The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  Rafferty might well have made it through the rest of the day, almost sober, but for the hotel’s library, really just a shelf of books with greasy-thumbed paperbacks and out-of-date guidebooks on offer. James Patterson and Lee Child. The Rough Guide to the Australian Outback (revised). Lonely Planet, even a Frommer’s. And wedged in among them, that familiar green spine: Casablanca to Timbuktu. He pulled it free. “For Elizabeth on her birthday. Love always and forever, Micky.” Crappy present, Micky. The inscription on the first page was dated ten years earlier, and Rafferty wondered how it had come to be separated from Liz. Lost? Thrown aside? Left behind? How many hands had it passed through since then, and were Elizabeth and Micky still together? Odds, not.

  Slouched on the couch in the hotel lobby, Thomas Rafferty flipped through to the book’s celebrated opening line, one that often cropped up in travel anthologies and dictionaries of quotations (a level of fame only slightly higher than that of anecdote): “What quantity of lager it took to come up with this, I do not know, but the notion, having seized our beer-addled brains, refused to let go: we would travel the bulge of Africa, unaided.” A lie, of course. The trip had been conceived as a book right from the start, but it was more entertaining to present it as a wager or a wild-hearted, crazy impulse. Have gone to Patagonia! Have made a wacky bet with my wacky mates to cross Ireland in a rain barrel. Provence softly beckoned! As I walked out, early one morning… Just once, Rafferty wanted to open a travel memoir and read, “I decided to walk the El Camino because my agent got me a book deal and, having already blown the advance, I had no choice but to go.”

  He skimmed a few passages from this early, much admired, little-read work of his. It was like reading the diary of a distant relative or sifting through photographs of forgotten forbears, who bear a slight resemblance to you, rendered now in sepia. Here was a memory from Senegal, but it might well have been Ecuador, or Indonesia:

  Our bus leaned perilously on each corner, passengers scrambling, hanging from the opposite side, trying to prevent the vehicle from toppling over the edge. Afterwards, we exchanged grins. The same grin, every time. It said, “We have cheated death, not forever, possibly not even for long—but we have cheated it here, have cheated it now, in this valley, on this bus.” It was the grin of life.

  He could hardly remember those words or the person who had written them. Where had he gone, that younger man, so cheerfully convinced of his own immortality? Whatever happened to him? Thomas Rafferty’s unpublished autobiography still sat on a hard drive somewhere, he couldn’t recall where, but it was titled In Medias Res, and contained only the one line: “I found myself lost in the middle of a lonely nowhere.” He had scribbled that down in the Gobi Desert, beyond Ulaanbaatar, could just as easily have written it in a mall or a suburb or any number of hotel rooms.

  He stared at the front door of the hotel, the glare of heat outside staring back at him. He was sweating alcohol; he could feel it. Bangkok and Bali. Mumbai and Malacatos. Sordid transactions in the dark. Love affairs that were hardly either. And with a lurch, the world moves backward like a train leaving the platform, picking up speed. Tibetan prayer wheels and his father dying in a bed at the Madison County Memorial Hospital in Winterset, three blocks from the house he was born in, such a small trajectory. Walking alone under the African moon. All those truths that can be understood but not explained. God, perhaps. Or love. When you are tethered at the center, all journeys become a circle.

  A ceiling fan was stirring the heat.

  The gray tide of Christchurch. Lombok in the rain. The anvil of the Outback, reverberating from the heat. He peeled himself off the sofa—his back had locked again—left the book behind, and made his way to the hotel bar. It was empty, and the threadbare clerk followed him in to take his order. Just a gin and tonic, and still he wrote it down. Came back a few minutes later. “Tonic, right?”

  Nicotine walls. A spiral of sticky paper speckled with flies. The slow singe of gin. Rafferty’s thoughts turned with the predictability of a compass to the girl from Des Moines who stole stories. That was what she did for a living. “It’s what she does,” he said to the empty room. Call it folklore archivist or ethnologist or whatever you liked; she trafficked in stories. And he wanted to bring it to a close, the Story of Becky and Tom. That’s all he wanted.

