by Sarah Bruni
With that, the floodgates opened. Later that night, the dream came exactly as it had before. There were the skyscrapers, the scrap yard; there was the narrow river, the strange apartment, and the eyes of the man who lived there. The eyes were quiet and pleading. There was the half a vial of white pills in the medicine cabinet. The man was sitting on the bathroom floor with a glass of water. He sat with his legs propped beneath him. Then Peter was at the sink with the water glass in his hands, and when he turned around the man was no longer there. Peter stood alone in the bathroom. It was while he was looking for the man that it occurred to him that Gwen was not there either. It wasn’t clear if she had been there at all this time. “Gwen,” Peter began to call through the rooms. “Gwen.” He was alone in the apartment for only another moment. Then he was at the lake. He was walking along the lakeshore near the space where a small crowd had gathered. There were cameramen and there were microphones. There was a crowd surrounding a stretcher that was being thrust toward the water. Under the water, something was caught. Something was being prodded at and recovered. He heard someone say, Shallow by the rocks. He saw her blond hair, drenched and floating. When he woke up, it was not in their bed. He was alone in the bathroom with an empty glass and every tap in the house was running, the sinks and tub pooling with Lake Michigan water that Peter drank by the glassful.
The dream would come for three more nights before Peter said something. He woke up in her arms, on the floor of the bathroom. Gwen was smoothing her hands over his hair again. She was leaning into him, saying his name, and he was relieved to hear her say it. But later that night, or the next, or the next, it would happen again, and he was terrified not to say something to her now. The following morning she was listening to her French lesson in the other room with the CD player he had given her for her birthday, brushing her hair in the mirror, when he said her name like it was a question.
“Gwen?”
“Je voudrais un café,” the French woman was saying.
“Lady wants a cup of coffee,” Gwen said loudly, as if translating for the benefit of a phantom waiter in the bathroom with them. The way she interacted with the CDs lately, when she played them at all, it sounded as if it were Gwen who was trying to help the French woman communicate, rather than the other way around.
“Un café crème,” the French woman clarified.
“Cream, hold the sugar!”
“Gwen?” Peter said again.
For a moment, Gwen said nothing, and Peter thought she was too entrenched in breakfast translation to be bothered. But when he pulled her against his chest, she stayed rooted to the spot he held her. She let the French woman struggle through the rest of her order alone. He smoothed her hair in his hand. He said, “Gwen, there’s something I need to tell you.”
She nodded. He felt her body tense again in response to his weight.
He said, “It has to do with why we’re here.”
ANOTHER ABDUCTION, ANOTHER RUNAWAY, another kidnapping, another set of dough-faced middle-aged parents appealing to their God to bring back another child unharmed. Every night, it seemed, there was one of these stories on television. But the lines blurred. Sometimes the kidnappers were victims, the runaways were perpetrators, the abductees complicit in their own demise. This was what made a captive audience of the nation—one never could anticipate the twists and turns of a story like that. You started with an innocent victim who captured the hearts of viewers everywhere, and you hoped for the best. But sometimes she was secretly a prostitute, or maybe she had tried to kill the wife of her illicit lover five years ago, stuff like that. Tonight there were the parents saying what a good girl she was, good grades, driven, kind to her neighbors, a real gem of a kid, this girl. Sure, sure, Novak thought. The mother was a little overweight, tearing up with a photograph clutched between her two hands. The father was solemn, quiet, brooding, holding the hand of his wife, and you could tell he was broken up about the whole thing, but he wasn’t going to cry on national television.
A runaway himself, these stories interested Novak. His own family had never searched for him, never notified the cops, never wept on television. And while initially, that had been exactly what Novak had wanted, while it seemed for a time that he was going to get away scot-free, it didn’t take long to resent the fact that no one had ever bothered to pursue him. It felt after a while like they had been the ones who had chosen to abandon him instead of the other way around. Novak had failed at enough things to not try much anymore. He had failed at pleasing his family. He had failed in love. The only way he succeeded in maintaining any kind of income at all was through his work at the foundry, but even that was precarious. He’d messed up his lower back years ago working construction, an injury that he’d never had properly looked at, and it had grown into a kind of chronic pain that he was only able to keep at bay through a careful balance of pain medication, sedatives, and antidepressants. The first few times he stumbled into the television crew at the lake throwing coyote props into the water, he thought he was seeing things. If he missed a dose and doubled up later, there were sometimes side effects. But he wasn’t seeing things. Things were just legitimately that messed up.
