Ghost Lights (6 page)

He mainly supervised the process these days, of course. A technicality.

Sal was picking all of the bay leaves out of his leftover soup and placing them one by one, with a wiping motion, on his placemat. Hal found himself captivated by the process. Its repugnance was bold. Practically courageous.

Was Sal insane, actually?

“Honey, we should talk about this,” said Susan.

“You need someone you can trust,” said Hal, a bit severely. He knew himself for a liar, because she could not trust him now, not when he was angry. Not at all. But
honey
? The nerve of the woman. “You need a known quantity. There’s nothing more to discuss.”

There was a silence, the guests chewing their food. Possibly they were simply bored. Hal noticed again that his beer bottle was empty; at the same time Nancy reached for a saltshaker and knocked her wineglass over. Red wine flowed and then dripped over the edge of the table.

“I’m getting up anyway. I’ll get something to clean that with,” said Hal.

“Daddy, I think it’s brave of you,” said Casey softly. “I do. Volunteering like that.”

He felt a rush of tenderness toward her as he rounded the end of the table behind her chair and looked down at the golden cap of hair on her head, neat and small and shining—but then she too was deceiving him, albeit to a lesser degree. From now on, in his nightmares, she would say “I’m a slut” . . .

Not words to reassure a parent. No indeed.

It was settled: he would fly away from all of it and that would leave the field wide open, he reflected as he went into the kitchen. He had already forgotten what he came for . . . a rag? A rag for cleaning up the spilt wine. And a beer for drinking. He didn’t care if he drove home at all; he would be happy to fall asleep here. Too drunk to drive would be, the more he thought about it, a very neat solution . . . of course Susan had her own car, but he could claim he did not want to leave his here, didn’t want to have to come back for it in the morning. He would get so goddamn drunk no one could reason with him.

Then he would get into a plane and leave the field wide open; the field was crammed with paralegals, all of them stoutly armed with condoms.

Possibly, he reflected, Susan and Robert had an Oedipal relationship. She was, after all, twice his age.

Here also he would leave the fat, ugly men on phone-sex lines, grunting and jerking off as they listened to his baby girl.

It was all crumbling. No one had his back anymore, no one was with him. Not a single person. All he felt at his back was a cold wind, a falling-off into nothing. As he left, an abyss yawned behind him. He’d nearly been swept in.

Before him, the ground would be more solid. Anyway there was nothing more Susan could do to him once he was far away—nothing she wasn’t already doing.

His own bed, slow and lavish afternoons.

• • • • •

A
lthough she made the arrangements for him dutifully he could feel Susan’s shock reverberate throughout the day. It was gratifying, in a minor way. She had not let him pass out alone at Casey’s as he preferred to, had insisted on sleeping alongside him in the guest room. But still he had crept away from the dinner early, three glasses of wine and two rapidly quaffed beers under his belt behind the two whiskeys, and collapsed on the edge of the bumpy futon. He slept so heavily he did not even register her presence when she came in later, and in the morning he got up stealthily, leaving her fast asleep with her back turned to him. He rinsed his face, brushed his teeth with toothpaste on a finger, and kissed Casey’s forehead before he left, stopping at a gas station to chase three aspirin with a can of V8.

He was glad of the shock. He would not like to see Susan get comfortable with his gesture, adjust to it easily. He wanted her to
recognize this as a private venture whose meaning was locked up
to her and out of sight, a gesture belonging solely to him.

He drove home and packed a suitcase with a few changes of casual clothing, a shaving kit and some work boots. All he had for sneakers were worn-out Converse hightops, probably fifteen years old. He packed his passport, which he was relieved to see was still good, a phone card, a cheap camera. The dog regarded him patiently as he ordered the items in the case; he felt a stab of affection or regret, hard to say which.

But Susan would take good care of the dog, he did not need to worry. In fact the dog would probably be right here, watching calmly and every so often blinking, as she and her boyfriend thrashed and moaned on the bed.

Would the dog observe a moving tableau, slow and graceful with soft shadows and a gentle light—and therefore chilling to Hal if he saw it himself? With the dog as his proxy, would he have a connection to this? Or maybe the dog would see a labored, awkward contact, something Hal could watch with contempt or disgust, almost entirely unmoved. Would a dog perceive any difference?

Dogs had the habit of watching when you did it. Cats, not so much. Dogs were bigger perverts.

