by Brett Adams
I had swung down the line from one partner to the next, and finally fallen off the procession with this diagnosis: idiopathic orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.
Idiopathic from the Greek, idios, meaning “one’s own” and pathos, meaning “suffering”. That is, your own unique brand of pain.
Sorry, Mr Griffen, but we don’t know why your heart sometimes stops beating when it stays too long above 160 beats per minute. Best to live calm, eh?
To my mind, that idiopathic resembles idiot is no accident.
Idiopathic attached to any diagnosis is its doom. It means the sample space for your disease is one. You’re it. And medical science doesn’t do ones. Clinical studies, and the drug companies that fund them, most definitely don’t do ones, unless the one is followed by billion.
So the diagnosis is your polite instruction to leave the party. No more dancing for you. A part of your biology, or psychology, or pathology, or some other -ology, is irreparably, mystifyingly, screwed. Get over it, and get on with whatever life it leaves you. And be aware that unpaid bills will be handed over to our debt collection agency. Have a nice day.
I never sank so low as to get an aura-photo, but what’s the bet even that would have come back green with purple polka dots?
I pressed the cards together, re-clipped them, held them over the bin, and hesitated.
That pack of cards had become part of me. Every one a joker, really. I knew it was a sick kind of nostalgia to hold on to them.
But I put the pack in another pocket.
With a final look at my empty and forlorn briefcase, I exited the restroom.
Striding again toward the queue I felt naked.
When I stepped beneath the detector it shrieked at me. I ignored the attendant’s instruction to try again, and instead walked over to her pointing at where I imagined my failed pacemaker lay.
Knowing my body was going to fail every metal detection test was strangely soothing. I felt no tension waiting to see if it would go off. It always did.
She called over a male officer, who frisked me, and gave me the okay.
At immigration, I lied like a pro, and the officer stamped my passport with a smile and told me to have a nice flight.
As I joined the flow of travellers heading for the departure gates, it occurred to me why it had been so easy: barring the odds and ends in my pockets, and the chunk of silicon near my heart, almost nothing remained of Jack Griffen. I had even left my name behind.
15
Thirty-thousand feet in the night sky above the sands of the ancient Persian Empire, modern day Iraq, I had finally found calm.
A calm that was broken minutes later, at 12:39 AM Hong Kong time.
My heart had been beating at a leisurely 80 bpm. Seated in Cattle Class of the Emirates Airlines Airbus A380, my decisions were limited to whether I would have the satay chicken with rice or the beef and vegetables, and when precisely to empty my bladder of its beer ballast. Until the plane landed, I was in Fate’s iron grip.
After the cabin lights dimmed, I switched on my personal light and pulled out my fifteen-year pen and a notebook I had bought at the airport. I had doodled in its margins and begun turning over in my mind the plot of my novel.
The small video screen embedded in the chair in front of me was a distracting glare, and it was while navigating its menus to kill the screen that I discovered I could access the internet.
With a moment’s hesitation I called up my email.
My inbox was full of stale letters, but for three new messages, marked in bold. Two were spam. The third was from Matthew Price, the university systems administrator.
I opened it and read the following message:
Jack,
I looked into your login problem. Not sure what’s going on there, but—get this—your account was hacked a couple of weeks back. I don’t know what the hacker got, but I traced the attack origin to a cloud server on the west coast of the US.
I hope you don’t mind, but I returned fire and hacked the server. Turns out its currently registered to a H. Beck. Does that name meaning anything to you? I poked through the server’s file system and found the only active branch of the tree besides security patches (hah!) is a Wordpress blog. I’ll paste the address below. It’s private, but I dug the admin password out: ConRadsh3art. Doesn’t make any sense to me, but maybe you’ll have more luck.
Sorry to disturb you. The attacker is probably just some script-kiddy who got hold of a hacking library, but better to be safe . . .
Cheers, Matt.
My heart was no longer beating at 80 bpm.
I quit the email and entered the blog address Matt had sent me into a web browser. After an agonizingly slow load time, a title blazed on the screen, bright in the dim cabin: Blood and Ink, by Hieronymus Beck.
My hand went to Hiero’s novel notes stowed in my back pocket. I wriggled in the seat until I could extract them. I placed the folded-up wad on the tray table, unfolded it, and smoothed the paper flat.
The topmost sheet described the (attempted) murder of Rhianne Goldman. The title of the page was Case Notes #1 for Blood and Ink, by Hieronymus Beck.
My eyes flicked back to the screen. The title of the first blog post was: Chapter 1: A Dark And Hungry God Arises. Below it, a few short paragraphs. Reading them, the hairs on my neck stood up.
My thigh muscles clench and unclench. Much longer and they will begin to cramp. The smell of crushed sedge rises from beneath my feet, as my ears strain for her footfall. It’s nearly 7:36 PM, and she keeps time like the Japanese Metro. Not much longer now.
I hear the rap-rap of runners on asphalt. A quick glance confirms, even in the darkness, the telltale pink light of her Bluetooth headphones bobbing along the path. In my right hand, the heavy wooden handle of the kyokestu-shoge; in my left, the coarse braid of its cord, two feet of length. My entire body clenches, ready to spring. Three . . . two . . . one . . .
