Remote Control

by Stephen White

  “What about your family, Kevin? Don’t you have to head home, like, ever?”

  “They’re used to my sudden road trips. Part of the territory, Emma. What’s your schedule today?”

  She told him.

  “You have a beeper, or a cell phone?”

  “I have a portable phone.”

  “Number?”

  She told him.

  “I’ll be in touch. I’m planning on finding that damn box and destroying it. That’s my job. Your job is to be much more careful about whom you sleep with.”

  I am careful, she thought, stung by his rebuke. She managed to say, “Thanks for your help, Kevin. Bye.”

  Alan called next.

  “Lauren told me the latest, Emma. How are you?” he asked.

  Slightly exasperated, she said, “I’m getting tired of telling people I’m okay.”

  “That’s fair. But we’re concerned about you. I have phone numbers of a couple of therapists who told me they could see you later today.”

  He was listening for evidence that Emma’s despair had deepened. Instead he heard an energetic, “Great, give me the numbers.” He did. She said, “I have to run. I’m late for class. I’ll give one of these people a call when I have a minute.”

  She hadn’t asked for details about either of the referrals. What are they like? Which one did he recommend? She hadn’t voiced any second thoughts about seeing someone.

  “You promise you’re okay?”

  “Alan, don’t be so worried, I’m not about to blow my brains out.”

  He grew concerned all over again. Now he knew one of her methods.

  Emma Spire’s contracts professor thought Judge Lance Ito’s policy of confiscating beepers and cell phones that erupted during court sessions was an absolute hoot. The law professor loved the idea so much that he instituted the same policy during his lectures. So far this semester he had bagged six beepers and two cell phones for his collection of booty. During lectures, he displayed his catch in a big zippered plastic bag on his podium. At the end of the semester he was thinking of having an artist do something creative with them—maybe something resembling a gavel, he thought—and having the thing mounted on the wall of his office.

  Like big game.

  As a precaution against confiscation, as she always did, Emma Spire turned off the power to her cell phone before she went into class.

  As she often did, Emma failed to turn the power back on after class ended.

  She missed Kevin Quirk’s first call.

  Kevin Quirk tried her cell phone a second time with the same result before he left a message on her answering machine at home. For good measure, he also phoned the DA’s office. She wasn’t in and his call was forwarded to a voice mailbox. He left his message there, too.

  He was discreet. “Hi, it’s me. I think I may have a line on it. I’ll be in touch.”

  When Emma walked out of her late-morning class, the air was warm and no breeze disturbed the few leaves that remained on the trees on campus. An arctic cold front was barreling down from Canada, but was still four or five hours away from its inevitable collision with a huge mass of heavy, moist air that was lazily migrating north from the Gulf of Mexico. Like a cunning co-conspirator, an area of extreme low pressure was inching into position over the Four Corners and generating a healthy counterclockwise spin that would soon twist the two approaching weather systems together in a powerful flow against the eastern face of the Continental Divide.

  The weather people called this configuration a classic upslope. By evening, the locals would call it a damn blizzard.

  Emma was oblivious to the approaching storm.

  She was wearing black jeans over modest black leotards. A Colorado Avalanche cap shadowed her face and her rich auburn hair was tied back in a neat French braid. Sunglasses hid her eyes. Dressed like this on campus, she knew, she would not be casually recognized. Unless the paparazzi had received marching orders from the tabloids that it was time for another Emma sighting, she was unlikely to draw any attention.

  During that morning contracts lecture, all of her concerns about the missing optical disc had crystallized into hopelessness. She had come to the conclusion that whoever had stolen the optical drive took it because they already knew what was on it. And, she had decided, they took it because they were smart enough to recognize the value of what was recorded on it, and smart enough to have the data copied. Maybe once, more likely a dozen or a thousand times.

  Despite Lauren’s plea that a solution was possible, Emma felt that she had little left to lose.

