“The problem is,” Joseph said, as if this observation had been building force in his throat for a while, “you like to be taken care of.”
William let that comment hang between them, pretending to roll it over in his head. What did Joseph know about women anyway? Del had pulled Joseph off of a market that had little interest in him to begin with. The guy hardly dated. His stories of one-night stands were so hopelessly banal, so cut and run, that William had to rethink his long-held opinion that the people who acted the most prudish in public were the world’s dirtiest perverts when given a few hours alone. He had once checked his e-mail on Joseph’s computer and covertly searched the Internet history expecting to find a flock of addresses guiding him to hardcore porn sites. All he found were conspiracy-theory chat rooms. It seemed so out of character for a man who listened to the stories William told without ever bothering to question their veracity that the discovery of 9/11 sites and Kennedymafia plots took on a more extreme perversion than snuff films would have. William chalked it up to boredom. Except for those Web sites, William’s file on Joseph was so clean it was almost unnerving. Almost. He did know one thing, and he never dared to mention it. Joseph kept a loaded gun in a metal box underneath his bed. He found it the same way he found those Web sites: by snooping.
William wondered if Del knew about the conspiracy chat rooms. Or the gun. But maybe Joseph was right. Maybe William liked being taken care of too much. And maybe Joseph had simply learned how to take care of himself.
“Will you be honest with me?” William said, entangling his feet around the legs of Joseph’s stool. His brown eyes were faded with worry. “Are you getting work? I mean, are you going out for auditions? Because I’ve got nothing.”
“It’s slow for everyone right now,” Joseph replied. He must have understood that William’s complaints had merely been a preamble to this admission of failure. “I’m up for a spot or two.”
“Well, that’s something.” William once confided his deepest fears in Joseph, but over the years there had grown some kernel of distrust, of jealousy, a little seed that could almost be classified as hate. While William’s career had sputtered and stalled through the last of his twenties, Joseph’s had taken shape. His bland, generically handsome looks had suddenly found an interested audience, while William’s darker, arrogant features started to read as too malevolent for toothpaste or greeting card spots. Like he was the kind of guy who couldn’t be counted on to remember birthdays or dental appointments. There were carefully concealed moments of joy when Joseph failed to land a role he had worked hard for. For William, jealousy was a survival instinct. He didn’t want Joseph destroyed, he simply wanted to beat him, to reach his arms out farther, to take what was there to be taken.
He paused, shaping his next thought while staring at the foam at the bottom of his glass. “What would you say if I told you I was thinking of moving to L.A. to start my career over?”
“You’ll never leave,” Joseph replied. “You’ve been living here too long to know what to do anywhere else.”
“That’s not what I wanted to hear,” William said, suppressing a whimper that would have summarized all of the panic he felt since he saw the dead scuba diver on the television set that morning.
Joseph seemed to sense that panic anyway and stretched his arm out.
“Come here,” he said softly.
Two men hugging in an empty dive bar in the West Forties at 3:15 PM on a Tuesday afternoon was a strange sight even in a city of nine million. But they held on to each other briefly for dear life, like locked wrestlers taking a moment to catch their breaths, until the bartender carried over two cold beers and told them in a slow, incurious drawl that “this isn’t that kind of place.”
CHAPTER THREE
ONE MORNING FIVE months earlier, Joseph walked into the kitchen, poured a glass of water from the tap, and found a rat sitting on top of the stove, licking burnt cheese off one of the metal rings. He dropped the glass of water in the sink and sprinted down the hallway to alert Del. “A rat. In the kitchen. On the stove.”
Del pushed the blankets aside and stumbled to the kitchen before his arms succeeded in rescuing her from the infestation of the floor. She returned a minute later wiping her palms.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I caught it between two pans,” she said.
“And?”
“And threw it out the window. It was so drugged up on poison it barely fought me.”
