by Martin Rose
In the silence of the slumbering house, a ringing phone sounded, the tinny old style telephone rending the air. All of us at distant points snapped to the center, where the ringing bleated, invisible.
“Well, answer it,” Lafferty suggested.
I didn’t realize I still had a telephone. I hopped a chair, overturned a table, and at last fished it out from under the pull-out mattress while Lafferty watched, enduring my clumsy efforts. I took up the receiver and answered.
“Hello?”
“Is this Mr. Valens?”
I whirled with the handset dangling from one finger, the receiver crushed between my chin and shoulder, and stared down the hallway. Lionel must be sleeping in the guest bedroom and the hallway remained empty, all the doors closed.
“This is Lionel Valens,” I said.
Lafferty lifted one eyebrow and I put a finger at my lips, leaning down to hold the phone out. He inched toward the offered receiver and listened beside me as I crouched.
“Yeah, well, I wanted to let you know that there was a fight today while the inmates were getting their meals. A prisoner doing time for grand theft auto, name is Gunther, got into some kind of altercation with Highsmith. There was an assault, looks like Gunther was sent to solitary.”
“I’m sorry. This concerns me how?”
“You paid me money to know, buddy, but that’s not the juicy part. The fight was around five or so. Gunther was trapped in solitary about five hours until now, and he ain’t trapped no more. Found his body in the cell. We think he hanged himself, but everything’s being processed now. You want more info, price goes up, got it?”
“Yeah, thanks for your help, and don’t call again.”
Click. The connection cut and I set down the phone on the base and put it back on the floor.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lafferty asked.
“I don’t know,” but all the same, I didn’t like it. I would have to tell Lionel in the morning, despite the deception. Paying prison guards to get information is small stuff, but it put me at ease about Lionel’s presence, as though he was on the level, actively helping, not conducting anything untoward behind my back I would come to regret later. In the morning then, I promised myself, I would fill him in.
I stumbled to bed in a drunken haze. Lafferty hid the bottle back under the couch. I hit the mattress with my shoes still on my feet, dangling in thin air. I twisted to sprawl on my back, staring at the ceiling, counting her footsteps out to the entrance of my door and then back again. They receded down the hall. I reached into my pocket and brought out my pills.
I held the prescription bottle up into the light. Pills caught in the orange cylinder like fireflies.
It was different, when you were a zombie, my Id pointed out. Didn’t matter about the side effects. So what if it ruined your kidneys, pitted holes in your stomach lining, or increased your chances of cancer? But you ain’t a zombie no more, Vitus.
I spun off the cap and jammed a dose down my throat. A hammer blow to my mouth. I dropped the bottle and it rolled into darkness.
On a night like this, I would have driven past the funeral home. Would have watched Niko, hidden among the cemetery stones, playing the radio to an audience of corpses. She could have been my new addiction, but I’d used her up, ran down the supply. All I had left was this bottle to soothe the withdrawal.
I contorted, bed springs squealing beneath me, and brought forth the red folder. Papers spilled out across the sheets. I held the first sheet to my nose in the dim light, working out word by painful word through my drug-addled brain. Atroxipine heated the bottom layer of my stomach with steady pulses, feeding me as I read. Jamie’s handwriting decorated the margins, shorthand codes he utilized when he worked out puzzles in his mind.
The handwriting the dead leave behind is irrevocable—it subsists like a spell, waiting to take effect long after they’re passed. From end to end, the pages packed with old-style type—the kind pressed into the tooth of the page from old typewriters. Sheets of flimsy onion skin, yellowed at the edges. The date at the top read AUGUST, 1958. Above the heading: PFC, VALENS, LIONEL—TRANSCRIPT.
I read and my brain snapped and crackled, Atroxipine raising up a euphoria amid the quickening, a thousand cups of coffee and a heroin shot rolled into one.
The sheaf of papers formed an old report, purloined from Jamie’s locked filing cabinet, if I had to guess. What other secrets were buried in that house that might leak out if someone put the thumbscrews to Megan? I pushed the thought aside to examine the contents.
