The Invisibles (14 page)

“Shut the fuck up, Perzik, you meatcart.”

Candy took Henry's hand. “Hey, take it easy.”

I gave Perzik a frown, entreating him to be patient since there was more than he knew to our friend's anguish. He whistled a brief note and walked away.

Henry ignored his departure. He glared at Candy, who playfully mocked his grimace. Henry wasn't laughing. He said, “We should be out picking the houses to pieces, looking for the guy. He could be in this room right now. I can't stand it.”

“But this is a great thing, what the community's doing,” said Candy. “You know?”

“I'm going,” said Henry. He walked away from us toward the door and knocked his shoulder against an unwitting man in a fire department T-shirt. The fireman looked up, startled, and laughed at the receding smaller figure.

I sympathized with Henry. He'd loved Ellie Pardo, and it hadn't worked out, but I guessed he'd gone on hoping that it might. The things that surrounded me, the dinner, the music, the reminiscences, held nothing for him. I asked Candy to tell my parents that I had a ride home; then I hurried out after him.

A few nights earlier I'd gotten out of bed, thirsty for cold water, and found my father standing at the sink in the dark kitchen, looking through the window at Ellie's house. I joined him, and he
accepted my company without a word, stepping aside to give me room. In the moonlight the house looked like the closed face of a man buried to his neck. The yellow Caution tape shimmered in the wind. We could see the basement window, where for a certain amount of time we might have seen her in her distress, had we put our faces to the glass.

“Just watching for punk kids.”

“There's nobody out there.”

My father continued to frown at the house. He seemed frail in his pajamas; the key to his biology was winding down. When I suggested that he return to his bed, he would not budge. His fists trembled, but when I put my arm around his shoulders he turned away.

“She was so nice,” he said bitterly. “She was so goddamn nice.”

“I know.”

“She was good to you.”

“I know.”

“All you had to do was be yourself, and she went on being an angel. I don't know what sort of person can't understand that.” He looked up at me. “Nobody asked for this.”

I couldn't tell him that sometimes you don't ask for what you have: a certain distance from the people, the right to be aloof. I knew this, and I also knew that philosophy is worthless just after a loss. So I told my father that he was right.

Eventually the police would find their man, some younger creep Ellie worked with, a pimply faced goblin who had built a shrine to her in his basement and filled it with souvenirs from her house. The news would put to rest any remaining questions Henry or I
had about what had happened that night. And by then I'd be gone, in another city entirely, training for a new cubicle, and it would prove a very easy thing to put off telephoning an old friend. When we did talk finally, we had little to say about Ellie or her killer or what happened the night of her memorial party, and the feeling between us was so poisoned that we hung up after ten or fifteen minutes of braying false good cheer.

After leaving the reception hall that night, we drove out toward the lake, like teenagers restless to skip town for a few hours. As we moved across the flat blue land, past little woods and silos and solitary houses, the conviviality of Ellie's dinner seemed more and more a figment of wishful memory. It seemed rather that the laughter and the music had been the sounds made by people who wanted to distract themselves from the dark silence we now encountered along the shore. Out here we could stop at any point and look out on the water, to see that the dark and the silence had no end. They were simply the shade and texture that remained when the day burned out.

Henry was a harsh man in the green light of the dashboard. “Those people are cowards,” he said. “I guess a role to play's a good hiding spot.”

“I guess.”

It felt familiar and fitting, the pair of us in the front seat, moving along the road beside the perimeter of the state park, but when Henry said he saw a figure run along the tree line and plunge into the woods I began to doubt whether he was thinking clearly. He braked hard, and we stopped just over the road's frosty shoulder.

Concentrating on a point in the trees, he reached across my lap and got a handgun out of the glove compartment.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I saw him,” he told me. “He's right back there. I saw the motherfucker.”

All I saw were the woods at night. “Really?”

Ignoring any doubt in my tone, he removed the gun's magazine. He pointed it at the ceiling, and I eased up against the door as he counted the bullets inside.

