by Andrew Pyper
I take a step forward but nobody moves to let me pass. The TV woman pulls a strand of hair from her mouth, clears her throat.
“One more thing,” she says. “If Tripp didn’t do it, what do you think happened to those girls?”
The sky above dimpled with snow, flakes of a size that make a flat thump upon impact with shoulders and boots. We’re statues gathering drifts on extended limbs, faces hidden to all those who stand outside the circle.
“You know something?” I start, pull myself back. “I’m really very tired now, Ali, and the day hasn’t even started yet. So if you could all please step aside, I’ve got to get back to work.”
And they do step aside. Microphones retracted, notebooks drawn against chests, mouths held shut. I move through them and hear only my own footsteps and the rattle of runny noses. But as I scuff up the slick courthouse steps I can’t help but look back. Air taken in, warmed and released in irregular cycles, rising above them like white smoke lifting from dying embers.
“Excuse me! Barth! Can I just clarify something?”
It’s Ali Gregg’s voice again, its practiced toughness gone and replaced by the higher pitch of confusion.
“Are you trying to tell us that you think Tripp did it? That you believe your own client is guilty?”
I should say something to that, I know. Tell them of course not, not at all, I never meant to suggest anything of the kind, where’d you get that idea? But instead I slip inside and let the heavy door close behind me, pretending not to hear.
THIRTY-NINE
That evening I return to The Empire Hotel with rivulets of meltwater from the morning’s snow trickling over my shoes. Black shoes now brown from the mud I had to plug through to go from the courthouse back door, behind the library and down a backyard lane to avoid the pack of reporters waiting for me out front. There’s now $250 in ruined Italian leather on my feet but it’s well worth not having to look again into the hollow faces of the press, openmouthed and circling in like a pack of wild things that feed upon the flesh of the living along with the dead.
But of course it’s already too late. My morning’s candid performance may have stunned them all for a second, but they must have soon collected themselves to beam back the image of counsel for the defense in the Important Murder Trial of the Week having what appears to be some kind of low-grade nervous breakdown on the front steps of the court. Not terribly momentous as news, perhaps, but undoubtedly close to the top of the something-you-just-don’t-see-every-day list. So when I finally duck into the hotel’s front door I’m not surprised to immediately hear the concierge’s voice come out at me from the murk of the lobby.
“It’s a lucky thing I caught you there, Mr. Crane, ’cos I’ve got a wad of messages from your lawyer friends down in Toronto as thick as my thumb!”
I wait for my eyes to adjust so that I can scuff over and take the messages from his hand. A wad as thick as two thumbs, by the feel of it.
“Thank you. Another thing. I was just wondering, does that young woman who dances in the Lord Byron—the one with the longish blonde hair—is she still a guest here?”
“You mean the young young one?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she weren’t ever a guest here.”
There’s a pause, and I’m thankful that the darkness prevents me from seeing the concierge’s puzzled face or the terrible map of veins etched into the top of his head.
“Only danced the one night. Came in here saying she’d never done it before and wanted to give it a shot. Must not have liked it much.”
“I see. Well, thanks anyway.”
“A damn shame, though,” I hear him say as I make my way to the top of the stairs. “We don’t get ’em that young or pretty up here every day. No sir, we have to live with whatever hand-me-downs we can get, so to speak.”
All of the messages have come from either Graham or Bert and all are marked URGENT. I can hear Graham holding the concierge’s hand through the message-taking (“Can you please make sure that Bartholomew gets this, and that he understands it’s urgent. Now, can I help you with the spelling of any of that?”) or Bert’s more direct approach (“Just get him to fucking call, alright Einstein?”). The offices of Lie, Get ’Em Off & Associate must be having one of those days marbled with tension, office doors continually swinging open and slamming shut, and before it’s all over one of the secretaries bursting into tears.
Despite all this, I decide not to call back. It’s not a fear of having my employers tear a wide strip off me, nor is it humiliation for having done a profoundly unwise thing. I just don’t have the energy to pull the cellular out of my bag, turn it on and punch in the numbers.
Then the bedside phone rings.
In one spasm I pull the cord out of the wall and roll onto my back on the bed. And just when I start to think that the time has finally arrived to figure out the larger significance of recent events and make some serious decisions as to what to do next, sleep comes.
When I wake it’s with the suddenness with which one responds to a noise, but the cool air of the room is silent. The night has collected again outside the windows, and the wind that sways the streetlight sends a shiver down from the back of my head, although I’m still fully dressed in my suit on top of the sheets. A quarter past three and there’s no good reason to get up now, but I know that sleep won’t return for me tonight.
I screw the top off the thermos and have to stick my hand in up to the wrist before my fingers hit powder. For a time I let them probe inside, pretend to feel for something lost, then pull up a choking dose and bury myself in it, coming up flush-headed in the instant, gushing heat. Biting down hard on my lip to make sure something can still be felt.
And then I’m tipping the thermos over and spilling a crystal mountain out over the table, going at it without division or counting lines. Somewhere inside my head a door slams shut but I keep pulling it in, blowing the mountain into shape-shifting dunes, powdering the air all around with white dust. Something splashing into what remains on the table, a thousand transparent explosions. Thoughtless, narcotic tears.
