by Mark Powell
“I would like,” he said, “something slightly better than your best.”
But Stone wasn’t listening. He was looking at the money, looking at it with as much repulsion as fascination. It looked like an infectious thing, but of the sort you couldn’t help but touch. “You offer me this because of the fact of my brown skin,” he said. “You think I’ll take it because I’m an Indian.”
“On the contrary. I offer it to you in spite of the fact of your brown skin.” He pushed the brick toward him. “I think you’ll take it because you’re an American.”
Stone looked at the money for some time before taking it, but he did take it, and when he did he liked the heft of it.
“Consider that a retainer,” Sharma said. “There might always be more.”
“Might?”
“So long as you take care of him.”
Stone nodded. “So I guess you’re the big chief now.”
Sharma was already on his way out of the room. “You’re goddamn right I am,” he called. “Now get the fuck out of my kitchen and go find my boy.”
And that was exactly what Stone did.
24.
One day in early November Tess ran into the awful Pat Glenn in the grocery store. She had seen him only once since that night they’d been over for dinner and Glenn did his racist shtick about wetbacks and ragheads and Professor Hadawi while his wife listened adoringly or dismissively—it was hard to tell which. Since the day at the convenience store, Tess and John had turned down a few invitations and not asked the Glenns back. Pat seemed a little pissed about it. He also seemed a little drunk. It was four o’clock on a Wednesday, but that sort of logic didn’t seem to hold.
“Where’s this husband of yours been?”
“At work, at home. The usual. How’s Martha?”
“How do you mean ‘the usual’?”
They were in the cereal aisle with the Fruity Pebbles and Cheerios, the bags of granola and sleeves of oatmeal. It was too bright and too crowded and on the speakers they were playing Christmas music just a bit too loud.
“What’s he doing down in Peach Creek?” Glenn asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Heard he’s been running around Peach Creek.”
“He’s at some conference every Saturday,” she said. “Relicensure. But that’s in Atlanta.”
“Atlanta? That’s what he told you?”
She was in her black running tights with the reflective stripe, a black windbreaker pulled over a white tank top and she wasn’t flattering herself in thinking his eyes kept sliding down to her legs and then back up to the hollow between her breasts. She wasn’t flattering herself. She felt ashamed of herself.
“Where are the kids?” he asked.
His cart was nearly empty, ground beef and mayonnaise, skim milk and a suitcase of Natural Light. She thought of his wife at home, or maybe not at home, with her saline breasts and spray-on tan.
“With John, actually.”
“So you’re all alone, are you?”
“Not really.”
“Sounds like you are,” he said. “Kids with their daddy.” And here he looked openly at her breasts and then up at her. “You still nursing that girl?”
“I need to go.”
“Seen your husband,” he called as she wheeled away. “Might want to check with your husband on that whole relicensure thing, honey.”
*
She went home and stood alone in the kitchen and it was like being in the condo of St. Simons all over again. There were days she felt she had never left. Days she tried to fix her mind on the now, the present. But what fixed was that winter. What fixed were the long walks, the shower with no curtain, the way someone else’s mail kept gathering in the slot. The waiting. She remembered the waiting. John in bed for days so that for company she had not her new husband but the seabirds and migrating waterfowl.
In the spring of their second year of marriage John was called away on business. What exactly that business entailed she didn’t know, only that he would be gone for several weeks, and communication would be limited. He did contract work for the government. That was all he could tell her. He was going somewhere and asked that she not ask where or why. He would be safe, he promised her as much. He wasn’t a spy or a soldier. He was a psychologist. But beyond that he offered no explanation, and Tess never asked because that was what she did back then and did still: she didn’t ask.
John didn’t want to go, that much was clear. In the week leading up to his flight he became depressed, moody in a way she had never seen. The day before he left he told her about Karla, about Kayla and the wreck. It was stunning in a way, but also not. There was always the sense that he wasn’t telling her everything, or anything, really. So when it came out, sad as it was, it was a relief for Tess. It made them closer, she thought. It definitely made her love him more, and when she took him to the airport she kissed him goodbye feeling she knew him better and deeper than she ever had. She didn’t know where he was going or why. But he would be back soon. Everything would be fine.
She stayed in St. Pete, alone through the spring and into the summer. Her mother called. Her father wanted her to come home to Sanibel. The news was all bad. There were dirty bombs and suicide bombs and every night more dead in Iraq. A car bomb here, a drone strike there. The airports were patrolled by police in riot gear carrying the sort of assault rifles that had become familiar on the news. Still, it was better here than elsewhere. Better here than wherever John was.
Not that she knew, but she had a sense of things. He promised to e-mail and did for a while. But the intervals grew longer, and by late June she’d heard nothing from him in weeks.
Then one night she watched a journalist being waterboarded in the interest of something she was made to understand was noble. While he retched and gasped the process was explained in bullet points:
• The individual is bound securely to an inclined bench.
• The individual’s feet are elevated.
