The Bend of the World: A Novel (27 page)

7

Ben David promised to call me on Monday and let me know what he found out about Johnny. I asked him if I owed him anything. Like what? he said. I don’t know, I said. Like money. He laughed. His fingers tapped the wheel. Gratis, he said. Tell your uncle he owes me one. He’s my cousin, actually, I said. Once removed. Well, tell your cousin, then. And stay out of trouble. I will, I said sincerely. Hell, kid, Ben David said. I was
kidding
.

8

I took a long shower. I considered the past twenty-four hours and wondered how exactly I ought to separate the actual from the unreal; what should I believe and what shouldn’t I believe; what was true and what had been false; what, if true, was the true truth, and what its mere facsimile? I remembered the woods with a clarity that was unusual after a serious dissociative trip; the particulars of those experiences—and it had been years since I’d had those trips with anything like regularity—were usually like the particulars of a dream: the more you tried to hold them firmly in your memory, the more swiftly they receded into a general impression, leaving only that impression along with a few disconcertingly precise but seemingly disparate, disconnected details in your mind. Now, of course, it seemed to me that I could match at least some of the experiences to the refraction of a bright, external reality through the weird prism of those drugs, whatever they’d been, and yet it also seemed to me that some of what I remembered had to have, in some way or other, happened. It seemed to me that Pringle must have appeared in the woods, that his minion Mandy must have threatened us, whether or not with an actual gun. But I was sure it had been an actual gun. And I was sure that Pringle had been exactly that grandiose. Or, anyway, I was fairly convinced. I was fairly convinced that he bought into that bullshit just enough really to try to kidnap us, and he might really have tried to kill us, but for the intervention of that UFO, unless that had been the police helicopter—but I had seen identical UFOs before, and they’d not been helicopters. And, also, I was mindful that dissociative drugs didn’t generally cause the mind to manufacture hallucinations; they were confabulatory; they autotuned outside stimuli to the harmonics of a user’s imagination. Or anyway, that was what I thought that I thought. Then the water was cold, and I dried myself and lay down in bed. The windows were open. Had I opened them? It had begun to rain. I had the sense that I had something to do with the rain. No, I thought; that must be an aftereffect. You got that sometimes. I thought about Johnny, who was probably in jail. Then I thought about my dad. I’m not sure why. I thought about him in his study at home, listening to the Pirates on the radio, because, he always said, he preferred it to TV, while my mother read in the other room and waited for some or other call that would send her back to the hospital; I thought of all the years between myself in that moment and him in his moment, and it occurred to me, suddenly and without warning, that my inevitable regret was not for the last night, the night before, or any day or night before that; the memories I regretted were for a remembered future, an intimation of a life that ended up in a similar study in a similar house on a similar street in a similar overmoneyed town; everything I’d ever done to the contrary was an affectation, if not exactly the affectation that Johnny, half jokingly, had always accused me of. Everyone is guilty of something, just not necessarily what they’re accused of, I thought. It occurred to me that, without knowing what it was that I wanted, I wanted something worlds away from what I had.

9

There are several appendices to
Fourth River, Fifth Dimension
, and after the last appendix (Appendix F: An Electronics Hobbyist’s Guide to Time Chamber Construction), there is a brief authorial afterward. Of course I can understand, Pringle writes, if you find the preceding material hard to believe. It is full of both what you might call the true truth, which is empirically verifiable with documents and so forth, and the unclear truth, which is the gray area you run into when you begin messing with the time stream. If you prefer to treat it as speculative fiction to increase your enjoyment of the subject matter, I would encourage you to do so. You won’t offend me! My only goal is to open your mind to different modalities of thought and consciousness, although I would also encourage you to dig more deeply into the goings-on in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and even to write your congressman or other government officials to let them know about your concerns. This bit of civic boosterism seems a little bit absurd, but I guess if you believe, why not? Anyway, Pringle goes on to say that political solutions are probably insignificant nevertheless, since they can always be deleted out of the self-editing timelike feedback loop. In the end, I think, the Project is, or was, very sad; being generally godless, I would have wanted flying saucers to be a kind of miracle, not just a red pen applied by our timid descendants to all the flawed self-creations that preceded them.

