The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 Read online

  Remy now knew that for Evans it was about 1962, since Scott LaFaro, his young former bassist, had died in a car accident in 1961.

  “Do you play, man?” Evans asked.

  “Just enough to tell how good you are,” Remy said.

  “So there’s no chance you could become a musician?”

  “No, no, I couldn’t do it.”

  “I know this identity thing is difficult to handle at first.”

  “It is for me. It really is,” Remy said, touched by the note of sympathy in Evans’s voice.

  “Do you do any of the arts, man?”

  “Not with anything like your level of skill or Dali’s or any of the other members, for that matter. I write a little at my job . .. but you could hardly call it art. There’s a man, a rising star at my ad agency named Eugene who’s working on a campaign with me now who has the most original ideas and comes up with the most brilliant material who really is an artist. If he were here, instead of me, he could become George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde.”

  “Have you spoken to him about the club?”

  “No, no. I don’t really know him that well. I mean he barely knows I exist.”

  “Anyway, I’ve been speaking to some of the other members and there’s definitely growing support to include men of letters in the club, you know, critics of a high level like Edmund Wilson or Marshall McLuhan.”

  “Oh no, I don’t know anywhere near enough to be Edmund Wilson or McLuhan either. I figure if I become a member it will be as a novelist. I was thinking of Nathanael West, or maybe James Agee.”

  “Either way you’d have to go young.”

  Remy looked at Evans to be sure he was joking but saw that he looked quite serious. A chilling thought flitted through his mind. Did the committed members have a secret rule that they had to die at the same age their “adopted artists” did? And if so, was it merely a symbolic death of their identity or their actual physical death duplicated as closely as possible? Was the Identity Club, which he’d thought of as devoted to a form of reincarnation, then, actually devoted in the long run to a kind of delayed suicide? Of course this was probably a preposterous fantasy, still, he couldn’t completely dismiss it.

  “But you’ll have to die young too then,” Remy said, remembering that Bill Evans had died at fifty-one. He said this with a half smile so it could seem he was joking. Evans looked around himself nervously before he answered.

  “I find that Zen really helps me deal with the death thing.”

  Remy took a step back and nodded silently. His head had begun to hurt and after he saw that Evans wanted to play again he excused himself to use the bathroom. Once there, however, he realized that he’d forgotten to bring his Tylenol. He opened the mirrored cabinet, was blinded by a variety of pharmaceuticals but found nothing he could take. He closed the cabinet and heard Evans playing the opening chorus of “Time Remembered,” one of his best compositions. The music was startlingly lovely but then partially drowned out by a loud coughing in the hallway. Remy turned and saw Thomas Bernhard, face temporarily buried in a handkerchief.

  “Are you looking for something?” Bernhard said in a German accent.

  “I have a headache.”

  “How fragile we are, yet how determined. So you are looking for? ...”

  “Some Tylenol.”

  “Ah! You have a headache and I have some Tylenol,” Bernhard said, withdrawing a small bottle from the cavernous pocket of his corduroy sports jacket.

  “Since my illness I am nothing but pills, my kingdom for a pill. Here ...” he said, handing Remy the bottle.

  Remy took two and swallowed them.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said. Bernhard nodded, and half bowed in a gently mocking way.

  “So, have you decided to become Nathanael West or not?”

  “I understand that I’d have to die quite young then and quite violently,” Remy said, laughing uncertainly.

  Bernhard’s eyes had a heightened, almost shocked expression. Then he started coughing loudly and persistently again. Remy waited a half minute, finally saying, “Why don’t you drink some water?” He got out of the bathroom area, half directing Bernhard to the sink, and returned to the living room.

  “Is he all right?” Poe said, meeting him in the hallway. He was drinking from a half-empty wine bottle.

  “Yes, I think so,” Remy said. But I’m not, he said to himself. For the first time he felt profoundly uncomfortable at a club meeting. The pressure of having to make his identity decision was oppressive and worse still were the dark fears he now had about the club’s policies. The original conceit of the club had amused him in the titillating way he liked to be amused, but if he were right about his suspicions, then the club was far more literal about its directed reincarnation than he’d realized. If he were right about the death rule, to commit to an identity was to select all aspects of your fate including when you would die. And what if one changed one’s mind and didn’t want to cooperate after committing, what then?

  The pain in Remy’s head was excruciating and at the first polite opportunity he excused himself, heaping more praise on Evans for the wonderful evening before he closed the door . . . and shuddered.

  He decided not to return the phone calls he got from three club members over the next two days. To say anything while he was uncertain what to do about the Identity Club could be a mistake. On the one hand he’d been profoundly upset by what he thought he might have discovered about its policies, on the other hand the club was the nucleus of what social life he had and would be very difficult to give up. Besides his job, the Identity Club was his only consistent base of human contact.

