by Ron Currie
Theodore looked down at himself again, pushed his hands into the blood on his shirt, and held them up, dripping thickly, for me to see. “The next thing, I’m gut shot and bleeding out in some hillbilly’s basement, and you are now only the fourth person who knows what happened that night in Miami.
“And so I suppose that’s it.”
Thus unburdened after a decade, Theodore gave in to the exhaustion of blood loss and leaned his head back against the wall.
“I wish I could tell you I wouldn’t change anything,” he said. “But I would, my dear. One or two things, at least.”
A few minutes later, Theodore died there in the bunker. I didn’t need to check to make sure he was dead, because my wife had died with her eyes open, too.
And I cried—for Theodore, yes, but for Frank and Abraham Trumbull and their companions as well, and for the FBI casualties sure to be lying twisted and torn beyond the walls of the bunker. I cried for Peggy’s husband, Roger, and Arnulfo’s father, Eduardo. I cried for the anonymous prostitute, and I cried for another unnamed and unknown woman: my mother, she without face or form. I cried for all the dead across time, for every soul plucked from oblivion and forced into the torment of consciousness. I cried for the victims of jet crashes and siege machines, burst appendixes and Black Plague, starvation and snakebite and ritual sacrifice, but most of all I cried for Sarah, my Sarah, whom I had loved but did not know, just as she had loved but did not know me. I cried glorious cascades of tears, until it seemed I must die from it. I cried while several more hours passed and the air in the room began to cool and the voices outside drew ever so gradually nearer. I was still crying when by and by the bulkhead door opened, and as I emerged at gunpoint into the charred dawn my first thought was that Trumbull had gotten his wish, because war had to be the only thing that could look and smell and taste like that.
28
NOW
It’s been four years. A short enough time that we’re not old yet, a long enough time that people have forgotten, or nearly forgotten, why they once cared who we were.
We live in Toledo, of all places.
“Toledo,” Claire says, sometimes, upon returning home in the evening. She’ll stand on the back steps, gaze at the downtown skyline as it strains upward toward relevance, and either shake her head or shrug her shoulders. Sometimes she seems more or less content; other times she seems like she’s wondering how, exactly, time’s undulations managed to deposit her here.
I have no such moments of bafflement, but I understand the reasons she does.
Thanks to both the United States Witness Security Program and our own discretion, we exist anonymously. This was all Claire wanted, once we crawled out of the bunker and rinsed the ash and blood off ourselves and explained, to the eventual grudging satisfaction of the FBI, why I’d thought I had no choice but to shoot Frank in the leg. “Nondescript” has become the watchword. Our house features taupe vinyl siding, and is of an appraised value that many American couples could easily afford. In our driveway sit a used Dodge minivan and a used Ford Fiesta. There is a picket fence, and a durable, low-maintenance carpet of zoysia grass front and back. Last summer we installed an aboveground pool, oval, twenty-eight by twelve feet, less because we like to swim, and more because ours was the last house in the cul-de-sac without a pool.
I work doing what I did before Sarah passed away, a job so inconsequential to humanity that it hardly bears mentioning, though it is, ultimately, the only vocation for which I am qualified. I wear unremarkable wool suits to this job, just as before. During winter—which in northern Ohio, on the lake, is a merciless horror—I wear unremarkable wool overcoats. I fold myself into the Fiesta, merge with traffic on 280, cross the river, and descend onto surface streets, the names of which—Manhattan Boulevard, New York Avenue—broadcast Toledo’s inferiority complex. I park in a municipal lot with prorated fees for monthly pass holders, of which I am one. I sit for between seven and ten hours in a ground-level office, at a particleboard desk, under fluorescent tubes that allegedly produce a soft white light. I spend time conversing with people, some via telephone or video chat, some in person. I engage in work on a computer. I eat, I use the restroom, I idly consume trivialities on the Internet. When 100 percent of any given day is used up, I go to the parking garage, get into the Fit once more, and drive back across the river. Most often the river roils brown; on occasion, when the air is still and the sky clear, it flows a tranquil dark blue. The trees are green; the trees burn yellow and red and orange; the trees, gray and skeletal, huddle against the cold. The sun shines, or else doesn’t. Between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, I drive to work in the dark, and return home in the dark. During summer, by contrast, I often go to bed when it’s still light out, while Claire sits on the front steps drinking cranberry juice and club soda, watching that skyline about which she can’t seem to decide how she feels.
