Nerve Damage

by Peter Abrahams

  Janet unlocked the shed, shone the light inside. Roy saw a white convertible, old and covered with dust and cobwebs, the top down.

  “Paul’s car?” he said. But he knew: white with white interior, waiting for Delia under their personal cherry-blossom tree.

  “He loved it,” Janet said.

  Roy went over, rested his hand on the passenger-side headrest. Cold, cracked leather, but Roy, touching it, was hit by a sudden sensory memory of the exact feel of Delia’s skin. If he still knew something like that, didn’t it follow that he’d known everything about her?

  “I had this idea of burying him in it,” Janet said. “But then I started having doubts—would he have wanted that? We…we were young. So many things we never got around to discussing.”

  Roy nodded.

  “The funny thing is,” Janet said, “I kind of did end up burying him in it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Janet came forward, reached into the car, opened the glove box. She took out an urn, oval-shaped with flattened ends, made of some dull silvery metal, maybe pewter.

  “This came a few days later, UPS,” she said. “I just didn’t take the last step, burying the car. It seemed so over-the-top.” She held the urn in one arm, enfolded, the way you carry a baby.

  What was the expression? Starting to show. When would Delia have started to show? Soon, right? And then a thought struck him, struck him with physical force. If Janet Habib was telling him the truth, then it was possible Delia did end up showing. And more; an almost unimaginable chain of mores that made him lean against the car, and hold on, just in case.

  “Tell me again,” he said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “This story—of Delia coming to your house in Cambridge.”

  “I have no interest in persuading you,” Janet said. “Believe or disbelieve, it makes no difference.”

  “Just tell me again,” Roy said.

  Outside the wind rose, banging the shed door closed. Janet flicked a wall switch, turning on a bulb that hung down from a crossbeam, the light harsh on her face. She squinted at him—what was she seeing?—and said, “You’re really telling me you never saw her after the trip?”

  “Tom Parish called with the news,” Roy said. “And came to the funeral. She’s buried in the old town graveyard.”

  “You saw with your own eyes?” Janet said.

  “Of course—I was at the funeral.”

  “She wasn’t cremated?”

  “No. There was a coffin.” White, with scrollwork highlighted in gold leaf, all paid for by the Hobbes Institute; at least, that was what Roy assumed: he’d never seen a bill.

  “I don’t understand,” Janet said.

  “That’s why I’m asking you—are you sure it was Delia in the limo?”

  “Beyond any doubt,” Janet said.

  “Did Tom Parish say where the car crash happened?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t want to know,” Janet said. Her voice grew quieter, almost as though talking to herself. “I didn’t want any of the details. And I wanted Tom to know that.”

  “To know you didn’t want to know?” said Roy.

  She gazed at him. Her eyes were dark and blurred.

  “Explain,” he said.

  “Are all artists like you?” she said. “The answer should be obvious—to make sure nothing like this ever happened.”

  “Nothing like what?”

  “A stranger turning up with dangerous questions.” Her gaze, drawn back to the urn, went far away. “Paul told me he was going to Washington, nothing more. But I knew. I knew from how nervous he was.” Habib’s shirt was the color of the cherry blossoms; damp patches had spread under both arms.

  “Knew what?” Roy said.

  “And from how he muttered in his sleep,” she said, now meeting Roy’s gaze. “Muttered in Arabic.”

  “About?” said Roy.

  She looked away. “I don’t speak a word of Arabic.”

  “I think you know where they went,” Roy said.

  She shook her head.

  “Tell me.”

  Janet took a step back, cradling the urn. “What are you doing?” The lightbulb flickered, went out, came back on. She looked scared. “Well? What are you doing?”

  What was he doing? Right now, he was trying to come up with an explanation more believable than what Janet took to be obvious—that Delia and Paul had gone to some Arabic-speaking place, not Venezuela. Did that mean Venezuela had never been in the plans, that Delia had lied to him? Or had there been some last-minute change, a message waiting at the airport?

  “Why did you come here?” Janet said. “What did you want with Paul?”

