Biofire, p.4
Biofire, page 4
That was when everything became too good to be true. Everything was so wonderful that he could not help wondering when the other shoe would drop—it was his nature. He got a job at the Journal, the biggest paper in the city, and one of the more respected papers in the country. On the basis of his work prior to the Searchlight, he was asked to start work immediately. During his farewell handshake with his boss at the Searchlight, McNolte smilingly told the man, “I wouldn’t want to be your dick,” and left his office chuckling.
He and Trisha were married a month later in a small ceremony, with only a few friends in attendance.
Seven months later, Trisha went into labor prematurely. She gave birth to a perfectly sound baby girl who was stillborn only because of a rare mishap: a knot in her umbilical cord. Unable to stay the night in the maternity ward, Trisha went home the same day. They left the hospital with the assurance from the doctor that they would have no trouble having another child, none at all. They listened to her words, but paid them little attention. They were already grieving the baby they would never have and would be too busy with that for a while to even consider trying again.
Trisha found a managerial job in the advertising department at the city’s most popular talk radio station while McNolte took his job at the Journal and ran with it. His articles quickly began to get serious attention, some getting picked up by Associated Press and United Press International, and he was frequently invited to join discussion panels on CNN.
Seven years, a lot of attention, and a few journalism awards into his job at the Journal, McNolte was surprised when Trisha brought up the subject of having another baby. He knew it had to be hard for her to do. He could see the wound opening in her eyes as she spoke of it one night in a low, whispery voice. They discussed it now and then over a period of weeks, then months, neither rejecting nor accepting the idea, but approaching it with caution.
Then something happened that completely changed their life together. McNolte was approached by an advertising agency that admired his work, his ability to use the language and turn a clever phrase. The agency had its headquarters there in the city but it was a multinational company. And it wanted to hire him. He discussed it with Trisha, but they did not need to discuss it long. While they were not hurting financially, the advertising job paid three times their combined incomes, with benefits which, on their own, made the mere idea of rejecting the offer ludicrous. He accepted the job, and Trish happily walked away from hers to devote her full attention to their new nest on First Bay Avenue in Wakehurst, an upscale neighborhood that was sort of a suburb within the city.
It was that change in their lives, that abrupt elevation of status and security, that made them decide it was time to have a baby. Everything was going so well that it suddenly seemed as if they could do no wrong, as if no harm could possibly come to them or the child they hoped to have.
Looking back on that time, McNolte wondered if things would have been different if he had not taken the job at the advertising firm. But it was ridiculous to ponder such things, of course. Worse, it was self-torture. What had happened had happened. What had been done was done.
After parking across the street from Miklos’s building, McNolte snatched the baggy from the glove compartment, reached into it for the small spoon that rested among the remaining power, and took a couple of quick snorts. Then a couple more. Then he finished off the baggy.
McNolte leaned his head back and closed his eyes, enjoying the sudden jolt of happiness, then the steady buzz that began to work its way through his body. It made his fingers feel like fingers and his toes like toes, made his lips feel like they were incapable of letting anything inane pass between them, and made his eyes feel like they could see just beyond what was visible.
He took an empty suitcase from the back seat, got out of the car, and went into the building with the envelope of cash in the inside breast pocket of his sport coat, hoping that Miklos had some beer.
It was an elegant building in the city’s Bancroft district, a neighborhood much farther from Old Town in its wealth and security than in miles.
The doorman, Phil, opened the door and smiled as he said, “Evening, Mr. McNolte.”
“Hey, Phil,” McNolte said, returning the smile.
He got out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor and walked into Miklos’s apartment without knocking. It was bare except for the sofa, coffee table, a couple of torchiere lamps, and several cardboard boxes of varying sizes with their lids taped closed.
He found Miklos sitting on the edge of the sofa, hunched forward, cutting some coke on the glass-topped coffee table. Standing a few inches away from his busy hands was an unopened bottle of Chivas Regal.
“Hey, McNolte,” Miklos said without looking up, his words darkened slightly by his faint Greek accent, “you’re just in time. This is a momentous occasion.”
