Exiles (30 page)

“So now he’s back at your room—“

“He’s in your old room, actually. Or he was this morning, when I went to the studio, with Mick. When I got back home, though, the door was locked, and he wouldn’t answer.”

“So he could be in there, in a coma or something—”

Melissa nodded. “I thought you might still have a key,” she said.

“No, he has the only one,” Spiegel said.

“We should get him to a hospital,” Tracy said. “I can tell them we just found him in his room like that. . . .”

Melissa was sobbing. Her story, or her portion of Jorge’s story, was finished. She had plunged in much deeper than she had ever meant to go. She had turned to Spiegel and to Tracy in desperation.

“I’m talking to you, Melissa,” Tracy said, and Melissa nodded, but it was unclear how much of what Tracy was explaining to her she could comprehend. Maybe some of it registered and was filed away, and when the spasms of emotion and guilt eased she would be able to recall Tracy’s words and make some sense of them.

“Lenny and I have to get the hell over to Flogsta as fast as we can and get some help for Jorge. The less we know about him right now, the better. As far as we’re concerned, you told us nothing, we never saw you. We were just worried about Jorge because we haven’t seen him since he split from the show, you dig?”

Melissa looked up at Tracy with wet eyes. She had nothing more to say.

“As for you,” Tracy went on, “you’ve got to get out of here. Go to Mick, but don’t tell him anything. I don’t want the whole world to know we’re covering your ass, and his. I don’t want to see this in his next fucking play: Hamlet beating Polonius’s head against the hood ornament of a Karmann Ghia. Do you understand me, Melissa?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then go. Now.”

Melissa said okay, and stood. “I don’t know how, you guys, I mean . . . ” And she fell into Tracy’s arms. Tracy held her in a motherly embrace, and Spiegel could see the gentling effect she had on Melissa. It was as if some of Tracy’s power and determination was being passed on directly to Melissa, by contact, calming her nerves and her heart.

“I’m ready now,” she said. “I’m okay.”

Melissa left, heading for Mick’s. Tracy and Spiegel hopped into the VW and took off for Flogsta. Spiegel’s knees shook from fear and anxiety.

“How bad do you think it’ll be?” he asked Tracy.

“Head injuries—I don’t know. They can become real serious really fast. Swelling of the brain and stuff.”

“She should never have left him alone,” Spiegel said.

“No shit. If anything happens, she’s as much to blame as Mick.”

“Maybe she didn’t know.”

“Hell, of course she knew,” Tracy said. “Didn’t anything strike you as really strange about her story?”

“Like the whole fucking thing,” Spiegel said.

“Yes, but strangest of all. She was so particular about tucking Jorge into bed all snuggly and warm. Now how often do you think he’s been sleeping in your old room?”

Spiegel understood. Never. But Melissa wanted to make sure that if anything went desperately wrong it wouldn’t happen in her room and that whatever happened, whenever it happened, she would be far from the scene.

“You mean she was just putting on an act for us. She knew exactly what to do about Jorge, but she was playing the role of the helpless ingenue, the space ranger, strung out on vapors and meth.”

“We ride off to the rescue,” Tracy said, “while she and Mick wash each other’s hands.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence, each lost in thought.

* * *

It had been more than a month since Spiegel had been back to Flogsta. He was amazed to see the changes. The earth was no longer gashed with tractor treads nor scarred by tailings of cement. Grass flourished, and conical plantings cast shade across the fresh, undulant lawns. The bulldozers, earthmovers, and cranes, which had huddled in the snowdrifts like great yellow reptiles, had been replaced by a fleet of Saabs and Volvos, parked at identical angles, in neat rows, on the newly paved lot that had been carved into the hillside. The six towers, which in the winter had been framed by scaffolding, draped in bright blue tarpaulins, and limned with orange power cords that traversed the temporary facings like veins, had been unshrouded. The buildings stood on the hilltop, six gleaming obelisks of glass and steel, each one cold and isolate, like modules for a lunar colony.

