Woke Up Lonely A Novel

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.

I think, too, that the press will want to sensationalize what’s going on here, but I prefer the facts and a list of my doings: The seeding and growth of a therapeutic movement whose recruits are legion. A snatching from the Frenchies of philosophy the whys of bereavement and isolation. A crusade for the idea that if companionship makes you feel twice as lonely as you were before, it’s because you’re not doing it right. Disclosing, sharing. Principles! They’re in the charter book, no need to labor them here.

Other behaviors that might warrant the crazy moniker if taken out of context: a blossomed rapport with North Korea; an intent taken up by some of my people to declare sovereign multiple counties nationwide; and, yesterday, the detaining of four federal employees, for which I bear full load.

And so this video, to be distributed in the event this doesn’t work out as planned. Because there are other facts you can’t know unless I tell you directly. For instance: Two weeks ago, I saw my wife and daughter for the first time in nearly ten years. After, I spoke to my wife for about ten minutes, during which conversation she promised or at least strongly implied she would be in touch. But she has not. Not in person, not at all. And I have not been able to locate her or my daughter since. Another problem? I cannot carry on this way without them. And so: I consider these desperate times. Why wouldn’t they call for desperate measures?

The four people imprisoned in my den—I found them snooping across my lawn. In coveralls and work boots. They’d come in a repair truck, which idled by the curb. It bore the Cinergy logo and tag, The Power of Change, which claimed for the gas and electric company more esteem than it was due. I took down the license plate and had my head of security check it out. Then I waited. I sat on a couch, which felt like plywood.

I hate being here. This place is a clink. Three stories, fifteen rooms, stone facade, lintels. A Renaissance Revival in a corner of Ohio. See those windows? My head of security—his name is Dean—says they’re bulletproof, UV resistant, and self-tinting. I think my Murphy bed is some kind of escape vehicle. And at night, when I’m scrubbing my teeth with the electric toothbrush he gave me last month, I think it checks my vitals.

This part of Cincinnati was his choice, too. A couple miles north of the four-block nexus called downtown, with its stadiums and street-name blandishments, Rosa Parks Street and Freeman Avenue. Since 1990, people have been fleeing this town in droves. Mine was the first new place to go up in years, which meant that every contractor in town wanted in. And yesterday, when we needed extra rebar—because what is a kidnapping without a cell?—the material was here ASAP. Not that rebar is the incarcerating metal of choice—the stuff bends, after all—but the point is verisimilitude.

Dean called back to say Cinergy didn’t have any trucks with the plate number I gave him—no surprise there. And yet a little surprising. What sort of infiltration party was this?

I watched the four technicians clod through the snow. Their coveralls were insulated and bulky, so that one guy looked like he walked on the moon, another like he had a pillow between his legs. They’d come under the pretense of wanting to dislodge a manhole cover. Who had the crowbar?

The third tech was Indian and held his clipboard upside down. The girl had trouble with her tool belt. One of the guys stared up at the sky like maybe my house had launched itself there. The tech with pillow pants had a video camera. He held it to his eye with his index finger on the zoom. I looked at his face; he looked almost happy.

Next they hopped the fence and were closing in as though they meant to ring the bell. I thought about going out there myself. Instead, I buzzed for Norman, COO of the Helix, who seemed to have anticipated the call and was here in three seconds. In a double-breasted blazer and chinos. A button-down that fought with the insurgency of his waist. A tie and kerchief.

“I saw them,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

I could feel my Adam’s apple ascend but not come down. “Taking pictures,” I said. “We can’t have that.”

“It’s not a problem. And there’s nothing to see anyway. Just forget them. They’ll leave eventually.”

“And then what?”

Norman shrugged. He has a way of looking depressed no matter the context, as though his face were stuck in range of a vacuum hose hitched to his neck and always on. He is barely five-five, and alone with his color on this side of town. I’ve been told Cincinnati is the sixth-most segregated city in America, and to the extent that Norman is the only black man I’ve seen in months, I can only imagine what the first five are like.

“We go on with our work,” he said. “There’s an event with Pack 3, Colorado, in two days. You’re expected.”

“Our work,” I said, and I moved away from the window. How much was I really caring about our work? I tried to picture my daughter. She’d been so well bundled on the street, I could barely see her face. God knows what she must think of me. If she even knows I am alive, it’s possible she despises me in ways she feels without words but will put words to soon enough. She is almost ten, which is when your kid feelings petrify and cornerstone the prison that becomes your psychic life from then on.

I asked Norman if any of my people in D.C. had checked in. They had not. He wanted to know why, but I didn’t tell him. There are just some things you cannot share. Even with your oldest friend. Poor Norman. He’s been my wingman ever since we were kids. He has flirted with Centers for Change and Reevaluation Counseling, est and the Way, and lived in New York with Fred Newman’s crew on the Upper West Side. By the time he came to the Helix he was already steeped in a version of Manichaean paranoia: from his toil could develop an end to grief but in his sloth would be the demise of man. Talk about pressure.

