Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

“You called the police?”

“Of course I called the fucking police. You were gone all night. What were you thinking?”

“I’m sorry.”

“And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen. That all you got? Where were you? I want you to tell me right now where you were.”

“You’re overreacting. I needed some time to myself. I was losing it.”

“I’m overreacting? Is that what I’m doing?”

“You seem to have forgotten what happened yesterday. I was angry with you. I am angry with you. That fucking string thing. Bringing your mother’s bullshit into our world.”

“Oh, so you’re punishing me? By going out into a bar and getting wasted? Go on, what else did you do?”

Just for a second, a stricken look passed across her face. Just for a second, but he caught it. His throat constricted. His voice sounded different to him, whiny and shrill.

“What happened, Lisa? Where have you been?”

“Nowhere. And get off my back. Nothing happened.”

Raj was hovering by them, picking up their agitation, flapping his hands. Lisa squatted down, cupping his head in her hands, trying to get him to focus on her. Gradually he calmed down. Jaz sank into a chair and watched them.

“Look,” she said. “I was furious with you. I drove around all day, ate lunch in a diner. Then — I don’t know. I drove out into the desert. I needed to be alone.”

“And after that?”

“Yes, I went drinking. I sat in a bar and got drunk.”

“And you drove back.”

“Sue me.”

“Oh, very mature. God, sometimes you can be unbelievably irresponsible.”

“You know what? Fuck you. How about that? Mommy did something irresponsible. Bad Mommy, take her baby away. When was the last time you looked at yourself, Jaz? When did you turn into such a self-righteous prick?”

Raj began to wail. Lisa knelt down again. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m sorry, OK. Yes, darling, Mommy’s here. We’re going to go and get some breakfast. Yes, I know, I know you’re hungry. I’m hungry. I’m sure Daddy’s hungry. We’ll go get some nice breakfast.”

She looked up at Jaz, imploringly. “He needs to eat. Let’s go get something, OK? Please.”

They gathered their things in silence. As they were walking out to the car, they ran into the manager, who was showing a room to a middle-aged couple wearing identical sun visors.

“You OK, honey?” the manager asked Lisa. To Jaz’s surprise, Lisa nodded and gave her a hug.

“That’s good, dear,” said the manager. “That’s a relief.”

Jaz pointed the key at the car. The locks thunked open. They put Raj in his seat and belted themselves in. Lisa waved at the manager, who raised a hand as she walked back to the office.

“You were with her ?”

“I ran into her at the bar.”

“That figures. Old freak.”

“Don’t call her that. She’s a kind woman.”

“In what way?”

“For two minutes, could you stop interrogating me? I need a coffee. I suppose there’s nowhere we can get something less revolting than the stuff at that place.”

“This isn’t Park Slope.”

He sped down the hill, ignoring her appeal to slow down. He pulled in at a Denny’s. They sat inside, silently watching the road through the window. Most of the other booths were filled with young Marines, scarfing down eggs. Jaz ate pancakes, watching Lisa nurse a mug of thin coffee. His self-righteousness was fading beneath a rising conviction that some disaster had occurred and he would be the last to know what it was.

“Did you meet someone?” he asked.

She knew what he meant. “Dawn,” she said. “I met Dawn, from the motel.”

“Who else?”

“I talked to people.”

“What kind of people?”

“I don’t know, Jaz. People. Men. I got drunk and talked to men. Now chop my head off with your curly sword for staining the family honor.”

“You just talked.”

“We just talked. I played some pool.”

“You didn’t come home until six. The bars round here don’t stay open that late.”

“Look, I know I should have phoned. I was angry. Let’s just try to deal with this. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. Let’s go take a look at the park. That’s what we came here to do.”

“You seriously want to do that?”

“Yes. Before it gets too hot. We don’t need anything from the motel. I just want to be outside in the open. I can’t breathe in that room.”

“We haven’t got a picnic. The water’s in the room.”

“We’ll get more water.”

“We haven’t brought his hat.”

“There’s a bag in the trunk. I don’t want to be in that room. Let’s just go, OK? You don’t have to talk to me.”

“That’s a stupid thing to say.”

“You know what I mean.”

They took the turn for the park and drove to the ranger’s station, where they paid an entry fee and got a map and a ticket to display on the dash. They sped on through a moonscape, cliffs and ridges strewn with shards of broken rock. The road climbed up to a gap, through a field of rounded boulders, haphazardly piled up into mounds and turrets, weathered into fantastical shapes. The light was dazzling. Below in the valley the concrete pavement shimmered on the straight and it looked to Jaz as if he was hurtling down into a phantom lake, set in a huge flat plain of Joshua trees. The lake broke into pools and streams. The pools and streams dried into flat white salt. All illusion, all fake.

“Make a left,” said Lisa, as they came to a junction.

“Where are we going?”

“See those rocks? I want to take a look at them.”

Jaz turned the wheel.

“Why? What does the guide say?”

“I don’t know. I saw them yesterday. Off in the distance. I tried walking toward them but they were too far.”

“You were here yesterday?”

“I think I must have been on the other side. I didn’t come into the park.”

They drove toward the three spires, which rose up out of the dust like skinny arms lifted up to the sky. On every side the horizon was marked by mountain ranges, a jagged, absolute border to the world. The country opened up, until only a few tortured Joshua trees broke the endless flat. Lisa watched the rocks intently, as if they were about to do something — start moving, sprout hands and fingers.

They left the car in a little graded lot by the road and took a path toward the rocks, pushing Raj along in his stroller. The ground was rough and the boy was a dead weight. Lisa handed over to Jaz, who felt like Sisyphus as he maneuvered his sleeping son onward. The path passed over a wash and climbed a gentle slope, pocked with creosote bushes. There was no sound but the crunch of their feet, the stroller’s squeaky bearings. Jaz could hear a faint high-pitched whine, almost at the edge of consciousness, and searched the sky for contrails. The clear ceramic blue was broken by high lenticular clouds, a formation of perfect little disks, like fluffy spaceships. He removed his sunglasses to get a look at them and was hit by a wall of light. The world was bleached out. Every scrap of color — Lisa’s green halter top, the stroller’s red nylon hood — had been subdued by the intensity of the glare. It was like walking through an overexposed photograph.

Finally they reached the rocks. They stood in their shadow and drained most of a bottle of water, decanting some into a plastic beaker for Raj. The three vast towers teetered on a flat plinth, stained black with desert varnish. They seemed to be straining directly toward the sun like heliotropic plants. Jaz looked at his watch. It was midday. He could see the car in the distance, a lone silver glint on the desert floor. Raj fell asleep again, so they parked the stroller in the shade and followed a path around the base to take a look at the country on the other side. A barren basin scrolled away toward the mountains, at its center the blown-out white plane of a salt flat, almost too bright to look at.