Terminal Island

Chapter Eighteen

WE’RE SHADY ISLE



It is a low cliff—two or three feet high—but Henry lands hard on his face. If the ground wasn’t soft earth he could have fractured his skull. As it is, he is just rattled. He crawls to his feet, spitting a gob of blood and dirt.

“F*ck,” he says, checking his jaw. His voice echoes as if in a barn; the whole building is hollow inside, gutted. There are no condos, no separate rooms at all, just one big empty box. What is this? Remodeling?

Standing up, Henry closes the door to a crack and blearily peeks out. He can hear the jangling of the inner fence being unlocked and dragged open, and a gruff voice abusing the dogs. “Stay!” the voice says. “Stay, you whores!” The vehicle spurts through with a farting roar, and now Henry sees it coming down the driveway:

It is the same dirty-yellow quad ATV that he and Ruby saw at the Casino, and carrying the same two men. The one in the rear has a blue U.S. Postal Service mailbag slung across his back. They do not stop to scan the grounds, but move purposefully as if on an errand, following the service road downward to the lowest bank of condos. Henry loses sight of them. The dogs are nowhere to be seen—they must not have been released into the compound.

Thank you, dear lord, Henry thinks—not only for himself, but because of his foresight in telling Ruby to return to the hotel.

The last thing he would have pegged those guys for is mailmen. At least they’re not security or cops—at the moment he seems to be in the clear. It’s almost disappointing: For a second Henry’s mind had raced through the various scenarios of being caught, and all of them at least allowed him to vent his frustration at being forced to trespass like this…and now almost break his neck. It’s not like he’s in here for fun! He’d like to walk right out and flag those men down, demanding answers.

But somehow it just doesn’t seem like a good idea to reveal himself to them. Maybe if they were more official-looking and not so much like crazy yahoos spoiling for a fight. Especially if something illegal is going on here, they could be dangerous. After all, isn’t that what he came here to find out?

Henry makes the snap decision to see where they went, to discreetly follow them. If they’re really mailmen, maybe they went to an administrative office where all this can be neatly resolved. He’d gladly pay for the busted door. In spite of everything, he still dearly hopes there is some reasonable explanation.

Venturing out of hiding and down the stairs, Henry listens carefully for the giveaway racket of that ATV. On the next-to-last landing, he catches sight of the vehicle. It is parked on the sun deck of the lowermost block of condos, which are set on a concrete ledge directly overhanging the beach. It is the base of this platform that Henry and Ruby had first seen from the shore road below.

Henry wavers, unsure of what to do. Much as he wishes he could just march down there, his military experience tells him to reconnoiter first, to not throw away his only advantage. Oh, now you’re James Bond, he thinks as he vaults the railing and ducks into the shaded space beneath the stairs.

Feeling like an idiot, he works his way down the steep culvert, hanging onto the wooden struts for support. It’s a little scary—the cement drainage chute dips almost vertical at times, and ends at a fifty-foot drop to the rocks. Quite a fall if he loses his grip.

Tourist killed in fall. He can’t help but grin at the idiocy of it—Ruby would kill him if she knew—but at the same time it feels good to be doing something, to be working up a sweat outside of the gym. However nonsensical, this is more real than anything he’s done in years. Henry knows that he is having a life-moment of some kind, and allows himself to relish the feeling—it doesn’t come often enough these days.

Suddenly he hears a spritely electronic tune—his cell phone! Struggling to grab the phone out of his back pocket without losing his grip on the wooden beam, Henry fumbles the noisy device and watches it go pinwheeling down the culvert and over the drop. The tinny music ends with a very faint splash.

Great. At the base of the stairs he peers out at the ATV, now eye-level with him and just a few dozen yards away. The engine is ticking as it cools. He can see down the length of the lowest tier of condos, his eyes following the ranks of doors and windows blankly facing the sea. The third door down is open, black as a missing tooth.

Henry boosts himself up onto the deck, not quite pulling off the fast, silent commando maneuver he had in mind—he was never that graceful, even when he was in shape. If someone glances out now they will see a middle-aged man straining like a walrus climbing out of a pool. But no one sees him, and in a second he is clear, heaving for breath behind the corner of the building.

