Deadline (24 page)

‘It's material you didn't keep with my main file, is that it? Material you wanted to hide away, right?'

‘Right.'

‘My God. You edited my records years ago, didn't you?'

‘I just decided that this particular item belonged in a more secure place than my floor-safe. That's all.'

‘Why, Jerry? What's so special about this
item?
Have you been protecting me from something?'

‘As much as I could,' I said.

‘Why?'

I wasn't sure why. Duty? A certain affection? On account of an oath I'd taken once when I was young and gullible? Or because I'd traveled the private highways of her mind and sympathized with her and how she'd acted? That sympathy had eroded to some extent, but for some contrary reason I still had an urge to comfort her.
Explain that
, I thought.
The vagaries of the heart.
Feelings were beyond cartography. They could be explored, but never fully mapped.

I stared at her. I was conscious of the clock on the cassette-player. It was a bright blue color. The minute counter changed soundlessly. A digital reality. A microchip kept track of time and sent messages along the arteries of a mother-board. In this digital reality there were no feelings, no emotions, no regrets. I wanted to enter this world and live my life within the confines of it. Silence and nothing, no pain, no threats of death.

I took the envelope that contained the cassette out of my pocket. Emily crossed the floor towards me.

I removed the tape. I'd marked it
Side B
in felt-tip pen, and dated it
September 7, 1996.
I held the cassette towards the slot and Emily covered my hand with her own, stalling me, preventing me from putting the cassette into the deck.

‘That's the item?' she asked. ‘A tape. A goddam tape.'

‘Yes.'

‘And you're going to play it?'

‘You have to know what's here,' I said.

‘Don't make me, Jerry. Don't make me do this.'

‘If you don't listen, you won't understand what I have to do and why I have to do it.'

She looked at me for a time, then she said, ‘Sometimes I have these … areas of experience that are sort of blacked-out, things I can't see. They're like sounds coming from a room I can't quite find. The experience has a dreamy feel, and I've grown comfortable with it. And I want it to stay that way. But you're going to change all that if you play the tape, aren't you?'

Yes
, I thought.
Everything changes for you, Emily.

‘Just listen,' I said. I pushed the tape into the slot and let my finger hover close to the
Play
button.

She turned away from me. I caught her by the shoulders and brought her around to face me and I held her for a time.

Then I reached out and punched the
Play
button.

9.52 p.m.

I heard my own voice say testing, testing and then the date.

The patient is in a state of trance. Can you hear me, Emily?

Yes.

I want you to do something for me. I want you to go back to August sixth, nineteen ninety-five. Can you do that?

Yes.

Where are you at around two in the afternoon?

It's hot, it's very hot, I'm in what looks like a trailer park. It's called something Glades. OK. Whipperwill Glades. There are weeds growing all over.

What else, Emily?

I'm wearing blue Levis and a matching jacket.

Fine. What other things do you remember, Emily?

I go inside this trailer. I'm very quiet. Walking on tiptoe.

Whose trailer is this?

A pause in the tape.

Emily pulled away from me. She stood with her arms folded, her back pressed against the shelves of CDs. She stared at the floor. A muscle worked in her jaw.

‘Stop it, Jerry,' she said.

‘Why? You don't know what's coming.'

‘I have a bad feeling,' she said.

‘Listen. Just listen.' I put my hand on hers. Her flesh was cold.

She said, ‘I just had this flash … like
déjà vu.
Only I don't know what I was
déjà vu-ing.
' She shivered, and I drew her closer to me. I didn't want her to hear this recording without my support. I didn't want her to think I was using this tape as the ammunition of revenge for the abortive mugging. She'd erased the experience – and now she was about to be exposed to it, and it was as toxic as a radioactive substance.

He's sitting on a couch, there's a crocheted rug tossed over it. He's got a can of tomato soup in one hand and a spoon in the other; he's eating the soup straight out the can, cold. He's wearing a maroon T-shirt, sleeveless.

Tell me what happens, Emily.

