Men from Boys

Concerto for Violence and Orchestra James Sallis

It is a beautiful fall day and he has driven nonstop, two days chewed down to the rind and the rind spit out, from New York. He should be tired, exhausted in fact, spent, but he isn’t. Every few hours he stops for a meal, briefly trading the warm vinyl Volvo seat for one not unlike it in a string of Shoneys, Dennys and Union 76 truckstops. On the seat and the floorboard beside him are packets of water crackers, plugs of cheese, bottles of selzer and depleted carry-out cups of coffee, wasabi peas. In the old world he drove away from, tips of leaves had gone crimson, bright yellow and orange, gold. Now he is coming into the desert outside Phoenix, the nearest thing he ever had to a home. Crisp morning air rushes into open windows. He passes an ostrich farm, impossibly canting stacks of huge stone like primitive altars out among the low scrub and cholla, a burning car at roadside with no one nearby. On the radio a song he vaguely remembers from what he thinks of as Back Then plays. He is happy. Strangely, this has nothing to do with the fact that soon he will be dead or that within the past month he has killed four people.

Pryor was the one who told him about it. There were these small rooms behind the huge open basement area used for church dinners, summer Bible School, youth meetings, evenings of amateur entertainment where groups of teenagers blackened faces with burnt cork and donned peculiar hats for minstrel shows, nerdish young men in ill-fitting suits and top hats urged objects from thin air and underscored the tentativeness of it all by transforming silk handkerchiefs to doves, sponge balls to coins, and where the church’s music director in his hairpiece trucked out again and again, relentlessly, his repertoire of pantomime skits: a man flying for the first time, a foreigner confronted for the first time by jello, a child on his first fishing trip forced to bait his own hook. (Is there something intrinsically funny about firsts?)

In the ceiling of one of those rooms was a small framed section, like a doorway. You could drag the table beneath, Pryor said, place a chair on the table, reach up and push the inset away. Then you could climb up in there. And if you kept going, always up, along stairways and ladders and catwalks, in and out of cramped crawl spaces, eventually you’d arrive at the steeple, where few before had ever ventured. A great secret, Pryor intimated. The whole climb was probably the equivalent of three floors at the most. But to Quentin’s eyes and imagination then, the climb seemed vast, illimitable, and he felt as though he might be ascending into a different, perhaps even a better, world.

It would not take much, after all. For it to be a better world.

Pushing the door out of its frame and pulling up from the chair, legs flailing, Quentin found himself in a low chamber much like a closet turned on its side. He couldn’t stand erect, but the far end of the chamber was unenclosed, and he passed through into an open, vaultlike space with a narrow walkway of bare boards nailed to beams. The nailheads were the size of dimes. Four yards or so further along, this walkway turned sharply right, fetching up rather soon at the base of a stairway steep and narrow as a ladder. The last few yards indeed became a ladder. Then he was there. Alone and far above the mundane, the ordinary, all those lives in their suits and cars and their cluttered houses with pot roasts cooking in ovens and laundry drying on lines out back. Quentin had seen Around the World in Eighty Days half a dozen times. This must be what it was like to go up in a balloon, float free, feel the ground surrender its claim on you. He was becoming David Niven.

Meanwhile he’d given no thought to Pryor, who seemed to have failed to follow, if indeed Pryor had begun at all.

Sunday School teacher Mr Robert, however, had been giving them both thought. He’d only a quarter-hour past dismissed the boys and now took note of their absence from services. So it was that, shortly after attaining his steeple, Quentin found himself being escorted down the aisle alongside Pryor and deposited in a front pew as Brother Douglas paused dramatically in his sermon, light fell like an accusing finger through stained-glass windows illustrating parables and the entire congregation looked on.

He was caught that time, but never again.

The steeple became Quentin’s special place. Just as other children spend hours and whole days of their lives sunk into books, board games or television, so Quentin spent his in the steeple, there by speaker horns that had taken the place of bells, sandwiches and a thermos of juice packed away in his school lunch box. Since of all things at his disposal his parents were least likely to miss one can of it among many, the sandwiches were generally Spam, which Quentin liked with mayonnaise and lots of pepper, sometimes sliced pickles. The bread was white, the juice that in name only, wholly innocent of fruit, rather some marvelous, alchemical compounding of concentrates, artificial flavors and Paracelsus knows what else.

