The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  Tamsin hadn’t recognized him, not at first. So, she came closer—she always came closer; it was her job to come closer. Changed lenses. Zoomed in to confirm. Sure enough, there he was: Tom Rafferty, looking lost and wet amid the wreckage, hopelessly, haplessly, trying to find someone—anyone—to rescue. It brought back memories of other wreckage, other wars.

  The image she captured would later be picked up by Reuters, would run in newspapers worldwide, in print and online, would earn Tamsin her seventh APA nomination: Thomas Rafferty (uncredited) standing in silhouette. Christchurch, 2011, after the earthquake.

  She began picking her way across the various mounds of debris that separated them. “Raff!”

  ROZENSTRAAT

  THE TAXI CAME OVER THE bridge, and Gaddy Rhodes leaned forward, peering out at what was both inevitable and unexpected: the hotel was… gone. Fenced off and rumbling with activity, a construction site now marked the spot. New York in motion, a city that was constantly erasing and reimagining itself. The Commonwealth Inn, removed. The edifice that had loomed so large at the heart of who she was, gone, gone, gone. Heavy machinery was taking great bloodless bites out of what remained, emptying wreckage-filled mouthfuls into waiting trucks, stirring up dust and ash and memories—asbestos, too. The orange-vested wrecking crew wore masks, looked like bandits from afar. From the back seat, Gaddy Rhodes watched as the rapidly disappearing hotel drew nearer.

  The morning traffic that caterpillared across the bridge slowed to a halt. Heat and horns and anger on a slow simmer. The stop and go, the nausea and sweaty shouted abuse, a wedding ring falling down a drain.

  Only the elevator shaft remained, stubbornly upright, refusing to fall. They’d have to detonate that later, she imagined. Mechanical buckets dumped rubble into large holding pens, the crews sifting through, the industrial mesh trays shaking the debris into pans below. And somewhere in this rubble, the remnants of a wooden bedframe. A bedframe with a hidden message carved into the underside: GR + ML 4 VR.

  This brittle city. The daily ordeals and obstacles that sap your will, that numb your heart like Novocain in a slow-drip. And the Commonwealth Inn disappearing into its own dust.

  It seemed so long ago.

  Memories emerge, brutal and banal. A greeting card left for her on the kitchen counter on the morning after another argument. An argument about nothing, their specialty. Inside the card was an inspirational thought (not his; he was an actor, an interpreter of other people’s lines, not his own): Love is a garden, and every garden needs tending. She’d had to stop herself from physically gagging. We’re a Hallmark couple now? Is that what we’ve become? If he’d thought this was the gesture that would turn things around, he was sadly mistaken.

  A garden? She had metaphors of her own. What was marriage? It was a quicksand picnic; struggling only pulled you deeper. It was a Pompeii of the soul: petrified postures, mummified figures, positions that have turned to stone. It was many things, but a garden it was not.

  The interchangeable breakfasts and daily quarrels, the sad desultory marital bed, and Gaddy off to Europe (again), as he stayed behind, hamster-wheeling through endless rounds of auditions, the two of them meeting on designated cease-fires (anniversaries, Valentine’s), opposing armies in a no-man’s-land coming out at Christmas to play a muddy round of football before returning to previously entrenched positions. A garden? No. Not a garden.

  Gaddy hadn’t been unfaithful—not physically anyway, and for all she knew neither had he. But there are worse things than infidelity. The slow death of affection, for one. She’d taken an extended leave in Amsterdam, a two-week seminar on the latest in forgery techniques, and he had retreated upstate to a community college—just a temporary measure, you understand—to teach others to be as successful as he was.

  The end of her marriage arrived postage due. He’d done the paperwork for her—she appreciated this; he was always considerate that way—and so, on a small table in a small room overlooking the Rozenstraat, Gaddy Rhodes had signed off on six years of her life.

