by James, Terry
As the afternoon progressed and the sting of our spat gradually receded, I began to feel sorry I had ever brought it up. I hadn’t given a moment’s consideration to the effect my pronouncement might have on her.
“I shouldn’t have gloated,” I apologized at dinner. “It was inconsiderate of your feelings. You’re right, I don’t have any proof. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway.”
“Yes it does,” she said sedately. “It changes everything.”
I rolled out the platitudes in an effort to convince her that it was water under the bridge, that Walter still had to write the books, had to transform all those dry notes and documents into gripping plots, that all writers use research, etc., but as the days went by it became clear from the change in her demeanor that I had dealt her a blow in some ways more devastating than his death. I had trampled his integrity. On the surface she remained as cordial as ever, even behaving towards me with a kind of humbled respect which hadn’t been there before. But a caustic undercurrent began to corrode our encounters. She began to make small, seemingly petty corrections to my table manners, telling me it wasn’t polite to rest my left arm on the table, or that it was poor form to use my dessert spoon to stir my tea. My biggest infraction, it seemed, was talking with food in my mouth, which she could not abide, though it had never seemed to bother her before. It wasn’t as though my mouth was crammed full of food. At most it was a few nibbles at the tail end of a substantial swallow, when I would shift the remainder to a cheek in order to keep the flow of conversation going. I thought I was being considerate, attentive. Apparently not. Or else it was all the paint flakes I kept tracking in. As if the house were as pristine as an operating theater, when in fact the whole place was as dusty as King Tut’s tomb.
Sometimes there was no clear object to the tension. It was just there in the room, like cosmic background radiation, beyond conscious perception but nonetheless sensed. I would glance over at her, reading her book, and feel that my presence was disturbing her peace, which naturally troubled my own. Sometimes it was too much, and I had to get out, go for a drive.
“Where are you going?” she would ask, a little too proprietorially for my taste.
“Out. Do I have your permission?”
“Don’t be a smartass.”
On more than one occasion I went back to my apartment to check the mail and be alone in my own space again. For the first few minutes it felt nice. I would tell myself that I wasn’t getting anywhere out there in that house with that old woman, that it was time to move on, to try to put this thing behind me and get back to reality. Then, after twenty minutes in the recliner, the loneliness would start coming on, a slowly expanding black hole behind my sternum. I would look around and wonder how in the hell I had lived in this place, all alone, for so many years. It was so small and barren, devoid of life. Another ten minutes was all I could take, then I was out the door, driving back to Sunset Acres.
One of those nights I stopped by the office to check my messages and the mail. Amongst the junk were two envelopes from Fletcher Enterprises, dated a week apart. I held them in my hand, recalling the feeling of Mrs. Fletcher’s tits against my face. I opened them. In each was a check for $150. No letter, no note of explanation.
I carried them over to the desk and sat there with them for a while, and when it didn’t add up there either, I telephoned Mr. Fletcher at his home. A man answered, the butler perhaps. I asked for Mr. Fletcher. He asked who was calling. I told him. A few minutes later, Fletcher came on the line.
“Good evening, Mr. King,” he said.
“I’m holding two checks from your company for $150 each. Memo line: “Services Rendered.” Signed by one Sheldon Rothblatt, Tres. What do you want me to do with them?”
“Whatever you like,” he replied. “It’s your pay.”
“My pay for what?”
“Services rendered.”
“You already paid me,” I pointed out.
“That was for the first week.”
“I thought I made it clear that our business was concluded.”
“You did.”
“So what is this?
“You’ve earned it.”
I stared at the opposite wall for a few seconds.
“Did something I say give you the impression that I had any intention of continuing to work for you?”
Just then, I heard a woman’s voice in the background. Whether or not it was Mrs. Fletcher’s, I couldn’t say. The mouthpiece was promptly muffled.
“I’m sorry, Mr. King,” Fletcher said a few seconds later. “I have to take care of something at the moment. I’ll give you a call tomorrow morning. We need to talk.”
I hung up and stared at the checks, marveling at the gall of the man. I tossed them into the garbage can, locked up, and drove back out to Sunset Acres.
The next morning before breakfast, in a burst of gratitude for being on leave from people like Gordon Fletcher, I went out into the back yard and pulled a few stems of the irises and put them in a vase on the table. When Imogen came in and saw them she laid into me: “Don’t tell me you pulled those up from the back yard.”
“I thought you’d like them.”
“You ass!” she stormed out to assess the damage. “If I wanted my flowers pulled up, I would have done it myself.”
“Sorry” was all I could say to her departing back. It was a rather subdued breakfast, to say the least.
Enough was enough. After a few hours of scraping, I put the ladder away, went inside, changed into my navy blue suit and packed my few belongings. Before leaving I stood in the hallway for a moment, listening to the thumping of her treadle. I felt bad leaving like that, without even a goodbye, but I knew she would try to stop me if I said anything. I quietly made my way down the stairs and out the door.
