Am I dead?
Adam, help me.
Please contact my wife and tell her not to worry.
The police have it wrong. I was murdered.
Please help us.
I need you to reach my daughter Amelia.
Tell them to call off the search.
At some point, I can’t even tune them out with both pillows over my head. The voices keep coming and the room gets like a fucking freezer and I’m already up to three blankets and a top sheet even with the heat cranked up to 70. Don’t believe what you see on TV or in the movies. They will come out in the day time. It’s just worse at night.
The ones who probably scare the shit out of me the most are the ones who know my name and call out to me. “Adam, help me.” “Adam, please contact my family and tell them what really happened to me.” “Adam, do this, Adam, do that.” I was really beginning to resent them and when they won’t let you sleep any more, your empathy can only stretch so far.
“Shut the fuck up!” I finally screamed. “Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone!”
As usual, Mom, Dad and Laura came into my room and turned the light on and they saw me sitting up, rocking back and forth in bed, trying to tune out the voices and not succeeding. Most of them left when the lights went on, some of them stayed behind but most of them shut up like I told them to. It was obvious to my family that I needed help. My parents were thinking either the hospital or the synagogue. Laura was thinking of this Oliver Blood character. I didn’t know who to turn to, who I could trust. I just needed to make the voices stop. They all sat on my bed and Dad asked me, “Son, do you want to go to the hospital?” I didn’t see how that could do me any good. The fucking assholes follow me everywhere I go. I’d be back in the same situation only next time I wake up screaming, I’d get a shot. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. I unclenched my fist and saw that my palm was bleeding. I looked up at my Dad and nodded my head. Laura actually looked disappointed in me.
After sitting at Newton Wellesley’s triage waiting room for three hours while my Dad and I watched stupid infomercials for exercise machines and juicers, I was finally admitted to the Psych ward. I never stopped to consider that going back there would be a trip down memory lane. I immediately started thinking about all the memories I had of Clarissa and me being here two years ago. We were both here for roughly a month and just about every fuckin’ square inch of that place reminded me of her. The far corner of the activities room is where we hugged for the first time. The area front and center under the TV high above the floor is where we snuggled for the first time before they broke us up and told us not to get too intimate. The kitchen is where we first met when we were both poking around looking for chocolate milk, the first thing we discovered we had in common.
I was moved into a different room than either of us had before and there was a fat dude already sacked out. He snored so loud my bed almost vibrated but anything would be better than what kept me up all night at home. After the nursing staff situated me, Dad hugged me and quietly said everybody would be back the next day. Hopefully, he added, I’ll get to talk to the resident psychiatrist tomorrow. I think I was asleep before Dad was buzzed off the ward.
The Psychiatric Wing, Newton Wellesley Hospital, Nov. 10th
Dr. Rubin looked at me and waited for me to start and I did the same thing with her. I automatically knew from my last experience with these professional people that they automatically blew off anything I could tell them. They only deal in what they can actually analyze, what they were trained to categorize, compartmentalize, whatever the fuck they do. If you say you saw a ghost, they label you as delusional. If you say you’re someone else, it never occurs to them that you could be and they label you a schizoid.
Finally, Dr. Ellen Rubin, MD had had it up to the ceiling with my silence.
“So, Adam, according to your history, you see ghosts? Could you tell me about them?” You mean like how many were there right now? Just a few but rush hour wouldn’t be for another few hours. Instead, I said nothing. I was really beginning to regret letting my Dad drive me here. At least when I yelled at them at home to shut up, most of them did. This shrink wouldn’t be able to do dick for me and all she’d say was that I was resisting therapy or some happy horseshit. I wished I was back at the skateboard park on John LeRoy Drive with my friends. Hell, I even missed school. Although, those places, too had a bunch of memories waiting for me.
“You don’t trust me, don’t you? Well, that’s understandable. I’ve never had you for a patient. The last psychiatrist who was assigned to your case…”
“…didn’t do shit for me,” I said while giving her the stink eye. I realized she was just trying to do her job and to help me out but I suddenly felt very hostile toward her, the Psych ward and the whole Goddamned hospital. There wasn’t a single person there who could help me unless she or someone in the pharmacy had a fucking pill that drove ghosts away. But short of being put back into another coma, there was no other way that I knew of to deal with this ghost infestation.
I looked at the heavyset guy in the bathrobe near the window, the one who was snoring in my room last night and wondered if he was real. Sometimes, for brief periods of time, they can appear as real as you or me then they would just walk through a wall or simply dissolve. Dr. Rubin followed my line of vision and looked back to the window.
“What do you see, Adam?”
“What do you see?” She looked behind her again.
“I see a window.”
“Just a window?”
“Yes. What do you see?”
Well, that answered that question. Finally, the fat dude walked away from the window and through the bathroom door, not the doorway, the door itself, and never came back out.
“Just a window,” I finally answered.
Nov. 11th
Not all the ones I see are there to haunt me and ask me for favors. There are some that my sister once called “residual hauntings” or when the ghosts do the same shit over and over again and don’t even know you’re there. The fat dude in the bathrobe is one of them. My guess is he died there and didn’t know enough to move on so he just kept retracing his steps without anything changing. I know what that feels like, to get into a rut and feeling like there’s no way out. They’re the ones that don’t bother you and can never touch you because they don’t know you’re even there or even that there are other ghosts nearby. Sometimes I can hear them, sometimes I can’t. But they tend to be the most interesting ones to watch because sometimes they’ll relive their last moments on earth and I’m the only one who can see it ‘cuz for some fucked up reason I’m on their frequency.
“So, have you seen any… residual hauntings since you’ve been here, Adam?”
“Sure, Doc. There’s the fat guy in the bathrobe. He sleeps in my room and he snores so loud it’s like Cape Canaveral in there. He does the same thing every morning. He gets up, goes to that window then walks through the bathroom door and never comes out.”
Dr. Rubin looked at me with a curious expression like I just did an awesome magic trick and she wanted to ask how I did it. She turned around and looked right at him as he stood in front of the same window just like yesterday, obviously not seeing him.
“Is he there now?” I nodded. “Can you describe him?”
“He’s a big dude, over six feet. He must weigh about 250. I can’t tell how old he is. He’s an older guy, about 25 to 30, I’d guess. Brown hair, always mussed up. He’s wearin’ a white bathrobe with blue trim and it’s always open at the chest. The same time as yesterday, he went right to that window, stood there for about a half hour then walked right through the door. That’s the last I saw him until last night when he suddenly started snoring in bed.”
If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear Dr. Rubin knew who I was talking about. If that was the case, maybe she blew it off, assuming that I found out about this fat dude through the basket case grapevine.
Turns out later on, through one of the oldtimers on the wing, someone who’d been there since September, I found out I was talking about someone who was actually there until about a month ago. His name was Charles Bruley and was last seen looking out the same window for about a half hour then walked into the bathroom, took off the belt around his bathrobe and found a way to hang himself. He was one of Dr. Rubin’s patients.
Nov. 12th
“I’ll assume that you knew about Mr. Bruley through the news. As you can expect, it was a big, hairy deal here at the hospital. His family threatened to sue and… Bottom line, Adam, I’d rather you not talk about one of my former patients and incorporating him into your…”
“…delusions? That’s what you were gonna say, right? ‘Don’t use one of my patients in your delusional structure’? Fine, I won’t talk about him again. I thought you were here to help me, though.”
“I am, Adam. But talking about one of my patients is not…”
“Hey, you were the one who asked me what I saw and to describe him. Now you’re tweakin’ out on me when I did. What the fuck do you want from me, Doc?”
“Alright, that was a mistake on my part and I’m sorry.” She looked down at her notes about me that I did and didn’t want to read. “What do you see right now?”
“I see Bruley standing at the window again. He’s gonna go hang himself in a few minutes. You can set your fuckin’ watch by him.”
“Who or what else do you see that the rest of us can’t?”
Bruley started shuffling off into the bathroom and walked right through the door. “Hold on, I’ll be right back.” I followed him in. A few minutes later I came back out. I was shaking like I just chugged a pot of coffee but I had to do it. I’d never seen anything like that before but I was getting sick and tired of Dr. Rubin and others telling me I was crazy.
“His suicide note was tucked in the waistline of his boxer shorts and read, ‘I’m sorry, Dr. Rubin. Don’t blame yourself. I hope you don’t get in trouble over this. Tell my family I love them. Charles.’ He misspelled your name and spelled it with an ‘e’.”
Dr. Rubin looked at me like I was sprouting lilies out of my ears. Bruley’s suicide note wasn’t published in the press and none of the other patients were allowed in the bathroom for hours after they found his body.
Nov. 13th
Whatever homing beacon I have in me started working again because as Dr. Rubin continued our therapy sessions, the wing got more and more crowded. In addition to Charles Bruley in between his suicides there were people who might and might not have been former patients. By the fourth day, there were more dead people on the ward than living. One old dude seemed to take a special interest in my shrink.
“You wanna know who else is here?”
“Who, Adam?”
“Your grandfather. He says his name is Oscar.”
“How did…? OK, Adam, this is very inappropriate. I’d rather you not mention my family any more, so let’s just keep this…”
“Don’t you wanna know what he wants, Doc? He’s standing right behind you.”
I could tell she was dying to turn around to look although she wouldn’t have seen him. He wore regular old man clothes with his pants almost up to his navel, was bald and looked about 80, real skinny.
“Alright, tell me.”
“He says he forgives you for going to medical school instead of Julliard. He would’ve rather you played violin in some orchestra but he now knows that he was wrong for spazzing out on you for going to Harvard. He wants you to forgive him.”
Dr. Rubin stood up so fast she knocked the plastic chair on its back.
“That’s enough, Adam! I don’t know how you found out this stuff about my family but I’m getting sick and tired of you using them and my patients in your, yes, I’ll say it, delusional structure.”
I stood up, too. I’d had it with her own bullshit.
“Hey, Doc, here’s the 411: I didn’t know that your grandfather existed until just now. In fact, I didn’t even know you existed until a few days ago, so cut me some fucking slack, alright?!”
I heard the front door buzz then open and my Dad, Mom and Laura walked into the ward just in time to hear me yelling at my doctor. A couple of the nurses walked toward me and told me to chill out. I sat back down and watched Mr. Bruley go hang himself in the bathroom as usual before I started crying my eyes out. The only ghost I wanted to see was the only one in the spirit world, it seemed, who never showed up anymore. Where was Clarissa? God, I missed her.
Laura and my folks talked to the doctor but mostly Laura. I was discharged a little over an hour later.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 9
Washington, DC, November 9th
“That much of a temperature variance, huh? Man, that’s off the charts, Elle, even in my experience,” Oliver Blood said as he paced his office. As promised, his best field agent had called him right after leaving the police station. While the news was welcome, it was far from happy. It seemed as if Dietrich was winding up and planning something big, as in Jonestown big. Blood got a queasy feeling down to his DNA that the German terrorist merely killed 53 people who were all probably in Who’s Who just as a trial run. If that was the case, where would he stop? “Alright, lemme know if you find anything else out. What?” He listened on his secure satellite phone. “Alright, bring your brother in, for whatever good it’ll do. Well, not here, obviously. A neutral spot but nothing too public. Alright, bye.”
Oliver Blood stopped pacing as soon as he terminated the connection and folded his long, lean frame into his leather swivel chair. What Agent Moss said about the autopsy photos and results almost made him glad it was she and not he who had to look at them. Some of them, according to her, died with their faces frozen in expressions of horror.
The agency knew through the Xe (formerly Blackwater) security detail that was also working surveillance that that Stasi prick was in Baghdad just a couple of weeks ago to help rid the Iraqi government, if it could be yet termed an actual government, of a certain belligerent entity named Mursi al Islamiyah. The word was that the now-infamous Charles Graner was the guy who offed him but since al Islamiyah was a proven terrorist and associate of Osama bin Laden, there was no dustup over the accidental death. In fact, when Graner was brought up on charges under the UCMJ, neither al Islamiyah’s name or death was even mentioned in the indictments. No doubt, the Bush administration that was so tough on terror was secretly worried about al Qaida backlash over Mursi’s death by misadventure.
Blood shuddered to think what Dietrich could do with a hundred or even just a few dozen entities as pissed off as al Islamiyah would’ve rightly been. In fact, the African American agency Director deeply suspected that he didn’t have to look any further than the aftermath of the Sheraton massacre. Yet if Dietrich came into possession of the technology that they were all but convinced he possessed, then how was he paying for it? As far as they understood it, such machinery that would have to be involved would take up enormous resources not to mention energy. And he wasn’t close to being convinced that whatever money Dietrich got from his industrial-scale “investigations” would provide him with enough to cover such overhead expenses.
Bottom line: Someone even above Dietrich was funding him but who? And to what end?
Braintree, MA, Nov. 9th
When Laura came back from where she went that morning and told me she’d set up a meeting with this Blood dude, I thought of all the times I’d been called to the principal’s office. No matter what I did, and I’d pulled some doozies in school, no trip to Mr. Croaker’s office compared to the dread I felt at that moment. She could tell I was getting freaked out and she said,
“Adam, Honey, it’s OK. Look, it’s true that almost no one gets to see my boss considering the line of work we’re in. I know it seems like something out of PG 13 rated action movie for an ordinary kid to meet an intelligence agency head but we all understand that you’re a civilian. No one’s going to be shining desk lamps in your face or anything.” She smiled to reassure me and it almost worked. Almost. If anything, I was far from ordinary. All the same, about as far out as I’m willing to go is wearing an Emo ‘do of two different colors. Other than that, I just wanted my life back, to be normal.
I was suspicious of my sister’s motives for wanting to hook me up with this dude. She kept saying that she wanted me to help them but that didn’t wash. How could I help them, an Emo boy on a skateboard who probably had hallucinations and one with a psychiatric history, at that? Helping them, my skinny Jewish ass. She was trying to protect me from something or someone that she wasn’t telling me about.
Laura’s kid brother always had a mobile, expressive face and it was obvious to her that he still didn’t trust her. That stung badly enough but what stung her even more was the fact that perhaps he shouldn’t. The nature of her business being what it is, she couldn’t tell even her own flesh and blood, at least not right away, about what the stakes could be. It was a given to her that her brother Adam was a sensitive, a bridge of flesh and bone that could make a vital connection between the worlds of the quick and the dead. And seeing, hearing and communicating with them en masse were perhaps not the extent of his undeveloped abilities. Just because their payroll was the smallest of all the government’s intelligence agencies didn’t mean they had the fewest troops.
During her training right out of college, Laura learned something fascinating: According to anthropologists and other scientists, it was estimated that something between 65 and 75 billion people had lived and died on the planet earth before the present population. Obviously, not all of them come back as paranormal entities otherwise supernatural sightings would be much more commonplace than they already are.
Yet it was estimated that at least several million of those 65-75 billion lost souls died yet were never truly laid to rest. Between war, famine, plague, pestilence and purges, the sheer number of human beings who had suddenly died before setting their house in order couldn’t even be imagined. Laura shuddered to think that most of not all of them, sensing Adam’s abilities when he was briefly dead, would come back to him appealing for resolution or salvation.
He was always a sensitive plant and she just knew deep in her bones that he wouldn’t be able to handle such a massive intrusion on his personal space. In fact, it was during such a time when Adam had his attempt two years ago. The sightings and encounters, albeit on a much smaller scale, were enough to drive him over the edge and one such noxious spirit, perhaps just for shits and giggles, told her brother he’d be better off if he opened a vein.
Laura wondered if such entities lived in one massive, common dimension or if they flitted back and forth randomly across others, including our own. Either way, one thing was for sure: Just as with the living, the dead, too, have their good and bad elements. And Laura’s agency had it on pretty good faith from which side Dietrich was recruiting. All that was required of him was to find the right one, the one that could rally, unite and organize an army unlike any ever seen before. And if Dietrich did that, then they, too, would need their own rally man.
Laura looked at her innocent kid brother as he struggled with a calculator while catching up on his math homework. She cupped his face with her hand and smiled sadly.
I so incredibly didn’t need this. Every time things start to get shitty at home, my folks briefly get all orthodox and Hasidic and bring the rabbi over. They brought him to the hospital when Clarissa and I were there a couple of years ago and it can’t be said that he did a damned bit of good. Apparently, it’s the same in a lot of households: Ordinarily secular families calling in the big guns when they run out of real answers. Catholics bring in priests who try to talk you into feeling guilty about something, Protestant ministers who try to talk you into voting Republican and neurotic rabbis who come to see if you’re properly neurotic, too. I liked Rabbi Green well enough on a personal basis but when he began talking about the Torah I’d start checking the insides of my eyelids for cracks.
“Honey, you’re going through a tough time with these things you’re imagining and Rabbi Green here…”
“I’m not imagining things! They’re there, Mom.”
“OK, whatever, Honey,” she said. I hated it when she patronized me. Every time she does that I feel like hopping on my skateboard and coasting all the way to Venice Beach. “Rabbi Green here just wants to talk to you and maybe help you through this.”
I looked at our family’s rabbi, who at least had the courtesy to wear his civilian clothes instead of going all Men in Black. As far as rabbis went, I guess he was pretty cool. He didn’t have the heavy beard that a lot of Hasidic rabbis do and was secular enough so that he could rap with people on an earthly level. Laura seemed amused by the whole thing as she leaned against the doorway. I wanted to make a face at her just for old time’s sake.
“OK, Rabbi, let’s go in the kitchen,” I said as I slouched down the hall.
“So, what you’re saying, Adam, is that you’re seeing dead people again.” He said it as a statement rather than a question. Using the phrase “seeing dead people” could’ve made it sound like he was ridiculing me but I could tell he wasn’t.
“Yeah, obviously. I can even see their old wounds. They tell me how they died. They tell me to contact their families. I’m not a Goddam… I’m not a medium. I really don’t need this.”
“Do you see any of them now?” He asked as if he was afraid to hear the answer. He should’ve been. We were fucking surrounded. I was learning to tune them out somewhat. It was their voices that distracted me more than anything. Like I told Clarissa on our last night together, I can’t not listen. But ignoring these poor people when they come to me asking for help makes me feel wicked guilty.
“Yeah,” I simply said, nodding my head. About 15 ghosts were standing behind Rabbi Green’s chair and a couple of them were really fucked up. I didn’t even want to know how many were behind me. The one word I hear more often than not is “Help.” Up to a point, I could appreciate their situation but their selfishness was really beginning to tick me off. I was ready to take back what I said about them bringing their manners with them from the grave ‘cuz it seems the first thing people forget after they die is how to wait in line. Then again, they may do that because they’re really not aware of each other’s presence. I don’t know enough about that shit. Maybe Laura and that Blood dude could educate me.
