The Speed Chronicles (22 page)

It was that day, the day of the paintings, their light, that Dr. Tremblay saw what was to occur. Walking out, he saw Warren Tibbs's six-year-old daughter dancing pirouettes on the front lawn, waving one of her father's paint brushes like a magic wand. He knew he must do something.

He decided he would perform a courageous act.

Is the spirit capable of achieving what we in our distress must expect of it? That is what Albert Schweitzer asked, and Dr. Tremblay knew the answer.

“Dr. Feelgood,” the government man said with a sneer. “You made Warren Tibbs feel so good he stopped taking his heart medication and died.”

“That is not how I see it,” he replied.

“You must have noted the strain on his heart.”

The doctor did not say anything.

“You stopped his heart, Dr. Tremblay.”

“His heart had stopped long ago, young man. I merely stopped the thunder in his head.”

The night before the jury's verdict, Dr. Tremblay woke with a start. He realized he had been in the midst of a stunningly vivid dream in which before him passed all his patients, eyes bright and glittering, smiling at him, thanking him, hurling their hands out, unknotting their knotted fists, opening their arms to him. Until the last one appeared. Walter Tibbs, of course, and when he smiled there were no teeth inside, only an orbular glow that hummed, like a tuning fork. But as he moved closer, the doctor saw that Warren's mouth was open not in a smile but in terror. As if the light inside was choking him, swallowing him whole.

Shaking in his bedclothes, huddled on his office couch, and the thought came to him: It happened because I was too greedy for love. It was all I wanted.

“Dr. Tremblay,” Mrs. Moses-Pittock pleaded as they led him out of the courtroom after the verdict, “you can't leave us. Who will take care of us? Who will take care of me?”

He touched her netted glove with two shaking fingers, looked into her watery gray eyes. “I trust you understand that our hearts can take us all to dark and ill-timed places.”

MEGAN ABBOTT
is the Edgar-winning author of the novels
The End of Everything, Bury Me Deep, Queenpin, The Song Is You
, and
Die a Little
. Her work has appeared in
Wall Street Noir, Phoenix Noir, Detroit Noir, Queens Noir, Between the Dark and the Daylight: And 27 More Best Crime & Mystery Stories of the Year, Storyglossia, Los Angeles Times Magazine,
and
The Believer
. She is also the author of a nonfiction book,
The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir
, and the editor of
A Hell of a Woman
, an anthology of female crime fiction. She lives in Queens, New York.

the speed of things

by james greer

part 1: ego in arcadia

N
othing would make me happier than to tell you, up front, that everything works out fine in the end. Can't do that, I'm afraid. Not because things don't work out fine in the end, but because I don't know how the end ends. The end hasn't happened yet (as far as I can tell). The end may never happen. Things are moving so quickly these days that the end may come and go and I might not notice. Have to allow for that possibility. Have to allow for every possibility. Facts are engrams. Engrams are hypothetical. Thus: Every. Possible. Outcome.

As for the body lying on the floor a few feet away from where I sit, at my desk: I can talk about that. I can give you a definitive answer with respect to the body. Yes, the blood pooling near her head and, less obviously, the little splatters on and around her bare feet: aftereffects of her transition from life to death by means of a series of bullets discharged from a handgun at close range. I should probably make this much (all right, fine) clear: I did not shoot the gun. She didn't shoot the gun. I have no idea who shot the gun. Not sure it matters. The gun got shot, right? A shot gun is not necessarily a shotgun, would be one conclusion you could draw from the

Cannot let this incident interfere with my work schedule. I am extremely busy. I'm on seven different deadlines. Which when you think about it, as I am sometimes given to do (think about it), presents a sort of ironie du sort. (Now I'm just playing word games.) But serious. The line drawn outside a prison beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot. From that idea to this: how? Is there any sense in which missing a deadline corresponds to going further than allowed and therefore liable to be shot and killed? Perhaps going further than allowed, yes, that much one can grant, but everything after therefore is a damned lie.

En attendant, everything is killing me. Not just the seven different deadlines but the expectations. People who know me, who have made the mistake of not shutting up (for good) the minute we met, have a series of expectations that seem to grow, perversely, in accord with my ability to disappoint each and every one. You have to say “each and every” in that sentence for the rhythm, not the meaning. The meaning can go to hell, along with all the people who expect things from me. I know my limits. I know when I've reached my limits. Hey, guess what? I've reached my limits. I might be, well, actually I am, let's not kid ourselves, he said, of at least superhuman intelligence and—did you see that? Her arm just twitched. That was disconcerting—supernal intuition, but even such a one has limits. I see everything, I understand everything, and this happens at both the conscious and all twelve subconscious levels simultaneously. You'd reasonably expect a man with such abilities to be sotted with power, joy-drunk, unintimidated by intimations of mortality. To some extent that is actual factual. To some extent just silly. I have to draw the. It's a question of. Guess. Guess not. Huh.

