Caller unknown, p.10
Caller Unknown, page 10
Moss filled a glass with water from the sink faucet and handed it to Ed. “Here, drink this,” he said.
Ed took a sip and the cool liquid steadied his world a little as it slipped down.
Moss picked up one of the many albums littering the floor. Ed saw it was Rust Never Sleeps. Moss slid it onto his turntable and carelessly dropped the arm on the record a couple of bars into the intro.
Then he got busy rolling a joint. “What happened back there?” he asked. He suddenly sounded sober and Ed found this more disturbing than the extroversion that had gone before.
Today was the day the past was meant to be over. But here it was again: it had been David on the steps of Ell, he was sure. But even as he thought this he began to doubt himself. Many times in the last nine years he had thought he had seen something, only to discover that his overheated mind had constructed a false connection. A remembered face that was not a remembered face; a place he had been before but could not have been before. Déjà vu. Gant and Cowdray had called it the same: PTSD. They avoided adding the word “psychosis,” but Ed had done a bit of side research and discovered that hallucinations and delusions were common when both were present.
“I think I saw someone I knew. A long time ago,” he answered.
Moss fired up the joint. “I’m guessing this person was bad news?”
“You could say that.”
“You think they could be a student here?”
“Maybe. We’re the same age.” Ed didn’t say the exact same age.
Moss passed over the spliff. “Like I said, Acapulco Gold. A vacation in smoke.”
Ed hesitated. He wasn’t sure if getting wasted was the best idea given his state of mind. He took a couple of exploratory puffs, coughed, then felt an almost contradictory sharpening of his senses and a mental drifting away. “Pretty good shit,” he said.
Moss gave him one of those smiles. “Party time,” he said.
An hour or so drifted. Another joint was passed. The sun angled across the room. Time appeared stationary. Moss rose once and flipped the album, then sat again.
The album ended where it had begun. Déjà vu. But now it was not the gentle acoustic “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” of the first track but the thrashing, doom-treading three-chord rocker “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” Neil Young admonished: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” The words went to Ed’s very soul. The track seemed to go on forever and yet be over almost before it had begun. The album ended with the sound of slamming doors and screaming crowds.
Moss stood and took a denim jacket from the back of the door. Ed came back to himself, looked at his watch. It was a quarter to three. Where had the time gone?
“Got to split, man,” Moss said. “You going to be OK?” The dope didn’t seem to have made much impact on him. Ed, on the other hand, still felt buzzing, distant from himself.
“Sure. Got to unpack, you know?” he replied, standing up gingerly.
Moss gently fist-bumped his shoulder. “Attaboy. Say, maybe Madeline has a friend. We could go on a double date later?”
“That would be nice,” Ed answered, but thinking he would like nothing less. It seemed very important to get back to his room and stay there until the next day.
They parted at Ed’s door.
“See you later, then,” Moss said and punched the call button on the elevator.
For years afterwards Moss was sometimes asked about the disappearance of his fellow political science student, Edward Burns Constance. A young man he had only known for a few brief hours and who, after that Orientation Day, vanished into thin air, much to the consternation of the university authorities, the police, and the missing persons unit of the FBI.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He didn’t unpack. Just as before Moss’s arrival that morning, he sat on the unmade bed and stared off through the window at Back Bay in the distance.
He didn’t look at his watch again. An unspecified amount of time elapsed.
Then there came another knock on the door. Maybe Moss had returned. Maybe he had, indeed, brought Madeline and a friend and they were waiting outside. He got up stiffly, mentally trying out excuses to turn down a night out. He pulled open the door.
It was not Moss.
It was David.
He had not seen him before today for nine years—had not remembered him as anything more than a name. Yet he knew him as he had known him in that first glimpse at the Ell. Knew he was not a delusion. Knew what this young man had once been. Knew what he had been to him.
