Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler

  “How about you and me take the dog for a walk,” he said by way of example.

  “I like a pizza with some cheese on top.

  “What say you and me go back to my place and play some bridge?”

  Addison’s eyes were on Rima, but not so they looked at her. Rima leaned forward. “Did anyone ever catch the arsonist?” she repeated. Although her tone was unimpeachable, suddenly the words “catch the arsonist” had a lascivious ring that hadn’t been there the first time she’d said them. What say you and me go back to my place and see if we can’t catch the arsonist ?

  Addison answered slowly. “No.” She picked up her ale, and her eyes focused. She was paying attention again. “The fires stopped.

  Maybe they stopped because your dad was poking around,” she said. “Maybe Constance knew that as soon as she gave your dad a name, he wouldn’t be dropping by to see her anymore. She was a lonely woman. Maybe she made the whole thing up. Maybe nobody who joins a cult isn’t pretty lonely to begin with.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t Constance herself setting the fires?” Addison asked.

  (3)

  Suddenly it was strange for Addison to think that the young woman across the table was Bim Lanisell’s daughter, who had Bim’s mouth and Bim’s smile, not that you saw it often on Rima’s face. Addison looked at Rima, and what she remembered next was the wide-awake, so-alive feeling she’d had, standing in the dark next to a young man she hardly knew, in a house where they weren’t supposed to be. She saw herself and Bim from above, the two of them bending over the little lights of their matches and the room large and dark and unseen around them.

  She’d worked her way down the bookcase, leaving a trail of sand. She didn’t think this would be too incriminating. It seemed like something the cats probably did. “Lots of pamphlets,” she told Bim.

  “Forget them. That’s the public face. That’s not what we’re after.”

  On one of the shelves was a tiny bottle with a paper rolled inside and a price on the glass, so this was surely also the public face, something they sold at the arcade. The littleness of it appealed to Addison, and she put it in her pocket, as if this wasn’t stealing, just because the object was so small and cheap.

  She moved from the bookcase to the pictures on the wall. She was going through her matches very quickly. The pictures turned out to be framed photographs. There was one of Father Riker holding a world globe in his hands, captioned “The Wise Man of the Far West.” Another picture was of the line of penny peep shows with a billboard at the end: “Good Things Are Bad Things for Some People. And Vice Versa.” All this was the public face again. Addison moved on.

  Whatever it was they were looking for was more likely to be upstairs in the bedroom than down here in the living room. She didn’t say this aloud. Her bravado was already pushed as far as she could push it. A staircase would snap her last nerve.

  She knelt by the coffee table and struck her final match. By its light she could see the dark spot that the oil in Riker’s hair had left on the back of the easy chair. She could see that the coffee table was dusty and there were plates from someone’s breakfast on it. Addison could see a crusting of egg yolk on one of the plates.

  She heard the crack of the middle porch step and blew her last match out. “Bim,” she said as quietly as she could, but the room was silent and completely dark.

  Someone knocked. “Are you in there?” a man’s voice asked. He tried the doorknob, but apparently Bim had thrown the lock. There was a long silence. Then Addison heard the crack of the step again. More footsteps, now receding.

  A minute passed, maybe two. Addison noticed that she’d stopped breathing. She started again. Bim struck a match and came over to her, helped her up. He shook the match and the room went dark. “I’m out of matches,” Addison said.

  “Me too.” Bim took her hand, turning away from her and putting it on his shoulder so that he led her as they went back through the room to the front door. They stopped there. “I have something for you,” Bim said. “A birthday present.”

  “It’s not my birthday.”

  “You have to promise not to open it till it is. I won’t give it to you unless you promise.”

  Addison promised. Bim handed her a bundle made of his handkerchief, with something small inside it. She put this in the same pocket as the bottle. Now she and Bim were standing in the dark, facing each other, so close she thought he must feel that she was shaking. This would have been a good time for Bim to kiss her.

