The archivist, p.69
The Archivist, page 69
Emily tensed when the spring-loaded door to the upper-level parking opened and banged shut with a vibration felt in the walls. Not uncommon. A scuffling of footsteps on the walkway stopped after a few seconds. Emily sat up straight. The rap of knuckles sounding at the plate glass window door seized her with terror. The window door was the only way in and the only way out! Unless she crawled out the kitchen window, but that was a fifteen-foot drop to the patio below. Emily tuned her ears to the noise, her heart racing, her breathing irregular, but remained motionless in fear. She heard something slap down on the doormat. Footsteps retreated down the concrete-treaded stairs in the direction of the complex’s swimming pool.
Emily rose in slow-motion off the bed and tiptoed into the living room. She craned her head into the living room around the dividing wall. The cream-colored paper shades were drawn shut. Emily stepped to the picture window. She slowly drew back the shade at the edge enough to gain a view of the courtyard. A man silhouetted by the turquoise of the pool fled down the short flight of steps that exited the complex. Headlights rose up on the stucco walls of the apartment complex below Emily’s, swept them like a lighthouse beacon, then briefly colored them in red with the taillights of an unseen car, turning away down the alley, tires squealing.
Emily let go of the blinds and stood in solitude breathing in short bursts like a scared animal. She crept over to the sliding glass door. Slowly, she parted the accordion blinds. The outdoor floodlights illuminated an object on the doorstep. Face pressed to the sliding glass door, Emily’s eyes roamed the outside. She cocked her sensitive ears. Barely heard the wind chimes from across the way. The balcony verandas were quiet. She dislodged the broom pole and unlocked the door. Quickly, she squatted down and picked up the white manila folder that had been dropped on the square of carpet that served as a doormat. She relocked the door, replaced the security pole, closed the blind, and shuttered herself inside, her heart beating wildly.
On the outside of the white manila folder was a message in black block letters: stop what you’re doing! Anxiety clutched Emily in the gut. She bent open the bronze clasp and tipped the envelope upside down. A half dozen eight-by-ten color printouts slid into her hands. Because of the graininess, the critical depth of field, Emily recognized they had been taken with a powerful telephoto lens—had to be, because they were photos of her and Raymond in his Range Rover at the Gliderport . . . kissing! Her hand darted to her throat and tried to stop it from leaping. The last item was not a photo, but a sheet of paper. On it, in the same block lettering: i want the notebooks.
Emily imploded with fear. She huddled on the sisal rug in a fetal posture, debating her next move. Every sound—a passing car, the palm frond clattering against the eave, even the waves—engendered a new shudder of fear.
Emily texted Joel: “Can I come over? Important.”
A few, excruciatingly long minutes passed, and Joel texted back: “Come on by. I’ll be up.”
In a flurry of anxious energy, Emily packed her carry-on backpack. She grabbed all the provisions she thought she would need and stuffed it full. With her carry-on over her back, a meowing, disconcerted Onyx under her arm, she fled her apartment.
The freeway unfurled in front of her, that wide undulating river of concrete emptiness with the occasional passing car, its occupants entombed in anonymity. As she drove south past the Genesee Avenue turnoff, she could make out Memorial Library to the west, the megastructure lit up like an enormous cracked diamond mounted on the dark cement shoulders of its massive concrete pronged pedestal. With Emily racing by it, seemingly holding its fate in her small hands, Onyx sitting on his haunches on the passenger seat, looking confused.
Emily bent off at the Garnett Avenue turnoff and navigated surface streets through Pacific Beach to Joel’s apartment. Except for a handful of bars and gas stations, everything was closed. Humans had seemingly ceased to exist. Southern California cities desolated themselves out after a certain hour and the streets burned weirdly malevolent, bounded with their Ed Ruscha–like paintings of overlit stores and franchise eateries.
An emotional wreck, Emily collapsed on the couch in Joel’s apartment, her hands covering her face. When she looked up Joel had Onyx cradled in his arms, and she was glad to see he apparently had no aversion to cats.
“You remember Onyx?” she said.