  “The Hobbes Institute has disappeared,” Roy said. “As though it never existed.”

  “So?”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said.

  “Think what you want.”

  “What are you so afraid of?” Roy said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “You.”

  “You’ve got nothing to fear from me,” Roy said. They were mirror images of each other. “I’d like to see his pay stubs.”

  “What pay stubs?”

  “From whoever did the paying.”

  “I didn’t keep anything like that,” Janet said.

  But here was the car, not up on blocks or preserved in any way, just retained; and the ashes, not underground, not on a mantelpiece, still unsettled. Roy didn’t believe her. Much more likely that she’d held on to everything: Paul Habib was still unsettled in her mind. Roy was starting to understand that feeling very well. “Where are the pay stubs?” he said.

  “Nowhere,” Janet said. “I threw all that stuff out years ago. Years and years and years.”

  Roy shook his head. His mind grasped something important. This shed—with the car that had taken Delia away, and the ashes of the last person he’d seen her with—had to be square one. He was on the right track, if for no other reason than that here was the first face that didn’t go blank at the mention of Tom Parish and the Hobbes Institute. That realization had an effect, immediate and physical. He felt pain-free and full of oxygen; strong, potent, clearheaded, felt, in fact, the way he had on any given day a year ago, six months ago, even two.

  “I’m going to look for those pay stubs, Janet,” he said. “I’d prefer your help, but I’m going to do it, one way or another.”

  “Are you threatening me?” she said.

  “It doesn’t have to be like that,” Roy began, “but if you don’t—”

  With her free hand, Janet was reaching under her Scandinavian sweater, into the waistband of her jeans. A little late, Roy remembered the gun. Then—things speeding up—the gun was out in the open, the barrel rising. Roy’s body, as it had done so often on the ice, took over, and flew at her, totally airborne. Not a great distance, and his legs had always been strong, but for some reason Roy fell short, swiping weakly at Janet’s arm as he went down.

  He landed heavily, mostly on his cast, cracking it open; he cried out in pain, lost his breath. Janet, off balance, tripped over a paint can and went down, also landing hard. The gun and the urn both sailed free, hitting the floor. The top of the urn popped off.

  Roy rolled over, crawled toward the gun, fighting to get air in his lungs. He grabbed it, turned. Janet was on her knees, gazing down at a small charcoal-gray nest: the ashes.

  “Oh my God,” she said. She began rocking back and forth.

  Roy got up, ripped broken plaster off his arm—the pain didn’t get any worse, lessened if anything—and went over to her. He put the gun in his pocket, knelt beside her. She didn’t seem aware of him at all.

  “Oh my God,” she said, “oh my God.”

  Roy reached for the urn, held it horizontally on the floor, the way you would a dustpan, started sweeping the ashes back in with his hand. The crematorium—perhaps
some foreign crematorium—hadn’t done a great job, unless it was normal to find tiny bone fragments among the ashes. And—and what was this? Something shiny?

  Roy picked it out of the ashes. Beside him, Janet went still. A metal object, high-quality carbon steel—Roy knew metals—about two inches long, irregular and partly blackened at one end, sharply pointed at the other: the broken-off blade of a knife.

  Janet’s hands covered the lower part of her face; her eyes were wide and dark. “He was murdered?” she said.

  Roy gazed at the blade. He could make out some engraved letters: zerland.

  “Is that what this means?” Janet said. “Tell me.” She dug her nails into his arm. For some reason he didn’t feel that at all. “Tell me what it means.”

  “This is everything,” Janet said. They were back in the house, in front of the fire. She dumped out cardboard boxes—three, four, more—spilling the contents onto the rug. “So much,” she said.

  It took hours. Roy came away with three things.

  One: Among the many pay stubs, the only one not from MIT: Verdadero Investments, $783.56 to Paul Habib.

  “What’s Verdadero Investments?” he said.

  “No idea,” said Janet.

