“I didn’t.”
“It is true.”
“Okay.”
“I am pleased to know you.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Cool.”
He craned forward so that his arms were bunched between his torso and briefcase, as if he had a major confidence to reveal. “Now I will explain this unfortunate scene,” he said. “In the past, not so long ago, when you bought food for your journey, it came to you wrapped in banana leaves. This was how it was done. You would eat your meal, and throw the banana leaf out the window. Like this!” Stiffening himself upright, he whipped his arm toward the window and laughed a bubbly little laugh; he was clearly cherishing some recollection from childhood. “I remember this! And the cattle would line the tracks to eat the leaves. That is the prior situation.”
Micah said, “What happened?”
“Plastic!” he exclaimed. “Do you know its history? A man named Alexander Parkes exhibited it at the Great London Exposition in 1862. It was to be, in his view, a replacement for ivory.” At this the man lifted his eyebrows, and awaited a reaction from Micah. When none came, he frowned. “Which comes from elephants.”
“Right,” she said. “I know that.”
“You know this! Then you will be most interested to know that Great Britain, during its control of India, consumed enough ivory to require the deaths of four thousand elephants a year.”
“That’s awful,” Micah said.
“I am in agreement with you!”
“But . . .”
“Yes.” He waved a finger. “But!”
Micah waited.
Lowering his finger, the man sighed. “This is our condition. We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems. You are too young to comprehend this but in time you will reach these conclusions. One could contend that Alexander Parkes saved the elephant from a swift and inevitable extinction. This is in fact my contention, and not only because my business happens to be plastics and their molding. But in order to preserve elephants we must also have—this.”
As if by conjuring, another polystyrene plate went whirling past the window.
“But what was wrong with the banana leaves?” Micah asked.
“A most incisive question!” Perhaps too incisive, because the man fell into a brow-knitted silence for a while, his smile drooping. “But to ask that,” he finally said, “is to ask why this train we are on is preferable to a cart. Or why this berth we are in is preferable to the sleeper class car ahead of us. It is to question progress. To question motion.”
Micah frowned.
“Also,” he went on, “the plastic costs less money for the vendors, and is not vulnerable to rot.”
Micah turned her attention outside: a sheet of pure cloudless blue above a scrubby green flatness.
From behind her shoulder the man said, “You must select what you see when you look out the window. You may see plastic, up and down the tracks. This is understandable, and you are right to be troubled. But do you know what I see?”
She turned to him. “What?”
“I,” said the man, “see elephants.”
For the remainder of the ride Micah stared out the window in search of elephants, metaphorical or otherwise. Despite the man’s lawyerly suit, she liked him, and wanted him to be right—wanted the elephants to fill her with the same faith and solace that the red parrots of San Francisco had. But all she saw was plastic, mile after mile of it, floating in bronze-colored ditches and snagged in camphire shrubs. When she glanced at the businessman, she saw he was also scanning the trackside, and she wondered if he too was watching for elephants, whether for his own benefit or hers. But there were no elephants, and after a time their absence began to feel oppressive, as though the two of them were waiting for someone to arrive whose dire tardiness was now casting doubt on the arrival itself.
As the train slowed into Mumbai, however, Micah finally saw one, and springing up from her seat so that her torso draped Leah she pressed her nose to the glass for a deeper look.
The elephant was standing at the head of a traffic line at a railway crossing, waiting for the train to pass, a snarl of Padmini cabs and auto rickshaws behind it. Tethered to its back, atop layers of blankets, was a plywood platform with steel railings on which sat a barefooted teenaged boy. Almost at once Micah felt the fizz of the sight go flat. As the train rolled by she drew her gaze first to the elephant’s eyes, which were dry and saggy, brimming (it seemed to her) with a kind of sorrow that persists long past the indulgence of tears, and then, panning upward, she looked at the boy’s face. Sullenly, perhaps impatiently, he was watching the long train go by, and for a fugitive moment their eyes locked, his and Micah’s, with what felt like a violent and unexpected snaring, as in a lock clanging shut. She lost her breath. His were hard, narrow, predatory eyes, like those of T.J. Lusk glancing up at her from behind the covers of a girlie magazine after a pint of white dog, eyes that refused to register her as a fellow human traveler, that were chilled by something she didn’t understand and wasn’t sure she wanted to understand: an ice-core of anger or resentment or nihilism or maybe just sour hopelessness. The boy’s head turned, as he tracked the passage of her face behind the smudged glass, and when at last he disappeared from the windowframe Micah rolled back into her seat—suddenly and confusedly aware of a wetness in her own eyes, of fetal teardrops at their base. She looked to the businessman, to see if he’d noticed, and if so wanting him to explain why the sight of this precious elephant felt more hopeless and dismaying than that of the plastic-strewn tracksides. But he hadn’t. He was back to staring straight ahead, an oblivious almost-smile on his lips, his hands splayed atop his briefcase. When she swung her gaze back outside the window she saw only plastic again, whole ditchfuls of it.
