“Mr. Riggs—”
Riggs held up a finger. “This was a tragic event. Granted. We will not, however, allow you to compound that tragedy by assigning blame where there is none.”
Lord God, thought Shenk. This sandbag isn’t kidding. He’s not making a play, he’s not holding out for more. He’s for real.
“You’re not going to counter.”
“I am not authorized to settle, no. And I wouldn’t, even if I was.”
Shenk looked around. The TV star had finished and left, and a small team of busboys was cleaning off the table, scraping crumbs and clearing cutlery like a NASCAR pit crew. The guy Shenk had thought was Jay-Z had not turned out to be Jay-Z.
Shenk set down his fork. “If you’re a flat no on settlement, what the hell are we doing here?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Shenk. You called me.”
Shenk gaped at the other man.
He had built his life, his practice, on a steady, sure sense of knowing what was going to happen next. Maybe he wouldn’t have all the details—he wasn’t a fortune-teller—but he knew the outlines. The big picture. He figured he’d be walking out of here with 4.1, OK, even down as far as 3.5—or even walking out of here with we’ll pick this up next week, with let me have a discussion with my clients.
But this. A flat refusal. A slammed door. This!
“My clients intend to take this to trial,” Riggs said. “Where they will win.”
“I think you’re making a mistake,” said Shenk.
Riggs took a final bite of fish. His plate was scrupulously clean. “I guess we’re going to find out.”
June 19, 2009
On Wesley’s birthday, which was also the day after the last day of the school year, his friend Bernie came to visit. He brought a cake, which was ridiculous, but he did it anyway. Carried the heavy box from underneath, balanced on his two flat hands. Said “Hey” and “Thanks” to the armed guard who was watching the door.
There had been various rumors about the “incident” that got Wes moved from room 906 down to a restricted wing in the hospital basement. It was a nurse, everyone had said at first, but then Bernie heard his parents whispering that, no, some kind of violent lunatic had attacked a nurse in room 906 and tried to drag Wesley away. A senior named Ed Nestor, whose dad worked at an office building near the hospital, said someone pretending to be a doctor was caught in Wesley’s room, trying to smother him with a pillow. Marco had it from a tenth grader who hung out in Venice that it was some crazy skateboard chick from the beach, who had snuck in in the middle of the night and tried to give Wes a blow job.
Point is, something fucking happened. People were still freaking out about Wesley Keener, eight months after it started—whatever it was. Since Wesley started walking. Coming in today with his cake, Bernie had seen a news truck idling outside, and he’d had to duck around a cluster of Jesus freaks walking in a circle in the lobby.
Wes was down here in the basement now, at the end of a secure corridor, and you had to have a laminated badge to come and see him. But Bernie was on the list. He had asked Mrs. Keener. He came a lot, the only one of the guys who still did so.
Bernie set down the cake and watched Wesley walk past it. They’d been friends since first grade. There were no windows down here in the basement room, which was a fucking bummer. At least the lights were on. Wesley was in pajama pants and what Bernie knew to be his favorite T-shirt, from the Who concert they’d all gone to at the Hollywood Bowl last summer; his mom and dad must have put it on him for his birthday or something. He imagined them holding Wesley still long enough to put it on, lifting his arms up, tugging them through the sleeves.
Jesus, Wes, he thought. Jesus fucking Christ.
“So what’s going on in there, dude?” said Bernie, who sometimes talked to Wesley and sometimes didn’t. He flicked open the cake box and ran his finger through the frosting at one corner.
By what’s going on in there he meant in your head. Wesley didn’t answer. Wesley went on walking.
It was awful. It was always awful. The stale smell of hospital air and bleach. And his bright, hilarious, obnoxious friend with his big, sharp, outraged laugh and his goofy duck walk, now moving in his endless slow circuit around the room, his arms hanging down, his hands like stones at the ends of his arms. Eyes open. Looking at nothing. Just fucking looking.