Joseph had hugged her tightly. He later realized, with deep embarrassment, it had been the first time he had pledged his love to Del. Whether or not the rat had brought on the confession, he meant what he said. He felt safe with her. Joseph had always felt safest by himself, but Del possessed a toughness emphasized in her dark, narrowed eyes and black sweep of hair that concentrated rooms to the rhythm she gave them. She didn’t nag him. She took simple compliments as if he were speaking in tongues, throwing them off with a wave of her hand, only for him to find her a few minutes later smiling with the eraser-wide gap between her front teeth fully exposed. He knew himself to be lucky every morning he woke up next to her, astonished that she agreed to be lying in bed with him day after day. He tried to learn a few words of Greek, but she said the nasal of his Ohio accent was like a blanket thrown on a fire.
He had no intention of marrying her. In fact, his intention was to not get married. He simply liked that they were striving together, far more than two strangers operating on a survivalist’s arrangement of shared groceries and rent. When Del asked him to marry her a month ago, Joseph understood that it wasn’t just love that brought the question to her lips. He had witnessed Del in the midst of her darkest, most restless moods. She often sat on the sofa with her knees pressed against her chest, staring out of the window as the buildings across the street turned from blue to black. “Another day,” she’d whisper to herself. “There it goes.” He’d turn on music, pour her a drink to shake her from her thoughts, and only in the worst moments—usually two days into a work week—did she push him away and say angrily, “You can leave a job without walking out on the rest of your life. Why can’t I do that?”
That was why he said yes to her that night a month ago. He didn’t need Del to confess her reasons, just as he hadn’t told her everything about himself. What Joseph wanted to say to William at the Hairy Bishop when his friend whined about his own wife walking out on him was this: “Did it ever occur to you that you shouldn’t have told Jennifer everything? Did you ever think that once you told her the worst she had no choice but to leave you over it?” Of course, Joseph did want to tell Del everything. But he knew there were some secrets so damaging they blew holes in even the toughest terrain. He had read a story a year ago about a suicide bomber with explosives taped to his chest under his coat. At the last minute, the bomber changed his mind and was taken into custody by the police, who naturally had asked him to remove his coat. The bomber refused. He knew that if they saw the explosives they would shoot him on the spot. Once the coat was opened, there would be no difference between the bomb and the man. Joseph purposely stopped reading before he discovered what had happened. But he could already guess. The only safe secret was one that remained concealed. He raced through midtown, sidestepping tourists and trying to fix the slight lurch from four beers with William. He was late for a meeting that he was very careful never to tell Del about.
“ I SAVED A man once.” The woman identified herself in the chat rooms of prisonersofearth.com as Miss Trust. At the basement meeting, under the buzzing fluorescent bulbs, she went by the less cryptic name of Rose. “He was crazy. A real lunatic, only you can’t tell that by two arms waving in the water.” She cleared her throat, attempted eye contact with the fourteen bodies slumped in metal folding chairs forming a loose double circle in the center of the room, and continued. “It was out at Coney Island last summer. I ran into the ocean and pulled him out of the waves. He must have weighed two hundred pounds with the water filling his pockets. I got
him onto the beach and that’s when I saw the donkey pin on his lapel and under it, a T-shirt that read A LEADER, FOR A CHANGE.” Rose laughed nervously and wound a ringlet of her brown hair around the tip of her nose. “He thought he was Jimmy Carter. No kidding. Looked like him too, you know, that tender face of an overripe apple. He kept swearing on and on about Kissinger and embassy hostages in Tehran. ‘Unfair,’ he kept saying. ‘Shame. They’ll know Henry made a backdoor deal with Iran not to release them. They’ll know I had no way out.’ He started quoting some 1979 reelection speech and said he finally lost faith that our children would have a better tomorrow, and, when belief in the future died, why continue? Then he dug into his pocket and offered me a piece of paper with circles and arrows running all over the place. Said it proved the whole thing, you follow one arrow and you get around to all of them. Israel selling arms to Iran to destabilize Iraq, America selling arms to Iran to support the contras, Iran promising a payout totaling twelve billion, Israel angry about being strong-armed at Camp David, but mostly, all them—Begin, Reagan, Bush, the clerics, and Kissinger conspiring to knock him out of office because he didn’t get the greedier picture, because he just wanted fifty-two men to kiss their home soil again. By that time, a crowd on the beach had gathered around us, and an ambulance drove right onto the sand. Before the paramedics took him away, he grabbed me hard by the neck and said, ‘There are no children of tomorrow. I was wrong. They grow up to be just like those monsters we call men today. I lost the election by telling the truth everyone knew. They won by telling lies nobody believed.’”
