by James Sallis
So he had showered and made a thermos of coffee, then sat out on the porch watching lights straggle on in neighbors’ houses as they eased into the new day.
Now more of the same.
Throughout those early hours and for much of the following day, pieces of his dreaming, patches, splinters, corners and edges, had come back to him. These would swim up out of nowhere, assert themselves, fall away again. In one he had been in a room lined with statues. They were stepping forward and back, turning their heads one to another, moving hands about, but they were statues. When he came into the room, they all held their hands out to him. That’s all he remembered.
Last he’d seen them, years ago, the photos had been in one of those corrugated file boxes. Josie was forever into projects. She’d plan them, get everything together, be right there on the lip ready to jump, but then something else would come along and the project would never get done. In the closets were bolts of material for the drapes she’d planned to sew, along with curtain rods and hangers. A box or two of shelving bought at least eight years ago and still unassembled. Cushions for chairs snug in store wrappings, neat but ever-growing stacks of paid bills, insurance papers and correspondence fully meant to be filed away, skirts for beds and stick-on pads for furniture legs. The photos, she had sorted into envelopes according to some taxonomy all her own, time or place or subjects; they’d gone into the file box along with corner mounts, double-sided tape, scissors, a scrapbook or two.
And the box had gone … where?
Not in the bedroom closet, or in the hallway catch-all closet, or out in the garage where the stacks were so high and long-established that boxes on the bottom had been compressed to half their original height.
He found textbooks from the criminal science classes he’d taken at Phoenix College, stacks of old case notes, library law books he had failed to return, expired passports, X-rays and lab reports with column after column of numbers, copies of his safety records and firing range qualifications, a Bible with his name and hers in gilt letters on the inside front page, tax files and documentation going back at least twenty years, a manila envelope of programs from plays and musicals they’d attended, a lot of old clothes, a surprising quantity of new clothes still with store tags on them or in gift boxes.
And finally, under her bed, he found the photos, two fat scrapbooks full, all of them sorted chronologically and expertly affixed to the pages.
He was partway through the second scrapbook when the phone rang, Graves offering to swing by and pick him up this morning. Why the hell not? They stopped at Denny’s for coffee on the way in. Sitting there watching a young couple bedecked with tattoos and piercings two booths over, Sayles told Graves about Dollman.
Typically Graves said nothing, but followed Sayles’s gaze to the young couple.
“You remember that?”
“Being young?”
Graves nodded.
“And stupid?”
“And not caring that you were—that too. But I was talking about being in love.”
“Isn’t it the same thing?”
“Maybe. Maybe it is.”
Graves waited as the server refilled their cups and again asked if there would be anything else before swinging off down the line holding the pot out in front of him like a lantern.
“You know I’ve never much believed in telling others how to live their lives …,” Graves said.
“Then now’s not a good time to start, is it?”
He looked away and drank coffee. “Yeah, I guess it isn’t. This stuff’s nasty.”
“First cup wasn’t as bad.”
“Always the way it is. Isn’t. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, Graves, I do. Damned near every time.”
“Right.”
They sat without speaking as the young couple got up to leave. Sayles couldn’t help but notice that the woman paid, and that the man followed her out the door, wondering what that said about the nature of their characters, of their relationship, and of the world they thought they lived in. As the couple passed by on the sidewalk outside the window, the man turned to look in at them. At some point, presumably, he’d become aware of being watched. Sayles tried to read his expression: Annoyance? Defiance? More like puzzled, he thought. What was the word? Quizzical.
“Dollman, huh?” Graves said.
“I don’t have a name for him. Not that it matters much, now that he’s gone to ground.”
“This guy has information, looks right to have information, but he doesn’t want to give it up. Yet he got in touch with you.”
Sayles nodded.
“What the hell’s that about?”
“I gave up trying to figure.”
“So whatever he claims, we have to assume that he’s directly involved.”
“Chances are good.”
“They’re a hundred percent. And we know he has to want something. But what? He’s not a suspect, there are no suspects—and no one even knows who he is.”
“And not a joyrider,” Sayles said, “or he’d have been out in the open with this from the get-go. I’ve been through it a hundred times. Hitchhike, minute-of-fame, self-styled Good Samaritan … Nothing fits.”
“Something does.”
The server was back. Graves’s hand shot out and hovered palm down an inch above the cup. The server, Donnie according to the name tag, glanced at Sayles. Sayles looked at his watch and shook his head. “We’re twenty minutes late.”
“They’ll start without us,” Graves said, then: “Vinegar and honey. You have a snake in a hole, a kid under a table, there’s two ways to go with it. You smoke him out. Or you make him think you’re going to give him what he wants.”
“This isn’t a snake or a kid, Graves. This guy’s a ghost.”
“Yeah. Well, ghosts want something too—or they wouldn’t still be around.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE KID WAS STILL OUT THERE, making his move on black, stopping for his phone call, making his move on white. Though now the game seemed to have become less important. He spent a lot of time between moves just talking into the phone and looking around.
