It is only when the Thinker goes to the east and looks out, as he does now, that it is possible he will see the head of security blinking. It is therefore advisable to stop blinking.
Tessa, in her sleep, will sometimes cuddle toward an erection if one is pressed against her. Tessa appears to be doing this now. Normally, if Tessa does this, and it wakes her companion—as it does, now, Brian—and if her companion wakes her in response—as Brian does, now, playfully grazing his lips across hers—Tessa will grunt in disgust and turn away, citing a dire need for sleep and a supreme distaste for her (and for her companion’s) foul breath.
She will not open her eyes dreamily, and gaze upon her companion like he is a dream, and kiss him. But she does so now, to Brian.
It is one thirty a.m. Veterans of special ops units are well acquainted with one thirty a.m., and hours like it. Particularly special ops veterans who cut their teeth on the skirmishes of the mid--to--late eighties, fights that weren’t supposed to be happening, wars that were never sanctioned by the general population or the politicians elected by the general population. They were like extramarital affairs. They happened in hours easily unaccounted for—hours that are cold, dark, and beautiful—the same as an affair happens on lunch breaks or supposed late nights at the office. The soldiers tucked dog tags under undershirts, so the metal wouldn’t wink back at the stars, alerting an enemy who had to die silently. It isn’t true that soldiers are brainless orangutans, swinging dicks knocking down dictators. Nor is it true, either or often, that these men, while floating on an inflatable raft in calm waters, waiting for the order to fall backward into the tiny waves and swim over a mile to shore, contemplate the night sky, or what they are about to do, and their position in time and space, and their personal philosophy, and karma. Most of the men are contemplating something, but typically it’s a girlfriend back home, or a wife, or their mother. Most men, when faced with death, think of a woman, one woman. It is wise for the lieutenant who forms the combat unit to promote to CO the one man who does not think of a woman. It is preferable that he think of philosophy and karma. It is ideal if he grew up poor—not destitute, but definitely poor—and if he is too poor to afford college, yet wants to go to college and has an excellent mind. He’s barely nineteen, but he has shown unparalleled discipline and persistence in training. He’s in special ops because the pay’s better. He’s trying to make enough money to send not only himself, but his little brother and little sister, to college. But the little brother joins up, too, and gets killed in an on--base Humvee rollover. The little sister, shortly afterward, gets pregnant and then gets married. He watches the stars, waits for the order, and thinks—even now, before his siblings’ misfortunes have come to pass—that one thirty a.m. and the hours like it are the hours of unfairness. They invite, in his fellow soldiers, diaphanous recollections of a woman—the woman, whether mother or lover or whatever she is—and turn her into something other, something much more than what she is. This is what the CO thinks: that loving a woman this way is foolish. And he thinks he’d give anything to forget what these hours can do. He believes the rich and the lucky are impervious to one thirty a.m. The rich and the lucky, in the mid--to--late eighties, are rationalizing a dominance he will only watch grow over time. But the coup will be: he will join that dominance. Not the highest echelon; that is closed to him. That is a precipice for men and women born to obscene, situational, circumstantial wealth, wealth once--earned but now merely passed on to the lucky. He will become, instead, the man who watches over them, making sure they live to love their luck. He will be an individual security attaché for a while, after an honorable discharge and a stamped recommendation letter from an admiral and excellent SATs get him into Columbia, followed by Oxford, followed by the realization he’d make far more money in the security sector than he ever could as a philosophy professor. (It will haunt him, how he abandoned academia for money, but not much, no. He is a pragmatist; he is not emotional; he is not sentimental, until he is, when—) Then he is approached about interviewing for the head of security position in Destin Management Group and—he meets Tessa.
I didn’t care about the interview. I didn’t want the job. I was a private consultant, coordinating the protection of actors and pop stars, heiresses and tycoons. The money was profane, and I never had to meet the people I was protecting. I designed routes for limousines, rewrote schedules for meathead bodyguards, and taught defense techniques. I had a reputation—made from a decade and a half alternating between the CIA and the Secret Service—and I was coasting on that reputation. I was bored, but I didn’t know it. I was sitting in a room with six other interviewees, a room with smooth black walls and a bowl of floating white flowers in the midst of a dozen high--priced chairs, a Monet (not a reproduction) behind the receptionist’s elephantine desk. Water poured down one black wall but didn’t pool anywhere. It recycled invisibly back to the top. No magazines to read, no clock. Modern decorating aesthetics equate beauty with empty space.
