Intoxicated and alive, they’d promised each other they would come back on their 10th anniversary, and their 20th and their 30th, would book the same room, stay in the same bed. But of course, they never made it to ten, let alone twenty. Gaddy was forced to pass that hotel every day during her long sullen commute into the city, but now that it was being dismantled, she wasn’t sure how to feel. Relieved, she supposed. Sad, too.
It seemed so long ago.
Tremulous desires. The tentative touch and bold-shy confidence of new lovers, awkward almost by definition, captive to their hunger, curling into each other like smoke, mesmerized by their own reflections looking back at them in each other’s eyes. Young, both of them, and unforgivably so. Her, in art history, and him in drama, and the two of them able to afford only their initials. They charge by the letter, so we have to be careful! He was going to be hailed as an actor and she was going to stride through the rarefied corridors of the Louvre as though she owned it, at least that was the plan, though last she checked—eleven hours, twenty-four minutes ago—he was still teaching drama at a community college in Lakeside. His Facebook family looked very happy, though, as did he, although you can never be sure with actors, even failed ones—especially, perhaps, the failed ones. She never did take possession of the Louvre.
They married young, too young. Everyone does. Gaddy had been prepared for the tedium of wedlock, it was hardly a secret (was there ever a more appropriate word than “wedlock”?); what she hadn’t been prepared for was how hypnotic that tedium would become—or how quickly. Graduations (plural), a mortgage (singular), the first fumbling attempts at a career, recycling on Wednesday, the Visa bill is due tomorrow, don’t forget. The same tired recursive arguments, endlessly repeated, never resolved. All those petty and predictable conflicts. (And what is marriage but accumulated resentment? A running tally of debts owed, a ledger book where the entries never quite reconcile even as the sums cancel each other out.) It was less a marriage, she realized now, than a hostage-taking. A mutual case of Stockholm syndrome. A slow asphyxiation. They were drowning in the shallow end, in the gaps between words.
Under ancient Common Law, when the accused refused to enter a plea, they were subjected to a method of interrogation known as peine forte et dure, “hard and forceful punishment.” Defendants who “stood mute”—that is, who would not take part in their own destruction—were tied down as heavier and heavier stones were placed on their chest, until a plea was either given or the defendant died. Marriage is not a marriage, she thought, it is an ongoing round of peine forte et dure.
From the window of the third floor, peering out from the glass cube that was the Interpol Admin Office, the Commonwealth Inn seemed to be growing larger even as the building itself was being stripped away. It was like a parable given form. But what type of parable? One that doesn’t have a moral at the end. Sometimes, when things are lost, they are lost forever. Love, youth, balloons into a summer sky, and wedding rings: they were all of them of the same category.
Maybe that was when it went wrong, right at the start, at the Commonwealth Inn, with a ring disappearing down a drain. Our room faced the bridge, I remember that. Gaddy had mismeasured her ring finger, or perhaps the discount jeweler at that Salem shopping mall had made a mistake, or maybe, nerves jangled in the weeks leading up to the Big Day, she’d simply lost too much weight—a habit she fought even now: forgetting to eat when things became tense—but whatever the reason, while Gaddy, our young bride, was running shampoo through her hair, the ring had slipped free, had disappeared like a vanishing act in a magician’s repertoire.
They had counted out the initials carefully; the engravers at Northshore Mall charged by the letter, so Gaddy and her beau had been forced to pare their eternal devotion down to a set of initials and a simple cypher. GR + ML 4 VR. Love on a budget. But the ring had seemed to leap off her finger of its own accord.
She’d told her office-appointed therapist about this, a silently flatulent man named Syd Something-or-Other, how it had seemed to leap away from her, but Syd had just nodded professionally and said, “Perhaps that is why you are so obsessed with finding things.” “Not finding,” she’d snapped. “Retrieving.” But he couldn’t see the difference and she couldn’t be bothered to explain.
“Hellooo? The card?”
Gaddy turned from the window. “The what?”
“The birthday card.”
