“Apologize,” he said—and he picked a petal.
He plucked a second petal: “Don’t apologize.”
If only it could be that easy—following the dictates of chance. But of course it could be that easy. All he had to do was to beg forgiveness and he’d be off the hook. His life would once again be his own. He might even win public esteem for his confession like those adulterous televangelists, forcing the genie back into the bottle except that was what everybody expected of him. What everybody wanted. He’d apologize, and adopt a kid, and six months later he’d be at a baseball game singing God Bess America—and even he wouldn’t care anymore.
He pulled out more petals. “Apologize. Don’t apologize. Apologize.” Soon the blossom was nearly bald. Before the plant rendered a verdict, he dozed off.
Although Arnold slept less than a quarter of an hour, when he awoke, it felt like a new day. What a difference a few minutes made. Sunshine was already streaming through the skylights and Lucinda’s Myna bird, which she kept behind the lycopodium and old world ferns, was scratching at the door of its cage. The sunflower lay at Arnold’s feet, mutilated, and he’d long lost track of where he was in his plucking. The botanist dropped the remains in the compost bin.
In his office, the television was still playing. But miraculously, the right-wing cable channel was no longer covering his case. Instead, they’d apparently glommed on to a fresh cause célèbre, this one an urban crime scene involving yellow police tape. Arnold was about to shut the machine off when he heard his own name mentioned. Mr. Brinkman, said the newscaster, may be armed and is presumed to be dangerous. That’s when the crime scene came into focus. They were showing the Church of the Crusader with a police searchlight illuminating its enormous windows. Only rather than one broken pane, all of the glass was shattered. “He ran from window to window like a maniac,” Spotty Spitford explained. “I’d given him a Bible in the hope that it might soothe his anger, but that wasn’t the Lord’s will. What did he do with it? He used it as a weapon against God. The beast—for it’s hard to think of a hatemonger like that as anything else—seemed determined to knock out every window in the tabernacle. I pity a creature who has no love for his own country, but I fear an animal who can desecrate a house of worship.” But what amazed Arnold most weren’t Spitford’s lies, but his clothing. The minister wore a pair of cotton pyjamas and a stocking cap. He’d changed out of his suit before phoning the police. “It pains me to say that Mr. Brinkman also chose this opportunity to express himself through racial invective. He called me a word that begins with the letter N that I will choose not to repeat.”
So the exploits of the Tongue Traitor grow increasingly deranged, observed the reporter. Not the fast-talker who usually followed Arnold’s actions, but a higher-ranking “correspondent at large” from the network. If you recall, earlier this week the Bronx county prosecutor announced that she might charge Mr. Brinkman with disorderly conduct. That may now be the least of his problems. We have word in this morning from the United States Attorney’s Office that, after this latest incident, the federal government is planning to charge Mr. Brinkman under the Terrorism Acts. Such charges may include destruction of a house of worship with the intent to incite widespread fear, as well as issuing threats against a public official, because Reverend Spitford is a member of the City Council’s advisory panel on religious affairs. Conviction on any of these counts would obviously result in a substantial prison sentence. That’s the latest from here in Upper Manhattan, where it appears that the Tongue Traitor will soon officially be known as the Tongue Terrorist.
PART II
Spring-Summer 2004
CHAPTER 7
Prisons, according to Bonnie Card, were highly underappreciated.
They’d had this conversation nearly a decade earlier, in the Berkshires, on the lakefront deck of the Cards’ summer retreat. The cottage itself was a clapboard structure constructed from red cedar and bald cypress around the turn of the twentieth century. At first, the choice of wood had mystified Arnold. Why import cedar boards from Ontario, or barge cypress planks up the Connecticut River, when the local forest abounded with white pine and Balsam firs? Bonnie and Gilbert hadn’t a clue. They’d purchased the property from a real estate firm in Pittsfield. Enough history for them. But Arnold had made a point investigating the construction. He’d spoken to the former owner of the defunct summer camp across the lake, who’d referred him to the elderly widow of a local dairy farmer. The only answer she’d offered was: “All the houses around here are built like that.” Eventually, the proprietor of the local bookshop, where the botanist had led an informal discussion on floral-based dining, had unravelled the mystery: One hundred years earlier, there’d been hardly a tree within a day’s walk of the Cards’ cabin. Only pastureland. Miles and miles of defoliated brush. So the Brahmin textile magnate who was erecting the cottage as a fishing lodge, forced to cart in his lumber, had splurged on the most lavish softwoods he could find. That also explained the maple floors on the lower level and the tamarack wainscoting in the bedrooms. “It’s incredible how you can spend so much time in a place and yet know so little about it,” Arnold had mused. Bonnie had responded with her tirade against the penal system.
