HOW DIFFERENT IS FLYING from Renata’s fantasies of life on the QE2 with Mrs. Stiller. In their heyday, the old ocean liners, grand and humane, were traveling communities that lent themselves to metaphorical use: ship of fools, ship of state. They rocked and swayed in the cradle of waters, lulled and lulling, gentle as very large, slow things can be gentle. They were a vacation from the commonplace yet didn’t extinguish its memory. Ordinary events continued, made lustrous by the sea and the lulling and the luxury, while unexpected winding stairs and crannies allowed for small, safe adventures, for losing and finding one’s bearings—the kind of adventures Mrs. Stiller must be relishing on the QE2. People ate dinners at linen-covered tables, made friends and enemies, stretched out in the sun, played cards or sports or music, had love affairs, even married. They bore children and died. The captain invited to his table the most illustrious or gracious members of the community, for even at sea the innuendos of social stratification persisted; people accumulated histories and reputations; some were sought out and others avoided, but everyone belonged somewhere.
Flying, even in the best of circumstances, is a refined form of torture. So Renata believes. Does she really exaggerate? The cramping and claustrophobia and bad air and wretched food are the least of it. A commercial airplane is a sealed autocracy, with its pilot the invisible despot, benevolent, we have to hope. Carrying out his will is a staff of uniformed “flight attendants,” as ubiquitous as the police in an autocratic state and as swift to point out infractions of the rules. In olden times the attendants—stewardesses—had to be female and beautiful and ingratiating, but equal opportunity changed all that. Now they need only be enforcers. So many rules! So many announcements, sing-song voices nagging in ridiculous euphemisms. Surely the rules can’t all be necessary. Surely some primitive gratification is at work, some glee in regulation for its own sake. Where to sit and how—upright or reclining—where to put “personal belongings,” when to eat and drink and use the bathroom. (And speaking of bathrooms, she wonders, as she finds her seat and stows her bag, what Linda and Roger’s punishment would be, were they discovered in some contorted sexual posture in the cramped bathroom. Would they be mildly admonished, or be seated far apart like naughty children in school, perhaps even put off the plane in an unscheduled stop? For that matter—and it’s strange that this hasn’t occurred to her before—were there any couples having sex in the bathroom on those four doomed flights, anyone interrupted mid-climax, blown to bits while...? No, such thoughts are blasphemous. Cut it out, she scolds.)
On the ground, self-reliance is prized, but up in the air the prime virtue is passive obedience, the sacrifice of self. Identity is siphoned off: here is equality at its tackiest. Everyone endures the same tyranny, never mind the linen napkins and wider seats of first class. Individual features of dress or speech or gesture mean nothing; everyone dissolves into a shared impotence at the far reaches of anonymity. And it does no good to remember that soon enough we’ll be picking up our identities along with our luggage. It feels as though we are no one, have never been anyone, and never will be again.
Now, of course, these complaints felt frivolous. On Renata’s flight to Houston, as on all flights since they resumed two days ago, everyone on board was simply frightened of being hijacked and blown up. Some less, some more, depending. Renata more, not because she was more cowardly than others, but because her need was greater. She had to get to Houston; she had to see her uncle. After all this time, she could not be thwarted by some zealot’s passion. She had a passion of her own—to confront, to avenge.
Her Houston-bound neighbor, a thirty-something body-builder who smelled of aftershave, poked at his teeth with a green plastic toothpick he kept in his shirt pocket. She leafed through the morning paper. An extremist group in Birmingham envisioned a future Britain as an Islamic state, and one of its leaders addressed young Muslim men: “When the attack comes then every Muslim in the world should take it as an attack on themselves. This is a war that the west cannot win. Muslims love death more than life and they will never understand that.” The plane began taxiing toward the runway and she braced for the sickening roar of takeoff. Suddenly they stopped short. Captain Farrell, whose accent proclaimed him from Wisconsin (“aboot twenty minutes more”), explained that they were pausing to fix a valve on the door of the luggage compartment. Renata imagined the door catapulting into the blue somewhere over Kentucky, baggage overflowing as from a cornucopia, hurtling through the sweet southern air to settle in swaying blue grass.
“That’s no joke, a loose door,” her neighbor snarled. He had mean little green eyes. “A doors loose, flies open, the air pressure in the cabin changes, ruins the whole balance of the plane.” He made a diving motion with his hands and brought them down between his knees.
“One more thing,” Captain Farrell said, “while I have the attention of you folks. This aircraft is not—I repeat, not—going to be hijacked. Anyone makes a suspicious move, I want every able-bodied man aboard up on their feet to take him down. Able-bodied women, too, let me add. Anyone with ideas, consider yourself warned. This aircraft is going to land safely in Houston and I wish you all a pleasant flight.”
