The Dreamer in Fire and Other Stories

by Gafford, Sam

  Until that moment, I had completely forgotten about the box buried in my closet. I looked at him and wondered if I should tell him the truth and eventually decided to because, if for no other reason, it would get me out of there faster. “I have it. I put all the stuff from your desk in a box and kept it.”

  His face lightened up. It was like seeing a kid when he wakes up and realizes it’s Christmas morning.

  “You have it? THANK GOD! You’ve got to bring me the box. Right away. TONIGHT!”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m not doing that, Carl. I’ll bring it over in a couple of days when I have a chance, or I’ll send it over by some courier. You’ve waited for it for a few years, you can wait a few more days.”

  He wanted to hit me then. I could see it in his eyes, but then they relaxed except that the hate was replaced with a steely glare. “Sure, no problem, Richard. You send it over when you get a chance. Why don’t you sit down and have a drink with me? Talk about old times.”

  “No thanks,” I said as I started walking down the path back to the front door. “I’ll get that stuff to you but, Carl, don’t call me again. You understand?”

  “Sure, sure, I understand. But listen, Richard, don’t take too long, OK? I’m running out of time. ‘The center cannot hold!’”

  I was out the door and away before he could say any more. Carl Eckhardt had become a fungus and I was intent upon scraping him off my shoe as quickly as possible.

  * * *

  I forgot about Eckhardt almost immediately.

  There were other things that were going on in the world and I truly didn’t care that much about a washed-up reporter who was festering in an apartment full of junk. The world was moving forward in ways that no one could have predicted before. Martin Luther King Jr. had led his successful four-day march to Montgomery, Alabama, with 25,000 civil rights activists earlier in the year. President Johnson had announced his plan for a ‘perfect society’ and we all felt that we were building a better world.

  Except then things started to fall apart.

  Malcolm X, a radical civil rights activist, had been assassinated that February. Johnson escalated the ‘police action’ in Viet Nam by bringing the number of troops overseas to 125,000 in July, which was the same month he announced his “War on Poverty” by creating Medicare and Medicaid. More than one of us in the newsroom wondered about Johnson’s schizophrenic nature. And then, three days after I had left Eckhardt’s apartment in a huff, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles exploded in a race riot.

  It began as a typical traffic stop with the white California Highway Patrol officer stopping a black driver he believed to be intoxicated. It escalated quickly from there and would last for four days. What made it so horrifying and frightening to everyone was that it was televised. The violence was right there in your living room. There were frequent bulletins on the TV and updates coming over the wires. Most of us slept in the newsroom for those four days, deathly afraid that we would miss the latest news. Through it all, Walter Cronkite was there on CBS News.

  When it was all over, there were 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, 3,438 arrests, and more than $40 million in property damage. It was the worst riot in American history and, even more than the sight of 25,000 people marching for equal rights, it seared the racial experience into our minds.

  It had been the kind of four days that you couldn’t forget if you tried. I had put the last words down on an article about local reaction to the riots and had given it to the stringer when my phone rang. It was the Police Department and they wanted to verify my name and address. I was then told that I needed to get to my apartment quickly. The implication was that if I did not show up, they would come and get me.

  The cab got me home fast but couldn’t get me through the police barricade. I gave my name to the first cop I saw, and he rushed me through into the building. I didn’t live in a really expensive neighborhood, but it wasn’t a slum either. As I walked inside, the janitor gave me an evil look. It was likely that I’d have to be looking for a new home after this.

  My place was on the third floor, and I passed several cops going up and down the stairs. A couple of medical-looking people were talking among themselves outside my door and just shaking their heads. I caught the words “from the inside” before I was hustled away from them. No matter how much I asked, no one would tell me why I was there, but that became obvious once I walked through my front door.

  The place had been ransacked. All my books and records and stuff had been tossed across the room. “This is it?” I asked the cop who’d escorted me upstairs. “You called me here because my place got robbed?”

