Across the years there had been so many strangers who each in his or her way had become a hero for a day, and lasted a while, and who eventually slipped from conversation, who was forgotten. It was inevitable, and yet each perishing memory weighed against Carlo as it sank. Someone went missing—this was always the sense he had—yet he couldn’t say who. He experienced at once a burden to track so many memories and a sense of defeat, a loss, all the people they’d met year by year slipping away. And Carlo also had to wonder if he himself had played the part of the stranger in the lives of other people. If so, how many times a day was he forgotten? Or recalled?
The first time he met Tom, at the police station, as Carlo was leaving, he’d said, “Thank you for talking to me,” and Tom had replied, “No, thank
you
for talking to
me.”
The second time Carlo saw Tom, Tom didn’t seemed at all surprised, as if he’d been expecting Carlo one day to turn up …
It wouldn’t necessarily right anything, and it would hardly constitute any major recompense for the way he’d betrayed Tom, or Robbie—Carlo wasn’t deluding himself—but when he sat up and noticed it was evening, he resolved to seek out Gabriel and engage him and make a point of spending time with the boy, if for no other reason than to watch out for him.
• • •
A
LTHOUGH HE WAS NOT AT THE OFFICE
when Gabriel was there, Robbie had gone in earlier and in general was making
an effort to show up every day, refusing to give in to his malaise. However, there was no avoiding that he didn’t want to be at his desk, and he jumped at any opportunity to run an errand, the longer and more involved, the better.
He drove, for example, over to the hardware store on Tracy to pick up replacement parts to fix the running office toilet but couldn’t find what he needed and ended up at a box store in Hollywood, but from the roof level of the parking lot, he gazed out at the ileal ripple of hills in the distance and then before long found himself taking the very long way home, following the arid crevasses, past carports, past stilted cottages, reminded of a time when he and Carlo first came to Los Angeles and would take Sunday drives, peeling off narrow known roads onto narrower unknown ones, pursuing them less to master the city than to lose themselves in this exotic new habitat of mudslides and fire and earthquakes, acclimating fast to the local arrogance: Angelinos built wherever they damn well pleased, no matter the threat of natural calamity, no matter the paucity of water, no matter the unwelcoming carve of the land. Now, even though he knew well enough how the roads ran, he still got turned around and drove in loops, what with no navigator with an open map on his lap in the passenger seat. Remembering the Sunday drives, he was warmed by nostalgia, and yet he didn’t quite feel like the same man who made those tours so many years ago for the simple reason that now he was alone.
He went to the grocery store and procured the ingredients Carlo had scribbled out, and at the grocery store, in the checkout line one afternoon, Robbie observed an old woman he’d never seen before (or had he?). She was wearing a formal wool coat and
matching navy-blue pillbox hat and walking with cane. Clutching her arm was a middle-aged woman who looked exactly like the older woman—the younger woman could only be her daughter. The daughter’s hair was graying and she was wearing a black coat and hat of the same style as her mother—also they had the same sprayed coif and the same unevenly penciled eyebrows, but the daughter walked with a limp and her eyes appeared to focus on nothing, and Robbie guessed she was mentally retarded. The daughter had the mother, the mother the daughter, they weren’t alone (quite literally, they looked as though they were propping each other up), yet each in her way certainly looked lonesome. And Robbie wondered what would happen when the frail mother died or could no longer care for her daughter, not provisionally because provisions were likely in place, but emotionally. If the daughter already looked easily frightened, then what would her years be like without the only person on whom she could settle her glance with any modicum of peace?
He knew better than to decide what was and was not going on in other people’s lives, but likewise the stooping man shuffling around pots of desiccated plants in the nursery across Hyperion, this man with his trousers belted high, who was going to provide for him when he could no longer eke out a wilting profit? Robbie didn’t want to go straight home and headed out on a short drive through Griffith Park but ended up in the Valley at rush hour. It took the better part of an hour to make it back to the house, by which point some of the things he’d purchased, cheese, butter, frozen yogurt, were getting soft or melting.