He asked if we could just get on with the day. He said we had a lot to do.

And I knew he was right. I should forget about the techs, the snoops, the surveillance, and get on with my life. What I’m trying to say is: It’s not like I didn’t understand what this situation would do to Norman and the Helix. I even scanned his face and tried to find in its expression qualities that wouldn’t get trashed when this thing was over. I went: Hope, trust, loyalty, faith, and ticked off each one. But that didn’t stop me. Because what kind of life am I having without my family?

I said: “Norman, this is what I want. I want you to bring those four people in. They are trespassing. We can’t have it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I want you to bring them in and keep them here until further notice.” And with that I turned my back on him, knowing that in some way, it’d be out of my hands from then on.

“But we don’t even know who they are. And we certainly don’t need that kind of attention. Florida just cleared five thousand. I’m going down there next week to make the Pack official.”

“Great. All the more reason to protect ourselves. Now just do what I say.”

His mouth opened, but he knew the discussion was over. He backed out of the room. His face seemed to drag across the floor.

On his way out, I told him to get them hoods. I didn’t want to see their faces, didn’t want to know their names.

Which brings me to the present. I now have four hostages I will gladly exchange for my wife and child. I will make a ransom tape and make my demands clear. But I don’t know if it will work, and if it doesn’t, then I would like to ask for something else, which is this: the chance to humanize this story so that among those for whom the expiry of my life will come as good news, there are two who might someday know of the sorrow wrought in my heart for them.

Thurlow put on his gym pants and a long-sleeved polyester crew and made for the sauna. Five pounds in five minutes, sweat therapy. He was what the professionals call TOFI: thin outside, fat inside. A skinny fat person, no muscle tone at all. His body fat percentage was 25, which he knew thanks to a medical resident, a dietician, who came once a fortnight to tell him how close he was to heart failure. She looked grim every time.

He opened the sauna door and found his crew waiting, as always, for the morning meeting. In attendance were Norman, Grant, Dean, in a sweat born of the excitement to which they were newly wed. That and the heat, 168 and rising. Norman wet the coals. The walls were Nordic spruce with burls that dilated in the grain if you stared at them too long. Thurlow sat on the top bench. His tennis socks were wet and printed the wood like flippers.

They’d had the hostages for twenty-four hours. Now it was time to deal.

Norman said, “I found a lighting crew in the area. And someone for hair and makeup. So how about we schedule filming for three o’clock—can we say three?” He swiped a finger across his brow and flicked what was there at the tile.

Dean’s voice surged above the wheezing stones. “I was hoping to get you first. For gear and training. It’s a brave new world. But we’re ready.”

Grant stared at his toes, which were bound in sandals and swelled with blood. He was the youngest there, twenty-nine and schooled in technologies that kept the Helix current. “We’re gonna need more bandwidth, that’s for shit sure. Our site’s gonna pop.”

“Totally ready,” Dean said, with fists upraised. “Bring it on.” He was dappled red in an allotment that seemed miserly in this context—it was 172 by now—but enviable the rest of the time. He never looked flustered; he was totally ready.

“A ransom tape,” Grant said. “So excellent. It’ll go viral in two minutes, so we have to be prepared.”

“Exactly so,” Norman said. “And with it, we will get our message out worldwide.” He flung his arms as if to compass worldwide but stopped quick. “Which is the point, right?” And here he looked at Thurlow, whose eyes closed immediately. Norman’s will to believe was profound. He had to believe; what else did he have? “We were stagnating,” Norman said. “Of course. I can see that now. I slept on it, and now I can see it plain. So we’ll use the tape to raise awareness. To let everyone know how dire the situation is out there by having these people perform what it feels like to be alone. To be severed from the world. So really, this isn’t a kidnapping so much as social art. Is that right?”

“Correct,” Thurlow said, though the word seemed to drop from his lips like a brick. “Now get going.”

Meeting adjourned. But Thurlow didn’t move. And when he checked in with his will to move, all evidence suggested this torpor would be ongoing. Brave new world? Gear and training? He’d had one night to indulge the romance of what he’d done before the logistics rained out the wedding.

The four hostages worked for the Department of the Interior, which was odd, to say the least. Who would send these people? They didn’t seem to know themselves.

Thurlow got changed and went to the den. The hostages were sitting on the floor in burlap hoods, with hands cuffed behind their backs. One of them had been unable to coerce his gams into the lotus position, so he’d taken to flapping them like butterfly wings. Another was davening, less in prayer than distress, like one of the nuts you see in the ward or someone who needed a bathroom. The girl was unmoved, and the Indian—it was like his body hair was about to ignite for the tinder of being here and for the way he hated the Helix. Thurlow could feel this, though the man hadn’t said a word. But it didn’t matter. In a few hours, Thurlow would be in a director’s chair. In the room: four hostages who had no burden except to hold up the day’s newspaper and appear not dead. In his head: his wife and child and the bliss of their return, for which he’d ransom the four alongside the faith of every person who believed in him. Starting with Norman.

