“Hello, Eli,” his mother said.
He sank into the desk chair, closed his eyes, and lowered his forehead into the palm of his left hand. He clutched the phone white-knuckled with his right.
“Hi.”
“You sound strange,” she said. “Is everything okay?”
He told her that he was slightly tired. This seemed to be her cue. Did he know that it had been two months since he’d called her last? She was serious. Two months! She was only up in the Upper West Side, you know, not in Siberia, he could visit sometimes, or at least call, but any way. She just wanted to know how he was. How was the thesis coming? How was life in Brooklyn? She’d been out earlier, running a few errands, and on the way out of Zabar’s she almost got hit by a taxi. On a crosswalk, on the walk signal! Manhattan taxi drivers are homicidal. She was thinking of writing to the mayor. But anyway, her friend Sylvia’s daughter was having a baby, did he remember Sylvia’s daughter? Red hair? Blue eyes? Yes, everyone was excited. She was the one who was right between Zed and Eli, agewise. And that bloody tap in the bathroom had begun dripping again, but she wasn’t complaining. Because life’s too short to complain about small things, especially if you’re going to practically lose your life to a taxi on the way out of Zabar’s, c’est la vie, et cetera.
She faded in and out, like a shifting and unreliable radio signal. The monologue eventually subsided, and a silence settled over the line. He didn’t speak.
She began speaking again all at once, fast and nervous. She just worried about him, she said, out there in the boroughs like that. She just didn’t want him to end up like Zed. Eli transferred the phone into his left hand and held the torn page in his right. He turned the page over to read the rest of the psalm. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. When he held it up to the window, Lilia’s childhood handwriting was a backward shadow on the other side of the page. His mother wanted to know if he’d heard from Zed lately; at last word he was headed for Ethiopia, although she couldn’t remember what he was doing there. It wasn’t that she entirely disapproved of Eli’s brother, although she wished he’d go to college; she was glad that he was seeing the world (incidentally, had Eli considered travel? Maybe a month or two abroad would do him good, perhaps focus him a little), but she worried about Zed. She did. She worried that Zed was getting too radical, too mystical (or was spiritual the right word? She was never sure what the difference was), just the way he wandered around biblical countries talking about God like that. Did he seem at all unhinged? Had he been heard from lately?
Eli turned the page over again. The first part of the psalm was partly lost under her handwriting, but he could still make it out: . . . I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t heard from Zed for a while, but I don’t think you should worry about him. He doesn’t just talk about God, he talks about Buddhism and Taoism at least as much. What he suffers from—” He listened to his mother’s interruption for a second and then interrupted her. “No, he’s not an extremist, you’ve got it all wrong. I was going to say what Zed suffers from is a pathological sense of democ racy. He’s too democratic to even choose one individual religion to be extreme and radical about. He’s probably an atheist.”
This last sentiment triggered a longish pause, in which he imagined her switching the telephone from one ear to the other and mentally rewriting her will.
“Eli,” she said, “sweetheart, tell me what’s wrong.”
“I just don’t think we’re in any position to judge his life.”
The pause lengthened and grew black around the edges. No, she told him, she was serious. She wanted to know what was wrong, with no diversions this time.
“My girlfriend disappeared.” Eli listened for a moment and then interrupted her. “Yes, Lilia, the one I was living with, you think I’d have more than one? She didn’t just leave me. I mean she disappeared.”
His mother offered her opinion that girls don’t just disappear, unless they’ve gone and gotten themselves—
“This one does.”
Then she did go and get herself—
“No,” he said, “she wasn’t pregnant. For God’s sake.”
Her son, she felt, deserved better than that. And what did he mean by disappeared, exactly?
“She just got on a train and—”
“So she left.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t—”
“Then how do you know it was a train?”
“Because she said she was sick of traveling on buses,” he said.
She was worried about him. How long had he been working on his thesis, out there in the boroughs? (She had a way of saying the word boroughs that conjured up images of far-off places of questionable repute: Uzbekistan, North Korea, Côte d’Ivoire.) How long was his thesis? It must be the length of War and Peace by this point. Was it even done yet? Wasn’t it due a year ago, at least? Heaven knew she wasn’t one to judge, of course, or to criticize, but he had to at least consider her point of view in this matter. It seemed a bit odd to her that he’d want to spend time chasing after noncommittal girls who leave on trains when here it had been years and he’d missed at least one thesis deadline already. What exactly was it that was so impossible to write about? He’d always been so good at writing, he’d always been so passionate about those dead languages of his, and she understood about writer’s block, well, she thought she did, but how hard could it be? Well, she worried about him, that was all. He just seemed a bit lost to her when she called sometimes. Lacking focus, perhaps. She just didn’t want him to end up like Zed, wandering rootlessly through dangerous places far away. She still didn’t understand why he didn’t just finish his thesis and take his master’s degree. She wondered sometimes if he knew what he wanted. She was afraid sometimes that perhaps he didn’t.
He was reading the eleventh verse of the psalm: Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.
