Author: Ben H. Winters
Category: Humorous
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/ben-h-winters/page,15,176942-world_of_trouble.html
She sits in her silence. I can see, or imagine that I can see, her eyes moving behind the lids, like dancers behind a curtain. Slow, Detective, slower. Build trust. Have a conversation. This is all covered extensively in the literature. In the FBI’s standard witness-engagement guidelines; in Farley and Leonard, Criminal Investigation. I can picture the books on the shelf in my house, the neat line of their spines. My house, in Concord, that burned down. Suddenly, from down the hall, there is a determined thirty-second burst of jackhammering, ka-da-thunk, ka-da-thunk, ka-da-thunk, followed by a loud backfire, and then Cortez’s exasperated hollering. “Oh, fucker! Fuck me sideways! Fuck!” and the girl looks up, surprised, and bursts out laughing, and I grab the moment, giggle also, lean in, shake my head with amusement.
“Oh, hey,” I say, sighing. “My name is Henry. Did I tell you that already?”
“You did. Yes. Henry Palace. My real name is Jean,” she says. “And I think—” She looks up at me, rubs her bloodshot eyes. “Actually, could I have—is there any water? Is that okay?”
“Of course, Jean,” I say. “Of course it’s okay.”
* * *
The jackhammer is the property of Atlee Miller. It was hidden in the fruit-and-vegetable stand, as it turns out, where the farm lines up against the highway. The piece of light machinery was stashed there along with a range of other specialty equipment, the existence of which would raise uncomfortable questions among his family: like sophisticated radio equipment, for example, like heavy artillery. These items were under the guard of a solemn young man named Bishal, with whom I had a quick, tense exchange before I said the password Atlee had provided me and produced my notebook with his signature on it.
The jackhammer is “an old dog,” Atlee warned, but he also assured me it worked with some coaxing. He did not say that the best coaxing involves shouting “fuck me sideways” when it stalls, but I trust Cortez knows what he’s doing, digging away in there. The two of us proceeding along parallel tracks in our investigation, our earlier altercation behind us. Both of us drilling down—he into the dense resistance of the stone and I into this poor kid’s damaged psyche.
Jean starts talking and talks for a while, sometimes in long jags but mostly in quick anxious bursts, frequently stopping and restarting, choking off sentences midway through, as if afraid of saying too much, saying something wrong. Bits and pieces. In her manner and appearance she is nothing like Nico—shy and hesitant where my sister was bold and direct—but sometimes, just the fact of her, her being a college-age kid who got sucked into this end-times looking-glass world, she reminds me so much of my sister that I have to stop talking for a second and hold onto my mouth or risk collapsing onto the ground.
“I was at Michigan,” Jean tells me, clutching the paper cup of warm water. “The university? That’s where I’m from. From Michigan. My parents are from Taiwan. My last name is Wong. They wanted me to come home. When the—when it started. Home to Michigan, I mean. Not Taiwan. They told me to leave school and come home and pray. We’re Catholic. I was born in Lansing.”
I’m not writing any of this down. My notebook is full, and anyway it’s better not to write, not to draw her attention any further to the fact that this is not just a regular conversation. I listen because I have to, to show empathy and build trust, but I do not care at all about her lineage, her faith and family. I am a question mark aimed at an answer.
“I didn’t want to, though, to just—just go home. Pray. I wanted to—” She shrugs, bites her lip. “I don’t know.”
In mid-January the University of Michigan wrapped up its existence with a final gathering of the community on the main quad to sing the fight song and raise a toast in Latin. But Jean Wong remained on campus through the early spring, hanging around, at loose ends. As little as she was interested in huddling in a church with her parents and reciting psalms in Mandarin, she was equally repulsed by the last-months options being explored by her former classmates: all the drum circles and “sexperimentation,” the semiorganized bus caravan heading south to the Gulf of Mexico, with pillowcases full of dope and breakfast cereal looted from the student center cafeteria. She was mainly angry, she says, and confused.
“I wanted to—I don’t know.”
I speak softly. “You wanted to do something about it.”