Thurlow adjusted his chair. Turned on the desk lamp. Turned it off. This was all wrong. The angle, the shot, the lighting. He felt like an anchorman for the nightly news. No affect for the relay of trauma, no stake in its outcome. This would not do for broadcast into every home in America. After all, it wasn’t like he didn’t know what happened to a cult leader’s footage in the aftermath of a siege. Especially if people died. Especially if the cult leader died.

He looked at the camera again. He went: Roll tape, and said, “Now, look: I am not a crazy.”

But it was impossible to maintain the pretense of dignity with his earpiece vibrating every two seconds. It had been vibrating for hours. It was vibrating now. The Helix was in the news, and everyone wanted to know, What the hell. What the hell, Thurlow? What have you done? He took every fifth call. This time it was Norman, bearing word: The hoods were a bust. They didn’t breathe or wick, and one of the artists—he was calling them artists—the Indian, was getting a rash.

In the meantime, three calls had been forwarded to his voicemail. The messages were brief. They said: What the hell. Also: Close the blinds. It was hard to know what forces would mass out there against him, but he expected the usual: special ops, trained to kill.

But don’t worry, Dean said. Message four. The house could take it.

He looked back at the camera. He felt a little sick.

01:41:11:09: What else should I say for starters? Nobody wants to hurt this much. Even people who court the hurt, who need the hurt by way of self-recrimination and penance—they do not want this much of it.

And not for this long. Because after this long, it’s hard to acknowledge that hurt—this hurt—resolves into years of poor judgment.

On his computer: If my wife comes here with Ida jubhjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj. He lifted his head and felt where the keyboard had imprinted his cheek. He was in his study. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that receded into the wall. He had planned this room down to the grain of its boards, and yet its blessing was owed to chance. The lights were energy conscious and would turn off for lack of movement after five minutes. This meant that whenever he got to self-immolating about the past, the overheads would go dark and he would come round. Only this time, he’d fallen asleep.

Norman was at the door. He said, “Working on your speech? Great,” and he marched in to have a look. Thurlow hid the screen.

“Sorry. It’s just that the crew is here and we’re ready to go. Everyone’s waiting.”

Thurlow clapped his PC shut. “Look, we only have one shot at this. And I want to get it right. You of all people should appreciate that.”

“I do, of course, but I also—okay, just look at this”—and he waved a DVD in the air.

It was a video taken by a Helix Head who’d been emailing them views of Covington, on the Kentucky side of the river. It was a quaint spot, minus the National Guard, stationed in the farmers’ market.

Norman rolled back on his heels. “So this is exactly as you planned, right? International coverage. Because, just to reconfirm, that is the point, right?”

“It’s going to be fine, Norm. Don’t worry.”

Thurlow leaned in close to the computer screen, trying to count heads. Plus the Guard, there were probably one hundred special ops in the market, and more en route.

“In any case, the artists are ready to go,” Norman said. “I assume, once the tape’s out, we’ll let them go, right? Send them off and, what, pay a fine or something?”

They paused in this exchange until Norman said, “Oh, you know what I mean. Half of D.C. is Helix. You’ve got friends. I predict you spend one night away from home, tops.”

Thurlow sat back in his chair. Breathing in, letting out. But it was no good. His body had taken over the discharge of what Norman had roused in him, which was anxiety. Fibrillations of heart and eyelid, a throbbing wen on his forearm that had not been there minutes ago. Water coming down the ducts but stopping short of notice.

“Certainly no more than a week,” Norman said. “And in the meantime! Anyone skeptical about what we’re doing here is going to change his mind.” Norman freed a sheet of notebook paper from his back pocket. “Not to be presumptuous, but I’ve been pushing some words around and wonder if maybe you’ll consider including some of them in your address.”

Thurlow pressed the wen with his fist. “What address?”

“On the ransom tape? Maybe something about how there’s thirty million single people in the country. Or ninety million. How the system is designed to keep us apart. The class divide. The housing gap. Work ninety hours a week in a cubicle at a soul-sapping job whose chief enterprise is to proliferate dialogue about last night’s TV fare, and what are the odds you find someone to hold your hand under the covers at night? Something like that, maybe?”

The wen seemed like it might erupt. Or migrate up his arm and into his brain.

“Norman, get out. I don’t need your help.”

“Okay, but just in case it wasn’t clear, the United States government has sent the army for your artists.”

“Hostages, Norm. They are hostages. But they aren’t mine. I did this for the Helix.”

