Without even looking at him, she motioned at him to sit down.
“Want anything?” she asked. She had a high, distant voice, as if it had come into the room over wires. “There are bananas over there.” She made no gesture. “And grapefruit, I think, in the refrigerator.”
“That’s all right.” He sat down on the other side of the table and folded his hands together, studying his fingers. The sound of traffic came up from the street outside.
“You’re from somewhere,” she said. “Scandinavia?”
“Yes,” he said. “How can you tell?” Talking had become a terrible effort.
“Vowels,” she said. “You sound like one of those Finns up north of here. When will you go back? To your country?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps a few days. Perhaps not. My name is Anders.” He held out his hand.
“Nice to meet you.” She touched but did not shake his hand. “Why don’t you know when you’re going back?” She turned to look at him at last. It was a face on which curiosity still registered. She observed him as if he were an example of a certain kind of human being in whom she still had an interest.
“I don’t know … I am not sure. Last night, I …”
“You don’t finish your sentences,” the old woman said.
“I am trying to. I don’t want to leave your granddaughter,” he said. “She is”—he tried to think of the right adjective—“amazing to me.”
“Yes, she is.” The old woman peered at him. “You don’t think you’re in love, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, don’t be. She won’t ever be married, so there’s no point in being in love with her. There’s no point in being married here. I see them, you know.”
“Who?”
“All the young men. Well, there aren’t many. A few. Every so often. They come and sleep here with her and then in the morning they come out for breakfast with me and then they go away. We sit and talk. They’re usually very pleasant. Men are, in the morning. They should be. She’s a beautiful girl.”
“Yes, she is.”
“But there’s no future in her, you know,” the old woman said. “Sure you don’t want a grapefruit? You should eat something.”
“No, thank you. What do you mean, ‘no future’?”
“Well, the young men usually understand that.” The old woman looked at the television set, scowled, and shifted her eyes to the window. She rubbed her hands together. “You can’t invest in her. You can’t do that at all. She won’t let you. I know. I know how she thinks.”
“We have women like that in my country,” Anders said. “They are—”
“Oh no you don’t,” the old woman said. “Sooner or later they want to get married, don’t they?”
“I suppose most of them.”
She glanced out the window toward the Detroit River and the city of Windsor on the opposite shore. Just when he thought that she had forgotten all about him, he felt her hand, dry as a winter leaf, taking hold of his own. Another siren went by outside. He felt a weight descending in his stomach. The touch of the old woman’s hand made him feel worse than before, and he stood up quickly, looking around the room as if there were some object nearby he had to pick up and take away immediately. Her hand dropped away from his.
“No plans,” she said. “Didn’t she tell you?” the old woman asked. “It’s what she believes.” She shrugged. “It makes her happy.”
“I am not sure I understand.”
The old woman lifted her right hand and made a dismissive wave in his direction. She pursed her mouth; he knew she had stopped speaking to him. He called a cab, and in half an hour he was back in his hotel room. In the shower he realized that he had forgotten to write down her address or phone number.
He felt itchy: he went out running, returned to his room, and took another shower. He did thirty push-ups and jogged in place. He groaned and shouted, knowing that no one would hear. How would he explain this to anyone? He was feeling passionate puzzlement. He went down to the hotel’s dining room for lunch and ordered Dover sole and white wine but found himself unable to eat much of anything. He stared at his plate and at the other men and women consuming their meals calmly, and he was suddenly filled with wonder at ordinary life.
He couldn’t stand to be by himself, and after lunch he had the doorman hail a cab. He gave the cabdriver a fifty and asked him to drive him around the city until all the money was used up.
“You want to see the nice parts?” the cabbie asked.
“No.”
“What is it you want to see then?”
“The city.”
“You tryin’ to score, man? That it?”
Anders didn’t know what he meant. He was certain that no sport was intended. He decided to play it safe. “No,” he said.
The cabdriver shook his head and whistled. They drove east and then south; Anders watched the water-ball compass stuck to the front window. Along Jefferson Avenue they went past the shells of apartment buildings, and then, heading north, they passed block after block of vacated or boarded-up properties. One old building with Doric columns was draped with a banner.
PROGRESS! THE OLD MUST MAKE WAY
FOR THE NEW
Acme Wrecking Company
The banner was worn and tattered. Anders noticed broken beer bottles, sharp brown glass, on sidewalks and vacant lots, and the glass, in the sun, seemed perversely beautiful. Men were sleeping on sidewalks and in front stairwells; one man, wearing a hat, urinated against the corner of a burned-out building. He saw other men—there were very few women out here in the light of day—in groups gazing at him with cold slow deadly expressions. In his state of mind, he understood it all; he identified with it. All of it, the ruins and the remnants, made perfect sense.
At six o’clock she picked him up and took him to a Greek restaurant. All the way over, he watched her. He examined her with the puzzled curiosity of someone who wants to know how another person who looks rather attractive but also rather ordinary could have such power. Her physical features didn’t explain anything.
“Did you miss me today?” she asked, half jokingly.
