No Sleep till Wonderland

by Paul Tremblay

  “It wasn’t me. It was Charlton Heston.”

  “He’s dead. I know it was you.”

  I know when I’m had. “All right. I’m guilty. How did you know?”

  “I see things. I hear things.” Rita pauses to blow a cloud of burned air into my face. “I know things.”

  Great. Somebody told her, and I’m sure she’s hardly the only person swinging on that grapevine. The half gainer onto the bridge isn’t going to win me the respect and admiration of the locals, who are already abuzz with the news apparently. So Fred the friendly neighbor gets newspaper credit for saving Jody’s JT from the fire, and I’ll be a back-page joke and a YouTube legend.

  I say, “What do you know? Besides Soylent Green is people.” Everyone walking by our bench looks at me and knows what happened and knows who I am.

  Rita absorbs my bitchy verbal jab with remarkable dignity. A dignity I clearly lack. She pats my shoulder, which aches and is made of cracked balsa wood. There, there.

  She says, “There’s something seriously wrong with you, my friend.”

  “Can’t argue with that. Let’s get back on topic.”

  “Didn’t know we were off topic.”

  “We were. Trust me.”

  “If you say so.”

  “The night of the fire, who did you see there?”

  “I saw you run in and then stumble out a little later, then timber! to the sidewalk.” Rita stretches our her timber call like a lumberjack. “That was real good of you to try and help those people.”

  “I did help. I got the kid off the second floor before the smoke got to be too much, but no one will listen…”

  Rita nods, then says, “Other than you and the hero guy who went in after you, I didn’t see anyone else go in or go out. I already told this to the cops. I only got there when you did.”

  I try not to let toxic disappointment ooze out of my pores. “Did you know the guy who was killed? He lived on the first floor. His name was Aleksandar.”

  Rita fiddles with her cigarette and her baseball hat. Leftover pizza grease darkens the brim. “Saw him around town but didn’t really know him or talk to him.”

  She is as patient and gentle smoking as she was with the pizza. I have no patience and want to empty my pack, stack each cigarette on the bench like kindling, light a fire, and thrash around in the smoke like a greedy parasite in blood.

  Rita passes and twirls the lit cigarette between her fingers. The pinwheeling ember is hypnotic. Then she switches hands. It’s a trick I’ve never seen before. I don’t know how she’s doing it. She starts talking without dropping the minibaton made out of tobacco.

  She says, “What’d you say his name was, again? Didn’t know that. Didn’t see him around all that much. Seen him walk to a Laundromat maybe, or to the Hub, not that I followed him around, right?” The spinning cigarette is a turbine on her fingers. It’s a blur. “Used to see this well-dressed guy going into that first-floor apartment. I saw him like three times, a month ago, maybe less, walking down H, always walking real fast. Young, good-looking guy, never stayed for more than a few minutes, always dressed in a suit, shiny black hair, wearing big, fat, dark sunglasses.”

  I see Timothy Carter’s face, the face that filled my office once, and I want to take a swing at him; I see myself throwing a compact, three-inch punch. Then I’m falling from a great height, from the top of the Tower of Babel, and my arms flail and spin like her cigarette. I land in a tree. The thin trunk is a fist between my shoulder blades, all knuckles. The shaking leaves complain and let scalding sunlight pass through the canopy to punish me.

  My legs are still in contact with the concrete bench, and my ass hangs a few inches above the ground. I figure out my previous few moments even though I wasn’t there. Yeah, I’m an instant archaeologist or an archaeologist of instants. My findings: I passed out, fell backward into our shady tree, and the Mayan calendar has doomed us all. The spindly little tree will never be the same.

  Rita paces in front of the bench, wearing out the sidewalk. She yells, “What’s going on? What the hell, Mark?” She’s looking around for help, for someone to commiserate with, but the people walking by are doing their best to ignore her. They don’t have to try that hard.

  I say, “Easy, easy, Rita. I fell off. I’m clumsy. I’m fine. I’m sorry. Help me up, will ya? I smacked the back of my head again. I’m seeing stars right now.”

  She’s scared and won’t look at my face. I don’t blame her on either count. She crouches next to me and grabs an arm. I push off the tree and, with her help, wiggle back up onto the bench.

