Vortex (29 page)

“Whatever it is you’re hiding from us, I promise it won’t make a difference to Vox.”

“What I’m saying, Oscar, is that I’m not an innocent man.”

“None of us is innocent.”

“I’m a murderer,” I said.

All true.

*   *   *

The burning man in his aura of blue fire:

I killed him because I was angry, because I was humiliated, or maybe just because a storm had blown through Houston on the heels of a record heat wave. Maybe there’s no point asking why.

In the dark, as oily rain sheeted off rooftops and plunged down gutters, I walked along an empty back street carrying a jug of methyl hydrate in a plastic bag. In my right pocket I had a box of matches, also wrapped in plastic, and, for insurance, a butane lighter the store clerk had told me was waterproof.

I was eighteen years old. I had taken public transit from the suburb where I lived with my parents, changing buses three times. There had been nobody on the last bus but a few sullen night-shift workers, and I hoped I looked like one more sodden and unlucky minimum-wager. The bus wound through an industrial park as grim as a prison compound. I got off and stood a moment under a bus stop sign, alone. The bus lumbered around a corner, belching diesel fumes; then the street was empty. The warehouse where my father ran his criminal enterprise was a couple of blocks away.

I didn’t know much about the business except that it had been the subject of arguments between my mother and my father, as far back as I could remember. I had spent some of my childhood in Istanbul, where we lived for six years—that was why my friends called me Turk. In Istanbul, as in Houston, we had lived in a comfortable part of town while my father worked in much less desirable neighborhoods. My mother was a Louisiana Baptist by heritage and she had never gotten accustomed to the mosques, the burqas—even though Istanbul was a cosmopolitan city and we lived in a Westernized district. For a while I thought that was why they argued so often. But the arguments continued after we moved back to the States. And although they tried to keep it from me, I eventually understood that it wasn’t the long hours or the foreign interludes of my father’s work that upset my mother, it was the nature of the work itself.

Her shame and discomfort were expressed in small ways. She wouldn’t answer the phone unless the call came from a known number. We seldom visited relatives on either side of the family, nor were we visited by them. As the years passed, my mother grew quiet, sullen, withdrawn. Once I hit adolescence I began to spend more time out of the house—as much as possible. Better the street than these drawn curtains and whispered conversations.

Maybe that makes it sound worse than it was. We were at least superficially comfortable. We had money; I went to a decent school. Furtive though my father’s business might be, he was successful at it. I overheard argumentative phone calls in which he inevitably prevailed. Sometimes men in neatly pressed suits came to see him, and they spoke to him softly and deferentially. I had occasionally wondered whether my father might be a criminal, but the idea seemed ludicrous on the face of it. I guessed he might be operating on the far side of some trivial law, maybe dodging taxes or import duties, but I had learned from television and the Internet that such behavior could be lovable and even, looked at in the right light, heroic. The Spin years had taught us that when the rules break down it’s root hog or die; and in those days you did what you had to do to keep a family together and food on the table.

I loved my father. I told myself so, and I believed it. It was only later that I collided with his disdain for conventional ethics, his pathological need to be obeyed.

The sluicing rain was useful cover. My father’s business was housed in a building older than the Spin, a twentieth-century building with brick walls and small high windows of green leaded glass. It fronted on this dreary street, but the real work was conducted from the rear, where the loading bays were. My father had taken me here twice before, against my mother’s objections, to give me a sanitized tour of the warehouse—he may have hoped to bring me into the business at some point in the future. And I had scouted the area myself just two days ago, working out a plan. I cut down a narrow passage between two adjoining buildings to the laneway at the back. Long ago, a railway spur had serviced these warehouses. The spur line had been paved over but the asphalt had scabbed away in places to reveal the old steel rails, glittering in the smoky orange light of the street lamps. The rain was coming down pretty hard but I could hear the slosh of flammable liquid in the jug I was carrying.