The sunken ground he had indicated was covered with small ridges of snow collapsing on themselves. There were many holes, and it was impossible to see footprints. There was no telling what was out there. I looked at Henry, bent furiously at the window, studying the darkness, and it was then that I began to second-guess myself. What were the chances that this would happen to the woman I grew up next door to? What were the odds that my best friend and I would track down her killer when the cops could not? But then, what did I know at the end of the day? I'd lost a career, moved home when I should have been making adult strides. I hadn't even known, even dreamed my best friend from childhood might actually take the woman of our dreams to bed. And there were far greater mysteries. Maybe Henry had seen the killer. I turned and looked out my window, then up the dark road, to make sure there was no one standing there. A heat began to run through my body, and my mouth dried up.

“Henry. Are you sure you saw someone?”

He stopped what he was doing and said, “Look. You can come with me or you can stay here. You can believe whatever you want.”

“Let's go.”

He opened the door. A cold breeze washed over my face and tongue, giving me a taste of the lake, a stand of naked trees, a sky prizing a moon. I got out on the passenger side. He fiddled with the safety on his gun and crunched down through the snow toward the trees. I zipped up my coat and walked a few feet behind him. He drew strength from my presence, standing taller, lengthening
his steps. We came to the line of the forest and looked in at the shapes of the trees that scurried deep to a point where we could see nothing else. We breathed patient clouds.

Henry looked at me and nodded, indicating I should lead the way.

I stepped into the woods, through ice and into freezing water and mud, my friend walking just behind me. The snow provided enough reflection for me to lead the way between thin trunks, and every few seconds a dark movement in my peripheral vision caused me to look one way or another. Suddenly I became aware of something else, something real and breathing on the other side of the trees ahead, something I could not quite see. I stopped and held up my hand. Henry came beside me, breathing through his mouth, and held out the gun in front of him. The figure was tall and wide, moving slowly, almost undulating, all colors flashing faintly in the blackness of its silhouette. I heard a snort; snow crunched. My eyes adjusted, and I saw the shape of the deer, at the same time Henry fired off three rounds.

He stood, panting. I heard myself swear softly.

“Didn't it hear us?” His voice cracked as he said it, like that of a kid who's destroyed something of value. He held the gun before him, balanced on two hands, waiting for someone to take it away. “Why didn't it run?”

“She's probably starving. Sometimes they forage all winter.”

We came nearer and looked at the dying doe. She kicked her hooves against a tree. Her breaths wheezed in and out slowly. Hunger had deranged her, and in a fit of idiotic blindness we'd killed her. There was nothing we could do but go home and try to pretend it hadn't happened. We couldn't bury her, not in the frozen earth. We were no detectives. We were barely even hunters.

“What should we do, Nolan?” Henry said.

Seeing he didn't want to accept the inevitable, I took the gun
from his hands and aimed it at the deer. It had been a long time since I held a gun, but I recognized all the sensations. For a second I could hear all three of us breathing.

We wouldn't officially say good-bye for another few weeks. Still, I'm pretty sure Henry understood what was happening, there in the woods. I stood beside him one more time, as I had done on countless afternoons of our damned childhoods, and pretended ownership just long enough to claim a life.

High above, propped-open windows let ghostly winter light into the station. Pigeons fluttered in and out, a constant disturbance of wings. He had seen five trains arrive and empty, fill with new passengers, and depart. He was trying to remember where he had seen the mosaic tiled into the wall across the tracks. It showed Lazarus emerging from his tomb, unwrapping the bluish shroud from his head as he walked out before the crowd. His arms were pale green by contrast to the peach-colored faces and arms of onlookers, his posture upright and solemn, as if the experience of death and resurrection had turned the former beggar into something other than human.

