Personal Effects

by J. C. Hutchins

  “Hear, hear,” Rachael said. She carried our dinner and two Rogue Chipotle Ales into the living room, and placed them on the battered steamer trunk that doubled as our coffee table. She plopped onto the couch with a tiny oof, slipped off her dress shoes, wriggled her toes. “You’ve been spooked since that guy came up to you. And you! Agent 007! What did that guy say when you chased him outside?”

  She closed one eye and pursed her lips. She pointed an index finger at me, her thumb up like a gun hammer. Kiss kiss, bang bang.

  I love Rachael. I love our life together. I love this breadbox apartment in which we live, on a street that’s as electric and eccentric as we are. I love the comfort she brings to my life, the way she looks at me, the way she kisses me, fucks me, cheers me, knows me better than anyone else.

  She takes care of me.

  But if what the Invisible Man had said tonight was true, then this was rotten family history, emotional sludge. I didn’t want to go there with her just yet. It was too soon, too new. Too raw. And hell, Dad could be right: none of it might be true at all.

  “He was nuts,” I said. “Dad said he was a killer, fresh out of Sing Sing or something.”

  “Gah. There’s a million stories in the naked city,” Rachael said as she pried off the cap with the bottle opener. “Why do you always get the weird ones?”

  I gestured to the corner of the room where I made my art. Like my office, it was a four-car-pileup of sketches, easels, mason jars filled with muddy water, paintbrushes. “Guess it’s the luck of the drawer.”

  Rachael mimicked a punch-line trumpet: wah-wah-wahhhh.

  “Bad puns. A Zach Taylor specialty.”

  I gazed down at the cats, inspired. “Well, hello, Dali!”

  Rachael laughed through her mouthful of noodles.

  “Hey. Hottie.” She slapped the cushion beside her. “Get over here.”

  I tossed my coat and tie onto the comfy chair in the room’s corner, then sat next to my girl.

  “Seriously. I’m sorry it happened,” she said. She placed her chopsticks on her plate and cupped my face in her hands. I was deep-sea diving in those blue eyes. We kissed. I gave an appreciative mmmm as she pulled away. “Can I do anything?”

  “Just accept my apology for Dad flexing his prick-fu action grip.” I plucked up a slice of chicken with my sticks. “He was in rare form. So was Papa-Jean. Me and Eye, we’ve got … single-minded fathers.”

  “They always get their man,” Rachael affirmed. She reached out and stroked my arm. “Just like me. Hey. Don’t wig. You turned out just fine.”

  My eyes flicked around the room and mentally cataloged the other rooms in our cozy, cramped apartment. Past the bookcases stuffed with comic trade paperbacks, video game guides, sci-fi novels and technothrillers … past the paintings with “ZT” in their corners, the framed movie and video-game posters, the art prints … past Rachael’s spectacular widescreen TV, sound system and racks of game consoles … past our cramped corners where we performed our passions of writing and art … past all of these things were Zach lights. Zach lights in every room.

  Here in the living room, a string of cheerful chili pepper-shaped Christmas lights, stapled to the walls, glowed above us. In the kitchen and bathroom, light-sensitive gizmos plugged into wall sockets. In our bedroom, a desk lamp with a dimmer switch that was always on, glowing softly, always on. Rachael had learned to appreciate sleep masks.

  I hadn’t turned out just fine. I couldn’t tell you why that was, just that it was. Broken Zach, scared of the dark. A blind man had reminded me of that, nearly five hours ago.

  I faked a smile. “Maybe a little undercooked, but I guess I’ll do in a pinch.”

  Rachael grinned, leaning her shoulder against mine.

  “You’re my fella,” she said. “You’re doing me just fine.”

  We shared a smile, and munched in amiable silence, surrounded by that warm blanket of familiarity and comfort. We ate our Szechwan, sipped our Rogues. Rachael chatted about the review of Bloodwire she was cooking up for PixelVixen707. I laughed at the probable headline: “Fan-fraggin’-tastic.”

  But the shadow-fingers slowly crept back into my mind. My father wasn’t the only Taylor man to obsess about his work. I brought my baggage home, too: the whispers, the taunts. You want to save the blind man? Then fucking earn it.