His mother was explaining about responsibility and adulthood. She had ideas about staying engaged with the world, as expressed in one’s willingness to make something of one’s life, particularly after having enjoyed the benefits of a lengthy and maternally funded university education. Which, naturally, was not an inexpensive proposition. Not that she minded, of course she didn’t, not at all, and she certainly wasn’t saying this to make him feel guilty; she just didn’t want him to end up like his brother, she was just a bit concerned, and she wondered if he was fully aware of the—
“I know what I want,” he said quietly. And suddenly, miraculously, the haze lifted. The decision was made. He let the phone drop a little, holding it loosely and barely listening to her, and with his other hand he picked up the map. Montreal was less than two inches to the north.
She wanted to know what he meant by that, but he’d already hung up the phone. He reached for his wallet from the side table, folded the Bible page into it, grabbed his coat from the closet, and put his toothbrush and the map in opposite coat pockets. The telephone began ringing again within minutes, but he was already out the door.
Part Two
10.
In a low-lit jazz club in Montreal, some years before Eli arrived in the city, a detective was sitting alone at the bar. He was meeting an old friend, who was running late, and while he waited he examined his fedora in the warm dim light. His wife had given it to him for his birthday a month earlier, and it had an appealing newness about it. It was a perfect shade of chocolate brown. He rotated it slowly, admiring every angle, set it down on the gleaming dark wood of the bar, and ordered a pint of Guinness which took some time to arrive.
He was trained in the reading of malevolent patterns. His work was essentially the study of intersections: the crosshairs where childhood trauma meets a longing for violence, where specific temperaments come up against messages written on mirrors in red lipstick, torn pairs of stocking
s in the empty industrial streets out by Métro Pie-IX, the backseats of secondhand automobiles and angles of moonlight over stains on concrete. He possessed a brilliant and sometimes eerie sense of intuition, which he wielded like a scalpel, and in the Montreal police department he was unsurpassed. His work usually involved rapists or murderers, and he had never worked with missing children until this particular afternoon at an almost deserted downtown jazz club, when his friend showed up forty-five minutes late, bought him a second beer to make up for it, and pulled a Bible out of his briefcase.
“Christopher,” his friend said, “I need your help on something.”
Christopher glanced at the Bible and then at Peter. “Don’t tell me you’ve found religion,” he said.
“No, this is evidence. Listen,” Peter said, leaning toward him a little, “have you ever thought about coming to work for me?”
“Thought never crossed my mind.”
“You’d like working for me. You get a little more leeway to do your job. It’s less . . . procedural, for lack of a better word. I don’t believe in paperwork. But anyway, look, you don’t have to decide right away about coming to work for me, I just want you to take a look at this. You know that parental abduction case I’ve been working on, the one I was telling you about?”
Peter opened the Bible on the bar. A certain page had been marked with a yellow sticky note.
A child’s uneven handwriting sloped downward across the page in blue ink, overlapping the beginning of the Twenty-second Psalm: Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home.—Lilia.
“Good Lord,” said the detective. He took the Bible from Peter’s hands. “I could find her in ten minutes with something like this. How old did you say she was?”
“She’s eleven and a half. Been missing a little over four years.”
“Same age as my daughter. Missing from where?”
“Middle of nowhere, south of here. Her mother has a house near St.-Jean, not far from the American border. Her father’s an American, so the kid has dual citizenship, and they’d probably crossed the border before the mother even reported her missing. Anyway, the girl’s been missing for years, and the police’ve been useless. Someone recognized them from a poster and they almost caught her in Cincinnati a year ago, but nothing after that. There’s just no trail. She could be anywhere this evening.”
“This note is recent?”
“Not particularly. Some religiously inclined traveling salesman found it in his motel room in Toledo three years ago.”
“Three years ago. So she was eight when she wrote this.” He was still looking at the note, shaking his head. An image flashed through him—a small girl with short blond hair sitting cross-legged on a bed in a motel room, writing carefully in a Bible—and he blinked.
“At most. She might’ve still been seven. Three years ago was just when the salesman happened to find it. Listen,” Peter said, “I could use your help on this. It’s a solvable case, but she could be anywhere, literally anywhere tonight, I am out of leads, and I’m having a bad month. You know Anya left me. Take a leave of absence from the police force, come work with me on this. The money’s better.”
“Christ,” he said, “I didn’t know about Anya. I’m sorry.”
“Well, she always said she was going to. Has it been that long since we’ve spoken?”
“I guess it’s been a while,” Christopher said.
“Think about coming to work with me on this. If anyone can find her . . .”
“I’ll think about it. May I borrow this?”
“Of course.”
He left the bar not long afterward. It was August in Montreal, and an airless day had turned to a perfect evening; there was a cool breeze from the distant river and Rue St.-Denis was alight, outdoor cafés spilling their light and voices out into the street, streetlamps shining down through the leaves of the trees that lined the sidewalk, and people everywhere: couples out walking in the twilight, girls with short skirts and multicolored hair and combat boots, young men with berets and goatees smoking cigarettes and walking somewhere quickly, slow-moving hippies with scarves wrapped over their dreadlocks and benevolent expressions, people eating dinner at small round tables on the sidewalk, everyone surreptitiously watching everyone else.