“Right-o,” he said, and he lifted his palms, which exposed his cuffs, his cuff links, and with them a suspicion Thurlow had been trying to repress since the moment Norman walked in. Cuff links? Really? Because even a conscientious, exemplary worker among men does not wear cuff links in the day-to-day. He told Norman to leave them on the table, which Norman did with vigor, so that they fell to the floor and to a hollow between the baseboard and parquet. Thurlow waited for Norman to leave and shut the door behind him before going after the links. The link-microphones. But they were gone. He took stock of the room. He’d always liked this room. But never mind. He would pack up his computer and papers of import and seal off his study forever.

But first: rest. He flopped into an easy chair and splayed all the limbs he had. He thought about the hostages. The troops in the market. His wife and daughter and the life they had together, pillaged by a lonely guy who screwed up every chance he got. The lights went out. A siren cried.

He buzzed for Vicki. At least Vicki would kiss him hello and put her arms around him and be happier for it. He buzzed for her again and got no answer.

The commissary: Impersonal and square. No weird angles to negotiate, no family photos to remove. Potted plants arranged around a director’s chair. Dean wearing a boonie hat with chin strap and black aigrette pinned to the side, not fancy but more like he’d plucked a duck.

Thurlow watched him and the gaffer spar in one corner and Norman preside over the hostages in another. Their hoods were still on, though Norman had procured an emollient for the Indian’s neck, which was aflame with rash.

Dean said, “Almost ready,” and dragged a bouquet of assault rifles across the floor. They were arranged in a tin stand like umbrellas. He prodded a floodlight with the tip of his boot. “Except it’s too dark in here,” he said. “Too Goddamn dark. Hey, Edison,” he said, and he frowned at the gaffer, who was hell-bent on chiaroscuro. “Watch it!” Dean said as the gaffer’s ladder tipped and fell into the director’s chair.

“Not the chair,” Dean said. “We don’t have another one here. Okay, let me think. I need an hour.”

Norman, who had been standing by the cheese platter—his idea of craft services for the crew—smacked his head. “An hour? What makes you think we have an hour? Just use a different chair.”

Thurlow stood. “And get rid of the rifles. Seriously. That’s not what we’re about.”

Dean looked bereft, as if the seat of passion once vacated by his wife’s death was now vacant all over again. He took Thurlow aside. He said, “You know it’s my job to read everything that comes in here. So you know I’ve seen what the North Koreans have been saying. And I’m all for it. So are a lot of people. So you just say the word. Whenever you’re ready.”

“I appreciate that,” Thurlow said, and was about to say more when a fist of disappointment and upset grabbed his voice and closed it off.

He made for the cheese platter. Nine kinds of curd, sliced thin. Those rounds with the red and yellow wax. Antipasto and toothpicks with tinsel finials half-mooned by a swath of wheaty biscuits.

Then he went back to his room and shut the door.

03:12:53:12: Some people know their destiny from the start. But not me. And even if I did, it’s not like there’s a manual for how to become what I’ve become. It’s not like there’s a school for brinksmanship or a ladder with rungs visible from the bottom up. There’s not even a school for the presidency of the nation, and yet the road to that job is still clearer than mine. And so, a little about me, because I want people to understand how I got here. Plus, I think my time is running out.

My parents were part of the middling salariat that votes right but acts left. Men who tout family values while dropping a load at Tart’s Bigbar. Women who abort their kids in secret. They were Reaganites who imposed an old-fashioned aesthetic on the scheduling of our lives, so that we seemed to meet only at dinners, which were opportunities to know each other that we never took. Our family congress was more like antecedent to purdah among friends, which is, not coincidentally, the experience and philosophy I have spent the Helix trying to retire.

As for my parents, for parents in general, there’s the education they mean to give you and then what they actually give you; in a good family the two are discrepant because at least they tried to give you the best.

Our kitchen was meat and potatoes and squash, carrots in stock, brisket with pineapple Os, short ribs and stew. By age ten, I could out-girth a keg of beer. Or so I was told by my dad, who found in this razzing a way to be intimate that did not humiliate him. For many dads, the way is violence, so I consider myself lucky.

We were not excitably poor or evangelical, but we were striking for how little capacity any of us had to dream of a life outside the one we had. My mother collected Tweety Bird figurines. My dad was a facilities services manager for the convention center. We lived in a shingled bungalow-type residence in Anaheim.

In 1985, my mother was driving by the Larry Fricker Company when it caught fire, sousing the air with methyl bromide. Not long after she developed a cough, followed by a cancer from which she died two months later. I was fifteen.

It took time, but my dad acquired a second wife, which he still has. Mostly, though, he sits in a La-Z-Boy, wears a mouth guard, and watches TV, which pleasure is slain twice a week by epileptic spasms that have revoked his driver’s license and aptitude for work. For the money I spend on his care—that’s him grousing down the hall, by the way—I could have financed a cure for epilepsy, I’m sure. He and my stepmom have been living with me for years. They don’t ask questions about my life, and I venture nothing. It seems to have worked so far.

I guess that’s not the story I meant to tell. But my dad’s calling, so I have to go. If I don’t have time to edit this thing, try to be kind when you air it later.

