Underneath Me, Steady Air
Carrie Laben

Rosemary’s is always this dark, but it’s a good dark. If you come here at night to drink with the hipsters and hipster-watchers, it’s illuminated by strings of year-round Christmas lights and the dull glow of the jukebox. If you come in the afternoon to drink with the old men with tracheotomies and slumped backs, the sun never reaches the third bar stool. Squint a little and you can believe you’re in a bunker underground. I still feel safe here, after everything.

I drank at Rosemary’s with Ginger and Carol and Steve the night before. I started around five with the vague plan that I’d cut it off and leave myself plenty of time to sleep, since I had to work the next day. Then I started drinking to forget that I had to work the next day. Then I did forget that I had to work the next day.

This is a long way of explaining why my story might sound unfocused, spotty. And, let’s be honest, self-centered. There’s nothing that inspires more self-centeredness than a hangover, and I was shitty hung over that day.

I made it out of the house on autopilot, it hit me in the subway: tightness in the skin over my skull, feet irritable in my cheap-cute rubber rain boots, and most of all the blue pain of hunger in a slightly nauseated stomach. But I was two trains into the commute by then, which made it harder to turn back than to go on.

The rain had mostly stopped by the time I got there. As I emerged from the subway station, I caught a flash of movement and looked up. I would have split my skull on the sun if it hadn’t been for a little cloud—a scrap of fog, really—just above the building that turned the light all pinkish-gray.

As it was, I winced and blinked and, seeing nothing important, turned my focus back to the pavement and cigarette butts and sodden pages of the Post.

The elevators in that building were saunas, prone to breaking down. I remember thinking that I could maybe claim that I’d been stuck in one; I looked shitty enough. It was something I often thought about trying. But I figured they could check with the maintenance guys, I’d get busted, which would be even more embarrassing.

As soon as I stepped through the door of the office I was struck by how quiet it was. To the point that I wondered if I’d somehow forgotten a day off. But Rosemary’s redecorates for every holiday known to humankind, including Arbor Day. I’d have noticed.

I came around the corner of the first row of cubes and spotted my boss and my boss’s boss. They couldn’t miss me. I tried to brace myself, but that would have required something to brace, and I felt invertebrate.

Neither of them said anything as I approached. Neither of them even looked up. They weren’t talking, I remember thinking they both looked sad, sore. I wondered if they’d decided to fire me.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound casual, actually sounding dehydrated. “Good morning.” And they each nodded slowly, but neither of them replied as I entered my cubicle. By the time my computer finished starting up, a peek over the wall revealed that they’d drifted away.

I figured something in email might account for their behavior, but no—the company hadn’t been sold, or sued, or the server farm set on fire, there hadn’t been any layoffs. There were no new emails at all except the autogenerated one I got every Monday reminding me to update my time sheets.

I got some coffee, read some blogs. The worst of the pounding and lurching inside faded away. By lunchtime, I was ready to risk the break room.

As I came back along the corridor, I heard a dull hiss, the sound of something scraping over the dense industrial carpet. A moment later the receptionist, Jeannette, came around the corner pushing a box of printer paper along the floor.

It started my brain and stomach pulsing again, the way she was bent like something out of Bosch with her knees crooked and her bowed back in the air. Normally she could lift three of those boxes. She was flushed a shade of orange I’d never seen on a human being before, beyond the worst nightmares of spray tan, and the tip of her tongue was protruding from her mouth.

As bad off as I was, I knew I needed to help her. But before the words could wriggle down from my brain and through my clamped jaw, she fell over. Not collapsed, not fell down—fell over, to the side, stiffly.

I knelt on the floor beside her, put my coffee against the wall—where I promptly kicked it over—and felt for her pulse. Her wrist was slick with greasy sweat and I couldn’t find it. But she was still alive, because she was still breathing, because something was making that moaning noise and pushing the horrible greenish foamy drool out.

I couldn’t figure out what to do, and then I thought she might be contagious, and I was kneeling in now-cold coffee-damp pants on the now-cold coffee-damp rug. I reached in my pocket for my phone, but of course I’d left it in my bag, back at my desk.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Jeanette, though I doubted she could hear me, and heaved myself back to my feet. Walking backwards, unwilling to take my eyes off her, I found myself among the cubes of the QA team.

