by Mark Powell
He squared it against his time at Site Nine, too, his time of watching.
But then he squared the entire universe against that, every good thing he’d ever been or done against those months. The goodness of his children, the strength of both his wives, the purity his parents had maintained. He put it all on one side of the ledger, put Site Nine on the other, and prayed—to the extent he prayed, which was not at all really—that it balanced, knowing all along it did not.
He didn’t see her shoot up again, but recognized when she had: that glass-eyed splendor, that brittle-boned brightness he remembered from the Mexican restaurant their first night. She’d wind her heart like a clock and go out and spend the next twenty-four hours doing good.
Teaching children to read and parents not to beat those children.
How it was better to repair than wreck.
When he asked about the drugs she only smiled, a little sadly.
Oh, honey, did you think for one teeny second you were entitled to an opinion on it?
Some nights she would light a joss stick. For atmosphere, she said, but he knew it was to make him uncomfortable.
“Are you high right now?”
“My god, you’re living in a state of constant fear.”
“High or stoned or whatever you call it.”
“It’s going to keep you from being alive.”
“That’s possible.”
“But not from dying.”
“Probably not.”
“Definitely,” she would say, crawling across the bed toward him, “not.”
It was dizzying, with Erin one moment, with his family the next. He took the boys to see his parents and his mother suddenly burst into tears and begged him to have bloodwork done, full panels, cholesterol, kidney function, and he decided he couldn’t go back, at least not for a while.
Where he could go was to Erin.
“I think you’ve been sent to me,” she told him. “I am a messenger and the message is that it’s time for you to put everything behind you and live.”
He believed her.
The problem was, he believed Stone, too. There was another message, and then another, and finally John decided to call him back late one Saturday night as he drove north.
“One other thing I need, John.”
And he waited for it because what was the point in not waiting, what was the point in trying to dodge it? He had called Stone after all.
“One other thing I need because to be totally honest, the first thing, Hadawi’s e-mails—which I do appreciate,” Stone said, “but the first thing was mostly for my personal edification. This is more official. I need you to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“He’s just a kid, but I’ve taken a shine to him.”
“Honestly, Jimmy, I don’t much give a fuck.”
“You don’t give a fuck? All right, I get that, I do. But before you hang up, listen to me, all right? This isn’t simply something involving your ever-evolving legal status. This is beyond that. This is beyond some legal whatever.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s redemption, John. Do you believe me?”
“Who is he?”
“I’m about to call Lazarus out of the grave. I’m about to resurrect your life. Do you believe what I’m saying? Do you?”
And across the distance of miles and drinks, he did.
It was mindless and pointless and he knew he’d regret it, but John believed him.
29.
She had waited for this without realizing it.
In bed, everyone in bed. The children tucked in, John asleep beside her. Outside the moon lodged in the high dark of winter.
In two days they were driving to Pigeon Forge for Thanksgiving, their first family trip since Laurie had been born. And on Friday—Black Friday—Tess was going Christmas shopping at the outlets. But that was only a small part of it. The larger was that she was going to meet Kayla. John would keep Laurie and the boys—he knew nothing about Tess’s plans—which meant Tess would have the entire day.
So maybe it was the fact that her meeting John’s daughter was settled.
Maybe it was the fact that everyone was home and safe and sleeping, and that was settled.
But whatever it was, she realized a certain moment had arrived.
She folded the page of the book she was reading and dimmed the bedside light. The USB drive was buried in the nightstand but it took only a moment to find it. In the kitchen, she turned the laptop so that the screen faced only her. She inserted the drive and opened the file to a gallery of thumbnail photographs.
They appeared to be vacation photographs from somewhere cold and distant. Rainy landscapes, gray castles, city streets. Gingerbread men and mulled wine. The occasional sign appeared vowel-deprived and she thought of the box at John’s parents’, the Slovak chocolate, the postcard from Ukraine. An apron of beach below the orange rooftops below the blue mountains.
Concrete dust on a monument.
A poorly lighted park and a blur of traffic.
She kept clicking until she came to a face.
Not John. It was a man she didn’t know. Except she did. The face belonged to one of the men she had met at St. Simons so many years ago. That first weekend she had insisted on driving up, she and John only barely dating, a maybe couple still in the process of becoming what it was they eventually became.
The man looked older in this picture, he looked tired. But Tess felt certain it was him. Then she thought of something else, she thought of the mail that had accrued during that winter retreat, and she remembered the name: James Stone.
Hadn’t John mentioned it recently, some old friend?
Jimmy I might have called him. Haven’t seen him in years and there he was outside my office.
She was staring at the face of James Stone.
The next image was of a man, seen from behind. He was kneeling on the floor so that she saw the dark soles of his slippers against the orange of his jumpsuit. Not his face, not his hands. He was without any identifying markers.
He was, she thought, the man in the basement.
Or some man in some basement.
Something told her to stop.