  What followed was predictable: lots of sex, very little love. These weren’t even affairs, but escapades—escapades of the heart, and not even the heart, the flesh. She tried girls, but they annoyed her. Tried boys, but they bored her. Tried abstinence, but that just made her skin jitter. Stepped off the ledge again and again, flung herself at love—and missed. Again and again. Land mines everywhere. But even as she picked out the shrapnel of yet another affair, yet another escapade of the flesh, her thoughts turned ever homeward, to that tousled drama student, so full of promise, so short on talent, the boy who had surrendered so easily, who had settled for less: her husband, now ex, and the lost ring at the Commonwealth Inn.

  The traffic came to a halt, throwing her forward, then pulling her back. Oh, the stop-and-go joys of a New York commute.

  From the back seat, Gaddy stared above the machinery that was erasing the last remnants of her honeymoon, tried to imagine where in midair their third-floor “suite” would have been. Our room faced the bridge, I remember that. And her brand-new husband under the bed with a penknife, singing “Honeymoon Hotel” off-key, in homage to Elvis, socked feet sticking out like a marriage mechanic, and she was never sure if he knew those weren’t the right lyrics, or was just being playful. He had carved those initials, underneath and out of view, to make her feel better, and it almost worked.

  Disappearing down the bathtub drain, the rattle of a ring, and her in tears and him saying, Never mind, we will buy a new one, but of course they never did, and the hotel handyman shaking his head and explaining how it was gone for good because the pipes fell three floors into a holding tank and more tears and her sobbing apologies to her young husband and young husband saying it was just a ring and what did it matter we are in love, but were they really? And maybe it was a sign, a small omen. The ring had leapt off her finger so easily, as though trying to escape. “It was a mistake,” she said. “A mistake, a mistake.” And it wasn’t clear, even then, if she was still talking about the wedding ring.

  GR + ML 4 VR. It was the same message Marc had carved under the bed. (That was his name: Marc. She looked him up now and then on IMDb, was both secretly pleased and secretly sad when she saw no record of any roles beyond a short film he did in college. His best reviews were on Rate My Prof.)

  It seems so long ago.

  And yet… Even now, she tells her therapist, Syd Something-or-Other, even now, after all these years, I still believe.

  In God?

  In love. It was embarrassing to admit; it felt as though she were confessing to something foolish and disreputable, like being a charter member of the Flat Earth Society or a practitioner of naturopathic medicine. And perhaps she was right to be embarrassed. Gaddy would have explained more, would have told Syd about the initials on the ring and the message under the bed, but her time was up and she never went back.

  The taxi crawled past the architectural vanishing act on the corner.

  Even with the quicksand and the chasm gaps and the Pompeii postures and slow suffocation, she missed him—the idea of him. She missed being in love. She missed the person she used to be. Gaddy, the mooncalf. That silly girl, young and overflowing with possibilities and potentialities. Someone who believed in Art and Truth and Beauty, who felt (wrongly, as it turned out) that all three were interchangeable.

  She twisted her empty ring finger as the missing hotel came up alongside the taxi window. She’d told Syd about the wedding ring, but not the childlike inscription inside: GR + ML 4 VR. Why? She wasn’t sure except, maybe, like any secret worth keeping, it was too small to reveal, too important to share.

  The taxi lurched. She could feel her stomach slosh. Leaned up, banged on the glass. “I’ll get out here.” She could see the blue cube that was her office. Two blocks. Three intersections. It would probably be faster to walk anyway. “But—now is picking up,” the cabbie protested, referring to the traffic. She shouted again for him to let her out. Now.

  Gaddy w
alrused herself from the back seat, pushed her way past the Commonwealth deconstruction site, where the work crews in the pit below had come up against the bedrock of the hotel’s foundations, once hidden in the earth, now exposed.

  Horses clattered by, hooves in disagreement, tourists in carriages trying hard to have fun. A bus stopped to decant passengers, lowering itself on a pneumatic hiss. Gaddy crossed the street, moving upstream against the flow of pedestrians, past a schoolyard surging with shrieks. The blame-shifting protestations of children. Alpha girls flouncing past, head high. The shy ones chewing on their hair. Boys in huddles. Pokémon sects. Older kids, louder shouts—on some hidden cue they will disappear as surely as a magician’s flourish, into hallways, into classrooms. No children. They’d agreed on that, but now up pops his Instagram daughters and his Instagram wife, the four of them looking like a Sears studio portrait.

