A Perfect Universe

by Scott O'Connor

  Then I only saw Martín in the early mornings, when I was going out on my bike. Passing the front window of the Romeros’ trailer, I could see the back of his head there, his thick brown curls in front of the cartoons on TV.

  * * *

  “Ellie,” Gary said. “So quiet.” He stared at me from his chair, swallowing hard, trying to get his throat to work enough to continue speaking. It was Friday night, a week after Martín and I saw the movie. I was sprawled on our sofa reading a bike magazine. I had a nearly new Dawes Galaxy stashed out in the toolshed and wanted to be armed with some pricing information when I brought it over to Donald the next morning.

  Gary cleared his throat again, then gave up and tilted his head in the direction of the wall of metal shelving at the back of the trailer. That’s where he stored his records, hundreds of them, lined up neatly in rows I tried to keep free of cobwebs and dust. The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, The Shirelles, The Chiffons. I knew what he wanted. I walked to the shelves and found the LP, pulled it from its jacket and plastic sleeve. On the cover was a singer named Martha Fox. She had a strong, lean face, rich brown skin, dark eyes. She was holding a microphone to her lips, staring at the camera, her expression somewhere between a smirk and a snarl. The record was called Martha Fox and the Tick-Tocks. My father had produced it many years ago at a studio in Hollywood. His name was listed on the back cover credits. My mother’s name was there, too. She was one of the Tick-Tocks, Martha Fox’s backup singers, the only white girl in the group.

  I carried the record to the turntable and switched on the receiver. The machine warmed up slowly with a low, velvety hum. I lowered the needle onto the record, and after the first crackles and pops the music began, brash and brassy, Martha Fox’s voice full of gravel and attitude. My father listened with his eyes closed, and when the Tick-Tocks sang out in the background, he lifted his eyebrows, the smallest gesture, then cleared his throat and said, “There. Do you hear her?”

  I told him that I did, though no matter how many times I listened to that record, I was never able to pick out which voice was hers.

  “You don’t look like her,” he said. His eyes were open now, looking at me, and then they glazed, retreating, remembering. He had stopped swallowing so hard. His voice came easier now; music always seemed to settle him.

  “Isn’t that strange?” he said. “She was such a beautiful girl. You look more like me.”

  Later in the bedroom, I stood in front of my mirror and looked at my face, the large features I shared with him, the long range of whiteheads along my cheeks and chin that would one day leave a field of shallow round scars, just like his. I’d only ever seen my mother a few times that I could remember, when an emaciated and strung-out bottle blonde showed up at the trailer asking my father for money. He’d always sent me into the bedroom, where I watched through a crack in the door, staring at the woman, her body bent in desperate need. I tried to see something, anything in her skeletal face, in her posture, that spoke to something in me, that tied us together, some call-and-response like the voices on the record, a shared sound.

  I pulled off my T-shirt, my sweatpants. There were scars across the undersides of my forearms, along the muscles of my calves, my inner thighs. Short brown lines, an inch or so long, raised a bit on the skin. Little speed bumps. Before I started taking bikes, I had a few years where I’d take Gary’s razor and after I’d shaved his face at the kitchen sink I’d lock myself in the bathroom and pull the blade across my own skin, harder than on his, until I felt the pop and the bite and a little space opened, quickly flooding with blood. Two years, maybe, or three. It always scared the hell out of me, and maybe that’s why I did it, because the fear made me lightheaded but awake, apart, like I’d found a place no one else had discovered. When I started taking bikes, I cooled it with the razor. It didn’t seem necessary anymore. I realized then that there were other ways to step outside of myself.

  It was only when I looked at the scars that I saw any similarity with my mother. That crippled woman, eaten away by need. It was in those moments—when my father played the record out in the trailer, when I imagined I could hear her voice—that it seemed like this image in the mirror was someone she might understand.

