by Jeff Siamon
And there was something else that was leaving. Connie felt its shiver. The thing’s shiver. It was retreating. Easing its shadow away like a dog with its tail between its legs. That’s what he felt. That’s what he knew after his heart had slowed down enough to have a thought other than survival. Another defeat for the thing. Another victory for Connie. If you could call Evie’s death any sort of victory.
Connie remained standing as still as the musicians. The distant sounds of sirens slowly increased in intensity while the moans of the survivors competed with the sirens. He let go of the tommy gun and began walking towards the cries of someone under a nearby table. He moved like he was in a trance. Seeing but not seeing the gory mayhem in the room.
But he never reached the wounded person. For with each footstep, his vision became blurred. The room grew dim like another shadow had passed over it. Only it wasn’t a shadow. He found himself in a space between a shadow and the speakeasy. Then a shadow and sunshine brightness. The sunshine brightness shining down on his apartment’s driveway.
39
The teen had gone. An elderly couple were coming out of the apartment’s front door. Connie heard their footsteps. Their conversation. He spun around and held his hands as if the tommy gun was still in his grasp. In his mind, still back in the speakeasy while his vision told him it was the sunshine brightness of the morning that Evie had jumped to her death.
The couple waved to him, but he didn’t wave back.
The shadow had accomplished one small victory. It had left an impression of itself on Connie’s mood. As quickly as this reality had returned to him, so did a sense of depression take hold. Evie had died because of him. As had the two men he had killed. No matter that if he hadn’t killed the gunmen, he’d likely be dead now. He had killed someone. Two someones. Yet rather than feel empowered by having defended himself ─ as he had felt in the desert ─ he felt this hopelessness.
He looked down at the cast on his arm. He had chosen a short sleeve shirt in homage to Evie’s criticism, so the cast was completely visible. So was the crack running from one end to the other.
✽ ✽ ✽
“And you say she slept with you last night.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t notice anything about her. About the way she acted that would have suggested she was going to kill herself.”
“No.”
Connie couldn’t let go of Evie’s death. He had to do something about it. So instead of once more dealing with his damn cast, he had the cabbie take him to the nearest police station. There was always the possibility that when asked to identify the body, it wasn’t Evie. That she had dropped her necklace after coming back from her run. He had kept that hope alive by purposely not scanning the parking lot for her car.
But she hadn’t dropped her necklace. She hadn’t been jogging. And there was no mistaking her remains. Despite their gruesome appearance. After confirming who she was, the officer who had taken him to the morgue took him back to the police station. If he was curious why he hadn’t shown any emotion when he saw the body, was what the officer thought.
“Do you have any idea why she should want to kill herself?”
So ─ Here he was at the point he had imagined he had wanted to be. Of course, he knew why she had jumped to her death. Some unknown force was stealing human bodies. And the ones who resisted did so by killing themselves. Like Evie. Like Mai Lin. Like the woman on the bridge. He had felt the same but somehow had managed to resist this force. Only ─
“Mr. Brinkley?”
There were two male officers and the woman who had taken him to the morgue in the room the station used for interviews. They weren’t in uniform but they all had the bearings of military personnel.
“No.” His thoughts had stopped at only. What was the use of being candid? All it would get him would be a trip to the mental ward. That’s what he sensed in their attitudes. And what did it matter, anyway? It was easier to sink into depression.
The door to the room opened and an uniformed officer leaned in. “Sir?” he addressed the man who had been questioning Connie. The man left the room with the officer after a significant glance at his partners.
There was a table and two chairs in the room. One on either side of the table. As well as windowless blank walls. None of them had bothered to sit. Connie, in the mood he was in, never considered taking a seat. And the officers wouldn’t conduct an interview below the eye level of someone being questioned. However, because of the leaving officer’s significant glance, the remaining policeman sat on the edge of the table. The woman hardened her look at Connie.
“And you say you two worked together.” The male officer smiled at Connie. A crooked smile.
“What?” Connie had been lost in the images of the gunmen he had shot just before he had pulled the trigger of the tommy gun. At two sets of angry eyes. He had had the same images in his head on the taxi ride to the police station. And then again going to the morgue. That was probably why he had shown no emotion when he saw Evie’s body. By then all the emotion had been drained out of him.
“You two worked for the same company.”
“What? Yes.”
“It must have been tough,” the officer continued, “to have relations with someone you work with. Seeing someone day and night. That could get on your nerves. Right? I mean, my wife kicks me out of house on days I’m off if I’m around all day. Did she get on your nerves sometime? At work or when you were alone together?”
“No.”
“Fight a lot, did you?” the woman officer asked.
“No.” Connie shrugged. They had broken up. He guessed that was a fight although no harsh words were spoken.
“Oh, I know it happens. Even to the best of couples. Doesn’t it, Diane?”
The woman nodded. “What did you two fight about?”
“What?”
The two officers looked at each other.
“Did you have a fight last night?” the woman asked.