  He didn’t. Maybe this was because his nose was running and his eyes were puffed and swollen. Maybe it was because people who smell like cat piss seldom get kissed.

  Addison got home around sunrise. She left her shoes at the door, tiptoed through the hall so as not to wake her mother.

  Addison put Bim’s handkerchief into her jewelry box and slammed it shut, because, when open, it was also a music box and quite noisy. The song it played was “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” which Addison’s mother loved. Hated the movie. How hard is it, she’d asked when they saw it, to give the people in movies a happy ending? You’re making the whole thing up. Why not make it up happy? The thing in Addison’s handkerchief turned out to be the kind of little plastic birthday cake you might see in a dollhouse, but she didn’t find that out for months.

  She didn’t wait to break the little bottle open. She did that as soon as she’d put the handkerchiefed bundle in her jewelry box. She fished out the roll of paper, smoothed it flat, and read it. In fancy, curly lettering, it outlined Riker’s doctrine of The Perfect Christian Divine Way:No 1 No longer are those murderous wars needed because we now have the true solution to get rid of them.

  No 2 No longer are our imperfect governments needed because we now have the perfect one to take their place.

  No 3 No longer do our intelligent people have to tolerate terrible-God race crime blood mixing because we have the true solution to that racial problem.

  No 4 Also we now have the true solution to that spiritual religious problem as never before in history.

  Of course, sitting there in the pizza parlor, Addison didn’t remember it all word for word like that. She remembered just something evil and oddly vague. The only words she remembered for sure were “true solution.”

  What was the true solution? Riker neglected to say, but it had a Nazi ring to it. True solutions that couldn’t be revealed seemed, to Addison now, to belong to the same family tree as secret plans to end the war, FOIA documents with everything but the verbs blacked out, secret prisons with secret lists of prisoners in them, secret methods of extracting information from those secret prisoners in those secret prisons, and all those things that for national security reasons couldn’t be counted up, like Iraqi deaths and private contractors. Addison couldn’t say any of this online, though she would have liked to. The myriad fallacious Hitler references had ruined it for the legitimate ones.

  “Which is worse, competent or incompetent evil?” Addison asked Rima. “That’s really the question of our times, isn’t it? William Riker was the first man to make me ask that. How I wish he’d been the last.”

  At the next table, the older man was on his feet, helping the younger woman into her coat. He turned to Addison. “William Riker had some serious father issues,” he said. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I just heard the name and I’m kind of a buff.”

  “I didn’t know that about Riker,” Addison said.

  “Oh, sure.”

  Addison was only being polite. She had yet to meet the person who didn’t have father issues. It came with the standard package. She’d never supposed for a second that the exception would be a white supremacist cult leader.

  The man flashed the Vulcan hand signal from Star Trek on his way out the door. He did it surreptitiously, shielding his hand with his body, so the young woman wouldn’t see. This was puzzling. Not the fact that he’d hidden it—there are few situations in which Vulcan hand gestures add to a man’s allure—but the fact t
hat he’d made the gesture in the first place.

  Neither Addison nor Rima knew it, but the man had confused William E. Riker with William T. Riker. William E. Riker was born in California in 1873 and ran Holy City from the 1920s through the 1950s. His followers sold gas, dirty pictures, and holy water to travelers on the Old Santa Cruz Highway.

  William T. Riker was born on Earth (Valdez, Alaska) in 2335 and served as first officer on the USS Enterprise-D and -E under Captain Jean-Luc Picard until his promotion in 2379 to the command of the USS Titan.

  Two totally different people.

  So my father never did write anything about Holy City?” Rima asked.

  “No. A few months later he was offered a job on the sports desk at the Chicago Tribune. I never met the man who wouldn’t give it all up to work the sports desk,” Addison said.

  Rima finished her ale and ordered another. She hadn’t had breakfast and she’d drunk quickly, so maybe that was causing the pleasantly buoyant feeling on the edges of her brain. Or maybe it was a delayed reaction to the catnip tea. “Okay, then,” she said.

