I catch the twitch on her face, an involuntary muscle reaction to an intensely unpleasant thought.
“And tell them I’ll be right there,” Lucy says, and I detect her murderous anger.
Just as quickly it’s hidden under her many layers, down deep in a space that’s not reachable. Like a diver breaking the surface, and then dropping down and gone. Nothing there but the rocking sea and the light caught by the water, and the flatness of an empty horizon.
I don’t remember. I just know it happened. It’s what I imagine it must be like to be born, to be warm and submerged, then suddenly, violently forced through the birth canal, and shocked and manhandled into breathing, into living this life. I have no memory of Benton helping me to the surface. I can’t recall reaching the stern of the boat or how I got up on it. I couldn’t have climbed the ladder.
My first real memory is someone holding a mask over my face, giving me oxygen, and how dry my mouth was. It felt as if my right thigh was in a vise that was clamped so tight it was crushing my femur. It was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced, at least that’s my impression of it now. The black carbon fiber spear had entered through the quadriceps, perforating the vastus medialis and in the process grazing the bone before protruding from the other side of my leg. When I saw it, I didn’t understand.
For a bizarre instant I thought I’d been involved in a construction accident and my thigh was impaled by rebar. Then I didn’t believe what I was seeing was reality until I touched the tip of the spear and pain reverberated along the shaft. I saw blood on my hands, and smears of blood on the fiberglass flooring of the boat. I kept feeling for my inner thigh, making sure the spear was nowhere near my femoral artery.
Dear God please don’t let me bleed to death. You’re going to bleed to death. No, if you were going to you already would have. I remember what was going through my mind. The thoughts were splinters piercing my awareness, disconnected bits and pieces, and then blackness, and then I would drift back. I’d have a vague awareness of lying on the floor of the boat. I remember blood and a lot of towels, and Benton leaning close to me.
“Benton? Benton? Where am I? What’s happened?”
He gently kept my leg still, and as he made me breathe he talked to me. He explained everything. He says he did but I can’t replay it, not a word of it now. It’s all so hazy. It’s so strangely out of reach.
“Does Desi have any idea what’s going on?” I ask Lucy, focusing on her, realizing she’s not sitting anymore.
“Are you okay?” She stands over me. “Where were you just then?”
I don’t tell her that when I go there wherever there is, it’s like disjointed fragments of a dreadful illusion. It constantly enters my mind that I died and came back, and I won’t share such thoughts. I won’t mention the intrusions, the sensations and images that suddenly seize me when I least expect it. The cues are imperceptible. The spitting of a cigarette lighter, of a hose spraying. A movement in the corner of my eye.
Then out of nowhere, suddenly, violently like a seizure, the tugging, the screaming pain reverberate inside my brain. It was as if my leg was in the jaws of a shark, yanking, swimming away with me. I accepted my fate. I was about to drown. Then everything went empty and dark like a power outage. And suddenly, crazily, I hear it again.
The C-sharp cord of an electric guitar.
My eyes land on my phone absently gripped in one hand, at the message at the top of the display:
LucyICE Message.
I enter my password and go to my messages, and this one is just like the other. A link and nothing more. But it can’t be from Lucy. How can it be? There’s no way. She’s standing not even six feet from me. She recognizes the alert tone that she knows so well, and meets my eyes.
Next she looks at her own phone, then at me. “I didn’t just text you,” she says.
“I know. Better put I didn’t see you do it.”
“You didn’t see me? I just heard the alert tone for my ICE line, my second line on this phone.” She holds it up and looks baffled and wary. “And I didn’t send you anything.”
“Yes. I’m aware I didn’t see you touch your phone.”
“Why are you talking like this?”
“I’m just commenting on what I did and didn’t see,” I reply.
“Have you assigned that tone to anyone else?”
“You customized my ringtones, created this one for me because it’s unique, Lucy. No other caller in my contacts list has …”
“Okay,” she interrupts impatiently. “What number is showing up?”
