Crack-Up (2 page)

“Uniform?
 
What uniform?
 
She’s bare-ass naked.”

He cracked another huge, Seabiscuit smile.
 
“Is this . . . some kind of joke?”

“No!” I whisper-screamed.
 
“Of course not!”

My eyes rushed around the cabin.
 
The big-haired lady had stopped clattering away on her keyboard, and she was calling for the naked flight attendant.

“Miss!
 
Over here, Sugar!
 
Clumsy me had a little accident with the Diet Coke.
 
Could you get me cleaned up?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said the flight attendant, who scurried her milky white bottom back inside the galley.

I addressed the entire cabin in my full voice.
 
In fact, I nearly shouted.
 
“Will somebody please tell me why our flight attendant is naked?”

Rob stared open-mouthed at me.
 
So did the big-haired lady.
 
Then the face of the silver-haired man popped into view beside the seat in front of me.
 
His wrinkled skin was chalky and saggy and sunspot peppered.

“There’s nothing unusual about our flight attendant,” he said with the certainty of a college professor.
 
“There’s nothing strange going on here, Sir.
 
Nothing at all.”

He gave a crisp and confident nod—as if he’d just given me the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem—and withdrew.

When the flight attendant appeared again she was still nude, still balancing the undelivered drinks on her tray.
 
With a small cloth in her free hand, she mopped up the big-haired lady’s mess, then moved on to Rob, who received a bottle of
Corona
beer with a lime quarter wedged in the mouth and a napkin and bar glass.

Then she approached me.
 
I noted her nervous smile, her sharp tan lines, her B-cup breasts, and her pinkish nipples, small and erect.
 
She’s cold
, I thought.
 
The cabin temperature feels about sixty-eight degrees, tops
.

A short-lived blast of air turbulence unsteadied her balance.
 
Her breasts jiggled.
 
For the first time, her nudity excited a stir in me.
 
She leaned over me with her serving tray.
 
Her pubic hair loomed near enough to my head to share its musty scent and fire off invisible pheromones deep into the primitive part of my brain.
 
It wasn’t my seat that I sprung into the upright position.

She dropped a napkin down on the mahogany table by my armchair, followed by my glass of scotch on the rocks.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked her, a little surprised by the deepness of my own voice.

“What?” she said.

I took a quick look around the cabin and found I doubted my own sanity.
 
“Twist of lemon,” I said.

Chapter 2

The Gulfstream touched down at
Reagan
National
Airport
.
 
In a still much-bewildered state, I shuffled down the aisle, filing out.
 
Beside the exit door, in front of the pilot’s cabin, stood the flight attendant, smiling politely and saying goodbye to each of the passengers disembarking.
 
I saw her in a boxy blue uniform again—had for the last thirty minutes, ever since she’d finished distributing the last round of drinks.
 
No one had spoken to me for the same amount of time, though I’d joked aloud to the entire cabin about drinking some bad coconut juice in
Thailand
.

I counted back in time to the year I lost my sanity . . . Twenty-two years had gone by.
 
Twenty-two years without doubting my own eyes.
 
Or ever really doubting my own mind.
 
I felt the urge to resume a habit I’d kicked twenty-two years earlier: the reassuring habit of reciting a litany of facts about myself and my life, just to prove to myself I still knew what they were.
 
I used to recite the litany aloud—anywhere, anytime—when feeling acutely stressed.
 
This time I managed to do it mentally.

My name is Argus Ward.
 
I’m 44 years old.
 
I have a wife.
 
Her name is Sarah.
 
I have a daughter.
 
Her name is Ellie.
 
Short for Eleanor.
 
We have another child on the way.
 
We have an Irish Setter, Duke.
 
I don’t know the housekeeper’s name, but that’s not my fault.
 
We have a revolving door in that department.
 
I am the president and CEO of Argus Ward, Incorporated.
 
My firm provides security consulting and services to individuals and to commercial interests.
 
Threat assessment.
 
Personal protection.
 
Investigations.
 
Counter measures against industrial spying
.

I ceased my mental litany at the exit door.
 
I gave to the flight attendant an empty, parting nod in exchange for her plastic smile and sterile “Goodbye.”

On the steel ladder leading to the tarmac, the mellow gold rays of the waning sun blinded my descent.
 
I felt regret at having been—not many minutes earlier—too gentlemanly to goose what I’d taken to be a woman’s bare bottom, regret at not allowing my sense of touch to weigh in on my grasp of reality.

But before I hit the tarmac, I realized I’d probably end up telling my wife everything that had just happened on that plane, and my regret over not goosing the flight attendant instantly evaporated.
 
Sarah is the jealous kind.

Tucked inside the Freon-cooled cocoon of my gray BMW, I rolled past the airport terminal and a bronze statue of Ronald Reagan—who, I noted, was not naked, but still in a suit and tie.

