Damnation Street

10.

It was two hours before McNair arrived. A good thing too; I needed that time to recover my senses. At first, after Sissy spoke his name, I couldn't think at all. My head was filled with a noise like wind rushing through a tunnel. I was stunned by a whirling sense of mystic impossibilities.

Of course, like most amazing coincidences, this one was not as amazing as all that. I had met Emma while working on a case involving a lady professor. The lady professor probably knew McNair and recommended Weiss to him. That's what I told myself, in any case. Still, the wind roared in my head.

I left Sissy and made my stumbling way back down the hall, back through the glassed-in reception area, back past the smirking Amy, and down the farther hall to my alcove, my desk. I sat there a long time, making copies, typing reports, doing whatever the hell I did-I wasn't sure then and I don't remember now. Mostly, I think I watched the digital clock on my desk. With every minute that ticked away, a sensation grew inside me, a feeling between dread and panic. I could think about nothing but my meeting with Patrick McNair.

Why was he coming? What could he want? Could it have anything to do with me? There were no answers in the manila case folder Sissy had given me. A name, a brief description, an address. I kept turning back to it, opening it, scanning the two typed pages inside, but there was nothing else.

The time of our appointment approached. I got up from my desk with the folder in my hand. I stepped with the tread of a condemned man down the last stretch of hall to Weiss's office at the end. I opened the door slowly. I stepped gingerly across the threshold.

I shut the door. For a long time, I simply stood there, stood where I was. I looked at the place with what I would have to call reverence. Weiss's office. Somehow, just being there began to calm me down.

Weiss was my hero. Bishop was my hero, too, in his own inimitable mad-dog way. But Weiss… there was something about Weiss that had completely captured my youthful imagination. His solitude, his sorrow, his worldly wisdom, his nearly mythic acceptance of life as it was. Just standing there in that empty office-in his spiritual presence, as it were-the wind-tunnel roar in my head grew fainter; my mind grew quieter, grew still.

I didn't turn the lights on-not yet-but the sun through the wall of large arched windows made the place bright enough to see clearly. It was a large room, as Weiss himself was large, a cavernous space with a vast desk on the far side of it, two huge blocky armchairs for the clients, and, of course, the famous swivel chair itself with its high, high back and its thick arms flanking an impossibly spacious seat. The wall to my right was made up almost entirely of those windows, the apex of their arches rising to just beneath the ceiling. They seemed to open the room up into the city and to bring the city right inside the room. They showed a sweeping, vertiginous view of the ornately carved stone buildings across the street and the jagged, gleaming rise and fall of modern towers beyond.

After a while, when I had settled down, I turned the light on. I moved forward, still holding McNair's folder. I went around the enormous desk to stand beside the great chair. I had to take a deep breath before I could bring myself to sit in it.

Then I sat, sat silently awhile, swiveling slightly back and forth. Without thinking, I propped my elbow on the chair arm and rested my cheek against my fist-exactly as I had often seen Weiss do. What would he have made of this, I wondered. My first client, Emma's father. What would a down-to-earth ex-cop like Weiss have made of such a wild improbability?

I considered the question and sat and swiveled and leaned my cheek against my fist. Soon I found that I was even thinking to myself in Weiss's voice. I was thinking, Hey, it's a mystery, that's all. We think we know what the world looks like, but that's just our own bullshit we're looking at. Past the bullshit, take my word, it's a fucking mystery.

Just then I was startled by the ringing of the interoffice phone. I hesitated, then picked it up: "Uh… Yeah?"

It was Amy. She was still smirking. I could hear it.

"Patrick McNair," she said.

He was a small man, solidly built, fat in the belly the way drinkers get fat. In fact, as I stepped up to shake his hand, I caught the scent of whiskey on him, though it wasn't yet noon. He was bald with a flyaway fringe of silver hair. He had a round, pug, pinched Irish face. His cheeks were laced with scowl lines that seemed to have been carved into them with a putty knife. He had squinting eyes sunk deep into the flesh-eyes that looked out at me from a remove, withdrawn but watchful, a drunk's eyes.

