Orpheus Lost (6 page)

He did not call very often, never more than three or four times a year, and always from different public telephone booths.

Now, however, was different. Now he had access to her emails, to incoming and outgoing calls, to transcripts of same, to her credit card transactions, her library borrowings. He had photographs. He was looking forward to the moment when he would say casually: You could have been a porn star. And then, when her eyes widened, he would say: I could get
you started. I could post these on the net and you’d be flooded with calls. Bound to pay a lot better than teaching college kids math which is the only thing in store when your post-doc runs out.

She believed she was safely walled up in her ivory tower on a remote peak of higher mathematics. He wanted to tell her: Your grasp of reality has always been slight. You’ve always had your head in the clouds. You’ve never fully grasped the situation for people who live on the ground.

She had moved on from Pure Mathematics to the Math of Music. He had photocopies of articles that she had published: “Waves and Harmonics”; “Mathematical Frequencies and the Cultural Construction of the Twelve-tone Scale”; “Mathematical Signatures of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms”; “Trigonometric Identity in the Compositions of John Cage”; “Development of the Sound Holes in Violins: a historical and mathematical perspective”. He’d read some of the pieces twice, hunting for intimate revelation, but the reasoning and the equations were opaque. Whatever she was talking about, it was not his kind of math.

What he did know was that numbers to her, as to him, were secret codes. She read messages in them. She used them to encrypt the notes she sent.

Cobb read, and listened to, thousands of messages every day. He collected codes. He deciphered them.

He believed that Leela—possibly without her own knowledge—was being used to encode information of a dangerous kind.

Watching her through the one-way glass, he focused on her lips and on her closed eyes. How could she manage such stillness? Was she counting? What could possibly be going through her head?

Cobb fingered the tobacco tin in the inside pocket of his vest. He studied Leela’s lips as he had covertly studied them in junior high from two rows away. He had still wanted to please her in junior high. Then he had simply wanted to make her take notice. And then he had wanted to punish her for the casual way she flouted rules: meeting boys behind the derelict Hamilton house, making out with them on the weed-choked veranda, swimming in the creek with no attention to propriety whatsoever, swimming with black boys and white trash. He saw her day after day on the Hamilton veranda with Benedict Boykin whose father, after Vietnam, became the mailman and a member of the NAACP. Leela and Benedict Boykin smoked cigarettes. They sat on the rotting floorboards and leaned back to back against each other. Sometimes they kissed. Cobb, behind azalea bushes, could hear them laugh. They rode buses with banners on the side. They marched on the State House in Columbia and listened to speeches about the Confederate flag. Back then, it still flew above the State House dome. The flag must come down, they chanted.

The demonstrations enraged Cobb’s father. “Sherman’s thugs,” his father said, “may have burned our fields, but they can’t burn that flag from sacred memory. Or off of our bodies either.” He flexed the tattoo on his arm.

Leela put a sticker on her locker:
Take it down! The war ended in 1865.

The day after her sign was posted, Cobb shaved his head. He had a flag—a Confederate flag—and a rattlesnake tattooed on his arm and that worked.

It worked spectacularly.

Leela stared at him, at his right bicep, and at the coiled rattler on his right forearm, all through math class. The rattler was the
Don’t Tread on Me
snake of the Sons of Liberty flag.

Leela penciled a question mark on her notebook and flashed it at Cobb. The interrogative curve was a snake, the dot below it a drop of poison from its fangs.

Sons of Liberty
, Cobb wrote on his own notebook.
Revolutionary flag
. He held up the page.

Duh!
Leela wrote.
I know that. But why?

Cobb turned away to hide his smile. He never looked at her again but he could feel her watching him all afternoon.

She caught up with him after school. She drew alongside on her bike. He pedaled faster, but so did she. It became, pure and simple, a race, with the finish line at the Slaughters’ front porch and the result a dead heat.

“You better watch out for my father,” he said.

“Why, Cobb?
Why
?” she asked.

“Because he’ll shoot anyone comes on our porch before he even thinks about it, especially preachers’ leeches and types who suck up to the NAACP.”

“I mean, why’d you shave off your beautiful hair? And why did you get the tattoos?”

“Doesn’t heritage mean anything to you?”

