by Hari Kunzru
—I see.
—Do you? Do you see? There are boxes I built myself from schematics.
—Call it an extra thirty, to acknowledge your time and effort. The Foundation is very keen to draw a line under this. They don’t want any gray areas. I’ll have to make a call to confirm, but that should be fine.
—And will Leonie get a foundation?
—Beg your pardon?
—Do they each get a foundation, or just Carter? What charities will Leonie’s foundation support?
—The family may opt to expand the mission of the existing nonprofit.
—I won’t take a cent of your money.
I am tired. In pain. He knows that. He knows I only have so much fight in me, so he leads me round in circles, ducking and weaving, coating everything in legal language. I raise my voice. He increases his offer. Sometimes he gets up from the table and glances nervously out of the window. I think he is looking out for news crews. Eventually my knees buckle and I find myself on the canvas, documents in front of me, a heavy pen in my hand. I scratch my name on the paper. Once he has my signature, the lawyer goes back to issuing threats.
—If you break any of these conditions, the payments will cease. Any suggestion that you have tried to contact the family and the payments will cease. Any conversation or communication with a journalist. A journalist comes to us, says he has a source, we have reason to believe that source is you, the payments will cease.
He puts the documents in his portfolio.
—I’m supposed to take you to the bus station and buy you a ticket to wherever you want to go.
—The bus station.
—The family was quite specific about that. Not the airport. You are expected to be discreet.
—Where will I go?
—That’s entirely up to you, within the scope of our agreement. Entirely your call. Just phone me when you’re set up.
The fluid has stopped seeping out of my ear. I take out the toilet paper plug.
I WAS POLITE WHEN I BOUGHT TICKETS. I did not engage anyone in conversation. I stayed in motels, or slept in bus terminals. When you know nothing, you have many reasons to keep silent. Language exposes you to other people. It commits you to versions of the world you may not trust. At many times of day and night I would find myself, just for a second, a fragment, a terrifying splinter of time, back in the underground room with the detectives, waiting for agony, hyperventilating inside the hood. It was hard to concentrate. The stink of my abjection seemed to follow me around.
I rode the bus. I got off in small towns. I did not call the Wallace lawyer. I could, I suppose, have gone to an airport. After a few days, no one would have been looking for me. But instead I rode the bus. Somehow an airport seemed risky, inadvisable. To be forced to check each situation, to watch this man’s posture, each expression passing across that woman’s face. In any transaction, I had to be on my guard. Any encounter with authority.
Plastic seats, coin-op armrest televisions.
Waiting rooms. White and Colored.
When you are powerless, something can happen to you and afterwards it has not happened. For you, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently, or don’t remember it at all. You can tell them, but it slips their minds. When you are powerless, everything you do seems to be in vain. You stow your bag, show your ticket, climb the steps. All the sinners climb aboard. You shuffle down the aisle to your seat and pluck at the little concertinaed curtain that does not block out the sun. Days spent with your forehead pressed against window glass. Nights turning your shoulder, trying to get comfortable, feeling the cold air freezing your neck. Your road seems dark. Your path is not clear. You only feel alive when you pass a source of light, driving through a town, pulling in for a rest stop. Your trace on the window, on all the windows the same horizontal smear. The grease of unhappy foreheads.
I got off in small towns, my pack landing in the dust. The driver pulling out the cases, throwing the cases in the dust. The bus terminals of small towns. Hunched sleepers and vending machines. The driver’s peaked cap, pushed up high on his head.
Sweating in the heat, throwing out the cases. I fish in my pocket for a quarter. The TV eats the coin, shows strobing shadows, ghost heads…heiress Leonie Wallace’s death at a motel in rural Mississippi, where she was found after what appears to have been an overdose of sleeping pills. Wallace was one of the heirs to a $10 billion global logistics empire. Her shares in Wallace Corp. stock were worth a reported $80 million. In a statement to media, a company spokesman said that they were not able to rule out suicide at this time. Now, friends and family are asking themselves why the beautiful and wealthy artist would feel so bereft of hope for the future.
