Look at me: (17 page)

Now the husband pitched forward and introduced himself, a big man who wheezed a little when he breathed.

“Lori, yes,” Michael said. A girl with golden hair and long thin legs like tusks. Could this truly be her mother?

“I’m concerned about her grades,” she said, narrowing her eyes. Her hair was short, cut close to the head. Michael felt a pulse of anxiety. He knew this woman: the fool who sees everything. She had dogged him throughout his life, though more often she appeared as a man.

“Please. Tell me your concerns, Mrs. Haft.”

“Well, she studies like mad, but she says you don’t give her any idea what’s important. She doesn’t understand you.” Her eyes crackled with suspicion.

Any threat, even a small one, like this, induced in Michael West a calm that was almost like sleep. “I feel that I’m being quite clear,” he said. “But perhaps not enough.”

“Perhaps,” she said with faint mockery, as if the very word proved her point.

“If she will meet with me after class, I’ll review with her what is important.”

“Really? You’d really do that?” There, a relaxation. She was selfish, finally; selfish above all else. Nearly everyone was.

“If Lori takes the initiative, I will be available.”

“Abby Reece says you’re from California,” said the woman. “But you sound foreign.”

Mentally, he cursed her. His accent was so slight, as long as he avoided words he hadn’t practiced. Soon it would be nonexistent. Of course, he hadn’t yet developed an individual voice; his phrasing and diction were copied from TV and the people around him. His grammar was cautious, studied. But eventually a voice, too, would come. It always did.

“I’ve lived abroad for many years,” he said.

“Where is it you’re from exactly?”

“Smithton. It’s near L.A.,” he said, and then, as if she might not understand, “Los Angeles.”

Of course, an evasion like this would be pointless elsewhere in the world; people identified one another by dialect, family, accent. But in America, there was always someplace else. And Michael West had a gift for languages and accents—more than a gift, he could not resist them. They acted upon him like magnetic fields, unmooring his speech from the landscape of his own past and reconfiguring it in the image of his immediate surroundings. Accents were history; an accent declared
I come from someplace else.
But for Michael West, the past was gone, pulverized into grains of memory too fine to decipher, or to leave him with any sense of loss.

“And where is it you spent all those years abroad? Mexico?”

He had a sensuous fantasy of seizing her proud, bloated head and pushing his gun into the loose underside of her chin, watching her expression collapse into fear so abject it looked like tenderness. “France,” he told her, squashing the ‘a’ so flat that it broke in half and occupied most of the word. You want America, there it is, he was thinking.

Mercifully, another woman who was friendly with this one came along, and Michael was released. He went to the window and gazed outside at the odd arrangement of lawns: one of short green grass, a second of long dry brown grass. They met behind the house in a line. He closed his eyes, releasing himself to the exhaustion that had consumed him ever since his arrival in Rockford, Illinois. Each night, he anticipated sleep like a meal.

“We’re thinking of doing the whole thing prairie.” Mindy Anderson, at his side once again.

“Prairie?” It was not a word he knew.

“See, we did this patch as an experiment,” she was gesturing at the brown half of the lawn. “I think George thought it would be too wild, but I love it. Of course, it’s half-dead now.”

“How does it work?” He asked the question tentatively, always reluctant to acknowledge the vast dark spaces in his knowledge. But instinct told him that this discussion concerned fashion, not substance, that not knowing was all right.

“Well, they have the basic mix of grasses. Then you pick one of the Wildflower Moods. I picked ‘Rainbow,’ you should’ve seen it in the spring and summer, it was every color you can imagine, but subtle, too, like—like real wildflowers in a field. Oh, shoot, people are leaving. Excuse me.”

Good, he thought, people were going home. Soon he could sleep. Prairie. Prairie was grass, wild grass that was fashionable for lawns. “We’re doing the whole thing prairie,” she’d said.
Doing prairie.
Softly he murmured, “Have you ever thought about doing prairie?” But no, the stress was wrong, the grammar too formal. The sentence had to lean. “You ever thought about doing prairie? You ever thought of doing—”

“Don’t talk to yourself. Talk to me.”

