Green, green, and more green, he knew. That was what.
“I’m fine, sweetie,” he told her again, feeling a little closer to the pronouncement than a moment before. The little hiccup of old, bitter memory was gone now, back where it belonged in some dark corner of his head where such things brooded until roused. “Really, I’m fine.”
She nodded obligingly, though she wondered about his sincerity. But she would not let that show. As she’d reconfirmed a few minutes before, she would allow him his space. All the space he needed. “Go home, babe,” she suggested, taking his receipt and change from the front of her apron and putting it on the counter where his plate had been. “Kick off your shoes and put on the TV. Have a beer and just relax. Hmm?”
“That may be a good idea,” he agreed quite honestly. Put on the tube, catch the end of a MacGyver rerun, sip a cold one, and let the day fade. Fade like all things faded. “I think I will.”
She leaned close and planted a soft kiss on his cheek, poking a little tongue between her lips just because, and then she walked around the plating station and into the kitchen. Jay watched her until she was gone, and then he reached for his change, thinking that he should probably leave a big tip for his girl (despite the circular meaninglessness of such a gesture), but he never got past the consideration stage of the tip quandary because when he saw the change that Carrie had brought him and placed on the counter all thoughts stilled. His breath gasped softly out. His heart raced.
There was a ten and a one left from his twenty, and atop the paper laid seven coins. Three quarters, a nickel, three pennies, and all were heads.
Air slowly filled his lungs once more as he straightened on the stool, recoiling slightly from the sight. The seven coins. The eighty three cents. All of them heads.
He swallowed and breathed. Breathed. Breathed. His mouth was parched, but he did not reach for the water glass very near his right hand. Instead, he reached for the coins.
There were no sounds, no sights around him as his fingers brushed over the small rounds of metal and took them in hand. There was only the coins. The feel of them. The fear of them. The want of them.
He raised his fist over the counter and opened it. The seven coins dribbled down, and bounced, and rolled, and spun, and then settled. Settled with seven heads to the unseen sky.
And the voice that was not a voice, that was pure
knowing
, telling him, prompting him,
Zee Zee Tee
.
ZZT
“It’s not over,” Jay whispered to himself, a small, hungry grin curling onto his lips. “It’s not over at all.”
Second Interrogation
August 15...12:55 a.m.
“It was only the beginning,” Jay told Mr. Wright, bringing his cuffed hands up from his lap to wipe his mouth. “It happened again, and again, and just kept on happening. Once, twice, sometimes three times in one day. I’d get change from a cup of coffee, or at the market, or the video store, or Carrie would dump her purse on the kitchen counter, and wherever it fell there would be heads. Not every single time, but enough. And when it did, I’d know.”
“You’d know,” Mr. Wright said, his fingers tapping in repeated sequence—pinkie, ring, middle, index, pinkie, ring, middle, index. He paused for a moment, saying nothing, just the muted, rhythmic thud-thud-thud-thud, thud-thud-thud-thud of calloused fingertips against the back of his other hand to vie with the hum of the fluorescents overhead. “You’d know what stock to buy because some little voice that wasn’t a voice whispered it to you. Is that your story, Grady?”
There might have been some mocking intended, but what was there to do? Protest? To who? Jay wondered, reaching with one of his bound hands to rub just above the cast on his throbbing left leg. No protest would be entertained here, he knew, and no prayer either, so he massaged the hot skin beneath the cut off leg of his pants and simply nodded in reply to Mr. Wright’s question.
“All from a bunch of coins,” Mr. Wright commented. His fingers stilled, and in his small notebook he wrote something quickly, then flipped the cover closed. “Coins that came up all heads?”
Jay nodded, knowing there was no way to convey just what it had been. What the knowing had felt like. How real, how tangible it was, like... “It was like some new instinct had just switched on inside of me,” he told his captor, but the stab at an explanation seemed not to impress, and dissipated completely in the silence that followed.
The fluorescents hummed alone for a moment as Mr. Wright thought to himself. About what, Jay could only imagine, though he tried not to.
