The Reconstructionist Read online

  Eventually he looked up and saw a woman, in sweatpants and a T-shirt snug enough to show the roll of her belly fat, standing outside the pet supply store, watching him. She smiled and moved to the side window of the minivan and tapped. ‘Ellis Barstow!’ she exclaimed as he rolled down the window. And he said hi, but who was she? Without provocation she talked about teachers he remembered and some of his friends. She mentioned Christopher, solemnly, and glanced at the intersection. She seemed his own age, more or less, but her weight had bagged into small jowls that exaggerated as she frowned. A spray of curling thin brown hair imperfectly covered her pink scalp. Ellis said little to encourage her, and finally she said, ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

  He smiled and shook his head.

  ‘Kari Butters.’

  Even this did not help. But he said, ‘Oh, yes, Kari. Of course.’ And because she still had a look of expectation, he added, ‘Wow.’

  She mentioned other people, one feebly familiar, but more that it seemed to him he had never heard of before in his life. He nodded dumbly. He tried to subtract the jowls, subtract some wrinkles from around her eyes. But the effort gained him nothing. She talked on, faster and faster, and suddenly she said, with forced enthusiasm, ‘Well, how about you? What are you up to? What do you do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing right now.’

  She waited.

  ‘I’m between jobs,’ he said. ‘Between things.’

  With a little clawing motion she burst into talking about a couple more people. He felt like a disappointment. Soon she looked over to the pet store – Kissing Kritters – as if it had just now appeared, cast out a farewell and fled.

  He was glad to drive again. The land streamed by and he worked out a sense that some of the people she had mentioned had been a grade or two below himself, and if she were also from one of the lower grades that might explain how she had been so aware of him while he could not recall her at all. Or perhaps Christopher’s death had made everyone aware of him. Nonetheless, he had a feeling of precarious nullity: the place where his brother had died was no longer the place where his brother had died, and Kari Butters indicated a world that had once been his life and yet now he hardly recognised it.

  When he reached the house and found Heather there, he embraced her with an urgency that he saw startled her.

  That night he lay naked beside her, and he recalled that she had never answered his questions about Christopher’s accident, but he also hated to be holding any secret from her. Having begun this examination of Christopher’s accident he felt himself in the midst of a betrayal that he could hardly afford when without her he might dissipate, a phantom of smoke, an odour of tyre rubber.

  On the interstate the next day he passed signs and exits, fields and woods that should have been perfectly familiar from the day before and yet much of it appeared strange and newborn. Then, in Coil he had to stop and think for several minutes to recall where to find the police station.

  Like the high school, like the library, the police station had not changed: an almost windowless beige brick building, its function named across the front in aluminum letters. He had entered it only once before, years ago, on a grade school field trip led by a teacher named Mrs Hose – with a hair out her nose, went the playground chant. The children were fingerprinted onto souvenir cards, and they peered into a holding cell. He had been disappointed that it had no steel bars, only pink walls. Pink, said their guide, a woman who normally sat at the reception desk, was soothing.

  He wasn’t sure that it wasn’t the same woman, now much older, who sat at a desk by the door and nodded and darted glances at him while he explained his purpose. The accident report that he wanted was very old, she said, and it wouldn’t be here but at a document-holding facility maintained by the county. She drew a map on the backside of an ‘Emergency Preparedness’ brochure, lining roads and highways atop a bulleted list of first-aid items.

  Her route took him through the intersection where Christopher had died and onward between two silvered lakes under a vast cream sky, through cow fields, and along the edge of a regional airport where prop airplanes came down and went up with dragonfly noises, to a warehouse with a bank of offices stretched along the front. Its gutters sagged and the appliqué window tints had bubbled. A receptionist sent him to a heavy, balding, moustached, cubicled man in beige pants and a mauve shirt who listened to what Ellis wanted, spent a few minutes peering into an old, DOS-based program on his computer, wrote down a number, said, ‘Please wait here,’ and went away.

