Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  We scurried from the Connelly house, as if involved not in leave-taking but escape. We slid into our car, full of merriment. We were shaking with suppressed laughter— we often felt closer, luckier to have each other, after leaving others. But when the doors shut and the pitiful few watts of overhead lighting were extinguished, our shared ripple of hateful glee had expended itself and we were plunged into a sudden, devastating exhaustion. If not for the fear that Russ might be peeking out his window, I would have rested my forehead on the steering wheel.

  “Let’s go, Sam,” said Olivia, in a murmur. She used my name so gently, so naturally, it actually gave me a chill.

  The Windsor Mall was eight miles from Leyden. It was a mall like all the rest—a Sears, a Kmart, a J.C. Penney, a Gap, Kaybee Toys, a couple of banks. It was the place I would want to conjure while gasping my last mortal breaths, so as to not feel all that bad about dying.

  It was nearly ten o’clock when we walked in. We spotted no other adults in the mall. Even the other parents were teenagers—pale youngsters pushing collapsible strollers in which toddlers slept with scowls on their faces. The clerks in the stores were teenagers, for the most part girls with ruinous makeup habits to support. The stores were relatively empty. The mass of teenagers—there must have been about five hundred of them—prowled the faux-marble corridors of the mall, the boys in packs, the girls in less threatening clusters of three and four. The occasional boy-girl couples were on their own, holding hands or staggering around with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, as if helping each other limp out of a war zone. Yet their faces were proud, like those of people who have just bought their first piece of real estate.

  Olivia’s eyes combed through the faces, dividing the mall into quadrants. I was circumspect. Like a white man in Zaire, I felt suddenly bereft of my status as a member of the majority.

  Olivia must have seen it in my face. “You’re the only guy here with a collar on his shirt,” she said.

  “But the girls dress like you. Or are you dressing like them?”

  Suddenly Olivia rose onto her toes and touched the fingers of her left hand against the bottom of her chin. “Wait! Isn’t that him?”

  I followed her eyes into the crowd.

  “Michael? I don’t see him.”

  “No—Greg, Greg Pitcher. Over there, near the Fashion Barn.”

  The Fashion Barn had a red neon sign, the letters shaped like logs, and there below it, more or less out of the restless flow of teen traffic, was a moody-looking, dark- complexioned girl in a floral print dress. Her arm was around a tall, bewildered-looking boy in jeans, who if he didn’t go home soon and get some rest would be milking his father’s cows in his sleep tomorrow morning.

  “That’s not Greg,” I said. “It doesn’t even look like him.”

  “It doesn’t? Are you sure?”

  “That kid is the president of the local 4-H Club, for Christ’s sake. Greg was living in our house. Can’t you remember what he looks like? Like an athlete with drinking and alimony problems.”

  Olivia presented a blank face. Her soul could leave her body like someone slipping out of the house for a smoke.

  “Let’s surprise everyone,” she said, “and not turn on each other during this crisis.”

  In a fit of penance, I took her in my arms and stroked the back of her head, the enduring silkiness of her long hair, the abrupt Nefertiti-like curve of the back of her skull.

  The mall closed at eleven. We stood by the exits—Olivia near the Cineplex, myself near Penney’s—and watched the teenagers leave, and when that was over and the lights in the stores were going off, one at a time, right down the line, like dominoes falling, we met back at the car, and it was difficult to speak, or even make eye contact. We were in the throes of an emergency which remained maddeningly dim.

  Olivia took the wheel and we got into line with the hundreds of cars leaving the Windsor Mall.

  “I think we should go home,” I said. “For all we know, Michael’s there.”

  “I called. There’s no answer.”

  “Oh.”

  “Exactly. ‘Oh.’”

  “What’s that for?”

  “Sam, you have to tell me something. I’m not blaming, but I have to know. Did anything happen between you and Michael today that might have caused this? Something, anything—an argument, a comment, some caustic remark, a misunderstanding?”

