“A morphine addict?”
“Yeah. I think morphine. Some kind of opiate, for sure. But not now—not anymore—I mean, obviously, he’s dead now—but I mean—” She pauses, her fluency has deserted her, and she shakes her head, slows down. “For a period, last year, he was addicted to something, and then he quit.”
She keeps talking, and I keep listening, writing down every word she says, even as some hungry part of my mind flies off into a corner, huddles with this new information—a morphine addict, some kind of opiate, for a period—and begins to chew on it, taste its marrow, decide how it might be digested. Decide if it’s true.
“Zell was not inclined to outsize living, as you may have discovered,” says Eddes. “No booze. No dope. No cigarettes, even. Nothing.”
“Right.”
Peter played Dungeons & Dragons. Peter alphabetized his breakfast cereal. He arranged actuarial data into tables, analyzed it.
“And then, last summer, with everything, I guess he felt like making a change.” She smiles grimly. “A new lifestyle choice. He’s telling me all this later, by the way. I wasn’t privy to his decision-making process when he started.”
I write down last summer and lifestyle choice. Questions are bubbling up on my lips, but I force myself to stay silent, sit still, let her keep talking, now that at last she’s begun.
“So, you know, apparently this dalliance in illicit substances, it didn’t go that well for him. Or, it went really well at first, and then really poorly. As it happens, you know?”
I nod like I do know, but everything I know is from law-enforcement training materials and cop movies. Personally, I’m like Peter: a beer now and again, maybe. No pot, no smokes, no booze. My whole life. The skinny policeman-to-be at sixteen waiting in the restaurant with a paperback copy of Ender’s Game, his friends in the parking lot pulling hits off a purple ceramic head-shop bong and then sliding, giggling, back into the booth—this very booth. Not sure why. Just never been all that interested.
Our food comes, and Eddes pauses to deconstruct her sandwich, making three small piles on her plate: vegetables over here, bread over there, bacon at the farthest edge of the plate. Inside I’m quivering, thinking about these new pieces of the puzzle that are falling from the sky, trying to grasp them and slide each falling brick into the place where it fits, like in that old video game.
The asteroid. The shoebox.
Morphine.
J. T. Toussaint.
12.375. Twelve point three seven five what?
Pay attention, Henry, I tell myself. Listen. Follow where it goes. “Sometime in October, Peter stopped using.” Eddes is talking with her big eyes shut, her head tilted back.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
“But he was suffering.”
“Withdrawing.”
“Yeah. And trying to cover it up. And failing.”
I’m writing, trying to piece together the timeline on all this. Old Gompers, his voice soaked in gin and stentorian malaise, explaining how Peter had flipped out at work, screamed at the girl. The asteroid costume. Halloween night.
Eddes keeps talking. “Kicking morphine is not easy, is nearly impossible, in fact. So I volunteered to help the guy out. Told him he had to go home for a little bit, and I would help him.”
“Okay…”
A week? Gompers had said. Two weeks? I thought he was gone, but then he turned up again, no explanation, and he’s been the same as ever.
“All I did was, I checked in with him on my way to work each day. Lunch, sometimes. Make sure he had everything he needed, bring him a fresh blanket, soup, whatever. He didn’t have any family. No friends.”
By the week before Thanksgiving, she says, Peter was up and around, shaky on his feet but ready to go back to work, to insurance data.
“And the phone calls every night?”
“Well, nighttime’s the hard part, and he was alone. Each night he would call me to check in. So I knew he was okay, and so he knew there was someone waiting to hear his voice.”
“Every night?”
“I used to have a dog,” she says. “That was a lot more burdensome.”
I’m thinking this over, wishing it rang entirely true.
“Why did you say you weren’t that close?”
“We weren’t. Before last fall, before all of this, we’d never actually spoken.”
“So, why go to all this trouble for the guy?
“I had to.” She looks down, looks away. “He was suffering.”
“Yeah, but that’s an awful lot of time and effort. Especially now.”
“Well, exactly.” Now she stops looking away; she stares at me, her eyes flashing, as if daring me to reject the possibility of such a far-fetched motive as simple human kindness. “Especially now.”
“What about the bruises?”
“Below his eye? I don’t know. Showed up two weeks ago, said he had fallen down some stairs.”
“Did you believe him?”
She shrugs. “Like I said…”
“You weren’t that close.”
“Yeah.”
And here I’m feeling this strange and strong impulse to reach across the table, to take her hands in my own, to tell her it’s okay, that it’s all going to be okay. But I can’t do that, can I? It’s not okay. I can’t tell her it’s okay, because it’s not okay, and because I have one more question.
“Naomi,” I say, and her eyes flicker in quick teasing recognition that I’ve never used her first name before. “What were you doing there that morning?”
The spark dies in her eyes; her face tightens, pales. I wish I hadn’t asked. I wish we could just be sitting here, two people, order some dessert.
“He used to talk about it. On the phone, at night, especially around December. He was done with the drugs, I really think he was, but he was still—he was not entirely happy. On the other hand, no one is. Entirely happy. How can we be?”
“Yeah. So, but, he would talk about the McDonald’s?”
She nods. “Yeah. He’d say, you know that place? If I was going to kill myself, that would be the place to do it. Just look at that place.” I don’t say anything. From elsewhere in the restaurant, spoons clinking of coffee cups. Other people’s melancholy conversation. “Anyway. As soon as he didn’t show up for work, I came over to that McDonald’s. I knew it. I knew he would be over there.”
From Maurice’s radio in the kitchen come the opening chords of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
“Hey,” says Naomi. “This is Dylan, isn’t it? You like this one?”
“No. I only like the seventies Dylan and the post-1990s Dylan.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
I shrug. We listen for a minute. The song plays. She takes a bite of tomato.
“My eyelashes, huh?”
“Yeah.”
It’s probably not true.
Almost certainly, this woman is gulling me, misdirecting me for reasons still to be discovered.
From all that I have learned, the idea of Peter Zell having experimented with hard drugs—not to mention having sought out and purchased drugs, given their current scarcity and extreme expense, and the severity of the penalties for such purchases under the post-Maia criminal codes—it all seems like a one-in-a-million chance. On the other hand, isn’t it so that even the one-in-a-million chance must be true one time, or there would be no chance at all? Everybody’s been saying that. Statisticians on television talk shows, scientists testifying before Congress, everyone trying to explain, everyone desperate for all of this to make some kind of sense. Yes, the odds were extremely unlikely. A statistical unlikelihood approaching zero. But the strong unlikelihood of a given event is moot once that event has nevertheless transpired.