A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (10 page)

She led Henry out to the office and through the front door. The bells on the door chimed, but otherwise everything was silent. No cars passed on the highway, and even the fluorescent lights in the parking lot seemed to have dimmed, casting only a faint pink light onto the motel's gray-brick walls. “I will sleep very well tonight, Mr. Henry. Thank you for your kindness. You will sleep well too. I know this.” She raised one hand, as if she were offering him, in the quiet of night, a final blessing, and Henry thought of Tomas Otxoa's description of the idiot Bernardo raising his hand like a priest making the sign of the cross before falling into the silo.
How would Tomas have known such a thing?

Henry looked down the row of rooms to the one that Latangi's husband had used as his study. He had no idea what he might do for Latangi, why his reading her husband's poems seemed to mean so much to her. He thought about his mother and Mrs. Broussard, about how his mother had wanted Mrs. Broussard to be beautiful, as beautiful as a princess. “What were you certain about, Latangi?” he asked again, slipping the key to Mohit's study into his pocket and removing his own key.

He waited as Latangi once again adjusted her sari. “I am certain, Mr. Henry, that they were waiting for you,” she said. “Perhaps you do not believe in such things, but there it is. I am certain that Mohit's words have been waiting for you.”

HE DID
not sleep well, despite Latangi's assurances, her benediction. He woke up again and again covered in sweat. The room's air conditioner seemed to have quit working, so he kicked away the covers and peeled off his soaked T-shirt. He lay there on his back, awake, restless, sore, his legs twitching. Even in the dark he could see the pattern of thick swirls on the ceiling, the same design as the one inside the old theater on Prytania Street where he and Amy had sometimes gone on Monday nights to watch double features of French melodramas or Scandinavian epics or corny Gene Kelly musicals.

Amy loved movies, though she'd told Henry when they'd first met that she didn't like severed limbs or bloody axes or skeletons, and she didn't like guns or car chases or abducted children or stories about sports, except the ones, she'd explained, where some athlete or team overcomes incredible odds. Documentaries were fine as long as they weren't about serial killers or sex-change operations or political assassinations or animal cruelty.

“I like wholesome movies, I guess,” she'd said, and Henry couldn't help but think about the sex they'd been having, the spectacularly unwholesome things they'd been up to.

“I've got it,” he'd said. “You sure that's the whole list?”

“And clowns,” Amy said. “I don't particularly care for clowns.”

He and Amy were often almost the only patrons at the Prytania, and Henry had felt the same restlessness there as he felt now, the same twitching in his legs. Amy had loved it, though. She had loved the theater's baroque gold doors and sticky concrete floor and dusty red-velvet curtains. She'd sworn that if she ever got rich she would buy an antique organ for the theater so they could play it during intermissions and on Tuesday nights when they showed silent movies, which Amy also loved.

Henry, of course, couldn't stand them. He could never follow their plots; he grew impatient with the black dialogue cards, or whatever they were called, that interrupted every scene; he was repulsed by the characters' jerky, exaggerated gestures and by their ghastly makeup, by the rake's shiny, twirling mustache and oily hair, by the virginal heroine's sparkling eyes ringed with dark mascara. They all looked like ghouls, he told Amy. Everything about these movies, in fact, made him feel tense, as if at any moment—and he hadn't meant the pun, though Amy had groaned and then laughed—something unspeakable might happen.

Eventually Henry stopped going to these Silent Tuesdays, as the theater called them, and Amy went alone or dragged along one of her friends, usually Renée Bergeron, a high-school buddy of Amy's who eventually married a much younger man, an Argentine tennis player she'd met when she was handling publicity for a tournament in New Orleans. Henry could never remember the player's name and so always called him Sancho Panza, which made Amy roll her eyes. “Pablo Sanchez, then?” Henry would say. “Pancho Stanza?”

“Paulo Suarez,” Amy would say, laughing. “You're such a jerk.”

Suarez was ranked something like one hundred fifty-second in the world, but Henry had actually seen one of his matches on ESPN. He'd called Amy over, pointed him out, but she hadn't seemed impressed. “Look at that,” she'd said. “Is he winning?” But she didn't say anything when Henry told her that he was up a service break in the third set, probably because his answer was inscrutable to her. She wandered away, left him to fight off the perverse impulse to cheer for the guy's opponent.

Amy didn't watch anything on television except for the same old movies they'd seen at the Prytania. Once, watching
Anna Karenina,
she'd begun crying as soon as Greta Garbo stepped off the train and her face emerged through the cloud of steam, and she cried practically the whole way through the rest of the movie. He couldn't bear to sit with Amy all the way to the end, when Anna threw herself beneath the train.