  “Nah,” said the detective in a cheap but clean suit who walked over to me. “We called you because of him.”

  He pointed behind my couch, and there was Eckhardt. He was not only dead but quite spectacularly dead. Something had ripped a bloody hole in his chest.

  “I’m Detective Cardy. This is your apartment, right?”

  I was stunned. Even though I had covered murder trials, I had never seen a dead body myself. Especially not one I knew.

  “Yeah, yeah, this is my place. What the hell happened here?”

  Cardy guided me away from the body, but I couldn’t keep from looking at it. “That’s what we’re hoping you can tell us. Did you know him?”

  “What? Yeah, that’s . . . that’s Carl Eckhardt. I used to work with him at the paper. He was a reporter.”

  “Uh-huh. And when’s the last time you saw him?”

  I stopped to think. “Ah, I guess about a week or so ago. I visited him at his apartment. How did he know where I lived? Who the hell did this to him?”

  We walked into my small kitchen and I sat down dumbly on a chair. Part of me was horrified at seeing my friend lying dead in my living room, but the other part of me was taking notes and analyzing everything for the article I was already itching to write.

  “That’s a good question. We got a call from your janitor last night saying that there was a lot of noise coming from your place. When the responding officers got here, they found the door open and your friend on the floor. Any idea who might want to do something like this to him?”

  I shook my head. “No, none of us had even heard from him in years. He’d dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “And yet you saw him a week ago? How was that?”

  I explained how Eckhardt had left me a message and I had visited him at his place.

  “Why did he want to see you? I mean, you hadn’t heard from this mook in years, right? Then out of the blue he says ‘come on over’ and you come running? What’s the deal?”

  “I think,” I said hesitantly, “that he just wanted free booze. He started going on about how there was some giant conspiracy and that the world was going to hell.” For some reason, I didn’t mention the box that I hoped was still in my closet.

  Cardy snickered at that. “Yeah, ain’t it though? And where were you last night?”

  I lit a cigarette and took a deep breath, feeling the nicotine hit my system. “At the paper. I’ve been there for the last four or five days. I never left the newsroom except for coffee or to take a piss. We were covering the Watts Race Riot. You hear of it?”

  Cardy looked disgusted, which told me a lot about the man. “Yeah, seen it on the TV. Guess we get what we deserve, huh? Anyone at the paper can verify this?”

  I nodded. “Just about everyone. Go ahead and ask.”

  Flipping his notebook closed, Cardy grinned at me. “Oh, we will. Trust me. Thing is, this is a weird one. I mean, there’s very little blood. Wounds like that, we should be swimming in blood, but there’s barely enough to wet a sponge. Of course, he must have put up quite a fight, right? I mean, this place is a mess. And why would he be here anyway? He wouldn’t be looking for anything, would he?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. More booze? Stuff to sell? The guy had fallen pretty far, you know. He was living like a bum.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, they’re clearing
out the body now, so we’ll be out of your way in a minute. Anything else you can think of that we might need to know?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Right, well, here’s my card. I’ll be in touch. And you might want to invest in some new locks.”

  Cardy left the room and I sat there, listening and waiting. I called the night desk and quickly gave them the details. The editor was suitably unimpressed, which meant that it might get a mention in the obits and maybe in the back section. The cops took lots of pictures, made measurements, and eventually took Eckhardt away and I waited. The last cop left and still I waited until the barricades were removed and the last patrol cars drove away. There was no one left in the street when I finally allowed myself to go to the closet. There, buried beneath a pile of old clothes and bags of stuff my mother had sent me, was Eckhardt’s box. I don’t know how he could have missed it.

  I pulled it out of the closet and brought it to the kitchen table, taking care not to look at where the body had been only an hour or so ago. Opening the box, I saw a few personal items like his nameplate and mug and desk crap. Below them was a pile of papers that I only vaguely remembered taking out of the bottom drawer of Eckhardt’s desk. I sat down at the table, poured myself a glass of beer, and started to look through them.

