He was only, he was only. As though it matters.
Was it random or specific? They couldn’t tell that, either. Valuable things ignored—his watch, phone, et cetera—ruled out simple robbery. There were suspicions but no evidence. Just as likely a crazed loner as any of the other, more infamous possibilities.
How? I still want to know. Notwithstanding who. If there was footage, I would have watched it. Many times, I would have watched, I know. I would not have been able to stop myself. Instead, I have watched all the other footage. Scrolled and played and replayed. And when there is new footage that bubbles up from the dark belly of the internet, I watch it also. This, too, is something I cannot help. So much for the protective efforts of my colleagues.
The day upon which Maria is supposed to come and collect Chavez arrives and disappears like the TGV through an insignificant town. Then the morning after this, and the one which follows do not bring her. I call the number she has left for me to call if something happens to Chavez or the building burns down or some other catastrophe occurs, but the numbers do not reach to anywhere or anyone, just the apology of a robot voice explaining that nobody is at the end of this sequence of numbers.
I am not sure if it is my position to do something now, to call and make some report or other. For the first time, I properly worry—how bad was this bad husband of Maria’s? I worry also whether they confiscate the dogs of missing persons. This is unlikely, but just in case, I decide I will not mention Chavez when calling authorities. However, the weeks vanish without me calling any authorities.
During this time, the only mail which arrives for Maria is in the form of bills, threats of disconnections, and finally notices of disconnections. There is also one subscription to a Spanish science magazine, in which I appreciate some of the graphs and diagrams. Aside from this there is nothing but junk.
I try to interpret if Chavez is concerned for her, whether he is pining. One night we climb up to Maria’s apartment together, and he circles the main room and sniffs everything to make sure it still belongs to him, and then huffs down onto the woven rag rug in the center of the room in a way that seems abattu. Chavez, I mean, though the rug seems despondent also. But when I go to the door the dog follows without protest. We return downstairs, where he settles down Sphinx-like beside me as I pull my laptop onto my knees and begin a new search for the videos I know I should not be searching for.
In the footages that do not show Bruno, the hostages appear shaken and malnourished. Or else they appear sinewy and stoic. They have not had any alcohol in many months, this can be seen in comparing the footage to the photographs from fishing trips and honeymoons and family holidays that are published by less morbid media. Their clothes are sandblasted to no color, or rotting away with a greenish damp. On occasion their skin, along with their expressions, have taken on some elemental likeness—stone, or earth, or closely grained wood—as if to chameleon to their particular surrounds, or to separate themselves completely from undependable flesh and blood.
They deliver, sometimes, rehearsed statements to families and governments. Sometimes these include appeals, demands, bargains, and then the footage is over, the screen blacks out harmlessly.
Other times, no bargains are to be offered, and what follows was always going to follow, was always crouching there, hidden in plain silence at the end of the statement.
I smooth down the ears of Chavez. Does he know that what he sees is terrible? I think yes. I suspect he is this smart, and because of this I feel some guilt to be exposing him to these scenes. It is not so good for him, I think, to watch these things only. And so I play sometimes the absurd English comedy shows Bruno enjoyed, and which I could apparently never appreciate the genius hilarity of. It is a parrot in a tuxedo, or whatever, I would say. It is a man walking idiotically—so what? And this, where people are attempting to remain in hiding, behind bushes and trees and cars, but each time the hiding place is exploded. I still do not see where it is so funny.
Towards Christmas I am taking downstairs the small amount of rubbish which Chavez and I succeed to make between us during a week. Mostly it is hair: my dark-with-gray hair, his white hair. Enough to construct another Séverine and one other Chavez, almost. I notice that huddled around the dumpster are some of Maria’s possessions, packed into cardboard boxes. I determine they are Maria’s by the old stack of Muy Interesante. Inside the dumpster there are larger items; chairs and clotheshorses, the despondent rug. I place my rubbish bag onto the ground and go to the front of the building. The name next to the buzzer for Maria’s apartment still reads Quintana. But the name next to the buzzer for my apartment still reads Schutt, and that is not my name. Though it possibly could be, I sometimes think. The only real mail which ever arrived at this apartment was one letter for Ms. A. Schutt, which I marked for return and sent away. Avis. Anne. Arlene. Arabella. Alma. Nothing addressed to her has arrived since. I could be Ava Schutt—there is no one to say otherwise.