“Someone better call 911.” No one answered, and for a moment I wondered if I’d only thought it, but then I turned around and saw Angel slumped at her desk and Karl at his, both foaming and staring blankly, both as orange as Jeanette.

I don’t know how I made myself reach across Karl and pick up his phone. I don’t remember what I said to the woman who answered. Sometime between when I hung up and when the EMTs arrived, I got back to my desk. I even retrieved my empty mug along the way.

Yeah, some inspiring story of survival. Honestly, it’s probably a good thing that I lost so much of my hospital stay. I’m not sure who broke it to me that I was the only survivor to come out of the office. I have vague memories of people interrogating me and yelling about bioterrorism. And then later different people telling me that it had all been some kind of weird gas leak, and that I didn’t need to talk to the press if I didn’t want to, and that, by the way, I definitely didn’t want to. That I might be confused or have hallucinations. That they’d given me some kind of weird experimental drug that was supposed to prevent PTSD but also fucked with my short-term memory kind of a lot.

But I remembered enough to bet that what I’d seen wasn’t a gas leak, even before the weird crap started happening.

You’d think I wouldn’t keep coming back here, wouldn’t you? I was on this exact fucking stool the first time I got one of those calls. You’d think I’d have the good goddamn sense to be creeped out. But I get angry and think, why should I let them scare me off? It was my bar first.

Yeah, the calls were what started it. They didn’t start until almost three months after I got out of the hospital, but then again, for most of that time I didn’t have a phone. My old phone, along with everything in my bag and my office, my wallet, my keys, my coffee mug, my boots, got swept into the maw of evidence control and were never heard from again.

If it hadn’t been for Ginger I’d probably still be living on cash and self-pity, but she got me through the convoluted process of getting everything back in order. Out of all my friends, she was the one who kept up with me instead of coming to visit a couple of times and then getting weirded out by the hamster wheel of no explanations that my brain was on and drifting away. She was the one who told the reporters to fuck off and leave me alone when they tracked me down. She was the one who smiled at the cops when they came by after the reporters left, and assured them that everything was just fine, officer. She listened to me when I explained what I’d seen, or thought I’d seen. And then when I didn’t want to talk about it she didn’t bring it up.

She also let me stay with her, which was really key because I wasn’t sleeping so great in my old apartment by myself. Her place was right on Bedford Avenue and we came down to Rosemary’s almost every night, to take the edge off.

One night, when the edge had been blunted, my phone rang.

At first I thought I was just confused by the noise of conversation and the blaring jukebox. I shouted “Hello” three times, then realized I was talking to a recording. But it wasn’t about one of my many unpaid bills or a political candidate. It wasn’t about anything, it didn’t make any sense no matter how I tried to push through the beer and concentrate.

The voice didn’t have a gender or age that I could pin down, and it didn’t sound like any machine voice I’d ever heard either. When I tried to understand it, the syllables slid away. Yet there was a tone of urgency that made me keep trying. I finally got up and left Ginger watching my drink and took it outside.

On the sidewalk the words were still evasive, but eventually I got them. That didn’t really help, though.

Numbers. No nouns or verbs or context, no discernible pattern. Just an endless string of numbers in that slippery voice.

I don’t know how long I stood out there, waiting for it to end or say something else or for some kind of pattern to emerge. Eventually I felt a tap on my shoulder, flinched away, and turned to find Ginger behind me.

“The hell?” she said. “Are you ok?”

“Listen to this.” I shoved the phone at her, and she put it to her ear and frowned.

Then she laughed and hung up. “That’s the stupidest prank call I’ve ever heard. Do you even know anyone with a” she glanced at the phone, “406 number?”

I shook my head.

We went back inside and ordered new drinks. It being a Tuesday, we were even able to get our stools back.

Sonovia, the bartender, smiled at me and then glanced at the phone. I didn’t remember putting it on the bar instead of back in my bag, but there it was and I was fidgeting with it.

“Everything alright?”

I nodded and managed a smile, but not a very convincing one, because the next thing I knew she was giving me a buyback on a shot of Jameson.