His had been a false choice, she realized: the plastic or the elephants. The elephant she’d seen had not been spared or saved or otherwise preserved. Instead it had been coerced into service as a cog in the plasticized system, had been mechanized as the boy atop it had been. This was what civilization, the World, forced upon us: false choices. It stung her pride to acknowledge it, but it was true: Her father had been right after all.
But then maybe she’d been operating under her own version of a false choice too, she wondered now, ten years after kissing Leah goodbye forever at a Heathrow boarding gate and setting off on her own, knee-deep in that polychromatic abundance of slashed clothing in the dumpster off 35th Street, kneading the onesie with her thumb. Between rejecting the World and surrendering to it. Between abstaining and succumbing. Why couldn’t there be some sort of middle path—or if not a middle path, because that reeked of acquiescence, then a three-quarters path, or a fifteen-sixteenths path? She didn’t quite know what she meant—her brain was firing willy-nilly, thoughts and emotions streaming and colliding in her head—but through all the mayhem in her mind she was seeing another way forward, a freshly dug and profound new truth. To start over from scratch—this meant creation. She peered down at the onesie. It wasn’t mere coincidence, she realized, that God had deigned to speak to John Rye during Janie’s second trimester of pregnancy. Because her father hadn’t meant to merely escape the World; not for himself anyway. His goal, she saw now, had been to make a new and better world for her, his child—with his hands, the only way he knew how. So perhaps she hadn’t been the snake in Eden after all, not the cause of all the doom that’d befallen it. She’d been the cause of the dream of Eden itself.
Into her pack went the pink onesie, and with a flurry of effusion that startled and nearly knocked over Marcella she hugged the woman, who shot a grimacing glance to her husband as she patted Micah’s back. He just shrugged, and as Micah climbed out of the dumpster he returned her farewell waves with a gringo-bemused grin—just as the security monitor emerged from the orange loading-dock door for a cigarette and, seeing them there, came charging at them shouting, brandishing the cigarette like a weapon. Backing into the alley, Micah waved at the security monitor, too, but he
ignored her, haranguing the husband in Nuyorcian-inflected Spanish while the man leapt up to help his wife out of the dumpster and while their little girl went on coloring in her book, wonderfully (Micah thought) oblivious to it all, ensconced in a better world of her own waxed making. From 35th Street Micah turned south onto Broadway, charging through the sidewalk crowds like an ice cutter parting bergs, headed straight for Talmadge.
4
DUMPING HIMSELF INTO the sofa Dave emitted a sound like a juicy air-brake blast from a tractor-trailer: “Pppppbbbbbbffffffffffffttttttttt.” His collapse was so forceful, in fact, that it caused a wave in the foam-core cushions that went all the way down-sofa to where Alexis was sitting with her legs folded beneath her, thereby dislodging the finger she was using to type a text message. “Shit,” she said, sending an inflammable scowl Dave’s way. “You just made autocorrect change dammit to donuts.”
