If you think about it, everyone is behind someone and in front of someone. The nature of the sphere, right? No one gets left at the end or is forced to take the lead, and in this way you might say the shape of the earth is democratic. There are hesitations, of course. There are lines going in ways that you wouldn’t imagine. People are passed up or passed over. The tempo is irregular and messy. If you thought about the entirety of it, the legs, the back and forth, it’s a fiasco, an anarchy of steps. It’s impossible. And there’s no way to tidy it or make it in any way manageable, not in one’s imagination or anywhere else.
After all, it was exhausting enough—the job, the wife, the commute, the wandering after her until all hours of the night. Just getting food into one’s body was a chore. It was absurd, how could anyone do what they did and have to come home and talk about anything other than lights or locks? But was he going to confront her before he knew what she was up to so she could come up with some outrageous lie and then he’d never find out the truth? It all seemed like a nightmare in any case, and he wasn’t entirely certain he wouldn’t wake up soon.
It wasn’t about the arguing, of course, but one of them seemed to decide to pretend it was about the arguing and the other without saying so agreed and then there was no going back, it fixed between them: None of this would be happening if we didn’t argue so much. This is how it started to add up, bit by bit.
They fought. The tea. One of them didn’t want it but the other had made it anyway and the result was two cups when there should have been only one. The one who didn’t want it had said so, but too softly, and the other hadn’t heard.
The one who didn’t want it always speaks too softly.
The one who made it never hears.
The one who didn’t want it never knows what to want and what not to.
The one who made it always wants too much.
And this was like other things in their love. It was like sex in their love. Or lack of. (Ahem?) Or at least less of. It was like cooperation in their love. It was like friendship in their love. And/or it revealed their love, an aspect of it they had not previously identified, had not yet protested.
It was a terrible thing what had happened with the tea.
It was an act committed in duty but resulting in alienation. No, it was a passive act resulting in aggression. No, it was a demonstration, a lesson, a portent.
She hadn’t gone hobbling off after complete strangers when they met, of course, but it had to have been somewhat inside her all along. A thing like that doesn’t grow out of nothing, without divine intervention, without a seed in the soil, without a small star, so small no one could see it, that one day explodes.
No, it was there but no one could see it and somehow it had grown. He himself must have watered it or blown it up with air or thrown more wood on it or tacked more pieces to it because how could this wife have come from that one without her husband’s help?
No, he had no intention at all of revealing what he knew.
Where have you been? was the most he’d give away.
I didn’t know I had a curfew, she said.
I called you at work.
I didn’t know I was in lockdown.
They said you’d left.
Nobody told me about the martial law.
He left off following her to follow other women. He could be unfaithful in the same way she was, easily. The women went down sidewalks, through subways, out into crisp air. They clipped up the block, over fall leaves, to their brownstones. So what was he now, a stalker? He went home.
He trailed Gray when she didn’t. He called home and made excuses, called work and made excuses. Now the guy was being watched by both of them. And he was a wanderer, this Gray. He got around. But Myers discovered nothing. Only routines, broken or kept. Split roads, silence amid street noise. Grim.
What I do is my business, she said.
Apparently.
I am not your employee.
That’s some luck. I’d fire you.
I am not your dog.
You don’t seem like anything these days. You seem like a vacant stare.
Do you think I don’t know that? she said. Do you think I don’t see myself?
The tea fight, and then had come the walkouts. She yelled something and walked out the back door and stood outside on the landing. He walked out the front door and stood under the trees. Then he walked around the building and looked up at her looking up. And then she looked down and saw him and went back inside. He walked around the front and went back in too. He called to her, said something in a new voice, something about the tea, a thing he hoped would be conciliatory and that he hoped would make her say something conciliatory back. Instead she said her own new thing about the tea, or the dishes really, in general, how they were never clean unless she did them, and then she started crying and he got up and tried to comfort her. Leave me
alone
! she said and moved her shoulder around, and he went into the bathroom and when she called to him he locked the door, which he knows she hates. Then she took his newspaper out of his briefcase, which she knows he hates, and she looked up apartments for rent because she was throwing him out and he knew she was doing this because she called it to him through the bathroom door. Then she looked at airfares in the travel section because she was sending him away and he knew this because she called it to him through the bathroom door too. Then she looked at the personals, which she knows he hates, read aloud who might be better for her than him and he knew she was doing it because she called this to him too through the bathroom door. Then she just sat there sniffling and taking apart the newspaper because she knows he hates that, and she called that to him too. I’m leaving you, she said, and I’m taking the paper with me. Blow a kiss goodbye. I’m going out the window, she said. Throwing myself out and I’m throwing your paper out first. I’m taking the window with me. I’m taking the door. Better come out, she said. Soon there’ll be nothing left but you.
Chapter Seven
CLAIRE
Last week the phone rang. This is how I wound up on the train.