How often do you think about prisons? She’d asked. Not often, right? Maybe when you pass a sign on the interstate warning you not to pick up hitchhikers. Or on the rare occasion you hear about a jailbreak or violent uprising on the evening news. But prisons are the defining moral feature of our culture—the atrocity by which future generations will judge us. The Medieval Church had its Inquisition. The South had Negro slavery. We have two million men and women behind bars. Which is something we never think about, on a daily basis—though it’s far more important than wondering about how our homes were built or with what sort of wood. Arnold recalled insisting that he thought about prisons all the time: Hadn’t he even taught a workshop on gardening for juvenile offenders at Riker’s Island? That had just whetted Bonnie’s appetite. You think about prisons in the abstract, she’d said. Incarceration is a misfortune that happens to other people. Occasionally, when you feel a human connection to one of those people, let’s say Nelson Mandela or the Birmingham Six, you find the concept of imprisonment unsettling. Because it could have been you. That’s the reason Kafka’s The Trial is so disturbing. But the truth of the matter is that you never reflect upon what it means to spend thirty years in a small padlocked cell. You don’t appreciate the horror. And I mean whether for a crime you didn’t commit or a crime you did commit, because if imprisonment is torture, whether or not the prisoner is guilty is beside the point. Bonnie had later expanded this sermon into a highly controversial article for a British magazine in which she referred to American prisons as “concentration camps for the poor.” That had provoked outrage from Holocaust survivors and public prosecutors, but also leading prisoner rights groups, which weren’t exactly thrilled to find themselves allied with Professor Babykiller. Now, a terrorism charge hanging over his head, Arnold couldn’t shake Bonnie’s final words on the subject: People like Arnold Brinkman don’t think about prisons because people like Arnold Brinkman don’t end up in prisons. Maybe people like him might spend a few months in a country club jail if they misappropriated other people’s money, but these institutions were like boarding schools for recalcitrant adults, wall-less facilities surrounded by chalk lines, not real prisons where rape and isolation defined the daily routine. That Arnold might be sent to a run-of-the-mill locks-and-bars federal penitentiary—for many years, if not forever—was absolutely unthinkable. He refused to let that happen.
But what then? Arnold wasn’t exactly capable of holing himself up in the basement of the nursery with a stockpile of ammunition, a là Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—nor was he foolish enough to try. He certainly wasn’t ready to call it quits with a cup of hemlock. The wisest choice would have been to follow Vince Sprague to Fiji—or some similar island sanctuary, because one atoll probably wasn’t large enou
gh for the two of them—but that sort of escape required planning and connections and time. Arnold had none of these. He wasn’t even sure where he’d put his passport. Moreover, he couldn’t possibly hope to make it past airport security. That was the difference between Arnold and his ex-brother-in-law: Celeste’s husband was just another obscure white-slaver, not even a footnote on the crime-blotter. The Tongue Terrorist was a household name. Which meant, ironically, that Gilbert Card had been right. It was all about borders. And Arnold was on the wrong side of them. He’d end up spending the rest of his life in a 8’ x 10’ cell, another darling of the Left like Mumia Abu-Jamal or Lisl Auman, because he happened to be standing on one side of an arbitrary political boundary, a line as imaginary as the equator. In some countries, sticking out his tongue at the American flag would have made him a hero. He could have been elected mayor of Havana or Tehran. But that did him little good in New York City after 9-11. Even the so-called liberals would offer a half-hearted, apologetic defence: We deplore his actions, but we believe in the principles of free expression. Because we do love America. He had hundreds of “free-thinking” friends, but not one couple he could call upon who would let him hide out in their cellar while the FBI hunted for him. Not if that meant jeopardizing their own freedom or compromising their grandchildren’s chances of preschool admission. He also had a rolodex full of college classmates and hiking partners, every last one of whom, he sensed viscerally, would have handed Anne Frank over to the Germans. Even Bonnie and Gilbert would urge him to turn himself in. Only Judith might help him—if she could. And Guillermo. He didn’t doubt the business manager would shield him from a hail of bullets, if necessary. But loyalty and utility were not one and the same. Where could the Venezuelan possible conceal him that the authorities wouldn’t think to look? What Arnold needed was a new friend: an instant Sancho Panza. Or a sure-shot mistress of the Belle Star-Calamity Jane variety.
