WHEN I WOKE UP the following morning, it was as if my anxiety was waiting for me at the foot of my bed, holding my slippers. Had another packet of Sweetness #9 been delivered to the office? No matter how many times I tried to push away the question, it kept rushing back, making it impossible for me to concentrate on anything else. I forgot to put water in the coffee machine before turning it on, then corrected this mistake only to realize I hadn’t filled the cone with any grounds. For breakfast I had an egg that seemed somehow naked; when I finished, I remembered the bread I’d left in the toaster.
Near ten, I told Betty I was going to run to the office and see about some paperwork. She didn’t mind. She’d felt slighted to learn about Priscilla from me. (“Apparently, a mother doesn’t know,” she’d said.) So she made plans to spend the day with our daughter, cooking bread and making barbecue tempeh.
When I got to the office, it was just as I’d feared—another plain white business envelope lying beneath the brass slot of the front door. Hearing music, loud and with a sharp percussive beat, I took it into the back, where I found Koba and Beekley. They’d pushed the sofa away from the soda machine and placed a large piece of cardboard on the floor. Beekley was spinning on top of it, his legs awhirl above him.
“David!” Koba was dressed in casual clothing: a pair of khakis and a long-sleeve Madras shirt. “Look at what I can do!” He began moving his limbs stiffly, popping and locking his torso and arms into place, a wave of motion moving out from one wrist to the other. “It’s called The Robot. Isn’t it wonderful? I’m doing The Robot!”
Beekley jumped to his feet and pushed a button on his boom box to silence it. “Something wrong?” he said. “Your eye is twitching.”
I handed him the envelope, telling him it was the second one I’d received in as many days.
He shook its contents, then held it up to the light. “Is this a packet of Sweetness #9?”
I nodded, telling him my first job out of college was at Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark. “In Animal Testing,” I said.
“That’s so old school. As is this.” He looked more closely at the contents of the envelope, remarking on its color. “Is this Mexican Nine? Why would someone send you a packet of Mexican Sweetness #9?”
I saw no reason to withhold this information anymore. “I conducted a chronic toxicity test on it prior to its bid for FDA approval.”
He handed the envelope back to me. “I guess you know where all the dead bodies are buried, then, don’t you?”
“Why would you say that, Beekley?”
He just gave me a look.
“What are you?” I said. “A member of the Sweetness #9 Action Network? One of the Widows of Sugar Hill?”
“The Widows of Sugar Hill? David, I’m a life-long bachelor, you know that.”
“What do you expect me to think, Beekley?” I pointed at the face of the envelope. “It’s blank, meaning it was hand-delivered. It’s here, you’re here. The only way it could more obviously be your work is if you called me up to whisper, ‘It’s coming from inside the house.’”
“When a Stranger Calls,” Beekley said with an appreciative smile.
Koba looked between us, confused.
“The movie,” Beekley explained.
“Is that the one with Dustin Hoffman? About divorce?”
“It’s about a babysitter who receives threatening phone calls from a crazed killer,” I said, still looking directly at Beekley. “The police trace the calls to inside the same house.”
“Oh my. That’s terrifying,” Koba said.
Beekley nodded, suddenly very excited. “The horror genre in many ways defined life in the nineteen seventies. You have to understand: after Vietnam and Watergate, we were a country horrified by what we had become, so we washed ourselves in the blood of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween and Friday the 13th, needing to feel the catharsis of these on-screen atrocities before we could be reborn into the feel-good movies of the Reagan Years. Porky’s, Weird Science, Stripes. Have you seen Weird Science? Write that down. If you rent five movies for five nights, it’s only five bucks.”
I stood there like a ghost, my voice barely a whisper. “So did you? You have to tell me, Beekley. Are you behind this?”
He only then remembered the envelope in my hand. “What? No! You think someone’s stalking you because of what you know or did? That maybe this is the prelude to extortion or violence?”
It was so terrifying to hear these thoughts coming from outside my own head. I nodded.
Beekley went into the fridge for a canister of pressurized orange cheese and spoke while sending bursts of it into his mouth. “You ask me, it could be the work of the GLF.”
“The GLF?”