  Ellis studied a photograph on the desk – two fat children grinned before a pull-down backdrop of washed-out blue – until he wanted to smash it. The man returned with a manila folder. He said that he could xerox the text of the report for ten cents a page, but the photos would have to be sent to the photo lab for prints, which would take several days.

  He went away to copy the report, and Ellis sat with the stack of photos – color glossy 4x6s. Minutes passed while he sat not looking at the photos, thinking only of putting them aside, standing and leaving.

  Then without any conscious prompting his attention settled onto them. The first photo, mostly black, showed a view straight down at an asphalt road surface with someone’s black shoe – probably the photographer’s – gleaming in the corner, and he could not tell if the photo was taken in error or if it was supposed to show something on the road that could not be seen, a tyre mark, perhaps. The second photo offered only more black and a double yellow lane line crossing it diagonally. In the third photo shapes could be made out – a lamp post, a portion of a parked police cruiser, and in the middle distance a burned vehicle bellied on the street, an overhead light reflecting weakly from the patches of unburned paint on its front end. Between the burned car and the camera lay a blanket-covered shape that was, almost certainly, Christopher, and Ellis experienced a surge of feeling that he had not prepared for. A ferocious hot pain. He set the photos aside. He had not taken them up again when the fat man returned with his copy of the report. Ellis gave him a cheque and asked to have the photos mailed to his apartment’s address.

  He had not been to his apartment since the day after the accident with James Dell. The silent grandfather clock, the shelves of books – everything here held a layer of dust, which obscurely pleased him, and he tried to disturb it as little as possible. He sorted the mail heaped under the mail slot – junk mail, magazines, catalogues, bills, overdue notices – and when he found the photos he opened the envelope quickly, to pre-empt hesitation, and turned through the images. The pain that had caught him the first time he had looked at them did not resume. Christopher’s body was visible in just three photos and was never the centre of focus, only a thing under a blanket in the middle distance. Ellis looked at it calmly. Why? He didn’t know. Was this how he should have felt when he first saw the photo? Or had the feeling before been the true feeling?

  The evidence in the photos seemed generally as he had expected – short tyre marks left by the airlane, a point of impact indicated by a spill of fluid and glass in the middle of the intersection, two cars standing at their points of rest, police and fire vehicles scattered around the periphery, everything muddled by the surrounding murk of night. Strange to see how long ago it all appeared – the boxy cars, the men with shaggy hair and moustaches, a sign in the background offering a gallon of gasoline for less than a dollar. It had been an Amoco station – so, he and Heather had both been wrong. He went back and forth through the photos, thinking, If you look long enough you will see something new. He didn’t; but when he finally set the photos down, the objects of his apartment appeared strange, as if their dirt and wear had been caused by someone else.

  Working between the photos, the police report and the measurements he’d made at the intersection, he built a diagram of the scene in his computer. He drew dimensionally correct icons to represent the cars at their points of rest, then he studied the damage on each vehicle and the tyre marks on the roadway to estima
te their orientations as they collided and set the icons at the point of impact and at maximum intrusion with a couple of inches added to account for restitution – his brother’s airlane striking the left rear-quarter panel area of the other vehicle at a little less than ninety degrees, the result of both vehicles swerving too late.

  When he finished, the diagram showed an overhead view of the lane lines, the kerbs, the poles at the corners, the two cars at the instant of impact and the positions where they had come to rest. This was, in a sense, the place where Christopher had died.

  He copied the scene diagram into a specialised accident reconstruction program called PC-Crash – when he started working with Boggs he had thought a lot of jokes would come of the name, but it had only become part of the background: chair, calculator, email, PC-Crash. Within the program he created representations of the two cars that included suspension characteristics and passenger weights – he tried for a minute to remember what Christopher’s weight might have been, but finally settled for using a published statistical average. He set the simulated vehicles onto the icons at the point of impact, adjusted their velocities, steering angles, brake factors and restitution. Then he ran the analysis and watched as they spun away from the impact toward the rest positions. The airlane overshot its mark by a dozen feet, while the other vehicle didn’t go far enough and ended up facing the wrong way. He began to make adjustments. Velocity. Steering angles. Brake factors. Restitution factors. Small changes sometimes resulted in large effects in post-impact motion, but after a couple of hours he had refined the model so that the vehicles spun away from the point of impact, scrubbed speed off as they went round and rocked to a stop exactly on the icons where he had marked the rest positions.

