by James Sallis
“Yet it appears,” he said, “that this must be done.”
“According to information you have received, yes. But in the first place, that information remains circumstantial. And secondly, since your own agency has no specific intelligence function, most of that information was piped in from another agency—”
He nodded.
“—one with which you have had disputes in the past—”
No nod this time.
“—and is therefore suspect.”
“Perhaps so. One takes nothing at face value, of course.”
“Including your own veracity in reporting this information to me.”
“There is that, yes. Do you believe I would lie to you, David?”
“Freely. Outrageously. The good reporter looks at his scattered facts, then starts cobbling them into shoes that will fit. There’s always an agenda: political, aesthetic, personal. Connect the dots. Constellations.”
“You’re right, of course. I would do whatever I thought necessary to get done what I thought must be. And so, in another time, would you have.”
“It was another time, sir.” After a moment I added: “If Planchat needs taking out, they should be the ones to do it.”
“Ah: should. A most dangerous word.”
He moved for the first time since we’d begun talking, taking his hands from the chair arms and folding long fingers together on his lap. I thought again of the feet of predatory birds. There was no desk in the room, only chairs with various tables alongside, many of them antiques picked up at flea markets, estate and garage sales. Johnsson hated desks. Hated people who sat behind them. Hated cages.
“Removal, you understand, is no longer a part of their agency’s charter.”
“And it is of yours.”
“As it has always been.”
Something suspiciously like a smile darted across his face and was gone.
“They created Planchat,” I said. “And then they decided—or someone decided, at whatever level—that the model was obsolete.”
“Perhaps more an anachronism than obsolete: their thinking, of course, not my own. A killing machine, David. The finest, certainly the most artful, ever devised.”
“Yes. And if the machine needs unplugging, it’s their responsibility.”
“Absolutely. No one would argue that. It is their responsibility. But it’s also our job: what we do.”
“It’s not what I do, sir.”
He looked at me for several moments.
“Very well,” he said. “I suppose it is possible that nine years can change a man, perhaps even past the point of recognition.”
“Or in that time, the man can change himself.”
“By his own bootstraps, yes. I understand that you’re an artist now. Critics write of the ‘contained violence’ and gentleness of your—do you call them statues?”
“Pieces, usually. Or just work. Most of them aren’t sculpture in any classical sense.”
He nodded. Anyone not watching closely would have missed it.
“The word poise is often used. Meaning, I take it, a kind of rare and comely balance.”
“By some.”
“Of course: by some.”
Neither of us spoke for a time then. Out on the ledge the bird’s audition continued. Darkening clouds nudged at the sky. Finally, as imperceptibly as, earlier, he had nodded, he shook his head.
“Be cautious about settling for memory, David. It’s far too thin a gruel for the like of us to live on.”
I said nothing.
“I suppose that you may have changed in fundamental ways, after all. And I cannot say, finally, that I am sorry for that. I suppose it’s time for you to go back to your Gabrielle now, back to your work, your ‘pieces.’ Thank you for coming.”
I stood and held out my hand. After a moment his own left his lap and falteringly searched mine out.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I forget, and you could not have known. But for several years now I have been quite blind.”
I told him that I was sorry, and to take care.
“David…,” he said when I was almost to the door. “A single favor.”
“Yes, sir.”
“An old friend has many times asked after you. Go and see him. It will not take you long.”
“Blaise.”
He nodded.
“You will find him here.”
He held out a card. I walked back across the room and took it from him. His hand lingered there after it was gone.
7
Two days past, on a hillside in Oak Cliff, the motel-room TV won’t work, bringing in only dim gray forms and phantoms behind a wash of dots, and the real world outside my window, awash with gray drizzle, is little more defined.
Jorge Sanchez lies on his bed in paint- and plaster-spattered jeans and sweatshirt waiting. Occasionally there is lightning far off, or a climb of car lights up the wall. The couple next door (possibly a threesome) has left off its lovemaking, and someone over there’s drawing a bath now. The whining glide of a steel guitar reaches out from a radio nearby.
A knock at the door, then: “Pizza.”
“Sanchez?” she says when I open the door. In her mid-twenties and in sweats, with a face that still could go either way: towards beauty and character, towards plainness, a kind of vacancy. Her nose is peeling from recent sunburn. Hair tucked into a long-billed baseball cap. “Comes to eleven ninety-seven.”
I hand over a ten and a five and tell her to keep it.
“Have a good stay,” she tells me in return. Her car is an ancient VW beetle, once beige, in other incarnations green and canary yellow. There’s a sign on top, FREE DELIVERY, that’s almost as big as the car itself. In a good wind you could use it to sail the thing.
Under the pizza there are two waxed envelopes.
The first one contains a dossier on Luc Planchat. I know a lot of this, up till about ten years ago, and go through it hurriedly. There’s a gap then for most of that ten years until, six months ago, entries resume.
