The Intruders Read online

  —Søren Kierkegaard

  The Sickness Unto Death

  chapter

  ONE

  There was this girl I knew back in high school. Her name was Donna, and even that was wrong about her, as if she’d been mislabeled at birth. She wasn’t a Donna. Not in real terms. She made you realize there must be an underlying rhythm to the universe, and you knew this purely because she wasn’t hitting it. She walked a little too quickly. She turned her head a little too slowly. It was like she was dubbed onto reality a beat out of true. She was one of those kids you saw at a distance, toting a pile of books, standing diffidently with people you didn’t realize were even at the school. She had friends, she did okay in class, she wasn’t a total loser, and she wasn’t dumb. She was just kind of hard to see.

  Like all schools we had a pecking order of looks, but Donna somehow wasn’t on the same scale. Her skin was pale and her features fine-boned and evenly spaced, faultless except for a crescent scar to the side of her right eye, legacy of some toddling collision with a table. The eyes themselves were inky gray and very clear, and on the rare occasions when you got to look into them, you received a vivid sense she was real after all—which only made you wonder what you thought she was the rest of the time. She was a little skinny, maybe, but otherwise slightly cute in every way except that she somehow just…wasn’t. It was as if she released no pheromones, or they operated on an inaudible wavelength, broadcasting their signal to sexual radios either out of date or not yet invented.

  I found her attractive nonetheless, though I was never really sure why. So I noticed when it looked like she was hanging out with—or in the vicinity of—a guy named Gary Fisher. Fisher was one of the kids who strode the halls as if accompanied by fanfare, the group that makes anyone who’s been through the American school system instantly wary of egalitarian philosophies later in life. He played football with conspicuous success. He was on the starting basketball lineup, played significant tennis, too. He was good-looking, naturally: When God confers control of sports spheres, he tends to wrap it in a prettier package, too. Fisher wasn’t like the actors you see in teen movies now, impossibly handsome and free of facial blemish, but he looked right, back in the days when the rest of us stared dismally in the mirror every morning and wondered what had gone wrong and whether it would get better—or even worse.

  He was also, oddly, not too much of an asshole. I knew him a little from track, where I had a minor talent for hurling things a long way. I’d gathered from the jock grapevine that a realignment had taken place among the ruling classes, principally that Gary’s girl, Nicole, was now going with one of his friends instead, in what appeared to be an amicable transfer of chattels. You didn’t have to be too keen an observer of the social scene to perceive a degree of interest in taking her place—but the truly weird thing was that Donna seemed to believe herself in the running. It was as if she had received intelligence from somewhere that the caste system was illusory and you actually could fit a square peg in a round hole. She couldn’t sit at the same table at lunch, of course, but would wind up at one nearby, close to Gary’s line of sight. She would engineer “accidental” bumps in the corridor but manage nothing more than nervous laughs. I even saw her a couple of Fridays out at Radical Bob’s, a burger/pizza place where people tended to start the weekend. She would stop by whatever table Fisher was sitting at and deliver some remark about a class or assignment, which would fall to the floor like a brick. Then she would wander off, a little too slowly now, as if hoping to be called back. This never happened. Other than being mildly perplexed, I doubt Fisher had the slightest clue what was going on. After a couple weeks, a deal was done in some gilded back room—or the backseat of a gilded car, more likely—and one morning Gary was to be found in the company of Courtney Willis, textbook hot blonde. Life went on.

  For most of us.

  Two days later Donna was found in the bathtub at her parents’ home. Her wrists had been cut with determination and only one testing slash on the forearm. The adult consensus, which I overheard more than once, was that it could not have been a fast way to go—despite a last-ditch attempt to hasten progress by pushing a pair of nail scissors deep into her right eye socket, as if that crescent scar had been some kind of omen. There was a handwritten letter to Gary Fisher on the floor, the words blurred by water that had spilled over the edges of the tub. Lots of people later claimed to have seen the letter, or a photocopy, or overheard someone saying what was in it. But, as far as I know, none of this was true.

  News spread fast. People went through the motions, and there were outbreaks of crying and prayer, but I don’t think any of us were shaken to our core. Personally, I was not surprised or even particularly sorry. That sounds callous, but the truth was, it felt like it made sense. Donna was a weird chick.

  A strange girl, a dumb death. End of story.

  Or so it seemed to most of us. Gary Fisher’s reaction was different, and at the time it was the most surprising thing I had ever seen. Everything was new and strange back then, events backlit by the foreshortened perspective of a fledgling life. The guy who did something halfway cool one time became our very own Clint Eastwood. A party that happened a year before could take on the status of legend, generating nicknames that would last a lifetime. And when someone went tearing out into the farther reaches of left field, it tended to stick in your mind.

