“Who gives a shit? You’re”—and here Stetson sought a word that didn’t exist—“you. My God, man. If you let her ruin you like this, that’s a giant mistake. You can do so much good for this city. You already have. You can’t stop now. There’s so much left for you to do. There’s so much left for us to do. You can’t let her ruin you like this. She’s a fucking whore. Nothing more, nothing less. You’re so much more than that whore.”
Only after the Kingfisher had bolted upright to his feet and pinned Stetson against the wall, his hand wrapping around Stetson’s throat, did Stetson realize he had once again fucked up. The Kingfisher squeezed so tightly that Stetson, as consciousness quickly waned, realized he was going to die. And to die here, to fall lifeless into the snow, at the hands of the man whom he believed to be the answer to every question Chicago had ever asked.
But he felt the hand on his throat slacken, slowly, and then pull away. Stetson fell to his knees in the snow, coughing.
“You don’t know her,” the Kingfisher said above him. “And you don’t know me.”
Stetson tried to speak, but the words couldn’t pass.
“I’m done,” the Kingfisher said.
Stetson coughed again. His voice came out like a damaged record, stuttered and scratched. “You can’t be done.”
“I am.”
“They won’t understand. They need you.”
“Who?”
“Everyone. We need you.”
“I don’t care. I can’t help everyone and I can’t help you. I’m going to end it. I’m going to end this.”
“You’re the Kingfisher.” Stetson looked up, meeting the man’s shadowed face. “I don’t care if you don’t want me to call you that, but that’s the name they call you. That’s the only name they know you by. That’s the only name that gives them hope. Don’t you see? You mean everything to them. You can’t just quit like this. You’re not a coward. You can’t quit.”
And now the Kingfisher’s voice was roaring from the walls again. “I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want it. I don’t want it.” Over and over. The words thundered and blurred into one another as a single breath without beginning or end, climbing upward and outward like a symphony of scattered pages, and Stetson could have sworn, many years later, that in this exact moment, he felt his all-too-human body shaking beneath the brute force of this otherworldly voice—his organs and bones and muscle fibers and veins all vibrating to the tune of superhuman cries. Whenever Stetson remembers it, which he often does, even thirty years later, he feels a phantom tremble pass through his body once more. And he concludes, these years later—now an older man, a wiser man, a police chief, a man who sits in an even larger office with larger windows with a larger view of the larger city that never ceases to amaze him—that these things never truly end even when they’re over, and they come back to you in those moments when you’re least ready for them.
24 WHATEVER DAYS MIGHT FOLLOW
THE LIBER-TEEN FORUM had been a ghost town since the release of the second video. Digital tumbleweeds. The celebration of Wren’s Herculean hack the day before had been cut short, a memory no one seemed in a hurry to revisit, least of all Wren herself. She had watched on television that morning as the police chief stood in front of reporters, implying that the Liber-teens’ release of the ME report linked them directly to the gunman. She wished she could say that he was wrong—that she hadn’t inadvertently helped the gunman, that she hadn’t made everything exponentially worse. But there was nothing to say, no lie she could tell that would make her feel less guilty as she stared at the empty forum.
But Wren still refreshed the page every few anxious seconds. The bowling alley was empty. She was supposed to be vacuuming the carpet, but the carpet was beyond salvation. Instead, she was watching the forum, waiting for Parker to post something, anything. Parker hadn’t returned any of her many frantic calls and texts. Nothing. Not from her, not from anyone. Perfect and unsettling silence.
Finally, someone posted something. But it wasn’t Parker. It was Proleterrier, posting a link that led to a Twitter hashtag: #LiberteenSolidarityMarch. Proleterrier wrote beneath the link, Whoever is organizing this saw the police chief’s conference and wants to protest the investigation into us. They want the police to apologize publically for blaming us. I know it’s a bad time right now, but we are not defeated. Something good will still come of this.