“Yes.” She looks up, and then repeats the phrase mockingly. “Do something about it. So stupid. Now, I mean. In retrospect.”
For a while, Jean wanders around Ann Arbor. She is briefly signed up for a mission to the Arctic, being touted by an energetic young entrepreneur who claims the world’s polarity can be shifted with the right combination of magnets. When that falls apart she moves in with strangers who are starting a cooperative “pickling and canning society,” to lay in huge quantities of preserved produce for the aftermath. But none of this feels quite real, nothing feels useful. Finally Jean finds herself at a house party slash political gathering in the basement of a Pattengill townhouse, drinking bathtub wine from a red plastic cup, listening to a man standing on a coffee table explain how the whole thing is a “con job” and a “frame-up” and how the government could “stop it like that if it wanted to.”
Jean snaps her fingers like the man on the coffee table snapped his fingers, and in my mind I am watching Nico snap her fingers, trying to sell me the same story. I experience a melancholy roll of feeling, sensing her presence in the room with us, her emphatic intonations, knowing that really she is dead down the hallway, in Dispatch, rolled up in a tarp.
The guy on the coffee table at the Pattengill party was a young man with “crazy curly hair” and bright blue shoes. He wore some kind of cape covered in glittering yellow stars. He was called Delighted—just the one name, says Jean quietly. Like Madonna. Or Bono.
“We kept talking to him after the party. Me and this girl Alice, I had met her doing the other thing. That pickling thing. We ended up—actually, we ended up moving in with him. Me and her and some others.” She bites her lip, and I don’t ask if Astronaut was one of the other people, he of the calm demeanor and the tools on his belt, because I don’t want her eyes to slam shut again.
I guide her instead into a description of the sorts of activities that she and her new housemates got up to: throwing more parties, giving more speeches, printing pamphlets to convince more people that the government was playing false about the asteroid threat. That’s as much as Jean will say, but presumably this upper-midwestern branch then progressed to the same second-order mischief as Nico and her pals in New England: committing street-corner vandalism; amassing small arms and hauling them around in duffel bags; eventually escalating to targeted trespassing on military bases, like the escapade that got Nico’s husband, Derek, pinched at the New Hampshire National Guard station.
The one thing that troubles me is the geographic reach of the organization. When Nico told me that there was a “Midwest branch” of this collective, I wrote it off as more tough talk, more BS; Nico having been fooled or trying to fool me. But here’s Jean confirming she was recruited into this gang at a basement house party at the University of Michigan, many months and miles away from when Nico came in, in central New Hampshire. It’s another aspect of this thing that speaks to a certain level of capability, a scale of operations that sits uneasily with my mental picture of Nico and some goofball pals playing at revolution in a Concord vintage store.
I don’t know what to do with this kind of information. I don’t know where to put it.
“Jean,” I say abruptly, “we need to skip ahead.”
“What?”
“Eventually a plan emerged, to track down a former United States Space Command scientist named Hans-Michael Parry, who claimed to be in possession of a plan to blow the asteroid off course. Right?”
“Right,” she says, startled. I press on. “Your group or an affiliated group was going to find Parry and free him, get him to England where he could orchestrate a standoff burst. Right?”
A stunned pause, then a qui
et “Right.” She brings her pinky finger up to the corner of her mouth and gnaws at the nail, like a nervous child.
“And then he was found, right? In Gary, Indiana? And everyone was going meet down here in Rotary and await his arrival.”
“It was all so stupid.” This is the second time she’s said it, and now her eyes are flashing anger at all of this stupidity. “We sat here. Waiting and waiting, just—waiting.”
She stops there, and I watch her hand rise mechanically back to her neck, her wound, her fingers twitching along the edges of the bandage. It’s like she senses it, that we are getting nearer to the heart of this conversation, to the events of Wednesday, September 26—the mud, the knives, the violence in the woods beside the station—and the nearness of it draws her and repels her, like a black hole.
