Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  He pressed his hands against his eyes and drew a deep, shuddering breath. Then he let his palms fall on top of the file-folder with a thump.

  “When it happened, I was in Kansas City on business. Julia spent Monday to Thursday mornings at Work Fair. Ez went to a daycare. A good one. I could have sued and broken that place—beggared the women who ran it—but I didn’t. Because even in my grief, I understood that what happened to Esmeralda could have happened to anyone’s child. It’s all just la lotería, entiendes? Once our firm sued a Venetian blind company—I wasn’t personally involved—when a baby lying in his crib got hold of the draw-cord, swallowed it, and choked to death. The parents won and there was a payout, but their baby was just as dead, and if it hadn’t been the cord, it might have been something else. A Matchbox car. The ID tag off the dog’s collar. A marble.” Wireman shrugged. “With Ez it was the marble. She pulled it down her throat during playtime and choked to death.”

  “Wireman, Jesus! I’m so sorry!”

  “She was still alive when they got her to the hospital. The woman from the daycare called both Julia’s office and mine. She was babbling-crazy, insane. Julia went tearing out of Work Fair, got into her car, drove like hell. Three blocks from the hospital she had a head-on collision with an Omaha Public Works truck. She was killed instantly. By then our daughter had probably already been dead for twenty minutes. That Mary medallion you held for me … that was Julia’s.”

  He fell silent, and the silence spun out. I didn’t fill it; there’s nothing to say to a story like that. Eventually he resumed.

  “Just another version of the Powerball. Five numbers, plus that all-important Bonus Number. Click, click, click, click, click. And then clack for good measure. Did I think such a thing could happen to me? No, muchacho, never in my wildest, and God punishes us for what we can’t imagine. My mother and dad begged me to go see a psychiatrist, and for a little while—eight months after the funerals—I did indeed go. I was tired of floating through the world like a balloon tethered three feet over my own head.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said.

  “I know you do. We checked into hell on different shifts, you and me. And out again, I suppose, although my heels are still smoking. How about yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The psychiatrist … nice man, but I couldn’t talk to him. With him I was inarticulate. With him I found myself grinning a lot. I kept expecting a cute chick in a bathing suit to trot out my big cardboard check. The audience would see it and applaud. And eventually a check did come. When we married, I’d taken out a joint life insurance policy. When Ez came, I added to it. So I really did win la lotería. Especially when you add in the compensation Julia received from the accident in the supermarket parking lot. Which brings us to this.”

  He held up the slim gray folder.

  “The thought of suicide had been out there, circling closer and closer. The primary attraction was the idea that Julia and Esmeralda might also still be out there, waiting for me to catch up … but they might not wait forever. I’m not a conventionally religious man, but I think there’s at least a chance that there is life after death, and that we survive as … you know, ourselves. But of course …” A wintry smile touched the sides of his mouth. “Mostly I was just depressed. I had a gun in my safe. A .22. I bought it for home protection after Esmeralda was born. One night I sat down with it at the dining room table, and … I believe you might know this part of the story, muchacho.”

  I raised one hand and seesawed it in a maybe sí, maybe no gesture.

  “I sat down at the dining room table in my empty house. There was a bowl of fruit there, courtesy of the home shopper I employed. I put the gun on the table, and then I closed my eyes. I spun the bowl of fruit around two or three times. I told myself if I picked an apple out of the bowl, I’d put the gun to my temple and end my life. If it was an orange, however … then I’d take my lottery winnings and go to Disney World.”

  “You could hear the refrigerator,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said without surprise. “I could hear the fridge—both the hum of the motor and the clunk of the ice-maker. I reached out and I picked an apple.”

  “Did you cheat?”

