Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  Cops do not understand what’s improvised in life. A cop will think that riding the bus, hiring the car, lead inexorably to this broken body on a roadside.

  A foreigner and an all-American boy, and the all-American is dead. Or dying.

  He listens. There is no sound of an engine in either direction. He puts his head down to Seth’s heart, which is struggling away.

  Then there are Dr. and Mrs. Arkenhout to consider. They’d hate the idea of something so sensational happening to their son. They might even bring him home, and he couldn’t stand going back to all those empty manners.

  He picks up a heavy, faceted stone and hits Seth’s head, two times, and then throws the rock into the ditch. This is mercy, because there’s no way to call help, let alone make it come. He holds the head in his hands for a moment, checking it impersonally. The teeth are loose, he sees. The face is so spoiled it could belong to almost any boy the same build, age, color.

  A truck goes by, a high chrome train on twenty-four wheels. For a moment, Arkenhout thinks the truck will stop, but it barrels on. He wonders how long it takes to stop a monster like that.

  He holds Goodman’s hand. The nails are unbitten. He bites them.

  Three miles, four miles down the highway, which once seemed so straight and now bends and shimmers, he’s dry and almost out of breath. Nobody’s moving, nobody passing. He has the whole damn world to himself.

  The sky rumbles and blackens behind him.

  He has two sets of papers in the jacket that trails in his left hand. He has Martin Arkenhout, who’s a kid and a visitor. He has Seth Goodman, who’s already at college and can do what he wants. He has blond hair, the proper height. Easy. The watch on his left wrist is now a Swiss Army watch.

  He could be Seth Goodman better than Seth Goodman ever could. He can make Seth Goodman anyone he can imagine.

  There is a diner, finally: a yellowish smear of brick between pines. He says there’s been an accident, asks for a phone.

  A waitress gives him coffee when he wants water and points him to the phone. He can see the waitress wants to be sympathetic, wants to mother the boy and believe him; it’s natural. But she’s experienced, so she also wants proof of his story.

  “College boy,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says, “Ma’am.”

  She beams, so close he smells the metal of old coffee on her breath.

  But the smile is for the other diners. To Arkenhout, she says, softly, “Where’s your freaking car then? Where is it?”

  “We broke down,” he says. “By the alligator farm. And then we tried to get someone to stop on the highway.”

  It’s all true, but still she snorts.

  “He was Dutch,” Arkenhout says. “He thought they’d stop for us.”

  “Foreign. What were you doing with a foreign boy?”

  “Just traveling.”

  She skims about the diner for a bit, ferrying salad to a pasty couple by the window, more coffee to a pencil-thin black queen, a plate of meat and French fries to the middle-aged couple in plaids.

  “It sounds terrible, sugar,” she says.

  He has never gambled before, but if he had, he’d recognize his bright concentration on a single chance.

  He watches rain come down in clots, rain with the force of hammers picking at the road and scouring the roadside. Just for a moment, hail makes the air rattle.

  He can’t eat, although the waitress says he should eat.

  He knows when the sun comes back from all the brilliance that lies about on the ground.

  He has the phone in his hands at the police station. He’s not at all sure that this can work.

  “You sound different,” this woman’s voice says down the phone. She’s Mrs. Goodman, mother.

  “I did what I could,” he says. Say as little as possible. Mimic Seth’s particular flat language with your clever mouth.

  “It must be shock, dear,” she says. Then it’s as though she remembers the boy doesn’t tolerate endearments anymore. “Seth, I mean,” she says. “They’ll find the body when the storm stops, all that rain. I know you did all you could.”

  Arkenhout is dizzy, falling down all the implications of what she says: that he is going to be found.

  “Come home. We’ll take care of you,” the woman says. “Until you’re yourself again.”

  He hears the father snapping and hawking in the background. He thinks he should say something, but the silence, he guesses, only helps his credibility.

  “The cops,” he begins tentatively.

  “Police. Police, Seth.”

  “The police said bodies do get moved. There are alligators around here. I left him on the roadside because I couldn’t just leave him on the road . . .”