“Yes,” he said. He started to say more but didn’t know how to begin. “It was hard to breathe,” he said at last.
“I know,” she said. “It’s the air.”
“No, it isn’t. Not the air.”
“Well, what then?”
He looked at her.
“Oh, come on, Anders. We’re just two blind people who staggered into each other and we’re about to stagger off in different directions. That’s all.”
Sentences struggled in his mind, then vanished before he could say them. He watched the pavement pass underneath the car.
In the restaurant, a crowded and lively place smelling of beer and roasted meat and cigars, they sat in a booth and ordered an antipasto plate. He leaned over and took her hands. “Tell me, please, who and what you are.”
She seemed surprised that he had asked. “I’ve explained,” she said. She waited, then started up again. “When I was younger I had an idea that I wanted to be a dancer. I had to give that up. My timing was off.” She smiled. “Onstage, I looked like a memory of what had already happened. The other girls would do something and then I’d do it. I come in late on a lot of things. That’s good for me. I’ve told you where I work. I live with my grandmother. I go with her into the parks in the fall and we watch for birds. And you know what else I believe.” He gazed at the gold hoops of her earrings. “What else do you want to know?”
“I feel happy and terrible,” he said. “Is it you? Did you do this?”
“I guess I did,” she said, smiling faintly. “Tell me some words in Swedish.”
“Which ones?”
“House.”
“Hus.”
“Pain.”
“Smärta.”
She leaned back. “Face.”
“Ansikte.”
“Light.”
“Ljus.”
“Never.”
“Aldrig.”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t like the sound of those words at all. They’re too cold. They’re cold-weather words.”
“Cold? Try another one.”
“Soul.”
“Själ.”
“No, I don’t like it.” She raised her hand to the top of his head, grabbed a bit of his hair, and laughed. “Too bad.”
“Do you do this to everyone?” he asked. “I feel such confusion.”
He saw her stiffen. “You want to know too much. You’re too messed up. Too messed up with plans. You and your rust. All that isn’t important. Not here. We don’t do all that explaining. I’ve told you everything about me. We’re just supposed to be enjoying ourselves. Nobody has to explain. That’s freedom, Anders. Never telling why.” She leaned over toward him so that her shoulders touched his, and with a sense of shock and desperation, he felt himself becoming aroused. She kissed him, and her lips tasted slightly of garlic. “Just say hi to the New World,” she said.
“You feel like a drug to me,” he said. “You feel experimental.”
“We don’t use that word that way,” she said. Then she said, “Oh,” as if she had understood something, or remembered another engagement. “Okay. I’ll explain all this in a minute. Excuse me.” She rose and disappeared behind a corner of the restaurant, and Anders looked out the window at a Catholic church the color of sandstone, on whose front steps a group of boys sat, eating Popsicles. One of the boys got up and began to ask passersby for money; this went on until a policeman came and sent the boys away. Anders looked at his watch. Ten minutes had gone by since she had left. He looked up. He knew without thinking about it that she wasn’t coming back.
He put a ten-dollar bill on the table and left the restaurant, jogging into the parking structure where she had left the car. Although he wasn’t particularly surprised to see that it wasn’t there, he sat down on the concrete and felt the floor of the structure shaking. He ran his hands through his hair, where she had grabbed at it. He waited as long as he could stand to do so, then returned to the hotel.
Luis was back on duty. Anders told him what had happened.
“Ah,” Luis said. “She is disappeared.”
“Yes. Do you think I should call the police?”
“No,” Luis said. “I do not think so. They have too many disappeared already.”
“Too many disappeared?”
“Yes. All over this city. Many many disappeared. For how many times do you take this lady out?”
“Once. No, twice.”
“And this time is the time she leave you?”
Anders nodded.
“I have done that,” Luis said. “When I get sick of a woman, I, too, have disappeared. Maybe,” he said suddenly, “she will reappear. Sometimes they do.”
“I don’t think she will.” He sat down on the sidewalk in front of the hotel and cupped his chin in his hands.
“No, no,” Luis said. “You cannot do that in front of the hotel. This looks very bad. Please stand up.” He felt Luis reaching around his shoulders and pulling him to his feet. “What you are acting is impossible after one night,” Luis said. “Be like everyone else. Have another night.” He took off his doorman’s cap and combed his hair with precision. “Many men and women also disappear from each other. It is one thing to do. You had a good time?”
Anders nodded.
“Have another good time,” Luis suggested, “with someone else. Beer, pizza, go to bed. Women who have not disappeared will talk to you, I am sure.”
“I think I’ll call the police,” Anders said.
“Myself, no, I would not do that.”
He dialed a number he found in the telephone book for a local precinct station. As soon as the station officer understood what Anders was saying to him, he became angry, said it wasn’t a police matter, and hung up on him. Anders sat for a moment in the phone booth, then looked up the Church of the Millennium in the directory. He wrote down its address. Someone there would know about her, and explain.
