Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
Mrs. Starn put a reassuring hand on my arm, gazing into my eyes. I suppose the wisdom of her years took over. "Maybe your mother has something wonderful to share, if you just relax and give her a chance."
I highly doubted that.
"As for Mrs. Kellerton, perhaps she wants to be part of the restoration of your health, as she could not do as much for her own children."
I smiled. I liked that idea. It was hard to talk about my mother—or to look into the dark, wandering eyes of Mrs. Kellerton, which resembled my mother's in their sharpness. But it wasn't hard to look into Mrs. Starn's eyes and take in almost ninety years of wisdom.
Mrs. Starn went back to putting fresh flowers in a vase on top of the piano, and I walked aimlessly through the antique-filled rooms downstairs. Drifting back up the stairs, I found myself standing at Scott's closed door. I didn't hear him moving, and I forced myself to go and get dressed. I felt off center, pulled in many directions, and like I might find peace in this house by walking into it, like you'd walk into a hot spot in the road on a summer's night.
TYLER PING
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
8:30
A.M.
DINING ROOM
H
ODJI MONTU
dropped in on Shahzad and me in the morning. In Pakistan, the two of them had been really tight. V-spy and bodyguard.
Since Shahzad came to live on American soil, his relationship with Hodji is tricky. Hodji can't acknowledge what we do, or he could lose his job.
I've noted to Hamdani many times how funny it is that he got both a bodyguard and money while living in Pakistan, but here in America, he's unprotected and working for free. But I don't think there's a line of reasoning in the Pakistani culture to capture the essence of "what the fuck." He refuses to complain.
Hodji clomped his cowboy boots on my mom's hardwood floors and came into the dining room, where we were eating this concoction Nurse Alexa makes for us, which is scrambled eggs with blotches of spinach in it. Our tongues are healing. We try not to discuss the sorry state of our food choices.
"I got word last night from an anonymous source that Omar is alive and well and hanging out in Mexico," he said innocently.
"Anonymous sources are quite wonderful, yes," Shahzad noted.
Hodji sat down at the head of the table and forced himself to look at each of us. He is as good a liar as Intelligence could create for working undercover, but we know him very well, so it's obvious that he forces himself to look at us. Nobody would
want
to look at us. He craned his neck back to see into the kitchen and listen for Nurse Alexa pattering about. The kitchen was silent. She retreats to her room behind the pantry sometimes and closes the door to read a novel.
He watched Shahzad pick at his eggs.
His face brightened. "You guys want to live somewhere else for a while? Are you up for a little change of scene?"
I raised my hand as an enthusiastic
yes.
"I keep waiting for this place to get spray-painted, despite the rumor of some elderly couple living here. The news stations
had
to report our address when my mom was arrested for spying. They just
had
to come out here and shoot footage of our house. I'm surprised we haven't found a few crosses burning on the lawn already."
"What means this burning of crosses?" Hamdani asked.
Pakistanis.
I ignored him. "I don't expect the graciousness of our neighbors to last much longer. Where to?"
Not that you could call any element of being poisoned fun, but I had thought it might come close to fun to live with the victims of the Trinity Falls water poisoning instead of in my Long Island house. In fact, Hodji had gotten us kind of excited early in March to go to this place on Great Bay near New Gretna to live with the Trinity Four.
But a week later, Hodji got nervous. The only people outside of USIC who knew our status as v-spies were in jail. They were either ShadowStrike members or recruits who had been arrested at the same raid where Hamdani and I got discovered and scratched in the face. But despite high security, there were ways to get word out of prison, and Hodji was growing more and more concerned about ShadowStrike members who were not in jail discovering us. And he was also concerned that our presence at the Kellerton House might jeopardize the safety of the Trinity Four.
"I'm not sure of the 'where' yet," he said. "But I'll get on it this afternoon. If ShadowStrike had any idea who you are, they might come after you. I do need to go out of town for three days, and it won't be the last time."
He shifted nervously in his seat, avoiding Shahzad's eyes. Hodji had gone away several times, and Shahzad got separation anxiety each time.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"Can't say."