“The Gastrophilic Liberation Front,” he said, before his voice became more nasal. “Le Front de Libération Gastrophilic. They’re slow-fooders based out of Quebec, active since nineteen eighty-seven, and most recently linked to attacks on food production facilities in two provinces and three states. Vicious group, absolutely brutal. I’ve even heard chatter online that suggests they’re assembling a children’s martyrs’ brigade.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“Joking? Do you also want to tell me the organic food movement doesn’t have a paramilitary wing? Who’s the one being naïve here, David?” He squirted more cheese into his mouth. “You could be one of a dozen or more flavorists getting these packets of sweetener in the mail. The Nine doesn’t have the best reputation, you know. I’ve got friends who rate it just a cut above Agent Orange.” He pointed to the front of the building. “Dreadlocked men could burst through these doors at any minute, holding semi-automatic weapons they’ve cleaned with organic vegetable oil.”
He rattled on like some excitable professor, speaking of abortion doctors stalked by pro-lifers and animal research facilities that had been ransacked by masked activists. He knew of a nuclear physicist who’d been blinded by battery acid, and a scientist with the CDC whose work with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines had so enraged the mothers of autistic children that the government had offered him the use of a new name.
“And you think this could be something like that?”
He squirted more cheese into his mouth, nodding.
I wanted to take a knee. “So what should I do? Call the postmaster general?”
“Please. A man who deals in lost mail?”
“What, then?”
He put the cheese back into the fridge, telling me it wasn’t too late for us to buy a gun safe. He pointed to the space beside the soda machine. “There’s plenty of room.”
Koba smiled hopefully. “I’m sure it’s probably nothing.”
Then Beekley reached into a drawer and came over to me with a Ziploc bag. “You better put that in here,” he said. “You don’t want to tamper with the evidence any more than you already have.”
I took the side streets home, wanting to remain in motion, my destination forever deferred. Then as I was driving through South Battle Station I saw two large words—SECURITY CAMERAS—painted in red on the side of a white windowless building, and I made a U-turn and parked alongside the door.
A tired-eyed man stood at the front counter, scratching at his side. He wore faded blue jeans and a black T-shirt that didn’t quite cover all of his belly. Slump-shouldered, and with thinning hair and a two-day beard, he’d probably looked forty-three since he was seventeen.
“How can I help you?” he said, with breath that would’ve announced his presence to a blind man.
“I’m a local business owner,” I told him, this story springing from me fully formed, “and in the last week I’ve become the target of vandals. Graffiti and the like. The worst vulgarities.”
“Kids,” he said. “They got no moral compass anymore.”
“That’s right. But I thought if I had a camera fixed to the side of my building”—already he was nodding—“I’d scare them away or at least be able to take some hard evidence to the police.”
The man held up a finger, then stepped over to a neighboring display unit and slid open its back panel and reached inside for a box.
“This is The Eagle Eye.” He set it down between us. The cover of the box had a photo of a sleek CCTV camera on it. “Top of the line, unrivaled functionality, tamper proof. It’ll pan, tilt, zoom, give you night vision technology, you name it. If I were Saddam Hussein, this is the one I’d buy.”
“And the cost?”
“Seventeen forty-nine.”
“Seventeen dollars?”
“Seventeen hundred.”
A moment, then, “Do you have anything else?”
The next one he showed me came in a larger box.
“This is The Hawk,” he said. “She’ll give you six hundred lines of resolution at distances of up to two hundred feet, one hundred at night. Tamper proof; you don’t worry about the wind and the rain. I sell a lot of these.”
“It looks bulky.”
“Bulk scares the bad guys.”
I told him I might have misspoken. “I’m more interested in catching someone in the act.”
“I like your style.” He stepped away again, then returned with a third box, on the cover of which was a picture of a halved orb made of darkened glass. “This is The Invisible Eyeball.”
“That’s quite a name.”
“It’s quite a system. Sleek, doesn’t mar the sight lines. You just pop her up there on the wall and people think it’s a motion-sensitive light. It’s a bargain at three hundred bucks.”
“Does that include installation?”
“Installation is extra. As is a power source and recording equipment.”