10

Mark, I said. I quit. You can’t quit, he said. You’re fired. He produced a document that said as much. It was dated that Monday, and since he already had it, it obviously predated my announcement. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, I said. He can’t help you, said Mark. No, I said. I suppose not. I would also, Mark said, like to know what you’ve done with my girlfriend. What? I said. Nothing. What do you mean? Look, Mark said, I know you took her to that confab of degenerates. We left separately, I said. Don’t tell me you let her take your car? Mark grinned, that swift, wolfish baring of his canines that I’d come to recognize as the pleasure he took from another’s error. So? I said. She’s probably in flames on the side of a highway, Mark said. Never let Helen drive. I was sort of indisposed at the time, I said. Yes, said Mark. Apparently so. Well, I said. Well, Mark said. He was sitting behind my desk. I was standing just inside of the doorway. Well, look, he said. You were never really cut out for this. I still don’t know what this is, I said. No, said Mark. I don’t imagine you do. You have a tendency to look at things through a frustratingly human lens. Is there another lens? I asked. Mark tapped a pen on the desk, watching me, his eyes moving as if the eyelids were closed and they were tracing the rapid paths of a dream. He sighed. Go see Karla, he said. There will be a modest severance. And Pete, he said. Yes? I said. Keep an eye out.

11

Mystery Man, said Karla. I guess you didn’t make it after all. I guess I didn’t, I said. You’re better off, she told me. Am I? I said. She smiled, and she shrugged. She fingered one of her big copper earrings. Think about what we do with resources, Mystery Man, she said, and then she explained how our last mutual act, the company’s and mine, would be for them to buy, and me to sell, my silence. I would like to tell you that I said fuck it and threw the money, or the promise of it, back in her face, but I didn’t, and I won’t. Instead, I left the building and tried to have a smoke, but it tasted like a mouthful of dirt, and I couldn’t swallow. I wandered down to a filthy cop-and-lawyer bar near the river and had a couple of shots and beers with some off-duty cops and public defender types. I eavesdropped. So she says, one of the cops was saying, she says, Don’t arrest him. If you arrest him, how’m I gonna
kill his ass
? Another one laughed. You should’ve let her take a few swings, he said. No way; this was your classic skinny guy/fat girl domestic situation. She’d have killed him for real. Skinny guy/fat girl black, or skinny guy/fat girl white? asked one of the lawyers. White, said the black cop. Ooh, said the lawyer. The worst. Definitely the worst, the cop agreed. You think? Another lawyer. Oh yeah, the cop said. Skinny dude/fat girl black is a sex thing ninety percent of the time. He chuckled. He was pretty skinny himself. You know how we do. But for whites it’s a she-got-fat-after-a-couple-of-babies-and-he-does-a-lot-of-crank thing. Yeah, one of the lawyers said. So listen to this shit, said the other lawyer. He was young, just my age or thereabouts, although his hairline had already retreated into a
W
across his pale scalp; his suit was too big, and his delicate wrists were too small for his cuffs. Listen to this shit: I got one this morning who says he saved the world. I didn’t look, but tilted my head to hear them better. Oh yeah, a cop said, laughing. What from? The aliens, said the other cop. More or less, said the young lawyer. What’s the charges? asked another cop who’d just then leaned into the conversation. Plagiarism, cracked the other lawyer. They laughed. No, said the skinny lawyer. A bunch of drug shit. Hoofing it for some fat fuck down in the Mon Valley. Winston Pringle, I said. They turned and stared down the bar, their cop eyes and lawyer eyes looking through my suit, which was probably worth more than all the rest of the suits in that bar combined, and finding underneath a man who, by their expressions alone, I could see they assessed as being worth something somewhat less.

12

The lawyer’s name was Mike Kelly. He wasn’t a public defender, he said. The public defender’s office, he said, is bogged down in seventeen kinds of shit and doesn’t have time for this sort of trial work. Oh Jesus, I said, are they going to prosecute Johnny? I had sketched out, with as little self-implication as possible, what had transpired the weekend past and what I knew about the Pringle gang. They’re going to threaten to, Kelly told me. Christ, I hate prosecutors. Your buddy thinks he’s an expert on Nazis, wait till he meets the asshole assigned to this one. He even looks like a fucking Nazi. Blond and blue-eyed. The works. The Fourth Reich, he said. You and Johnny, I said, are going to get along. Kelly raised an eyebrow. You know, he said, I’m sure we will. Your friend is fucking crazy, but he’s a charmer. That’ll probably be to his advantage. Anyway, look: He’s already indicated his willingness to become a cooperating witness. To, I quote, end Wilhelm Zollen’s reign of evil will and subjugation on this earth forevermore. He cleared his throat. As we move, uh, forward in the process, I am going to suggest to him that all interests might be better served if we dial back on the grandiloquence. Of course, Drake isn’t really inclined to deal too generously, since those incompetent rednecks up in Armstrong lost the girl. The girl? I said. Yeah, said Kelly. The main accomplice. The partner, or whatever. Mandy, I said. Right, Kelly said. Not really her name, but not really relevant. Yeah. Fucking idiot deputies. Once they’d rounded up anyone obviously using or possessing, they just let the rest go. In her case, Jesus Christ. She walks right up to one of them and she says, You guys arrested my asshole boyfriend and he had the keys. Asshole boyfriend. Kelly shook his head. Nice touch, right? So they
give her some poor jagoff’s keys
, and she fucking splits in his car.