22
IT WAS ABOUT eleven o’clock when I pulled into the garage under the Regal Arms. Arturo gave me a hearty handshake in the elevator, asking if I had been on vacation. “Sunset Acres,” I replied. “I highly recommend the roast goose.” We parted with another handshake at the fourth floor, and I made my way down the hall to my door. I unlocked it and stepped in. I reached up to take my hat off. The last thing I recall before waking up in a hospital bed was a swishing sound and a quick movement behind me.
It must have been around 1 p.m. when I came to, because the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a line of white sand streaming through an hourglass against a partly cloudy sky.
“Like sands through the hourglass,” a familiar voice said, “so are the days of our lives.”
I tried to sit up. Halfway there I got dizzy and vomited. Nothing substantial came up. A tube connected to a drip was hanging from my left arm. My right arm was free. With it I reached up and felt around my head. It was bandaged all the way around. I counted half a dozen points of pain. Pink abrasions encircled both wrists. I pulled back the sheet. My right knee was the size of a grapefruit. A bandage six inches long was showing blood on my left shin. I probed around my torso: sharp pain around the lower left ribs.
A blue curtain was drawn across the middle of the room, but I couldn’t hear anything coming from the other side. The TV was mounted high on the facing wall. I saw no way to turn it off.
I’ve got to get out of here, I thought. Every passing second was costing me more than a weekend on the French Riviera. I was uninsured.
As the opening title sequence gave way to the first scene (zoom out from a crackling fire to see Roman and Marlena having breakfast in their ski chateau) it soon became apparent that the episode was either a rerun or was being piped in from the hospital’s own video collection, because those hairstyles hadn’t been seen on broadcast television, except in jest, in at least thirty years. That I remembered the names of these characters at all was a testament to how desperately bored I had been that week in the fall of 1983 when I stayed home from school to be with Mom after her hysterectomy. To this day she never misses an episode.
Suddenly I had an erecti
on. It had nothing to do with the chemistry of the actors or the subtext of their lines. It was the studio lighting, the tacky sets, the bad acting, the synthesized mood music, the hairdos, and perhaps most of all the quality of the video itself—the soft, flat, metallic sheen of low-grade videotape. It may as well have been my old bootleg copy of Insatiable, which had given me so many hours of companionship during high school.
The first commercial break confirmed my suspicion. The ads looked positively quaint compared to today’s frenetic editing and slick computer graphics. In the space of three minutes I was treated to nearly all the tropes of 80’s daytime television advertising: stop-motion animated dancing sponges, droll basset hounds, aristocratic cats, long static shots of packages on tables, split-screen taste tests on unwitting consumers, cantankerous old women doing crazy things, arch British dandies, nerds, robots. It was heartbreaking.
I fell asleep before the end of the episode. When I awoke, Dr. Guhathakurta was standing at the foot of the bed, her dense jet-black hair framing a broad, round face, Bengali eyes, a long, smooth nose only bested in voluptuousness by her lower lip. She was far too young and beautiful to be a real doctor. Either I was still asleep or had slipped into Another World.
“How are you feeling?” she asked rather woodenly.
“I’ve been better.”
She took a look at my charts and said, without looking up: “You’ve been out a long time.” She then came around to the right side of the bed and asked my permission to look at my wounds. She raised the sheet and examined the dressings. Her ID badge swung freely from her soft brown neck faintly redolent of cardamom. Her first name was Chitralekha.
“Where am I?”
“Mercy Presbyterian,” she answered, pulling the sheet back over me. Finally she turned her face to mine. “You’re pretty lucky.”
From her I believed it.
“How did I get here?”
“You were brought by ambulance this morning.”
“Who brought me?”
“The police.”
“Could you tell me their names?”
“You should get some rest,” she said. “All your questions will be answered in time.”
She seemed eager to be on her way.
“When do you think I can leave?”
“I would give it a few more days, see how you … What’s wrong?”
I badly wanted to confess to her that I was uninsured, but the shame of it in the face of such beauty and self-assurance was too much.
“Nothing,” I said vaguely and looked away.
Before she left I asked her if she could turn the TV off. She made a few obligatory glances around for a remote, but clearly she had more important things on her mind than my mental health.
During Another World there was a commercial for Flo-Go Systems, a local plumbing and air-conditioning company. I had never heard of it. It had probably long since gone bankrupt. It was a thirty-second spot, amateur in every regard, a man’s voice asking a series of supposedly random people on the street: “Where do you go for the flow?” To which they exuberantly declare, “Flo-go!” while thrusting out a hand curled into an “O”, as if launching an invisible javelin. Hearing that word, repeated over and over like that, depressed me.
Hollywood Squares cheered me up a little. That day it was Jimmie Walker, Joan Rivers, Florence Henderson, and Sandy Duncan, among the lesser luminaries. The only reason I could think of why the show’s producers had ever conceived of sticking Florence Henderson (not exactly a renowned comedienne) in a giant tic-tac-toe grid was for the visual pun on the opening sequence of The Brady Bunch. Joan Rivers delivered the only decent joke. Host: “Jackie Gleason recently revealed that he firmly believes in them and has actually seen them on at least two occasions. What are they?” Joan Rivers: “His feet.”