Something told her to slowly pull her hand back from the touchscreen. When she trusted herself to move, she closed the window and removed the USB drive. But she couldn’t get up, at least not yet. That same something told her to look, but not at the thumb drive, and she brought up the CNN website and there, bannered across the page in large font was news that the man in the basement, the American, was dead, beheaded online for all to see.
She made no move.
There would be a new video now, there would be a record of it.
Still, she made no move. Someone was very near. Someone stood directly behind her, close enough to touch, if only Tess would turn. Yet she made no move. She made no sound. Then, moving very calmly and very deliberately, she put the laptop to sleep and went back to bed, put the USB drive back in her nightstand, and took up her book. John was still asleep. He hadn’t stirred.
She flipped to a chapter on nineteenth-century whaling.
The tails of sperm whales, she read, were a constant danger to whalers chasing them in small boats. They could smash timber, they could break necks. They were so dangerous that whalers had once referred to them as the Hands of God. Which spoke not only to the sudden violence, but to the unpredictability of their movement.
30.
Jimmy Stone’s place was in the mountains off I-40 and just south of the North Carolina–Tennessee line, the forest dense and steep, the road a constant switchback. The last half mile was a gravel road overhung with fir and then the sky opened and there in the clearing was the house to which Stone had given John directions.
It was a 1950s lake house—the gray-green water began just down the slope—refurbished, but not recently. A big screened deck with a canoe tucked beneath. Asbestos siding painted a dark red. A rotten-looking hammock. There was an E
conoline van and beneath a shed what appeared to be an old Camry. John parked and stood in the yard. The only sound the wind in the trees and the slow rotation of a weather vane.
Stone waited on the porch, smiling, a drink in one hand. He had acquired a cut down the left side of his face, closed, scabbed over, but puffy and still unhealed. The kind of wound that stays with you.
“You found us.”
“Yeah.”
“Not that I had any doubt. What are you drinking?”
“What happened to your face?”
“A misunderstanding is all. What are you drinking, John?”
John didn’t answer, just followed Stone inside where he stood beneath a trophy buck and poured something brown into a glass. The room was long and narrow, low-ceilinged and decorated with down-home kitsch. The needlepoint cushions. The prints of mallards. All of a piece except for the painting thumbtacked to the wall. John stepped closer. It was a page torn from a book, glossy and creased where it had been folded, a horrific image that registered only vaguely.
“Goya,” Stone said.
“Torn out of a book?”
“He brought it with him.” Stone motioned across the room. Through the sliding glass door John could see someone sitting on the back porch, staring out at the lake. “Reed Sharma, not that it matters.”
“What am I supposed to say to him?”
“You said to me something once about understanding regret, about having to live with it.”
“I said that?”
“Jesus. You wrote an entire book about it. About wanting to undo what can’t be undone. I want you to tell that to him.”
“Tell him what?”
“Your past,” Stone said.
“Which part?”
“That boy—he’s on the verge of doing something beyond stupid. He’s on the verge of becoming us. You get what I mean when I say that?”
“Which part?”
“All of it,” Stone said. “Except one thing. Tell him about your wife. Tell him about your daughter. But no Peter Keyes and no Site Nine.”
“That boy?”
“Correct. That boy right there. The only other human being in plain sight.”
“You said Lazarus on the phone.”
Stone motioned with his drink. “That’s Lazarus right out there watching the bass jump.”
“I thought I was Lazarus.”
Stone shook his head in disappointment. “You want to try to make some amends. You want to try to undo some of the damage you did—”
“Don’t you?”
“I stand by what I did. I did what was necessary. But I know you don’t necessarily share the sentiment.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t know what to say? You’re a counselor, aren’t you?” Stone said. “So go counsel him. Go out there and tell him what you did, and then tell him how you live with it every day. Tell him how you’re living with it still. Or maybe tell him how you’re not living with it if that sounds more like it. Tell him how you’re failing to live with it.”
“All right,” John said. Because that did sound more like it. The not living, the failing.
“All right,” he said. Because that sounded exactly like it.
The failing was his past. The failing was where he would start.
Part Three
AltKombat
31.
As for Reed Sharma’s failing—which was just another way of saying his past—you might start after his graduation from an expensive Swiss boarding school, that lolling period that was more like twenty-odd months but his mother chose to call his gap year. Endless drift—that was more the truth of it. Nineteen and hungry but who could say for what? Working as a runner at a brokerage house, a job reluctantly secured for him by his disbelieving father. But Reed had taken it because it put him inside the machine, and even then he knew all about the machine.
You might start there.
Or you might start with his father, chief economist for an influential consulting firm, and well placed in the lucrative intersection of government and private sector cooperation. Or go back further still: Reed’s grandfather had emigrated after the partition of India, a secular thoracic surgeon who knew better than to walk to Pakistan with nothing more than his new bride and an antique British service revolver.
