We Are Pirates: A Novel (21 page)

“Marina?” he said.

But there was nobody on the phone, just the same hum and a new, tappy sound:
hic-hic-hic.
He remembered the phone call from the drugstore, the man who told him he had a daughter named Octavia. That had been wrong. Surely that was the case now: that some other girl—maybe that girl Octavia—was missing. Where was she?

Hic-hic-hic.
“
Phil-hic
?
”

It was Marina, crying. “Honey?”

“Where are you, Phil?”
Hic-hic
.

What? “I’m here, Marina. I’m here at the hotel.”

“They couldn’t find you,” she wailed, “and you didn’t answer your cell. You didn’t call. I didn’t know where you were.”

“I called you when the plane landed. There was a plane problem.”

“No,”
hic-hic-hic
, “you didn’t, Phil.”

It was his
father
he had called. The world, he’d said, had gone wrong.

“Gwen’s missing, Phil. She didn’t come home last night. I haven’t seen her since she ran to pay the taxi.”

“What? She took a taxi?”

“She didn’t
take a taxi
, Phil. Remember that girl of yours lost her purse.”

By magic Alma Levine entered the room. She was wearing a robe, and her lips were freshly red with hip, wet lipstick. She had something in her hand that looked folded up. Phil Needle pulled the blanket tighter around himself and shooed her away.

“I have to talk to you,” Levine said.

Phil Needle felt that his wife could see into the room, and he stared back into the phone’s little screen. He lurched one step toward Levine, his body warm in the blanket, hot even in one place, a place Levine had touched him. It felt like a burn. He covered the phone.

“I’m on with Marina,” he told Levine. “It’s an emergency.”

“I really have to talk to you,” she said.

“Not now.”

“Yes.”

“In a second, in a minute. This is an emergency. Go to the bathroom.”

“What?”

“The bathroom, get out of here.”

“I don’t have to use the bathroom.”

Hic-hic-hic.
Who cannot at any time force a little urine out of them?
“
Go.
”

Levine stalked past the bed and slammed the bathroom door. “What was that?” Marina asked.

“Nothing,” Phil Needle said. “I’m sorry. I’m just learning this.”

“I left like ten messages,” Marina said. “Even the hotel couldn’t find you.”

“I was in the bar.”

“The
bar
,” Marina said angrily.

“Tell me what happened.”

“I don’t
know
,” she said. “She went out this morning and never came back.”

“But it
is
morning.”

“
Yesterday
,” Marina wailed. “I’ve been up all night.”

“Did you call—”

“I called, of course I called, and her phone rang in her
room
, Phil. She abandoned it, her phone is in her room but where is she? I called
everyone. Everyone
from school and everyone on the swim roster.”

“But she quit swimming.”

“I called Naomi Wise and Wendy, but she said they weren’t
friends
anymore. But she’s been out all the time.”

“Doesn’t she have a new friend?”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.”

“Who, Phil? Who are her friends?”

Phil Needle looked at his clothes on the chair, flat and wrinkled and shameful. There was a man missing from them. Missing, Phil Needle thought, was better than dead, although Gwen could be dead too, dead and also missing.
Hic-hic-hic.
He did not know who his daughter’s friends were. Once, when she was four years old, she ran around their old house in the Sunset, shouting “Six ears! Six ears!” Phil Needle had never understood a word she said.

“Swimming,” he said. “That Glasserman kid from swimming.”

“
You’re
the one,” Marina said, “who likes him. Even
I
know that.”

Phil Needle was thrown by the “Even
I
,” as if his wife were the out-of-touch parent, when he thought all along that was his role. “Marina, what happened?”

“I don’t
know
,” she said. “She told me she was playing with Naomi.”

“She doesn’t
play
,” Phil Needle said. “She’s fourteen.”

“Something with her, a movie maybe, I don’t know,” Marina said. “She never came back upstairs from the taxi. Something’s
happened
, Phil.”

“Have you called the police?”

“Of course I called the police. And
they
called the police.”

“Who?”

“The people here. A guy, I don’t know.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the morgue.”

The rebel in Phil Needle departed. The earth split, too.
Dead,
he thought.
So it feels like this.

“It’s not the morgue,” he heard clearly in the background.

“I was here as soon as it opened,” Marina said. “They didn’t even believe I
have
a daughter. Oh, God, Phil.”

“Where are you?”

“I thought the morgue was in the basement of City Hall.”

“What?”

“You did a show about it once.”

Phil Needle thought and then found it: some mixing, a few years ago, on a spot for somebody else’s program. Marina had stopped in before the doctor’s and he had her listen to it. “That was the tiniest town in Texas,” he said. “Did she call you? Have you heard from her?”

“I was painting all day,” Marina said, “but no.”

Painting,
he thought, unable to picture what her painting looked like. “Okay, I’m coming home,” he said. “I’m coming home right now, Marina.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Marina said. “They won’t help me here.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’re anywhere.”

“I’m in the basement of City Hall!”

There was a staticky scuffle and
hic-hic-hic
,
fainter and fainter, until Phil Needle heard the man’s voice again.

“We’ve called the police,” he said. “I’m sorry for the confusion. That is your wife?”

“Yes, Marina.”

“She was so disoriented when she came here. She was looking for your daughter—you have a daughter?”

“Yes, Gwen.”