Foraging in the hall closet, he found outdoor supplies left over from camping trips taken in the seventies: a windbreaker, a small bottle of iodine, a safety blanket, a bandage and a lighter. Who knew where he would have to go? It could be anywhere. And he could buy what he needed when he knew what that was, but it pleased him to think he might have an urgent need for these simple objects—objects that in his house, in his disused closet, seemed both commonplace and completely irrelevant. It signaled the possibility of a great departure from his life’s routine.

After that he drank water and black coffee, popped some more aspirin, pet the dog on the head once or twice, heaved the suitcase into the back seat of the rental car and drove to work.

•

H
e was standing over his deck, parceling out files into separate piles, when Rodriguez came in and asked him where he was going.

“It’s so sudden,” said Rodriguez. “Like,
¿qu
é
pasa, hombre?
”

“Family matter. Helping my wife with a problem,” said Hal.

“But like where you headed?”

“Central America. Her employer went down there and now no one can find him. I’m going down to see if I can suss out what happened.”

“Holy shit,” said Rodriguez.

“Yeah well,” said Hal, and picked up a pile. “Here you go. And this stack here is Linda’s. Can you ask her to come in and see me?”

“Oh, man. You gave me all the TDAs, didn’t you.”

“Do your worst.”

“Huh. Going down
south
,
” said Rodriguez, lingering. “You da 
man
.”

“The man. Yes.”

“Palm trees, margaritas, all the sexy señoritas . . . you need a sidekick? Hey! I got vacation days coming too.”

“Thanks for the offer. Think I’ll try flying solo this time.”

“Send us a postcard, homes.”

“Will do.”

He called Casey to say goodbye. He would not talk to her about what he had overheard. She said again that she was glad he was going, that she admired him for following through on what was clearly an irrational impulse.

“I just wouldn’t have thought it,” she said, and he felt a twinge. It occurred to him that she had, for a long dreary time, basically been bored of him, her
boring old father
,
and that this unexpected and sudden turn was possibly a rare opportunity for redemption. Spark-of-life-in-the-old-geezer-yet. “I never would have thought you would take it on. Like, I couldn’t personally do this. I mean, even if I could, I couldn’t. But you know what? I’m glad that you’re stepping up. I’m glad one of us is looking out for him.”

He almost asked why she and Stern were not close anymore. There was a time the two of them had got together almost every weekend. He had assumed the relationship was purely platonic, but that assumption was rooted in fatherhood and, if he had to be honest, also her condition. She would not appreciate a question on the subject. Not in the least.

Anyway he thought of her in the kitchen with Nancy and did not wish to know the details.

After they hung up he was torn: possibly she attributed noble motives to him where there were none, maybe he was lying to her by letting her think this was some kind of generous act. Then again she was not too interested in nobility, as a rule. She was interested in honesty, and also some other quality that sometimes seemed like courage and other times bravado, but she was not interested in altruism; she thought it was beside the point. Maybe she was just relieved to discover he could be spontaneous.

He had to talk to Susan next, there was no helping it. He had to get information from her: contact numbers, addresses, copies of photographs to show around, his travel itinerary. Reluctantly he called her office, praying Robert would not pick up instead.

“I got you a flight out this evening, believe it or not,” she told him, a bit breathless. “The travel agent’s next door. You know, Pam? It was either tonight or early next week.”

“Fine with me,” he said, and waved in Linda, who stood hesitating in his open door. Her frizzy hair descended from her head like a flying buttress, or a wedge not unlike the headdress of the Giza Sphinx.

The effect, sadly, was less regal.

Then he felt a stab of guilt, or sympathy. Both. Linda was a self-effacing, kindly woman. He picked at the flaws of his coworkers because he could never get at his own, he knew they were there but could not easily identify them—save for one, which opened before him like a hole in the very fabric of space, bristling with static. Bad father, father who let them hurt his baby.

It was transparent, but no less a habit for being so obvious.

He felt sorry for all of them, the coworkers and himself. He barely listened to Susan, who seemed to be nattering on about logistics. This lack of attention was a victory of a sort, a victory over her. Or his love for her anyway.

Meanwhile Linda sat down self-consciously in his guest chair, shifting in the seat as she crossed her wide legs.

“Is there a copy of his passport? With the number on it?” he asked Susan, mostly to sound official.

“I’ll look.”

“That would be helpful. Other than that, the hotel, his own itinerary, flights, cars, whatever records you have of the travel. His Social Security, just in case. Business credit-card numbers. All that.”

Linda shuffled her feet back and forth in their sturdy brown shoes and fiddled with her watchband, waiting. He caught her eye and mouthed that he was sorry. The gesture was too intimate for her, however. She looked down, embarrassed.

