The Aether and the Lie is a story about heartbreak, art, murder, a billion-dollar heist, and the motivations behind the crimes. Enzi's past experience of a robbery in the winter oil fields starts to shape his life.
Visit MontanaVoice.com for more information and to listen to additional episodes.
The Aether and the Lie is a story about heartbreak, art, murder, a billion-dollar heist, and the motivations behind the crimes. Enzi's past experience of a robbery in the winter oil fields starts to shape his life.
Visit MontanaVoice.com for more information and to listen to additional episodes.
The Lie. A novel by Steve S. Saroff
copyright 2021 Steve S. Saroff
Chapter Two - New York
Success is what people with ambition aim for. Runaways just try for happiness and the safety of knowing they can always escape.
When I was a kid words swam on paper. They flipped and reversed and tormented me. When I tried to explain, I stuttered. But shapes made perfect sense. Looking at a tree, the clouds, or the cracks on the asphalt, I saw patterns, I saw order. What I recognized would become Fibonacci sequences, Pascal's triangles, Sierpinski fractals ? but at 14, I had no names yet for what I was seeing. And then I was gone. I left home, I left school, I left what wasn't there to look for anything else.
I slept against wire fences. I slept under bridges. I always tried to hide. I stayed out of the cities, and I found jobs further away from everything. I made it through a winter, then another. I lied about my age until I was old enough not to have to lie anymore.
This is a story of leaving. There are many people who start early on the road, who are homeless and who are searching for happiness. My story is perhaps not as common because of mathematics. The part of who I am that has brought me the best and the worst of what is human: to think and create, then to manipulate and ruin.
I started the same. I found dull, dull work. Jobs that lasted a few days or a week: picking apples in Washington state, stringing wire fences on ranches in Wyoming, working on road crews everywhere. I found the West and nights in bunkhouses, with the sounds of men coughing and drunks talking in their sleep. I found filthy motel rooms with stains on the walls, and the forever miles of highways and roads. But I also found the sky, the rivers, and the wind, and I knew that the rooms were just for sleep, that the work was just to be able to keep moving. Eastern cities collect the runaways who are afraid of openness. The West collects the runaways who are afraid of not being able to keep leaving.
When words came to me ? the shifting letters in books calming and flattening ? when words explained the shapes and the numbers ? it was a home. I would find libraries in small college towns and read whatever math books were there. The best days of my life ? like this memory: the University library in Missoula one September. The lights blinked on and off to warn of its closing in fifteen minutes. I looked up at a clock and realized seven hours had gone by. I had been studying the mathematics of automata and trying to find a combination of linear equations that could explain the chaos. I was doing this because it was wonderful. The notebook near my hand was now filled with my own thoughts, but none of those thoughts were words. I went outside into the autumn darkness. Students walked past me, leaving to go back to their homes and dorm rooms. The air had the wood smoke-tinge of coming coldness. I swung my pack on. I walked across the road that circles the campus. Right there, right next to the library, there was mountain. Mount Sentinel. I walked part way up there, up high enough so that I could see the Missoula lights. Up where no one would bother me, and I fell sleep in my sleeping bag, with nothing else in between me and the infinite sky. My dreams had no words, my dreams had only perfect ideas. The next morning, I woke up because an inch of snow had fallen, and I was cold and wet. But I was happy. I walked back down the mountain to the books.
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At six thirty in the morning, I knocked on Kaori's door expecting to wake her up, but she was already dressed. She stepped out into the hallway carrying a jacket, a small duffle bag and a large-sized zippered portfolio case. I knew that she was not allowed to leave Montana before her court hearing, but I didn’t tell her this. Instead, all I asked her was if she had some ID with her, because she would need it to get on the flight. She said she had her passport, and then she locked her door, and we went out and got into the car and made the seven-mile drive to the airport without talking.
At the airport I parked in the long-term lot, and we went in and got our boarding passes. I checked my suitcase, and Kaori asked me why I did not have a small bag that I could carry on the plane. I told her that I liked bringing one bag with enough room to fit whatever I might buy while New York. We then went through security and waited upstairs for our flight.
Scattered details come up like this, remembering where I left the parking stub on the car's dash, about the way the TSA agent unzipped and looked inside Kaori's portfolio case, glancing at the sketch pad and pencil sharpeners. I also remembered touching the keys in my pocket. The key to my car. The key to my house. The small key to the suitcase. I remembered these things but could not remember what Kaori was doing. I knew she was sitting next to me, and that we were both facing large, dark windows. I knew that outside our jet was parked at the gate where it had been since the night before, waiting for this early morning flight. But I don't remember looking at the jet, and I don't remember feeling anything, except tired. And being tired in the early morning is never good.
During the two-hour flight to Minneapolis, and brief layover, we didn't talk at all. However, on the next flight, to New York, she told me about how children in Japan learned to read and write. I took a notebook from my coat pocket and asked her to teach me some Japanese, and she spent the next two hours - until we landed - writing the phonic sounds for some basic Japanese words. She laughed at my pronunciation and she had me say things like “Tomodachi,” and “Neko.” Friend and cat. She also taught me to say, “Kitanai furui okami,” getting me to pronounce it perfectly before she told me what it meant. “This means, 'I am dirty old wolf,'” she laughed, slapping my arm gently. “When you see Japanese girl at party, you say to her.”