  A flurry of insistent knocking brought me back out in my pajamas. I padded past Gary, asleep now in his chair, and opened the door to find Mr. and Mrs. Romero and Martín’s grandmother standing together on the step. It was the first time I’d seen Martín’s grandmother up close. A small woman with a gold-capped overbite, she worked her hands together furiously, as if trying to rub the skin from one to the other. Mrs. Romero wasn’t smiling this time, and she looked past me into the trailer, her eyes searching the living room, the kitchen beyond. Before I could ask what was wrong, she started speaking in a hurried jumble of English and Spanish, asking if I had seen Martín. No, I said, but before I could say more, before I could ask what was wrong, she was talking again, pleading. Please, Ellie, she said, tell me that you know where he is. Que has visto mi hijo. Please tell me que está seguro, mi Martín. Please tell me he’s safe.

  * * *

  The next morning, the trailer park was swarming with cops. I worried about Martín but was also freaking out that the cops would poke around in the shed and find the Galaxy I’d parked in there. I started to feel so sick and guilty that after an hour or so I just marched out of our trailer, through the squad cars and worried neighbors, straight to the shed. I climbed onto the Galaxy and rode back through the cops like I owned the thing.

  I should have taken the bike straight to Donald, but instead I circled the neighborhood looking for Martín. I rode up Brand Boulevard peering into storefront windows; I rode through the side streets behind the library, the nicer houses with their sloping green lawns, bicentennial flags waving from front porches. I rode along the top of the river’s cement wall, looking down into the dry bed, shouting his name. It was a stupid risk, riding that bike with so many cops around. I kept waiting to hear the chirp of a siren coming up behind me.

  Finally, I rode out to Highland Park. Donald gave me fifteen bucks for the bike. I didn’t even argue, just took the bus back to where I’d stashed my Schwinn and rode back to Atwater. It was evening by then, the sky dimming red above the tree line. Martín still wasn’t home. Word had spread while I was away, though, and as I rode back through the neighborhood I could hear other voices on other streets, different layers of distance and volume in the gathering dark, Martín, Martín, like echoes of my own voice calling his name.

  * * *

  The story was that Martín had been playing at the park by the elementary school with a few of his friends. There was some sort of disagreement over a toy, and Martín stormed away to the other end of the playground, alone. His grandmother was supposed to be watching the boys, but it was the heat of the day and she’d dozed off sitting beneath one of the school’s shady oaks.

  Afterward, the other boys remembered a fat white man walking on the other side of the playground fence. They remembered a skinny black man rummaging through the garbage cans. They remembered two women in a yellow van, the same yellow van that had been spotted at the scene of other abductions that summer.

  At first, none of the boys remembered seeing Martín with any of the possible suspects. When pressed by their parents or the police, though, their memories began to change. Some said that they could clearly recall Martín walking with the fat white man on the other side of the fence. Some saw him with the skinny black man. Eduardo Lopez, the oldest of the boys, a second grader, was the one who remembered the women and the van. He said he saw Martín lured into the back with a handful of candy. Jolly Ranchers, he said, red and yellow and green.

  Flyers went up around the neighborhood, stapled to telephone poles and taped to stop signs, showing a black-and-white copy of Martín’s kindergarten photo and descriptions of the women and the van. Martín’s parents went door-to-door in the park, and then out into the surrounding neighborhood, then out into the next. They were joined
by other adults who could get off work, or older kids who didn’t have summer jobs. I spent those first few days riding in wider and wider rings from the park, pedaling up behind apartments and into vacant lots, calling for Martín, looking for the van. Every night when I returned home, I would find Martín’s grandmother, still in her housedress, her apron, walking and wringing her hands, calling his name in her high, unsteady voice like some kind of ghost, haunting the dark lanes between trailers. In bed I’d stick my fingers in my ears, or turn up my clock radio to drown out that sound, thinking that this wouldn’t have happened if I had been with him, if I had still been babysitting. I never would have fallen asleep, I thought. I never would have let him out of my sight.

  As the week went on, fewer cops showed up. That next Friday morning, when I looked out the trailer’s front window, there wasn’t a single squad car parked outside. Gary rolled up beside me and looked out and said that the police had moved on, that there were other problems in the city. There was only so long, he said, that everyone would come around looking for the same little brown boy.

