The Candy House(12)
There was nothing quite like that first scream, so said Alfred, who likened it to the initial gurgling sip of wine on the palate of an expert. But the last bit was important, too, and to get at that, he had to keep screaming. He had only one rule: Don’t interact. His job was simply and only to scream and await the Something Happens Phase—“something” usually taking the form of a physical incursion. Alfred had been slapped, punched, tossed out doors onto sidewalks; had a rug thrown over his head, an orange wedged into his mouth, and a shot of anesthesia administered without his consent. He’d been Tasered, billy-clubbed, and arrested for disturbing the peace. He’d spent eight separate nights in jail.
About thirty seconds after Alfred’s first scream, the Avis bus veered to the curb and the driver, a tall African-American man, parted the flailing crowd and strode to the back. Alfred braced for physical confrontation, being guilty of prejudice about Black men and violence despite a passionate belief that he was free of it. But the driver, whose name patch read “Kinghorn,” fixed upon Alfred the laparoscopic gaze of a surgeon teasing muscle from bone as prelude to excising a tumor. His invasive scrutiny prompted a discovery for Alfred: Being studied, while screaming, was actually more uncomfortable than being thrown or punched or kicked. And that discovery yielded a second: Physical assaults, while painful, gave him a way to end his uninterrupted screaming. Which led to a third discovery: Screaming is not uninterrupted. In order to scream, one must breathe; in order to breathe, one must inhale; and in order to inhale, one must interrupt one’s screaming.
“Did someone hurt this man?” Mr. Kinghorn inquired sharply during the first such interruption. Having discerned a united denial and noticed a pale, distraught face close at hand—Kristen’s—he addressed her quietly. “Are you traveling with this man?”
“I was,” she murmured.
“Does he have psychological issues?”
“I don’t know,” Kristen said wearily. “I think he just likes to scream.”
Mr. Kinghorn injected into Alfred’s next several inhalations: “Sir, you’ve made your racket for going on two minutes now… I’ll allow you thirty more seconds… at which point you’ll either have to stop hollering or leave my bus… Am I making myself clear?”
Alfred found himself nodding his compliance, a heinous breach of his “don’t interact” rule. Mr. Kinghorn consulted his wristwatch—a big chunky diver’s watch, or a skydiver’s watch, a watch that could make you an omelet or teleport you into another millennium. Then he waited. But Alfred couldn’t keep screaming in quite the way he had; Mr. Kinghorn’s authority soothed the ravaged passengers, neutralizing the screams’ effects. Alfred had a sensation like a tent collapsing; awash in fabric, he fell silent.
Mr. Kinghorn gave a curt nod. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “I appreciate your willingness to pipe down. Now let us proceed.”
His voice rose with these last words, a sonorous baritone filling the bus and apparently also people’s hearts, for there was a round of applause. The bus swung away from the curb and soon was hurtling toward the Avis rental lot buoyed by communal jubilation that knew only three exceptions: Alfred, who drooped in mortified exhaustion from his bar; Kristen, who stared furiously at the bleak airport landscape; and Mr. Kinghorn, whose expertise at subduing disruptive passengers made it clear there was nothing so special about this one.
* * *
“I wonder what Mr. Kinghorn is like in real life,” Kristen mused dreamily as they sat in their Avis rental, enmeshed in O’Hare traffic.
“Why don’t you call the Avis office and ask for him,” Alfred said sourly.
“You’re not in a very good mood,” Kristen said. “You’ve just indulged in your fetish; isn’t that supposed to leave you flushed and a little high?”
“Let’s forget it happened.”
“I wish!”
Alfred sighed. “You used to like my screaming.”
“I wouldn’t say like.”
“You used to believe in it.”
“True.”
“What changed?”
Kristen considered this. At last she said, “It got boring.”
4
The misery of the drive to Miles’s Winnetka house was surpassed only by the misery of being there: eating sandwiches on his brother’s deck overlooking Lake Michigan, leaves sashaying from the trees and settling on the water like yellow lily pads. His mother had enfolded him in her jasmine-scented embrace. Introductions to Kristen had been made (followed by pointed, questioning looks that translated to: “She’s lovely; it’s a miracle; she must not know him well; or maybe she’s off in some way we can’t see…?”). Inquiries about the travel from New York had been satisfied (vaguely), and there was the new baby, of course, and he was tiny, of course, and everyone wanted to hold him, of course, and although Kristen had been nervous to meet Alfred’s family, now she seemed glad just to be away from people who were screaming. Alfred had forgotten that Ames was coming. But Ames was here, along with the usual amorphous tension that arose from the shadowy mystery of his career. That mystery had swelled in direct proportion to Ames’s muscle mass starting a couple of years after 9/11, when he advanced from enlisted soldier to Special Ops. Now, at thirty-one, he was allegedly retired, but he’d bulked up yet more, spent most of his time overseas, and, at a mention of Bin Laden’s recent assassination, seemed briefly unsure who that was.