“So. The continental crossing,” says Dr. Bob Mercer, grandly, safely.
Stanley Peke nods with a smile.
“Well, welcome to Cleveburg. A place to raise families. Flat, virtuous, unironic. A place not to think too much. Which makes it as American as you can get.”
“Oh, now, Bob,” his wife, Emily, reprimands teasingly.
First, children, of course. Children and grandchildren. The requisite but exultant exchange of information. Jack is in the film business in Los Angeles, an editor of documentaries, has two darling little girls, says Emily Mercer. Our daughter Sarah is out there, too, says Rose; she’s a lawyer specializing in the oil industry, deals a lot with the Saudis. Our other daughter, Anne, is an internist in New York, with three boys, God bless her. And Daniel, of course, took over the business. Very solid. He has a boy and a girl. Names and ages. Each offspring getting his or her due. Hitching a ride on the forward progress of their children’s lives—their own lives don’t describe a similar forward arc of news anymore. In their own lives, the news is now made to happen—planned and purchased. Overseas trips, concerts, charity dances. Lives that have had their turn now take their turn observing other lives.
There is, in their grandparent stories, their modest anecdotes, a palpable sense of completion. Dr. Mercer adds to it more specifically. “I retired late last year,” he tells the Pekes.
“Forty years in oncology at the Cleveland Clinic,” Emily pipes in.
“Forty years of saving people,” says Rose graciously.
“And not saving them,” Bob adds, not gloomy or reflective, but rather for the record.
“Bob is working in a free clinic downtown now. Donates his services.”
“The local golf courses are quite pleased about that,” Mercer jokes. “The grass is back.”
“He couldn’t just retire. Couldn’t go cold turkey,” says Emily.
“Like Stan did,” observes Rose.
Which merits Bob’s unalloyed curiosity. “You, what . . . just stopped one day?” asks Bob. “That amazes me. I mean, what do you do with your time?” An unblinking midwestern bluntness that Peke likes.
“Exist,” says Peke, more humorously than cryptically. “And that’s good enough for me.” Knowing they will accept that. That a survivor’s answers are given wide berth, are allowed to make sense. He’s seen enough for one lifetime. Just wants to relax. Enjoy the little things, the creature comforts, the leisure he never had. The Mercers are assembling some version of that, no doubt.
He elaborates slightly, only out of regard for them. “Read. Garden. Think.” Brood. He shrugs. “I look in on the business occasionally.” A chemical business that produces a line of high-grade bonding materials that the automotive and aerospace industries use in manufacturing. “My son, Daniel, runs it now, so I can still pop in and snoop around. Daniel puts up with me politely. I still know most of the employees. When they know you’re a survivor, everyone’s very polite, of course. Even your own son.” After the world has been so impolite. He smiles. “I have to say, Daniel’s got it running smoothly. At this point, honestly, it doesn’t seem to need me or him. Things work in America,” he says with a twinkle. “You go use a toilet five miles into the woods in a national park, and it works.”
“Almost everything,” counters Bob, with intentionally dark implication. “We haven’t talked to you since the Trade Towers.” The oncologist is conversant with death. Is a mortality professional, is comfortable discussing it, has labored in its portals all his professional life. “We were obviously less directly affected by it here. How was it?” he asks Peke, assuming, it seems, that a comfortable reacquaintance has sufficiently taken place.
It is a question that, Peke has noticed, their out-of-town visitors to Westchester have begun to ask as well. Acceptable, almost required, dinner conversation. Nearly impolite if you don’t ask. Though usually a subject drifted to, and not summoned so directly.
“How was it?” Peke adjusts his seat. “It was kids,” he says, getting to what for him is the pertinent point. “Our kids’ generation. Working fathers with young families. Even a few our own kids knew.” It’s all still inconceivable, he can sense, to his neighbors, to his family, to that magnificent city. He can still see that inconceivability—the immense brute block of the unimaginable—in his neighbors’ eyes. But it’s not inconceivable to him. A catastrophe, yes, but catastrophes can become as familiar as sunlight.