  Two: An overhead color photograph, shot from a high-flying plane or maybe a satellite, of a large square structure with towers on each corner. Computerized printing at the bottom read: Operation Pineapple. But this couldn’t be Venezuela. Desert lay all around, not an American-style southwestern desert, but the kind with dunes; they cast rippling black shadows.

  “Where’s this?”

  “Couldn’t tell you.”

  Three: Another photograph, this one black-and-white, out of focus. Paul, younger and thinner than Roy remembered him, sat on a fence rail, laughing. A man in a Stetson stood beside him, in profile. He was laughing, too. Out of focus, face in shadow beneath the Stetson brim, and hair brown, not white, but: Calvin Truesdale, almost for sure.

  “Do you know him?” Roy said.

  “No,” Janet said. “I’ve never seen this picture.” Her eyes were still on it. “Who is he?”

  Roy could feel how intensely she waited for his answer; a little too intensely, he thought. “No idea,” he said.

  “But you think it’s important?” She had a sudden thought—a thought that seemed to scare her. “Because of who took it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who took it?”

  But Roy didn’t want to say. If all this was true, then: Why hadn’t she come back to him? He thought again of that line Delia had once quoted, when he’d asked how work was going: the line about holding two contradictory thoughts in your mind at once. Now it scared him.

  “What’s going on?” Janet said. Her eyes went quickly to a window, returned to Roy.

  “That’s what I’m asking you,” he said.

  The fire had gone out; a few embers glowed faintly in the grate, and even more faintly in Janet’s eyes. “I always felt uneasy,” she said, “way down deep—where I could ignore it. My whole marriage.” She handed him the picture. “Did you feel uneasy, too?”

  “Never,” Roy said.

  Tears rose up in her eyes, overflowed. “I thought I was all cried out.”

  “That won’t happen until you tell whatever it is you’re hiding,” Roy said. Then came a thought. “Did Paul ever mention a woman named Lenore?”

  “No.”

  “Tall, light-skinned black, now in her midforties?”

  Janet’s eyes widened.

  “I’ve seen her,” Roy said. “Who is she?”

  Janet backed away. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you do.”

  But Janet shook her head, kept doing it like a child. “Please go,” she said.

  “Help me,” Roy said. “We can figure this out.”

  “Oh, sure, what a team.” Her eyes found the blood spots on his sleeve, remnants of the nosebleed.

  “Please,” Roy said.

  But she just shook her head some more. He showed himself out.

  Twenty-three

  Roy drove north, back across the Cape Cod Canal, three exhibits on the seat beside him. A: Paul Habib’s pay stub from Verdadero Investments. B: The overhead shot of the big structure in the desert. C: The black-and-white picture of Habib and Calvin Truesdale. Triangle ABC. He’d been no good at high school geometry—a fact that didn’t make much sense in retrospect—but he’d done some thinking about triangles, especially in the middle stages of the Neanderthal series. Now—late at night, almost no traffic, alone in the moving yellow tunnel of his headlights—Roy turned triangle ABC over and over in his mind, an unstable form, dim and elusive, rotating not so much in space as in time, specifically time past. Whatever came next, he knew, was going to be hard: he’d spent his whole working life solving spatial problems; temporal problems were new. But he had them, by God. His uncasted arm throbbed in his lap, finding a rhythm in sync with the big V-8 and the knobby snow tires on the bare pavement.

  Roy switched on the radio, found a jazz station. They were playing something slow and sleepy, mostly soft bass and light brushwork. The announcer came on; he had a soft, slow voice, could probably have made more money as a hypnotist. Roy’s eyelids got very heavy. He was thinking about pulling off to the side when the next song started up: “For All We Know,” the Billie Holiday version.

  Roy’s mind came to life; he could almost feel electric circuits firing in the different parts of his brain. Delia had known the guitarist who’d played “For All We Know” by the grave site, an aging hippie who performed Friday nights at Ethan’s Pub, her favorite restaurant in the valley, mostly because of the shrimp cocktail, a dish she ordered unfailingly if available. After a drink or two, she’d start making requests, requests that got more and more romantic—“Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “My Romance,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Here’s That Rainy Day,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “Little Girl Blue.” She knew all the lyrics, had a great fund of songs like those, surprising to Roy at first. The guitarist loved her requests. He’d worn a tie to her funeral, the only time Roy had seen him in one.

