Look At Me_ A Novel Part 31

"No thank you," Aziz said.

He traversed the dark streets south of the bus station, dark with soot and the shadows of tall buildings blocking the already weak American sunlight, dark with the faces of toilers pulling racks of clothing over soiled, uneven pavement, people too far removed from the conspiracy even to know they were its victims. Aziz trolled for bits of conversation: "The guy was a Froot Loop," and "I started seeing, like, funny shapes," and "I gotta go play my mother's numbers," words and phrases catching in his mind like burrs-"Too rich for my blood," and "Knowhamsay?" One word. Aziz whispered it: "Knowhamsay?"

His next visit was one week later. This time he brought a guidebook with a laminated map attached. Already his English had improved, words begetting words even as he slept, a proliferation that was not unlike the obstinate and furious activity of life itself. For architecture buffs, we've rated the city's treasures on a scale of one to four, with "1" meaning Miss at Your Peril! For architecture buffs, we've rated the city's treasures on a scale of one to four, with "1" meaning Miss at Your Peril! He was able to read most of the guidebook, though all he really wanted was to identify the different neighborhoods and canva.s.s them. He walked north to the "Upper West Side," which appeared to be the exclusive domain of children and babies along with their bedraggled mothers or tranquil Caribbean nursemaids. Sidewalks jammed with strollers five abreast, the air moist with phlegmy cries. He fled to Central Park, where the babies had reached adulthood and were exercising their bodies with a rigor that appeared brutal, expiatory. On the "Upper East Side" he emerged into the last phase of this foreshortened life cycle: an abundance of ancient bejeweled ladies crushed into wheelchairs only slightly larger than the prams across the park, pushed by the same Caribbean nursemaids through an embalmed and moneyed silence. It was April; Aziz prowled the streets in his lush beard and immigrant's garb of obvious synthetics. No one looked at him, and this was convenient; it allowed him to stare at people unhindered, conduct his search for conspirators beneath a mantle of invisibility. He was able to read most of the guidebook, though all he really wanted was to identify the different neighborhoods and canva.s.s them. He walked north to the "Upper West Side," which appeared to be the exclusive domain of children and babies along with their bedraggled mothers or tranquil Caribbean nursemaids. Sidewalks jammed with strollers five abreast, the air moist with phlegmy cries. He fled to Central Park, where the babies had reached adulthood and were exercising their bodies with a rigor that appeared brutal, expiatory. On the "Upper East Side" he emerged into the last phase of this foreshortened life cycle: an abundance of ancient bejeweled ladies crushed into wheelchairs only slightly larger than the prams across the park, pushed by the same Caribbean nursemaids through an embalmed and moneyed silence. It was April; Aziz prowled the streets in his lush beard and immigrant's garb of obvious synthetics. No one looked at him, and this was convenient; it allowed him to stare at people unhindered, conduct his search for conspirators beneath a mantle of invisibility.

The soles of his cheap shoes were paper-thin, he felt grains of pavement under his toes. He turned, heading south on Madison Avenue (The window shopper will find much to savor, but the bargain hunter may be disappointed!) (The window shopper will find much to savor, but the bargain hunter may be disappointed!), when a long black car eased toward a curb, tightening a string around Aziz's heart. A slight blond woman emerged among a cordon of attendants, her familiar, striking face tipped down, dark gla.s.ses sealing off her eyes, the mere intimation of her physical presence impacting everyone within range like lightning stunning a pool full of swimmers. People froze, clutching shopping bags, they turned and strained to glimpse this woman as she slipped with her entourage inside a lavish department store. Aziz followed invisibly in his torn shoes and brown polyester, vaulting through the heavy, parted doors to keep his famous quarry in sight.

Inside, the intensity of light and perfume and glittering objects made him gasp; he stopped, wavered, stared into a foam of blond hair and brightly painted faces aimed at him like spears. Indoors, he no longer was invisible! He stood, caught in the brightness, caught on the p.r.o.ngs of the women's stares as a guard approached, a gentle-eyed black in a uniform with gold piping. "Sir, may I help you?" this man began politely, and Aziz bolted back outside, shamed by the piteous spectacle he made even as he knew that it was temporary. Necessary.

Still, he'd learned something critical: America's conspirators were no different from overlords elsewhere in the world, encased within bulletproof cars and crusts of bodyguards, all the usual accoutrements of oppression and injustice. Of course you didn't see them on the street! As Aziz peered through the store windows, the rage that lived inside him like a second beating heart awoke with a jerk that stirred his lower parts, rousing him. Exciting him. Rage and desire were a pair, joined somewhere deep within him. He cut short his search that day, consumed by a need to return to Jersey City and stand behind the blue plastic shower curtain (the bathroom door didn't close) and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e.

