by Josh Cook
“I do.”
“What the fuck is going on there? I know it probably has something to do with his memory, and him looking stupid for a few minutes is the least of my gripes, but it drives me fucking nuts. You’re talking to this asshole, and then he’s just fucking gone.”
“So, what’s going on there?”
“Exactly. What the fuck is going on there?”
“He described it to me this way,” Max put his burger down and wiped his hands clean. Then he cleared his throat. “Imagine you’ve got a house full of filing cabinets and each drawer of every cabinet is filled with folders and each folder has a particular piece of information in it. Even if you know which folder, in which drawer, in which cabinet the thing you want is, it still takes time to get it.”
“So, he’s walking around his house of filing cabinets?”
“He’s running at the speed of sound through a city of houses of filing cabinets.”
Horn-Rims raised his eyebrows in his version of awe. “Jesus. No wonder he looks like he’s had a stroke.”
“No wonder.”
“Does he get what it’s like for us?”
“I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“That’s your actual question.”
“How the fuck would you know?”
“ ’Cause I solve motherfucking cases too, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah. You got an answer?” Horn-Rims persisted.
“First, I get to ask you … a five-year question.”
“So this is an exchange?”
“It is now.”
“All right, shoot.”
“Why don’t you join the Bureau?”
“After all the shit you’ve told me about it, you wonder?”
“You’re wasted here, HR. And they’re demoting you while wasting you.”
“So why don’t I move on to bigger and better?”
“Exactly.”
“And you thought this was a tough question,” Horn-Rims said. “The closest Bureau office is an hour from here, Claire loves this city, I don’t want to move the kids, and I sure as fuck don’t want to drive two hours a day on boring days, and who knows how the fuck long for an investigation. Nope, I’m staying put despite the shit.”
“That’s it?”
“Said by a man who’s never had a wife and kids.”
Max shook his head. Grimaced. “I hate that argument.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t care. It’s the argument. And you owe me an answer.”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“I didn’t ask because I knew I’d like the answer. No point in that.”
Max cleared his throat. Rolled his neck. Cracked his knuckles. “Imagine what a Zulu warrior in the seventeenth century felt like in his own brain. Or a Victorian housewife. Or a convict deported to Australia. You can’t do it. The distance between us and them is too great. Where that distance is created by time and circumstance, the distance between us and Trike is created by biology. His brain is as different from ours as the brain of any Greek politician, Roman centurion, or Japanese samurai. Frankly, it’s a miracle he can even carry on a conversation.”
Max picked up his burger. Started eating again.
“So that’s his excuse,” Horn-Rims asked.
“No,” Max said through a mouthful, “that’s his life.”
“I’m not letting him off, Max. Your theory is fine if you’ve got to share an office with him, but with me, nobody gets a free pass.”
Max set his burger down. He’d had a thought off and on since he started working with Trike. This was his first chance to put it into words.
“Think about everything Trike already has going for him. The memory. The intelligence. The observation. The martial arts. I saw a beautiful woman tell him he’s cute in an indie-band-drummer kind of way, whatever that means. Think of all that, and imagine if, on top of it all, he was a nice guy. How would you feel about him?”
Horn-Rims glared at nothing in front of him. “Fucking Trike Augustine. Fucking PIs.”
UNIFIED THEORY OF ART
Brain like a beaten dog from the jet lag, alone at a cafe, Trike elsewhere Triking, reeling in unreeling-like ways from her visit to Le Centre Pompidou, sitting outside, watching it all walk by, wondering, with her wet-cat jet-lagged reeling unreeling brain how it could all be expressed, Lola got The Joyce Case, and why it would be impossible to explain to Trike.
THE OLD-TIMER HAS HIS THIRD SAY
“Dumb sentimental shit. Nobody evens these things out,” The Old-Timer muttered, standing at his government-subsidized P.O. box holding a bank statement about the account opened in his name.
