Children of Paranoia Read online

  We approached the house after about a forty-five-minute walk. I could already feel my skin sizzling beneath the sun and was ready to find some shade. Michael had gotten us a little house right on the beach. It was the top floor of a duplex. As we began to walk up the hill toward the house, I could make out Jared sitting in a chair on the porch reading, his feet up on the table in front of him. “Look what I found,” Michael shouted as soon as we were close enough for Jared to hear. Jared waved to us, using his whole arm. I waved back and watched as he put his book down and trekked inside the house.

  “Place looks great,” I said to Michael.

  “I’m glad you think so,” Michael replied, “because you owe me seven hundred bucks for the week.”

  When we made it up to the house, Jared was back outside on the deck. He’d gone inside to grab a blender and some cocktails so that he could mix drinks. The deck was nice. From it, you could see over the sand dunes and watch the waves crash against the sand. Those waves were the only sound that made it up from the beach. The crash. Then silence. Then the slow build toward another crash.

  Michael ran to the bathroom as soon as we got back, leaving me and Jared alone on the deck. I hadn’t been alone with my oldest friend in a while. “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

  “Right now? Drink a little. Sit. Watch the water.” Jared smiled and picked up a shaker. He had an assortment of liquors and juices in front of him.

  “And tonight?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? Michael’s been waiting all week for you to show up so that we can hit the bars together. You better not let him down.” It was a toss-away line at the time. There was no way that Jared or I could know how badly I would wind up letting Michael down.

  “Well, let’s pick a mellow place tonight,” I replied. “I could use a little rest before things get crazy.”

  “I think that can be arranged,” Jared said. The sun was beginning to drop toward the bay on the other side of the island, creating a glare. Even through the glare, I could see Jared smiling.

  “What are you making?” I asked, watching Jared measure and poor and shake.

  “Been making ’em for the past two days. If we can’t get Michael to the islands, I figured the least we could do is bring a little bit of the islands to Michael.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “A little rum, pineapple juice, orange juice, and some coconut cream. Big drink in the islands. You want one?” Jared started pouring the frothy drink into a cup.

  “Sounds a little girlie to me. What’s it called?”

  “A painkiller.”

  “All right, then,” I answered. “Make mine a double.”

  We drank painkillers and grilled burgers on the deck that night as the sky grew darker above us. Michael gave in and agreed to a relaxed evening after I promised that he would get to pick everything we did the following night. So, on the first night, we picked a small bar on the bay that we knew wouldn’t get crowded. When we got to the bar, it was nearly empty. They were playing Jimmy Buffet music, trying to make people forget that they were at a dumpy little bar in New Jersey. We walked in and went straight for the bar. Michael tried ordering a painkiller. The old man behind the bar looked at him like he was from another planet. He settled on a beer.

  I grabbed a barstool and sat down. I didn’t plan on getting up again until we left. Michael and Jared decided to explore the place before sitting down. They didn’t make it back. Instead, they discovered an old bar game tucked away in the back. I knew Jared and Michael well enough to know that, once they found that game, they weren’t leaving it until one of them declared himself the champion of the bar. The game seemed simple enough. There was a small golden ring hanging from the ceiling by a string. The ring hung about chest high. About five feet away there was a hook screwed into a post. The object of the game was to hold the ring, place your feet behind the line taped to the floor, and try to swing the ring so that it would catch itself on the hook. It looked easy until you watched people try it. I sat there, with my drink in my hand, and watched as my two friends took turns standing behind the line and swinging the ring. It was unbelievably frustrating and I wasn’t even playing. If you aimed the ring right for the hook, it would bounce off the hook and swing back to you. Instead, you had to swing the ring to one side, so that it would pass the hook on the way up and encircle it as it began to swing back toward you.

