“Just a few days before Gary returns from Bermuda. What a coincidence,” said Vanessa. She finished her large, graceful lassoing of letters.
“The only way to get rid of the words is to remove the turf,” said Ryan. “Smart, eh?”
“Done.” She headed back to the car.
“That’s it?”
“Chop-chop. Let’s get a move on.”
A minute later they were on the freeway again. Vanessa was still driving. John was getting the jitters. He was having dark thoughts about what could have happened to Susan. Though his movies were violent and their characters often sick, John had never thought of them as being real. For the first time in his life he began visualizing the violence of his films entering his life and it made him feel queasy, and now he knew a bit of what the people who sent him letters chiding him for gore might be feeling.
Ryan said, “Vanessa and I are going to help you find Susan.”
“Leave it to the cops,” said Vanessa, “and she’ll be luncheon meat before anybody finds her. Let me put out a dragnet tonight. Come over to my place tomorrow afternoon at five. I’ll give you the results and throw in dinner.” She paused. “Are you okay, John?”
“Why?”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I’m fine. Vanessa,” he said, “I have a question for you.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Why are you helping me? I mean, you don’t know me—you don’t—”
“Oh, stop right there. My angle is Ryan. You helped him, and so I’m helping you.”
“And?” asked John.
“And that’s all. Please, why don’t you tell me the real reason you’re so obsessed with finding Susan Colgate, huh? For all I know, she could be wearing a Girl Guide costume and decomposing underneath your front porch—and maybe all of this search stuff we’re doing is a ruse designed to deflect attention away from you.”
John was dismissive: “Not the case.”
“Okay then, why look for Susan Colgate, John?”
“It’s because . . .”
“Yes?”
John squeezed and squeezed his brain with his fingers like a hard-to-open bottle of olives. “It’s because she knows that people were meant to change. She knows it’s inevitable. And she seems to recognize I’m at a point in my life where I can’t transform anymore. I sound like a country-western song. Sorry.”
“Well, to me it looks like you’re stalking her. It could seem kind of creepy to her.”
“I’m not stalking her, Vanessa. I’m trying to find her. Nobody’s taking this disappearance seriously, except us.”
“Hey, what’s in this for Susan?” Ryan asked. “Assuming we rescue her from being tied up on top of the railway tracks.”
John glared at him.
“Sorry.”
But Ryan’s question got John to thinking. What did he bring to Susan’s table? Was he just another fucked-up Hollywood guy for her to take care of? No, because—because what? John reached down deep into the hole of his mind, trying to grasp onto a nugget of reason. He thought of the desperately lonely woman reading the Architectural Digest, and he thought of the woman he’d met outside the Pottery Barn who’d fed him dinner, the secret nation of Eleanor Rigbys who existed just under the threshold of perception. That this secret nation existed was new to him. That he might help fix it was even newer. “We have a lot in common,” he blurted out.
“Huh?” Both Ryan and Vanessa had each gone on to new thoughts.
“Haven’t you noticed that the couples who stick together the longest in life are the ones who shared some intense, freaky experience together? Jobs—school—a circle of friends?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, Susan and I did that, too.”
“But you have no idea where Susan went after the crash, John. I mean, you’re talking about disappearance, right?”
“Ryan, that’s what we learned about each other during our walk—that we both went to the same place. At the moment I don’t know her specifics, but that’ll happen once I find her.”
They fell silent. Vanessa was frozen at the wheel, as if driving through a snowstorm. They were in one of thousands of cars on a ten-lane freeway jammed with cars, even in the darkest part of the night, rivers of cars headed God knows where. Nobody spoke.
John slept all of the next day. That night, over a simple pasta primavera, Vanessa emptied out her net for John and Ryan to see her bounty. “Susan Amelia Colgate was born on March 4, 1970, in Corvallis, Oregon. Her mother, Marilyn, was married to a Duran Deschennes, but never actually got divorced.”
“She’s a polyandrist,” said Ryan.
“A what?” asked John.
“It’s the opposite of bigamy. When a woman has two or more husbands at once.”
