The Shadow Men

Man with No Country

Breathe, Jim. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced himself to take four long, shuddering breaths, then opened his eyes again and looked around the living room. His hands were clenched into fists-not in anger, but in some subconscious attempt to grab hold of the fabric of the world, as if he could clutch it to himself and it would not slip away.

The wedding photo had been just the beginning. His mind had been muddled by sleep and then by irritation with Jonathan, but that empty place on the wall where the photo should have hung-and the absence of any faded paint, any hook, any evidence of a nail-sparked a barrage of tiny epiphanies that paralyzed him. At first he’d thought the furniture had been rearranged, but that impression lasted only a split second before he realized that the room around him had changed much more than that.

The armchair by the fireplace had been stiff-backed, striped in white and burgundy, but the chair that now occupied that spot was wider and plusher, upholstered in a chalky shade of blue. The end table beside the sofa and the long teak coffee table were the same, if a little more pristine than he remembered, but the lamps were different. When Jenny’s grandfather had died, her mother had sold the house and asked them to take whatever they wanted. The only furnishings Jenny had claimed were a set of antique lamps with glass shades hand-painted with red and pink roses. The lamps had vanished, replaced by more modern lighting, including a brass floor lamp Jim could not imagine ever buying.

“Jenny?” he shouted in the empty apartment. “Holly?”

His voice filled the place, giving it a sense of occupancy that felt entirely wrong. His voice alone shouldn’t be enough to make the apartment seem full. The very life and laughter of the place had gone from it, and it did not yawn with emptiness the way a home ought to when its people were out.

He glanced at the mirror over the fireplace. He had inherited it from his own mother. It remained, but something caught his eye, and Jim finally snapped from his paralysis and rushed over to stare at the mantelpiece. The two small framed photos that had always seemed to attract too much dust were now missing. One had been a baby picture of Holly, the other a snapshot from a Vermont trip a few years ago when Holly had been four or so, the three of them sitting on an old-time toboggan in the snow. But the pictures weren’t there. Neither did he see any sign of the usual detritus that having a daughter provided. Jim and Jenny were constantly picking up small parts of her toys-plastic Barbie shoes, pet bobbleheads, Super Balls, beads from broken bracelets-but the mantel was clear.

These absences hit him faster now, and his gut churned with nausea. A quick glance at the curio cabinet behind the chair revealed awards he had won and small statuettes, knickknacks of a lifetime. Bronze replicas of western-motif sculptures by Frederic Remington were side by side with the carved glass Viking he’d picked up in Sweden and the crystal ball Jonathan had given to Jim after he’d earned his first million-“to see the future,” he’d said.

His face felt flushed, and he leaned against the chair, staring in through the glass doors of the cabinet. His hands were shaking as he reached out to touch the knob. They had built in a magnetic latch to keep Holly from getting into the cabinet, but the door pulled open easily. No latch.

Gone were the Lladro figures that Jenny had so loved: the mermaid, the mother and daughter, the Japanese woman in her kimono, and others he could not recall. Gone were the matryoshka nesting dolls Jenny had brought home from St. Petersburg when she was pregnant with Holly.

Shaking his head, trembling even more, he backed away from the curio cabinet until his legs hit the coffee table. He turned around in circles, a peculiar kind of anger blazing up within him, fueled by fear and confusion. “This. Isn’t. Funny!” he shouted.

You’re being ridiculous. The common-sense voice threw cold water on his panic. It’s a joke. A really horrible, almost unforgivable joke .

He left the living room behind, striding purposefully into the dining room. Something on top of the china cabinet caught his eye. A platter, incredibly detailed, bone china with blue trim. It had sat in the same place in his childhood home in Andover, used only on Thanksgiving, a family heirloom that had come down from his mother’s grandmother, and it would have been his, except that on the first Thanksgiving after he and Jenny had begun dating, she had caught her foot on the carpet and tripped, destroying both a century of family history and Thanksgiving dinner in seconds. Jim’s mother, God rest her, had never forgotten. For the few years she had left of her life, she had tried to make light of it, but Jim had felt the distance the woman had placed between herself and her future daughter-in-law, and he knew Jenny had felt it, too.

