A Man Overboard Read online

  “Hungry?” he asked Jack. He disappeared into the kitchen.

  Jack was still on the couch, staring into the mysteries of life as seen woven into the throw rug beneath his feet. “No,” he muttered.

  “You have to eat,” he called back.

  “Don’t you have to work?” He dropped his head and grabbed handfuls of his hair, as if pulling it might tug at his brain and unclog some vital clue.

  “It’s Saturday.”

  Saturday. It’s been a whole week? He forced himself to his feet and padded into the kitchen. In some ways, it felt like seven years had gone by and in others, just seven hours. “Cops don’t work on the weekends?”

  “Not this one.” He got some coffee brewing. “When are you supposed to go back?”

  He didn’t think he could ever go back. “The cruise was supposed to last another week.” He didn’t want to think about work. Or whatever would have to be done about his house. He didn’t care. Not right now. Not in light of Ivan’s revelation. That Anna was Stacey.

  He sat at the table and stared out into the morning, watching little birds dart around the bushes surrounding the small patio out back. What was it that the Bible said? Something about not worrying for your life, what you’ll eat, drink, or wear? That the birds don’t gather more than they need day to day and yet God takes care of them? But he’d seen birds fly into plate-glass windows and drop dead, just as he knew people were starving to death all over the world. But did that make Jesus a liar? Why did he care? Maybe it was the possibility of his wife’s death and her belief in nothing hereafter that was priming this part of his brain. The nothing hereafter was just so depressing. To think that she just blinked out of existence like she was never alive to begin with…her personality, past, feelings…all gone forever. Nonexistent. Pointless.

  Jack sighed, still watching the birds. It was only natural, he thought, to think about what came next. Especially after coming so close to finding out for yourself. Though if Stacey was right, you wouldn’t find out at all, would you? You’d have no conscious awareness left to compute the next act because the next act wouldn’t include your existence. You’d never discover what did or didn’t follow. Again, depressing. He marveled at her willingness to believe it, to embrace it. Not that he held any one religious belief over another, or even espoused to religion at all, but to be so sure that everything in existence only existed by dumb luck, that nothing had any meaning beyond whatever some evolved feelings had decided to trick us into believing… He could never buy it. And that no one acknowledged the hypocrisy of it disturbed him more than the belief itself. For if life was an accident with no purpose or value and the human race wasn’t any better than the rest of the animal kingdom, then no one had the right to hold anyone else accountable for anything. The establishment teaches kids they’re animals and then acts surprised and throws them in jail when they act like it. He knew some said that the concept of God was a product of human evolution, the morality-maker that enabled a greater chance of survival for the greatest species. But there were two things wrong with that. First, if they believed that devotion to a God was seen fit by the evolution they espoused, why then reject it? In rejecting it (at least this was how he saw it, anyway), they were rejecting the wisdom of their own god. It didn’t make sense. And second, to believe that natural selection and evolution deemed it necessary to trick mankind into believing in some deity so as to prolong its existence via moral barriers would be attributing some form of self-consciousness to evolution, making it the god they didn’t believe in. But still, even if it was the way they said, in the end, it was still pointless. An old apologetic from school came back to him. He couldn’t remember the details or what the argument was called or who had come up with it, but he remembered the basic question. If God didn’t exist, then how could mankind ever have come up with the concept of Him? The argument rested on man’s inability to create something from nothing. It said, in a nutshell, that if God didn’t exist in some way, shape, or form, then there was no way possible that the human mind could invent it from scratch. Like trying to come up with another color for the rainbow, or another element for the periodic table…

  He thought of Grandmom’s smiling face and the worn Bible held tight in her feeble grasp.

  Then he broke his eyes away from the care-free play of the birds and told his inner musings to shut up. Again, he’d been down that intellectual road before, and he wasn’t about to let little birds lead him back to its chains right now.

