American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  Sigrid yanks the suitcase up the three steps to the front door, raps loudly, and then waits.

  As she waits she cannot help but look at the house. It is truly awful. It is also big; More than one person needs. But how do you split something like this? And with whom? A local motorcycle gang? Surely they’d have parked on the lawn.

  Sigrid bangs the crap out of the door and hollers in Norwegian.

  “Marcus, wake up. It’s Sigrid.”

  She stands back and waits for the door to open.

  It doesn’t.

  Leaving the suitcase on the doorstep, she hops down the steps and crawls over browning bushes and around the corner of the house to see inside the first window she can reach.

  There is some kind of steel mesh in front of the window—something she’s never seen before. It makes it very hard to look inside. Through its rust and the crust of cobwebs she half expects to see gangsters, drug mules, and cockroaches playing cards while sipping Budweiser.

  Sigrid has raided places like this before. Nothing good has ever opened the door.

  He isn’t inside. Nor is anyone else. No need to loiter in the bushes anymore.

  Turning to pull herself out of there, Sigrid accidentally snags her purse on a branch. Had she been in a more forgiving mood she might have stepped forward to remove the strap from the twig and better navigated the minor inconvenience. But this is not what she does, because her mood does not permit it. That mood has been shaped by the house itself and its surroundings, by Marcus and his choices, by the bad breakfast that has left her fat and greasy, by the jet lag, by China’s trial-and-error approach to the manufacturing of consumer goods. And in such a mood, she tugs at the bag to teach the twig who is boss.

  The twig proves stronger than expected and the purse more slippery. This transforms the twig into a catapult and her purse into a missile. In flight it glides through the air with a sleek Italian elegance; on impact, though, the fancy is ended and the bag splits like a severed head, splattering its contents all over the road.

  Sigrid surveys the results of her choices and swears in the choice language of a seafaring nation.

  As Sigrid continues her auto-rant, a woman from across the street emerges from the shadow of the off-ramp. Sigrid, on seeing her, stops swearing.

  “He ain’t here, ya know,” she says in an accent that seems more southern than northern, but Sigrid is no real judge of these things.

  “Who?” Sigrid asks.

  “Marcus? You said Marcus like twenty times. I’m saying: He. Ain’t. Here.”

  She is a hooker. She has to be. No matter the country, hookers dress the same. The only logic Sigrid can find to this universality is that they are meeting men’s expectations of what hookers are supposed to look like. But men have learned this from the hookers themselves. Could it be that everyone wants it to stop but no one can turn it off?

  Her miniskirt is made of purple sequins. Her stomach is exposed to no positive effect. Her tank-top presses so tightly against her enormous chest that the wires of her bra have become smiles beneath her boobs—each with an unblinking eye above; they sit there, together, like demented cyclops twins.

  “Who are you and how do you know that Marcus isn’t here?” Sigrid asks.

  “I’m just sayin’,” the woman says.

  Sigrid says nothing and the woman—being American—fills the lull:

  “He hasn’t been here since he moved out. He’s gone. He ain’t com­in’ back.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  The woman crosses her arms and takes a defiant stance. “Who the hell are ya, anyway?”

  “I’m his sister.”

  “Oh yeah? Where you from?”

  “Earth,” Sigrid’s mood answers. She regrets it the moment she says it, but the pleasure was undeniable.

  “He’s foreign. If you’re his sister, you’d know.”

  That is true. The woman has made a valid point.

  “Norway,” says Sigrid as a reward for reason.

  The prostitute’s face softens through the industrial putty of her makeup.

  “Look,” she says, defensively. “He gave me his key. Said I could stay there when he was gone. I asked when he was coming back and he said he wasn’t sure if he was ever coming back and I said, Well, what about your shit? He said none of it was worth a damn but the guitar and books. He said I could keep the books and I made a face like he was fuckin’ with me—cuz, what? I’m gonna read ’em?—and he said I could burn ’em in winter if I wanted, but I ain’t burnin’ no books whether I’m gonna read ’em or not and I asked if he wanted to fuck and he said no and I asked if it was on account of that woman who died. He said it was, which seemed kinda sad. In my experience, fucking is the sixth stage of grief but no one ever asks me about it, though I am an expert. Now I’m staying here, which is totally legal and aboveboard and I don’t want any crap about it, OK? But if you’ve come for his stuff you can have it. I ain’t no thief.”