  “Thanks, and I’m sorry about that, Rita. Didn’t mean to scare you.” The apology disappears into my lower register, where words go to die.

  Rita stands next to the bench, arms folded across her chest. She’s host to a raging internal debate; the pro and con arguments about her continued association with me bubble underneath her skin.

  I don’t know how much of what I remember her saying about a well-dressed man was real or a dream. Was she telling me about seeing Timothy Carter visiting Aleksandar? And holy shit, I’m in a lot of pain again and don’t think I’ll be able to move for a day or so.

  Not sure of what tack to take, I throw out some phrases decorated with question marks. “You were saying? Young guy? Well dressed? Big sunglasses, too? At that apartment?” I light two cigarettes, keep both for myself, and give her the rest of the pack.

  She says, “Yeah. That’s what I said. Saw him a bunch of times.”

  I need time to process this. Maybe she saw Timothy Carter, and maybe she didn’t. And Timothy Carter visiting Aleskandar by himself, in and of itself, proves nothing. Nothing except that I really want him to be the person to take the blame for the fire, take the blame for everything that’s ever gone wrong anywhere, to be the mythical bad guy we all need and maybe even deserve.

  I ask, “Did you tell the police about the well-dressed man?”

  “I told them everything I know. Why wouldn’t I? I’m not stupid.”

  “Right. Of course. That’s very sensible of you.” I bring both burning cigarettes to my lips. In with the bad and out with “Thanks, Rita. That helps me out a lot.”

  Rita says, “I was lying.”

  I look up, and she’s covering a smile with a shaking hand. The smile repairs me, but her shaking hand tears me back down. I say, “Lying about what, Rita?”

  She says, “I didn’t know that was you who fell on the bridge. No one’s talking. I guessed.”

  “You guessed?”

  “Yeah. I saw your hospital scrubs, and you looked like you got the shit beat out of you. Flopping around the bridge sounded like something you’d do.”

  I laugh, but Rita stops laughing. We weren’t supposed to share that. I stand up, and my body, that flawed bag of meat and bones stuck carrying around my consciousness, doesn’t like the standing. Tough shit.

  I say, “All right, Rita. Sorry again for the scare. I gotta go. Next lunch we’ll take it easy and swap Planet of the Apes lines. Okay?”

  Rita nods, and neither of us knows what I meant by we’ll take it easy. She hitches up her pants and says, “My favorite line is, ‘It’s a mad house. A mad house,’” and walks away, into the bank lot behind our bench and loses herself in the maze of gleaming metal and glass of the cars parked tightly together.

  Twenty-Three

  I call Ekat’s cell and leave a message. I tell her that Eddie Ryan has been arrested (but not for what) and maybe we should consider reporting Gus missing. I tell her that Owolewa interviewed me again but not why. I wish her a happy birthday even if it isn’t happy or her birthday, and then I hang up.

  Expecting an instantaneous return call that doesn’t come, I sit and stare at the phone like it’s the magic mirror on the wall, waiting for it to lie through its glass teeth and tell me I’m the fairest of all, like it’s supposed to. There’s no such thing as magic.

  Maybe I don’t need magic, and it’s all as simple as a high or drunk or
sober Eddie trying to burn up his estranged girlfriend and her son, with the unfortunate Aleksandar Antonov, the forgotten man, as an unintended casualty. But I don’t believe that. I don’t think Detective Owolewa believes it either. The list of people who are connected to me and the fire spreads. I can’t help but feel there’s a terrible balance to it all, it’s about to be upset, and everything will fall apart. Maybe I should go to group therapy tonight.

  I leave the bench, determined to walk past my brownstone. I could go upstairs and change my jacket and out of my scrubs, but the escapee-from-an-institution look is edgy and hip and surprisingly comfortable. Besides, I need to avoid my apartment now. It’s the rabbit hole, and it leads down into a deep, dark, and empty warren. I’d get lost and never be found.

  I cross Dorchester Street against the advice of the traffic lights and the red don’t-walk hand. A bus driver and an idiot in a Hummer express dissatisfaction with my chicken crossing the road. I tell them I think they’re number one. Glad we got that off our chests.

