Noah woke up to his ringing phone. Like most mornings, his first thought was “I’m a killer.” This morning it was a sickening thought and the caller deepened his nausea. Detective Hopwood wanted to know if he would be available for a coffee in the afternoon at a place near Noah’s apartment called Buena Bean. Noah agreed to meet him, hung up and flopped back onto his pillow and stared at the ceiling. How did Hopwood know where he lived? He hadn’t given his address in their first meeting. He realized that Hopwood knew more about him than he had thought. And why coffee? Why not meet in the station again? Was this a set-up, some kind of chummy cop trick to lower his guard?
Hopwood squeezed the lemon rind over his double espresso. “I like this place. I’m not a shitty-coffee and doughnut cop.”
“I guess the cop and doughnut thing is a bit of a myth,” Noah said.
“Unfortunately, it isn’t,” Hopwood said as he sipped his coffee. “There are a lot of dumb, fat cops who love their doughnuts. I’m no genius, but I try to control my weight. I played junior hockey before I became a cop. I was always in good shape and wanted to stay that way. But it gets harder every year. I’m a good fifteen pounds over my playing weight.”
Was he letting Noah know that he wasn’t a dumb doughnut cop but a smart double-espresso cop who had Noah in his sights? Was this casual meeting Hopwood’s way of narrowing the plank that Noah had to walk?
Noah was suspicious of the whole conversation and waited for the real agenda to reveal itself. Hopwood finished his espresso and sat back. He put both hands together as if in prayer and held them to his lips. This was the pose of a man who was thinking. He clearly wanted to send that message to Noah. He didn’t have the answer but he was trying to ask the right question. Noah suspected this non-threatening posture was meant to put him at ease but it did the opposite. It was a cop move and he wasn’t sure where it was going.
“I think I have a case against the student you took on the night of the book launch.”
The plank Noah now stood on narrowed by a few more inches. Of every possible outcome of his act that Noah had written and rewritten in his head, he had never included the student. He had earlier thought that the student could be a suspect but had never contemplated the implications of his actual arrest. Perhaps his job writing cop shows had had an influence and he could think of suspects as nothing more than actors in a drama.
“I can’t put him at the scene with any hard evidence yet. We found a few of his prints in McEwen’s office, but he had been there just days before the murder to plead his case for a better mark on an assignment. He doesn’t have a solid alibi for what he was doing and where he was at the time of the murder, and his story about the incident at the book launch didn’t match that of the witnesses. He also changed his story of what happened with you that night from one interview to the next. He now claims he was there but didn’t get into a fight with anyone. I have a gut feeling that this kid is our killer. He had been in McEwen’s office and had seen the machete. He couldn’t control his anger, as was evident at the book launch.”
“I pushed him. He didn’t push me.”
“But there was provocation. You didn’t just walk up to some quiet student minding his own business and push him into the water, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to help me out here and come down to the station and pick him out of a lineup. I know it was dark, which is working against us, but a positive ID is essential.”
Us, Noah thought. What the fuck does that mean? Is he pulling me into this fucked-up investigation, into railroading some innocent kid? Noah had read too many news stories in recent years about the wrongfully accused—men who had done ten and twenty years in prison for murders they didn’t commit and all because the cops or prosecution twisted the case to get a conviction. They didn’t want justice—they wanted a win.
“Do you think you can do it?” Hopwood asked.
“I think I could identify the guy I pushed.”
“This is really little more than a formality. You just have to look at a handful of photographs. I know he was at the book launch, I just want to make sure he’s the guy you pushed.”
Noah hated the cliché “little more than a formality.” He had used it himself in his scripts when he was fucking over the suspect. He thought that Hopwood was more original than that. But who can tell these days whether TV is imitating life or life is imitating TV or even if it matters. Perhaps, Noah thought, it’s all one big fucked-up intermingled system of social schizophrenia where reality has become irrelevant and the culture is a rabid animal chasing its tail and gorging on its own entrails.
“Are you free tomorrow at noon?” Hopwood was trying to get the last drop from his empty coffee cup, and before Noah could answer, he interjected, “They roast their own beans here.” He didn’t say anything else. All these little moves were so obviously the tricks of the trade, the cat playing with the mouse. And even if Noah wasn’t, in Hopwood’s mind, the guilty mouse, he was to be played, because this is how cops relate to the world.