  Springtime—in fact, the very first day that felt like spring that year, the year Delia died: the sun shining with real warmth, the breeze bringing a softness that had been missing for months. And standing before the open grave? Roy in front, the minister beside him; Turk and his wife at the time; the guitarist; a few others, but Roy couldn’t remember exactly who. Tom Parish? At the church service, yes, but in the cemetery? Roy didn’t think so. All he really remembered was that soft breeze, “For All We Know,” the scrollwork on the white coffin, and the thump of that first symbolic spadeful of moist springtime earth landing on the lid.

  Light snow started falling as Roy crossed the Vermont line, tiny flakes that seemed to hang motionless in the headlight beams. He took out his phone; every player on the Thongs was in the directory. Roy called Freddy Boudreau.

  “Roy? What the fuck? It’s three in the morning.”

  “I know,” Roy said, although the truth was he’d forgotten all about the time. “But I was wondering whether that ski-patrol guy came in with Skippy’s phone.”

  “You couldn’t have wondered a few more hours?”

  “Sorry,” said Roy. “But did he?”

  “Yeah, he did,” Freddy said. “Let’s dis—”

  “And did you go up there?”

  “Up where?”

  “The mountain hut,” Roy said. “To look around.”

  “Telling me how to do my job?” said Freddy.

  “It’s not that,” Roy said. “I—”

  “Think there’s a payoff to searchin’ the woods at night?” Freddy said. “Ever in a million years?”

  “Probably not,” Roy said.

  “Which is how come I’m waiting for daylight.”

  “It’s just that I’m worried he—”

  “Go to sleep, Roy. You’re starting to piss me off.”

  Roy drove u
p to the barn. He’d left some lights on inside. Sections of Delia appeared in some of the long windows, like—the comparison too obvious to miss—pieces of a puzzle. He went inside. Everything normal, but he had a very weird feeling, as though the place wasn’t his anymore.

  When had he last eaten? Roy couldn’t remember. Wasn’t that his job right now, to eat, rest, get strong? More than a job—his purpose in life. What did it say about a man, forgetting his purpose in life? Roy opened the fridge, found not much: a few bottles of beer, orange juice, the steak he’d bought for Skippy, the pineapple—Product of Venezuela—from Dickie Russo’s. Plus a freezer full of ice cream. Roy didn’t feel like ice cream. He cut the rind off the pineapple, then sliced it into a dozen disks, very precise, as though he were working on something. After that, he ate them one by one, slowly at first, then faster and faster, with a kind of desperation, almost like a starving animal, pineapple juice dripping off his chin.

  Roy went into the bedroom, lay on his bed. Worn out—an expression a lot of people used, his mother, for example, coming home from her night job just as Roy was getting ready for school. Roy himself had felt tired many times, but never worn out. He felt it now—the difference between a battery that needed a charge and one that had to be replaced—and closed his eyes. First, a long, long sleep, and then—

  But his eyes wouldn’t stay closed. Some part of his mind—not the rational part that appreciated the wisdom of think there’s a payoff to searchin’ the woods at night?—refused to shut down.

  Searchin’ the woods: the implications of that short phrase struck him. They were very bad.

  Roy went into the bathroom, had a good look at his broken arm. A little skinny, but wasn’t that expected? And the throbbing just meant the healing wasn’t quite done; no surprise. He turned on the tap, washed his forearm gently in warm water. Gentle warm water: it felt great. He didn’t want to stop.

  Roy found an Ace bandage in the medicine cabinet, wrapped his arm nice and tight. He put on long underwear, ski pants, fleece, hat, boots, took his jacket off the peg by the door. Still snowing outside; no wind. Roy checked the thermometer by the door. Nine degrees. He put his snowshoes and a pair of poles in the truck and drove to the base of the mountain.