Dave didn’t respond. Instead he rubbed his eyes and craned his neck and then sat there with his mouth open in what appeared to be an approximation of death or at least a coma. He was fresh from dinner with Tim, his senior VP and general manager, and Tim’s wife Susan, whom Sara couldn’t stand for reasons she’d tried unsuccessfully explaining to Dave on the drives to and then from the restaurant. Something about how Susan was unable to talk about anything besides politics and her kids—always the insufferable (Sara’s word) kids, with the twenty-minute play-by-play rehashings of their latest hockey games (lately augmented with cellphone video footage) or Brit Hume–level analyses of their student council maneuverings. Dave didn’t find Susan all that bad but then again he didn’t really listen to her. Regardless, to his thinking, kids and politics (of a kind, that being his) scored higher on the topic list than shopping, Sara’s main conversational subject. (Sara had tried to engage Susan on that one back when they’d met, but had backed off for good after Susan raved about a sale at Kohl’s.) The dinner had been fine, otherwise—or maybe not fine, now that he considered it. Tolerable. But exhausting. He felt as though he’d been smiling for a group photo for the last three hours, waiting for the fucking cheeeeese that’d allow him to be human again. Like he’d suffered the equivalent of a power-steering fluid leak—by which he meant, his own power to steer other people. When had that started?
Righting the tilt of his head, he scowled back at Lexi. “Whaddaya, sexting?”
Tap, tap. She didn’t look up. “You wish, perv.”
“Kinky donut messages.”
“‘They’re home, dammit.’ That’s what I’d meant to type, okay? Before you, like, burped yourself down.”
“Who’s they?”
“Guess.”
“Oh, right. Us. Me.” He frowned. She was wearing those low-slung sweatpants of hers that tended to creep down her hips to expose just an inch-long coin-slot of butt-crack, which he tried not to look at except when he didn’t try, which was maybe half the time. Sometimes he resented that humid-looking inch, while at other times he resented being equipped with downwardable eyes. At still other times, however, the sight of that shadowed little crevice provided him the only jolt to his existence all day, the only hint of life’s magnificence. He thought it all very complicated, which was why he tended not to think about it. “Must be texting your dealer, then.”
“Yeah, right. My dealer.”
“Tell him I said hi.”
“Right,” she said. “Perv says hi. Send.”
It was 10:32 P.M. Said so on the fancy Italian clock on the wall. He rubbed his knees while examining his loafers which also happened to be Italian. Well, Italians made good shit. Like his dad used to say: “The Chinese mighta invented noodles, but we Italians invented spaghetti.” He scanned the living room, pleased to see it tidy save for the disarray of papers on Lexi’s end of the coffee table, then drew his gaze back to himself: also tidy, but definitely not pleased. What was he supposed to be doing at 10:32 P.M. anyway, with a belly full of ricotta-and-chive gnocchi, diver scallops, truffle rémoulade, roasted cipollini onions, and key lime semifreddo, and with his brain overrun with echoing dinner chat? Besides the obvious, that is. (Sara had already Heismanned him on that front.) Digesting: right. That was it. Digesting dinner, digesting the day, digesting his life. He brushed a hand across his middle and with a kind of philosophical softness asked, “You ever get that feeling like you’re full but you’re not full?”
“Yeah, it’s called Chinese food.”
“We didn’t eat Chinese.”
“Can’t help you then.”
“Like you should be full, you know, but you’re not? Full, I mean.”
Her phone dinged, and in trained response her chin sank and her thumb went scrambling across the keypad. Like a fingertip on a soap bubble, the ding also caused whatever vague inquiry had been swelling inside Dave’s head to vanish: pop. Needing auxiliary stimulation, he glared at the television screen. Some tiny lipsticked girl-child in a tiara was getting hug-squashed by her mom in slow motion while spooky horror-movie music thrummed. Clearly this wasn’t going to end well—not stimulatingly, for damn sure. “The hell you watching, anyway?”
“Dumb reality show,” said Alexis. “Take the remote.”
He thumbed it. SportsCenter. That’d work.
“Where’s Miguel?” he said.
“What?”
“Your dealer.”
“He was never my dealer. God. Where’d Mom go anyway?”
“To bed.”
“Can’t you follow her?”
Dave grunted. The short answer, of course, was no. He tried thinking of the long answer but it was also just no, or maybe noooooo. An analytical knot appeared on his forehead. “Whaddaya mean, ‘was’?”
“Was what?”
“You said, ‘was never my dealer.’”
“What’s with the shakedown?”
