Color of Blood(119)

Dennis was already at the door, turning the knob, when Massey said loudly to great effect, “It’s for your own wellbeing, Cunningham.”

***

He was furious that he had not driven to work that day and had to wait twenty minutes at the front desk for another cab.

He had the cabbie drive him back to the National Mall and ordered him to stop near the Science and Technology building. Dennis told the cabbie to wait while he bought a Diet Coke from a street vendor. He sat on a bench under a bus stop awning and watched the tour buses and cars crawl by.

Dennis liked being around tourists sometimes. They seemed so innocent, patriotic, and earnest. It was refreshing.

The cabbie honked his horn at Dennis to show his irritation at having to wait.

Dennis held up his forefinger suggesting just one more minute.

Dr. Forrester had warned Dennis that his unwillingness to deal with his father’s murder-suicide, which had happened nearly forty years ago, had turned his life into “a stilted, venomous existence.” Martha’s passing made it more important for him, Dr. Forrester said, to start examining that dark corner of his family life. She even encouraged Dennis to tell his daughter about it as a way to start the cleansing process.

And now, out of the blue, Massey had done what no other Agency official, including Marty, had done in all his years there—bring the subject up directly. Once or twice Marty had made small, glancing references to his childhood, but had never pressed the details or requested an answer.

Who in their right mind would want to remember a murder-suicide by his father forty years ago? Dennis thought.

In fact, he could only remember two things about that day: his mother lying sideways on the beige carpet, the clothes hamper on the couch full of freshly folded clothes. A huge pool of dark-red blood had collected near his mother’s mouth. The shape of the pool looked like the bubble you’d see next to a comic-book character with words drawn in it. The other thing he remembered was that his father’s face was twisted as he lay back in the kitchen chair after shooting himself. Because of the angle of the shot and strange muscular contortion, in death his father looked like he was sneering.

Dennis had talked to Dr. Forrester about feeling depressed, and it was she who brought up the issue of suicide. Dennis had simply responded, “Maybe.”

He had agreed to have Dr. Forrester’s files reviewed by the Agency’s medical staff before returning to work but was na?ve, in retrospect, to think that they’d know how to treat that interchange.

He finally stood up and got back into the cab; thirty minutes later, he was unlocking his front door.





Chapter 43


The late-afternoon light slanted through the house windows, giving it a cathedral-like feel: cavernous, dank, and musty. He hung his suit coat on the kitchen chair, pulled off his tie, and threw it on the kitchen table. He felt agitated and confused. He opened a bottle of beer and turned on the TV, something he rarely did.

The channel was set to CNN, and he numbly watched a reporter from Iraq detail the sudden drop in violence against American soldiers.

He put his feet up onto the coffee table and on top of a book. The book slid a little, and he pulled his feet down and looked at it.

It was the War Poetry hardcover that he had purchased in Australia. He put down his beer, leaned over, grabbed the book, and opened it to a bookmark that he had made from an American Airlines ticket stub.

Dennis’s eyes fell to the third stanza of the Wilfred Owen poem titled “Insensibility” that he found himself returning to from time to time. He read:

Happy are these who lose imagination:

They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Their spirit drags no pack.

Their old wounds save with cold can not more ache.

Having seen all things red,

Their eyes are rid

Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.



He closed the book and set it down.

I’m not rid of the hurt of the color of blood, he thought. Blood has followed me my entire stupid life and I can’t escape it. I’m drowning in it.

And blood was following him now, at least it seemed that way. Something strange had gone on in Massey’s office earlier that day. It wasn’t merely the uncomfortable facts of his childhood, or the mention of his medical records. Massey was doing something, but what was it? It gnawed at him like a beetle boring into his brain.

The clues, he thought. Stay focused; just pay attention to the clues. Forget the distracting crap in your life he was digging up.

Why had Massey pulled the psychiatrist into the meeting? Why did he keep harping on his depression and talk of suicide? And when Massey had brought up the one subject he could not deal with—his father’s murder-suicide—Dennis had bolted from the room, looking, he guessed, like a crazed, depressed man.

Wait, Dennis thought: like a crazed, suicidal man.

Dennis had bolted from Massey’s office to . . . to do what?

Jesus, Dennis thought, to kill himself.

Dennis would have appeared angry, depressed, and capable of suicide to Dr. Norris.

A TV commercial droned on in the background, and Dennis reached for the remote and turned off the set. The old TV tube crackled as it went black. The compressor in the refrigerator started up, and Dennis listened to it drum on. He felt his heart racing, and he took a huge gulp of beer.

The scene was perfectly set for that evening; Dennis was going to kill himself with his personal handgun. He was distraught, depressed, and suicidal. Three Agency officials had witnessed his meltdown. It was perfect, really. If he weren’t so startled, he might have smiled out of admiration for Massey.