Killer of a Mind

by Valerie Albemarle

  In the hot humid air Ryan was sweltering like a fool under his baseball cap and his yuppie clothes no doubt made from recycled plastic bottles. He envied Mario his wicked straw fedora and his cotton slacks—slacks, not shorts—with the heavy leather belt, and his crisp white shirt with a collar that looked starched. Coolness emanated from him as from a refrigerator running on low power. The man had been born without sweat glands. Growing up in Chilliwack with the name Mario was a small price to pay for that. Ryan wanted to ask him why he was on this holiday all alone but decided it was too early in their acquaintance for such familiarity.

  Maybe Mario was thinking about this himself, or maybe he caught on to something in Ryan’s mood. “This trip is going to mark a new beginning for me,” he said.

  “A happy beginning, I hope?”

  “Hell yes. Tell me: when you hear the word “downsize,” who do you think it refers to?”

  “To the company that’s downsizing.”

  “Not to the people getting the boot?”

  “No. They’re not getting smaller. The company is.”

  “Ha!” Mario triumphed. “That’s my man, you’ve got it right. It’s easy to get confused about the meaning of that ugly-ass word. Because it’s easy to feel really, really small when they hand you an envelope for all your years of loyalty. A fucking cheque, nothing more than money. Have a wonderful life, don’t let the door slam you in the ass.”

  “But you’re celebrating now.”

  “I realized that life has done me a favour. It wants me to strike out on my own.”

  He paused to let Ryan wonder what sort of work he did. Ryan thought that maybe he was an archeologist because of the resemblance to Indiana Jones, or maybe some manner of scholar; but these were likely not the kind of occupations where you “struck out on your own.”

  “You’re a journalist?” Ryan ventured.

  “No, but I’m flattered. I might have made a good journalist,” Mario pondered, fantasizing about the roads not taken.

  “Shall I keep guessing, then?” Ryan asked with a smile.

  “Nah, that’s not a man’s game. I’m a lawyer. Criminal defense attorney.”

  “Wow. If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look like the type.”

  “When I first joined the firm, one of the associates told me at a party after a few drinks that they liked my style. I don’t give off the impression of greed, he said, and that was important to them. ‘They’ being the senior partners.”

  “So why did they let you go?”

  “Politics, mostly. They let me go for the same reason they hired me: my style. My Old Country gentleman style no longer served them well, you see. They decided they wanted to project a more aggressive image. Also, I simply got tired of being handed one sleazy client after another. I stopped trying hard.”

  “Isn’t that the job of a criminal defense attorney, to defend one sleazy client after another? Aren’t most of the people you defend guilty?” Ryan had tried and failed to find a gentle way of saying that he had no sympathy for Mario’s predicament even if he liked the man himself.

  “It’s not that simple.” Mario must have explained this many times before; he sounded patient and bored. “Sure, they’re almost always guilty of having done something in the past. But often there’s good reason to believe they’re not guilty of the particular crime they’re charged with. If I had my say, I would only take cases like that. I didn’t have that luxury. I had to defend whomever the firm sent my way.”

  “But you knew you wouldn’t have that luxury,” Ryan persisted.

  “Of course I knew. Despite all the cynicism toward lawyers, very few of us go into the profession hoping to defend rich and powerful criminals whom we truly believe to be guilty. That takes a toll on anyone. I joined the firm expecting to make partner after a reasonable number of high-profile victories, to earn the freedom to choose my cases. That never happened.”

  “And now it has.”

  “Now it has. Now I can’t wait to get started.” He looked with a smile toward that bright if hazy future, and settled into a half-nap.

