Night Train (13 page)

       'That's okay. But let's stop this. Jennifer did it.'

       'Jennifer did it. See? Why doesn't everyone just keep their mouth shut. Why doesn't everyone... just shut the fuck up.'

       Then a revelation: Did you talk to Professor Denziger?

       Yeah I talked to Bax. He told you what— Yeah, he did. He agonized good about that. I thought it was kind of typical of her in a way. Not the incompetence. That wasn't typical. But how she did it. Changing the values. Changing all the givens. Why's that?

       Like if you said to her, I don't know, who's going to win the election in November, she had trouble getting interested. Because of the givens. The parameters. Not just the candidates—the whole thing. For her the thread had gotten lost so long ago.

       Did Denziger tell you that what she did looked deliberate?

       I think the only way you can genuinely go wrong there is when you have an ax to grind. Like when Sandage started wowing everyone with his quasar discoveries. His results were contaminated by brown dwarves, which quasars can resemble. It's like in tennis: You want the ball to be good so much you actually 'see' it good when it's not. Jennifer wouldn't see anything that wasn't there. I think it was just part of the pattern. You said she wasn't the pattern type. But that's what mental illness does—it ropes you into a pattern. Some very corny stuff. There's something else she did too. She started 'buying' things. What? Don't tell me. Cars. Pianos. No, paintings. Real crap, too. She wasn't particularly visual, and I'm not either. But they look like airport art to me. I keep turning deliveries away. The galleries don't holler. It's a suicide. They've seen this before.

       She used post-dated checks... Yeah. Post-dated checks. There were two deliveries on Friday. The checks were dated April first. April Fool. April Fool.

       Then another revelation: He'd just bummed a smoke off me: His first of the evening. I was halfway through my second pack. I said, 'This might surprise you, but I don't think so. From the autopsy. Toxicology? I get the feeling Tom's told you about it.'

       'Miriam told me about it. She tells me everything in the end. The lithium? I played dumb. But I already knew.'

       'You knew Jennifer was on lithium?'

       'Not while she was alive I didn't.' He sighed and said, 'Mike, tell me something. That book... 'Making Sense of Suicide' doesn't make sense of suicide, or anything else. But it's extra vague on suicide notes. How many suicides leave suicide notes?'

       That's a very slippery stat, and I told him so.

       'And what's the difference? What does it mean?'

       Nothing in itself, I said. Depends on the person, depends on the note. Some offer comfort. Others, blame.

       'She left a note. She left a note. She sent me a note by U. S. Mail. I went back to the office a week later and it was there in my tray. Here, help yourself. Now I'm going to do what she did on Saturday morning, when she posted it. I'm going to take a walk around the block.'

       I waited till I heard the door. I huddled down over the tape recorder. I tried to raise my voice above a whisper—and I couldn't. I had to use the volume control on the machine, because mine just wasn't working.

       'My darling,' I whispered. 'You're back at work now and that consoles me. That, and the fact that you're the kindest lover on the planet and will eventually have to forgive me for what I've done.

       'You knew me ten times better than anyone, but I wasn't quite what you thought I was. Almost exactly a year ago I started getting the sense that I was losing control of my thoughts. That's the only way I can put it. My thoughts went about their thought thing, doing what they had to do, while I was just an innocent bystander. I didn't dare go through Tulkinghorn, because I couldn't trust him not to run to Dad. I thought I could fix it myself—which might have been part of the internal liar dice. I read up on it. And when you thought I was at the Brogan on Mondays I was at Rainbow Plaza where all the GCG people take their lunchbreaks on the lawn. You never scored a dime-bag so easy. Since last May I've been on varying doses of a stabilizer. Serzone, depecote, tegretol—they sound like moral stances. They dry your head out. But they stopped helping.

       'I'm frightened. I keep thinking I'm going to do something that nobody's ever done before—something altogether inhuman. Is that what I'm doing now? Baby, I'm staying with you until tomorrow night. You were perfect for me. And remember that you couldn't have done 'anything any different'.

       'Help Ma. Help Dad. Help Dad. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry...'

       And so it went on, over the page to the end of the sheet: I'm sorry.