  He ran the model a few times, and the accident enacted itself again and again in shifting pixels, perfectly silent. The computer offered that at impact Christopher’s car had been travelling at 42.3 mph; the other car at 49.1 mph. By hand Ellis calculated his brother’s initial velocity before he had begun laying down tyre marks, and came up with 46 mph, give or take a couple of mph, a speed not unexpected on that road, a speed that might even be considered cautious, since Ellis had observed many vehicles breezing through at around 60 mph. Perhaps Christopher had slowed while he was involved with some distraction. But one might formulate endless speculations.

  He had no evidence whatsoever as to whether Christopher had entered the intersection under a green, yellow or red light. Witnesses often provided the only available evidence about light timing, and here the witness statements recorded in the police report, from the occupants of vehicles that had been approaching the intersection, were all against Christopher. The report mentioned that Heather had been at the scene at the time of the accident and described her injuries, but it didn’t include any witness testimony from her.

  He tried to think, what had he gained from this analysis?

  Nothing presented itself. This sort of analysis was needed to make a credible presentation in a courtroom, but he probably could have estimated the results to within a few mph beforehand.

  Could Boggs have seen something in this that he had missed?

  He turned through the photos again. It seemed perhaps the airlane had come to a stop a few feet further off the kerb than he had represented it in his scene diagram. He moved the point of rest in PC-Crash and began readjusting parameters. It took him an hour to clean up the simulation again, but in the end it only made a half an mph of difference.

  He went through the photos yet again, and again, until although his eyes focused on the images he seemed not to see anything, and he was tempted to think that by memorising them completely he might forget them.

  He returned to the house. He was lying flat on the floor when he heard Heather’s car in the drive. Seeing him, she started, then laughed. ‘You’re all right?’ She passed through the room, her steps jarring faintly through the floor into his skull. After a few minutes she returned, barefoot – he couldn’t see her feet but knew by the sound.

  ‘Can you get up?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said.

  ‘I find you like this,’ she said, ‘and I worry that you’ve been on the floor all afternoon.’

  ‘It’s only been a moment,’ he said. ‘It’s not uncomfortable.’ Sun through a window beat warmly on his foot and ankle. He monitored the effort of the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. ‘It’s a very nice floor,’ he offered.

  She frowned, but sat cross-legged beside him.

  He felt his heaviness pressing him to the floor and, in a way gratifying to observe, it held him here and his weight implied his substance, his existence.

  He pushed himself up – surprising how little effort it took – and put his head in her lap. She stroked the hair at his temples. ‘You’re OK,’ she said, in a tone that didn’t seem to seek an immediate response. He closed his eyes and lay feeling his weight and her fingers and thinking to himself that he loved her. And, he didn’t quite trust her. He wanted to ask her about that, but the words too were dense and did not like to rise.

  The next step would be to go to see his father, but he hesitated.

  He made coffee and watched the arabesque of the milk and its subsequent slow diffusion. He put ice in a glass of water and grew lost in the transmutation of solid into liquid. Everything worked this way, one thing always becoming another, powered by entropy. In the nights when he rose to pace the house it contained a faint, nameless smell that Boggs must have carried on his clothes, because at times it sucker-punched Ellis, forcing memories of awful vividness. And despite a general sense of slowness, whenever he looked at a clock minutes seemed to have passed with startling speed.

  ‘My brother –’ From time to time those two words came of themselves into his mind, the beginning of a sentence or thought that went no further. Sometimes it felt like a message delivered incompletely, sometimes it felt like a failure in himself, and sometimes he seemed to be thinking about Christopher only to realise that the image he had in his mind was of Boggs. And he still saw the form of James Dell strike the windshield and press into it and saw, or imagined – because he knew that he had shut his eyes – the glass flex and the cracks form and run to all directions like a growth of shining crystals.