Sometimes up there in the steeple Quentin would pull himself to the edge and lie prone, propping elbows at the correct angle and sighting along an imaginary rifle as Jenny Bulow, Doug Prather or the straggling Dowdy family climbed from cars and crossed the parking lot below.

Years later, half a world away and more than once, Quentin would find himself again in exactly that same position.

But this has nothing to do with his life now, he always insisted — to himself, for few others knew about it. That was another time, another place. Another person, you might as well say. Quentin came home from that undeclared war and its long aftermath an undeclared hero even to himself, and after much searching (You have no college? You have to have college!) took a job at Allied Beverage, where he still works. Where he worked until last month, at least. He hasn’t been in, or called, and doubts they’ve held the position for him. It’s not as though they’d have much difficulty finding someone to take up his slack: keep track of health-care benefits, paid time off, excused absences, time and attendance, IRAs. Holidays the company loaded employees up with discontinued lines, champagnes no one asked to the prom, odd bottled concoctions of such things as cranberry juice and vodka, lemonade and brandy, licorice-flavored liqueurs. After work they’d all be out in the parking lot stowing this stuff in trunks. It would follow them home, go about its unassuming existence on various shelves and in various cabinets till, months or years later, it got thrown out. The company made little more ado over throwing away its people.

He pushed. Recently there’d been rain, and enough water remained to bear the body away. But you couldn’t see the water. It looked as though the body were sliding on its back, on its own momentum, along the canal. Further on, an oil slick broke into a sickly rainbow. Food wrappers, drink containers, condoms, beer cans and unidentifiable bits of clothing decorated the canal’s edge. Down here one entered an elemental world, cement belly curved like a ship’s hold, walls to either side as far as one could see. Jonah’s whale, what Mars or the moon might look like, a landscape even more basic than that stretching for endless miles around the city. Out there, barren land and plants like something dredged from sea bottoms. He looked up. Air shimmered atop the canal’s cement walls, half a dozen palm trees thrust shaggy heads into the sky. The body moved slowly away from him in absolute silence. Out a few yards, it hit deeper water, an imperceptible incline perhaps, and picked up speed, began to turn slowly round and round. Water had soaked into the fabric of the man’s cheap blue suit and turned it purple. Blue dye spread out like a stain in the water beneath him. When he looked up again, two kids were there on the wall, peering over. Their eyes went back and forth from the body to him. He waved.

He’d picked up a new car nearby, in one of those suburbs with walls behind which the rich live so safely, at a mall there. Tempted by a Lexus, he settled on a Honda Accord. That’s what this country does, of course, it holds out temptation after temptation, forever building appetites that can’t be assuaged. He didn’t know if the Crown Vic was on anyone’s list yet, but over the past few days he’d pushed it pretty hard. Probably time to change mounts. He left it there by the Accord. The whole exchange took perhaps five minutes.

For that matter, he had no reason to believe anyone might be on him, but one didn’t take chances. Never move in straight lines.

He drove out of town, out into the desert, everything earth-colored so that it was difficult to say where city ended, desert began. But after a time, the walls, walls around individual houses, walls around whole communities, petered away. Lemon trees were in bloom, filling the air with their sweet sting. Bursts of vivid oleander at roadside. Imperial cactus.

The Accord handled wonderfully, a pleasure to drive. He settled back and, looking about, started to come to some sense of the life its owner lived. A small life, circumscribed, routine. Scattering bits of rainbow, a crystal key chain swung from the rear-view mirror. The compartment behind the gear shift held tapes of Willie Nelson, Johnny Mathis, Enya, Van Morrison. A much-thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugged on the floor. The owner had tossed empty water bottles behind his seat after screwing the tops back on, so that many of them had collapsed into themselves. There were a couple of bronchodilator inhalers in the glove compartment. Find yourself without one, tap the guy next to you and borrow his: everyone in the state carries them. Physicians used to send what were then called chest patients here for their health. They came, bringing their plants and their cars with them. Drive into Phoenix, the first thing you see’s a brown film on the horizon. The city diverts water from all over to keep lawns and golf courses green, buys electric power at a premium to run the city’s myriad air conditioners. Its children gulp for air.

