Palm Springs Noir

VIP Check-In by Michael Craft

Little Tuscany

The move, the new job, the fresh beginning, none of that was my idea. But for two men, together for years — hell, decades — the time had come to plot a path toward retirement. And to Dr. Anthony Gascogne, ophthalmologist, Palm Springs felt like the logical destination. To me, not so much.

That was seven years ago, when Anthony was dead set on relocating his practice from LA. Because I balked, he said I could join him in the business as his office manager and assistant. My lackluster career as an actor and model had sputtered to a standstill, so I tagged along to the desert. Soon after, when the law finally allowed, he asked me to marry him.

Then, two years ago, Anthony divorced me. And fired me. And my career path took another unexpected turn — a much darker turn.

Starting over, pushing sixty, I was broke, unemployed, and couch-surfing.

On the brighter side, I was now in Palm Springs.

Well-heeled snowbirds fled for the long summers, but for the rest of us, twelve months of sunshine provided a constant tan, inspiring me to stay fit. And while the sizable gay populace skewed toward the rickety side of Medicare, this demographic twist had its upside: in the eyes of the local gentry, I was still pretty hot (which had a little something to do with the divorce).

My immediate need for income and a cheap apartment led me to consider — briefly — a stint as an escort. But I wasn’t getting any younger, and time would quickly take its toll, as it had on my starstruck dreams, so I settled on a bartending gig to get back on my feet. When I took the job, the manager said, “We already have a Danny.” He rummaged through a drawer and pulled out a name tag. “Here you go: Dante.”

The job lasted only five months, but the name stuck, trailing me as I sniffed around for more durable employment. And that’s when a friend tipped me off to a vacation-rental agency that had an immediate opening for a field inspector. I landed the job, which involved checking the condition of properties before guests arrived and after they left. My duties also included occasional VIP check-ins and minor service calls during their stay.

“Yes?” crackled the intercom after I rang the doorbell.

“Dante from Sunny Junket.”

A befuddled pause. “What?”

“My name’s Dante. I’m from Sunny Junket Vacation Rentals.”

“Oh. Just a minute.”

This was one of our premier properties, up in the Little Tuscany neighborhood, where the bohemian feel of steep, winding streets gave no hint of the million-dollar views enjoyed by residents behind their walled courtyards. In the gravel parking court on that rare cloudy afternoon in February, my battered Camry looked especially pathetic — huddled next to an elegant champagne-colored SUV. When did Bentley start making those?

The party of two was registered under the name Edison Quesada Reál, booked for eleven nights, the entire duration of Modernism Week. It was a prime booking in high season, costing north of a thousand a day. The office said the guy was a bigwig art dealer from LA, and they wanted him happy, so they sent me out for the VIP treatment.

I intended to greet them when they arrived at the house, but they’d driven over early, letting themselves in with the keypad code we provided. The front door now rattled as someone fussed with the lock from inside. I waited with my slim folder of paperwork, standing under the cantilevered roof of the boulder-lined entryway. A small peeping bird flitted from the top of a barrel cactus and darted into the darkening sky when the door swung open.

“Well, hello.” His Asian eyes widened with interest as he sized me up.

I grinned, returning the once-over. He didn’t fit my picture of anyone named Edison Quesada Reál. And he was too young for a titan of the art world, maybe in his thirties. He had delicate features and a prettiness about him, like a twink who’d grown up, but he’d also hit the gym and was pleasingly buff, for a short guy. I’ve always had a thing for short guys.

I reached to shake hands. “I’m Dante. Welcome.”

“And I’m Clarence Kwon. Friends call me Clark.”

“Hi there” — I smiled — “Clark.”

“C’mon in,” he said, stepping aside and closing the door after me. He was dressed with the casual sophistication of moneyed LA — wispy calfskin loafers, tailored slacks, and a clingy cream-colored cashmere sweater with its arms shoved up to his elbows. Nice pecs. Good guns.

By contrast, I looked dorky in dad jeans and a yellow polo shirt embroidered with the Sunny Junket logo. Gesturing to myself, I told Clark, “They make me wear this.”

He laughed. “You look great.” And I half believed him as he wagged me along, leading me toward the back of the house.

As we entered the main room, the view opened up from a wall of glass. Although I had seen it many times, the elevated vista never failed to stop me cold. Even on that gloomy day, I caught my breath as the city spread out below, peeking through the crowns of distant palms. Sloping down from one side, granite mountains muscled into the scene to wrap around the city. Above, in a vast gray sky, clouds slowly roiled, snagged on the barren shards of the horizon.

“Edison,” said Clark, “the guy from the agency is here.”

Seated at the center of the huge window, facing out, mere inches from the glass, a man in a wheelchair remained dead still for a moment. Then he grasped both wheels. The rings adorning his hands clanged the chrome rims as he turned the chair to face me.

I stepped toward him.

“Stop,” he said sharply. “Let me get a look at you.”

I waited. He was older than me, well into his seventies, and way too heavy to be healthy. Though stuck in a wheelchair, he was smartly dressed — to the point of flamboyance — with a silk scarf of peacock blue around his neck. I shot him a smile.

“Forgive me if I don’t get up,” he said. “If I could, I’d kiss you.” He spoke with a worldly refinement and the trace of a Castilian lisp.

I moved to the wheelchair. “But I hardly know you.”

He grinned as we shook hands. “You’re quite the cheeky little cabbage, aren’t you?”

“I’ve been called many things, Mr. Quesada Reál. But never a cabbage.”

He let out a feeble roar of a laugh. “Please, please — it’s Edison.”

“And I’m Dante.”

“Of course you are.” His tone sounded almost suspicious. Had he seen through my act, the stagey name, the swarthy tan?

Clark moved to the far end of the room, near the long dining table, where he fussed with several piles of art prints, all of them protected by plastic sleeves. While arranging them vertically in wood-slatted browsing racks, he called over to me, “Did you bring us something to sign?”

“No, actually, that was handled online. I just need to snap a picture of the credit card you’ll use for payment — and a driver’s license to verify the name.”

Edison noted, “I don’t drive. You’ll need to handle this, precious.”

The younger man stopped his sorting. With an impatient sigh, he pulled his wallet from a pocket, slid out his license and an AmEx, and plopped them on the table. “This what you need?”

“You bet.” I went over and took pictures of the cards with my phone. I noticed that Clarence Kwon was thirty-four, which could not have been half Edison’s age. I assumed they were a couple; even though their rental was one of our most expensive properties, it had only one bedroom. I explained, “For these pedigreed houses, we run the charges every other day.”

Clark shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Perfectly understandable,” said Edison, wheeling himself in our direction. “You know I’m good for it, precious.”

Clark said nothing as he resumed sorting the artwork.

Edison continued, “Truth be told, no price would be too high for this.” He flung both arms, a gesture that embraced the whole house. Then he leaned forward, beading me with a milky stare. “Do you know who designed this, Dante?”

“Umm, I’ve heard, but...”

Edison sat back, twining the plump fingers of both hands. “Alva Kessler designed and built this house for himself shortly before he died in the late fifties. He envisioned it as a pure, modernist vacation ‘cabin’ — a sleek exercise in glass and steel. Truly magnificent, yes? In its sheer minimalism, it’s every bit as fresh and avant-garde as it was sixty years ago. And now, for a while, it’s all mine.” Edison paused, turning his head toward Clark. “I mean, it’s all ours.”

“Right,” said Clark, looking peeved. “Ours, when I’m not at the convention center.”

I asked, “The art sale? I know it’s a big deal during Modernism. I went once.”

“Once” — Edison sniffed — “is enough.”

Clark added, “If you’ve seen one lava lamp, or one Noguchi table, you’ve seen’m all.”

Edison explained that his Los Angeles gallery, Quesada Fine Prints — which dealt in original graphic art, no reproductions — had rented exhibit space where they would offer collectors a wide selection of lithographs, engravings, and screen prints from the mid-1900s. The bulk of their inventory had already been delivered to the convention center, with two of their staffers setting up for the show. The most valuable works, however, would remain here at the house, with Clark showing them by appointment or delivering them for consideration by high-end buyers.

Listening to these details, I stepped over to one of the racks to take a look and was instantly drawn to a smaller print, less than a foot high. “This is great,” I said, breaking into a smile as I lifted it from the bin. “It would sure be at home in Palm Springs.” Bright and colorful, it was a blotchy depiction of a swimming pool.

“That’s a David Hockney,” said Clark. “Limited-edition lithograph, signed artist’s proof, mint condition. At this show, it’s our jewel in the crown.”

Edison said, “Sell that one to the right buyer, precious, and you’ll get the other Bentley.” He turned to tell me, “Clark’s been wanting the convertible.”

Gingerly, I handed the Hockney to Clark, who said, “Edison is exaggerating.” He glanced at the coded sticker on the back of the plastic sleeve, adding, “Or maybe not.”

“I’m feeling peckish,” said Edison. “Some trifle would help.”

Under his breath, Clark told me, “He’s been a bit much lately.”

Edison reminded us, “I can hear you.”

Clearly seething, Clark turned to the wheelchair. “I’m not your coolie servant.”

“But you are.” Edison chuckled. “You can leave, if you want — but you won’t. And I can’t divorce you, can I? Far too costly. Face it, precious: we’re stuck.”

Rain began to spit against the expansive window and drip in long tendrils, streaking the glass from top to bottom, rippling the million-dollar view.

Hoping to defuse the tension, I asked, “Is there anything I can help you with?”

Edison gave me a lecherous look. “Like... what?”

“I’d show you through the house, but you’re already settled in. It’s an older place, has a few quirks. The electronics are all new. Most guests have questions.”

Edison said, “We’ll figure it out.” Then he blurted, “Pink fluff!”

Bewildered, I looked to Clark for guidance.

Still sorting prints, he spoke to me over his shoulder. “We brought a few things that need to go in the fridge — including the raspberry trifle. Could you?”

“Sure.” The galley kitchen opened into the main room from the street side of the house. While the A/V system was up-to-the-minute, the kitchen had retro appliances with a midcentury vibe. The vintage refrigerator was a hulking old Philco in red porcelain enamel; the doors of the top freezer and the main compartment both featured elaborate chrome-handled latches.