McNolte went to the sofa, put the suitcase on the floor and sat down beside Miklos, watching as he continued to work with the coke on the table.
“What’s the momentous occasion, Miklos?”
“This is the last of my personal stash of coke, and my last bottle of Chivas.” He dropped the razor blade on the glass tabletop with a gentle clank, then leaned back with a sigh. “If you’ve got the money I think you’ve got, I can pay off some bills and keep the new apartment for about five, maybe six months.” He paused a moment, frowned, made a raspberry sound with his tongue protruding between his lips. “What am I saying, that’s not a fucking apartment. Ventriloquist dummies have better digs. Anyway, after that, unless things change, I’m a dead man. It would have been one thing if I’d just been fired from the magazine. But they practically threw me out the door physically. Then they spread all those stories about me. He’s unreliable, he’s volatile…and now he’s poison. Ah, well, I suppose I was. Am. I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry, Miklos, you’ll come back before long. A photographer like you? A bad rep can’t bury your talent. I mean, look at me. I’m down, but not out. This coke’ll take care of my bills, get me back on my feet. I’ll have another job in no time.”
“I’d sell it all myself, but I don’t have the time. I need the money now, even if it’s not as much as it would be if I’d sold it on the street myself.” He chuckled coldly. “I’m doing you a big favor, my friend, remember that. But it’s out of necessity only, not out of any generosity.” He scrubbed both hands up and down over his face. “Getting a job isn’t my only worry. The IRS has drilled me a new asshole. This is my third, by the way.” His hands slapped down on his thighs. “Those sons of bitches are worse than the mob. You owe the mob money you can’t pay off, they just kill you and get it over with. The IRS, on the other hand, likes to torture you slowly, pull your life apart a bit at a time.”
The skin on the back of McNolte’s neck tightened at the mention of owing money to the mob. He tried to ignore it as he reached into his coat, took out the envelope, and dropped it into Miklos’s lap. “Well, you’re not dead yet,” he said. “Here’s the money. You can count if you want. Just use it well.”
Miklos laughed as he opened the envelope and looked at the money. “I’m not gonna count it, I trust you. Jeez, what do you think I am, anyway. C’mon, McNolte, help me out. I don’t want to do the last of my coke alone.”
“Well, I won’t say no to a hit. Got any beer?”
Miklos nodded toward the bottle on the table. “That’s all I’ve got. Wanna buy it?”
“What?”
He laughed as he picked up the bottle of Chivas and handed it to McNolte. “Just kidding. Go ahead, open it. We’ll have to drink from the bottle, though. I’ve packed all my glasses.”
“No problem,” McNolte said, opening the bottle. “I’m not proud.”
As Miklos took the first hit of coke, McNolte took the first swallow of Chivas, then another, and another. He handed the bottle to Miklos, then turned his attention to the coke on the glass tabletop.
Each hit led to a few more swallows, which led to another hit, and the momentous occasion lasted longer than McNolte had planned.
When McNolte finally left the apartment and returned to his car, the large suitcase he carried was packed full of cocaine, and he was feeling the effects of Miklos’s momentous occasion. He chided himself silently for staying so long, for drinking and snorting so much, but the coke had been damned good. Miklos had always had the best.
The rain was still falling steadily and the night’s chill had grown more biting. McNolte had planned on making three stops with his full suitcase before going home, but in his present condition, he decided to make only one. His rent was overdue and he could not go home empty-handed. The rest could be done tomorrow, and more the day after that.
With the suitcase on the back seat, McNolte folded his arms on the steering wheel and leaned his head on them. He stayed there for a moment, taking a few slow, deep breaths. Then he sat up, started the engine, and drove away from the curb.
Mixed with the chemicals that were coursing through his system was a warm and soothing sense of relief. He got the money. He got the coke. His profit margin would be a healthy one. His worries would finally be over.
That thought made his flesh crawl. It was a comfortable thought, the idea that his problems were finally over, one he was familiar with. It was a thought he’d had before. Back when he had taken that advertising job.
He decided it was dangerous to think that way because it would never be true. Not as long as he was alive. Life was full of problems.