The audience shifted uncomfortably in their seats. A few worked their teeth on splintered fingernails.
“I guess you could say I saved a president,” Rose said. “I brought that paper home, hung it with clothespins on my shower curtain, and put my blow dryer to it. In the end, all I got was a dry piece of paper with all of the words washed off. Here’s the worst part. I called all the hospitals and the ambulance companies. There’s no record of anyone being picked up in Coney Island and taken to the emergency room that afternoon. But I have that paper. They forgot to take that from me.”
An elderly man who sat next to Rose placed a sympathetic hand on her knee, and all eyes drifted to over to Tobias X, leader and soothsaying blogger of prisonersofearth, to gauge his reaction. The verdict wasn’t good. He puffed a quick channel of air from a graying beard that hung like an awning over his lips. The beard, along with a loose T-shirt soaked with chest sweat, gave Tobias the hybrid appearance of an American hostage or the late Jerry Garcia—a prisoner of enemy insurgents or an icon of bohemian freedom. He crossed his legs and gathered his small belly between his folded arms. “They, they, they. Who are they, Rose?”
“Tobias.” A young man in a sleeveless Princeton sweatshirt raised his arm to reveal a mound of ginger pit fuzz. “They could be the current administration. They could be the Israeli secret police. Wouldn’t be so credible for Israel to be supplying their enemies with—”
“Stop,” Tobias yelled. “I will not have this meeting turned over to nonsense tales as a cheap form of entertainment. That pollutes our message. We are here specifically to posit conceivable detours, possible ways in which our own government and their media development arm is purposefully deceiving the citizens of this planet. We present truths against fiction. Not blank pieces of paper. That is how you escape the prison.”
“But all I have are my stories,” Rose cried, pushing away the calming hand. “You tell us not to trust the newspapers and the commentators. Well, what the hell is left but our own stories?”
Still slightly drunk from the beers with William, Joseph sat quietly in the second row where the suspicious stares of regulars had less chance to settle on him. He had heard this debate erupt so many times at the meeting—whom to trust, where the information was coming from, what counted and what didn’t. Those questions could clog his brain for the rest of the afternoon. Joseph had been attending these clandestine meetings—always in underground rooms of community centers, locations changing but the bare cinderblock walls with bulletin boards covered in flyers for dog-grooming classes and substance-abuse hotlines predictably the same—for so many of the years he had lived in New York. It wasn’t because he believed every irrational intrigue that got touted around these anonymous circles. It was simply the value in the questions themselves—the notion that the world turned with more sinister complications and betrayals than it seemed to in the sober light of day. The conspiracies lulled him. He found a strange consolation in these meetings. Perhaps because they reminded him of home.
Joseph’s mother had been a prophet of paranoia throughout his childhood. She had once been a Catholic and had raised him the same, but the religion that ruled their house was hardly monotheistic. Joseph’s mother prayed to conspiracies, making patron saints out of plots and cover-ups and, as a tenured professor of American history, the bizarre predictive pattern of dates. She had been a regular speaker at conspiracy seminars, and Joseph could still remember attending one of her speaking engagements when he was only six or seven, in a small side room in Cincinnati’s convention center off of Fountain Square. The concrete walls had been covered in maroon muslin that left the thirty dazed audience members holding weedy library books and tattered newspapers synthetically pale under the bright overhead lights. A flower show had just decamped, and the room must have been used for last-minute floral arranging because bits of green foam, plastic fern branches, and wilted white carnations littered the carpet like the aftermath of a summer storm. Joseph sat quietly in one of the foldout chairs by the emergency exit. He remembered his mother taking the stage, walking confidently toward the microphone in a brick-red dress. The applause flooded the room, and his mother fought a smile as she introduced herself. “Facts can suggest almost anything,” she had begun. “But for those of us who make it our duty to study them carefully, they can tell us something very specific indeed. I am proposing that history does not simply illuminate where we have been. Logic does not come only in the backward glance. It can also shed light on where we are going. Definitive light. To misquote a fellow conspiracist, I say to you today, don’t follow the money. Follow the years.”
