What if we actually were our names? Elizabeth asks.
What do you think, Mare? Zadie whinnies.
Someone is watching us, Elizabeth says.
Meredith holds up an ash-smudged finger like a TV prosecutor. Or our memories of what we might have been, given a little more time.
Puck says from the stage that it’s just the mushrooms talking.
Actors, Elizabeth says, smirking.
Still, he is kind of cute, Zadie says, feeling wistful.
There is pressure in Hollis’s ear. The wind whistles through the bare limbs, stirs the ash. The moon-tower glow weighs down the sky until they are on the bottom of a vast, shallow sea. A sea that’s built its monuments of coral and shell and limestone from the death of its own body, from small and terrible sufferings that it’s kept hidden from itself.
Oh, it’s the art car guy, Meredith says in a way that makes pride and shame flicker through Hollis like heat lightning.
Elizabeth lifts her head and closes her eyes like a medium. Ah. I see now.
He’s building a monument.
A shrine, Zadie corrects. Holds up an ashy index finger.
A likeness, Meredith says, with a kind of finality.
Hollis can smell their Dolce & Gabbana perfume in the trees now (which they’ve applied liberally to cover the waffle cone smell) and feels the ache of leaving and coming home (which strikes the girls as funny, since he lives in his car) and remembers suddenly the milky smell of his mother’s dress right after she’d had her last child, who was not really his brother, how it thrilled and repulsed him.
He wants to tell them he can’t help. That even though they are on the floor of a shallow sea and greatly changed, he can’t even tell them what has happened to them or who has done it.
You have carved us on the palm of your hand, they say, one voice handing off to the next like a relay race. And he denies them three times. Until finally they spit him out onto the rocky crags of the park, his ears, two seashells, still murmuring of the sea.
18
THE DETECTIVES TOLD Michael there had been a lucky break in the case. They’d picked him up at the apartment, taken him and Alice to the police station downtown, a squatty low-rise with tall, narrow windows, like coin slots. Michael sat in the detective’s hard plastic chairs in a small room with the camera high in the corner. A woman with cropped hair and large eyes had taken Alice from him on the way in. She had an ID tag slung around her neck that seemed to give her the right. Michael told the woman Alice was allergic to strawberries and the woman said she’d make a note about that but then didn’t. Michael said for Alice to be good for the nice woman. He’d come get her soon. Alice gave him a look of limitless blame over the woman’s shoulder and he’d waved to her until she disappeared through a set of double doors.
There were two detectives. Detective Murrow was fat and kind. Detective Lawrence was sinewy and gruff. They had their parts to play, he had his. That was one of the rules here. They first asked him what he’d been doing in the four years and eight months since the last time Robeson, the lead detective, had questioned him, and his answers seemed, even to him, oddly evasive and incomplete. “When I became a dad, things changed,” he said, finally. They tried to scare him with the usual deceptions and wickedness, saying his friends had told them this and that about his whereabouts on the night of the murders. That a witness had finally come forward and placed him in the ice cream shop parking lot late that night. They wondered if Michael might remember any more details to help them out. They had his statement from before, but they were looking for clarity. If he wasn’t there, then he needed to tell them where he was. No harm in that, right? Just clarification. Detective Morrow wanted to be his friend. “We know you didn’t intend to mislead us, but there are things here, Michael, that just don’t add up.” Michael tried to steady his Xanax-hands in his lap. What had he intended? Hardly anything he’d ever done.
The detectives knew all about his past: How he’d quit school in the fall, weeks before the murders. He’d been in juvenile detention a couple of times before that. Drug charges. Disorderly. He’d twice been picked up for breaking and entering, though they never caught him with any stolen goods. His dad had hired an attorney to pull his ass out of the fire. They knew quite a bit about his brother Andrew, too. “A cautionary fucking tale,” Detective Lawrence said.
“Can I smoke in here?” Michael asked.
Detective Morrow said they’d give him time for that later.
