by Seth Fried
I took another drink and pictured a charred Steam Beetle crushed in the rubble and had to fight the urge to throw my glass against the wall. Instead I slouched in my seat, missing the agency.
I asked OWEN if we should check in with Garrett.
“Let’s wait till we have good news,” he said.
He was staring up at one of the televisions, nursing a drink out of a tumbler that was now roughly half the size of a bowling ball.
I wondered when we could possibly expect good news. But I was also glad I wouldn’t have to end the day by explaining to Garrett just how badly I’d disappointed him. I finished the rest of my drink and picked up the fresh one our waitress had put down in front of OWEN. “To the MetMoH,” I said, a little glumly, spilling some of my drink as I raised my glass.
OWEN sat up in his seat and passed his glass through mine, his interface producing a loud and mistimed clink.
“Yes,” OWEN said. “Future generations will still be able to get their fill of moose vaginas.”
The corners of his mouth were curled up in the beginning of a smile. My lack of friendships in general meant I was unaccustomed to the sort of secret elation one feels in the sharing of a private joke, especially when overwhelmed by grief and frustration. But as we both burst out laughing in our booth, nothing felt more natural.
Our laughter became so intense that it was hard to tell how much time had gone by before we noticed that the rest of the patrons in the bar were now turned away from the televisions and watching us with disgust.
A tall, heavyset man in jeans and a Metropolis Rivets jersey rose from his stool.
“Do you mind telling me what the fuck you two are laughing at?”
OWEN straightened up in his seat and turned toward the man, appraising him for a moment.
“Moose vaginas,” he said, before we both again dissolved into laughter.
Soon our waitress approached us and said our drinks were on the house but we had to go.
OWEN raised his eyebrows when she said it. Being asked to leave a bar for laughing during a national tragedy was a type of human interaction that was no doubt as new to him as it was to me and he looked up at her with a certain degree of wonder as he cataloged it somewhere deep in his memory banks.
The man in the Rivets jersey watched us as we left. I tried to avoid eye contact, whereas OWEN stared at him aggressively. When we passed him, OWEN leaned in and said in a slurred attempt at a menacing voice, “Moose are even-toed ruminants,” a provocation which was fortunately confusing enough for the man to let us stumble out of the bar unmolested.
Outside, it was getting dark. People were making runs on the bodegas and grocery stores, lugging huge jugs of water and bags of canned goods back to their apartments. I stood on the sidewalk and took in the crackling, predoom panic that Kirklin had left hanging over the city.
“We need to call the police,” I said. “Or the FBI. Somebody.”
OWEN and the man in the jersey were still glaring at each other through the bar’s window.
“Sure,” OWEN said over his shoulder, refusing to break eye contact with the man. “What would you like to tell them?”
“We know this was Kirklin.”
When the man inside lost interest and turned back to the news coverage, OWEN mumbled a few words on human cowardice before stumbling away from the window.
“Great,” OWEN said. “And you can prove that?”
I had to search the drunken mess of my thoughts before a possibility occurred to me.
“We have footage from inside one of the attacks,” I said.
OWEN was rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms and counting aloud as he tried to tally up the drinks he’d had that night.
“Yeah,” he said, “we have footage that puts you at the scene of a terrorist attack, during which no one said anything incriminating about Terrence Kirklin. I’m sure that’ll give the FBI something to think about while they’re detaining you as a person of interest. At least enough for them to be frustrated that you have no other practical information to give up, making your tip some exciting new kind of useless. Honestly, Henry, I know you’re trying to help, but I’ve thought this all through and the most important thing right now is for you to be quiet so I can figure out exactly how drunk I am.”
I tried to insist, but OWEN raised an impatient finger. He then leaned forward and vomited out a string of lime-green code all over the pavement and onto my shoes. The numbers and symbols gradually oozed together, losing their shape and evaporating. OWEN kept his hands on his knees and announced without looking up, “I’m going to do that again.”
The street was still bustling with frightened people, so to avoid any unwanted attention I encouraged OWEN to follow me into a nearby alley, where he gripped an open garbage can with both hands and continued to heave up thick, translucent ribbons of code. After a particularly forceful convulsion, he paused for a moment and began to sing an old sea chanty that I recognized from the Peter McCaw film Pirate Steel:
When I was a little boy my mother always told me
Way haul away, we’ll haul away, Joe!
That if I did not kiss the girls my lips would all grow moldy.
First I met a Spanish girl, who said that I was lazy.
Way haul away, we’ll haul away, Joe!
