“Me? But how?”
“By connecting me to Mr. Freud’s employer, all else failing.”
“You’re telling me you never met him?”
“Of course not. You were my chance.”
“Look for him, Doc. I’m sure you’ll find him eventually. Don’t see why you’d want to, though.”
“Then you have made up your mind.”
“Sorry, it’s not for me. And thanks for… you know.”
I fidgeted in place, feeling Iris’s eyes on me and not knowing what to do next. Dr. Young helped me out by hastening to depart.
“Good-bye, then, Mr. Whales.” He smiled at Iris and took her hand. “Cherish you friends. I really hope you made the right decision. By the way, it wasn’t your friend Paul who made that call to the police. Mr. Freud told me that some time ago, but I never got the chance to let you know.”
“It was Lloyd,” I stated. Bowing his head full of shiny gray hair, Dr. Young walked out of the room. Iris and I were left alone under the buzzing vent. “Good old Lloyd.”
Chapter Eighteen
They put everything on Lloyd. They said rather than a murderer, Luke Whales had been a hostage all this time, and they wondered if a formal apology would be issued. They thought it only fair and the least the authorities could do. All of this was true, but I had no idea how they figured all of that out without me. They made no mention of Iris, a person of interest only half a day ago.
Iris walked me back to Goethe’s bench and stopped. The plans I had been secretly making during our conversation on the way crumbled around me. I realized it was as far as she would go.
For several moments we stood in silence, passing a cigarette back and forth and watching the spires of the downtown smoke with us. The promised sun was right there above us, burning like it was about to kick the world backwards into summer. I took my ski hat off and wiped my forehead with it.
She pulled out a piece of paper and an old ballpoint pen, jotted down a number with “Iris” above it and handed the paper to me.
“Here,” she said. “This is my number.”
Normally, a casual gesture like that would mean it was up to me to call, but in this particular case I suddenly wasn’t so sure. It occurred to me that “this is my number” was a silly thing to say, and Iris didn’t say silly things. If she wanted me to call her, I thought to myself, she would have said, “Here. Call me,” and gave me the number. Or, if she wanted to see me again she could have asked for my number in exchange, but she didn’t. She just said, “This is my number,” which is a pretty dumb thing to say when you’re handing someone a sheet of paper with digits and your name on it. Redundancy just wasn’t her style. I suppressed a sigh.
And stared down at the scrap of paper, doing my darnest to examine it.
It was strange saying good-bye forever to a girl I didn’t have sex with. It was like the last grain of oddity sand to fall down through a week-long hourglass of weirdness. As soon as it landed, I would be able to flip the bastard and return to my normal life. But I couldn’t bear utter something like, “I’ll keep in touch.”
Instead, I shook the scrap of paper in my hand, knocked it a few times against the nail of my left thumb and asked, “At the apartment?”
Iris gazed at me momentarily through narrowed eyes… and burst out laughing. I began to laugh too.
“You started it!”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Still grinning, she rose to her tiptoes and kissed my cheek, tugging at the arm of my jacket. “Take care, Luke.”
“Iris!” I called after her. She turned around. A skinny girl in high-heeled boots. “Who the hell are you?”
To answer that, she bared her teeth and lifted her arms, making mock paws with her tiny hands. She walked backwards like that for a little bit, then turned around and disappeared around a corner.
Shaking my head, I hooked on my shades and headed briskly across the field of grass towards the lake.
Backwards. I kept seeing this image of Iris walking backwards, as I walked backwards along the lake. Sand within the imaginary hourglass, which I imagined to have flipped, fell backwards. Everything was backwards. Maybe the sun had, in fact, kicked the world backwards into summer.
I was experiencing a backward deja-vu. I was seeing it all again: the joggers on the winding lakeshore walkway, the mustached guy on the bike, the dirty birds, the waves, the decorated, jumping boats. As I passed, backwards, the spot where I’d flung my cell phone away, I was sure it was still buried in the silt in the exact same place where it had landed. As well as it should have been, I realize now. Cell phones are not in the habit of strafing around the bottom of the sea, but back then it seemed part of the whole.
I felt woozy and helplessly disoriented. I suddenly wondered if all that had really happened was just that walk up and down the lake shore on a sunny day. The supposed events of three previous days were so surreal that I could easily recall them all within seconds. Maybe even one second. Maybe less. What if I simply “called” then the events I could so easily re-call now? What if I had walked up to where Goethe was having a picnic, sat on the bench and called them, living through the whole imaginary deal in the matter of milliseconds. What if it’s still the same day?
But wait a minute, I thought. What about the dead marshal I found in my kitchen before going for a walk?
And then it dawned on me… I must have called that one too. But then… the shore walk I’ve just considered the real one, must also be a deja-vu of some earlier walk along the beach, which would have been in the same direction I was headed now, and not backwards. While I searched my memory for that fateful, real, previous walk, another idea scared me, namely the idea that there was no guarantee that the previous walk had been, in fact, the real deal and not just another deja-vu. How many deja-vu of the same event could there be? Or maybe! They were not deja-vu at all; they had all been real, these walks, and all I’d done my whole life was walking up and down this beach and calling everything else into imaginary existence. Sisyphus of the Midwest.
At this point a wry voice spoke inside my excited brain. “Listen, Sisyphus, old man. I know a place you should call next.”
The gate of the marina barred my way. Above me, the tower, destroyed once in my nuclear fantasy, swayed in the wind. Inhaling deeply to chase away the last remnants of that fearful thought-loop I’d gotten myself into, I pondered going through the main entrance and decided against it. The rewind was complete.
Chapter Nineteen
There was a guard at my door. Not a cop, but the semi-bearded maintenance guy, whose name I’d forgotten. In an indifferent, business-like manner he explained that he was waiting for the “go” concerning the removal of yellow police tape. He hadn’t specified how long he’d been waiting for, but a day and a half seemed like a decent guess.
Unable to come up with a topic for conversation, I removed the tape myself. The maintenance guard watched me do it, radioed the office when I was done to relay the development and ask for instructions. He was still waiting when I dropped the twin plastic tape holsters to the floor and shut the door behind me.
I was back in my hallway. Back in normal life. After coming home to an empty apartment every day for the last four months, all I required to confirm my solitude beyond doubt was a single glance through the hallway into the living room. The TV screen was black. Sunlight, reflected weakly from airborne particles of heavy metals rising from the streets, coaxed hazy shadows out of the sofa and the overpriced Chinese vase on top of the overpriced magazine table. Faces, mine all of them, peered from de-glossed photographs protecting the cemetery of books I’d never read. The stillness was complete. Only it didn’t feel normal.