I was offended, sitting there, that six other interviewees were vying for the position. Destin Management Group had gone through some trouble to contact me. My number was unlisted, my address classified. I am offended, still, at the memory: we sat in that black room in our black suits with our black ties and shoes, profiling one another out of habit. Seven men contacted through unofficial channels. We were called that way, placed that way—in a room with nothing to read and no clock to hear ticking—to communicate to us that not one of us was special.
But one of us had brought a book. I remember it had a black cover, a black cat backlit in green. One of us was reading while the rest envied him his book, yet the rest of us recognized this as an enormous error—his reading, not our envy—because there was certainly a camera or two or five trained on our behavior, on our watchfulness, and this man leisurely flipping pages was failing the test. A man across from me smiled at our peer’s obvious failure. But a smile, too, was a failure. We were all so alike. We were virtually identical. Standing out in any way was an error, for safety is the provenance of ghosts, and though the water wall’s trickle provoked the need to urinate, only I sat patiently, not moving, while one by one the others visited the men’s room.
“Anybody know if they’re interviewing somebody right now?” said the man across from me, the one who’d smiled.
Another of us responded; another joined in. I said nothing. I knew that the current head of security for Destin Management Group was watching us. I knew, because it was what I would have done: observe who can and cannot be still and attentive and unmoving and quiet until such a time as action is called for.
We weren’t waiting for the interview. This was the interview.
I truly didn’t want the job. It meant a bump in pay, but not one worth the fantastic amount of work it would be to set up the gratuitous safety measures legendarily demanded by Destin at all his many new properties—paranoid son of a murdered diplomat, spoiled child with a god complex—but I wanted the offer of the job. That was all I wanted.
She appeared at the receptionist’s desk, and my breath stopped. Suddenly, she was there. I would never describe the feeling, both because it would sound like it always sounds when someone describes the sensation of love at first sight, and because I had no one to describe the feeling to: it was a hollowing out all through me, and yet a filling up. It was the end of a wait I’d never known I was enduring. It was senseless. It made perfect sense.
The walls were black, and so was Tessa’s hair, and so were her clothes, her boots. I would learn she had ten of the same black skirt and blazer, twenty white blouses, four pairs of the same black--heeled boots. Her black hair glowed darker than the walls. Royal blue in it, thanks to the room’s shadows. Like fine, clean water in a mountain’s valley. Like a lake it would be fatal to try to reach.
She smiled at the receptionist, setting a file on the desk. She whispered, “He’s the one,” and she winked at the receptionist and disappeared again. I would learn there was a hallway Tessa had designed in the administration wing of Destin Management Group headquarters, to make such subtle entrances and exits possible. I would learn she’d wanted to major in architecture, but Destin’s offer of a guaranteed job after graduation swayed her, because she had a horror of ever returning to the destitute dependency of her early childhood. I would learn it was my file she’d set in front of the receptionist, as I was called moments later and led to a back room, where I sat opposite an aged but fit man who gestured to a monitor beside us, to a specific monitor on which my fellow interviewees were being dismissed. And he said to me, with no facial expression to speak of, “Tell me what mistakes these men made, and what mistake you made.”
I stated baldly that I had stared at Tessa in blatant distraction after he’d selected me as his successor. I acknowledged my own mistake, one I would repeat. And repeat.
I listed the other applicants’ bathroom breaks, conversations, smiles, the book—how these errors demonstrated a need to be occupied and moving and active with something other than the task exactly at hand.
He nodded. Then he said, “Do you want the job?”
“Bri?” Tessa whispers.
“Yeah?”
“You love riding.”
He kisses the underside of her neck, where the skin is so pale one can—up close—trace the veins under Tessa’s skin. “It’s not that I love it,” he says. “It’s in me. I’ve been doing it so long, it’s part of me. It’s how I got somewhere.” He kisses her lips. Tessa’s been tasting them as he speaks. “If you absolutely need me to quit riding, I’ll quit.”
