The Fall Line

by Mark T Sullivan

  January 10

  It’s over between me and Lydia now. I feel as if there were a shower curtain, pink and almost transparent, between me and what is real …

  The curtain hangs there, moldy and wet. I press my hands and body to it, but only see shadows. Of me … of Lydia … of everyone …

  I’ve been sitting here four hours, bone tired, feet aching, lots of crying … can’t figure out what to write. Wish Jack were here, but don’t know what I’d say. Whether he’d listen.

  Tell the truth, I say to myself. And maybe that is the way out. I came on shift before midnight, watched Elizabeth for a half hour and charted my notes. I tried to ignore the voice in me and the image of bubbles, but couldn’t. This time I knew what was happening, knew there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  At three in the hospital, the halls are dark. Sounds came: the moaning of the old in their beds, the beeps of the machines that keep them alive, my feet scuffing through the supply room, paper and plastic that crinkled and ripped under my fingers until I had the needle in my hand. It was so sharp and true that it kept me company when I scuffed down the hall to the elevator.

  Break, I told the charge nurse. She nodded and went back to her charts. The elevator closed. A trickle of cold dripped down my back under my scrubs. The needle kept me company.

  In Lydia’s hall, the bell of the elevator opening was the only sound. Two nurses I know chatted at the station. I went around the back, quiet and quick, as if I were an avenging angel who belonged there in the middle of the night.

  Lydia was alone in her room at the far end of the hall. The chart on the door said her moaning kept other patients awake, so they had moved her. I smelled Lydia’s sweat when I pushed through the door; she was in the bed near the window. The monitor was silent, but the pulsing blue line that tracked her heart bulged and died and left traces in the darkness.

  My fingers didn’t feel like mine when I pulled off the blue cap over the long steel needle. Those fingers drew back the plunger an eighth of an inch, 20 ccs. I walked, thinking of Elizabeth, and then halfway to the bed, of Jenny.

  Four plastic tubes ran into Lydia. Her leg hung awkward off three cables taut to the pulley and bar above the bed. The IV bag sagged with the weight of liquid. The skin on Lydia’s neck—pale, moist in the moonlight—almost made me stop when I picked up the plastic tube and held the needle to it.

  But then I saw my own shadow on the curtain beyond Lydia’s bed and I fumbled for the v-stopper in the middle of the tube that ran to her arm. I found it and then the rubber gasket, a diaphragm through which drugs can be administered. Or air.

  The gasket held off my needle, then yielded.

  Lydia stirred in her sleep. She rolled toward me. Her eyelids fluttered. Her mouth opened and chopped at the air, like she wanted water. Her eyes rolled, crossed, and then she smiled. I think she thought I was bringing her more morphine. My thumb began to pressure the plunger.

  She croaked, “Is just you—the one who tells me about her feet. I was scared for a moment. You see Elizabeth tonight? Tell me about my baby.”

  I looked into that uncovered well of a face, crying now. I began to cry, too. Tell me about my baby.

  I said Elizabeth was sleeping, that I came just to tell her that.

  She nodded and cried again that Elizabeth didn’t deserve her, that she knew this.

  Before I could say more, a monitor clicked and a drip of morphine slipped down the line. She closed her eyes, off in her dream world where all babies were not blue, but perfectly pink. I stood there, thumb—my thumb now—on the plunger, but I couldn’t do it. She loved her daughter as much as I loved mine.

  I pulled the needle from the gasket and put it in my pocket. I snapped the point from the barrel.

  When the elevator door opened on my floor, I leaned against the wall, knowing that Jenny will always be like a clear plastic curtain around me whether I beat against it or try to cut it or just let it be.

  I guess I have to learn to live with it. At least I want to. That is a start.

  Farrell closed the diary. Tears collected, then ran down his face. He knew that at the time Lena wrote those words, he must have been in the jungle, begging for a way out. Only it had gotten deeper and worse, hadn’t it? And in that moment, Farrell decided he didn’t want his life to continue to echo on itself. He wanted to change.

  The problem was he didn’t know where to begin.

