by Sean Black
‘I don’t want to do it, okay? And I feel like I’m being pressured.’
He withdrew his hand as the safety supervisor reached down to check something, letting the couple have their argument if that was what it was going to be.
‘I thought you’d enjoy it. I’m sorry. I truly am. I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to.’
She felt herself soften. He seemed genuine. His face wore the expression of a man who was contrite.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.
She took another step back from the lip of the bridge, her hands on her hips and took three long, deep breaths.
‘Julia,’ he said. ‘When I said I would never let something bad happen, I meant it. I checked all the gear twice myself before the safety guy. If I thought there was any risk I wouldn’t have suggested it.’
She thought back to his heart rate. ‘That why you’re so calm?’
He glanced down to the watch and something flitted across his face. It worried her: it was the look of a man who had been caught out. ‘You want to go to dinner?’ he asked. ‘We’ll go.’
‘No,’ she found herself saying. ‘I want to do this.’
He smiled and took her hand. ‘Count of three, okay?’ he said, as they edged back to the lip. ‘And look up at the stars, not down at the water.’
Byron motioned for the waiter to let Julia taste the wine. The man poured a little into her glass. She tasted it. It was good. Better than good. It was sensational. Everything was better than good. Everything since the jump from the bridge had felt sharper, more intense. Colors. Smells. Taste. Byron.
She had decided not to spoil the moment by asking him why his heart rate never moved. For once she didn’t want to be the woman who interrogated a guy she liked about everything on the second date. More selfishly, she didn’t want to spoil her own mood. There was something to be said for allowing a person to reveal themselves at their own pace, and nothing about Byron had suggested a man who was evasive. He had boundaries when it came to work, but that was understandable in a government job. He wouldn’t be much of a State Department or CIA worker if he spilled his guts to every girl he talked to at a party or went home with.
They had dinner and she kept the conversation away from work. She found herself gabbling on about how scared she had been standing on the bridge.
‘There’s only two fears we’re born with, Julia. Falling and loud noises. They’re hard-wired into our minds. Everything else we pick up.’ He laid his fork on his plate and took a sip of wine.
‘What about dying?’ she asked him.
‘That’s abstract. It comes later.’
‘So what fears do you have, Byron? And if you say something cheesy, like losing my number, you’re picking up the check.’
He gave that same broad, open smile and his eyes crinkled at the edges. ‘Lots of things. The only difference is that I’m too stupid to pay any attention.’
‘So when did you get into all this extreme-sports stuff?’ He had already told her that he also rock-climbed, parachuted, and had done open-water dives with hammerhead sharks, as well as snowboarding and para-sailing.
His head tilted up and his eyes half closed. ‘Let me see. The more extreme stuff? Guess I started around the same time I got myself a motorbike as a twenty-fifth birthday present.’ He smiled again. ‘Quarter-life crisis?’
‘So the military didn’t give you a taste for it?’
The smile faded. His brow furrowed. He sat up in his chair and put down his wine glass. It didn’t look so much like he was angry as suddenly depleted, spent. ‘No. It didn’t.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …’
His eyes met hers and she saw they were wet. ‘You don’t have to be sorry, Julia. And I’ll tell you all about my time in the service. One day. But not tonight. The military saved me and I’ll always be grateful for everything they gave me. Y’know, you see stuff and it can be hard for someone who hasn’t been in that position to understand.’
TWENTY-NINE
In contrast to the slightly bohemian chaos of her apartment, his place was, as she had expected, suitably utilitarian and well ordered — another by-product of his military career, she assumed. In the living room there was a couch, a coffee-table, and two rows of bookshelves. While he opened another bottle of wine in the kitchen area, she studied his books. Apart from some literary classics (Dickens, Flaubert, Camus, Mailer), they were mostly non-fiction. There were a lot of military memoirs, ranging from the civil war to more contemporary accounts of Afghanistan and Iraq, and a lot of heavyweight academic studies of current events in the Middle East from a range of Western and Middle Eastern authors. There was some philosophy too (Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche). An entire shelf was devoted to works on conflict resolution, and there were several volumes, some academic, others more journalistic, on counter-insurgency strategies.