I don't speak. He looks up and sees me. But he's wasted, totally wrecked. I don't think he even sees me. Or he thinks I'm a hallucination.

And then what?

I have
…

What do you have, Emily?

‘Stop it now, Jerry,' she said. She tugged her hand free of mine and reached for the
Stop
button, but I caught her fingers and pulled her back against me. I encircled her with my arms, imprisoned her against my own body. She struggled a moment.

‘Listen,' I said.

She shook her head furiously. ‘No.' She tried again to break away from me. I held her all the more tightly.

I have a gun in my pocket. The gun belonged to my Dad. I take the gun out.

What happens?

He looks at me and laughs and then he spoons more of the cold soup to his lips.

And what do you do, Emily?

I just go up close to him and.

And what?

‘Jesus Christ, Jerry! Stop the goddam tape, I don't need to hear this!' She reached out and punched the
Stop
button, and as I caught her by the arms and tried to move her away from the cassette-player, she suddenly swung up her fist and struck me directly on the bridge of my nose. I could feel blood run from my nostrils and tiny starry sparkles appeared in my vision. She turned, made a move for the tape, trying to haul it out of the deck, but I grabbed her hand and twisted her wrist. Blood falling from my face splashed over her fingers. She raised a knee quickly, directed it at my groin; I swiveled away from the thrust of her kneecap and she caught me on the side of the hip. Then she lost her balance and we fell, clutching each other, to the floor.

‘Goddam you, Jerry. God fucking damn you.'

‘Emily, Emily,' I said. ‘I don't want to fight with you.'

‘Then don't play the fucking tape!'

She pulled a hand free and spread her fingers like weapons, directing them at my eyes. I managed to turn my head a little, and felt her fingernails, missing my eyes, stab my cheek in little jabs of pain. This fighting, this grappling, this squalid warfare on the floor – how could I make it stop? She was strong, and energized by a force I'd never seen in her before. I caught her shoulders, pinned her to the Navajo rug, rolled on top of her, using my weight to keep her in place. She stared up at me. Blood dripped from my face into her eyes and she blinked. My blood gathered in small flecks at the corners of her mouth.

All at once she was still. I placed my hands flat on either side of her face, feeling the structure of bone. There was an enormous distance in the dark of her eyes. She was like a kite that had suddenly collapsed, a darkness folded within itself.

Then I rolled away from her, and I stood up and punched the
Play
button. Emily's voice filled the room.

And I shoot him in the face.

Like that?

Oh yes.

You think he deserved to die?

Deserved? Billy Fear deserved it all right.

She looked at me. I wasn't sure she saw me. She uttered a silent
No.
I heard the tape hiss, then a period of quiet, but I knew there was more, because I'd listened to this tape a score of times – more than that – before I'd decided to bury it in a box at a bank.

I pressed the
Stop
button.

‘Oh, Christ,
Christ.
' She gazed at me. ‘This is crucifying.'

‘You had to know.'

She shut her eyes now and I couldn't hear any sound from her. It was as if she'd suspended the act of breathing. I slipped the cassette from the deck and put it back in my pocket, then I went down on my knees and touched the side of her face, shoved a strand of black hair away from her ear. She looked devastated and lonely. She looked as if she were emerging from years in a
gulag
of amnesia. And she didn't like the outside world. She preferred the prison, the isolation.

‘You're giving that tape to the kidnappers,' she said.

‘You see any other choice, Emily?'

‘Why didn't you go to the cops with it years ago?' she asked.

‘Maybe I felt you'd been through too much already. Maybe I didn't believe you deserved to be punished for shooting Billy Fear.'

She was staring at me, but seeing through me. ‘I wanted that job in DC, Jerry.'

‘I know.'

‘But I'm not exactly the right person for it, am I? I killed a man. It doesn't matter that he deserved to die. That's not the point. The Attorney-General of the United States shouldn't have blood on her hands.' She made a gesture of enormous frustration, banging tight fists together, knocking knuckle against knuckle. ‘I worked and I worked. I drove myself hard, year in, year out. I passed up on the chance of leading a real life. Now do I just give up? Do I just walk the hell away from my dream? Is that what you expect me to do? I don't get to Washington. I fade into goddam obscurity.'

