When I was working murders it sometimes felt like TV: But the wrong way around. As if some dope had watched a murder mystery (based on a true story?) and was bringing it back for you the wrong way around. As if TV was the master criminal, beaming out gameplans to the somnambulists of the street. You’re thinking: This is ketchup. Ketchup from a squeezer that’s getting crusty around the spout.
I am taking a good firm knot and reducing it to a mess of loose ends. And why would I see it like that if it wasn’t so? It’s the last thing I want. This way, I don’t win. This way, I don’t prevail.
But let’s ride with the ketchup—with the procedural ketchup of questions and numbers and expert testimony. Then we can do the noir. I may still be prov-ably wrong.
This is where we came in.
-+=*=+-
On the phone I said that I would be buying, but when we’re standing at the bar in the Decoy Room and facing that palisade of booze Paulie No flattens out a twenty and asks me:
What’s your poison?
And I say seltzer.
There’s a lilt in his voice and his fold-lidded eyes are downward glancing. Since he’s apparently twigged that I’m off from CID just now, he seems to think that this is tantamount to a date. Unexpected, because I’d always fingered him for a fruit. Like every other pathologist you ever came across. As if anybody gives a fuck, one way or the other.
We talk about five-irons and RBIs and whether the Pushers have what it takes to beat the Rapists next Saturday, or whatever, and then I say,
Paulie. This conversation never happened, okay?
... What conversation?
Thanks, Paulie. Paulie. Remember when you cut the Rockwell girl?
Most definitely. Every day it should be like that.
It beats bursters, right, Paulie?
It beats floaters. Hey. We going to talk dead bodies? Or we going to talk living meat?
No speaks perfect American but he looks like Fu Manchu’s nephew. I’m staring at his mustache, which is shiny but also patchy, threadbare. Christ, he’s like the guy under the earphones in the Crescent. I mean it’s pretty basic, isn’t it: Why have a mustache when it just didn’t happen? His hands are clean, puffy, and gray. Like the hands of some dish-plunging stiff in a diner kitchen. I congratulate myself. I’m flesh and blood, not hide and ice: I can still get the creeps around Paul No, a state cutter who loves his job. But every ten minutes I’m shuddering at the thought of how hardbitten I’ve gotten.
“The night is young, Paulie. Eric: Another beer for Dr. No.”
“...With suicides, know what they used to do?”
“What, Paulie?”
“Dissect the brain looking for special lesions. Suicide lesions. Caused by?”
“Tell me.”
“Masturbation.”
“That’s interesting. This is interesting also. There was a tox report on the Rockwell girl. You didn’t see it.”
“Why would I?”
“Yeah well the Colonel had it shitcanned.”
“Mm-hm. What was it? Marijuana?” Then, horrif-ically overdoing the mock-horror, he said, “Cocaine?”
“Lithium.”
Somehow, we all bought the lithium. We all swallowed it. Colonel Tom, down to his last marble. Hi Tulkinghorn, going lean and mean into his own little end-zone. Trader—because he believed her dying words. Because he felt the special weight, as testimony, of dying words. And I, too, bought and swallowed. Because otherwise...
“Lithium?” he said. “No way. Lithium? Fuck no.”
Here we are in the Decoy Room, the day after April Fool’s: These, surely, are not Jennifer’s jokes. It’s just the world being heavyhanded. Similarly, in the center of the room, over the white baby grand, the sleepy-looking... Let me recast that sentence. Over the white baby grand the pianist with the big hair is playing “Night Train.” Of all things. In the Oscar Peterson style, but with trills and graces. Not passion and muscle. I make my head do a half circle and expect to see, straddling the next stool along, Am Debs’s tense and keglike thighs. But all I get are the Monday-night drinkers, and decoys, decoys, and the wall of hooch, and the bubbling tideline on No’s mustache.
I say so don’t tell me. An individual’s on that shit for a time. Maybe a year. What would you see?
He says oh you’d most certainly be seeing signs of renal damage there. After maybe a month. Most definitely.
I say seeing what signs?
He says distal tubules where the salt was reab-sorbed. The thyroid, also, would underfunction and enlarge.
I say and the Rockwell girl?
He says no fucking way. Her organ tree was like a wall chart. The kidneys? They were dinner. No, man. She was—she was like Plan A.
“Paulie, this conversation never happened.”
“Yeah yeah.”
“I believe you’re going to keep that promise, Paulie. I always liked and trusted you.”
“You did? I thought you had a thing against slants.”
