Concert of Ghosts (15 page)

“The sensible part of me tells me this whole thing is fucked,” she said eventually. “If we back off now, maybe we'll have some kind of chance. Maybe we won't end up like that miserable bastard.”

“Is that what you want? To walk away?”

“I'm not the walking type, Harry. I don't always listen to the reasonable part of my brain. If I did, I'd be raising kids of my own in a ranch-style house in Tonawanda and cooking suppers for my workaholic husband. Something like that.”

Tennant was quiet for a while, gazing at the darkened gas pumps and the solitary neon that said
EXXON
in a window. It was an eerie little pocket of civilization; each pump was a square motionless figure, the neon a malevolent formation of gasses.

“I hate this … this goddamn manipulation,” he said. “Somebody's trying to tell me to stay away from my own past. I'm sick to death of threats. I'm up to here with people taking away things that belong to me.”
And I'm scared
, he thought. He punched the palm of his left hand and sighed.

Turning, looking back, he saw the skyline of Manhattan, the light show. “Drive,” he said.

He had no sense of destination, no purpose. He knew only that he'd underestimated flight. It was
more
than a mere way of life; it consumed you. He thought of nothing but distance, space between himself and the pathetic remains of Sajac.

10

The motel, a barren, balconied affair, was located outside the town of Bethlehem just across the Pennsylvania state line from New Jersey. Bethlehem: Christmas and old steelworks and German immigrants. In the 3:00
A.M.
darkness the town struck Tennant as sad, as if it were dying, withering into itself. He and Alison checked into a single room with twin beds, a shabby box in which thousands of people had come and gone, leaving behind grease marks on the wallpaper, cigarette burns on the edge of the coffee table, a crack in the bathroom mirror. Happy days in Christmas City.

The drive had been tense, Alison constantly checking the rearview mirror, Tennant looking back every five minutes or so to scrutinize the dark highway. He wasn't aware of having been followed. And yet the sensation that he was somehow being
perceived
wouldn't leave him.

He sat on the bed that was situated close to the window. Alison drew the curtains. To keep out the night, he thought. To create an illusion of safety. He watched her switch on the TV, which played without sound. An underwater explorer floated silently among shivering sea plants while exotic fish moved away from him in translucent schools, like small flickers of electricity. Bubbles rose in a constant stream from the swimmer's mask. Tennant looked at the picture a moment, drawn into its placid quality. Alison lay on the other bed and stared at the ceiling. Her expression was remote, as if she were gazing into the future and seeing there absolutely nothing; the void at the center of a crystal ball.

He had the urge to hold her, to make a connection. He imagined, as he'd done in the hotel bar, that contact might defuse the menace surrounding them. But he didn't move. She got up from the bed and strolled into the bathroom. After she'd closed the door, there was the sound of the shower drumming upon tiles. He thought of water falling across her naked body, rolling over her breasts and her flat stomach and between her thighs—pictures going nowhere except into dead ends and impossibilities.

He gazed back at the explorer, who was surrounded by a blaze of pink coral. A large crab scuttled across the seabed, tossing up puffy little clouds of sand. He thought of a day when he'd gone to Pacifica where, stoned on some wicked acid, he'd sat on the beach and watched the sun set. People did that back then, a common ritual, a cool thing. Tripping on mushrooms, LSD, zonked on Thai sticks, any viable substance that would loosen the stranglehold of the senses, they gazed blankly into that great Californian orange disk of the sun, seeing all manner of patterns in light on water and thinking all kinds of disconnected cosmic thoughts, the intensity of which suggested they simply had to be
real
.

He remembered a blond, long-haired, doped boy walking past, muttering that he
was
the sun. Wowee! You oughta be there, man! Wasted, Tennant had experienced a deep, druggy lethargy that kept him motionless on the sand; in his torpor, he was detached from the world.

There was an oddity about the memory, a shadow of sorts. He'd gone to Pacifica with somebody, he was certain of that. Only he couldn't bring to mind the face of the other. No name, no face. Simply a presence. A spook. Another specter. A ghost in sunlight. He pressed his fingertips on his eyelids, as if he might force the image into view. Broken, he thought. My whole life is broken.