  On the following Monday, we heard that Fisher had quit the team. All the teams. He stood there and let the coaches bawl him out, then just walked away. Maybe these days you’d get some kind of slacker kudos for that kind of shit. Not in the 1980s, and not in the town where I grew up. It was so out there it was disturbing—the Alpha Teenager Who Resigned. Fisher became the guy you’d see wandering across the campus in transit between the library and class, as if he’d slipped into Donna’s slot. And he worked. Hard. Over the next months, he hauled his grade-point average up, first a little, then a lot. He went from being a C student—and some of those had been massaged through sports prowess—to B’s and some regular A’s. Maybe he was getting parent-funded extra tutoring after school, but actually I doubt it. I think he just jumped tracks, decided to be some other guy. By the end you hardly ever saw him except in class. The masses dealt with him warily. No one wanted to get too close, in case the madness was catching.

  I did see him this one afternoon, though. I’d been out training for our last-ever track meet and stayed on after the rest of the team left. Theoretically I was practicing the javelin, but really I just liked being there when no one else was around. I’d spent a lot of hours running that track, and it had started to dawn on me that the end was coming and some things were happening for the last time. As I pounded up the approach, back and forth, refining my run-up, I saw a guy walking from the far end. Finally I realized it was Gary Fisher.

  He wandered the periphery, not headed anywhere in particular. He’d been one of our star sprinters before he quit, and maybe he was there for the same kind of reason that I was. He wound up a few yards away and watched for a little while. Eventually he spoke.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Not going to win, though.”

  “How’s that?”

  I explained that a guy from another school had recently revealed himself not only to be good at throwing but to care about it also. After easy wins had stopped being a given, my interest had waned. I didn’t put it in those terms, but that was the bottom line.

  He shrugged. “Never know. Could be Friday’s going to be your day. Be cool to go out on a win.”

  For a moment then, I found I did care. Maybe I could do it, this last time. Fisher stood a bit longer, looking across the track, as if hearing the beat of feet in races gone by.

  “She was provisional,” I said suddenly.

  It was like he hadn’t heard me. Then he slowly turned his head. “What’s that?”

  “Donna,” I said. “She never really…locked in, you know? Like she was just renting space.”


  He frowned. I kept going.

  “It was like…like she knew it might just not work out, you know? Like she came into the world aware that happy-ever-after was a long shot. So she put all her chips on one bet to win. Came in red instead of black, so she just walked away from the table.”

  I hadn’t rehearsed any of this, but when I’d said it, I felt proud. It meant something profound, or sounded like it might—which is plenty good enough when you’re eighteen.

  Fisher looked at the ground for a minute and then seemed to nod faintly. “Thanks.”

  I nodded back, all out of words, and went thudding down the track to hurl my spear. Maybe I was showing off, hoping to impress the Gary Fisher of eight months before. Either way I pulled my arm over far too fast, reopened an old split on the tip of my middle finger, and wound up not making the last meet after all.

  The end of school came and went. Like everyone else, I was too busy rushing through celebrated rites of passage to pay much attention to people I didn’t really know. Tests, dances, everything hurried as our childhoods started to run out of gas. Then—bang: out into the real world, which has a way of feeling like that supertest you never got around to studying for. It still feels that way to me sometimes. I don’t think I heard Fisher’s name mentioned once during the summer, and then I left town to go to college. I thought about him every now and then over the next couple years, but eventually he dropped out of my head along with all the other things that had no relevance to my life.

  And so I was not really prepared for the experience of meeting him again, nearly twenty years later, when he turned up at the door of my house and started talking as if no time had passed at all.

  I was at my desk. I was trying to work, though a time-management study would probably have suggested that my job consisted of staring out the window, with only occasional and apparently random glances at a computer screen. The house was very quiet, and when the phone rang, it jerked me back in my chair.

  I reached out, surprised that Amy was calling the landline rather than my cell, but not thinking much more about it than that. Being on the phone to my wife meant a break from work. Then I could make more coffee. Go have a cigarette on the deck. Time would pass. Tomorrow would come.

  “Hey, babe,” I said. “How stands the corporate struggle?”

  “Is this Jack? Jack Whalen?”

  It was a man’s voice. “Yes,” I said, sitting up and paying more attention. “Who’s this?”

  “Hang on to your hat, my friend. It’s Gary Fisher.”

  The name sent up a flag right away, but it took another second to haul it back through the years. Names from the past are like streets you haven’t driven in a while. You have to remember where they go.

  “You still there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Just surprised. Gary Fisher? Really?”

  “It’s my name,” the guy said, and laughed. “I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”

  “I guess not,” I said. I had question marks right across the dial. “How did you get my number?”

  “A contact in L.A. I tried calling last night.”

  “Right,” I said, remembering a couple of hang-ups on the machine. “You didn’t leave a message.”

  “Thought it might come across kind of weird, getting in touch after nearly twenty years.”

  “A little,” I admitted. I found it hard to imagine that Fisher and I had anything to discuss unless he was running the class reunion, which seemed unlikely in the extreme. “So what can I do for you, Gary?”

  “It’s more what I might be able to do for you,” he said. “Or maybe both of us. Look—where is it you live, exactly? I’m in Seattle for a few days. Thought it might be cool to meet up, talk about old times.”