• A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes.
• Water is applied to the cloth in a controlled manner.
• As this is done, the cloth is lowered until it covers both the nose and mouth.
• Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers the mouth and nose, airflow is slightly restricted for twenty to forty seconds due to the presence of the cloth.
She had the volume off. The man appeared to be vomiting. Then she realized he was crying.
• During those twenty to forty seconds, water is continuously applied from a height of twelve to twenty-four inches.
Then she realized she was crying, too, and not because of the violence, at least not exactly. It was more the realization that this was the world, and had always been the world. She was just too busy running and laughing to bother noticing it.
The next day, on the TV in a bar on Treasure Island, she watched two men fighting in a cage, and the next day she watched again, this time online. She was amazed by the absolute brutality, the relentless head strikes that registered as damage, damage, damage. But it was also comforting in that it was just two men. What you had to face literally stood before you. Unlike the small-boat sense she carried, the small boat on the wide unsettling seas. The whole adrift thing she was letting fester into high art.
She watched and watched, and by July—with no word from John in several weeks—she had come to feel violence as a natural state, no different from sleeping or eating. She watched the men fight and walked through her day thinking constantly of pressure points and submission holds. She would look at someone and discover she was actually considering the vulnerability of the temple and eyes, gauging the softness of the throat. What she was learning was that the human body was frighteningly fragile and transient, a construct to be dismantled by the patient practitioner. At night, she would wake and think her way through the breaking of someone’s instep or the tearing of one’s ears, the mere availability of pain enough to see her through until morning.
>
And where was John?
Where was John so she could tell him this?
Every day she expected an e-mail and every day it failed to arrive.
She started Googling his old life. A Facebook memorial page for his wife. Newspaper accounts of the wreck. His daughter was online in all the usual places and Tess lurked to the extent she could. Then one day she made herself stop. She wasn’t sure why exactly. Only that if she kept on searching she would find something, and whatever she found she would regret. It was a world about which she knew nothing and if she persisted it would swallow her.
So instead of searching she went back to the one thing she knew: her body, particularly her body under physical duress.
Every day she ran or lifted weights, usually both, and one afternoon caught her reflection in the far mirror past the Cybex machines, back arched, hands on her hips and mouth gasping for air. It took a moment to know it was her. She looked elastic and powerful, wiry and—she liked to think—more than a little dangerous. Beneath the halogen lights she appeared jagged and warlike, not unlike the fighters she watched.
After that, she stopped expecting to hear from John.
It seemed almost as if she’d forfeited him.
Then, with no warning, he returned. It was October and the world was just beginning to shed itself. The sky rift by weather, sun and then rain, one coming as certain as the other, and with it came her husband, shoaled back into the world of the living. He had been gone almost six months, long enough to have become a ghost, but now he was waiting for her on the street when she came out of the condo as if no more than an afternoon had passed. They walked to a Pakistani place in Bayside. His hands shook and his once-tan skin was pale and dry. He appeared sick.
“I am,” he told her. “I’m dying.”
“You’re dying?”
“Of boredom, exhaustion.”
She told him about watching the online fights, about the desire to hurt someone, and when he laughed at her she realized there was something cruel in him she had never detected.
After lunch they walked toward the Dalí, past the cafés with their rattan furniture and carafes of kombucha, past the buskers strumming this land is your land, past the boutiques and food carts and the marina with its clutter of boats. He’d been back since September. He told her this near the museum steps. He’d seen her twice, had spent an entire day just following her.
Why had he done this?
He didn’t know.
Why was he telling her this?
He didn’t know that either.
“Something’s happened to you.” It was less accusation than objective observation for at that moment she felt outside herself, suspended above where they stood by the museum steps, stones in the current of human traffic. “You’ve changed,” she said.
“Everybody changes.”
“You’ve turned cruel.”
“That was inevitable.”
She found herself pleading with him. “Oh no, John, it doesn’t have to be.”
“Everyone turns cruel. Given enough time.”
“No.”
“Given enough time,” he told her, “everyone does.”
But it wasn’t cruelty exactly. It was something else. It was frailty, the fragility of his pieces—for that is what she discovered over the months that followed: that he was no longer the sum of his parts. Rather he was simply his parts, separate if intact. A collection of neuroses and fears and shakes and habits (all bad) to which they referred to as John.
Where were you?
He wouldn’t say.
What were you doing?
I can’t tell you.
What happened to you over there?
Nothing, nothing.
What he said was nothing.
There was a flurry of lovemaking and then, as if exhausted by it, he barricaded himself into the condo. She begged him to come out, to come back into the world, desperate enough to take him to parties with women she’d known in prep school, to a reunion of high-school assholes grown taller and richer. These wealthy strivers back in town to network. Their world was Daddy’s getaway on Captiva or Mom’s loft in the East Village. Sunset cruises when they were on the Gulf. Christmas envelopes for the doorman when they were in Brooklyn. Everywhere hired help, everywhere someone to sweep the snow or cut the grass while you studied for the bar exam on an heirloom Biedermeier desk. Saturday nights they clustered around banquettes and drank signature cocktails.