“Not all kids.” Mercer looks at Peke. “Stan, did you know there were several Holocaust survivors in those buildings? Survivors of the camps?” It is for the first time a searching, direct look. A look in which their wives and the elegant restaurant are momentarily gone, and the two men are somehow alone.
“Yes.” Peke nods, says flatly, “I did know that.”
To survive the base depredations of one continent; to inhabit the noble heights of another. To daily occupy soaring symbols of commerce and productivity and human achievement. To ascend to heaven in the morning and back to Earth each night, to travel freely between Earth and clouds, to look down from the sky every day at the famously welcoming harbor that in fact welcomed you—and then to have that daily heaven, that epic statement of human capacity, fall away beneath you. Toxic fumes descending from the ceiling . . . trapped with hundreds of others . . . unable to breathe . . . the perverse echo, the ancient feverish black repeating dream, unexpectedly enacted in serene offices high in the air. Would you think, in your fraught final moments, that fate had singled you out, that fate had taken special notice of you for this treatment? Or would you think, conversely, that fate had taken no notice of you at all?
“They survived, thank God,” says Robert. “They weren’t among the dead.”
“They survived.” Peke raises his eyebrows and gently corrects him. “But, Robert, my old friend, they were among the dead.”
To be a survivor, Robert, means you emerged from among the dead.
Now, only after wine, the recent domestic calamity is described. The heads of their dining companions shake in disbelief, hang in sympathy. But the Mercers bring their inborn midwestern optimism to bear. It’s only things. That’s why there’s insurance. You still have all this is the conclusion of the evening, the subtle, reassuring point of the retired oncologist. Meals like this. Evenings like this. Friends like us. Which is true. Indisputable. The oncologist has lived around death, and now, retired—with a few hours a week treating the coughs and infections of the wide-eyed children of uninsured young mothers, telling the kids knock-knock jokes to put them at ease—he is determined to live around life and is determined that his friend should do the same.
Dining sumptuously in Cleveland. Heading cross-country in their Mercedes.
It hardly seems a ride toward destiny.
But Peke feels—knows—it is. Is it the ultimate fool’s errand, attempting to seize one’s fate? Or is trying to seize one’s fate the ultimate human act?
There is no sense of mission in his selection of a chateaubriand. In his approval of a mid-seventies Bordeaux. But he knows. Feels it in his bones.
He looks at his two friends from Cleveland—and at warmly lit restaurants, proudly elegant hotel lobbies, pristine hotel rooms—as if for the last time. And realizes—with a shock of recognition—that is always how he looks at them. A summary look, like a squint into dying light. The only way to look he’s ever known.
Vegas. Three in the morning.
Nick and his Viola are in a high-roller room.
Nick has driven from Montana. That morning into that night, slipping across the sometimes verdantly thick, sometimes dusty carpet of America like a scuttling bug. And here he is. In the city that is home to all the world’s Nicks. Home to anyone who chooses it. If you recognize it as home, then it is yours.
Vegas, three in the morning. The ultimate hiding place, and the ultimate playing place. Therelessness, perfectly constructed, perfectly understood. Anonymity refined to a sterling point.
This is the only possible pl
ace for him.
Maybe Miami.
The hotel room is mirrored, cut off, isolated, a sanctuary smothered in audio to filter out Vegas’s anonymous noise. Temporal and aural suspension. It’s an isolation tank in reverse—all the hedonistic pleasures and recreations poured together at once.
They lie there. Intercourse is the business at hand for a short and somewhat formal first segment of the night. A piquant appetizer. And with Viola’s hard, tan body and outsize balloon breasts, it is pleasurably cartoony. Comically perfect and unreal. Amusement-park stuff: bright-colored flags waving gaily, hyperdental big white smiles. Viola used to ride rodeo—hence the flat stomach, the muscled biceps and calves—and then a girlfriend introduced all this to her, and she moved from horses to men. The superbreasts came later, celebratory, part of calling Vegas home.
