The Unbinding (8 page)

20.

[MyStory.com]

Steaks at the W Hotel later tonight with Rob and Jesse and Sabrina. Synchronizing busy schedules and mending tender feelings took some work, but I’m not sure I’m in the mood for other people now. And don’t take offense, Rob, if you’re reading this; my desire to be alone is nothing personal. I had a crazy day is all, and by the time I’m done recording it here I’ll have less than three hours until dinner, which doesn’t feel like enough to think things through.

The conversation happened over breakfast. Sabrina had asked a favor of me last week during one of our wee-hours, patch-things-up calls: See
Mission: Impossible III
on Friday night and meet her at the colonel’s the next morning to tell him what I thought about it. As an old mentor to the movie’s star, he was eager for an early review, she said. Plus, he needed some cheering up. News had come from the VA that had complicated his diagnosis. Other than latent mononucleosis, none of the viruses they’d screened for had shown up in his samples, but they had found another member of his old unit—another media liaison officer—who was complaining of difficulty swallowing, painful urination, and chronic muscle aches.

No lights were on at the colonel’s when I arrived. Since learning that Sabrina’s AidSat ear jack had been piping their conversations to parties unknown for going on three weeks, they’d boycotted all electrical devices except for a battery-powered radio that stood on a shelf beside the colonel’s hospital bed. It was tuned to
a national phone-in show
hosted by a vicious female psychologist who, I happened to know through AidSat gossip, sometimes called in too drunk to start her car.

“It wasn’t your old friend’s best movie,” I told the colonel. I explained then about my long letter to Tom Cruise and the paltry signed photo he’d sent me in return—a photo that struck me as neither recent nor genuinely hand-autographed.

“Kent sent the note as a prank,” Sabrina said, though she knew very well that I’d been serious. There are plenty of stories of average Americans reaching out to the rich and celebrated and receiving gratifying responses. According to family legend, my great-grandfather had written to Henry Ford himself once about a defect-plagued roadster that he’d bought with seven years of savings from his dairy route. Days later the vehicle vanished from his driveway, replaced by a newer, more luxurious model with a telegram folded on the front seat:
Because I’m concerned, sir, and because I can.

“It’s a movie that I know I saw,” I said, “but that I still feel like I missed. You know how the effect of certain medicines—certain sedatives,
certain sleeping pills
—is to make you forget that you’ve taken them? Like that.”

Colonel Geoff sucked punch through a bent straw inserted in the top of a red juice box whose sides crinkled in when it was empty. He’d turned into an ant or hummingbird, subsisting on sugar water, Sabrina said. It showed in the snowfield of dandruff on his green pillowcase and in the mottled pallor of his hands, which, after he set the juice box down, lay palms-up on his blanket as though prepared to be taken for repairs.

“The movie isn’t performing well,” he said. “It won’t meet projections.” He nodded at the radio, which was the source of all his news, presumably. So much information, so many developments, and such a small hole for them to pass through.

“I’ve heard that about the box office,” I said.

The colonel said, “It’s not just him. It’s all of them. They’re finally about to lose their hold on us.”

“I guess that the studio’s blaming piracy.”

“We’ll be free of them soon,” the colonel said, ignoring me. “The energy they’ve captured will be returned. That’s all it is, Kent: borrowed energy. ‘
Tractons
,’ we called them, units of human magnetism. It was an object of study for a time there, back when we still spent money on such projects: the origins and uses of charisma.” He held out his caved-in juice box to Sabrina. “More, please, dear. The Gonzo Grape this time. And bring the hot-water bottles for my hips.”

As Sabrina walked off, the colonel leaned nearer to me. “You used my name?”

“In the letter? More than once.”

“The maniacs forget the ones who made them.”

“The fans?” I said.

“Before the fans. The fans are an epiphenomenon. They’re secondary. Tell me more about the film, though.”

“Which aspects?”

“All of them. Give me the whole feeling.”

Uncertain about my talent as a critic, I started with the jumping problem. Whenever Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, made one of his running leaps between two rooftops, he kicked his legs in the air as though to push himself, which didn’t make sense to me as a matter of physics. Nor did the rapid scissoring of his arms help him to run any faster. It looked ridiculous. Also, Cruise’s face had lost its harmony. His nostrils had shrunk and resembled two small dark seeds, while his eyes had migrated so close together that their inner corners appeared to meet at times, particularly in moments of high tension such as those that followed the villain’s firing of a tiny bomb up Cruise’s sinuses. I liked the idea of a miniature skull explosive, but I felt that its potential wasn’t fully explored. I wished that the bomb had been in there through the whole movie.

And what, I wondered, was the “Anti-God” sealed inside the transparent canister that Cruise lost hold of on a Shanghai freeway, where it was almost crushed by passing trucks? Was it the same as the substance called Toxin Five that Cruise was briefed about before his team infiltrated the black-tie reception at the Vatican? And one last problem: Why, to enter the Vatican, did the team have to tunnel through stone walls? The year she retired from teaching Montessori, my mother had toured the Sistine Chapel and been admitted with a simple ticket.