The calls weren’t every night, at least not at first. If they had been I would have just flushed the phone down the toilet like a prom baby, or turned it off. No, they were sporadic, and yet somehow only came when I was drunk enough to answer, thinking this time it might make sense.

It didn’t, and finally Ginger demanded custody of the phone because me running in and out of the bar getting more agitated was not the point of the exercise. I was happy to hand it over. She let everything go to voicemail.

Now we’re coming to a part of the story where I look kind of stupid. Stupider.

So, it was a week after I’d given up on my cell phone making any sense, more than four months after the gas leak, or whatever you wanted to call it. That’s when I see that asshole Doyle for the first time.

He waited until I was five beers in. Then he walked up as though he’d just come in off Bedford Avenue, he even had a foil-wrapped lamb shawarma in his hand, and he plopped down on the vacant bar stool next to me when Ginger went to the bathroom. But he blew it with his first line.

“There are tigers in the air,” he said.

He looked at me as though he expected me to supply the other half of a secret password, while the yogurt sauce dripped through the foil and onto his fingers.

“Tigers? In the beer?” I gazed into the foam at the bottom of my pint glass, then back at him. Then I decided that maybe this was some kind of PETA thing, like the sea kittens, even though I could smell the delicious dead baby sheep in his hand.

The whole point was that I was drunk enough to take the burden off of things to make sense, after all.

I didn’t want anything to do with any save-the-yeasts campaign, so I turned away and asked Sonovia for another drink. Then I turned back to tell this tiger guy to get out of Ginger’s seat. But he was already gone.

I shrugged and when Ginger got back we laughed about it. But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t irritated when I saw him again the next evening, sitting in the backmost booth. I’m sure he thought it was a good place to observe without being observed, but it was next to the bathrooms. Poor dumb fuck.

“He’s here,” I said to Ginger when I got back from the facilities, leaning over close to her ear.

“Who?”

“Tiger dude.”

“Where?”

“Last booth.”

“What, the guy with the beard and the five-head?”

“That’s the one.”

Ginger stared, so blatantly he couldn’t have missed her. I gave up trying to resist and stared too. His untrimmed beard and bulging cranium, combined with his narrow cheeks, made his head look like a giant had pinched it. His eyes were ridiculously huge, dirty-ice gray, and bloodshot. Although to be fair Rosemary’s lighting scheme tends to make everyone’s eyes look that way.

“Creeper,” Ginger said after a moment’s consideration.

“You can’t say that just based on the fact that he doesn’t own a beard trimmer.”

“My instincts are never wrong,” she said, and to be fair this was accurate in my experience. Also I had no interest in defending the dude.

We turned away. For the rest of the night my shoulders were tense waiting for him to come up behind me, but he didn’t.

That was too good to last, though, and a few days later we walked in and he was just standing at the end of the bar, grinning through his beard at us.

“Looks like someone gave him the talk about how self-confidence is attractive,” Ginger muttered.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said as we approached, and held up his hand so that I had to stop if I didn’t want to touch him. “I’m not trying to be dense on purpose. I thought you knew.”

I was drawn into the question like quicksand. “Knew what?”

“About the air jungles. About those weird phone calls you’ve been getting. About what killed all those people in your office.”

Ginger stepped around me to get between us. “She doesn’t want to talk about that shit.”

“I’m not a reporter,” he said, side-stepping her. “In fact,” he looked directly at me again, “you don’t have to talk at all. You listen, I’ll tell you what I know. You can decide if I sound like a reporter, or someone who actually knows what’s going on.”

“Not right now,” I said, “I need a beer.”

But you can’t hear something like that and not wonder. Besides, if I didn’t talk, and Ginger was right there, everything would be fine.

The stupidest thought I ever had in my life. And I’ve drunk-dialed my mom at midnight to win an argument, flirted with the tracheotomy guys, cried about Jeanette and Karl and Angel in public even though I know I couldn’t have done anything different.

Anyhow, when a bar stool opened up next to me a couple of hours later, he slid in immediately.

“Get lost,” Ginger said without looking up.

