Richard Cheeseman stands still. “Quite an entrance.”
“Richard! You scared the sodding shitout of me.”
“Well, pardon me for scaring the sodding shit out of you.”
We ought to be clapping each other’s back, but I just gape. Richard Cheeseman’s flab had melted away after a month of Latin American prison diet, but his civilian clothes accentuate how hard, gnarled, and leathered he’s become. That eye patch—when did thathappen?—gives him the air of an Israeli general. “I—I was all set to see you in Bradford after Christmas. I’ve arranged it with Maggie.”
“Then it looks like I’ve saved you a trip.”
“If I’d known you were coming here, I’d have …”
“Laid on champagne, a brass band? Not my style.”
“So”—I try to smile—“to what doI owe this pleasure?”
Richard Cheeseman sighs and bites at a hangnail. “Back in the Penitenciarнa, one method of slaying minutes was to plan my first trip to New York as a free man. The tinier the details, the more minutes my reverie would kill, you see. I used to refine my plans, night after night. So, when I found myself unable to face a family Christmas at Maggie’s, full of jollity, pity, Christmas TV specials, then, naturally, New York was where I fled. And once there, what could be more appropriate than a ride up the Hudson Line to see the leading light, the chiefest friend of the Friends of Richard Cheeseman, Crispin Hershey?”
“The Friends of Richard Cheeseman was the least I could do.”
His stare says, The very fucking least you could do.
I try to delay what I dread is coming. “Did you damage your eye in a fight, Richard?”
“No, no, not a knife fight, nothing so Shawshank Redemption. It was a spark from a welding torch on my very last day as a prisoner in Yorkshire. The doctor says the patch can come off in a week.”
“Good.” The framed photo of Gabriel is on the floor. I pick it up, and my visitor remarks, with sinister levity, “That’s your son?”
“Yes. Gabriel Joseph. After Garcia Marquйz and Conrad.”
“May your son be blessed with friends as true as mine.”
He knows. He’s worked it out. He’s here for payback.
“Must be tough,” remarks Cheeseman. “You here, him in Spain.”
“It’s less than ideal,” I try to sound casual, “but Carmen has family in Madrid, so she’s not alone. She’d been told she couldn’t have children, you see, so for her, Gabriel was a minor miracle. Well, a major one. We were no longer an item by that point, but she was determined to go through with the pregnancy and”—I reposition Gabriel next to my sticky-tape dispenser—“he’s the fruit of her labor. Won’t you sit down? I could scare up a shot of brandy to celebrate …”
“What—to celebrate my four wasted years in prison?”
I can’t look at him and I can’t look away.
“You seem antsy, Crispin. I seem to be unnerving you.”
“Seem” x 2 = textual mumble squared, I think, and notice that Richard Cheeseman’s coat pocket is bulging and sagging. I can guess what heavy lethal object it may contain. He reads my thoughts. “Working out who put the cocaine in my suitcase, Crispin, and when, and even why—it didn’t take me long.”
Hot. Strange. My insides are being decanted out of me.
“I made up my mind not to confront my betrayer until I was out. After all, he was doing his damnedest to get me repatriated and released. Wasn’t he?”
I can’t trust my voice so I just nod, once.
“ No, Crispin! He fucking well wasn’tdoing his best to get me out! If he’d confessed, I’d have been out in days. He let me rot.”
Snow is falling again, I notice. The second hand on the clock lurches in tiny arcs. Nothing else moves. Nothing.
“As I lay in my cell in Bogotб, it wasn’t only New York I dreamt of. I also dreamt of what I’d do to him. To the slug-fuck who came to see me, to gloat, who cared, but not enough to change places. Never that. I planned how I’d drug him, bind him, and kill him with a screwdriver over forty days. No script was ever polished as lovingly. Then I realized I was being silly. Teenage. Why take all that risk? Why not just meet him in America, buy a gun, and blow the fucker away in some out-of-the-way locale?”
I wish Betty the secretary or Inigo Wilderhoff was still pottering around. “Your tormentor,” I try to keep my voice steady, “has been tortured by remorse.”
