Telephone

by Percival Everett

  “She did?”

  “Yes.” I looked at the man’s eyes and realized how weary mine must have appeared. “Is there a photograph of the woman?”

  His shoulders sagged as he leaned into the back of his chair. “What do you do for a living, Mr. Wells?”

  “I’m a university professor. I’m a paleontologist.”

  Deocampo raised his brows.

  “I study fossils.” Language was getting in the way. “Dinosaurios.”

  “Really? My son loves them.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you have any children, Mr. Wells?”

  “I have a daughter.”

  “You should go home to her.”

  “Someone needs help,” I said.

  “You really believe this woman is a prisoner,” he said more to himself than to me. “Come with me.”

  Lieutenant Deocampo led me out of the conference room, down the wide stairs where I came in, along a wide hallway lined with portraits of uniformed men, to a narrower corridor, and then down a straight flight of stairs. He opened a heavy but unsecured door and waved his arm for me to enter before him. Inside the large room were crates upon crates, stacked boxes, and an entire wall of file cabinets, floor to chin high, all set against walls painted the sort of pale green found in old hospitals.

  “This is what three hundred and six dead and missing women look like,” he said.

  I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  He dragged his finger along the faces of the file cabinets as he walked. “Here we are,” he said. He slid open the drawer second from the top and found the green folder he wanted, opened it, and held it for me to see. “Rosalita Gonzalez,” he said.

  I studied the picture. It was old, frayed at the bottom. It showed a woman standing in front of a small house with an older woman. The young woman held a small dog in her arms, a Pekingese, maybe.

  “Is this the woman you saw?”

  “I can’t say,” I said, reaching out and touching the picture with the tip of my right index finger. I traced the outline of her face, touched the dog. “I saw her only once, and this photo is not very clear.”

  Deocampo closed the folder. “You seem like a good man,” he said. “There is a lot of sadness here because of this. It is easy to get people’s hope up. Is that how you say it?”

  I nodded. Hope, hopes, it was the same thing. I saw no need to correct him on such a small thing, or even a bigger thing.

  “Maybe the police in New Mexico will listen to you?”

  As he said this, I wondered why I had not gone to the New Mexico police at first. Perhaps it was because I saw them as white, but, frankly, they scared me, seemed too much like the men I was reporting. More likely it was because I didn’t have a real story to tell them.

  “There are others,” I said. “I think some white men are holding them as prisoners. Slaves.”

  Deocampo put the folder back into the cabinet and pushed in the drawer. He paused his hand on the handle.

  “I don’t think the police in America will believe me. I think my story sounds crazy. It does, doesn’t it?”

  “Not so crazy. You believe you saw a missing woman. It happens every day. Here, a woman goes missing every day.”

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  He looked at me, I thought, as if that piece of information helped him better make sense of all of this and me. “Go home, Mr. Wells. Be with your daughter.”

  “You’re not going to call anyone, are you?”

  Deocampo looked at his watch. “How much time do you have? Do you have time for a drive? An hour?”

  “Of course.”

  Some said that three hundred young women had been killed or disappeared in some twenty years. Others said it was closer to seven hundred gone. People are like that about numbers. They will say it is not seven hundred but only three, two hundred, as if one hundred would not be truly horrible, fifty, twenty-five. No one knew who killed and kidnapped these people. Maybe drug cartels, some said. Maybe roving gangs of sexual predators. Devil worshippers. Perhaps invaders from space. Men. It was men. It was always men. Always men.

  The numbers were so very large, obscene, fescennine. Olga Perez. Hundreds of women have no name. Edith Longoria. Hundreds of women have no face. Guadalupe de la Rosa. Names. Name. Maria Najera. It was so uncomplicated, safe, simple to talk about numbers in El Paso, a world away. Nobody misses five hundred people. Nobody misses one hundred people. In Juárez, it was one. One daughter. One friend. One face. One name. Somebody misses one person. Maybe Rosalita Gonzalez.

