Seven Shoes

by Mark Davis

  “In a small chamber, ten feet above soft material.”

  “Still, it’s less certain than this Ruger.” Daryl produced a small pistol out of his backpack.

  Lars was coming. Elizabeth had to slow this down.

  “That was a dirty trick you played on me with Max.”

  “I could continue to mess with Max, but I don’t like shooting fish in a barrel. Now that would be really dirty.”

  “You went to dinner with them—Lionel, Sandra, Ken, the others. Did you ever tell them that you were Freyja?”

  “No, they believed me to be a fellow seeker, that’s all. Which I am, of sorts.”

  “Why did Lionel Jacobson kill himself?”

  “I see what you’re doing. But I’ll give you the quick answer. Because Lionel was about to be revealed as a plagiarist in a countersuit by his Hollywood enemies. They discovered that the play that had made him famous was an unpublished work his professor lover had toyed with for years. That’s why none of Lionel’s subsequent plays quite measured up. He could bear almost anything except that particular form of disgrace. Time to suit up.”

  “You think you can get me to jump?”

  Daryl’s head cocked in a quizzical manner.

  “I’m not sure. You see, that’s the interesting part, the point of our little experiment, Elizabeth. Which will you choose, certain but painless death with a bullet to the head or a brave leap into the void with a microscopic chance that your amateur skills will put you in the record books for all time?”

  “With you gloating over me all the way down.”

  “Take this suit.” He handed her the smaller of the two suits. “Strip down to your undies.”

  Elizabeth slowly pulled off her shirt, yanked off her hiking boots and her socks.

  “Pants.”

  She stepped out of her jeans. She was now standing on a platform in the sky wearing a T-shirt and panties rippling in the wind.

  “I’ve already attached our suits to their main rigs, so we have very little to do. Lay out your suit and sit down at the top end.”

  Elizabeth wanted to let the wind catch the suit and take it away from her, but she knew that would mean a bullet to the brain. If she took her time, Lars might come.

  She sat down and inserted her feet into the suit. The fabric was smooth, light, insubstantial. Her torso was to be her fuselage, with her head as nose, hands as ailerons, feet as rudders. The fabric between her arms would be her wings, and the fabric between her legs her elevators.

  She felt as if she could repeat those terms, it might make all the pieces work together.

  Daryl set out the other suit and sat down, gun next to him on the rock.

  If Lars did not come soon, Elizabeth had only one move she could think of, one tiny chance to slow Daryl down, maybe stop him cold, if he didn’t shoot her first.

  “Pull all the way through, like this, until your feet stick out … Good. Pull the suit up and now stand.”

  He stood and she stood.

  “Now thread your arms through the harness.”

  She did as he did.

  “Fasten your leg straps like this.”

  She fastened the straps and squeezed the clamps hard.

  “Fasten your chest straps, tight, hard on the buckle.”

  Elizabeth watched him closely, intently, trying to get it right.

  “Pull on the main zipper, all the way up.”

  She did it.

  “Slip on your booties and zip the ankle grips around them.”

  She mimicked his actions.

  Daryl tucked his pistol in the belt of his suit to check her suit. He zipped a zipper that went up her arms. He checked her up and down, pulling hard on all her straps, zips and handles, testing them.

  “Slip on your gloves and we’re good to go.”

  Daryl stretched his arms and spread his legs to show her his wings.

  “See, there’s a carbon grip here by your hand. You’ll want to hold on to that for dear life.”

  “All you want, Daryl, is to trick me into committing suicide in front of you.”

  “The choice is yours. Quick, painless and certain, or terrifying and just barely possible, Elizabeth, but possible.”

  “Why?”

  “To challenge your fear. To see what you’re made of.”

  “And you think you can get away?”

  “If I heave everything over the side, you included and make it to the shore alive, yes, no one will be the wiser.”

