by Mark Powell
It seemed significant, but what came to her was the sheer abundance of trivia, the sludge of mindlessness, and how this is life. Even when someone is in the next room, dying—or not dying, as it may be—what actually mattered was the accrual of everything else. The clipped nails, the taste in the corners of your mouth.
“All I want to do is see death,” he told her. It was when? It was November. One of those terrifyingly lucid states he would sometimes enter. “Something is happening.”
She moved around the room tentatively never taking her eyes off him, because the scary truth was, he seemed predatory. Tess felt like something hunted, like something being lured in.
“Like what is happening?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking a lot.”
She waited for more, but he waved her off.
“Yahweh,” he told her, “is just the sound of the breath, the in and out of being.”
She didn’t recognize his voice. Not just the words but the actual sound of his voice.
She had no friends. In place of friends there were those long walks across the cold sand, through the streets where everything looked unfinished, constructed from mail-order parts that never quite arrived. She found a church on Demere Road. A conch shell of holy water. An ivory Christ on his whalebone cross.
Come down, she whispered. It was her first prayer in months.
Because she was desperate.
Because she was tired.
Had she gotten old? She was twenty-four and looked mostly the same, though she knew she wasn’t. Her urine smelled. One day she just noticed it. Old, medicinal.
She could no longer think of a child. In place of a child she had the fawn-colored water. The ocean-like grasses and the wish to swim it. The wish to be carried out to sea. She knew now her mistake was too quickly abandoning her new life, rushing into marriage, giving herself away before there was a self to give. She’d fallen through it like water. It was traceless. But you have to scar the body to remember. There has to be a mark.
She kept walking to the church, along the beach, past the houses with the outdoor showers for washing the sand from your feet, the lattice of grille to stand on, the joinery of metal pipework above.
One night they managed to make love for the first time in weeks, but it was with such robotic movements it felt like shapes moving behind a curtain. When he came inside her he turned his head and exhaled. It felt like grief, a hiss of steam, like less than nothing. But a part of her floated away with the vapor.
Still, she went on doing everything for him, she cleaned him, fed him, cared for him. She did everything except listen to him. She did watch him. And watching him she came to understand that it was completely possible to believe every word in the Gospels and not believe it at all.
“If I can just tell you this—”
“Oh, John.”
“If I can just tell you this I can walk out of here. We can walk out of here.”
But they were past the telling of anything. There was no hiding from as much. To look at him lurching to the bathroom in his gray sweatsuit, blanket shrouded over his shoulders, unshaven, unwashed. To see him was to know there was nothing left to explain. If they came out of this, when they came out of this, the approach would be simple: forget it ever happened. Don’t speak of it. Don’t acknowledge it. Don’t even think about it. Go on with your life together, go forward, the two of you.
But that was the thinking on one of her strong days.
The day she realized she was pregnant was one of her weak days, and that day she decided to go home to her parents, to leave him.
“I have to go out for a little. Get some things.”
He was beneath the covers, Tess beside him.
“I’ll die here alone,” he said.
“Groceries. One hour. You won’t die. Please, John.”
It wasn’t for an hour—she had known that from the start, but only admitted it to herself when she was driving. She cried while heading south on I-95 but was dry-eyed by the time she made the Georgia-Florida line. Late morning and nerves seared with coffee and anticipation, but dry-eyed. Absolutely cried out and fine with that, happy, actually, that there was nothing more to cry about. Because it wasn’t fear that made her decide to go to her parents, it was exhaustion.
What made her decide to turn around she didn’t know, only that she did.
When she told him about the baby he got up.
As simple as that. Got up as if he’d lain there for months simply because he had no reason not to, and now she had given him one. She didn’t know whether to weep or laugh or to hit him as hard and as many times as possible. In the absence of clarity, she spent the day packing and cleaning and the next morning they pulled on their coats and headed out the door.