“It just isn’t you, Cobb.” She was genuinely puzzled. “It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t you.”

“You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know me at all.”

“I know you go nuts every once in a while. I know you take after your mom.”

“I do not take after my mother. I’m nothing like her. You think you’re smarter than I am at math, but you’re not.”

“I don’t think that at all. I know you’re smarter. But Miss Morrow thinks we’ll both get into Ivy League.”

“I wouldn’t go to a Yankee college if they paid me.”

“What’s got into you, Cobb? What’s happening to you?”

I saw you kissing Benedict Boykin
, he might have said.

And she would have said:
So?

“Don’t tread on me,” he warned. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

“I know you’re not making sense. But I admire the way you’re always loyal to your dad even though—”

“Get out!” he shouted. “Get out before I get my dad’s gun.”

She could not think of a single joke. She could think of nothing to say. She stared at him and then she turned her bike around and rode away.

L
EELA OPENED HER
eyes when he entered the room but she did not otherwise move. The ski mask startled her—he saw the widening of her eyes—but otherwise her body was relaxed. Her ankles were crossed and her arms folded. She leaned slightly back in the vinyl chair which gave a little under the pressure though her weight was slight. In all the years since he had seen her, Cobb thought, she could not have put on more than five pounds. He, on the other hand, was considerably heavier. He knew that the shape of his face had changed. His body, which was hard and muscled, bore no relationship to that of the skinny kid he had been at school. One glance was enough to reveal, back then, that he was the kind of child who got picked on.

No one would pick on him now.

Leela focused on the eye holes in the mask. Her gaze was intense and unwavering. His face felt naked. On his left hand, he wore a close-fitting leather glove.

Even if he were to remove the mask, he thought it possible she would not recognize him, particularly since he had a military buzz cut (although it was true she had once seen him—for several weeks—with shaven head.) That act of attention-getting having served its purpose, he had let his thick hair grow back. It was dark and wavy and a hank always fell
across his brow and she had turned one day and collided with him as he passed her locker. He had been avoiding her for weeks, ever since the standoff when he’d threatened to get his father’s gun, but on this day he walked past the girls’ lockers by design. She was reaching for her books, her back to the hallway, at the moment of impact.

“Hey,” she said, “watch where you’re—oh, Cobb!” She put her hand on his arm. That was something she did instinctively: she touched people when she spoke to them.

“I’m so glad you let your hair grow back. You look great.” She stood close and he could smell her breath, sweet and citrusy, as though she had just drunk orange juice. “You look like you again,” she said.

He wanted to do something intense and passionate and possibly violent. He thought of biting her lips. He thought that he could not bear for the searchlight of her attention to flicker or move on.

“I’ve missed you,” she said, and then he thought of what to do.

He held her gaze steadily and coldly until her warmth turned to uncertainty and she withdrew her hand from his arm and stepped back a little, and then he walked on without speaking. His heart was racing. He felt that a victory had been chalked up. He felt something as decisive as a power surge in every nerve. There had been a transfusion, a reverse flow of energies: he was soaked with her power; she was flooded with his anxiety. He felt in such a state of excitation that he barely reached the men’s bathroom in time. He did not even have to touch himself before he came.

He invented a word for the sensation:
switch-flow.

In the interview room so many years later, watching her bounce lightly against the back of the vinyl chair, languorous,
swaying as a waking sleeper sways, he felt the old blood-rush coming on. He was addicted to switch-flow. He had the sensation that his ears were on fire. Hot needles, in small battalions, were pricking his extremities—his fingers, his toes—and advancing like shock troops toward his crotch. Adrenalin lurked in odd places when the switch-flow tide was on the rise.

He was skilled at feeding his addiction.

In high school, he had become an enigma to her. This was the weapon he could always count on because he knew she could not leave puzzles alone. He bothered her. She was preoccupied with him. He knew it from her perplexed smile when she looked at him. He did not return her smile and this puzzled her further. His status was assured. He settled into his niche and was warmed by it. It felt permanent.

Knowledge was power: she had taught him that.

Secret
knowledge—knowledge illicitly gained and kept private—was absolute power, and for that awareness also, he had Leela to condemn and to thank. Her face at the window on the night of his broken thumb, the night of which she never spoke, not to him nor to anyone else (he was confident of that), had given sudden meaning to his life. It had shaped his career.