In his mind’s eye, he could still see the shattered platter and the ruined bird on the floor of his parents’ dining room, the shards like the rough edges of broken clamshells.

Yet there it was, good as new, on display on top of his china cabinet.

It broke him. He stood on tiptoes, reached up on top of the cabinet, and swept the platter onto the floor. It shattered, smashed as it should have been, and then Jim bolted for the stairs, not pausing to study the kitchen for the thousand inaccuracies it no doubt contained. One picture hung on the stairwell’s wall-him and a gorgeous young woman he did not know, holding hands on a skyscraper balcony somewhere-where there should have been a dozen snaps of him, Jenny, and Holly. He ignored the unknown picture and ran his palm along where the other frames should have been, a cold knot forming in his belly. He passed the door to the guest room, running into his own room. His and Jenny’s.

His eyes began to burn with unshed tears, blurring.

She’d left no trace of herself behind.

“Jenny!” he called, like a medium trying to summon a ghost, looking at the ceiling and at the shadowed corners of the room. “This isn’t funny!”

This isn’t funny. The plaintive wail of a child left alone in the dark by his older siblings.

Slowly he turned to look at the door to the corridor-the one he’d just come through. He took short, sharp breaths and then forced himself to leave his bedroom and walk toward the back of the apartment. If it wasn’t a trick, what was it? Had she left him? Could he have done something terrible to her without even knowing it? Something so awful that it could have driven her to abandon him so thoroughly?

No. He’d seen the love and the sweet mischief in her eyes just this morning. They had made love in the shower, as tenderly and as hungrily as they ever had. And if Jenny had left, that didn’t explain the apartment. Why would she bother to erase all evidence that she had ever been his wife? How the hell could she have done it? It would have been easy enough to drug him this morning, something in his breakfast or his coffee, or in the donuts that Jonathan brought-

Jonathan. He denied even knowing Jenny. And Holly! How could he do that? He had to be involved.

But even with him sedated, could they have changed everything so completely in just six hours? Could he really have been that heavily drugged and not feel any lingering effects now?

He stood in front of the last door at the end of the hall. No, she wouldn’t have left. Not the woman he had loved all these years. Not the woman who had smiled at him so beautifully, so intimately, that morning. Not his Jenny. But that opened up another possibility. Had his family been taken? If so, by whom? And again, the most troubling, most impossible question-how?

Jim pushed open the door to Holly’s bedroom, a picture in his mind of the soft pink decorations, the princesses, the bookshelf he had built for her, the fairies he had painted on the wall.

The room held only a desk and filing cabinet, an old computer, boxes of books, and an old love seat. On the seat cushion was a dark stain from where he’d spilled grape soda the last day of fourth grade. Thirty years ago.

Jenny had persuaded him to put that love seat out at the curb for trash pickers to cart off when he put his parents’ house up for sale after his mother’s funeral. It had been taken away within an hour, and he hadn’t seen it since.

It couldn’t be there.

Jim sank into the love seat, numb and hollow, this impossible piece of furniture that had been left-along with his great-grandmother’s platter-in the place of his wife and his little girl.

Minutes passed-he didn’t know how many-before he blinked and looked around, as though waking from a trance. He wiped away tears with the back of his hand as he stared first at the boxes and then at the old computer. “What the fuck is this?” he whispered to himself.

Then he was up and moving, because he knew what he had to do.

Jim’s building stood on a corner across from Union Square in Boston’s trendy South End. The six-story bowfront brick row house was the last on the block. Its upper five stories were split between two apartments, with the Banks family taking the top three, including the dormered attic where Jim had his studio. The ground floor housed Tallulah’s, a restaurant and cafe that specialized in European fare and damn fine coffee. The apartment in between was occupied by a fiftyish travel writer named Carole Levitt and her latest boyfriend, Oliver Chin.

Jim knocked so hard the door shook. He waited only seconds before knocking again, standing in the dim light of the stairwell landing.

“All right, all right!” Carole called from inside. Jim heard the lock slide back, and then she opened the door, irritation creasing her brow. “You don’t look like you’re on fire. What’s the-”

“Have you seen Jenny and Holly today?” he demanded, jaw set, daring her to say no.

