“Where it’s decanted.”
“You’ve got the terms. It’s funny, though. Only a few years back we were trying to keep it all hush-hush. Thought if people knew what we were up to, there’d be trouble. Specially over here . . .”
“You’re kind of an old hand at this, aren’t you?”
“Don’t rub it in.”
“Seen some changes.”
The inner doors opened, and I looked up, thinking it might be something about Melody; but the man in the white coat just whispered to the receptionist, then disappeared again.
“You know,” said Silverman, “if we could get together sometime? I know this is not—I mean, it’s a stressful time, but, you know, I’ve heard all the official stuff, and to get it from a Field Op—that perspective . . .”
I wondered how he managed to stay so fired up, at this ungodly hour of the night.
He said, “I hear you guys can be pretty . . . unconventional, yeah?”
“We’re that, all right.”
“You don’t toe the party line. I was actually . . . warned about you. Kind of. Told if any of you turned up, you probably weren’t reliable.”
A young woman in a wheelchair glided by, pushed by a guy in scrubs. None of the staff here was old. I wondered what the burnout rate was. How long you could handle it. And whether it was any easier than my job.
Silverman said, “That sort of piqued my interest . . . ?”
He waited for me to say something. I didn’t, and he went on, “See, this is my third month doing this, and you’re the first, the only Field Op I have had the chance to sit and talk with.”
“We move around a lot.”
“Yeah. Always moving on, right?” He put a hand up to his brow, to hair that was already too far gone to need brushing from his face. “It’s kind of like . . . meeting Indiana Jones, you know?”
“Is it?”
“Kidding, kidding.”
“Yeah,” I told him. “Funny joke . . .”
Chapter 12
Death and Breakfast
She didn’t make it.
Melody.
That’s when the joking stopped.
I kept looking around under the sickly lighting, wanting to move on, go somewhere, anywhere.
But there was nowhere left to go.
I felt like somebody had punched a hole straight through me.
I’d seen her take a fragment of a god, roll it in her fingers, then slip it in her mouth . . . and any time, I could have stopped her. I could have reached out, snatched it from her. If I’d read her right. If I’d have guessed.
But had she really meant to kill herself?
Or had she wanted something else, some mystical transcendence, union with a god, something to lift her up, out of the world?
I’d thought her too hard-nosed for all that mystic bullshit. But who knows what you’ll do, or what you’ll go for, when you’re close to death?
One thing I did know that she’d wanted.
Someone to validate, to testify. Someone, perhaps, to be an audience, to force her, in her own mind, to go through with things.
Me.
I couldn’t shake the notion that, if we had never met, if I had never gone to her apartment, then she’d be alive. Angry, lonely and unhappy, but even so—alive.
“I have some questions that I need to ask, before you go.”
The doc who brought the news was young and handsome, like a doctor in a TV show. What the TV might have lost, though, were the gray rings around his eyes, the little twitch of sleeplessness pulling at the corner of his mouth, as if he were a fish on a line, forever tugged back to his work. “We found bruising to the abdomen and thorax. Frankly, she looked like she’d been punched. Repeatedly.”
I stood there, said nothing.
He prompted.
“Could be due to CPR,” he said.
He wasn’t accusing me. He just wanted it all over and done, so he could write up his report, tick the proper boxes and move on.
I said, “I tried a few things.”
“Uh-huh.” He looked down for a moment. Then, “Ambulance says she was ‘tied up’.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
He looked so tired his face was practically unreadable. His voice was soft and flat. He’d probably have failed the Turing test.
“And you’re . . . who, exactly? Grandson? Son?”
“No,” I said. “Apparently, I’m Indiana Jones.”
“You gotta be excited.”
“I’m thrilled.”
It was not the first time I had breakfasted at sunrise in Manhattan after an appalling night. The last time had been several years ago; I’d just seen a bunch of shriveled corpses in an 8th Avenue sex shop, the kind of thing that lingers in your head, even when daylight comes. I know they say that sex is good for you, but those guys might have disagreed.
So when Silverman suggested we “go eat,” I should have told him no, thanks very much. I barely wanted coffee. I definitely didn’t want the company. But I knew that, if I went home now, I’d lie there, staring at the ceiling and the thoughts would whirl around my head and never stop.
So I said yes.