“No, let him stay,” I said. Judas asshole me. She gave me a look that would have killed me if I had any sense. Anyway, I said, “Let’s see if he’s actually as smart as he says.”

He smiled again. His teeth were weird. All there, all white and shiny, but they seemed off-center somehow.

“Thanks. I’m Henry Doyle. And like I said, you don’t have to tell me anything. The people in your office didn’t die of any gas leak.”

I didn’t move, didn’t nod my head or twitch my hand. It could be a set-up, despite his insistence that I didn’t have to talk.

Besides, if he was the kind of person he looked to be, he’d go on in the absence of any encouragement.

“What most people don’t know about the history of aviation . . . ” He stopped, waved his hand vaguely. “What most people don’t know about the history of aviation fills books. But even the books don’t tell about Harold Conrad, or Lieutenant Ash, or Randolph Joyner-Leigh.”

It wasn’t hard to keep looking at him blankly.

“Why should anyone remember? They were only three martyrs, out of many martyrs . . . but my great-great uncle remembered. You might have heard of him.” He paused, took a little sip of his PBR, and for a moment I thought Williamsburg suited him very well. “Arthur Conan Doyle.”

“Yeah, the writer,” Ginger said. “Who wrote fiction.”

“Sometimes. And sometimes when he wrote the truth, the government asked him to publish it as fiction, with the names and details changed to throw the public off track. He did what they asked. But in the family, we passed it down for generations. There’s a reason none of us will get on an airplane. I personally spent days getting here on a Greyhound bus next to the most awful gum-chewing old woman who wanted me to pray with her every time she opened a snack cake, rather than risk flying.”

Sonovia came by and Doyle interrupted his rant to order us all another round, although he hadn’t finished the one he already had. As soon as she stepped away to pull the taps he plunged back in, still in the groove.

“What the history books, and the science books, and the governments of this and every other nation won’t tell you is that there are jungles in the air.”

“With tigers?” I said. I couldn’t help myself. At least one minor thing made more sense now.

“With every sort of creature that belongs in an ecosystem, from tiny herbivores to massive predators. All amorphous or supported by gas bladders, all adapted to living in the upper atmosphere. Early aeronauts ran into these creatures from time to time as they got high enough. Or when the creatures get low enough, because sometimes they get knocked down somehow. The Crawfordsville monster, to name one, was probably a smaller and less dangerous . . . ”

“Horseshit,” Ginger cut in. “If that were true, we’d have planes and things getting attacked all the time.”

He seemed to be prepared for that. “Does the fact that normal tigers don’t eat people in downtown Mumbai prove that the normal jungle doesn’t exist? Does the fact that you aren’t currently being eaten by a black bear prove that there’s no such thing? No. The fact is, when the governments of the world saw how key a role aircraft could play in warfare, if only they could get up there without getting their heads eaten, they took it upon themselves to civilize the skies. The tigers like the head best, you know. And the tongue best out of the head.”

“Yum,” said Ginger.

He frowned at her. “The air tigers were slaughtered or repelled by the numbers stations. They exist now mostly over remote, uninhabited parts of the world that no major power bothers with.”

“Numbers.” I needed to stop doing that, but when I wasn’t talking I had nothing to do with myself but drink and my latest beer was already almost gone. I could feel my brain shuffling and reshuffling all this information, trying to make the pieces fit, and I didn’t like the futility of the feeling.

“Yes, have you heard of numbers stations? Broadcasting eternally on a wavelength no one listens to, impossible to jam, sending out a string of numbers to the atmosphere—numbers that mean nothing to a human, but repel the air-beasts like citronella repels a mosquito.”

“Ginger,” I said, “give me my phone.” There were seven missed calls blinking, and when I hit the callback button, the Carmina Burana started playing in Doyle’s pocket.

He chuckled. “Caught me. I wanted to see how you’d react to that. I thought it would tell me how much you already know.”

“Thanks a lot, asshole.”

He brushed that off. “So, like the tigers in earth jungles, these were out of sight and out of mind—maybe killing some hikers in the Urals, grabbing a hunter in Vermont, causing a plane crash or two over what the rubes call the Bermuda Triangle, but mostly not a problem. Except for the rare instances where they come down over a major, populated area. Like they did a few months ago.”