I burst from the bushes as she passes—and the shoge’s ring snags on a branch, whips me around. We collide and go down in a tangle of limbs. She writhes under me, and I start giggling, because we must look like kids having a fight. She bows her back to throw me, lifting her head clear of the ground, and I loop the cord around her neck. It pulls taut on her skin and I cross fists to tighten the choke—when she crunches her knee into my groin.
The stars fall from the sky. I barely notice the shoge’s handle clock my forehead as she springs up, with it still wrapped around her neck. I hear her sprint—RAP-Rap-Rap-rap-rap—much faster now and fading.
But, god, I don’t care. My entire body is a crushed nerve. And still I can hear myself giggling.
I glanced back at the creased paper on the table, picked out the word kyokestu-shoge. I couldn’t believe it. Hiero had blogged his failed attempt to murder Rhianne Goldman.
With clumsy fingers I peeled the top sheet away, and slipped it beneath the stack. The sheet revealed was titled, Case Notes #2. I knew every word on the page without reading it.
My gaze flicked back to the slow-motion-car-crash of Hiero’s blog. I scrolled down, whipping past blocks of text, more blog entries, until I found the date I wanted, yesterday’s. Below its title, “Chapter 8”, was another handful of paragraphs.
Deed done. The heroin flooding Li Min’s system has shut down her heart.
Some girls look good with short hair. Li Min looks good dead.
I don’t mean to be cruel. It’s true. A quiet has settled over her fragile body, now that her anxious spirit has set sail on eternal waters. Her skin is smooth to the touch and already cooling. With a finger, I travel over it, across her flanks, which are covered in almost microscopic down—find a small birthmark on her inner thigh I hadn’t noticed before. Got to slow down, lover boy.
An idea occurs to me. I grasp her wrists and lift her arms, which have come to rest at awkward angles. I move them above her head, and bow them into a heart shape.
Ah, true love.
Then I’m laughing. What a pri
ck.
I tweak her nose, and begin the mop up.
Condom. My underwear—third wear, turn them inside out. (Shit, I wouldn’t be surprised if the washing machine spits these guys out.) Her underwear, just to be safe. Wipe off the lamp switch, drawer handles and top, door handle. In the living room, let’s see. Rack back through the ol’ memory. Did I touch the kitchen taps? Rinse some dishes? Doesn’t sound like me. Do ‘em anyway. Wine glass, the one without the lipstick. Glossy magazine. Pretending to be interested in Wood Turning—those were hard yards, but worth it. Light switch and done. Need to hurry now. The MC is coming.
“Night, honey,” I say into the quiet apartment, and exit stage left.
I finished reading the entry and lay back in my seat. My skin prickled with heat all over my body, and my temples were throbbing. I flicked my wrist to see the Medline’s display—in the orange, okay.
I blinked and read the blog post again. Still couldn’t believe it. Not only had Hiero recorded how he tried to murder Rhianne Goldman, he had recorded how he actually murdered Li Min and put it on the internet. Sure, the blog was private. But it would only take the click of a button to publish it to the world.
And again there was that reference to MC, just like the one I had found in Li Min’s journal. She had written it in anticipation of Hiero’s arrival. But she had written MC Griffen.
What did it mean? It made no sense.
Hiero’s text blazed at me from the screen. I shut my eyes, but behind my lids there was an even brighter blaze—the memory of Li Min’s lifeless body, which shock had seared onto my brain. I tried to push it away, but it didn’t budge. I had to open my eyes.
My thoughts swam for minutes until I gathered the strength to close Hiero’s blog. I switched back to my email and wrote a message to Kim.
Kim — still in the shit.
You have to see this, and then, please, forward it to the Murdoch police, with the subject, Re: Jack Griffen and Rhianne Goldman.
Go to the URL I’ll paste below. It’s a blog of the little psycho recording what he is doing. It’s there in black and white, an account of how he murdered a girl in a Hong Kong apartment.
The blog is private, but you can enter it with user ‘admin’ and password ‘ConRadsh3art’.
Now do you think I have attention deficit?
Message sent, I switched off the screen and put away Hiero’s notes and my notebook. The urge to write had evaporated. I pressed the call button, and when a hostess arrived I asked for the stiffest drink they stocked, wondering at what point they would refuse to serve alcohol.
Turns out to be the fifth drink.
16
Dear Professor Griffen
My name is Hieronymus Beck. I’m writing to petition you to accept me as a graduate student in your modern literature program for the first semester of the coming year.
Wait! Hear me out! I’m already accepted in the Linguistics grad program, and am all paid up (sorry, it’s cheaper than your class). I wouldn’t add any admin load, so I guess I’m just asking for the permission to sit at your feet.
Jokes aside, I’ve attached a resume. But you’re probably more interested in what makes me tick, right?
It was my father who taught me to love Story. Joy, according to him, is either a swift clean bowel movement, or a good book. Sometimes both at the same time.
My mother doesn’t care much for fiction. Can’t understand why anyone would waste time with reading made-up stuff. She says if less people escaped from real life, real life would be a heck of a lot better. She patches her clothes with wet blankets.