If I were to tell…
her silence said,
though I never would…

He knew with absolute certainty that she would never even be tempted to tell, that the possibility would never enter her head, that she could no more think of telling than she could fly. Nevertheless, the hold she had over him because of that night was intolerable. It was also the very thing that made the tripping of the switch so intense. She would come to understand that. Lesson One was about to begin.

“I keep reading about this,” she said, coming to life. “Random interrogations. A lot of bloggers claim they’re not
official at all, they’re rogue vigilante groups, ex-military types, that kind of thing.” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. “Everyone’s understandably paranoid these days, it’s a national epidemic, isn’t it? Still, I’ve assumed the bloggers were conspiracy nutters.” Her focus on the eye holes in his mask was intense. “But then, it’s never happened to me before. I’ve never had a gun held against my head before.” She waited for his response, and when there was none, she said, “And then again, suicide bombers tip us all toward conspiracy theories.”

She was turned on again.

So was he.

They were at the lip of the switch-flow falls.

Would she recognize his voice? Unlikely. Did he want her to? Yes. No. Not yet. Not until he was ready.
I know things about you that no one should know. When you know that I know them, you will squirm. You will find the situation unbearable but there will be nothing you can do.

“This is all very strange,” she said. “I suppose it’s to do with yesterday’s subway bombing?”

“I have some questions. Your answers will be recorded.”

She frowned, her monitoring of details unwavering. “You remind me of someone. Do I know you?”

He did not look at her. He said nothing. He took the chair opposite, on the other side of the table, and switched the tape recorder on.

“Name,” he said.

“Have we met somewhere? Your voice sounds familiar.”

“Name.”

“You mean you don’t know it?”

“State your name.”

“Obviously you already know it. You don’t arrest people in the middle of the night and put them in a car with blackened windows and take them on long rides in circles around Boston and to God knows where without knowing who they are.”

“You are not under arrest.”

“I’m glad to hear it. You would have been in multiple violations of due process if I were. So what exactly am I under, apart from duress?”

He busied himself with knobs and dials, his voice bureaucratic. “You have been brought in for questioning on issues pertaining to terrorist acts.”

“You mean the Park Street incident.” She leaned closer, intimately conspiratorial. “If you bring in people at random, that’s okay. Well, it’s not okay, but these days it’s better than being on the casualty lists. On the other hand, if I’m supposed to have any information on the incident, I regret to tell you somebody must have screwed up because I’m a dead waste of your time. But if you tell me who you think I am and what murky connection you think I have to the bombing, then I’ll tell you who I really am and what I actually do, and I’ll state my full name for your machine there. Then maybe you can figure out who screwed up.”

She was behaving the way she behaved in his dreams. Was this a dream? In a small spasm of anxiety, he applied tests: he pushed REWIND and PLAY.

You are not under arrest
, his own voice said.

I’m glad to hear it. You would have been in multiple violations of due process due process due process—

He pushed
STOP
.

He had the dream-sense of moving underwater, of wading through sand, of being unable to make things happen, of being
impotent. He could never make the dream scripts come out right. He could never make switch-flow happen in his sleep.
You won’t think it’s so funny
, he kept warning in dreams, but she kept on insisting it was.

He almost shouted at her:
A normal person would be alarmed
. A normal person, at the very least, would be either frightened or outraged. What was the matter with her fear index? How was it possible, given what had happened to her in the course of the last few hours, to be so unperturbed? He wanted to ask:
What’s your trick
?

But he probably knew the answer. Her trick was that there was no trick. She would not know what he meant. She had the alarming sort of innocence and the wide-eyed insatiable curiosity available only to the genius, the idiot, and the child. She could be all or any of those. In that instant of realization, he felt something shift at the bottom of the deep well where his own sorrows and angers roiled. He saw that he had never been an innocent child. That luxury had never been his.

“Your machine’s stuck,” she said helpfully. “It’s in a loop. Loops are fascinating phenomena, especially to mathematicians, which is what I am. Do you know what a ‘strange loop’ is, mathematically speaking?”

“Ma’am, this is not a game.” He spoke sharply but his voice caught and he had to clear his throat. “State your name.”

