'Aw, fuck,' Ripley repeated in a small voice. She was sitting on the welcome mat, her legs pulled to the side, her eyes wide and empty.
'She won't say anything,' Thomas heard himself say to Sam.
Agent Logan turned from the window, blinking tears from her eyes. 'How can I be such an idiot?' she murmured.
Suddenly Control was nowhere to be found.
'What's wrong with Mom?' Ripley asked, not the way a child might, but like an adult, with all the cynical intonations of 'wrong'.
'Sam… Are you okay?'
She gathered her things with hand-wringing haste. She made a point of avoiding his gaze.
Thomas reached out to press a palm against the wall, did his best to make it look casual. Suddenly his living room felt like the edge of a cliff. 'We should talk about this, don't you think?'
Sam sniffled, paused to pull a tissue from her purse. She did her best to smile at Ripley while she pulled on her heels.
'Sam… Please…'
She paused for an instant while still looking down. The aura of contrived briskness dissolved. When she looked up, two silver tracks etched her cheeks. She shook her head and smiled in a queer, apologetic way that Thomas found terrifying. 'Sorry, professor,' she said. 'I can't do this.'
Then she was upright, straightening her jacket and skirt with her palms. 'I never could,' she said as she stepped through the door. Thomas listened to her heels tap across the concrete.
Rather than meeting her father's plaintive gaze, Ripley sat listless in the oblong of sunlight, picking fluff from the mat.
'What's wrong with Mommy?' Ripley asked again, this time from the safety of the television's circus glare. To her credit, she had let several minutes pass before repeating the question, apparently every bit as content as he was watching the riot of soundless images.
So much life from so many angles. Explorations of a sea-wrecked world.
'Mom misses Frankie, honey,' Thomas said, somewhat amazed he could say his son's name aloud. Apparently Control was back online.
'But Frankie's just sleeping in the hospital. You said he wasn't dead yet.'
Thomas blinked.
He knelt before his daughter. 'What about you, Ripley? Don't you miss Frankie?'
'Naw,' she said with a shrug. 'It usually takes a week or so for me to miss his sorry ass…' Then she exploded in tears.
Thomas picked her up and rocked her in his arms, whispered loving reassurances in her ear. When she finally stopped crying, he sat with her in the recliner for a time, saying nothing. Soon sorrow became boredom and she began picking at his thumb. He made her giggle by pretending it was an animal ducking in and out of his palm for cover.
'Come,' he said finally, hoisting her into the air as he stood. 'Do you want to join me in my office? Color or something?'
'You gotta work?' she asked.
'Yep,' he said. 'I gotta save Frankie.'
At first, it seemed he had simply awakened with the revelation. But in retrospect, he realized that it had dawned on him talking to Gyges the previous day, only he'd been too rattled to make much sense of it. And even then, he wasn't sure it qualified as a revelation at all.
Ripley swung from his arm as though it were a swimming-hole rope as they turned into the office. She raced ahead to fetch her pencils and books, plopping stomach-first in the middle of the floor. He paused at the doorway, absently studied the great poster of the earth on the far wall.
Neil had loved the thing. He would stand in front of it, his profile turned so that Florida dangled like an obscene goblin dick from his fly, and call out: 'Nora! Ever been to Disney World?'
'Too many times,' she would answer.
Haw-fucking-haw. How many winks had they traded between them? Neil and Nora… Thomas wondered how long he'd be rewriting his history. He'd be bled white before it was done, he knew that much.
'Verbal,' he said, settling before the computer. 'Class files… Starting from about, ah, five years ago.'
Columns of folder icons unfolded across the screen. Thomas peered at them, looking for likely suspects.
'Ten years!' Ripley yelled with a giggle. Everything onscreen flickered out, instantaneously replaced. Thomas scowled at his daughter. She played innocent, smiling down at a blob of poppy red.
'Little bitch,' he muttered with a smile. A 'REPEAT REQUEST' window popped onto the screen.
'Starting from five years ago,' Thomas said.
