The Return of the Player, page 19
“Plenty of big banks handle drug money, you know that.”
“But the banks don’t sell the shit themselves. That’s the difference. Your idea is clumsy. I’m disappointed.”
Griffin had nothing left to say in defense, because he knew that Hitt was right.
“Thank you, Gunther. Are there any other comments?”
There were none. Griffin left the podium, a dead man.
There had been no comic spirit guides. There had been no purification. No mentor. No double in the mirror. He wasn’t even the villain. He was a troll, one of those monsters along the hero’s path, who makes a lot of noise at the entrance to his bone-littered cave. Not even that big. He was the nameless bodyguard in the Bond film shot down from the catwalk, one of those deaths that serve as punctuation to a larger action. He was too small for even the villain to know by name, and if there were heroes in the world, the whole meaning of his miserable death was that he was too unimaginative to even know that heroes exist.
He went back to his hotel room and packed. A knock at the door: Chris Tryon. Griffin let him in. Tryon had a large manila envelope for him.
“Your plane ticket. You’re flying out of Grand Junction.”
“I shouldn’t be so petty about this, but it’s kind of crude of him: he brought me here and now he’s taking the plane away.”
“He took the plane home half an hour ago.”
“Who are you, Chris? What are you? What do you do? I don’t get it, I don’t get you, I just don’t know.”
“I work for the right people at the right time. I’m a kind of cipher, I know that. It comes from having a small role in the lives of large people, but my role is important. A spy is no one, and I’m not a spy, but I keep my eyes open, and I have a memory, and I have a discerning sense of judgment, and I’m always right, even if I can’t say why. I’m right about you. You’ll do fine. You just need more information. You haven’t had the right life experiences yet. Until today you haven’t been disoriented as much as you need to be. Even the fact that you’ve killed someone—that only helped you for a while.”
“I figured they knew. They told you?”
“You’ve got this backward. I didn’t tell them. This is between you and me”—
In the microsecond before Tryon continued his thought, Griffin wondered how Tryon would have known about the murder of David Kahane, but he didn’t mean Kahane, he meant Swaine.
—“and Warren Swaine, may he rest in peace, a good peace; he deserves it. Here’s the medicine he was reaching for.” And out of the envelope Tryon removed a photograph and text, downloaded from the Internet, a picture of Greg Swaine and Elixa, their faces distorted, but not enough to fool anyone who knew them. The picture was taken in a hip hotel room, one of those rooms with gray walls and a good photograph of William Burroughs horsing around with Jack Kerouac. Beside the photograph, Greg and Elixa were leaning against the wall; he was in a dark suit, she was in tight red latex. They looked like sex. It was their ad on Adult Friend Finders.
PERVO_LOIS&CLARK
By day we’re part of the crowd, doing our best. By night we’re movie stars. We’re new to the Lifestyle and we’re looking for folks pretty much like ourselves, sophisticated, friendly and nasty. We’re both bi and very oral. We’re looking for people not just to have sex with but to be friends with. We’re educated and would love to meet others like us, a bit surprised to be here, but no less delighted. We’re on the West Coast, and while we don’t live in San Francisco we travel there often. We love discovering new restaurants. Then we like to go back to a sexy hotel room—like the W—and fuck our brains out. No (tobacco) smokers, please!
“I watched your meeting with Mr. Swaine on a computer in the house—the office had a few hidden cameras—and I saw everything and I heard everything. You thought he had medicine in that drawer, didn’t you? That’s why you held it closed with your knee. He did have medicine, in the top drawer, but he wanted to show you something that was more important to him than his own life. Powerful stuff, Griffin, you know? He was saying to you, You don’t know a thing about my son. And all he wanted to do was show you this picture, to explain why he wasn’t going to pay for Eli’s tuition. Until I saw the picture I thought he was being harsh.”
“Why didn’t you come in and save him?”
“Because if I had, you wouldn’t have been able to send your son to Coldwater as easily as you did, because there wouldn’t have been any money for Eli. Right?”
“How did you figure that out?”
“Because you were asking him to pay for his grandson’s tuition. I heard everything, Griffin. And then you made your move on Phil. It was a great move too. You took advantage of the situation like you’d planned it. And Swaine was just trying to tell you how much his son disgusted him. Look at the picture. It’s not even that bad.”
“Can I keep this?” asked Griffin.
“You killed for it, dude. It’s yours.”
…
He took a cab home from LAX. He had to wait in line with tourists and businessmen without limousines to meet them—the loveless, he supposed, people with no one to pick them up. He didn’t even know what the cab was going to cost, and that made him sick. He was out. He wasn’t even on the way down. It was all over. This was the name of the ghost: David Kahane. The name of the ghost had always been David Kahane. You can’t get away with murder. His children would end up in public school while Greg Swaine’s kids got the trust-fund free ride. Lisa will leave me and take what she can. My son will hate me. Willa will go insane. Jessa—what will Jessa do? I don’t know her. I left her too young.
