by Mark Powell
“Please.”
“You asked me, Jimmy, and now I’m blessing you. Isn’t this what you wanted? You’re going to be purified. You’re forgiven. The way you showed up right now—how is that not a sign?”
He began to splash the gasoline around the legs of the chair and onto Jimmy’s lap and down the sleeves of his bound arms. Even the scent burned, the fluid alone sharp enough to deposit you on the far shore. Jimmy’s eyes watered and shut.
“What choice did I have?” he said.
“You had a choice.”
“What fucking choice? You went after his family, his children.”
He stopped and when Jimmy could look he thought the boy looked hurt, hurt and still very much a child.
“No, Jimmy. That’s the point. I didn’t go after his family. I didn’t go after his children. I’m the one who hasn’t hurt anyone.” He went back to pouring and then stopped. “Except you,” he said.
He emptied the first can and uncapped the second.
“Do you know what bombs do, Jimmy? That’s what he asked me and I’ll admit to you that I didn’t.”
“Nothing has to happen.”
“But I do now.”
“Nothing has to happen,” Jimmy said. He could feel his voice getting away from him, beginning to scratch with altitude. His eyes were squeezed shut against the fumes.
“I had to learn, but I do now.”
“This isn’t Syria.”
“You should have stuck with watching.”
“This isn’t Iraq.”
“What’s the difference, Jimmy? Once you get involved, I mean. You should have stuck with watching like all the other good citizens of the West.”
“Reed—”
“The good citizens of these United States.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“I’m not doing anything. This is your choice.”
“You can still just disappear.”
“See, that’s the part I’m afraid of.” He had poured a long trail from the chair to the curtains. “I’m afraid of disappearing. Afraid no one will see, that no one will watch, and wasn’t that the whole point? To see what happens to the soul under duress? I remember reading that in Maynard’s book, I guess. That a pattern emerges. That a pattern asserts itself. So you had Hassan Natashe, and now you have me.” He held the gas can in front of Jimmy. “Do you want it all? It’s your choice, Jimmy.”
Jimmy hesitated, eyes shut, tearing, and then he nodded his head. Yes, he said, or tried to say. If he was going to do it, he should do it right. If he was going to be purified, let him be purified.
“All of it?” Reed asked.
He nodded.
“Good,” Reed said, and began to pour it over Jimmy’s head where it soaked his hair and ran into his ears and clenched eyes. “You’re a good man, Jimmy. You are. I believe that now.”
Jimmy coughed and felt something being placed into his hands. It was a small lighter. He could feel the grating of the metal wheel.
“It’s up to you, Jimmy. You get to decide.”
“Reed—”
“You choose, Jimmy. The lighter’s in your hand.”
“Please, Reed.”
“Do it or don’t. But no more talking.”
“I’m begging you. Leave her alone.”
“Don’t talk. The time to talk—well, no, Jimmy. That’s over now. Use the lighter or don’t. That’s up to you. All that’s left for me is to watch.” He stood in the open door, one foot in, one foot on the way out. “Now,” he said, “is the time for watching.”
43.
Reed sat in the car and watched the flames go up the asbestos siding to shimmer and bend and lick at the asphalt shingles. He had left everything exactly as he wanted it be destroyed—the photographs, the letter, the crumpled Goya print and crushed thumb drive—still he was sorry to watch it burn, sorry to know it had come to that for Jimmy. He’d always known it was a possibility. Still, he had hoped it wouldn’t end this way. But he needed them to know he wasn’t like them, he needed them to understand how utterly and completely they had failed to understand him, how utterly and completely they had underestimated him. He didn’t want Jimmy dead, but now that he was burning something was speaking to him.
It wasn’t the money. He had left the money he had found hidden above ceiling tiles—there would be no need for the money. The money was useless. What he heard might have been coming from the gun. The Walther sat on the passenger seat, disassembled on a square of white chamois. He watched the house burn, felt the heat on his face, and for the third time took the pistol and reinserted the barrel into the slide. He flipped the slide-stop lever and when the slide snapped into place he popped in the magazine. The gun was loaded. He checked the safety and tucked it into his bag.
Then he took out his phone and texted Kayla.
See you tomorrow!
A moment later came her response.
Can’t wait
luv U
Something was speaking to him, and maybe it came from the fire or maybe it came from the gun, but whatever its source it sounded not so much like the voice of Allah or God as the Voice of Reason.
Do you know what bombs do, Reed?
He thought he did, finally. He hadn’t lied to Jimmy. Those days practicing in front of the mirror, mouthing b-o-m-b, as if he could conjure a violence apart from himself. How naive he had been. But not anymore.
The roof was beginning to collapse. It was time to go. But before he did he entered John Maynard’s contact information and sent the telescope invitation to Maynard’s e-mail account. The invitation was in Arabic, but he would know, and he would watch.
It was that time now. It was time for the watching.
Part Five
The Watching
44.
