by Lydia Millet
Its propeller was already whirring, there was a door open, and the pilot was seated, wearing a bulky headset. Hal put a foot up on the rim of the door to step in.
“Here, here,” said the pilot, and gestured for him to sit up front. It was tight, barely room to move.
“This?” asked Hal, raising his suitcase.
“Back there,” said the pilot.
Hal was sure they would skim the trees on takeoff. The night outside was daunting from the tiny cabin of the plane, its bottomless dark; he wore the headset the pilot had given him, but they hardly spoke. He recalled a phrase an FAA guy had once used with him on a commercial flight, discussing Cessnas just like this one: single-point failure. No backup systems in case of malfunction. As they taxied and rose up above the runway he willed himself beyond the plane, out of the frail and shaking capsule into the rest of his life.
L.A. was spread out far to the north, gray and blond and spidering everywhere—its fastness, its familiar blocky strip malls and wide boulevards with their unceasing traffic and smog and the glamorous jungly hills that rose above and housed the royalty. Everything was the same; his house was the same, even, full of the mundane objects he knew so well … by now Susan had told Casey T. was alive. They would both know by now, and Casey, at least, would feel affectionate and grateful. But Susan’s gratitude he had foolishly squandered. By accusing her at the very moment of triumph, the moment of revelation, he had squandered all his credit. Such as it was. It should have been a pure gift, the culmination of a gesture that quietly knighted him; instead he had revealed his petty nature, his real motivation for leaving and coming here, thus giving the lie to any idea she might have had about his minor effort at heroism.
He had to get T. out of the hands of the Belizean cops. It was imperative. Both for Susan and Casey and for him, T. himself, because actually he did not deserve it.
A short time ago, before he went to the island, if someone had told him Stern was in jail Hal would not have objected too strongly. Only mildly, for the sake of politeness. He might have held the private opinion, in fact, that a few nights in a Central American hellhole could benefit the Armani-wearing shithead. But not anymore. Now he wanted to get the guy out, partly because he seemed a painfully easy mark, now that he had gone hippie. Hal had always had a weakness for hippies, despite their free-love tendencies. Between them and the libertarians, he’d take hippies. Now—a benevolent-seeming, almost submissive individual—T. was without defenses. He would be instantly victimized, by either the thugs in the police force or his fellow inmates. It was ugly to contemplate.
Often people prefaced a stupid remark with the words “There are two kinds of people in the world,” and Hal had always been annoyed by this. The words tended to introduce a false dichotomy, an infantile reduction. At the same time he, too, felt the urge to divide and categorize, the satisfaction of separating the world into discrete parts that could be identified. If T. had once been a person who thought chiefly of himself and his shining Mercedes, he was now something else—if only on a temporary basis.
For it was entirely possible, as Susan had suggested, that he would revert to his usual form once the trauma of the hiking misadventure was past. People tended to settle back into their old routines. Returns to form were standard. Fundamental character change was all but impossible.
Still, for now he more closely resembled the pet lovers, for instance, than Donald Trump or Leona Helmsley. He was like the post-hippie nomads that drove around in painted vans, let their children grow dreadlocks and lived on pennies. He had the beard and the hygiene, anyway. But the key distinction was this: he had gone from being consumed with his own life and advancement to looking outward. Whereas Hal himself, once youth had passed, had gone the other way.
For there had been an interval, while he and Susan were both young, when he too had thought of the rest of the world quite often. He had often thought of justice and liberation, of the good of mankind, etc. But then he had forgotten it.
Except for his job, he had argued to himself over the years, but he had to admit it: even the job had become little more than a sinecure. He could not argue that in going to work every day he made a sacrifice of himself. It was more like a well-fitting shoe that was worn all the time but was never noticed.
If there were in fact two kinds of people in the world, those who faced inward and those who looked out, he had been the latter and turned into the former, whereas Stern, or T., had been the former and turned into the latter. It was T. who was taking the road less traveled, whereas Hal, with all his ideas about a government that protected and sheltered the people, with his lifetime of civil service, had in fact become a typical domestic drone, a man wrapped up in the details of his own life and only his own.
He had acquired the habit of blaming the accident for this. And yes, the accident had made it easier to shelve the concerns of the world, to relegate them to the back burner. But if he was honest, the patterns had been worn into him years before the accident, possibly even from the time when he manipulated Susan into abandoning her commune. He had manipulated her away from her youthful Eden Project ideal out of a sense of desperation, true, but that did not excuse his cynical calculation. He had been desperate to keep her and had reassured himself that love was enough reason for manipulation. But it was selfish and nothing else. Love had been an excuse, more than anything, for greediness. Love and self-interest had coalesced.
And separated from her Mendocino ideal—from the future of fresh air and the fields of organic strawberries—in time she had given up public high-school teaching, with its long hours and low pay and frequent disappointments, and become an assistant to a real-estate guy. This was after the accident, of course … she had taken an office job, become an office worker. He himself was an office worker too, nothing more than a glorified clerk, really, but still: who knew what she might have become if, back in 1967, instead of manipulating her he had just let her go?