He waved Sonovia over. “You look like you could use another drink.”

I was shaking like a chihuahua I was so pissed off. “Yeah, no kidding.”

“Put it on my tab,” he said to Sonovia, and then he tapped on the bar. “I’ll be right back.” He headed for the bathroom, and went into the ladies’ by mistake.

“What a dipshit,” Ginger said.

“For real. I was about to buy it for a while, with the numbers thing.”

“You should have decked him for that.” She gulped beer; she was pissed for real, even if she was joking. “You still can if you’d like, I’ll hold his arms.”

“Not even worth it.” I sighed. “I don’t know why I fell for it. It’s not like Jeanette or any of them had their heads eaten, or their tongues, or whatever.”

We sat in silence for a moment, and then she grinned and said, “Do it.”

“Don’t tempt me. I don’t need any more reasons for the police to yell at me.”

“They’d give you the keys to the city for it if they had any sense. Put you on the cover of the Post.”

After what seemed like a ridiculously long time for a pee, Doyle came back.

“Ok, my turn,” Ginger said, and as she walked by me whispered, “Don’t smack him while I’m gone, I want to see this.”

Doyle didn’t hear, and didn’t seem to sense the shift in the wind. “A lot of us believe that most of the UFO flaps in history are actually sightings of air beasts. If you look at the older reports, they tend to suggest something organic—it’s only when the Air Force gets involved during and right after World War Two that you start to see witnesses jumping to mechanistic explanations for what they saw.”

“Who is us, exactly?”

He looked at me and smiled so I could see those awful teeth again. “There are a lot of us who know the truth. More than the government would like, for sure.” He pulled his beer towards him, and knocked my cell phone off the bar. I ducked down to retrieve it.

After I came back up and took another sip of beer, my memories get all wobbly.

Yeah, not the smartest night of my life.

I woke up, sort of, with streetlights flashing over my face. The side of my head hurt where it was pressed against the cold window glass, and I’d drooled on my sleeve.

“I’m thirsty,” I said, pulling myself upright.

“That’s to be expected.” It was Doyle. I’d known it would be. Ginger doesn’t even own a car. “There’s a bottle of water in the cup holder. It’s still sealed.”

“Too late now.”

He chuckled. “You really had me going, you know. Whoever covered up your ties to the government did a good job. And I thought you might honestly not know what I was talking about for a little while there. “

“There’s a reason for that.”

“Drop the act. You’re the only person who wasn’t eaten in that office. You know how to survive. That kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.”

“No one was eaten!”

“I said drop it. You gave yourself away when you tried to get names out of me.”

We were going about eighty miles an hour, thought the road didn’t seem built for it. I wasn’t sure if I could survive jumping out of the car or not. If I’d really been a government agent, I would know things like that.

“Would you mind telling me which branch you were in? We’ve never been quite sure whose bailiwick the air tigers are—I’ve always felt it would be Air Force, but some of my friends think it’s more the C.I.A.’s type of thing. Or even the N.S.A.”

I opened the water bottle and took a slurp.

“Of course, it’s just idle curiosity on my part. It’s all the same in the end.”

“Why,” I said slowly, trying to sound non-confrontational, “allowing that these air tigers exist at all, why would the government want to cover them up? They don’t cover up real tigers.”

He looked over at me. His expression was unclear behind the beard but I felt safe assuming it was a smirk. “I suppose I might as well admit that we don’t know. It’s the subject of a lot of speculation in our groups. Probably at first it was to prevent panic that would discourage aeronautic exploration, and later because secrecy is self-perpetuating in the halls of power. Am I close?”

I slurped again. If I told him I had to pee, would he let me out long enough to make a break for it? Probably not.

“Now it’s my turn to ask a question, and of course you won’t answer, but it doesn’t matter because I’ve learned to read your face. Why let any through? Is it some kind of green nonsense, like those idiots who put the wolves back in Yellowstone? Is it to keep people panicked? Has the government decided to bankrupt the airlines so it can nationalize them?”

I realized after a few seconds that if I didn’t say something, he was going to keep watching me instead of the road.