“Why should I do such a thing?” I asked.
She looked at me, and at first didn't answer. Then she leant close to my face, putting her mouth against my ear, and whispered, “Because you like my body. Because maybe I be nasty girl with you.” Then she sat back in her seat, and closed her eyes, and was a young woman whom I didn't know at all.
After landing in New York, we got my suitcase and then caught a cab and went into the city. It was late afternoon, and the traffic was absurd. Kaori had her dark glasses on and looked out the cab’s window without commenting. The cab dropped us off at the New York Palace, fifty-five stories of excess. As we were walking into the lobby, I asked Kaori if she wanted her own room. She said, “No.” I got an expensive room on the thirty-sixth floor with two large beds. It was still a sterile hotel room to me, but Kaori seemed happy. She turned off the room's lights and stood near the windows. The entire wall was glass. The view was toward downtown, with dusk coming on and a clear sky, with building lights just starting to show. I was laying back on one of the beds, my feet on the floor, my arms behind my head. She came over and sat next to me.
“Four days ago I in jail,” she said, “and now I am in New York. You need tie. You confuse me.”
“I don't need a tie,” I said to her. “But I do need to go and meet the person I came here for. Come with me. He is interesting.”
“Where you go?” She asked.
“Rough kind of place,” I said. “No sweet drinks, but interesting.”
“Will you talk about computers?” she asked.
“No. I think we will talk about almost nothing. Maybe we will talk about you. You can tell my friend, his name is ‘Tsai,’ about the trains and the buildings you showed me in your drawings.”
Kaori turned her head away from me, and said, in better English than she normally used with me, “I am more than what I draw. You remember what you hear me say. You remember what I show you in art. But I have secrets you have not heard or seen. Maybe I tell your friend my secrets.”
I heard Kaori say this, but I was mostly thinking about Tsai, thinking about why I had come to New York. And when Kaori then stood up, picked up her coat and put her hand out to me, saying, “We go then,” I forgot about her, even with her being next to me, even as we held each other’s hand and headed to the elevators and the street.
It was short cab ride to Katz's. Lower East side, Houston Street. We changed worlds from excess to grit. Young men leaned against payphones and there was graffiti on most flat surfaces. We went into the deli and Tsai was already there, sitting at a table in the corner. He was reading a newspaper but looked up when we walked in the door. He nodded to me, and we went to his table, and he stood up. He was wearing an expensive suit. He immediately handed me a briefcase, and said, “This is yours.”
I should have paused, I could still have backed away, but my hand reached out. I was sharing the handle, Tsai's and my hands momentarily touching, then I was holding the briefcase, making it mine.
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When I was eighteen, I bought my first car for three hundred dollars. It was a wreck of a thing and I expected it to only last a mont. Instead, it lasted a bit more than a year, and took care of me for thousands of miles. That year, whenever I got any pay, I would go buy a few more tools, and I fix things. I replaced the thermostat. I replaced the alternator. I changed the tires. I fixed the brakes. That winter, when I had the car, I was working in the northeast corner of Montana, near the Canadian border, on an oil rig. My job was melting the frozen mud and water from the catwalks beneath the derrick. I did this with steam from a pressurized hose. It was the lowest paid, worst work. The steam screamed against the metal decks and shrouded me in mist that soaked into my clothes and kept me covered me in a thin, crackling glaze of oily ice all day. By that time, I had learned about work clothes. I had good boots. I had my own, heavy gloves. I wore wool covered by denim. That winter, though, was sleet followed by wind, and no matter how much the crew boss yelled, I couldn't keep up with the ice. One morning there was another man there. He stood shivering and stamping his feet as I showed him how to connect the hoses to the steam fittings on the pipes that ran like electrical conduits all over the rig. He wore thin shoes and a nylon bowling jacket. He wore jeans. He wore a cotton stocking cap under his hard-hat. He had on a pair of the lousy gloves that were available in the trailer office next to the time clock. He cursed with each sentence, “The fucking cold. This fucking shit.”
We worked all day, until the early winter darkness, and the whistle blew. I turned everything off and coiled up the hose and hung it in a tool closet, but the new man just left his laying there, still connected to the steam fitting. Then he climbed off the deck and walked into the office trailer. I could hear him yelling, “This is fucking shit.” Then he came out holding a check for his one day of work.
While I was getting into my car he came up, opened my passenger door, and got in the front seat.
When I looked at him, he said, “Brother, just give me a fucking ride into town. The man in there says to fuck me,” and he gestured with his hand to the trailer, “So fuck him.” We were about thirty miles outside of Plentywood, with the only thing for miles being the rig. Other workers were getting into their cars and trucks. I’d been on the road now for years. I knew that I didn’t like this person. I wanted to tell him to get a ride from someone else, but instead I looked at how he was shivering, how thin all his clothes were, and I just said, “Sure,” and we drove off.