The colonel smiled and nodded as I spoke, seeming to anticipate my criticisms and to agree with most of them. Sabrina returned, and together we raised his hips and positioned the hot-water bottles. The man’s bony lightnessshocked me. He felt mummified. What substance and life still resided in his flesh was concentrated in his face, whose muscles evacuated another juice box in three ferocious sips.

“Let’s play a guessing game. At any point in the story,” the colonel said, “did the hero expire or appear to have expired?”

“He sure did,” I said.

“At the hands of a female?” the colonel asked.

“His wife electrocuted him to defuse the microscopic brain bomb.”

“But she revived him?”

“Through CPR,” I said. “It was nip and tuck there for a minute, though.”

“And was there, by any chance, a fallen bridge? A scene of bridge destruction?”

“A fairly long one. Hellfire missiles fired by swooping drones took out a section of a concrete causeway, and Cruise had to do his jump to cross the gap. He landed just short and hung there on the edge at first, but eventually he scrambled up.”

“Was the star condescended to, at any time, by a Negro male of higher rank? By someone who roughly resembled yours truly, say?”

This one stalled me. I had to think. “On his team he had a black man, yes. Also, at the end, he asked his boss—”

“A man of color?”

“Yes. He asked him what was inside the canister that he’d spent the movie tracking down and risking his life to keep intact.”

“And his Negro superior brushed off this query?”

“Totally. Which I found frustrating,” I said. “Here’s this supposed container of Anti-God, which may or not be the same as Toxin Five—”

“The fellow’s been stripped. We’ve stripped him,” said the colonel. He drew the straw out of the juice box and compressed it slightly at its hinge between a thumb and forefinger. “What you and the world have just witnessed, Kent,” he said, releasing the straw, which sprang back straight, “is the end of an engineered event. The reversal of a major myth-op. I’d like to know who we had on this one. Danziger? It has a Danziger ring to it. Sabrina?”

“Yes, Colonel Geoff?”

“I need my stationery. There’s a note of congratulations I’d like to write.”

Sabrina rose. I stayed.

“Tractons,” I said.

“Once concentrated, now dissipated. Take the ruptured bridge. A potent ‘mytheme.’ A lot like the vertical flybys in
Top Gun
, but with the opposite effect. It disperses the energies. It doesn’t bind them. The mock-murder by the Delilah-wife figure, too, as well as the star’s resurrection through her mercy. A man’s a castrato after that. His face may still sell a few tickets, but not to women. Not Caucasian women, especially. We stripped him good and bare with this one.”

“Why? May I ask why?” I said.

“Why are tall buildings demolished? To clear the lot. These performers we helped train, these mesmerists we put in place, they take up a lot of space, Kent. In the mind.”

“Not in this mind.”

“No? Think it over in bed tonight,” he said. “Sabrina, it’s my nap time. Get my mask. Can you hear me in there, dear?”

“I’m coming.”

I stood to leave. The colonel touched my hand. It warmed my whole arm, somehow. The surge of tractons.

“You’ll be back. Soon, I hope,” he said.

“Yes, sir, I will.”

“With questions.”

“Probably.”

“It’s a set of procedures we developed. It isn’t a miracle; it isn’t fate. And it just happened to be him we chose. It could have been anyone with pleasing features. Even you,” the colonel said.

“I know that, for some reason. I realize that.”

“We wanted a role in everything. Journalism, business, academia. The entertainment world we couldn’t touch, though. Politically hostile, socially impenetrable. Then we put our heads together. It’s amazing what half a billion dollars and ten or fifteen PhDs could do back then.”

“Tom Cruise was invented by our government?”

“‘Improved’ would be more accurate. Now, apparently, we’re through with him. You think I’ve lost my ever-loving marbles.”

“No. But I feel like I need to lie down, too, now.”

“We’re all going to need our rest soon, with what’s coming. You go lie down, boy.”

And now that I’ve written this,
I think I will
.

21.

[Via courier]

Agent’s Memo: The booth at the W faced a window that took in the busy valet-parking lot. The rich and famous were in town that night, laden with designer garment bags and zipper-cased sporting-goods equipment. The women had that
aging-ageless look
, like heavily doctored photos of themselves, and their bodies repeated the curves and cuts of the
late-model sports coupes
they stepped out of. The men were not as smoothly molded, but I could feel the excitement of the staff as it vied for the tips concealed inside their handshakes. I worked for gratuities during my college years, and it’s a desperate way to live. After a while, your smiles are not your own.