  Wireman smiled. “A fair question. If you mean did I peek, the answer is no. If you mean did I memorize the geography of the fruit in the bowl …” He shrugged. “Quién sabe? In any case, I picked an apple: in Adam’s fall, sinned we all. I didn’t have to bite it or smell it; I could tell what it was by the skin. So without opening my eyes—or giving myself any chance to think—I picked up the gun and put it to my temple.” He mimed this with the hand I no longer had, cocking the thumb and placing the first finger against the small circular scar that his long, graying hair usually hid. “My last thought was, ‘At least I won’t have to listen to that refrigerator anymore, or eat one more gourmet shepherd’s pie out of it.’ I don’t remember any bang. Nevertheless, the whole world went white, and that was the end of Wireman’s other life. Now … would you like the hallucinogenic shit?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “You want to see if it matches yours, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” And a question occurred to me. One of some import, maybe. “Wireman, did you have any of these telepathic bursts … weird receptions … whatever you want to call them … before you came to Duma Key?” I was thinking of Monica Goldstein’s dog, Gandalf, and how I seemed to have choked him with an arm I no longer had.

  “Yes, two or three,” he said. “I may tell you about them in time, Edgar, but I don’t want to stick Jack with Miss Eastlake for too long. All other considerations aside, she’s apt to be worried about me. She’s a dear thing.”

  I could have said that Jack—also sort of a dear thing—would probably be worried, too, but instead I only told him to go on.

  “You often have a redness about you, muchacho,” Wireman said. “I don’t think it’s an aura, exactly, and it’s not exactly a thought … except when it is. I’ve gotten it from you as a word as well as a color on three or four occasions. And yes, once when I was off Duma Key. When we were at the Scoto.”

  “When I was stuck for a word.”

  “Were you? I don’t remember.”

  “Neither do I, but I’m sure that was it. Red’s a mnemonic for me. A trigger. From a Reba McEntyre song, of all things. I found it almost by accident. And there’s something else, I guess. When I forget stuff I tend to get … you know …”

  “A little pissed off?”

  I thought of how I’d taken Pam by the throat. How I’d tried to choke her.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You could say that.”

  “Ah.”

  “Anyway, I guess that red must have gotten out and stained my … my mental suit of clothes? Is that what it’s like?”

  “Close. And every time I sense that around you, in you, I think of waking up after putting a bullet in my temple and seeing the whole world was dark red. I thought I was in hell, that that was what hell was going to be like, an eternity of deepest scarlet.” He paused. “Then I realized it was just the apple. It was lying right in front of me, maybe an inch from my eyes. It was on the floor and I was on the floor.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s what I thought, but it wasn’t damnation, only an apple. ‘In Adam’s fall, sinned we all.’ I said that out loud. Then I said, ‘Fruit-bowl.’ I remember everything that happened and everything that was said over the next ninety-six hours with perfect clarity. Every detail.” He laughed. “Of course I know some of the things I remember aren’t true, but I remember them with exquisite precision, all the same. No cross-examination could trip me up to this very day, not even concerning the pus-covered roaches I saw crawling out of old Jack Fineham’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils.

  “I had a hell of a headache, but once I got over the shock of the apple close-up, I felt pretty much okay otherwise. It was four in the morning. Six hours had gone by. I was lying in a puddle of con
gealed blood. It was caked on my right cheek like jelly. I remember sitting up and saying, ‘I’m a dandy in aspic’ and trying to remember if aspic was some kind of jelly. I said, ‘No jelly in the fruit-bowl.’ And saying that seemed so rational it was like passing a sanity test. I began to doubt that I’d shot myself. It seemed more likely that I’d gone to sleep at the dining room table only thinking of shooting myself, fallen off my chair, and hit my head. That’s where the blood came from. In fact, it seemed almost certain, given the fact that I was moving around and talking. I told myself to say something else. To say my mother’s name. Instead I said, ‘Cash crop in the groun, lan’lord soon be roun.’ “

  I nodded, excited. I had had similar experiences, not once but countless times, after coming out of my coma. Sit in the buddy, sit in the chum.

  “Were you angry?”

