by Neal Goldy
“Why were you in the hospital?” Higgins asked.
“Unbeknownst to you, I was knocked full front by a car. What was to become of the two young men who almost murdered me in the accident? I don’t know. But I do hope they pay for what they did.”
“I see.” Higgins stretched. “Why do you need me, anyway?”
“We need to talk. It’s about your family. Remember Paul?”
Somehow the name of the disappeared man became a trigger, or perhaps it was taboo. “Of course I remember Paul. You know he disappeared five years ago?”
“He did?” D. held his faked surprise. “That’s not new, and unfortunate to your methods of surprising people via withhold information. Not even withhold information, since everyone knows about the McDermott case. But despite that, I’m on the case of finding your brother and the culprit, if one such exists.”
“That’s good. You work with the police on the case?” Quite an expression he had, this Higgins. D. said yes, he was. “Do you need information?”
“I’m an investigator; of course I need information. When was the last time you talked to your brother?”
“The last time . . . hmm, that would be during October. Both of us were on the phone. I remember Paul being very depressed, and he didn’t want our parents knowing about him acting this way. He got kicked out of school. Now, we weren’t talking about high school or anything like that. I’m talking about medical school. He flunked the subject so bad to become a doctor that they kicked him out. Not that he care about it, but he was depressed about having to break the news to our parents. They really wanted Paul to become a doctor, God knows why. If he had his way, Paul would have been something else . . . an architect, maybe. But never would he be a doctor.”
The word doctor reminded D. of psychiatrist Fiend. Not a good sign.
“And after he quit medical school, did he do something else?”
“Didn’t I just tell you? He didn’t quit medical school. He flunked and they kicked him out. And no, he didn’t do anything after that because he goddamn disappeared before thinking about it! Crazy, I know, but what could you do?”
Many things, you could do many things, D. thought. You just had to be brave enough.
“It’s getting late,” Higgins said. “Should we talk about this later?”
“Sure,” D. said. But he couldn’t afford to; there had to be something he didn’t know previously for a lead. Failing in medical school wasn’t going to cut it. “But wait – one more question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Did he have any classmates you felt suspicious about?” Once he said it, old detective D.’s heart beat quickly. He was afraid of what Higgins was going to say.
“Lemme think about it . . . seems there was always that guy I never liked. Paul never liked him, either, but he had this nagging effect. Really struck a sour chord in the family. He envied Paul, but I think he also was mystified as to how, during his medical school years, Paul never really liked it. He could joke and have fun and never get away with it. Lake never liked it.”
“Lake?” said D. “You mean West Lake?”
“Yes,” Higgins said. “Did you know him, too?”
It couldn’t be a coincidence. “Indirectly, but yes: I kind of do.” Palms sweating, D. got up. “Excuse me. Can we meet some other time?”
“Sure. How about at my parents’ home, since I’ll be helping move some of Paul’s stuff ? Maybe you can interview the whole family, find out what son-of-a-bitch took Paul.”
“I’ll be glad to.” They shook hands and left.
On his way back D. kept his eyes wider than ever. It was a good thing, too, because he caught sight of the bobbing brown-haired woman taking a guest into a room. So she was real. To any passerby he would have just strolled on without lingering a second. On the inside D. kept long stares on the young lady. She never saw him, and she didn’t need to. If he approached, things wouldn’t end well. No more details should be spilled, even when it was in the most private place in his body: D.’s brain.
Once in the elevator D. pressed the last number: six. Who would have that many floors and still maintain business? A lot of men must be wasting time instead of spending it on more important things.
The elevator doors opened. Perky was there, waving all cutesy-like. When you entered, the room was the first place you entered. A lofty bed branched out from the wall, with red wine everywhere for its colors. Perky lay there, her curved body awaiting him like a Venus flytrap opening up to its soon-to-be-doomed prey. D. went closer and closer, his eyes closing, until everything was black and he was feeling nothing but skin. Everything hurt and he knew that he had been crying that entire night.
