The next Wednesday, McEwen called to set up a squash game at the university for eight o’clock that night. He had already booked a court. Noah was pissed off at McEwen’s assumption that he could set a game without any notice and wanted to pass, but he didn’t. They arranged to meet at McEwen’s university office at seven-thirty and walk to the gym from there.
Noah arrived at the building with his racket, shorts, sneakers and T-shirt rolled into a bundle. The main door was open until eight and he took the elevator to the fourth floor. This was a staff office building and no one was around at this hour. He found his way to McEwen’s small office and knocked. McEwen opened the door holding a portable phone. He was on a call.
“Come. Sit,” McEwen whispered, covering the mouthpiece. He indicated one of two guest chairs in the cramped, book-filled space, then sat and swivelled away from Noah to face his desk, which was pushed up against the wall beneath a large double-pane window with the blind down for nighttime privacy. You wouldn’t want to interview female students at night with the lights on and blind up, Noah thought. That would be like fucking in a fishbowl. The door swung closed by itself. Noah imagined McEwen’s first one-on-one with The Hobson Girl in this space. She would have been sitting where Noah now sat and McEwen would have swung around and away from his computer on the desk, crossed a leg, leaned back and talked to her with his patronizing grin. You didn’t score with these girls by being honest or self-deprecating, as Noah had been. You score, he thought now, by being controlling and self-assured. They all wanted to fuck a father figure.
McEwen wasn’t trying to maintain any privacy with his call. In fact, Noah could tell that he wanted Noah to hear every word. McEwen was one of those people who talked to everyone within earshot when he was on his cellphone, especially when the conversation was about his own business or literary endeavours. Strangers waiting for a bus or in line at Safeway all had to know that McEwen was a player.
“That’s good, that’s very good. It’s all very good news. And you’ve done a terrific job. You have. The New York Times is better than a poke in the eye. I’m late for a squash game and I will read it online as soon as I’m finished. Take care.”
McEwen quickly stood up and ran both hands through his hair. His cool telephone demeanour evaporated. Noah started to stand but McEwen held up a hand to stop him.
“No. No. Sit. Sit.” He was frantic. Noah had never seen this side of him. “I have to cancel! I can’t play! But I want you to wait. You have to wait. That was my book agent in New York. The fucking New York Times reviewed my book for next Sunday’s book-review section and they loved it. She just emailed it to me. They fucking love me. And she’s talking to the U.S. publisher about a big advance for the next book. When it fucking rains it pours, Noah. When it fucking rains it fucking pours.”
McEwen dropped back into his chair and swung around to his computer. Noah sat staring at McEwen’s back and didn’t say a word. He sensed that McEwen wouldn’t hear him anyway. After all, he had lied to his agent that he was going to play squash and would read the review later, and it didn’t appear to bother him for a second that Noah had heard the lie. It felt strange to Noah to remain silent, not even a perfunctory “sounds good” or “congratulations.” He just sat there not knowing what to do or say. He found himself looking at McEwen from a distance as if he were watching some kind of wriggling bug in a jar. He could tell McEwen didn’t care whether he was there or not. In fact, it was clear that Noah had just moved from the endangered list in McEwen’s world to extinct species. He was now invisible.
McEwen ran his hands over his computer keyboard, calling up his email in search of the review while Noah glanced around the room at the signs of a methodically invented life. He had been in the office once before but all he had taken in was “professor’s office.” Now things were coming into a finer focus. The bookshelves not just full but stuffed in an unruly way as if to denote a mind that was everywhere at once. The massive anthologies; the well-worn volumes of poetry; the classics shuffled randomly amongst the contemporary thinkers, every important name visible; the framed photos from trips to Africa, South America, London, Moscow, Tiananmen Square, jammed with a studied clutter into the small areas of available wall space; some remaining Christmas cards; his squash and tennis rackets; a bottle of Dom Pérignon, a gift from someone who could obviously afford it; and the clicheéd trinkets from his travels, which included pieces of Inuit and African art as well as a machete with a decorative handle that dangled from a leather strap.