Christian got a bottle of orange juice out of the half-pint refrigerator. The table limped when he set the laptop down, so he scooted the legs around till it got better. Turned the computer on and, once it powered up, found the wireless connection. It sat there quietly waiting, locked, loaded, ready.
For what?
Getting in touch with the cop, the only tangible thing he had to grab on to, had been a bust. Should he try again? Guy had probably written him off by now. Decided he was a crank or crackpot. To get his interest back—Sayles, that was his name—he’d have to give him something. An earnest, as they used to say. Something to convince him that Christian had goods, had knowledge or witness, without giving up anything about himself.
He opened a message board and scrolled down without reading. He always imagined he could hear the computer’s drive whirring inside. He didn’t know if it spun, if it did anything like that, if it moved at all, but he heard it. Or thought he did.
Last few weeks, he’d been having this weird sense that … what? That he wasn’t alone? Not quite. As though someone were standing off watching or standing half a step to one side, maybe, seeing what he saw, almost a part of it. But that wasn’t quite it either. A sense of presence—that was as close as he could come. The drugs, he had figured. But that sense was still with him, and the drugs weren’t.
The feeling he had now was close. But different.
He turned. The kid had his nose pressed against the front window, looking in.
Christian went to the door. “Tell them I’m not here,” Christian said. The kid just looked. He had brown eyes that went gold when light caught in them. “Old joke … You need something?”
The boy shook his head. “My name’s Chris. What’s yours?”
“Christian.”
“Wow. We got the same name almost. Is that cool or what?”
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“It’s cool. You want to come in?”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“And I’m thinking you were also told not to bother me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Quite the moral dilemma.”
“What?”
“One transgression leading inexorably to another.” Christian stepped back out of the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell your mother I invited you.”
“That would be lying.”
“Not really—since I just did.”
The boy thought about it and stepped inside.
“You like chess,” Christian said.
“It’s okay. One of my teachers—Mr. Stuart? He taught me. Picked out six of us, those with the highest IQs he said, and taught us. I think I’m the only one that stayed with it. You don’t have much stuff, do you?”
“Only what I need.”
“That’s my old TV. Cool computer. Is it fast?”
“No. But then, neither am I.”
“Mine’s slow. Good, but slow.” He took in the books stacked on the window ledge and table. “You read a lot.”
“I’m guessing you do too.”
“Mostly online. You can get anything you want online—newspapers from all around the world, music, books. But you know that.”
“Anything you want, huh?”
“You can even order food, clothes. Never have to leave your house.”
“I suppose you could.”
The boy picked up the copy of Earth Abides atop the stack on the table and leafed through. “I read Nicholas Nickleby last week.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
“Online?”
“You got it.”
“And never left your house.”
“You’re funny.” The boy held up the book. “Can I borrow this?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll bring it back soon.”
“There’s no hurry.”
“I read fast.” He looked at the monitor screen, where the menu for a forum on animal rights hung suspended. “What do you do, Mr. Christian?”
“For a living, you mean? Not much, anymore.”
“You’re retired?”
“I suppose I am.”
“And before?” He glanced back at the screen. “Were you a teacher? Or a biologist?”
“I was trained in the sciences. But I went another way. What about you, what are you interested in?”
The boy read the screen as they talked. “I don’t know. My dad was a teacher. That was his day job, though. What he really was, was a historian. The two world wars—he knew everything about them. People wrote him from all over the world asking for information. He died three years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Maybe I’ll do something like that.” The boy turned his head toward the house. “I better go. That’s my mom calling. She’s not calling me, she’s calling the dog. But the dog never comes, so in a minute she’s gonna be calling me to go look for him. His name’s Rommel. He’s old, and looks mean, but he’s—”
“A pussycat?”
“A pussycat. That’s good. That’s what he is all right.” At the door he turned back. “Good-bye, Mr. Christian. See you later.”
“Enjoy the book.”
“Yes, sir.”
The boy’s mother met him just outside the back door. Twice as they spoke, she glanced toward the apartment. Christian hoped the boy wouldn’t get into trouble over his visit.
Christian went back to the forum, dutifully scrolled through five or six entries before realizing that he had no memory of what he had read. He drank the orange juice, warm now and fairly disgusting, and, more or less from habit, began a sweep of the sites he habitually used for communication. There were two repeated messages from people inquiring about dolls. No follow-up message on Rankin. Nothing from the cop, from Sayles.
Distractedly, with images of hard-packed dirt trails and of rooms at the edges of cities sliding through his mind, he clicked at a series of links: a piece on army dogs abandoned in the Pacific following World War II, another about a man who’d fought in both Korea and Vietnam, the review of a novel about a Desert Storm grunt’s homecoming, slide shows of Revolutionary and Civil War reenactments, online stores selling authentic battle gear, memorial sites, veteran’s chat rooms, history pages, Wikipedia, academic essays studded with sentences whose second clauses seemed to rip away or confound whatever meaning he had drawn from the first, further memorial sites, blogs about lost loved ones, travel pieces. Then suddenly his attention was full on the screen.