Oh, how the children wept! Scary thoughts and spidery feelings, he felt them all. Elsewhere in the deepest of thoughts, he wondered if he slept at all that night. He tried to think of what would happen to Higgins, or the man who called himself West Lake who terrorized in the lightest and darkest of places. But down where pleasure was sought, thought processing didn’t exist. You paid and you were pleased. The inner child was shunned by old detective D., and the children wept some more, weeping the rain of the clouds that stole their depressed forms. Perky, no longer feeling human to the old detective, let go and he could have sworn all the children lost their minds from all the crying.
Chapter 5
Oliver Henry closed his eyes, thinking. He thought quite a lot these recent days since the capture of that old detective D. So close, he thought: that was when the old man had escaped his fingertips like the slippery bar of soap you never keep in your hands for more than a couple of seconds. But the old P.I. had spoken words he never would’ve thought about. Dark things, the old man spoke of. D. had talked about the sky and how lifeless it was: the night never ceased to cool off, let its guard down, and make way for the sunrise to come after. Oliver was intrigued by this, and began watching the night even until the wee hours of morning – and after that, too, when morning was supposed to be well into the world’s view. Thinking about it, Oliver did hear from someone (or something) – some source, all right? He heard nearby rumors of sunlight, the Sun That Never Came. Oliver had begun his daily – or should we say nightly – routine of watching the skies. How he waited for it to come with each day, patient only to end up with nothing arising.
His watch had been set to the 12-hour time that people in America had been so used to back in those days; now they were lost with no memory of it save for a few. And he had met those sorts of people, old and dying, but having a few bits of the past still in them. Oliver measured the ticks of the long hand moving with each second that went by. Up and up it went until ticking at the 12. Yes, he thought when it struck 7 A.M.
Oliver Henry surveyed the glass view of the city – a truly beautiful setting.
Did you miss it (or notice it, in some cases)? As Oliver Henry witnessed, the sun did not show up even at this late time for the sunrise to come up. The sky kept its brooding darkness as if it was hiding from the dangerous power of sunlight. But the light never harmed anything; it helped people see much clearer than with what they were given. What, the sky that acted so godlike in its scope of vision was afraid of seeing the same world it was used to all the time in the daytime? He supposed there were different matters that made the events happening so odd and unreal.
Oliver Henry thought silently to himself, just thinking about how maybe, just maybe, old detective D. was telling the truth. He was just too blinded by the new normal to see it.
Sighing, he went to his bedroom. Working with Paul McDermott had its advantages – say, having an apartment that covered one floor. But now he had his doubts. What if someone broke in? He would know, of course, if someone had broken in. The great glass walls had been manufactured this way so that if anyone entered the place, he would surely know. How could he not? Exceptions were minor except if he were simply not there at the time of the break-in; but he made himself reside in the apartment at all times.
He flicked on the
kitchen light. Two blinks and the lights came on. Something hit his chest when he came in – a bullet. Oliver Henry crashed to the floor. He didn’t feel anything, nothing at all, but he found himself crying: there was no control over the crying.
The man with the pistol came over him. He shot again.
Oliver Henry opened his mouth, but all the screaming had left with his courage.
“What – what are you doing?” he demanded.
But the man had left. Off the room, Oliver Henry heard more gunfire. After that came a shattering noise, cracking and breaking, coming down in a rain filled agony. He knew the man had shot through the glass wall, destroying it in its entirety.
“Stop!” he warned. “Please . . .”
He felt himself being dragged, both arms lifted by the man with the gun, Oliver supposed, but he felt faint. Distorted images cut each other off in jagged ways so that everything went herky-jerky. Closer and closer they went to the edge of the building before the man with the gun put his foot on Oliver’s body. Rubber pressed onto his torso.
The man didn’t laugh like most killers did, but he didn’t speak, either. What was he up to?
