by Rich Horton
Jim hung up and stumbled out of the booth, suddenly nauseous. He went back to the snack bar and asked the girl if she had a copy of today’s newspaper.
“The one with you on the cover?” she said. “Right here.”
The photo showed him in profile, talking to someone at a bus station, holding out a map, asking for directions. He scanned the article—some of the words were different, but it was close enough to American English—and yes, he was apparently famous, and dozens of people he’d spoken to since they crossed over had been interviewed, and specialists of various kinds were giving opinions, opinions that didn’t make much sense to him.
There was no mention of Laura, only references to a traveling companion. He was the one they were interested in.
He returned the newspaper, noticed that she had Purple Pow-Pow behind the counter and bought a bottle, then tucked that in his shirt pocket and went back into the theater. The boy with curly hair was center stage now. He stirred a cauldron of turtle soup and sang a kind of dirge.
Laura leaned forward in her seat. “This is getting really good.”
“Yeah,” he said, wondering: If he was famous here, why wasn’t Laura famous? Probably because he was the one who talked too much, who got them into trouble, who bumbled through everything they were up against. And people here found that interesting.
“You get something to eat?” Laura asked.
He shook a few of the whatever-they-weres from the envelope into Laura’s hand, then almost tried to pour some into his own right hand before he remembered. He tipped them straight into his mouth instead.
“Ugh, these are weird,” Laura said. “Don’t they have popcorn?”
“I kind of like them,” Jim said.
She kept her eyes on the stage. The boy was still singing, stirring and singing, crying as he sang.
“Did you hear that?” Laura whispered.
Jim hadn’t been paying attention to the words, but now he listened. “I want to go home,” the boy sang. “I want to go home.” And then, more quietly, “All I need is a window, a window or a small box.”
After the show, Jim convinced the girl behind the snack bar to show them the way backstage. They found the young actor in his dressing room. He didn’t want to talk about the play, didn’t want to talk about the song he’d sung, or who’d written it. “I’m going to do bigger things,” he said. He nodded at Jim and added, “He knows. He understands.”
“Sure,” Jim said, “you’re obviously going places.”
The boy smiled.
“Please,” Laura said. “May I see the script?”
The boy rolled his eyes at Jim, knowingly, as though in some private understanding. Then he opened a trunk and brought out a stack of bound pages. “I think this is the one. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the last one I did. Or the one before that.”
“All the Swimming Things,” Laura said, reading the title. “But who wrote it?”
“This conversation is so boring,” the boy said. “Can’t we talk about something else? Let’s talk about feelings.”
He was still looking at Jim, and Laura noticed this time. She gave Jim a hard look.
Jim hunkered down and said, “So, thing is, we know this play’s just pig and pepper to someone with your talents.” Pig and pepper was a popular game here. At least, lots of people talked about it, though neither Jim nor Laura had seen it played. “But we really need to know who wrote this play. A lot of . . . a lot of feelings are riding on this. Ours, and some other people’s. Our families, our friends. People with some pretty big feelings.”
The boy nodded slowly. This was making an impression.
“So, what do you say?” Jim asked. “Can you help us out?”
The boy looked at his feet. “He’s mean,” he said. “Like, alpaca-spit mean.”
“Who is?” Laura said.
“The man who wrote the play. He hurts people, and I don’t like talking about him.”
Laura knelt beside the boy and put one hand on his shoulder. “We won’t tell him that we saw you,” she said. “This can be our secret.”
The boy looked at himself in his mirror, then looked at Laura. “He comes every few days, to drop off more pages. He gives us presents, presents that we hate. He makes us open them in front of him. He says we aren’t good enough for his plays, that we should be happy just to know him. His name is Gray.”
“Gray,” Laura said. “Gray what?”
“Just Gray,” the boy said.
The door opened and a tall man with a handlebar mustache ducked through, a marionette draped over his arms. Seeing it, the boy’s face went pale. The man set the marionette in a chair.
“My contract,” the boy said to Jim, as though he’d know what this meant.
Jim rose from his seat. “You’re all right?”
“I’m great,” the boy said, though his voice was flat. The man with the handlebar mustache lifted him into his arms, and the boy went limp.
“Where are you taking him?” Laura said.
The man didn’t look at her, didn’t answer.
“Our secret, like you said,” the boy told her.
She nodded, but the boy’s eyes had closed, and the man carried him from the room, leaving them alone with the marionette. Jim was about to say something, but she shook her head to stop him, because she’d already seen it, seen the puppet’s curly hair and brown eyes, its delicate fingers. It looked just like the boy.
“I want to go home,” she said quietly. “I really just want to go home.”
They’d been fighting about something, the day they crossed over, but now neither of them could remember what the fight was about. They couldn’t remember how they’d crossed over, but they had their passports with them and their passports had been stamped. Were there customs officials? Inspections of some kind? Neither of them could say. The first thing they knew of this place was a roadside diner, and a menu they couldn’t make sense of. Then a hot meal of something syrupy that came in three bowls, each a different color, each with a little plastic ship floating on top, then a panicked conversation in the parking lot, and apologies for the things they’d said that they couldn’t remember.