  He lay back on the bed and considered the notion that analyzing the past will only get you so far. The trick was to solve the present. It hit him, not where to begin, but what had bothered him long after Page had floated above Granite Chief. He slammed his hand on the bedspread. “That goddamned helmet camera was on the whole time!”

  Farrell could picture it: the lens panning the entire green, gray, and white valley. The field of vision shifts and staggers during Page’s leap into the air where all the audience would witness was blue sky, maybe a cloud. At once the jagged rocks reel into focus. The witness splashes into the icy rush, stalls and jerks against unseen currents, yanks free, and drops again through frozen eddies.

  Now the lens goes off-kilter and focuses briefly on Trent Page. He pleads for forgiveness. But the framing is off and only half the father’s face is in the picture. The camera swings across the embroidery on the father’s chest. It points down at the skis, now at the piñon grove in the distance, back across the black baseball jacket and up to the sky. With the mumbled words “something in my gut,” the lens returns in still, dreadful focus to the gray, resigned face.

  And then?

  Inez opened the door, saw him, and made to shut it. “It is the late hour,” Inez said. “I have much to finish before I leave in the morning.”

  “We have to talk,” Farrell said.

  “I think that is not what you want and I have much to do,” Inez said.

  Farrell pushed his way in. “It’s not like that.”

  “With men, it is always like that,” Inez said, turning away. She wore black jeans and a purple sweater. “Drink?”

  It was his only opening. “Why not?”

  Inez slid rapidly across the room to a monitor on which a video version of the day’s shooting played. He saw it was Inez’s camera and he was doing the windshield wiper turns in the last stretch of the chute.

  “Looks good,” Farrell said.

  “It is enough for what do you call?—filler,” Inez said. She snapped off the monitor and the video machine. “Ice?”

  “Please,” Farrell said.

  Inez picked up the bottle of Pernod and poured two inches of the clear liquid into the glasses, added ice cubes from a bucket, then disappeared into the bathroom. She shut the door.

  A San Francisco paper, that day’s, sat on the table. He picked it up, the first newspaper he’d looked at since fleeing the safe house, and thumbed through it noticing how little the news changed; like a soap opera, you could slide right into the stories after months and not notice the difference in tone. There was the usual bad news from the Middle East, the blustering of politicians in Washington, the tragedy of a local fire, the hero of the latest basketball game. On page A-31, he stopped. His knee shook. He reached down and dug all the fingers of his right hand into the muscle of his thigh until he thought it would bunch and charley horse.

  Gangland Slaying in Tucson Hotel

  (AP)—A Mexican businessman with reputed links to drug traffickers was found slain gangland-style in a Tucson Hotel room yesterday morning.

  Tucson Police said maids discovered Jorge Madrid Cordova slumped in a chair in his room at the Saguaro Inn about 9:30 A.M.

  “He’d been shot twice in the head sometime last night, it looks like through the mouth, gangland style,” said Lt. Peter Reeves, chief of Homicide for the Tucson Police.

  Reeves said there were no witnesses and no suspects in the case. The FBI has been called in to assist in the investigation.

  “The FBI said they think it could have been revenge, something having to do wit
h the people he ran with,” Reeves said. “But until someone comes forward, there’s little we have to go on.

  Reeves said the FBI had been probing links between Cordova and a sophisticated money laundering ring in Southern California between 1987 and 1989.

  At one point, Reeves said, Cordova was under investigation by a federal grand jury interested in money laundering, but the probe was stopped when key government witnesses, Jack Allen Farrell and his wife, Lena …

  Inez held a drink over the front of the paper, startling Farrell.

  “I see that,” she said, pointing to the article. “We are in the Wild West, no?”

  Farrell’s head bobbed. Inez swirled the milky white glass of Pernod and water and ice. “You do not want your drink then?” she said.

  “No … it’s not that, I’m just … tired, that’s all,” Farrell said.

  Before he could reach for the glass, Inez had placed it on the table. He allowed his eyes to wander to the newspaper again; the story petered out after a few more inches, mostly background about himself and Cordova’s business dealings in Tucson. There was no mention of Gabriel Cortez.

