Receptor

by Alan Glynn

  I can see her clocking Molly’s reaction.

  Who are Josh and Ellie?

  But there’s no time for this.

  “We’ll come back, I promise. We’ll stay for a week. Won’t we, Molly?” I don’t even look at her when I say this. “Now, Jill, we need to talk.”

  * * *

  How our mom, Sara, put up with Tom for so long has always been a mystery to me—or not even a mystery, because that implies I spent time thinking about it. It certainly never occurred to me that she loved him, or that she stuck around for our sakes.

  That both of these things were true comes as a shock to me now. When Dad died, Jill and I were both really still kids, resplendently dumb in our respective levels of self-absorption. But by the time Mom died, five years later, Jill already had two kids of her own. I was still dumb, but it seems that Jill had somehow managed to move on, grow up a bit, and maybe find some common ground with Mom. Naturally, I wasn’t around for any of this. The funeral was a somber, quiet affair and the opportunity to talk or ask questions never arose.

  “She opened up a lot to me in those last couple of months,” Jill says. “I knew I’d get around to telling you about it some day, but you know how time slips by…”

  Anyway, according to Sara’s account of things, our dad’s entire life was dominated by his own father’s suicide—trying to understand it, to interpret it, to forgive it, even. But he never succeeded at any of these. If it had just been “straight suicide” (whatever that even means), things might have been different. But there were certain peculiar circumstances surrounding Ned’s death, and preceding it, that Tom found out about from our grandmother, Laura, when he was in his late teens.

  Apparently, before he killed himself, Ned went missing for about six months—a period of absence that remains unaccounted for. When he reappeared, he was a changed man: he seemed twenty years older and more than a little disturbed. But the strange thing was that during his absence he sent money home, regularly and in increasingly large amounts—so much money, in fact, that after he died, Laura was financially secure for years to come.

  This, too, was never explained.

  “So Tom was tormented by these weird, isolated bits of information,” Jill says. “Throw in his two tours in Vietnam, in ’69 and ’70, some PTSD, a perforated eardrum, and I don’t know what the hell you end up with. But the thing that really twisted him came in the mid-seventies.”

  As Jill is talking, I glance at Molly. I barely know her and here she is knee-deep in my family history. I wonder what she makes of it all.

  “So, late one night,” Jill goes on, “he gets a phone call. It’s from someone who won’t identify himself. Mom always wondered if this person was drunk, or deranged, but whatever they said that night shook Tom to his core. It was around the time of … what was it…?” She clicks her fingers. “You’d know more about this than I would, Ray, the Rockefeller Commission, and the … Something Committee?”

  “The Church Committee.”

  “Yes.”

  Molly looks at me.

  “It was 1975,” I say. “They were hearings about the CIA’s involvement in illegal wiretapping and domestic surveillance, assassination plots, all sorts of weird shit.”

  “Fucking incredible,” Jill continues, “but anyway this guy led Tom to believe that in the early fifties his father had been the victim of a medical experiment, that it was some kind of government-sponsored program, and that he should look into it. Dad believed him, of course.” She throws her hands up. “It was something to cling to. Then in the late seventies, early eighties there was a lot of high-profile litigation, class-action suits, whatever, by people who had been victims of this thing. He followed all of these cases, and even tried to get involved. But there was nothing for him in any of it, no medical records like these other people had, nothing, not a single thread linking Ned with anything. He spent ten, fifteen years chasing his tail, and by the time you and I were hitting our teens, he was wasted most of the time and pretty much gone.”

  We sit in silence for a moment.

  “Mom put up with it all because she felt bad for him, and she loved him, I guess, but she didn’t buy any of it for a second. Or she realized it was pointless to pursue it.”

  There is another silence.

  “So, Ray,” Jill then says, an almost accusatory tone in her voice, “what is this thing that you heard?”

  “It’s sort of … what you just described. All of it.”

  “Oh God. Are you going to lose your mind now, too? I mean, who cares? It was sixty fucking years ago.”

  “I know, don’t worry. I’ve already been in and out of the rabbit hole.” I pause. “But I do need to go through Dad’s stuff.”

  She looks at Molly, then back at me.

  “I get it. Just one more hit off the crack pipe, right? We all know how that goes.”

  * * *

  Empire Self-Storage is a vast, indoor affair, and Jill’s units are at the end of a long, brightly lit aisle. She opens the lock, raises the steel roll-up door, and flicks on a light switch. The unit is about fifty square feet. Looking in, I get an immediate and unexpected sensory blast from my childhood. That armchair, the coffee table, the metal filing cabinet, the framed mirror—these are all items yanked from my memory and repositioned here in this dream-skewed tableau.

  There is a row of stacked boxes at the back. I head straight for these, skirting around the furniture, and choose one at random from the top. I lay it on the ground and bend down to open it. I remove the lid. The box contains old documents, letters, subpoenas, writs, newspaper cuttings. I open a second box and it’s the same. I pretty quickly discern a pattern. A lot of this material relates to class-action suits filed in the early eighties by victims’ groups looking to extract compensation from the government.

