The Vanishing Point

by Elizabeth Brundage

  He drove around for another hour or so, circling the area. It was starting to get dark and by now the snow was falling heavily. It was windy and very cold. He decided to check into the motel on the corner. He parked in the lot and got out and locked his door, then entered the small lobby. The motel clerk, a man wearing a turban, slid Rye’s credit card back to him across the counter and glanced at him with curiosity. You are here on business?

  You could say that. He put his card back in his wallet. Thank you.

  For how long will you stay?

  I don’t know. Maybe two nights.

  We are happy to have you, he said with a politeness only immigrants possessed, and, smiling, handed him the key. Your room is just down there, on the left.

  The hall was long and narrow and smelled of ammonia and somebody’s microwaved leftovers. He found his room and unlocked the door, reflecting on how, within just a few hours, his circumstances had profoundly changed. He stood there a moment, staring at the dubious carpet, the shiny orange drapes, the mud-brown bedspread. A long black stripe ran the length of the wall, drawn by an unwieldy suitcase. A portal of dislocation, he thought. Another kind of in-between.

  So be it, he thought.

  He turned on the small lamp on the nightstand and set his pack down on the desk. He took out his phone and glanced through the window. Cars were pulling over, idling with their wipers going, the snow collecting on their windshields. He heard a man’s guttural preview of the spit he would expel on the asphalt. Two women who might have been hookers staggered across the lot, holding hands. There were people here, living their lives, doing what they do. He was the stranger. He tugged on the string and closed the drapes. Show’s over, he thought. He turned the heat to full blast. He sat on the bed and considered calling Magda. But the more he thought about his plan—finding Theo, trying to talk him out of doing heroin—the more it felt like a bad idea.

  He took out the photos she’d given to him. He flipped through them again and again, finding himself in the boy’s face. He was nearby, he knew it; he could sense his presence. Just out there. Wandering the surrounding streets. He would find him. He would at least try.

  He pulled off the bedspread and inspected the bed; it looked clean. Then he lay down, turned off the light, and closed his eyes.

  His phone woke him. The room was dark save for the light from a streetlamp, slipping through the crack in the curtains.

  How are you?

  I’m in a motel. He switched on the lamp. It was ten p.m. He told her about his day, the Chinese takeout, the bus station, the kids on the street.

  I can’t stand this, she said. I can’t do anything. I can’t work. I can’t eat.

  I know.

  Everything’s different now. The whole world seems—

  It’s very hard, he said.

  She complained about the political situation, the liars in Congress, the pervasive deception, all of the terrible things that were happening around the globe, how powerless she felt.

  He heard people in the parking lot. He got up and drew the curtain aside and peered out.

  It was still snowing. Cars passed by slowly, their lights blurred. He saw a man in a heavy coat, walking against the wind.

  It’s really snowing here, he told her.

  Here, too, she said, and he tried to picture her in her suburban kitchen, the one she had shared with Julian Ladd; he couldn’t. He resented her life, her bad decisions. Her inferiority. He thought of her now with an unsettling measure of contempt. She was not his lover, he decided. He would not allow it.

  Rye, she said. Are you okay?

  Yes. I’m fine.

  You don’t sound it.

  Just tired.

  Thank you for doing this.

  Don’t thank me yet.

  He promised to have some news for her tomorrow, and they hung up.

  He thought of his wife. That certified letter Magda had sent all those years ago. Was it possible that Simone had signed for it? Maybe she’d forgotten to tell him, he thought. It could have been an honest mistake. Somehow he doubted it.

  He turned off the light and lay awake in the dark, staring at the shadow on the ceiling, shaped like an icepick, from the crack in the curtains, he surmised. As he lay there, his mind brought her back to him, the hotel room, the white sheets, their pillows tossed to the floor. How she had stood before him naked in the streetlight. Look at me, she’d demanded without speaking. Look at me.

  He lifted his hands to his face, his arms, but her scent was gone.

