They're Watching (2010) Page 14

  I reached for her hand.

  It seemed a little unnatural, but we both held on. "Your theory . . ." she prompted.

  "I think the assault on us, our house, was to show me what they were capable of. How else would I believe that they could know all this? I mean, about some water heater that blew up in Pittsburgh and a hidden security tape?"

  "And it also ensured you'd do what they wanted."

  "That, too. It was a setup so I'd be forced to be their errand boy. I mean, if someone just contacted me randomly, said, 'Take this package to an apartment in a shady part of town'?"

  "But why do they need you?" Ari asked. "Why didn't they just send him the DVD anonymously, say, in a Netflix envelope?"

  "Clearly they didn't need me."

  "So then the question is . . . ?" Her hand spun in the air.

  "Why did they choose me?"

  One of her eyebrows lifted. "You're special." She said it flatly, but I knew it was a question. A challenge.

  "No, not special," I said. "But maybe at the end of this . . ." I paused, not wanting to admit it, but she nodded me on. "Maybe I'll get a DVD that absolves me."

  "Of what?"

  "I don't know. But maybe I'll get something that does for me what that recording did for Doug Beeman. Jars me out of my--"

  I caught myself.

  "Like footage that shows Keith Conner banging his own damn chin?" she said. "Maybe they got that to the studio and that's why the studio's pushing for a quick confidential agreement?"

  "The thought certainly occurred to me. And maybe they have something else that could help us, too."

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know." I realized that I sounded excited, and I made an effort to tone down my demeanor.

  "Look, whatever this is, someone wants to fit you into their agenda," she said.

  "Or someone wants to make use of me to help other people."

  Her hand stiffened in mine. We walked a few more steps, and then I let go. "What?" I said. "How do you know that's not it?"

  Ariana said, "Because it's what you want to believe."

  My laugh had a bitter edge. "What I want is to get back at the assholes who invaded our lives. But right now playing along on the surface is the only way I can get more information. And the more we know, the closer we'll be to finding out what the hell is going on."

  "Don't you teach about hubris?"

  "I teach that a character has to impact the plot. He has to determine his own destiny. He can't merely react to external forces."

  "So it's all about out-tricking the tricksters?" She gave me that same skeptical stare. "Tonight wasn't something more to you?"

  The old frustration pricked my cheeks. "Of course it was. It's the first meaningful thing I've done in I don't know how long."

  "It's not meaningful. For Doug Beeman it is, but for you it's fake. You didn't do anything but add water and stir."

  "I sure as hell impacted his life."

  "But you didn't earn it," she said.

  "So what? No matter how I got manipulated there and no matter how fucking scary it was going in, freeing him from his guilt--how is that not a good thing? And if the studio caught a signal that they should back off me, that's positive, too. Why are you being so cynical?"

  "Because, Patrick, one of us has to be. I mean, the way you're throwing yourself into this. You've been blocked at the keyboard for what? Half a year? And losing your interest for months before that. And now you're approaching this . . . adventure like it's your chance to write again."

  I said swiftly, angrily, "You can't compare writing to this."

  "You think this is better than writing?"

  "No," I said, "I mean the opposite."

  "You didn't see your face when you said it."

  I kept my mouth shut. Despite how horrible the past week had been, was some small part of me relieved that these guys had given me something to do? Beeman's focus on me had been as absolute as that of the men behind the DVDs. When was the last time I'd been at the center of anyone's attention?

  The elementary-school teacher from the cul-de-sac sauntered by with her down vest and twin rottweilers, and we had to pause to smile and exchange pleasantries. A young couple across the street were in their family room, hanging a hefty painting. The husband bending under the frame, his pregnant wife, one hand pressed to the small of her back, directing him with her other. A little more to the left. Left. Now right.

  I used to have that life. And it was enough for me, until my script sold, until Keith Conner and Don Miller strolled into the picture and hit me smack in the blind spot. I couldn't find my way back, and every time I thought I glimpsed the route, I got derailed. What I had was more than anyone could ask for, but I couldn't figure out how to inhabit it again.