  “It doesn’t bear thinking about,” says Mrs. Goodman, and she means it. “You can come home now. You know that. If you want to.”

  He’s guessing: that she longs for him to rush home at once and forever, that the real Seth would pose as a man and refuse. They’re not used to separation, he can tell; so they’re trying very hard to do it properly.

  He knows that much, but he doesn’t even know what Seth calls his mother: Mum, Ma, Mother, by her Christian name, by some nickname, and whether she’ll notice if he never calls her anything at all. Then he remembers that she expects him to sound, very slightly, not himself.

  “I’d rather carry on to New York,” Arkenhout says. “I want to get started.”

  Mrs. Goodman breathes hard. There is a pause, a bit of talk, and Mr. Goodman says down the line, “We’ll get you a ticket, Seth. It’ll be waiting at the airport. You’re all right, are you? You have seen a doctor, haven’t you?”

  “I’m all right.” So they don’t parade feeling, either; like his own family, they think they can park emotion like a car until it’s needed. “I’ll call you from New York.”

  He puts down the phone. He’s very aware, on his skin, that three cops are watching him.

  An older sergeant, black, takes him into an interview room.

  “Son,” he says. “You should know we still didn’t find your friend.”

  Arkenhout thinks they’re questioning his story. He sets his face blank.

  “There’s tire marks, nothing else. The rain and the hail just mashed down the verges and there wasn’t a body to see.”

  Arkenhout says nothing.

  “I know this is hard. You want,” and here the cop fishes up a word from talk shows, “closure. I promise you. We find him, I’ll call you. I’ll be in touch right away.”

  He stretches on the dorm bed, chilled down by the air conditioner. He’s early for the semester; his roommate will not arrive for another week. Everybody seems to know there was an accident, so he has a brief buzz of glamour. Everyone is also very kind. Counseling is offered.

  But he’s thinking: It can’t work. They’ll find the body. You can’t ruin a body enough to escape all those medical records, dental charts; what if Seth Goodman was fingerprinted once, or had his appendix or his wisdom teeth out? He should have inventoried Seth’s body while it was alive.

  Then: If they find the body and send it back to Holland, what if his parents decide it’s not him? The possibilities run about his skin like sweat.

  It’s only when the call comes from Florida—boy found, badly cut up and smashed, major injuries compatible with car accident and the rest from being tugged about and mauled by gators, everything rotted down by weeks in warm, sluggish water; some contusions that might be from the head going downstream against a sluice; the body photographed, cataloged, identified as Martin Arkenhout because that was the name it ought to have, then burned in a plywood coffin because the remains were too foul to be shared with the grieving parents, and the ashes sent back to Holland—that Arkenhout stops seeing the kind black Florida cop on guard over his bed.

  He punches the air, once. He’s rid himself of a skin. He can take up a new life, know people he shouldn’t know, invent himself.

  At this moment, Fifth A
venue shining with the dust in the air on a brute summer’s day, he owns the city.

  And for a time, he is blessed: fearless because he doesn’t know quite what he ought to fear.

  He does Seth Goodman, student, just right. He cracks books at midnight with a pencil light on his desk, and gets to the great vaulted emptiness of the library at opening time and wades through his courses purposefully. His roommate likes the peace. He signs up for physical anthropology, all that measuring and reading of bones.

  But he also hangs out just a measured amount—sprawled on sunny benches in the sun in Washington Square, out in a posse for a couple of beers, coinciding at the gym so he can spot his roommate. There’s nothing missing.

  The Goodmans call. But he’s never in his room when they call. “He’s out a lot,” his roommate says. “At the library.” The Goodmans want to know if he’s well, if he’s working. “No problems,” his roommate says, expecting Goodman would do the same for him.

  “We didn’t want to bother him,” Goodman’s mother says. She doesn’t mean it.

  Arkenhout calls back. Mrs. Goodman says they’d love to come to see him in New York, but Seth knows what his father feels about the city. Arkenhout gives a sage, brief “Uh huh.”