And John, John laughed at them, mocked them. How failed they were as human beings. Trading junk bonds and buying bread machines. Papa flying to Savile Row for his bespoke shirts. Lord, preserve me from the bread makers. They are decent people, John. Laughing again: Lord, preserve me from the decent people. She begged to know where he had been, what he had done.
Instead of speaking, John stayed home. For seven days he stayed in bed and said nothing. Tess would start to the Publix for groceries and then turn back, panicked that he was—what?
Not dead. She knew instead of dead he would be awake when she got home, online, and hounding out suffering. Surfing through the archived photos. Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The gulags. The dead in the Congo. The dead in Rwanda and Darfur and Bosnia and Iraq. He spent hours staring at images from Abu Ghraib.
Will you stop?
Please, John, can’t you stop?
But he gave no answer.
Did she resent this?
And if I don’t now, how long until I do?
Those were the questions she asked herself, city bus lurching, folks leaned against the windows, ears plugged with headphones. Do I resent John? Do I hate him because I’m afraid? That’s not a reason to hate him. But Tess couldn’t definitively say that she didn’t.
At the end of the week, they left the city. Her idea, and it wasn’t a bad idea. But where to? What about the place on St. Simons? A place to rest, a place to recover. John gave her a number. Call him. You can trust this guy, he said. He’s one of us. But who are we? she wanted to know. Ask for Ray, he said. Ray can help. Which was no answer at all. Still, she called. The man—Ray, she supposed—said they could stay, but it would take a few days to arrange. Be patient. Let me make a call to Jimmy, okay?
“But who are you?” Tess asked. “You keep saying we this, and we that.”
“We,” he said, as if he finally understood her. “We are America. We are your invention, my dear.”
The next day everything was arranged. Ray had called Jimmy and Jimmy wasn’t happy about it, but whatever, right? Here’s where you find the key.
“Take care of him, all right? He’s fucked up right now, but he’s a good man.”
By noon they were settled. Her winter retreat, as she gradually came to think of it, her tower, her redoubt, if that was even the word. Four narrow stories facing the finger curl of bay.
It wasn’t at all like she remembered it from their honeymoon. Physically, of course, it was no different. But everything felt a half-tick off. Just little things, but she noticed. For instance, on the top floor was the master bath, the tub centered in the room. Except there was no curtain, only the mosaic tile that beaded wetly. Showering was like a performance. Except there was no one to watch.
There was a commercial icemaker, but no water line.
There was a spyglass, but it faced inland.
She walked and considered these things, and at some point, while she walked and John slept, winter came. She walked the footpaths and she walked the boardwalks and all around her were birds she could not name. Plovers. Sandpipers. They came wheeling from the beach, bedded in the soft banks, their tracks checked in the mud like runes. They hopped, she would watch them hop and then walk home to find the mail. The mail kept arriving—addressed to a Mr. James Stone, let me make a call to Jimmy, okay?—piling in the iron slot, the bills and fliers and pleas for donations. She stacked it in a wire basket, made the daily gathering of the mail a sort of practice. It was like watching the birds. It was like tending to John, except John wa
s the one need that didn’t actually need tending. John did nothing.
Still, she counseled herself to pay attention. Change the sheets. Bring him soup. Take away the soup. Let nothing pass you by.
And it worked, to some degree it worked.
She started noticing things.
The empty house.
The empty bay with its brittle grasses.
The sky was gray with snow, downy and ill-lit, so thick it began to tear and fall. But what was it but water and air and light? What was anything but water and air and light and, perhaps, thickening dust?
The reducibility of things was astounding.
To fall in love with spareness—there were entire days it felt like a blessing.
Nights she would cut off her laptop, cross the cold floorboards, barefoot with a blanket slung over her shoulders. It would be two, maybe three in the morning, the glass door open a few necessary inches so that she could hear wind in the street, the barred owls that flew at dawn.
She wasn’t running anymore.
She wasn’t calling her parents or her brother or sister or Emma.
She was standing in the center of her life like a fool.
John asleep in the bedroom, or pretending to sleep, a foot protruding from beneath the heavy comforter.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Standing here.”
“Go to bed,” he told her.
Go, she thought, not come.
She stretched her walks, one hour, two hours, sometimes three. Houses everywhere but mostly empty. It felt more than seasonal: it felt permanent, the island abandoned. The beach shacks, the starfish painted on plaster, the stucco, the bead board, the three-story Victorians, fish-scaled and leaning back from the sea.
She started a list of questions she might ask John and then abandoned it, because honestly, why? The walk to the grocery store was over a mile along the cobblestones, half the length of the island, and instead of questions she listed items to be purchased. Soap, coffee, creamer—creamer was an indulgence. Shower curtain—she wrote the words shower curtain on her list.