I pass through the world, but I leave no trace. Leonie’s death is a suicide. I was never her brother’s friend. Money says our friendship never happened. Money says that I was never really alive at all. The Wallace family, struck by a double tragedy. The suicide of their daughter, a senseless attack on their son. Dignified in their grief, they appear in long lens pictures taken at the crematorium. I do not see how I can win, not against them. They are too old in the game.
They believe in me, the Wallaces. They believe in me enough to pay me money. Charlie Shaw believes in me too. I know that I am only provisionally, tenuously alive, caught like a bird, a bubble, in whatever reality has been imagined for me. I wonder where it will come from, what direction. How my death will come and fill me up. I look for people following me. I make ATM transactions for variable amounts, at irregular intervals.
Sleeping on plastic seats in bus terminals. Standing in the doorways of dead theaters, consumed by shame. The police kicking the sole of your boot to wake you up.
—Where you headed, sir?
—I hold a valid ticket.
Standing by the dumpster, watching them taser a man outside a 7-Eleven. All the men on the ground outside 7-Elevens. All the spilled Big Gulp cups, all the ice sprayed across the concrete.
I make ATM transactions just before I leave town. Only then.
My inquiries are, of necessity, discreet. By asking questions, I put myself in breach of the family’s terms and without their money I will starve. But I don’t really have a choice. Move on, they said. Move along. As if everything had been settled. Nothing has been settled. Nothing is over. I take what precautions I can. I call from public pay phones. I scout locations before I use them. Exits, lines of flight. If I sense any anomalies, any wavering in the fabric of the present, I pull out.
—Yes, the inmate’s name is Shaw. Charles Shaw. What agency? I’m sorry I don’t have that. Well, yes that’s why I’m calling you. That would be who? The Metro police? And you’re. Oh, I see. Well, can you put me through. Yes. Hello is this. I am seeking information on. What do you mean you can’t see him in your system? If I could what? Surely you have that information. I’m an ordinary private citizen. Why would I need to tell you something you already know. Surely you hold that hello hello hello
Secrets are shared at the back of long-distance buses. Whispers and confessions. A young couple furtively masturbate each other under a blanket. A fat woman clutches a prayer card. The back of the bus is a place of lottery tickets and ritual candles, fast luck and money drawing, because all the riders know it would take a miracle for good fortune to settle on these shiny fabric seats. Twenty weeks of lottery numbers for twenty dollars. If that’s the best you can do, maybe you even borrow the twenty dollars. You buy the rabbit’s foot, the reputed swallow’s heart. You sprinkle a little powder, add a root to your bag. You ride and you try to be careful, but however still or silent you make yourself, there is always the risk that someone will turn their eye on you. People are bored on buses. They will break down any wall. I lost my apartment lost my car lost my dogs I’m in the navy visiting my kids my moms down in Florida see that on my arm I got that in my tag name is but my government name
Sometimes I crack under the pressure of all that language. I find myself moving my lips and befo
re I know it I am trying to explain. The pain in my heart. The things they did. To me, to Carter, to Leonie. The shame. Every time you get suckered into thinking she wants to listen, but it slips off her, just rolls away and gets lost somewhere under the seats. You try to tell her but she loses her appetite for talk. Every time. This is how you learn: none of what happened to you happened.
Gradually I learn to keep a check on myself. On my mouth, on the sounds of my body. The slight fluttering wheeze in my breathing that never will go away, the creak of my joints as I shift position in my seat at night. Such things are tells, to a sensitive listener, someone who may wish you harm. You try not to express, but there is always something. You give yourself away and one morning the jinx is there again, all round your bed, rubbing against your ankles like a cat.
I hire someone to make inquiries on my behalf. A week later I call from a phone by the entrance of a Tulsa park and he lets me know that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. All he has is word-of-mouth. There are no documents or photos, nothing that would really hold up. But he believes his information was reliable. A suspect was taken into custody under the name of Charles Shaw. Yes, his contact is sure of the name, definitely Shaw, but there are complications. The suspect was taken to a special unit, a place which did not participate in the usual police booking formalities. I tell him I don’t understand. Participate? I thought it was the law. He tells me the place is an exception, a black site. It is exempt from scrutiny. There is no publicly available information about the special unit. There is no website for the special unit, no phone number. There is no public access. Yes, he is working on it. He is trying to find out more.
