Death Will Have Your Eyes (3 page)

In the cabin
window, against the city's pinpoint lights, what Neruda called “the diminutive fires of the planet,” I saw: a man in his forties rushing headlong from everything that had sustained him, rushing towards the things that almost destroyed him. But within those things, in large part, were the seeds of what he'd become, what he was, what he couldn't (however he tried) leave behind.

Following my designated assassin's departure, I'd gone back to bed, later had a leisurely midmorning breakfast, then in early afternoon paid my visit to Howard. Two hours still remained before my flight, and I had passed them in a bar by the departure gate drinking Perrier. The same people were milling around who'd been milling around years ago when I spent a lot of time in airports.

I was on my way to Dallas. The message left for me in Memphis had directed me there, to DayRest Motel in Oak Cliff where, as I sank slowly through southwestern skies, I would become Jorge Sanchez and (the message had no need to tell me this part) await further instructions. The address that Howard the Horse gave me also belonged to Dallas.

Just before takeoff a young woman had slipped into the seat beside me, and we spent much of the early part of the flight talking. She was twenty-six, Indian, traveling from New York City, where she lived and worked as a CPA, to attend her husband's graduation from engineering school at SMU. It was an arranged marriage; married a year, they had spent one long initial week and six evenly spaced weekends together. She kept telling me how nervous she was. Now, after a few pages of something gargantuan by Michener and a brief plunge into what appeared to be a prayer or inspirational book of some kind, she'd fallen asleep. Cities scrolled by below us.

And I was thinking about Gabrielle again.

I'd been alone a long time. For a year or more after quitting, I sat in my rented room and read things I'd always wanted to read and a lot of other things I'd never even known existed. I ate in anonymous lunchrooms and delis, usually with a book propped before me, and talked to almost no one. I walked in the streets and parks for hours at a time, watching people closely, all the different ways they linked themselves or kept apart. And I spent whole days in galleries and museums, slowly coming to realize that my future, whatever future I had, was bound up with these places, with what they stood for. At one point, I remember, every wall of my room was papered with prints and reproductions torn from books bought cheaply in secondhand stores near the college: Cézanne, Delvaux, Redon, Renoir, Dalí, Rothko, all of it in a dazzling, undifferentiated jumble. This was some time before my first makeshift studio and longer still before my first real piece, but studio and piece were there already, nascent, in the half-life I was living. A future had begun coalescing even as I moved blindly (and trying to learn to see) towards it, and in one of the museums on a dim, low November day, I met Gabrielle.

She worked there as a part-time guide, just as she worked as a substitute teacher, as an occasional waitress, as a spear carrier for the opera, as a ballet or tennis tutor. All were ways of staying safely out of the mainstream, of remaining (she liked to say) at the center of her own life and (she'd add, laughing) not ever getting
too
bored.

A major Matisse show was in progress, and Matisse, the way he repealed not just perspective but depth itself, the way he handled large forms and pools of pure color, had recently become important to me. I wound up sitting much of the afternoon in a room full of work from the
Jazz
period. Individuals straggled through. A guard circulated erratically. Tour groups eddied in and out. Then just after the museum's closing was announced, someone came and sat beside me.

“You really like these, don't you?”

I nodded and looked at her.

“Especially these two.” She pointed. I nodded. She pointed again. “I couldn't help noticing. When I came through with my tours.” She held out her hand. “My name's Gabrielle. Tell me: do you usually have dinner after a tough day of museum-going?”

“Usually.”

“Early, I bet.”

“Early.”

“And alone?”

“Almost always.”

“But not tonight.”

“I hope not.” We stood and walked together towards the door. “My name's David,” I told her.

“Come with Gabrielle, David.”

Late that night I had returned to a cozy, safe room suddenly gone bare and cold. I stood for what seemed hours looking out at a blood-red moon, at trucks being loaded from the docks across the street for early-morning hauls. I was thinking that I'd just received, without warning, fanfare or expectation, an invitation to rejoin the human race, RSVP. Towards dawn I picked up Pavese.

Two days later
I was sitting in Johnsson's office saying, “No, sir.”

It was not something he was used to hearing. He dealt with it by waiting to see if I was through, then, when I added nothing more, simply went on talking.

“No, sir,” I said again, interrupting him, something he was even
less
used to. It's conceivable that no one had ever interrupted him before. “I will not pull down Luc Planchat for you. Or for anyone else.”

He waited again. A bird on the window ledge outside peered fiercely in at us. I thought how birdlike Johnsson himself was. Heavy brow, dark recession of eyes, the stillness in them.

“Yet it appears,” he said, “that this must be done.”

“According to information you have received, yes. But in the first place, that information remains circumstantial. And secondly, since your own agency has no specific intelligence function, most of that information was piped in from another agency—”

He nodded.

“—one with which you have had disputes in the past—”

No nod this time.