A simple report, a transcript of an interrogation—deposition? The origins unclear, as though someone preferred not to reveal to what purpose the information had been recorded, and then disappeared into my brother’s possession. It stood to reason this had been my father’s, passed down from father to son.
Naturally, I’d never been the recipient of my father’s trust, nor his hidden reports.
Typed, Spartan questions, supplied with long-winded answers from Lionel Valens. A mission in North Korea gone awry. It started off in the same monotone filling a thousand and one encyclopedias, the naming of trivial tasks and listing of various goals, missions, contingencies. Typical protocols to be followed, in what order.
Then, things queered and a weirdness began and ended with the one person most capable of fucking up any mission: my father, the wily gray fox, Todd Adamson.
I bared my teeth to think on him—our endless fights, his condescension as he asked me to explain myself, account for my savagery, my coarseness. Why could I not do what was best for the family, why could I not respect him?
Because you’re a snake with a human face, I had told him and received a ringing slap across the cheek for my troubles. A glitter in his eyes, a breathlessness as he shook his hand in the air to free it of my stain, the sharp ring turned out, my face bleeding.
He’d been an old man at my birth. Yet, in this report, he would have been closer to my age. In my mind’s eye, I melted away his wizened old man’s mask. Smoothed the wrinkles, the way my mother had laid out a pie crust when it broke, rubbing the dough back together, brand new.
Thinking about family and home made the cocktail of whiskey and Atroxipine heave deep in my stomach. The ceiling revolved above me. I shut my eyes, holding my father’s face there, firm, like an ancient god. Saturn, with his mouth forming a sickle.
Younger, younger.
Clean shaven and in an army uniform, jouncing along unknown roads in the back of an all-terrain army vehicle in olive drab. Another man beside him. I grasped after the figment of imagined memory, building it from scratch out of Lionel’s face, moving him backward as I had my father until he, too, became a slight youth in my mind’s eye, his whole life ahead of him.
I tried to taste the heat of the wind curling up thick from the Sea of Japan. Recalled maps from my military years. Almost heard the sound of Lionel narrating to a disembodied presence in the room; a bright light occulted by an interrogator; the hot, sticky sweat of soldiers and tobacco from someone’s cigarette. Lionel, a young and shivering soldier, pressing out the words between puffs of smoke.
The transcript text went missing where the action intensified. Redacted with a black marker—all my attempts to bend the page in the light revealed nothing. I managed to extract enough to know Lionel and my father left the relative safety of their banal intelligence gathering from their office desks and went joyriding with necessary fieldwork being the pretense. They played hookey and got caught. Someone from the North Korean side, an agent named Jin. The black marker turned more blocks of text into massive squares of black. Midnight swallowed up the paper and my father’s secrets with it.
But imagination could suffice. The empty space made rich with unspoken affairs, clandestine or perhaps considered too improper to put into writing. Had my father been affiliated with the enemy in some other fashion? I wondered if it were scandalous. My father’s amoral bent bore allegiance to no one. Perhaps the answer was more mundane�
��Jin and my father could have been lovers. Not the first nor the last time his dick had gotten him into trouble. I wished I could say my father was the product of a repressed generation that could not fully appreciate all forms of love, but the reality gave no respect to the lofty ideal of love itself—my father was an omnivore. He did not love people. He loved himself. And if he could get what he wanted with sex, he wouldn’t think twice. No doubt he left a legion of broken hearts behind in his wake on either side of the gender divide.
Elvedina’s footsteps echoed back and forth across my door. I peered over the top edge of the paper to catch her face before looking away. Why give this to me? To let me know where Lionel’s loyalties resided?
I closed my eyes, pressed the paper to my forehead.
I reached the end and let the final page float down to the floor. I dropped the others over the mattress until I was papered in Lionel’s old transcript, floating on a high that made me not give a single care for anything around me, for the dirty socks I still wore or my rank-smelling shirt. I curled on the bed and pictured the transcript text floating before my eyes, laid out across the paper-white ceiling like a flat screen, waiting for oblivion to arrive, waiting for the dreams on the inside of me to come roiling up out of my own leviathan.