Edison wheeled in behind me, watching as I hefted five or six shopping bags from the floor to the countertop. They held a few canned goods and liquor bottles, which I set aside, but they were mostly filled with clear plastic containers brimming with a sludgy concoction that Edison had aptly described as pink fluff. Two bags contained ingredients to make more of it — box after box of fresh raspberries, jars of raspberry jam and Melba sauce, several hefty packages of pound cake. A zippered thermal bag contained at least a dozen rattling cans of aerosol whipped cream.

“Now,” Edison barked with a wild look in his eyes, “pink fluff!”

I removed the lid from one of the Tupperware tubs.

“Smell it,” he commanded.

Whoa. The recipe had been lavishly spiked with Cointreau. The piercing boozy scent of orange melded with the tart perfume of crushed berries, making both my mouth and my eyes water.

“Now,” he repeated, reaching with trembling hands.

I gave it to him, then slid a drawer open. “Fork? Or spoon?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He looked ready to slop into it with his fingers. I gave him a spoon.

He rolled a few feet back and gobbled the trifle. Between swallows, he groaned and gurgled.

I glanced over at Clark, who seemed unfazed by this behavior. In fact, he gave me a thumbs-up. So, I returned to the task of putting things away. I had to tug at the Philco’s heavy ornamental latch (which brought to mind the hardware on a casket) and soon had the beast filled. Its condenser hummed in earnest.

Edison was now banging his spoon on the sides of the plastic container as he scraped at the last of the trifle. I asked if he needed anything else from me, but he shook his head without looking up from his scavenging.

I stepped around the wheelchair, took my folder from the dining table, and told Clark I was leaving. He followed me toward the front of the house.

When I stepped outside, he went with me and gently closed the door behind us. We stood together on the landscaped walkway, protected by the jutting cantilever of the roof. It rained heavily now — straight down, with no wind to drive it — like a translucent curtain blurring the gray afternoon. Raindrops danced wildly on the windshield of the polished Bentley. In the hushed racket of the pelting water, the world was still.

“It’s... exhausting,” said Clark, his words no louder than a whisper as he gazed into the courtyard.

“Edison?”

Nodding, Clark turned to me. “Ten years ago, I knew what I was getting into, and I was sure I could deal with the age difference. He’s always been pampered and fussy — that was part of his charm. But now, Jesus. It gets worse by the month, like he’s regressing into childhood. You’ve seen the pink fluff; that’s been going on awhile. As of last week, about the only other thing he’s willing to eat is canned spaghetti, like a kid.”

I’d noticed the SpaghettiOs while unpacking in the kitchen.

Clark said, “What’s next — diapers?”

“Maybe.”

He was quiet for a moment, then laughed. Stepping near, he clasped my hand with both of his. “You’ve been super, Dante. Really helpful. Thank you.”

I grinned. “Anything else, just let me know.”

He moved closer still, brushing against me and lolling his head back to fix me in his stare. His dark almond-shaped eyes appeared black in the dusky shadows that hugged us. I could hear him breathing. I could almost hear his thoughts. Was he open to a fleeting kiss? Or did he want something less innocent — something more animal and lusty?

When his lips parted, he broke the spell. “Can you fix this weather?”

I backed off a few inches. “It’ll dry up. We never get much, but they say we need it.”

“Yeah,” he agreed coyly, “we need it.”

Which left me unsure if this was small talk — or foreplay. Either way, the time was right for a quick exit. I turned to leave but paused. “Enjoy your Sunny Junket.”

Clark rolled his eyes. “Let me guess. They make you say that.”

With a wink, I sprinted off toward my car.

When the office texted the next morning, it came as no surprise that the Quesada Reál party was having trouble with the cable and Wi-Fi. They had snubbed my earlier offer to explain things, and now they were miffed, so the office told me to return to Little Tuscany at once. I was driving down valley for an inspection in Indian Wells — I’d nearly arrived — but I did a U-turn at the next light on Highway 111 and shot back toward Palm Springs.

Shortly after ten, I drove up the narrow driveway and parked in the courtyard next to the Bentley, which had been spiffed and detailed since the rain. More was on the way, but for now, tourists were getting the slice of winter paradise they’d paid for.

When I rang the doorbell, it took a while for someone to garble through the intercom. I said, “It’s Dante.”

Another long pause. “Let yourself in?”

“Sure.” I tapped the code.

Inside, I walked back to the main room. “Hello?” Hearing no response, I stepped farther in and looked around. Everything seemed in order. In the kitchen, a few dishes were stacked near the sink, but the tenants clearly appreciated tidy surroundings. Although the print racks near the dining table had been rearranged, the David Hockney was still prominently displayed. On the table, boxes and bulging portfolios contained more inventory.

I turned as one of the glass doors on a side wall slid open, and in from the pool deck strolled Clarence Kwon with a towel slung over one shoulder. He was otherwise naked, far more buff than I had imagined, and still aroused from whatever merrymaking had transpired outdoors. He carried an empty Tupperware container of raspberry trifle, smeared pink. Unless I was mistaken, there was also a creamy lick of it on his inner thigh.

“Morning, Dante,” he said, crossing the room toward the kitchen. “Sorry to call you back. Edison got frustrated with the TV last night. He started punching buttons, and by the time he gave up, the Wi-Fi was fritzed out.” Clark set the towel on the kitchen counter and rinsed the Tupperware in the sink.

“Happens all the time,” I said. “No two setups are alike. I’ll restore the settings, then show him how to work the video.”

“Fair warning: he’ll never catch on.” Clark stepped over to me while wiping his hands. “Can you tackle the Wi-Fi first?”

“Uh-huh.” I paused to look him up and down, which got a rise out of both of us. A jolt of waist-level attraction nudged us closer. I managed to say, “Seems you had no trouble with the pool controls.”

“Worked like a charm. But Edison was griping last night about the landscape lighting — said it was totally screwed up. I thought it looked fine.”

“I’ll check it out.”

Clark wrapped the towel around his waist. “Gotta throw myself together. Someone’s coming over from the convention center. Security — to help transport some of the good stuff. So, go ahead and do your thing.” He traipsed off toward the bedroom.

I gathered the remote controls and took them to a former linen closet, now overtaken by electronics. Resetting the Wi-Fi was easy but rebooting the cable and restoring the streaming services was tedious. About ten minutes into it, I heard the doorbell ring. I also heard the spray of the shower from down the hall. Stepping out to the main room, I saw that Edison had not yet come in from the pool. The doorbell rang again, so I went to answer it.

When I opened the door, our eyes locked in disbelief.

“What the fuck?” she said.

And I relived the scene — a shattering scene from a year earlier — when I had first encountered this woman.

After Dr. Anthony Gascogne, ophthalmologist, had fired me, thrown me out of the house, and changed the locks, he was then catty enough to give me one of his new keys — in case anyone needed access during his travels, which had grown more frequent.

A few months later, after leaving the bartending job, I was going through several days of training with Sunny Junket. On a Wednesday morning, while touring some of our properties with Ed, my supervisor, I started receiving messages from my ex’s office, concerned that he had not shown up that day. He’d already missed two appointments and could not be reached. Could I check at the house?

Later, maybe — I was in the middle of something important, at the far end of the valley.

By late afternoon, after work, after a continued spate of texting, I drove to the house I had once shared with Anthony. Letting myself in, I called to him, but all was quiet. At a glance, there were no signs of trouble, and I thought he had simply taken off for a while. Spontaneity, though, was not one of his hallmarks, so I decided to do a walk-through.

When I entered his study, my knees went weak. I grabbed the doorjamb to steady myself as the room seemed to spin beneath me. Anthony had dropped face-first from the chair behind his desk, landing on the white shag carpet, puddled with the blackening ooze of his blood. His skull was bashed in. A lamp with a heavy crystal base, streaked red, had been thrown violently aside, cracking a cabinet door below the bookcase.

I kneeled in the mess to check on Anthony, who was beyond helping. Stupidly, I picked up the lamp and set it upright. Then I phoned 911.

Among the first responders was a hotshot cop, a black woman in her thirties with a street mouth and a chip on her shoulder. I assumed she was a dyke. Her name badge identified her, dubiously, as Officer Friendly. I would later learn that her surname was indeed Friendly, that she was not a dyke, and that she was bucking for a promotion to detective.

That day at the crime scene, she must’ve figured she could grease the path to her promotion by arresting me on the spot. It sort of made sense: I literally had blood on my hands, there were no signs of intrusion, I had a key, and most important, I had a plausible motive for revenge against the victim. It was front-page news in Thursday morning’s Desert Sun, though I never saw it, waking up behind bars.

On Thursday evening, the medical examiner released his finding that Anthony had died Wednesday around noon. My salvation turned out to be Ed at Sunny Junket, who had spent most of Wednesday with me, providing a solid alibi. I was freed within the hour. Officer Friendly, however, was screwed.

And now, there she was, in a rent-a-cop costume, reduced to running security errands for the convention center. She sported a gun, a badge, and handcuffs, looking plenty pissed.

I smiled. “What happened? Lose your job?”

“None of your motherfucking business.”

“Couth it up, Friendly. Our clients wouldn’t approve.”

“Go to hell, asshole.”

“Aha,” said Clark, strolling out from the bedroom, dressed for the day. “It seems you two have met. Morning, Jazz.”

“Jazz?” I said.

She looked aside, mumbling, “Beats the shit out of Jasmine.”

Nodding, I agreed. “Not quite your style.”

Clark asked, “Get everything fixed, Dante?”

“Hold on,” said Friendly. With a low chortle, she said, “Dante? This asswipe lowlife? He’s Danny O’Donnell.”

We were interrupted by the rattle of the sliding glass door to the pool deck as Edison struggled to open it from his wheelchair. I rushed over and helped him inside.

“Dante, dah-ling,” he said, “too good of you.”

“I’ve got the video up and running again. Can we take a few minutes to go over it?”

He heaved a weary sigh. “If we must. Later — when you come back to fix the lighting.”

“I can take a look at that right now.”

“Not in the daylight,” he scoffed. “It has to be tonight.”

Hesitating, I said, “I’ll drop by around six.” Not wanting to be stuck alone with Edison, I turned to ask Clark, “Will you be here?”

“Depends. I’ll try.” Clark was at the dining table, checking the inventory of prints against a list. As if he’d just thought of something, he looked up to tell Friendly, “I need a few minutes before we go. Make yourself at home. Check out the view.”

Edison gave the black woman a haughty, disapproving look as she sauntered out to the pool deck. I followed.