  The wind ruffled the rills of Elizabeth’s suit, pushing her toward the edge. As she righted herself, she knew this was the moment. She drew in a breath and bent over to press a button on the sat phone. She hit speaker and it began to ring.

  “Turn that thing off,” he said, thrusting the gun toward her face.

  “Daddy?”

  Daryl stiffened, paralyzed by indecision.

  It was a young woman’s voice. Elizabeth hit another button and Stacie Parnell appeared, barely visible in the late afternoon sunlight against the little screen. Elizabeth held her arm out straight so Daryl could see his daughter and she could see him. She knew from the last call what Daryl was seeing—a young woman, now, thin and pretty, hair shaved on one side of her head, a delicate nose ring and a small Chinese symbol tattooed on the side of her slender neck. Behind her would be a patio door that revealed an apartment complex and a swimming pool.

  It was already morning in Silver Lake, California.

  “Daddy?”

  Daryl’s eyes went wild. He looked from side to side, seeking escape.

  “Oh my God, Elizabeth, what have you done to me?”

  “Daddy, this lady, this doctor, tells me that you’re in trouble.”

  “Stacie, no honey, no, there’s nothing like that.”

  “Is that a gun?”

  He tucked it back in his suit.

  “Where are you? I see mountains. Is that a cliff? What are you wearing?”

  “Stacie, love, I’m just doing some jumping, like I did in the Army.”

  “From what the doctor told me, I worry that you might kill yourself. Come home. We’re still family. I miss you now.”

  “Stacie darling, I just … it’s not, it’s not …”

  Daryl’s eyes welled up.

  “She says you’re in Europe? Is that Switzerland?”

  “I am traveling.”

  “Come home, Daddy.”

  His mouth curled down, his face reddened and he began to sob.

  “I can’t darling. Daddy can’t.”

  “Come home.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Come home.”

  “So, so sorry, about all that’s happened to us. I love you.”

  Daryl went silent. He had nothing else to say to his daughter. He reached out and swatted the phone from Elizabeth’s hands. It rattled across the rocks and went over the edge. He pulled his gun again. His jaw clenched, face like a knotted fist.

  “Now or die.”

  His tight expression squeezed tears into deep creases around his eyes.

  “Listen to you daughter.”

  “Count of three.”

  “Okay, which edge is best?”

  Daryl pointed to the left-hand side of the tip of the tongue.

  “Some last advice.” Daryl’s voice was a croak. “You’re going to want to spread out immediately. You will plunge at first, straight down, but try to keep your eyes on the horizon and bow your body, pulling hard up like a cobra to try to level off.”

  “And then what?”

  “You know as much now as you’ll ever know.”

  Elizabeth stepped back a good dozen feet from the edge and went into a crouch, preparing to sprint to the tip and dive head first.

  “One,” he said, aiming the pistol at her.

  She calmed her mind, focused on her breathing. This was the end of her life, but she was doing something brave. She was doing it for Max. She woul
d choose the fall because that would give her at least a tiny chance to see her son again. To accept the bullet would be to accept suicide. Somehow, she hoped Max would know that.

  “Two.”

  Daryl fired into the sky. The report of the pistol made her whole body flinch.

  “Three.”

  “I’m going. I’m doing it. Let them know I did it for Max.”

  “Go now or die now.”

  He stretched his arm and aimed the pistol at her, smiled through his tears and spoke.

  “If you make me shoot you, I promise to do it in the side of your head. Small caliber. You will still be pretty.”

  Elizabeth puffed several short breaths and began to sprint toward the cliff.

  A rifle shot, behind her. She fell flat, skittering and scraping hard across the rocks, a few feet from the edge. She looked up and saw Daryl running. He spread his arms and soared out over the fjord at the same instant as a second report boomed from the rifle.

  Daryl plunged out of sight.

  Lars, Lieutenant Dahl, Agent Norris and half-a-dozen rangers ran around Nasrin’s body and out onto the rock.

