Authors: Hari Kunzru
The next morning, Jaz called Louis to talk about the clinic. Lisa was sitting up in bed, groggily watching him. Hunched furtively over the phone, he felt like he was selling her out to the Gestapo.
“I don’t know, Louis. Maybe it’s the best thing. At least she could get some rest.”
Lisa’s voice was freighted with suspicion. “You’re talking about me.”
“In a minute, honey.”
He should have taken it outside. But she’d been asleep. And he hated going outside. The hotel wanted them to leave, because of the disruption they were causing other guests. People had been jostled in the lobby. There were reports of damage done to cars in the parking lot.
Louis put Patty on the line.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. “Because I sure don’t. You know your problem, Jaz? You say one thing, then do another. You were all ‘Oh I can take care of her.’ Now you find it’s too much trouble so you’re putting her in a clinic? Just throwing my daughter in a clinic. Unbelievable.”
She wasn’t interested in hearing that it had been Louis’s idea. She thought Jaz was showing a “dark side” of himself. The answer was obvious.
Lisa should be back at home with them. Jaz didn’t have the strength to take offense. He drove Lisa to Phoenix. While she arranged her things in the guest room, he stood up in the kitchen and drank an awkward coffee with Patty and Louis.
“Well, then,” said Louis. “Bon voyage.” Like he was sending him off on a journey.
Jaz sat outside in the car for a few minutes, his mind blank. Then he started the engine and headed for the airport.
Going home to New York probably made things worse. Fleeing, one newspaper called it, running the story beneath a long-lens photograph of him walking through arrivals at LaGuardia. Dark glasses, wheelie case. An image of well-heeled callousness. Suddenly #matharus was a trending topic. The Internet was calling him a murderer. Everyone on earth seemed to have an opinion. He knew he should shut it all off—the TV, the Net, the constant babble of voices. But somehow he couldn’t. He wanted to know what the world thought of him, to look it in the face. He read the articles, the blog posts, watched the webcammed talking heads, immersing himself in the appalling churn of rumor like a yogi standing in a freezing river. It seemed he and Lisa were now the worst people in America. Someone found his e-mail address and sent obscene taunts, describing all the things that would happen to him when the public found out “the truth.” A journalist called his unlisted cell number and asked him point-blank if he’d killed Raj.
“My son is missing,” he told the man flatly. “I need help finding him.
That’s all.”
Should he have been angry? He couldn’t feel anything. Perhaps he was taking too many pills. Two minutes after the call and he couldn’t even remember what the guy’s voice sounded like.
Late at night he watched movies on his laptop, the kind of romantic comedies he usually saw only on planes. He tried to make his life as much like plane travel as possible. He slept in an armchair he’d dragged into Raj’s room, wearing an eye mask and a pair of bulky noise-canceling headphones. It was like staging his own extraordinary rendition, grabbing himself out of one time and place, hoping to land in another. Emotional teleportation.
Lisa called, crying over something she’d seen on Facebook. He was annoyed. Louis had promised to stop her from looking at it. “Why did you go online?” he asked her. “You knew what you’d see.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he? Some pervert has got him.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You think he’s alive?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You don’t know.”
“No, I don’t know. But I believe.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m feeling positive. I think it’ll come out right. That’s all I’m saying.”
“No, you’re saying you
believe
. That’s not the same.
Your
belief, Jaz? What’s that worth? I don’t even know what the word means to you.”
He couldn’t understand why she was so angry. Did she mean religion? That never used to be part of their lives. Religious belief wasn’t some precious commodity. It was everywhere. On a good day he thought of it as something like smoking—a bad habit that society was gradually breaking. On a bad day it seemed more a type of low-level mental illness. People who had it could be irrational, violent. His parents, for example, still trying to use God to control the family. As a scientist, he could term it an evolutionary throwback, perhaps with some residual social function—that was the kind of explanation he gave at dinner parties when asked about Al-Qaeda or Sarah Palin. So the honest answer to Lisa’s question was probably
nothing;
his belief was worth nothing at all. But that wasn’t what he’d meant. He’d only been trying to reassure her.