For the last three years, Claire has been employed at a nearby Tim’s Club. Each morning she puts on one of several electric blue Tim’s Club vests in her possession and drives the Dodge van six miles to work. Her areas of responsibility are the books and clothing sections. One day it’s soft-core-porn novels and celebrity memoirs; the next, great stacks of denim, mounds of irregular Tshirts, Everests of tube sock multipacks. Sometimes, to ward off boredom and repetitive motion injury, she dons a hair net and electric blue apron and offers passing customers bits of Heluva Good cheese or Poppies mini cream puffs. As she has no interest in ascending the Tim’s Club career ladder, she has turned down multiple offers of commission as a shift leader. She packs a lunch each day, the centerpiece of which is always a tuna salad sandwich. On occasion she drives a forklift, though doing so is not part of her job duties. In the afternoon, she, like I, drives back across the river, weaves her way through the civil engineer’s nightmare known as suburban Toledo, and parks under our carport.
From time to time it occurs to me to wonder aloud if Claire really is happy living such an unremarkable existence, when just a few short years ago she was of the rigid belief that it was better to be dead than anonymous.
She always responds the same way.
“Adventure? Excitement?” she says. “A Jedi craves not these things.”
Though her words indicate humor, her eyes indicate otherwise. And I am left with no clearer sense of whether, in her heart of hearts, perhaps in a place hidden even from herself, she wants more than the taupe house, the blue vests, the late summer sunsets over Toledo.
I suppose this life, dull though it may be, provides Claire some consolations. She rarely rises with a headache anymore, and when she does can take comfort in the fact that she’s blameless in the matter. We do the Saturday crossword together. We sit side by side in darkened theaters and take in films with our forearms touching on the armrest, our hands mingling in the popcorn tub. We have plenty of money, owing to residuals from the first and only season of our television show, which continues to do remarkably well in overseas markets where both disposable income and television ownership are on the rise. Claire has also, in her sobriety, taken up smoking, which seems to have mitigated the loss of alcohol somewhat.
She has been guided in this new habit by the steady and nicotine-yellowed hand of my mother-in-law, Peggy, whom Claire visits four or five times per annum.
I am rarely invited on these trips. I stay behind, most often, and take care of the cat.
Though in reality of course the cat requires very little actual care.
I read recently that most domestic cats have at least two households in which people believe they own the cat exclusively. The cats oscillate between these households like philandering husbands. So presumably if one of those households were suddenly unoccupied, the cat would simply get everything it needed from the other. Or else just wander onto another porch at random, pretending to be a stray, and get taken in by yet another family eager to be duped into the illusion of cat ownership.
So yes, Claire and I, in our government-shielded domesti
city, are now co-owners of not just a nondescript house, two used vehicles, and a new swimming pool, but also of Meowser, the cat I used to own with Sarah, the cat that has grown quite old by cat standards, the cat whose real name is seemingly forevermore lost to me.
Of course, it’s not the cat’s name that is lost to me, but rather that the me who knows the cat’s name is lost to me.
In the same way that my first wife is not dead, so much as unavailable.
Perhaps it is for the better that I can’t remember the name Sarah gave the cat.
Perhaps it is, all of it, for the better.
Who am I to say? What do I know?
Five things, give or take. None of which sheds any light on the issue of the cat’s real name, what it means to know it, what it means not to.
If there’s anything I can be said to have learned in all this, the wisdom in limiting idle thought is probably it.
