America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  “We want you to be the face,” he said, “to give the talk. We were inspired by your early work in Ecuador. It could only be you,” he said. “What we need is an icon.”

  She did not point out the contradiction, the space between only and an.

  There were three weeks until the launch. She asked for time. The mechanic, glancing at her occasionally when he emerged from inside a propped hood, mimed a flapping mouth with his hand and grinned, misunderstanding the look on her face for some domestic exasperation. In return she waved, high and tight, which she knew was not quite the right gesture. She had been too long removed from the codex of them, the small things people did with their bodies to signal respect for each other. The weather out there, the smell inside, the danger ahead.

  That had been five days before, a number she was certain about. Time had tightened for her again, snapped into efficiency under what she was going to do. She had turned her curiosity toward an end and it was an incredible comfort, warm, forgiving of everything that had led to it.

  The faucet running, she swiped a wet hand towel along the counter until it was clean. Back in the room, all she wanted was to crawl into the tight cheap bedding and sleep with her son, but she knew she needed to be awake when he saw what she’d done to herself, to explain it. The bigger piece of your promise as a mother was your ability to interpolate, rush before the oncoming menace and explain the ways its shadow was shorter than it seemed. Of course, she was the thing with the shadow now, the threat to be explained. Without the frame of lashes surrounding them, the slate of her eyes took on the quality of something abandoned to the elements, part the color of what they were but more the color of what they saw. Waiting, she left the television off, the curtains drawn, the water that fell from her body where it pooled.

  He woke up twenty minutes after the sun went down, his eyes adjusting to the change in light at the same time they adjusted to the change to her face. Two hours had passed and she could barely explain what she’d done to herself, now, let alone Wright. In the first years of his life, her parents had often mentioned how strange it was—that he did not really resemble her.

  “You’re out of your mind,” he said, passing a hand over his face in an adult way she had not taught him. From the dresser he took her rollies and a violet plastic lighter and stepped outside, a book under his arm, almost thirteen and a person without her. She said nothing when she passed him on the balcony, just handed him the hat he’d forgotten.

  On the way to the pay phone she looked in the rooms she could, gnarled feet crossed daintily on the made beds, shirts thrown over lamps to make the light another color. She descended a set of freestanding steps, concrete fixed with glitter, like so much of the country both hideous and unremarkable.

  “Yes,” she said to the voice on the phone. Fay believed she could see his hand, how it brought the others in the room closer to the receiver. In the news that had not stopped reading, the polls were clear. The majority of Americans were for withdrawal, and of those who disapproved of the war, the great part disapproved of people like her. In the month between Philadelphia and New York they had received a letter from a priest imprisoned for burning draft cards, a man with a face so long and noble that his pacifist message seemed painted on it. He worried Shelter had become what it wanted to eradicate. Shouldn’t a revolution, he had written, differ vastly, in action and feeling, from the forces it hopes to dismantle? Annabelle, in the days before she died, had mocked it, quoting it with her hands folded behind her back in the way of a clergyman.

  In the year since the bomb, Fay had taken to speaking their names aloud, Oz, Annabelle, Charlie. What did you say, her son had whispered, any time he heard this, as bitter about her degeneration as he was afraid.

  The metal cord snaking around her wrist, she watched a man by the vending machines push his forearm up inside it to a Snickers that was caught. What Fay planned to do she did not tell them, then or ever. She would be part of their message and distinct from it. The voice on the phone began to talk about the speech she would deliver, and she alluded to the safety of the line.

  Under all thoughts, her son. In leaving hers, she would give him his life.

  20.

  YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, 1972

  For the first time in his life, Vincent Kahn kept irregular hours, sometimes remaining in bed until the light thickened into the shadow play of midmorning. The future yawned before him, bored with his misery, sick of his preoccupation with the zero-gravity simulations that had taken place underwater, the Life photos of Bisson grilling, the release of their collected piss into the black of space. What’s the most beautiful thing you saw? A reporter to Jeanie. Urine dump at sunset. Laughter that locked everyone else out.

  The time that lay ahead had no investment in him, and he had no interest in it. He paid the boy who delivered his newspapers to deliver his groceries, too, always the same, leave them ’round the side of the house, if they’re out of something don’t call to ask after a substitute, just use your judgment. Campbell’s tomato soup, eggs, milk, hot dogs, Cream of Wheat. His body was no longer intrigued by the smell or heat of food, and it took him an hour, sometimes, to shovel in a meal, the dish growing cold on the table of puckered magazines and coupon circulars.

  In the days after their launch there had been the quarantine, the scientists in hazmat suits taking samples of their skin and blood and hair and piss, two weeks of it, and then they were released into the circus of publicity, the violently confettied parades where he kept his mouth closed so as not to swallow any of it, the press conferences, the microphones coming for him from every angle, the handshakes with their soundtrack of a flashbulb’s fizz. It was over in six months.

