No Way Back (46 page)

The shack has electricity, at least. A black wire arcs from a utility pole nearby. I limp up the hill, the rubber feet of my crutches digging into pebbles, crushing shells. The
door opens without a key.

I flick the light. The interior of the shack looks like an execution chamber. Wool blankets, black and rough, are taped across the windows, smothering the sunlight. In the middle of the room is
a wooden chair. A video camera on a tripod points at it. Strapped to the chair is a corpse.

Most of the skin on his face is gone, and the patches that remain look like old leather, yellow and brittle, stretched tightly over a skull that leers at me. The man in the chair is held in
place with black electrical tape on his wrists and ankles. He wears a business suit. His eye sockets are empty. He stares blindly, smiling.

There’s a table on the far side, and a small metal wash basin. I close the door of the shack and go to the basin. There’s an old metallic mirror above the faucet. I try to avoid
looking at my face. Just below the mirror is a wooden shelf upon which a straight-edge razor lies. In the sink is a pile of hair. Dark brown, fading to grey. My own colour.

I limp back to the table. There’s an envelope, and an old manual typewriter, and a laptop computer, which is closed. A Post-it note on the back of the computer says: ‘Play
movie’.

I open the laptop, and it wakes from electronic slumber. In the middle of the screen is a video file, named ‘PLAY ME’.

Instead I take out my cellphone. There’s one bar of signal strength. I dial a number. A strange woman answers – someone I don’t recognize – and I ask her to connect me to
Darryl Gaspar. She doesn’t ask me who I am, or why I’m calling. She just says, ‘Hold, please,’ and then the line rings, and my old colleague, Darryl, sounding quite stoned,
answers. ‘Yo yo yo?’ he says.

‘Darryl, it’s me. Jim Thane.’

His voice drops to a whisper. ‘Jim?’ He speaks quickly. ‘Where are you? There’s a hundred cops looking for you. What’s going on?’

‘I need your help. Can you set up a demo for me – a P-Scan demo?’

‘You want to demo our product?
Now
?’

‘I’ll need to log in remotely. Can you set it up?’

‘Sure... but... ’

‘No questions, Darryl.’

‘Yeah, all right,’ he says. ‘You know how to use RDC?’

‘More or less.’

‘Write this down.’

I take out a pen. He reads me four numbers, a computer Internet address. I write them on the yellow Post-it.

‘You can log in through that IP,’ he says. ‘What photo do you want to use?’

‘I’ll email it to you.’

It takes only a few minutes to set up.

I point my cellphone camera at my own face and take a picture. I stare at the photo on the tiny screen. The man I see is tired, and old, and worn. He has sleepy eyes, red-rimmed and bloodshot,
and a glaucous complexion. His hair is matted, dirty. He needs a shower.

I email the photo to Darryl. On the laptop, I fire up the Remote Desktop Client program. I type the Internet Protocol address that Darryl gave. Now, on the laptop screen, I can see and control
Darryl’s computer, as if I am seated in front of it.

What I see on the screen is familiar to me. It’s Tao’s P-Scan program, except, this time, it’s my own photograph – the one I just sent to Darryl – in the corner of
the screen, labelled ‘Target to Identify’.

I click the icon that says ‘START SCAN’.

On screen, my photo fades and transforms into grey and yellow blocks, highlighting my dark and sleepy eyes, my broken nose, the width of my jaw.

The word, ‘Scanning... ’ appears, and then, below it, flashing strings of text: ‘DMV: Alabama... DMV: Alaska... DMV: American Samoa... DMV: Arizona... ’

At California, the search pauses, and text appears: ‘Possible Match’, along with a driver’s licence photograph. There’s no mistaking it; the driver’s licence found
by P-Scan contains a photograph of me. Except, the name on the licence is: ‘Lawson Chatterlee’, and it lists an address in Los Angeles that I do not know.

Other driver’s licences come up as positive matches, too – one in Delaware, again with my photograph – clearly and certainly me – but this time with the name Tyler
Farnsworth beneath; and one in Hawaii, with my photo supposedly belonging to a man named Manuel de Casas.

Other databases are searched, and they turn up a surprising number of ‘possible matches’. A search of
New York Legal Journal
shows a photograph of me, leaning over a desk
and poring over a folio-bound law journal, with the caption, ‘Attorney Stanley Hopewell joins Cravath, Swain & Moore LLP as a partner in their Intellectual Property practice’.