“And you told no one about this? Not a soul?”
Jay snickered. “Lousy brokers make lousy money. Crazy brokers—or those who say crazy things—make less than lousy brokers.”
Mr. Wright thought quietly again for a time, his gaze mining his prisoner’s face, his look, his tried and tired features, very carefully as though recording every wrinkle, every minute muscle twitch, every possible thing that there was to see. His own wanting showing again. But what was it he wanted? Jay wondered in spite of his efforts to not. What exactly was this all about?
The man emerged finally from his silent consideration of the exchange and asked. “Have you ever suffered a head injury, Grady?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Mr. Wright’s blue stare flushed instantly hot. “Answer the damn question!”
“No,” Jay said, then almost immediately he reconsidered his reply and reached up, his cuffed hands in tandem, and touched the fine ridge of scar tissue beneath his hairline just above his left temple.
“What?” Mr. Wright asked, seeing this.
“I got cut,” Jay said, thinking ‘just a scratch’. Flying glass. A few stitches. Good as new. Just a band aid over the spot had showed at the funeral. “In an accident.”
“The car accident? When your parents were killed?”
Jay nodded. A few stitches had fixed him right up, and he remembered dreaming back then that the doctors had just stitched up his parents, and that his mother had come into his room with her head sewn back on like some Frankenstein monster and her teeth put jaggedly back in place by big, shiny bolts that glinted savagely when she smiled. He’d had that dream for a while, and sometimes one where his father would be walking in from the field, fire licking skyward from him in great ribbons of black and orange flame, the smoke from the inferno rising and coalescing into puffs that became shapes that became coal black birds with orange eyes that fluttered about the foul air above him, screaming as though inside they were ablaze.
And then the dreams had gone. That fall they had gone. School had come, Carrie had come, and the dreams had gone. Life moved on.
“Just cut?”
The answer took a few seconds in coming. “Yes.”
“No concussion?”
Jay didn’t answer directly, instead glancing at the file that supposedly held his life in paper form. “I thought you had everything about me in there, such as medical records?”
“Everything isn’t known at once,” Mr. Wright told him. “That’s partly why you’re still talking.”
Threat? Reminder? Carrot, maybe? Did it matter which his captor’s words were? Jay was talking, after all, and it hadn’t killed him. A few mental rivets were hissing, threatening to pop, but all was holding for now.
But, then, he’d hardly told a thing yet. Just a story. A fairy tale, some might say. A tale of bright and sunny times.
But times changed, Jay knew. How would the rivets do when he got to that part. A part not so far off, now.
“Concussion, Grady?” Mr. Wright asked once more.
Jay looked at him. He’d come this far. He could go on. Would go on. And from the odd paths of his captor’s questions, striking this way and that way like the spastic needle of a compass at the north pole, he knew he would have to lead the way. “What do you think, some whack on the head gave this thing to me? Well, it didn’t.”
“You sound like you know how you got it.”
“I know exactly how I got it.”
“How?”
“I was leaving work on Friday,” Jay began.
“Day five of your...streak?”
Streaks end, Jay thought. Nightmares could come back, and back, and back again. “Right. Anyway, it was like any other Friday. I was walking to the subway like I always did, was going to meet the guys at Buffalo Kabuki’s like almost every Friday. Except that night they wanted to drink it up, you know. Celebrate my sudden success. Fine with me. I was starting to get into it. Starting to like my new little gift, and besides, I wanted to see that waitress again because that damn name of hers was still bugging me.”
“Irrelevant shit?” Mr. Wright prompted.
“It turned out not to be,” Jay said soberly. “You see, I was thinking about her like crazy the last few hours of work, and when I was walking down the street just outside the office I was racking my brain—
What is her name? What iiiiis it?
Walking and asking myself that, and then...” Jay drifted back, stepping into the moment, the memory, and he could feel the city pulse around him, could hear the traffic ahead on Broadway, could see the spire of Trinity Church and below it very near the curb he could see Sign Guy. “...and then I saw his sign.”
Mr. Wright drew a shallow, anticipatory breath that was lost on Jay. “What did it say?”