Stop only when the blood starts. A blasting flood I don’t attempt to cut off at first, let it stain where it falls. When it finally begins to slow I staunch it by pressing the nostrils together and counting to sixty until they’re dried shut.
Then I’m putting on my coat again, stepping out the door and down the hall. Leaving my room, the hotel. I’m aware of this. But it’s as though I observe myself from another place. Watch myself creak down the stairs, out the doors and into the Lincoln, starting it up with a roaring pump of gas. Then I’m up the street with a screech from the back tires, driving round the corner and taking the road north out of town.
Out beyond the last of the streetlights, beyond any light at all but the shallow range of halogen white that beams out from the front of the car. Arms so heavy I can barely keep them on the wheel. A sound in my throat I recognize as my own voice. A wordless moan of fear.
Come to the turn for Fireweed Road and I’m slamming on the brakes, taking the corner on the fly, the wheel cranked with the flat of the hand, and make it like I’ve done it a dozen times. Arms extended before me, steering in jerky corrections. Swerving onto the cusp of a cottage lawn then wrenching the wheel back to swing the car through the soft gravel at the side of the road. Too goddamn fast. Why am I driving so fast?
“Why are you driving so fast?”
In the car with me. A girl’s voice coming from the backseat.
“Yeah, what’s the big hurry?”
Another. A girl as well but different from the first. Throw my eyes up into the rearview mirror but nothing’s visible in the plush gloom.
“Who are you?” I hear myself scratch out from the back of my throat.
“Don’t you know?”
“Yeah, don’t you know?”
Giggles. But in this child’s sound there’s also an edge of something older. A viciousness that cuts through the soundproofed sp
ace between us.
The car pushed faster. The speedometer needle shaking to the top of the circle, to the limit for travel on paved highways. A number far too high for a curving lakeside road at night.
Then movement in the backseat. A whisper of cotton over leather. The voice I hear next only inches from the back of my neck.
“You seem to know the way, don’t you?”
Throw myself forward against the wheel but that doesn’t move me any further from its cold breath. An arm resting on the back of my seat, a mouth that sighs through the crack below the headrest. There’re waves of odors now too. The candy-sweet lilac of children’s play perfume. Bloated fish washed up onto the mud shore.
“Are we going to get to see her, Dad?”
“Will you show us this time?”
“No!”
The word comes out of me not as a word at all but a canine whimper.
“Because we know who you are.”
“Yeah, we know you.”
Then it’s my scream that blocks out everything else. Through the windshield the headlights flash upon oncoming trees, the wheel spins out of my hands, the car slams its side against their trunks but doesn’t stop. Even the screech of folding metal is drowned out by this single, wavering scream.
A pair of frigid hands placed over my eyes. My foot plunged down on the gas.
But in the time it takes another scream to reach my lips there is the crunch of the car’s front connecting with something that stops it dead. Then, for what is either a long time or no time at all, there’s nothing.
It’s still night. The cool air swirls in through the place where the windshield used to be, having already dried the better part of the blood trickling out from the cuts caused by flying glass. A sound in my head like a hornet trapped inside a paper cup and a throbbing behind my ears that expands with every beat of pulse. But I can still see. I can still hear.
As for my legs, I’m not so sure. Twisted around each other so tightly beneath the wheel they won’t move on their own. I use my hands to lift one knee up, setting it off to the side as I bend the other in the opposite direction, flinging it out the open door. In a moment, blood rushes back down both legs in a painful tingling and with it the feeling slowly returns.
It’s only then that I notice the car is still running. Despite the crushed hood and the steam that swells out from beneath it, the engine sputters on. I could back up out of here and roll home right now. But instead I pull the keys out of the ignition and let it rattle to a stop. And at the same moment as the night’s quiet descends upon the wreck, a powerful dizziness floods my head. The space inside the car is suddenly too small, and in an awkward spasm I topple out onto the wet earth.
Mud instantly glued to every inch of me. I’m surprised by its weight, the way it makes lifting each limb a test of endurance. Hands held at the sides of my head, legs wobbly as a glue sniffer’s. Stumbling down the path that isn’t really a path at all but a zigzagging indentation through the brush. The wind drying the rain, leaves and blood into a second skin.
Please, please, please.
I ask myself to stop, or think I do. For along with the noise in my head there’s now the added sound of the lake coming in hard on the shore, driven by a wind that rips over its surface. Stand on the last rock at the furthest point out into the water, slip my shoes off with my heels and kick them in. Ahead of me the night rolled out like endless black carpets.
No, please.
The jacket next. Tossed onto the foam where it floats for a moment before slipping under.
Don’t.
Then I’m in the air. A forward collapse more than a dive. Yet in the time it takes to meet the water I take in the dome of stars over the lake, the glint of distant whitecaps, a whiff of cherry woodsmoke before it all goes.
