PALINDROME Read online

  The home theater system fell when Vincent slammed into the wall. It tumbled from the wall unit and crashed to the floor with a thud.

  I continued to watch until I was sure that Vincent was unconscious and then I stepped into the room. I began to sob, although I didn’t understand which emotion had moved me to tears.

  “He’s not moving,” I said. “Why isn’t he moving?”

  “I hit him hard.”

  “So hard that he’s not moving? Oh my God, I don’t know what to do. What should we do?”

  “It will be all right,” she said. “Try to calm down.”

  “Calm down, how can I calm down?”

  She knelt alongside him and placed two fingers against the side of Vincent’s neck. “It’s okay; you can breathe easy,” she said. “He’s gone.”

  Three: The Morning After Can be Such a Pill

  The weather was much cooler on Saturday, and the sky was gray. Technically it was still morning, although I had the sense of being lost in time. I had lost hours the night before, as well as the memory of events I wasn’t sure I wanted back. I couldn’t even remember the address of the house from which I had been rescued, but somewhere in the town of Islandia, a dead man was decomposing. We had left him in the spot in which he had died, with the air-conditioning turned down so low that frost was practically blowing out of the vents. It would be days before the odor grew strong and the maggots began to digest his rotting tissue, but I doubted things would stay quiet that long.

  I was sitting on a bench near Lake Ronkonkoma with my big sunglasses on, sunglasses large enough to shield me from a solar eclipse, sunglasses so large no one could see my face. I stuffed my hands into my pockets and waited for Ax to arrive. A breeze came up from the south. It felt good against my cheeks and bare arms. I had probably been alone no more than ten minutes, but it felt like much longer. I was struggling to piece it all together. What had happened from the time I passed out to the time I came to in Vincent’s apartment? What had happened in between? Somewhere, down deep, I felt the need to go to the hospital and check to see if I had been raped, but I didn’t. I had the sense that I had been rescued in time. Besides, a police report was the last thing I needed. I had always lived a complicated life, and I had learned for better or worse to cover my tracks. Above all else, I had learned to fly under the radar and live on the “down-low.”

  I heard the sound of a car approaching and then the creak of the rusted door as Ax got out. He was so light on his feet that I didn’t hear him approach. He sat down next to me and handed me a cup of coffee. “Double pull of espresso—this should do the trick,” he said.

  I took the paper cup and shook my head woefully as I sucked the first sip through the hole in the plastic lid. “What the hell? Why does this always happen to me?”

  “You know why it happened.”

  I laid my head down on his shoulder. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  We were quiet for several moments. We sat, sipping coffee and allowing the passage of time to heal us. It was a process I was very familiar with: sitting and waiting, watching the clock and hoping that the pain would subside—sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. I’m not sure how long we sat there, but neither of us complained about being bored. The healing was far from done, and I didn’t know how long it would take.

  A pretty young woman was walking her dog, a stunning black Lab. I noticed Ax staring at her. She looked like an early Marilyn Monroe—not the bleached blonde Marilyn with tweezed eyebrows, but the early Marilyn with auburn hair, the Marilyn that had yet to be tainted by Hollywood, President John Kennedy, and his brother Bobby. She looked like Norma Jean Baker, the original. “She’s gorgeous.”

  “By any man’s measure,” Ax said.

  “Gonna talk to her?”

  He continued to watch her while the Lab found a choice spot and returned to the earth that which he no longer needed. Ax turned to me, admonishing me with a stare. “You know I don’t do that.”

  “You’re painfully bashful. I’ll do it for you.”

  “No.”

  “Ah come on, I’m not wearing makeup; I can be you in two minutes. C’mon, please?” We were both in jeans, tees, and kicks. I would have to lose the bra, of course, but I have the dexterity of a Three-Card Monte dealer and can get out of my bra in the blink of an eye.

  “No.”

  “Why? I’ve been you before.”