  The high from Beeman's place deserted me, leaving me drained. The redemption I'd witnessed literally before my eyes had been so intense that everything else seemed bleached by the afterglow. I visualized the crappy shared office at Northridge, the unpaid legal bills and Ari crying on the arm of the couch, the braying neighbors, my unfinished scripts, the staff room with the broken coffeemaker, how-are-you chat with Bill the checkout grocer. It all seemed to pale in comparison with the dreams I'd grown up dreaming, lying on my back on the Little League grass, the New England air biting my cheeks, letting me know, minute to minute, that I was alive. Aliens and cowboys. Astronauts and outfielders. Hell, maybe I'd be a screenwriter one day, get my movie poster on the side of a bus.

  I thought about what Ari had told me about the world closing in on her in a hurry, about how her life didn't have a lot of what she hoped it would. The term "soul mates" got thrown around at our wedding, and here we'd found ourselves, for better or for worse, aligned in perspective even when we weren't. My visit to Doug Beeman had cut through all that stagnation, right to the pulsing heart of what mattered. I didn't want to have to defend how it had made me feel.

  The rotties were straining on their leashes, so we said goodbye to our neighbor, who gave us a wink and a smile. "Happy Valentine's Day, you two."

  We'd both forgotten. As she and the dogs padded away, our frozen grins faded and we regarded each other, wary under the strain of where we'd left off. Our breath was visible, mingling.

  "I guess . . ." It was going to be hard to say. "I guess I can't remember the last time I felt significant."

  "If it's meaning you're looking for, don't you think you'd do better to find that in your own life?" Her tone wasn't judgmental or harsh; it was the hurt in it that made me drop my gaze.

  "I didn't choose this," I said.

  "Neither of us did. And we're not gonna get out of it if we don't keep our heads clear and our eyes open."

  Worms lay helpless and limp, pale squiggles on the wet pavement. We circled back toward home, leaning into the incline, our heads down. By the time we passed Don and Martinique's, we were a full stride apart.

  The bags, lettered in Vietnamese, sat on my passenger seat, emitting the rich scent of ginger and cardamom. The heat of the food fogged the windshield, and I had to crack a window to let in the night air. Though Ariana and I had been polite back at the house, our squabble had taken some of the shine off our newfound rapport, and I'd offered to pick up the food myself as an olive branch.

  At the stoplight the click-click-click of my turn signal seemed to echo my mounting restlessness. I glanced across three lanes and up the street in the opposite direction of where I was headed. Glossed with rain, the Kinko's sign peeked out from behind a church billboard. A half block away. In fact, it was along the other route I occasionally took home, so it wouldn't even qualify as a detour. I was wearing boots rather than my Nikes, so my stalkers didn't necessarily know where I was right now. My eyes ticked to my rearview, then back up the street. The Roman lettering of the billboard proclaimed EVERY MAN'S WORK SHALL BE MADE MANIFEST, a riff from Corinthians that I took as a sign.

  The weather had kept a lot of thin-blooded Angelenos off the streets, so I reversed abo
ut ten yards, pulled across the empty lanes, and turned right. I couldn't help but wonder at myself--had this been my real motive in offering to come down the hill alone? Tapping the steering wheel, I pounded out my growing agitation. Slowing as I passed the strip mall, I peered at the dark interior with a blend of relief and disappointment. Closed. That was that.

  The windshield wipers worked double-time, trying to clear my view. I was a few blocks from home when, seized by an impulse, I U-turned back down the hill and trolled Ventura, wired with agitation. Finally I found a late-night Internet cafe.

  A few minutes later, snugged to a rented computer amid the sharp scent of coffee and the banter of two MySpacers comparing piercings, I logged in to the Gmail account. As the page loaded, I had to concentrate to slow down my breathing.