“It’s getting rather chilly in here, isn’t it?” It was getting so cold in the kitchen that the rabbi had to zip up his windbreaker. Another few degrees and we could’ve seen our breath.
“Yeah, that happens when they show up. It especially sucks during the winter.”
“Have they given you their names?”
“Yeah. Some of them knew you were coming over. Some of them are here to see you, not me.”
“They’re here to see me, you say?” he asked pointing to himself.
“Remember old man Friedman? The old dude who ran that second hand general store in downtown?” Rabbi Green nodded. “He’s got his hand on your left shoulder right now and he’s asking you…” I listened more closely since Friedman was talking in a whisper. “I can’t make out what he’s saying but he’s trying to make contact. Some are louder than others. Wait, I hear him now.” I paused to listen. “He said he always had the hots for your wife. That’s really the only reason he went to shul in the morning. He was trying to make atonements because he was guilty about wanting to bone your wife.”
Rabbi Green touched his left shoulder with his right hand and looked at it. He must’ve felt the cold spot that Mr. Friedman left behind. Actually, a lot of guys in the synagogue have the hots for Bertha Green, including my old man, mainly ‘cuz she had probably the biggest tits in Braintree. He was looking more and more freaked out by the second and I looked at him as if to say, “Welcome to my world, bitch.”
“Have they…? OK, Adam, listen closely and tell me the truth. Have they told you which one is… the true religion?” I looked at Rabbi Green for a long time before answering him.
“I don’t know what you’d call it, Rabbi, but let’s just say you all got it wrong.”
Rabbi Green never said another word to me and he beat it the hell out of there without even so much as a “Shalom.” And this time I don’t think it was because of Mom’s horrible gefilte fish.
“That much of a temperature variance, huh? Man, that’s off the charts, Elle, even in my experience,” Oliver Blood said as he paced his office. As promised, his best field agent had called him right after leaving the police station. While the news was welcome, it was far from happy. It seemed as if Dietrich was winding up and planning something big, as in Jonestown big. Blood got a queasy feeling down to his DNA that the German terrorist merely killed 53 people who were all probably in Who’s Who just as a trial run. If that was the case, where would he stop? “Alright, lemme know if you find anything else out. What?” He listened on his secure satellite phone. “Alright, bring your brother in, for whatever good it’ll do. Well, not here, obviously. A neutral spot but nothing too public. Alright, bye.”
Oliver Blood stopped pacing as soon as he terminated the connection and folded his long, lean frame into his leather swivel chair. What Agent Moss said about the autopsy photos and results almost made him glad it was she and not he who had to look at them. Some of them, according to her, died with their faces frozen in expressions of horror.
The agency knew through the Xe (formerly Blackwater) security detail that was also working surveillance that that Stasi prick was in Baghdad just a couple of weeks ago to help rid the Iraqi government, if it could be yet termed an actual government, of a certain belligerent entity named Mursi al Islamiyah. The word was that the now-infamous Charles Graner was the guy who offed him but since al Islamiyah was a proven terrorist and associate of Osama bin Laden, there was no dustup over the accidental death. In fact, when Graner was brought up on charges under the UCMJ, neither al Islamiyah’s name or death was even mentioned in the indictments. No doubt, the Bush administration that was so tough on terror was secretly worried about al Qaida backlash over Mursi’s death by misadventure.
Blood shuddered to think what Dietrich could do with a hundred or even just a few dozen entities as pissed off as al Islamiyah would’ve rightly been. In fact, the African American agency Director deeply suspected that he didn’t have to look any further than the aftermath of the Sheraton massacre. Yet if Dietrich came into possession of the technology that they were all but convinced he possessed, then how was he paying for it? As far as they understood it, such machinery that would have to be involved would take up enormous resources not to mention energy. And he wasn’t close to being convinced that whatever money Dietrich got from his industrial-scale “investigations” would provide him with enough to cover such overhead expenses.
Bottom line: Someone even above Dietrich was funding him but who? And to what end?
Braintree, MA, Nov. 9th
When Laura came back from where she went that morning and told me she’d set up a meeting with this Blood dude, I thought of all the times I’d been called to the principal’s office. No matter what I did, and I’d pulled some doozies in school, no trip to Mr. Croaker’s office compared to the dread I felt at that moment. She could tell I was getting freaked out and she said,
“Adam, Honey, it’s OK. Look, it’s true that almost no one gets to see my boss considering the line of work we’re in. I know it seems like something out of PG 13 rated action movie for an ordinary kid to meet an intelligence agency head but we all understand that you’re a civilian. No one’s going to be shining desk lamps in your face or anything.” She smiled to reassure me and it almost worked. Almost. If anything, I was far from ordinary. All the same, about as far out as I’m willing to go is wearing an Emo ‘do of two different colors. Other than that, I just wanted my life back, to be normal.
I was suspicious of my sister’s motives for wanting to hook me up with this dude. She kept saying that she wanted me to help them but that didn’t wash. How could I help them, an Emo boy on a skateboard who probably had hallucinations and one with a psychiatric history, at that? Helping them, my skinny Jewish ass. She was trying to protect me from something or someone that she wasn’t telling me about.
Laura’s kid brother always had a mobile, expressive face and it was obvious to her that he still didn’t trust her. That stung badly enough but what stung her even more was the fact that perhaps he shouldn’t. The nature of her business being what it is, she couldn’t tell even her own flesh and blood, at least not right away, about what the stakes could be. It was a given to her that her brother Adam was a sensitive, a bridge of flesh and bone that could make a vital connection between the worlds of the quick and the dead. And seeing, hearing and communicating with them en masse were perhaps not the extent of his undeveloped abilities. Just because their payroll was the smallest of all the government’s intelligence agencies didn’t mean they had the fewest troops.
During her training right out of college, Laura learned something fascinating: According to anthropologists and other scientists, it was estimated that something between 65 and 75 billion people had lived and died on the planet earth before the present population. Obviously, not all of them come back as paranormal entities otherwise supernatural sightings would be much more commonplace than they already are.
Yet it was estimated that at least several million of those 65-75 billion lost souls died yet were never truly laid to rest. Between war, famine, plague, pestilence and purges, the sheer number of human beings who had suddenly died before setting their house in order couldn’t even be imagined. Laura shuddered to think that most of not all of them, sensing Adam’s abilities when he was briefly dead, would come back to him appealing for resolution or salvation.
He was always a sensitive plant and she just knew deep in her bones that he wouldn’t be able to handle such a massive intrusion on his personal space. In fact, it was during such a time when Adam had his attempt two years ago. The sightings and encounters, albeit on a much smaller scale, were enough to drive him over the edge and one such noxious spirit, perhaps just for shits and giggles, told her brother he’d be better off if he opened a vein.
Laura wondered if such entities lived in one massive, common dimension or if they flitted back and forth randomly across others, including our own. Either way, one thing was for sure: Just as with the living, the dead, too, have their good and bad elements. And Laura’s agency had it on pretty good faith from which side Dietrich was recruiting. All that was required of him was to find the right one, the one that could rally, unite and organize an army unlike any ever seen before. And if Dietrich did that, then they, too, would need their own rally man.
Laura looked at her innocent kid brother as he struggled with a calculator while catching up on his math homework. She cupped his face with her hand and smiled sadly.
I so incredibly didn’t need this. Every time things start to get shitty at home, my folks briefly get all orthodox and Hasidic and bring the rabbi over. They brought him to the hospital when Clarissa and I were there a couple of years ago and it can’t be said that he did a damned bit of good. Apparently, it’s the same in a lot of households: Ordinarily secular families calling in the big guns when they run out of real answers. Catholics bring in priests who try to talk you into feeling guilty about something, Protestant ministers who try to talk you into voting Republican and neurotic rabbis who come to see if you’re properly neurotic, too. I liked Rabbi Green well enough on a personal basis but when he began talking about the Torah I’d start checking the insides of my eyelids for cracks.
“Honey, you’re going through a tough time with these things you’re imagining and Rabbi Green here…”
“I’m not imagining things! They’re there, Mom.”
“OK, whatever, Honey,” she said. I hated it when she patronized me. Every time she does that I feel like hopping on my skateboard and coasting all the way to Venice Beach. “Rabbi Green here just wants to talk to you and maybe help you through this.”
I looked at our family’s rabbi, who at least had the courtesy to wear his civilian clothes instead of going all Men in Black. As far as rabbis went, I guess he was pretty cool. He didn’t have the heavy beard that a lot of Hasidic rabbis do and was secular enough so that he could rap with people on an earthly level. Laura seemed amused by the whole thing as she leaned against the doorway. I wanted to make a face at her just for old time’s sake.
“OK, Rabbi, let’s go in the kitchen,” I said as I slouched down the hall.
“So, what you’re saying, Adam, is that you’re seeing dead people again.” He said it as a statement rather than a question. Using the phrase “seeing dead people” could’ve made it sound like he was ridiculing me but I could tell he wasn’t.
“Yeah, obviously. I can even see their old wounds. They tell me how they died. They tell me to contact their families. I’m not a Goddam… I’m not a medium. I really don’t need this.”
“Do you see any of them now?” He asked as if he was afraid to hear the answer. He should’ve been. We were fucking surrounded. I was learning to tune them out somewhat. It was their voices that distracted me more than anything. Like I told Clarissa on our last night together, I can’t not listen. But ignoring these poor people when they come to me asking for help makes me feel wicked guilty.
“Yeah,” I simply said, nodding my head. About 15 ghosts were standing behind Rabbi Green’s chair and a couple of them were really fucked up. I didn’t even want to know how many were behind me. The one word I hear more often than not is “Help.” Up to a point, I could appreciate their situation but their selfishness was really beginning to tick me off. I was ready to take back what I said about them bringing their manners with them from the grave ‘cuz it seems the first thing people forget after they die is how to wait in line. Then again, they may do that because they’re really not aware of each other’s presence. I don’t know enough about that shit. Maybe Laura and that Blood dude could educate me.
“It’s getting rather chilly in here, isn’t it?” It was getting so cold in the kitchen that the rabbi had to zip up his windbreaker. Another few degrees and we could’ve seen our breath.
“Yeah, that happens when they show up. It especially sucks during the winter.”
“Have they given you their names?”
“Yeah. Some of them knew you were coming over. Some of them are here to see you, not me.”
“They’re here to see me, you say?” he asked pointing to himself.
“Remember old man Friedman? The old dude who ran that second hand general store in downtown?” Rabbi Green nodded. “He’s got his hand on your left shoulder right now and he’s asking you…” I listened more closely since Friedman was talking in a whisper. “I can’t make out what he’s saying but he’s trying to make contact. Some are louder than others. Wait, I hear him now.” I paused to listen. “He said he always had the hots for your wife. That’s really the only reason he went to shul in the morning. He was trying to make atonements because he was guilty about wanting to bone your wife.”
Rabbi Green touched his left shoulder with his right hand and looked at it. He must’ve felt the cold spot that Mr. Friedman left behind. Actually, a lot of guys in the synagogue have the hots for Bertha Green, including my old man, mainly ‘cuz she had probably the biggest tits in Braintree. He was looking more and more freaked out by the second and I looked at him as if to say, “Welcome to my world, bitch.”
“Have they…? OK, Adam, listen closely and tell me the truth. Have they told you which one is… the true religion?” I looked at Rabbi Green for a long time before answering him.
“I don’t know what you’d call it, Rabbi, but let’s just say you all got it wrong.”
Rabbi Green never said another word to me and he beat it the hell out of there without even so much as a “Shalom.” And this time I don’t think it was because of Mom’s horrible gefilte fish.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Bone Bridge- Chapter Eight
CIA HQ, Langley, VA, March 28, 1968
“Now, who’s this bird, again?” asked President Johnson of the CIA Assistant Director in his trademark drawl. They were impatient to start the presentation and the Commander in Chief kept interrupting them with questions that they knew would be answered by the film. But patience was never one of LBJ’s long suits. Understandably, he was flabbergasted when apprised in the Oval Office of the research being done at MIT and underwritten by the CIA.
“The gentleman narrating the film is Dr. Bernard Moss, Mr. President. He’s the project manager of Operation Casper,” the AD patiently explained. “Now, if you’re ready, sir, let’s just watch the film and see what Dr. Moss has to say.”
A lot depended on this film and the President was understandably skeptical about the research findings. There were only six men in the room, which was already about half of the people on earth who knew of the work being done in a top secret laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts. The idea was to convince LBJ to declassify the findings and privately ask Congressional leaders of both parties and pertinent committee chairmen to allocate more money into the CIA’s budget to in turn increase funding for Casper.
“Alright,” the President said, “let ‘er rip.” The room went dark and the projector began to whirr.
“Operation Casper: A Proposal,” began Dr. Moss. The 36th President had to stifle a giggle on hearing a super serious mad scientist type refer with a straight face to a million dollar Central Intelligence Agency program named after a cute cartoon ghost.
Even without anything to use for scale, the narrator seemed a small man made even smaller by his oversized white lab coat and, in fact, he was. His eyes were large and green, eyes made even larger by the thick lenses of his glasses. His full head of white hair was unruly and he himself looked like a cartoon stereotype of a mad scientist, albeit a benevolent one.
The presentation film showed all the flair and panache of modern federal architecture and publications from the government printing office. As with seemingly all training and orientation films of the day, it was desk- or stage-bound on account of the one static camera and the cutaways were animated, which also almost made the Commander in Chief chuckle out loud. The Assistant Director, who also hadn’t seen the film, pinched the bridge of his nose as he saw LBJ’s silhouetted head bob up and down, obviously in amusement. But it was a foregone conclusion that unless Moss literally pulled a ghost out of his ass or Fellini was hired to direct the second half, the President’s transient amusement wouldn’t exactly translate into extra funding. Hell, he might even advise the Congressional leaders to cut funding altogether. As it was, the whole thing looked so much like Saturday morning cartoon fare, he was actually surprised they didn’t draw the animated ghosts with sheets or even use Casper in a cameo.
“…and if our research findings are correct,” Dr. Moss concluded, “we may one day actually be able to trap these entities in a manmade dimension, sort of a vortex, if you will. Once detained and fixed, we can then learn from these beings and perhaps be able to harness their abilities in the world of the living to be applied in the realm of national security. Thank you for listening.”
Presently, the lights came back on and the President was grinning as if he’d been getting a blow job under the desk the whole time.
“Well!” he exclaimed. “That’s certainly a Texas league whopper! Maybe JFK’s kids woulda got something out of that, too!” Then he added in a more ominous tone, “in 1963! What the hell was that, Mr. Assistant Director? You actually thought that was worth taking up half my morning?”
“Mr. President,” the AD stammered, no longer secure even in his continued employment in the Company, much less the additional funding, “I agree that the presentation may have been a little condescending, but…”
“‘May have been a little condescending’? Mr. Director, I can think of some retards down in Oklahoma that woulda laughed at that! And you expect me to ask Congressional leaders, including Republicans, for more money based on that?”
“Sir, the research findings are conclusive up to a point. You can’t deny they made some headway in terms of…”
“I’ve already heard enough,” the President said as he got up to leave the secure conference room. “Ya’ll get to keep your present funding for your cartoon schemes but there ain’t no way I’m gonna fund Vietnam, the War on Poverty plus more for that…” and he gestured vaguely toward the projection screen, “that… lunacy.”
“So it stayed in limbo until it got axed right after Nixon left office,” Laura said. This time it was Adam’s turn to drop his jaw in his lap. He knew that Grandpa Bernard was a research scientist but Mom and Dad never discussed his work, especially after he was found washed up on the banks of the Charles with his untracked veins bulging with high-grade heroin. “Intelligence scuttlebutt has it LBJ was still chuckling about our grandfather’s film on his deathbed five years later.”
“So… so what you’re sayin’ is, you continued Grandpa’s work?”
“Uh, no. Not exactly. The agency’s working along parallel lines but, no, we’re not continuing Grandpa’s work.” Laura stopped to look at her brother. “Our job, among other things, is to keep others from doing that.”
“So you’re like, a real-life Agent Scully.” Laura pinched the bridge of her nose.
“No, Adam, not like Agent Scully and the X Files. There’s a lot of research that goes into the work, a lot of leads that lead to dead ends. No aliens, no Sasquatch, no secret flying saucers at Area 51, none of that. There’s really not a lot I can say about my job that would interest you.” Frighten, perhaps, but not what one would call strictly interest. She didn’t see any reason to bring Adam completely into the fold. That would depend upon Oliver, the agency’s boss.
The mass suicide at the Boston Sheraton was news in which she and the agency had more than a passing interest. As with the baffled Boston PD, Oliver Blood and the relatively few people under him knew that this wasn’t explainable by mass psychosis. Although there was little to no forensic evidence from which to launch even a plausible theory, a paranormal angle would explain the obvious terror that had gripped these people in their final moments. Two of the 53 victims were the parents of a girl with whom her sibling had almost died in a car accident.
If Adam was somehow connected to the possible supernatural shenanigans in Boston, she had yet to see it. Yet Adam’s seeming involvement couldn’t be ignored and left to chance, especially in light of his “glimpses.” Then there was his claiming that Clarissa’s alleged ghost pled with him to “Free us.” Lastly, from what her brother himself had just told her, a certain police detective named Ed Coffey was also thinking along the same lines as she. She’d have to talk to this cop, pick his brains to see what they found out in their own investigation, if anything. Yeah, she’d have to bring her baby brother in from the cold, albeit slowly.
“Adam, while I’m still in town,” she calmly said, “I’d like you to meet my boss.”
I don’t think I’ll ever look at my big sister quite the same way ever again. I mean, I always thought that how she made her living was kinda sketchy even before I knew that she was a spook, if you’ll pardon the phrase. Just the fact that she worked for the government was both cool and scary at the same time. But this shit she just unloaded on me…
I also wasn’t exactly sketched out to meet her boss. Any intelligence agency head honcho is a scary dude in my opinion and just the fact that most of our government not knowing about their existence was enough for me to dig in my heels. Laura tried reassuring me that this Blood dude (Day-am, even his name scared me shitless) was righteous but I wasn’t about to go forming on blind faith warm and fuzzy opinions about a guy who’s probably waxed more people than Ted Bundy.
I wondered how long it would take for Bundy’s unknown victims to seek me out asking me to solve their murders and if Laura and this Blood dude could help me out with that.
Boston, MA, November 9
“Coffey! There’s some girl out here to see you.” I nodded and put the Sheraton file away. I asked Roddy which one it was and he said, “The cute blonde over there,” pointing in her direction.