  Frustration has never been a quiet emotion for my friends. Jared and Michael’s competition started quietly enough but it didn’t take long before the two of them were louder than the music coming over the bar’s speakers. I divided my time between watching them and watching the bubbles rise up through my beer. I was perfectly happy just sitting there, continuing down my path toward debilitating drunkenness. I just wanted to let my worries melt away from me. I let my guard down. When I was on my third or fourth drink a woman sat down next to me at the bar. She looked like she was alone. She glanced over at Michael and Jared. They were tough to ignore. They’d always been tough to ignore. She looked at them and laughed and then turned toward me. “Friends of yours?” she asked.

  It took me a moment to realize that she was talking to me. When I finally caught on, I tried to play it cool. “What makes you think that?” I asked. The woman was wearing a thin white tank top and a long island-print skirt. She was Asian, probably in her late twenties. She was in fantastic shape. She didn’t look like your typical Jersey girl. She didn’t look like your typical anything.

  “Don’t worry. I think they’re cute,” she said to me, staring at my friends berating each other. “They’re not going to kill each other, are they?” I looked over at Jared and Michael. It was nothing I hadn’t seen before. I figured my best strategy was to try to ignore them. It was a strategy I’d used plenty of times over the past ten years.

  “You here alone?” I asked. It was the alcohol talking, pumping me full of courage that I normally didn’t have.

  “Maybe,” she replied. She had a strange accent. “What would you think of a woman who went to a bar alone?”

  “If she looked like you?” I answered. “I’d think she was mysterious. A little pathetic, but definitely mysterious.”

  “Great. Mysterious and pathetic.” She laughed.

  “Hell,” I replied, “you can’t win them all.”

  We sat for a few moments in silence, watching Jared and Michael argue. “So”—the woman eventually broke the silence—“do you come here often?”

  I placed my drink back on the bar. “Are you trying to pick me up?”

  “Not yet,” she said, smiling. She paused, biting down on the corner of her lower lip. “I should probably get to know you first.”

  “And then you’ll try to pick me up?”

  “Maybe, if I like what I hear.” She placed her hand on my elbow as she slid herself onto the barstool next to mine. Her skin was rougher than I’d expected but it was still warm, and my skin flared up at her touch. “So, what’s your name?”

  “Joseph,” I replied, and held out my hand to shake hers. It was the first time that I’d used my real name with a woman in ages, maybe since high school. It felt good.

  “Catherine,” the woman volunteered, and shook my hand.

  “Where you from, Catherine?” I asked. “You’ve got a peculiar accent.”

  “Yeah, yeah, my accent. There is nowhere in the world where I can go and not have people think that I have an accent.” She looked at me, taking in my entire face, looking for something. At the time, I thought that it was good sign. “I grew up in Vietnam but I went to graduate school in London.”

  “You don’t see too many people with that type of pedigree at the Jersey Shore,” I offered. She laughed. I liked her laugh.

  “What about you? Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Right here,” I replied, not yet growing uneasy with the questions.

  “Really? You’re from New Jersey?”

  “Well, not New Jersey. I live just outside of Philadelphia,�
�� I lied. Lying was easier than the truth.

  “So you spend a lot of time around here?” Catherine asked, leaning into me a bit, squeezing her elbows into the sides of her breasts so that they nearly erupted out of the top of her shirt. In an instant, I could feel my pulse in my head. “I’m kind of new to the area,” she added. “I just came down from New York. Do you make it up there much?”

  “Now and then,” I replied. “I have to go there on business sometimes.” I knew that I was dangerously close to the truth.

  “Really? What do you do?” Catherine asked, still expertly using her cleavage to hypnotize me.

  “Shill for the man,” I replied, deciding to try to get the subject off of me. “What about you?”

  Catherine laughed. “No, really. What do you do? If I’m going to pick you up, I need to know that you’ve got a stable career.” She smiled at me. I never wanted her to stop smiling.

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” I replied. I leaned in toward her. I was drunk and horny and out of sorts.

  “I think I’ll be the judge of that,” she rebuked me. I figured that if I wanted to get in her pants, I needed to come up with a job where I made some money.

