Vacation (18 page)

So with briefcase and that much decided, he walked over the last of the earthquake, continued on into the impeding day.

Somewhere around now his injured arm began to throb.

THE WIFE’S CONFESSION (PART \X)

If I thought of us as prophets, there in the city, each with our own message quiet in our throats, which of us was the one hearing the message for the first time, gathering it for future broadcast, coming to terms with its calling? And which of us was the outcast, shunned, without followers, thought mad for our strange predictions? And which of us was the retired prophet—message delivered, prophecy fulfilled, sinners punished—now sliding through the hubbub, breaking away, exiting, heading home, his business here done?

Myers turned left and headed for the lake. Above, a queer light, a bluing landscape.

THE WIFE’S CONFESSION (PART XI, CONCLUSION)

I don’t want to talk about my husband. I will say only that I did not mean to behave uncivilly. But who ever found themselves married to a man who jumped out a window? Yes, I should have asked him why he did it and why he hid it. Don’t ask me about him. Please don’t say another word. Don’t ask me anything at all. I despise a querying man. You have a question? Bring it to your accountant.

I think I can be comfortable with you thinking the worst of me.

That is all I have to say.

End of confession.

Chapter Fifteen

RECEPTIONIST

She was hanging around the embassy all day—the man’s ex-wife, yes. It wasn’t my business and I wasn’t going to make it so. The people in the office were ignoring her, of course. She had her baby with her, a little girl about three or four years old. The girl was well-behaved, better behaved than the woman anyway, who sat there looking hysterical all day and every now and then got up and came over to me and acted hysterical and talked about her husband and some emails he’d sent her and then sometimes she got as far as the office and I could hear her in there acting hysterical too. But mostly she sat in the waiting room with a piece of Kleenex in her hand that she pressed to her eyes or held in her fist. She waited a long time. I wanted to tell her, Don’t feel so bad. Nobody cares about me and my problems either.

I had my own ugly project that day. I was using a pen that I hated. It was a cheap ballpoint and it kept leaking all over the page. Globs and smears of black ink. God, I hate this pen, I kept thinking. The pen was just like my husband, who’d left me the week before. The pen was like everything I dislike about him—messy, cheap, broken—and it was for that very reason, because the thing reminded me of him and because it was in fact his, one of the cheap broken items he’d left behind, that
I was determined to write with it to the bitter end, until it went dry, no matter the mess. He had never loved me, he’d said. Let the ink bleed.

So I was working on that, filling in forms with smudges and blots, and this tearful woman was sitting there all day, calling people on her cellphone and telling me the story again and again, about how her husband was missing, how he was sick in the head. Line up, lady!

It was the girl who finally did it for me. While her mother was making a nuisance, the girl sat, swinging her legs, looking around. She hopped off her seat, stepped across to my desk, where I was furiously scratching away with my pen. She put her little hand up, peeked over the edge of the desk.

Yes? I snapped. Yes? Yes?

We can’t find my daddy, she said.

I put down the pen at last. Where did you lose him?

I couldn’t do much more than get the U.S. Embassy in Managua to send their people out, to alert whomever they had wherever they were to keep an eye out. A man with a massive brain tumor, of all things, who would be showing symptoms by now, physical and social.

Chapter Sixteen

All right, yes, once Myers went out a window. Nearly any moron could manage it. He was twelve years old and chasing a bird that had flown in, sailed around the apartment, and then out, Myers following. The bird unreeled into the sky, swept over the heartsick city and rose. Myers leapt after that bird as if attached by a rope, as if chaperoned or prodded with a stick. He dropped five stories and landed on his head, the remainder of his body heaped behind. His skull cracked into thirty-one pieces, made a cushion for his brain to sink into. He spent eleven weeks in the hospital, five in a coma and six coming out. In the end he rose up out of the bed like Jesus and walked away (first hobbling through rehab, then tossing away his stick like a new believer). He continued his life without alteration, dully. No one except him could have detected any difference. The before and after, those parts of it were equal.

The first image he saw with precision as he came out of the coma was the bottom half of a water vase on the bedstand. Then the mess behind it, the apples or chocolates or wrappings piled up—what
was
all that crap?

Items shrank and enlarged in his eye that morning. The nurse’s uniform, his father’s brown, the geometry of the ceiling tiles (sensation: of falling), a few robotish structures set to one side, a small knickknack stuffed and giraffe-looking that had dropped off under a chair. And
so on.

No memory loss for him. He was utterly, vaguely aware. The soaring bird, the leap, the fall, he could see it all, carbon-star dark.

What it’s like to be in a coma: How should he know? He wasn’t there for it. He later wondered where he’d been stored in the meantime, the weeks of it, of functioning only on backup power and emergency lights while the rest of him, most of him, floated out in the dark in a lifeboat. On waking, he had no new understanding, made no resolutions, signed no new leases, saw no visions of the perfect world to come.

The doctors stitched the parts back together to form a rocky whole. At home Myers turned side to side in the mirror and considered. He couldn’t detect any bumps or swells, but the thoughts themselves seemed to be chipped or chinked, like seeing through water, so objects appear bent or of unnatural lengths. He felt that way and he felt that one of the holes hadn’t sealed up completely, that it gaped still. He walked to the corner store in the cold and he could feel the wind blow through it and freeze his brain, freeze his thoughts even. He also felt like things were falling out of it, like a heavy shake might dent it further. He could sometimes feel the half-healed lines left behind on his skull, he could sense them, he could run his fingers over them.