She was of medium height and slightly voluptuous build, shoulder length blonde hair neatly pulled back with a barrette. Despite the November chill, she wore a simple white blouse under a black dress coat and matching slacks. She advanced toward me, extending her hand. As I got closer to her, I noticed the bulge beneath her coat just under her visitor badge and wondered if the lifer manning the metal detector downstairs fell asleep or was too busy gawking at her big tits. No way was she supposed to have that piece up here.
“Detective Coffey?” I nodded and took her hand. “I’m Laura Moss. Could I have a few minutes of your time? In private?”
We walked into one of the unused interrogation rooms and each took a seat. I waited for her to continue and she got right down to business.
“Detective, we’d like to know the status of your investigation into the Sheraton mass suicide on Halloween night.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” In response, she showed me her credentials and it seemed as if she was sent here from our mutual Uncle Sam. When I looked at her name on the intelligence agency badge, it finally clicked. Sure, Moss was a common name but it was a bit of a stretch to think it could be pure coincidence meeting another within a few days.
“I just met another Moss. Some kid named Adam.”
“I know. He’s my brother. I got your name from him.”
I sat back and regarded her with new eyes. If her brother was her sole reason for picking my brains about this case, then perhaps she wasn’t here in an official capacity, after all, and had no business using the word “we”. Besides, why would the feds be sniffing around asking about an investigation that, as far I was concerned, was still a municipal matter? If anything, it would be the FBI trying to walk on our grass instead of this intelligence agency I’d never heard of. I felt I was on solid ground in assuming I didn’t have to tell her a damned thing but I still wanted to see what exactly she wanted and, more importantly, why she wanted to know it.
“How’s your brother doing, by the way?”
“He’s doing fine,” Moss finally said as she exhaled, which told me he wasn’t. “I just got back home early last night and we talked. He still hasn’t gone back to school but he’s getting his homework sent to him and he seems to be getting back to his old self.” Then for the briefest of instants she smirked as if remembering an inside joke.
“Has he remembered anything else that happened that night?” She shook her head.
“I don’t know what he’d told you at the hospital but he didn’t give me any indication that he recalled anything else of significance.”
“So, may I ask what interest your agency has in this case? Or do they even know you’re here? I’m suspecting this may be a purely family matter.”
“Well, yes and no, Detective. My people have taken a very lively interest in the case and my brother’s involvement, while undetermined, is still undeniable. I mean, you have to admit it would be a hell of a string of coincidences for him to not be relevant to it in some way.”
I looked her up and down and remembered the gun under her jacket. Her creds would certainly explain why the people downstairs would let her through the metal detector. She seemed to be tough as nails and her kid brother’s involvement would perhaps make her even tougher to deal with.
When I was in the Green Berets, I’d run across a few spooks from the CIA when they were all duded out in their camo fatigues. Some of them thought they were as badass as us and a few of them were. This very feminine young lady didn’t strike me as being a wannabe. The impression I got was that she could field strip an AK47 in pitch blackness with her feet while applying her makeup.
“OK, you realize this is a very high profile investigation considering the identity of the victims.” She nodded with barely hidden impatience. “I can’t just release details and evidence from an ongoing investigation merely because your brother is, at best, marginally involved with some of the principals. I don’t care who you work for, Agent Moss.”
“How about if I can help you establish MO and maybe provide you with a suspect?”
I leaned back in the chair again and tapped the long bare table as I regarded her with another set of eyes. This girl was beginning to spook me more than the case itself.
“You guys were here long before us, weren’t you?” I quietly asked. She nodded.
“Months and months of studying criminal justice, fingerprinting, crime scene investigation and criminal psychology and how do I use it? Getting your coffee.” The patrolman put the Dunkin’ Donuts bag and cup holder down on the interrogation room table.
“Look at it this way, Ramirez: As long as Roddy keeps making that hemlock he calls coffee, you’ll be fulfilling a cherished cop stereotype.” The Hispanic officer humorlessly smirked at me and left Laura Moss and me alone.
This girl certainly wasn’t a stereotype. The intelligence types I saw in the Army, including Army Intelligence, were almost all macho assholes who probably took a shot of testosterone in their coffee in the morning and stirred it in with a survival knife. Moss, my instincts told me, was as tough as any of them but wasn’t overbearing about it. She didn’t sacrifice much if any of her femininity.
“OK, you understand that nothing you see here leaves this room, right? No files leave, no copies or notes will be made. You look at what you see here and keep it in your head.” I realized even as I said that there was no way I could keep her from making notes after she left the station. Hell, knowing these James Bond types, I couldn’t even be sure she didn’t have a miniature camera built into one of her blouse’s buttons and was silently clicking away like Annie Liebovitz..
“You’re not making this easy for me, Detective.”
“If this line of work was easy, we’d all be doing it.” I opened up the bulging case file and she immediately went to the dozens of pictures of the victims. Most of them were gory beyond belief and had even made me wince when I first saw them but Laura didn’t bat an eyelash until she got to one. I spotted the extra beat she lost looking at it. “What?”
“Clarissa’s autopsy photo. Those poor kids,” she muttered as she continued reviewing the pictures.
“You know, just an observation: Your brother perfectly described her injuries down to their precise location and he couldn’t have known that since he was out cold for four days. How do you explain that?”
“Like I said, Detective, he has a gift, although he’d call it a curse. I believe that he wasn’t dreaming about her.”
I recalled the security video showed to me in the hospital and what didn’t sit right with me tickled the back of my skull again but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was trying to zero in on what didn’t seem right when Moss looked at a picture and held it up for special attention. I asked her what it was.
“This picture of Senator Dumont’s wife. Are those ice crystals on her face?”
“Yeah. That was the only tangible evidence that we got at the crime scene and it melted away almost as soon as our CSI guy snapped the picture. Any theories as to how that ice formed?”
“Maybe,” she said cryptically. Apparently, she was playing the same cat and mouse game I was, the both of us playing proprietor. At this rate, it was going to get us nowhere and in record time.
“OK, quid pro quo. You said you could give me some insight regarding MO and a suspect. Who do you think could be behind this and why is your agency looking at him?”
“You ever heard of the East German Stasi, Detective?” I cautiously nodded my head and she told me about the illustrious life and times of one Hans Dietrich and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It got even more bizarre when she told me who her grandfather was and what he used to work on in the 60’s.
“It isn’t a theory, Ed.” We’d long since begun a first name basis. The coffee was gone and only donut crumbs and a lot of my questions remained. “When a spirit manifests, it can significantly reduce the temperature where it appears. It’s commonly referred to as a cold spot.”
“Could it get so cold as to crystallize human skin tissue?”
“Typically, no. There have been some documented cases of already chilly environments getting down to freezing. We’ve heard of temperature variances of sometimes ten, even twenty degrees, maybe more. But the kind of cold that would’ve been necessary to produce those ice crystals… Ed, there would’ve had to have been dozens of apparitions there, all drawing energy from the air simultaneously. It would’ve been like a reefer in that penthouse.” She was right. It was but at the time we tended to dismiss that because of the rush of cold air coming in from the broken windows.
“So why would Dietrich do this? I mean, does this technology you’re talking about actually exist? Because this sounds like something out of Ghost Busters.” She seemed irritated by the movie reference. No doubt she’d heard all the jokes before.
“Yes, we all but believe it does. And my grandfather’s partly the reason why. He’s also part of the reason why I got into this line of work, to help atone for his research, to ensure that it isn’t resurrected and perverted for nefarious ends. As for why Dietrich may’ve done this… That’s undetermined.”
When I first met her, I deeply suspected her involvement was purely a family matter. I just didn’t realize how deeply a family matter it was.
“OK, unless this Dietrich guy lives in Copley Plaza, I think it’s safe to say he’s out of our jurisdiction. So how do we reach this asshole?”
“Leave that up to me,” Laura grinned. She put her hand on my arm as she got up to leave and my mind suddenly flashed back to the hospital’s security video.
“Wait. Before you go, let me show you something.”
“So this is the moment my brother woke up from his coma?” I nodded and chewed a fingernail. We stood beside each other while closely regarding the monitor. I let the tape run for a few seconds then stabbed at the “pause” button. “There! Did you see that?”
“No. What did you see?” I pointed to her brother’s right arm.
“I’ll play it back. Make careful note of that arm when he begins to get up.” I slowed the speed to frame by frame and while Adam’s head and torso began rising from the bed, his arm remained pinned to the mattress. In fact, the sheet over it had also been pressed down.
“As if someone was holding it down,” she slowly said. “Nice catch, Ed.”
“Right. No one, I don’t care who, would create such a delusion immediately after waking up from a coma, especially if he doesn’t even know there’s a camera on him. That always bugged me subconsciously and then when you touched my arm back there, it all clicked. Someone or something was holding down his arm.”
“Clarissa,” Laura sighed.
“Now, who’s this bird, again?” asked President Johnson of the CIA Assistant Director in his trademark drawl. They were impatient to start the presentation and the Commander in Chief kept interrupting them with questions that they knew would be answered by the film. But patience was never one of LBJ’s long suits. Understandably, he was flabbergasted when apprised in the Oval Office of the research being done at MIT and underwritten by the CIA.
“The gentleman narrating the film is Dr. Bernard Moss, Mr. President. He’s the project manager of Operation Casper,” the AD patiently explained. “Now, if you’re ready, sir, let’s just watch the film and see what Dr. Moss has to say.”
A lot depended on this film and the President was understandably skeptical about the research findings. There were only six men in the room, which was already about half of the people on earth who knew of the work being done in a top secret laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts. The idea was to convince LBJ to declassify the findings and privately ask Congressional leaders of both parties and pertinent committee chairmen to allocate more money into the CIA’s budget to in turn increase funding for Casper.
“Alright,” the President said, “let ‘er rip.” The room went dark and the projector began to whirr.
“Operation Casper: A Proposal,” began Dr. Moss. The 36th President had to stifle a giggle on hearing a super serious mad scientist type refer with a straight face to a million dollar Central Intelligence Agency program named after a cute cartoon ghost.
Even without anything to use for scale, the narrator seemed a small man made even smaller by his oversized white lab coat and, in fact, he was. His eyes were large and green, eyes made even larger by the thick lenses of his glasses. His full head of white hair was unruly and he himself looked like a cartoon stereotype of a mad scientist, albeit a benevolent one.
The presentation film showed all the flair and panache of modern federal architecture and publications from the government printing office. As with seemingly all training and orientation films of the day, it was desk- or stage-bound on account of the one static camera and the cutaways were animated, which also almost made the Commander in Chief chuckle out loud. The Assistant Director, who also hadn’t seen the film, pinched the bridge of his nose as he saw LBJ’s silhouetted head bob up and down, obviously in amusement. But it was a foregone conclusion that unless Moss literally pulled a ghost out of his ass or Fellini was hired to direct the second half, the President’s transient amusement wouldn’t exactly translate into extra funding. Hell, he might even advise the Congressional leaders to cut funding altogether. As it was, the whole thing looked so much like Saturday morning cartoon fare, he was actually surprised they didn’t draw the animated ghosts with sheets or even use Casper in a cameo.
“…and if our research findings are correct,” Dr. Moss concluded, “we may one day actually be able to trap these entities in a manmade dimension, sort of a vortex, if you will. Once detained and fixed, we can then learn from these beings and perhaps be able to harness their abilities in the world of the living to be applied in the realm of national security. Thank you for listening.”
Presently, the lights came back on and the President was grinning as if he’d been getting a blow job under the desk the whole time.
“Well!” he exclaimed. “That’s certainly a Texas league whopper! Maybe JFK’s kids woulda got something out of that, too!” Then he added in a more ominous tone, “in 1963! What the hell was that, Mr. Assistant Director? You actually thought that was worth taking up half my morning?”
“Mr. President,” the AD stammered, no longer secure even in his continued employment in the Company, much less the additional funding, “I agree that the presentation may have been a little condescending, but…”
“‘May have been a little condescending’? Mr. Director, I can think of some retards down in Oklahoma that woulda laughed at that! And you expect me to ask Congressional leaders, including Republicans, for more money based on that?”
“Sir, the research findings are conclusive up to a point. You can’t deny they made some headway in terms of…”
“I’ve already heard enough,” the President said as he got up to leave the secure conference room. “Ya’ll get to keep your present funding for your cartoon schemes but there ain’t no way I’m gonna fund Vietnam, the War on Poverty plus more for that…” and he gestured vaguely toward the projection screen, “that… lunacy.”
“So it stayed in limbo until it got axed right after Nixon left office,” Laura said. This time it was Adam’s turn to drop his jaw in his lap. He knew that Grandpa Bernard was a research scientist but Mom and Dad never discussed his work, especially after he was found washed up on the banks of the Charles with his untracked veins bulging with high-grade heroin. “Intelligence scuttlebutt has it LBJ was still chuckling about our grandfather’s film on his deathbed five years later.”
“So… so what you’re sayin’ is, you continued Grandpa’s work?”
“Uh, no. Not exactly. The agency’s working along parallel lines but, no, we’re not continuing Grandpa’s work.” Laura stopped to look at her brother. “Our job, among other things, is to keep others from doing that.”
“So you’re like, a real-life Agent Scully.” Laura pinched the bridge of her nose.
“No, Adam, not like Agent Scully and the X Files. There’s a lot of research that goes into the work, a lot of leads that lead to dead ends. No aliens, no Sasquatch, no secret flying saucers at Area 51, none of that. There’s really not a lot I can say about my job that would interest you.” Frighten, perhaps, but not what one would call strictly interest. She didn’t see any reason to bring Adam completely into the fold. That would depend upon Oliver, the agency’s boss.
The mass suicide at the Boston Sheraton was news in which she and the agency had more than a passing interest. As with the baffled Boston PD, Oliver Blood and the relatively few people under him knew that this wasn’t explainable by mass psychosis. Although there was little to no forensic evidence from which to launch even a plausible theory, a paranormal angle would explain the obvious terror that had gripped these people in their final moments. Two of the 53 victims were the parents of a girl with whom her sibling had almost died in a car accident.
If Adam was somehow connected to the possible supernatural shenanigans in Boston, she had yet to see it. Yet Adam’s seeming involvement couldn’t be ignored and left to chance, especially in light of his “glimpses.” Then there was his claiming that Clarissa’s alleged ghost pled with him to “Free us.” Lastly, from what her brother himself had just told her, a certain police detective named Ed Coffey was also thinking along the same lines as she. She’d have to talk to this cop, pick his brains to see what they found out in their own investigation, if anything. Yeah, she’d have to bring her baby brother in from the cold, albeit slowly.
“Adam, while I’m still in town,” she calmly said, “I’d like you to meet my boss.”
I don’t think I’ll ever look at my big sister quite the same way ever again. I mean, I always thought that how she made her living was kinda sketchy even before I knew that she was a spook, if you’ll pardon the phrase. Just the fact that she worked for the government was both cool and scary at the same time. But this shit she just unloaded on me…
I also wasn’t exactly sketched out to meet her boss. Any intelligence agency head honcho is a scary dude in my opinion and just the fact that most of our government not knowing about their existence was enough for me to dig in my heels. Laura tried reassuring me that this Blood dude (Day-am, even his name scared me shitless) was righteous but I wasn’t about to go forming on blind faith warm and fuzzy opinions about a guy who’s probably waxed more people than Ted Bundy.
I wondered how long it would take for Bundy’s unknown victims to seek me out asking me to solve their murders and if Laura and this Blood dude could help me out with that.
Boston, MA, November 9
“Coffey! There’s some girl out here to see you.” I nodded and put the Sheraton file away. I asked Roddy which one it was and he said, “The cute blonde over there,” pointing in her direction.
She was of medium height and slightly voluptuous build, shoulder length blonde hair neatly pulled back with a barrette. Despite the November chill, she wore a simple white blouse under a black dress coat and matching slacks. She advanced toward me, extending her hand. As I got closer to her, I noticed the bulge beneath her coat just under her visitor badge and wondered if the lifer manning the metal detector downstairs fell asleep or was too busy gawking at her big tits. No way was she supposed to have that piece up here.
“Detective Coffey?” I nodded and took her hand. “I’m Laura Moss. Could I have a few minutes of your time? In private?”
We walked into one of the unused interrogation rooms and each took a seat. I waited for her to continue and she got right down to business.
“Detective, we’d like to know the status of your investigation into the Sheraton mass suicide on Halloween night.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” In response, she showed me her credentials and it seemed as if she was sent here from our mutual Uncle Sam. When I looked at her name on the intelligence agency badge, it finally clicked. Sure, Moss was a common name but it was a bit of a stretch to think it could be pure coincidence meeting another within a few days.
“I just met another Moss. Some kid named Adam.”
“I know. He’s my brother. I got your name from him.”
I sat back and regarded her with new eyes. If her brother was her sole reason for picking my brains about this case, then perhaps she wasn’t here in an official capacity, after all, and had no business using the word “we”. Besides, why would the feds be sniffing around asking about an investigation that, as far I was concerned, was still a municipal matter? If anything, it would be the FBI trying to walk on our grass instead of this intelligence agency I’d never heard of. I felt I was on solid ground in assuming I didn’t have to tell her a damned thing but I still wanted to see what exactly she wanted and, more importantly, why she wanted to know it.
“How’s your brother doing, by the way?”
“He’s doing fine,” Moss finally said as she exhaled, which told me he wasn’t. “I just got back home early last night and we talked. He still hasn’t gone back to school but he’s getting his homework sent to him and he seems to be getting back to his old self.” Then for the briefest of instants she smirked as if remembering an inside joke.
“Has he remembered anything else that happened that night?” She shook her head.
“I don’t know what he’d told you at the hospital but he didn’t give me any indication that he recalled anything else of significance.”
“So, may I ask what interest your agency has in this case? Or do they even know you’re here? I’m suspecting this may be a purely family matter.”
“Well, yes and no, Detective. My people have taken a very lively interest in the case and my brother’s involvement, while undetermined, is still undeniable. I mean, you have to admit it would be a hell of a string of coincidences for him to not be relevant to it in some way.”
I looked her up and down and remembered the gun under her jacket. Her creds would certainly explain why the people downstairs would let her through the metal detector. She seemed to be tough as nails and her kid brother’s involvement would perhaps make her even tougher to deal with.
When I was in the Green Berets, I’d run across a few spooks from the CIA when they were all duded out in their camo fatigues. Some of them thought they were as badass as us and a few of them were. This very feminine young lady didn’t strike me as being a wannabe. The impression I got was that she could field strip an AK47 in pitch blackness with her feet while applying her makeup.
