by Mark Powell
Did he know then what he would be doing a few months later?
Things were coming. The bursting bubbles—tech sector, bond market, housing—the ubiquitous surveillance. Soaking the face of a college student with pepper spray while our sensitive president read poetry and signed off on drone strikes—it hadn’t happened yet, but it would. The crowds would go needy and then scary and then the police would roll in riding their armored personal carriers. It was years away but it was already in the air.
The following week he was summoned back to Sansome. Only this time the car picked him up outside his apartment complex and Keyes was in the back with a proposition of sorts: that John come work for him.
He told Keyes that he already worked for him and Keyes shook his sad head.
For me, he said. Me as in personally. There was a sub-group beneath the Keyes umbrella called Global Solutions, a consulting firm acquired in the near past, and he wanted John to join it, to be his personal liaison. The men were older—they were all men. They were grimmer. They were working under contract for the U.S. government, carrying out the gathering of human intelligence. They were scattered throughout the world, the Mideast, Asia Minor, Eastern Europe. John would be tasked—Keyes’s word—with running an office in Poland.
“I read your book. Grief,” Keyes said. “Suffering, but to a particular end. Suffering as a means of revelation. There’s a secret, John. You said so yourself. It’s locked inside all of us and it takes trauma to bring it out. Wasn’t that what your book was about? The necessity of suffering, the revelatory nature of it. We’re going to open up souls. But it isn’t going to be random. We’ll open souls in a controlled manner. There is no other laboratory on earth that can offer what I’m offering. I ask only that you be ready for as much.”
He was, or wasn’t, but didn’t care, and for the second time in as many weeks he said yes.
A week later, at a decommissioned air base in Poland, John watched a man on a high-definition screen have his arms placed in restraints and twisted behind him so that his orange jumpsuit pulled tight across his chest. And then they raised him as if he were being crucified. That was John’s work, that was why he was there.
He was there to watch.
27.
She had to chase Wally off the computer, flapping her arms the way you might scare vultures from a carcass. But he wouldn’t quite scatter.
“Where are you learning this?” she wanted to know. “At school?”
“Watch this, Mom.”
“This is Minecraft? These little blocks?”
They were in the living room, Tess’s laptop across the slim expanse of Wally’s lap. She’d left it just a moment before and here he was, having swept in without a sound.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“I downloaded it.”
“The game?”
“I’ve got whales, all this marine life. There’s this mod you can get for large-brained cetaceans.”
“Whales?”
“They’re all down on the bottom just sort of like hanging out.” The little block figure that was, she supposed, her son, floated over the block sea and it was true: there was something down there, something beneath the surface but just above the tabs he had minimized: Facebook, CNN, a recipe site with a vegetarian shepherd’s pie that called for Greek yogurt which she didn’t have so forget it.
“Where are they?” she asked, closer now, her mouth by the swirled crown of his head.
“You have to go deeper, really deep,” he said, and his little figure did exactly that. “You have to be willing to wait.”
Then there was something, the block rippling out of which emerged the block shape: the head, the pectoral fins like great flat paddles. It was a whale! It was down there. A bell chimed.
“You made this?”
“It’s a mod you get.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s just something, I don’t know.”
“What’s that sound?”
“I think you got a message.”
“Hop up,” she said.
“Wait.”
“Hop up, honey. Come on.”
She lifted the computer from him and he allowed it to be taken, his body suddenly limp so that he lurched into the couch like some protester given over to authority. She opened the Facebook tab and there it was:
I can’t tell you how excited I was to get your friend request
and also so so sorry for my slow response. I’m not on
here as much as I should be I guess. But so excited.
Obviously, I don’t hear much from my dad but I’m cool
with that. Truly. But would luv to get together sometime
if that’s not too much. Please message me.
It had been long enough for Tess to stare at the screen for a moment in confusion.
“Who’s that?” Wally asked and she turned to block the screen with her body, folding the screen forward.
“Go check on your brother for me, honey.”
“Who’s that message from?”
“Go check real quick, okay?”
She waited until he slouched out of the room before raising the screen. A message from Kayla Maynard? Then the memory of the friend request Tess had sent arrived with a hit of euphoric panic. They were friends now. She spent naptime scrolling through Kayla’s pictures and posts. She seemed so happy, her scar barely visible. What did Tess have to fear?
She wrote back: I would luv, luv, luv to get together sometime. Let me know when works.
Then it came to her: Thanksgiving up in the mountains. A condo with a kitchen, maybe a hot tub for her and John because the children were out at like seven, seven thirty at the latest. It was just a thought. None of it having anything to do, of course, with proximity to John’s daughter.
She sat for a moment in front of the screen and then found a condo by the Pigeon River. Indoor heated pool. Jacuzzi tub. She got out her credit card and booked it.
Why not? she thought.
They could always cancel.
28.