On his way home from Buena Bean, Noah realized for the first time that his crime may not be exclusively his. No matter how he had previously defined his act, it had been only in terms of himself. Whatever it was, he had been solely responsible for it and its consequences. But now this other thing, this student. This wasn’t a consequence he had intended. This wasn’t part of “the act.” This was an injustice that not very many years ago he might have fought against in the streets. Not only would it be a wrongful conviction but more importantly it would no longer be Noah’s crime. Or was Hopwood’s case against the student all bullshit? Did his real case have Noah as the killer? Was the suspicion around the student only a decoy, a trick to get Noah thinking the way he was thinking at this moment?
Noah stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and gripped his head between his hands like any other crazy street person might do. He couldn’t think like this. Every conversation interpreted and reinterpreted, picked apart like an autopsy searching for the clue that would reveal not how Noah died but how he would die. Perhaps this thinking came from the fact that he had been a hypochondriac from an early age. It had started with a burst appendix. He had been at the lake with his family and they got him to the hospital just in time. From then on any little symptom had scared him. His family doctor used to say about symptoms, “When you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras.” He tried to pull himself together. He believed that a good part of being normal was acting normal. He put his hands in his pockets and walked and tried to identify the “horses” in Hopwood’s thinking. The student was most likely Hopwood’s main suspect. But why would the student lie about the fight at the book launch? Why lie when you’re innocent? Why did Noah lie when he was guilty? He realized how unintelligible life could be when we try to sort out its truths from its lies and right from wrong. So we invent systems to address these questions, Noah thought. The system is nothing more than an intelligible narrative imposed on the chaos of human life. The Catholic Church was the system in a good part of the world for centuries. Islam another system, democratic capitalism another, as was National Socialism in Germany and communism in the Soviet Union. For each system to work, reality had to be bent to fit its form and laws written to justify the bending. Noah saw Hopwood cherry-picking the facts he needed to make his case against the student while ignoring the more complex reality that could push it into the unknown. This, Noah realized, is the justice system.
He remembered reading how Nixon had been forced from office for the Watergate break-in and how this showed that the “American system worked.” Nixon hadn’t been dumped for murdering a million Southeast Asians during the Vietnam War. They got him for, as Nixon himself correctly described it, “a third-rate burglary.” The system worked. What was missed was the reality the American narrative couldn’t bend or legalize, a reality the system couldn’t have withstood, and that was to prosecute Nixon and Kissinger for mass murder. As he walked, Noah wrote this essay in his head. If the system really worked, why weren’t they prosecuted for mass murder? Because the system only had to work to maintain the appearance of democracy. This would allow America to move on without self-recrimination or guilt or responsibility. Hopwood was, Noah realized, only doing his job and looking for a smaller but similarly workable narrative.
Noah took a beer from his fridge and thought he might write the scene that the TV producer wanted. But he had no energy for it. The idea of writing something for TV now seemed to him a profound waste of time. Even if it was what he and the producer had called a satire of our political system. As if a satire would change the world, Noah thought. That’s the real joke. The notion of satire, which at one time had interested Noah as a political tool, now seemed naive; as if there was something to be said that could make a difference. There’s nothing more pathetic than a naive satirist, he thought as he polished off his beer and cracked another, noticing it was his last.
It was two-thirty in the afternoon and a safe hour to call Andrea Scott without the risk of her husband answering. “Andrea isn’t home,” the nanny said. “Would you like to leave a message?”
“No. It’s about reupholstering a couch. I think we can get the material she wants. I’ll call her cellphone.” Noah called her cell and got her in the middle of coffee downtown with two friends. He had seen women like her in small groups, well-to-do housewives, drinking coffee at this hour in cafés attached to high-end clothing stores, and he had had no idea who they were or what they talked about. Now, at least, he had a clue. They were Andrea Scott. They had been to the mountaintop and there was nothing there except a heated pool. She told him she couldn’t talk and would call him back tomorrow.
