Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  “I was a couple of feet away.”

  “This woman couldn’t be at a relative’s house or something, some friend’s place?”

  “She could be, but as far as I know all her relatives from the Dominican Republic are dead. The people in her old neighborhood would know who her friends are.”

  “We checked that out.”

  We sat there. The clock moved. The two men had a certain patience. People had been sitting in this room for over a century.

  “You know their baby boy got killed about three years ago,” the older detective said softly. “You know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that related in any way you can think of?”

  “Directly? No.”

  “Indirectly?” the detective said, leaning forward ever so little.

  “It was a cause of grief and despair,” I told him. “It was the thing that destroyed their marriage.”

  The younger detective, who did not have a wedding band on his hand, seemed less interested in these vagaries. “You don’t know where the woman is, you really have no idea?”

  His insistence alarmed me; I wondered if they suspected that Dolores had shot Hector.

  “Look, I wish she would come back,” I finally offered. “I didn’t want them to leave. I’d give anything for them to come back.”

  The older detective glanced at the younger one and nodded his head forward an inch.

  “Okay,” the other one said, “all right. Now, you got some kind of explanation for what this Hector did, seeing as how the only other witnesses are gone?”

  “I thought Dolores gave a statement to the cop who was there.”

  “She did but it was very sketchy-like.” He lifted his eyes from his clipboard. “She was upset.”

  “Right.”

  “So?”

  “My only explanation is that he did it out of despair.”

  “You a shrink?”

  “No.”

  And so on. I answered every question, I told them everything. My lengthy and confusing explanation of my affair with Dolores seemed only to confound their conclusions, but in the following days, as I sat in my house and spoke to no one and let the newspapers pile up outside the front door among the leaves and Chinese restaurant fliers and the grime of the city, the long shadows of the Corporation’s legal representation silently moved in without my bidding, not to protect me but to protect the good name of the Corporation, and the police let the matter rest.

  The cops did not ask the hardest questions, of course; the hardest questions were the ones I pondered with tortuous irresolution, such as what went through Hector’s mind in those minutes that he quietly moved about the house while Dolores and Maria and I were in the garden. It haunted me to know all that he had seen—the bathtub, with Maria’s bright plastic toys in it; the bedroom, its intimately rumpled sheets, a folded stack of Dolores’s new underwear on the dresser, my socks and shoes and ties evident. Did Hector stop, his chest surging, and stoop closely to the bed to see the long strands of Dolores’s hair on the pillow? Did he fling open the closet and see her new clothes? The spring dresses and new shoes? Yes, of course he did. Any man would. Every closet in the house was open, I later noticed, every one. He saw everything—he saw that I had the world available to me, as he did not, and even so, I had insisted on keeping his wife and child apart from him. And at some point he entered my office. I know this because the door was open and I always kept it shut to discourage Maria from rummaging around. On my desk, kept in eight or nine folders, were papers relating to different elements of the Volkman-Sakura deal, clipped together and left set in a perfect row. One folder was labeled WORLD CABLE OPERATIONS and when I returned to my office, it was lying atop another file at an angle. There was nothing in those papers that would mean much to Hector, in particular, but the fact of them, the brute reduction of the place where he worked, testified as to his smallness in the big web of things. Perhaps he even flipped through the papers, wondering if his name was there, which of course it was not. He would see that Big Apple Cable merited no special attention and that it was merely one of the Corporation’s eighty-six local operations spread around the country.

  But the worst thing that Hector saw in those fevered minutes was something else. Maria’s bedroom—that bower of childhood—must have been the most devastating sight of all. The walls were recently adorned with a border of ABC’s. And there was the low bed from Macy’s children’s department with its bright sheets and the toy chest with dolls and blocks and coloring books spilling from it, and I know that it was altogether too much for Hector to bear—that his child was being taken from him, seemingly bought from him, which such ease and effectiveness. There were a good five fist marks in the wall, slight depressions where the old horsehair plaster had been crushed against the wooden lathing underneath. I see now, more clearly, the pain of this. While we never own our children, we quite clearly mean to possess them.

