Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “So you want me to take you to the end, or—”

  “Here’s fine.” Mills unbuckled his seat belt. Isaiah let the car glide to a halt. He rotated in his seat and touched Mills on the knee.

  “Hey, I was serious about you coming over for dinner. Vince is a decent cook, and the mice are gone, I swear. Whenever you want. Or even if you just need a place to crash. We’re the little English cottage on Edwards Lane. We’d love to have you.” Mills wasn’t sure if Isaiah was intimating a more accommodating situation than dinner or a place to crash. He wondered if he and Vince were monogamous. He remembered seeing them on the night of Beth’s party, kissing briefly against the refrigerator. It had seemed so normal to him, so easy; that was what had shocked him most. They seemed to have picked the lock on each other’s secret doors. He tried to imagine the handsome couple by the refrigerator as two sweaty bodies in a bedroom, one on top of the other. Which did what to the other? Mills kept rotating the two men in his mind, which he never had to do when he imagined straight couples having sex. Their sex seemed more intimate for his not knowing. Then he complicated the arithmetic by trying to imagine himself between them, three bodies fusing, six pairs of arms, a train of heads facing the same direction. Mills shifted his leg away from Isaiah’s fingers.

  “Thanks for the ride. I’ll call you about dinner.” He climbed out of the car. Isaiah waved through the windshield as he drove in reverse down the park road. Mills wished he’d brought Paul’s video camera to film Lisa and Adam reuniting at the beach by Bug Light.

  The wind on the tip blew in circles, whipping around his shoulders. The sea’s surface was zippered in foam, and a few old men shaped like lanterns in their thick coats stood on the rocks with their fishing poles. Vacant picnic tables lined the sandbar. A lone deer stumbled across the road and into the inland ponds. As Mills headed toward the picnic tables, he noticed Lisa’s car parked in a side lot farther down the beach. He saw her in the distance, hugging herself as she stared at the lighthouse, its windows dark, its lamp unlit. Beyond Bug Light was the open Atlantic. Adam Pruitt hadn’t yet joined her. Mills wasn’t too late.

  A black Jeep roared from the park’s entrance. It slid by him and jerked to a stop ten feet ahead, then slowly reversed. The driver-side window rolled down in fits of manual unwinding, and a bearded man with flesh-colored teeth smiled at him. “That’s him,” the guy said. “That’s the faggot who lit up the Muldoon house!” The insult was tossed out the window, dousing him like a cup of soda. Mills looked around for another car—for anyone besides the old fishermen, who were more like salt columns than sources of safety. As he backed off into the grass, one of the Jeep doors swung open. “I want to teach that little shit what it means to hurt someone from Orient.”

  Mills barreled through the tall grass, disappearing into its thick, unbending braid. He heard feet running on the pavement, and he twisted through the blades until he reached the rocks on the beach, swirling with jetties of seawater. He felt his breath abandon him, as if he’d already been punched in the stomach. His muscles tightened, but he ran as fast as he could along the rocks, jumping to keep his feet from getting stuck. Two of the men had fought through the phragmites and circled behind him on the beach. They were fatter and shorter than he was, but one held a crowbar as they hopscotched over the rocks. He could hear the Jeep driving along the road, lost behind the grass. He followed the water, gasping as he wove in the direction of Main Road, in the opposite direction of the lighthouse and Lisa.

  Mills heard one of the men behind him fall, yelping as his ankle was pinioned between rocks, but the guy with the crowbar was still on his feet. A wire fence loomed ahead with a triangular orange sign across it: WARNING. FEDERALLY RESTRICTED AREA. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, which sounded both secure and hazardous. There was a gap between the fence and the grasses, and Mills hurtled through it, out of the park. Ahead was the ferry landing for Plum, beyond it the ferry to Connecticut.

  He ran by the gates of Plum, tasting blood in his mouth, glancing over his shoulder as the guy with the crowbar leapt onto the concrete, giving him the speed of solid ground. Inside the restricted Plum terminal he saw men in business suits waiting for the ferry, but they were too far to hear a cry for help. The black Jeep had reached the park entrance but was stuck behind cars turning onto the feeder road to the ferry terminal. Mills finally made it to the ferry hub, snaking through the cars waiting in line, all of their windows sealed. A green sign welcomed new arrivals to the state of New York.