  Since he doesn’t know anyone, he decides this means he can know anyone at all. He cruises SoHo on the nights the art season opens, the galleries open out like souks and people spill out of them on a tide of thin white wine. He gets talked to, invited: he is seventeen, a personable volunteer. He remembers enough names from trips to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam—Haring, Nauman, Koons, that kind of name— to sound a bit informed. He doesn’t worry people by mentioning his favorite: Malevich. He’s smart enough to know these people don’t like true disturbers of the peace.

  Out of this drifting come offers. He’s useful, so the galleries have him around like furniture. He’s helped shift glass snails, jokes on paper, brass pornography. That leads to parties; he samples a whole social round. He’s inscribed in this group and that group, but people single him out because he has a party trick. He’s blank like someone his age, a surrogate son, a potential lover, someone to mold, but he gives great attention. He doesn’t mind egos spilling out their stories. He’s hungry for the information they let slip in between their words.

  In class, he’s the one who doesn’t ask the dumb questions, who knows not all the world is green-grass suburbia; he was taught that at school. He clatters ineffectually at the gym, but he’s helpful. He goes his own private round among the galleries, now down on West Broadway helping shift boxes, now hanging out in some remote Chelsea space to make it look peopled. His roommate finds a girlfriend for the afternoons when Goodman is reliably never there.

  Then there’s Thanksgiving.

  Arkenhout is Dutch. He knows about St. Nicholas, about Christmas, maybe New Year. He doesn’t know about Thanksgiving, this late-November roadblock to his life; so he’s startled when the Goodmans leave a message that they’ll send him the ticket to come home for Thanksgiving and how long can he stay?

  His roommate says, “It’s lame. You got to let the parents know they don’t rule you.”

  Arkenhout sees Christmas loom behind Thanksgiving on the calendar and a full month of vacation behind that. He needs alibis.

  “You going home?” he asks his roommate.

  “No way.”

  He has six weeks before Thanksgiving, maybe four before he has to call and say precisely when he’s coming; or so he thinks.

  His luck is cracking.

  But then he’s down one brilliant day on West Broadway, just hanging out in the big white back office of a gallery, and David Silver walks through: a name off museum banners. Silver has an impassive face, like he’s Saran-Wrapped his feelings. The two see each other very briefly, but very clearly.

  Silver starts talking too loudly. He needs a new assistant, so he says—part-time, afternoons, then Christmas, maybe summer.

  Arkenhout says, “Mr. Silver.”

  The two stand like two screens opposite each other; all anyone will see is what they project.

  “You want the job?” Silver says.

  The artist’s house is a mansion, behind shade trees on a quiet street, with a courtyard and a bare glass studio that mysteriously is without heat or glare. Among the spindles and towers of apartment blocks that surround it, it seems arrogant.

  Silver is working on huge blind canvases in which, like a puzzle, there’s a figure hidden: the critics find some kind of leper from an altarpiece, a specter of death or disease. Arkenhout thinks it’s the artist himself, hiding in his work. A bit later, in a sensational piece in Artforum, a Canadian critic will say the hidden figure is Seth Goodman, and pick apart what that means for the story of David Silver. Silver, as usual, will refuse to explain or even talk.

  There are three other assistants. Very quickly, Arkenhout figures out his importance: he’s not responsive like the great artist’s other arrangements—Jeff, Raoul, Henry—so he makes the whole household more opaque. But he’s wrong and cheap about that.

  “He’s queer, isn’t he?” the roommate says.

  “I don’t know.”

  The roommate looks skeptical.

  Arkenhout reckons something different, based on the books and the profiles he has studied: that Silver sees a bit of himself in Arkenhout, the self that came out of Arizona at the same age because there was nowhere to go but New York, the self that is discreet as a mirror.

  “I’ve been invited to work for David Silver,” Arkenhout tells the Goodmans.

  “Oh,” his father says. “That’s good. If you still have time to study. Your mother took me to that big show of his in Washington, once.”

