They’d married and he had, at times, gotten better, though he had never been best. This, for a hopeful person, might have been a consolation prize. But instead, strange things occurred of his own doing if not—or so it seemed—his volition. There was the mutant yolk cooked sunny-side up, inedible when he saw its yellow doubleness. There was the missed call. Then, he had upended the trash, found what he had not intended to seek, and the hotel receipts were as real as thin was the story.
She had not even seemed to believe the narrative herself. Of course she wouldn’t. It was an alibi.
A friend, Alexandra had called him.
And a diamond is a rock.
He could not speak the word that Lyle Michaels was.
Jeremy passed a park shrieking with children, trees imported to gaps in cement. It was a Friday, and a slapping sound was skipping rope. Jeremy kept on. His head hurt with every sound come into it.
Wright had said, listen to everything in case it’s something. An Intelligence Corps trainer had said, we trained the E4A, but there are dogs that bite the hand who feeds. And Alexandra, she had said soon she must go to Nevada to hire a home health aide for her mother. From somewhere, the jag of a child’s cry cut through the noise, and there was a loss of equilibrium for a moment. In the sky, the sun shone, but even in the light he perceived a loss of center, transitory North Star. There was something rising up his throat. He paused by a trash can to smell the steadying stench of decay.
“Baba sick?”
Sometimes Jeremy forgot where he was in space. But he didn’t forget that a body is evidence that you are watched. He must be a man strong enough to be seen by his son. He walked again, and Han was still holding his hand. He walked faster. Just get them home.
“Excuse me,” someone said.
He stopped. He turned toward the voice. The voice, he saw, belonged to a young woman in blue jeans. “Excuse me,” she said again. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”
“Sorry, what?”
“What exactly do you think you’re doing with this little boy?” She knelt. Her hand was upturned, pink fingers spread, extended to Han. “Where are your mommy and daddy?” the woman said.
He looked down at the splash of black hair on his boy’s head, looked down at the blond hair on his own arm. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he said. “This is my son.”
Black. Blond. This woman’s hair was brown.
“I’m Rachel,” she said. “I’m a friend. Can you tell me where your mommy and daddy are?” And she was touching him now. She had his hand.
There were explanations, but Jeremy didn’t have them. There were explanations, but his mind was locked up. His son was not speaking. His son whose hand she’d taken. She wanted to take his son. And before Jeremy knew it, he pulled hard, and he was running. He hugged Han to his chest, heard him cry, and ran.
Later, after the matter was cleared up, after the police had been satisfied and Alexandra had put Han to bed, after she’d said the woman with the brown hair and blue jeans could fuck off, the woman with her ratty brown hair and ratty blue jeans could go fuck a hydrant covered in dog piss, her voice was very tight and she had to pour out a glass of red wine she’d filled with ice cubes. Jeremy folded the corkscrew, gave her a new glass.
“But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is why did you run?”