A bemused smile lit Carole’s eyes, and she leaned against the door frame. “Are those the two college girls you had up there a while back? If so, then no, and I’m sure Ollie hasn’t seen them, either, because he would definitely have noticed. He sure noticed them the night you brought them home.”

Of all possible responses, this was one Jim had not considered. It struck him dumb for a moment, then he shook his head, trying to clear it. “Listen, Carole-”

“Did they steal something? I’ve warned you about letting these girls you barely know into your place, Jimmy. They see something shiny, and that’s-”

“Damn it, will you listen?” he shouted at her.

Carole scowled, stepping back from the door, about to close it. “Why don’t you come back when you figure out what the hell your problem is?”

Jim slammed a palm against the door, preventing her from closing it. Alarm flared in her eyes, and he could see her trying to decide if he was secretly a psychopath or a rapist or both.

“Please, just…,” he started, forcing himself to calm down, to take even breaths. “You really don’t know who I’m talking about? When I say ‘Jenny and Holly,’ you don’t know who I mean?”

Carole seemed to sense his genuine distress at last and take pity on him. “Look, Jimmy, I liked that one girl last year, the one who works in the mayor’s office? But it’s not like I invite all your flings in for tea. If you want me to try to remember these girls, you could at least describe them. But short answer is no, I haven’t seen or heard anyone on the stairs today except for you and Oliver.”

A dreadful chill had begun to settle into his bones, and he felt weariness and surrender waiting for him at the edges of his consciousness like thieves lurking in shadows. “Thank you,” he said. “Thanks. I’m sorry I…”

But he didn’t finish. Instead he backed through the door, turned, and ran down the stairs toward their shared exit out onto the street. What could he possibly have said?

Tallulah’s thrummed with clinking plates and glasses and the buzz of conversation. The aroma of coffee hung like a thick, warm cloud inside the restaurant; Jenny had always claimed to get a caffeine high just from walking into the place.

Jim walked like a man spoiling for a fight, but he couldn’t help it. His hands were curled into fists, and he clenched his jaw, the muscles in his neck and shoulders drawn tight. The hostess, Miranda, had bottle-red hair and a top cut so low her breasts seemed about to pop out and say hello. She smiled as he approached. “Wow, Jim, you look so serious,” she said, her voice almost teasing. “Someone key your car or something?”

He almost couldn’t get the question out, that cold dread filling him with a terrible certainty. “Has Jenny been in today?”

Miranda frowned. “Jenny?”

“Yes, Jenny!” he said, slamming both hands down on the hostess’s podium. “My wife, goddamn it! Have you seen…” He faltered, emotion welling up in him, feeling utterly lost. “Oh, Christ, Miranda. Please tell me you’ve seen my wife.”

But Miranda’s eyes had narrowed to cold slits. The dozen or so people waiting to be seated had moved to a safe distance, eyeing him warily, but Miranda only stared contempt in his direction. “You never told me you had a wife, Jim,” she said, biting off each word. “Don’t you think you should’ve told me?”

He shook his head. “This isn’t real. This isn’t my life.”

Miranda shouted something at him as he staggered out the door, but he didn’t hear. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a heavy, unfamiliar key ring, only vaguely noticing that it was different before he bent over a metal trash can and vomited. Blinking, trying to catch his breath, he stared down into the can, grateful that he couldn’t tell what it was he’d just thrown up… because he knew it wasn’t blueberry pancakes.

Spitting on the sidewalk, he turned the corner and hurried around to the back of the building, where the reserved parking spaces that came with the apartment were located. It must have been nearly six o’clock by now. The shadows had grown long and the sky had the strange, ethereal quality of autumn evenings, almost like a dream.

Jim wished he could believe this was all a dream, but he knew he was awake.

Awake, yeah. But sane? He didn’t know the answer to that.

He stopped short, staring at the silver Mercedes parked in his spot. Jim drove a six-year-old blue Audi. His hand closed around his car keys, and the unfamiliarity of their shape and heft struck him again. He opened his hand and looked down at the logo on the key ring. Mercedes.

Jim made up his mind then. He gritted his teeth as he clicked the button to unlock the car. The Mercedes chirped.