“It's just too awful,” he'd said, and Amy had nodded and whispered, “It is, it is,” sniffling and blowing her nose, but he'd meant watching Amy cry, seeing her splotched face, her tear-streaked cheeks, not Anna's fate. He'd never read
Anna Karenina,
of course, though he had read the Classics Illustrated comic-book version when he was a kid, Vronsky drawn to look just like Clark Gable, Anna like Lois Lane in a Victorian corset.

The only other thing Amy watched on TV was the Weather Channel, an inexplicable obsession to Henry but one that made Amy practically giddy, especially when the meteorologists were dispatched to dangerous locations, hoods pulled over their heads as they stood near crashing waves on North Carolina's Outer Banks or on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, a trailer park's tornado-strewn ruins in Ohio or Kansas, a giant snowdrift in Albany or Boston.

“This is supposed to be the Weather Channel,” Henry once pointed out when he spotted a vexed reporter crouching amid the overturned shelves of a grocery store in California, encircled by dented cans and shattered jars. “Earthquakes aren't weather, are they?”

“They
cause
weather,” Amy said matter-of-factly without taking her eyes from the screen, refusing to be distracted. But then she turned, smiled, and said, “You really don't know anything, do you?”

“I don't,” he confessed yet again—how many times would he have to say it?—but now he knew she wasn't listening. She was watching the somber reporter poking his microphone through the rubble as though the dented cans and shattered bottles might miraculously begin to recount their evening of terror for the camera. “I don't know anything,” he'd said.

Now he lay staring at the motel's ceiling. Why didn't he know anything? Why didn't anything except the random and inconsequential stick in his head? How was it that he remembered, word for word, the stories of an old man drinking gin and tonic in a run-down grocery store but not the things that mattered, the things that had happened to him, that had shaped his life, his one fuckup after another? He tried again to remember what he'd told Amy about buying the Fresh and Friendly, about why he'd moved out, about what he believed was wrong with his life, with their life together. But he could not reconstruct these conversations, could not remember a single thing he'd said. Instead, he remembered the way Amy pinched salt from a bowl when she was cooking, the imprint her heels left in her shoes, the crescent-shaped scar above her right knee, the red speck he'd once noticed in her left eye, at the edge of the iris, something she'd never noticed herself. He remembered the graceful arc of Pistol Pete Maravich's shots, his sagging gray socks, his jaw cocked to the side in concentration, the swan's neck his arm formed as the ball peeled off his fingertips; he remembered Mary singing in her bedroom, late one night, an Italian aria so beautiful he was sure that he understood the words, that he knew the story: a maiden's lament for a lover gone off to war and likely never to return. He remembered the ragged, uneven cuffs on his father's gray wool pants, the fancy script on the packs of Chesterfield he smoked, a girl named Elise whom Henry had slept with in college who had laughed derisively when she realized he hadn't taken off his socks (white tube socks with three red stripes at the top). He remembered old phone numbers; the taste of a high-school friend's mother's jambalaya; Melvin the butcher, lanky and slope-shouldered, wiping his hands on his apron and, looking past Henry to the blue sky outside the window, glumly declaring, “It'll probably go and rain tomorrow.”

And the girl. Here was the girl's voice—no, not her voice but someone else's, someone speaking to him.
Clarissa Nash learned the peculiar entanglement of love and disappearance the summer she turned twelve.
Was this from a book he'd once read? Was that all it was, all
she
was—a character from a book?

He remembered Amy stepping out of the shower, her skin scalded pig's-ass pink, as she'd once called it, steam rising from her shoulders and breasts, hair wild and tangled, knotted and roped. He'd wanted to screw her then, had wanted to screw her every time he saw her naked or his hand happened to fall against her bare hip when he rolled over in bed or he spotted her pulling a stocking up her leg as she sat on the low pillow chair by the bed. She looked like a French model casually posing for erotic photographs that seductively imitated ordinary domestic life.

Oh God. What an idiot he was to have given up this life. He was a numskull, a blockhead, a dunderbutt, a jackass, and he remembered Amy once lying in bed and compiling a hilarious list of all the names for penises, prodding him to do the same for—pointing between her legs—“here,” she'd said, spreading her legs. “This.”

He wouldn't.

“Come on!” she'd said, pinching him, making him swat her hand away again and again, the two of them rolling around on the bed. “Jackhammer,” she said in a breathy whisper, her ridiculous imitation of seduction. “Cock,” she said, running her tongue along her lips, “tallywhacker. Instrument”—she was laughing now, shouting—“dong, tool, rod, pole, prick!” And he held her arms as she squirmed beneath him, panting.

