by Nick Totem
In his personal life, he no longer cared about being a father, no longer wanted to have his own children, because he was fearful that whatever advice he had, that he once had considered to be wisdom, would eventually lead his children to the same place he was. Professionally, he gave up working full time and worked only enough to pay his expenses. Mike hired a new doctor and hinted very tactfully that Thomas should vacate his office, since he was no longer there full-time; he moved out without complaint.
Every other week, he would visit Crystal, so much so that it became a sort of routine. He would let himself in through the red door, a glass of cognac would wait for him, and her familiar voice would call out from the bathroom. Each time, he placed the envelope of money discreetly on the corner of the coffee table. Several times, he fell asleep afterward and was thankful that, if she didn’t have another client coming, she would let him sleep, and he would have a dreamless, restful sleep, without dreaming of Cristiano sitting at the corner of the bed with a violin, or Lloyd standing next to him and waving his hand in a well-rehearsed arc, or the Iraqi boy falling down. Until one day he called Crystal, but got a busy signal. He knocked on the red door, and a new girl answered, another would-be actress who had just moved to Los Angeles from the Midwest.
Some months later, the trial for the murder of Lloyd Quattlebern began in earnest. Chau the Dog was the one and only suspect. His father, the old pastor with a crunched up, sad face, sat in the audience, his hands resting on a cane, his head bent down, praying. No one else came to his defense; it was obvious that the big time criminals, the triad, the mafia, the drug cartels, all having gotten their money back, had no business showing up. A bag of money, fifty thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills, was indeed found at his hide-out, as was a gold Patek Philip watch, whose serial number was traced to a shop in Switzerland and registered to Lloyd. Martin did his bidding as expected and described all the circumstances, the motive, and the opportunity, implicating Chau the Dog. When it was his turn, Chau the Dog insisted that he was innocent. He repeated adamantly in his accented, broken English, how he was set up; he claimed that Lana had asked him to shoot those warning shots when she and Thomas had been walking, that she had told him she had wanted to scare Thomas away. These assertions were so incredible that even his own lawyer shook his head. Thomas didn’t need to believe him. He knew it to be true but not for the reason Chau the Dog had said; Lana had wanted those warning shots to push Thomas over the edge, into killing Lloyd. And she had succeeded.
When Thomas finally took the stand to testify about the shooting that night, there was only one thing in his mind, what Lana had said: Between killing someone and killing yourself, the choice is easy enough. Neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney mentioned Lana at all; they both had been promised hefty political donations. The jury took less than half an hour to deliberate the charge of first-degree murder. The verdict was guilty.
After the verdict, Thomas left the courtroom and drove to the beach. He would later be grateful that the sentence would be life imprisonment, that the man would live many more years; he didn’t need to add Chau the Dog to his dreams. He sat at the bar and drank and drank, knowing that it would eventually get dark, that on the side of darkness the Iraqi boy, Jeffrey, Cristiano, and Lloyd would be waiting.
Darkness came every night, as though his life now consisted only of nights, teetering on the edge of madness. Thomas grew a beard and let his hair grow out. Sadness must have been apparent in his eyes so that his patients would sometimes be moved to inquire about his well-being. And one night as he sat and listened to Samuel Barber’s adagio, he suddenly heard each note of music dropping like death knocks in the air, mocking him, so he stopped listening to all music. Silence then suffused his existence.
In the following year, his mother suffered a severe stroke. She became paralyzed on the left side and was placed into a nursing home. Every day, he visited her and talked to her despite periods when she seemed lost, unable to understand what he was saying or even to recognize him. Sometimes he would comb her hair, still very prodigious and vibrant; at other times he would clip her nails, or put lotion on her skin. There were, however, times when lucidity returned to her, and she would say, “Thomas, why is it so difficult to get marry and have children? Will you do that? And bring the kids to see me. I wait every day to see them.” He would tell her, “Yes, mom. We’ll bring the baby by to see you when she is old enough.” Grace giggled happily. “Please do, Thomas. I can’t wait to see the baby.” “Let me cook you a pot of spaghetti. Are you eating enough?” And just as quickly, in another minute, she couldn’t recognize him and looked vacantly out the window. Six months after the stroke, his mother died of pneumonia. After the funeral, he didn’t see her in his dreams. Maybe because he no longer believed in anything, her soul didn’t exist for him.
He was alone. He had been burnt by the fire of love, and now the fire of time.
Even in his dreams, the fire of time burned, and, three long years after the murder, Cristiano, Lloyd, Jeffrey, and the Iraqi boy became opaque shadows, hoovering at the corner of the bed. Fortunately, the fire also burned away all the bitterness. Sometimes when he remembered what Lana had said, he would say it to himself: Between killing someone and killing yourself, the choice is easy enough. But he would now add: And time will prove it right, always. Sometimes the starkness of life with its indifferent undersurface hit him hard, leaving him thoughtless and speechless, and when he finally recovered his wit, he would say to himself: Good girl, Lana; Smart girl, Lana; You did right for yourself.
On a bright summer day, a vanilla envelope arrived at his home. Inside was a photograph, but upon closer inspection, Thomas saw that it had been trimmed from a much larger one. The envelope had been posted from Sidney, Australia, without a return address. On the back of the photo, there were five hand-written words: On vacation. Christiana is two.
Thomas could deduce the meaning of the words. On vacation meant to tell him that tracking the origin of the sender would be useless, and “Christiana is two” referred to the front.
The photo was of a little girl sitting on a bench that could have been any where in the world. Only a hand, delicate and graceful, could be seen, extending from the left to hold the child’s hand. The little girl wore a yellow dress with pink roses, her hair was slightly curly and light, and her cheeks were ruby and very cute in the way most two year olds are. Her eyes, however, were large and a little slender and of strange clarity, reminding him so much of a photo he had seen before, of a feline precociousness. He tried to discern his features in her face. No matter the angle he held the photo at, she seemed to be staring straight at him. As if awakened from sleep, he held the photo at arm’s length and wandered around his darkened house to examine it under different lights. Finally, it drew him into the back yard, into the burning rays of the midday sun.
The End