In the morning he would tell Carlo what errands he would take care of, sometimes in lieu of heading in to the office at all,
and Robbie did fulfill each mission, but after selecting new sheets and towels at a white sale in West Hollywood, he continued driving west toward the ocean, thinking he’d scoot up the Coast Road a-ways, except the traffic became overbearing once again and he ended up buying a cultural history of cats in a Brentwood bookstore and sat in a coffee shop reading the book, or pretending to read it while instead surveilling all the other readers and computer-tappers who sat solo at tables-for-two. He couldn’t help himself: he kept ascribing to them the same smallness-in-the-world he was experiencing. Everywhere he looked now, no matter where he was, he saw lonely people, as if for years he’d been wearing sunglasses that filtered out anyone in unwanted solitude, anyone filling his or her day with tasks that should have taken a quarter the time to complete, all the loiterers and lingerers and blank-starers of the city, whose legion apparently he had joined. For didn’t the woman leaning back in her chair, both hands gripping an unsipped cup of cappuccino, not really reading the
Weekly
open on the table, didn’t she notice Robbie and think, He’s just like me? We could disappear and it would take a month for anyone to notice. We can go an entire day and the only thing we say is, Medium non-fat latte, please—oh sure, whipped cream. We confide too much in our dogs. We sleep in the middle of the bed.
Robbie stroked his chin with his thumb and forefinger and was reminded he hadn’t shaved in days. He looked at the book he was holding, of which he’d apparently digested a good third, except he had no idea what he’d read. He glanced back at the woman—she looked away.
What kind of lonely.
In truth Robbie lived a life nothing like the one he was playing at, nothing like it whatsoever. Every night a bright handsome man came home to him and asked, “What are you in the mood for—pasta, chicken, fish?” Robbie was
not
alone in the world, not remotely. He was neither divorced nor widowed nor abandoned, nor for that matter unloved, nor unloving, however he would have to admit that pretending he was single brought him perverse melancholic pleasure. And he had to wonder if he would ever return to his old self or if this was who he was now, auditioning for a role he feared he might someday play.
• • •
T
HEN ONE AFTERNOON
one month after Tom died, a turn: Robbie returned home from his meandering at around five, and because Tuesday was trash day, there were emptied square bins up and down the street, the containers at jocular angles, the lids thrown back—nothing unusual. However, as Robbie pulled into his driveway, he noticed first that his own trash bins had been marked up with an indecipherable white graffiti, while none of his neighbors’ containers appeared similarly marked, and then, in a much more violent act of vandalism, it appeared the taggers (or someone else?) had dragged the tied-up trash onto his front lawn, ripped open the bags, and strewn the rotten content everywhere. Fruit rinds and banana peels and squashed cartons and wadded tissue and discarded mail, a week’s worth of putrid gunk, lay scattered all around the plum trees and pepper tree and across the grass and lavender beds. It was disgusting.
The wind was blowing the looser detritus toward the house, and Robbie did his best to step on envelopes and torn plastic before
it all flew up into the trees and eaves. He bolted after a page of newsprint flapping off toward the neighbors. He plucked a water bottle that had somehow flown up into the fork of the tallest plum tree. He shoveled up what he could and dumped it back in the tagged bins still out by the curb, but the task became sisyphean. He thought he was making headway, but then he spotted a damp half-full coffee filter, a cereal box. Was someone trying to draw attention to how much trash the two men generated? Because they certainly had made a lot of it.
After Robbie had been cleaning up a good half hour, Carlo arrived home. He had Gabriel Sanchez with him. Robbie couldn’t recall the last time he’d spoken to the boy.
“Well, hey,” Robbie said, but declined to shake Gabriel’s hand since Robbie was holding a tomato can in one hand, a banana peel in the other.
“Hey,” Gabriel said. And then, stating the obvious: “Whoa. Your trash got messed with.”
“What the hell,” Carlo said.
“It was worse when I came home,” Robbie said.
“What the hell,” Carlo said again.
Robbie began rolling a bin back up the side of the driveway toward the garage. Gabriel waited a beat but then helped haul in the remaining bins.
Carlo looked confused, a scowl forming. “This is so foul,” he said.
“What brings you by?” Robbie asked Gabriel.
“Your boyfriend,” Gabriel answered.
“Is that a gang tag?” Carlo asked—he directed the question at Gabriel, as if the boy would know.