That night he went back to the Williamsburg Bridge, to a spot partway across, a kind of cage where he could sit back against a spray-tagged slab and watch the cyclists tear past. If he was a man of faith, maybe he would have found consolation? Or at least had a plan. A road map; some picture of the future. The cold was seeping through his jacket, so he got up and walked into Manhattan, wandering aimlessly downtown into the Financial District until he found himself outside the building on Broad Street where he used to work. He stood there for almost an hour, looking up at the mosaic of lighted windows, thinking about the Walter model and causality and guilt. If the world was made of signs,
why couldn’t he read it? He had to be some kind of fool. All he could say for sure was that everything was connected—Raj, Walter, the desert. A bloom of paranoia grew up in his mind; he felt as if he was being watched by someone on one of the upper floors. Binoculars or a rifle sight. He walked away, trying to measure his pace. It took all his concentration not to break into a run.
It didn’t feel like coincidence when he got a call from Fenton the next day. “Were you watching me?” Jaz asked. Fenton said he didn’t know anything about that, but Jaz should listen up. He was sorry to have to do it, but they were letting him go. There was a long silence, while Jaz failed to formulate a reaction. He’d forgotten this part hadn’t happened yet.
The package was generous. Fenton said he felt bad, but things at the firm needed to move on and because of Jaz’s “family troubles” he wasn’t in a position to contribute. The old ham managed to sound as if losing “such a valued colleague” was a personal blow. Jaz appreciated that he was trying to be kind. He even offered to engage a private detective to help search for Raj.
“I can’t accept that from you, Fenton.”
“Don’t be so hardheaded, Jas-win-der. I mean it. It’s the least I can do.”
He sounded sincere enough, but he didn’t repeat the offer. Now that the deed was done, neither of them knew what to say.
“I’m sorry to do this on the telephone, but the idea of you having to drag your ass downtown …”
“I understand. Thanks.”
“Well. Then …” Fenton’s voice was uncertain. “Good-bye.”
He sounded relieved to end the call.
So there it was. He was free. Now there was absolutely nothing to distract him from the pain.
He spoke to Lisa every day on the phone, but it was more ritual than real conversation. She seemed better than before; camped in her parents’ spare bedroom, she was beginning to pay some attention to the world around her, even managing a few weak jokes at her mother’s expense—about the floral wallpaper she’d chosen for the house, the fussy little pouches of potpourri hanging over the closet door handles. The calls
were never long. Jaz felt as if they were going through the motions with each other, priests of a faith they no longer believed in.
“How are you?”
“I’m doing OK. You?”
“Fine. Are you sleeping?”
“I have the pills.”
“What else are you doing?”
“Mom wants me to help her in the garden.”
“Does anything actually grow out there? It’s like
Dune
.”
“You’d be surprised. She’s got this cactus thing going on. She has plans for a wishing well.”
“Nice.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I spoke to the contractor. He knows we don’t want to go ahead with the remodeling.”
He waited for her to say something.
“So you don’t have to worry about any of that.”
“I’m tired, Jaz. I should go rest.”
“What time is it there?”
“Time?”
“Is it still light where you are?”
“Yes.”
“I miss you.”
“Sure.”
“Come home. You should be at home.”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.”
“At least here I’m not too far if—”
“Sure.”
“Look, I really am tired.”
“OK. I’ll let you get to bed. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Click.
Afterward, after one of those calls, the house would feel like a huge parquet-floored coffin. He’d look around without recognizing anything.
So much stuff, so many tennis rackets and dinner plates and tastefully framed prints. Were they really his? He stopped sleeping in Raj’s room; the accusatory stares of the stuffed animals were too intense. Retreating to the master bedroom, he lay awake at night. He could sense the mass of clothes and shoes stacked behind the looming closet doors, threatening to spew over him in a tidal wave of wool and sea-island cotton.