“I’ll have it ready in a few minutes. You fly out around six, so you should leave the office by four,” said Susan. “You’ll be staying the night in Houston before you do the international leg in the morning. I got you an airport hotel.”

“And you’ll need to return the rental car for me. It’s parked in my space. Linda will have the key.”

“I’ll send a runner over with the documents. And your ticket. And whatever.”

“Excellent.”

“But Hal? You were drunk, honey. OK? You really don’t have to do this.”

“I want to.”

“You don’t realize how much this means to me. At least to know, finally. But I worry.”

No doubt.

“Last-minute things to work out here, sorry. Gotta go.”

He was relieved to have Linda with him, grateful her presence had given him an excuse to say nothing personal.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but there’s good news. At least, I hope you think so. You’ll be Acting while I’m gone,” he said, and saw her face light up.

•

W
hen he left the office at four, slumped in the soft vinyl seat of the taxi and watching the buildings float past, he was by turns worn and eager—sunk by the loneliness of his position and then, as he let the defeat dwindle behind him and rushed onward, almost exhilarated. He sensed a kind of freedom and looseness in the air—in the things of the world around him, in the long low land and the height of the sky. It was a dream of running, running away.

It
was
running away. But he was not ashamed. He could not care less. It was what he wanted.

4

H
e had to hire a car from the airport, a four-wheel-drive taxi in the form of a mud-spattered jeep. When he got in, vaguely remembering film-noir detectives, he rummaged around in his case and brought out a picture of Stern to show the driver. This opened the floodgates, apparently, and whenever he was beginning to drift off in his seat, whenever he thought that maybe, by dint of the long moments of contemplation and engrossment, he was on the edge of coming to a new pass—a discovery or at least a mental accommodation about him and Susan, or more specifically him and Susan and Robert the Paralegal—the driver would interrupt his train of thought with a question of triumphant banality. Then when Hal grunted out a minimal acknowledgment he would offer up a few words about his country, words so flat and devoid of content that Hal drew a blank when called upon to answer. “Beautiful.” “Nice weather, you know?” “We got beaches. You like the beach?”

There was nothing to say to any of this, though each remark seemed tinged with the expectation that Hal would answer with great and sudden enthusiasm.

Susan was a natural at responding to empty phrases, though she did not enjoy it either. He had watched her on occasion, dealing with, say, a person in a service transaction who was inclined to chitchat. She made soft murmurs of assent, often, nodding her head and smiling as she listened and, in a gesture of fellowship, asking questions so minute and tailored to the other person’s mundane interests that he could barely believe she was expending the calories to produce them. It was an exhausting effort for no clear payoff.

Casey, on the other hand, never did this. She would go so far as to rudely announce that she didn’t do small talk. And because of the chair, would be his own guess, she got away with this without blame or comment.

Twice the car stopped unexpectedly at a gas station and the driver got out, then loitered talking to other loiterers with no apparent purpose. Meanwhile Hal waited in the car, impatient and unmoving, full of rising resentment, until ten minutes later the driver got in again without bothering to proffer an explanation. A Caribbean cultural practice, possibly. Possibly Hal would be rewarded one day for broadening his cultural horizons.

It was three or four hours at least to the resort where Stern had been staying—first on a two-lane highway that meandered up and down hills with a view of the sea, then on a long red-dirt road down a narrow peninsula. Most people flew directly to one of the resorts on the coast and landed on a private airstrip, skipping the inland road where barren fields and dirty urchins with stick-legs would dampen the holiday mood.

Whenever settlement hove into view it was shacks with graffiti on them, snarled wire and molding, flimsy pieces of particleboard in place of fences and walls. There were fields of dirt where nothing grew but bald tires and garbage, smoke rising from ashcan fires, and no cars or trees or vegetation outside the hovels either, only bare expanses of soil with an occasional weed. Sometimes a woman or child or dog could be seen wandering through, emaciated; one old woman he saw through a fence with a ragged, open sore on her calf. He caught a glimpse of some skinny kids playing soccer outside what was probably a schoolhouse, which cheered him a bit until he also noticed, beside the stretch of baked earth where the boys were playing, a corrugated-metal rooftop. Underneath it two other boys were carving up a dead animal. He could not tell what it was.

