13 - Empty Graves

The thin detective looks for connections, while Enzi finds one between Tsai and his Chinese ancestors who died in Butte. The Aether and the Lie is a story of murder, greed, and math.

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Empty Graves. From the novel, "The Aether and the Lie," by Steve S. Saroff

When I checked my voice mail in the morning, I skipped through messages, erasing each after hearing the first few words. But there was one from the thin detective that I listened to carefully. His message said that he saw that I had visited with Kaori in jail and wanted to meet with me again. He left a phone number.

            I thought about ignoring him. But I wanted to know more about anything regarding Kaori. So instead of returning his call, I drove downtown in the Subaru with a daypack of cash covered by a blanket. I went to the police desk in city hall. I asked to see Thin, who then came out to the reception desk to meet me. 

            "Didn't expect to you see you," he said. He motioned me to follow.

            I thought he was leading me to go into one of those interview rooms they show in the cop shows, the ones with nothing on the walls except a two-way mirror and a video camera, but instead, I followed him through a door with his name on it and into his office.

            Thin sat down behind a wooden desk. Attached to one end of the desk was an old paper dispensing contraption, which looked like it had come out of an antique mall after having been on the counter of some butcher shop. But instead of wide, butcher-wrap, the contraption held a roll of bright white typing paper. 

            Tacked on all the walls of his office were the continuous paper scrolls that must have come from the dispenser on his desk. Some were short, a foot or two long, but others wrapped completely around the office's four walls. Drawn carefully on the scrolls were parallel, colored lines, which varied in width from fine to thick. Above and below all the lines were carefully written notes. 

            Thin watched me, waved his hand, and said, "Take a look."

            The scrolls were timelines. The sort of long charts that history teachers unfold and tack on the walls of classrooms. 

            Most of Thin's scrolls had multiple colored lines. Some lines were a few inches long. Others ran the entire length of the scrolls. Lines stopped, crossed each other, or moved apart. Most lines ended abruptly. 

            I glanced at Thin, and he said, "Look around as much as you want." And then he leaned back in his chair. "But what you want to see is not up there. It's here," and he tapped at the scroll of paper that was currently stretching out across his desk. 

            The scroll in front of Thin reached about mid-point on the long desk. Kaori's name was at the start of a fine, red line that began at the beginning of the length of paper and then grew wider. After her name, the first annotation read, "Tokyo," with a date. Near that date was another orange line, labeled "Boyfriend/Jim," which started above Kaori's. At a label that read, "Missoula," Jim's line moved onto Kaori's line. Then, a few inches past that convergence, a green line labeled "Elizabeth" began. Elizabeth's line curved down from the top of the paper crossed into Jim's and Kaori's line and caused Kaori's to bend abruptly downward. 

            My name was on Kaori's scroll, by a purple line that started a foot from where Kaori's began. My line widened at the point where I bailed her from jail. Then it widened more where Tsai, Kaori, and I had met. That was also the start of another line labeled "Tsai," which began at another annotation reading, "NYC."

            Kaori's line veered up on the scroll, away from my line, intersected, and then ended Jim and Elizabeth's lines. At that point, there were many annotations with the date of the murders. Then Kaori's line leveled and continued, with its last annotation being a date and the words, "Arrested/Jailed." 

            I was looking at this when Thin asked, "Do I have things right about you?"

            He did have things right. They were perfect. He had what I had told him. Almost nothing.

            "Does it look correct?" Thin pressed again.

            I didn't answer. I kept my silent right.

            But I asked him a question, pointing to the scrolls on the walls, "Are all these crimes that you've solved?" 

            He moved his hand off Kaori's scroll, picked up a pen, and started flipping it between his fingers and over his knuckles. The way some people do with quarters. The detective nodded, yes. Then he asked, "You grow up here?"

            I didn't answer.

            He leaned towards me and said, "Well, I was born here. Went East for a while. Studied to be an architect. Bored. Came back."

            He looked at me, expecting his confession to elicit some dialog. It did. I asked, "You curious about Kaori because of her drawings?"

            He nodded. "That. And that she's a murderer." He paused, then said, "And because of you."

