Before (25 page)

But she is bunched against the corner where the microwave is, looking at him and screaming the torrent of words, and Ghost-Man tucks his package close to his side and purses his lips, feeling the muscles of his face quiver, and he walks by her and out the kitchen door to the backyard, down steps, behind the two garages and through a thicket of heavy-smelling sumac and into the shadows of buildings on Irving Street. He hears his breathing, looks down at his steady trousers, shoes, at bubblegum wrappers, a newspaper, a used condom, some tinfoil caught in the rusting old fence here where the chain link is bent back, the dark path going straight through. She is still screaming.
Crazy bitch.
In a minute he hears the blipping sirens of police cars coming onto Trowbridge; they glance through the trees. He walks onto the Irving sidewalk. Light blinks on in a brownstone above, and some people are coming out of the building to see what all the commotion is. He looks, too; through the foliage the buildings of Trowbridge Street are a march of windows, squatting beneath trees and telephone lines, lights coming on; he feigns curiosity. He looks just long enough to make it believable, shakes his head with some of those who have gathered—
What craziness is in the world now?
—then goes steadily toward the brightness of Kirkland Street, holding his package tightly.

The goddamn groceries are on the front step. Because I completely lost myself and didn't think. The goddamn soy milk bottle, the plastic on the Poland Spring six-pack with my fingerprints all over them. The police might overlook it at first, thinking she left it there; a helpful neighbor will bring it in for her, while the police are interviewing her, unload the soy milk and Poland Spring, the chili and apples, smudge up the prints maybe a little. And Alison will say,
Those aren't mine,
and the neighbor will say,
But, dear, they were on the doorstep,
and Alison will look alarmed and say,
That's right, when he was beside me at the travel agency he had a grocery bag.
Soon they will know I am alive. They will then know about the other neighborhoods and the other women. Oh, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

In his mind Ghost-Man can still hear Alison Tiner shouting, a sound that was unreal, deafening. The terrified white of her face. There is sweat at the sides of his throat, the small of his back. What had happened to his quickness and courage? Why hadn't he been prepared? It wasn't supposed to be like this! It was such a simple thing!
Fuck!
He just wanted to talk to her. To straighten a few things out!

*   *   *

He has recovered himself somewhat by the time he reaches the car. It is a year-old Mazda sedan, and it waits here beneath a spread of oaks on Summer Street next to a meter. The left front fender is dented and this embarrasses him—it happened in the city a few days ago, when he was parked, and of course nobody left a note. He should have gotten it fixed right away but he was lazy about it and now it is something that someone could identify him with. Things are falling apart, small things that will add up to very big problems. He needs to think. He ducks quickly into the car, puts his head back on the headrest, sits there in the darkness.

He might drive back to his small apartment in the bloodred brick building on George Street, in Medford, where he can turn on his computer, clutch himself through his pants, watching a film he has downloaded to his RealPlayer—this would be the smart thing to do. The film is short, all of two minutes: A man is naked, on his knees, his body bent forward. He is in an odd, dark room of shimmering curtains, a single door beyond him. A woman comes through the door wearing a long black leather dress, a black cape. It is hard to make out her movement, that strange, quirky streaming video that reminds Ghost-Man of images from the moon all those years ago: bodies moving through another gravity. The woman comes forward, and it is terribly, exquisitely quiet, and you hear the rustle of her dress, the click of her heels, feel her bristling
presence
in that room. She kicks the man, just once, hard, and pushes him with her shoe onto his side. She says,
You'll keep waiting.
She raises the cape with one arm and turns, walks from the room. The door closes.

Ghost-Man is clutching himself. He can go and relieve this, be in this protected, exalted simplicity, get away from the world. He can lie in his bed after and listen to college girls walk beneath his window, the lightness of their voices. A police car turns onto the street before him, lights wash through the glass, and he ducks away as if to check something on the seat. He takes his hand from his pants, starts the car, puts it into gear, and the police car whooshes by.

