chapter 7
Doug didn't usually return to the house at such an early hour. But that afternoon he'd received a call out of the blue from Vrieger, his old commanding officer. It turned out he was living south of Boston and had heard through friends that Doug worked in the city. He'd phoned around noon from a restaurant not far from the office and asked if they could meet for lunch. Doug's first inclination was to say of course he couldn't, that he scheduled appointments weeks in advance, and that they would have to set a later date. But to tell Vrieger that seemed ridiculous and he found himself saying, yes, it was fine, that he would be there in an hour.
Walking beneath what remained of the Central Artery, he crossed into the narrow streets of the North End, glad to be out of the office for a little while at least.
The last week had been hectic. The Japanese Ministry of Finance's intervention to prop up the country's stock market had finally been made public, causing the Nikkei index to start dropping. Doug had phoned McTeague straightaway, instructing him to trim back Atlantic Securities' positions, limiting their exposure. McTeague had seemed reluctant at first, arguing that it was only a blip, that they would be getting out of the market too soon if they sold now. Eventually, Doug had been forced to make it clear to him that the choice wasn't his to make. The firm's bets, built up over the course of months, were huge by now and would take time to unwind. Done right, however, they could get out with nearly all their profit intact and the whole Finden Holdings operation would still count as a major success. If McTeague's clients wanted to keep going, pouring more money into the strategy, that was their business and their risk.
Making his way up Prince Street, Doug entered the restaurant and found Vrieger at the bar sipping a glass of bourbon, a nearly full ashtray at his side. In the decade and a half since Doug had last seen him, he had put on a bit of weight, but on the whole he looked remarkably unchanged with his ramrod posture and hair still clipped regulation short. He wore a version of his same square metal glasses, as unfashionable now as they had been back in the eighties.
"Christ," he said, when he spotted Doug. "The least you could have done was get a bit uglier."
"Lieutenant Commander, a pleasure to see you."
"So you're a corporate guy, huh? A suit. You always said that's what you wanted to do."
"Did I? To tell you the truth, I don't remember talking about it."
Doug ordered a beer and the bartender produced a few sandwich menus. Before the two of them had last parted in San Diego, Vrieger had told Doug that he planned to sign up for another tour. As he began describing it to Doug now, that third stint of his had taken him back to the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm. Later, in the mid-nineties, he'd run clandestine interdiction off the coast of North Korea as part of a loose nukes operation. The way he told it, he'd pissed off too many captains along the way to expect further promotion. "Truth is," he said, "after Vincennes I didn't really care. I just wanted to keep going." When the navy assigned him desk duty back in Norfolk, Virginia, he'd decided to quit. "That was four years ago," he said. "I thought I'd get a job out at Raytheon. Test battle systems. Something like that. I lasted through about two interviews." Since then he'd been living with his father in Quincy, working at a liquor warehouse.
He reported all this in an affectless tone, his eyes fixed on the television over the bar, where cable news was spooling a loop of satellite images of building complexes in the Iraqi desert, as a commentator detailed the suspicious movement of trucks.
"So what about you? You seem to have done okay for yourself."
Doug told him about getting his first job in New York, and how he'd spent his time learning the business, listening to the geeks and the quants, the pale men in ill-fitting suits who could tell you the yield curve on a Brazilian pipeline bond without looking up from their sandwich. And how when it came time to charm the Ivy League VPs, he'd just opened with a compliment and let them do the rest of the talking. And later, when he fired some of them, how disdainful the look in their eyes had been, as if all along they'd known he was a hustler and that they should never have let him into the club they were so fond of saying no longer existed, believing with fervor that all of finance was a meritocracy now.
"You'd recognize it," Doug said. "Bullshit hierarchies and a bunch of rules you got to get around to get anything done."
"You married?" Vrieger asked.
"No. You?"
"Are you kidding? Nine months is my record. And she was a drinker. But you? I mean, come on. You're a pretty boy. You must have to fight 'em off."
Doug couldn't remember the last time he'd been asked such questions by anyone. He and Mikey never talked about personal stuff and no matter how often Sabrina Svetz tried, he'd never given her much detail either. The one woman he'd stayed with for more than a few weeks was Jessica Tenger and he hadn't thought about her in ages.
They had met at a party in SoHo. Vrieger was right that Doug had grown used to girls requiring nothing more than a few minutes of easy flattery before they made it clear they were willing to be led. The thing about Jessica had been how directly she played the game. Her second question was where he lived, and her third when he planned on leaving the party. Back at his apartment they had ordered food and already finished having sex by the time it arrived. She hadn't slept over that night or any other.
They hadn't asked each other questions about work or discussed current events or how their days had been. In fact, they said very little to each other at all.
