Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

  No answer. I found another brother on Facebook and tried to “friend” him, but he wouldn’t be my friend. I couldn’t find the other brothers.

  I figured George was just flat gone now.

  I thought about hiring a private eye. In fact, I spoke to a private eye. I typed into a Web search “private eye” and called the first number listed, which seemed like a bad idea as I was doing it, but the man I spoke to did not lack sense. He had reasonable ideas and asked me reasonable questions, such as, “Where do you think he is?”

  “I believe,” I said, “that he’s in Brazil.”

  “Could be expensive,” he said. “Big country. It could be done. You could hire people to look for him in Brazil, but that’s going to be real money.”

  “I have money,” I said. I wasn’t sure what real money was. What I had was real.

  “What do you want to find him for?” the private eye said. “You know, this is not like the movies. You don’t hire a private eye to find out if your wife is cheating on you. That’s not what this business is.”

  I knew that already. It was written on his Web site. One reason that was not a good reason to hire a private eye, according to his Web site, was to find out if your wife was cheating on you.

  “Do you know where he was last living?”

  “I know where one of his brothers lives,” I said.

  “Why don’t you ask his brother?”

  “I wrote him and he didn’t answer,” I said.

  “Why wouldn’t he answer?”

  “I know where his best friend is,” I said. “His old best friend, from high school. You could call him and ask.”

  “Why don’t you call him yourself and ask? Why wouldn’t he want to hear from you?”

  I called this private eye several times from different phones and pretended to be different people. I asked many questions. I didn’t hire him because I was afraid how much it would cost to send him to Brazil, but I kept calling. During our last conversation he called me “Deb.” I was certain I hadn’t given him my name. “All right, Deb,” he said. “Talk to you soon.” Surely he knew it was the same woman calling over and over. I mean, the guy was a private eye. I guess he had to let me know I wasn’t fooling anyone.

  After that, of course, I couldn’t call him again.

  At last I cooked up my nerves and I called George’s best friend from high school. I’ve always known where this guy was because he’s still working at the same place he worked when he finished college, has been working there all these years. He lives right nearby the house he grew up in and does volunteer after-school tutoring at the very high school he and George had attended. I’d been following all this on the Internet for years. How do people wind up like that? I’ll never know.

  “You may not remember me,” I said.

  “I remember you,” he said.

  I made up an enormous mountain of crap. “My sister,” I said. “She’s moving. Your town. Her husband. His job. Needs advice. Schools and so on. Such and such.”

  “How’s Wendy?” I said. “Oh that’s good, that’s nice. How’s Max?”

  “Good,” I said. “Good.”

  “Hey,” I said, “by the way, I just thought of this. Are you in touch with George? How’s he doing? Still in Brazil?”

  “Brazil?” the best friend said. “No, no. That was years ago. He’s in Pennsylvania, isn’t he? With his wife and kids.”

  “Pennsylvania?”

  “Yeah, he’s a programmer.”

  A programmer?

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Sure, I’m sure.”

  Now how did George learn how to be a programmer? Are there even computers in the jungles of Brazil? What does a programmer do anyway?

  I’ll tell you one thing. Basically I bet he has more stuff. I’d put my stuff up against his stuff any day. We could lay it out on the road, end to end, beside each other, his stuff on one side and mine on the other. We could put his kid on the road, glue him down there, any other kids he’s got now too, stick them down, give his wife a chair to sit in, and his mother, who I understand is living there with them too and must be best friends with the wife. We could take apart his house, board by board, and line it on the road. There is no way he doesn’t have more stuff.

  A programmer!

  And after his belongings and the immediate family, there are the in-laws and all that family, and don’t forget the boat or canoe or trampoline in the garage, and then the garage itself. His stuff will stretch off into the distance toward the horizon and I’ll be way back here on the same street I started. That’s a fact.

  ANOTHER ENDING

  To find him again was harder. Some months went by, then some more. It wasn’t fair—here I’d written this entire goddamn book. Didn’t I deserve to find out a little more? I hired a private eye. Not the same private eye. That would have been humiliating. I hired a second private eye. In fact, a third private eye—the second one I spoke to charged too much and the one after that, I didn’t like, and then there was another one, a fourth, who didn’t call me back, so this was the fifth private eye. I had to sign a paper saying I wouldn’t cause George any harm and that I wouldn’t cause any minors or celebrities or other public figures any harm either, and that I wouldn’t hire George or any minors or public figures or give them promotions, or decide not to, based on the information my private eye gave me. And I had to write a short essay about what I planned to do to George when I found him. I worked hard on the essay, but my private eye didn’t comment on it. He just told me the job was easy. He said it would take one day. He said he’d locate the house, call and confirm George was still there, and that would be the end of it. But then I didn’t hear back for a week.

  Finally he wrote. “The case has complications. Things do not look good for George.”

  The house had been foreclosed on. Someone was suing him.

  The news got worse and worse.

  His company was no longer his company. Wherever he was, there seemed to be no wife with him, no child in sight. He might be living in New Mexico with his mother.

  “Are you sure you have the right man?” I said. “That doesn’t sound like George to have a company.”

  “Yes, he had a company. Translating INS documents.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You have the right man.”

  Then he seemed to be fleeing too. That was suddenly part of it. The court couldn’t serve him papers. He was last seen in Florida, no, New Mexico. There were other states involved. Wisconsin. Pennsylvania again. I could tell my private eye thought George was a deadbeat and wondered why I needed to know so much about an irresponsible reprobate. My private eye sounded disapproving. Meanwhile I mourned George and what had become of him, alone, living with his mother. What had happened? Had he found owning a company insipid? Was he lazy? I was certain he’d never learned how to pay a bill, but what about the queen? Had she been mean or insane? And what about the child? I regretted looking for George. He should be allowed his own private catastrophe.

