Shift: A Novel (6 page)

Naz
.

He heard glass breaking, felt a sharp pain in his hand. The next thing he knew, he was standing over the kitchen sink. The window was closed, the glass in the bottom left pane broken. A thin trickle of blood
ran down his hand and there was no sign of a bird. The dishes were still there, though, reeking faintly of mildew.

For a moment
he stared at the blood trickling down his hand as though it might turn out to be another hallucination. He could feel the tiny pressure as the warm red stream pressed on each hair of his wrist, felt the weight of it pressing on the very vein that was pumping more blood to the wound. He stared at it until he was sure it was real, because if the blood was real, if the cut was real, then that meant she was real too. Only when he was absolutely sure did he say her name out loud.

“Naz.”

The word rippled into the world like a sonic cry. Out and out it went, but nothing bounced back. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t real. It just meant she was lost, and he would have to find her. Like Eurydice, he told himself again, and did his best to forget how that story ended. Then, catching himself, he chuckled sheepishly.

“I have
got
to stop drinking on an empty stomach.”

His protest rang hollow. He had no headache, no sign of a hangover. He wasn’t even hungry, even though he usually woke up starving after a bender. He remembered drinking the day before—remembered drinking
a lot
—but it seemed to have had no effect. He looked at his body for some sign that he’d had sex but found no incriminating marks. Not that he usually found marks after sex, but still. After an encounter like that, you’d think there’d be some trace. But that made him think of his eyes. Of his oddly clear vision. He’d worn glasses for nearly two years now, and his deteriorating eyesight was the kind of thing that was supposed to get worse, not better. So why was he seeing with 20/20 vision this morning—20/15, 20/10—and why did he feel like it had something to do with what happened last night?

What
happened last night?

“Nothing happened last night,” he said out loud, but this protest was even more unconvincing than the last.

He filled the percolator and set it on one ring of his hot plate, opened the fridge, put a pan on the other ring of the hot plate, dropped in half a stick of butter and, while it melted, cracked a couple of eggs into a bowl. When the butter was sizzling, he poured the eggs
in and scrambled them quickly, dumped some salt and pepper on top, ate them out of the pan. The coffee was done by then, and he poured himself a cup, added three teaspoons of sugar, and, more or less on instinct, sat down in front of his typewriter. He reached for his glasses by reflex, but they only blurred his vision—for a moment, anyway, and then it cleared again. He took his glasses off and the same thing happened: his sight blurred, then cleared, the sentence at the top of the page springing out in bold relief:

It was the thousandth incarnation of a sentence he’d been writing for the past three months. His goal was to trace the history of fire through the world’s religions, from Akhenaten’s replacement of Amun with the sun god Ra in ancient Egypt to Prometheus’s theft of fire from the gods in Greece to the Persian incarnation of Adar and onward. His intention was to show how the sun, the giver of all life, is first deified (Ra), then demystified (Prometheus), then resignified (Adar) as human beings realize that fire, like a stallion, can be only partially tamed—which is why most religions contain an apocalyptic vision of the earth consumed by flames in a final judgment against mankind’s hubris. It was this quasi-animist belief that Chandler believed was fueling the nuclear arms race: from primitive fire arrows to medieval trebuchets to nuclear bombs, humanity was doing the bidding of the fire god, building the tools that would enable it to realize its ultimate goal: the purification of the world through its annihilation.

He knew the arguments backward and forward, had scoured the dusty corners of every library between Cambridge and Princeton for supporting evidence. But every time he sat down at the typewriter, something stopped him. There was always one more fact he needed to look up, a distracting errand he had to get done. Chandler knew the truth, of course. The truth was that if he ever finished his dissertation he’d have to leave school. Go out into the world and make something
of himself, and he knew how that story ended. Knew how it had ended for his father at any rate, and Uncle Jimmy, and Percy Logan, his best friend at Andover: a slab of white marble forty-two inches tall, thirteen inches wide, and four inches thick. For now he’d settle for the less frightening prospect of a blank sheet of paper.