A mockingbird warbled as it swooped from the fronds of a palm to the scrub of an embankment that opened to the city below. Friendly stood at the railing, looking out. I approached from behind. With her back to me, she said, “You fucked up my life.”

I stepped to the railing and stood beside her, looking out. “You didn’t do me any favors, either. The few friends I had left after the divorce — they’re gone.”

“Shit happens, O’Donnell. It happened to me, starting with the murder of your ex. Still an open case” — she turned to look at me — “but I have my suspicions.”

“Knock it off. You know I didn’t do it. You were wrong.”

“And you made a mess of that crime scene. My so-called partner — a racist prick — reported that the muddled evidence was my doing, that the arrest was wrongful and incompetent. So, I was denied training for detective status. I lost overtime privileges. Got crappy shifts. Then my husband dumped me — said it was my drinking.” She paused and looked away. Her voice dropped as she said, “Worst part, he got custody of our daughter. My little girl.”

I blew a low whistle. “Sorry. That’s rough.”

The story had drained her swagger. I heard the tinge of fear in her words, in her uncertain future, as she explained how her standing with the police force had continued to sour. They made it clear they wanted her out. She decided to leave on her own terms and quit. Trying to start over, she opened a private investigation service. “Not much business yet” — she shook her head — “so I’m doing security at the convention center.”

I shrugged. “It’s a plan.”

“It sucks.”

Clark appeared in the doorway. “Ready, Jazz.”

With a parting smirk, she went inside.

So did I. Closing the glass slider, I noticed that the front door of the house was wide open, as if Clark had already trudged through with several batches of prints. But he was standing at the dining table with Jazz, telling her, “Light load today, just this portfolio. Take it in your van; I’ll follow in the Bentley.”

“Got it.” After signing a receipt, she took the portfolio from Clark, and they headed toward the door.

“Pink fluff!” bellowed Edison.

Exasperated, Clark asked me, “Can you take care of him?” Before I could answer, Clark walked out to the courtyard with Friendly and shut the door.

“Now,” said Edison.

I turned to him. “You just finished a whole tub of the stuff.”

“And now I’d like you to try some. It’s quite delicious.”

I wanted to leave. But I’d been told to give him the VIP treatment. Plus, I’d been wondering if the trifle was as good as it looked. So I played along.

Edison wheeled himself into the kitchen and waited behind me as I tugged the refrigerator door open and removed one of the containers. I popped the lid, grabbed a spoon from a drawer, and gave it a taste.

“Get out,” I said, amazed. It was fabulous.

“Didn’t I tell you?”

I wolfed a few more spoonfuls, then stopped myself, returning the trifle to the fridge. “Thanks, really, it was great.” I stepped to the sink to rinse the spoon.

“Give me that.” He grabbed it. Locking eyes with me, he licked my spoon lewdly. When finished, he sat back, whirling the spoon. “Let me ask you something. What do you think of my Clark?”

“Nice guy. Seems attentive to your needs.” I grinned.

“And he’s hot.”

“Isn’t he though?” With an edge of bitterness, Edison added, “I’m not stupid, Dante. I know what you’re thinking: I’m just a vapid old rice queen.”

I assured him, “I would never say such a thing.”

But that very thought had crossed my mind.

Driving back to Little Tuscany that evening, I hoped that Edison would not be alone at the house, that Clark would have returned from the convention center. He might be in the mood for a drink. He might ask me to join him. I was off the clock and felt no obligation to wear the insipid Sunny Junket uniform, so I wore tight black jeans and a leather jacket — surefire date bait.

Winter nights in the desert could be cold, and the bright, perfect day had already turned gray and windy. Clouds piled up beyond the mountains to the west, rushing the sunset. The dusk disappeared into a starless, moonless darkness.

As the Camry reached the top of the narrow drive, its headlights skimmed the parking court, which was empty. Peachy — I’d be solo with Edison. When I got out of the car, I took note of the landscape lighting and, finding no problems at the front of the house, checked along both sides, which also seemed fine. However, the most elaborate lighting could be seen only from the rear deck, and due to the embankment, the safest way to get there was through the house.

I rang the doorbell. After half a minute, I rang again. A minute later, I punched in the code and entered, calling, “Edison?” All was quiet.

The interior lights were on, as programmed. At a glance, there were no signs of trouble, and I thought Edison’s afternoon nap might have drifted into the evening. But he had been expecting me, so I decided — with a chilling sense of déjà vu — to do a walk-through.

When I entered the kitchen, my knees went weak. I grabbed the doorjamb to steady myself as the room seemed to spin beneath me. Edison had fallen backward, crushed beneath the refrigerator, which had toppled onto him, covering his lower torso. The scene was a nightmarish shamble, with Edison pinned in the mangled metal frame of his wheelchair. The refrigerator was still running, its condenser humming, its door flung open. Raspberries, whipped cream, and tub after tub of pink fluff were scattered everywhere, oozing across Edison’s chest. From his mouth, blood had gushed and was beginning to blacken, puddling with Melba sauce on the hard, white terrazzo floor.

This time, I knew better than to kneel in the mess and try to help.

This time, I knew better than to phone 911.

This time, I beat a path out the door and ran to my car.

Shaking, I fumbled to start the engine, then backed up to turn around, when I noticed headlights bouncing up the narrow drive. Running through my options — fuck me, there weren’t any — I stopped the car and got out while Officer Friendly pulled her van in next to me, followed by Clark in the Bentley. The wind had picked up, rattling the palms in the black sky.

Friendly got out of the van with the portfolio she was guarding. With a flashlight, she swept the surroundings before proceeding. The beam slid up my backside. “Hngh,” she grunted. “Nice ass, for a white guy.”

Trying to keep things buoyant, I said, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You damn well better.”

Carrying a box of files from the Bentley toward the house, Clark asked, “Did you check out the lighting?”

“Uh, look,” I said. “There’s something you need to know. Inside. It’s bad.”

Clark and Friendly glanced at each other, then rushed into the house. I followed, telling them, “Kitchen.”

“Holy fucking Christ,” said Friendly, stunned by the grisly scene.

Clark dropped the files and stared numbly at his husband.

“Jesus.”

“No signs of intrusion,” said Friendly, giving me a suspicious look.

I said, “Edison asked me here tonight. This had to be an accident. Why would I...?”

“Then why didn’t you report it? You were leaving.”

Clark blurted, “I knew it.” He had moved over to the print racks and held up one of the plastic sleeves, empty. “The Hockney. It’s missing. It’s worth more than this clown makes in a year—”

“Two years,” I assured him. “Or three.”

“—and just yesterday, he practically creamed over it.”

Turning to Friendly, I spread my jacket open. “If I took it, where is it? Wanna frisk me?”

“The car,” said Clark, rushing out of the house with Friendly at his heels.

I took my time. In the courtyard, Clark had flung open the doors and trunk of my car, making a frantic search, while Friendly assisted with her flashlight. I watched calmly as they trashed it, secure in the knowledge there was nothing to find.

“See?” said Clark. “I told you.” And he withdrew the Hockney from underneath the Camry’s passenger seat.

And Friendly was cuffing me and phoning it in and calling for backup and dreaming of salvaging her tattered career.

And I regretted that I had been so easily mesmerized by Clark’s tight little body.

And I recalled that morning, when I came in from the pool deck, after talking to Friendly, while Clark was inside, fussing with prints, and I wondered why the front door was open.

And through the wind, I heard the first distant wail of sirens.

And now I said, “Yes, indeed. This old house has state-of-the-art electronics. Surveillance in every room. Up under the eaves too.” I pointed vaguely toward the deep, dark recesses of the roof. “Back at the office, we can just scan through all the video. We’ll see Clark planting the ‘evidence’ this morning. Then we’ll see him again, later, killing his husband.”

Clark froze, dropping the Hockney as the first cold spits of rain arrived on the wind. He hadn’t planned on video — lying would be futile. With a convulsive heave, he said, “Edison was right. I couldn’t leave, and he would never divorce me. We were stuck.”

“Till death do you part,” I said. “And I’ll bet you’re his heir.”

Clark looked blindly into the rain. Beaten by the truth, he muttered, “There was... no other way.”

Friendly released one of my cuffs and clamped it to one of Clark’s wrists, saying, “We’ll sort this out quick enough.” The sirens grew louder. A gust of wind grabbed the soggy Hockney from the gravel and tumbled it through the courtyard, sending it over the embankment.

I laughed, saying to Clark, “You idiot. There’s no surveillance. At Sunny Junket, we have a measure of respect for our guests.”

Slowly, Clark’s gaze pivoted to Friendly. With renewed fire, he stared into her eyes. “Some of our wealthier clients value their privacy and prefer cash transactions. I have forty thousand in the house. That could go a long way in the fight to get your daughter back. It’s yours — tonight — if you forget what you heard.”

Jazz Friendly, the ex-cop who’d accused me of fucking up her life, now studied my face while telling Clark, “But I’m not the only one who heard it.”

Clark reminded her, “You’ve got a gun. Use it. Self-defense — if you say he tried to grab it. Case closed.”

Her eyes darted from mine to Clark’s and back to mine.

Clark smiled. “Just do it.”

Sirens screamed nearby.

The Water Holds You Still by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Twin Palms

The landline rang after midnight. It had to be my mother down in Palm Springs. She was the reason I kept the line.

I picked up. “Hi, Mom.”

“There was a noise,” she said.

I stood my brush in a jar of water. Red paint escaped the bristles, a blood cloud. I took the phone outside, the curly black cord stretched taut as a tightrope. Ferns along the patio were wet with night mist, common here on the Central Coast.

“Houses settle at night and make noises,” I said.

A few months ago, she began calling me about noises at night and the calls were coming more often.

A puff of breath and the faint strain of music — Sinatra. “Mood Indigo.” She’d become obsessed with him, more so since my stepfather Jerry died.

“A coyote was outside by the pool,” she said. “It was sniffing the water.”

“Maybe it’s bored,” I said. “No little dogs around to eat.”

“Greta, that’s not funny.”

“You’re keeping Joey Bishop in, right?” He was her little red Pomeranian.

“He’s in.” Her voice dropped an octave. “My sapphire ring is missing. Your brother was here. Every time he stops by, something else goes missing.”

“Are you sure?” Out on the highway red and blue lights whirled by.

“Last week it was my diamond earrings. I was going to give those to you.”