Their tone finally hit home. This was an interrogation not an interview. That was what Connie had been afraid of if he tried telling someone in authority his fears. And now it seemed, he didn’t even have to say anything to be thought of as suspicious.
The officer who had left returned. “Sit down,” he told Connie. He handed the folder he had brought with him to the female officer. She looked inside at the sheets of printouts. Then handed the folder to the other officer.
Connie sat.
“So, Mr. Brinkley.” The officer who had returned glowered at Connie. “This is not the first time you’ve been around someone who has committed suicide.”
Connie thought about what he said. Maybe he had been wrong and they weren’t suspicious of him. Maybe someone else had come to the same conclusions as he had. “No. There was Mai Lin.”
The officer took back the folder and glanced at one of the sheets inside. “Who’s Mai Lin?”
“She used to work on my team.”
“You team?”
“Yes. I work for IntelLogic.”
“What about her?”
“She killed herself, too.”
“Did she? She killed herself, too?” Connie misinterpreted the significant looks the officers exchanged. Maybe they were interested in all the unexplained suicides. Maybe even the disappearances, as well.
“So ─ How did you know …” The officer glanced at the one of the printouts. “… Tracy Warner.”
He didn’t know any Tracy Warner. “Who?”
“Tracy Warner. Was she a girl friend of yours, too?”
“Sorry.”
“When did you meet her?” the female officer asked.
Now confusion vied with the beginnings of hope that at last he could lay this nightmare at the feet of someone else. “I never met her. I don’t know any Tracy …”
“Warner.”
Connie shrugged.
“Then why were you with her when she died?” the officer with the folder asked. “When she lea
ped to her death.”
Like any truly innocent man, Connie didn’t realize where this interrogation was going.
“With her? What do you mean?” He glanced at each of the officers. At what he thought was their concerned faces. “Oh, you mean the woman on the bridge.” This was going well, he thought. Someone was finally putting two and two together. “So that was her name.”
“So that was her name, is it?” The officer holding the folder glared at him. “Where’d you meet her?”
“Meet her?”
“How long had you known her?”
“You had a fight with her, too. Didn’t you?”
“Was she another girl friend of yours?”
“You seem to have a lot of girl friends who commit suicide.”
“Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? All your girlfriends kill themselves.”
“What kind of a sick bastard are you?”
The questioning went on for another twenty minutes. At first, Connie tried to interrupt. To explain. But when his senses went on alert, he just listened to their hectoring. He knew what they were after. The easy explanation that he was responsible.
✽ ✽ ✽
They left him alone in the room for several hours. It was sound proof. Quiet except for the fluorescent lights’ hum. Let the guy sweat was the idea. And ordinarily, Connie might have sweated out the wait, fearing that they were going to charge him with murder. But he had a sweat of his own. Despair and hopelessness. The world was being attacked by some unknown force and there was nothing he could do about it. The world was doomed. He was doomed.
He sunk into this stupor of depression as soon as the officers had left him. Time had little meaning for him. A minute. An hour. Time passed slowly just as it sped by. He was so numbed by how he felt that he was barely aware of another invasion. A whisper that commanded him to confess and be done with it. He shrugged off the sensation as if it were an annoying insect. Unaware of how resistant he had become against the forces of this thing. Even unaware of the trickle of its fear ebbing away from his consciousness in defeat. He was only aware of how bleak he felt.
40
For the rest of the week, his hopeless mood persisted. Became bleaker. He had gone to work after leaving the police station. That was Tuesday. Not wanting to but obliged to tell everyone about Evie. He listened to their reactions. Hopeless ─ that’s how he felt. He had left the case with Little Connie in the taxi on the ride to the police station. Hopeless. On Wednesday He had tried to talk to Marlene about what really was happening. Hopeless. For the rest of that week, he had come into work very early and stayed late after everyone had left ─ locked away either in his office or in the lab. Hopeless. He had tried to avoid being alone with Vicky, yet couldn’t avoid her worried, frightened frown. Hopeless. His nightmares became more vivid. The dream girl more anxious. More insistent. Throughout the dreams that dark shadow flittered in and out in hopes of overpowering him and his dream. He was hopeless. The dreams were hopeless. The thing was hopeless. Everyone and everything ─ they were all hopeless.
✽ ✽ ✽
His car was ready on Friday if he didn’t mind bringing it in a week for the paint job. He didn’t mind. On Friday morning, he drove across the bridge in the middle of rush hour. The car offered some chard of comfort. A sort of remembrance of normal. It wasn’t until the ride became stop and go that he began to tense up about the drive. What if someone else was about to jump off the bridge? That thought badgered him until he got to the other side. By then, his memory of what had happened ─ what Evie looked like in the morgue ─ had become so vivid, he had to pull over until he could catch his breath. Until he stopped shaking. Then he was able to rouse his senses long enough to maneuver the city streets to the company parking lot. But that was all he was able to maneuver. That day may have been bright and warm. By the end of the week at work, the turmoil over Hal and Suzuki’s disappearances may have calmed down. The anxiety his team members and the others in the company had about losing their jobs may have been pushed aside by TGIF. Vicky’s avoidance of him may have turned to sympathetic smiles whenever she saw him. But the gloom he was in only deepened. Everything had become hopeless!
