World of Trouble (19 page)

“I made coffee. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? It’s not gourmet or anything, but it’s coffee. It’s something.”

“No, thank you.” The girl looks up, looks at me quickly, a frightened bird, and then quickly down again. “Do you have tea?”

“Oh, shoot,” I say, “no. I’m so sorry. Just coffee.”

Lily doesn’t say anything else. She’s sitting on the edge of the thin mattress in the holding cell, staring at her hands folded in her lap. The politeness and patience I am showing her, the composed and even casual demeanor, is all artifice, a strategy designed to achieve a goal. The feeling I have inside is of having been exploded—like all of the things that for so long have defined me, all of my habits and memories and idiosyncrasies, everything that I have built up around whatever core there is of me, all of it has turned out to be plaster,
and now it has been blown up and I am watching the powder drift in the atmosphere and settle slowly on the ground. The question now is whether there is or ever was anything underneath all of that, or was I always papier-mâché, a dragon head in a parade, all exterior adornment and nothing inside. I think there is something that remains, a hard warm stone like you find glowing on the ground after a fire. But I’m not sure. I don’t know.

I am leaning against the back wall of the holding room, on the good-guy side of the bars, sipping from my thermos with exaggerated calm. From down the hall, in the garage, there is an occasional rattling blast of sound, Cortez grinding away at that concrete wedge with a diesel-fuel jackhammer. My sister’s body is in the dispatch room, wrapped in a wrinkled blue tarp.

“So why don’t we start by getting your name straight,” I say. “It’s not Lily, that much I know.” I laugh a little, and it sounds hollow, so I stop.

The girl watches her hands. The jackhammer sounds again, growling from down the hall. So far the interrogation is going poorly.

“I wish that I could leave you alone,” I say, “I really do.” I talk slow, as slow as I can force myself to talk. “You’ve been through a lot.”

“I have?” She looks up, genuinely asking, and then her finger runs along her throat, where she has allowed me to reapply the bandage. “I guess I have.”

Mental pictures in strobe-light flash: Two girls, crazy with fear. Tan sandals slipping on leaves. Heavy footsteps crashing through the woods behind them. Nico, facedown, blood flooding from her neck. I blink, clear my throat. Talk very, very slowly. “Your mind is
processing trauma. It’s hard. The thing is, though, we’re in a tough spot, so to speak, just in terms of time.”

She nods some more, her small head nervously bobbling up and down, her hands twitching in her lap. “Actually,” she says softly. “Can I—you said, about time …” She peeks up at me, and then down. “How much longer?”

“Oh,” I say. “Sure.” She doesn’t know how long she was unconscious. She doesn’t know. “It’s Monday morning, October 1,” I tell her. “There are two more days.”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.” She licks her dry lips nervously, pushes one stray lock of black hair behind one small ear, a simple gesture redolent of who she is, a girl in her late teens or early twenties, a kid who got lost in something terrible and strange.

“So I’m really …” I smile one more time, try to make the smile look human. “I’m really wanting to figure out what happened.”

“But I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember. It’s all like this—I don’t know.” Glances up at me, scared, touches the thick gauze on her neck. “It’s all black.”

“Not everything, though, right?”

She shakes her head, barely, a tiny motion.

“Not your whole life?”

“No,” she manages, glancing up. “Not my whole life.”

“Okay, then. So we’ll start with what you do remember, okay?”

“Okay,” she whispers.

It’s not okay. It’s really not. What I want to do and what I would do if it would work is lift her and shake her by the feet until the facts come flying out like coins from her pockets. But this is how
the process works. It works slowly. It’s impossible to tell at this point what portion of her not remembering stems from literal amnesia, what portion from the atavistic fear of reliving whatever horrors she has encountered. The necessary tactic in either case is bound to be patience, small steady movement through the fog, toward the truth. You build trust: Here are the things we both know. Here are the things we are going to talk about. You coach. You coax. It can be hours.
Days
.

I slip through the bars onto her side of the room and place my coffee cup carefully on the floor and take a knee like I’m going to propose.

“You had this bracelet in your pocket, with the charms,” I say. “The lilies. So that’s why we called you Lily.” She lifts it hesitantly from my hand and then presses it in her palm, folds her fingers around it tightly.

