Later, I open my eyes as he sits across from me, a silver laptop with a glowing apple in his lap, clicking away.
“His name was Jason Crenshaw. The trucker. The clerk, Herschel Tidwell, died later from a massive stroke.”
The weight of that sinks me farther in the chair, gravity growing stronger. But I push myself up. I’m so tired, but I need to go. I don’t want Jerry to end up like the trucker.
He had a name. Jason.
I move forward and reach for the photo. He places a liver-marked hand on it before I can.
“This stays with me until you tell me it all.”
“So you believe me?”
“I didn’t say that, did I, Shreve?”
“You always answer a question with a question?”
“You always run from your problems?”
Screw this guy. He’s prodding me now. Jabbing a stick wherever he thinks I’m vulnerable. And I’m vulnerable everywhere.
“People get hurt when I’m around, Jer. I just need the photo.”
He ignores that like I never even said it. Instead, he says, “So you’re telling me you can read minds. Can you read mine?”
I shake my head.
“Why not? Should be easy, no? Old man sitting here asking for it?”
“It’s not like that.” I sit back down. “Most folks, getting in their head is as easy as sticking a knife in an open jelly jar. But other folks, it’s harder. Sometimes because they’re disturbed. Sometimes because they’ve had hard things happen to them and lived with it.”
“You’re talking abuse. Sexual?”
“Use your imagination. Humans are bizarre and terrible things.”
“You say that like you’re not one.”
I don’t reply.
Jerry shuts his laptop, places it on the coffee table.
“Will you finish your story, Shreve?”
I only hesitate a moment and then begin talking once more.
When I come to the end, he sucks his teeth. Shakes his head. His brow furrows, crags and crevices and crevasses.
I’ve told him everything. All of it. The theft of memories, the possessions. Rollie. I held nothing back. It felt like a confession.
“You stole those poor souls’ happy memories? Like some junkie?” He points to the window. “We have junkies here. More every day with the insomnia. Pitiful creatures.”
“So you believe me?”
“I don’t yet know. But if what you say is true and you’ve done these things … these things have been done to you. This man, this Quincrux …”
“Do I need to prove it to you?”
“I think that might be necessary.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll need to go out. I’m hungry anyway.”
Even though it’s gorgeous outside, sun lowering into the golden hour, Jerry puts on a light tan jacket and a white straw hat. Very slowly, he changes his shoes, from the comfy running shoes to leather loafers. From a closet at the front door he gets a cane. Wooden, with a simple metal knob.
“Aren’t you the clotheshorse?”
Jerry raises his considerably furry eyebrows. Possibly in amusement. Maybe outrage.
“I prefer ‘clothes thoroughbred.’”
He does look quite dapper. We leave the apartment, taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Despite the cane, Jerry moves pretty well for an old dude.
On the street, he says, “You like pizza? We’ll get you a New York slice.”
The air smells of sewage and smoke and is filled with the sound of furious honking and the scream of sirens in the air. Men and women hustle past us, heads down. The crazies at the park have gone, maybe moved on to some more populous area. Multiple sirens. An NYPD cruiser whizzes by us as we walk south on Irving a couple of blocks away.
“Oh, no,” Jerry says. He’s limping a little, just a touch, and using his cane—clack clack clack—but he picks up the pace.
Pizza D’Resistance has been husked out by some sort of fire, and recently, judging by the char and melted-plastic smell, along with the two stores nearby, one selling shoes and the other a nail and pedi spa. The upper floors of the building have broken windows, tarred black by smoke.
“It’s like a war zone or something,” I say as another NYPD cruiser blasts past, sirens blazing. Despite the noise and confusion, there aren’t many cars on the streets. Maybe it’s too dangerous to drive now that everyone is working on zero hours’ sleep.
Jerry’s cane pops across my chest. Not hard. It’s like he’s getting my attention, stopping my forward movement, both physically and conversationally.
