“Come on. What are you having?” Irv asks, closing the menu.
“What’s chipotle?” she asks.
“No one knows,” he answers.
“I think I’ll have the fried calamari for an appetizer and then a burger.”
Melinda laughs. “That’s too much.”
“Let her,” Irv says. “It’s her colon.”
They order from a man who does not blink. His job complete, he is sucked back to the kitchen as if by a pneumatic tube.
Adjusting her eyes to the distance, Sigrid can better see the emblem on the baseball uniforms. It is the Cardinals against . . . someone else. She has seen cardinals in films before. They are exquisitely beautiful birds that are colored for the tropics. Nothing like them in Scandinavia.
Melinda hears the lull in their conversation as an imperative to speak:
“Do you believe that?” she says, directing her wonderment at Irv. “That if someone commits suicide they go to hell?”
“No.”
“But many Christians do, right?”
“There’s a debate, but it’s doctrine.”
“But you don’t think so?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“For the same reason the Catholics believe in the Trinity, Melinda.”
The appetizers arrive with a speed that Sigrid finds suspicious.
“Which is . . . what?”
“It’s how I understand Jesus’s words spoken from the cross,” says Irv, taking one of Sigrid’s calamari. “Jesus spoke seven times on the cross. In Matthew Twenty-Seven, verse forty-six and in Mark Fifteen verse thirty-four he says, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ This led to the Trinity,” Irv said, sucking cocktail sauce and grease from his thumb. “The thinking is, if Jesus was Lord, who was he speaking to? He was obviously speaking to someone or something other than himself, unless . . . ya know.” Irv makes a circular cuckoo motion by his head with a piece of squid. “So perhaps he was speaking to the Father, or to the Holy Spirit. In this act, he distinguishes himself from the eternal and embodies everything that is Man. The fear, the sadness, the tragedy. The longing. The recognition of betrayal. We see him, in that moment, only as the Son, and because of that, as ourselves. As I read it, Melinda, we are not invited in that moment to be cruel to him for his despair, or to mock him. Instead we are asked to feel his pain. When Jesus says, ‘It is finished’ I don’t read, ‘Mission accomplished.’ I see a person resigned. A person who has lost hope. A person who has taken a step away from this life. And our pity for him grows. And finally he says, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Now, I’m not going to equate Jesus letting go with suicide, but any decent and forgiving Christian person would have to admit that we are looking at a person who cannot fight anymore. We are being taught to be understanding of that state of mind and sympathetic to the suffering that might lead a person to it. It does not follow to me that if someone succumbs to that grief we are to treat them with eternal contempt. I just don’t believe it.”
But Sigrid isn’t listening anymore, because as interesting as it is listening to a sheriff discuss scripture, it is nothing compared to the picture of herself now on the widescreen television. Because it is not only a picture of her. It is, unquestionably, the worst picture of herself that she’s ever seen.
It is a manipulated version of the picture that Irv took during her pre-coffee haze. The burning fluorescent bulbs in Irv’s converted jail cell had been directly over Sigrid’s jet-lagged face, and so cast their industrial light down and into her blond eyebrows, which—on television—burn with electric fire. By rights, glowing eyebrows should be stare-worthy, but the tip of her nose was far more interesting, having been, apparently, polished. As the announcer speaks, Sigrid focuses on the nose and, yes, sees a tiny little image of the photographer in there—a little gnome in a sheriff’s hat. Beneath her eyes are black triangles; her eyebrows having sucked in all the available light. Sigrid looks at herself. She has never been especially vain or concerned with appearances beyond being neat and clean and properly dressed for occasions. But here she looks not so much bad as . . . evil. The kind of evil that hates children and birthdays and piñatas, the evil that lives in a cabin with meat hooks. And . . . what is that at the corner of her mouth? A piece of gristle? The foam of insanity? The remains of Hansel and Gretel?
