The Accident (20 page)

“So you are having difficulties finding focus? For your life?”

“I’m having difficulties
justifying
my life. I’m … not proud, I guess would be an understated way of saying it, of certain things I’ve done.”

Studer nods.

“I’ve engaged in major, ah,
mis
representations, about some important events.”

The author struggles with his own vagueness. He knows he hasn’t been a particularly forthcoming patient, probably an unsatisfying two hours per week in the life of this inscrutable psychiatrist. Even though he felt compelled to try this process, he was sort of hoping that he could just show up to an office and have someone else do the actual work, someone with advanced degrees and board-certified specialties, someone who could diagnose what was wrong and prescribe how to fix it. Perhaps with a pill and some, whatever, stretching exercises.

“There was this thing that happened, back in college—at university. That was the first major instance.”

“Of?”

“Of, um …” There’s an idea just beyond the tip of his consciousness … “Of, I guess,
redefining
reality. Of taking an event, and just sort of turning it into something else. Something advantageous, instead of dis-.”

He suspects that the doctor has no idea what this means, but neither
of them particularly cares. They’re not here for the doctor to learn things; the point is the patient’s enlightenment.

“I came to the realization that all events, all facts, were to some extent negotiable. And throughout my life, this concept, this ever-present opportunity, took increasing control of my consciousness, and my career. I’ve spent the past two decades negotiating reality. Manipulating other people’s perceptions of it.”

Studer looks like a lecture student who has lost the thread of the professor’s argument, but is hoping that the topic will expire without anyone asking him any questions.

“I’ve led a dishonest life. An
amoral
life. And sadly there aren’t very many people who care, on a personal level. I’m childless and divorced, and have pretty much no relationship with my ex-wife. My father died a long time ago. And Mom, she sort of washed her hands of me. I still see her once a year, but we don’t really talk.

“I don’t think there’s anything I can do, on a personal level, to improve anything with anyone, and I accept that. But on an impersonal level, I’m finding my legacy … um … unpalatable.”

Studer nods vigorously. “And you would like to
set the record straight
, as they say.” He seems relieved to be returning the conversation to a more practical level.

“Yes, I would.”

“And may I ask, Herr Carner: Why? Why do you want to set the record straight?”

“Because I want to do the right thing. For once.”

“
Is
it the right thing? Will it
help
anyone?”

The author doesn’t respond.

“Or will it serve only to assuage—is this the correct word?”

“It is.”

“To
assuage
your conscience?”

He has wondered exactly the same thing, many times. Every day. But he already made the decision, irrevocable.

They drove wordlessly through the quiet streets near the lake, then into downtown. Charlie was becoming more sober by the second. The bright red color was draining from his cheeks, and instead he was looking increasingly ashen.

They pulled to a stop at a traffic light. The car was facing in the direction of their university, up at the top of the hill. But Charlie was gazing off to the side.

“My father is over there,” he said. “In that hotel.”

The two boys stared at the unremarkable structure a few blocks away.

“He’ll know what to do,” Charlie said.

“Um … Are you sure?”

“I am. I think.”

So Dave pulled the vintage Jaguar around a corner and into a mostly empty parking lot. They walked as calmly as they could through the lobby, to the elevator. Charlie pushed the button for the top floor. He looked down at his feet and noticed a blood spatter on the top of one of his boat shoes. He knelt down to wipe it up, but he realized he had nothing to wipe with. He paused, thinking, then rubbed the splotch with his thumb until it looked like just another commonplace stain on an unremarkable shoe.

CHAPTER 26

“J
esus!”

Isabel pushes the door open. “Get in,” she says.

“What the—?”

“Get. In.”

Jeffrey stands there, dumbstruck, not moving, his coffee toppled at his feet, his bag strap tugging at the crook of his arm.

“Goddamnit Jeffrey! Get the
fuck
in this car!
Right now!
”

He finally obeys, folding himself into the taxi, panic all over his face.

Isabel turns her attention back to the driver, who’s staring at her in the rearview. “It’s okay,” she tries to reassure him. “We’re just … you know.”

