The Night Gwen Stacy Died (19 page)

It seemed (lately, again) like the rest of the world was in on some enormous gag,
so he could either resist or play along, and why not play along, at a time like this
in which he was grateful for the diversion, willing to accept whatever followed. He
was feeling as he had felt when he first came to Chicago, a much younger man. He had
worked construction then, before he secured the job at the foundry, and that was another
time in his life in which it seemed that the rules in operation in his own brain were
not necessarily those generally accepted as law, as if he were looking up from a page
in a book he had been plodding through for years, only to find that it was the wrong
book, or the wrong sort of book, a dictionary, a cookbook.

He remembered riding the bus to various construction sites in the morning during those
first months, before he could afford to buy his truck. Fellow commuters had carried
their morning coffee in thermoses or paper cups beside him, whistling through the
tiny hole with their tongues, slurping. It was obscene. Talking about the weather
was out of the question. People here were militant about the weather. Novak thought
he had put up with his fair share of turning seasons before coming to Chicago, but
people here acted as if they were privy to a specific brand of seasonal severity with
which those from the other parts of the country couldn’t begin to sympathize. They
squinted like martyrs into the sun during the summer months, martyrs who didn’t own
sunglasses. Their winters were unanimously agreed to be harsher, windier, worse than
anything you’d seen. Also there was something here called lake effect.

“How about all this snow?” Novak had erroneously said to another commuter on the bus
during his first Chicago winter.

“What, this? No, this is just lake effect!” Everyone had laughed, as if the wet white
fact of it were an optical illusion, a trick up the lake’s sleeve. Even now, with
the merciful first taste of spring in the air, there was a persistent attitude of
the city bracing itself for the soon-to-rise heat index.

And then there was the way that people in Chicago were defensive about the fact that
their city was in the middle of the country. Novak always heard the question posed
of the city’s deserters, “You think you can do better on a coast?” Making something
of yourself didn’t mean as much if you had to go to New York or L.A. to do it. People
spoke of it as if proximity to the ocean made any aspect of everyday life a big free-for-all.
The thing to do was to be a success smack in the middle of the country.
Hey buddy, try doing that landlocked.
That got respect.

But Novak never felt landlocked. During his first year, he spent so much time near
the lake it was enough to make him forget where he was. You couldn’t see Michigan
or Canada or any land to speak of, so it might as well have been an ocean. He might
as well have been on the edge of the earth looking off it into the unknown and not
in the center of what was verifiably nothing. Five nights a week, in the spring of
his first year in Chicago, Novak sat on the lip of this great lake, skipping rocks,
watching the quick shiver and plummet of every one he threw.

That had been a year of unimaginable loneliness. The feeling had slowly subsided,
as he found a better wage at the foundry, one that he could reasonably live on, and
he made a few friends to drink with on his nights off. There was even a woman—Carolyn—who
worked in the pet shelter around the corner from the foundry, and she was (physically,
conversationally) nothing spectacular, but she had a good heart, she loved those homeless
animals in a way that Novak could appreciate—Jesus, how sometimes she would talk and
talk about the obscure anguishes of some of these animals!—and sometimes, when they
were both feeling festive, or lonely, or drunk, they slept together. It was never
committed, or regular, but there was an enormous comfort in the arrangement, if only
because it reminded him that there were others in the world for whom wants and desires
and needs and schedules did not ultimately line up, and yes life was sad, but here
was this small thing they could offer one another, some small kind act that sometimes
looked a little like what one supposed love resembled. But after a while even Carolyn
and her homeless cat stories and her pale thighs didn’t bring him any relief. He worked
through the days as if in a trance, and evenings he would find himself back at the
lake, just staring at the surface of the water. The lake was a place he returned to
every few years when he entered a period of solitude. But this was the first time
the area was so populated at night. This was the first time there were packs of wild
animals supposedly running around.

Perhaps his judgment was playing tricks on him again. It was like the eyes playing
tricks, but with inflated conscience. It was like the explosions that had started
up full force in the scrap yard again most nights. Yes, there was a logical explanation
for the smoke and the sound: some poor junker trying to make an extra buck by throwing
the weight of a gas tank into his pile. But just because you knew the cause of something
didn’t mean your body would learn how not to process this, how to sensibly react.
The brain could know something to be harmless, but the body could not deny that the
ground shook. The body knew better. Or, the body was gullible. Either way, things
were not balanced. By day, Novak mitigated the stress of such delusions by melting
metal, stirring evenly so that the pieces of broken things could be reconstituted.
Old things became new things. A fender, a can-opener, the body of a bicycle. By night,
he sat alone at the lake and watched the documentary men reconstruct a narrative for
the benefit of the camera. Every day went like this. Novak woke up alone. He went
to sleep alone. He drove his truck to the foundry. He put on his uniform and protective
mask, and he stirred the melted metal closer to its newest forms. The cameras continued
to roll. The cue cards dropped to the ground with every take. The trailer became lighter
as its stuffed inhabitants drowned in dramatic reenactments of lived events, while
later still, the real coyotes, remote and wandering, forgotten by their packs, abandoned
their hiding places and continued to make the morning paper with their leaps.