  It had ended in Okinawa, though they didn’t realize it at the time. Had staggered on, stomach shot, till they reached Hanoi. Her leaving, and him not even realizing she had left. Not at first.

  Thomas Rafferty had thrown himself into marriage like a drunk down a flight of stairs. Doomed from the start, one supposes, as all love affairs are. The one Almighty Fact about love affairs is that they end. He’d read that somewhere, couldn’t remember where; his memories were blurring more and more as he got older. He thought he could hear the sound of birds. Mourning doves, maybe. Or was it morning? He was never quite sure.

  A sky full of stars and a tent on a beach by the side of the sea. And maybe life is supposed to break your heart, maybe that was the whole entire point of it. The girl with the rose madder lips, what was her name again? Erin. Tear-streaked but strong. They had to amputate their legs to save them. Erin, in the world. Had he ever been that young? Had he always been so—What was the word he was fumbling for? So chary. A good word, that: careful + wary = chary. Should write that down. He looked around for a scrap of paper, smoothed out his napkin instead, and when the waiter next checked in on him, Rafferty asked to borrow his pen.

  Reluctant, he handed it over. (How would he be able to remember the order without it?) “Any tuck?” he asked.

  “What do you have?”

  “Can do a nice chiko roll.”

  A contradiction in terms, that: nice and chiko roll. Cabbage, barley, and beef tallow deep-fried in dough. “Sure. One of those.”

  The chiko roll arrived, along with another gin.

  He was still there in the empty bar, hours later, mumbling to himself about items lost and lexiconic, when the woman with the gun sat down across from him.

  EXIT VERONICA LAKE

  IF IT ENDED IN OKINAWA, where did it begin? That was an easier question to answer: in Sydney, at the dawn of a new millennium, six years after Rwanda, at a champagne-fluted reception on a richly lathered, moon-illuminated night on Lavender Bay.

  Tom Rafferty, younger then, had taken the ferry across Sydney Harbour to a modernist café-cum-art-gallery at MacMahon’s Point, a thin wedge of glass, right on the water. The gallery’s café—Sails, it was called—faced Sydney’s iconic bridge with the city’s opera house perfectly framed below. The view from Sails also included Luna Park, with its giant harlequin’s mask and neon Ferris wheel turning slowly atop its own wave-mottled reflection, wet and bright in the night. But it was the opera house that everyone’s eyes were drawn to, lit up like cockle shells on the shore.

  “More like nuns in a rugby huddle,” someone said with typical Aussie aplomb.

  The clink of glass, the tinkle of a piano, the constant hum of murmured gossip. Canapés and the connect-the-dots outline of the Harbour Bridge. This was where Rafferty’s life went askew.

  “The guest of honor!”

  A hand on Rafferty’s elbow steered him away from the view. This was Rafferty’s first time in Sydney and he’d been mesmerized by it.

  “Come, come, Mr. Rafferty. So much to talk about.”

  Cornered at a cocktail party, trying to escape from the conversational headlock the curator had put him in, Rafferty kept searching about for a pretext to worm free, but found none. All he could do was nod in a vaguely noncommittal way. “Art is no different than a bowel movement, when all is said and done,” proclaimed the curator. “Inevitable, you see.” Sure. Why not? Another nod, another swallowed yawn. “One consumes,” said the curator. “One consumes, and one purges.” No argument there.

  Rafferty’s hearing gelled over soon after that. The room was both boring and bizarre, like a zoo on a Sunday afternoon—and what a collection it was! Bon vivants a
nd dilettantes, debutantes and dahlings. Arched eyebrows and piquant opinions, all charmingly provocative, and a gallery owner whose mind moved with the alacrity of a cash register.

  A bumptious art critic, loudly assertive, was holding court in the far corner. (Here was a man who had clearly dressed in the grips of delirium: clashing plaids, with lime greens and yellows so radioactively bright as to be combustible. That he critiqued art for a living amused Rafferty to no end.) And everyone ignoring the actual canvases, bombastic works replete with Aboriginal motifs and ghost-like faces superimposed on each. It was the artist’s own face, Rafferty later learned. “A comment on the nature of art,” the curator assured him. “The Ego Has Landed,” the critic would later write.

