The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  “Twenty-six. I talked them up.”

  “Even with the cost of your trip covered by Tourism New Zealand, you’ll be lucky to break even.”

  “Appearances to the contrary, I’m not an idiot. A press junket may have gotten me down here, but after that, I’m on my own. We can’t all wait around for people to die like you do. I’m thinking I may head north, up to the main island. There’s a Maori festival coming up. I might write something on spec, Maori Mornings, something like that, see if my former colleagues at Travel and Leisure bite, maybe try Zoomer if they’re still talking to me. Maybe pen a side article about bungee jumping. It was invented here, they even have a nude version. Could pitch that to Men’s Health or Outdoor Adventure or Nudists Monthly.”

  “There’s a Nudists Monthly?”

  “Probably. Why not? There’s a Dog Fancier and a Cigar Aficionado and a Cuckoo Clock Enthusiast—I did a piece for them on Switzerland. If there are cuckoo clock periodicals, I’m sure there’s a nudist magazine out there somewhere.”

  “I don’t know, Raff. Might seem insensitive, pitching stories like that, what with the bodies still warm and all.” But they both knew that with the typical six-month lead time for glossy magazines, the earthquake would have been long pushed off the front pages by then. “And anyway,” said Tamsin. “Since when do you care about Maori culture?”

  “Since when do I care about anything?” It was the first rule of travel writing: you care about what you’re paid to care about. “It’s the nature of the biz. They want Maori, I’ll give ’em Maori. If I nab an assignment about the latest developments in sheepshearing technology, by gum, I will care about that, too, and deeply so.”

  “Freelance writer and dime-store hooker. Can you spot the difference? Not exactly a saint, are you Raff?”

  “Never claimed to be.”

  “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”

  “You didn’t get the memo? My world is over. And anyway,” he said, “I sold my soul long ago. You know that.”

  “Ah,” she said, “but that was predicated on you having a soul in the first place. Any evidence of that is circumstantial at best.”

  “I’m not the one whose bread and butter is pictures of dead babies.”

  A cruel smile surfaced. “Ah, Rafferty. What an interesting man you could have been.”

  At which point, they were both so irritated with each other that there was nothing left to do but go upstairs and screw. It was a lesson hard learned: affection might fuel passion, resentment more so.

  He finished his drink, got up. “C’mon,” he snarled.

  She snarled right back at him. “Fine.”

  It was the nearest they ever came to courtship.

  * * *

  PLASTER FROM THE CELLING HAD fallen across the bed, and the window had been blown outward, into the street, though a margarita crust of powdered glass still lined the sill. A standing lamp had timbered over, sending delicate shards across the carpet. A dresser had toppled as well, and the Christchurch spire, once perfectly framed by the window, was gone. The glow from Rafferty’s laptop had died as well, its battery having finally dwindled into nothingness.

  “Like what you’ve done with the place,” Tamsin said as she swept the duvet aside, taking most of the debris with it, pulled back the sheets, gave them a shake.

  Rafferty stumbled into her arms, groping for something: salvation perhaps; breasts, more likely. She shoved him back. “You’re taking a shower.” It wasn’t a question. He pushed in again, the way men do, penises like a divining rod. “Now,” she said.

  “Won’t be any water,” he protested, but Tamsin knew better. The water pressure at older hotels was gravity fed, and although the rooftop holding tank had sloshed about mightily during the quake, it had held. The heat was draining from the water, though, and Rafferty stood under a tepid shower, eyes closed. Spent some extra time soaping his balls, as an act of chivalry, y’see, but, really, he was trying to wash it from his body, all of it: the smoke, the ash, the acrid scent. But no matter how long he stood under the shower, the earthquake was still there. He could taste it on the back of his tongue.

