Carter & Lovecraft (26 page)
She made them black coffee. “I’m staying at my mom’s until I go back to work,” she said, excusing the lack of food or milk in the refrigerator. “She would be really mad if she knew why I’d come out today. She doesn’t want me even thinking about Suydam. I’m trying not to, but…” She made a hopeless gesture.
“Look, Maggie, if talking about it is going to mess you up, that’s really not what we want,” said Lovecraft. “Your health comes first.”
“No!” Chun said it so forcefully she even startled herself. “I … It needs to be worked out. The department has got me seeing the psychologist, and that helps, but he doesn’t get it, either. I can’t talk to him about it honestly, because it sounds psychotic. You were there, Carter. You saw it. You know.”
Carter looked into the blackness of his cup. “What do I know, Maggie?”
She leaned forward, craning sideways a little to look at his downturned face. “That he wasn’t completely wrong. Suydam saw something, thought something. I don’t think he was wrong.” She straightened as Carter looked at her. “How he did it was wrong, I’m not defending him or excusing him. But he saw
something
.”
She sat back, and looked at her hands as she fussed with a thumb ring. “There’s something there.”
Lovecraft exchanged a glance with Carter, and said, “Like things have been twisted a little out of true?”
Chun looked at her sharply. “Twisted. Several of the notations on Suydam’s wall talk about a perceptual twist. That’s one way of looking at it, I guess. It’s not how I read it.
“I have an uncle who’s into photography. Lifelong hobby, ever since he was a kid. He used to have a 35mm SLR with motor drive. I loved the sound of that thing. It was like the beginning of ‘Girls On Film.’ Y’know, the Duran Duran song? It’s an exciting sound. Anyhow, he dropped it once, and something went wrong with the camera. It would only wind once every other exposure.
“You’d think that he’d have junked it or got it fixed, but he loved it all the more afterward, because it took two pictures to every frame. A fast double exposure, two almost identical pictures overlaid on each other with only fast-moving things in obviously different places. Once he got the exposure setting adjusted, he’d shoot whole canisters with that camera. He used to say it was like looking at our world and the one next door at the same time, pretty much the same but just out of sync.
“That’s what I think Suydam was getting at. Worlds out of sync. Close enough to touch, but we can never quite reach it. That’s what he was trying to do with those kids. To see our next-door neighbor clearly.”
“Have you ever heard of a guy called William Colt?” asked Lovecraft, as much to break the uncomfortable silence as anything.
“No. Who’s he?”
“Just a name that got mentioned,” said Carter. He didn’t want Chun going off and researching Colt herself. That might not end well. “An outlier. Suydam’s theory. How far do you think he was from proving or disproving it?”
Chun seemed surprised. “It’s all there, right on the wall. All of it. He’d finished. He’d seen it. Mr. Carter, you were right there. Why do you think Suydam went to so much trouble to die?”
“I still don’t understand why he didn’t just shoot himself. He had a gun in his hand when we went in, and we found another two in the house.”
“He was a lapsed Catholic,” said Chun. “And self-destruction is a sin.”
Black lines, red line, blue, and green in white space. Carter rotated the model, re-zeroed it, zoomed in, read annotations, zoomed out.
Carter was looking at the patterns in his office, after dropping Lovecraft off at the station to go back to Providence. Maggie Chun had done a remarkable job building a virtual model of Martin Suydam’s wall. Suydam himself would probably have been ecstatic to have seen it, magnificent in all its deranged glory.
Carter zoomed out once more and looked at it as a whole, a dark network of interactions marked by positions, lines, and definitions. The nomenclature of the labels were nested, and marked further iterations of relationship between the irregularly placed points. Carter could switch off the original wall’s appearance and replace it with patterns wrought by these subordinate connections. At first glance, they were a mess of lines, more or less parallel, but not quite. There were five such subordinate sets. As he clicked through them, he held up the aluminum cube, turning it in one hand.
One, two, three, four, five … they matched the patterns of striations on the cube’s sides perfectly, as far as he could see.
