13. Hoping It Was a Lie

"No you're not."

"You're little, I'm big. Try and stop me."

"You're not coming with me, Greg."

"Aw, Mom."

"I'm doing this alone."

"Then you'll have to handcuff me to the bathroom sink."

For show – he hoped – she pulled out the pair of cuffs she kept at the bottom of her handbag. Time to get loud.

"I'm not letting you search Blenheim's apartment alone! I can help –"

"I know how to search an apartment, Greg."

"So do I!" You think that's what this is about?" The thunder in his voice made her spin on him. "I want to keep you safe, dammit! Your boss may be a terrorist – he may already have been part of Dirty May and now -" Then she was rushing at him to clap a hand over his mouth, more paranoid than ever since Kearney because the walls might have ears, but it quieted them both, as though her own stubbornness bled out when she touched him. She dissolved against his chest, weak, shaking her head at herself. He could smell her hair. In the three days since seeing her with her father, a certain knowledge had entered his skin, a truth the average joe, he supposed, would never have the bad luck to grasp in all its pain – what it would feel like for the powers that be to tear someone you love away from you. He had watched them together, separated for seventeen years by an injustice, and his breaths had come shorter ever since. They could take her away from him too. He understood why she had said that about the camps. He could almost taste the horror, like a coating of bile down his throat. He knew she felt it too. Always these moments, stiffly courageous only to melt into him the next second. Sex had become a fever pitch for them; they were manic in bed, mining each other's bodies, stretching close afterwards to talk about anything and everything, with no thread to the conversation, each rambling on about whatever came to mind. Non-sequiturs that went on all night. Sensing they had to discover everything there was to know about each other before their time ran out.

When she looked up the dry tears were in her eyes again.

"Let's fight later," she begged.

"I'm going with you."

She nodded, reluctantly, and picked up her bag.

He drove. Evening light lingered in the streets; the days had become long. "Blenheim goes around the corner for take-out about this time," she told him. "At least he has the three days I've watched. Takes a good half-hour."

"Have you found out anything new on him?"

She grimaced. "Funny, I thought I'd get at him through his marriage records today. He's always told everyone he was divorced, even went on to a few people about how messy it was. But there was no record. He's never been married, much less divorced. Why would someone fake marriage and divorce?"

"To appear normal."

The people they passed on the streets seemed ghosts in the waning light, detached from them, ignorant of their terrible concerns. That was another lesson he had learned – how heavy a truly momentous secret could be. He hadn't even logorrheaed this one to Wilson this time, and the weight of it had made him bow his head whenever he passed the oncologist's open office door the last few days, sensing the dark-eyed gaze following him.

Ailyn was slipping an object from her bag. It looked like a foreshortened gun, with steel needles of various shapes that could be inserted where the muzzle should have been. "Park here," she said. "Put your shade down." She did the same. Ten minutes later a man left the apartment building across the street. Ailyn stiffened and he felt the chill leap across to him. "Guy's like clockwork," she muttered. "He's the same at work. Everything in perfect order, all the time."

"The sign of a bent mind."

"Think so? I'm still not sure about any of this. Blenheim's got all these references, worked his way up through CA for the last fifteen years. He didn't come out of nowhere. He's got a pedigree going way back."

"Pedigree is appropriate."

"I just mean he's well-connected."

"You can be well-connected and still be unhinged."

Blenheim had disappeared around the corner. She led the way to the building door, which opened in four seconds flat, her skill with the pick-gun impressive, then up a flight of stairs to the apartment door. Five seconds. She eased it open just as he made the top of the stairs, having beaten his own record by arm strength alone, swinging all his weight furiously on the handrail, not about to admit he might slow her down. He was already sweating. The sheer audacity of what they were doing – so much more dangerous than his puny B&E's – made his heart almost code. The guy could have a live-in buddy terrorist she knew nothing about, or come back early because his dinner-bucket was closed. The kind of risk he and Foreman had taken often enough, but there were too many factors here, and they involved people a little more desperate than your average suburban housewife. He sensed his hands itch to hold a gun. It was a novel feeling.