“You have to hear this, you have to hear this,” McEwen chirped like an excitable parakeet. He had the review up. “This is the first line—‘Few comic novelists dive into the cold, dark waters of truth with the abandon of Patrick McEwen in A Horrible Night.’”
Noah sat there looking at McEwen’s back, listening to his distant voice read what Noah’s mother used to call “supercilious drivel.” It wasn’t until later in life that he had understood how she used the expression to refer with contempt to a conversation that bored her or was over her head or that she found self-serving. But when he was too young to know what “supercilious” meant, Noah still liked all of its s’s and syllables. It also sounded adult and sophisticated, and he imagined it had something to do with the brain or brainy people and he had a picture of their ideas as they slid from their brains, through their nasal passages, where they collected mucus and continued down into the back of their throats, where this mixture combined with their words and formed a thick dribble called “drivel.” And at this moment, things all made sense to Noah. His life had recently felt to him like it was adrift across some featureless white plain lacking any points of reference. He had once driven across the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where there was no road, nothing growing, just a flat white surface for miles on end in all directions. But he was now staring at a secret door that had miraculously appeared on that plain, a door beyond which lay something completely different and completely unknown and all he had to do was step through and he would change his life forever. He was sure no one had seen him enter the building and take the elevator up to McEwen’s office. It all seemed so easy. He simply had to open the door and step through. It was logistics, not the right or the wrong. He felt as if the decision had been made for him by someone else, someone he couldn’t see, a being or thing who was in the room with him. Noah took the T-shirt from his bundle of squash stuff and wrapped it around his right hand. McEwen kept reading aloud. Noah reached for the machete. It didn’t have the heft of his baseball bat and wouldn’t have the momentum, but he calculated that the blade would make up the difference. He knew where the jugular ran down the front right side of the neck from a biology class at university. He was surprised by his state of mind, a state quite foreign to him. He was capable of doing what was about to come. This wasn’t him, he thought. This was how cold-blooded killers think, how psychos think. Or was it how the highly trained Navy SEAL marksmen in the U.S. forces think when they are about to take down a target that is threatening the free world and its way of life? He had reached a point of style and had left morality far behind. He was exhilarated by his cool, by his lack of fear. He raised the machete to the level of his hip as McEwen continued to read aloud from his computer. Noah had focused on a point between the jaw and the base of the neck when McEwen raised his left hand and hooked it over his left shoulder to scratch the left side of his neck. Noah lowered the machete and waited for him to stop scratching, as if it was wrong to interrupt this attempt to satisfy an itch. McEwen finished scratching and continued reading, and Noah stood up and with an allarm tennis swing, not a squash swing from the wrist, brought the machete down hard across McEwen’s neck with enough force to cut at least four inches into him. McEwen plunged forward and to his left, grabbing his neck with his right hand. The only sound he made was a muffled gag. The jugular had been cut and blood pumped out of him like a ruptured water main. Noah didn’t expect that much blood that quickly and almost vomited. He wanted to run and have someone else finish what he had started but he knew he had to keep going. The damage was done and to stop now would be insane. He swung again and again in the area of the first cut, slashing at McEwen’s neck until his body collapsed forward onto his desk, blood gushing onto his computer in horrible rhythmic spurts, each one draining more life from him until the gushing and spurting slowed and his body lost all resilience and lay flaccid on the desktop. Noah found it hard to breathe and gulped for air. He was, at this point, not a human being but an animal struggling to survive. He pulled the T-shirt from the machete and dropped the weapon on the floor. He rolled the T-shirt into the rest of his squash stuff and took off his jacket, which was blood splattered, turned it inside out and folded the squash stuff into it. With his sleeve over his hand, he opened the office door and walked to the fire exit again, using his sleeve over his hand to open the door onto the grey-painted cement stairwell. He hurried down the four flights, checking his clothes and wiping at his face for signs of blood. He exited through a one-way door, kicking the bar with his foot. It opened into the dark at the building’s rear next to an empty parking lot. No one had seen him and he was satisfied there was no blood splattered on his face or clothing. He walked quickly toward the gym and dialled McEwen’s office on his cellphone. He left a message on the machine when it picked up. “I’m at the gym and it’s eight o’clock. Just wanted to know if you’re on your way.” He hung up and walked as quickly as he could.