  Deocampo’s car was royal blue, late eighties, a Buick sedan, as clean as the day it rolled off the assembly line. Even the floor mats were pristine. I hated putting my big boots on them. He could see my stiffness.

  “Do not worry,” he said. “I will clean the mats. I clean them every week.”

  “I can see that.”

  “My wife likes a clean car. And a clean house. And a clean husband.”

  The ride took us back along the river the way I had come. The afternoon had become hot and uncomfortable, but the lieutenant appeared unfazed in his buttoned-up shirt and tie. He turned left and we gained some elevation as we rolled into an industrial area that had seen busier times. He stopped the car and we got out. I followed him past a loading dock of some long-defunct business into a yard of discarded metal and mounds of baked hard earth. We stood above a subdivision of modest homes, mostly one-story affairs with postage-stamp lawns. Across the river were the high-rise buildings of El Paso.

  “This is where we found the bodies of eight women,” Deocampo said. He kicked at the dirt with his shiny shoes. “This is the reality we deal with every day. I don’t know if my phone is going to ring and I’ll have to go out and find a body. Families come in every week with stories and photos. I don’t have time to check out the leads I get here, much less think about things across the border. There was a head right where your foot is.”

  I looked down and stepped aside.

  He looked over at the reasonably safe city of El Paso. It looked like Oz.

  “What could you do if I brought Rosalita Gonzalez here to you?”

  “Mr. Wells, go home to California. Make a report to the police in New Mexico, then go home to your daughter.”

  On the way back to headquarters, Deocampo took us on a detour, stopped the car downtown on Avenue 16 de Septiembre.

  “Why are we stopped here?” I asked.

  He pointed at a large three-story building. “See that?”

  I looked at the building.

  “The first two floors are a whorehouse.”

  “Thank you, but I’m good.”

  “On the third floor is the cartel, their offices.”

  “Like a drug cartel?”

  “Exactly, a drug cartel.” He put a cigarette in his mouth but did not light it. “That’s what we deal with down here. The cartel has offices. You have a war on drugs, and we get shot. It is a mess. In Ciudad Juárez women are hunted. It didn’t used to be like this. Maybe one day it will not be like this again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Deocampo shrugged. “Go home. You cannot save anybody. I cannot save anybody. Go home to your family.”

  a pocketknife, a tarp, a map, a compass, a shovel, a canteen, a poncho, a trail, a mission

  Camaïeu

  I drove home to my daughter.

  I had been away from home for a couple of weeks, but the strangeness of the house upon my return caused me to feel as if I had been gone for years. Like a coward sidling back onto a battlefield, I found all that I expected but cast in unfamiliar light, with unfamiliar and strange shadows. When I saw Meg’s face, I wondered if she would ever again speak to me, but she did, her compassion, her love allowing her to understand that the grief I was experiencing was no less deep and intense than hers, that we each had to cope in our own way. My leaving, however, had cheated her out of an opp
ortunity to run away as I had, to hide from the world that had been given to us.

  She put to me a reasonable-enough question. “Where were you?”

  “I told you, I was in New Mexico.”

  “What were you doing?”

  I answered truthfully. “I don’t know.”

  She nodded.

  “Is Sarah asleep?”

  “Yes. She went down easily.”

  “Has she asked for me?”

  “No.” That simple answer crushed me, but a yes would have been equally as devastating.

  “Seizures?”

  “A couple every day. There was a pretty severe one two days ago. Otherwise they’ve been mild. Spacing out.” Meg began to cry.

  I sat with her on the sofa, held her. We softened to each other in a way that we had not for some time.

