Martin Amis - Night Train

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

“Here we go. Arnold... ? Starts with a D?”

“Debs. Arn Debs.”

“Right. Yeah, she just wants to check where and when.”

“Would around eight be good? Here at the Mallard. In the Decoy Room?”

“You got it.”

That evening, over dinner, I hardly said a word. And that night, after lights out, what happens but Tobe comes across...This is no impulse thing with Tobe. It’s a task of major administration. Like the King Arthur movies—winching the knight up onto horseback. But it was all very gentle, all very sweet and dear, as I need it to be now. Now I’m sober. Before, I liked it to be rough, or I thought I did. These days I hate the idea of all that. Enough with the rough, I think. Enough rough.

The night train woke me around quarter of four. I lay there for a time with my eyes open. No chance of reentry. So I got out of bed and made coffee and sat and smoked over my notes.

I’m upset. I’m upset anyway, but I’m also pissed about something personal. Here’s what: The remarks and descriptions in Trader’s letters. Why? They weren’t unsympathetic. And I accept that I must have been a pretty pitiful sight back then—sweating it out behind drawn blinds. What am I concerned about? My privacy? Oh, sure. As I wind down from the job I begin to see these things more clearly. And privacy is what police spend their entire lives stomping on and riding roughshod over. Very, very soon you lose the whole concept of it. Privacy? Say what? No, what’s bothering me, I think, is the stuff about my childhood. As if, given that, there could be no other outcome.

Here are two related things I have to set down.

First is the reason why I love Colonel Tom. Not the reason exactly, but the moment I knew it to be true. There was a high-profile murder up in the Ninety-Nine. A dead baby in a picnic cooler. Talk of drug wars and race riots. Media up the kazoo. I was passing his office and I heard him on the phone. Lieutenant Rockwell, as he then was, on the phone to the Mayor. And I heard him say, very deliberate: My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out. I’d heard him use that parlance before. My Keith Booker. My Oltan O’Boye. It was just the way he said it. “My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out.” I went into the toilet and bawled. Then I went and straightened out the murder in the Ninety-Nine.

The second thing is this. My father messed with me when I was a child. Out in Moon Park. Yeah he used to fuck me, okay? It started when I was seven and it stopped when I was ten. I made up my mind that after I hit double figures it just wasn’t going to happen. To this end I grew the fingernails of my right hand. I sharpened them also, and hardened them with vinegar. This growing, this sharpening, this hardening: This was the reality of my resolve. On the morning after my birthday he came at me in my bedroom. And I almost ripped his fucking face off. I did. I had the fucking thing in my hand like a Halloween mask. I had it by the temple, just above the eye, and I sensed that with one more rip I could find out who my father really was. Then my mother woke up. We were never a model unit, the Hoolihans. By noon that same day we ceased to exist.

I’m what they call “state-raised.” I was fostered some, but basically I’m state-raised. And as a child I always tried to love the state the way you’d love a parent, and I gave it a hundred percent. I’ve never wanted a kid. What I’ve wanted is a father. So how do we all stand, now that Colonel Tom doesn’t have a daughter?

At 7:45 I called downtown. Johnny Mac: Mr. Whip on the midnights, which would now be falling apart. I asked him to have Silvera or whoever run a make on Arnold Debs.

I dug out my list: Stressors and Precipitants. Yeah, tell me about it. I crossed out 2 (Money?). And I crossed out 6 (Deep Secret? Trauma? Childhood?). This doesn’t leave me with much.

Today I’m doing 3 (Job?). And tonight I’m doing Mr. Seven.

Jennifer Rockwell, to say it all in one go, worked in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Institute of Physical Problems. The Institute lies well north of campus, in the foothills of Mount Lee, where the old observatory looms. What you do is: You take the MIE around CSU, skirting Lawnwood. And spend twenty minutes stuck in the Sutton Bay tailback. The Sutton Bay tailback: Another excellent reason for blowing your brains out.

Then you park the car and walk toward a low array of wood-clad buildings, expecting to be met by a forest ranger or a Boy Scout or a chipmunk. Here comes Chip. Here comes Dale. Here comes Woody Woodpecker, wearing a reversed baseball cap. The Department of Terrestrial Magnetism has the following words scrolled into the wall of its entrance corridor: ET GRITIS SICVT DEI SCIENTES BONVM ET MALVM. I got a translation from a kid who was passing: And you will be like gods, knowing good and evil. That’s Genesis, isn’t it? And isn’t it what the Serpent says? Whenever I’ve been out to CSU—for a criminology lecture, an o.d., a student suicide around exam time—I’ve always had the same feeling. I think: It’s a drag, not being young, but at least I don’t have to take a test tomorrow morning. Another thing I notice, at the Institute of Physical Problems, is that someone has changed all the rules of attraction. Sexual allure is a physical problem that the students are no longer addressing. In my day, at the Academy, the women were all tits and ass and the men were all dick and bicep. Now the student body has no body. Now it’s strictly sloppy-joe.

I am identified and greeted in the corridor by Jennifer’s department head. His name is Bax Denziger and he’s big in his discipline. He’s big all right: Not a joint-splitter like my Tobe, but your regular bearish, bearded, flame-eyed, slobber-mouthed type with (you can bet) an inch-thick pelt all over his back. Yeah, one of those guys who’s basically all bush. The little gap around the nose is the only clearing in the rain forest. He takes me into his office, where I feel I am surrounded by enormous quantities of information, all of it available, summonable, fingertip. He gives me coffee. I imagine asking permission to smoke, and imagine the way he’d say no: Totally relaxed about it. I repeat that I’m conducting an informal inquiry into Jennifer’s death, prompted by Colonel and Mrs. Rockwell. Off the record—but is it okay if I use a tape recorder? Yes. He waves a hand in the air.

Bax Denziger, incidentally, is famous: TV-famous. I know stuff about him. He has a twin-prop airplane and a second home in Aspen. He is a skier and a mountaineer. He used to lift weights for the state. And I don’t mean in prison. Three or four years ago he fronted a series on Channel 13 called “The Evolution of the Universe.” And they have him on the news-magazine shows whenever something gives in his field. Bax here is a skilled “communicator” who talks in paragraphs as if to camera. And that’s pretty much how I’m going to present it. The technical language should be right because I had Tobe run it by his computer.

I kicked off by asking him what Jennifer did all day. Would he please describe her work?

Certainly. In a department like ours you have three kinds of people. People in white coats who man the labs and the computers. People like Jennifer—postdocs, maybe assistant professors—who order the people in white coats around. And then people like yours truly. I order everyone around. Each day we have a ton of data coming in which has to be checked and processed. Which has to be reduced. That was Jennifer’s job. She was also working on some leads herself. As of last fall she was working on the Milky Way’s Virgo-infall velocity.