Deceit

FIFTY-SIX

I turned my cell phone back on two weeks ago.

Emitted its signal to those tireless satellites spinning slowly in space that would’ve bounced it back to earth, where some exhausted tech in the NSA or the FBI or maybe just the DOE would’ve triangulated, diagrammed, and computed it, then sent it on up to the interested parties.

Two weeks ago, when I first arrived in room four.

What did people do before Microsoft Word?

Before laptops, cursors, delete keys, desktops-before backing up, dragging things in, and dragging things out?

Before you could make one document two. Drag it onto the desktop and rearrange it, pare it down, edit it just so.

This is Document One.

Which either will or won’t make it to where it needs to go.

I have no such fears about Document Two, which is the only one left on my computer.

It reads remarkably like this one-minus a few things. Minus the insights, conclusions, and connective tissue. To go back to what must by now be a tiresome and overused analogy-think of it as a connect-the-dots drawing minus the connections.

The dots are there.

The entire cast of characters.

Miss Anagram and Sam Savage and Doctor Death himself.

Benjy and Bronson and Bailey et al.

It is the story the way they wanted it written.

Why they kept leading me on and putting a cork in me at the same time. Letting the leash out, then jerking it back. Why they tainted me, incarcerated me, and then set me free.

For this.

Another saying comes to mind-courtesy of Stalin or one of his minions, orchestrators of the first Karabolka.

Forgive me it if I get it wrong. Something about history. It’s not what happens in history that matters, he said.

It’s who writes it.

Me.

That’s who’s writing it.

Tom Valle.

I was meant to tell the story that was never meant to be told.

Before someone else told it.

Because once a story’s been discredited-once it’s been ridiculed, ripped apart, and indicted-it forever loses its claim to legitimacy. It passes into urban legend, to the canon of conspiracy theorists, onto the refuse pile of hack history. Remember that story about a certain president’s discharge from the National Guard? By the time handwriting experts had discredited the documents, by the time a national anchor had resigned and a nationally respected producer was fired-by then, it didn’t matter if the basic truth of the story remained unchallenged. It was trash. It was a tissue of lies. It was garbage.

The very fate awaiting Document Two.

It will be dissected for the amusement of the public-those who give a crap. It will be snickered at, railed at, and ultimately reviled. It will be held up in journalism classes at serious-minded universities across the country as an example of what not to do, a cautionary tale for every cub reporter about to enter the fray.

It will belong to the LBJ-killed-Kennedy crowd, to the Area 51 cabal, to the Bailey Kindlons of the world.

Because even if you bought the anagrams, the hired actors-even if you did, you would have to consider the source.

Enough said.

That’s what they wanted.

That’s what I’ll give them.

I’ve left it here on my computer-right at page 1.

I am writing this as fast as I can.

I, myself, am going for a stroll now.

I’ve already called the front desk and asked them to send Luiza in to clean the room again. I told the manager that I’ll be taking a walk to get out of her hair. Behind the motel, maybe, where I’ve seen a path leading out to the dusty flats.

When I hear her knock at my door, I’m already up and on my way.

Half an hour maybe, I think.

At least that.

Enough time for them to come in, put that Evelyn Wood speed-reading course to good use, and get the gist of it.

I’m leaving an offering at the altar and hoping to mollify the gods. Vengeance might be theirs, but if you proffer the proper sacrifice, might you still be spared?

Luiza wordlessly passes me on her way into the room, and suddenly I’m standing on the deck in the full glare of afternoon. The deserted parking lot. The dead air.

I descend the stairs one rickety wooden step at a time.

I look neither right or left. Certainly not behind. I’ve been there, done that. It’s eyes forward now.

I lope across the parking lot, dead man walking.

Because that’s what I am.

One way or another.

I said this is my last will and testament, and it is. I’ve said you are its executor, and you are.

It sits in my pocket, this story, on a shiny CD.

It is next to a forged license, courtesy of Luiza, who slipped it under my door some time ago, after our conversation about illegal documentation. After I slipped her five hundred dollars.