She didn’t look up from the paper. “Dying in the name of Islam is the ultimate sacrifice and you will be rewarded in heaven. If the alliance of the Devil attacked the Taliban, then it is every Muslim’s duty...” She shivered in the frigid air (outside, the temperature was enviably balmy) as the attendants jiggled down the aisle to make sure everyone was properly belted. “Straighten your seat back,” they ordered, and she obeyed.
Yet even in the oppressive cylinder of the plane, she recalled, once in a while a kind of camaraderie does spring up (not today it won’t, not with the dreadful man beside her). It can happen when the plane lurches and feels out of control, and everyone searches the attendants’ porcelain faces to see if they’re worried too. Strangers clutch each others’ arms, whoever is alongside them, as Mrs. Amalia Gutierrez of Queens, mother of four, clutched Renata’s arm last winter when they hit a series of air pockets. She and Jack were flying home from a weekend escape to Puerto Rico, in their first flush of lust. “It’s just air pockets,” Renata told Mrs. Gutierrez. “It’s nothing.” On her other side, Jack was sleeping through the turbulence. Mrs. Gutierrez was not consoled, and in between sobs she related her life story, so that it should not go unrecorded. It was a happy story, for the most part. She had a lot to lose. For those fifteen minutes, Renata was her confessor and her confidante, the bearer of her closest secrets.
The most intimate moments can be the most ephemeral. When the crisis is over we’re strangers again. It’s not like a stupendous crisis, where the two who clutched hands will greet death together, like those who leaped from the flaming towers, or, if they live, will forever honor the memory of what they endured and what solace they gave. It can be a small crisis of mortification, of having unwillingly bared, under extreme pressure, the intimate self. As they filed out, Mrs. Gutierrez just nodded, eyes lowered.
Still, those few poignant moments when the plane plunges and thrashes—driven by the currents, driving us into each others’ arms—are a paradigm of love. We’re solitary, sealed off, and then out of the blue comes an impulsive rushing together, preternaturally intense, swiftly erased.
Ships offer the illusion of a life of ease, free of toil. No wonder they figure prominently in movies: they are susceptible to being romanticized. The unlovely airplane can’t evoke very much. It’s too clumsy and stiff for a bird; at night it may be mistaken for a star, but only briefly. The only films about airplanes are satirical farces or disaster films. And soon, after a decent interval, Renata supposed, would come a spate of terrorism movies featuring dark bearded men who love death more than life.
She must have dozed, for when she opened her eyes the plane was bouncing unpleasantly through an ash-white sky. She peered past the man beside her, perusing Sports Illustrated and stirring his Scotch, to catch a glimpse of another plane in the distance, a silver speck that stubbornly remained stationary and parallel. Just let me get there, she prayed. If I have to die, let it be on the way home. After.
“You missed the drinks,” her seatmate said. “But they’ll be coming back to give me my change, so you can get one.”
She nodded and raised the paper again. “Oh, there will be times when people don’t have this incident on their minds,” the President said yesterday. “There’ll be times down the road where citizens will be concerned about other matters, and I completely understand that. But this administration...will do what it takes...” The attendant was back. “Marcia,” according to the tag pinned to her maroon uniform, looked as though she would rather have been at a PTA meeting. Middle-aged, brown-haired and stocky, she would never have met the weight and beauty standards required in the coffee-tea-or-me days. She gave Renata a Coke, then addressed the muscular man.
“Your change, sir.”
He counted the bills. “I gave you a twenty.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she chirped. “You gave me a ten.”
“I gave you a twenty.” His lips curled in a smirk.
“I’m pretty sure it was a ten, but let me check. Sandy,” she called down the aisle. “Seat 18C, was that a ten or a twenty?”
“You’ve got to watch out for them,” he muttered to Renata. “Bitches always trying to gouge you.”
“A ten,” Sandy called back.
“I gave you a twenty and I want my change. Now.” Along with the smirk, he tilted his head almost coyly, but Marcia was too old to be impressed.
Her voice dropped one octave. “Let me go back and check again, and I’ll do my best to straighten this out.”
“Lucky it wasn’t a hundred.” He laughed and slapped his thigh. “They better watch their step. No one messes with me or screws me out of my money.”
“Are you sure?” Renata said. “They’re usually pretty careful.”
“Of course I’m sure.” Now she got the smirk.
Marcia returned. “I’m sorry, sir, but we’ve tallied up and...Maybe if you checked your bills again?”
He half-rose from his seat and leaned over. Renata could feel his breath, the Scotch. “Listen up, Marcia. If I say it was a twenty, it’s a twenty. Hand it over before I get really mad.”
Marcia looked at Renata appealingly.
“I’m sorry, I was sleeping.” She hoped Marcia understood that they weren’t traveling companions.
“One moment, sir.” Marcia scurried away and a new attendant appeared, “Doug,” a hefty black man in a crisp white shirt and tie. A bouncer type, but where could anyone be bounced, so far up?
“I hear there’s been a misunderstanding,” said Doug in an operatic bass.