  “Died? Who died?”

  “That fancy woman he was seeing. Talked about her all time. Loved her something fierce.”

  “The woman Marcus loved died?”

  “You’ve got that echolalia or something? I seen a woman like you on Oprah. Kept repeating the last thing anybody said. Echolalia.”

  “Echolalia?”

  “Yeah, you got it bad,” the woman says. “You a little retarded? Autistic or such?”

  “I’m foreign,” says Sigrid, refilling her purse.

  The woman seemed to accept this as a reasonable synonym. “Yeah. Marcus’s girl. She up and died.”

  “Died?”

  “Yes, died,” she says, starting to laugh. “Fuck me, how do you get through your day? Say this: ‘Dude, where’s my car?’”

  “How did she die?” asks Sigrid.

  “Oh well . . . yeah, I don’t know. He didn’t say. But it broke his heart and he decided to pack it all up and take off. And now . . .” she says, opening her arms for dramatic emphasis, “here we are.”

  “I need to get in and look around.”

  The woman looks at her wristwatch. It’s sized for a man and made of gold-colored plastic.

  “I don’t have much time,” the woman says.

  With her purse full again, Sigrid walks around the corner of the house and back to the steps by the front door. The woman follows her. As she does, she pulls her skirt down after every third step, fighting its inclination to become a cummerbund.

  At the door the hooker removes a rabbit’s foot key ring from her purse and opens the lock. The stale smell of shag carpet hits Sigrid and gives her pause before she steps in.

  “Where’s my suitcase?” she asks.

  “What suitcase?”

  “Black. Cheap. Broken wheel.”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Has anyone else been here?” Sigrid asks.

  “Wait a second. You left your suitcase on the steps. Here?”

  “Shit.”

  “Earth, huh?”

  The Defining Characteristics of Gum

  Despite being on a tight schedule, the woman in the midmorning sequins wants to talk to Sigrid. “What do you want in here, anyway?”

  “Do you know where Marcus is?”

  “I told you. He’s gone.”

  “I understand that, but do you know where he went?”

  “I figured he went home.”

  Sigrid does not reply.

  “To your home,” the woman clarifies. “Norway.”

  “I checked there.”

  Sigrid resists the impulse to take off her shoes because she doesn’t want to prompt a new round of intercultural conversation, but she is careful about where she places her feet. Taking her smartphone from the scuffed Italian purse, she snaps pictures.

  “You a cop or something?” the woman says.

  “I’m on vacation,” Sigrid says, clicking away liberally.

  “You act like a cop.”

  “I’m trying to find him. I don’
t know all the right questions to ask yet. I’m collecting information broadly so that later, when I do build an investigative strategy, I’ll have material to consider, informed by a framework.”

  “That doesn’t sound like what they do on TV,” says the woman.

  “It’s not.”

  In the course of her career as a beat cop and later an investigator, Sigrid has been inside many homes. Most adults are invited into the homes of friends and neighbors and family, but that is a limited social and economic range of homes, and the frequency curve on new locations flattens out the older people get. The simple fact is that most adults seldom enter new spaces on a regular basis. Cops, though, are in new places all the time. Domestic disturbances, abuse, murder, missing children . . . they are all invitations to the wider world.

  The house does not look like the typical bachelor homes she often saw in Norway during her time as a beat cop. Then, she used to visit drunks or occasionally drop them off at home. One apartment after another was filled with IKEA furniture bought from the discounted corner near the cashier for being damaged or having pieces missing; the disposable income spent on a TV too big for the room and placed like a god in its center; video game consoles with white and black cords intermingling like interracial robots; Grandiosa frozen pizzas in ordered stacks in the freezer; boxes of wine sorted like ammunition in the pantry.