  He drifted off and woke to voices in the parking lot. It was seven a.m. He glanced through the parted curtains and saw a few kids standing in a huddle, a mix of colors, sizes, genders, some with signs, some with their hands pushed in their pockets—they were their own species, he concluded, a melancholy tribe. He opened the curtains to get a better look and that’s when he saw the girl, standing off to the side, smoking a cigarette. He reached for his camera. She was beautiful, he noticed, even like this. She had unusual eyes. The sweatshirt hung on her thin frame, under a grease-spotted, rust-colored down vest zipped to her chin. There was no sign of Theo. He brought the camera up and framed the shot and took it.

  He set his camera down guiltily. It had been a long time since he’d taken a picture of somebody without their knowing it. He did a lot of studio work these days. People would come. He’d study their faces closely. Their wrinkles, blemishes, birthmarks. They were like patients, he often thought, waiting for a diagnosis, the thing nobody else could see that was wrong with them.

  He washed and dressed quickly, layering his clothing, pulling on wool socks. It was even colder today. Winter had come in earnest. He’d brought a few pairs of old trousers and one or two shirts. He never packed much when he traveled for work. This felt like work, but of course it wasn’t. It was personal, and it was difficult for him, as most personal things were. He was a little frightened.

  He was feeling a nagging desire to photograph the crumbling old buildings, the boarded-up storefronts, the faces he encountered on the street, the blight of ennui. He pulled on his old peacoat and grabbed his camera; he couldn’t be without it.

  There was a new person at the desk, a woman this time, wearing a headscarf, preoccupied with something on her computer screen. The cold air hit him hard. The clouds were low and dense. He pulled a black skullcap over his ears.

  With the snow, the streets were empty. Two obese women who looked like twins ambled up the sidewalk, carrying bulky yellow ShopRite bags. In the distance, he could see the broken windows of a dilapidated factory. A hawk slowly circled the sky above.

  He spotted the girl and her friends heading toward the expressway entrance ramp, their panhandling posts. They dispersed, holding up their signs. He sat on a metal barrier across the street, where he could watch her from a safe distance. Discreetly he took a couple photographs. After a while, a white van pulled up, and the girl got in. As it drew away from the curb, the driver, a man of maybe forty with matted blond hair that looked dyed, glanced at him. It was the kind of look that meant something. A face Rye wouldn’t forget. He watched the van drive up the road, its back door dented, two stickers, an American flag and PROUD VETERAN, plastered on its bumper.

  He waited around for Theo. He waited a good hour before giving up.

  He found a coffee shop down the street and sat at the counter and ordered the breakfast special. The coffee was hot and strong. He discerned from the chatter around him that the place catered to state workers and legislators. He studied his phone, thinking of Simone. He knew he should call her; he couldn’t. Even as he grappled with all the reasons he needed to be here, none of them were easily explained. He had come to find his son, but in truth he was looking for something else, himself.

  Theo

  This used to be forest, she told him.

  She waved her arm across the horizon of smokestacks, the factories down near the port. Under all that cement is the land. My grandma used to live over there. They took her house d
own. Put up a truck stop. It’s what killed her in the end. Losing that place. That land. She had the softest hands. She smelled like biscuits. She used to take care of me when I got sick. Nobody loved me like her.

  They stood out on the ramp together. Their signs said HUNGRY, but they weren’t, not for food. There were places all over the city where you could eat without so much as a dollar in your pocket. The shelter was pretty good or the soup kitchen at St. Peter’s Church. Maybe he wasn’t hungry, but the word described a longing he felt inside for something he couldn’t really name. He only knew that he needed it very badly. And he might never find it.

  Usually she did better than him. Maybe they felt sorry for her because she was a girl, all alone out there, skinny and with shoulders kind of hunched and a long braid tied off with a rubber band. They’d take one look at her face, which was an angel’s face, and put their window down. People gave her things: change, lifesavers, chocolate bars, even a ball of wool once. She showed it to him, holding out her palm. She carried that tangle of wool around in her pocket like a bird’s nest. They were the same age, but she’d lived too much. Inside, she said, where it mattered, she was already old.