It never ends. Keurig pods and coffee cup chitchat, the feigned smile and too-loud laughter, the conversational eddies, the birthday cards that always needed signing. Gaddy Rhodes avoided her coworkers—for all the good it did her—and, as a result, had garnered a well-deserved reputation for being standoffish, which was absolutely fine with her. The amount of fucks she didn’t give bordered on the infinite.
“You sign it,” she said. “Something nice.”
And with that, she left, wading back into her cubicle sea.
Gaddy knew full well that she had been relegated to the fringe ranks of conspiratorial nuts and free-range cranks, to a minor post, aggressively ignored, but with this came a certain amount of freedom: the freedom of diminished expectations. No one was keeping track of her anymore; as long as she met her deadlines and submitted the proper follow-up reports in the correct order, she could have placed a mop with a wig in her stead and no one would have been the wiser. It was a defeat, certainly. But beyond defeat lay a certain courage, a certain defiant lack of hope. It was the courage of lost causes.
She stuffed the folder marked HATERUMA into the larger one labelled FINDER, bulging now with false leads and paper trails, scrolled through another article that had popped up. She was searching for lost objects that had recently resurfaced. Where are you? He probably wasn’t even in the same hemisphere, let alone continent; she herself had said as much. Where are you? And beneath that, another question: Who are you, and how are you able to move so smoothly across international borders, in and out of shadows as though made of liquid?
It occurred to Agent Rhodes that perhaps the real question wasn’t “Who are you?” but “What are you?” What do you do? What sort of employment would provide the proper cover, would allow you to hopscotch across the map, alibi intact, from Okinawa to Rwanda and back again? Art curator? Maybe. Archeology? Too specialized. Military? Too visible. Import-export ventures would be too dangerous, too tightly monitored. And it occurred to her as well that instead of tracking objects, she should have been tracking people. It was a crucial insight, but one that came too late. She was lost now—lost behind a wall of folders as surely as Fortunato in his tomb. The might-have-beens and should-have-saids, the things we meant to do, the people we planned to become, the lovers we let slip from our embrace. We are all of us drowning in the shallow end, she supposed. But still the question remained: Who are you?
What Gaddy Rhodes didn’t realize—couldn’t have realized—was that the key to the conundrum was already in her possession, was in the very travel article she had, moments before, stuffed into a folder, a folder for a case now closed, one marked HATERUMA. It wasn’t the name of the island, or the destination that was germane, not even the article itself. It was the byline of the writer who had penned it: T. Rafferty.
PART THREE SOUTHERN CROSS
THOMAS RAFFERTY WAS ON HIS third gin and cider when the shaking began, something he initially attributed to a long flight and a lack of sleep: jet lag plus gin equals palsy. A simple formula, really. But it wasn’t the DTs and he wasn’t shaking, the building was.
The table suddenly lurched, as though pulled violently to one side, his drink skidding off, shattering. The array of upside-down glasses hanging above the barroom counter began clacking wildly. Reminded him of castanets.
He felt the ground heave beneath him, as though trying to buck him off.
“Jesus H. Fucking Christ.” He was drunk on fear and vaguely aware that these might very well be his last words, spoken to no one, a final plea to be buried with him. Here lies Tom Rafferty. Jesus H. Fucking Ch
rist.
Would that count as a dying prayer?
He stumbled for the door the way one does on a train, leaning one way, then the other, coming outside onto the street just in time to see the cathedral fall.
It was February 22, 2011, and Christchurch, New Zealand, was collapsing in on itself.
A LAND OF CONTRASTS
EIGHTEEN HOURS EARLIER, and Andy the Englishman is holding forth, center stage, as per usual, with an exhausted eloquence and ever-expansive arm gestures. Andy wrote for the Guardian, freelanced for Condé Nast, was currently on assignment—or “commission,” as he called it—with Granta. Something arch and irreverent, no doubt. That’s what Andy the Englishman specialized in: arch irreverence. It was kind of his beat.
Rafferty pulled up a chair next to him.
You know you’ve been traveling for too long when every place reminds you of someplace else. They had arrived in clusters and clumps throughout the day, making their way down to the bottom of the world, dragging battered luggage tattooed with decals through various airport holding pens, collecting their next poker hand of boarding passes, trooping on to their next connecting flight, and their next, with the strained perma-smile of their Travel New Zealand host already starting to slip from her suntanned and unconscionably healthy face.