  Remy began to throw himself into the new campaign with more passion than he’d ever shown at the agency. Largely due to Eugene’s contributions, it was succeeding and, as expected, it was Eugene who benefited the most from it with the agency higher-ups. It was not that Eugene worked harder than Remy; it was simply that he could accomplish twice as much with less effort because he was so talented in the field. Still, Remy didn’t begrudge him his success. Instead his interest in Eugene grew even stronger as he continued to watch and study him. He felt if he could become Eugene’s friend and confide in him, than Eugene might know just what he should do about the Identity Club.

  As Remy suspected, Eugene led a highly ritualized existence in the workplace. It wasn’t difficult to arrange a “chance meeting” at the elevator banks and to quickly ask him to have a drink in a way he couldn’t refuse. They went to a bar on Restaurant Row — Remy feeling happier than he had in days. But once outside the agency Eugene seemed tense and remote, and sitting across from him at the bar he avoided eye contact and spoke sparsely in a strangely clipped tone that forced Remy to become uncharacteristically aggressive.

  “We’re all so grateful for the work you did on the campaign. It was just amazing,” Remy said. Eugene nodded and said a muted thank you. It was as if Remy had just said to him “nice shirt you’re wearing.”

  “I’m really proud to have you as a colleague,” Remy added for good measure.

  Again Eugene nodded, but this time said nothing and Remy began to feel defeated and strangely desperate. He waited until their eyes locked for a moment then said, “Do you know what the Identity Club is?” The immediate reddening of Eugene’s face told Remy that he did.

  “What makes you think that I would know?”

  “I know some of the key members in the club came from our agency.”

  Eugene raised his eyebrows but still said nothing.

  “In fact, I’m a member myself or a potential member.”

  “Then what is it you think I would know about the club that you wouldn’t know already?”

  “Fair enough,” Remy said, clearing his throat and finishing his beer.

  “I’ll be a little more candid. I’m a member in that I’ve been attending the meetings but I’m not a completely committed member. I’ve been trying to decide whether to commit to the club completely and since I respect
you and admire your judgment so much I thought I would ask you about it.”

  “I tend to avoid organizations that have a strong ideology, especially ones that try to convert you to their worldview. I think they are unappetizing and often dangerous.”

  “Why is it dangerous?” Remy asked.

  “Any organization that asks you to alter your life, or to jeopardize it and in many cases to give it up is to be avoided like the plague. Is, in fact, the plague . . . I’m just making this as a general statement, OK? I’m not saying anything about your club specifically,” Eugene said hurriedly, looking away from Remy when he tried to make eye contact with him again.

  “Thank you for your advice.”

  “It wasn’t advice about anything specific. Remember that. It was just a general observation on the nature of organizations.”

  “Thank you for your observations then. I appreciate it and will keep it completely confidential.”

  Eugene seemed more relaxed then but five minutes later excused himself, saying he had to leave for another appointment. Remy could barely make himself stand when Eugene left, he felt so frozen with disappointment. When he did begin to move he felt strangely weightless, like a dizzy ghost passing down a dreamlike street. It was as if for the first time the universe had revealed its essential emptiness to him and he was completely baffled by it. In his life before New York there had always been some kind of support for him. First his parents, when he was a child, of course. Perhaps he left them too soon. Then his teachers when he went to school where he also met his friends who were now dispersed around the country as he was, though none of them had landed in New York. The Identity Club had filled that void, he supposed, although not completely or else Eugene wouldn’t have been so important to him. But now it was clear that Eugene wanted little to do with him and it was also becoming increasingly clear (from the meeting at Evans’s house to the dark advice of Eugene) that there were real problems, some of them perhaps dangerous, with the club. But how could he bear to leave it? The truth was he could hardly bring himself to focus on these problems, much less think them through in any systematic way. He could barely bring himself to get to work on time, dressed properly and able to smile, and could hardly remember that in the past he had always prided himself on being neat, on time, and amiable — the ultimate team player. After work, the next day, he went directly home as if there were some awful menace on the streets he had to flee.

  In his apartment he found it difficult to sit still, and nearly impossible to sleep. He began pacing from wall to wall of his apartment, trying to move without any thought or even excess motion, like a fish in an aquarium, varying his passage as little as possible as he continued his routine.

  Then, finally, a change. The phone rang in his aquarium, he picked it up for some reason, following some fish-like impulse, and heard the voice of Bill Evans saying, “I’ve got to talk to you, man.”

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  “Not on the phone. Are you free now?”

  Remy thought of the dark streets and wasn’t sure how to answer.

  “It’s important.”

  “OK,” Remy said.

