Faces: old men—Elkaim, Uncle Herschel—turning their sorrowful Jewish countenances upon me, then fading into dark—
Faces: the teenage boys in the canyon, posing for their shoot—solemn, sage—they saw it coming—
“Tell me what you see.”
I groaned “faces” and hurt burst inside me like a super-bubble, spreading its ache through my limbs. “I knew him,” I confessed, “as a child.”
“You knew Emil.”
“Yes…I…looked up to him.”
“I see. So presented with this case—”
“…to make my uncle happy. My late uncle.”
“Your…dead uncle?”
“My dead uncle,” I said, eyes still closed, clutching at a velvet throw pillow now, its softness throbbing in my grip like a beating heart. “He adopted me. I don’t feel good.”
“Stay with me, Adam. What you are feeling is nothing more than extreme openness. And even that passes—you’ll miss it when it’s gone.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“Why…would your uncle adopt you?”
“My mother was arrested for vagrancy. Parent services intervened.”
“I see. Did your uncle love you? Or was he just engaging in filial obligation?”
“He loved me.”
“He did.”
“Yes. Too much.”
I felt speedy shivering from within, but Bahari’s presence contained the dream-swirl, framed it like the movie-house walls.
“We…had a falling out,” I said. “Uncle Herschel wanted me to be a winner.”
“A winner at what? Not at detective work.”
“Songwriting. But…I sucked. I didn’t have what it takes, I bombed, I gave up. We fought. Then…he died. But I don’t see what any of this—”
“Cause of death?”
The question had a businesslike quality I didn’t quite like. Nausea—to snuff it, I blurted, “My uncle died of shame.”
A grunt of approval. “Shame for what.”
“For the way I let life blow me around.”
“Say more.”
“The way I got lost.”
“More.”
“My lostness, my weakness. Is this going—”
“Weakness meaning—”
“Everything I promised. And didn’t deliver.”
“Hmm.” It was a hum of inquiry that wouldn’t let me budge, and I felt even more weak, immobilized—he had to see it. He said, “Lay down, Adam. Nobody’s going to mess with you. You’re safe here.”
I lay back, why not? I wasn’t going anywhere soon. But I opened my eyes. Either-or. It hardly mattered. The tin ceiling was alive like a bustling red-gold city—Hawley’s miniature-land upside-down. The last piece of my resistance kicked in.
“Doc, I still don’t see what any of this has to do with a pair of murders that happened thirty years ago. Laying here like a zonked-out blob—what the fuck? I may be amateur, but this ain’t detective work.”
“On the contrary, this is very much detective work.”
“Well, I don’t see it.”
“No—no, you don’t. Not yet. But I have a theory, Adam. You’re a bright boy, I can see that. And I think there is a decent chance you may have a deep line into why all this happened—”
“The why behind the why?”
“Now you’ve got it. Problem is, right now your lens is too fogged up…with pain, resentment, the usual horseshit. And that anyone can see from a mile away—it’s written all over your face.”
