The Myths of Living Read online

  ***

  Again two men occupied Astrid’s couch, but the comparison of FBI agents Dunn and Pumares to Manthus and Son ended there. Nothing was loose on either man. They wore their suits as an extension of themselves, like the mane of a horse. They were neither angry nor lusty. Pumares had peculiar yellow highlights in his light brown eyes and a mole on the side of his face that made him look exotic from one angle and terrifying from another. Dunn was as steady as a piano.

  Both men stared down at the camera without any hint of surprise, wonder, or disdain, as Astrid dropped to the floor pushing the button. The angle struck her as strange, even as she felt her knees touch the hardwood and spread apart. The symbolism ran through her: Of looking up to these men. Of submitting before them. Of being brought to her knees. The whole room had a blowjob air. Before he told her the reason why they had come, Dunn said how much he admired Astrid’s work, the undaunted woman who went for shots where most men wouldn’t dare to go. He wished she worked for the Bureau, that they needed good, fearless photographers, although he understood that the artistry wasn’t the same. Still, maybe they would try to lure her away from freelancing and onto their staff when all this was over. But for now, they needed to hear her version of events between the time she arrived in Dover to claim Simon’s body and the time she learned Simon’s body was missing.

  Astrid pulled herself off the floor, sat in the chair and began describing the room where she and Peter made the official identification and signed the forms verifying the remains were Simon’s. She stood beside Peter as Quando Talmone, who had been the body hauler for the Manthus funeral home, loaded the coffin into the hearse.

  No, they didn’t follow the hearse back to New York. Peter tried to make a joke of it, saying he heard it was bad luck driving behind hearses carrying his best friend. Everything else she knew was hearsay: Ben Manthus explained that when Talmone pulled into the Funeral Home, Ben helped him unload the coffin. That’s when Ben noticed how light the box was. Talmone said, “Maybe this guy really is a saint,” and Ben snickered, but he didn’t open the coffin until the next morning. Talmone swore that he only stopped once on the trip up from Dover, at the Woodrow Wilson rest stop to get some coffee and use the bathroom.

  “Isn’t this all in the original report?” Astrid asked.

  Neither FBI man answered. Their faces didn’t look compassionate, but Astrid felt a wave of compassion fall around her. She reached for the camera again, but Dunn stopped her by leaning forward and swallowing the camera with his huge hand. He would like nothing more than to be the subject of her photographs, he told her, and again, at a later time, maybe that would be possible.

  Now, however, they had to deal with the foot.

  “What foot?” Astrid asked.

  Dunn gave her the news in a flat, straightforward tone: Simon’s foot had been found buried in the Jefferson National Expansion Park, behind the Basilica of St. Louis. A groundskeeper dug it up when he saw the fresh dirt and became curious. The foot had been sawn off the leg about three inches above the ankle. DNA tests confirmed the foot belonged to the body of Simon Kent.

  In the silence that followed, Astrid could only think how strange it was that people say darkness fills a room. They say, “It’s getting darker.” Astrid looked hard, but she couldn’t see the darkness filling up the room. What she saw was the light ebbing away, being drawn out of the world like a magician withdraws a cover to reveal the disappearance of the beautiful assistant.

  She couldn’t hear Dunn’s questions, only her answers:

  No, she had not received any strange phone calls.

  Simon was Lutheran and he attended services occasionally; she did not. God was an unstated but semi-permanent guest in their lives.

  The Alliance. The Black Flame. The Order of the Rose. No, she hadn’t heard of them.

  By the time Dunn and Pumares left, all the light was gone.

  A foot.

  She drove to a grocery store and bought bubble bath. When she returned home, she poured half the container into a steaming tubful of water and got in.

  Encapsulated in the tiny bathroom, without Other People poking into her life, without the wall of the camera to distance herself from herself, Astrid let loose. First came the soft hiss-plunk of tears falling into the soapy water. But it wasn’t until she lifted her right foot out of the water and placed it on the side of the tub that the short gasps became sobs. What had happened? She had always been the fragmented one. She was the one broken into pieces. She was the random electron being attracted and repelled without visible predictability. But Simon, he was solid mass. Until now. When she finished crying, she let her head fall onto the back of the tub. The rest of her remained submerged in the icy water, but she was too exhausted to lift herself out.