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Authors: Stephen Romano
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say, very evenly, with as much respect as I can come up with: “Yes. I understand.”
Sometimes you just have to play it cool.
Even when they’re calling you by name.
Another long silence in the room. The air force redhead across from me downshifts her gaze again, not saying a word, but I can see something that might be vague contempt and puzzlement flash in her eyes. She turns her look inward. Keeping it to herself. For now.
The boss lady stands from her chair. Offers me her hand.
“Mister Coffin, I think we finally do understand each other. My name is Jayne Jenison. It’s good to make your acquaintance.”
I shake her hand.
Her flesh is cold, like the devil’s.
The killer inside her glows just beneath the surface.
• • •
T hat night, I stash my getaway money under the bed in my room upstairs in the farmhouse. I don’t tell my father about it. I sit on the bed staring at the key to my safe deposit box. It might be useless now. I put it back in my pocket.
I can’t sleep. Toni’s keeping me awake, as usual. She’s pissed off at me. She’s screaming that I’m her only hope, that she’s still alive, that I’ve messed everything up. That my plots have failed me, failed us. That I’m too smart for my own good. Too good at too many things. Tricking computers, stealing cars, breaking people’s legs with my bare hands, it all has a price, and I’ve been paying it for years . . . but now my smart self has painted me into a very dark corner. I want to cry. The tears almost come.
No.
Keep it under control, kid.
Keep your game face on.
Keep it under control . . .
My wife screams at me that I’m a diaper-wagging baby. The same cruel way she used to when my back was against the wall, when I had something to prove, those white-hot moments when I knew she was right and I was wrong and I was fighting just to hear the sound of my own arrogant pride.
But her voice is not her voice in my memory.
Not at all.
I know it’s her, I can hear the words . . . but it sounds like someone else.
Something abstract.
Like in a dream I can’t bring back.
My head burns white-hot and ice-cold when I strain to hear her. I rub the plate under my thick hair and all the scar tissue. My whole skull itches. The smell of rose petals, canceling out the dampness of the room, overriding everything. Ammonia and a razor blade, the sharp smell of blood, somewhere way back among the important things that are washed out.
The doctors could never give me a straight answer on what it was, the way she was blocked from me, her face and her voice gone, but the memories still there, the details scrawled in abstract. Some kind of regression, self-punishment. A couple of guys told me it was a no-brainer. They actually said that to me. Someone shot you in the head, Mister Coffin. What’s the big mystery?
It never mattered to give my condition a name, but they threw around a lot of highbrow terms in the hospital. Cognitive dissonance. Prosopagnosia, face blindness. My favorite was transregressional selective doorway amnesia .
I don’t even think “transregressional” is a real word.
I started realizing they make this shit up as they go in some hospitals.
My wife would have laughed at those doctors.
I see my father telling me Toni’s no good, that I settled for something because I had nothing better, that she finally left me because she was a survivor, not because she was trying to save my life.
Love cannot stay, kid. She was just an illusion.
I know that can’t be true. I don’t want to believe that’s true.
But I see her in Hartman’s arms. The sweat dripping off his fat face, into her mouth, which is the mouth of a china doll—a smooth, blank face like porcelain, shattered into pieces. Not her at all. Her face shattered and lost to me forever. Until I can make forever go away. Until I can find her.
I get out of the bed and sit in the center of the floor.
Concentrate hard and take myself out.
Out of the
Sometimes you just have to play it cool.
Even when they’re calling you by name.
Another long silence in the room. The air force redhead across from me downshifts her gaze again, not saying a word, but I can see something that might be vague contempt and puzzlement flash in her eyes. She turns her look inward. Keeping it to herself. For now.
The boss lady stands from her chair. Offers me her hand.
“Mister Coffin, I think we finally do understand each other. My name is Jayne Jenison. It’s good to make your acquaintance.”
I shake her hand.
Her flesh is cold, like the devil’s.
The killer inside her glows just beneath the surface.
• • •
T hat night, I stash my getaway money under the bed in my room upstairs in the farmhouse. I don’t tell my father about it. I sit on the bed staring at the key to my safe deposit box. It might be useless now. I put it back in my pocket.
I can’t sleep. Toni’s keeping me awake, as usual. She’s pissed off at me. She’s screaming that I’m her only hope, that she’s still alive, that I’ve messed everything up. That my plots have failed me, failed us. That I’m too smart for my own good. Too good at too many things. Tricking computers, stealing cars, breaking people’s legs with my bare hands, it all has a price, and I’ve been paying it for years . . . but now my smart self has painted me into a very dark corner. I want to cry. The tears almost come.
No.
Keep it under control, kid.
Keep your game face on.
Keep it under control . . .
My wife screams at me that I’m a diaper-wagging baby. The same cruel way she used to when my back was against the wall, when I had something to prove, those white-hot moments when I knew she was right and I was wrong and I was fighting just to hear the sound of my own arrogant pride.
But her voice is not her voice in my memory.
Not at all.
I know it’s her, I can hear the words . . . but it sounds like someone else.
Something abstract.
Like in a dream I can’t bring back.
My head burns white-hot and ice-cold when I strain to hear her. I rub the plate under my thick hair and all the scar tissue. My whole skull itches. The smell of rose petals, canceling out the dampness of the room, overriding everything. Ammonia and a razor blade, the sharp smell of blood, somewhere way back among the important things that are washed out.
The doctors could never give me a straight answer on what it was, the way she was blocked from me, her face and her voice gone, but the memories still there, the details scrawled in abstract. Some kind of regression, self-punishment. A couple of guys told me it was a no-brainer. They actually said that to me. Someone shot you in the head, Mister Coffin. What’s the big mystery?
It never mattered to give my condition a name, but they threw around a lot of highbrow terms in the hospital. Cognitive dissonance. Prosopagnosia, face blindness. My favorite was transregressional selective doorway amnesia .
I don’t even think “transregressional” is a real word.
I started realizing they make this shit up as they go in some hospitals.
My wife would have laughed at those doctors.
I see my father telling me Toni’s no good, that I settled for something because I had nothing better, that she finally left me because she was a survivor, not because she was trying to save my life.
Love cannot stay, kid. She was just an illusion.
I know that can’t be true. I don’t want to believe that’s true.
But I see her in Hartman’s arms. The sweat dripping off his fat face, into her mouth, which is the mouth of a china doll—a smooth, blank face like porcelain, shattered into pieces. Not her at all. Her face shattered and lost to me forever. Until I can make forever go away. Until I can find her.
I get out of the bed and sit in the center of the floor.
Concentrate hard and take myself out.
Out of the
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