The driver doesn’t respond.

“Herald Square, please.”

“What’s going on?” Jeffrey demands. “Where are we going? Did you say Herald Square?”

Isabel yanks a notepad out of her purse. “What do you think of the manuscript?” she asks, but doesn’t pay attention to Jeffrey’s answer as she scribbles, and thrusts the pad at him:

This a.m. at b’fast did a stranger interact w/ you? Touch you?

He reads, nods, writes:
Borrowed my pen
.

Is pen w/ you?

He reaches into his breast pocket, holds up the Sheaffer for her to see.

“So are you going to want to publish the thing?” she asks aloud, continuing to scribble. “Or not?”

They’re listening
.

Jeffrey looks shaken. “I’m definitely intrigued,” he says, “but …”

She writes again:
My asst Alexis just murdered
.

“I know,” she says, staring at Jeffrey as he reads her note, mouth falling open into an O, brow deeply furrowed. “There are an awful lot of buts.”

T
he traffic leading into Herald Square is a mass-merge of taxis and trucks and angry impatient drivers of jumbo SUVs with Jersey plates, leaning on their horns pointlessly.

Isabel takes her compact out of her handbag. She holds up the mirror, surveys the reflection out the back windshield. The white Toyota, which was a few cars back when they were down in the Village, became entangled in traffic in north Chelsea, and is now nearly a block back and a few lanes over.

“Driver, this is good,” Isabel says, placing another ten-dollar bill in the pass-through. She pushes out the door, and turns to check on Jeffrey, and the Toyota. She thinks she can see the passenger watching her, buzz-cut and sunglassed, across the stalled rows of glinting steel, the air shimmering with exhaust.

They leave the loud bright sunny avenue onto a shady side street, the sidewalk crowded with late-lunchtime jovial groups spilling out of the restaurants in another of the city’s micro-neighborhoods, Koreatown.

Isabel looks back over her shoulder, and sees the Toyota’s passenger wending his way through the bumper-to-bumper of Sixth Avenue, pursuing.

“Come on,” she urges Jeffrey, “let’s go.” She picks up her pace, sidesteps a group of tourists gawking up. They hustle down the street, a half-block ahead of their lone pursuer. The car will still be stuck in traffic.

At Fifth Avenue she grabs Jeffrey’s wrist, yanks him around the corner, another sun-splashed wide avenue with broad sidewalks, with buses and
taxis, trucks and motorcycles, whiffs of diesel mingling with the aromas of honey-roasted peanuts and hot dogs soaking in their salty steel baths under striped umbrellas. Fifth Avenue is thick with crowds of visitors from all over the globe, cameras and guidebooks, pamphlets and maps, milling and staring up and snapping photos of the most famous building in America.

“Here,” she says, ushering Jeffrey through the doors and into the lobby and to the counter. She hands over her credit card and collects the tickets.

Isabel had been here before, not terribly long ago, with Tommy. The little boy used to regularly ask, “Mommy, when can we go to the top of the world?” She didn’t know exactly what he meant, what he was asking to be allowed to do. But she figured this experience was as close as possible to that elusive ideal.

On that prior visit, she learned that if there was one worthwhile extra expense in this already extravagant city, it was paying a premium for the express ticket that grants cutting-the-line privileges; there are a lot of lines here, and they’re all long. So now she and Jeffrey enter the special queue for the cutting-the-liners.

Isabel nods at the X-ray machine and the metal-detector, glances around at the large police presence in the Art Deco lobby. “We’re getting ourselves some privacy, and some safety. I’m sure that the guy following us is armed.”

“There’s a guy following us?”

“And unless he’s willing to ditch his weapon, he’s not going to be able to keep up with us. Plus I’m sure he didn’t preorder tickets.”

Jeffrey is spinning his head around, looking for the pursuer.

“Plus we’re about to find out if he’s an actual law-enforcement officer, in which case he’ll flash his badge.”

