“And this happened to you when?” said Shenk. “This vision?”
“Oh, not to me,” said Katy, aghast. “To Dennis.”
Jay had almost forgotten there was someone else in the room. But now they all turned their heads toward him, the sun-bleached dude at the window. He raised one hand slowly, almost sheepish, and grinned.
“Yeah,” said Dennis. “It was fucking crazy, man.”
He yawned for a long moment, mouth uncovered, revealing perfectly white teeth on top and bottom.
“The thing is, though, is that it matched up.” His voice was slow, cool, SoCal casual. “With other dreams that people’ve had. Other visions. I’m talking about over the centuries. A whole lot of people, it turns out. Books have been written and all that. It’s all over the internet, if you know where to look.”
“I’m kind of the research department,” Samir added modestly, but Dennis didn’t even look at him. His dreamy, smiling eyes stayed on Shenk as he rose slowly and stretched. He was tall, rangy and muscular, with a long wingspan. Shenk was reminded of some of the tattooed skateboarders he’d seen on the Venice boardwalk—just young guys, hanging out and having fun, but with something menacing just under the skin. Hazy and relaxed, but with steel at the core.
“I’m not the first person to have this revelation,” said Dennis. “This thing goes back. It goes way back. As far back as anything.”
“As old as man,” said Samir.
“As old as sorrow,” said Katy.
After these ritualistic interjections, Dennis tilted his head toward his companions and rolled his eyes; separating himself from the others, attaching himself to Shenk, the other real adult in the room.
“The revelation was a dream, man, a vision of how beautiful this world could be. Our world, made new. All people stripped of all their pain.”
“Right,” said Shenk. “I heard that part.”
“And then…I was presented with a riddle.”
“Oh yeah?” said Shenk. He almost laughed. Come on. “And what was the riddle?”
“I can’t tell you.” Dennis smiled, benevolent and smug. “I mean it. I can’t.”
“Let me guess,” said Shenk. “It’s a secret.”
“No,” said Dennis. He let his eyes meet Jay’s and held them there. “Because it would blow your fucking mind. This is not like, if a tree falls in the woods, OK? I’m talking about a mindfuck of the highest order. I’m saying, if I gave you this to think about, you’d never think about anything else again.”
Shenk didn’t know what to say. “But you heard it. Why are you OK?”
“Oh, I’m not, man.” Dennis’s face twitched, a quick agitated spasm, and he laughed darkly. “I’m not OK.”
There was a pause then. Dennis stared evenly at Shenk, and Shenk stared back. Katy and Samir were holding hands, their arms trembling. The room was cold.
Shenk still wanted these people out, but he had stopped trying to get them out.
“Here’s what I knew when I woke,” Dennis said, and by now his cheap California boardwalk cadence was gone; now he sounded like a preacher, a snake-charmer, a saint. “If I contemplated the riddle that had been presented to me, if I concentrated my mind upon it, then I would be…” He trailed off, gazed up at the ceiling of Shenk & Partners as if at the whole unfolding wonder of the universe. “Then eventually I’d be emptied out. So that the other world could use me as its vessel. The good and golden world would flow into me. Like a gas. Like a spirit, a merciful spirit. And it will fill me up, and I will be its conduit, and then—and then—”
Samir was murmuring to himself, eyes shut, and Katy had begun crying again, doleful little hitches of breath. And Shenk, for all the work he had to do, for all that this was self-evidently nonsense, he kept listening too, to this boardwalk Rasputin, with his cheap sunglasses and his scraggly beard, weaving his spell.
He couldn’t stop listening.
“—and then we will all of us be healed. All of the pain and all of the sadness and all of the unending worry—jealousy, anger, anxiety, fear. Gone from our lives forever. And all we gotta do is let the other world into this one.” Dennis paused, coughed, breaking his own spell. He shook his head. “It just needs a way in. It just needs the vessel.”
Hollow, thought Shenk suddenly, remembering how the word had dropped into his mind, when he first laid eyes on Wesley in room 906.
Hollow.
