Treadmill (9 page)

Cooper considered the parallels of their experience with Parrish. It was true. Parrish’s only sin seemed to be that he was there, a mysterious presence.

“So, what are you thinking?”

“I’ve got this…idea.” Cooper cleared his throat. “I can’t seem to shake it away. Like he was into some weird thing.”

“Some weird thing? Like what?”

“Sounds ridiculous,” Cooper said. “Something conspiratorial. I can’t quite put my finger on it. But if you see it from my perspective…all those things that have happened to me….”

Susan stood up suddenly. Then she looked out of the rear window, studying the view.

Cooper watched her. She appeared to be considering everything he had just told her. He could hear the percolator bubbling in the kitchen.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” she said.

“What is?”

“I guess you might say that we’re both in a unique predicament because of Parrish.”

“Some good might come of this yet,” he said.

Susan went into the kitchen. She brought out two cups and poured the coffee. He noted that like him, she also took hers black. She gave him a full cup on a saucer, and brought hers to the couch and balanced it on her knees. Cooper waited for it to cool. He was feeling the fatigue of his long night, and hoped that the caffeine would revitalize him. For a long time they stared at each other and said nothing.

“Did he ever tell you about his being a stolen baby?” he said, taking a deep sip of his coffee.

An exclamatory sound escaped her lips. “He told you that?”

“You, too?” Cooper asked.

“I thought it was an exclusive. I mean it’s so…so personal…for a man like Parrish to reveal it to….”

“Just anybody?” he said.

It flashed across his mind that maybe there was more between Susan and Parrish than she was revealing. And had there been something between he and Parrish?

“My own view,” Cooper said as if it were important to express, “is that he probably needed to tell people, a kind of confession. It might even have given him a piece of the one thing he never had.”

“What was that?”

“Identity.”

“My, we’re getting metaphysical,” Susan said. He finished his coffee. She hadn’t touched hers. “Here we are, reading things into Parrish, his persona and motives. Bizarre, isn’t it? He made this impression on us, and we both know very little about him. All he is to me is a strange neighbor. I expect the next time we meet will be when he says good-bye and collects his key. I mean,
if
he says good-bye.”

Cooper stiffened.

“Key?”

“You know. Just in case we had deliveries when we weren’t home. He had ours. Neighbors do that.”

Cooper had the impression that she had not meant this fact to surface.

“Can I persuade you to open his door?”

Susan frowned. “Somehow that rubs me the wrong way,” she said.

“Me, too,” Cooper said. “But these are special circumstances.”
Are they really?

She ran her fingers through her hair, thinking through the moral quandary.

“What will that prove?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. But I do sense some weird things happening because of him. I would like to to know more, and I don’t mind taking the risk. Hell, I don’t intend to burglarize the place. Or even look through anything.”

“Then why?”

“Tell you the truth, I’m not sure.”

He thought of his own apartment, strangers rummaging through his possessions. He remembered feeling a sense of violation, and here he was advocating a similar invasion of privacy.

“I don’t want any part of it,” Susan said emphatically.

“I agree. You shouldn’t.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Just open it for me. I’ll look around for a while and leave. I might learn something important.”

“I don’t know.”

“If he shows up, I’ll tell him a story,” Cooper said. “I’ll say, I broke in or something. Let’s face it. He could be the root of all my current problems.” He stood up and faced her. “There’s no harm in it. I think I just need a peek. I’ve got this strange feeling, but if you won’t want to, I’ll understand.”

Her features froze as she continued to contemplate the idea.

“I’ll open the door,” she said. “But if you get caught or something, I’ll deny I ever did it. I also want you to know, that I’m taking a chance. I mean, I believe your story, but….”

“I could be a con man or have some other motive?”

“I’ve been considering that.”

“You should,” Cooper admitted.

“What do you think you’ll find?”

“I haven’t got a clue. Only this idea that it will lead to…the end of it.” Cooper met her glance as her eyes inspected him.