“Fine,” he said as he slid into the driver’s seat and plunged the key into the ignition. “I don’t care.”

And he didn’t. The details didn’t matter. Only Jenny and Holly mattered. It was almost as if they had been erased from the world, but Jim knew-as sure as he knew that the road beneath his tires was solid and that the Earth revolved around the sun-that people couldn’t be deleted from existence. Either he was crazy, or something impossible had happened.

It was time to find out which.

The knot in Jim’s gut twisted tighter as he drove over to Jonathan’s apartment in the Back Bay. With one hand on the wheel and only occasional glances at the road, he scanned the contacts list on his cell phone, thinking he would call friends, try to find someone who would end the nightmare, tell him it was all a joke. Somehow, he had to fight the growing certainty that it was neither a joke nor a dream, that either reality or his own sanity had been abruptly and brutally altered. Now that he was away from the apartment, he could pretend it was possible that he had been drugged, that someone had come in and erased all traces of her from his life. And though that idea horrified him, it was somehow preferable to the alternatives.

But now he saw that something had happened to his cell phone contacts list. Names were missing-Jenny’s best friend, Trixie Newcomb, who had become Jim’s friend as well. Matt and Gretchen Kelleher, whom Jenny had met at the gym and who had become their go-to dinner companions-the one couple they really seemed to get along with. The office number for the Atherton School, where Jenny taught.

In place of those listings there were new contacts, names that were unfamiliar to him, and it chilled Jim to wonder who they were and how their information had gotten into his cell phone. If he phoned them and introduced himself, what would they say to him? How well would they know him, these people whose names he did not know?

But not all of his familiar contacts were gone-only the ones he had known through, or because of, Jenny.

A car braked too fast in front of him, and he stopped fast enough for the tires to skid, cutting the wheel and slewing to the right. Another night he would have shot the guy the finger or at least muttered some curse under his breath, but his focus was on the phone instead of the road. The car drove on and Jim accelerated. He had driven this route to Jonathan’s apartment hundreds of times. One hand on the wheel, he navigated on autopilot, scanning the list, finding Steve Menken, and hitting CALL.

Menken answered on the third ring. “Jimbo! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I need to ask you a question,” Jim said.

“Oooh. Sounds ominous.”

“It is.”

A hesitation on the line. Jim could practically see the smile fading from Menken’s face. They had known each other for more than a decade, running in the same circles in Boston’s artistic community. Menken worked at Hiram Davis Press in Cambridge, editing nonfiction from biographies to art books. He and Jim had become friends without ever managing to work on a project together-Hiram Davis couldn’t afford Jim Banks. They had bonded over a mutual love of beer, old science-fiction movies, and Boston sports teams-common enough interests for men in the city, but not in their line of work.

“You can ask me anything, Jim,” Menken said. “What’s going on? You sound awful.”

“This is… this may sound weird. Do you remember Jenny and Holly?”

Menken paused in thought before replying. “I don’t think I know anyone named Holly. Are you talking about Jenny Garza?”

Jim went numb. “No. Not Jenny Garza.”

“You’re gonna have to give me something more to go on,” Menken said.

“Never mind, I’ll talk to you later,” Jim said, ending the call.

He tossed the phone onto the seat beside him. There were other people still in his contacts list-friends and colleagues who knew him well enough to know his wife and daughter-but he no longer had any desire to call them. Another conversation like the one he’d just had with Menken, and he might completely fall apart.

Instead, he drove in silence. No talk radio. No music. No phone. Several times he encountered snarled traffic, but he knew these streets well enough by now to avoid most of it, and soon he was pulling up to Jonathan’s Marlborough Street brownstone. He cruised another block before noticing an aging BMW pulling out, and he slid into the vacated parking space.

As Jim climbed out of the car, an unseasonably icy breeze swept along the street and seemed to eddy around him. He looked toward Jonathan’s apartment, and a coil of fear encircled him. He could almost picture Marlborough Street as the road to Oz, and he felt a terrible trepidation at the prospect of approaching the wizard. Jonathan had been the last to see Jenny and Holly.