“I’ve got a spare VCR. Would that be sufficient?”
“Only if you want to replace the tape every six hours. This one here”—he walked me over to a neighboring display unit, where a massive black VCR-like machine sat on the top shelf—“this is the T1-60. You can slide a tape in there, go to the Bahamas for forty days, have a mai tai, look at the pretty girls, then come back and you don’t miss a thing. That’ll get you nine hundred hours of full-day real-time results on a single cassette. I wouldn’t even try to sell you anything else.”
“Okay,” I said. “Out the door, ready to go, just press play, what does it cost to get this all in today?”
“Today? A rush job will run you more. As will a weekend install.”
“By nightfall,” I said. “Today.”
He looked at me as if trying to guess the number that was five dollars below as high as I was willing to go. He must have read me right, too, because a few seconds later we were shaking hands and he was telling me I wouldn’t regret it.
Later that afternoon my cell phone rang while I lay on the couch in the great room, watching a college football game. The screen of my little Nokia flashed Unknown Caller. I muted the television and answered it.
“David!” the voice on the other end said. “Joseph Willingham!”
I answered with silence.
“Of Better Health and Flavorings?” he went on. “We spoke the night of the Society meeting. In the bathroom?”
“Oh yes!” I was excited, if only to learn it wasn’t a Mexican or an Albanian.
“Hope you don’t mind my calling on a Saturday, but I’m off to Shanghai tomorrow and I wanted to see if I could have a word with you before I left. Is this a bad time?”
“No, no.” I walked out of the great room and turned in to my bedroom. “I’m just curious how you got this number.”
“The Society roster,” he said. I’d been obligated to provide my contact information when I’d served as the chair of the Bylaws Committee. “Hope you don’t mind my not being shy about using it?”
I walked into the closet and shut the door behind me, then reached into the pocket of the jacket I’d worn that morning for the Ziploc bag that Beekley had given me. It held that day’s envelope inside it, still unopened. “It’s just funny timing, I suppose.”
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear that. You’re breaking up.”
I moved out toward the window. “Is this better?”
“There you go, yes. Well here’s the thing. I sensed from our initial conversation that you weren’t too excited about selling FlavAmerica. But I’ve been in this game long enough to know everything is subject to change, so I thought I’d call and see how life in upper management is treating you. Do you enjoy having the buck stop on your desk?”
Our neighbor was doing tai chi again. I turned away from him toward the door when I heard Betty coming in, wearing her tracksuit from the gym.
Mr. Willingham laughed, mistaking my silence for something it was not. “A tough negotiator, I like that. Never say more than you need to. Well, listen, as a goodwill gesture, let me open up to you a little bit. I think FlavAmerica’s got something very special there in NoNilla®, and with China opening up, a company could make a fortune if it positioned itself right. It’s a very tricky market over there, though. Entirely based on who you know and, let’s be honest, how much you’ll pay. We’re almost set up in Beijing now, and we could use a good man to be our Director of East Asian Affairs. How’d you like me to tee that up for you? A little exotica in late middle age? Hmm? Do a man some good, I’d think. Provide more than a little money, too. Well, I’ve said enough. But if any of this interests you, you contact my secretary and have her set up a time for us to sit down and push some numbers back and forth. Sound good? Or you still not ready to change your mind?”
I’m not sure I said more than five words between hello and good-bye. But as Betty stepped out of the walk-in closet, dressed now in her house clothes, it became clear to me what they were doing. “Those bastards!” I said. It was a negotiating tactic!
Betty followed me down to the computer in the study, hearing me whisper of the day’s events. By the time I’d told her about the security system I’d purchased for FlavAmerica, she was standing at my back and watching as I moved my cursor to the search bar on our Yahoo home page. Charles Hithenbottom, I typed, and sure enough, there he was, referenced in an article in the Journal of the American Association of Laboratory Animal Science. “Testing and Efficacy Analyst at Better Health and Flavorings,” it read. “Jupiter Park, New Jersey.”