“This Duran Deschennes guy got killed in 1983 and the mother married Donald Alexander Colgate in 1977, so for seven years she was a polyandrist. But my hunch is that Don Colgate has no idea he was hubby number two. I bet we three, along with Marilyn herself, are the only people in on her secret.”
Vanessa continued. “Susan grew up in McMinnville, Oregon-in a trailer, at that. She was a frequent entrant, finalist and winner in literally hundreds of beauty pageants during her youth. Her biggest win was the 1985 Miss USA Teen pageant in Denver, but she surrendered her crown there onstage, to LuAnn Ramsay, now wife of Arizona’s governor, I might add.”
“This stuff I already know,” said John. “Internet. Library. Magazines. Tell me something new.”
“In 1997 she was presumed dead in the Seneca plane crash, but she wasn’t, and to this day nobody knows where she spent almost exactly one calendar year. Even I couldn’t find anything there.”
“Such modesty.”
“Well, I did find something.”
“What?” John pounced.
“It may be nothing, but when I was patterning her phone data—”
“What phone data?”
“Oh, grow up. The era of privacy is over. As I was saying, I was patterning her phone data and found an anomaly. Her most-dialed phone number is to a guy named Randy Hexum. He lives out in the Valley. So I did a scan on him, and it turns out he’s from Erie, Pennsylvania. His real name’s Randy Montarelli and he lived thirty miles away from the police station where Susan turned herself in and claimed amnesia.”
“And?”
“They both arrived back in L.A. at the same time a year ago, and he went to work for Chris Thraice. Randy Montarelli-slash-Hexum also has almost no data attached to him since leaving Erie. It’s damn hard to have a dead data file, but he’s done it. It’s bloody suspicious.”
“He’s in the Valley?”
“Yup.”
John was up in a second, carrying the emptied plates into the kitchen, screwing the cap back on the Coke. He put it in the fridge. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty
When John was young, back in New York, in the third grade on one of his few nonsick days, a math teacher named Mr. Bird, who also filled the roles of gym teacher and guidance counselor, took the entire shivering class out onto the playing field. He pointed out white chalk marks which outlined a large square. Onto each of these marks he made students stand in place, and once everybody was in their assigned location, he used a megaphone he’d brought to shout out the following words: “Class, look at the area in front of your eyes. This is called an acre. For the rest of your lives you’re going to be hearing people talk about acres. Five acres. Three thousand acres. An acre and a half. Well, this is an acre. Look at it hard. Burn it into your memory because this is the one time in your life you’re going to see a perfect, one-hundred-percent-pure acre.”
John remembered that acre, cold and wet and trampled. Its size did truly stay in his mind, and as he crisscrossed the country on foot, he saw nothing but acres, on all horizons, all of them one hundred percent pure, one hundred percent empty and most of them ownerless. He was truly a Nobody now, the land was his. He felt like a king during his fe
w good moments, but these decreased as he nose-dived deeper into the American landscape. The sex had ended. Most forms of communication had quieted. Women vanished from his life and he missed them with the dull hunger of homesickness. He caught only glimpses of them, sleek, well fed, possessing clear goals and usually behind a car window in the process of rolling it up. John knew that he’d become the cautionary story their mothers had warned them about. He longed for female company and the ability of women to forgive, to care about hurts, and their readiness to laugh and be amused. His mother, Melody, Nylla and even the Florida twins, whose names he’d forgotten.
Nearly all of the Nobodies he saw were men. Women, he thought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world—children, families, friends.
John was an expert at looking in people’s eyes and knowing when they wanted something from him. Nobody gave him that look anymore. But he wasn’t astute about looking in people’s eyes and recognizing when they wanted to give him something. Sometimes he’d see a woman watching him as he walked from a Denny’s rest room back to the counter, or in a grocery store, tending to squawking kids and errant grocery carts. What were they offering? A meal and a dose of love to get him to the next way station? Women became to him portals back into a better place he’d always seemed to have overlooked.