He asked the cabdriver to go around the block twice. He didn’t care what kind of weird impression he made, but then he thought, I have to be careful. I may be working with this guy in a few months. Griffin had the feeling of waking up after a one-night stand, the feeling of having burned a carpet with a cigarette after not smoking for ten years, an important carpet, the carpet of your father’s boss, and you fucked his wife on the carpet and it was her cigarette and you’d taken one drag and choked and dropped the cigarette, and you’re so drunk you pass out and then in the morning you wake up naked on the carpet, your father’s boss’s wife snoring beside you, and her husband wakes you up with a kick to your ribs. That’s not a good feeling, and it was all that Griffin knew.
…
He didn’t push the doorbell because he didn’t want the children to rush up to him in their automatic enthusiasm for his return. He was sure that if he looked at himself in a mirror he would see his dissolution, something he wanted to hide from his children at least for a few minutes longer, and protect himself from the sudden retreat of their happiness on seeing him, as their fear of the changes in their father confused them.
…
He went into the house he shared with Lisa and the first voice he heard was June’s, calling up the stairs to tell Jessa to finish her homework. Willa heard him and came out of the dining room to give him a hug. Lisa followed, but saw, looking at his eyes, that the trip had failed.
“You’re home early. I thought you were coming back in three days.”
“I don’t want to talk right now.” He patted Willa, knowing he owed her more, left his bag in the hall, and went upstairs. He could hear Ethan listening to music and went in. He didn’t knock on Ethan’s door.
Ethan slouched on his bed, surrounded by posters and stickers.
“I thought you were coming back after the weekend.”
“I finished what I had to do.”
“How did it go?”
“I failed you, Ethan. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you except, I don’t know, learn Chinese. That’s it. Learn Chinese and study something real, like engineering, and you should also learn something practical and basic, like plumbing, just in case.”
“What are you talking about, Dad?”
“The end of the world as we know it.”
“I hate that song. REM is your generation, not mine. My generation has hope.”
“Why?”
“Because your generation grew up with the fantasy that things were getting better. That’s fucked up.”
“Is that why the movies don’t work anymore? The three-act structure is based on the idea that things will change?”
“I don’t know. Some movies are good.”
“But I don’t mean some movies, I mean the movies, as this cultural thing. Solve the crime, win the game. That’s not really change, is it? I mean in story terms. The CSI shows. Nothing changes. Guilt is found out. That’s not a story, is it? Not in the old sense. Marriage, that’s a story.”
“Dad, what can I do to help you?”
Griffin hugged his son, because Ethan had never looked at him and shown Griffin that he was seen whole. “You can see how bad things are with me, can’t you?”
“All of you. You and Mom and Lisa and Willa, everyone except Jessa. Mom? Wow, let me show you something.”
Ethan sat up and went to the computer. He typed in a Web site, ICARRYMYLIFE.blogspot.com. It was just a standard green blog page and the author of the blog called herself JB.
The most recent entry, a few days old, said:
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time, and now I’ve done it. I may have only two readers in the whole wide world, but they helped me. Thank you, guys, I love you! I was going to have a link here to the posting, but you’d still need a password, so here it is, straight from the personals on Nerve.
The previous entry was her first.
HOW DO YOU CARRY YOUR LIFE?
I carry mine badly these days. If I could write a novel about it I would. But right now I can’t because I can’t stop seeing that my ex was cruel to me and he’s in a mess because he did horrible things that he might not be able to heal. Really horrible. The worst. And I have to help him, at the same time, to help the children. This disgusts me. And then I think, no, I am an adult. He did what he did, I have done what I did. I have to find a way to help.
I like the blogosphere because no one knows who you are, so you can be yourself in a sea of other selves. This feels to me like a regression to something beautiful and primordial. I like the way the blog entries are stacked, not even backwards, but down. It’s sedimentary. Sentimental sediment, all the way down to the bedrock, a long cylinder of memories. Someday in the future, there are going to be computer programs that sift through the blogs the way geologists and biologists today read the history of the natural world through the pollen embedded in the layers of glaciers and river bottoms, and the programs will track the changing world through the simultaneous deposits of digitized human emotion. They’ll see the broad strata like the layers at the Grand Canyon, or like tree rings. They’ll find out the deep patterns of emotion, like which years saw the worst lovers, which saw the advance of tenderness and mercy, which years contained the richest silt of love, which years were nothing but disasters of frustration and fear, the years of increased friendships and connections, the years that men turned away from real women, the years that men came back, and so on and so on and so on.
And this is only the beginning of what they’ll do. They will measure the layers against history and weather, they will understand the connections between political leadership and human emotion, global warming and group sex, massacre and plague and jealousy and acid rain and cyclones and the rise of divorce. The scientists and specialists will argue among themselves about cause and effect, but they will have a way to connect the physical record with the emotional record, the record of human stories with the record of animal extinction. Perhaps they’ll find that human emotion changed the weather, that it wasn’t just carbon dioxide that caused global warming, but something else, something powerful inside the heart, the human heart.
I know what happened this year. This year everything fell apart.