  Martin Grace.

  “I’ve gotta ask you something,” I said. Rachael looked at me, quizzical. I brushed a magenta bang away from her glasses. “I need a favor.”

  Beneath my girlfriend’s electric hair, tattoos, piercings, and over-the-top online persona lurks the soul of a brilliant woman. My friends say Rachael’s slumming, being with a guy like me. I’ve never disagreed. She craves precision in nearly everything she does. Her writing for PixelVixen sports a brass-knuckled humor and practicality that her readers adore. (Or ’dore, as Lucas would say.) Her freelance work as a technical writer is frills-free, logical and direct. And her tenacity is unparalleled as a part-time researcher and fact-checker for the New York Journal-Ledger. In the months after 9/11, she contributed to the two series that won Pulitzer prizes in the National Reporting and Public Service categories.

  That’s my girl. She’s the rational ying to my emotional yang.

  I told her about Martin Grace, the murders, his psychosomatic blindness, next week’s trial. She frowned, horrified, as I recounted the ordeal in Room 507, and the conclusion I’d made as the train had rolled into the 6th Avenue-14th Street station. I needed to know who Martin Grace was. I needed more than what was in The Brink’s admittance report.

  Rachael took a sip of her beer. She glanced at the laptop resting on the tiny desk in her corner of the room. Her eyes came back to me.

  “If you’re going to ask me, Z, ask me.”

  She’s so shrewd. I bit my bottom lip.

  “I need your access to the Journal-Ledger’s research library. I want to know everything about this guy: past addresses, income, taxes, marriages, whatever I can dig up. The cops and Dad have access to all that stuff—”

  “Your dad isn’t the attorney prosecuting the case, Z,” Rachael interjected. She crossed her arms; the fabric of her sweater bunched around her chest. “He’s an administrator now. Assistant D.A.s handle the cases. You know that.”

  She was right. She also wasn’t through.

  “You’ve had a lousy night, Z. I dig that,” she said. “But if this is about you beating your Dad, forget it. And if it’s about beating Grace, you can forget that, too. If you’ve got some vendetta working behind that very handsome, very kissable face of yours, there’s absolutely no way I’ll help. It’s manipulative, and it’s not who you are. I love you. I don’t want to resent you.”

  “It isn’t,” I said. “Lookit, I’ve gotta be armed when I go back in there. I have to earn his trust, and the only way to do that is to get beyond the folder. I don’t want to beat him. I want to help him.”

  She sighed.

  “Zach, it doesn’t sound like he wants to be helped.”

  “Maybe not,” I admitted, and this was true. Grace had confounded every therapist he’d encountered during his hopscotch through the system. He’d mocked his doctors, sniffed them over … and then snapped them over his knee. Grace was a self-proclaimed pariah, believing he deserved this fast track to Hell. Which didn’t make sense. Despite those odd, so-called visions of death, his alibis were solid.

  I thought back to this afternoon. Grace had torn a chunk out of me in that room. But I’d bitten back. He had admired that.

  “Yeah, maybe not,” I said again. “But I’m not going to know unless I try, unless I get some”—I thought of my father—“history. Context.”

  Rachael pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose. She took another sip from her bottle.

  “You’re not messing around,” she said. “Not placating me.”

  “Not a bit.” This was also true.

  “Then you can come and play,” Rachael said. She stood up, stretched,
and pulled the black sweater from her body. The ink on her pale arms lanced from her shoulders, down to her elbows. I admired her for a breathless moment. Now that’s my girl.

  “But on one condition,” she said. “I’m driving.”

  Over the next two hours (and more Rogue Chipotle Ales), I watched my girlfriend perform high-powered sorcery on her laptop. Using the biographical information I’d culled from The Brink’s report, Rachael trolled a phalanx of governmental databases, collecting bits and bytes from the DMV, IRS, and other institutions. Since Martin Grace was under criminal investigation, some searchable information was also available in the NYPD’s computer network.

  My geek goddess was no black hat. She was a cybersleuth. If it could be legally found with the resources at her disposal, she could nearly always find it.

  Tonight, she did—and it didn’t make a goddamned bit of sense.