Next time, Charlotte went to the house in daylight. She saw a "FOR RENT" sign in the front window and was instantly lifted away, spirited from inside herself to a safe and padded distance. From there, she watched herself push the front doorbell, which she hadn't done since that first night when she'd brought him the fish. The sound of the bell clattered through the empty house.

Still, she pretended not to know, and not knowing lent a drenched, sensuous quality to the next several minutes. She walked behind the house to the back door, overwhelmed by the humid, sour-sweet smell of mown gra.s.s, bees panting in the bushes, the air thick with sunshine you could practically eat. And behind it all the eerie chime of locusts.

The door was unlocked. Charlotte pushed it wide and stepped inside the kitchen. In daytime it was a different room. So light! But airless, too. She went straight to the freezer, found a half-empty box of frozen waffles and felt a lurch of hope. But the refrigerator was bare, a carton of sour milk, dry sandwich meats. No one had been here in days.

Upstairs, the bed was stripped. On the windowsill sat her fishbowl, empty. He took the fish! Charlotte thought, grasping for some encouragement. Window and screen were wide open, big flies b.u.t.ting at the walls. The k.u.mquat tree had fainted. She carried it into the bathroom and watered it in the sink. Everything looked slightly meager in daylight. She went in his office and opened desk drawers in search of a note, a letter addressed to herself, some explanation that would include her. She felt it in the empty house: an intelligence. Some deeper fold in the mystery. But there was nothing in the desk. She trudged downstairs to the living room and clawed between the cushions of the couch, threw open drawers in the kitchen but found just the same dented cutlery. She looked inside the waffle box. And gradually, the inoculation she'd received outside the house began to fade, and she felt a pull of fear.

She ran back upstairs to the bedroom and wriggled her fingers under the mattress, slid her palms over the bottom of each dresser drawer, collecting a fine layer of dust on her fingertips. Then she sat on the bed and touched the amber bead at her neck. She took it off and held it. It was real, it was in her hands. But the exotic smell of the leather had faded. Now it smelled like nothing, like herself.

She was supposed to have been at her uncle's office twenty minutes ago-the first appointment of their new, twice-weekly summer schedule. She'd written an essay describing the changes to Rockford after World War II: the construction of the Northwest Tollway in 1958, five miles east of downtown, and the subsequent drift of the city in that direction until miles of commercial strip replaced miles of cornfield which in turn had replaced miles of nine-foot-tall blue prairie gra.s.s. She'd detailed the construction of malls, the closure of downtown theaters and vaudeville houses in the 1950s when people started watching TV. Charlotte knew she was late, but she couldn't seem to move. She was afraid to. As long as she was here in this house, some possibility remained alive. She lay face-down on the bare mattress, listening to the strange, chattering locusts. The furniture industry was dying out because the trees were long gone, even the trees in Wisconsin were depleted The furniture industry was dying out because the trees were long gone, even the trees in Wisconsin were depleted ... Occasionally she heard a car. The first two times, Charlotte bolted into his office, whose windows faced the street, and each time, she felt some terrible knowledge preparing to lift from her like a page, to peel away, an unhappiness whose full weight she sensed only in those moments of believing she would be freed of it. And then the car would mutter out of sight and the page would fall back down and she would release herself to the suction of that mattress. She wanted to cry, to be consumed by convulsions of innocent grief. ... Occasionally she heard a car. The first two times, Charlotte bolted into his office, whose windows faced the street, and each time, she felt some terrible knowledge preparing to lift from her like a page, to peel away, an unhappiness whose full weight she sensed only in those moments of believing she would be freed of it. And then the car would mutter out of sight and the page would fall back down and she would release herself to the suction of that mattress. She wanted to cry, to be consumed by convulsions of innocent grief. My love affair has ended My love affair has ended, she baited herself, My boyfriend has left. My boyfriend has left. But her chest stayed dry and tight. But her chest stayed dry and tight.

The sun completed its trip, curtsied, vanished. Shadows crawled inside the room. Charlotte heard people coming home from work, but she no longer jumped to her feet. She imagined her uncle waiting for her at his desk, nervously checking his watch, lifting the shade on his window to peer above the dirt. When two hours had pa.s.sed, she was relieved to think that her time with her uncle would be finished. He would be home now, or heading home, carrying his Smith-Corona. Bits of speech from other houses flecked the quiet, church bells specked the distance. Charlotte tried to picture Michael West, what he might be doing: driving with the radio on, or else riding a bus, or lying on a bed somewhere, hands behind his head. Or sitting in a park, as he'd been doing when she met him first. His arm in a sling. But she couldn't imagine any of it. What she saw instead was her uncle traversing State Street, a lone figure weaving stolidly among fenders and hedges.

