by Don DeLillo
It was hard to think clearly. The enormity of it, all that empty country. She kept appearing in some inner field of vision, indistinct, like something I'd forgotten to say or do.
We went into the house again and looked more closely, room to room, finding her suitcase, poking through her closet, opening drawers in the bureau. We hardly spoke, did not speculate on what or where. Elster spoke but not to me, a few puzzled mutterings about her unpredictability. I crossed the hall to the bathroom that she and I shared. Toilet kit on the windowsill. No note taped to the mirror. I threw back the shower curtain, making more noise than I'd intended.
Then I thought of the shed, how had we forgotten the shed. I felt a strange brainless elation. I told Elster. The shed.
This was the first time we'd gone anywhere without her. She hadn't wanted to come with us but we should have said something, and her father did, but we should have insisted, should have been unyielding.
All right it was not impossible, a long walk. The heat had diminished these past few days, there was cloud cover, even a breeze.
Maybe she didn't want to spend another minute here and walked all the way out to the nearest paved road hoping to hitch a ride. This was hard to believe, that she might expect to reach San Diego and then get on a flight to New York, apparently carrying nothing, not even a wallet. The wallet was on her dresser with bills and change scattered around it, credit card in its slot.
I stood at the entrance to the shed. A hundred years of junk, this is what I saw, glass, rags, metal, wood, alone here, we'd left her, and the feeling in the body, the sheer deadness in my arms and shoulders, and not knowing what to say to him, and the chance, the faint prospect that we'd be standing on the deck in faded light and she'd come walking along the sandpath and we'd barely believe what we were seeing, he and I, and it would take only moments to forget the past several hours and we'd go in to dinner and be the people we always were.
He was in the house, on the sofa, leaning well forward and talking into the floor.
"I tried to get her to come with me. I talked to her. You heard me. She said she wasn't feeling well. Headache. She gets headaches sometimes. She wanted to stay here and take a nap. I gave her an aspirin. I brought her an aspirin and a glass of water. I watched her swallow the damn thing."
He seemed to be trying to convince himself that all of this had happened precisely as he was stating it.
"We have to call."
"We have to call," he said. "But won't they say it's too early? She's only been gone an hour or two."
"They must get calls for lost hikers all the time. People missing all the time. Out here, this time of year, whatever the situation, they have to take action fast," I said.
The only phones were our cell phones, the quickest link we had to assistance of any kind. Elster had a map of the area with numbers he'd written down for the caretaker, the sheriff's office and the park rangers. I got both our phones and snatched the map off the kitchen wall.
I reached a man in the park rangers' office. I supplied name, description, rough location of Elster's house. I explained Jessie's circumstances, not a trailwalker or mountain biker, not driving a car, not prepared to withstand even a limited period in the elements. He said he was a volunteer and would try to reach the superintendent, who was with a search party now, looking for Mexicans who'd been led across the border and then abandoned, no food or water. There were search planes, tracking dogs, GPS hand units and they often searched at night. They would be on lookout, he said.
Elster was still on the sofa, phone at his side. No one answering in the sheriff's office, he'd left a message. He wanted to call the caretaker now, someone who knew the area, and I tried to recall the man clearly, face stained by sun and wind, eyes tight. If Jessie was the victim of a crime, I'd want to know where he was when it happened.
Elster called, phone rang a dozen times.
I finished putting away the groceries. I tried to concentrate on this, where things go, but objects seemed transparent, I could see through them, think through them. He was out on the deck again. I went through the house one more time, looking for an indication, a glimmer of intent. The impact, gathering from the first moment, hard to absorb. I didn't want to go out there and stand watch alongside him. The fear deepened in his presence, the foreboding. But after a while I poured scotch over ice in a tall glass and took it out to him and soon night was everywhere around us.
4
Passing into air, it seemed this is what she was meant to do, what she was made for, two full days, no word, no sign. Had she strayed past the edge of conjecture or were we willing to imagine what had happened? I tried not to think beyond geography, every moment defined by the desolation around us. But imagination was itself a natural force, unmanageable. Animals, I thought, and what they do to bodies in the wild, in the mind, no safe place.
The day before, with all the phone calls made and everyone alerted, I'd stood outside and seen a car on the horizon floating slowly into motion, rippled in dust and haze, as in a long shot in a film, a moment of slow expectation.
It was the local sheriff, broad red face, cropped beard. A helicopter was in the air, he said, trackers were on the ground. First thing he wanted to know was whether there had been any recent deviation in Jessie's normal pattern of behavior. The only deviation, I told him, was the fact that she was missing.
I walked him through the house. He seemed to be looking for signs of a struggle. He checked Jessie's room and spoke briefly to Elster, who sat on the sofa throughout, barely able to move, either from medication or lack of sleep. He said nearly nothing and showed confusion at the sight of a uniformed man in the house, large man shrinking the room, badge on his chest, gun at his belt.
Outside the sheriff told me that at this point there was no evidence of a crime to investigate. The procedure over time would be to coordinate a program with officials of other counties in order to examine motel records, phone records, car rentals, airline reservations and other matters.