And it might still have worked out between them. In due course he might have sought her out again, might have followed her to the commune, gotten down on one knee, and humbly asked Rom to give him a free lute lesson. After a potluck dinner, around a bonfire, Susan might have played the tambourine and sung songs about the giving spirit of trees while he and Rom accompanied her on twin lutes.
And Casey: Casey might have been born in a yurt with a midwife attending, instead of by emergency C-section at the UCLA Medical Center. When she was seventeen she might not have gone driving at all, in that snowstorm in the suburbs of Denver. She might have had different friends, might not have even have decided impulsively that she wanted to learn to ski, wanted to take her turn on the baby slopes, and therefore never have asked Hal and Susan if she could go on a Colorado ski trip with her L.A. friends, who in addition to skiing enjoyed drinking games and fast driving. She might have been, say, more of a horseback-rider type, competed in horse-riding meets in a black velvet cap and tall boots, and had different friends entirely, who knew, friends who did Outward Bound courses or line dancing, friends who won prizes at the county fair for growing outsize tomatoes.
But instead he had followed one urge, a single urge. What was an urge but a quick pulse of energy through the brain? He had followed a jealous, self-protective urge and consecrated his behavior to persuasion. For two or three weeks his attention had been focused entirely on preventing Susan from leaving—on preventing his future wife from realizing her dream.
And that petty urge of self-protection, that small urge that passed through him in seconds, had determined the future for all three of them.
8
As soon as his taxi pulled up alongside the curb outside the small police station he saw the building was locked up tight as a drum, lights off. He got out to check the sign on the door—a paper clock with the hands stuck at seven and twelve—while a streetlight above him flickered and buzzed.
“I don’t understand,” he said to the driver as he got back in. “What about the jail, then? T
here has to be some kind of holding cells, at least. Supervised by police. Do you know where that would be?”
The driver shrugged and shook his head.
“But what if there are crimes committed? And someone, you know, a criminal does something and needs to be arrested? I mean, no one commits crimes after the end of the workday?”
“You come back in the morning,” said the driver, nodding. He had an accent like the harelip cadet: maybe Garifuna. “I take you to a nice hotel. Your friend be OK. Don’t worry.”
The hotel had iron gates and a fountain playing in the front garden; its lobby was empty save for a clerk at the long counter, who found him a room right away.
“Maybe you can tell me,” said Hal. “The police. What do you do if you have to call the police in the middle of the night?”
“We’ve never had to call the police,” said the night clerk, smiling. “We have a quality clientele.”
“I’m sure you do. But let’s say something happened—a breakin. Something like that.”
“Yes sir, I would report it first thing in the morning,” said the desk clerk.
Hal was exasperated. There was no way. Was the man ill-informed, or was it Hal who was wrong? There was no way to know.
In his room, which was small and so cloying he had to open a window immediately, the clock radio read 1:15. He sat down on the bed and took his phone card out of his wallet, keyed in the long sequence.
She picked up after a single ring.
“Hal?”
“Sorry to wake you.”
“Actually I couldn’t sleep. I called the resort and they said you guys were gone, both of you.”
“I had to charter a flight to the city. They arrested him.”
While he explained what he thought had happened he was preoccupied with himself—himself and the free love. What to say next, about the rest of it, the rest of their lives and whether there was a future? He was bound up in the saga, his own concerns.
“Suze,” he said suddenly. “I know it’s my fault. I don’t blame you.”
“Your fault?”
“I realized, this trip, how I’ve been preoccupied for so long. I’m always feeling regret. I go around in a daze … years now, Suze. For years. But I know it at least. I’ve seen it now. I mean I already knew it, rationally, but I hadn’t …”
“It’s all right, Hal. You don’t have to apologize. Please.”
“But you’ve been … I mean, I think somewhere in there I may have left you alone.”
She was quiet. He had the window open, and a palm was waving. Outside he heard a car swish down the empty street. Had it rained? They were both alone now. She was alone because years ago he had left her for an idea of loss; he was alone because he had chosen it, without even knowing. He was afloat in the world, its vast and empty spaces … far away from his wife and his little girl, in a foreign city where not one person knew him. A silent, sweltering city in a subtropical country, toward the equator, toward the South Pole, toward the black place in the sky around which all the stars seemed to spin.
He was awake in the warm night, alone, while everyone else was sleeping.
The walls of the room felt closer than they were, covered in a dark-red-and-white-striped wallpaper like Christmas wrapping. Beneath his legs, the bed’s coverlet was scratchy. Susan always stripped the coverlets off hotel beds as soon as she got into the hotel room. She said they were unhygienic—that hotels never washed them and they were the repositories of bodily secretions and pathogens. In the main she was not too uptight about germs, but when it came to hotel coverlets she made no exceptions.
“We’ll talk about it when you get back,” she said gently, after a while. “OK? I mean the phone isn’t the best for this, you know. This kind of conversation.”