In the motion picture
Meet John Doe
starring that one guy and that girl and directed by what's-his-name (1939), movement is both created and just happens. Think on this: w/r/t film and music, all forms of dissemination heretofore have involved circular objects, spinning. No matter how far back you looky-loo. Revolvers each and every one, but no more, no more, no more, no more. I don't “these days” know the shape of the medium. Does anyone? Is there a shape? I have seen certain media represented as a waveform, but I suspect that waveform is merely a visual translation of a shapeless batch of numbers. Thing I need to know, has art become math or has math become art, (and) is there a meaningful distinction?

A John Doe club forms for the purpose of improving relations between and among neighbors. That's all. To be a better neighbor. Not really sure how such a thing, even if fueled by a despicable despot, takes root and flowers. Where I live, there are only seven or ten people grouped in ten or seven tin houses, then nothing interesting for many kilometers. An island afloat in the middle of a great city. Everyone is related either by marriage or blood, and everyone keeps to himself. Family members do not talk to family members. No one talks to anyone. Where I live is spectral silent except for noises made by elements and animals. Where I live is nowhere.

The potential when you harness the separate units of a great number of John Doe clubs toward some end other than neighborly. In and out of doors. Well, that's just frightening. If you agree raise your hand. No, other hand. Theoretically I am writing a history of the Federal Reserve Bank. I say theoretically because I don't believe the Federal Reserve Bank exists, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. You could, I suppose, say with some accuracy that I'm writing a history of nothing. The History of Nothing. Written in Nowhere. Written By. (Hope is in the hand that hits you.)

I have been contracted. Contacted? After a while you forget the smaller differences. This is a known side effect, according to the materials accompanying my prescription of PROVIGIL. I thank, I praise, I grant every, no, each and every day. One hundred milligrams in the morning is my prescriptive dose. I'm not good at following instructions. Too proud or something. Nine is the number of the muses, so nine hundred milligrams in the morning suits my symmetry. Many people say:
Where would I be without coffee?
and for coffee you can substitute other stimulants or depressants or ampersands. But where would I be without coffee? Added to nine muses of PROVIGIL you can accomplish worlds. You can eliminate sleep from your diet. How super, my love!

Walking through tall pines, trunks pasted with greeny moss, forest floor covered in a mass of needles and cones and deciduous leaves, brown or yellow according to their last request, Aunt Panne was over-brimmed with holy spirit of trees. Praying as she walked, slowly, for soul of dead girl lying on the floor next to desk of Writer. Dead girl or possibly not-dead girl, id est dying girl. Lovely deep blue of her lips.

Mossy ruins of a water mill. Heavyset old man with dropsical jowls and comically large glasses sat on a rotting tree limb chewing a reed.

“I am Aunt Panne.”

“I am Paul Volcker, twelfth chairman of the Federal Reserve, 1979–1987. I grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey.”

“What brings you to the forest, Paul Volcker?”

“I'm waiting for Writer to remember me.”

“There's a plaque here by the ruin of the millstone. I can't read it.”

“Because it's in Gallic. The gist of the inscription is that these ruins are symbolic of a larger wreck.”

“Well, that makes sense. Did you know the dead or dying girl?”

“Not personally. Only what you read in papers. When there used to be papers. Newspapers, I mean. Les journaux.”

“It wasn't all that long ago.”

“No, it wasn't. You're right.”

“By larger wreck you mean the design?”

“Yes.”

“I've been wondering lately if the seeming incoherence of the design isn't contained, somehow, within an even larger design whose outlines we can't see. And that maybe this imperceptible scheme makes perfect sense.”

“I don't engage with poetry.” Paul Volcker stopped chewing his reed and fished in his jacket pocket for a small notebook.

“
Meet John Doe
,” he read aloud from the notebook.

“And then what?” asked Aunt Panne.

“That's all I have so far.”

“It's a good start.”

Aunt Panne left Paul Volcker sitting by the remains of the mill and continued through the forest, following a path that was no path. She knew that Paul Volcker was worried about the farmers driving their tractors down C Street NW to blockade the Eccles Building, but he would never admit it, not to her, anyway. Maybe he wouldn't admit it to anyone, anymore. Maybe the reason he wouldn't admit it is related to the reason he was sitting on the rotting tree limb by the old water mill.

Was there even a trace of whatever water source once drove the mill? As she moved farther and farther away, Aunt Panne's memory similarly receded. She could no longer picture Paul Volcker's face. She could no longer in any detail picture the mossy ruin of the mill. It was entirely possible, she admitted to herself as she trudged up a gentle slope slick with mud from a recent rain, that she had imagined the whole interval. The words
lacuna
and
caesura
flitted through her brain, for a moment, and then disappeared.

Okay, but if you allow one example do you have to allow them all? Do you admit the unreality of experience generally if one experience turns out to be illusion? The brain is capable of many things when its circuits are working, even more when overloaded with catecholamines and hypothalamic histamines. The synaptic terminals release these oracles into the floodstream and you start to see things: Is it the future? Is it the past? Is it a kind of present that would otherwise be invisible to our seven dulled senses? Or is it, as most would have you think, a fantasy, the product of a disordered mind. Consciousness infected with chemicals, perception out of step with consensus. When you apply reason to the problem, you kill the problem. You derive a solution. Aunt Panne mistrusted solutions. She would rather beggar the question by withholding logic, and thus arrive at the edge of the forest rather than, say, a small clearing or a mossy ruin.