I mentioned the caretaker. He said he'd known the man for thirty years. The man was a volunteer naturalist, an expert on local plants and fossils. They were neighbors, he said, and then looked at me and listed a few categories of people in distress, ending with those who come to the desert to commit suicide.
Elster agreed to make the call, finally, the one to Jessie's mother. I tested locations for him and the clearest signal was outside, late afternoon, the man facing away from the house. He spoke Russian, his body sagged, it was hard for him to lift his voice above a whisper. There were long pauses. He listened, then spoke again, every word a plea, the response of an accused man, negligent, stupid, guilty. I stood nearby, understanding that his one lapse into awkward English was a helpless mimicry of hers, an expression of shared pain and parental identity. A helicopter appeared in the pale sky to the east and I watched him straighten his back, slowly, head raised, free hand blocking the sun.
Later I asked if he'd done what I'd told him to do. He looked away and walked toward his bedroom. I'd told him to raise the subject of Jessie's friend, the man she'd been seeing. Isn't this why her mother had sent her here? I stood at the door to his room. He sat on the bed, one hand raised in a gesture I could not interpret. What's the use or what's the connection or leave me alone.
He wanted pure mystery. Maybe it was easier for him, something beyond the damp reach of human motive. I was trying to think his thoughts. Mystery had its truth, all the deeper for being shapeless, an elusive meaning that might spare him whatever explicit details would otherwise come to mind.
But these weren't his thoughts. I didn't know what his thoughts were. I barely knew my own. I could think around the fact of her disappearance. But at the heart, in the moment itself, the physical crux of it, only a hole in the air.
I said, "Do you want me to call?"
"Doesn't make sense. Someone in New York."
"It's not supposed to make sense. What makes sense? Missing people never make sense," I said. "What's
her name, Jessie's mother? I'll talk to her."
It wasn't until the following morning that he agreed to give me her phone number. Busy signal for half an hour, then an angry woman who resisted answering questions from someone she didn't know. The conversation went nowhere for a while. She'd met the man once, didn't know where he lived, how old he was exactly, what he did for a living.
"Just tell me his name. Can you do that?"
"She has three friends, girls, these names I know. Otherwise who she sees, where she goes, she doesn't listen to names, she doesn't tell me names."
"But this man. They went out together, yes. You met him, you said."
"Because I insisted. Two minutes he stands here. Then they leave."
"But he told you his name, or Jessie did."
"Maybe she told me, first name only."
She could not recall the name and this made her angrier. I put Elster on the phone and he said something to calm her. It didn't work but I wasn't giving up. I reminded her there was something about this man that she didn't like. Tell me, I said, and she responded ungrudgingly for a change.
For a week or longer there were phone calls. When she picked up, the caller put down the phone. She knew it was him, trying to reach Jessie. The ID screen displayed Blocked Caller. It was him every time, putting down the phone softly, and she could remember him standing in her doorway like someone you see three times a week, a delivery man with groceries, and you still don't know what he looks like.
"Last time I see Blocked Caller I pick up the phone and say nothing. Nobody is speaking. We are playing like it's a stupid game. I wait, he says nothing. He waits, I say nothing. Full minute. Then I say I know who you are. Man puts down the phone."
"You feel sure it was him."
"This is when I tell her she is going away."
"And once she went away."
"No more phone calls," the mother said.
He stopped shaving, I made it a point to shave every day, do nothing different. We waited for news. I wanted to get out, get in the car and join the searchers. But I imagined Elster with a mouthful of sleeping pills, the contents of a bottle. I imagined a soggy lump, a glob, thirty or forty pills compacted and dripping spit. I sat and talked to him about the medications in his cabinet. Only the usual dose, I said. Double-check the directions, heed the warnings. I actually said this, heed the warnings, and the phrase did not seem stilted. I imagined him standing in the doorway of his bathroom, mouth forced partly open by the dense mass, a tentative attempt, a literal taste, one hand on each doorpost, bracing him.
Jessie had no cell phone but the police were checking records to see if she'd made or received calls on our phones. They were checking motel registers, reports of crimes in nearby counties and states.
"We can't leave."
"No, we can't."
"What if she comes back?"
"One of us has to be here," I said.
I was cooking the omelettes now. He seemed to wonder what he was supposed to do with the fork in his hand. I made coffee in the morning, set out bread, cereal, milk, butter and jam. Then I went to his bedroom and talked him out of bed. Nothing happened that was not marked by her absence. He ate sparingly. He moved through the house like someone mopping the floor, taking steps determined by laborious circumstance.
He was supposed to be in Berlin in a week, a lecture, a conference, he wasn't clear on the details.
He began to see things out of the corner of his eye, the right eye. He'd walk into a room and catch a glimpse of something, a color, a movement. When he turned his head, nothing. It happened once or twice a day. I told him it was physiological, same eye every time, routine sort of dysfunction, minor, happens to people of a certain age. He turned and looked. Someone there but then she wasn't.