When John finally checked his voicemail it was Stone, of course, which wasn’t surprising. That Stone mentioned Ray Bageant was. Talked to Ray, John. He sends his hugs and kisses, you heartless bastard. But by then John was headed south on I-75 and couldn’t be bothered by Stone’s pleading.
Why the fuck are you ducking me, man? I just want to talk.
That was Stone’s question.
“What the fuck are you watching this for?”
That had been Ray Bageant’s, asked the night he staggered into John’s Tampa condo, a six-pack in each hand, plastic rings hooked on his index fingers. He stood with one foot out and his toes turned, as if it was Ray on the verge of walking away when they both knew it had been John who’d left. But instead of leaving Bageant gestured at the television where a thousand miles away Senator Obama stood in Grant Park.
Election Day 2008. Or maybe by that point it was the day after Election Day.
Either way, Bageant was making progress on drinking one administration into the next.
“Be the change, John.”
“Ray. What are you doing here?”
“I am the change you’ve been waiting for,” he said, and dropped the cans onto the carpet. “And I come bearing bad tidings.”
It had been over a year since John had left his position with Global Solutions. He had left Site Nine and all that it involved the previous summer, and in the intervening months he’d had no contact with anyone from that life, save the deposit that appeared every month in his bank account. This was the remnant of John’s own walking away: the remainder of the contract he had refused to complete. The only thing that linked to him to those days. Besides, of course, the dreams. Besides, of course, the damage done.
Bageant slumped into the couch and cracked a beer.
“Where’s the wife?”
“She took our son to spend a few days with her parents.”
“A
son. I hadn’t heard.”
“Wallace.”
“Wallace. Hey, congrats.”
Despite everything Bageant looked no worse for the wear than the day John had met him so many years before in Minnesota. In fact, he looked better. He had gained weight, but it appeared more as solidity than anything else. The sort of mass that signaled his presence.
“What is this we’re watching, John?”
“His acceptance speech.”
“My God, what a stupid America we live in. How about try again.”
John said nothing.
“You don’t know?” Bageant asked.
“Why don’t you just tell me.”
“What we’re watching is our death warrant, all right? What we’re watching is the official issuance of our demise.”
John shook his head.
“Don’t do that,” Bageant said. “You’re shaking your head because it’s still buried in the sand of the Bush administration.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Look at Biden up there. You see him. The second they close Guantanamo you know what his job is? His job is to start an investigation into enhanced interrogation. His job is to start rolling heads.”
“I’m not so sure. The past is past.” John pointed with the remote. “That’s what he’s saying.”
“The past is past?”
“That seems to be the message.”
“It’s morning in goddamn America? This is what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying: change. It’s what he’s saying.”
“Change? How about change as a probe by the U.S. Justice Department?”
“Come on, Ray.”
“How about change as a congressional inquiry with subpoena power? Truth commissions, all right? You honestly need convincing?”
He didn’t. You listened to a man like Ray Bageant because Bageant, in his circumspect way, was an adept of the twenty-first century. A dialectician of the working groups and video chats, the occasional pithy, well-timed tweet. It wasn’t hard to imagine him striding through the world of global finance, quoting interagency position papers and checking his phone from one of the lie-flat beds on the overnight to Berlin or Myanmar. Yet here he was, slouched on the couch, popping the ring-tops off can after can while people clung to streetlights to get a better cell phone shot of the president-elect.
“Peter can’t protect us,” Bageant said finally. “Peter,” he said, “is dead.”
“As in truly and officially?”
“As in he has ceased to exist.”
“And this is a permanent state, his death?”
Bageant smiled with what might have been exasperation, but John knew wasn’t. Peter Keyes had been a sort of god to John, burnished and almost bright with wisdom. He’d given John a chance to do something that mattered. But he knew it had been different for Ray. “It’s death, John. What can I say beyond that? He was wrong about a lot of things. He was right about a lot of things too, but on the question of death, well.”
“I understand.”
“It doesn’t give me any pleasure, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Like the rest of the world, John had seen it on TV and read about it online. But half of him had believed it was another rumor, another legend. Another lie. But it was true. When last he’d seen Peter he was wasting away with an autoimmune disorder. Then there was word of his recovery. And then word of his violent expiration. Not that his death was surprising. After a report surfaced identifying the Keyes Group as the parent corporation of Global Solutions, named as one of the accused in the case of Hassan Natashe, there were plenty of people who wanted to take a shot at Keyes. So it wasn’t his actual death.
It was the manner that unsettled John. All the talk of immortality, the antioxidants and hyperbaric chamber, the grooming of telomeres—only to be shot by some third-rate jihadist. A California-born convert who walked out of Friday prayers with his balled hatred and an antique machine-pistol. Peter must have walked into the bullets like rain, never believing in his own death, never having time to. Twenty years old, was the rumor online. A white kid, a college dropout singing Allahu akbar in the shower. It hurt to think it hadn’t even been a proper assassin, though John supposed it was fast becoming a traditional form of death: the disappointing killer with the failure-prone gun that, just this once, doesn’t fail.