Cooper suddenly felt uncomfortable, confused, and uncertain about this investment of energy in what could result in nothing. “I hope I’m not being played for a fool,” Susan said, going into the bedroom. Expectation had made his heartbeat accelerate. He had begun to perspire.

She came back, still displaying her anxiety.

“Remember. If anything goes wrong, I’ve got nothing to do with this. You were never in my apartment. We never met.”

“Agreed,” Cooper said. “Although….”

“Although what?”

“If things go right…then we can acknowledge that we have met and perhaps…we can meet again.”

“First things first,” she said, opening her apartment door. She crossed the hall, put a key in the lock of Parrish’s apartment and turned it.

“You’re on your own,” she said, going back inside her apartment and shutting the door.

The apartment was totally empty. No furniture. No possessions. No sign of Parrish ever having lived there. Being there gave Cooper an eerie feeling. He wanted to leave immediately, knock on Susan’s door and tell her the news. Then he hesitated. Was there something to learn here? Something barely articulated, a sense, a feeling that there was something here. Parrish had lived there.

Cooper looked around him. The apartment’s layout was a mirror image of Susan Haber’s place. Moving to the center of the living room, he carefully inspected the space, wall to wall, along a 360-degree arc. The walls were clean, and he pressed his nose against one of them to see if it had been freshly painted or not. It hadn’t. Even the floor showed little sign of wear. Cooper understood the irony. Parrish was a man without a real identity. He was a non-person, and he had learned to live like that.

Susan had described Parrish as self-contained, and he was certainly that. Parrish was, in a way, a kind of urban Bedouin; when he felt too exposed, he pulled up stakes and moved on. By freelancing as a layout artist, he had found a career that complimented that lifestyle, a profession where he could maintain few real ties to other people. Cooper suspected that he only worked with small firms that weren’t strict with their recordkeeping. Perhaps Parrish had found work elsewhere, somewhere it must have been even easier for him to remain anonymous. Where the absence of an identity was not a hindrance.

In a burst of insight Cooper deduced that whatever Parrish was involved with, it was because he had no identity. Cooper was sure that Parrish had no social security number, no fingerprints on file, no bank accounts, no driver’s license, no car, and no credit cards. He had probably devised a way to evade the IRS and, therefore, paid no income tax. He clearly owned no property, had no legal ties to anyone or anything.

Cooper suspected that it had to have been hard for Parrish to maintain some shred of humanity while spending most of his time evading computers, avoiding identification. When none was required, he went by the name Mike Parrish. Alternatively, he must have worked out a different system to maintain his life within the cracks. Exploring this space now, where Parrish had lived, Cooper was sure he had it right. Parrish had lived without identity since birth, but he needed to validate his own history, to prove to himself that he was alive. His body was his identity and he worked out to make certain he existed.

Cooper, too, had made an effort to obliterate his identity during the past few months. Turning inward had made him a free man. Now Cooper was back in the mainstream, and he felt trapped, even tormented.

He envied Parrish. He had evaded relationships of any kind and thereby liberated himself from all pain of loss, like Cooper had tried and failed to do. Cooper felt something for Susan, emotions he thought he had excised from his life forever. Was he falling headlong into the old pattern, courting the possibility of pain again? An attraction to Susan was the surest signal that he was returning to the land of the living where suffering was endemic to the environment, the place from where he had fled. He pushed these thoughts from his mind.

Cooper walked into the bedroom.
Here is where Parrish must have slept.
Now, the bathroom. Here he performed his ablutions.
The closets. Here the man had stored his things, his sparse collection of clothing, his underwear, socks, and trainers, dressing a body that could never be identified, in life or death.

Information about Parrish was seeping into him, entering his mind, consciously and subconsciously. Cooper leaned against a wall and slowly sank to the floor. He felt himself opening up further, understanding more about Parrish, entering Parrish’s psychic space. He had the sensation that he had reached some other place, a dreamscape. He could feel himself leaving his own body, looking down at himself, sprawled on the floor in the fetal position.

