Players (14 page)

“Sure, get right back.”

“I’ll call you in fifteen minutes.”

“Sure, call, Lyle, anytime.”

He went to the bar and sipped his drink. A man with crutches stood nearby, a near derelict, it seemed. It wasn’t much of a place. Two elderly women sat at a far corner of the bar, sharing a cigarette. Lyle finished his drink. It was too soon to call McKechnie again. He ordered another Scotch and went back to phone J. Kinnear, realizing, with profound surprise, that he didn’t know how to get in touch with Kinnear. The listing would be in another name, obviously, and Lyle had never thought to check the number on the telephone in the frame house in Queens. Dumb, very dumb. When he got back to the bar he saw someone walk past the front door, hurrying through the rain, a man holding a newspaper over his head. Just a glimpse was all. Wee glimpse o’ the laddie’s mustache. A little later a woman came in and greeted the man on crutches, asking what had happened.

“I got runned over by a learner driver.”

“Did you sue his ass?”

“What sue?” he said. “I was like on the brink.”

“You could collect, Mikey. People do it. You could make a nice little something for yourself.”

“I was like seeing cherubs.”

Or an M.A. in economics, he thought. Big Ten fencing titles. Square head, wiry hair. Author of a study on trade regulations in Eastern Europe. Does push-ups with his knuckles.

Lyle walked down Nassau Street. The district was a locked sector. Through wavering layers of rain he saw it that way for
the first time. It was sealed off from the rest of the city, as the city itself had been planned to conceal what lay around it, the rough country’s assent to unceremonious decay. The district grew repeatedly inward, more secret, an occult theology of money, extending ever deeper into its own veined marble. Unit managers accrued and stockpiled. Engineers shampooed the vaults. At the inmost crypt might be heard the amplitude pulse of history, a system and rite to outshadow the evidence of men’s senses. He stepped out of a doorway and hailed the first free cab he saw, feeling intelligent again.

At home he heard from Kinnear almost immediately. He stood holding the phone, concentrating intently, determined to understand what was being said, the implications, the shadings, whatever petalous subtleties might be contained in the modulations of J.’s voice.

“I’m not where I usually am.”

“Right.”

“I’ll be sort of transient—I would say indefinitely.”

“Before that, there’s something that happened. I talked to a Burks, if you know the name. He asked about you.”

“Not unsurprisingly.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“I may have talked to him on the phone. I talked to several of them. I wasn’t given names. I had a number to call. We did our talking exclusively over the phone.”

“I told him everything I know.”

“That was clever, Lyle, actually.”

“I thought I should tell you.”

“I’m one of those people you’ve read about who’s constantly being described as ‘dropping out of sight,’ or ‘resurfacing.’
As in: ‘He resurfaced in Bogotá four years later.’ Right now it’s the former condition that prevails.”

Lyle tried to imagine Kinnear in some specific locale, an airport (but there was no background of amplified voices) or remote house (where, what room) in a well-defined landscape. But he remained a voice, no more, a vibratory hum, coming from nowhere in particular.

“I asked him about Vilar,” Lyle said. “He outright refused to tell me anything.”

“Makes sense.”

“They don’t like me.”

“Well, I talked to them, you know. We had talks about this and that.”

“My name came up.”

“I was very selective. That was part of the appeal of the whole experiment, from my viewpoint. It was interesting, very much so. I told them only certain things. They’re quite a group—quite, let’s say, adaptable, I guess is the word.”

“They know my recent history.”

“They know your recent history.”

“And they didn’t contact me earlier because they had someone inside.”

“Now that I’ve severed all connections, Lyle, they’ve become very interested in you. You’re their remaining means of tying into the little terror seminar.”

“Can’t they just go in and seize weapons and arrest people for that, if nothing else?”

“They’ll find nothing there
but
weapons. I was the only person who spent any appreciable time in that house. Won’t be anybody there, now or later.”

“I thought Marina.”

“Marina was out there maybe half a dozen times, never for longer than a couple of hours.”

“Why pick now to travel, J.?”

“I was getting bricked in, old man. The element you think of in the person of Marina was clearly aware that information was trickling. The element you think of in the person of Burks was getting a touch possessive. It was time to do a one-eighty out the door.”