  Unusually progressive. That was how Dr. Gurewich characterized my daughter’s condition. It sounded like a description of a private school. Unusually progressive. It was so much like falling. “Rapidly progressive dementia,” Gurewich called it, sounding more distant and detached each time we consulted with her. Sarah hadn’t known there was a ledge, and with just a few steps she was gone. But she was also there, present with me, in time and in space, in the same body, asleep at that moment while I sat in the chair beside her bed. Morning was just coming on, her shade up to allow the new light in. She was still beautiful, as she would forever be. She awoke and she recognized that it was morning, but there was nothing to indicate that she recognized me, yet she didn’t recoil as if I were a stranger. She let me guide her to the bathroom. I stood with my back to her while she sat on the toilet and peed. The sound of her urine stopped, and I heard her frustration with the toilet paper. I turned to see her fumbling with the roll; she could not tear it off and hold it. I called out for Meg and then remembered she had gone out to yoga, finally some time for herself. The nurse had not yet arrived. Sarah looked at me, perhaps asking for help. I tore off some paper and wiped my daughter’s vagina. When she was an infant, I changed her diaper so many times, being certain to dry inside her little creases. She didn’t have a vagina then, not really, but now she was no infant. I had never felt so awkward, so scared, so inappropriate in my life, and yet I was performing this most intimate action for my dearest person. To feel so close to her while feeling so strange and weirdly guilty was confusing and disorienting. I happened to look at the tissue before tossing it into the bowl. The paper was tinged pink.

  If my daughter had ever had a period, I didn’t know about it. It was one of those things that as a father I was to know about and happily be unaware of. Here I was wiping my baby girl’s vagina while wiping away evidence of her womanhood. I didn’t know what to do. There were no pads within view in her bathroom, so I folded toilet paper until thick and pushed it against her and got some underwear on her. After I had pulled up her pajama bottoms and flushed the toilet, she looked at me and smiled.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, sounding surprisingly collected.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “What about some breakfast?”

  “That would be nice.” Again, she sounded decidedly older, different from the little girl I remembered, and still there was no reason for me to assume she knew who I was.

  “Do you know who I am?” I asked.

  She ignored the question.

  I got her into her robe and we moved to the kitchen, where I poured us bowls of cereal, Grape-Nuts. We sat beside each other at the table, facing the window and a view of the hills. Sarah managed to feed herself a couple of bites, and then she stopped eating, I thought, because of fear of attempting another. Her hands were failing her again.

  Basil came over and pressed his head against Sarah’s leg. She reached down and absently scratched him behind his ear. An automatic action that betrayed the person inside the shell. I was warmed by it, saddened by it.

  “I know what,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I got up and went to the study, where I grabbed the board and chess pieces. At the table I was excited to see that Sarah recognized the board and the pieces. Though she fumbled with each one, she was able to place them correctly. She moved first. The game moved forward predictably, conservatively until she attempted to use a knight. She grabbed the horse and hovered it over the board, finally putting it down well away from any legal square.

  I said nothing, didn’t correct her, and went ahead and made my move.

  She was somewhere else now. Whether it was a seizure, I didn’t know. I sat with her, watching her, detecting a slight tremor in her right hand.

  “Is it my move?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m tired. Daniel mopped the floor yesterday.”

  “He did?” I looked at the floor. I didn’t know who Daniel was, but the floor was in need of mopping. “He did a good job,” I lied.

  “Daniel did it.”

  de dicto/de re

  Of all possible worlds this was the one in which I had landed. I wondered how years passed for parents who lost children, how these parents navigated birthdays, Thanksgivings. Would my imaginary daughter grow older in my dreams? Would she graduate from high school and go to college? Have babies? Would my imagined child sit beside my deathbed and allow me to thank her for completing my world? However brief the time we shared. My daughter came to me in every nighttime dream, and I anticipated the self-loathing and guilt that would come years later when one night she would fail to appear, or rather, I would fail to conjure or summon her.

  de se

  Meg came into house through the kitchen door with a tray of two coffees and a paper sack of bagels. “Well, look who’s up,” she said.

  Sarah got up and walked to Meg. “Thank you,” she said, taking the bagels.

  I glanced down at the chair beside me and noticed the blood-soaked cushion. “We have a small problem,” I said.

  At that moment Sarah turned away from Meg to move to the counter. Meg saw the child’s bloodstained pants.

  “I didn’t know quite how to handle it,” I said.

  Meg put her hands on Sarah’s shoulders and tried to gently guide her out of the room. Sarah resisted, twisting away, shaking her head. Meg tried again.

