Woke Up Lonely (15 page)

From the bedroom, his wife was calling. He had his thoughts. Was an alcoholic blackout advisable under the circumstances? You couldn’t be blamed for negligence if you were
blacked out.
He draped a blanket over his shoulders. It was possible Rita had stopped paying the heating bill.

“What is it, honey?” He stood inside the doorway to their room. The longer he slept on the couch, the more he felt the trespass of his return.

“Just thinking,” she said. “Couldn’t sleep.”

He approached the bed slowly. Among the blankets and throw pillows, hers was still the most prominent stuffing there.

“You been sick?” she said.

He nodded, though she still faced the wall. This gave him the chance to step in further. Closer, one toe at a time. Could he really see his own breath? He shivered and looked at his wife, could almost feel her breasts and stomach, the pack of her thighs. Under those covers was a pound of flesh. And so, though the timing was awful, his blood began to jazz like seltzer. Neurons firing, he came to life.

He sidled along the wall undetected. The flap of his pajama bottoms turned him loose. He closed in on the edge of the bed but stepped on a comb that skidded across the carpet. He froze, heart stopped. She lifted her head, nose in the air. The draft in the apartment put him at a disadvantage, upwind. Desire has a whiff; if she caught on, forget it. She lowered her head. Snuggled.

He scanned the terrain of blankets for a point of entry and settled on a tiered approach, peeling back one layer of blanket at a time.

“Get me my lotion?” Rita said, and he all but reared as the nape of the duvet fell from his hand. Lotion? She said
lotion!
And like that, he was fifteen years old. Wanting to get over on his wife and wresting from language in one context arousal in another. Could he assist in the application of this slippery, thick, jerk-off
lotion?

He watched her cream her palms and forearms, and he waited. She might say: I can’t reach this spot, can you help? Or: I need some here and here. And if in the process he dragged the tip of his penis down her spine—an accident, he’d swear—it would be enough to get him off later, dial-up be damned.

He waited and watched, but still no orders, and so he was all but resigned when she said, “Baby, come here,” followed by the unthinkable gesture of her turning over to look at him. He was backlit; there was no way she wouldn’t see his condition, and yet he still tried to hide it. She patted the mattress. What were the odds? So, no, he would not be stupid about this. Would not mistake
come hither
for
meow,
would instead sit on the bed and regard the impudence of his erection with pity.

She touched his hand and said, “You’re freezing!”

He got under the covers, actively trying to leach the excitement from his body. He knew Rita; she’d be appalled. She was pregnant and bedridden and no part of her was unfurling to accommodate his needs. Not tonight, not any night soon, not even for weeks or months after the baby was born. And anyone who thought otherwise was not just insensitive but sadistic, because this arousal did not affirm his wife’s hotness blazed through the more immediate evidence that she’d lost her sex appeal so much as furnish her sense—her fear—that she’d married an asshole.

He stared at the rice-paper shade overhead and considered what disposable savings he and Rita would need to justify purchase of a replacement shade, something stained glass or Tiffany-like, and how they might never accede to this position of wealth, and where normally such thoughts deflated his courage to live, never mind a hard-on, tonight they roused him up the gallows. He was on his back with his arms fastened to his side. Entombed. Safe. Do. Not. Move.

“Honey,” she said, and she scooted for him so that her kneecaps pressed into his upper thigh and her hand fell atop his chest. “Honey, I was thinking—”

Oh, to hell with it: he reverted to strategies that had groped at him through high school. He sat up to scratch his foot so that her hand rappelled down his chest and landed in the flesh well between his hip and navel. Maybe the landscaping of their bodies would give her ideas where before she had none.

She laughed. “Feels like a war in your belly,” she said, and she pinched the mini-donuts tubed about his waist.

“Thanks,” he said, but thought: A little to the left. Just a little!

“So, anyway, I was thinking,” she said. “About the baby? What if we named him after someone I kind of admire?”

She was breathing on his shoulder, and the heat collected in his armpits. Her finger traced a halo around his belly button. “Someone he can be proud of his whole life.”

Bruce tried not to move—his fists were tight—and yet there it was, his pelvis thrusting for her, gently and without commitment, but thrusting all the same while he watched in horror and waited for the tirade that was, instead, his wife vouchsafing her thighs, lathered in cream. He fit himself between them and smiled like an ape.

