The Reconstructionist

by Nick Arvin

  The girl started out of the minivan, stopped, waved. ‘Come on. Mom’s here.’

  A fibreglass storm door on a spring clapped loudly behind him. The mother, a lank and weathered woman in a denim shirt, said to the girl, ‘There you are,’ and ignoring Ellis she rattled through a speech of reprimand – How can you wander off without telling me? Don’t you know I worry? – in a tone of saying a thing that had been said before and would be said again without expectation of effect. Then she looked at the headlamp assembly. ‘Four bucks. Maybe.’ She turned to Ellis. ‘Thanks for bringing her back. You want coffee?‘

  Ellis refused. The accident that he described, between the semi and the Dodge, sounded familiar, she said, but there were a lot of accidents, they ran together. He asked about Boggs, but she only shrugged and smiled, the headlamp still in her hands. ‘I don’t know where she finds these things,’ she said.

  She had unnaturally white teeth, hollow cheeks. She smiled and smiled, and when Ellis looked around, the girl had vanished. He thought of Boggs out there alone, and he wrenched around on one heel, toward the door, calling out apologies and goodbye.

  No rain. The puddles showed fragments of sky in the gravel. As he crossed to the minivan, the girl wandered out from behind a Subaru Brat rusting along the door sills. A boy who appeared to be a couple of years younger trailed her, wearing a bandanna around his neck like a cowboy.

  ‘I bet I know how you can find your friend,’ the girl said.

  ‘Your mom didn’t know anything.’

  ‘I have a technique,’ she said.

  ‘Really.’ He looked for her to smirk, but she only nodded. He felt tired and drained of resistance and ideas. He shrugged.

  They passed between rough rows of vehicles lying side by side, spaced just far enough apart to allow the doors to swing a few inches, cars and trucks caved, twisted, pierced, burned, or freed of doors, hood, wheels, trunk lid, roof or fenders. Like bodies gathered after battle. Like a sorting of things before the rendering of final judgement. Drops of rainwater clung to the sheet metal, puddled in the dents. The girl and the boy walked ahead, and the boy’s steps clicked oddly – he was wearing tap shoes. And Ellis heard occasional shrill voices calling in other parts of the junkyard, words he could not make out.

  A pile of rusting wheels. A pile of drive shafts. Somewhere a train moved, pushing vibrations that caused the entire field of vehicles to shimmer. Ellis lagged behind. It was easy to imagine that in any slightly different life he would never have come here.

  The girl slowed and spoke without looking: the back of her head speaking to him. ‘The thing is, dead people don’t just go away. Things don’t just disappear. Things leave an effect. Souls leave an effect. And here we have a bunch of things that have the traces of souls. They’re not obvious. Maybe they’re only the effects of effects or the traces of traces, you know? But it’s not that hard to bring them out.’

  Ellis hardly knew where to begin with this.

  ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘it can’t hurt.’

  Ellis asked, ‘Are you talking about ghosts?’

  She glanced back. ‘Boo!’ Then she turned into a cul-de-sac and stopped before a Monte Carlo – crimson paint, gold trim, the interior upholstered in beige. The paint gleamed, the tyres held air. But the passenger door had been forced deep into the vehicle, as if staved in by a battering ram. The girl opened the driver’s door. She looked at Ellis.

  ‘What?’ Ellis said.

  ‘You’ll have to sit here.’

  Ellis looked at his watch. The day had advanced into mid-afternoon. Overhead, clouds still dominated. ‘Are you sure you haven’t seen a big guy with a beard?’ Ellis asked. ‘Whatever he paid you, I’ll pay double.’

  ‘Don’t you want to find your friend?’

  He peered inside. Colourful paraphernalia covered the dashboard and the pale seat fabric was spattered with stains. He tried to remember – he seemed to have no instinctive sense of himself any more – if in the past this was the sort of situation he would have extracted himself from. The stains appeared to be blood. An enormous blotching covered the passenger seat, which was distorted by the impacted door. He waited for the girl to say something ridiculous that would spur him away. But she said nothing.