“OK, you realize this is a very high profile investigation considering the identity of the victims.” She nodded with barely hidden impatience. “I can’t just release details and evidence from an ongoing investigation merely because your brother is, at best, marginally involved with some of the principals. I don’t care who you work for, Agent Moss.”
“How about if I can help you establish MO and maybe provide you with a suspect?”
I leaned back in the chair again and tapped the long bare table as I regarded her with another set of eyes. This girl was beginning to spook me more than the case itself.
“You guys were here long before us, weren’t you?” I quietly asked. She nodded.
“Months and months of studying criminal justice, fingerprinting, crime scene investigation and criminal psychology and how do I use it? Getting your coffee.” The patrolman put the Dunkin’ Donuts bag and cup holder down on the interrogation room table.
“Look at it this way, Ramirez: As long as Roddy keeps making that hemlock he calls coffee, you’ll be fulfilling a cherished cop stereotype.” The Hispanic officer humorlessly smirked at me and left Laura Moss and me alone.
This girl certainly wasn’t a stereotype. The intelligence types I saw in the Army, including Army Intelligence, were almost all macho assholes who probably took a shot of testosterone in their coffee in the morning and stirred it in with a survival knife. Moss, my instincts told me, was as tough as any of them but wasn’t overbearing about it. She didn’t sacrifice much if any of her femininity.
“OK, you understand that nothing you see here leaves this room, right? No files leave, no copies or notes will be made. You look at what you see here and keep it in your head.” I realized even as I said that there was no way I could keep her from making notes after she left the station. Hell, knowing these James Bond types, I couldn’t even be sure she didn’t have a miniature camera built into one of her blouse’s buttons and was silently clicking away like Annie Liebovitz..
“You’re not making this easy for me, Detective.”
“If this line of work was easy, we’d all be doing it.” I opened up the bulging case file and she immediately went to the dozens of pictures of the victims. Most of them were gory beyond belief and had even made me wince when I first saw them but Laura didn’t bat an eyelash until she got to one. I spotted the extra beat she lost looking at it. “What?”
“Clarissa’s autopsy photo. Those poor kids,” she muttered as she continued reviewing the pictures.
“You know, just an observation: Your brother perfectly described her injuries down to their precise location and he couldn’t have known that since he was out cold for four days. How do you explain that?”
“Like I said, Detective, he has a gift, although he’d call it a curse. I believe that he wasn’t dreaming about her.”
I recalled the security video showed to me in the hospital and what didn’t sit right with me tickled the back of my skull again but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was trying to zero in on what didn’t seem right when Moss looked at a picture and held it up for special attention. I asked her what it was.
“This picture of Senator Dumont’s wife. Are those ice crystals on her face?”
“Yeah. That was the only tangible evidence that we got at the crime scene and it melted away almost as soon as our CSI guy snapped the picture. Any theories as to how that ice formed?”
“Maybe,” she said cryptically. Apparently, she was playing the same cat and mouse game I was, the both of us playing proprietor. At this rate, it was going to get us nowhere and in record time.
“OK, quid pro quo. You said you could give me some insight regarding MO and a suspect. Who do you think could be behind this and why is your agency looking at him?”
“You ever heard of the East German Stasi, Detective?” I cautiously nodded my head and she told me about the illustrious life and times of one Hans Dietrich and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It got even more bizarre when she told me who her grandfather was and what he used to work on in the 60’s.
“It isn’t a theory, Ed.” We’d long since begun a first name basis. The coffee was gone and only donut crumbs and a lot of my questions remained. “When a spirit manifests, it can significantly reduce the temperature where it appears. It’s commonly referred to as a cold spot.”
“Could it get so cold as to crystallize human skin tissue?”
“Typically, no. There have been some documented cases of already chilly environments getting down to freezing. We’ve heard of temperature variances of sometimes ten, even twenty degrees, maybe more. But the kind of cold that would’ve been necessary to produce those ice crystals… Ed, there would’ve had to have been dozens of apparitions there, all drawing energy from the air simultaneously. It would’ve been like a reefer in that penthouse.” She was right. It was but at the time we tended to dismiss that because of the rush of cold air coming in from the broken windows.
“So why would Dietrich do this? I mean, does this technology you’re talking about actually exist? Because this sounds like something out of Ghost Busters.” She seemed irritated by the movie reference. No doubt she’d heard all the jokes before.
“Yes, we all but believe it does. And my grandfather’s partly the reason why. He’s also part of the reason why I got into this line of work, to help atone for his research, to ensure that it isn’t resurrected and perverted for nefarious ends. As for why Dietrich may’ve done this… That’s undetermined.”
When I first met her, I deeply suspected her involvement was purely a family matter. I just didn’t realize how deeply a family matter it was.
“OK, unless this Dietrich guy lives in Copley Plaza, I think it’s safe to say he’s out of our jurisdiction. So how do we reach this asshole?”
“Leave that up to me,” Laura grinned. She put her hand on my arm as she got up to leave and my mind suddenly flashed back to the hospital’s security video.
“Wait. Before you go, let me show you something.”
“So this is the moment my brother woke up from his coma?” I nodded and chewed a fingernail. We stood beside each other while closely regarding the monitor. I let the tape run for a few seconds then stabbed at the “pause” button. “There! Did you see that?”
“No. What did you see?” I pointed to her brother’s right arm.
“I’ll play it back. Make careful note of that arm when he begins to get up.” I slowed the speed to frame by frame and while Adam’s head and torso began rising from the bed, his arm remained pinned to the mattress. In fact, the sheet over it had also been pressed down.
“As if someone was holding it down,” she slowly said. “Nice catch, Ed.”
“Right. No one, I don’t care who, would create such a delusion immediately after waking up from a coma, especially if he doesn’t even know there’s a camera on him. That always bugged me subconsciously and then when you touched my arm back there, it all clicked. Someone or something was holding down his arm.”
“Clarissa,” Laura sighed.
The Bone Bridge: Chapter Seven
The Moss home, Braintree, MA, November 8th
Laura Moss pulled up to her parents’ homestead in her rented Chevy Cobalt and concurrently breathed first a sigh of relief and inhaled with dread at what Adam might present. She had nothing but her Mom’s word to go on and it seemed every time she called her brother was either asleep or out of the house. They had to walk a fine line between sheltering him and letting him get back on the horse or skateboard as it were. They all knew that he was visiting Clarissa’s grave every day and it broke their hearts to see the poor boy pining for her. Yet they also all knew that unless Adam stopped mooning over Clarissa’s plot, someone would have to read him the riot act and tell him to stop his obsessive/compulsive behavior.
She continued texting him while she could on the plane and, as always, could never get through. At Logan Airport, she called home and Mom said he was sleeping. He hadn’t gone back to school yet and his depression was really starting to worry his family. So when Clarissa marched up the walkway she had no idea if Adam was still in bed or out. The sun was just beginning to set. Since Iraq was eight hours ahead of the eastern US, there was jet lag with which she’d have to contend but not tonight. She was too keyed-up worrying about her baby brother.
She walked right in without knocking and announced herself. Why should she? This was the house in which she and Adam grew up and for the few days she’d be here, she wouldn’t be “Elle” but Laura. Mom came out from the kitchen after a second or two, wiping her hands on a towel then broke into a full sprint. Wrapping her daughter in a hug, she began sobbing. Laura hugged her mother back and only realized it had been over a year since she’d last been in her childhood home. Still, Jewish mothers, she thought, were overly emotional when it came to their children. She’d had no choice but to adopt a stoic attitude in her line of work but Laura conceded that perhaps her Mom had a right to emotionalism since she was a Mom and Laura wasn’t.
Her fingers smelled of gefilte fish, which she always made homemade. Adam couldn’t stand it and he was always the closest thing the family had to a gentile. For Mom, matzo ball soup and gefilte fish was her comfort food like mac and cheese with hot dog pennies was always Laura’s. Come to think of it, no one else in the family liked Mom’s gefilte fish and even Rabbi Green, when he’d come over, always tightly smiled during such dinners as if he was circumcising an elephant. Mrs. Moss was probably the only wife and mother in the entire Judaic world who couldn’t cook.
“Oh my God, Laura, I was beginning to think we’d never see you again!”
“Mom, I’ve been busy, not dead.” She gently separated from her mother and looked at her. She cut her hair again, which was always a mistake with her physiognomy. With her hair short or pulled-back, her moon-shaped face always looked as big around as a hub cap.
“I like your new haircut,” she charitably said.
“Thanks. Adam’s still upstairs. I imagine you’d rather see him than me or Dad right now. We’ll have time to catch up, later.” She wiped her eyes dry and walked back into the kitchen.
I twitched when there was a knock at my door. Yeah, sometimes, they actually knock just before they haunt you. Sometimes they knock on other things. It’s like even after people die they take their manners to the grave and then bring them back when they come calling.
“Who… who is it?” I asked in a tiny voice. The blankets were already up to my fucking chin. I jumped out of bed and tore open the door when Laura answered.
I wrapped her in a huge hug and pulled her in and, believe it or not, my sister the Ice Princess was actually sobbing.
“Didn’t you get my messages? I was going crazy trying to call and text you!” she said with half anger and half love.
“I lost my phone,” I lamely explained. I never had the guts to ask if I could look for it in Clarissa’s Range Rover. I tried calling it from the house but no one ever answered it but an automated message saying the user was unavailable, yada yada. I figured maybe it got thrown out and smashed when the car tumbled.
“Oh, kiddo, I’m so sorry about Clarissa!” She hugged me again.
At the mention of her name, tears I thought were long cried out started pouring down my face and suddenly we weren’t secret agent and Emo boy but just two siblings who just hadn’t seen each other in way too long. I gladly hugged her back and tried my damnedest to ignore the pale man in the far corner of my room.
Laura couldn’t understand why Adam kept glancing at a corner of his room as if self-consciously mindful of another person observing their private moment. Mom had told him that Adam claimed to have seen Clarissa at the hospital days after she was killed and both she and Dad had dismissed it as either a dream or as one of Adam’s “glimpses.” The way he’d once explained it to her when they were still growing up, he said seeing a ghost was like getting a glimpse into another environment, like you would catch a fleeting glimpse of the interior of a passenger train as it sped by. Their baby brother who’d died seven years ago was just the first one he’d claim to see but certainly not the last.
Finally, when Adam opened up his wrists two years ago (Thank God he made the same mistake as many others, cutting horizontally instead of vertically), Adam said a ghost had told him to do it. They feared that he was schizophrenic until the psychiatrist at the hospital had the chance to examine him and rule out that diagnosis. The doctor said that Adam was suffering from paranoid delusions but certainly not schizophrenia, which was a much rarer malady. Then he met Clarissa and the two of them seemed to thrive and even depend upon each other. They both made a mutually miraculous recovery and Adam was discharged two days after her. They’d been almost inseparable ever since. When Laura got word that Clarissa was killed while Adam was with her, she feared her death would make her brother relapse.
But she had no illusions about his paranoid delusions. Adam was legitimately seeing things. And she feared he was seeing something right now, something that he was desperately trying to ignore and not call attention to.
I really wished that dude had stopped looking at me, at us. The fucking assholes (Clarissa excepted) hardly gave me a breather since. The kid in The Sixth Sense used to piss me off in that he never seemed to be seriously freaked out about seeing dead people. Trust me, kids, that’s some shit you just never take in your stride. The ones that died in horrible accidents were usually the worst ones because they come back with their trauma intact. One thing I noticed during the one time I made contact with Clarissa was she seemed to be holding her head at an odd angle. So when that cop told me that she died of a broken neck, I put two and two together.
The dude in the corner was one of those guys, I guess. He had a humongous chest wound like someone tattooed him with a fucking shotgun or something. What creeped me out was that he kept making like he was reaching out to me but couldn’t move or talk. He just stood there, his left arm out, like the world’s most hideous panhandler.
“What are you looking at, Bro?” Laura looked at the corner where he was standing quietly spazzing out but of course she couldn’t see him. Seeing shit like that was, for some reason, my job.
“Nuthin’. So, how ya doin’, Sis? Working on anything interesting?”
“You know I can’t talk about that,” she said. I knew that’s what her answer would be. It always is. But I was so distracted by the dude in the corner that I didn’t know what else to say. When I looked back to where he was, he was gone. I breathed a small sigh of relief.
“I’m sorry if I freaked you out. I guess, since you were in Baghdad, you were there doing something important.”
“Adam,” she said. As she drew out the last syllable of my name, she almost sounded like she was whining. She hugged me again, “stop apologizing, Honey. It’s not like you were driving the car or anything.”
“No, Clarissa was.” And I was no closer to understanding why she did what she did than I was the moment I woke up from my coma.
“Do you remember…?” She stopped and re-gathered her thoughts. “Do you recall anything during your near-death experience?”
Mom and Dad and even one of my friends asked me the same thing and I was getting sick and tired of being treated like a freak. There’s being treated like a freak because of my Emo boy looks but this was something else entirely.
“Yeah,” I said in all seriousness. “There was this pinprick of light. Then it got bigger and bigger and I started to see shit on the other side. It was like, swimming in pure light. Then as this bright white light got bigger and bigger, I heard music and saw…” Laura’s eyes also got bigger and I knew I’d hooked her. “…I saw… Elvis sitting on a Laz-E-Boy with this big-ass remote, controlling the world.”
Laura slapped my shoulder, knowing that I got her for a change.
“You wouldn’t believe how loud Elvis’s farts are, Laura.” She slapped the same shoulder again.
“You fucking asshole. You really had me goin’ there. Just for that, I’m telling all your Emo friends you’re a Phil Collins and Genesis fan.” She laughed and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear and asked, “So you don’t remember anything, then?”
“Nah. I mean, I didn’t even know until after I got back and even then I overheard Mom telling one of her friends from the synagogue.”
“They didn’t even tell you you were clinically dead?”
“Fuck no. You know, because of my… history,” I said with exaggerated scare quotes. Despite the fact that while growing up we fought like rabid cats and dogs, Laura always gave me the impression that she was on my side. We drew closer together after our brother died because we knew Mom wouldn’t have any more after us. So, as far as siblings went, we knew we were all we had and were ever going to have.
“Laura,” I said while chewing my lower lip, “I have a confession to make.” She looked at me more closely. “They’re back, only there’re more of them. A lot more.”
When Adam got done talking, my jaw was almost touching my knees. He’d told me the stories of the ghosts he was seeing back when but it seemed as if, when he came back from the dead, he didn’t come back alone. What truly alarmed me was when Adam said they were coming in ever greater numbers. I believed him to the point that I was convinced they were coming to him for some reason. I wanted to protect my baby brother since I couldn’t or didn’t take it on faith they were all good but how the hell do you protect a loved one from insubstantial energy?
“OK, baby brother, since we’re making confessions like guilty Catholics, I got one for you. And you have to promise to not put it on your Myspace or Facebook pages, ya hear?”
“Waddya think, I’m retarded? I know you work for the government and shit.”
I then gave Adam a basic overview of what we did at our agency, the 17th one that’s never mentioned in the annual National Intelligence Estimate. Without getting too deeply into classified material, I told Adam what I did for a living because I was beginning to suspect more and more that in some indefinable way, we would need my employers to shield him.
I debated whether to tell him the real story of our Grandpa Bernard then decided to. I never thought it was possible for Adam’s huge eyes to get any bigger yet somehow he managed it.
Laura Moss pulled up to her parents’ homestead in her rented Chevy Cobalt and concurrently breathed first a sigh of relief and inhaled with dread at what Adam might present. She had nothing but her Mom’s word to go on and it seemed every time she called her brother was either asleep or out of the house. They had to walk a fine line between sheltering him and letting him get back on the horse or skateboard as it were. They all knew that he was visiting Clarissa’s grave every day and it broke their hearts to see the poor boy pining for her. Yet they also all knew that unless Adam stopped mooning over Clarissa’s plot, someone would have to read him the riot act and tell him to stop his obsessive/compulsive behavior.
She continued texting him while she could on the plane and, as always, could never get through. At Logan Airport, she called home and Mom said he was sleeping. He hadn’t gone back to school yet and his depression was really starting to worry his family. So when Clarissa marched up the walkway she had no idea if Adam was still in bed or out. The sun was just beginning to set. Since Iraq was eight hours ahead of the eastern US, there was jet lag with which she’d have to contend but not tonight. She was too keyed-up worrying about her baby brother.
She walked right in without knocking and announced herself. Why should she? This was the house in which she and Adam grew up and for the few days she’d be here, she wouldn’t be “Elle” but Laura. Mom came out from the kitchen after a second or two, wiping her hands on a towel then broke into a full sprint. Wrapping her daughter in a hug, she began sobbing. Laura hugged her mother back and only realized it had been over a year since she’d last been in her childhood home. Still, Jewish mothers, she thought, were overly emotional when it came to their children. She’d had no choice but to adopt a stoic attitude in her line of work but Laura conceded that perhaps her Mom had a right to emotionalism since she was a Mom and Laura wasn’t.
Her fingers smelled of gefilte fish, which she always made homemade. Adam couldn’t stand it and he was always the closest thing the family had to a gentile. For Mom, matzo ball soup and gefilte fish was her comfort food like mac and cheese with hot dog pennies was always Laura’s. Come to think of it, no one else in the family liked Mom’s gefilte fish and even Rabbi Green, when he’d come over, always tightly smiled during such dinners as if he was circumcising an elephant. Mrs. Moss was probably the only wife and mother in the entire Judaic world who couldn’t cook.
“Oh my God, Laura, I was beginning to think we’d never see you again!”
“Mom, I’ve been busy, not dead.” She gently separated from her mother and looked at her. She cut her hair again, which was always a mistake with her physiognomy. With her hair short or pulled-back, her moon-shaped face always looked as big around as a hub cap.
“I like your new haircut,” she charitably said.
“Thanks. Adam’s still upstairs. I imagine you’d rather see him than me or Dad right now. We’ll have time to catch up, later.” She wiped her eyes dry and walked back into the kitchen.
I twitched when there was a knock at my door. Yeah, sometimes, they actually knock just before they haunt you. Sometimes they knock on other things. It’s like even after people die they take their manners to the grave and then bring them back when they come calling.
“Who… who is it?” I asked in a tiny voice. The blankets were already up to my fucking chin. I jumped out of bed and tore open the door when Laura answered.
I wrapped her in a huge hug and pulled her in and, believe it or not, my sister the Ice Princess was actually sobbing.
“Didn’t you get my messages? I was going crazy trying to call and text you!” she said with half anger and half love.
“I lost my phone,” I lamely explained. I never had the guts to ask if I could look for it in Clarissa’s Range Rover. I tried calling it from the house but no one ever answered it but an automated message saying the user was unavailable, yada yada. I figured maybe it got thrown out and smashed when the car tumbled.