“My parents gave it to me.”

“A-ha.”

“When I was little.”

“Gotcha. Nice. But, so—what
is
your name?”

She says something, in the back of her throat, too soft for me to hear.

“I’m sorry?”

“Tapestry.”

“Tapestry?”

She nods. Sniffs a little, wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. I feel a dim glow of knowledge in the darkness between us, the first teardrop bulb glowing on in a string of Christmas lights.

“And is Tapestry a nickname?” I say. “A code name?”

“Yeah.” She looks up and gives a watery smile. “Both, sort of. We all have them.”

“A-ha.”

They all have them. Tapestry. Tick. Astronaut. Does Jordan have one of these nickname/code names, I wonder? Does Abigail? Tapestry’s black eye, I notice, is at the bare beginnings of the healing process, fading from dark purple to a soft bruised pink. She is—what? Nineteen? Twenty maybe. She’s like a hummingbird, this girl. She sort of reminds me of a hummingbird.

“Did Astronaut assign you the code names? Astronaut is—”

The end of the question is “the leader, right?” but before I can get there she inhales sharply and her eyelids drop shut like window blinds.

“Whoa,” I say, standing up. I take a half step forward. “Hello?”

She sits in her silence. I can see, or imagine that I can see, her eyes moving behind the lids, like dancers behind a curtain. Slow, Detective, slower. Build trust. Have a conversation. This is all covered extensively in the literature. In the FBI’s standard witness-engagement guidelines; in Farley and Leonard,
Criminal Investigation
. I can picture the books on the shelf in my house, the neat line of their spines. My house, in Concord, that burned down. Suddenly, from down the hall, there is a determined thirty-second burst of jackhammering,
ka-da-thunk, ka-da-thunk, ka-da-thunk
, followed by a loud backfire, and then Cortez’s exasperated hollering. “Oh, fucker! Fuck me sideways! Fuck!” and the girl looks up, surprised, and bursts out laughing, and I grab the moment, giggle also, lean in, shake my
head with amusement.

“Oh, hey,” I say, sighing. “My name is Henry. Did I tell you that already?”

“You did. Yes. Henry Palace. My real name is Jean,” she says. “And I think—” She looks up at me, rubs her bloodshot eyes. “Actually, could I have—is there any water? Is that okay?”

“Of course, Jean,” I say. “Of course it’s okay.”

*  *  *

The jackhammer is the property of Atlee Miller. It was hidden in the fruit-and-vegetable stand, as it turns out, where the farm lines up against the highway. The piece of light machinery was stashed there along with a range of other specialty equipment, the existence of which would raise uncomfortable questions among his family: like sophisticated radio equipment, for example, like heavy artillery. These items were under the guard of a solemn young man named Bishal, with whom I had a quick, tense exchange before I said the password Atlee had provided me and produced my notebook with his signature on it.

The jackhammer is “an old dog,” Atlee warned, but he also assured me it worked with some coaxing. He did not say that the best coaxing involves shouting “fuck me sideways” when it stalls, but I trust Cortez knows what he’s doing, digging away in there. The two of us proceeding along parallel tracks in our investigation, our earlier altercation behind us. Both of us drilling down—he into the dense resistance of the stone and I into this poor kid’s damaged psyche.

Jean starts talking and talks for a while, sometimes in long jags but mostly in quick anxious bursts, frequently stopping and restarting, choking off sentences midway through, as if afraid of saying too much, saying something wrong. Bits and pieces. In her manner and appearance she is nothing like Nico—shy and hesitant where my sister was bold and direct—but sometimes, just the fact of her, her being a college-age kid who got sucked into this end-times looking-glass world, she reminds me so much of my sister that I have to stop talking for a second and hold onto my mouth or risk collapsing onto the ground.

“I was at Michigan,” Jean tells me, clutching the paper cup of warm water. “The university? That’s where I’m from. From Michigan. My parents are from Taiwan. My last name is Wong. They wanted me to come home. When the—when it started. Home to Michigan, I mean. Not Taiwan. They told me to leave school and come home and pray. We’re Catholic. I was born in Lansing.”