He arrived at the gym in less than five minutes. He went down to the towel counter in the area outside the weight room and squash courts and asked the student attendant if a “Patrick McEwen” had arrived for his court. She checked her court schedule and said, “Not yet.” Noah said he was supposed to meet him for an eight o’clock court and could he take the court and wait for him inside. She looked at her watch, saw it was an hour from closing, smiled and let him in without a guest pass. He took a towel and thanked her for trusting him.
Noah sat on the floor of the empty court, his legs outstretched, his back against a side wall which was streaked with ball and racket marks. He was in a place where nothing bad happened, a place of sportsmanship and camaraderie, and for the moment, he felt safe. His breathing slowed, but his feet and hands were still shaking—the slaughter’s aftershock. He dialled McEwen’s cellphone and left another message, that he was on the court and waiting and knocking the ball around by himself, and that if McEwen couldn’t make it, it was no big deal—he had his cellphone with him and McEwen should call if something else had come up. Noah waited twenty minutes, changed and walked home.
He knew he was going to need alcohol to get him through the coming days and picked up a forty-ounce bottle of Absolut at his local liquor store. The cashiers and customers all seemed strangely passive to him, as if they were moving in slow motion. He wondered if he appeared jumpy to them, hyperactive, out of sync with the normal rhythm of things, and whether this was giving something away. He tried to appear relaxed and smiled in response to the cashier’s comments, but his smiles seemed to come at the wrong time, either too soon or too late. He started to sweat and wanted to get out and into the night.
Once outside he headed for the closest side street. This would be a detour on his route home but would also be dark and unpopulated. Once off the main strip, he unscrewed the top of the Absolut bottle and gulped down at least four ounces without taking the bottle from its plastic bag. He screwed the top back on, then remembered his bloody clothing. He wrapped the bottle in his gym shorts and stuffed the bloodied T-shirt and jacket into the plastic bag and tied it tight. When he passed the first public trash bin with a door flap, he stuffed the bag in and kept going. He stopped twice more for gulps from the bottle and arrived home feeling numb.
He thought of turning on the TV news but then decided to wait for the morning. He poured himself three or four more ounces and sat on the edge of his bed with only one thought in his mind: there was no turning back. The chill he felt was, he thought, what people must feel when they are told by their doctor that they have a serious chronic disease, that they have diabetes, or a kidney disease which will require dialysis for the rest of their lives, or that they have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma “but it’s treatable.” You live with it, he thought, that’s what you do. Noah finished his drink, kicked off his shoes and curled up under his covers without taking off his clothes. He tried to imagine what his demeanour would be in his first conversations about the “horrific murder” and wondered whether he could express the necessary shock. He then fell asleep thinking that though his mother was dead, he was alive and that would make her feel good.
Noah didn’t wake up until after eleven the next morning, when the phone rang that long-distance double ring. He didn’t answer it. He lay on his back, staring straight up, and came to consciousness as if the events of the night before had been written on the ceiling then let go and crashed onto his face. The phone rang again with the long-distance ring. He picked it up. It was his cousin James from London. His “colonial mate” had just called with the news. After a few obligatory words of condolence for the loss of Noah’s old friend, James soon slipped into a chipper, gossipy desire for more gory details, which made it unnecessary for Noah to feign any shock or sorrow.
“I was supposed to meet him for squash last night. When he didn’t show up I went home thinking he had forgotten until I heard the news.”
“God, you were supposed to meet him last night?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck. It could have fucking been you too if you had been with him.”
“Maybe.”
“Fucking Christ, man. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone even vaguely who’s been murdered. A couple of suicides, but not this kind of thing. Fucking hacked to death. It sounds like fucking Rwanda. Do they know how many did it or who or why?”
“No idea. It’s all like a bad dream.”
