A Murder of Crows

by David Rotenberg

  He made his way upstream watching the fish battling to gain every inch, leaping over rock dams and fallen trees, moving, always moving upstream toward the completion of their dream.

  Four or five hundred yards farther upstream he saw the first of the carcasses floating back downstream. Around the bend there were hundreds more on the sandy shore—those who didn’t make it, those not chosen to complete the dream. Chosen, he thought. Some are chosen.

  A fish jumped high out of the water in a vain effort to leap a log, the fading sunlight glistening off its back, and Seth thought for a moment that the creature had turned toward him as if pleading for help. But there was no help here. There was the challenge and the dream—that was all.

  Three fish jumped in unison; one cleared a fallen tree branch while the two others slapped back into the water. One then began to float back down the stream.

  On the far bank Seth saw the bush in motion and knew there would be bears. Shortly two females and a cub emerged and waded into the river, quickly emerging with wriggling fish in their mouths. Those not chosen were a God-given banquet for these black bears and the grizzlies who were yet to come.

  Seth watched, then felt the weakness come upon him again. Vomit flew from his mouth and splatted in the fast-moving water.

  Then he was falling, his knees weak, his world in motion. And before he blacked out from the pain there was a single thought in his head: The black bears eat those not chosen—but the chosen move on. The chosen, those who could enter the dream.

  Then his own dream took hold of him and he was once again flying, soaring to worlds unknown, to beauty beyond comprehension. As the vision ebbed and left him cold and shivering in the shallow water he begged to dream again, and again, and again.

  7

  AN APPROACH OF GRADUATIONS—T EQUALS 1 MONTH PLUS

  THE GRADUATION TENT ROSE SLOWLY FROM THE GROUND WITH each pull on the dozens of ropes attached to the tall poles. From a tarplike cover that hid the rented plank flooring and the raised platform stage for the professors, it lifted like a huge, slowly waking white albatross and took the assigned form dictated by the twenty stanchions.

  Tears clouded Grover Cleveland Rabinowitz’s eyes as he watched the tent assume its predestined form. He would graduate in three weeks and have to leave Ancaster College—a place he thought of as home—a place of science for scientists like him.

  He loved Ancaster College.

  As the south end of the tent began to obscure the college’s famous eighteenth-century church steeple, Grover Cleveland worked out the algorithm that would have permitted the tent to encompass the beautiful symmetry of the steeple in its midst.

  While Grover was busy with his mathematical twitterings, Professor Neil Frost watched the damned thing take shape, and all he could think of was that it was going to be hotter than hell in there but if he didn’t attend the ceremony he’d be docked his final paycheck. Just more bullshit from this bullshit place.

  Even more bullshit than usual. And moving on—always moving on and leaving him behind. Every year the students seemed to get younger while he felt five years older. These ungrateful, self-satisfied, spoiled . . . but not for long, not for long.

  A crowd had gathered and cheered as the thing rose.

  But in the crowd there was someone who was not concerned about the tent rising. No. He was concerned that as it rose it didn’t reveal two carefully chosen hiding spots.

  The thing rose; the hiding spots stayed hidden.

  8

  A BEGINNING OF BETRAYALS—EIGHTEEN MONTHS EARLIER

  CRAZY EDDIE SAT ON A BED IN THE LAS VEGAS HOTEL ROOM AND switched the NPR South by Southwest podcast on his iPod from Pree, who reminded him of Rickie Lee Jones, to Broken Bells, then to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. He fast-forwarded their concert to the group’s song “Home” and as the two lead singers began to whistle to each other, he put his daughter’s photo on his chest and fought off the tears. But when they sang, “Home, home is wherever I’m with you,” he could fight no more and the tears came in waves of anguish and anger and profound regret.

  He rocked the picture gently in his hand as if the motion would animate the girl trapped within the boundaries of the frame. But Crazy Eddie’s daughter did not move. Her eyes did not find either purchase or clarity—just the madness he’d sensed in her so long ago.