  “And I’ve been you—but only for the right reasons. We can’t let it get out of control.”

  “Ah c’mon, Ax, five minutes of innocent flirting. You can time me. If I don’t get her cell phone number in five minutes, I’ll pull the plug.”

  “And what am I supposed to do, sit here, twiddle my thumbs, and watch myself flirt?”

  “Go sit in the car if you don’t want to watch. Better still—” I took off my blast-shield sunglasses and handed them to him. “You’re as good as invisible.”

  “No!”

  “C’mon, she’s such a hottie . . . and she loves dogs. Where are you gonna find a combination like that?”

  “Fine, but only because you’re such a ballbuster.”

  “Yeah, right. You’ll thank me when the two of you are curled up in front of the fireplace.” I was feeling alive again. “She’s not looking.” My bra was already unhooked and on its way into my bag. “Turn toward me, I want to get this right.”

  “I’m your brother; you can’t do this from memory?”

  “Quiet.” I closed my eyes to clear my mind and then gazed intently at Ax. The eyes are the hardest part to get right. It takes lots of concentration to copy the pigmentation in the iris accurately. I can’t feel the iris as it changes, but somehow I know when it’s just right. The muscles and soft tissue are easier. I can feel them moving and squeezing as I meld them into the desired shape. Ax’s nose has a slight bump in it from where his sensei had accidentally broken it. In a moment, I felt my hair retreat off my shoulders. My jeans grew loose in the seat, and the sleeves of my tee shirt tightened around my arms.

  “Hurry, she’s about to—”

  “Done.” I sprang off the bench and turned to go after her. “Your dog is gorgeous,” I said as I called after her. She stopped and waited for me. I turned back to Ax after I saw the smile I had been greeted with. I whispered to Ax, “It’s in the bag.”

  So I looked like a man, but I was, after all, a woman and once we started to talk . . . well, you know, it was a solid ten minutes before I returned. Ax was waiting eagerly for me when I got back. “So?” he asked with excitement in his voice.

  I held up my phone so he could read the new contact. “Her name is Geena, and you have plans for next weekend.” He smiled the biggest smile I had seen from him in a long time. We pounded fists.

  “You’re unbelievable.”

  “And she’s even prettier up close. I should’ve—”

  “You should’ve what . . . kept her number for yourself?”

  “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.” I started singing Katy Perry, “I kissed a girl and I liked it.” I’m a regular hetero girl, but there’s no denying that girls are pretty.

  “What do you think would’ve happened when she realized that you don’t have any junk?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, what do you think she’ll do when she realizes you suck at making conversation?”

  Ax couldn’t hold back the laughter. “Sista, that’s when I break out my junk.”

  We were both rolling. “You are such a smooth talker.” Tears were running down my cheeks. We had almost forgotten that we had just killed a man.

  Ax stopped laughing. I saw it in his eyes immediately; reality had just clawed its way back to the surface. “No one will ever catch us,” I said.

  “I don’t want to have to live the rest of my life being someone else: the guy at the mall, someone I sit down next to on the railroad—that’s not the kind of life that I want.”

  “He deserved it. You said he drugged me.”

  “Oh, he definite
ly drugged you. I found GHB tablets in his pockets. I got there just in time.”

  “Thank you.” More tears, tears of sorrow mixing with the tears of laughter that were already drying on my cheeks. “So, you didn’t tell me . . . how did you find me?”

  Ax lowered his head. He was embarrassed.

  “You followed me again, didn’t you?”

  He nodded without looking at me. “I just do it to—”

  Part of me wanted to scold him for the unending invasion of my privacy, but the other half of me wanted to hug him again and cry. “I know. You’re protective.” I kissed him on the cheek. “What would I do without you?” I thought back to the evening before and searched for the face in the crowd my brother might have hidden behind, but like the rest of the evening, everything was a blur.

  I was thankful, of course, that he had been there last night. He had been there for me many times before.