Shahzad took off in Punjabi, which is his tendency when he gets upset. I only understood the words "Cancún" and "Mexico" and sensed his total frustration that Hodji was probably going to help look for Omar. And despite that we had fed him the intelligence about where Omar was, he would not confirm his plans.
"Stop picking," Hodji interrupted, knocking one of Shahzad's hands away from his cheek. Hamdani likes to pick his scabs when he's thinking. "And stop focusing on what you don't get instead of what you do. I've got a meeting with the squad in New York today. I've got a great plan of protection in mind, just in case those idiots eventually try to do more harm to my two most trusted, uh, v-spies-oops-I-mean-friends. That is, if your senses of humor are still working."
My sense of humor only malfunctioned for about half of each day. Hamdani never had any, so the remark was directed at me.
"I'm not sure USIC will go for it. But I would like to propose faking your deaths. If you had new identities, I could go back to work and quit worrying about you all the time. So. How would you feel about, uh, dying in some staged accident? Becoming two other guys?"
Hamdani watched patiently for more information, as if this were a perfectly normal conversation.
I finally decided, well, screw him if he can't see the humor. "Do we get to be carried out of here in body bags? You won't let anyone accidentally embalm us, right?"
Hodji said, "We would drive you to the morgue, get death certificates, the whole schmear. We can even drug you with chloroform—maybe. We've done worse in Intelligence to set a realistic stage. We can have a 'funeral.' Of course, we'll tell your uncle Ahmer in Pakistan, Shahzad, and have him come back for a 'funeral' so it would look good in the newspaper. I trust him with my life."
"Will USIC go for this?" Hamdani made a face like Hodji had warts on his cheeks.
Hodji shrugged uneasily, repeating his doubts. "The Witness Protection Program doesn't do minors without parents. You're setting yet another precedent. And wherever it is, it would have to be somewhere you can stay out of sight for weeks—months, if necessary. Our country is in a state of national panic right now over acts of terror. Considering the two of you look like a radioactive rain shower dropped on you, you'll have the media chasing you five minutes after you're seen in public. It would have to be someplace where you can heal in private. A farm or something. Maybe in Kansas or Oklahoma, say. I'll check our contacts—if USIC agrees to this. Tyler, we would have to tell your mother in jail that you actually died. That's ... horrendous, as far as I'm concerned. USIC might say the same."
"I'm only a minor for another eight months. If I were eighteen, would it be so iffy?" I asked.
"Intelligence has been known to lie about causes of death for the sake of national security, even to family members," he said. "But yes, it's iffy. A minor is a minor, whether he's got eight months to go or ten years to go. God forbid the truth should come out—"
"She's earned it," I said, though I felt the bottom fall out of me. Turning in my own mother for spying for the North Koreans made me feel like a hero when I was looking at Shahzad and Hodji but like fungus-infested roadkill in the middle of every night. "She stole my high school years from me. She was so embarrassing, I couldn't even make friends," I went on, mostly for my own sanity. No one could understand the feeling. I could have lived with having a hooker for a mother.
Walk a mile in my shoes,
I had told my shrink at Beth Israel.
I wandered away from them, up to my bedroom. Ever since eighth grade, when I found out about my mom, it was the only room in the house that felt like I belonged in it. I'm a pretty ridiculous information head—I like keeping information just because. In ninth grade I was on lithium for obsessive-compulsive disorder after my mom got a load of all my CDs and how obsessed I'd gotten over cataloging and cleaning them. She forced me to the doctor's office, but it's hard to trust a woman who is a big fat liar. I went off the medication after a month or so. I enjoy collecting facts about people and still can't see the big deal in that part of it.
I had five shelves of CDs, the length of the room, probably containing every online
People
magazine article ever printed, every NatGeo, Yahoo!, and MSNBC article on every person ever featured, and that's for starters. I have a corkboard that runs the length of the wall, and almost every centimeter is covered with people news I've read. Mostly right now, it's covered with pictures of Cora Holman.
I use two bedroom doors turned up on their sides as desktops, and they meet in the corner. On them I have four towers, four flat-screens, four printers capable of varying tricks, and six extra hard drives, also full of information. I'm also a cord-cover freak. In all of that hardware, you would be hard-pressed to find a loose cord.
