Chapter 8 chapter Five

Harry sat at his desk in the living room of his Brooklyn Heights home, sipping his morning coffee and looking out the window at the East River.He reached into his sweatpants and fumbled carefully, the sad expression on his face lingering like a horseshoe.Last night, during his marathon shower, he discovered what had made him shiver in the hot steam, a small bump under the skin of his groin, about the size of a grape, soft and hard . During the years he worked on the obituary page of The New York Times before he met Geiger, Harry had come to believe that anyone who lived past forty would get cancer sooner or later.The few people who didn't make it to forty, the people who died in car accidents, murders, or strokes, would have gotten cancer too had they lived longer.Now Harry was forty-four, and he could no longer trust the body he had fought against the world with.From all the sifted lives, he knows that everyone is his own Caesar and Brutus. From now on, his body may betray him at any time, and the moment of "you too?" Not a dagger, but a bump you feel when you swallow, a dilated pupil when you glance in the mirror, or a grape-sized hard lump on your fingertip in the shower.

In moments like these, Harry envied Geiger.He wouldn't want to trade seats with him at any cost - he clearly had more demons in him than in a Hieronymus Bausch painting - but the steel-wrapped heart and will were definitely fascinating people.To Geiger, there seemed to be no such thing as unusual.He was like some mystical engineer who found a way to shut down the occasional emotional ups and downs and their effects.When they first started out as partners, Harry had decided that Geiger was taking mood stabilizers, the kind of drug that smoothed out the roughness of experiencing life.In the end, however, Harry changed his mind. If Geiger was taking drugs, it was his brain making them up. Whatever the chemical and neurological cocktail was, Harry wanted some.

They met in Central Park at three in the morning one night eleven years ago.Harry was drunk, which was his nightly habit, and was about to get kicked in the head by two punks.Years ago, he had been a man without dreams—not the kind you sleep at night, but giving up hope—giving up the hope that something new and different, that anything else could happen.The dreams of his youth vanished like the objects of his writing, reduced to dust and dirt; thus, his erratic plodding dragged his flesh and blood, weakening the pain of breathing, the possibility of being sent out of this world And so on add up, and it almost all feels normal.Lost becomes the supporting actor who is always at hand, following him at a few steps.The thought of saying goodbye at last made Harry's wounded lips stretch into a smile above his poor teeth, and at that moment Geiger paused from his night run, lingering long enough to attack those men with deadly hands and feet in a blur. Bastard, walked away before Harry could take a breath and speak.

Two weeks later, with thirty stitches and two new teeth installed, Harry began a daily vigil at the place of infamy.He didn't have to wait long: The next night, Geiger, in a T-shirt and sweatpants, appeared on the trail in the torrential rain. Harry stepped in and Geiger stopped, but kept running. "What do you want?" Geiger asked. "Just wanted to say thank you." Geiger's wet hair shone like polish, and rain dripped from his eyebrows into his eyes, but he didn't seem to mind.Harry noticed he was barely blinking. "My name is Harry, Harry Burdick."

He held out a hand, but Geiger didn't even look at it. "Can I buy you a drink?" "I do not drink." "Well, I was just thinking, because you saved my life—" "Just a coincidence, Harry, and it has nothing to do with you. If they kicked a dog, I'd do the same thing." "How about coffee? Would you like coffee?" For a moment, Geiger looked at Harry with his steady, unblinking eyes, without saying a word.Harry suddenly felt uneasy, this man seemed to be examining him, judging him.Then Geiger nodded and said, "Okay, Harry."

They went to a bar on Broadway and sat in a shaded, ammonia-filled box, Geiger sipping a cup of black coffee and Harry drinking three wild turkey whiskeys.For the next three hours, Harry's autobiographical monologue is mixed with eager sharing and attempts to reaffirm himself, as if the abilities he once possessed in the past have been worn to a dangerous level, and he must rely on retrospective events to sustain him now. . When it comes to getting a job as a researcher at The New York Times right out of City University, Harry says the pace of the story picks up, "That's when I realized I was really good at digging, and they called me 'Shovel,' funny. Yeah, sometimes it takes a while to find out what you're good at."