This is how it will be now.
In his rearview mirror, the police car is at the intersection, brake lights flickering, turning harmlessly onto Cambridge. Ghost-Man drives in the opposite direction, starts moving down Kirkland Avenue. Past Gary's bar, then the spaghetti place with the neon display of fettuccine in the window, to the rise into Union Square, most of these stores darkened. A commuter train sparks over the bridge and then is gone into the night. The clock above the Somerville bank has its hands set at one forty-five. He swings left beneath the bridge, checks in the rearview mirror. No police.
But this is how it will be now.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Once, in a desert battle, Simon held the head of his friend Harvey Stocker in his lap. But half of the head wasn't there. There was an eye, and then there was wet, bloody darkness. The other guys were saying,
C'mon, Simon, he's fucking gone, let them take him.
There was a smell of cordite everywhere. The desert was like a weird ocean, tinted red, the sky red. Simon's M-16A2 was beside him and he wanted to pick it up and jam it into the gut of every Iraqi he could find and fire and fire.
Simon, Simon, Simon. Hey, Simon. Jesus Christ, Simon, let him go.
In the distance, Saddam's burning came from the throat of the earth, black-twisting clouds rising into the red.

Ghost-Man rolls up onto the highway, thinking of Harvey Stocker, Harvey tough and firing into that red horizon, saying,
Simon, man, holy shit oh fuck
—in that moment before the bright white light, the crack of explosion, the screaming everywhere.

FOURTEEN

Fuck
. These potholes, all over the goddamn place. Ghost-Man hurtles down Route 38, thinking,
With all the goddamn taxes everyone is paying someone should work on these
. He is angry that the fucking rice spooked him, now as all of it is coming back, that he lost his nerve. He has a lot to tell the woman, and he shouldn't have let her hysterics affect him that way.

Now over the bridge, wheels sounding like thunder on the grating, by malls, lights out, swinging left with the highway, running parallel to Route 93. It would be easy to go north, to 95 and to Maine. He remembers Jenna kayaking with him near Kittery, her eyes delighted as the sea rose with her, and at the shore behind her white fans of spray.

Ghost-Man turns in at the Burger King, across from the Century Bank, pulls the Mazda swiftly into the S-curve drive-through, waiting behind a rusting white van to order. There is a mother with her children in the van; Ghost-Man sees silhouettes through windows against the bright orange neon. It takes a while for them to order, the mother turning back to admonish and request and plead and snap, then turning to the monitor again, and Ghost-Man hears, “Three number twos, um, can I have a Diet Coke and two milks and two Crispy Chicken Meals and one Whopper Junior.” He looks up at the Burger King sign above, a circular medallion of red and orange—an American fire cartoon set against the autumn night. Ghost-Man is remembering.
In a helicopter above the desert there are just the other guys with him now and no Harvey Stocker, hard to believe no fucking Harvey, and far below them charred corpses and war machines and buses and cars are scattered on the highway, mile after mile, and someone says
, Holy shit, you guys, it's like the end of the fucking world,
and on the horizon Saddam's oil fires are burning and burning. Father Bush is pulling America out of the war, leaving those who have defied the dictator, Shiite and Kurds, to be butchered. The flames lick the sky with impunity, like they will burn forever
.

Ghost-Man eases the car forward to order. In the windows of the restaurant are slate blue plastic tubes that children can crawl through while parents are wolfing down late night dinners. What's the world coming to when children stay up so late and parents don't even think twice about it? Ghost-Man orders a Diet Coke and a BK Broiler without mayonnaise, for lately he has been trying to lose weight. You hit forty, the jowls start to sag with the belly, and it's murder to try to keep it off, even with all the walking he does. He motors up to window two and pays four dollars and eighteen cents, the sunshade dropped over his face, hoping that the cheery Hispanic woman there does not see much of him or his dented car as it slides past her window.