“Just as I suspected.” I leaned back in my chair, smiling like a detective at the conclusion of a case. “Don’t you see? The Cosa Nostra or the KGB would come at you with all the power of the fist and the boot, but Better Health and Flavorings—they’re more sophisticated than that. They want to intimidate me without my even realizing that’s what they’re doing. First Hickey plants that packet in my pocket at the Society meeting, and now I get another in the mail just before this Willingham character calls. It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
Betty stood there, looking down at the Ziploc bag in her hand.
“They think if they scare me, I’ll open up and be more willing to make a deal.”
“Maybe we should go to the police,” Betty said.
I shook my head, reaching for the phone book. “No crime’s been done yet, unless you consider this tampering with the mail. And what’s the postmaster general going to do? Nothing. Here we are.” I’d flipped open to the white pages and found Hickey’s address listed alongside his telephone number. I wrote it down on the face of an envelope, affixed a US flag stamp to it, then led the way into the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” Betty said.
I reached into the cupboard for the box of Sweetness #9. “Two can play at this game,” I said. I sealed the packet of sweetener inside the envelope, gave it a lick to seal it, then wrote across its back: You can stop now. We’re onto you. And it’s not working.
Priscilla came in from the garage then, holding a big black Glad bag. As I stuck the envelope into my back pocket, she reached between us for the box of Sweetness #9 and dropped it into her garbage bag.
“What are you doing?”
Just as quickly, she moved on to the refrigerator.
“Cleaning up,” she said. She grabbed a squeeze bottle of barbecue sauce, glanced at its list of ingredients, then dropped it into her bag and reached for the sweet and sour.
“That’s still half-full,” Betty said.
Priscilla worked in silence now, grabbing tubs of yogurt and jars of jam, bottles of salad dressing and tubes of crescent rolls. When she moved on to the freezer, grabbing first the tri-colored popsicles and then all of our frozen entrées, Betty asked the question again:
“What are you doing?”
Priscilla closed the freezer and gave a firm look while passing between us to the rear of the house. “Someone has to be the parent,” she said.
We followed. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m not going to let him do it anymore. Have anything with Red Dye No. 40 or Sweetness #9.”
Betty and I looked at each other as our daughter turned in to the bathroom.
“You can ground me,” she said, “you can lock me in my room, but if you do, the historical record will show that you first had to rip this bag out of my hands.”
Maybe it was imagining her failings that did it, or the threat of what I’d received in the mail these last two days, I don’t know, but without another word Betty moved away from me and joined our daughter in the bathroom. And what could I do then? A family is nothing if not a grand coalition, an entity that cannot survive if fractious.
“Here, let me hold the bag,” I said.
And so I stood there as they reached for the expired decongestants and a medley of flavored cough syrups, stood there pointing out the vitamins modeled on the characters of a Stone Age cartoon and the soaps and shampoos that were every color of the rainbow. It didn’t matter if I believed this would help or not; it felt good to be doing something, to be united in action. So we continued into the bathroom upstairs, then doubled back down through the pantry and out to the stand-alone freezer in the garage. By then our bag was bulging, and we were sated like cavemen after the kill.
“I still can’t believe the crescent rolls have red dye in them,” Betty said, holding the twist-to-open cylinder up before her eyes so she could read its list of ingredients.
I didn’t need to repeat myself: I’d already told her that Yellow No. 5 was combined with the red food coloring to give the cooked dough a golden, just-from-the-oven appearance.
“And the Sweetness #9 holds it all together,” Priscilla said.
“Get the lid,” I told her.
She held the garbage can open, and then I emptied the bag into it and we stood for a moment over the detritus of our sweet and colorful past.
When we returned indoors, Ernest was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a bloodied orange juice. He wouldn’t look at us. Instead, he reached for the little bottle of red food coloring that sat on the table beside him, then added another couple of drops into his glass.
I nodded to Betty and Priscilla, asking for a moment alone. Then, when it was just me and my son, I sat down across from him and placed my hands on the table where he could see them.
“Ernest,” I said. “You understand why we’re doing this, don’t you?”
And that puckered look he gave me—so intense, somehow already soured to the world—it was the same one I’d seen when I first held him in my arms at the hospital and knew in a rush of love and sadness that he was my son. Ernest, I’d call him. I knew the only name I could give him was Ernest.