  Arkenhout is relieved they know the name. He says, “It means I won’t be able to come home for Thanksgiving.”

  “Your mother,” says his father, “will be very disappointed.”

  He’s grateful that Silver has just enough celebrity to excuse anything Arkenhout does, that the name is big and gilded in the Goodmans’ minds. The Goodmans send him, UPS overnight, a pumpkin pie which arrives cracked. There’s also a letter from his father: love, prefaced by oblique talk about the great city, and how a boy shouldn’t grow too far away from his parents. Arkenhout knows it is a begging letter.

  In mid-December he’s up at Silver’s house, copying some articles that Silver claims he won’t ever read, when Raoul passes him the phone.

  “Your father’s coming,” his roommate says.

  “Coming?”

  “He’s on the New Jersey Turnpike now.”

  “But—”

  “He’s coming to some meeting in New Jersey, and he’s coming to take you to dinner or something. He’s an hour away, two hours if the tunnels are really bad.”

  Arkenhout puts down the phone. He catches Silver’s eye. He doesn’t have the right to bother Silver, but he hasn’t any choice.

  “My roommate says my father’s here.”

  Silver says, “You want to see him?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I could talk to him. Say you’re out of town on an errand for me. Taking something to the National Gallery in Washington, maybe.”

  “But he’ll want—”

  Silver remembers evading a father; he sees his own story in Arkenhout. “There’s work here, house-sitting for the vacation. You could pay for spring break that way. I didn’t think you’d want to come to the Caribbean—”

  Arkenhout stays in the studio that night, on a futon on the floor, in a garden of high painted canvases.

  Mr. Goodman sits on Arkenhout’s bed, in Arkenhout’s room, trying to sense the presence of his son. He shouldn’t have surprised him. He shouldn’t have come to New York at all. The place is a kind of after-life, an altered state.

  He takes down a book from the shelf. His eyes water. He counts the pens in the coffee cup, twice. He won’t invade the boy’s privacy by turning on the laptop. He sees clothes in a clean laundromat stack on a shelf and he takes
the top T-shirt. He holds it up before him. He smells the good domestic smell of soap and artificial freshness.

  The roommate stands in the doorway. “Sir,” he says. “Sir, I’m afraid it’s a bit difficult for you to stay here.” His girlfriend is hanging back, between giggles and annoyance. “Sir?”

  Mr. Goodman looks as though he would bury his face in the T-shirt. But he gets up slowly and says “Thank you” with mechanical manners and goes heavily down the hallway.

  The Goodmans’ Christmas card plays “Joy to the World” when it is opened, as Arkenhout does in David Silver’s empty house.

  Seth Goodman is a success: a social creature, in a world Martin Arkenhout never expected to know, which doesn’t seem narrow and self-righteous and beery like the Amsterdam artists he used to read about in the magazines. Seth Goodman wants to live on, if he can.

  The Goodmans write letters now. They don’t call much. There doesn’t seem any point. The letters are sometimes brief, and sometimes they say much too much about life back home in Jackson, Michigan, as though they were trying to pull Seth back with detail. At first, they’re angry Seth does not tell them more. Then they seem to get scared they’ll push him away; they write about “growing pains.”

  Just once, they talk about cutting off the allowance unless Seth comes home.

  Arkenhout on a subway train out to Park Slope. A black woman in a pose of sad tiredness, sitting sideways, face rolled up. A dapper Sunday suit and a pink Sunday dress on children traveling with shiny prayer books, and a very small, thin, blank Chinese man with a bag of windmills.

  He gets it, suddenly: an F train epiphany. The other passengers think he’s waking up from drugs or sleep; they pull back from him.

  He can’t be just Seth Goodman. That’s a trap, too. These people out in Michigan want to see a Seth Goodman, and they’ll start to get literal soon, and ask what happened to their real son.

  He’s supposed to visit people who live above a Chinese takeout on Seventh Avenue, in a second-floor cave of chocolate wood. Instead, he goes to the Botanic Gardens and sits on the lawn among the early lilacs, running the circuit of his situation over and over again.