            I knew he was pressing me to talk too much, but I asked the detective another question "Why did you come back to Montana? You could have been," and this time, I waved at his walls, "A cop who draws lines. Anywhere."

            He smiled. He didn't answer me. That was his right. Instead, he opened a drawer in his desk and brought out the notebook of Kaori's drawings that he had shown me the last time he and I had met. Thin said, "This case is simple. We know who did the killing. But I want your opinion." He turned to a bookmarked page and then reached across the desk and handed me the notebook.

            It was another sketch showing Kaori's and my trip to New York. It showed her and me on the rooftop of the New York Palace. Even though it had been drawn with a jail-issued felt tip, the sketch was detailed. The perspective was above us as if she had climbed one of the radio masts and then drawn what she had seen while looking down. The sketch showed the street with traffic. It showed the machinery and cables on the roof. She drew the low, narrow ledge. All of it had been drawn accurately. But she had also drawn what had not happened. She had drawn herself naked and standing on the ledge, arms outstretched, balanced like a high-wire walker. 

            In the drawing, there was also a naked man sitting alone on the gravel. Me, it was a drawing of me, with a lot of Kanji characters on the bottom of the page.

            "I had the writing translated." Thin said. He took a sheet of paper out from a folder and read, "Man takes me from jail and touches me. Man shows me place to jump. Man helps me kill my love. Together we do what I cannot do alone." Then the detective looked at me and asked, "What does she mean?"

            Between concrete and sky. My hands were under her shirt. Her hands on my shoulders. Her mouth against mine, the hum of air compressors, the roar of traffic from five-hundred feet beneath us. That was where she had been, but then she had moved her right hand, her drawing hand, and drew the truth and showed that she had been alone. Her arms and legs had been wrapped around me, but her thoughts had been elsewhere. And her thoughts walked her along the ledge, on the verge of a jump, on the edge of a fall. 

            I looked quietly at Thin, and thought to myself: "She meant I killed the importance of her boyfriend, broke his touch, made her be a 'Nasty girl,' who had sex with a drunk stranger on a rooftop," I thought to myself. But, to him, I said, "No idea what she meant. No idea at all."

            "You do whatever you want," Thin said. "Don't you?"

            I did not answer him.

            He said, "You own that software company, the one in the Central Square building?"

            I answered that question. I said, "I'm an employee there. It is a public company that has a Missoula office."

            He asked, "You come and go? Right? You do as you please? That's what I hear. That's what I see. That sounds like ownership to me. That or you're a 'prime-a-donna'."

            I didn't say anything, and he went on, "I checked with your company, SLAM, right? No one knew that you were in New York. I also checked with British Telglomerate," then he rummaged in a file and found Tsai's card again and read from it, "BTG. Tommy Tsai. Vice President of Broadband Networking." Then Thin said, "No one knew he was in New York either. I checked. Someone told me that they thought he was in London at the time when Kaori says she met him." 

            The detective leaned over his desk, holding out his hand, and asked me for the notebook, which I gave back to him. He then flipped through it and found the sketch that he had shown me during our earlier meeting. The sketch where Kaori had drawn Tsai handing me the case filled with money, and which she had written underneath, in Kanji, "He takes the money." 

            Kaori probably had guessed what it had held while we were in the cab driving towards the NBC building. She had glanced at me while I had been taking the first envelope of money out of the briefcase. Then she probably noticed that I always had hundred-dollar bills after that. 

            "Know what I think?" Thin asked, "I think there is a connection between this Tommy Tsai, you, and her family back in Japan. I think you were part of something that didn't go as it was supposed to. I know that she killed these kids." He tossed several glossy photographs on his desk, crime photos of Jim and Elizabeth as they were found, which I don't look at or touch, "But I think you were supposed to be part of it too. I think you got the money from Tsai, and then you were supposed to do something for it. Maybe you were supposed to have done it for her."

            I suddenly felt the same as when Dave Cheat had found my backdoor hack and then had only thought it was an overrun bug. 

            Thin was close, but he was wrong. 

            "Not Japanese," I said.

            "What?" Thin asked.