The boy had grown into a six-foot-plus man, towering a good three or four inches over Ed. He looked a lot older than his supposed eighteen years. As earlier, he was dressed in black jeans and a denim jacket, Ray-Bans now in the pocket of his check shirt. His upper body had filled out. Some stubble covered his sculpted cheekbones, marred by acne pockmarks. But the cold, furious eyes and nasty grin were the same.
David gave Ed a short, mock-playful jab. However innocent the gesture, it was not like Moss’s playful punch earlier. He hit him hard in the shoulder, leading with a big signet ring on his middle finger.
“Do you remember me, Ed?” he asked.
Ed found he couldn’t answer. The words stuck in his throat. He guessed his face registered shock. His hand was nursing his bruised arm. David took advantage of his momentary distraction and pushed Ed back into the room with one hand. Ed’s feet skidded from under him; though he was strong, he seemed to have nothing on David.
“I guess you do remember.” David smiled. His incisors were showing. He slammed the door to with his heel. He bunched a fist through Ed’s collar. His fingers on Ed’s neck felt like pincers.
He twisted the collar into a choke hold and got right in Ed’s face. Ed could smell his aftershave: Old Spice.
“Guess you didn’t think you’d see me again, eh? Well, guess again, kid. You can’t lose the past.”
Ed left off rubbing his shoulder, grabbed David’s arms and tried to break his grip, but, though he had held his own in every playground in every school he’d attended these last nine years, it was like trying to detach steel vises. David’s smile widened. There was a drip of saliva hanging from one of his incisors, like Dracula in the movies.
“I’m here to collect your debt.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ed gasped. The pressure on his throat was unbearable. “Just let me go, will you?” His voice sounded high and strained.
It was coming back: the bullying boy, the helpless feeling he had when confronted by him back at the Lot…
“No can do,” David answered. “You see, I have a job for you and refusal isn’t an option. You and I have to move on. We got some exciting times ahead. Well, exciting for me. Less so for you.”
“I’ll call security,” Ed managed.
David laughed. “Still lippy, eh? Well, there’s a cure. ‘See thou hurt not the oil and wine.’”
It was not the lack of oxygen from the choke hold that now edged Ed’s vision with black. It was the eight words.
Only eight words.
Just like before when he’d seen him on the steps of the Ell, it was as if a lens aperture was closing in his mind. Where all had been bright, now the peripheries of his vision hurried into a pinprick. The darkness and silence were coming.
“You remember that at least,” he heard David say from far away. The pinprick vanished. All was black.
He was no longer in the dorm room. It was night. He stood at the head of some stairs leading down to what looked like a basement. The sound of chanting children came up to him. “A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and wine.”
Then, just as he was about to go down forever to what awaited him, he was suddenly back from the blackness, rising to the surface, to the light…
He found David shaking his bruised shoulder. His head wobbled back and forth like a broken puppet’s.
“Wake up!” It was David in a whisper. “There’s someone at the door.”
The room came back into focus. Ed found he was sitting on the edge of the bed. David loomed over him. He had let go of his collar.
“Tell whoever it is to go away,” David ordered.
Like a zombie, Ed got to his feet and zigzagged to the door.
Garval was outside with his clipboard. He looked flushed; his brows were knitted. “OK, not a good start, Constance,” he said, looking behind him at David. “First thing I said was all visitors to register, the next thing I see this guy walking past to the elevators. Spent the last ten minutes looking for him and there must be a dozen students waiting for their keys downstairs.”
Ed just stared at him blankly, his brain hardly computing the words.
“Something the matter with you, kid?” Garval asked. He leaned in closer, waved his free hand in front of Ed’s face. “You still on something? I told you about drugs. This guy your connection?”
When Ed didn’t respond, he turned to David. “Let’s see your ID.”
“You gonna make me?” David asked.
“Those are the rules around here. The ID or I call campus security,” Garval answered.
David grunted, reached for his billfold and showed Garval his driver’s license, over Ed’s shoulder. “We’re just friends, you know. No drugs in here.”
Garval ignored him. “David Krige, huh?” he said. “Well, Mr. Krige, if I see you around here again, you can be sure security will be here within minutes and then you’ll have a few questions to answer. Maybe they’ll call the cops, capisce?”