  And then there was that singular question—why did Hector shoot himself and not me? After all, it could have gone that way so easily. I’d kept his wife and child from him. Perhaps he knew instinctively that killing me instead of himself would not end his torment and would only push Dolores further from him. He understood what her reaction would be, her revulsion and anger. Above all, to the end, he wanted her love, and that may have been the thing that saved me. Or maybe he wanted to be sure that she and I did not stay together. But if he killed me, Dolores might mourn me. Perhaps he knew that if he killed himself he would kill whatever chance Dolores and I might have had.

  Maybe. I’ve gone over those last minutes at least a thou-sand times, arranging the four of us on the square of garden bricks like the few remaining figures on a chessboard, and I have come to realize that Hector may have turned his gun on himself and not me for another reason, too. In the moment when his despairing impulse toward destruction was strongest, he looked at me and saw that I was holding Maria in my arms. If he had been thinking rationally, he would have told me to put Maria down—and I would have done it, given that he held a gun—but he was not thinking rationally, he was possessed by a deranged, sorrowful desire to prove his incontrovertible love for Dolores and to end his own humiliation. When he looked at me, he saw Maria too, and he would not shoot in her direction in an attempt to kill me. It could have been as simple as that.

  Only by accident did I figure out how Hector had found the address of my house in Park Slope. That information, after all, was exactly what I didn’t want him to discover. The people at New York Telephone examined their records and said that although my phone number had unaccountably been changed, at no time did my street address pass into the province of the directory information operators. In the week after Hector’s suicide I assumed Dolores had told one of her girl-friends. How else, I thought, could it have happened? The answer came after a drenching rain one evening, when finally I picked up Hector’s coat from the bricks and carried it inside. Soaked, it must have weighed twenty pounds. In the clammy pockets, which had attracted some slugs, I found a crumpled, half-eaten bag of potato chips, a set of car keys, and a stub from the cheap seats of a Yankees game back in April. I realized that the keys might correspond to an unfamiliar old Buick parked down the block whose windshield was littered with parking tickets. A few minutes later, I inspected the car for a car alarm sticker, found none, then tried the keys in the driver’s door. The second one fit. I slipped into the seat. Baby shoes hung from the windshield mirror—Maria’s or little Hector’s. I tried the ignition. The car started right up. Hector was the kind of man who kept his car tuned. I sat a moment with my leg out the door on the street and listened to the engine, staring at the long damp traffic tickets wedged under the windshield wipers.

  Then I turned off the engine and inspected the inside of the car. Among the empty oil cans and old copies of the New York Post, I found a supervisor’s training manual from Big Apple Cable, which Hector, no doubt, had received when he was promoted, thanks to me. I flipped idly throug
h it and found the pertinent paragraph that explained the perfect irony of the timing of Hector’s location of my house, why he had struggled to find Dolores and Maria for weeks and yet had succeeded almost immediately after being promoted at Big Apple Cable. Yes, the irony hit me like a baseball bat. The cup of my stupidity runneth over. When insisting to Janklow at Big Apple Cable that Hector be promoted, I should have remembered that the same wire of information that ran through the Corporation from Hector to me also ran from me back to him. When Hector was promoted, he’d received the cable installer’s supervisor’s manual. He dutifully took it home to study, and no doubt was jolted to attention when he read the same short paragraph now on the page before me, the paragraph that explained that “all top-level Corporation executives living in the New York metropolitan area/Big Apple Cable subscriber region receive full cable service completely free of charge” and that “supervisors are to be attentive that these accounts are serviced quickly and correctly.” Once Hector knew this, all he had to do to get my address was look my name up on the subscriber computer system. The supervisor’s manual explained how to do that, too.

  Disgusted with myself, I tossed the manual back on the seat and got out of the car with the keys. Closed the door, wondered what to do. I opened the trunk. Next to a tangle of tools and jumper cables was a box full of beach stuff: tiny cheap shovels and pails, plastic sandals for walking on hot sand, a little inflatable raft, perfect for Maria, perfect for a Saturday afternoon at Atlantic City. Everything was new, still had the packaging and price stickers. Here I was discovering the doomed dreams of a dead man. I shut the trunk.