But the star was the sixth side, the side Suydam had fashioned with colored threads on his wall. The side with the thickened line from the upper right down to about a third of the way along from the bottom-right corner on the lower edge when aligned in the same manner. What was that, and why did Suydam regard it as so important that, of the six data sets, this was the one he laid at the front of his pattern?
Carter ran his thumb back and forth along the crease. “Here comes The Twist!” Hammond said in his dreams, and that was probably what Suydam had called it. Lovecraft had called it a “perceptual twist.” Chun said it was the next iteration of reality printing through. Carter eased a growing tension across his shoulders, driving the fingers of his free hand into the muscles. Why did he think they were all wrong? Why did he think the truth was more dangerous still?
He mentally shook himself. These were dangerous thoughts. When you start to believe that only you know the truth, it doesn’t bode well. When the alternatives are all enough to put you into a psychiatric wing, you realize you’re just putting yourself forward as King of the Mad.
Perhaps, he thought, he should get drunk. Maybe it was all just conspiracy bullshit and he was working himself into the same sort of state of frothing belief in coincidences being significant usually occupied by the flat earthers, the hollow earthers, the moonshot and Kennedy conspiracy theorists, the birthers and the truthers, the reptilian ruler nuts, nukes-in-a-volcano idiots, and the whole fucking flock of resolute mouth-breathers.
Alcohol looked like a rational act. A lot of alcohol. It might help him forget, at least for a while, about almost drowning on dry land. No amount of skepticism would get him past that. He had either suffered an incredibly disciplined psychotic break, or he was just looking to get drunk so he could ignore the big picture for a little while.
That seemed a fair trade, so he got his jacket and headed for his favorite bar.
* * *
Emily Lovecraft always knew her relationship with Ken Rothwell was a mayfly sort of affair. They liked each other well enough, and enjoyed the novelty of their different lifestyles, but Lovecraft knew that as soon as his political ambitions got out of neutral and he really started reaching for the prize, she would be jettisoned as unsuitable. She wasn’t rich, her politics were liberal, she was a dangerous intellectual, and she said “fuck” too much.
Still, she was expecting him to be up-front about it. One evening there would be an “I want to talk about us” kind of conversation leading up to “It just isn’t working,” and she’d promised herself a spa weekend if he resorted to “It’s not you, it’s me.” What she definitely had not been expecting was for him to go emo on her.
Rothwell had always been a politician, right from birth. It’s what he had been raised to do. He lacked intellectual heft, but, God, could he ever do a firm, dry handshake, look you full in the face with those blue eyes, smile like he almost meant it, nod while you talked, and seem to take an interest. Jumping Jehoshaphat, you
would
buy a secondhand car from this man, and be glad to have done so.
When he dumped her, it would play out like he was selling her an insurance policy. What she actually got was sullen silences, distraction, and dropping her off at her house three times in a row without even hinting he wanted to stay over. She truly didn’t mind if he did, and for a good while neither did he, but now all of a sudden he was giving her the kind of perfunctory kiss you give an elderly relative, and scuttling back to his car. It was sad; her projected scenario for the breakup had included one last farewell fuck, and now that seemed unlikely to happen. He wasn’t great in bed, but he had a good body, and that was distracting enough for a busy girl.
“Ken, is everything okay? You’ve been kind of distant recently.”
They were on her doorstep. She’d had enough of him being weird with her and had decided that this was going to be the make or break evening. She’d given him every chance during the meal, then they’d gone to see a production of
Richard III
, and now here they were, on her doorstep and still with no definite resolution.
He seemed honestly surprised at the question. “Have I? I’m sorry. Not been sleeping too well. I’m not feeling myself.”
“Have you seen a doctor? Could be a low-level virus or something. Hangs around making you miserable, then either goes away or turns bad. You should get yourself checked out.”
“Yeah.” He gave his car a longing glance that Lovecraft did not miss. “Yeah, that might be it.”
“Want to stay over? I’ll dust off the waffle iron for you. Waffles…”
It was a strange thing to see. He looked at the car and his need to leave was palpable. Then he looked down for a few breaths, and then he looked at Lovecraft. He smiled and it was like he was selling her aluminum siding.
“Sure,” he said. That smile frightened her a little. “Sure. I’ve been neglecting you, and I’m sorry. Yes, I’d like to stay. Thanks.”