“Do me a favour and give us a call if you hear any more interesting stuff. This could even be a sex thing. Was he gay?”
“No. But he had just left his wife for a younger woman.”
“Fuck me. Hell has no fury like a woman scorned, mate. If I were a betting man I’d put my money on the wife. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Stay in touch. It was great seeing you at the farm. We should get together more often. You should come to London.”
“I might do that.”
“Take care of yourself. Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
They hung up. Noah thought that he played that quite well. He now saw what his near future looked like—lies, deception, performances. Say as little as possible and be consistent. Don’t get tripped up. That was the key.
He had to gather his thoughts. He unplugged his phone. There was a knock at his door. Not a ring from the street bell—this was someone in the building. This is how the police must do it, he thought.
Noah calmed down as well as he could and went to the door. The cops were quicker than he thought. He opened the door, and there was the father of his Italian landlord. “We have to turn off the water for maybe an hour,” he said with his rough Italian accent.
Why didn’t the Italians who came here bring those fabulous accents of Marcello Mastroianni and all the Fellini characters? Noah thought.
“Can I take a shower?”
“Now?” he said looking at his watch as if there was an official shower time for all people.
“I was thinking about it.”
“In cold water,” the old man laughed. “Give us an hour. Two tops.”
“No problem.” Noah wanted to say “No problemo,” since he likely would never again in his life have this perfect opportunity for it, but declined. He closed the door and thought that he wasn’t a hunted animal. In fact, most people in the world weren’t even aware of McEwen’s death.
Noah was nervous about watching TV news coverage of the killing. He had no idea how he would react. He was the star of the story, albeit the mystery star. His first reaction was an unexpected detachment. It was the news as always, and he watched it as if he had no part in it. His name wasn’t mentioned. The first speculations over who might do such a thing didn’t come close to describing a person like himself. As the story continued with its lurid detail, a self-satisfied smugness set in. He realized how those who capitalize on these events with their analysis and speculation consistently get it wrong. How each creates a self-serving narrative out of disconnected and messy facts. After all, stories sell; messy facts don’t. Noah remembered how he had felt watching live as the second plane on 9/11 hit the second World Trade Center Tower. The slicing impact of the plane entering the building had hit him in the gut. He, like everyone else watching on TV, understood that those on the plane were instantly dead. This was a narrative he had been prepared for and feared every time he flew. But the buildings’ collapse was different. He was not prepared for the consequences of that one. He had been in hundreds of apartment and office towers and had never imagined what he was looking at on this day. It was a spectacular image, and when the buildings went down it wasn’t thousands of people dying in front of his eyes as much as it was a mind-blowing spectacle. He couldn’t imagine the people inside. There wasn’t yet a human narrative for this image, and without a narrative there was no emotional connection. In the McEwen case, which didn’t happen live on TV, there was time for the news to manufacture its own narrative.
The police investigator in charge of the case “could not imagine the kind of mind that would perform such a horrific act.”
“You can’t imagine him?” Noah asked aloud. “He’s like you and me. Two arms, two legs, likes to get laid and can’t pay his bills. Welcome to the land of the unimaginable, asshole.”
A guest psychologist claimed that “the number of seemingly unprovoked blows from behind with a weapon like a machete could indicate a person with a psychotic major depression, or PMD, which affects 0.3 per cent of the population. Many of these people experience delusions. For example, a person with PMD may kill another person because he or she believes that person is the devil.”
“And what if I had a moment of fucking cosmic clarity—not a delusion, but the polar opposite? That’s a narrative you can’t sell, right, fuckhead!” Noah yelled at the TV. He clicked it off and flopped back onto his bed. He thought about the horrors he had seen on TV and how they were turned into “stories” that the audience would buy. A 747 heading to Singapore crashes and kills hundreds on board. The TV shots of screaming and grieving relatives at the airport waiting to hear the names of loved ones lost. What we never see, Noah thought, is the woman in that crowd at the airport saying to the TV camera that her husband was on a business trip with his secretary and he was screwing her and they both had died on that flight and “I couldn’t be happier.” Noah was sure that this had happened at some time somewhere but had never reached our living rooms. He thought about many things except the crime he had committed and that he was guilty of murder.