I took it personally. My brother knew they would be mine someday. “I’ve always loved those earrings. Has anyone other than Ben been around?”

“Repair people. Pool cleaner. Gardener. I can’t keep track.”

“So, it could be anyone.”

“Do you think your brother’s gambling again?” she asked. “People go to those pawn shops up on Palm Canyon and over in Cathedral City to sell things they steal. Or they sell them on Clubslist.”

“You mean Craigslist.”

“Make fun.”

“Look, Mom,” I said, “if Ben’s stealing from you, call the police. Turn him in.”

“I can’t. He’s my son.”

“It will only get worse.” I was afraid for my mother, brother, and me. Families weren’t supposed to be like this. Sons didn’t steal from their mothers. But she’d complained before so there must have been some truth to his thieving. “You’d be doing him a favor.”

“He’ll stop coming to see me. Then who will I have?”

“You have me.” I felt like that little girl again, competing with my brother for her love. Ours was a complicated relationship. Mothers and daughters and sons — oh my. She had that old-world Italian thing going: sons were gods, daughters... were what?

“You’re so far away,” she said.

“I’m not that far away, only four, maybe five hours. Come stay with me for a while.”

“I don’t drive anymore. My eyes.”

“Then I’ll come there.”

We made plans for me to go down in three days and hung up. Back in the studio, I studied my many unfinished canvases propped against the walls. I’d never get another gallery show if I didn’t finish already. I had done well at my first show but how could it ever happen like that again? What if I was a one-hit wonder? And was that better than becoming a follow-up failure? When Daniel and I broke up — I found out on Instagram, of all places, that he’d cheated on me with an ex-girlfriend — my confidence was rocked. Faulty female intuition. The dick-head. I lost my motivation and my creative ideas turned to mush.

By the weekend, I’d made little progress on my painting, but I had to visit my mother.

On Friday morning I threw a few things into a suitcase — changes of clothes, sarong, bathing suit — bagged a bottle of wine, got into my Mini, and headed south, Amy Winehouse crooning “Back to Black.”

Past Redlands on Interstate 10, the land yawned open. The hills were curvy, a smooth velveteen. A freight train passed alongside the freeway. Blades of wind generators lackadaisically spun.

I took the exit for Highway 111 and ten minutes later the lunar landscape gave way to Palm Springs’s green lawns and lush landscaping fed by a humongous underground lake.

Palm Canyon Drive runs through downtown and even though it was August, pedestrians milled about. My desert city no longer cleared out during the searing summer months. I liked it better back when tumbleweeds rolled down the streets as the theme song from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly played in my head.

At the stoplight near Rocky’s Pawn Shop I called my brother and left a voice mail. Just beyond the Ace Hotel I hung a right and turned into Twin Palms, named for the two palm trees planted in front of each midcentury marvel. My father had bought one of the original homes and Mom had lived here through three husbands. I pulled into the curving driveway and made a mental note to ask her where her car was.

From the outside, the house looked the same: the butterfly design — sleek angular lines spread open like wings, high windows with broad panes of glass, chartreuse front door.

As I made my way up the front walk, things began to look awry. Empty vegetable and dog food cans littered either side of the cement path as if someone had pitched them out the front door instead of into the trash. And why hadn’t Ben picked them up? Was he losing it too?

I rang the doorbell. Through the walls, a vague chime. I shifted from foot to foot, knocking, ringing the doorbell, and waiting. It took awhile for my mother to respond and when she did, she opened the door a crack.

“Who are you?” she said, peering out.

“I’m your daughter, remember me?” I replied, partly indignant. Still, I was freaking out inside. “C’mon, open up.”

“You look different,” she said, and pulled the door open.

“I cut my hair.” I reached up, touched the ends that I’d dyed blue.

“Why’d you do that?”

My hair had been long until last month when I kicked out Little Dick. “I needed a change,” I said.

“What the hell is with the turquoise?”

I dropped my bags in my old bedroom, which had hardly changed, put the wine in the fridge, and joined her in the kitchen. Joey Bishop spun as he barked. Yappy dogs can drive anyone right over the edge. Maybe this was what had happened to her; it was the dog’s fault. I leaned down to pet his head. He growled, then snapped at me. I jumped back.

“He likes to protect me,” she said.

“Not from your son, apparently,” I mumbled.

“What did you say?”

“Oh, nothing.”

The inside of the house wasn’t exactly a shambles, but something was off. The big plate-glass windows were smudged at the bottom from Joey Bishop’s snout. Big antiques were missing — the carved Chinese table my father had bought when I was twelve. A bronze mirror that hung opposite the front door, supposedly from the Tang dynasty. Then there were the missing Eames coffee table and Slim Aarons photographs.

End tables and built-in shelves were bare of artifacts she’d collected over the years from her trips to Europe and Asia and they were dusty, except for circles and squares that were varying levels of clean, the chalk outline equivalent of missing items.

A yellowing pile of Desert Sun newspapers as tall as a toddler stood by the sliders. I ran my fingers up the side. “You going to read all these?”

“I’ll get to them,” she said, and trundled to her midcentury stereo cabinet. Hanging on the wall behind it were dozens of framed photos, mostly of Ben and me, but also of the Palm Springs celeb set she once hung out with. She set the needle of the turntable down on vinyl. There was Sinatra again, singing “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” from his saddest album.

I poured wine into a mug with that Marilyn Monroe flying skirt image. After that long drive, I deserved a drink. It was five o’clock somewhere, right? I took my cup and wandered about the house, noting all that was missing or just plain wrong. I threw away an empty plastic milk carton on the floor by her nightstand. On the wall where a Slim Aarons photo once hung, the paint was a shade lighter.

“Where is it?” I said, pointing.

“Where is what?”

“My favorite photo of the Kaufmann house.”

“That’s been gone a long time.”

“It was here the last time I visited. Four months.”

“Seems like longer,” she said. “Ask your brother.”

“When does Ben come by? His voice mail was full.”

“He comes over every night to swim. His new religion. What do you want for dinner?” She threw open the fridge to reveal a dismal collection of milk, condiments, wilted iceberg lettuce, and not much else.

“Let’s go to the store.”

“You go,” she said, and handed me her checkbook. “Take one, unless you need more.”

“You shouldn’t be handing out checks like Halloween candy.”

“You’re my daughter,” she said. “If I can’t trust you, who can I trust?”

“Do you say the same thing to Ben?”

“He’s my son,” she said.

When I returned with groceries, I set them on the bench outside the front door, picked up the tin cans and threw them out, then carried the bags inside. Mom was on the sofa paging through a Palm Springs Life. Out by the pool the first man in some time I wanted to be close enough to smell was skimming the water, sweeping leaves, bugs, and crud into a net. He wore khaki board shorts, a neon-yellow rash guard like what surfers wear, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. He looked to be pure muscle, calves striated like rocks carved by river currents. He moved fluidly, as if to his own soundtrack, and swished the pool sifter back and forth.

“That’s Ernesto,” my mother said without looking up from the magazine.

I put away the frozen foods and went out to introduce myself.

He was tall with eyes the color of kiwi fruit. He said he had tended the pool three times a week for the last two months.

“That’s a lot, isn’t it?” I said.

“It’s what the man wants,” he said.

“What man? My brother?”

“Ben, he said his name was.”

So, the house can go to hell, but the pool needs to be pristine. Interesting.

“And you are?” he asked.

“Greta,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you. I’ll leave you to your work.” I turned toward the house.

“Que bonita,” he said softly, perhaps to himself.

“What?”

Rather shyly, he said, “You’re much more beautiful than your picture.”

I felt flustered, then dizzy, then smitten. It happened so fast, like I had just been hit with the flu. “How’d you see my photo?”

“Your mother asked me to look at her stereo. Sound wasn’t coming out. Your photos were on the wall above it.”

“Do you want a drink?” Was I hitting on him or had he just hit on me?

“A cerveza would be nice. So hot.” He wiped a red bandanna across his forehead.

“I don’t think there’s beer, but I’ll check. I have wine.”

“Whatever you like, I like,” he said.

I stumbled on my way inside. What is this? I wanted him, and that he might want me was enough to turn any whisper of the idea into a roar of demand.

I poured more wine into my mug and into one that read PALM SPRINGS with a palm tree, and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows that took up the entire back of the house. Ernesto scooped water from the pool into a vial and squeezed in a chemical. Capped the bottle, gave it a shake, then dipped it in litmus paper. He was young; his face and body were absent of history. When I was eighteen, I wanted wrinkles so I’d be taken more seriously. Imagine. Now, closer to forty than thirty, I lapped up his attention like a neglected kitten.

In my old room I changed into my two-piece. Dust bunnies hugged corners. This wasn’t like my mother. She used to keep a pristine home, vacuumed as if it were her part-time job.

I carried the wine out to the pool and handed Ernesto one. We awkwardly thunked mugs.

“Sí, muy hermosa,” he said, looking me up and down as I approached in my two-piece. It wasn’t like me to find a man I’d just met, my mother’s pool cleaner at that, so instantly compelling. But after my lying Little Dick boyfriend — he’d even proposed! — I was game. I needed an ego boost, and fast.

Plus, this thing with Ernesto, whatever it was, would distract me from my growing concern over my mother and brother. A tryst while I was here would be sublime.

I laid a towel over the lounge chair and sat down. He took the chair beside me and we made chitchat. He told me about his mother, a green-eyed blonde from Los Angeles who lost the part to Bo Derek in that awful movie Bolero, but got a walk-on part and met his father, also an aspiring actor. I was only half listening as I felt a gnawing animal attraction.

I asked him how he came to be a pool cleaner in Palm Springs. It was time to leave LA, he said, and shook his head. He didn’t offer more and I didn’t ask. I didn’t care.

I must have been nervous because I downed that wine like a ginger shot. I jumped up, padded inside, and grabbed the bottle.

When I sat back down, I said, “I’m curious. Have you seen my brother doing anything strange?”

“Strange?”

“Things are missing from the house.”

He pondered this and said, “One day as I was arriving, he was putting a black table into his car. He asked me for help.”

“Was it carved?”

“With dragons,” he said.

The Chinese table.

“Another time he carried out a cardboard box with frames.”

That Slim Aarons print.

Ernesto’s cell phone pinged with an incoming text. He looked at his phone and said, “Filter emergency.”

Huh? Who has filter emergencies in the late afternoon?

