YOU HAVE THE right to remain silent.”
“Shush, Kent.” She looks at the boy, sitting cross-legged on the ground, looking at Jeremy, a mock serious look in his eyes. She looks at Jeremy, swallows.
Jeremy puts up his hands, surrender. He reaches into his pocket, withdraws it, empty-handed. He pulls his fingers across his lips, as if sealing them, then tosses away the key.
Emily exhales.
Kent smiles. “Let’s do this one!” Jeremy twists his body, reaches behind him, picks up a puzzle box. On the cover, a large monster, Godzilla-like, stepping on a city.
“How about a different one, sweetie?” Emily says it to Kent, but looks at Jeremy.
He opens his palms, like, whatever, smiles.
Kent spills the pieces onto the floor. Jeremy feels something around his chest, a sensation that, for an instant, he can’t interpret. Is it the pain, resurfacing? No, not that, it’s smoother, duller, like the coursing of the morning’s first cup of coffee, or tea. It feels like: thanks. He’s struck by an urge to direct his appreciation, to express gratitude, to send it heavenward, thank somebody, or something. He realizes he’s got tears welling, again, a lot of that lately. He drops his eyes and lets them focus on a puzzle piece, with green and a touch of slick gray, maybe Godzilla’s toenail.
In his periphery, he allows himself to pick up the colors in Emily’s modestly appointed living room, the red throw carpet, the brownish couch, the worn wood of the shelf over the fireplace. He feels the warmth again spread in his chest, such a far cry from the pulsing pain that plagued him until two weeks ago, when the world nearly ended.
When he removed the key fob from around his neck. When he pulled from his chest the symbol of his burden, his need to be right, his certainty of his righteousness. He didn’t need an MRI. He needed to be relieved, to relieve himself, of his certitude, that singular belief in his own infallibility. Or, rather, he needed to admit to himself what he already knew: He was merely human. Not omniscient. The pain, the excruciating throbbing, was due not to cancer or disease but to a disconnect between the reality of an uncertain, chaotic existence and what he romanticized, idealized, needed.
“I had a fob, and Nik had a cross.”
“What?”
He laughs. “Never mind. I’m waxing idiotic. How we doing this puzzle, Kent?”
“Let’s put all the green pieces together.”
He feels Emily’s hand on his back, rubbing in a gentle circle. He takes a deep, appreciative breath. He picks up a puzzle piece with red jags, maybe fire jutting from a window of a building being stomped by Godzilla. He has another new sensation and tries to place it, and does: fear.
Yes, he’s been temporarily exonerated of the murders of Harry and Evan. There was sufficient doubt he could’ve pulled off such a crime, doubt cast by the conflicting physical evidence, his lack of any violent history, alibis that put him in too many places other than the murder scenes, particularly at the apparent times of death. Jeremy suspects he got some help from Andrea, or even those above her, suggesting to law enforcement that Jeremy was caught up in a larger terrorist-related plot, details missing, sotto voce, stuff that would fall under federal jurisdiction, the military.
Some suspicion for the murders has fallen on a woman who was consorting with high-tech execs, someone thought to be a prostitute, a woman described by Emily and Kent as radiant but heartless. She’s thought too to have shot Evan. There are rumors that she goes by Janine, among other names, that her fingerprints have traveled the world. That she may have loosed a lion in the San Francisco Zoo. An assassin, a harlot, a zealot, but a practical one, the perfect terrorist. But rumors, ghost trails. The woman has not been further identified, or found.
Nor has there been any discovery of a bearded man, bomb parts that Jeremy alleges exists, or Nik. Perry. Whatever his name is. Gone, just as mysteriously and silently as he appeared one day those many years ago in the lab in Oxford.
Regardless, in a way, they’ve won. Not just because they’ve evaporated. But because they managed to head off the plans of the technology consortium to announce a development in the West Bank. Who knows why? Maybe Evan’s death spooked them. Maybe they sensed danger. Maybe they just decided that their business is, plainly, business. No sense messing with efforts outside, as it is said, their core missions.
Jeremy glances at Emily and feels a surge of passion, not lust, just a craving to stay connected. He takes her in, pausing momentarily at her ankle, where he sees her blue-tinged Star of David tattoo. He’s struck by her quiet observance of Judaism, how it bolsters her inner peace, how different from Nik’s politicized version of religion. Who has the wisdom to know what’s right?
Then he turns his attention to the cover of the puzzle box. One of Godzilla’s feet pushes halfway through a building, a car pierced by the monster’s toe. The other massive foot hangs in the air, poised to stomp, the edges of a setting sun peeking out from behind the furious green giant. At the edge of the image, a big white dog appears to sprint from danger.
“I know where he is.”
Emily looks at him.
“You’ve done so well.”
He takes her meaning: he’s not touched a computer. He’s even conceded that maybe Harry was right; computers, for all their power, might create major problems. Not just because they aren’t human but because they make us less human. They make us less empathic. More computer communications, Harry has posited—or had posited—could mean more conflict. We don’t see who we’re talking to, we flame each other, we bully. We are inured to the responses we engender, just like, Jeremy thinks, I insulate myself from what everyone thought. Maybe, he’s been thinking, he can do a little less of that insulating.
“It wasn’t the computer that told me,” Jeremy says to Emily.
It was an intuition, an impulse. And not one nearly so profound.
He stands up.
“Where are you going?”
“An errand. I promise.” He feels too embarrassed to say now what he’s thinking but what he once would’ve said without reservation: I’m going to make the world a little bit safer.
“Kent, you’re a big guy now, the man of the house. Please take care of your mother.”
Kent looks up, blinks, something in his eyes, a question.
“Oh yeah, I’ll be back. This puzzle better be finished when I get here.”