Moving Day: A Thriller (12 page)

To be a survivor, Robert, means you emerged from among the dead.

Now, only after wine, the recent domestic calamity is described. The heads of their dining companions shake in disbelief, hang in sympathy. But the Mercers bring their inborn midwestern optimism to bear. It’s only things. That’s why there’s insurance.
You still have all this
is the conclusion of the evening, the subtle, reassuring point of the retired oncologist.
Meals like this. Evenings like this. Friends like us.
Which is true. Indisputable. The oncologist has lived around death, and now, retired—with a few hours a week treating the coughs and infections of the wide-eyed children of uninsured young mothers, telling the kids knock-knock jokes to put them at ease—he
is determined to live around life and is determined that his friend should do the same.

Dining sumptuously in Cleveland. Heading cross-country in their Mercedes.

It hardly seems a ride toward destiny.

But Peke feels—knows—it is. Is it the ultimate fool’s errand, attempting to seize one’s fate? Or is trying to seize one’s fate the ultimate human act?

There is no sense of mission in his selection of a chateaubriand. In his approval of a mid-seventies Bordeaux. But he knows. Feels it in his bones.

He looks at his two friends from Cleveland—and at warmly lit restaurants, proudly elegant hotel lobbies, pristine hotel rooms—as if for the last time. And realizes—with a shock of recognition—that is always how he looks at them. A summary look, like a squint into dying light. The only way to look he’s ever known.

V
egas. Three in the morning.

Nick and his Viola are in a high-roller room.

Nick has driven from Montana. That morning into that night, slipping across the sometimes verdantly thick, sometimes dusty carpet of America like a scuttling bug. And here he is. In the city that is home to all the world’s Nicks. Home to anyone who chooses it. If you recognize it as home, then it is yours.

Vegas, three in the morning. The ultimate hiding place, and the ultimate playing place. Therelessness, perfectly constructed, perfectly understood. Anonymity refined to a sterling point.

This is the only possible place for him.

Maybe Miami.

The hotel room is mirrored, cut off, isolated, a sanctuary smothered in audio to filter out Vegas’s anonymous noise. Temporal and aural suspension. It’s an isolation tank in reverse—all the hedonistic pleasures and recreations poured together at once.

They lie there. Intercourse is the business at hand for a short and somewhat formal first segment of the night. A piquant appetizer. And with Viola’s hard, tan body and outsize balloon breasts, it is pleasurably cartoony. Comically perfect and unreal. Amusement-park stuff: bright-colored flags waving gaily, hyperdental big white
smiles. Viola used to ride rodeo—hence the flat stomach, the muscled biceps and calves—and then a girlfriend introduced all this to her, and she moved from horses to men. The superbreasts came later, celebratory, part of calling Vegas home.

He observes it as he performs it, and though there are reliable but modest pleasures in it, he finds that he wants this portion of the festivities over with. His thoughts drift to Armando as he thrusts, as he lies there afterward, and he must repeatedly tether himself back to the scene.

“You see this watch?” Nick says to her. He reaches behind him, picks it up from the night table, dangles it above her white teeth. “This is what a Rolex wants to be. Wishes it could be. This is what a Rolex dreams of at night.”

“What is it?” she asks, the pupil lying naked with her hoary teacher.

“Bildetmeyer. German. So rare, there’s no way to put a price on it. How ’bout that?” He giggles a little at the concept. He feels a relaxed postcoital glory. A temporary lightness. “I want you to have it. It’s yours.”

“Nicky.” Cooing but nervous—
What does this mean? What does this change?

“Go ahead. Put it on.”

She pauses. Clearly a man’s watch. So it will be clear someone gave it to her. As a statement of some sort.
She made time stand still. Made time go backward. She was that good.
Something like that.

“Soon as I leave town, you could hock it and go anywhere in the world you want to,” Nick says with a sly smile, full of wolf teeth.

“Would you come find me?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer. They look at the watch now together as she holds it up against her tan wrist. “Take it,” says Nick.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“You mean . . . it’s mine?”

“Yours.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Nodding with solemnity.