It was hot and he had no air conditioning. He finished off his last beer and decided to go down to the pub next door for a cold draft in an air-conditioned space.
The pub wasn’t Noah’s scene, although he wasn’t sure he had one. It attracted any number of types, from old drunks to the wet T-shirt crowd. He hated that drinkers in this city didn’t know their place. It was impossible to find an establishment with true character. People from all over invaded every pub and bar as if their choice depended more on parking than on the character of the room. It was depressing and at times made Noah want to move to Dublin, get a small flat in a half-decent area and drink himself to death in the corner pub surrounded by regulars. A Brendan Behan without talent; not a bad way to go, he thought.
He sat at the window bar, which was half a dozen stools pushed up to a counter where the pub’s front window opened onto the street. People walked by on the sidewalk within three or four feet of the customers. It was neither a sidewalk table nor a real bar. It was a concept. Noah didn’t like concepts because he could imagine the conversation between the investors over the “selling point” of the window bar. He thought how so few things in the sprawling, developer-built city were truly indigenous. Most seemed born of a marketing scheme. Today, however, he lacked the energy to make a better choice, since the difference between all of life’s choices seemed, in his present state of mind, like nothing more than a “city’s best pizza” feature in a lifestyle magazine.
Sitting next to him at the window bar was a drinker of about seventy with a weathered face, a greying pony-tail, a plaid shirt and jeans and, in a small-town way, a worldly aura. This wasn’t a guy, Noah guessed, who had been to Egypt or Ecuador or New Guinea, but the squint that framed his sharp blue eyes wasn’t innocent. It gave the impression he had seen a certain amount. Maybe Janice Joplin backstage on acid or a motel dice game that ended with a dead guy. After a bit of chat about the weather he revealed he had worked the Hibernia offshore oil rigs, had done time and had survived prostate cancer. “I’m a cancer survivor!” Noah could not understand the need some people had to associate one’s self in this way with the disease—as if cancer was the devil and they had beaten him in the name of good. Hibernia also had no frickin’ wife or frickin’ kids. No frickin’ mortgage either. He was now working at a car wash that handled mostly Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches and Lexuses. “Our brushes don’t leave micro scratches on high-end paint jobs you pick up at most other washes. You don’t see many Hummers no more in this financial climate and with global warming. That was a nineties, early-2000 vehicle. All about the size of your dick. Ate gas like there was no tomorra. A guy I worked with at the wash used to say they drive Hummers while Rome burns. My choice vehicle is the BMW 5 series. That is, for your dollar, the best vehicle on the road today.”
When Noah told him he didn’t drive and had no licence, Hibernia snorted a laugh and shook his head. He took another long drink of his beer. “Not a bad idea in this financial climate and with global warming.”
Noah downed his cold pint and ordered another for each of them. Sensing that his drinking partner didn’t offend easily, he asked him why he did time.
“Stupidity. That shoulda been the charge. Sheer frickin’ stupidity. Nothin’ to be proud of on that side of things except you pay for it. Then you got these frickin’ businessmen, the CEOs, and they don’t pay for shit. Society just gives ‘em the green light.”
“Do you drink here often?” Noah asked.
“Couple times a week. I take the bus south from the wash and pick up the subway on the corner to the east end. Bit of a rough area out there, but not so bad if you’re my age. It’s kids who get into the gangs. Maybe I shoulda been one of those social-work types with my experience but I don’t have the patience to work with kids. Maybe it’s because I never had any. And maybe because I never saw a big difference between the criminal and the supposed innocent man. In most situations I experienced it sure as hell ain’t no difference of character.”
Hibernia was exactly what Noah needed in a drinking partner at this point. Push a button, get a conversation. No need to get involved. A lot like sex with a married woman, Noah thought.
It was after one in the morning, and Noah waited for Hibernia on a bleak commercial street corner under a bright plastic sign advertising “Girls Girls Girls.” This was Hibernia’s turf.
Two stiletto-heeled hookers in micro skirts stood a few feet away on the curb smoking. Noah didn’t even get the standard, laconic “Want a date?” from them and figured he must not look like a john. Johns cruise in cars, hotel rooms on wheels. For these girls, a blowjob, twenty dollars and one more rock of crack was their circle of life. Noah thought they should call this part of town “One More.” One more then I quit. One more then I clean up. One more then I go back to school. One more then I get a real job. One more then I go back home.