Got to keep moving. Never look in the restroom mirror. Small towns. Rusted water towers with green vines climbing the legs. Water towers overgrown with vines. Sleeping in the terminals, under the porch of a church. Sleeping in the bushes by a lake. When you are powerless, your belief or disbelief is irrelevant. No one gives a damn about what you believe. But if some reality believes in you, then you must live it. You can’t say no thank you. You can’t say I don’t want this. If horror believes in you, there’s nothing to be done.
Black sites. I know all about black sites. A pay phone on the dock at a marina in Pensacola. Evening. Standing in a narrow cone of light. I have bad news, he says. Or good news, depending. Your man was definitely being held at the special unit. No, no paperwork. Nothing like that. Everything happened very fast. Thing is he’s dead. Yes, that’s right. The day of his arrival he was found unresponsive in an interview room. They only had him for a few hours. Yes, they did. Natural causes. No, I only have what I was told. Where is he now? You mean you want me to find out what happened to the body?
Motels and bus stations. Small towns. Rooms rented by the week, by the month. I live like a spy in a wartime city, a state of constant managed terror. Where is Charlie Shaw? I close the blinds, so eyes on the walkway can’t see the order in which I pack my bag. Try to stop your body sending or receiving. Try to stop all signal traffic. And now remember that you have to eat and maintain yourself in certain other basic ways. It is not straightforward. It puts you under pressure. I climb the steps, take my seat, press my forehead against the smeared window glass. I listen to the top forty through headphones, the same songs over and over again. Bobbysoxer records. “Sentimental Journey.” “Don’t Fence Me In.” There are always audible ghosts, remnants of compression. If you make a file of all the parts that are lost, you can hear them quite distinctly. I was making eight-hour round-trips to use an ATM.
The crowd at the door. Slipping down into the dark, running down the dry hill, pushing through the jostling crowd at the door, stepping over the threshold, the crowd of uniforms competing, climbing over each other just to take a look.
Excuse me, excuse me.
A pay phone on the outside wall of a convenience store in Midland, Texas. A high wind blowing dusty topsoil into my face. No record of an inquest, says the man. But he’s dead and buried. I can give you a plot number, a location. Yes, absolutely. I have that. You can go and see for yourself.
Until I see you. Until we come face-to-face. See you for myself. Until I see you. I cannot let it lie. If I don’t find out what he wants I will have to step through the door, into the dark. I will have to see her lying there, stretched out, so cold and fair. Late one night, I walk out into a potter’s field with a spade and a flashlight and a grid reference. I find what I think is the place and begin to dig, but I can’t be sure I have it right. I am full of doubt. The ground is hard and stony. It does not look as if it has been recently disturbed. The spade feels like rubber as I try to push it in. I dig and sooner than I expected I am exhausted and my palms feel raw, already blistered at the base of the fingers where the handle of the spade has been rubbing. I lie down on the pile of earth and rest and the sky begins to lighten to a proto-gray and in that gray light I come to the realization that I will never be able to dig my way to Charlie Shaw. What do I expect to find? A body? A living man down there in the coffin? A man singing and playing a guitar, with whom I can negotiate, a man I can beg for mercy? Is that what I am digging for? To beg back my life?
STANDING AT A PAY PHONE outside a yard lined with identical storage units, somewhere outside Baton Rouge. A chemical tang in the air. Naphtha vapor, refinery smog. My clothes are covered in mud. Trash whips around my feet as the trucks go by.
I punch numbers. Nothing has changed. I am out of ideas. It is impossible to catch up with Charlie Shaw and now I am falling fast. It is impossible to live without leaving a trace. Hit the resonant frequencies of those long-distance waiting rooms and you understand soon enough. The thick dark muttering. The residue. Every complaint and every argument, every day of every year, happening simultaneously. A roaring in the consciousness.