  * * *

  The next day I rode around Glendale, looking for Martín, asking everyone I passed if they’d seen a boy like him, if they’d seen the van. By late afternoon I was fried by the heat and the empty stares. I found myself back at the movie theater, where Martín and I had gone just two weeks before. I bought a ticket and sat alone in the middle of all the empty seats. There was one part of the movie that had stuck with me, one sequence that I remembered as I rode around calling his name. I wasn’t exactly sure why, but I wanted to see it again.

  It was one of the final scenes, a chase through the long, branching corridors of a vast high-tech facility, a water-making plant on a desert planet. The plant had been sabotaged, flooding with all of the water it had created. The wife of the movie’s hero was lost inside. Hearing the first rush of water, she starts to run. The movie’s perspective shifts then, to the action seen through her eyes. The movement of the camera—of the woman—is jerky and panicked. She gathers speed, and the walls on either side with their looping wires and blinking lights begin to blur. The sound of the flood grows louder, and when she passes connecting corridors she can see walls of water surging from each side, crashing behind as she runs past. She turns her head this way and that. The camera frame begins to rattle from the speed. The synthesizer music and the sound of the woman’s breathing are uncomfortably loud. She runs and runs, the image jumping even more violently, and for a moment it feels like the entire theater will shake apart, but then there’s a light, the flat orange sunlight of the alien planet, a square of it growing in the distance, an open doorway getting closer as the woman rushes toward it. Suddenly there’s another, smaller figure ahead in the corridor, and I remembered then that I had forgotten that part, that the woman’s son was lost there, too. All she can see is the top of his head, his dark curly hair bobbing up in the frame, but she’s able to grab him as she runs by. The camera is shaking so violently that the doorway becomes abstract, just shape and color growing to fill the frame. That warm orange light covers the screen, the theater, my face and hands, spreading across my skin, filling my body. Through the doorway, she sees an escape pod gleaming in the distance. She needs to reach it, but the water’s here now, there’s only time for a single breath. She takes it, and I take it, and she makes one final push and then they’re out, free of the corridor, into the open air of the alien planet. The scene cuts outside then, the woman falling to the ground on top of her son, covering him as the water bursts from the doorway like a wild animal, arcing over the two bodies pressed low into the sand. She’s gone for a moment, they’re both lost below, and then she bursts through to the surface, gasping, still holding her son, swimming now toward the pod.

  I had thought it was the thrill of the chase that had stuck with me, like riding a bike down the Cahuenga Pass at rush hour, flying through the streaming avalanche of cars, but sitting alone in the dark theater long after the credits had passed I realized that it was the son, it was the boy I had come back to see. In other parts of the film there were no real similarities, but when it was just his curls bobbing in the frame, just his small body covered by his mother’s, the kid actor looked for all the world like Martín.

  * * *

  That night, I came home to find Gary spilled from his wheelchair, lying spread out across the kitchen floor. The kitchen was tiny, so his arms and legs were bent where they pushed against the walls and cabinets. He was snoring loudly. There was an empty bottle in one of his hands, and another beside his head, its wet lip just an inch or so from his open mouth.

  At that moment, more than any time before, I wanted to follow his directions, to turn and walk from the trailer. No goodbyes. I wanted to get on my bike and ride, even if the Schwinn would only carry me so far. I didn’t think I could wait for however long it would take to make enough money; I didn’t think I could spend another day there, with Gary, with Martín’s parents knocking door-to-door, with his grandmother walking between the trailers at night, calling his name.

  In my room, I counted the money from my mattress, knowing it wasn’t enough, but hoping that it could get me part of the way, out of the city at least, starting along one of those routes from the map I’d memorized, those multicolored lines I saw every time I closed my eyes.

  Ellie, I heard my father call. Ellie, I need you.