“Of course. Love the little guy.” He stroked his fur. “Can I get you a beer?”
“Sure,” replied an overwrought Emily.
Joel gently set Onyx down and disappeared into the kitchen. Onyx looked around, disoriented, recognized Emily’s solicitous voice, and leaped up onto the couch next to her.
Joel brought a bottle of beer in, reached it across his cluttered coffee table to her, then ebbed back into an Adirondack-style chair with a groaning canvas back.
“Thanks,” said Emily. She took a sip and then studied the bottle label absently while she sorted through the events of the past couple of days in an effort to summarize them for Joel without compromising him—without further alarming him. She bent her head back and took another swig. The beer foamed in her mouth. She had an image of her head exploding.
“What’s up?” Joel said, fully aware of the irony of his casual tone.
“They came again,” Emily said.
“Broke into your apartment again!”
“No.” Emily shook her head. “Left something on the doorstep.”
“What?” Joel asked.
“I can’t show you.” She raised her head to Joel. In a manic, machine-gun burst of words, she spurted out, “They might come here. They’re following me. I’m going to get a hotel.”
“You’re wound up, Emily. Breathe.”
“You would be too.”
“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what it is,” he said sharply, more in an effort to bring her to her senses than a rebuke.
“I don’t want to compromise you any more than you already are.”
Joel straightened to his feet. “I have to admit, Emily, a part of me thinks the reason you’re like this is because . . .”—he turned to face her—“you’re losing touch with reality here.”
Emily looked up at him, fearing recrimination.
“The whiteboard? The pursuit of everything you found in his archive. Everything. Introverts go mad, Emily. Archivists are introverts.”
“You think I’m insane?” she accused, trying to keep her voice lowered. “That I’m making this all up? That I’m delusional?”
“No, I’m not saying that. You know I was with you on this all the way.” Joel leaned forward. “Nadia’s personal file. The permission to get you into the dark archives. I didn’t believe it was a drowning or suicide either a year ago when it went down. It’s just . . . this whole thing has spiraled out of control. There are bad actors following you now, Emily.”
“I know,” said Emily, relieved by the solicitous tone of Joel’s voice. “Tell me about it.”
“There are moments when I think you’ve somehow merged with Nadia, you’ve become her doppelgänger or something in some movie or . . .”
Emily met his words with narrowed eyes of shock and near disbelief. To her, the narrative was clear. To him, it looked like she was marching off the deep end. In trying to rein her back in, she felt like he was asking her to erect a wall around the truth, even if the truth was now under siege behind a crumbling rampart.
Emily set the half-drunk bottle of beer on the lacquered driftwood coffee table with a plunk and rose to her feet. She slipped her arms through the harness of her carry-on backpack and turned to Joel. “Can you take care of Onyx?”
“Emily? Where’re you going?”
“I’m going to get a hotel.”
“No, stay, I don’t care. I’m not afraid.”
“I’m not delusional!” she nearly screamed, whiplashing back to her distrust of everyone.
“I didn’t say that. I care about you. I don’t want to see you get hurt. I feel complicit,” Joel pleaded.
“Maybe I am losing my mind. Maybe I have overidentified with Nadia and become too obsessed with the correspondence and The Archivist and what happened to her.” She adjusted the shoulder straps on her carry-on backpack, ready to exit. “But I’m going to find out the truth, Joel, and no one is going to fucking stop me.”
“Emily?” she heard him call as she went out the door, down yet another concrete flight of stairs, across yet another walkway that brushed up against a water-stained stucco wall, broadening out to yet another apocalyptically deserted street with nothing but lit-up signs of two-story apartment complexes all with ridiculously banal names like Paradise Palms. Paradise Palms, Emily snorted in contempt.
Emily followed the coast north, hugging the ocean all the way, to the hotel she had booked. Every stoplight was green. Every store was closed. She felt remorseful about leaving Joel’s in such a fit of pique, but the stress of the day had built up in her like a massive pressure, for which no release valve could vent.