He told Geiger how to use software he designed to sneak into computer networks at night, how to use these techniques to unearth secrets and connect clues: how he wrote an important report on the current situation of race, and his career as a reporter was shot. And red. "It just popped up there one morning, and the front-page headline, 'Harry Burdick reports,' was like, hey, that's me." Geiger only answered yes or no a few times as Harry spoke, nodding or shaking his head to other questions.While this was the limit of his active participation, he had no urge to leave.He noticed that as the alcohol took effect, Harry took a sharp turn toward depression, and his recollections became more and more blurred, and the story became more and more disjointed.Geiger also felt that Harry had left out an important chapter: talking about his own life as if he lived through two distinct eras, without mentioning the events that connected them.At first, Harry's story is full of excitement and proud achievement, but then it turns into a dark alley: waning enthusiasm for work, rapid decline in the quality of reporting, inaccurate content, wrong drafts, and drinking from hobby to habit.After months of admonishment, The New York Times gave him one last chance and a job in the obituary department.

"You know that feeling," said Harry, "when you feel like you've hit rock bottom, only to realize you're right there?" Harry told Geiger that being sent to the obituaries was like coming home, that he lived with the ghosts and their pasts, immersed in their deeds and their decline.However, it also led him to create more elaborate and devious search programs.Filling in the blanks, giving continuity to the chaos, and thus obsessing over it, is a strange form of regeneration. For Geiger, listening to this epic story was a strange experience.In those three hours, he'd learned more about Harry than anyone he'd ever known.As he ran home in the morning light, it was as if an invisible hand had sent him a thought: This wouldn't be the last time he saw Harry Burdick.

Harry's computer beeped, alerting him that someone had visited the site; it was always an uplifting sound, a sign of business, the challenge of piecing together a person's life story, and money.It was only after he started working with Geiger and making a lot of money that Harry began to appreciate the benefits of money.The money certainly helps, but it also assuages ​​the shame of how he earned it. Harry never showed up for the execution, but came to understand that for Geiger, the job wasn't about the money.God knows why, but Harry never asked, it would be like asking Van Gogh why he painted, or Jack the Ripper why he went out at night.Harry finally understood that Geiger had to do it, and that, like everything else about the man, did make Harry curious.He vaguely remembered that feeling, the tremor strong enough to pull him back into the churning sea, against the current.Geiger's ascetic oddity reminds him of what it's like to be passionate.

Harry looked at the website on the screen. Ninety-five percent of the visitors to DoYouMrjones.com were Dylan Thomas fans. Click "Password" to explore the site in more depth.The password must be five words derived from Harry's favorite fruit "MELON".If they type in the correct password, it means they were referred by a legitimate source. Harry sips his coffee, smiling as a current visitor types "Men Everywhere Live On Nuts - Everywhere Nuts Live On" .Not bad, he told himself.Of course, none can match the vocabulary that Carmini used when he first logged in 1999: "Minestrone, Eggplant, Linguine, Veal Shank (Braut) Ossibuchi), Nougat (Nougat).A typical five-course Italian meal, from a man whose appetite and sense of humor were as high as his vengeance, his way of life as much as his way of wielding power.

