by Julian Folk
“That’s Connor Yard,” he roars. “Out of the way or the nurse dies.”
Ayelet pushes Nikki. Move closer. Connor Jr.’s agitation ebbs.
The cloud formed by the troopers, with Officer Rice and the nurse at the center, migrates to the operating room. The chill of the hallway discomfits Ayelet. Nikki peeks around the corner.
“WAKE THIS BUM UP!” Officer Rice says.
A trooper signals the surgeon.
“The patient’s undergoing a procedure on his mouth,” the surgeon says. “He’s physically unable to speak.”
“Do his fuckin’ ears work?” Officer Rice asks.
Additional troopers flow in from two directions. Ayelet realizes Officer Rice likely shot innocent people on his hike to this floor. She sticks Connor Jr. in Nikki’s arms and peeks in to get her own perspective.
Officer Rice sees this movement in his periphery, looks, recognizes Ayelet, quakes with seismic hatred, and his hand slips. The old lion takes his eye off the ball. The barrel points at the woman’s cheek, not her brain.
The troopers note this small shift of angle.
Gunshots reverberate like cannon blasts.
Bullets rip and tear and slice the old lion’s head.
Dying, but still standing, Officer Rice pulls the trigger.
The nurse’s cheek blows.
Bullets ricochet.
Ayelet and Nikki retreat. The nurse screeches. She warbles the words, “I’m okay I’m okay.”
The surgeons jump on her, two of them struck by ricochets.
“Can you finish the reconstruction surgery?” the UCLA surgeon asks by video.
“Yes,” a surgeon says.
Troopers check IDs in the waiting room. Take statements. So many troopers occupy the floor, the unneeded ones fill waiting room seats.
Any one of these cops might belong to Jasper.
The Yard-Martin family is forever vulnerable to annihilation.
Chapter 40
Bayside, Queens
Nikki goes home.
Not to her apartment but her parents’ house.
Jasper instructed her to repair her thigh, ponder her future and prepare for congressional testimony.
“Take three months,” he said.
A courier delivers a package. The Official Story, final draft, hard copy. Accurate in fine detail. Despicable but accurate. The larger narrative, however, is laughable.
In Jasper’s rendering:
Tehran hires Vincent DeSantis to infiltrate CIA and Noland Bridgewater to infiltrate NSA. Tehran orders Vincent to sabotage America’s counterterrorism efforts and Noland to steal classified info. Emotional disturbance compromises Vincent’s sabotage. He exploits his office to attack his childhood bullying victim, Connor Yard. Vincent’s antics panic Tehran. Tehran orders Vincent and Noland to blow up the national security meeting in Honolulu and flee to Iran.
Noland complies. Vincent participates in the bombing but refuses to flee. He preserves his cover against orders. Until his mental health declines and the Massachusetts rampage ensues.
The FBI claims Vincent and Noland surreptitiously visited Tehran eighteen times, total. Passports under fake aliases prove it.
Horseshit.
The FBI claims Iran paid them four million dollars each. Treasury confirms those findings.
Double horseshit.
Iran denies everything. But they shelter Noland Bridgewater and deliberate whether to grant him asylum.
Nikki searches “Noland Bridgewater video” on her phone. She watches Noland speak the truth, the gory truth, nothing but the truth. His statement ends. Noland’s eyes wander his Tehran bunker. Fear of his hosts accumulates in his blood.
Nikki’s recovery hurts. Much more than the initial consultations suggested. Not only in her thigh. Surgeons say whatever they have to say to get you on the table. Nikki added to her pain by letting the surgeon upsell her on a boobjob.
The Percocet induces lolling and daydreaming. She pops pills and sprawls in her childhood bed. Reminiscing on life as Robert’s Side Chick. The drinks in dive bars and dinners at holes-in-the-wall. An animalistic affair carved out of small blocks of time left untouched by all-consuming jobs. In Percocet Land, Robert’s dirty talk echoes. Nikki masturbates.
Sometimes she hears him say he loves her.
Nikki hears it at Maggie’s, the fancy bakery on Bell Boulevard.