       Some time later I was in the kitchen again, drinking soda again. Watching the man move around again. Not just the cold air had pushed the blood into his cheeks. His movements, now, were sharper and noisier, tinnier. And his breath sounded raw. I changed the tape. I smoked. Feeding the thing inside of me. The thing inside of me—it wasn't any calmer. It too was sharper, noisier—colder, angrier.

       He said over his shoulder: 'Mike, don't you have symptoms when you're on that shit? Physical symptoms?'

       'Yeah, you can do,' I said.

       'Doesn't your face swell up and your hair fall out?'

       'It can do, yeah. Suddenly you're Kojak. '

       'Mike, you'll believe me when I say... My faith in my powers of observation have—has seen better days. I lived with a mood-drugged suicide for a year without noticing. Maybe I wouldn't even have noticed that I was living with Kojak. But I'd have noticed that I was fucking him, wouldn't I? Reassure me.'

       'Some people don't get any physical symptoms. Not double vision. Not even the breath. Jennifer. Jennifer was very lucky with her body.'

       'A 'pity' about that. A 'pity' about that.'

       Her shine is leaving these rooms. Jennifer's will to order is leaving these rooms. Slow male entropy is beginning—but for the time being nothing else has changed. Her blue trunk still occupies its place beneath the window. Her bureau lies open in its ante-mortem busyness. The bowl of potpourri goes on aging between the lamp and the framed photograph on the table we're sitting at.

       'Jesus,' I said, smiling, 'what was she on? Magic mushrooms?'

       Trader leaned forward. 'Jennifer?'

       Graduation: In the photograph the three girls are standing—no, bending—in their robes and flat hats. Jennifer is laughing with her mouth about as wide as a mouth can go. Her eyes are moist seams. The two friends don't appear to be in much better shape. But there is the fourth girl in the photograph, trapped in the corner of the frame, and she seems immune to this laughter—immune, maybe, to any laughter at all.

       'No,' he said. 'Jennifer? No. See, this is where it stops adding up for me.'

       He paused—and then came the frown or the shadow.

       'What does?' I said. 'What stops?'

       'She 'hated' anything mood-altering—for herself. I mean, she did the usual shit at college like everybody else. But then she quit and that was that. You know Jennifer. One glass of wine, but never two. She had a thing about it. The whole first year I met her, she had this crazy housemate who was—'

       'Phyllida,' I said. And saw that shadow again.

       'Phyllida. She was taking zinc and manganese and steel and chrome. And Jennifer said, 'She's eating a Sherman tank every day. What do you expect? She isn't 'anyone' now.' I mean, I like to drink some nights and I like to smoke a little weed, and Jennifer never had a problem with that. But for herself? No sleeping pills, nothing. Even an aspirin was a last resort.'

       'She keep up with this Phyllida?'

       'No, thank God. A few letters. She got farmed out to her stepmother. And they moved to Canada. That 'was' a buzz.'

       After a time I said, 'You mind if I ask you a personal question?'

       'Come on, Mike. Don't be ridiculous.'

       How was your sex life?

       Good, thanks.

       I mean in the last year. You didn't feel that it was dropping off a little?

       Maybe. It might have dropped off a little, I guess.

       Because that's almost always a sign. So how often were you making love?

       Oh, I don't know. I suppose in the last year it was down to once or twice a day.

       A day? You don't mean once or twice a week?

       Once or twice a day. But more at the weekend.

       And who would initiate?

       Huh?

       Was it always your idea? Listen. Tell me to fuck off and everything, but some women, when they're 'that' good-looking, it's like honey from the icebox. It won't spread. What was she like in the sack?

       ... Adorable. Relax. I'm feeling good telling you this. It's funny. That letter you saw is about the only one she ever sent me that's halfway printable. She used to say, 'Do you think anyone would 'believe' how much of our time we spend doing this? Two rational adults?' When we went south on vacation, we'd come back and everyone would ask us why we didn't have a tan.

       So sex was a big part of it.

       It didn't come in parts.

       ... You never sensed any restlessness in her? I mean, she hooked up with you pretty early. You don't think she might have felt she'd missed out?

