The Dismal Science (29 page)

The person who was driving, a friend of hers, drove into a guardrail while trying to turn the volume up on his stereo, and then his car helicoptered through several lanes of highway, missing various cars, miraculously, any one of which could have killed Leonora, before they slammed into a streetlight. The pole, as chance would have it, struck the driver's side. The driver, named Lee, who was drunk and high on marijuana, died immediately. His body absorbed much of the force of impact, so Leonora felt almost none. The car, slowed considerably now, rolled off down a hill into the woods. Leonora walked out of the crushed car soaked in Lee's blood, but completely unharmed. She sat on the damp leaves and
watched the full moon above, listening to the cars whipping past on the freeway nearby. Eventually, she heard the sirens.

Visiting her that weekend, Vincenzo asked if she had realized that Lee had died—this happened a year after her mother died—and she nodded sleepily, staring at her thighs. She was in her bed, her prosthesis leaning against the bedside table. Her eyes were still puffy and red and she looked battered, far older than her real age. She had another month or two of shock and horror left before this, too, became another large piece of trauma lodged into her soul. She was expert enough at the process to know how it worked. Vincenzo didn't say it, because it's not the kind of thing one says to another person, but he was sure this, too, was for the best, somehow.

Looking at her in her dorm room that night and listening to her talk dreamily about what it was like to sit there on those damp leaves, staring up at the full moon and smelling the gasoline . . . and as she spoke, he knew for the first time with absolute certainty that she was already a better person—in every sense—than he, better than he'd ever been, better than he'd ever be.

The following day, at three in the afternoon, nauseated and nearly feverish with some bubbling subterranean terror—a supercharged stage fright or stage fright plus another less definable, but still knife-sharp, queasiness—Vincenzo donned a crisp white shirt, dark-blue suit, and dark tie. In the mirror, he saw an aging man dressed for a funeral. He brushed his teeth
(again) and urinated (again)—he'd been drinking coca tea all day long, hoping it would set him straight. It had not. His stomach was tangled, cinched, and saturated with acids. Walter, this working Walter, voracious consumer of facts, had spent the day doing interviews and had called to say he was back at his hotel now, filing a preliminary article. Vincenzo wasn't sure he wanted to see him.

Against his better judgment, Vincenzo went down to the hotel bar and ordered a whisky, which he hoped would dim his fear and therefore silence the roiling in his belly. Instead, the first sip was a knife twisting in his stomach. But he kept drinking anyway. From his perch at the hotel bar's corner, the doppelgänger was nowhere to be seen. This was for the best. She was not a calming presence.

Last night, Vincenzo had hastily typed up and printed out a draft of something that approximated a speech, but it was too short and too hazily conceived to be an actual speech; it was rambling and aggressively banal, violently bereft of character. He had two hours before Lenka was going to pick him up. He drained the rest of his whisky and was about to beckon the bill and head upstairs to reread the speech and pace for a while more when a supple-voiced man said, “Can I sit?”

Vincenzo turned and saw Ben motioning at the chair beside him. Groaning, he glanced around the room—no one he recognized. He drew a deep breath, and then nodded. Exhaling slowly, he turned to the bartender and gestured for another whisky.

“You ready for your big night?” Ben said. He was wearing loafers, the kind of boat shoes that the blond boys prowling Georgetown wore in the summer.

Vincenzo shrugged, shook his head.

“Was it hard to write the speech?”

Vincenzo sighed again, not looking at Ben. He rubbed his eyes. Maybe he had the mortar of the speech, but he had not discovered any bricks, yet—or probably it was the other way around and he had the bricks, but nothing to bind them. In any case, time was up, and he had built nothing—time was up and he was drinking whisky, talking to this monster.

“Well, you'll figure something out,” Ben said.

Vincenzo snorted. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course you can.”

“Am I unusual?”

Ben peered at him uncertainly.

“Of the people you visit, am I different from the others?” he said.

“Oh,
absolutely,”
Ben said, catching his meaning and slapping his back like they were old chums. “Everyone's different from everyone, and you're no exception!” He chuckled. What immaculate teeth! They were gorgeous.

Vincenzo waited for him to settle back down, and then said, “And do you enjoy it?”

“Enjoy it? I love it! What's there not to like?” Ben gestured at Vincenzo and then he gestured at the hotel and he continued with the gesture, as if to include elsewhere, nowhere, everywhere, as if to say,
Look at this world we walk upon, look at the majesty of it—what else could a person hope for!