Lyle suspected J. was getting ready to hang up.

“How long have you been giving information?”

“Matter of a few months.”

“Get paid?”

“That was to come, eventually. Extremely doubtful I’ll ever see it.”

“Fair amount, I assume.”

“Pittance.”

“Why all the risk then?”

“People make experiments, Lyle. They’re very adept at certain things, so aware of shadings, our secret police. I wanted to get inside that particular apparatus, just a step or two.”

“They got your name slightly wrong.”

“I didn’t know they had it at all. That’s interesting. See what I mean? Techniques. I wonder how they managed it. They must have spent a great deal of time on me. I used to wonder about that. Are they really interested in what they’re getting? Do they know who I am? Their secrets are worse than ours, by far, which goes a long way toward explaining why their techniques are so well developed.”

“What happens now?”

“I continue to ask for your trust.”

“Don’t go just yet, J.”

“God bless,” he said.

Lyle put down the phone, then dialed McKechnie’s number. The little girl said her daddy didn’t want to talk to him.

They discussed the sunset awhile, sitting on the deck with junk food and drinks. It was better than the previous day’s sunset but lacked the faint mauve tones, according to Ethan, of the day before yesterday. They went inside and ate dinner, slowly, an uncoordinated effort. Jack complained that they were talking about the food while eating it, that they talked about sunsets while looking at them, so on, so forth. It was beginning to get on his nerves, he said. He used his semihysterical voice, that exaggerated whine of urban discontent. They sat by the fire after dinner, looking at magazines. Jack found a six-month-old
New York Times.
He read aloud from a list of restaurants cited for health code violations, chanting the names and addresses.

“We need wood,” Ethan said.

“Wood.”

“Bring in wood.”

“Wood,” Jack said.

“In bring,” Pammy said. “Put pile.”

“Wood, wood.”

“Fire come,” she said. “Make big for heat the body.”

In the morning they drove over the causeway, their hair flattening in the wind, and then across the bridge to the mainland. The sky was everywhere. Pammy sat behind the men, smiling at the backs of their heads. Weathering had given the houses a second, deeper life, more private, a beauty that was skillfully spare, that had been won. Boulders in brown fields. The kids here, on bikes, barefoot. She scanned carefully for traces of water, eager to be surprised by it, to have it come up suddenly, an avenue of hard blue between stands of pine, sunlight bouncing on the surface. The kids on bikes were lean and blond, a little less than well-fed, a certain edge, she thought, to the way they returned her smile, looking hard at the car and the travelers, eyes narrow in the sun.

In Blue Hill they visited a married couple Ethan knew, three children, a dog. Leaving, she and Jack waited by the car while Ethan exchanged prolonged goodbyes with his friends. Jack was looking at her.

“I’m not really gay,” he said.

“If you say so, Jack.”

“I’m not, it’s true.”

“It’s your mind and body.”

“I should know, right?”

Late that afternoon she stepped out of the shower and felt pain, momentary pressure, at the side of her head. She would be dead within weeks. They’d force her to go through a series of horrible tests but the results would be the same every time. She was depressed, standing in a towel, her body slowly drying, dying. Waste, what a waste. She felt awful about Lyle. It would be easier for her to accept if she weren’t leaving someone
behind. Thank God no kids. She dressed and went outside.

After dinner they took the remaining wine and some brandy out to the deck. It was the mildest night they’d had. Jack was restless and decided to take the garbage over to the dump instead of waiting for morning. He got a flashlight and went up the path to the car, dragging two large plastic bags.

“He’s right,” Ethan said. “We can’t seem to do anything without discussing it at the same time.”

“Vacation,” she said. “That’s what people do.”

“I hadn’t realized we were doing it to the extent we were.”

“Your German mouth is so serious.”

“Maybe that’s the secret meaning of new places.”

“What is?”

“Quiet, I’m working it out.”

“I don’t want to hear.”

“It concerns self-awareness,” he said. “I’ll give you the rest later.”

“God, stars.”

“The clearer everything is. That has something to do with it too.”

“Look at them, millions.”