“When you came to Yalta.”
“I remember.”
“I didn’t want him to meet with you, but he insisted.” Bageant let his hands float up as if disavowing what he had just said. “Make of that what you will.”
When the beer was gone they decided to get dressed and walk to the corner bodega. Bageant needed alcohol. John needed air.
They came home with a box of Franzia and drank wordlessly until the sun came up.
“I still think of it like the Blitz,” Bageant said. “A few RAF pilots holding the line against the barbarians.”
“We few.”
“We happy few.” He held the box of wine as if it were a child, one finger curled around the spout. “I’m not trying to sound all high and mighty. Mistakes were made. We know this. Some very regrettable decisions in the heat of the moment. There was confusion on the ground.”
“Fog of war.”
“Fog of war. We know this. We also know we did exactly what we were supposed to do and that’s why they’ll come after us.”
It was hours later that Bageant shook John awake.
“You need to shut up,” he said.
John’s eyes opened slowly. Outside it was day, another day.
“What’s wrong?”
“You were saying his name in your sleep.”
“Whose name?”
“Whose do you think, asshole? Hassan Natashe.”
*
Erin lived in a neighborhood of shabby-chic bungalows and old trees, a world of silver propane tanks and underpinned mobile homes stuffed in the margins. But of all the places John had seen in his hometown, it seemed to have best survived what seemed a plague of collective indifference. Not that he didn’t question how he defined the world. For years he had railed against the bourgeois norms of trim lawns, the policy holders, the ones with whole life and major medical. The comfort that encapsulates. The luxury that cushions. The heart’s carapace, he would say.
Or some such shit.
The day he drove to Peach Creek from his failed non-visit to his daughter, they had sat on Erin’s porch drinking wine and talking, and the talk had carried them through the afternoon into the evening where at some point they realized they were both hungry and drunk. They had wound up with takeout egg rolls and hibachi, John passed out on the couch and then up and on the road before Erin ever woke.
Since then they had been talking online, always at John’s initiating, never really intending to, but doing it anyway because when he talked to her there was the possibility he was talking to a past that wasn’t so much gone as misplaced. When they talked he could almost believe in the only resurrection he cared about: the resurrection of his wife. Going to see Kayla had been an honest mistake. But he saw now how foolish it had been, the nuclear option, the sort of all-out engagement he could never survive. It was different with Erin. At times she seemed as lonely and sleepless as John.
John: You awake?
EP: You 2 huh.
John: Roger that.
He had said nothing about his wife and children and wondered sometimes if Erin knew. It would be hard not to: if she had looked him up on the Garrison website or almost anywhere online she would have found mention of family. But maybe she chose not to look. Maybe she chose to allow John to reveal what he wanted to reveal. Or maybe she simply didn’t care.
John: I miss talking to you.
EP: Then come back.
John: I will.
EP: When?????
John: Soon. I promise.
That first day at her house she had given him this drunken half-cocked look, a little incredulous, a little
mocking. So here’s John. Back again. Slumming.
She was on the porch again when he next came, same rocking chair, same look, and it was at this moment he would later realize that things began to gather speed. The quickening started with her standing and smiling. That they wound up first in the shower together and then her bed, tangled and panting, seemed more an accident of acceleration than anything else. He didn’t really begin to think about what he had done until after when he sat naked on her mattress while she pulled on a T-shirt and went to bring something back in from the porch: a small jewelry box that held a baggie and lighter and several sealed hypodermics. He realized then what it was he had interrupted: sitting on the porch, she’d been on the verge of shooting up.
“My God.”
“Honey,” she said.
“That’s crack.”
“Crank, actually.”
A leather belt from her closet, the way she popped at the crook of her bent arm, slapping it as if trying to wake a small child. She shot up and her entire face went slack. Later, they made love a second time, slower, and afterward held each other lightly.
That was it. He thought that was it, a single Saturday fallen into his life like a stone.
But then it was every Saturday. Relicensure, he told Tess, who always seemed to be putting on her running shoes or taking them off. Relicensure, reaccreditation—he could hardly keep track of what he said, but knew, too, she wasn’t listening. She was running, she was trying to wean Laurie, she was trying to sleep through the night. He was attentive. In so many ways he was a good father. He did prayers and bedtime stories and breakfasts, but every Saturday, he was gone. Because he had to. Because to some extent he felt himself squaring those days drinking wine with Erin against his past, against his time in Minnesota with Stone and in California with Peter Keyes. That lost world of disaster and haute vegan cuisine. The women who appeared to be in constant pursuit of rare hand lotions. The men tapping on the screens of tablets, such an unnatural sound, like a deaf child imagining rain.
He squared it against the love they made, so tentative, as if giving birth to some frightened needful thing. Coaxing out their truer selves, what they might yet be if only they could sit still long enough to realize it.