“Hey, look,” says Irv. “That’s you. Melinda, go have them turn that up, will ya?”
Before Sigrid can object, Melinda—uniformed and authoritative—tells the barkeeper to crank the volume up, so now everyone at the bar at the Cheesecake Factory is watching the scary woman on TV and listening to the report as a new video of Sigrid replaces the photograph:
“. . . sister of Marcus Odd-Guard, who is now missing and wanted by the police, in possible connection to the death of Dr. Lydia Jones, who was found bloodied on Brookmeyer Road on August third. Ms. Odd-Guard is believed to have connections to a white supremacist motorcycle gang—the Vandals—who proclaim themselves to be the descendants of the original Vandals; the Germanic tribe that sacked a decadent Rome.”
The report pops back to an interview with Roger Mandel, whom neither Sigrid nor Melinda can hear on account of Irv’s immediate curse-filled rant. Melinda shushes him and Irv dials it back to a steady growl so that the women can hear Roger say:
“. . . a tip from a reliable source, who provided the video, showing Ms. Sigrid Odd-Guard enter the notorious Inferno bar by Target off the I-37, tells us that Ms. Odd-Guard was looking to—and I quote here—‘catch a ride with the gang to avoid the local police,’ unquote. Our investigative team has learned that Ms. Odd-Guard was suspended from the Norwegian police force recently for the shooting of an unarmed immigrant. No one knows where she is now, or what her direct connection is to this case, but we are pursuing this new connection between the Odd-Guard family and the Vandals, and Marcus Odd-Guard’s own romantic relationship with Professor Jones at the time of her death. So far the police investigators have been unavailable for comment. We’re going to be staying with this story, Alison, until we have some answers. Back to you.”
Sigrid’s burger arrives.
“Melinda,” says Irv, seeing Sigrid’s condition, “go tell Alan to turn the channel, OK?”
“Yes, Sheriff.”
As Melinda carries out her duties, Irv lifts a french fry from Sigrid’s untouched plate and chews it. “So I’m thinking Juliet takes your money for a favor. She then rats you out to us for more money. And then—it really is a masterstroke, I have to admit—she rats us both out to the media for even more money. I wonder how much she got from Roger.”
“There is no case.”
“When you said before, that not all your plans work out, did you mean that some of them do?”
“You took that picture, Irving, and that journalist is part of your coterie.”
“That’s not true. I hate the guy. But nice word. Coterie.”
“Fix this.”
“I’ll do it right now.” And true to his word, Irv fishes in his pocket for his phone, settles back in his seat, and—staring at the ceiling—waits for Roger to answer the phone.
“Sheriff!” says Roger. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”
“And now I know why,” Irv answers, switching on the phone’s speaker for Sigrid and Melinda.
“Saw the news, huh?”
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“I wanted your comment, but deadlines must be met. The reason is right there in the term. Dead-line. A line that . . .”
“How much did you pay the industrialist?”
“I can’t reveal my sources, Sheriff, and you can’t compel me . . .”
“I paid her a hundred bucks to know if anyone came or went from that house.”
“A hundred! We paid her three hundred.”
“This woman should be running Wall Street. And when, exactly, did you get to her? The time line doesn’t make sense to me.”
&nb
sp; “Not long after you issued that APB a few weeks ago. We went to Marcus’s listed address and there she was in pink curlers and one of those freaky green face masks you see in old movies. Told her we’d pay for tips on his whereabouts. We do that sort of thing all the time, so that was no big deal. I didn’t think it was going anywhere. Not until we found out about the love connection to Dr. Jones after a few interviews at the Ivory Tower. That’s when we learned that we had ourselves a SECRET interracial CAMPUS murder mystery coming shortly on the heels of that Roy Carman judgment. And now with the white supremacist motorcycle gang angle tossed in there with video to show? It’s like an afterschool special gone wrong! It’s paperback magic, Sheriff. There’s gonna be a miniseries about this. You mark my words.”