  Inez said, “This interests?”

  She inspected him now. She stood with her arms crossed, her legs more than a shoulder’s width apart, the drink an inch from her mouth.

  “What?” Farrell said. “No, it’s just not often you hear about a—what did they call it, gangland?—gangland slaying in a sleepy town like Tucson. When I was a kid, I always used to read about the mob wars on the East Coast.”

  “Vraiment?” Inez said. “I think I read that Arizona is the place of retirement for the Mafia?”

  “Never really thought of it that way,” Farrell said, trying to appear nonchalant. “But I guess you’re right.”

  He got the drink and raised the glass to his mouth fast, letting the sweet licorice and alcohol pluck and bounce off the back of his throat. In his haste, some of the liquid went down the wrong way. He choked, his eyes watered. He set the glass down quickly and coughed until the choking sensation passed. When he looked up, Inez’s lower jaw had slackened and her nostrils flared. She sat down immediately on the corner of the bed opposite Farrell as she had the night before.

  She said, “I ask you to forgive me for my rudesse at the door, chéri. It’s just that you seemed—I think I should say—hostile for me today.”

  “The helmet,” Farrell said, grateful for the turn in the conversation. He finished the drink.

  Inez stiffened, looked away, brushed back a lock of her hair. “A wonderful technology, no?” She stood before he could answer. “Another drink perhaps?”

  “Why don’t you … well, why not?” Farrell said. He handed her the glass, happy that his nerves had steadied.

  While Inez fixed the drinks, Farrell’s attention darted between the noise she made and the paper: Who had killed Cordova? Cortez? Never. The Colombians? Possible. Whoever had done the deed, he wished he’d been there himself, to see the dove boy’s blank eyes flash, to enjoy the terror that Cordova must have endured. Despite his decision to change, the room began to whirl.

  The scent of freshly applied perfume altered the angle of the spinning sensation. Inez had changed into her blue velvet robe again. She handed him his drink, lay on the bed, and propped her head on her arm. “Now what do we do?”

  “The helmet,” Farrell insisted.

  Her lower lip pouted, shifting her leg. “I think … an innovation to be explored.”

  “You planned that, didn’t you?” Farrell said. “You planned to have Page wearing that helmet when he found his father at the bottom of the chute. And you’ll use the footage somehow in the film.”

  Inez smiled. “But of course I use this helmet footage, it’s there and adds a new angle,” she said. “But this was a gift. How do I know he wears the helmet and not you? You and Page have the option to wear the head camera or no.”

  “You had an idea he would,” Farrell said. “I think you always have an idea of where things might be going.”

  “The action I cannot direct,” she said, waving the glass in the air. “I create documentaries. Actions occur.”

  “Within limits you create,” Farrell said. “Your things artificiels.”

  “Well, yes. It is necessary, you know, because I make a film about skiing the extreme; I do not discuss the architecture of Italy.”

  “So you think Page goes to the edge because of his father?” Farrell said. “And The Wave because of his mother?”

  “Does it really matter if this is the true reason?” she said. “It just tells us more about them. Makes them complex and vulnerable, shaded in a way they cannot be if I just take pictures of them making the stares at death.”

  “No matter that they’d feel pain?”

  “I tell you once: pain and pleasure are so close, one can say all life is a form of pain, some good, some bad,” Inez shrugged. “But when life reveals herself, the audience knows it is true.”

  “Always for the audience,” Farrell said.

  “No,” Inez said. “When Page walks away with his father, it is a triumph for him. Ten years they do not speak.”

  “And for you?”

  “Yes. I said I am the woman, I feel compassion for the actor. Can you not see I feel for Page and for you, chéri?”

  Farrell didn’t answer.

  Inez stood. She smiled and loosened the sash on her robe. The thick fabric slid away to hang open around her hips. She arched her chin toward him and said, “To smell you here, it makes me forget my work.”

  Inez took two steps toward Farrell, her fingers running up the curve of her thighs. She shivered and said in a husky voice, “When I see you today almost crash and then recover. To come so close. Alors … it made me excited. That’s why I became so angry with you, chéri.”