He studied the icons for a moment. It had to be one of the bigger classes, he decided, the ones he and his colleagues jokingly called the 'hatcheries', where teaching played second fiddle to wowing freshmen into becoming psych majors.
'Open Intro 104a 2010,' he said.
A list of folders, each with a student's name, appeared. He scanned through them.
Nothing.
'Open Intro 104b 2011.'
Again he scanned down the list. Two-thirds the way down, his heart stopped at:
POWSKI, CYNTHIA 792-11-473
She had been his student.
Which meant he had been linked to all of them—all of Neil's victims.
He had once voted for Peter Halasz, had once participated in a pro-labor demonstration against Theodoros Gyges, and had argued several times with Nora over one of Jackie Forrest's books. He supposed he'd never made the link because of the tenuousness of these relationships. They seemed random. Meaningless.
But then this morning it had dawned on him: perhaps that was the point. Neil's point.
Only Cynthia Powski had seemed to argue against it.
'Display Cynthia Powski.'
A youthful, innocent version of her face materialized on the screen. Though motionless, it seemed to lean back, eyes fluttering, lips curling…
He pushed his chair back on its rollers, ran both hands across his scalp.
'Dad?' Ripley asked. 'Will Sam be coming over tonight?'
Ripley liked Sam. She adored anyone who treated her like a little adult.
'I'm not sure, honey,'
A memory, as insubstantial as gauze in water, came to him: a younger Cynthia, looking Midwest fresh, leaning against his desk and confessing her confusion with the term 'gestalt'. He remembered making a joke—something harmless and clever, he had thought—then immediately regretting it. How frightened she had looked! Bewildered and despairing. It was so easy to forget how vulnerable…
His mouse-hand shaking, Thomas scrolled through her record, afraid he would discover what he now thought he remembered.
She had failed. From the looks of her grade breakdown, she had simply dropped out without withdrawing, which probably meant she had dropped out of Columbia altogether. Just one more young, anxious face culled from the herd.
Thomas had failed her. He blinked, saw her licking a red-lacquered nail.
No wonder her image had nagged him with such violent regularity! He knew her. Knew without knowing.
But what did it mean?
With the exception of Frankie, Neil had picked his victims on the basis of a random and unwitting connection to him. He had ransacked his best friend's life searching for those single degrees of separation that would take him as close as possible to fame. A business magnate, a politician, a televangelist, a porn star. There could be no doubt he meant these relationships to be meaningless, accidental, like a scarf or glove 'accidentally forgotten' when visiting an estranged lover. But why? Was it simply part of his larger message? A crude illustration of the meaninglessness of all relationships?
No, Thomas realized. There was something horrifically personal in the impersonal nature of these connections. Something meant just for him. He was certain of it.
What was Neil after?
He obviously wanted an audience; the high-profile abductions and dramatic demonstrations had made that obvious from the beginning. He also wanted Thomas to suffer—Frankie and Nora were proof enough of that. But these other people—Halasz, Gyges, Forrest, and Powski—meant nothing to Thomas. Witnessing their pain had horrified him, certai
nly, but no more than their bit-parts in the script of his life warranted. They were strangers, after all, sharing, as Neil would say, no familial genetic material.
Thomas looked sidelong at Ripley lying on the floor, her heels bouncing against her bum, her head askew as she concentrated on coloring.
For the briefest of instants, she looked a stranger.
Horror. Control faltered, like paint crinkling in the heat of an unseen fire. His skin pimpled in dread.
'Have you an arm like God?' Neil had asked that night. 'Have you?'
All of it, Thomas realized—everything that had happened—was aimed directly at him. The FBI, the clumsy bids for publicity, even the prophet-of-the-semantic-apocalypse routine were simply lies that Neil had told himself, compensatory mechanisms meant to rationalize and conceal his real motive.
Hatred. Psychopathic hatred. Neil wanted his best friend to suffer. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It should have made him laugh, Thomas realized, after agonizing over the Argument, after harboring the chill premonition that Neil could be right. All along the answer could be found in any freshman's psychology course notes—or work of literature for that matter. Neil hated, and like any other man who hated, he wanted nothing more than to see the object of his hate destroyed.
