Chapter 11: Simeon Search Sweeps the City
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. — Matthew 7:7
“Simeon! This is the most I’ve seen you the whole millennium. To whom do I owe the pleasure?”
I looked up at the self-satisfied prig through the disheveled locks glued to my eyes. It had rained across the entire eastern seaboard, and I’d be needing new clothes again. “I told you not to wait up.”
“What was I going to do — go to sleep?”
“I don’t know. Just get the sangria.”
“It’s Miri, then.”
He led me through his hallway of old tomes and curios and sat me down at the kitchen table.
“She checked out,” I announced. “Monday. While you were here prattling on about kink etiquette. I got back to her late that night and didn’t scan the mindspace because I was trying to be respectable. I staked out the hotel bar the next morning hoping to catch her on her way out to…wherever…and she was already gone. The desk clerk tried to convert in my clutches rather than hand me her home address and I couldn’t stand the pain long enough to work his naiveté to my advantage. He disclosed only her city before I had to bolt. Now all I have is Boston, a first name, and my impressive cross-country endurance. Saul. I need your people.”
“My people?”
“Your tight-lipped NSA archeologists, or whoever they are.”
“Yeah, and what do you propose they do? Check her genealogy records? You never even took a sip!”
“But they find things. You’re moonlighting as a consultant canvassing antique skeletons and I’ve a live one I’ve lost my mind trying to find!”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly.” He settled down beside me with his congenial anticoagulant. “Here, sip on this.”
“Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?”
“Physician, heal thyself.”
“Saul, not the theology again. I’m serious. Those spooks have ways of tracing anyone. I’m surprised they haven’t placed a tap on you, frankly. You should be more careful. But you should also be more helpful!”
“I am being helpful. Walk me through the moral calculus, because I’m old and not as quick of conscience as I used to be. You would not press her mind for want of decency, but now you want to run her Social Security number? You would not shake down the poor hotel staff for want of an analgesic, but now you want to stand up a dragnet on the government’s dime? What’s the through-line?”
“That I don’t have her Social Security number.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not doing this tonight. You’re being glib, and you look like offal. Go take a bath before you take my mood down with you.”
I modulated the heat out of my voice. “Apologies, teacher. You’re absolutely correct. There has never been a worse mood in recorded history. But since when do you decline an opportunity to show off your skills?”
“This isn’t a run-of-the-mill OSINT operation, Simeon. This is survival we’re talking about. Yours — and mine. You think I wouldn’t burn doing it? Is Miri any less Christian in my eyes than she is in yours?” He got up, clearly uncomfortable, and started fidgeting with a knob on the dishwasher.
“Unlike you, I actually have survival instincts — and a contract to fulfill that I can’t afford to sleep on because they’re getting a little close for comfort,” he said, shaking his head and slamming the dishwasher shut. “And they’re with DARPA, not the NSA,” he added, putting away some dishes that were sitting by the sink. “You’re on your own for this one, partner.”
“I honestly thought an old ghoul such as yourself would have said we ride at dawn.”
“I have a nine a.m.”
“Fine. No matter. I’ll handle it myself. But how do I start? Will you at least tell me that?”
“First of all, whatever has you so committed to the idea she’s even here?”
“The clerk told me so.”
“The clerk told you whatever helped him keep his life. You know very well that forced confessions under duress do not yield reliable data. That’s just foxhole physics.”
“Fuck.”
“No atheists or innocents left standing. He could have said anything. And our girl could be in Kathmandu by now.”
“Probably not with layovers.”
“I’m reaching for impact, Simeon.”
“Then land the plane, Saul.”
“Look: normally, I’d say run the grid and meditate on street corners like a rishi,” he said archly, knowing this was plainly ridiculous. “But you’d be combing a city on hearsay. Does she travel for work? Does she reside in Boston now or is she summering somewhere in Europe? What do you know about your missed connection?”
“Her name and religious affiliation.”
“That doesn’t help me scope the search. Can you give me anything else? Think, Simeon. What did she tell you?”
I inventoried my estate. “Auburn, curly, and talks back. A counselor. And she helps people.”
“That’s the entire file?”
“And that we’re nothing alike because she seeks Christ first. Her words.”
“Then you might have a prayer: she’d surface near His territory. Stake the parishes. Trinity’s practically a transit hub, and Advent does a weekday evensong that draws exactly the sort of —”
“I wouldn’t make it through vespers, Saul.”
“No,” he agreed, a little too gleefully, I thought. “You wouldn’t. So we return to: a sassy, humanitarian Christian, in Boston. Congratulations, dear boy. Half the city is insolent humanities students and their anxious therapists, all of them trying to survive Harvard. You’ve narrowed it to everyone, without telling me whether she’s here at all.” He walked over, collected my empty glass, and put it in the sink.
“Is your guest room occupied?”
“No, all yours — help yourself,” he said into the sink as he rinsed my glass clean.
I went upstairs in my wet clothes that I had every intention of changing out of before a much-delayed shower. Instead, I sat on the bed — my joints buzzing with unsated hunger I forgot to manage on the interstate — and put my hands on my knees, palms open. Then I descended into the depths to look for her.
Nothing. No gardens in any direction I scanned. A city of sixty-some square miles returning a flat static of paranoias, dashed hopes, personal grievances, a handful of alarming financial foibles that might crash the Nasdaq, and the occasional marriage proposal. I surfaced near dawn and took the dullness for absence, Saul’s caveat weighing on me like a prophecy: you may be about to comb a city she’s not in.
Sangria is not a hearty meal, so I wandered out into the morning hubbub having forgotten to change. I looked like a fucking mongrel, I tell you, but I was past caring what anyone else thought. I had zero pride left, only hope: the last of a man’s dignities — and exceedingly deceitful.
