“Windows?”
“Yeah, one, to the left of the bed and about ten feet away.”
“What could you see?”
“Not much, because I was cuffed to the bed. But there were some treetops and some buildings behind them, tall ones, farther away—and . . . uhhhh, one of them was that whopper, the really high one with the kind of needle on top.”
Rafferty sits up straight. “The Baiyoke Tower, the Sky, whatever it’s called? The hotel?”
“Maybe.”
He closes his eyes and tries to visualize it. “Very high rectangular building, but then it goes round under the spire for a couple of stories, like a hypodermic? And the round part beneath the spire lights up?”
“That’s it.”
“How much of it could you see?”
“Don’t know. There were other tall buildings between me and it, but it was taller than all of them. Maybe eight, ten stories at the top, the layer cake, and the spire.”
“In what direction?”
“Well, the sun set behind it.”
“So west of you. How far away?”
“Who can tell? Far enough so I could see the top of it.”
“Could be miles. I mean, it would have to be, for you to see the top through a small window, right? I think it’s the second-tallest building in the city. Do you have any idea where you were, what roads you took to get there?”
“No. I was kind of occupied. She was keeping me busy.”
The point of Rafferty’s pen tears the paper, and he forces himself to sit back. “Think.”
“I am thinking. Third or fourth day I was there, she saw me looking out the window. That night they doped me. Next morning there were blinds. Closed.”
Rafferty exhales so loudly that Finch can hear him.
“I’m trying, I’m trying,” he says. “If it helps any, the spire on that hotel, if that’s what it is, pretty much cut the sun in half.”
“Canal, in a nothing area, due east of Baiyoke. Maybe within two or three miles.” His knee is bouncing up and down as though of its own will.
“The canal,” Finch says.
“I just said the canal—”
“Wait, wait, hold it, I . . . I know you said the canal, but I remembered something while you were talking, and my wires got crossed. One thing, when we were driving in. The block where we were ended in the back of a sort of medium-size building. And when we drove in, I saw a word, part of a word, in the headlights on the front of the building, or a sign in front of the building, and it caught my eye because you know how you can hear your name in a roomful of—”
“Yeah, yeah, got it.”
“So yeah, there was this sign in front of the building, and when the headlights hit it on a bounce, I saw the end of a word, i-t-y, and then blank space, which is how I knew it was the end of the word. Anyway, when I was a kid, I had a T-shirt with that sideways eight on it, because I’d watched Cosmos and I thought it was cool, and I spent half my time for about six months explaining it meant infinity and then trying to explain infinity, which I wasn’t very good at. So those letters, they sort of jumped—”
“Right. Anything special about the building with the sign? High, narrow, octagonal, tapering, tons of glass, a bell tower, anything?”
“No. Just a building. Wide, but only two, three stories high. No lights on. Just a big dark box.”
“Which direction from where you were? If Baiyoke was to the west—”
“Gotcha. Woulda been to the . . . to my left. What’s that if you’re facing west, south? Mostly south, anyway.”
“Well, well.” Rafferty is drawing it all on the back of the Pygmalion script: the canal, the small apartment house, the building with “ity” on it, the setting sun, the high Baiyoke tower. A compass in one corner. He says, “My, my, my.”
Larry Finch says, “Yeah?”
“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. So tell me how you got away.”
“First thing was—did I tell you about the mask?”
“No.”
“When I was there, in the hospital bed, she was wearing a nurse’s uniform and she had a surgical mask on. Always had it on. At first I figured, okay, she’s dumb enough to think I won’t recognize her, and she almost never talked, so I wouldn’t hear her voice, and I thought it meant they might eventually let me go.”
“Even though she’d taken you to the—”
“You grab at straws,” Finch says. “When all you’ve got is straws, you grab at them. But then it just stopped making sense, no matter how desperate I was, and I realized I was supposed to think that, that it meant they weren’t going to kill me. So all I could think then about was how to escape, but by then the cast was halfway up my thigh. A couple nights later, the last night, they doped me extra good. I mean, usually it felt like sinking into a soft bed, but this was like getting tossed off a roof. I actually thought for a second I was going to die right then. I went under. I think you could have pulled teeth, you could have circumcised me with a pair of pliers, I wouldn’t have noticed. But then the monster dropped me.”
“Dropped you.”
“He tripped, I guess. One minute I was out cold, dead to the world, and the next I was tumbling ass over elbow down the stairs with the monster falling on top of me. For once in my life, I had the brains to do the right thing, I just lay there facedown at the bottom of the stairs with my eyes closed. He kicked me once, for the inconvenience, I guess, and picked me up and took me out and tossed me into the canal.”
“How far to the canal?”
“Thirty, forty steps. Really big steps. But see, what he didn’t know was that my cast had cracked open above the ankle, maybe on the edge of a stair, and when it started to pull me down in the water, I was able to hit it against the cement on the side of the canal, and that was hard enough to break it the rest of the way open so the bottom part of it slipped off, like a shoe, and then I rose to the surface. I grabbed one gigantic breath the minute I could, then rolled facedown and let the current take me until I had to breathe again. By then I was out of sight. It took me forever, maybe an hour—but who the hell can tell in a situation like that?—before I could grab hold of something and get out of that sewer.”