“There isn’t one. It just says LucyICE, which is how I have the number labeled in my contacts list. And if I go to contacts now and look? There.” I hold up my phone but don’t let her get close. “It looks exactly as it always has. LucyICE.” I recite the phone number. “And that’s yours.” I look her in the eye. “Is it possible someone’s hijacked it? Specifically is it possible someone has found a way to hijack your In Case of Emergency line so it appears you’re calling or texting urgently when in fact you’re not?”
“A great way to get your attention. To make you stop everything you’re doing—just like you are right now. A great way to manipulate you to respond as directed at a precise time for a certain reason.” Lucy looks around as if someone might be watching, then walks over and holds out her hand. “Let me see.”
I’m not about to give her my phone, and I get up from my chair. I step back from her.
“I need to take a look.” She continues to hold out her hand for my phone. “I promise whatever you just got isn’t from me. Let me see what it is.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Legally I can’t. Legally I won’t be that reckless. I don’t know for a fact who’s doing this, Lucy.”
“Doing what?”
“Sending me things as if they’re from you.”
“And you worry it might really be me doing it.” She looks hurt, then stung.
“I don’t know for a fact who it is,” I repeat.
“What do you mean by legally?” She begins to react angrily and so do I. “You’re just like them. You think I did something. The FBI’s all over my property so that makes me guilty of something?”
“We’re not discussing this. You didn’t overhear anything, not even a ringtone, dammit, and you need to step back.” I’m dismayed by the tone in my voice, and Lucy is about to lose her temper.
“I can’t help if you withhold things from me, Aunt Kay!”
“You can help by answering my very simple question, Lucy. Could someone be spoofing your number? Could someone have hijacked it?”
“You know better than anyone that I don’t give out my phone numbers.” Her arms are defiantly crossed. “I almost never call anybody from my emergency line, anyway. And nobody has that number except you. And Benton, Marino and Janet of course.”
“Well it seems somebody has it. I’m wondering how that could happen. Especially to you.”
“I don’t know how. I don’t know enough yet.”
“I almost never hear you say you don’t know.” I carefully, painfully get up from my stone slab. “I need a few minutes of privacy, please.”
I dig into a pocket for my wireless earpiece. I put it on as I click on the link and immediately text rolls by, bloodred like before:
DEPRAVED HEART—VIDEO 2
BY CARRIE GRETHEN
JULY 11, 1997
I feel the stone dragon watching from his rose quartz perch. His glinting red garnet eyes seem to follow me as I move as far from Lucy as I can.
CARRIE’S FACE looms large and porpoise-like as she peers into a microcamera disguised as a battery-operated beige plastic pencil sharpener shaped like a brick.
She picks it up and films herself from different angles, then directs the tiny lens inside the dark pink cavern of her mouth. She wags her tongue and it moves hugely, fatly in different tempos like an obscene metronome. Slowly up and down. Side
to side very fast. She rapidly touches her pink lips together and they make musical popping sounds. Then she holds up the pencil sharpener like the skull in Hamlet and talks directly to it.
“To be or not to be God? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to suffer the abstinence of putting off pleasure or should I give in to instant gratification? The answer is no. I must not give in. I must be patient, as patient as required no matter how difficult or demanding. God plans events millions of years in advance. And so can I, Chief,” she says and I hear it again, a sentence that has been edited.
Who is she talking to when she says Chief?
“Howdy. Welcome back.” Carrie walks over to the computer on the desk, sets down the pencil sharpener, pulls out the chair and sits.
Reaching for the mouse, she clicks on it and a paused image of Lucy and me fills the screen. In it I’m gesturing midsentence while Lucy sits on top of a wooden picnic table, listening, smiling. I recognize the pearl gray silk suit I had on, long since given away. Carrie must have had a zoom lens. She must have been out of sight, and I instantly recognize the perspective, the weather, the foliage.