“Because she showed us a picture on her phone, then one in her wallet. Otherwise we might have thought, I mean, nothing personal.”

“No.”

“It’s just that this isn’t where you go. She was upset.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m on the janitorial staff. We’re getting her a taxi home. She doesn’t know where she left her car.”

Marina grabbed back the phone. “I never should have come here,” she said.

“Yes,” Phil Needle said.

“Gwen, I mean. Never should have left.”

“I’m coming home,” Phil Needle said.

“Leave your phone on,” she said. “
Leave it on, goddammit
!
”

“I’m coming home,” Phil Needle said helplessly. “You come home too.”

“Where is she?”

“I’m coming home.”

“
Where is she
?
” She sounded so much like Gwen, furious Gwen, that Phil Needle remembered how much they had been fighting. She was probably fine—stalked away from her mother, but fine. Still, though, where? Where was she fine?

“I’m leaving now,” Phil Needle said. “I’m coming home.”

He hung up the phone and held it in his blanketed lap. What had happened? He felt he should call somebody else, as it was an emergency, somebody else right away. But instead he stood up with the blanket, let the phone topple, and walked into the bathroom to take a shower. He should shower. He smelled of last night, and his own panic.

Levine was standing there, right in the center of the tiny room, still in a robe and holding the object, which turned out to be a newspaper in the stupid bag they hang on the door. Phil Needle held his blanket tighter. Her robe had the name of the hotel, on her breast, or on a fold of the robe. Phil Needle could not think of what her breasts looked like.

“You told me to go in here,” she said, as if in reply. “Can I talk to you now?”

“Something has happened,” Phil Needle said. “I need to take a shower.”

In the small room they were startlingly close to each other, considering the size of the hotel suite or the damn world. Levine handed him the newspaper.

“I quit, Phil,” she said. “I thought about it, and I can’t work for you anymore.”

“Something has happened,” he said. “That was my wife on the phone.”

“You didn’t tell her,” she said.

“My daughter is missing,” he said, unfolding the newspaper absently. Gwen’s disappearance was not in the papers yet, he thought. It was just everything else, alphabetically listed in a box in the corner: Advice, Business, California, Classified, Crossword, Editorial, Legal Notices, Life, Lottery, Movies, National, Obituaries, People, Sports, Television, with Gwen nowhere to be found. “She’s not at home,” he said. “Nobody knows where she is. My wife is very upset. I need to get home as quickly as possible, and I need to take a shower.”

“Did you hear what I said?” Levine asked.

“Leonard Steed,” he said out loud. That was who. “He’s having coffee downstairs. You need to cancel the pitch.”

“You’re not listening to me,” Levine said.

“I’m listening, I’m listening,” Phil Needle said. “I’ve spent this whole time listening. Go downstairs right now and tell Leonard—”

“I’m not dressed,” she said.

“Get dressed if you’re not dressed. I need to shower, shower and shave.”

“Phil, I’m quitting. I’m done.”

“Levine, if you don’t get the fuck out of the bathroom, I’m going to I don’t know what.
Get out.
Go downstairs.
”

“I
quit.
”

“I
know.
”

“Then
why
—”

“How are you planning to get home?” he asked. “Without a purse, by the way.” They were in Los Angeles right now. The magazine.

Levine scowled but nudged past him. Phil Needle shut the door and tossed the newspaper into the sink. He dropped his blanket. His body looked rancid in the jaundicey light of the bathroom, his thighs shaky and wide, his feet too curly and too yellow. His penis was half-hard
—Did she suck it first?
—and Phil Needle grabbed it for a second in guilt before stepping in and turning the faucet. The shower was spiny, but it barely touched him. Hot felt the same as cold. On a tiny shelf were three bottles in a tight row, and he put something in his hair, which used to be thicker, not so long ago even, when Marina was pregnant. Phil Needle said something out loud, realizing that Marina had been pregnant with Gwen, who was now nobody knew where. He turned the water right off. This was not a way to broadcast a hero, to do something selfish like bathe, while his child was missing. He wiped his face with his hands and hunchbacked over to the towels. He dried himself. There was lint on his legs. He would not shave, not just because heroes were unshaven at the time this story takes place, but because he was trembling and would likely slice open his throat. Phil Needle could almost feel the blood running down his neck, but it was the water, from the shower. He had to get home. He sat on the bed again and put on his unhappy underpants, but halfway up his legs he stopped.

“God,” he said. His voice sounded too mean in the room. “God,” he said again, more politely, the way God probably preferred. But then what? He prayed probably once a month but never knew how he did it. He sat on the bed, impure and desperate.
Find my daughter
, or something. But God could find anyone. It was unthinkable, even naked, with Levine stomping around outside his door, that he, Phil Needle, did not deserve to know where his daughter was. Who would think that? Nobody would think that. Phil Needle supposed what he meant was that he wanted to
be
God, just long enough to find his daughter. It was not a prayer but a promotion. This was why nobody liked God: they wanted his job. “God,” he said, one more time, and shook his head mightily, like a dog, water everywhere, until a new sound came to his ears.

It was Belly Jefferson. His phone.

Phil Needle stood up with underwear around his ankles, pulling it up and grabbing the phone. The screen told him who was calling, and he pressed the button indicating he would not answer, and sat down again, this time on the chair, on top of the clothes he had to put on. Shirt, with buttons. Pants first, one leg at a time. He had to go. He couldn’t stay here.