Vincenzo declined the opportunity to give a pithy answer. Instead he held Ben firm with his gaze. Maybe this was the purpose of Ben's trip, right here. His whole trip to Bolivia was so that he could sit there, a gleaming enigma, charmingly menacing, beside Vincenzo in the moments before Vincenzo gave his speech. Maybe it was just a lot of intimidation and no matter what he said this would be the last time he saw Ben. On the other hand, maybe Ben would go upstairs and inject a lethal dose of radioactive isotopes into Vincenzo's tube of toothpaste while Vincenzo was away delivering his speech.

Sensing this was his time, his only opportunity, he said: “Will I die unexpectedly, some unforeseen heart condition, if I get up there and fan the flames of this anti-American thing—this, what is it? A shoving war from the south?”

Ben rolled his eyes and smirked. But there it was, this little false note. Something in the flawless smile. The artifice was too much. Ben's every movement felt a little overly studied, the opposite of effortless. Ben said, “Don't get ahead of yourself, Vincenzo—we don't care about this that much.” And he kept shaking his head, making skeptical faces, like some cut-rate actor, but it was all too deliberate, too forced, and so much less terrifying as a result.

“You're going to secure me a job at Lehman?” Vincenzo said. This hadn't seemed terribly plausible before and now seemed even less so. Vincenzo knew the kinds of people who ran places like Lehman, and they didn't take orders from junior
CIA
operatives in comfortable footwear, even if those operatives could magically insinuate themselves into their offices. It was too conspicuous. If Lehman hired every aging
economist whom the State Department wanted to shut up, their upper-middle management would be overrun with uncooperative bureaucrats.

“Lehman is possible. And I know you're interested in Tellus, too—we can set that up. I understand that the Project for the New American Century is also interested in you, but I don't think they've contacted you yet. If you conduct yourself respectfully, the world can be pried open for you.”

Puffing out his cheeks, Vincenzo squinted as if contemplating this. But the answer, as with everything, was more complicated. In the Latin Bible of his youth, it was written,
lectio difficilior potior
: the more difficult reading is the stronger. Yes, maybe Ben could carve a swath through a crowd of powerful white people, but he was only as dangerous as his job allowed him to be. And this man, with his iridescent teeth and gloomy shoes, his sensible no-wrinkle shirt, this man was no killer, he was one step away from running the fax machine. If this were a convention, he'd be passing out business cards, looking for an angle. And twenty-five years hence, he'd be just another exhausted, well-traveled bureaucrat in the upper management of some organization or other. Vincenzo would bet his life on it. Since he had to decide how to treat this, had to decide right now, that was his decision. He bet his life on it.

Standing abruptly, he drained his whisky, winced as it landed like fuel on the conflagration in his stomach. Then, gritting his teeth at the pain, he patted Ben on the shoulder, saying, “I'll see you later.” And with that he walked back in the direction of the elevators, feeling those eyes on him, but never once hesitating, never once looking back.

In Greek, Thanatos was a minor deity who embodied death itself. Son of Nyx (night) and Erebos (darkness), he was a taker of souls, and a prototype of Lucifer. He dwelled in the underworld. While he lurked mainly in the background of Greek myth, usually in the company of his twin, the god of sleep, his presence—and relevance—has endured through history.

Later, the Romans depicted him as a benevolent winged child, not unlike Cupid, who would swoop in to usher people to peaceful deaths. This temporary gilding of his reputation did not last, however.

To Freudians, Thanatos was the opposite of Eros. And, although Freud himself never used the word “Thanatos,” he identified its future concept concisely when he described “a diversion inwards of aggressiveness.” Later, Freud amended his assessment and came to see that the aggression in question was more often directed outward, pointed out at the world.

From the same root we get “thanatology,” the academic study of death among human beings. We also get the word “euthanasia,” for when a person, recognizing that their life has run its course, embraces death gladly.

Vincenzo held Lenka's arm—she was dressed in a limoncellocolored suit, her hair up, her mouth crimson. A guard waved them inside the National Museum, which was composed of several interconnected colonial mansions and whose interior, as
a result, was a tight, complicated series of rooms and hallways and antechambers and balconies that overlooked little patios. There were no windows facing out onto the street where the natives would have been. The museum organizers had roughly divided the maze into two sections, the modern and the ancient. The architecture was decidedly Spanish and most of the old art was poorly executed religious iconography. Crude and overly colorful images of a ghostly pale Christ looking down from the cross, dripping crimson from the gash at his side, or his emaciated corpse cradled by voluptuous maidens. Vincenzo caught glimpses of the art as Lenka swept him through the hallways and rooms, all filled with people—there were hundreds of people there. Vincenzo was aware, partially, that some of them were staring at him, but Lenka marched him right along to a small room, a claustrophobia-inducing windowless greenroom, in the modern wing.