by Mark Powell
It was possible, she thought, that the answer was contained in the hard plastic of the USB drive, still sleeping in her nightstand. She felt it was there, this knowledge. But she sensed there might also be things she didn’t need to know, things she wouldn’t be able to unknow, things it would be impossible to forget.
*
“A man came to see me recently.” John talking from one end of the couch, Tess on the other. Between them slept the boys, Laurie already in the crib. He muted the volume on whatever it was they were watching and in the darkness there was only the soft snoring of their sons. “James Stone. I don’t know if I ever mentioned him.”
“I don’t remember.”
“ ‘Jimmy’ I might have called him. Haven’t seen him in years and there he was outside my office.”
“Was something wrong?”
“Since oh-eight, it’s been. Which is what, six years?”
“A figure from your dark past. So spooky.”
They made love with the bedroom door open, the boys still asleep on the couch. It lent something of the exotic to the act, the slightest whiff of danger. Total darkness so that other senses became acute, touch, taste, hearing. The smell of each other. Skin and milk—that was hers. His was a feral scent that bordered on rankness, the smell of unwashed business socks, the metallic taste of cologne.
It was only the second time they had made love since Laurie was born and they both felt it, the pent-up energy. He bit her shoulder, put her legs in the air, pulled them so that they bent around his waist where he stood by the bed. It was more aggressive than she was used to, a calling back to those Florida days, those few months before his St. Simons breakdown, that period when she felt herself to be wholly body. Not living in a body, but body alone.
She felt his hips shudder and they washed into each other, panting, a little raw, a little angry. He let go of her ankles, her legs, released her in stages so that she felt the lingering imprint of his fingers running her length. Something desperate about it, the last grip of used-up power.
She lay there letting the tingle circulate a moment longer while he showered and came out in a towel to tell her he had to be in Atlanta all weekend.
12.
The Show Pony occupied the top two floors of what appeared from the street to be office space. John took the elevator five floors to the glassed roof where a bouncer in bib overalls found his name on a clipboard. The room was steamy. Water streaked the glass and bright aqueous light waved from the surface of the pool where boys in tiny trunks splashed and laughed. The air was eucalyptus. The vibe was exclusionary. But it wasn’t the first place John knew he didn’t belong.
He spotted Stone at a small table near the diving board, alone with a bottle of champagne, a glass of pomegranate juice, and a bowl of mixed nuts. Barefoot in a sports coat and hemp pants, the trace of yesterday’s eyeliner visible against his brown skin. His face hung over his phone, big finger swiping the screen.
John watched him, and in watching discovered that he was no longer afraid of Stone. It was particularly strange because it had never occurred to him that he was afraid in the first place. Stone’s eyes were glossy and appeared to have sunk deeper into his head, his hands were swollen. His skin had once been a sort of walnut—he had some native blood, Comanche maybe—but now appeared sallow, more yellow than brown. He wasn’t the same man John had worked with at Site Nine, no longer the auteur with his godlike omniscience, no longer the man with the camera, John’s eyes, the lens through which John suffered the world.
“I’m making a Spanish-language version of Anna Karenina,” he said. “Today we shot the scene where Anna and Vronsky have sex for the first time.” He dug out a macadamia. “I’ve got a Cameron Diaz look-alike in jodhpurs and a dog collar. It’s bonkers. Absolutely out of this world.”
A second bottle of champagne came out, along with a salad. Stone stood up a stalk of romaine and began to shave green fiber. “You’ve been avoiding me. All these years. But honestly, I get it.”
“You weren’t exactly looking for me.”
“I get it, I do. The point is I suddenly have folks whispering in my ear.”
“Who’s whispering?”
“You bailed on us, okay, fine. I can live with it.”
“I never bailed on anyone.”
“You walked away, John. You walked away from me and you walked away from Ray. The work wasn’t complete and you knew it.”
“What happened with you and Peter?”
“I honest to God wanted to spit on you. You were needed, but where were you? Crying your eyes out in my—goddamn it, John—my house on St. Simons. That’s where.”
“Tell me about Peter.”
Stone shook his head.
“You know he’s dead,” John said.
“The whole world knows. The great Internet billionaire prophet gone to that glorious URL in the sky. I assure you they were wailing and gnashing teeth outside every Apple store in Southeast Asia, these slick little two-point-oh humanoids. But honestly, fuck Peter.”
“The thing is, I never understood what it was you were doing in California. No one ever said exactly.”
“Because they were required to do that, right? Explain it to you, clear it with you. I was doing the groundwork for a biopic if it’s any of your business.” He gulped his champagne. “Have you even considered what the last few years have done to my heart? I pine for the days of nitroglycerin. Little brown tablets dissolving under the tongue.”
“A biopic as in a film?”
“It was going to be high art. Think Leni Riefenstahl on mood enhancers.”
“I never heard anything about a film.”
“A side project until finally I got tired of his shit. Watching him run around the world like Obi-Wan off his Abilify. Now I’ve got three hundred hours of footage locked in a bank vault.”
“This is from Site Nine?”
