Chapter 39: Aaren’s visit (2)
“Who’s watching Jennings?” It’s a question that gets answered with a sequence of pass along names much like the game of telephone. “Isn’t McNamara on him this week?” “Ask Putowski.” “Hey, I looked in last week, don’t need to be bored to death again. Give it to the new guy, Banner.” It went like that because—for some reason that no one knows—Jared’s case slipped down the priority list once Witson delivered him to the safe house. As things go in bureaucracies, snafu’s are a given, not the exception—even in an agency as quasi-mythological as the FBI whose head, J. Edgar Hoover is called “The Boss.”
At some point, someone decides to bring Aaren in again. Or was it really a snafu? Aaren doesn’t question the caller. She jots down the address and picks up her pre-paid ticket at Minneapolis’ Lindbergh airport.
Aaren’s regular visiting stopped once Jared was off the Ride. Whoever is on the case—again, if anyone really is watching—she is instructed, “Take that tape.” “Which tape?” There was a pause: time lapsed as she heard shuffling, some whispers, “You know the tape!” “I don’t know what you mean,” she says so earnestly and with a tinge of hurt that the agent fumes and rushes his words as if they would erase his previous instruction, “Okay, Miss, don’t worry. (Pause.) There is no tape. My mistake.” He hangs up. Aaren shakes her head, Tape?
The next morning Jared finds a videotape at his breakfast spot, right in front of the coffee pot. After eating he takes the morning paper, a fresh cup of coffee and the mysterious tape, goes to the TV room, slips it in, settles back and raises the volume on the remote. Within a nanosecond he realizes that it’s a tape of a meeting at the Black Forest. His heart turns to ice, cracks and he dies as he listens to Witson and Aaren say, “What do you want? Drugs, get him to escape . . . rape me, what?”
On the plane Aaren knows that she’s being used again—assumes that Witson is behind this—but she doesn’t care what he’s up to anymore. She only wants to be with Jared to tell him about her heart, what’s she found out about herself with Char and the nonviolent Sisters. She’s not sure how to approach him. Should I tell him everything?
“Mr. Jennings, you have a visitor in the Coolidge room,” is the butler’s single comment.
As Jared walks in he sees a woman across the room. Her back is to him. Her hair is cut mannishly short. She’s wearing a plain brown smock that is loose fitting. He walks towards her, halting two feet away.
“Hey?”
She turns. Aaren’s face? It’s Aaren!
“What the fuck . . . ?” Jared is shocked not only by seeing her but by her being in this strange attire and hair cut. “Aaren?”
She smiles, steps forward and links with him by finger-locking his wrists. She looks at him, admiringly. Then she leads him towards a sofa, all formal white, both of them like two out-of-place decorations in this room of ultra-formal taste and propriety. As they sit, Jared rips his hands away from hers, breaking the thin coma induced by the weirdness of her being here.
“What do you want?” is delivered with control, intending to short-circuit all the bullshit.
“Did you think you could keep me away?” Ah, sweet innocence! Eyes so sincere that he shivers, sensitive now to the depths of her perversity. Echoing throughout his mind, the tape plays back her conversation with Steve.
“Tell me, honestly, this is the contradictions, eh? This is how you fucking-A work it out?”
Having said that, he intended to rise and leave but he stays seated, stifling his violent lust. Despite everything, he wants to ride this filly.
“I don’t understand . . .”
So sweetly, he responds within, what does she really want? Why would they send her here? And now? Flash! A plan pops into his head. Play her game. She couldn’t know about the tape, could she? Be cagey, hmmm.
She so wants him to want her, to be open that she falls for his switcheroo. He says, shaking his head, “You took me by surprise. I mean,” he points at her garb, “your rags, this place. Christ, sure, fucking-A, I’m glad they let you in. You’re still my only contact with the outside—with real people, that is.”
“Yes. Yes. I know. Maybe love does conquer all?”
His brain riots, Love? Jesus, bitch, what type of asshole do you take me for?
“Possibly. Possibly it does,” he says, back into the conversation, keeping a lid on all the weirdness. “Tell me where you’ve been and what’s been going on since our last visit?” It’s an award-winning moment, the perfection of visiting room banality.