“Interracial? It’s 2008. We got a black guy running for president. Ten years ago we had a Jewish Secretary of Defense—from my home state of Maine no less—married to a black woman.”
“We did?”
“I think you just made my point.”
“Not a campus murder mystery, though. Everyone loves those.”
“Hmm. Yeah. Unfortunately, Roger, that’s not the story.”
“Ingredients make the dish, Sheriff.”
“No, Roger, it’s the recipe. It really is. For example, using careful observation and solid police work I could tell you that Sigrid Ødegård . . .”
Sigrid raises her eyebrows at Irv’s perfect pronunciation of her name and Irv winks. “. . . is not exactly a fugitive from the law. We know exactly where she is and what she’s doing.”
“Oh, really. And where’s that?”
“She’s at the Cheesecake Factory by the multiplex. She’s having herself a Factory Burger, medium rare, and she’s barely touched it.”
“Really.”
“Don’t believe me? Ask her yourself.”
Irv hands over the phone.
“I’m going to kill you in your sleep,” she says.
Irv takes back the phone.
“Her English is really coming along nicely. Thing is, she’s working with us, Roger. We’re even buying her lunch. Her brother is indeed missing and she came here to the Land of the Free all worried-like and looking for him. Doesn’t have anything to do with anything else. It’s all in your head.”
“And what about the video proving her ties with the Vandals?”
“She’s an expert on international drug smuggling and the influence of . . .”—he looks at the round hamburger bun—“globalization. Yeah. On organized crime.” He gives Sigrid a thumbs-up. “While here, as a tourist, we asked her to teach us a thing or two given that Scandinavia is so enlightened and everything and we have those villainous Canadians to deal with it. My crew was in the parking lot taking notes at the time.”
“And how did Juliet McKenna—lady of the night—come onto the scene with the grainy phone video?”
“Video. Right. Video that was taken from a dark corner by a dumpster. Personally, I think you shot the video. I think you were involved in some Expect-More-Pay-Less activity in the alley with Juliet—the one you admitted paying money to—when you saw something weird and decided to stop taking a home movie of your own shenanigans—which is just icky, by the way—and shoot that instead. Now, I admit I’m only wondering all this, but I find that a common sense of wonder is what brings people together, and I think it might be fun to share my sense of wonder with your wife.”
“Oh, come on, Sheriff . . .”
“Bye, Roger.”
Irv places the phone back in his pocket and smiles at Sigrid, waiting for her to acknowledge a job well done. He is slightly surprised to find that she doesn’t agree.
“You should have provided him with the solution,” Sigrid says, slumped in her chair. “If you tell him to fix something, you’re at the mercy of his imagination. If you tell him how, you only need to supervise.”
“You have an interesting problem, Sigrid,” Irv says. “It’s like . . . you’re right about everything, and yet it never seems to matter. You’re a Greek myth of some kind, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“You’re really annoying me,” Sigrid says.
“You should eat. American beef, right there. Perk you right up.”
Le Suicide
From the comfort of a flat-topped rock facing due west, Marcus Ødegård watches the golden crest of the sun drop below the lake. He digs his bare feet more deeply into the sandy bottom of Lake Flower near Saranac.
America, for all its expansiveness and romantic poetry about wilderness, is a nation built by people with a keen sense of real estate and no fear of solitude. Every piece of land with a view of mountains or water is precious here, and someone has always laid a claim.
God is in the wilderness for the American soul. Out here is where you sit to watch the battle rage, the battle that rages both inside and out.
As he’d explained to his class, the officials in the Adirondacks call it “primitive camping” and it is legal. Not that he cares. The park is big enough, the area wild enough, that if he avoids making fires and using a flashlight, he might never be seen. But the problem, as always, is his compulsion to seek out the beauty of the day. It pulls a spirit like his to the very best spots as if by a song. He is not the only one who hears it, though. This is what leads people to gather, unbidden, onto wide streets and boulevards at the close of day—at the end of a war. We saunter like the undead toward the sunset, exultant.