It was Abby, smiling. Abby Reece, an English teacher whose wavy dark hair was faintly streaked with gray. Her eyes, too, were gray, wide and thoughtful and easily hurt. Four times, Michael West had taken her to dinner. The last was two nights ago, and they had seen a movie—his first in many years. He had gone to the theater the day before to observe the process: ticketing and concessions, restrooms, seats; the less he knew, the more conversancy he required to be at ease. And when he returned to the theater, with Abby, it had all been familiar, like second nature. The movie concerned a doctor who begins to think that his patients are animals. Pigs and sheep lay in hospital beds. Michael hardly knew what to say about it afterwards, but this seemed not to matter. “Yuck,” Abby proclaimed, and they had returned to her house and lain on her metallic blue bedspread and had sex—his first time in some months—while her children slept. Afterward, while they drank tea in Abby’s kitchen, the children had appeared, two of them, like little ghosts. Michael hadn’t seen them before; Abby didn’t want him to. They were very small. In their presence, he felt the stirring of a memory, which he snuffed. Abby hustled the children away. “I’m sorry,” she’d said at the door, as he was leaving. “They almost always sleep through the night.”

Abby Reece brought with her a life; her small house, her two children and slender gray cat, her collection of antique dolls with china heads. It could become Michael’s life, too—overnight, the way restaurants appeared on State Street fully formed, assembled from plastic parts that arrived in long boxes stacked on trucks. He had driven to these building sites in the middle of the night and watched the crews at work. Each part was numbered. Even banks could be built in this way. The indoor music, he’d learned, was beamed down by satellite to all incarnations of a particular store or restaurant, so that in New York and Atlanta or Los Angeles, the same song would always be playing. “I say we blow this pop stand,” Abby said.

“Sure,” he said, dissatisfied by the way the word caught on his teeth.
Sure
.

Good-bye, good-bye. So very nice. He shook hands with the host, a rich jowly man whose five children were either students at Baxter now or had been once. “Such beautiful art,” Michael said, eyeing the smears upon the walls that looked like shit, or snot.

“We’re glad you’re here and we hope you’ll stay,” the host said jovially.

“Thank you,” Michael said.

In the car he took Abby’s hand. Her hands were strong, a mother’s hands. At night he imagined them touching him.

“I’ve got to let the sitter go,” she said, “but you could stay for dinner.” Perhaps because he had already seen her children.

“I think not,” he said. “I’m so tired.”

She smiled through her disappointment. She was a good, trusting person. He had given her the impression that a tragedy had befallen him, a dead child, a dead wife. He had not been specific, and she was too polite, too respectful to ask what exactly it was that had caused him to abandon one life and begin another. Like most people, Abby assumed that only a catastrophe could cause a person to do such a thing, but Michael West had done it more than once. There was a freshness in leaving behind one life for the next, a raw, tingling sensation that was one step short of pain. An imperative of the mind and spirit had reshaped the facts of his life like tides rearranging a shore. And in each new life there was Abby, awaiting his arrival—more than one Abby, sometimes—people with empty places beside them where Michael could stand and look as if he belonged.

They passed two McDonald’s, but he had trained himself not to look at them in the presence of other people. He had never been inside one.

Michael pulled into the driveway of Abby’s house, a small one-story made of yellowish brick, indistinguishable from thousands of other houses in Rockford. “You want to come in for a minute?” she asked, from politeness this time. Expecting him to refuse.

“Sure,” he said, testing his pronunciation once again. He wanted to prolong the presence of people around him another few minutes, to put off his solitude. With solitude came exhaustion, sleep, but underneath that sleep, running through it in the form of urgent and disturbing dreams, were the questions he would have to answer as soon as he was rested: What was he doing in Rockford, Illinois? And where was the conspiracy he had come to America to destroy?

Abby looked surprised, pleased that he would come in. Her husband, Darden, had bolted to California two years ago with a young woman in possession of a false nose, a false chin and two false breasts. Except for occasional grudging payments, he’d had no contact with Abby or his children since that time. Michael had to forcibly curb his curiosity about this man, Darden Reece. What had he hoped to find in California, and had he found it?

