Nine Lives(5)

He’d written to say how much he’d enjoyed her talk, but also to share a poem he thought she might enjoy by Louis MacNeice, called “Wolves.” Its opening line was “I do not want to be reflective anymore,” and Caroline had had that particular line trapped in her head ever since she’d read it. She reread the poem now, nearly wrote David to tell him again how much she loved it but stopped herself. It was enough that she’d written him once, and enough to think she might see him again at some further date and be able to tell him in person.

Her office hours over, she crossed the campus to where her Prius was parked, then drove to her two-bedroom cottage in the Water Hill section of Ann Arbor. She’d left Fable, her adventurous cat, out all day, and was relieved to see him waiting on the front porch for her, relieved also that he hadn’t caught and killed a bird and left it on her doormat. He followed her in, pinned his gray ears back, and bolted toward the food bowl in the kitchen. Estrella, her shy orange tabby, leaped up onto the dining room table to greet her. Caroline flipped through the mail she’d received, pulling out a white envelope, her address printed out on a mailing label in Courier font. A single Forever stamp with the American flag was in the right-hand corner. There was no return address.

Something about it seemed personal somehow, even though there wasn’t anything remotely personal about it. She set aside the excise tax bill, the solicitation letters from any one of the animal welfare nonprofits she got—Pet Smart had clearly sold her address to some sort of mailing list—and slit open the envelope with an unvarnished thumbnail.

Inside was a single piece of paper, computer printed, the font Courier, like the mailing label.

Matthew Beaumont

Jay Coates

Ethan Dart

Caroline Geddes

Frank Hopkins

Alison Horne

Arthur Kruse

Jack Radebaugh

Jessica Winslow



Caroline looked into the envelope to see if there was anything else, but there wasn’t. Just the single sheet of paper with the list of names, none of which was familiar to her, except for her own, of course.

Estrella tried to rub her cheek against the edge of the paper, and Fable loudly mewled from the kitchen, waiting for food. A horrible thought went through Caroline’s mind: It is a list of death. Someone has marked us for death. She thought this automatically, in the same way that she automatically thought that every time her phone rang it was news of some unspeakable tragedy. She read the list again, then laughed internally at how morbid she’d been. Of course, if it was a list of living people, they were all marked for death, sooner or later. It was eerie, no matter what, and reminded her of that Muriel Spark book, Memento Mori. Of course, she was reading too much into what was probably a list of no consequence. But that was what she did with her life, that was her profession—she read into things.

“‘I do not want to be reflective anymore,’” she recited to herself, “‘envying and despising unreflective things.’” MacNeice was onto something there, even though he’d probably been talking about the political situation in Germany right before World War II and not about a tendency to overanalyze. But in her own life, though not necessarily in her class, she allowed for personal interpretations of literary works. What was the next line in the poem? Was it “I do not want to be a tragic or a philosophic chorus,” then something, something, then “And after that let the sea flow over us”? Maybe tonight she’d memorize the whole poem. It was the one good thing that her mother had taught her to do. Memorize and recite poetry.

Caroline rubbed Estrella beneath the chin, feeling the vibrations of her purr against her fingers. Then she went into the kitchen to feed Fable.





6





THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 12:33 P.M.


He glanced through the list, didn’t think much of it, and threw it into the kitchen wastebasket. Jay Coates had a callback for a commercial that day and was feeling halfway bullish about his prospects. It was an ad for instant rice, and he would be playing the elitist chef won over by the crappy processed rice in a box. His meeting was at three that afternoon in Burbank, so that gave him two hours before he’d need to be in the Beemer and on his way.

Even though he’d gone for a short run right after he’d gotten up, he pulled out the rowing machine and did a solid hour on it, finally watching the NCIS episode that his friend Madison was in. It had been on his DVR for weeks, and she’d been asking if he’d watched it yet, hoping for notes. Notes. Jesus. It was NCIS. She had two scenes, and a total of three lines of dialogue. She played a personal trainer at a gym, and the director made sure her tits—he probably thought they were real—were prominently framed in both of her scenes. After watching the whole episode, Jay was relieved that a) it was a crappy role, and b) Madison was crappy in it. The real reason he’d delayed watching her big break was the fear she might have nailed it, and that it might lead to more work for her, and that was something he couldn’t handle right now.

After parking in one of the guest spots outside of the single-story office park where Buchman Creative was housed, Jay did two quick lines of the coke he’d been saving up for just this occasion, then walked across the gluey asphalt in the near ninety-degree heat, hoping he wouldn’t start sweating before the meeting. He was ushered straight in by the doughy receptionist, who had some sort of Midwestern accent, turned down the offer of a bottled water, and asked for tap. Madison had suggested the tap-water move—made you seem down to earth, she’d said. He ran his lines again in front of the two ad writers, creeps who might be younger than he was, although he was not a hundred percent sure, plus Amy Buchman, head of the agency, who swung by because she’d just found five free minutes in the day. When he left, Jay spotted Dan Sweden in the waiting room. They both pretended not to see each other.