On the rear floor there were two-hundred-dollar running shoes, in the back seat itself a sweatshirt and windbreaker from Land’s End, a red baseball cap, a deflated soccer ball, a thick yellow towel. In the bin just fore of the gearshift he found the notice of a bank overdrawal that George Hassler (he knew the name from the registration) had crumpled and thrown there. Angrily?

America.

Was there any more alien a landscape than the one in which he found himself — this long, trailing exhaust of desert, mountains forever in the distance — anywhere? He drove across dry runnels marked Coyote Wash or Aqua Fria River, chugged in the new carapace past piles, pillars and Πs of stone to challenge Stonehenge or Carnac, past crass billboards, cement oases of gas stations, fast-food stalls and convenience stores chock full of sugary drinks, salty snacks, racks of sunglasses, souvenir T-shirts, Indian jewelry. Past those regal cacti.

They stood like sentinels, in an endless variety of configurations, on hillside and plain, some of them over forty feet. Most never made it through their first year of life. Those that did, grew slowly. A saguaro could take a hundred and fifty years to reach full height; in another fifty years it died. Some would never develop arms, while others might have two or four or six all upraised like candelabra, or dozens of them twisted and pointing in all directions. No one knew why this happened. Shallow and close to the surface, root systems ran out as much as a hundred feet, allowing the plants rapidly to soak up even minimal rainfalls. As the cactus took on water, its accordionlike pleats expanded. Woodpeckers and other birds often made their way into it to nest. Some, particularly hawks and the cactus wren, preferred to nest at junctures of arm and trunk. Red-tailed hawks would build large platform nests there; they’d come back again and again, every year, till the pair stopped nesting altogether. Over a six-week period in May and June, brilliant flowers emerged atop mature cacti. These would bloom for twenty-four hours only, opening at night, closing for ever against the heat of day.

Lizards were everywhere and just as ancient. They scampered out from beneath tangles of cholla, crouched soaking up sun atop stones, skittered across the highway, minds clenched on memories of endless rain forests, green shade, green sunlight. Brains the size of bb shot enfolded dioramas, whole maps in stark detail, of worlds long gone, worlds long ago lost.

At a truck stop near Benson, Arizona, where the pie was excellent, a young man came up to say he’d seen him arrive in the Honda Accord. On one wall dinner plates with figures of wildlife hung among framed photographs of motorbikes and vintage automobiles; on the other, portraits of John Wayne, Elvis, Marilyn and James Dean. Out back, a crude hand-painted sign with the cameo of a Confederate soldier and the legend Rebel Café leaned against a crèche of discarded water heaters, stoves, sinks and minor appliances from which a rheumy-eyed dog peered out, as from an undersea grotto.

The young man wore an XXL purple-and-blue plaid shirt over a red T-shirt gone dull maroon, and well-used black jeans a couple of inches too long. The back half or so of the leg bottoms had been trod to shreds. Quentin’s first thought as the young man approached was that he wore a baseball cap in the currently fashionable front-to-back style. But now he saw it was a skullcap. Knit, like those he’d seen on Africans.

‘Had the Accord long?’

Quentin looked up at the young man. For all the alarm his question set off, this was obviously no cop. No more challenge or anxiety in those eyes than in Quentin’s own. He approved, too, of the way the young man held back, staying on his feet, not presuming. Quentin nodded to the young man to join him. A corner booth. Nondescript beige plastic covering, blue paint above. Carpentry tacks stood out like a line of small brass turtles crossing the horizon.

‘Had one myself,’ the young man said. ‘Accord, just like yours. Got off from work one day, came out and it was gone. First time I ever talked to police face to face.’

The waitress came to refill Quentin’s coffee. He asked if the young man wanted anything. He shook his head.