After Hollywood Squares I was treated to Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion. I nodded off on the boat to Algiers. By the time I awoke, the bumbling duo were being given their medals by the Commandant and honorably discharged. Next up was Channel 4 News at Five O’Clock, a real blast from the past: “Jurors in the Groucho Marx Estate trial have handed in a verdict that one lawyer says will never stand.”
I should mention that in between all this entertainment a variety of nurses and nurse practitioners came and went, fiddled with the equipment, made notes, pretended to be interested in me. I did learn that I was alone in a shared room. I asked several times if I could turn the TV off. The answers ranged from: “I’ll look into it” to “Why?” I ate a piece of freeze-dried chicken-fried steak, some frozen peas, a glob of instant mashed potatoes, and a cube of red Jell-O. I washed it all down with a half-pint of chocolate milk. I kept thinking that any minute now Imogen would step through the door with a care package, that somehow with that remarkable intuition of hers, she would have sensed that I was in trouble and made some calls and found out I was here. Every time a nurse walked by, my eyes turned to the door, only to be disappointed by a rushing white uniform.
Towards nightfall, the wan light of the fluorescent tubes flickering to life, the meal carts clanking and clattering in the hallway, the visitors leaving grateful for their good health, I decided to put the cost out of my mind for the time being. Apart from killing myself, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
23
IN THE MIDDLE of The A-Team, a good-looking kid in dark jeans and a white T-shirt entered the room. I figured he had come about the TV. He looked like someone who belonged on it. He was about twenty-five, with thick, curly black hair and the deliberately casual unshaven look of a men’s cologne model, eyes the color of a Caribbean lagoon on whose untroubled waters, judging by his tan, he had been floating since he was born. He walked up to me as if he knew me.
“I’m Detective Gallo,” he said in a voice nearly as rich as my own, pulling a wallet from his front left pants pocket and opening it to show me his shiny badge. He held it out long enough to convince me that my nose for cops was broken. He closed the badge case and returned it to his pocket.
“I guess you’re not here about the remote,” I said.
“Sorry?”
I tried to sit up a little but the rib had other ideas. I doubled the pillow under my head instead. “I’m afraid I don’t have much to give you,” I said. “Talk to Arturo Sanchez at the Regal Arms. He’s the doorman and elevator guy. I was with him right before they jacked me. That was just after eleven o’clock.”
“Actually, I’m not handling the assault,” he said, quite pleasantly. “Phibsboro PD took the call. It’s their guys. I’m homicide, 66th Street Division. I’m on the Walter Morris case.”
I took a few moments to digest this, after which I said:
“What happened to Hicks and Stiles?”
“They’re not on the squad anymore,” he replied with what underneath his obligatory posture of fraternal solidarity sounded distinctly like a hint of satisfaction.
“Oh,” I said. “What happened?”
“I’m not at liberty to disclose.” He crossed his arms in front of him, revealing the regular hours he put in at the gym. “The Morris case has been reassigned to me.”
“Fancy that.”
For a minute there the TV had completely vanished from my consciousness. Suddenly it was back, trying to sell me a dreamy glass of iced tea. I tried to block it out, but the kid’s head was so positioned that I couldn’t look at his face without also seeing what was going on on the screen.
“There appears to be a connection between your assault and the Morris case,” he said.
He pulled his cell phone out of his right front pocket and brushed his fingertips across the screen.
Still looking at the phone, he said: “On the chalkboard in the classroom where you were discovered this morning was written the following: I killed Walter Morris.”
I worked on that sentence for about thirty seconds, turning it this way and that, trying to wring some sense out of it, before finally admitting defeat.
�
��Classroom?” I said.
He peered at me over the edge of his phone. “You were found unconscious in a classroom at Del Norte Elementary School in Phibsboro.”
I stared at him for another half-minute or so.
“Are you sure you’re in the right room?”
“You’re Eddie King, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t in any classroom this morning. It was past eleven when they whacked me.”
“That was yesterday,” he said. “Phibsboro PD responded to a call at seven o’clock this morning. By all appearances you were in the school most of the night.”
I stared dumbfounded at him for another large fraction of a minute. It took that long for the name of the school to sink in. I had gone there for third grade.
He looked at me over the edge of the phone. “It was written a hundred times, like a kid’s penmanship exercise. I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”
“About what?”
“I killed Walter Morris.”
I began to wonder if I wasn’t still dreaming. “You killed Walter Morris?”
He actually rolled his eyes. He turned his phone around and held it near my face so I could see a photograph of a chalkboard with I killed Walter Morris written a hundred times on it. He zoomed in.
“It’s your handwriting,” he said.
“That’s a good one.”
“We had it compared this morning to a statement of yours on file. The samples matched.”
He slid his phone back into his pocket and gazed down at me with unsettling empathy.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Something to drink?”
“A bourbon would be nice.”
He smiled. This bastard was way too charming to be a cop.
“I just have a few questions, if you don’t mind.”
He then stepped over and grabbed the chair beneath the TV and in one seamless motion simultaneously slid it and turned it and plunked himself down in it just out of my reach.
“What was your relationship to Walter Morris?” he asked, leaning forward, forearms along his thighs, as if he were the host of a talk show and I its special guest.