The only word for Blenheim's apartment was spartan. Functional furniture in dark hues, hardwood floor. Stylish, if there had been enough items there to hang a verdict of style on. A sofa, a small bookcase with texts on Christian history, the rational choice, he noted, for someone working in CA, and yet ambiguous. Two other rooms led off a hallway. Ailyn was moving through them briskly. The place had no lived-in feel. Every burnished-wood surface was spotless. No socks over chairs, no plate with its half-eaten pastrami-on-rye under the sofa …. Stop comparing him to yourself. No papers. That was the odd part – not a scrap of writing beyond the books. Ailyn had come back to the living room after ensuring the other rooms were empty and began a systematic search, pulling out each book from the shelf to riffle it and replacing it with the knife-edge precision Blenheim had ordained for it. She motioned him to continue on the next shelf, and when he turned he saw she had approached a long bare table at the back of the room, another oddity as it appeared to serve no purpose. With small square cloths she swabbed various sections of the surface and bagged the results. "A friend who won't ask questions can run tests for explosives residue," she explained when she saw his face.

They attacked the kitchen and the bedroom. More spotless precision. She stirred through the sugar and flour canisters as best she could without dumping them out. ("A great place to hide things," she told him. "Really?" he replied). In the cutlery drawer the spoons were spooning, each laid sideways to fit exactly into the next, the same with the forks, and they stood for a moment gazing down at this display of analness, in silent agreement that they did not like Blenheim. On to the bedroom. The bed had been made by his dad, he decided, on one of his more military days. Ailyn kept her eye on her watch. "Half an hour's not half enough," she muttered. It was like a surgery that could leave no trace of itself. Seconds were wasted putting things back in place. Ailyn glanced at him. "How did you know we searched your place back then?" she asked. He shrugged. "Piano bench was pushed in an inch too far." She nodded thoughtfully.

The bedroom desk finally yielded papers. Tax returns almost made Blenheim human. Work-related flotsam, commendations. He wondered what service above and beyond duty looked like in a place like CA and decided he didn't want to know.

The bottom drawer held a bulky manila envelope. The first item that had looked even halfway secretive. Ailyn slid the contents onto the desk, sheets of paper that looked like bad xerox copies and a large thin book, and then she was backing away, a hand to her mouth, as though she had dumped out an envelope of tarantulas instead of a book. It was the terror he'd seen in her at Kearney. He stepped in front of her and examined the book.

It was a high-school yearbook. Andrew Jackson High, 1989, from some place called Honey Brook in Pennsylvania. Feeling sick, he thumbed through to the N's. Nealy, Aimee Lynn. She wore the obligatory feather boa and a smile that said she was happy. A soft blonde teenager, on the brink of adult life. Just barely recognizable as Ailyn McCullough. Her face had changed, but the eyes were the same.

Fuck this. Every sound wafting through the apartment was loud, the slam of a car door rising from the street, a clock that ticked on the wall. He thought he could hear her heart. "So Blenheim knows who you are." His own voice startled him. "Ups the ante, I suppose."

She was still struggling for breath. "I should have guessed," she finally whispered. "He looked so funny when I made the suggestion about visiting Dad. So – knowing." She was shaking now, remembering. "Charlie even told me Blenheim thought my eyes were shifty. That they – reminded him of someone."

"Your dad. And so he orders up the yearbook to make sure."

She let out a laugh-sob. "And since everyone knows Mike Nealy's face, it doesn't even prove he's Blackwell."

"No. But I bet this does." He held up a blurry photo that had been among the xerox copies. A student cafe perhaps. A younger Mike Nealy sat at a huge table filled with books and the odd backpack, while the students around him, men and women, smiled into the camera. One young man, with black hair and a wedge-shaped head, was twisted toward Nealy, with an expression that cried for attention. The gaze of a troubled child to an ignoring father. Nealy was looking away.

A sound came from the other room. It might have been another noise from the street, or a neighbor in the next apartment – he knew apartments as empty as Blenheim's could echo oddly – but she panicked, stuffing the contents of the envelope back in, only seconds for a quick glance at the other papers – they looked like blueprints of a building, he decided, with all identifying lettering removed – and fumbling to put it back in the bottom drawer. He stopped her hands. They were shaking. "He's not here," he told her. "We're still alone." He took the envelope from her and rearranged the contents in their original anal order, with the photo last, and replaced it in the drawer. "We still have five minutes," he pointed out. She was shaking her head. "It's cutting it too short," she replied. All her nerve had left her at the sight of the yearbook. And so it was back out the door and down the stairs. Just as they reached the bottom of the stairs, the door to the street began to open and stopped halfway. "Not on the steps," a peevish male voice said to some one they couldn't see. A child answered, too muffled to hear, but Ailyn was already pushing him toward the back of the hallway, her whispered "Hide hide hide!" not words as much as a hiss of air. No time for cane maneuvering, he skip-ran the ten feet, his thigh screaming protest that exploded up his spine. A niche at the top of the stairs to the basement lay in shadow and she pressed him into the tiny space, their bodies close, chest to chest. "Because I said so," the voice added and the man came in. Instead of heading up the stairs, he stepped to the mailboxes and took out his key. They were feet away from him. Ailyn had stopped breathing. The pain from his sprint had reached his head, wave after wave searing through him, worse because he had to stand still and let it wash over him. He thought he would pass out. He tried to concentrate on Blenheim, languidly sifting through his mail. It was the first close look he had had, aside from the blurry photo, and he knew why Ailyn had been so certain the mashed-baby description was her boss. Blenheim pursed his lips over one of the letters, accentuating the effect, then turned away and disappeared up the stairs with the bounce of a man who paid a good gym a wad to keep him in shape. They heard his door open and close.