And besides, this time there was no getting around it. He had to write
something
. His advisor had given him a deadline of 5 p.m. to turn in a draft of this chaper or she was going to cancel his monthly stipend.

He glanced at his watch—7:18. Just under ten hours to write fifty pages. Chandler didn’t think he could fill that many pages even if, like the proverbial monkey, all he did was hit random keys for the next ten hours, let alone attempt to lay out a cogent argument spanning five continents and as many millennia.

He set his fingers on the keyboard, let his mind fill with the image of Adar. Like all fire, Adar was always moving from one place to another. To Chandler, he was like Hanuman, Rama’s devoted servant, not as powerful as his king, but made invincible by unwavering fealty. Hanuman’s chin was scarred by a lightning bolt when he was a child. Adar was the lightning itself: a limbed comet, a warrior made of pure flame—

The clacking of keys pulled him from his thoughts. He looked down, was surprised to see that he’d typed everything that had just run through his mind. He’d substituted the word “Urizen” for “Adar” (one of Blake’s deities? he wasn’t quite sure, although he could see the god clearly enough, beard and hair streaming in a cosmic breeze). Emboldened, his fingers flew over the keys. Words, sentences, paragraphs poured onto the page. One page, two, a third. In the middle of the fourth he needed to check a quotation but was afraid to get up. He knew the quote, could almost see it in front of him, written out on one of the thousands of index cards that filled a dozen drawers in his carrel in the library. And then, suddenly, he
could
see it:

He didn’t ask himself how this was happening or if it could possibly have something to do with last night. When he finally looked up, it was just after four. A stack of pages sat next to the typewriter. He was about to count them when the number came to him: seventy-two. He had no idea how he knew this number, but he knew it was accurate. He threw the pages into his briefcase and ran out the front door. The campus was half a mile away. He was going to have to sprint if he wanted to get this in on time. He set off down Brattle Street at a run, but before he’d gone half a block he pulled up short. Something had caught his eye. A stack of newspapers at the corner kiosk. The
Worker
, of all papers. He glanced at the headline—
FPCC AND DRE FACE OFF ON NEW ORLEANS RADIO—
then realized it was the words above the headline that had caught his eye. I.e., Friday, November 1, 1963.

Friday?

Friday?!

Never mind that he was able to see letters a quarter-inch high from ten feet away (and at a run to boot): if the paper was right, he’d somehow lost
five days
. He stood there dumbfounded, wracking his mind for some memory of the last 120 hours. Had he slept it all away? Wandered through it in some kind of alcohol blackout? An image of Urizen flashed in his mind again, stamped on a little square of translucent paper that floated in a glass of clear liquid for a second before dissolving. The taste of warm vodka was so palpable that his eyes watered.

Confused and frightened, he turned and walked back home. His key was in the door when he heard a throat clear. Even before he turned, he felt her. Her sense of barely controlled panic as she waded through the pyroclastic emotions streaming by with the other people on the sidewalk. She was hunched inside a dark jacket, her face shielded by sunglasses with lenses as big as the saucers on which espresso is served in cafes in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The most real thing about her seemed to be the ruby ring on her right hand, which she twisted nervously with the fingers of her left.

“Naz.” Chandler’s voice was as dry as the crust of food on the plates in his sink upstairs. “I—I thought I dreamed you up.”

Naz didn’t say anything for so long that Chandler thought she was just another hallucination. Then:

“I think you did,” she said, and fell into his arms.