“This is your fault, Dad.” And then Ethan surprised himself by slamming the door on his father and running downstairs. He went to the kitchen and pulled down the pots and pans hanging from the rack.
…
While Griffin was in Ethan’s room, Lisa helped Willa with an old homework assignment she hadn’t finished at school, a crayon copy of the Duc de Berry’s illustrated manuscript Book of Hours, a typical Children’s Lincoln assignment, contrived to flatter cash out of the wealthier grandparents who held their children in contempt for having rejected the sophistication taught at home, where they grew up with expensive limited-edition copies of Renaissance art, instead of coffee-table books like The Art of The Lord of the Rings and Hip Hotels. June was worried about Lisa’s short fuse with Willa after Griffin had come into the house in such a low mood, and whatever Ethan was doing in the kitchen now could only be as an alarm to summon his mother, but she had promised Maya Hernandez to protect Willa, and Ethan would have to wait or come out to find her.
Willa drew blackbirds in her blue sky, too many, until this bat-swarm representation of her turmoil became a cloud that ate the sun, and Lisa, afraid of anyone’s opinion of the obvious significance of this symbol, could find no other way to ask Willa to work on another section of the page than to say, “Honey, over here, in the sky? Those birds are getting kind of busy, do you know what I mean? You don’t want anyone to look at this beautiful page and then look up here at the birds and think, hmmm, that’s kind of sloppy.”
Willa threw her crayon across the room. Lisa could see the tantrum rise triumphantly through her daughter like Jerry Lewis announcing a telethon fund-raising record.
“I’m not being soppy. I’m doing the best I can.”
June heard the dropped consonant bounce from the floor to the ceiling and then ricochet around the room, a Daffy Duck sproing.
Compelled by who knows what kind of ancestral will to doom, Lisa said, “Sloppy.”
“That’s what I said.”
“You said soppy.” Lisa ripped the book and wailed at June, “I can’t do this! I can’t do this anymore!” And she ran out of the room.
June sat quickly beside Willa. “Your mom is tired. Let’s let her get a glass of water, and while she drinks it you and I can start this drawing over again. You can draw it any way you want. And if you want me to help you, all you have to do is ask.”
Willa picked up the black crayon. “I’m going to draw the birds.”
“Do you want to draw the sky first?”
“No. I’m going to draw the birds. See? This is a bird. And this is another bird. And these are birds: all of these are birds.”
…
“What are you doing on the floor?” Lisa asked Ethan, when she found him in the kitchen, surrounded by stockpots, saucepans, two roasting pans, five ceramic mixing bowls in five colors, and every bag or box of anything dry from the pantry—flour, sugar, salt, kosher salt, uncooked pinto beans, uncooked long-grain brown rice, un-cooked organic basmati rice, muesli, Jell-O, dried wasabi, dried chickpeas, Special K, Cocoa Puffs, bags of whole coffee beans, Starbucks House Blend, Starbucks Decaf French Roast—and he was emptying each of the bags into the pots, pouring one variety of grain and legume on top of the next until level with the top, and then above, making a little Vesuvius that fell under the weight of the stream. He had put the empty bags into the garbage.
“What is everybody screaming about in the living room?”
“That I’m a bad mother. Basically. Why are you here?”
“Because my father is a bad father.”
“But that’s probably how it looks to you because, if you look at it, why you’re really here is because I’m a bad mother. Willa and I wouldn’t need your mother here tonight if I were a good mother. I hit her.”
“There’s worse things.”
“I don’t want to think about them.”
“Sometimes parents do things they think no one knows about.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to be thinking of something, otherwise you wouldn’t have said that.”
“Never mind.”
“You’re going to have to throw all that out. It costs a lot of money.”
“What does all this cost, a hundred dollars? More or less?”
“Something like that, although you’d be surprised at how quickly it all adds up when you check it out at the supermarket. It could be a hundred and seventy-five dollars, right there. That’s a lot of money.”
“Not really. And even if it is, so what? My father is rich.”
“Not really.”
“Does he have more than a million dollars in the bank?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I don’t know how much he has, not really.”
“You know; I know you know. You have to know.”
“Do you know?”
“Yes, because my mother told me.”
“So why ask me?”
“To see if you’d be honest with me.”
“There’s a difference between honesty and telling a child something he doesn’t really need to know.”
“Never mind.”
“Did your father get mad at you for something?”
“Could I be alone, please? Could I just be alone?”
“I came in here for a drink of water.”
“So get your water and leave me alone.”
“That’s not a nice way to talk to me.”
“Are you going to hit me too?”
Lisa kicked a frying pan filled with white rice, then a six-quart stockpot filled with coffee beans, flour, and muesli. Bound by the heavy flour, a delta of the grains and beans sprayed across the floor in streaked layers like tailings from the mine in Telluride.
“Clean it up, Ethan.” Forgetting to pour a glass of water, Lisa left the kitchen, slammed the door of the empty maid’s room, and knelt on the floor beside the sofa, thinking about pills, many pills, how many it would take to die.