The coyotes were rumored to be hailing primarily from wildlife preserves in the suburbs. They had lost their packs, for reasons said to be obscure, and were heading east, toward the lake, as if by instinct. They were isolated and terrified, their actions impossible to predict. Something that should go without saying when it comes to wild animals roaming a metropolis. Novak understood this as well as anyone. He had been alone at the lake for weeks before the crews showed up to document this phenomenon. It started with a video camera. A few stands of lights. A man with a microphone. Soon there was a trailer parked along the lake to house cue cards and a man whose job it was to call out when it was a wrap. A television documentary crew had shown up with a modest budget, set up cameras on the rocks, and shot a special report on the rising number of coyote casualties recorded in conjunction with this stretch of land. The documented number of wild coyotes in Chicago was staggering by all accounts, but recently their bodies had begun showing up in the lake. Scientists were interviewed, along with eyewitnesses claiming to have seen coyotes jump. Novak was happy to have the company at the lake. He never saw a coyote jump, but he saw plenty of the crew, staging reenactments with life-size stuffed animals. When the stuffed animals were pitched into the water, they floated for a few minutes before sinking. Sometimes, there was the outline of a tail or snout resting just above the surface of the water. It was good to see something besides a stone sink. Gravity at work called to mind a larger world of momentum operating outside the laws of his own body and brain.
It seemed (lately, again) like the rest of the world was in on some enormous gag, so he could either resist or play along, and why not play along, at a time like this in which he was grateful for the diversion, willing to accept whatever followed. He was feeling as he had felt when he first came to Chicago, a much younger man. He had worked construction then, before he secured the job at the foundry, and that was another time in his life in which it seemed that the rules in operation in his own brain were not necessarily those generally accepted as law, as if he were looking up from a page in a book he had been plodding through for years, only to find that it was the wrong book, or the wrong sort of book, a dictionary, a cookbook.
He remembered riding the bus to various construction sites in the morning during those first months, before he could afford to buy his truck. Fellow commuters had carried their morning coffee in thermoses or paper cups beside him, whistling through the tiny hole with their tongues, slurping. It was obscene. Talking about the weather was out of the question. People here were militant about the weather. Novak thought he had put up with his fair share of turning seasons before coming to Chicago, but people here acted as if they were privy to a specific brand of seasonal severity with which those from the other parts of the country couldn’t begin to sympathize. They squinted like martyrs into the sun
during the summer months, martyrs who didn’t own sunglasses. Their winters were unanimously agreed to be harsher, windier, worse than anything you’d seen. Also there was something here called lake effect.
“How about all this snow?” Novak had erroneously said to another commuter on the bus during his first Chicago winter.
“What, this? No, this is just lake effect!” Everyone had laughed, as if the wet white fact of it were an optical illusion, a trick up the lake’s sleeve. Even now, with the merciful first taste of spring in the air, there was a persistent attitude of the city bracing itself for the soon-to-rise heat index.
And then there was the way that people in Chicago were defensive about the fact that their city was in the middle of the country. Novak always heard the question posed of the city’s deserters, “You think you can do better on a coast?” Making something of yourself didn’t mean as much if you had to go to New York or L.A. to do it. People spoke of it as if proximity to the ocean made any aspect of everyday life a big free-for-all. The thing to do was to be a success smack in the middle of the country. Hey buddy, try doing that landlocked. That got respect.
But Novak never felt landlocked. During his first year, he spent so much time near the lake it was enough to make him forget where he was. You couldn’t see Michigan or Canada or any land to speak of, so it might as well have been an ocean. He might as well have been on the edge of the earth looking off it into the unknown and not in the center of what was verifiably nothing. Five nights a week, in the spring of his first year in Chicago, Novak sat on the lip of this great lake, skipping rocks, watching the quick shiver and plummet of every one he threw.
That had been a year of unimaginable loneliness. The feeling had slowly subsided, as he found a better wage at the foundry, one that he could reasonably live on, and he made a few friends to drink with on his nights off. There was even a woman—Carolyn—who worked in the pet shelter around the corner from the foundry, and she was (physically, conversationally) nothing spectacular, but she had a good heart, she loved those homeless animals in a way that Novak could appreciate—Jesus, how sometimes she would talk and talk about the obscure anguishes of some of these animals!—and sometimes, when they were both feeling festive, or lonely, or drunk, they slept together. It was never committed, or regular, but there was an enormous comfort in the arrangement, if only because it reminded him that there were others in the world for whom wants and desires and needs and schedules did not ultimately line up, and yes life was sad, but here was this small thing they could offer one another, some small kind act that sometimes looked a little like what one supposed love resembled. But after a while even Carolyn and her homeless cat stories and her pale thighs didn’t bring him any relief. He worked through the days as if in a trance, and evenings he would find himself back at the lake, just staring at the surface of the water. The lake was a place he returned to every few years when he entered a period of solitude. But this was the first time the area was so populated at night. This was the first time there were packs of wild animals supposedly running around.
Perhaps his judgment was playing tricks on him again. It was like the eyes playing tricks, but with inflated conscience. It was like the explosions that had started up full force in the scrap yard again most nights. Yes, there was a logical explanation for the smoke and the sound: some poor junker trying to make an extra buck by throwing the weight of a gas tank into his pile. But just because you knew the cause of something didn’t mean your body would learn how not to process this, how to sensibly react. The brain could know something to be harmless, but the body could not deny that the ground shook. The body knew better. Or, the body was gullible. Either way, things were not balanced. By day, Novak mitigated the stress of such delusions by melting metal, stirring evenly so that the pieces of broken things could be reconstituted. Old things became new things. A fender, a can-opener, the body of a bicycle. By night, he sat alone at the lake and watched the documentary men reconstruct a narrative for the benefit of the camera. Every day went like this. Novak woke up alone. He went to sleep alone. He drove his truck to the foundry. He put on his uniform and protective mask, and he stirred the melted metal closer to its newest forms. The cameras continued to roll. The cue cards dropped to the ground with every take. The trailer became lighter as its stuffed inhabitants drowned in dramatic reenactments of lived events, while later still, the real coyotes, remote and wandering, forgotten by their packs, abandoned their hiding places and continued to make the morning paper with their leaps.