From the
De Moines Register Online
is another photograph of me, this one black-and-white, with the caption, ‘Derrick Fruetel is being sought for questioning in the murder of his
wife, Jane Fruetel. He is currently at large.’

Another photograph of me, back in Hawaii, dated two years ago. It’s from a local newspaper article announcing that ‘James Johnson, Child Psychiatrist’ has returned to the Big
Island from the mainland, and that I have opened a practice specializing in the treatment of teenage drug addiction.

I don’t bother waiting for the P-Scan to finish. There will be other photos, too. Other names. Other restarts. I shut the laptop.

I put off doing it for as long as I can.

But at last, I do it anyway, because it’s part of the script. The script that I wrote for myself, long ago.

I swing onto my crutches, and cross the tiny cabin, and approach the dead man waiting for me on the chair.

I see a bulge of wallet in his suit pocket.

Gingerly, I reach for it, trying not to touch the corpse. I hold my breath. My fingers brush something hard, and when I look down they are on white pelvic bone, just above his pants waist. Dried
stringy muscle is attached to the hip.

I ignore it and dig my fingers into the pocket. I retrieve the wallet, a beautiful crocodile billfold. Inside, in a transparent plastic window, is a California driver’s licence. It shows a
photograph of a man. The photograph is blond, handsome, thin, with a pronounced bone structure that makes the man look regal and severe. The man looks absolutely nothing like me.

He does look, however, like the man in the chair – or at least like some version of that man – the version that was once alive.

The name on the driver’s licence says: ‘James Thane’.

I close the billfold, and gently return it to Jimmy Thane’s pocket.

Back to the laptop computer. I open it again, and I click on the video file that I left for myself, at the centre of the screen, named ‘PLAY ME’.

I don’t need to watch for very long. Just a minute or two is enough. The image on the screen suddenly is familiar, burning through a haze of forgotten memory: it was recorded in this
shack, by the same camera that stands on the tripod just behind me. It shows the man in the chair being tortured. It shows the horrible things that were done to him. His fingers being chopped, his
body being cut.

The screams. The endless screams.

The man standing over him, performing these deeds, has no expression on his face. There is no pleasure. No disgust.

He asks his questions in a cold, unemotional voice, sucking every bit of information from the dying Jimmy Thane – asking him about his wife Libby, and his drowned child, and his ruthless
sponsor Gordon, and that time in the parking garage, and what was Libby buying in the supermarket, that night you ran into her and agreed to have dinner?

The man conducting this torture, and asking these questions, is me.

I close the laptop, so that the screaming will stop.

I see her on the beach, sitting cross-legged atop a rock that juts into the water, not far from the shack. She wasn’t there when I went inside. She has been waiting for me, somewhere
nearby. Or maybe she just arrived.

I swing onto my crutches, and down the lawn, and onto the beach. The rubber feet sink into pebbled sand. When I reach the rock where she sits, I slant the crutches against it, and I pull myself
onto the stone beside her. The rock is wet, and mossy, and cold. We sit, next to each other, looking into the Puget Sound. She doesn’t turn to me. Doesn’t acknowledge that I’ve
come.

‘Amanda,’ I say. ‘Who was that man, in the chair?’

‘Oh, him?’ she says, with a casualness that horrifies me. She does not turn to me. ‘A weak man. A customer. He never could quite pay what he owed.’

‘He was Jim Thane?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘And the woman I lived with? The woman that was my wife?’

‘Libby,’ she says dully.

‘But her name wasn’t Libby.’

‘No,’ she agrees. ‘She worked for you. You promised to help her daughter, if she did a good job.’

‘A good job?’

‘If she convinced you.’

‘She didn’t do a very good job,’ I say.

‘No,’ she agrees. ‘The wives are always the hardest to get right. Love is so hard to pretend.’

‘And those men that lived across the street from us?’

‘Dispensable. They were supposed to watch you. To protect you. To keep the plan on track.’

She turns to me, and smiles. Her teeth are little white pebbles, just as I remember them. There is something so foreign about crooked little teeth. Something un-American.

In Russian she says, ‘Do you know how many times I’ve explained this to you?’