And also that Claire was correct when she said that certainty is a myth only children and Republicans ever truly believe in.
• • •
I guide the Fiesta home one crystalline and jungle-hot early evening in July to find the Dodge van in the carport, even though as far as I knew Claire took on evening forklift work beyond her regular shift, and so is not supposed to be home for another two hours.
Experience has taught us that only one of our vehicles can really fit in the carport at a given time. The left side of the Fiesta and the right side of the van bear testament to this fact, in the form of numerous dings and slashes of gray paint from the carport’s front support poles. So I park in the driveway and get out, briefcase in hand, jacket draped over my shoulder, the armpits of my oxford dark with sweat. I am curious about Claire’s presence, but not alarmed, so instead of rushing inside I pause at the back of the Fiesta to watch the McAleer boy, Larry, who lives directly across the street, as he pilots a large RC plane back and forth over the neighborhood like an attack aircraft on strafing runs.
The plane dips and rises, following the contours of the gable rooftops, then performs a crisp barrel roll as it streaks overhead. The wings flash in the sun, and Larry and I pivot on our heels and follow the plane’s trajectory out toward the high-tension wires that run parallel to 280.
Even though I’m standing right next to him, I’m not sure Larry has yet registered my presence.
“You want to fly planes when you grow up?” I ask.
He answers without looking at me. “I fly planes now,” he says. “As you can see.”
“What I mean is, do you want to be a pilot?” I say. “As in, actually get into a plane? Slip the surly bonds? Feel the weightlessness of negative Gs, and the extraterrestrial crush of multiple Gs? Perhaps be responsible for the lives of hundreds on a daily basis as a commercial airline captain?”
Larry continues to peer out to where his plane traces a long, menacing turn back in our direction. “No,” he says.
“So this is just a hobby, then,” I say.
“A hobby is something people do for fun,” Larry says. “This is not fun. I don’t enjoy standing in the middle of this stupid cul-de-sac. I don’t enjoy living in this stupid cul-de-sac. I disapprove of the existence of this stupid cul-de-sac.”
“I’m a little confused, I guess,” I tell Larry.
He heaves a sigh loud enough to be heard three doors down. “I’m going to fly drones,” he says.
“Drones?” I ask.
The plane cruises overhead again—a mammoth dragonfly from either the distant past or the distant future—and resumes faux-strafing the rooftops.
“Drones,” Larry says. “I’ve been preparing for it my whole life. I play video games for hours in my bedroom with the lights off, killing people all over the world. What do you think the difference is between that and a climate-controlled booth in Nevada, where you sit for hours in a flight suit shooting Hellfire missiles at people on a screen?”
“I would think the principal difference, in the latter scenario, is that the figures on the screen are actual people.”
“Wrong,” Larry says. “The difference is, right now I don’t have a flight suit.”
The plane buzzes us again, and again we rotate to watch it streak away.
“I got my first recruitment letter when I was ten,” Larry says.
“They recruit for this sort of thing now?” I ask.
“Sure. It’s bigger than college football. Chat rooms and gaming tournaments are filthy with military talent scouts.”
“I see. And so they take the best gamers and turn them into drone pilots?”
“Not pilots. We’re called drivers,” Larry says. “And no, not just the best gamers. There’s a lot more to it. All kinds of tests, psychological profiles. Joystick skills can be taught. A certain moral flexibility, on the other hand … well, either you’ve got it, or you don’t.”
“And you’ve got it?”
“I’m a blue chip,” Larry says. “Guaranteed commission as a second lieutenant, right out of high school. Sky’s the limit. Pardon the pun.”
“How does your father feel about this?”
“My father’s job is to fuck people over on a daily basis,” Larry says. “He’s cool with it.”
Larry’s father, if I remember correctly, is an investment banker.
The plane cruises overhead again, executes a smart left turn, and speeds straight for the steeple of the U.U. church, an alabaster spike half a mile due north of where we stand.