He observes it as he performs it, and though there are reliable but modest pleasures in it, he finds that he wants this portion of the festivities over with. His thoughts drift to Armando as he thrusts, as he lies there afterward, and he must repeatedly tether himself back to the scene.
“You see this watch?” Nick says to her. He reaches behind him, picks it up from the night table, dangles it above her white teeth. “This is what a Rolex wants to be. Wishes it could be. This is what a Rolex dreams of at night.”
“What is it?” she asks, the pupil lying naked with her hoary teacher.
“Bildetmeyer. German. So rare, there’s no way to put a price on it. How ’bout that?” He giggles a little at the concept. He feels a relaxed postcoital glory. A temporary lightness. “I want you to have it. It’s yours.”
“Nicky.” Cooing but nervous—What does this mean? What does this change?
“Go ahead. Put it on.”
She pauses. Clearly a man’s watch. So it will be clear someone gave it to her. As a statement of some sort. She made time stand still. Made time go backward. She was that good. Something like that.
“Soon as I leave town, you could hock it and go anywhere in the world you want to,” Nick says with a sly smile, full of wolf teeth.
“Would you come find me?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer. They look at the watch now together as she holds it up against her tan wrist. “Take it,” says Nick.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You mean . . . it’s mine?”
“Yours.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Nodding with solemnity.
She closes the strap. Clasps it. Turns the watch in the suite’s gently set lighting, admiring it.
“Mine,” she says, checking once more, reassuring herself.
“Yours.”
She smiles. Something seems to settle in her, to relax and soften almost physically. Her prostitute’s elaborate defenses seem momentarily breached.
Women. Women and their objects. They are simple creatures, aren’t they?
Early in the morning, Viola still curled in sleep, Nick, fully dressed, steps quietly around to the table on her side of the bed.
He picks up the watch, puts it back on his own wrist.
He peels ten hundreds from his wallet, places them exactly where the watch was.
She needs to be reminded of what the relationship is. He needs to remind himself.
He’d like to leave it. He meant to. But he just can’t.
Anyway, she’s had the brief pleasure of ownership. The magical moment of possession. So now it reverts to him.
He glides down in the silent elevator, is released into the empty lobby still fragrant with contrails of last night’s teeming humanity. He strides out into the Vegas dawn, the air heating up already, the changeless sun already preparing to scorch the streets again.
The Bildetmeyer is back on his wrist. And despite the long, tiring, reckless, drunken, and chemical night, he finds that he immediately feels better.
At night, when Peke checks the device, there is western movement, far ahead of their own. He pushes the little buttons, the crude digital map comes up. LAS VEGAS, it reads. His heart sinks. Tourists stacked room on room, strolling in bright-colored flocks down bright-lit boulevards at night, crowded gleefully into the casinos. He’ll never find the thief in Las Vegas. The little light’s insistent blink will be meaningless there. And could that be where the Pekes’ belongings are, anyway? In some warehouse? Some nondescript self-storage facility among dozens in that booming city?
He is puzzling this out, thinking maybe, like the occasional tourist, he’ll get lucky in Vegas.
But in the morning he checks again, and the digital map has changed, indicating a direction north-northeast.
The watch. Its tiny, steady tick-tock, thinks Peke.
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
They see old friends in Chicago. Attend La Bohème. Stay in the Four Seasons again. Luxury and comfort become even more so when they’re predictable: an aphorism of American life, he thinks. He might record such observations of his trip in a little spiral notebook, if he were another kind of older American.
Yes, yes, we’re making our way to Santa’s never seen the country. His adoptive land. Never had the time.
Well, you’ve got to do it once before you die.
Oh, we are. We are.
You’ve got to do it once before you die. The startling choice of words like a mocking missive from the Fates. The conventional, unthinking quip from their friend, an engineering professor, is suddenly a dark little joke, placed in the man’s mouth, reaching an audience of only Peke.