Two days before Christmas they drove north to Cherokee, John and Erin, and from there headed east on the Blue Ridge Parkway and into Pisgah National Forest, the highway a furrow plowed along the ridge tops and the slim edge of the viaduct. It was snowing, and he looked at the highway gates knowing they’d be closing them soon, closing the parkway to traffic. There would be no going back. So there was that sense of finality. But more than that, there was the sense of guilt. Guilt in not being with Kayla and his parents, and more guilt still in not being with Tess and Laurie and the boys. He felt its presence like something coming through the vents with the heat. But when he looked out at the fogged valley and bristled mountain slopes, the green quilt of fir and pine and snow it was there too, this guilt, and it wasn’t just his.
“No one up here,” Erin said.
“No.”
“But the roads are fine. The roads aren’t slick. They’re all at home, I guess.”
He twined his fingers with hers and thought of the fingers his father had exchanged for the chance to come home. Carrying his lunch in a plastic Ingles bag. Sending checks to Jimmy Bakker and Praise the Lord. Three fingers it had been. He knew his father would have exchanged even more to go back. And what was it they had gone back to? To the corn patch and fish fries. The fierce mountain streams and the good vine-ripe tomatoes. The church suppers and the baby showers. Easter Sunday. Hot days and cool nights when you can’t help but make a fire just to smell the wood smoke.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you remember Paul Harvey?”
“We went to school with him?”
“No, the radio guy. My dad used to listen. Is he dead now you think?”
Erin looked at him and then stared out the window.
“What’s the name of this place?” she asked.
The name was Snow Tree, a cedar-shaked inn that overlooked the snowy valley.
The parking lot was plowed and empty. The room key hung from a plastic tree.
John passed over his credit card and carried in their bags while Erin shot up in the bathroom. The furnace was on high, the room stuffy and overheated, and he turned it off while she assumed that familiar pose, crouched on the lowered toilet seat, a lamp burning pew
ter light. The needle went into the crook of her smaller arm, as if she were vaccinating a small child against grief. He tried not to stare. She’d asked him not to be a prude. Aren’t we all just doing the best we can? Aren’t we all equipped differently? Isn’t that what your job is about?
She came out in a slip, the bathroom light radiant beneath the door.
“Open the curtains, John.”
“People can see.”
“I don’t care if people can see. Let ’em see. There’s no one here but us anyway.”
It was a heatless light that fell through the part in the curtains, a rind of yellow indifference, and they made love slowly, lingering in each other, as if knowing already that here in their beginnings their end was near. Outside, the flurries turned to sleet, not spun sugar but cracked ice. Inside, they lay in bed beneath the sheets. She touched the prayer rope that John had somehow failed to remove.
“What’s this for?” She was on her stomach and had reached out so that one bead was pinched between thumb and forefinger. “You’re not Orthodox.”
“No.”
“What are you then?”
“I don’t know.”
She pulled it toward her.
“Do you say the prayer that goes with it? Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God.”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
“You do?”
“No. Actually, I don’t.” He was looking out the window at a magnolia, its limbs weighed with snow. “I don’t ever.”
She idly touched the inside of his arm.
“What we need is a plan,” she said, “that doesn’t involve crazy.”
Later, they drove down the mountain to eat. She wanted to cook for him—they had brought food—but somehow they ate nothing but strawberries, a pint of them in their plastic coffin while the Cure played on her iPad. John listened to her move about the suite, in the kitchenette with its mini-fridge and coffeemaker, in the bathroom. Twice he called Jimmy Stone but no one answered.
Down in the valley the sleet had turned to rain and they debated stopping. It was not even a town really, a strip of fast food and gas stations and, at the farthermost reaches of the halogen streetlights, a Chuck E. Cheese’s with skinned carpet and laminated booths, a few families milling sadly around the skee-ball lanes. A ream of tickets hung brown and perforated beside the coin slot. They ate cheese pizza and stood outside to drink vodka and tomato juice on a wet putting green.
“I don’t think this is it,” Erin said.
“Don’t think this is what?”
“What we need. This isn’t what we need.”
She kept moving, little involuntary fidgets that seemed to travel out along her wrists to compress as a twitch in the nail beds of her hands. Someone was singing in the car on the way back and it took him a moment to realize she had brought the iPad with her. The Cure. She was singing along with the Cure. Later, she dried in front of the heater vents and, still damp, passed out.
He carried her to bed and checked his e-mail. Happy students. Sad students. Nigerian princes. A message accosting him in Arabic.
He closed the screen and called his parents.
“Kayla will be here tomorrow,” his mother said.
“I’m sorry to miss her.”
“How is Florida?”
“Fine. Same as always.”
He could hear his dad watching an old Detroit Pistons game, Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars, big bad Bill Laimbeer with his acrylic facemask.
“Merry Christmas, Dad.”
“Merry Christmas, John. Your mamma and I love you so much.”
It was only at the very end that John had flown to Ukraine.
Hassan Natashe had been released and though Peter was sick he wanted to speak directly to John. So John drove from Site Nine to Krakow, flew to Kiev and eventually Simferopol where a car took him down a potted road to Yalta. It was August and the shingle of beach was covered with blistering Russians. Behind them palm trees and mountains that at dusk turned the color of wet gravel.