I got up with him. He went to shake my hand, or maybe kiss it, when I pulled him into a hug.

“How old are you?” I said, looking for a reason to stay away.

“What’s age?” he responded, and gave me his card: a little graphic of a diving board with his contact info.

“Call me if you want to talk,” he said, and with that, he pulled his trolley with bottles and hoses and disappeared through the side gate.

I went inside and changed. I vacuumed and cleaned the house. An hour later Ben showed up. My handsome little brother was losing his hair and had teeth in need of white strips. We side-hugged. I followed him outside. The sun had moved behind San Jacinto Peak, turning the sky a sulky violet.

He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and offered me one. I shook my head. I’d stopped smoking and didn’t want to start up again. My brother’s hands trembled slightly as he lit one for himself.

“I’m worried about Mom,” I said. “She called the other night about a noise. She’s getting worse.”

“She has her good days and her bad days,” he said, puffing away. The smoke hung in the windless air, our own personal smog alert. I hated wind but right now I longed for it.

I waved away the smoke. “She says things are missing.”

“She’s imagining. Sign of early-stage dementia. What kinds of things?”

“Art. Jewelry. The dragon table — where is it?”

“What table? I didn’t take a table. What am I going to do with a table?”

“It was worth a lot of money.”

“Lots of people go in and out of the house,” he said. “There’s no telling. Old people are hungry for friends.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Is it?” Ben set down the cigarette and pulled off his T-shirt.

“You’re growing a belly there,” I said.

He gave me the stink-eye.

Three crows perched on the branch of a huge ficus tree, complaining about something or other. He stamped out his cigarette, lit another, and offered me the pack.

“Stop doing that,” I said. “It took me forever to quit.”

He shrugged. “Whatever.”

“And the house is filthy. I found an empty milk carton beside her bed.”

“She was probably thirsty.”

I didn’t laugh. “You were supposed to look after her. Make sure she has food and a clean house.”

“I am!”

“You’re not doing a good job of it.”

“Why don’t you move back, then?” he said. “You can take care of all this crap.”

The underwater lights of the pool came on. Ben went into the house, returned a few minutes later in his trunks, and dove in.

I stood to stretch. My mother was on the other side of the slider, gazing out. I waved but she made no gesture to show she saw me and evaporated back into the darkened house.

“What’s up with all the darkness, Mom?” I said, stepping inside, sliding the glass door shut behind me.

“The bulbs burned out,” she said, and wandered back over to the slider. “Your brother thinks he’s a fish. Always swimming.”

When we were kids, my brother and I would swim as close to the bottom as we could, lie on our backs, and open our eyes. Above, the water became a stained-glass window to the world. Once, as we surfaced, I pushed Ben back under and held him there, wishing, in a way, that he’d drown so I’d get back the attention he took from me when he was born. I still had nightmares about it, only in my dreams he sinks to the bottom and my father dives in to save him. I always wake up before they surface.

By the light of my phone, I searched the drawers for bulbs. I replaced what I could and switched them on. Somehow, when all lit up, the house looked even dingier. I heated up a mac-and-cheese entrée in the microwave, made a salad, and as I set plates on the table, Ben hefted himself out of the pool, dried off, and came in.

“Are you hungry?” asked our mother, who was already at the table.

“Have an appointment.” He kissed her on the check, gave a little wave to me, and said, “Good to see you,” then scampered down the hallway and out the front door.

“Your brother always has meetings.”

“At night?”

“He’s a very busy man.”

She got up. I heard the bathroom door close. When she was back, she said, “I can’t find my ruby ring. It was in the bathroom drawer.”

“What was it doing in the bathroom?”

“That’s where I keep it.”

I went to look, riffled through her vanity drawers, and found it, wrapped in a tissue.

“Here,” I said, placing it in front of her plate.

She picked it up and studied it. “Where was it?”

“In the bathroom,” I said. Hard to know what she imagined and what was real.

I drained the bottle into my mug, but I needed more than wine. I needed Ernesto.

“C’mon, Mom, you have to eat.”

She took a bite. “He was such a sweet boy,” she said. “I used to dress him in the cutest outfits.” A bemused expression skittered across her face. “So smart.”

What I remembered was a smart-ass kid who always tattled on me, who pulled scary pranks, and who once almost got me killed when we were on our bikes at a busy intersection.

I tonged salad onto our plates.

“He must be gambling,” she said. “What else would he do with the money I withdraw from the bank?”

“The bank?”

“Sometimes we go to the bank so I can take out money. Last week it was two thousand. What does he do with it?”

“Dollars?”

“He says we need things. Repairs.” She gestured. “House is old.”

There goes my inheritance.

“I meant to ask: where’s your car?” I said.

She shrugged. “Ask your brother.”

“Oh my God. He doesn’t tell me anything useful and neither do you.”

She pushed back her chair, wandered over to the windows, and gazed out at the pool flashing blue in the darkness. “We used to have such parties. Frank would come by. He had a house a few streets over. This was before he married Barbara. Do you remember him? You were just a little girl. He’d come over and we’d sit by the pool and drink Jack Daniel’s. That was his drink, you know. He was a very nice man, always nice to you. I have all his albums. He gave them to me.”

I remembered Sinatra, how he would sing in our living room, all my mother’s friends gathered around.

She sighed. “I’m going to bed.” Before she disappeared around the corner, she said, “Where does the time go?”

I’d begun to wonder the same thing myself.

Slippers scuffed down the hallway, followed by Joey Bishop’s nails slipping across the floor. Her bedroom door clicked shut. I held Ernesto’s business card, kept turning it over in my hands, and finally gave in. I texted him, asked what he was doing. Watching TV, he said. Come over, I said. He lived in Cathedral City, the next town over, and could be here in a half hour.

I cleaned the kitchen and paged through a newspaper that had fallen from the stack. A feature about the growing crime of elder abuse in the desert, prevalent because there were more and more older people coming here with property and money.

I didn’t want to believe that’s what Ben was doing. But somebody was doing something nefarious.

Such a sweet little boy.

When did sweet turn to sour?

I flipped through the paper. Buried on page five was a story about a pool drowning from electric shock. A lot of swimming pools in Palm Springs were built before 1963 and not all were up to code. Who even knew to get the wiring of their pools checked twice a year?

I called my brother. He picked up.

“What did you do with her car?” I asked.

“Look,” he said. “You’re not around. You don’t know what goes on here.”

“Enlighten me: what goes on here?”

“She’s losing it,” he said.

“Today you said she has her good days and her bad days.”

“You’re afraid for your inheritance, aren’t you? I’m the one who deserves payback. You left. You don’t care about Mom.”

“Fuck you,” I said, and hung up. My face felt hot. I found a bottle of tequila in the liquor cabinet, probably five years old from when Jerry was still alive — maybe from their last cocktail party — and set it on the counter. There was a faint rap on the slider. A silhouette of a man framed against the turquoise of the pool. I jumped.

“You scared me,” I said, hand on heart, sliding open the door.

“I have a key for the gate,” Ernesto replied.

I held up the bottle. “Look what I found. I’ll pour us some over ice.”

We took our tumblers out to the pool along with the half-full bottle and sat side by side on lounge chairs.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.

“What did you think?”

“You in that bikini.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s right here.”

“I thought of you too,” I said. Tequila was wending its way through me, tamping down the circuits, loosening the boundaries between me and everything else.

He took hold of my hand and gave it a tug.

“Come sit with me,” he said. I snuggled into him on the lounge chair as if I’d known him forever. He stroked my arm, then my shoulder, trailed his fingers over the cliff of my clavicle and kept traveling south under my tank top. He gave my chest a delicious massage.

“You have some hands on you.”

“That’s not all I have,” he said, which is when he tugged at the waistband of my shorts and I let him. I pulled them off, pulled his off. We fucked by my mother’s pool under the stars as the bats fluttered among the palm fronds.

Afterward we jumped in the pool to rinse off, wrapped ourselves in towels, and went back to the lounge chairs. I poured us more tequila and we toasted to us.

I awoke as the sun inched up over Indian Canyons. On the other side of the pool a coyote sniffed the water. I clapped my hands and he jumped over the gate and ran.

Inside, my mother was still asleep. After a shower, I tied on my sarong, brewed a pot of coffee, and checked my cell phone. A message from my brother.

Another message, this one from Little Dick.

Screw them. Screw both of them.

My brother continued to come over every night to swim — usually at sundown when my mother went to bed. We ignored each other. My mother was the same, ignoring me but vaguely glad I was here.

Each night as soon as Ben left, I’d text Ernesto. He’d come over and we’d have sex, and then we’d talk. Mostly I talked. Over the next few nights, I told him the long story of my past with Daniel, my painting, why I was here. Admittedly, I’d grown addicted to his silky fingers that made my body feel things it hadn’t felt in years.

It was bugging me, what my mother said about going to the bank. I wondered if I’d find out anything if I went through her expandable file.

As soon as I started riffling through her file, I found papers for a reverse mortgage. What the fuck? I about exploded out of my sarong.

My mother was in the garage, going through a box of old photos.

“Why’d you take out a reverse mortgage on the house?” I asked.

Studying a faded color photo, she said, “Ben told me I should spend the money before I croak.”

“But what do you need it for?”

“I don’t need it but just in case.”

“Unbelievable,” I said, and returned to the file and the bank statements, accompanied by a huge headache that two Advils and a glass of wine helped to mute.

That night as Ernesto and I lay naked in the balmy night air, I said, “I have to do something, go to court, get power of attorney or something, so my brother doesn’t take all my mother’s assets.”

“Court takes a long time, no?”

“By the time it goes through, my mother could be penniless. Fifty grand is already gone.”

“How much is left?”

“Around a hundred grand. Probably more.”

“Still, a lot of money,” he said.

We watched the glimmery blue water, listened to the mockingbird that ran through its repertoire of cell phone ring-tones, and sipped tequila. My eyes fixed on the underwater light.

I brought up the article. “I’ve read that a lot of pools here are not code compliant. Old pools, old wires.” I paused before asking, “Is it painful, drowning that way? Do you think it hurts?”

“The swimmer feels a tingling, becomes kind of numb, can’t get out, gets sucked under.”

“My brother swims all the time,” I said.

“I check pools to make sure this does not happen.”

A shiver ran through me when I realized what I was thinking. I wanted my brother gone and I needed Ernesto’s help to make it happen. There was a name for that, and it wasn’t good.