Emily frequently glanced up at her rearview mirror with the darting, watchful eyes of a bird. It didn’t appear anyone was following her. But whoever it was, he had her in his sights now, that she was sure of.
Emily drove through slumbering La Jolla. A waxing, near-full moon produced a shaft of white light that stretched to infinity on the placid dark waters where Nadia once swam, fracturing it into two separate oceans.
Emily checked into Estancia Hotel, the one across from the university, aware of the eerie irony that it was the hotel where Nadia and Raymond had first made love but figuring that if it had been good enough them, it was good enough for her too. Maybe she was her doppelgänger after all, and Joel and the rest of them were the sane ones, and she was stark raving mad and just hadn’t been tranquilized yet and come to in a narcotized state in a mental institution. Maybe if she could feel the power, the erotic urgency of that love, she would understand why Nadia had risked her life for it. She had felt Raymond’s lips on hers, and even if they weren’t on hers the way they had no doubt been on Nadia’s, she had felt them.
A valet took Emily’s car without the same gleam of lechery they had thrown at Nadia, but then Emily, in T-shirt and cords, wasn’t in heels and her lips weren’t a glistening red, and she wasn’t exuding the lust Nadia must have when she roared up in her Ford Falcon Futura in a flamboyant cloud of dust, Emily liked to imagine, to meet her lover, who had checked in earlier, undoubtedly under a pseudonym.
Emily checked in at the front desk and followed a yellow-lit hallway with saffron-splashed walls to a bottom floor room with a sliding glass door that faced out to a courtyard edged by palm trees circumscribing a lawn where shadows of the palms swayed gently against the neon-green grass. And no one. Not even a maintenance worker or a housekeeper.
Emily slumped wearily onto the bed with her laptop and made landfall with the hotel’s internet. She logged in to her university account and wrote an email to Jean explaining she was taking the next day off because she wasn’t feeling well, but that the West finding aid only needed a few more tweaks with the abstract and it would be finished and ready to go live.
She closed her laptop and threw a forearm over her eyes and lay back on the plush pillows, sapped of strength, physical and moral, dreading being all alone in the world. The convolutions since she first opened that Pandora’s box of digital correspondence between Nadia and Raymond had drained her of all her will to fight. She wasn’t sure where she was anymore. She wanted to be a pelican soaring along the cliff. Food. Sex. Something primordially simple. Not this booming drumbeat of tortured love and its malignant repercussions.
She tried to find refuge in sleep, hoping it would halt her encroaching sense of disorientation and rudderlessness. Her brain chewed on the marrow of her ontological worth until she dropped into the void of dreams. She dreamed . . .
Chapter 23
The Law of the Land
10/22/18
I dreamt of Nadia and Raymond and their lovemaking. I feel haunted by them.
I’m all alone. Called in sick. Joel thinks I should just drop it, but I can’t. Not with what I know. I can’t prove anything definitively.
I feel vulnerable. Unprotected.
Emily pressed the red button on her Voice Memos app. She knew where it was without looking for it.
A knock at the door momentarily startled her. Through the security eyepiece she saw that it was room service and opened the door. Coffee and a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon came rolling into her room on a white-cloth trolley. She signed for it and closed the door behind the young man who brought it. She checked her email. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw one from Detective Taggart agreeing to meet her at Estancia at 2:00 p.m.
In her carry-on she had brought Nadia’s personal file, the one she had found at the Annex. There were some grainy photos in it that she didn’t think meant anything when she first came upon them. They were photos of the man she believed was the one following her in the gray Volvo SUV. She compared them to the screenshots of the security video that Jorge had given her. It was difficult to compare the faces because of the shadowy light and the indistinct images and find similarities. But she noticed something glinting in the collar of the mock turtleneck. The logo of the clothing brand she noticed a tiny metallic, winged mythological creature and it gleamed unmistakably in all of the photos in an identifying pinpoint of light.
Storm clouds were gathering in the sky when Emily corkscrewed into her Mini and the valet closed the door gently on her. She tipped him five dollars and drove off out of the circular drive, feeling a little bit like she was retracing Nadia’s trysting past.