It’s only a license, but it’s a start.

Tom Valle will be dead.

One way or another.

Dead.

In my other pocket is the Smith amp; Wesson.

In case the sacrifice isn’t enough. In case it’s better to have the author dead than alive. The crazy reporter who must’ve shot himself out in the desert behind a ratty motel. The last refuge of a liar.

I don’t know.

I’m not a mind reader.

I will walk and walk and I will not come back, and I will not turn around until I hear the sound of their boots, and then I’ll know.

It’s hot out here behind the motel, where the desert stretches all the way to Nevada. But it seems like I’ve been enveloped in chill for years. I am warm for the first time in forever.

This story’s in my pocket. On a shiny CD.

I will take it with me and we’ll see.

I walk and walk and walk.

I’m aware of the time passing, but it’s all time. It’s not minutes; it’s years. It’s then to now. It’s the Acropolis Diner and Queens, New York, and the night of the blizzard and what happened, Tommy and someone standing behind my right shoulder to read my faltering copy. It’s bratwurst sandwiches and walks in Bryant Park and that terrible day when I didn’t have the guts to go into his office and say something. Anything. Like another day when the truth refused to come out of me.

When I finally hear them, it’s not their boots.

It’s their tires.

Their engines.

Two Jeeps, I think.

Don’t worry.

I have one last secret.

One.

I have appointed another executor.

I have heeded the rules of Wren and protected the story.

My editor. He is shuttered away in his mountain house in Putnam County, New York. Faded, sure, but still faintly glowing, still a beacon for those who believe that we can do good and necessary things in this world. There’s a reputation in tatters there that can still, even now, be mended. There’s an injustice there that can still be rectified. There’s a fearsome debt that can still be repaid.

By now, Sam would’ve sent it to him.

He would’ve answered the knock at his front door and signed for the package, then sliced it open with the penknife he’d begrudgingly accepted on one of his unacknowledged birthdays.

He would’ve pushed his bifocals down on his nose and read what looked like the front page of a small-town California newspaper. The Littleton Journal. Where had he heard that name before?

He would’ve read it more than once. He would’ve seen the note I sent along with it. The one that explained how this particular front page had never seen the light of day. Till now. But that it wasn’t too late. It’s never too late. There’s no statute of limitations on a story-something he used to say.

He would’ve dismissed it, of course.

At first.

Recalled my phone call and been ready to airmail it into the waste basket. But there was that blueprint. He would’ve been forced to study it-how could you not? The date and location and name clearly written there in official-looking type. He would’ve gone online. He would’ve looked up Littleton Flats. The flood. The dam. Lloyd Steiner. VA Hospital 138. He’s a journalist. He would’ve done what a journalist does. He would’ve investigated.

He wouldn’t stop investigating until he found out. One way or another.

He will get the story out.

Not under the byline of a disgraced fabulist-the polite term for me. For pathological liar. No. It will come out under the byline of a much-respected editor whose only crime was having had me as a reporter.

The engines grow louder.

I still haven’t turned around.

I will wait until they’re right there.

I grip the gun in my left pocket. Mano a mano. Duel in the desert. Every gunfight I’d ever seen on my living room TV back in Queens.

Maybe I’ll make it. You never know.

Either way, Tom Valle will be dead. Gone. Forgotten.

If not in a blaze of glory, in the pale hue of redemption. I have taken the liar out to the woodshed and I have finally set him right.

I grip the gun. I turn.

The words of something flit through my mind. Something they read at Jimmy’s funeral-I’d never forgotten it; years later I looked it up and memorized each word. An appropriate sendoff for Jimmy, and Benjy, and Eddie Bronson, for all the doomed children in this world, those who grow up and those who don’t. For everyone we can’t help mourning for.

Even me.

I am standing upon that shore. A ship at my side spreads its white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. Soon she hangs like a speck of a white cloud just where the sea and sky mingle. And just at the moment when someone at my side says “There! She’s gone!” I know there are other eyes watching the ship coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”

And that is dying.

I hope it’s true.

I hope it’s true.