Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

Bah. Once-white bunny. Bald patches, tufted graying fur. Bacterial Bah, sucked and wiped and dragged, spongy with goo and secretions. Raj threw him at his mother’s head. She ignored the blow, mechanically sorting through their things, shirts and pants and swim shorts, diapers for Raj, who was now happily wrapping himself in the curtains. Lately Lisa’s face had acquired a fixed cast. The girl Jaz first knew had been a flirt, a wearer of short skirts, a teller of dirty jokes. She liked to do things on impulse: grab a bag and head for the airport; check into the Mercer to watch TV. She once made love to him in the toilet stall of a Lower East Side sushi restaurant while their friends sat in a booth, thinking they’d gone to get money at an ATM. Jaz had known very few women in his life and none at all like her. She had amazed his senses. At heart he was still a typical immigrant’s kid, nervous, on the lookout for social banana skins. She showed him it was OK to take risks, to allow oneself uncalibrated pleasure. He wanted to remind himself of that woman; she must still be there, locked away inside this new version of herself, the princess in the tower.

“Are we going to go visit the park?”

Lisa shrugged. “I guess. It’s what we came for.”

“We need a picnic.”

“Damn it, Jaz. I know we need a picnic. I’m unpacking here, I can’t do everything—”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I’ll take the boss to the market in town. We’ll pick up food, plastic plates, whatever we need.”

“Sure.”

“You could take a nap.”

“I don’t want — OK, sure, I’ll take a nap, whatever. Thanks.”

The boss. The young master. Those were their names for him. They’d become the serfs in his little feudal kingdom. Jaz chased him down, smeared sunscreen on his screwed-up face, collected car keys, dark glasses, the GPS device with its pigtail of black cable. They left Lisa sitting on the edge of the bed, robotically channel surfing the TV.

The motel manager was hovering about outside the office. Jaz hadn’t paid her much attention when they checked in. She was an odd-looking woman, with a mane of permed hair and a lot of turquoise jewelry.

“You all OK there?” she asked.

“Sure,” Jaz said, squaring up. “We’re absolutely fine.” Was she going to complain? Raj hadn’t done anything. The boy slipped his hand, started examining something on the ground. The woman smiled.

“Room to your liking?”

“Everything’s great. We’re just going to pick up something to eat, get a picnic to take into the park.”

“That’s nice. There’s a market on your right as you head down the hill. You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks.”

“You have a good day. Take plenty of water and don’t sit out in the sun.”

In the time it took them to exchange these pleasantries, Raj had vanished. Jaz looked around but couldn’t see him anywhere.

“My kid. Did you see where he went?”

“Oh, no, honey. I hope he didn’t go out front.”

Jaz jogged over to the corner of the building, where he had a view of the highway. He half expected to see his son playing in the traffic.

“Sir? Excuse me, sir?”

The motel manager was pointing. The British junkie guy was standing at the door of one of the rooms, a small pink towel around his waist. Without clothes, his scrawny body was alarming, pallid and inked with tattoos, like raw chicken drumsticks scribbled on with a ballpoint pen.

“Mate? You looking for your boy? He’s in here.”

Jaz went over. The guy pointed him to the bathroom, where Raj was stubbornly pressing the toilet flush. “Sorry,” he said, gesturing nervously at his towel. “I was having, you know, a kip. Rough night last night. Heard the bog and there he was. Couldn’t get him to budge.”

“I’m so sorry. Raj, you’re not supposed to be in here. It’s not our room. This is the man’s room.”

“Don’t have a pop at him on my account. It’s just — you know — you don’t want some little kid in your hotel room. Looks a bit Gary Glitter.”

He nodded, pretending he understood the man’s accent, then took Raj firmly by the hand, apologized again and headed for the car. Raj didn’t make too much of a fuss, allowed himself to be placed in his booster seat and belted in. As Jaz settled himself behind the wheel, he tried to work out how difficult the shopping trip was going to be. They really needed a few easy days, so Lisa and he could remember what it was like to be decent to each other.

She had come along without warning, in his final summer of grad school. She was seated next to him at a potluck supper, gorgeous, blond, just finishing up a master’s in comparative literature at Brown. She talked about Henry James and Marrakech and the Kosovo war and the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski, and he had to stop himself smiling from the sheer pleasure of watching her mouth move. When he spoke, which he did hesitantly and (as he later heard) with painful seriousness, she focused on him so intently that he felt as if he’d been caught in the beam of a searchlight. For a few moments he was the only man at the table, the only man in the building. By the time the main course was served, he belonged to her entirely.

Lisa was well aware of the impression she’d made. As people started to gather their coats, she wrote her number down on the back of someone else’s business card. You need this, she said. He thanked her, flushing with pleasure. She smiled flirtatiously.

“Don’t you want to know why?”

“Sure.”

“Because you’re taking me to the theater next week.”

“What are we going to see?”

“Well, that’s up to you. But make sure it’s good. I get bored easily.”

That week, stochastic modeling took second place to frantic combing of the listings pages. It wasn’t that he couldn’t concentrate. The numbers themselves seemed to have loosened their bonds. His distributions were all improbable, his scattering patterns shoals of little swimming fish. He bought seats for a production of The Seagull and waited nervously for Saturday night.

It seemed incredible to Jaz that a woman like Lisa would want him, let alone fall in love. Yet the week after The Seagull , she returned the favor, taking him to see a string quartet playing repetitive Minimalist pieces that he pretended to like much more than he did. Afterward they went for dinner and at the end of the evening he worked up the courage to kiss her. Soon they were seeing each other regularly. His life opened up like a flower. He was drunk with her, her ambition, her intelligence, her sense of entitlement. Academia wasn’t for her, she’d realized. She wanted to move to New York, to become an editor at a publishing house. He marveled at the precise picture she had of her future: children, a house with steps leading up to the front door, shelves of first editions, witty and fascinating friends. She asked him about physics, and surprised him by exhibiting a real fascination with his research. She also asked about his family, and for the first time he risked telling some version of the truth. Her reaction astonished him. She wasn’t mocking or disdainful. If anything, it seemed to make him more interesting in her eyes.

As their relationship grew serious, he realized he was going to have to work hard to keep her. She seemed to be friends with several ex-lovers. He found this intolerable; often he lay awake at night consumed by sexual images of her with these old boyfriends — positions, acts. He wanted to feel as if she’d come into existence the day he first saw her, that there had never been anyone but him. When he blurted something out, she had the good sense not to get defensive. He tried to explain that where he came from it was considered demeaning for a man to marry a woman who wasn’t a virgin. “Marry?” she said. “You’re very sure of yourself.” He blushed and spluttered, until he realized she was teasing him. “You’ll just have to accept it, Jaz. I’m not your veiled teenage bride. If that’s what you want, you better look elsewhere.”