Here and there a bedraggled brown palm tree struggled to look exotic. Forests must have been felled, for sometimes he caught sight of a clump of shiny-leafed bushes and trees in brief straggles of green against the backdrop of dirt and rust, with stumps around them that looked like they’d been hacked at with machetes. Once he saw a column of smoke on a low hill in the distance.

“When will we get to Placencia?” he asked the driver.

“Not too long, not too long,” said the driver unhelpfully.

The peninsula had been hit hard by the storm. There were still power lines down, and here and there a telephone pole lay tumbled in wire beside the road. It was strange to him, the poles left where they fell—as though there was no machine here to move them and make the roads safe again, no vigilant authority.

The sky faded into a velvety dusk as he watched it through the window, thinking: I came here to escape my wife. My wife who may not love me after a quarter of a century.

Now he was far away from her, in a strange place. He was almost nonexistent; he was nowhere and known by no one.

• • • • •

I
t was only the next morning that he got a look at the hotel grounds. Out his window he could see the ocean, a few small boats without sails, and near the dock white-skinned guests sitting atop the glittering water in colorful kayaks. The water, he thought, was gray-blue, not what they led you to expect in commercials for Hawaii or the Bahamas—not the emerald or turquoise transparence of a kidney-shaped pool. The color was less stunning, more familiar. Crews worked in the gardens, making flowerbeds, laying turf and digging. There were many of them, men in straw hats with shovels and wheelbarrows.

He would eat, take a walk. It was safe to admit it, since no one was listening: he was not here to find anyone. Not here to exert himself, but rather here to melt down, settle, coalesce, and rise in a new form . . . still he could occupy himself a few hours a day with a search of some kind. That was fine. It would give him something to do.

At his table in the restaurant, which overlooked the pool and beyond it the sea again, he gazed out the window. Children played in the pool, spitting long gouts of water out of their gap-toothed mouths. He watched a little boy bounce on the diving board and could not help seeing the boy’s head split open as it connected with the concrete bottom, spinal trauma and then, as usual, Casey. It was a sign of his partial recovery that he was falling back into his old habits of thought again, the worn ruts of his neural circuitry—back to Casey and her injury instead of Susan.

But then even this flicker of Susan opened up the whole scene again. She and Robert in the bedroom or on the floor of the office; himself, papery and sad in the blurry distance.

So there was no recovery yet, after all.

He should not think too much. As a rule he set too much store by thinking. Or at least, complacent in the knowledge that thought was the most useful tool available to men—and one so often neglected by his fellow Americans—he relied on it to the exclusion of other ways of filtering information. Thought was the act of conscious cognition but there were alternative processes of the mind that could work around or alongside it, processes of slow and growing awareness that did not register until they were complete, or the accretion of vague ideas that suddenly produced a form.

Thinking alone had not given him an answer to Casey’s situation and it would not give him an answer to his and Susan’s either. That was his prediction. He should walk on through his day and let the passing of time mold him; time would go by and he would see what to do. This was a vacation—and after the four long years of aggravation that Stern had given him, all the grating secondhand descriptions of his mini-malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions, it was right that Stern should receive the final bill.

Eggs arrived, with a slice of papaya to remind him of his location. Lest he mistake them for Hackensack eggs or eggs in Topeka, the papaya came along to announce they were tropical eggs, to remind him that congratulations!—he was on a tropical vacation.

He ate the eggs and even the papaya, which had an overly luscious, sweaty taste. He went to a rack and picked out a newspaper, then came back to read and drink his coffee. It was a day-old copy of
USA Today
. This was not a newspaper he chose to read at home—too many colors on the front page, for starters—but it was nice to let his eyes rest.

Sometimes he glanced out the window, past the pool at the stretch of beach: a few of the ubiquitous palms, a hammock, some beach chairs and umbrellas, flapping a bit in the breeze, a pile of upside-down red and purple kayaks and a man raking sand. This was less opportunity, he thought, than the simple end of something. Pebbles and sand and waves softly lapping. For their vacations, people liked to arrive at the end.

He himself would have chosen something with height, cliffs or mountains—something with grandeur and scale. Sure, the water was mild here, and there had to be a coral reef or two. But he saw mostly a blankness, a place that was less a place than an erosion into nothing. That was what he had seen when he stood on the shore that morning—the flat ocean lapping, the flat sand beneath his feet. Maybe tourists came here because they actually missed flat blankness in their daily lives. The flat blankness was possibly a reminder that there was an end to everything, a reminder they lacked while they were going to work and running errands in their suburbs and cities, where they were constantly required to answer the stimuli. Maybe they yearned to be in a place where there was little to see but a line between water and air.

