End of Secrets Page 19

  “You better believe we’re going to the game,” Jalen said. “Pistons–Knicks in the playoffs at Madison Square Garden? There’s only one thing I’d miss that game for, and we already did that. Let’s go.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The news came in the late afternoon. Parker sat in stunned silence while his bosses, the firm’s cofounders, expressed their excitement and outlined the details of the transition. Despite the celebratory atmosphere, Parker could not trigger those feelings within himself. To him, there was something crushing about the news, something that gnawed on his conscience as he walked the streets of the city. Helplessness mounted quickly, not like pressure building in a volcano or a gas line that could be relieved with the release of a valve, but a kind of depth pressure, like sinking under hundreds of feet of water. There was no release. He would drown or be crushed if he wasn’t rescued.

  He wanted to talk to someone who would understand—or at least listen. He walked into L@Ho and planted himself at the bar. He had come here ready to unload about the work situation, but instead, as soon as he’d swallowed his first sip of gin, he began to tell the bartender what he’d done to Kera. It bubbled out of him irrevocably. He could not stop it.

  He’d been in Dubai for four days. Four. An insignificant length of time for someone who had lived thirty-one years. He had always been a man in control of himself, deliberate and rational. He and Kera had dated a full month before sleeping together. He’d waited a full year to propose to her, even though it was apparent long before where things were headed. Deliberate and rational Parker, the furthest thing from self-destructive.

  In Dubai it had taken the length of the post-keynote cocktail hour for a young woman, a slim Dutch start-up consultant with a charming take on the English language, to invite herself up to his room. She was not particularly persistent, though she was absolutely attractive—blond hair, sharp but playful eyes, the whole package managed with a businesswoman’s confidence. Still, she was no more attractive than women he’d politely declined before. He always managed to sidestep trouble discreetly, disposing of any errant urges or fantasies later, in a few harmless moments with himself. He’d never actually intended to go through with sleeping with anyone other than Kera.

  But then he was in Dubai. On the other side of the world. The cliché of it all made it, in retrospect, almost laughably pathetic. One of the most frustrating characteristics of this brand of regret was Parker’s inability to understand why things had been so different in Dubai. It wasn’t oversimplifying it to say that it had just happened.

  He paused his confession, trying to recall what it was that the Dutch consultant at the cocktail party in Dubai had first said that made him want to keep talking to her. Had he been jet-lagged? Had he approached her, or was it the other way around? He could only remember her saying, not long after they were acquainted, “We can lay together in your room?” At first he hadn’t even understood what she meant, and then somehow it was too late. They were upstairs lying together in his hotel room, and the poisoned logic of the moment permitted him to go through with it.

  In the cab ride home from the airport, Parker had been afraid to face Kera, afraid that she would know and that he would make everything worse by not telling her before she figured it out on her own. What if he’d contracted something? Was that a burning sensation when he urinated? He had never been any good at keeping secrets. Secrets ate away at him. But when he walked in the door and saw the way they slipped so comfortably and safely back into each other’s lives, it occurred to him that it would be worse now to introduce trouble. It was over and done with. He started thinking of his mistake as a blessing, a wake-up call. Kera was, without a doubt, the woman of his life. Chastened by his brief failure of judgment, Parker had begun to feel more than ever that he was up to the task of deserving her.

  But then, how could she not know? He couldn’t let that question go. It was all he thought about, even when he was thinking about other things. He spent hours in his head trying to make it go away. Since it wouldn’t go away, he tried to make it better. Often he longed to come home and find her hurrying a shirtless stranger onto the fire escape. He wanted to surprise her at lunchtime and catch her kissing a coworker. He wanted that power back, the power to grant forgiveness. He did not have the balls to ask to be forgiven.

  The bartender said little while Parker spoke. On a few occasions, the moments when Parker outlined his lowest acts, the bartender looked up from his doodling. And once or twice he nodded sympathetically. But otherwise, he kept his face down, offering nothing harsher than ambivalence in judgment of his customer. He’s disgusted by me, Parker thought, and ordered another drink.

  Hours later he approached the door to his apartment. He had trouble with the dead bolt and made a stumbling mess of his entrance. Kera was on the couch with her laptop. For a moment they both looked at each other.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. She sounded concerned, also maybe a little judgmental about his drinking.

  I cheated on you! For a brief moment, he could imagine in sensational detail the words forming at the back of his throat and then dislodging, existing, those words in that order, floating across the air between them. He had no idea what would happen next. Tears, a slap, bitter silence, a great weight lifted from his chest? What did it matter? The words would not come out of him. They sat undigested in his gut like something heavy eaten too fast. Guilt, he thought, must be the most useless human emotion. Fear alerted one to danger and therefore saved lives. Love alerted one to living and therefore improved lives. But guilt—guilt was so uselessly after-the-fact, so absent as a tool of prevention and yet so powerful as a tool of misery. Guilt rotted men in cells and suburbs and churches. Guilt destroyed lives. Following that orgasm on the other side of the world, he had slumped against the foreign sheets, paralyzed with a sickening stillness of emotion. He smelled the strange girl beneath him and knew, as he should have anticipated ahead of time when they were downstairs talking, vertical and clothed and among chattering colleagues wearing name tags, that everything was ruined.

