Gods Without Men (45 page)

They had been crushing, lonely months. Lisa had gone to stay with her parents in Phoenix. His old friends seemed distant, busy with their lives. One evening he walked halfway across the Williamsburg Bridge, judging the height of the mesh fence that separated him from the water. He was trying to remember what was supposed to happen. Didn’t you die on impact? You were unconscious as soon as you hit the water. Reasons to do it, reasons not to. After a while he turned and walked back.

The story running in his head had a sickening weight.
He’d made it happen
. He’d wanted Raj to disappear. It was all he’d been thinking about as they drove from L.A. to that awful place—how nice it would be to have his life back, the old times when he and Lisa ran around the city like latchkey kids. Then Lisa broke the string on Raj’s charm and his evil thoughts were set free to do their work. The lunatics on the Internet were telling the truth—he’d murdered his son. Through force of will, bad magic. A kind of spoon-bending.

He’d stopped speaking to his parents. At first they’d wanted him to pay for a guru to come from India; some Punjabi godman his mom had been sending money to. It will be guruji and three, four followers only. They will need hotel, meals. He’d lost his temper, told her she was pagal if she thought he’d pay to be exploited by some village swami. “But you can afford it,” she said. “You’re rich. It is for your son.” One evening she called to say his father wanted to speak to him. Papaji hadn’t been well. When he came on the line, his voice was shaky. “Beta, it is God’s will. That is all. If you will not go for the guru, try and give your wife another child, a son whose mind and body is sound. Do it quickly. Help her forget her pain. In the end it may be for the best.” All this, just two weeks after Raj had vanished. As if he were trash, genetic waste.

Back then they were staying in a business hotel in Riverside. Air-con buzzing, a slew of room-service trays. Lisa was barely present, just a catatonic hump in the bed. He put the phone down on his dad and got in beside her, running a hand over her back, her hip, smelling the
unwashed animal reek of her. She groaned and reached out pale fingers, scrabbling for something on the bedside table. The TV remote. On it went, the daytime yabbering. Mufflers, double glazing, great new taste. There were days when it drove him crazy and he went to sit in the antiseptic restaurant to be spied on by the waitresses; and other days when he’d give in and watch with her, trying to follow along as Gavin crashed Deana’s car and Petra woke up from her coma.

As he sat in bed he found himself obsessing—not just about what had happened in the park, the tiny forgotten details on which it all hinged, which way he’d turned, what he’d heard behind him on the path, but about the day before, when Lisa had left him alone with Raj at the motel. Something had happened to her. Sure, she’d gotten drunk, but he had the sense that she’d been somewhere, somewhere a long way away. She’d been out of touch for almost twenty-four hours. She could have driven two hundred miles or more. Day by day he became more convinced that this journey had some bearing on Raj’s disappearance. If she knew something and wasn’t saying and because of it Raj was … When he got back to New York he planned to open her credit-card bill and look for charges from Las Vegas or Palm Springs. It wasn’t that she was lying to him. She wasn’t saying anything at all. She’d withdrawn completely. It made him feel powerless. He’d sit in the chair by the window, angrily staring at the shapeless blob bundled up under the covers, like a predatory animal waiting outside a burrow.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said to her on the seventeenth day, adopting a soothing tone. It was an experiment, a probe. “Whatever you did, it doesn’t matter. What’s happening isn’t your fault.”

“You don’t know.”

“So tell me.”

She just shook her head. He kept pushing, but she said nothing. After a while, he realized the medication had put her back to sleep.

When he found her on the bathroom floor, he was sure she’d tried to kill herself. Frantically he dialed 911, then saw that her eyes were open. Within minutes the room was full of hotel staff and paramedics. There seemed to be nothing wrong with her, except that she wouldn’t speak. She refused to tell them whether she’d taken anything, and they drove
her to a hospital and kept her there overnight while they ran toxicology tests. The results were negative.

The doctors diagnosed a “psychotic break.” Her dad flew in and tried to take charge. Louis wanted his little girl sent to some expensive clinic in Colorado. He was a guy who liked to throw money at a situation; it made him feel he was in control. Airlifted, he kept saying, like she’d been wounded on a battlefield. Jaz disagreed and they had a stand-up finger-pointing argument in the hospital Starbucks.