  She looked across the table to Addison, and was filled with affection for this woman without whom the world would have no Maxwell Lane in it and no one would even know what they were missing.

  “What exactly was it that went on between you and my father?” Rima asked.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  (1)

  Rima was instantly sorry she’d asked. Addison’s face locked tight for a second; her cheeks had no color. But before she could speak, Rima became aware that someone was standing behind her. She turned to see a young Asian woman with tiny glasses and black hair just long enough to tuck behind her ears. “I don’t mean to interrupt,” the young woman said, “but I’m such a fan. I can’t even fly on a plane unless I have one of your books to read. Otherwise I spend the whole flight expecting to crash and die.” She had a preppy look—a powder-blue sweater set and jeans with embroidered flowers on the knees. Gold stud earrings, only two, and only in the lobes. Very un-Santa Cruz. But very pretty.

  “Air travel has become impossible,” Addison agreed. She’d managed a smile. Unpersuasive, but high-wattage all the same. “I’m so pleased to hear I help.”

  “That’s all I wanted to say.” This was a lie. The woman’s eyes were big and her voice nervous. More words came out, all in a rush. “I love every book you’ve ever written. I won’t read anyone else. Until you write a new one, I’ll just keep rereading the old ones. Will there be a new one soon?”

  Addison stopped smiling. “I hope so.”

  “Does it have a title?”

  “Not yet. Maybe when we get habeas corpus back.” Addison gestured to Rima. “This is my goddaughter, Rima Lanisell.”

  “Oh!” The word came out in a gasp. “Bim’s daughter? I love Bim! I’m the biggest M-and-B-shipper!”

  A couple of weeks earlier, Rima wouldn’t have known what to make of that description. Now she knew it meant that this woman was a fan of the Maxwell-Bim relationship. Possibly she wrote sex scenes and posted them on the Web. Probably she read them. Probably these sex scenes were lousy with deep emotional connection. Rima didn’t imagine that anyone who wore sweater sets would be into meaningless sex.

  “You do understand that those characters are under copyright?” Addison asked. (In point of fact, since Bim was not only a character in a book but also a newspaper columnist for The Plain Dealer and dead, the issue of copyright was kind of interesting. Addison wasn’t doing the nuance.)

  The woman took a step backward. “I’m not a writer,” she said. “I won’t interrupt you anymore. I just wanted to say how much I love your books.”

  “Aren’t you sweet?”

  The woman backed into one of the Ping-Pong players. The backswing of his paddle hit her right on the ass. This mortified everyone concerned, so there was a string of apologies in multiple languages. It brought the smile back to Addison’s face. “Ping-Pong is a deadly game,” she said to Rima. “Few survive it.”

  The cavalry arrived, a bit late, in the form of the owner with a water pitcher. “Are you being disturbed?” she asked in a whisper, topping off their already full glasses.

  “By someone who reads my books? Never,” Addison said. “She’d have to bite me before I’d find her disturbing.”

  The owner and Addison were both members of the Bonny Doon wine club. They discussed the latest shipment in such detail that Rima felt Addison was deliberately prolonging it. If enough time passed, she could pretend to have forgotten the question Rima had asked. Rima did her bit by excusing herself and going to the bathroom.

  The rest room mirror was recessed, and framed by a wooden box painted with vines. The silver base of the sink matched the chairs in the restaurant. There was the usual sign about employees being required to wash their hands. No such requirement for customers. Rima washed her hands voluntarily.

  Someone knocked on the door. Rima dried her hands quickly and opened it. The young M-and-B-shipper was standing outside.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “I was trying so hard not to babble and all I did was babble. I insulted her!”

  “You didn’t,” Rima said.

  “I gushed! I babbled! I got paddled! That’s what she’ll remember. I’ll probably be in her next book.”

  “She was charmed.”

  “You’re such a liar.”