‘Same week, my apartment got broken into. Took the stereo, TV, small appliances, most of the clothes. Even hauled off a footlocker I’d had since college, filled with God knows what. I came home from a six-mile run, took one look around and said fuck it. Knew at some level I’d been wanting this to happen. Clear the decks. Free me to start over.’

Sipping his third cup of coffee, Quentin watched truckers as they bowed heads over eggs and ham, looking to be in prayer. From nearby booths drifted strains of pragmatic seductions, complaints about jobs and wives, political discussions. A hash of all the age-old songs.

In the car the young man fell asleep almost at once. He’d propped feet on his duffel bag; the world bucked up unseen, unfired upon, in the notch of his knees. Choppy piano music played on the local university station. Quentin hit Scan. Sound and world alike tilted all about him, falling away, rearranging itself. Rock, country, news, chatter. Stone, cactus, wildflowers, trailer park.

Awake now, Quentin’s passenger said, ‘Where are we?’

‘Pretty much where we were before. It’s only been a couple of hours.’

He thought about that.

‘Damn.’

Roadside, an elderly Latino sold cabbage, cucumbers and bags of peppers out of the bed of his truck, the cover of which unfolded and sat atop rough wood legs to form a tent. A younger woman (daughter? wife?) sat on the ground in the shade of the truck, reading.

‘Where we going?’ Quentin’s passenger said.

‘East.’

Towards El Paso, one of America’s great in-between cities. They ate in a truck stop on I-10 just outside Los Cruces, a place the size of a gymnasium smelling of onions, hot grease and diesel. Meat loaf was the daily special, with mashed potatoes and boiled cabbage on the side. Using his fork like a squeegee, Quentin’s passenger scraped his plate clean, then caught up with a piece of bread what minuscule leavings remained.

Eschewing the Interstate, Quentin took the long way in, the back road as locals say, Route 28, skirting fields of cotton, chilis, onions and alfalfa, tunneling through the 2.7-mile green, cool canopy of Stahman Farm’s pecan orchards, up past San Miguel, La Mesa, Chambertino, La Union. The sun was settling into the cleft of the mountains to the left, throwing out its net of evening to reel the world in. As they pulled onto Mesa, parking lots outside shops and offices were emptying, streets filling with cars, street lights coming on.

‘You can let me out up at that corner,’ Quentin’s passenger said. ‘Appreciate the ride. Looks like a good place, El Paso. For a while.’ He leaned back into the window. ‘They’re all good places for a while, right?’

Dinner became caldo and chicken mole at Casa Herado, the rest of the evening a movie on the cable channel at La Quinta off Mesa on Remcon Circle.

In the space between seat and door on the passenger’s side, Quentin found a well-worn wallet bound with rubber bands and containing a driver’s license, social security card and two or three low-end charge cards for James Parker. Left behind, obviously, by his passenger. Had the young man stolen it, lifted it, liberated it? Much of the gypsy about him, no doubt about that. But mostly Quentin remembered the young man’s remarks about becoming free, starting over.

By five in the morning, light in hot pursuit, Quentin was on Transmountain Road heading through Smuggler’s Pass to Rim Road where, at one of the slumbering residential palaces there, he swapped the Honda for a Crown Vic. Some banker or real-estate salesman would greet the morning with unaccustomed surprise. Quentin hoped the man liked his new car. His own smelt faintly of cigars, spilled milk and bourbon. Wires had hung below the dash even before those Quentin tugged out and touched together. But when he goosed the accelerator in query, the car shuddered and roared to let him know it was ready.