“Thurlow! Answer me, son!” Wayne was seventy-nine, and since he couldn’t be bothered to move, he’d just yell for people across the house. His wife had the same habit. It drove Thurlow nuts. They’d yell for each other and for him, and now Wayne was just deaf enough to go ballistic when he couldn’t hear you, as though you were to blame. “Son!”

He was actually using the intercom, which Thurlow had asked him not to do. But he did it just the same, because the more he called, the more apparent it would be that Thurlow had not come, that Thurlow was neglecting him, the son grown too big and famous to tend his old man.

He headed for his father’s quarters. He had installed a keypad just in case Wayne had a seizure and couldn’t let him in, but mostly he endured the charade of being asked who was there and how could Wayne know for sure.

He found his dad eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich. Most of the hair on his head had fallen off years ago, which made inexplicable the flocks spilling from his ears and nose. Today he wore a turtleneck and sweater-vest twenty years old, and jeans that were cropped at the ankle. His sneakers were white and of no recognizable brand. Who knew why older men always seemed to buy no-name sneakers, but it was a phenomenon common to his kind. He offered Thurlow some sandwich.

“Dad, what do you want? I’m having a busy day.”

“Yes, yes, too busy for your old man, I heard that before.”

Thurlow sat opposite his father and folded his hands on the table. They had never been the best of friends.

“Son, I saw something on TV just now that has me wondering what the hell is happening to the world. Something about a kidnapping. Four people who work for the government, and poof! they’re snatched up by some fanatic who wants to change the world.”

Thurlow sighed. His dad rarely took an interest in anything besides sports. He was so out of touch, he seemed to think Thurlow had acquired wealth from a well-placed investment portfolio. It also helped that he was half-blind without his glasses and kept the TV on mute. Still, Thurlow made a note to disable his cable box.

Wayne reached into his mouth to free a bit of peanut that had wedged under his denture plate.

Thurlow began to lose patience. “Dad, what do you want?”

Only Tyrone got in the way—Tyrone, who was his father’s bird. “Silly bird,” Wayne said, and he disappeared down the hall. It was times like these that Thurlow rued having made his dad’s quarter of the house so big.

“Dad, I’m leaving.” But instead he followed Wayne until brought up short by Deborah, who was standing in the doorway to their bedroom. She wore a thin pink nightgown. Her curly white hair, generally stiff, was wilting down her face. She’d been married to Wayne for fifteen years and seemed to be the worse for it every time Thurlow saw her.

“A visitor!” she said. “What’s the occasion?”

Wayne reappeared with Tyrone on his shoulder.

Thurlow blenched. He didn’t like animals, domestic or wild. He especially did not like this bird.

Apparently, the feeling was mutual, since Tyrone, whose wings had been clipped, took one look at Thurlow and thudded to the floor. Then went under the bed.

Wayne got on his knees. Thurlow looked at Deborah and asked for an umbrella. She looked at him, and the look was not nice.

Wayne said, “Come on, Ty, everyone loves you, just come out.”

Deborah said, “Wayne, please, you are being ridiculous. All you care about is this stupid bird.”

They carried on this way for some minutes. Thurlow didn’t understand much about what was going on. It was true their repartee had always featured what rankled most, only this bravado felt new.

Deborah went to the bathroom to change clothes. Wayne enticed Tyrone back into his cage. Then everyone returned to the living room.

“Son,” Wayne said, “the reason I was calling you is because Deborah and I, well, maybe it’s obvious, but we’re not getting along too well these days.”

Aha.

“What your father means is that we are ready for counseling. You’ve given us a wonderful life here, but it’s also a little strange and it’s put a strain on things and we think we need to talk to an outsider.”

Thurlow began to shake his head even as he tried to seem amenable. “Are you sure? Because I don’t think counseling is a proven science.”

Wayne snorted and stubbed his index finger on the table. He was about to slay Thurlow with evidence of how little he knew about marriage. “Maybe if you and what’s-her-name had tried counseling—”

Deborah cut him off, but she looked pleased. She lit up a Virginia extra-slim cigarette and brought it within inches of her lips. She had quit smoking years ago, and this was how.

Thurlow swatted the air to clear a path. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But leave it to me. I’ll find Ohio’s best,” which meant he would hire from within and they would never know.

04:25:32:08: A marriage counselor? Now? The universe laughs at me, but I can’t take a joke. Especially since my dad is right: I understand so little of love. Love and marriage. It’s as though all my experience ramped up to these days has taught me nothing. My first billow of desire? Fifth grade, improper fractions with Mr. Coombs, and to my left one Esme Haas in striped tee, navy-blue short shorts with white piping, and Tretorns, which she’d had the foresight to wear years before they were a fad. She’d been assigned to buddy me through class. She was older and adept in the augmenting of her self-esteem via charity; I was stupid and courting a one-and-seven-fourths chance of failing fifth grade. We sat at adjacent desks. In the tradition of another famous love capsized on food, I had an apple in class the day she showed. Every time Mr. Coombs wrote on the board, we’d pass this apple between us, our fingers mating in the relay of this fruit. I took to offering her an apple a day. But she stopped being interested. She had always been good at tiring of a thing the moment I realized it pleased her. Also, my grades were better; her work was done.