The cab let him out in front. It was like no other church he had ever seen before. Even the smallest places of worship in his own country had vaulted roofs, steeples, and stained glass. This building seemed to be someone’s remodeled house. On either side of it, two lots down, were two skeletal homes, one of which had been burned and which now stood with charcoal windows and a charcoal portal where the front door had once been. The other house was boarded up; in the evening wind, sheets of newspaper were stuck to its south wall. Across the street was an almost deserted playground. The saddles had been removed from the swing set, and the chains hung down from the upper bar and moved slightly in the wind. Four men stood together under a basketball hoop, talking. One of the men bounced a basketball occasionally.
A signboard had been planted into the ground in front of the church, but so many letters had been removed from it that Anders couldn’t make out what it was supposed to say.
On the steps leading up to the front door, he turned around and saw, to the south, the lights of the office buildings of downtown Detroit suspended like enlarged stars in the darkness. After hearing what he thought was some sound in the bushes, he opened the front doors of the church and went inside.
Over a bare wood floor, folding chairs were lined up in five straight rows, facing toward a front chest intended as an altar, and everywhere there was a smell of incense, of ashy pine. Above the chest, and nailed to the far wall where a crucifix might be located in a Protestant church, was a polished brass circle with a nimbus of rays projecting out from its top. The rays were extended along the wall for a distance of about four feet. One spotlight from a corner behind him lit up the brass circle, which in the gloom looked like either a deity-sun or some kind of explosion. The bare walls had been painted with flames: buildings of the city, some he had already seen, painted in flames, the earth in flames. There was an open Bible on the chest, and on one of the folding chairs a deck of playing cards. Otherwise, the room was completely empty. Glancing at a side door, he decided that he had never seen a church so small, or one that filled him with a greater sense of desolation. Behind him, near the door, was a bench. He had the feeling that the bench was filled with the disappeared. He sat down on it, and as he looked at the folding chairs it occurred to him that the disappeared were in fact here now, in front of him, sitting or standing or kneeling.
He composed himself and went back out onto the street, thinking that perhaps a cab would go by, but he saw neither cabs nor cars, not even pedestrians. After deciding that he had better begin walking toward the downtown area, he made his way down two blocks, past a boarded-up grocery store and a vacated apartment building, when he heard what he thought was the sound of footsteps behind him.
He felt the blow at the back of his head; it came to him not as a sensation of pain but as an instant crashing explosion of light in his brain, a bursting circle with a shooting aura irradiating from it. As he turned to fall, he felt hands touching his chest and his trousers; they moved with speed and almost with tenderness, until they found what they were looking for and took it away from him.
He lay on the sidewalk in a state somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, hearing the wind through the trees overhead and feeling some blood trickling out of the back of his scalp, until he felt the hands again, perhaps the same hands, lifting him up, putting him into something, taking him somewhere. Inside the darkness he now inhabited, he found that at some level he could still think: Someone hit me and I’ve been robbed. At another, later point, he understood that he could open his eyes; he had that kind of permission. He was sitting in a wheelchair in what was clearly a hospital emergency room. It felt as though someone were pushing him toward a planetary corridor. They asked him questions, which he answered in Swedish. “Det gör ont,” he said, puzzled that they didn’t understand him. “Var är jag?” he asked. They didn’t know. English was what they wanted.
He tried to give them some.
They X-rayed him and examined his cut; he would need four stitches, they said. He found that he could walk. They told him he was lucky, that he had not been badly hurt. A doctor, and then a nurse, and then another nurse told him that he might have been killed—shot or knifed—and that victims of this type, strangers who wandered into the wrong parts of the city, were not unknown. He mentioned the disappeared. They were polite, but said that there was no such phrase in English. When he mentioned the name of his hotel, they said, once again, that he was lucky: it was only a few blocks away, walking distance. They smiled. You’re a lucky man, they said, grinning oddly. They knew something but weren’t saying it.
As the smaller debris of consciousness returned to him, he found himself sitting in a brightly lit room, like a waiting room, near the entryway for emergency medicine. From where he sat, he could see, through his fluent tidal headache, the patients arriving, directed to the Triage Desk, where their conditions were judged.
They brought in a man on a gurney, who was hoarsely shouting. They rushed him through. He was bleeding, and they were holding him down as his feet kicked sideways.
They brought in someone else, a girl, who was stumbling, held up on both sides by friends. Anders heard something that sounded like “Odie.” Who was Odie? Her boyfriend? “Odie,” she screamed. “Get me Odie.”
Anders stood up, unable to watch any more. He shuffled through two doorways and found himself standing near an elevator. From a side window, he saw light from the sun rising. He hadn’t realized that it was day. The sun made the inside of his head shriek. To escape the light, he stepped on the elevator and pressed the button for the fifth floor.
As the elevator rose, he felt his knees weakening. In order to clear his head, he began to count the other people on the elevator: seven. They seemed normal to him. The signs of this were coats and ties on the men, white frocks and a stethoscope on one of the women, and blouses and jeans on the other women. None of them looked like her. From now on, none of them ever would.
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