  Rhodes spotted a sodden Pokémon card plastered on the sidewalk, had to resist the urge to lean over, scoop it up as she passed. Some of these cards can be worth thousands of dollars. Treasures, treasures, everywhere.

  The glass cube was getting closer.

  Here is what Gaddy Rhodes didn’t do on this particular morning: she didn’t enter the office lobby, didn’t beep her card, didn’t ride the elevator to her cubicle Knossos. Instead, she kept walking, past her building, could see her reflection swimming alongside her in the glass. And then it too was gone. Crossed one street, and the next, headed down an alleyway past an autobody shop muscular with mechanics and a pawnbroker with barred windows, its treasures under lock and key. It would take twenty-two minutes for her to walk it, if Google Maps was to be trusted—and it usually wasn’t. And now her pace was picking up.

  The usual tatty stores, permanently going out of business. Self-anointed “emporiums” with brummagem abundances, shelves stacked with designer goods of unlikely provenance. Knockoffs of knockoffs—and oh, for a decent Chinese reproduction rather than these shoddy Serbian versions thereof. Maybe even a three-legged toad or two.

  None of this—none of it—was on official company business. Gaddy would be logged as late, if anyone bothered to check, which they didn’t. True, she did have her Interpol ID on her, and she may have given the impression to the person she had contacted that this was, possibly, perhaps, an Interpol assignment, but those were assumptions on their part, not assertions on hers. An online forum, a query thrown into the ether, and Gaddy Rhodes had jumped at it. I will be there first thing tomorrow morning Please have it ready.

  Another street, another neighborhood. She was cutting across social strata. Older buildings. Colonnades, crumbling, but still regal, with angels and other architectural flourishes tangled up in a stonework of garlands, of gargoyles. Pupil-less eyes. And brownstones lined up like leather-bound volumes on a bookshelf. She counted down the numbers, buzzed the correct door.

  “Hi. Come on up.”

  Stairs that creaked underneath the carpets. Walls, freshly painted. The entire place smelled of latex and linseed oil. A fretful woman, a fretful man. Newlyweds with expensive secondhand furniture. Living beyond their means; she could smell that too.

  “It’s, ah, it’s over here.” This was the husband. “Wasn’t sure whether we should move it, might get damaged, so we sort of left it how it was.”

  A loose bolt of cloth on the dining room table.

  The wife, eyes wide, watching Rhodes. “Do you think… maybe?”

  Rhodes smiled tightly, said nothing, took a pair of cotton gloves from her pocket, unfolded the first large flap of the canvas. The surface was covered in a riot of hues, dribbled lines of color and wildly exuberant splatters of paint, this way and that, unbridled and overlain as though in a frenzy.

  She folded the cloth back, peeled off her gloves.

  The young couple, hearts wringing, waited for her to say something.

  “I like your ring,” said Agent Rhodes. “Elegant.”

  She was referring to the matching wedding bands they wore.

  “Thank you. A friend of ours did them. And the—the painting?”

  “It’s not a Pollock.”

  “It’s not? Are you sure?”

  “It’s a drop cloth, left behind by the painters.” She flapped the cloth open again, not bothering with gloves this time. “You see the spatters of blue, here, on top of the orange? That’s the same blue on your sideboards.”

  A pained look. “Worth nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  An alternate future, one attended by manservants and maids and droll British butlers, had melted away. Too many episodes of Antiques Roadshow. Tales of dusty fortunes tucked into wardrobes, stuffed under mattresses. Treasures everywhere, true, but the fact remained that there would always be more drop cloths than lost Pollocks.

  The husband smiled—more of a grimace really, the type of expression one sees on someone who has been shot in the stomach but is still trying to put up a brave front. With the wife, a look of someone perplexed to discover that reality is, yet again, at odds with her idea of reality. Rhodes knew that look. Knew that feeling. Still, they comported themselves well, all things considered.

  The wife, voice barely audible. “Are you sure?”

  Agent Rhodes nodded, handed her a business card. “If anyone else shows up asking about this canvas, call me. Right away.”

  “Who?”