  They pooled their money. It was starting to get really cold out. He would hold her hands in his own, blowing on them to make them warm. A few nights they slept on the street, in the vestibule of the Asian Market, where they kept the fish tanks on the other side of the glass. If you leaned up against it, you could almost feel warm. He told her the dorms were closed and he couldn’t go home, and she said she knew a place where he could stay.

  There was an island down near the port, some kind of nature preserve right in the middle of the Hudson River. You crossed a bridge to get to it. You set your foot down on the land and understood what it was to be a stranger. She pulled him along, into the woods. Trees sprawled here and there. After a while, they came upon this ruined hotel, this decaying palace, surrounded by a high chain-link fence and NO TRESPASSING signs. Somebody had cut the fence with wire cutters and pulled it back on either side, and now it served as a kind of entrance. It was a beautiful old miserable place, paint rippling on the ceiling, falling off like moon craters to the bloodred carpet below, and when you were high enough, they almost looked like flowers. There was a big open room with a drained pool and one of those massive diving boards. People had scrawled graffiti all around the pool, and somebody had written END OF DAYS in black spray paint with a mean-looking smiley face in the O. All across the tiled floor you saw grass spiking up. You saw old chairs—lawn chairs with green-and-white straps and wooden chairs piled in the middle of the room like someone had planned to set fire to them. There were old phones with dials and squiggly cords, and there was a lot of wreckage, just broken stuff, like there’d been a war.

  She had her own room, with a mattress on the floor. Old wallpaper peeling off. She kept it neat. She had this kind of altar to her lost boy, with his pictures taped up and a few of his Matchbox cars. In one photo, he had on a Rangers T-shirt. He was maybe three. That was right before, she said. Someone had taken him from her car in a Rite Aid parking lot. It wasn’t even late at night, she said. She’d run in for a couple seconds to get a prescription, and when she came out, he was gone.

  This is what it done to me, she cried, showing him her arms, her naked legs, the constellation of needle marks.

  At night they’d lie there side-by-side. They were like people lost at sea, floating on a life raft under the black sky. Sometimes their hands would come together, their fingers entwining. Even in the dark you could see things. You could see the crazy shining branches on the ceiling. You saw mice jumbled in the corners, centipedes like the spine of a fish, and one time, a little bird flew from one side of the room to the other, and he thought it was death paying a visit. She was death, this girl. He had come to believe it. Death lying right there next to him, breathing the same air.

  Out of nowhere, you’d hear the train whistle, and after a while, this light would come out of the dark, this white spotlight, followed by a chain of yellow windows moving through the night, and you could see the people reading the paper or just sitting there. And it was like they were in a whole other world, a whole different reality, and he and True and the others were far away and apart from everything they had known before.

  She had this glow. Like she knew things. You saw it in her eyes. She was a city of shuttered windows. You got lost.

  The world comes into your arms. It falls into you like so much wind.

  When the weather wasn’t good, they rode the trains. She knew one of the conductors. He let them ride for free. Theo suspected she’d done something to this guy, he didn’t want to think what. He could only go so far in his thinking now. It was like a spell he was under. And she was part of it. They’d sit up against each other, watching the river and all its changes and the sleet frosting its surface, and they’d pull into one dreary town after another, and you’d see the people standing on the platform, waiting to get on, with their briefcases and bags and newspapers, and then they’d get going again, past old brick buildings crammed up one after another, and the river had no color, like a very old person’s eyes. Sometimes they’d go into the bathroom to fool around. They’d cling to each other as the world flashed by with that sound in your ears and your eyes shut so tight you can see inside your head.

