Hal Ackerman: Stein,stoned

The inevitable arc of electric current did not shoot across the gap. Stein looked intently at the wires and wondered why they were disobeying the laws of physics, when he had the immense revelation that he must be seeing at faster than the speed of light. What other explanation could there be for the thing that must have happened not yet reaching his eyes?

Or, as he held the wires for a few more moments, he realized to his immense amusement that there was another, less grandiose explanation for why he had not received an electric shock. As he had pulled the wires out of the socket, there was no current running through it. He threw himself back on the easy chair, still holding the lamp. This would be a funny cartoon of God, he thought. God holding a busted lamp in one hand and a frayed wire in the other, saying “Let There Be Light.” And there being no light. He wondered for a moment what kind of easy chair God might sit on. That was certainly a provocative question. He wondered if any of the great philosophers had ever pondered that same thought or had he just framed a completely original metaphysical question.

What qualities of a chair would give God pleasure? Would God even need to experience pleasure? Could he imagine it and create it without having the experience himself? Did he even need to sit? To take a load off? Did he get lower back pain? Did he have pain at all? Or does omnipotence make him immune to the very thing he made the center point of human life? Is that why he seems indifferent to human suffering? Was Jesus his effort to try to experience pain? What did God do on his day of rest? Come to think of it, Stein thought, why would God need to rest at all? If God needed to rest, didn’t that imply weakening? Depletion? Good God, Stein thought, he had just disproved God’s omnipotence! The Doctrine of Depletion! He had to remember that.

He rummaged for something to write on. He found scraps of paper in his pocket. He breathed in the last remnants of Nicholette’s scent. It was practically gone now, and even though he knew that it was not purely Nicholette, he felt the loss of something irreplaceable. Nicholette’s card was still in his breast pocket. The scent had faded from there, too. But he vividly recalled Michael Esposito plucking that card from his pocket, certain that it had been Paul Vane’s. He heard his whiney voice in his mind: Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

That moment had been so weird and Halloweeny that Stein had jettisoned it overboard. But now he hoisted it back in, dried it off and looked at it more carefully. Stein understood now why “Miss Espe” had been so certain the card had been Vane’s. It carried the scent that he would have known so well, his New Millennium shampoo. It would have confirmed his suspicion that Vane was concocting a rip-off batch of his own.

But! Uh oh. A mental light bulb way down at the far end of a tunnel snapped on. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. When Esposito saw that the card was Nicholette’s, it had shocked him. It had not registered to Stein at the time that it happened, but now in the backlight of Nicholette’s death, that strong reaction was significant. He would have known that there was no reason for Nicholette to have the scent of his new shampoo upon her. She was no longer the Espe girl and would have no access to it.

Stein put himself into the dark corkscrew mind of Michael Es-posito. He would have come to the irrefutable conclusion that Nicholette had formed an alliance with his former lover/mentor, Paul Vane. Vane and Nicholette were linked by what they had lost. She had lost her identity as the Espe girl and possibly lost Goodpasture. Vane had lost the product he had created and his protege-lover.

Stein’s other inner voice elbowed his way through the waves of verbiage and met the errant train of thought head-on: All of this is marginally interesting but it has nothing to do with Nicholette’s being killed.

There was a moment of empty air. Then. His other internal voice answered. What about the extortion notes? “Blow the lid off.” “Fall of the house of Espe.” Somebody was threatening to bring Espe down.

That’s all been settled. Morty Green and his partner dude and Paul Vane and David Hart…

Let’s just go slow here. Maybe there’s something we didn’t notice. We know that only three people knew that the original Espe box had been re-shot after David Hart screwed up the negatives. David, because he shot it. Alex because she was in it. Paul Vane, because he made the hairpiece, the fall, out of Alex’s hair that he had just shaved to the skull. Mattingly never knew. Of course he never knows anything except for how many squares of toilet paper are missing. Who else? Even Ray Ramos, the photographer who had shot the layout, didn’t know.

Who cares about the fucking shampoo?

We may have a priests/monkeys thing here. We made the wrong picture out of the fragments. We thought she died for smoke. But maybe it was lather.

What are you saying?

Listen, Espe and Mattingly are getting extortion notes. They figure it’s from Paul Vane. We go there. Confront him. He’s cool about confiding that he’s making the product for his regular clients. We find all the missing bottles. Turns out he’s making a little bit more than he let on. Ok, maybe a lot more. He and his new partner have their own private little distribution company going on. David Hart wants to be taken care of “in perpetuity.” But you saw Vane’s reaction to the extortion notes. He knew nothing about them. This was David’s side deal off the side deal. Why stop at one little golden egg when you get the whole goose?

You just want it to be Paul Vane.

His voices were getting quite roiled at each other.

You won’t let it be Paul Vane and it’s making you blind. Here’s the scenario: Michael Esposito finds Nikki’s card in our shirt pocket. He sees that she is Vane’s ally. He goes to her place to confront her. He’s known her for years, so she’d certainly let him in with no struggle. He wants her to confess to the notes. She refuses. Maybe she wrote them, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she got the shampoo from Paul Vane, maybe she got it from her friend Alex. But “Miss Espe” drowns her before he finds out.

No! It’s about the weed. Look at the note pad from her night table. Something about a “lid of.”

What if it’s “lid off ”? Blow the lid off!

Oh, fuck! Oh Shit. You might be right.

This is what I’m saying.

All right, but. Wait a minute.

Stein’s heart raced. Trouble breathing. “Moonlight Sonata.”

Espe couldn’t have killed her alone. He had to have help.

Mattingly?

Mattingly would never be that daring. Think. Who would do anything in the world for him? Who is more vulnerable but a discarded lover who sees the last person put on this earth who might ever love him leaving his solar system forever.

Not Paul Vane.

Yes, Paul Vane.

No. Why was her place ransacked? They were looking for something.

Or maybe planting something they wanted to be sure was found. Like the fall. The fall of the house of Espe.

We could have prevented it.

It’s worse than that. Her card in our shirt pocket put them on her trail. We killed her. We killed the thing we loved.

Stein threw his head back against the mattress in despair. The trouble with searching for the truth is that we sometimes find it. We’re hoping for priests, and get monkeys. He pictured a beach with smooth wet sand and wrote in it with a pointed stick the solution to the murder.

The one force that had been sustaining him was now abruptly gone. Sleep beckoned him to escape once again, caressed his eyelids, massaged his forehead. And as there was nothing left to discover, he yielded without struggle. Ocean waves rolled over the shore. Now the waves filled in the crevasses, smoothed away every indentation, left the surface shiny and with no hint anyone had ever walked there. He should’ve written it down.