I return to search amongst the boxes, and find the photographs of the daughter and son of Maria. They are there amongst the paper flowers and the god’s-eyes made in blue and yellow yarn wound around crossed popsicle sticks, jumbled in with clothes and tangled strings of colored lights. Everything that was upstairs is now downstairs; plates painted in crimson and peacock, Maria’s bright scarves and tiny fierce shoes. An ugly winter coat which I am unable to picture her in, because it was not yet winter when she left. There are some toy animals belonging either to Chavez or the children. I pick up one small felt walrus and turn him over to assess if he has been assaulted by tooth marks or dog spit. He fits into my pocket. I try to imagine what Maria will want most when she returns, and I transfer these things into one box: a spiral notebook of handwritten recipes, one silver pashmina, along with the photographs and postcards and children’s crafts. I realize I do not know Maria well enough to know what she would most want, so I make one more box full of things I would want, and I carry both upstairs to store inside my closet. That is all there is room for. But then I go down and carry back one last box, made heavy by dinnerware, dollar votive candles, and clothbound novels in Spanish. My apartment becomes full of Maria Quintana’s apartment. When I offer Chavez the walrus, he accepts it as delicately as if it is a Communion wafer, then shakes his head violently to murder it.
In the few cold weeks that barely amount to winter, Chavez and I follow the sunlight around the apartment. The monstera plant recovers. Encouraged, I commit to more plants—midget magnolia, purple jade, elephant food. Chavez ruins the ones he does not care for. Or perhaps he ruins the ones he cares for too much—this issue of translation persists. In any case, he is indifferent to the succulents, and so they flourish.
The world trickles back to me, slowly, percolated through headphones, in many voices: Nothing left, for food. In the last days we eat even the toothpaste. I think: someone comes soon. Someone must. But no one comes. When she stops breathing, I breathe to her. For how long I don’t know. Many hours. Because what if help comes just around that corner? I keep breathing to her. I refuse to believe it is too late until it is a long way past too late.
Once more I am to be trusted with the hearing of such recollections; reports of wars, diseases, cruelties. Terrible things recounted by unfamiliar voices who nevertheless manage to continue broadcasting from the mouths of storekeepers, cleaning staff, people passed in the street, as gradually Chavez and I take our walks later and later in the mornings, earlier and earlier in the nights. In fact this is only the illusion, of earlier and later: it is simply the fact of winter leaning quietly towards spring, the light stretching out across the length of a day, infiltrating our routine. The sensation is of the world gaining volume, the little metallic light stealing in at the edges of sky, skin and fur taking on an icy, drowned color. We abandon the hours of dogs and wolves for the hours of Tai Chi seniors and yoga boot camps and seagull feeders. The hours of boom boxes and picnic rugs, hazy ukulele circles, after-school gymnastics troupes.
&n
bsp; One afternoon a postcard appears in my mailbox, an Anywhere image of a beach and palm trees.
Querida S, I read while standing at the box, then hurry upstairs to place it written-side down on the table, afraid of what it will go on to say. I am embarrassed to admit that I leave it there overnight, offering the words underneath a chance to kindly rearrange or erase themselves, to scuttle away like beetles, the way they sometimes will in dreams. When I have finally collected enough courage, I find that what it says is nothing much. Dear S. Very peacefully here, but have some pain for (smudge) to not come back these days. I think to you often. Thank you always for your kind. M.
I am at the same time relieved and offended on the behalf of Chavez. But one’s dog is not one’s children, I understand. I expect another card but there is never another. Or if there is, it does not reach me.
