Treadmill (7 page)

It had taken Cooper longer than he thought to locate the health clubs’ mailing list from a list wholesaler in New York. Cooper had told him that he was selling home exercise equipment and needed all potential customers, particularly in the Maryland suburbs of the Washington Metropolitan Area.

To the man at the list house, it was a routine request and quickly obliged. Cooper promised him that he would FedEx a check that same day if they sent the list in label form. Despite his dwindling bank account, Cooper was willing to make the sacrifice. Finding Parrish had quickly evolved from a mere interruption to an obsession, and into a crusade. He needed to follow the path to where it led, as if it were an unsolved crime.

He was more than an hour behind schedule when he left his building and jogged to the club. He decided that under no circumstances would he give up his workouts. Parrish would never allow him to do that. He jogged swiftly.

It was a warm day and he was starting to perspire. Stopping briefly, he swabbed his forehead with his sleeve. At that moment a strange feeling came over him. Although he knew he was relatively alone and anonymous on the streets, he sensed that he was being watched. It was a sensation not unlike the night before when he abruptly saw a familiar face. He turned his head until his peripheral vision revealed the square blockhouse body of Melnechuck, wearing a knitted hat pulled low over his eyes. He resumed his jogging, Melnechuck still behind him, also jogging, but at a much slower pace than Cooper.

Cooper entered the lobby of Bethesda. He showed his card, then suddenly became aware of someone coming in the door. It was Melnechuck. He nodded toward him, and Melnechuck nodded back. Cooper put his tote bag in his usual locker and went to the weight room. Beth also nodded to him as he came in, and he acknowledged her with his own. Blake wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Also missing was Anni Corazon, the Filipino woman. Sig Kessler was using the weight machines.

As he ran on the treadmill, Cooper felt a certain strangeness taking possession of him. He remembered that Parrish was paid in cash. Obviously, Parrish himself also dealt in cash with Bethesda. They might not have recorded his payment, but if Parrish had joined another club, perhaps that club did keep accurate records.

In the sauna, Kessler again tried to engage Cooper in conversation. Since he had finished his workout late, Cooper had expected, and hoped, that Kessler would be long gone.

“Have you been coming here for awhile?” Kessler asked.

“About six months,” Cooper replied, although he had no interest in being polite. Rudeness might shut the man up. Parrish’s disappearance had taught him that getting involved with people in the club could have untoward consequences. It was safer to stay uninvolved.

Kessler patted his belly, which was slightly mounded.

“Can’t seem to get rid of this,” he said.

“Just keep at it,” Cooper said, cutting short his time in the sauna. He grunted a goodbye.

Cooper sat at his place at the lunch counter and ordered a sandwich and a Coke. He had no illusions that he could escape the attention of Beth Davis. Not long after his sandwich arrived she was next to him. She ordered a cup of coffee.

“I see your schedule is really loused up, Jack,” she said. “You were about an hour late.”

“Still clocking me,” he sighed, showing no real desire to engage in the conversation. How else was he going to get her off his back?

“Guess you had something more important to do,” she said. There seemed an edge of sarcasm in the remark and he turned to look at her. She smiled and her big eyes looked directly into his.

Not sarcasm
, he decided. Something worse, something proprietary. She was burrowing in.

“I don’t see why it should be any concern of yours,” he said, biting into his sandwich. She nodded. “I know.”

“You know what?” he snapped. “I really don’t get your concern about Parrish or your reasons for accosting me. I’m sorry if you think I’m rude, but that’s the way it is.”

“In other words, you want me to get out of your face.”

“I didn’t put it that way.”

The woman paused, sucked in a deep breath, her nostrils flared. She was silent for a long moment, but when she began to speak again her demeanor underwent a change. Her concern was palpable.

“You’re right, you don’t know why I should be worried,” she said. Her eyes had moistened.

Oh God, not tears
, he thought. Tears provoked sympathy, and sympathy provoked engagement. Engagement was the enemy.

“If I said something hurtful, I apologize. I just don’t know why you…well…why you’re so persistent! If you haven’t noticed, I like my space! I like the way I’ve arranged my life!” Why was he telling her this?

“Believe me, Jack, I don’t want to interfere with your life,” she said. The glaze in her eyes had diminished. “In fact, that’s the last thing I want to interfere with.”

“So we understand each other. Nothing personal.”

“I’ve always understood that. It’s only….” Her voice had lowered to a whisper. She looked around her cautiously, but didn’t go on.

“Only what?” he prompted.

“You don’t see anything odd. Off-key?”