Voices floated in and out his consciousness, garbled as if coming from underwater. Sometimes the image of a face, distorted and swollen, would cry out for recognition, vaguely familiar. The voices would echo his thoughts. Colors flashed in front of him, like fireworks bursting. An iciness rolled over his chest, but the rest of his skin was hot. He felt bound. He tried to scream but no sound came.

Blind determination drove him. He knew he was hallucinating, but he tried to hold the experience in memory. It was elusive, slippery. He reached out, touched it, held it, but it slid away, out of sight, out of memory.

He saw himself sprawled on the floor, half naked, cold. Colors flashed in front of him, like fireworks bursting, then blackness, a curtain descending.

At some point, the black became grayer, and he heard a more familiar sound. It took him some time to realize that the sound was his own voice, but he didn’t know what he was saying. Then his consciousness began to return, a slow dance in his mind.

He raised his head and opened his eyes to darkness.

Where am I?

Cooper searched for recollection, but it had disappeared along with the dream. Whatever nightmare had been trapped in his head, had escaped. Using the wall for support, he got up, shaking the numbness out of his arms and legs. He looked around. His legs felt rubbery and his head ached. He slowly remembered where he was and what had happened.

He found a light switch and flicked it on. Nothing happened. Then he groped his way in the darkness until he reached the kitchen sink. He turned on the tap and put his head under the flow of cold water, then shook it off like a dog.

Apparently his sleepless night had caught up with him and he had literally crashed. He looked at his watch. It was nearly nine. How long had he been asleep? Eight? Nine hours? Cooper’s first inclination was to go to Susan’s apartment and explain what he had discovered, that Parrish was already gone. He held back. He could not shake the feeling of a crucial image lost to memory, a sequence of action badly blurred. It lingered in his mind, like the fading memory of a sharp pain. Everything that had happened since the beginning of his search for Parrish had become a surreal exercise. Even the cadence of his life had changed. He felt as if he were standing on a razor’s edge between reality and the imaginary.

Cooper moved soundlessly down the stairs and out the front door. When he reached the parking lot, he turned to contemplate the building he had just left. The lights were off in Susan’s apartment. He replayed their conversation in his mind, especially her reluctance to participate in opening Parrish’s door. Her sense of morality impressed him. For the first time in months, he had reacted to a woman, a biological normality that frightened him.

The building was dark, but as he started to turn away, an odd sight stopped him. Slivers of light had appeared behind the drawn blinds of Parrish’s apartment. At first, Cooper was confused. Perhaps he was viewing the wrong apartment. He had flicked all the light switches in Parrish’s apartment and none had worked. The moment he confirmed that the light was indeed coming from Parrish’s apartment, it disappeared.

He stood in the darkness for a long time, assembling himself, clearing his mind, validating his sanity. Could what he had just seen been a reflection? An optical illusion? Parrish’s apartment remained dark.
It’s over
, Cooper told himself. The time had come to erase Parrish from his mind. Hopefully all of the other things that were happening would also go away.

The parking lot itself was well lit, and he had no trouble finding the walkway that led through the complex. But as he headed towards the entrance, one of the cars parked nearby, illuminated by a lamppost, caught his attention.

It was a yellow Honda, two door, an old model. He inspected it for a moment. On the windshield was the distinctive logo of the Bethesda Health Club: “BHC” on a background of red, white, and blue.

Anni Corazon the Filipino woman!
He had seen the car coming out of the parking garage of the club. But Georgia Mews was a stone’s throw from the Bethesda Health Club. She probably lived there.

It was time to definitively resign from the pursuit of Parrish. He thought of Beth and chuckled. He couldn’t wait to tell her about his discovery. He felt a sense of liberation and well-being. There was no need to complicate his life any longer.

He began to jog in long steady strides, feeling his heart begin to pump harder. He picked up speed, sucking in deep breaths. A burden had been lifted.
There was no need to be watchful
, he told himself. The image of Susan Haber lingered in his mind. He saw her clearly: her face dominated by an open smile, her flowing blonde hair, her long legs and graceful body. Again, he felt the stirring of desire, stronger than before, but familiar, and natural.