Planchat had been the pride of a new program established in one of those backwashes we learn to live with, hawkish after several years of a kindler, gentler leadership. Someone with sufficient political clout had decided the only answer to terrorism was an elite killer corps and went about calling in sufficient favors to make it happen. Planchat was first car off the assembly line, the prototype, a real dazzler. He was also a loner. And became ever more so as his fellow grads started checking out to brute craziness: some suddenly proclaiming themselves free agents (as though they were, after all, only football players), many either on their own or with a little help from their friends back at the factory heading out in search of what Rabelais called le grand peut-être.
The ensuing backwash was liberal, of course. When word came down that his program was deactivated, Planchat declined further government service and, in time-honored tradition, fostered out to a new identity.
Of three program graduates still undocumented (agency code meaning not dead), that accounted for two, Planchat and myself. Meanwhile “out in the world somewhere” (as an old blues song has it), whereabouts unknown, identity unknown—if indeed he were still alive—there might be another. No one could be sure.
No one had an explanation, either, for Planchat’s sudden resurfacing. All these years he’d quietly gone about his placebo life of employment, possessions, payments, polls, appointments. Then something brought him crashing back out of the closet.
Twenty-three weeks ago two security guards were found dead at Compso, a high-tech electronics manufacturer and research facility in upstate New York. Both had been dispatched instantly, expertly: the first with a single blow, the second by severing the spinal cord through a narrow incision at the base of his neck. There were some blinds and red herrings thrown up, but whatever was missing, really missing, didn’t show up on any of the company’s various inventories.
Four days later a military installation was hit; and in following week
s bodies turned up in hotel rooms, places of business, parks and storage facilities, warehouses, even once in a library. There was nothing definite to tie Planchat to any of this, but his name came up in one of those sotto voce conversations between our best jockey and his computer, and the more it was looked into, the more it started looking like a match.
For one thing, Planchat wasn’t where he was supposed to be, and hadn’t been there for a while—about six months.
He may as well have dropped off the edge of the earth, floated away in a balloon, gone to Tahiti to live among natives. Or been collected by extraterrestrials. The few spoors that existed were being tracked. Several calls had been traced to a phone booth in Dallas. That’s why I’d been routed through here on my way in. To connect, if a connection existed. If the arc was there.
Rain hasn’t abated. I put the dossier down and look again out the window. The world remains obscure. An occasional car scales the curved back of the hill like a momentary moon.
In that rented room of mine, the second month after I’d quit maybe, or the third, I got up one morning and, sitting still naked on the side of the bed, with frost plating the window outside and my own breath spilling out from me in spumes as a portable heater filled the room with the smell of raw alcohol, began a journal.
At first I simply transcribed my day: what I read and saw, where I went, stray thoughts, observations. Before long, though, I found the journal pulling away from the day’s details and pastimes.
Memory was strong then; I sank back into it. Scenes of my childhood, friends, family, the way spaghetti or milk and oatmeal cookies had tasted when I was a kid, the first time I kissed a girl (Trudy Mayfield, Friday after school, February 1962), stories about a bibliographic worm in Boy’s Life, my mother’s face. It all came back in a flood.
Cedar Hill, I wrote. A two-story white frame house at the end of the block, with a scraggly weeping willow out front. We never locked doors, didn’t even have keys for them as far as I know. Ate at a gray Formica table in the kitchen; the dining room stayed closed off except for holidays. A ’52 Dodge with green plastic shades for the wing windows and windshield, and fluid drive. Pecans. They were everywhere, forever rolling and cracking open underfoot. Wasps in thick bushes that skirted the house. Honeysuckle.
But soon I learned that, precise and detailed as my memories were, they were also in some incomprehensible way complete. Once I had gone over a period in my mind, it was set; if I returned to it, there’d be nothing more, just those same memories. There was no depth.
There were also curious gaps. I could visualize my mother’s face exactly, curve of cheek into chin, the wing-like sweep of eyebrows, but I couldn’t, for all my efforts, recall how she smelled, or the touch of her skin. And Trudy Mayfield’s name was just that: a name. I had no image of her face, no further memories of her sitting beside me in a classroom or over sloppy joes in the school cafeteria.
Shortly after these realizations, I put the journal away. Best not to think about it, I told myself. I had a present, a life that gradually was taking on form, and that was what was important. Not the past, not history, not the stumbles and snags of a faulty memory.
I go into the bathroom, tear the weightless plastic cup out of its paper cocoon, fill it from the tap, and drink. When I come back, the couple (threesome?) next door has again taken up the challenge.
The second envelope contains a copy of the police report on the death of one Raymond Hicks, discovered by his common-law wife early that morning in their home on Colorado. The only mark on Mr. Hicks was a small incision beneath his nipple by way of which, with some flexible knifelike object and what the ME called “astonishing surgical skill,” the ventricles of his heart had been pared away like quarters of an apple.
Rain streams on the window. Momentarily I feel like some ancient aquatic being, sequestered from evolution’s progress in the depths of its cave and forgotten. When a truck’s lights break suddenly against the rain there, I’m startled.
Raymond Hicks was the name Howard the Horse had given me back in Memphis.