Cheeseman’s voice turns into barbed wire: “Tortured? Swanning around the globe? Fathering children? While I, I, was caged in Colombia with killers, drug addicts with HIV, and rusty razors. Which of these fates is torture?”
His hand goes to his coat pocket. A janitor walks down the corridor, whistling. I see him framed in the outer doorway of Betty’s reception. Yell for help!urges Hershey the Sodding Terrified. Or run for it. Or beg for forgiveness: “Please don’t orphan my children.” Or negotiate. Or offer to write out a full confession. Or—or—or—
—or let him take his revenge. “Your tormentor,” I begin, “wasn’t gloating, when he came to visit you. He despised his own cowardice, and still does. But this changes nothing. He wants to pay, Richard. He’s only a step away from personal bankruptcy, so if you want cash, he can’t help you. But was it money that you wanted?”
“Weird thing is,” he swivels his head, “now I’m here, I don’t know what to take.”
My shirt’s glued to my body by hot and cold sweat. “Then I’ll sit at my table,” I tell him, “and wait for you to decide. Your tormentor didn’t mean to get you banged up for years, he only meant a—a prank, a stupid prank, but it went nightmarishly wrong. What you decide he owes, he’ll pay. All right?” No, dear reader, it’s not all right. Here in my chair I’m disintegrating. Better to close your eyes. Shut out Richard Cheeseman, my books, the view of white woods. One blast to the head. There are worse ways to go. The kettledrumming in my ears muffles whatever Richard Cheeseman is doing, and I barely hear the click of the safety catch, or the footsteps. Curiously, I sense the muzzle of the handgun, an inch from my forehead. RUN! BEG! FIGHT! But like a suffering dog who knows what the vet’s needle is for, I remain inert. Bowel and bladder control stay operative. Small mercies. Final seconds. Final thoughts? Anaпs as a little girl, proudly presenting her handmade book, The Rabbit Family Go on a Picnic. Juno telling me how the coolest boy in her year told her that, to understand him, she had to read a book called Desiccated Embryos. Gabriel in Madrid, growing so fast, so big, smelling of milk, marshy nappies, and talcum powder. A pity I won’t know him, but maybe he’ll find something of me in my best books. Holly, my only friend, really. I’m sorry about the upset my death will cause her. My favorite line from Roth’s The Human Stain:“Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.” Of how, in a roundabout way, it’s not Richard Cheeseman who’s shooting me no in fact it’s Crispin Hershey’s finger on the trigger as he slips a tiny packet of cocaine into the lining of a suitcase in a hotel room long ago nowI’m shuddering nowI clench my body nowand my eyes are streaming nowI’m sorryI’m sorryand nowhe’s nowme nowI’m nowhim now now now …
… and I’m alone. I’m alive, more to the sodding point.
Open your eyes. Go on, don’t be afraid. Open up.
Same old room. The same, but not. Cheeseman’s gone.
Down the faculty stairs he’s walking, in the wake of Inigo Wilderhoff. Across the lobby, through the big glass doors, along a track, out of my story … Hunkering into his coat as the snowy evening creeps through the trees, Vietcong-like. I scrutinize my hand for no reason I know of, marveling at its fleshy robotronics … Clasp the mug. Let the heat hurt. Raise the mug, bring it to your lips and sip. Tea from Darjeeling … Soily leaf and tannin sun bloom across my tongue. Marvel at my Rosetta Stone mouse mat; at the gray-pink beauty of a thumbnail; at how one’s lungs drink in oxygen … Rattle a fruit Tic-Tac into your palm and pop it in: I know the flavors are synthetic chemicals, but to me it’s a gustatory “Ode to Autumn” by Keats. Nothing attunes you to the beauty of the quotidian like a man who decides not to kill you after all. Scoop up the detritus I knocked to the floor: my pen holder, a plastic spoon, a memory stick, my Lego Man collection. Juno, Anaпs, and I send one another packets as jokey presents. I’m up to five: spaceman, surgeon, Santa, Minotaur—bugger. Who am I missing? I’m on my knees hunting for the fifth among the power cords when my laptop trills.