  She was waiting for him, under the sheets, clothes folded next to her camera case, head back, smoking a cigarette. “If we’re going to go, Raff, we might as well go in style,” she said. And what is sex anyway, but just a series of squishy noises in the dark? She knew that wasn’t true, though, even as he plodded over to her, sidestepping shards of glass like a clumsy matador. You could try as much as you liked, but a kiss always gives you away. As she saw it, there were only two categories of kiss: sincere and insincere, and Rafferty was always lost somewhere between the two. A line from a Tom Phillips hurtin’ song surfaced in her memory: “He kissed me like he meant it every time.” It was the “like” in that lyric that made it so tragic.

  She held him, calmed his horror. He held her and calmed her loneliness. Or was it the other way around? Horror and the lonely, it reminded Rafferty of ships gone missing in the Arctic. What were they called, the two that had sailed first to Antarctica, then to the north, only to be lost forever? Terror and the Erebus. He whispered this in her ear. That’s us.

  The slow combat of lovers in a bed. The bold shyness, the shy confidence, the surrender that isn’t really a surrender, but a ploy. The advance that is secretly a retreat, falling back only to surround, engulf, contain, defeat. To win, to win. They touched like burn victims, wary, tender, nerves raw, and when an aftershock shook the bed, she had to stop herself from laughing. Did the earth move for you as well? The building might collapse on them at any point, but neither of them could work up the energy to care. She had been under fire in Kosovo, been pinned down in East Timor, had climbed over dead bodies in the Congo. A tremor in Christchurch? That hardly got the heart rate up.

  Waltz with the devil long enough and the danse macabre eventually becomes a two-step. But this was not a two-step; this was a tango. He flipped her over—rather, she flipped herself over; it was a tango, after all, and that takes two—but when another aftershock rippled through, stronger this time, Tamsin twisted free, pulled Rafferty around, on top of her instead, face-to-face. “If they retrieve our bodies, I don’t want them to find you humping me from behind. And anyway, if the roof falls on us, I want you on top of me to provide extra padding.”

  “Shhh.”

  Making a woman peak suddenly—so suddenly, she has to catch her breath—was a trick Rafferty had learned years before in Bangkok. It usually worked only the one time, though; he had only that one magic trick, hence the series of opening-night performances and premature departures that had marked his life. Tamsin was one of the few who fell for it every time: start soft, end strong; start strong, end soft, with her inner thigh trembling like a tuning fork, in an aftershock of its own. He flopped onto his back, fumbled for one of her cigarettes.

  Tamsin exhaled, and he got out of bed, pulling a tide of blankets with him. At first he tried to wrap them over his shoulders, but gave up, threw them to one side, instead. Slipped into his shoes—in case he didn’t look ridiculous enough naked already—tread carefully across the glass to the window.

  The rain had stopped, and the small man in the tailored suit was gone. Rafferty could still see that one shard of wall, though, the one knuckled with rock, balancing like an obelisk.

  Tamsin, asprawl on the bed, lighting a cigarette of her own, letting the ashes drop onto the covers. What did it matter? They probably weren’t going to get their deposit back on the room anyway. In a certain light, Rafferty’s skin had a faintly yellowish hue, the malarial inheritance of some ill-advised journey she was sure, an Amazonian trek or an East Hastings bender. Jaundiced, she thought, in every sense.

  He flicked his cigarette out of the window, into the wet streets below. “I need a drink.” With Rafferty it was more a state of being than an actual thirst.

  Tamsin, one hand behind her head, considered her misshapen lover. “Y’ever notice,” she said, “how a flaccid dick only looks g
ood right after sex? That’s the only time.” She leaned across, ground out her cigarette on the bedside table. “Y’know what I think? I don’t think they added fig leaves to Michelangelo for moral reasons. I think it was purely aesthetic.” She shifted, propped herself up, considered this sad specimen of masculinity standing before her now in profile at the window. “Jesus, Raff. You’ve really let yourself go.”

  “I’m trying for a certain ugly chic.”

  “Well, you’ve got the ugly part down, I’ll give you that. You are one ugly son of a bitch.” Appeals to pity never worked on Tamsin. “You had a six-pack when I first met you, Raff. Now, what is that, a keg?”

  “There’s muscles in there somewhere,” he assured her.

  “Yeah, right. Covered by a protective layer of suet, no doubt.”