That man is standing at the lobby’s front doors, trying to figure out how to proceed. He puts a cell phone to his ear, starts talking. Isabel feels like she should wink at him, or nod. But this is not a game, not at all. So she turns away, before she’s tempted to make eye contact.

Then she turns back, an instant flash of recognition, something about the way the guy is standing, and she realizes: this is the delivery messenger, the person who brought the manuscript to her office. Is he now pursuing her?

She joins Jeffrey for the feet-shuffling march to the elevator, tries to breathe normally during the long ascent, then steps out into a highly un-scenic floor and then up again and out into the bright sunshine, again, this time on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building.

T
hey stand there perched at the top of the world, a quarter-mile into the sky, with the city spread beneath, the rivers and harbor and ocean, the buildings and highways and bridges, the endless sprawls of Queens and Jersey.

Isabel explains her plan cursorily, in this panicked and rushed state, scrawling on a notepad in the middle of all these people, all this sunshine and wind. She can see that Jeffrey doesn’t completely understand her, and doesn’t know if he should—if he can—commit to this course of action.

You have a better idea?
she writes. She shoves the pad at him.

He turns his eyes away from the expansive view, and glances down. He shakes his head. The wind whips into the notepad, fluttering the pages.

Isabel holds up her hand, bends her fingers, beckoning something. Jeffrey nods. He reaches into his pocket, removes his pen, places it on the ledge.

“Ready?” she asks.

He doesn’t look okay, nor ready. But he says, “Sure. Let’s go.”

They turn away from his antique Sheaffer, bound to be discovered within seconds by some stranger, pocketed, toted along to somewhere else. They make their way quickly through the thick shifting crowds and down the elevator and out into the street. Isabel doesn’t see the white Toyota, but she doesn’t spend a lot of time looking. It doesn’t really matter.

They hustle around one corner and then another, picking their way
through the midafternoon crowds of this low-rent version of Midtown, stale air being pushed through the revolving doors from the low-ceilinged claustrophobic lobbies of nondescript buildings occupied by vocational schools and shady accountants and cut-rate matrimonial attorneys, with barbers providing ten-dollar haircuts and delis selling five-dollar lunches.

They descend into the damp chill of the subway tunnels, the burst of wind that precedes the screaming arrival of the uptown local, then after a few stops exit directly into the basement of Bloomingdale’s. They fight through the aggressive and nauseating gauntlet of Fragrance, and into the nakedly crass ogling at Jewelry. Isabel looks around at the women leaning on the counters, engrossed in their assessments of gold and silver, watches and necklaces.

An overweight woman is examining a trio of bracelets sitting on a black velvet pad. A large forest-green bag dangles from the woman’s chunky shoulder, the bag’s maw wide open. Isabel pauses at the counter. She reaches into her handbag and removes her mobile phone, a familiar plastic presence in her palm.

“They’re beautiful,” Isabel says to the woman, who smiles at her, nonplussed, then turns away. Isabel slides her phone gently into the woman’s green bag, and slinks away.

They arrive at the relative irrelevance of Men’s Accessories, and exit through revolving doors back into daylight. Across a street and around a corner and through the cavernous lobby of a recently constructed tower, glass and steel and marble and soaring negative space, an architecture that reeks of the relentless optimism of 2005, the cockiness that there would never be anything other than reliably and rapidly escalating real-estate values, ever again.

Out the far side and around a corner and suddenly out of Midtown, on a completely residential block, nineteenth-century brownstone town-houses and linden trees and small fluffy dogs at the ends of expensive leather leashes.

Isabel climbs a wide staircase to an etched-glass doorway flanked by ornate topiary. She rings the doorbell, and barely a second passes before the door is opened by an explosively smiling young man, all white teeth and an aggressive flip of blond, holding an iPad.

“Isabel Reed?!” he exclaims, and leans in for a cheek kiss, sort of, with skin not quite grazing, lips barely pursing, and no part of him actually touching any part of Isabel. “She’s expecting you?!” Glancing down at his touch screen, panicked.