Years ago in Texas, Quentin had witnessed an execution. The whole lethal injection thing was new back then and no one knew just how to proceed. Some sort of ritual seemed in order, though, so things were said by the warden, a grizzled, stoop-shouldered man looking twice his probable age, then by a tow-headed chaplain looking half his. It was difficult to find much to say. Casey Cortland had led a wholly unremarkable, all but invisible life before one warm Friday evening in the space of an hour killing his wife of twelve years, his ten-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter, and the lay minister of a local church. Cortland was brought in and strapped to a table. Beneath prison overalls, Quentin knew, he was diapered. Unlike the warden and chaplain, Cortland had no final words. When they injected the fatal drug, he seized: the IV line pulled out and went flying, dousing all those seated close by with toxic chemicals. State police took Quentin, who’d caught the spray directly in his eyes, to Parkland. Though basically unharmed, for several weeks he suffered blurred vision and headaches. Hours later on the prison parking lot Quentin reclaimed his Volvo, then I-30. Hour by hour, chunks of Texas broke off and fell away in his rear-view mirror. That night he had the dream for the first time. In the dream, along with an estimated half-million other viewers, he watched as Tiffany’s father was eaten on camera, the mid-morning show live, producers and cameramen too stunned to shut it all down. Tiffany used to have a pair of earrings with the bottom half of a man hanging out of a shark’s mouth. That’s not what it was like. It wasn’t like anything Quentin or other viewers had ever seen. Tiffany’s father’s legs rolled back and forth, feet pointing north-north-east, north-north-west, as the tiger chewed and pawed and pulled back its head to tear away chunks. There were sounds. Screams at first, then not so many. Gristle sounds, bone sounds. Growls. Or was it purring? Panels of experts, rapidly assembled, offered explanations of what this event said about society’s implicit violence. Then Tiffany herself was there, sobbing into the microphone held close to her face like a second bulbous nose. Daddy only did it for her, she said. He did everything for her.

All that day off and on, Back Then as he now thought of it, Quentin had spent writing a letter he hoped might persuade Allied’s insurance carriers to reconsider Sandy Buford’s claim. Every two minutes the phone rang, people kept washing up from the passageway outside his cubicle, his boss broke in like a barge with queries re one or another file, the list of calls to return and calls to be made seemed as always to grow longer instead of shorter. Sandy had hurt his back on the job and now, following surgery, wasn’t able to lift the poundage Allied’s job description required. He was a good worker, with the company over fourteen years. But since the surgeon had released him and he couldn’t meet the job’s bottom line — even though Sandy’s actual work from day to day didn’t call for lifting — the insurance carrier had begun disallowing all claims, refusing payment to physicians, labs and physical therapists, and effectively blocking the company’s efforts to re-employ him. Quentin’s letter summarised the case in concise detail, explained why Allied believed the carrier’s disallowment to be inappropriate and in error, and put forth a convincing argument (Quentin hoped) for re-evaluation.

Pulling out of the parking lot at 6.18, just a little over an hour late leaving, on the spur of the moment Quentin decided to swing by Sandy Buford’s and drop off a copy of the letter, let him know someone cared. Quentin had called to let Ellie know how late he was running; she was expecting him home. But this would only take a few minutes.

Buford’s address bore him to a sea of duplexes and shabby apartment buildings at city’s edge. Many of them looked like something giant children, given blocks and stucco, might erect. Discarded appliances formed victory gardens in side and back yards. Long-dead cars and trucks sat in driveways, ancient life forms partially reconstructed from remains.

Quentin waded through front yards that may well have seen conga lines of children dancing their parents’ preference for Adlai Stevenson over Ike (when had people stopped caring that much?) and climbed a stairwell where the Rosenbergs’ execution could have been a major topic of discussion. One expected the smell of cooking cabbage. These days the smell of Quarter Pounders, Whoppers, Pizza Hut and KFC were far more likely, maybe a bit of cumin or curry mixed in.

Buford’s apartment was on the third floor. There was music playing inside, sounded like maybe a TV as well, but no one responded to Quentin’s knocks. Finally he pushed a copy of the letter, tucked into an Allied Beverage pay envelope, beneath it. He was almost to the second landing when he heard four loud cracks, like limbs breaking. Instinctively he drew back against the wall as two young men burst from the apartment nearest the stairwell. Both wore nylon stockings over their faces. Quentin moved forward, peered over the bannister just as one of them after pulling off his stocking glanced up.

That was the footprint he left.

Careful to give the two men ample time to exit, Quentin continued down the stairs. He was turning the corner on to Central in his Taurus when the first police cars came barreling down it.