Spiegel was disoriented by the evening light. The sky was so bright, the light so clear, that Spiegel had to remind himself that it was nearly six o’clock. A small group of students, their day’s work done, stood in the long shadows of the Flogsta towers. Spiegel thought that the architects might have placed the students on the lawn as an element of the design, to mark the blank tablet of the otherwise deserted campus with the ornaments of habitation and community as a landscape artist might sketch a row of sheep grazing on a hillside to imply a human presence that lies just outside the frame. Spiegel thought of all the signs of student life, as he had known it, which were missing in Uppsala: no Frisbees, no tattered backpacks, no golden Labs on frayed leashes, no thumping rock bass from a portable hi-fi, no stink of incense and marijuana, no bleach-scarred jeans and tie-dyed T’s, no unruly hair and bloodshot eyes and mouths concealed by the scruff of a black beard, no bandannas, no woven magic-eye necklaces, no bracelets of Navajo beads, in short, none of the symbolic assertions that had set the current generation, Spiegel’s own, apart from the rest of American society.

The lobby of Spiegel’s building, which he remembered as a tomb framed in rough cement, had been transformed. The floor was covered by a sisal carpet, the walls lighted by recessed bulbs placed discreetly above the doorway. The elevator seemed to float between floors, and its arrival was announced with a soft but satisfying
ping.

It was all Tracy and Spiegel could do to keep from shouldering open the elevator doors and sprinting to Jorge’s room. But they had agreed that they would approach the scene as if nothing were wrong. And their caution was rewarded when they saw, by the kitchen, one of the Swedish students who lived down the hallway. Spiegel remembered his name.

“
Hej
, Lars,” he said.

“
Hej
. You’re back.” Lars set a saucepan on the stove and stepped over to greet Spiegel. “Welcome.”

Spiegel wondered how much Lars had read, or been questioned, about his disappearance. “I’m just here for a moment. I’m just visiting.”

“We’re here to see Jorge,” Tracy said, cutting Spiegel off. “Is he home? Have you seen him?”

“You, too,” Lars said. “Everybody’s after that guy, this evening.”

Tracy and Spiegel looked at each other.

“Who else?” Tracy asked.

“First Melissa asked me if I had seen him. Then some girl from building one.”

That must have been Lisbet, Spiegel realized. Was Jorge still seeing her, too? Perhaps, while Melissa was pursuing her extracurricular interests, he had been involved in a bit of recidivism.

“Is he around?” Spiegel asked. “Did they find him?”

“The girl had been knocking on his door, but he didn’t answer,” Lars said. “She was all dressed to go out—makeup, stockings. I could smell her perfume from here, like a cloud of violets.”

“It’s not like Jorge to miss a chance to be with one of his birds.”

“Maybe he’s just asleep,” Lars said. “Like the last time you were here.”

“Last time?” Spiegel said.

“You know, last week. When you came back, from—wherever— and you found him in your room.”

A chill shook Spiegel’s body. He suddenly understood what was happening. Aaronson had been here, trying to make contact.

Perhaps he didn’t want anyone in ARMS to know that he was back in Uppsala. But why had Aaronson come to Flogsta and not to Tracy’s?

“Have people been looking for me, as well?” Spiegel asked.

“No one this week. After you moved out, there was that newspaper fellow. And some calls from the States, I think.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Nothing. I didn’t know where you had gone. I said to talk to Jorge, that he might know.”

“Yes,” Tracy said. “We’ve got to talk to Jorge, too.”

Lars shrugged, as if to say, suit yourself. For a guy who has done a lot of observing, Spiegel thought, Lars comes across with very little information. Maybe you have to pay him for his information. Maybe somebody has. There was always something creepy and conspiratorial about Lars, and Spiegel sensed that Lars was part of the network or circle that had been surrounding him, just beyond the margins of his vision. Now, he could see signs of its presence everywhere he turned.

He and Tracy walked quickly down the hallway to Jorge’s room. The door was locked. Tracy whacked her palm against it and called Jorge’s name.

“But maybe he’s not there,” Spiegel said. “He could have gotten up, felt better.”

“And then?”

“He would have looked for Melissa. Most of his stuff is in her room, anyway.”

