The Reconstructionist Read online

  Ellis shook himself. Leaning forward, not looking at Boggs, he said, ‘I can’t have all of this on myself. You have your own volition.’

  Boggs laughed. ‘Sure. Volition. Awareness of my own volition has been eating me alive. Terrible stuff. On the other hand, let me tell you about an accident: one day I get out of a depo sooner than expected, go to the airport, put myself on standby for an early flight, catch a tailwind and land on the ground almost five hours early. I get in the car and start driving back to the house. And along the way I happen to see, at the edge of the Home Depot parking lot, a familiar-looking RV. Did you really think, by the way, that that thing was inconspicuous? Why not go around fucking my wife in a lime-green school bus? So I stopped and watched the RV, and when it started up, I followed. It went to your place, you got out and you went inside. Jaunty, I thought, very jaunty. I hadn’t seen you walk like that before. And then – then all the options sucked. Usually I know what I want to do, but with this thing, trying to decide what to do felt like trying to reach my hand down my throat to grab my liver. I gave up. I figured I’d let you guys figure it out. You seemed to have ideas. Why should I step into it?’

  ‘Is this what you talked to her about, at the golf course?’ Ellis asked. ‘That I didn’t tell her to get a divorce?’

  ‘No,’ Boggs said. ‘I talked to her about your brother.’

  ‘Half-brother,’ Ellis said mechanically.

  ‘Right.’ Boggs said. ‘And driving around. I don’t know. I guess I figured we have to do something with our time. We might as well look at these places. When you’re in a darkness and you see a few points of light out there, of course you tend to go toward them. And if you’ve lost something, you go back to the last places you can remember having it. Maybe it was a mistake, though. Too much.’

  ‘If you’re depressed, we can –’

  ‘Stop that. I’m not depressed. Do I seem depressed? I’m just tired of thinking.’ He glowered at the highway. ‘Wounded pigs screaming. Something about the screaming pigs. People screamed in other accidents, but I started to think about the pigs. What does a screaming pig sound like? I imagine it sounds almost human, only a little different, in some unidentifiable way, to make you think, What in the name of God? And fog does weird things to sound. The cops wouldn’t have been able to see through the fog, they would have tracked the sound of the screams, stumbling around to find screaming wounded pigs, and occasionally you hear your partner blasting away, and a scream somewhere stops. Not to mention the fires, the smells of burned vehicles and ham, the body of a man lying still to be discovered after being dragged under a semi. What are you to think? What’s even the right question to ask? Is it: Who’s to blame? Who can be sued? Probably not. “It changes life forever,” they say. So, it’s like an inflection point, where the curve of a life changes direction.’ Boggs joined his hands in an inverted V. ‘The change of direction is important, but life is what happens before and after. That’s the implication. But what if that’s wrong? What if what’s actually essential is the point of change, the instant when everything is altered: the accident, the collision, the rollover? What if that’s life? Where everything changes. And if the accident is the essential point, then by travelling and gathering them together in my mind, I could see something new. Right? That was one thought I had. I guess it was stupid.’

  They sat in silence. They ate doughnuts. Ellis tremored. The sky was cloudless and depthless and difficult to look at. Over time the wind gathered, and the windmills whirred and made whomp-whomp sounds. Sometimes one windmill or another boomed with a noise of aching steel. He worried hopelessly about abandoning the body by the lake. He felt an obligation to it, felt that he should have done something differently, although he could not think what exactly. Much of the past now felt this way. He had abandoned Heather and James Dell, too. Below moved the traffic, always moving. Red car. Black semi-tractor and shining refrigerated trailer. Green car. Silver SUV. Purple pickup. Green car. He recalled that when he had been growing up, it had been next to impossible to find a new car in green; now they were everywhere.

  ‘I saw the two of you embracing,’ Boggs said. ‘I knew she was only trying to console you. I knew you were probably only thinking about the man you had hit. But it only made it worse, to see you need her so much. And that was it. Nothing had changed in the facts of my life, but I saw them clearly. I couldn’t go back to Heather, to you, to work.’