The years went by. We’d see each other in the halls. The summer before eighth grade, the rumor was that Esme had free passes to Disneyland because her dad understudied for Pecos Bill in The Golden Horseshoe Revue. She gave the passes out, and on my day, because I got winded quick and was not much for walking, I headed for the skyway funicular. There I found her on the floor, on a blanket, reading Steinbeck. We spanned the park, then walked for a while, but still, I never touched the ground.

Fast-forward to sophomore year of high school, Sunday in the market. Esme in a sleeveless denim vest and carmine mini. Bangles around her wrists, ankles, neck. Hair in a high ponytail, strafed green. Me beholding the cereals the way some people look at art. I was sixteen, and two years shy of a myocardial infarction because of my bad diet and weak heart. I listened to soft rock, had never kissed a girl; I did not know the president’s name. I was, essentially, an archetypal American boy growing up in the wealthiest, most enlightened country on earth, staring at Esme Haas, who had stalled in front of the cereals, too.

I got within a couple feet of her when she turned my way. And it was too late to be normal. I had no basket and no cart. I was backed up against the gondola shelves; a bracket spiked my neck. My palms were flat against the Special K. I looked like a jumper. I felt like a jumper. The tumult of my feelings had struck me dumb. Esme with her box of Kashi was leaving my aisle—Esme, whom I barely knew but who continued to rouse from me the urge to know her more.

She went to an East Coast university and then overseas, while I tooled around Anaheim. I still thought about her, of course, but figured she was lost to me and that in lieu of this fabled thing called happiness, I’d try something else. I started up a few meetings here and there. The idea? Show up. Talk. Share something of yourself. Get to know your neighbors. What I did not know then is that there are politics in numbers, and that when you bring the isolates together, sometimes they want to discuss the state of our union, to say that our lawmakers are charlatans who should be deposed and that only a sundering of this menace can return us to values touted in the Bill of Rights. And that sometimes, for saying this and joining up, they want sex. It’s the strandeds’ approach to intercourse: Let’s rend ourselves from humanity so we can find ourselves in each other. Still, these people were here and there, hardly a notable constituency among those for whom the Helix—though we didn’t have a name yet—was a way out of isolation.

The meetings got bigger. And more frequent. I began to think there was real purpose in this, which was when Esme reappeared. On my block. She was visiting her parents, driving a new car, and wanting to head into L.A. to a new restaurant she’d heard about, and did I know the way? I was twenty-four and enrolled at a local college but starting to be Helix full-time. I just happened to be home, looking for a Hamburger Helper Halloween costume I’d made with Norman many years before. In ’83, when I was thirteen, the semiotics of the white glove were incandescent in the sequined accessory of one Michael Jackson, though for me, it was all about the four-fingered Helping Hand, with red cuff and smiley face. That Halloween, the last I’d ever celebrate, Norman and I sported the Hand’s likeness through a gauntlet of evidence that said: Already, you are different.

So I’d come back for the glove, but really for providence, which explains itself post hoc, if ever.

I couldn’t tell if Esme remembered me, but I decided our history was so dull, it would compromise our future if I brought it up. She was wearing a baby-blue cardigan buttoned to the neck, and sunglasses she took off when I gave her directions, botched the directions, and then insisted I didn’t know the directions by name, only sight. She would simply have to take me along. I stood with my head braced against my arms, which were folded atop the driver’s side door. She got out of the car. She was a foot shorter than me. I’d seen her kind of hair on a billboard for a revolutionary shampoo product—bright, blond, emulsive. Her fingernails were pastel. Creamy pink for the virgin bride. She wore white leather Keds bound tight. She was a fortress, a turret, and in those embrasure eyes were the guns of Navarone.

“Hop in,” she said, and we were off.

A slop of Vaseline, the occasional sock, hole in the pillow—my victories in the ejaculate of love had been circumscribed by diffidence and, before the infarction and weight loss, the more apparent problem of repelling women in my age bracket because women under thirty do not yet realize they can’t be this picky.

So you can imagine how it was with Esme. I was awkward in bed. Angles of penetration that were obtuse and painful. Slippage. The indiscriminate lapping of skin between her legs until she told me to stop, just stop it. She said good-bye with tenderness and relief. And in the instant that followed her leaving, it was clear: I would be with her again or kill myself.

That night I went to bed a wreck. The resolve of but a few hours ago had given way to anxieties about why I would never see her again. I turned off the light, keen on pursuing my thoughts. I needed to understand which failure had driven her away. I was a young man. I couldn’t know then I’d be asking these questions for the rest of my life.