  “Tomorrow morning my boss will announce that our company has agreed to be acquired by ONE,” Parker said.

  Kera’s expression was blank for a moment. And then finally she said, “Why?”

  This question annoyed him. She wanted facts. What why who when how. It wasn’t enough that his job was fucked; she wanted all the gory details. That’s how she was, who she was. Who he’d fallen in love with. He loved that idealism, that pure trust in the idea that situations improve automatically if you uncover all the facts. “That’s a really excellent question. They’re calling it a ‘strategic acquisition.’ ”

  He could feel her watching him as he sat on the arm of the couch and bent down to untie his shoes. He wanted another drink. He did not want her to watch him pour it.

  “Will you go and work for them?” she asked.

  “No.” That felt good to say. He felt principled. He liked the little surge of power that came from feeling principled.

  But then what? He knew the alternative. He could search for a new job. The thought was at the same time exciting and exhausting. It had been one thing searching for a job after he’d first arrived in the city, when naïveté sheltered him from noticing the struggle. Now he was painfully aware of what a job search would entail. The résumés, the unanswered cover letters, dressing up for interviews, shamelessly e-mailing his network of friends and acquaintances—horrible, inhumane things he’d not had to do the first time around, thanks to the friend of his father’s whose son had gone to business school with the founder of his firm. No, he didn’t think he could put himself through all that.

  “What will you do?” Kera said.

  “What will I do? When did this not become about what we will do?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Babe, that isn’t what I meant.”

  “Oh, it’s not? How am I supposed to know what you mean? You work all day, all weekend. You work constantly. Do you ever think
about our wedding? Or no, forget the wedding. Do you think about me? Am I as important to you as work? Do you wonder what your job does to me, what this city does to me? That’s what I want to know: What will we do?”

  The next few moments would have been more difficult to get through but for the convenient fact that he was wasted. It made it easier for them both to dismiss the things he’d just said. They became silent partners in this conspiracy, together excusing the pain and brutality that lived in those words.

  “Drink some water, babe. Take a shower. You’re not yourself right now.”

  Rotting rotting rotting. He felt thirsty. They had gin and vodka and scotch in the apartment. He imagined mixing himself a drink. Three parts rotting, one part self-loathing guilt.

  Later, she lay next to him in bed and told him that there wasn’t any shame in keeping his job. “You’re successful. It’s a good job. If you find you can’t stand it, then you’ll know it’s time to look for something else.”

  He didn’t respond to this. He just lay there, hiccupping at odd intervals, his body turned from hers. Finally he said, very quietly, “I wish we could just go away together. There’s a place somewhere where we’d be happier.” And then the next thing she heard was the deepening of his breaths into light snores.

  THIRTY

  When the young man slid unnoticed into the black waters of the Hudson, it was twilight, still cocktail hour up on deck. He had excused himself from a conversation, descended to the lower cabin, and walked out onto the aft viewing deck. Without hesitation, he had swung one leg at a time over the railing and had taken a long step away from the vessel.

  The water was many levels more uncomfortable than he’d expected. Not just the cold, seeping temperature, but the foul taste and smell. The boat’s propellers churned the surface of this soup into a white froth.

  Soon the wake settled, and the raucous atmosphere of the boat died away. The darkness stretched deep below him, clasping tightly around his neck, compressing his chest and weighing his clothes like blocks of ice. He had not anticipated such a moment of humility: he had not thought he would actually feel death in this way, its isolation, its irrevocability. He shed all but the closest layer of clothing and tested a few strokes in the direction of Manhattan.

  His fear dulled gradually. A spectacular view of the city rose before him. The lights of the west side seemed to have been tilted forward and dipped in the water, leaving blurred imprints of color dancing on the surface. He thought he could hear laughter from the distant boat. He liked the sound of that. It meant they were not coming back for him. He wouldn’t be missed until the group took their seats for dinner. And by then it would be too late.

  He started swimming.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The next day was a busy news day, even by New York City standards. A bomb scare shut down the 1 train, a major airline declared bankruptcy, and the UN was hosting a special session on global trade that was being protested enthusiastically by PETA and Greenpeace, both of whom had sent activists scaling the sides of Midtown buildings to unfurl billboard-sized slogans. The headline that caught Kera’s eye, though, in the business section of the New York Times, was a short article about an unnamed ONE employee who had gone overboard on a dinner cruise the previous evening. The company’s top executives and their staffs, including Ford Dillingham, ONE’s president of Media and Entertainment, and Gray Heller, the music arm’s VP of Marketing, had been on board. The occasion, apparently, was a welcome celebration for new executives who had been corralled under the ONE umbrella in recent acquisitions.

  Kera was reading this on her commute to work when a conversation between two girls near her on the train suddenly got her attention.

  “The Internet is fucking genius.”

  “What?”

  “You know that actor, Daryl Walker?”

  “What was he in?”

  “Nothing major. But you’d recognize him. Look.” The girl passed her tablet over to share a series of photographs.

  “Oh, him. He’s hot.”

