Authors: Ben H. Winters
A stunned pause, then a quiet “Right.” She brings her pinky finger up to the corner of her mouth and gnaws at the nail, like a nervous child.
“And then he was found, right? In Gary, Indiana? And everyone was going meet down here in Rotary and await his arrival.”
“It was all so
stupid
.” This is the second time she’s said it, and now her eyes are flashing anger at all of this stupidity. “We sat here.
Waiting and waiting, just—
waiting
.”
She stops there, and I watch her hand rise mechanically back to her neck, her wound, her fingers twitching along the edges of the bandage. It’s like she senses it, that we are getting nearer to the heart of this conversation, to the events of Wednesday, September 26—the mud, the knives, the violence in the woods beside the station—and the nearness of it draws her and repels her, like a black hole.
I force myself to go nice and slow, get there in time. I ask her about the people she was here with, and she does, debuting more silly code names: there was not only Delighted, there was Alice, who at some point became Sailor; there was “this real smiley kid, very young, called Kingfisher.” There was a girl named Surprise and a man called Little Man, who was “super big, actually,” so that was kind of a joke. Ha-ha. They all came down via a long zigzagging van ride from Michigan, detouring to pick up a couple of people in Kalamazoo, detouring again for a ton of packing crates from a warehouse in Wauseon, west of Toledo.
I lean forward.
“And what was in those crates?”
“I don’t know, actually. I didn’t—I never saw. He said—no peeking.”
“Who did?”
No answer. She really won’t say his name; she won’t even let herself think it. I watch it appear and linger on her face, again, her palpable terror of this man, this leader. “Never mind,” I say, “go on,” and she does. She and her bunch were joined by the other group,
the group that included Nico, in late July. People came and went. As she describes the atmosphere on the lawn of the police station these last couple months, awaiting this elusive scientist, Jean’s face brightens, her body visibly unclenches. It’s like she’s talking about a garden party, like some sort of asteroid-conspiracy day camp: everybody hanging out, smoking, cooking hot dogs, flirting.
One guy in particular, she says offhandedly, was “totally in love” with Nico.
“Oh,” I say, suddenly changing my mind, suddenly wishing I had my notebook, some notebook, something. “What guy?”
“Tick,” she says.
“Tick.” Strange looking. Nervous disposition. “Did she reciprocate?”
“Ugh. No.” Jean makes a face, breathes out a tiny gale of fluttery sorority-sister laughter. “No interest. He looked like a—a horse, really. Plus he was sort of with this other girl, Valentine. But he would always make these jokes about Nico.”
“Valentine?”
“That’s her code name. Whatever. She’s so pretty. Black girl, really tall.”
Atlee saw her. I know of her already, and now I can put a name on the description. It’s so odd, to start to feel like I know these people, this world, the last one my sister lived in before she died.
“What kind of jokes did Tick make?”
“Oh, my God. I mean. Adam and Eve? Like, you know. If the plan didn’t work. If we had to go under. He and Nico were going
to be like Adam and Eve. It was—gross.”
“Gross,” I say. I squeeze my eyes shut to capture the information, keep everything on file. “Hey, here’s a question for you. Did Nico have one of these code names?”
“Oh,” says Jean, and laughs. “She didn’t use it much. She thought the whole thing was sort of stupid. But her code name was Isis.”
“Isis?” My eyes pop open. “Like the Bob Dylan song?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Is that where it’s from?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, that’s where it’s from.”
I savor this small pleasant factoid for a moment, half a moment, before we press on into the hard part of this. It’s going to get rough now, but it has to. Time is passing. There is nowhere else to go in this conversation but forward.
“So, Jean,” I say. “So Hans-Michael Parry never turned up. And a decision was made.” I look her in the eyes. “Astronaut made a decision.”
“I’m tired,” says Jean. She sets down her cup so fast that it tips over and the water rolls out. “I’m ready to stop.”
“No,” I say, and she flinches. “You just listen. Listen. Parry never showed up. And once everyone realizes it’s not happening, Astronaut makes the decision to relocate underground. To move everything downstairs. Jean?”
She opens her mouth to answer but the jackhammer abruptly roars down the hall, and her face constricts with fear and she closes her mouth just as the machine goes silent again.