In Russian, I answer: ‘How many?’

‘Oh,’ she says. And she looks into the distance, and her lips move slightly, as if she is counting silently to herself. Then, she gives up, and shrugs, and says, ‘Too
many.’

We continue in the language that, until moments ago, I did not know that I could speak. ‘Tell me anyway,’ I say. ‘That man in the airport. Gordon Kramer –
he—’

‘—was not Gordon Kramer. There
is
a Gordon Kramer. Jimmy Thane’s friend. But that man in the airport, was just... ’

‘Dispensable.’

‘Yes,’ she agrees.

And then, thinking perhaps that I need more explanation, she says,

‘You loved Jimmy Thane’s stories. More than all the others, I think. You loved to hear his stories best. They fascinated you. That he was so weak. Such a disaster. You liked the idea
of it. A drug-addict trying to turn around his own life – while trying to turn around a company. It seemed so... poetical.’

‘Poetical?’

‘You’ve always been a beautiful, sensitive man.’

‘Yes,’ I agree.

‘Maybe that is the problem. Your true nature comes through. The real Jimmy Thane... he would have accepted the life that you gave him.

He would have taken the money, and accepted the wife. He wouldn’t have asked questions. But you... in your heart, you are too decent, you see? Despite Liago, your true nature comes
through. You are too smart. Too good. You can’t just live, and be stupid, and happy.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Maybe that
is
how Jimmy Thane would have acted. He was trying to change. He wanted to be someone better than he was.’

‘I wonder,’ she says. ‘Was it Jimmy Thane? Or was it you?’

I take her hand. ‘Katerina, who am I?’

‘You know who you are. Why do you always make me say the name?’

Silence. We stare at the ocean. Fog is pressed into a thin band above the horizon. Just beyond, looming through the haze, is a dark mass of land – British Columbia. The sun is behind us,
and I can feel it warming my neck, my back, and it makes the water sparkle with pearly iridescence. The world is a beautiful place, I think, if only men didn’t foul it with sin.

I say: ‘And Cole? That little boy?’

‘Yes, the children,’ she says, with something like sadness. ‘They are the worst part for you. You do them yourself. You remember that now, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You never ask other men to bear those crimes. Charles Adams’s little girl. Jimmy Thane’s little boy. Terrible. But you do it.’

‘I’m a monster.’

‘Yes,’ she says, matter-of-factly. ‘But you don’t want to be any more. And that’s what matters. You want forgiveness. You want your sins washed away. It can be
done. I know it can. He promises us. It is written, that anyone can be forgiven. Anyone can be reborn. Anyone can start again.’

‘Even me?’

The memories come back.

Rushing back, as if a heavy sea lock has rumbled open deep inside my soul, and the cold grey water has come churning back in. I can see them now – the things that Ghol Gedrosian has done.
I can remember them.

He has raped women, in front of husbands and children, and then had those children killed to teach the men a lesson.

He has taken eyes and fingers, made grotesqueries of flesh and bone.

He has listened to men scream like babies as he cut them apart to make them speak.

He has walked into quiet suburban houses at night, and lifted sleeping children, and drowned them in tubs of water while their fathers slept.

I can hear the screams now. I can feel those frantic fingers grasping at mine, the hands of the little boys and girls as they struggle for air.

His deeds are vile. Evil. There is no other word for the things he has done.

For the things I have done.

Yet I know in my heart: I had no choice. These things were required of me. Circumstances required them. Circumstances of birth, of contingency, of chance. Who I was. Where I was born. Who I
became. None of these were my choices.

It is easy to live without sin in a monastery in the mountains, or in an American suburb with white picket fences and two cars in the garage. Any man can do that. No one should congratulate
himself for living that spotless life.

It is harder to live without sin in Chechnya, to be born in a war that drives children to kill their fathers, and husbands to kill their wives.

‘Please forgive me,’ I say, to no one in particular.

‘Would you like to try again?’ she asks tenderly. She tilts her head, and looks into my eyes. ‘You don’t have to, you know. You have a choice. You always have a choice.
You can stay who you are. We can go somewhere together. Somewhere far away, where your enemies cannot find us. We have money. We can go to the other side of the world, and live on an island, and
walk on the beach, and make love all day, and be together until we die.’