Authors: Martin Amis
Part of the pattern. Warnings. Clues. Jennifer left 'clues'. She was the daughter of a police.
That did matter.
The other end of it came to me this morning as I was clattering through the kitchen cupboards, looking for a pack of Sweet 'N' Low. I found myself dully staring at the bottles of jug liquor that Tobe seeps his way through. And in response I felt my liver shimmer, seeming to excrete something. And I thought: Wait. A body has an inside as well as an outside. Even Jennifer's body. Especially Jennifer's body. Which has consumed so much of our time. This is the body—this is the body that Miriam bore, that Colonel Tom protected, that Trader Faulkner caressed, that Hi Tulkinghorn tended, that Paulie No cut. Christ, don't 'I' know this about bodies? Don't I know about alcohol—don't I know about Sweet 'N' Low?
You do something to the body, and the body does something back.
At noon I called the office of the Dean of Admissions at CSU. I gave the name and the year of graduation. I said, 'I'll spell it: T-r-o-u-n-c-e. First name Phyllida. What address do you have?'
'One moment, sir.'
'Look, I'm not 'sir, okay?'
''I'm'sorry, ma'am. One moment. We have an address in Seattle. And in Vancouver.'
'That's it?'
'The Seattle address is more recent. You want that?'
'No. Phyllida's back in town,' I said. 'Her guardian's surname. Spell it, please.'
This information I flipped over to Silvera.
Next I called state cutter Paulie No. I asked him to meet me for a drink this evening, at six. Where? What the hell. In the Decoy Room at the Mallard.
Next I called Colonel Tom. I said I'd be ready to talk. Tonight.
From now on, at least, I won't be asking any more questions. Except those that expect a certain answer. I won't be asking any more questions.
Phyllida Trounce was back in town. Or back in the burbs: Moon Park. She herself had no real weight in all this. And, as I drove across the river and out over Hillside, I could feel a great failure of tolerance in me. I thought: If she wasn't so nuts we could do this on the fucking phone. A failure of tolerance, or just a terrible impatience, now, to get the thing down? The insane live in another country. Canada. But then they come home. And sane people hate crazy people. Jennifer hated crazy people, too. Because Jennifer was sane.
On the phone, Phyllida had tried to give me directions, and she'd gotten lost. But I did not get lost. Moon Park was where I was born. We lived in the crummier end of it—Crackertown. This. Wooden cartons with add-on A-frames or cinderblock shacks with cardboard windows. Now spruced up with pieces of contemporary detritus: The soaked plastic of yard furniture, climbing frames, kiddie pools, and squads of half-dismantled cars with covens of babies crawling around in their guts. I slowed as I passed the old place. We have all moved on, but my fear is still living there, in the crawlspace underneath...
It was over in the Crescent that Phyllida and her stepma now resided. The houses here are larger, older, spookier. One memory. As kids we had to dare each other to do the Crescent on Halloween. I would lead. With a rubber ghoul mask over my face I'd use the knocker, and then, minutes later, a gnarled hand would curl around the door and drop a ten-cent treat bag onto the mat.
There'd been rain, and the house was on a slow drip.
'You and Jennifer, you roomed together at CSU?'
... In a house. With two other girls. A third and fourth girl.
'Then you got sick, didn't you, Phyllida. But you hung on till graduation.'
... I hung on.
'Then you guys lost touch.'
... We wrote for a time. I'm not one for going out.
'But Jennifer came here to see you, didn't she, Phyllida. In the week before she died.'
I'm putting in these dots—but you'd want more than three of them to get the measure of Phyllida's pauses. Like an international phone call ten or fifteen years back, minus the echo, with that lag that made you start repeating the question just as the answer was finally coming through... By now I'm giving myself the cop shrug and thinking: I know exactly why Jennifer killed herself. She set foot in this fucking joint: That's why.
'Yes,' said Phyllida. 'On the Thursday before she died.'
The room was muffled with dust, but cold. Phyllida was sitting in her chair like a lifesize photograph. Like the photograph in Jennifer's apartment. Just the same, only more beat-looking. Straight, thin, weak brown hair, over a gaze that traveled not an inch into the world. Also present was a guy: About thirty, fair, with a balding mustache. He never said a word or even looked in my direction, but attended to the buzz of the earphones he wore. His face gave no indication of the kind of thing he was listening to. It could have been heavy metal. It could have been Teach Yourself French. There was a third person in the house. The stepmother. I never saw this woman, but I heard her. Blundering around in the back room, and groaning, with infinite fatigue, as each new obstacle materialized in her path.