A dozen blocks along, he began to wonder if those were the same headlights behind him. He turned on to Magnolia, abruptly into the parking lot at Cambridge Arms, pulled back out on to Elm. Still there. Same brilliance, same level, dipping a beat or so after he dipped, buoying up moments later. He pulled into a Sonic and ordered a drink. Drove on a half-mile or more before pulling up at the curb and getting out, motor left idling, to buy the early edition of tomorrow’s newspaper. No lights behind him when he took to the street. Whoever it had been, back there, following him, was gone. If there’d been anyone. Only his imagination, most likely.

He said nothing of this to Ellie, neither as they had a pre-prandial glass of wine before the fireplace, nor as she pulled plates of flank steak, mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts, foil covered, from the oven, nor as, afterwards, they sat before the lowering fire with coffee. He spoke, instead, of the minutiae of his day. Office politics, the latest barge of rumor and gossip making its way upriver, cylinders banging, his concern over Sandy Buford. She shared in turn the minutiae of her day, including a visit to Dr Worrell.

Head against his shoulder, 12.37 when last he glanced at the clock bedside, Ellie fell fast asleep. Quentin himself was almost asleep when he heard the crash of a window downstairs.

The car hesitates, only a moment, though it must seem for ever, there at the lip.

He’s not sure of any of this, of course. Not sure if it really happened, how it happened, where or when. More than once he’s thought it might be only something suggested to him by a therapist; something he’s read or seen on the dayroom TV whose eye is as bleary and unfocused as those of its watchers; something that he’s imagined, a dream breaking like a whale from the depths of that long sleep. Yet it keeps coming back — like that other dream of a man being eaten by a tiger on live TV. Again and again in his mind’s eye he sees it. It’s as real as the plastic furniture, coffee makers and floor polishers around him — realer than most things in this world he’s begun re-entering. But mind is only a screen, upon which anything may be projected.

Go on, then.

The car hesitates there at the lip.

With no warning a woman’s nude body, pale as the moon, had stepped into his headlights on that barren stretch of road. Flying saucers might just as well have set down beside him.

He’d left Cave Creek half an hour past. No houses or much of anything else out here, no lights, headlights or other cars, this time of night at least, few signs of human life at all, just this vast scoop of dark sky above and, at the edge of his lights, vague huddled shapes of low scrub, creosote, cholla, prickly pear. Further off the road, tall saguaro with arms upraised — then the heavier darkness of sawtooth mountains.

Had he a destination in mind? Into Phoenix via some roundabout route to take dinner at a crowded restaurant perhaps, hopscotching over his isolation, his loneliness? Or, as he pushed ever deeper into the desert, did he mean to flee something else altogether, the dribble of headlights on gravel roads about him, high-riding headlights of trucks and SUVs behind, silhouettes of houses on hills half a mile away, himself?

His name was Parker.

He’d taken over a light-struck house with exposed beams and white shutters, leaving behind, at the apartment where he’d been staying, the pump of accordions through open windows, songs whose tag line always seemed to be mi corazon, afternoons filled with the sound of stationary racing motors from tanklike ancient Fords and Buicks being worked on in the parking lot. Coyotes at twilight walked three or four to the pack down the middle of streets. First night there, he’d sat watching a hawk fall from the sky to carry off a cat. The cat had come over to investigate this new person or say hello. It had leapt onto the half-wall facing his front door, ground to wall in that effortless, levitating way they have, here one moment, there the next. Then just as suddenly the hawk had appeared — swooping away with the cat into a sunset like silent bursting shells.

He remembered eating dinner, some pasta concoction he had only to pop into the microwave. Then he’d gone outside with a bottle of wine, watching day bleed away to its end, watching the hawk make off with the cat, watching as night parachuted grandly into the mountains. He’d gone in to watch part of a movie, then, bottle depleted, decided on a ride. In the car he found a tape of Indian flute music. Drove off, empty himself, into the desert’s greater and somehow comforting emptiness.

Till the nude woman appeared before him.

