Eleven

Gavin made a list of things he didn't need anymore. Number one: electricity. He bought candles in a dollar store and set them up in old beer bottles, which he half-filled with water to counterbalance the weight, and thus he was serenely prepared when the lights blinked out. Number two: the home phone, but this was redundant, because his phone was the kind with a digital call display that plugs into the wall and therefore hadn't worked since the electricity ended. Number three: gas. This one was obvious. He wasn't cooking anymore, and anyway he hadn't opened the fridge since the day the light switches had stopped working. At first he'd thought about emptying it out and cleaning it, taking the dead food out to the curb, but lately he'd been thinking about taping it shut.

There was a night when Gavin stood in the apartment with candlelight flickering all around him and thought, Someday soon this will all be gone. He was listening to classical music on an old battery-operated radio that he'd pulled out of the closet, part of the emergency preparedness kit he'd assembled with Karen a few years back. The Brandenburg Concertos sounded staticky and far away and he had a disoriented feeling that nothing in the room was real. His papers, his clothes, his books, this detritus he'd accumulated all around him, these shadows in these darkened rooms. He could live without most of it, but not all, so he began carrying an overnight bag when he left the apartment. A spare set of toiletries purchased on a credit card— why not?—and a change of clothing, the only clothes he owned that he absolutely couldn't stand to give up: a pair of particularly excellent pin-striped pants, a crisp white shirt that he loved, his best corduroy jacket. The bag also held his camera— the 1973 Yashica with a perfect lens— and a couple pairs each of underwear and socks, his passport, an umbrella, a broken gold pocket watch he'd found at a stoop sale, his laptop, power adapters for the computer and the cell phone. He felt overburdened and weighted when he went out in the mornings.

There were several unopened envelopes from his landlord on his kitchen table. He hadn't paid the rent in some time. He knew that someday soon he'd come home and his belongings would be scattered on the street or closed away behind a lock for which he didn't have the key, and he had salvaged the best of them. He never left the apartment without his favorite fedora.

Gavin had always taken pictures, but now it was different. He took as many pictures as he always had— of angles of light, of interesting graffiti, of street corners— but he no longer bothered to get the film developed. That had always been the expensive part.

S o m e w h e r e a l o n g the way, perhaps in high school, Gavin had fallen into the habit of mentally framing himself in an imaginary photograph and murmuring the caption aloud, mostly to avoid taking his life too seriously. Noted journalist Gavin Sasaki stands in line at the supermarket. Or later, Former reporter Gavin Sasaki ducks out of Barbès before the arrival of the tip bucket. Or later still, Disgraced newspaperman Gavin Sasaki debates whether to put one sugar or two into his Venti latte and simultaneously ponders the ruins of his life. Gavin was spending all his time at a Starbucks near his apartment. His bank account was empty and he'd maxed out two credit cards, but there were one hundred and forty-one dollars left on a third. In the absence of any better ideas, he thought he might as well spend it all on sandwiches and coffee. In one last heroic effort he had fifty résumés printed at a Kinko's, and he walked the streets for two days distributing them at any place he thought he could possibly work, restaurants and coffee shops and bookstores, places that sold cell phones, clothing shops. When the résumés were gone he went back to sitting at Starbucks with his cell phone and his laptop plugged into the wall beside him, but none of the fifty businesses called him back. When the phone finally rang it was his sister.

"Four months ago I was fine," he said. This wasn't entirely true, when he thought about it, but at least four months ago he hadn't known that Chloe existed, and four months ago he hadn't been consumed by guilt. He was increasingly certain that he'd known Anna was pregnant.

"What I'm saying is that if you want to cut your losses, Gavin, if you want to leave New York for a while, if it's all come unglued and you don't really have a reason to be there at all anymore and it happens that your phone's been cut off, I can offer you a place to stay and a job."