  “You’re not going to like this,” Rachael said. She pulled a chewed pencil from the small bun she’d made in her hair a beer-and-a-half ago. “Look.”

  She tapped the computer’s screen with the pencil’s eraser. “I’ve got tax records from 1980 right here. Says Grace worked for Music Street Elite, a music store, in Louisiana. Cross-ref this—”

  Her thumb and pinky executed a maneuver on the keyboard. A new window flashed on the screen.

  “—with Louisiana local business data from the same year. Guess what? No Music Street Elite.” She glanced at me, a tight frown on her lips. “Not in the Better Business Bureau, not in city or county property records—actually, they call counties ‘parishes’ down there—and not in the friggin’ phone book.”

  “So he faked his taxes?” I asked.

  Rachael snorted. “He faked a lot more than that.” She tapped the screen again, reaching for the beer in my hand. I surrendered it. “This is nuts, Z. Nearly every tax report is bogus. The businesses don’t exist. Even the homes he said he lived in don’t exist.”

  She performed that same ninja move with her fingers, and the contents of the LCD flashed from one window to another (and then another, and another) in machine-gun rapid fire. As she did this, her pencil scratched check marks and question marks on a nearby notepad.

  “Okay, I was lying,” she said. “About half all of these addresses do exist, but according to residency data, the homes—many of which are apartments—were occupied by other families at the time.”

  “So he lived with friends,” I said. “Roomies.”

  “Unlikely,” Rachael said. She circled something on a sheet that had belched out of our laser printer. It was an address. “Look. 1985. Providence, Rhode Island. Do you really think that the Miller family—a married couple with four kids, crammed into a two-bedroom apartment—actually let Martin Grace crash on their couch for three years?”

  I cringed. Six months ago, Lucas had roomed here for two weeks, after an unexplained falling out with some of his parkour roommates. I’d wanted to kill him by the end of the third day.

  “Hell no,” I said.

  “Preeecisely,” Rachael said. “Bogus employment record, bogus addys, no marriage certificates, no children, no criminal record, no IRS audits. Squeaky clean. On paper, Martin Grace is incorporeal, Z. He’s a hoax. A ghost.”

  She whistled the theme from “The Twilight Zone.”

  “But these records here …” I began, pointing to the steamer trunk. My notes from The Brink were stacked there.

  “Yeah, I’m getting to that,” Rachael said. She was buzzing, in the zone, and I was buzzing right along with her. It wasn’t the beer. I loved it when she was like this, relishing in the doing of what she did. I wanted to kiss her then. I resisted this. She was on a roll.

  “This is where things get legit,” she explained. “Everything from ten years ago checks out. The jobs, addresses, tax stuff. It’s as if Martin Grace, then 46, appeared fully formed in Rochester. He stepped out of the ether and started working for, ah … Syncopation Productions, LLC. Music studio.”

  She executed another keystroke, and my patient’s most recent state ID photo—from three years ago—winked on the screen.

  “The folks working for your dad, they undoubtedly have access to this,” Rachael said. “If they know anything more, it’s coming from data I can’t grab. They’ll play those cards at the trial, I bet.”

  I took the bottle from her hand and took a pull.

  “So what does it all mean?”

  Rachael’s pencil tapped the screen again.

  “It means I don’t have a clue who you’re dealing with.”

  8

  Two hours later, nearly midnight. I sat in the comfy chair near my corner of the living room, one leg slung over its upholstered arm. My angled thigh played easel for the sketch pad in my lap. Bliss sat on my other leg, purring, kneading my knee.

  It was impossible to sleep.

  Rachael and I had double-checked her research an hour ago, coming to the same conclusion: the man in Room 507 hadn’t existed until a decade ago.

  I made the connection not long after that.

  That’s when the killings began, I’d said. When his “Dark Man” came.

  We’d held hands and chuckled about boogeymen, and then Rachael had gone to bed. She wasn’t spooked—far from it. She simply had no expertise in where my mind was wandering. Data was her game. Therapy was mine. She’d left her laptop running, in case I wanted to search Journal-Ledger archives stories about the Grace murders. I’d told her I wouldn’t be up much longer.