“I am.”

“Talk about them,” she said. “Quick, before Jack comes back.”

Much later there were long silences between periods of conversation. Jack brought out extra sweaters, then three blankets. When the wind rolled through the tops of trees, Pammy had trouble understanding the sound in its early stages, that building insistence of surf.

Later still, in some perfect interpenetration of wine and
night air, she drifted through a more congenial region, a nonspace, really, in which immaculate calm prevailed. Between moments of near-sleep she felt her mind alive in the vivid chill. Clarity rang through every sparse remark. When Ethan laughed briefly, an idiot grunt, she felt she
knew
what tiny neural event had caused that sound. There was total order in the night.

Then she was sluggish and dumb. She wanted to be in bed but hadn’t the will to get up and go inside. She kept edging into some unstable phase of sleep. Her elbow slipped off the inside of the chair arm, causing her to snap awake. Everything was different after that, a struggle.

“God, the stars,” Jack said.

It occurred to Pam that Ethan rarely talked to Jack. He addressed Jack by talking about furniture, movies, the weather. That, plus third person. He said things to Pammy that were meant for Jack. Sometimes he read an item aloud from a newspaper or repeated a phrase spoken by a TV newsman, repeated it in a certain way—meant for Jack, some fragmentary parable. She didn’t think this revealed as much about the two men involved as it did about people living together, their lesions of speech and demeanor. Pammy and Lyle, had their own characteristics, of course. Pammy and Lyle, she thought. We sound like a pompom girl and a physics major. Or chimps, she thought. The names of chimps learning language with multicolored disks. She drank more wine, watching Ethan make a series of preliminary hand flourishes.

“New places, when they’re really new, really fresh and new, make you more aware of yourself. This can be dangerous.”

“I want my sleeping bag,” Jack said.

“All this stuff is flashing your way. It’s like a mirror, ultimately. You end up with yourself minus all the familiar outward forms, the trappings and surroundings. If it’s too new, it’s frightening. You get too much feedback that’s not predetermined.”

“Want sleep out,” Jack said. “Air, wind.”

“Fear is intense self-awareness.”

“Like today, earlier,” Pammy said, “when I thought I had something wrong, I thought me, me, my tissue, my inner body. But it’s easier to die alone. Kids, forget about.”

“Ground,” Jack said. “Sleep, earth, creature.”

Ethan ran the side of his index finger along his throat, thoughtfully, and up over the point of his chin, many times—an indication of ironic comments in the offing, or pseudo wisdom perhaps, or even autobiography, which, in his framework of slanting planes, was itself determinedly ironic. They both waited. It was the middle of the night. Water closed around the rocks near shore, audibly, finding lanes.

“You people here.”

Jack went inside, returning with a sleeping bag, which he tossed on the deck. Everything was happening slowly now. Jack went around lighting candles. Jack paced, imitating a tiger. Pammy was aware that he was seated again, finally. They drank awhile in silence.

“I’m slightly lantern-jawed,” she said.

They seemed to laugh.

“No, really, people, I’m slightly lantern-jawed. It’s all right. It’s, so what, no problem, long as I accept it.”

“Pam-mee.”

“So, you know, so what? When you think of other people’s,
what they have to accept type thing. And it’s slight, just hardly noticeable, I know that. So you accept. And you live. You simply everyday live.”

“She’s not about to blow her cookies, I hope.”

“Your sleeping bag gets the brunt if I do.”

“Mercy me.”

“Blat,” she said.

Pammy and Jack began a sequence of giddiness here. Everything was funny. She felt lightheaded, never more awake. Where was Ethan? She turned to see his profile, partly shrouded in the blanket, theatrical and grave. It would be dawn soon, maybe an hour or two, unfortunately at their backs somewhere. Jack’s voice grew shrewd and dry. It was the only sound for a time. He paused between remarks, effectively. She laughed at everything he said. It was comical, this matter-of-fact Jack. She began to laugh at the end of pauses, anticipating. There was a spell of quiet. Softest color seeped into Pammy’s awareness, something pared away from the night, a glow of the lowest resolution, as though night itself were being broken down into its optically active parts.