  Alan Gregory’s day began to deteriorate shortly after three o’clock. He was with a patient when Lauren called and left a message that Emma hadn’t shown up for the evidence hearing she had been so eager to attend. She wasn’t answering her phone at home. Had he heard from her?

  No, he hadn’t. He wondered if either of the therapists he had referred Emma to had received a call from her.

  An hour of phone tag answered that question. She hadn’t phoned either therapist for an appointment.

  At four-fifteen, Alan stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets and strode out to the waiting room to greet his next patient, Kendal Green, a fragile woman who was not only battling self-doubt but also enduring a vicious custody fight for her two young children.

  The waiting room was furnished with a sofa and six chairs. An old pine table in front of the couch was covered with magazines. Kendal usually chose a seat facing the doors, one that permitted her to sit with her back to the farthest corner of the room. Alan looked for her there. But it was Emma Spire, not Kendal Green, sitting in that chair. Emma was fingering the spine of an unopened magazine that rested on her lap. Her gaze was fixed on the room’s sole window.

  Kendal sat anxiously on the sofa, her back as straight as a marine’s, her Gucci-emblazoned purse in her lap.

  Alan didn’t know what to do. This appointment time was Kendal’s. But Emma’s surprise appearance raised many red flags and he guessed that of the two women in his waiting room, she was in greater immediate jeopardy.

  Alan walked over to Kendal, leaned over, and said, “I have an emergency I need to deal with, so you and I will be a few minutes late getting started. Is that okay? I need to see this young woman briefly.”

  Kendal looked at Emma as though she had just noticed that there was someone else in the room. Awareness flickered in her eyes.

  “We’re…not going to meet?”

  “No, no, no. We’ll talk. It will start a little late, that’s all. This happens occasionally, something unexpected.”

  “I have that meeting tomorrow, with the custody people. You know that.” Her tone was a mixture of admonishment and panic.

  “I know. I apologize for the delay in starting. I really do.”

  Kendal finally realized who the younger woman was. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “But I’ll see you for the regular amount of time?”

  Alan felt the gravitational force of Kendal’s insecurity. Was her therapist, like her husband, going to discard her for a younger, more attractive woman?

  “I hope so, but honestly, I don’t know. Let me explore this other situation a bit and then we will talk about our meeting, okay?”

  Kendal looked crushed.

  Alan crossed the room and said softly, “Emma, would you like to come back to my office?”

  She rose slowly, her eyes never meeting his gaze. To him, her movements seemed to require inordinate effort.

  Once inside his office, she settled into a chair far from Alan and folded her legs beneath her.

  He waited.

  She stared outside. A harsh wind had begun blowing in advance of the cold front and the wind was bending the trees and whistling debris past the windows. The temperature had dropped thirty degrees in an hour.

  She finally said, “Hi.” She didn’t look at him.

  He tried to decide what to do.

  Despair should be dark and brooding, with heavy eyes and oily hair, ratty clo
thing and fetid breath. But occasionally, Alan knew, despair was a chameleon, looking fresh and merely forlorn, as Emma did that day, in her jeans and leotards. After following her gaze outside and witnessing the ferocity of the invading front, he hoped she had a jacket in her car. Just as quickly, he realized that heavy clothing was the least of the protection Emma needed that day.

  Relieved that she had found a way to start this conversation, Alan responded to her opening. “Hello, Emma. I’m glad you came. How can I help?”

  He knew that at some time during this impromptu visit he would have to remind Emma that he was not ethically in a position to provide her with psychotherapy. He also knew that particular news could wait a few minutes while he assessed her mental status. He didn’t expect to like what he discovered during the assessment and was already anticipating the possibility that he would be asking her to consider allowing a colleague of his to hospitalize her.

  “I doubt you can,” Emma said in a scratchy voice. The only distinct sound in the room was the sound of a clock ticking. Outside, the wind whined and squealed, syncopated by the tinny sound of autumn debris impacting the glass windows. Both Alan and Emma were breathing silently.