There is a sound: the muffled bass thump of heavy metal music, resonating from the wall next to him. Henry presses his ear to it and the AC/DC song jumps out loud and clear: “Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap.” The music has a hollow echo to it, as if being played in a cavern.

Deciding to risk it, Henry turns the corner and briskly walks toward the open doorway. If anyone should pop out, he will just be completely honest and straightforward, cut to the chase. It would probably be for the best at this point anyway to get it over with—Ruby was most likely the one trying to call him, perhaps to say she is back at the hotel, and he doesn’t want to worry her.

But as he nears the door, Henry has second thoughts. Slowing down, he pads to the edge of the doorframe and listens. The music is muffled, emanating from somewhere deep inside—a big open space, by the sound of it. He steals a peek: The room is dark compared to the brightness outside, but in a panel of sunlight Henry can see plywood flooring and exposed wall joists. The building is not an empty shell on a dirt foundation like the other, but it’s clearly not ready to be lived in. The two men are nowhere in sight.

Standing in the doorway, Henry’s eyes adjust to the gloom. He can now make out the entire apartment, front to back. A ladder is propped against the side wall, and there are beer cans and construction trash scattered around. In the far corner is a mattress piled with old sleeping bags.

What is still not clear to Henry is exactly where the men are, or where that music is coming from. He can see as far back as the unit goes, right through the joists of the unfinished bathroom and closet partitions. The whole place is empty; there seems to be nowhere left to hide.

Where the hell did they go?

Henry creeps inside, ready to bolt any second. He goes to the mattress and stoops down, scanning the collection of pornography lying around on the floor: Leg Show, Hustler, Club International. There are crumpled Trojan wrappers underfoot.

Suddenly the music cuts off and there is a hooting laugh from somewhere high up, practically in his ear. Henry jumps in alarm, whipping around to see a man materializing at the top of the ladder, climbing in over the wall through the ceiling rafters. He is not looking at Henry or he would have seen him at once; he is busy talking to someone on the far side:

“—so I says to her, I says, ‘If you think you can get it done cheaper, you go right ahead,’ and she says, ‘Kevin, you drive a hard bargain,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I got your hard bargain right here!’”

From the opposite side of the wall, another man laughs, saying, “Dude, you know she wants it.”

“Hell yes. One of these days she’ll be getting it, too. Put that mouth of hers to good use.”

There is no way for Henry to cross back to the front door without being seen. The first man is already moving down the ladder and the second one coming over the top. All of Henry’s plans for confronting the men evaporate in a burst of instinctive action:

Without thinking, he dives down flat in the crevice between the mattress and the wall, huddling there behind rumpled sleeping bags as the men descend to the floor and go outside. There is the sound of the door being shut, and the ka-chunk of its lock. Still, Henry doesn’t budge until he hears the grunt of the ATV starting up, its receding snarl up the hill.

“Damn,” he says aloud, pushing back the smelly sleeping bag and sitting up in darkness. “What the f*ck am I doing?”

There is dim light bleeding through the curtain, barely enough to see by. Henry goes to check the door, and with a feeling of unreality discovers that there is no inside latch—it requires a key to get out. This is funnier to him than it is frightening—there is no question of staying there until someone comes along to free him, but how many damn doors is he going to have to bust down today? The idea that it took three days to get in and now he can’t get out without literally breaking out—Ruby would be shaking her head at the well-deserved irony: So much for chutzpah, bunnykins.

Henry leaves the door for now and goes to the ladder. Wherever this leads, maybe there’s another way out, or perhaps a phone he can use to call the hotel desk and reassure Ruby. He climbs up and looks over the top of the plywood wall, grunting at the view as if jabbed in the solar-plexus with a big soft finger. So this is why the music sounded so strange.

Just like the other one, the rest of this building is hollow inside…but not quite empty. In fact, it’s as cluttered as a warehouse. He is looking down its whole length, two stories up and a hundred feet long. Light seeps in through the rows of draped windows, every door a fake front for a condominium that doesn’t exist. Henry knows for sure now: It’s all a façade, the whole complex; some kind of front for a scam of epic proportions.

