She does, she is seeing something—someone—I see it happening in her eyes. I lean forward and grab her but she wriggles back, rolls away. “Jean, keep talking. Jean, stay with me. You went to stop her but someone followed you guys.”
But she’s gone, she’s done, she falls back on the bed and throws her hands up in front of her face, and I am saying, “Jean! Jean. Somebody surprised you outside the station. With a knife.”
She shrieks a little, a sharp burst of air, and then she presses her hand across her lips. And I grab her again, clutch her by the shoulders and lift her, and my shell of dispassion, my phony policeman’s calm, is melting off of me, burned off by heat: I can’t stand this, I have to know.
“Someone chased you and attacked you with a knife, and they killed my sister.”
She shakes her head violently, keeps her hand clapped over her mouth, like there’s a demon in there, something trying to slip free and wreck the world.
“Was it Astronaut?”
Eyes squeezed shut tight, body shaking.
“Or was it a stranger? A short man, sunglasses? Baseball cap?”
She turns her body away from me, turns her back. I wish I could pull out a picture of him—lay it on the bed, Jordan smirking in his stupid Ray-Bans, see Jean’s face see the picture. But it’s too late, she’s disappeared, she’s gone, turning her mind away from whatever it is she is unwilling to see. Her hand is clamped over her mouth, her body has fallen over onto its side and she lies there on the thin mattress, mute, terrified, useless.
“Oh, come on,” I say.
I kick the bed and it bounces with her in it.
“Oh, come on, come on, come on.”
2.
“Isis,” of course, is the second track on the 1976 album Desire, and for a brief period when I was about fifteen or sixteen it was my favorite Bob Dylan song. It was around that time Nico discovered a journal in which I had carefully recorded my top twenty Dylan numbers, each annotated with the year written and the performers on the track. Nico found something hysterical about the fastidiousness of this particular exercise, and she ran around the house, dying with laughter, tossing the notebook up and down to herself like a chimpanzee.
It’s weird to think back now, to think about who I was then, to think that at any time “Isis” was my favorite Dylan song. Now it probably isn’t even my favorite song on Desire. But there’s no reason Nico would have known that, and I think it is at least possible, I think it is perhaps even likely, that she chose the code name because she knew at some point, somehow, I would find out about it. That she left it behind not as a marker, a follow-me bread crumb like the bent fork in the vending machine or the butt of the American Spirit, but rather as a kind of a gift. Or else she did it just because it made her laugh, because various aspects of my personality make her laugh, and that, also, at this point, is a kind of a gift.
I walk down the hall from the holding cell to Detective Irma Russel’s little office, and I flip her heavy leather-bound log book to the back and tear out sixteen sheets and fold them over neatly to form a book, and then I spend a good half hour recording everything that Jean had to say before she shut down, blanked out, went dark. How she came to be in the group; the names and approximate ages and appearances of her pals and coconspirators; the way her face turned cloudy and wild at the mention of the name Astronaut. How she realized that Nico had taken off, how she ran to follow her …
When I’m done writing, when I’ve written up to the brick wall at the end of the story, I walk back down the hall to Dispatch so I can sit next to Nico. She would laugh at me for all of this. She would tell me to take a load off, go back and have more beer with the rednecks, eat more chicken.
I press the power button on the RadioCOMMAND and the room fills with prayer: a gospel choir singing about the promised land in lush layers of harmony, transmitting up to God and out over a 600 MHz band. I picture a church somewhere, barricaded doors, blackout shades over the windows, a hungry happy congregation singing and singing till the day arrives. Till the promised land. I press SCAN and find someone claiming to be the president of the United States of America, proudly announcing that the whole thing was just a test of the resiliency of the American people, and—good news—we passed the test. It’s okay now, though, folks. Everything is fine.
I change the station. I change it again. Flickering voices, bursts of static, “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED,” and then a tipsy ecstatic teenager: “I don’t know where y’all motherfuckers are at, but we all motherfuckers are in the Verizon store at the Crestview Hills Mall in Crestview Hills, Kentucky, bi-zatch! Anyone looking to par-tay get on fucking I-75 …”