“Something good,” Wren repeated.
And that was the moment, four hours left in her shift, that Wren vomited on the counter the contents of an empty stomach. A sort of watercolor, yellows and browns and a mix of other colors not easily named.
Wren opened Fester’s door without knocking. She found him seated behind his desk, half-mindedly eating a hamburger while playing a game on his phone. He held up a finger while he finished the game and then stared back at her, taking a large bite of the burger. Mustard dripped onto his shirt.
“Knock next time,” he said, mouth full.
“I’m not feeling well. I need to go home. Right now.”
“You got something on your chin,” Fester said, pointing at his own ketchup-stained chin for reference. “Is that puke? That’s disgusting. Get out of here. I’ll call Melinda in to cover for you. Consider this the final warning. No more coming in here hungover. Makes us look bad.”
She arrived at her apartment building. The warm, sweltering air gathered in the hall pressed into her skin like a hand, gently and then not-gently constricting her throat. She fumbled with her keys, a shaking hand struggling to turn the lock.
But it was already unlocked. Their door was never left unlocked. And that should have been her first sign that something was wrong, but maybe she knew already. Regardless, she opened the door, standing frozen in the doorway. Her keys dangling in her numb fingers.
Staring back at her were two men in dark, matching suits. Iron-pressed, pleated pants like knife-edges. Both of them, the same granite expression, like park statues, as though they had been standing there in her entryway forever and she had simply never seen them before until just this moment. And even now, Wren looked beyond them, through the cracks of their bodies, and she saw a glint of aquamarine hair. A body curled into the couch. Parker’s face was masked beneath her hands, but what or who she was hiding from—or if she was hiding at all—Wren couldn’t understand. There are no lines of code, no sacred chain of algorithms that can decrypt a lived moment.
“You must be Wren,” said one of the men, a diplomatic friendliness. But Wren heard his voice only as an echo, emerging from a moment already lost. She had her eyes fixed on Parker, silently pleading for her to look up. She needed Parker. She needed just one look. One dare-me-not smile. One fuck-it-all shift in her cosmic-black eyes. Something to give Wren whatever it was she needed so desperately in this impossible moment. Something to bring her back to whatever moment was unfolding. But Parker only bent further into herself, hair draping over her hands, over her face.
The man who spoke produced a badge from his pocket—Federal Bureau of Investigation. “My name is Special Agent Jorgensen, and this”—he nodded at the man behind him—“is Special Agent Fredericks. I’m going to ask that you come with us Wren,” he said.
“Just to talk,” said Fredericks.
“That’s right.” Jorgensen smiled. “We just want to talk. We have some questions we’d like answered.”
“Questions,” Fredericks repeated. “Just questions.”
“Parker!” Wren shouted, the brute force of her voice surprising her. Unbending, unyielding. “Parker!”
“Wren,” said Jorgensen, stepping forward and reaching out for her. “Let’s just take a moment and talk. There isn’t a need to make a scene.”
She slapped his arm away, backing into the hallway. “Parker!” she screamed even louder.
Both men followed after her into the hallway, holding their arms out like scarecrows, forcing her back to the wall. One of them was saying something, something meant to calm her down, but sh
e didn’t hear him. She felt herself coil like a spring, studied the spaces between their bodies. She saw Parker behind them, balled up on the couch, lying on her side.
Wren rushed forward, pushing through the men’s open arms. She rushed into the apartment and grabbed Parker by her shoulders. She pulled Parker upright, wrestling her hands away from her eyes. “Parker,” Wren whispered, both hands holding Parker’s face. But this was not Parker. It was someone else; it could only be someone else. She looked like Parker. She had all the same features, but was lacking something so essential that without it, Wren couldn’t recognize her as the woman she knew she was. The face held in Wren’s hands was fearful. Tear-stained, with lips quivering, parting with the onset of a word that rested somewhere inside her, finding its way out.
But not fast enough.