“There’s no Site Nine footage. Not anymore. The day I heard rumor of a subpoena was the day I set fire to our life’s work.” He took a bite and swallowed. “Ray Bageant sends his greetings, by the way. He said last he saw you, you were passed out on a couch in some Gulf Coast village of the damned.”
“That would have been Ray, not me.”
“You do look like you’ve been living clean. The young father vibe.”
John lifted Stone’s glass of champagne. “I’m not that young anymore.”
One of the honey-colored pool boys cannonballed into the water.
“You work in a building called the Truth Center,” Stone said. “That occurred to me the other day. You and Professor Hadawi.”
“I hardly knew the man.”
“Yet you’re here.”
“I have no idea why I’m here.”
Stone shook his head. “This isn’t the John I know. You remember those nights in Minnesota? The pure unadulterated consumption of booze. You remember these?”
Stone appeared about to say more but instead pointed with his fork, flexed his jaw, and shifted it from side to side as if testing its utility. “You know the way Tolstoy writes it, Anna, she’s a corpse, and our man Vronsky has murdered her. Goddamn Tolstoy. The man thinks he invented love.”
“Is this just a reunion, Jimmy?
“Versus what’s the alternative?”
“The alternative would be—I don’t know—that you’re messing with me.”
He put down his fork and leaned close enough for John to see the sparkles in his eyeliner. “You think I would hop a plane for the sake of a joke?” he said. “I completely reject that line of inquiry.” He threw a cashew at him. “We have history, John. We have water under the bridge. And don’t stare at me like that. So I drink pomegranate. Sixteen ounces a day. Big fucking deal. It explains my healthy glow.”
“Jimmy.”
“You want something to eat?”
“I want to go home.”
“Home? Christ. Home he tells me. Where is home? Kindly provide me with some GPS coordinates and I’ll cue t
he violins.”
Around them daylight was fading into a band of salmon. John streaked one finger down the glass and watched the water run. Go home. Forget. It was Peter who said this. There is another life—it was Paul Éluard who said that. There is another life, but it is within this one.
“Look,” Stone said, “I’m here because I need a favor. Your famed Professor Hadawi who decides to just go strolling off into the sunset.”
“He was on a Soros Fellowship.”
“In goddamn Yemen. I’m fully aware.”
“Who are you working for, Jimmy? This film—”
“I already told you: Peter wouldn’t commit.”
“There was never any film.”
“Fuck you, you don’t know. And that has nothing to do with the reason we’re both sitting here, now does it?”
“So why are we sitting here?”
“We’re sitting here because I need a favor.”
“Are you still one of the good guys?”
Stone fished out an almond and held it before him as if for inspection. “I need access to Hadawi’s shared drive.”
“They took his computer.”
“They took the computer from his office. But there’s more than that.”
“The Georgia Bureau. You were standing there.”
“There’s a shared drive and I happen to know for a fact your very privileged, very progressive employers have conveniently failed to mention it. Hadawi could have used it, right? Did committee work on it? And if he did, no one would ever think to look there.”
“Then get a court order.”
“All that information buried in some obscure server. But you were on that committee, weren’t you, John? You’d have access.”
“You think any court in the state of Georgia is going to deny your request?”
“You know it doesn’t work like that. Besides,” Stone said, “I’m not asking the court. I’m asking you.”
Night had fallen, darkness beyond the dewy glass. The bartender was a blonde girl with an ear full of loops and a sleeve of intersecting tattoos. She caught John looking at her, smirked, and for a moment he felt a slippery hit of misguided lust. The pouting mouth, her complete disregard.
“There’s a mosque in Atlanta,” Stone said finally. “The Masjid of Al-Islam. They’ve been on and off your campus.”
“There was never any biopic, was there, Jimmy. But there was going to be a film.”
Stone balanced his hands, palms up like scales. “Peter wanted things documented, this is true. What we were doing over there—it was necessary, John. I don’t question its necessity. What if we’d achieved some psychic breakthrough, right? But Peter also knew the day might come when they would turn on us, try to bury us for doing exactly what we were told.”
“We deserve to be buried.”
Stone waved him off. “You don’t know shit about it. You forget I was there. South of Canal. I saw the second goddamn plane and never, not a single fucking time since then have I questioned the necessity of what we did.”
“Yet you still have the dreams.”
“We all have the dreams. Fuck the dreams. It’s the waking life I’m worried about. The walking around part.”
“Ray Bageant said a long time ago someone would come looking for us.”
“Well, they found me, John, and now they’ve found you.”
“So I help out,” John said. “I cooperate, and they forgive and forget?”
“That seems to be the crux of it.”
“Who are we talking about here, the Justice Department?”
“Would it make a difference?”
“Did you really burn all the footage?”
“You’re luring me toward a speech.”
“Everything we did—Site Nine, everything we did for Peter—it was all perfectly legal. Every bit of it. I’ve read the opinions, the rulings. I know this for a fact.”
“It’s really more of a story than a speech.”
“I need to go.”
Stone put his hand on John’s wrist to keep him from rising. “See I tried to join the army once, way back in the day I’m talking about. Wouldn’t let me in, though. True story and here’s the true part: my dick’s too big. You understand the moral here?”