  Lars pulled Elizabeth up. Her suit was shredded in front, streaks of blood where the scrape had gone through to bare stomach.

  “Are you wounded?”

  “We’ve got to see,” Elizabeth said, moving toward the tip in a crouch.

  She crept toward the edge on all fours, then scooted up to it. Elizabeth looked out over the fjord and felt a flash of vertigo terror. Wearing this suit, the wind could truly take her over the edge. Lars laid down next to her. She grabbed Lars by the belt and held on tight.

  Lieutenant Dahl scanned the rocks below but saw no one. Lars whipped out a small pair of binoculars.

  “Five o’clock.”

  Elizabeth looked to where Lars was pointing.

  A yellow mote shot out over the lake. It slowed, pivoted and made a downturn and plunged, righted, and plunged again. The mote was attempting a wide corkscrew spiral but kept losing control and cutting inward.

  “He’s in trouble,” Elizabeth said.

  “I think I blew a hole in his right wing,” Lars said.

  Lieutenant Dahl handed Elizabeth a pair of binoculars.

  The mote leveled off and kept a straight line over the length of the lake. The mote’s descent now seemed better controlled. It was hard to believe that this particle shooting through the air was a man. The particle gracefully descended, as Daryl had said he would, over the face of the waters.

  He slowed, fell and wobbled upward, fell and wobbled upward. He moved upward and stalled, flapping his arms and pumping his legs as if he were on a bicycle.

  “He could easily be going 200 kilometers per hour,” Dahl said.

  Daryl slammed into the lake, bounded into an arc heels over head, and hit the water again. He was not skipping over the water like a tossed stone. He was a human cannonball repeatedly slamming into the lake at the hardest angle, bouncing upwards, and hitting it again, for a quarter of a mile until he came to rest.

  The mote became still as it floated, arms and legs spread-eagled, face down. It reminded Elizabeth of a tiny bug in a water glass.

  THIRTY

  Elizabeth paced when she lectured but kept herself to the side of the screen to give her students a clear view of the PET scans of two human brains. She always saved the most interesting part of her lectures for the last minutes before the bell. It kept students alert and off their phones.

  One of the brains was lit up like a war zone, explosions of reds and yellows in the cerebral cortex that extended downward in a crescent of color.

  “The orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC, is the lower portion of the cortex,” Elizabeth said. “It is where we govern our emotions, impulses and moral choices.”

  The other brain was also bright in the high, frontal portions, but in the OFC region there was only an archipelago of tiny islands of color. The rest was dark and quiet.

  “This is a PET scan of a serial killer,” she said. “A psychopath lacks processing power in this part of the brain.”

  “So our moral choices are determined by our brains?” A young man asked.

  The students were a mix of pre-med biology majors, a few Georgetown School of Medicine residents and some curious, undergraduate liberal arts majors. This question came from an earnest looking pre-med type.

  “There is no doubt that people are born with genetic predispositions to these patterns,” Elizabeth replied. “But could it also work the other way around? Could the way we live, the choices we make throughout our lives, affect our brain patterns, turn a dormant gene on or an active gene off, reinforcing a tendency through an act of will?”

  “This leads us to an even deeper question.”

  The speaker, sitting high up in the small auditorium, had a deep, booming voice.

  “Can someone be normal, happy, well-adjusted and socially moral, only to lapse to psychopathy late in life due to deep trauma?”

  “Students, this is George Abelman, one of the most distinguished scholars in this field,” Elizabeth said. “We’re writing a paper together on this very subject, though we have yet to agree on a conclusion. Yes, George, as we have seen in our case study, that can happen.”

  The bell rang. Elizabeth remained behind to answer a few questions from students, most of them about the questionable morality of grading on a curve. She met George outside of White-Gravenor Hall. Students were walking fast to their next class. October had arrived in full, the air pleasantly crisp, the trees shimmering with their own explosions of red and orange against the blue-gray stones of the university.

