by Tim Downs
“That’s against the rules.”
“When did you start following rules?”
“I’m a big rule-keeper. For example, rule number one: Be careful what you say to a psychiatrist.”
“I thought we were speaking as friends.”
“Come off it, Beth—we’re not friends. A friend doesn’t psychoanalyze you; a friend doesn’t keep a list of all your neuroses, like the one you’ve got in that folder there in front of you. May I?”
Before she could protest, he slid the file folder across the table and opened it. He began to scan the neatly typed pages of performance reviews and exit interviews and the numerous handwritten notations that filled the margins.
He glanced up. “Does everybody in DMORT merit such careful scrutiny?”
“You’re not like everybody in DMORT.”
“‘Altruism,’” he read. “Sounds like a good quality to me.”
“In your case, it’s a form of sublimation—channeling your negative emotions into socially acceptable behaviors. You’re driven by principle, but at times you become fixated on that principle. It’s all you see; you shut everything else out—friends, coworkers, even other principles.”
“That’s called focus,” Nick said.
“There’s a fine line between focus and fixation. It’s a matter of flexibility.”
“I’ll have to do more stretching. What’s this one—‘depersonalization’?”
“It means you’ve been hurt so many times that you’ve formed an emotional callus to protect you from contact with the rest of the world. Nobody can hurt you because nobody gets close—you won’t let them.”
“This one sounds great: ‘dissociation.’”
“That means you deal with your differences by telling yourself that you’re not like other people. You are different from other people, Nick—you’re brilliant, and you’re analytical, and you’re fascinated by things that most people can’t even bear to look at. How do you explain someone who’s so unlike other human beings? You do it by telling yourself that you’re not human. You think of yourself as a bug.”
“I never should have told you that.”
“I’m glad you did. It helped me understand a lot about you.”
Nick scanned another page. “Now, here’s a term even a layman can understand: ‘savior complex.’ Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Beth said. “That one’s more common than you think, especially around here. It’s the belief that everything depends on you—that if you quit, everything will fall apart. You can’t afford to stop, so you never do. It’s what happens to responsible people when they step across the line.”
“What line?”
“Every good thing has a line, Nick; you cross the line and the good thing turns bad. Focus becomes fixation; distance becomes depersonalization; responsibility becomes a savior complex. You think I’m keeping a list of your bad qualities, but I’m not. I think you have some remarkable qualities; I just think you’ve crossed a few lines.”
Nick closed the file and slid it back. “Friends don’t write performance reviews that make their friends miss DMORT deployments,” he said.
“I did that for your own good.”
Nick cocked his head and looked at her. “I was always told that friendship is a two-way street.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got a file on me; I should have a file on you. I could, you know—like you said, I used to ‘enjoy your company.’”
She blinked. “And what would my file say?”
“It would contain a lot of technical terms,” Nick said.
“Such as?”
“‘Anal’ comes to mind—I believe that’s a good Freudian term.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning your ponytail’s too tight. You overanalyze everything; you see lines everywhere; you see yourself as a kind of mental health crossing guard, standing on one side of the line and holding everybody else back. You get a feeling of superiority by figuring out how everybody else works.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “What else?”
“Neurotic.”
“Neurotic? I am not.”
“I’m sorry, I’m a little new at this ‘friendship’ thing—perhaps ‘phobic’ is the more accurate term. One example comes to mind: You’re afraid of mice.”
“That’s a common dislike.”
“But with you it’s more than a dislike—with you it’s a full-blown phobia. Mice, rats, gerbils—anything with a tail. It’s the tail that really gets you, isn’t it? Let me ask you something: When you got out of bed this morning, when you reached down for your shoes—did you find something stuffed into them? Something you put there the night before? A pair of socks, maybe—and not so the socks would be ready to slip right on, but to keep little rodents from inhabiting your shoes at night.”
“Okay,” she said. “I get the point.”
“You can feel them, can’t you? You slide your foot into your shoe—what’s this? There’s something there—you can feel the fur wriggling against your toes.”
“Nick, shut up.”
“I’ve read that rats often use socks for nesting material.”
“Nick—shut up.”
“There’s one more term I’d include in your file,” Nick said. “‘Snob.’”
“How am I a snob?”
“You think you’re better than other people. You think you’re too good to struggle with the same ordinary neuroses that everybody else does. You know what really bothers you about your fear of mice? Girls are afraid of mice—it’s an old stereotype, and you fit right into it. That’s the thought that really eats your lunch—you’re a girl.”
She glared at him. “Now you’re just being insulting.”
Nick shrugged. “I did it for your own good.”
She took the file folder and buried it in the middle of the pile. “You’re wrong,” she said. “Friends do psychoanalyze each other. Maybe they don’t use technical terms, and maybe they don’t make written reports, but they look into each other’s lives and they try to see if anything’s wrong. That’s what friends do, Nick—a good friendship is like therapy.”