  Nothing from them, just a pop-up window for Viagra on the cheap and uppercase spam from Barrister Felix Mgbada, urgently requesting my help in setting straight his wealthy relative's affairs in Nigeria. I blew out a breath and cocked back in the rickety chair. I was just about to shut down the computer when another e-mail chimed into the in-box. No subject. They knew I was logged in.

  My palms were slick. I clicked on the e-mail. A single word.

  Tomorrow.

  Chapter 27

  Awakened by the sound of the running shower, I took a moment to get my bearings. Upstairs. In our bed. Ariana getting ready.

  New e-mail coming. Today.

  I hadn't done laundry all week, so the only suitable clean thing on a hanger was a trendy, faded salmon button-up that I'd bought overpriced at a Melrose boutique for some screening my agent had invited me to the week after she'd sold my script. Back then I was neither that cool nor did I have the money to afford it. And now I was less cool and more broke, so I would've felt sheepish wearing it if my apprehension about the coming e-mail hadn't drowned out competing emotions.

  In my office, nauseous with stress, I booted up and logged in. Even if I wasn't going to open an e-mail from my computer, I could at least see if there was anything waiting in my in-box. But there wasn't. I hit "refresh" to check for new mail. And then again. I jotted down a few sentences for my morning lecture before my attention pulled back to the screen. Still nothing.

  The shower stopped, and I felt a flare of unease. Hoping the student scripts might be more distracting, I pulled one from the growing stack. I read through it, retaining next to nothing. I tried the next one, too, but just couldn't find it interesting. Worse, I couldn't see the point of it anymore. Words on a page. How was I supposed to find interest in a fabricated plot when a real-life one was a single e-mail away?

  My hand reached for the mouse. Came back to my pad. Went to the mouse again. Refresh. Nothing new. Tapping my pen against the notepad, I refocused on my lecture, trying yet again to care about character arcs.

  Ariana poked her head into my office. "Bathroom's all yours."

  I quickly closed out of my browser screen. "Great. Thanks."

  "Want to have breakfast with me? I mean, we are sleeping in the same room now, so I figure we're at least intimate enough to try sharing a Pop-Tart."

  I smiled. "I'm ready. I'll be right down."

  "Whatcha doing?"

  I glanced at the mostly blank notepad. "Just finishing up some work."

  "Are you having an affair?" Navigating the hall, Julianne placed a hand on the neck of a student and steered him out of our way.

  I was slightly winded, having just run upstairs from the computer lab, where I'd logged in to my Gmail account so I could watch my empty in-box for the fifteen minutes before class. I could feel the blood in my cheeks. "No," I said. "Why?"

  She tilted her head back, appraising me. "You're positively glowing."

  "A lot of excitement lately."

  I started to peel off, but Julianne pulled me aside, out of the Monday crush, and lowered her voice. "I looked into that media contact. Even found a few producers who've gone through the process with her."

  It took me a moment to figure out who she was talking about: the person at the CIA who read movie scripts to see which were worthy of agency cooperation. "Right," I said. "Thanks for doing that, but--"

  "Not all the producers got their scripts approved, but to a one they vouched for her. I got her on the phone, said I was doing an article on the approval process--blah, blah, blah. Mentioned your script, and she had less than no reaction. She said it didn't circulate past her staff. She also said--like most scripts she assesses--it didn't paint a picture of the Agency that made them want to help with the movie. But there was no fire to it. So my guess? Unless she's Oscar-worthy, no one at the CIA gives a shit about They're Watching any more than you'd expect them to. I doubt they're behind whatever you're dealing with."

  "Yeah." I pictured Doug Beeman on that dank carpet, face to the screen, sobbing with relief. "I think I figured that out already."

  She glanced at the clock, swore under her breath, and began to backpedal up the hall. "So I guess that leaves you wide open again."

  SHE NEEDS YOUR HELP.

  The message, standing out against the black of the screen, made my gut twist. The tiny office in the department felt even more cramped than usual. The air gusting from the vent overhead smelled like freezer-burned ice cubes, and the scent of stale coffee lingered from whoever had taken office hours here last period.