“We’re her goddamn family.”

“And what am I?”

“Jaz, I don’t mean that. But this is my daughter we’re talking about. And both of us know you haven’t exactly been good for each other.”

“What do you even mean by that?”

“I mind my business, Jaz. But Jesus Christ, she’s my daughter. I know when she’s not happy.”

“So you’re saying this is
my
fault?”

“Who the hell knows whose fault it is? But she’s up there in the—you know—in the fucking nut ward.”

Then he began to cry. The tears were streaming down his face and he was just repeating oh hell oh damn over and over and Jaz took him out to the parking lot so the people in Starbucks couldn’t see.

Price was still in the picture then. That slick asshole. Some Phoenix real-estate guy who’d given his card to Louis at the golf club. For those first few weeks, Jaz didn’t care where Louis had found him; he was just grateful for the help. The press briefings, the phone ringing off the hook; Lisa couldn’t handle any of it, which meant it was all on him. He was offered medication by a hotel doctor. He said no and then changed his mind; getting to sleep was near impossible. When exhaustion finally dragged him under, he’d dream he was digging with his hands in the ground under the Pinnacle Rocks, or else just scratching at himself, opening up sores and abscesses. The pills buried all that, at first.

The cops took them back to the scene. A wagon train of news crews trailed their Escalade, raising dust. It was a world bleached out by sunlight. The ink on the Amber Alert notices was already crackling to brown, on its way to pale yellow and that final bone-white that seemed to be the
ultimate state of all things out there. Silence and death. Jaz climbed up on the rocks, looking around and shading his eyes as instructed, to recreate the moments after Raj was taken. Standing in position, framed by long lenses, he felt physically nauseated at the vast emptiness of the place. He bent over, propping himself up on his knees. Soon there would be nothing left of Raj but a few blank sheets of paper pinned on park notice boards. When the last journalist forgot about him, Jaz and Lisa would vanish too, erased from communal memory.

The police thought the abductor had been watching them. He or she must have driven behind them into the park, trailed them up the path as they walked to the rocks. They were hoping it was just a woman who wanted a kid. The young detective with the mustache said if that was the case, maybe she’d give him back once she realized he wasn’t—he stumbled over the phrasing, trying
mentally
,
psychologically
, settling for the unmodified
normal
. Then there were the other possibilities. A cellar; a vacant lot; the back of an unmarked van. Jaz had never given much thought to the thrill people got out of serial killers. The movies, the fat paperbacks. Duct tape and chainsaws and needles and masks. Suddenly all that Halloween glitter bore down on him as a sick weight. It was evil, debased.

Now that he was sensitized to obscenity, it seemed to jump out at him everywhere. He didn’t even have to leave his hotel room; like the haggard Latina with her cart of cleaning supplies, it just shoved its way right in. The newspaper hanging in a plastic bag from the door handle was full of it; a little girl shot at a Baghdad checkpoint; ten shoppers blown up in a street market.
No, uh, por favor. Tomorrow, maybe. Come back tomorrow
. But what was new? The war had always been going on somewhere. It just changed faces and locations. There wasn’t anything you could do. So why did he sit on the floor with the Weekend Edition spread out around him, tears streaming down his face? Why was that the only thing that made him feel clean?

There were gestures of friendship. People called from New York, asking how they were, offering help. Lisa’s cousin Eli started a blog, asking for information, giving updates on the search. Lisa wouldn’t speak to any of her friends except her old friend Amy, who now lived in Chicago.
He called Amy to ask if she could fly out, offering to pay for her ticket. I think she needs someone, he pleaded. Someone who’s not me. Amy promised to see what she could do, and two days later arrived in their fetid room, opening curtains, forcing the two of them to clean up. She was the one who helped them find another place to stay, where it was quiet and the balcony didn’t look out onto a freeway. On her last night, the three of them had a meal in a Mexican restaurant. It felt almost normal. As she left for the airport, Lisa hugged her and wouldn’t let go, clinging, clawing at her back with her fingers.