“I just want to know if we’re going to be all right. If we’re going to get through it.” He waited for a second, then got up restlessly, holding the receiver. The red wallpaper was closing in.
The cord barely stretched but he made it to the window, gazed through the silhouettes of fronds onto the dark street. She was not answering. The silence was ominous. His stomach turned. “Or if you want to, you know, leave me. And be with that …”
He let it trail off. Damned if he would say more.
The wait made his stomach lurch again.
“Be with—? Oh. No, no, no, it’s nothing like that, sweetheart. It’s not, you know. Anything important.”
“I see,” he said, nodding invisibly.
He felt lighter, though at the same time his skin prickled with a faint annoyance. It was not important to her, yet for it she risked everything: for a trivial fuck, or series of fucks, she had done this to him. But he should count his blessings. They were still married. It seemed they would probably continue to be. His home was still his home, his wife was still his wife. She was not trying to get away from him. On and on, as always, it would keep being the three of them, him and her and Casey.
“I mean, that’s a relief to me. Of course.”
He felt almost off the hook, now that he knew. Now that he knew, the familiar was coming back. Already—he felt it—already the strangeness of life was receding. He heard something in the background—was it here or in the background in L.A., across the many miles? No; it was here, it was outside the window. A siren, but different from the sirens he was used to, slower and tinnier. No surprise: in a foreign country the sound of a siren was bound to be a variation on the familiar theme, not an exact replica.
It was amazing, astounding, come to think of it, that even the idea siren was replicated throughout the world—and the idea traffic lights, for instance, wherever you went: red, yellow and green. (Although in the United States officials insisted on calling the yellow lights “amber,” for some consistently aggravating nonreason—like a tic, like an officially sanctioned form of Tourette’s. If you had to go to traffic school, say, or take a test for your driver’s license at the Department of Motor Vehicles, it was a sure bet the yellow lights would be referred to as “amber,” as though the word yellow, in this official setting, was somehow regarded as obscene and therefore required a euphemism. It made him glad he did not work for the Department of Transportation, which needless to say had a checkered past anyway. For while the Service was guilty of many things—many bureaucratic complications of a Kafkaesque nature all too easily lampoonable by opportunistic politicians who irresponsibly advocated for harebrained schemes like the flat tax—at least it had the cojones to call yellow yellow.)
The world seemed to be in opposition and even turmoil on many subjects—who would claim the rights to its riches, for instance, who would hold sway from year to year or decade to decade when it came to the rule of law, dominance and extraction, trade or sales or production. On the other hand it presented a more or less united front on who should do the fighting and dying, whose children should starve or die of malaria by the tens of millions. In these matters there was the polite appearance of dispute, in diplomatic and academic circles, but in fact a stasis of hardship on a massive scale that could only reflect, in the end, a kind of global consensus.
And when it came to details like traffic signals and sirens the human population might even look, from outer space, like a single race of peaceful, compliant men.
At first he did not register the siren’s significance. Susan was saying something about emotional rollercoasters, a term he flatly, privately rejected.
You had aversions, in this life, aversions to foods like granola and terms like emotional rollercoaster. You wished to excise these items and the terms for them. But a woman like Susan, despite being highly intelligent, did not know that intuitively nor, if she did, would she necessarily respect the aversions. Instead she ran roughshod over them. In fact, few women respected his aversions.
Men also failed to respect them. People, you could almost say, did not respect the aversions.
Maybe, when all this was behind Susan and him—call it the free love, call it adultery—they c
ould sit down and have a conversation on the subject. He could talk about the importance of aversions, and why the term emotional rollercoaster should be, as the Germans said, verboten.
Then the car went by, a light-colored car, its red lights flashing. A squad car, surely.
He should go! He should follow it. Sooner or later it had to take him to some outpost of the police, to what he needed to know.
“I was, at first I was so excited,” Susan was saying. “When you told me it was like the best gift I’d ever had, but that, you know, that euphoria of relief—it passes so quickly and regular life comes back. With its own kind of normal and boring pace. You know?”
He had his eyes on the police car’s taillights as the car made its way up the street. It had slowed down, it wasn’t going that fast. If he ran, he could catch it. Maybe it was right nearby, the police emergency. He should drop the phone and run. He should run up the dark street after it.
Now. Now. Go.
“And now it’s just like, I take for granted he’s alive and I’m back to worrying about these petty details …”
He stayed where he was. It seemed unrealistic, impossible to catch the car. Of course, he would never know.
Standing there, watching the taillights disappear and holding the phone, he felt this had happened to him over and over. He never jumped out windows, never moved suddenly, with a jolt. The lights faded as he stood still and looked at them. He did not leap, did not give chase. It always seemed unfeasible and rash. But there was a defeatism in that, clearly, a submission to ease, a cowardly risk avoidance. The same force that had bound Susan to him through manipulation rather than honesty.
T. would have his night in jail, that was clear. He would spend the whole night in a cell while Hal lay sleeping in the soft hotel bed. Albeit with scratchy coverlet. He pictured a medieval torture chamber, the rack, a rusting Iron Maiden. Then burly sailors.