Cooper glanced around. “Like what?”

He wanted to tell her that he thought he might have solved the mystery of Parrish’s name being off the books, but he held back. She would insist on details, press him further.

“That’s the point,” she said.

“What is?”

“It’s so subtle. The way they act. Blake. Melnechuck. Anni. This new man. You didn’t notice?”

She was bringing a level of paranoia into the discussion that he couldn’t comprehend. He saw the woman behind the counter watching him. He quickly nodded, a gesture for her to take his plate away. She came forward. Cooper reached into his pocket for money to pay the check and stood up.

Get me the hell out of here
, he cautioned himself.

“I really have to go,” he said, hoping that she would interpret his attitude as complete indifference, and fearful of being drawn deeper into this strange situation. He waved a perfunctory goodbye and walked toward the exit, leaving Beth still sitting at the table. But he wasn’t more than half a block from Bethesda when he heard her voice behind him.

“Wait, Jack!”

He pretended not to hear and started to jog. He heard her coming up behind him.
My God, she would probably follow me to my apartment.
He slowed down and waited for her to catch up.

“I know you think I’m being a pain in the ass,” she said. Perspiration covered her forehead.

“Now that you mention it,” he sighed. “Really, Beth, I don’t know what’s going through your mind. If it’s Parrish that’s still bugging you, forget it. I think we’ve read too much into it. He paid cash for everything, and it’s obvious that his payment wasn’t recorded. Case closed.”

“Are you saying you’ve stopped looking for him?” she asked pointedly.

“What I do is my business.”

He suddenly realized that he had given himself away and it annoyed him.

“Please,” he said. “I don’t know what your game is, but I don’t care. I would appreciate it if you left me alone.”

“You think I’m paranoid, don’t you?”

He sucked in a deep breath. “I don’t want to think anything.”

“But you’re still thinking about Parrish, wondering what happened to him.”

He started to move away from her. She caught up again.

“You’re wrong about Parrish,” she said. Cooper stopped, exasperated. Before he could comment, she continued. “I went through their records. They recorded Parrish’s dues scrupulously.”

“Who cares?” Cooper snapped. “So I was wrong.”

“Very,” she said. He felt suddenly rooted to the spot.

“Now do you see?”

“See what?”

“You must be blind,” she said, irritated.

“Maybe so,” he acknowledged. “And if I am, that’s the way I like it. Frankly, this whole involvement with you sucks. I want no part of it. I want you to leave me alone. I’m not interested in your theories, your investigations, and your suspicions. Just leave me alone!”

“You won’t find Parrish,” she said.

He shook his head turned away from her, and headed back to his apartment. A few blocks later when he looked back, Beth Davis was nowhere to be seen.

He puzzled over Beth’s parting remark and dismissed it as yet another of her ploys to engage him. But after a few blocks, the feeling that he experienced earlier returned. He sensed that someone was following him.

Can’t be
, he told himself. Beth had done a good job of transferring her paranoia to him.

As he crossed the street, he took the opportunity to observe what was going on behind him. Nothing unusual.
Why has she done this?
He berated himself for ever allowing himself to become involved with Beth Davis. But her revelations rattled around in his head, especially the business with discovering that Blake had maintained the dues receipts. Her investigation seemed so specific, so targeted. She would have actually had to enter his office, snoop around. What had put such an idea in her mind? This whole situation had all seemed so benign at first. Parrish, the lost child. Gone.

Still the feeling would not go away.
Why would anyone be following me?
Except Beth Davis….
Again, he turned. Nothing. Cooper decided that this feeling was another manifestation of abandoning his life in the “now” mode. It confirmed what he had known instinctively, that controlling one’s life was the result of extraordinary mental and physical discipline. Any deviation resulted in chaos. Come what may, he had to get back on that routine, and avoid any interference, especially Beth Davis.
And Parrish
, he added as an afterthought, remembering suddenly what was arriving the following day by FedEx.

Inexplicably, he started to run. He was sprinting, accelerating as he went, as if he were in some sort of a race. He tried to focus his mind on movement, balling his fists, swinging his arms to increase his rhythm and speed, his tote bag straining his shoulders. He felt his heart thumping, a hard steady pace, the deep inhaling and exhaling oxygenating his body. He watched his feet fly under him. Yet he could not shake the feeling that he was being followed. Perhaps even pursued.

Struck by the absurdity of his own behavior, he slowed down and looked behind him once again. As his eyes swept the area, he noticed a black car. It seemed to be moving slower than the rest of the traffic, hugging the right lane.