“Shreve. There are places in the world that this—” He pulls the cane away from my chest and jabs it at the burnt husk of a building. “This is far better than their everyday life. And war? What do you know of it?”
The smell of burning human waste and the percussive chuffing of the helicopter rotors as we unloaded the body bags to the LZ in the middle of the moisture-drenched Cambodian air. The chatter of rifle fire in the bush.
But I say, “Nothing. Living off the fat of the land, Jer-bear.”
He frowns, either at the nickname or the pained expression on my face as I say it. “I do not like that.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“Always with the mocking.” He sighs. “Maybe you can’t help yourself. And maybe you know more of war than I might have thought. Come on, I see Herschel’s is still open.”
The door chimes as we enter, and at the deli counter Jerry orders a “half-and-half” sandwich with extra rye and two bags of chips and two sodas.
“Just one sandwich?”
“Just you wait.”
At the register, I whip out my wallet, since I’m flush and don’t want Jerry to think that I’m a mooch to top it all off, but he looks at me so furiously, furry eyebrows waggling like outraged caterpillars, that I relent. He pays.
“Jerome!” The cashier’s name tag reads DEBBI. “Such a shame about the fire, yes? Things getting terrible. No sleep and people getting careless,” she says, almost gleefully. Some people thrive on tragedy.
Jerry nods his head sagely and tsks. “A terrible thing. No one was hurt, I gather?”
“In that, they were lucky. Everyone was awake when the fire started,” Debbi says, taking Jerry’s money and giving him a numbered ticket. “This your nephew?”
Jerry’s old enough to be my grandfather, but I don’t correct her.
Jerry says, “No. An old friend.”
We take our chips and drinks and find a table in the near-empty deli. There’s a couple eating furtively in the rear, heads close together. A tremendously fat man drinking coffee near the front window. And us.
By the time we’ve sat and I’ve opened my soda, Debbi calls out, “Fifty-three!” and I go back to the counter and take up the tray with what can only be described as a small mountain of meat with a single piece of rye bread perched on top. I assume the other piece is buried underneath the three hundred pounds of pastrami and corned beef. A massive plate with extra bread and pickles around the edges. I return to our seat carrying it.
For a while, all we do is eat, using our forks to make small sandwiches from the pile. Mustard. Pickles. It’s very good. I didn’t realize how hungry I was.
Afterward, Jerry says, “So.”
“So?”
“How should we proceed?”
“You need proof.”
“Yes.”
“All right.” I reach out, touching the flames of the nearest minds. No Riders in the building. No knuckleheads, either.
I close my eyes. Out in the ether—those etheric heights—and into the fat man at the front of the deli. His name is Massey D’Lainge, born in Podgorica, Montenegro, on New Year’s Day, 1960, immigrated to America with his parents at the tender age of six. New York is all he’s ever known. Never left the city. It’s world enough for him. He weighs in at 337 pounds. Hasn’t slept for a couple of days, and his heart hammers away in his chest furiously. In his considerab
le meatsuit, I stand, painfully—three-hundred-plus pounds is hell on the knees and ankles—and waddle back to where Jerry and the now vacated Shreve meatsuit sit.
I take a chair from a nearby table and sit. Jerry watches MeMassey closely.
“I can tell you anything you want to know about him, Jerry.”
Gotta hand it to him. Jerry doesn’t gape or go all agog at the parlor tricks. He says, “What was the game we played in that hospital in South Carolina?”
I laugh. It’s a thick sound coming from this guy’s meaty throat. “It wasn’t South Carolina. It was North Carolina, Jer-bear. And the game was Double Shutter. You kept trying to tell me that your ‘people’ invented it.”
“So, you’re in there, Shreve? You didn’t pay this man to say these things?”
“No.” I say this simultaneously from both MeShreve and MeMassey. This time, Jerry jumps a little at the echo.
“Will he remember this?” he asks, raising a trembling hand.