  “No, serene! Relieved! I could accept a little disorientation from a knock on the head. Only then I saw the gun on the floor. I picked it up and smelled the muzzle. There’s no mistaking the smell of a recently fired gun. It’s acrid, a smell with claws. Still, I held onto the falling-asleep-and-hitting-my-head idea until I got into the bathroom and saw the hole in my temple. Little round hole with a corona of singe-marks around it.” He laughed again, as people do when remembering some crazy boner they’ve pulled—forgetting to open the garage door, for instance, and then backing into it.

  “That’s when I heard the last number clicking into place, Edgar—the Powerball Number! And I knew I was going to Disney World, after all.”

  “Or a reasonable facsimile,” I said. “Christ, Wireman.”

  “I tried to wash the powder-burns off, but bearing down with a facecloth hurt too much. It was like biting down on a bad tooth.”

  Suddenly I understood why they’d X-rayed him instead of sticking him in the MRI machine. The bullet was still in his head.

  “Wireman, can I ask you something?”

  “All right.”

  “Are a person’s optic nerves … I don’t know … bass-ackwards?”

  “Indeed they are.”

  “So that’s why your left eye is fucked up. It’s like …” For a moment the word wouldn’t come, and I clenched my fists. Then it was there. “It’s like contracoup.”

  “I guess so, yeah. I shot myself in the right side of my stupid head, but it’s my left eye that’s fucked up. I put a Band-Aid over the hole. And took some aspirin.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Wireman smiled and nodded.

  “Then I went to bed and tried to sleep. I might as well have tried sleeping in the middle of a brass band. I didn’t sleep for four days. I felt I would never sleep again. My mind was going four thousand miles an hour. This made cocaine seem like Xanax. I couldn’t even lie still for long. I managed twenty minutes, then leaped up and put on a mariachi record. It was five-thirty in the morning. I spent thirty minutes on the exercise bike—first time I’d been on it since Julia and Ez died—showered, and went in to work.

  “For the next three days I was a bird, I was a plane, I was Super Lawyer. My colleagues progressed from being worried about me to being scared for me to being scared for themselves—the non sequiturs were getting worse, and so was my tendency to lapse into both pidgin Spanish and a kind of Pepé Le Pew French—but there can be no doubt that I moved a mountain of paper during those days, and very little of it ever came back on the firm. I checked. The partners in the corner offices and the lawyers in the trenches were united in the belief that I was having a nervous breakdown, and in a sense they were right. It was an organic nervous breakdown. Several people tried to get me to go home, with no success. Dion Knightly, one of my good friends there, all but begged me to let him take me to see a doctor. Know what I told him?”

  I shook my head.

  “ ‘Corn in the field, deal soon sealed.’ I remember it perfectly! Then I walked away. Except I was almost skipping. Walking was too slow for Wireman. I pulled two all-nighters. The third night, the security guard escorted me, protesting, from the premises. I informed him that a rigid penis has a million capillaries but not one scruple. I also told him he was a dandy in aspic, and that his father hated him.” Wireman brooded down at his folder briefly. “The thing about his father got to him, I think. Actually I know it did.” He tapped his scarred temple. “Weird radio, amigo. Weird radio.

  “The next day I was called in to see Jack Fineham, the grand high rajah of our kingdom. I was ordered to take a leave of absence. Not asked, ordered. Jack opined that I’d come back too soon after ‘my unfortunate family reversals.’ I told him that was silly, I’d had no family reversals. ‘Say only that my wife and child et a rotten apple,’ I told him. ‘Say that, thou white-haired syndic, for it did be mortal full of bugs.’ That was when the roaches started to come out of his eyes and nose. And a couple from under his tongue, spilling white scum down his chin when they crawled over his lower lip.