  “You know Coliseum Books on Fifty-ninth Street?”

  “Yes.”

  “Meet me there in half an hour. I’ll be in the mystery section.”

  Remy hung up and continued pacing rapidly for a minute, like a fish doing double time. Then he stopped and began wondering if he should call a cab or not — would it really be any safer? And as he thought, the water around him evaporated, as did his feeling of having gills and a fish persona. He was so happy about that he decided to run the twenty blocks to the bookstore, keeping his mind as thought-free as possible although he did feel a low but persistent level of anxiety the whole way.

  As promised, Evans was in the mystery section in a long black overcoat looking at or pretending to look at a book by Poe with his black-rimmed glasses. Their eyes met quickly, Evans, looking around himself, half nodding, but waiting until Remy was next to him before he spoke in a low voice barely louder than a whisper.

  “We can talk here, man.”

  “What is it?” Remy said. He wanted to say more but couldn’t, as if all those silent hours away in the aquarium made him forget how to talk.

  “There are some things I think you don’t know, that I want you to know.”

  “What things?”

  “About the club and its ideas. When I was talking to you at the last meeting you looked confused when I was referring to my trio, like you didn’t know how old I was.”

  “But then I figured it out.”

  “Yah, man, cause I talked about Scotty’s death and the record I made a year later. You figured it out ‘cause you know about my career. But let me lay it out to you in simple terms ‘cause you’re going to have to make an important commitment at the next meeting and when you make it it’s like a complete life commitment. When you take on a new identity there are a lot of rewards, but also a lot of demands. You have to do a tremendous amount of research too and you have to have a lot of strength to leave your old self completely behind. In that sense you have to kill your old self and its old life. The only thing you can keep is your job but you have to do your job the way Nathanael West would, if you go ahead and decide to become him. That’s why it takes so much courage and faith as well as work — time spent in a library, or whatever, doing as much research on him as you can. And finally, well let me ask you how old you are?”

  “Twenty-nine,” Remy said in a voice now barely above a whisper.

  “OK, man. You’ll live the life West did at twenty-nine, you’ll take on his life in chronological order from twenty-nine on, so when you turn thirty West will turn thirty until ...”

  “Until when?”

  “Until he dies, man. I wanted you to understand that. That’s where the courage and faith part come in.”

  “But he died so young. “

  “Like I said, I’m gonna pass pretty soon too, but I’m also going to play jazz piano more beautifully than anyone’s ever played it — that’s the reward part — and besides, as long as the club exists I’ll be reincarnated again somewhere down the line.”

  “But you‘ll be dead.”

  “No man, I’ll be Bill Evans reincarnated. I might have to wait a number of years but like my song says, ‘We Will Meet Again,’” Evans said with an ironic smile.

  Remy looked down at the floor to get his bearings.

  “Do all the members understand this when they make their commitment?”

  “Don’t worry about the other members. Just focus on yourself.”

  “But what if I lack the courage and vision to do this, to…”

  “Have you been studying the club literature, especially the parts about reincarnation?”

  “Not as much as I should have. Look, Bill, what if I decide I can’t go through with this and just want to withdraw my membership?”

  “I wouldn’t advise that, man,” Evans said with unexpected sternness. “I really think it’s too late for that in your case.”

  Instinctively Remy took a step back — his face turning a shade of white that, in turn, made Evans’s eyes grow larger and more intense.

  “Do you realize the invaluable work we’re doing?”

  “Yes, no,” Remy said.

  “We’re saving the most important members of the human race— allowing their beauty to continue to touch humanity.”

  “But you’re killing them again. Why not give the, give yourself, for example, a chance to live longer to see what you could do with more time?”

  Evans shook his head from side to side like a pendulum.

  “You can’t go against karma, man. We have to accept our limits.” Remy took another step back and Evans extended his arm and let his hand rest on his shoulder.

  “This world is as beautiful as it can get. You have to accept it. You know, like the poet said, ‘death is the mother of beauty.’”

  “It sounds more like a suicide club tha
n an identity club,” Remy blurted.

  “Sometimes when something is really important or beautiful you have to die for it, like freedom. Isn’t that why all the wars are fought?”

  “But most wars are stupid and preventable.”

  “Death isn’t preventable, man. We know this. Every bar of every tune I play knows this. It’s like we accept this unstated contract with the world when we’re born that we understand we’ll have to die but we’ll live out our destiny anyway.”

  “But all of science and medicine is trying to extend life, to defeat death.”

  “They’ll never succeed, man. We know that, that’s why we’re a club of artists. Death and reincarnation is stronger than freedom. You have to give your life to forces that are bigger than you. Isn’t that the unstated contract we all understand once we realize what death is? Isn’t that humility the biggest part about what being a man is, man?”