These were travel writers on a press junket, and every place reminded them of someplace else. Auckland had reminded them of Sydney, and Sydney had reminded them of Vancouver, which reminded them of Seattle, which reminded them of Auckland. They had descended—quite literally from thin air—onto Christchurch in the South Island, amid the vast and pastoral Canterbury Plains, the Avon River wending through, the very names an echo of Olde Country longings. To be colonial is to be born into exile, and New Zealand, it seemed to Rafferty, was as much a cargo cult as a country.
Theirs was a disheveled invasion. Bedouins of the minibar, they had gathered now at the hotel’s pub, hotel pubs being the natural habitat of travel writers everywhere, in front of a window where the name read, in reverse, BUSBY & HOBSON’S. An Irish pub, allegedly. Rafferty was the last to arrive, as was his habit—not fashionably so, just slow to unpack. His lower back was acting up again and he’d had to swallow a handful of ibuprofen and muscle relaxants before he could face his colleague’s company. “I have a love-hate relationship with my fellow writers,” is how he liked to put it, “but without the love part.”
More importantly, he had slipped away during the morning’s champagne reception, had hopped a streetcar to the art gallery, to no avail. She was gone. And so, he had returned, back to this dissolute den of wordsmiths. This pox of pundits. This veritable—
He spotted Freebie Frank across from him, already well into his cups. With his Bob Ross hair and carious grin, Freebie Frank worked almost exclusively for corporate newsletters and in-house journals, notoriously low paying, yet somehow managing to turn a profit on these press trips, all without ever actually writing anything of note. Every now and then, Freebie would convince a specialty magazine to sponsor one of his wildly improbable mash-ups—he’d been to Papua New Guinea for Modern Bride, Botswana for Poodle Smart Monthly—but generally he stuck to newsletters and their ilk, always returning with more money in his pocket than when he left. How Freebie managed to do this remained something of a mystery. Need to ask him about it, thought Rafferty. At some point, I really should try to earn a living at this. So entrenched was Freebie Frank’s reputation that when people shortened his name, they dropped the Frank instead.
“Freebie,” said Rafferty with a nod.
“Raff!” cried Freebie, greeting him like a long-lost brother returned from the war with a winning lottery ticket in his pocket. He was already several sheets to whatever wind was blowing.
Down from Freebie was a trio of rather grim-faced, semi-autonomous guidebook authors piggybacking on the press trip. They disappeared during the day, swept back at night. Germans, by inclination, if not nationality. Efficient. Meticulous. The Sour Krauts, as they’d been dubbed. Their attitude was understandable. You needed laser-like focus and a touch of OCD to write guidebooks. What time does the museum open, what time does the museum close, and on which days, and what about holidays? What are the fees? Any discounts? The nearest train station? Bus stop? Taxi stand? Cockfight? Which bus do you take from the station to get to the museum and where is the nearest laundromat? Nearest bank? Money changer? And which one offers the best rates? Nearest post office? Schnitzel house? Tattoo parlor? And when do these venues open/close/offer discounts/tattoos, and how much and for whom?
Rafferty was nowhere near organized or disciplined enough for this type of travel, as he’d discovered several years ago when he’d been hired to update a budget guide to Japan. At one point, he had sent his readers into the ocean. A letter from a backpacker explained: “Dude, on pg. 84, you advised us to turn left when we get off the ferry and continue 400 meters to the hostel on Sado Island. That actually sends you into the Sea of Japan.” One wonders how far they waded into the water before catching the error. The guidebook trio that had landed in Christchurch were listening to Andy the Englishman with the same grim dedication they brought to their task. Guidebooks: travel writing, with the fun removed.
Other writers had already landed. Luciano from São Paulo, with Go’Where magazine, Javier from Madrid, here with ABC (the Spanish-language journal, not the American network), and the always adorable Anya with the Moscow edition of Barti’s Travel Tips. Rafferty recognized a features editor from Gourmet magazine, treating herself to a free trip on the pretext of researching an upcoming feature. How was the food so far? “Well, it’s New Zealand,” she said, “so if you don’t like lamb…” The rest of the faces in the bar were less familiar.