The ERF’s parking lot. Hot and sunny. Late in the day.
The canopies of the hardwood trees are densely green and mature. There is no sign of the leaves turning, not the slightest hint of gold or red. It’s summertime. July or August. It could be the second half of June, but not the first half. No earlier than mid-to late June. Carrie might have been inside a car filming Lucy and me at the picnic tables in the wooded area flanking the employee parking lot, and I see it, feel it, smell it as if I’m there.
I have on the elegant silk suit that Benton gave me for my birthday, June 12, almost exactly one month before Marino’s. In 1995 I’m pretty sure, and I know for a fact I wore the suit only once to court because it wrinkled terribly. By the time I was called to the stand the skirt looked like it had been balled up in a drawer before I put it on, the wrinkles radiating from under the arms of the jacket are huge crow’s-feet. I see the suit clearly. I remember making a joke about it to Lucy.
It was a Northern Virginia case, not far from Quantico, and I stopped by after court and had lunch with her in the picnic area. Not in 1997. Definitely not. She was just starting her internship and I was laughing about my suit. I said it showed sweat stains too, and that Benton was a typical man who didn’t think of things like that. He may be sensitive and hyperintuitive and have exquisite taste, but he shouldn’t be picking out clothes for me.
I don’t work for the Bureau, I remember saying to Lucy, or words to that effect. I don’t dress for meetings in war rooms, I dress for a landfill. Wash and wear, that’s me.
As early as 1995 and already Carrie was spying. She may have been covertly recording Lucy and even me soon after she met us, and I look at my phone display and watch Carrie get up from the desk two years later, in July 1997. I watch her walk across the dorm room. Pay attention. Don’t let your memories distract you from her manipulations.
“Are you having a nice trip down memory lane, Chief? Because I have a feeling you’re having a nice long leisurely stroll remembering all sorts of things you’ve not thought about in the longest time.” Carrie finds another camera, talks directly into it. “I wish I knew what stardate you’re in at this very moment. I’m here inside Lucy’s cramped unimaginative boudoir in this land of walking dicks who wear guns and flash their badges.”
Carrie is barefoot and in the same white running clothes, and the light seeping around the outer edges of the slatted blinds isn’t as intense as earlier. It’s later in the day.
“Lucy just stepped out for a few minutes to be domestic. Surprised? I imagine you are scratching your head. And I wonder? Okay tell me the truth.” Carrie leans toward the camera conspiratorially. “Does she help out around her Auntie Kay’s house? Does she do dishes or clean toilets or take out the trash or even offer? If not you should work with her on that particular aspect of her considerable immaturity and spoiledness. Because I have no problem getting her to be responsible. I simply tell her, ‘Lucy, do this or do that. And snap to it!’” Carrie laughs as she snaps her fingers. “Right now she’s taking care of our dirty laundry.
“So while we have a second alone I’m going to tell you a little bit about what to expect. By the time you see this months and years will have passed. I don’t know how many. It could be five. It could be thirty. They will pass in the twinkling of an eye and the older we get the faster time will speed on, carrying us closer to dilapidation and physical nonexistence.
“Already the days seem to go more quickly for me than they do for Lucy, and your days must go much faster than either of ours because the brain’s biological clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the hypothalamus”—she taps her forehead—“ages just like the rest of us. What changes isn’t time but our perception of it as the instruments inside our biological vessel are subject to stress, fatigue and wear and tear. They become less accurate like a precessing directional gyro or a wet compass out of calibration, and what you perceive isn’t accurate anymore.
“Already your memory-bumps should be moving you back in time like an assembly line. Already the past is being reconstructed and restored rapidly and miraculously as you relive what you see, and what a wonderful ride that will be. Consider it my gift to you. A bit of immortality, a spritz from the Fountain of Youth. But as I continue to emphasize by way of an apology I can’t say when.