David stuffed the ID into his back pocket and glared at Garval. “OK, I get it. I’m going.” He turned to Ed and gave him a look. Even in his spaced-out state, Ed could see the meaning: wait here, I’ll be back. Then David brushed past him and was gone, leaving him with Garval.
“OK, Constance. I’m going to report this to the resident head,” Garval said. “If I was you, I’d get myself straightened out before he summons you.” He spun on his heels and followed David down the hall.
Ed slammed the door, stumbled into the bathroom and was violently sick in the toilet.
He cleaned himself up. His head was still spinning in two directions at once and he was cold all over. Half of him wanted to get out of the room immediately. Yet his deepest wish seemed to be to sit down on the bed again and wait for David to return.
He stared at himself in the mirror. The face of a madman stared back. But behind that mask he recognized someone—himself. With this self-recognition came a slow drift of returning awareness. What had just happened? What had David wanted from him? One conversation, one fragment from the Bible and he was like this? Nine years and five hundred hours of therapy and it took just eight words?
He thought of the police. But what had he got to report? David had simply visited; they’d talked. It was a breach of the dorm rules—hell, it was a breach of the adoption agreement, which forbade the kids from contacting each other. So what? The cops would laugh it off. Just a chance meeting. Even thinking of the police made him feel sick again.
He splashed more water on his face and shook his head. All he wanted to do was to return to the bed. But if he sat on it again, he was lost, he was sure. Some invisible hand would keep him there until David came back.
He had to fight that impulse at all costs. He had to move fast. No waiting, no luggage.
He opened the dorm door. The corridor was empty. He took his jacket from the hook, stumbled to the elevator and went down. There were a few kids waiting at the front desk. Garval was occupied with them and didn’t notice him. No sign of David. He went outside.
The golden early fall sun on the leafy square was tarnished, a lustrous decay. He staggered out on to Huntington Street. The 39 bus was just pulling in and he boarded it, blindly handed over a dollar, was called back for his change and, unseeing, went down the aisle and collapsed on the back bench. As the bus headed west to Brookline, a new memory came. He was at the back of a yellow school bus, the evening light slanting through the windows, Shannon asleep on his shoulder… Shannon.
He remembered her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He had no recollection of the bus ride, or getting down at his stop, or the key in the lock, but suddenly he was back in the hall at Winthrop Road. He closed the door behind him. Stu would be at his office. It seemed a year ago since he’d left, but it had only been a few hours. The house gently creaked and settled in the September heat, enduring another lonely day in the sun. He went toward the stairs.
Then a voice came from the study. Ed froze.
“Who’s there?” It was Stu.
“It’s me—Ed.” His voice sounded distant to his own ears, as if another person was talking in a far-off room.
Stu shuffled out into the hall in his carpet slippers. The gray stubble covering his chin matched the shabby cardigan, part of what he called his “den wear.” His eyes were watering behind his glasses, whether from tears or the unaccustomed light of the sun shining through the transom, Ed couldn’t tell. He had his pipe in one hand and a Ronson lighter in the other.
“Ed? Did you forget something?” he asked.
Ed shook his head.
“So what’re you doing here?”
“I could ask the same.”
“Just late getting off is all,” Stu answered. Given his undress and the fact that it was by now late afternoon, this seemed unlikely.
“Something came up at Northeastern,” Ed said.
Stu scrunched his eyes, reminding Ed of Mole in The Wind in the Willows. “Came up?”
“One of the kids was there,” Ed mumbled.
“You mean your kids?”
“Sure, Stu, one of my kids. David.”
“Oh—you remembered him?”
“Yeah, I remembered him alright,” Ed answered.
Stu had inserted the stem of the pipe in his mouth and was trying to fire the Ronson up, but his hands were trembling and the lighter just sparked and didn’t flame. He gave up and stuffed the pipe and the lighter into his cardigan pockets. He seemed as jumpy as a sack of frogs. He didn’t meet Ed’s eyes.
