He closed the PowerBook, polished off the bourbon, and took a lukewarm shower under the stars on the back porch. The sex-starved housewives down at the bar always preferred it if you started the conversation smelling like a rose.
Ordinarily, he would see the same three dreams: a trilogy. One would always follow the next, so that over the course of every few nights, he would get the whole story. Deviation did not occur.
On the nights they came, he would fall asleep for two or three minutes, only to wake up shivering in a cold sweat. Getting the feeling that if he moved an inch, the draft of cold air against his skin would induce frostbite. Get out of bed, change his shirt, use a different pillow, then soak them both again over the course of another ten, fifteen rotations. He endured a sense of sheer exhaustion-it seemed the most difficult, irrational task to turn on a light or read a book…and always there was the determination to get back to sleep. In the routine, he found comfort. He knew what to expect; he knew what was coming.
Tonight’s dream began on schedule, episode one of the trilogy, the story beginning again after the sixteen thousandth playback of episode three. He’d seen the latest incarnation of the concluding installment maybe two nights before Roy had called him about the body on the beach.
There was darkness-black night, lasting for days on end. And there were scents-dank, musky, rich odors, the scents of mold, soil, mildew, rot, and the coagulating secretions of his own body. He heard the sound of a deadbolt opening, deafening after weeks of silence. He reached out, tried to grasp the massive door handle to hold the door closed, but they came in anyway and grabbed him. They moved him along; he was walking, but not easily, an utter lack of strength in his legs. There was light, but it was dim, like the vanishing light of the moon’s crescent in the last moments before a lunar eclipse-lunar eclipse, Cooper thought, as he remembered always thinking. Of course, he was wearing the blindfold. Light was seeping in around its edges.
He found himself in a chair with no seat, tied to the frame, bound, ass poking through the seat hole, the rest of him dangling, vulnerable. In burning streaks against his naked ass, they whipped him. They whipped him as they always did. He heard the things they said as the stripes of agony writhed up through him-This is for the manhood of your country…We’ll take America’s cock-the commentary delivered in the comical accent, Cooper thinking every time of Speedy Gonzales. He felt pain in its purest form as the whip strafed him, every strike sending a rush of red through his head. The red bled into his vision, it bled everywhere, until there was no distinction between senses, the pain reaching first to extreme peaks, then descending gradually into comfort as he fell into a comatose state, in there dancing with death.
Another dark time came. Days, weeks, longer, shorter, sleeping and waking blurred. A circuit of horrors: solitude, darkness, light, torture, solitude. And occasionally a serving of food, slipped through a rectangular hole in the door before the opening was slammed shut again. This, he knew, was where he would awaken, lift the blindfold, and, before eating his single, rock-hard tortilla, vow quietly to himself that the next time they came for the whipping, he would kill them all.
And so he lifted the blindfold, a single line of light at the base of the door illuminating the tortilla lying on the floor. To Cooper, it seemed too bright. He didn’t remember it this way. He tried to speak, to utter his vow, but nothing came from his lips. They failed to move. He couldn’t speak.
The light beneath the door brightened, bathing him in its soft glow. He felt a sudden pang of fear. Unsure how to proceed, he crawled painfully to the tortilla, snatched it, began eating. Chunks fell from his mouth as he ate. In desperate need of the calories, he reached for the pieces he had missed-
And saw the burns on his torso. Whitish, waterlogged sores, covering him-stark, swollen mushrooms embedded in his raven skin. His sinewy legs were fractured below the knee, the ankles snapped grotesquely-
Cooper opened his eyes.
The ceiling fan in his bungalow spun lazily. A drizzle tapped the metal roof; he heard a gull caw from the garden. He could still taste the woman he’d brought back from the bar-fruity cocktails, cocoa butter, salt from the sea, the poisonous tang of cigarette smoke on her breath. She’d been twenty, thirty pounds overweight, and Cooper hadn’t minded at all.
Maybe that ghost had been talking to Roy, Cooper thought, and that’s why Roy had called. Eh, Cooper, dat you, mon? There something here I thinking you maybe wanna see. Leaving out the other part: This dead bastard, he been talkin’ to me, found him on the beach and can’t get him out of my head. I thinking maybe we pass him onto you, mon.
Rising to find a pair of shorts, he reflected that it may have taken the entire eighteen years of his stay, but now he could chalk it up as officiaclass="underline" he was a superstitious West Indian just like the rest, a belonger now, somebody who knew enough about the way things happened ’round here to understand you were better off following the signs if you could read ’em.
To know that he was better off listening when some poor dead bastard happened to be talkin’ to him.
There something here, that screeching ghost of a poor dead bastard telling him again, I thinking you maybe wanna see, mon.
5
Traveling light, only a single bag strapped over her shoulder, Julie Laramie came through the sliding glass doors of the United baggage claim at O’Hare trying not to appear as though she were looking for somebody. She wondered how she would look to him; whether she’d look the same, or older, or possibly better. This morning she’d pretended she wasn’t carefully picking out the jeans, the thin V-neck cashmere sweater, the leather jacket to wear over the sweater, the Doc Martens-she liked the boots because they matched the leather jacket and made her legs look thinner than they were. Laramie decided he would think she looked better. Why wouldn’t he? She did.
Coming out onto the sidewalk, it occurred to her that what she was doing was ridiculous. She could have called anybody-pick any historian out of the phone book, or maybe just walk across the street to the nearest Beltway think tank, in order to get her questions answered. But as she’d told herself before dialing up Eddie Rothgeb, she wasn’t permitted to show classified documents to such people. Of course she wasn’t permitted to show them to Eddie Rothgeb either, but to Laramie, Eddie would always qualify as the exception, since she wouldn’t even have her job if it hadn’t been for him. Still, coming here involved other perils, and perhaps she should have considered them.
The maroon BMW jerked to a stop on the other side of the island. He had told her about the car when she called, a maroon 525i-said he’d gone all out. Laramie had laughed over the phone and said something like “pretty sporty,” but she knew it wasn’t a move toward sporty at all. It was a move to a four-door sedan, in as conservative a color as he could find. She hadn’t talked to him in maybe a year, and wasn’t supposed to care, but it still made her mad that he’d bought it.
Rothgeb got out of the car and stood across the hood from her, and Laramie thought that he, at least, looked exactly the same. It wasn’t what she expected-or maybe she’d expected it but hadn’t prepared herself for it. Why would he look any older or any worse? Did three years change any man? Round, wire-rim glasses, beard trimmed short, blue Oxford button-down, red crew neck sweater over the shirt. Worn jeans, ratty Converse high-tops. The ageless professor slumming on a Saturday, exuding wisdom beyond his years. His eyes were the same too-she could see the blue in them twenty yards off. He waited beside the fender until she stepped over the curb and stopped a few feet in front of him.