Reed’s own father was born three years later in the Baltimore hospital where his immigrant father—Reed’s grandfather—would soon be chief of staff. It was in Baltimore where Reed’s father went on to meet Reed’s mother, a snow-white society girl studying literature at Johns Hopkins. The result being money on both sides, influence compounded quarterly, and a scrawny kid—Reed—who appeared more Italian than anything else. Nobody went to the mosque, nobody got on their knees. His mother was Catholic, but only at Christmas and at Easter, because their religion was the self-actualization of wealth. Which is another way of saying they were Americans.
So maybe start there, start with the money Reed didn’t want.
Start with the privilege he couldn’t stand.
Start with nineteen-year-old Reed, pissy and depressive and stuttering.
Start, perhaps, with Reed in New York.
He had come for the movement, the revolution, it didn’t matter what exactly so long as the underlying principle was disruption, so long as the order of the day was the destruction of his father’s world, the stomping of money’s clogged heart. This was just after Occupy had been flushed from American parks, their Gore-Tex tents and vegan meals hosed out of city squares from New York to Oakland. But he knew the energy had not dissipated so much as been sublimated, gone underground where now and then it would rear up, not uncommonly in the tags and murals that began to appear on the façades and glass fronts of banks.
It was why he had come. Word would go out that a graffiti artist had hit the HSBC on Fifth Avenue or Goldman down in the Financial District and Reed would rush out to see it before it was pressure-washed into oblivion. It felt like the beginning of something rather than the end. These wannabe Banksy boys with theirs spray acrylics and paperbacks of Chomsky—who could possibly stop them? That they were tagging everything, reaching impossible locations, first the walls of some corporate building and then the lobby itself, the expensive bas reliefs, the fountains carved with dates and names—it spoke to their omnipotence. That they were inside the Bank of America Tower was proof, Reed thought, of the helpless decadence of his father’s world.
Then it went online. First Anonymous, and then its children, these cyber-anarchists who called themselves the Jackals, the Aliens, the Werner Herzog Metaphysical Collective Devoted to Cosmic Indifference. They were shutting down banks and government websites, redirecting traffic from Wells Fargo to a dummy site promising to redistribute stolen wealth. An ATM in Columbus Circle was spitting out receipts printed MOLOCH IS GOD AND JANET YELLEN HIS PROPHET.
Yellen? For realz? Janet-fucking-Yellen you’re saying?
No kidding?
Reed loved it and was determined to make contact because it’s not a cliché if you actually do something, right? He was what they needed after all: a believer, but a believer on the inside. He had access to whatever it was he had access to. A laminated swipe badge he wore on a lanyard around his neck, keypad entry to the seventh floor.
Everyone at the firm knew of his father.
Everyone smiled and nodded.
Business had been grim once but not now, now there was money to be made. Meanwhile, Reed bided his time, made coffee and lunch runs. Espresso. Sushi like maki rolls and ika nigiri and never did he forget the extra wasabi because you have to attend to things, you have to pay attention.
Meanwhile—within that previous meanwhile—he was putting out feelers, asking questions, letting it be known that he was willing to act, poised, perched. Prepared for something beyond riding the A train to a delicatessen near Fort Tryon Park. The special pastries from Park Slope. The cupcakes and craft beer. These refined palates that reminded him of his fat
her’s students back in Palo Alto, econ majors concerned with junk bonds and flavored popcorn. People getting obsessive over shade-grown roasts, debating coffee blends as runic as apocryphal gospels.
And still the feelers were out there, Reed’s antennae up. Reed attuned, awaiting. Anxiously awaiting, yes, admittedly, but knowing too it was a time for clarity, for thinking things through. Like what he was against: things like corporate capital, bullies, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. His father. Also the shits on the seventh-floor equities desk who so obviously knew all that there was to know in the entire fucking universe even though they were barely older than him. Fuck those guys.
Now a list of what he was for, but admittedly it was a vague list: whatever the man in the street is screaming about, the old guy with the sandwich boards and the lazy eye, the dreadlocked white girl wrestled to the ground by riot police, the kid shot dead in the face with pepper spray: Reed was for whatever it was they were about, no hesitation, no questions asked.
Meanwhile—because this was a period of meanwhiles, each stacked one inside the next like nesting dolls—meanwhile, he got a room in a railroad apartment in Flatbush and spread his arms so that his fingertips grazed the walls so narrow was his single room, and he loved that, the constriction of physical space mirroring his narrowing focus. This was clarity speaking its truth-to-power as clear as the ring of an old rotary-dial phone. He loved the rotting window casement. Loved the radiator beneath it and how sometimes he forgot and left the dial set at five so that he woke on his synthetic foam mattress in a funk of sweat and body odor.
He had rashes.
He talked to the cab drivers. Sikhs in turbans. Smoke-eyed Nigerians. The average cab driver had a PhD in systems theory and a familiarity with the use of thumbscrews. Before the coup they were cabinet secretaries and legal advisors to the now-deposed junta.
But how to let them know he was simpatico?