I force myself to go nice and slow, get there in time. I ask her about the people she was here with, and she does, debuting more silly code names: there was not only Delighted, there was Alice, who at some point became Sailor; there was “this real smiley kid, very young, called Kingfisher.” There was a girl named Surprise and a man called Little Man, who was “super big, actually,” so that was kind of a joke. Ha-ha. They all came down via a long zigzagging van ride from Michigan, detouring to pick up a couple of people in Kalamazoo, detouring again for a ton of packing crates from a warehouse in Wauseon, west of Toledo.
I lean forward.
“And what was in those crates?”
“I don’t know, actually. I didn’t—I never saw. He said—no peeking.”
“Who did?”
No answer. She really won’t say his name; she won’t even let herself think it. I watch it appear and linger on her face, again, her palpable terror of this man, this leader. “Never mind,” I say, “go on,” and she does. She and her bunch were joined by the other group, the group that included Nico, in late July. People came and went. As she describes the atmosphere on the lawn of the police station these last couple months, awaiting this elusive scientist, Jean’s face brightens, her body visibly unclenches. It’s like she’s talking about a garden party, like some sort of asteroid-conspiracy day camp: everybody hanging out, smoking, cooking hot dogs, flirting.
One guy in particular, she says offhandedly, was “totally in love” with Nico.
“Oh,” I say, suddenly changing my mind, suddenly wishing I had my notebook, some notebook, something. “What guy?”
“Tick,” she says.
“Tick.” Strange looking. Nervous disposition. “Did she reciprocate?”
“Ugh. No.” Jean makes a face, breathes out a tiny gale of fluttery sorority-sister laughter. “No interest. He looked like a—a horse, really. Plus he was sort of with this other girl, Valentine. But he would always make these jokes about Nico.”
“Valentine?”
“That’s her code name. Whatever. She’s so pretty. Black girl, really tall.”
Atlee saw her. I know of her already, and now I can put a name on the description. It’s so odd, to start to feel like I know these people, this world, the last one my sister lived in before she died.
“What kind of jokes did Tick make?”
“Oh, my God. I mean. Adam and Eve? Like, you know. If the plan didn’t work. If we had to go under. He and Nico were going to be like Adam and Eve. It was—gross.”
“Gross,” I say. I squeeze my eyes shut to capture the information, keep everything on file. “Hey, here’s a question for you. Did Nico have one of these code names?”
“Oh,” says Jean, and laughs. “She didn’t use it much. She thought the whole thing was sort of stupid. But her code name was Isis.”
“Isis?” My eyes pop open. “Like the Bob Dylan song?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Is that where it’s from?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, that’s where it’s from.”
I savor this small pleasant factoid for a moment, half a moment, before we press on into the hard part of this. It’s going to get rough now, but it has to. Time is passing. There is nowhere else to go in this conversation but forward.
“So, Jean,” I say. “So Hans-Michael Parry never turned up. And a decision was made.” I look her in the eyes. “Astronaut made a decision.”
“I’m tired,” says Jean. She sets down her cup so fast that it tips over and the water rolls out. “I’m ready to stop.”
“No,” I say, and she flinches. “You just listen. Listen. Parry never showed up. And once everyone realizes it’s not happening, Astronaut makes the decision to relocate underground. To move everything downstairs. Jean?”
She opens her mouth to answer but the jackhammer abruptly roars down the hall, and her face constricts with fear and she closes her mouth just as the machine goes silent again.
“Jean? Was that his plan?”
“His plan,” she says, and then she shudders, violent but slow, like a theatrical enactment of a shudder: her face and then her neck and then her back and then her torso, a wave of revulsion rolling down the length of her body. “His plan.”
“Lily?”
“That’s not my name,” she says.
“Oh, God, Jean. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t want her to go. I told her not to.”
“What?”
“Nico. We’re going down, we’re making the last trips, and she goes, she goes, ‘I’m taking off.’ ”
“To go get Parry on her own.”
“Right,” says Jean. “Yes.”
“So this was what time?”
She looks up, confused. “What time?”
I know it’s after Nico and Astronaut have their argument in the hallway, and it’s before Atlee closes up the floor at 5:30. “Is this about five o’clock?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s say it’s five o’clock. She tells you she’s leaving and you did what?”