“Misunderstanding, my ass. I gave your girl a twenty and she gave me change for a ten, man. Just give me my money and everything’ll be fine.”
After a pensive moment, Doug strode off and returned with a crisp ten-dollar bill. As Renata’s seatmate tucked it into his shirt pocket next to the toothpick, he gave her a quick wink.
She should have lied, she thought, and stuck up for poor plastic Marcia. She knew how it felt to be wrongly accused. Sure it was a ten, I saw it. It would have been the most innocuous form of wrong words, prashmon, a negligible lie. Except if her neighbor strangled her, she wouldn’t get to Houston. She closed her eyes, but it was hard to sleep with him beside her.
Last winter, on the flight to Puerto Rico, Jack had put his hand under the blanket and up her skirt (her favorite flowered skirt, now in a garbage heap with other debris) and dug his fingers into her. Not so bold as Linda’s flying escapades with Roger, but bold enough. Renata was barely awake but opened her eyes to find Jack looking composed, innocently Jack-like. She stirred in the seat to help his fingers, suppressing all sounds, only a long sigh at the end. They didn’t look at each other. After, they held hands. His hand was sticky and hot. “I was so bored,” he murmured. “There’s nothing to do.” The memory made her warm, and made the brute next to her worse.
Out the window the flat, brownish landscape—a converted swamp bed—rose at a tilt, upended, threaded with a maze of highways and low buildings sprinkled here and there. The land climbed up closer and clouds of dust climbed with it, shimmering in the heat. Then the awful bump as they hit the runway, the rush forward, the plane galloping out of control, the pilot in the saddle gripping the reins to hold it back. Everyone gasped in relief. They were still imprisoned, but one danger was gone. They would no longer crash into a building.
Welcome to Houston. A voice thanked the passengers for choosing to travel with them and hoped they’d enjoyed their flight. The voice spoke English, but the syllables didn’t make words Renata could recognize. They were pieces of familiar words, but something about the pacing was off. It was the stresses—all wrong, a stress every few syllables regardless of sense, making a repetitive, opaque little tune. “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened until the aircraft has come to a complete stop...” Words and melody had never been introduced. It was like hearing Cole Porter sung in rap mode.
As the passengers filed out, the attendants at the door bid them farewell like ministers greeting the worshippers after a church service, except they greeted only every third passenger. Renata emerged from the tube to see the approach of four armed guards in camouflage flanked by two plainclothesmen. What have I done!
“Come along with us, please.”
They were addressing her seatmate, right behind her. “What’s going on? What’re you talking about?” he said.
“Let’s not have any trouble. Just come along.” Two of the guards reached out to take his arms.
He tried to wrench away, while all around them the passengers froze. “Hey listen, I’m no fucking terrorist. I just wanted my fucking change. They tried to give me the wrong change.”
“You’ll have a chance to explain everything. Just come along quietly and there won’t be any trouble.”
“That cocksucking cunt,” he shouted as they escorted him away swiftly. “Do I look like a fucking Arab? I’m an American citizen, goddammit.” He had to be dragged off. “What about my bags, eh? I want my stuff.”
It was almost six and the light outside was fading. The moist heat was a relief after the plane’s frosty air, but that relief was brief: the bus to the city was air-conditioned to a fault and smelled of fake leather. Out the window was flat desolation. Webbed highway as far as the eye could see, forty miles of serpentine gray stripes and broken white lines. Finally the city, a distant glitter of green and glossy black. The closer they got, the more splendidly it glistened, an emerald city, each sleek glass skyscraper mirroring another’s surfaces. A few showed signs of architectural wit, stony ornaments, bits of cornices and friezes borrowed from the past, the only acknowledgment of a past. The highway snaked around the buildings as if to display them at different angles; the facets shifted, appeared, disappeared; the light flickered.
From where she sat, in the third row on the aisle, Renata could glimpse her face in the round rearview mirror at the front of the bus. Her face appeared to be vibrating. Trembling. The surface jiggled, as if its features were loose, its planes readjusting. She touched her face but it felt quite still. It took her a moment to grasp that the mirror itself was loose on its frame, and the speed of the bus was making it shake. Only another minor delusion but eerily true, as if the mirror were reflecting not her carefully composed face but a layer behind it.
Her hotel was in a downtown empty-as a desert. The room, large and depressingly neat, was freezing. Outside, tall buildings stalked the dark, sending out gleams like animals’ eyes in the night. Plastered on a building across the street, far below, was a poster advertising the Academy Art School, but she didn’t even bother to note it down. When she called the desk to ask how to turn off the air-conditioning, she was told it couldn’t be turned off. And why on earth would she want to? the voice implied. The cold was built in and everlasting.