'Jennifer stay long?'
'Ten minutes.'
'Phyllida, you're a manic depressive, right?'
I think my eyes came off brutal when I said it. But she nodded and smiled.
'But you have that under control now, don't you, Phyllida.'
She nodded and smiled.
Yeah: One pill too many and she slips into a coma. One pill too few and she goes out and buys an airplane. Jesus, the poor bitch, even her teeth are nuts. Her gums are nuts.
'You keep a pill chart, don't you, Phyllida. And a roster. You probably have one of those little yellow boxes with the time compartments and the dosages.'
She nodded.
'Do something for me. Go count your pills and tell me how many are missing. The stabilizers. The tegretol or whatever.'
While she was gone I listened to the steady buzz of the guy's earphones. The insect drone—the music of psychosis. I listened also to the woman in the other room. She stumbled and groaned, with that unforgettable weariness—that indelible weariness. And I said out loud, 'She got it too? Jesus Christ, I'm surrounded.' I stood up and moved to the window. Drip, drop, said the rain. It was now that I made myself a promise—a promise that only the few would understand. The stepmother stumbled and groaned, stumbled and groaned.
Phyllida came floating down the passage like a nurse. I moved to the door. She herself had no real weight in this. She was just the connect.
'How many?' I called. 'Five? Six?'
'I think six.'
And I was gone.
Hurry hurry. Because you see: This is where we came in. It's five p.m. on April second. In an hour I meet with Paulie No. I will ask him two questions. He will give me two answers. Then it's a wrap. It's down. And again I wonder: Is it the case? Is it reality, or is it just me? Is it just Mike Hoolihan?
Trader says it's like calling shots in a ballgame. It even fucks with your eyes. You call a good ball out because you wish it out. You wish it out so bad that you 'see' it out. You have an agenda—to win, to prevail. And it fucks with your eyes.
When I was working murders it sometimes felt like TV: But the wrong way around. As if some dope had watched a murder mystery (based on a true story?) and was bringing it back for you the wrong way around. As if TV was the master criminal, beaming out gameplans to the somnambulists of the street. You're thinking: This is ketchup. Ketchup from a squeezer that's getting crusty around the spout.
I am taking a good firm knot and reducing it to a mess of loose ends. And why would I see it like that if it wasn't so? It's the last thing I want. This way, I don't win. This way, I don't prevail.
But let's ride with the ketchup—with the procedural ketchup of questions and numbers and expert testimony. Then we can do the 'noir'. I may still be provably wrong.
This is where we came in.
On the phone I said that I would be buying, but when we're standing at the bar in the Decoy Room and facing that palisade of booze Paulie No flattens out a twenty and asks me: What's your poison?
And I say seltzer.
There's a lilt in his voice and his fold-lidded eyes are downward glancing. Since he's apparently twigged that I'm off from CID just now, he seems to think that this is tantamount to a date. Unexpected, because I'd always fingered him for a fruit. Like every other pathologist you ever came across. As if anybody gives a fuck, one way or the other.
We talk about five-irons and RBIs and whether the Pushers have what it takes to beat the Rapists next Saturday, or whatever, and then I say, Paulie. This conversation never happened, okay?
... 'What' conversation?
Thanks, Paulie. Paulie. Remember when you cut the Rockwell girl?
Most definitely. Every day it should be like that.
It beats bursters, right, Paulie?
It beats floaters. Hey. We going to talk dead bodies? Or we going to talk living meat?
No speaks perfect American but he looks like Fu Manchu's nephew. I'm staring at his mustache, which is shiny but also patchy, threadbare. Christ, he's like the guy under the earphones in the Crescent. I mean it's pretty basic, isn't it: Why have a mustache when it just 'didn't happen?' His hands are clean, puffy, and gray. Like the hands of some dish-plunging stiff in a diner kitchen. I congratulate myself. I'm flesh and blood, not hide and ice: I can still get the creeps around Paul No, a state cutter who loves his job. But every ten minutes I'm shuddering at the thought of how hardbitten I've gotten.