Ailyn laid her forehead against his chest, the first movement she had allowed herself, then raised a hand to count off five interminable seconds, before leading him out the door and to the car.

****

I have a right to this.

This is the way the world should be, this well-ordered realm that is mine. Its rules and understandings. Where an ant crawling across the floor would be crushed immediately, an affront to the silence that is this perfect repose. Where this thinnest coating of dust on the table - these almost imperceptible streaks in it I have apparently made without knowing – foolishly has been left to accumulate only because I have been busy lately. And quickly wiped away.

Love, they say, the highest edict, (he said), but it's not it's not, it is this – that a religion concocts these bars to hold us in, the safety of the cage, rules you will all live by when I am finished with you. I will build my house of nails, have built it already, every sharp point sticking up in my realm of pain, thousands, leaving free only those paths you may trod on or be impaled. This image, so central, that he would never accept, though I pointed it out to him over and over: nails, the violence done to a body, this is the wrathful, the vengeful lord, the message to us. Well, he learned.

… If they do not wish it, it must be imposed upon them.

For the greater good.

You have learned, haven't you? As will your daughter. You, there, head turned away as usual, this photo what I have of you, to be viewed daily once and only once at this moment when the dark is moving down, and which I see I have – foolishly, as with the dust – not put back as perfectly straight as you should be. I am slipping. This burden… They will not help me. I am a storm that has passed, my plans are thunder from far away. Thy ignore it and drift on to other, peaceful means. They go over to the side of love. I can't even touch you anymore. No threat of pain now to make you confess to something you didn't do, make them close a chapter, loosen up, put them off their guard. They're afraid you'll die. But your daughter is close, and ignorant. I can teach her how useless love is, that it will only kick you in the throat in the end. That it cannot save her.

She will learn.

****

As soon as they were back in Greg's apartment, she threw up in his toilet.

She could sense him watching her from the bathroom door, as though a comment were immanent, but when she turned to wash at the sink, he had shuffled back down the hall.

Tensions were traveling through her like toxins, fears that were free radicals bombarding her from the inside. When she slept she dreamed of her father, a thousand fragments of image, the cataclysmic event of having seen him again diffusing through her REM mind; she was running from the prison with his younger self, they stood in a charred city, the old broken man in the wheelchair who could not be him crying to them for help, on his lap a bomb - of the Road-Runner type, fuse sizzling - placed there by Blenheim.

And then seeing her yearbook was like the bomb exploding. There had always been that possibility – that someone would put two and two together and come up with a terrorist's missing daughter - but it was the thought of how long Blenheim – Blackwell - must have known, weeks, months perhaps, passing her desk with a pressed-lip nod, even sitting across from her and her team talking to her about leads, the bland snake face with its snake eyes. Did you already know when you ordered me to arrest Greg? No change in him she could remember, nothing that would pinpoint a moment of discovery. He might have known forever…

Might have sought transfer to head of your section because he knew.

She leaned against the bathroom door, stomach vapor-locking again, until she had fought it back under control.

In the kitchen Greg stood very straight at the counter, watching a shot of brandy he hadn't touched. That straightness in his spine, the strength it implied to her, even if no one else believed in it, made her want to cry. She could never convey to him how important he had become. He was her only source of strength, her religion. When he looked up she saw something was wrong.

"You're going to leave now, aren't you?" he asked simply. Before she could recover and shake her head, he went on: "I mean, it makes sense. Get the hell out of Dodge." He shrugged. "Disappear before Blenheim can roll on you."

"He can't go public with me because I'd go public with who he is."

" –Just go to ground and pop up somewhere else as a different person, right? Hey, you've done it once –"

"No, Greg –"

"- I guess the next time you'll be what? – Annie Lee? How about Annie Lee McNealy – I like the ring of it -"

"Stop it - I'm not going anywhere."

The intensity of it knocked him out of his spiel. "You can't stay here just because of me, Ailyn -"

"Yes I can."