  “A smaller man, well mannered. He may have seen your post as well, may try to contact you. My office is just a few streets over. I can be here in fifteen minutes.”

  They took her card, nodded softly. But the small man never showed up and they never called.

  Gaddy Rhodes returned to her glass corner cubicle, went about her work, waiting for a hushed phone call that never came. “He’s here now, in my shop! In my gallery! In my house!” She waited for the kettle in the staff room to boil, dunked her tea bags. Waited, as the days slipped away, one after the other. It seemed so tepid, all of it: the tea, her work, the morning commute and the taxis and the Commonwealth Inn disappearing into its own dust. Eventually a birthday card arrived with her name on it. It was from Andrea Addario and was signed “Belated wishes.”

  So it went. Gaddy Rhodes added her name to get-well-soons! for people she hardly knew, submitted reports to administrative assistants she’d never met, waited again for the past to resurface. Eventually, the Commonwealth Inn itself would be paved over and sealed under a layer of asphalt, just another vacant lot awaiting investors who never materialized. The Okinawan snake on her desk, suspended in a cloudy liquor, slowly disappeared behind a wall of file folders and three-ring binders.

  Personnel manuals and mission statements. Leaning towers of paper. Quarterly assessments are due Friday! And in the middle, sinking slowly: Gaddy Rhodes, formerly on active duty, now crossing items off a to-do list. Lost behind a wall of her own, murky and depleted.

  She could feel the pilot light inside her flicker and go out.

  Could feel her world being stripped away, layer by layer, until only that gnawing question remained: Who are you? She was still there, lost among the cubicles, when news first began to crawl along the bottom of her screen of an earthquake in Christchurch.

  INTERESTING TIMES

  AS A WELL-KNOWN CHINESE CURSE has it: “May you live in interesting times.” A modern update might be, “May you find yourself in a news cycle.” CNN, all frowny faced. BBC likewise. NHK too. Christchurch was trending.

  The territorial army had cordoned off the city’s central business district, and the entire region “within the four avenues” was now off-limits. Teams of engineers swept through, assessing degrees of damage, moving people away from the drop zones—those areas where taller buildings might still yet fall. Compromised architecture, poised to topple. Red zones, drop zones, no-gos: whatever the designation, it amounted to the same thing. Christchurch was being emptied out.

  A slow-moving exodus was underway, biblical in scope, as thousands left the city in a haze, stumble-walking away from homes that had been lef
t uninhabitable even as the helicopters continued to chirr overhead, releasing bucket-falls of water onto still-smoldering ruins. In Leicester Square, where the diaspora had gathered, someone began to sing “Amazing Grace,” and one by one other voices picked it up, carried it forward. “I once was lost, but now am found.” On the park’s wrought iron gate, someone had draped a hand-painted banner: RISE UP, CHRISTCHURCH.

  Rafferty’s fellow typists had been on a sponsored jaunt to a local gallery to see a display of Maori artifacts “reimagined” in a modern context. (That’s what conceptual art does; it doesn’t imagine, it reimagines.) They were there when the earthquake hit, as light fixtures swung crazily and Maori war clubs jumped in the display cases. The Christchurch earthquake would kick-start several careers as this dissolute array of travel writers was suddenly thrust into the thick of it, elevated to the role of eyewitness reporters, on the ground at the very epicenter. Christchurch had found itself in interesting times, indeed.

  And all the while, across town and past the cathedral, Thomas Rafferty kept digging.

  He worked his way in, slab by slab, had acquired a safety vest from one of the crews at some point, took a break only when his back forced him to. His spine was killing him, and he eventually limped across to his hotel in search of water and ibuprofen, past the fallen cathedral. Heritage ruins. Culturally significant rubble. In an instant, the cobblestone heart of Christchurch had gone from city square, lousy with tourists, to an abandoned amphitheater, something you might see in ancient Rome or modern Sarajevo.

  The dust that had plumed upward had not entirely settled, and a figure moved through this purgatorial dimness. A small man, impeccably dressed. The sort of man who seemed to be wearing a bowler even when he wasn’t. He was carrying a large fold of paper under one arm, blueprints of some sort, with two heavyset construction workers accompanying him in hard hats and reflective vests.