  If life was a story written by God, then this was the moment in which I could fearfully light the flickering flame of my confession. Olivia looked at me through the corner of her eye, awaiting an explanation. There might never be a better, or even another, time for me to tell her about Nadia, about my feelings of ridiculousness and remorse. Olivia had set the scene for me, relieving me of the most terrible part—that moment in which you say, in effect, “Darling, there’s something I must tell you….” I considered the moment, tried quickly to imagine what the rest of my life would be like once I uttered the words “Michael may be upset because he found a letter….” In front of us, teenaged drivers sailed past the flashing red traffic light and out onto the state highway, bordered on one side by hills and on the other by a desultory commercial strip— one-hour lube joints, Roy Rogers, Penn Auto Glass. It amazed me: the power of words, the corrosive power of a lie, how I could say one thing and ruin my life and say another and ruin it in a different—though possibly, in the short term at least, more tolerable—way.

  I took a deep breath. The moon had risen out of range of the clouds, a cantaloupe-colored hole in the sky.

  “It was just like any other day,” I said.

  In Leyden, the town’s occasional crimes were easily handled by the nearby branch of the state police, which was headquartered in a small, low-slung brick building a couple miles out of town, on Route 100. There were four blue- and-tan patrol cars parked in front, a desultory, unkempt air in the gravel parking lot—scraps of tissue such as come with hot dogs, a dying rhododendron packed with last autumn’s leaves.

  When we pulled in, Olivia shut the motor off but then just sat there, with her hands on the steering wheel. She breathed deeply, trying to calm herself.

  “I don’t want to cry in there,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, you won’t.” I meant it to sound encouraging, but I detected something hard in the remark. I was so compromised, my words were turning to salt. “Anyhow,” I said quickly, “maybe we’re heading into good news.”

  “Do you think so? I don’t. I don’t have the feeling we’re anywhere near good news.”

  She pulled the key out of the ignition and dropped it into her purse. She went to open the door but I stopped her, taking her arm. She turned toward me, the whites of her eyes alive in the darkness of the car.

  “I love you, Olivia.”

  She settled back in the seat. I was immediately and ravishingly sorry I’d said it. It had come from nowhere; an emotional hiccup.

  “I love you, too,” she said, softly.

  It broke my heart. I looked away from her, toward the police headquarters. The windows were lit, but somehow none of that light left the building. It was as if the glass had been painted to look as if the lights were on.

  I had never asked the police for help. I didn’t even ask them for directions. My only contact with cops had been as a potential defendant—the campus police wading into the University of Wisconsin administration building to remove antiwar students during a Vietnam War protest, highway cops zapping me with their radar guns, street cops on Second Avenue eying everyone in line for the Albert King show at the Fillmore East, hoping for a quickie drug bust.

  But now I had to hand myself over to them, willingly, imploringly. I was turning my life in a new direction, and things would never be the same. I would always be, among other things, a man who’d come to the police and said, “My son is missing!”

  “Name?” asked the cop behind the desk. A young guy, he wore his blue shirt open-necked; a tangle of dark fur grew in the hollow beneath his Ad
am’s apple.

  “We called a couple of hours ago,” said Olivia. “About our son?”

  “Holland,” I said. “Michael Holland.” I felt the requirements of the drama into which I’d been cast. I was there as the steady male, the one who can dispassionately handle matters of fact. Olivia would play the woman with emotions.

  “Have you heard anything yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet, ma’am,” said the young officer. His nametag announced him as Sergeant Rick McGrath. A good name for a ball player. Good old semireliable Rick McGrath, with his brilliant plays in the outfield and his weakness for the off-speed pitch. As good-field, no-hit McGrath delivered this disappointing news, he tightened his jaw, looked away, as if to shield his ego from jeers and catcalls after popping up with men in scoring positions.

  “Can you tell us what’s been done so far?” asked Olivia.

  “All of our personnel have been alerted and a description of your son has been circulated.”

  Olivia colored. She looked at me, but I wasn’t sure what she expected me to do just now.

  “Isn’t that just saying you’ve mentioned it to people?” she said.

  “No, ma’am.”

  Again, Olivia looked to me. Your turn, I said to myself.

  “How many officers are specifically assigned to look for Michael?” I asked. There. When in doubt, revert to statistics.