Aaren sighs, inches, almost glides closer. “Everywhere,” comes on a smile, a slight head nod upward and eyes sparkling, indicating a fullness to the word “everywhere.” Then she says, “Here” and she touches her heart. A slight pause, then “here” and she touches his heart.
He struggles not to flinch as her movement evokes her slick twist of the stiletto. They are back at the draft raid retreat. She’s all eruption and Liquid Fire, but now his flesh is asbestos, his heart, titanium. Mercilessly, she continues to slice him with her bodily motions. She lifts and places his palms on her face, kisses them and then lets him have them back. She sighs, a woeful, almost pathetic, confessional sigh, and words of self-criticism, indictment flow, “What haven’t I done?”
It’s unbearable. Not the pain he suffers from the emotional iron restraints he’s cuffing himself with. Not the stabbing pressure of his unvented anger. No, unbearable is the farce, the scene, the dialogue. I know! I know! They taped you! And I know! is what he wants to shout, but he’s holds back. In recent weeks, he’s been gaining some insight on his own tumultuous twists and turns. Maybe it’s happening to her, too? Maybe everyone’s flipping out?
She places her hands on her lap. Calm, almost monkish in her bearing. Then playfully, “Mr. Jennings . . . may I call you Mr. Jennings?”
He looks at her quizzically.
“I have come to claim my soul. I have come to praise you, my soul mate.”
This is too much. “Aw, shit, don’t fuck with my mind! Jesus fucking Christ, what are you doing? Have you fried your brain, man? Or,” bitterly, “fucked yourself mindless?”
He gets up and paces, walks around the sofa, sees himself seeing himself here surrounded by all the opulent heavy-handed finery and overdone airs of the place, laughs at the scene, stares at the walls as if behind them is an audience. Laughs angrily inside: Maybe it’s a two-way wall! Who would put it beyond them? She and I in a fish bowl ... being dissected—Sweet Jesus!
He blurts out, breaking the mood she has set, making her jump, “Who’d have thought? You’re a fucking snitch, eh? It’s come down to this. Don’t deny it, you fucking bitch!” Aaren is staggered by the remark—he knows!— her body jerks backwards, her eyes slowly twitch and flutter making her look stoned, and he runs on that scent. “Jesus, are you drugged out of your mind or something?”
Justified. Righteous. Vindictive. “Didn’t you hear me? Your little game’s up. They taped you and Steve. All of it. I’ve heard the fucking tape.” He exaggerates, making it all seem buffoonish. “Heighten the contradictions!” Jumping up and down, kangaroo antics. “Heighten the contradictions!” He mocks, stroking the air with pontifical sweep, “May the blessings of Chairman Mao be upon you and your descendants!”
What she then does totally confuses him. He’s expecting her to break down or, actually, to break out—break out of her disguise, this sham attire and false speech, to snarl back at him with the black tongue he’s used to. He wants her curses, her Fuck you! and Eat shit! Her condemnations: “Dickless pacifist, the smell of my cunt will kill you!”
Atypically she doesn’t spew. She is stone silent, immobile. Then, as if fainting, she falls back into a corner of the sofa, falls throwing her left arm across the back and lifting one leg to set restfully on a cushion pad. Simultaneously, she breaks forth into hysterical laughter—no words, just sounds, twitterings, head bobbing back and forth, tears streaming down her cheeks. It’s th
e hysteria of the maniac and the bereaved. A wail of laughter, high pitched, low moaned, then short rasping breaths. She lets herself sink into the couch, embrace her, finding it her sole emotional support. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” softly, five, seven, ten times. Ending, “Oh, Jared.”
She calls his eyes to her, bewitching. He’s watching her like a boxer ready to repel, then simply as a bystander pitying this bewildered woman. God damn! He’s once again overcome by a fierce passion—“I desire you! I want you! I need you!” is what he desperately wants to say. He bites his tongue, presses his hands over his eyes, who’s crazier?
Aaren quiets down, dries her cheeks, looks at the man she loves, says with great sincerity and honest disclosure, “Can you see what they’ve done?”
Eyes still closed, he mentally tracks her cleverness.
“They are truly masters of the contradictions. Oh, can this web ever be unwoven?”
“At last, you admit it?”
“The tapes?”
“Yes.”
Pause. He drops his hands, looks at her.
She starts up, “Yes, but—”
“Ha! Gotcha . . . no buts. Were you a plant all along—I mean, is the Weatherman trip for you what it was for Steve?”