“At this juncture in time and space I honestly can’t predict when I will decide the history of the world is perfectly poised and suited for you to be properly and at long last enlightened about the meaning of your life and death, and the beginnings and ends of all the people on earth who matter to you. Including me. Yes me. We’ve never had an opportunity to be friends. We’ve never had a substantive conversation. Not even a cordial one. And that’s shocking when one considers what you could learn from me. Let me fill you in on a few facts about Carrie Grethen.”
Another hidden camera picks her up as she walks across the room to an Army green canvas backpack on the floor. She crouches and digs inside it. She finds a manila envelope that isn’t sealed and slides out folded sheets of paper, more pages of a script.
“Did you know I’m a writer, a raconteur, an artiste? That I’m a devotee of Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Salinger, Kerouac, Capote? Of course not. You wouldn’t want to humanize me. You wouldn’t want to assign anything positive or noteworthy—no pun intended—such as an appreciation for poetry and prose. Or that I have a very wicked sense of humor.
“I offer a brief character sketch that will give you a few clues, and you go right ahead and share them with whoever you like. Put them in one of your boring technical books. Now there’s an idea. Please excuse that I prefer the third person when I talk about myself. I don’t talk about me. I talk about her. Are you ready? Are you sure?”
CHAPTER 14
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS AN ALCHEMIST WHO PREPARED HER OWN special protective potions that kept her forever young.”
Carrie holds up the bottle of lotion as she reads from her script.
“With her very fair skin”—she touches her pale cheek—“and very fair hair”—she touches her platinum hair—“she blended like a moth inside the bland off-white FBI dorm room as if natural selection was the explanation for what she’d become. But it wasn’t. Something else had leached the color out of her soul, mutating it and creating paranormal cravings and behaviors that made her seek out lightlessness and gloom.
“As a young child Carrie knew she wasn’t good. When people at church talked about good stewards, good Samaritans, good believers pure of heart she knew she wasn’t one of them. From the earliest age she knew she wasn’t like anyone at school or inside her own home. She wasn’t like anyone at all and while this was confusing it also pleased her greatly that she had been unusually blessed. Such a rare gift not to mind extreme temperatures, to scarcely feel heat or cold and to see in the dark like a cat. What a treat to leave her body during sleep
and travel to distant lands and into the past, to speak languages she’d never learned and remember places she’d never been. Carrie’s IQ was too high to measure.
“But to whom much is given much also can be taken, and one day her mother uttered the terrible words that no child should ever hear. Little Carrie’s destiny was to die young. She was so special that Jesus couldn’t bear to be without her long and would take her back to heaven early.
“‘Think of it as a Holy layaway plan,’ Carrie’s mother explained. ‘Jesus was shopping, and as He browsed through all the millions of new babies about to be born, He picked you out and set you aside. Very soon He’ll return to pick you up and take you home with Him forever.’
“‘Then He has to get the money to pay for me?’ Carrie inquired.
“‘Jesus doesn’t need money. Jesus can do whatever He wants. He’s perfect and all-powerful.’
“‘Then why didn’t He just pay for me when He found me and take me home with Him?’
“‘It’s not for us to question Jesus.’
“‘But it sounds like He’s poor and not very powerful after all, Mommy. It sounds like He couldn’t afford me the same way you can’t afford things you put on layaway.’
“‘You must never say anything disrespectful about our Lord and Savior.’
“‘But I didn’t, Mommy. You did. You said He can’t afford me right now or else I’d be gone from here and in heaven with Him. And then I wouldn’t be a burden for you anymore. You don’t want me and wish I was dead.’
“Carrie’s mother responded by washing her young daughter’s mouth out with a bar of Ivory soap, twisting it so hard that the bright white cake turned red from her bleeding gums. After that her mother gave up on the layaway analogy, realizing it was close to what she meant but not quite right. Instead she took to reminding Carrie that she should live an exemplary pure-hearted life and to thank God for it while she could because none of us knows how long we’ll be here anyway.