“I do want to marry you,” he’d told her, meaning it for the first time, maybe.
“I want to marry you too,” she said. “Let’s just get home in time, all right?”
The wedding was about two months off: plenty of time to find their way back. There were roadside hotels, and more diners, and drive-in movie theaters with big playgrounds under the screens. It was summer, and fireflies flashed in broad fields, and once they even managed to rent a car, but there was something in the contract they didn’t understand, and an agent of the rental company came and took the car from them, shaking the wad of paper they’d signed and shouting about how hard his job was because of people like them.
They asked everyone they met which way to the border, but no one knew what they were talking about. They showed their passports, pointed at the stamps they’d been given, but got only shrugs and vacant looks in return. They asked, “Where are we?” until they learned not to bother asking.
On a bus, following a hint that a retired colonel in a seaside town might know about the country they’d come from, they decided to work on their wedding vows. “I don’t want the usual nonsense about sickness and health,” she said, tapping her pen against the notebook.
“You mean you’ll leave me if I get sick?”
“Come on. What kind of marriage do we want, here? I thought you were looking for something a little off the beaten path.”
“I don’t know. Beaten paths are sounding good to me these days.”
He saw the whiteness of her knuckles as she squeezed her pen. She needed this, needed something to hang on to, and he did too, maybe. So he said, “Okay, how about this? I promise, at least once a year, to learn a new craft and to craft something for you.”
“Really?”
“Write it down.”
She wrote it down
and said, “Then I promise to bring you fresh flowers sometimes, especially on days for which there is no expectation of flowers.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I promise to do that thing you like when I—”
“You can’t say that in front of my aunt Meg.”
“Just put the first part, then. I promise to do that thing you like.”
She wrote it down and said, “I promise to never make you feel bad about yourself on purpose, or to criticize you for making reasonable mistakes.”
“And I, too,” he said solemnly, “shall keep in mind that you are a fallible human being.”
“But I won’t have sex with other people,” she said.
“Okay, ditto that one for me,” he said.
And they were going to keep at it, but then the brass band at the back of the bus started rehearsing again, so they just held hands and watched the alpaca ranches roll by, until they came to the town by the sea, and to the colonel’s enormous empty house, up there on the cliffs, and that was where the goons caught up with them, and they’d been running ever since.
They left the theater and found the nearest newsstand. Newsstand wasn’t really the word for the thing. These roadside stalls, common to most every town they’d visited, were stocked with tools, small appliances, old photographs, and bits of junk neither of them could identify. But there were also books, maps, glossy magazines, and copies of the latest newspapers. They scoured the papers for mention of the play, for anything having to do with its author.
New merchandise was unloaded at a neighboring stand, and the other patrons swarmed away. A man in shiny green shorts came up to Laura and said, “Take these for a minute?” He dumped two babies into her arms and was gone before she could say anything.
“Unbelievable,” Laura said, though it wasn’t the first time this had happened. Because Laura and Jim didn’t have babies of their own, people here thought it was fine to lend them theirs.
“Take one,” she said to Jim.
He held up his handless right arm to protest, but she pushed the baby at him, and he bent to take it in his left.
Laura searched the magazines while Jim stood there.
“So, when did you first meet him?” he asked her.
“Meet who?”
“That asshole goon. There was something about the way you two looked at each other in the bar. Like it wasn’t the first time you’d talked.”
She kept turning pages as she spoke. “He came up to me in the first week, I think. You were—I don’t know, in some store, looking for that soda you like.”
“Purple Pow-Pow.”
“He said he just wanted to talk. To explain some things.”
“And did he?”
“No better than anyone else. He said they’d be keeping track of us. They’re like border guards, I guess. And now he just kind of checks in with me sometimes.”
“That’s really great,” Jim said, bouncing the baby against his side. “So as long as you guys are pals, do you think you could get us deported home or something? And while you’re at it, maybe you could ask him for my hand back? Because I really liked having a right hand.”
The proprietor of the place, who’d been dozing in a big rattan chair with three babies sprawled sleeping on top of him, opened his eyes a little.
“It’s not like that,” Laura said. “He doesn’t want to help. It’s more like he’s waiting for me to slip up. Like he’s looking for an excuse to—I don’t know what. To do something really bad to us.”
Jim tapped the stump of his arm against what looked like a toaster oven. “He already has done something really bad to us, Laura. But apparently you’ve got too big of a crush on this guy to worry about it.”
He looked horrible to her, then, with his stump, with the baby on his hip starting to cry, and she felt horrible for thinking it. “I guess I’m pretty useless to you,” she said.
“I guess you are,” he said. He knocked over the thing that looked like a toaster oven, and trading cards of pig-and-pepper athletes spilled everywhere.
She said, “I’ve been counting, you know.”
“Counting what?”