They were back in St. Pete by that night, and here were crowds coming out of restaurants, Christmas lights hung along Fourth Street. Here was the world just as she had left it. He bought her a new pair of running shoes and an expensive jogging stroller and a GPS wristwatch, and it was as if nothing had happened—John was John—but also everything had happened so how could that be?
She had no answer, only that it was. John became the same solicitous, doting husband he had been before. He didn’t talk about death or suffering or God. He talked about baby names, a list for girls, a list for boys. They moved into a sublet while they looked for a new condo, something bigger. They looked at cradles and baby clothes and at night he rubbed her feet. In the mornings he sang. The rest he left out. He never mentioned Ray, the man she had called. He never mentioned James Stone, the man whose mail kept arriving. He never mentioned any of it. Life went on as before, better than before.
Wally was born.
They moved to Georgia.
Daniel was born and then Laurie. They were happy and John seemed to have no memory of those months so why should she?
It was years ago. It was over.
She needed to let it be over.
25.
Jimmy Stone sat in his van, flush against the loading dock at the rear of the Food City which appeared to be a shitty grocery store if ever there was one. It was dark, close to midnight, but he could see enough from the lights of the parking lot to watch Ahmad and four boys pile out of a hooptie, climb into the two dumpsters, and then climb out with bread and fruit and a freaking sheet cake of all things, smiling like kids. Which was exactly what they were.
A lesson in urban survival, Jimmy thought. A bit theatrical, if necessary.
Ahmad gathered the haul and sent them back in. Not like they needed encouraging. Probably the best food they’d had since arriving. The shit they were serving at camp. A breakfast of oatmeal and amphetamines. A little chemically induced brain light with your steel-cut oats. But how else could you survive?
Jimmy had followed Professor Hadawi north, and what he had discovered was that he had been right about everything, right about the professor, right about Reed. Right—as if such needed confirmation—about the generally toxic state of this fallen world.
Right about the camp, too.
It was on the back side of a ski resort. The place was closed for the season, but even had the snow been falling and the lifts running no one would have spotted them. They were in an abandoned section that had once been a gem mine for tourists, a place to pan for gold except there was no gold. Serious backcountry with no decent access besides an overgrown fire road. There was a converted barracks with a half-assed kitchen, a fire pit for gatherings, a few storage sheds, and the remnants of mining troughs and conveyor belts.
Jimmy had watched the place for weeks, making certain the professor was nowhere to be found before venturing up. That Ahmad was the instructor was a nice surprise. He knew Ahmad from back inside the high blast walls of the Green Zone. The months of poolside barbecues and Filipino maids and the occasional senator doing a windshield tour of the New Iraq. It wasn’t exactly what you would call a war, at least back then. The insurgency was still in its infancy so besides
the occasional mortar attack it was like being at camp: sleeping in a dorm, eating in the KBR cafeteria. You had Bible studies. You had twenty-something Ivy League staffers running entire departments because Daddy gave big to Bush-Cheney.
Occasionally rocket fire hit the Al Rasheed and almost daily the burned-out shells of Humvees were towed, very quietly, to the Vehicle Sanitation Point, but it wasn’t exactly real. He saw Ahmad again, years later in Afghanistan, and it was different then. A time of HESCO barriers and fentanyl lollipops, the moon reefed in silver clouds. Jimmy and Ahmad stuffed into MOPP suits and waiting for the All Clear. That was the time when he began to think about the body as a candle, the body as this lit thing, flame devouring hair and skin and adipose tissue so that it became pure. Because at times it seemed preferable to the waiting. Not that he told anyone. Not that he told Ahmad, though Jimmy suspected deep down they all felt it. They all shared that same desire that it be done with. So it was convenient, discovering his old pal. Still, Jimmy didn’t rush right in. He watched them run in the woods, took a few photos for the sake of posterity, and didn’t approach until that night.
