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It had taken me a while, but something about the weird phone call I had received just before the ERA soldiers broke down the door of my apartment had jogged an old memory. After I opened the VIDEOVIEW window on the computer screen, I moused JAIME.6 and the REPLAY command; it took me only a couple of minutes to find the footage I remembered shooting of him, just a few weeks before he was killed.
And now here was Jamie, very much alive and well, sitting in his child-size rocking chair in the living room. He was wearing blue jeans and his favorite St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt; just a cute little kid, both bored and embarrassed to have his dad making yet another video of him.
My voice, off-camera: “Okay, kiddo, what’s your name?”
Jamie, pouting, wishing to be anywhere but here: “Jamie …”
Me again: “And what’s your last name?”
Jamie looks down at the floor, his hands fidgeting restlessly on the armrests of his chair: “Jamie Rosen, and I’m six years old …”
My voice, prodding him gently from behind the camera: “That’s good! Now what’s your mommy’s and daddy’s names?”
His face scrunches up in earnest concentration, the child who has only recently learned that his folks have names besides Mommy and Daddy: “My daddy’s name is Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … and Mommy’s … my mommy’s name is Maria
Me, playing the proud papa: “That’s good, Jamie! That’s very good! Now, can you tell me what you’re supposed to do if a stranger comes up to you?”
Jamie dutifully recites everything I had just told him: “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers, even if they ask me if I want a present, and I can … I’m supposed to run and get a p’leaseman or another grownup and tell them to take me to you, and …”
There. That was it.
I froze the image and marked its endpoint, then I moved back to the begi
I then began to work my way through the transcript, highlighting certain key words. It took me a few minutes, but when I was through I had a couple of lines I had pieced together from the videotape. I took a deep breath, then I moused the line and tapped in commands to verbalize those lines.
Jamie’s voice reemerged from the computer, speaking something he had never said in life, but which I had heard over the phone earlier that night:
“Rosen, Gerard … Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … can I talk to you, Daddy?”
And on the computer screen, Jamie’s reedited face was exactly the same as I had seen it on the phone.
“Gerry, what the hell are you doing?”
Startled, I jerked away from the keyboard and spun around in the office chair to find Maria
Her arms were crossed in front of her robe; she had a look of horror on her face, as if she had just caught me trying on a pair of her panties. Maybe reality was worse than that; after all, she had just discovered me in the act of editing one of the last tangible memories of our son.
I lay back in the chair, letting out my breath as I rubbed my eyelids between my fingertips. “Part of the deal was that you wouldn’t ask me any questions,” I murmured. “And believe me, if I told you, you’d just think I was crazy.”
“I already think you’re crazy,” she replied, her voice harsh with anger barely kept in check. “Leave Jamie’s video alone. I mean it …”
Before I could do anything, she stalked across the room and began to reach for the computer. “Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands over the keyboard. “I’ll get out of this, so long as you answer one question for me.”
She stopped and stared at me, not pulling her hands away. “What is it?”
“Did you load this disk into the hard drive?” I asked. “This file in particular?”
Maria
“And do you still leave the computer on all day?”
She shrugged. “Of course I do. My clients have to talk to the expert system when I’m gone. You know that.” She peered more closely at me. “What’s going on here, Gerard? Why were you editing the-?”
“Never mind. Go ahead and restore the video.” I withdrew my hands from the keyboard and pushed the chair back from the desk. Maria
Some of them, rather. Just as I had managed to piece together a message in Jamie’s own words, so had someone else. The video was stored on the computer’s hard drive and Maria
But why go to such extremes? If the culprit had been trying to get my attention, why imitate the voice of my dead son … or my own, for that matter? If anything, it was a sick prank, tantamount to calling up a grieving widow and pretending to be the ghost of her late spouse. Yet this was the second time in as many days someone had used a computer to send mysterious messages to me, and the technical sophistication necessary to do this went far beyond the capability of some twisted little cyberpunk trying to spook me.
In fact, now that I thought about it, how would some pimplehead even know to call into Maria
It made no sense …
Or it made perfect sense, but I was unable to perceive the logic.
“You miss him, don’t you?”
Maria
“Yeah, I miss him.” I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets, suddenly feeling very old. “He was the best thing that happened to us … and I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” Maria
The train. Always the train …
“He’s gone, Mari,” I said softly. “There’s no mistake. There was an accident, and he died … and that’s all there is to it.”
She slowly nodded her head. “Yeah. That’s all there is to it.” She stared at the floor. “Tell me you just wanted to look at him again, Gerry. Tell me he isn’t mixed up in whatever trouble you’re in.”
She raised her eyes and stared straight at me. “This isn’t part of some story, is it?”
I knew what she meant. I had lost one newspaper job because I had been trying to stop kids from dying; I had thrown myself on the sword in order to save some youngsters I had never really known, the children of complete strangers, because that had been part of a story. Yet when the time had come for me to protect my own child, I had not been available. Jamie had perished without ever seeing his father’s face again because Daddy had been too busy with his career to do anything but buy him a train ticket to eternity.