We have a box here in Chicago, said the woman on the phone. We thought you might like to know.
It was early. I was half-asleep in my bathrobe, propped up in a chair.
Thank you for the update, I said. Maybe next time you could take out an announcement in the
Times
.
It’s a box with your mother’s papers in it—your mother, the TV star?
If this is blackmail, you go ahead and show those to anyone you want.
This is not blackmail.
Pawn shop? Mob?
Librarian. Your father sold these to us on condition that they stay sealed until now.
What’s so special about now? I said. I looked at the clock.
Your father’s been dead ten years today.
He wasn’t my father.
Whoever he was, the box is here and on top is a card with your name on it. As of today these papers are a matter of public record to anyone with a fine-free card. But you get first look, if you care to, which you might, considering.
Considering what?
Don’t ask me. It’s your family.
At first I wasn’t going to go. I had a lot to do myself. I don’t know why he had to sell them to a place way out west.
Ha. I was going. Of course I was going. My mother’s papers? You bet I was going. I never got to ask the woman a single question. And the man who raised me just made his broadcast and died.
At first I wasn’t going to go because the truth was I had no money, or the truth was I was going to go when I had the money—it always comes along sometime. No, the truth was I had no money but clearly now
I needed some money because I had to find out what was in that box. I needed money now.
I was up at this hour because I didn’t want to be in bed. There was a stranger in there who I hoped would wake up soon and leave.
Hey, wake up, I called. I went over to him. You have to get up now.
He opened his eyes. I dreamed the phone was ringing, he said.
It was just a dream, I said.
He sat up, pulled on his shirt.
Your dog wants to be let in, he said. Don’t you hear that?
I don’t have a dog, I said.
I fastened a hairpin in my hair.
Do you have any cash? I said.
He blinked at me.
It’s for my mother.
So I took the subway to the train station and got on the train. I’d only been seated a few minutes before the man sat down next to me, the one with the head. He had just the single odd feature, like a trick with mirrors or papîer-mâché. Or perhaps as if he had been lying down for a long time with a small weight pressing into the side of his head, and each day a smaller weight was put on top of the one that was there, and another and another. At first the weight would have been nothing. A fly to swat. Tax. Almost not there. But one day it wasn’t nothing anymore—the accumulation, the duration pushed it (inward) to subtle, devastating proportions. It’s all just math.
Later, after he’d left his seat and I saw him out on the platform,
I realized who he resembled. An image of the man who raised me came into my mind: We were playing nuclear war together and making sounds of sirens. We were laughing. I’d drawn on the mirror with soap a bomb going into the ocean. Mayday! he was saying. Man down!
Chapter Eight
In the capital Myers woke. Cool dim room. A sinking dream of water. An inkling, a sensation almost of pleasure: he’d find Gray today. He placed his feet on the carpet. The exterior hung in the window. A scroll of low houses unwound on a hill. A card on the nightstand apprised him:
We’re proud to serve you!
Somehow the next thing that happened was that Myers lost his job.
There was no ceremony to it. He got into his clothes, made it down to the business center, opened his browser, saw the message, sat back in his chair. He didn’t open the email, didn’t have to. What else could Human Resources want with him? Besides, the subject line gave it away. Really, it was hard to believe it could be official, coming in this way, as an early lifeless streak of light.
Outside, the Nicaraguan sun was getting around, blinking on the screen.
He put off opening the email, pushed the moment ahead of him because at this moment he was just a man sitting in an office chair. Yes, once he read it he would still be a man sitting in an office chair, but that sitting man would be different, so it would look different, though it would look exactly the same. He wanted to look like he did, a man in this chair with that job, rather than one without it, a little longer. He closed his eyes.
He tried to imagine a black line growing out in both directions. He tried to imagine a quiet sea.
He had no message from Gray.
My dearest wife, he typed.
It is beautiful here despite the heat and there is quite a bit of that. It seems to be the main feature. They have certainly got a handle on that end of it, on keeping it turned up high, on not letting anybody get cold.
The hotel is. The food is. The sights are. The language.
Wish you
Wish for you
He stopped. Deleted.
It seemed to him that he’d had in his life very few surprises in the category of employment. He’d had only long slow years, felt disappointed in increments, on schedule.
Tourist shrubs lined the walk. In the lobby, giant dry leaves drooped from the palms. A woman was cleaning the plastic-upholstered interior.
Where the hell could Gray be? This hotel seemed practically empty.
My dearest wife, he began again, with a slight shake in his hand.
It is beautiful here, somewhat like Florida but shaped differently, more squat than long. Splotchlike. Imagine ink spill. Water spot. Broke yolk. I did have fine eggs for breakfast.
Having a good. Thinking of. Sending you. Farewell from. Warm wish. Weather.
Deleted.