What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  No one had been able to see them unload their expensive audiovisual equipment. No one had been close enough to hear the sounds of construction as Michael had prepared the studio where Number 4 was being filmed.

  Linda did not know it consciously but, in a way, they were as isolated as Number 4. For Linda, the sense of owning and controlling a world of their own became a part of her pleasure. It was all taking place in an old farmhouse miles from any urban center. No neighbors poking around nosily, bringing over a let’s be friends casserole. They had no connection to where they were. No friends. No acquaintances. They did not participate in any world other than Series #4. Nor did she suffer any part of the outside world to intrude on theirs.

  She held her finger up to the light coming through the window. She hoped she would not develop a scar. A rush of deep-red anger overcame her, a rage at the idea that Number 4 had inadvertently left a mark on her skin. Any flaw on her body frightened her. She expected always to be perfect.

  “I’m okay,” she said. She wasn’t sure she believed this. She wanted, in that moment, to hurt Number 4 in some unforgettable way.

  “Let me bandage it,” Michael said.

  She held out her hand and he took it like a bridegroom standing at the altar. Tender. He had changed his approach. No more laughter. He turned it to the light and dried it by dabbing it with cotton. Then he lifted her hand, like a medieval courtier, and kissed it.

  “I think,” she said slowly, finally breaking into a smile, “that it’s time for Number Four to learn something new.”

  Michael nodded.

  “A new threat?” he asked.

  Linda smiled. “An old threat, reinvented.”

  29

  Adrian used the gun to gesture toward the inside of the house, pointing it in the direction for the sex offender to move. The weight of the weapon seemed to fluctuate—light, almost airy one second, iron, anvil-like the next. He tried to force himself through a checklist: Full clip in the handle? Check. Round chambered? Check. Safety off? Check. Finger on the trigger? Check.

  Willingness to shoot?

  He doubted he could do this, even with his threats to the contrary and even taking into consideration the amount of evil that Mark Wolfe was clearly willing to deliver to innocent children. He heard Brian’s voice whispering in his ear: If you shoot him, you will be arrested and there will be no one left to search for Jennifer and she will be gone forever.

  The practical lawyer argument was his brother’s. The matter-of-fact tone was his brother’s. But he knew Brian wasn’t with him, not at that moment. I’m on my own, he thought. Then he contradicted himself. No I’m not. He fought his own confusion.

  Adrian looked at the shifty-eyed way the sex offender seemed to slink back into his living room. It nearly overwhelmed him to be in the presence of a man who cared so little about the impact of his desires. Ordinary folks consider consequences. The Mark Wolfes of the world do not.

  The 9mm seemed suddenly cold to his touch, and then, in the next second, almost red hot, as if it had just been pulled from a refiner’s fire. He tightened his grip. But maybe I am the same.

  The man wore a grin that Adrian believed was indicative of a sickness he could only imagine. At least his own illness had a name and a diagnosis and a recognizable pattern of madness and disintegration. But Mark Wolfe’s compulsion seemed to enter into a different realm, one where medicine lost its grip and was replaced by something far darker.

  “Okay, old man,” Wolfe said with a mocking familiarity. “Stop waving the cannon around and tell me what you need to know.”

  He stepped into the living room. There was little in his voice that suggested he felt terribly threatened by Adrian, despite the gun wavering in the air between them.

  “But first I want that computer.”

  Adrian hesitated.

  “It’s important, is it?”

  Wolfe smiled.

  “You wouldn’t be here, if you didn’t know the answer to that question already.”

  From behind him, Rose entered the living room. She had a dishtowel in her hand and she smiled when she saw Adrian.

  “Oh, Marky, your friend is back,” she said enthusiastically.

  Wolfe kept his eyes on Adrian. “That’s right, Mom,” he said slowly. “My good friend the professor has come to visit again. He brought your computer with him.”

  Rose had not seen the automatic in Adrian’s hand, or else she didn’t understand why he held it, or maybe even what it was, because she did not mention it. “Are we all going to watch our shows?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mom. I think that’s why the professor is here. He wants to join us watching television. You can start knitting now.”

  Rose smiled and moved over to her chair. Within seconds she had plopped herself down and the subtle click clack of needles and yarn dropped into the background.

  “I don’t show her my personal stuff,” Wolfe said. “Even if she can’t really wrap her head around it. I still make her go to bed before I hook it up.”

  Touching, Adrian thought. He hides his sick pornography from his mother. What a good son.

  “So . . .” Adrian started. He stopped just as quickly.

  “You will have to wait,” Wolfe said. “This is my house, and my schedule.”

  Adrian nodded. He moved to a seat on a threadbare couch. “We’ll wait together,” he said. The weapon remained in his hand, trained on Wolfe’s chest.

  “You know,” Wolfe said slowly, “people like me, we’re not really dangerous. We’re just . . . curious. Didn’t Doctor West tell you that?”

  Not dangerous. What a lie, Adrian shouted inwardly. But outwardly he maintained what he hoped was a clinician’s poker face.