*
I woke up, and when I woke up, I knew I was not awake.
Lucid dreaming. In a distant point in the universe, I was sleeping in my humble ranch surrounded by my father’s once right-hand man, my good friend, and my terrifying automaton of a babysitter.
I woke up lying on a field of green and fragrant grass with a cerulean sky above.
I’ve been waiting.
The field extended into vast open spaces in all directions with the faint smudge of buildings in the distance to the left of me and an ocean to the right. Forests of unknown plants, and just beside me, the figure of a man in a dark suit encased in a living shadow. Surrounded by a corona of darkness consuming the sunlight around him. A black hole threatened to open up beneath his feet. He stared out at the vista with his arms crossed, tapping one shoe, impatient.
I don’t have all day.
“You’re him. You’re the Inspector.”
He put a finger to his lips and turned to me in a snarl.
Others are listening, fool! Silence. I have better things to do than make small talk with a whelp such as yourself!
He leaned down, grabbed my shirt by the collar. I dangled in thin space before he deposited me on my feet. The shadow passed over me, nipped at my neck where his fingers had gripped me, became spears of ice.
Come now. It’s happening.
“What? What’s happening?” I asked, but he did not answer. He turned his back to me and paced forward, bringing the shadow engulfing him like coils of unending smoke. I ran to keep up. He glided, an arc of blackness at his feet, his shoes never touching the ground and speeding up, even as I ran faster.
He went down a dirt path between arching trees. His back rigid, arrow-straight and discordant with the stride of a normal man. I closed the distance, taking a bend in the road, when the sound of a sputtering engine broke the silence. I stopped and faded into the shoulder of the road, out from the tunnel of trees. A shape moved through the dappled light, bursting out to the other side where the Inspector and I stood.
You see those men in the car?
“Yes.”
An all-terrain 1950s army Jeep jounced over the imitation road. This model had the top taken off so it looked like an opened tackle box, square and compartmentalized, the windows discarded so the passengers rode exposed to the elements. A trio of men rode in the car, one in the front behind the wheel. I saw the Asian. His hair dark, his skin tanned by long hours out in the sun. He took the corner with his face grim, wearing the North Korean uniform. The two young men in the back, equally grim. Their eyes passed over us.
“They can’t see us, can they?”
No. You’re the one here to see. Now keep quiet and truly look.
The two men in the back wore Russian uniforms. Their light-colored eyes, their hair—maybe it was the cowboy in their tilted shoulders that gave it away. American. American posing as Russian.
Everything locked into place:
“That’s my father.”
The Inspector offered nothing. Distant trees rustled, complemented the sound of the army vehicle, the lilt of foreign languages. My father, one arm slung across the back of the seat and surveying the countryside like a lord, with Lionel beside him.
Jin, his face turned to the sun beneath the shadow of his military cap, pressed the pedal so the Jeep gave a burst of speed before he stomped on the brakes, carving deep brown swaths of earth into the land where they stopped.
I abandoned the Inspector, running to draw closer to the Jeep. I heard yelling. My father, sulking beside Lionel with his teeth gritted, whispering into Lionel’s ear, I mapped the movement of his lips to read the words: Just give it a minute, we’ll get out of this, and then the Jeep’s engine stopped. Lionel and Todd, small and fragile in their flak jackets, unarmed.
“Go ahead,” Jin said. Jin pulled the brake to seat the car in place and stood up on the seat with his back to the idling engine and the wheel, turning with my father’s .22 in his hand. Jin spoke perfect English in an Oxford accent. He spoke better than my father. “Get out and take it off.”
Jin made them undress. They trundled out of the vehicle to stand at the side of the road. The process rendered awkward, stilted as men are when forced to abandoned their armor. How young, how unthreatening this young version of my father was, as he stripped down to his underwear, with Lionel beside him doing the same. Unarmed along an unfamiliar road. Jin tossed them two Korean uniforms from his superior position at the helm of the car, and they began the tedious process of getting dressed into ill-fitting clothing. This was the man I had feared for all my life? Cowered before, forced on my knees before, broken and killed before? Disgusted, I watched Todd’s impassive expression. But for that, I never would have realized this man was my father. Even with our features so well-matched.