  I still believe in him, I thought loyally. I knew him when he was young, and I know he still is what he was then: patient and kind and brilliant. It shouldn’t have turned out this way.

  * * *

  Then the story got better and better.

  “There’s no record of any divorce,” my private eye told me. “In fact it’s hard to figure out just who the wife is. There’s a Brazilian woman who’s shared a lot of addresses with him. Could that be the wife?

  “People are protecting him, that’s for sure,” my private eye said. “He’s in hiding. He’s avoiding being served.

  “He’s had so many addresses in so many states,” my private eye said, “it’s impossible to follow it all.” The business might now be in the Brazilian woman’s name. The paperwork was convoluted.

  New Mexico kept coming up, so I called the number the private eye gave me. A man answered the phone. “Is this George?” I said.

  “I’m not George,” he said.

>   I didn’t think it was. I thought I would still know his voice, and anyway this voice sounded too young.

  “Could you give him a message?”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “I swear I’m not a bill collector.”

  “I’m not saying you are. I just don’t know any George.”

  “I knew him in college. I need to get him the message.”

  “I could maybe get him a message.”

  “Could you tell him I’m not a bill collector?”

  “All right.”

  “Ask him to call me.”

  “Give me your number.”

  “Write this down. It’s like a password. He’ll know who I am.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you speak Spanish?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I speak Portuguese.”

  Ahhhhh. Brazil. My heart leapt. Was I talking to George’s teenage son?

  In that moment I had a flash of what had happened.

  “Tell him: Aquí no se rinde nadie,” I said. It was a Sandinista slogan. We used to say it all the time. Here no one surrenders.

  * * *

  George was not lost. In fact he had won. I’d figured it out. His wife had not deserted him, business gone broke. She was still with him, hiding his business for him. His son sounded like he loved him. He was the same George, up to his old tricks. He’d pulled one off on them all, he was running off into the sunset, leaving his trail of debt behind him, Viva la revolución, he will never surrender.

  Indeed it was likely I who had more stuff.

  He didn’t call back, of course, but it was okay. I had what I needed. I was sitting on my bed in my apartment, water out the window, papers strewn all over the bed and the floor and the table and spread all over the stairs and the room beneath me and the counter in the kitchen, and suddenly my life seemed to have all the air sucked out of it, all my furniture, the care I’d taken in carrying it across the land and bringing it into this room. What did I care about? What was worth believing in? It was a tremendous feeling, glorious, that challenge to what I’d deemed important. I hadn’t felt it in so long.

  I don’t know if I hired the private eye so I could write the book or if I wrote the book so I could hire the private eye, but I needed to know that George still existed, still exists, that the thing that he is exists, that it’s out there somewhere, roaming the earth, creating havoc, growing, possibly multiplying. I want it to exist.

  FINAL ROBBERY

  George and I were in Mexico City, almost home, when we finally ran out of money. All the usual ways people outspend themselves were avenues not open to us. Nineteen eighty-seven was at the very beginning of the credit craze. I didn’t have a credit card yet. George had defaulted on both of his. I think we had something like forty dollars. We talked about who would be more likely to give us money: my mother or his mother. The fathers were out of the question and we both hoped they didn’t answer the phone. His mother had less money, but my mother always said no. I said I was willing to bet his mother could spare a few bucks. He said, “Let’s ask your mom first.” So I called my mother and she said no. She said that if we made it to the border she and my father would pick us up. I may not have admitted just how bad things had gotten. I like to think if I had been honest about the situation they would have come up with the cash. I’ll never know.

  But now we had no choice. George had to call his mother. She said she would wire us two hundred dollars. George went to pick it up at the cash express and was robbed coming back. A group of men got around him on the train, cut the money belt from his neck with a knife, and took his wallet. He was late coming back—I think he wound up walking partway. I’m not sure. He was very late and upset. He was shaking, and it took him a long time to calm down.

  Then we kept saying, “Oh great,” and throwing up our hands. “Now what are we going to do?” There was a horrible day or two when we didn’t know how we were going to make it to the border. Then we made it to the border.

  I mean, we didn’t just live there for the rest of our lives.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With heartfelt thanks to the following people for their vital assistance and friendship: Clancy Martin, Chris Miller, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Gillian Blake, Ethan Nosowsky, David McCormick, Kaydi and Cean Colcord, Robert Nelson, Rosalyn Olin Porte, Margaret Olin, Nancy Unferth, and, above all, Matt Evans.

  Grateful thanks also to the Creative Capital Foundation and the Corporation of Yaddo, and to Eli Horowitz and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, where selections from this book originally appeared.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DEB OLIN UNFERTH is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies and the novel Vacation, winner of the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award. Her work has been featured in Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and the Boston Review. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a 2009 Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature. She teaches at Wesleyan University.

  ALSO BY DEB OLIN UNFERTH

  Vacation

  Minor Robberies

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

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  Copyright © 2011 by Deb Olin Unferth

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  The names of some individuals have been changed.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Unferth, Deb Olin.

  Revolution : the year I fell in love and went to join the war / Deb Olin Unferth.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-8050-9323-0

  1. Unferth, Deb Olin—Travel—Central America. 2. Central America—Description and travel. 3. Authors, American—21st century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3621.N44Z46 2011

  813'.6–dc22

  [B] 2010023471

  First Edition 2011

  eISBN 978-1-4299-9212-1

  First Henry Holt and Company eBook Edition: February 2011