“Jean? Was that his plan?”
“His plan,” she says, and then she shudders, violent but slow, like a theatrical enactment of a shudder: her face and then her neck and then her back and then her torso, a wave of revulsion rolling down the length of her body. “His
plan
.”
“Lily?”
“That’s not my name,” she says.
“Oh, God, Jean. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t want her to go. I told her not to.”
“What?”
“
Nico
. We’re going down, we’re making the last trips, and she goes, she goes, ‘I’m taking off.’ ”
“To go get Parry on her own.”
“Right,” says Jean. “Yes.”
“So this was what time?”
She looks up, confused. “What time?”
I know it’s after Nico and Astronaut have their argument in the hallway, and it’s before Atlee closes up the floor at 5:30. “Is this about five o’clock?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s say it’s five o’clock. She tells you she’s leaving and you did what?”
“I mean, I told her it was insane.” She shakes her head, and for an instant I see reflected in her eyes this incredulous exasperation that I myself have felt a thousand times, trying to tell Nico anything she doesn’t want to hear. “Just—useless. I said, why would you want to leave for nothing and be alone, when we can all be together? At least that, you know? Be together.”
“But she went anyway.”
“She did. We brought everything down, and I didn’t think she would really go, but then everyone was like—she’s gone. She was gone.”
“And you followed her?”
“I—” She stops; her brow furrows; her eyes well up with confusion. “I—did.”
I stand up. “Jean? You followed her.”
“Yes. I had to, see? I had to. She’s my friend.”
I’m leading her as far out into this memory as she’ll go, I’m holding her hand and leading her out on the slippery rocks toward the dangerous water. “You had to stop her from leaving, but then there was someone else. Someone followed
you
. Jean?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do, Jean. Yes, you do.”
Her mouth drops open, and her eyes widen, and then she shakes her head again, she stares forward into the air between us. “I don’t remember.”
She does, she is seeing something—someone—I see it happening in her eyes. I lean forward and grab her but she wriggles back, rolls away. “Jean, keep talking. Jean, stay with me. You went to stop her but someone followed you guys.”
But she’s gone, she’s done, she falls back on the bed and throws her hands up in front of her face, and I am saying, “Jean! Jean. Somebody surprised you outside the station. With a knife.”
She shrieks a little, a sharp burst of air, and then she presses her hand across her lips. And I grab her again, clutch her by
the shoulders and lift her, and my shell of dispassion, my phony policeman’s calm, is melting off of me, burned off by heat: I can’t stand this, I have to know.
“Someone chased you and attacked you with a knife, and they killed my sister.”
She shakes her head violently, keeps her hand clapped over her mouth, like there’s a demon in there, something trying to slip free and wreck the world.
“Was it Astronaut?”
Eyes squeezed shut tight, body shaking.
“Or was it a stranger? A short man, sunglasses? Baseball cap?”
She turns her body away from me, turns her back. I wish I could pull out a picture of him—lay it on the bed, Jordan smirking in his stupid Ray-Bans, see Jean’s face see the picture. But it’s too late, she’s disappeared, she’s gone, turning her mind away from whatever it is she is unwilling to see. Her hand is clamped over her mouth, her body has fallen over onto its side and she lies there on the thin mattress, mute, terrified, useless.
“Oh, come on,” I say.
I kick the bed and it bounces with her in it.
“Oh, come on, come on, come on.”
“Isis,” of course, is the second track on the 1976 album
Desire
, and for a brief period when I was about fifteen or sixteen it was my favorite Bob Dylan song. It was around that time Nico discovered a journal in which I had carefully recorded my top twenty Dylan numbers, each annotated with the year written and the performers on the track. Nico found something hysterical about the fastidiousness of this particular exercise, and she ran around the house, dying with laughter, tossing the notebook up and down to herself like a chimpanzee.