  “But you came to see me?” he said. Water the hope. Weed the despair. Whatever else they ended up talking about, Alan figured that this conversation was about suicide. That’s what he was listening for.

  Emma cleared her throat. The scratchiness didn’t entirely disappear. “I didn’t want to go home. Didn’t want to go to work. Couldn’t pick up the phone and call my mom or my dad. I came here.”

  The desperation of the choices she perceived saddened Alan. Emma was looking for sanctuary from the most severe of storms and had ended choosing to sit in the office of a man she barely knew.

  Bad choices, likely misperceived as no choices, hovered on Emma’s horizon.

  Alan had long considered that most of the time, day in and day out, psychotherapy was much like flying an airplane. Serious work, requiring serious attention, but mostly routine. To the passengers, the pilot’s skills seemed magical. To the patient, the therapist’s skills otherwordly. But to the professional, the daily tasks were mundane. Occasionally, though, a crisis was so acute, a problem so severe, that it required all Alan’s skills to begin to understand it and to muddle through it.

  This day, he figured that the airplane that Emma Spire was on had lost a wing.

  Midafternoon, after court, Lauren had walked briskly back to her office. The temperature had started to plummet and she was caught without her coat. She settled in at her desk, read a memo that the chief trial deputy had placed on her blotter, and punched buttons on her speakerphone to retrieve her voice-mail messages. Since, as an intern, Emma didn’t have her own extension, her infrequent messages were routinely forwarded to her supervisor’s mailbox—Lauren’s.

  The person who had left the message hadn’t identified himself, but Lauren thought she recognized the flat, accentless voice of Kevin Quirk, who left word that he thought he had a lead on the missing disc.

  “Great,” Lauren thought, as she pressed a button to save that message for Emma.

  The next message was much more disquieting. A soft voice Lauren couldn’t identify at first said, “The guy who has it says he’s been thinking of a deal. He says I can have it back if I’ll trade it for the real thing. Can you believe it?”

  Lauren’s mind translated the offer: If you sing me a personal song, I’ll give you back the tape of your concert.

  She replayed the message, stunned. Who was that? Was that Emma? It was.

  Lauren realized that the subtext of the message was that someone was offering to return the disc to Emma, if Emma would agree to have sex with him. Once. Lauren pondered the dilemma and wondered what she would do.

  What was worse, being forced to have sex against one’s will once?

  Or having the rape occur a thousand times, or a million, and never even knowing?

  Emma was trying to explain the same conundrum to Alan.

  She had found the message in an envelope placed under her windshield wiper. The offer, at first, had stunned her. Then angered her. She found herself vacillating, actually considering that a quick fuck, a blackmailed rape, might be the best solution. A way to make this all go away.

  “So I can go and screw this guy, whoever he is, and he’ll give me back the disc. In effect, I can trade being raped once for a promise of freedom from being raped every day by strangers. Or I can tell him no and suffer the consequences of the existence of the disc becoming public.”

  Alan could tell that Emma wasn’t asking for advice. They both knew that there was no safe passageway through this minefield. Alan couldn’t show Emma where it might be safe to step.

  “Let’s say you give him what he wants. You go ahead and…have sex…with him.” Alan hesitated, then completed his thought after failing to find language that conveyed the oxymoron “agree to be raped by him.”

  “Yes?”

  “What would force him to actually turn over the disc, Emma? Assuming he even has it.”

  She half laughed. “I can’t exactly count on his honor, can I?”

  Alan responded seriously, to be certain she understood. “No, Emma, you can’t.”

  In a voice so low he had to strain to hear, she said, “He’s already probably made copies. It’d be easy, if you knew what you were doing.”

  “Yes. Probably.”

  A lazy flurry of big flakes began to float diagonally across the yard like advance scouts checking the terrain, in no hurry to reach the ground. The low ceiling above was a mosaic of airy grays, a palette almost sufficient to paint the scope of Emma’s despair.