I merged into heavy, rush hour traffic on the
George Washington Parkway
, and I slipped in a bluegrass CD.
 
Those zippy fiddles always pick me up.

Well, not that time.
 
I couldn’t quite put out of my mind that everything I’d worked for in this life—and everyone I loved in it—was now suddenly at risk.

Twenty minutes later, I arrived home in
Georgetown
, parking in the driveway beside the house.
 
Next door, Stuart Carr and his eight year-old son, Jason, were spread out on their front lawn, playing catch with a baseball and mitts.

“That reminds me,” I called to Stuart.
 
“We need to take in another Orioles game.”

Stuart gave me a nod during his wind-up.
 
“Red Sox are visiting in three weeks.”
 
He’d gone to Harvard as an undergrad, when he’d switched allegiances from his native Seattle Mariners to the storied
Boston
team.
 
“With the Orioles in the cellar, it shouldn’t be hard to get tickets.”

“Works for me.
 
You pick a date, and buy the tickets.”

“Day game, or night?”

“Night,” I said.
 
It would be late June by then, and I was thinking about the heat.

“Okay, buddy.”

I waved and headed inside.
 
In the five years since I’d moved to the neighborhood, Stuart Carr had gradually become my closest friend.
 
But it never crossed my mind to share with even him what had happened to me on that plane.

In the center hallway on the ground floor of our townhouse, I passed by the new maid—what’s her name—as she dusted picture frames.
 
She was white, this one, and weathered, with rheumy eyes telling of too many bad decisions.
 
She flashed me a smile, her teeth stained and crooked, avoiding each other, like a family that doesn’t get along while posing for a group portrait.

In the kitchen, I slugged down a tall glass of water while peering through the window over the sink.
 
Ellie was running with Duke around our little, fenced-in back lawn, playing keep-away with a squeaky toy.
 
Sarah sat on the edge of the open porch, lost in her prenatal yoga.
 
Along with her old drawstring yoga pants, she wore a pink cut-off Tee shirt, her swollen, second trimester belly exposed and celebrated with hand-painted swirls of vivid color I recognized as Ellie’s art.
 
Nearby, our Japanese gardener was sculpting a shrub.

Now his name I knew.
 
Hideo Mori.
 
He’d been doing our yard for years.
 
He rarely spoke to me, and when he did, I rarely understood his meaning.
 
Sarah, on the other hand, seemed to know all about him.
 
Thought him profound.
 
Said he had an old soul. (Hard to check her story though.
 
She has a knack that way.)

Something in my chest squeezed as I looked at my ladies unobserved.
 
I took the stairs up to the master bedroom.

In the bathroom, I opened the mirrored cupboard above the sink and grabbed a bottle of pills sitting on the top shelf.
 
I spilled the entire contents onto the countertop.
 
Then I began counting . . . So many little white pills . . .
If I were John Helms
, I thought,
I wouldn’t have to do this pill counting
.
 
John had a high-tech medicine cupboard I’d seen once when redesigning the security system for his estate.
 
Every time he opened it up, a recorded voice would play through a small speaker to remind him if he needed to take a pill.
 
Somehow, his computer-assisted cupboard even knew whether he did what he was told.

My count, as I recall, ended at fifty-three pills.
 
I checked the pill bottle for the date of purchase and the number of pills it had originally contained.
 
Then I did the math . . .

No, I hadn’t been forgetting.
 
Hadn’t skipped a single day.
 
In fact, I was a pill short—as if I’d taken two pills one day by accident.
 
Probably a math error.
 
The important thing was I’d been taking my medication.
 
Just as I’d thought.
 
The first thing I would do in the morning was pee and then I’d take my Risperdal.

You’re probably wondering by now, if you’re having trouble recalling the news accounts from last year, during the peak of my infamy, “Just what exactly, Mister Ward, is wrong with you?”

Clinically speaking, I’m a paranoid schizophrenic.
 
I’m not, however, a typical case.
 
I count myself very lucky to be what Doctor Shields—that’s my psychiatrist—calls a
high-functioning
paranoid schizophrenic.
 
But enough about my disease for now as I’m sure you must be wondering how I ever managed to sneak myself into the security business in the first place.
 
I’ll tell you this much.
 
Until recently, I was able—with some luck and some cunning—to hide my disease from all public knowledge.

Why I ever chose to become a security consultant—and before that, a United States Secret Service agent—I never considered seriously until Doctor Shields insisted.

Excitement, challenge, the satisfaction of public service—I came up with those reasons on my own.
 
Doctor Shields came up with my having an unconscious desire for a socially acceptable way to express my paranoid tendencies.
 
And I’m sure he’s right too.
 
Think about it.
 
I’d chosen a career in which I got paid to worry, basically.
 
The perfect career for me. (Almost.)