"It's too dangerous!"

"And dangerous for you if I go. Blenheim must know about the two of us if he's been watching me. If he told them about me, they'd assume you knew where I was hiding. It would be information to get out of you." The thought was sobering enough to make him chug the brandy in one gulp.

"Look." The liquor had hardened his voice. "This thing's always had an expiration date on it." Don't go there. "Ever since you walked into my office. You were CA then, and now you're…a bunch of other stuff that makes it non-viable. We're going to be separated by this thing someday anyway." His eyes were suddenly red-rimmed. "I'm a doctor, Ailyn. I know what it means to draw out something terminal, and I know what it means to get it over with fast. The latter is infinitely preferable. And I'll at least have the comfort of knowing you're safe. So go on and – vanish." He spoke the last word to the wall, the brandy – it had to be the brandy – making him sound as though he were being strangled.

Such a non-believer. "Greg." She waited until he looked at her. "Do you know what a one-time pad is?"

It took him a moment to understand that it was her reply, that she would not argue anymore with him about staying, because she was staying. The relief made him stand up straighter, watching her for a long time. Finally he said, "I assume we're not talking feminine hygiene." She waited. "Cryptography. Codes. Don't know how the one-time pad works."

"I do. I'm going to create one with you, small enough to be hidden around here. It might even look like medical data to someone who'd never seen a key like that before. If –" She swallowed. "If I'm ever gone, I'll get a message to you."

The choice of gone was a poor one, it sounded like funeral-speak, and he acknowledged it by pouring himself another shot. She realized she was exhausted; the cozy messy warmth of his kitchen, the dirty-dish towers in which things probably lived, each chair wearing its own cast-off shirt from the week, all of which would have usually relaxed her, left her now chilled because they stood in it talking – so mundanely - about capture and death. She thought of the shadows in the niche at the top of the basement stairs, where they had hidden less than an hour ago from Blenheim, pressed hard against one another, not moving, and she suddenly longed to be transported there again; it seemed – insanely – a place they might stand for a moment, in an interstice outside of the world, inside a perfectly balanced, immobile peace at a point no one crossed and where they would thus never be found; that this snatched, safe moment might be made to last forever. It made her think of Blenheim and then her yearbook, the spoon-in-spoon mentality that had hidden what it knew of her behind a pursed smile while it probably planned its next killing, and then it was all too much, fear overload, and she was sobbing, holding up the doorjamb, while he watched, that specimen-under-the-microscope stare she had come to understand was his defense against the emotions of others, until he couldn't stand it anymore and limped to her, almost lifting her with his hug, muttering "Oh, crap," not at her but at the thing that had hurt her.

"- and he must hate Daddy and he's sick in the head have you ever had someone hate you who was sick in the head?" He wasn't going to answer that one. She tried to draw breath. "And he hates me I'm sure by proxy, and you." She was babbling between the sobs. "He mentioned hating someone once, he was almost catatonic about it –" She shuddered through her tears, thinking of Blenheim in the two-way mirror room, lost in his reptile memories while she pretended to detest Greg House for his arrogance. She had thought little of it at the time, figuring there were a lot of people someone like Blenheim would hate and that the feeling would be mutual. She knew now Blenheim had been seeing her father's face. "He might do anything," she rasped. "He would use either of us against the other, anything he knows about us is fair game." More sobs tendriled up into her throat, and down into her stomach, nauseating her again because the real reference here was the camps, the miles and miles of lined-up barracks kept in off-limit desert areas in the southwest, a photo of which she had seen once in a classified report, rows of teeth in a skull. It would break him to be sent there because of you, break every bone in his body from the inside as he detoxed and then starved - not physically, they fed them, humane enough – but because he could not buckle under. Like certain animals a cage would kill him. Starvation by despair. Because you couldn't leave him alone.

It welled up inside – my fault my fault – sheer terror now, she was sobbing again, no coherent thought left, only the will to hold him. She moaned, "It's all my fault," his "Shut up" too gentle to stop her – "I'm scared for you, Greg. You shouldn’t be mixed up in this. It was wrong of us to get you involved – it was so wrong!"

In the hush of dusk around them they were abruptly a tableau, frozen, unreal. His hands had stopped moving in her hair. The shock of her own idiocy lamed her, even the sobs chopped off, only her heart still going crazy, a wild animal that had clawed its way up into her mouth somehow; she would bite it dead, bite her tongue off and then everything would be all right.

After a long moment in which she didn't look at him he finally spoke. "I suppose," he said, words like ice, "by us you mean you and John Galt?"