8
It’s good to see you.
“How long…?”
Three years.
“What happened?”
Beats me. Woke up one day and turned over to say good morning to whoever was there and I couldn’t. Now I write on this blackboard, like some kid. Nothing wrong physically, the doctors say. Hell, Dave, I’m sixty-two: there’s a lot wrong physically.
“So at this advanced age you’ve become a writer.”
Ha. It ain’t funny, I guess. But then if it ain’t funny, what the hell is it?
“Life.”
Yeah, life. Joke without a punch line. So how you been?
“Good, Blaise. It was rough at first.”
Letting go, you mean.
“Yes.”
It was hard taking hold at first, too. You forget?
“No, I haven’t forgotten. Anything. Including the fact that I wouldn’t be here now, probably wouldn’t have returned from my second assignment and certainly not from my tenth, if it hadn’t been for you.”
So you’re welcome. You have someone to tell good morning?
“Yes. Her name’s Gabrielle.”
Good. That’s important. You never did before. Maybe someday I’ll get a chance to meet her. You can take us both to dinner.
“I’d like that.”
You’d like it a lot more after a few years of the oatmeal soup here.
“I hope you’re kidding.”
With croutons. Just a guess, of course. Can’t tell a thing by looking at it, even less from tasting it. You ever get around to reading that Frenchman I told you about?
“Cendrars—your namesake. Some of it. What I could find in translation. Amazing stuff.”
Amazing life. What are you doing these days?
“I’m an artist, Blaise.”
Always were. Saw it in you from the first. Told Johnsson that.
“A different kind of artist.”
Different, huh? Everybody’s hard behind change these days. Like there’s always been something wrong with us and we just noticed it so now we’re going to do something about it. People and things all changing so fast you can’t hold on to any of them anymore.
“I never could.”
Yeah. I guess maybe none of us could.
“Are you doing okay?”
I’m not doing at all—that’s the problem. But yeah, I have what I need. Johnsson and the others, they see to that. He bring you in because of Luc?
“Yes, sir.”
Thought he would. You still that kind of artist too?
“You mean, am I going to pull Luc down for him?”
It wouldn’t be for him.
“Should I?”
You never asked me before what you should or shouldn’t do.
“A dangerous word.”
?
“Johnsson called should ‘a most dangerous word.’”
He’s right. But if you take out all the shoulds, what’s left that’s worth anything?
“I have to go, Blaise. Take care.”
You too. Come again.
“I will. And next time I won’t wait so long.”
I may not wait at all. Ha.
9
I’m certain I am dreaming, and am watching, I think, within the dream, a play.
Scattered about the stage are folding screens, all of them sheer and lit from behind, some plain linen or rice paper, others painted with landscapes, domestic scenes, still lifes, vegetation. As actors speak and move about onstage, they pass behind these screens, sometimes pausing there, other times moving quickly through, and reemerge. Whenever an actor goes behind a screen (beyond a country hillside, behind a table and chairs or a vase with flowers, among the silhouettes of a crowded street) the actor abruptly, unpredictably changes: how he moves, how he responds, what he says—veering off even in midphrase. A comic line suddenly gleams with menace, dialogue curdles to diatribe, an actor�
��s kindly query concerning another’s affairs becomes, for the split second he passes behind one of the screens, a fierce, mad monologue. When the actor reemerges then, just as suddenly, the play comes back to keel.
I look down and find I am holding a program. On its front is printed the play’s title: Dailyness. On its back is a peel-off sticker reading HELLO MY NAME IS.
Applause starts up around me. An actor reemerges from one of the screens and the play, whose end he had signaled with a final, summary line while there, resumes.
10
“Yes, David.”
I looked past the window at a group of young people emerging from Wendy’s. They wore the general uniform of the day—jeans or baggy trousers, various combinations of T-shirts, denim jackets and oversize sweaters—and were laughing before the jokes got told.
“I just had an interesting conversation on the subject of change.”
He had picked up the phone on the first ring. Now he waited a moment and said, “I see. Philosophical discussion, like memories, in time of inactivity can prove somewhat comforting, I suppose.”
“Or, again like those memories, disturbing.”
“Of course.”
The young people, who’d gone out of frame to the right, reappeared in the window imaginatively arranged on the seats of a convertible. They were still laughing. On the wall by the phone someone had written in purple marker: WE NO WHO YOU R.
“I’ll need a complete file,” I said. “Not the one everybody else sees. Your own.”
“Certainly, David. For whatever good it may do you. Which I suspect will be very little, by the way. But I’ll have Lawrence run off a disk for you. Your preference as to format? ASCII, perhaps?”
“Paper.”
“Very well. Paper, then. Those thrilling days of yesteryear. What else?”
“Clothes. All I have are jeans, sweatshirts, running shoes. Those won’t do, not for this.”
“Of course. Your measurements would be approximately as before, I assume.”
“Close enough.”
“Cohen is still with us. I believe he should be able to assemble what’s required in short order. Suits for daytime and evening, I would think. Assorted sportswear. Formal?”