With the low-pressure system overhead, the ocean churned with gray waters and jagged whitecaps. The local surfers had seen the forecast online and stayed home. The birds were hunkered down in the lagoon, waiting for more favorable conditions to prey. To the east the low-lying hills were shrouded in cloud cover, lending them a mythological appearance.
Emily stopped at Bird Rock Coffee to get a real cup of coffee and collect her thoughts. While the barista made her pour-over she checked emails on her cell. Helena had written, expressed congratulations things were wrapping up on West, and forwarded her the announcement on the Eighth Floor Gala. The photo of Raymond West on the news link was not the man she had met the day before. He was smiling that tight-lipped smile of irony. He looked impossibly handsome in the unbuttoned white shirt and black linen coat, hair tumbling youthfully to his shoulders. Nothing at all like the broken man who had staggered out of the accident at Adobe Guadalupe, his life in escalatory turmoil. The accompanying picture of Elizabeth didn’t match with him. Helena, arm hooked around Elizabeth’s waist, with her silver-and-black, two-toned hairdo, made for an incongruous trifecta of mystery.
Emily got her Ethiopian pour-over in a to-go cup and climbed back in her car. She drove past the lagoon, swung right at the corner where her apartment complex was, didn’t notice anything suspicious, then gunned up the steep incline of Del Mar Heights Road.
The PostalAnnex+ that served as the mailing address for Seymor’s Catering was in the Del Mar Plaza, sandwiched in a large strip mall of shops—the usual Southern California fare: Rite-Aid, a dry cleaner’s, a Thai restaurant . . .
Emily stepped out of her car and strolled inside the PostalAnnex+. Almost the entire wall to her right was occupied with uniformly sized brass PO boxes. Behind a counter in the center, a woman of Indian descent was engulfed in stacks of packages, absorbed in getting them all sorted and into the proper shipping containers. Emily approached her.
“Excuse me. I have this address for Seymour’s Catering,” she said, feigning naiveté.
The Indian woman looked up and smiled. She pointed to the bank of post office boxes. “Probably one of them,” she indicated.
“Oh, I’m so dumb,” Emily said, “I thought I could pop in and sit down with somebody and go over an event I’m supposed to help cater.”
The proprietor was not shy about divulging her intuition. “Frankly, Miss, a lot of those people up there don’t really exist as who they claim to be. If they show me a business card with a business name, then that’s what I write down when I rent them the box. As long as they pay the monthly.”
Emily leaned her backside against the counter and gazed up at the post office boxes. “You ever see this Seymour guy come in?” Emily said to the bronze mail slots.
“I see them,” replied the proprietor. “They mostly come, get their mail, and go without so much as a hello.”
Emily rooted a rectangle of paper from her back jeans pocket, unfolded it, and laid it on the desk next to the proprietor’s postal scale. “Do you recognize this man?”
The woman picked up the piece of paper and squinted at it with failing eyesight. She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Can’t place him.”
Emily leaned forward on her elbows: “Have the police ever been in here asking about him?”
The woman set the picture down and grinned excitedly. “Why? Is he wanted for something?”
“He might be,” Emily said enigmatically.
“What are you? Some kind of private investigator?”
“I’m becoming one. This guy owes a client a ton of money.”
The woman laughed. “Half of them up there are probably running from something. That wall’s for the wanted, and the unwanted,” she chuckled. “I just rent them the boxes if they’ve got a credit card. I don’t ask questions.”
Emily retrieved the photo, refolded it, and wriggled it into her back pocket. “Thank you.”
Emily drove back down Del Mar Heights in the direction of the ocean. As she crested the hill the ocean bloomed up in her windshield, windblown and angry. The sky mushroomed with black and gray clouds. She parked on the street and cautiously approached her apartment complex through the narrow alley. Stopping below the pool, Emily tented her forehead with a flattened hand and looked up two flights of stairs to her apartment. The unit seemed to be repudiating her existence. It was as if she had died inside there and now her ghost was coming back to conduct the postmortem. Now that she had been violated twice there, she didn’t know if she could ever return.