  “Place called Birch Crossing. Hour and a half inland. Plus, my wife’s got the car,” I added. Amy has claimed that if you could get enough unsociable people together in a room to vote, they’d make me their king. She’s probably right. Since my book came out, I’d been contacted by a few other people from the past, though none as far back as Fisher. I hadn’t bothered to reply to their e-mails, forwarded via the publisher. Okay, so we used to know each other. What’s your point?

  “I’ve got a day to kill,” Fished persisted. “Had a string of meetings canceled.”

  “You don’t want to just tell me on the phone?”

  “Would be a long call. Seriously, you’d be doing me a favor, Jack. I’m going nuts in this hotel, and if I walk round Pike Place Market one more time, I’m going to wind up with a big dead fish I don’t need.”

  I thought about it. Curiosity struck a deal with the desire not to work, the terms brokered by a small part of my soul for which—absurdly—Gary Fisher’s name evidently still held something of a charge.

  “Well, okay,” I said. “Why not?”

  He arrived a little after two. I’d achieved nothing in the meantime. Even a call to Amy’s cell phone for a hey-how-are-you had dead-ended in her answering ser vice. I was becalmed in the kitchen thinking vaguely about lunch when I heard someone pulling into the drive.

  I walked up the polished wood steps and opened the front door to see a black Lexus where our SUV usually sat—a vehicle that was currently in Seattle, with my wife. The car door opened and some mid-thirties guy got out. He came crunching over the gravel.

  “Jack Whalen,” he said, breath clouding around his face. “So you grew up. How did that happen?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “Did everything I could to avoid it.”

  I made coffee, and we took it down into the living room. He looked around for a few moments, checking out the view of the wooded valley through the big plate-glass windows, then turned to me.

  “So,” he said, “still got that good throwing arm?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Don’t get much occasion to throw stuff these days.”

  “You should. It’s very liberating. I try to throw something at least once a week.”

  He grinned, and for a moment he looked pretty much how I remembered him, albeit better dressed. He reached a hand across the coffee table. I shook it.

  “Looking good, Jack.”

  “You, too.”

  He was. You can tell men in good condition just from how they sit in a chair. There’s a confidence in their poise, a sense that sitting is not a relief but merely one of the many positions in which their body is at ease. Gary looked trim and fit. His hair was well cut and not gray, and he had the skin that healthy eating and nonsmoking deliver to those with the patience to endure that type of lifestyle. His face had matured into that of a youthful senator from somewhere unimportant, the kind who might have a shot at vice president someday, and his eyes were clear and blue. The only thing I had over him was that the lines around my mouth and eyes were less pronounced, which surprised me.

  He was silent for a few moments, undoubtedly making a similar assessment. Meeting a contemporary after a long time personifies the passage of time in a serious and irrevocable way.

  “I read your book,” he said, confirming what I’d suspected.

  “So you’re the one.”

  “Really? Didn’t do so well? I’m surprised.”

  “It did okay,” I admitted. “Better than. Problem is, I’m not sure there’s another.”

  He shrugged. “Everyone thinks you’ve got to do things over and over. Nail your colors to the mast, make it who you are. Maybe one was all you had.”

  “Could be.”

  “You couldn’t go back to the police force?” He saw the way I looked at him. “You thank the LAPD in the acknowledgments, Jack.”

  Slightly against my will, I smiled back. Fisher still had that effect. “No. I’m done there. So how do you earn a buck these days?”

  “Corporate law. I’m a partner in a firm back east.”

  Him being an attorney figured, but it didn’t give me a lot to work with. We knocked sentences back and forth for a little while, mentioning people and places we’d once known
, but it didn’t catch fire. It’s one thing if you’ve kept in touch over the years, lit beacons to steer you across the seas of time. Otherwise it seems strange, being confronted with this impostor who happens to have the same name as a kid you once knew. Though Fisher had referred to old times, we didn’t really have any, unless pounding around the same track counted, or a shared ability to remember the menu at Radical Bob’s. A lot had happened to me since then, probably to him, too. It was evident that neither of us counted classmates as friends or retained ties to the town where we’d grown up. The kids we’d once been now seemed imaginary, a genesis myth to explain how we’d used up our first twenty years.

  “So,” I said, swallowing the rest of my coffee, “what did you want to talk to me about?”

  He smiled. “You’re done with the small talk?”

  “Never really been a core skill.”

  “I remember. What makes you think I’ve got something to say?”

  “You said you did. Plus, until you got my new number, you evidently thought I still lived in L.A. That’s not a couple hours’ drive from Seattle. So you started looking for me for some other reason.”

  He nodded, as if pleased. “How’d you find this place anyway? Birch Crossing? Is it even on maps?”

  “Amy did. We’d talked about getting out of L.A. I had, at least. She got this new job. It meant we could basically be anywhere as long as she could get to an airport once in a while. She found this place online or somewhere, came and checked it out. I took her word for it.”

  “Liking it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Kind of a change from Los Angeles, though.”

  “That was partly the point.”

  “Any kids?”

  “No.”

  “I got a couple. Five and two years old. You should try it. They change your life, dude.”

  “So I hear. Where are you based these days?”

  “Evanston. Though I work in downtown Chicago. Which brings me to it, I guess.”