Hollybaby, he thought, missing his daughter so much that he nearly fell to his knees. He practically flung himself across the street, picking up his pace as he hurried toward Jonathan’s brownstone, so that by the time he reached the front door he was running. With a quick glance at the intercom, he pressed the bottom-most button. It made a sound less like a buzzer than an old-fashioned school bell. Seconds ticked by, each one an eternity, and he hit the button again.

Crackle. “Who is it?”

“It’s Jim. I need to-”

“What are you doing here?” Jonathan asked sharply, the intercom crackling.

“We have to talk,” Jim said, hearing the pleading in his own voice and hating it. “I really… I’m at my wit’s end here, Jonathan. I need a reality check, man. I need a friend.”

For several seconds the intercom did not even crackle. And then the door buzzed.

Jim hauled it open, then made sure the heavy door latched behind him. The foyer of the building smelled of disinfectant. He headed past the stairs toward the door at the rear of the foyer. Jonathan lived on the ground floor. He could have easily afforded the view from the top-floor apartment, but he didn’t like heights.

As Jim approached the door he heard the dead bolt slide back, and then the door swung open. Jonathan stood outlined in the doorway, the wan light from the hall casting shadows on the lines and hollows of his face. The sight of him startled Jim so much he came to an abrupt halt. At fifty, Jonathan had perfected the aura of a 1940s movie idol trying to hold on to his looks. Always tan, his silver hair always neatly trimmed, he was a man with expensive tastes.

But this was not the Jonathan that Jim knew. This man was a withered husk, his clothes hanging on his thinning frame, his silver hair gone dull and gray, his skin jaundiced and sagging. “Jesus,” Jim whispered. “What the hell’s happened to you?”

Jonathan’s eyes flashed with anger, and he straightened himself up. “What kind of question is that? First that crap on the phone, and now you show up here with your eyes wide like it’s your first fucking day on Earth? What’s so goddamned important?”

Jim shook himself and took a step forward, frowning. “Sorry. You caught me by surprise.”

“ I caught you?”

But Jim barely registered the sarcasm. He took another step nearer, the sadness that already enveloped him growing heavier. “Are you sick?” he asked. Then he shook his head. “I mean, obviously you are. But what is it? How did it happen so fast? Christ, Jonathan, you never said anything.”

Jonathan cocked his head, regarding Jim anew. His eyes narrowed. “You’re really asking that,” Jonathan said, almost to himself. When he spoke again, he had softened. “What’s wrong with you? You really forgot I have cancer?”

Jim closed his eyes, shaking his head, wishing it all away. “Cancer?”

“In my brain. I… hell, Jim, you know all this. I’ve got eight, maybe nine months.”

They stood in the hallway, those two old friends, and stared at each other.

“So you can’t have been at my place this morning,” Jim said.

“I haven’t been over to your place since Labor Day,” Jonathan replied. Then he stepped back into his apartment. “Come in, Jim. Call your shrink. I’m serious. I don’t know what that stuff was on the phone before about Julie or whatever-”

“Jenny.”

“-but you’re having an episode or something. Are you on any medication?”

Jim stood paralyzed in the hall, bathed in that hideous yellow light.

“Hey,” Jonathan said, coming out into the hall and reaching for his arm. “Please, don’t. I’ve had enough tears.”

Only when Jim tasted salt on his lips did he understand that he had started to cry. Instantly he shut off the tears, wiping them from his cheeks. He pulled away from Jonathan. “I have to go.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Jonathan said. “Come in. Please. Sit with me. I’ll make tea and you can clear your mind, talk to me about what’s going on in your head right now.”

Jim backed away from him, toward the foyer. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

This isn’t my Jonathan. This isn’t my life. Somehow, the world he knew had been stolen from him while he slept. Or maybe this is my life, and the rest was just me inventing one that isn’t so fucking ugly. Maybe I’m meant to be alone.

But he rejected that instantly. Even with all the hours that had passed, his lips could still remember Jenny’s kiss. He could close his eyes and picture her, recall her smell, the perfect way her body cleaved to his when they slid into bed at night. He knew Holly’s laugh, the dimple in her left cheek, the silly way she would dance to make him smile whenever he grew too serious for her liking.

They were his wife and his little girl. They weren’t inventions.