Inevitably, he returns to the question: Are they worth this? His belongings? He thinks of the objects—the Biedermeier chairs, the Oriental rugs, the Andalusian settee. Considered separately, they have nothing to do with one another. They are from across epochs, from wildly divergent locales and aesthetics and temperaments. Separately, they are trifles. Tchotchkes. Junk in the back of a truck, random and unrelated.
But taken together, they create a home, comprise an environment. And more than that, they are a missive, a single message—of culture and civilization. Of mankind at peace. Mankind at play. Mankind creating. Mankind imagining. The best of man, his most primitive and noble impulses, in fact: making himself a home, a safe harbor against the elements, against harm. All man’s possessions are just this impulse, aren’t they, filtered through civilization—simply the impulse for a home.
Yet he knows this is only a version of an explanation that he is framing for himself. He knows it has little to do with the objects themselves. It is the principle of the thing. One cannot disrupt another life. There has to be a consequence.
It is hard for him to sift out whether it is the long, deep injustice of his own early life that makes him take up this cause. That gives him no choice.
And a shadow thought—itchy, uncomfortable—accompanies all these others: Aren’t they really the same? This thief and he? Desiring, needing, the same objects? Yes, he earned them by obeying society’s rules, while his antagonist won them through a clever manipulation of those rules, but don’t they have the same hunger? Isn’t it only their means that are different, while their end is the same? But while Peke can entertain that thought, while he can allow it, it is not enough to make him adjust his route. It is not enough to make him turn the Mercedes south, point it toward the easy bliss of Santa Barbara.
Sometimes, in a flash here or there, it appears simple: in a life robbed of justice, he intends to see some done.
And where justice leaves off and revenge begins? He knows that is impossible for him to say. He knows that his past has left him no natural experience with justice, and so he has no reliable perspective from which to understand.
After Chicago, the country opens up slowly, steadily, to the elemental. To sky and land, to swaths of color, to immensity. As if the Mercedes is being poured from a bottleneck of urban density out into vastness and shapelessness, out into inexplicable space and plenty.
The bright busyness of western Illinois—gargantuan suburban malls glistening beside
the interstate, anchor stores like mother ships in a universe of consumerism—gives way over hours, as if in a gradual shaving away, a more and more scrupulous scraping off of the busyness, to the fields and farms of central Iowa. Farmland, every inch of it eagerly sprouting, it seems, rows of greens and grains of such majesty and magnitude and nearly comical endlessness that Peke is certain America could feed the world—could feed the universe—just given the geopolitical chance.
The populace recedes, grows measurably less present—like a cast of midwestern millions making a gracious, prearranged exit with a bow.
An automobile passing the other way becomes a minor event. The accents of the hosts and callers on local talk radio grow flatter and more measured, as even as the land itself. The voices, and their words, become simpler, devoid of unnecessary expression—auditorily featureless, an aural equivalent of the topography. Eventually, Peke turns the radio off and they ride in silence. He listens to the hollow rubber thrum of the tires on the macadam, a low, industrious, unaltering note. The double yellow lines brighten where a municipality has proudly repainted and in the next county go faded and sorry again. As there is a reduction of sensory input, there is a reduction to one’s thoughts, too, Peke notices. They seem to become elemental as well. The sameness and predictability of the road and view reduce the sense of question in him. Reduce interior discussion to barely a murmur. He is soon following the lines and the road as unthinkingly as he is following the blinking of the black device. He fights sleep, yawns and shakes away the yawn, blinks himself into alertness—like any older American on a long drive. But the other septuagenarian cross-country drivers—the ones he sees occasionally, stretching at a rest stop, picking up a coffee—undoubtedly travel to the warming vision of an old college roommate, or a raucous class reunion, or a favorite grandchild at the other end of the drive. Or perhaps only the image of a quiet guest room over the garage. Or of a magnificent sixteenth hole. Where he has only his unknown destination, his blind rendezvous. Its hundred possible outcomes combine and collapse in his mind into a blurry blankness, though every outcome features the thief. The thief Peke thought was only a uniformed foreman, so his physical image remains blurry, too.
Moving Day: A Thriller Page 7