Does it show? he asked his father.

His father looked at his mother.

Nope, not at all, she said. Looks good.

His family moved across town. He left home and moved across another town. Soon he saw no one who had known him on both sides of the accident. Soon no one he knew knew.

Puzzlehead. Soft skull. These and other descriptions occurred to him. He didn’t tell her. Not before the wedding or after. He felt inarticulate. Foolish. Defensive. He wasn’t a realist. Had no interest in an objective statement of his life. She couldn’t tell so why should he?

It never occurred to him that she knew. He was so accustomed to behaving as if it’d never happened that neither her hints nor anyone else’s broke through the insulation and sheetrock of his consciousness. Maybe he didn’t want them to. Maybe he preferred not to know that the incident, so large a part of his dim internal world, lit up so brightly on the surface.

My dearest wife,

I don’t know why you would report the credit cards stolen unless you wanted me out of the way for good. I suppose I was wrong in assuming you would at the very least extend to me the courtesies any individual deserves who has the foresight to obtain a wife—the whole point of marriage being the guarantee that there exists one citizen on earth who is under contract to deal honestly with you.

As it stands you are under breach of contract. You are against the law.

That being the case, I will take this opportunity to tell you that I know you followed that guy, for months and months and months. You trailed him instead of me. That was the initial betrayal done in the dawn of our marriage and this is the furthering of that. There, I have said it: I know.

In Granada, it turned out, a boat left the lakeshore twice a day and everybody walked up a ramp to get on. Lucky for Myers (the one moment of luck he seemed to have—too bad it couldn’t have been a bigger one, longer, farther reaching) he arrived just as the ramp was being pulled back and all he had to do was give a shout and run up. The ramp was a thin strip of rotted wood suspended over the water and Myers had to decide to be brave, had to determine not to have an existential crisis in crossing it. He did and he did. He was brave, there was no crisis, his feet held the steady tread of a man who had done this all his life. He was on.

A few half-dead fish washed up onshore, vines lined down the sand, parrots rising in clusters. Far off, he saw three men in hotel livery running down the shore, arms in the air, waving. They were small, still had a distance to go.

The boat coasted off.

My husband,

I don’t know how you could have known my movements without having me followed or without following me yourself, which I consider to be your own breach of contract, the alleged pledge of allegiance between husband and wife, the part about trust and free will, the nondetermination clause, the criminal trespassing clause, the anti-martial marital law clause. I cannot find the fine print just now but there must be a clause in the wedding contract that stipulates the allowance of certain freedoms, such as movement, such as sight, the freedom to look in one direction as opposed to another. Unless you stapled an unfriendly amendment onto the original, which I know very well you did not.

In any case, you can prove nothing. I did nothing. I admit to nothing and feel the guilt of a sparrow or of any lifting bird. It is a basic tenet of those who agree to live in democratic states, that is, in a state of being that accepts concepts such as rights, citizenship, and so on, that a person be allowed to walk down a city block if she likes and to walk back up it if she reaches the end and is unsatisfied or if for some other reason, undisclosed even to her own heart, she chooses to turn and walk back. And I have so chosen. I have so on many occasions, as many as I have decided not to, and I will not explain these choices. I will not.

Your devoted wife

He got off at the first stop to throw off his pursuers—in case they decided to jump into the lake after him. He managed to get on a boat full of priests. They had to make room for him among their books and rods and their holy baggage.

The next boat he got on was a business boat, carrying nothing but sand and rocks. They were bringing the shipment to the Atlantic, they said, for export to Haiti. They carried it over the lake, then through the sea from the docks.

The sand part made sense to him, but why bring rocks?

Sand of the future, they said, which Myers thought odd because surely they had rocks on Haiti.

No, the rocks had all been smashed to bits and carted away. At Navidad, they said, this same boat exports leafage to the north. Sad fact, what happens to the northern leaves each year. If he came back then, he’d take his own fistful home free.

My dearest wife,

Say what you like, I will not force your word. I know you followed Gray. He carried a briefcase. He was stooped. Or sometimes he stood up straight. I followed him too and I do still today though I do not care to, though it broke my heart and my limbs. Admit nothing, but can you tell me this: If you were to follow such a man, what would your reason be? Would you do it because you loved him?

He rode on a knife-selling boat. The walls of the boat were made up of strips of differently sized plywood, not quite cardboard, not quite wood, each a square foot or two and painted bright colors, fitted irregularly and nailed together like a jigsaw.

Seems like you have the mug of a wanted man, said the knife man, sharpening his ware.

Sure do, said Myers. In want of a drink.

Police boat came by, the knife man said, squinting out at the horizon. Talked about a man who matches your description.

Not me, said Myers. I look like anyone. This lake is full of people who look like this.

You headed to Corn Island?

(Damn Spoke. He must have told them.)

Haiti, said Myers.

You one of those Haitian boat people?

What do I look like?

So what are you doing in this lake?