Back then, though, he was not worried about paying off debts created by his habit, or getting a job, or paying back the loan from Mr. Trafficante. Back then, the problems that he thought would be over were problems he did not even have yet. He did not know what he was thinking at the time.
With the salary he would get from his new advertising job—wherever that might be—he and Trisha could live comfortably and not worry about any expenses brought about by having a child. Trisha enjoyed the idea of being a full-time housewife and mother, and McNolte no longer would have to work under the same around-the-clock pressures he’d had at the Journal; there would be no more late-night calls to cover something happening in the wee hours, no more impossible deadlines looming over him menacingly. They could live in a neighborhood that was safe and suitable for children, a neighborhood with a good school. They would not have to worry all the time. They could enjoy their life together.
Again, he cringed at the thought. It was so full of certainty, but nothing in the world was certain. He had thought it before, back when he and Trisha had lived comfortably on his salary at Cutley-McCormick. He’d had a small but comfortable office there with his name on the door, his own secretary, and because of the reputation he had built, people there treated him like a visiting dignitary.
Although they kept trying on a delightfully regular basis, Trisha did not get pregnant again. Her doctor assured them it meant nothing, that getting pregnant always seemed easier to do when one did not want to than when one did. He suggested that her subconscious fear of losing another baby might be creating more stress than she realized and he gave her the name of a therapist if Trisha thought that might help.
It was the happiest time McNolte could remember, the best time of his life. Bits and pieces of it fluttered through his mind as he drove through the rain and out of the city, almost to the rhythm of the clumping windshield wipers.
That time in his life was not so long ago, but now when he thought back on it, the memories were fuzzy. It was almost as if he were standing in the icy-cold night looking through a frosted window at vaguely familiar people warming themselves by a fire inside, but the closer he got to the pane, the more his breath fogged up the glass, and the more ghostly those people became. McNolte hoped those memories would become clear again one day. But for now, he knew it was for his own good that they remain vague, not because they were distant but because he knew that to dwell on what he’d had, on what he had lost, and probably would never have again, was to kill himself.
McNolte had been trying to kill himself long enough. That was why he had lost the life he’d had, and he knew it. He did not deny that he was at fault; he had at first, but not anymore. That was why he had borrowed the money from Mr. Trafficante, why he had used it to buy all that cocaine from Miklos, and why he wanted to sell the cocaine now, needed to sell it. One last brief bit of dealing. The money he would make from that would be the life preserver that would keep him from going under for a third and final time. It would allow him to focus on bringing himself back from the near-dead.
It was during that happiest time of McNolte’s life that the rot and decay first began to set in, hidden away, spreading rapidly, but invisibly, undetected, like a secret cancer. It had happened on a night like any other, at a dinner party being thrown by McNolte and Trisha at their house. Cocktail and dinner parties quickly became a regular part of their life once McNolte started working for Cutley-McCormick. Through his work, McNolte and Trisha suddenly found themselves with a social life they had never imagined they would have. But it was not all social; there was always work to be done while the drinks were poured and the hors d’oeuvres served. There were new clients to make love to and potential clients to seduce. And it was for just such a seduction that McNolte had thrown that particular party.
The potential client had been a young man, about ten years younger than McNolte, named Griffin Schultz, whose already popular nationwide chain of computer stores was about to launch a nationwide internet provider, which Griffin wanted to make sure was just as popular as his stores. He was young but savvy, charismatic and vital, and McNolte, whose job it was to work into the chit-chat a pitch for his campaign for the new venture, was impressed, even a bit intimidated although he was on his own turf. They danced a dance of words and laughter for the first part of the evening, McNolte and Griffin, and the young man began to show what appeared to be a sincere interest in McNolte’s ideas. So when Griffin asked McNolte to accompany him to the bathroom—quite casually and without causing the slightest hitch in their energetic, momentum-building conversation—McNolte followed immediately and took no time to think the request an odd one.
