Underworld (29 page)

They were showing the tape again. The TV set was on in the empty room and they had the tape going, they had the victim at the wheel, the random man in the medium Dodge, alive again in sunlight—they were running it one more time.

Matt came in, surprised to find the TV on, and he sat on the footstool near the screen. When it was running he could not turn away from it. When it wasn't running he never thought about it. Then he'd get on line at the supermarket back home and there it was again on the monitors they'd installed to keep shoppers occupied at the checkout—nine monitors, ten monitors, all showing the tape.

But this time something was different. There was a voice-over, barely audible, and he looked around for the remote control device. He hit the button a couple of times and the voice came up and it had something in it that matched the tape. The voice was naked the way the tape was naked. A man's voice, flat and stripped, saying something about the weather.

A set of words appeared, superimposed across the bottom of the tape.

LIVE CALL-IN VOICE OF TEXAS HIGHWAY KILLER.

The voice was asking about the weather in Atlanta. They cut from the videotape to a live shot of a face above a desk, a woman with red hair and amazing green eyes. The anchorwoman. The anchorwoman was telling the caller that the weather desk said rain.

Then she said, “And clearly this is not a true voice we are hearing over the phone lines. This is a manipulated voice, an altered voice.”

And the voice said, “Well, it is a device that disguises the sound. It is a device that's a little more than three inches by two inches and you fit it to the talk part of the telephone and it makes the sound hard to identify as an individual.”

Then she said, “Just to recap. We are taking a call from an individual
who identifies himself as the Texas Highway Killer. He has given us information known only to the real killer and to the authorities and we have checked this information with the authorities in order to verify the caller's credentials.”

Then she said something to the caller about his reason for calling.

Matt looked at her, half mesmerized. Those eyes were an amazement, like offshore green you see from an airplane.

The voice said, “Why I'm calling is to set the record straight. People write things and say things on air that I don't know from day one where they're coming from. I feel like my situation has been twisted in with the profiles of a hundred other individuals in the crime computer. I keep hearing about low self-esteem. They keep harping about this. Use your own judgment, Sue Ann. How does an individual with this kind of proven accuracy where he hits targets in moving vehicles where he's driving with one hand and firing a handweapon with the other and he's not supposed to be aware of his personal skills?”

The anchorwoman looked into the camera. She had no choice of course. The camera was on her, not on the caller. She was a live body and he was just a voice, or not a voice. The odd sound, the devoicing, with contour and modulation strained out. Electronically toned but not without a human quality, Matt thought, a trace of jerkwater swerve. The struggle to speak, the bare insides of the simplest utterance.

The anchorwoman listened.

“I keep hearing about history of head trauma whereby an individual, you know, can't control their behavior.”

They cut to the tape again. It showed the man at the wheel of the medium Dodge.

“Let's set the record straight. I did not grow up with head trauma. I had a healthy, basically, type childhood.”

The car approaches briefly, then falls back.

“Why are you doing it?”

“Say what?”

“Why are you committing these murders?”

“Let's just say it's a nice seasonal day where I'm located here, with scattered clouds, and if that's a hint to my location, then take it as a hint, and if this is all a game, then take it as a game.”

On the screen the man at the wheel does his little wave, the friendly understated wave to the camera and the future and all the watching world, his hand wagging stiffly from the top of the wheel.

“You are aware, are you not, that one of these crimes is said to have been the work of a copycat killer. Can you comment on that for us?”

Now here is where he gets it. Matt could not look at the tape without wanting to call out to Janet. Hurry up, Janet, here it comes. Getting her mad. Mad at the tape and mad at him. And the more often they showed it, the more singsong he put in his voice. Hur-ree u-up, here it co-omes. An anxious joke, a joke in somebody else's voice, not meant to be funny. Janet swore at him and said enough. But it wasn't enough. It was never enough.

“Let's just say, okay, the police have their job and I have mine.”

The eeriness of the car that keeps on coming after the driver is shot. It approaches briefly, then falls back.

“Which the correct term for this is not sniper by the way. This is not an individual with a rifle working more or less long-range. You're mobile here, you're moving, you want to get as close to the situation as humanly possible without bringing the two vehicles into contact, whereby a paint mark might result.”

The car is drifting toward the guardrail now. The odd sound of the caller's voice, leveled-out, with faint tremors at the edges, odd little electronic storms, like someone trying to make a human utterance out of itemized data.

They cut to the face above the desk. The anchorwoman live. Her elbows rested on the desk now, hands tucked together beneath her chin. Matt wondered what this meant. Every shift of position meant a change in the state of the news. The green eyes peered from the screen. And the altered voice went on, talking in that flat-graphed way, he was actually chatting now, confident, getting the feel of the medium, the format, and the anchorwoman listened because she had no choice and everybody watched her as she listened. They were watching her in Murmansk in the fog.

The voice said, “I hope this talk has been conducive to understand the situation better. For me to request that I would only talk to Sue Ann Corcoran, one-on-one, that was intentional on my part. I saw the
interview you did where you stated you'd like to keep your career, you know, ongoing while you hopefully raise a family and I feel like this is a thing whereby the superstation has the responsibility to keep the position open, okay, because an individual should not be penalized for lifestyle type choices.”

They began to run the tape again. It showed the man at the wheel of the medium Dodge.

When his mother came in he was scouring a frying pan with a short-handled brush. She stood there and looked at him.

“You'll wear it out,” she said.

“I did this in the army. I liked doing it. It was the best thing about the army.”

“That was a long time ago. Besides, the pan is already clean. Whatever you think you're doing, you're not getting the pan any cleaner.”

“The TV was on. When I walked in,” he said. “You normally leave the TV on?”

“Not normally. But if you say it was on, I guess it was on. Abnormally.”