Oliver Henry, for the first time in his life, had flown above the city. Sadly he lasted no more than two seconds before he was sent spiraling down to the city ground. His scream lasted longer than twenty stories. He died before reaching the ground.
*****
He searched all the rooms – and he meant all, knocking through each one hoping for a solid explanation – but D. had to face the boiling reality: someone stole his apartment on the third floor.
Now, it technically wasn’t stealing, mind you, but rather disappeared would be the more relevant term. Not to mention the past night, too, when he acted things out in a dreamlike manner. In fact, old detective D. had awoken with Perky to open his eyes in the darkened streets of the city. It prompted the did-it-really-happen kind of question, or a slightly clichéd line at the end of those decide-your-own-conclusions: Was it all a dream? Most (if not all) times the answer is yes, but when you’re inside the dream, you never can tell for sure. But, to D.’s misfortune, when it ended in a dream, everything was a relief in the end, which apparently wasn’t happening in his case.
D. stood at the middle, uncertain, between rooms 107 and 109. In between he faced a wall with flowered wallpaper plastered over it. A mirror presented itself in an unexpected introduction. Its style reminded D. of the 1890s, somewhere in England, probably.
He must still be dreaming, but with everything wholly real. With one hand he smoothed out the wallpaper, which seemed wrinkled to him. If they knocked it out, surely they would’ve contacted him before doing so, right? He paced back and forth, a pawn indecisive of what next move he would make. Should he call the front desk? They would have to know. So old detective D. went back and took the elevator once again, going down, all the way to the lowest and highest floor of the building and up to the front desk.
He felt like he was mirroring himself when he got to the front desk. Instead of a lady there was a man with a broad beard that reached to his chin reading a newspaper that, on the front page, told of ghosts haunting a home away from the mainland. Sailors had made a voyage to the forbidden land; their whereabouts had vanished like their bodies, including the boat itself. Go into further detail and you will find out the interlocking and unanswered questions brought up by the public. Some of them sounded like foreign languages or no language at all. Psychobabble spurted onto the pages spilling the most of ink. You wouldn’t want to know what the headline was.
“Excuse me?” said Front Desk Man. He wore square glasses, but that should probably be eliminated from the manuscript because of its pure non-purpose and unnecessariness. “Oh, nice to meet you again,” he said when he noticed D. and they shook hands. However, D. was not pleased to have such a reaction from his presence.
“I’m not sure we’re coming to the same agreement,” said D. “There seems to be a problem with the apartment I reside in currently.”
“Is there?” wondered the Front Desk Man. “What seems to be the problem, D.?”
“It’s gone.”
As simple as that, the problem unfolded through communication of English words from old detective D. to Front Desk Man. Like most people, Front Desk Man (FDM) didn’t take it so seriously. And what better reply than with a joke? “Soooo . . . where did it go?” said FDM.
“That’s a good question,” answered D., “but I’m afraid I’m thinking the same thing.”
“So you went looking for it?”
“I went looking for it, yes.”
But it appeared not to be there, D.’s mind rambled with no intention of receiving any answers. Yapping, yapping, yapping – was there an end to the endless babble of the mind? “When I came back from where I was, my apartment wasn’t there. There are rooms 107 and 109, but no room 108. Is it possible that the room has been . . . relocated, maybe? Or that they removed the apartment from its original location?”
FMC couldn’t hold his laughter. “You really think your apartment room has moved?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mind if I check it, just to make sure?”
D. pulled up his coat collar. “It’d be better if you did. Someone’s gotta find out how to solve this unwanted mystery.”
“Life’s full of mysteries, you know?” said FMC. “And I don’t think anyone’s gonna solve them anytime soon.”