Her red eye steams. Vanilla ice cream melts atop warm blueberry pie. Teenage girls at a neighboring table talk trash. A purple-haired girl cups imaginary bolted-on boobs. People in Bayside know Nikki’s name and face. And the implants announce themselves, even from under her sweater.
Her new boobs are supposed to be way subtler than that.
She talks to herself on the street.
The rest of Bayside regards her indifferently. She is a Japanese Jew who technically isn’t Jewish. Koreans, Irish and Italians populate the neighborhood. She never fit in here or anywhere else. Only with Robert.
Nikki’s parents drag her to restaurants. She feels more like an adolescent now than she did when she was fourteen. Her dad, David, a union lawyer reluctant to speak about work, says things like, “You gotta toe the party line, right? I know the feeling.” She offers a throat-slitting gesture in response. Her mom, Ryoko, a professor of Japanese at NYU, treats Nikki like a friend, getting her drunk on red wine while they bingewatch TV. Nikki’s appreciation of the effort sours when Ryoko accidentally leaves open the Sexual Assault Survivors Anonymous website on Nikki’s laptop.
Old friends trickle in, doubtlessly at Ryoko’s urging. They invite Nikki to clubs. She goes but has absolutely nothing to say. Her mental vacuity terrifies her. So she drinks and asks her friends about their lives.
A single night of fun satisfies both sides. Each time. Nikki doesn’t hear from them again.
Weirdly, nobody wants to fuck her, not even, of all places, on Craigslist.
The day comes to testify. Jasper dispatches a courier bearing an outfit, shoes and accessories. His granddaughter, Erin, a stylist, selected the gear.
Beautiful suit. The blouse fits her new bust well. Nikki rocks the outfit and hopes Jasper draws the appropriate conclusions.
Her testimony hits the right notes. Lies ring truer than facts. The worst lie of the bunch, the most critical one, she repeats twelve times: “To my knowledge, there is no such thing as No Touch Kill.” A mantra. Republicans and Democrats encourage her to repeat the mantra. They insist. She says the words enthusiastically. To conclude Nikki’s testimony, members of both parties invite her to demolish Noland Bridgewater’s bizarre accusations. She grinds them to a fine powder.
It’s you or me, Noland… You’d do the same thing.
Jasper begs to meet her at a Georgetown restaurant. Nikki half-expects to be killed. Instead he pushes a thick package to her side of the table. “Your memoir,” he says. “The ghostwriter is a best-selling thriller writer. The deal is worth seven figures. Sign it. Choose celebrity, Nikki. Set up your own consulting shop. Or get a license to be a P.I. Whatever pleases you. You’ve earned it.”
When the devil compliments you, what does it mean?
Like death and taxes, the holidays come.
Nikki attends her extended family’s Jewish-Buddhist Christmas party. For years she blew it off and snuck around with Robert in NoVa. This party is light on Santa Claus and Jesus; it’s heavy on gifts, wine and sweets. Her family treats Nikki kindly, out of fear, not love. Treacherous circumstances befell her. They worry the danger might be contagious.
Christmas night, she pukes in her parents’ toilet and cries in her childhood bed. Ambien escorts her to sleep. Between the sleeping and waking worlds, she vows to abolish this horrible feeling from her life.
She rises Christmas morning rife with love of life. She signs the book deal and says fuck you to the workaday world.
I choose celebrity.
Chapter 41
Los Angeles
Surviving the Siege earns Connor a severanc
e package. The package wins him the distinction of being the highest paid sociology professor in the nation. Shame they pay him NOT to teach.
Jasper mails him a memoir. Connor rejects it, writes his own and ships it to Jasper for vetting. The funniest thing happens. Jasper clears it. He asks for no revisions. Connor scans the vetted manuscript ten times. The red marks on the page are proofreader’s marks.
Jasper asked for no revisions because Connor had censored himself.
Ayelet moves the family to L.A., Laurel Canyon. She steps up her involvement in The Mother of the World TV series. Book IV, written during the Siege, debuts at number one on the New York Times best-seller list and earns the best reviews of the series.
The family’s live-in nanny, Paula, runs herd on Connor Jr.