“Well, when I was talking to the police after the attack on my office, they did keep asking about bioterrorism.”

He nodded. “That’s what I thought. It all makes sense. Frightened people are sheep.”

Baaah, I thought, and didn’t jump out of the car.

Doyle shut up and I tried to puzzle out where the hell we were. Clearly outside of the city. The streetlights had ended abruptly and now we were driving uphill with trees closer than I liked on either side and large areas of unnerving emptiness that I guessed must be meadows, or marshes, or glimpses of the Hudson. Or maybe off the edge of world. You’d think there would be something. Deer, owls, then, if this is the country. A light from a window in the distance. But no.

I was nauseous from just the water by the time we stopped, and my head was pounding again. Doyle could obviously tell that I was doing bad. He let me walk behind without anything tying me to him except the need to stay in the circle of his flashlight.

“Luckily for you,” he said as we walked out of sight of the car on an unpaved path, “we don’t need to go all the way to the top. This tiger is coming to unprecedented lows, or so my guy with the tracking equipment says.”

“Then why are we here?”

“I’ll tell you when this is all over.”

“According to you, when this is all over we’ll be eaten. Or at least our tongues will.” Right now that didn’t even sound like such a bad option.

Doyle waited for me to catch up, but he didn’t answer. I didn’t have the breath for much more conversation anyway, and it did feel as though making noise under these pine trees in this dark would bring something down on us, even if air tigers were bullshit.

Finally, after I’d drained the rest of the water bottle and developed blisters on top of my blisters, we came to an open space.

“This is the spot,” Doyle said. “Or within a quarter-mile of here anyway.”

He clicked off the flashlight, and I felt that I had no option but to sit down too.

I felt pretty calm, like people who’ve been kidnapped often say. I thought maybe he’d doze off and I could grab the flashlight, make a break for the car. Maybe when morning came and we were still alive and had our tongues I’d be able to talk him down. Maybe I could call 911. It seemed improbable that I’d have a signal, but maybe luck would be with me, if he’d just fall asleep so he wouldn’t see the light from my phone.

To distract myself from the pain and how chilly the night was, I stared up at the stars. Out here they looked close. I could pick out the Big Dipper, and the North Star, and . . . well, that was it, actually. So I looked at that, until a cloud drifted by.

The cloud passed on, and over the moon, and Doyle gasped. He fumbled a bit, stood up, turned the flashlight back on and pointed it at the ground.

When I looked back up from that distraction, the cloud was bigger. And expanding, every second. The stars behind it turned pinkish-gray.

Yeah. Not expanding. Dropping.

I glanced over at Doyle. He planned to survive, and I was going to take my cues from him on that even if he was a crazy kidnapping fuck.

He was staring back at me. Waiting to see what I would do, with a big old shit-eating wrong-toothed grin on his face like he was the smartest damn conspiracy theory buff ever.

I scrambled to my feet and turned to run, but he got to me before I could get anywhere and pinned me against a tree.

“Too late to run now anyway,” he said. “It’ll be on us in thirty seconds max. Do your stuff.”

“I don’t have any stuff to do, you dumb shit!”

He looked stunned, and let go of me. Stepped back into the middle of the clearing to stare at me as if I’d let him down, not even turning over his shoulder to see the translucent but now clearly defined mass of death heading for us.

I knew it was no use now, but I didn’t want my body to rot up on the mountain next to this jackass’s, so I pulled out my cell phone anyway. And it did have a signal. God from a machine.

My hands were shaking and my brain was on autopilot, and I wasn’t looking down. I was looking at the thing, which I will not call an air tiger. It looked like a large, pearly amoeba with fine eyelash-hairs all over and a slight pink tinge. It made a moaning sound as it came down on Doyle, who had spread his arms in a Jesus Christ pose, I suppose to die as big a douche as he had lived, all tragic around the red-rimmed eyes. I hit a few buttons that weren’t 9-1-1.

My voicemail started playing back. The volume was turned up all the way, the better to be heard in the noisy womb of Rosemary’s.