At sunset, Charlotte hauled herself outside. She didn't want to see the house in darkness. She would never see it again, would forget where it was, felt herself forgetting even now. She walked her bike around to the street and got on, then hesitated, standing in front of the house, dogged by a sense that she was leaving something behind. Gently she rested her bike on the curb and went around back. Beneath Michael's open bedroom window she squatted in the gra.s.s, thinking No No, even as she teased apart the strands. Don't. Don't. But she kept looking, propelled by some thrust of dread, until she found them-two out of three, anyway. Fish were almost all water, so they dried to practically nothing in the open air. Little husks. Charlotte lifted them out of the gra.s.s by their membranous tails, dry and delicate as b.u.t.terfly wings, amazed that they had always been so small inside their floating veils-nothing really, just seeds, those feather-shaped seeds that twirled from the trees each fall. As she sat in the gra.s.s, holding the fish, she felt her memories of Michael West begin to shrink, to dry away, leaving behind a chilly desolation that bore a faint trace of relief. As if some mammoth effort had at last been suspended. She dropped the fish in her shirt pocket and rode away. But she kept looking, propelled by some thrust of dread, until she found them-two out of three, anyway. Fish were almost all water, so they dried to practically nothing in the open air. Little husks. Charlotte lifted them out of the gra.s.s by their membranous tails, dry and delicate as b.u.t.terfly wings, amazed that they had always been so small inside their floating veils-nothing really, just seeds, those feather-shaped seeds that twirled from the trees each fall. As she sat in the gra.s.s, holding the fish, she felt her memories of Michael West begin to shrink, to dry away, leaving behind a chilly desolation that bore a faint trace of relief. As if some mammoth effort had at last been suspended. She dropped the fish in her shirt pocket and rode away.

Five weeks after his arrival in America, Aziz unveiled his proposal on a Jersey City pay phone to one of the several puppeteers who believed they were controlling him from afar. If the collective goal was to be seen to be seen-to saturate the airwaves with images of devastation that would serve as both a lesson and a warning-why not strike at the famous people themselves? Were they not at the conspiracy's very heart, its very instruments? If the goal was symbolism, how could leveling a bridge or a tunnel or even the f.u.c.king White House f.u.c.king White House (this in English) approach the perfect symmetry of his idea? Thus he argued in a forcible hiss, then lowered his voice as a man his compatriots believed was an FBI informant moseyed toward him through the icy dawn. (this in English) approach the perfect symmetry of his idea? Thus he argued in a forcible hiss, then lowered his voice as a man his compatriots believed was an FBI informant moseyed toward him through the icy dawn.

It was an idea, the puppeteer conceded. The main thing was not to act precipitously. Aziz understood his caution-rogues were a serious worry. Witness the World Trade Center fiasco; only seven people dead of the many thousands who worked in those buildings, seven including an unborn child! Structural damage completely underground. In short, nothing to see! Nothing to see but hundreds of people coughing and weeping. Yes, Aziz agreed about rogues and their dangers. And now he cajoled the puppeteer by putting on accents, a Jersey accent, Brooklyn accent, Queens, Haitian, black American; he dangled expressions, A face like a hundred miles of bad road A face like a hundred miles of bad road, and I'll hurt you bad, motherf.u.c.ker I'll hurt you bad, motherf.u.c.ker, he donned and doffed voices like silly hats until at last the puppeteer snickered, then laughed outright. And then, with the man's laughter tickling his eardrums, he broached the topic of who should drive to Canada and collect the money to be wired there.

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Charlotte called her uncle to apologize for the missed appointment. I'm sick, she told him, unable to push the despair from her voice. But her very sorrow seemed, oddly, to enliven Moose, for his voice shook as he a.s.sured her, "I understand completely. Completely. Call when you're ready."

At home no one noticed. They were concentrating on Ricky's one-year bone marrow test, which was later that week. School was out, and Charlotte spent hours on her bike, taking the measure of the strange, empty new world where she lived. She rode in search of people, strangers-anyone. It was hard to find them. They were all in their cars, afloat in air-conditioning. She crossed the river to the west side and rode downtown to the old water power district, that glittering wreck she'd plundered with Moose only weeks before, but she found just various forms of emptiness, parking lots and parking garages, parking ramps, solitary drinkers slumped on benches. Twice she rode past Teeter's bar, but didn't go inside.

The riverfront park was still the most populous place-her old haunt, where children wobbled on training wheels and flabby guys played volleyball on rectangles of orange sand. The water twitched with motor boats and jet skis. She rode north to Sh.o.r.ewood Park and the water-ski jump, then south to the YMCA, her stomach seizing each time she approached it because she half expected to see Michael West sitting cross-legged by the river. His arm in a sling. She craved this-to begin the story again, like re-entering a dream. But it wouldn't be the same. Something had shifted, broken in her. When she thought of herself a year ago she remembered a girl flush with outsized hopes, a girl who believed the world had made secret arrangements in her favor. Charlotte hated her.