She ordered dinner from room service. The TV was tempting, like something you know is bad for you, but she fought it; she’d promised herself a day off, like a smoker giving her lungs a rest. If anything happened she’d know soon enough; it wasn’t likely to happen here. She tried to study Arabic, but both the plural forms and the mysteries of the fifth verb conjugation defied her powers of concentration. Mrs. Stiller, amid the luxuries of the QE2, came back to mind, and then, inevitably, Miss Greff. Miss Greff would have felt at home in this room, this place, because nothing reeked of life. No need for ahmintu. Here you could play dead. It was worse than the room Renata had lived in when she first came to New York, for that at least was dingy, and dinginess was a form of life.
Around midnight she looked again out the window she’d tried in vain to open. Far down below, a passel of slender figures dressed in black—shorts, tank tops, knee pads—swept back and forth on the empty street. Skates or blades, she couldn’t tell, but wheels for sure. The figures were spinning and swirling, looping and leaping, a dozen or more, moving too fast to count. They made no pattern, each one moved in isolation, yet they were clearly a group, a clan, a tribe. When they skimmed under the hotel’s light, she could see their hair standing straight up and out in spikes, like Gianna’s hair but more colorful. Chartreuse, pink, teal blue, gold, and silver. A flock of lurid birds on wheels, a nighttime species, they prowled, crouched, darted. They swooped from one end of the broad street to the other in their entropie ballet, defying the dead streets. They were a pack of abandoned children protesting their abandonment, protesting those hot, empty streets, insisting on motion and color. If she’d been able to open the window, she would have cheered them on. In the king-sized bed, she piled on all the blankets she could find, tried to imagine Jack’s body curled around hers, and slept.
Her taxi came promptly the next morning. After a quick gust of warm street air, she was refrigerated again. This city renowned for its unbearable heat from May to November was the coldest place she’d ever been. And at nine-thirty on a Tuesday morning, where were the people?
“Abajo.” The driver was Mexican. Down below.
“Abajo?”
In the underground passageways. You could go from your car to your office, he explained, or from one building to another, without ever risking the air. You could eat lunch, do your shopping, go to the bank or the gym. A subterranean stratum of city lay hidden from the glare of the sun. This would never be the target of a terrorist attack. Everyone was already buried. This was the right place for Peter, the rat. How fitting that he’d ended up here.
She navigated the frigid labyrinth of the medical center for fifteen minutes before she found the right section. A nurse with hair slicked back in a bun sat staring at a computer screen. Renata asked for him by name, the words an irritation on her tongue, like a bit of grit. Peter. But not his real surname. A new name, the one Cindy said he went by; he found it best to change from time to time.
“Down this hall.” The nurse raised her head. She sat very erect, shoulders back, neck long and straight like a dancer’s. “Make a right, then the third door on your left.”
“Is he...? How’s he doing?”
“Rather poorly.” She studied Renata. “He hasn’t had any visitors since he’s been here. Are you a relative?” Her skin was very dark and her eyes were a startling shade of green. Like jade, like the jade brooch Renata’s father gave her mother on their anniversary a week before the twenty dollars was lost, smoky green fading into gray. She and Claudia had exchanged a grin as he pinned it on their mother’s blouse because his arm brushed her breast. Maybe this nurse’s great-great-grandmother had attracted the green eyes of a slave owner who bequeathed them. When the nurse looked in the mirror, did she see her eyes as a sign of violation? Did she cling to old outrages? Surely not. Surely she liked her eyes; they were beautiful. Only Renata saw violation everywhere. The nurse was waiting for her to answer, the green eyes blinking with impatience.
“His niece.”
“I could let him know you’re here. So he won’t be shocked?”
“I’d like to surprise him, if that’s okay. I only just learned he was sick.”
The nurse turned back to the screen. “You’ll see his name on the door.”
She saw the false name, and beneath it, H. Chang. Mr. Chang occupied the first bed, a slight, wizened Chinese man of about seventy, with graying hair carefully combed straight back. He sat propped against pillows, looking proprietary in crisply ironed striped pajamas—his own, not the hospital’s standard-issue gown—reading a Chinese newspaper, his glasses low on his nose. He looked up and nodded at Renata in regal fashion, as if she were a tourist come to gawk at his estate. At his bedside, in a pink plastic chair, sat Mrs. Chang, she presumed, a plump, round-faced woman in a polyester pants suit, also proprietary, but not regal. A placid knitter. A long red skein unfurled from her rattling needles. On the bedside table was a vase of purple irises, along with a white telephone and a few paperback books. But for the high white bed and the plastic water pitcher, the Changs might have been spending a peaceful morning on the patio, enjoying their retirement.
“Good morning,” Mrs. Chang said. “Are you here for the gentleman in the next bed?” She gestured toward the drawn curtain dividing the room.
“Yes. How is he?”
Mrs. Chang shook her head. “He doesn’t say much. He doesn’t want to eat. The nurses try to make him eat. I try. But it’s no good. Maybe you can make him eat.”
“Maybe I can.” What a glutton Peter had been. When he and Cindy came over for dinner her mother used to cook in great quantities. He eats like there’s no tomorrow, she would say. He’s a growing boy, Dan would joke. To you he’ll always be a boy, that’s the trouble, Grace muttered.