Rafferty had drawn a thick box around his map as Finch told the story. “So,” he says, “the casts are weighted.” Arthit had mentioned that, he thinks.
“Yeah, I figure there’s weights in the foot. They’re to keep you from trying to get away and then to make you sink.”
“And your reaction to all this, once it was all over and you were safe and sound, was to run away.”
Finch’s voice rises. “The fuck would you have done? Go to the cops? The cops fucking visited me. And Lala and the monster, they knew I hadn’t been found, so I obviously wasn’t dead. Bet your ass I ran away. I called a friend, stayed at his place while the embassy got me some new papers and I figured out where I still had some money, and then I came here. Here, meaning where I am now, and that’s all you need to know about it, it’s where I am now.”
“Okay,” Rafferty says. “Can you think of anything else? When you took Lala out, did you choose the places you went or did she?”
“I did, maybe she did once.”
“Where? Did they seem to know her there?”
“No, just a . . . uhhh, a Brazilian steak house, you know, a meat palace, ’cause I said I wanted meat, over near Sukhumvit. Around Asoke. There were a million people, but no one seemed to recognize her or anything. Just, you know, eat and go.”
“I know the place.” He finished writing and looked at the three scribbled pages. “If you think of anything else, anything that might help, let me know.”
“Okay, and to square things up, you do something for me.”
“Sure.”
“If they get her, if they get both of them, tell Bob. Tell Campeau. Ask him to
call me. I’d like to go back there, maybe stay with him while I find a place. I’m lonely here.”
“Will do, I promise. Thanks.”
He waits until Finch has disconnected, then makes a quick outline of what matters most. He takes a photograph of the map he’s drawn and emails it to Arthit. As he starts to dial Arthit’s number to discuss it, the phone rings.
28
As Temporary as a Rash
The room keeps tilting.
He feels like he’s in a boat, adrift on an unending series of high, long swells that come from all directions. Just as he learns to anticipate that the next one will roll in from the left, they shift and begin to come from behind him or in front of him. Dealing with the rise and fall of the room distracts him from his work, it slows him down, it makes him sick to his stomach. And when the movement comes from in front of him, it terrifies him.
Back when he was in high school and winning all those swimming medals, he took a brief stab at diving. The really good divers got all the prime fluff. Being a swimmer, where your body is invisible in the water most of the time, was like being the bassist in a rock band; being a diver, rotating slowly, gracefully through the air as the girls gasped at your abs, was like playing lead guitar. Divers didn’t need handcuffs.
But the dives where he had to go off the board backward, straight up into the air facing the board and then flip forward and down toward the water—those dives scared him senseless. He could visualize the moment of impact as his forehead struck the board, and in his vision the board simply scalped him, baring the white bone of his skull as he dropped through the air, leaving his skin and his hair dangling from the tip of the diving board like a victory flag, like a trophy: Board 1–Buddy 0. Once he imagined that, his diving career was over.
And that’s almost what this feels like at the times when the swells approach from in front of him. Like he’s about to pitch forward, helpless against the tilt of the room.
Whatever they gave him . . .
Here it is again, coming from in front of him, and he has to lean into it, and his hand, a cramping, knotted claw now, loses the zipper yet again. I’m not making enough progress.
Whatever they gave him this time, it was different. In the seconds after the stuff hit his veins, he felt like he was dissolving down a drain, a sensation of disintegration and swirling and free fall with the room above him getting smaller and smaller. A kind of awful warmth, as though he’d somehow pissed himself all over, bloomed from the top of his head to the end of the foot in the cast. And then he was just gone, off to the place where they keep the dark and the silence, not a glimmer, not a shadow, not a paling, not an edge. Darkness with a texture, like a warm, soft blanket, and him drifting through it weightless, the softness opening in front of him and closing behind him, maybe like the dream of a baby that’s still inside its mother.
And now the rocking intensifies, and with a jolt he comes to himself again, fast and hard, because he’s going to hit his head on the end of—Snaps his eyes open once more for, what? The thirtieth time? The room so out of focus it could have been a picture by that guy who painted all those fat naked women with the sunlit haze around them. Renoir. If Renoir had painted a dark room. With a terrified guy in it.
There. Renoir. Who said he was stupid?
A baby, he thinks, and for a moment he’s back in the time, pretty hazy itself and always seeming sunlit, when Edward was a baby, and then, later, when Bessie—oh, pardon me, Elizabeth—was a baby, when they were more important than anything else, when he could be good, as he thought of it, because what could make a man happier than a family with a baby in it? What more did a man need than a beautiful—if occasionally difficult—wife and two little kids who adored him? What kind of fool would endanger that kind of happiness? Well . . .
And of course, as his own father said, nothing lasts forever. Happiness, his father had said, was a practical joke played on people with arrested development who continue to believe in fairies and Santa Claus and miracle cures; for the rest of us, happiness was just something we use later to measure our unhappiness against. Happiness was as temporary as a rash, and it ended worse.