The bathroom door opened. Alison, wearing a gray silk slip, her hair wrapped in a damp towel, stepped toward her bed. She lay down without looking at him. “I needed that,” she said. “God bless the therapy of water.” She stretched both arms upward, her fingers extended. The graceful little movement suggested a passage in a dance. She pulled the towel free of her head and tossed it aside.

Her short hair sparkled with drops of water. A damp patch was visible through her slip at the thigh where she hadn't dried herself completely. Tennant was absorbed in this discolored area. He imagined feeling it, then raising the slip up and over her shoulders. Down into her flesh, her mouth, down inside her.

“I don't think it would help, Harry,” she said. “You know that, don't you.”

Perceptive little thing. “I guess I do.”

“It would only be a complication, Harry.”

“Some complications are easier than others,” he said.

A droplet of water adhered to the shade of the bedside lamp, where it glowed before dissolving. “I can see where it would be a kind of escape hatch,” she said, and she smiled at him. “On a temporary basis. Only I don't do temporary too well, Harry. I like commitment. But I don't need it in my life, especially in these circumstances. Does that clarify things for you?”

She rose from her bed and approached him; she sat, taking his hand, gently running her fingertips between the mounds of his knuckles.

“I like you,” she said. “I like you a lot.”

“Is this a tease?”

“Teasing you isn't in my repertoire, Harry.”

“What you see is what you get.”

“Right.”

“Maybe you can tell me what I'm seeing right now.”

“Somebody on the edge, Harry. Somebody who's become fond of you except she isn't sure what that involves because she doesn't really know who you are. Somebody whose future is a tad uncertain and who has a murder on her mind. Somebody who might be developing a really substantial paranoia.”

Bad timing, Tennant thought. The room was filled, not with the breathless possibility of sex, but with the smell of Sajac's death. He looked into her eyes; the blackness there resembled one of those incredible starless nights in which nothing whispers, no wind shakes the trees, no animal forages. You could fall in love with those eyes alone.

“Have you ever been in love?” he asked.

“You come out of left field sometimes, don't you?”

“Curiosity, that's all.” I want to know you, he thought. I want to reach a place where there are no secrets.

“I'm not sure I know how to define love, Harry.”

“And I thought I was asking a simple question.”

“Okay. Let's see. I had this mad passion one time for a guy called Stern. Charlie Stern. Class valedictorian in high school. Editor of the school paper. President of the student union. Mr. Big. We had some fumbling behind the bleachers. I thought my heart was going to shoot right out of my throat that night.”

“What happened?”

Alison smiled. “Sad really. There I was all set to give up my suffocating virginity when poor Charlie Stern ejaculated in his pants. He avoided me after that. Embarrassed, I guess. Then, when I was in college, I had a fling with my professor, a married man by God. Swore he'd leave his wife and all that bullshit. It came to nothing in the end. I was that semester's affair. He had a notorious habit of bedding his female students. I was one more conquest. Another notch. At least he gave me an A.”

He had the feeling she hadn't answered his question, but had circled it instead, as if the subject of love was one on which she wouldn't be drawn. Secrets, he thought. Things she doesn't want to say. He was reminded of how she resisted his question about her parents in Buffalo. Okay. There were sides to her he didn't know. Live with the fact. You don't get to know another person in a matter of days. It takes time, a lifetime.

“What about you, Harry? You been in love?”

The question stung him because he had no answer. He stared at the ceiling. Had his life been loveless? There had been girls in the Haight, there were always girls in the Haight because sex was what everybody did—casual, carefree, going through the motions of the deceptive new liberty. You fucked indiscriminately because it was one way of saying,
Look, all the old values are dead
. But love? He felt the panic of a man trying to check his own pulse and failing to find it. I'd remember love, he thought. Wouldn't I? I'd remember love. Something that intense.

“Sorry. I shouldn't have asked,” Alison said. She kissed him lightly on the forehead—he smelled soap on her skin, shampoo in her hair—then she rose and went back to her own bed, where she sat with her legs crossed and hands clasped. She arranged the slip as demurely as she could. If there was to be anything between them, it had been put on hold.