He had a penchant for the lost and the missing, for rejects and runaways. In the last few months he had started taking care of a stray at the scrap yard. Novak had seen the dog before, rifling through the dumpsters in the alley behind Marcy Street, and it was a beautiful goddamn dog, fierce, the kind of dog you’d imagine pulling sleds across the arctic, with those intense gray eyes and sharp teeth. He took care of the poor thing, left out food and water, always in secret. He didn’t tell anyone about it, and he couldn’t say why exactly. He liked to think of himself akin to one of those anonymous donors you read about in the newspaper. Also he had the sense that maybe anyone else would find something to criticize about the act, like maybe you weren’t supposed to feed a stray unless you were going to pay for her shots and vaccines and take her in to the vet and all this shit. But Novak wasn’t looking for that much commitment. He was just trying to do the right thing. When he was smart enough to carry a piece of lunch meat in his pocket, the dog would practically jump into his lap, like he’d saved her life or something. Sometimes Novak thought of the dog as his dog, he referred to her with the name of this dog he used to have. The stray didn’t mind. She’d answer to any name if it was in her best interest.
Novak went to the bathroom with a glass, filled it with water, swallowed a sedative, and placed himself back in front of the television. The footage from the girl’s abduction was playing on a loop now, the few moments caught on a security camera. The kidnapper’s face was obscured. He had a hat angled down over his face, and anyway he wasn’t about to look in the direction of the camera. The girl, however, was staring straight into the eye of the thing. She exchanged a few words with the perpetrator, but the whole time she kept her gaze steady on the camera. She was a good-looking girl, as they usually were, but the interesting thing was there wasn’t a hint of fear in her posture. She was talking to the camera as if she were delivering lines. Novak kicked his feet up on the sofa and clicked through the channels a few more times before he began to doze off. When he fell asleep in front of the television, he didn’t dream as much.
SOMEONE HAD SWITCHED on the radio in the house while cleaning. It was background noise only; it was practice listening to spoken English. For this reason, Sheila alone looked up at the sound of her name in the context of a report on a forced abduction, robbery, and auto theft in Coralville, Iowa. The radio explained that Sheila Gower had been kidnapped nearly five weeks ago from her place of employment; Sheila Gower was thought to be alive and within the Chicago metropolitan area. The name of the crime’s primary suspect had already been given; it was said moments before her own name, then repeated, but this name she barely heard, the way so many strange names on the news slip quickly out of mind a few moments after they are spoken. Sheila panicked to hear each fact and detail of their crime listed aloud and broadcast to listeners everywhere. She dropped a bottle of Windex into the sink of the master bathroom. She closed the door, and then she locked it as if some crazed kidnapper were truly on the loose, coming after her. She started to unbutton her jeans, as if to calmly use the bathroom. Instead, she removed them, followed by her shirt; she stood in front of the mirror in the master bathroom with her underwear at her ankles, and stared. The woman whose bathroom it was had a collection of perfumes on the counter. Sheila picked up one bottle in the shape of a pyramid and sprayed her wrists and neck with the scent inside. She thought she looked like someone else. Her hips were nonexistent. Her breasts, thin enough to scarcely raise the front of h
er T-shirt, seemed unremarkable at best. When she was with him she felt bigger, filled-out, more solid somehow. She couldn’t imagine how this girl’s body was the one people on the radio were looking for, the one that Peter saw in his dreams.
Last night, they had spoken about leaving the city. Peter was afraid for her safety because she wouldn’t stop showing up in his dreams with the crazy suicidal man who, as it turned out, they happened to be searching for together—which was news to her. At first, Sheila had been concerned, to put it lightly, finding Peter in the bathroom, drinking water from the bathtub and the sink, calling her name. She had been concerned to learn that Peter’s dreams had been what had initiated their entire acquaintance. But when presented with the alternative of, say, going back to Iowa, she understood, however irrationally, that she would rather chase a suicidal man from someone else’s dream than go home.
Why? What was so bad about home? It was a question she was trying to work out. She wasn’t abused or adopted, sexually molested or emotionally deranged in the way runaways always were in the magazines her parents kept in the bathroom. She had come from good stock, as people liked to say in Coralville.
There was an idiom in her French workbook and tape set—être sans histoire. It literally meant to be without story, but it was an expression you were supposed to use when talking about someone who was easygoing or unremarkable. Sheila had taught Peter this expression while passing the time during the drive to Chicago. Technically idioms were for the advanced student, but Sheila liked to jump around.
“Repeat after me,” she had directed him.
“Without story?” Peter had said, once she’d translated for him. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
She tried to explain to him the thing about idioms, how you couldn’t take them literally, but he didn’t get it.