The kid lifted his hands shoulder high. “Hey, politics is just show business for ugly people so don’t go dancing in the end zone is my call on this one.”
Town reached for the TV remote and killed the tube. He was tired of hearing these hacks, hearing their overeager speech and the false enthusiasm with which they regurgitated the same information ad nauseam.
All this TV watching over the last few days had made Town something of an unwitting expert on the language tics of the new breed of media professional. He had come to understand how similar they all sounded, as if they had all graduated from the same academy. An academy that taught a brand of slightly hysterical, over-tooled English, an English designed to entice, rather than to communicate.
From CNN to Fox to the BBC to Al-Jazeera, there were the same overstressed vowels, and the anchors all raised their eyebrows too frequently, as if to communicate their eternal surprise at the warmed-over fodder on the news cycle, and opened their mouths wider than necessary, like sex dolls.
It had left Town exhausted.
He removed his key card and closed the door and walked to the elevator and pressed the button. He would check out and pay with the James Goodhew MasterCard and then dump the card and the burner phone—that had never once rung—into a trash can on Wilshire and get a cab to LAX and go home.
The elevator doors whispered open. Town saw himself in the mirror, a gray-haired man in a tan jacket, open-necked shirt and fawn trousers. He didn’t move and the doors closed. He pressed again and again the doors opened. He still didn’t enter the cabin. Instead he sighed and turned and went back to the room.
Town, to his shame, realized he didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want this to end, even though all the signs were there, as evidenced by the roundelay on TV, that it had already ended.
But something other than his need to be back at the table made him retrace his path to the room and open the door. Made him unpack the bag, hang the clothes in the closet and return his razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, Armani cologne (a sixtieth birthday gift from Ann) to the counter in the bathroom.
He wasn’t sure what it was. Back in the day, back when he was still operational, he’d believed he’d had a kind of sixth sense, a nose for when things were going to go bad. The psychic equivalent of a coal miner’s canary.
But this wasn’t a sense of foreboding, like he’d had in Afghanistan in 2010 just before the explosion that had left seven of his colleagues dead and three others severely wounded and Town with a mangled leg.
This was something else.
He had a bizarre memory, from deep in his childhood, of the kitschy little weather house on the wall of his grandmother’s apartment in Portland. The house was in the style of an Alpine chalet, with two doors side by side. A tiny couple lived on a balance bar inside, attached to a length of catgut, and the catgut relaxed or shrank in reaction to the humidity in the air, sending the flaxen haired woman in her dirndl out through her door when the air was dry and the weather fine and her husband, who wore a slicker over his lederhosen and carried an umbrella, out his door when rain was due.
The memory made Town laugh, and he realized that his whole life he had been that little man with the umbrella, warning of tempests ahead.
And now?
What was he now?
He didn’t know.
The only way to find out was to remain alert and watchful and let this thing unravel.
Town sat on the bed and clicked on the TV, plunging himself back into the over-modulated world of the latter-day carnival barkers.
SIXTEEN
Rick Finch walked into the hotel room and saw the quartz lamps on stands and the two tripod-mounted video cameras and the three guys in jeans and sneakers lounging on the sofa, one of them holding a fluffy microphone that resembled a ferret with a pole shoved up its ass.
He stared at the journalist, Margo Banner, who was looking all made up and TV, no longer the mega-boneable girl next door of the other night, and said, “What the fuck is this?”
“I also report for CNN,” she said. “We’re going out live in five minutes. Is that a problem?”
He gaped at her. Jesus, he’d been expecting a bottle of wine and low lights and had imagined her with her shoes off and her legs curled under her on the sofa as she asked him questions in that empathetic way of hers, and then the eventual, inexorable, melting together on her bed.
Not this.
No, not fucking this.
But then he thought, fuck, maybe this is exactly what he needed. What he needed to stop being a pawn in somebody else game. What he needed to take control of his own fucking destiny.
“No,” he said, “no problem.”
She was gaping at him.
“What?” he said.
“Your face…”
He touched a hand to the forgotten blobs of toilet paper and laughed and said, “Oh, yeah. These.”
“Come,” she said.
Margo took him into the bathroom that was as bright as an operating room and pulled the bloody paper free with an admirable lack of squeamishness. She even powdered away his shine and brushed his hair and straightened his shirt collar.
She glanced at her watch and said, “Okay, it’s time.”
They went back into the room and she sat him down on a chair and took a seat opposite him. The lights were fired and he blinked like he was having a petit mal seizure.
The camera crew took up their positions as Margo put a hand to her ear and nodded and said “Yes, okay” to somebody far away.
He saw the CNN anchors on the monitor and heard the self-important music and there was a montage of Catherine in captivity and a clip of him facing the media yesterday morning—Jesus, he looked like shit warmed over—and then the female anchor said, “We’re crossing live now to Margo Banner in Los Angeles who has an exclusive interview with Richard Finch, the husband of ISIS hostage, Catherine Finch.”
He stared into the dark, yawning eye of lens and then dragged his gaze across to Margo who was saying, “Richard Finch, you’ve heard that the Middle East peace talks have stalled? That the Palestinian delegates have withdrawn, demanding tangible proof that your wife is alive before they continue?”
