Brainfire Page 19

  He listened to the great silence of the building. Then he heard the whining noise of the elevator moving in the shaft. It stopped. Faintly he could hear the door slide open. And then the silence came in once again. He looked back at the newspaper where, momentarily, a headline caught his eye: “Police Puzzled by Murders”—

  He had begun to read it, drawn not by the headline but by the curious suspicion, the uneasy presentiment, that something in this story was familiar to him—as if he had noticed, without really seeing it, a name he knew, a person he knew—he had begun to read it when the door of his office opened and he looked up to see Ambassador Quarterman standing there. Sunday suit, fresh flower in the buttonhole, the face of an old charmer, a faded film actor, perhaps, who has bought himself into a nice diplomatic situation.

  “I heard you were here, John,” the Ambassador said. He slid across the room, a man on wheels. You couldn’t imagine Himself in his underwear, or making love, or defecating: he was not of this world.

  Rayner, torn between the Ambassador and the newspaper article, stood up.

  Schoolboy time, he thought. Quarterman, picking at his carnation, always reminded Rayner of a face in a credit-card commercial, but he wasn’t sure which one.

  “I don’t normally drop in on you people,” Quarterman said. “The business of the Embassy isn’t always on a par with what you people do. More often it’s a collision course.”

  Tell me, Rayner thought. Tell me more.

  The Ambassador frowned now: a piece of playacting. He might have been faced with a lunch of jellied eel during a goodwill visit to the London docks.

  “This terrible business with the Englishman yesterday,” Quarterman said. “It must have been a great shock to you, John. I can understand it.”

  Speech, Rayner thought. You stand that close to death, you’re bound to get a little upset. He glanced down at the newspaper again, seeing, not seeing, her name. Her name. He couldn’t get it into focus, as if there were two realities running, like a pair of amok battleships, into one another. Her name.

  “I’ve been having a word with George,” said the Ambassador. “Naturally, this isn’t my business, I’m not officially a part of George’s team, after all … but we think, George and I, that after all you’ve been through—your poor brother, now this awful incident yesterday …”

  Sally Macnamara. Leave would be in order for a month or so. Sally, Sally. Spend it where you like, John. George suggests Europe. But it’s up to you, of course.

  Rayner saw his own hand fall across the newspaper article.

  Puzzled by the apparent lack of motive, police officials

  He saw how white his knuckles

  Quarterman was laughing at something. Some goddam story. Some fucking pointless reminiscence about a cycling tour of the Camargue—

  Wellington, 47, was the author of several well-known

  Flat tires all the way from here to the Bay of Biscay, I swear it.

  Ms. Macnamara was employed in an editorial capacity at

  Rayner, unable to see clearly, looked up at the Ambassador and heard himself say, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say except I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?”

  Quarterman, who looked as if death and disease were as much occasions for speeches as the launching of ships, opened his mouth and, with a tone of dismay, repeated his question.

  Sorry?

  apparently entered by the front door while the couple were in the bedroom

  “I’m sorry,” Rayner said again. “Really sorry. I mean, about everything. Really.”

  “John, John.” The Ambassador stood by the desk and put his hand on Rayner’s sleeve. “The shock, the shock must have been terrible.”

  “The shock?”

  “Look. Sit down. I’ll get you some water or something. Better still, I’ll call my physician.”

  Physician. Parapsychologist. Nerve pills. Voices from the Great Beyond.

  Rayner sat down, his eyes shut, conscious of Quarterman fussing with the telephone, shouting down the line at somebody—get your ass over here, I don’t care a damn if you’re having breakfast—

  also worked closely with Mr. Wellington

  worked closely, closely, very closely

  two of his books were made into

  Rayner opened his eyes. You could wish your way out of the world. You could long so badly for a better place that people came and locked you up. You were safe in rooms with soft cushioned walls and all your friends wore nice white coats.