  Choosing another box, I glance back at Jill and Molly. They’re standing out in the aisle, chatting quietly. I remove the lid. The box contains three large brown envelopes—thick, padded ones. I lift out the first one. Inside is a wad of typed pages. It looks like a manuscript of some kind. I do a quick check of the other two envelopes, and they’re the same. I extract the wad of pages from the first one and flick through it quickly. Some of the pages are torn, or dog-eared, or have stains on them. The paper is old and dry, and the print is faded. It has that classic typewritten look.

  I don’t know what this is, but I have an intuition that it’s the only thing of significance I’m going to find here.

  I flick through the wad of pages again and stop at one randomly, a solid block of type with no paragraph breaks. I try to focus on a few lines.

  … a global convergence of interdependent organisms, a collective mindscape of data expressways, a living skein, a rippling membrane stretched out over the entire surface of the planet …

  I don’t know what this means exactly, but I find it astonishing that it was written when I think it was written. In the early 1950s. Tom had this all along? What did he make of it, if he even read it?

  I gather up the three envelopes and lay them to the side. I feel that I have to check out the rest of this stuff, even though my gut tells me to just leave. I open a few more boxes. A couple contain more recent material, from the nineties, medical records, insurance claims, tax forms. Another one has documents relating to Tom’s construction business. A few more are filled with personal stuff—those old books, magazines, and LPs.

  After a few minutes, I’ve had enough. I close up the boxes and carefully place them in their original positions. Then I put the three bulky envelopes in their box, lift it up, and turn around. Jill is still standing out in the aisle, her arms folded, but she’s alone. Carrying the box, I make my way gingerly back through the dusty labyrinth of eerily familiar objects.

  Jill seems bored now. “What have you got there?”

  I ignore this. “Where’s Molly?”

  She nods back toward the other end of the aisle, where Molly is pacing up and down. She’s on her phone.


  I turn back to Jill. “I need to take this stuff with me. I’m not sure what it is, to be honest, but I want to check through it carefully.”

  “Sure you don’t want to take all of it?” she says, glancing over my shoulder. “That old armchair, the mirror? We’re paying two hundred dollars a month for the climate-controlled privilege of not throwing this crap out.”

  “Maybe next time.”

  “Funny.”

  Molly is off the phone and walking back toward us. I can tell that something is up. I wait until she’s close. “Anything wrong?”

  “He’s gone,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief and holding up her phone. “Clay Proctor.”

  “Dead?”

  She nods.

  I put the box down. “Fuck.”

  “What?” Jill says. “Who’s Clay Proctor?”

  I wait a moment, then turn to her. “That thing I heard? Clay Proctor is the man who told me.”

  19

  On the return flights, to Honolulu, and then Los Angeles, there is endless discussion among the scientists about what happened at Bikini Atoll—about how they could have gotten it so wrong and yet still be so lucky. The yield was an incredible fifteen megatons, and the radioactive contamination, as a result, is much more widespread than expected.

  Sweeney has been getting a lot of curious glances, but no one has approached him with the obvious question. Hey Monroe, how did you do that? How did you work it all out so accurately? At the same time, he finds it remarkable how quickly these guys can put what they’ve seen out of their minds and get back to fiddling with their slide rules.

  By the time they land in Los Angeles, Sweeney is also beginning to understand why his nausea hasn’t lifted yet. He’s not physically sick—though that may come, and not just to him; it may come to any or all of them in this group returning from the Marshall Islands, and sooner than they think. It’s more that he has lost his bearings. Because how is it that a mere thirty-six or forty-eight hours earlier he was so sanguine about the prospect of witnessing what could have been, quite literally, the end of the world? It was a real prospect. Until he worked out that it probably wasn’t. But before that? He had no thought for his wife and six-year-old son, no feelings of separation or loss, no desperate urge to make contact with them. How is that possible? Because if not with them, where else does he think there’s even the remotest chance that he’s going to find any meaning in life? In Santa Monica? In the South Pacific? How about he goes to the moon?

  All he’d need for that is a slide rule and a few hundred million dollars.

  Sweeney is not blaming the MDT for any of this. He’s the one holding back and resisting. He’s the one with a six-year-old son on the other side of the country. Crucially, Tommy won’t always be six. He’ll grow up and become a man. He’ll do things, forge a career, make decisions. Maybe he’ll have a kid of his own someday. It’ll all be beautiful. But what is Sweeney saying here? That apart from sending regular checks home, he’s prepared to forego any involvement in Tommy’s life?

  MDT can’t make you smart, not if you choose to be stupid—not if you choose to close your eyes while standing in a field of flame-red California poppies at sunrise. Sweeney knows that. So when it eventually comes, the decision is quick and unequivocal. He’ll return to New York, to Laura and Tommy. It won’t be easy at first, he’ll have to learn how to pace himself, but it’ll be worth it, because whatever path he’s going to take in the coming years, it really has to be with them.

  On the drive back to Santa Monica, Sweeney decides that one thing he should do before leaving town is gather up the hundreds of typed pages that are distributed all around the apartment now and start organizing them into a coherent manuscript. At least that way, when he reappears in New York, he’ll have something to show for the six months he’s been AWOL. The ambitious scale of the book, and the prodigious amount of work he’s already done, will provide him with considerable cover when he shops it around to some of the big publishing houses.