            "We chanced into each other in New York, that's all, but 'Tsai' is a Chinese surname. Not a Japanese name. From his accent, I guessed he grew up in Texas. It's racist to think he is anything other than a Texan." 

            Thin waited for me to say more. But I was quiet again. I had already said too much.

            "I've been checking on you," Thin said, "Gaps in the work history. People you work with don't know much about you. I don't think you have friends. I don't think people like you."

            Again, I didn't respond, and he continued, "I think maybe you were only supposed to have messed with the kids' records. That's what tech people do, right? Mess with files, get people in trouble, right? Were you supposed to mess with them? Maybe break them up? She wrote," and he hits the notebook loudly with his fist and repeats from memory, "Man helps me kill my love." 

            He stared at me and then said, "Were you the 'Man,' or was it Tsai?" 

            Neither of us said anything. I could hear talking from the next-door offices. I heard a mechanical clock ticking. Then Thin leaned back in his chair again and said, "I also just don't like you."

            And I shouldn't have, but I said, "But you like her? You like what you feel when you look at her drawings? You see her drawings and they touch you, right?"

            He glared at me.

            "I liked her, and I liked her drawings," I said, "But I don't know why she killed her ex. I don't know why she killed the other girl. I wasn't any part of it."

            Thin put Kaori's notebook back in the desk drawer, stood up, and pointed at his door, and said, "Get out of here. I'm not going to threaten you because you already know that I have."

            I left the police station but didn't want to be anywhere inside. So I drove up the Pattee Canyon Road, behind mount Sentinel. I parked at the Crazy Canyon trailhead and then walked a few miles along an old fire road until I was above the polluted air.

            There were tall Ponderosas on the open hill slopes. I stopped at one of them, leaned against it, and put an arm partially around the tree. The bark was broken in large, natural patterns. I looked up at the branches and those spiraled around the trunk. A Fibonacci sequence, a growing spiral.

            As my sweat cooled on the back of my shirt, I began to get cold. In my coat pocket, there were matches. I started a small fire. A raven glided past and landed in the nearby tree. He croaked loudly and then was answered by another raven from across the canyon. I put more sticks on the fire. The Thin detective had been right in that I didn't have friends. What I had were people who needed what I could do for them. I had rocks and trees. I had fire and ravens. And I had patterns.

            I kicked at the snow, and the crystals that were thrown into the sunlight sparkled. I did not see the "infinite" that schoolbooks use to describe snow, saying that each snowflake is unique. What I saw instead was repeating fractal sequences. The branches that were on the tree above me repeated. The patterns in the bark of its trunk repeated. The snow that I kicked sparked with repetition.

            Tsai had said, "Go push some buttons or whatever it is that you people do." Tsai didn't want explanations, no matter how brief. He wanted results and money. The same as most people. His infectious greed just demanded more.

            I saw my future in the patterns of my past. Like a fractal cycle, in the sparkle of memories that are never the same. I kicked at the snow again.

            I saw myself having friends and then losing friends. I saw my best friend, Helen, having sex with another man, who I had thought had been my friend too. 

            I was working with the v-v-vacuum, and working at losing my stutter. Working at being at peace with living with my 'one love.' She was in college, and I had a job – I told you this, but I still must remind myself often, through telling you, of where I was. 

            She had a family. A father, a mother, and sisters who she called and talked with often. About social events, about a cat and dog, and about dorms and apartments, about jobs, about new cars that their friends were buying, about good, normal stuff.

            In the evenings coming back to her house that we shared was the closest I ever came to normal. Sometimes there would be friends from her classes visiting. The windows in that north-side Missoula house did not have curtains, and I would pause outside for a few moments and look in. 

            Then I would open the door and come inside to where we lived. Those of us who have been homeless know how much this means: a place to go into where no one will ask you to leave. And then, if you are also welcomed, you have a home.

            And it was home with her. Sometimes with friends. Those evenings, all of us drinking and talking, but me mostly listening. Listening to the talking about what was wanted. Talking from people who had never been without, but who always wanted more. 

            Sometimes, when I was part of the conversations, my words did not have enough wanting to fit in. But there was nothing more I wanted, and I often didn't know what to say.