Joseph’s mother thought years could predict what was to come. Joseph had left Cincinnati to get away from those voices predicting worst-case scenarios. But those frightening possibilities she had force-fed him too early started to accelerate in his mind until he couldn’t outpace them, even in this city, hundreds of miles and years beyond her reach. That’s when he started sitting in on these subterranean gatherings to listen to other men and women whose lives had been picked apart by questions that could only be answered by turning every fact upside down.
Joseph had never told Del how many hours he clocked listening to conspiracies. Del was not the sort of woman to take insanity with appreciation. She might have found the normalcy of these conspiracy theory regulars even more threatening: middle-aged men and women dressed in mismatched sweat suits with greasy hair, clinging to their notebooks and watching from their corners with squinted eyes as if badly in need of prescription glasses. A few college students—arrogant, supple faces with vehement nods that they had learned to perform in their undergraduate seminars—filled out the number. Joseph figured that a few decades ago this faction could have taken to the streets in a Vietnam protest but now existed mostly in the freefall of Internet space, typing their dissent and waiting to voice their exposures in secret unrecorded meetings where full names were not allowed.
Tobias had begun as he always did. “We are a small group willing to ask questions,” he said. “There are some new faces here, and we must try to be welcoming. When so few in the American population are willing to ask questions and remember the answers supplied, we are thankful to gain participants. That said—”
“We don’t want strangers sniffing around for trouble,” Tobias’s ruddy-faced second-in-command interjected. He went by the code name Gorilla, and dense black hair covered his body whe
re his denim overalls did not. “No tape recorders. No cameras. No last names.”
The group nodded with complying smiles.
“Asking questions can be dangerous,” Tobias continued. “Unfortunately, in this time where identifying real from unreal is so crucial and explosive, we are forced to keep ourselves far from direct sunlight. Personal privacy is a necessary safety measure for public examination.”
Rose had waited a good ten minutes to tell her Jimmy Carter story, during which Gorilla reported at length his six-year research into the morning of 9/11. He counted the exact number of Arabowned newsstands that had been inexplicably closed in the hours before the attack and compared it to the number of Jewish-owned stores in the Financial District that had also been shuttered (side note: three gay video stores in the West Village, forming a tight geometric triangle, had all mysteriously been closed that morning). Defeated by the outcome, which suggested that neither camp knew an attack was imminent, Gorilla explained that he was now accumulating new statistics on why certain flights from JFK to various South American capitals had been heavily booked in the weeks before the collapse. “One name. Chavez. And his Bohemian Grove of capitalist pseudo-socialist Latin leaders sitting on their own oil reserves, happy to see blowout in the Middle East. No one has bothered to look in that direction yet.”
Tobias scratched his chin despondently, sensing derision in his own derision camp. “That’s an interesting perspective. But please do not stop thinking about an inside job. I’m convinced about the smoke clouds in the lower part of the tower. I’m convinced about explosive devices. Does anyone have any new findings on the engineering studies coming out of MIT?”
The mantra of prisonersofearth was that the U.S. government had planned the attacks. The White House saw those two New York towers as a tuning fork that needed to be struck in order to bring the entire country in key—and, of course, that key was a hymn of patriotism disguised to start new wars. Joseph heard many skeptics joke behind Tobias’s back that it was just like the bloated American ego to try to take credit for even its own national disasters. But Tobias wouldn’t hear any of it. The problem with Rose’s story, Joseph realized, was that it pulled focus away from 9/11, the massive expanding subject that had recharged the conspiracy community and shelved all tangled, over-farmed theories on Kennedy, Vietnam, and even the New World Order as tired riddles no longer worth dissection unless they pointed to that bright September morning. Tobias clearly did not want to get bogged down with Kissinger. But the Reagan-Iran nexus, in such little circulation and thus as rare as two-dollar bills, suddenly caused a wave of alert voices and craning necks among the prisonersofearth.
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