He went back to the paper and listened to a conversation behind him as he scanned the headlines. He could not see the speakers, a man and a woman, could not turn to look at them without being noticed, but he could tell they were young.

“You can do the scuba class but I’m not doing it. No way.”

“Come on! Come
on
. Do scuba by myself?”

“This one guy I read about who’s a diver in the Marines or something? He got the bends and he ended up with these little pockmarks all over his face. Like bad acne. Plus he got double vision.”

“You won’t get the bends, OK? This would be at maybe twenty feet deep. They call it, like, a resort dive or something. To show that it’s basically for wusses that would sue them if anything happened. The risk is like
nothing
.”

“It can also hurt your brain. Or you can choke on your own vomit. You know who choked on their own vomit?”

“I’m getting the Belgian waffle. What are you getting?”

“Hermann Goering. Little-known fact.”

“What are you
talking
about? The guy took a pill! Believe me. I saw it on the Hitler Channel. He was going to be executed like a few minutes later.”

“May I take your order?”

“I’d like the egg-white omelet? With mushroom and tomato?”

“And I’d like the Belgian waffle.”

“Very good, sir. Coffee?”

“Wait. Does that come with like just regular fruit or that jelly-ish, bright-red fake-strawberry stuff? Know what I mean?”

“Seasonal fruit, sir. Today it is fresh blueberries.”

“OK. Yeah. OK then, I guess I’ll get the waffle.”

The woman addressed the waiter.

“Sorry. We’re on our honeymoon. He’s not usually so picky.”

“Are you kidding me? Picky? That stuff is like fluorescent. It’s full of Red Dye Number Three. Erythrosine. Heard of it? It’s a known carcinogen. It causes cancer in mice. They feed it to those little tiny white mice and then the mice sprout tumors the size of a cantaloupe. Man. They can barely even walk lugging those things around.”

When Hal got up to leave he saw they were pale and thin and black-haired—out of place in the resort, where most of the families were blond, overweight and Midwestern-seeming. Temporary refugees from SoHo, possibly. In fact he had not been to SoHo since the early 1970s but he imagined young people there might resemble these two.

•

“
E
xcuse me,” he said to the clerk at the front desk. “You have a Xerox machine, right? I’d like twenty copies of this, if possible.”

He passed across Stern’s photo.

“One moment, sir,” said the clerk, a lofty woman with prominent cheekbones and beads in her hair, and went through a door. He would be expected to check in periodically with Susan—every couple of days, he thought, and wondered how he could get around it. He would fax her reports, that was it. Cheaper than international calls, was how he could justify it, and people liked to receive or send a fax. They liked to say the word
fax,
said it with abandon. No doubt its moment would be brief.

Personally he preferred telegrams and mourned their passing. He could remember getting one from his father when as a college student, traveling in Italy, he had called his parents in a panic and asked for money. His father had wired it to an American Express office and sent a telegram to Hal’s youth hostel to tell him this. It contained only the AmEx address and the words
Next time beg sooner
.

“There you go,” said the clerk, and smiled with white straight teeth. “Twenty.”

“Bill it to my room, would you? Thanks. 202,” he said, and as he went out thought she resembled an African queen.

It flashed through his mind that he, too, should have an affair, if only to prove he could, but then he knew this for a juvenile impulse.

He stopped in at the manager’s office and left a message with the secretary. He wanted to hear what the hotel knew about Stern’s trip up the river and what had become of the belongings from his room. He handed his business card to the secretary as he was leaving and she smiled at him sweetly.

At home the card struck fear, or if not fear a kind of casual contempt.

In the hotel gift shop he bought a local map, a baseball cap against the noonday sun, and what appeared to be a child’s backpack—they had none for adults and damned if he was going to carry his briefcase like a stodgy old fucker. The backpack was emerald green, festooned with frogs and lizards. He slid the photographs into the pack and ordered a taxi at the front desk, where the queenly woman had been replaced by a thin man with a pencil mustache. He had the address of Stern’s foreman in the papers Susan had given him and he gave this to the driver when he stepped in.

The road was deeply rutted and the jeep had no suspension, so he bounced on the hard seat as they drove. Out the window he could see restaurants in rickety buildings on stilts, named after animals and painted in pastel colors. They had a temporary, slipshod appearance and were often combined with homes or small convenience stores; faded soda logos graced the storefronts and fluttering laundry hung on clotheslines out back. The thin walls would only suffice in this warm, mild place, where no protection from the cold was needed.