Five drunk farm kids in a pickup rolled him one evening at sunset because he was there and they felt like doing it. His UPS uniform was Rorschached with blood puddles and he had to throw it into a gas-station litter bin. He spent his accumulated recycling money, fifteen dollars, on a discounted yellow T-shirt that read MY OTHER SHIRT IS A PORSCHE and a Corona beer wind-breaker that came free with a six-pack, which he drank, metabolized and pissed away in the space of one thunderstorm.
One night in Winslow, Arizona, he met a friendly-enough guy, Kevin. They’d both been checking out the pickings around an Exxon station’s groceteria. It was around sunset. One or two stars had risen in the sky. John had just found a pack of time-expired hot dogs when Kevin said, “I’ve got a place not far from here. We can go eat there.” Kevin seemed friendly enough and John missed simple conversation. Truth be told, he hadn’t had a profound thought in weeks.
Home was underneath a sun-rusted bridge that crossed a dry gully, decorated with high school graduation graffiti, so-and-so-was-here felt-pennings, sun-rotted condoms and a mattress so verminous that John consciously swept his way around it, as if he might catch athletically hopping crabs.
“Here. Get a fire going.” He helped John light a twig fire beneath an inverted Chevelle hubcap filled with the lame trickle of water dripping down the gully’s bottom-most rift. The water came to a boil and John put his time-expired hot dogs into it and the two watched them cook and said nothing. John figured so much for conversation.
They ate the hot dogs, shared only the most cursory of stories—mostly about planned trips, whether the other was headed east or west, or what the weather might do; neither offered up his past—and then the sky was dark. Kevin went to sleep on the mattress. John found a sandy nook high up in a corner underneath the bridge where it joined the road. He’d learned that there was little, if anything, for a Nobody to do past sundown. He fell asleep to the sound of the occasional vehicle passing overhead.
Somewhere in the night he felt a jolt of pain inside his dream, and he woke up to find Kevin walloping him with a broken-off metal rear flap from a shopping cart. Kevin was spewing out random invective: “Take my hot dogs away from me, will you? Steal a man’s food right from under his nose, you’re no better than Detroit automakers . . .”
Blood dripping from a gash in his cheekbone, John ran away, down the road, into flat landscape, nothing on either side, finally far enough away to feel safe. He scuttled off the road, into a patch of desert, found a rut, crept into it, heard small animals scurry away, and then once more slept.
The next day in Flagstaff he ate a discarded hamburger for lunch. The meat tasted strange, but he ignored it. Four hours later he was walking down a gravel road in what he thought was the direction of a meteorite crater he’d read about as a sick kid in Manhattan, when his gut collapsed as if he’d been judo-chopped, and he keeled over, into a dry ditch alongside the road. He began to shit and vomit as though all the cells in his body were screaming to empty themselves of toxins. In the haze of illness he removed his pants, knowing he had to keep them clean, and clumped his still clean clothes in a heap above him. He lay on the gritty soil and his body exploded. He could see the mountains and the mesas on the horizons, and billions of acres. John tried to imagine a bunch of children—all the kids in Arizona—standing around the edge of this landscape so savage and broken and freshly ripped from the kiln, and imagined as he clutched his stomach that children might one day play on this desert, this blank space; but he knew they never would, the land would always outsmart them, always be just one notch more cruel.
He asked the stars to give him some kind of word, but the stars gave nothing. Then he recalled being in the hospital a few months before—had it been so recently as December?—the night of his flu and the vision. He remembered seeing Susan Colgate on TV—before he conked out completely—and he suddenly realized that his vision of Susan’s face was a rerun that had been playing on his bedside TV, and it meant nothing. His time on the road was a sham as well. His exercise in going solo was a cosmic joke. He was inside a hellish one-panel New Yorker cartoon captioned, “Her face was just some TV actress your neurons glommed onto.” And here he was, near death again, except this time he just didn’t care.
