Night Train полностью

“With drugs?”

“When she was just a little girl, she asked her daddy...why he came to her bedroom. Why he made her do those bad things. Why he...Oh no. Oh. I’m sorry, Mike.”

“That’s okay. But let’s stop this. Jennifer did it.”

“Jennifer did it. See? Why doesn’t everyone just keep their mouth shut. Why doesn’t everyone...just shut the fuck up.”

Then a revelation:

Did you talk to Professor Denziger?

Yeah I talked to Bax. He told you what—

Yeah, he did. He agonized good about that. I thought it was kind of typical of her in a way. Not the incompetence. That wasn’t typical. But how she did it. Changing the values. Changing all the givens. Why’s that?

Like if you said to her, I don’t know, who’s going to win the election in November, she had trouble get­ting interested. Because of the givens. The parameters. Not just the candidates—the whole thing. For her the thread had gotten lost so long ago.

Did Denziger tell you that what she did looked deliberate?

I think the only way you can genuinely go wrong there is when you have an ax to grind. Like when Sandage started wowing everyone with his quasar dis­coveries. His results were contaminated by brown dwarves, which quasars can resemble. It’s like in ten­nis: You want the ball to be good so much you actually see it good when it’s not. Jennifer wouldn’t see anything that wasn’t there. I think it was just part of the pattern. You said she wasn’t the pattern type. But that’s what mental illness does—it ropes you into a pattern. Some very corny stuff. There’s some­thing else she did too. She started buying things. What? Don’t tell me. Cars. Pianos. No, paintings. Real crap, too. She wasn’t particu­larly visual, and I’m not either. But they look like airport art to me. I keep turning deliveries away. The galleries don’t holler. It’s a suicide. They’ve seen this before.

She used post-dated checks... Yeah. Post-dated checks. There were two deliv­eries on Friday. The checks were dated April first. April Fool. April Fool.

Then another revelation:

He’d just bummed a smoke off me: His first of the evening. I was halfway through my second pack. I said,

“This might surprise you, but I don’t think so. From the autopsy. Toxicology? I get the feeling Tom’s told you about it.”

“Miriam told me about it. She tells me everything in the end. The lithium? I played dumb. But I already knew.”

“You knew Jennifer was on lithium?”

“Not while she was alive I didn’t.” He sighed and said, “Mike, tell me something. That book... Making Sense of Suicide doesn’t make sense of suicide, or any­thing else. But it’s extra vague on suicide notes. How many suicides leave suicide notes?”

That’s a very slippery stat, and I told him so.

“And what’s the difference? What does it mean?”

Nothing in itself, I said. Depends on the person, depends on the note. Some offer comfort. Others, blame.

“She left a note. She left a note. She sent me a note by U.S. Mail. I went back to the office a week later and it was there in my tray. Here, help yourself. Now

I’m going to do what she did on Saturday morning, when she posted it. I’m going to take a walk around the block.”

I waited till I heard the door. I huddled down over the tape recorder. I tried to raise my voice above a whis­per—and I couldn’t. I had to use the volume control on the machine, because mine just wasn’t working.

“My darling,” I whispered. “You’re back at work now and that consoles me. That, and the fact that you’re the kindest lover on the planet and will eventu­ally have to forgive me for what I’ve done.

“You knew me ten times better than anyone, but I wasn’t quite what you thought I was. Almost exactly a year ago I started getting the sense that I was losing control of my thoughts. That’s the only way I can put it. My thoughts went about their thought thing, doing what they had to do, while I was just an innocent bystander. I didn’t dare go through Tulkinghorn, because I couldn’t trust him not to run to Dad. I thought I could fix it myself—which might have been part of the internal liar dice. I read up on it. And when you thought I was at the Brogan on Mondays I was at Rainbow Plaza where all the GCG people take their lunchbreaks on the lawn. You never scored a dime-bag so easy. Since last May I’ve been on varying doses of a stabilizer. Serzone, depecote, tegretol—they sound like moral stances. They dry your head out. But they stopped helping.

“I’m frightened. I keep thinking I’m going to do something that nobody’s ever done before—something altogether inhuman. Is that what I’m doing now? Baby, I’m staying with you until tomorrow night. You were perfect for me. And remember that you couldn’t have done anything any different.

“Help Ma. Help Dad. Help Dad. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry...”

And so it went on, over the page to the end of the sheet: I’m sorry.