“And now this woman,” Ptolema says, pushing aside the first photo to reveal a second. The woman in this one is as striking as the first was plain. She’s sitting on a park bench reading a paperback. Her white hair is cut in a bob. “I snapped this on St. Stephen’s Green yesterday.”
“The twins,” says black braids and chews at a thumbnail. “The albinos. One of them. Think that’s the one calls herself Ivoire. That’s her mac, yeah? Always wears that thing, if it’s rainin’ or not. Yeah, that’s Ivy.”
“Ivy?”
“Yeah, Ivoire,” says the redhead.
“But Ivoire—Ivy—and the Twisby woman, you’ve never seen the two of them together, have you?”
“No,” replies the redhead. “That’s not the way it works.”
Ptolema sets aside the second photo, and there’s one below it that could be the same person. Same face. Same cornsilk hair and haircut, same pale complexion, same startling blue eyes. She’s sitting beneath a tree, also reading a paperback. They are, in fact, both reading the same book, which is plain upon close inspection: Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
“No. Yeah. That one’s the other. Bête, I mean,” black braids says around her thumb. “Feckin’ bitch, in on what they’re doin’ to her own sister. Just wrong, by anyone’s standards of fair play. Not just her sister, either. But guess you—”
“—already know the twins are also lovers?” interrupts Ptolema. “Yes. We know that. And the two of you have spoken with all three of these individuals?”
“That’s why we’re here, innit?” asks black braids.
Ptolema returns the photos to the folder, the folder to the satchel, and she fastens the strap again. She returns the iPod to her pocket.
“That all?” asks the redhead.
“No,” Ptolema says. “That’s us just getting started. But it’s enough for this morning. We’ll talk again tomorrow night. I trust you two know Beshoff’s, on O’Connell.”
The redhead nods. “We know it.”
“Eight o’clock. And at least consider being on time, will you?”
The redhead moves the unlit cigarette between her fingers the way a magician might a coin. But then, she is a magician, isn’t she? “My associate and I will take it under consideration, guv’ner.” She’s trying to sound cocky, but she’s rattled. That’s good.
Ptolema pays them both, even if it’s only a formality and she doubts either of them needs the money. Then again, if they aren’t lying and they’ve actually severed ties with Julia Set, they could be poor as fucking church mice.
“Eight. Beshoff’s. Don’t you keep me waiting again.”
They slide out of the booth, one after the other. Before the pair turn to leave, the redhead grins and says, “Like you have a choice.”
When they’ve gone, Ptolema considers going to the counter and getting another cup of coffee, maybe even something to eat. Instead, she keeps her seat and lets her eyes trace the angles and drink in the backlit colors of the stained-glass windows until her phone rings.
2.: Anybody Could Write a True Story
(Stonington, Maine, 9/28/2012)
It’s dawn, unless it’s sunset. I’m sitting on the mattress, and Sixty-Six is sitting on the other side of the room listening to me. It isn’t true to say that she never speaks, but it’s true to say that she very rarely ever speaks. I talk enough for the both of us, and if it bothers her she has never said so. Watching the sun rise, or set, I’ve been talking, this time, about expectation effects, straying into the Gettier problem, propositional knowledge, epistemology, observer-expectancy and subject-expectancy effects. I will not say that she is enduring my rambling patiently or politely because Sixty-Six is not blessed with an overabundance of either of these qualities. I am the nattering; she the hush-hush. Yeah, and then, without warning, she reaches for the rifle on the floor, rises to her knees, rests the gun on the attic windowsill, and fires five shots—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—in quick tattoo succession. I don’t have to look to know that she’s dropped one or two or several of the demons that have marched out of the sea. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march . . . some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Who wrote that? I cannot remember now. The pain, the dope, the way horror can turn to the mundane, to existential shock, it’s all made a sieve of my mind, and now memories slip straight through. You’d never know, Bête, that I was who I was two months ago. You’d never know me, I fear. Sixty-Six lingers a moment at the window, then sets her gun aside and goes back to her place on the floor. She’s not unpretty, despite the darkness like bruises that surrounds her oddly golden eyes. Her ebony hair hangs in unkempt dreadlocks, except when she ties it back. Almost always she keeps it tied back, out of her face. (The lead in my pencil breaks, and I have to stop to sharpen it again with my pocketknife.) There are days and nights (though the two are now, here, hardly distinguishable, one from the other) when I fancy her my shaded, sooty twin. But don’t think me unfaithful, Bête. The air in the attic is still jangling from the gunfire, but I ask her if she’d like me to stop nattering; she knows it’s what happens when I get nervous. And I’m almost always nervous, unless I’m on the street or on the beach and those things are coming at us and I don’t have to think about anything but the Ghurka blade in my hand cutting them down. Then I am calm, and the pain fades away, no matter how long it’s been since my last fix. Sixty-Six shrugs. She shrugs a lot, but I do try to talk less. I’m getting on my own nerves. Down on West