  I decided to return to my house, but, giving the car a final look, I noticed a crumpled brown bag in the backseat, and to satisfy my curiosity, I unlocked the driver’s door again, reached over the seat, and retrieved it. Inside the bag was a woman’s shoe with the heel missing, some of Maria’s clothing, and a handful of Crayola crayons, some broken. I stared at these items, waiting to remember why I knew exactly why they were in a bag together, why they were familiar to me—and then, in the suddenness of certainty, I knew: the broken shoe and clothing and crayons were the very same items that Ahmed had returned to Hector those many weeks prior when Hector had gone to Ahmed’s building in his search for Dolores and Maria. I carefully picked all of Maria’s crayons out of the bag. These were the ones she’d been coloring with on the subway, on the night I’d first seen the two of them. I remembered that the crayon that had rolled across the floor had been a certain dark red. Yes, here it was. For the second time I held it in my hand and this time I kept it, slipping it into my pocket.

  Back in my house I hung Hector’s wet, black coat over the head of my shower and it dripped for almost a day. When it was reasonably dry I put it outside my house on the fence. Within ten minutes it was gone. And the following day the city towed away Hector’s car, probably to be sold at auction to a stranger.

  As for the other questions, the less important ones, I meant to ask the Chairman whether he had played the whole game knowingly from the start or had changed his strategy as conditions themselves changed. It could have been either possibility. Lying back craftily for months, he’d seemed the epitome of the ruined monarch tottering on collapse; yet at other times, he moved with great speed and surety. Could one man play the game so adeptly? He knew just who I was from the beginning, he had been scanning the field, hidden in his booze and smoke, waiting for the messenger, waiting for the game to begin, feeling the reins tighten. The game included Morrison and all of us. The game is always bigger than all of us.

  Also, I wanted to explain to the Chairman what had happened. I figured I owed him that. When I finally called, Mrs. Marsh asked hadn’t I been reading the papers? Hadn’t I heard? There was a tone in her voice. No, I said. She told me that the Chairman had a series of strokes one night while he was watching the news, and I was given to understand that his mind blew out like an engine throwing one piston after another. There had been no protracted decline, no confused ebbing of function. One day he was the Chairman and the next he was a seventy-one-year-old man being taught how to use a straw. All of it—the forty-five-odd years with the Corporation, his three wives and dozen or so mistresses, the names of his parents and children, the purposes of such things as music, bicycles, and light bulbs—gone.

  I drove out to his mansion on Long Island that same day and talked my way in past Mr. Warren to find the Chairman dressed in yellow flannel pajamas, sitting on the sun porch. Though he’d lost perhaps fifteen pounds and the skin had fallen slack under his jaw, his blue eyes were bright with wonderment. His wife, the third one, sat in a room nearby, chatting happily on the telephone. The nurse tried to distract the Chairman with the television but he couldn’t operate the remote control. He had no idea what it was, and clicked indiscriminately through forty or fifty channels, the light of the screen playing across his blank, amazed face as his blue eyes looked with rapt amusement at something beyond the images. I shook his hand gently and gave him a squeeze on the shoulder before leaving. Later I heard he regained a certain animal vigor and has taken up collecting golf balls. Instead of playing a regular round at Palm Beach or up in Newport at his club, he and his old caddy walk the greens relentlessly, the Chairman shuffling a bit lopsidedly, picking up discarded Truflites, Wilsons, and Titleists, and then he is driven home. Apparently there are a dozen or so buckets of old, nicked balls in his greenhouse.

  A police sergeant called a week later to say that Dolores had never showed up to claim Hector’s body and did I know how to reach his family? It disturbed me to hear this and immediately I worried about Dolores and Maria. I told the policeman what I knew, where to inquire, including the employment forms on record at the Corporation, but the next day he called back to say that Hector’s mother had died six months ago in Puerto Rico and they couldn’t find a family at all. The neighbors in Hector’s apartment building didn’t know anybody, not real family members, and neither did anyone at St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church. There was no one to take responsibility. Did I know anybody at all?