  By the time I had finished, it was late morning and I could barely breathe. It was too much for me to deal with and I was close to just burning all the files. But, like Eckhardt, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I needed to learn more.

  After that, I began keeping records of my own and, once I knew what to look for, it wasn’t hard to find. There was Albert DeSalvo, the ‘Boston Strangler,’ who confessed to the rapes and murder of thirteen women, although others have said he was not in it alone. Kitty Genovese, in 1963, was raped and stabbed to death outside her apartment building in Queens. Reportedly thirty-seven people in neighboring apartments saw or heard the attack and did nothing. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy (a Category 4 storm) struck Florida and the Gulf Coast resulting in eighty-one deaths and more than $1 billion in damages. In 1965, the Compton Cafeteria Riots in San Francisco began when police were called to arrest transgender customers who were picketing the cafeteria. The plate-glass windows of the cafeteria were broken and a police car’s windows and doors were smashed. It is impossible to determine the injuries or deaths resulting from the riots because newspapers agreed not to cover it. To them, it never happened. Also in 1966, Charles Joseph Whitman climbed a tower at the University of Texas at Austin where, using a rifle, he shot and killed sixteen people and wounded thirty-two. His motives were unknown because Whitman was shot and killed by an Austin police officer.

  The list goes on and on throughout the ’60s. The Six Day War in the Middle East. The Apollo 1 test launch fire that killed three astronauts trapped in their missile. The Tlatelolco Massacre where as many as 300 students were executed by Mexican military and police ten days before the opening of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. A leak of nerve gas in Utah kills 6,000 sheep. The My Lai Massacre where between 347 to 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam were murdered by U.S. troops. Victims included men, women, children, and infants, with some of the women being gang-raped and their bodies mutilated.

  Then there were the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. The best chances for peace and guidance in the coming decades died with them. The Manson Family murders in 1969 where a pregnant Sharon Tate and others were brutally killed. 1969 also ushered in the Presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Every time I saw his face on television, I felt an itching deep within my chest.

  I have made my files and my notes. Some days I wonder if Eckhardt would have made the same connections. Once you know, it becomes absurdly easy to spot it. With time, you can even spot the ones that have been influenced the most. My head hurts most of the time now. Drinking helps a bit but doesn’t take it all away.

  Eckhardt’s original files have become the core of my collection of misery. I have them memorized in case someday my apartment is ‘robbed’ even though, eventually, they will find me with a suspicious hole in my chest. But I remember every word in those files.

  There were eight files in the box. Most were on specific cases or events, but the last one was filled with Eckhardt’s notes. He had been working on an article that would have tied all these cases, and more, together. My mind flew back to that day all those years ago when Eckhardt had gotten fired. I’m sure now that it was because of this article he tried to write.

  One of the files was labeled “VA belt” and had pictures of scientists posing happily for the camera. Under one of them was the name “Van Allen.” Another, later picture of him showed a man who looked haunted, as if he jumped at every sound around him. There were government reports with large blocks of text blacked out to the point where they made no sense, but there were also handwritten statements that Eckhardt had gathered from Van Allen and some of the men in the photograph. They were trying to warn about what had really happened when those bombs exploded. The words ‘fractured reality’ were used more than once.

  Another file was even more disturbing. It was labeled “Dyatlov Pass” and had gruesome pictures of frozen bodies. It looked as if it had been the result of a failed rescue attempt, but even more disturbing were autopsy photos of some of the bodies. One had the eyes gouged out and another was posed to show that the victim’s tongue was missing. Some of the papers in the file were in Russian, which I couldn’t understand. A crude map showed the progress of a party through a mountainous region close to Siberia.