  Heather asked what kind of jobs he was looking at. Engineering, he said, the only field he had qualifications in. ‘Accident reconstruction?’ He said no. They ate dinners with the television on, so that the quiet would be less conspicuous.

  As far as he knew, his father still had Christopher’s airlane. To see it he would need to see his father, and he didn’t want to see his father.

  In the mornings he woke before her, but waited, listening to her slow breath. Eventually she pulled up her legs and curled her face down toward them, as if in a last effort to gather into sleep and fend off the day. Then she stretched. He rolled over and moved to hold her a minute before she slipped out of bed. He made coffee and put on a kettle of water for her tea while she showered. He stirred milk into her tea and handed it to her while she ate a bowl of cereal. He asked about what she would do that day. As she finished a bowl of cereal, her spoon knocked noisily against the bottom of the bowl. She carried her bowl to the sink. She moved toward the front door, efficiently gathering her things along the way. He watched her go with a knife working inside himself.

  * * *

  Heather had given him a cellphone, so that she could reach him, and he had had his old number reassigned to it. It surprised him every time it rang.

  ‘I’m having a bad time,’ said Mrs Dell. ‘I don’t want to bother you. But I thought it might help to talk.’

  He went to visit. Although Mrs Dell’s house stood directly beside an industrial-looking railway embankment that crossed the road on a concrete bridge, her neighbourhood was filled with pleasant little houses on large lawns. Mrs Dell’s was a yellow house with green shutters behind tall trees and several flower beds – a patch of hostas under a blue spruce, towering sunflowers near the road
, clusters of roses and others around the house. The rubber mat at the front door said ‘Welcome’, and a brass plaque attached to the door frame said ‘Solicitors will be composted’. He rang, and she opened the door squinting into the sun glare and smiling with the corners of her lips. She appeared puffy under the eyes. But she had her hair neatly in place and wore pants, blouse and vest in matched patterns of white, grey, and black. She led him into a pink sitting room shadowed and crowded with photos and knick-knacks, set him on an overstuffed love seat, and sat across from him on the front edge of a high-backed wooden rocking chair, leaning with her elbows on her thighs. She began to say something, then laughed, looked away, began again. ‘This is silly. I shouldn’t have dragged you here.’

  He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know you were a gardener.’

  ‘Only a few flowers.’ She looked at the window. ‘The hostas have a slug problem. The thing to do about slugs is to put out pans of beer, and they will drown themselves.’

  ‘My mom liked flowers,’ Ellis said. ‘But when I was growing up the entire lawn around our house was covered with concrete.’

  ‘A city?’

  ‘Small town, a sort of semi-rural place. Dad worked for a concrete contractor.’

  ‘He paved your yard?’ She looked shocked.

  ‘Dad never could get the screws in his head all tightened down. Once I went outside and found a gas-pump nozzle stuck in the gas tank of his car, hose hanging down. He’d forgotten to take it out at the gas station and just drove away. It might have been in there for days if I hadn’t pointed it out.’

  She sat blinking, as if trying to remember if she had ever done such a thing.

  Ellis said, ‘When I told him about it, he said, “I thought something sounded funny.”’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we all have our quirks.’ She twisted a foot against the carpet. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Ellis refused. She nodded. ‘I should be glad he’s gone, really. He met a woman who throws pottery.’ She glanced around. ‘Well, maybe he’s known her for a while. She makes it, I mean. The pottery. Her hands are ugly things.’ She smiled as if for a camera. ‘Oh, it’s true he never totally lived here. Maybe he told you that. He had his own place, but he stayed here. He’d come here crying like a baby, and I’d take care of him. A lot of drama. Eventually, he’d leave, then a couple of days later he’d come back. He didn’t have anyone else to take care of him. Maybe now the potter is taking care of him.’ She shrugged. ‘Do you understand? I thought you might understand, somehow.’ She nodded her rocking chair. ‘Why did he do this, now? What’s wrong with him? How can I help him? I thought maybe – He was very moved by your visit. He didn’t have many friends.’