  “Fine. I’m a financial consultant,” I lied. We were taught, during training, to tell people that we worked in professions that wouldn’t elicit much of a response. They suggested jobs like product managers for companies that made hangers or salesmen for plastic doorstops. Basically, we were taught to pick jobs that would effectively act as conversation enders. Of course, we were never taught how to do this and get laid at the same time. It really was a flaw in the curriculum.

  Her smile broadened. “Is there lots of financial consulting in Philadelphia?”

  “Big fish, small pond,” I responded.

  “Wouldn’t you be better off working in New York? That’s where all the finance happens, right?” Catherine replied. I began to feel uneasy that she kept bringing up New York. “I mean, you could work downtown and live in Brooklyn. I love Brooklyn.” She held the word Brooklyn in her mouth for a moment before letting it out. “Have you been to Brooklyn?” That’s when the alarms began to go off in my head. My memory ran to the last moments I’d spent in Brooklyn. It was only a week earlier. I saw the face of the woman I’d strangled. I heard the voices of her children. Everything that I had come to the Jersey Shore to forget came rushing back to me. Catherine just sat there, staring at me, watching as the blood began to run out of my face. “Are you okay?” she asked. Her voice was cold. There was no concern in it. I felt dizzy. I needed to change the subject. I took a long swig of beer from the bottle in front of me. I tried to take a couple breaths to regain my composure. My pulse was racing. If I hadn’t been drunk or if I wasn’t so turned on, or if I hadn’t spent the day at the beach trying to forget everything about my life, maybe I would have been able to keep my cool. Have I been to Brooklyn?

  “No,” I answered, trying to buy myself enough time to get my shit together. “Maybe once or twice.” I could feel myself speaking quickly, unnaturally. “I don’t really remember.” I looked over at Catherine, trying to read her response. I was looking for confusion. A normal person would have been confused by my reaction. Instead, she was simply sitting on her stool, that tight little smile still on her lips. I wanted her to stop smiling. Time to pull your shit together, I said to myself. I tried to convince myself to forget everything that I’d been taught about paranoia being your best friend. My best friends were playing ring jockey at the other end of the room. I just wanted to look at this woman and forget everything else. I let my eyes scan Catherine’s well-toned body again. She was leaning back in her chair, her eyes fixed on me, sipping her drink through a straw.

  “So, you want to try your hand at this ring game?” I offered, knowing that I had to stand up before I fell off my barstool. Before Catherine had time to answer the question, I got up and began walking toward the back of the bar, toward my loud and obnoxious friends. I held out some obscure hope that she would follow me, that we’d play this silly game and I would take her home and that I would eventually wake up in the morning with her toned, naked body next to mine. Somewhere deep in my gut, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  When I made it about halfway between the bar and my friends I stopped and looked back. Catherine was gone. She’d simply disappeared. She had been there thirty seconds ago and now there was no sign of her. My stomach dropped. I tried to wave the feeling in my stomach off as regret but I was lying to myself and I knew it. It wasn’t regret. That feeling in my gut was telling me that something was wrong. Too bad I didn’t listen.

  “All right, Joe,” Jared said as I stepped toward my two old friends. “Let’s see what you can do.” He patted me on the back.

  “I think the string’s too short,” Michael shouted. “Hey, barkeep, what’s the deal with this string?” The bartender didn’t answer. He just shook his head and looked away. I stepped forward and placed my feet behind the line of tape on the floor.

  “Who was the beauty at the bar?” Michael asked. I took the ring in my right hand and stepped back with my left foot, as if I were about to throw a dart. “And where’d she go?” Michael laughed, suspecting that I’d simply blown it with her. He didn’t know the half of it. I closed one eye and tried to align the small ring in my hand with the hook attached to the post. The room was spinning, half because of the alcohol and half because I still couldn’t get my heart to slow down.