I’m not writing any of this down. My notebook is full, and anyway it’s better not to write, not to draw her attention any further to the fact that this is not just a regular conversation. I listen because I have to, to show empathy and build trust, but I do not care at all about her lineage, her faith and family. I am a question mark aimed at an answer.

“I didn’t want to, though, to just—just go
home
. Pray. I wanted to—” She shrugs, bites her lip. “I don’t know.”

In mid-January the University of Michigan wrapped up its existence with a final gathering of the community on the main quad to sing the fight song and raise a toast in Latin. But Jean
Wong remained on campus through the early spring, hanging around, at loose ends. As little as she was interested in huddling in a church with her parents and reciting psalms in Mandarin, she was equally repulsed by the last-months options being explored by her former classmates: all the drum circles and “sexperimentation,” the semiorganized bus caravan heading south to the Gulf of Mexico, with pillowcases full of dope and breakfast cereal looted from the student center cafeteria. She was mainly angry, she says, and confused.

“I wanted to—I don’t know.”

I speak softly. “You wanted to
do
something about it.”

“Yes.” She looks up, and then repeats the phrase mockingly. “Do something about it. So stupid. Now, I mean. In retrospect.”

For a while, Jean wanders around Ann Arbor. She is briefly signed up for a mission to the Arctic, being touted by an energetic young entrepreneur who claims the world’s polarity can be shifted with the right combination of magnets. When that falls apart she moves in with strangers who are starting a cooperative “pickling and canning society,” to lay in huge quantities of preserved produce for the aftermath. But none of this feels quite real, nothing feels useful. Finally Jean finds herself at a house party slash political gathering in the basement of a Pattengill townhouse, drinking bathtub wine from a red plastic cup, listening to a man standing on a coffee table explain how the whole thing is a “con job” and a “frame-up” and how the government could “stop it like
that
if it wanted to.”

Jean snaps her fingers like the man on the coffee table snapped his fingers, and in my mind I am watching Nico snap her fingers,
trying to sell me the same story. I experience a melancholy roll of feeling, sensing her presence in the room with us, her emphatic intonations, knowing that really she is dead down the hallway, in Dispatch, rolled up in a tarp.

The guy on the coffee table at the Pattengill party was a young man with “crazy curly hair” and bright blue shoes. He wore some kind of cape covered in glittering yellow stars. He was called Delighted—just the one name, says Jean quietly. Like Madonna. Or Bono.

“We kept talking to him after the party. Me and this girl Alice, I had met her doing the other thing. That pickling thing. We ended up—actually, we ended up moving in with him. Me and her and some others.” She bites her lip, and I don’t ask if Astronaut was one of the other people, he of the calm demeanor and the tools on his belt, because I don’t want her eyes to slam shut again.

I guide her instead into a description of the sorts of activities that she and her new housemates got up to: throwing more parties, giving more speeches, printing pamphlets to convince more people that the government was playing false about the asteroid threat. That’s as much as Jean will say, but presumably this upper-midwestern branch then progressed to the same second-order mischief as Nico and her pals in New England: committing street-corner vandalism; amassing small arms and hauling them around in duffel bags; eventually escalating to targeted trespassing on military bases, like the escapade that got Nico’s husband, Derek, pinched at the New Hampshire National Guard station.

The one thing that troubles me is the geographic reach of
the organization. When Nico told me that there was a “Midwest branch” of this collective, I wrote it off as more tough talk, more BS; Nico having been fooled or trying to fool me. But here’s Jean confirming she was recruited into this gang at a basement house party at the University of Michigan, many months and miles away from when Nico came in, in central New Hampshire. It’s another aspect of this thing that speaks to a certain level of capability, a scale of operations that sits uneasily with my mental picture of Nico and some goofball pals playing at revolution in a Concord vintage store.

I don’t know what to do with this kind of information. I don’t know where to put it.

“Jean,” I say abruptly, “we need to skip ahead.”

“What?”

“Eventually a plan emerged, to track down a former United States Space Command scientist named Hans-Michael Parry, who claimed to be in possession of a plan to blow the asteroid off course. Right?”

“Right,” she says, startled. I press on. “Your group or an affiliated group was going to find Parry and free him, get him to England where he could orchestrate a standoff burst. Right?”