The sensation became maddening. He accelerated again, and made an unaccustomed turn off the main road into a street that fed into a row of neat suburban detached homes. He had no idea whether the road he was taking would end in another outlet or dead-end. Inside the houses he saw people sitting down to dinner, television sets turned on. Rivulets of perspiration were running down his back, between his shoulder blades.

He heard a car rolling behind him. It put him in a double bind. On the one hand, he wanted confirm this sensation of being followed, but on the other, knowing he was being pursued would confirm his fears.

Ahead, he could see a cross street coming up. He knew if he made the turn, and if the car made the same turn, then he was being followed. At this point he needed to know whether or not paranoia was destroying his powers of reason.

As he prepared to the cross street, Cooper looked back. He could no longer see the car. When he reached Wisconsin Avenue again, Cooper forced himself to slow down to a brisk walk. His heart was pounding harshly against his rib cage and the sweat had soaked through his clothes.

Just as Cooper entered the lobby of his apartment building, he noted his reflection in the glass door, and behind him, again, a black car. He saw it just as it pulled into the service driveway of a building across the street. He assured himself that it was not the same car, reasoning that were hundreds of black cars in the Washington area, perhaps thousands, and that if he kept this up he would eventually believe that most people and all black cars were converging on him.

By the time Cooper had let himself into his apartment, his diagnosis of his behavior was ominous. He had had a secretary who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia for which she had been once institutionalized. She had been a person who lived alone and put all energies into her job.

One day she told Cooper that she was hearing voices on the phone instructing her to quit her job and go back to Massachusetts where she had grown up. At first, Cooper had thought that this was her way of saying that she wanted to quit, and he was sympathetic towards her. She could have been the type of person who could not abide by any kind of confrontation. Then she told him that the voice was that of the President of the United States, and that he was spouting obscene remarks and making sexual overtures. She called the police. They came to her office and interviewed her. After the interview, she was taken directly to the mental ward of the Washington Hospital Center. To her, the voices were real. To Cooper, the sense of being followed was just as real. It recalled the dilemma of the hero in Franz Kafka’s book,
The Trial
, in which a man was pursued and persecuted for no apparent reason by anonymous forces.

Once inside his apartment, he double-locked his door, and looked through the window. The black car was still parked across the street. He could not clearly see who the driver was. He closed the blinds, took a shower, toweled off, and put a Healthy Choice into the microwave. Before he sat down to eat, he peeked through the slits in the blinds. It had grown dark, but the black car was still in the driveway.

Cooper tried to interest himself in
The Magic Mountain
as he ate his food, but every few minutes he got up and looked outside again. The car was there each time. Finally, Cooper put the book away, lay down on his bed, and tried to sleep. But his frenetic thoughts would not allow it. Images of Parrish, Beth, Blake, Melnechuck, Anni, Kessler, and the others in the club tumbled in his mind. Beth had confronted him, accusing him of being unaware, that he had not seen the truth. Was he really blind? He wondered if she had been right.
But right about what?

Uncertainty was exhausting him, but he couldn’t sleep; he kept getting out of bed to look out the window. The black car remained. He decided that he would not rest until he knew for sure. Was someone in the black car watching him?
Who is it?

Sometime before dawn, he got up, dressed in his jogging clothes, and went down into the lobby. A night clerk looked up at him as he got out of the elevator. He was a student from Africa, and used the time to study.

“Can’t sleep,” Cooper told him, to justify what could be considered out of the ordinary.

“Happens sometimes,” the clerk replied in heavily accented English.

Cooper paced the lobby for a few moments and looked out of the window where he could get a better view of the car’s interior than he could have from his apartment. He thought he saw a figure seated in the driver’s seat. It was time to act.

But just as he pushed open the swinging glass doors of the lobby and headed for the car, its headlights burst through the darkness, partially blinding him. Tires squealed, and it sped out of the driveway. Cooper stood there, bewildered.

Returning to his apartment, he pulled the upholstered chair to the window and surveilled the street in front of the building. If the car returned, then it would absolutely validate that he was being watched. With singleness of purpose, he kept watch. He tried desperately to stay alert and resist sleep. He pinched himself, slapped his cheeks, sang—anything to keep from drifting off.

The car did not return. Occasionally he dozed, drifting off, losing track of time. He’d check his watch: sometimes he caught himself sleeping for five minutes, sometimes for more. He’d suddenly jolt awake, and then slip back into a short troubled sleep. Finally, he felt his consciousness fragment and disappear completely.