  Ryan was considerably relieved. He had no obligation to chum around with this man who turned out to be a defense attorney and was none too shy about it. When they got to Tulum, they’d wish each other a good holiday and part ways. Right? No; not quite right. Ryan had never liked to miss out on a possible discovery. Heck, why would the guy tell a near-stranger his story and then go on to make such a maddeningly rational defense of the trade he’d chosen? He was at once arrogant and idealistic, almost innocent in his strange views of justice. He hadn’t changed Ryan’s opinion about the business of defending criminals no matter what they had or hadn’t done, but now Ryan found him even more interesting. Besides, it was good to have a distraction from the absence of Sam. And where was Sam, what was she doing? Was she sad and did she miss him like he missed her? Had she too met a fellow traveller, and had their conversations taken her mind off her sadness? Even if she was headed back to Vancouver to brood and “figure things out,” he felt no duty to rehearse the serious and solemn pageant of separation. He meant to enjoy life for both of them, to lounge on the silver sand, sip margaritas, hop on the breakers. Too bad he’d never learned to swim. Why hadn’t he? It had something to do with being thrown in the swimming pool at the age of four by his father, a disciple of the school of hard knocks that had left him deaf and numb to anything more subtle. Ryan neither sank nor swam but flapped and flailed with such desperation that he seemed to whip up a cloud of water vapour that kept him afloat for the two seconds it took his alarmed father to drag him out of the pool. He never screamed, though; he never made any noise. Of that much his father was proud. His sister tried to teach him to swim when he was older, but he never trusted the water enough to heed her instructions. But maybe now he could give it a go...

  Mario startled him from his reveries by asking, “Do you know where you’re staying in Tulum?”

  “Uh, no. This trip to Tulum is a last-minute decision.”

  “Oh, right! Right. I forgot. You shouldn’t have trouble finding a place, there are hotels everywhere in town and along the beach. Tulum used to be a little village, now it’s a major tourist hub. Still, not nearly as crazy as Cancun.”

  “Sounds good. Is the town right on the sea?”

  “Actually, it isn’t. There’s the beach strip with a road that eventually goes to a biosphere reserve, then there’s a jungle in which they’re now building some fancy-ass condos, and the town itself is about four kilometers inland. You have to take a cab or bike to the beach unless you enjoy long walks in the blazing sun. Towns and villages here are built around cenotes, not along the seashore. The Mayans had different priorities when it came to real estate.”

  “Of course: fresh water. In that case I’ll hang out by the sea for a while, then go and find a place to stay in town,” Ryan thought out loud.

  “Good plan, always start by paying homage to the sea. The bus brings us downtown, from there we can take a cab to my hotel and you can leave your bag there if you want. While you explore and look for a place.”

  “Well, thanks. That really helps.” Ryan found he didn’t mind this spot of dependency at all.

  “No worries. We can meet for drinks later. About five? It gets dark early, so we’ll catch the sunset on the sea.”

  The part of Mexico known as the Mayan Riviera is a realm of water and sand, water and sand throughout the universe.

  Water rises from the ocean in a mist so fine it looks like smoke. It never leaves the air because the ocean doesn’t want it back. The elysian shimmer of turquoise in the sun, the deep dark velvet that cradles a swimmer at dusk—this is all the same water, and it follows you over questionably dry land into houses. In the middle of dry land you are in water. At night you sleep under a moist sheet, feeling as if you’re in a tub of water that has gone tepid. You breathe lukewarm water in a room alive with mold, that hideous child of warm water and still air. The moment you stop moving,
you start rotting. You must slam the door on this hideous thought if you want to get any sleep.

  Sand is honest and clean, and at least tries to stay dry. It wants nothing of our garbage, yet it hides it so well that we delude ourselves into thinking it keeps our secrets and that the beaches are clean. It’s very tempting to lie down and expect the soft powder to cradle you; but the warm layer of sand is only an inch deep. Beneath that, it is ungiving and cold like a rock. Once, long ago, it was living coral that grew and died like any living thing. Millions of years have ground it down to this soft powder that bears a grudge against the world of the living it has left behind. It has millions of tiny million-year old axes to grind. It follows you to dry land, sticking to your body, getting in your ears and your hair and your crotch as you hop and whirl like a blessed fool on the breaking waves.