“Good talking to you, Larry,” I say.
Larry flashes a peace sign over one shoulder. I turn and walk toward the taupe house.
There’s no sign of Claire inside, so I drop my things on the kitchen table and go to the back porch, where I find her sitting on the steps. In the distance, Toledo’s skyline is like a game of Tetris that ended almost before it began. A Miller High Life gathers condensation beside Claire’s left hip.
“No forklift work after all?” I ask, trying to sound casual despite the presence of the beer and all it could imply.
“I put a Clearly Canadian in the fridge,” she says without turning to face me. “Should be cold by now.”
I hesitate, think a moment, check my mental calendar. “It’s not Sarah’s birthday,” I say.
“No. It is, however, a special occasion.” She holds the beer up. “As you can see.”
I go back into the kitchen and find the bottle of Clearly Canadian in the refrigerator. On the counter there’s a lime-green beer koozie that reads THE BEST PARTY IS A WEDDING PARTY! MIKE AND SARAH, SARATOGA SPRINGS, 2002. I have no idea who Mike and Sarah are, and no idea whether I’m supposed to. I slip the koozie over the bottle and return to the porch, where Claire has stretched her legs across the top step with her back resting against the railing. A cigarette burns between the index and middle fingers of her right hand.
“Mind if I sit?” I ask.
“Of course not.”
I step over her and sit down. She drapes her free hand over my shoulder.
“So you’re home early,” I say.
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest,” Claire says.
“Okay,” I say.
“I didn’t get fired from Total Foods because of you,” she says.
“Okay,” I say.
Larry’s plane appears above us, performs a Split-S with airshow precision over the backyard, then disappears again in the direction from which it came.
“What the hell was that?” Claire says.
“The McAleer boy, across the street,” I tell her.
“The creepy little ginger with the pet snake?”
“That’s the one,” I say. “He wants to fly drones for the government when he gets older.”
“Perfect job for him.”
“Apparently the government agrees,” I say.
Claire drags on her cigarette. “Aren’t you even a little bit curious why I actually got fired from Total Foods?”
“I am,” I tell her. “Just figured I’d let you come out wi
th it in your own time.”
“You can probably guess,” she says.
“You know I don’t like to speculate anymore.”
“They fired me because I was drunk half the time, and hungover the other half.”
“Stands to reason.”
There’s a pause.
“You’re not upset?”
I think for a moment. “It’s not exactly a surprise,” I say. “My only concern is the possibility that this might not be all you’ve lied to me about.”
“It is,” Claire says. “Scout’s honor.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I say. “I guess what I’m really wondering is why you’re drinking now.”
“Bad day at work,” she says.
“What happened?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“I’d believe anything you told me,” I say.
“Even though you know I lied before?”
“You lied,” I say, “because you wanted an excuse to get close to me. That’s about as bleached white as lies come, I guess.”
It’s a simple enough statement, but in its wake I sense the air around us ionize, charged with the sudden expulsion of long-pent shame. Claire sniffles, kneads the muscle between my shoulder and neck with her hand.
“Customer got crushed to death,” she says after she composes herself. “A pallet fell on him. Eight hundred pounds of OxiClean. One of the forklift guys fucked up big.”
This is not what I expected to hear. I have no idea what to say about it, so I take a drink of Clearly Canadian Orchard Peach. It tastes like peach in the same way Pine-Sol smells like pine.
“I didn’t see it happen,” Claire says. “But I saw after.”
“I’m really sorry, Claire.”
She drinks from her beer, grimaces. “This stuff is shit,” she says. “I can’t believe there was ever a time when I liked it so much.”
“It’s not great when it gets warm,” I say.
“It’s not great, period,” Claire says.
We’re quiet for a few moments. Larry’s plane buzzes in the distance. Two squirrels bound across the lawn, pause to cock their heads, flick their tails, sniff the wind for threats.