In the car he took Abby’s hand. Her hands were strong, a mother’s hands. At night he imagined them touching him.
“I’ve got to let the sitter go,” she said, “but you could stay for dinner.” Perhaps because he had already seen her children.
“I think not,” he said. “I’m so tired.”
She smiled through her disappointment. She was a good, trusting person. He had given her the impression that a tragedy had befallen him, a dead child, a dead wife. He had not been specific, and she was too polite, too respectful to ask what exactly it was that had caused him to abandon one life and begin another. Like most people, Abby assumed that only a catastrophe could cause a person to do such a thing, but Michael West had done it more than once. There was a freshness in leaving behind one life for the next, a raw, tingling sensation that was one step short of pain. An imperative of the mind and spirit had reshaped the facts of his life like tides rearranging a shore. And in each new life there was Abby, awaiting his arrival—more than one Abby, sometimes—people with empty places beside them where Michael could stand and look as if he belonged.
They passed two McDonald’s, but he had trained himself not to look at them in the presence of other people. He had never been inside one.
Michael pulled into the driveway of Abby’s house, a small one-story made of yellowish brick, indistinguishable from thousands of other houses in Rockford. “You want to come in for a minute?” she asked, from politeness this time. Expecting him to refuse.
“Sure,” he said, testing his pronunciation once again. He wanted to prolong the presence of people around him another few minutes, to put off his solitude. With solitude came exhaustion, sleep, but underneath that sleep, running through it in the form of urgent and disturbing dreams, were the questions he would have to answer as soon as he was rested: What was he doing in Rockford, Illinois? And where was the conspiracy he had come to America to destroy?
Abby looked surprised, pleased that he would come in. Her husband, Darden, had bolted to California two years ago with a young woman in possession of a false nose, a false chin and two false breasts. Except for occasional grudging payments, he’d had no contact with Abby or his children since that time. Michael had to forcibly curb his curiosity about this man, Darden Reece. What had he hoped to find in California, and had he found it?
Abby opened the front door and the two children, Colleen and Gavin, tumbled toward her across the room. Michael glimpsed the babysitter quickly hang up the telephone, and winked so she would know he’d caught her. She had long orange fingernails and was chewing a massive wad of gum that bulged in her cheek. Her age—sixteen, he guessed—reminded him of the other girl, the one who had followed him to his house.
Without thinking, Michael lifted Colleen into his arms, a mouse of a girl, feet sticky with something from the floor. Abby, who was paying the sitter, looked up startled, but glad, too—glad he’d wanted to lift her daughter. Michael held the wriggling four-year-old girl and felt how easily she could become his own. People were vines awaiting the chance to cling—Colleen’s sticky feet on his shirt, her small arms around his neck, her mother standing nearby, watching them with anxiety and hope. So easily, one could slip inside of other people’s lives. Gavin, the two-year-old, clung to Michael’s leg, and Michael lifted him, too, so both children squirmed in his arms, and he felt a pull deep as gravity, an exhausted longing to relax, to lie down here with this woman and her warm, squirming children and never leave. Then he extinguished the thought. It wouldn’t work; his soul was too small. Most peoples’ were large and soft, engorged with sensations and needs that would have made life unbearable for Michael West, like trying to function with his stomach cut open, holding in guts with both fists. His own soul was tight and hard, white as a diamond. People saw in it whatever they chose. That was his gift: to be blessed with a soul that promised whatever people wished, and yielded nothing.
He knew what would come of “settling down,” how welcome it would feel at first. But if he were to marry Abby Reece and move into her house and go to church on Sunday mornings with her children, if he were to “barbecue” and feed the cat and take up golf, all the while, his hard white soul would be burning slowly through the soft tissues of this new life until finally it would pierce the last layer and he would find himself outside it. No matter how many layers a life contained, his soul would eventually work its way through the outermost one, and take him with it.