By now, Andy the Englishman was in full flight.
“—I says to myself, self I says, ‘If I am in Peking, I am bloody well going to have Peking Duck.’ So, I flip through my Chinese-English dictionary, piece together a request, and, wouldn’t you know it, something gets lost in translation—always does. I was merely asking for directions and he joins us! At the table! Our rickshaw driver! Sits down, enjoys all forty-seven courses with us. They eat the entire bird, you see, the way a Red Indian might eat a buffalo.’ ”
“Beijing,” said Rafferty. “The name of the city. It’s Beijing. Hasn’t been called Peking in years. And it’s Native American, not Red Indian.”
“Yes, but the story isn’t as funny if it’s Beijing.”
“I don’t think it’s Native anymore either,” said Freebie. “I think the correct term is Aboriginal.”
“That’s only Australia,” someone else said. “It’s Indigenous now.”
“Well,” said Rafferty. “Whatever it is, it sure as fuck isn’t Red Indian.”
Andy smiled at Rafferty. “You look like hell, Tom. A surfeit of alcohol and a paucity of sleep, I imagine. One is tempted to ask after your health, if one were to care. Nice to see you joining us lesser mortals on a lowly press trip junket. Peddling our usual emetic prose, are we?”
Rafferty waved the waiter over. Ordered a scotch, no ice. Cricked his neck. (Later, he would look up the word “emetic” and think, Should’ve punched that Limey fuck in the head.) “Beijing,” he said, just to piss Andy off one last time.
“Ah, yes. Tom Rafferty. Once a prick, always a prick.”
Rafferty lifted his glass. A half-hearted salute in Andy’s general direction.
That was when the rest of the table realized. Rafferty. The younger writers at the table—and they were mostly younger now—exchanged glances, eyes flitting back and forth, the visual equivalent of a murmur. It was the “rhubarb, rhubarb” of background players in a dinner theater, for they knew that they were in the presence of royalty, or the closest thing to it in the rapidly crumbling genre in which they wrote. Oh my god, that’s Thomas Rafferty. He looks so, so… old. They’d barely noticed him on the flight down; he’d been silent, almost catatonic: a middle-aged slab of a man, frayed at the edges, skin creased in a
palimpsest of sunburns past, face like poorly thrown pottery.
Rafferty swirled his glass as though panning for some lost thing. Took a hard swallow. The burned-wood taste of single-malt scotch. He could feel the rest of the table watching him.
“Is it, is it true…?” one of them started.
“Yeah.” He nodded. Whatever they were going to say probably was, and even if it wasn’t, what did it matter?
But before this first writer could broach the subject, another had cut in. “You wrote Casablanca to Timbuktu.” A journey around the bulge of Africa on overcrowded ferries and long-haul buses. Diarrhea and malarone-induced hallucinations mainly.
“That was a long time ago,” he said. He’d only ever written one travel memoir of note. It was considered a cult classic, meaning “out of print.” Meaning, rarely read.
“And The Great Railway Bazaar. Loved it!”
“That was Paul,” he said. When they blinked, he added, “Theroux.”
“You know Paul Theroux?”
“Bastard owes me forty bucks on a Hanoi handshake.” He finished his scotch. “Long story,” he said, but didn’t elaborate. There was no such thing as a Hanoi handshake. He was just messing with them, wanted to see if anyone would admit to not knowing what a Hanoi handshake was. No one did.
“And Sara Wheeler? You know her?”
“Met her when she was en route to Antarctica, in transit—can’t remember where.”
“And Pico Iyer?”
“In Japan, I think. Some sort’a temple or shrine in Kyoto. Can’t recall the details.” What a paltry collection of anecdotes I’ve amassed.
“And is it true?” asked the first writer, circling back, a woman with a distinct Aussie twang. “You were there, right? In Rwanda, during the—the killings?”
“I was.”
“News?”
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