He eats in the parking lot of the Admiral a few blocks down, close to 93. It is an old converted bikers' bar, and men's cars are packed here, parked in close to the building, the neon sign an artist's curvy girl with an admiral's cap, saluting, her oversize electric lips glistening red, bright cursive reading
Live Dancing Late
. High above Ghost-Man, to this side of the building, is the huge billboard, set so that you can see it from 93, of Kascha LaFond's enormous eyes advertising expensive gin. There is a silver-colored bottle, and letters, five feet tall, across the bottom:
BOMBAY SAPPHIRE GIN: BECAUSE SHE IS WATCHING
. The eyes probe for male prowess. Ghost-Man glances at the constant rush of cars on the highway, thinks of the men in those cars seeing Kascha, these eyes so famous that they alone are recognizable, this glance of a wary gatekeeper. Men thinking of scenarios that might let them impress such a woman, quickly, for it is not hard to imagine her slipping from probing and flirting to an untouchable indifference.

That is where the horror begins, Ghost-Man knows, in that moment when you think you will never be allowed to move in that other flesh, in any female flesh, you might be counted out, no egg for the sperm.
You make other fires.
He watches the traffic lights at the turn to the highway burn in the September night, red and then green: the Admiral's girl burns. He watches the provocative eyes above, held up by rusty scaffolding.

*   *   *

Simon Jacob Acre went to work for, then eventually took over, Harvey Stocker's family business in Portland, Maine—made it, with the family's blessing, into a small local empire. He kept the name, always,
Harvey's Cleaning Services,
even when the business had expanded to include all of the government buildings and most of the major businesses downtown, and more extensive services—power washing of exteriors and cleaning up after fires. In four years' time he went from having eight employees to seventy-three.

He met his Jenna with her extraordinary green eyes there and built a home by the sea. She left her temp job at the Portland Bank soon after the marriage. Their home was made of Pennsylvania barn wood, with a great stone fireplace that everyone gathered around during their many parties. From the living room you could walk onto the cool veranda, torches illuminating circles of dark flagstone, women in their dresses holding fluted glasses of wine. Beyond the lawn and outcroppings of rock there was the sea, a dark whispering mirror of God.

In Ghost-Man's mind now he sees his Jenna, a month before she came to him and asked him for the divorce. It is a night of festivity—a birthday party for a dear friend of hers who is a local politician, a woman whom Simon is actively engaged in a conversation with when he looks across the room at his wife. Jenna is in a gray chiffon dress and satin sandals, and Simon is thinking of how elegant his wife is when she puts down her wineglass. The man she is talking to is making her laugh; she covers her face with her hands, and her eyes flirt. She laughs again with her long throat, her blond hair tossed back, touches the man's wrist with her fingers.

It burns like a hot wire in him, that evening. The politician, taking him by the arm, led him out to the veranda, and her empathy told Ghost-Man how long ago he had lost his wife.
If I ever had her,
he thought.
If it wasn't only about money. The things, the security I could bring into her life
. He watched the sea beneath the moon; he imagined his wife's face in a hotel bed, beyond another male shoulder, her eyes closed in ecstasy.

He keeps the windows of the Mazda down, finishing his chicken sandwich. Thinks of turning on the radio and then decides against it. He must assume it will be only hours before they know who they are after. There will be older photographs from the military, of course, and some of him in
Portland Business Magazine
and newspaper files. So tonight he must pack a few things, inconspicuously (he is always ready for flight), and then with one of the other license plates and identities he has prepared he must drive west. He has wanted to see Nevada; he can be there for a brief, quiet time and then fly to Europe or perhaps the Caribbean. He is feeling better.
Just no more stupid fucking mistakes.
Ghost-Man checks his teeth in the mirror closely, a horseshoe of white, fillings, glistening saliva—finds a breath mint in the glove compartment. He stuffs the Burger King bag with its wrappings under a seat, tightly, reminding himself to pull it out later and vacuum the car. He leaves his package on the seat beside him, beneath a windbreaker (they will not let him in with the package), locks the car, and walks to the cement-block building, this paint fading and peeling as you get up close to it. The heavy rock music from the club catches Ghost-Man's heart, and the air is cool on his arms; just above him the Admiral girl salutes with her neon brightness.