Main, I hear more shots, other soldiers sent here to do no good whatsoever, unless we are actually holding the line and the demons haven’t made it off Deer Isle to the mainland. But how is that even possible? We can barricade the bridge and shut down the fishermen and ferries, and the CDC and DOD and agents of X and Y and the Albany spooks can all do their very best, even the endlessly circling patrol boats we have been told keep watch over Eggemoggin Reach and the rest of the bay. We can do all that, but we can’t see what’s going on below the sea, now can we? Below the surface of the sea. So, I think there are the usual lies, though I try to pretend otherwise. I’m here to do the job I’m here to do, to flap my wings and set distant hurricanes in motion. That’s what I’m here to do, to mind sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the voyeur of utter destruction as beauty, marking micro-changes in deterministic nonlinear, nonrandom systems. No, no. Not marking them. Setting them in motion. Whatever it was out there Sixty-Six just put down, well, the death or deaths sent ripples, as did the bullets, and her every move during the act, and the weight of the gun on the sill, and my interrupted words and thoughts. And a million other variables that will have so many repercussions to echo down history to come. History of the future, that’s what we are making. Maybe the rest are fighting the scourge, but not us. We only seem to be soldiers against these interlopers; we are actually instigators, toppling dominoes, setting in motion. “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” 1963, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 20 (2): 130–141, Dr. Edward Norton Lorenz (also author of the concept of strange attractors, near and dear), an MIT alumnus just like Father. I have written equations on the attic wall, for old times’ sake and more for comfort. I’ve stopped trying to explain them to Sixty-Six, because I’m pretty sure it bores her almost enough to turn that rifle on me. There’s no theory in her chaos. She doesn’t need theory when she’s so adept at the practice. The magic I do not believe in swirls around her, before my very eyes, but I’m not ever again going to believe what I see, and I know that. I sometimes wonder if behind her dirty face and smudgy eyes Sixty-Six harbors an intelligence to put us both to shame, dearest Bête. If she has any other name—and she must—she’s never going to let it slip. A time or two, she’s whispered this or that about her past, and, by the way, she can’t be more than, I don’t know, twenty? Twenty-two? Her mother sent her away to . . . a hospital? I’m not sure, but it shows. I check my wristwatch, which tells me that is sunset out there. Well, if watches even work in this event horizon that was once an island off the coast of Maine, notable only for its granite quarries, the Haystack craft school, lobsters, the one-time home of Buckminster Fuller. In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck wrote, “One doesn’t have to be sensitive to feel the strangeness of Deer Isle.” So, how long has this place been wrong, and was it always set to be the epicenter for this plague? Was it always damned? Have we—all the shadow people—been sitting back for centuries or millennia waiting for this to begin? Or did a butterfly only recently flap its wings? Sixty-Six is staring at the window and eating from a bag of stale Funyuns. We eat what we can find in what is left of the grocery stores and convenience stores and restaurants. That’s not much, but the heroin has mostly killed my appetite anyway, and Sixty-Six, she doesn’t seem to mind the slim bill of fare this ruin offers. I believe she could live off candy bars and Skittles. A wonder she has any teeth left. She looks away from the window and says to me, “We should go soon.” By which she means, I understand, that if we wait much longer I might miss the drop, my week’s supply of dope to keep the agony at arm’s length. The pain they gave me so I’ll be a good marionette, as if taking you away from me weren’t enough. I think it’s cancer, but there’s no way to know. Not like I can get to a doctor. There were a couple here in Stonington, but they died shortly after the first wave rose up and slithered across the sand and docks and over the seawalls. I got only Vicodin and Percocet at first, then oxycodone, then the heroin. The stations of my walk to addiction to make of me a junkie. Anything to dull the pain. The needle and the blade, because I haven’t mentioned (or have I?) that the pain fades completely away—I mean entirely—whenever the killing starts. Numbness is my reward for being a good tin soldier, a dutiful agent with initiative, who only rarely receives direct orders, who acts on her own recognizance. And, Bête, here’s the rub, I am becoming precisely that, and I mean without worrying about your safety, without the carrot-on-a-stick, without any coercion. I am beginning to feel as though I was almost meant to come here and to be what I have become, these days and this island and Ivoire set on an inevitable intersecting path from the birth of the universe, Planck time, zero to ~10-43 seconds, and there was never any doubt that this is how it would go. Sixty-Six is up, pulling that filthy pink hoodie over her head, reaching for her coat. She tosses me my coat, too. And my pack. So, sorry Bête, that’s all for now. What rough beast slouches time. Time to fight the thunder and the lightning and the obscuring, suffocating mists that roll in from the wicked, wicked sea.