That’s when he thought of the girl. Why not? They shared no common past, no mutual acquaintances. She wasn’t enough part of his life that the powers-that-be would ever think to trace him to her. Maybe he could offer the girl a trade: He’d do the damned interview her way if she’d let him hide in her closet. Not forever—just long enough for him to gain his bearing. Long enough to arrange for a more permanent escape. Even Judith couldn’t reasonably fault him for contacting the girl under these circumstances. Arnold knew enough not to return home: As much as he longed to see his wife, to discuss this crisis like any other family emergency, he imagined the FBI was already ensconced at their townhouse—lifting fingerprints from their glassware, scanning their computer for pornography, exploring their basement with a Geiger counter. So he’d have to take the initiative and grant himself Judith’s permission to contact the girl. They were a nation at war, right? Well, war made strange bedfellows. Metaphorically speaking. If his only friend turned out to be a radical reporter half his age, Arnold was no longer in a position to turn down any offer of assistance. He was even willing to eat crow and concede that he needed Cassandra’s help desperately, an admission he sensed that the reporter would relish. Luckily, he’d kept her handwritten business card. Where he’d stashed it, of course, was another matter entirely. He rummaged through his desk drawers, finally turning them over on the blotter in frustration. The contents still smelled of sweet tobacco from his pipe-smoking days. It amazed him what junk he’d collected over the years: matchbooks from upscale restaurants, insects preserved in amber, his mother’s old address book—which he’d used to telephone her surviving friends on the night she’d died. He had contact information for dozens of retired social workers. But no handwritten card. Of course not. Because the card, he recalled, was in the pocket of his overalls, and his gardening outfit was hanging on the hook in his tool shed.
On the television, they were showing a taped interview with two college kids who’d begun marketing “Tongue Traitor” paraphernalia. T-shirts and caps. The shirts featured gargantuan mouths with protruding tongues and captions like: “The Tongue Traitor: From His Lips to Osama’s Ass” and “Loose Tongues Topple Towers: Keep Your Mouth Shut.” Arnold swept his elbow across the desk, knocking the television to the carpet. The set emitted a flurry of sparks, but continued broadcasting. He didn’t unplug the device—no need to risk electrocuting himself. That would just be more headline fodder for the tabloids. The disabled television reminded him that what the situation called for was level-headed thinking. Before his employees started showing up for work or a SWAT team surrounded the building. Arnold scoured the nursery in search of a phone book. In his haste, he accidentally overturned a bin of exotic bulbs, but didn’t bother to retrieve them. Fifty dollar tulips rolled under glass display cases. The only directory Arnold managed to find was a set of Staten Island yellow pages from the mid-1980s that had been used as a doorstop. Lucinda most likely had white pages for all five boroughs in her cabinets, probably for the surrounding counties as well, but she’d locked her office door. Guillermo possessed the spare keys, not Arnold. Which meant he’d have to dial the operator and risk having the FBI trace the call. No, that wouldn’t do. That’s exactly how second-rate crooks got caught. They figured the police would overlook one minor clue—like leaving the blood-stained knife in their freezer or the getaway car parked in their driveway—as though the authorities didn’t have the sense to trace a 411 call and find out which address he’d requested. Or maybe he was paranoid. In any case, there was no point in hanging out at the nursery. Far better to make a go of it on the streets. Arnold raced down the rear steps of the loading dock and darted across the back alley, nearly toppling over the auburn-wigged transvestite from the costume shop. The old woman was perched on a milk crate, reading a fashion magazine and smoking a cigarette through a holder.
“Goodness, Mr. Brinkman,” said Gladys. “You startled me.”