            If I talked about the work I did, my janitor work, or about fixing old cars, I fit in a bit. But if I tried to talk about my mathematics, my patterns, then all the lightness left. So mostly, I just tried to listen.

            When it was Helen and I alone, it was different. When it was her and I...

            ... The stitches had come out of her hand and wrist. I was tracing her thick scars with my fingertips. Candlelight, laying together on the bed. She tells me that she owes me her life. I say the same. We were both right. 

            There was a garden. "These are the best tomatoes ever," Helen said, coming inside, holding the hem of her skirt so that it has become a basket. "Come and try one." I go to where she is standing. I sit on the floor. I lean against her bare legs. She laughed, "You are tickling me." She hands me a tomato, and I bite into it like an apple. It is delicious. I lean my face against her thigh. She lets go of her skirt, and the tomatoes bounce across the floor. She laughs. She lays down on the floor. She said, "You always know exactly what I want you to do. So how come you can't talk with my friends?"

            One of those friends, another art student, brought her flowers and bottles of expensive wine. He also left her drawings. One time a drawing of a hornet crawling on an open hand, on the wall next to the front door. He had drawn it with a pen and written next to it, "Love you, Stewart." When I asked Helen why he would do this, she got angry at me and said, "Don't insult me. It is you I love."

            That same evening that I had asked about the drawing by the door, Helen asked me, "What do you want to do with your life? This not having money thing is getting old." 

            Instead of saying some easy lie like, "I'll try to get into college and become an engineer," I told her the truth, "I have no idea. I'm here with you. That's enough amazement for now." 

            Then, a few weeks later, I came home early with good news. I had gotten a new job, which meant more pay. Because I kept fixing things, the place where I was working had promoted me from a janitor to their repairman. I had left work early with this news. It was mid-morning, the sun streamed through the windows, and I walked through the unlocked door. 

            They were there in the middle of the floor. She was on top of him, facing me, and she and I looked at each other. 

            I'm trapped with the details, but I won't share them with you.

            I stepped backward. I closed the door. I got in my car, which I knew how to fix. I left. 

            It was death, except no one bled, no one died. Books left behind, clothing, candles, the garden, and the trinkets that money had bought but which were not enough.

            Runaway, runaway, runaway. Much more than a word...

            Then, two years later, after she was gone, I came back to Missoula. For a while, her ghost haunted me, especially near the places where we had been together. But when I avoided those spots when I kept to the edges of the memories, they faded, and I stayed.

            The night we had found the bodies, that night in Maloney's, Pascal had said, "It's not right to sit near ghosts." He was right. I kicked snow over the fire, and the smoke turned to sooty steam, and its cold dampness covered me. The fractals stopped sparkling. 

            The sun was setting, and a cold wind whistled in the darkening canyon. There was another half-million in hundred-dollar bills in the back of the Subaru. Money that I had not asked for and money which I did not want. Money that I knew Tsai was using to show me the insignificance of every part of my life. But that bag of cash also told me that neither Tsai nor his partners, had anyone else they could get to do what they needed.

            I walked out of Crazy canyon and then drove away from town and headed East.

            After an hour of driving the Interstate curved into the valley of tortured towns. Deer Lodge, Galen, Warm Springs. 

            Signs warned about the prison in Deer Lodge and said not to stop for hitchhikers. 

            Then, at Galen, where the exit sign read, "No services," I got off the highway and drove south to the frontage road and past a bar with fifteen-foot-tall letters on its roof, a sign big enough to be read from the interstate. The sign used to read, "DUGOUT," but the first two letters had blown down and were rusting in weeds behind the bar, so the sign read, "GOUT." 

            The "No services" town of Galen had the alcohol treatment prison. And one bar. People who worked in the prison drank in Gout before driving back to their homes. 

            I continued East through Warm Springs. Then past the state mental institute. Then up and out of the valley and then down again, into Butte. 