Just like before, Michael told the detectives he would try to help them. But the night is a smear in his mind, he tells them. Indistinct. But he will try to retrace his steps. To get it right. Maybe he saw something? Maybe. He was nearby. He wouldn’t deny that. He’d been out with some friends, first over to the Peter Pan Mini Golf, and then drinking beer, he told them, down along the creek like they sometimes did, about eleven. That’s when he saw the smoke.
“Right,” Detective Morrow said, sitting down heavily in a chair beside him. His midsection fat squeezed into a roll beneath his shirt. “You said that before, Michael. About the smoke. How can you see smoke at night?”
Michael said he didn’t know. Maybe he just smelled it, then.
Detective Morrow said, “Now, here’s the thing: Your friends have told us you were there, at the ice cream shop.”
He saw Lucinda talking and talking with her hands, like she did. The cigarette between her fingers tracing the air. The ashtray balanced on her naked belly. She could go on and on.
Michael wanted to help them, he said. He did. But back then he’d been high or drunk more than half those nights. Could they remember all the things they did when they were seventeen?
“Awful things happened to those girls,” Detective Lawrence said with his hard, sinewy face. He tapped a pencil on the table.
“Awful things,” Michael said, nodding. Why was he nodding? His skin tightened around his eyes.
“You didn’t want those awful things to happen, Michael,” his friend Detective Morrow said. “We think someone put you up to robbing the place. But then things went wrong. Things got out of hand.” Detective Morrow seemed to drift off momentarily to the place where things always got out of hand and girls never made it back to their beds.
“A clusterfuck,” Michael said. The tiny room blurred at the edges, drifted.
“Something like that,” Detective Morrow said, nodding.
“Like people just lost their minds,” Michael said.
“Some people did,” Detective Morrow said. “And some people got trapped.”
“What’s your daughter’s name, Michael?” Detective Lawrence asked.
“Alice.”
“Beautiful little girl.”
“Thank you.”
“How old is Alice? About four?”
Michael nodded. “Am I under arrest?”
“No, sir. You can walk out of here anytime,” Detective Lawrence said but didn’t mean it.
“Walk right out?” Michael smiled.
“Yes,” Detective Morrow said.
“But y’all don’t believe me.”
“We’re not sure what to believe, Michael.”
“Believe I was never there,” Michael said, like an incantation.
Something elusive was happening in the room. Above them, one of the fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed. Standing at the front of the table, Detective Lawrence shifted on his feet like an athlete. Detective Morrow sat back in his chair with his arms crossed, legs splayed. The door between them was a narrow slab of beige. Framed for a moment in the door’s small window, the face of the woman with the large eyes who’d taken Alice from him.
Detective Lawrence sighed the way he did before he threw something or ruffled his papers or walked behind you so you couldn’t see what he was up to. He blurred a little around the head and shoulders.
How long would this go on? What could he say to make it end? He looked toward the small window again and Andrew’s face looked back.
&nb
sp; Michael’s bowels filled with sand.
“Michael? You okay?” Detective Morrow asked.
Michael nodded, unconvincingly.
“Let’s back up a bit. Who was there that night? Down by the creek with you?”
“Just friends, you know. Scott Carl, probably. A girl named Letty I used to hang out with.”
“Anybody else?”
“That’s all I can remember.”
“What if I told you they never saw you down by the creek?” Detective Morrow said. “Would that surprise you?”
He tried to imagine what might surprise him but came up empty. His jaw ached. He thought he could hear Alice calling him from some other room.
“We know you were there, Michael,” Detective Morrow said. “Who else was there?”
“I’d really like to help y’all,” he said, weakly. He was grinding his teeth again. He needed a cigarette.
“We know there were two other men. We know you didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“I saw him just sitting there on that picnic table,” Michael said. “He didn’t say much. Didn’t tell me which way to go, what to do, or anything like that. He was never good at that kind of stuff.”
“Who are we talking about here?” Detective Morrow said.
“Andrew busted my nose once. I had to go to the hospital.”
“Stay with me, Michael.”
“He didn’t mean to. It just happened.”
“Like with the girls?” Detective Morrow said.
“They weren’t supposed to be there,” Michael said.
“I believe you,” Detective Morrow said.
