Spirits in the Wires

  He sat now in his study, face and hands tinted blue from the glow of his computer screen as he composed his review of the show. He restrained himself from being too nasty—the entertainment editor had a different philosophy from Aaran’s own in the book pages and preferred her reviewers to focus on the positive elements of what was being covered—but he couldn’t resist slipping in a few digs about Australia, a country he’d never visited but instinctively disliked, and the idea that Chambers could have any sort of real experience on which to base her songs of heartbreak and country life.

  And really, what was with the twang in her voice? Chambers should take a page from real country artists like Shania Twain, or Faith Hill’s more recent work.

  Melissa Lawrence, the entertainment editor, would probably edit out the digs, since she was a fan of Australia in general and Chambers’s music in particular, but at least Aaran got the satisfaction of bringing her blood pressure up a notch or two. Especially since she hadn’t been able to attend the show last night, which was how he got the job. It was never a bad thing to have people owe you favours.

  The real highlight of last night’s concert hadn’t been the music, but a conversation he’d overheard while waiting in line to get into the Standish Hall. He’d recognized the pair standing ahead of him to be a couple of Saskia’s friends and couldn’t hold back a grin as he listened to them lament the fact that the Wordwood site was still down. He’d been very tempted to tap them on the shoulder and brag about the part he’d played in bringing its collapse, but common sense prevailed.

  There was no point in making a scene.

  Some of the people in that crowd of Saskia’s were very high-strung and argumentative. It seemed to be one of the prerequisites of being an artist. That celebrated creative temperament.

  When he was finished writing the review, he saved it on a disk then shut down his machine. Pocketing the disk, he set off for the newspaper’s offices. He could as easily have e-mailed it to Melissa, but this was Sunday, when the Arts & Living offices would be pretty much empty, which made it a perfect time to go rooting about in the week’s new promotional arrivals to see if there was anything he might have missed.

  The office was a hubbub of conversation when Aaran stepped out of the elevator. Clusters of the newspaper’s employees gathered around various desks, caught up in animated conversations, or sat in front of their monitors, fingers tapping on their keyboards. CNN was on the television set in the corner, but from where he stood, Aaran couldn’t make out what its earnest news anchors were discussing. Either some big story had broken, or something had happened to one of the staff. His coworkers never got this interested in much else.

  Big story, he decided when he spied a few of the hard news guys working at their terminals. Chuck Tremaine. Barbara Haley. Rob Watley. You never saw any of them in the office on a weekend unless there was a story well worth their time. And then, as though to confirm his suspicions, his gaze went to the glass windows of Kathleen Winter’s office. There was a meeting underway in the news editor’s office with a half-dozen production people sitting or standing around her desk. Which probably meant she was shooting for an extra edition and needed to work out the logistics.

  “What’s going on?” Aaran asked of the three reporters talking around the desk closest to the elevator doors.

  Harold Cole turned to him. “Christ, Goldstein,” he said. “Are you living in a cave? CNN’s been running the story for hours.”

  Aaran shrugged. “I was out late last night and didn’t turn on the TV this morning.”

  “So was she good?”

  That was Mark Sakers, fresh out of journalism school and always eager to hear Aaran’s stories of sexual conquest. Aaran never disappointed him, even if he had to make the stories up.

  “They’re always good,” he told Mark, before turning back to Harold. “Seriously, what’s up?”

  “CNN’s calling them ‘the disappeared’—which should piss off anyone who lost relatives to South American dictators. But I suppose it’s as descriptive a term as any, seeing how a few hundred people just up and vanished from their homes last night.”

  “What do you mean ‘vanished’?”

  “As in gone without a trace,” George Hooper said. He was the third of the reporters standing around Harold’s desk, an old hippie with his grey hair tied back in a ponytail. “There one moment, gone the next.”

  “But… how’s that even possible?”

  George smiled. “It’s not—hence the big story.”

  “How many people are we talking about here?” Aaran asked.

  When Harold turned to look at the television set, Aaran’s gaze followed, but he couldn’t make anything out beyond the blonde anchor looking into the camera with her patented serious expression.

  “I think it was just tipping three-fifty,” Harold said. “The last time I looked.”

  “All from the city?” Aaran asked.

  George shook his head. “From all over the country, and abroad, too.”

  “We lost one of the nerd squad,” Mark put in. “Disappeared right out of his apartment last night. Very X-Files.”

  Aaran got an eerie feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “Who was it?” he asked, though he was pretty sure he already knew. It just came to him in a flash, the way a good phrase did when he was writing a review.

  “Jackson Hart,” Mark said. “Did you know him?”

  Aaran shook his head. “Just to see him around the office. What did you mean about it being very X-Files?”

  “This is where it gets good,” George said. “Apparently his landlady heard something dripping outside her apartment door. When she looked in the hall, there was this black goop dripping down the stairs, coming out of the crack under Hart’s door. She stepped around it and banged on his door—no answer. So she uses her master key, opens the door, and this flood of the crap comes flowing out.”