“Oh, I got it. Was.” He grinned and jutted a tongue at her. “Sexy Lexi’s single again.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever that means.”
“It means what I said.”
“Like when you said, ‘full but not full’? Your communication skills are, like, awesome.”
He ignored this, because his communication skills actually were awesome. This he knew because seven years ago he’d attended a “High Impact CEO Communications” boot camp in Rutherford where he’d learned absolutely nothing because it was all as friggin obvious as the “open bag, eat nuts” instructions on a package of airline peanuts. At the end of it he’d received a dinky little medal, as meaningless as the one the Cowardly Lion got at the end of The Wizard of Oz, which he would’ve happily shown Lexi were it not encased in a frame on his office wall between a photograph of him with Derek Jeter and another one of him with Jeter’s fellow Yankee Andy Pettitte. (Sara had not been the first to liken his office decorating scheme to a pizzeria’s.) He said, “So, no more Pedro. Huh. Now who’s gonna hook me up with some of that medical-grade shit?”
Glancing up from her phone, Alexis sighed and said, “Miguel, not Pedro. And did you even hear me just say he’s not a dealer? You got ears or are those weird things just decorations?”
“So why don’t you hook me up?”
“I’m out, okay? Which isn’t cool ’cause of my you-know-what.”
“The irritable butt?”
“You’re the irritable butt.”
Bah. Dave blew the air from his cheeks, motorboating his lips. Being deemed an irritable butt wasn’t helping his present condition, which he suspected might be medical—a tapeworm?—and therefore qualified for some of that medical-grade weed to which it seemed, alas, he was no longer privy. He focused on SportsCenter for a while, but nothing that was said or news-crawled or headlined seemed to be sticking. His brain felt like a wide and leaky sieve, all these noodles of information slipping right on through. Nothing was plugging the holes. Was there such a thing as mental tapeworm? Tiger Woods came onscreen, shown in a practice swing, fanning the clubface in that killer takeaway of his. Dave wondered idly if Tiger had ever calculated how much he
made with each swing, practice swings included. Had to be a lot. Also if Tiger ever felt this same way at 10:32 . . . no, 10:35 on a Wednesday night, like a big glob of gorged dissatisfaction. A big glob of gorged dissatisfaction with . . . weird ears. “What’s wrong with my ears?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, looking up at him. With an unexpected gentleness she assessed his head in profile and concluded, “They’re decent ears, actually.”
“Yeah?”
“Too bad they don’t work.”
“Huh.” Dave nodded to himself. He’d never considered his ears before, and raising a hand to examine them decided they felt like decent ears, actually. Hairless and aerodynamic. This was something. This stuck. Take that, little tapeworm. Feeling brighter, he pressed Lexi again: “So what’s the deal? With Pedro. Come clean.”
“Miguel. Jesus.”
“Yeah yeah, whatever. Him.”
“Like, nothing, okay?” Down went her phone, and with a flat terseness, as if to close the subject, she said, “He was cute, that’s all.”
Dave smiled. The most important component of communication, they’d told him at that boot camp, is knowing what goes unsaid. (Duh, he’d unsaid.) “There you go again. Was cute. What happened, his face get caught in a deli slicer?”
“Is cute, okay?” Her shift to the present tense, he noted, demanded a measure of emotional exertion. “What’s with the freaking interest, anyway? You want his number? Exploring your bi side?”
“Can’t a stepdad be concerned?”
“A real one, maybe.”
Crack: a line drive right back to the Irritable Butt Era. He chafed. “Hey, I’m just making conversation here,” he barked. “It’s my goddamn sofa. I’m allowed.”
“Fine,” she said, “I’m gone,” but when she made to rise Dave lifted a hand and said, “Relax, okay?” He didn’t want her to go. In fact, the thought of her leaving pumped a sudden spurt of despair through him, because then all he’d have was the empty sofa, and the SportsCenter guys, and the fancy Italian clock, and the plump wiggly tapeworm munching away somewhere inside him that might or might not be the source of this acute appetite he was feeling for something he couldn’t describe or define except with the word more. Soothingly, he said, “He just seemed like a nice enough kid, is all.”
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