  Silence again and Ellis sat huge with guilt, as if too obese to move himself, and time passed and perhaps he slept – was it possible to sleep with eyes open? The scene remained before him, but its meaning changed with the purity of dream. All of it lay under a great bell jar. All of it peered at him and waited. All of it was held in a fog with the noises of the end of world. All of it fell slowly away.

  Suddenly Boggs looked up, startled. And Ellis followed him down the slope of the hill.

  As they reached the edge of the road, wind galed off the passing semis, the sun strobed between the blades of a windmill, and Boggs began talking about putting up little windmills along the interstates to catch the wind thrown off by passing traffic. He said he wasn’t sure if the energy captured this way would be negated by an additional wind resistance experienced by the passing vehicles. He raised a hand to shield the sun and talked about the worst gas station bathroom that he had ever seen. He said something about water, most of his words lost in the traffic noise. Then he turned and stepped into the road. Ellis, surprised, hesitated, and the air pulsed with the passage of the SUV that struck Boggs and carried him away.

  Boggs flipped over the hood, bounced off the windshield and roof, and turned heels over head, limbs outstretched, as the SUV passed below. He came down on his shoulder with his head bent strangely while the SUV continued ahead a hundred feet before the brakes locked the tyres and they began to cry and the SUV spun in the roadway. A semi travelling behind it had time and space to slow and stop. Traffic began to back up. Ellis stared, waiting for something more to happen – it seemed something more must happen. Time passed, and he thought, I should understand this now. Someone was shouting. Nothing happened except that people shouted and traffic accumulated in a long idling column behind the stopped semi. He went slowly toward Boggs, already sure that Boggs was dead.

  PART FIVE: THE RECONSTRUCTION

  12.

  THE ROOM – SMALL, oddly shaped, poorly lit – lay at the end of a cul-de-sac hallway, at the place where an older hospital building had been mated to a newer addition, the room itself a structural afterthought formed by opening some space off the side of a storage closet. It had several corners, one narrow window, and provided barely sufficient floor space for a few pieces of equipment, two chairs and a single bed. On the ceiling a fluorescent light box flickered. ‘They brought me back to life and then what? Then they put me into a tomb,’ complained James Dell, his voice a croak. He sipped from a plastic cup and water overspilled his lips and flowed onto his green hospital gown, where he batted at it. Pale and brightly scarred, he lay in collapse, a pair of eyeglasses with thick black frames owling his eyes.

  Ellis had come here in a state of exhaustion that left him stumbling and half blind, fearful that James would despise him, that James would refuse him. But James seemed hardly aware of him. Instead he worried aloud about money, and because of money he wanted to leave the hospital. His wife said he couldn’t leave. He said it was a free country. Mrs Dell said the doctors said he shouldn’t leave. He tried to get out of bed but fell back with a shriek and moaned. He said she should help him. She glowered and said she would not help him to act like an idiot. He said he would soon be broke. She said he had no choice. He said he would be broke and would soon live under a bridge and cook rats for dinner over a barrel fire. She said he had never cooked a thing in his life. He said she should have let him die rather than be bankrupted into a life of homelessness and rat-eating and could she move the pillow under his leg nearer to the knee? Which she did. But on and on they argued, with loud indif
ference to anyone who might be listening.

  Their volume rose and fell; James’s strength was inconsistent. Ellis sat in the corner in one of the plastic chairs. Now that he was here, he had little sense of reason or purpose. He recalled the collapse of James Dell onto the hood and the patter of glass against his own face – and now he sat beside James Dell’s bed and James Dell complained that there were too many commercials on and changed the channel and Mrs Dell hounded him to change it back and leave it, please. Meanwhile the light in the little window over the bed brightened and faded with the passage of unseen clouds.

  Eventually Ellis excused himself to go to the bathroom. When he’d finished he considered walking out of the hospital and driving away. But he wanted to watch one more time the opening and closing of James’s eyes, the life of his thin limbs, the sneering of his lips.

  James lay alone in the room, holding up a hand and staring at it.