“Are you listening?” she said.

He was, he was! He was even going to climax with this name on her lips, their boy’s name, Bruce Jr., because all his life, secretly, he’d wanted to have his own father’s name—Henry—and felt this keenly and always in the presence of his younger brother, the doctor brother, the most renowned hematologist in the country brother, Dr. Henry Bollinger II. And Rita knew this—in the courtship phase of releasing secrets you’d never told anyone else, he had told her—and now, suddenly, his beloved wife was making good on what she knew. Bruce Jr.! His baby boy. And this despite everything he had done. She was a marvel, he was a cad, and from this incoherence grew the tension that stormed out of his body and all over her legs, the sheets, and the duvet.

He was panting so loud, he didn’t hear her at first. “The Helix,” she said. “They’re amazing. And the guy who started it?” She reached for a tissue and plucked the semen off her quad. “He’s a genius. So that’s what I want. They say he’s nicknamed Lo. I think it’s cute. So it’s settled, okay?”

“What?” Bruce said, though he was laughing. “Are you kidding?” And he laughed harder. “The
Helix?
”

“Stop laughing!” she said.

“What? I can’t hear you.” He was laughing so hard, the piss romped through his pipes and the brandy lees down his colon, so that unless he got to the bathroom now, the rain of his ejaculate would be but prelude to something much worse. And so he got up not having said yea or nay, so that Rita began to holler after him: “Thurlow! I want to name the baby after THURLOW DAN!” at which point, Esme, who had fallen asleep on the job, woke up with a start, certain she’d been wandering the world in dream and calling his name. Thurlow, where are you? Thurlow, I miss you. Wait for me, I’m trying.

Team ARDOR: Ready, willing, able.

A municipal building two miles from the Capitol. A conference room with window, wall, and two-way mirror. Around a table, four Department of the Interior employees who’d been summoned from their place of work and given roast beef sandwiches with extra mayo. Standing up: some guy who seemed distantly familiar to Ned and Bruce, but not enough to distract from the oddity and thrill of what he was offering, which was, in the main: hope.

Ned stared out the window, looked up at the sky. In 1986, the USSR seeded the clouds above Chernobyl so that they would deposit their radioactive load on the peasants of Belarus instead of on the cognoscenti of Moscow. And it worked. The Soviets had engineered the weather to kill people. The Chinese, too, were obsessed with the weather. With rainmaking to forfend drought. But in all cases, for good or evil, these people were frosting the sky and changing the world. It was science at its most heretical. Do it right, and you could conjure a storm that was godlike in its rage, steeped in the punitive grammar of the Bible. Do it right, and you could show the heavens who was boss. And this mattered to Ned, since his fear of powerlessness had always aspirated whatever went sloshing about his heart, so that he couldn’t date the same woman more than a few weeks, couldn’t acquire any real friends, couldn’t lock down a single feeling and make it last. But not for long. Cloud seeding and weather modification. It was why he’d been hired, or so he’d been told, and though studying cloud cover in Cincinnati seemed like a dubious application of his talent, it was still a chance to prove he could impose his will on the big things. Find his sister and be happy. Cincinnati, tallyho.

The guy in charge handed out envelopes. He said, “In each you’ll find a key to one of four lockers at the Greyhound bus station. In those lockers, you’ll find coveralls, badges, and clipboards. Anne-Janet, in your locker you will also find keys to the van, which will be parked on Court Street. Now, are you okay to drive the van, or do you want someone else to do it?”

Anne-Janet was startled. She’d been staring at Ned’s shoes under the table. Brown lace-up gum shoes that were popular among the preppies at her school circa 1993. Did that mean he’d been a preppy and was hanging on to the glory days via his shoes? Or did he just shop secondhand?

One of the fluorescents overhead began to strobe. The effect was to slow time in the room and to repulse its occupants even further into themselves.

“I can drive,” Olgo said, and he nearly stood up. Would have stood up, if not for his reflection in the mirror, which showed a man without purpose. Yes, he was working the Indian land claims, but no, he really wasn’t. So maybe he’d started moping around the house. Maybe, for feeling so aimless, he’d stopped managing his looks, such as they were. For instance, his shirt, muddied with raspberry ganache from his birthday cake. But was that any reason to leave your husband? Not that Kay had left. She was just out to graze. Kay Panjabi was
grazing.
“I can drive us from here, if you want. Right now. Anyone object to leaving right now?”