  Oh Sally

  Quarterman slammed the telephone down. “He’ll be here soon, John. I’ll wait with you until he comes. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry, Rayner thought. Bit by bit they’re killing my world and I’m not to worry. He stared at the Ambassador for a time. But there was nothing else to say and he had run out of apologies and explanations and reasons—and even grief, even that.

  PART III

  April

  “Do you want to have power over something? Be more nearly real than it.”

  —CHARLES FORT, The Book of the Damned

  1

  1.

  It was George Gull who suggested Europe as a suitable place in which to spend a month’s leave; and it was George Gull, smiling, strangely subservient, as if Rayner were a bomb about to explode, who brought in travel brochures proclaiming the merits of this or that Greek island, of Venice in the spring, Munich—“the sweet jewel of Bavaria.” Rayner, sick of being treated like an invalid, lied about his itinerary; that way, at least, he could get George Gull off his back. He could rid himself of Gull’s relentless platitudes: “We all need a break from time to time, John. You’ll come back a new man. You’ll see.” Rayner promised he would go to Germany but instead spent four days in a rainy Scotland, driving from one dark loch to another in a hired car, wandering through ruined keeps and broken castles, immersing himself in a history he felt no attachment to: a stranger in a strange heritage. Glasgow, a huge dark slum on a grubby river; Edinburgh, where he visited the Castle and looked from the battlements across a damp gray vista; Perth, bleak in the cold April rains.

  He took to driving circuitous routes, imagining that whoever had fired the shots at Wembley would be following him around still. Or maybe both shots had been meant only for Ernest, after all; how could he know? He drove south from Glasgow along the Ayrshire coast, barren little seaside towns. He was tired of the absences in himself, tired of death, of dead seasons, of going nowhere.

  At Prestwick Airport he booked a flight to New York. He checked in his rented car, spent a sleepless night in an airport hotel, listening to the noise of the Atlantic. He realized he should have told George Gull, as his superior officer—and therefore someone with a right to know—that he was going back to the United States. To hell with him, Rayner thought. To hell with all that he stands for. I’m going back home.

  The long Atlantic crossing was turbulent. The ocean was raked by great electric storms. The plane came down in New York City—a humid darkness, a tightness in the air. Rayner passed through customs and Immigration uneventfully, yet somehow suspecting that he would be questioned: an absurd feeling altogether. This man must be stopped. But he was free, after all. Who could stop him from reentering his own country? From the airport he tried to place a collect call to Isobel’s number in Georgetown, only to be told that the line had been disconnected. She had a different number now, the operator said, and gave him a number with an area code of 804. When he had hung up he checked the directory, discovering that 804 was Virginia: Norfolk, Richmond. He put through another collect call. The number rang for a long time before he heard her voice. Then there was silence before the operator said that Rayner could speak.

  “John? Where are you, John?”

  Rayner said, “More to the point, where are you? I called the Washington number and—”

  “I moved, John. Sometimes you get sick of an empty house.”

  Rayner was silent a moment. He ha
ted airport terminals, the transiency; even the loudspeaker announcements were terse, abbreviated, as if there was no time to spare for anything. The essence of things; the absence of the superfluous.

  “I have a little place on the beach,” Isobel said.

  “Beach?”

  “Virginia,” she said. “When are you coming home?”

  “I don’t want to shock you, but I’m presently standing in a phone booth at JFK—”

  “What happened? What happened to London?”

  “Euphemistically they call it leave, Isobel.”

  “Does it have another name?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you about it.”

  “Can you get a flight to Norfolk? I’ll pick you up,” she said.

  “I’ll try. Call you back.”

  Somehow he didn’t want to hang up; it was as if this connection was more significant than a simple electronic conjunction—an emotional skein, he thought, something attaching him to his dead brother.

  “Call me back just as soon as you know,” she said.