“Maybe. Some do, some don’t. The shibboleth works differently with different people. Some folks I can leave with a ‘suggestion,’ and they will forget. Or do what I ask of them if their will isn’t too strong, and it’s not anything they wouldn’t do in normal life. I couldn’t, say, tell him to kill the president, and he’d go buy a gun.”
Jerry’s eyebrows continue their thoughtful dance. “Let him go.”
I do, diving back in the good old Shreve chassis. I open my eyes. Massey’s looking somewhat startled.
“Massey,” I say and bridge the gap between our minds. “I command you to forget this conversation. Also, I command you to go immediately to your doctor and have your heart checked out, and then I want you to go home and sleep. You will have no more trouble sleeping. Also, this isn’t an order, more along the lines of a suggestion—lay off the doughnuts. Okay?”
The man nods his head, chins wobbling. He stands and lumbers out the front door.
I turn back to Jerry.
“Oy, vey. It is true.”
“I’ve never lied to you, Jerry. Well, okay. Maybe a couple of times. But not about anything that really matters.”
“You called it a shibboleth.”
“The shibboleth. Quincrux said that to me once. He planted a message in one of the Casimir bulls’ memories.”
Jerry rubs his face. Looks out the window onto the street. Before he seemed pretty spry, but now he looks tired.
“You know what it means?”
“I think so.”
“In Hebrew, shibboleth literally means ‘grain.’ Or sometimes ‘stream’ or ‘fluid.’ Or ‘torrent.’ And it was used as a password by the Gilead men after a battle. It has interesting connotations the way you use it.”
“It just struck me when Quincrux said it. Sort of the phrase I hung all the weirdness on, if that makes sense.”
He nods, and he’s about to say something when his phone begins chirping. He holds up a finger and answers the phone, saying, “Ahuvi! Hold on one moment.” He stands and walks away a few paces. After a few moments, he returns and says, “That was my wife. She hasn’t been sleeping well lately—like everyone I know—and went down to a spa with some of her friends for the evening in hopes of relaxing. She won’t be back tonight, which is good, I think. Because we have many things to discuss, do we not?”
“You tell her about me?”
“I mentioned I was having lunch with a friend, Shreve.” He says this like he’s squeezed the last bit of patience out of the tube he bought at the local bodega. “I did not tell her with whom.”
“That’s good.”
“You are a wary young man.”
“Being a fugitive with psychopathic telepaths on your ass tends to do that to you.”
“Point taken. For the moment, it is just you and me. But Miriam will return tomorrow, midmorning, and before then we must figure out your final disposition.”
A couple thousand different ways to tell him that I’ll be captaining this vessel pop into my mind, none of them as snarky as I’d like.
So I nod like an idiot and say, “You got it.”
“Let’s get back to my apartment. We have much to discuss.”
“You’ll give me the photo then? I need it to find Jack.”
“We shall see.”
FOURTEEN
Sitting at his kitchen island, Jerry makes me start again from the beginning. Somewhere in North Carolina, after the Dubrovnik episode, when I was in the hospital. Hearing about my conversation with Quincrux, he exclaims, “That maintenance man was Quincrux? Very polite, yet I sensed something wrong with him. He kept coming in to change lightbulbs or take out the trash or check pipework—even though no pipework was in evidence. Limping, no?”
“Yeah.” A permanent limp, I hope.
A look of creeping horror spreads across Jerry’s face. He passes a hand over his eyes.
“You all right, Jer?”
“When I was a boy, a friend of mine went for a vacation in Florida and captured a snake. He would carry it around and feed it mice he bought at the local pet store. All the boys in the neighborhood were wild about that snake, and we’d congregate on Richard’s stoop on Saturday morning in hopes of him letting us hold it.”
“I’ve heard this one before. But it was a coral snake, right? And eventually it bit the boy and killed him.”
“No, this is a true story, though your expression makes me think you do not believe me. Trust me, this is the story that created your story.”
