Nick Arvin: The Reconstructionist

‘They’re cute, though.’

‘Cute, but they don’t even know how to wipe themselves. Who wants to spend day after day hanging out with a room-mate who can’t wipe his own butt?’

‘Someone did it for you.’

‘Bless her, I have no idea why. Look at what Mom got out of it. A son who sent her a case of beer at Christmas.’

‘Mindless propagation of the species,’ Ellis said.

‘You’re being sarcastic, but you’re right.’

‘You’re being sarcastic.’

‘Nope.’ Boggs grinned, took another photo, then dropped the camera and let it hang on its cord around his neck. ‘The other thing is, I’m sure that any kid I have will die before I do. Hit by a bus, drowning in a pool, SIDS, finding a gun in the neighbour’s closet, leukaemia, drafted into some dick-swinging war, whatever. How could the kid possibly survive? Most do, somehow. But I’m stuck inside my own lizard brain, and whenever I think about having some idiot kid, I get these chills. Dead kid. It would be horrible. I would go to the nearest steel foundry and jump into a batch of molten iron.’

Ellis looked up at him and said nothing.

‘I’m sorry.’ Boggs frowned. ‘I wasn’t thinking of your brother. I hadn’t made the connection. I’m the idiot.’

‘My dad’s life did go pretty much straight to hell after that,’ Ellis said. Trying to give nothing away. He already knew Boggs’s position on the topic of children, through Heather, because he was conducting an affair with her.

‘I don’t know what an accident is, really,’ Boggs said.

This – or a version of this – represented one of Boggs’s themes. And after the third or fourth time, Ellis had developed a standard response: ‘Everything’s got a name, but not every name’s got a thing.’ Or a version of this.

‘Everything,’ Boggs would say, ‘depends on the contingent and the adventitious, and if the meeting of two vehicles in an intersection can be called an accident, then what can’t be called an accident? Where my footsteps fall, where I place my hands, where I sit, where I stand, how I appear in the world, who I speak to, the kind of work I do, who I befriend, who I fall in love with?’ Boggs pouted. ‘ Accident? ’

Some of these conversations occurred in Boggs’s office, and Ellis had grown exquisitely familiar with the backside of the photograph of Heather that stood on Boggs’s desk – the black cardboard, the little rotating latches, the triangular folding stand, the stainless-steel frame edge. But if he came around the desk to point out something on Boggs’s computer screen, he wouldn’t let himself glance at the photo. Instead he closed his attention on the computer screen, sometimes examining it pixel by pixel. He had an attitude of awe before his yearning toward her. And anger, because that yearning appeared so irrational and futile.

Every few weeks, despite himself, he went again to the art museum and wandered. He could not deny his hope, which amazed him. Sometimes he paced a slow circle around the spot where he’d encountered Heather before, looking, smelling the air, as if he might find some evidence of her, as if by detecting her in the past he might summon her into the present.

And years passed. Then, on a late-spring afternoon when Boggs was across the continent, participating in a mock trial that a client had arranged, Ellis’s phone rang. Boggs, in a growly tone, said, ‘Do me a favour?’ Heather – he said – was stranded in her father’s RV in a grocery store parking lot. The engine wouldn’t start. ‘Do you know what it costs to get an RV that size towed?’ Boggs asked. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a bad connection at the battery.’

Ellis went.

The RV – a Coachmen Leprechaun, running a Ford V8 under the hood – lay at the edge of the parking lot, big and rectangular as a fallen megalith. The problem was just as Boggs had suggested. Ellis retrieved pliers and a wire brush from a hardware store down the street, cleaned the battery connections and tightened the leads, and the engine keyed on. Heather, in the driver’s seat, clapped. She climbed down and peered at the burbling engine. ‘All good,’ Ellis said.

‘Want some iced tea?’ she asked. ‘Want to come in?’ she added, in a satirical tone, gesturing at the RV’s fibreglass side door. She apologised several times for the mess before letting him enter.

Marbles, toilet paper rolls, electrical wires in many colours, seashells, dryer lint, blackened sheets of aluminum foil, quartered tennis balls, Dixie cups, images of children cut from magazines, moulded plastic zoo animals – these were gathered in coffee cans and shoeboxes all over the floor. On the little dining table lay a large set of watercolours and an old anatomy textbook with holes drilled through and plastic flowers sprouting from it. She cleared a seat for him and poured iced tea in repurposed yogurt cups. He sat with anxiety bobbing inside. Beside her, loosely arranged on the bit of counter space beside the sink, stood a few strange objects. A pair of little alien creatures – assembled from pen caps, wires, pieces of cellphones, bits of shining broken glass for teeth – looked at themselves in dollhouse mirrors. A spiky ball had been built from cigarette butts and painted an unnaturally bright sun-yellow, making it a pretty little object. And flooding from the double door of a plastic toy barn came a blob-like collection of pieces of things, arranged as if oozing into all directions. Looking closer, he saw that the blob-thing was made of many plastic soldiers, or pieces of plastic soldiers, assembled to present a surface of weaponry – pistols, rifles, bazookas, mortars, machine guns, aiming everywhere.

Heather said, ‘Don’t touch!’ But then she reached with a finger and prodded it. ‘It’s too delicate. Some day I’ll hit a pothole and destroy it.’ She apologised once more for the clutter. ‘Dad doesn’t use the RV any more, so he lets me borrow it, and it’s kind of evolved into a storage unit.’

As if conditioned by the photo on Boggs’s desk, he could look toward her only in fretful glances. ‘I should thank you,’ he said, ‘for helping me to meet Boggs, for the job.’

‘Should you? Do you like it?’

‘It’s always interesting. Every case is different.’

She talked about her father’s love of his job, as a cop. Ellis picked a roll of tape from the table and tested the stickiness of its edges. He tapped with his foot a box of toothpaste-tube caps and matchbook covers.

Into a silence he blurted, ‘That’s a lot of toothpaste caps.’

‘You can find the strangest things at garage sales. I once saw a shrunken head, set out on a blanket beside some cheap flower vases. A price was stickered onto the nose. Ten bucks, I think.’

‘It was real?’

‘I think so. I tried to buy it, but the woman decided she didn’t want to sell it after all. I offered fifty, and she started yelling at me.’

‘She lost her head?’

Heather didn’t reply, and Ellis, in anxiety, glanced at her again. ‘It’s more like she kept her head,’ Heather said, ‘but decided that she’d gotten ahead of herself.’

‘Stuck her neck out?’

Now she grinned. ‘Way out.’ She searched in a pile of construction paper. ‘I was just sort of experimenting with Popsicle sticks for Christmas tree ornaments.’ She held up a star shape, decorated with glued bits of coloured cellophane. ‘The trick is to remember to pretend that you have the clumsy hands of a child.’

They sat quietly while she fussed with the cellophane.

She said, ‘John’s glad to be working with you. He likes you.’

‘I like him, too.’

‘But don’t you wish sometimes that he’d just shut the hell up?’