If Tessa had absolutely needed anything, I’d have given it. I wouldn’t have paused to ask myself what I was sacrificing, what was being lost. But Tessa didn’t need anything from me. Not a damn thing. She was helping launch Destin Management Group to a height that dwarfed Donofrio Properties, spat on it from the troposphere of success, and she was doing it the fair way, by being simply better, by working harder. Destin Management Group built an office complex for an animation company in Palo Alto, and while construction raged like a competitive sport, walls and plumbing and electric and the highest--tech technology in meeting rooms resembling a sketch from The Jetsons, Tessa was called away from a problem with the unisex bathrooms to the coffee bar, where the animation company’s CEO was livid over the design of the cups and saucers. So Tessa took four hours to call the coffee bar manager, get the number of the distributor through whom he’d ordered the dishes, call that number, and climb the levels of speakers’ importance until she was joking good--naturedly with the CEO of that company. She talked him into marshaling his designers together and creating for the office complex an exclusive set of cups and saucers. When the animation company’s office complex was toured by a journalist, he ordered a coffee at the coffee bar, and used a paragraph of precious space regaling his readers with the fascinating, tilted, off--kilter design of the dishes from which he sipped his soy chai latte. Tessa’s job was to make an infinity of infinitesimal decisions like that, and to make the right decision, every day, all day. And the head of security watched her do this, from banks of monitors in close little rooms. He would take coffee breaks and bring her coffee, to which she said thank you, but then she would sip, set down the cup, and forget about it. He would see the cup from a monitor. It was torture. But it was also bliss, because she didn’t have a boyfriend, no husband, not even a father, and so it stood to reason that she was profoundly alone, as the man who watched her was alone, and that made it stand to reason that Tessa—given enough time and attention, enough focused prodding—would come to love the man who watched her. She had come from nothing, as he had. She’d come from a larger nothing than he had, and the sense of this, followed by the confirmation of it when he read her personnel file, was arguably what made him love her with such abrupt completeness. She lived in a humble apartment, but he owned a house in Malibu. She had made good her escape, but dared not enjoy it yet. He could teach her. He could save her.
“You love riding,” she says again. She winces. “How many motor-cycles do you have?”
Brian winces, too, and says, “Eight.”
They laugh. They hold each other in the middle of the bed. A shape under the comforter. Tessa’s leg, rising around his waist, and the shape of Brian’s arm, stroking that tear--jerking home country of high on her thigh, to her buttock, to her hip and the lowest part of her back.
“Keep one,” Tessa says. Her laugh muffles as Brian kisses her hard on the mouth.
He says, “Two. I never ride one of them. It’s Mitch’s.”
“Two.” Tessa kisses him. She does it like she’s serious about progressing beyond a kiss. Though that is a guess. That is not based on experience. Experience would suggest that sex was utilitarian for Tessa. Boring, really, most of the time.
“You love working.” Brian pins Tessa under him to say it, pins her hands by her head. “Keep your job, but scale it back.” He says it roughly. He’s holding her wrists rather roughly. “Take a vacation. Take a big vacation, soon, so we can go somewhere and try and kill each other with sex.”
Tessa says, “’Kay,” and rolls him over, under her, but he rolls them again, to the edge of the bed, where they teeter, giggling. He sounds like a girl; he practically is. He has the ass of a twelve--year--old girl, and he was the one Tessa thought of when she contemplated the dead morning hours, happening upon a cold cup of coffee she’d abandoned in another building project in another part of coastal California. Brian was why she looked sad when she brought the cup to her lips, needing the jolt to stay awake, needing to stay awake to make more decisions, put out more fires, do more work, more, more work. It was Brian she didn’t want to go to sleep and dream about, so she’d take the cup to the nearest microwave and nuke it, drink it, make sour faces at it. She didn’t have a boyfriend, husband, not even a goddamn father, but she had a soul mate, somewhere, missing her, needing her. Those two elements—missing and needing—multiplied together and then taken to the power of the years they’d been apart, resulted in a string of digits that stacked to dwarf the love of a man who thought Tessa would come to need him because she no doubt wanted to forget her humble beginnings, when the truth was that Tessa wanted to remember them. She wants to revel in them; she wants to return to her beginning, and be brand--new. She sounds brand--new, like a child. Happy. Brian’s tickling her.
