Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“No shit?” Big Rob wished Philly were here, then looked down at his mostly naked body and at Peg half covered by a sheet and he almost laughed. “No shit.”

Peg continued. Big Rob recognized the tired, relieved – almost tearful – tone of a confession. “After Moore used Ricky to track down Spears, he sent some guy here – a private eye with a gun, to kill Ricky, and Ricky… well, Ricky wrestled the gun away from him. Here at the trailer. Then the detective started running. He ran to his car.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I saw it. He came here to kill Ricky.” Then, in a confused and tired lapse that shattered Big Rob’s most fragile hope, “It was self-defense. I saw it.”

“Self-defense. I believe you. Anybody would,” Big Rob said. His heart was beating at a speed that would terrify his doctor. “What did Ricky do with the gun?”

Peg climbed out of bed and opened the sliding closet door. On tiptoe, she reached up to a high shelf and pushed aside a number of boxes and single shoes. In the moonlight, the skin on her back was shiny like wet sand. She turned around and presented the gun to him carefully, at arm’s length.

“It’s okay.” Big Rob hooked his pinky through the trigger guard and checked to see if the safety was on, and he set it on top of his folded pants. He took her in his arms and she squeezed him. Her hands were sweaty against his back. Later, remembering this, he would cry.

“So you’re gonna help us?” she asked, sniffling into his ear. “You’re gonna help me and Ricky get our money?”

What could Big Rob say except yes?

That’s when her hand went under the waistband of his boxers.

Big Rob closed his eyes and coaxed himself to the finish. Toward a greater end.

Barwick kept her apartment dark and cool. A friend in Arizona often asked why she lived in Chicago, why she put up with those Northern winters, but Sally never understood the question. With layers, it was easy to escape the cold, and snow was only a temporary nuisance, like boxes piled in a hallway. Northern winters were preferable to Southern summers – which were unrelenting and bright and hot. You could hide your worst flaws in the short, cold days of winter, but the Southern heat and sun only exposed your worst features to the world. Even now, as spring intruded, Sally, with drawn shades, made her home a bunker from the early mornings and lengthening afternoons.

She turned on her computer and with a keystroke rejected an offer to enter Shadow World, which she had just started playing in the past week. She had heard about the game from a friend and although it wasn’t exactly a mainstream phenomenon, the alternative press had been raving about its potential. She understood the appeal. Being inside the game was like being in one of her dreams.

Sally opened her word processor and began a letter to Martha Finn.

She told Martha who she really was. What her job was. What she had done. She said she was sorry. That she had accepted the assignment without realizing they would become friends. That once she started the lies – the most necessary tools of her business – it became impossible for her to stop them.

A man is dead now, and I don’t yet know if I have any culpability for his murder, Sally wrote. I once asked that same man about conflicts of interest in our profession. Philly told me, “Lawyers have conflicts of interest, Barwick. Not us. We’re more like priests. The husbands confess to us. The wives confess to us. We hear their worst secrets. Act on their worst impulses.”

You deserved less cynical consideration from me, Martha. You are a good person, far better than me. You have a wonderful son, destined for wonderful things. Even now it is easy for me to imagine him as an older boy, as a man. A man of duty and great responsibility. I have not only betrayed you, my friend, I have betrayed Justin. I will live with that pain all my life.

When my boss returns from his business trip I am quitting. Leaving this job for good. All I have to show for my falsehoods are dead colleagues and lost friends. There must be a better living in honesty, a better way to pursue the truth than through lies.

She printed the letter and signed it, then stuffed it in an envelope, which she addressed and stamped and left on a tiny sideboard that flanked her door. She deleted the original from her hard drive so it could never be edited, never be changed.

Davis left work at about ten o’clock. He liked coming home after Jackie had gone to bed but before she had gone to sleep. In the darkness of their bedroom, lying in their king-sized bed like parallel lines, never touching, they could talk. They could discuss the highlights of their days and the miscellaneous nuisances of their lives – bills, home repair, social obligations, and so forth. All of that was harder in the light of downstairs. Except for the bedroom and sometimes the dining room, the rest of the big house had become like a time-share in which they both lived, but never together.

He ate an unbruised portion of banana from a bowl and then walked upstairs. The stereo was tuned at high volume to a classical station. Haydn’s Twenty-second Symphony, he realized, and was amazed he recognized it. Davis preferred jazz, but he and Jackie had season tickets to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and went often, even over the last few years. Davis didn’t hate his wife. Their marriage had just lost its tolerance for long silences. At Symphony Center, silence was never an issue.

The door to the bathroom was open three inches and the light was on. Davis sat on the bed, dropped his head between his hunched shoulders, and put his palms flat atop the comforter.

The boy. Christ. The boy.

Davis had decided his path in the first year of medical school, but he told his mother and father that he planned to be a surgeon. His father was never churched, but he was a devout believer. An engineer, he taught his children that the purpose of life was to discover God from the inside out. The old man loved science, especially physics. The language of God was not Aramaic, or Latin, or Hebrew, or Arabic, he used to say, usually with a dismissive wave at a church or a Bible. The language of God, he’d say, is mathematics. When we reconcile the randomness of the universe with the precision of its rules, when we can see no contradictions in the chaos of nature and the equations of natural law, then we will understand his hows and whys.

Niles Moore believed God wanted us to deconstruct the world, to lay it in pieces across the kitchen table and, in doing so, understand him.

Davis believed that, too, which is what drew him to genetic research and, when Congress and a friendly administration assented, to fertility. For him, cloning was never about playing God. It was about replicating God’s work, following the blueprints of God’s greatest achievement and creating life.

The old man wouldn’t see it that way. The old man, back when cloning was only a possibility that made half the electorate excited for mankind and the other half afraid for their souls, thought that scientists who pursued human cloning were not observing nature but foiling it.

And so the deception throughout medical school – an easy enough thing considering the years of study and residency, unobserved outside the hospital. When he went into practice, it was more difficult.

By that time, Davis, privately (never to his patients), had become an agnostic. He had lost his faith like so many, gradually, slowly coming to the conclusion that his father’s God had not lived up to expectations. Davis didn’t blame his lack of faith on a godless universe – he still believed in some sort of power – but on the ridiculous demands religion placed on God. Omniscience? Omnipotence? Omnipresence? How could anyone who believed in a God like that not be disappointed with the world?