Arms locked around Wren’s waist, pulling her away, picking her up off the ground and lofting her into the air. Weightlessness, nothingness. Receding from the walls, the doorway. Wren threw her weight against the bodies holding her own.
“Parker!” Wren screamed. She wanted to communicate a thousand thoughts at once—she should have been there when the men came, she should have known they would come, she never should have taken the police files, she should have kissed Parker when she had held her face a moment ago, she should have done and not done so much, she should have been someone else in some other life altogether—but all that came out was, “I’m sorry.”
She kicked her feet against whichever of the men held her. She jabbed her elbows into his ribs. She dug her nails into the skin of his hands until she felt the skin peel. He cursed beneath his breath and squeezed her tighter. She felt her breath come to her slower, and she writhed against the grip of whatever hell was dragging her further and further away from the only person in the world who she needed right now, who she needed tomorrow, who she needed for whatever days might follow. She shouted Parker’s name again. Not for an answer, but just to hear it. Just to hear something.
25 MISS MAY
MARCUS WATERS TURNED OFF his Camry’s engine and rolled down the window to let in the outside air. Peter shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat, gently massaging his back. He had withdrawn into his turtleneck as Marcus piloted the Camry around each corner. Peter hadn’t said much, if anything, since Marcus had picked him up outside his apartment, offering only a wordless stare outside his window. The entire drive, a sort of silent exchange. They knew why they were here, and there was no reason to speak beyond the courtesies of two old friends. But still, Marcus could sense Peter’s anticipation each time he shifted in his seat, his vacant stare out the window at the passing streets, the opening possibilities of a story previously concluded, finished, over.
Marcus had been hesitant to drive to Wrigleyville to look for Miss May, much less park on the street for any extended period of time, even in the light of day. Though he couldn’t recall the last time he’d been to this particular corner of the North Side, he remembered it as a place where oil drum fires cast shapeless shadows on buildings that had been reduced to hollowed-out playthings. He was surprised now to find it rejuvenated—deliberately quaint and forcibly charming. The light poles were refurbished antiques, molded iron that reached across the street like tree branches. At the end of the block was a new café, where servers in pressed black uniforms carried cocktails to young businessmen chatting with young businesswomen, faces frozen mid-laugh.
In contrast to the rest of their surroundings, the Lindley Apartments on the left side of the street looked as though they would crumble at a cough or a sneeze. Marcus had parked across the street, and from his vantage point he could see that the building leaned drunkenly. The bricks were arranged slipshod, decades-old mortar spilling like drool. Lindley Apartments had managed to be passed over by the angel of gentrification that had evidently swept through this corner of the city, and it seemed appropriate to Marcus, even unavoidable, that Miss May might live in this residence. A lost name dwelling in a lost history.
“You think she’s inside?” Marcus asked Peter. He had considered knocking on every door in the place until he found her, but decided against it. If she was the same woman in the apartment that Peter had found and the same woman with Jeremiah as a boy—his heart raced at the thought—then she would be worth the time spent waiting.
“No,” Peter replied. “Or, maybe. But let’s wait. Let’s see. Let’s give it a little while.”
As they waited, Marcus’s car radio broadcast coverage of a few small protests that were occurring throughout the city. Evidently, a few had turned ugly when pro-Liber-teen protestors wandered into pro-police protests—protests, in this case, being something of a loose and lost term. The newscaster spoke solemnly of riot gear, as though reading from a dictionary. There had been two arrests, the newscaster recited.
Marcus had not seen any of these protests on his way to Wrigleyville, and he was thankful for it. Protests made him feel physically ill. When he was in high school, he had been glued to the television during the coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as was his tenured philosopher stepfather, Corn, who sat on the couch like a sitcom patriarch—legs crossed, straight-backed, posing for no one in particular.