MAX CATCHES UP
Max stood by the window thinking of new ways to describe the moon; he was that bored. Paperwork’ll do bad things to a man. Big moon. Low over the city. Clear sky. First clear sky in weeks. He settled on “bare bulb in a big room strewn with low furniture and battered books.” If there were anything to look at, he might’ve lingered, but the office was in a borderland between the business and residential districts. The view had all the activity of an Amish village after the big old barn had been big old raised.
They had a great plan: divvy up a portion of the reward between the three of them for personal use, set up 401(k)s for Trike and Lola and substantially add to the one he had from the Bureau, and put the rest in a series of checking accounts to use for that stalagmite of back bills that had accumulated between paychecks. He figured it’d take a couple of days to work through it all with an accountant, and it did. Then it was just writing checks until his fingers fell off and he was free and clear for a three-week vacation at the cabin. Maybe call Jessie when he got back.
Max had to admit throwing all those zeroes around was thrilling for a couple of days. Three months back and two years’ advance rent on the office. Invoices from the alarm company and Constable Wensley’s Law Enforcement and Home Defense supply store, where they got a big credit line because Max knew a guy. A few of the credit-card bills with more digits than was heart-healthy.
But eventually he got to the more lenient licensing agencies. The utilities you can’t pay in advance. The credit cards they used for Chinese takeout and other necessities. And then, what was once just a bluesman cliché became The Thrill Is Gone.
He sat heavily back down at his desk. He had forty to sixty-five minutes left of addressing and signing and then he was done. Just a little more than an hour. Maybe not even that much. Then he could sleep in and head up to the cabin as free as he’d been since—as free as he’d ever been. His mind drifted to the books he’d packed: The Maltese Falcon, The Daughter of Time, and Ulysses. The last one just so he could tell that arrogant bastard he gave it a shot. He thought about the Adirondack chair at his fishing spot. Tried to remember the last time he’d changed his oil. He pictured the fire he would build in the fireplace. The contents of his freezer. He thought about the first long walk. He considered his cases journal and how he would add The Joyce Case to it, because telling people was the consolation prize for crazy-ass shit happening in your life. He wondered if he’d remembered to put a hold on the newspapers. He thought about listening to the game on the radio on the porch with no lights for miles.
He was thinking about listening to the game on the radio on the porch with no lights for miles when it hit him so hard, he had to say it out loud.
“Trike’s in Paris … I can smoke in the office.”
Max grabbed an empty tallboy from the recycling bin. Put his feet up on his desk. Lit a cigarette. The windows were closed, so the smoke loitered in cirrus clouds around the still fan blades.
He figured Trike and Lola were out on their first day in Paris. If the beast ran according to form, they’d be on their way to a lesser-known museum on that day—because Lola was a traveler, not a tourist, goddammit—and Lola would find out that Trike had consumed a book on interpreting brushstrokes while she slept on the flight, when she tried to explain the significance of a painting to
him. Reminded again why he was beyond the loving people evolved with.
Max finished his cigarette and dropped the smoldering butt into the tallboy. He’d hoped some vague resource would be renewed, the whatever-it-was that one used to sign checks for hours. But it wasn’t. The pile of bills grew in stature while he smoked. It was like the Mongols made camp for the night and woke up next to a wall. Staggered, they could say nothing about their experience. Borders are not built things to nomads. The gap and a different possession and the most demolished of them explained their return by demons and monsters.
“New strategy,” Max thought. “Take the rest home … finish it watching … my freshly repaired cable. Mail on the way out.”
He started to gather the papers together. He almost fell over when the phone rang. Almost hit the ground when he recognized the caller.
One of the guys from the Bureau.
Jesus, one of the guys from the Bureau.
A few of them, and one guy who’d retired two years before Max did, were in town for a conference and wondered about giving him a call. Finding the agency number online made the decision. He noted that Max was working late again. They were getting a beer in about an hour. Max knew where the bar was. No, he didn’t have any plans. Yes, he would meet them there. No, he couldn’t believe how long it’d been. Yes, it would be great to catch up.