Daddy lounges in the house and naps in the hammock. His hammock from North Berkshire. The only item to make the trip. Other than Ayelet’s red rotary phone, which decorates an end-table in the living room, purely an ornament now, disconnected forever.
He applies for positions at colleges and universities from San Diego to San Raphael. Hiring committees decline to interview him. Many in academia still believe in the veracity of the I-Stand-with-Frank campaign. They consider authentic the fabricated emails Vincent leaked, in which a fake Connor criticized campus politics, even though the congressional commission appointed to study the events concluded that his leaked emails were indeed the product of a software program designed by Vincent DeSantis.
Every now and again, Connor takes the temperature of professors in his field. To be sure that he’s still damaged goods. The profs sing the same song: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
He understands their quandary. If a college took a chance and hired him, a student/faculty movement to fire him would surely begin before the start of classes. So he focuses on promoting his memoir.
The morning shows regard him as a hero. Certain news personalities—two cable morning anchors, a primetime cable news host and an NPR host—eat up Connor’s story. Jasper texts some high-fives. Anti-bullying groups invite Connor to speak at conferences. His agent books him on the college lecture circuit. At UCLA, he manages to speak above the shouting.
I-Stand-with-Frank and Team Noland Bridgewater protesters shout him down at three-quarters of the colleges on his tour.
Bomb threats cancel the European dates.
Students stab a lecture organizer to death in Bruges.
Connor elects to spend more time with his family.
The success of Ayelet’s Showtime series brings a blizzard of social invitations
Connor’s reconstructed face stirs Hollywood’s curiosity. Officer Rice fractured everything above the nostril openings and below the forehead. To recreate Connor’s facial symmetry, the doctors re-broke the bones. To restore his jaw, they stole skin and muscle from his thigh; a sickle-shaped scar spoils his complexion.
Evidence of his former prettiness abounds in his blue eyes, blond hair and healed nose. The overall contours of his face. But this ugly new version exudes Scarface vibes.
Connor instills a gym habit and sculpts a mean body—veiny, striated—to match his mean mug. Bodybuilders chat him up, asking questions like, “You played ball back in the day?” or “You’re an MMA fighter, right?” Their obliviousness charms him.
He sells the memoir’s film rights to the highest bidder.
Insomnia creeps…
Ayelet’s snores abrade Connor. He tosses and turns. Fantasies proliferate. Fantasies about running from Vincent again. Fantasies about killing him in a more violent fashion. Hubby and Wifey each took another human being’s life. But Wifey sleeps soundly.
Until, in Connor’s tossing and turning, an elbow jars Ayelet awake and they fuck madly.
These days she has affairs left and right. He likes it now. The cuckold life suits him.
Post-sex, Mommy falls asleep again. Daddy flops around like a fish out of water. The break of day calms his mind. Initiates the process of falling asleep. But Connor Jr. cries. Daddy’s yanked back. His fists pummel the bed. Mommy feeds Baby. Daddy jumps in a pair of shorts and jogs six miles, showers, and goes for a swim at the pool. He naps in the afternoon, flirts with the nanny and lifts weights at the gym.
With Vincent/Marcello/Eric dead at Connor’s hands, dead forever, and the Victim Years of his life behind him, what’s there to do?
Jimmy and Jan sell the house in Franklin Square and use the check Jasper cut them, on Uncle Sam’s behalf, to buy an oceanfront home in La Jolla.
The jolly grandparents drive up to L.A. one weekend.
Melody flies out with the boys. She steps off the plane and asks, “Nikki’s not coming, is she?”
The Writing Gods beckon Ayelet to ignore her guests and finish The Mother of the World once and for all. But she defies the Gods. She caters what she can’t cook and commits to being a superb host.
Jimmy recovered fully from his carotid surgery and his Christmas-surprise quadruple bypass. Jan tracks their doctor’s appointments, pills and lifestyle modifications. Connor Jr. relishes the attention of Grandma and Grandpa. He beams the whole weekend, climbing their bodies, crawling across their laps.
The family eats baked ziti at twilight. Connor Jr. squirms in his high chair, fingering the plastic toys that dangle above him. Robert’s boys swallow whole mountains of ziti, excuse themselves and recuperate together in the hammock playing games on their phones.