  The driver’s seat held him as softly as a plush sofa. Gold braid and tassels ran around the windshield glass; cards printed with the images of saints hung from the ceiling; figurines of crudely painted plastic stood on the dash holding swords, sceptres or birds; faux leopard skin wrapped the steering wheel; a bust of a weeping Virgin dangled from the rear-view mirror. The sun had faded the colours of the cards and figurines. The leopard skin was soiled at three and nine o’clock. A small stain of, again, blood marked the chin of the Virgin.

  ‘What now?’ he asked.

  She closed the door. ‘Put your hands on the wheel.’ She circled to the front and she looked at him down the length of the hood. ‘Ask your question.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The one you want answered.’

  ‘Who’s going to answer it?’

  ‘That’s a stupid question. That’s not the question you want answered.’

  He looked around the car once more.

  ‘Ask your question,’ she said.

  ‘Where is Boggs?’ he said. ‘How do I find him?’

  ‘One question. Repeat it one hundred and eleven times.’

  He laughed. But she waited with a dark gaze. ‘How do I find Boggs?’ he said. He began to repeat it.

  The boy with the bandanna had disappeared. The girl bent and came up with a rubber mallet. She swung it at the hood, and it bounced away with a crash that sent the entire steel body of the car into a short, resonating shriek. ‘Keep going!’ she yelled and lifted and swung, lifted and swung, in rhythm with the repeated question. Then, with a bang, an answering percussion began – in the mirror Ellis saw a boy, not the boy with the bandanna but a sleepy-eyed blond boy, swinging a pair of croquet mallets at the trunk. The noise was painfully loud. Then the boy with the bandanna reappeared, running up the hood, scrambling onto the roof, and the tap shoes began striking there like falling ball bearings. Ellis cringed. But the noise had begun to generate a rhythm of patterns within patterns, and the hanging cards jiggled and turned, the tinsel and the gold braid shimmered and sparked, the Virgin bobbled and the noise beat a rhythm in Ellis’s core. He could no longer hear himself chanting the question – How do I find Boggs? – so that it seemed to sound only in his mind. The boy on the roof began to rock the car on its springs – saints swayed, the fur-wrapped steering wheel shook in Ellis’s hands.

  He had no idea how many times he had repeated his question when the girl yelled, ‘Shut your eyes!’ He did. Effects echoed and buzzed, waves of pressure moved in him. At some point he had stopped mumbling his question. The terrible splitting havoc went on and on. He had to admit, if anything could shift the substance of the world off its rational foundation, this might be it.

  Then it stopped.

  Silence.

  ‘Listen for it!’ the girl shouted.

  He wondered, For?

  For the voice of the person or persons who had been in this car? The voices from all the accidents he had studied and reconstructed? The voices from all the accidents everywhere, ever, from Bridget Driscoll at the Crystal Palace and onward? The accidents in this way became a mathematical progression past counting. Meanwhile a noise skimmed the edge of his awareness, a modulating of frequencies and a havoc of tempo, imagined, a fire in the ears. Before him hung shining pinwheels, depthless drifting auroras. He trembled. If time could fall away, if he could look in all directions, where would he look? But he could not even keep his thoughts focused on Boggs. Instead, he thought of Heather, with an aching.

  Then he realised, with a dull internal settling, that he could not believe in this business of the traces of spirits and souls. Even after allowing himself to be brought this far, his mind shaken and emotional, some crucial part of him knew that this was nonse
nse. He experienced this knowledge as a flaw in himself. He seemed empty, lacking belief in a soul and therefore almost certainly without the possession of one.

  A breeze hissed on the sharp edges of the car. There seemed a rhythm in it, too. Whisperings. A warble of metal ripping in the faint distance.

  ‘Human factors analysis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘People don’t assess speed, it’s hard to assess speed. We assess the gap. The gap between vehicles, the gap available to cross or turn.’

  Darkness. ‘Boggs?’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘No. No, I’m not happy.’

  ‘Are you depressed, Ellis?’

  ‘I’m not happy.’

  ‘Are you sad?’

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Do you have feelings of guilt?’