Last year I had fallen in love with a girl named Latisha Philips—fallen in love the way a seventeen-year-old falls in love, stupidly, wholeheartedly. Latisha was an inch taller than I was and so sweetly good-looking that I woke up most mornings afraid she’d figure out she could do better than Turk Findley. She was smart, too. If scholarship programs hadn’t been cut to the bone during the post-Spin austerity drives, she might have qualified for an Ivy League college. She wanted to be a marine biologist. She wanted to save the oceans from acidification. She attended local protests against the sulfur-aerosol launches.

Her family was neither rich nor poor. They lived in a neighborhood adjoining the gated community where my father owned a house. I believe they rented. I didn’t mention Latisha to my parents because I knew my father would disapprove of her. There had been hardscrabble Findleys in Texas and Louisiana since before those states joined the Union, and part of my father’s legacy was a racism so offensive he had long since learned to conceal it in polite company. Istanbul had been a particular strain for him, but he found plenty to complain about in Houston. When he was at home he dropped his veneer of tolerance like a pair of tight shoes. The world was being mongrelized, he said, and he knew exactly who was to blame. I didn’t know whether my mother shared these views. If so, she never spoke about them; like me, she had learned to ignore my father’s rants even as she pretended to listen to them.

His racism was almost antiquarian, poisonous but—so I thought—toothless. Nevertheless I wasn’t eager to introduce him to Latisha, who happened to be black. I had already met her family. Her father was a pharmacist; her mother had moved to Houston from the Dominican Republic twenty years ago and currently worked at Walmart. They had always treated me with a cautious but sincere cordiality.

I followed the old railbed until I was opposite the loading bays at my father’s warehouse. I found a dark space between two concrete abutments and hunkered down where I couldn’t be seen, not that there was much chance of anyone coming by. The warehouse was closed, and although my father occasionally stayed late to take care of unscheduled business, this wasn’t one of those nights: he had come home for dinner and settled into the sofa with a drink in his hand and a twenty-four-hour news channel to glower at. The rain fell continuously and I was drenched and shivering, although it had been a stiflingly hot day—the rain fell from some colder, higher place than these cloistered back alleys. I watched the warehouse attentively for half an hour. From my earlier scouting trips I had concluded that there would be no one here after midnight but the night watchman, a skinny drifter my father had hired from the bus depot downtown. By watching the windows I had even established his regular routine: an hourly fifteen-minute walk-through of the upper and lower floors, the rest of his time spent in a small room with a single frosted and wire-reinforced window. I guessed he had a video monitor in there, by the way the light flickered.

I had known my father would be a problem, but I was serious about Latisha. We had even talked about marriage. Or “elopement.” Some arrangement that would leave my father out of the loop until it was too late for him to interfere. No fixed date because Latisha, at least, deserved a shot at whatever higher education she could afford to get. But our plans were real. Or at least I had thought so.

Real enough that I had confided in my mother over the kitchen table. She had listened carefully and wordlessly. Then she sat back in her chair and said, “I don’t know what’s good and what’s bad anymore, if I ever did. But if you do this, it’s probably best you get out of the house.” She added, plaintively, “I would like to meet Latisha one day. When that becomes possible. Until then I won’t say anything to your father.”

I’m sure she meant not to. But over the summer something must have aroused his suspicion, I didn’t know what: an undeleted text message, a phone conversation overheard. He hadn’t questioned me but he had questioned my mother, and she caved in and told him what she knew.

My father believed in direct action. I didn’t know he had done anything at all until my calls and texts to Latisha started bouncing. I went to her house but her parents wouldn’t let me talk to her; they said she had decided to break off the relationship. Maybe so, but I refused to believe it until I had spoken to her herself. I kept an eye on the house but there was little sign of Latisha apart from a couple of trips out in the company of her mother.

I got a note to her through a girl she knew, enclosing a more secure IP address—I had changed it without telling my parents. That night I waited for a return message, but when it came it was abrupt and unapologetic.