In the meantime, he got glamor shots of every kid on campus. These beardless wonders, almost interchangeable with the sunken eyes and glazed faces. But he knew Reed right off. He was skinnier than the night Jimmy had met him at a McDonald’s near I-75 but little else had changed. Jimmy recognized the walk, that sort of apologetic creep, but arrogant, too. Like he knew he was better than you, even if no one else was in possession of such information. They had something like a bond, maybe. He’d told Jimmy once about the girl in New York—pale legs, the elevator girl—and Jimmy could tell the kid had immediately resented Jimmy for having heard. You don’t want to spill things, but then sometimes you go and do it anyway. Jimmy had told the kid some things he regretted, too, but it had been that sort of time in his life. Panicked. Frayed.
New York in a particular moment. Rebar and yellow construction cranes down at Ground Zero. Disease everywhere. Not just anthrax, but methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. You heard rumors about the prostitutes in Brownsville and East Harlem and then it crept south to Midtown. MRSA. SARS. Rhinovirus. Cops having to Lysol their cars. Cops refusing to haul hookers at all. Call the fucking paddy wagon, call HAZMAT. You could buy Zithromax on the street because Zithromax don’t do shit. He rode out to Borough Park for latkes. You couldn’t tell the police from the army, all masked, all armed, everywhere in their MRAPs and helicopters. There was talk of the National Defense Authorization Act. People referenced the Posse Comitatus Act. Dirty bombs—someone was caught planting one in a Times Square mailbox. Cesium-137 wrapped in plastique. Or maybe the bomb wasn’t actually planted, maybe it was still in the planning stage. Or maybe someone had just talked about a dirty bomb. Maybe someone had just thought it.
He was a different kid now, but Jimmy recognized him, spotted him hauling himself in and out of the trash.
Jimmy had his camera with him, but didn’t bother with it.
Tonight was for watching.
He’d already relayed an update to Dr. Sharma and for it had acquired a second brick of cash. Like the first, it was tucked above a ceiling tile in the kitchen of a lake house Stone kept deep in the mountains.
Things were coming together. He had the e-mails John had sent. Pair it with the photographs and it was the start of something. But put the e-mails with the pics with the confession of the kid and you’re talking federal probe, you’re talking somebody call the inspector general. Forget material support. It was straight-up entrapment and Jimmy wondered how the federal district court might fancy such. Then again maybe he would just let the kid walk. If possible, Jimmy felt certain he would. Use some of Daddy’s money to facilitate a permanent vacation.
He’d wait a few days, let the kid hit the breaking point, and then go up and get him out. Get him papers and drive him to the lake house for a bit. Get John on the phone, get him to come over and it would be just like the old days which, no, not really. But they’d be after the same thing. Only this time instead of trying to get some kid to spill his secrets they’d convince him to keep them. To shut up and disappear, to start a new life somewhere else.
John would say no at first, but he’d relent. You pressure a guy like John, you get his moral dander up and it was too easy, really. A guy like that couldn’t say no.
He watched the kids load their food into Ahmad’s car. One of the boys had a bag of grapes it looked like, and it was just a crazy thought, but Jimmy was still thinking it, thinking: here he is, old Reed, so what if I just called his name? Could we sort this whole thing out, just the two of us?
He imagined Reed striding over, spotting the van past the angle of the loading dock, spotting Jimmy who had his hands on the wheel in a sort of shy shrug as if to say, Hey, hi, howdy there, remember all those mornings I would call early and wake your sleepy ass up?
Would it be a mistake or not?
But he knew better than to call to him.
Instead, he watched the boys load up and drive away, drive back to the hell of the professor’s camp. When they were gone Jimmy took out his cell and dialed John’s number.
26.
Stone dialed again the next day but John let it go to voicemail too.
When he called a third time later that week John intentionally walked out of the room. It wasn’t like you could hear Stone’s voice, but John didn’t like the thought of it. Besides, it was Saturday and he was on his way out the door.
He wanted to be in Peach Creek with Erin.
He didn’t want to be in San Francisco with Peter Keyes. But talking to Stone would carry him there.