  “I started to scream. And I went for him. If not for the panic button on his desk—I didn’t even know the paranoid old geezer had one—I might have killed him. Also, he could run surprisingly fast. I mean he sped around that office, Edgar. Must have been all those years of tennis and golf.” He mulled this for a moment. “Still, I had both madness and youth on my side. I had laid hands on him by the time the posse burst in. It took half a dozen lawyers to haul me off him, and I tore his Paul Stuart suit-coat in half. Straight down the back.” He shook his head slowly back and forth. “You should have heard that hijo de puta holler. And you should have heard me. The maddest shit you can imagine, including accusations—shouted at the top of my lungs—about his preference for ladies’ underwear. And like the thing about the security guard’s father, I think that may well have been true. Funny, no? And, crazy or not, valued legal mind or not, that was the end of my career at Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “De nada, all for the best,” he said in a businesslike tone. “As the lawyers were wrestling me out of his office—which was trashed—I pitched a fit. The grandest of grand mals. If there hadn’t been a legal aide handy with some medical training, I might have died right there. As it was, I was out cold for three days. And hey, I needed the sleep. So now …”

  He opened the folder and handed me three X-rays. They weren’t as good as the cortical slices produced by an MRI, but I had an informed layman’s understanding of what I was looking at, thanks to my own experience.

  “There it is, Edgar, a thing many claim does not exist: the brain of a lawyer. Have any pictures like these yourself?”

  “Let’s put it this way: if I’d wanted to fill a scrapbook …”

  He grinned. “But who’d want a scrapbook of shots like these. Do you see the slug?”

  “Yes. You must have been holding the gun …” I held up my hand, tilting the finger at a pretty severe downward angle.

  “That’s about right. And it had to’ve been a partial misfire. There was enough bang to drive it through my skull-case and deflect the bullet downward at an even steeper angle. It burrowed into my brain and came to rest. But before it did, it created a kind of … I don’t know …”

  “Bow-wave?”

  His eyes lit up. “Exactly! Only the texture of brain-matter is more like calves’ liver than water.”

  “Euuuu. Nice.”

  “I know. Wireman can be eloquent, he admits it. The slug created a downward bow-wave that caused edema and pressure on the optic chiasm. That’s the brain’s visual switching-point. Are you getting the richness of this? I shot myself in the temple and not only did I end up still alive, I ended up with the bullet causing problems in the equipment located back here.” He tapped the ridge of bone above his right ear. “And the problems are getting worse because the slug’s moving. It’s at least a quarter-inch deeper in than two years ago. Probably more. I didn’t need Hadlock or Principe to give me that information; I can see it in these pictures for myself.”

  “So let them operate on you, Wireman, and take it
out. Jack and I will make sure Elizabeth’s okay until you’re back on your …” He was shaking his head. “No? Why no?”

  “It’s too deep for surgery, amigo. That’s why I didn’t let them admit me. Did you think it was because I’ve got a Marlboro Man complex? No way. My days of wanting to be dead are over. I still miss my wife and my daughter, but now I’ve got Miss Eastlake to take care of, and I’ve come to love the Key. And there’s you, Edgar. I want to know how your story comes out. Do I regret what I did? Sometimes sí, sometimes no. When it’s sí, I remind myself I wasn’t the same man then that I am now, and that I have to cut the old me some slack. That man was so hurt and lost he really wasn’t responsible. This is my other life, and I try to look at my problems in it as … well … birth defects.”

  “Wireman, that’s bizarre.”

  “Is it? Think of your own situation.”

  I thought of my situation. I was a man who had choked his own wife and then forgot about it. A man who now slept with a doll in the other half of the bed. I decided to keep my opinions to myself.

  “Dr. Principe only wants to admit me because I’m an interesting case.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “But I do!” Wireman spoke with suppressed passion. “I’ve met at least four Principes since I did this to myself. They’re terrifyingly similar: brilliant but disassociative, incapable of empathy, really only one or two doors down from the sociopaths John D. MacDonald used to write about. Principe can’t operate on me any more than he could on a patient who presents with a malignant tumor in that same location. With a tumor they could at least try radiation. A lead slug isn’t amenable to that. Principe knows it, but he’s fascinated. And sees nothing wrong with giving me a little false hope if it’ll get me in a hospital bed where he can ask me if it hurts when he does … this. And later, when I’m dead, perhaps there’d be a paper in it for him. He can go to Cancún and drink wine coolers on the beach.”

  “That’s harsh.”