  “She needs help. Let’s do whatever is best for her. Please think about her like I do,” he’d pleaded with his common-law wife way back when they had lived together in Portland, Oregon.

  “She needs to be away from you. Why the fuck do you think your friends call you Crazy Eddie? Because you’re nuts and she’s terrified of you. Terrified, you hear me?”

  In an effort to calm her he had agreed. “Maybe. Maybe she is frightened of me, but can’t you see that she’s just on a different path?”

  “I see that she’s off her rocker.”

  “Don’t say that. Look, maybe you’re right. Sure, this is all my fault, I’m a brute.”

  He had no idea she was wearing a wire.

  And his wife had used those ambiguous words in court to insinuate that he had molested his daughter—a vicious lie that he did not have the money to contest.

  The last time Eddie had been allowed to see Marina was two summers ago. He’d forgotten how cold an August morning in Portland could be. But as he sat and waited for the court appointed and supervised visit with his daughter he did his best to count his blessings.

  After a long wait—no doubt to make it clear to him that he was an imposition on the system—the court-appointed supervisor, a heavyset woman dressed in a thick twill suit, opened the door and ushered in Marina.

  The girl stood for a moment in the doorway not knowing what to do.

  The woman took a seat against the far wall and stared at Eddie, challenging him with her every breath.

  Marina stood quietly and looked at the floor. Eddie rose from his chair; his leg brace gave an uncharacteristic clack. The girl’s face snapped up. “What’s that?” she demanded.

  She’d already forgotten.

  Eddie pulled up his pant leg to show the old gizmo that lifted the front of his foot as he walked, preventing him from tripping on his down-pointed toes. “An old football injury,” he said.

  Marina’s face instantly brightened. “You play for the Seahawks, don’t you, Daddy?”

  Such naïveté from a teenager shocked Eddie; the word “daddy” pierced his heart.

  “It’s not good to lie to the girl,” the court-appointed supervisor said.

  “I never lie to my daughter—”

  “Then why does she think—”

  “Do you have to be here?” Eddie demanded.

  The woman folded her arms across her ample bosom and nodded once, her disgust with what she thought Eddie had done to this poor girl openly on display.

  “Marina, I played football with my friends when I was in high school back in Toronto, never for the Seahawks.”

  “Too bad,” the girl said, “I like the Seahawks. I tried to get Mom to buy me a Seahawks jersey . . .”

  “What number, Marina? What number would you like on the jersey?”

  “Fourteen. I like number fourteen.”

  “I’ll send it to you. I promise.”

  The girl beamed, then without evident segue her face fell and a profound anger filled it. “Did someone hurt you?”

  “I tore my Achilles tendon. No one did it to me. It just happened—sometimes things just happen.”

  “Like me being stupid.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Eddie approached her, aware that he was not allowed to touch her like in some idiotic table dancing club—You can look but no touching, he thought. He threw the thought from his head. What was wrong with him? Maybe they were right.

  “Are you okay, Daddy?”

  The word “daddy” brought him back from the dark places. “Who said you were stupid, Marina?”

  The girl looked away.

 
; The supervisor looked grim.

  “Marina, who said you were stupid?”

  “Everyone.”

  “But who specifically said you were stupid?” Images of watching Seth’s hockey games came to Eddie. Of a father grabbing his son by the cage on his helmet and shaking it so hard that the boy’s head thumped against the sides, then the father screaming through the cage’s bars into the boy’s soul, “You’re fucking stupid, how could you do that? Stupid, fucking stupid.”

  “Who did this, Marina?” he asked even more gently.

  Marina brought her shoulders together as if to protect her centre, then pulled down hard with her clasped hands.

  “Marina?”

  “Mommy’s boyfriends. All of Mommy’s boyfriends.”

  That was the exact moment that Eddie had decided to return the phone calls from the lawyer in New York—the ones that suggested that for a “favour” he’d help Eddie get back his daughter. The lawyer’s name was Ira Charendoff and he had offices in Patchin Place in New York City, and all Eddie had to do was give him information about Decker Roberts. And he’d done the favour—the favours—and betrayed his friend.