Sorry Turk yr father talked to my father made an offer: my college tuition paid provided we break up, shitty deal but now my folks insist on it, only chance for a good school & so forth, not too proud to milk a bigot for his money etc. I would tell them go to hell but really what kind of life could we have broke and young
+
even tho I love you how long til we start to hate each other for what love cost us? Don’t blame anyone but me I know I have a choice & Im probably making the wrong one but its my life & I have to think of the future. Crying now, pls don’t write anymore.

It was from this low brick building that my father had extracted the cash that paid for our house, our backyard pool, the clothes on my back, and the sedition and betrayal of my best hopes. Out of this warehouse and whatever business he conducted here had come my mother’s chronic unhappiness and my own wholesale humiliation. That was why it had occurred to me with the force of revelation that the building ought to be burned down. For the purpose of revenge, yes, but also as a purification by fire. I had read that on the battlefield wounds were sometimes cauterized to stop uncontrollable bleeding. And I was bleeding, and this building was my wound.

Rainwater gurgled down a storm drain by my feet, stranding scraps of paper, cigarette butts, a discarded condom as pale and flaccid as a jellyfish. The night watchman worked his rounds. I could see the sway of his flashlight on the high windows as he moved from room to room. When he was (as I calculated) at the far end of the building I crossed to the loading bays and mounted a few steps to the steel door, painted military green, that was the building’s back entrance. Mounted beside the door was a two-step lock: you used a physical key to uncover a numerical touchpad. I had taken the key from the top drawer of the desk in my father’s home office, and I remembered the entry code from the last time he had brought me here (because it had struck me as ludicrously obvious: the year of his birth).

Whatever part of Latisha’s tuition my father had arranged to pay, he probably considered it a bargain. My father was never ostentatious about his wealth but I had lived in his house long enough to overhear the occasional veiled reference to offshore holdings and IRS audits aborted by expensive lawyers. He could have sent me to Yale twice over if I had shown any aptitude for schoolwork. None of this money had been applied to the premises of the warehouse, however. The corridor inside had been overpainted with cheap yellow enamel, the floor was ocher linoleum, the ceiling lights were flyspecked fluorescent tubes. A door to the right opened into the storage and forwarding area, stairs to the left led to second-floor offices.

My plan was to douse the hallway, start the fire, pull the alarm by the exit (to give the watchman some warning), and run. Whether the fire would be quickly controlled or whether it would spread, whether the damage would be significant or just another financial nuisance for my father, whether I would be caught and punished for it or whether I would buy a ticket out of town and change my name—I didn’t know, it didn’t matter. My rage mattered, my humiliation mattered. So I took the jug of methyl hydrate out of the plastic bag I’d wrapped it in. I put it on the floor. I unscrewed the cap and tipped it over.

The floor had sagged over the years. The liquid puddled and spread toward the interior of the building. The reek of it was eye-wateringly sharp. It filled the crevices in the linoleum and crept steadily down the hallway, pooling here and there. There seemed to be much more of it than a two-gallon jug could possibly have contained.

I took the matchbook out of my pocket and peeled off the wrapping that had protected it from the rain. The matchbook was dry but my hand was wet and I ruined two matches before I managed to strike one into a steady flame. I wondered if the fumes in the corridor might themselves be flammable, whether I was about to be immolated by my own act of revenge. I decided I didn’t care.

I was in the act of tossing the match when the door to the right opened and the night watchman stepped through.

Maybe there was a surveillance camera in the hallway, though I hadn’t seen one, or maybe I had tripped a warning light in the watchman’s cubby just by coming through the door. Or maybe he had left his post for the purpose of taking a piss. All I knew was that he was suddenly standing in the hallway a couple of yards away, staring at me. He was a skinny guy in jeans and a sweat-stained open-collar shirt. He had a big angular head and his hair was shaved close. He couldn’t have been much older than I was. His eyes bugged out in surprise. A small river of flammable liquid forked around his old brown shoes.