He went out and bought the paper. He was on the front page. It was a brief story, three short columns below the fold, but there was his face, the photo from his employee ID card, and the headline was "Star Journalist Committed Fraud." For a moment he was flattered that they'd called him a star journalist, then he realized they just meant he'd been a journalist for the Star. He read the first few lines, about a promising young reporter who'd invented characters and written dialogue for them for his stories, and let his gaze slide over the paragraphs that followed— there they all were, Amy Torren and the others, a congregation of ghosts— and then he came upon a sentence that stopped him cold: "This episode is deeply regretted by everyone here at the New York Star, and marks a low in the 82-year history of the paper."

"Plagiarism matters," he said. "They teach you that on the first day of journalism school. Actually, you know what? Before journalism school. I think they covered that in maybe the ninth grade. It makes a difference, Eilo, believe me. I would never, I would never—"

"I would never do it, Eilo. Yeah, I lied. I made up people who gave me quotes because real people are so goddamn disappointing, Eilo, real people have nothing good to say when something happens, you ask them for a reaction and they just stare at you like 'uh . . .' and they can't string a sentence together, they're pitiful—"

G a v i n a r r i v e d home just as the locksmith was leaving. There was a notice of eviction on his apartment door and his first thought was that now Karen wouldn't be able to find him, but he'd been avoiding her since he'd lost his job and she hadn't called once. It occurred to him that she'd very likely seen the story in the Star by now. He stood looking at his apartment door for a moment, thought about tearing down the eviction notice, calling a different locksmith and pretending to be locked out, but he knew that locksmiths in Manhattan ran in the two-hundred-dollar range for lockouts and if he was going to lose his apartment anyway, why not today? He had the important things with him, the camera, the computer, his favorite hat.

Back out on the street he wandered aimlessly for a while. The city was pressing down upon him. He thought at that moment that he might've done anything to escape the gray of the city, his static life, and that thought— anything— made him stop in his tracks. It was the worst thought he'd had in a while, because what was left to lose? His hands were shaking. He sat on a bench on a traffic island in the middle of Broadway until his cell phone rang.

She gave him the flight information and he wrote it on his hand, hailed a taxi and watched the city slip away from him. It was late spring but a cloud hung low over the streets and Manhattan had already turned into a ghost of itself, gray with tower lights shining high in the fog. At LaGuardia he paid for the taxi with a credit card. He bought an extra pair of socks and two cheap paperbacks in the terminal. He refused to look directly at the New York Star in the newsstand. He'd checked in hours early. He paced the length of the terminal and read both paperbacks cover to cover. It occurred to him in the airplane that he might never live in New York City again, and he was surprised to discover that the thought came as a relief. Night had fallen by the time the plane began the descent. The lights of Florida glimmered to the horizon, one suburb bleeding into another along the blackness of the Everglades.

He shook his head. A crease of worry appeared on her forehead, but she was kind enough not to make further inquiries. The heat struck him when they stepped out of the terminal. The old dread came over him, childhood memories of dizziness and heatstroke, but in the cool of Eilo's air-conditioned car it was possible to forget all this for a moment. Eilo flicked between stations on the radio, her hand lit pale by the console lights. The interior of the car smelled faintly of lavender. The outskirts of Boca Raton bled into the outskirts of Sebastian and the streets became gradually familiar, except it seemed to him that Eilo was making all the wrong turns.

" Three months. We're not legally divorced yet." Eilo took an off-ramp that spiraled down into a dim wide street, made a sharp right turn and pulled up into the driveway of a low-slung brick house. The house looked large and Gavin supposed it was relatively nice, as houses went— he vastly preferred apartments— but when he got out of the car the air was filled with sound. After a moment he realized that the freeway was almost overhead, massive pylons rising up just beyond the backyard.

"We're not under the freeway," she said. "It's behind the house. And you can't hear it from inside. The place is completely soundproofed." She punched a code into a console by the garage door and went back to the car, got in and drove into the garage, and Gavin found himself alone on a suburban driveway. He was thinking about how he'd frame the image if he were taking a photograph. The bright square of the garage door opening at the lower left corner of the frame, darkness all around it and above.