  Maybe I did drown, he thought again, the Sandman refusing to go away. Maybe all the thoughts of the afterlife were due to the fact that he was in the afterlife.

  “You think I could be dead? That all of this is…” And for a second, Jack thought that Donny might just fizzle away, disappear back into the imagination of purgatory once he’d figured it out. The jig was up, he cracked the code, the first part of the test passed.

  But Donny didn’t disappear behind a proud smile. Instead, he set two mugs on the counter beside the percolating coffee maker and stared at him. “Are you saying that I’m not real? Because if that’s what you’re suggesting, I might have to ask you to leave.” Then he leaned against the counter and sighed. “I know that all of this has to be taking a toll on you. Everything’s happening so fast, it has to be messing with your head, the world spinning out of control and crap. But you’re not dead. You’re not asleep in some government lab. You’re not on an alien spacecraft. You’re in my house. Come on, man. Get it together.” He turned to the stove.

  “If Stacey is the Anna in the letters…” The possibilities that such a notion allowed for had circled around his head all night. Like planets he knew to be there but not wanting to observe them with a telescope for fear of finding out that, yes, mankind actually was the product of a genetic experiment conducted by green men on Mars. Actually examining any of the insinuations could have sent him over the edge last night, but he knew that he’d have to face it eventually. He decided that eventually would be now.

  “The way I see it,” Donny said, filling the two porcelain mugs, “is that either she had her mother set all this up to be with Vadim again, which would mean that she knew she didn’t have cancer; she thought she had cancer, and Viktoriya helped Vadim get her back unbeknownst to Stacey; or this has nothing to do with a past love relationship, and it’s all strictly business.” He handed a blue Fraternal Order of Police mug to Jack. “KGB-type business.”

  “You think Stacey—”

  “—Anna.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Possibly.”

  “You think that my wife could be a Russian spy?”

  Donny shrugged. “I’m a detective. I’m trained to consider every possibility. Granted, it’s not the most likely one, but—”

  “But until we find out who the man in the photo is, who Vadim is, what Viktoriya’s up to, why they wanted me dead, whether or not Stacey’s alive…”

  “Yeah, we don’t know much of anything, Jack. So here’s my advice: stop thinking about it. You’re only driving yourself crazy. You don’t know. Don’t go throwing your marriage away or disrespecting Stacey’s memory until you have all the facts.”

  Seeing his own face move back and forth in the reflection cast by his coffee, he asked, “Is that what you’d do?”

  “Hell no. But I’m telling you what you should do. Wait. Keep your head down, stay alive, let the Feds figure this thing out. You ain’t gonna help anyone by getting yourself killed or locked up.”

  He lifted the cup and took a sip. “Fine.”

  “Good. Now, I mean it. Don’t go dumping on Stacey until you have a reason in stone to. She’s your soul mate, your son’s mother, and my friend. Give her the benefit of the doubt.”

  “‘Love hopes all things, believes all things…’” he muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  Jack looked up. “Something from the Bible.”

  “Didn’t know you still remembered all that stuff.”

  “Neither d
id I.” He took another sip. But the verse hadn’t come from school; it had come from the wall of Grandmom’s living room. Memories came flooding back. Memories of Jack catching her standing there, tears in her eyes, just staring at the framed words, as if God’s hand had taken to scribbling on walls again. He could recall every detail of those moments, her black shoes over pantyhose, the flowered dresses she loved to wear, her glasses hanging from her neck, the whirl of white hair crowning her head… She had never explained what it was that made that specific scripture so special to her, but Jack knew it had to do with Grandpa. The story was that he’d died of a heart attack on his way to the train after work one day. But what was usually omitted from the story was where he was coming from; for he had surely died after work, but he had not been coming straight from work. And when five hundred dollars was found in his pocket, the rumors began to circulate. Prostitutes, cocaine, you name it. Of course, Grandmom always rejected such nonsense, even if she couldn’t explain it herself. Their marriage had been a good one, and she wasn’t about to let some mysterious unknown tarnish the whole thing. Yeah, it was Grandpa’s death that made those verses special to her, Jack was pretty certain of that; especially now that they seemed applicable to his own situation.