  “No,” Sarah said. She bent slightly at the waist, perhaps cramping. I didn’t know.

  Meg’s eyes welled up. She tried again.

  I stood but didn’t move forward.

  Sarah looked at me. She was shaking. “What are you going to do?” she asked. She looked so frightened to me that I was near crying as well.

  Meg made soothing sounds. “It’s okay, baby. We just need to go back to the bathroom and get more comfortable. That’s a good idea, isn’t it?” She did not push or pull but touched Sarah’s face. “Is that a good idea?”

  Sarah nodded.

  I sat like a dumb bird at the table. A pigeon, perhaps, or a chicken. I considered my beautiful daughter marking this change in her physical development while being completely unaware of her body or herself, with no attendant fears that she might have had in a more normal world, while the fabric of her understanding of the most basic, ever-taken-for-granted truths about daily life frayed not only at the edges but from the middle, spiderwebbing out, growing and connecting one destruction to the next. My daughter, a little life in the scheme of the world, of time, the star, however, around which my planet orbited. My source of gravity and warmth and light was eroding and so was I, and I could not help her, couldn’t even contact her to offer an apology or say good-bye or express my love. There might not have been the heaven that so many fools advertised, but there certainly was a hell, and it smelled like blood and cold cereal and the family dog.

  I called Basil to me and let him comfort me. The way he settled his chin on my thigh let me know that I was also comforting him. I moved the stained chair cushion into the laundry room.

  Meg came back into the kitchen with Sarah in fresh clothes, sweatpants and a yellow T-shirt. The child returned to her previous seat, minus cushion, and fiddl
ed with the pieces on the board with no seeming notion of a game or a promise of one.

  I pulled a chair out for Meg and sat where I had been.

  “That was her first,” she said. She did not cry now, but the look on her face could easily have been wailing.

  “Who is Daniel?” I asked.

  “Daniel?”

  “Sarah said Daniel mopped the floor.”

  Meg shrugged. What else could she do. These behaviors were in line with what the doctor had told us. She had even said there might be fits of paranoia or rage. The mere thought sent me into panic.

  “What time does the nurse get here?” I asked.

  “She’s not coming. She called to say she had an emergency.”

  “I like that better,” I said. “I’m here all day today. You can go out and do what you need to.”

  “There are pads in our bathroom,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Pads. For Sarah.”

  “Right.”

  Meg turned to look out the window. A Steller’s jay was on a branch of the jacaranda. It was unusual for one to come so far down.

  There were times in life that things felt easy and slow, or easy and fast, somehow not the world of grown-ups, but everything now felt so hard, so real, every move an effort and a mystery, yet strangely, no move seemed as if it could be wrong. How could things be worse? I watched like a big cat for any flicker of joy or mere recognition on my child’s face, ready to pounce on it and stretch it out in front of me.

  fac et spera

  I spent the day trying to keep my daughter alive. It was just like when she was the infant we brought home. I couldn’t believe the people at the hospital were just letting us leave with that little animal. They made sure we had a car seat, presented us with a cheap stroller, and sent us on our way. I also could not believe that Meg was walking, now sitting in the backseat with the strapped-in infant, after having just pushed a person out of her body. It was all so surreal. It remained surreal when we arrived home. The surreality either faded or became the norm as the days passed and we became used to it all, but now all was as surreal as it ever was.

  We sat around the house. I read to her. We watched cartoons that Sarah had long outgrown, it being unclear whether she was watching or seizing. I even managed to steer her through a short walk along a short and easy trail along the bottom of the mountain. When we returned, a bit hot and sweaty from the early summer heat, I left her in the kitchen while I went to pee. I was gone for only a minute. I returned to find Sarah sitting on the floor, loving up on Basil. The sight made me feel an inkling of happiness. Then I heard a humming. It was coming from the microwave. The light was on, and through the glass I could see a mug full of forks spinning clockwise on the table. I don’t know if I saw a spark or not, but I certainly imagined one, if not many, as I leaped to open the door. My heart was racing.