"Hey, Vaughn," the mailroom clerk came to his desk with a package in hand, "You've got mail."
Vaughn glanced up from his paperwork at the pimply, late-teen man-child who was interning with them for the summer to do deliveries and sorting. The kid was earnest, excited to work there. He was basically the antithesis of himself, Vaughn observed.
"Thanks, Jimmy," he said, taking the brown envelope. It was fairly heavy. "You got any plans for the weekend?"
"Yeah, I think me and my girlfriend are gonna drive up to Santa Barbara and check out the coast, I heard it's pretty cool up around there," Jimmy nodded, affirming the plan to himself.
"Actually, it's not," Vaughn felt only a trace of shame at squashing the kid's expectations. He had proposed her in Santa Barbara. He would never go back.
"Oh," Jimmy looked at the floor. "Um, alright, well—have a good weekend, OK?"
"Thanks," Vaughn said, lifting the package towards Jimmy's receding back.
He slit the flap of the padded envelope with a sandalwood letter opener and drew out a hard cover book.
The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje.
There was something marking one of the pages; he opened it to that page and there, over a paragraph, was her wedding band.
His heart skipped a beat when he saw it, saw how small it was. Were her fingers really that slender? He traced the circle under the Scotch tape—the tape was old, it had that smell, that adhesive odor that old tape gets—and tried to remember what it looked like on her finger. He had no idea where she was.
He peeled the corner of the tape up and glanced around to make sure no one was watching him. He read:
July 1936.
There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared to our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
A love story is not about those who lose their heart, but those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.
He stood abruptly and threw the book in the trash, ring and all.
"Mike, are you ok?" Weiss looked up from pecking out an ops report across the desk at him.
"Yeah, I'll be back in awhile," Vaughn muttered, stuffing his keys in his pocket.
"Alright," Weiss went back to work. Vaughn needed help, he decided.
Vaughn drove to the nearest Chinese place that no one from work would be at. Well, really, no one should be anywhere but work, since it was 3:30 in the afternoon. He sat down at the bar and looked around at the dive he'd picked out. Outside, the building was a low, green metal building, like a hangar, but inside was decorated to look like some kind of cave. At least, he guessed it was a cave. The carpet was blood red, the walls were plastered to look like rock, but painted white. The bar was decorated with red paper lanterns from Tsingtao beer company, red leatherette booths and chairs, gold-flecked Formica on the bar counter. A fountain recycled stale-smelling water through a concrete Buddha's mouth, over some rocks that had a considerable coating of algae.
"You need drink?" the man behind the bar asked, looking Vaughn up and down.
"Yeah," Vaughn said, "You have Sapporo?"
"Sure, sure, coming right up," the man dug in a mini-fridge near his knees. "You wanna large or a small?"
"A large," Vaughn replied without thinking.
"You look like you need large," the man nodded. "You have a fight with the missus?"
Vaughn just nodded. He really didn't want to talk to this guy. He didn't know why he kept wearing his wedding ring. "Yeah," he said finally, and threw a ten dollar bill on the counter. "Keep the change."
"You wanna fortune cookie?" the man asked. "Kitchen's closed, but we gotta fortune cookies."
Before Vaughn could respond, the man placed one in front of him.
"I killed a man," she told him, "Someone I cared about." It was obvious how much it bothered her.
"Noah Hicks was an assassin," he pointed out, logically, "If you hadn't killed him, he would've killed you."
"Maybe," she frowned, "But I was the one who forced the fight."
"Hicks was a bad guy," he reiterated, mildly irritated that she was so conflicted over the issue. It seemed black-and-white to him.
"But the truth is, it affects me," her lower lip had started to tremble, "Never knowing who to trust… Learning to… expect betrayal? Plotting in secrecy, and hatred, and anger? It's becoming a part of me."
He stared at her, not knowing what to say, if anything. Her knuckles were bruised to a dark purple and raw on the points where her tendons were just underneath her skin.
"I am becoming what I despise," she realized. "I tell myself that got into this to bring Danny's killers to justice, but the truth is? I'm more interested in revenge."
He just looked at her.
"I thought I could stay in control, but… it's just gotten so twisted.i"
Taking a large swig of the beer, Vaughn tore open the wrapper and shook the cookie out into his hand. He could feel that it wasn't fresh, that it would be soft. He wondered if the beer had been frozen and allowed to thaw. It was flat in a peculiar kind of way that belied some kind of mishandling in transport.
The little strip of paper was printed in light blue, unusual for a fortune, he thought.
Learn Chinese, one side read. Watch- Shou-biao.
Watch, he wondered, in what sense of the word, like the thing you wear on your wrist, or like the verb? Either way, it was creepy. His father's wristwatch had stopped the day Sydney had walked into the CIA. The Watch of Eternal Sydney Love.
He flipped it over and read his fortune: "Beware the fury of a patient man."
Lucky numbers: 1, 22, 33, 37, 38, 47.
He looked for a pattern in the numbers, knowing there was none, but unable to stop himself. He'd been an agent too long not to do it automatically.
He assigned meanings to them. One: just because, everything starts with one. Twenty-two: he'd been 22 when he graduated from college and been hired by the Agency. Thirty-three: the age he'd been when he'd married Sydney. Thirty-seven: he turned 37 next week. Thirty-eight: he couldn't think of a meaning for it. The age he'd be next year, with two failed marriages and a house in LA and no kids.
Forty-seven.
He wished to God the number 47 didn't even exist. What had Rambaldi seen in that number? He saw it everywhere now. It made him think of Sydney, of her picture on the missing page 47 of the Rambaldi manuscript.
The last time he'd seen her had been the evening she'd come home from Berlin and he'd confronted her about her infidelity. She had come home to collect her clothes, and then… He didn't know where she was. He knew, from the unexpected delivery, that she was with Sark.
He wondered which of them had sent the book. Sydney loved to read; she always complained that she didn't get enough time to read when she was working at the Agency. But the gesture seemed so… Sark, both in its obscurity and its blatant cruelty.
Beware the fury of a patient man.
Sark was patient. He had waited patiently in custody for two years, until Sydney escaped from the Covenant and walked back into their lives, long after Vaughn had given up hope of ever finding her, and had married Lauren. Sark had waited patiently another two and a half years after he had escaped from custody before reappearing. Vaughn was vaguely aware that there was music playing in the restaurant, but he didn't actively listen. It was just weird that it was pop music instead of the usual oriental-influenced muzak that Chinese places usually played.
I remember
When we could sleep on stones
Now we lie together
In whispers and moans
When I was all messed up
And I heard opera in my head
Your love was a light bulb
Hanging over my bed
Baby, baby, baby—light my way1
Well, Vaughn thought, taking another drink of the curiously flat beer, you can be patient too.
Beware the fury of a patient man.
Songs:
1 "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)." Achtung, Baby. U2.
Episodes:
i The Solution. Season 1, Episode 20. Written by John Eisendrath.
And that's all, folks! Thanks for all the reading and reviewing :)