Jesse, my brat, arrived for dinner first, already tipsy and argumentative but dressed in a manner that made her black mood bearable. Since our first breakup the week before, we’d undergone two more entire cycles of rupture and repair, both of them entailing costly visits to the Neiman Marcus lingerie floor. I feared that unless I made things last with her, my investments in her undergarments had grown too extensive ever to recoup. There were corsets that I might never see her wear and certain bra-and-panty combinations that her next man would gain more pleasure from than I would.

“I thought this was a double date,” she said. Her first vodka gimlet was nothing but ice by then, and her second was on its way. In the meantime, she’d made a move on my martini. “Where’s Cass and his little lady?”

“He goes by Kent now.”

“And next year he’ll go by something else,” she said. “He’s still in play. Still forming. That’s his charm. When we met, he called himself a Christian. Then he became a ‘deep ecologist.’ A couple weeks later, on his bedside table, I found a Koran. On a stack of
Penthouse Forums
. Next to a sign-up form for a tai chi class.”

“Selkirk studied the Koran?”

“Is the Koran the one that Buddha wrote?”

“Not according to tradition, no.”

“Then it might not have been the Koran. I don’t remember. Maybe it was
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
. How much do you love the pattern in these stockings?”

“As much as I thought I would when I bought them for you. Let’s go back to the mystery scripture on Selkirk’s nightstand.”

Jesse’s gaze had slanted toward the window, where a woman with rocky little childish features set in a concave, banana-shaped face was stepping out of a silver BMW. She smiled in the manner of the oft-photographed.

“It’s her. Holy shit!” said Jesse. “It’s what’s-her-name. That lesbian slut who broke up Grace and Chad. The couple from
The Enchantress
, season three. Who’s in that commercial for Dovebars now. Malicia?”

There is no such thing as empty-headedness. All of our brains are full of what they’re full of, and all of us are authorities on something. Sadly, my Jesse possessed expertise in a field that mattered only to her. This was true of Selkirk, too, who arrived a few minutes later without his date, wearing sneakers and a flag-themed tracksuit and bearing a bug-eaten bouquet of white and yellow supermarket roses.

“For you,” he said, laying the flowers in front of Jesse. He stood there, apparently waiting for her to smell them, with a brilliant pink rash in the center of his throat that made him look like an agitated songbird. When our waiter approached, he ordered a neat manhattan without looking up from the flowers.

“Sit down,” I said. “I’m perspiring just watching you. Where’s Sabrina, Kent?”

“The hospital. Her friend Colonel Geoff had a crisis about an hour ago. As soon as my drink comes, I’m headed over there. Jesse, darling? Jesse, honey?”

“Yes?” She seemed insufficiently afraid of him. Their time as a couple, from what she’d told me, had been brief and mutually unsatisfying, and yet I detected a tolerance between them that reminded me of my parents’ relationship in the last few years before my father died. They’d seen every behavior that the other one was capable of and could no longer be disappointed, hurt, startled, or angered.

“What?” said Jesse. “Tell me.”

Selkirk collected his drink and tipped it back, cherry and all, into his blushing gullet. He set the glass down on the table and zipped his tracksuit top up to his chin, as though he’d suffered a chill.

“By the way, in the lobby just now,” he said, losing his focus or his nerve, perhaps, “I saw that Malivia woman from that show we loved.”

Jesse nodded.

“We watched too much TV, I think. We didn’t talk enough,” said Selkirk. “Nobody does anymore. That’s going to change, though. It was a temporary imbalance, Jesse. It’s all coming back to us. All that power. Soon. At AidSat tomorrow, I’m going to spread the word. I’m going to tell all my callers to prepare themselves.”

“Sit, Kent,” I said. An order. But he ignored it. I opened my menu and withdrew. I’d planned an evening of mischief and provocation, hoping that with enough jealousy and alcohol I could arouse in this circle of latent offenders a measure of overt hostility—toward me to begin with and, later on, perhaps, toward society at large. There were so many outrages and brutalities that I could imagine them being guilty of, but I couldn’t wreak their havoc for them. I could only flush out their desire to do damage and suggest possible means for its expression.

But not tonight. I’d given up. All I wanted now was a rare ribeye.

“And when this new world comes,” said Kent, “I want us to go forth in it together. Tell me you will. Say yes.”

“To what?” said Jesse. “I don’t know what you’re saying to me, exactly.”

“You will,” said Selkirk. “Right now I have to run, though. I’m needed at the VA hospital. Good night, friends.”

After he left us, hustling through the parking lot and up an alley between two banks, I asked my girl the question that he’d been too confused to ask, I felt, or at least too jazzed up to ask straightforwardly. I’d had three martinis by then but wasn’t drunk. I asked because I liked her stockings and all the other naughty fineries I’d filled her closet with. I couldn’t stand the idea that some other man might one day benefit from my lavish outlay.

Her answer: “No.”

Her reasons: “Besides the fact we hardly know each other, I just don’t love you. I love
someone else
.”

My reaction: “Try their blackened T-bone. I hear it’s a killer piece of meat.”