Summer arrives. In March, taking everyone by surprise. Chavez suffers the entrapment of his thick fur, seeking the cool kitchen tiles, the bathtub, finally settling to stretch out beneath my desk with his head resting on a ziplock bag of frozen grapes, while I attempt to work. Now and again I stray to browsing international quarantine laws. Cargo. It is not a very comfortable word. He does not take up so much space, really. Even when complaining.
On one of these false summer nights, I am woken from the darkest parts of sleep to find Chavez, crouched before the apartment’s door, his snout pushed to the sill, teeth bared at whatever might be outside in the hallway. I lower myself to the floor alongside him, smelling dog breath and an unfamiliar, angry rank. Burying my hands into the dog’s ruff makes him quiet, only; his fur remains bristled, his ears high and sharp, on radar. I listen for human movements—any movements—on the other side of the door. The thin wedge of light that intrudes underneath is not broken by any shadow. There is nothing. Or if there is something, it is very small, a rat or escaped hamster, or it has already moved on. I coax Chavez away before blocking the offending light with a bath towel rolled into a snake. That is that. Though I wake soon after to Chavez patrolling the room, back and forth, back and forth, tossing his great head and pawing and whimpering into corners. It is a noise, I determine, a dog-maddening sound pitched beyond my simple hearing. Or else it is a gas leak, or something living in the walls.
Or, I have damaged him, after all, with my gloomy obsessions.
Finally I convince him to be still. Summoning him up onto the bed, and pushing my toes into his fur in the way we have both come to appreciate: I am here; I am here, also. But each time I open my eyes I see the glint of his, watchful, in the dark.
Shortly before dawn, the building heaves. A shallow dream in which I missed a stair. Chavez is already awake—has perhaps been awake this whole while—sitting sentinel, looking impatient.
A second shudder passes through the building. (Yes, all right, I admit to him. I see now.) Something heavy thuds onto the floor of upstairs. A bad art print crashes from the wall, and from the kitchen comes the silvery sound of glassware turning to smithereens.
I take Chavez by the collar, unsure of where is the better place to be: doorway or bathtub or under a table, or whether it is best of all to run out into the open street. (Disaster does not choose.) Doorway, I decide. I hold to Chavez as we wait for whatever underlying forces to shift again, or cease shifting, while unnumbered feet pound along the hallway towards the exits.
We sit eye to eye, dog and I, until the stomping and the shouting has gone away, gone out. We stay like this, listening as the building settles with a harmless ticking, like the cooling sounds of a big machine.
Then the fire alarm begins its caterwaul, as if upholding appearances: a child who has fallen and takes a moment to decide that yes, this is an applicable moment to wail. Chavez howls in response, and the sprinkler system follows, raining upon the subleased furniture, upon the fallen art print, and all the boxes of rescued things that Maria will never, I know, be returning for.
Okay, I say, Uncle.
Out in the street, our neighbors have converged, in shoes and out of shoes, clutching children or animals or laptops, occasionally managing all three. The more organized have evidently studied quake preparedness, and are handing out from a bulk box of pharmacy protein bars, determined on maintaining energy levels, though it has only been twenty minutes.
The surrounding hills blink quietly with lights, showing no signs of unrest. Overhead, the power lines are slack and unsparking. Two boys, bored with waiting, have decided to document the almost-disaster on cell phone. We must look the most miserable, Chavez and myself, the most tragedy-struck; the last to emerge, the only ones drenched. The boys invent a more stirring narrative of our plight—and this trained wolf dragged this woman to safety—before turning the camera back towards our building, shaking the device for effect.
I imagine this footage finding its way, somehow, to Lotti, during her rigorous tallying of this country’s perils.
Fault lines! she will call to say triumphantly. Did I not warn you? Though, in fact, fault lines had not featured in her catalog of menace.
As light comes into the sky I make out the small particulars of these faces around us, familiar and otherwise, and in some I read what I first believe to be grief, the shadow of possible loss. Then I understand that it is in fact not grief, but disappointment: they have done everything right. They have drilled and drilled, they have performed perfectly, but this is not the big one. This is only another drill. The big one is still to come.