Well, fine. Renata was glad he couldn’t eat. Let him starve. Her mother didn’t sit down to a meal for a month, after Claudia was fished from the river. They ate crackers and cheese and apples and pizza until Renata began cooking, from a book. Only now that she was here to see how thin he’d grown, she couldn’t seem to cross the two yards to the curtain that separated them. She hated to leave the Changs’ well-ordered domesticity. They were the family she should have had. When Mr. Chang recovered—and surely he would recover, he didn’t seem very ill—maybe they could adopt her and take her home; she could forget and start a new life. She’d once had a smattering of Chinese but just now it eluded her. With a bland smile at Mrs. Chang, she forced herself to step to the other side of the curtain.
What she saw resembled a photographic study in shades of white and gray. The sheets were blinding white in the sunlight beaming in from the window. The body on the bed was asleep, at least the eyes were closed. Peter’s hair, once so black, was a steely gray, matted from sleep, his face a sickly ivory, the skin blotched with grayish spots. The stubble on his chin was white. His lips, greenish gray. The hospital gown was yellow-gray and his hands, long and smooth, the family’s hands, were the color and texture of used waxed paper.
The only color in the room was the salmon pink of the visitor’s chair, where she sat down and gazed out the window. Low, drab houses were strung out in rows, laced by highways with billboards advertising auto parts and barbecued ribs. She could almost feel the sky’s white heat, though the air inside was modulated to a slight chill. The sensible Mrs. Chang had worn a cardigan.
He stirred. She cleared her throat to make him wake, driven by the predator’s thrill, a flutter behind her ribs, a low whir in her head. He was in his early fifties, but he looked much older, older, even, than Mr. Chang. Hollows had carved themselves out under the cheekbones. With his head flat on the pillow, the flesh sank down to drape the bone. His lips trembled with each faint, blowing breath, a syncopated rhythm. A tube snaked into his nose. Another, attached to the inside of his elbow, delivered a colorless liquid from a bottle suspended near the bed. A third tube, thicker, emerged from under the sheets and carried a brown liquid that emptied into a large, narrow-necked jug on the floor. The flesh of his arms was loose, like fabric. The body hardly rose above the mattress, as though the bed were concave, and his feet rose up in sharp points.
Her sister, with this? Claudia was willful; she didn’t give in easily. He must have played on her boredom, her restlessness.
She stared hard until his eyelids began to twitch. His eyes opened slowly, black marbles with blacker dots for pupils. They opened straight onto her, and the look in them, gathering terror, was worth years of grief. The same look as in her father’s eyes when they dragged the river. In her own, in the mirror, when she entered their bedroom and knew she would sleep there alone from then on. Never in her mother’s eyes. Her mother refused terror; she closed her eyes and hid.
Renata sat perfectly still while he stared. She felt relaxed, more than she’d been since last Tuesday. For the little while she sat here with Peter, she didn’t have to think about that. His Adam’s apple jerked as he tried to swallow. He was confused, naturally. She’d changed in eighteen years, as Claudia would have changed, though not so much that he wouldn’t know her. Them. He closed his eyes as if he’d made a mistake and opened them onto the wrong decade, then tried again. It was the same a second time. He’d seen a ghost.
“No,” he croaked.
“Yes.”
“But—”
“I’m not a ghost. I’m Renata.” Not destroyed, like a twin star slipped out of orbit. She is lost but I will not be destroyed.
He gave a groan and put a papery hand on his chest. “You nearly scared me to death.” His lips parted to show yellowish teeth—an attempt at a smile. “You came to visit me? That’s good of you.”
“This isn’t a social call. I’ve been looking for you. You’re not easy to find.”
“How, then? Cindy? Ah, Cindy. Always the sentimental one. Well, how are you? How’ve you been all these years?”
He had nerve. She had to grant that. Nerve enough to keep up the pretense.
“Are you okay after what happened,...you know, last week? You weren’t anywhere near, I hope?”
“No.”
“What a terrible shock. Especially living in New York. And your mother?”
“Not quite in tiptop shape. What can you expect? But then, you know all about her, don’t you? Don’t you know all about everyone? I heard you’ve been keeping tabs.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I’m sick. You can see that.”
“Oh, cut it out. I didn’t come to hear more lies. It’s incredible I didn’t realize right away. Incredible. Don’t you think so? An imbecile would have understood. It just goes to show what people can refuse to see. All of us. We’re all guilty.”
“I don’t get it. I’m sick, I told you. I can’t listen to all this.”
“I’ll make it quick. Remember the time you came on to me in the garage?”
“You’re all mixed up, Renata. I know you’ve been through a lot, but—”
“Of course you remember. You were the one who was mixed up that day. You put your hand on my neck. And when I turned around and looked up at you and you realized, you said you were sorry, you didn’t mean to frighten me.” That’s what she should have said a moment ago. Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. Maybe he would have recognized his words.