  The third file said simply, “Space.” It was a list of space missions, but I didn’t recognize any of them. Most of them were Soviet launches, but there were several American ones listed as well. None of them were on any official list of space missions. Eckhardt, again, had pictures of the missiles and crew, but these were no public relations events staged for photographers. These were frightened men climbing into rocket cans for secret purposes. Eckhardt had notes next to each that read either “lost,” “abandoned,” or “dead on recovery.” One particularly disturbing photo showed a Soviet woman standing next to a Russian general. Neither one looked eager to discover new horizons. There was a report that had a detailed translation of a transmission from one lone cosmonaut whom I believed to be that woman. She had been pleading for help, pleading for them to send someone to rescue her from something. In the end she begged them to destroy the capsule, but they refused. They demanded to know what was happening, and all she could say was that something was walking on the outside of the capsule, tapping and making rhyming sounds. Her last words were screams and the final lines of the translation simply said, “sounds of metal collapsing and being ripped.” Eckhardt’s note next to her mission said only, “sacrificed.”

  There were more. Many cases of unbelievable horror and brutality that, on the surface, had no connection whatsoever. But the more I looked, the more I thought I could see something there behind it all. Just when I thought I had a grip on it, though, it would slip away and leave me with only pieces of the puzzle.

  That’s when I read Eckhardt’s notes. Like most reporters, his handwriting was terrible, but I could read most of it. At first it was like the ravings of some lunatic, but by the time I reached the end I felt entirely differently.

  “ITEM: 1958. Despite warnings to the contrary by Van Allen and other scientists, America proceeds with plans to explode an atomic device in the upper atmosphere to counter Russian tests. The resultant blast knocks out electronic devices over ¼ of the hemisphere. What only Van Allen knew was that a second bomb was exploded at the same time. The first was a decoy. It was the second that was the real test. After the detonation, the Aurora Borealis reached the brightest intensity it had ever known before or since. Van Allen had been afraid that the bombs would ignite the atmosphere and set off a deadly ‘cascade effect’ that would destroy all life on this planet. The second bomb opened a crack in space and something came through. Van Allen
is haunted by the thought of what that ‘something’ could have been.

  “ITEM: 1959. Nine experienced hikers enter the Ural Mountains in Russia. None return. A search party finds their abandoned tent, which looks perfectly normal. There are slits in the back of the tent that later study shows were cut from the inside. When the bodies are found later, they were all barefoot and several were not wearing their coats. Something had compelled them to leave their tent in the middle of the night, unclothed and unprepared, to go into the snow in -22 degree temperatures. None of the corpses showed any signs of struggle, but two had fractured skulls, another two had broken ribs, and one was missing parts of her face. Her tongue had been ripped out. Photo graphic evidence found at the scene (along with personal journals of the hikers) described how the night before they had seen mysterious orbs of light above the mountains. The records of the investigation were quickly sealed and the bodies quietly buried. The official cause of death is listed as a ‘compelling natural force.’ What ‘natural force’ found them camped alone in the mountain?

  “ITEM: 1960. Largest earthquake ever recorded hits Chile. Measures 9.5 on the Richter scale. The resulting tsunami affected southern Chile, Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, eastern New Zealand, southeast Australia, and the Aleutian Islands. Some reports list as many as 6,000 dead.

  “ITEM: 1961. The Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA launches an attempt to overthrow Castro and fails miserably and publicly. America has shown its weakness. What compelled the CIA to do this?

  “ITEM: 1961. The U.S. sends 900 ‘military advisors’ to Viet Nam. This begins a new type of war that America is not equipped morally or militarily to fight. What inspired this aggression?

  “ITEM: 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Russia parks atomic warheads in Cuba, sparking a confrontation that brings the world to the brink of nuclear war. The madness is spreading and quickly.

  “ITEM: 1963. The ‘Age of Assassination’ begins with JFK and Medgar Evers. Television brings the JFK murder into everyone’s home. The idea spreads that anyone can be killed anywhere at any time. JFK’s assassin is himself killed on television. Murder is no longer a vague concept. No one is safe.