Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

No money trace. Fake papers. A three-month head start. “This one’s gonna take a while,” Jonathan had said. He went out and brought them back two coldcut sandwiches from the deli, and while they ate, Bailey had asked if he could try something.

Jonathan looked at him through those thick, black nerd-glasses and grinned. “Knock yourself out. I’m not paying you for lunch.”

Bailey had reasoned that a man can change his identity, but not his self; at least, not without years of effort. And why bother to try? You can’t trace a missing person’s self. But in a world based on birth certificates and social security numbers, he thought that the sorcerers of primitive tribes had it right: You didn’t send sickness to confound an enemy by way of his zip code. You focused your power on a person, a soul, an inner core.

He’d walked through their target’s apartment. He’d talked to their target’s ex-wife. She met him at the address, letting him in with her spare set of keys—that surprised him, but she merely said, bitterly, that her husband never kept anything important in the apartment. She took him through each room, keeping up a continuous stream of information about her ex as they went. She thought he had some kind of shady friends in Arizona. Or was it Wyoming? One of those western places. He’d talked about retiring to a cabin there…

In the den, above the PC, there was a framed poster of Edward Hopper’s “Gas.” A lonely road in Cape Cod, shivery in the gathering darkness. In the foreground a man stood beside the lit pumps of a Shell station; in the background, the road wove into the dark trees and waving grass. A moment from the Fifties, frozen in its disquietude.

“I wouldn’t let him keep it in the living room,” said their target’s wife. “I was sick of looking at it. He had it in the bedroom in our old place—I couldn’t get away from it. I wanted Impressionists, you know? Was that too much to ask? I’m telling you—” she paused.

“Bailey.”

“Bailey. The man never learned how to compromise. That’s his problem, in a nutshell.”

She said a number of other things, but that day at lunch, Bailey called the fine arts department at Columbia University. Then he called the Museum of Modern Art, identifying himself as an officer with the fifth precinct. He’d thought it would be more difficult than that, but the person he spoke with at the museum simply went away, came back, and told him that yes, they had shipped a copy of “Gas” to Morant, Wyoming, three weeks ago. They had the address waiting to go into the database for future delivery of sale catalogues. No, only two other copies of that print had been shipped outside the New York area in the last three months—and the man named a woman in California and one in Texas.

Bailey hung up the phone feeling completely disoriented. It must have shown, because his eyes met Jonathan’s, who was sitting on the edge of his desk, and a wry grin sneaked over Jonathan’s face. He said, “You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?”

Bailey lay there, feeling the late morning breeze ruffle the sheets. Lilith had opened the shutters for him before she left, which probably meant she wasn’t coming back to the room. Most likely she was in the study now, working at her computer terminal.

Six weeks. This was February second; he had till mid-March.

“What if she doesn’t throw you out after six weeks, Bailey?”

He remembered his friend Marianne’s voice, the open window that looked out over the campus, the sound of birdsong and drifting conversation from passing Barnard students. That last crash-and-burn had been particularly bad. He’d needed to talk… when he was able to talk.

“She has to throw me out, I told you; I’d die, otherwise.” And by the time it got that far, he was no longer psychologically able to leave on his own. Jesus, that got embarrassing, sometimes, that final week or so: Are you having any symptoms, Bailey?—Cough, cough. Oh, no. As he’d start to shift all his weight onto his hands as he rose from a chair, to try to hide the growing weakness. Perfectly fine. Not yet, don’t do it yet, I don’t want to come home and find the place empty—

“And you just trust her to do it.”

“I trust her, yes.”

“Does she know how bad it is for you, afterward?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“We don’t talk about it.”

“What do you mean, you don’t talk about it?”

“You know, it’s like personal death or nuclear war. We live in the present.”

“Alcoholics live in the present, Bailey. Drug addicts live in the present.”

“Zen buddhists live in the present.”

She sighed. “Bailey, don’t you think you should see a therapist instead of an anthropologist?”

He gave her his most innocent smile. “Anthropologists make fewer assumptions.”