My mind had reached its limit, and without sleep I’d be unable to function, so I fell away for several hours. It was lousy sleep, my dreams a moonscape populated with towering cowboys, broken Indians, dead women dragging themselves across the ground and leaving bloody trails from the ragged holes in their bellies. I could hear Alice’s voice, but when I turned my head, she was gone. Jeremy’s head popped from craters, laughing at me. When I’d run to his crater he’d pop from another one and I’d run in that direction.
From somewhere behind the sky, Vangie’s somber voice would say, “Sorry, Carson.”
I awakened for good at four and went to my butcher paper. I began a new section, the formerly perplexing stacks of words and questions making sense when I added the name Day. It was the bottom line to almost everything.
I was still puzzled by the message Jeremy had conveyed through the blind man, Parks. No matter how I tried to interpret it, the George Bernard Shaw quote seemed no more than a cutesy reflection on the country as an asylum. It seemed frivolous for Jeremy, who never did anything without a subtext.
I studied my ramble of words, irritated. I leaned close to see other words scribbled in that particular storyline. Parks, referring to my brother, had said, “He called you something nice, said you was ‘ever the hero on water or land.’ Seems a nice thing to say, right?”
I stepped back and frowned. Ever the hero? Hadn’t Jeremy used the same phrase during his bedside visit?
Five minutes later I sat in the business center of the hotel, banging a computer keyboard, entering phrases into a search engine. Ever, hero, water, land. The engine returned tens of thousands of hits. I studied page after page, looking for anything to spark inspiration.
Thirty-seven screens in and about to bag the exercise, I noticed the name Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass had been one of my brother’s favorite works, a gift from his junior-year teacher at high school. Jeremy had loved Whitman, another searching spirit.
I added “Whitman” to my list of search terms and again scanned the results. On the second page of hits was a listing highlighting the terms “heroes of water and land”. I followed the link to a poem, Song For All Seas, All Ships, twenty lines in length.
Several phrases stood out as if written in neon:
To-day a rude brief recitative
Of ships sailing the Seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal …
Ever the heroes on water or on land, by ones or twos appearing,
…reserve especially for yourself …one flag above all the rest …
Flaunt out, visible as ever, the various ship-signals! …
Flags. Signals. Heroes by ones or twos.
“You bastard,” I whispered. “You tricky bastard.”
I knew what Jeremy had given me: the key for making contact. But I had to figure it out on my own, another of his damned games.
As children, my brother and I built forts in the woods behind our house, haphazard derelicts constructed from junkyard leavings. We often imagined them as ships and ourselves as heroic sailors, signaling between our forts with flags of torn sheets my mother had discarded, yelling “ahoy!” and “avast!” and whatever else heroic sailors yelled while coursing the Spanish Main.
I hung a sheet in my window, thinking I’d wait hours, maybe days. I waited for twelve minutes. The phone rang.
“Took you long enough,” Jeremy said. “Had a lobotomy recently?”
“You’re hiding across the damned street?”
“Guess again, matey.”
I went to the window and looked down into the crowd. Catty-corner was a pair of purse and luggage vendors, ink-black Somalians who hawked their wares in a succulent, musical language. They arrived at dawn and stayed past dark.
“One of the purse guys is doing recon on my window.”
“I pay M’tiwmbe two hundred a week to check every now and then.”
“How’s Folger? Is she –”
“She’s breathing and eating and, if I interpreted the sound correctly, she’s urinating as well. All that commotion just to take a piss. It sounded like someone aiming a hose at a wall.”
“How soon can we meet? We’ve got to meet. No tricks.”
“About time you did something worthwhile. I’ll send a cab. The driver has some odd notions. Play along with them.”
I stood on the corner and watched as a yellow cab roared to the curb, the driver grinning and waving furiously.
“Get in. GET IN! We are going to be important major stars together.”
The driver’s eyes blazed in two directions with cockeyed bliss. His hair looked like a field of elephant grass plowed by tornadoes. He wore a silver lamé tux jacket over a black tee emblazoned with a Warhol Marilyn. He seemed to have consumed several hundred cups of coffee.
“Stars?” I said.
“I AM GOING TO BUILD A HOUSE IN MALIBU!”
After a disorienting two blocks I discerned that a powerful and elusive Hollywood casting director had convinced my loosely wrapped driver that he was bound for stardom as long as he stayed in the director’s good graces. It appeared the director had cast me in the same movie.
I figured I knew who the director was.
When I exited at an address in Murray Hill, my driver wiggled his thumb and pinky at his mouth, screamed, “CALL WHEN YOU GET SETTLED,” and vanished like he had a date at the edge of a galaxy far, far away.
I found myself on a sedate street of brownstones. I stepped to the door of a slender building of gray sandstone and rang the bell. Jeremy opened the door wearing a red jacket and blousy blue shirt. He was thick in the middle – a pillow or something. His hair was a layer of blond snips, his eyes brown with false contacts. He’d done something to emphasize the creases in his face. He had spent time at a tanning salon, or perhaps it was a chemical concoction.
“You look ridiculous,” I said.
“I feel safe. Guess which is most important?”
We walked a long room with polished wood floors, tapestries, curio cabinets holding sculpture that looked pre-Columbian. The furniture was mismatched in a good way, selected for comfort instead of aesthetics. The fireplace was large and deep with a heavy oaken mantel. The only out-of-synch note was the roll of duct tape on the mantel.
Jeremy said, “The owners are a brace of fag ophthalmologists fixing the eyeballs of peasant kiddies in Peru or some such dreadful, goody-goody thing. I’m renting for a month. I had another nest, but had to vacate when you dropped the bricks on my Portuguese cousin.” He winked. “It was a splashy tip-off, obrigado, irmão.”
“Where’s Folger, Jeremy?”
“She’s pissing like a trouper, brother. Keep me safe and you’ll be swimming the ol’ ween once again.”
I hadn’t expected to see Folger. I knew Jeremy too well.
He clapped his hands expectantly. “So, I guess it’s down to bidness, Carson. Are you ready for me? For Sirius?” He lolled his tongue as if panting.
“You knew all along Sirius was a dog, didn’t you?”
“Prowsie and me in flagrante delicto? It would have been the highlight of her life, but we have differing astrological signs. I don’t wish to run afoul of my stars.”
“What happened, Jeremy? To Vangie.”
“She had an anxiety attack, nerves. Had to go for a run. He was waiting. Or he sent someone.”
“Jim Day?”
“I TOLD HER TO STAY PUT. GODDAMN STUPID BITCH.”
I backhanded him across the face. His head snapped sideways and he stumbled backward. His hand reached to his cheek.
“Never call Vangie anything like that again,” I said. “Not in my presence.”
His eyes narrowed and started to heat up. I said, “Don’t even think of giving me that look. All it’ll see is my back going out the door.”
He raised his eyebrows, jammed his hands in his pockets, gave me a smile of plastic bonhomie.
“So you’ve heard of Jim Day, Carson?”
“Harry did my work well. But I’ve still got a lot of holes. Like how did it all come together. How did Day approach you?”
“Oh my,” he said. “You want to start at the very beginning …”