He hadn’t heard this but he nodded and managed to say, “Yes. That would cause Catherine great, uh, sadness. She has fought long and hard for peace in the Middle East. She has dedicated her years in captivity to encouraging the peace process.”
“So you’re still saying that she's alive?”
He widened his eyes. “Of course she’s alive.”
“Because you got a text message a day ago saying she is?”
Finch, feeling a sudden sense of his own power, feeling centered, in the fucking now, squared his shoulders and said, “No, because I heard from her again. Just over an hour ago.”
Margo Banner sat forward in her chair and he knew that this gesture was being mirrored in living rooms across America, and he swore he could fucking feel it, feel that movement of millions of asses causing the planet to tilt on its axis.
“Your wife has contacted you again?” Margo said.
“Yes, she contacted me via the messaging app, Telegram.”
“Can you show us this message?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Her captors, clearly aware that they need to keep her location secret for her own safety, used a self-destruct timer,” he said, pulling this out of his butt with commendable aplomb.
“A self-destruct timer?”
“Yes. Within seconds of me reading the message it was erased.” He saw her face. “It’s a thing,” he said.
“And what did this message say?”
“Catherine said she’s still in the hospital, but okay. And she is aware of the doubts about her being alive, so she intends to give irrefutable proof of life, within the next day or two, as soon as her health allows.”
“And what form will this proof take?”
Finch smiled. “Oh, she’ll make a video, Margo. A YouTube video. Like she always does.�
��
PART TWO
ONE
The sheet of the hospital bed felt heavy to her body. She battled to breathe and the morphine had left her confused and she struggled to focus on the white-coated young doctor who stood over her.
“Janet,” he said, “have you been informed of the test results?”
She nodded. The cancer had metastasized. What had started as a small lump in her breast had run rampant through her, invading her lymph nodes, liver, lungs, bones and brain.
“Yes,” she said. “The chemo is no longer working.”
“We can’t treat you anymore, but we’re still here to help.”
She was twenty-eight. Or was she twenty-nine? No, twenty-eight.
“How long do I have?” she asked.
“I think you need to talk to the consulting oncologist.”
“I’ve got a child,” she said. “Lucy. She’s only three.”
The doctor took her hand. He seemed at a loss for words, battling to meet her gaze.
Did she have a husband? She searched her memory. No, she was a single parent.
“Who’s going to take care of her when I’m gone?”
She heard sniffling and looked past the doctor at the two white-coated figures—one male, one female—who sat on chairs near the bed. The man, bearded and beefy, blew his nose noisily.
“Okay, time out,” the instructor said.
Florescent lights flickered and beamed their cold blue light down on the bed in which Kirby Chance lay in a classroom at USC’s Keck School of Medicine on L.A.’s Eastside, where freshmen students were busy with an introduction to clinical medicine.
Kirby was forgotten now that her work was done, the instructor already huddled with his class, critiquing their responses to her performance as Janet Mulroney.
She sat up and removed her paper gown, revealing her jeans and baggy sweatshirt. Retrieving her pack from where she’d stowed it under the bed, she left the classroom, walking down the corridor toward the green room, slouching, as she’d done since she was a teenager, to disguise her leggy height, her disconcertingly plump breasts hidden beneath the shapeless shirt, her blonde hair a curtain obscuring her face.
The green room resembled a casting call—around twenty medical actors (known as Standardized Patients in the trade) all dressed in pajamas or sweats, eating pizza and drinking sodas. Old geezers with too much time on their hands supplementing their Social Security checks. Kids barely out of their teens in Manga footwear earning beer money. Bored housewives.
Kirby knew some of them by sight, but she didn’t greet anyone, finding a seat and sitting with her eyes closed, trying to clear her head.
She’d only played Janet Mulroney once before, and even though last night and this morning she’d scanned the ten-page script that gave a detailed account of Janet’s life and her illness, she’d felt underprepared. She hoped that hadn’t been noticed. She needed this gig, needed the $20 per hour she was getting a couple of days a week.
But there had been those tears, back there, when she’d ad-libbed about the soon-to-be orphaned child. Tears were good, right?
For fifteen long years Kirby, a singleton, had nursed her single-parent mother through breast cancer, through the initial diagnosis, through the chemo treatments and the remissions and the recurrences, and then the final, terrible, slow, agonizing death. She’d taken the Red Cross Family Caregiver Training Program to help her in this task, and had even, briefly, considered a career in medicine.
All of which had given her a lot of insight into the role she’d played that morning. Helped her turn in that real tearjerker of a performance.
Her mother always said she would leave her a nice nest egg. Which implied that it was something Kirby should sit on for a long while until it hatched. This she had not done. After her mother had finally died, Kirby had cashed in her small inheritance (it had been eroded by the shortfall in medical insurance and the extortionate cost of the cremation) and left Scottsdale, Arizona, and come out here to L.A. to become an actor.