“Oh, kiddo, I’m so sorry about Clarissa!” She hugged me again.
At the mention of her name, tears I thought were long cried out started pouring down my face and suddenly we weren’t secret agent and Emo boy but just two siblings who just hadn’t seen each other in way too long. I gladly hugged her back and tried my damnedest to ignore the pale man in the far corner of my room.
Laura couldn’t understand why Adam kept glancing at a corner of his room as if self-consciously mindful of another person observing their private moment. Mom had told him that Adam claimed to have seen Clarissa at the hospital days after she was killed and both she and Dad had dismissed it as either a dream or as one of Adam’s “glimpses.” The way he’d once explained it to her when they were still growing up, he said seeing a ghost was like getting a glimpse into another environment, like you would catch a fleeting glimpse of the interior of a passenger train as it sped by. Their baby brother who’d died seven years ago was just the first one he’d claim to see but certainly not the last.
Finally, when Adam opened up his wrists two years ago (Thank God he made the same mistake as many others, cutting horizontally instead of vertically), Adam said a ghost had told him to do it. They feared that he was schizophrenic until the psychiatrist at the hospital had the chance to examine him and rule out that diagnosis. The doctor said that Adam was suffering from paranoid delusions but certainly not schizophrenia, which was a much rarer malady. Then he met Clarissa and the two of them seemed to thrive and even depend upon each other. They both made a mutually miraculous recovery and Adam was discharged two days after her. They’d been almost inseparable ever since. When Laura got word that Clarissa was killed while Adam was with her, she feared her death would make her brother relapse.
But she had no illusions about his paranoid delusions. Adam was legitimately seeing things. And she feared he was seeing something right now, something that he was desperately trying to ignore and not call attention to.
I really wished that dude had stopped looking at me, at us. The fucking assholes (Clarissa excepted) hardly gave me a breather since. The kid in The Sixth Sense used to piss me off in that he never seemed to be seriously freaked out about seeing dead people. Trust me, kids, that’s some shit you just never take in your stride. The ones that died in horrible accidents were usually the worst ones because they come back with their trauma intact. One thing I noticed during the one time I made contact with Clarissa was she seemed to be holding her head at an odd angle. So when that cop told me that she died of a broken neck, I put two and two together.
The dude in the corner was one of those guys, I guess. He had a humongous chest wound like someone tattooed him with a fucking shotgun or something. What creeped me out was that he kept making like he was reaching out to me but couldn’t move or talk. He just stood there, his left arm out, like the world’s most hideous panhandler.
“What are you looking at, Bro?” Laura looked at the corner where he was standing quietly spazzing out but of course she couldn’t see him. Seeing shit like that was, for some reason, my job.
“Nuthin’. So, how ya doin’, Sis? Working on anything interesting?”
“You know I can’t talk about that,” she said. I knew that’s what her answer would be. It always is. But I was so distracted by the dude in the corner that I didn’t know what else to say. When I looked back to where he was, he was gone. I breathed a small sigh of relief.
“I’m sorry if I freaked you out. I guess, since you were in Baghdad, you were there doing something important.”
“Adam,” she said. As she drew out the last syllable of my name, she almost sounded like she was whining. She hugged me again, “stop apologizing, Honey. It’s not like you were driving the car or anything.”
“No, Clarissa was.” And I was no closer to understanding why she did what she did than I was the moment I woke up from my coma.
“Do you remember…?” She stopped and re-gathered her thoughts. “Do you recall anything during your near-death experience?”
Mom and Dad and even one of my friends asked me the same thing and I was getting sick and tired of being treated like a freak. There’s being treated like a freak because of my Emo boy looks but this was something else entirely.
“Yeah,” I said in all seriousness. “There was this pinprick of light. Then it got bigger and bigger and I started to see shit on the other side. It was like, swimming in pure light. Then as this bright white light got bigger and bigger, I heard music and saw…” Laura’s eyes also got bigger and I knew I’d hooked her. “…I saw… Elvis sitting on a Laz-E-Boy with this big-ass remote, controlling the world.”
Laura slapped my shoulder, knowing that I got her for a change.
“You wouldn’t believe how loud Elvis’s farts are, Laura.” She slapped the same shoulder again.
“You fucking asshole. You really had me goin’ there. Just for that, I’m telling all your Emo friends you’re a Phil Collins and Genesis fan.” She laughed and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear and asked, “So you don’t remember anything, then?”
“Nah. I mean, I didn’t even know until after I got back and even then I overheard Mom telling one of her friends from the synagogue.”
“They didn’t even tell you you were clinically dead?”
“Fuck no. You know, because of my… history,” I said with exaggerated scare quotes. Despite the fact that while growing up we fought like rabid cats and dogs, Laura always gave me the impression that she was on my side. We drew closer together after our brother died because we knew Mom wouldn’t have any more after us. So, as far as siblings went, we knew we were all we had and were ever going to have.
“Laura,” I said while chewing my lower lip, “I have a confession to make.” She looked at me more closely. “They’re back, only there’re more of them. A lot more.”
When Adam got done talking, my jaw was almost touching my knees. He’d told me the stories of the ghosts he was seeing back when but it seemed as if, when he came back from the dead, he didn’t come back alone. What truly alarmed me was when Adam said they were coming in ever greater numbers. I believed him to the point that I was convinced they were coming to him for some reason. I wanted to protect my baby brother since I couldn’t or didn’t take it on faith they were all good but how the hell do you protect a loved one from insubstantial energy?
“OK, baby brother, since we’re making confessions like guilty Catholics, I got one for you. And you have to promise to not put it on your Myspace or Facebook pages, ya hear?”
“Waddya think, I’m retarded? I know you work for the government and shit.”
I then gave Adam a basic overview of what we did at our agency, the 17th one that’s never mentioned in the annual National Intelligence Estimate. Without getting too deeply into classified material, I told Adam what I did for a living because I was beginning to suspect more and more that in some indefinable way, we would need my employers to shield him.
I debated whether to tell him the real story of our Grandpa Bernard then decided to. I never thought it was possible for Adam’s huge eyes to get any bigger yet somehow he managed it.
Monday, April 27, 2009
The Bone Bridge: Chapter Six
Abu Ghraib Prison, west of Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 7
“Look, I’ve got to go. I love you, too, Mom. Kiss Adam for me, ‘kay? Bye bye.”
Elle (After the first letter of her first name Laura) Moss clapped her cell phone shut as the Iraqi intelligence officials approached her at the end of their pantomime of an investigation. She self-consciously straightened the green badge of whatever intelligence agency out of the 16 known ones for whom she purported to work this week. Pocketing the phone, she began closing the gap between herself and the Iraqis.
She wasn’t sure what they’d expected to find considering al Islamiyah’s now seemingly absent, alleged ghost. After all, it was foolhardy at best, dangerous at worst, to consider lack of evidence as proof of anything. We learned that the hard way with Rumsfeld and Cheney. Besides, their inspection was a purely ceremonial one, like the kind Presidents and other visiting heads of state give as they strut past foreign troops. Except this symbolic inspection didn’t have the press to dutifully record it. The Iraqi government, as Col. Waterston told both her and Hans Dietrich, the world-renowned ghost hunter, was particularly eager to reclaim control of the prison, ahem, facility, according to the good Colonel, and that simply wouldn’t happen as long as there was a poltergeist on the premises.
Elle Moss was officially there in the capacity of a liaison officer for a certain intelligence agency, someone to help facilitate the transfer of authority from the Americans to the Iraqis. The idea was never to turn the notorious prison back into a prison but a museum to memorialize the abuses that had taken place there. No doubt, the Iraqi intelligence officials weren’t thinking of just Saddam’s own excesses at Abu Ghraib. In fact, they were probably secretly tempted to devote a wing or at least a tier to Bush’s, Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s own excesses that began right after Shock and Awe in March 2003.
Unofficially, Elle Moss was not there to liaise with the Iraqis but to investigate Hans Dietrich. Her people, her real people, had been investigating that dirtbag for over two years. There was nothing much that anyone in the world except for Dietrich himself couldn’t tell her about him. She was an expert on this guy, his blood-spattered past as a Stasi official and how he’d managed to not only escape his deserved comeuppance but even procure for himself a second and lucrative career as a “paranormal investigator.” So Laura “Elle” Moss was fooling everyone but herself by becoming part of the window dressing. While it wasn’t exactly on a par with Colin Powell’s bedtime fairy tales of WMD to the UN Security Council, it was important that the American intelligence community be represented as fully as the Iraqis’. And the CIA and other pertinent agencies didn’t think this was important enough to show up for. So it was a snap for Elle’s own well-connected if little-understood agency to shoehorn her in.
“I trust everything met to your satisfaction, Mr. Director?”
The tall and burly Iraqi intelligence chief curtly nodded his head and seemed almost shamed in having to deal with a woman who was anywhere close to his equal. She was 25, nowhere near Directorate level but she carried herself with a bearing that suggested hidden power and influence, like the stately carriage of an iceberg keeping 90% of itself under water. She had been asked to wear a kaffiyeh, or head scarf, to show her modesty and she politely but firmly refused.
The truly comical thing about this inspection was the complete absence of electronic equipment to document anything they would see. And there wasn’t much chance of that happening because the inspection was carried out in broad daylight. Ghosts, like vampires, tended to be shy around UV light and were generally nocturnal. She wasn’t exactly an expert on vampires whether or not they existed. Ghosts, on the other hand, were something she knew a thing or two about. In fact, it was almost a family profession.
After exchanging the usual diplomatic closing pleasantries and passing the details of the transfer of control to the detail men in attendance, Elle briskly walked out of the prison. In spite of her impressive knowledge of the paranormal, she wasn’t what you’d call an adept or a sensitive, people who claim to be able to see spirits (unlike her baby brother Adam). She just wanted to leave the prison because its sheer reputation oppressed her. It was the horrible knowledge of what had gone on, horrible knowledge that even Seymour Hersh had never learned and uncovered on the pages of the New Yorker. Earlier in the year, when the Obama administration released about a dozen more pictures of the abuses Americans had another opportunity to remember and not be allowed to forget what had been done in their good name. It remained to be seen if any permanent lessons were learned.
She was able to let her mind wander to personal matters once she was back in her borrowed Humvee. Several times she’d tried texting and calling her little brother once she got the terrible news about the accident that killed his girlfriend and, for a brief time, Adam himself. She should’ve known that even Adam, who practically slept with his iPhone, wouldn’t be accessible for a while after what had happened on Halloween night. To date, he still wasn’t answering his phone and she began wondering if it was irreparably damaged in the crash. She kept telling herself that was the reason why he never got around to calling her on her own phone.
She never told her younger skateboarding sibling but it was partly his “glimpses”, as he’d come to call them, that got her into her present line of work. The story he’d told the family years ago about having seen their stillborn brother, umbilical cord and all, standing on his own grave wasn’t the kind that Mom and Dad loved to dust off and trot out for polite company. Still, there was no denying that the kid at the very least believed that he saw something in that cemetery. He may have been an award-winning prevaricator who’d conned Mom and Dad countless times but he never fooled his big sister. And when Laura looked into his wide green eyes, she knew he’d seen something that would change at least his own life.
She toyed with the idea of calling Adam again then thought better of it. Whether or not his phone was junk, she’d see him soon enough. Now that her business in Baghdad was finally concluded, she prepared to hop on a MAC flight and take enough time off to swing by Massachusetts to pay her family a visit.
I knew it was sketchy beyond belief doing this, visiting Clarissa’s grave. It wasn’t lost on me what kind of shit went down the last time I went to a cemetery. That’s why, until today, I avoided them like our rabbi does pork chops. Still, I couldn’t not be there. I had to pay my last respects, to get closure, to torture myself on what could’ve been between us. Her father the Congressman already got his headstone so I guess the government moves on certain things. I avoided looking at file footage on the news of the big turnout for the family’s mass funeral yet for some reason actually being here by myself didn’t hurt as much as seeing the public outpouring of grief. I heard the Speaker of the House was there and a bunch of other politicians and even the Vice President put in a brief appearance.
But now I had the place all to myself. I paid my last respects in my own way to Clarissa’s mother and father just to get that out of the way before concentrating on her plot. Obviously, considering the time of the year, grass had yet to grow over them and they sat on the earth like barely-healed scars. I noticed with some irritation that there was just one massive headstone for the entire family and obviously it was put there to honor the Congressman. His wife and daughter had to share it.
It was a miniature obelisk like the kind you see in Egypt only it had a Star of David on it and the names of all three. I hugged my skateboard a little more tightly as I looked at Clarissa’s birth and death dates. She had touched my board and, before she got her own, even rode on it when I was teaching her how to do Ollies and other simple tricks right after we got out of the hospital together. Suddenly, my board got a whole lot more precious than it already was.
God damn you, Clarissa, what the hell were you thinking trying to outrun the cops? Even if they were there to bust us over the party, it was just a fucking party. Maybe it would’ve resulted in being grounded for a month after a few mentions on Republican blogs. But anything your folks would’ve done to you, even if it meant us being separated for that month, would’ve been a fuck of a lot better than this.
What wouldn’t you go back to? Your house or the hospital? I thought you were past all that, that you were, if anything, more normal than me. Why would you fear getting sent back to the hospital’s psych unit just for leading the cops on a high speed chase?
And did I really see you, your ghost, one that, thankfully, didn’t make an appearance at the cemetery? Or was it just a dream? The more I thought about what she said, the more convinced I was that she wasn’t saying “Frias” but “Free us.” But that only led to more questions. “Free us” from whom or what?
Hans Dietrich simply called it “The Hole.” It was a most amazing hole, albeit one in a purely metaphorical sense. In actuality, it was a larger, more outsized version of the “black hole” around which they’d built a Humvee that they took on “investigations.” The Hole wasn’t large to accommodate the growing number of restless ghosts and spirits. After all, such beings don’t view or move in conventional spatial dimensions as you and I do. But the huger, stationary Hole was larger because of the sheer volume of energy it required to keep them fixed within a manmade vortex that prevented them from slipping into another, uncharted dimension.
Dietrich dimmed the lights as he approached the massive structure, which was about the size of a tiny cottage such as you’d find on Cape Cod, so he could peer into the thick window that was made of bulletproof glass (in spite of their non-corporeality, they could get quite nasty). Generally, the inside of the structure was actually illuminated with the roiling energy of the partial and full body apparitions within it. Despite the august but posthumous assemblage, he was there to see just one, his newest acquisition: Mursi al Islamiyah, the terrorist mastermind who was rumored to be one of bin Laden’s countless second in commands.
The al Qaeda terrorist apparently had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations at the Sheraton in Boston. Among the countless EVPs that were recorded around the clock in the Hole, Dietrich heard what he thought was Tim McVeigh’s ghost crow about al Islamiyah actually chasing people around the hotel, people like Congressman Feingold. The terrorist was unusually adept at manifesting and visually presenting himself to people, even touching them briefly. The bastard even knew how to fly, another skill not mastered if ever by more conventional spirits.
With all that energy being drawn from the air, Dietrich mused, it must have been freezing cold in that penthouse. Served the decadent bastards right. The German had nothing really personal against the Who’s Who that was assembled at the Sheraton. It was merely a wakeup call to the complacent, a calling card from Dietrich warning of something far more disastrous.
He cupped his black gloved hands around his eyes as he peered into the window, looking for al Islamiyah’s unique energy signature. At last he found it and he banged on the three inch-thick glass. He got the terrorist’s attention and he floated to the window, his voice picked up by the Hole’s countless built-in microphones. He appeared to say something in Arabic and Breck wasn’t there to translate. But Dietrich wasn’t fazed by that. He thumbed the “talk” button on the Hole’s outer hull and said, “Speak English, you cretin.”
Dietrich knew all too well that al Islamiyah spoke perfect English, having gotten his college education at Eton in the UK on a Fulbright scholarship. The terrorist’s ghost distended his jaw and screamed, making his face much longer than it was in life and Dietrich smiled and shook his head. In his line of work, he’d seen and heard it all but this one was a fucking freak, the total package, the rarest of all ghosts. Moreso than any other entity he’d ever captured, Mursi al Islamiyah was seemingly more adroit at acclimating himself to the netherworld, having gleaned a vast array of supernatural disciplines. Most restless spirits, if at all, manage to partially master one, perhaps two. Mursi al Islamiyah seemingly could do everything of which a ghost was rumored to be capable and perhaps more. And Dietrich wondered what other tricks he could or would show him either now or in the future.
He thumbed the “talk” button again.
“Once, during an investigation in Ireland, we were hunting a criminal just like you. Toward the end of the hunt, one of my team members felt something go through him and the next thing he knew he was looking at his organs being pulled out of his torso even though his flesh wasn’t broken. He was literally turned inside out. Irish ghosts are especially nasty.
“In my line of work, my friend, I have seen and heard it all and you screaming makes me laugh. I would get more out of a conversation with you, for you to show me something I haven’t seen before. So make use of that Eton College education and impress me.”
“I. Don’t. Do. Tricks. You dog,” al Islamiyah hissed, his face back to normal dimensions. Dietrich tapped the “talk” button again.
“Tim McVeigh tells me differently. He said you did some splendid tricks on Halloween night in Boston, Massachusetts. Good job.”
Mursi al Islamiyah looked behind him as if searching for the Oklahoma City bomber then turned his attention back to Dietrich.
“You. Will. Pay. For this, heathen.” Dietrich touched the “talk” button for the briefest of instants to sarcastically murmur, “Ooh.”
“Some. Day. We will. Find. A way. Out. And you. Will be. Sorry.”
There wasn’t much chance of that happening, thought the ex Stasi policeman. The technology made available to him came courtesy of the Americans, who’d been looking into controlling supernatural dimensions and detaining spirits since the late 1960’s. The CIA project, named Operation Casper, had been axed by a secret act of Congress in 1974. Formerly attached to their Psy Ops division that also did R&D on remote psychics, the project’s existence was mainly rumor and conspiracy theory and had acquired a fantastic air to it similar to the Philadelphia Experiment or the Majestic Twelve.
However, unlike the Philadelphia Experiment and MJ 12, Operation Casper actually had existed and the neglected technology that only lack of funding could stop still provided a great head start to what Dietrich had had in mind twenty years ago when it was obvious the Stasi’s days were numbered. Luckily, he was able to make contact with one of the few Casper research scientists still alive, someone who had access to copies of the notes. He’d fallen on hard times and was willing to sell them to the highest bidder. Considering the fantastical nature of the research, it wasn’t surprising that he had no takers until it reached the ears of Dietrich.