  The Artist Himself had yet to make an appearance, and many of the guests stood around like awkward statuary, awaiting His Arrival. How had Rafferty come to be invited to such a soiree? He wasn’t sure himself. One moment he was in a marketplace in Indonesia, and the next moment he was answering a frantic phone call from his agent (long since fired; Rafferty went through agents the way diabetics went through needles), who, breathless and buoyant, wanted to get him to Australia for an “Author and Artist event.” Or maybe Artist and Author. Better than a launch! he assured Rafferty. This was technically true, because there were very few things on this earth worse than a book launch. Poetry readings, perhaps. Interpretive dance, certainly. But little else.

  Rafferty was supposed to be networking, though to what end wasn’t clear. His agent was still stateside, so Rafferty had no informants to whisper details in his ear about who mattered and who did not. (Slowly, he realized that he himself was among the latter.) It had indeed been advertised as Artist & Author, painter and wordsmith, but no one gave a damn about the writer in the room. Why should they? Anything interesting about a writer is left on the page, and who has time to read these days, anyway? Painters worked in splashes of color; writers sat alone in a room, pecking away at their keyboard, inventing imaginary conversations between make-believe people who didn’t exist—and yes, that included travel writers. A good deal of Casablanca to Timbuktu was “reconstructed” after the event, including entire swathes of conversation. Painters were crazy—crazy, exciting. Authors were crazy, too, but not crazy enough—and what is an author but the empty shell that follows its book around? Rafferty knew where he stood: he had all the appeal of a bottom-shelf celebrity. Had a daytime TV star showed up, she would have instantly trumped the artist, just as a B-list film actor would trump daytime TV. There was a pecking order to such things.

  “And you are the author?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  Rafferty among the dowager class. He wanted nothing more than to not be here, in this gallery, with these people. He wanted to be back on the red earth of West Africa, the scalloped paddies of Bali and Lombok, even the backstreets of Belfast. Anything was better than this. But that was before he met Rebecca.

  The man who had taken Rafferty’s elbow hostage now guided him through the room, sidestepping donors and the verbal incontinence of po-faced patrons, until they reached at last an overstuffed sofa, where an equally overstuffed man waited with papal indulgence. “Ah, there you are.”

  He didn’t rise, but rather placed his hands on either side and propelled himself upward, like a hippo rearing onto hind legs. A bulbous face. Even his eyelids were fat. It was one of the reasons Rafferty would still remember him, years later. “Welcome, welcome, Mr. Rafferty.” The man’s voice gurgled like a tap with too much air in the pipes. His name was Melvyn—with a y the curator quickly added—and he had the leathery scent of wealth about him, old wealth, the kind that doesn’t rot, but decomposes like so much warm autumn mulch.

  “Amongst the effete elites, eh Mr. Rafferty? Preening fools, strutting about with the cock-a-hoop pride of peacocks. Not men of action, like you or I.”

  What the hell was he on about?

  The fat man held his gaze a beat too long. “The Kalinga drum? Ring a bell?”

  How a drum would ring a bell wasn’t clear. “A drum?”

  “I am a broker, Mr. Rafferty. I arrange, shall I say, certain services.” He stared again into Rafferty’s eyes as though expecting a certain response. “Ah, I see. I was, perhaps, misinformed about your role in the matter. Forget I even mentioned it. Water under the proverbial bridge. I served with a travel writer, in the war. Jan Morris, though of course I knew her as James.”

  “Sure. Jan Morris. One of the best.” He was already getting tired of the fat man.

  “And Bill Bryson? You’ve met him, as well? He wrote a book about Australia, you know.”

  “Sure. Bill and I go way back. Let’s see, last I saw Bill he was snorting crack off a hooker’s ass. That would’a been at a brothel in Vietnam, or maybe an opium den. I can’t recall. Anyway, we’d outrun the military police, a misunderstanding really, could have happened to anyone, but you know Bill, with that temper of his. We almost got in a knife fight with our rickshaw driver over a Hanoi handshake. Classic Bill, with his switchblade and glass eye. Did he show you his neck tattoo? Gang tats, I think is the correct term.”