Hibernia came out of “Girls Girls Girls.” They went into a nearby alley, where they did half a gram of coke. High, and drug friendly, Noah said, “I’ve committed a crime. It wasn’t small.”
“Don’t want to hear about it.” Hibernia had another snort and passed the coke to Noah.
“Can I ask why?”
“‘Cause we’re all alone in the world, my man.”
They finished off the coke in silence and returned to “Girls Girls Girls” for another beer.
They drank with two women Hibernia knew, one in her mid-twenties and one around forty. The conversation didn’t get much beyond American Idol but there were some good laughs and impressions of the judges. Like the coke, the beer got paid for in a random, “This one’s mine!” way. No phone numbers or email addresses were exchanged, and it was after four by the time Noah got home. He wanted more coke and was coming down hard, so he guzzled two beers in a row and fell asleep on the couch without taking off his clothes.
Noah woke the next morning feeling almost paralyzed. He remembered he had to be at the police station. The phone rang. It was the secretary from the English department where McEwen had taught his creative writing course. At the beginning of the semester McEwen had given her names he wanted as guest lecturers during the session. Noah’s name had “Television Script Writing” next to it. The department wanted to finish the course that McEwen had laid out and wondered whether Noah would be available on the course’s last day, May 3rd, at 10:40, Room 200, the Gilchrist Building. His first thought was, would The Hobson Girl be there? His next was that McEwen had given him “Television Writing.” Aside from everything that had happened, Noah still read this as a backhanded acknowledgement and thought that in death McEwen was still a prick. He accepted.
Hopwood met Noah at the station’s reception area and walked him up to his office. “I watched some of the TV shows you wrote on DVD. Pretty good. I don’t watch much TV but I could see you had a different angle than most of the writers.”
“I try.”
Noah wondered why Hopwood had taken the time to watch his old shows unless he was looking for something.
The lineup was no different from the TV version. But why all the drama? Noah wondered. They knew the student was there that night. Was the lineup really “just a formality,” as Hopwood had described it, or was something else going on?
Hopwood placed photos of six men on his desk. “Second from the right,” Noah said without hesitation. “Him.” He pointed at the photo.
“You’re sure?” Hopwood asked.
“Yes. That’s who I pushed into the water.” And with this, at least for now, Noah had convicted an innocent man.
He left the station and walked home. Thinking about what he had done seemed futile. What was done was done.
He decided to count his footsteps between the station and his apartment, anything to stop his mind from running through this new complication. But after a few hundred steps counting seemed like the mental activity of a crazy person, or at least an obsessive-compulsive. The only thing that could save his soul—not him, but his soul, he thought—was to bring all of the suspicion and doubt and duplicity to an end. Oh my god, he thought, I’m looking for closure! His snorting laugh snapped him out of yet another bout of useless torment. This could be the real price I will pay, the unexpected hell, he laughed to himself. I could become one of those people on TV “seeking closure.” Noah despised this media invention picked up by so many damaged people clinging to the hope that their troubles can be resolved. As if “trouble” was an infection and “closure” was the antibiotic. He knew from watching enough CNN that closure could never be reached; it could only be sought. The seeking is what gives closure its legs on shows like Larry King. And one can only seek it as a celebrity of tragedy on TV. Closure cannot be sought in private. Noah could hear the producer in the control room, watching his televised confession to murder and yelling at his switcher, “Give me the McEwen photo on his desk drowned in blood! Go to Noah Douglas crying! Give me more fucking tears, Noah!”
There was no closure. There was only the gratification of the viewer’s appetite for schadenfreude. I don’t think I’ll go public, he thought, with a smirking satisfaction that he alone could deprive the entire CNN audience of its pornographic fix. “Seven million with one blow!” He took a well-balanced kick at a rock in his path that finished with his right leg extended and both arms out. Ronaldo!
That’s why they go nuts in Brazil, Noah realized. That kick. The Saviour on the cross with one leg in your face. Christ with attitude!