On a Sat.u.r.day night six weeks after his arrival, Aziz wedged himself among the others onto the foam-rubber couch and closed his eyes pro-phylactically, shielding himself from the television's stupefying rays. Then he waited, eyelids fluttering, for anesthesia to befall the rest. When they were fully p.r.o.ne, mouths ajar, eyes crossed, he shimmied out of their midst, slid from the room and broke free of the apartment.

Across the river, Manhattan glittered like a gold mine.

At Port Authority, Aziz threaded his way among the desperate stragglers, the drug-baffled wanderers and empty-eyed travelers, then walked straight across Forty-second Street to Fifth Avenue. But the avenue was empty, jewels in windows replaced by photographs of jewels, skinny faceless mannequins semaphoring in linen dresses-empty, empty, newspapers lazing on the air.

He stood on a corner, debating where to go. By now he had gathered intelligence in all of Manhattan's neighborhoods except those mired in poverty, where victims of the conspiracy lived. Greenwich Village was home to a handful of conspirators; dank, empty Tribeca housed an even greater concentration. The East Village had practically none, although now and then they visited to buy narcotics. Soho was the hardest to a.s.sess; at first, Aziz had believed it consisted solely of famous people, but he'd come to see that its inhabitants were merely sympathizers of fame-they darted from black cars with exactly the feinting, coded motions that famous people used.

He took the number six train downtown and got off at Spring Street, where the Geiger counter of his anger began to signal instantly. He walked to Broadway, searching out the source of his excitement among the mult.i.tudes of young-looking people in black, men with small round gla.s.ses, women whose belly b.u.t.tons winked at the warm night; intentionally scruffy people whom he had only recently learned to distinguish from actually scruffy people like himself. Finally he began walking north, then east, guided by a pulse from within the city's depths.

He reached a narrow street with a contortion of activity at one end-a crush of taxis, a phalanx of long black cars, a beseeching crowd yearning toward an unmarked door where two bulky blacks and one bulky white were keeping order. He fixed his eyes on the individuals going inside, heartbeat flailing in recognition: There There, the famous misbehaving boxer! There There, the young actress who resembled Grace Kelly! There There, the red-haired girl from the shampoo commercial! They parted the crowd as if it were sea foam lapping at their knees, floated indoors and out of sight. A convocation close enough to touch! He'd stumbled upon them! And although Aziz knew he should regroup to formulate a plan, still he thrust himself invisibly among the throng of seekers, the welter of anxious devotees, unable to stop himself until he'd reached the front of the line and ma.s.saged the velvet ropes with his fingertips, ascertaining that no electric current ran through them; they restrained the crowd through sheer symbolism. He hung there, enjoying the beat of his rage, half pleasure, half sickness, until one of the black door guardians confronted him, a tilt of amus.e.m.e.nt to the man's face as he flicked his eyes at the chaotic whorls of Aziz's beard, his synthetic raiments. "You on the list?" he asked (skeptically), and Aziz shook his head, swallowing back his anger, shamed by his own abjectness, so p.r.o.nounced in this setting, and worse (he realized now) fully erect inside his polyester pants, a fact not lost upon his inquisitor, who shook his head muttering, "Call a doctor, man," before his eyes shuttered over and Aziz felt himself to dematerialize. And only then did he notice the peculiar din made by other pet.i.tioners calling out to this man. "G!" they cried, "Over here-G," entreating his attention with the urgency of drowning victims begging for flotation. And as Aziz detached himself from this crowd, melting back into the shadowy darkness whence he had emerged, those plaintive cries caught in his ears: "G! ... G!"

G.

Heading south along the river, Charlotte noticed someone waving from a bench. Two people. She had taken to riding without gla.s.ses, blurring the emptiness around her into something almost lovely, and now her helpless eyes fumbled at the waving shapes, searching for the outline of Michael West. She braked, sliding the gla.s.ses from the collar of her shirt. But by then she knew. It was Ricky and her mother.

"Wow," she said, pulling over beside them, weak from that spasm of hope. "Is everything okay?"

"Ricky thought we'd find you here," her mother said.

But Ricky wasn't talking. Ricky was grinning, arms folded at his chest, big feet nuzzling his skateboard like two hands, sliding it lovingly back and forth across the gra.s.s. He was looking at the river and looking at Charlotte, too, from the edges of his eyes.

"The tests," she said.

Now Ricky let his eyes flick in her direction, the grin half breaking his face.

"And?" Charlotte said. "And?"

And Ricky grinned, her beautiful little brother grinned like a knife. He looked older. Something in his jaw, his eyes. The proportions of his face. Charlotte noticed this now, for the first time, and it shocked her.

"Everything came back negative," Ellen said. "It was absolutely clean."