  He considered running toward the ferry, but he didn’t have a car or the price of a ticket, and the dilapidated restaurant on the pier looked as if it had been boarded up for winter. There were no police cars or officers or anyone besides a pair of white hands poking out from a toll booth. He passed the terminal and ran down a small dirt road until the beach returned, diminishing his traction. He kicked up stones as he followed the beach west; Beth and Paul both lived miles away, but other houses grew erratically along the coast. For a second, there was no sign of the Jeep or the man waving the crowbar. But as he climbed up a rocky slope, which began to waver into cliffs, he spotted all three men. They were thirty feet behind him, and they were red-faced and wheezing, but they weren’t giving up their chase. They knew the geography better than he did. The bearded driver sprinted out of sight into a thicket of trees.

  Mills roped between the beach and the manicured lawns of large, wax-windowed houses, high as cruise ships above the blue water, a stray pebble working its way into the heel of his shoe. He combed the houses above him for lights or open doors or people standing on their decks, potential rescuers. A thought came into his brain like a spot of blood beginning to clot: I don’t want to spend the five unbearable minutes it will take for them to inflict their pain. I wish I were already beaten up.

  Just as he was slowing down, knees aflame, the bearded driver burst from behind a nearby house in a flank attack, his speed increased by the descent of the lawn. “Little shit,” he yelled. Mills fought through the melt of his muscles for whatever strength he had left, springing up a small incline as the man rounded behind him, four feet galloping together as if they were a single horse. Ahead he saw a speedboat tied to a dock and up the hill a farmhouse draped in tarps. He’d been there before: it was the old farmhouse inn, the rich artists’ new remodeling project. If he climbed up to its deck he could crash through one of the tarps and beg them for help.

  Phragmites bristled ahead, gluts of wind-tossed green, and the mud was wet under his feet from high tide. The driver tried to grab him, lunging, and Mills swiveled as he ducked through the tall weeds that swatted his face. He gave one last jump to escape, and the ground below him disappeared, no longer there to catch his fall. It dropped away into a gulley of sand. Mills fell, landing on something hard and reeking so badly of brine that he kept his eyes shut. He expected a fist or a foot or a crowbar to bash him in the ribs.

  “Holy shit. No fucking way.” The driver was looking down where he’d fallen, his mouth open. He looked scared, not like a predator anymore but huntable too. Reaching for a handhold beneath him, Mills touched bone and thick fur. Embedded in the sand, a few feet from the sea, was an animal, or some kind of hybrid of animals, split, fissured, lab-replicated, reorganized, dead. It had the skeletal head of a deer with its long purple tongue uncurled, the claws of a raccoon bunched up against its slick pig chest, its eyes pierced with the wings of insects, its back feet two hooves dragging seaweed from the surf. Mills thought he could make out two separate spinal cords in its back, but the second cord ended in a fist of meat, a pincushion of flies. Mills almost vomited as he scrambled off the monster, wiping his hands on his body. He jumped back to avoid the oncoming tide—as if the water itself were contaminated—and the driver, who’d been chasing him for the last ten minutes, reached out to lift him out of the pit.

  His two friends stood overhead, dumbstruck by the creature, then lifted their eyes toward Plum. “Another one? It can’t be. Holy shit. Wait until Adam hea
rs.”

  “I told you that’s why Pruitt Securities is fucking important,” the driver panted. “There’s something seriously wrong with the land out here.”

  “Just look at that thing,” the crowbar-wielding guy said. He glanced at Mills and nodded like they were old friends, like the presence of the mutant had instantly reshuffled their loyalties. “It’s got two backbones. It’s more of a mutant than the first one.”

  A breeze came down from the house above, carrying a whiff of cigarette smoke. The four men looked up to see a black woman leaning over the farmhouse railing.

  “Yo. You know this is private property, right?” Luz called down to them.