  9

  A FRIENDSHIP OF EDDIE’S—T EQUALS 1 MONTH PLUS

  LATER THAT NIGHT WHEN DECKER CAME BACK TO THEIR HOTEL suite with beer and other necessities, Eddie was squatting on the floor of the living room intent on the screen of his laptop. On the rug beside him was a clipping from a newspaper of a man in a suit being arrested by FBI agents. Beside the photo were pages of printouts with the word “PROMPTOR” circled in red Magic Marker.

  Eddie looked up from his computer.

  “More PROMPTOR investigations?” Decker asked.

  “Yeah. The feds hate PROMPTOR—so it’s worth investigating.”

  “Remind me again why the Feds hate PROMPTOR.”

  “Again? I don’t believe I ‘reminded’ you before.”

  “Okay, so tell me for the first time why they hate PROMPTOR.”

  “Because, my Luddite friend, PROMPTOR provides an Internet user with complete anonymity. So if you wanted to go online and look for video of Gretzky’s 1993 winner against the Leafs—”

  “He high-sticked Gilmour. He should have been in the box for five not—”

  “True, but that’s not my point. If you wanted to watch it over and over again and didn’t want anyone to know that you were wasting your time reliving Leaf infamy, you could keep your secret obsession from the world by using PROMPTOR.”

  “Cause PROMPTOR would hide my identity.”

  “Yeah, and where you signed in, where your computer is, what your real URL address is, and all the little cookies and snitches that the CIA and other delightful security services are forever seeding on your computer.”

  “And how does PROMPTOR do this?”

  “You don’t want the full technical explanation, but think of it this way. If you are on PROMPTOR there are thousands of PROMPTOR volunteers who receive data from your computer and each strips off one layer of identity then passes it to another volunteer, until your identity is completely lost in land digitalis.”

  “Not hard to understand why the feds hate it.”

  “Not even a little hard to understand.”

  Eddie closed his laptop then hit a remote and the demanding jazz explorations of a young Havana pianist poured from Eddie’s iPod dock in the corner of the room.

  Decker tried to put the mise-en-scène together but couldn’t find any semblant order in what was in front of him: Eddie and PROMPTOR; Eddie and newspaper clippings; and Eddie and this Cuban jazz pianist.

  Finally he said, “Didn’t know you liked him.”

  A concerned look crossed Eddie’s face.

  “What?” Decker asked.

  “Okay. This Cuban kid is just a kid, right?”

  Decker nodded and gave the international signal for “So?”

  “Well, you can hear him muscling the piano. Working hard. Banging the thing. Pushing it.”

  “Pushing it to what?”

  Eddie looked hard at Decker and said, “To . . . to . . . to . . . to I don’t know what. Fuck.” He punched the remote and the speakers went silent. He picked up his newspaper article on PROMPTOR and his laptop then hop/hobbled out of the room, taking the Whippets Decker had brought with him.

  Decker retrieved the remote and pressed play. He listened as the young Cuban demanded the piano give up its secrets. He pounded on the keys and banged on the instrument’s sides and top, evidently believing the keys were not enough to contain his dreams.

  He hoped the young man would avoid the trap he’d heard other jazz musicians speak about. Most tellingly he remembered hearing an old jazz musician say, “When you stretch the notes of a chord so far apart sometimes you lose the music. And sometimes you can’t find your way back—to the music. Unfortunately, heroin shows you the way.”

  Heroin shows you the way—the way, Decker thought. The path.

  * * *

  Crazy Eddie reentered, his mouth full of marshmallow cookies. “Who exactly decided that a crowd of geese was a gaggle?”

  Decker looked up and heard the movement of subtext beneath the surface of Eddie’s words—in acting terms the Z behind the Y that leads to the line reading. He said, “Say what?”

  “Don’t do that. You heard what I said.”