  Mexico doesn’t ask for permission, it enters through all the portals and pores of your being. The shades of blue and grey of the ocean and the of gathering thunderstorm invade your eyes and remain as pictures painted in light on the canvas of your memory. The gentle sand makes its way into the most intimate places but remains gentle so you never know that it’s there. The rudeness of chile peppers scorches your mouth until your eyes feel like they’re falling out. Your nose lets in the scents of ocean and jungle, the unrepentant cigarette smoke and the acrid stench of exhaust fumes from passing cars. Your ears are assailed by the honking of car horns, by advertisements bellowing from loudspeakers, and by the early morning calls of birds in the jungle canopy: shpa-choo,shpa-choo,shpa-choo. If you want personal space, you’d better stay within the confines of your five-star all-inclusive compound, if that’s how you’ve chosen to spend your holiday. Neither Ryan nor Mario had chosen that.

  You watch the iguanas, those scaly primordial lions perched on the rocks as on the prow of a ship sailing motionless. Soon you make like the iguanas, reverting to reptilian pacifism in the blazing sun. Your body’s movements are guided by nothing more than ambient temperature, aligning it to the sun’s warmth or the freshness of the shade. The greatest effort of the day is shifting your cumbersome mammalian spine against the back of the deck chair.

  By afternoon your soul gives in to the ambient indolence. The Mayan boy brings a bottle of beer when it’s time for a new one, and smiles as he does so; he says nothing and looks genuinely pleased. You still have to reach out to take the beer from the little table under the thatched umbrella.

  At some point in this vision of sea and sand and light Ryan stopped asking for beer and switched to espresso. Energy returned to his mind and his limbs, and he went for a hop-about in the water. The little beach was almost walled off from the open sea by a broken fortress of rocks, but the waves, although muted, were still quite high. To the right of the beach and under a grove of palm trees was a bed placed askew on a platform of rock. It seemed like a very logical place to take a nap, yet entirely stripped of privacy. The Mayan boy gave Ryan some bread to throw to the resident iguana that had been sunning itself on the patio. When Ryan asked the time in broken Spanish, he was surprised to learn that it was only two. It felt like he’d been on this sheltered little beach for days, maybe weeks. That was what a holiday was supposed to feel like: time multiplied, billowed out into aeons of new impressions and discoveries, each day no longer measured in hours but in memories. Back at home Ryan’s workdays ticked away like dry little beads, each day like the one before it and like the one after. If you weren’t careful, a whole lifetime could shrivel down to a rosary of identical little days like beads counted off in identical cycles. It was unforgivable to live like that, and it frightened Ryan. But what could you do? A body had to earn a living and a body needed rituals, comforting routines that made one day like the next.

  Ryan took a cab back to town where he rented a bicycle with a creaky seat and screechy brakes, the pick of a litter of bicycles lined up outside the rental shop. He cruised the streets of Tulum and soon realized that they were all named after constellations. Presently he found an attractive little hotel on a relatively quiet street; it was owned by a German lady who’d settled in Mexico. The common area could have been either a patio under a very vast roof or a living room with one wall missing, the one that opened onto the sidewalk. For a moment Ryan panicked at the loss of his duffle bag until he remembered that it was waiting for him in Mario’s room; it seemed like he’d left it there a very long time ago. The beach with its velvety silver sand was what he’d come for, or so he’d thought. But now that he’d seen the beach and assured himself that it wasn’t going anywhere, he started to wonder how he’d fill his days. You could only spend so many hours sprawled on the sand or hopping on the breakers before you got bored out of your mind. Already he was beginning to think that leaving the laptop and cell phone hadn’t been such a good idea. He could’ve gone online and read about how to cope with a breakup; he could’ve learned he wasn’t the only one like this. Now he had only himself as the echo chamber of his sadness.

  Before this brooding could get out of hand, Ryan took a shower and headed for the hotel’s patio.

  He hadn’t thought to bring any books but wished now that he had. He’d always been more comfortable around books than around people. All you had to do with a moralizing nag of a book was to stop reading, no excuses necessary, no apologies expected. Fortunately, this little hotel had what he needed. A cupboard originally meant for wine glasses and dinnerware housed an eclectic collection of books previous guests had left behind and current guests were welcome to borrow. One title caught Ryan’s eye:Gaslight, A Victorian Thrillerby Patrick Hamilton. Ryan had never heard of this author and was skeptical that a Victorian writer could thrill a twenty-first century reader who’s seen it all. But he was curious. Like himself, this book was a stranger in a strange land, sandwiched between paperbacks with bright covers depicting wars and ruination, vampires and witches and wizards, well-endowed swooning damsels in the arms of well-muscled men, and other wondrous and shattering things. This book with its plain black-on-white cover couldn’t be bothered to market itself. “Read me or don’t; it’s your gain or loss,” it seemed to say. Ryan pulled it out from between its shiny neighbours and headed for a rocking chair draped in a bright woollen blanket.