'Who hates you?' Ripley asked, looking at him curiously.
Thomas was startled. Had he spoken aloud?
'No one, honey,' he said. 'I was just mumbling.'
None of them were safe. Not Ripley, not Nora, not even Mia or Sam. Neil was coming for them.
Have you an arm like God?
Think clear. Think straight.
Neil wasn't playing Kurtz to his Marlowe, he was playing God to his Job. He was obsessed. For some reason Neil had become obsessed with his best friend. Somehow he had developed, nursed, and concealed some kind of psychopathic affective fixation.
Thomas clutched his trembling hands.
Control had returned. The world had resumed its place outside the fishbowl.
An old professor of his had argued that psychologists were the true fishers of men. Great nets of expectation, he said, bound individuals into communities. And when individuals violated those expectations, the psychologist was called to cast further nets about them. That's all the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was, he insisted, a way to entangle the unexpected within expectation, to utterly eliminate the threat of surprise. Trespasses became symptoms. Abominations became clinical evidence.
'There's no escape!' he would shout to his class. 'That's the true motto of all psychology.'
No escape.
For the first time, Thomas truly understood what the man had meant. For the first time, he truly understood Neil Cassidy. Neil was a stalker—little more than a mutt as far as psychological disorders go. A simple obsessional. Domestic. Delusional. Highly organized. Definitely psychopathic.
There were many ways to crack this chestnut. Any number of interpretative viewpoints suggested themselves: the socio-cultural, the learning, the humanistic, the psychodynamic…
Stupid, he thought. Stupid. So fucking stupid! How could he have missed it?
He looked to the dust-free square where his brass desk-lamp had once stood. He could almost see Neil bending over it as he scrawled 'www.semanticapocalypse.com' across the green glass. He could almost see the dress-dropping smile, crooked with wicked delight. Neil reveled in knowing things others should know, be they facts of character, profession, or women. Nothing tickled him more than irony. In college, he had made an art of stringing along those duped by their own words. Thomas had played as well—but only reluctantly. To witness self-deception was to know someone better than they knew themselves. And even though Thomas had, in a sense, made a profession of the game, he found it far more uncomfortable than comforting. To toy with irony was to toy with the vulnerabilities of others. Since everyone, including Neil, was as much other as self, toying with others' vulnerabilities meant toying with one's own vulnerabilities as well. And that was the point. Neil played these games, Thomas had realized, in order to cultivate a sense of invulnerability.
The greatest self-deception of all.
Thomas had tried to tell him this once, but it was part of Neil's peculiar blindness to think he saw everything. He never stopped playing his games, never stopped smirking at the obliviousness of others, at the truth hidden right there where anyone could see it—in a wife's flirtatious smile, in a friend's embarrassed silence…
Thomas shivered. He turned to his left, to his beaten poster of a world equally hard done by. A landscape of dimples and refracted light obscured the dark, satellite landmasses. He glimpsed a felt-tip 'x' in a finger-shaped gleam. How?
Oh my God…
'Ripley?'
'Yeah, Dad?'
'Get your things together, honey.'
Thomas hustled Ripley across the lawn. They trotted up Mia's porch steps, and Thomas rapped hard on the screen door. 'Mia!' he called. Ripley was frightened. 'What's wrong, Daddy?' Thomas pulled on his black-and-green blazer, which he had grabbed on his way out the door. The air had a dry, pre-autumn chill, it seemed.
'When we get inside, Rip, I need you to go out back and watch TV, okay?'
'But nuthin's on.'
'Play with their Gamesphere, then. Or watch a movie. Order any movie you want.'
She squinted up at him, looking so adorable he felt Control momentarily waver. 'Any movie?'
'Any movie. So long as it's not—'
'Ello-ello,' Mia said, little more than an apparition behind the screen. He pushed the door open, and Ripley bolted past him.
'Please come in!' Mia called after her. He turned back to Thomas, perplexed and perhaps a little annoyed.
'I know this is short notice, Mia, but I need you to look after her for a bit.'
'Sure-sure. What's going on?'
'I've been an idiot. A total fucking idiot.'