“I don’t remember anything like that. I think maybe you should go now.” He looked to the left, at a cord with a nurse’s buzzer.
“That buzzer can’t do you any good. I can get to it quicker than you can. I always knew she didn’t go down there herself. She’d never have done it alone. You were so close, we just didn’t see you. Now I have to know how you did it.”
He started coughing, spat up into a tissue, then reached for the buzzer, but she got there first and held the cord away from him. In the silence came the pages of Mr. Chang’s newspaper rustling. “Do you want a cup of tea, Herbert?” said Mrs. Chang. “Shall I get you a cup of tea?” They heard her leave the room.
“Why are you saying such things?” Peter muttered. “Are you mad? It’s made you mad.”
“You arranged to meet her that night. I know. I saw her go out with the dog. How did you do it? Did you push her off the pier and then go home to Cindy?”
“Stop it! I was home all night. I was as horrified as you were. When people can’t accept things, they rearrange them in their minds.”
She could have hit him, helpless as he was. “Cindy remembers. She said you used to go out a lot at night.”
“Cindy.” He was wheezing with every breath. “Cindy makes up what she likes. She always did. She’s a drunk. Can you trust a drunk?”
“She’s not drunk anymore. She’s quite clear.” She tossed the cord behind the bedframe and leaned over him. “Tell me how you did it,” she whispered. “Just say it. That’s what I came for. I need to hear you say it.”
“I can’t say what isn’t true.”
She sat back down. “I can wait till you’re ready.” Moments passed. “What about Gianna, meanwhile?”
He raised his head an inch from the pillow. “What about her?”
“Did you arrange that with the Jordans or do it yourself? That day at the merry-go-round. How did you manage that? It couldn’t have been easy. You must have had help.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I swear it. I lost touch with the Jordans after...after they moved away. I never saw them again.”
“How many other children did you sell? Was that one of your sidelines? Or did you just sell your own?”
He spit up again. “It’s pathetic, what you’ve turned into. I’ll call for help.”
“You won’t call for help because I’ll tell everything I know. Cindy will talk if I ask her to. You have no hold over her anymore. Do you want to die behind bars?” Mrs. Chang was returning, so she spoke more softly. “Do you want your nice neighbors here to know what you are? They might not want to share a room with you.”
“Stop,” he whimpered. “I’m in pain.”
“What’ve you got? AIDS? Cancer?”
“Lymphoma. They can’t do anything. It won’t be long. Give it up, Renata.”
Pleading for mercy. It was what she’d envisioned, what she’d made the trip for. But she didn’t feel the satisfaction she’d envisioned along with it. Iranima again: the melancholic unease on the attainment of a long craving. She was torturing a dying man. But dying doesn’t exempt people from anything. While we live we have to answer, isn’t that justice? She bent lower over him till his stale breath made her lip curl. Sick people exude rot, or maybe it was the smell of guilt. Her mother hadn’t any smell, just neutral, dry and clean.
He sank deeper into the bed. “Give me a drink of water.”
She held the glass as he drank. He might have spit in her face, she was prepared for that, but he sipped carefully, like a well-trained child. A good patient.
“Listen, Renata.” He gripped her wrist tightly. Surprising strength for a man so sick. “You hate me. So do it. Now. Hold your hand over my mouth.”
Her heart pounded so hard it shook her chest. “What?”
“You understand. Please. You won’t get caught. They expect it any minute. Pull out the tubes. Do something. You know you want to. You’ll be satisfied and I’ll be done with everything.”
“Shut up. Do you know what you’re asking? I’ll be like you then.”
“You’ll be righteous. You always liked being righteous. Remember the time you lost that money? You were miserable because you lost your righteousness. So do it. Have your revenge.”
“I didn’t lose the money. Claudia took it. She stole it and let me take the blame.”
“Whatever. Does it matter now? Just let me go.”
She studied the tubes and imagined yanking them out. It would have to look like he’d done it himself. No. Not yet, anyway. Not until she knew.
“I’ll think it over. Maybe I’ll come back and do it tomorrow.” Help rid the world of evil, why not? But revenge didn’t feel sweet. It felt like more to add to the past.
He held up his hand. “Don’t, don’t come back anymore. I don’t want to remember. You’re cruel to come here.”
“I am. When she was stolen, it made me cruel. Tell me what happened to her and I won’t have to be cruel.”
“I don’t know,” he gasped. “I told you. People take children all the time, but I was never into that.”
“What people?”
“You know. People. They...” He turned his head to one side and closed his eyes. “I wouldn’t do that to her.”
“Not to your own child. To others, maybe. All right, so tell me about Claudia. Go on, I’ll wait as long as it takes.”
“Please go away. If you won’t help me, go away.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. Did you plan it? Did you know that place down by the river? Or was that her idea?”