  “You mind if I take a shower?” he asked Donny.

  “I’m making us breakfast, man. Relax for a second.” He opened the fridge and took out a carton of eggs. “When we’re done eating, you can take a shower. God knows you need one. You smell like pickled diarrhea.”

  And he realized that his last shower had been shared with Stacey.

  Or Anna…

  * * * *

  Jack stepped into the hallway with a bath towel tied around his waist and called out for Donny. When Donny didn’t answer, Jack assumed he was still out on his morning jog through the neighborhood. He went into Donny’s bedroom and, opening dresser drawers, began looking for some clean clothes that might fit him. Jack was a respectable one-eighty-five with a six-pack, but it wasn’t because Donny was a donut cop on the verge of a heart attack that Jack would most likely be unable to fit into his clothes. Donny was two hundred and twenty pounds of solid, veins-popping-out mass. And he never ate donuts.

  Movement in his periphery put his search on pause. Standing tall, he turned and gazed into a full-length mirror that was hanging on the wall across from him. He didn’t look one-eighty-five anymore. He looked frail, weak. A salesman. And he wondered just how in the world this small man staring back at him was going to set things right.

  With a gun, that’s how. Guns were the great equalizers, as the man in his garage had learned. But then, that was what Donny and Johnson were talking about, wasn’t it? That was the kind of Hollywood crap that would get him killed. Or save his life, as had been the case with the intruder. With nowhere to go, though, it was irrelevant. He could daydream all he wanted of storming some Communist compound with his lonely 9mm blazing, rescuing his wife and son from the hands of some ridiculous James Bond villain with metal teeth, but without a compound to storm, the fantasy could never tempt reality.

  He turned away from the sight and went back to the dressers, rummaging through socks and…black-laced lingerie? Unless his friend was into some really strange stuff or spent his nights as an undercover drag queen, it looked as if Donny’s girlfriend had begun to take over ample dresser space. He found three more outfits, some T-shirts, pajamas, and some really short jean shorts that he hoped were hers, too. But that didn’t seem like something Donny would allow. Sharing his bed with a woman was one thing, but his dresser? That wasn’t the Donny he knew. Maybe this relationship was serious. If so, it would be the first for his friend.

  Setting down the lace and pushing from his mind the more recent memories that such material suggested, he settled on the smallest clothes he could find. A dark pair of jeans that fit him fine and a tight, black T-shirt that was probably the girlfriend’s. He pulled them on and looked in the mirror. The shirt was a little tight, but it made him look more like the one-eighty-five he used to be, so he didn’t mind. He just double-checked to make sure that PINK wasn’t spelled out in some obscure location. Satisfied that he could walk around in public without ending up on some “escaped from Walmart” website, he turned back to close the drawers. That’s when he noticed a little black box nestled into the corner of the top drawer. Curiosity moved his hand to it, and he took it out, flipping the lid open. A diamond ring. It was serious. Jack couldn’t believe it. He put the box back before Donny could walk in behind him and catch him in his girlfriend’s clothes holding the engagement ring, all his dresser drawers opened. That could be an awkward moment. Jack grabbed a pair of socks, shut the drawers, and went back to the bathroom for his sneakers.

  Finally clean and dressed for the first time in a week, he descended the stairs. And though the fresh feeling didn’t do anything for the nightmare decor still hanging in his soul, it did fill him with an eagerness to get something done. But without direction, he could only settle down on the patio and sit beneath the ascending sun, thinking.