He crossed to her and handed her a long-stemmed glass of red wine. He reached past her and clicked on an iPod, which nestled in a Bose docking station.
John Coltrane, A Love Supreme.
‘Smooth,’ she said, teasing.
‘Shoot me. I like jazz.’
He leaned in to kiss her, softly at first, then more insistently. She opened her mouth and felt his tongue against hers. She was still floating from the earlier high. He cradled her face in his hands, then pulled her with him down onto the couch. She was lying on top of him. She could feel him harden against her stomach. She reached out to put her glass on the coffee-table as he unbuttoned her blouse and slid a hand inside, cupping her breast through her bra.
Between her legs, she was wet and hot. It had been less than a week since they’d first been together but already there was an ache, a need to have him inside her. His hands pulled at her blouse, then he took off her bra, kissing his way down her neck. They stood up and she took off his shirt. He reached down, his hand brushing against her thigh and working its way up between her legs.
With her arms around his neck, he lifted her up. Her legs wrapped around his waist. He held her tight as he took off his pants and then he was inside her, his hands on her ass. She bucked and writhed, completely lost. She came quickly, her head snapping back as he kissed her throat. He carried her through into the bedroom.
She put a hand across his chest. ‘Lie down,’ she said, the balance shifting from him to her.
He did as she had asked and she straddled him, feeling him go deeper inside her. Her back arched as she moved her hips. They stayed like that for a long time. Her moving on top of him. She came again and then he began to groan. He said her name as her hair fell across his face. They kissed as he came and she collapsed, her head resting against his muscular chest. Moments passed when neither of them moved, or said anything.
After a time she turned her head fractionally. Through her tangle of red hair, she could see that he was still wearing his heart monitor. The display flashed green in the darkness of the bedroom – the reading constant.
His heart rate. Eighty-five beats per minute. It hadn’t moved. She felt a chill run through her. She could imagine someone might remain calm as they faced down their fear, especially someone who had been in frightening situations. But for your heart not to quicken when you made love as they had?
He followed her gaze to the glowing display. ‘I wanted to wait before I told you,’ he said softly. ‘But I guess if we’re to go on seeing each other I should do it now.’
His eyes were searching her face. Who was he? She had asked it before, in the manner of a woman wondering how a man she had met could be so perfect. Now it had taken on a more sinister edge. ‘Yes,’ she said, sitting up. ‘I think you should.’
‘Aghast the Devil stood, and felt how awful goodness was.’
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Scrawled on a tunnel under the Las Vegas Strip
THIRTY
Las Vegas
Byron
The lights of the Strip fell away with the rising sun but Las Vegas remained, sh
abby and faded in the daylight. I kept walking, praying it would shatter as I drew closer. It didn’t. It grew more real with each step I took, the shared features of the two landscapes shifting inexorably in front of me to those of the American south-west; wadis gave way to concrete run-offs, the grey-green landscape around Kabul was pushed out by the vivid desert reds and yellows; scrub and trees were replaced by palms arranged along neatly paved boulevards.
Between the malls, wedding chapels and golden arches of McDonald’s, the horror returned. Sasha didn’t feature: she had faded with the juniper trees. These were fresh horrors, with me in the lead role. It was as if time had fractured and a piece had fallen into the abyss. Everything around me appeared real. I could see, touch, taste, smell and hear Vegas all around me. Cars and trucks sped past on Las Vegas Boulevard, and no one looked twice. At one point I caught myself mumbling out loud. At least, my lips were moving, and I could hear my own voice. A video camera set on a tripod in the window of an electronics store caught anyone passing and threw their image onto a row of super-thin TV sets.