The numbers seemed tiny in the woods, tiny compared to the thing on top of Doyle, but it shuddered. The moaning went up a note, the little hairs all quivered in unison. Slowly, like an elephant climbing out of a wallow, it began to rise.

When the first message ended I frantically skipped to the next. It was twice as high as the trees when I had to start replaying from the beginning, and that’s when the clearing was flooded with light and a dozen uniformed, armed men burst from the trees.

Two of them grabbed me, and held me up when my legs decided they were checking out. Another two tackled Doyle.

A pony-tailed woman came up behind them with a pair of binoculars and a long rifle. She looked at the pearly thing still hovering just above us, then shook her head.

“It’s too late,” she said to the man next to her, and he nodded. She raised the rifle, sighted, fired.

I expected the bullet to go right through, but it made a sound like wumph, like it had hit a pillow, and exploded like a tiny firework inside the thing.

The moaning, Jesus Christ. Like Jeanette had moaned that day dying on the dirty brown carpet. It listed towards the side it’d been shot on, then tried to right itself, tipped too far the other way, went over and belly up. And then it dissolved into the air, into the tops of the trees, barely-pink fragments snowing down. A couple of the men raised bandannas to their faces, but most of us, including the woman with the gun, just watched in silence.

When there was nothing more to witness, they jerked Doyle to his feet and we headed back down the mountain. Someone shut down the floodlight behind us, but that was ok because the sun was coming up.

Doyle seemed triumphant, despite the burly guy on either side of him and the cuffs on his wrists.

“It’s too late,” he whispered at me when they shoved him into the back seat of the cop car next to me. “Now that I know how you did it, I’m going to make sure everyone knows. All along we thought it was something about the radio waves, but it turns out it’s just the voice.”

“But . . . ” No. Let him figure it out how that couldn’t work on his own, if he was so smart. It’d only taken me a minute once I had time to think, once I wasn’t terrified for my life. In the meantime, if he wanted to believe he’d got one over on me, more power to him.

Besides, since that couldn’t have worked, I wasn’t sure what had.

Doyle was silent as we headed back downstate, which was a relief. But then, just as we passed out of the south boundary of Adirondack State Park, he slumped over onto me.

“Hey!” I pushed him, and he flopped over the other way. His skin had flushed orange, and as his head jerked his tongue lolled out.

“Crap.” The man riding shotgun looked back at us. “It touched him, huh?”

“It was settled on him for . . . ” I didn’t know for sure, though, although later by playing my messages and timing them I figured it must have been a solid five minutes.

They pulled over and dragged Doyle out to lie on the pine needles on the shoulder of the road. Another car stopped and emitted the pony-tailed woman.

“She says it was on him for awhile,” the man said, and jerked his chin at me.

“Poor thing. No wonder it was so bad off.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. You know there’s nothing we can do.” Doyle was in the foaming stage, and they both looked down at him with a combination of pity and disgust. “For anyone concerned.”

I walked back to the car and didn’t look at Doyle again. No one tried to stop me.

They gave me more of their so-called anti-PTSD drugs, but I don’t think those work like they’re supposed to on me. Maybe it’s all the booze in my system. I pretended to forget it all, though.

The hardest part was getting Ginger to forgive me for ignoring her creepdar and screwing us both. She’d been beat up pretty bad by Doyle’s confederate who jumped her in the bathroom, but Sonovia spotted something wrong when I left with Doyle and went to investigate. The police got things put together pretty quickly, since Doyle had used the same credit card for everything from his Greyhound ticket to his fleabag hostel bed, the same card he’d left behind when he took me out of Rosemary’s without paying our tab. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure that out.

Yeah, I’m sorry. Not that funny.

I erased all the messages. I told Ginger I’d been a schmuck and an asshole and I bought her dinner at Momofuku. We still live together, and she still drinks with me, although not every night now that she has a new job. But she’ll definitely notice if I don’t come home. Just so you know. In case you’re one of Doyle’s “us.”

But I doubt you are. I doubt you’ll even remember this conversation tomorrow, since you’ve been pacing me all night. But if you do, maybe you’ll be able to figure out everything Doyle mistakenly thought he knew and I never did grasp. Maybe it’ll click in your brain, even though it keeps buzzing in circles in mine.