Seven
A Gift Horse
H E R N A M E
I S S U Z Y
For a second it didn’t register, and in that tiny slice of time the sign that Jay Grady saw as he approached the crosswalk at Broadway and Wall was just another odd proclamation that the bum had given the world that day. But when the first suspicious synapses fired in his brain and made the very logical connection to a particular and recent event (not to mention the very question—the
very
one!—that was sputtering about in his head right then), Jay slowed abruptly, as if the air before him had suddenly thickened. A few yards short of Broadway, with traffic still zipping over the safe lane the crosswalk would soon be, he stopped completely and gaped at the sight before Trinity Church.
Her Name Is Suzy
And damned if it wasn’t.
Double
damned if it wasn’t. Suzy the waitress. Suzy with the wiggle. Suzy whose name had eluded him since a week ago this very day. But now...now he knew. He knew! But...
That wasn’t exactly right. He didn’t
know
; he had been
reminded
.
Only, how could that be?
For a moment he wondered if he should be questioning events of inexplicable nature, considering all that had happened. All that he had accepted, or acquiesced to, without understanding. On a river in a current he could not see, could only ride with his eyes still wide. Yes, that current he had deferred to. The knowing that was its flow he did embrace. But
this
? This sign the bum had propped against his knees and what was told upon it? This sign about pretty little Suzy, whose forgotten name he would have learned that night in any case? Where did
it
come from? And why? And how?
New questions, Jay thought, but ones that could be asked. That
would
be asked.
And on that determination, Jay’s body seemed to emerge from the molassified air that had engulfed it and he walked on. Toward the crosswalk, stopping at the curb and waiting for the light to change. Waiting and staring and wondering, and even rationalizing. Was the sign simply some coincidental cosmic hiccup (was everything that had happened, for that matter?), or was it more? More than black paint on whitewashed wood? And just what the hell might ‘more’ be?
Jay stared and wondered, in a way both wary and curious, wanting to know what this sign was, what it meant. He waited for the light to grant him passage. Waited and watched, and across the street the tall, slender spire of Trinity Church, silhouetted with the glow of the fading day behind it, laid a dim gray shadow across Broadway. A shadow in which Sign Guy sat, looking toward Jay.
No—looking directly
at
Jay. Looking and smiling, and between the flicker of cars passing between them, Jay saw the bum’s left hand come up, and two fingers spread to flash him the peace sign across the river of traffic.
Peace, brother
. That was what he was saying, his lips forming those two words between flashes of cars and taxis and the occasional delivery truck. Mouthing his queer little greeting, to which Jay blankly nodded recognition and watched as the V of his two fingers slowly collapsed to a loose fist atop that day’s very serendipitous sign.
The light changed and Jay moved, stepping between the fat white lines with hardly a conscious thought of the motion. He felt drawn forward, sucked toward the far side of Broadway by the void of an unfilled desire, an unanswered question. He simply had to know about the sign. Had to.
The bum’s happy gaze stayed upon him as he crossed, and at the opposite curb, where Jay could have turned right toward the subway (where years later he would wish he had turned and just run, baby, run) and a night at BK’s with the guys to celebrate one very incredible week, he did not. He stopped, and he looked left, and he saw Sign Guy beaming at him, and he went to him.
“Peace, brother,” Sign Guy said again, his greeting audible now, the traffic noise just a background hum that paled around his sharp and pleasant tone.
“Your sign,” Jay said, skipping any pleasantries.
“I gave it a new coat of white last night. It looks good, doesn’t it.” He admired his handiwork with a glance, then patted the top of the sign like a father might the head of his toddler and looked back to Jay. “Stark, I think. Makes things clear. Very clear. Don’t you agree?”
“What does it mean?” Jay asked quite directly.
A look, a funny look, a coy look, maybe, and then, “It means what it means, of course.”
Jay shook his head, because that was not good enough. No way. Not for this, it wasn’t. He needed an answer, a real answer, and he was going to get it. “Listen, I need to know exactly what—”