Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

Esther thought Lisa ought to write a book about the witch hunt, about being a mother in the spotlight. Lisa, better than almost anyone alive, knew how it felt to be a woman hounded by the misogynist news media. It ought to be a passionate book. A polemic. It could really make a difference to other women going through the same thing. Lisa toyed with the idea, but she didn’t really have the stomach for it. Not just for the writing, for what it would mean to spend days in front of a laptop, forcing herself to think back to the bad days — the hotel in Riverside, the buzzing air conditioner, the TV and the dirty room-service trays — but for the whole process of turning herself inside out. She’d had enough of being discussed and picked apart. Now that her son had been returned to her, she wanted to luxuriate in him, and she wanted to do so in private, without interference or observation, without being judged.

Esther was understanding. We all have a right to a private life, she said. You more than anyone. Esther understood the beauty of silence, the silence in which a still small voice could make itself heard. Lisa admired her for that. In the first days after she and Jaz got Raj back, they’d barely uttered a word. It was as if they both had the same fear, that something fine and fragile was being woven around them — a magic cocoon, a crystal web — and loud voices or sudden movement would shatter it. They lived like medieval peasants, cowering from signs and portents. They hid from the FedEx man.

They were, the two of them, so very delicate, so bruised. She’d hoped — and she was sure Jaz had felt the same — that, like a broken bone, they’d eventually knit back together, filaments of new love reaching across the distance between the kitchen table and the sink. They’d been through so much. It would be absurd to split up. And she couldn’t deny how hard he’d tried for her. When she’d fallen down, he’d picked her up. When she couldn’t cope, when they were forcing her to walk back up to those terrible rocks, pushing some strange child in the stroller; when she was lying on the bathroom floor, paralyzed, catatonic, trying to abdicate all responsibility, trying to stop breathing, to stop her heart from pumping blood around her body, Jaz had tried his best to look after her. He’d tried to say the right words. But (and this was what lay over them like a miasma) he’d failed. He hadn’t been able to pull her round. When it came down to it, his love and care hadn’t been enough.

They were different. Of course it had always been that way, part of what had attracted them to each other. A mutual fascination, loving contact with someone new and strange. Not exotic , though, never that. She believed she’d always made the effort to see Jaz as an individual, not a representative of anything. After they brought Raj back, Jaz’s parents had taken the train up from Baltimore. Thank God, they’d said, pressing their palms together, and for once she’d been able to agree with them. But his mother had taken it too far, standing in their kitchen with her eyes shut, her hand on the top of Raj’s head, muttering in Punjabi. Lisa had felt like snatching her son away. It’s their culture, she told herself. It’s just their culture. Jaz came from that, but he wasn’t that. Her problem with him was purely personal.

For her it was enough to have Raj back. He seemed to be unhurt. He was proof that by loving, by holding on tight, what was lost would be returned. But Jaz seemed unsatisfied. He wanted an explanation. He worried over the evidence like a dog with a chew toy, phoning the police so often she was sure he was making a nuisance of himself. He spouted endless theories. One evening she came back from work to find him poring over a large-scale map of the Mojave Desert, drawing circles with a compass. Beside him was a yellow legal pad, scrawled with notes and calculations: how far a toddler could walk in an hour; the location of the nearest public road.

“It’s so frustrating,” he said. “The area where they found him is just a blank. It’s military land, so the mapping data’s classified.”

“I’m sure the police have all the information they need. What can you find out that they can’t?”

“They’re not doing anything. They aren’t making it a priority.”

“They have other problems, Jaz. Other cases.”

“But what happened to him? What do you think happened?”

“Does it matter?”

He looked at her pityingly. “How can you say that? He’s our son. Someone had him. Someone took him away from us. How can you live, knowing that person’s still out there, ready to do it again?”

“I don’t know, Jaz. I just don’t think it’s our job anymore.”

Sometimes it seemed to her that there was only so much energy in a relationship, so much electricity in circulation between two people. As she grew stronger and more confident, Jaz seemed to wane. He lost weight. He’d pad through the house in sweats and a T-shirt, looking like a ghost. She found his listlessness irritating. “What’s happened to you?” she asked him one night, when she came home, loaded with Barneys bags, to find him collapsed on the couch, watching a true-crime show in a litter of crusted cereal bowls and the previous day’s Times . Raj was playing unsupervised in her office. He’d upended a box of pins and clips, creating a chaos of sharp points on the rug. She bustled around, clearing up, angrily berating Jaz over her shoulder as he yawned and thumbed the remote. “You’re like a stranger. You should go back to work. You were better when you were working.”

“I don’t know what I’d do,” he said. Just that. As if he’d come to the end of something and hadn’t the will to go on.

Esther was blunt. “Do you still love him?” They’d met for a coffee. Lisa had brought Raj with her, and he was being an angel, sitting quietly at the little café table, eating an ice cream. A good little boy, dressed in a new blue-and-white matelot top. She glanced at him uneasily, trying to work out if he was paying attention.

“Esther, what a question!”

Her friend arched an eyebrow, making light of her curiosity. “It’s not a stupid thing to ask. If you love him, the rest will take care of itself.”

Lisa considered the matter. “Yes,” she said. “I think I do.” Yes, dimly. Yes, for old times’ sake. Here was Esther, blowzy big-chested Esther, with her chunky amber jewelry, her silk head scarves wrapping up hair still thin from chemo, her children already at Brown and UPenn and her unapologetically fat husband, Ralph, who was always blowing in through the door with something gift-wrapped in his hands, who’d always just happened to be passing a deli or a bookstore or a bakery that sold the most delightful little macaroons. Ralph was so plainly thankful to have his wife alive that going to the office every morning was a painful separation and it was all he could do not to crush her to his big barrel chest when he came home again at night. Their home was a temple, their family table an altar. It was hard not to make comparisons.

Lisa smoothed Raj’s hair. He allowed her to do that now, without flinching.

“I wish — I wish he’d let it go. It’s like he’s still out there, wandering in that awful desert.”

The previous night, they’d had a terrible fight. She’d found Jaz staring at Raj in the way he now had, a deep silent interrogation. He was squatting on the floor, watching the boy play, with a kind of forensic attention, as if every maneuver of his pack of plastic dinosaurs might yield up vital information. He spoke without even looking up.

“Do you think he was — you know.”

“Jaz.”

“There was no physical evidence.”

“Not in front of him.”

“That’s not definitive, though. The fact that they couldn’t find anything. I mean, he was away for months. It could have healed.”