It’s a novel thought for her. “Me, a Fed?”
“How else could you get here? How else could only your letters get to me—uncensored, not a jot or tittle blacked out?” This is the first time he discerns this obvious clue—Fuck, how did I miss …?” In a flash all her visits rerun and—self-deception, Friar Otto!—he now clearly sees the show titled “Aaren’s Deception.”
She gathers herself together and stands, takes a step towards him. He steps back as she comes forward. She interprets the moment. “I understand. We’re like body and shadow. I move and you move. Somehow never on the same dimension. Together only at some point, some curious point where you begin and I end, I begin and you end.”
“What the fuck’s that’s supposed to mean?” Jared is hyped up, weary but cautious. Was, is everything a lie?
She knows that this is her last stand, she’ll just have to risk it all. Madness is her only guide.
“I love you. I love you because I love myself. I have come to understand that we are two parts of the same soul. You and I have walked the same road, only in opposite directions. I’ve been Mary Magdalene drawing your holy lusts. You’ve been my Sweet Jesus giving yourself up to be crucified. Don’t you see, we have saved each other!”
Sarcastically, “Right on, Sister! Right on!”
She despairs. “Oh, Jared . . . Jared. Can’t you see? Trust? You’ve been the visible one and I the invisible one. And then you disappeared. And I appeared. It’s true, as you went into prison, into this foul womb, going the opposite way, I was born. Once you were gone, I realized how much I was you and you were me. I even had to love Char to find your love, lingering on her lips.”
“Jesus! You’re mad! One fucking-A insane Weatherman asshole!”
She dismisses this with a “Tsk!” but then affirms, “True, I am mad. As only a sane woman can be, today. I am a madwoman. I dress like this because I am mad. I live alone and have chosen poverty because I am mad. I am chaste because I am mad. I tend a plot of vegetables in the middle of a welfare neighborhood because I am mad. I pray . . . pray for Char and her lesbian Sisters. Pray for those who do not pray. I am most mad because I pray for you . . . pray that you will go mad!”
“Fuck! You’re now Sister Monk? Seducing me with holy babble!”
Fearful, caring, “Is it that dark in prison,” two fingers knocking on the seatback, “that it’s only dark in here?” tapping on her heart. She wants to say, “Sweetheart!”
It’s still too much someone else’s theater. It has to be a script! Jared, barely an arm’s length away, starts commanding, almost yells, “Get out of here! Fuck you! Go back, go back to wherever you really came from—hell or the FBI or both. Fucking go tell the Boss that I know your game!”
On a frustrated sigh, “But this isn’t a game! Truly. Trust . . .” Before she completes the sentence, she’s down on her knees, head bowed. “This isn’t a game! I did betray you but I’ve changed, I’ve seen through all the false ideology, the nuttiness of it all. Please, Jared, please ….”
He doesn’t want this. Stop it! Bring down the curtain! Angrily, hatefully, bewildered, he bends and picks her up planning to carry her out the door and dump her on the lawn but she wraps her arms around him and try as he may he can’t dislodge her. Her seeming smallness wedges against him with a weight five times her size. His only weapon is his words.
“You love me, eh! Shit. All those letters. Fuck. All that cock-licking and eagle-spread pussy. Yeah, all that ‘Waiting for you Jared, Special Delivery’ crap. I’ll tell you, it’s a lot more of a turn-on than this holy moley bullshit. Fucking-A, how in Mao’s fucked-up name did you ever believe this would work?”
Aaren clings to him silently, forlorn, trying to press trust into him through her body. But he is the exorcist, expurgating with biting sarcasm. “I liked you better when you were only mad about sucking my cock and getting fucked up and in and out and around! If you are what you say you are—Jesus, how Satan rules!—man, holy shit, what are you? Just a burned-out hippie chick who’s afraid of living. Man, I can smell it. It’s the smell of the fucking monastery . . . of holy fear. So now you’re praying! Well, whoopie doo! Fuck it, you deceptive bitch. I don’t need you, so don’t come knocking on my door anymore!” With vehemence, “Get the fucking shit outta here!”
Jared with fierce effort rips her tired arms off of him, flings her to the floor and strides out of the room, leaving her there like a discarded towel, a clean-up task for the butler.