“I didn’t plan anything.” It was as close to a shout as he could manage. Then at the sound of Mrs. Chang’s soft murmurs, he lowered his voice. “Why would I go climbing down those rocks in the middle of the night? I only wanted to talk to her.”
“But somehow she went out on the pier and you pushed her.”
“You’re all wrong. Nothing like that. We were up in the park and we argued. She said she was going to tell. First she went along with everything, but after the baby she got scared. She couldn’t take it. Any of it. Us, the secret. She wanted the baby.”
“She asked you to get the baby back?”
“When I said no she went wild and started running. I chased after her, I was afraid she’d hurt herself, but I couldn’t see, and those rocks,...I slipped and twisted my ankle and by the time I got down there she was out on this, I don’t know, sort of broken-down jetty. I could barely see her out there. She must’ve flipped out. She was calling me—she wanted to swim. A midnight swim.” He crumpled the tissue and dropped it on the sheet. “Totally crazy.”
That part Renata could believe. She could hear her. I dare you. It’s hot out. What are you afraid of?
“Go on. I want to hear it all.”
He rolled his head on the pillow. “I yelled to her to come back, I would do whatever she wanted. And then, it was so dark, I don’t know how it happened. She didn’t jump in, she just...disappeared, like she fell through.” Tears oozed out the corners of his marbly eyes and down the grooves in his face.
The planks were rotted. She couldn’t see in the dark. Anyway, it was only water. He thought she was scared? She’d show him who was scared. I dare you. In the silence came the click of Mrs. Chang’s knitting needles. Renata waited.
“There’s no more,” he said.
“You mean you left her there to drown.” If it was true, this was worse than she’d imagined, worse than if he’d pushed her in.
“No, I was...I figured she must be hiding underwater to frighten me, it couldn’t have been that deep, and she’d come up on the other side and get back up another way.”
“You figured she was better out of the way. She was too much trouble. She wasn’t trouble before, but she was trouble now. You figured they’d never find her. Who would ever think of the river? Well, I thought of it.”
He coughed. “Can’t you just shut up? You’re terrible.”
“No, you’re the terrible one. And you lived this long. Too long. You don’t know what you’ve done.” She stood up.
“I know what I’ve done. Don’t you think all my life—”
“Don’t tell me about your life. I don’t want to hear about your rotten life. I’m going.”
“Don’t go.”
“You were just begging me to go. What should I stay for?”
“You promised. That’s why I told you.”
“I might come back. You won’t know. You might be sleeping. You can lie here wondering if I’ll come back to release you.” She heard Mrs. Chang moving about and raised her voice to a conversational pitch. “Goodbye now. By the way, I heard you’re not eating. Try, Uncle Peter. If you’re going to get well, you have to eat. You always enjoyed a good meal.”
The Changs were sitting as before, and Mr. Chang was sipping from a Styrofoam cup. Renata smiled as she passed.
“You told him to eat?” Mrs. Chang said.
“I told him, yes, but he’s always been very stubborn. A stubborn old goat. I hope you’re well very soon,” she said to Mr. Chang, who looked up over his glasses and smiled remotely.
She asked the taxi driver to take her to a park. Any park. They must have one. Somewhere away from tall glass buildings. The place he brought her to was scruffy and flat as far as the eye could see. The grass was wilted, but not from the trampling of feet; no one was around. The few benches looked mournful, in need of a paint job. Only the trees showed a sense of pride: magnificent, widely spaced live oaks with dripping Spanish moss. The outdoors was a vast steam bath, the kind of heat in which the body goes limp and the mind follows. Everything was hazy and shrouded in damp. Far off, the glass buildings, shimmery in the heat, looked like shoe boxes with windows cut out, the kind of houses children make after they’ve gotten new shoes. Renata and Claudia did that, made shoe-box cities.
She walked on and soon heard a rhythmic barking voice. In the distance, a group of forty or fifty boys and young men were doing calisthenics, their leader shouting orders like a drill sergeant with a platoon of new recruits: push-ups, jack-in-the-boxes, somersaults. They marched, too, and executed smart military turns. As she approached she could read “YAC” on their shirt fronts, Youth Athletic Corps spelled out on the back. Around them rained a fine mist of sweat. They must be one of the paramilitary groups she’d read about in the papers—the antithesis of the flock of nocturnal birds, the anarchic skaters skimming the streets last night. The skaters had an ironic, somber gaiety. These young warriors were earnestly cheerful, like a local team giving their all for the honor of the school. They had heard the President and were heeding his call. “My message is for everyone who wears the uniform to get ready.” They were zealous. They were dedicated, disciplined, and sinister, as all groups of marching men are sinister. A reminder that any minute now, tomorrow, in a week, or a month, would come the war. The sheer eagerness could not be suppressed. And here she’d forgotten for a little while. It was just what the President had predicted, one of those “times down the road where citizens will be concerned about other matters.” Watching them, she flushed with shame. What an ignoble scene she’d played in that hospital room. No wonder she couldn’t bring herself to tell Jack of her plan. It was too shameful. She couldn’t have done it if he’d heard it out loud, the impotent rage of it.
