Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

Back then they were staying in a business hotel in Riverside. Air-con buzzing, a slew of room-service trays. Lisa was barely present, just a catatonic hump in the bed. He put the phone down on his dad and got in beside her, running a hand over her back, her hip, smelling the unwashed animal reek of her. She groaned and reached out pale fingers, scrabbling for something on the bedside table. The TV remote. On it went, the daytime yabbering. Mufflers, double glazing, great new taste. There were days when it drove him crazy and he went to sit in the antiseptic restaurant to be spied on by the waitresses; and other days when he’d give in and watch with her, trying to follow along as Gavin crashed Deana’s car and Petra woke up from her coma.

As he sat in bed he found himself obsessing — not just about what had happened in the park, the tiny forgotten details on which it all hinged, which way he’d turned, what he’d heard behind him on the path, but about the day before, when Lisa had left him alone with Raj at the motel. Something had happened to her. Sure, she’d gotten drunk, but he had the sense that she’d been somewhere, somewhere a long way away. She’d been out of touch for almost twenty-four hours. She could have driven two hundred miles or more. Day by day he became more convinced that this journey had some bearing on Raj’s disappearance. If she knew something and wasn’t saying and because of it Raj was … When he got back to New York he planned to open her credit-card bill and look for charges from Las Vegas or Palm Springs. It wasn’t that she was lying to him. She wasn’t saying anything at all. She’d withdrawn completely. It made him feel powerless. He’d sit in the chair by the window, angrily staring at the shapeless blob bundled up under the covers, like a predatory animal waiting outside a burrow.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said to her on the seventeenth day, adopting a soothing tone. It was an experiment, a probe. “Whatever you did, it doesn’t matter. What’s happening isn’t your fault.”

“You don’t know.”

“So tell me.”

She just shook her head. He kept pushing, but she said nothing. After a while, he realized the medication had put her back to sleep.

When he found her on the bathroom floor, he was sure she’d tried to kill herself. Frantically he dialed 911, then saw that her eyes were open. Within minutes the room was full of hotel staff and paramedics. There seemed to be nothing wrong with her, except that she wouldn’t speak. She refused to tell them whether she’d taken anything, and they drove her to a hospital and kept her there overnight while they ran toxicology tests. The results were negative.

The doctors diagnosed a “psychotic break.” Her dad flew in and tried to take charge. Louis wanted his little girl sent to some expensive clinic in Colorado. He was a guy who liked to throw money at a situation; it made him feel he was in control. Airlifted, he kept saying, like she’d been wounded on a battlefield. Jaz disagreed and they had a stand-up finger-pointing argument in the hospital Starbucks.

“We’re her goddamn family.”

“And what am I?”

“Jaz, I don’t mean that. But this is my daughter we’re talking about. And both of us know you haven’t exactly been good for each other.”

“What do you even mean by that?”

“I mind my business, Jaz. But Jesus Christ, she’s my daughter. I know when she’s not happy.”

“So you’re saying this is my fault?”

“Who the hell knows whose fault it is? But she’s up there in the — you know — in the fucking nut ward.”

Then he began to cry. The tears were streaming down his face and he was just repeating oh hell oh damn over and over and Jaz took him out to the parking lot so the people in Starbucks couldn’t see.

Price was still in the picture then. That slick asshole. Some Phoenix real-estate guy who’d given his card to Louis at the golf club. For those first few weeks, Jaz didn’t care where Louis had found him; he was just grateful for the help. The press briefings, the phone ringing off the hook; Lisa couldn’t handle any of it, which meant it was all on him. He was offered medication by a hotel doctor. He said no and then changed his mind; getting to sleep was near impossible. When exhaustion finally dragged him under, he’d dream he was digging with his hands in the ground under the Pinnacle Rocks, or else just scratching at himself, opening up sores and abscesses. The pills buried all that, at first.

The cops took them back to the scene. A wagon train of news crews trailed their Escalade, raising dust. It was a world bleached out by sunlight. The ink on the Amber Alert notices was already crackling to brown, on its way to pale yellow and that final bone-white that seemed to be the ultimate state of all things out there. Silence and death. Jaz climbed up on the rocks, looking around and shading his eyes as instructed, to recreate the moments after Raj was taken. Standing in position, framed by long lenses, he felt physically nauseated at the vast emptiness of the place. He bent over, propping himself up on his knees. Soon there would be nothing left of Raj but a few blank sheets of paper pinned on park notice boards. When the last journalist forgot about him, Jaz and Lisa would vanish too, erased from communal memory.

The police thought the abductor had been watching them. He or she must have driven behind them into the park, trailed them up the path as they walked to the rocks. They were hoping it was just a woman who wanted a kid. The young detective with the mustache said if that was the case, maybe she’d give him back once she realized he wasn’t — he stumbled over the phrasing, trying mentally, psychologically , settling for the unmodified normal . Then there were the other possibilities. A cellar; a vacant lot; the back of an unmarked van. Jaz had never given much thought to the thrill people got out of serial killers. The movies, the fat paperbacks. Duct tape and chainsaws and needles and masks. Suddenly all that Halloween glitter bore down on him as a sick weight. It was evil, debased.

Now that he was sensitized to obscenity, it seemed to jump out at him everywhere. He didn’t even have to leave his hotel room; like the haggard Latina with her cart of cleaning supplies, it just shoved its way right in. The newspaper hanging in a plastic bag from the door handle was full of it; a little girl shot at a Baghdad checkpoint; ten shoppers blown up in a street market. No, uh, por favor. Tomorrow, maybe. Come back tomorrow . But what was new? The war had always been going on somewhere. It just changed faces and locations. There wasn’t anything you could do. So why did he sit on the floor with the Weekend Edition spread out around him, tears streaming down his face? Why was that the only thing that made him feel clean?

There were gestures of friendship. People called from New York, asking how they were, offering help. Lisa’s cousin Eli started a blog, asking for information, giving updates on the search. Lisa wouldn’t speak to any of her friends except her old friend Amy, who now lived in Chicago. He called Amy to ask if she could fly out, offering to pay for her ticket. I think she needs someone, he pleaded. Someone who’s not me. Amy promised to see what she could do, and two days later arrived in their fetid room, opening curtains, forcing the two of them to clean up. She was the one who helped them find another place to stay, where it was quiet and the balcony didn’t look out onto a freeway. On her last night, the three of them had a meal in a Mexican restaurant. It felt almost normal. As she left for the airport, Lisa hugged her and wouldn’t let go, clinging, clawing at her back with her fingers.

When the accusations started, he didn’t know how to respond. It seemed outlandish. The first hint of trouble came at the second reconstruction, the one after he’d been hypnotized and remembered the car parked next to theirs at the rocks. A lot of people had turned up, not all of them journalists. There were pickups parked among the news vans. Sunshades and coolers, bored kids come to see what there was to see. He and Lisa were walking along the path. They’d been induced to push a stroller with a strange little boy sitting in it, a deputy sheriff’s son. A voice called out, “What did you do with him, Lisa?” That was all. He turned around angrily, but couldn’t see who’d spoken. Lisa was looking at the ground, her knuckles white on the stroller’s plastic grips.