He had seen this in a church somewhere. A long time back. He could remember neither the name of the church nor the city, though he knew, studying the scene, he was not religious. His memory was blank, a dark sea of implications throwing him back into the present moment. He had come down here after waking up in a dingy hotel room with only a train pass, forty-nine crumpled dollars and change, and a ring of keys in his possession. There were no cards, no phone. In the emergency room at the hospital he had waited more than an hour between two patients with more visible woes — a boy with a broken nose and a bloody shirt-front and a shivering woman with blue lips — before the nagging certainty that there was nothing wrong with him, at least not physically, won out, and he got up and walked out, feeling chills of liberation as he hurried away from the automated doors.

He reached into his pocket and took out the keys and ran a finger over their teeth. They were colored silver and dull gold. These details told him nothing.

A light appeared down the dark tunnel, and a rapid transit train screamed and clattered into the station, car after car of yellow-lit faces looking dully out. An internal clock, not a watch or other conventional timepiece, but a mechanism in him measuring time in its own way, prodded him to get up — perhaps motion would jog something loose, a street name, a trusted face. He looked into the dark window of the door and was momentarily stunned by the sight of himself: shock of black hair, face molded tightly to the skull beneath.

The car was full, the seats and the standing room at the front taken. He moved through making as little contact as he could, aware of faces pinching with annoyance as he eased by. In the back corner he came face-to-face with a small woman in a white and black plaid wool coat. Her blue eyes looked surprised to see him. She did not look away as he took hold of the pole beside her and the train resumed moving.

Passengers swayed as the car rocked back and forth along the rail. He felt her watching and wondered, if he knew her, how to explain himself. She sighed lightly, with what sounded like real disappointment. He turned back and gave a smile which might be an apology or just polite.

She frowned. “One of your moods today?”

“Sorry?”

“One of your moods.”

“I guess. I don't know.”

She had a wide pale face that was used to smiling. “Is something wrong? Are you feeling sick?”

“Both, you could say.” He looked around at the nearby passengers. Only an old woman, looking tired to the point of anger, paid
them any attention. “See,” he said, leaning in close, “I'm having trouble remembering.”

This won him a bigger smile. He supposed he must be a playful enough person to be considered a character.

“What do you mean?” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“I mean I think I've got amnesia. Like what people get in the movies.”

“Stop.”

“Really. I woke up in this hotel room this morning without a wallet. It looked like I'd been there awhile.”

“What hotel?”

“One near the station. The Arms.”

“You stayed there?”

“I guess. I woke up there.” He paused, wondering if he should say more. She held to the overhead bar with white wool mittens and looked him over. He wanted to talk to someone, put what he knew into words, to see if he'd missed something. “I kind of panicked and left. I felt like I knew the last station, the one with Lazarus on the wall.”

“Grant and Riverside,” she said. “Okay.”

“Maybe I live near there.”

She smiled more widely. “Are you serious?”

He swallowed roughly, his face still hot, and nodded.

She took a step closer and lowered her voice. “Oh my God, Marcus. What are you going to do?”

“So it's Marcus.” The sound did not fit him like a name. But she said it with conviction, and she had recognized him, after all. “I'm not sure. Should I go to the hospital? The police?”

“You don't look like you were mugged.” She reached out to touch his hair. He let her. It was pleasant and delicate, and she was comfortable putting her hands on him. The sensation felt vaguely familiar.

“I don't feel like I was hurt in any way. In fact, I feel rested.” He flipped up the lapels of his pea coat and bounced his shoulders like a greaser in a leather jacket. “I feel spry.”

“Something's wrong with you,” she said. “Listen, we're almost to my stop. Come with me.”

“It's been a few weeks since I heard from you.” She tore open a brown packet and poured sugar pellets into her coffee. She began to stir with her spoon, rattling the sides of the mug, then slowing so the light toffee-colored froth swirled on the darker liquid. She went on quietly. “You used to get on the train each morning at the same time. Always at the same spot on the platform. You stood next to me riding to work for six months. We would look at each other, but you never would talk to me. I thought it was because you were married. I thought it was for the best. I was mixed up with a married man one time, and it turned out bad.”