The next evening when Ben came over, he brought Mom a cherry pie, her favorite, and exclaimed for the universe to hear that he’d hired a cleaning lady.

He went out to swim laps and Mom went to bed. I stood over the glistening pool.

“I know what you’re doing,” I said.

He pretended not to hear me. Water in his ears or something.

“You don’t fool me,” I continued, and sat on a lounge chair with my drink, hoping to intimidate him into leaving. I watched him swim back and forth — not for much longer, though, if things went as planned. I used to like my brother more, even love him, but for years now he’d been all about Ben and I’d had my fill.

That night Ernesto and I went at it in our usual place, on the lounge chair beside the pool. Thank God for mothers who go to bed early and for magenta bougainvillea that grows tall along stucco walls surrounding properties. Sex with Ernesto was good for my nerves — better than any antianxiety medication. This thing with my brother had my nerves sheared raw.

We rinsed off in the pool, then sat on the bullnose edge, sipping tequila.

“I’d be willing to give you some of the money.”

“Excuse me?” he said.

“The last straw was the reverse mortgage. He needs to pay. You can help me, can’t you?”

He took a long sip. “Oh, chica, this can be very dangerous.”

“It’s a lot of money, you even said that.”

“I know, but I—”

“You know how to make pools safe, right? So, you must know what makes them unsafe.”

“I can’t disconnect anything, but I can do something, make the wiring look frayed maybe.”

“No one will ever know you had anything to do with it. I’d never tell them how to find you. Why would I?” I ran my hand over his lower regions, said, “Ernesto, I would do anything to show you my appreciation for your efforts on my behalf,” and we went at it again.

Afterward I said, “I need a picture of us,” and reached for my phone.

“Oh, no,” he said, “I don’t like to take pictures.”

I leaned my face against his anyway, reached out my arm, and took a selfie. My breasts and his bare chest were in the shot. So sexy. A photo to keep me company on hot desert nights.

“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said as I licked a bead of sweat from his cheek.

“There’s more of this for you, whenever you like.”

He shook his head, kissed me hard, and said, “Tomorrow I’ll come over and play with the wires. Just don’t forget and jump in the water yourself.”

My brother took my mother out for breakfast, just the two of them. I did errands. When I returned, I dodged yappy Joey Bishop — maybe he’d get dizzy and faint from spinning as he barked — and stood before the pool. It looked so pristine, so very innocent. I dropped in a palm frond to see what would happen. It did not sizzle. It did not fry. I wasn’t going to jump in to test it. Hopefully Ernesto had been here and done his thing.

I was in the bathroom slathering on sunblock when Mom returned — shuffling down the hallway, followed by her frantic little pooch, and she said, “I’m going to rest.”

“Where’s Ben?” I called after her.

“Had to work.” And closed her door.

Work. What work?

When the sky turned lavender, the pool lights came on. I poured a drink and heard the front door.

Ben was here, using his key, striding through the house like he owned it, heading for the pool. I purposely didn’t turn on any lights in the living room so I could watch him.

The desert wind stirred up fronds and dust, sweeping them against the house and into the pool. The south end of town rarely got hit hard, but this evening the wind was wicked and sent a standing umbrella onto its side, missing Ben by inches. He jumped out of its way, then picked it up and leaned it against the stucco wall.

My mother’s bedroom door creaked open.

Shit.

Out scampered Joey Bishop, who sniffed my feet, barked, and ran out the open slider toward the pool.

“Don’t!” I called. He trotted back, spinning as he barked.

My mother moved beside me, watched my brother standing by the water. The room was freezing; she must have turned the air down to sixty-five.

“We saw Ernesto at breakfast,” she said.

“Who?” I responded, playing dumb.

“Your boyfriend,” she said. So, she’d seen us outside. “Ben took me to Cathedral City, some little restaurant. Your boyfriend was there, with his wife and kids.”

My brother dove in, began swimming laps.

I felt suddenly hot all over. “How do you know they were his wife and kids?”

“They called him Daddy.”

Ben slowed and seemed to struggle, as if an invisible force was pulling at him.

“Why isn’t he moving?” my mother asked, her voice quavering.

“Maybe he has a cramp.”

I felt awful. A mother shouldn’t have to watch her son die.

“Call 911!” she cried, flailing her hands about like startled birds. I found my phone and called.

Ben gestured toward the house for help, then stopped struggling, and was sucked under. He rose to the surface and lay inert on the water.

The sirens grew close and then the paramedics were here. I let them in and said the way a frantic person would, “My brother! He’s in the pool!” and three men rushed past. Joey Bishop spun like a top out of control, barking till he went hoarse.

I followed them out.

“Did your brother know how to swim, ma’am?”

“Of course!”

“Does he take drugs?”

“I don’t know! He comes over every night to swim.”

They mumbled among themselves, then one of them went over and unplugged the wiring and filter and whatever else was electrical; the other two used the leaf skimmer and a rope to pull his limp body from the pool. They administered CPR but Ben didn’t respond.

The carved dragon table, the Slim Aarons photos. Ernesto, with a wife and kids? The world was full of rats.

As they continued administering CPR on my brother, I rushed inside. I would give them Ernesto’s business card, give Ernesto to them. Mom sat in the dark of the living room and there was Sinatra again, singing about a piper man and losing someone to the summer wind. But as I held the card, I realized that by giving them Ernesto, I would also be giving them me.

I went back outside. They were loading Ben onto a stretcher. His cigarettes lay on his shirt. Oh, what the hell. I reached out and grabbed them, tapped one from the pack, and lit up. On my phone I looked at the picture of Ernesto and me. Gave me pangs to think it was over. I flicked the card against the phone, then the thought came to me: maybe his wife would like the photo too.

The Expendables by Rob Roberge

Wonder Valley

1981

Have you ever seen government agents feed radioactive cereal to a group of mentally ill children, just to study what would happen, and have them call it a medical experiment?

I have.

What happens when you poison mentally ill children with radiation? With dusts of plutonium? Any children, of course. We used the institutionalized. What happens? They die. Of radiation poisoning.

The ones who ingested the most, the luckiest, died fastest. The others died slowly and more painfully than you could possibly imagine unless you’ve ever witnessed it. There are the enormous skin blisters and burns down to red muscle and the white — with a subtle shade of light blue — bones exposed. The constant diarrhea and vomiting. Often, blood from every orifice. The organs break down and basically liquefy. The child dies a savage death.

And I thought then, and I still think: why in the world did you need that experiment to figure out what the results would be?

I’m hiding, even if you couldn’t tell by looking. I sit on my screen porch here in the high desert. An unforgiving burning sun that keeps most people away is perfect for me. You spend a summer out here, and you wonder why the people stopped here on their westward expansion. A hundred and twenty miles from Los Angeles. From paradise. But it wasn’t like that distance was easy back then. My guess is they rode until they dropped. And they probably got here in fall or spring, when the weather sits in the low nineties and loosens its grip on everybody when the nights are all seventy-five to eighty-five degrees.

I read and watch the clouds change the colors of the mountains to the north. From sharp grays, to, later in the day, a dark tint like on a car window, to a burst near sunset that looks like cotton candy might if it were the most beautiful purples and oranges and reds and whites you’ve ever seen. As colorful as an atom bomb’s mushroom. The place might hold a place of love in my heart, if I didn’t have to be here.

Out here, you never know the secrets of people’s lives. My secrets are more guarded than most — as they are murderous secrets I’ve been keeping since 1953. My actions were born in secrecy, and it’s what I’ve lived in ever since then. In the 1950s I participated in the CIA’s mind control experiments, known as MK-ULTRA. I worked in what were called “subprojects,” but they were all under the ULTRA umbrella. I told myself, at first — before I’d seen or known of the scope of it — that I was doing this as a patriot, knowing the Russians were doing the same experiments. And we in the agency could not allow them to be first. To be able to control people’s minds. Our soldiers. Our POWs. Our spies. Hell, possibly our president. And we did these experiments, I now regret deeply, so we could, with our rapid advancements, be able to control their minds. Any other enemies of the state, domestic and global.

A good man would have told the government and screamed it to the Times. A good man would have risked his life. But while it does nothing to ease my guilt, I have never thought that was an option. To want to quit made you a national security risk. If they didn’t kill you right away, they would torture you and destroy your mind until you were of no use. And then they’d kill you. Or, worse, leave what was left of you alive.

But still, the man I should have been would’ve known he couldn’t keep torturing and killing people and remain a human being.

If I’d become a true security risk by talking, maybe I could have saved thousands of lives by trading my own. Though sometimes I think one man’s word against the CIA’s worst is hopeless.

I became a monster with a useless conscience. What you think of yourself is nothing when you stand it next to what you actually do.

But I could easily be disappeared. People in the project were tortured and killed — though sometimes just killed — and nobody would figure out it was a murder. The CIA was built on the desire for no one to know what they were doing behind the scenes. It’s in the very DNA of the CIA’s birth. It is the CIA.

Even in the agency, though, we were a particularly evil — I think I can use that word sincerely — tributary off the already poison river.

In the previous eighteen months, I’ve leaked as much information about MK-ULTRA as I can. It’s probably what helped the agency find my trail again. When I was silent and on the run, they had better things to do. But now, it’s a matter of time. You can be very hard to find in this world. But never impossible to find.

My best chance is why I originally came to live out here — a hundred and twenty miles from Los Angeles, as I say, and northeast of Palm Springs, fifty miles into the empty high desert.

Wonder Valley is a world where you don’t have neighbors. Or want them. This valley is for people who don’t like or want people in their lives. No one gives a shit about you. The only places I go are the gas station seven miles into town, the grocery store near it, and a little crap bar called the Mouse Trap down Highway 62, away from town and even farther east than I am. It’s not really a bar — not in any legal sense. It’s in a converted garage. The owner Leo built a small bar, put in five mismatched stools. There’s only one beer on tap — whatever keg he got from the liquor store. And even with only five stools, the place is mostly empty during the day. I drink there when I’m sick of drinking alone. Sometimes the generator power shuts down and the swamp cooler stops. And there you are, left to drink in total darkness — opening the door would only bring more heat. Drinking quickly because out here even a cold keg can turn the temperature of a cup of tea in no time.

Leo and I talk. We talk but we don’t communicate. Who does? Neither of us knows anything about each other’s lives. I’ll never know his story, and he’ll never know that I spend my time sending the secrets of the agency to the world in hopes they will be read and heard.