“I don’t need therapy,” he said. “What I need right now is a real friend.”
She paused. “What does that mean?”
Nick leaned back to the table behind him and opened his equipment bag; he pulled out a tablet of white paper and handed it to her.
She looked at it. The first two sheets were smeared with black fingerprints and hand-scrawled notations. They looked like something a child had made.
“What is this?”
“Fingerprints and physical descriptions from two bodies I found yesterday.”
“Nick.”
“Hey, I was only doing what they told me to do.”
“That’s not what I hear. Denny briefed me after your conversation with the two DEA agents.”
Nick stopped. “Two DEA agents?”
“Special Agents Turlock and Detwiler. It was just last night—don’t tell me you forgot already.”
“I spoke with Turlock; I never met any Detwiler.”
“Denny says you were supposed to locate bodies, and that’s all.”
“That’s not true. Turlock told me to locate bodies and see what I could learn—that’s what I did.”
“How did you take their fingerprints while they were floating in water?”
“Focus,” Nick said. “It’s one of my better qualities.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“A friend would run them through the system for me to see if we can get an ID.”
“If you’re only doing what they told you to do, why can’t you do this yourself ?”
“A friend wouldn’t ask me that—not yet, anyway.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head.
“It’s no big deal,” Nick said. “You work with the Family Assistance Center; this should be right up your alley—you’re helping me sea
rch for two lost men.”
“And where am I supposed to tell them I got these prints?”
“Tell them some woman gave them to you; tell them she’s looking for her cousins. Tell them you know the physical descriptions are vague, but that’s all she could remember.”
“In other words, you want me to lie.”
“I want you to try out your seldom-used powers of creativity. C’mon, Beth, let down that ponytail for once. Stick a toe over the line—who knows, you might like it over here with the rest of us.”
“You have to promise me something first,” she said.
“What’s going on? Everybody wants promises.”
“You have to promise me that you’re not doing anything wrong.”
He leaned across the table to her. “Believe me—I’m doing the right thing.”
She considered for a long time before answering. “All right, I’ll do it—but I want you to recognize something: A psychiatrist would never do this for you; this is something only a friend would do.”
“Thank you,” Nick said. “And while we’re in this spirit of friendship, I have one more favor to ask.” He took out the vial of caddis-fly larvae and set it on the table.
She picked it up. “What is this?”
“It would take a lot explaining, and you’d probably ask me more questions and want me to make more promises. This favor is even easier, and there’s no risk for you whatsoever—even a psychiatrist would do it. Tomorrow, when your shift is over, I want you to take this to a friend of mine at LSU—it’s only fifteen minutes from here. I’ll give you the name and the office address.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I’ll call ahead and explain everything. All you have to do is show up—with this.”
She looked at the vial again. “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me how you got this.”
“It’s late,” he said. “You should get some sleep.”
He got up from his chair and swung his equipment bag over one shoulder.
“Nick,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Mice don’t really use socks for nesting material, do they?”
He winked. “Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
19
He lay spread-eagled on the bed, staring at the palmetto bug on the ceiling directly above his head. Why didn’t it move? Was it dead? He had been watching it for almost an hour now, waiting for one of the bristly legs to budge. He never took his eyes away; he refused to even blink, willing his eyes to remain open even when tears gathered in little pools and burned down the sides of his face.
With the tips of his fingers he could just reach both sides of the king-sized bed. He grabbed the edges and pulled, flexing the mattress slightly. He wondered: If he pulled hard enough, could he wrap it around him? There was only a bottom sheet on the bed, and it hadn’t been changed in weeks. It didn’t matter; he was the only one who slept on the bed anyway, and he didn’t really sleep—that had stopped weeks ago.
He had lost the ability to reach a state of sleep; he was like a man in a dark cellar feeling along the wall for a light switch—some mental mechanism that would turn off all the pain and regret and bring on welcome oblivion. But he could find no switch; the walls were bare. Even when he did occasionally slip into unconsciousness, he would suddenly jerk upright like a dozing man who had slipped beneath the water of a bath. At first he could sleep only a few fitful hours each night; later, it was only an hour or two; now he couldn’t even close his eyes. He felt like a starving child standing at the back door of a bakery night after night, hoping that the door would open and some crumb would be thrown to him—but it never happened.
He didn’t even undress anymore—there was no point. He knew that sleep was gone forever; he wasn’t sure why he came to bed at all. It was a sort of penance—a ritual he had to perform each night to remind himself of what he had become: He was the undead, doomed to lie in darkness while eternally awake.
He rolled his head to the right and looked at the empty closet. He wondered where she was tonight. He wondered if she could sleep. He wondered if she had a new husband now, with a new daughter who was still alive. He wondered if she had forgotten all about her, and the thought made his eyes begin to burn.
He had not forgotten. He would never forget. And he would never rest until he had made things right.