  “I didn’t mean to kill him,” Ax said, “but I knew he was dead as soon as I hit him. I lost control.”

  “I’m the one who lost control, not you. I got drunk and put myself in a dangerous situation. You found me with a lowlife animal who drugged me and was about to rape me. You can’t blame yourself.”

  “But my training.”

  “Easy on yourself, ninja boy, you’re only human.”

  “I practice control every day. I shouldn’t have let my emotions take over the way they did.”

  “Like I said, Ax . . . Anyway, what’s done is done.”

  My attempt to console Ax was inadequate. He stood. “I’d better go.”

  I knew that Gabi had been in tears since the evening before. She had gotten sick and missed the entire event while she was in the bathroom at the Suds Shack. She was going to meet me in a few minutes. I knew her so well. I knew that she felt obligated to bare her soul. She was guilt-laden over last night’s poorly timed case of indigestion. I checked the time on my cell phone. “Gabi will be here any minute.”

  “Going, going, gone.”

  I agreed with a tentative nod but didn’t want to see Ax leave. He was halfway to his car when I called out. “There’s one thing I can’t figure out—Vincent never had the chance to drug me. I had the margarita in my hand until I finished it.”

  Ax got into his car and pulled the creaking door shut. He leaned out the window. “Someone did it. We’ll just have to figure out who’s guilty.”

  Ax pulled away. I turned and looked at Lake Ronkonkoma and wondered if it was anywhere as deep as the trouble the two of us had just found.

  Four: Round About the Cauldron Go

  Keith the bartender drove a muscle car. I mean you’re not really surprised, are you? It was a new Camaro V8 with an aftermarket performance package. Like Ford’s excellent reproduction of the original Mustang, Chevy had recreated the sixties muscle car in exquisite fashion. The exhaust burble was deep enough to give you blunt-force liver damage. The muscle car was waxed to the extreme—the tires were dressed over twenty-inch rims. Does bartending pay that well? If it did, I would have to pick up a couple of nights at the Suds Shack after this mess was over and sorted out. Ax and I were always hard up for the rent and made money wherever we could.

  Allie was impressed with his car. She met Keith at the gym. Equinox was not a gym for the faint of pocketbook—annual membership at the classy workout club ran well over a grand. When you met someone there, you figured they had some bucks. Allie was looking for someone like that. She would have preferred that Keith drove a BMW or a Benz, but the Camaro was a classic design and as mentioned, it was polished up real pretty.

  Keith had sold her a bill of goods. He had told her that he was studying at Hofstra Law School and was only tending bar to keep busy over the summer. He told her that his father was the inventor of cell phone technology and that the licensing royalties from Verizon, AT&T, and the rest pulled in millions each year. Yeah, good one. So, while Allie was not totally sold on Keith’s story, he was not hard on the eyes and the possibility of getting close to all that wealth excited her. She agreed to a first date.

  Allie was a Muttontown girl. Muttontown was part of Long Island’s Gold Coast where people of prominence and wealth lived. She came from a good home, and her parents both worked hard to pay the monthly mortgage bill, the exorbitant Nassau County property taxes, as well as the school superintendent’s absurd 500K annual salary. Like most good parents, they strove to provide Allie with a better life than they’d had themselves. To keep up with the Joneses in a highfalutin North Shore town like Muttontown, her parents had to pony up: a 3 Series BMW for her high school graduation gift, fifty thousand per year for Ivy League college tuition, iPhones, iPads, designer clothes, and enough spending money to feed a working-class family of six. So, Allie didn’t want for much. She was, however, a bright girl and had some doubt that her future NYU theater arts degree would go on to earn her a humungous salary. Allie was working Plan B, looking for a Long Island money player to marry.

  Prime was the place to take a girl when you wanted to impress her. The posh eatery was located on the water in Huntington Harbor with a view to die for, and prices that could stop your heart if the cholesterol from the aged steaks didn’t clog your aorta first.