  Marcus’s living room does not look like this. He has placed two brown three-seater sofas across from each other and a large wooden coffee table between them as though for a summit of some kind. The crumbs and detritus under the cushions, however, prove that he always sat alone and in the same spot; a spot that does not face a television. Instead, and nearby, is a teetering stack of books piled with the spines facing in all directions.

  “Was Marcus depressed?” Sigrid asks, running a finger across the windows and wiping the dirt on the upholstery of the sofa.

  “He was sad.”

  “I don’t know if that’s different,” Sigrid says.

  “Me either,” the woman whispers.

  Upstairs the woman guides Sigrid through the two bedrooms. In the master, she explains how she’d put everything of Marcus’s that looked valuable or useful into the same boxes she’d used for the move. Sigrid decides not to ask where she moved from because it seems tangential. The number of boxes tells Sigrid that she has taken the move seriously and is intending to stay for a long time; the same length of time she expects Marcus to be gone.

  Her name is Juliet McKenna; it is printed in capital letters on every box in purple marker.

  “They got my name on ’em,” she explains unnecessarily. “That’s why the cops didn’t touch ’em.”

  “What cops?”

  “The ones who came here with a warrant and looked around. Didn’t we talk about this already? No. Well . . . Irving. Irving the cop. And that little sidekick who follows him around? I forget her name. They were trying to find Marcus. I didn’t tell them anything, though. I told them not to touch my shit unless my name’s on the warrant. And it wasn’t. That backed them off.”

  “The police were here looking for Marcus?”

  “I can’t tell if you’re summing up or trying to catch on.”

  “When and why?”

  “A week ago. Listen, you can’t just pump me for information without . . .”

  “Are you telling me that Marcus was seeing a fancy woman, that the woman died, Marcus disappeared, and that the cops came here with a warrant looking for him, and went through his stuff?”

  “You’re repeating shit again.”

  “Who’s Irving?” Sigrid asks.

  “Irving Wylie,” she says. “Irv.”

  “OK.”

  “The sheriff.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “About what?”

  “Sheriff Irving Wylie? You have sheriffs here?”

  “Police station. Center of town. Can’t miss it.” She looks at her watch and says, “Oh shit, I’ve got a date. Don’t fuck up anything while I’m gone.”

  Juliet leaves Sigrid in peace, and she takes the opportunity to not only see her surroundings but try to feel them. The bedroom is furnished in earth tones and shadows, with the single window facing the busy off-ramp of cars. The kinetic energy of the world outside underscores the static space of the room, and the absence of whatever life has previously been experienced here.

  Juliet has already removed most of Marcus’s clothes from the closet and stuffed them in her JULIET MCKENNA boxes. Sigrid sees how unceremonious her efforts had been once she opens them with the Buck lock-blade knife she finds on the dresser and decides to keep, as it must have been Marcus’s.

  The contents are mostly balled-up casual clothes, though she does find a good blue suit and leather shoes tossed in with the rest.

  In the third box Sigrid finds a sling bag—the kind with one strap that cuts across the chest and is popular with bicycle messengers—and decides to keep that. She has no clothing now with the suitcase gone, but there may be enough here to help her make do until she can visit a store.

  She had been hoping to stumble on something of Lydia’s, but there is nothing. Given the state of the house, that doesn’t surprise her, but there is a good chance that the condition of the apartment has deteriorated over the past month. Maybe Lydia had come here during better times.

  Marcus has always been taller than her, and while he isn’t particularly athletic he does have a lean build. He never had much of a belly. Everything he owns, however, is decidedly too big for her. Nevertheless, she finds a slim black T-shirt that will work, a gray sweatshirt she can sleep in, some sweatpants, a pair of gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, a mobile phone, and a dated but seemingly functioning iPod. Most important, though: an orange hard drive that has been rolled up inside a Rush T-shirt that displays the word SIGNALS above a photo of a Dalmatian sniffing a fake red hydrant on a tuft of Astroturf.