At first I didn’t recognize myself. It was only when I caught sight of the raw wound on the side of my neck, and reached up to touch it, the image on screen matching the movement of my hand, that I realized I was looking at myself. Afghanistan or Nevada, I sure as hell looked like someone who had left somewhere in a hurry and spent the last few days trekking over open country, exposed to the elements at every turn.
My apparent invisibility suddenly made sense. I was the crazy homeless guy wearing long sleeves and a jacket in the blazing sun. My straight black hair had grown so it was touching my collar, and I was sporting a ragged, unruly shadow of a beard. My dark complexion was matted with a thin layer of grime, my hands were rough and calloused, fingernails long like claws.
Behind the screens, a store employee wearing a blue polo shirt was staring at me. I moved on. When I glanced back over my shoulder, he was talking to a customer. Up ahead was a bus stop with a bench advertising the services of a local attorney who specialized in DUI cases. I sat down and tried to gather myself. I needed a meal, fresh clothes, and a place to stay while I worked out what the hell had happened. There must be homeless shelters nearby but they would ask for some form of ID. Even if they didn’t, the thought of having to speak to someone was frightening. The fear was absurd, but there it was.
A roar filled my ears. A JetBlue passenger aircraft came in low overhead. I looked over my shoulder to see a chain-link fence and a runway. Several small private jets were parked less than a hundred yards away. McCarran airport, it had to be. I had passed through it a couple of times. If I called Julia she could book me a ticket back to New York. The thought scared me more than a homeless shelter. I would have to present ID at the airport. Before that I would have to tell my wife that I didn’t know how I’d got there but I was in Vegas.
There was something else too. The Hindu Kush might have faded back into the mists but I hadn’t shaken off the feeling that I was on the run from someone or something. It crowded in on me at every fleeting glance or sudden noise. No, before I committed to any course of action, I had to figure out what the hell was going on. But first, I needed to get some money.
Even by the casual standards of Vegas, I was in no state to hang out in any of the casinos. I knew from my solitary visit for an international security conference that a lot of homeless people lived by skimming credits from slot machines abandoned by tourists. Someone would be playing one of the slots, was distracted by the lure of an all-you-can-eat buffet and left the machine with unplayed credits. The homeless would walk the casino floors on the lookout for them until house security threw them out. It was a bare-bones way of scraping a living but you had to achieve some base level of dress code. The way I looked now, I doubted I would even get through the doors of an off-Strip low-rent joint.
Covert special-forces training had taught me all the stuff that teenage boys obsessed over. Field work had taught me that firearms and close-combat skills mattered less than people assumed. The ability to see rather than merely look was far more important. From that starting point you could establish how other people in the same situation survived and assess the effectiveness of their behavior.
Five minutes later, I was Dumpster-diving in the alley behind the TV store. A fast-food restaurant at the end of the row provided a free meal. The TV store threw up a world of discarded cardboard. I tore off a couple of sturdy box flaps and walked back out to the street, heading for a freeway off-ramp I’d spotted when I’d walked into town. In front of the fast-food outlet there was a water fountain. I filled my bottles with clean water and continued on. No one looked at me twice. I was just another Vegas loser standing at the wrong end of the American Dream, invisible, a background actor in regular people’s lives – I was grateful for the anonymity. I couldn’t have picked a better identity or a better place to deploy it than this city.
Keeping busy settled me. Urban Survival 101 was proving the antidote to my mind storm. My past might have fractured but at least I had a present.
THIRTY-ONE
‘Get the fuck out of here, man. This here’s my spot. Understand me? Mine!’ the man screamed, as I walked toward the traffic waiting to turn at the bottom of the freeway ramp.
He had a standard-issue homeless-person dirty ball cap and full white beard. A farmer’s tan covered his face, arms and lower legs. He wore sneakers, shorts, a couple of T-shirts, a jacket with the sleeves rolled up and shades, while he smoked a cigarette and held up his sign that announced his veteran status. Vietnam. His only problem was that, despite his booze-dried complexion, he was at least ten years too young to have picked up the end of the war in Vietnam, even allowing for a willing spirit and a forged birth certificate.