“What did he want?” he asked.
“I dunno,” Ed answered. Now he was talking, another wave of dizziness threatened him. He braced himself against the doorframe of the study.
“Let’s go into the study,” Stu said, taking his arm. Ed wanted to refuse: he needed to get to his room and then get out of here. But he was weak as a kitten, and Stu led him unresisting into his lair.
As ever, the curtains were drawn, the air was stale and the lampshade cast its weird patterns over the desk and cabinets. A bottle of Smirnoff, half full, sat at the center of Stu’s desk. An empty shot glass stood next to it.
Stu caught Ed looking at the bottle. “You guessed, didn’t you?”
“Yeah” was all Ed could manage.
“Put the empties in the neighbor’s trash. Not proud of that.” He let go of Ed’s arm, went behind the desk, and sat down abruptly on the swivel chair. He poured himself a stiff shot and chugged it back. “Maybe you could use some. There’s a glass on the sideboard,” he said.
Ed thought: spoken like a true drunk. Couldn’t tolerate a sober person across the table. But Stu was right in a way: he needed something to settle his nerves. He went and picked up a glass, then sat in the chair facing Stu and poured himself two inches. He tipped half of it back, grimacing at the acrid taste and fire. The spinning world slowed a bit.
“So, what happened with David?” Stu asked.
Where to start? Ed wasn’t going to tell Stu about the blackout.
“He talked about calling in a debt,” he said.
“A debt?” Stu had been reaching for the bottle again, but now went very still.
“Yeah, a debt,” Ed said.
Stu lowered his head. He picked up the bottle, but this time his hand trembled so much some of the vodka spilled on the desktop. “The debt,” he sighed quietly. He stared past Ed at the window.
“You know something I don’t?” Ed asked.
Stu swallowed. “I guess it’s time I told you something.”
Ed already felt cold fingers on his spine. “Like what?” he asked.
Stu still couldn’t look at Ed. “About your adoption.” His eyes had teared again and he removed his glasses and wiped at them with his cardigan sleeve. He swallowed and put the glasses back on. “It started innocently enough, I guess.”
“What started?” Ed asked.
Stu didn’t answer immediately but stared past him at a spot a few yards behind. “You know Bettie wanted a kid, wanted one bad,” he said. “But it wasn’t our idea to adopt you. We wanted a baby, for Chrissakes. You were already nine.”
Ed felt himself sinking again. There had not been much love in Winthrop Road. Just a correctness, a ticking of the boxes. Christmas and birthdays delivered, but without joy. The discussions of grades. The lip service of encouragement. The lectures when the behavior was out of line. The “here we are thens” at each new school gate, each time with increasingly fixed smiles from Stu and Bettie.
“So if it wasn’t your idea, whose was it?” he asked.
Stu picked up the Smirnoff bottle and stared at the label in the dim light before hitting himself with another shot. He grimaced. “Woodson Bates, the pastor at the church. Paid us a visit in ’70. Talked about your case. Well, everyone on the eastern seaboard was talking about it back then. Bates said that he knew some influential people who would be awful grateful if good Christian homes could be found for the kids… That these people would be generous in settling some money on whoever took them. Didn’t of course specify who these people were. Well, Bettie and I just shrugged him off, said if we were to adopt we’d set our heart on a baby, maybe one from overseas.
“But it didn’t end there. Turned out he knew my company was struggling and I had debts here, there and everywhere and there was a loan guaranteed on this house, and it was a big loan, believe me. That same evening when I was sitting here the phone rang and it was Bates again, and now Bettie was out back in the kitchen and wasn’t around to listen, he laid out all that he knew about my problems, and in some detail—more like a banker than a pastor, truth be told. And he told me if I didn’t want to be foreclosed I better reconsider his offer. There wasn’t much sweet and reasonable in his tone, I can tell you. He told me, should I reconsider, not only would the debts go away but there would be enough extra to refloat my company.