            I headed up what used to be called "the richest hill on earth," but now was a toxic cinder. I parked by the Dubliner, a ten-story brick hotel built a hundred years ago, which had become half derelict since the mines shut down forty years before. It was a place that rented rooms for cash by the week without asking for identification. I asked for a specific room number, and it was available. The room was on the topmost floor that was still in operation. The room had no phone and no television. The room had a solid oak chair and an even more solid oak desk. On the desk, there was a lamp with a green shade. I turned the lamp on and turned off the overhead light. No traffic sounds. No sounds from people in the other rooms. The room was the same as it had been years before when I had first stayed there.

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            My first time in Butte: before Helen, before software, before networks, before Tsai, before Kaori. I had been drifting up from work in Wyoming when I stopped in Butte, Montana. A gas station attendant pointed up to the Dubliner and told me that it was a cheap place to stay. After I had checked into a room there, I went outside and walked on the streets named after slow dreams and fast poison. Gold. Silver. Mercury. When I passed the public library, I went in. In a collection of mining books were a few old math books. On that shelf, there was also a thin, new textbook.

            It was on that textbook's cover that I first read the word "fractal." The math in that book did not have the complexity of differential equations nor calculus. Instead, it was a math of simple equations which fed their easy results back into themselves, over and over again. I took a pencil and a sheet of folded paper from my coat pocket. I wrote down several of the book's examples. 

            There were drawings in the book of a lake shoreline, and explanations of how that shoreline could be measured in a way that made its length endless. The smaller the steps of measurement, the greater the final distance. This "fractal" math showed that the Greek paradox of Zeno had been foolish. Zeno had seen an arrow heading towards a target and said he could prove that the arrow would never hit. After leaving its bow, the arrow would come halfway to its target. Then it would continue and be a quarter of the way, then an eighth, then a sixteenth, then on and on. The ancient math showed that the arrow would forever be an endless, smaller, and smaller fraction away from hitting, and thus the math proved that it would never hit. But of course, that was wrong. Arrows pierced targets. Arrows changed the lines on the history charts.

             I also read equations from that library book that described another word that I had never seen before, "recursion." Those fractal equations showed me a way to view the repetition of my stutter and my flip-flopping view of reading. For the first time, I saw math that described a world that I was part of. But I did not see that I was also about to start learning tools valuable enough to kill for.

            I stayed until the library's closing time. Then, I brought the book to the librarian and told him that I didn't have a card but wanted to know if I could borrow the book for a few days. He asked where I lived. I told him that I worked all over and was driving through town, but I would stay in town while I studied what was in the book. The librarian nodded and said, "Well, in Butte, a person is as good as their word," and he let me take the "Fractal Geometry of Nature" back to the Dubliner with my word that I would return it before I left town.

            I stayed in the Dubliner for three days and filled pages of paper with equations that recursively became the Julia and the Mandelbrot sets. I glimpsed what could be predicted if the results of simple equations were fed back into themselves millions, billions, trillions of times. I had learned what a computer could be used for without ever having pounded a line of code.

            When I returned "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" to the librarian, I stopped and looked at a framed black and white photo on the library's walls. It was an early aerial photo showing the richest hill cluttered with mining camps and mineshafts. I noticed hundreds of light-colored mounds along the photo's edge. The mounds spiraled slightly, with a neatness and a pattern that nothing else in the photograph had. 

            The librarian came up to me as I was looking at the photo and said, "Place was a mess even before they dug the pit." 

            I asked him about the organized mounds.

            "Empty graves," he said. "Refugees from wars and famine. The slaves of the Anaconda company. These," and he softly touched the glass of the framed photo, "are empty graves of the Chinese, who died by the thousand. Go up there now, and you will see where the relatives came and dug up the bones to take back to San Francisco, Seattle, New York. To all the Chinatowns that connect with pain back to here. But first, next to the graves, they cleaned off every racist speck of Montana dirt with tweezers and bleach. Left that hatred on the hill," and he tapped the glass.

            I looked at the librarian. I asked him if his relatives had worked in the mines in the photo. He nodded yes. He pointed on the photo to a sprawling mining camp, where you can see tent tops, clotheslines, and rubbish heaps. He said, "I'm part Chinese and part Irish. Two sad histories met, and my parents stayed." Then he said, "Step outside while I smoke, and I will show you something."