“Do you have a phonebook?” he asked.
The drag queen folded shut her magazine and blew a perfect ring of smoke. She massaged her forehead as though Arnold’s request required deep reflection. “I remember when you didn’t need a phonebook,” she said. “All you did was ring up the operator and tell her who you wanted to speak to. That was outside Laramie, Wyoming, of course. We had a party line when I was a boy.”
“Please, Gladys. This is an emergency. Can I borrow your white pages?”
“Heavens. I really don’t know if we have any. You’d have to ask Anabelle and she’s still upstairs.” The transvestite scooped a plump Abyssinian cat onto her lap and began stroking its coat. “I wish I could sleep half as many hours as Anabelle does. A good night of Z’s works wonders for the complexion.”
“Can we wake her?” pleaded Arnold.
“Wake Anabelle?” Gladys appeared genuinely shocked—as though he’d suggested axe-murdering the old woman rather than rousing her. “You’ve clearly never seen my sister without her ten hours.”
Arnold usually got a kick out of the ‘sisters’ and their idiosyncrasies. Anabelle, the older of the pair, was a Korean War veteran. Gladys had been a star of the longhorn rodeo circuit in the late 1950s. Both were practicing Catholics—“the most devout cross-dressers south of 14th Street”—and they’d actually met at Sunday vespers on the weekend after the Stonewall riots. The pair enjoyed a cat-and-mouse relationship with the young Polish priest at St. Felix’s, Father Stanislaw, who allowed them to take communion but insisted on calling them Andy and Gary. Since the transvestites lived above their shop, and Gladys suffered severe insomnia, she often greeted Arnold in the early morning with anecdotes about “poor Father Stan” and his adventures in cognitive dissonance.
“I’m afraid my sister doesn’t do mornings, Mr. Brinkman. They take such a toll. But if you’ll stop by later in the day, I’m sure she’d love to see you. She is always saying that we should invite you over for tea one of these afternoons.” Gladys smiled genially. “My, my, Mr. Brinkman. You look out of sorts.”
Arnold held back the urge to grab the old woman by the shoulders and shake
her. “I don’t have time for this now, Gladys” he said. “I’m in desperate trouble.”
“We know that,” answered Gladys. “Poor Father Stan mentioned you in his homily. He was warning us against the sin of irreverence.”
“I need your help.”
“We’ve been counting the Rosary for you every night.”
“Goddam it, Gladys. You’re not listening to me. If I don’t find this address, I’m going to end up in jail. You’ve got to help me.”
Gladys looked distressed. “You want an address?”
“That’s right, Gladys,” said Arnold. He spoke slowly, articulating every word. “I need you to wake up Anabelle so we can look up an address in the telephone directory.”
“Oh, is that all?” Gladys answered with apparent relief. “Why not find the address on the Internet?”
“Can you do that?”
The transvestite smiled. “You truly are an odd duck, aren’t you, Mr. Brinkman? Come inside and we’ll have you your magic address in a heartbeat.”
She led him up the iron stairs into the long, narrow shop. Costumes blanketed every inch of wall space. These included the standard assortment of Halloween and disguise-party fare—clusters of Elvis masks, Che Guevara masks, masks of pop-culture figures whom Arnold didn’t recognize—but also several full sets of medieval armour and a phalanx of vintage nativity outfits. Above the counter hung sizeable photographs of each Pope since Pius XII. There were the harried Paul VI, the genial John Paul I, a beaming John Paul II and a solemn Benedict XVI facing each other in an eternal game of good cop – bad cop. But the ‘sisters’ had reserved the place of honour for a larger portrait of John XXIII blessing Jackie Onassis. Beneath the pontiff, they’d written: GOOD POPE JOHN, ONE OF US. What exactly they meant by this, whether to suggest that the late Cardinal Roncalli had possessed the common touch, or had worn women’s clothes, wasn’t clear. In addition to the papal gallery, there were posters of Mother Theresa, and St. Francis, and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot. A stringy spider plant hung beside the cash register. The internet terminals, which had been added one-by-one over the course of a decade, ran along both of the side walls. None of the computers matched. Gladys settled down in front of the newest model and asked for Cassandra’s full name.
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