He pulled the covers up to his chin and stared at the ceiling and thought that if he stayed just like this in bed, no one would ever get to him. He fell asleep.
Noah woke up three hours later with a thought already buzzing in his head. It had passed over from his dream to his waking world. He didn’t want to open his eyes. He didn’t want to return to consciousness. The thought went back to the TV shrink and his clinical definition of psychosis. Noah had always imagined the gap between sanity and insanity to be a vast no-man’s land like the complex of walls and wire and cameras and searchlights and electric current that divided Cold War East and West Berlin. But now he realized that the gap was no wider than a chalk mark that could be crossed with a forehand tennis stroke. Sanity and insanity, he now thought, lived cheek by jowl and allowed those on either side to pass freely without questions or papers. In Noah’s case, all it took was a decision to cross the line. It was simply a matter of will.
Curled up in his bed, the murder had no moral context for Noah. It was, for him, the result of his action rather than inaction. That was its sum total. He had made a decision and jumped in. His mind wandered to his childhood on the dock of the family cottage and how his cousins would dive or leap into the cold water in the morning and he would take forever to lower himself in down the ladder, feet, knees, thighs, stomach. “Just jump in!” the others screamed. He had jumped in.
Noah decided to contact the police about his squash date with McEwen. They would most likely come to him, but he thought it better to volunteer. After all, he had left two phone messages on McEwen’s voice mail to show his innocence regarding McEwen’s absence. He called the police station closest to the university and was connected to the detective in charge of the investigation who asked Noah to come in for an interview.
Noah showered and shaved. He wasn’t sure what to wear. What do you wear to a police interview? Should he wear his suit and tie? Respectable businessmen wear suits every day. But if he told the police what he did for a living, which was almost certain to come up, and of his present unemployed circumstance, they may wonder why he wore a suit. Was he trying to impress them? Was he trying to throw them off? His other clothes were, under the close examination he had never given them before, too shabby and made him look, in this context, like a possible criminal. He decided on his suit pants and a crisp white shirt, no tie. In the mirror he looked unlike himself, as if he were in costume. This gave him an odd kind of confidence to play a role.
Riding the subway to the police station, Noah thought how this interview was so much bigger than anything anyone he sat with on the train would ever know. He wasn’t like a person who had just been told by his doctor that he had a terrible disease. He wasn’t like the guy sitting across from him, who very easily could have just received the bad news. The guy was around fifty and wasn’t reading or looking at anything or carrying anything, just sitting there with a dead expression, rocking back and forth with the motion of the train as if his body had given up hope. Noah had, as the saying goes, been given the ball, and how well he played the police would determine his future. He had never before been a player when the stakes were so high.
“There are two cameras, one behind me, and one behind you,” Detective Hopwood said, pointing at the cameras on the walls just below the ceiling. “We tape all our interviews, so don’t think this is anything out of the ordinary. I’m going to get myself a coffee. Can I get you one too?”
“No, thanks. I’m fine,” Noah said as Hopwood left him sitting alone on one of the two hard chairs. He was sitting on a chair that he was certain had been sat on by innumerable criminals, and he wondered whether the coffee routine was a standard test and whether Hopwood was watching him on a monitor in another room, looking for some kind of body language that might give him away. He tried to behave normally and quickly realized that there is no such thing. He looked at his right hand resting on the table in front of him and started to drum his fingers, and then, thinking that this might look theatrical, something someone might do in a movie, he stopped and folded his arms, still looking at the tabletop. He then thought that Hopwood had pointed out the cameras, and that any normal person would feel odd sitting alone with that knowledge and would likely look up at them, so he looked at the camera in front of him and had turned in his chair to look at the camera behind him when Hopwood returned.
“That one gets a wide shot of the whole room and this one is a tighter shot of you. They’re for recording everyone we talk to. It’s easier and more thorough than notes. I hope you don’t feel like you’re a suspect.”