  “Well, no one, at this point in time, sir.”

  I saw the cop was trying to be nice, had been taught to respect his elders. “Your son’s only been out for a few hours.”

  “‘Out’? Is that the new way of putting it? What about ‘missing’?” I looked at Olivia; her gaze had softened, she stood a little closer to me—in fact, she was reaching for me, to touch my elbow.

  Just then, the door to the station opened and two more officers came in.

  “Were you out checking that break-in on River Road?” McGrath asked, speaking to them through the space between Olivia and me, and adding to his inquiry a certain tone that let us know that now he was devoting himself to real police business.

  At home that night, we tried to sleep, while anxiety hummed in the force field between our bodies.

  “Olivia?” I whispered.

  She was on her back, her eyes not so much closed as unexpressed, like a Roman statue on which the sculptor has merely indicated the shape and location of the eye but nothing more. A gnarled twig of moonlight trembled on her bare arm; the vanilla blanket gently rose and fell with her Methodical breaths. Truly, Stanislavsky had nothing to teach Olivia about what had become her premier role: the woman too tired to talk to her husband.

  Where in the fuck is that kid? I asked myself. For all the effort we had put in that night, I was left feeling we might only have managed to obscure the path that could lead us to Michael, that we had kicked up dust, trampled clues, somehow driven him further away.

  I closed my eyes and saw Michael’s face before me. It was too unnerving to have the boy appear unbidden. I turned in my bed, looked at the shadow of our budding maple, a slender, trembling thing, a piece of filigree placed upon the bedroom wall by an aged hand.

  There is something dangerous in this boy, I thought, and the complaint hit me with the force of revelation. I thought back to the preceding spring when I brought Michael over to the schoolyard to play a little ball. I wanted to make some unspoken point about the casual pleasure of country life—Michael might be giving up the greasy, cumin- drenched smells of souvlaki, but in return he was getting a bit of batting practice with Dad. We walked behind the school, where there was a baseball diamond with a backstop. I pitched slow to Michael; he seemed perfectly content to whack them over my head and send me chasing. Not once did Michael ask me to pitch a little faster, and I was happy to let him succeed. I shagged his hits through the white and cinnamon-colored clover of the outfield and tossed high pop-ups to myself during the trudge back to the mound. Finally, Michael asked me if I wanted to take a couple hits. It had been at least fifteen years since I had swung at a baseball, but once I had enjoyed it and hadn’t been bad at it, so I agreed, and Michael handed the bat to me and I handed Michael his glove and we changed places.

  The first pitch Michael threw hit me square in the head, and I could never explain why but I was certain it had been deliberate. The pain had a kinetic power; it bored its way down from my skull to my bowels. The world looked as if it were a quick sketch—Michael was a few shaky lines, the grass a mere suggestion of green, no one had filled in the sky. But then reality returned and the pain jumped up a couple of notches and I threw the bat down.

  “Goddammit, Michael!” I said.

  “Sorry,” Michael said, in a tone so casual, as if he had stepped on my foot, not at all appropriate to having brought his father to the cusp of concussion.

  In all likelihood, the casualness of his apology was meant to provoke me. I picked the bat up again, threw it down again, kicked it, and then stalked out toward the mound. Instinctively, Michael turned and ran. I set out after him, moving almost as fleetly as Michael. I knew I was losing this contest but took a certain brutish satisfaction from it anyhow because I knew I was frightening him. Phrases like “wring his neck” and “kick his ass” droned within me. Michael zigged, I zagged; Michael streaked and I lunged. We circled the school building, and when we reached the parking lot Michael went toward the Dodge. He flung his hands onto the hood, as if he could not be harmed while touching it. I caught up to him, accepted the fact that the chase was over.

  “That hurt,” I said, my voice unstable with exhaustion.

  “I said I was sorry,” Michael said. His tone was mild, unrepentant. What is happening to us?, I had thought, my heart suddenly breaking in two.