Then I met a Yankee girl—
Before he could finish the verse, he heaved again and the words landed with a wet splat into the garbage can—“Whose blond hair drove me crazy.” They lingered there for a few seconds and then faded into nothing just when a thought occurred to me that managed to transcend my own inebriation. OWEN had just coughed up perhaps Kirklin’s only weakness, the one aspect of his recent behavior in which he didn’t seem to be in complete control of himself and everyone around him. A Yankee girl whose blond hair drove me crazy. If Kirklin was still in the city, it stood to reason his girlfriend was too.
7 Before her alleged kidnapping, Sarah Laury was a rising sophomore at Newton College, a private school tucked away in Barington Heights. It was the North Side’s wealthiest neighborhood, with its lush, flowered medians, sidewalks peopled by elderly women in furs, and doormen in epauletted blazers and flat black-billed caps. OWEN and I couldn’t have looked more out of place that Monday morning as we marched, hungover, up Telmont Avenue toward the Newton campus.
My other clothes were still in the model tenement, so I’d had to sleep in my suit at the YMCA, where OWEN and I had passed the night. OWEN had lain facedown on the linoleum floor of our room with his arms at his sides, shifting only twice to vomit into the plastic garbage bin at the foot of my bed. In the morning I’d had to give the tie clip a few hard flicks to rouse him. He was upset at first, but once I explained my plan to find Kirklin through Sarah Laury he was on his feet and full of questions.
“How is this supposed to help?” he said, straightening his hair and changing his suit in our room’s small mirror. “The whole city has been looking for her since she ran off.”
“We don’t need to find her,” I said. “We just need to learn more about her. Laury’s video went live the night before Kirklin attacked headquarters. That was an unnecessary risk Kirklin either allowed or couldn’t prevent. So if we’re looking for loose ends, Laury seems like a good place to start.”
OWEN stopped fussing with his tie and gave this some thought.
“Human beings are weird when it comes to love,” he admitted. “I read an article the other day about a woman in Houston who tried to marry her pet turtle.”
This comment hung in the air for a moment. But I was eager to get him on board, so I agreed enthusiastically, at which point he started to talk about the plan as if it were his idea.
It took him only a few seconds to analyze every feature article ever written on the subject of Sarah Laury. As I washed my face in the public restroom at the Y, OWEN stood over my sh
oulder and summarized what he felt were some of his more interesting findings:
Sarah Laury was a vegan for ethical reasons.
She’d described herself in over twenty-three different interviews as an avid reader.
Her dislikes included lack of intellectual curiosity, institutional racism, and cilantro.
The previous year she’d organized a fund-raiser for the victims of a hospital fire in Baton Rouge. The cell phone footage of her playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on her trumpet had gone viral and spurred a brief trumpeting fad.
She was an assistant editor at Newton’s literary journal, The Newton Quarterly Review, and was also a staff writer for the school’s newspaper, The Marigold, to which she contributed a monthly column.
This spring she had played Nathan Detroit in the drama department’s all-female production of Guys and Dolls.
Around the same time, she’d starred in an avant-garde play that she had written and directed herself.
OWEN also brought up an interview that had originally been conducted by a reporter for the online edition of Metropolis News, but which had been reposted to a blog called Real Celebrity Meltdowns. It was from over a year ago and showed Laury conservatively dressed and seated across from a young male journalist, discussing an event she was planning for the Metropolis Food Bank. After a few polite questions regarding the benefit, the journalist asked her whether she could address the rumors that she was considering breast augmentation.
Laury’s smile vanished and she turned a shade of red that seemed more angry than embarrassed. She looked as if she were about to ask the man what on earth he was talking about, but instead stammered for a moment.
“I’m talking about people,” she finally managed to say, “people starving to death less than a mile from where we’re sitting right now, and you’re asking if I have any future plans for my breasts?”
Her voice was calm but incredulous.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Laury,” the reporter said, doing his best to project an air of professional obligation onto his question, “but these rumors exist and I have a responsibility.”
“Oh, yes,” Laury said. “It must be awful for you, having to answer to every thirteen-year-old boy on the internet.”
“So,” the reporter said, pushing ahead, “there’s no truth to the rumors?”
“Actually, there is,” she said, pointing at the reporter. “I’m about to have this tit removed right now.”
She turned to someone off camera and soon a well-dressed older woman with a clipboard informed the man that the interview was over. Before the video ended there was one last shot of the reporter as he prepared to leave the room, his expression a convincing attempt at bewilderment. Though, his slight smile showed that he had gotten exactly what he had hoped to out of Sarah Laury.