  Just before, the pallid, wrecked face of James Dell had been declaiming on the perversity of fortune with respect to the allocation of individual appearances, and as he spoke his left eye swivelled strangely with a cheerful ringing noise, then popped from the socket and hung on its nerve bundle. Behind James Dell, guffawing, stood Christopher, freshly burned. But that had been a dream. ‘Boggs,’ Ellis said.

  ‘Are you proud?’

  ‘Boggs. Stop.’

  ‘Are you self-conscious? Self-doubting?’

  Ellis said yes. He had fumbled and answered the phone still half asleep, confused as to place and time, responding automatically to the noise of the ring. He began to register how complete the darkness around him was. He put a hand forward and felt a fur-wrapped steering wheel.

  ‘Self-loathing? Have you had thoughts of killing yourself?’

  Ellis waited.

  ‘It’s been interesting to drive and think.’

  Ellis waited, but Boggs said nothing more, and Ellis finally said, ‘All right. What are you thinking?’

  ‘The road is a place where you know you might die at any instant. Right? It’s a part of the nature of driving. On some level we’re always aware of death as we drive. It’s actually a part of why we like to be on the road. The possibility of an accident, of drama, of death, which is absent from our lives otherwise. Modern life is deathless, we expect that we will grow old and shuffle away to an assisted living facility where we can expire in obscurity. Is that really what we want, deep in our brains? Maybe something will happen on the road, now, or now, or now. You see? It provides an element of ultimate risk, and we desire risk. How many thousands die each year? I’ll tell you: more than forty thousand, just in America. How many of them might be saved if only the speed limit were reduced ten miles an hour? It’s less interesting that we slow to rubberneck the car crash on the side of the road than that we speed up again as soon as we’re past it. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.’ He hummed a few notes of the theme from CHiPs. ‘Seventy-two in a sixty-five zone,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what you’re doing now?’

  ‘Let’s allow a perception-reaction time of, say, two point five seconds, to get on the brake. And then braking. I’ll be a full foot-ball field and more down the road before I can stop this thing. Where are you?’

  ‘In a junkyard. What time is it?’ Ellis asked.

  ‘It’s almost four.’

  ‘A.m.?’

  ‘No -’

  ‘In the afternoon?’ Ellis pulled the door handle, pushed the door. It swung partly open. A heavy tarpaulin lay over the car. He allowed the door to click shut.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  Ellis let the question float. Then he said again, ‘Boggs.’

  ‘Witnesses are unreliable. The car flipped six times, went fifty feet in the air, did a triple lutz! Always prefer the physical evidence over testimony, Ellis.’

  ‘Right. Right. Sure. Why are we talking about this?’

  ‘You’re wondering, does a suicide actually talk about death? Wouldn’t someone intent on taking his life talk around death, the way we talk around whatever is nearest to heart? I wonder, too. It’s refreshing. I’m used to knowing what I’ll do. Does this sound insincere? Is it getting under your skin. God, I hope so. You’re still on the road? Still following me?’

  ‘I’m trying to,’ Ellis said, staring at the darkness.

  ‘You do love your subtle distinctions.’

  ‘Tell me where you are. Wright? Wright twenty-nine eighty-two? Wright thirty thirty-five? The one with the hood ornament in the eye?’

  ‘Give up.’

  ‘I’m going to find you.’

  ‘This isn’t about you,’ Boggs said. ‘I’ve known about you and Heather for a long while. She always had the sheets from that RV in the laundry. It isn’t about that. What I’m doing is about me.’

  ‘How long have you known?’

  Boggs said nothing. Ellis knew he was unlikely to get from Boggs anything that Boggs didn’t want to give. He tried to listen for background noise, but he heard only a faint high whine that seemed a lingering effect of the hammering on the car. Ellis said, ‘If this isn’t about me and Heather, what is it?’

  ‘Well, maybe that was a lie. Maybe I was just trying to puncture your self-importance.’

  ‘You really knew?’

  ‘Come on, any asshole would have known. I should have known the minute you sat for your interview and you didn’t dare mention my wife’s name, even though she was the only reason you were there. But I thought you were too shy to try anything.’

  ‘You let it go on, after you knew?’ Ellis said.

  Then Boggs hung up.