  Fuck you. “You’re no spring chicken yourself.”

  “Hey! I’ve kept my shape.”

  “Sure. Convex is a shape.”

  She threw herself back into the pillows with a great harrumph. “Times like this, I really wish I was a lesbian.”

  “You think they’d have you?”

  “What are you implying?”

  “I’m just saying, it’s a bit presumptuous, no? We barely put up with you, what makes you think they would?”

  She considered hurling something at him, a cushion, or brick maybe, but couldn’t be bothered. Lit another cigarette, instead, lay back, smoke trailing from her lungs. A dragon, sated. “It’s cold,” she said. “Come back to bed, warm me up.” But he stayed at the window, standing vigil, staring like a sniper at the broken streets below, looking for a man who wasn’t there.

  Tamsin peered down at her lopsided breasts, which were even more relaxed than she was. “I have these weird blue veins around my nipples lately. You have any weird blue veins?”

  “My entire body is a weird blue vein.”

  That slab of wall below, balanced upright in the ruined city, looked more and more like a headstone the longer he stared at it, a marker of some sort.

  “Raff, come back to bed.”

  He left the window, but didn’t climb in beside her. Sat instead, paunch out, on the edge of the mattress. Took a drag from her latest cigarette, handed it back.

  “It’s good to see you, Raff.”

  Lives crossing like contrails.

  He was facing away from her, but she could see his shoulders relax, just a little. “You as well, Tammy.” He was one of the few people allowed to use her childhood nickname. “Always a pleasant surprise,” he said, “when the stars align like that. Usually, when I’m scrambling to get out, you’re rushing to get in.”

  She studied his broad back, oddly scarless considering the line of work he was in. “Funny, isn’t it?” she said. “And a little sad, I suppose. We think of ourselves as a breed apart, swashbuckling buccaneers of the air, but really we’re just travelers caught between destinations.”

  “Don’t go getting all sappy on me now,” he said. He thought of the cathedral and the candles, the arms outstretched, and perhaps she was right, perhaps purgatory was simply a departure gate at night, a flight delayed, forever.

  “You ever think about it?” she asked. “The other you. The one you would have been or could have been.”

  “What, like a normal life?”

  She nodded. “A normal life.”

  “Who wants normal?”

  She sighed, postcoital wistful. “I do,” she said. “Sometimes. Fleetingly.”

  “Well,” he said, “I haven’t given up yet, kiddo. I’m still workin’ toward my lifelong dream.”

  “Which is?”

  “To be a child prodigy.”

  She laughed, felt the wistful lift. Maybe this is why she fucked him, not for the sex but for the moments afterward.

  He turned. “Why were you there? In the Congo, in Rwanda.”

  “I told you, I was on assignment.”

  “Would be the perfect cover.”

  “I suppose…” Then, with another snorting laugh, “I’m not with the CIA.”

  “You’re with someone.”

  “I’m with you. God knows why.”

  Rwanda dissolved into the air between them like a secret they forgot to share—and a secret’s not a secret till it’s shared. They never spoke about the Congo or Rwanda, danced around it, never faced it. Why now? she wondered. And as quickly as she asked herself, it hit her: The chaos, the smoke, the screams. It must have brought it all back to him. The troops, the helicopters, the field hospitals.

  It was how they had met, after all, how their unlikely, seventeen-year romantic friendship had begun, amid the flies, in the sweltering heat of central Africa, and then later in Hanoi, Lombok, Seoul, Western Samoa, the riots in Lyon, in happenstance and foresight both: sometimes luck, sometimes in scheduled stopovers and highway hotel rendezvouses.

  And here he was, still shattered.

  “Why are you here, Raff?”

  “Me? I heard you were easy.”

  “Not this room. This country. This press trip. What’s really going on? You’ve done New Zealand, Raff, more than once. It’s not like you to retrace your steps. Have you finally run out of places to go?”

  “Not even close.”

  “So, when did you become so keen to return to the Land of Mutton and Orcs?”

  “When I got the assignment.”

  “Got? Or pitched?”