* * *
Just under an hour later, Lovecraft was obliged to beat the putative senator repeatedly on the side of the head with her clock radio.
When he had come in, he looked around like he’d never seen the place before, and he never stopped smiling. Lovecraft began to wish she’d just made do with the dry little kiss at the door and seen him on his way then, but now she was stuck with him. They’d sat around, talking awkwardly like characters in a movie made by somebody who will never be John Cassavetes. Then they went to bed, Lovecraft trying to work up some enthusiasm for what was shaping up to be a swift mercy fuck, all the quicker to get Rothwell out of the house and on his way home.
Rothwell was never very freaky in bed. Lovecraft got the impression that he thought pretty much anything other than missionary was an assault on his masculinity, probably unconstitutional, and downright un-American in any case. Tonight, however, he was different. Unnervingly different. He wanted to kiss, a
lot
, and got a little bit bitey in the process. He got close to drawing blood a couple of times and she had to tell him to stop. Then he rolled her over and covered her with his body. He was strongly built, played sports in college and had kept up with some track sports long after. Alongside the racquetball and squash, he had kept himself strong and athletic. Lovecraft liked his body, but she wasn’t very happy about what he was doing with it at that exact moment. She’d momentarily thought he was going to try something utterly alien to his normal lovemaking and go doggie-style, but then she felt him part her buttocks.
“No,” she said, and half laughed to show she wasn’t offended by the sentiment, but wasn’t up for that.
Rothwell ignored her. He was so strong. Lovecraft started to feel worried.
“Ken, no. I don’t wanna…”
She could feel him bringing pressure to bear. His hands were on her wrists.
“Ken … no!”
She struggled. He was breathing heavily. It was as if he’d lost the ability to speak, he was so stupid with lust.
“Fuck’s sake, Ken! Get off me!”
He paused, and she thought she’d gotten through to him. Then he said in a dreamy, thick voice, “I love it when you talk dirty.” He started to penetrate her.
Lovecraft felt fear, but it was as nothing to her sudden blazing anger. She brought her wrist to her mouth and—in not trying to break his grip—Rothwell permitted the movement, bringing his own wrist within range of her teeth. Then she bit him, hard, and if she had gotten down to the bone it would have suited her just fine.
He cried out and snatched his hand away, and in the moment when her hand was free, she snatched the clock radio—a nice piece of equipment in a wooden box—and twisted far enough to get a clear shot at Rothwell’s head. She slammed it hard upside his head, but he only grunted, so she angled it for the next blow so that the corner struck first.
He cried out, and his weight lifted enough for her to push her shoulders back and wriggle out from under him. She ran to the side of the room and stood, glaring at him, naked and furious. He looked at her uncomprehendingly, holding the side of his head. Even in the gloom of the bedroom, she could see his ear was bleeding.
“You wanna do that,” she shouted at him, “you use lube, you go slow, and you better
ask fucking nicely first
!” He was looking at his hand, seeing the blood there. “And when I say no, I mean
no!
Saying no and struggling is not playing hard to get, Ken! What the fuck were you thinking?”
“Emily.” He said her name slowly, as if remembering it, as if it were something alien on his tongue. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? You just tried to
rape
me, Ken!”
The word stung him, made him flinch as if she’d spat in his face. “No.” He shook his head. “No.”
Lovecraft didn’t know what to think of him. He seemed stunned, not just by a couple of solid blows to the head, but stunned at his actions. All in all, though, she would be happier with him out of the house.
“You’d better go,” she said. “We’ll talk about this, but in broad daylight.”
And in a public place
.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. This time it sounded a little more sincere, or at least human. “I don’t know … that wasn’t like me. I’m sorry. It’s the strain.”
Lovecraft wanted to ask “What strain?” but didn’t want a conversation.
Rothwell looked at her. She’d never seen him looking confused before. Not just puzzled, but confused all the way down to the metal.
“I’m going to win the election.” It wasn’t political bravado, or the sureness of a rhetorical flourish. He said it as if he was telling her he had been diagnosed with an inoperable malignant cancer and was still in denial about it himself.