“No, no,” Noah replied. He could feel the sweat begin to dribble from under his arms. “I’ve never done anything like this, but I have some idea of the procedure. I’m a writer on a police TV show.”
“I know the show. I’ve seen your name on the credits.”
Hopwood didn’t say whether he liked the show or not. What if he hated it? What if he had seen some of the episodes Noah had written that attacked the police?
“I’m not on the show anymore. Also, cop shows aren’t my thing. It was just a living.” Noah used the informal “cop” rather than the more formal “police,” which he thought would signal to Hopwood that they were both on the same side.
“We have Mr. McEwen’s voice mail. You called him twice the night he was murdered.”
Hopwood stopped without asking a direct question and Noah didn’t know whether to answer or not. He thought that interrogations, in part, came down to punctuation, and there was no question mark at the end of Hopwood’s remark. Was this bad English, or was it bait?
“Yes, I called him.”
“Why?”
With this unadorned, single word, it was now clear to Noah that Hopwood had been bullshitting him. Hopwood had dropped his easy-going approach, which had both him and Noah on the same side, and revealed his real intention. Noah now knew he was a suspect.
“I wanted to tell him I was at the gym. We had arranged to play squash at eight and I was supposed to meet him there around 7:45 so he could get me in. I’m not a member. I have been, but I let my membership lapse. When Patrick didn’t arrive on time, I talked the student attendant into letting me go in and change and wait for him on the court. They usually don’t allow that, but it was eight and the gym closes at nine and I guess she figured no one else was going to take the court at that hour.”
“You made another call.”
“Very good,” Noah said with a bit of a laugh. He wanted to compliment Hopwood but it came out as clumsy and condescending and Noah could hear it echo in the room. Did he just reveal that he was capable of setting up an alibi? He lowered his voice and took a deep breath, shaking his head as if to ponder the horrors that are possible in civilized society. “This is an incredibly horrible and gruesome thing.” He was expecting Hopwood to agree, but he said nothing. Had he changed gears too quickly? Had a large chunk of scenery crashed to the stage in mid-performance? Was this the way he would have written the scene in one of his cop episodes if his character was in fact guilty? “I called Patrick from the court about fifteen minutes later, since he still hadn’t shown up. I guessed he had forgotten or something more important had come up. I didn’t want him to worry about not making it. So I called to tell him I was hitting the ball around by myself, and if he couldn’t make it, no sweat. I hit the ball around for another few minutes then changed and walked home. I don’t get uptight about those things.”
“About people missing appointments. You can’t take that personally. You have to be reasonable.”
“You had a fight with a student at …” Hopwood checked his notes. “… McEwen’s book launch. This was an event to …” He again scanned his notes. Noah helped him out.
“… launch a newly published book. It’s for friends of the author and the people who published the book and others in the literary community as well as people the writer and publisher might want to suck up to.” Noah chuckled at his last remark. Hopwood didn’t. “That’s an inside thing,” Noah said. “The literati—it’s a bitchy business.” Noah wondered if this sounded gay. Would Hopwood now consider the possibility that both he and McEwen were in the closet and having an affair that had soured? This had been a plot point on an episode of his cop show, and now this scene was also beginning to sound scripted to Noah. If it was a script, he and Hopwood were actors, and the actors know the ending. Sweat from under his arms continued to stream down his sides.
“‘Bitchy business,’ meaning …?” Hopwood asked.
“Meaning there’s a lot of competition.”
“Got it,” Hopwood said with a smile.
Suddenly, and simply from this turn of the phrase “Got it,” Noah had the sense that he and Hopwood got each other. He now felt he shouldn’t have jumped to the conclusion that he was a suspect. Hopwood’s earlier abrupt question may have been nothing more than his need to get through the drudgery of a day’s work.
Noah relaxed back in his chair as much as was possible with the kind of chair made to put people on edge.
“Can you tell me about the fight?”
“At the book launch?”
“Was there another fight?” Hopwood asked without any irony.