As he described her to Vrieger, her narrow hips and pageboy haircut, he remembered how he'd kept the lights on during sex and how she preferred keeping her eyes closed, allowing him to look at her without being watched. She could give herself over to whatever waking dream occupied her mind, the particulars of which he didn't need to know. Raised over her in a push-up position, he would watch himself: the pleasing proportions of his biceps; his gleaming chest; the flat shield of muscle running across his abdomen into his groin; and the splendid view of himself disappearing inside her like the fluke of an anchor grabbing the seabed. The tightness and precision of his body felt alive then, and he would come to the sight of it in motion.
They might have continued on indefinitely. But one evening, after leaving work early, Doug had phoned her and she'd said to come by her apartment, which he'd never seen, over by the Hudson on Washington Street. The place was a semi-converted warehouse space with rough wood floors, iron columns, and windows high up the walls. It turned out she was some kind of sculptor. A series of worktables occupying one side of the apartment were covered in small bins of everything from copper wire to sand. On one of them, a few pale white heads, human size and made of wax by the look of them, lay on their sides. She poured wine, and as soon as they'd sat down on her couch Doug had realized that whatever they'd had was over. It had nothing to do with her being an artist or living in that apartment. She could have been a lawyer or an actress or a grad student. It was the specificity of the circumstance that broke the circuit. The particularity of her life, as he could see it now. Like all particularity, it had a terminal air about it. At work, which was to say in his life, his mind glided over the present, headed always into possibility. But that apartment - that announcement of all those specific, irrevocable choices - it demanded that he stop. That he remain still.
"I don't have a lot of time these days," he said to Vrieger. "To tell you the truth, I don't think about relationships much."
In the pause that followed, Doug began to wonder why he had agreed to come here. Was it out of obedience to his old commanding officer? This made no sense; he wouldn't have so much as taken a call from the captain. Vrieger's pull came from somewhere else. As Doug watched him order his third bourbon of the afternoon, it struck him that the thing about Vrieger, which he'd sensed ever since that summer in the Gulf, was how the events they had been through had acted on him like a trance, as if no matter where he might be, no matter what might be going on around him, he was still fixed back in that one place: the Combat Center of the Vincennes, July 3, '88, his finger on the launch button. The years hadn't changed that. Doug saw it in the constancy of his gaze at the television: that permanent alert habitual in the survivors of emergency.
"We're going back in, you know," Vrieger said. "You understand that, right? We're going all the way to Baghdad. They're polishing the missiles as we speak. Fifth Fleet's already scheduled the hardware for the Gulf."
Doug hailed the bartender and ordered another beer.
"Cat got your tongue?" Vrieger asked, a note of aggression creeping into his voice. "I don't know about you," he went on, "but the ones I remember are the women. The ones in those black sack dresses with their heads covered, just the slits for the eyes. The wailing that came out of them. You remember that? It's strange, isn't it? Down on the ground like that by the coffins, being held back by their families, like they can't control it. You wonder: Why don't we do that? Grieve like that, I mean. Give in to it. Grief's like an illness here. A disease."
The TV camera panned across a column of Israeli tanks filing through clouds of dust into the West Bank.
When his drink arrived, Doug asked the bartender if he minded changing the channel. The guy reached up and hit the Plus button once, leaving them with a close-up of a rotating diamond ring set in a velvet case above another ticker, this one running with product detail and a number to call.
"Is it that easy for you?" Vrieger said.
"What?"
"To turn it off. To forget."
"Who said I was forgetting anything?"
Placing his empty tumbler upside down on the bar, Vrieger tilted his head to examine the cut of the glass. "Well, tell me then. I'm interested. How do you hold it? What we did."
This was why Vrieger had called. And maybe why Doug had come.
That summer of '88, a few days after they had shot down the airliner, a crew member from the USS Sides had told a reporter for some newspaper that he had seen bodies falling from the sky. On their return to San Diego, the entire crew of the Vincennes had been awarded combat action ribbons for their engagement of the Iranian gunboats. Vrieger had won the navy's commendation medal for heroic achievement. He'd had to carry that around, too, all these years.
Doug took a cigarette from Vrieger's box and lit it. "You know what the Iranians did?" he said. "After they signed the cease-fire with Iraq? They went into their gulags and rounded up all the political prisoners - leftists, mujahideen, whoever they thought might take advantage of the armistice. And they murdered them all. Either you repented and started praying or they murdered you. Tired old guy rotting in some cell for years? Pop. Sixteen-year-old kids? Pop. Girls? They raped them first and then popped them. Wives brought in to see their husbands hanged. That's what they do to their own people. I'm not even talking our guys - Beirut, Khobar Towers - none of that."
Vrieger's next bourbon arrived. Without the cable news to soak up his watchfulness, he gazed into the amber liquid with a kind of dejected fervor, as if staring into the dark mouth of a tunnel, listening for the roar. "Interesting," he said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You're still bound to the wheel of fire."