She had tried to get an agent, and had succeeded only in getting ripped off. For a fee she’d posted her photograph and details on a couple of casting web sites and data bases. Nothing had come of it.
Out of desperation she had fallen into doing the medical acting. A kindly female agent, while declining to represent Kirby, had given her the details of the Keck School’s program. She’d applied online, and then had done a phone interview, after which she was brought in to meet with the director of the program and some current Standardized Patients. The years she had spent in the shadow of illness and the medical professionals who service it had been to her advantage, and she was hired, which was just as well because the nest egg was all but gone.
Kirby fumbled in her pack for her iPad. She had a few minutes to kill while she waited for the clerk to prepare her check and she surfed to CNN for an update on what was happening with Catherine Finch, who was still getting a lot of heat after what her husband had said the night before.
“She’s a cunt.”
Kirby looked up at the heavy girl with zits looming over her, drinking from a can of Coke as she stared down at the photograph of Catherine on the screen of the tablet. The girl appeared to have a pillow strapped beneath her polyester sack dress—playing an expectant mother?—or maybe she was just really fat. Kirby hadn’t seen her around before and ignored her.
“She’s a fuckin traitor, that bitch,” the girl said. “She deserves to be killed.”
Kirby admired Catherine, but it wasn’t in her nature to confront this chunky girl—or to confront anybody for that matter.
“You’re a doormat, Kirby,” she heard her dead mother say as she stood and slung the pack over her shoulder and walked away, eyes still on the iPad, the strip lights from the corridor reflected in the screen.
The CNN anchor was talking to some expert about Catherine Finch, some frog-like man whose mouth was permanently pursed in an embouchure, like he was about to play the trumpet.
“Finch was a divisive figure,” he said in a fruity voice, “with her outspoken criticisms of America, made all the more powerful since there is no sign that she is being coerced.”
The news moved on to an analysis of the primaries and Kirby doused the tablet and stowed it in her pack as she went into a restroom. After she washed and dried her hands she stood before the mirror and pulled her hair away from her face.
I really do look like her, she thought, as she had so many times over the last years. Or, rather, she looks like me, because Kirby was the elder by seven months, so, therefore, she was the original was she not, and Catherine the facsimile? Or, because of Catherine’s fame—or notoriety—was that voided? Did celebrity trump precedence?
A few years ago after they’d watched Sean Hannity skewer Catherine on Fox News—her mother had been politically conservative (conservative in everything, truth be told) and had regarded Hannity as an oracle—Kirby, in a moment of weakness, had said, “We look alike, don’t we?”
Her mother had stared at her.
“There is a resemblance, isn’t there?” Kirby said, regretting her words as she spoke them.
“Between you and that turncoat? I should hope not!” Her mother, not yet medicated into a near coma, looked at her, squinted and said, “Well, you do both have very American faces.” Saying this as if she were somehow foreign, or at least of a superior pedigree.
“What’s an American face?” Kirby asked.
“Oh, square jaw, large teeth and somewhat pronounced zygomaticis major muscles.”
Her mother liked to throw medical and anatomical terms around, like she was some kind of health-care professional, even though she’d never even finished high school and spent her life working check-out at Costco and waitressing at Denny’s.
“Zygo what?” Kirby said.
“The muscles that make you smile. These.”
With her thumb and index finger her mother indicated the muscles that started at her cheekbones and extende
d to the corners of the mouth. Hers were sorely underused. She’d found little to smile about, even before the cancer had invaded her body.
And there the conversation had ended. But Kirby had carried with her this belief. Of course, looks were nothing, it was all about character, and in that department she did not at all resemble Catherine, who was brave and forthright and spoke her mind and stood up for her beliefs.
Inspired by Meryl Streep in Silkwood and Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, Kirby dreamed of playing Catherine in a movie. Of course, Meryl Streep was more of a role model than Julia Roberts, because Streep hadn’t merely portrayed Karen Silkwood, she had become her.
Kirby had seen all Catherine’s videos and read all there was to read, on and offline, about her. In the process she’d found herself learning about Sharia law and women’s rights in the Middle East and the role her own country had played in destabilizing the region. This she could never discuss with her mother, but it had drawn her closer to Catherine as she’d sat alone at night, watching the YouTube videos on her laptop, her mother gasping and crying in the next room.
So it had devastated her when, two days ago in her apartment, Good Morning America chattering away as she’d made her breakfast of granola and soy milk, she’d heard that Catherine was dead. She’d had to sit down and found her hands shaking, feeling a terrible sense of loss at the death of this woman she’d never met, with whom she shared a passing resemblance, as though Catherine’s death had subtracted something from her.
Then came the good news. The husband, Richard, Rick, a handsome if slightly shiftless looking man—perhaps that was uncharitable, the last four years must have been an ordeal for him—had read a text from Catherine saying she was alive.
And now there was the promise of a video appearance, all of which had buoyed Kirby, and she had spent too much time last night and this morning thinking about Catherine and her idealism and her bravery, and too little time preparing for her performance at the medical school.
She stopped off at the clerk’s office and collected her check and walked out onto San Pablo Street in Boyle Heights just in time to get her bus to Hollywood.
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