found no serenity in it. Something wasn’t right. And now my guard was raised, the paranoia so well sharpened that I’d become afraid I’d get cut and not even feel it.
I finally told myself it had to end, eventually convinced myself of it. The craziness served no purpose. And I’m sure the tapes I played in my head were similar to ones Chuck and Randall played, the wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat type where you decide today is the day you come to your senses. You’re never doing it again.
But like all addicts and people weakened with obsession, with the passage of enough time the cycle begins again, and you can’t do anything to prevent that; the only control you have is your reaction to it. The fantasy of feeling the rush (Randall’s issue) or the weight of concern (my issue) comes on full force, and you fight it for a while—a few hollow victories—until the cycle coincides with some other overwhelming impulse—like the notion that this time will be different, or that this time will be the last—and you give it all a second thought. And then a third. And then it runs through your mind with an uncomfortable rhythm.
And then you think, I could probably get to New Mexico in two days if I drove really fast.
EIGHT
Wouldn’t it seem the purpose of following Melody over and over again was to learn something about her, to gain some sort of intelligence into how she led her life? No matter where I went—she went—I really only learned of the things that affected her, but never how or why they affected her.
On my third trip to New Mexico, sometime in my twenty-seventh year and her twenty-third, I finally understood just how abandoned she was. Certainly, I was to blame for the absence of family in her life, but the spoon-fed circumstances that Justice delivered ensured it would always be that way. I watched her go back and forth from her small rambler on the north side of Farmington to a forgotten sixties-era office building on the south side of the city, and every day was the same: out the door at seven in the morning, coffee at the 7-Eleven, lunch at a picnic table behind the office building, back home by four-thirty, paying pizza/sandwich/Chinese food delivery guy at five-fifteen, lights-out at ten. Justice offered her safety through the guise of invisibility, days and nights so rote that no one might ever notice she had a routine worth noticing. It’s odd how one can find someone else’s ennui to be so fascinating.
I finally came to the disappointing conclusion that there was only one person who genuinely cared about her well-being.
Me.
All these trips, all the cycles of concern, were to try and ensure that she had not buried herself in alcohol or promiscuity or some other destructive behavior and to one day—what I hoped for most of all—find her in the arms of a man, safe and secure and satisfied. I longed for her to meet someone who would protect her. I thought that if I witnessed her being happy and healthy I could finally bring it all to a close. But through all the years, all the trips, there were no surprises: same scene, different town.
Then, in the dead of winter halfway through my twenty-eighth year, Melody was relocated once again. By that time, I’d modified my methodology of knowing where she lived; Gardner knew to check once a month and update me if her whereabouts ever changed. And one evening in February, while dropping off a wad of cash to cover his latest losses, Gardner also dropped off an address for me.
And with that relocation, Justice did something that altered the course of my life: They moved her only four hours south of New York.
Columbia, Maryland, a suburb south of Baltimore, became Melody’s new home, and this address transformed the rules of the game—mostly by eliminating an entire subset of rules. It meant I could watch her way too regularly; if I left New York at six in the morning, I could be in Columbia by ten, stay for a while, and still be back in Brooklyn by the dinner rush.
Her experiences in Columbia looked no different from Farmington or Lawrenceburg or Mineral Point. I rarely witnessed Melody interact with anyone or anything beyond a superficial level. No friends, no lovers. And with the dissatisfaction that stemmed from her not meeting that need for security, my mind began to shift its attention away from that