My bed was in the middle of all this ... unmade today. So it looks to me like some rabid goose flew in here and took a dump right in the middle of the room. That's what has bugged me worse than anything about being sick. When your inability to clean gets to be a problem, you know that terrorists have managed to climb very far up your ass.
Hodji and Shahzad had followed me up. I hadn't let too many people in here over the years, because the complex nature of Being Tyler was too weird on most people's eyeballs.
"The first time I was in this room, back in March, I thought all these CDs were music," Hodji said, and I detected a note of concern. Only about forty of them were music. "Did they get you back on lithium?"
That's the obsessive-compulsive-disorder drug. The doctors nixed it because I'm taking so much other shit right now to reduce the f/x of ulceroglandular tularemia. Decision: They would fix my head after fixing my body.
I was pretty proud of myself for standing in the middle of my room and not cussing out the bed for being unmade. I felt something more powerful than my compulsiveness, despite that my compulsiveness went over the top lately.
I didn't answer. At least not directly. "Got a great idea. You want Shahzad and me to 'die' and have nobody question it? Let's burn down the house."
I glanced at the two of them, their jaws floating and their eyes scanning this info tank of CDs, which could have served the New York Public Library extremely well. I guess the two of them knew me well enough not to focus on the loss to mankind. Considering my compulsions, this was major ground breaking.
"...dangerous..." Hodji was remarking. "...don't want to take out the whole neighborhood ... kerosene fire would burn fast and dramatically but not hotly ... not as dangerous." Blah blah.
I was looking at my CDs, reading the side jackets. I had science dudes, then history dudes, then criminal dudes, then detective dudes, then various writer and novelist dudes whom I'd never had time to read, then philosophers and musicians and movie stars.
"Do you know where all your mom's money is?" Hodji was asking. "It would probably be a good idea to get it all out of the house sometime soon, no matter what we do about your—"
Hamdani and I are surviving here on cash payments that my mom had hidden all over the damn place. If you deposit money you earned as a spy, it could send the IRS into epileptic seizures. I knew most of the hiding places by v-spying on her. Over a hundred thousand in cash and precious metals—gold, silver, and platinum coins—were buried behind the fireplace, behind the stove, under the floorboards where Shahzad now slept, yadda yadda.
"Why?" I turned, ignoring his slight flinch, which could still happen if either Shahzad or I turned our faces to him without warning and his thoughts had been on something else. "I don't want it."
I gazed at my CDs again. I think at last count it was eleven hundred and eight.
"So, pick a night when there's no wind," I told him. "But make it a second-story fire. Shahzad and I can hole up on the first floor to get taken out on stretchers, right? I really want to do the body-bag part. That sounds like a rip."
They said nothing about my bad pun, and I attacked the damn bed to make it before the sight of it gave me a hole in my head.
SCOTT EBERMAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
9:30
A.M.
HIS BEDROOM
R
AIN'S PREDICTION
that I would get the Throat from Hell was dead on. I glanced at my watch. 9:31. I'd slept the clock around, but I shut my eyes again, trying to enjoy the fact that for the first time in two months, I had slept on a mattress that wasn't wrapped in a rubber sheet.
I opened my eyes minutes later as I suddenly smelled Cora. One side effect of our antiretroviral meds is an overly keen sense of smell. It could be annoying, as not all smells are good. Cora has a distinctive smell, some combination of talcum powder and carnations, and it was wafting in from the corridor. She was standing out there, god knows why, but she'd done that at St. Ann's sometimes—just stood outside the door until I smelled her and told her to come in.
If any of a hundred girls smelled that way, I'd have admitted it could drive me nuts. But Cora's got that virginal, never-been-kissed, honor-student way about her, and even I have a conscience. I'd been with my share of girls, but any innocence they'd had was either gone long before they got to me, or they seriously wanted it gone. You don't cuss in front of a statue of the Blessed Mother, and you don't smell Cora Holman and think bad thoughts. Especially if you're a germ fest and it would be pointless anyway.