She closes the strap. Clasps it. Turns the watch in the suite’s gently set lighting, admiring it.

“Mine,” she says, checking once more, reassuring herself.

“Yours.”

She smiles. Something seems to settle in her, to relax and soften almost physically. Her prostitute’s elaborate defenses seem momentarily breached.

Women. Women and their objects. They are simple creatures, aren’t they?

Early in the morning, Viola still curled in sleep, Nick, fully dressed, steps quietly around to the table on her side of the bed.

He picks up the watch, puts it back on his own wrist.

He peels ten hundreds from his wallet, places them exactly where the watch was.

She needs to be reminded of what the relationship is. He needs to remind himself.

He’d like to leave it. He meant to. But he just can’t.

Anyway, she’s had the brief pleasure of ownership. The magical moment of possession. So now it reverts to him.

He glides down in the silent elevator, is released into the empty lobby still fragrant with contrails of last night’s teeming humanity. He strides out into the Vegas dawn, the air heating up already, the changeless sun already preparing to scorch the streets again.

The Bildetmeyer is back on his wrist. And despite the long, tiring, reckless, drunken, and chemical night, he finds that he immediately feels better.

A
t night, when Peke checks the device, there is western movement, far ahead of their own. He pushes the little buttons, the crude digital map comes up.
LAS VEGAS,
it reads. His heart sinks. Tourists stacked room on room, strolling in bright-colored flocks down bright-lit boulevards at night, crowded gleefully into the casinos. He’ll never find the thief in Las Vegas. The little light’s insistent blink will be meaningless there. And could that be where the Pekes’ belongings are, anyway? In some warehouse? Some nondescript self-storage facility among dozens in that booming city?

He is puzzling this out, thinking maybe, like the occasional tourist, he’ll get lucky in Vegas.

But in the morning he checks again, and the digital map has changed, indicating a direction north-northeast.

The watch. Its tiny, steady
tick-tock
, thinks Peke.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

They see old friends in Chicago. Attend
La Bohème.
Stay in the Four Seasons again. Luxury and comfort become even more so when they’re predictable: an aphorism of American life, he thinks. He
might record such observations of his trip in a little spiral notebook, if he were another kind of older American.

Yes, yes, we’re making our way to Santa’s never seen the country. His adoptive land. Never had the time.

Well, you’ve got to do it once before you die.

Oh, we are. We are.

You’ve got to do it once before you die
. The startling choice of words like a mocking missive from the Fates. The conventional, unthinking quip from their friend, an engineering professor, is suddenly a dark little joke, placed in the man’s mouth, reaching an audience of only Peke.

Inevitably, he returns to the question: Are they worth this? His belongings? He thinks of the objects—the Biedermeier chairs, the Oriental rugs, the Andalusian settee. Considered separately, they have nothing to do with one another. They are from across epochs, from wildly divergent locales and aesthetics and temperaments. Separately, they are trifles. Tchotchkes. Junk in the back of a truck, random and unrelated.

But taken together, they create a home, comprise an environment. And more than that, they are a missive, a single message—of culture and civilization. Of mankind at peace. Mankind at play. Mankind creating. Mankind imagining. The best of man, his most primitive and noble impulses, in fact: making himself a home, a safe harbor against the elements, against harm. All man’s possessions are just this impulse, aren’t they, filtered through civilization—simply the impulse for a home.

Yet he knows this is only a version of an explanation that he is framing for himself. He knows it has little to do with the objects themselves. It is the principle of the thing. One cannot disrupt another life. There has to be a consequence.

It is hard for him to sift out whether it is the long, deep injustice of his own early life that makes him take up this cause. That gives him no choice.

And a shadow thought—itchy, uncomfortable—accompanies all these others: Aren’t they really the same? This thief and he? Desiring, needing, the same objects? Yes, he earned them by obeying society’s rules, while his antagonist won them through a clever manipulation of those rules, but don’t they have the same hunger? Isn’t it only their means that are different, while their end is the same? But while Peke can entertain that thought, while he can allow it, it is not enough to make him adjust his route. It is not enough to make him turn the Mercedes south, point it toward the easy bliss of Santa Barbara.