It’s weird to think back now, to think about who I was then, to think that at any time “Isis” was my favorite Dylan song. Now it probably isn’t even my favorite song on
Desire
. But there’s no reason Nico would have known that, and I think it is at least possible, I think it is perhaps even likely, that she chose the code name because she knew at some point, somehow, I would find out about it. That she
left it behind not as a marker, a follow-me bread crumb like the bent fork in the vending machine or the butt of the American Spirit, but rather as a kind of a gift. Or else she did it just because it made her laugh, because various aspects of my personality make her laugh, and that, also, at this point, is a kind of a gift.
I walk down the hall from the holding cell to Detective Irma Russel’s little office, and I flip her heavy leather-bound log book to the back and tear out sixteen sheets and fold them over neatly to form a book, and then I spend a good half hour recording everything that Jean had to say before she shut down, blanked out, went dark. How she came to be in the group; the names and approximate ages and appearances of her pals and coconspirators; the way her face turned cloudy and wild at the mention of the name Astronaut. How she realized that Nico had taken off, how she ran to follow her …
When I’m done writing, when I’ve written up to the brick wall at the end of the story, I walk back down the hall to Dispatch so I can sit next to Nico. She would laugh at me for all of this. She would tell me to take a load off, go back and have more beer with the rednecks, eat more chicken.
I press the power button on the RadioCOMMAND and the room fills with prayer: a gospel choir singing about the promised land in lush layers of harmony, transmitting up to God and out over a 600 MHz band. I picture a church somewhere, barricaded doors, blackout shades over the windows, a hungry happy congregation singing and singing till the day arrives. Till the promised land. I press
SCAN
and find someone claiming to be the president of the
United States of America, proudly announcing that the whole thing was just a test of the resiliency of the American people, and—good news—we passed the test. It’s okay now, though, folks. Everything is fine.
I change the station. I change it again. Flickering voices, bursts of static, “
DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED
,” and then a tipsy ecstatic teenager: “I don’t know where y’all motherfuckers are at, but we all motherfuckers are in the Verizon store at the Crestview Hills Mall in Crestview Hills, Kentucky, bi-zatch! Anyone looking to par-tay get on fucking I-75 …”
It’s foolish to keep listening to strangers. I should preserve the battery; I should preserve my time. I press the
SCAN
button just one more time, the last time, and find a quiet and urgent voice, and I have to move right up close to the speaker to hear it.
“I repeat, I am in my car and I am driving south on Highway 40, if you get this and you still love me, I will be in Norman by five tomorrow, that’s tomorrow … I repeat, I’m in the car, I’m on the highway, and I love you. I, uh …”
The voice trails off into silence, the rush of highway wind. I wait a moment holding my breath and then I turn it off, just as the jackhammer starts up again at last, steady and sure from Cortez’s end of the hall. He fixed it. He’s got it.
It remains hard to fathom, hard to believe, that this is what the world has become. That this, of all possible worlds and times in which I could have been born, could have been a policeman, that this is the world and time that I got.
“We got ripped off, Nic,” I walk back over to my sister, look again at her face, the savaged flesh of her neck. “We got ripped off.”
I start to pull the tarp up over her head but then I stop, I just hold it there like a blanket.
It’s the wound. It’s her throat.
Maybe I didn’t look hard enough out in the woods, maybe I was distracted or maybe it’s that just now I’ve had the experience of sitting and staring at Jean for half an hour, watching her talk, looking at her throat. Out there in the woods, at first glance, it was clear to me that these two wounds were the same: two girls, throats slashed, victim one and victim two, wound one and wound two.
But it’s not so. Nico’s injury is worse—much worse. Which makes sense, of course, because she’s dead and Jean isn’t. I lean in close, trace the line of the assault with the tip of a finger. Looking closely I see it’s not a cut but a mass of cuts, a cluster of overlapping lacerations, forming a rough V below the victim’s chin, pointing down. With the other wound there was blood, there was the raw pinkness of the exposed muscle, but now here with this second victim it goes deeper than that—below all the blood of the jugular and the shredded layers of throat there is the shell color of bone, the off-white piping of the trachea. The depth of the wound and its messiness suggest that she was struggling, moving the whole time, trying to defend herself, get free from what was happening.
I blink back to Jean’s wound, the one I was just staring at
while she stumbled through her story, a less messy wound—a single slash, suggesting little struggle or no struggle, contrary to the bruising and lacerations on her face.