“So why were they there?” Michael asked. He knew something significant pivoted off the answer to this question. In one version of the night in his head, he hears the girls’ singsong voices in the parking lot, the jangle of car keys as the car starts, the first guitar chords of a song on the radio.
“I don’t know,” Detective Morrow said. “Who else was there who wasn’t supposed to be, Michael?”
Everything Detective Morrow didn’t know made Michael want to weep. His ignorance was unbearably large.
Michael watched the patterns of light on the white table, a trapezoid, rectangle. No names, the younger man had said. Whatever you put a name to would lose its power. It was the opposite of what most people thought, the younger man said. Sometimes not knowing was stronger than knowing. The older man Michael hated said that if that was true, then Michael was the strongest of all. The older man grinned. Michael thought it was all bullshit but he liked hearing the younger man talk, the cadence of his voice. Inviolable was a word the younger man used. Their bond was inviolable. Michael would regret it terribly if he even thought of breaking it. What are men, the younger man said, without their word?
“He has a real way with people,” Michael told Detective Morrow. “He could smile and get you to do just about anything.”
“Whose smile, Michael?” Detective Morrow asked. He put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. The detective looked at him as if he understood the struggles of someone who worked with his hands for a living, someone with responsibilities, a father, like the detective himself, who wanted to do the right thing but for some reason never could. Michael knew if he laid down his burden, the detective would carry it. And for a moment Detective Morrow’s bulk seemed to fill the whole room and Michael felt weightless, hardly anchored to the earth at all.
19
JACK LOST HIS daughter, Sam, at the River Festival when she was six. His friends said what happened was understandable, considering his wife’s aneurysm, her lengthy hospitalization. All the stress. But he knew they were lying. It happened because he was selfish. Thinking about his dick. He’d been standing at a raffle booth near the Ferris wheel, talking with Carla Looper, who had taught school with his wife. He’d always found Carla attractive and after a few beers he’d gotten the courage to talk to her. It would be a few years before they slept together, a half dozen more before Carla moved in with him and Sam. Sam, six years old, was twenty feet away, watching people throwing baseballs at the dunking booth. She made an exaggerated pitching motion toward him and smiled—she often pretended to like baseball for his sake. Carla counted out her register and asked him how Sam was dealing with her mother’s absence. Jack told her that Sam would sometimes sit with her mother in her hospital room among the whirring machines and tell her old jokes, ones they’d enjoyed together before the aneurysm. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Carla smiled, her face open and sympathetic. And for a moment—and this is something Jack’s nearly forgotten—he had pictured a naked Carla, moving her hips on top of him, her face lit with pleasure. He’d tried to push the image away. Then he’d glanced over at the dunking booth cage and Sam had vanished.
The River Festival director made the announcements over the loudspeaker. For a moment, there was a deflated silence in the crowd and the parents seemed to glance around for their children, touch them on shoulder or head to confirm that they were real. Volunteers with flashlights combed the dusky grounds and the park beyond. Wading into the duckweed and cattails and calling for Sam along the shore, the mud sucking at his tennis shoes, Jack could see families canoeing nearby, their faces appearing here and there in the glow of flashlights. Their calm voices traveled over the water. He could hear paddles strike the surface. A female voice somewhere said that the river was an ancient seabed once. An estuary. They seemed to take part in another world.
Jack took deep breaths, shoved aside terrible images that strobed his mind, focused on his search-and-rescue training. He organized parents and some of the off-duty police who were working security at the festival. They made a makeshift grid and walked it, their flashlights flaring off parking lots and the Zilker Hillside Theater stage, where they’d just held a summer-stock play. People were still scattered here and there on blankets, drinking, talking, under the false glow of the moon tower. Sam’s name echoed from the tree-lined edges of the park.
The year before, he’d taken Sam and his wife to a spot below the Springs for a swim. This was two months before the aneurysm, before things changed so abruptly. It was just before sunset and they’d looked up from the edge of the water to see a plume of smoke and fire trailing high over their heads. A flock of grackles wheeled crazily over the water and up the banks of the creek. He remembered standing knee-deep in the current with his family, looking up at the smoldering sky, thinking it portended something. But it wasn’t clear what.