“No, no.” Just as quickly as he had relaxed, Noah realized that Hopwood wasn’t a friend but was looking for any misstep or inconsistency and he shouldn’t get drawn into a relationship with him that went beyond cop and suspect. Anything else could only work against him. That was the real game and Noah understood he mustn’t forget it. He now had no friends. That was the rule he had to follow. “The kid was drunk and wanted to disrupt things. He was pissed off about how McEwen had treated him in a class. He was out of control. When I tried to shut him up, he kind of came at me. I’d also had a few. I pushed him back and he fell into the water. I wouldn’t have called it a major battle. I just didn’t want to see McEwen’s night ruined.”
Noah guessed Hopwood had known about the fight from one of the smokers who had witnessed it. The cops probably had the student he pushed into the water pretty high up on their suspect list. Maybe even alone on their list. Noah was certain that his own actions at the book launch had convinced Hopwood that he was not a suspect, in fact the opposite: he was a close friend who would defend McEwen’s reputation with his fists.
When the interview was over, Noah stood to leave. “I sweat,” he said.
“What?” Hopwood replied, genuinely uncertain of what he meant.
“Under my arms,” Noah said, indicating how wet his shirt was and feeling he had to explain it.
“I didn’t notice.” Hopwood smiled.
Noah had opened up a small can of worms, but one he felt had to be explained. “I walked here, and when I come inside an air-conditioned building from the heat, I have the kind of physiognomy that sweats.” Noah wanted to stop talking and get out, but it wasn’t his nature. “I’m a big sweater, always have been.”
“Doesn’t physiognomy refer to the face?” Hopwood asked as he moved to the door.
Noah honestly didn’t know the answer, and he suspected Hopwood could be right and that he had been beaten at this semantic game by a cop.
“Maybe it does. Good call,” Noah said as if they had been in competition and Hopwood had won. This was exactly the relationship Noah didn’t want. He didn’t want to start a cat-and-mouse game and have Hopwood thinking about him.
“Here’s my card.” Hopwood handed him a business card and Noah thought how things have changed, how everyone now wanted to be in business. Noah could imagine Hopwood saying, “I’m in the murder business.”
“Call that number if anything else comes to mind or you hear anything we might be interested in.”
“For sure,” Noah said. “It was nice meeting you.”
Hopwood didn’t reply. They each went their own way.
By the time he was on the street, Noah was convinced that the worst Hopwood could think of him was that he was intellectually competitive and slightly insecure, which was a much better impression than that of a machete-wielding madman.
The day was bright and warm, and Noah felt like walking. He wanted to see how his new relationship with the world felt. The people he used to envy—the businessmen with their attaché cases, the businesswomen in their heels, all of whom before had moved with a purpose that he couldn’t understand—now appeared different to Noah. Now they appeared like robots moving on defined tracks, repeating their plotted routes day after day for no other reason than that they had done it the day before. None of them would change the world. All were what used to be called Spear Carriers in his drama club at college. Noah had been a Spear Carrier in Julius Caesar. He had had no lines. He had watched from his background mark on the stage as Ian Frazer played Brutus and then, in the years after, read in the business section of his newspaper how Frazer moved up the corporate ladder to head one of the top four banks in the country. Now, walking the streets, Noah felt he was no longer a Spear Carrier. He was different from every person he passed. He was a Brutus in a real drama. He had, in his mind, taken on Shakespearian proportions. He was a warrior in his own war. Why did he have to go by other people’s definition of war? After all, one person’s warrior is another person’s terrorist, he thought. Everyone defines war to suit his or her own needs. Fighter pilots who dropped their bombs on Iraq were “heroes.” Iraqis who blew up transports with roadside bombs were “terrorists.” It had been this way since the beginning of human history. Why couldn’t he be an “assassin” rather than a “murderer”? Why couldn’t he define his war? His war wasn’t with one of the tyrants of the twenty-first century, but with the century’s false gods. His was a war over their degradation of the culture. And why was culture any less important or less coveted than land or gold or oil? Why did war have to be a world war, or a war between countries or a civil war? Noah had decided to go to war alone and with his act define his place in the world.