“I mean, I told her it was insane.” She shakes her head, and for an instant I see reflected in her eyes this incredulous exasperation that I myself have felt a thousand times, trying to tell Nico anything she doesn’t want to hear. “Just—useless. I said, why would you want to leave for nothing and be alone, when we can all be together? At least that, you know? Be together.”
“But she went anyway.”
“She did. We brought everything down, and I didn’t think she would really go, but then everyone was like—she’s gone. She was gone.”
“And you followed her?”
“I—” She stops; her brow furrows; her eyes well up with confusion. “I—did.”
I stand up. “Jean? You followed her.”
“Yes. I had to, see? I had to. She’s my friend.”
I’m leading her as far out into this memory as she’ll go, I’m holding her hand and leading her out on the slippery rocks toward the dangerous water. “You had to stop her from leaving, but then there was someone else. Someone followed you. Jean?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do, Jean. Yes, you do.”
Her mouth drops open, and her eyes widen, and then she shakes her head again, she stares forward into the air between us. “I don’t remember.”
She does, she is seeing something—someone—I see it happening in her eyes. I lean forward and grab her but she wriggles back, rolls away. “Jean, keep talking. Jean, stay with me. You went to stop her but someone followed you guys.”
But she’s gone, she’s done, she falls back on the bed and throws her hands up in front of her face, and I am saying, “Jean! Jean. Somebody surprised you outside the station. With a knife.”
She shrieks a little, a sharp burst of air, and then she presses her hand across her lips. And I grab her again, clutch her by the shoulders and lift her, and my shell of dispassion, my phony policeman’s calm, is melting off of me, burned off by heat: I can’t stand this, I have to know.
“Someone chased you and attacked you with a knife, and they killed my sister.”
She shakes her head violently, keeps her hand clapped over her mouth, like
there’s a demon in there, something trying to slip free and wreck the world.
“Was it Astronaut?”
Eyes squeezed shut tight, body shaking.
“Or was it a stranger? A short man, sunglasses? Baseball cap?”
She turns her body away from me, turns her back. I wish I could pull out a picture of him—lay it on the bed, Jordan smirking in his stupid Ray-Bans, see Jean’s face see the picture. But it’s too late, she’s disappeared, she’s gone, turning her mind away from whatever it is she is unwilling to see. Her hand is clamped over her mouth, her body has fallen over onto its side and she lies there on the thin mattress, mute, terrified, useless.
“Oh, come on,” I say.
I kick the bed and it bounces with her in it.
“Oh, come on, come on, come on.”
2.
“Isis,” of course, is the second track on the 1976 album Desire, and for a brief period when I was about fifteen or sixteen it was my favorite Bob Dylan song. It was around that time Nico discovered a journal in which I had carefully recorded my top twenty Dylan numbers, each annotated with the year written and the performers on the track. Nico found something hysterical about the fastidiousness of this particular exercise, and she ran around the house, dying with laughter, tossing the notebook up and down to herself like a chimpanzee.
It’s weird to think back now, to think about who I was then, to think that at any time “Isis” was my favorite Dylan song. Now it probably isn’t even my favorite song on Desire. But there’s no reason Nico would have known that, and I think it is at least possible, I think it is perhaps even likely, that she chose the code name because she knew at some point, somehow, I would find out about it. That she left it behind not as a marker, a follow-me bread crumb like the bent fork in the vending machine or the butt of the American Spirit, but rather as a kind of a gift. Or else she did it just because it made her laugh, because various aspects of my personality make her laugh, and that, also, at this point, is a kind of a gift.
I walk down the hall from the holding cell to Detective Irma Russel’s little office, and I flip her heavy leather-bound log book to the back and tear out sixteen sheets and fold them over neatly to form a book, and then I spend a good half hour recording everything that Jean had to say before she shut down, blanked out, went dark. How she came to be in the group; the names and approximate ages and appearances of her pals and coconspirators; the way her face turned cloudy and wild at the mention of the name Astronaut. How she realized that Nico had taken off, how she ran to follow her …