The Thinker leaves the east window. The monitor for the twentieth floor shows him sitting at the slop of his playing cards, gathering them together again, sighing and dealing his fifty--first game of solitaire. There is a salty, wet drop on the security counter, under the inert skull resting there, sideways. There is no way for the skull to lick the teardrop without alerting the Thinker to the body’s continued functioning (though the body has urinated and moved its bowels in the chair with wheels, by now, but bladder and bowels let go in death, and so the smell blends with the three other bodies that are actually dead).
There is a running time clock on each security monitor. It is one fifty a.m.
It is not impossible to recuperate from severe spinal injuries. It’s also not impossible that the Killers want to leave a survivor, to testify to the Killers’ cunning and ruthlessness. Probably only one survivor. Probably leave only one, knowingly.
Jules and Justin are sleeping.
Tessa is tickling Brian now. He’s ticklish in his armpits.
It is easy to be motionless when one is paralyzed, and in three hours, when the security team arrives for shift change, the Killers will have left. And my team is trained to check vital signs before moving a body, no matter how apparent it is that the body is dead, and they will find that my body is not dead, and they’ll get my body on an ambulance, to a hospital, through physical therapy, into a wheelchair, onto crutches, off crutches. Tessa will visit. She’ll be traumatized. She’ll be inconsolable, because Brian will have died for her, heroically, taking a knife to the heart as she ran and, against all odds, escaped. I’ll console her, despite my condition. I’ll be the only one who can understand.
Seconds are not sloppy, necessarily. Some things are better left over; everyone knows that. Lasagna, for example.
Tessa and Brian are talking. They are saying the fastest way is to go to city hall on Monday. He is saying, haltingly, Kids—I don’t, and she is saying, Me either, and he is boneless with relief. He is telling her the two of them, knowing what they know, seeing what they’ve seen—she is finishing for him: What if something happened to us? He is holding her so tight, so tight, and in years and years of professionally spying, hearing conversations meant for two sets of ears, an exchange such as this, a sight such as this, is embarrassing to observe. It does not belong to anybody but them. No part of it can be borrowed for one’s own use. It can’t be projected upon. It could only be observed in the hours of total, utter unfairness, hours of beauty; it isn’t fair, not at all. I never had the remotest chance at all.
It is two a.m.
In Room 717, the clock radio suddenly blasts the bridge of “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. Clarence Clemons was a wizard with a saxophone, truly. I’ll miss the sound. It is premature to think what one will miss, when one is not dead yet. There has been remarkable medical progress in the realm of severe spinal trauma.
The Killer sits up on the bed and stretches. He arches his back. He’s probably yawning under the mask. He moves a dial on the clock radio, and it quiets. He turns on the bedside lamp and taps his phone alight, then types a text message.
The Thinker’s phone buzzes. He stands and walks toward the bank of monitors on the north wall. He stops directly behind the seemingly dead body in the chair with wheels. If the Thinker nudges the chair, it could easily roll. If the Thinker moves—but he doesn’t; he watches. His mask makes it impossible to decide whom he’s watching.
Justin and Jules are sleeping.
Tessa and Brian are holding each other, so tight; it is not anyone’s moment—even with the Thinker watching—but theirs. They are kissing again, but without the hurry of before. With an altogether different heat. Hate is natural, and self--hate is natural, but the two combined are an unnatural sensation: to despise Brian or to despise the desire for the Killer to kill Brian? One or the other, not both.
The Thinker types a text message, and the Killer’s phone lights but does not buzz. The Killer reads it, goes to the bathroom—the stiffness in his shin a bit worse—and urinates, checks his wounds, fills a short glass with water and drinks it by folding the chin of his mask. He takes his knife from where he left it on the nightstand.
The Thinker, turning from the monitors, bumps the chair. The angle of vision changes, panic red and fiery, but say nothing, do nothing; you are dead. The angle changed about the width of a hair. You are not dead. There is no method to estimate the pressure or direction of body weight now loaded against the chair on wheels. There was no method for estimating this before. There’s no moving any muscle of the body. There’s no God; don’t pray.
Please. Please, God.