  It’s the ten-thousandth consecutive day of ninety-plus-degree heat, and the city is withering, drying up, turning to bonemeal. I stick with the long walk and pass on a cab ride, even if the not-so-complex movements of right-foot-left-foot and inflating my chest with air result in spectacular fireworks of pain. Ooos and ahhs, indeed. It’s a collective and collaborative pain that’s keeping me awake and upright for the moment. Me and time, we’re marching on.

  I mosey up East Broadway, past more brownstones, darkened and taped-up real estate offices, a Laundromat, court house, and bowling alley. Then I take a right at the Store 24 and onto H Street. Time to canvass the neighborhood. I’m convinced that knowing more about Aleksandar is the key to what happened the night of the fire. He’s a secret that somebody is keeping.

  I ring bells and knock on doors up and down H Street. I get an answer on maybe one out of four apartments. Those who do answer their doors aren’t impressed by me or my PI ID badge. I don’t know their language or the Southie handshake. My ID photo is cracked and faded, and I’m not wearing a hat. Maybe I should replace it with the picture I drew at group therapy.

  The mini-interviews are microscopic. No one knew or talked to Aleksandar. Only one old man the size of Jiminy Cricket, wearing flannel pajamas and wisps of white cotton-candy hair clinging to the top of his head, wants to chat for more than ten seconds. He recognizes me from last year’s DA case. He tells me he knew the DA wasn’t a good guy. I yawn. He tells me I should be looking into the kook who got dumped onto the Zakim Bridge. I tell him he’s right, I should. He doesn’t let me leave until I give him a sweat-damped calling card from my wallet. I sign it upon his insistence. Give the people what they want.

  I try a few more buildings on H Street, but I don’t get anywhere. I limp down one more set of wooden front stairs of another swing and miss, straining the rotting handrail with my weight until I crash onto the sidewalk like an asteroid. I sit on the stairs, take off my hat, and wipe the flop sweat off my face and forehead.

  I scan H Street, trying to recall which places I’ve been to already, and Jody O’Malley creeps into my vision like a forgotten memory. She’s a block away, walking down East Sixth, probably coming from Rachel’s place. She wears cutoff gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Same T-shirt she had on yesterday. The exposed skin of her thick arms and legs is pale, sun-starved, Transylvanian. Hubble telescope–sized sunglasses cover most of her face, and she looks like a wingless dragonfly.

  Jody stops at the corner, sways a little, feels the world turning and tumbling under her. She roots through a black handbag slung over her shoulder, then puts her arms behind her head and wrestles with her hair. She loses the match, barks out a monosyllable, and throws a black hair elastic onto the curb. She slowly crosses H, walking like she might step into an open sewer at any moment, and continues down East Sixth.

  I wonder if she knows about Eddie’s arrest, if despite everything, she was his one phone call. I wait until she’s out of sight, and I get up and follow the leader. When I hit East Sixth, I peek around the corner, and she’s there. We’ve managed to maintain our one-block distance. Like me, she isn’t walking very well.

  Jody lists to the right, toward the street, and almost stumbles off the curb. She manages to correct herself, but it’s an overcorrection, and she walks into a chain-link fence on her right. She’s drunk, and by the looks of it, it’s been a long, hard drunk, the kind of drunk that’s supposed to act like sleep, a dimming or dulling of the lights until you can’t feel anything.

  She turns left, onto I Street. We walk, slow and deliberate, and when we pass Ekat’s apartment I can’t help but throw a glance at her front window. The blinds are down. Then it’s past Gate of Heaven and up toward East Broadway. Jody stops at the corner of I and East Broadway and ducks into a little place called the Hub, a catchall convenience store that also sells liquor, Keno, and lottery tickets.

  I don’t know if I should go inside, talk to her, confront her because she told Eddie about my appearance at Rachel’s, tell her what Eddie did to me and where he is now, maybe even mention their childhood hiding-in-the-closet story. While any sort of discussion like that wouldn’t go over well in a small public venue, I’m too fucking sore and hot to stand out here with a metaphorical thumb up my ass. I enter the Hub.

  Through the door, and I’m welcomed by a blast of chilled air. I exhale for what feels like the first time since leaving the hospital. I could stand beneath the manufactured cold all day and contemplate the existential implications of air-conditioning. The rapid change in temperature also brings on a flash-flood headache. Seems I can’t win, but I knew that already.