The only real apartment is the one being built beneath him, assembled like a kit out of the prefabricated parts that are lying all around. Whole finished walls ready to be snapped together whenever and wherever needed, an instant showroom behind any of these sham doorways.

Along with the building supplies are troves of plastic-wrapped furniture and appliances, rolls of carpeting, all manner of decorative lawn and garden kitsch. Henry supposes that all this stuff goes on display when the brochures are being shot, or when visitors and prospective tenants are ushered through. Stage dressing. He has no doubt there are actors in this show as well, con-artists playing the part of happy residents.

There is a ladder on the opposite side of the wall, and with a sickly sense of wonder Henry climbs down to the floor of the cavernous space. It is like standing in any kind of factory or mill. Along the nearest wall are several large tables made from plywood sheets propped on sawhorses, and on these tables are plastic crates of mail in various stages of being sorted and filed. Aside from the enormous boom-box that Henry expected to see, there are also TVs and laptop computers and a host of electronic printing equipment. Metal folding chairs have been set up in front of the tables, and the floor is covered with bags of unsorted mail.

Henry turns on a lamp over the table, creating a pool of light in the gloom, and looks at the assembly-line operation. It is laid out in stages, nice and simple, starting with sheaves of freshly-arrived mail. As far as he can see, all of it is intended for residents of Shady Isle, and the lion’s share seems to be addressed to women with archaic-sounding names like Selma or Gertrude or Edith. Going down the line, Henry sees where the mail is opened and the contents filed by date and order of importance, with sticky-notes attached for special instructions: “Nd 401K stats ASAP” “Move acct to Cr. Suisse?” “Pull fam. hist. to locate” “Accss Soc. Sec. tax docs Apr. ’51-May ’66.” “Renw. passport and drv. lic.” There are postal meters, notary stamps, official seals and imprimaturs of every kind.

Henry looks into the long row of alphabetized file boxes and skips to the Cs. Holy shit—he can’t believe his eyes, but there it is: Cadmus. A thick bundle of material in a brown cardboard legal folder. The word dossier flies through his head. Henry opens it up and finds a window envelope containing two freshly-minted DVDs, one labeled, Cadmus stats and the other, Cadmus pics. Beneath it is a recent eight-by-ten photograph of his mother—a professional-looking head-shot—and an envelope full of negatives.

As Henry sifts through the material beneath, he is swamped with confusion and shock, hands trembling as he turns page after page of legal and financial documents that all seem to have his mother’s signature and handwriting, but which reveal a degree of wealth that he never knew she had, nor would have imagined she was capable of either amassing or managing:

Loans for tens of thousands of dollars, mortgages, vast lines of credit, high-yield investment portfolios, insurance policies worth millions, with names of beneficiaries that he has never heard of before, mostly obscure charity foundations that smack of religion or extreme right-wing politics. The level of international finance savvy on display is far beyond anything his mother is capable of, Henry is sure, though at one time she did speak the languages—Greek, Italian, French, Portuguese. But he would have thought that after all these years she would be a little rusty. Certainly he has never known her to be so well-regarded by the slick gatekeepers of capitalism. In Henry’s experience, Vicki’s level of correspondence with such entities has always been limited to overdrafts and past-due notices—and there has never been any reason to suppose that old age has made her more competent. He is not the son of this steel-willed speculator, gambling with borrowed fortunes; the mother he knows is altogether more hapless. This creature in the paperwork with his mother’s name and handwriting is a stranger to him—Henry’s weird, involuntary stirring of pride in her accomplishment is an alien emotion to be stamped down, proof positive that this is all wrong. A phantom sensation like feelings in an amputated limb.

My mother is dead.

It’s not the first time in the past three months that this thought has occurred to him, but it is the first time that Henry knows it is true, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

They’ve killed her. They’ve killed my mother and stolen her identity.

And not just her; all these people’s identities—hundreds or thousands of lonely souls who died unremembered and unmourned, but whose fixed incomes live on. All of them existing now only in these files, in the form of paper and mail and electronic transactions, a whole population of ghosts haunting this island, where they can be put to good use.