Jin climbed into the front seat proper, facing the road ahead with my father and his friend to the side. I discerned the nature of his intentions. In all likelihood, Lionel and Todd’s own men would mistake them for enemy soldiers and cut them to pieces with friendly fire. They wouldn’t realize their error until they got close enough, and even then, may never realize their error.
My father opened his mouth and a tirade issued forth. Sharp, commanding barks and this, this I recognized anywhere, in any language—my father was cursing his head off. He was cursing at Jin. In Korean.
My father hurled insults with his mouth twisted on one side like he always did when he was in the heat of it. Obscenities Lionel failed to include in the secret report. I tried to retrieve the transcript from memory but what I witnessed was part of no report. This—all this—had been redacted. The Inspector brought me here for the live performance.
Todd knew Jin—knew what things to say, and about whom he should say it, to get Jin to wheel his vehicle back around. The same way he always knew what to say, to anyone, to hit their soft spots and get them to go from zero to sixty in no time. I’d played this game with my old man before. I knew how good he was at it.
Jin turned away from my father, but his ears flamed red. He revved the engine and then hit the gas. Tires spun in Korean mud, trails of earth, Jin’s mouth a flat line. I tried to imagine my father’s enemy, a man I could empathize with for our mutual hatred of Todd, the wily gray fox, who in this time was not so gray, but still wily. Jin with his mouth pressed together so thin and small his lips disappeared from the map of his face.
Jin yanked the wheel and the Jeep cut a doughnut until it faced back at my father. Todd perfected the art of venom. My old man with his hands on his hips and facing down a Korean soldier who wrestled the humming engine of the all-terrain beneath his hips, waiting to drive it right over my father’s face.
The grenade, though? the Inspe
ctor said with a sigh. I don’t think Todd expected that.
“Grenade?” I asked. “What grenade?”
Jin hauled himself up to stand on the front seat, reached down to his well-armored vest and ammunition belts, took an object off his flak jacket, pulled the pin, and threw it.
Handheld one second and airborne the next, sailing through the brilliant blue sky and past the foliage, the diesel fume of the running vehicle bringing tears to their eyes as Todd tracked it against the sun.
Jin had thrown it at Lionel.
I admired Jin. He estimated my father’s character and decided the best jab at Todd he could make was going after his friend. I held my breath, forgot Lionel lived, unable to understand how time would coalesce to the present, when—
Todd reached out a hand and caught it.
The grenade made contact in the soft meat of his palm. He thrust forward with a gasp, launching into a sprint. By my birth, all his youth and athleticism would be gone, save the burning vitality in his eyes. Here in the bendable past, my father was a different animal. He pounded up the road with the live grenade, arms and legs pumping.
Jin stood poised at the helm of his stolen vehicle like a captain who only begins to realize his ship is sinking. Five seconds stood between my father and explosion. Five seconds until detonation; my father making those five seconds count, eating the meters fast.
Jin startled, scrambling to return to the driver’s seat.
Todd launched onto the front of the jeep. A howling commenced, the marriage of sounds betwixt desperate men—Jin’s howl, Todd’s snarl, the guttering engine as Jin tried to reach the gas and use momentum to tumble my father off the vehicle. Too late. Todd hurdled the engine like a Goliath with one distance-eating stride, grabbed Jin by the scruff of his collar, and sent him reeling back.
Jin shrieked. Todd laid out the agent on the back seat and snatched a pin out of one of Jin’s vest grenades. My father didn’t hesitate, though for one second, I thought it wouldn’t fit. That maybe the hole for the pin wouldn’t be the same size and shape. I wondered if Todd could feel through his fingers, down deep through cast iron, the grenade expand a fraction of an inch before he shoved the pin back into the hole and it held true.