Killer Move

“It does sound odd,” she said. “But the acts of the deranged often do, at first, until we accept, yes, that’s what they did. And it won’t seem too out of line, in light of your recent Facebook activity.”

“What? I haven’t been on there for days.”

“Right—you’ve been too busy. But, yeah, turns out you’ve been posting a load of subtle crazy shit up there in the last forty-eight hours. How Ms. White was making moves against you behind your back. How your secret friend Mr. Warner had started to give you ideas about how to teach chicks like that a lesson. And how finally you realized you don’t need him anymore, and you can take vengeance on your tight-skirt-wearing colleague by yourself. Kind of dumb of you to have posted up those photographs of Karren this afternoon, but the flamboyantly deranged aren’t always very smart.”

“No one is going to believe I did all this.”

“Actually, they will. People will believe anything that’s lurid enough—we’re all still looking for that sense of wonder. Plus, it sounds like you played the wacko very well in the hospital on the way. That’ll help.”

“Is Nick . . . Which bit of this is he a part of?”

“Nick? I have no idea.”

“You know. You must know.”

“I really don’t. This is intriguing.”

“He . . . he was the guy who was trying to have an affair with my wife. Who was there when she drank the bottle of wine intended for the Thompsons.”

“I got nothing. That must just have been real life, I’m afraid. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

“But . . . who are you? Where do you come from?”

“Out there. In the world.”

“And you’re just going to do this to me, and go?”

“It’s the way it is. I’m sorry. You’re not actually a dumb guy, not totally anyway—you just got modified. I don’t even mean by the old folks here—I mean by life. Everybody does. You start with an open road, but then the walls start to close in—day by day, year by year. There’s no market for who you thought you were, so you become someone else. You get trammeled. You get crucified by the quotidian and you get smaller and smaller every minute until you die. Resisting that? It’s tough. Staying true to who you are is the only real superpower. I have it. You don’t.”

“But—”

“No, my friend, we’re done talking. Are you going to leave the building, or what? I would if I were you, because what I’m offering isn’t in anybody’s game plan but mine. It’s a cheat code, if you like. A secret side door. Who knows what you’ll find on the other side?”

“You’re going to . . . let me go?”

“It’s why the balcony doors are open, dumb-ass.”

I looked across at the doors, but couldn’t work out what she was getting at.

“Could be that you manage to get past me,” she said patiently. “That you flip over the side before I can get a clean shot, and run off into the night.”

“But . . . why would you do that?”

“Why does anyone do anything?” She smiled, wide and innocent, looking for a moment exactly like the girl who’d served me mascarpone frozen yogurt on a hot afternoon not long ago. “To see what happens next. My job was to tidy up the Warner situation and provide whatever collateral muddying seemed necessary or advisable. But as regards you personally . . . I have no instructions. I’m thinking it could be fun to watch. No one’s going to believe a single word you say. About anything. And if they should ever start to . . . well, then I guess I’ll just have to come and find you, right? So what’s it gonna be? Do I shoot you now or later? It’s your game. You choose.”

I walked out onto the balcony. I climbed onto the railing, all the while expecting to feel an impact, and then to die. I dropped down onto the grass, landing heavily, falling on my side. I got up.

Cass was on the balcony, looking down at me.

“I’ll count to a hundred, Mr. Moore,” she said. “Run and hide.”

The car was still there. I opened the driver’s-side door. Steph looked up at me, eyes wide.

“Is Karren okay?”

“She’s fine.”

My wife hauled herself across into the passenger seat. I got in and started the engine with hands that were not shaking and I drove away.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

I drove for a long time without stopping, and as I took us up the coast and then north across the panhandle, I also talked. I tried to explain everything that had happened to me in the last days, to recount it, at least, but I kept getting tangled, caught up in trying to work out who had been running things at each point, and why. I couldn’t think straight. I had not eaten for a long time. I was exhausted. I had seen people killed and I had seen what happened to them after that, without at any point understanding why. At first Steph asked questions, though not many, and in a voice that sounded increasingly tired. After a while she stopped asking and so I just kept talking, trying to put it all together and glad she was giving me the opportunity, glad that she was sitting next to me and letting me run. Sometimes that’s what you need in your loved ones. Someone who just lets you run on, who provides a safe track for your thoughts and hopes to revolve around. It was a long time—in fact, only when I stopped for gas in South Carolina in the dead of night—before I realized that she’d fallen asleep.

When I’d gassed up I got back in the car, put a blanket over her, and went back to driving and talking to myself. I drove straight through the night, up into the woods of Kentucky, wondering how long it was since we’d done something like this. Simply been in movement together, without an agenda, without a five-year plan. A world without walls. Eventually the sky started to soften and the forest on either side of the road turned from being an undifferentiated mass of black into individual trees. I tried to make something metaphoric of this, but I was so tired I was incapable of joined-up thought. I’d stopped talking by that point, had become content to keep driving with Steph sleeping in the seat beside me.

No matter how much I talked through the last five days, the final analysis remained the same. Everything we’d had was gone. There would be people who’d try to blame a lot of things on me, at least one cop who’d be ready to help, and as much evidence as they could need. It was all gone, then—everything, except for the two of us. After a decade of accruing baggage, of earning and seeking and building our lives layer by layer until we were held apart by our accretions of shell, it was back to just the two of us, naked in the world—and the weird thing was that it felt good. It felt like what I’d always wanted, back when I had an idea of who I really was and who I wanted to be. You put one foot after another, one word after another, and it makes sense at the time—until one day you look up and find you’re lost in a future you don’t understand, someplace you never wanted to go and do not recognize. That’s what had happened to us: had happened, most of all, to me. You get up in the morning and look in the mirror and find a stranger looking back, and you brush your teeth and smile, and when you leave the room there’s no reflection left in the mirror because you have climbed inside the fake.

What do you do if you realize this has happened? Go back to the beginning and start again? It isn’t possible. Time flows but one way and all rivers make for the sea, and so we keep trudging on, writing our story-lives sentence by sentence, hoping that sooner or later we’ll be able to steer them back onto a track that we recognize. It never happens. We just die, and in death it becomes contextualized. Everything makes sense at the instant we close the book on ourselves.

That’s what happened, for better or worse.

I’m done now.

Good-bye.

In the end, a little after six in the morning, I got too hungry and tired to continue driving. I took it as a sign when, five minutes later, I glimpsed in the distance the blessed great yellow M of a fast-food outlet Stephanie and I had been going to for all of our lives together. So much of a sign, in fact, that it was only when I parked in the lot outside that I realized my face was wet. I sat looking up at the golden arches as if they were the gateway to the promised land.