She had said this again and again, silently to herself and aloud with no one in the room. Back and forth with Harris on the phone, both of them silly with the news. "He made it!" and then, "So far."

"We made it."

"For now."

"It's over."

"For the time being, anyway."

"I don't think I realized how awful it was until I knew it was behind us."

"At least for now." Again and again they swapped the roles of exultation and sobriety. Their son was well-for now he was well, and probably forever.

Across the river, a pink sun nudged the ashy remains of downtown. Ninety percent. Even to Ellen's pessimistic ear, ninety percent sounded awfully good. As she sat with her children, watching the sun, she thought of Bartholomeu Dias, the Portuguese sea captain whose ship was blown around the Cape of Good Hope by a storm-the first time a European had rounded Africa's tip. But his crew refused to go on to the Indian Ocean, and it was Vasco da Gama who retraced his steps and reached India and famously subdued it. Eventually Dias died in a shipwreck, sailing for another captain. But he'd done it. Ellen looked at her children: Ricky, who was well, Charlotte, whose heart was broken. It was impossible not to see; Ellen knew the signs too well.

And always, too, there was an absence, an empty place she was holding with her mind. Moose. An explorer who hadn't returned, who remained on a strange, distant sea. Ellen could barely keep her brother in sight anymore, but she did, she would forever. As she sat on a bench, her children near enough to touch, the sun in her eyes, Bartholomeu Dias rounding the Cape of Good Hope, she felt something pooling inside her. Peace.

Ricky went to the river's edge and began flinging stones at the water. When he found a flat one, he skipped it. "Careful of the water-skiers," Ellen warned, enjoying the luxury of fretting over something so tiny.

"I'm not even close, Mom," Ricky snorted-in the same spirit, she thought-miming with her the gestures of a mother and son with nothing more urgent to think about.

Ellen moved close to Charlotte, narrowing the s.p.a.ce between herself and her daughter. She reached an arm around her shoulders. It was a bold move, and she half expected Charlotte to shake her off. But Charlotte didn't move-too depressed, Ellen thought, self-mockingly. They sat together in the gaudy sunset.

Charlotte watched Ricky throw stones, his lithe silhouette against the brown water. Early settlers had written joyous tributes to the Rock River: its leaping fish, its sweet taste. Ricky was well, just as Charlotte had promised him. He was growing up. Soon he wouldn't need her anymore; she saw this now with a pitiless clarity. At the touch of her mother's arm she had an impulse to withdraw, hold herself apart; preserve herself for the special fate she had always believed was awaiting her. But that mystery had shrunken away; there were no more shortcuts, no shimmering paths through the darkness. She had made them up. Her uncle's picture of the Rock River was of no particular spot; Charlotte saw this, now, each time she looked. It could have been taken anywhere along the riverbank.

She leaned into her mother's arm and gazed across the river. Old houses, weeping willows. Evidence Evidence, Moose had said. Evidence of what? Charlotte narrowed her eyes and tried to imagine today in black and white, pale and shrunken in her hand: this river, this bench, this afternoon in 199-, and for a telescopic instant, she felt how long ago it would all seem one day. The vision shook her, like peering through a crack and glimpsing some alien, furious motion. She opened her eyes, relieved by the brightness around her, the colors of the setting sun, her brother whipping stones across the water's skin. Her mother's arm. And something scratched to life in Charlotte, then, as if she had very nearly lost these things. She held them with her eyes.

The next time Aziz approached the velvet ropes, three more weeks had pa.s.sed. Colored tulips fringed the streets. He wore a suit designed by Helmut Lang. He was clean-shaven, with short, neatly trimmed hair spiked up slightly from his head, and very small eyegla.s.ses containing yellow-tinted gla.s.s (his vision was perfect). He concealed in his hand two crisp hundred-dollar bills, which he palmed to the doorman, along with a business card that read "Z," with the telephone number of a voicemail box he had rented using cash that very morning.

"Thank you," he murmured in a faintly European accent, and floated through the doors.

He had settled on these details of attire and mien by milling outside the club on a different night each week (excepting Fridays, which he spent at the mosque), standing invisibly, observing in punctilious detail which of the conspirators' sycophants and admirers were allowed to accompany them inside. He studied clothing, a jacket thrown over an arm, an upturned label above the neckline of a ladies' dress. He studied haircuts, beard stubble, possession of an earring or lack thereof, shoes, gla.s.ses (if any), wrist.w.a.tches, beepers, cell phones, moneyclips. Neckties were certain doom. He dredged the premises for listless chat and repeated phrases to himself before the bathroom mirror. He filled his pockets with debris from the sidewalk and street: business cards, cigarette b.u.t.ts, a tiny spoon, a hair clip, cards advertising other clubs, two earrings, a nail clipper, three small gla.s.sine bags, a ribbed red condom still in its package, a playing card with two phone numbers on it, both of which he called, listening to the style and tone of their outgoing messages.