  When he stood out of the car he was alone in long aisles of devastated vehicles. The grey sky lay close. The gate had been locked. He moved along the fence until he came to a Ford Excursion, climbed onto the roof, dropped over the fence. He would not have been surprised to find his minivan gutted, its parts spreading across the city. But it stood as he had left it. He eased slowly along the driveway to the road, then pushed fast, as if he were stealing it.

  He returned to the access road beside the interstate where he had parked before, and he parked again and listened for some minutes to the bluster of the traffic. Then he went from business to business, enquiring if anyone had seen a man of Boggs’s description. None had. He walked the top of the embankment, looking again for the accident’s specific location, without success. It came to him that the girl was wrong: all things did not necessarily leave a trace, and even traces were not immortal; eventually the dead were absolutely forgotten, eventually the places where they died became merely places.

  Sliding in the mud he went down and searched along the shoulder once more. The clouds had cleared and as he walked with the traffic he squinted into the sun. He recalled that the driver of the semi that had struck the Dodge had talked to the police about the sun in his face before he jackknifed.

  But the accident had occurred in the a.m.

  And therefore he was on the wrong side of the interstate.

  He scrambled up the embankment, drove to the access road on the interstate’s opposite side, parked in front of a Shell station. He remembered this Shell – when he and Boggs were here, they had parked in the same place. Boggs had gone inside and bought a hot dog from the rotating rack. Ellis had laughed at it, and Boggs had said gravely as he ate, ‘Sweet porcine flesh.’

  He crossed the access road and studied the ground. A pen cap. A black plastic garbage bag. A dirt-crusted wine bottle. Items cleansed of histories. And, here, the same tyre mark from the VFW parking lot.

  He examined it a minute, then ground his heel into it and went back to the minivan.

  On a map he put down Xs on Wright jobs. He was stunned to see how many there had been, and he feared he was forgetting more. Minutes passed, his mind wandered, another memory appeared, and he marked an X. Xs lay in all directions from here, and where to go next was unclear. He couldn’t think of anything to do but pick one.

  He stopped for the night in an empty corner of a Wal-Mart parking lot. He phoned Heather. ‘Love,’ he said.

  ‘Stop s
aying that,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think you know if you love me.’

  ‘Why are you saying this?’

  She was crying. He was glad that at least she was crying.

  ‘You’re cold,’ he said.

  Somehow, it sounded like a joke, and she laughed. ‘Then I wonder, what do I want?’ she said. ‘Is it that I can’t even have love without questioning it until it becomes something else?’

  ‘Questioning,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know.’

  He said, ‘Are you sure you can’t talk about Christopher?’

  ‘I’m going to hang up now,’ she said, ‘but you understand that you deserve it, right?’

  ‘Please, I don’t -’

  ‘Let’s talk later. I can’t now.’ She hung up.

  He called her again, but she did not answer, and he smashed the cellphone against the steering wheel, repeatedly, until it had broken into several pieces. Then he looked at the pieces and regretted it. He gathered the pieces and put them in a cup holder.

  When he closed his eyes his thoughts clawed at one another in a kind of terrible dreaming. A tap on the window woke him. A security guard told him to go on. Ellis asked about the RVs parked nearby, and the guard said, ‘RVs allowed, cars not allowed.’ Ellis stared at the young man, but the absurdity did not seem to penetrate.

  ‘This is a minivan,’ Ellis said.

  ‘Minivans not allowed.’

  He drove on, down an unknown road, into darkness, trees flickering at the periphery. He saw no good prospect for stopping. His eyelids trembled.

  The asphalt ended and he continued into the darkness on gravel and jarring washboard ruts. A glow appeared in the distance. A hand-painted sign, illuminated with floodlights, said ‘The Cricket Bar’. A bar seemed like a good place to rest – if he were questioned he could claim to be sleeping off his drinks. The bar itself appeared to be little more than a hut of weathered wood. He stopped in a far corner of the rutted parking lot, nosed into some brush, away from the handful of cars and trucks clustered around the building, where a couple of windows showed small, dim light. He could faintly hear voices. Cicadas screaming. No music. No one came or went from the building.