  “Just some girl,” I replied. I let go of the ring, pushing it slightly off to the side. It swung in a slow arc to my left, swinging back toward the hook as it neared the post. The golden ring flared in the light from the bar as it began to swing back toward us. Then, with a small clink, the ring looped itself around the hook. Michael let out an incomprehensible howl. The string went slack. The ring hung there on the hook screwed into the post. Bull’s-eye.

  I got up early the next morning. I weathered my headache and decided to watch the sunrise. When I was a kid, I used to get up to watch at least one sunrise each summer. I always liked watching the world wake up. The deck on the beach house was built for it. You could sit there in the morning and watch the sky lighten, hear the seagulls come to life, feel the sun on your skin when it lifted over the horizon, and still be no more than twenty feet from your bed. My plan was to head back to bed once the show was over. I still had some sleeping to do.

  By morning, Catherine and the little panic attack that I’d had were nothing but faint memories. I convinced myself that I just needed more time to unwind. Watch the sunrise. Climb back in bed. Sleep until noon. I figured that was all the cure that I needed.

  The sky was still a dark purple when I stepped out onto the deck. The wind was blowing off the ocean. It was cold. It may not be darkest right before dawn, but that’s definitely when it’s the coldest. I went back inside and pulled some sheets off my bed so that I could wrap them around me as I sat and stared at the horizon. Then I started my vigil, wrapped in a blanket, sitting on the deck of that old rental, waiting for the sun to come up.

  The sky barely got any brighter before I had company on the porch. “Just like old times,” a voice spoke from behind me. I looked back and could see Jared standing behind the screen door. “I thought you might come out here,” Jared said.

  I shrugged. “What’s the good of having a beachfront house if you’re not going to get up for the sunrise?”

  “Want some company?” Jared asked.

  “Just like old times,” I replied, and nodded for him to come out.

  “So what is it with you and sunrises, Pony Boy?” Jared asked as he sat down in the chair next to me. I laughed. I couldn’t even remember how many sunrises Jared had watched with me. He always seemed to be doing it begrudgingly, but he always did it.

  “Just something about them,” I replied. If I’d had a better answer, I would have used it.

  “Someday we’ll get Michael to join us for one of these,” Jared said.

  “Yeah, right
. I’d never hear the end of that one.” We both laughed. I don’t think Michael had ever gotten up that early, not when he wasn’t on a job, anyway. Jared and I sat in silence for a few minutes, both watching the water like we expected something to surprise us. The thing with sunrises, though, was that there were no surprises, no matter what else was going on in your life. The sky grew lighter, from a dark purple to a deep red. I could hear the seagulls begin calling out over our heads. I never wondered where they went at night. I was used to things simply disappearing and reappearing.

  Eventually, Jared broke the silence. “So, how have you been? It’s been a while, you know?”

  I knew. “Yeah, it’s hard to find time,” I answered.

  “You ain’t kidding.” Jared shook his head. “For real, though, are you okay? You don’t seem yourself.” There was genuine concern in Jared’s voice.

  “Just tired,” I lied. I didn’t know why I was lying. I had so few people to confide in to begin with. Lying was just so easy. “I needed a little break, that’s all.”

  “You’re getting old before your time,” Jared mocked.

  “Maybe.” I looked over at Jared to see if his face had the same weariness as mine. It did, but he wore his differently. He didn’t look beat down like I did. Jared was a machine. “Doesn’t all this killing and running, running and killing, ever get to you? Doesn’t it just make you tired?”‘

  “I’ve got moments,” Jared said. He was lying to me too. It didn’t make him tired. He was trying to make me feel better. It worked. He put his foot up on the deck’s railing and leaned back in his chair. “Sometimes it all seems so surreal, you know?” Jared crossed his arms over his chest to fight the chill in the air. “When we were fourteen, did you ever think that we’d be here one day?”

  “The Jersey Shore? We were here when we were fourteen,” I joked.

  Jared didn’t even pause to acknowledge my joke. He kept on with his speech. “No, I mean, here, at this place in our lives. Doing what we do.”