“Why are you asking me?” Gabriel asked.
“Do we even have gangs up here?” Robbie said.
Carlo walked out to the street and back to the stoop. “It’s not like anyone else had their garbage messed with, as far as I can tell.”
Robbie knew what Carlo was considering and said, “We’re hardly the only couple on the block.”
“I know that,” Carlo said. “You think it was random?”
“Of course,” Robbie said, and truly he did.
In a blink it was night—the clean-up would need to be finished in the morning—and so the two men and the boy went inside. As was his habit of late, Carlo poured himself a tall glass of wine.
“It’s just—,” Carlo started to say.
“Just what?” Robbie asked.
“Because of what happened,” Carlo said.
Robbie rolled his eyes, Oh please. As if they were what, marked?
“All I’m saying—,” Carlo started to say again, but cut himself off. Silence. Then, “Whatever.”
“We’ll have to finish cleaning up in the morning,” Robbie said. “I’ll take care of it.”
Carlo had gone mute. He sipped his wine.
“It’s nice to see you,” Robbie said to Gabriel. “Did you miss the old neighborhood?”
“Kind of,” Gabriel said.
“I thought I’d show him the spot where we’d talked about putting a fountain,” Carlo said.
“Oh,” Robbie said—and now it was his turn to be confused because they’d decided against the fountain at the bottom of the slope, hadn’t they? And why would a teenager be interested in a fountain?
“Follow me,” Carlo said to Gabriel and led him out to the patio and then down the side of the hill where there was a loose stone path.
Robbie poured himself a glass of wine and stepped outside as well, but he stayed up by the house. It had been Carlo’s notion to create a little hideout down where the plot flattened out and there was some shade by a rotting fence. Robbie thought that while they could create a pleasant enough oasis that would be nice to look at, they’d never use it, and Carlo countered that the sound of trickling water would be soothing and audible everywhere on the property, and maybe they went back and forth for a couple of months, but this was ages ago. Robbie heard Carlo explaining to the boy what brush would need to be cleared out, where a pipe might be tied in to the house plumbing and buried and run down the hill. Also he mentioned rigging a hammock. He sounded like he was selling the kid something, and Gabriel, for his part, kept issuing an encouraging, “Cool.”
Back up on the patio, Carlo said to Robbie, “If we get the fountain in now, we’ll be able to enjoy it next spring. What do you think?”
It was as if they had never discussed the project before, but honestly Robbie didn’t much care. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sure.”
“Gabriel is going to help me,” Carlo explained.
“Gabriel is getting paid,” Gabriel said.
The boy had his hands in his back pockets, his elbows out wide. He’d changed, Robbie thought. In the dim light, the kid was gaunt, his eyes sunken—he was a teenager, probably up all night. Nevertheless, he didn’t look great.
“What’s new in your world?” Robbie asked. “How is your aunt?”
Gabriel didn’t answer, or what he said was a mumble. And then, out of nowhere but as if in response, he asked, “Do you guys believe in ghosts?”
“Why?” Robbie asked.
“You remember my dog,” the boy said.
“Oh sure. He was a fun dog,” Robbie said.
“I keep seeing him wandering around.”
“Oh really?”
“He’s been dead for years though, but I keep seeing him and he’s panting, tongue hanging out, wants to be wrangled, nuzzled, wrestled.”
“Can’t find his way home,” Robbie said.
“I know,” Gabriel said.
“Dreams are strange that way,” Carlo said.
“I don’t see him in my dreams. I see him during the day,” Gabriel said.
“In your daydreams,” Carlo said.
“No, for real. I see him for real, but he runs away before I can catch up with him.”
Neither man spoke.
“Maybe you should drop by the shelter and rescue another dog,” Carlo suggested.
His comment seemed misguided. Robbie glared at him.
Gabriel motioned to run his fingers through his hair and stopped, his hand in midair, maybe remembering his once long hair was now short. There was something setting the boy on edge, and he pointed at the Liquidambar and said, “So this is where that guy offed himself, right?”
That burn, that grade-school burn that comes when you realize people have been talking about you made Robbie uncomfortably warm, and the word offed—there was something snide about it, as if a life could be switched on or off like light.