  “Does it matter?” He put out their shared cigarette. “Let’s go downstairs, grab one last drink before this entire place lands on top of us.”

  Rafferty at the art gallery, the day before. Rafferty asking, cajoling, badgering the staff: “We don’t have a number for her,” they said, and he knew they were lying. “And anyway. She’s gone. Left last week.” Where to? “I’m not sure. The North Island, maybe? If you leave your number, we could pass it on to her—if she calls.”

  “C’mon, Tammy,” he said. “Let’s get dressed, go to the bar. Catch last call.”

  “Maori Morning.” Tamsin snorted. “Since when do you give a shit about—”and that was when the penny dropped, with a rattle and a clink. “Oh, my god. She’s here, isn’t she? It’s her.”

  “Her who?”

  “What’s-her-name. Fuck face. That archeology floozy you used to—”

  “Ethnology.”

  “Whatever. Maori myths and legends, that’s right up her wheelhouse. Oh, for god’s sake. She’s here, isn’t she? I never cared for her, Raff, never. She looks weird. She has a weird face.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “Her features all scrunched up in the middle like that, like a human wart. Never smiled. All the vitality of a fallen soufflé. Yippy little voice. Don’t tell me you came all the way to the other side of the world just to mope after Rebecca the Human Wart?”

  “She has something of mine.”

  “Like what, your balls?”

  “Oh, I lost those years ago, remember? Pawned them for a night with you, as I recall. Never got ’em back.”

  “Your heart, then?” Tamsin fell into the bed, laughed at the ceiling. “Thomas P. Rafferty, still carrying a torch for the girl next door. Tom-Tom the incurable romantic, flouncing about like a love-besotted swain. I love it!” ’

  “Not my heart either.”

  “Right.” She leaned up on her elbows. “How would she find it? It’s probably all shriveled up by now. Must be the size of a raisin.”

  “God, you’re annoying.”

  She ran her callused hand up his shoulder, and the room buckled and creaked. They held their breath, but it was only timbers, adjusting. A sense of imminent doom was as exciting as any foreplay, though, and she reached around, between his legs, fondled him as though there were some secret combination that might work. “Hey there, slugger,” she said, in what she thought was a sexy purr. More asthmatic alley cat than kitten, but no matter, the intent was clear. “How about another go?”

  He moved her hand away as gently as he could; she had a fair grip. “You’re mista
king me for a much younger man,” he said.

  Another creak in the joinery. Another sift of the dust. Another omen calling softly, softly.

  “Gather your stuff,” he said. “We can only tempt fate so long.”

  FREEZE FRAME

  IN THE BAR BELOW, THE candles had died, the darkness had grown. Shivering aftershocks had thinned the gathering of journalists and travel writers; it was less a conclave now than a coven, an Algonquin roundtable of cutout figures backlit by the emergency exits, crowding around a single table. The jar on the bar was stuffed with various currencies and the front door was propped open, their one concession to safety, with each person ready to bolt on drunken legs at the first sign of collapse. They could outrun gravity, apparently.

  Tamsin and Rafferty joined them, Tamsin with her camera, Raff with his laptop: tools of their trade.

  “You’re alive!” Freebie repeated woozily when he saw Raff, forgetting they’d already had this conversation. “We were takin’ bets.” An empty bottle of schnapps, looking not unlike a drained IV, lay on its side on the table in front of him. When Freebie spotted Tamsin, he added, “The war photographer! You grace us with your presence.”

  There were hardcore journalists among them now. No namby-pamby travel writers, these. They were disaster zone veterans in their own right, and they knew Tamsin, threw nods and perfunctory greetings her way.

  “Still with Getty Images?” they asked.

  “New York Times Magazine. A photo-essay.”

  This was followed by barely concealed glares of envy. Tamsin always got the plum assignments, and there was nothing plumier than a photo-essay.

  She had entered the roundtable in mid-dialogue. “They call themselves the Farmy Army,” one of the coven was saying. “They trundled in from the countryside on tractors and front-end loaders, cleared the roads of debris.”