The underwater diver on TV had surfaced, ripping his mask off. He held something aloft in one hand, a trophy seized from the deep, a gigantic shell, the former habitat of some poor evicted gastropod. The man's life seemed very uncomplicated to Tennant. He finned his way down through clear tropical water and came back with a shell and that made him enthusiastic and happy. I must learn to dive. I must learn the simplicity of shells. I would be a contented man.

Alison clicked her thumb and middle finger together. “Obe might be the key,” she said. “We've got to see him. We've got to know if he arranged that particular group for a specific purpose.”

“What makes you think Obe can tell us anything?” he asked. “You said he'd lost it.”

“His
wife
said he'd lost it, Harry. I didn't see for myself.”

“And you want proof?”

“I'm addicted to proof.”

“You said he was in Iowa. You know where exactly?”

“I know where his wife is.”

“And we just go and ask for directions to Sammy? Where's the asylum? What's Sammy's room number?”

“Sure.”

“If she refuses?”

“I'm a firm believer in not crossing bridges before I come to them.”

Tennant reached out and switched off the bedside lamp. He'd never been in Iowa. But one place was as good or bad as any right now.

“As soon as it's light,” she said. “We're out of here.”

He slept in a superficial way, drifting in and out of awareness. He enjoyed the proximity of Alison, the idea that she lay only a few feet away. He dreamed of Chinatown, the fronts of tourist shops, gaudy silks, screens, paper lanterns. Somebody was beckoning to him, a figure in a shop doorway. He couldn't see a face, only an outstretched hand. At some point the sky over Chinatown was filled with screaming gulls flying across the sun.

The sound of a car in the parking lot woke him and the dream dissolved and he lay silent and tense, expecting to hear someone at the door. But nothing happened. Before daylight he woke again, this time with an erection, although he couldn't remember a dream that might have inspired it.

He looked at the curtains, which had begun to glow. On the other bed, Alison turned restlessly, asleep still but apparently troubled by specters of her own.

The parking lot of the motel lay beneath a skein of pale pink sunlight. The few other cars parked neatly in their slots shone in a dull way. So far as Tennant could tell they were unoccupied. He scanned them quickly as he got inside the Cadillac. It was going to be one of those glorious clear blue days of late summer, wonderful visibility; it was the kind of day in which his awareness of vulnerability could only be increased by the clarity of the landscape. He and Alison would drive back roads, of course, but even so Tennant knew he wasn't going to be able to subdue his tension. Where could you hide in this great blue-sky continent? The sun was already huge by the time Alison had driven twenty miles, and the pink had yielded to a fiery orange that appeared to make trees and meadows blaze; a ferocious sun of unbroken scrutiny.

He took a road map from the glove compartment. Pennsylvania was a vast wedge of land that ended in one direction on the shores of Lake Erie, and in another on the Ohio state line. Youngstown, East Palestine, East Liverpool. In the center lay the Appalachians, dotted by villages, small settlements, towns that seemingly had no reason to exist other than as places on a map. St. Augustin. Glasgow. Cassandra. What did people do in a place called Cassandra? Feel sorry for themselves?

He and Alison shared driving, speaking only rarely to each other. Tennant concentrated on the fields and woodlands that breezed past. He rolled down his window, catching the sharply delicious smell of fresh-cut grass. He tried to imagine he was complete, that he had total recall of his past. The mysterious dead were figments who had existed only in an old insignificant photograph. I am not Harry Tennant, he thought. Harry Tennant is also dead. I am somebody else, a nameless fugitive. But then he'd glance back too often, searching the road for any sign of a car tracking the Cadillac, and the illusion, already so fragile, would dissolve. Where were they, he wondered, the pursuers, the followers? Why weren't they evident? Did they have some improbable power that enabled them to merge with the landscape? These questions worried him. Unanswered, they seemed to give flight another, darker, dimension: What if nobody was tracking them? What if everything were a complicated construct of the mind?