  NASA had offered him a job in administration, a sort of waiting room for whatever the next conquest might be, and he lasted less than ninety days there. The funding was cut, the landings no longer televised, the last of the Apollo missions to be canceled, and he had no confidence that his appointment in a corner office would ever become anything else. He could not wait twenty years there for a pension, getting pains in his neck from bending over paperwork, his legs asleep under the desk, all for the salary of any middling government employee. There had been no party when he left, no card passed around. He had walked to his car, already packed with the few things he was taking, and driven straight to Ohio, leaving behind his home with a realtor, Elise in her new marriage.

  She had left him in the fall of 1970, made the announcement in the morning and spent the afternoon stocking the fridge with heat-up meals in Tupperware. Two weeks’ worth, she said, but Vincent stretched it to four.

  He was a policeman, a widower with blond twins. People called him chief and he called them sport.

  Vincent returned to his home state and took a house near his mother’s. Two bedrooms, east-facing windows, a kitchenette. With his father dead she was thrilled with all the tasks Vincent’s return afforded her, the House Beautifuls to be pored over and the casseroles to be delivered. She was the only one who rang his doorbell. He had accepted a job at the university an hour away and taught two classes a week, his body turned almost exclusively toward the chalkboard. At the beginning of the semester he made it clear that no questions about his past work would be acknowledged, and he instructed those who showed up to his office hours and asked anyway to drop the class. After a spring and a fall he had typed up a letter of resignation and slipped it, the eight-by-eleven envelope, in the department head’s cubby, working it a little so that the edges of it were flush with the diagonal corners. Good night and good luck, he said to the three secretaries whose desks stretched from the front of the room to the back, but he didn’t stay to watch their three chins tip up, to hear their chairs swivel as they began to whisper.

  There were so many intricate nightmares that Vincent felt he deserved, but they never arrived. Instead he dreamed of the mission’s minutiae, details that became, the moment they parachuted into the Pacific, men with the defining moment of their life now behind th
em, totally and forever irrelevant. He dreamed of the typed labels on the medical kit that hung like a calendar—DIARRHEA STIMULANT SLEEPING PAIN ASPIRIN ASPIRIN ASPIRIN. The object that was both scoop and tong, the solid bucket and the metal teeth poised over it, reminiscent of a whisk sawed in half; the notepad that snapped onto his knee with a leather strap, ensuring no aberration went undocumented; the Hasselblad cameras mounted on poles like birdhouses, the shutters activated by triggers they pulled with their thickly gloved fingers. There was a tiny bag of shark repellent. There was a tin box that promised to desalt the ocean, make it drinkable. There was the Omega Speedmaster, the miles moving up around the rim as the faces in miniature, thirty seconds, ten, encircled by the regular hands of hour and minute, ticked down.

  He dreamed of all this but almost never of what happened in real air on earth, the relationships and the stopgap homes that he had tried to grow into sideways. Never of being a husband, the arguments across their oaken dining table, never of being a child, the small voices of his parents beckoning him back from the paper airplanes he flew through the wind tunnels he’d built—fans and cardboard boxes. His sleep wouldn’t consider the flat of the country, the trolley cars trundling through cities, the rideable lawn mowers purchased on installment plan.

  HE HAD ENTERED THE TIME, so long fought for, when he was truly alone. There were no parties, no silk bow ties that he could feel against his larynx when he spoke. It was not beyond him that his present solitude was made possible by the vestigial Life money, by every moment he had allowed a camera into his friendship or marriage. He spent the mornings reading, biographies and accounts by naturalists in parts of the world he’d seen only in parades, and the afternoons at his first aviation school, flying old routes in planes that shuddered at any change like some abused animal. He had loved them first and wanted to again, but he heard himself curse—like flying a secondhand vacuum. That he could have traveled so far from the boy he’d been, bicycling out there to pay for his lessons with his saved-up coins in a knotted handkerchief—the flights made him aware of every knot along his spine, every potential cavity and source of arthritis.

  If her face came up on the news, still wanted, still missing, he changed the channel. He thought of her as an expression of his own unhappiness in California, an unwise purchase he’d been lucky enough to pay off. Even commercials were beautiful now, and there was one he liked particularly, a life insurance ad that followed a red rubber ball on its long bounce from a child’s hands on a lawn to a father’s lap by a fireplace. He had dreamt once of the man she’d killed, the schoolteacher, that he’d been with Vincent on the mission but refused to check the time.

  21.

  He woke thinking he heard birds nesting in the motel room. In his gray briefs he pushed aside the curtains, roughly starched on a warped plastic track, but there was nothing behind them—the same parking lot, a big rig painted with bubbles and the slogan IT’S THE REAL THING, a gas station with a scrolling marquee whose last numeral had stuck between six and seven. Behind flimsy pocket doors, the closet’s hangers stayed secured to the rod by loops, the shelves above them still empty. A radio, he thought, a television in the next room, but when he stepped into the hall the sound faded.

  It was coming from the bathroom. He placed the pads of his fingers on the door, which sat a full inch above the wan tile, and slipped in. The chirps were coming from inside the walls, he thought, perhaps behind the shower where the mold had been painted over. In the fan built in to the ceiling, through the radial swirls of plastic that would animate at the flip of a switch, he could see little bits of dried grass and plastic, hear the squabbles of adjustment. He tried to explain it to himself, how they were laid there, how the mother had left them. A hole in the roofing she had flown through, the gap soon patched so she couldn’t return.