But she did do it. And she was glad.
Linda, who came from Houston, said there were three things worth seeing. The only one Renata remembered was the Rothko Chapel, and so she spent the rest of the day in that octagonal space staring at the black paintings on the wall. Not vacant but a rich black. Black that turned the city’s blankness inside out like an empty bag and filled it with all that was missing. Black not for oblivion but for remembering, so dense with memory that the colors of the spectrum deepened and merged.
Back at the hotel, she changed the next day’s flight for an earlier one; her business was done. She checked out, unwilling to spend another night in that tall cavern. She chose a cheap motel on the highway near the airport, overlooking a parking lot. It was spare but adequate—no thick towels or tiny bottles of shampoo and body lotion, but the bed was fine and she’d sleep well. Just to make sure, she drank half a bottle of wine with her steak at the roadhouse across the highway.
At three-fifty—she checked her watch; this kind of motel didn’t supply a bedside clock-radio—she was awakened by men’s voices and clattering feet. The voices were so loud, the sound of the key in the lock so close, that for a moment she thought her own door was being opened. But its placard outlining the fire regulations didn’t move; she could see it from the light insinuating through a crack in the curtains that didn’t quite close, as they never do in cheap motels. Drunken chatter broke through the cardboard wall. Young voices, four or five of them. Or two or three, making enough noise for five. Things banged around. She pictured burly, suntanned college boys with opaque eyes and incipient beer bellies. Boys like the iron-pumper on the flight in, who was probably locked in a cell right this minute, trying to explain he wasn’t a terrorist, just trying to get his change. Careless rich boys on a spree. Or, given the motel, careless poor boys, much the same thing.
“Now I call that scoring,” one of them said.
She could hear everything, though in the haze of sleep it didn’t make sense at first. How about that tall skinny one who put away the beer like a pro? And that one with tits like watermelons. The one with the slit in her skirt. A litany of the girls they’d just left.
“I forced her,” the loudest one said, laughing raucously. Those words were clear; they made her sit up in bed. “She was more loaded than me, and I was pretty loaded. I forced her.”
I should do something, Renata thought. But first she got up to make sure her door was securely locked.
“I forced her,” he kept saying, and the others joined in his laughter, like a sitcom laugh track. “She tried to get out from under but I was inside before she even knew it was happening.”
Would a man knock on their door and confront them? And say what? She could ask Jack what a man would do. In a uchrony, Renata would bravely apprehend the criminal and change the course of history in the direction of justice. But righteousness was out of the question here in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, in nothing but an old T-shirt.
There was a smudged white phone beside the bed. She could call the police. Even out here in the wilderness, there must be police. She could say she overheard a confession. She was lying in bed and heard voices through the wall. Would they bother to come when they heard that story? A woman alone, dreaming in a motel bed. Dreaming of rape?
She could wait till morning. Knock on their door with the desk clerk beside her and say shed heard it all. And then? Tie them down till the cops arrived?
Or she could go outside and write “Rapist” on their windshield. She tiptoed to the window to scan the parking lot. Were she a car expert, she might figure out what a bunch of rowdy boys would be likely to drive. A pickup? SUV? Suppose she wrote “Rapist” on the car of some law-abiding family man, taking his wife and kids to see the grandparents. Wouldn’t they be surprised. And what would she use to write with? She must remember, in the future, to travel with Magic Markers or spray paint for just such contingencies.
She could watch for them in the morning, take down their license plate and report them. She could try worming their names out of the desk clerk. She could rent a car and follow them, find out where they lived, and begin a campaign of retaliation. Another chance to rid the world of evil. They’d never know who sent the threatening letters or phoned the dean. But that was elaborate, and she had a plane to catch.
It was one rape out of many. It happened every night, many times a night. The girl was home by now. Crying. The way Gianna might have cried, how many times? Until she stopped crying altogether, and stopped speaking too. The girl might have cried herself to sleep by now. She wouldn’t report it. Too mortifying: I went to a bar with my friends, met these guys, we had a few beers, they said they knew a great club not far away, we got in the car....Bingo.
And if they’d brought the girls back to the motel room? Would she have banged on the door then? Called the police? A boy could push his way into a girl faster than the police could arrive.
She’d never see their faces. Or if by chance she saw them in the morning, checking out, she’d never know which was the one. But somewhere not far away, a girl was having a bad dream.
She called for a cab early in the morning and left a note on the night table: “I heard a boy in room 112 next door say he raped a girl last night,” she wrote. She had to use the pad she carried around: cheap motels don’t provide writing paper. The maid would find it. She’d throw it away. It was a pathetic gesture that would change nothing. The whole trip had been a pathetic gesture, an orgy of bakiranima. Still, it was better to have come than not. Better to have something to cling to, than nothing.