  When I told him I did not, he asked politely if they could release the body to me, because room in the hospital morgue was very tight, and otherwise the body would go to a pauper’s grave, where unclaimed bodies of homeless people and abandoned infants are buried, and so I agreed and the Methodist Hospital morgue released the body to me. I had a funeral home in Sunset Park pick it up. I asked the funeral director to arrange for a Catholic service and to let the neighborhood know of it. Whatever was customary, I told him, the priest, the casket, flowers, everything. I paid him in full and explained that I would not be at the service or the burial, which I wanted him to oversee. I drove out to the Green-Wood Cemetery and arranged for Hector to be buried in the plot next to his son. The cemetery official didn’t understand who I was, since I was not a family member, but I paid for the plot and stone with cash and he seemed satisfied. My only consolation in doing these things is that Dolores may visit her son’s grave and thus discover that her husband was properly attended to. Maybe she already has visited, I don’t know.

  I thought all these matters were finished but last October while I was watching the World Series on television, one of the Corporation’s lawyers called to inform me that the Corporation was suing me for all of my retirement benefits in order to indemnify itself should one of Hector’s family members, such as Dolores, surface and decide to sue the Corporation for Hector’s death. When I protested, he pointed out that certain “abuses,” as he called them, had allowed for the chain of circumstances. It could be argued by a plaintiff, the lawyer said, that I had maliciously caused mental anguish to Hector in my position of power in the Corporation. The lawyer and his “team” who had reviewed the possibility that Dolores could sue the Corporation thought she might be able to make a viable case. Thus I could sign a piece of paper or countersue the Corporation. I signed. I signed it all away. Of course, to this day, Dolores has never made a claim.

  All of this happ
ened just last year and it’s changed me. The only thing that isn’t different is my acid problem, which is still this burning crud, this bile, rising like blame or vengeance for everything I’ve ever done wrong. I went to my internist and he asked about the catching sensation in the throat. He was surpised to hear how much Maalox I was knocking back. This is not optimal, he said. There was a test he could do, in which I would swallow barium and get strapped down to a table that tilted my feet up to get an X-ray to see what was going on in there. It sounded like “Barrett’s esophagus” to him. We’ll do an endoscopy. Would I have to undergo a Nissen’s plication? I asked. He was noncommittal. Let’s increase your medication and watch it. He’d seen a number of cases such as mine, he said, and it could go on like this.

  I’m living on my savings, but sooner or later I’ll have to find work. I had to rent out my house to cover the monthly payments and it was taken by a young family with three children. The couple seemed glad to find it. The father, a big, hearty guy who reminded me of Harry McCaw, pumped my hand. I’m living now in a small, cheap apartment in one of the farther neighborhoods in Brooklyn. As I mentioned before I’ve been wandering through the city lately, moving around with no real purpose. The days go on forever. I’m quite neat in my appearance, shaving most mornings, and generally they let me sit at the window in restaurants. I’m that guy staring out through the glass with a stupid, far look on his face. I keep wondering what the way back is.

  Sooner or later I’ll get going. I’m sure of it. No doubt about it, actually. But right now I’m still caught up in the mystery of how it is that I live while Hector is dead, how it is that I once held Dolores and Maria tightly in my bed and they are gone and where I don’t know. That, finally, is the inscrutable aspect of it. We passed through each other’s lives with such mysterious velocity. She broke me, she remade me. I see now that I was foolish about her, overly sentimental. This is an old flaw in my nature, but in the case of Dolores Salcines, I should have been smarter, not so eager to get caught up in the idea of it. Dolores, after all, was hardly blameless. She was a woman who cheated on her husband with at least four men, then left him without telling him. She had lied to me from the start. And she seemed to have made no effort to talk it out with Hector; she forced his panic. Could it have ever worked out between us? I wonder what I was thinking.