As I showed him to one of the client's chairs, I noticed that he was dressed in an expensive and formal suit, black with a bright red paisley waistcoat in the English fashion, a bright blue tie. There was a generous sprinkling of dandruff on his shoulders. He somehow managed to come across as austere and unkempt at the same time.

I expected to have to explain to him why Weiss wasn't there, why such a young man was handling his case. I even had a little speech worked out about how I was supported by the full power and experience of the Agency and so on. But none of that was necessary. McNair began speaking even as he sat, even before I'd made my way back around the desk to the swivel chair.

"I suppose I can assume this is all confidential. There are situations in which one hopes never to find oneself, and sitting in the office of a private investigator certainly fits that description." He spoke like that, in a stilted, old-fashioned way, as if he were a character in a novel. He had a slow, rolling bass voice that added to the effect.

"Of course," I said, grateful to sink into the chair again, hoping it would steady me.

"The idea that anyone might know I'd been here, talked to you, especially about private family business…" He made a great show of shuddering. He gave a single bitter laugh. "It's bad enough I know it."

I offered him what I hoped was an encouraging gesture. Then I put my cheek back on my fist-a conscious action this time, trying to conjure Weiss's gravity and wisdom in myself. It didn't work. My heart hammered. My mind raced.

Patrick McNair, meanwhile, seemed to gather himself for a great effort. Then he said, "I want to talk to you about my daughter."

It's not easy to fall over when you're already sitting down, but I nearly managed it. My elbow slipped off the chair arm, and I-leaning on my fist-nearly went over the side with it. "Your… your daughter?"

"Her name is Emma." He sat like a pharaoh in the blocky chair, his head erect, his back stiff, his arms lying flat on the chair's arms. He seemed very conscious of his dignity; disdainful, lofty, fearful that the grime of our grimy business might somehow rub off on him. The more he talked, and the more personal the talk became, the more he seemed to fear he would be soiled. "She's my only child."

At this point I couldn't respond. I couldn't believe what was happening. It even occurred to me this might be some kind of joke or prank. Maybe Emma was taking vengeance on me for not calling her when I said I would.

I had repositioned myself now to keep from tumbling to the floor. I sat straight, my hands folded in my lap. It was silent in the room an uncomfortably long time before I realized McNair was waiting for me to prod him to go on with his story. I managed to stammer: "What seems to be the problem with her? With Emma. Miss… Emma. With her."

"Well-I'm not sure," McNair said. "I'm not even sure there is a problem. In fact, that's the problem: I'm not sure. I seem to have found myself in a position where I can either lower myself to snooping on her, following her, listening in on her phone calls and so on, or I can resign myself to ignorance." Without relaxing his lofty pose, he let out three sudden barks of harsh laughter. "Fortunately, it occurred to me that snooping and following people wouldn't present the same sort of moral dilemma for you. For you, it would just be business as usual."

It took me a second to work out the insult, but the insult was the least of my concerns. With popping eyes, I blurted, "You want me to follow Emma?"

"I want…"

"I mean your daughter," I said. "You want me to follow, um, your daughter, is that right?"

"I want you to find out what, if anything, is troubling her, and I want you to find out without her knowing you're finding out. I'll leave the methods to what I'm assuming, perhaps foolishly, to be your expertise."

At the moment I could understand his having doubts. My mind just then was like a demolition derby, the thoughts like stock cars racing every which way, crashing into each other. No matter how hard I tried to think it through, the full breadth and consequence of the situation was beyond me. He wanted me to follow Emma? Spy on her? When I'd already wronged and insulted her so badly? It was impossible. It was madness. To have the perfect excuse to be near her, and yet not be able to tell her I was there? And I would never be able to tell her! And what about him, her father? If ever I got the chance to be with her, how could I ever let her introduce me to him? What would he say when he realized who I was and how he and I had met?

That wind-tunnel roar was rising in my head again. My heart was racing again. I was perilously close to babbling hysteria.

"Maybe we should start at the beginning," I said, to buy some time, to calm myself. "Maybe you could explain what brought you here in the first place, what made you think Em… your daughter… needs to be watched."

I would've thought this would be the point where a client would say something like "I hardly know how to begin," or at least hem and haw for a moment as he worked to get his story in order. Not McNair. He answered immedi- ately, declaiming in such complete and complex sentences that it seemed as if he had composed the whole thing beforehand and was merely reciting it now.