He should have known better. Still, he submitted to the impulse to watch the sunset by the rock and now three young men are emerging from the woods, all drawn, it seems, by the same forces that pulled him here.
They are polite. They too are camping nearby at Pine Pond, they explain. Is he alone? Yes, he is. Sorry to bother you, they say. It’s no bother, he is forced to say. Nice night. Yes. And so on. They make small talk as people do in the woods, being unable to avoid one another or break off for another conversation as they might at a party.
There are lights by the rising moon. They are not stars but planets.
The men are playful and young, taken in by one another’s company and keeping the mood buoyant. They try to pull Marcus into it. “Have you seen this?” one of them—Jacob—asks him. He’s on his mobile phone. In contrast to the simple majesty of the sunset, the phone casts an eerie blue mask across his face, separating him from the natural order. He laughs at the image a second time. The others gather and laugh too. He is the kind of person who is plugged in and becomes nervous when he is not. Marcus has students like him. The more they strive to express their uniqueness in those machines, the more conformist they become.
Jacob and his friends speak of memes and viruses and winning the internet. They seem to exist on the crest of an endless chuckle that is both constantly renewed and immediately forgotten.
The phone is placed in front of Marcus. There is an image of a woman. He focuses—the screen is too close—and that quickly, as if through a wormhole, he is sucked in.
Jacob is on some kind of robot service that finds whatever is trending around his phone’s location so Jacob can surf the wave of proximate interest. The joke of the moment is from a local network affiliate.
What Marcus is looking at is a picture of Sigrid subjected to juvenile humor and Photoshop. The campers find her hilarious. They call her Mrs. Hagrid. Has he seen this yet? No? This is great.
Marcus does not laugh because seeing Sigrid here is not funny, but he smiles enough to endear himself and convince them that he needs to borrow their phone. The photo links to the news station and a story. Attached to the story is a second picture of her on a flyer stapled to a telephone pole on a street corner that looks familiar. That picture has not been doctored. At the bottom of the flyer is a phone number.
“Do you all mind if I make a local call?” he asks.
Ensconced back at her workstation in the jail cell, Melinda is now free and emboldened to pursue her new interest in suicide. Sigrid can hear the clicking and scrolling of the mouse, which is old and y
ellowed like a smoker’s teeth. Her searches are manic and her findings impressionistic, but she is covering remarkable ground—much like anyone falling down a mountain.
Sigrid plans to let gravity slow her momentum before intervening to direct her course toward something more productive.
Unfortunately, and as always with Melinda, this journey is not going to be a silent one.
“According to the World Health Organization,” Melinda says, “suicide is the third leading cause of death in the world for those aged fifteen through forty-four. Men do it much more often, but many more women attempt it. Meanwhile, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Men, at least in America, shoot themselves. Women poison themselves. But in looking for the relationship between cause and effect, the story gets very confused. Wow, now this is cool. Turns out,” Melinda says, sipping from a cup of instant coffee, “modern sociology was founded by someone named Émile Durkheim and his first subject of study was . . . get this . . . suicide! It was called Le Suicide,” she says in an accent learned from a cartoon. “He reasoned that suicide was the one thing you could do that didn’t give back any social benefits and for this reason it shouldn’t have a social origin. But it turns out, there were patterns. And so sociology was born. I always wondered what people were studying in sociology. Society, I guess.”
Sigrid didn’t know any of this either. Even if Melinda’s information is procedurally useless, Sigrid finds it comforting to learn that her own confusion has roots and a pedigree.
“Maybe you should take a break from the material for a while,” Sigrid suggests. Taking the cue, Melinda leaves Sigrid for the main room and passes Irv, who is walking in at the same time. He plops down in his favorite spot in the cell.
American by Day Page 18