This time it was both FMC and D. who got into the elevator and rode up to the floor where D. had his room (well, it was there). Walking, walking, and more walking they did down the hall and all the way to where room 108 was supposed to be. FMC stopped, and in D.’s opinion only wallpaper with nothing else was left but the shiny mirror. FMC, bored-looking with those low down eyelids, took the key he had for room 108 and unlocked the door. The brown wooden door swayed out, almost inviting FMC to go in. He then turned to D.
“Here’s the room,” FMC said. “Are you well now?”
But the old detective didn’t believe it. “Hold on . . . it’s not there!”
“It’s there. I can see it!” He pointed to the door.
D. was wide-eyed. “All I see is a mirror and flowered wallpaper.”
FMC cried, “Well of course the wallpaper is there! It always was there! For more than forty years we had that wallpaper established for the floors, so don’t go bothering me about how the wallpaper appeared out of nowhere! Now, get in your room before I change my mind.”
“But it’s not there.”
“Are you sick or something?” asked FMC. “It’s there, dammit! Don’t you see?”
“No I don’t.”
FMC stormed off, muttering “I give up” and the like. He left D. there, standing in bewilderment and wonderment in all their purity. He became smaller and smaller until FMC reached the elevator, got inside, and went down to where the front desk resided--that shabby-looking front desk that he took pride in even though he was only reassuring himself that he was not the drooping old poor man he was made out to be from the start. Of course, D. couldn’t think these opinions or facts or conceptions. Much more important things to figure out like the missing apartment room that, when spoken to someone else, acted perfectly. FMC even opened the door – somehow – and showed it to him! How was that possible? And where was he going to go now? No one was able to live inside an apartment that wasn’t there. What was he supposed to do, go inside the mirror?
Pathetic human beings with their pathetic little obsessions!
It’s like they don’t know what they’re doing!
*****
Old detective D. lived for the remainder of his life (he had no idea when he would return to his former apartment) in the once beautiful home of the McDermott family. They weren’t British, but D. guessed they took pride in their taste in period architecture and in making their home a model, although now forgotten, built in 1903. So a now forgotten home was based on the style of a long forgotten home? D. found it amusing yet was s
addened by this piece of information. Nonetheless, he recorded all the information – including measurements of the rooms, each room’s name, house sections, blueprints, and background – into the fresh journal he had bought some months ago, but never actually used it until recently. He had chosen that one journal out of all the others due to its name: Impromptu. Never had he heard a word like that before – or maybe it was his lack of vocabulary – but it reminded him of things he had forgotten about, things that happened a long time ago.
Sitting in what used-to-be the father of the family’s office desk (it also resembled 20th century England), D. opened up Impromptu to the first blank page. To his surprise, the first page had something already written on it: “everything happens at once.”
“Interesting,” he said aloud. His pen, with black ink that mimicked old feathers and fountain pens, kissed the paper. He wrote down the background of the house the McDermotts used to live in. Nowadays they lived elsewhere, and he suspected the fancy yet smaller home nearby the city. This home, aptly named Water Home, since it existed near a pond, was never sold to any other owners. The price was too expensive, most said, but D. didn’t agree. He supposed other, much darker reasons, were the case.
When he finished writing, D. lay back in the creaky old chair that might have belonged to the family’s grandmother – the head of the house, according to some families. But then D. felt something, a pang that could have been guilt while he sat. “Well, it’s not like I’m breaking into their home,” he told himself. “I’m on a case, remember? If I need to investigate into the home of the family I’m involved with, why of course I need to get information from the inside! Is that why other detectives hadn’t finished the case?”
Water Home might have answered because, the minute he finished speaking, pain was released into his arm. He tried to jerk it off, but his arm slammed onto the office desk. Growling in anger, D. scratched its edges. He needed something to hold onto. The pain – no, it wasn’t pain anymore, but something a lot worse. Agony – no, not that either. It was beyond his superstitions, cleaving his head in two. Heaving hard, D.’s eyes began to stream out tears so much so that it deemed itself unreal, like the artificial emotions coming from robots and false humans. Where the hell was all this coming from?