  Off to my right, there’s a group of people, almost exclusively gray-hairs, all bundled up and braced for the store’s canned winter. They’re rooted in the gambling nook, filling out their Keno cards and watching the TVs that hang from the dropped ceiling. They stare at the noiseless screens, the blue backgrounds with ordered rows of white numbers. That order belies the hidden and stacked-against-us laws of statistics and chance. No one will get lucky.

  I pull my hat lower over my eyes. That way no one can see me. I head deeper into the store. Toward the back, I catch a glimpse of Jody near the refrigerated section—micro wave dinners, Push Pops, and twelve-packs of beer. She still wears the sunglasses, and she fills her arms with bags of chips and bottles of vodka. I’m now of the professional opinion that chatting with her here would not be the best way to go.

  She floats toward the front of the store, and I drift back and grab something cold and loaded with caffeine. I don’t think she has seen me hiding in the stacks yet, and I keep watch from the periphery. There’s no line at the register. A large older woman is sunken in behind the counter.

  Jody dumps her haul next to the register and dives into the bag slung on her shoulder. Receipts and gum wrappers spill out and flutter to the floor, a pocketbook autumn. She mutters and swears, and her hands are lost in a bog.

  With Jody’s items processed and brown bagged already, the woman behind the counter stands but doesn’t increase her height by more than a few inches. She adjusts her waistband and has a go at some serious eye rolling.

  This might be an in for me. I could offer to pay for the stuff, win her trust, and maybe Jody would tell me more about Aleksandar, about the night of the fire. I don’t walk. I sidle toward the counter and behind Jody, but I don’t get there in time. She pulls out the Excalibur credit card from the stone of her bag and flings it onto the counter.

  Opportunity lost, I creep back, the blob shrinking away from the cold. Maybe I can lose myself among the Stonehenge of Keno players to my left, and I start to lean that way.

  The woman at the register runs the card through the magic bean-counting machine that no one ever questions. She glances at the card and starts to give it back to Jody in a practiced yet indifferent motion, but she stops, swapping cartoon-eyed looks between the card in her hand and Jody. The woman’s arm recoils into her chest quicker
than a cord returning to a vacuum cleaner. She brings the card up to her face, lifts her glasses, and inspects it, a jeweler appraising a flawed pearl.

  She announces, “I’m not taking that; I know who you are,” and aims the card at Jody like it’s loaded.

  Jody shakes her head, laughs, and wipes her face. She says, “You don’t know me.” Her voice is a desperate growl, an SOS signal with fuck-you attitude.

  “I’m not taking this card.”

  The barometric pressure inside the store plummets, and a blizzard warning should be issued. Even the folks blinded by Keno electric-slide away from Jody and the front register. Not sure what I should do. I don’t like confrontation.

  “Fine.” Jody smacks the counter with an open hand and says, “Give it back.”

  The woman behind the counter clutches it to her chest, shakes her head, and asks Jody to leave before she calls the police.

  “Gimme the fuckin’ card!” Jody reaches across and rips it out of the woman’s grasp, then lumbers to the entrance/exit, head down, breathing heavy. She rips the door open and leaves. The sing-song, two-note, electronic customer-left-the-building blat echoes gently through the Hub.

  The woman behind the counter is shaking, talking to herself, and dialing. I step up, flash my PI badge, the kind you can get if you send the state a check and Frosted Flakes box tops.

  “I’ll take care of it. No worries.” I drop a twenty and a ten on the counter and add, “Keep the change,” without being sure that I’ve covered Jody’s tab. Doesn’t matter. The woman puts the phone down and stares at me like I’m a mirage, like she won’t believe that I was really there until after I’m gone. It’s a stare I get a lot. I snatch up the brown bag and follow Jody out the door.

  She’s already a half block ahead of me, and I can’t run on my lactic acid legs to catch up. I call out, yell her name three times. Bad idea. My headache goes supernova, and white stars of varying sizes and mass invade my vision, bending time and space. I stumble and lean against the brick outer wall of the Hub. Hopefully, it’s strong enough to hold me up.