When the video ended, OWEN turned to me and said, “Seven million views.”
I shook my head. No teenager should have been expected to cope with such a perverse level of attention. And while her apparent attachment to Kirklin remained a mystery, it was obvious to me why she might have been eager to withdraw so dramatically from public life.
This sad insight made it that much more awkward when OWEN and I concluded that, since her interests at Newton seemed mostly literary, the next logical step in our investigation was to steal a copy of her library records, which OWEN was unable to access remotely on account of the school’s outdated computer system.
Now it was barely seven in the morning and I was walking through one of the richest neighborhoods in the world wearing a wrinkled suit that stunk of stale booze. After a while I caught OWEN regarding me with what looked like concern and I asked him if everything was all right. He paused in an obvious effort to phrase something carefully, then said, “Last night—after the bar.”
“Yeah?”
“You talked about model trains a lot.”
“Oh.”
“Like, a lot a lot.”
I had no memory of discussing my hobby with OWEN and was wondering what I could have said.
“I collect them.”
“Henry, I know.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It was just because—”
OWEN’s expression froze at what he seemed to expect would be more train talk.
“I’ll keep the train stuff to myself,” I said.
“Not forever,” OWEN said. “I just think I’ve hit my limit for this trip.”
This conversation was luckily interrupted when an older woman passing by with her corgi took in our messy appearance and abruptly crossed to the other side of the street. I shot OWEN a meaningful glance and he nodded in agreement before turning us into a pair of well-dressed older women. The disguises proved effective, earning us half a dozen friendly greetings from various doormen as we continued up the avenue. When we walked up to the gates of Newton’s campus, OWEN gave the young guard in the security booth a matronly frown and he waved apologetically, buzzing us in.
All schools in the city had suspended classes in the wake of the attacks. Newton was no exception, its campus deserted and quiet except for the snapping of a flag at half-mast in the middle of the main quad. This sound was joined by our footsteps as we followed the paved paths that led to the school’s library.
It was a three-story brick building, which sat between a mostly empty faculty parking lot and a large stone-lined pond surrounded by willow trees and wooden benches. We had assumed the library would be closed and had been hoping to sneak in through a window, but as we approached we saw that the building’s lights were on and there was movement inside. OWEN paused for a moment to consider this, then turned us both into firemen and headed toward the library’s entrance without explanation.
The rattle of our oxygen tanks and gear filled the place as we entered. The first floor of the library was a charming space filled with round worktables and warmly lit study nooks furnished with overstuffed leather chairs. It was empty except for a middle-aged woman in a red turtleneck who was sorting books on a handcart behind the front counter. She looked understandably alarmed when she saw us. OWEN gave me a reassuring smile, then turned to the woman and screamed, “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! GET OUT OF HERE!”
She gasped and grabbed a cardigan off the back of a chair before half running to the exit. As she pushed her way through the door she glanced over her shoulder at OWEN, who made an aggressive shooing motion, at which point she dropped her sweater and broke into an all-out sprint toward the parking lot. OWEN vanished and reappeared standing behind the counter. He looked around the empty library and screamed the word “Fire!” a few more times, scanning for any movement before turning back to me.
“Lock the door,” he said.
I walked over to the double doors and turned the dead bolt.
“Couldn’t you have lied about something else?”
OWEN gave me a long, blank look, as if by asking this question I had betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding with respect to the intensity of his hangover.
“I just wanted to get her out of here before you tried to kick her in the genitals,” he said.
He then waved his hand lazily in the direction of a wire rack of periodicals near the front door, which became engulfed in flames.
“There,” he said. “A fire. Now come over here and help me with this thing.”
He was frowning at the large tube monitor and tower of the library’s primitive computer.
“What are they spending these kids’ tuition on?” he said, running his hand along the bulky monitor. “This old girl should be enjoying her retirement somewhere.”
I waggled the mouse and the computer sprang noisily to life. Their user database wasn’t password protected, so I was able to pull up Laury’s library records without any trouble. I clicked print and an old line printer on the counter began to churn out her bo
rrowing history on continuous paper.
I was then startled by a pounding coming from the library’s entrance. The security guard from the main gate was pressing his forehead against the glass with his hands cupped around his eyes, while the librarian stood behind him, peering over his shoulder and holding her recovered sweater to her chest. OWEN and I were still disguised as firemen, though the sight of us standing behind the counter watching a document print must have for all practical purposes blown our cover.