The site accepts the term, requiring a referrer to be typed in.Harry recognized the name when a visitor typed in "Collicos".Colricos, the scrap metal king, had hired Geiger twice.Harry waited for the visitor to follow instructions to provide his name, his mobile phone number, who Jones was, and why the client needed Geiger's services. Harry squeezed the lump at Rat Creek again, thinking about getting it checked out, but he hated going to the doctor as much as he knew why he should.Geiger had taught him how to forge all kinds of false documents, but health insurance was too risky for a marginal man like him, so he always paid cash for doctor visits.He didn't mind paying a fortune for checking, examining, slicing, and everything. The website starts filling up with information, and then another tone shows the visitor leaving.Harry pressed "Print" and looked at his watch. Lily was almost here. He turned his gaze to her picture on the table in the corner. She curled up on the sofa with a mischievous expression on her face, and looked at him with a smile of "I know a secret", but his sister hadn't shown this expression for a long time .He had placed her in a nursing home ten years ago, and since then he has visited her every other Sunday in New Rochelle, sitting by the bed watching clips of her staring blankly or humming a song, Listening to a voice that sounded so old, it seemed like she had lived a dozen lifetimes.She looks like an alien-possessed creature from a sci-fi movie: awkward movements, archaic, fragmented speech, incomprehensible to its subject matter. Even so, Harry was convinced that Lily had always had a firm grip on the absurdity of his own life, and her stubbornness haunted him.Harry had trained himself not to think about Lily, but his sister occupied his almost empty conscience and refused to be expelled.His guilt didn't come from proxy care—he paid a fortune to have her live in a nursing home.What tormented him was the jagged truth that lodged in him long ago.He spent a hundred thousand dollars a year not because he loved Lily, but because he wanted her dead.Six figures seem to be the market for Burdick's guilt these days. The downstairs doorbell rang, and Harry went to the door and pressed the intercom on the wall.Out of sudden remorse, four months earlier he had arranged for Lily to be brought home by a psychiatric nurse on vacation, and he found it more difficult to visit her in the hospice's bleak room than to take Lily to the apartment and speak to himself. Anxiety has a temporary numbing effect.He recently arranged another overnight trip, tonight. Harry stepped back after opening the door, listening to footsteps coming up the stairs.A woman in her twenties, dressed in black, with straw-like hair, a green hakama and boots, came in with a small canvas overnight bag. "Hi, Mr. Jones." "Hi, Melissa." She turned and stretched out a hand into the invisible corridor, "Come on, Lily, come in." A voice as soft as satin said, "It's time to go." "That's right," the nurse said, pulling Lily into the apartment. Drugs and insanity left his sister gray-haired and thin.She was wearing a short-sleeved pink shirt and lilac knee-length tights he'd bought her a few years earlier.Protruding elbows, wrist bones, and cheekbones are visible beneath her opalescent skin.As always, Harry had to remind himself when he saw her that she was six years younger than him. "How is she?" he asked. "Same," said Melissa, "good, isn't it, Lily?" There was a dead air about her, nothing seemed to move, as if the psychosis were a tumor dissolving every muscle, tendon, and nerve in her body.She looks as light as air, a beautiful, giant origami figure.When her deep-set blue eyes finally moved and settled on Harry, they stared at him without a hint of recognition. Harry took a step towards his sister, her gaze fixed on the small dimple just below his Adam's apple.He raised one hand and tapped the top of her head three times with his knuckles, "Is anyone home?" Lily's lips curved slightly when he touched her. Harry glanced at Melissa, "We used to do that when we were kids." His sister went to the wide picture window. "I like it here," Lily said. "Everything is moving fast, and I like to see everything moving fast." The East River, barely affected by ripples, continues to reflect the Manhattan skyline almost perfectly.On summer days like these, the city seems to have a twinkling twin lying just below the surface. Lily leaned her forehead against the glass, put her palms flat on it, and began to sing hesitantly in soft, flying words. "Far below...the depths of the ocean..." Harry added, "Where I want to be, she might be." Lily didn't seem to hear his involvement at all. "Melissa, do you know the song?" Harry asked, "<Atlantis>?" "I don't know—" she said. "Is there any coffee?" "In the coffee pot, if you want to drink something fresh, make another pot yourself." Harry sat back at his desk, his chest heaving with deep breaths and deep sighs.He took a sheet of paper from the printer and nodded as he read it, liking what he read. "Melissa, I might have to go out for a while." "Okay, we'll be fine, Lily's fine." Harry looked up and smiled with one corner of his mouth tilted. "Yeah," he said, "Lily's fine."