  “I haven’t spoken to Doctor West about you,” Adrian replied. A small look of surprise flitted into Wolfe’s eyes.

  “That’s interesting,” the sex offender said. He sat down heavily across from Adrian and picked up a television remote control. He pointed it at the cable box beneath the flat-screen television and, as the device came to life, he muttered, “Because the good doctor seems to me to be pretty much the same as you.”

  “What do you mean?” Adrian asked as a channel guide came up on the screen.

  “He wants to learn,” Wolfe said. A quick burst of laughter jumped through his lips. “Except he doesn’t need to point a gun at my chest to find out what he wants.”

  Adrian felt dizzy. He wanted help. He needed help. But all his dead visitors were quiet.

  “What do you think, professor,” Wolfe asked abruptly. “A rerun of M*A*S*H or maybe the old Mary Tyler Moore Show? My mother doesn’t get the humor in The Simpsons.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He punched a button and the screen filled with olive-drab army helicopters circling over a Southern California hillside pretending to be 1950s-era Korea. Familiar music poured out of the speakers. “Oh, good,” Rose said brightly. “It’s Hawkeye and Major Burns.” The knitting needles clicked energetically as she bent forward toward the television.

  “She can remember them,” Wolfe said. “Radar. Hot Lips. Trapper John and Klinger. But not her sister’s name. Or any of my cousins. They’re all strangers now. Of course, they don’t show up as regularly as Alan Alda and Mike Farrell. No one does. It’s just the two of us. All alone. Except for the people on the screen. They’re her only friends.”

  The sex offender turned slightly in his seat to follow the action in the show, ignoring Adrian almost to the point of behaving as if he and the weapon were no longer in the room, except Adrian saw Wolfe stiffen when he moved the satchel with Rose’s computer to a spot on the floor between his feet. He did not know how long he could hold the weapon in his hand steady, and he wondered if it was like a diver’s weight that would pull him into an abyss.

  They sat through an evenin
g of old sitcoms. The 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital characters changed into Archie and Meathead. They were followed by Diane and Sam. For two hours antics filled the screen. Rose laughed frequently, occasionally when there was an actual joke, but that didn’t necessarily seem a crucial part of her enjoyment. Mark Wolfe lounged in his seat, oblivious to the weapon pointed in his direction. Adrian shifted about in the couch, half paying attention to the comedies but also eyeing Wolfe. He had never held someone at gunpoint before. It didn’t seem to him that he was doing a good job, but he wasn’t sure that was entirely relevant.

  He felt as if he were on some avant-garde stage but there was no prompter to feed him his lines.

  The end theme from Cheers filled the room and Mark Wolfe took the remote control and shut off the television.

  “That’s enough for tonight, Mom,” he said. “The professor and I need to finish our business. Time for you to go to bed.”

  Rose looked sad. “It’s all over for tonight?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  The woman sighed and put her knitting back into the basket. She looked up. “Hello?” she said to Adrian. “Are you one of Mark’s friends?”

  Adrian didn’t answer.

  “Bed, Mother,” he said. “You’re tired now. You need to take your pills and go to sleep.”

  “It’s bedtime?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it dinner?”

  “No. You ate earlier.”

  “Then we should watch our shows now.”

  “No, Mother. Finished for tonight.”

  Mark Wolfe stood up. He went over and half lifted his mother from her chair. Then he turned back to Adrian, who still held the weapon in front of him, but to what point seemed to have dissipated in the rush of sitcom canned laughs and Rose’s fading in and out memory.

  “You going to keep an eye on me?” Wolfe said. “Or are you willing to wait until I come back?”

  Adrian stood up. He knew that letting Wolfe out of his sight would be wrong, although precisely why in the midst of the theater of the absurd was elusive. He smiled at Rose.

  “Let’s go, then,” Wolfe said, taking his mother by the hand.

  Adrian thought he was being invited in on some sort of hidden ritual, like an anthropologist that finally wins the trust of a deep Amazon Indian tribe. He watched from a few feet away as the son monitored his mother preparing for bed. He helped her out of her clothes right to the edge of propriety; he put the toothpaste on the brush for her. He arranged a series of pills on a bureau top for her and handed her a glass of water. He made sure that she used the toilet, patiently waiting outside the bathroom door and calling out questions such as “Did you use the toilet paper?” and “Did you remember to flush?” Then he tucked her in to bed—all with Adrian, weapon still in hand, standing a few feet away. It was like he was invisible.

  Few things he had ever seen in his life frightened him as much as watching the ritual of Rose getting ready for bed. It was not that she was childlike, though she was. It was that the ordinary routines of life had lost their connection to her thinking. In every action, every small moment that reflected her loss of grip on the world, Rose displayed what Adrian feared was barreling toward him. It will be the same, but worse, for me.

  He hung back. Embarrassed. He was tumbling headlong into something so intimate that he could not put a word to it.