  He heard the line click dead. He stood a moment in the booth, unwilling to move back out into the concourse, the crowds, the madness of motion and noise. Maybe they were right, he thought. Gull, Quarterman, Quarterman’s personal physician, a Harley Street man with a cold touch and a quick prescription pad—maybe they were right, all of them, and he did need to rest. Shock will sometimes be a delayed thing, Mr. Rayner. Yeah, he thought. I have personally known people who didn’t feel the aftereffects for years. He looked through the glass, feeling in his coat pocket for the pills that had been prescribed. Two kinds. One that brought sleep, dreamless unsatisfying sleep, the other—Quaalude—that was meant to relax him. Shock, he thought. He had gone to Dubbs’s funeral, standing in the stupid spring sunshine and wondering, Who’s going to feed the parrot, the fucking parrot?

  He stepped out of the phone booth and went in search of an airline desk. Make arrangements, comprehend timetables, catch flights. It was called Going Through the Motions. And if that was what it took to hold himself together—in a place where he wouldn’t need the salves of a Harley Street doctor—then that was what he would do.

  2.

  He couldn’t get a flight until morning and was obliged to spend the night in a motel room. He was in Norfolk by noon. A new Isobel met him, somebody he didn’t recognize at first, a different woman: not the glacial hostess who had looked more like an elaborate birthday cake than a human being, but someone less gaunt, more vibrant, wearing her clothes with casual indifference: faded blue jeans, a shirt smock tucked untidily inside the belt, cracked leather boots. Her hair had grown down her back; there was a simple center parting, combed unevenly as if there were no longer mirrors in her life.

  When he embraced her, feeling her face pressed against his cheek, he could sense her aliveness; if there was a memory of death in her, it belonged to another season. He wondered at first if perhaps there was a new man, a new love. Hand in hand they went across the parking lot to a 1968 Ford station wagon, a rusted-out vehicle with broken upholstery. Where was Richard’s beloved Jaguar? Where was the low-slung British sports car on which he had lavished such inordinate attention? A vehicle, Rayner thought, that was like a surrogate wife to him. Now this beat-up old Ford that looked as if it should be crammed with grubby kids and shopping bags and all the paraphernalia of a crazy family.

  “Don’t look like that,” Isobel said. “It works. Really. Runs like a sweetheart.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Want to drive?”

  “When my nerve comes back,” he said. He slung his suitcase in back, noticing how the rear seats had been removed. There were cardboard boxes, flowerpots packed with dirt, balls of string.

  “The door doesn’t work on the passenger side,” Isobel said. “You have to climb across the wheel. If you don’t object?”

  Rayner scrambled in. Loose wires hung raggedly from the dash. “Aren’t you afraid of being electrocuted?”

  “Nope. None of the instruments work anyhow. The whole point of a car is transporting your body from A to B, right? And that’s what this one does.” She smiled at him. Even the smile—when had he seen it so warm? so welcoming? Changes, he thought, changes in all of us.

  On the Norfolk–Virginia Beach Expressway, he said, “I can’t get over how … well, different you look. And all this. I mean—”

  “Words fail you, huh?” She hunched over the wheel, swinging the car into the outer lane of traffic.

  “Words fail me,” he said.

  “We’ll talk about life-styles sometime,” she said.

  Sometime. The sky, a marvelous unclouded blue, suggested the ocean, as if it were all one vast expanse of mutually reflecting mirrors. You could run a long way from death in a place like this, under a sky like this one. He closed his eyes; a warm breeze floated in through the open windows.

  Isobel drove off the Expressway, turning the car through the streets of Virginia Beach, past the monstrous hotels that straddled the sands like purposeless concrete slabs. She was driving left on Atlantic Avenue, heading toward the edge of town. Then they were going down a sand-strewn lane that led to the shore—and the sea, drawn far back by the tide, looked impossibly distant. She stopped the car outside a cottage. It was small, awkwardly angled, as if a series of residents had whimsically added to the original structure.

  “Home,” she said. She got out of the car. “Do you like it?”

  Rayner slid across the seat. The breeze, smelling of salt, a clear, stinging scent, blew random patterns in the sand. “I like it,” he said.

  She took his hand and led him inside the house. A dark cool room, barely furnished: a room of spaces, dim corners, plants. She lives here, he thought, where there’s no clutter. Where there’s nothing of the past. She lives, he understood, with an exorcism of her own history. Plants, climbing ivies, hanging ferns: a dark green cool room.