Their band, the Reverse Psychologists, was pretty much a done deal by now. After Wesley, it had never been the same. They fucked up their first actual gig, at some lame after-school activities place called Club Soda, because Noah broke a string and hadn’t brought any backups. Then around Christmas, Cal and Marco got into a dumb-ass fight about a junior girl named Karina Trotter, who they both liked but who neither of them ended up going out with anyway. After that it was just a matter of time.
Bernie kept practicing on his bass, though, all by himself. Crouched in the corner of his room, walking through scales and teaching himself Rush songs, playing along. “I’ve actually gotten—not good, but, like, not bad,” he told Wes. Went back for another dip of the frosting. “To be honest.”
By the end of junior year, Bernie wouldn’t be friends with any of those guys, except to say “What’s up?” in the hallway. Marco, unexpectedly, decided to try out for cross-country, and it quickly consumed his life. Noah’s family moved to Arizona or someplace. Bernie played in his room, every night, alone, and his ear in time would find the bass line in every song on the radio, the subterranean motion prowling beneath the surface of the melody. Pads of calluses sprouted on his fingertips.
Eventually, it would only be Bernie who kept up with Wesley, even after the Keeners pulled him from the hospital entirely.
That was after a couple more scary incidents, when Beth got really crazy about it, and insisted that not only Wes but the whole family become impossible to find, at least until the publicity died down; at least until the trial ended. So they found some tough guy that Richard knew from work, a former detective who worked as some kind of security consultant, and this guy set up a whole system of moving them from location to location, staying ahead of the gawkers and the dangerous freaks.
But wherever they went, Bernie would visit. He would text Evie, Wes’s sister, to find out the latest, or he’d call Mrs. Keener, who was always pretty nice about it, and then he’d drive to wherever it was and just hang out. He’d set up his phone and open Spotify and play songs by bands he’d discovered that he knew Wes would dig: the Mountain Goats and the Hold Steady and OK GO. He would bring flowers. He would bring stories about their friends and their teachers, about who had turned out to be crazy and who a slut, who was named homecoming king and who ended up in rehab and who was confirmed to be gay. He would tell him the whole crazy saga, at the end of junior year, when Mr. Delahunt got arrested for jerking off in the girls’ locker room.
Bernie visiting Wesley, following him around metro LA, bringing him the world.
Bernie would get older, like everybody gets older. His body changed shape, he got better and better at the bass guitar, he fell in and out of love, he experimented with smoking cigarettes and thought they were dumb, he lost his virginity to Becky Carrol in Jane Essman’s basement, he took the SAT, he grew a mustache for a while and then shaved it, and Wesley stayed exactly the same.
“All right,” he said now. He got up and stood in Wesley’s path so he’d stop walking, and kissed his buddy roughly on the cheek. “Great to see you.”
He left the cake, and Wesley walked around it in a circle. Six hours later, when Beth took the hospital’s back stairs down to the basement to spend the night, there were ants crawling over it and she threw it away.
Part Two
NOBODY FEELS ANY PAIN
November 8, 2009
1.
A stubborn winter mist had seeped in from off the ocean and spread itself out across the Westside, clammy and cold, and it was like they came with it, these people, like they materialized out of the weather, a small tribe of strangers, b
orn of the rain and fog, creaking up the metal stairway of Shenk & Partners.
They were goons. They were kooks. Shenk was in no mood for it.
“All right, people,” he told them after ten irritating minutes. “You can go ahead and see yourselves out.”
“No, no, Mr. Shenk. Please.”
This one seemed to be the spokesman. He was very calm, very sincere and plainspoken. He had introduced himself as Samir, plus a last name that Shenk didn’t quite catch, because he hadn’t been listening and didn’t care. Samir Whatever It Was was thin and polite and dressed neatly in a button-down shirt and pressed pants.
“It really is important that we talk to you. It’ll really be just a moment.”
“I have given you too many moments already, folks.” Shenk hopped up, walked past his treadmill, and flung open the door. “Out you go.”
“No, wait. Can we just…” Samir’s friend, or maybe girlfriend, was named Katy. She peered at Samir anxiously, clutching one of his narrow biceps.