  Rima stepped aside so that the woman could step in. It was that sort of bathroom, a single toilet, no stalls. One person at a time. But the woman blocked Rima’s exit. “I actually wanted to talk to you,” she said. She closed and locked the door with Rima still inside. “I’ll only take a minute.”

  Rima didn’t suppose she should let herself be locked in a rest room with a strange woman even if it was only for a minute. Any more than she should let one in the house to rifle through the shelves. And yet somehow, here she was.

  “You’re staying with her, right?” the woman asked. “I was just wondering if she ever talks about the new book. You’ve probably seen the dollhouse at least.”

  “No,” said Rima. “And no. And why would I tell you, even if I had? She obviously doesn’t want it talked about.”

  “There’s this person,” the woman said. “On the Web. Who’s offered two thousand dollars to anyone who can find out what’s going to happen to Maxwell. Of course, I’d share the money if you found out something. Fifty-fifty. I mean, you could just look around, right? The dollhouse has to be somewhere.”

  “When did this offer go up?” Rima asked. “The two thousand?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  “We had a break-in recently.”

  The woman brushed her black hair back nervously with her hand. Her eyes skipped from Rima’s face to the mottled gray-and-white tile on the floor. “Yeah,” she said. “Listen. That’s the other thing I wanted to say to you. You know how on the Web you mostly can’t tell who’s crazy and who isn’t? That woman’s crazy. You should watch out for her.”

  “You know about the break-in?”

  “She posted about it. She figured she had some leverage, now that she had something Early would want back.”

  Rima had been picturing Pamela Price as a drug-addled homeless type. Not, she corrected herself hastily and for Tilda’s sake, that the homeless were usually drug-addled or even that there was a homeless type. But the thing Pamela Price had never struck Rima as being was a Web maven.

  “What’s her handle?” Rima asked.

  “ConstantComment. Avatar of a teapot. But I think she uses a lot of other names and avatars too. But I think she’s all over the discussion boards. Sock puppets here, there, and everywhere. Nothing I can prove.”

  “Thank you for the warning,” Rima said, “and I’m going to decline your offer. Are we finished, then? Can I go?”

  The woman let her out. “I really do love her books,” she said apologetically. “I really do love Maxwell Lane.”

  “Don’t we all?” said Rima. Halfway through the open door, she
had another thought. “How did you know we were here?”

  “She comes here all the time. I got a phone call,” the woman said.

  Poor Addison! So worried about governmental spying, while her fans were tracking her every movement. Every pizza parlor a nest of spies. Rima had changed her mind about the young woman’s being pretty. Apparently they were letting just anyone wear a sweater set these days.

  (2)

  Martin had said he would come for dinner and would arrive around six-thirty. By seven, Tilda was so nervous she was practically airborne. She stood at the stove, stirring the mushroom soup and fretting that it was getting a skin.

  Rima had told Addison about the woman in the rest room and the two-thousand-dollar bounty on Maxwell Lane sightings. Addison had gone upstairs to see what she could find on the Internet. Now she came back down. If she’d found anything out, she wasn’t sharing.

  “Just leave the soup,” she told Tilda. “Rima and I are going to play Trivial Pursuit while we wait for Martin.” This was the first Rima had heard of it. “Come join us.”

  “Which board?” Tilda asked.

  “Lord of the Rings. It’s a party in a box,” Addison said temptingly.

  Tilda turned the burner off and put a lid on the soup. She moved the baking dish from the oven to the counter and covered it with a dish towel.

  “No one has ever beaten Tilda at Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit,” Addison told Rima. “Not in the whole history of Middle-earth.”

  Rima didn’t think of herself as a Middle-earth expert. But she did know that Gandalf’s sword was named Glamdring and that Glamdring had once belonged to Turgon, the only Elf ever to be king of Gondolin. She had no idea how she knew this. But she thought she’d probably do okay. Like all first children, when she played games, she planned to win.