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave. Maybe if he had been violent, or abusive, but he was just sick. He was just sad and trapped. How could I leave? I stuffed the money back into my mattress and returned to the kitchen. I pulled him into his chair, got him his pills, his bottle. His hair was wet with sweat, plastered across his forehead. He needed a shave and a bath. His smell filled the small room. I stood against the wall by the window and he drank and stared at me. It was like the moment after a fight, like the fights I used to have with girls at school, when the girl and I were completely worn out but still circling each other, wondering what was left, where we went from there.

  * * *

  Mid-June became late-June. It felt like rain, but not a single drop fell. The city was suffused with a steamy sepia haze, hot and oppressively humid. I stopped looking for bikes, and spent all my time looking for Martín. Everywhere I rode, I thought that I saw him. The streets were full of brown, dark-haired boys. The Romeros continued their search. They walked the neighborhood and took the bus to other neighborhoods to walk the streets there. They visited the police precinct every afternoon. Sometimes patrol officers gave them a ride home in one of the squad cars.

  At the window, watching, my father said, “A kid missing this long isn’t missing anymore. He’s just gone.”

  The rumors continued cycling—two sisters or lesbians with handfuls of Jolly Ranchers in a yellow van—but they were becoming legend rather than news, stories I heard kids telling at the flagpole when it was getting late, to scare one another for the walk home.

  Other grandmothers came to the park to watch the younger kids. Martín’s grandmother was never part of them. It was like she was cursed, like her misfortune might be contagious.

  I looked for Martín, and when I got burned out from that, when every kid I saw looked like him and I started to think it was pointless, I went to see the movie. I sat through the first hour and a half, fidgety, impatient to get to that late sequence, the race through the corridors. Alone in the dark, the woman’s panic felt like my own, and I’d grip the arms of my seat and breathe with her, running through those endlessly branching corridors, trying to outrace the flood, until the boy’s head appeared, and then we’d both grab him and sprint for the light, the sand. The water rushed over us, and I could feel it, the roaring whoosh overhead and then the small body beneath mine, Martín held safe in my arms.

  * * *

  The movie began to disappear. I had to ride farther to see it, out to Sherman Oaks or down to Westchester, by the airport. Usually, I was the only person in the audience. This was true during weekday matinees, but als
o on Friday and Saturday nights, during stretches of heat that should have driven people into the theater just for the air-conditioned darkness. At a theater in Redondo Beach, the old man in the ticket booth didn’t even bother to charge me, letting me pass with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  I was on my way to a theater in West Hollywood, crossing the intersection of La Brea and Sunset, when I saw the van.

  It seemed like something out of a dream, some kind of mythical creature alive now in the bright afternoon of the real world. The van was yellow and rusty, with two women in the front seats. I could hardly believe it, but when they passed, I followed, climbing La Brea north. The traffic was getting heavier as rush hour approached, and I squeezed between lanes, my elbows and knees skimming the doors and mirrors of the cars parked along the edge of the street.

  The van cut east and then north again on Highland, climbing through the canyon, past the Hollywood Bowl and along the raised freeway of speeding cars. Hoods and windshields slapped reflected sunlight into my eyes. The climb was tough, unrelentingly uphill. Sweat ran down my calves and forearms, making it hard to keep my hands on my grips, but I knew the crest would come soon. By the time I reached it I had almost lost sight of the van, but on the downhill drop I tucked into the frame of the Schwinn and lowered my head and let gravity pull. I flew down the hill, passing cars and pickups and tractor trailers, all rattling dangerously close from the speed. The wind rushed against my face, almost forcing my eyes shut. The bike shook beneath me, and for a moment I could imagine it bursting apart, frame cracking, tires bouncing, my body hitting the asphalt and tumbling, skidding, sliding, but it all held together, and I remembered what Donald always said when I brought him a Schwinn; Not much to look at, but sturdy as a sonofabitch.

  Finally, the valley flattened out, and the van slowed, turning north again on Vineland. I knew that I needed to stay back, a couple of car lengths at least, so the women wouldn’t notice me following. They continued up to where the freeway cut across the valley floor and for a second I worried that they were going to jump on, but at the next light they turned west, sticking to the surface streets, heading into Van Nuys.