It would be terrifying to catch up.
The only drama missing from Max’s last day at the office was him getting shot and using what little blood remained in his heart and air remained in his lungs to tell his partner to get the bastards whatever it took. Painful goodbyes. Crippling guilt. Monuments of regret.
But it was the carpet that struck him.
As he left, it occurred to him for the first time that someone had to pick the carpet. The color. The material. The brand. And since he was walking through a government building, it was a committee decision. Which meant there was a discussion. A long discussion. Factoring regulations and pork-barrel funding streams. Until the committee got so sick of looking at samples, they shoved the catalog at the interns and told them to earn the résumé line.
Once he saw the decision on the carpet, he saw the decisions everywhere. The walls. The ceiling. The desks. His desk. Elevator buttons. Vending machines. Handles on the water fountains. Paint in the parking spots. Papers in the bathrooms. In the photocopiers. In the printers. Decision pyramids balanced apex to apex. There was a committee at the carpet company too.
The enormity of his departure initially wasn’t vivid. It was just a thing in his life, like his address. It came to life two weeks later at the copy shop.
Max was waiting to make copies of his passport and credit cards. He overheard two employees at the large format printer, complaining about their boss, calling him Herr Manager. Max and a few of his buddies called one of their bosses Herr Manager. They had their reasons. So did the guys at the copy shop. But they weren’t going to get killed spiral-binding an order.
Max heard the bullets and the blades.
The eyes desperate to kill.
The eyes desperate to live. To flee. To be anywhere or anyone else.
Max’s desk was next to Jabez Balfour’s. They both worked deep cover and went for years without seeing each other.
Lives depended on what they did. And deaths.
The bar was about a half-hour walk from the office. The remaining paperwork looked like fragile vials of infectious disease.
Max stood up. “TV plan … after the bar,” he said.
He gathered the rest of the bills into a folder, then got his coat and hat.
“Nice night … nice stroll.”
Max turned on the recently paid-for security alarm, locked the door, and left. He put the folder in the car. He stood still for a moment after he closed the car door.
The city was quiet. Which was just a consequence of attention.
“Spiral my way to the bar,” he decided.
Something made him think of the special hell that was watching football with Trike, when Trike tried to be polite. Most of the time, Trike just let it all flow out—the stats, the coverages, the reads, the upcoming plays once he cracked the coaches’ codes—because it was in his head piling up with everything else that piled up. But every now and again, Max told him to zip it for a minute so he could just watch the game. That was a different worse. Having a guy jabber in your ear is one thing; sitting next to a brain vibrating like a paper shredder is another torture altogether.
Max passed the Hanoi Cafe. Its green-and-white striped awning was tattered. The brick exterior was dingy and covered with long out-of-date concert posters. The inside matched the outside. The drinking water was warm. Talk radio was on so loud in the kitchen, you could hear it in the dining room. No matter the weather, no matter the season, there was always at least one big black fly buzzing around. The utensils were never quite clean. But the Hanoi Cafe served honesttogod whitesofcharlieseyes pho. Max learned about pho the hard way. The best way.
Sixteen years ago, Max woke up in Hanoi in the already sweltering morning after a sweltering night in a sweltering hotel with the ruou de hangover he earned cultivating a relationship with a potential contact who might move the joint FBI/CIA/Interpol Snakehead investigation forward by trekking them out to a suspected hideout in the jungle that afternoon. Max felt death and decay from his eyelashes to his toenails. Dragged what was left of himself into the street. Dragged the dragging thing dragging himself along with it to a cart selling pho. He was reborn, vibrant and strong. The primordial clay reformed over the wounds of his soul recreating the whole being he was before the fall.
As long as the Hanoi Cafe was there, Max could get a bowl of pho when he needed it. Maybe for breakfast tomorrow. Especially if it ended up being a long night. Propel him into his vacation.