Yet it conducts us pleasantly enough to our journey’s end, I mused, remembering the 1600s and the Rochefoucaulds fondly — I was in my prime with the empresses back then — and I supposed my end might not be too far off if I managed to track down my captor and work my way into that O-ring of hers…
No pang. No sweet, sweet pain. She must not be present. But we journey on.
And, you know, whatever else may be said of Boston, at least it was orderly. The Back Bay is alphabetized: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford — some Puritan surveyor’s gift to the easily lost. And I was a ridiculous pilgrim, so I went by the letters.
The method was this. Pick a street. Stop every few blocks. Open the hands. Relax the jaw. Face the sky — or the ceiling, whatever’s above. And push out toward the periphery.
There is no dignified way down the mind. The glamour is the first thing the depths confiscate, and every fathom deeper strips another rank — until the murderer starts looking more like a monk than a monster.
And so the man who has assiduously tended his coiffure for eight centuries stands on Exeter Street looking like a mad peasant — palms out, mouth agape, staring at the clouds — while the city files past at a gingerly remove.
But she yields nothing, my Moated One, her silence a clever sheepdog. Next blast radius.
I meandered this way from A to H in my filthy clothes and learned helplessness, courting by turns arrest and curiosity. A policeman inquired whether I required assistance and I suggested he try meditation to take the edge off his occupational hazards. On Dartmouth I was mistaken for a performance artist and handed a quarter. On Fairfield, two teenagers livestreamed as I went under and pronounced that “bro is buffering.”
And everywhere, the ambient Christians, whose concern for my safety earned me the occasional lashing — and none of the kind I volunteered for. A nun at the corner of Gloucester and Marlborough assaulted me as I accidentally closed in on all ninety pounds of her — and I crossed the street with my collar up like I was dodging a publicanus. I had been deep in the drop and powerless when two women outside a church on Berkeley handed me a sandwich that smarted like a brand that I mistook for Miri.
By evening I had cleared the alphabet and started on the wharves, my morning cheerfulness giving way to despair. It was a decent enough place to stop for a repast. Ports never change: there are sailors who sing, sailors who drink, sailors who sleep where they fall — and, on the nights Saul and I used to come down to the water, sailors who die. I sated myself for old times’ sake. Ah, Amsterdam.
Then, on an absolutely nothing corner — my last-ditch attempt to test my line on the way back to Saul’s — it started to burn. Not before the kill, but after. At last.
I hadn’t even made it into theta before the fire took me. I was in alpha when it arrived like a sunrise above water — directional, graduated, and sparking against my lymph nodes — and every instinct I own said flee. I turned toward it instead and the pain escalated, and its worsening was like a benediction. Warmer. I was a compass needle springing to purpose after living its whole life in a drawer. O, Sweet Perdition, be not proud. Two blocks and my ribs were in an argument; three, and they filed for acrimonious divorce.
And then she opened.
The miles that stretched and haunted me with static cohered into a beacon, and the fire flooded my body. It felt like a homecoming into a hell they never advertise, so alluring it is. Oh, she was resplendent amid the coils of her roses and curls and winding thoughts and so, so many byways and scenic routes to explore.
My knees went to the pavement — only the third genuflection in my post-lifetime, all within a fortnight — as I took her in. But non serviam, I reminded myself.
You, she fired her first shot into my mind.
Auburn, stubborn, hair with its own agenda — and arms crossed. The file made flesh. Three days I had carried these facts and a first name across a city and continent, and here was the unabridged edition, barefoot in her own firelight and now worked up into such a fury as only the faithful can muster.
Miri— I thought, most ardently.
You! Where were you?
It was exactly like speaking in my dreams when I was a little boy, and the dreams answered — because the dreamscape was waking life and the vision real. And the dream was a nightmare in bloom.
My lady, would — would you believe me — if I said…everywhere?
I could hardly have gotten the words out if I’d been speaking them out loud. But as I merely had to think them, they flickered in my mind like phantasms in a death stupor.
No. You don’t talk yet. I waited for you! I stood there and debased myself while you — while you…debauched me — on a street corner! And then stuffed me into a cab like I’d embarrassed you. And you couldn’t even trouble yourself to ask for my number after all that — that — I don’t even know if I can call it lovebombing! After all the…fumbling about and confusing me with your empresses and agonies and — and being a — a dead man!
Well, I was both dead yet somehow also dying, I thought, but not at her. She pressed on:
After I danced with you! And don’t pretend you couldn’t have found me if you wanted to. You have resources. A man with empresses must have resources.
And I could have entered the mileage into evidence for my defense. Austin-Boston thrice over, once for wise counsel, once back down south, and once through a seaboard of nonstop rain for good measure — all in service of figuring out how to cradle her head without burning. Sixteen hours running ragged through an alphabetized grid with my jaw slack like a carp, begging to be scourged — and handed mostly sandwiches. The front desk and the near escape from her before my hunger bested me. I could have laid the whole odometer at her feet and been acquitted of indifference in one stroke.
But I managed only this:
I…can’t — not here. Not. Like this — please! Grant — your — number.
She thought a moment before thinking the actual number, and I surfaced from my trance gasping as if from underwater. I careened onto the sidewalk in front of me clutching my stomach and fighting off delirium. I rolled over, pulled my knees up to retrieve my cellular phone with trembling hands, and dialed her at once.
“My resources,” I began as soon as she said hello — trying to catch my breath before remembering I didn’t need it, “were a conscientious objector.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t thinking about your number, Miri,” I laid it out slowly as the fire cooled. “I was counting what was left of my restraint, and I spent all of it putting you in that cab. But I’m here now.”
“Well, then you can find me in Boston.”
“I’m already here.”
A beat.
“Come over.”