13

Helen.

14

Johnny was sitting in something resembling a half lotus when they let me into the little meeting room to see him. He had his index fingers to his thumbs and the backs of his hands resting on his knees. Jesus Christ, Johnny, get off the floor, I said. What are you doing? I’m at peace, he said. You’re in a shitload of trouble, I told him. Brother, he said, you sure are swift to swing to the moral opprobrium. I have achieved my life’s purpose. Getting thrown in the clink? I said. Very funny, he said. No. I’ve set things right. I’ve broken the cycle. I’ve let the tide turn of its own accord. Come on, I said, get up. He did, reluctantly, and I hugged him. He smelled like jail, but I didn’t want to let him go. He held me in his big arms, too. It’s okay, buddy, he said. It’s going to be okay. You’re going to go to prison, I said. We sat down at the plain table. Probably. He shrugged. For a little while, anyway. But that’s part of the plan. The plan? I said. Jesus, Johnny. Don’t worry, Rabbi Mustafah Elijah and I have discussed it extensively. The Universal Synagogue must grow, and I intend to become its chief evangelist on the inside, spreading the gospel of mental discipline, sobriety, and Gnostic self-programming. Oh, Johnny, I said. You met my lawyer, said Johnny. Poor kid. He’s terrified of the prosecutor. Did he tell you who’s prosecuting Pringle? Maybe, I said. I’m not sure. Who? Billy Drake! said Pringle. William, now. Can you fucking
believe
it? Do you remember that kid? I do, I said. He looks like a goddamn
Bel Ami
model these days, Johnny said. I told him he ought to quit persecuting poor innocent criminals and go into porn. He didn’t think that was very funny. He claims not to remember me, but I can tell he’s never forgotten our night of passion. Wearing a wedding ring, though, so I’ll play it DL for now. Johnny, I said, you’re incredible. You’re really going to prison? Seriously, kiddo, he said. The tough-guy thing is all an act. He does keep telling poor Mike that I’ve managed to offend all the wrong people. Your blog, I said. Yeah, he said. I guess someone figured it out. I told him I’d offended all the
right
people, but you know how lawyers think. Johnny, I said, what if I found you a, you know, better lawyer? Aw, said Johnny, I like Mike Kelly. He’s sweet. Could stand to eat a pie or two, but sweet. Yeah, I said, but why don’t you save all that charitable sentiment for your ministry? Hm, said, Johnny. Well, what’s your lawyer’s name? David Ben David, I said. Whoa, said Johnny. Sounds like a big Jew. The biggest, I said. Ex-Mossad.

15

I can tell you where I was when they found Helen. I was at the gym. I’d been playing racquetball with Julian, who seemed to be the only unincarcerated nonrelative whom I could call. He and Tom had broken up after Accounting had noticed some irregularities in his expense reconciliations and he’d discovered that Tom had spent a few thousand dollars on bars and clothes with Julian’s corporate card. Julian kept making lame jokes about our being two single dudes on the hunt, and I pretended to laugh, because I needed someone to hang out with. It had been a few weeks since Johnny and I had gone into the woods. It had become August; you could see the end of August already. It was still hot during the day, but at night you wanted to open the windows, and the leaves, although they were still green, had started to dry in anticipation of the fall and sounded like paper when the breeze moved them. I’d spent a week doing absolutely nothing, walking aimlessly around the apartment or the neighborhood, watching TV, buying wild ingredients and attempting to cook elaborate meals for myself that kept ending in failure and Chinese. Then Cousin Bill called and said, with no preamble, Peter, Cuz, listen, I’ve got some Mexicans coming by to drywall one of the units. Keep an eye on them for me, will you? I gotta do a thing. What do you mean, keep an eye on them? I said. I mean, he said, point them at 3A and say,
Trabayho a key
. I can do that, I said, and, in effect, I did.