He fell unconscious, and when he woke up, he didn’t know how much later, he saw the Milky Way and some shooting stars, and knew that the worst had passed, but his body felt like a chunk of salt licorice, as if all its moisture was gone. Then he heard an idling engine and a woman’s voice. The woman was carrying a flashlight and she told him he was going to be okay, he could come with her. He forgot he was naked and crawled up the crumbling ditch. A man’s voice said, “One wrong move, asshole, and I’ll blow you into hamburger.”
The woman said, “Eric, put that thing down and pass me the bag of groceries. Jeanie, get the blanket from behind my seat.” Jeanie, a teenage girl, was videotaping John. “My name is Beth,” the woman said. “Here . . .” She placed an Arapaho blanket around his shoulders and then opened a cardboard carton of orange juice. “Here, drink this up. You’re dehydrated.”
John guzzled the juice and collapsed on his knees. His teeth chattered. Beth retrieved his bundled clothing. He saw the man in a truck. “Eric, goddammit, help this guy out. Get out here.” Eric put down the gun and reluctantly helped Beth lift John onto the truck bed. She spoke to John over the bed’s rim. “What’s your name, hon?”
He said, “John.”
“John, you lie down and we’ll have you home in a few minutes, okay?”
John said, “Okay,” then lay back and watched the blinking red light of Jeanie’s camcorder taping him. Then he tilted his head back and looked at the stars, and he began to cry because it had all been a waste and because the voice of Susan was only a sound buried under a laugh track he’d heard by accident in a stale white room.
Chapter Twenty-one
Even the most anal of the 4 A.M. bread-baking monks would be unable to compete with Eugene Lindsay’s compulsion for getting his postal fraud mail-outs into the local postbox before morning pickup. Susan was drafted into this work pronto, and even when she was half a year pregnant, Eugene still had her lugging box loads of heavy documents and paper up and down the basement stairs. Susan could have cared less. For the first time in her life she felt as if there were no tightly coiled springs waiting to lurch out from beneath her skin. She felt as if she were on holiday. Added bonus: wild sex, up until the baby got too big.
“Yooj, I feel like a Cambodian peasant or something, freighting these—what are they?”—she looked down at the envelopes in the box she was holding—“mail-outs to the Greater Tampa, Florida, postal region. I could drop Junior into t
he rice paddy and be back on threshing duty the next afternoon.”
Eugene attended his Xerox 5380 console copier like a surgeon with a patient, bathed in strobes of Frankenstein green light. “Hey, sunshine, God bless Florida. All those seniors with nothing but free time and too many radio stations. They hand in their mailing addresses like they were spare change. Now let’s get them up to the front door. Mush!”
When winter came, the air in the house became drier, but the daily schedule went on unchanged. In December, when Susan had realized she was pregnant, Eugene forbid her to go near the microwave oven or to drink alcohol.
Spring and summer came and went. She liked her job. She opened the daily mail, which Eugene picked up at a post-office box a few streets over. Inside the envelopes came crumpled money, sent in by superstitious radio enthusiasts whose names Eugene purchased from an old college pal who’d become a telemarketing whiz—suckers! Most often it consisted of two twenties and a ten, but sometimes Susan collected wads of ones and fives in dirty little clumps, likely scrounged from under the front seat of a teenager’s car. What did these people want? What kind of cosmic roulette wheel did they hope to spin by responding to Eugene’s fraudulent thrusts?
Susan’s stomach felt as if it contained a great big ski boot that rolled around inside her. The Seneca plane crash seemed like a lifetime ago, her precrash life, a miraculous story of outrageous behavior relayed to her the morning after a drinking binge blackout. The only real reminders she had of her former days were the passing glimpses of herself on TV-reruns of old shows—as well as the image of Marilyn, now dressed like a Fifth Avenue stick insect, hair chignoned regardless of time of day or season, scrapping it out in court with the airline.
The crux of Marilyn’s case was that Susan’s physical remains were never found despite indisputable evidence she was on the flight (a GTE Airfone call and the testimony of four ground staffers) and that, unlike other family members of crash victims, Marilyn was alone in not having so much as a fingernail with which to memorialize her daughter.
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