  “Take a walk?”

  They fell into lockstep.

  “The essential remaining issue in our paper is ideation,” he said.

  “I’ve got a theory,” Elizabeth replied. “Daryl had been committed to his family and went to church, for years. I postulate that he never stopped believing in God. He was an angry Job who wanted to pile one stinking corpse on top of another under the very nostrils of the Lord. He was saying to God, ‘See. See what you do to us.’ The Norse imagery just a pagan wrapper for his calculated insult.”

  “As an insult to God?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so he became a killer, just like that?”

  “He had been a killer for years for Uncle Sam. It was his peaceful years in Atlanta that were the anomaly.”

  They passed through the iron gates of the university and took the sidewalk that led down to M Street in the direction of Martin’s Tavern, their default bar whenever George came to Georgetown.

  He shook his head.

  “My, how much all this God nonsense has cost humanity over the centuries. Even intelligent people still fall for it.”

  “Yes they do,” Elizabeth said. “You should know, George, I have my moments on that question as well.”

  George stopped walking for a moment.

  “Really? And I thought I had educated you so well.”

  “Let’s save that talk for another time. All I am prepared to say right now is that I don’t believe in Daryl’s God, a fundamentalist deity not that much different from Odin. He saw God as his father figure who had betrayed him, tortured him, and he wanted payback.”

  “And so Daryl Parnell’s brain switched, at middle age, to that of a psychopath? Just like that?”

  “Another way to put it is that he gave in to an evil impulse—to medicate his intense pain by enjoying the many clever ways he could mete out God’s punishment to others. He allowed himself to become degraded by grief.”

  “We were talking brains earlier. Now you sound like you’re defending the idea of a soul.”

  “If you take a computer apart and examine its circuits it will tell you nothing about the meanings of the movies, books and blogs that flicker across its screen. The device should not be mistaken for its content.”

  “I can see that our paper is going to take longer than
we thought.”

  They walked on to Martin’s. They had a lot to talk about. They always had.

  ___________

  Max waited for her in a chain coffee shop by their gate.

  She hugged him. He let her do this, confident that none of his friends were around to witness the act.

  “Are you excited about seeing California?”

  “Yeah, but it’s going to be kinda weird being alone for part of the time,” he said.

  “I just need a few hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings. We’ll have the afternoons and all day Monday.”

  “I’m cool,” he said. “I can sleep in, I guess.”

  “I bet you can.”

  They went to their gate, waiting for their flight to be called.

  The last time Elizabeth had flown had been to attend a memorial service for Nasrin Jones on an appropriately dreary London day. The service had been held in one of the older and more established mosques in England, one that had the dark atmospherics of a Victorian church.

  She met Nasrin’s mother, beautiful in old age, who despite her grief displayed a similarly canny expression and offhand sense of humor.

  All pretense that Nasrin had worked for Scotland Yard had been abandoned. The congregation was packed with men and women whose dark suits matched their glowering expressions. But MI6 had done a good job overall, delivering a train full of Nasrin’s old Manchester police colleagues, complete with the customary bagpipers who played patriotic and mournful tunes.

  Lars had met Elizabeth outside after the service. The conversation was awkward as they held their umbrellas upright and had to move now and then to let fellow mourners pass. On Trolltunga, Lars had been sweet, holding Elizabeth tight and not letting her look at Nasrin as he led her away. Lars stayed with Elizabeth for several days until it was time for her to fly home. Now, all he really seemed to want to talk about was being promoted and elevated into the PST. If he played his cards right, he might someday become the director. She could have said something cutting, but he had saved her life. They talked awhile, hugged and parted.

  They had run out of things to say to each other.

  Now Elizabeth was going to spend a long weekend in LA. She would do fun things with her son, make up for all the time she had been gone and for almost leaving him forever. They would go to the beach, do a studio tour and eat at fancy restaurants with outdoor seating.