He wanted to begin again, to be unformed, a fetus floating in warm amniotic fluid. One day, walking through SoHo, he went into a Japanese store that specialized in generic clothes and bought himself jeans, a gray T-shirt and a pair of white tennis shoes. He changed into them in the store and stuffed his other clothes into a plastic bag. He felt unburdened, glad to be free of their irritating particularity, their trace of the past. Later he gave the bag to a homeless guy outside the Astor Place subway. He kept walking until it got dark, a generic man in motion through the streets of his generic city. Finding himself outside an anonymous business hotel in Midtown, he checked in. He rode the elevator to his floor, slotted the keycard into the holder by the door, and when the lights clicked on, switched them off again. Unusually for New York, the window opened. He lay down on the bed in the twilight, listening to the traffic noise filtering up from the street. There was nothing to remind him of his own life. It was just the sound of a city, any city; an ant colony in which he was an ant who’d followed a pheromone trail to this place in which he was programmed to rest. He slept better than he had for weeks.
He took the room for a second night, then a third. On the fourth morning he was sitting in the chair by the window, watching the workers in the office building on the other side of the street. The office workers sat at their desks and stared at their screens. They moved through the space carrying files and sheets of paper. Rarely did they speak to one another. It wasn’t clear what they were doing. He liked that; it was soothing to watch them work at their abstract task, to feel that they would carry on for as long as he cared to watch them, until they were claimed by death, downsizing, or simple entropy. Dimly he realized his phone was ringing. He thought about answering it, decided not to, then, prompted by some obscure sense of duty, picked up. At first, he didn’t
understand what the voice was telling him. Who are you? … From where? … I don’t—oh, yes … Yes? … What? Are you sure?
It was the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s office. Raj had been found. Alive.
He tried to process the information. His son was safe. A little dehydrated, but apart from that … No, they couldn’t say right now where he’d been. Out in the desert. On military land. Yes, he’d understood correctly. No, they didn’t know why. Of course, he heard himself say. I’ll leave now. I don’t know how long. Soon as possible. I’ll let you know when I have an exact time. He ended the call and phoned Lisa. She sobbed incoherently. Thank God, she kept saying. Thank God, who has answered my prayers.
He checked out of the hotel and took a taxi to JFK. As they went into the Midtown Tunnel he was gripped by a sudden powerful anxiety. He’d misunderstood. This was just wish fulfillment; it couldn’t be real. As soon as he could get a signal again, he phoned the sheriff’s office. In the background he could hear what sounded like a party. “You’ll have to speak up, Mr. Matharu,” said the deputy sheriff, in the tone of a man whose back had lately been slapped a lot. “We got a bunch of folks here. Everyone’s come in to celebrate.”
“So you found him.”
“Yes, sir, we did.”
“And he’s alive?”
“Like I said. Safe and sound. He’s a tough little guy, your son.”
“I know you told me already, but—could you say it again? Just go through what happened?”
The sheriff repeated the details. Raj had been found on a Marine base in the middle of an exercise. No one could work out how he’d got there. He was ten miles from the nearest public road. The kidnapper must have dumped him, though why he chose that spot and how he got a car there were complete mysteries. The Marine Corps perimeter security was considered state-of-the-art. Heat sensors, motion sensors, aerial surveillance: the whole nine yards.
At JFK he bought a ticket for Las Vegas. At the gate he paced up and down, unable to sit still. The ground staff hand-searched him twice,
suspicious that he was traveling without luggage. The flight seemed interminable. Around him people read or watched movies. He sat and listened to the rumble of the engine, willing the pilot to fly faster. A police driver was waiting for him at McCarran, a young man with a wispy mustache and a misspelled sign. They drove down I-15, the evening sunlight turning the desert a dazzling orange-gold. He phoned Lisa to find out the news.
“Are you there?”
She was sobbing. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Is he OK?”
“He’s back, Jaz. He’s really back.”
They drove on. The gold land was triumphant, a revelation of glory.
The media were waiting outside the office, the familiar mob scene—reporters taking calls in the parking lot, television lights on ten-foot stands. When he got out of the car they surged forward with mikes and cameras, calling out his name. “How does it feel, Jaz? How does it feel?” The driver hustled him through the doors and into the quiet of the lobby.