“Okay. So, what happened?”
“You said you know the story.”
“I’ve heard it. He’s showing off the snake, but then someone who knows something about snakes realizes, as he sees the boy handling it, that it’s not a milk snake, it’s a coral snake. And as the boy freaks, the snake bites him and he dies.”
Jerry shakes his head. “Unfortunately, no. He was showing the snake off at the local park—it was a gorgeous creature. And some herpetologist happened to spy it and ‘freaked out,’ as you say. But it was not the boy who died. It was the snake. They snatched up sticks and killed it right then and there on the spot, even with a herpetologist present. Poor, beautiful creature.”
“No way.”
“I was there.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I have never lied to you, Shreve. Well, except for a couple times.” He winks at me.
“Jerry, sometimes you really surprise me.”
Jerry raises his eyebrows. “I do not celebrate death, nor should you.”
Good point. “But why’d you bring it up?”
“Eh? Oh.” He stands, not looking at me, as if he’s ruminating on something, and toddles over to a cabinet and withdraws a plate. He uncaps a cookie jar and places some cookies on a plate. Jerry’s got his own speed.
He sets the plate down, and I take one of the wonderful little vanilla cookies and pop it in my mouth. He picks one up and chews very thoughtfully, very slowly. Finally, he says, “Sometimes, learning one little thing can change your whole view of the world.”
“Like learning that a snake is poisonous.”
“No. Like the world suddenly changing its whole opinion about you.”
“I don’t get it.”
He looks at me. “You will, someday, Shreve. You might have lived a hundred lives, yet you are still a boy. It’s all about sweat equity.”
There’s a thundering boom that shakes the building, and the lights flicker off and on. We move to the bay windows and look out at New York’s nighttime skyline, close-up, over Gramercy Park. A car has exploded, as far as I can tell, down the block. Trash fires spew living embers that make intertwined patterns as they rise. Shadowy figures rush along the streets, casting long shadows like wolves skirting the edges of campfires. Jerry pushes open the windows.
The smell of burning rubber on the wind and the scream of sirens reach us.
Jerry says, “This is not good.”
No shit, Sherlock.
“Come, there’s no need to
stare out at the signs of our time. We are on the brink. But you must finish the story.”
We return to the kitchen. The electricity remains on, though the lights flicker. The clock on the microwave blinks 12:00, over and over.
I take up the thread of the story. The cookies are gone, and I’ve reached my stint in the Tulaville Psychiatric Hospital and the sad end of Rollie. It’s hard to talk about, her inglorious end.
“You liked this girl, did you?”
“In what way? I thought she was smart, I guess. But I didn’t know her very well. I wasn’t even attracted to her.”
“Then why did you kiss her, like you said?”
Dammit. Why can’t he just shut up?
“Because she asked me to.”
“That’s not a reason.”
I probe the hard, steely surface of his mind. Still like a ball bearing. He gets right to the heart of it. But I say, “Because I needed her help.”
“So you used her. Is that right?”
I can just stand up and walk out the door. I can do it right now.
Jerry frowns. “You just looked twice at the door. You are going to leave?”
“Hey, what is this, psychoanalysis?”
He waves a hand at the door to his apartment. “Go ahead. Leave. Run away. It is what you do, is it not?”
“You don’t really know anything about me.”
“I know more than most. It’s okay to feel bad about the way you treated this poor girl.”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
He remains silent for a long while, looking at me.
“No. Her death is not on you, I don’t think. But you should have treated her as a human. Not as some …” His eyebrows do more interesting things. “As some pawn in a game. Do you understand?”
“I don’t need this, Jer-bear.”
“You obviously wanted it.” He sighs and looks ineffably tired. “I worry about you. And I thank the Creator that you cannot get inside me. Not with your mind. Not with your words. You are a problem, a cipher.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I say. “I’ll be just fine.”
The Shibboleth Page 11