Archaeologists were right. You learned the most from people's garbage.

To effect these drastic changes in appearance and demeanor without alarming his Jersey City compatriots, Aziz had rented, first, a locker in the Port Authority in which to conceal items of clothing as he acquired them, then a room in an Eighth Avenue hotel (paid for weekly, in cash) whose selling point was its full-length mirror, admittedly speckled with mold, in which he studied and made adjustments to his ensemble. The money had come from the Canadian wire, which he'd depleted by nearly half on the pretext that the puppeteers had instructed him to buy weaponry. But there would come a time-soon, he guessed-when no further explanations would suffice, when he would seize what cash remained and vanish.

He felt no guilt over this. He'd turned his back on people he owed far more than he did these compatriots, had walked away from people he actually loved, without a backward glance. Again and again. Aziz did everything possible not to think of those people now, the lost loves he'd abandoned for the thrall of his rage, but occasionally a memory would flinch awake and startle him with its slice of pain, a glimpse, a blurred glimpse of some other life he'd once enjoyed. A squall of velvety limbs across a room: his first son, wet from the womb, kicking in sunlight. A boy who would now be fourteen. His tired wife smiling at him from tousled sheets. All this and more he'd given up to fight the conspiracy, and so he had to win. Had to, or these forfeitures would have been for nothing.

Inside the club, he took several long breaths and looked around through his yellow-tinted gla.s.ses. He was pressed among a crowd in what appeared to be a restaurant. Waiters fought through a mob ama.s.sed before a spectacular bar, spare, colossal, backlit, crowned with textured squares of something deeply red, while music jerked up from beneath the floor, hijacking his innards. The conspirators were seated beyond the bar at round tables and booths, identifiable by the concentric rings of admirers inclining toward them, and by the noose of scrutiny they dropped around everyone else. The room was filled with hundreds of the most beautiful girls Aziz had ever seen, girls from television, the makeup and shampoo girls all gathered here in such abundance that it was impossible to look at any one without his eyes slipping inadvertently to the next, as if they existed collectively rather than singly: the very medium in which the rest of it was suspended.

So much beauty in one place made the equivalent of brightness, and Aziz shut his eyes, struggling to organize his impressions. He recognized this place as the referent of every crummy disco in the world, every cinderblock room with colored lights and a mirror ball missing half its chips, every girl with a cheap, shimmery blouse pulled over her scrawny arms, nodding her chin to a synthetic backbeat; Cairo, Mombasa, Beirut-all were concentric ripples of a disturbance generated here, a hunger whose signal had reached virtually every cranny of the earth.

Still, the basic questions eluded him. Who was in charge? How were the cheap dreams tested to ensure their effectiveness? Was headquarters actually here, or did the plan of subjugation arise from some more remote place? The girls distracted him, glowing like marine life from the phosph.o.r.escent reaches of the sea, girls like unicorns, their impossible, faceted faces making him dizzy. How he loathed them. And standing in their midst, Aziz felt the peculiar, dizzying pleasure of hating a thing so purely you'll do anything to destroy it, anything, a pleasure that was indistinguishable from the wish to be destroyed himself. Consumed.

As he scanned the room for some articulation of the conspiracy, his eye fell upon a woman he'd already looked at several times, a short-haired brunette who was the same physical type as the other girls, but older. Familiar. He seemed to remember her from years ago-TV, perhaps, some commercial or photograph that had wended its way through the locks and sluices of telecommunication to his remote patch of the world. She seemed to call to him from his own youth, when the conspiracy had worked upon him without his knowledge or consent. Unlike the other girls, who were purely visual phenomena, this one had an air of consciousness. She was seated at a conspirator's table, but seemed not to act in tandem with the rest. She sipped her c.o.c.ktail, bracelets sliding down her arm, a chill in her eyes as she surveyed the room, appraising these trappings of her life. She was waiting. And Z smiled, recognizing her.

He'd met her before, countless times. Every social structure contained such a figure: the disillusioned one who knew the system but no longer cared, no longer believed. Who was waiting. Sometimes money was required to turn such people, but often not; often, attention alone was enough, the appearance of love, or helplessness, or strength. Mystery or straightforwardness. Z recognized her, and in that instant, his hatred and l.u.s.t and longing to destroy, his regret over all he'd gouged from himself in the process, affixed themselves to this woman with a heave and thrust of connection that obscured the room's din, an eruption whose radiance blocked every brightness around him. He imagined sinking his teeth into her lovely white arm, pulling off those bracelets and breaking them between his jaws. As he watched her, the woman looked up (had she really, or did he only imagine it as he watched this young, sleeping girl in Rockford, Illinois?), looked up as if alerted, somehow, to the chaos within him, the heaving and crashing. Her eyes sifted among the crowd inevitably toward his own, which Aziz imagined fulminating like stars, and broke there, resting on him very lightly (he leaned over the girl's sleeping ear, lips almost touching it, and whispered, "Good-bye"), eyeing him with something too mild to be called curiosity as she sat, luxuriating in this tyranny. ("Good-bye," he said again.) They watched each other for a full twenty seconds, a period so prolonged that Z was relieved when at last the woman's eyes drifted past him, carrying with them her boredom, her indifference.