  One morning he woke up and looked over at her and she didn’t look right and he pulled off the blanket and she was, like, naked and gray and really, really skinny, and this cold feeling went through him, and he thought she might be dead. It was like he saw her for the first time, who she really was, this drugged-out girl, this whore. All marked up. Purple bruises up her legs. She was a broken person. And he felt sickened. He felt so very sick. He just wanted to go home. He wanted his mother. He thought how nice it would be, just sitting in the kitchen doing nothing but looking out the window, smelling the coffee brewing. Just that alone would be enough.

  This is the last time, he said to her. Then I’m leaving.

  That’s good. You should.

  He reached for her hand and held it, and it was so cold.

  Let’s just have one more night, she said.

  One more. And then I’m gone.

  She talked about her stolen kid. How she could be rough with him, impatient. That night in the drugstore, she was in a bad mood, feeling sorry for herself on account of she was only eighteen and had a three-year-old who she had to feed and look after and even though she loved him it wasn’t fair how he’d come to her and it made her angry. She took her time, flipping through some magazines. She said she deserved it, someone taking him. She was a bad mother. And now she was rotting from the inside. It was her punishment. God hated her.

  She had no fear of death, she told him. She courted it.

  You saw the real world out on the ramp. You saw the people in their cars. In those few seconds when they’d pull up, waiting for the light to change. Most of them wouldn’t look at you. Or if they did, it was with disdain. It hurt a little, their judgment. Like you were garbage.

  Take the lady in the white Mercedes. Behind the tinted glass she was like an alien insect-goddess, the dragonfly sunglasses, the fake-golden hair, the Rolex shaking on her wrist as she brought an apple to her lips and bit into it, baring her perfect white teeth. It was a long light, and he had about four minutes to make an impression, and he bowed a little, like her servant, and she finally looked at him, rolled down her window, and tossed out the core. Get a job, she said, and drove away.

  That was always their answer: get a job. Not a realistic solution for someone in his situation. That’s what they didn’t get. It wasn’t just about getting enough money for a fix. It wasn’t about the fucking drugs. That was all of it and none of it. That was just the mechanics of the problem. Because you changed, you went through a chemical metamorphosis that turned you into another species. And you weren’t really human anymore. You required certain things to survive, to satisfy the host. Pain was your compass. It’s what
got you up every day. And for a few precious hours, after you used, you were well again. But then it came back. And it wanted more. It drove you to it. It was all you thought about. It was your salvation.

  What people didn’t understand was that—

  This one priest drove up and held out a twenty and told him to get some breakfast with it, and Theo nodded and said, Bless you, Father (for I have sinned), and left the ramp and walked in the direction of the diner, fully intending to get a plate of eggs, home fries, toast, but he ran into Carmine, who hooked him up in the parking lot behind the OTB. They sat there in the car a long while with the cold air coming in through the busted sunroof, and you could hear the sound of running horses and the men shouting at the screens.

  At some point he understood that Carmine was driving, and it was a long drive, and when he finally opened his eyes, it was almost dark, and he was still in the car in the passenger seat but it was parked someplace in the woods and he was alone. He could smell somebody’s cigarette, and he sat up and rubbed his eyes and saw Carmine talking to this dude Cyrus, who everybody said was, like, a psychopath, and who kind of oversaw the hotel and had people doing things for him in exchange for dope, and they looked over at him, and then Carmine was coming back to the car. He opened the door on his side and told him to get out, they had a job to do, so he got out, even though he didn’t want to, even though he wasn’t feeling right, and they went together over to Cyrus, who was standing there by his van, smoking, and you could hear the cars speeding past on the highway, and it was an unsettling kind of sound that made him distantly fear for his life. Cyrus opened the back of his van and pulled off a tarp, and that’s when he saw her. She was naked, rolled up in a shower curtain, and you could see the long blond hair streaming out. He felt the puke coming up and had to lean over, and Carmine laughed like an outlaw, like he’d been there, done it, and Theo was just a baby, a kind of innocent, which he was, and then Cyrus handed them each a shovel and told them to start digging.