Again: he has no idea how much of this is actual; how much remembered, suggested, imagined. Why, just returned from a turnabout trip to New York, and at that time of night, would he have driven off into the desert — driven anywhere, for that matter? What could have borne him off the highway on to that road, through fence breaks and boulders, up the bare mountainside, to its edge? What could the woman have been doing there, nude, in his headlights?

Seeing her, he swerves, instinctively left, away from the rim, but fetches up against a rise there and slides back, loose stone giving way at his rear when he hits his brakes.

The car rocks back.

In the moment before his windshield fills with dark sky and stars, he sees her there before the car, arms out like a bullfighter, breasts swaying. Braid of dark hair. In his rear-view mirror, a canyon of the sort Cochise and his men might have used, subterranean rivers from which they’d suddenly rise into the white man’s world to strike, into which they’d sink again without trace.

Though the car’s motor has stalled, the tape plays on as the flutist begins to sing wordlessly behind the breath of his instrument, providing his own ghostly accompaniment. A lizard scampers across the windshield. Music, sky and lizard alike go with him over the edge and down — down for a long time.

His name, the name of the person to whom this happens, is Parker.

Without thought, he left her there.

Acting purely on instinct, he was halfway across the roof before anything like actual thought or volition came, before the webwork of choices began forming in his mind. Never let the opponent choose the ground. Withdraw, lure the opponent on to your own, or at least on to neutral ground. By then years of training and action had broken over him like a flood. Four days later, on a Monday, Quentin stood looking down at two bodies. These were the men he’d seen fleeing the apartment below Sandy Buford’s. For a moment it was Ellie’s body he saw there on the floor of that faceless motel room. He knew from newspaper accounts that the two of them had spent some time at the house once he’d fled. He tried not to think how long, tried not to imagine what had happened there.

Surprisingly, as in the old days, he bore them no direct ill will. They were working men like himself, long riders, dogs let loose on the grounds.

Himself who, hearing the window crash downstairs, rolled from bed on to his feet and was edging out on to the roof even as footsteps sounded on the stairs. Then was up and over.

With small enough satisfaction he took their car, a midrange Buick. A simple thing to pull wires out from beneath the dash, cross them. Somewhere in it he would find the map he needed, something about the car would guide him. He had that faith. Everyone left footprints.

Never blame the cannon. Find the hands that set elevation, loaded and primed it, lit the fuse. Find the mouth that gave the order.

They’d have to die, of course, those two. But that was only the beginning.

The world comes back by degrees. There are shapes, patterns of dark and light, motion that corresponds in some vague way to sounds arriving from out there. They knock at your door with luggage in hand, these sounds. While in here you have a great deal of time to think, to sink back into image and sensation in which language has no place. Again and again you see a sky strewn with stars, a lizard’s form huge among them, a woman’s pale body.

Constantly, it seems, you are aware of your breathing as an envelope that surrounds you, contains you.

For some reason flute music, itself a kind of breath, remains, tendrils of memory drifting through random moments of consciousness. Memory and present time have fused. Each moment’s from a book. You page backward, forward, back again. All of it has the same import, same imprimatur.

Faces bend close above you. When you see them, they all look the same. You’re fed bitter pastes of vegetables and meat. Someone pulls at your leg, rotates the ankle, pushes up on the ball of your foot to flex it. Two women talk overhead, about home and boyfriends and errant children, as they roll you side to side, wiping away excrement, changing sheets. One day you realise that you can feel the scratchiness, the warmth, of their washclothes.

The TV is left on all the time. At night (you know it’s night because no one disturbs you then) the rise and fall of this voice proves strangely comforting. Worst is mid-morning when everything goes shrill: voices of announcers and game show hosts, the edgy canned laughter of sitcoms, commercials kicked into overdrive.

There are, too, endless interrogations. At first, even when you can’t, even when it’s all you can do to keep from drowning in the flood of words and you’re wholly unable to respond, you try to answer. Further along, having answered much the same queries for daily generations of social workers, medical students and interns, you refuse to participate, silent now for quite a different reason.