Abby had gone to the kitchen to start dinner. Still holding the children, Michael leaned in and told her he was leaving. “No!” Colleen cried, and Gavin imitated her without understanding, “NO. NO!” They clung to his neck like frantic monkeys when he tried to release them.
“Kids,” Abby said sharply, and they let go in a single motion. When he set them down they stood quite still.
She had poured a package of microwave fettuccine into a glass bowl—powder, noodles—and was adding water. “Sure you don’t want to stay?” she asked lightly.
At the door, Colleen hugged Michael’s legs and kissed both his knees. He did not lift her again.
He drove quickly to his house, a tiny two-story which was the precise opposite in atmosphere of the one he had just left. Abby had never seen his house, and she would be shocked, he thought, by its emptiness. Right now, the house suited him perfectly.
Tired. Exhausted. Bushed. Beat. Colloquial English lacked sufficient vocabulary to express the enormity of what he felt, had felt for months, ever since his arrival in this place. He reached for a beer, then changed his mind and poured a glass of milk, which he took to his room. There was a bed, a dresser and of course a TV set, that American treasure chest. He watched the programs that everyone watched, and when he wasn’t watching, he listened—for accents, facts, common knowledge. Sometimes he had trouble distinguishing between TV events and real ones; certain things on TV could not happen in life, even in America. He showered down the hall, listening to shreds of TV sound through the running water, and with his hair and body still damp, he lay down on the bed and glanced at his book of Japanese erotica, then decided against it. Too tired. He felt a moment of regret for not having stayed with Abby; he longed for sex with a human being. But sex, not love; not making love. It was too much work.
In the middle of the night, the doorbell rang. Michael woke in a paroxysm of fear and leapt to his feet, which made pricks of light flood his head. For a moment, he felt close to passing out. But already the calm, reasoning part of him was restoring order: if his compatriots had tracked him down, then so be it. He had always known they might. Still, anxiety cracked through his limbs when the bell rang a second time.
He pulled on his jeans and pushed his Walther into the waistband, against his stomach, not that a gun would be any use if they had found him, but it made him feel stronger. He pulled a shirt from a hanger and buttoned a couple of buttons, enough to cover the Walther, then stepped nimbly into the empty room at the front of the house, the room from which he could glimpse whoever was standing at the door. Someone thin, female. In the moonlight, a red bicycle gleamed against the grass.
He descended the stairs and opened the front door. It was the girl, holding a bowl of fish.
He experienced a wave of relief so immense it made his eyes sting. He felt as if the girl had brought that relief, irrational though this was.
“Hello,” he said, dizzy from the sudden calming of his heart.
“Hi,” she said, and held out the fishbowl. There were three fish, smooth and brightly colored: crimson, vermilion. They looked like flowers. “These are for you.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking the bowl from her. He felt half-asleep, the exhaustion already flowing back around the shards of his panic, reclaiming him. He opened the door and led the way into the kitchen, where he set the fish on the table. When he turned on the light, he noticed how bad its color was, green almost. He would get a different bulb, or else a shade. Something to filter the light. The fish bumped very gently against the sides of the bow
l.
“They’re cold,” the girl said.
She wore a jean jacket and a white shirt underneath, a man’s shirt much like his own. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore glasses. Her cheeks were red. “You carried these fish on a bicycle?” he asked.
“I only need one hand to steer,” she said. “You should keep them by your bed.”
“And why is that?”
“If you watch them when you go to sleep, they’ll give you good dreams.”
This got his attention. Dreams were a problem—not only did they curdle his nights, but at times left a troubling residue that touched his days. He preferred not to dream at all.
“Maybe you would always have good dreams,” he said. “Fish or no fish.”
“I’m telling you,” she said.
He leaned against the sink, watching her. There was some response between them; he felt it each time she was near. Michael respected the power of chance, of vibrations, all the things one couldn’t see. Occasionally, those things were more powerful than all the rest—you either bowed to them, let them in, or their force would break you. But this vibration was nothing like that. This was one of hundreds you sensed between yourself and other people.