The surrounding architecture shifted to residential with a scattering of businesses. Bodega. Check-cashing joint. Hardware store. Consignment clothing store. Hair salon.
Then the row of mill housing spared by the 1974 urban renewal. The Section 8 housing in the brick apartment complex. The Victorian with the landlocked widow’s walk. Stairs up to front doors. Porches without yards. Cars parked on the street.
Max suddenly suspected he’d been to this neighborhood before with Trike on one of their early cases. “The Charleston Fraud.” “The Case of the Precarious Philatelist.” “The Misplaced Malice Murders.” “Bad Blood Over the Rainbow Diamonds.” As Max tried to remember, he doubted. Maybe it was later. “The Case of the Black Mask.” “The Peregrine of the Mediterranean.” Doubt unfurled. “The Listener to Distant Music.” “The Two Lost Keys.” “The Irishman Who Fell Off the Ladder.” Max couldn’t drag it out of his head.
Maybe he’d never been there on a case.
He turned at the transition to the purely residential. The turn took him past the pawnshop where Trike bought all his office chairs. He looked in the window. Costume jewelry. Obsolete stereos. Tennis rackets. Purses. Bureau. Leather jacket. Evening gown. Multi-function gaming table. Home cappuccino machine. Set of steak knives. Through the gap in the window display, a wall of guitars.
The only thing Max had ever pawned was a guitar. It was his first year at his second undergraduate college. He couldn’t remember why he wanted the money. Life changed soon after that.
Max lit another cigarette standing by the window. He took a few puffs, then sauntered on.
His next turn took him into the nice-restaurant district. It was the part of town college kids took their parents to when the parents were buying. You could wear a tie to those places. Get a nice glass of wine. Rustic bread on the table. Cheese plate for dessert.
Max paused at the last one on the block and looked in. A young man wishing he’d worn a tie sat next to a young woman in a dress that made her look way too sexy for the situation and they were both across from an older couple who were clearly the young woman’s parents and clearly not impressed with the young man sitting across from them and next to the
ir beautiful, precious, perfect daughter. Straight backs. Mild glares. Conversation like dentistry. Max could say this: he lived a life with very few of those dinners.
Max lit a new cigarette off the ember of the last. Last in his pack. He still had half an hour. He headed to the convenience store on the edge of the downtown. It was the only one that carried his brand. And it would kill some time.
The smoke curled around a lamppost like the ghost of a fatigued constrictor remembering the trunk of a sheared jungle tree above a strange ape stalking, in tentative steps, across the concrete mass of interstitial habitats, a scentless, soundless prey persistently too distant to capture.
Dispersed smoke-ghost of a fatigued constrictor peered through windows at secular ceremonies of static reverence, vague terrains in the contained twilight, and unnaturally illuminated surfaces.
Disintegrated smoke-ghost of a fatigued constrictor rose until it could gaze with enlightened disdain on what qualified as action below:
the slow skitter of the ape
the permanent paths of rigid quadrupeds
the exquisitely eroded mineral structures
the confluence and dissonance of their interaction.
Then it was too separate to any longer be itself, be anything but an integrated and forgotten element of the atmosphere.
Max passed a sports bar slowly, trying to see the scores. There were only a handful of people scattered about the available seating. Mostly alone. Picking at food. Sipping at beer. Killing time. Living lives of time mostly killed. You can see that in someone’s eyes. Empty bottles and pint glasses. Remnants of nachos. Coats over the backs of chairs. Sighs. Throat clearings. Jukebox quiet. Max could say this: he lived a life with very few of those evenings.
Max put his cigarette butt in the smokers’ station outside the convenience store. A decrepit enclosure of contemporary commerce. Sparse shelves. Snack foods. Instant meals. Soft drinks. Assortments of automobile maintenance supplies. Trash bags. Toilet paper. Magazines. The best cigarette selection in the county.