Lydia Millet - Ghost Lights

They shook. The man’s hand was faintly greasy. Hal’s own was probably just as bad.

“Mr. Stern is not here yet,” said Jorge, in English that was unaccented and fluent. “He’s being transported overland. They should be getting in a little later.”

“We can come back,” said Brady. “We’ll have our interview then, and talk to the detective.”

“Do we know—”

“We’ll get the details then,” said Brady, smiling. “No problem.” He turned and shook Jorge’s hand.

Out on the street he told Hal not to seem overeager, that a casual attitude was best. Hal stopped on the sidewalk and turned to him, incredulous.

“Casual? Casual attitude? An innocent man’s languishing in prison! Who knows if the rule of law even holds? I mean do we even know if they have grounds for arresting him?”

Brady took him by the shoulder.

“The key is not to get overwrought. Trust me. Keep things low-key, unless we get indications there’s a hidden agenda. In that case, we’ll go in from a whole different angle. But there’s no sign of that yet. Best way to get him out quickly is to act like the stakes are low, like there’s no official anxiety. Act like we’re all on the same side. Because we are, basically. Walk softly, carry a big stick. Trust me.”

“Poker face. That’s what you’re saying?”

“More or less. Let’s go get some lunch. I know a nice little place right around the corner. Family runs it. Shall we?”

•

Lunch was jerk chicken they ate off paper plates on cheery red and green vinyl tablecloths. They washed down the chicken with tepid half-pints of watery beer, and afterward Hal retired to his hotel room, a relief. In the thick air the beer was making him feel heavy, his limbs difficult to lift.

He lay down on the coverlet, then thought of the bacteria Susan would assure him were writhing there — possibly even parasites such as crabs, which would take up residence in his pubic hair.

All right! Jesus.

He stood, pulled the coverlet off and lay down again on the cool top sheet. He was logy, but he was also restless. He missed Casey.

When she picked up the phone he felt drunker, suddenly, than he had since Gretel. It seemed all things were transparent, and who was he to pretend otherwise?

“I know about the phone sex,” he said.

“Shit,” said Casey.

“Yep. I do.”

“Huh,” said Casey. “What can I say. Sorry?”

“You’re not sorry,” he said. He was curious, actually. “You said you liked it. In the kitchen, to what’s her name. Who crochets the hideous multicolored afghans. And the baby booties.”

“Nancy.”

“You don’t have to lie to me, is my point. I’m your father.”

“Come on, Dad. You don’t want to know stuff like that. I mean really. Do you?”

He felt clean, miraculous. As though the details had no power over him. Everything was the idea of itself; everything was the shape of itself, not the texture — the shadow it threw or the light it cast, the arc of its traveling. Not the trivia, not the variables, no: the great sweep of feeling, the adventurous gesture.

“If it makes you happy, that’s good enough for me. Whatever. I mean not everyone wants to work for the IRS, either.”

“Nice try, Daddy. IRS, phone porn, same thing.”

“Anyway, sweetheart, I don’t need to know the details. But that doesn’t mean I need to be lied to. I’d rather get the respect of hearing the truth and having to deal with it.”

“I thought, you know, no one wants to think of their crippled kid doing phone porn for a living. Sordid. You know — do you really need the ideation? It’s like seeing your parents have sex. Right? Pretty disgusting. No offense, but who wants that? Come on!”

“The truth will set us free.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“OK, the truth will set me free. That’s what I’m seeing, since I’ve been down here. Or wait. What I’m seeing is more: I want to know the truth, but I don’t want to have to tell the truth. See? You want to have the truth available to you, but then you also want the freedom of never having to tell it yourself. That’s the deal with truth. It sets you free when you hear it, but if you have to tell it, that’s pretty much a non-freedom situation. Get it? People should tell the truth to me, if I ask them for it. But I should be able to hide the truth whenever I want to.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I resent the implication.”

“Uh huh. Mom said you’d been hitting the sauce. It’s not like you. So what is this? A mid-life-crisis thing?”

“I did have two beers with lunch. With the guy from the embassy. Beer in the middle of the day knocks me out, though. It’s humid here.”

“She also said T.’s in jail.”

“It’s more of a holding facility. Don’t worry. We’re gonna spring him. We’ll bust him out. I’m working closely with the U.S. embassy.”

“He killed someone?”

“Of course not, honey. A guy just happened to, you know, die next to him.”

“Just die?”

“Hey. It happens.”

“And there’s no, they don’t have any evidence against him, or whatever?”

“There’s no body, even. Don’t worry, Case. Hey, listen. What about Sal? How’s it going with him?”

“Oh, you know. It’s not anything, really.”

“Good to hear.”

“I bet.”

“Hey. Case.”

“Uh huh.”

“So I’ve been wondering. What happened with you and T.?”

She was silent. He was overstepping, but he couldn’t help it — there was a carelessness to him. Or he was carefree.

“In a nutshell? He condescended, Dad.”

“He condescended?”

“He condescended to me.”

There was nothing more. Casey was not one to step into an awkward pause, to take up the slack. The static buzzed between them. He let it rest.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all, Daddy. So when are you guys coming home?”

After they hung up he lay back on the sheet, content. It always made him feel good to talk to her. She always sounded like herself, whole, confident, abrupt. Her matter-of-factness was comforting, her cheery pugnacity. When he went to see her, or even heard her speaking to him on the phone, it reminded him that she was not gone at all — not gone at all and not miserable, at least no more so than the rest of the humans. She was warm, she was there, she was not the specter of a miserable daughter that lived alongside him. That specter could be dismissed.

It was irrelevant.

•

When he met Brady outside the jail there was another man with him, a younger Anglo in a seersucker suit. It turned out he was a lawyer.

“You said there was nothing to worry about,” said Hal, alarmed. It was beyond his control after all. It had run away on him. “You said walk lightly, not to show we’re worried!”

“A basic precaution. Cleve’s an old friend of mine from Miami. Jorge knows him too. He met him last year at a pool party. Remember that, Cleve? After the ribbon-cutting? At the new youth hostel?”

“With the — that woman with the grass skirt? The supernumerary nipple?”

“Right. Right! Who kept showing it to everyone.”

“Jesus,” said the lawyer, and shook his head. He turned to Hal. “She was an entertainer I guess? Something to do with the music? But she had this extra nipple. It was, like, right under her clavicle.” He tugged his shirt collar down to display the area in question.

“It was weird, though,” said Brady. “It was little.”

“Almost like a big wart.”

“But with an areola.”

“So this won’t, this won’t make the cops think we’re adversarial?” asked Hal. “Marching back in there with an attorney?”