Obviously he must send her away yet again. But he delayed. She was reaching into the pocket of her jacket for a cylinder of fish food, explaining at what times and in what quantities the fish should be fed. Michael didn’t listen. Sending her away would not be enough; he’d done that already, twice. This time, he would deliver the message more strongly. He must shake her, but not frighten her deeply enough that she would turn to someone for help. Although he doubted she would. She could absorb it on her own, this girl. He watched her pale face and neck.
“Let’s take them where you sleep,” she said.
“That isn’t necessary.”
She picked up the fish with a quiet insistence that angered him and aroused his curiosity. If there was a single impulse Michael West found hardest to curb in himself, it was the desire to know every fact about a situation before he acted—to wait, test his beliefs about human nature and psychology against the bracing force of reality. He had suffered for it—more than once—yet the impulse remained, perhaps had even strengthened over time. So often he knew more than the people around him, sometimes a great deal more, and yet some part of him still longed to have his own predictions confirmed, or, better yet—and this happened rarely—to be surprised. There was something engaging, now, about allowing this young American girl to believe she could trick him.
“Upstairs,” he said.
She went first. He followed her into the sound of the TV, and noticed from this vantage point her ass and hips and her smell, a clean smell, like the sea. He felt a first intimation of something overtly physical toward the girl, and it was simply the thought that he would like to smell her again.
“Wait,” he said at the top of the stairs. He was picturing his room. “It’s not clean. Give me the fish.”
“Turn off the light,” she said, “and then I won’t see.”
“You’ll fall down, and my lovely new fish will die.”
“I can walk in the dark.”
He paused, taking his own mental temperature once again. There was plenty of time to get rid of her. But curiosity stopped him, he was unwilling to end the story so soon. Who was this girl? He’d met her before, of course—there was no one in the world he hadn’t met before, usually many times. And yet he found her difficult to place. She stood in the half-light, holding her bowl of fish, and a moment later, Michael found himself inside the room, switching off the light. On the window sill stood a little kumquat tree he’d bought, and it filled the room with a citrus smell much sweeter than the taste of kumquats. He snapped off the TV. A terrific hush settled over room and house, a sound of its own. He hadn’t pulled the shades, and a bright, hard moon thrust its light between the clouds. “Okay,” he said, opening the door. He found that he was nervous—it was eerie, somehow. The girl came in and shut the door behind her.
“Wait—,” he said. But apparently, moonlight was enough, because she made her way to the window and set down the fish beside the kumquat tree. Moonlight filled the bowl, and the flowing, dreamy movement of the fish seemed to capture Michael’s own state of mind, as if he were swimming among them, as if he himself were the bowl in which they swam. The girl sat on his bed and kicked off her sneakers. Her back was to the window. Except for a slim black silhouette, he couldn’t see her.
“Come here,” she said.
It was time to stop, to draw the line, he told himself (a TV phrase), yet it also felt too late. Too late: the story was unfurling like a scroll. “It’s time for you to go,” he said, his accent strong in a way that startled him.
“Just sit here for a minute.”
He sat. And only then did he feel the Walther against his ribs and remember it there. “Wait,” he said, standing again, moving to the dresser. He opened a drawer, slipped out the Walther, and put it where it had been, under his socks.
“What are you doing?” she asked, and he heard a guttering of fear in her voice, slight but distinct. She was alone in a stranger’s house, a stranger holding a gun, and she’d brought with her nothing but a bowl of fish. Stupid, he thought, desperate, crazy—the words arced through his mind, but he was also thinking, brave. Strange. It moved him. She had placed herself entirely in his hands while pretending not to know it, pretending to think she was in charge. And he had believed her.
And at that moment he decided, or rather, accepted the decision that had been made without his knowing. He would set down this coordinate, though it conformed to no picture he could recognize. In an empty universe, everyone must choose a few coordinates, and Michael West—or Z, as he had been until last August, and before that another name, a series of other names—chose to sit beside this girl.
