Permanence Read online

  PERMANANCE

  VINCENT ZANDRI

  PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI

  “Vincent Zandri explodes onto the scene with the debut thriller of the year. The Innocent is gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting. Don’t miss it.” — Harlan Coben, author of Caught

  “A SATISFYING YARN.” — Chicago Tribune

  “COMPELLING … The Innocent pulls you in with rat-a-tat prose, kinetic pacing … characters are authentic, and the punchy dialogue rings true. Zandri’s staccato prose moves The Innocent at a steady, suspenseful pace.” —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  “EXCITING … AN ENGROSSING THRILLER … the descriptions of life behind bars will stand your hair on end.” — Rocky Mountain News

  “READERS WILL BE HELD CAPTIVE BY PROSE THAT POUNDS AS STEADILY AS AN ELEVATED PULSE… Vincent Zandri nails readers’ attention.” —Boston Herald

  “A SMOKING GUN OF A DEBUT NOVEL. The rough and tumble pages turn quicker than men turn on each other.” —The Times-Union (Albany)

  “THE STORY LINE IS NON-STOP ACTION and the flashback to Attica is eerily brilliant. If this debut is any indication of his work, readers will demand a lifetime sentence of novels by Vincent Zandri.” —í Love a Mystery

  “A TOUGH-MINDED, INVOLVING NOVEL … Zandri writes strong prose that rarely strains for effect, and some of his scenes … achieve a powerful hallucinatory horror,” —Publishers Weekly

  “A CLASSIC DETECTIVE TALE.” —The Record (Troy, N.Y.)

  “[Zandri] demonstrates an uncanny knack for exposition, introducing new characters and narrative possibilities with the confidence of an old pro… Zandri does a superb job creating interlocking puzzle pieces.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “This is a tough, stylish, heartbreaking car accident of a book: You don’t want to look but you can’t look away. Zandri’s a terrific writer and he tells a terrific story.” — Don Winslow, author of The Death & Life of Bobby Z

  “SATISFYING.” —Kirkus Reviews

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Vincent Zandri

  Also by Vincent Zandri

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book One

  Book Two

  Book Three

  About the Author

  Also by Vincent Zandri

  The Innocent (formerly As Catch Can)

  Godchild

  The Remains

  The Concrete Pearl

  Moonlight Falls

  Moonlight Mafia (Digital Short)

  Moonlight Rises

  Blue Moonlight

  Murder By Moonlight

  Scream Catcher

  Pathological (Digital Short)

  True Stories (Digital Short)

  Copyright © 2010 by Vincent Zandri

  Cover design and art by Jeroen Ten Berge

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  Edition: June 2012

  Sections of this novella have appeared, in slightly different form, under the titles listed in the following publications:

  —”Permanence,” (short story), Reconteur, Vol. 1, No. 2, September, 1993 (ISBN) 1069-9457, by Susan Carrol Publishing, Williamsburg, VA.)

  —-”Hopelessly Lost In Love And Venice,” (travel article), New York Newsday (Sunday, October 10, 1993).

  —”Permanence,” (short story), Fugue, #10, Fall/Winter 1994, University of Idaho, English Dept., Brink Hall, Room 200 Moscow, ID 83844-1102.

  —”Permanence,” (short story). Spring 1995, The Ultimate Writer. New Orleans, LA.

  For Laura

  Book One

  Water

  I look to you and I see nothing.

  I look to you to see the truth.

  —Mazzy Star

  September, 1989

  Restitution

  The problem is my heart.

  I thought it would break when doctor poured a glass of water from the pitcher on his desk. Running water is the sound I remember best—and worst—about baby. Water is what I remember as it spilled over the walls of the bathtub when baby died fourteen months ago.

  For six months now I’ve been seeing doctor once a week, whether I need him or not. The visits are not really voluntary visits. The visits are necessity. But I give the visits a different name: restitution—self-appointed penance for my guilt, for the time I left baby alone in the bathtub.

  So here’s what I do to get my money’s worth: I ask doctor to tell me about someone whose life is worse than my own.

  “If it isn’t about a bad marriage or a tragic death,” I tell him, “then just make it plain miserable so I don’t feel so bad.”

  “I know,” says doctor. “Misery loves company.”

  Doctor’s face bears no expression at all. His face is emotionless, but mysteriously attractive. His thin, pale lips are pressed together inside his salt-and-pepper beard. He neither smiles nor frowns.

  I make a small, fake laugh. I cross my legs while I sit on this long, leather patient’s couch. I smooth the creases and wrinkles that disfigure my skirt. I run my hands through my shoulder-length, brown hair. I close my legs tightly, feel the warmth of thigh against thigh and all that is beginning to excite between my thighs.

  “Yes,” I say, looking away from doctor and at the plain white walls of his office. “Something like that, so long as it’s miserable.”

  Doctor stares at the ceiling for some time, as though collecting his thoughts. “I knew this fat man a long time ago,” he says. “The man was so convinced of being trapped inside his body, he overdosed on tranquilizers. But the tranquilizers did not have the hoped-for effect.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I say.

  “The man’s body was so large, it absorbed the entirety of the drugs without killing him. He stayed alive.”