“Oh, it’s the space shuttle,” his wife said, suddenly, “coming back to Earth.”
“Why is it on fire?” Sam said.
“It only looks that way,” Jack said.
“Like in a movie,” Sam said matter-of-factly, staring up at the plume.
“The astronauts are safe and sound inside,” his wife said. “They’re looking out the windows.”
“Can they see us?” Sam asked.
“We’re too tiny,” Jack said.
“Are we like microbes?” Sam asked.
“They probably see rivers and hills,” his wife said.
“What about our house?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know. They’re pretty far up there,” Jack said.
“When you’re that far up, the ground misses you more.”
“Maybe so,” Jack said.
The grackles wheeled and cried out like rusty gates. The sky burned.
Jack’s wife turned to him, smiled. “I’m glad I’m here with you and Sam to see this,” she said. “It’s really something.”
The morning Jack’s wife was struck down by the aneurysm, she’d done something they could never explain: she’d taken a baseball bat from the hall closet and shattered the three bay windows in the den.
Two park employees found Sam near the canoe rental. In the car on the way home, Jack had asked Sam why she’d wandered away, how she’d vanished. His blood pressure was up. There was a steady pain behind his eyes. Sam said she’d made herself invisible. It wasn’t hard, she said.
It’s like how in a joke one word can hide behind the meaning of another. It’s right in front of you but you don’t see it. Invisible. She said she didn’t realize she’d gone so far until she saw the rental canoes yoked together with a chain, paddles sticking from the barrels, the blue light at the end of the dock. She said she’d walked there with a boy. “What boy?” he’d asked. She said, “The one who teaches you how to be invisible.”
20
WHAT HOLLIS REMEMBERS: He was driving a medical supply truck at night along the rutted dirt road to Mosul, something he’d done dozens of times. A companion beside him was singing or humming a song Hollis couldn’t name but that the companion had sung or hummed before. A dust storm had just passed through the Iraqi village they were entering, and Hollis could taste grit in the air. Dust swirled in the headlights and it seemed for a moment like they were driving on the bottom of a silty sea. Then came the bright flash of light. Hollis remembers thinking that the light was both terrible and beautiful and that if circumstances were different he would have looked at it longer. It lit up the road and surrounding desert and revealed what he never noticed anymore—a half-eaten dog carcass, an old tire, a woman’s discarded purple slipper—but it seemed to flash inside him, too, and he imagined in that instant that all his organs were distinct and visible, which he thought was funny because as a medic he knew organs were often unrecognizable when looked at on the inside. Like one organism, indivisible.
There was no bomb concussion. Instead, a girl child appeared in the road. She wore a blue flowered dress. Her face was calm. Hollis swerved. The truck went into the ditch.
The roaring of the Lord was deafening. But it was hard to tell what it all meant.
After the truck flipped over, he decided to lie there for a bit before trying to open his eyes. Get his bearings. He couldn’t lift his head but somehow knew his skull was pointed to the east, toward Mecca. The air had a burned smell. Also blood. Shit. His singing or humming companion’s twisted body was somewhere around. He tried to plan triage in his head. He couldn’t hear a thing except for a singsong call to prayer, which also sounded like the music to an old TV variety show being played underwater. The image of the girl in the road lingered behind his eyelids. Fired his brain by some alchemical process. He wondered if he was bleeding from his ears. To take his mind off this, he took an inventory with his hands, opened his jacket, felt along his chest, rib cage, abdomen. He seemed to be dressed in a suit of chain mail. He remembered thinking, lying there in the darkness waiting on the assassins, about a TV documentary he’d once seen about ancient cave paintings in France. The absolute darkness of the caves, the effete guide said, was essential to the painters. The void was what made it possible to see things as if for the first time. The guide demonstrated with his girlish hands how these painters—after receiving their visions in that dark—used firelight and shadow and the pitted and swollen cave wall itself to animate their work in space and time. How the painters made horses and bison leap just as they did in the mind of God.
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