He pressed his weight down on her, pinned her legs, made her keep still. “Cunt?” she whispered into his ear. “Pussy? Snatch? Come on, Henry.
Please.
”

Had he heard it even then, when he was making love to Amy, fucking her? Had he heard his own voice speaking the name? It
was
his own voice, wasn't it?
Clarissa Nash,
it had said,
Clarissa Nash,
as if he were summoning this girl, as if he were not simply recounting her life but speaking it into being. His voice:
Everything Clarissa Nash knew emerged from the books she endlessly, passionately read: stories of orphans with inexplicable, nearly olive complexions, too dark for beauty; curly-haired and bone-thin waifs who were smart enough to know they deserved a kinder fate.
That must have been it, just some book he'd once read, some cheap trashy paperback, or worse—something highbrow, something literary, something he'd come across in graduate school? Was he rummaging through his own head, leaching another pointless memory from his brain, simply to come up with a woman—this woman—to imagine, with her schoolgirl breasts and peppermint smile, a low-rent version of Lolita—no, not to just imagine, of course. To imagine
fucking.

Oh God. It was all so pathetic. He couldn't sleep, couldn't shut down his despair, his disgust, his desire. He finally got up and tried to open the room's windows, but they were sealed shut. He got back into bed, where he drifted in and out of sleep, plagued by his utterly predictable dreams of wandering and dislocation, climbing winding narrow stairways of crumbling stone in a gloomy Spanish cathedral only to find himself again and again in the cathedral's dank crypt; hacking his way through a verdant forest filled with the stench of rotten fruit, the ground covered with a thick muck of bananas and mangoes and papayas; clinging to the listing prow of a sinking ship, the figurehead carved, like a garish Mardi Gras float, into the form of the elephant god Ganesh, the waves swelling again and again over his head, the roofs of houses bobbing up out of the water all around him. On one of these roofs sat Bob Dylan, black boot heels anchored against the shingles—and even in the midst of this dream Henry felt the urge to laugh at how idiotic it had all become, with the elephant-head prow and Dylan strumming a guitar, singing in his nasally whine Skip James's “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.”

Henry couldn't hear him, though. He couldn't hear anything. The monotonous voice that had accompanied these dreams was gone, replaced by an equally suffocating silence, and he found himself behind the wheel of his car, driving for hours and hours along some barren stretch of highway, unable to find a place to pull over but so tired he couldn't keep his eyes open. Then the old man, the prisoner with the frazzled gray hair and beard, appeared out of nowhere, standing with outstretched arms directly in front of his car. And now there
was
sound, as if a switch had been turned on: he heard the awful thud of impact and the old man's piercing, anguished scream and then his final groaning breath, blood bubbling from the corner of his mouth, spilling a jagged line down his chin and through his beard and along his throat until it had soaked his shirt.
Enough,
he heard someone say, a woman's voice, and the word began to echo as though it had become an incantation, the one voice multiplying into a dozen voices, a thousand, too many to count, though he could hear Amy's voice and Latangi's among the chorus and then his mother's voice and Mary's and then the girl's, of course, Clarissa Nash's, a child's voice, taunting, playful, seductive—but he didn't want to hear it.
A man is dead,
he said, and he said it over and over again until he managed to tear himself from the dream, make himself wake up.

He sat up in bed, panicked, still drenched in sweat. He was certain that when the sheriff arrived this morning he would tell Henry that he'd changed his mind, that he'd examined the evidence and found that Henry had been responsible after all, that he would have to be charged with the old man's murder.
Whose murder?
Henry thought, and he realized that he did not know, had not even asked, the old man's name. They must have told him, must have given Henry the man's name, but he couldn't remember it. He needed to call someone—Mary or Amy, it didn't matter. He needed to call someone and say,
I'm here. I'm alone. A man is dead. I don't even know his name.

He didn't have a phone, though; he looked at the nightstand next to the bed. There wasn't a phone there. Didn't every motel, no matter how run down or lousy, have phones in the rooms? Wasn't there some law or regulation that required them for public safety? Or maybe he was the only person left in the world who didn't have a cell phone, who had never had one. He needed money, needed cash, but all he had left in his wallet were a couple of twenties and a few singles. No ATM card, no Visa or MasterCard or American Express—he'd gotten rid of them all when he moved out, one more idiotic step in his insane, relentless purging. He still had a checkbook, but that was in the glove compartment of his car, and his car was gone, towed away. What in the hell was he going to do? He needed to get out of this fucked-up, cheap-shit, no-phone motel, out of Virginia.