  “Alive,” I say. “I see.”

  “You don’t see,” insists doctor from behind his enormous mahogany desk. “The fat man tried hanging himself, but the thin rope he wrapped around his neck and around the roof rafters in his attic wasn’t strong enough. The rope suddenly snapped in two when the fat man kicked a chair out from under himself. He came tumbling to the floor, a bit bruised but very much alive.

  “By that time,” doctor goes on, “the man was in a state of panic. He felt absolutely helpless. He believed he had become immortal. He was miserable. He even tried to gas himself with the oven, but listen to this: the appliance was electric.”

  I don’t know whether to believe doctor or not. I don’t know whether to smile or not, because doctor is dead serious. He stares off into the distance, despite the lack of distance in this small office.

  A long, weighty silence ensues.

  Then doctor jumps from his chair to his feet. He slams his fist to the mahogany desk. He raises the same fist to me. He stares into me with passionate, feeling eyes.

  “Listen,” he demands. “Don’t you get it? The fat man stayed alive in spite of himself.”

  Slowly, doctor reins his emotion in. He sits back down into the leather chair. He pulls a white handkerchief from his pocket, wipes his moist brow. He breathes a heavy, exaggerated breath. He seems frustrated. Like a suffocating man, he seems to be gasping for air that will not come.

  Parable

  Maybe a story about someone who lives in spite of himself is too miserable, because I force a smile onto my face, beginning with the comers of my mouth and getting larger, straining to grow. I gaze upon my own s
mile in the mirror behind doctor. But then I shift my focus to doctor. I want him to see how happy I can be. I want him to know he has affected me, and in this, perhaps he has made some progress. But why should I smile? What is it about guilt that can make me smile?

  I should be crying.

  Doctor stares into my eyes. He bears his usual, indifferent frown. After six months’ worth of Friday afternoon visits, I do not expect him to smile, ever.

  I guess you can say that doctor is never in a smiling mood

  So I do this in order to avoid looking at his sullen face: I stand up from the leather patient’s couch. I walk to the window and stare outside. I picture the travel posters that covered the walls of my office before I gave up my career as a travel agent after the death of baby. Colorful posters of exotic, faraway destinations that still fill my imagination. Except that the place outside this window is not exotic or romantic. This is not “Beautiful Miami Beach,” or “Sunny Southern California.” Life might be “Better in the Bahamas,” but for now I watch the rain coming down steady against the pavement of this parking lot in Albany, New York, at the end of daylight, the start of darkness.

  “You win, doc,” I say. “How’s about a miserable story with a happy ending.”

  “What you want, Mary,” says doctor, “is a parable.”

  “Aren’t all stories parables?”

  “Some more than others.”

  “And yours?”

  “I give you only what you ask for. I give you what you need.”

  I stand by the window. I see my face reflected in the glass. My face is not my face at all. It is a detached, distorted face. A face that has seen too much; a face that knows too much. My eyes are sunken deep, drooping almost. I look older, feel far older than twenty-nine years, as though the loss of baby and Jamie has sucked the life out of me.

  In the distance of this window reflection, I see my doctor. He is standing behind me. I know this: he does not know that I can see him. I watch him pull at his beard with his fingertips. I watch him pick at his nose gently with his forefinger and thumb, like he’s not really picking. He moves to his desk and pours water from a pitcher into a glass that is already half-full. He lifts the now full glass and stares into it, deeply.

  Doctor places the glass of water back down on his desk without taking a drink. I turn away from the window. Doctor stares at me, into me. We say nothing. But I sense we are communicating, tearing apart my past with his vision. We do this in order to save my life, not my soul, which, in the eyes of God, must already be damned. I am responsible for the death of my two-year-old son. A toddler who was walking and talking. But also a boy who I will forever think of as baby—my first and last baby.

  I was responsible for baby’s life and death.

  “Okay,” says doctor. “How’s this for a happy ending?” He sits back deeply into his chair and places his hands behind his head. “This is what I did to make the fat man regain control of his body and his life. I convinced him that his body was not his enemy, that a person obsessed with exercise, a person who cannot live without Dexatrim Max or Lean Cuisine, is the person truly trapped inside his body.”

  Doctor sits up straight in his leather chair. He extends his arms to me. His eyes widen. The steady rain falls outside the window onto the parking lot on this late September afternoon.

  “Don’t you get it?” he asks. “It took some time, but I made the fat man feel so good about himself, he was able to stop overeating. He lost one hundred fifty pounds in just ten months. He kept the weight off. No fad diets, no grueling exercise, no pills.” Doctor extends his index finger to his temple. An imitation pistol. “Just mind over matter,” he says. “The formerly fat man was thin. He was suddenly free. Happy to be alive.”

  “I see now,” I lie, smiling. “Truly, I see.”

  “That’s the beauty,” says doctor.

  “Of freedom?”

  “No,” he says. “Of a parable.”

  Is there a doctor in the house?

  Doctor and I drown ourselves in silence.

  Total silence.

  Until the rain, spattering hard now against the pavement outside this window, revives our senses like bees buzzing around a hive. Now that doctor is finished with his story, he takes a deep drink of water. But the drink turns out to be too deep.