  In fact, Michael had a long history of hitting me, breaking my things, adding a measure of misery to my daily life. As an infant, he liked to flail in my arms, and often his little pink fingers with their razor-sharp, obdurate cuticles would make contact with the side of my nostrils, the corner of my eyes. When he learned how to control himself a little better, he graduated to grabbing the tip of my nose, as if to pull it off. He scattered my papers, jammed and bent the keys to my typewriter, and on and on and on. I accepted the existence of a certain oedipal rivalry between father and son; I could conjure memories of those feelings in myself, that little boy whom my father so liberally bounced around through the fifties. But to this inevitable Freudian fandango I also added a certain specific culpability of my own: that is to say, Michael destroyed my silk ties and dropped my cat’s-eye cuff links down the drain because he felt on some fundamental level that I was not a fit father.

  And that was what broke my heart all through Michael’s childhood—my own inescapable inadequacy. Now, next to my supposedly sleeping wife, with the poised and intimate spring night lurking like the bird of death outside every window of our house, I, for the fifty thousandth time, berated myself for being so congenitally unequal to the tasks of fatherhood, beginning with Olivia’s pregnancy and continuing with the undulating implacability of a Möbius strip to this very insomniac instant.

  “We’re going to have a child,” she’d said.

  “Oh, great,” I had replied. I eventually got back on track, but the race was lost; I was like a horse who spooks in the starting gate, and it would have taken a miracle to win the race, or to place, or even show.

  When Olivia announced her pregnancy, I had been at the kitchen table, typing my second novel. We were living on Olivia’s Rolling Stone salary and the remains of my advance.

  “Aren’t you excited?” she asked.

  “Excited?” I turned off my Olivetti; the red indicator light stayed on for an extra moment and then faded to black. “We’ve only been married two months. You don’t even know what you want to do when you grow up.”

  She smiled at me; it was important to her that she remember this day in a certain way. “Aren’t you happy?” she asked, giving me another chance.

  “I don’t know.”

&n
bsp; “Sam, you know Dr. Mead always told me if we wanted to get pregnant I’d probably have to take fertility pills. I only get my period three or four times a year. This is a miracle, Sam. I really think it is.”

  “I never thought Dr. Mead was much of a doctor,” I said.

  Yet I did get caught up in the whole miracle-of-life angle of Olivia’s pregnancy. I read the popular books on the subject, like So You’re Having a Baby!, written by a fellow calling himself (certainly pseudonymously) Lawrence Kindheart, author of So You’ve Got Cancer! and So You’re Going to Declare Bankruptcy! I made lists of names, boys and girls; shopped for baby furniture on Orchard Street. Olivia eschewed any of those tests available to pregnant women—no peeks behind the curtain for her, no shaking of the wrapped present for some telltale rattle within. What if it’s a terribly deformed…well, you know, I asked her, as delicately as I could, since I thought we should avail ourselves of the entire array of tests—amniocentesis, sonograms, whatever. But she insisted she was far too young to worry about things like that, and she said it in a way that fairly implied that my concern was perhaps a form of projection, that I had turned our unborn child into some kind of translucent Quasimodo because that’s how I felt about the poor thing. I love this little guy, I had insisted, and fell to my knees before her, wrapping my arms around her ample waist, resting my suddenly tear-slicked cheek against her bountiful belly, and the strange thing about these declarations is that they become resonantly true as you make them—function follows form and you say what you think you ought to be feeling and then, lo and behold, you are feeling it.

  Not only did Olivia avoid any sneak previews of this progeny, but she chose to have the child delivered by a midwife, a woman named Gloria Wurtzel, with tight auburn curls, pop eyes, and a rotting tooth somewhere in the back of her mouth. “Sometimes God makes people look that way to warn others about them,” I said to Olivia, but she was blind to Wurtzel’s defects. She told me that in the Middle Ages the so-called witches who were burnt at the stake were in many cases midwives, whose familiarity with the mysteries of birth was construed as a kind of sorcery. Makes sense to me, I thought; but really there was nothing more to say. Olivia wanted Wurtzel, so Wurtzel it was. I was somewhat mollified to learn that at least Nurse Wurtzel made her deliveries at a real hospital, so if any medical intervention was necessary it would be available.