  Allie was dressed first-date appropriate in a white jean skirt, wedges, and a knit top that drew modest attention to her pretty cleavage. They had a drink on the outdoor deck, which overlooked the marina. Keith drank basic and strong: Kettle One on the rocks with a splash of tonic water. He had gone into great detail about the precise quantities of how much vodka and tonic water to add to his drink. He proffered his instructions to Prime’s bartender as if no one else was capable of matching his skills as a mixologist. Allie picked from the cocktail menu; she ordered a pomegranate martini made with Gray Goose Vodka.

  Their table was ready much sooner than Allie had expected. Keith commented, fabricating, “I know people here,” taking credit for the quick seating at the exclusive restaurant.

  “You’re an impressive guy,” she said.

  Keith shrugged in an effort to appear modest.

  She was mulling over Keith’s cell-phone-fortune story as the waitress pushed in her chair. The martini was beginning to take the edge off, and the air-conditioning felt good after coming in from the warm night air. Intellectually, Keith was no match for the NYU guys she had dated during the school year, but he was an acceptable change of pace. He spoke about his experiences on Long Island and the fun summers he had spent in locations she was familiar with. He was good-looking and sure of himself. She was enjoying herself and felt loose enough to ask some probing questions.

  “So, where are you from?”

  “Originally?”

  “Of course originally.”

  “I grew up in Chicago, but I’ve spent so much time traveling it’s hard to name a place I really think of as home. I guess I’m from here now.”

  “Why’d you move around so much?” Allie picked up a breadstick and began to nibble on the end. She wasn’t a big fan of carbs, but she was feeling her drink and needed to put something into her stomach.

  “My dad was a big executive at Motorola. You know how those big companies operate; if you don’t let them move you around every few years, they figure you’ve lost the spark. They send you to some gulag to do a meaningless job, and you’re never heard from again. They put you in charge of staplers and paperclips, and you wake up one morning to realize that your career is over and decide to commit suicide.”

  Keith Cooper’s real father drove containerized freight for a living. He left Keith and his mother for a twenty-two-year-old hairdresser when Keith was just twelve. His father did share the same name as Martin Cooper, the Motorola executive credited with the creation of modern cell phone technology, but that was about all. From there the story grew—while attempting to Google his father’s current whereabouts, he accidentally stumbled on the Motorola exec’s Wikipedia page and sort of reverse-adopted him as his father. If anyone checked his story, they would find that Keit
h Cooper’s father was Martin Cooper. He figured most people would not look any deeper than that, and the multimillionaire-father story got more women into bed than the trucker-who-abandoned-his-family version. Keith was quite a talented bullshit artist when he had something to work with.

  “I’ve been everywhere, L.A., Texas . . . Japan.”

  “Japan, oh that’s so cool. What was it like?”

  “Congested, and you can’t get a good dessert over there. Everything’s red-bean this and green-tea that. I don’t think chocolate’s a Japanese staple.”

  Allie laughed. “No chocolate? I’d hate it there.”

  “And everything is tiny. If you check into a hotel and get a regular room, you get a space the size of a closet. The place is totally messed up.”

  “Don’t put down the Japanese,” Allie said, taking up their cause. “They’ve had so much trouble: the tsunami and the nuclear power plant meltdown. Those poor people are living such a nightmare.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean, those people are screwed. I think it’s all payback for the way they treated Godzilla.”

  “What?” Allie laughed so hard she almost spit out her breadstick. “What are you talking about?”

  Keith chuckled at her reaction. “You’ve never watched those old dubbed movies? The Japanese hunted Godzilla, King Kong, and every other creature into extinction. They were all created as the result of some radiation blunder.” He did his best to impersonate Darth Vader: “It is their destiny.”

  Allie’s eyes widened. “Okay, I guess they had it coming. Is that what you’re implying?” She was still laughing.