Before the Fall(80)
As he did every morning, Gil rose before dawn. It was the fourth Sunday in August, the family’s last on the Vineyard. They had been invited to Camp David for the Labor Day weekend, and Gil had spent much of yesterday coordinating security with the Secret Service. He spoke four languages, Hebrew, English, Arabic, and German, joking that it was important for a Jew to know the language of his enemies, so he could tell when they were plotting against him.
This joke, of course, was lost on most listeners. It was the look on his face when he told it, like a mourner at a funeral.
The first thing Gil did after he rose was change his status to active. He did it instantly, the moment his eyes opened. At most, he slept four hours a night, waiting an hour or two after the family went to sleep, and rising an hour or two before they woke. He liked that quiet time when the lights were out, sitting in the kitchen, listening to the mechanical hum of the appliances, the trigger click of the HVAC as it engaged to cool or heat the house. He was a master of immobility, having sat still—the legend went—for five days straight on a Gaza roof, deep inside enemy territory, his Barrett M82 balanced on metal legs, waiting for a high-value target to emerge from an apartment complex, the threat of discovery by Palestinian forces a constant.
Compared with that, sitting in the air-conditioned, luxury kitchen of a multimillionaire’s estate was like an ocean cruise. He sat with a thermos of green tea (no one ever saw him make it), eyes closed, listening. As opposed to the domestic craziness of the waking day, the night sounds of a house—even a big one like this—were consistent and predictable. The house was wired, of course, sensors on all the windows and doors, motion detectors, cameras. But that was technology, and technology could be tricked, disabled. Gil Baruch was old school, a sensualist. Some said he wore a garrote for a belt, but no one had ever seen the proof.
The truth was, when Gil was a child, he and his father fought all the time, about everything. Gil was the middle child, and by the time he was born the paterfamilias was already well on his way to drinking himself to death. Which he did, in 1991, when cirrhosis became heart failure and heart failure became silence.
And then, according to the Torah, Gil’s father ceased to be. Which was just fine with Gil, who sat now in the air-conditioned kitchen and listened to the barely audible hush of the surf as it pounded the beach outside.
The security logs from that Sunday are unremarkable. The husband (Condor) stayed home (read newspaper 8:10 am–9:45, napped in upstairs guest room 12:45–1:55, made and received several phone calls 2:15–3:45, prepared and cooked supper 4:30–5:40 pm). The wife (Falcon) went to the farmers market, accompanied by Rachel and a body man, Avraham. The boy played in his room and had a soccer lesson. He napped from eleven thirty to one. Anyone looking back at the log later, trying to piece together a mystery, would find nothing but times and dry entries. It was a lazy Sunday. What made it meaningful were not the facts or details, but the imperceptibles. Inner life. The smell of the beach grass and the feel of sand on a bathroom floor when changing out of a swimsuit.
The heat of American summer.
Line ten of the log read simply: 10:22 Condor ate second breakfast. It couldn’t capture the perfect toasting of the onion bagel or the saltiness of the fish in contrast with the thickness of cream cheese. It was time lost in a book—a journey of imagination, transportation—which to others simply looks like sitting or lying stomach-down on the rug in front of a summertime fire, legs bent at the knees, up ninety degrees, kicking absently, feet languid in the air.
To be a body man did not mean being in a state of constant alarm. In fact it was the opposite. One had to be open to changes in the way things were—receptive to subtle shifts, understanding that the frog was killed not by being dropped into boiling water, but by being boiled slowly, one degree at a time. The best body men understood this. They knew that the job required a kind of tense passivity, mind and body in tune with all five senses. If you thought about it, private security was just another form of Buddhism, tai chi. To live in the moment, fluidly, thinking of nothing more than where you are and what exists around you. Bodies in space and time moving along a prescribed arc. Shadow and light. Positive and negative space.
In living this way, a sense of anticipation can evolve, the voodoo pre-knowledge that the wards you are watching are going to do or say something expectable. By being one with the universe you become the universe, and in this way you know how the rain will fall, the way cut grass will blow in fixed starts in a summer wind. You know when Condor and Falcon are about to fight, when the girl, Rachel (Robin), is getting bored, and when the boy, JJ (Sparrow), has missed his nap and is going to melt down.
You know when the man in the crowd is going to take one step too close, when the autograph fan is, instead, looking to serve legal papers. You know when to slow down on a yellow light and when to take the next elevator.
These are not things you have feelings about. They are simply things that are.
Falcon was up first, in her robe, carrying Sparrow. The machine had already made coffee. It ran on a timer. Robin came down next. She went straight to the living room and put on cartoons. Condor was up last, an hour later, shuffling in with the newspaper, thumbs digging into the blue Sunday plastic bag. Gil lurked, staying out of the way, eyes on the periphery, hugging the shadows.
After breakfast he approached Condor.
“Mr. Bateman,” he said. “Okay if I brief you now?”
Condor looked up over his reading glasses.