  She flips the bag across her chest and heads downstairs.

  In the kitchen Sigrid checks the fridge and freezer. In the living room she flips through the books—a collection of novels, environmentalist textbooks, popular nonfiction, and biographies. Nothing particularly personal remains, and the house is devoid of the small knickknacks and memorabilia that tend to accumulate around the aged, sentimental, or lazy.

  There is one sign of life, though. In the corner of the living room, a meter to the left of the boarded fireplace, is Marcus’s acoustic guitar. It is the same one he played as a teenager. Sigrid does not know much about guitars, but this one is easy to recognize by its color. It is made of a beautiful mahogany and the headstock says MARTIN AND CO. EST. 1833. She bought it for him, used, the Christmas of 1981, when he turned nineteen and Sigrid was thirteen. The money came from a summer working at an adventure-tourism outfit, rigging ropes and cables from trees so that urban people could test their fear of heights and trust in one another.

  The guitar is leaning at an unnatural slant on its stand. Scanning the room, she finds its hard case with its assortment of stickers from Marcus’s favorite bands and visited cities, as well as from airline security. Marcus wasn’t a particularly good guitarist but he wasn’t that bad either; he could strum a tune and carry a song. There has always been a warmth and sincerity to his voice that allowed him to find and share the simple melody at the center of a song and make the moment more complete. He played alone in his old bedroom when he came to visit. She would sit in the hall and listen, eavesdropping to feel closer to him.

  Sigrid puts the guitar in its case and locks it. This is coming too.

  Geared up, Sigrid steps outside into the shade and noise to find Juliet walking toward her while slotting cash into a wallet.

  She’s chewing a piece of gum.

  “Wouldn’t you prefer mouthwash?” Sigrid asks.

  “I got gum.”

  “Yeah, but . . . gum’s defining characteristics are that it doesn’t dissolve and it retains flavor.”

  “What’s your point?”r />
  “Marcus’s girlfriend was named Lydia,” Sigrid says. “Did you ever meet her?”

  “No.”

  “See her?”

  “No.”

  Juliet chews away and Sigrid cannot help but visualize what must be happening between her molars. All those tiny white heads—exploding.

  “Do you want to help him?” Sigrid asks.

  “How?”

  “I’m alone over here, and I suspect Marcus is alone wherever he is, too. And something I’m sure about is that it’s almost impossible to do anything hard all by yourself. I might need help at some point. I’m going to give you some money in case something comes up. The idea is, I pay you now for help later. I’ll give you my number. What do you think?”

  Juliet takes the money.

  “Which way is the police station?” Sigrid asks.

  Sheriff Irving Wylie

  At the police station, a few miles down the road from Marcus’s house, Sheriff Irving Wylie is yelling into his phone at Roger Mandel. He is yelling because he likes to, because it is morally justified, and because he can’t help himself. Or he probably wouldn’t be able to help himself if he tried, but since he likes to yell at Roger he’ll never really know for certain whether he could have stopped or not.

  Roger calls himself a journalist at WRGT, a local ABC news affiliate. Irving isn’t prepared for the word “journalist” to be so elastic as to stretch to Roger Mandel.

  Irv is two years into his second four-year term as a Jefferson County, New York, state sheriff and he would have thought, by now, that he’d have trained the local journalists about what kinds of questions he is willing to answer and what kinds will get them ridiculed, humiliated, embarrassed, or yelled at by their producers, spouses, or mothers.

  It still tickles Irving that these morons call him, time and time again, trying to get quotes about cases that are either ongoing, outside his jurisdiction, or ones he’s simply not in the mood to talk about. Law and order, he has explained during lucid rants, doesn’t mean the draconian oppression of the population or the cynical manipulation of public opinion to create a condition of tyranny. No. The simple idea is this: You follow the law to produce the order. That’s the part he likes. That’s why he took the job. That and the title. And the boots. And the pea shooter.