  Once settled in, he was embarrassed to learn that the Victorian thriller was written in the 1930s by the same author who wroteRope on which Hitchcock hung his movie. “Victorian” had nothing to do with when the book was written. Rather, it was a statement of intent, a promise that the reader was about to visit an era when men were still men and wore bowler hats, and women were very much women and wore generous amounts of lace, but industrialization had started to grow like a cancer all the more terrible and ugly because people were as yet unaware of it and had no idea of what they’d started. Ryan smiled at the thought that if this book were reprinted today, a clever publisher might market it as “Steampunk” to reach a wider audience. Who the hell knew these days what Victorian meant? Ryan didn’t, and he thought of himself as more educated than your average redneck. He cheated by reading the synopsis first. It was no great crime, he decided: the play itself would take no more than a couple of hours to read.

  A few pages into the play Ryan met his new friend. Beside Jack Manningham’s monologue on his boyhood dream of becoming an actor and his rather high opinion of his acting talent, someone had written “giveaway.” The word had been penned in an old-fashioned slanting hand with purple ink that had long ago started to fade. Maybe decades ago. What had the reader meant? What was being given away? Ryan continued reading. Beside the lines where Jack commands Bella to restore the missing picture to its place, the mysterious reader had written “so, do it!” A little further down, when Bella protests that she hasn’t touched the picture, the hand had written “yes, do it!” Yes do what? Ryan realized he’d been having a mute and one-sided conversation with this other reader who was probably long dead but who felt as alive as if he were sitting here on this patio in Tulum. He? No, it was a woman who’d written the mar
ginalia. Definitely a woman, although Ryan couldn’t explain how he knew. He read on, but it took an effort to focus on the text. He was trying to follow his new friend’s line of thinking as much as he was trying to follow Hamilton’s. “There, you do know!” the woman had written beside the lines where Bella protests that she didn’t know, that she only guessed where the picture was hidden because it was found there twice before. Was the reader accusing Bella of lying? Ryan rested the book in his lap and looked around the veranda. He was reading a play about a woman whose husband was trying to drive her insane by hiding various objects and accusing her of misplacing them. And Bella believed him when he insisted that she was going insane. She doubted her own senses because her husband told her to. That was probably what made the story Victorian—the fact that a woman could doubt herself so readily at her husband’s bidding. It wasn’t much of a thriller by our modern jaded standards. Jack had been established as an evil man right from the start. The only question was, what kind of evil man, and that was answered by the good detective. The mystery wasn’t in the play, it was in the marginalia.

  To Ryan’s disappointment, there was only one more note on the margins. It appeared toward the end, when Bella asks to be alone with her how arrested murderer of a husband so she can talk to him in private. Beside Hamilton’s italics describing Bella’s dawning realization that she’s been played for a madwoman, the mysterious reader had written “at last!” Ryan had no doubt as to what this meant, for he too had become frustrated with Bella’s readiness to doubt her own self, Victorian or not. But in a few more passages the play was over, the evil husband was hauled off to jail, the good detective would go on to do more good detecting, and Bella was free to enjoy fresh air and Devonshire cream with her dear family. Ryan felt abandoned. The characters had no more need of his attention. Only his new friend the mysterious reader was still calling out to him across the decades, asking him to understand and agree with her. Of course she was. A person doesn’t write marginalia for herself, not in such a short play so easily remembered. She writes them so others can see them one day. Ryan went back to the beginning of the play to try and decipher the notes, but the words refused to make sense. They were only a few pieces of a puzzle most of which was missing. She’d been flirting with his mind, leaving clues big as clouds and just as easy to capture. Yet he felt so close to an understanding! He could see what she’d meant, but he could see it only in the corner of his mind’s eye. It refused to be captured head-on.