  Eyes agog. “Really? Honey! Come here, you have to listen to this.” The fat man toddled off to find his dowager wife, never returned.

  Hell with this.

  Rafferty was just about to leave when the Artist finally arrived, sweeping in with a dash of hauteur, the physical equivalent of a scarf flung over a shoulder, an almost weightless presence eeling through the crowds, from clutch to cluster, preening and purring, making small talk to no one in particular, leaving half smiles and sighs as he passed. He was followed by the usual coterie of admirers. And how easily a coterie becomes a cabal. There was something sinister about the man, though it may have been the cliques and claques that surrounded him, caught up in their echo-chambered chorus. Never did a face need punching more, yet no one stepped up to the task. Instead, everyone seemed to be very much impressed with him. Not everyone, though, as Rafferty was about to discover.

  “You paint with words, my friend,” said the Artist, hand extended graciously in Rafferty’s direction. “You, too, are an artist—in your way.” Artists always think the highest compliment you can pay other people is to say they are an artist. “We are both artists.”

  “And you’re like a writer,” said Rafferty. “But with paint.”

  Not so much a conversation as a competition. When the Artist smiled, he showed all his teeth. He dropped hints of Very Important Meetings, spoke of his mission, his mandate, his passion.

  “I’ve always been inclined toward the Sad Clown school of painting myself,” said Rafferty. “That, and young Elvis on velvet.”

  The Artist paid no heed. Turned instead to his apostles. “Now, this one,” he said, a sweeping reference to a vast canvas; the artist’s face superimposed over Aboriginal motifs. “Came to me in a dream.”

  At which point there was a tap on Rafferty’s shoulder and a breathy tickle on his neck. “Insufferable, isn’t he?”

  Rafferty turned and was immediately pulled into the gravity well of her presence. She reminded him of—who exactly? Veronica Lake. Sultry to the point of lethargic. But she wasn’t Veronica Lake, she wasn’t even American. She was British, the consular general’s wife, and with her appearance a parallel narrative opened up, not a promise, but a possibility. Rafferty had always enjoyed other men’s wives, ambassadorial especially. There was a boudoir boredom that he found alluring, and over the years, the woman at this party would become emblematic of missed chances.

  She was wealthy, or at the very least had access to wealth: her husband’s. Every artist needs a patron, perhaps she could be his. The consular general’s wife might well have transformed Thomas Rafferty, still reasonably young and reasonably vibrant, into a kept man, might have sponsored his flights, fanciful and otherwise, might have cast him in a cinematic adventure of her own making. Either way, had Thomas Rafferty pursued the consular general’s wife that night, no matter how it playe
d out, he would not have found himself here in a dead-end town south of Alice, in this bar, on this day.

  It made him think of a story that had confused him as a child, the tale of a prisoner and his clandestine lover, the queen. Condemned to choose between two doors, one of which held a ravenous tiger, the other a beautiful maiden, the prisoner had hesitated. This was a dangerous choice, to be sure. Rafferty had skipped ahead to the last line, where the story threw back its challenge to the reader: Which door did the prisoner choose? What a strange question, Rafferty thought. The one with the girl, of course.

  That night, at a glass gallery on Lavender Bay, a similar choice had opened up, though he didn’t realize it at the time. It was a choice that led straight to a failed marriage, a nylon tent and a heated argument, obsessive regrets, a message waiting in a faded hotel: Stop following me. I don’t have it. Looking back, he could see portents of those last moments in the first: her temper, the self-stoking anger, even the waver in her voice; it was all there in front of him that first night, and still he had chosen the wrong door.

  It was the accent, not the argument, that first caught his attention. He turned, saw a fiercely determined woman going nose-to-nose with the guest of honor. She was so clearly angry, so clearly upset, and was so clearly trying not to let her voice betray her, and still it did; a tremor ran through everything she said. It was the waver that did it.

  “As an artist, what right do you have to use Aboriginal images?”

  Rafferty knew that accent. Corn fed, Middle America. Sweet jams and pickled carrots. A daughter of the drylands. His people. And thus, with a vague wave of his hand, Rafferty lost all interest in the consular general’s wife. Veronica sank back into the lake from whence she came and Rafferty pushed in closer to the confrontation.