  “Black goop?”

  George shrugged. “Who knows? Anyway, she beats a hasty retreat and calls the cops. No sign of Hart inside—though she swears she heard him up there a few minutes before and he never went out. And then, get this, over the next fifteen minutes or so the goop just fades away like it never was. Now you tell me. If that isn’t weird, what is?”

  “No kidding,” Aaran said. “I’m still trying to take it all in.”

  Not to mention trying to figure out how he’d known it was Jackson that had disappeared. And why he also knew—as clearly, if as inexplicably— that it had something to do with the little blackmail task he’d set Jackson. What, he didn’t know. But somehow the disappearances were connected.

  “Thing like this,” Harold said. “I’ll bet it makes you wish you were a real reporter.”

  Aaran gave a slow, distracted nod, not rising to the bait.

  “You guys all have assignments?” he asked.

  George shook his head. “We’re waiting for Winter to finish with the production people to have our meeting with her.”

  “Well, good luck with it,” Aaran told them.

  He went into Melissa’s office. Pulling the disk with the Chambers review out of his pocket, he dropped it on the entertainment editor’s desk, then left the office without even bothering to go through the promotional materials that were on the bookcase behind her desk, or piled up in boxes along one wall.

  After leaving the paper, Aaran went straight home and switched on his TV. He sat down on the couch, punched in CNN on his remote, and watched the story unfold. To anybody who’d been tuned in to the channel for awhile, this would be the umpteenth repeat of their coverage, but it was all new to Aaran as he watched in disbelief.

  The truth was, back at the office, he hadn’t really taken his coworkers seriously. While he’d known that there was something major going on— that was obvious—he hadn’t really believed it to be some massive disappearance of people, figuring that Harold and the others had just been having him on. All he’d known for sure was that it had something to do with Jac
kson Hart, and therefore it could possibly be connected to him. How, he wasn’t sure. What exactly it was, he hadn’t known either, but was willing to wait until he got home rather than make a fool of himself by asking someone else in the office.

  But there it was on the screen, and unless CNN had taken a page from Orson Welles and was doing their own version of The War of the Worlds, this had really happened.

  The disappeared.

  According to a little box in the corner of the screen, the number of people confirmed to be missing stood at eight hundred sixty-three, worldwide. Half that number had disappeared from North America.

  At least there was nothing about computers, he thought, as the anchor woman completed her update. Nothing to connect any of this to me. It was just coincidence that Jackson Hart was involved. That little frisson of alarm that had made him think it had anything to do with blackmailing Jackson was obviously wrong.

  But he still couldn’t completely quell the uneasiness that had gripped him ever since he’d heard the news back at the paper. And questions kept rising to jangle his nerves.

  Like, what if the authorities were merely withholding the fact that computers had been involved?

  That was exactly the kind of thing they’d do, hoping some schmuck would trip himself up by showing he knew more than what was reported in the media. Just asking about it could get you into trouble.

  But Aaran still had to know.

  He sat awhile longer, staring at the TV but no longer hearing the anchor’s voice or seeing what played out on the screen. Finally he shut it off, got his coat and went out again.

  Don’t do this, Aaran told himself as he made his way to Jackson’s apartment.

  But he went all the same.

  “I’ve already talked to someone from the Journal,” Jackson’s landlady said.

  She started to hand Aaran back his press I.D., then gave it another look.

  “I know you,” she said. “Jackson’s talked about you.”

  The hand of fear tightened its grip inside Aaran.

  “Did he now?” he said, managing to keep his face far calmer than he was feeling.

  The landlady nodded. Although he put her age at not much more than his own thirty-eight, she gave him the impression of being older, like someone from his parents’ generation rather than his own. It was something in the cut of her skirt and blouse, and those sensible brown shoes. Her makeup and the nondescript styling of her short, already greying hair only added to the impression.

  “Nothing bad, I hope,” Aaran said.

  “Oh, no. He seemed to quite admire you. All the books you read and how you’re able to write about them in a manner that’s both intelligent, yet accessible to the lay person.”

  “Really?”

  Jesus, Aaran thought. No wonder Jackson had opened up to him in the bar that night. And what had he done? Turned around and blackmailed him.

  The landlady was nodding again. “Yes. Though he hasn’t spoken of you in a while. I take it yours was more of an office friendship.”

  “The truth is, I didn’t really know him all that well.”

  “Then it’s all the more commendable for you to have come by to see about him now.”

  Aaran blinked in surprise. He felt as though he’d stepped into some surreal alternate dimension where dowdy tenement landladies turned out to be well-spoken and people only seemed to have nice things to say about him. That didn’t normally happen. He wanted to be liked, but he also knew that he sabotaged any relationships—romantic or otherwise—with his constant need for control. To be the one on top.

  Occasionally, he even made an effort to change, but it never lasted.

  “Well, I just hope nothing bad’s happened to him,” he managed to say.