'The night is young, Paulie. Eric: Another beer for Dr. No.'
'... With suicides, know what they used to do?'
'What, Paulie?'
'Dissect the brain looking for special lesions. Suicide lesions. Caused by?'
'Tell me.'
'Masturbation.'
'That's interesting. This is interesting also. There was a tox report on the Rockwell girl. You didn't see it.'
'Why would I?'
'Yeah well the Colonel had it shitcanned.'
'Mm-hm. What was it? Marijuana?' Then, horrifically overdoing the mock-horror, he said,''Cocaine?''
'Lithium.'
Somehow, we all bought the lithium. We all swallowed it. Colonel Tom, down to his last marble. Hi Tulkinghorn, going lean and mean into his own little end-zone. Trader—because he believed her dying words. Because he felt the special weight, as testimony, of dying words. And I, too, bought and swallowed. Because otherwise...
'Lithium?' he said. 'No way. Lithium? Fuck no.'
Here we are in the Decoy Room, the day after April Fool's: These, surely, are not Jennifer's jokes. It's just the world being heavy-handed. Similarly, in the center of the room, over the white baby grand, the sleepy-looking... Let me recast that sentence. Over the white baby grand the pianist with the big hair is playing 'Night Train.' Of all things. In the Oscar Peterson style, but with trills and graces. Not passion and muscle. I make my head do a half circle and expect to see, straddling the next stool along, Am Debs's tense and keg-like thighs. But all I get are the Monday-night drinkers, and decoys, decoys, and the wall of hooch, and the bubbling tideline on No's mustache.
I say so don't tell me. An individual's on that shit for a time. Maybe a year. What would you see?
He says oh you'd most certainly be seeing signs of renal damage there. After maybe a month. Most definitely.
I say seeing what signs?
He says distal tubules where the salt was reabsorbed. The thyroid, also, would underfunction and enlarge.
I say and the Rockwell girl?
He says no fucking way. Her organ tree was like a wall chart. The kidneys? They were dinner. No, man. She was—she was like Plan A.
'Paulie, this conversation never happened.'
'Yeah yeah.'
'I believe you're going to keep that promise, Paulie. I always liked and trusted you.'
'You did? I thought you had a thing against slants.'
'Me? No,' I said. And earnestly. I have no idea what I'm feeling. Random stabs of love and hate. But I gave the cop shrug and said, 'No, Paulie. It's just that you seemed so absorbed in your job.'
'That's true.'
'This has been nice and we'll do it again soon. But just so we understand each other. You keep your mouth shut about Jennifer Rockwell. Or Colonel Tom will put you out. Believe it, Paul. You won't be cutting on Battery and Jefferson. You'll be bucket boy at Final Rest. But I trust you and I know you'll keep your promise to me. That's what you got my respect for.'
'Have another one, Mike.'
'For the road.'
I felt relief like luxury when I added, 'Just a seltzer. Yeah, sure, why not?'
Tobe is attending a video-game tournament and will not be home till eleven. It's now nine. At ten I have a phone date with Colonel Tom. So it should work out. I'm sitting here at the kitchen table with my notebook, my tape recorder, my PC. I'm wearing my latest golf pants, with the big gold check, and a white Brooks Brothers shirt. And I'm thinking... Oh, Jennifer, you wicked girl.
It's a phone date with Colonel Tom because I won't be able to do this face to face. For several reasons. One of them being that Colonel Tom always knows when I'm not telling the truth. He'll say, 'Meet my eye, Mike'—like a parent. And I wouldn't be able to do that.
Today in the 'Times' there's a piece about a recently recognized mental disorder called the Paradise Syndrome. I thought: Look no further. That was what Jennifer had. Turns out it's just this thing where ignorant billionaires—stars of soap and rock and ballpark—succeed in rigging up some worries for themselves. Some boobytraps—pitfalls in paradise. 'Zugts afen mir'. Say it about me. I look around the apartment—the hip-high heaps of computer magazines, the dust on my framed commendations. No less than what you'd expect, in the habitat of half a ton of slob and slut. No Paradise Syndrome here. We're clean. In the 'Times' there's also a follow-up report and an editorial about the microbes on the rock from Mars. A single smear of three-billion-year-old jizz, and suddenly they're all saying, 'We are not alone.'