“—and is therefore suspect.”

“Perhaps so. One takes nothing at face value, of course.”

“Including your own veracity in reporting this information to me.”

“There is that, yes. Do you believe I would lie to you, David?”

“Freely. Outrageously. The good reporter looks at his scattered facts, then starts cobbling them into shoes that will fit. There's always an agenda: political, aesthetic, personal. Connect the dots. Constellations.”

“You're right, of course. I would do whatever I thought necessary to get done what I thought must be. And so, in another time, would you have.”

“It
was
another time, sir.” After a moment I added: “If Planchat needs taking out, they should be the ones to do it.”

“Ah:
should
. A most dangerous word.”

He moved for the first time since we'd begun talking, taking his hands from the chair arms and folding long fingers together on his lap. I thought again of the feet of predatory birds. There was no desk in the room, only chairs with various tables alongside, many of them antiques picked up at flea markets, estate and garage sales. Johnsson hated desks. Hated people who sat behind them. Hated cages.

“Removal, you understand, is no longer a part of their agency's charter.”

“And it is of yours.”

“As it has always been.”

Something suspiciously like a smile darted across his face and was gone.

“They created Planchat,” I said. “And then they decided—or someone decided, at whatever level—that the model was obsolete.”

“Perhaps more an anachronism than obsolete:
their
thinking, of course, not my own. A killing machine, David. The finest, certainly the most artful, ever devised.”

“Yes. And if the machine needs unplugging, it's their responsibility.”

“Absolutely. No one would argue that. It
is
their responsibility. But it's also our job: what we do.”

“It's not what
I
do, sir.”

He looked at me for several moments.

“Very well,” he said. “I suppose it is possible that nine years can change a man, perhaps even past the point of recognition.”

“Or in that time, the man can change himself.”

“By his own bootstraps, yes. I understand that you're an artist now. Critics write of the ‘contained violence' and gentleness of your—do you call them statues?”

“
Pieces,
usually. Or just
work
. Most of them aren't sculpture in any classical sense.”

He nodded. Anyone not watching closely would have missed it.

“The word
poise
is often used. Meaning, I take it, a kind of rare and comely balance.”

“By some.”

“Of course: by some.”

Neither of us spoke for a time then. Out on the ledge the bird's audition continued. Darkening clouds nudged at the sky. Finally, as imperceptibly as, earlier, he had nodded, he shook his head.

“Be cautious about settling for memory, David. It's far too thin a gruel for the like of us to live on.”

I said nothing.

“I suppose that you may have changed in fundamental ways, after all. And I cannot say, finally, that I am sorry for that. I suppose it's time for you to go back to your Gabrielle now, back to your work, your ‘pieces.' Thank you for coming.”

I stood and held out my hand. After a moment his own left his lap and falteringly searched mine out.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I forget, and you could not have known. But for several years now I have been quite blind.”

I told him that I was sorry, and to take care.

“David…,” he said when I was almost to the door. “A single favor.”

“Yes, sir.”

“An old friend has many times asked after you. Go and see him. It will not take you long.”

“Blaise.”

He nodded.

“You will find him here.”

He held out a card. I walked back across the room and took it from him. His hand lingered there after it was gone.

Two days past,
on a hillside in Oak Cliff, the motel-room TV won't work, bringing in only dim gray forms and phantoms behind a wash of dots, and the real world outside my window, awash with gray drizzle, is little more defined.

Jorge Sanchez lies on his bed in paint- and plaster-spattered jeans and sweatshirt waiting. Occasionally there is lightning far off, or a climb of car lights up the wall. The couple next door (possibly a threesome) has left off its lovemaking, and someone over there's drawing a bath now. The whining glide of a steel guitar reaches out from a radio nearby.

A knock at the door, then: “Pizza.”

“Sanchez?” she says when I open the door. In her mid-twenties and in sweats, with a face that still could go either way: towards beauty and character, towards plainness, a kind of vacancy. Her nose is peeling from recent sunburn. Hair tucked into a long-billed baseball cap. “Comes to eleven ninety-seven.”

I hand over a ten and a five and tell her to keep it.

“Have a good stay,” she tells me in return. Her car is an ancient VW beetle, once beige, in other incarnations green and canary yellow. There's a sign on top,
FREE DELIVERY
, that's almost as big as the car itself. In a good wind you could use it to sail the thing.

Under the pizza there are two waxed envelopes.

The first one contains a dossier on Luc Planchat. I know a lot of this, up till about ten years ago, and go through it hurriedly. There's a gap then for most of that ten years until, six months ago, entries resume.

Planchat had been the pride of a new program established in one of those backwashes we learn to live with, hawkish after several years of a kindler, gentler leadership. Someone with sufficient political clout had decided the only answer to terrorism was an elite killer corps and went about calling in sufficient favors to make it happen. Planchat was first car off the assembly line, the prototype, a real dazzler. He was also a loner. And became ever more so as his fellow grads started checking out to brute craziness: some suddenly proclaiming themselves free agents (as though they were, after all, only football players), many either on their own or with a little help from their friends back at the factory heading out in search of what Rabelais called
le grand peut-être
.