She was lying down, arms at her sides, staring at the ceiling. He lay beside her, not touching. He breathed her smell. Plums, he thought, plums that grew by the sea. “Is that perfume?” he asked.
“Lotion,” she said. “From Florida.” She was terrified; he felt the mattress trembling underneath her. She’d been afraid all along, but he hadn’t known.
“I love it,” he said, and took her hand, which was hot and shook in his, and she rolled on her side to face him and he held her. They held each other very tightly. He felt her strength, the pounding heart inside her small frame, and in that moment he recognized her at last: the innocent. He felt an impulse to protect her, shield her from some proximate and overwhelming danger. But there was only himself.
Chapter Seven
On the morning after my abortive interview with Irene Maitlock, Oscar called and read me the phone numbers of two psychiatrists. In a show of devastating restraint, he made no mention of the fact that I had hounded a New York Post reporter from my home, thus dashing my last, best hope of resuming my former life. “We’ll speak again when you’ve met with one of these excellent doctors,” he told me. “Or both.”
I had no intention of calling a shrink; in my present, incomeless state, I couldn’t have justified seeing a shrink even if I’d thought it would do any good, which I did not. Was a shrink going to succeed where the combined expertise of Doctors Fabermann and Miller had fallen short—namely, in restoring me to my pre-accident state? No. A shrink was going to make me, or “help me,” as Oscar so delicately put it, accept my present circumstances. And I could do that alone—I’d done it all my life. My problem was that I didn’t yet know what those circumstances were, exactly.
I waited twenty-four hours before calling Oscar back. “I saw Mitzenkopf,” I reported. “And you know what he told me, Oscar? He said getting a few jobs would do more for my peace of mind than a hundred hours of therapy. Can you believe the honesty of a shrink saying that?”
“Dr. Mitzenkopf is female,” Oscar replied, and hung up without further comment.
After that exchange, which concluded at ten-thirty-five on a Friday mo
rning, I did not speak to another human being for seventy-two hours. A colossal silence broke open and spread around me, a silence whose dimensions felt global, seismic, planetary; a seeping quiet that was familiar, I supposed, to astronauts and Antarctic explorers, but not to me. I sat on my sectional couch looking out at a snowstorm, jillions of white dots hurling themselves against my sliding glass door in a subatomic frenzy.
By Monday morning snow lay piled along the East River, heaps of gold in the slanted morning sun. And then the phone rang. “I have two words for you,” said Oscar, when I answered in a voice grown froggish from disuse. “Italian Vogue.”
I must have screamed.
“Careful of your face,” he said. “It has to last until tomorrow.”
The blood was beating against my cheeks. I sat down, light-headed.
“There’s just one tiny thing,” he said. “They believe you’re the subject of an upcoming feature story in the Post. Let us not enlighten them.”
I let this go. “Who’s the photographer?”
“Spiro. Who happens at the moment to be incandescent.”
“Not paparazzo Spiro,” I said, referring to a fairly desperate second stringer whose postage-stamp-sized photos had freckled the lower-tier gossip pages for years.
“The very same,” Oscar said. “My, how things change in a few short months.”
Spiro’s fortunes had turned last fall, Oscar said, when he’d had a one-man show at Metro Pictures displaying work he’d been shooting on his own: an homage to Gordon Parks consisting of black-and-white photos of a sixteen-year-old gang leader called Honey B. Reviewers praised the show’s gritty authenticity, its unblinking portraits of urban violence rendered in magisterial tableaux reminiscent of Goya. Bazaar immediately hired Spiro to reprise the series in “Girl Gang,” a now-infamous fashion spread featuring models in Martine Sitbon and Helmut Lang posing as gang members. (“Execution,” a shot of Kate Moss holding a sawed-off shotgun to the head of a blindfolded and kneeling Amber Valetta, had caused a particular frisson of outrage and commentary.) Since then, fashion assignments had been coursing into Spiro’s life without interruption.
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