“I have Dirk’s file in front of me.”
“He’s been away.”
“So I gather from the paperwork,” he said.
“Yeah. He was in Hawaii for a while.”
“Uh-huh? For how long?”
“About a year.”
“How did he manage that?”
I said, “I gather a lot of people there are in the same boat. Long-term tourists without green cards.”
“I see.”
“He was in California for a while before that.”
“Yes?”
“Yeah. He was hanging around on a street corner and some Moonies picked him up. They drove him back to their plantation or their ashram or whatever they call it. I guess after one evening with him, they didn’t want him anymore. They delivered him back to the street corner as quickly as possible. He got a free meal out of it, though. I imagine that was his idea all along. He can manage on shoestrings and earwax if he’s forced to.”
I heard a guffaw at the other end of the line, then silence.
“Are you still there, Mr. Trelawny?”
“Yeah. Some papers fell on the floor. Too smart for his own good, right?”
“That’s more or less the way it is. Are you going to see him?”
“It’s unfortunate, but there’s not a lot we can do at the moment, Miss Madison. You probably know how it goes. We have to wait for something to happen.”
“Just before he went to California, he started wearing a Burmese Wot on his head, this kind of colorful knit hat with a little peak, fluorescent colors actually. He took a suite at the Hotel Vancouver and enticed a seagull into the room. He said he was teaching it to walk in a straight line. He said he was sure the seagull was capable of learning but lazy and not committed to the goal. Needless to say, Dirk left without paying his bill.”
“And this was before he went to California and then Hawaii?”
“Just before. He must have skipped town the same day. Payday. You know, the government check?”
“Do I ever. It’s always a busy week.”
“Mr. Trelawny?”
“Yes, Miss Madison…I’m assuming it’s Miss?”
“Why would you? You have a fifty percent chance of being mistaken.” I was curious.
“Your voice just sounds…I don’t know, peppy, lively…like you don’t have six kids and half an alcoholic husband dragging you down.”
“Thanks,” I laughed. “It is Miss. Mr. Trelawny?”
“Yes?”
“Something serious is going to happen very soon. Probably in the next day or so.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“He was wearing a Superman costume and moving fast. He’s on a roll.”
“Well, any signs that he might harm himself or others around him…”
“Can’t we just have him picked up?”
“Look. Take down these numbers. They’re emergency numbers. Not in the book. He makes an appearance, you keep him there, call the police, and we’ll have the assessment team arrive and do a follow-up.”
He gave me the numbers and I wrote them out carefully. Gratitude toward the faceless Mr. Trelawny oozed from my every pore.
He said, “Good luck. We’ll be in touch. I’m afraid I’ve gotta go. Got an emergency call on another line. Bye, Miss Madison.”
“Bye, Mr. Trelawny.”
My hand was shaking as I put the receiver down. On another occasion when my brother Dirk had decided his life wasn’t interesting enough, before California and Hawaii, he had boarded a downtown bus with a toy pistol. It had been snowing then as well and everyone was getting sick of the cold and slush. He had held the pistol to the driver’s head and ordered the poor man to take him to Cuba…where it was warm.
Dirk was a one-man raid on sanity. And he was six feet, four inches tall. So people usually took his threats seriously.
On the subject of Dirk, my mother took a classic position, the ostrich position, with her head well-buried in sand. Whereas my father pleaded the fifth amendment and arranged to be out or busy whenever his only male heir was around. As far as my mother was concerned, Dirk had nothing that a good meal, his family’s love and a few lithium cocktails couldn’t cure. She was always going on about how talented he was.
Dirk had trained as an actor at the National Theatre School. As far as I was concerned, he was still acting, but with a rotten script. He had once confessed to me, when we were both teenagers, that he would never work at a normal job, that he wouldn’t have to, because he was such a mind-boggling genius. I concur with the mind-boggling part.
I was on the lookout for the Superman costume all day but it never showed. Probably slowed down by a lump of kryptonite.
The next morning I took the bus down to the East End of the city and the Italian neighborhood. Jeremy and Connie had shared a big old Victorian house, a ruin with a vague whiff of damp rot about it. For years, the dilapidated four-story mansion had hosted big parties, biker friends and whoever happened to need a place to crash. And then Jeremy had taken that trip to the States six years before and come back with Connie. The doors that had always been open were suddenly closed. Jeremy took Connie very seriously. There were still parties, but never at the house.
After that, I always met him at one greasy spoon or another—some place where we could get cheap bacon and eggs and talk for a while. He’d intimated that Connie reminded him of someone he’d been crazy about. But there was more to it than that. There was a sense of mission. He was like a schoolteacher guiding a favorite pupil and this had never made much sense to me.
There I was on the rickety doorstep peering through the beveled glass door into the interior. Connie was the last person in the world I wanted to talk to. I always had the feeling that she was sneering behind my back, probably thinking how tough and world-wise she was and how bourgeois and artsy-fartsy I was. It was the expression on her face whenever she saw me, a blunt skepticism, and it completely unnerved me.
But Jeremy’s wish was my command. I rang the bell and waited. A few minutes passed and no one came. I lifted my hand to ring again when I saw a dark shape at the end of the corridor. It was her. She moved slowly and when she got to the door and opened it, she didn’t look pleased to see me.
To say she looked like she’d been scraped off the bottom of someone’s shoe would be putting it nicely. She had a cigarette hanging off her lower lip. Her face was puffy with a greenish tinge. Her hair was greasy and limp, and the house-coat she was wearing looked like it was hosting miniature colonies of thriving alien life.