            I walked out with him. He sat down on the street curb and lit a cigarette. "Here," he said, and he nodded at the road surface, "Look at this."

            I sat next to him and looked at the road. There was a pothole in the asphalt, which was exposing a buried layer of red brick cobblestones.

            The librarian said, "These bricks came from kilns that were in China. Then the cargo ships that brought the refugees over, ships meant to be filled with lumber or coal, those ships couldn't draft right with their soft, human loads. Even packed with people, the ships were not heavy enough, so the owners stacked bricks down there with them." He kicked at the exposed cobblestones and said, "Imagine the misery. Then they sold the bricks to the Anaconda, and you can still find these cobblestones on the back railway streets from Seattle to here. Everywhere the Chinese worked building the railways, tamping black powder into spark holes, or digging for copper. Everywhere they died." 

            The librarian threw his half-smoked cigarette into the middle of the street, then stood up and walked back into the library, saying to me before he went in, "Ten years working here. No one ever noticed or asked about those graves. Come back and borrow books anytime you want."

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            Now I had returned to the Dubliner and to the same room where I had first started learning fractals. I bought a bottle of Jameson from the bar near the lobby and then went up to the room. I sat by the window at the same desk. Outside were the lights of Butte. The place where copper for all the wires had come from. Edison and Westinghouse on the East coast had figured out the physics and then the business of electricity. But the metal for their needs had to be dug from this hill. And the laborers who died by the thousands had come from across the world, from wars and famine. 

            And then their bones were dug out of the poisoned, racist dirt, scrubbed clean, and taken away. And now, the lucky bones were stored in heirloom boxes in top-story apartments and condos of the richest cities around the world. 

            I drank from the bottle. 

            I was drinking too much. 

            But I kept drinking more until I was watching Butte's lights blinking off with the approaching morning. I was going to sleep for a few hours and then wake up. Then I was going to dive South. Down I-15 towards deserts and salt. I was going to run away again. 

            Then I started thinking about Tsai and his two grandfathers from China who came to Butte. I remembered the librarian who long ago tossed his cigarette into the middle of the street and told me about bricks piled around refugees.

            I turned on my burner and called Tsai's burner. Secrets on secrets. I had no idea what time it was wherever he might have been. I didn't think he would answer, but he did. 

             "Where are you?" Tsai asked.

            I said, "You told me your grandfathers both worked in Montana." Then I asked, "Did they also both die in Butte?"

            He said, "You didn't do the job you were paid to do."

            "I don't want your money," I said and added, "And usually when someone doesn't do a job, you fire them. You don't have a thug throw more money at them."

             "This is bigger than you can imagine," Tsai said.

             "Do you have their bones?" I asked. "Did your parents go and dig them up? Or was it you? Is that our 'Montana Connection' you spoke of when you first stalked me? Are you getting some revenge against the wires and Montana by using me?"

            He ignored the questions and said, "You sound drunk. Finish your job. The debt to my business partners grows." 

             "Answer me about your grandparent's bones," I said.

            Then Tsai snapped, "Do what you know how to do, or all the people you care about will end up in boxes like my grandparent's bones."

            I thought he was going to hang up then, but he didn't. He was waiting to hear me respond. I drank more whiskey, keeping the phone near my mouth so that Tsai could hear me swallow. Then I said, "I'm a friendless freak. There is no way for you to pressure me."

            He said, "They will start with your business partner. And then the one who answers your phones. They won't stop. Think hard about what is at stake for you." 

            Finally beating him to it, I hung up and turned off the phone.

            I went out to the hallway bathroom and was sick. Then I went back to the room and passed out on the bed. 

            When I woke up, it was getting dark. Again. I had stayed up for an entire night and then gotten so sickly drunk that I had managed to turn day and night upside down. I went outside and walked to the M&M. I sat at the bar near several men who looked like they hadn't known a steady job in forty years but were still being worked to death. No one was saying anything to each other, and I fit right in.

            After I ate, instead of heading south, I drove the two hours back to Missoula. 

(c) 2021 Steve S. Saroff
from the novel, "The Aether and the Lie"