  “Ma’am,” the bearded driver yelled. “We don’t mean any trouble. You’d better call the police.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Aisle three of Dooley’s Pharmacy was reserved for feminine products. Actually, the aisle started near the cash register with condoms and lubricants, but the shelves quickly gave way to vaginal condoms and yeast-infection treatments, followed by pillowed bricks of maxi-pads, tampons, day liners, and douches, and somewhere midway along the aisle, a fleet of home-pregnancy tests with product shots of sticks floating in a white dimension outside of time or space. After the tests came the baby goods: pacifiers, diapers, rattles, nursing bottles, rash powders, dolls. At the far end of the aisle was the pharmacy’s copy machine, an ungainly metal box that duplicated any material pressed to its stomach for twenty-five cents per page.

  Beth had come to Dooley’s Pharmacy in Greenport for replication. Before she handed over Jeff Trader’s journal to Mike Gilburn, she wanted a copy for herself. She opened the lid, flattened the book, and pressed COPY to an astral burst of light. A page spit from the slot, still hot from its rotation through the machine.

  Dooley’s was the same pharmacy Beth had visited at fifteen for her first home-pregnancy test and again for her last test more than a month ago. She had made her first pilgrimage to the pharmacy at twelve, alone, terrified of aisle three, searching for her first box of tampons or perhaps a bottle of glue so she could seal her vagina and prevent it from ever leaking again during chemistry. She supposed that other women found happiness in places like aisle three. She pulled the last copy from the machine, then walked to aisle five and opened a bottle of aspirin.

  The early winter weather had brought a leaden stillness to the streets of Greenport. The nicer restaurants and boating shops had switched to winter hours, weekends only. Even Mario Laurito’s increasingly passé Italian restaurant read CHIUSO on its stainless-steel door. Pearl Farms/Pearl Explorations, Sarakit Herrig’s corner real estate and travel agency, had a note taped to its glass. Underneath the agency’s oyster-shell logo, the sign read WINTER HOURS BY APPOINTMENT. Sarakit’s corporate mélange of exotic foreign travel and North Fork real estate had a schizophrenic appeal; Beth assumed that wealthy Manhattanites appreciated the mixed message, that the same agent could find you a Sound-front retreat or a trip to the Far East.

  The pastel merry-go-round by the harbor was dark, its horses frozen. Even the teenagers smoking weed on the docks seemed sluggish and underwhelmed. Beth passed into the bakery, its windows flecked in snow, its display cakes yellowed and cracked, as if they’d been baked by chain-smokers. Christmas music jingled too early in the shop. Beth selected a cake decorated with a lighthouse, the icing a barbershop pole of red and white amid blue frosted waves. Most of the others were white and blank, like faces in hospital rooms.

  “That one’s chocolate mud. You want anything written on it?” the counterwoman asked. “It’s two dollars a word.” The same fee they paid writers per word at the Scientific Frontier. She tried to think of something clever, but settled on “Happy Birthday Paul.”

  Luz had been sending her clever texts all morning: “The Russians are coming!”—tonight was their dinner with the Russian collectors—and then, an hour later, “Remind me, have the Romanians forgiven the Soviets for abandoning them during the Cold War?” Maybe I should have that iced onto a cake, Beth thought, and serve it as a surprise at dinner. Beth was dreading the evening, especially since she and Gavril were still barely speaking. “Add an exclamation point,” she told the woman frosting the cake.

  Beth carried the cake box to the car. With time to kill before Mills came to sit for his portrait at two, she decided to stop by the Herrigs’ on her way home. Sarakit’s outburst at the funeral had unnerved her, and Beth felt that she herself had handled the situation badly. Sarakit had asked her a simple question—what had they been fighting about?—and while she couldn’t have answered with the truth (a blow job! was there anything more inconsequential?), at least she could have tried to convince Sarakit that it had nothing to do with the fire. Beth thumbed through Jeff Trader’s book to reread his secrets on the Herrigs: divorce papers sent but shredded, Sarakit’s travel business failing. She remembered her mother saying that Ted was losing his job, and Tommy had made a note about a loan that now wouldn’t need to be repaid.

  Driving along the causeway, its sides still guard-railed with snow, she phoned the Greenport locksmith to ask if they could change her locks.