“Call Dr. Lebowitz,” Jonathan said, starting to follow him into the hall but too weary to chase him.

“First thing in the morning,” Jim muttered.

“Promise?”

“I’ve got to go.”

Then he was out the door and running for his car, wondering what else would be taken from him today… and then realizing that he had nothing else in his life that really mattered.

Jim felt invisible to the world. He drove home in a fog, trying to figure out what to do next. Memories of Jenny and Holly kept crowding into his thoughts. He found himself singing softly in the silence of the car-all those songs he had used as lullabies on nights when Holly had trouble falling asleep as a toddler. No one remembered them. If he called the police, they would probably think he was crazy. He might even end up on some psych ward for evaluation. But what other choice did he have? He couldn’t just do nothing. Prayer wasn’t going to bring them back. He knew a private detective-a poker buddy of Menken’s-who would at least listen without calling him crazy.

Jonathan had been afraid for him. Jim had seen it in his eyes, the sympathy for the artist who had finally lost his mind. But he refused to believe that insanity could summon up the vivid details and the heartbreaking emotions that filled him now. Maybe schizophrenia could produce such delusions, but didn’t the very fact that he could so coolly examine the possibility make that unlikely?

“Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, gripping the steering wheel tighter as though holding on for his life. Perhaps, in spite of himself, he was praying without even realizing it.

He would search the apartment top to bottom, and much more meticulously this time. If any trace of them remained, he would find it. And if he found no trace, then what? It had all happened while he was sleeping. Maybe if he went back to sleep, he would wake up in the morning and the world would have returned to normal, and it would seem like it really had been a dream.

A little bit of madness had crept into him. Jim knew that, and he welcomed it. He thought he would need it to survive.

Adrift in his own mind, he parked in his space behind his building. His sense of dislocation made even those most familiar surroundings feel surreal. He hurried along the sidewalk beside Tallulah’s and turned right at the corner, keys clutched in his hand, thinking of the nooks and hidden corners of the apartment where some evidence might still be found that he did not live there alone.

Music came from the cafe, acoustic guitars and voices raised in song. He heard it only vaguely, like elevator Muzak, too focused on the task ahead. But a few steps past Tallulah’s he heard the music grow louder as someone opened the door, and a voice called his name. Hope flickered and died within him as, for half a second, he thought it could be Jenny. But it wasn’t her voice.

The woman had lovely, anguished features and bright pink hair. Everything about her spoke of desperation, from her black clothing to the imploring look in her eyes. “Jim, please say you know me,” she whispered.

He blinked in surprise and studied her. “Trix?”

Something burst within her. She let out a sob and rushed to him, threw her arms around him, and held on tight. Trix Newcomb. Jenny’s best friend. Thinner than he remembered, her pink, jagged-cut hair such a radical departure from her usual look, she was barely recognizable at first. Now she wept into his shoulder, trying to talk but unable to get words out past the sobs.

“Trix,” he said again, in wonder. With some effort, he pried her away from him, staring into her face. “You remember.”

Eyes wide, she caught her breath. “I just…” She gestured at her clothes, then grabbed fistfuls of her hair. “I changed. In, like, a millisecond. I totally freaked. I didn’t know if someone had slipped me something or, shit, I just didn’t know. I went to call Jenny and her number wasn’t in my cell. Yours, either. I was already online, and I went to find it on her Facebook page, but it’s gone, so I looked for her blog, only that’s gone, too. So I called information and your number is unlisted and there’s nothing for her and then I started calling around and…”

Her voice stopped working. Her mouth opened and closed, but her lower lip quivered and fresh tears slid down her cheeks.

Jim hugged her again, so relieved to see her, to have her know him. He wasn’t alone. And if Trix remembered Jenny and Holly, then that meant that Jim wasn’t crazy. They had existed. Somehow they had vanished, and who- or whatever had taken them had managed to eliminate them from the minds of anyone who had known them, except for Jim. And now Trix.

“Holly’s gone, too,” he said. The hardest words he’d ever spoken.

“Where… where are they?” Trix pleaded with him.

Jim didn’t let her go. Trix had become his anchor. “I don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll find them. I swear we’ll find them both.”