Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

the idea of itself; everything was the shape of itself, not the texture—the shadow it threw or the light it cast, the arc of its traveling. Not the trivia, not the variables, no: the great sweep of feeling, the adventurous gesture.

“If it makes you happy, that’s good enough for me. Whatever. I mean not everyone wants to work for the IRS, either.”

“Nice try, Daddy. IRS, phone porn, same thing.”

“Anyway, sweetheart, I don’t need to know the details. But that doesn’t mean I need to be lied to. I’d rather get the respect of hearing the truth and having to deal with it.”

“I thought, you know, no one wants to think of their crippled kid doing phone porn for a living. Sordid. You know—do you really need the ideation? It’s like seeing your parents have sex. Right? Pretty disgusting. No offense, but who wants that? Come on!”

“The truth will set us free.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“OK, the truth will set me free. That’s what I’m seeing, since I’ve been down here. Or wait. What I’m seeing is more: I want to know the truth, but I don’t want to have to tell the truth. See? You want to have the truth available to you, but then you also want the freedom of never having to tell it yourself. That’s the deal with truth. It sets you free when you hear it, but if you have to tell it, that’s pretty much a non-freedom situation. Get it? People should tell the truth to me, if I ask them for it. But I should be able to hide the truth whenever I want to.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I resent the implication.”

“Uh huh. Mom said you’d been hitting the sauce. It’s not like you. So what is this? A mid-life-crisis thing?”

“I did have two beers with lunch. With the guy from the embassy. Beer in the middle of the day knocks me out, though. It’s humid here.”

“She also said T.’s in jail.”

“It’s more of a holding facility. Don’t worry. We’re gonna spring him. We’ll bust him out. I’m working closely with the U.S. embassy.”

“He killed someone?”

“Of course not, honey. A guy just happened to, you know, die next to him.”

“Just die?”

“Hey. It happens.”

“And there’s no, they don’t have any evidence against him, or whatever?”

“There’s no body, even. Don’t worry, Case. Hey, listen. What about Sal? How’s it going with him?”

“Oh, you know. It’s not anything, really.”

“Good to hear.”

“I bet.”

“Hey. Case.”

“Uh huh.”

“So I’ve been wondering. What happened with you and T.?”

She was silent. He was overstepping, but he couldn’t help it—there was a carelessness to him. Or he was carefree.

“In a nutshell? He condescended, Dad.”

“He condescended?”

“He condescended to me.”

There was nothing more. Casey was not one to step into an awkward pause, to take up the slack. The static buzzed between them. He let it rest.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all, Daddy. So when are you guys coming home?”

After they hung up he lay back on the sheet, content. It always made him feel good to talk to her. She always sounded like herself, whole, confident, abrupt. Her matter-of-factness was comforting, her cheery pugnacity. When he went to see her, or even heard her speaking to him on the phone, it reminded him that she was not gone at all—not gone at all and not miserable, at least no more so than the rest of the humans. She was warm, she was there, she was not the specter of a miserable daughter that lived alongside him. That specter could be dismissed.

It was irrelevant.

•

When he met Brady outside the jail there was another man with him, a younger Anglo in a seersucker suit. It turned out he was a lawyer.

“You said there was nothing to worry about,” said Hal, alarmed. It was beyond his control after all. It had run away on him. “You said walk lightly, not to show we’re worried!”

“A basic precaution. Cleve’s an old friend of mine from Miami. Jorge knows him too. He met him last year at a pool party. Remember that, Cleve? After the ribbon-cutting? At the new youth hostel?”

“With the—that woman with the grass skirt? The supernumerary nipple?”

“Right. Right! Who kept showing it to everyone.”

“Jesus,” said the lawyer, and shook his head. He turned to Hal. “She was an entertainer I guess? Something to do with the music? But she had this extra nipple. It was, like, right under her clavicle.” He tugged his shirt collar down to display the area in question.

“It was weird, though,” said Brady. “It was little.”

“Almost like a big wart.”

“But with an areola.”

“So this won’t, this won’t make the cops think we’re adversarial?” asked Hal. “Marching back in there with an attorney?”

“It’s just a formality. Don’t worry. After you, gentlemen.”

Brady opened the door for him.

“She kept going, ‘my supernumerary nipple,’” said the lawyer. “That’s what she called it. I never forgot. ‘Supernumerary.’”

“Made it sound official,” said Brady.

“Bureaucratic,” said Cleve.

After a few minutes’ wait, with Brady and the lawyer still talking about the pool party—apparently a man had walked through a plate-glass door and been airlifted to a hospital in Mexico City—the stocky, sweat-stained man from before came out and ushered them in. It seemed to Hal that the security guard looked askance at him as they passed, as though Hal posed a security risk.

Inside they went down a brightly lit corridor and the stocky man opened the door to an interrogation room.

There was T., seated at a Formica table. At his elbow was a bottle of water.

Hal bent down and held his shoulders, then stepped back. He did not look upset.

“Are you OK? How are you holding up?”

“Fine, thank you,” said T., and smiled.

“Where were you sleeping last night?”

“We were driving for some of it. There was a rest stop. I didn’t get that much sleep.”

“Man. I’m so sorry. This is wrong, T.”

T. patted him on the arm and then looked past him, polite. “Tom Stern. Please call me T. And you are?”

Hal introduced Brady and the lawyer. On the other side of the table the stocky man arranged chairs.

“One moment,” said