“I always thought you were careful.”

“I'm pretty careful. I'm not a fanatic,” she said. “You're wearing out the steel. You'll clean right through it.”

He made dinner for them and they kept a fan going because the air conditioner seemed to be running at half strength.

“I walked over there today. Quite a few buildings are gone. Nothing in their place. Parking lots without cars. It's very strange to see this. There's a skyline, suddenly.”

“I don't go over there,” Rosemary said.

“Good. Don't.”

“I don't like to go.”

“I looked at 611.”

“I don't want to see it.”

“No, you don't. Eat your asparagus,” he said.

He heard thunder in the west, the promise of rain on stifling nights, one of the primitive memories.

“I caught Nick just before he left the hotel. Told him the doctor said you were in great shape.”

“Don't get carried away.”

“They'll send me printouts of all the tests.”

“Does he ever say anything to you?”

“Nick?”

“Does he ever say anything?”

“No.”

“Not to me either.”

“He erased it,” Matt said.

“I guess what else could he do.”

“What else could he do?”

“I don't know,” she said.

They ate quietly for a while. Two of the cats came out of the bedroom. They slipped past the chairs like liquid fur.

“I went to see Mr. Bronzini.”

“Albert. He's the last rose of summer. I told him last time I saw him. See a barber. He goes out in his house slippers. I said to him.”

“He lost weight.”

“What did I say? You're turning into an old eccentric.”

They finished eating and Matt went into the kitchen and got the fruit he'd bought, huge ruby grapes that did not have the seeds bred out of them, and peaches with leafy stems.

“What time do you want me to wake you up?”

“Don't bother,” he said.

“What time is your plane?”

“When I get there.”

“You have your ticket all set?”

“I'm taking the shuttle.”

“The shuttle.”

“I don't need a ticket.”

“What's the shuttle?”

“I go to the airport, I get on the plane and we go to Boston. Unless I get on the wrong plane. Then we go to Washington.”

“Where was I when they stopped using tickets?”

“I pay on the plane.”

“What if all the seats are taken?”

“I get the next plane. It's the shuttle. One plane goes, there's another waiting.”

“Where was I when they did this? The shuttle. Everybody knows this but me.”

He waited for her to say something about the enormous grapes bunched in the ceramic bowl, or to eat one, rinsed and glistening.

“What about Arizona?”

“What about it?” she said.

“I don't know. What about it?”

The last cat came out of the bedroom, the shy white one, and Matt scooped it onto his thigh.

“Scrubbing pots and pans.”

“That was the best part of basic training,” he said. “Because it was the most civilian part.”

“I don't know how many nights I stayed awake when they sent you over.”

“How many letters did I write saying I was nowhere near the combat zone?”

“You were in the country. That was near enough for me.”

“The country's not that small. If they fired a shot in Khe Sanh, I wasn't about to get hit wherever I was sitting, comfortably indoors, doing my drudge work.”

“You were luckier than a lot of others.”

“You sure you don't want to go?”

“I'm staying here,” she said.

They sat there with the fruit between them. He heard rain glancing off the window, sounding cool and fresh, and he looked at his mother. She didn't see peaches with leafy stems as works of art.

“I'm going to early mass.”

“Say hello to God for me. I'll have coffee waiting when you get back.”

“He erased it,” she said. “Because what else was he supposed to do?”

She said good night and went inside. The cats vanished while he made up the sofa. Nick was always the subject, ultimately. Every subject,
ground down and sifted through, yielded a little Nicky, or a version of the distant adult, or the adolescent half lout looking to hit someone. These were the terms of the kinship. He lay in the dark and listened to the rain. He felt little. He felt small and lost. His wife was little. He had undersized kids. They did nothing in the world that would ever be noticed. They were innocent. There was a curse of innocence that he carried with him. Against his brother, against the stature of danger and rage he could only pose the fact of his secondness, his meek freedom from guilt.

There was a noise near the door. He didn't move for a moment. He lay there listening. The rain hit hard now, splashy, rattling the window. He heard the noise again and got up. He put on his glasses and looked through the peephole. He edged the door slowly open. He looked into the hallway, long and prison-lit, left and right, rows of closed doors, all blank and still, and he was a grown man in his mother's house, afraid of noises in the hall.

How deep is time? How far down into the life of matter do we have to go before we understand what time is?

The old science teacher, Bronzini, moved through the snow, slogging, dragging happily, head down, his cigar box tucked under his arm—the scissors, the combs, the electric clipper to do the nape of Eddie's neck.

We head out into space, we brave space, line up the launch window and blast off, we swing around the planet in a song. But time binds us to aging flesh. Not that he minded growing old. But as a point of argument, in theory only, he wondered what we'd learn by going deeper into structures beneath the standard model, down under the quantum, a million billion times smaller than the old Greek atom.

The snow came down, enormous star-tipped flakes, feathery wet on his lashes, stuck and gone, and he raised his head to see parked cars humped and stunned, nothing moving in the streets, snow on the back of his hand—touches flesh and disappears.

He climbed the stairs to Eddie's apartment and rang the bell. No ding or buzz, no sawtooth whine. He knocked on the metal sheath
that covered the door and heard Mercedes approach in her slappy shoes.

She opened up, calling back to Eddie, “You'll never guess who is it.”

Bronzini handed her the cigar box, Garcia y Vega, fine cigars since 1882. He took off his checked cap and gave it to her. He got out of the old belted greatcoat he'd bought cheap at Freight Liquidation, where you go for factory discounts, for irregular suits and dresses, cardigans hijacked by mistake—they thought they were getting cigarettes. He gave her the coat. He wiggled his hands to show no gloves. Then he bent to unbuckle his galoshes, stepping out of them half dizzy from the bending.