But me? Story is life.
I haven’t met you in the flesh, but I feel like I know you. I’ve read every one of your short stories I could get my hands on—Full Metal Jacket Potato is sheer genius!—and I suspect we’re kindred spirits.
Kind regards, and breathless with hope,
Hieronymus Beck.
17
My ears popped.
We were dropping through thick cloud toward Vienna.
The PA had announced that the entertainment services would shortly be switched off. I wasn’t sure if that included the internet in Economy, but I hastened to check my email just in case.
There was one new email.
It was from Kim. I opened it.
Jack, now I’m starting to worry, goddamn you.
If it were only ADD, I could live with that. Did you break your crown again, Jack? Get on the bottle?
I checked the URL you sent me. Yes, it exists, but no, the password you sent me doesn’t open it.
Look, I’m sorry. I just read what I wrote. I’m concerned. Where are you, anyway?
I had to suppress the urge to swear. I opened another browser tab and entered the address of Hiero’s blog. It asked me for the password, which I typed: ConRadsh3art.
And in response I got an Access Forbidden. I was locked out.
I switched back to my email and typed a message to IT Matt. He got the password once, he could get it again.
But before I could hit send, the browser died. The screen switched to a world map, showing a little plane icon closing in on Vienna. In-flight entertainment, including internet access, had been shut down.
No suppressing the swearing this time.
We had landed, and I was still stewing on the failed password when immigration loomed, and a new fear spiked my belly. I’d had eleven hours on the plane to concoct my story—make that, Trevor Williams’ story—and had done nothing. I was walking up cold to a guy in uniform trained to spot nervous liars.
I joined the end of the line, which was moving at a snail’s pace. When I reached its head, the officer greeted me in a thick Teutonic accent with, “Good morning, sir.”
I looked into his eyes and with a sinking feeling saw his was an X-ray gaze. Might as well throw my hands up and yell, ‘Sanctuary!’
“Mmm,” I managed, and deposited my passport onto the counter.
With a smile, he flicked it open.
My mind raced. Was it more suspicious to watch him or not, or a mix of both? Maybe that was precisely what they looked for. My scalp tingled with the sensation that means you’re going to sweat.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
Wasn’t that Sibelius good? Better with a drink. I could use a drink.
“You’ve had a haircut, sir,” he said, looking at his screen with a smile and tapping at his keyboard with deliberation.
Haircut! You idiot. Was that suspicious?
I just smiled and ran a hand over my scalp, not trusting myself to speak.
“And what is the purpose of your visit to Vien, Mr Williams?”
Purpose?
“Visiting friends,” I said.
“Without luggage?” he said, a slight crease forming over his brow, still not looking at me.
“Good friends,” I said with a breathy laugh.
“You like Mozart?” he said. “We have a little statue to Mozart.”
“I like Mozart.” Love Sibelius.
He tapped some more at the keyboard, gaze still inscrutable.
Then: “I hate Mozart.”
—Bang!
He stamped the passport. I nearly wet my pants.
“Have a good stay in our city, Mister Williams,” he said, and nodded to the next person in line.
Just like that I was through.
I had gone ten paces when another officer came alongside me and said, “Would you please step this way, Mr Williams.”
I discovered much later that what Mr Huh of Hong Kong’s Sing Ping pawnshop meant when he said ‘budget passport’ was that the man I was pretending to be had flags on his passport. He had been caught travelling with small amounts of marijuana that he claimed were medicinal, but which were obviously to be sold to make a little extra holiday money.
The result of this was a strip search.
They got two-thirds the way through before my Medline went into the red zone, and when I told them that if I didn�
�t calm down, they would soon be frisking my corpse, I guess they figured they had scared Mr Williams enough and didn’t want a lawsuit on their hands.
No mention was made of the name Jack Griffen inscribed on my fifteen-year pen. I guess they thought Mr Williams was a petty thief as well as small time drug trafficker.
I cleared customs with a curious sense of relief and the smell of latex on my skin.
18
The first thing I did on the other side of Viennese customs was to stop at one of the airport’s currency exchange counters and convert my Hong Kong dollars into Euros.
The next was to locate a free internet terminal.
In my search I passed huge rain-streaked windows through which the lights of Vienna glowed. With a shiver, I realized that out there, somewhere, Hiero was probably already prowling.
I emailed Matt for the password to get back into Hiero’s blog, and looked up directions to the address I had for Annika Kreider, Chalky. The address wasn’t near a subway station, so too far to walk. Speed was of the essence, and anyway, a rain squall had engulfed the city. The sight of it made me spend precious minutes and precious Euros on the cheapest overcoat and hat that Hugo Boss stocked. I shrugged the coat on as I stepped outside, but the cold still took my breath away. I hailed a cab, a brown Mercedes, and gave the driver the address.
The apartment was in a tenement row beyond the ring road, in the new city which looker older than the old. The kind of place where a man had kept his daughter locked in the basement for twenty-four years. I asked the driver to wait (was thinking more and more of accruing witnesses to my not murdering) ran up the short flight of steps and into a cool lobby. I found a buzzer for apartment 27 and pressed it.