  Now, sitting in my second-hand chair, I hoped I was right.

  I stared up at the glowing chili-pepper lights. So. Ten years ago, a man named Martin Grace had punched a hole into the world … and to hear him tell the tale, had brought a monster with him. It was ridiculous, to be sure; Grace’s Inkstain was a psychological creation, a way to rationalize his supposedly precognitive visions. And those visions, I knew, represented psychological breakdowns in their own right. Delusions of reference, like Grace’s last doctor had supposed? Schizotypal personality disorder?

  That was inscrutable—at least, for right now. I’d have to hack-and-slash my way to the cause of Grace’s psychosomatic blindness before I could learn more about the deaths. And I had to learn about the deaths before I could decipher what fueled his visions. To do that, I had to find out who this man was before he was Martin Grace.

  I chuckled. It was a bitter sound.

  Who is Martin Grace? Who is John Galt?

  I gently shooed Bliss from my lap and picked up the wedge of charcoal resting by my sketch pad. I wasn’t feeling the manic artistic urge that I’d experienced this morning under Primoris Maximus, but something was tugging at my hand. I let it flow.

  It drew a large question mark on the page.

  Ha. Yes. That was today, represented right here, surrounded by a field of white. Questions. Question after question after question.

  The coal scratched smaller question marks as I chewed on this. I wrote the emotions I was feeling now, adding more question marks as I did so, quietly absorbed by the swirling motion of my hand.

  Exhausted. Scared. Bruised. Determined, alone, invisible.

  The doubt and curiosity came now. What if I couldn’t help Grace?

  Scritch. Another question mark. Scritch, another word.

  What was his history? Scritch.

  What if I couldn’t find what he was hiding?

  Scritch.

  What had he lost?

  Scritch.

  Why couldn’t he see?

  Where, how, when?

  Scritch, scritch, scritch.

  Ten minutes later, I mentally up-shifted and took a deep breath, examining what I’d created. Yes, question marks, all over the page—I expected that. I didn’t expect, however, to find that the curved lines and dots were arranged in the shape of a man.

  And there was more here. Some words were larger than the others. I read them and felt my eyes widen, then water. The coal trembled in my hand.

  HIDDEN HELP

&
nbsp; FIND LOST INVISIBLE HISTORY

  I SEE ALONE

  Oh my. This wasn’t about Grace, not at all.

  I was telling myself to find lost history … invisible history. From an Invisible Man.

  My hand dropped the charcoal. My fingers, numb and stupid, slid to my pants pocket and tugged at the paper inside. I gaped at the crumpled envelope now in my hand, the thing given to me by the stranger. I opened the envelope and read the card.

  An uncle who never was. A brother who wanted to hide him. A … a mother who still loved him? It was all here, what he’d said as the East 77th Street traffic had rushed by.

  I turned my head slowly, to the end table by our front door. There, beside a flickering scented candle, rested the box of photos Lucas had given me earlier that evening. The world assumed the syrupy slowness of a dream now. I went to it, brought it back to my chair, opened it and gazed into the past.

  Most of the photos resting atop the stack were from the past year. These were pictures Lucas and I sent Gram as she’d grown ill, to keep her posted on our lives and loves. I held a photo taken nearly a year ago: My father, Lucas, Rachael and me, posing for a “Gram pic” in Central Park. Lucas was hamming it up for the lens, as always. Rachael and I held each other close, exuberant in our newfound romance. Her laughter at Lucas’ cross-eyed expression had evoked a cheerful rise from Dad. We were all smiling.

  It was a beautiful photo. I pulled my wallet from my slacks pocket and placed it inside, knowing Gram would want me to have it.

  I dug further then, an archaeologist questing for I knew not what. In the middle of the stack, I found a yellowed sheet of paper, folded in thirds. As I pulled it out of the box, a scrap fell from its folds. I eyed the ragged cursive handwriting that stared back from inside in the box.

  Suddenly have lots of time on my hands, it read. Wanted to see how far it—or rather, we—went back. Did research. Hope you appreciate the history lesson, especially in light of recent events. Forever yours—H

  I squinted. Henry? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps Grandpa Taylor. His name was Howard.