  Doctor begins to choke. He coughs until his eyes water. He coughs and struggles for the air that will not pass into his throat.

  Doubled over, doctor places his open hands to his stomach. I am helpless. I stand here by the window. I watch doctor drown from swallowing water from a glass. Listen: I want to scream: Help! Anyone! Is there a doctor in the house?

  I want to call for Wendy, doctor’s receptionist. But this is late Friday afternoon. Doctor’s receptionist is already gone for the weekend. The reason I come here on late Friday afternoons is that doctor’s receptionist leaves early on Friday. She leaves me alone with doctor because that is the way doctor wants it. Alone, doctor tells me, is the only way he will be with me.

  Here’s what I do: I go to doctor to try to help him, to save his life. I stand over him, where he is doubled over behind his wide mahogany desk, and begin to slap him on the back.

  I am scared to death.

  I lean over to get a better look at his face. But doctor, still doubled over, pushes me away. I am only making matters worse for him. Doctor is not a baby. I am not a mother anymore. I want to scream for the help I know does not exist.

  So here’s what I will do: I will do nothing.

  I just stand there and watch.

  Then, just as suddenly as the coughing starts, the coughing stops. Doctor manages to catch his air and attempts to regain his composure. He does not drown in the water poured from the pitcher.

  I move closer to him. But he waves me away. He performs this act convincingly, as if to say this: Don’t worry, I’m not dying. Not yet.

  And I believe him.

  He is my doctor, after all.

  Part of his job, doctor told me six months ago, was to make me believe him, no matter what. We wouldn’t work well together if I couldn’t believe him. I wouldn’t make any progress. I would never get over the death of baby or the loss of Jamie. I have never considered myself a naive person, a person easily convinced. But I make it a point to trust doctor at face value. Maintaining that trust, he says, is my job as a patient.

  I feel a slight, nervous cramping just below my stomach.

  I move away from doctor, slowly, as if at any moment the drowning might begin again.

  “Are you all right?” I ask. I stare at doctor’s Adam’s apple bobbing up and down inside his throat in a way that seems unnatural.

  Pain, I think.

  Doctor rubs his throat with his hands. “Wrong pipe,” he says, with a raw, hoarse voice. Doctor smiles despite the obvious pain he is feeling. This is the first and only smile I’ve seen today. Or this month, for that matter.

  Doctor’s smiles are not feeling smiles. His smiles are forced and in this case, the result of embarrassment. But listen to this: I am the one embarrassed. I am feeling for doctor in my heart at a time when doctor should be feeling for me.

  The affects of water

  I turn away from the window and look for doctor.

  Outside, the rain makes small pools and puddles in the blacktop on this late September Friday afternoon. The glow from the overhead street lamps is orange colored and reflected in the puddles that collect in the pavement.

  I am dead tired.

  I brush my jacket with my open hand, straighten my skirt, run my open hands against my dark, shoulder-length hair. I want to be more appealing to doctor. But I know this: the way I look should have nothing to do with my reasons for being with him. But they do.

  I see doctor absorbed in the dim orange light coming from his desk lamp. He sports closely cropped hair and a trim, salt-and-pepper beard. He wears an old, loose-fitting, gray wool suit with matching vest and a pocket watch in his left-hand pocket. He is bent forward, his c
hin nearly touching the top of his desk. We say nothing for some time. But we communicate.

  Rain comes down in sheets against the pavement.

  I go to doctor. I reach for the pack of cigarettes on his desk. I tip over the entire pitcher of water. Water gushes out, spills across the desk, expands and puddles over the stacks of papers.

  I jump away from the desk. I swallow my breath while the water spreads across the entire desktop.

  Doctor springs back into his leather chair. He produces a handkerchief from his pocket. He does this quickly, faster than I ever thought him capable. His facial expression collapses. His indifferent frown becomes a mourning frown. Absolute sadness. At least, I think it is emotion.

  There is a knot in my stomach.

  But doctor proves himself a professional. He does not forget about his role as the problem solver of my life.

  “Don’t worry,” he says, in forced whisper, patting his handkerchief helplessly into now soaking papers spread out across his desk. I step closer, attempting to dry the water simply with my presence. But there is nothing to dry the water with. I lift the empty pitcher from the desk. I stand it upright. But this small gesture corrects nothing.

  Then I see the water-soaked papers.

  The papers are from my file. The ink from my papers is already beginning to smear. I can see my name floating away in a wave of blue ink and water.

  “Nothing to worry about,” says doctor, as if nothing has happened, as if the damage caused by the spilled water will have no consequence.

  Doctor is back to frowning his familiar frown. He is so difficult to interpret. But I know he is only doing his job. For instance, part of doctor’s job is to tell me not to worry.

  Here’s what I do to combat the effects of worry: I place one of doctor’s cigarettes into my mouth. The cigarettes have survived the spill. I do this with a trembling hand. This is the first cigarette today, my habit having begun not years ago, but only fourteen months ago, after baby died and Jamie left me. Smoking had never been a question for me. I despised smoking and smokers and would not have married Jamie had he been one. Now I can’t think about going a day without smoking.