When I started writing all this information down — when I started releasing this information — I signed my death warrant.

More than 90 percent of the ULTRA files were destroyed in 1973 by the director of the CIA, on the order of my old boss, Sidney Gottlieb. Nothing we did was legal, according our government, the CIA, or the Nuremberg Code. If any other country were outed for doing this, our president would call them war criminals. Instead, Eisenhower knew about it and let it go on. After my time, Kennedy endorsed it. Nixon. It seems impossible to me that it’s stopped at all since. There is permanence to the subterranean horror that lies hidden from this nation.

They only ended the Tuskegee Airmen Syphilis Study in 1972, after more than forty years. Did it end because someone with a shred of ethics came to power? No. It ended because it was uncovered.

The people will only ever know — if they find out at all — long after the damage has been done. Long after what’s being done and will be done in the future.

If people knew the truth about the scope of this shadow world, they would realize what a fragile endeavor society actually is.

My death? The agency may torture me — but electroshock and isolation aren’t practical for a portable assassination. LSD or another drug would be too unpredictable, even if quickly administered by IV. There’s no twenty-story hotel to toss me off. I’m guessing a beating with a bat. I only hope it’s not a sniper. I need to see the assassin’s fear when they walk in the door and realize I’m not the only dead man in the room.

1953

I was hired because I was an expert in biochemical developments, and I was excited to have funding for what I thought I was there for — national security. Over time, I would collaborate with major advancements, but all of them were meant for defense, as far as I knew.

Very soon after being recruited and receiving my security clearance — which I was granted despite being a Jew who’d attended, after I’d immigrated to save my life, communist meetings with a girlfriend in the 1930s. She was more possessed with a revolutionary spirit than I was. I thought the American government could be trusted to a degree. Certainly more than the Germany which I’d fled. But I learned painfully and relentlessly that there was not an honest or benevolent government in the world. Savage men run everything. Everywhere.

As Abigail Adams wrote to her husband: All men would be tyrants if they could.

Yet, at the time, I was still a patriot. No one is more in love with this country than the immigrant. I wanted to spend my life in service to the ideals, the promise, of my new home. The agency taught me early that the ways to reach closer to that perfect American ideal were as far as you could get from those ideals. A lie in service to the greater truth, a colleague said. No matter how much that truth went against everything people thought the country stood for. They didn’t even have a country. They just never knew.

1981

You do have to understand it was a different time, which excuses the fear, but not the experimenting with human subjects. The agency — the whole government — was terrified at how advanced the Russians might be at controlling a person’s mind. We had no idea and, as people tend to do when they don’t know anything, we feared the worst. And, as is always the reaction, we acted with blind rage over what we didn’t know. So, this was mainly about beating the enemy to discovering the secrets of mind control. And it made for what should have been strange bedfellows.

First came Operation Paperclip. The agency brought over Nazi space engineers, rocket scientists, chemists — anyone who could give them an edge in the Cold War.

And there were doctors. Nazi doctors — mostly Nazis, anyway — who performed experiments on human beings. The Nazi doctors and chemists and others experimenting on prisoners from the camps. POWs. Several of the Nazis who had tortured people to death, reduced others to permanent vegetative states, exposed them to poisons and illnesses, were given one of the great moral mulligans of all time. Some of these men were about to be sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials.

Project Artichoke would protect those guilty of war crimes and, in trade for their knowledge from inhumane studies, the US government brought them to America to share their information with the CIA. The other, perhaps main, reason they did this was to keep the doctors and scientists and biochemists away from the Soviet Union.

My first mentor was a Nazi. Hans Krieger. My family had fled Poland in the thirties and would almost assuredly be dead had we stayed. I studied how to experiment on human beings from this man. I never could reconcile that our national security meant we had to protect war criminals and put them in positions of power.

If Nazis taught me my first lessons in how to destroy the human mind, what does that make me?

People think there’s nothing to see in the desert. No life to speak of. But it’s all here. You just have to know where to look. Lizards hide under any shelter they can find so the birds of prey don’t get them. Sidewinder rattlesnakes that move in a way that will always creep me out. I’m not afraid of death. But I’m still afraid of that damn snake.

Mesquite trees. When it rains, the whole desert smells of ozone. There’s nothing quite like it.

The bones left to the elements out here? Some of them easy to identify as human, for someone who knows too much about remains. They turn whiter than other bones. They fracture up and down their sides. Somehow, they are the loneliest bones I’ve known. Stories behind all of them.

1953

After any training, the way Sidney Gottlieb trapped you into silence was to bring you in. The moments you were in a room where these experiences took place was when you became one of them forever.

Gottlieb had me present to study their mind control and interrogation techniques so that I might have a better idea of what they were looking for from my field of expertise. I designed nothing for the test. I didn’t administer any of the tests — I was later put on strategies for assassination of foreign leaders, including Castro.

At the experiments, I was sickened by what I saw. Nothing in my imagination prepared me for any of it.

I witnessed how a man responds to interrogation while he’s sealed in a low-pressure chamber. The pain builds. The body is stressed beyond belief. What did I learn about how a man responds to a high-pressure chamber while he’s being interrogated? I learned that his eyes pop out of his sockets while he’s still alive and screaming and begging to die, which he does.

At first, all the experiments were in Europe. Then Gottlieb managed to start them in the US and Canada — at hospitals and institutions. All of the unwitting test subjects were known, casually and on the paperwork, as expendables.

Some of the other techniques I saw were tests in how a man reacts to hypothermia while interrogated. He freezes to death. How he reacts to 130-degree heat until he, too, can no longer speak and slips into a coma and dies.

Other expendables? Prisoners. Heroin addicts. Children. Mentally ill children and adults. Anyone in a mental institution, no matter how minor the reason they were admitted. It didn’t matter if you were white, so long as you were expendable. But you mattered even less if you were black.

1981

There was a saying in the agency. It’s good to have someone you can trust to have your back; it’s better to trust no one.

Along with an elaborate system of getting information to various destinations, I trusted my mentor, Dr. Hans Krieger. The Nazi. I wouldn’t call it true trust, however. I figured, if I had secrets, his were worse. If the agency taught me nothing else, it was to always have the most leverage in any situation. I didn’t trust Hans. But I trusted Hans to keep his mouth shut for fear that I’d expose him.

If anything happens to me, I’ve left paper trails all over.

1953

I’ve seen the lifeless eyes of a woman who entered a hospital for postpartum depression and then had ten times the normal electroshock dose twice a day for forty-three days in a row. The hope was to empty a person’s mind and then implant thoughts that would make them helpless to protest, or even reflect on, the agency’s commands. They weren’t supposed to be people anymore. They were only vessels for orders. They could be used to do anything, no matter the person they used to be. The goal behind this was to create unwitting assassins. The result, in this case, was a woman with no history. No knowledge of a millisecond of her life. With the cognitive skills of a child. Destroyed.

I’ve seen expendables driven insane, given massive doses of LSD for fifty days or greater in a row.

I’ve seen pregnant women intentionally infected with malaria to see if their babies are born with it. Almost always black women and children.

I have seen people put to sleep for 172 days and played the same recorded sentence every second of it. A command that would replace one’s mind.

I have been, as with the entire inner circle, experimented on.

1981

Hans contacts me via a PO Box in Palm Springs. Over an hour away, but a PO Box in Twentynine Palms would only be useful if you lived a hundred miles away, let alone fewer than five miles from my cabin. Everything is a code. We haven’t spoken or written a word to each other in almost thirty years. If we don’t truly have trust, we share an enlightened self-interest in staying alive.

But with the information I’ve already released, the agency has known for a while that I’m responsible. Hans has told me this much. I have no idea what else he’s told them. Among all the deaths, secrets, double lives, the actual scope of the information could only be from the inner circle. And I am the weak link.

Though I have no idea if they’ve already reached Hans and let him live the rest of his anonymous life in trade for the end of mine.

1953

In my first two months on the job, I was invited to a meeting with Gottlieb and much of the inner circle.

After dinner, the seven of us retired to a large living room with books lining the walls. Every chair some dark wood with deep leather seats, looking as deep and ominous as a Bacon painting.

Gottlieb and a man I didn’t know poured drinks from a carafe. This was used for just five of the drinks — emptied, and then he poured mine.

I had no idea I was given LSD. A dose that was twenty times what would later become a common recreational dose. I lost clear vision. Everything became exaggerated and looked like a funhouse mirror on every side of me. I remember the laughing. Then the menace of two men approaching me, taking me to another room with only a simple chair in the center. It was the brightest-lit room I had ever been in.

I was ordered to strip.

They tied me to the chair. I opened my eyes and saw an enormous mirror on the wall to my right. I’d seen enough sub-projects to know, even in my compromised state, that it was a one-way mirror and I was being observed. There had to be an audio recorder, as well. I tried to prepare to die and prayed the torture wouldn’t last long. I couldn’t fathom what I had done. A man I recognized — Thomas Somebody, or Somebody Thomas — from the chemical studies came in, bent down, and gave me a shot at the base of my penis. It burned immediately and my penis swelled beyond anything I’d ever experienced. Enormous pressure, like my blood was trying to escape through my increasingly pained skin. It felt like it could split open at any time.

Then, a different shot, this one rough, as they tied off my bound left arm with rubber, and injected into my vein, after trying many times. I realized I should be feeling pain with the needle’s crude hunt, but I felt nothing. Just fingers and the pressure of the needle.

But once it was in me, even with the acid fracturing my brain, I knew immediately what it was. They’d been testing ketamine as a truth serum. And I’d felt a light sample once. This was not a light sample.

A young man — maybe eighteen — was escorted by two men into the room and they closed the door behind him. He stripped and came over to me, got on his knees, and began sucking my penis. I’d seen this, or something like it, happen to others in the program. The point was to compromise the agent by documenting him in certain positions — and homosexual activities were a popular way to leverage your total loyalty. I stared at the light and felt the boy’s mouth up and down the length of my penis. It felt amazing, and my head rolled back, and I moaned for what seemed like a very long time. He didn’t stop. I heard the door open. I heard cameras flash. Their light exploding behind my eyelids at irregular intervals. But I didn’t care. Nothing but lights and the feeling I’d be blind soon when I closed my eyes, and this blurred, distorted, beautiful boy in my lap when I opened them. I felt on the verge of orgasm for what seemed like an hour, but I never had one.

