The Reconstructionist

‘Do you have feelings of guilt?’

Just before, the pallid, wrecked face of James Dell had been declaiming on the perversity of fortune with respect to the allocation of individual appearances, and as he spoke his left eye swivelled strangely with a cheerful ringing noise, then popped from the socket and hung on its nerve bundle. Behind James Dell, guffawing, stood Christopher, freshly burned. But that had been a dream. ‘Boggs,’ Ellis said.

‘Are you proud?’

‘Boggs. Stop.’

‘Are you self-conscious? Self-doubting?’

Ellis said yes. He had fumbled and answered the phone still half asleep, confused as to place and time, responding automatically to the noise of the ring. He began to register how complete the darkness around him was. He put a hand forward and felt a fur-wrapped steering wheel.

‘Self-loathing? Have you had thoughts of killing yourself?’

Ellis waited.

‘It’s been interesting to drive and think.’

Ellis waited, but Boggs said nothing more, and Ellis finally said, ‘All right. What are you thinking?’

‘The road is a place where you know you might die at any instant. Right? It’s a part of the nature of driving. On some level we’re always aware of death as we drive. It’s actually a part of why we like to be on the road. The possibility of an accident, of drama, of death, which is absent from our lives otherwise. Modern life is deathless, we expect that we will grow old and shuffle away to an assisted living facility where we can expire in obscurity. Is that really what we want, deep in our brains? Maybe something will happen on the road, now, or now, or now. You see? It provides an element of ultimate risk, and we desire risk. How many thousands die each year? I’ll tell you: more than forty thousand, just in America. How many of them might be saved if only the speed limit were reduced ten miles an hour? It’s less interesting that we slow to rubberneck the car crash on the side of the road than that we speed up again as soon as we’re past it. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.’ He hummed a few notes of the theme from CHiPs. ‘Seventy-two in a sixty-five zone,’ he said.

‘That’s what you’re doing now?’

‘Let’s allow a perception-reaction time of, say, two point five seconds, to get on the brake. And then braking. I’ll be a full foot-ball field and more down the road before I can stop this thing. Where are you?’

‘In a junkyard. What time is it?’ Ellis asked.

‘It’s almost four.’

‘A.m.?’

‘No -’

‘In the afternoon?’ Ellis pulled the door handle, pushed the door. It swung partly open. A heavy tarpaulin lay over the car. He allowed the door to click shut.

‘Is something wrong?’

Ellis let the question float. Then he said again, ‘Boggs.’

‘Witnesses are unreliable. The car flipped six times, went fifty feet in the air, did a triple lutz! Always prefer the physical evidence over testimony, Ellis.’

‘Right. Right. Sure. Why are we talking about this?’

‘You’re wondering, does a suicide actually talk about death? Wouldn’t someone intent on taking his life talk around death, the way we talk around whatever is nearest to heart? I wonder, too. It’s refreshing. I’m used to knowing what I’ll do. Does this sound insincere? Is it getting under your skin. God, I hope so. You’re still on the road? Still following me?’

‘I’m trying to,’ Ellis said, staring at the darkness.

‘You do love your subtle distinctions.’

‘Tell me where you are. Wright? Wright twenty-nine eighty-two? Wright thirty thirty-five? The one with the hood ornament in the eye?’

‘Give up.’

‘I’m going to find you.’

‘This isn’t about you,’ Boggs said. ‘I’ve known about you and Heather for a long while. She always had the sheets from that RV in the laundry. It isn’t about that. What I’m doing is about me.’

‘How long have you known?’

Boggs said nothing. Ellis knew he was unlikely to get from Boggs anything that Boggs didn’t want to give. He tried to listen for background noise, but he heard only a faint high whine that seemed a lingering effect of the hammering on the car. Ellis said, ‘If this isn’t about me and Heather, what is it?’

‘Well, maybe that was a lie. Maybe I was just trying to puncture your self-importance.’

‘You really knew?’

‘Come on, any asshole would have known. I should have known the minute you sat for your interview and you didn’t dare mention my wife’s name, even though she was the only reason you were there. But I thought you were too shy to try anything.’

‘You let it go on, after you knew?’ Ellis said.

Then Boggs hung up.

When he stood out of the car he was alone in long aisles of devastated vehicles. The grey sky lay close. The gate had been locked. He moved along the fence until he came to a Ford Excursion, climbed onto the roof, dropped over the fence. He would not have been surprised to find his minivan gutted, its parts spreading across the city. But it stood as he had left it. He eased slowly along the driveway to the road, then pushed fast, as if he were stealing it.

He returned to the access road beside the interstate where he had parked before, and he parked again and listened for some minutes to the bluster of the traffic. Then he went from business to business, enquiring if anyone had seen a man of Boggs’s description. None had. He walked the top of the embankment, looking again for the accident’s specific location, without success. It came to him that the girl was wrong: all things did not necessarily leave a trace, and even traces were not immortal; eventually the dead were absolutely forgotten, eventually the places where they died became merely places.

Sliding in the mud he went down and searched along the shoulder once more. The clouds had cleared and as he walked with the traffic he squinted into the sun. He recalled that the driver of the semi that had struck the Dodge had talked to the police about the sun in his face before he jackknifed.

But the accident had occurred in the a.m.

And therefore he was on the wrong side of the interstate.

He scrambled up the embankment, drove to the access road on the interstate’s opposite side, parked in front of a Shell station. He remembered this Shell – when he and Boggs were here, they had parked in the same place. Boggs had gone inside and bought a hot dog from the rotating rack. Ellis had laughed at it, and Boggs had said gravely as he ate, ‘Sweet porcine flesh.’

He crossed the access road and studied the ground. A pen cap. A black plastic garbage bag. A dirt-crusted wine bottle. Items cleansed of histories. And, here, the same tyre mark from the VFW parking lot.

He examined it a minute, then ground his heel into it and went back to the minivan.

On a map he put down Xs on Wright jobs. He was stunned to see how many there had been, and he feared he was forgetting more. Minutes passed, his mind wandered, another memory appeared, and he marked an X. Xs lay in all directions from here, and where to go next was unclear. He couldn’t think of anything to do but pick one.

He stopped for the night in an empty corner of a Wal-Mart parking lot. He phoned Heather. ‘Love,’ he said.

‘Stop saying that,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I don’t think you know if you love me.’

‘Why are you saying this?’

She was crying. He was glad that at least she was crying.

‘You’re cold,’ he said.

Somehow, it sounded like a joke, and she laughed. ‘Then I wonder, what do I want?’ she said. ‘Is it that I can’t even have love without questioning it until it becomes something else?’

‘Questioning,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

‘You know.’