He waited to see Peter, walked the concrete promenade, bought a postcard—GREETINGS FROM SUNNY YALTA—thought about Tess back in St. Pete and the days they would swim off the point at St. Simons. He could have called her, but he didn’t. He could have mailed the postcard—it seemed somehow more manageable—but he didn’t do that either.
The next day he saw Peter. John had known he was sick but it always seemed more something passing than serious, a persistent cold, or the earliest incubation of flu. Something that would come and go. No need for alarm, just regular injections of B12 and an abundance of antioxidants. But that was no longer the case.
Peter owned a compound overlooking the Baltic and John found him in a corner of the main hall, an area crowded with tapestries and plush chairs gone ragged, over-upholstered as if for some impoverished lord. Above, a vault of glass and stone. Beneath, the dying billionaire. Even in the darkness John could see he had lost weight. Nothing but kale and edible flowers, Bageant had told him. He had quit his meds. No more combination therapy. No AZT, no prednisone. He was eating flowers when John arrived, purple ones, and even in the darkness John could see they were beautiful.
“God is a staircase that ascends to a place that isn’t there,” he said, “or isn’t there yet. Do you know who said that?”
“No.”
He exhaled. “Neither do I.”
They sat like that for a while, long enough for John’s eyes to adjust, long enough to discern the outline of his slippered feet, the robe that hung beneath the curve of his skull.
“Being,” he said, “is not about persistence.”
“Christ, Peter.”
“Are you listening to me?”
“Tell me what we’ve done here.”
“Tell you? You’re supposed to tell me.”
“Peter?”
“Life,” he said, “is not opposed to death.”
He had a thin smile on his face.
“Go home,” he said, and a flower fell from his mouth. “Forget.”
Or did he?
Without question he fell into a pit of coughing out of which he might rise, but only briefly. He was nearer to death than life. Go home. Did he say those words? Forget. Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps it was an aural hallucination, the thing John most needed to hear. He looked in Peter’s eyes for an answer, but they were buried in the grave of his collapsing face.
Go home. Forget.
*
It was four in the morning on Christmas Eve when he woke with heartburn and went looking in his bag for his Prilosec. But what he found was the gun Stone had given him, and what he realized was that he had done exactly as Stone had told him: he had kept it with him. At all times in all situations.
45.
It wasn’t like Tess remembered.
Or actually it was exactly like she remembered, only she had chosen to misremember.
The drive took longer, a front of rain that didn’t break until they were in south Georgia and then it rained again on I-75, sideways, blowing east off the Gulf all the way to the causeway to Sanibel Island. She had burned off the fatigue with three espressos, but felt seared and jerky, twice thinking she saw someone in the front seat beside her—it’s not even real Wally had said—her husband’s first dead wife in her peripheral vision so clearly Tess had screamed inside the walls of her head. She knew then it was time to stop and pulled into a McDonald’s where, standing in the bathroom stall, she refused to cry.
But by the time she got to her parents they were all four in tears, Tess and Laurie, Wally and Daniel, and she was exhausted. Pissed at John and pissed at herself. But then the rain blew over and it was a warm evening, Christmas Eve’s Eve, and everyone was coming out to greet them, her parents, her sister, her brother and his wife and their three girls, and they were carrying up luggage and pouring Tess a glass of wine and already her mom was holding Laurie, and Wally and Daniel were playing Legos on the floor with her sister, and David’s girls were dancing in front of the TV to Taylor Swi
ft songs. The tree was all silver tinsel and silver star and off the back deck you looked out over the sawgrass marsh to the sea where a paring of bright moon hung like the sort of punctuation meant to signal contentment.
The wine flushed through her and she felt the tension in her shoulders release. She was here, she was happy. All of them piled into the living room and kitchen, happily disheveled. She hugged her parents and neither asked about John.
Her brother came out with a glass dish of raw steak and tin-foiled potatoes.
“Who wants to swim?” he asked, and of course they all did, the kids splashing in the heated pool, Liz wading in with Laurie. Night-swimming beneath the wire cage that encased everything.
Tess stood by the grill where her brother cooked dinner.
She motioned at his amber glass.
“Is that the bourbon you got for John?”
“Where is old John anyway?”
“Can I have a glass?”
“You can have three, but any more than that and you’ll fall off these running shoes we got you.”
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Maximalist. How could I not?”
“They are sort of orthopedic, aren’t they?”
“You’ll look like some speedy grandma.”
They swam, ate, danced in front of the TV, and it was all exactly like she had hoped it would be, exactly as how she misremembered. But then exhaustion reasserted itself. The children got fussy. Her mother, pink with Cabernet, wanted to talk really talk about what was going on with her and John and talking, really or not, was the last thing on earth Tess wanted.
Then her father announced they were all walking down to the beach. Blue whales had been spotted close to shore. All Tess wanted to do was put the children to bed and sleep herself.
“Dad, it’s after ten.”
“But blue whales, honey. Your mother heard it on NPR.”
So they did that, they trundled down the boardwalk over the dunes down to the sand, but Laurie was asleep and Daniel stepped on a sand spur and David’s two oldest girls wanted to walk alone down to the pier where a reggae band was playing and—