“
Ma’am!
” She laughed. “You’re a Southerner.” She reached across the table and touched his arm. “I know you. I know you from somewhere. Where are you from?”

“Don’t touch me.” His gesture was violent.

“Hey,” she said, eyebrows raised. “Sorry. I’m not infectious with anything except the Deep South, but you’d be immunized. Hard to shake off, isn’t it?”

“State your name,” he shouted. The shout was involuntary, and shocked him.

“Gosh, okay,” she said. “Take it easy.”

She did this every time: made him lose dignity. He wanted to strike her. There were always and only two outcomes: switch-flow or surrender.

“My name is Leela-May Magnolia Moore, per my birth certificate. My driver’s license, which I’ll be happy to show you, says only Leela Moore and anyone who calls me Leela-May these days is dead on the spot. But since you’ve also left the South and tried to disguise your accent, none of that will come as any surprise. I bet you have at least two names yourself.”

“Place of birth?”

“Promised Land, South Carolina. Know it? Small town near the coast, but close enough to the capital—”

“Subject states for the record—”

“What record am I stating for? Are you FBI or Homeland Security or one of those rogue vigilante forces or what?”

He opened a drawer on his side of the table and extracted a loose-leaf ring binder. “For the record: interrogator has introduced the folder of photographic evidence to show subject and to gauge her response.”

“Where am I, by the way?”

“I am going to show you a series of photographs,” he said, “and I’m going to ask you whether or not you can identify the subjects in the photographs.”

“Sure,” she said. “Fire ahead. I’m terribly curious to find out who I’m supposed to know and what I’m supposed to have done. But before I look at your photographs, I would like to know where I am.”

She was like a pit bull. He felt challenge and irritation in equal parts. “Bonbec,” he said without thinking.

“Bonbec?” She frowned and made a compass with her hand on the table, her thumb as fulcrum. She described an arc, calculating something. “I know I’m still somewhere in Greater Boston, not far off 128, I’d say. I know we took the Mass Pike because we slowed for the toll, and even though your driver had an EZ pass I kept count of the slowdowns and booths. My specialty happens to be the mathematics of sound—well, of music in particular, which is simply one highly codified branch of the mathematics of vibrations—and there’s a precise mathematical relationship, you know, between the sound of tire revolutions per minute on the pike and on 128, where they are quite different, and on the secondary roads, where they are different again, and on the off-off roads to the secondary, and so on. I’d say we made at least one complete revolution of the city on Route 128 in a rather silly attempt to confuse. And now I’d say we’re west or north-west of Boston on one of those off-off roads, out beyond Waltham is my guess. So is Bonbec a new subdivision? Or is it some sort of private bunker? One of those empty warehouses taken over by rogue security corporations, as some bloggers claim?”

He was studying a photograph in the binder. Perhaps it was taken in her bedroom, perhaps the room of her lover. Because of the darkness, there were green shadows at the pillowy edges, but the curves of flesh were like cream.

“The only Bonbec I actually know of is in the Conciergerie in Paris,” she said. “Not a helpful association.”

“On the contrary.”

She stared at him. “Bonbec is the tower where they tortured people to make them talk.”

“Correct.”

“You intend a connection?”

Silence.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, “though I can’t think of anything sicker. D’you know what
bonbec
means? The word itself?”

He had imagined her often in tangled sheets, as in the photographs. He had imagined her with various lovers, himself included. He had watched her, sometimes, from behind the azalea bushes, cavorting on the Hamilton veranda. He had seen boys tearing at her clothes.

“
Bonbec
means ‘good beak’,” she told him. “That is, a beak that sings well, a mouth that won’t shut up under torture.”

“Yes.” He looked up from the photographs. “You are sweating,” he noted. Mentally, he put a checkmark in his own column on the switch-flow scoreboard.

“That excites you,” she observed, fascinated. She was watching him closely.

One: one, he thought.

Switch-flow was a switchback ride, and because it was never simple, the thrill was high. Switch-flow took focus; it took concentration; it took skill. It was like whitewater rafting. A player could drown.

“You have beads of perspiration on your upper lip,” she said. “Of course, the ski mask itself must make you sweat, but I’d say there was also some excitation involved.”