“So let me get this straight.” Shenk made his voice grandiose and mocking, spread his hands wide, but still he was thinking Hollow…hollow. “Some lucky SOB serves as the vessel, so the better world, the—what did you call it?”
“The good and golden world,” whispered Katy in a marveling quaver, while Dennis only smiled.
“So the good and golden world can come through, and everybody’s problems are solved. Everybody is happy forever.”
“Well, you’re being kind of sarcastic there, but yeah. That’s it, man.” Dennis shrugged, sighed. “Funny thing is, I been working on it for a long, long time. While my friends here tend to my earthly concerns.”
Shenk glanced at Samir and Katy; Samir stood up straight and Katy flushed.
“I been working on the riddle that was revealed to me. Tryna get empty.” Dennis paused, sighing at the injustice of it all. “I’ve been trying for ten years to get to where that kid got by banging his head on a fucking bench.”
For a second the mild and peaceable face hardened, before the anger rolled away like cloud cover and he was all sunshine again.
“I gotta talk to that family,” he said. “I gotta get to that kid.”
Shenk noticed that Samir and Katy had said we. Over and over. Not Dennis. Dennis said I.
“Well, that’s not happening.”
There was no way. Of that, at least, Shenk felt certain. No way would he put these people in touch with the Keeners; no way would he add to the nightmare of their grief and confusion with some cultic cock-and-bull story. “You’re not going anywhere near that boy.”
“He’s not a boy,” said Dennis. “He used to be a boy. Now he’s a vessel. He’s got the future inside of him. It’s gotta come out.”
Shenk was trying to figure out how to respond to this when Dennis’s gaze shifted toward the door.
“Oh, hey.” He smiled, an immediate thousand-watt smile. Shenk hadn’t heard the door open, but it had.
“Is this your son?”
2.
Ruben had been at his mother’s bedside, in the ICU, ten years ago, on the night she died. He was four and a half years old, a toddler, really, a baby. They were in his mother’s hospital room on the intensive care floor, he and Jay together, and he had fallen asleep in his dad’s lap in this big overstuffed armchair they had in the hospice rooms for families to sit quietly and be with their loved one, hour after hour. There were two chairs but they were together in one. He was sitting on his dad’s lap while Marilyn slept. She was bald and bone thin. Only her eyes were the same as they were supposed to be. Big and blue and warm.
They didn’t know it was the night that she would die. They were just there; they came every evening. Marilyn sometimes would be awake, or she could come awake, and she would always be so happy to see him there; she would read him a few pages of a story, or just stroke the back of his hand and tell him how handsome he was getting.
This time she was asleep and she stayed asleep. She was going. She was almost gone.
Ruben was sleeping too, lying on his father’s lap in the big armchair, and Jay, Ruben was sure, would never have left him alone in the room except that he was fast asleep, and Jay’s phone rang—Ruben pieced this all together later—so he just kind of slid Ruben off his lap and laid him gently in the chair while he went outside to take the call.
But then Ruben woke up and it was just him in the room with his dying mother, the dark of her eyelids and her bald head and the heavy respirating whoosh of the machines, until he realized then there was someone else in the room. In the other armchair. A lean man wi
th lank blond hair and a scruff of beard, gazing lazily at Ruben and then at Marilyn and then back at Ruben.
“Who are you?” said Ruben, and the man said “I’m a nurse,” but Ruben had met all the nurses and he hadn’t seen this man before. “I know,” the man said, and winked, a lingering, lurid wink, and said “I’m the night man.”
And yes, he was dressed as a nurse, in pale blue scrubs, but he didn’t look like a nurse; his hair was too long and his beard was ragged and he was wearing sandals—Ruben remembered it vividly—sandals or flip-flops or something, his strange craggy toes like crooked branches coming out from under the cuffs of the pastel pants. Ruben said “Why are you here?” and the night man rose and reached out and took the wires that connected Marilyn to the machines. “Taking care of your mom, buddy.” He seized hold of the wires and the tubes, like a rampaging giant gathering up a handful of telephone lines, and he began to twist them between his fingers, still looking at Ruben, Ruben calling out “No” and “Stop” but not getting up, not doing anything. And then the machines cried out in protest, long shrill beeps while Marilyn jerked and spasmed in the bed and the night man laughed, no, not laughed but giggled, as he yanked and tugged on the wires, until they popped out of the machines and their free ends danced in the darkness, and Marilyn thrashed and gasped and then Ruben woke up and it was morning.