“I need to get back.”
“The moral is this: you needed a dick back then and I had it. Jesus, I had it. But no one wants to be reminded of his own insufficiency, his paltriness when everyone starts whipping it out. No one wants the zealous hanging around queering the brew.”
“I appreciate the drink.”
“Hassan Natashe, John.”
“I don’t need to be reminded.”
“Yeah, well, neither do the feds.”
“Are you really working for them again? I don’t see it.”
“I had aspirations to be a folk singer. Somewhere things went a bit askew. I admit this.”
“I need you to level with me.”
“Level with you? We’re all going to spend our golden years in some low-security prison, John. How’s that for leveling with you? Basic cable and a starchy diet. We’ll wear those denim slippers and complain about our bowels.” He shook his head with what might have been disgust. “I make high-end porn in a Liberty City warehouse and you want me to level with you? I come home from work with pubic hairs on my goddamn sleeves. How’s that for leveling with you?”
13.
Sunday morning Tess drove the children the half-hour to John’s parents. The college sat at the first rise of the Blue Ridge, the gentle up-sweep of the mountains beginning at the edge of campus, scrub pine giving way to white pine, to the tall conifers and the bare skeletons of elms blighted a generation ago. Garrison was a college town, one of those pricey mountain enclaves featured in Garden & Gun and marketed as quaint. Which meant everything was overpriced and artisanal. But there was a good Thai place and a theater that ran Terrence Malick marathons. A used bookshop and a Lord & Taylor. You could get Rolfed, you could get trigger-point therapy, you could get organic hair-seeding.
And then you couldn’t. A mile outside town there was a granite quarry and after that it was all gas stations and spills of kudzu, rebel flags and NO TRESPASSING signs that ran north until you hit the national park. The highway switching back on itself as it followed the course of a nearly dry river, a slim ribbon of water eddied and stagnant and attended by a flock of Canada geese.
She didn’t mind the drive.
The boys were watching a Wild Kratts DVD in the back. Laurie was asleep.
Tess was in her running tights and Nikes, the idea being drop the kids off and go for a run while John’s parents took them to church. Come back and shower—she had a change of clothes—and spend the afternoon together. She liked the visits. It had been months into their relationship before John had even mentioned them, and had he never endured whatever it was he had endured—and what about what she had endured?—they might never have come up at all.
She turned on the radio, kept it low so as not wake Laurie, then turned it right off when she realized it had disrupted the cartoon the boys were watching.
“Mah-om,” that two syllable whine that had replaced her name.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“We’re watching this,” Wally said.
“I know. I just forgot.”
“How far now?”
“Don’t wake your sister, honey.”
“How far is it?”
“Just a few minutes. Don’t wake your sister, all right?”
He had left yesterday while Tess was still in bed, John she meant, dressing while she pretended to sleep. Which seemed to be a new activity between them—one pretending to sleep so as to avoid talking to the other. The single thing they shared. He was in Atlanta for a conference on something and she mostly believed him. She believed he had a reason to be in Atlanta, at least, conference or not. Beyond that, she didn’t really care. He didn’t sing in the morning anymore, and she didn’t care about that either. It was strang
e to realize as much.
She turned the Odyssey off the highway onto a track of gravel road and thought of her grievances against Karla and Kayla.
Stupid, that alliteration of names. Sometimes she thought it stupid and she hated herself for that. The pettiness of resenting the dead. Like the wound of finding out there was someone—two someones—before you was simultaneously scabbed over and raw, because it can be that way.
But she didn’t care about that either. What she cared about—what she told herself she cared about—was on the thumb drive, and along with her laptop, the thumb drive was in her bag, waiting on her.
*
She sat on the screened porch and nursed Laurie from her right breast while she pumped her left. The verb was express. She expressed four ounces, she expressed five ounces. The boys were inside, bouncing around the kitchen, waiting for the moment they were released into the world. When Laurie was finished and the bottle full Tess would pass both over to John’s mother and the five of them would leave for New Canaan Baptist Church and Tess would be alone in the house.
She listened to the children, the sound of their high voices going up like kites, that little clutched fear that came to her now and then that they would keep lifting, keep going higher, and she would be left alone, earthbound. Yet another stupid thought. If she wanted to worry about something real wouldn’t it be handing her sons and seven-month-old daughter over to her aging mother-in-law for the next three hours?
Maybe, probably. There was a part of her that knew it wasn’t the safest thing to do, but there was another, larger, part of her that saw both how much the woman needed it, and how much she, Tess, needed it, too. You want that balance, that place, she was always telling herself, where your self is both a part of and separate from your children. You want—
Laurie came off her nipple.
The bottle was full.
She fixed her too-tight jog-bra and shirt and went into the kitchen where Daniel and Wally sat in her father-in-law’s lap, The Tom and Jerry Show on the TV. Her mother-in-law took Laurie. Are we all ready now? Yes, I think we are. Turn that off, Thomas. Let’s load up, boys. Turn that off, please. Come on, boys.