  As the bold letters faded away on-screen, I checked my Canon camcorder, which I had pointed at the old Dell monitor. No green dot--the damn thing wasn't recording.

  I knocked the camera with the heel of my hand, but already the slideshow had moved on.

  A photo of a well-kept prefab house, taken at night, stars in the windows from the camera's flash. Just visible inside, the silhouette of a woman sitting on a couch and watching TV, her curly hair piled high. Two chairs pinned down the little strip of grass in the front, and a lawn gnome kept mischievous lookout.

  My eyes jumped frantically from my camcorder to the monitor and back again. After testing the Canon this morning, I'd left it briefly unattended at a few points--in the car when I stopped to get coffee, in the faculty lounge when I'd gone down to the computer lab. They must have disabled the recording function. To stop me from doing this.

  Dropping the camera on the desk, I searched out a pencil, finding a broken one in the coffee mug. My other hand rooted in my briefcase, yanking free the notepad and spilling scripts onto the floor. All the while I kept one eye on the monitor, fearful of missing something. Cracked pencil poised over pad, waiting to write. That hazy outline of the woman on the couch. She? Who the hell was she?

  A new picture showed our house from the front. Standard shot, like a Realtor's photo.

  A knocking on the office door.

  "Just a minute!" I shouted, a bit too loudly.

  "Patrick? This isn't your slot. My office hours started five minutes ago."

  The next photo showed the fake rock by the driveway, where we used to hide the spare house key, a flash illuminating the night scene.

  My heartbeat pounded. "Right, sorry about that. I'll clear out in a minute."

  And now a car key laid on the grass of our front lawn beside the fake rock. The plug on the rock had been pulled out and the key angled toward the hole. I squinted at the plastic key head, made out the Honda insignia.

  Her voice, more polite to mask the rising tenseness: "I'd appreciate it. You know our time in there is limited as is."

  I did. But I had only a ten-minute window between afternoon lectures, not time enough to leave the floor to hit the computer lab, and my colleague hadn't shown up for her office hours. Or so I'd thought.

  The next shot showed my Red Sox cap lying on our bed, as stark as Exhibit A in a crime-scene photo. The air-conditioning froze the sweat on the back of my neck. In the picture, our bedroom walls weren't torn up, so it had been taken before Thursday night. I dug in my pocket for my cell phone and thumbed it on, the spinning Sanyo graphics taking their time.

  "I'm just packing up. Gimme a sec."
Navigating its menu, I held the phone up next to the monitor so I could take in the cell-phone screen and computer monitor at a glance. Furiously punching at the tiny buttons, I finally called up the camera function on the phone and hit "record."

  On the computer a QuickTime video lurched into action. A driver's view through a windshield, the lens carefully positioned so not a sliver of dashboard or hood crept into the frame. The rumble of an engine. A low view--a car, not a truck or SUV, leaving a familiar parking area. Northridge Faculty Lot B2. The footage played on fast-forward, the car zipping through streetlights, turning corners, other vehicles speeding by.

  My eyes jerked back and forth from the real screen to the view of it through my cell phone's camera, as I made sure the Sanyo was picking up the footage.

  A frustrated thump at the door--a little more than a knock this time. I could hear her keys jangling in her fist. "Patrick, this is getting a bit rude. Don't you have class now anyway?"

  "Yes. Sorry. Literally give me two minutes."

  My phone beeped twice, and the camera shut off--the memory was limited, so it recorded only in ten-second chunks.

  About two blocks from campus, the driver pulled in to a dead-end alley between a Chinese restaurant and a video store. Parked tight in front of a Dumpster, facing away, was an old Honda Civic. The screen went black, and when it came back on, the driver was no longer in his car--he'd edited out his exit from the vehicle so I wouldn't catch even a glimpse of the door.

  A handheld approach to the Honda, the screen tilting back and forth. Not wanting to take my eyes from the monitor, I struggled with my phone, punching buttons by feel and memory, trying to call up another ten-second recording session. A quick glance over showed me to have succeeded in getting myself into a cell-phone game of Tetris.