"Good-bye."

But of course, Charlotte couldn't hear him.

Chapter Eighteen.

"Pluswhich," Roselyn told Charlotte, emerging from behind the counter in her little paper hat to mop a swath of Orange Crush from the white linoleum floor, "if you worked here, we could be homies all summer long." Charlotte, emerging from behind the counter in her little paper hat to mop a swath of Orange Crush from the white linoleum floor, "if you worked here, we could be homies all summer long."

"Aren't we now?"

Roselyn wielded the mop in silence, letting Charlotte mull that question over for herself. Laurel had gone off to ballet camp for the summer, and no one knew what Sheila was doing. Their quartet had ceased to exist and Charlotte was to blame-in disappearing, she had cut the knot of her friends. Everyone seemed to agree on this.

Folded into a booth, she tipped her head, watching Roz swab the Crush and then wring the mop into a bucket of inky water. She'd come to TCBY straight from Fish World, where she had worked alone among salt.w.a.ter and seahorses and starfish and chunks of live coral, interpreting for customers the mute, elastic motions of fish. Gradually, she was breaking the habit of picturing them dead, as they would look after days in the open air. Charlotte handled herself very carefully. She came to TCBY without her gla.s.ses, with blusher on her cheeks and eyelashes drooping with mascara; she sluiced her lips with a tube of crimson, strawberry-scented gloss Roz had given her, and in performing these ablutions she unburdened herself of the other Charlotte Hauser, the one the boys from Baxter had despised.

Often they would appear, these boys, ama.s.sing at TCBY before or after jobs in other places: Magic Waters, where a lot of them worked at night manning the water rides, the food court at Cherryvale. They accreted on chairs and tables inadvertently, like ice forming on window-panes; they perched atop their skateboards and kneaded them back and forth across the floor, occasionally cracking one against a wall until the manager shooed them away. At which point they roused themselves and shambled outdoors to skate the handicapped ramp. Charlotte took unexpected comfort in the presence of these boys; they didn't know about Michael West. They didn't know, and so he was erased.

"How can I quit?" she pleaded with Roz. "It'll take Mrs. Holenhaft so long to train someone else, and she's already old."

"Por favor," Roz said, nudging the bucket back around the counter with her foot. "For once in your life." She had a new soft voice, fluttery, tender, a voice that turned her most ribald remarks into sweet, delicate patter. Charlotte hadn't even known about the operation. Roz said, nudging the bucket back around the counter with her foot. "For once in your life." She had a new soft voice, fluttery, tender, a voice that turned her most ribald remarks into sweet, delicate patter. Charlotte hadn't even known about the operation.

"For once what?" she said.

"Be like everybody else?"

The computerized bell on the gla.s.s door tolled the arrival of two guys dragging pockets of heat from outdoors like parachutes. Roz acknowledged their cuteness with a forked glance at Charlotte and a crack of green gum. The yogurt machine shuddered to life.

Sunlight leaned through the gla.s.s door. Charlotte checked her watch. She was meeting her uncle for the first time since the missed appointment two weeks ago, the belated start of their intensive summer schedule. She'd prepared encyclopedically for this encounter, reviewing everything he'd taught her until her brain quivered with facts like a thousand racehorses twitching at a starting line. She wanted to stun Moose, delight and overwhelm him, redeem the missed appointment and all the days she'd spent not thinking about Rockford's history. She hungered for the jolt of his proximity-the sensation of slipping with Moose through a hidden door into a strange, secret world.

At the same time, she was anxious-afraid, almost-to see him.

"I can hold him off maybe one more day," Roz called from behind the counter, heaping chocolate sprinkles onto spires of yogurt. "Then he's gonna do the 'Help Wanted' thing." Behind her sweet new voice there was a gap: indifference. She expected Charlotte to refuse.

"Got it," Charlotte said, uneasy. She gathered up her books. "I'll think about it tonight."

"Thinking is a good thing," Roz said.

Charlotte stepped outside into the heat. Paul Lofgren and Jimmy Prezioso were skating the little flight of steps that lifted from the parking lot to the shops. Charlotte glanced at them quickly and raised a hand h.e.l.lo; she'd become a shy, demure girl in their presence, polite and sweet, asking nothing, deeply tentative without her gla.s.ses, fearful of tripping or colliding. And in exchange for this reticence (and the makeup, too, she supposed), the negative charge she had borne had at last been canceled. They waved back at her, easy.