I mooned away the hours. I floundered at Cypress College. Esme had vanished. Her parents had vanished. I had no way to find her; it made me nuts. I started to lose even more weight. To think about food as the thing denied, the thing indulged, and to see in both a mortification of the body that I deserved. The closeness I had felt with Esme set my other relationships in relief. I would never be comfortable with my peers. I did not have any friends. I worked the Helix all the time.

Three months later, the phone rang. And just like that, she was at my place.

I made her some chocolate milk. We talked.

I said, “It’s okay. We can handle this. I’m just so happy you called. That you’re here.”

“Handle? What’s to handle? There will be no handling. None whatsoever. No way.”

“What do you mean ‘no way’?”

I wanted to crawl under the table, hasp my fingers around her waist, and stay there for the next six months.

“I can’t believe you,” she said. “You’re supposed to flip out when I tell you, split the cost, and disappear.”

I was appalled. “Disappear? What do you mean? We’re a family now. We’re in love.”

“Good God,” she said, and she stood up. Three months in, and it was terrible already. She had mistaken the spotting of early pregnancy for a normal, if light, cycle. She menstruated irregularly; how could she have known? But now that she did, it had to be done. Any longer and the procedure could get dangerous.

I tried to listen, but I was too happy. She had called. She was in distress, so she called. That would have been enough, but now this. A baby together. Surely we had to marry. Only we were not marrying. She was going to a motel.

I stammered. “But you called me. You came all the way to campus.”

She reached over and put a hand on mine. I guess my incapacity to understand what was going on moved her.

“If you can just help me with the money, everything will be fine.”

“Can you stay the night? Maybe if you stay the night, we can talk more about this tomorrow.”

“No,” she said. “You send me a check. You get on with your life. Do something useful. Forget the Helix.”

I shook my head. If I couldn’t have her, I obviously needed the Helix.

“I can’t afford this on my own,” she said. Her voice seemed to point itself at me. “You have to help.”

“Then stay the night.”

“On the couch.”

“No. With me.”

“But your roommates.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t need them.”

That night I crawled into bed with Esme. She wore one of my T-shirts. She did not want me to touch her, but I curled up behind her in spoon formation. She didn’t resist. I put my hand on her stomach and tried to tell the baby I was there. We stayed like that for hours.

“I could babysit,” I said.

She laughed. “You could darn socks.”

“I could! What, you think I can’t learn to knit? I could.” I sat up and showed her my hands. “Look at these. They can do anything.”

“Shhh. Your roommates. Let’s go to sleep—I’m tired. Then I can go home and make an appointment.”

I refit myself behind her and pressed my lips to a tendon at the base of her neck. She seemed interested in talk of my parenting skills. I would convince her yet.

“We’re going to stay together,” I said. And I believed this. Child or no child, we were bound.

She turned to face me. “Let me put this as best I can: I am not keeping this baby. Tomorrow I will go home, and you will not hear from me again. Ever. I know it sounds cruel. You’re very sweet to understand. I have a life of my own. It doesn’t include you.”

She turned away and moved to the edge of the bed.

I blinked. Stunned. I could not lose her again. I could not return to my life without her. I tried to calm down and sync my breath with hers, and when I could not accomplish even this measure of intimacy, I went for the keys in my pocket. Locked her in my bedroom. Made for a spot under a desk in the common area, drew up my legs, and rocked myself to sleep.

The next morning, I ran to the store. Bagels, cream cheese, orange juice, raspberries, an egg-white omelet in case she was the type, a jelly donut in case she wasn’t. Got home and prepared a tray. Coffee and tea, plus an origami flower, because I knew how to make exactly one origami gift, and it was this.

A breeze lilted across my room. I found Esme dressed and framed in the window, which was open. She bent the morning light. And as I watched her jump the sill and tear down the road, I was returned to the work that has been my life’s thrill and challenge ever since.

Thurlow’s cell phone rang; it was Norman. He’d been in touch with the FBI negotiator, who said it was now or never for the ransom tape. Seriously. Now or never. Dean had found a new chair that pleased him well enough, so they were all set.

“Any calls come in that weren’t FBI?” Thurlow’s ear sweat into the phone.

“The press.”

“Anyone else?”

“No.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

He went to the kitchen. Put a saucepan on the range. Added sugar, water, gelatin, lemon juice, grenadine, coconut. Heated it up, let it sit. Coated the result with silver luster dust, wrapped it in edible foil, and voilà: pink-lemonade coconut jellies for the playing of his last card.

It was almost four. He walked the central artery of the residence but was in no hurry. The house was quiet, though he bet the TV networks were in a tizzy. They awaited the ransom tape and were ready to preempt whatever was on air the second they got it, never mind that if you were watching Oprah at the very moment she disclosed the secret to painless and permanent weight loss, the last thing you cared about was some guy who just wanted everyone to get along.