  “No chairs, John. Help yourself to a pillow.”

  He squatted on a fat embroidered pillow. Too much, he thought, too much to absorb at once. Take it slow, in stages. She reclined on a pillow opposite, her head propped up by her hand. He could hardly see her: his eyes were still filled with sunlight.

  “Made it myself,” she said. “The very pillow on which you sit. With my own little hands.”

  “I didn’t know you had such talent,” he said.

  “Oh, there’s a whole bunch of things you don’t know, John Rayner,” she said, laughing very lightly.

  He realized he had never heard her laugh before. A musical sound, as if she meant it. He looked around the room, the darkness beginning to take shape. Drawn blinds, an absence of pictures, of photographs. There wasn’t, as far as he could see, a TV. A small portable record player, of the kind one might find in a child’s bedroom, sat on a shelf—but even this gadget was surrounded by some massive philodendron. Growing things, he thought. She’s taken her life, erased her past, crowded her energies into growing things. And she looked—well, beautiful, even if he had some trouble in thinking of his brother’s widow in this way.

  “Are you intending to stay for a time?” she asked.

  He wasn’t sure how to answer. Coming here, coming to see Isobel, had seemed the most logical thing; but he hadn’t given any thought to time, to movement.

  “Can you use a guest?” he asked.

  “Sure. Sure I can use a guest.”

  He smiled, closing his eyes. Here it was easy to imagine that nothing had ever happened; events dwindled, diminishing into nonoccurrences. Richard hadn’t died. Richard was still—He opened his eyes and looked at her. Leave it alone, he thought. Put the questions aside. All the asking in the world wouldn’t bring any of them back. Not Richard, not Dubbs, not Sally.

  “So, John. How come the leave? Did you do something terrible? Trade a few secrets with the Russians or something?” She was leaning forward, her face hardly visible in the gloom, but he knew she was watching him intently. He said nothing. The silence was like a
pool in the room. There was, he thought, an edge of slight bitterness in her voice. But what could he expect? She was still staring at him. “I’ve come to the conclusion, the hard way, John, that it’s all a crock of shit,” she said. “Your world, the world he lived in—it doesn’t mean a goddam thing. It never meant anything. They give you badges and ID cards and special passports and secret telephone numbers you can call. It’s hilarious. I was in a toy store yesterday and they had this kit you could buy. Secret Agent Kit, it was called. Imagine little kids pretending to be people who’re pretending to be something else—”

  She stopped, turning her face to the side.

  “I sold it. The house. The two cars. The furniture. Every goddam thing I could see I sold. The junk of my life. And I came down here because all I wanted was peace. It’s not so much to ask for in life, is it? Is it, John?”

  “No. It’s not much,” he said.

  “You find other things. You go on. After a time it isn’t so difficult. You accept easily. New pastimes. New friends. New things to dabble in.”

  Rayner had an image of Richard: obscure, fuzzy, like a face seen through mist. Broken glass, the fall. He looked away from Isobel, noticing now the row of books held in place with cinder blocks. He moved nearer to them.

  “Don’t mock it,” she said. “When the physical world’s a huge pain in the ass, what do you turn to?”

  Rayner said nothing. He stared at the titles on the paperback spines. Strange—strange how damned hard it was to get away from reminders. Books and Sally. Books and Andreyev. Keys to Inner Space. New Frontiers of the Mind. The Third Eye. The World Beyond. Many Mansions. Make Parapsychology Work for You. He touched the spines; how could he laugh at it all? You come, like Isobel, to some hard, cold place and all you want is the reinforcement of a belief. Powers of the mind. Extrasensory perception. Life after death. How could you make fun of her?

  “Okay. Call them comforters. Nipples for babies,” she said. “It’s a growing process. When I finish with that, I move on to something else. When I finally understand what a shitty woman I was, what a terrible wife I was to him, then I can grow.”