The Long Fall

I passed through three packed rooms before coming to Tiny’s office. This had once been the master bedroom of the subterranean abode. Huge light-gray, plastic-encased computers lined the southern wall. They were humming and throwing off a lot of heat, I was sure, but Tiny had enough air-conditioning running to freeze a penguin.

The fat young caramel-colored man was seated in a swive cted

“Hey, Tiny,” I said.

I didn’t sit because there was no visitor’s chair in Tiny’s laboratory. He once told me that he only ever had four visitors. I didn’t know the others’ names but it was a good bet that one of them was his father.

Simon Bateman had introduced me to his nerd-to-the-max son. I helped the elder Bateman once when he was in serious trouble, and he paid me by getting Bug to agree to work for me now and again.

“How’d that phone work out?” the thirty-something misanthrope asked in a high voice that seemed to want to get higher.

“Fine. Fine. I think I might need another couple soon.”

“The blue and pink ones near the front door,” he said.

Bug owned, and slept in, the apartment above his workplace. The people he did business with dropped their deliveries and picked up their orders in a sealed antechamber that he constructed up there. That way he didn’t have to see anyone for weeks at a time.

“I wanted to talk to you,” I said.

“ ’Bout what?”

I explained about the e-mails that Twill had sent and received.

“I’m worried about my son,” I said.

“Maybe he’s got a good reason,” Tiny said, removing the glasses that had earned him the insect nickname.

His eyes were small and his fleshy limbs chubby. He was both the technically smartest and physically unhealthiest person I’d ever known.

Tiny called himself a techno-anarchist. He believed that humanity would slowly separate into what he called monadic particulates : self-sufficient individuals who depended only upon technology and their relationship with it.

“I’m not gonna have my son out there murdering people, Tiny. No way.”

“Twill’s a smart kid,” the self-made scientist said. “Maybe he could get away with it.”

“I need to know everything about the person he’s communicating with,” I said, cutting off any further discussion.

Tiny drew up his shoulders and nodded, submitting to my demand. Despite his particulate aspirations, Tiny’s father was his lifeline, and Simon owed me big.

I WALKED FROM Tiny’s to a small bar on East Houston named the Naked Ear. It was a place where I used to drink with Gert before she was murdered. Back then it had been a neighborhood bar that sponsored poetry readings after ten but now it catered to twenty-something stockbrokers who made more in a week than I did in three months.

If I got there early enough I could get a corner table, away from the crowd of flirty children. There I would down my cognac, toasting a memory.

I DRANK UNTIL standing up was a serious challenge but still I managed to stumble out into the street and hail a cab.

That night I remembered to call Katrina, so she was in bed when I got home. I dropped my jacket in the hallway and kicked off my shoes in the dining room. On the way to our bedroom I looked in on Twill. I didn’t do that because he was my favorite (even though he is) but because Twill often went out at night when the rest of us were asleep. And when Twill was on the prowl there was no telling what mischief he’d get into.

But that evening he was sound asleep under a thin blanket. I smiled at him and staggered off to bed.

KATRINA WAS SNORING and the TV was on. My wife could not sleep without the drone of the television, so I dropped the rest of my clothes on the floor and rolled into my side of the bed.

I lay there in an alcoholic stupor, not really worried about anything. I had to do something about The Suit’s problem, and there was Twill to worry about. But there was nothing I could do right then and so I stared into the bright glare of the TV screen, hoping that sleep would ambush me.

“. . . murder in lower Manhattan this evening,” a woman reporter was saying. The image of a clean-cut and youngish black face appeared on the screen behind her. The face looked vaguely familiar. “Frank Tork, only hours out on bail from police custody, was found beaten and strangled to death in a small alley off of Maiden Lane this evening. Mr. Tork was awaiting sentencing on a burglary conviction. Police say that an investigation is under way . . .”

I lifted my head to get a better look but then the dizziness from seven or maybe eleven shots of brandy pushed me down into unconsciousness.

Ê€„

12

I didn’t sleep long. Frank Tork kept entering my dreams, asking me for twenty dollars or maybe a lifeline.

“I ain’t got no idea where B-Brain is, man,” he’d said in the visitor’s cubicle, and also in the dream. “Georgie Girl said that she seen ’im that one time but he could be dead for all I know.”

That phrase roused me at 5:34. My body wanted either to be sick or allowed to return to sleep—I didn’t give in to either urge.