The bells of Our Lady ring out across the lake, mournful and extravagant, though it is too early for any service. The street slowly empties of people, as if the signal has been issued that all is safe, now, that all may return to their homes.
In the city so recently known as Home, it will be 3:51 p.m., CET. Sunday. Winter will still be itself there, and Lotti will be pattering around her kitchen above the heads of the Norwegian architects, preparing for dinner. Perhaps making mercimek köftesi in the way their mother taught to her and Bruno. Her jewelry held aside in an empty wineglass so she can compress the lentil mixture very tightly between cupped palms. The art to it, Bruno insisted, his hands around my own, is pressing tight enough to leave an impression of one’s lifeline. There.
The Once-Drowned Man
The once-drowned man hailed me from outside the county courthouse. He was trailing a little blue-and-leather suitcase. I figured it held legal documents or some such, but the fact was I saw him standing there at 2 a.m., and although he wore a suit he did not strike me as the solicitorial type. The suit was very nicely cut, though even I could tell it was a decade outdated. And also a little disheveled, with the shirt open at the collar. A button was off. I wondered whether he might have been the defendant in an important case that day, and spent some hours trying to console himself in some rat-nest or other. But his breath did not smell of drinking.
At first he only wanted to go as far as Lloyd’s, pick up a few things, use the phone. Lloyd’s then bed, he told me. I left the meter running. Then while he was in there he changed his mind. He came back out through the colored plastic streamers with a six-pack of seltzer and a potted baby spruce. The spruce was dressed for Christmas, but it was only October. When he climbed back into my cab, it was right into the passenger seat. Usually only the very old or the very tall did this. He settled the suitcase between his feet and the baby spruce between his knees. Then he turned to me, eyes crackling with an indistinct glory, a light that was infectious if perhaps not thoroughly sound.
He started: I try to honor every coincidence, you understand. (Here he put his hand on my shoulder. I looked at the hand. He took the hand away and continued.) This was meant to be an auspicious day for me. I still hope I might recover it. I have at least one sturdy friend in Canada, he said, though this friend seems no longer in the habit of picking up the phone. Doesn’t this seem a fine night for it, though?
For what?
For Canada. It’s only a squeak past the border, St. Kitts.
Tonight, I said. You mean this morning.<
br />
This very morning.
This very morning. I think that would make for an expensive coincidence.
We were one of only two cars in the lot. I tried to see through the windows of Lloyd’s, whether my fare had knocked somebody down, or been the cause of some other commotion. But all appeared normal.
In any case, I said. I can’t drive you across the border.
You ever tried? he asked. It against the law?
Probably it’s against the law, I don’t know. In any case. I won’t get a fare back from way up there.
Of course I will pay your fare back. I’ve already factored that into the expense.
Also, I said, I am not carrying my passport.
Well, we can make a detour for your passport. We can factor that into expenses too.
I told him that would make a very long detour for us both.
He seemed to understand. He stroked the little spruce in thought, as if it were substitute for a beard. Okay, he said. Say you drive me to the border—am I then within my legal rights to walk over on my own two feet?
I’m sure that’s allowed. But I don’t make the rules.
Mother Maria, what fuss. In California, you wanna go to Mexico? You can just walk behind the fried chicken place and there it is: Bienvenido! A twelve-year-old with a gun who just nods at you. Bienvenido!
The airport would be cheaper, I offered. Cheaper and faster. Bet there’s a dozen flights going up there come 6 a.m., I said, though in fact I had no idea.
You don’t heed the news? he said. Could you look at my face, please. (I looked at his face.) Who with this face can trouble with airports nowadays? And fact is I never fly when I can help it. Especially never east. Flying against time—crazy. West isn’t so bad. You only fly west, and you’re ahead on time. Your whole life could be one long stretch of daylight. Look, all right, I know it doesn’t exactly work that way, but you try explaining to me why not.
Here Until August Page 10