  She parted her thighs. She moved her legs on either side of Farrell’s, then squeezed them together.

  “Tell me you are not excited after you almost fall, that you do not want me afterwards, even though you hate me at the same time,” she whispered as she unbuttoned his shirt.

  Inez engulfed him, just as Page had said, like she was water. His decision to change faded. The old habits reasserted themselves, the idea of drowning with her so inviting. He went with the current, slid his hands behind the robe to cup her buttocks, and pulled her to him.

  “Yes, chéri.” She fumbled at his belt and pants. “Quick now. She wants you.”

  Farrell ran his hand between her legs. She gasped and moved down on his fingers. She leaned forward to kiss him. He closed his eyes, imagining himself being sucked into a fierce eddy, where he tried to fight the water at first, gave up, and opened his mouth to draw it into his lungs, to drift away.

  Inez’s movements quickened. She shifted to move his hand away, to unzip his fly. But in the process, the edge of her robe fluttered on the erect hairs of his forearm. And his mind raced back in a terrible instant to another night long before and the fabric of another robe. He heard Page’s voice describing her second movie: “She’s buff with him in one scene. Though I don’t understand why.” He remembered his wife and how she had backed away from Lydia.

  Inez had her fingers around him, guiding him. He was at the edge, almost incapable of fight, heated and ready when something deep inside him cooled. He went limp in her hand. He grabbed her wrists. With slow force he pushed her off.

  “What is the matter, chéri,” Inez cooed. “Whatever is, we go past. I help.”

  Farrell zipped up and grabbed his jacket. “You won’t get your shading, or whatever you call it, like that,” Farrell said, surprised at how calm he was.

  “It is not like that,” Inez said. But her voice had cooled so quickly Farrell knew it was like that. She drew the robe together.

  “I remembered you were in bed with a guy in one of your films.”

  “This is different,” Inez said. “You excite me.”

  “So you say. Funny, I can’t help but get the feeling I’m a repeat performance. An
d the first guy who had this part had such a shitty ending.”

  “You pig.” Inez threw the glass of Pernod and ice at him. “Get out! You are finished here, with me, with this film!”

  Farrell ducked. The glass crashed on the wall above him, showering him with tiny shards and liquid. Suddenly, he felt strong.

  “Oh, I don’t think you really want me to go anywhere,” Farrell said, drawing an invisible circle on the door with one hand while he twisted the brass knob with the other. “I’m the only mystery you’ve got left.”

  Chapter 20

  FARRELL LEFT BEFORE DAWN and drove thirteen hours straight, backtracking through Nevada, then north to Idaho. During the long hours of driving he concluded that if he really wanted to change it wasn’t enough to confront what he’d done in San Diego. He had to understand Inez, too; for she seemed to get to him in a way that no one ever had except Gabriel. She was everything he’d ever craved, everything he’d ever dreaded. There was no thought of escaping to the northern snowfields now. He’d see this through. Conquering her was his only hope for salvation. When he crossed the Idaho state line, he stopped at a gas station next to a saloon that spit out disjointed country-western tunes. He listened for a minute while he filled the truck, the music carrying him back to Colombia. Even then he’d found it ironic that one of the men whom Gabriel had brought him to meet was a fan of the Grande Olde Oprey in Nashville. That was D. Juan Montenegras, a balding, heavy-lipped man who had the habit of shifting his hips while he talked, an unconscious physical tribute to his idol, Elvis.

  Montenegras was in charge of the jungle laboratories between the Yari and Apaporis Rivers east of Cali, hard by Peru. When he wasn’t working or trying to play steel guitar, Montenegras’s passions were parrots and parties. The evening after Farrell and Cordova were rescued, they attended a fete in Montenegras’s private aviary on the south lawn of his estate. Farrell had moved in a stupor through the crowd. He wanted to flee the party, call his wife, and tell her he was okay. But he knew he couldn’t; so great was the fear that surrounded Montenegras and his partners that when the red-headed Amazons, white cockatiels, pink cockatiels, and African greys fluttered in the trees to shit on the bare shoulders of the women and the fine linen suits of the men, they smiled.