And cold. A flashing current of electricity that stops the heart for the space of four beats before it resumes, making up for lost time at double speed. Working to move the blood to my arms and legs, now kicking and circling in a heavy breaststroke. A glance back shows that I’m already a hundred feet from shore and heading further out.
It’s quiet out here. Just the ruffle of air passing my ears, the pant and spit of my mouth. All of me below the water’s purple line except the top half of my head. So small a thing it could dip under without any sound at all.
You’re drowning.
An exhausted man just stepped out of a car wreck, fully dressed in clothes now ten times their normal weight. But I don’t turn back to give myself a chance. Keep lunging forward, pulling my body out to the deeper place. Drifting lower so that with each breath more water comes in than air.
You’re under.
And I am. Kicking my way down deeper to where the water is dense as stone. To where the slime of lake bottom weeds licks my arms. Swaying tentacles that are easily pushed aside at first but in another second have slipped a noose around my neck, tied my hands together in a tight knot.
The panic now. A final choking cough before taking the water in but there is no sound, only a teasing veil of bubbles over my face. The rest of me struggling at the weeds, flipping like a hooked fish, but they only bind me further inside their swaying body.
Then the muscles finally yield and I can do nothing but absently pull at each slick arm, one by one. And one by one they give way, wrenched from where they grow to be collected in my fists. Then I’m pulling my way up, chin first, squeezing my lips shut for one more second, just hold on until I’m out, until—
The air.
Dog-paddling back the way I came, the range of motion allowed my arms and legs now so limited I’m capable only of wriggling forward just below the surface. Watch the dark rocks of the shoreline approaching. Keep my eyes on them in the hope that so long as I can see them they won’t go away.
And they don’t. I pick the nearest one. Pulling myself onto its flat surface with my knuckles, my fingers still clamped shut around two handfuls of weeds. Lurching to my bare feet, from the rock to the mud shore, into the trees and back up to the road.
When I get there I collapse into the Lincoln and turn the key. The engine hacks and there’s a knocking sound like someone trapped under the hood, but it starts.
Go. Get out of here.
But as I raise my clenched hands to the wheel I see something in the dimness of the car’s overhead light that freezes a scream in my throat.
There, gripped tight in my hands, I hold not green weeds pulled from the lake’s bottom but a thick clump of human hair, light and dark.
FORTY
The Lincoln makes it back into town—it must—because the morning finds me pulled into a ball under the sheets, damp footprints leading from the door to the bed. I don’t remember the drive back, climbing the stairs, pulling off clothes. Or the package that sits next to me on the bedside table. A loose roll of pages from the latest Murdoch Phoenix with a bundle of hair sticking out at both ends and leaving droplets of water on the varnished wood. I don’t remember wrapping it up like that and leaving it there so close, but it all must have happened.
Pull back the sheets and haul myself into the shower. Bend to scrub the dried mud from my feet and it comes off in black clumps and liquid strings. My back burns.
When I’m done the effort of lifting my legs over the side of the tub sends dark stars popping before my eyes. Water rushes down over my skin to an instant pool on the floor. There’s the thought that I should really wipe it up and then in the next second I’m on the floor myself, splayed out like an unmanned puppet. In a minute I’ll raise my hand to the door handle and crawl out into the cool of the bedroom, wait for the fluttering hitch of my breathing to clear. But for now I just stay where I am, sinking and floating at once.
They say madness runs in families. Like cancer, obesity, hair loss or rotten teeth, it’s handed down to descendants who have the bad luck to inherit the loony-tunes gene from some straightjacketed uncle or granny banished to the attic in the days when such measures were considered nothing more or less
than good manners. I don’t know my lineage well enough to say for sure, but I always thought the Cranes were relatively free of crazies swinging off the limbs of the family tree. So where did it come from?
It wouldn’t be so bad if all I had was an uncomplicated disease of the body. Something slowly debilitating and pitiable, with a high enough sympathy profile that it gives rise to television commercials and annual charity telethons. I could lend my services to the cause as a role model, a man-who-continues-to-function-despite-his-handi-cap story which would feature yours truly being wheeled into courtrooms to ensure the rights of able-bodied misfits and misunderstood thieves. It would be great exposure for my practice, and besides, I don’t have much use for my body anymore anyway. But my mind! It seems that I’m losing one of the few things I value in the world, and all because the Crane semen-and-ovum trail can be traced back to some long-forgotten lunatic.
Or maybe it’s all just the drugs. Building up, hiding in the brain cells I have little need for anymore such as those responsible for erections or kindness to strangers. Teenage acid, wicked college weed, the purified cocaine of the salaried adult—all finally organized in a unified attack. Not madness, but betrayal from within.
Well then. It’s war.
I will lay siege to my enemy! Cut off the supply lines! Call the sentries to the gate!
In this combative spirit I forgo my usual wake-up line and instead light up one of the cigarettes Flynn gave me. It’s not nearly the same effect at all, but I’m glad to find that a few good hauls are at least enough to permit me to remain standing and dress in the normal sequence. Still, somewhere between tucking the shirt in and finding my socks I’m stopped by the pictures on the wall.
Ashley Flynn.
Krystal McConnell.