  “Right?”

  “What about him?”

  “Gawker just posted this. It says that if people make donations that reach a million dollars, Daryl Walker will make a naked video and post it online.”

  “I’m in. What’s he raising the money for?”

  “For himself, I guess.”

  “That’s genius.”

  “Right?”

  “I can’t believe no one else has thought of this.”

  “He says the video will be five minutes, and it’s not porn. It’s just a nudie vid of him—oh, yeah, get this. Everyone who contributes five bucks or more has voting rights.”

  “Voting rights?”

  “Yeah. You can vote on what he’ll do in the video.”

  “What he’ll do?”

  “Not like that! The options are showering, performing household chores, and lifting weights.”

  “Definitely household chores. Is there a way to pitch other suggestions?”

  “Vacuuming.”

  “Changing the oil in his car.”

  “Cleaning toilets.”

  Nearby eavesdroppers cracked smiles.

  “How many people would it take to reach a million dollars if everyone pays five bucks?”

  There was a brief silence during the computation.

  “Two hundred thousand.”

  “Wow. That’s a lot.”

  “There’s no way he’ll get to a million, right? Otherwise, everyone would be doing this.”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

  Kera put her earphones in. Over the last week she’d listened to JW, Jalen West’s new album, so many times that certain phrases looped continuously in her head. She listened now with her eyes shut, opening them only to watch for her stop. Aboveground in Times Square, a pedestrian backup on the sidewalk brought her march toward work to a halt, and her eyes drew upward. In the spot where the America billboard had once been, there was now a new advertisement for the action movie Apocalypse. She put her head down and waited for the foot traffic to flow again.

  When she got to her workstation, she read through the day’s alerts, which included mentions of the ONE employee who had fallen into the Hudson while on the company cruise. There were also more and more articles, she noticed, dwelling on the fact that both Rowena Pete and the members of Background Noise Pollution—both ONE Music artists—had gone missing. Kera felt a flutter of urgency course through her. It would complicate her investigation if the disappearing artists became a media obsession.

  She reached for her cell phone to call Canyon. She wanted to apply a little pressure on him, to see what information he was willing to give up in exchange for her attending the event he’d told her not to miss on Tuesday.

  “May I ask who’s calling?” An unfamiliar secretary answered the phone.

  Kera said she was a friend. Her policy was to reveal as little as possible to secretaries. Canyon always seemed to know it was her.

  “I’m afraid I can’t give you any information,” the secretary said.

  “That’s all right, I’ll call back later.”

  She was logging in to HawkEye to see what she’d missed in the life of Rafael Bolívar when the secretary’s words struck her. I can’t give you any information? Kera dialed the number again.

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “My name is Kera Mersal. I’m a reporter—”

  “Hold, please.”

  Kera exhaled, relieved to be getting somewhere. She half expected Canyon’s would be the next voice on the line.

  “Are you there, ma’am?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to read you the official statement. ‘The disappearance of Mr. Canyon is currently under investigation, and all employees of the ONE Corporation are cooperating fully with the NYPD. No further statement will be made until the investigation has reached its conclusion.’ Do you have an e-mail address you’d like me to send this to?”

 
; “Wait.” The only other thing Kera could say was, “He’s gone?” It was unthinkable. She’d been sitting across from him just a few nights before. After a moment, though, she began to see that it was entirely thinkable. Perhaps even inevitable.

  “You all right?” Jones said through the monitors between them when she’d hung up. His responsibilities on the Gnos.is task force had kept him busy over the past few days, and she had not had much interaction with him. Ignoring his question for a moment, she brought up Canyon’s HawkEye map. She’d last glanced at the map around 1800 hours the previous evening. She started the playback there to see what she’d missed. Canyon had boarded the corporate cruise around 1830. Over the next ninety minutes, he’d used his phone three times to make routine business calls while the yacht looped down around the tip of Manhattan before making its way back up the Hudson. At 2014 the dot vanished. It had not reappeared since.

  “We have number nine. It’s Canyon.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  The Annual Celebration of Media Industry Pioneers was held in a ballroom on the sixty-third floor of a Midtown skyscraper. Kera gave her name at a podium in the ground-floor lobby and was ushered onto a dedicated elevator. She rode up with a man dressed in a suit and tie who never took his eyes off his BlackBerry, a paparazzo, an underdressed but stylish man who tapped his foot to the elevator music, and two couples gossiping about a colleague who edited a pop culture and entertainment blog.

  When Kera entered the ballroom, the first thing she saw was the view: the dark green carpet of Central Park stretched north, framed by neighboring skyscrapers. At this dizzying height, it was easy to imagine the slow roll of the earth, forcing the distant New Jersey horizon up to block out the sun, which was reddening more and more by the second, like cooling steel. Because she didn’t yet know why she was here, and also to position herself to get a good read on the crowd, she crossed the room and stood before a large window, silhouetted against the city. She wore a blue dress and a silver necklace and bracelet that matched her heels. The outfit had raised Parker’s eyebrows, first because he said she looked beautiful and then because the only explanation she gave him for where she was going was, “It’s a work thing, babe.”