Melissa’s door had been left ajar. The stench of cigarettes and incense seeped from her room into the hallway. Inside, it looked as if the room had been ransacked. Clothing, books, and papers were strewn all over the floor. Record albums were fanned out on the desktop. Some had been stripped from their paper sleeves. One black disk with a bright green island at its center, exposed to the direct sunlight, had begun to warp. The room was uncomfortably hot. A plate of cheese and sliced salami had melted into little pools of oil that reeked of garlic and smoke. Several tall glasses left beside the window were streaked with a dark but translucent film. The rya rug had been kicked aside, its long fibers greasy with wine stains and the grainy residue of ashes and cake crumbs. The coverlet, sheets, and bedding had been stripped and left in a pile by the closet door. The bare white mattress looked odd amid the chaos, like a well-trimmed boat passing through a sea churning with wreckage and debris.

“Someone tore this place up,” Tracy said. “No one could live like this.”

“I’m not sure,” Spiegel said. He had seen plenty of other rooms in such disarray, had even awakened in some of them. “Maybe she just left in a hurry.”

“No,” Tracy said. “Someone’s been through here, either looking for something or trying to send Melissa a message.”

“You think it was Jorge?”

“Maybe he woke up this morning, before Melissa left for the TV interviews, and they had a fight. . . .”

Spiegel looked around the room. “Jorge doesn’t fight that well,” he said. “You’d have to be really strong to fight long enough to do all this damage.”

“But it must have made a lot of noise,” Tracy said. “Wouldn’t someone have heard and come in to see what was happening?”

“People here tend to mind their own business,” Spiegel said.

He stepped cautiously through the rubble, turning this way and that, trying to reconstruct from memory the room as it was when he had first met Melissa. He picked up some cosmetics that had been knocked to the floor, straightened a mirror on the dresser top. It was a fine mirror, with beveled glass and a frame of darkened ivory, nearly the color of tortoiseshell. African, possibly, Spiegel thought. He wondered whether it was Jorge’s or Melissa’s. He couldn’t manage to make it stand properly on the dresser because of a slight irregularity at the base, as if the dimensions of the frame had been subtly adapted to natural contours of the bone. Spiegel noticed a clasp on the back, however, and realized that the mirror must have once hung from a small hook that he saw protruding from the wall. Before he could replace the mirror, he caught sight of his own image in the glass. It still surprised him to see himself with such short hair. In the months that he had been in Sweden, or perhaps just in the time that he had been living with Tracy, his face had filled out and his eyes had become more alert, his lips more prominent. The set of his face conveyed a new serenity and self-confidence. Spiegel wondered if somehow he looked even more like Aaronson than when they had agreed to exchange identities and to step into each other’s lives.

Just then, an odd thing happened. As Spiegel looked at his reflection, his own face seemed to speak to him, to form some words, inaudible and barely intelligible at first, but words that seemed to present to him a riddle that he could not solve. “Which one am I?” the face in the mirror seemed to be whispering from somewhere deep within the glass. What’s going on here? Spiegel wondered. He tried to look away from the mirror, but his own image held him fast. Was he actually saying these words, or was it just a nervous tic that had always lain dormant or, more likely, that he had never before had the capacity to observe, some spasm that forced his mouth into a set of shapes that looked like words? Or perhaps the words, which he could not at first comprehend, had risen from a deeper region of his mind where they had been hidden, coagulating for years, like a bubble of petroleum lying unseen beneath desert sand.

“Are you okay?” Tracy asked. For a full minute, she had been watching Spiegel, transfixed by his own image. “Why are you staring like that?”

The words seemed to pass from Spiegel’s image directly to his lips, and as he said them—“Which one am I?”—the words tasted peculiar on his tongue. It was as if someone else had spoken through Spiegel’s body, as if he were just a medium.

“What are you talking about?” Tracy said.

Spiegel set the mirror back on the dresser. He felt cleansed and lightened, as if a weight had been lifted and he was free to move again, to speak in his own voice. His muscles felt loose and flexible, the air itself seemed thin, pure, and he thought that if he relaxed he could lose his grip and float to the ceiling, as if the oxygen in his blood had been transformed through some intercession, some sudden and obscure chemical phenomenon, into helium. He knew that these thoughts were absurd, yet the perception itself was persistent, overpowering. Have I fallen into the clutches of some exotic West Coast hallucinogen that Melissa had sprinkled on the carpet like talc so that the merest human stirrings would cloud the air with the infectious powder? Or am I in the aura that passes through the mind like a wave of light before an epileptic seizure?