  He thought about The House of Thunder by Dean Koontz, October’s Ghost by Ryne Douglas Pearson, Seventeen Moments of Spring by Yulian Semyonov… They were all novels of Soviet interest, but each one was as different as the next. He hadn’t seen a note in Pearson’s Simple Simon, though he supposed he could’ve missed it. But if the notes were pertinent to the reason they were being removed from his house, either to save them from the fire or to ensure their destruction via another means, then Simple Simon might have been left behind because it didn’t share the same relevance as the others. Or the man hadn’t found it in the midst of the clothes piled on the bed. Unless, believing Jack to be dead and knowing that Stacey had Simple Simon on the boat with her, he would have no reason to look for it. How the guy would know that, though, was way beyond Jack’s realm of limited understanding. If only he could examine the novel again, but holding his hand up in the air and having the morning breeze reassemble it in his grasp was probably just as likely to happen as finding the paperback still intact beneath the smoldering pile of his former home.

  He went back inside and sat himself at Donny’s computer. A screensaver was going through a slideshow of bikini-clad beauties positioned erotically in front of various world-renowned locations. The Giza Plateau, Easter Island, Mount Rushmore, the Great Wall of China. As Jack chased the airbrushed and silicone-loaded hotties away with a gentle move of the mouse, he wondered if married life would finally mature Donnie. He entered Simple Simon into Amazon’s search bar. Though he didn’t think Mercury Rising involved a Soviet plot, he wanted to make sure that the movie was true to the novel in that regard. After reading through a few reviews, it seemed that it was. One reviewer stated, “The whole NSA side of the story was great, making it the techno-thriller it is and topping it off with a twist of government conspiracy so believable that it may leave you uncomfortable next time you watch C-Span or read about certain clandestine operations and DoD budgets…” It sounded like Jack’s type of story. Like Stacey’s. But the thing that was odd about Stacey having this novel (apart from it being in the same series with October’s Ghost) was that she’d been getting all her books from the library lately. So why had she paid for this particular one? If it was sent to her like the others had been, then it would be part of the same puzzle whether it had a Soviet plot or not.

  And then, depending on what I believed was going on, I’d either want my wife back or I wouldn’t…

  Was Johnson actually hinting at…

  The screensaver came back on, the near-naked women smiling at him, promising things they could never offer. Would never offer. They were teasing him. But fake or not, they were beautiful. Though not as beautiful as Stacey. And she had made him an actual promise. Made a covenant with him. The looks of seduction she teased him with actually led to fulfillment. And again, the God thoughts crept back into his thought process, reminding him that her beauty was one of the major reasons he rejected atheism. For though Stacey hated
the concept of a Creator, her existence alone was proof enough for him that there was one. He couldn’t believe that she was an accident, that beauty itself was an accident, that virtues like truth and love weren’t virtues at all but just strange quirks fabricated by chance to simply confuse a pointless reality. At least until this splinter of doubt came infecting his conviction: what if she had been too perfect? She could have certainly done better than him. What if this Vadim guy was—

  A sudden thought came crashing through his psyche like a thunderbolt from Olympus, riding the wings of a memory. A memory from that night on the boat. Of what Stacey had said to him from beneath the depths of a drunken stupor.

  I haven’t gotten this drunk since Joseph was conceived!

  To which he replied, “What are you talking about? You were as sober as a judge…”

  That must’ve been the other guy, then!

  He took a deep breath, refusing to accept that line of thought, focusing on Grandmom’s picture. Love believes all things, hopes all things. He wouldn’t throw away the validity of their relationship on idiotic conjecture.

  He just wouldn’t.

  He walked out to the patio.

  21

  He opened his eyes, and the first thing he noticed was the sun’s changed position in the sky. It was now above the big puffy clouds and the chemical trails cutting paths through them. He squinted against the brightness and lifted his head off the back of the chair, absorbing his surroundings. After the mental re-entry back to his current location, he forced himself to his feet and walked to the kitchen. The microwave displayed 12:22 as being the current time. He’d been asleep for almost three hours. “Don?” he called.

  A knock came from the front door.