I didn't talk, but he kept repeating how “Fucked up” the day's work had been, and how “Fucking cold” he was. Then he started saying how “Fucking much” he needed a drink, and how “Fucking stupid” I was to not just have quit as well, since by quitting he had gotten paid for his day's work, while I would have to wait until Friday for my paycheck.
He also kept twisting radio dial back and forth between stations, rolling his window up and down, looking at me like he was waiting for me to start talking, and smacking the dashboard in time with the music from the radio. I asked him where he had come from. He answered and said that he had come down from Calgary, where he had been in jail, and that he had come into Plentywood the night before, had spent his last money at a bar, and was told that he could get a job in the morning if he showed up at the Conoco station. He said he had been told, “Anyone can get a job if they just show up early.”
Then he said, more of a demand than a question, “Brother, where you staying?”
I had a motel room in Plentywood, but I said, “I sleep here, in the car.” He answered, “Well fuck that. Just drop me off at a bar. Someplace that will cash my check.”
Ten miles from town, at a crossroad, there was a restaurant on the highway, with a bright, a neon sign in the window, and streetlights showing the empty parking lot. He looked at it as we drove, and just as we passed, he said that he wanted me to stop and turn around. He said that he was hungry and that he wanted to get some food, “Before I spend all my Fucking money in the bar.” I stopped and went back.
When I parked, he rummaged on the floor by his feet and found a sheet of newspaper. I wasn’t paying much attention to him. I had told him I didn’t want anything, that I would wait to get food at the grocery store in town. After he got out of the car, I thought about driving away, about leaving him there. It had been twelve hours straight of work. My arms were tingling, and my thoughts were not moving fast. I was listening to the radio, and I was feeling the warmth from the heater ? with the engine running ? parked there, waiting.
Then he was back in the car, and he was saying, before he had even slammed the door shut, “Brother, get the fuck moving now.”
I pulled back on the highway and started towards town and he was quiet for nearly a minute, until we were well past the restaurant and onto a stretch of the road that was straight and empty. Then he said, “Change of plans. Drive through town. No need to stop at no bar in this fucking place. We are going over to 'North D' tonight.”
I looked at him. He pulled his left hand from his jacket pocket and was holding a fist-full of cash, maybe a hundred dollars. I stared at the money, and he looked like he thought I was impressed. He said, “It was fucking too easy. I wrapped my hand in that newspaper, went up to her and said, 'Fucking blow you fucking away, give me the fucking money,' and she god-damned did. Everything in the register. Check it fucking out,” and he waved the money in my face. Then he said, “Brother, its half yours. Easy money. Fucking half.”
I braked hard and pulled over right there, not even a shoulder. I just stopped the car. He told me to keep driving. I told him that I didn't want the money, I told him to get out. He said, “This is easy, this is half yours,” and again he held the money towards me. He said, “Fucking just drive me to Williston.” I said no. He said, “You were out of there fast, Man. You are clean, my Brother. You get this for being here. For driving,” and he waved the hand full of cash towards the east.
I could have done it. I could have driven him to North Dakota, and maybe he would have given me money. Maybe we would have been parked in front of some bar in Williston, that most western of towns in that most desolate of states, and he would have gotten out and then I would have then driven the hundred ten miles back to Plentywood. Back to my motel room to, maybe, sleep for an hour and then show up again for work, my exhaustion not even noticed because everyone at those winter workplaces were always exhausted or hungover. Instead, I said, “It's not right. It's not our money.”
I said this and then, with a big twitch, like I have poked him in the eye, he fidgeted and exploded. He yelled, “Fucking froze all day.” Then he reached into his pocket and had a large, folding knife. Open. “Get the fuck out of the car,” he said.
I knew right then that if I don't get out of the car, he would try to kill me. I knew this because I saw, from the light from the radio, that he was moving his knife-hand back, but more than that, I saw that his eyes are open wide and that his face was smiling. His teeth were all there, white, and clenched. He was about to stab me. Then I opened the car door and I fell backwards out onto the road. I've kicked up with my feet, and I thought that I somehow must have kicked his arm. Doing this meant that I was ok, that I was not cut. But he slid fast over and got behind the wheel, and then my car was driving away.
I lay there watching the red of the taillights dim until, about half a mile away, they disappeared. I was in darkness. Not even a light in the distance, just a road at night in winter, with no trees, no houses, no people. I rolled onto my back and looked up. There were the stars. A moonless, cloudless night. Stars thick like a blanket. My stars. The stars I had seen from many places. Stars who's names I knew. Stars that were familiar and comforting and which showed me ever richer, ever better patterns. I looked up and I saw places where I would be happy. I saw mathematics.
I walked the rest of the night. No cars stopped, and in the early morning I was explaining my story to police, who asked me over and over to repeat again and again what had happened. Even though no one blamed me, I had then been awake nearly two days. Back in my motel room I slept hard and solid, and when I woke, I had nothing but my wool and denim clothes that I was wearing. I had no car, no tools. I stayed there in Plentywood, through the rest of that winter, going each pre-dawn to the Conoco station and riding with the other daily-work bums into the fields, to different derricks, to the steam, to the ice. I did what was right.
So why did I agree to do what Tsai wanted?