"Here's where I lose you."
"Yeah," Vrieger said, "that's right." With a slightly trembling hand, he raised his glass to his lips and drained it. "That's King Lear being woken by his daughter at the end of the play. When his world has gone all the way to shit. You do me wrong to take me out of the grave, he tells her. Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead." He paused, his mouth in a slight wince, as if he were physically pained by the words. "You're still in hell. That's what I'm saying. You're still in the hell of revenge."
According to the clock above the cash register, Doug had been at the restaurant nearly an hour. In a little while, McTeague would be arriving at the office in Hong Kong, getting ready to withdraw a bit more of Atlantic Securities' money from the market. Doug needed to get back, to look the numbers over once more, to make sure they were reducing their exposure at a quick enough pace.
"Do your folks still live around here?" Vrieger asked, breaking the silence between them.
"Who told you that?"
"You did. When I first met you."
"Alden," Doug said. "And it's just my mother."
"Wasn't my business then and it isn't now."
He scooped up a handful of nuts and, removing the cigarette from between his lips, leaned his head back and poured them into his mouth. "I don't mean to get at you. You got out, like you wanted to. You built a life. You've got something. I guess it's just a question of what you bring out with you. Me? I didn't bring much. Fact is, I'm going back."
"Back where?"
"The Gulf."
"What the f*ck are you talking about?"
"I know a guy down in Virginia. He started one of these security outfits. Lots of ex-military. It's still pretty small but he says if I get through the training, he'll give me a job. I'm telling you, everybody's ramping up. Logistics. Force protection. They don't know where they're going yet, where they'll be needed. But it's going to be a shit-storm."
"You're kidding me. Why the hell would you do that?"
"Why not?" Vrieger said. "I've got nothing here. Nothing to go the distance with. At least there I'll be back inside. It's got nothing to do with making up for what we did. Or winning or being forgiven or any of that. I guess you could say it's sad or f*cked up or I'm traumatized or whatever. But I don't really care about any of that anymore. I'm not looking to be cured."
WALKING BACK under the rusted struts of the Central Artery, the roar of jackhammers filling his ears, Doug felt light-headed. By the time he reached the cool of the tower's lobby, the dizziness had given way to exhaustion. His legs would barely move one in front of the other. Unsure if he would make it to the elevator, he took a seat on one of the chrome benches running along the glass wall of the atrium. He watched employees come and go: the senior secretaries paddling by with their shoulder bags full of crosswords and knitting, junior analysts in serious suits, building security in purple sport coats returning with their takeout. A young woman coming off the elevator glanced in Doug's direction and, recognizing him, appeared confused at the sight of him on his own with no papers or briefcase or BlackBerry in hand.
Finally, he managed to get his phone out and dial Sabrina.
"Call the garage for me, would you?" he said. "Have them bring up my car."
By the time it appeared in front of the building, he felt lucid enough to take the wheel. He headed for Storrow Drive thinking maybe he would walk along the river to clear his head, but the mere thought of it tired him further and so he kept driving, exiting onto the Pike, where the lanes were clogged with traffic. It took him twenty minutes longer than usual to reach the house. Tossing his keys on the kitchen counter, he headed up the stairs to his room and flopped down on the bed, not even bothering to remove his shoes.
On the verge of sleep, he heard a sound behind him, coming from the bathroom.
He opened his eyes and remained perfectly still. Listening intently, he discerned two cautious footsteps. The house contained nothing worth stealing but the televisions; they were still here. Whoever it was had been waiting. Slowly, very slowly, he moved his hand to the floor. Reaching under the bed, he fingered the steel crosshatching on the butt of his pistol and coaxed it into his grip. Between the next footstep and the one that followed, he counted five seconds. The sound was just a few yards from his shoulder now. When he heard it again, he grabbed the gun up off the floor, cocked it, and swiveled upright, shouting, "Back it up!" just in time to see the young man's knees buckle as he fainted, falling into the room with a thud.
Coming up off the bed, Doug strode to the door, checked the hallway, and then crossed the room again to the window to see if there was anyone in the driveway or yard. Finding them clear, he turned back to the boy slumped in the bathroom doorway. He had disheveled brown hair and was dressed in frayed jeans and a sweatshirt. Doug nudged him with his foot but he was out cold.
Squatting down, he reached one arm under the kid's knees and the other beneath the middle of his back. He was heavier than Doug had anticipated, his head lolling backward, his waist sagging between Doug's arms. An odd sensation - that warm, unconscious body pressed up against his chest. Crossing the room, he set him down on the rumpled sheets. He looked peaceful lying there. Unsure what to do, Doug stood over him awhile, experiencing something peculiar, a feeling of sorts. A passing sorrow as he watched the boy breathe.