The ensuing backwash was liberal, of course. When word came down that his program was deactivated, Planchat declined further government service and, in time-honored tradition, fostered out to a new identity.

Of three program graduates still undocumented (agency code meaning
not dead
), that accounted for two, Planchat and myself. Meanwhile “out in the world somewhere” (as an old blues song has it), whereabouts unknown, identity unknown—if indeed he were still alive—there might be another. No one could be sure.

No one had an explanation, either, for Planchat's sudden resurfacing. All these years he'd quietly gone about his placebo life of employment, possessions, payments, polls, appointments. Then
something
brought him crashing back out of the closet.

Twenty-three weeks ago two security guards were found dead at Compso, a high-tech electronics manufacturer and research facility in upstate New York. Both had been dispatched instantly, expertly: the first with a single blow, the second by severing the spinal cord through a narrow incision at the base of his neck. There were some blinds and red herrings thrown up, but whatever was missing,
really
missing, didn't show up on any of the company's various inventories.

Four days later a military installation was hit; and in following weeks bodies turned up in hotel rooms, places of business, parks and storage facilities, warehouses, even once in a library. There was nothing definite to tie Planchat to any of this, but his name came up in one of those sotto voce conversations between our best jockey and his computer, and the more it was looked into, the more it started looking like a match.

For one thing, Planchat wasn't where he was supposed to be, and hadn't been there for a while—about six months.

He may as well have dropped off the edge of the earth, floated away in a balloon, gone to Tahiti to live among natives. Or been collected by extraterrestrials. The few spoors that existed were being tracked. Several calls had been traced to a phone booth in Dallas. That's why I'd been routed through here on my way in. To connect, if a connection existed. If the arc was there.

Rain hasn't abated. I put the dossier down and look again out the window. The world remains obscure. An occasional car scales the curved back of the hill like a momentary moon.

In that rented room of mine, the second month after I'd quit maybe, or the third, I got up one morning and, sitting still naked on the side of the bed, with frost plating the window outside and my own breath spilling out from me in spumes as a portable heater filled the room with the smell of raw alcohol, began a journal.

At first I simply transcribed my day: what I read and saw, where I went, stray thoughts, observations. Before long, though, I found the journal pulling away from the day's details and pastimes.

Memory was strong then; I sank back into it. Scenes of my childhood, friends, family, the way spaghetti or milk and oatmeal cookies had tasted when I was a kid, the first time I kissed a girl (Trudy Mayfield, Friday after school, February 1962), stories about a bibliographic worm in
Boy's Life,
my mother's face. It all came back in a flood.

Cedar Hill,
I wrote. A two-story white frame house at the end of the block, with a scraggly weeping willow out front. We never locked doors, didn't even have keys for them as far as I know. Ate at a gray Formica table in the kitchen; the dining room stayed closed off except for holidays. A '52 Dodge with green plastic shades for the wing windows and windshield, and fluid drive.
Pecans
. They were everywhere, forever rolling and cracking open underfoot. Wasps in thick bushes that skirted the house.
Honeysuckle
.

But soon I learned that, precise and detailed as my memories were, they were also in some incomprehensible way complete. Once I had gone over a period in my mind, it was set; if I returned to it, there'd be nothing more, just those same memories. There was no depth.

There were also curious gaps. I could visualize my mother's face exactly, curve of cheek into chin, the wing-like sweep of eyebrows, but I couldn't, for all my efforts, recall how she smelled, or the touch of her skin. And Trudy Mayfield's name was just that: a name. I had no image of her face, no further memories of her sitting beside me in a classroom or over sloppy joes in the school cafeteria.

Shortly after these realizations, I put the journal away. Best not to think about it, I told myself. I had a present, a life that gradually was taking on form, and
that
was what was important. Not the past, not history, not the stumbles and snags of a faulty memory.

I go into the bathroom, tear the weightless plastic cup out of its paper cocoon, fill it from the tap, and drink. When I come back, the couple (threesome?) next door has again taken up the challenge.

The second envelope contains a copy of the police report on the death of one Raymond Hicks, discovered by his common-law wife early that morning in their home on Colorado. The only mark on Mr. Hicks was a small incision beneath his nipple by way of which, with some flexible knifelike object and what the ME called “astonishing surgical skill,” the ventricles of his heart had been pared away like quarters of an apple.

Rain streams on the window. Momentarily I feel like some ancient aquatic being, sequestered from evolution's progress in the depths of its cave and forgotten. When a truck's lights break suddenly against the rain there, I'm startled.

Raymond Hicks was the name Howard the Horse had given me back in Memphis.