“Me? No,” I said. And earnestly. I have no idea what I’m feeling. Random stabs of love and hate. But I gave the cop shrug and said, “No, Paulie. It’s just that you seemed so absorbed in your job.”
“That’s true.”
“This has been nice and we’ll do it again soon. But just so we understand each other. You keep your mouth shut about Jennifer Rockwell. Or Colonel Tom will put you out. Believe it, Paul. You won’t be cutting on Battery and Jefferson. You’ll be bucket boy at Final Rest. But I trust you and I know you’ll keep your promise to me. That’s what you got my respect for.”
“Have another one, Mike.”
“For the road.”
I felt relief like luxury when I added, “Just a seltzer. Yeah, sure, why not?”
Tobe is attending a video-game tournament and will not be home till eleven. It’s now nine. At ten I have a phone date with Colonel Tom. So it should work out. I’m sitting here at the kitchen table with my notebook, my tape recorder, my PC. I’m wearing my latest golf pants, with the big gold check, and a white Brooks Brothers shirt. And I’m thinking... Oh, Jennifer, you wicked girl.
It’s a phone date with Colonel Tom because I won’t be able to do this face to face. For several reasons. One of them being that Colonel Tom always knows when I’m not telling the truth. He’ll say, “Meet my eye, Mike”—like a parent. And I wouldn’t be able to do that.
Today in the Times there’s a piece about a recently recognized mental disorder called the Paradise Syndrome. I thought: Look no further. That was what Jennifer had. Turns out it’s just this thing where ignorant billionaires—stars of soap and rock and ballpark—succeed in rigging up some worries for themselves. Some boobytraps—pitfalls in paradise. Zugts afen mir. Say it about me. I look around the apartment—the hip-high heaps of computer magazines, the dust on my framed commendations. No less than what you’d expect, in the habitat of half a ton of slob and slut. No Paradise Syndrome here. We’re clean. In the Times there’s also a follow-up report and an editorial about the microbes on the rock from Mars. A single smear of three-billion-year-old jizz, and suddenly they’re all saying, “We are not alone.”
I don’t personally believe that her work—her bent, her calling—had much to do with anything, except that it lengthened the band. By which I mean something like: The intellectual gap between Jennifer and LaDonna, Jennifer and DeLeon, Jennifer and the thirteen-year-old girl who murdered a baby over a diaper—that gap feels vast, but might be narrowed by habitual thoughts about the universe. In the same way, Trader was “the kindest lover on the planet”—but how kind is that? Miriam was the sweetest mother—but how sweet is that? And Colonel Tom was the fondest father. And how fond is that? Jennifer was beautiful. But how beautiful? Think about this human face anyway, with its silly ears, its sprout of fur, its nonsensical nostrils, the wetness of the eyes and of the mouth, where white bone grows.
In suicide studies there used to be a rough rule that went: The more violent the m
eans, the louder the snarl at the living. The louder they said, Look what you made me do. If you left your body whole, merely mimicking sleep, then this was considered a quieter reproach to those who were left behind. (Left behind? No! They stop. We go on. The dead are those who are left behind.)... Still, I never believed that. The woman who cuts her throat with an electric carving knife—you’re telling me she’s got a thought for anybody else? But yet, three bullets, like the opposite of three cheers. What a judgment. What...highness. What ice. She hurt the living, and that’s another reason to hate her. And she didn’t even care that everyone would remember her as just another mad bitch. Everyone except me.
-+=*=+-
Unfair. She was the daughter of a police—her father commanded three thousand sworn. She knew that he would follow her trail. And I believe she knew also that I would play a part in the search. Sure. Who else? If not me, who? Who? Tony Silvera? Oltan O’Boye? Who? As she headed toward death she imprinted a pattern that she thought would solace the living. A pattern: Something often seen before. Jennifer left clues. But the clues were all blinds. Bax Denziger’s mangled algorithm? A blind (and a joke, saying something like: Don’t grind your ax against the universe. I grind mine against mother earth). The paintings she bought? A blind—an indolent afterthought. The lithium was a blind. Arn Debs was a blind. Man, was he ever. For days I have hated her for Arn Debs. Detested her, despised her. Hated it that she thought I’d swallow Arn Debs—that I’d reckon he’d do, even as a decoy. But then again: Shit, who did she ever see me run with? From the age of eight she watched me hanging on the arms of woman-haters and woman-hitters. Me with my black eye, and Duwain with his. Deniss and myself, holding hands as we limped off to join the line outside Emergency. These guys didn’t just slap me around: We had fistfights that lasted half an hour. Jennifer must have thought that black and blue were my favorite colors. What would you expect from Mike Hoolihan—a woman who was gored by her dad? Sure I’d go for big Arn Debs. And why wouldn’t I figure, being so fucking dumb, that Jennifer might go for him too? Did she not see intelligence in me? Did she actually not? Did nobody see it? Because if you take intelligence from me, if you take it from my face, then you really don’t leave me with very much at all.
