couldn’t be seen, about all those things that didn’t quite add up-none of that came to matter much.”
Silence again before he said, “How terribly we will miss her, I can’t begin to tell you.”
Most anyone else, Driver thought, would be dispensing homilies now: she’s in a better place, she’s gone to her reward, her journey’s over. He could see where so much of Elsa had come from. Her spirit, the quiet at her center, her generosity.
“But we will miss you too, Paul. We are your family. What is going on now, once it’s done, however and whatever it is, we hope you’ll come back to us. We’ll be here…I have to go, son.”
Driver was at America’s Tacos on Seventh Avenue, misters going full, no one else out here on the patio. Mostly couples inside, beyond the windows. Just two men eating alone. One of them young, crested hair, denim shirt with sleeves ripped off, head bobbing to the piped music. The other in his fifties or sixties, staring at the wall as he ate. Lost in reverie? Or to memory?
Leaving, Driver dropped his paper plate, cup, and cell phone in the recycle container.
A young woman was bent over something that looked like a gymnast’s pommel horse, bare butt in the air, eating a burger as the tattooist worked on her. Every time she took a bite, a brownish mess of grease, mayonnaise and who knows what else spurted onto the floor. Hebrew letters took form slowly on her butt. Justin’s eyes kept going back and forth from that butt to the printout tacked on the wall. His Rasta hair looked like something pulled down from attic storage, first thing you’d want to do is thwack out the dust. Jeans low on hips, shirtless, nipples sporting tiny gold anchors. After watching closely a moment, Driver wondered if the young woman or anyone else realized how bad Justin’s eyes were.
Those who wore their exception like a billboard were a puzzle to Driver. Given his circumstances, he’d always worked hard to appear to fit in, not be noticed. But he was with them in spirit.
The tattooist’s head turned. Driver watched as his eyes worked to grab and hold the new focus.
“From the look of you, no way you’re here for ink, so I’m thinking you have to be Felix’s friend.” He laid a hand lightly on the young woman’s rump. “Right back, sweetheart.” She shrugged and took another bite of the burger.
Justin kicked off the wall and rode his roller chair across the floor, fetched up at the front counter and went adroitly erect.
“Clothing, laptop, sandwich, Cracker Jacks,” he said, hauling a duffel bag to the countertop. “And…” snagging these from a nail in the wall, “keys. Place is a little out of the way, off the beaten path. But cozy. Or so I hear.”
“Appreciate it.”
“Don’t see Felix do many solids like this. Marine?”
“Something like that.”
“Had to be. Back to my homework, then. Phone’s in there. It’s safe. Felix says call him.”
The woman had finished with her burger. Justin looked at the puddle on the floor and shook his head as he settled in at his post.
Back early on, back before the house, before the job, before Paul West, he had a fascination for malls. In ways he never understood, they drew him. Bright colors, lush displays in windows, the sense and sound of all those bodies moving separately and together, music, the cries of children, friendly banter. Malls were a country in miniature. He visited them, stepped into them, as though just off the ship. As though if only he sat in them long enough, put in enough miles along those arcades and scuffed floors, ate enough food court specials, something- some understanding, some sense of belonging-might solidify around him.
It was a pull he still felt when he met Elsa-at this very mall, in fact. They came back regularly. And sitting here one day, could even be the same table, he’d spoken to her about it, wondering why he kept returning.
Elsa had looked at him in that quiet way she had. “You really don’t know, do you?” Eyes went up as a pigeon took wing from the struts above their heads and sailed off toward the domed roof. Did it think that was sky? “It’s homework, Paul. Anthropology. You’re learning how to fake it.”
And he still must be-since here he was again.
He thought back to how he’d sit and eavesdrop, matching voice and cadence to appearance, this one a business woman, this one a hands-on worker, that one a teacher, moving about the scraps of sentences he overheard till a story suggested itself, the story of their lives.
To his left now sat a couple not much older than himself, man in black jeans slick at the knee, dress shirt with tail out and sleeves rolled, woman wearing loose slacks that fell to her calf, light print blouse. The man shook his head and smiled for the fifth or sixth time.
“Well, let’s see, Doris. The politicians we elected are mostly rich, members of elitist societies of one kind or another, and subject to pressure groups that have nothing to do with us and everything to do with self-preservation. The companies that process our food keep on putting in more and more additives that cause heart attacks, rampant obesity, and cancer. Meanwhile, seventy percent of American viewers last night were tuned in to find out which hunk The Bachelorette would choose once she stopped crying, wiping off her mascara and spouting homilies on camera. There ’s your great country. That ’s why I have so much hope for us.”
From a table occupied by two older women he heard: “Your problem, Anne, is you have to believe. That’s what comes first, belief-then everything else.”
And from another: “I realized just because he’s dead doesn’t mean I can’t still write him, so I started doing that. Sat down at the computer and before I knew it I’d filled eight pages. Told him what was going on, explained things, brought him up to date with my life.”
Crickets outnumbered roaches a hundred to one at the new place. He’d been sitting out back near dark when they began emerging, and soon the patio, such as it was, swarmed with them, tiny ones no larger than horseflies, others maybe a half-inch. The smallest scuttled about only to fall into cracks in the cement that must be like deep trenches for them.
Crickets and cracks went a ways toward describing the new place. Water pipes barely beneath the ground, with water coming out of the cold tap lukewarm. Any available edge-roof, foundation, window, interior wall- crumbling. A wilderness of oleanders out back, their roots no doubt well along to claiming the house’s sewer lines, so that you might expect them to come whipping out of the sink drain like tentacles any day now. Meanwhile, from the sound, about a hundred dove lived back in there somewhere.
His driver on the way to the mall hadn’t glanced up at the rearview mirror a single time. Odd, since most cabbies learned to keep a subtle watch. Man didn’t seem to have much use for mirrors period. There was a gaping wound where the driver’s side mirror used to be, and glass had gone MIA from the one on the right.
Manny had thought cabs were hysterical when he called.
“Hey, that’s funny! Guy I never knew to so much as climb in a car anyone else was driving, now he’s taking cabs.”
It had been a while since they talked. Manny knew about his recent life, went unsurprised at the sudden change.
“It is what it is-whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. You notice how that line’s in every damn script for the last two years? Just hunkered down in there, like a bad spot in a potato.”
Manny thanked him for calling and taking him away from the shit projects on his desk.
“You hear that? Write this crap long enough, you can’t think anymore, just plug in a few familiar words, what the hell, they’ll do. ‘On my desk’ my fat hairy ass. Haven’t had a desk since I was in college.”
He was working, he said, on two things. “One’s a piece of sausage. Some rich hardware dude out in the Valley who always wanted to make movies, figures vampires had their day, then zombies, next big thing has to be mermaids and-men. You’d be surprised how well Joseph Conrad adapts. I’m throwing in Little Nell for good measure. Other one’s a fine piece of cod for some pale Norwegian type who wants to show us what America’s all about.”
Another incoming call sounded on Manny’s line. He was gone seven seconds, tops. “Told ’em to fuck off. So you’re telling me you just walked away?”
“You got it. House. Car. That life.”
“What now?”