The doorbell rings.
The timing perturbs Connor.
The whole family is together at home. Vincent threatened them all. Nobody expects a visitor. What if Jasper chose today to wipe them out? What if, on the East Coast, a bullet ends Nikki’s life right now?
Not thinking along those lines, Ayelet glides to the door. Jan’s breath shortens. Jimmy gorges on ziti. Connor sinks his hand in his pocket and clutches his phone. Ayelet squints in the peephole and SHRIEKS.
Connor dials 9 and 1 and bolts up to see for himself. Ayelet spirits her baby away and hides in the backyard.
Connor squints, recognizes the visitor, exhales and swings the door open.
The man at the door isn’t the Angel of Death. He’s an old friend. Underneath the Jesus beard/hair combo, he discerns E.J.’s saintly face. Connor pockets the phone and hugs the friend he thought was dead.
“They said poachers wore your face like a mask, man,” Connor says.
“No, man,” E.J. says. “I was in P.T. Learning how to walk again.”
The anti-poacher struts inside on mechanical stems.
“We got attacked,” E.J. says. “Because of you, Connor. Uncle Sam put a hit on us. Poachers, though, they still got a heart. They killed the elephants. Took the tusks. But they let me live. Cut me out from under the poor mom that squished me. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ they said. I talked to them, man. I talked to them about the preciousness of life. I talked to them about preserving God’s gifts to the world. That’s what elephants are, man, one of God’s gifts to the world, one of God’s most majestic gifts. Those rebels won their war, man. To control a piece of the land. And I convinced them to let the rest of the elephants live. I won them to our side.”
Our side?
“Awesome,” Connor says.
The guests ogle E.J.’s bionic legs and inspect them. The boys take photos and text them to friends. “Rebels and nonprofits footed the bill,” he says. “I did my P.T. in the capitol.”
Ayelet apologizes for her freakout. She feeds E.J. a plate of ziti; he eats the platter. She pours him a glass of wine; he drinks the bottle. And another.
E.J. says sorry about Robert and informs the group of his contribution to the Robert Yard Memorial Scholarship Fund. Ayelet serves dessert, apple pie, which E.J. tops with vanilla ice cream. Then the anti-poacher drops the true purpose of his visit:
“I’m here to take Connor back with me,” he says. “We got rebels and villagers helping us defeat new poachers coming in from Cameroon and Congo. Change is in the air, man. Every pers
on, every creature, living side-by-side in peace and harmony, man. We’re building that on earth. In Gabon. Now. And I want you, Connor. I need you. We had a deal. I told you names of people you hurt. Now you need to help us protect the majestic creatures of the jungle, man.
“There’s a war going on. A war we’re gonna to win. Come fight, man. Come fight.”
Connor waits for Ayelet and Jan and Jimmy and Melody to laugh. Could anyone think of a more transparently foolish idea? Connor’s heart stopped beating in North Berkshire—it was a fucking heart-attack. The doctor hand-massaged it back to its normal rhythm. He had a concussion. His facial bones were shambled. His jaw was torn open. Somehow, he contracted sepsis. After he killed Vincent, whose blood and brain were polluted with high doses of unprescribed Provigil—a wakefulness-promoting drug banned in professional sports as a doping agent—and three different anabolic steroids, Vincent’s fucking father came and tried to kill him as he underwent facial reconstruction surgery. The monster shot a nurse before he was put down.
After all this, does E.J. seriously believe Connor’ll abandon his newborn son, hop on a plane and risk his life to save jungle beasts in a country he didn’t even know existed ’til his parents told him E.J. was there?
How detached from reality can you be?
But nobody else sees it that way.
“You should go, Connor,” Ayelet says. “Let off some steam. You liked fighting psychopaths. Now go fight the poaching syndicates. It’s such a cruel form of organized crime.”
Furious at his wife’s disloyalty, Connor slumps in his seat and shakes his head like an angry teenager.
“It would kinda honor Robert,” Jan says. “Fighting the bad guys. Robert always hated bad guys. You two should have gotten together as kids and fought that crazy Eric then.”
Big Bro was six years older than me, Connor thinks. Four years older than Eric. Too old to take Eric on.