"My daughter recently turned twenty years old," he said in his grand bass voice, shifting in his chair to sit even more pharaonically erect than before. "For most of her life, she and I have been extremely close. I know normally you'd think a girl would form her primary bond with her mother, and my wife has certainly provided her with"-he waved a hand dismissively-"all the attentions, food, and so forth children need when they're younger. But my daughter had a very lively, quick intelligence from the start. She has the makings of an intellectual, so it was natural she would turn to me as soon as she developed to the point where she could begin to understand the world."

He had a way of looking at you as he spoke, a sort of suggestive glance up from under the eyebrows. It communicated the idea that he was saying much more than he actually said, that his narrative line was surrounded with a mist of subtleties. Between my own confusion and this talent he had for unspoken implications, I had a hard time following any of it. But I guess I got the general idea all right: he and Emma were close. I forced myself to focus.

"Given the situation, and the fact that we were father and daughter, and I suppose my own inclinations to some extent-well, for any number of reasons-there was always an educational element to our relationship. We were like teacher and pupil sometimes. And like any good relationship between a teacher and a pupil, it became something more like a friendship as the years went by, as the age difference became less pronounced. Seems natural to me," he added, as if I'd objected it wasn't, instead of just sitting there like an idiot staring at him with eyes glazed and mouth agape. "Since she and I were so much alike, I thought, if nothing else, I could save her some time by helping her learn not only how to think, but what sort of things she might enjoy thinking about. I wish someone had done it for me! By the time she was sixteen, I'd given her a complete course in Western civilization. We read our way together from… from the Bible and Homer to Beckett and deconstruction." He gave that sharp, hard laugh again. "'The realms of gold.'"

"Ah," I said. "Byron."

"Keats!" he snorted with contempt.

"Keats! Keats! I meant Keats!"

With an exasperated roll of his eyes toward heaven, he went on, "The point is she and I began with natural genetic similarities, and this education I'm describing tended to emphasize them. If she'd gravitated more to her mother or been raised by, I don't know, some shoe salesman in Milwaukee somewhere, it wouldn't have happened that way, but she wasn't and it did. When she graduated high school-just to give you an example-her final project was some term paper or other, I don't know. But she turned in an almost book-length treatise arguing that the maturation of Western man could be traced in the life and death of the idea of God. It was brilliant stuff; it really was. It could've been a doctoral thesis. She argued that the projection of human personality onto the gods of Olympus and Sinai created a magical, infantile world reflecting the infancy of civilization and that, despite the ups and downs of history, this idea has steadily matured into an understanding of God as a psychological illusion-and of psychology itself, the self itself, as an illusion created by brain function. I mean, I remember sitting and reading this and thinking, My God, so to speak, I could've written this myself-so to speak! "

He laughed again and eyed me carefully to make sure I had caught the high irony of those so to speak s.

I hadn't. I was still too busy gaping at him stupidly. And I was thinking, Keats! Why the hell did I say Byron? I knew it was Keats! I meant to say Keats! My one chance to impress him with my literary knowledge, to show him I was more (oh, so much more) than just some sleazy, stupid private eye like-well, like Weiss or Bishop-and I said Byron! Byron when I knew it was Keats!

It must've been easy for him to tell that I had no idea what the hell we were talking about anymore. His eyes fluttered with frustration. He lifted his hands from the chair arms and moved them as if shaping the words in the air for me so I could read along with him. At the same time, he began speaking more simply, slowly, loudly, enunciating each syllable with painful clarity as if speaking to a foreigner or a child. "So you can understand-right?-given how close she and I have been, you can understand why I might be troubled by the fact that recently, suddenly, Emma has begun to avoid me. For no apparent reason. We haven't argued. We haven't even disagreed. There's nothing domestic-I haven't left the cap off her toothpaste tube or anything. In fact, as far as I can tell, there's been no hostility between us at all. We used to spend several evenings a week together. We used to go to the movies sometimes, talk about ideas, discuss her schoolwork. Now she keeps to her room or slips out before I come home at night. She gets up early and leaves before I come down to breakfast in the morning. She's a full-grown woman and she's going to have her own interests, her own friends-although God knows what she'd talk to them about-but all right, she is. But she doesn't have to run away from me. I thought she enjoyed our talks and so on. She never indicated anything else. It always seemed to me that we were the best of…"