There is no reply from my man. I put down the phone and feel a sort of flickering, an unsteadiness about my surroundings. I look down. At my feet, beside a crushed plastic cup and a burrito wrapper, is a sheet of yellowing paper, an old flyer.
KEY & GATE ARTISTS PLAY AND SING FOR YOU. ASK TO HEAR THEM!
The greatest stars perform for you only on Key & Gate.
“A smile on the face and a song in the heart!”
25000 Series latest releases
25800—Down On The Old Camp Ground and Father, Prepare Me, The New Cotton Blossom Minstrels
25801—My Old Pal Rastus and Beans, Beans, Beans, “Uncle” Vernon Sylvester and his guitar
25802—I Don’t Know Where To Go and Goodbye Honey Goodbye, Esther Shaver piano Acc. Will Robinson
25803—The Stars and Bars and Yessir I’m Going South, The Savannah Club Orchestra
25804—Mysterious Coon and Run Rabbit Run, Emmett Charles
25805—Dry Bones and My Old Dog Bow Wow, The Westmoreland Institute for the Blind Quartette
25806—Graveyard Blues and The Laughing Song, Wolfmouth Shaw
I look around. There is no one on the street, no place for anyone to hide. I scour the trash in the gutter, but see nothing out of the ordinary. I can feel the hair on my arms begin to stand up. My whole body is charged, expectant. “Graveyard Blues” and “The Laughing Song.” Now I know what is on the other side of the record. But what is “The Laughing Song”? I can only guess. At one time there was a fashion, a whole genre, music hall songsters emitting staccato bursts in time to upbeat rhythms. The laughing fad was all over before the First World War. It seems an unlikely choice of material for Charlie Shaw, or Wolfmouth Shaw, if that was his nickname or stage name, but then a raw country bluesman makes no sense on a list populated with bad-sounding vaudeville acts singing songs that went out of style before the turn of the century. None of it makes sense. Wolfmouth. The wolf’s mouth. What kind of person would have such a name?
At the bottom of the page is the label’s contact information. Write to us to find out more! An address on 28th Street in New York City. I look around again. There is no one on the street. No sign of life at all. The giant semis grind past as I shoulder m
y bag and walk down the road towards the bus station.
I WOKE UP AS WE CROSSED THE BRIDGE into Manhattan. Midtown lay under a fog, which moved and shifted uncertainly between the buildings. The bus riders coughed and stretched, preparing to face the city which had already closed around them. I didn’t recognize anything, not the rain-slicked stone buildings, not the crowd of men and women in their gray hats and coats. The bus reached the Capitol Greyhound Terminal, and I took a trolley downtown. I could remember certain places, though I was not sure when I had been to them. My memory was faulty, more broken every day.
I found a room, I kept a low profile. I knew better than to approach Key & Gate by any straight route. The phone number in the catalog did not work when I tried it. Too few digits. I understood that I would have to chance upon the path, that simply going to the address would not work. I spent my days walking far uptown. Mott Haven, Hunts Point. Empty blocks, drifts of rubble, a patchwork of gang territories. Boys in cut sleeve jackets made way for me to pass. Black Spades, Ministers, Seven Immortals. No one wanted the evil eye on them. X’s were marked on structures judged unsafe to enter, burned-out tenements that looked like rows of crying women, blind-eyed window sockets smudged arson black. Here and there I could see signs of life. A washing line. A little girl trying to ride a tricycle over a sidewalk that had degenerated into a mountain range of broken slabs.
One day I took the subway downtown, watching my fellow riders slump in their seats, the tangled magic marker tags over their heads ramifying like a shared map of thought. There was so much I could not call to mind. Was I being followed? I expected so. Someone, some agent, had put the flyer into my hands. Someone wanted me there. I tried to sense my pursuer. Who had come after me as I changed cars? Who had been behind me on the stairs? I rode downtown to the tip of the island and the sand and rubble of the landfill. A gaunt man was selling paletas in the shadow of the twin towers. I bought one and wandered through the abandoned waterside of the city, dawdling in the middle lanes of the empty West Side Highway, past the piers. Coal barges plied the river. A kingdom of rotting wood and rats.