I was counting the days again as I'd done in the beginning. Days missing. One of us was almost always on the deck, keeping watch. We did this well into the night. It became a ritual, a religious observance, and often, when both of us were out there, completely wordless.
We kept the door to her bedroom closed.
He began to resemble a recluse who might live in a shack on an abandoned mining site, unwashed old man, shaky, stubbled, caution in his eyes, a fear from one step to the next that someone or something is waiting.
He referred to her now as Jessica, the real name, the birth name. He spoke in fragments, opening and closing his hand. I could watch him being driven insistently inward. The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he'd always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past. But now it made him feel enclosed and I understood this, hemmed in, pressed tight. We stood outside and felt the desert bearing in. Sterile thunder seemed to hang over the hills, stormlight washing toward us. A hundred childhoods, he said obscurely. Meaning what, the thunder maybe, a soft evocative rumble sounding down the years.
He asked me for the first time what had happened. Not what I thought or guessed or envisioned. What happened, Jimmy? I didn't know what to tell him. Nothing I might say to him was more or less likely than something else. It had happened, whatever it was, and there was no point thinking back into it, although we would of course, or I would. He had the intimate past to think back to, his and hers and her mother's. This is what he was left with, lost times and places, the true life, over and over.
A call late one night, the mother.
"I think I know his name."
"You think you know."
"I was sleeping. Then I wake up with his name. It is Dennis."
"You think it is Dennis."
"It is Dennis, for sure."
"First name Dennis."
"This is all I heard, first name. I wake up, just now, it is Dennis," she said.
At night the rooms were clocks. The stillness was nearly complete, bare walls, plank floors, time here and out there, on the high trails, every passing minute a function of our waiting. I was drinking, he was not. I wouldn't let him drink and he didn't seem to care. Sunsets were nothing more than dying light now, the dimming of chance. For weeks there had been nothing to do but talk. Now nothing to say.
The name sounded ominous, Jessica, sounded like formal surrender. I was the man who'd stood in the dark watching while she lay in bed. Whatever Elster's sense of implication, the nature of his guilt and failure, I shared it. He sat opening and closing his hand. When he heard helicopters beating down out of the sun, he looked up, surprised, always, then remembered why they were there.
We were often testing locations for cell phone reception, one of us facing one way, one of us the other, inside the house, outside, calling and getting calls, phone to one ear, free hand to the other, he is on the deck, I am forty yards down the path. I tried not to watch us when we did this. I wanted to stay within it, where the dance was a practical matter. I wanted to be free of seeing.
I began to use the old handweights he'd found earlier. I stood in my room lifting and counting. I called the park rangers and the sheriff. I could not forget what the sheriff had said. People come to the desert to commit suicide. I knew I had to ask Elster if she'd ever showed tendencies. Jessica. Was she seeing a doctor? Did she take antidepressants? Her airline kit was still in the bathroom we'd shared. I found nothing, talked to her father, called her mother, learned nothing from either that might indicate a drift in that direction.
I lifted the handweights one at a time, then both at once, twenty reps one way, ten the other, lifting and counting, on and on.
I led him out to the deck and put him in a chair. He was in pajamas and old tennis shoes, unlaced, his eyes seeming to trace a single thought. This is where he fixed his gaze now, not on objects but thoughts. I stood behind him with a pair of scissors and a comb and told him it was time for a haircut.
He turned his head slightly, in inquiry, but I repositioned it and began to trim his sideburns. I talked as I worked. I talked in a kind of audiostream, combing and cutting through the tangled strands on one side of his head. I told him this was different
from shaving. The day would come when he'd want to shave and he'd have to do it himself but the hair on his head was a question of morale, his and mine. I said many empty things that morning, matter-of-factly, half believing. I removed the wormy rubberband from the weave of braided hair at the back of his neck and tried to comb and trim. I kept skipping to other parts of the head. He spoke about Jessie's mother, her face and eyes, his admiration, voice trailing off, low and hoarse. I felt compelled to trim the hair in his ears, long white fibers curling out of the dark. I tried to unsnarl every inch of matted vegetation before I cut. He spoke about his sons. You don't know this, he said. I have two sons from the first marriage. Their mother was a paleontologist. Then he said it again. Their mother was a paleontologist. He was remembering her, seeing her in the word. She loved this place and so did the boys. I did not, he said. But this changed over the years. He began to look forward to his time here, he said, and then the marriage broke up and the boys were young men and that was all he was able to say.
I stood to the side, head tilted, and studied my handiwork. I'd forgotten to drape a towel over his upper body and there were cuttings everywhere, hair on his face, neck, lap and shoulders, hair in his pajamas. I said nothing about the sons. I just kept cutting. If I had to give him a shower, I'd give him a shower. I'd stick his head in the kitchen sink and wash his hair. I'd scrub out the sour odor he carried with him. I told him I was almost done but I wasn't almost done. Then I realized there was something else I'd forgotten, some sort of brush to whisk away all this hair. But I didn't go inside to find one. I just kept cutting, combing out and cutting.