  Ellis said, ‘I wish I could do more than say I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sir.’ James grimaced. ‘If you apologise again, I’ll have them throw you out.’

  Ellis sat. The overhead light flashed. A passing bed rattled in the hallway.

  ‘I shouldn’t have crossed there,’ James said.

  ‘I shouldn’t have tried to pass on the right.’

  ‘I’ve passed on the right a thousand times.’ James’s voice guttered with self-disgust. ‘Nothing wrong with it.’

  Ellis hesitated, feeling he should apologise, afraid to apologise.

  ‘She went out for some lunch,’ James said. ‘The bitch.’

  ‘She was here all the time that you were in the coma.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘It was very hard for her, her husband –’

  ‘I’m not her husband. She’s not my wife.’

  ‘She isn’t?’

  ‘Ex. We were unmarried eight and a half years ago. She can go any time she wants. I don’t love her.’ He wound his sheet on his finger. ‘I wish I did. It would be something.’

  Then he sat forward with a jerk and looked around. He complained that she had been away too long and she was spending money on lunch when she could have just as easily eaten off the tray of food that the hospital gave him.

  A short, cushiony nurse came in to fret over the machines.

  Ellis rose and excused himself.

  He drove to Heather’s house. In the street before it he slowed the minivan to a crawl and remembered years before, passing by here in naivety and embarrassment, while Boggs waved from the garage, and it roused a sensation that he could not name but it was excruciating. A car came close behind him, and he accelerated away. Then through a route of miles he turned and turned back, slowed, turned into the drive, let the minivan idle down its length. He stood a minute in the driveway. The garage was closed, the windows dark. The grass of the lawn had grown long. Black clouds were heaving up out of the west.

  He reached for the doorbell, but then tried the knob instead, and at his touch the door opened. He stood looking in at the darkened living room. ‘Heather?’ he called, softly. The walls were worked with innumerable bright colours – images in crayon, watercolour, construction paper, cellophane, papier mâché, stickers, marker, glued buttons, seashells, bottle caps – pieces of art that her students had given her or had simply abandoned. Some of it she had framed and some of it was stuck up with thumbtacks, so that they filled the walls from floor to ceiling with stick figures, mountains, houses, flowers, monster trucks, rainbows and various abstractions and images so crude as to be effectively abstract. Their initial effect could be overwhelming, but he had seen them a couple of times before when he picked up Boggs for work trips, and he looked at them now only to try to detect whether anything had changed. All over the floor lay many objects, scattered or assembled in piles – pens, coffee mugs, silverware, magazines, drink coasters, a tube of Crest, sheets, a bar of soap, telephone books, wire hangers, a TV remote. He studied these things for a while, but could make no sense of them, and then toed through to the kitchen, which stood empty, the shades drawn, the refrigerator whirring, a single light under a cabinet illuminating a tub of sugar and a set of knives mounted to the wall on magnets so that they appeared to float.

  The windowless stairwell was particularly dark. He hung onto the banister as he went up. Then the top step lay underfoot and the guest bedroom stood open and empty, the bed squarely made and desolate. The door of the master bedroom stood ajar and swung under his hand. The shades drawn, the room lay in dim grey illumination, its objects defined by shadows. After a while he could see Heather asleep in the bed. He felt he could hardly breathe and feared he would inadvertently gasp or cry out. For minutes he stood. Then he moved into the room, aware of the sounds he made – the brushing of the creases of his clothing, the crackling press of his feet into the carpet, the tiny grinding of his joints. He stood beside the bed, then eased down until he kneeled on the carpet. She slept on her stomach, her head turned so that the right side of her face pressed into the pillow, exposing the scar on the left side. Her hair spread wild. Her lashless eyelids appeared frail and naked as an infant’s, but her face was lined in a way that made her seem tired even as she slept. He reached toward her, but stopped short. The bed sheets were twisted tight around her. Laundry sprawled at the foot of the bed, and a half-dozen coffee mugs crowded the bedside table.

