Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

“What do you mean she’s losing her shit?” he asked, picking up one of her books about Christians and teens off the floor. “Did you find out why she didn’t play paintball with us?”

“Yup. It was those pictures. The ones some old BEDS client left behind at the Hotel New England. She actually spent yesterday-most of it, anyway-in the darkroom. Can you believe it? She is so obsessed with those loopy old photos that she completely forgot she was supposed to be running around the woods with my youth group. With me! She’s actually forgotten about me totally lately. I must confess, I didn’t think such a thing was possible, and I am more than a little bent out of shape. But more than that, I am worried about her.”

She recounted for him the way Laurel had presumed their apartment had been ransacked yesterday, and her fear that someone was after the old homeless man’s pictures. She told him how her friend had been avoiding her since she had returned from Long Island, and how Laurel ’s life seemed, suddenly, to be revolving around this strange dead man’s work. When she was finished, she leaned her head against the back of the couch, closed her eyes, and said almost plaintively, “Really. I don’t know what to make of this or who I should call. Her boss, maybe? The minister at my church? What would you do?”

He wondered if she was, perhaps, overreacting. “Isn’t this just a new hobby? Something she’s jazzed about because it’s all fresh? Obviously, I don’t know a whole lot about her life or how she spends her time. She’s from Long Island, she works at BEDS, she’s dating an older guy from the newspaper. She likes to swim in the morning. She used to bike. That’s about it. But she doesn’t seem to have a whole lot going on in her life, does she? So why shouldn’t she work on those photos? It sounds like all they’re really keeping her from is…well, you.”

He hoped this last remark had sounded like a good-natured joke, but given the speed with which that sleepy hand of hers had backhanded him on the chest-a spring-loaded paddle, it felt like-he wasn’t so sure.

“Not everything is about me,” she said.

“No?”

“No. There is actually quite a lot going on in our Laurel ’s life-or, at least, in her head. You don’t know what the girl has been through. Almost no one does.”

Her tone was uncharacteristically wistful, and it made him wonder: “Does this have anything to do with the fact she was nearly raped once?”

“Nearly?”

“Yeah, I guess. The other day Gwen said something to me that implied Laurel had almost been raped. I don’t know anything more than that. I don’t know where or when or the circumstances. I figured it was none of my business and I didn’t want to pry.”

She raised her head from the couch and turned toward him. “It wasn’t almost.”

“Oh, shit.”

“And it wasn’t just rape. They-”

“They?”

“There were two of them. You want to know about Laurel? You want to know why she doesn’t bike anymore and why I worry? Okay, Captain Lycra, here’s the four-one-one on Miss Laurel Estabrook,” she said. Then, her eyes never wavering from his, Talia told him precisely what had happened to her friend up in Underhill, and why she was worried now.

A FTER SHEM HAD LEFT, Laurel went through the photos one last time in the diner, trying to piece them together in a linear fashion. Not chronologically. She’d already done that. This time she was seeing if she could, as Shem had suggested, form a treasure map. She winnowed out the celebrities-pushing aside the likes of Chuck Berry and Robert Frost and Julie Andrews-and then she made two piles, one of places and one of things, and she wrote down on a yellow legal pad what was in each.

Places

The Brooklyn Bridge

Plaza Hotel

Washington Square

Train station, West Egg

Manhattan cityscapes

Chrysler building

New York Philharmonic

Greenwich Village

Street football underneath Hebrew National billboard

World’s Fair (including the Unisphere)

Brownstones (in Brooklyn?)

Mustang in front of Marshfield estate Midwestern arts-and-crafts house (Wright?) Unknown jazz club (a series)

Central Park

World Trade Towers

Wall Street

Main Street, West Egg

Valley of Ashes office park (not real name) East Egg train platform

East Egg shoreline

West Egg shoreline

My old swim club (Gatsby’s old house) Underhill dirt road scenes (two with a girl on a bike) Stowe church

Waterfall

Mount Mansfield ski trails (in summer)

Things

Hair dryers

Autos (many)

Cigarettes (in ashtrays, on tables, close-ups in people’s mouths)

More autos (a half dozen)

IBM typewriter (three)

Mustang in front of Marshfield estate Fifth Avenue bus

Lava lamps

Love beads and peace medallions Art deco jewelry box

Crab apple tree (a few prints, one with a little pyramid of apples beside it)

Dog by bakery

There were certain images that Laurel assumed were valueless in this quest: the cigarettes, the lava lamps, the cars. The hair dryers. Likewise, she knew that other photographs had been commissioned assignments, such as the Unisphere. The ones that were most puzzling to her were actually the pictures of Vermont and the pictures of her that were taken just before her life would be altered forever: photographs Bobbie had snapped on that very Sunday in Underhill, perhaps, or on one of the Sundays that had preceded that awful day. Were those images relevant to her search? Was she actually a clue herself in Bobbie’s treasure map? Or was it just an odd coincidence that her path and Bobbie’s had crossed years before they would formally meet, and that they would cross in that particular month-perhaps on that very Sunday afternoon? Were the photographs of a bicyclist on a dirt road or of a church up in Stowe a part of the pictorial labyrinth he was constructing, or were they irrelevant? After all, there were no indications that either Gatsby or the Buchanans had ever set foot in Vermont.

And what of that house Laurel had presumed was somewhere in the Midwest? Was it in Chicago, where she knew Tom Buchanan’s family was from? Or was it in Saint Paul, where Howard Mason had said that Bobbie might have tracked down a grandfather? For all Laurel knew, the house with its gently pitched roofs and wide boxlike floors-a second floor that jutted out like a jaw above the first-might very well exist in East or West Egg, Long Island. Or it might have belonged to one of those Louisville cousins.

The prints that Laurel thought had the greatest potential were the ones that most obviously hinted at a part of Bobbie’s life. Carefully, she drew a line through the images that she was confident were not clues to his parentage, and decided that what remained was manageable. Doable. She could see the elements of a map, just as Shem had suggested. She would simply tell Katherine that she needed some time off from work-a week, maybe two. Tonight she would make prints from the last of the negatives, and perhaps as soon as tomorrow or Tuesday she would start to use up her vacation days and go…

Well, she might have to begin with a prison in northern Vermont. And, if that inmate wasn’t Bobbie’s son, then one in Montana. Because although the project might be doable, it wasn’t going to be easy. There were the trace elements of a map, perhaps, but which were the clues and which were merely the aimless photos (or, perhaps, even the red herrings) taken by a schizophrenic who drank too much she couldn’t decide. She had landmarks in East and West Egg: the houses and train platforms and the manicured lengths of beach. Her country club-Gatsby’s estate. She had an office park that had risen from the Valley of Ashes. She had the Plaza, the hotel where Bobbie’s own mother had been asked to choose between her husband and her lover, and been unable. She had an art deco jewelry box with scalloped mirrors along the lid. Surely there was a chance that the box held Jay’s wartime portrait-and perhaps something more. A letter. A locket. A ring with an engraving. But how did one begin to find a box in any of these structures? Suppose she found the arts-and-crafts house? What then? Ask the owner if she could dig up the basement? Ransack the floorboards in the attic? Likewise, what could she do at her old country club? Ask to rummage around the library-the one that had once dazzled guests simply because it happened to have books that were real?