       Well, what the fuck do I know. Listen, Mike, what can I tell you. Let me say how it was with us. We never really wanted to be with anybody else. It was kind of worrying. We had friends, we had brothers, and we saw a lot of Tom and Miriam, and we went to parties and hung with our crowd. But we never liked that as much as we liked being with each other. We spent our time talking, laughing, fucking and working. Our idea of a night out was a night in. Are you telling me people don't want that? We kept expecting it to quieten down but it never did. I didn't own her. I wasn't secure in her a hundred percent—because once you are, the best is over. I knew there was a part of her I couldn't see. A part she kept for herself. But it was a part of her intellect. It wasn't some fucking 'mood'. And I think she felt the same about me. We felt the same about each other. Isn't that what we're all meant to want?

       I was a long time leaving. Already I had my bag on my lap when I said, 'The letter. You have that in your wallet when I yanked you downtown?' He nodded. I said, 'That might have taken some of the wind out of my sails.'

       'Mike, you didn't have any wind in your sails. You just thought you did.'

       'I had Colonel Tom, is what I had. It might have speeded things up.'

       'Yeah, but I didn't want things speeded up. I wanted them slowed down.'

       'On March fourth. You said she seemed cheerful. All day. 'Typically cheerful.'

       'That's right. Ah but see, Jennifer thought you had a moral duty to be cheerful. Not to seem cheerful. To be cheerful.'

       'And you, dear? You said that, as you were leaving, you felt 'distressed.' Why 'distressed'?'

       His face was blank. But then a look of hilarious humiliation moved quickly across it. He closed his eyes and leaned his head on his hand.

       'Another time.' And he stood up, saying, 'Let's do 'distressed' another time.'

       We were in the hall and he was helping me on with my jacket. And he touched me. He lifted the hair out from under my collar, and smoothed his hand across my spine. I felt confusion. I turned and said, 'When people do this... When people do what she did, there's a thing that makes it different. They end it, they get out. It's over for them. But they kind of flip it over to you.'

       He considered me closely for a second. He said, 'No, I haven't found that.'

       'You okay, honey?'

       I gave him my softest look. But I was daunted, I think. Could I honestly say that Jennifer was an act I could even take his mind off, let alone follow? And if you aren't digging yourself, at such moments, then nobody else is going to dig you. And maybe my look wasn't so soft. Maybe, now, my softest look just isn't so soft.

       'Yeah. You okay, Mike? This place,' he said, and he glanced around vaguely. 'I realize... Have you ever lived with somebody who was physically beautiful? Physically.'

       'No,' I said, without having to think. Without having to think of Deniss, of Duwain, of Shawn, of Jon.

       'I realize now what an incredible luxury that was. This place—I guess this place is still pretty nice. But now it feels like a flop to me. Like a dump. Cold-water. Walk-up.'

       All I came home with, then, was 'Making Sense of Suicide'.

       And in its pages, against all expectation (it is, as Trader said, lousily written, as well as smug and sanctimonious and seriously out-of-date), I would find what I needed to know.

       The trail was cold, the trail was at absolute zero. But then I shivered—the way you do when you finally start to get warm.

NOW THERE'S NOTHING

I got back to the apartment around midnight.

       In the bedroom I stood over Tobe for the longest time. What 'he' goes through with his body. It's all he can do just to sit there on a summer evening, watching a game show, with a beer can sweating into his hand. Even in sleep he suffers. Like a mountain is always in pain. The slipping discs of its tectonic plates. The gristle caught between crust and mantle.

       When I quit working murders and had nothing much before me all day except the slow work of keeping dry, I used to stay up until the night train came—whenever. And then the long sleep. Until the night train came. Causing panic among the crockery. Shaking the ground beneath my feet.

       And that's what I intend to do now. Until whenever.

'My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out'.

       I did go. And I did straighten out the killing in the Ninety-Nine.

       It was a totally God-awful murder—I mean, for hunger—but it was the kind of case that homicide cops have sex dreams about: Basically, a newsworthy piece of shit with frills. Basically, a politically urgent, headline-hogging dunker. Quickly solved by concentration and instinct.