  “Well, Eddie, I don’t know the answer to that extremely interesting question.”

  “Don’t do that either—that ‘I’m smarter than the world’ thing you like to do.”

  “Okay. Sorry.” He saw Eddie’s face grimace. “I guess someone came up with the name gaggle and others picked it up and it became part of the language.”

  “It got accepted?”

  The word “accepted” hit the air with a thump.

  Decker was slow to respond but finally said, “Yeah.”

  “How does that work?”

  Decker heard it even more clearly—Eddie’s desire to bridge the huge chasm between them. But it was too early, too fast, so Decker said, “I really don’t know.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Language is important.”

  “Okay, I agree with that.”

  “Then how can you not give a shit how words get accepted into the language? I mean, who invented the word ‘deplane’? We don’t ‘onplane’ so why should we ‘deplane’? I mean, who made up that word?”

  “Some airline guy?”

  “So why can’t you and I invent words—” Eddie stopped midsentence.

  It was clear to Decker that Eddie wanted him to see where this was going and save him having to spell it out. But Decker remained silent.

  Eddie finally continued his thought. “Why can’t we send invented words out into the ether and see if they stick?”

  Decker still refused to play along. He said, “Okay, if that’s what’s on tap for a Saturday night in an expensive hotel suite in Las Vegas, sure. You start.”

  “So if there’s a gaggle of geese, how’s about a PROMPTOR of lawyers?”

  Decker couldn’t believe he’d gone right there—right to Ira Charendoff. Slowly he asked, “Because lawyers are hidden in life like PROMPTOR allows you to hide your identity on the Net?”

  “No, not that.”

  Decker knew that Eddie wanted to talk about his dealings with the lawyer Charendoff to get back his daughter. Those dealings had led directly to his betrayal of Decker—and they both knew it. But there was something else here. Something he couldn’t put together with the words. Something to do with PROMPTOR and Charendoff—but what?

  “How’s about an ambivalence of lawyers?”

  “Because we turn to them for help but are never sure exactly what they want?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  Decker looked at his friend and finally asked what had been on his mind since this afternoon. “Why are you really here in Vegas, Eddie?”

  Eddie reached into his coat pocket and held out a set of airline
tickets.

  “More truth-telling jaunts?”

  “No. Travel. Faraway travel. Time for you to disappear for a bit—while I get serious about Charendoff.”

  “Using PROMPTOR?”

  “Maybe. Not sure about that yet. But it’s safer if you skedaddle.”

  “Make like a bread truck and haul buns?”

  “Who said that?”

  Special Agent Yslan Hicks, Decker thought, but he said, “Some southerner.”

  “Fine,” Eddie said, then shoved the airline tickets at Decker.

  “And if I don’t want to go?”

  “I beat the crap out of you and throw you to your NSA friend.”

  “What about my classes at the Lab? I’m midsession with those actors.”

  “Actually, you cancelled your classes due to a family emergency.” He turned his phone to show Decker a copy of an e-mail message he’d just sent his seventy students.

  “Fine. I guess. Any suggestion as to where I should go?”

  “South Africa would be good.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because they have very little broadband and the ANC government is particularly anti-American. At least it will make it difficult for the NSA to track you.”

  “But they can still—”

  “Sure. But once you leave Cape Town they’ll have real problems following you. You wanna go back to Kruger?”

  “No.” Memories of the trouble with his son Seth up in the national park still haunted Decker. Seth had been only a boy but so angry at Decker’s response to his mother’s death that he destroyed an entire resort bar in the middle of the night. It had started the disastrous relationship he now had with his son.

  “I know you’ve got a standing offer to direct at the University of Cape Town. It’s time for you to direct again.”

  Decker hesitated.

  “Do it. You’re a better man when you direct.”

  “Nice of you to say.”

  “Besides, it’s all set up,” Eddie continued.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I contacted them for you last week.”

  Around the time when I first found the clippings about PROMPTOR all over the house, Decker thought.