Paul Griffin - Burning Blue

I am beginning to suspect patient is holding back more than the name of the young man who, per security guard, walked NC home.

BJ’s closed to the public at eight p.m., and I got to my restock work. At ten I grabbed my fifteen-minute break. I clicked one of the laptops to the local news links and found a short update on the Nicole Castro story, except it was hardly an update. That afternoon, some idiot had tackled some other idiot in Sports Authority after the dude tried to shoplift a Volta-Shock bottle. Other than that, there were no new leads in the case.

“Can you believe she actually got a boyfriend?” the woman who ran the electronics section said. She tapped the keyboard to a gossip site. The headline ran BURNED BEAUTY QUEEN BAGS NEW BEAU. I panicked, expecting to see a picture of Nicole’s arm hooked through mine at the security gatehouse that blocked off her neighborhood. The follow-up would then be BENDIX VOWS TO BASH BEAU’S BRAINS IN, but the picture wasn’t of Nicole and me. I wasn’t the only one following Nicole in CVS. The picture showed Nicole with the guy who tried to pick her up, until he saw the bandage on her face. The headline and the camera angle were enough to suggest they were together. The photo credit was ©Scorpion Imageworks .

“What kind of guy would want to go out with her after that?” my coworker said.

“Dude must be desperate,” I muttered, scanning the article.

“I bet you he’s burned too. You know, like where you can’t see?”

I got home from work at 11:00. We lived in one of those efficiency apartment complexes that are always full of bitterly divorced men and the odd widower with kids. The power lines sprayed from the phone pole and attacked the side of our building like blown snot. Dented, pigeon-crap-covered Dish Network discs tilted like begging hands. Even so, the rent wasn’t cheap in this last outpost of the coveted Brandywine zip code.

My father was at the piano, this little electric job we picked up for his birthday at BJ’s with my discount, low-end keys on ironing board stilts. I recognized the piece, Rachmaninoff, Vespers, some doleful notes to be sure. On the side table: bottle of red wine, the second one. The first, a dead soldier, was on the kitchen counter, next to picked-at Mexican takeout.

I would have asked him if he was okay, but he only would’ve told me to mind my own business. He’d catch an AA meeting the next morning on his way to work, and then he’d be good for a month or so before he fell off again. At least he wasn’t drinking and driving anymore, or that’s what he promised. But $4.99 a bottle? If you’re going to be bad, at least drink something good.

You might think art critics make a lot of money. They’re lucky if they make almost enough. They’re really smart, and they dress like they’re heading to a cocktail party at the Princeton Club, if you don’t notice that their designer label clothes are irregulars pulled from the Marshalls clearance rack. They can carry on one heck of a conversation-charm you silly-but they’re not to be confused with the millionaires they cover in their columns. Stevie Nazzaro from Hoboken did well enough to get into Columbia on a scholarship, art history of all the useless things, but he would have been better off if he stuck with the wrestling. Naz the Knuckler, WWE smackdown champ or some crap like that.

I think I was pretty close to getting him to give up on me, and then I could emancipate and be free of whatever it was I was living, just this day-to-day grayness. I’d move into the city and get by waiting tables or pushing flavored coffees at a godforsaken latte bar maybe. I could take subways instead of having to kick my skateboard everywhere. No more shoulder-less north Jersey roads without sidewalks, step-trucks and speeding Range Rovers sucking me into traffic. It would be better for my father too, having me out of the apartment. Couldn’t be easy living with a son of minor ambition.

“You had therapy today, right?” he said. “You didn’t ditch, did you?”

“I went.”

“How was Mrs. Schmidt?”

“It’s Doctor. Terrific.”

“Any of that bullying crap going on again?” he said.

“Nope. Thought you were getting home late.”

“I did. You were later. You have to get right in their faces and give it back to them, Jay. I told you how many times, you can’t just roll over.”

“It’s fine, Dad.”

“Sure it is.”

“Okay, don’t believe me.”

“You’re holding back. Something big too. Your breathing, it’s solemn.”

“How can breathing be solemn? It’s just breathing.”

“I need to be out of town for a week.” He tapped the high end piano key. “This conference wants me to speak. The money is just north of lousy enough to turn down.”

I checked the fridge for milk, nothing in there except duck sauce packets.

“You hear what I said?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Then can you acknowledge you heard me?”

“I heard you, man. Have a great trip.”

“Hey, Jay? When do I stop getting blamed?”

“Blamed for what?”

“Everything.” He headed for his room with the wine. He halted at his bedroom door, as if he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. He went in. The door puffed shut.

I grabbed what was left of the takeout and headed for my room, not much more than a closet with a bed that was too short for me, but it was on the back of the building and it was quiet, except for the old man’s TV, muffled by the wall. I could barely make out he was watching the old movie channel again. I hated feeling sorry for my father. Writing him off as a jerk was a lot easier.

I remembered that I’d forgotten to take my meds. I swigged them down with this sports drink that looked like chalk dust suspended in antifreeze. I’d grabbed it at work, overstock they were looking to dump, and now I knew why: It was disgusting. I shoveled cold burritos into my mouth as I waited for my laptop to boot. Now that I’d spent an afternoon with Nicole, had seen her up close, helped her out of that puddle on the side of the road, touched her, I felt involved. Okay, maybe not involved, not yet, but scared for her. That she was being followed freaked me out. If a photographer could tail her so easily, without being caught, couldn’t the psychopath who got away with throwing acid into Nicole Castro’s face just as easily sneak right up on her again?

Maybe I thought about it for a minute before I did it. Maybe not that long. In less than twenty keystrokes, I hacked a line into the Department of Motor Vehicles. Plate number MBE-7921 ran back to one Shane Puglisi.

At this point I wasn’t doing anything more than poking around. I had no inclination to do more than feel bad for Nicole and wonder whether or not she was going to call me before next Thursday, when I would see her in Schmidt’s office. She wasn’t particularly thrilled I’d followed her into CVS. Stalking her by way of my computer would win me a top spot on her hate list, if she found out about it. She might even be mad enough at that point to sic the cops onto me. I just wanted to be sure that Shane Puglisi wasn’t a psycho. After I cleared him, I was going to delete my suspect list from my phone and mind my own business.

Turning Puglisi inside out was cake. Most of the actionable intelligence the National Security Agency and CIA scoop comes from open source information. Most of that comes from Facebook. Hackers don’t have to hack so much anymore. Why would I take on the risk inherent in stealing information from you when you’re willing to tell me everything about yourself for free? The challenge now is skimming and leaking without letting people know you’re doing it. That’s the real game: remaining anonymous. Not that I was planning on doing any leaking when it came to Nicole’s case. Not yet anyway.