She was never going to DC. It had been a misplaced dream from the beginning. She had too many enemies. She was too vulnerable. She'd been too severely damaged. She was one of the walking wounded.

I helped her to sit upright.

‘So I drop out of sight, quit my work, go off quietly into the dusk? Is that what I do? Say “Welcome” to oblivion?' She raised an eyebrow, passed a hand through her hair. ‘What will they do with the tape, Jerry?'

‘Probably nothing. They'll have what they wanted in the beginning. The threat of exposure is enough to make you take your name out of the picture.'

‘But the tape will always be out there somewhere, always hanging over me, I'll be waiting for it to resurface somewhere down the line, the dread will never go away –'

My cellphone was ringing. I grabbed it from my pocket. Emily held my arm very tightly, as if the sound of the telephone suddenly brought the whole world into the room, all the fears and terrors of what lay outside, all the doubts and anxieties that permeated the night.

I heard Sondra say, ‘I'm sick, Jerry. Real sick. Come get me, please …'

My heart was suddenly pumping Freon. I shouted her name into the handset two or three times, but it was a futile gesture because the line had already been disconnected.

Sick
, I thought. The drugs had affected her … what else? Her voice had sounded lifeless and very far away. I tried not to panic. I looked at the blood I'd deposited on the receiver.

I shut the phone off. I turned to Emily, who was standing motionless beside the cassette-player. She seemed to be gazing inward, checking the contours of her mind, her memory. Maybe she doubted the veracity of the tape. Maybe she was thinking that her unconscious had taken the reality – the slaying of Fear – and built a fantasy of participation around it. She wished she'd killed him, and so she'd concocted a story of her own involvement. But that didn't work, because the tape contained tiny details that had never been released in any newspaper story. The color of Billy Fear's shirt. The profusion of weeds around his trailer. These weren't the kinds of trivia that you encountered in press reports, and certainly never on TV news. Murder was commonplace, anyway; who had time to be interested in the color of a slain man's shirt? The death of another junkie. Nobody gave a shit. The nation barely had time to register murder any more. The cities were running with blood. We were blasé, we didn't want to know.

She suddenly hauled the cassette-player from the wall and tossed it a couple of feet in the air, and I tried to catch it, but I didn't react in time and it clattered to the floor, dangling black wires as it fell. The back panel broke off and some computerized bits and pieces slid out. Emily made a sound like someone in sharp pain, and then began to pick CDs from the shelf one at a time, casually dropping them on the floor, one after another; picking one up, dropping it, picking up, dropping. Shock. A breakdown of sorts. How else could her system deal with what she'd learned? What she'd lived with for years, without knowing the experience inhabited her? That the memory was there, and festering?

I caught her hands but she jerked herself away from me and went on pulling the flat, glossy boxes from the shelves. She was working faster now, hands a flurry. ‘You could issue my tape as a CD, Jerry. You could get that sleazoid Gerson to put it out on his label –'

‘Emily, please –'

‘Emily, please, Emily, please, Emily,
please
… Well, fuck you, Jerry, fuck you!' Hysteria had altered her voice; it was higher, each vowel shortened like a gasp. Her face had changed too; it had become rigid, and her eyes were manic, like those of somebody emerging from a collapsed building – shocked, irrational, unseeing. ‘Think up a neat title, put a nifty photo on the box, maybe a tit shot and some see-through lace, something sexy, wham-bam, a hit, a fucking big hit, Jerry!'

I struck her with the flat of my hand against the side of her face, as lightly as I could; she seemed not to feel it. I wished I had a hypo and a bottle of liquid Demerol. I'd fill the syringe and inject her, sending her into temporary oblivion, a trip on the fast highway out of her pain. She was surrounded by the CDs on the floor, and hauling more of them from the shelves all the time, her hysteria speeding up her actions.