Abby opened the front door and the two children, Colleen and Gavin, tumbled toward her across the room. Michael glimpsed the babysitter quickly hang up the telephone, and winked so she would know he’d caught her. She had long orange fingernails and was chewing a massive wad of gum that bulged in her cheek. Her age—sixteen, he guessed—reminded him of the other girl, the one who had followed him to his house.

Without thinking, Michael lifted Colleen into his arms, a mouse of a girl, feet sticky with something from the floor. Abby, who was paying the sitter, looked up startled, but glad, too—glad he’d wanted to lift her daughter. Michael held the wriggling four-year-old girl and felt how easily she could become his own. People were vines awaiting the chance to cling—Colleen’s sticky feet on his shirt, her small arms around his neck, her mother standing nearby, watching them with anxiety and hope. So easily, one could slip inside of other people’s lives. Gavin, the two-year-old, clung to Michael’s leg, and Michael lifted him, too, so both children squirmed in his arms, and he felt a pull deep as gravity, an exhausted longing to relax, to lie down here with this woman and her warm, squirming children and never leave. Then he extinguished the thought. It wouldn’t work; his soul was too small. Most peoples’ were large and soft, engorged with sensations and needs that would have made life unbearable for Michael West, like trying to function with his stomach cut open, holding in guts with both fists. His own soul was tight and hard, white as a diamond. People saw in it whatever they chose. That was his gift: to be blessed with a soul that promised whatever people wished, and yielded nothing.

He knew what would come of “settling down,” how welcome it would feel at first. But if he were to marry Abby Reece and move into her house and go to church on Sunday mornings with her children, if he were to “barbecue” and feed the cat and take up golf, all the while, his hard white soul would be burning slowly through the soft tissues of this new life until finally it would pierce the last layer and he would find himself outside it. No matter how many layers a life contained, his soul would eventually work its way through the outermost one, and take him with it.

Abby had gone to the kitchen to start dinner. Still holding the children, Michael leaned in and told her he was leaving. “No!” Colleen cried, and Gavin imitated her without understanding, “NO. NO!” They clung to his neck like frantic monkeys when he tried to release them.

“Kids,” Abby said sharply, and they let go in a single motion. When he set them down they stood quite still.

She had poured a package of microwave fettuccine into a glass bowl—powder, noodles—and was adding water. “Sure you don’t want to stay?” she asked lightly.

At the door, Colleen hugged Michael’s legs and kissed both his knees. He did not lift her again.

He drove quickly to his house, a tiny two-story which was the precise opposite in atmosphere of the one he had just left. Abby had never seen his house, and she would be shocked, he thought, by its emptiness. Right now, the house suited him perfectly.

Tired. Exhausted. Bushed. Beat.
Colloquial English lacked sufficient vocabulary to express the enormity of what he felt, had felt for months, ever since his arrival in this place. He reached for a beer, then changed his mind and poured a glass of milk, which he took to his room. There was a bed, a dresser and of course a TV set, that American treasure chest. He watched the programs that everyone watched, and when he wasn’t watching, he listened—for accents, facts, common knowledge. Sometimes he had trouble distinguishing between TV events and real ones; certain things on TV could not happen in life, even in America. He showered down the hall, listening to shreds of TV sound through the running water, and with his hair and body still damp, he lay down on the bed and glanced at his book of Japanese erotica, then decided against it. Too tired. He felt a moment of regret for not having stayed with Abby; he longed for sex with a human being. But sex, not love; not
making love.
It was too much work.

In the middle of the night, the doorbell rang. Michael woke in a paroxysm of fear and leapt to his feet, which made pricks of light flood his head. For a moment, he felt close to passing out. But already the calm, reasoning part of him was restoring order: if his compatriots had tracked him down, then so be it. He had always known they might. Still, anxiety cracked through his limbs when the bell rang a second time.

He pulled on his jeans and pushed his Walther into the waistband, against his stomach, not that a gun would be any use if they had found him, but it made him feel stronger. He pulled a shirt from a hanger and buttoned a couple of buttons, enough to cover the Walther, then stepped nimbly into the empty room at the front of the house, the room from which he could glimpse whoever was standing at the door. Someone thin, female. In the moonlight, a red bicycle gleamed against the grass.