Good old Dad.
So, naturally, the Bessie/Elizabeth thing became an issue. Both children had royal names, although he’d barely recognized the fact when Sophie insisted on them. He’d responded to the revelation—after the fact—by saying, Sure, no problem, which was the best tactic when arguing with Sophie. He thought of it as his “yield immediately” strategy. It didn’t win him any arguments, but when Sophie was on the other side, it felt like a victory just to have the issue, whatever it was, behind him. So Edward and Elizabeth it had been.
Except that Elizabeth was such a Bessie. When he dreamed of her, her name was Bessie. Edward, on the other hand, was definitely Edward. Not remotely an Ed or an Eddie. Even as a small child, he’d had a distance to him. Where Bessie reached up to everyone in a room, Edward didn’t invite hugs. He responded to his mother’s baby talk with raised eyebrows. He was the cleanest child in history; when he was five or six, he began to criticize the way the laundry ironed his shirts. In the meantime Bessie was a human puppy; she wanted love from everyone. Naturally, she became Sophie’s favorite. Sophie identified Edward’s distance with Buddy’s own, and after a while she referred to her two children as “Bessie” and “the boy.”
And then Edward had shown no interest in the sports his father had imagined him playing. His father is thinking about winning medals, and the kid announces one day when he’s twelve that he might like to be an actor. So there he is, with a mother who refers to him as “the boy” and a father who’s worried that he might be a fairy. Jesus, poor kid.
A swell comes from the right. He closes his eyes, but he can manage them when they’re from the right. He waits until it stops, draws a few deep breaths.
But the babies. The way they’d smelled. How small their hands were. The way they’d looked at him when he came into the room. He had loved the babies.
He is certain he had loved the babies. He’s positive he had.
He looks around at the dark room in which he figures he’ll probably die. All this, just because he wanted someone to smile at him again, the way women used to, to want him again, as though he were still beautiful, as beautiful as he’d once been. As beautiful as Edward.
And yet again, with a pinching around his heart, he thinks, Edward, and then the swells begin to come from the front, and he chokes down some air and lets the movement take him. His consciousness thickens, and once more he’s afloat on a sluggish ocean of pitch. At some time (maybe twice), he turns his head to vomit.
When he comes back to himself in the puke-stinking room, he makes a fist with his right hand, squeezing so hard it drives his nails into his palm, stretches his fingers out, makes a fist again, willing the hand to do what he needs it to do. Then, for what feels like the millionth time, he takes the top end of the zipper between thumb and forefinger and slips it just into the cast, at the end of the short new cut he’s made, grabs the other end in his left, and begins to saw back and forth, the movements tiny, hampered by his inability to move the hand he’s jammed inside the cast more than half an inch at a time. But he’s broken off two new pieces of plaster since the first time he came out of the dope, so he’s making progress. He’s sawing, with agonizing slowness, to a spot a few inches below his knee—he’s close to breaking off more, to the point where he’ll be able to flex his knee, he’ll be able to flex his knee—when, downstairs, a door slams.
It takes him a second or two to process it, and then he has to pull himself together; he has to be completely here to hide everything, get the jeans flat beneath the blanket, and lie on top of them so they won’t be visible if she peels the blankets down, more time to rearrange the blankets, fumble with the handcuffs—and it feels like it takes a full minute for his hands to begin to do every single thing he wills them to do, however si
mple it is. He knows that he won’t be ready when they come up; he knows he’s about to be—
But they’re both still down there. Yelling at each other. He remembers to put the bobby pin back in his mouth footsteps on the stairs fastens the first cuff coming down the hall, heavy, so it’s fastens the second cuff it’s the big guy and closes his eyes just as the door opens.
Lala looses a tangle of angry syllables at the big guy, and the big guy startles him by hitting something, the door or the wall, hard, and so loud that Buddy flinches and thinks, I’m dead, so he plays it a little, groans, turns his head on the pillow.
Keeps his eyes closed.
They’re definitely arguing, volleying sharp-edged snatches of the Thai he’s never bothered to learn, and the big guy seems to be getting the worst of it. She makes a sound of disgust, a sharp pfffff, probably in disapproval of the way the room smells, and she says something that seems to be a joke, because the big guy makes a kind of snort that might be a laugh. After an absolutely immeasurable amount of time—could be a minute, could be ten—the door closes. He counts to fifty, even though he hears them going away down the hall and then on the stairs. He needs to be completely sure that one of them isn’t standing right there looking at him.
And then he counts to fifty again, getting lost once and starting over, and when he’s done, he opens his eyes just the tiniest amount. Through the thicket of his lashes, he sees that the room is empty.
This is all different. The drugs are different, the argument was different, her coming home and going out again, which he’s pretty sure she did, that’s different. Before, when she came back here, she stayed here, so that’s another change in the routine. Changes are not good news.
He’s certain that this is as far as he goes. This is the night they’ll kill him.
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