A man’s voice ordered the boy to stop.

I was already compromised. Whatever footage and recording they had were plenty. I felt the boy’s hands on my thighs as he started to stand, and I asked him to wait. I felt his erect penis hard up against my ribs as he got up and pressed into me.

“Please kiss me,” I said.

He sat on my lap and we kissed, my mouth open to the glorious invasion of his tongue. The ketamine had me floating endlessly — one of its effects was that it made you feel weightless and like you were drifting down slowly into a void without any bottom. My head grew cloudy with images. I tried to touch the boy, but my hands were still tied. I’d never felt someone lick my neck and I couldn’t believe the feeling. He kissed me again, and it was like we were alone, together, drifting and falling ecstatically through endless floating space and I never wanted to leave. Someone pulled him away from me.

I stayed locked naked and bound in that room. My mind stayed bent. The ketamine leveled off and faded about two hours later, but the grip of the acid was suffocating. I wanted it over. More than anything.

They turned the room temperature below freezing. I lost all control and shivered and shook while they interrogated me for an hour. My penis remained embarrassingly erect from whatever the chemist had shot me with. I tried to think of a chemical that would have this effect, but among the acid and the cold and the rapid aggressive questions, I couldn’t focus on any thoughts of my own. I saw my breath. The concrete floor that agonized my feet seemed somehow even colder than the air.

A man brought in a strobe light. Another came with a small table that he put down in front of me. The first man positioned the light in front of my eyes. They fastened a neck brace on me — one that totally restricted my head and left my eyes helpless to whatever assault they had planned. The overhead light went out seconds before the strobe started.

From a speaker in the wall, the faceless interrogator barked questions at me.

“What is your name?”

I had no idea at first. I laughed.

The strobe light made me sick. I tried to swing my head away, but I was completely bound. I vomited all over myself and felt it grow shockingly cold on my chest and legs. I could barely talk, but I finally answered my name.

“Have you ever betrayed the agency in any way?”

Answering was so difficult. I had no control of my body. I was falling into hypothermia — that much I knew. Every breath hurt. And the strobe light relentlessly attacked what little control I had of my mind. I spasmed repeatedly and lost control of my bowels and they left me in my own mess, never cleaning me the rest of the day. It turned cold. Soon, I would sit in my own frozen waste.

The interrogator said, “Answer me. And open your eyes.”

When I pushed my thighs against my bindings, I found that my vomit had formed a fragile skin of ice. When I moved — as little as I could — the sound of ice quietly cracking came from the vomit falling on the chair. I faded in and out of consciousness.

“Open your eyes!”

I did as I was told. With what little control I had left, I fought to not say anything that could make me a security risk.

He yelled the question again.

The strobe light had turned me blind. The questions kept coming. Are you trustworthy? Would you ever betray your country? Would you ever betray your country for the country you’d left? You’re not walking out of this room until you’re broken. Tell us that. Tell us you’re not walking out of this room until you’re broken.

I knew enough. They might be killing me, but I wasn’t giving them the satisfaction of a reason to do so. Plus, I was barely able to form a sentence. Whatever their plan was, they’d rendered me useless. I tried to think. To tell myself all drugs have their half-life and will fade. That I was a chemist. I knew this. But still, life kaleidoscoped and strobed and attacked. Light was a glorious enemy. Beautiful one second, jackhammering the brain the next.

I struggled to speak. “Then I am not walking out of this room.”

The cold was close to killing me. I screamed in pain. I screamed, thinking it was my last chance to be saved. I screamed. It was all that was left of me. Two men came in the room and untied me and brought me to a warmer room and covered me in blankets. I was going to live. And that could be very good — or very bad — news. The men stood over me. I still couldn’t make out faces. Objects I knew were stationary — bookcases, unoccupied chairs, a vase of flowers — swelled and moved like trees in a windstorm.

Maybe thirty minutes later, they brought me back to the room and tied me to the chair, the strobe light away from it. The room was comfortable with the heat cranking. Maybe eighty degrees. But I knew the room would shortly be heated to a hundred and five degrees and the interrogation would resume. The strobe came back on. The room grew hotter and hotter. A hundred and ten. A hundred and fifteen. By a hundred and twenty, I’d seen men start to die of heatstroke. One twenty-five or thirty, and you were sure to die.

I don’t know how long it lasted. I passed out.

I woke naked in a sealed box no wider than a couple of coffins. Tall enough to get on my hands and knees, but that was all. I’d been shot with ketamine again and it was starting to peak. The acid still raged inside of me. I was overcome with my own stink. I threw up.

Lights lined the walls and a voice kept repeating the phrase “You can stop this at any time.” How many times can you hear a sentence repeated for over an hour? Maybe thousands? You can stop this at any time. You can stop this any time. You can... It could have been ten hours or ten days. I thought about those we left to sleep for six months of this. I would live in this box and listen to that sentence until I died. I screamed and wept constantly and begged them for it to end. Never an answer, just the same recorded message over and over. I’d vomited so often it was impossible not to crawl or lie in it.

Telling them anything they wanted started to feel like a welcome manner to end this hell.

Every hour, they opened the box. I heard it and saw blurry figures. Muffled men’s voices. I would feel another shot, and the familiar floating sensation of ketamine would come raging back. They would close and lock the box again.

I felt myself suspended, drifting down again. But without the boy. I was locked in the box, my box, and set off to drift in the infinite loneliness of the universe.

At some point I was removed. I couldn’t stand. Weak and disoriented. I screamed again, weeping and gulping breaths as a man carried me to a bed and placed covers over me. I didn’t sleep all night. I think it was night. I remember hearing my constant screams. At one point, I collapsed on the way to the bathroom, dragged myself onto the tile, and then couldn’t stand or see shapes, and I passed out in my spreading pool of urine, only understanding my situation when I was dragged back to bed and tied down, still wet and stinking in all my waste.

I’d remember that boy forever. Maybe there have been only a handful of days that I haven’t thought about him. I still feel him on my skin. He lasted forever.

I don’t feel the torture anymore.

They didn’t break me. They didn’t kill me. But they became my silent enemy, and I knew I would try to destroy them if I could.

1981

It took a year after the interrogations for me to find an opening to leave the agency. That life. To begin my series of new identities and new lives. But every new person I became always looked over his shoulder. Though I don’t think I ever knew fear again after they’d finished with me in that room.

They tried to destroy all of the MK-ULTRA papers in 1973. Helms, the head of the CIA, did it at Gottlieb’s request, and Helms knew this was something that could never become public. However, twenty thousand pages were misfiled and never destroyed, and they were released under the Freedom of Information Act in 1975. Congress held hearings. People were shocked. But nothing happened. More hearings in 1977. The same — brief horror followed by everyone forgetting about it and moving on.

A couple years later, I started sharing the stories with some investigative reporters who I trusted could keep a secret. I knew experiments that were not covered in those twenty thousand pages. But my attempts at anonymity, I realized early, were futile. And the stories have yet to appear.

I’ve sent copies of everything to Hans. I’ve sent copies to a PO Box in Portland, Maine, and one in Lincoln, Nebraska, and mailed the keys to the Times journalist, who’s mailed it to a friend. A friend now at risk. I hope there is no way the agency can know about that. But I also know they are everywhere. Nowhere and everywhere.

1951

I was a graduate school chemist at Northwestern University. I remember snow, which I know I will never see again. I wasn’t this man. With only one different choice somewhere along the way, maybe I would have never been this man. I don’t remember the man I was before the agency. He disappeared when the man from the agency appeared.

1981

A new message from Hans told me to call him and he left the number and time. We hadn’t spoken in decades. When I called, all he said was, “I can’t protect you anymore. They’re on their way.”

When I went to hurry home, I burned my hand on the car handle. And on the steering wheel again. It can be damn near impossible to even drive out here.

Still, this cruel landscape has become my home.

Since I heard from Hans, I haven’t so much as left my cabin in three days. Nor have I slept. Methamphetamines are one of the easiest drugs to make. My brain slips here and there from sleep deprivation, but I have enough control to see this through.

They’ll come soon, and I’ll make sure I’m awake.

And when they open my door — front or back — they will be dosed with one of the early experiments with the VX nerve agent. I’ve carried it and made deadly gasses for years. The hard thing was picking one that would kill them within a minute or less, but have its power dissipate to safe levels so that when we’re all found, no one else will be in danger.

Never leave an institution that seeks to kill you without the means to kill them.

I have a gas mask for the VX. I put it on, and the vision glass fogs. I wear two pairs of latex gloves. Even though this is mainly an airborne weapon, you can kill yourself if you break the skin.

I’ve turned off the swamp cooler. It blows too much air for me to hear them coming. I spread the nerve agent over the middle of the floor and by the doors.

I have a cyanide capsule in my mouth that will end it soon after I watch them take their last breaths. My life is over. Somehow, this brings waves of relief.

Inhaling twenty-five to thirty micrograms of this VX strain is enough to kill a person in minutes. Once they open my door, they’ll be dosed with over two hundred micrograms. It immediately begins to paralyze the muscles. And then freezes the diaphragm, which causes the suffocation and death.

A car pulls up outside. I sit in my corner chair.

I’m covered in sweat. No swamp cooler, and in the confining rubber of the mask. The increasingly sweltering wet mask limits my vision a bit. But I can still make out their faces and thick, cruel bodies. They are the same as the agency killers I knew in the fifties. One replaced by a clone, and so on. A seemingly enormous supply of men with no skills other than to overpower and kill. Any agency with enemies will forever need these limited men.

The sunlight through the window illuminates dust specks in the air. The nerve agent hits them as soon as they fully enter. They shout at me to hold up my hands. Which I do, but the gas is already starting to kill them. They can no longer speak. The coughing has started. I watch to see if they will be able to step forward and try to beat me to death. The shorter one holds a gun on me — the taller man a baseball bat. The gun falls out of the short man’s hand, and he drops to the floor. The man with the bat takes two steps toward me and collapses. They look at each other. At me. They gasp for air that will never again come, terror in their eyes.

Briefly, I wonder whether or not it matters if I witness them die, or if knowing is enough. I close my eyes. I breathe. My face slippery from the sweat. I keep my eyes closed. I have seen enough death, caused enough death, to ever want to see another one. I bite down on the capsule and wait for it all to end.