  “We’re backed up,” the clerk replied. “It’s a small outfit here, and we got a full clipboard of requests from you people in Orient. Won’t be able to free up till next week. Everyone’s spooked since the fire.” She told him it was an emergency, that she’d pay double. “Everyone’s willing to pay double. Used to be, Jeff Trader would take care of the locks for you. If you’re in a pinch, you can try Pruitt Securities. They’ll get it done—maybe upside down, but done.” She made an appointment for next Tuesday.

  The Herrigs lived in the old Traylor House on Diedricks Road, one turnoff past Youngs Road, sharing a backyard with the houses that faced the Muldoons. Theirs was a clapboard two-story of New England simplicity, the board-and-batten shutters on its dormer windows ornamented with hand-carved latches. Three nylon wind socks the shape of dragons whirled across the porch. Children’s toys were strewn on the lawn—a roller skate, a hula hoop, a deserted army of action figures that circled a fluorescent machine gun. A Muldoon Security sign tilted in the breeze. As she approached the door, it was opened by a little boy with black, bowl-cut hair and slender eyelids: the Herrigs’ youngest, adopted from Cambodia, wearing a plastic tiara. He aimed a yellow water pistol at her and pulled the trigger. The gun was empty.

  “You’re dead,” he said. Beth feigned a bullet to her heart. Years of babysitting had taught her that kids gave up shooting you if you died right away.

  “You got me,” she said. The little boy tucked the barrel in the waistline of his pants. His miniature Nike Airs were pumped to full inflation. “I’m Nhean,” he told her. If Beth hadn’t known that Ted and Sarakit had adopted three boys, she wouldn’t have been certain about his sex. He twirled on one foot and slammed into a side table, knocking a stack of business cards to the floor. Beth stepped into the foyer to help pick them up. She felt the thick card stock and saw the Pearl Farms logo, an open oyster in profile clenching a pearl—the same logo that Nathan Crimp used for his stationery, and Tommy Muldoon had used to jot down his warning about Orient’s trust.

  “Your mom wouldn’t want you leaving a mess,” she said as she gathered up the cards.

  “I always wash my face after a hard day,” Nhean exclaimed, his black eyes glistening. Beth heard cartoons echoing from the den.

  “That’s a good idea.” She stacked the papers on the table.

  “That’s why I use Neutrogena Active. Because the last thing you want is an oily face.” It took Beth longer than it should have to realize that the seven-year-old in front of her was quoting a commercial.

  A taller, older boy shuffled into the hall. “Nhean, shut up.” He rolled his eyes and smiled at Beth, holding a bag of Cheetos to his stomach. “I’ve seen you before, around the neighborhood. And that day when the man drowned in the harbor. I’m Ronald.” He must be the middle child, adopted from Vietnam. “Are you here for my mom or my dad?” Ronald wo
re black pleather pants, a lime green belt, and a checkerboard sweater of pink and gray—a surprising display of fashion-consciousness, as Ted and Sarakit were both morbidly ordinary dressers.

  “Either one,” she said. “Maybe your mom.”

  “She’s around.” Ronald beckoned her to follow him down a hallway lined with framed posters of coastal cities: Cape Town, Bangkok, Jakarta, Shanghai, Manila, Honolulu. They ran in order from west to east, like clocks in banks showing different time zones. The décor made sense for the home of a travel agent and a geography teacher, and yet their three sons seemed to find their cultural roots at Riverhead Centre Mall.

  Ronald reached a wood sliding door and pulled it open. Behind it was a lamp-lit room full of rotating objects: a black circulating fan, a purple fish swimming in a glass bowl, and, in the corner, Sarakit, in a gray sweatsuit, exercising on an elliptical machine. She stopped treading when she noticed Beth; a look of confusion crossed her face as she waited for the pedals to cease spinning. Beth glanced into the hallway. Ronald had gone back to his cartoons, leaving her to explain her sudden appearance in the house.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Beth said. “Nhean let me in.”

  Sarakit grabbed the towel from the elliptical console and wiped her neck. “Ny-han,” she said.

  “And Ronald brought me in here. I didn’t know you were busy.”

  “Well.” She panted as she climbed off the machine. “It’s better if we talk in the kitchen.” Sarakit’s long hair was knotted back like a belt loop, and Beth followed its sheeny bounce through the hallway.