  There was only one switch, light and fan. He looked down at his shoes, the duct tape wrapped around the balls of his feet to cover a hole. Sitting on the rim of the bathtub, he began to pull it free, the adhesive trailing behind the silver in protest, the shape of the ribbon becoming warped. When he was done he tore off smaller pieces with his teeth, tasting the bits of stiff dirt and concrete that had made their way in, and then he began to cover the plastic rectangle that held the little lever, isolating its position at thirty degrees, hardening it there, pressing his fingers along the edges of the tape with his full weight. How long would it buy them, keep the blades off? Three days, a week, depending on the guests to come, how indifferent they were to their surroundings, how clearly they wanted to see their nipples and beer guts and crow’s-feet.

  He stood with his hands on the pink vinyl counter, appraising himself in the mirror in the low six P.M. light. A child still, he thought, removing his shirt and watching the demure curve of his shoulders as though they might fill with musculature as he evaluated them, reflect what he had done with Brianna, what she had forced him to do. That she had fucked him had not allowed Wright to enter some new version of himself, only made it clear how far he was from the one he needed.

  His hand on her jaw, he sat on his mother’s bed. All he wanted was to tell her about the predicament of the birds, see her face turn at the injustice of it. She smiled in a way that felt alien, as though the teeth and lips had received inadequate instruction, and took his fingers. That she had removed her eyelashes was a fact he declined to acknowledge further, knowing there would be some symbol she saw in it and would ask him to consider.

  When she’d returned that evening he had refused to look her way, locked his jaw and raised a straight arm, the remote a seamless addition at the tip of his fingers, to the television. The Price Is Right baffled him completely, the prerequisite knowledge of the things you had already bought to guess at the value of the things you might win. Money, in America, was a party you entered and could not leave. The longer you stayed, the more you imagined the happiness to be found on the other side of the room, if you could just work your away across.

  “There’s a protest I want to attend,” she said now, speaking as slowly as she had when disciplining him as a toddler. “It has nothing to do with Shelter, though they reached me through them. You’ll be glad to know that. The invitation came in some days ago but I wanted to sit with it awhile.”

  He waited, his bowels turning over, for the thing she was concealing to show itself in some euphemism, for the faltering in her careful phrasing. She had called Shelter a collective focused on change, Randy a boy whose life was taken from him, his missing finger dexterity sacrificed to condemn one. There was always, with her, some gauzy lingual veil fallen over the truth, some other conversation taking place on the inside of the words he could actually hear.

  “It’s a demonstration to take place at the launch of the last Apollo mission, organized by some brilliant college students who see the country’s space program as a distraction from the systemic abuse and disenfranchisement of so many. They want to form that association in the public’s mind.”

  “How,” he said. He wanted the truth while she had no acolytes to defend it, no distractions to offer him, no other room to enter.

  She was sitting up now, cross-legged, her hands spread across her knees. She spoke with the fidgety air of an expert, pushing some hair behind her ear, rotating a raised palm for emphasis, like someone explaining a procedure that had become a simple matter of muscle memory. Just a talk, she was saying, just a supplement to the images the group would provide, of the people forgotten by the American spectacle.

  He was silent now, as distant from her as he could be, in the far corner of the room with his forehead resting in the wedge. Only faintly, under the sound of all the blood in his body pounding in his ears, could he hear the room.

  “I’m not coming,” he said.

  “America has to see what it has done to its future,” she said, weakly, for the first time he could remember not convinced by her own rhetoric.

  “Who are you talking to? Who do you think is recording this right now, its future? We’re
two people in a very bad motel in Georgia, and I’m not its future. I’m just your son. That I’d gladly give up.”

  “I know that. I understand that, how I’ve failed you. I want to free you of this. I want you to become who you are. I’ve been in touch with your grandparents, and they say they’ll take you. They live on a hill in California. I was pregnant with you there. We grew tomatoes together, you and I, we fed chickens. You’ll recognize it.”

  “Recognize it. I’m sure that feels nice to believe.”

  “Come with me.”

  “No.”

  “You would do it knowing you had a new life ahead of you. A gas stove, a Labrador, oil landscapes on the walls. Clean laundry every Sunday. Starched. They are nothing like me, my parents. They would always be the same. Will you come?”

  “What happened to how you felt about me? What happened to ‘you’ll be teaching me, my love’?”

  “Do you want to live like this any longer? Coin-operated beds, a hospital if either of us needed it out of the question?”

  He knew she was talking to herself now and he let her, his face only changing with the colors of the television he’d got up and turned on again. Verdigris. Cyan. Ancient, modern red.

  “The moment it’s over you’ll be free to go. If I sent you now you’d be recognized on your way, if I sent you now it might keep me from this. Will you come?”

  ON THE BUS TO FLORIDA he told her about the birds trapped in the fan’s chamber, the bits of duct tape he had repurposed. Her eyes went glassy and her palms opened, and she looked as she had by the waterfalls, between then and now so many days where nothing was said, a winter that had left them both with a bronchitic cough.