He lumbered, dawdled, dragged ass. Heavy is the crown of self-disgust. It was true what Norman had said: Everyone would see the tape. And they would be appalled. To be sold out by the man in charge? Just so he could have a family of his own? Wasn’t the Helix family enough? Wasn’t it?

Outside the commissary door, he stood with an ear pressed to the wood. His plan was not to listen but to rest, only he heard what he heard, which added a new dread to the one already fixed in his mind. He swung the door open. No Dean, no film crew or even Norman. Just the four hostages on the floor—cuffed but unguarded and each staring up at him with the cow faces of kids in freshman comp, day one—and Vicki plus former TC Charlotte, screaming at each other.

The women verged on physical contact, so Thurlow took Charlotte by the arm.

She wanted to be on the ransom video. He said, Okay, just go get changed, because she was wearing boy shorts and a tank top. She debated whether it was wise to abandon the room, knowing he might lock her out. He swore up and down that he would not lock her out. She left, and he locked her out.

Meanwhile, Vicki was reapplying lip liner and Bare Escentuals foundation, which she had bought with the gift certificate he had given her. She was adamant he understand this was his gift, and began to tout the boons of mineral makeup and how well it looked on-screen.

He cleared his throat and said, “Vicki, you are not getting on TV, and you don’t belong here, so get out.”

She looked at him through the mirror. He had demoted TCs for less, and she knew it. He sat on the chair from which he would be making his demands, and stood her between his legs. He said, “Okay, Vick, tell me something: how did you even know we were filming today?”

She swiveled between his thighs. “Everyone knows.”

“I see. And what is it you hope to accomplish by imposing yourself on proceedings that do not concern you?”

“Exposure.” And then, because she had rehearsed this part, “So that everyone can see we’re happy and that our way is good.”

He didn’t want to demote Vicki, but she was not leaving him much choice. She doffed her newsboy cap, which was black leather, and smiled, so that whatever was in her mouth reflected light from the overhead. It took him a second to register that it was not a filling or a crown and that she’d been slurring a little, lisping a little, because there were ears in her teeth. A little mic. That traitor.

He sprang off the chair and backed away. Reached for the blanket Dean had folded on a shelf—“Think fireside chat,” he’d said—and threw it over his head.

“Spit it out!” he said, and he thrust his hand from under the blanket.

“What?” she said. “Spit what out?”

“Do it, Vicki. Hand it over.”

“The jelly? You’re mad because of the jelly? They were in the kitchen; I thought they were for everyone!”

“Get out, get out, GET OUT!” he said, and he used his wingspan—helped by the blanket—to corral her out the door, which he then barricaded with the desk. And the chair. And a five-gallon bottle of water he had to roll across the room on its side. Two five-gallon bottles. Three.

He was exhausted. But his labors were rewarded because neither Vicki nor Charlotte, nor both together, could force the door. He heard fists on the wood and a few body slams and then Vicki say, “This is some bullshit,” and Charlotte say, “I left home for this?” though what was noticeable in their remarks was not an upswell of disillusion but the torpor with which it was expressed.

The blanket had fallen to the floor. In lieu of parquet, they had dusted the concrete with wood shavings, which cleaved to the wool. Never mind. Thurlow just wanted to sit and regroup. He took note of the hostages, who had watched the foregoing play out in silence.

These people had names. Their lives were sui generis.

Outside, it had started to snow, maybe to hail. The feds had just cut electricity to the house. It took a minute for the generator to kick on, and in this minute, Thurlow heard ice pelt the roof. Also a voice, one of the hostages, saying, “Mr. Dan? We’re sorry to bother you, but is there any chance we can talk this over?”

He buzzed for Norman, and when he got Norman’s voicemail—where was everyone?—he told him to reinstate the hoods and find a few dishrags, bandannas, whatever, because apparently the hostages had things they wanted to say. Also, he was afraid to leave the commissary without escort. Then again, he hated to be there with them. How bad was it when your only companionship was the four people you’d kidnapped? Bride of Frankenstein came to mind.

He left the commissary through a back door. Slipped through a walk-in closet and into a guest room with a trundle bed and tinted glass doors that overlooked a lawn tombed in snow. Dust congested in the monocle of a surveillance lens overhead. He swiped it with a Kleenex. Cleared his throat. Sat on the carpet, looked at the camera, and emptied his face of anything that was not love.

“Hi, little one,” he said. “My little Ida. I guess it’s time I should be addressing myself to no one else but you. So here is what I expect: Mistakes will be made. In the ferreting out of Helix staff, the wrong people will get hurt. Whoever is out there will scan the house for heat signatures and kill one another in the process. There will be hearings in D.C. and a passing of the buck, and I won’t make it, and you’ll never know.”

It was probably five degrees outside. But with his dreams hanging off him like dead leaves and the winter of his unhappiness so cold it inured the body to minor pain but did nothing for the big stuff, he opened a window. And let the freeze rush in.