Atlee saw her. I know of her already, and now I can put a name on the description. It’s so odd, to start to feel like I know these people, this world, the last one my sister lived in before she died.
“What kind of jokes did Tick make?”
“Oh, my God. I mean. Adam and Eve? Like, you know. If the plan didn’t work. If we had to go under. He and Nico were going to be like Adam and Eve. It was—gross.”
“Gross,” I say. I squeeze my eyes shut to capture the information, keep everything on file. “Hey, here’s a question for you. Did Nico have one of these code names?”
“Oh,” says Jean, and laughs. “She didn’t use it much. She thought the whole thing was sort of stupid. But her code name was Isis.”
“Isis?” My eyes pop open. “Like the Bob Dylan song?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Is that where it’s from?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, that’s where it’s from.”
I savor this small pleasant factoid for a moment, half a moment, before we press on into the hard part of this. It’s going to get rough now, but it has to. Time is passing. There is nowhere else to go in this conversation but forward.
“So, Jean,” I say. “So Hans-Michael Parry never turned up. And a decision was made.” I look her in the eyes. “Astronaut made a decision.”
“I’m tired,” says Jean. She sets down her cup so fast that it tips over and the water rolls out. “I’m ready to stop.”
“No,” I say, and she flinches. “You just listen. Listen. Parry never showed up. And once everyone realizes it’s not happening, Astronaut makes the decision to relocate underground. To move everything downstairs. Jean?”
She opens her mouth to answer but the jackhammer abruptly roars down the hall, and her face constricts with fear and she closes her mouth just as the machine goes silent again.
“Jean? Was that his plan?”
“His plan,” she says, and then she shudders, violent but slow, like a theatrical enactment of a shudder: her face and then her neck and then her back and then her torso, a wave of revulsion rolling down the length of her body. “His plan.”
“Lily?”
“That’s not my name,” she says.
“Oh, God, Jean. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t want her to go. I told her not to.”
“What?”
“Nico. We’re going down, we’re making the last trips, and she goes, she goes, ‘I’m taking off.’”
“To go get Parry on her own.”
“Right,” says Jean. “Yes.”
“So this was what time?”
She looks up, confused. “What time?”
I know it’s after Nico and Astronaut have their argument in the hallway, and it’s before Atlee closes up the floor at 5:30. “Is this about five o’clock?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s say it’s five o’clock. She tells you she’s leaving and you did what?”
“I mean, I told her it was insane.” She shakes her head, and for an instant I see reflected in her eyes this incredulous exasperation that I myself have felt a thousand times, trying to tell Nico anything she doesn’t want to hear. “Just—useless. I said, why would you want to leave for nothing and be alone, when we can all be together? At least that, you know? Be together.”
“But she went anyway.”
“She did. We brought everything down, and I didn’t think she would really go, but then everyone was like—she’s gone. She was gone.”
“And you followed her?”
“I—” She stops; her brow furrows; her eyes well up with confusion. “I—did.”
I stand up. “Jean? You followed her.”
“Yes. I had to, see? I had to. She’s my friend.”
I’m leading her as far out into this memory as she’ll go, I’m holding her hand and leading her out on the slippery rocks toward the dangerous water. “You had to stop her from leaving, but then there was someone else. Someone followed you. Jean?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do, Jean. Yes, you do.”
Her mouth drops open, and her eyes widen, and then she shakes her head again, she stares forward into the air between us. “I don’t remember.”
She does, she is seeing something—someone—I see it happening in her eyes. I lean forward and grab her but she wriggles back, rolls away. “Jean, keep talking. Jean, stay with me. You went to stop her but someone followed you guys.”
But she’s gone, she’s done, she falls back on the bed and throws her hands up in front of her face, and I am saying, “Jean! Jean. Somebody surprised you outside the station. With a knife.”
She shrieks a little, a sharp burst of air, and then she presses her hand across her lips. And I grab her again, clutch her by the shoulders and lift her, and my shell of dispassion, my phony policeman’s calm, is melting off of me, burned off by heat: I can’t stand this, I have to know.
“Someone chased you and attacked you with a knife, and they killed my sister.”
She shakes her head violently, keeps her hand clapped over her mouth, like there’s a demon in there, something trying to slip free and wreck the world.
“Was it Astronaut?”
Eyes squeezed shut tight, body shaking.
“Or was it a stranger? A short man, sunglasses? Baseball cap?”
She turns her body away from me, turns her back. I wish I could pull out a picture of him—lay it on the bed, Jordan smirking in his stupid Ray-Bans, see Jean’s face see the picture. But it’s too late, she’s disappeared, she’s gone, turning her mind away from whatever it is she is unwilling to see. Her hand is clamped over her mouth, her body has fallen over onto its side and she lies there on the thin mattress, mute, terrified, useless.
“Oh, come on,” I say.
I kick the bed and it bounces with her in it.
“Oh, come on, come on, come on.”
2.
“Isis,” of course, is the second track on the 1976 album Desire, and for a brief period when I was about fifteen or sixteen it was my favorite Bob Dylan song. It was around that time Nico discovered a journal in which I had carefully recorded my top twenty Dylan numbers, each annotated with the year written and the performers on the track. Nico found something hysterical about the fastidiousness of this particular exercise, and she ran around the house, dying with laughter, tossing the notebook up and down to herself like a chimpanzee.
It’s weird to think back now, to think about who I was then, to think that at any time “Isis” was my favorite Dylan song. Now it probably isn’t even my favorite song on Desire. But there’s no reason Nico would have known that, and I think it is at least possible, I think it is perhaps even likely, that she chose the code name because she knew at some point, somehow, I would find out about it. That she left it behind not as a marker, a follow-me bread crumb like the bent fork in the vending machine or the butt of the American Spirit, but rather as a kind of a gift. Or else she did it just because it made her laugh, because various aspects of my personality make her laugh, and that, also, at this point, is a kind of a gift.
I walk down the hall from the holding cell to Detective Irma Russel’s little office, and I flip her heavy leather-bound log book to the back and tear out sixteen sheets and fold them over neatly to form a book, and then I spend a good half hour recording everything that Jean had to say before she shut down, blanked out, went dark. How she came to be in the group; the names and approximate ages and appearances of her pals and coconspirators; the way her face turned cloudy and wild at the mention of the name Astronaut. How she realized that Nico had taken off, how she ran to follow her…
When I’m done writing, when I’ve written up to the brick wall at the end of the story, I walk back down the hall to Dispatch so I can sit next to Nico. She would laugh at me for all of this. She would tell me to take a load off, go back and have more beer with the rednecks, eat more chicken.