Security(67)

It’s five twenty--eight a.m. A subtle burnish has appeared above the mountains. Police scurry across the monitors like ants. They obtain a card key and search the guest rooms floor by floor. They find Henri in Room 1408. An officer takes photos of Henri’s contorted position while a coroner’s assistant waits with a body bag. A detective squints at the dirty dishes in the kitchen, then at the meal laid out in the dining area. He goes back to the kitchen. When he thinks no one’s looking, he steals a spoonful of cold cherry coulis from the stove and nods appreciatively.

A few patrolmen continue with the room--to--room, but they’re far slower once reduced in numbers: Twombley will be waiting awhile in 1516.

Officers chatter about how they’ve never seen a case this grisly, this awful. They discuss the killers’ probable motives—parental abandonment, socialization in the penal system or the foster system or both, cruelty to animals, bed--wetting, and a fascination with fires. They state obvious facts. They can’t wait until it’s a story they tell one another, in some future where it isn’t a smell thick in their nostrils, where it’s not people sprawled in various exotic methods of murder but victims: the victim in the dryer, the victim in the penthouse hall, the victim on the fourteenth floor, the victims in that gorgeous lobby. I hear them rehearsing what the story will become.

We become what we become by accident, a lot of us. We find a method of being and be that. Even if we think we’re thinking about what we’re becoming, we’re often thinking around it, because there doesn’t seem to be enough time.

It’s five forty--nine a.m. They’ve arrived at the hospital by now. Brian’s refusing to leave her. If Tessa were to awaken tomorrow and learn I was alive, right down the hall—or in another ward, the ward where nurses turn you to prevent bedsores—she’d become confused. She would feel she owed me something. She would come to my room, apologizing.

Or, she wouldn’t come to my room, and I’d wonder why. I’d think: Last I saw her, she was screaming my name, afraid for me, and regretful, and Brian was saying there was no need for either her fear or for her regret. I might ask myself, Why didn’t I end it there?

I could be a motivational speaker. I have the suits. I merely need a wheelchair I control with a mouthpiece, or—by dint of a miracle—the minuscule range of motion I’m able to regain in a few fingers. There I am, wheeling across a stage, telling weary drones with disposable income how happy I am to be alive. While somewhere, Tessa and Brian live the truth of what I’m lying about. I could remain a security expert, but only in a consultative capacity. I’ll never again sit and stare at a bedlam I cannot prevent.

Or, that’s all I’ll do.

It’s a beautiful morning. The pixels change from green and black and white to the colors of morning. You reach out and seize the future, or you become the sum total of your past, and I’m sick of it already, my future, my tenancy inside this broken body, my thoughts, my philosophies, my empty observations. I see the years spinning out before me, sure as I see the highway like an adder waiting to strike. I wish I had a star so I could wish myself brave enough to face—

Five fifty a.m. I choke on a sob that waggles the knife in my neck. A bone called the atlas holds up the head. It is named in honor of Atlas, who held up the world. It’s also called C1. It will punch into my brain stem with the mildest impact, so I stop the motion, but not the sob. Motion is life. For how much of my life—even if I was running, swimming, driving, flying—for how great a portion of it was I sitting still? What I see—the cars on the highway, two of them a few miles out, a white sedan and a blue sedan, unassuming but well tended, the vehicles of men dedicated to order, to protocol, dedicated to the rule that early is on time and on time is late—what I see is not life. It’s high--definition color confetti.

It’s Bowles, arriving first, followed by Larson. Good men. They park in the lot, get out of their cars, and run for the main doors. Bowles is green, but he’s improving all the time. Someone must have watched out for him when he was a SEAL. That’s bad when you’re a SEAL, but Bowles no longer is. He’s a civilian. He’s security, and that’s nothing; there’s no such thing. There never was.

A sergeant stops them at the check--in counter. They show their ID. It’s a process. It takes a few minutes. They shift from foot to foot, taking in the splattered state of the foyer and glancing nervously at the ceiling, as if trying to see through it, to the twentieth floor. But they follow the rules.

The rules are: people will tell you you’re brave. When you’re bedridden, or you get a chair you control with a mouthpiece, “You’re a brave, brave man,” is what they have to tell you, according to the rules of etiquette when interacting with a quadriplegic. Especially one who was tall and broad, proud of it, vain. A man who exercised hard to look like Captain America. That was who he thought of, secretly, when he exercised. He was born in the late sixties in Indiana, and he thought Captain America was the best superhero. He was a strong kid, but he became so much stronger, through mental toughness, through discipline. And when someone like that has his spine severed and gets to watch his strong body atrophy underneath him as he wheels through life—if he’s lucky—by scraping a fingernail clumsily along a control panel, people will tell him, “You’re so brave.” And he will hate them. He will be wrong to hate them, but he won’t be able to help it. He is not a brave man, not in that way. Not in a lot of ways.