Security(44)

Vivica’s eyes are like a somber summer day, covered in fluffy white clouds. Where do they come from?

Where does memory come from? How does time pass, what is it? Is it the cinematic flash to running down the stairs in the house back in Indiana? The white walls scuffed by spirited boys? The revisited sense that the carpet there was not plush but it was thick. It was much too thick, and natty and dull. The railing’s surface with divots like healed acne, imprinting onto a smooth hand, an innocent hand, connected to an innocent body intent in its footy pajamas. The smell of syrup, vanilla, nutmeg. Bacon to counter the sweets. Sunday breakfasts. First one down the stairs got to lick the bowl of muffin batter. The secret was to decide, before sleep, “Wake up the minute the bacon’s on.” The secret to anything is to decide. Anything is surmountable. Anything. Anything but death, but if death is not foreign, if death is not exotic, if death isn’t—but death is. Death always is. It’s the unknown country. It’s the tenant of tall shadows. It’s the dark. It is the Thing humanity has tried to vanquish with cities, with lit--all--night streetlamps; with medicine and surgery, religion and mythology, art and demagoguery, and yet—yet, yet, death looks at these measures and feels the briefest, barest confusion. It carries on with its business. It’s the boogeyman. It is there in the operating room, and in the pill proffered afterward to ward off infection. It’s in every religion, myth, painting, song, poem, novel, and film, and in every speech by every fool who ever tried to argue that anything is surmountable. Death is not, because death simply is. If death simply is, how can it be argued that anything matters? Tessa once said, answering that very question, in bed, after saying the subject was a stupid waste of syllables, “Because if nothing matters, then everything does.” She said it with a rude brusqueness, like a self--evident fact. Like the maxim she lived her life by. And perhaps, perhaps that maxim is what makes her slightly other, mildly apart and above. Only mildly, slightly, because the difference in her can be a deficit as well as an attribute. She can hear the words “I love you” and reply, “I don’t love you. I don’t think I ever will. If you want to keep doing this, that’s fine, but it won’t ever be anything more for me.” The viciousness! The courage! What is that, what is it? Brian has it, too. It is—it is an insouciance vis--à--vis death. An equanimity about the value of life in the midst of death, but not an acceptance. Not at all. Death is not something many people think about—at least outside of religious dogma—and of those who think, few are capable of arriving at a conclusion that is anything but cynical, and so what Tessa has somehow done—and Brian, it seems, has done it, too—is to refuse to arrive at a conclusion, but instead to insist on honesty and forthrightness at the expense of sweetness. But not of decency. Never, ever that. It is idiotic folly, says the part of the mind that has known death uncommonly well, walked with it through war zones, swum with it in black coastlines, jumped with it out of Black Hawks. But another part of my mind watches time pass, hours of it, here on the twentieth floor, where the Thinker’s house of cards rises to a skyscraper. He estimates its stability has reached its limit, and he then begins construction on a maze in front of the tower, laying the cards horizontally with the precision of a kinesthetic sage. This is the part of my mind that watched the Killer finish taping his bandages, dry his coveralls, put on his coveralls, clean his knife, search the employee break room refrigerator and find Vivica’s huevos rancheros in a shallow Tupperware bowl, microwave it, eat it, board the secret elevator, skipping the stairs in consideration of his limp, arrive at the seventh floor, enter Room 717, set the clock radio’s alarm for two a.m., send a text that made the Thinker’s phone vibrate, and fold his hands across his stomach for a nap. As I watch these men in masks, the part of my mind thus engaged wonders, if it possessed Tessa’s and Brian’s insouciance, what might have happened at five oh two p.m., when Addison pointed to the monitor showing the secret elevator, and to the two men in it whose heads were bowed so all that could be seen were the parts of their hair. One man was enormous; the other average. Like Bowles and Petrovski. Bowles and Petrovski carpooled. Bowles had a hard time keeping his schedule straight; Petrovski was going through a divorce. Addison laughed at how they’d come to work when they weren’t scheduled to, and the team returned to its meeting, prepped to take the piss out of Bowles and Petrovski when they arrived at the twentieth floor. The head of security was running behind, too. I’d been screamed at, minutes ago, by Charles Destin. I was conducting the meeting distractedly, and yet another distraction in the form of my two worst employees botching their schedules annoyed me into the human fallacy that petty concerns render death inert. Death is not ever inert. The two men in the elevator were not Bowles and Petrovski. The Killer and the Thinker knew Bowles’s and Petrovski’s builds, and that their own builds could effectively deceive the security team. The large man—the Killer—wields a brutal and accurate knife, and the average man—the Thinker—can fire eight calm, considered shots through a silencer in the time it takes five former Navy SEALs to reach for their weapons.

The Killer’s knife throwing is exceptionally accurate, but not perfect. He was aiming for the neck, and he hit it, but he hit the back of the neck. He hit the space between the second and third vertebrae. His first victim fell into a chair, spine neatly severed but no major arteries hit, barely bleeding, head coming to rest on the counter that faces the bank of security monitors, eyes wide open. Such an injury would result in death if the victim moved even an inch the wrong way, and the chair into which the victim fell is on wheels. One of the sixty--four monitors (eight rows, eight columns, a third of them motion--activated and two--thirds fixed on pivot points crucial for security protocol) shows the twentieth floor. The other members of the security team, not including Twombley, were shot. They, including Twombley, are obviously dead. The Killer had another knife, a larger one he preferred, which is why the Killer’s Navy SEAL field knife remains lodged in the back of my neck.