He had a penchant for the lost and the missing, for rejects and runaways. In the last
few months he had started taking care of a stray at the scrap yard. Novak had seen
the dog before, rifling through the dumpsters in the alley behind Marcy Street, and
it was a beautiful goddamn dog, fierce, the kind of dog you’d imagine pulling sleds
across the arctic, with those intense gray eyes and sharp teeth. He took care of the
poor thing, left out food and water, always in secret. He didn’t tell anyone about
it, and he couldn’t say why exactly. He liked to think of himself akin to one of those
anonymous donors you read about in the newspaper. Also he had the sense that maybe
anyone else would find something to criticize about the act, like maybe you weren’t
supposed to feed a stray unless you were going to pay for her shots and vaccines and
take her in to the vet and all this shit. But Novak wasn’t looking for that much commitment.
He was just trying to do the right thing. When he was smart enough to carry a piece
of lunch meat in his pocket, the dog would practically jump into his lap, like he’d
saved her life or something. Sometimes Novak thought of the dog as his dog, he referred
to her with the name of this dog he used to have. The stray didn’t mind. She’d answer
to any name if it was in her best interest.

Novak went to the bathroom with a glass, filled it with water, swallowed a sedative,
and placed himself back in front of the television. The footage from the girl’s abduction
was playing on a loop now, the few moments caught on a security camera. The kidnapper’s
face was obscured. He had a hat angled down over his face, and anyway he wasn’t about
to look in the direction of the camera. The girl, however, was staring straight into
the eye of the thing. She exchanged a few words with the perpetrator, but the whole
time she kept her gaze steady on the camera. She was a good-looking girl, as they
usually were, but the interesting thing was there wasn’t a hint of fear in her posture.
She was talking to the camera as if she were delivering lines. Novak kicked his feet
up on the sofa and clicked through the channels a few more times before he began to
doze off. When he fell asleep in front of the television, he didn’t dream as much.

SOMEONE HAD SWITCHED
on the radio in the house while cleaning. It was background noise only; it was practice
listening to spoken English. For this reason, Sheila alone looked up at the sound
of her name in the context of a report on a forced abduction, robbery, and auto theft
in Coralville, Iowa. The radio explained that Sheila Gower had been kidnapped nearly
five weeks ago from her place of employment; Sheila Gower was thought to be alive
and within the Chicago metropolitan area. The name of the crime’s primary suspect
had already been given; it was said moments before her own name, then repeated, but
this name she barely heard, the way so many strange names on the news slip quickly
out of mind a few moments after they are spoken. Sheila panicked to hear each fact
and detail of their crime listed aloud and broadcast to listeners everywhere. She
dropped a bottle of Windex into the sink of the master bathroom. She closed the door,
and then she locked it as if some crazed kidnapper were truly on the loose, coming
after her. She started to unbutton her jeans, as if to calmly use the bathroom. Instead,
she removed them, followed by her shirt; she stood in front of the mirror in the master
bathroom with her underwear at her ankles, and stared. The woman whose bathroom it
was had a collection of perfumes on the counter. Sheila picked up one bottle in the
shape of a pyramid and sprayed her wrists and neck with the scent inside. She thought
she looked like someone else. Her hips were nonexistent. Her breasts, thin enough
to scarcely raise the front of her T-shirt, seemed unremarkable at best. When she
was with him she felt bigger, filled-out, more solid somehow. She couldn’t imagine
how this girl’s body was the one people on the radio were looking for, the one that
Peter saw in his dreams.

Last night, they had spoken about leaving the city. Peter was afraid for her safety
because she wouldn’t stop showing up in his dreams with the crazy suicidal man who,
as it turned out, they happened to be searching for together—which was news to her.
At first, Sheila had been concerned, to put it lightly, finding Peter in the bathroom,
drinking water from the bathtub and the sink, calling her name. She had been concerned
to learn that Peter’s dreams had been what had initiated their entire acquaintance.
But when presented with the alternative of, say, going back to Iowa, she understood,
however irrationally, that she would rather chase a suicidal man from someone else’s
dream than go home.

Why? What was so bad about home? It was a question she was trying to work out. She
wasn’t abused or adopted, sexually molested or emotionally deranged in the way runaways
always were in the magazines her parents kept in the bathroom. She had come from good
stock, as people liked to say in Coralville.

There was an idiom in her French workbook and tape set—
être sans histoire.
It literally meant to be without story, but it was an expression you were supposed
to use when talking about someone who was easygoing or unremarkable. Sheila had taught
Peter this expression while passing the time during the drive to Chicago. Technically
idioms were for the advanced student, but Sheila liked to jump around.

“Repeat after me,” she had directed him.

“Without story?” Peter had said, once she’d translated for him. “It doesn’t make any
sense.”

She tried to explain to him the thing about idioms, how you couldn’t take them literally,
but he didn’t get it.

Sheila remembered being in the gas station with Peter one night when a woman in stilettos
and a leather dress came into the station and started talking to them.

“Hi honey,” she greeted Sheila, then turned to Peter. “That your cab parked outside?”

It happened all the time. People with nothing better to do would kill time in the
station, just long enough for a conversation. The woman was complaining; she had walked
six blocks already from the club where she worked—here she’d gestured to her footwear
as if to explain the utter impracticality of the six blocks—all because the taxi she
called never showed. And this wasn’t the first time either.

Peter lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb and two fingers together. “How’s your tipping?”

“A couple bucks,” the woman said. “It’s late when I call. It’s not a far drive.”

Peter shook his head, gravely. “There’s your problem, sweetheart.”

“Okay, smartass,” she said. She put her hand on her hip. “You tell me. How much do
you tip a driver?”