  It’s late evening when he arrives at the Sausalito Arms. He gets to the door of his apartment, puts his travel bag down, and is just reaching into his pocket to take his key out when he senses that something isn’t right—and it’s ten different things at once. He turns around, intending to go back down the stairs, when a man appears from the shadows to his left.

  “Mr. Monroe?”

  Sweeney stops. “Yes?”

  “George Blair, Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The man has a badge and flips it open. “Can I have a word?”

  Sweeney remains still. Then he turns back around and points at the door. “There’s someone in there, isn’t there?”

  “Think of it as a welcoming party.”

  “That’s illegal entry.”

  “Nah, I don’t think so. Not when it’s a party.” Blair takes a step closer and taps on the door with his left hand. It opens immediately. The room is in darkness, but standing there, framed in the doorway, is Clay Proctor.

  Sweeney is simultaneously surprised and not surprised. He walks around Proctor, drops his travel bag to the floor, and flicks on the light switch. The place has been overturned. The furniture he doesn’t care about, but his typewriter is on its side at the foot of the bed, and the pages of his manuscript are strewn everywhere. His initial thought out in the hallway was that the interim security clearance he’d gotten for the trip might have raised some red flags and that this was a follow-up investigation of some kind. But that doesn’t explain Proctor. It doesn’t explain the illegal entry.

  “Hey, Tom,” Proctor says with a smirk. “Sorry about the mess.”

  “Then why don’t you clean it up?” Sweeney says.

  He knows that isn’t going to happen.

  Behind him, he hears George Blair enter the room and close the door. If this isn’t about his security clearance, Sweeney thinks, then what is it about? He casts an eye over the blizzard of manuscript pages. Some are facedown, some fanned out. From this distance, he recognizes occasional paragraphs, either by their shape or from certain stand-out words—convergence … plurality … cybernetic … multidimensional. If he had to, Sweeney could retype this whole thing from memory—maybe not syllable for syllable, but close enough.

  “What do you want?” he says.

  Blair steps around to face him. “You’re quite an interesting character, Mr. Monroe.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Blair seems puzzled by this. He’s clearly an idiot. Sweeney looks at Proctor, who goes out of his way to avoid making eye contact with him. He’s clearly an idiot, too.

  But Sweeney already knew that. There’s something else going on. He surveys the chaos again and the open window catches his eye. This has nothing to do with his manuscript. That was going to be disturbed no matter what went on in here. This was more deliberate. This was a search.

  Which can mean only one thing.

  Sweeney’s stomach turns and he feels weak all of a sudden. He’s reached the limits of today’s dose and is already exhausted from the traveling.

  “What do you want?” he repeats, though now he’s fairly certain he knows. He just doesn’t understand where this is coming from or where it’s headed.

  He glances over at the bathroom door. He sees that it’s ajar and that there’s a light on inside.

  “We want to know who the hell you are,” Blair says.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Sweeney whispers, nodding toward the bathroom.

  There is silence. Then the bathroom door creaks open and a man in a cheap suit and a homburg emerges.

  “Hello, Ned.”

  Sweeney half gulps, swallowing back some reflux.

  “Huh?” Proctor says. “Who’s Ned?”

  “Ned Sweeney.” Mike Sutton gestures toward him. “Advertising executive from New York.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Shut up, Clay.”

  Proctor opens his mouth, but doesn’t say anything. Blair just stands there. Sutton re
aches into his pocket and takes out his cigarettes and lighter. He holds the pack up, offering one to Sweeney.

  Sweeney shakes his head.

  “I knew it,” Sutton says. He lights one up for himself. “So, Ned, they tell me you’re something of a big shot out here. You care to explain?”

  Sweeney’s mind is racing. “Look, I really don’t know what—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Sutton blows smoke out of his nostrils. “I was reading some of this stuff you’ve been writing here.” He moves a couple of typed pages around with his foot. “You know what I thought? This guy’s got to be hopped up on something. That’s what I thought. And then I remembered.” After a pause, he stretches his hand out, wiggles it. “Come on, hand it over.”

  Sweeney just stares at him. “How did you find me?”

  “What makes you think I lost you?”

  “Nothing,” Sweeney says, defeated. “What do you want me to say? You’re the best?”

  “It was a photograph. I saw it in the Chronicle. In the social pages. You and some of those brainy fucks from RAND. At a gala event. It was in the … what’s the name of that hotel?”

  “The Casa del Mar,” Blair says.

  “That’s the one. There was a little group, and then you were off to the side.” He clicks his tongue. “The image was grainy, but it was unmistakably you. So I made inquiries. Came all the way down from Frisco just to see you.”

  Sweeney remembers the event. There were a lot of photographers there. And some TV people as well, conducting interviews. He even said a few words himself.

  But now he shrugs. “Why do you care about this?”

  “Why do I care? Holy shit. You stole something from me. Right out of my goddamn apartment.” He flicks ash from his cigarette onto the floor. “Now hand it over or I’ll break your legs.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Not this again.” He rolls his eyes. “Clay, do me a favor, search his bag, would you?”