  “So do I,” the landlady said. “Jackson’s a good man. He worked hard to make a success of himself. Most people with his unfortunate background don’t.”

  Aaran had no idea what she was talking about. But while he was curious about what she meant, right now all he wanted to do was get away.

  “If—when he comes back,” he said. “Will you tell him I was by?”

  The landlady nodded. “Keep him in your prayers, Mr. Goldstein.”

  “I will. Thank you for your time.”

  “The pleasure was mine.”

  Aaran backed away. He lifted a hand by way of goodbye and made his retreat through the front door of the building, feeling the weight of the landlady’s eyes upon his back with every step he took.

  Halfway down the block, he stopped and turned around to have another long look at the building. He wasn’t really sure what had happened back there, or even why he’d come in the first place. What had he expected to find out? Yellow police tape had sealed the door to Jackson’s apartment and it wasn’t as though the landlady would have let him in anyway. Nor could he have asked about a computer connection to Jackson’s disappearance, or what Jackson might have said about the Wordwood site.

  He hadn’t learned anything about the strange fluid that the landlady had noticed before Jackson’s disappearance. Hadn’t learned anything at all, except for what he already knew on nights when he was sitting in his own apartment with nowhere to go, no one to call: He was a heel.

  Sighing, he turned his back on the building and continued on his way. God, but it was turning into a miserable day. And with not much improvement to look forward to, either. You’d think that he could just—

  “Spare change?”

  Aaran hadn’t even seen the panhandler, tucked away in the doorway of the store he was walking by.

  No, but I’ve got some spare saliva, he wanted to tell her, and then maybe he’d spit in her hand. Or at least tell her off.

  Street people just annoyed him, from the big scary drunks trying to browbeat a few dollars out of you, to whiny runaways who left perfectly good homes and then expected people like him to support them.

  But when he turned to look at her, his displeasure got swallowed by a rather earthy curiosity. Behind her dirty face, this ragged gamine with her short spiky blonde hair was actually pretty good-looking. And she also had what looked like a fine body under her baggy T-shirt and skateboarder’s cargo pants—a little on the thin side, maybe, but an excellent lung capacity all the same.

  His attraction to her was instant, but it was tempered with a vague uneasiness that he couldn’t quite identify. He supposed it had to do with her age, which was hard to tell. She might be in late teens or early twenties, which would put her at about half his age.

  He’d have to be careful here; she could be underage. But he’d long carried around a fantasy of picking up one of these little street girls, bringing her home and cleaning her up. …

  Play this right and he could just get lucky.

  Looking for an opening, his gaze went to the face of the native man on her T-shirt. Under it a slogan read, “Remember Dudley George.” It took Aaran a moment, but then his eidetic memory kicked in and he connected the face to the relevant news story: Thirty-five natives peacefully protesting land seized during the Second World War—native land that contained an ancient burial ground—were confronted by two hundred and fifty heavily armed policemen. The resulting clash left George dead and ruined the career of the cop that had shot him. It had happened over five years ago, but the civil lawsuit was just going to court now.

  “You think his family will win their lawsuit?” he asked.

  Her look of surprise and the sudden interest in her eyes told him he had the hook in. Gently now, he told himself.

  “What?” she said. “And ruin the government’s record of successfully screwing indigenous people?”

  Aaran nodded. “There’s that. I’ve never understood why they don’t just bite the bullet and do what’s right.”

  “Money,” she said, rubbing the pad of her thumb against her index and middle fingers. “Someone’s making a buck, or we’d see a change.” She smiled at him. “So what are you, an activist?”

  “Not really,” Aaran said. ?
??I just believe we have to stand up against injustice.”

  And he supposed he really did believe that, so long as it didn’t interfere with his own quality of life.

  He let a pause hang for a moment between them, then turned the conversation to more personal concerns.

  “I guess you’ve hit some rough times?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “They say there’s no recession, but…”

  “Tell that to the people who can’t get a job,” Aaran filled in for her. “Not to mention how they make it so hard to collect welfare that a lot of people don’t even try anymore.”

  She gave him a considering look.

  “So what are you?” she asked. “A social worker?”

  Aaran laughed. “No, I’m a book editor for a newspaper. My name’s Aaran.”

  She shook the hand he offered her. Her hand was small in his, but her grip was firm.

  “I’mSuzi.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Suzi,” Aaran told her, “though I wish it was under better circumstances—for you, I mean.”

  “Oh, I get by.”

  “You been on the street a while?”

  “Long enough to know the score.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re hitting on me, aren’t you? Except you’re going easy ‘cause you’re thinking I just might be jailbait.”

  Aaran shook his head. “No, I’m not—”

  “Well, I’m not jailbait,” she went on, “but I don’t fuck for money, or whatever else you’re offering.”

  “You’ve got me mixed up with someone who did you a bad turn,” Aaran said. “I just stopped for some conversation, though I can’t help but wonder how you got into your present situation. And I can’t help feeling bad about it.”