Mia regarded him apprehensively. He glanced out across the street. 'C'mon in.'
Thomas numbly followed him into the kitchen. The remains of some abstemious dinner—a pot and two plates, a wooden bowl, its insides coated with flattened salad—cluttered the ceramic counter top.
'An idiot, huh?'
Thomas took a seat at their battered antique table. 'Neil. I've been an idiot about Neil.'
Mia winced. 'I had a feeling you were going to say that. How so?'
'All this time I've been taking everything at face value. Reading all his signals the way he wanted them to be read.'
Mia shrugged. 'So? He's a man with a message. A psycho with a statement.'
'It's not as simple as that. People rationalize everything they do. The more deviant the behavior, the more colorful the rationalization. And it's almost always bullshit—just like Freud said.' Thomas had yet to meet a Marxist without a smattering of psychoanalysis.
'So you're saying Neil's cigar isn't a cigar?'
'Exactly. The Argument, the death of meaning—all bullshit! Nothing more than a deranged and demented way for Neil to hide from his true motives.'
'True motives…'
'Yes! It's so simple, Mia!' Thomas paused, struggled to compose himself, his thoughts. 'Neil's "arguing" to deny his hatred. Nihilism is simply an excuse, a way for him to legitimize hurting me.'
'Hatred?' Mia ran a hand along his close-cropped scalp. 'But why would he hate you?'
'To repress his shame.'
'And why's he ashamed?'
'Because he's in love.'
'In love? With who?'
'Me.'
Mia scowled, his elbow up, his hand still on his head. 'Are you sure about this?'
'I know how it sounds. But those three years we spent together at Princeton were pretty intense. It's scary, when I think about it, how many levels we connected on. I came to love him like a brother, but Neil… he came to love me more, I think… Like a lover.' He found himself leaning forward, as though wanting to grab Mia by the shoulders. 'Don't you see? That's why he sedu
ced Nora. Both to avenge himself, and to prove to himself that no vengeance was needed!'
Mia regarded him skeptically, drew his palm down across his stubbled cheek. 'I dunno, Tommy.'
'What do you mean?' The shrill breath that accompanied these words made him realize how desperately he needed to be right.
'Neil? Gay?' Mia shook his head. 'No… I never got a blip from the guy, and believe me, Bill and I pinged him several times.'
'C'mon, Mia. You guys are always talking about "sticks in and out of water".'
'But that's my point: there was never any question as to whether he was bent or straight—at least not for us.' Mia paused, then shrugged sympathetically. 'He could be some kind of super-stealth homo, I suppose…' He trailed, looked at Thomas with dawning scrutiny. 'But what does any of this have to do with dropping off Rip? Why not just call Sam and tell her you have a new motive?'
Thomas swallowed, summoned what seemed the last of his breath. 'I think I know, Mia. I think I know where he is.'
Mia grabbed the antique back of one of his chairs, as though to steady himself. 'Have you told anybody?'
Something about this question itched.
'No. Not yet.'
'Jeezus, Tommy. Jeezus-jeezus. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. How the hell does Neil having a hard-on for you translate into knowing where he is?'
Thomas braced his forehead in his right hand. He told Mia about realizing his connection to Neil's victims, about discovering that Cynthia Powski had been his student. 'All of them, Mia… Neil's not simply hunting half-famous people, he's hunting half-famous people that I've had accidental contact with.'
'But that just doesn't make sense.'
'Not unless it's me he's been after all along.'
Mia nodded, but whether in understanding or simply to humor him, Thomas couldn't tell. His eyes remained skeptical. 'So how come you think you know where he is?'
'Because after I realized all this, I thought about the web address he'd written on my office lamp. Then I thought about my map—you know, the satellite photograph of North America in my office?—about how Neil had always loved the thing. Neil's playing these games, I thought, laughing at me, dancing in the darkness where I can't see him, wouldn't it be like him to simply mark his location, under my nose, under the noses of the FBI? So I look at the poster and what do I see? A small 'x' along the Hudson, in the same color pen he used to write the web address.' Fear flushed through him. 'Un-fucking-believable.'
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