Hans had listened because he knew such things were possible. In his youth, he’d had a paranormal experience of his own that involved both his parents right after the Nazi years, an experience that he’d never shared with anyone.
Just days after selling Dietrich the technology that he and his own experts were able to complete and perfect, the penniless scientist was later found dead on the banks of the Charles River on New Year’s Eve 1989. Despite his veins being loaded with high grade heroin that he shouldn’t have been able to afford, Dr. Bernard Moss’s death was later ruled a suicide by the Boston City Police Department.
Dietrich touched the “talk” button one more time and said, “Once again, good job on Halloween night. I may be a heathen dog, but that’s still better than being a trained dog.” He smiled cruelly at the terrorist’s ghost and walked out of the enormous structure. Mursi al Islamiyah silently screamed, heard only by his fellow dead.
“Look, I’ve got to go. I love you, too, Mom. Kiss Adam for me, ‘kay? Bye bye.”
Elle (After the first letter of her first name Laura) Moss clapped her cell phone shut as the Iraqi intelligence officials approached her at the end of their pantomime of an investigation. She self-consciously straightened the green badge of whatever intelligence agency out of the 16 known ones for whom she purported to work this week. Pocketing the phone, she began closing the gap between herself and the Iraqis.
She wasn’t sure what they’d expected to find considering al Islamiyah’s now seemingly absent, alleged ghost. After all, it was foolhardy at best, dangerous at worst, to consider lack of evidence as proof of anything. We learned that the hard way with Rumsfeld and Cheney. Besides, their inspection was a purely ceremonial one, like the kind Presidents and other visiting heads of state give as they strut past foreign troops. Except this symbolic inspection didn’t have the press to dutifully record it. The Iraqi government, as Col. Waterston told both her and Hans Dietrich, the world-renowned ghost hunter, was particularly eager to reclaim control of the prison, ahem, facility, according to the good Colonel, and that simply wouldn’t happen as long as there was a poltergeist on the premises.
Elle Moss was officially there in the capacity of a liaison officer for a certain intelligence agency, someone to help facilitate the transfer of authority from the Americans to the Iraqis. The idea was never to turn the notorious prison back into a prison but a museum to memorialize the abuses that had taken place there. No doubt, the Iraqi intelligence officials weren’t thinking of just Saddam’s own excesses at Abu Ghraib. In fact, they were probably secretly tempted to devote a wing or at least a tier to Bush’s, Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s own excesses that began right after Shock and Awe in March 2003.
Unofficially, Elle Moss was not there to liaise with the Iraqis but to investigate Hans Dietrich. Her people, her real people, had been investigating that dirtbag for over two years. There was nothing much that anyone in the world except for Dietrich himself couldn’t tell her about him. She was an expert on this guy, his blood-spattered past as a Stasi official and how he’d managed to not only escape his deserved comeuppance but even procure for himself a second and lucrative career as a “paranormal investigator.” So Laura “Elle” Moss was fooling everyone but herself by becoming part of the window dressing. While it wasn’t exactly on a par with Colin Powell’s bedtime fairy tales of WMD to the UN Security Council, it was important that the American intelligence community be represented as fully as the Iraqis’. And the CIA and other pertinent agencies didn’t think this was important enough to show up for. So it was a snap for Elle’s own well-connected if little-understood agency to shoehorn her in.
“I trust everything met to your satisfaction, Mr. Director?”
The tall and burly Iraqi intelligence chief curtly nodded his head and seemed almost shamed in having to deal with a woman who was anywhere close to his equal. She was 25, nowhere near Directorate level but she carried herself with a bearing that suggested hidden power and influence, like the stately carriage of an iceberg keeping 90% of itself under water. She had been asked to wear a kaffiyeh, or head scarf, to show her modesty and she politely but firmly refused.
The truly comical thing about this inspection was the complete absence of electronic equipment to document anything they would see. And there wasn’t much chance of that happening because the inspection was carried out in broad daylight. Ghosts, like vampires, tended to be shy around UV light and were generally nocturnal. She wasn’t exactly an expert on vampires whether or not they existed. Ghosts, on the other hand, were something she knew a thing or two about. In fact, it was almost a family profession.
After exchanging the usual diplomatic closing pleasantries and passing the details of the transfer of control to the detail men in attendance, Elle briskly walked out of the prison. In spite of her impressive knowledge of the paranormal, she wasn’t what you’d call an adept or a sensitive, people who claim to be able to see spirits (unlike her baby brother Adam). She just wanted to leave the prison because its sheer reputation oppressed her. It was the horrible knowledge of what had gone on, horrible knowledge that even Seymour Hersh had never learned and uncovered on the pages of the New Yorker. Earlier in the year, when the Obama administration released about a dozen more pictures of the abuses Americans had another opportunity to remember and not be allowed to forget what had been done in their good name. It remained to be seen if any permanent lessons were learned.
She was able to let her mind wander to personal matters once she was back in her borrowed Humvee. Several times she’d tried texting and calling her little brother once she got the terrible news about the accident that killed his girlfriend and, for a brief time, Adam himself. She should’ve known that even Adam, who practically slept with his iPhone, wouldn’t be accessible for a while after what had happened on Halloween night. To date, he still wasn’t answering his phone and she began wondering if it was irreparably damaged in the crash. She kept telling herself that was the reason why he never got around to calling her on her own phone.
She never told her younger skateboarding sibling but it was partly his “glimpses”, as he’d come to call them, that got her into her present line of work. The story he’d told the family years ago about having seen their stillborn brother, umbilical cord and all, standing on his own grave wasn’t the kind that Mom and Dad loved to dust off and trot out for polite company. Still, there was no denying that the kid at the very least believed that he saw something in that cemetery. He may have been an award-winning prevaricator who’d conned Mom and Dad countless times but he never fooled his big sister. And when Laura looked into his wide green eyes, she knew he’d seen something that would change at least his own life.
She toyed with the idea of calling Adam again then thought better of it. Whether or not his phone was junk, she’d see him soon enough. Now that her business in Baghdad was finally concluded, she prepared to hop on a MAC flight and take enough time off to swing by Massachusetts to pay her family a visit.
I knew it was sketchy beyond belief doing this, visiting Clarissa’s grave. It wasn’t lost on me what kind of shit went down the last time I went to a cemetery. That’s why, until today, I avoided them like our rabbi does pork chops. Still, I couldn’t not be there. I had to pay my last respects, to get closure, to torture myself on what could’ve been between us. Her father the Congressman already got his headstone so I guess the government moves on certain things. I avoided looking at file footage on the news of the big turnout for the family’s mass funeral yet for some reason actually being here by myself didn’t hurt as much as seeing the public outpouring of grief. I heard the Speaker of the House was there and a bunch of other politicians and even the Vice President put in a brief appearance.
But now I had the place all to myself. I paid my last respects in my own way to Clarissa’s mother and father just to get that out of the way before concentrating on her plot. Obviously, considering the time of the year, grass had yet to grow over them and they sat on the earth like barely-healed scars. I noticed with some irritation that there was just one massive headstone for the entire family and obviously it was put there to honor the Congressman. His wife and daughter had to share it.
It was a miniature obelisk like the kind you see in Egypt only it had a Star of David on it and the names of all three. I hugged my skateboard a little more tightly as I looked at Clarissa’s birth and death dates. She had touched my board and, before she got her own, even rode on it when I was teaching her how to do Ollies and other simple tricks right after we got out of the hospital together. Suddenly, my board got a whole lot more precious than it already was.
God damn you, Clarissa, what the hell were you thinking trying to outrun the cops? Even if they were there to bust us over the party, it was just a fucking party. Maybe it would’ve resulted in being grounded for a month after a few mentions on Republican blogs. But anything your folks would’ve done to you, even if it meant us being separated for that month, would’ve been a fuck of a lot better than this.
What wouldn’t you go back to? Your house or the hospital? I thought you were past all that, that you were, if anything, more normal than me. Why would you fear getting sent back to the hospital’s psych unit just for leading the cops on a high speed chase?
And did I really see you, your ghost, one that, thankfully, didn’t make an appearance at the cemetery? Or was it just a dream? The more I thought about what she said, the more convinced I was that she wasn’t saying “Frias” but “Free us.” But that only led to more questions. “Free us” from whom or what?
Hans Dietrich simply called it “The Hole.” It was a most amazing hole, albeit one in a purely metaphorical sense. In actuality, it was a larger, more outsized version of the “black hole” around which they’d built a Humvee that they took on “investigations.” The Hole wasn’t large to accommodate the growing number of restless ghosts and spirits. After all, such beings don’t view or move in conventional spatial dimensions as you and I do. But the huger, stationary Hole was larger because of the sheer volume of energy it required to keep them fixed within a manmade vortex that prevented them from slipping into another, uncharted dimension.
Dietrich dimmed the lights as he approached the massive structure, which was about the size of a tiny cottage such as you’d find on Cape Cod, so he could peer into the thick window that was made of bulletproof glass (in spite of their non-corporeality, they could get quite nasty). Generally, the inside of the structure was actually illuminated with the roiling energy of the partial and full body apparitions within it. Despite the august but posthumous assemblage, he was there to see just one, his newest acquisition: Mursi al Islamiyah, the terrorist mastermind who was rumored to be one of bin Laden’s countless second in commands.
The al Qaeda terrorist apparently had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations at the Sheraton in Boston. Among the countless EVPs that were recorded around the clock in the Hole, Dietrich heard what he thought was Tim McVeigh’s ghost crow about al Islamiyah actually chasing people around the hotel, people like Congressman Feingold. The terrorist was unusually adept at manifesting and visually presenting himself to people, even touching them briefly. The bastard even knew how to fly, another skill not mastered if ever by more conventional spirits.
With all that energy being drawn from the air, Dietrich mused, it must have been freezing cold in that penthouse. Served the decadent bastards right. The German had nothing really personal against the Who’s Who that was assembled at the Sheraton. It was merely a wakeup call to the complacent, a calling card from Dietrich warning of something far more disastrous.
He cupped his black gloved hands around his eyes as he peered into the window, looking for al Islamiyah’s unique energy signature. At last he found it and he banged on the three inch-thick glass. He got the terrorist’s attention and he floated to the window, his voice picked up by the Hole’s countless built-in microphones. He appeared to say something in Arabic and Breck wasn’t there to translate. But Dietrich wasn’t fazed by that. He thumbed the “talk” button on the Hole’s outer hull and said, “Speak English, you cretin.”
Dietrich knew all too well that al Islamiyah spoke perfect English, having gotten his college education at Eton in the UK on a Fulbright scholarship. The terrorist’s ghost distended his jaw and screamed, making his face much longer than it was in life and Dietrich smiled and shook his head. In his line of work, he’d seen and heard it all but this one was a fucking freak, the total package, the rarest of all ghosts. Moreso than any other entity he’d ever captured, Mursi al Islamiyah was seemingly more adroit at acclimating himself to the netherworld, having gleaned a vast array of supernatural disciplines. Most restless spirits, if at all, manage to partially master one, perhaps two. Mursi al Islamiyah seemingly could do everything of which a ghost was rumored to be capable and perhaps more. And Dietrich wondered what other tricks he could or would show him either now or in the future.
He thumbed the “talk” button again.
“Once, during an investigation in Ireland, we were hunting a criminal just like you. Toward the end of the hunt, one of my team members felt something go through him and the next thing he knew he was looking at his organs being pulled out of his torso even though his flesh wasn’t broken. He was literally turned inside out. Irish ghosts are especially nasty.
“In my line of work, my friend, I have seen and heard it all and you screaming makes me laugh. I would get more out of a conversation with you, for you to show me something I haven’t seen before. So make use of that Eton College education and impress me.”
“I. Don’t. Do. Tricks. You dog,” al Islamiyah hissed, his face back to normal dimensions. Dietrich tapped the “talk” button again.
“Tim McVeigh tells me differently. He said you did some splendid tricks on Halloween night in Boston, Massachusetts. Good job.”
Mursi al Islamiyah looked behind him as if searching for the Oklahoma City bomber then turned his attention back to Dietrich.
“You. Will. Pay. For this, heathen.” Dietrich touched the “talk” button for the briefest of instants to sarcastically murmur, “Ooh.”
“Some. Day. We will. Find. A way. Out. And you. Will be. Sorry.”
There wasn’t much chance of that happening, thought the ex Stasi policeman. The technology made available to him came courtesy of the Americans, who’d been looking into controlling supernatural dimensions and detaining spirits since the late 1960’s. The CIA project, named Operation Casper, had been axed by a secret act of Congress in 1974. Formerly attached to their Psy Ops division that also did R&D on remote psychics, the project’s existence was mainly rumor and conspiracy theory and had acquired a fantastic air to it similar to the Philadelphia Experiment or the Majestic Twelve.
However, unlike the Philadelphia Experiment and MJ 12, Operation Casper actually had existed and the neglected technology that only lack of funding could stop still provided a great head start to what Dietrich had had in mind twenty years ago when it was obvious the Stasi’s days were numbered. Luckily, he was able to make contact with one of the few Casper research scientists still alive, someone who had access to copies of the notes. He’d fallen on hard times and was willing to sell them to the highest bidder. Considering the fantastical nature of the research, it wasn’t surprising that he had no takers until it reached the ears of Dietrich.
Hans had listened because he knew such things were possible. In his youth, he’d had a paranormal experience of his own that involved both his parents right after the Nazi years, an experience that he’d never shared with anyone.
Just days after selling Dietrich the technology that he and his own experts were able to complete and perfect, the penniless scientist was later found dead on the banks of the Charles River on New Year’s Eve 1989. Despite his veins being loaded with high grade heroin that he shouldn’t have been able to afford, Dr. Bernard Moss’s death was later ruled a suicide by the Boston City Police Department.
Dietrich touched the “talk” button one more time and said, “Once again, good job on Halloween night. I may be a heathen dog, but that’s still better than being a trained dog.” He smiled cruelly at the terrorist’s ghost and walked out of the enormous structure. Mursi al Islamiyah silently screamed, heard only by his fellow dead.
The Bone Bridge: Chapter Five
November 5, 2009
I was so totally out of it that I wasn’t even aware there was a hand on my arm much less whose it was. My head felt like I landed on it without a helmet after a grind rail gone horribly wrong. The left side of my rib cage screamed out in protest every time I inhaled. I immediately tried to reconstruct the accident. OK, I said to myself, my head hurts because I wasn’t wearing a seat belt and when the car turned over, I got dumped on the roof. The left side of my ribs hurt probably because it hit the steering wheel or Clarissa’s elbow when we… Clarissa!
I tried to sit up and I felt the pressure on my arm for the first time. I turned to my right and saw Clarissa sitting beside me. I immediately took her face in my hands and kissed her. Her flesh was cool as was her attitude but she still kissed me back.
“Clarissa, babe! Are you OK?” She didn’t say a thing but just continued smiling at me in a sweet but sad way. As my eyes got adjusted I saw that she had a few wounds on her face and hands but what struck me as odd was that none of them were treated. No bandages, no stitches, no nothing.
“I miss you, Adam,” she finally said only she said it in such a soft whisper that I could barely hear her. The present tense also hit me as a little odd. It would’ve made more sense if she said, “I missed you,” past tense. But just seeing her next to my bed was almost more than I could handle. I was just glad she was there and alright.
“What happened?”
“You went back,” she whispered again. “I miss you, babe.”
I reached out to her and held her cold face in my hands again. Maybe it was the light but she seemed to be almost completely drained of color, like a character you see in an old black and white movie.
“Back from where? How long was I out?” Once again, she still refused to answer but her hand moved from my right arm to my face. It was as cool as her own face and it almost felt like she wasn’t touching me at all. When I tried to sit up again, I felt something yanking on my pecker and that’s when I noticed the catheter. I also felt embarrassed beyond words that Clarissa had to see me hooked up to something that was attached to my dick.
“We need you, Adam.”
“Who needs me?” I asked her. I could understand her saying that she needed me but who else? My folks? Yeah, where were Mom and Dad? No way they wouldn’t be here.
“Free us, Adam. Free us.” I looked at her and wondered who “Frias” was. I didn’t know anybody by that name and when I looked for the catheter bag under the bed that’s when I noticed that Clarissa wasn’t sitting next to me, after all. She was standing up, the bottom half of her body buried in the floor. I looked up at her and her wounds began to bleed like crazy. I screamed and that’s when my folks and a few of the nurses came running into the room. When they turned the light on, Clarissa was gone.
My parents and the nurses in my room tried to tell me that it was just a dream, that there was no way Clarissa Feingold could’ve been sitting much less standing next to me, her body buried in the floor up to the waist. It bothered me either way whether I believed my own eyes or their version of what I just saw. I much preferred to think that Clarissa was there even with the creepiness factor. But what bothered me was how they mentioned her name.
“Well, if she wasn’t here, then where is she?” I asked. My parents and the nurses looked at each other with sadness that put ice cubes in my stomach. “Where is she, God damnit?” I yelled.
“Adam,” my mother said as she walked around to where Clarissa may or may not have been, “you were in a coma for four days. You need to rest and let the doctors and nurses take care of you.”
“I was out for four days? Alright, whatever. I just wanna know where my girlfriend is.”
I never referred to Clarissa as my girlfriend and they all looked at eachother again with even more sadness than before. My mother put her hand to her face and took off like a fucking bat out of Hell. My Dad turned to me for a second then took off after my mother.
“Where’s Clarissa?” I asked one of the nurses as she checked some machine. She put her head down before turning to me and sighed.
“She was killed in the accident, Honey. Her family’s funeral was yesterday. I’m so sorry.”
I got to sit in bed for the next day or two, my thoughts occasionally interrupted by Mom and Dad coming in, nurses coming back and forth to give me medicine that I pretended to take before spitting it out in the toilet. Some of it may have been for pain but I didn’t give a shit. I welcomed the pain. It helped clarify my thoughts. I sank into a pit of depression finding out that the girl I love was killed but no one ever told me what happened to her parents and why and how the entire family could’ve been wiped out in two different places on the same night was never explained to me.
Finally, the same nurse who broke to me the horrible news of Clarissa’s death came in and asked both my parents and me if a Boston City homicide detective named Ed Coffey could talk to me. I desperately wanted to talk to him, too, anyone whose name wasn’t Moss or wore crepe shoes carrying medicine I didn’t need. I practically demanded that they bring him in even before my folks said it was OK.
The poor kid looked like an anime doll someone threw out a car window and that got run over by traffic. I pulled up a chair next to him and asked him how he was. He just stared at me, tears standing in his big green eyes and simply asked me what happened. Even though I was there to question him about why Clarissa Feingold took off and led the Braintree police on a high speed pursuit, years of experience interrogating suspects and witnesses taught me that if you want to get a little, you got to give a little. The truth was what the kid needed, in my estimation, although I could see why they’d embargo the flow of information to him considering what the boy had been through.