“That won’t be necessary,” said the man. “But your enthusiasm is noted.”

Bruce lifted his arm in the way kids do when they want to look like they’ve volunteered but don’t want to be called on. Today was payday. If he did as told and allotted his income responsibly, he’d have enough money left to buy his wife and unborn a six-pack of Jell-O pudding snacks for dinner.

“You have a question, Bruce?”

“Yes. Can I keep whatever footage I shoot at the Helix House? Can I get the rights and use it for whatever I want?”

The man touched the hearing device lodged in his ear and said, “After it’s been cleared.”

“I’m ready to leave now,” Olgo said. “Drive right to that man’s door and blow the place up if I have to.”

“What?” Ned said. “When are we going?”

“Whenever you’re going,” Anne-Janet said.

Esme stood. She’d been watching them through the two-way, but she’d seen enough. She patched in to Martin and told him to wrap it up.

She slung her purse over her shoulder but stopped at the door to answer her phone, and then not to answer, because it was Jim Bach. He’d want to know about her progress. He’d ask to meet the team. She let it go to voicemail, and when she listened two minutes later, it was as she suspected.

He said: Esme, the stakes have never been so high. Imperialist pretensions abroad are kid stuff in comparison. Are you sure you know what this means? She stopped listening there. Of course she was sure. And here was why: Some people hear voices and the voices are bad. They say: You’re going to die alone. And: You suck. Sometimes, when these voices come to you via satellite because it is your job to listen, it is your career as a sleuthing mercenary, sometimes they say the last thing you want to hear: Thurlow Dan accepting money from North Korea. Thurlow Dan giving presents to a hooker. Thurlow Dan weeping into his pillow at five in the afternoon, knowing that if his muscles have failed to rouse him from bed, it is because they are instruments of depressing notice that he does not want to live. She had heard it all, and so when Jim asked, for the millionth time, if she understood what was at stake, the answer was easy: Yes, I understand, I understand better than you. Though if he asked for more, she wouldn’t tell him. She could barely tell herself. Time heals all wounds? Ha, ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha.

III. In which a cult leader makes a tape. In which an ex-wife gets her chance. Like honeybees to the hive, Hostage Rescue to the Helix House.

III. In which a cult leader makes a tape. In which an ex-wife gets her chance. Like honeybees to the hive, Hostage Rescue to the Helix House.

THURLOW
GOT
THOUSANDS
OF
EMAILS
A
DAY, which Dean reduced to the few that seemed pressing or of interest. Among today’s crop was one was from a girl petitioning him to visit her weekly meeting, it being the most popular in her district—hundreds aggregating to lament
the darkness of 2000; the squandered surplus; WMDs;
etc. He wrote:
Dear Crystal, I’m glad your meeting has attracted so many people, except I encourage you to reacquaint yourself with the Helix charter and core principles because they don’t have too much to do with what you’re talking about.
But then instead of sending it, he just shook his head. To another follower, who’d promised his mom the Helix would make him a better son, though he wasn’t sure it had, Thurlow wrote:
The only promise that’s been despoiled is the one I made you.
But then he deleted that, too. Turned off his computer and looked at the video camera aimed his way. There was one in every room of the house, programmed to record in his presence and to send this footage to his PC for compiling. He had modeled the system on Nixon’s White House, only he never forgot it was on. Often, he’d look into the cameras and talk to himself. His work proceeded from the unhappiness of a deserted man—who else did he have to talk to? Plenty of people, it turned out. As of today, the whole world. Now that he was about to obliterate the trust so many had put in him, it was better to address them all in one go. He cleared his throat. And began.

00:58:12:12: Greetings from my home in Cincinnati. You all know my name, and by the time you see this tape, you will also know what I’ve done. So I want to use this as an opportunity to explain. But first, a few caveats, chiefly that I am not a crazy. The press will be calling me a crazy, but I’m not. Sun Myung Moon is crazy. Victor Paul Wierwille. Jim Jones and Chuck Dederich. But I am not them. What I am is heartbroken. Which will, yes, lead some men to do crazy things.