“It’s tomorrow, or maybe the day after. The day we were supposed to get married.” She shoved the other baby at him—now he had one on his left side and the other wobbling under his right arm. Both babies were red-faced and bawling as Laura ducked out of the stall and walked off.
Jim let her go, and he didn’t watch her leave. He thought: I’m going to change out of this flowered shirt first chance I get.
He went over to the man in the rattan chair and said, “You know this guy, Gray? Gray. Turtle soup, singing. Come on, help me out here.”
“Gray, sure, sure,” the man said, standing up, shaking himself free of the babies. He took a utility knife out of his pocket and cut the twine from a bundle of thick books, then set them aside until he found the one he was looking for. The cover said simply Gray in big, blocky type.
Jim put the two babies in the rattan chair, and the other three immediately started crying, as though they’d caught it from the new arrivals. The proprietor looked flustered, but he handed the book to Jim.
It was heavy, the size of a big city phone book. Jim set it on the ground and flipped through pages of very small print, then found some pictures: a long-haired older man standing among alpacas, papier mâché alpacas on a stage, the same man kneeling by a stream, pointing with a stick at some turtles on a log.
“His biography,” the proprietor said.
Jim flipped to the back of the book. “A Window or a Small Box” was the title of the last chapter.
“Twenty cents,” the proprietor said. “But for you, my friend, who are so famous and so dashing, you can have that volume for free.”
“Laura!” Jim shouted after her.
The man went back to the rattan chair and leaned over the babies, whose cries had turned to a chorus of shrieking. He cooed at them, but they only got louder.
“Laura!” Jim said again.
She’d already disappeared around the corner. Jim closed the book, tucked it under his arm, and ran in the direction she’d gone. He thought he spotted her straw hat, bouncing above the downtown lunch hour crowd, but it was just the basket on a melon salesman’s head.
He shouted her name again, spinning in place. All around him, people went in and out of doors, and there were doors in everything, doors in the street, doors on second stories with ladders leading up to them, doors built into doors, doors in those doors.
“Laura!”
But she was gone, and he was lost, sweating as he wove through the crowd, the biography getting heavy under his arm.
“West or east?” he’d asked her one day. They were on a train that sped along the edge of a deep, river-hewn chasm. “I just want to know if we’re going west or east.”
“Sweetie,” she’d told him, squeezing his hand, “I don’t think they have west and east here.”
That night, Jim sat in a sculpture garden in what he thought must be the center of the city. There were statues of cats, of moons, of arches shaped like horseshoes. It reminded him of something.
“That cereal,” he said to the musician who was sharing his carafe of spiked Pow-Pow. “That breakfast cereal with all the little marshmallows in it!” But the musician just shook his head, and plucked a few notes on his zither while his two babies splashed in the fountain.
Jim used Gray’s biography for a pillow, and in the morning it was all he had, because someone had stolen his knapsack and his shoes while he slept.
Laura hadn’t gone more than a block from the newsstand before the goons got her.
She was so angry that she didn’t even see the black sedan until it pulled up to the curb, didn’t notice the smell of freshly cooked breakfast until the smell had engulfed her, until the swollen, gelatinous hands of her pursuers took her and dragged her into the car.
It was completely dark inside. The windows were no-way windows, tinted on both sides. But the eng
ine roared, and the car veered and rattled, and somehow the driver was driving. The radio was on and tuned to something old-timey. The air was very cool, though Laura could feel the press of many bodies around her.
“You did the right thing, ditching that guy,” came the voice of the chief goon from the front passenger seat. “It never would have worked out between you two.”
“Take me back,” she said.
“Remember that day?” said the chief goon. “The house by the sea, the second time I saw you? Stay, I wanted to tell you. Just stay with me.”
She remembered: a cloudless afternoon, a dusty road out of town through tall grass, the ancient house on the high sea cliffs. The door was unlocked, and the retired colonel—the one they’d been told might know the way home—was dead or away or had never existed. She and Jim wandered countless bare rooms, dizzied by views of rock and wave and sky, until back in the entry hall they heard for the first time the sickening slosh of the goons’ arrival. Only the handsome one, the one with thick blond hair and a big grin, the one who’d told her weeks before how it would go, walked in on solid feet. She thought maybe she could reason with him, but instead she’d said to Jim, “We have to run,” and they ran, and kept running.
“Please,” she said to the goon now. “Please just tell me where we’re going.”
“Going? Darling, we’re already here. This is it.”
“This is what?”
“This is what happens when we catch you. We drive around together, and you say interesting things for as long as you can.”
The other goons were chuckling. There were more of them than could possibly fit inside that car: dozens, maybe. They could have filled a small theater.
“Keep it interesting, though. Because as soon as we get bored . . . ”
More chuckling, and Laura’s instinct was to fight—to kick and punch and claw her way out of there—but she’d heard the doors lock, and she knew what had happened to Jim when he tried to fight them. So she swallowed that back and said, “What do you want me to talk about?”
“Snacks,” one of the goons said.