You key the mike and you get the squawk that no one wants: Check suspicious odor. I have checked suspicious odors. Suspicious? No. This is blazing crime. Fulminant chemistry of death, on the planet of retards. I’ve seen bodies, dead bodies, in tiled morgues, in cell-blocks, in district lockups, in trunks of cars, in project stairwells, in loading-dock doorways, in tractor-trailer turnarounds, in torched rowhouses, in corner carry-outs, in cross alleys, in crawlspaces, and I’ve never seen one that sat with me like the body of Jennifer Rockwell, propped there naked after the act of love and life, saying even this, all this, I leave behind.
A sudden memory. Jesus, where did that come from? I once saw Phyllida Trounce. In the old days, I mean. At the Rockwell place. Sweating booze into the blankets, I turned on my side and fumbled with the latch of the window. And there she was, three feet away, staring. In vigil. We looked at each other. No big thing. Two ghosts saying, Hi, mack...
Phyllida Trounce is still walking. Phyllida’s stepma is still walking, blundering, groaning. We’re all still walking, aren’t we? We’re still persisting, still keeping on, still sleeping, waking, still crouching on cans, still crouching in cars, still driving, driving, driving, still taking it, still eating it, still home-improving and twelve-stepping it, still waiting, still standing in line, still scrabbling in bags for a handful of keys.
Ever have that childish feeling, with the sun on your salty face and ice cream melting in your mouth, the infantile feeling that you want to cancel worldly happiness, turn it down as a false lead? I don’t know. That was the past. And I sometimes think that Jennifer Rockwell came from the future.
Ten o’clock. I will record and then transcribe.
I have nothing to tell Colonel Tom except lies: Jennifer’s lies.
What else can I tell him?
Sir, your daughter didn’t have motives. She just had standards. High ones. Which we didn’t meet.
In the Decoy Room, with Paulie No, when I ordered the second seltzer—that was a sweet moment. The moment of deferral. Tasting far sweeter than what I’m tasting now.
I will record and then transcribe. Oh, Father...
Colonel Tom? Mike.
Yeah, Mike. Listen. You’re sure you want to do it this way?
Colonel Tom, what can I tell you. People point themselves at the world. People show a life to the world. Then you look past that and you see it ain’t so. One minute it’s a clear blue sky. Then you look again and there’s thunderheads all around.
Slow this down, Mike. Can we slow this down?
It measures up, Colonel Tom. It all measures up. Your little girl was on a break. No doctor was giving her that stuff she was taking. She was getting it on the street. On the—
Mike, you’re talking too loud. I—
On the fucking street, Colonel Tom. For a year she was second-guessing her own head. Bax Denziger told me she’d started losing it on the job. And talking about death. About staring at death. And things were coming apart with Trader because she was sizing up some other guy.
Who? What other guy?
Just some guy. Met in a bar. Only a flirt thing maybe but you see what it’s saying? Don’t tell Trader. Don’t tell Miriam because she—
Mike. What’s happening with you?
It’s a pattern. It’s all classic, Colonel Tom. It’s a dunker, man. It’s a piece of shit.
I’m coming over.
I won’t be here. Listen, I’m fine. I’m good—really. Wait...That’s better. I’m just upset with all this. But now it’s made. And you just have to let it be, Colonel Tom. I’m sorry, sir. I’m so sorry.
Mike...
It’s down.
-+=*=+-
There—finished. All gone. Now me I’m heading off to Battery and its long string of dives. I want to call Trader Faulkner and say goodbye but the phone’s ringing again and the night train’s coming and I can hear that dickless sack of shit bending the stairs out of joint and let him see what happens if he tries to stand in my way or just gives me that look or opens his mouth and says so much as one single word.
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With Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis gives us a novel that not on! rethinks history but drastically revises our notion of time itsel The doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly bette breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, an mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all tf while Tod’s life races backward toward one appalling momei in modern history when such reversals make sense.
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Martin Amis, Night Train
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