There was something else about him too, although I wasn’t conscious of seeing it, not at first anyway, not until we were already in conversation, and what I was looking at had begun to fade. As I approached him, the guy’s skull had glowed yellow. Not yellow from the sun bouncing off a windshield and shading his skin under the bill of his cap, but yellow in the very center top of his head.
Moving closer and using my size to intimidate, I spoke to him softly: ‘Chill. I’m not here to take your spot.’ I dug out my piece of blank cardboard. ‘I’m going to head down there a ways. Pick my own spot.’
The guy tilted his head back, squinting up at me and revealing a scorpion patterned in black ink around his neck. ‘You’d better not mess with me, man. I got a buddy round here who’ll fuck you up good.’
I ignored the invitation to a pissing contest. ‘I’m not looking for trouble. Just wanted to see if I could borrow a Sharpie or something to mark up my sign and see if you could give me a heads up on a couple of things.’
‘You’d better give it back to me,’ said the man, digging into his jacket and coming up with a black marker pen.
‘One vet to another,’ I said.
The man stuck out a weathered hand. ‘Name’s Chauncey.’
I shook but said nothing.
‘Not got a name, huh? Got it. Where’d you serve?’
I ignored that question too. I printed out my message with the marker and handed it back to my new buddy, Chauncey. ‘Thanks.’
‘Just watch for the cops,’ said Chauncey. ‘They see you panhandling, they’ll give you a ticket. I got myself three for loitering.’
‘I don’t plan on staying around too long. Just need to get myself some cash.’
Chauncey smiled. His lips peeled back to reveal yellow stumps of meth-ravaged teeth. ‘That’s what I said two years ago. I travel some but this place has a way of drawing people back.’
I was only half listening. I was too busy staring at the fading yellow patterns I could see where Chauncey’s skull was.
Yellow = fear.
It didn’t present itself as a fully formed thought, any more than touching ice made you think ice = cold. I was simply aware of the man’s fear in the same way I was aware of a dozen other sensation
s, like the temperature, the cars driving past, and the smell of stale sweat and gas fumes. Most of the time sensory information didn’t make it as far as crystallizing into a thought, and this was no different.
‘Thanks for your help, Chauncey.’
I strode to the crosswalk and hit the button. As I stepped out onto the road, Chauncey called after me, ‘Watch out for those Metro cops. They got some mean motherfuckers in Paradise City.’
I turned back. ‘Paradise City? Thought this was Vegas.’
Chauncey yanked a thumb north up the Strip. ‘That’s Vegas. This here is Paradise. Biggest unincorporated city in the country. Same asshole cops, though.’
I went on my way into the baking heat. A homeless woman with a couple of shopping carts loaded with recyclables already had the south off-ramp staked out. She was tall, close to six feet, with long, bleached-blonde hair. I headed downstream of her, ceding ground. She stared at me and pouted with bright red lips but didn’t say anything. There was no aura of color around her head. Maybe the yellow I’d seen when I was talking to Chauncey had been the sun after all.
I held up my sign and waited.
THIRTY-TWO
Most of the people driving past kept their windows closed, their doors locked and their eyes set dead ahead. A couple of lone female drivers, who had to pull up right next to me while they waited for the turn signal to flip over, glowed yellow. When they did, I walked further down the ramp, away from them, and their fear seemed to fade. About an hour after I had begun, a pick-up truck stopped. The driver, a middle-aged guy with a greasy comb-over and a bad suit, opened the passenger door.
‘I got a job for you. Pay sucks and it’ll be tough but if you want the work …’
With the heat rolling up from ground, I was just happy for the chance to climb into an air-conditioned cab. ‘How much and what do you need?’