When the accusations started, he didn’t know how to respond. It seemed outlandish. The first hint of trouble came at the second reconstruction, the one after he’d been hypnotized and remembered the car parked next to theirs at the rocks. A lot of people had turned up, not all of them journalists. There were pickups parked among the news vans. Sunshades and coolers, bored kids come to see what there was to see. He and Lisa were walking along the path. They’d been induced to push a stroller with a strange little boy sitting in it, a deputy sheriff’s son. A voice called out, “What did you do with him, Lisa?” That was all. He turned around angrily, but couldn’t see who’d spoken. Lisa was looking at the ground, her knuckles white on the stroller’s plastic grips.

Things seemed to slide from there. The local TV stations were giving a lot of airtime to Raj’s abduction. At first the tone was sympathetic, but by the end of the second week they seemed to be hunting for new things to say. The commentators were bored, punchy; they stopped dispensing clichés about how “unimaginable” they found the family’s “plight” and began to dissect the way they behaved at press conferences.
They’re kind of a cold couple. Very aloof. Very New York
. One morning they were propped up in bed, channel surfing. On the local breakfast show, two women in pantsuits—the presenter and a guest identified as a psychologist—sat on a couch and aired their opinions. As they watched, the pair began to speculate about whether he and Lisa had killed Raj themselves. “I don’t know what it is about that woman,” said one, “but I don’t care for it. She seems, you know, not quite normal. A normal mother would show some emotion.”

An hour later Lisa had a full-blown panic attack. She was rigid, gasping
for breath. He tried to rise and fall with her, but she wouldn’t come down. Breathe, he said. Breathe in and out. He tried to say them, the words you were supposed to say. They had no effect. He kept saying the words. It was no good. In the end he dialed the front desk. Help, he said. For some reason he was whispering. Just come and help, OK? Because I can’t help her.

The hotel doctor filled her so full of sedatives that in the middle of the night he thought her heart had stopped. She was too still. He fumbled for the light switch, freaking out because his wife was lying dead next to him and he couldn’t find the fucking switch. This was his fault, this on top of everything else. They’d wanted to take her to a hospital and he’d said no. She was dead because he hadn’t let them take her to the hospital. He shook her violently. She turned over and groaned. After that he couldn’t get back to sleep. Slowly, the sliver of sky visible through the blinds turned from black to gray.

The next day he screamed at Price. What the hell are you doing? My wife shouldn’t have to hear that shit. It’s defamation. It’s your job to protect us. Price told him it wasn’t so easy. He didn’t speak out of malice, but Jaz and Lisa hadn’t been helping themselves. Problem was, they weren’t likable characters. They came off—not to him, mind you, but to some folks—as snobs. You couldn’t put all the blame on the media. They were just going with the story the Matharu family had been offering them. He fished in his jacket pocket and produced a page torn out of a magazine, a feature written by an ex–film producer who’d taken to following high-profile trials and investigations.
They are
, the man wrote,
like a plaster-of-paris couple, something that can be painted to look exactly like life
.

“Buddy,” he said, “we got to change the story. First of all, you need to get out, show your human side. You go to church?”

“I’m not a Christian.”

“Not practicing?”

“Mr. Price, just go do your job. Tell them we’re not snobs or whatever they need to hear to get this bullshit to stop. Everyone, including you, seems to be forgetting about our son. Raj, his name is. Remember him? The little boy who went missing? He’s the story. The only story.”

“Sir, this is me right here, doing my job. I’m telling you, go to church. You’ll get the right result.”

“I’m a Sikh, Mr. Price. And my wife’s a Jew. You probably don’t know what a Sikh is, but surely you know about the Jews. The ones who killed Jesus?”

“There’s no need for that tone.”

“Man, I thought my people were ignorant. You really are a fucking hick.”

The insult hung in the air. Jaz shrugged. “I can’t deal with your crap anymore. You don’t understand a thing about me or my family. You’re fired. Now get out of here before you drive me completely insane.”

Price balled his fists, then picked up his briefcase and left, muttering something about a lawsuit. Jaz followed him into the corridor, shouting after him to bring it on. Price called him an elitist bastard, told him he “wasn’t surprised folks felt the way they did.” He stalked off down the hall, double doors flapping behind him.