cushions, carry-on luggage, a dog kennel. Catherine herself blinking to life, one arm draped over a piece of wreckage, realizing that she had somehow been washed up close enough to shore that she could stand.

  “I’m sorry,” Rostock said, seeing her expression.

  Catherine clenched her jaw. Opened and closed her hands. “It’s fine,” she said, just as appetizers arrived. Sweetbreads, oysters. The waiter said something to each of them about the dishes, but Catherine missed it all. Breathing steadily. Righting herself.

  After the hospital, Rostock went on, that’s when it really began. When something new was introduced. Some troubling element.

  Catherine looked up, waiting.

  “Have you heard of identit
y theft?” Rostock asked.

  It was much, much more than the inconvenience, you might imagine. There was something penetrating about this particular crime. Google it, Rostock told her. There was a lot of the modern person wrapped up in what we casually call “identification.” Snips of plastic and laminated paper, a constellation of cards and numbers and accounts and PINs that may be reassembled into a powerful proxy. They acted for you, standing in your stead in strange and forceful ways. Rostock felt that most destabilizing of feelings: that a copy of himself had been released into the world and was at that moment beyond his own control.

  “Your documents have no real life until they’re out of your hands. Then they really do.” He picked up an oyster.

  You get a call one day from a bank you’ve never heard of complaining about an overdue account you’ve never heard of either. In his case, a Citibank Visa card maxed out to its $20,000 limit and unpaid since the original charges, which had been made all over the Midwest and the South.

  He assumed a mistake, as everyone did at first. He told Citi they had the wrong Michael Rostock. They came back with a lot of convincing evidence that they had exactly the right man. They had his social security number on file, details from his Illinois Identification Card, a cancelled cheque from an existing account. He called an acquaintance, a man involved in computer security whom Rostock knew from his racquet club. The man gave Rostock his first education on the topic. Identities were stolen and then used to all kinds of ends: to impersonate for criminal purposes, to steal money directly from the person whose identity was involved, to get new documents, new passports, to use those in who knew how many fraudulent ways. A black web of nasty options were branching and spreading in Rostock’s mind, shadows flitting and scheming.