Corn had recently published his fourth monograph—The Epistemology of Schrödinger: Empirical Inquiry into Unobservable Phenomena. Though by no means a best seller, it had done well enough that he was granted sabbatical from Northwestern. With his newly found “free time”—words he pronounced as though they were a foreign, slightly unbearable phrase—he chose to watch the nightly news with his stepson while also reading from an array of books on ornithology.
Corn loved birds much more than he loved philosophy. Or anything else, for that matter.
“Snowy owls typically live much further north,” Corn had explained to his uninterested stepson in a whispery, awed voice. His voice competed against the news broadcast, where the collective roar of protestors grew muffled on the television speakers. “They prefer the northern climates, of course. Hence, the northern border. But they sometimes roost in Minnesota. We should go sometime, just you and I. Maybe quite soon? What do you say? You would love them. I hear they’re lovely, the snowy owls. Just lovely, perhaps even regal. Sublime is the word I’m looking for, though that isn’t entirely accurate if we’re being faithful to the origins of the word…”
The only times Corn’s spoken thoughts were even semi-coherent were when he discussed ornithology. The rest of the time, his erratic speech often intersected and crumbled in the twisting chambers of his mind. His sentences trailed off like cars driving off cliffs or ended abruptly like cars driving into walls.
When Marcus did not offer a reply, Corn joined him in watching the black-and-white broadcasts of protestors spilling and swirling in the Chicago streets. It was all happening just miles from where they currently sat, but that fact did not seem even remotely possible to Marcus, who periodically turned away from the television to glance out the window, as if in doing so he might be able to reconcile these plainly irreconcilable worlds.
He had remained in front of the television for the next few days, watching the ascent of protests, gradually becoming aware of a sharp pain spreading throughout his stomach. He winced, clenched his teeth. His mother had noticed and told him to turn off the television, but he didn’t. He dabbed a napkin to catch the sweat that poured freely down his forehead. He took medicine his mother scooped into his palm.
The miniaturized protestors on the screen had chanted, “The whole world is watching.” This, more than anything, piqued Corn’s interest.
“Correct me if I am wrong,” whispered Corn, clearing his throat. “But are they chanting, ‘The whole world is watching’?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. “That’s magnificent.”
By the final day of the convention, the pain in Marcus’s stomach was too much to handle. His mother had rushed him to the emergency room, where the doctor said he needed his appendix removed immediately. They put h
im under for the surgery. He remembered only the doctor’s face hovering over his own, dissolving into nothing, and then awaking in a hospital room with his mother at his side, her hand holding his.
Marcus turned down the radio in his car, these many years later, and strained to listen for the voice of a not-so-distant crowd, the organized incantations, but he heard nothing save for the clank and crash of dishes from the café bar at the end of the block. He was glad of it. And yet, he wondered what it was that the protestors were chanting, or if they were chanting anything at all. Maybe chants themselves belonged to a lost millennium, a turned page. Or maybe there was simply nothing left to proclaim in unison. Because these days, of course the whole world was watching. That might be the one thing that all the protestors and nonprotestors alike could now agree on. It was no longer worth the breath required to make it known.
“Protests?” Peter asked, repeating the radio broadcaster.
“I guess so.”
“Against what, exactly?”
“That’s what I’m wondering.”
“I’ll tell you what I think.” Peter shifted again in his seat. “They are protesting the fact that they are protesting. They are angry that they have to be out there. Out here. Why should they, citizens of the twenty-first century, have to protest information that was hidden from them to begin with? They have every right to that information.”
But Marcus wasn’t convinced. He refused to believe that the protestors cared about whether or not the Kingfisher—a man whom the city had been content to forget thirty years ago—was alive or dead. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but Marcus wanted to believe instead that the protestors were out there because they had witnessed two men die senseless deaths, and, in response, the police had done nothing but shield themselves. He thought back to his conversation with Paul Wroblewski that morning, remembering Paul’s insistence that the boundaries between good and evil had dissolved with the new millennium.
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 24