  Mark Wolfe, the sex offender, kissed his mother’s forehead tenderly. As he clicked off the bedroom light he turned to Adrian. “See?” he asked, but it was a question that didn’t require an answer because Adrian clearly could see. “That’s what it’s like. Every night.”

  Wolfe pushed past him. He was heading back toward the living room. “Close that,” he muttered, waving to the bedroom door. Adrian turned and stole a final glimpse of the woman lying like a lump in the shadowy darkness.

  “Maybe she’ll die in her sleep tonight,” Wolfe said. “But probably she won’t.”

  Adrian shut Rose away and followed.

  “That cop,” Wolfe said, “the one you came with before. She’s like all the other cops I’ve ever run into. They like to harass me. Take my computer. See what magazines I’ve got. Check on my therapy. Hassle me at my job. Make sure I’m not doing anything they don’t like, like visiting a school or a playground. They want to try to take the me out of me.” He laughed. “Fat chance.”

  Wolfe looked over at Adrian. “So you want a little tour of my life, huh?”

  The sex offender didn’t wait for an answer. He merely moved back into the living room. He went to the window and lowered the blinds.

  “You know that every day I get up and go to my job, just like a nice little parolee?”

  Adrian nodded his head. He kept the gun pointed to the front.

  “And now you’ve seen me and my mom. Ancient sitcoms and changing adult diapers. Real nice, huh?”

  Adrian guessed that the weapon wavered in his grip. He tried to steady his hand.

  “You’re not going to shoot me,” Wolfe said. “In fact, you’re going to agree to what I want, because otherwise I won’t help you. And you do need help, don’t you, professor?”

  He said this in a mocking, aggressive tone.

  Adrian kept quiet. He wanted to push the weapon forward. He didn’t understand why when he held a gun it didn’t scare Wolfe. He tried to sort through this equation in his head. The gun was appropriate stimulus. Violent painful death. The reaction should have been readily clear and instantly identifiable. Cowering unbridled fear. That it was not confused him.

  “So time for a little bargain, professor.”

  “I don’t make bargains with people like you,” Adrian weakly replied. This was woefully inadequate, he thought.

  “Sure you do. As soon as you knocked on my door there, you were selling something. Or maybe you wanted to buy something. We just have to get the terms of the sale right before we get to continue on to the good part.”

  Wolfe seemed relaxed for a man facing a gun barrel.

  “I want my mother’s computer back. For obvious reasons. The hard drive is mine and mine alone. Personal stuff. Now, tell me what you want and we can arrange a price.”

  “I need to find someone.”

  “Okay. Hire a private cop.”

  “I am the private cop,” Adrian replied.

  Wolfe burst out with a short, harsh laugh.

  “You don’t look much like one, except for that heavy-duty artillery piece you keep waving about. You know, for starters, professor, you should keep two hands on the weapon. That will steady it, allow you to sight down the barrel more accurately.”

  Wolfe smiled. “There. A little bit of education, and I won’t even charge you for it.”

  Adrian balanced conflicting notions in his head. He could lower the weapon, put it away, start negotiating. Or he could try to threaten Wolfe the way he imagined Terri Collins might, but he doubted he had the cop gravitas to make that believable. He was trapped, trying to consider his options, when he heard Brian whisper, “Use who you were, and who you are, and who you will be . . .That might work.”

  He nodded and felt his brother helping to steady his grip. He raised the gun and pointed it directly at Wolfe. He sighted down the barrel and slowly tightened his finger against the trigger. He installed a little quaver in his voice.

  “I’m sick,” Adrian said quietly. “I’m very sick. I’m going to die soon.”

  Wolfe looked at him quizzically.

  “Your mother, how much do you trust her? Do you think she knows what she’s doing? If it was her waving this gun around, how certain would you be she wouldn’t inadvertently pull the trigger and blow a nice huge damn hole in your face and not have a clue why she did it or how. And even if she only put a round in your stomach, and you had maybe just a little chance to live t
hrough it, do you think she would know enough to call 911? Or do you think maybe she’d start knitting and watching television?”

  Wolfe’s eyes narrowed and his face lost its mocking grin.

  “Well,” Adrian said slowly. “What I’ve got is something like what your mother has. Only it’s worse. It makes me do all sorts of things that are erratic as hell and I don’t understand at all why I do them. So there’s a real good chance that any second now I’m going to forget why I’m here and maybe this cannon, as you so eloquently put it, Mister Wolfe, will go off, because I won’t remember what I need from you and only that you’re a major league sex offender and an all-round piece of excrement that deserves to go directly to hell. I’m just like that. Unsteady. Like standing on a slippery deck, waves rocking the boat. And I don’t have much time to barter.”

  Wolfe seemed to recoil slightly. Adrian had spoken quickly, his voice rising and falling like the waves he’d used to give the whole speech a poetic ring.

  “That should make him think and really fuck him up,” Brian snorted gleefully. “Good job, Audie. You’ve got him off balance now. Nail him.”