They are farming them, just as Ruby joked—farming the dead, milking them like cattle. Better than cattle, for they use no resources, take up no space, leave no waste. Reaping these sad, fatted beings—who even alive were already relegated to a ghostly existence on the margins of society—for the economic lifelines that sustained and uselessly prolonged their empty, puttering existences. Plucking them off like so many suckling parasites to get at the nectar. Consolidating all their myriad separate dribbles of income which were just soaking into the ground; evaporating and making them all work together, supporting and reinforcing each other as a single grotesque tit of economic force. Henry is becoming enraged.

Evil, murdering bastards—

His first impression of the hollow building had been exactly right: It is a factory, a ghost-powered money-mill that grinds up living people and churns out wealth for…someone. But who? Who is gaining from this ultimate cost/benefit ratio? Who has killed his mother and stolen her identity and added it to the invisible population of golden ghouls? (And in the back of his mind: How can this be? Is she really dead, or is he just being hysterical, jumping to conclusions? But it is his childish, desperate need for this to be true that tells him it cannot be—the world as he knows it does not reward wishful thinking. And all his past experiences with this island only reinforce one grim conclusion.)

—murdering evil f*cks—

Henry comes across a box of Shady Isle promotional materials and application forms. Amid the brochures is a stack of DVDs with labels that read, We’re Shady Isle. There is a TV and a DVD player set up; on impulse Henry loads one of the disks.

Accompanied by bouncy Caribbean steel drums, there is an aerial shot of Catalina Island, the camera swooping in low over the sea. A genial narrator says, “Haven’t you always wanted to live in paradise? Far away from the hustle and bustle of modern life, but with all the conveniences? In a beautiful, small-town setting with a view of mountains and the beach? Where every day is a holiday.” The camera closes in on the coast, rising off the water to reveal majestic tiers of condos shining in the sun. Music swells as the voice announces, “Welcome…to Shady Isle.” Now the beat picks up and there is a montage showing the complex from different angles and at different times of day, and mixing in shots of Avalon that make the place look like a tropical wonderland.

The narrator says, “But what kind of people choose to live in such a paradise? Millionaires? Celebrities? Or are they everyday people, just like…you?” Now begins a series of warm close-up shots featuring ordinary, friendly-looking folks doing leisure activities. “Come join us,” they each say in turn, whether sunning on their porches or barbecuing or playing badminton or strolling under the evening lights of the complex. “We’re Shady Isle.”

Henry goes cold, rewinding to freeze the image on the final group scene. Amid the lawn party, everybody toasting the camera, he recognizes a face. She is made-up differently, but there is no mistaking her:

Lisa. Lisa again. God damn it.

Suddenly Henry is beyond rational thought; he can barely see straight, blinded by a red haze of rage and guilt, the skin on his face stretched too tight.

Putting his back into it, Henry pushes the big table over, spilling all the expensive electronics onto the floor. Everything goes down with a great, sliding crash. Then he kicks over the table covered with paperwork—it tumbles like an avalanche.

Not enough. He dances and stomps on the silver-gray laptops, trying to crack them open. They’re pretty tough, enraging him even more. Flinging one across the room, Henry gets the idea to unplug the heavy power converter that is feeding everything. The room goes dark.

Winding up like a discus-thrower, swinging the converter by its thick cord, Henry mutters, “When God shuts a door, he opens a…window!” He lets fly and the device hits the center of the nearest window.

The force of it smashing through drags most of the curtain outside and lets in blue sky and daylight. The sound is even more satisfying than the effect, the crash reverberating up to the rafters.

Standing silently for a moment, Henry wonders what he can do next. He could burn the whole place down. Yes, burn it to the ground! But then he goes still, trying to calm his manic thoughts: No…that would be destroying the evidence.

It suddenly dawns on him that he has made a terrible mistake. He has warned them. As soon as they see this mess they will know they’ve been discovered, and long before any authorities can get here this stuff will have magically disappeared. They’ll destroy it themselves—all this is probably just copies of copies of originals that are stored in anonymous vaults in faraway lands.

Then he remembers Ruby’s camera, still in the bag on his back.

His filming is interrupted by the distant snarl of the ATV returning to the complex.