So I told him in the gentlest way I could about what happened to his girlfriend. However, when you’re informing someone of how a loved one died it’s really no different than using a fucking sledgehammer that’s covered with velvet. The blows are just as crushing.
Considering that the house was still full of a bunch of underaged minors who were obviously under the influence and that there was a party at the Congressman’s house on Halloween night, my guess was that the Feingold girl panicked when she saw the cops there to tell her about her parents’ deaths. Of course, she had no way of knowing that and had assumed they were there just to break up the party and maybe throw her and her friends in jail over the illegal alcohol until they could get bailed out by their folks. I never stopped to consider the pressure that the child of a politician holding national office would have to live under, meeting higher standards than other kids, having to keep up unreasonably perfect appearances.
The Moss kid’s eyes got wider than bed pans when I gave him the basics of what happened to the Feingolds. All things considered, the girl was killed in an almost ordinary, pedestrian way compared to her folks. Her neck was broken instantly when the Range Rover flipped.
“So, why did your girlfriend hit the gas when she saw that cruiser?”
“I dunno, Detective,” he murmured. “She just said she wasn’t going back. She kept saying it over and over.”
I wondered whether she meant going back home into the waiting arms of the police or back to the hospital and the waiting arms of the psychiatric nursing staff. Either way, her refusal to go back made sense.
“So she never knew that her folks were dead?” I rhetorically asked.
“No. How could she? She tried calling them and they never picked up.” That also made sense. When the coroner’s office began picking up the bodies we heard cell phones going off one by one, especially after the news broke of the mass suicide. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I ever heard and it briefly reminded me of the 9/11 firefighters’ locating beacons going off long after they were buried by tons of rubble at Ground Zero.
Strictly speaking, I really had no business talking to this Adam Moss kid because the odds were slim to none that he could shed any light on what happened in Boston. Still, he was the last one to be seen alive with the recently deceased daughter of two of the victims. I was just about to get up and Adam asked me as I flipped my notebook shut, “Then please explain to me how come Clarissa was sitting or standing next to my bed when I came out of my coma?”
I asked the nursing staff if they could call up the surveillance video of Adam Moss at the moment he woke up and they did. The black and white video was a bit grainy but I could see the kid open his eyes and continue lying on his back as he looked at the ceiling, apparently deep in thought. After a minute or so, he turned to his right and reached out with both his hands as if to touch or hold something or somebody that wasn’t there. He then appeared to kiss thin air. Then I could see his lips move, holding a one-sided conversation. Reaching out and kissing thin air again. Eventually, after a few minutes of this tragic pantomime, he looked at something on or near the floor and freaked out just moments before the nursing staff and his parents rushed in. There were a couple of other things in the video that tickled the back of my mind but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I told the nursing staff to tell the security company to save that video in case I needed to see it again.
Before the Mosses gave me their permission to question their son, they took me outside and told me a bit about his history.
“Look, Detective Coffey,” his mother had begun, “Adam has a… history, let’s call it.”
“A history of what?” I asked.
“He claims to have seen ghosts on several occasions.”
Okaaay… “OK,” I said matter-of-factly.
“It goes back several years. When Adam was about 10, my husband and I lost a child during childbirth…”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Moss.”
“Thank you. And Adam claimed to have seen his brother standing on top of his own grave. He even said he saw the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. That’s what killed our baby.”
A chill had gone up my spine. This was already turning into more than I’d bargained for. The few words I’d exchanged with the kid led me to think that he was as lucid as could be expected under the circumstances, especially after finding out that his girlfriend was just killed. But why have a delusion of seeing the ghost of a girlfriend whom you think is still alive? Adam never claimed that he saw her ghost. In fact, no one ever mentioned the word, least of all his parents.
“Our son was obsessed with the spirit world and ghosts and every now and then he’ll insist he’d seen one,” his father said. “Finally, when he was about 15, he made a suicide attempt…”
I wasn’t sure at this point if I wanted to hear more about the family’s most confidential medical issues but all the same, I had to know what I was dealing with when I went to question him, even if he wasn’t a material witness in a homicide investigation that may not be a homicide investigation.
“That’s when he met Clarissa in the psychiatric wing of Newton Wellesley Hospital. The two of them struck up an instant friendship and they seemed to be good for each other. We figured the family’s also Jewish, solid, upstanding citizens, our Congressman, even. We had no problem with them seeing each other. Then, this…” Mr. Moss had raised then helplessly dropped his arm in the direction of his son’s room and looked as if he was about to cry. I closed my notebook, even though I hadn’t written anything into it before getting their permission the question their son. In light of what they’d told me, writing down their disclosures would’ve been redundant. I wasn’t very likely to forget much if any of it.
The kid could’ve been having a dream or a hallucination like they all said, although it’s odd to have a sleepwalking episode right after coming out of a coma. But it wasn’t until I got back to my office and again looked at the autopsy photos of the Feingold girl that I realized the Moss boy had perfectly described Clarissa’s wounds down to their exact locations, wounds that he was never conscious to see. I got this crazy idea that perhaps the people at the Sheraton were frightened to death and barely began to speculate why before dismissing the idea as absurd.
Braintree, MA, November 7, 2009
The night before the hospital turned me loose, I heard Clarissa’s voice in my ear. If she was in bed with me, she would’ve been behind me and I was too scared shitless to turn around and it didn’t matter much if I was dreaming or not. The first, last and only thing I heard her whisper was, “Free us, Adam. We are not pebbles.” I had two blankets and a sheet on top of me and I felt like I was sleeping naked on the tundra of the Antarctic.
One drawback to being a suicide boy is that your parents tend to fucking coddle you and keep shit from you. When you find out about it, they then justify it by saying that it’s all for your own good but that’s horseshit. For instance, I think I had a right to know that I had a near death experience before my four day-long coma. Little omissions like that kind of make me tweak out.
I found out about my being clinically dead after the accident when I heard my Mom talking to my sister Laura on the phone after I got home. It ticked me off a little that she couldn’t make it to be with the rest of the family and even from Mom’s end of the conversation I could almost hear Laura using her secret agent government job as an excuse as to why she couldn’t come up to see me.
Turns out she may have had a good excuse, after all: She was in Baghdad, Iraq doing something for the CIA or NSA or one of those other alphabet spy outfits. She was never very forthcoming about what she did or who she worked for and, given her line of work, who could blame her?
But while Laura wasn’t there for me to tweak out on, Mom and Dad were and I confronted them right away.
“Adam, Honey, try to look at it from our point of view,” Mom said, “You needed to be protected and you weren’t strong enough yet to hear about that, especially after hearing about Clarissa.”
“Protected from what or who, Mom? Did you ever think that maybe I’m a little bit tougher than you and Dad think? That I may not be the same kid who opened up his wrists two years ago? You keep telling me to look it from your point of view. But did either of you ever once try to look at shit from my point of view?”
“Adam, was it really all that important for you to know? The important thing is that you made it back and you’re safe at home here with us.”
Well, yeah, it’s important. Because the more time that went by, the more I was convinced that when they brought me back from the dead at the accident site I didn’t come back alone.
I was so totally out of it that I wasn’t even aware there was a hand on my arm much less whose it was. My head felt like I landed on it without a helmet after a grind rail gone horribly wrong. The left side of my rib cage screamed out in protest every time I inhaled. I immediately tried to reconstruct the accident. OK, I said to myself, my head hurts because I wasn’t wearing a seat belt and when the car turned over, I got dumped on the roof. The left side of my ribs hurt probably because it hit the steering wheel or Clarissa’s elbow when we… Clarissa!
I tried to sit up and I felt the pressure on my arm for the first time. I turned to my right and saw Clarissa sitting beside me. I immediately took her face in my hands and kissed her. Her flesh was cool as was her attitude but she still kissed me back.
“Clarissa, babe! Are you OK?” She didn’t say a thing but just continued smiling at me in a sweet but sad way. As my eyes got adjusted I saw that she had a few wounds on her face and hands but what struck me as odd was that none of them were treated. No bandages, no stitches, no nothing.
“I miss you, Adam,” she finally said only she said it in such a soft whisper that I could barely hear her. The present tense also hit me as a little odd. It would’ve made more sense if she said, “I missed you,” past tense. But just seeing her next to my bed was almost more than I could handle. I was just glad she was there and alright.
“What happened?”
“You went back,” she whispered again. “I miss you, babe.”
I reached out to her and held her cold face in my hands again. Maybe it was the light but she seemed to be almost completely drained of color, like a character you see in an old black and white movie.
“Back from where? How long was I out?” Once again, she still refused to answer but her hand moved from my right arm to my face. It was as cool as her own face and it almost felt like she wasn’t touching me at all. When I tried to sit up again, I felt something yanking on my pecker and that’s when I noticed the catheter. I also felt embarrassed beyond words that Clarissa had to see me hooked up to something that was attached to my dick.
“We need you, Adam.”
“Who needs me?” I asked her. I could understand her saying that she needed me but who else? My folks? Yeah, where were Mom and Dad? No way they wouldn’t be here.
“Free us, Adam. Free us.” I looked at her and wondered who “Frias” was. I didn’t know anybody by that name and when I looked for the catheter bag under the bed that’s when I noticed that Clarissa wasn’t sitting next to me, after all. She was standing up, the bottom half of her body buried in the floor. I looked up at her and her wounds began to bleed like crazy. I screamed and that’s when my folks and a few of the nurses came running into the room. When they turned the light on, Clarissa was gone.
My parents and the nurses in my room tried to tell me that it was just a dream, that there was no way Clarissa Feingold could’ve been sitting much less standing next to me, her body buried in the floor up to the waist. It bothered me either way whether I believed my own eyes or their version of what I just saw. I much preferred to think that Clarissa was there even with the creepiness factor. But what bothered me was how they mentioned her name.
“Well, if she wasn’t here, then where is she?” I asked. My parents and the nurses looked at each other with sadness that put ice cubes in my stomach. “Where is she, God damnit?” I yelled.
“Adam,” my mother said as she walked around to where Clarissa may or may not have been, “you were in a coma for four days. You need to rest and let the doctors and nurses take care of you.”
“I was out for four days? Alright, whatever. I just wanna know where my girlfriend is.”
I never referred to Clarissa as my girlfriend and they all looked at eachother again with even more sadness than before. My mother put her hand to her face and took off like a fucking bat out of Hell. My Dad turned to me for a second then took off after my mother.
“Where’s Clarissa?” I asked one of the nurses as she checked some machine. She put her head down before turning to me and sighed.
“She was killed in the accident, Honey. Her family’s funeral was yesterday. I’m so sorry.”
I got to sit in bed for the next day or two, my thoughts occasionally interrupted by Mom and Dad coming in, nurses coming back and forth to give me medicine that I pretended to take before spitting it out in the toilet. Some of it may have been for pain but I didn’t give a shit. I welcomed the pain. It helped clarify my thoughts. I sank into a pit of depression finding out that the girl I love was killed but no one ever told me what happened to her parents and why and how the entire family could’ve been wiped out in two different places on the same night was never explained to me.
Finally, the same nurse who broke to me the horrible news of Clarissa’s death came in and asked both my parents and me if a Boston City homicide detective named Ed Coffey could talk to me. I desperately wanted to talk to him, too, anyone whose name wasn’t Moss or wore crepe shoes carrying medicine I didn’t need. I practically demanded that they bring him in even before my folks said it was OK.
The poor kid looked like an anime doll someone threw out a car window and that got run over by traffic. I pulled up a chair next to him and asked him how he was. He just stared at me, tears standing in his big green eyes and simply asked me what happened. Even though I was there to question him about why Clarissa Feingold took off and led the Braintree police on a high speed pursuit, years of experience interrogating suspects and witnesses taught me that if you want to get a little, you got to give a little. The truth was what the kid needed, in my estimation, although I could see why they’d embargo the flow of information to him considering what the boy had been through.
So I told him in the gentlest way I could about what happened to his girlfriend. However, when you’re informing someone of how a loved one died it’s really no different than using a fucking sledgehammer that’s covered with velvet. The blows are just as crushing.
Considering that the house was still full of a bunch of underaged minors who were obviously under the influence and that there was a party at the Congressman’s house on Halloween night, my guess was that the Feingold girl panicked when she saw the cops there to tell her about her parents’ deaths. Of course, she had no way of knowing that and had assumed they were there just to break up the party and maybe throw her and her friends in jail over the illegal alcohol until they could get bailed out by their folks. I never stopped to consider the pressure that the child of a politician holding national office would have to live under, meeting higher standards than other kids, having to keep up unreasonably perfect appearances.
The Moss kid’s eyes got wider than bed pans when I gave him the basics of what happened to the Feingolds. All things considered, the girl was killed in an almost ordinary, pedestrian way compared to her folks. Her neck was broken instantly when the Range Rover flipped.
“So, why did your girlfriend hit the gas when she saw that cruiser?”
“I dunno, Detective,” he murmured. “She just said she wasn’t going back. She kept saying it over and over.”
I wondered whether she meant going back home into the waiting arms of the police or back to the hospital and the waiting arms of the psychiatric nursing staff. Either way, her refusal to go back made sense.
“So she never knew that her folks were dead?” I rhetorically asked.
“No. How could she? She tried calling them and they never picked up.” That also made sense. When the coroner’s office began picking up the bodies we heard cell phones going off one by one, especially after the news broke of the mass suicide. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I ever heard and it briefly reminded me of the 9/11 firefighters’ locating beacons going off long after they were buried by tons of rubble at Ground Zero.
Strictly speaking, I really had no business talking to this Adam Moss kid because the odds were slim to none that he could shed any light on what happened in Boston. Still, he was the last one to be seen alive with the recently deceased daughter of two of the victims. I was just about to get up and Adam asked me as I flipped my notebook shut, “Then please explain to me how come Clarissa was sitting or standing next to my bed when I came out of my coma?”
I asked the nursing staff if they could call up the surveillance video of Adam Moss at the moment he woke up and they did. The black and white video was a bit grainy but I could see the kid open his eyes and continue lying on his back as he looked at the ceiling, apparently deep in thought. After a minute or so, he turned to his right and reached out with both his hands as if to touch or hold something or somebody that wasn’t there. He then appeared to kiss thin air. Then I could see his lips move, holding a one-sided conversation. Reaching out and kissing thin air again. Eventually, after a few minutes of this tragic pantomime, he looked at something on or near the floor and freaked out just moments before the nursing staff and his parents rushed in. There were a couple of other things in the video that tickled the back of my mind but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I told the nursing staff to tell the security company to save that video in case I needed to see it again.
Before the Mosses gave me their permission to question their son, they took me outside and told me a bit about his history.
“Look, Detective Coffey,” his mother had begun, “Adam has a… history, let’s call it.”
“A history of what?” I asked.
“He claims to have seen ghosts on several occasions.”
Okaaay… “OK,” I said matter-of-factly.
“It goes back several years. When Adam was about 10, my husband and I lost a child during childbirth…”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Moss.”
“Thank you. And Adam claimed to have seen his brother standing on top of his own grave. He even said he saw the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. That’s what killed our baby.”
A chill had gone up my spine. This was already turning into more than I’d bargained for. The few words I’d exchanged with the kid led me to think that he was as lucid as could be expected under the circumstances, especially after finding out that his girlfriend was just killed. But why have a delusion of seeing the ghost of a girlfriend whom you think is still alive? Adam never claimed that he saw her ghost. In fact, no one ever mentioned the word, least of all his parents.
“Our son was obsessed with the spirit world and ghosts and every now and then he’ll insist he’d seen one,” his father said. “Finally, when he was about 15, he made a suicide attempt…”
I wasn’t sure at this point if I wanted to hear more about the family’s most confidential medical issues but all the same, I had to know what I was dealing with when I went to question him, even if he wasn’t a material witness in a homicide investigation that may not be a homicide investigation.
“That’s when he met Clarissa in the psychiatric wing of Newton Wellesley Hospital. The two of them struck up an instant friendship and they seemed to be good for each other. We figured the family’s also Jewish, solid, upstanding citizens, our Congressman, even. We had no problem with them seeing each other. Then, this…” Mr. Moss had raised then helplessly dropped his arm in the direction of his son’s room and looked as if he was about to cry. I closed my notebook, even though I hadn’t written anything into it before getting their permission the question their son. In light of what they’d told me, writing down their disclosures would’ve been redundant. I wasn’t very likely to forget much if any of it.
The kid could’ve been having a dream or a hallucination like they all said, although it’s odd to have a sleepwalking episode right after coming out of a coma. But it wasn’t until I got back to my office and again looked at the autopsy photos of the Feingold girl that I realized the Moss boy had perfectly described Clarissa’s wounds down to their exact locations, wounds that he was never conscious to see. I got this crazy idea that perhaps the people at the Sheraton were frightened to death and barely began to speculate why before dismissing the idea as absurd.
Braintree, MA, November 7, 2009
The night before the hospital turned me loose, I heard Clarissa’s voice in my ear. If she was in bed with me, she would’ve been behind me and I was too scared shitless to turn around and it didn’t matter much if I was dreaming or not. The first, last and only thing I heard her whisper was, “Free us, Adam. We are not pebbles.” I had two blankets and a sheet on top of me and I felt like I was sleeping naked on the tundra of the Antarctic.
One drawback to being a suicide boy is that your parents tend to fucking coddle you and keep shit from you. When you find out about it, they then justify it by saying that it’s all for your own good but that’s horseshit. For instance, I think I had a right to know that I had a near death experience before my four day-long coma. Little omissions like that kind of make me tweak out.
I found out about my being clinically dead after the accident when I heard my Mom talking to my sister Laura on the phone after I got home. It ticked me off a little that she couldn’t make it to be with the rest of the family and even from Mom’s end of the conversation I could almost hear Laura using her secret agent government job as an excuse as to why she couldn’t come up to see me.
Turns out she may have had a good excuse, after all: She was in Baghdad, Iraq doing something for the CIA or NSA or one of those other alphabet spy outfits. She was never very forthcoming about what she did or who she worked for and, given her line of work, who could blame her?
But while Laura wasn’t there for me to tweak out on, Mom and Dad were and I confronted them right away.
“Adam, Honey, try to look at it from our point of view,” Mom said, “You needed to be protected and you weren’t strong enough yet to hear about that, especially after hearing about Clarissa.”