Their dance went on as Griffin removed from his pocket a small vial of white powder and a tiny, delicate spoon. As they continued to talk, the rhythm of their conversation uninterrupted, one responding to the other without pause, Griffin dipped the spoon into the vial, held it beneath a nostril, and sucked it in sharply. Then he repeated the process with the other nostril, never disrupting the cadence of their verbal waltz, behaving as if they were still out there among the wandering, well-dressed drinkers and nibblers. They kept talking as Griffin held out the vial and spoon to McNolte, who shook his head once, only slightly, waving a hand dismissively, and Griffin shrugged one shoulder and said, oh, c’mon, go ahead, it’s really good stuff, and the rhythm was interrupted for a moment, the dance stumbled for a heartbeat, as McNolte, not wanting to lose step or interrupt the flow, took the vial and spoon, dipped the spoon and, still talking, took one strong sniff of the powder between sentences, then handed the vial and spoon back.
Simple as that. Perfectly innocent. No harm intended.
The sublime dance going on between them picked up speed after that one hit of cocaine, and they stayed there in the bathroom talking, laughing, their steps precise, always with the beat, and McNolte knew he had the account, knew the campaign for the whole chain of stores was his, knew Griffin was sold, and while they bantered, as if in the afterglow of consummated relationship, Griffin pulled out the vial again—was it only minutes later? A half hour? An hour, perhaps?—and took a couple more hits, then offered it to McNolte, who did not hesitate this time, took the vial, the spoon, and took two hits, one in each nostril. It was not bad at all, snorting that stuff up his nose, not like he had imagined. It felt kind of good, in fact, and his smile grew bigger. So did Griffin’s, as if they shared a secret, a knowledge that they were the holders of some great and powerful gift, the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, eat your fucking heart out, Indiana Jones.
And that was the beginning.
McNolte did not know it at the time, of course. He thought he had simply snagged a plum account for Cutler-McCormick, a feather in his own cap. He had told Trisha about it on the way home, after she asked why he was so jumpy, why he was talking so fast, and she had laughed at first, a nervous sort of laugh, then said maybe it was not such a good idea to be doing stuff like that if they were trying to get pregnant, and he had laughed then, not nervous at all, but a little too loud, maybe, and he said not to worry about it, really, it was just the way this guy worked, after all, she saw what he was wearing, the tinted glasses, and he pulled out that little vial, and McNolte had simply gone along with it, that was all, nothing to worry about, nothing at all.
Famous last words, he knew that now. But not then. He had been totally ignorant of the dark cloud that was already rolling in over him, blanketing him in its shadow.
After that, when people were doing cocaine around him, McNolte noticed in a way he never had before, and when it was offered, he accepted, until one afternoon, pressed for time, up against a presentation deadline with very little to present, swamped with work and knowing he would have to stay late, he bought some of his own from a fellow worker, just a little, enough to keep him going until he was caught up, until the work was out of the way, and sure enough, McNolte was at his desk long after everyone else had left, long after the sun had gone down, but he was too immersed in his work to notice, aflame with creativity, productivity, burning through his work like a comet through the sky, and when he got home late that night to find that Trisha had already gone to bed, he was still so full of fire that he went to work in the nursery, finished up the crib he had started weeks ago, and when Trisha shuffled in, sleepy-eyed and wondering what he was doing at such an hour, he took her in his arms, led her back to bed and made powerful, sweaty love to her once, then again, and by the time he wanted to try once more, the sun was coming up outside and Trisha was wide awake, asking with a combination of amusement and annoyance exactly what the hell had gotten into him, and McNolte realized that in a few hours he would have to give the presentation he had spent so much of the night before preparing, and it was not until that moment that he realized he was starting to come down again and needed another hit. But the little bit of coke he had bought was all gone, so he would have to get some more, maybe leave for work a little early, after a cold shower and some strong coffee. He could find the guy he had bought the coke from yesterday and get some more, pump himself up for that presentation. Get the juices flowing again. As he took his shower, McNolte tried to remember the name of the guy he had bought the coke from, but could not. Over coffee, Trisha scolded him for staying up all night when he knew he had something so important to do the next morning. He told her he was fine, though he sounded exhausted, looked drawn. She kept at it, and he finally snapped at her, told her not to worry about him. Then he left for work, still trying to remember that guy’s name.