By the time he awoke it was after 8:00 AM. He had slept three hours of deep, dreamless sleep. The sun had risen, and an orange glow covered the brick buildings across the street. The space where the black car had been was empty.

In the light of day, Cooper was almost able to dispel his panic from the night before. Reason seemed to be returning, although he still could not dismiss his antagonism toward Beth. She would gain nothing from what she was doing to him, and in the meantime it was only disrupting his life.

He made himself some coffee, taking big sips while packing his tote bag. In the lobby, he remembered the FedEx package he was expecting from the list company. He was surprised it had escaped his mind until now.

“FedEx arrive yet?” he asked the day clerk.

“About five minutes ago,” the man replied.

The clerk looked around the desk area where packages were usually left. He picked up two packages and read the recipients’ names.

“Nothing. Sorry, Mr. Cooper.”

“Are you certain?”

“See for yourself.”

He looked at the labels on the two packages. Neither were for him. Perhaps the list company had forgotten or had missed the FedEx pickup. His immediate instinct was to ignore the foul-up and close the Parrish chapter once and for all. But this mishap, combined with everything that had happened the previous day, prodded his curiosity. Using the phone at the desk, he called the toll free FedEx number.

“There was a pickup at our main Bethesda office,” the customer service lady said after she checked the computer.

“A pickup? I thought it was supposed to be delivered.”

“It normally is, but in this case it was picked up by the man to whom it was addressed. Jack Cooper.”

“You must have it wrong. I’m Jack Cooper. I never picked up anything”

The woman paused.

“It’s in the computer,” the woman said.

“I don’t care what’s in the computer. I’m Jack Cooper and I didn’t pick it up.”

“It could be a mix-up,” the woman said. “We’ll trace it, and call you back.”

He hung up. Experience had taught him that it was almost impossible to argue with a computer’s alleged knowledge.

Stay cool
, he urged himself. There was no point in trying to sort everything out all at once. He doubted that it was a mix-up. He was sure that someone had impersonated him and picked up the package. The demons of the night before rushed back into his mind. Something
had
happened. He felt a sense of strange relief in that idea; it proved that he wasn’t being paranoid after all. His sanity was no longer at issue. Now, only his fear was left to be dealt with.

“Am I not Jack Cooper?” he asked the day clerk angrily.

“Yes, you are Mr. Cooper,” the man at the desk responded, totally confused.

“Just wanted to make sure.”

Cooper felt violated. Someone had used his name and taken his property. He used the desk phone again and called the list company.

“Got a problem,” Cooper told him. “I lost the list you sent me.”

“Lost?”

“I misplaced it I guess. I feel like a damned fool.”

The man, a rare bird, was actually sympathetic, and promised to send another list immediately. But Cooper wanted immediate action.

“I am badly in need of a control name and address that I need to confirm.”

He knew from his days at the advertising agency how this worked. They would often place a “control name” on a list to find out if it was up to date.

“Alright. What was the name?”

“Mike Parrish.” Cooper’s free hand was shaking.

“Mike Parrish. Got it.”

“And the address?” Cooper asked, his throat constricting. He coughed to clear it.

“8750 Georgia Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland.”

He wrote down the number on the back of an old business card in his wallet, thanked the man, and hung up.

He couldn’t believe how simple it had been. He had a vague idea of where the address was located: a lower-middle class area, probably an apartment community. Somehow it had also demystified Parrish’s disappearance, and with that had come a diminishing of its importance. Nevertheless, he couldn’t ignore what was happening to him as a result of his interest in Parrish.

Now he was suspecting Parrish himself. He could be behind these bizarre happenings. Parrish could have deleted his name from Bethesda’s files, Parrish impersonating him at the FedEx pickup. It could even have been Parrish following him, watching him.
But why?
Cooper decided that Beth’s theory about the people in the club was wrong. Maybe Parrish simply didn’t want to be found or maybe Parrish was mixed up in some secret government agency, CIA, the FBI, or even to some above top-secret agency. The government, he supposed, was all-powerful, ubiquitous. It could do anything, including the odd episodes that bedeviled Cooper in the last few days.

If Parrish was a government agent, that would explain why he was excised from the files, why he paid in cash for everything, why he was so tight-lipped and mysterious. Perhaps he had even concocted the story about being a stolen baby in order to prevent people from trying to discover his true identity. Another explanation could be that Parrish was mixed up in some illegal scam, a drug ring, the mob. He was a hit man, or something worse. Perhaps Parrish had been suspicious of Cooper, which might explain why he was being observed. Indeed, nothing extraordinary had happened to him until he began his inquiries about Parrish.