The bed was empty and stripped. The room was cold and the daylight was flat in the window. Jay was sitting on the edge of the bed, where Marilyn had been. His eyes were raw and red. His hair was down.
“She’s gone, my love,” said Ruben’s dad, his voice a tired ache. “She’s gone.”
Ruben didn’t tell his father about the dream of the night man. Why would he? He hadn’t been able to stop the night man from doing what he did. But he hadn’t tried. Why hadn’t he tried? So he hadn’t told Jay about the man in the hospital room, he had never told him, because it was only a dream, and he hadn’t done anything about it.
And now the man was back.
He sat at his desk, trying to do his homework, eight hours after he’d walked into his dad’s office and seen the terrifying and familiar smile. How could he be back?
Even before the nutbars came in that day, Shenk had been in an ugly and unsettled mood. Coming up now on the one-year anniversary of Keener, he was slowly coming to terms with the fact that what had begun with such extraordinary promise had turned into a plaintiff lawyer’s worst nightmare. Far from being a humdinger, it had evolved into the kind of sandpit his mentor J. J. Barnes had always warned him about: a big, expensive suit with no payday on the horizon, and no way out.
Three times over the summer he had called Riggs with sequentially lower offers than the one he had tendered at Tomasso’s for Fish, and three times he had been cursorily rebuffed. Indeed, Shenk was embarrassed to recall, the third call had been returned not by Riggs but by someone named Billy Gershon, a first-year associate whose uncertain voice and uneasy grasp on the fundamentals of the case were probably intended as a deliberate insult to Shenk and his increasingly desperate proffers.
With five months left until trial, Shenk was out of ideas, and facing the brutal possibility that Beth and Richard Keener would end up with nothing; leaving Shenk himself, after all the money and time he had poured into this case, with forty percent of nothing.
He had taken Keener home with him today, schlepped three document boxes full of discovery back to the house on Tabor Street and spread the whole case out on the kitchen table, thinking all he needed was to take it from the top: go over all the charts again, re-read the depos, see what he had missed.
What was he failing to see?
A little after midnight, Shenk got up from the kitchen table, grasped the table’s edge, and tilted it, slowly at first and then at a dramatic angle, until the case slid off and landed in a messy heap on the linoleum.
Then he poured himself a double whiskey Coke, no ice.
He was not, in general, a big drinker, but at this particular moment he didn’t know what else there was to do. His best hope, at this point, was that the small tribe of lunatics was right, and some sort of portal was going to open, and our world would turn into a better one, and everything would be OK.
He finished the whiskey and stood, already a little drunk, to pour himself another.
It was times like this, he thought, catching a bulging funhouse reflection of himself in the steel of the refrigerator, that he wished he had a pinball machine. If he had to be a drunk loser lawyer he could at least be one like Paul Newman in the opening scene of The Verdict, the patron saint of drunk loser lawyers, getting increasingly smashed while sending out ball after ball to clang around awhile and make lights flash and then disappear into the gutter. Each wasted ball a reminder of how dumb it is to be a personal injury lawyer in the first place.
Shenk raised a toast to himself in the quiet of the midnight kitchen. “You, sir,” he said, “are no Paul Newman.”
He sipped the whiskey and then set it down.
He was no Paul Newman, unless he was. He dropped to his knees and started to sift through the pile of Keener papers he had dumped on the kitchen floor.
Digging faster, thinking, Those fuckers—those motherfuckers!
He had just put his hands on what he was looking for, a sheaf of six papers stapled along the left-side margin, when he heard Ruben.