He rolled to his feet and stood on the bed. With the butt of his palm he crushed the palmetto bug against the ceiling, then hopped down onto the floor. For an instant he thought he felt rested—but the feeling quickly passed. He no longer felt rested; he no longer felt tired either. He felt—electric, as though he were a machine that could run as long as it remained plugged in. It would run as long as it needed to run. Who knows—it might even run forever.
He crossed the hall and entered a second bedroom—her bedroom. The room felt different the moment he entered it; this room wasn’t empty like the other one was. This room was still full—full of her. The closets were still lined with dresses and shoes, and the chest of drawers was still stacked with neat little piles of cotton and silk. There were still photographs on the desk, though they now rested in a thick layer of dust; there was even a purple-and-gold LSU pennant that hung above the bed. The room was still full because she never really left; she didn’t pack her things and decide to run away like his wife did—she would never have done that. She was gone only because she was taken away—taken away from him.
He stretched out on her bed, being careful not to wrinkle the comforter or disturb the throw pillows at the head. He looked up at the ceiling; it was pure and white. He closed his eyes for a moment, but he knew that even here he would not sleep. He didn’t want to sleep; he wanted to feel her presence, which was never far away—but here it was so very real.
Speak to me, sweetheart—speak to me.
Silence.
He got up from the bed and carefully smoothed the comforter, erasing any sign of his intrusion. He crossed the hall into the bathroom—her bathroom. He switched on the light and found the medicine cabinet open wide; the shelves were empty, except for one small orange plastic bottle on the center shelf. He took out the bottle and opened it; he shook two pills into the palm of his hand. He tossed the pills into the back of his throat and swallowed quickly because the pills had no coating on them and they were bitter. He bent down and took a drink directly from the tap.
He set the bottle back on the shelf again and closed the cabinet door; when he did, he found a message written in lipstick on the glass. “Daddy,” it said at the top, and under that simple greeting was the name and address of a man.
At the bottom of the mirror a closing comment had been added. It read: “He was one of them too.”
Thank you, sweetheart. Thank you for speaking to me.
20
Friday, September 2
Nick waded out into the water at the end of St. Claude Avenue. The water came almost to his chest before he reached the old magnolia tree and ducked under its branches. He found the boat where he had left it the night before, still chained to the trunk of the tree. He removed the chain and tossed it into the bottom of the boat; when he did, J.T. sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Where you been?” he asked.
“J.T.—what are you doing in there?”
“Sleepin’.”
“I can see that. How long have you been here?”
He shrugged. “All night.”
“I dropped you off at the Convention Center.”
“You dropped me on the street.”
“You know what I mean—you were supposed to go to the Convention Center and wait for me there.”
“Didn’t like that place.”
Nick looked in the boat; it was empty except for two oars and a couple of old bench pillows. “You like this better?”
“It’s okay.”
“How did you get here?”
“I walked.”
“You walked five miles?”
Nick tried to visualize the route the boy must have taken: He couldn’t have backtracked the way they’d come—it was all underwater. He must have followed the levee along the Mississippi River, then headed north when he came to the Industrial Canal. But there were no roads and no lights, and there was no one to help him if he couldn’t find the way. The more he thought about it, the angrier he became—but he knew he had to let it go. After all, the boy did make it; no sense yelling at the kid because of his own unrealized fears.
“How did you get out to the boat?”
“I walked.”
“The water’s over your head. What did you do, use a snorkel?”
“I swam a little too.”
Now something else occurred to Nick: If the boy had bypassed the Convention Center, he had also bypassed dinner and breakfast too. He rubbed the boy’s head. “You hungry?”
“A little.”
“C’mon, let’s get you something to eat. Jerry’s probably got a couple of MREs stashed away in his equipment bag.”
He pulled the boat out from under the branches and guided it back to the boat ramp; Jerry was waiting for them there.
“Look what I found,” Nick called out.
“What the—how did you get here?”
“We’ve been over all that,” Nick said. “He’s a little hungry—see what you can dig up, will you?”
A few minutes later, they were on their way back into the Lower Nine, with J.T. devouring his MRE directly from the bag.
Nick looked at him. “There’s something we need to get straight,” he said.
J.T. looked up.
“From now on, you need to follow orders.”
“You don’t.”
“That’s one of the benefits of being a grown-up: I don’t have to do everything I tell you to do.”
“How come?”
“Because I’m big, and you’re small, and that’s how the universe works. Stop asking questions and eat. But next time I tell you to go somewhere, you go—understand?”
Beth pulled her car into the parking lot of the Life Sciences Building at LSU, a massive six-story structure in the center of campus that serves as home to five different fields of scientific endeavor—including the Department of Entomology. She took the stairs to the fifth floor, though the building had an elevator—a discipline she maintained to keep her calves looking trim. On the fifth floor she found the Louisiana State Arthropod Museum, which occupied four thousand square feet of collection and laboratory space.