His words trailed off to nothing and he shrugged. He looked at the floor and shook his head. I don't think he had meant to be so direct about it all. I think he'd only wanted to make sure he'd been clear enough to penetrate the iron wall of my stupidity. But in stating the simple facts, he had let his simple emotions show as well. Intellectuals hate that. I know them. They hate to be reminded that they are just like the rest of us in all the basic and most important ways. McNair loved his daughter beyond anything, loved her as any farmer or mechanic or-what was it?-any shoe salesman from Milwaukee might love his. Now she was suddenly, inexplicably estranged from him, and he was just as hurt and baffled as the farmer or mechanic or salesman would've been.

Exposed in this, he grew, if possible, even stiffer and more formal than before. He straightened again. He seemed to turn to stone in front of me. The silence went on awkwardly between us, long enough for me to gather my thoughts.

Then I said, "Have you asked her?"

"What?" he said, startled.

"Why she's changed toward you? What's going on in her life? Have you asked her?"

He snorted. The tone in which he spoke next reminded me of the whiskey I had smelled on his breath. "What am I supposed to do, crawl up to her room and beg for her companionship? Am I supposed to whine to her like one of her girlfriends? 'Why don't you like me anymore?' Her behavior's been perfectly obvious. If she had wanted to explain it to me, she would have."

"You'd…" rather hire a private detective to follow your own daughter than simply ask her what's up? I almost said. But looking at the proud, wounded, and probably somewhat drunken intellectual across the desk from me, I already knew his answer: yes; yes, he would.

I was about to speak again when something-a possible explanation for Emma's behavior-occurred to me and I paused. In an instant my inner state dropped dizzyingly from the heights of dazed confusion into the depths of darkness and depression. Raising one hand to my lips, tugging my lips between thumb and forefinger, I considered this new possibility. With every moment that passed, it seemed more and more plausible, until at last it seemed inescapably true. I began to ache-to ache hard. Emma. It was not just McNair who had lost her. I had lost her, too, and by my own folly.

"She must be in love." It came out of me in a tone of quiet wonder, spoken aloud before I'd meant it, before I'd fully thought it through. But now I came to myself. I confronted the man across from me. "I mean, doesn't that seem like the most likely explanation? A young girl acts mysteriously, slips out at night and early in the morning. She must've fallen in love with someone, and for one reason or another, she's not ready to tell you about him yet."

The professor answered with a violent snort. "Why shouldn't she?" he said-but he looked past me. He avoided my gaze. "She's had boyfriends before. It's never been like this. We've talked about them-openly. Sometimes we've even laughed about them. She's still always found time for a movie or our conversations and so on."

The darkness in me grew darker, the sorrow deeper. She could've been mine. She would've been. All I had had to do was call the damn number on the Carlo's coaster. She had been made for me. Made for me.

I had to force myself to answer him. The words were thick in my throat. "Maybe she doesn't want to laugh with you about this one," I said. "Maybe she wants to take this one seriously."

McNair blustered, making a vague circular gesture with one hand. Clearly, he didn't like this idea any more than I did. "Well…" His mouth worked. His eyes darted here and there as if he were searching for an avenue of escape. "Well… maybe. What can I say, since we don't know. Of course: maybe."

He scowled at the walls, the floor. He still wouldn't look at me. But I looked at him. I sat there with my hands in my lap again. I looked at him and nodded to myself. This was no more mere coincidence, him coming here. This was a cosmic rebuke. This was all the forces of the universe speaking to me in a single voice, saying, Schmuck! All you had to do was call the fucking number!

The pain of it was terrible. I hadn't fully realized until then how much I had hoped Emma and I might love each other.

After another long moment of silence between us, the older man sighed. Sitting there as if enthroned, frowning regally down at the floor. "Whatever," he said-it seemed to fall from him with a thud. "Whatever it is, I want you to find out. Whatever it is, I want to know the truth."