In the wake of his Caribbean sojourn, the Halls of Justice
seemed bland and expensive. Terrazzo floors speckled black and brown like a wren’s egg, buffed walnut wainscoting giving way to Listerine-colored walls. Sure, the slate roofs of Cuba’s government buildings were leaking and the rococo wallpaper had been repatterned by gunfire. But the Cubans made all this seem intentional. Not decrepit or disheveled, but
déshabillé
, as the French would have it, which made the whole setup somehow alluring. Sexy even. Give the Communists a few more years and they would no doubt erect buildings like this one: fish belly–white on the outside, every bit as soulless within. But they’d never be able to afford the telling details: the all-pervasive hum of thousands of coffee-makers, Dictaphones, and air conditioners, and of course the immeasurable wattage of infinite fluorescence. Melchior pulled his hat down lower on his forehead. The Wiz always said a spy had only three natural enemies: cheap liquor, cheap girls, and bright lights.

On the beaded glass of the nearest doorway, three letters were stenciled in gold and outlined in black, like the office of a private dick in a forties noir:

No name was painted on the door, but if he squinted Melchior could make out the ghostly outline of the words
FRANK WISDOM
just above the title. Whoever’d scraped the paint off had scratched the glass in the process, indelibly etching the Wiz’s name into the door and rendering him more of a presence than he’d ever been during his tenure as chief of covert ops. This seemed a fitting tribute, since the Wiz had spent even less time in this office than Melchior had in the Adams Morgan apartment he’d owned for the past eight years.

The door opened. A gray suit appeared. The suit had a head. The head had a face. The face had a mouth. The mouth said:

“You can come in now.”

The soles of Melchior’s sandals squeaked on epoxied marble when he stood up. He twisted his left shoe a little, which made the sound louder, longer. To an observer it might’ve looked as though he was just being obnoxious, a high schooler sliding his sneakers on a freshly waxed basketball court. Indeed, his whole demeanor exuded contempt for protocol and propriety, from his too-long and slightly oily hair to his ill-fitting linen suit to the utterly ridiculous woven leather sandals on his feet. But in fact all he was doing was adjusting the inner liner of his shoe, which had bunched up because of the piece of paper folded between it and the sole. A piece of paper worth more than this whole building, although Melchior would settle for an office in it, as long as it came with a pretty secretary.

The man who’d opened the door showed him into the inner office, then, instead of leaving, closed the door, walked around Melchior, and took a seat at the desk. The nameplate in front of him read
RICHARD HELMS
. Melchior’d never met Helms in person, but he’d seen his picture in the paper often enough. This wasn’t Helms.

Melchior was intrigued.

As soon as he sat down, the man seemed to forget about Melchior. He began flipping through the pages of a file on the desk. Melchior’s presumably. Melchior noted with pride the thinness of the sheaf of pages. Agents whose tenure with the Company was half his had files two, three, four feet thick, but there were only twenty or thirty pages on the desk. Even so, he didn’t like this self-important functionary looking at it. Where in the hell was Dick Helms? Given the fact that Melchior had worked side by side with the former occupant of this office for nearly two decades—not to mention the importance of the intelligence he’d gathered in Cuba—surely he rated a meeting with the current DDP?

Helms’s surrogate continued to ignore him, so Melchior plopped into one of the green leather chairs in front of the desk. The surrogate sighed but didn’t look up.

“I didn’t ask you to sit down.”

Melchior lifted both feet off the floor and held his battered sandals in the air. After fifteen months on his feet—and who knows how long on their previous owner—the soles were so worn that when he curled
his toes the brown leather wrinkled like skin. So thin that you could see the outline of the piece of paper just under the leather of the left shoe, if you knew what you were looking at.

Finally the man behind the desk raised his eyes.

“I’m sorry Deputy Director Helms wasn’t able to meet with you today. I’m Drew Everton. Acting assistant deputy director for the Western Hemisphere Division.”

“How in the hell do they fit all that on your card?”

Everton rolled his eyes. “Would you put your feet down, please?”

Melchior smiled. “I just wanted the Company to see what I’ve had to endure for the sake of my country. I been walking around in a pair of huaraches for more than a year. My feet,” he said, letting them plop one at a time to the floor, “are fucking
tired.”