To put things in order, this is what we all want. And here, we are on firm ground. But with the next step, the very next step, we begin to move violently apart. To some, individuals and societies alike, it is manifest that this order must be imposed, legislated, and enforced—impressed—from above. Others understand with selfsame certainty that, unless its growth is organic, unless that order comes from within, it is forever doomed.
I must, as you all know, return soon. My stay here has been short. I have seen so little of your world, finally, and have understood less.
Never forget that yours is a world of great beauty: these clouds, these trees, running water, the caress of wind. Yet so many of you do not live in it; you only visit; and choose instead to live in a world of words, of theories.
You are trapped, prisoners in your language, hostage to your insistence upon understanding.
Theories rule, and will destroy, your world.
Hours later, well into the night, when little of the world remained around him save the sound of an occasional passing car and the spill of moonlight over half the table, Christian got out of bed, turned on the computer, and tried to find the posting again. But try as he might, he couldn’t recover it, couldn’t reconstruct the steps that took him there. As he searched, moonlight moved across the surface of the table in a slow tide, touched his hands, and moved on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“SO LET’S SEE if we can call up the spirits.”
Graves rolled the chair in close, hands on the keyboard. He sat there rocking two inches forward, two inches back, wheels squeaking. Man couldn’t just sit in a chair to save himself. Always had to be scooting, rocking, keeping time. Not from nervousness or tamped-in energy, though. This was something else.
In quick succession, too fast for Sayles to follow (he spotted Google and Dogpile as they zipped past), Graves entered dolls on a stream of search engines, then, appending a series of qualifiers here and there, moved the search (“Let things perk a while”) to the left half of a split screen. He went on keying—John Rankin, the Arizona Republic for the days following the shooting, New Times, Good Sam and other central hospitals, fire department and city records, half a dozen addresses—in what seemed free association. Screen after screen came up, bloomed with prompt boxes or site jumps, and dropped to the bottom bar. Good soldiers.
Sayles watched Gonzalez move with his coffee mug down the aisle between desks. Barge was the word that came to mind, not barge in the sense of rushing, but in that of a river barge pushing its dogged way upstream. Gonzalez had been shot last year during a routine traffic stop, then while in the hospital and almost recovered, got hit by a stroke. Came back from that, too, but to permanent desk duty. Did okay on the whole, but you could see in his face, in the pitch of his body, the concentration required even for simple tasks. The mug was a gift from his wife, customized with his shield number, and it was never more than two-thirds full. He held it well out in front, balancing himself with the other arm, eyes on the mug as though it were a carpenter’s level.
Sayles heard the snap of Sanders biting into an apple at the next desk. When had the chair wheels stopped squeaking?
Graves leaned back. “This is interesting.”
Unable to make much of what he saw on the screen, Sayles shook his head.
“I put in Rankin’s address, sent out a crawler for activity in the vicinity.”
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��And?”
“A recent nine-one-one call just up the street from Rankin’s place, man unconscious in car. Paramedics responded with on-site treatment and transported. Probably just a coincidence, but …” Graves reached for the phone. “Let’s ask.”
Sayles noted with interest that Graves dialed the number from memory. And to a direct line, no getting passed along. A few moments of back-and-forth banter—someone he knew, obviously—then Graves asked his question.
Silence.
Graves swung the mouthpiece up. “Cooking.”
Then the phone went back, he listened, he said how much he appreciated it.
“It just got better,” he said as he hung up. “Caucasian male, late fifties to mid-sixties. Seriously ill, treated in ER, moves to a room—and he rabbits. No trace of him.”
“The hospital has to have—”
“He’s carrying a driver’s license with his picture. Shows his name as Gerald Hopkins. A case worker at the hospital tried to follow through when he went AMA. The license—”
“Was a fake.”
“And no other ID. A nurse in ER remembers that he said his name was Christian.”
“Another dead end. So we don’t know anything.”
“We know one thing.”
Sayles waited.
“We know he’s dying,” Graves said.
Dark night of the soul. There it was, looking in at him.
Sayles stood at the window. He’d stepped down the room to get away from the glare of computer screens and desk lamps. They were there, but off to the side, behind, distant and apart.
It was 2:48 A.M.
It was 2:48 A.M and Sayles was thinking how, despite white nights, a redoubling case load, and everything else that was going on, he never felt strung out anymore. Normal—that’s what would feel weird.
Stretched out flat on his back on the floor by their desks taking what he insisted upon calling a power nap, Graves was snoring. From the break room came the smell of burned coffee and the sound of the unwatched TV playing what seemed to be the same commercial over and over, something about the music we all love, before giving way to a program on the social behavior of cats and dogs.