He walked slowly down the long slope to Rue Ste.-Catherine, in love with the city, the Bible in his shoulder bag. It was a lightweight book, mass-produced on thin paper to be stolen from an American motel room, but he felt the weight. He’d spent his childhood traveling too, and felt a certain empathy on that front, but it seemed to him later that he’d been seduced by her language. I wish to remain vanishing. He knew exactly what she meant. He walked home from the jazz club because the walk took two hours and he wanted to be alone, turning the phrase over and over like a polished stone in his pocket. He told himself as he walked that he was trying to make the decision but realized long before he got home that the decision had already been made.
His wife was in the kitchen, listening to the radio with the newspaper spread out over the table; she looked up and smiled when he looked in but had nothing to say. He smiled back at her and went to the dining room, flicked on the overhead light, opened the Bible on the table to read the note again. He felt less than tranquil. I do not want to be found. Later he went upstairs but he couldn’t sleep; he got up once to look in on his daughter, asleep under a quilt that had sheep all around the edges. Afterward he lay reading for a long time, an old copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology that he’d picked up from a street vendor, listening to his wife moving restlessly around the house and turning the radio on and off in the kitchen. Something was bothering him; he put the book down on the bedside table and picked up the Bible again. The child’s handwriting obscured part of the Twenty-second Psalm. He read the psalm aloud once, and then recited the first two stanzas by memory to the plaster ceiling: “Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.”
He heard his wife turn the volume of the radio up somewhere far away in the house, as if she was hoping to drown him out, but realized that she couldn’t possibly have heard him. The radio was abstract from this distance, soft static and inaudible voices. He glanced at the bedside clock; it was three-forty-five in the morning.
“If you don’t want to be rescued,” Christopher said aloud to the ceiling, “then why the Twenty-second Psalm?”
11.
On Lilia’s twelfth birthday her father gave her a book of photographs: Life magazine’s collection of the most memorable images of the twentieth century. Women in bell-bottoms and big round glasses, antiwar banners above a sea of faces on the Washington Mall, cars full of families moving slowly across a 1930s field of dust. But there was a particular image that she turned to over and over again: the crater formed by the Trinity bomb test in the New Mexico desert, in the final year of the Second World War. (“Not far from here,” her father said, glancing briefly over her shoulder and then back at the road. “No, we can’t visit it. It’s still radioactive.”)
The crater showed the aftermath of an ungodly heat: the center was purest black, the brightest black imaginable, and around the edges of this brilliant darkness was a shining ring. This was where the unimaginable heat of the explosion had changed the sand to glass, and the glass reflected the sky. The same force levels cities and creates mirrors in the desert. It occurred to her that this was what being caught might be like. The white-hot flash of recognition and then her life blown open, a radioactive mirror in a wasteland, her secretive life torn asunder and scattered outward in disarray. Tears came to her eyes in the passenger seat.
“Lilia, Lilia. Let’s stop driving for the day. Look, there’s a restaurant, let’s get you something to eat . . .”
“Why aren’t there any pictures of me?” she asked later, sipping iced tea in the air-conditioned calm of a diner.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t most people have pictures? Of when they were kids?”
He looked at her for a moment and then stood up from the table. When she looked up he was leaning on the counter, talking to the waitress. He said something that made the waitress laugh and beckoned Lilia over.
“We’re in luck, Katie. They do have a camera here.”
“So what’re you doing traveling on your birthday, Katie?” the waitress asked. She had a cloud of blond curls and red lipstick, and she winked at Lilia while she handed the camera to her father. He motioned Lilia up on a stool and stood back.
“We’re going to visit my cousins,” Lilia said.
The waitress leaned on the counter to be in the picture, although she hadn’t been asked. Click “Much obliged,” Lilia’s father said. He handed Lilia the Polaroid, and she watched her face rise slowly out of milky white.
Eleven years later she knelt on Eli’s bed in Brooklyn and pinned the picture to the wall with a thumbtack.
12.
Late at night Christopher liked to read Shakespeare sometimes, while he waited for his wife to come to bed or for sleep to overtake him, whichever happened first, and at three in the morning on an unremarkable night he caught himself reading and rereading a line from Romeo and Juliet: She is as a stranger in the world. He had met Peter in the bar only two or three nights earlier, and the line resonated strangely. There was a particular song playing on the radio a lot around that time; it had a lyric that he particularly liked, something about being a stranger in your own hometown, and he caught himself singing this line sometimes at quiet moments. His voice was unfamiliar. He’d never sung in his life, except under his breath at birthday parties, but these days he no longer entirely recognized himself.
Christopher was forty-five that year and felt somewhat older, but on the drive to work this morning he felt younger than he had in years. The Bible with the note from the missing child was in his bag on the passenger side. He hadn’t slept much—his wife had taken to coming to bed just before dawn lately, and she talked incoherently in her sleep—but he wasn’t tired, and he felt an enormous weight lifting from his shoulders when his leave-of-absence request was approved in the early afternoon. A week later he dragged the crate filled with Lilia’s case files into a dusty corner office at Peter’s agency and began attempting to settle in.