“Hey, Dad?”
Shenk pulled himself up from the floor and saw Ruben looking down at him from the top of the steps with a troubled expression. He was seized as he often was at such moments by a love for his child that was so strong it was almost like fear, or grief. A strong clutch of feeling that made him rise shakily to his feet, reach to steady himself on the kitchen table, and put his other hand over his heart.
“What is it, my love?”
“It’s, um…” Ruben trailed off and Shenk knew what he would say next. “Are you OK? What are you working on?”
“Nothing. Nothing. Rubie. Come on. Come here.”
Ruben was worried about something. With Ruben it was always something. That dual nature of his only child pierced him as it always did. Ruben, good-natured and considerate, but always with the dark flush of worry on his cheeks. Jay wished as he had wished many times that the kid would find more to love in the world and less to be anxious about. Jay had always thought that his son was too serious a soul. He liked that the kid took things seriously; he was proud of it, and he encouraged it. But there was a tentativeness and a cautiousness to Ruben that Shenk had devoted some not insignificant portion of his own boundless energy to correcting: teasing him, needling him, grabbing at him and pulling him forward, toward life’s endless churn. If only he could give the kid some portion of the joy with which he naturally overflowed. If only that was how parenting worked: that you could slice off some portion of yourself, some quality, and simply graft it onto the child. Build him out of your own spare parts.
Instead you could only lead and hope they came along after you. Give and hope they take. Stand there holding your sign, like a livery driver at the airport, and hope they follow.
Ruben sat down reluctantly across from his dad at the kitchen table and got to work on the loose corner thread of a place mat. “I seriously don’t want to bother you.”
“I’m seriously not bothered.” Shenk squeezed Ruben on the shoulder. “I live to serve.”
Ruben paused. The clock ticked loudly above the sink. Shenk had his hand laid flat on the sheaf of stapled documents he’d found, keeping them warm until he could dive back in.
“It’s, uh—” Ruben looked away and then back. “It’s that girl.”
And Shenk, wise and perceptive as he was, probably should have known, or guessed, that Ruben was lying. He’d actually been lying for a good long time now about Annelise McTier. One day when Jay had asked him, in a casual moment, if there was “anything cooking in that department,” meaning the love-life department, Ruben had decided to invent a budding romance with Annelise from Poetry Confab, alth
ough he hadn’t been involved with the after-school for almost a year, and his friendship with Annelise had faded by now, to the point where they didn’t even really acknowledge each other if they crossed paths at lunch.
But we see what we want to see, even or maybe especially those of us who are like Shenk. “Uh-oh,” he said, and tilted back on the feet of his chair and smiled. “Trouble in paradise.”
And so they got into it: Ruben, having decided he didn’t want to burden or confuse his father with the real source of his anxiety—the whole weird business with the night man, the dark memory, the boogeyman in flip-flops—instead offered the details of a teenage lovers’ quarrel gleaned from books and TV shows. Shenk offering nuggets of kind but rote parental advice, his mind mostly consumed with the new Keener strategy he was suddenly sure would salvage the case.
“Hey, Romeo,” said Shenk in conclusion. “I love you.”
And then Ruben, from the stairs, faintly and maybe not even heard by Jay, who was already reading the papers, back to work, “I love you too, Dad.”
When his son had gone back to bed, Shenk read the document carefully, and then he read it again, pencil in hand, jotting chicken-scratch notes along the left-hand margin.
He considered it was possible that he had been more distracted than he realized all along, just by the sheer fucked-upped-ness of Keener v. Valley Village Hospital Corporation. By his client’s unique and disquieting condition, by all the dangerous eccentrics who’d come circling around the central oddity like moths. For whatever reason, Shenk had made what was essentially a beginner’s error: sifting again and again through what was here, looking for the answer, when the answer was to be found in what was missing.
Not what was missing, but who.
“Oh, you ding-dong,” whispered Shenk to Shenk in the shadows of the kitchen, scrawling his notes and laying new plans. “Oh, you fool!”
The Quiet Boy Page 16