When she pulled away he let her. The noise that came from her was the animal. All the moments in the last months when she had thought He will hate you rose now inside her, the lies roiling in her stomach, and she stumbled back to the bathroom, put her forehead on the door and waited. Nothing came. He will hate you. Now. After a long time she heard his thump down the hall and then his voice beside her.

"I saw how you reacted when your dad mentioned Galt." Too smart. "You cut him off. You didn't want it brought up." She forced herself to look at him. His face was a mask, sawn out of a single piece of smooth wood, but anger moved it from below. "Look, Ailyn – you think I can’t take this? This is the way it's been from the start. You reveal something to me that's either a lie or only part of the truth, say between 10 and 50 percent because that's all I rank at, and whenever you're in the mood you reveal a little more, bump me up in the ranking. I figure I'm about in the 87th percentile truthwise now. Why should this be any different?" The fierceness in his voice said it should be. "Come on, bump me up. I get to lick your cunt, but I don't get to find out what's going on in that head of yours?" She wanted to say Shut up, she could feel her mouth open, but only sorrow came out. This is it, this is when it ends. The numbness possessing her was resignation. "Well, maybe I don't let you in on everything that goes through my steel trap of a mind either, Ailyn. I've had enough time to think about it the last week or so." He looked as resigned as she felt. "And it all makes some kind of flooey sense. I figure if your father's Nealy – then, what the hell, you ought to have a dentist brother-in-law in Schenectady who's John Galt. Am I right?"

The anger he had felt at being lied to she could see evaporating. He thought he could accept this latest deceit of hers. Because he didn't know what was coming. "Would that be so bad?" she finally murmured. The air it took to speak burned in her throat.

"To have a brother-in-law from Schenectady?"

"I don’t have a brother-in-law, Greg. I don’t even have a brother." This is so hard. "But James does."

It took too long to register. She had hit him so many times, just slapped him in the face metaphorically – the moment outside the interrogation room when he understood she was locking him away without his pills, or when she had told him about her father – but this was worse. His face said it. It wasn't her, or not her alone. It was his friend, slapping him without even being there.

He said, "No." He shook his head. Slowly the slapped look spread to his eyes. After a long unbreathing moment he said, "I've met Wilson's brother."

"You haven't met his other brother."

Slap.

Then she told him everything, the extent of Wilson's manipulation, the part his brother played, her own part in it, while he backed up until he was leaning against the opposite wall as though driven there by the fists of a rabid opponent. He looked at the corners as she spoke, the lamp overhead, his mouth fumbled at a smile again and again that turned into a grimace Hey this is a good one I've haven't heard this one. Where's the punchline? And always, always shaking his head. Her life was draining from her; she would feel no nausea when it was over, would never feel anything again once he left her.

“He wanted to help you, Greg.”

"You and Wilson," he fought out, "you knew each other before you ever walked into my office."

"We were only introduced after James came up with his plan, after the underground group heard that Daddy was asking to see you about his heart. That was coincidence. But John Galt had a brother named James and James had a friend he had been wanting to tell about his beliefs for – so long. Because he thought it would help him. And he wanted to help him so much. He thought if his friend were exposed to Christianity he would accept it for himself. And he could help the cause at the same time, because if this famous doctor friend came to understand that Norxylam was really clozapine, if he went public with it, it would mean something."

"And you were the…bait."

"I was only supposed to watch you, nudge you in the right directions, Greg. Report back on what you were thinking – " His face made her stop.

"So - what? - every time I got a boner whenever I came too close to you, you and Wilson had little chats about it?"

"We talked about you, but it wasn't like that, we never thought –"

"No." His voice sounded as if he needed the toilet to puke in more than she did. It was his last attempt at denial, but it was useless. The phases sped across his face now, it was all true, and so she could watch the shock that had turned to disgust turn to bitterness, all in under a minute, record time for the death of a love affair. She felt her legs weak beneath her, waiting for his pronouncement.

"You bitch," he said.

She couldn't look at him. With her face turned to the bathroom door she said, "I fell in love with you." And then: "I love you, Greg."

He was already leaving -

"Greg, don't go -"

- banging through the rooms with his cane until he had his keys and helmet, no longer a body as much as a moving flame of anger. Clear where he was going. He left the door wide open behind him and she felt sucked out with him though she hadn't stirred from the cool wood of the bathroom door, a comfort against her forehead. She said, "Please come back."

****

End of Chapter 13

(A/N: I’m off to the States again for July, where I can never find the time (or the concentration) to write, so the next chapter in this won’t be until mid or late August. Thanks to everyone for reading (and reviewing!)- Have a great summer!