John had been in the Bay Area two weeks before he actually met Keyes. Peter’s office occupied the upper floors of the California Center on Sansome Street. But John worked out of an office park just beyond the gates of Stanford called the HIVE. Downtown Palo Alto with its boutiques and food co-ops. Parking lots thick with Lexus SUVs. John was given an apartment in Southgate and made the commute on foot.
The HIVE was an area of desks expanding radially from an open center lined with couches and video game consoles. He was the oldest man—there were only two women—a dinosaur among three dozen twenty-something dropouts from graduate programs in physics and engineering, newly minted PhDs in the philosophy of mind or nanotechnology. What was happening in the world—what was about to happen—was happening already, only oil wasn’t yet completely exhausted, the regional wars were still just that. They weren’t yet beheading journalists in the Levant. Most still opened the tap to find cool and drinkable water with just the correct dose of fluoride. But that was not the sense within the HIVE. The sense was of limitless possibility, of detecting ways in which crises might be exploited. The room was loud. They wrote algorithms and ate lunches of red chard.
John drank Budweiser at a frat bar, pitchers of it, weaning himself off the hard stuff, and then walking home through the California sun, past the iron-grilled bodegas and dim sum shops, the apartment complex swimming pools where the Stanford girls tanned. His was a sloppy existence, made sloppier still against the measured lives of his younger colleagues. Where he slumped through the drunken days and blacked-out nights, they weighed everything: calories, drinks, bonuses, neurons. Somewhere there was a ladder and they intended to climb it. Or were climbing it already. It would be revealed in time, its largeness, its largess. All were seeking the authenticity that works as cover for what is at base the selfishness that allows a CEO to be a Buddhist, or an upper-middle-class white woman in Greenwich to speak of her self-actualization at an upstate yoga retreat. They wanted the money, of course, but they wanted to feel good about the money; that was their right. If they knew anything, they knew that to which they had a right.
John knew this path.
Even if he was no longer traveling it.
Then one day Peter sent for him. It was a common thing for a new hire to be taken for an afternoon to Sansome Street to meet the principal. Still, there was an
air of jealously the day a car was sent to pick him up. They were like a harem of lovers, some favored, some forgotten, and there was always some wrangling for Peter’s attention.
And here was further justification for John’s sense of superiority: Peter Keyes looked a great deal like him. They were both tall and thin, both late thirties, a couple of sad-eyed waifs in cable-knit sweaters and worn shoes. Of course, Keyes was a successful billionaire, a feverish ascetic who refused carbohydrates and sex with boys over nineteen. While John was no more than an overeducated good ol’ boy, a Bible Belt scripture whiz gone rogue.
The room overlooked the bay, the Golden Gate. Federalist chairs and a collection of Francis Bacon triptychs. Bowls of floating edible flowers. Keyes was a man who ate kale and slept in a hyperbaric chamber. A man with no intentions of dying. It was silly, really, and John kept waiting for someone to bring out a carafe of beet juice.
The next day he was back at the HIVE, unchanged. Someone had left a note on his desk, Arial, 12-point font: Before enlightenment you chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment you chop wood and carry water. Still, he detected glances, the muffled insinuations. Until his visit no one had left the HIVE in months and there were rumors that the principal had lost interest, that the operation would be shuttered by the end of the year. This proved to be only partially the case.
In the meantime, John went back to work, sat with his books while the young talked of seasteading or angel investors. They were vegan or paleo or on calorie-restriction life-extending diets, and everyone ate mixed greens and drank espresso from little postconsumer waste cups. You would look up and see someone flossing free strings of cabbage, oblivious.
Then one night, for the first time in years, he went for a run.
Later, months later when running the inner perimeter of an abandoned airbase somewhere in Poland had again become the central tenet of his being, he realized that surely he had given up the act because it brought on such clarity, such gorgeous lucidity. Running, he couldn’t escape the self-examination that ultimately folded into self-recrimination.