“Look,” Samir said, ducking his head. “I am sorry we lied. That wasn’t right.”
“Yeah,” said Katy. She wore a white blouse and had blond hair, and she carried a black pocketbook no bigger than a paperback book, suspended from her shoulder by a thin strap. “That was lame.”
“Yes. Lame,” said Shenk. “And, actually, illegal, because you’re trespassing. Did you know that you were trespassing?”
Samir grimaced, and Katy looked horrified. Shenk, who did not practice criminal law, didn’t think making an appointment under false pretenses would actually count as trespassing, but if the invocation of a criminal-trespass charge helped hasten the departure of these clowns, terrific. It had been Shenk’s part-time bookkeeper, Darla, who had fielded the incoming new-client call, and Shenk—who had for the most part stopped taking new work, pending resolution of Keener—wouldn’t have met with them at all except they told Darla their case had to do with asbestos. That bastard Darius Kennerly had the market more or less cornered on asbestos-related mesothelioma, and so Shenk hadn’t been able to resist the chance to snatch a potential class action out from under that grinning peacock.
But none of these dingbats had mesothelioma. It had been a pretense to get into his office. Samir and Katy and the other one, the one still sitting silently in the corner, they wanted the same thing that everybody wanted: a piece of the Keener boy.
“All we want, honestly, is if you could help us have a word with Mr. and Mrs. Keener,” said Samir.
“Oh,” said Shenk, “is that all?”
“Or just tell us where the boy is,” said Katy. And then added, like a little kid, “Or maybe just, like, give us a hint?”
“I’m pretty sure I asked you people to get out of my office.”
The truth was, Shenk had no idea where Wesley was, right at that particular moment. First the hospital had moved him from the recovery floor down to some kind of special room in the basement, but even that had proved not sufficiently secure. The boy wasn’t in the hospital anymore. He was somewhere else. That was all Shenk had been told; Rich had made it very clear that the details were on a need-to-know basis.
“Geez,” Jay had said. “It’s like you’ve got the kid in witness protection.”
Beth had managed a dry smile, but Rich didn’t laugh. “If you’ve gotta see him,” Rich had said, “we can take you to see him.”
So no, Shenk was not surprised that these jokers had turned up at Shenk & Partners with their bullshit asbestos claim, trying to find the Keener boy. Samir and Katy were both thin and neat-looking, with short, conservative haircuts and energetic, expressive eyes. There was something disconcertingly well-mannered and articulate in their manner, especially for people in their twenties—something very Mormon, something very Jehovah’s Witness–like about their whole deal.
The third person, over in the corner, was a different story. He was lanky and disheveled, wearing board shorts and a tank top and sandals despite the winter chill outside—as if he had come here from surfing, or was going surfing after. While Samir and Katy gave their whole rap—about the asbestos in the ceiling at some middle school where they’d all supposedly worked—the third man didn’t say anything, and instead of joining them at Jay’s desk he’d dragged the one chair over to the window and planted himself there, looking out into the parking lot. He had a patchy blond beard and a growth of uneven stubble on his neck. He made no sense with these other two, Shenk thought, looking back and forth: they were polite, chirpy, plucky as ducklings, and he looked like some kind of drifter, blown in off the water.
“Mr. Shenk, please don’t get upset,” said Samir. “We just really need to see him.”
“I think when you hear the whole story,” added Katy, “you will change your mind.”
“I’m, A, not going to hear the full story, and B, not going to change my mind,” said Shenk. He stood by the door, glaring at the man-child in his chair by the window, who looked back at him vaguely, eyebrows raised. “Now, are we done here, or do I need to call the police?”
“Oh no. Please don’t do that,” said Katy. She looked alarmed, and her fair cheeks blushed pink.
“Let me ask you something,” said Samir hurriedly. “Has the boy, as far as you know, become—illuminated?”
“What?” Shenk said it softly. He raised one hand and steadied himself on the doorframe. “What did you say?”
