Adam Diamond was remarkably good-looking for a forty-five-year-old man. His dark brown hair lacked even a hint of gray-“distinguished my ass, I want be dead and gone before they call me distinguished”-and it fell in short wavy ringlets over his smooth forehead. He had a cruel face, but it was a learned cruelty. The anger did not flower naturally from beneath the skin, but sat across it, etched in the wrinkles he did not have.
He switched the jade balls from hand to hand, turning his left hand over on top of the right as if to clap. Adam Diamond rarely clapped, however, and when he did, it was to punctuate a command, not to display appreciation. “Clapping is for fools,” his father used to say. “Take what you can from a show and run.” His father was a famous agent, almost a living legend in New York, a city with a lot of names. Then he died, and was just a legend.
IT HURT, IT hurt like excising a cancerous growth, but once he started, he was steeped in blood too far to return, and so he continued. He entered them all, entered the voices one by one, and felt their words as the breath in his throat. Janson Tanker felt as if there were steam running through his insides, but he still had several nights of burning to do before he was spent. He only hoped that the stack of paper, which was shrinking like water leaving a tub, would last until the words ran out.
He had written them, written them one and all-his fallen comrades whom he loved and hated as he did his own flesh. He supposed he was trying to exorcise them or purify them, not that there was much of a difference anymore. He had reassembled them, brought them back from their homes in Heads Creek, Louisiana, and Culver, Texas, from Little Rock, Arkansas, and Detroit, Michigan. Using no discretion (for the war had not either), he plucked them from their homes like babes from a tit and sent them all back to the jungle.
Yet the scariest part was pulling the nails from the coffins and prying open the lids. Was watching the skeletons grow flesh and rise. And Janson resurrected them so precisely, adding even the optimistic shine of their smiles, only to kill them again. And he wished he had only to kill them with bullets.
He went to bed when he faded from his chair to the bare mattress. He wasn’t really sure when that was, just as he wasn’t really sure when his crying crossed from waking to sleeping hours. But somehow he always fell asleep because he always awoke with his mouth shut and his body screaming under the whirring paddles of the fan. The sweat was awful, so awful he didn’t even bother to try to clean his pillow in the little sink anymore because he knew it would be doused again the next night or the next sleep, whichever came first.
Sleep evaded and stalked him. It would slip away, fleeing through a tangled jungle path at night and drawing him inexorably along with it, through a waking hell. And then, just when he got his feet under him and adjusted to the rhythm of his footsteps, it would turn and pounce.
He had come to fear the typewriter. The 1951 Smith Corona typewriter on the stack of crates. He would stare at it, sometimes for hours, with hints of sleep glazing his eyes. Even when he turned away, he always knew it remained, always knew where it was. But after they routed Mai Teng, he knew it wasn’t the typewriter, that he would finish even if he had to write the rest on the walls in his own blood. He wondered what Barry’s friend would think of the skewed type on the sheets that he passed along.
He had a meeting in the morning, somewhere across the city, and his check had run out so he didn’t have money for a bus. He’d have to leave at 10:30 to make sure he got there by noon. He didn’t know what exactly it meant, but Barry said he had a friend who might give him money for his story, and he needed money right now more than almost anything. Barry said he’d pay for lunch if it was a lunch meeting, and Janson would have walked an hour and a half across town just for a decent meal.
He had written up to the very end. He didn’t know how many more pages, but he could feel the door closing. He didn’t think about it consciously, but he knew somewhere inside that he’d have to get through Henry Wilder to put it down, to put it all down. But for now, he couldn’t face the typewriter, so he concentrated on washing his pants and shirt in the sink so he wouldn’t smell at the meeting. He would try to tape the hole in the knee from the inside so it wouldn’t hang open.
He had given Barry the latest segments-the total was now one hundred seventeen pages and two paragraphs on the one hundred eighteenth. The pages were not numbered and he did not consciously count them, but each fresh sheet tolled, somehow, inside his head. Although he turned over the new pages the day before yesterday, he remembered just how he had written the storm, and could still feel it rattling inside him.
The thunder was still there, and it was all light that didn’t fade and shrapnel still in flight. I waited for the trees to stop shaking-what world what ungodly world where even the trees shake and the soil flies at you and folds under you-and for the rain to stop whipping my cheeks, but I had waited days or months already to no avail. When the ground eats its own progeny, then we’ve all come to judgment day, but I’d seen it all, seen the very ground spread its jaws and pull my struggling comrades down into tunnels and unimaginable torments, seen bodies waist deep in soil jerking with the movement of hands gripping them beneath the ground. And yanked down in a flash of foreign tongue moving vertically even in sound and then a scurrying of footsteps beneath. Always beneath and below. Footsteps in the cellar of my mind, even then in the rain with the shock of the blast still settling over and throughout me.
And the skies opened only with rain.
He knew that he was almost there; he had even allowed one of Wilder’s hands to creep over the edge of the coffin, but he slammed the lid on it. It would have to wait until after his meeting if he was going to get through it.
“I’M TELLING YOU, you would’ve died if you saw him. I know, I know-the suit. Last year Armani. Well he’s a prick. He was a prick when I knew him at Doubleday. That’s right, that’s exactly right. Can’t talk foreign, I want him off my fuckin’ Rolodex.”
Adam Diamond leaned forward and hit the fourth red button in from the left. “Janice. Richard Dawkins. Off the fuckin’ Rolodex, out of the computer. Done.”
“Yes, just like that, Harvey. I trust your judgment, especially when it coincides with mine. Hey-and guess who I’ve got coming in in about…” Adam flicked his Movado out from beneath a cuff. “… five minutes? The guy-the bum guy I told you about. Jaston Tanker. I’ll-”
The green light flashed on his desk, and a female voice crackled through. “We have a security problem, Adam. A homeless man in the lobby won’t leave, says he has an appointment with you, but I have you with Janson Tanker for your twelve o’clock and Michael Weaver for your twelve thirty.”
“Goddamnit Janice,” Adam roared. His voice dropped with the second half of the same breath. “Harvey, I’ll call you back.” He slammed down the phone and stood up, leaning over his desk toward the intercom. “That probably is Jaston Tanker.”
The intercom was silent for a minute. “You mean Janson Tanker, Adam?”
Adam was silent for a long time as he tried to control his breathing. Finally, he spoke, his voice wavering with rage. “Just you push me, you cunt. You push me about an inch further and you’ll be rolling calls the rest of your fucking life. Now get him in here.”
He sighed, and raised the jade duo balls from their box, a blue case with a flowing Asian design. He sat down and rolled his black leather chair to his enormous glass desk.
After a few seconds, there was an uncomfortable knock on the door, and then Janson entered the room. Adam could see how security had mistaken him for a bum; his shirt was so washed out that it had faded to a greenish gray, the color all clothes turned to once they were old enough.