✽ ✽ ✽
There was no way he was ever going to set foot again into Eddie’s bar. But Marlene had spent most of Friday hounding him to come and join everyone after work. It didn’t matter to her that he mostly ignored her suggestion. Oh, she knew why he was depressed. Everyone knew. They would have been depressed, too, if their significant other had committed suicide. But it had been a mean thing to do ─ that’s what everyone had concluded ─ for Evie to go back to him only to kill herself.
“I’m going down now.” Marlene stuck her head into the lab at six. Connie had spent most of the day there. Actually working when he wasn’t being interrupted by Marlene’s pleas. The case he had left in the taxi had the company’s address on it so it was delivered the next day. It wasn’t so much that by Friday he was less hopeless. But after a few days of trying to stare away how he felt, he had become restless. Hopeless or not, he had to do something practical to ease his torment.
“I’ll save a seat for you. Vicky says she’s going to brave karaoke tonight … Connie, are you all right?” she added when he didn’t say thing.
He looked up from the notes he was making.
“You know, Connie. You need to be around people. It’s not going to help to hide yourself away like this. Cooped up in your own misery.”
The look he gave her expressed a misery he knew she wouldn’t understand.
“Okay. Well, if you change your mind.” She started to close the door. “And if you need to talk, …” She left the sentence unfinished with a wan smile, closing the door after his response. A matching smile.
The smile turned to a frown after she had left. He knew she was right but besides the fact that he couldn’t go back into that place, what was the use of being around people who were trying to make him feel better about himself? And anyway, he didn’t want to be surrounded by sympathetic faces. Hopelessness left no room for sympathy.
It also left no room for conjecture. He had stopped trying to figure out the whats and whys of these last few days and weeks. Stopped looking for the dream girl. So perhaps this thing had won after all. His hopelessness had neutralized him.
After Marlene had left, he had given up playing around with coding. By seven his body had cramped up from sitting and staring at nothing. He eased himself off his stool, closed his notebook and turned off the probes connected to Little Connie’s DNA samples. At the door he turned around and looked at the lab. At the three rows of counters. At the computers and electronics. At the soon setting sun out the bank of windows. At the clock on the wall. (He still hadn’t gotten either a watch or a new cell phone.) Took everything in as if this was the last time he’d see any of this.
It had been warm and sunny. He hadn’t taken a coat so there was no need to stop by his office. He walked by its glass wall without a glance. If he had looked in, he would have seen Vicky sitting in his chair behind the desk. The only chair in the room.
She saw him, though. “Connie,” she called out as she came out of his office door.
He stopped at the sound of her voice. He didn’t want to see her or anyone. The elevators were only a few feet away. That’s where he wanted to be. In one of them. Alone.
“Connie, wait.” She caught up to him. “I know you must be mad at me. You told me what you thought was happening and all I did was push you away.”
He pressed the down button. Took a quick glance at her and then stared at the elevator closed door.
“I’m frightened. Ever since …” She meant ever since she heard what happened to Evie. “I haven’t been able to sleep. I freak at every sound. I wonder if I’m going to be next. I worry about you, too. We got to tell somebody about what’s happening. You got to tell somebody. This is all such a nightmare …” They both stared at the elevator door. “Connie, I’m really sorry for the way I treated
you.”
The elevator came. He got in. She followed. Hopeless was what he thought. Nightmare. Daymare. What difference did it make?
The elevator seemed to take forever to reach the ground floor. A few times, their eyes met. If he had had any sentiment left, he would have turned to her and said something reassuring. But hopeless also left little room for sentiment. However, when the door finally opened, he did look hard at her as if he was about to speak. There was something odd about her. That’s what stopped him, along with his hopeless feelings.
He remained in the elevator until the door closed. As she did. He looked at her again. At her anxious face. He frowned. That was it. She was wearing makeup. She never wore makeup. Not even lipstick. None that he had ever seen. But she was wearing makeup now. For his benefit?
She touched his injured arm. “Your cast. It’s cracked again.”
He glanced down at the cast. He hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about the cast. Decided on Tuesday that it didn’t really matter. The same decision he came to now. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“But don’t you think you should? Maybe it won’t heal right.”
He pressed the door-open button. “Doesn’t matter.” Hopeless didn’t worry about such things. Hopeless was personal injury all on its own.
The door opened and he and Vicky got out. Outside, the beginnings of a sunset feast of colors were adding their hues to the pavement and office building across the street. Some of the glow came through the entrance revolving doors. A quick glance at the reception counter told him the night man was on duty. A different man from last night. Tony hadn’t shown up for work on Monday, and since then, there had been a series of day and night guardians of the elevators.