Katy picked up the thread, glancing excitedly at Samir. “Has he, like, glowed? From the inside?”
Shenk stood for a moment, his grip frozen on the doorframe, and he felt as if he needed to be holding it tightly or he would fall down. He tried to remember who if anyone he had told that little detail. What poor rattled Bernie had told him, about the moment just after Wesley’s accident, before the paramedics arrived. That business about the light. The phosphorescence.
He had told no one, was the answer, no one but sweet Ruben—which wasn’t to say that Bernie couldn’t have told people other than him, or that one of the other kids hadn’t seen it also and told someone else.
And yet. But still. Fuck’s sake!
Samir got up from Shenk’s desk, seizing the moment, so eager now he tripped over the edge of the running machine and nearly collided with Shenk by the door.
“It’s yes, isn’t it? Is it yes?” He grasped Shenk by the shoulders, and Shenk shook himself loose.
“Who the fuck have you people been talking to? Where did you hear that?”
Samir and Katy shared a look. “Oh my God,” said Katy. “Oh my God.”
“What is this?” said Shenk.
Samir had him sort of cornered now, by the door. He leaned into Shenk, and Shenk leaned away. The young man was practically panting with urgency.
“There is another world beneath this one, Mr. Shenk.”
“Not beneath, exactly, but behind,” said Katy. “Below.”
“A better world.”
“In all ways better.”
They talked quickly, back and forth, breathlessly finishing each other’s sentences. One long sentence.
“And it is with us, but invisible.”
“It is here, but out of reach.”
“Like a memory, or a feeling. A—a—”
“—a version of our world, but without—” Samir stopped. Took a breath. “Without pain.”
Shenk finally spoke. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Without pain, Mr. Shenk. Without pain, or grief, or guilt. Without all of these burdens we carry around.” Katy was crying. Suddenly and completely, her voice choked, her blue eyes glistening with emotion. “Without hatred. Without sadness.”
“Think of your life’s suffering, Mr. Shenk. Think of all of its pain.”
For Jay this meant Marilyn, and he was dropped back into all of it, as if through a trapdoor: the agony of watching her die, of watching her body corrupted and watching her courage fail, of watching little Ruben, baffled by anger and sadness.
“This better world is with us,
even now, below us and beneath us and all around. A good and golden world, Mr. Shenk, and it’s here.” Samir brought up his hands in the empty air, as if he could feel it, this other place, as if he could see it and touch it and bring it to his lips. Katy raised her hands, too, open palmed, shoulder level, and she swayed with her eyes half-shut, transported.
“And this other world,” Jay said, forcing his lips to sneer, pushing sarcasm into his voice. “It’s what? It’s trying to—to break through, somehow?”
Samir and Katy cried out “Yes!” in unison, and Shenk threw up his hands, suddenly outraged. Why was he still standing here, listening to this messianic crap?
But he had to ask. What was he going to do—not ask?
“And how do you know all of this?”
Katy and Samir looked at each other, smiling, two lovers sharing their ecstatic secret.
“OK, so you want to hear something…crazy?” said Samir.
“I think that horse is out of the barn, pal,” said Shenk. Somehow they had migrated back to his desk. He was sitting down again, behind it, and Katy and Samir were standing, hovering on the other side, clutching each other.
“It was a dream,” said Katy.
“A vision,” said Samir, and brought his voice down to an awed hush. “A revelation.”
“I mean, can you imagine,” said Katy, “just lying on the beach and looking up at the sky and suddenly it is revealed to you, this good and golden world, the better world that this one could be, if we could only learn how to welcome it in.”
“No,” said Shenk.
“What?”
“I can’t imagine.”
This actually made it easier. A dream? A revelation? These people couldn’t come up with a sturdier backstory? No tablets in a cave? Nothing tangible to support their tin-pot mythology? The truth of the whole goddamn universe just breezed in on a summer wind? Katy was shivering on the other side of the desk, and Samir put his arm around her, holding her tight as if to keep her from shaking to pieces, so overcome was she—so overcome were they both—with emotion.
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