Away from them, she replaced her gla.s.ses and pedaled fiercely up Alpine, facts swarming her mind as she went-crooked bridges, surveyor's sticks, twenty-four-hour stagecoach to Chicago, horse races over the river in winter before the chemicals stopped it from freezing- The campus felt sullen, aquatic, bushy with leaves, vacant of all but an occasional listless summer school student. Charlotte locked her bike on the rack outside the history building. Descending the steps to her uncle's office, she was mugged by a despondency she hadn't felt in many days-it emptied her of everything but a wish to lie down and close her eyes. By the time she reached her uncle's open door, she felt faint.

"Hi," she said, setting her books carefully on the floor and collapsing into an orange plastic chair.

Moose was standing at his desk, backlit by a few feelers of sunlight that had made the long descent into his office, shy emissaries of the brightness above. He wore an uncharacteristically seasonal ensemble: khaki pants, a pale yellow shirt open at the neck, a blue-and-white seersucker jacket that tugged noticeably at the shoulders. An artifact of Moose's old life, it looked like.

"Charlotte," he said, beholding her. "Charlotte. Charlotte," uttering her name with such resonant clarity that she felt as if this were the first time she had ever heard him say it.

"You're happy," she said.

"It's a beautiful day," her uncle said, smiling at her. "It's ... it's summer."

"Hot," she sulked, crossing her arms.

"Oh, it's not so bad. But it's gloomy down here. It saps the spirit, being underground! Let's get outside, let's get up into that ..." He pulled down his shade, choking off the light, then patted his pockets for keys. "... that beautiful sunshine."

"Sure," Charlotte agreed. She was eager to escape the bas.e.m.e.nt, to shake this sudden weight of sorrow. For the first time in days, she pictured herself in Michael West's empty house, where there was no card, no note. Where her many proofs had come to nothing.

They climbed the stairs, Charlotte carrying the books. Stupid, she thought, as they stepped together from Meeker Hall into the tacky air-why bring the books outside? But it seemed too late to turn back, to resist her uncle's cheery momentum. Hundreds of yellow dandelions flecked the gra.s.s. They looked delicate, bright. So alive. Moose pounded over them in his big black shoes, leaving juicy prints as he flattened mult.i.tudes. Charlotte wished he would be more careful, but then, what did it matter? Dandelions were weeds.

They reached the athletic field, wide as a lagoon, white skeletal goal posts tottering in the heat, bald patches at the baseball diamond. More of those yellow dandelions, thousands of them. Her uncle stamped onto the field, buoyed by the restless vigor that had come to seem his permanent demeanor, each of his jouncing steps leaving Charlotte weaker. He was whistling. And now she stopped-stopped to watch him walk. Stopped to rest. The books felt like an anchor in her arms; she wanted to set them down in the gra.s.s but was afraid they would get lost, or wet-that the sprinklers would detonate without warning. Moose charged on, swinging his arms, trouncing dandelions, until finally (and it was odd, she thought, how long this took) he noticed that she wasn't beside him, and stopped.

He turned. He was alone in a field of weedy summer gra.s.s, alone and filled with a nearly indomitable urge to laugh. To sing! Leap! Sob! Because at last, at the outermost margin of almost too late, he had managed to impart the essence of his vision to another human being! Moose had known it the moment he'd heard Charlotte's despairing voice on the phone two weeks ago, after she didn't show up at his office.

He'd been afraid, of course, that she would never come back. In the days after her call, Moose had subsisted in a state of nearly lethal anxiety, pacing his living room unable to so much as read. But Charlotte had phoned this week, sounding much improved, at which point Moose's fear that she would bolt in response to what she had seen was supplanted by a more fundamental doubt (had she really seen anything?) and a new spate of anxiety had thus commenced, until Moose lay limp, spent, helpless upon his couch.

Only just now had his doubts been dispelled. Charlotte looked changed. Tired, pained, older (in a span of two weeks!), her features newly delineated, some darkness around her eyes, as if the vision had shocked her into a more final version of herself. To Moose, these changes amounted to a sudden radiance-beauty, even-and this impression took him aback.

Charlotte watched her uncle notice she wasn't beside him and turn. He looked back at her for what seemed a very long time, and then slowly he lifted his arms, raised them over his head so the seersucker jacket splayed open and spread out on both sides of him like a pair of pale blue wings.

"Come in," he called, arms aloft. "Come in, come in-the water's fine!" sun on his teeth, and he was the old Moose again, waving to Charlotte from the wheel of a speedboat, arrayed in his splendid musculature, coaxing her into the Rock River's mysterious depths.

And then he wasn't anymore. He was just her uncle, standing in a field of dandelions.