  He was glad to watch her sleep and feared that when she woke she would send him away, because he had not saved Boggs, because he had killed Boggs, because he had left her for so long, because he had not called, because to be sent away seemed the least that he deserved.

  Through parted lips her teeth showed dry and dull white. Her eyes darted under the lids. The scar on her skin seemed more shining and pale than he recalled. The room’s shadows darkened.

  Then her eyes opened; she gazed at him.

  Time seemed to condense, gather and fall in tiny droplets. He kneeled trembling. ‘Ellis,’ she said, unsurprised. ‘I’ve been so worried.’

  ‘Boggs is dead.’ His awareness concentrated in a little circle, of Heather, of the dark beyond gone blurry. ‘He stepped into the highway.’

  ‘They said you were there.’ She touched his hand. ‘I thought maybe at the funeral you would come.’

  ‘I just drove. For days I didn’t know what I was doing. Or I tried not to know. I was afraid if I came here you would send me away.’

  She shook her head. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll forgive me?’

  ‘Forgive? There are a thousand things that we should talk about, and I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Heather –’

  ‘I thought about buying an RV like the one my dad had and going out to look for you. The same kind of RV so you would know it was me. But I guessed you would come back.’ She spoke to the ceiling, turning to him only with glances, as if shy. ‘Because you had said you would, and you’re the kind of person who does what he says he will do. Even if you did say you would come back soon.’

  ‘As soon as I could –’

  ‘If I had a nickel for every excuse.’

  ‘The road to hell is paved with nickels.’

  She smiled a little. ‘Yes.’

  It seemed as if he could hear the faint, entropic noise of everything around him slowly corroding, oxidising, of the room’s thin light minutely eating into the surfaces it touched.

  Heather’s features suddenly strained, and she rolled away. ‘It’s OK,’ she said without looking at him. ‘It’s OK.’

  He moved into bed with her. He nestled against her. He tried not to suggest to himself the question of how many times Boggs had lain in this bed.

  After Boggs’s death, after the police had released him, he had begun driving without any sense of intention. He seemed able to see and to recall everything, and this was terrible, and he wished for a catatonic state, a slipping under the waters of consciousness. Only the shaking in him had stopped, and now he found he missed it. Otherwise he wanted no
thing of the world, but even as it feigned indifference the lurid world impinged on him constantly. He ate, he drank, he slept, he went to the bathroom in gas stations and rest stops and Taco Bells. His feelings were small, constant and physical in their shifting, like a leaf fluttering in his lung. He had loved Boggs, but he loved Heather more passionately, and recalling this pairing of facts stirred certain notions to life, and at times he screamed, beat on the steering wheel. But these efforts made no difference to anything, and when he stopped it seemed to be because he had simply decided to stop.

  One afternoon, as he drove a lonesome stretch of two-lane between fields where cotton tufted white like a scatter of snow on low brown plants, the minivan’s temperature gauge began to climb. Soon the radiator spit steam, and he had to be towed from the roadside. While a mechanic worked to swap the water pump, Ellis asked what day it was. Two weeks had dissolved since Boggs’s death. He went to a phone on a post near the road and, after several minutes of doubt, called the hospital.

  ‘He’s come out of it,’ Mrs Dell exclaimed. ‘He’s really better. I’ve told him about you, about how you called, about your concern. He wants to meet you.’

  This – he saw now – was obviously an untruth. But when she said it, he believed her and glimpsed something past his personal oblivion. He drove the minivan for a day and a half without rest to reach the hospital.

  But now the jolt of purpose had faded. He moved in a strange world, filled with dark strangeness, and it was strange to be expected – by the implication of the progress of time, if nothing else – to continue with life and find ways to act. For three days he did not leave Heather’s house. He wished he had come here sooner. He felt impossibly indebted. Here, for now, nothing needed to be explained.

  Boggs had been cremated, Heather said, the ashes sent to his surviving aunt. She had arranged to have his convertible donated to a charity rather than shipping it back here, but the things piled over the living-room floor were Boggs’s things, or things that she thought of as his, which she could not bring herself to use or to trash. She asked Ellis if he would do something with them.