  For a full minute she was silent, then in a voice that felt as intimate as a diary entry she said, “I’ve never understood being anointed the way I’ve been. Why my life has felt important enough to become part of other people’s lives—I don’t think I’ll ever know that. I’ve felt at times as though my very being—my identity—has become some wonderful new spice, something that people can take off the shelf and sprinkle on their own lives to enhance them.

  “I’ve become a flavor enhancer. That’s it. That’s all I am.”

  Alan considered responding, didn’t.

  “Those first few days after Daddy died were a blur. I didn’t realize, at first, that I’d been embraced by the media as some new thing. I was just so scared of what would happen to me, and I was so lonely, and so determined to live in a way that would have made my parents proud. When I started to come out of it—out of the haze—after the funeral, the next week, I realized that I’d become this thing, this media thing. It felt as though this girl on the news was really someone else, someone smarter, prettier, more charming than me. The president’s people encouraged me to be available. They said it would honor my father, allow people to know him, through me, you know.

  “So I did. I talked to Barbara Walters. I talked to Larry King. I did it all. I got to meet movie stars. But that wasn’t good enough for me, so I even got engaged to one. What a mistake. I should have just disappeared.

  “Why? I keep wondering why? What did I do to deserve this? I told a crazy man not to murder my father. That’s it. Then I got engaged to an actor. I’m not a brave person. I’m a wimp. Every day there are heroes greater than me. Read the papers. Watch the news. And there are a million women prettier than me—it can’t be that. It can’t be.

  “So why won’t they let me go? Whatever it was about me that they liked, that I liked, is dying inside me. Can’t they see that? They’re killing me. With each bite they take, they kill me. With each flash of the camera, they devour a piece of me. Slowly, but surely, whatever it’s been inside me that they thought was so special, it’s dying. Why does someone want to have my body on disc? God, how naked can they have me?”

  Alan recalled that he, too, had thought nothing of keeping track of Emma’s life before he met her. He never wondered if he had the right to watch. He never wondered if Emma Spire wanted to
be watched.

  He examined Emma, spirit frayed, eyes dark, before him.

  His job was clear. All he had to do was give her a reason not to die today.

  He asked the obvious. “Are you thinking of hurting yourself, Emma?”

  She didn’t look at him. She said, “Thinking?” She paused. “Of course. That’s nothing new.”

  “Have you made any plans?”

  Emma didn’t respond. She seemed mesmerized by the snow outside, now falling in earnest.

  He pressed. “Do you have any methods in mind that you’ve considered using to kill yourself?”

  She knew exactly what he was asking. “I have a gun. It was my grandfather’s. I have some drugs. I don’t know if they’ll work. I’ve thought about carbon monoxide, you know, with my car in the garage, the motor running. That should do it, but I’m afraid it’s too slow, that I’d chicken out.”

  “Could you use the gun?” Alan knew that, statistically, women were reluctant to use firearms for suicide. The statistics didn’t predict anything about Emma, however.

  “I’m not sure. I wonder.”

  “What drugs do you have?”

  “Some codeine. Some Atenolol.”

  Alan knew the carbon monoxide could be fatal. The codeine was dangerous, potentially lethal, especially if Emma mixed it with alcohol. He didn’t know anything about the lethality of Atenolol. He thought it was a beta-blocker and wondered what she was doing with it.

  “Do you have the drugs with you?”

  “No, they’re at home.”

  “Do you have the gun with you?”

  She exhaled. “No.”

  He realized that he didn’t believe her. That she might have the gun in her little leather backpack right then, right there, worried him. That she seemed willing to lie to him about it terrified him

  “I’m worried about you, Emma.”

  “Me, too,” she said.

  He knew he was going to have to cancel the appointment with Kendal Green to handle this situation with Emma. “If I leave you waiting for a few minutes, you won’t hurt yourself, will you?”