“Protected from what or who, Mom? Did you ever think that maybe I’m a little bit tougher than you and Dad think? That I may not be the same kid who opened up his wrists two years ago? You keep telling me to look it from your point of view. But did either of you ever once try to look at shit from my point of view?”
“Adam, was it really all that important for you to know? The important thing is that you made it back and you’re safe at home here with us.”
Well, yeah, it’s important. Because the more time that went by, the more I was convinced that when they brought me back from the dead at the accident site I didn’t come back alone.
The Bone Bridge: Chapter Four
November 1, 2009
With all due respect to other professions, being a cop, especially a homicide detective, has got to be the most frustrating job on earth. We’re constantly at a disadvantage, unable to use our skills until someone gets killed. Even the happiest of resolutions is cold comfort for the surviving relatives and the best we can say is that we took a killer off the streets before they killed anyone else. It’s like trying to tie up a tourniquet on a spurting wound only after the victim has lost a lot of blood. All you can do is damage control.
We’re also at a disadvantage in that we’re playing catch up with a perp who usually has some nominal skills in covering up after themselves. And even the simplest of timelines and the most unsophisticated of MOs still have to be painstakingly reconstructed, like pulling a handful of paper strips out of a shredder. You may be able, with a lot of tape and even more patience, to reconstruct the original document but you’ll rarely if ever get it perfect.
Then there are cases that are simply nightmares, cases involving dead bodies that yield few clues and offer nothing substantial or plausible in the way of motive, means and opportunity. The mass suicide at the Sheraton on Halloween night was one of those cases. For starters, we didn’t know whether to classify it as a mass suicide or a mass murder. There were no murder weapons, little in the way of useful forensic evidence, no apparent motive and the locked doors and secluded penthouse offered virtually no opportunity.
It’s the kind of case that makes other homicide detectives wonder if they should’ve taken that civil service exam to become mailmen, instead.
I especially was even more at a disadvantage than usual because I was HALO’d into this case with three hours of sleep and only Rodriguez’s horrible coffee to compensate for my lack of REM.
“Who the fuck made this coffee? Lucretia Borgia?” I looked around and Roddy smirked. I’d always suspected that Rodriguez made the most horrible coffee on earth just to make our chief break down and use some of his discretionary budget to buy us a coffee pod maker or at least a French Press. If his coffee was any worse, Internal Affairs would be investigating him and CSI would have our coffee maker at their lab.
I walked to the fax machine and was disappointed to find nothing from the Coroner’s Office. The sole survivor we’d found in the penthouse was Sylvia Feingold, Congressman Feingold’s wife. She’d managed to say one word before she’d passed away: Clarissa. She was calling out for the couple’s only child, their daughter Clarissa. The fax we were waiting for was the autopsy results from the ME and we’d already alerted the Braintree PD to go to the Congressman’s house to give their daughter the bad news. I already felt sorry for the poor kid. She was only 17 years old and already had one suicide attempt to her credit by the time she was 15.
As with Senator Dumont, Congressman Feingold abandoned his wife and leaped out of one of the windows on the floor below the penthouse. As it turned out, he was the one wearing the angel costume that left behind the feather we’d found at one of the crime scenes. So far, that was the only mystery we were able to solve. Up to this point, we came up dry again and again. I was beginning to feel like an idiot put in a bare round room and told to look for the penny in the corner.
I lurched back to my desk and checked my email. Ron the CSI guy had just sent me the picture attachment of Mrs. Dumont’s dead face with the ice crystals on it. I opened up the file and magnified it but it told me nothing usable especially when pixilation became an issue and ruined the resolution. I was utterly incapable of understanding what could’ve caused the crystallization on her skin then filed it away in the ever-growing To Do list in the back of my mind.
Braintree, MA, November 1, 2009
Some of the other kids who didn’t pass out had gone home, still leaving behind about a dozen others who’d either gone under or were about to. Just on the off chance Clarissa’s folks would come home, we had to get rid of them as well as all the beer cans and I volunteered to help her. In order to get a 20 on their location, Clarissa tried calling both her parents’ cell phones but they never picked up, which was odd. What was even more fucked up was that they hadn’t once called in to check up on their daughter. If anything, Clarissa’s folks were even more neurotic Jewish parents than my own, which is saying something. After all, she was their only child and, like me, had a “history” as professional people like to euphemistically say.
Before we got started with the garbage collection, she and I stood in front of one of the bedroom doors, our arms wrapped around each other’s waists. My little Trojan soldier finally remembered half his purpose in life and was beginning to rise to attention. Clarissa had taken off her bandanna and had pulled her gleaming red hair back in its usual high and tight ponytail and looked smoking hot. As we stood in the upstairs hallway, we swayed gently from side to side, her left hand around my back but her right on my chest, our crotches barely touching. It was like she was pulling me toward her while ready to push me away at any moment.
It was obvious she wanted to but she was freaked out by the thought of her parents coming home at any moment plus there were still a few of our idiot friends downstairs who were technically awake and slurring stupid comments to each other.
“Adam, it doesn’t feel right,” she half said/half whispered. “Not tonight, baby.”
I didn’t want to press her too hard on it and give her the impression that I only wanted to bury my little Trojan soldier with full honors ending with a ten squirt salute. Still, this was the closest we’d ever come to actually making out and neither one of us had ever been this close to walking into a bedroom together. Look at it from my point of view, dude: It was like standing between third and home plate with no outs and winding up getting stranded. So near and yet so far.
I always loved and always will love how she could so perfectly and smoothly pull her hair back without even using a brush and I stroked the drawn back part of her hair, playing with her perfect ponytail. I then hugged her and said, “OK. When the time is right.” Looks like Danica Patrick would get some attention tonight, after all. Clarissa whispered, “Thank you, babe. I knew you’d understand.” I nodded and my little soldier wilted back into parade rest if not totally at ease.
“Let’s take the garbage out. Then we’ll get the beer cans later.” She laughed and we started our way downstairs. It looked like we wouldn’t be getting help from any of our remaining friends even though Clarissa set up garbage bags all over the house for the beer cans and told everyone to use them. Of course, they didn’t and the morons left blue and silver beer cans on the mantle, the furniture, the floor, even leaving some outside. One of her biggest worries was that some got spilled on the rug or on the couches and chairs. The last thing we wanted to do was hunt the entire house for wet spots, blot up stale, piss-warm beer and to get out deodorizer and a hair dryer.
Most of the beer cans were a quarter to almost totally full and we schlepped around the house, walking over lifeless bodies and throwing aluminum and beer into trash bags. While we were collecting beer cans like a couple of rag pickers, we asked them to leave, our voices getting louder and angrier when they didn’t listen. I even gently kicked a couple of them in the ass.
Obviously, we couldn’t throw out 96 beer cans in her folks’ trash can but Clarissa had that covered. She knew of an unlocked dumpster across town and we could pitch them in that. We found about 5 or 6 unopened beers in the fridge and we took them, too.
“You assholes better be gone by the time me and Adam get back. You all got five minutes.” Few of them listened. “I mean it!” she said much louder. “I’ll call the cops and tell them you invaded my house. Don’t forget, you’re all hammered and wouldn’t pass a breathalyzer test and we’re taking away all the evidence.” She hoisted a bag to punctuate her point. “It’ll look like you were already wasted when you got here.”
At the mention of the police, some of our friends stirred from the floor and the furniture and began looking for their skateboards. Of course, Clarissa wouldn’t call the cops even if her old man was a Congressman. They’d alert her folks, they’d come home sooner and want to know why a bunch of drunken kids suddenly showed up at her door on Halloween night. But they were too baked to put that together.
“It helps having a Dad who’s a politician.” she sweetly smiled as she took the keys for their Range Rover off the hall table. “You learn from the best how to bluff and play hard ball.”
We loaded the two contractor bags of beer cans into the back and Clarissa backed out of the driveway. Like she said, there was a construction site with an open dumpster and we tossed both bags into it. By the time we got back to her street, the Braintree police were already in her driveway.
“Oh shit!” she said, putting her hand over her mouth and slamming on the brakes. The front door was wide open and the cops were already inside. We saw them talking to our friends and they gestured this way and that, probably telling them that we just took off but didn’t know where we were.
“Fuck. Now what?”
“No way am I going back there,” she said. Clarissa put the Rover in reverse and backed up where we just came from, did a three point turn in a neighbor’s driveway and peeled off.
“Clarissa, you can’t just take off. That’s your house.”
“No, no fuckin’ way,” she said. We were both assuming that the cops showed up when one of the neighbors complained about the noise and the sight of our stupid friends outside. I mean, it was obvious that we were having a party and maybe one of them called her folks and the police. Either way, she was totally boned if no one else. I felt guilty because I was part of the party.
I was about to tell her that she had to face the music and go back when a second Braintree cruiser passed us. The cop must’ve recognized the congressman’s car because he immediately put on his lights and siren and turned around. Then Clarissa did the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen her do: She hit the gas pedal and tried to run away. I wondered at that moment if we were going to wind up on one of those tabloid shows about stupid criminals and car chases narrated by some smarmy smart ass.
“Clarissa? Honey? This isn’t a good idea. It’s only a party, after all. It’s not like anyone died or anything. But if you try to run away from the cops that’s exactly what may happen!”
All she did was look behind her, her ponytail almost whipping my face twice and hit the gas harder even as she took a sharp left. By this time, we were back at the construction site and she never saw a gravel pit that was on my side. The Range Rover was already practically on two wheels when she took that turn doing 70 or so and the pile turned us over on the driver side. It suddenly occurred to me that neither of us was wearing our seat belts because we were just going on a five minute drive. My body landed on top of her as the car began to roll and the last things I remembered hearing was Clarissa screaming, glass breaking and police sirens.
With all due respect to other professions, being a cop, especially a homicide detective, has got to be the most frustrating job on earth. We’re constantly at a disadvantage, unable to use our skills until someone gets killed. Even the happiest of resolutions is cold comfort for the surviving relatives and the best we can say is that we took a killer off the streets before they killed anyone else. It’s like trying to tie up a tourniquet on a spurting wound only after the victim has lost a lot of blood. All you can do is damage control.
We’re also at a disadvantage in that we’re playing catch up with a perp who usually has some nominal skills in covering up after themselves. And even the simplest of timelines and the most unsophisticated of MOs still have to be painstakingly reconstructed, like pulling a handful of paper strips out of a shredder. You may be able, with a lot of tape and even more patience, to reconstruct the original document but you’ll rarely if ever get it perfect.
Then there are cases that are simply nightmares, cases involving dead bodies that yield few clues and offer nothing substantial or plausible in the way of motive, means and opportunity. The mass suicide at the Sheraton on Halloween night was one of those cases. For starters, we didn’t know whether to classify it as a mass suicide or a mass murder. There were no murder weapons, little in the way of useful forensic evidence, no apparent motive and the locked doors and secluded penthouse offered virtually no opportunity.
It’s the kind of case that makes other homicide detectives wonder if they should’ve taken that civil service exam to become mailmen, instead.
I especially was even more at a disadvantage than usual because I was HALO’d into this case with three hours of sleep and only Rodriguez’s horrible coffee to compensate for my lack of REM.
“Who the fuck made this coffee? Lucretia Borgia?” I looked around and Roddy smirked. I’d always suspected that Rodriguez made the most horrible coffee on earth just to make our chief break down and use some of his discretionary budget to buy us a coffee pod maker or at least a French Press. If his coffee was any worse, Internal Affairs would be investigating him and CSI would have our coffee maker at their lab.
I walked to the fax machine and was disappointed to find nothing from the Coroner’s Office. The sole survivor we’d found in the penthouse was Sylvia Feingold, Congressman Feingold’s wife. She’d managed to say one word before she’d passed away: Clarissa. She was calling out for the couple’s only child, their daughter Clarissa. The fax we were waiting for was the autopsy results from the ME and we’d already alerted the Braintree PD to go to the Congressman’s house to give their daughter the bad news. I already felt sorry for the poor kid. She was only 17 years old and already had one suicide attempt to her credit by the time she was 15.
As with Senator Dumont, Congressman Feingold abandoned his wife and leaped out of one of the windows on the floor below the penthouse. As it turned out, he was the one wearing the angel costume that left behind the feather we’d found at one of the crime scenes. So far, that was the only mystery we were able to solve. Up to this point, we came up dry again and again. I was beginning to feel like an idiot put in a bare round room and told to look for the penny in the corner.
I lurched back to my desk and checked my email. Ron the CSI guy had just sent me the picture attachment of Mrs. Dumont’s dead face with the ice crystals on it. I opened up the file and magnified it but it told me nothing usable especially when pixilation became an issue and ruined the resolution. I was utterly incapable of understanding what could’ve caused the crystallization on her skin then filed it away in the ever-growing To Do list in the back of my mind.
Braintree, MA, November 1, 2009
Some of the other kids who didn’t pass out had gone home, still leaving behind about a dozen others who’d either gone under or were about to. Just on the off chance Clarissa’s folks would come home, we had to get rid of them as well as all the beer cans and I volunteered to help her. In order to get a 20 on their location, Clarissa tried calling both her parents’ cell phones but they never picked up, which was odd. What was even more fucked up was that they hadn’t once called in to check up on their daughter. If anything, Clarissa’s folks were even more neurotic Jewish parents than my own, which is saying something. After all, she was their only child and, like me, had a “history” as professional people like to euphemistically say.
Before we got started with the garbage collection, she and I stood in front of one of the bedroom doors, our arms wrapped around each other’s waists. My little Trojan soldier finally remembered half his purpose in life and was beginning to rise to attention. Clarissa had taken off her bandanna and had pulled her gleaming red hair back in its usual high and tight ponytail and looked smoking hot. As we stood in the upstairs hallway, we swayed gently from side to side, her left hand around my back but her right on my chest, our crotches barely touching. It was like she was pulling me toward her while ready to push me away at any moment.
It was obvious she wanted to but she was freaked out by the thought of her parents coming home at any moment plus there were still a few of our idiot friends downstairs who were technically awake and slurring stupid comments to each other.
“Adam, it doesn’t feel right,” she half said/half whispered. “Not tonight, baby.”
I didn’t want to press her too hard on it and give her the impression that I only wanted to bury my little Trojan soldier with full honors ending with a ten squirt salute. Still, this was the closest we’d ever come to actually making out and neither one of us had ever been this close to walking into a bedroom together. Look at it from my point of view, dude: It was like standing between third and home plate with no outs and winding up getting stranded. So near and yet so far.
I always loved and always will love how she could so perfectly and smoothly pull her hair back without even using a brush and I stroked the drawn back part of her hair, playing with her perfect ponytail. I then hugged her and said, “OK. When the time is right.” Looks like Danica Patrick would get some attention tonight, after all. Clarissa whispered, “Thank you, babe. I knew you’d understand.” I nodded and my little soldier wilted back into parade rest if not totally at ease.
“Let’s take the garbage out. Then we’ll get the beer cans later.” She laughed and we started our way downstairs. It looked like we wouldn’t be getting help from any of our remaining friends even though Clarissa set up garbage bags all over the house for the beer cans and told everyone to use them. Of course, they didn’t and the morons left blue and silver beer cans on the mantle, the furniture, the floor, even leaving some outside. One of her biggest worries was that some got spilled on the rug or on the couches and chairs. The last thing we wanted to do was hunt the entire house for wet spots, blot up stale, piss-warm beer and to get out deodorizer and a hair dryer.
Most of the beer cans were a quarter to almost totally full and we schlepped around the house, walking over lifeless bodies and throwing aluminum and beer into trash bags. While we were collecting beer cans like a couple of rag pickers, we asked them to leave, our voices getting louder and angrier when they didn’t listen. I even gently kicked a couple of them in the ass.
Obviously, we couldn’t throw out 96 beer cans in her folks’ trash can but Clarissa had that covered. She knew of an unlocked dumpster across town and we could pitch them in that. We found about 5 or 6 unopened beers in the fridge and we took them, too.
“You assholes better be gone by the time me and Adam get back. You all got five minutes.” Few of them listened. “I mean it!” she said much louder. “I’ll call the cops and tell them you invaded my house. Don’t forget, you’re all hammered and wouldn’t pass a breathalyzer test and we’re taking away all the evidence.” She hoisted a bag to punctuate her point. “It’ll look like you were already wasted when you got here.”
At the mention of the police, some of our friends stirred from the floor and the furniture and began looking for their skateboards. Of course, Clarissa wouldn’t call the cops even if her old man was a Congressman. They’d alert her folks, they’d come home sooner and want to know why a bunch of drunken kids suddenly showed up at her door on Halloween night. But they were too baked to put that together.
“It helps having a Dad who’s a politician.” she sweetly smiled as she took the keys for their Range Rover off the hall table. “You learn from the best how to bluff and play hard ball.”
We loaded the two contractor bags of beer cans into the back and Clarissa backed out of the driveway. Like she said, there was a construction site with an open dumpster and we tossed both bags into it. By the time we got back to her street, the Braintree police were already in her driveway.
“Oh shit!” she said, putting her hand over her mouth and slamming on the brakes. The front door was wide open and the cops were already inside. We saw them talking to our friends and they gestured this way and that, probably telling them that we just took off but didn’t know where we were.
“Fuck. Now what?”
“No way am I going back there,” she said. Clarissa put the Rover in reverse and backed up where we just came from, did a three point turn in a neighbor’s driveway and peeled off.
“Clarissa, you can’t just take off. That’s your house.”
“No, no fuckin’ way,” she said. We were both assuming that the cops showed up when one of the neighbors complained about the noise and the sight of our stupid friends outside. I mean, it was obvious that we were having a party and maybe one of them called her folks and the police. Either way, she was totally boned if no one else. I felt guilty because I was part of the party.
I was about to tell her that she had to face the music and go back when a second Braintree cruiser passed us. The cop must’ve recognized the congressman’s car because he immediately put on his lights and siren and turned around. Then Clarissa did the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen her do: She hit the gas pedal and tried to run away. I wondered at that moment if we were going to wind up on one of those tabloid shows about stupid criminals and car chases narrated by some smarmy smart ass.
“Clarissa? Honey? This isn’t a good idea. It’s only a party, after all. It’s not like anyone died or anything. But if you try to run away from the cops that’s exactly what may happen!”
All she did was look behind her, her ponytail almost whipping my face twice and hit the gas harder even as she took a sharp left. By this time, we were back at the construction site and she never saw a gravel pit that was on my side. The Range Rover was already practically on two wheels when she took that turn doing 70 or so and the pile turned us over on the driver side. It suddenly occurred to me that neither of us was wearing our seat belts because we were just going on a five minute drive. My body landed on top of her as the car began to roll and the last things I remembered hearing was Clarissa screaming, glass breaking and police sirens.
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