The world comes back by degrees, and slowly, by degrees, you understand that it’s not the world you left. Surreptitious engineers have sneaked in and built a new world while you slept. In this world you’re but a tourist, a visitor, an impostor. They’ll find you out, some small mistake you’ll make.

Mr Parker, do you know where you are?

Can you tell me what happened?

Can you move your hand, feet, eyes?

Do you know who’s President?

Is there anything you need?

‘No.’

Here is what my visitor tells me.

We met, Julie and this Parker, just out of school, both still dragging along cumbersome ideals that all but dwarfed us. Once, she said, I told her how as a kid I’d find insects in drawers and cabinets lugging immense, stagecoach-like egg cases behind. That’s what it was like.

We had our own concept of manifest destiny, Julie said. No doubt about it, it was up to us to change the world. We’d have long conversations over pizza at the Raven, beer at the Rathskeller, burgers at Maple Street Café. What could we do? Push a few books back into place and the world’s shelves would be in order again? We fancied ourselves chiropractors of chaos and corruption: one small adjustment here, a realignment there, all would come straight.

Colonialism. Chile and the CIA. South Africa, Vietnam, our own inner cities, Appalachia. We imagined we were unearthing all manner of rare truth, whereas in truth, as immensely privileged middle-class whites, we were simply learning what most of the world had known for ever.

When I found out you were here, I had to come, she says. How long has it been? Twenty years?

She works as a volunteer at the hospital. Saw my name on the admissions list and thought: Could it possibly be?

Other things you begin to remember:

The smell of grapefruit from the backyard of the house across the alley from your apartment.

The rustle of pigeons high overhead in the topknots of palm trees.

Geckos living in a crack in the wall outside your window. By daylight larger lizards come out on to the ledge and rest there. Lizard aerobics: they push their bodies up on to extended legs. Lizard hydraulics: they ease back down.

Dry river beds.

Empty swimming pools painted sky-blue.

Mountains.

Even in the center of the city, you’re always within sight of mountains. Mornings, they’re shrouded in smog, distant, surreal and somehow prehistoric, as though just now, as slowly the earth warms, taking form. Late-afternoon sunlight breaks through clouds in fanlike shafts, washes the mountains in brilliance, some of them appearing black as though burned, others in close relief. Spectacular sunsets break over them at night — and plunge into them.

Sometimes you’d drive into the desert with burritos or a bottle of wine to witness those sunsets. Other times you’d go out there to watch storms gather. Doors fell open above you: great tidal waves of wind and lightning, the whole sky alive with fire.

This is when you were alive.

‘You’re going to be okay, Mr Parker.’

Her name, I remember, though I check myself with a glance at her nametag, is Marcia. On the margins of the nametag, which is the size of a playing card, she has pasted tiny pictures of rabbits and angels.

‘The doctors will be in to speak with you shortly.’

I wonder just how they’ll speak with me shortly. Use abbreviations, clipped phrases or accents, some special form of semaphore taught them in medical school? One rarely understands what they say in all earnest.

Marcia is twenty-eight. Her husband left her six months ago, she now lives in a garage apartment with an ex-biker truck driver named Jesse. To this arrangement Jesse has brought a baggage of tattoos (including two blue jailhouse tears at the edge of one eye) and his impression of life as a scrolling roadway, six hundred miles to cover before his day and daily case of beer are done. To this arrangement she’s brought a four-year-old daughter, regular paychecks and notions of enduring love. Hers is the heavier burden.

I’ve paid attention, watched closely, hoping to learn to pass here in this new world. I know the lives of these others just as, slowly, I am retrieving my own.

Of course it’s my own.

Marcia leans over me, wraps the bladder of the blood-pressure monitor about my arm, inflates it. ‘It’s coming back to you, isn’t it?’

Some of it.

‘No family that you know of?’

None.

‘I’m sorry. Families are a good thing at times like this.’

She tucks the blood-pressure cuff behind its wall gauge and plucks the digital thermometer from beneath my tongue, ejecting its sheath into the trash can.

‘Things are going to be tough for a while. Hate to think about your having to go it alone,’ she says, turning back at the door. ‘Need anything else right now?’

No.

I turn my head to the window. Hazy white sky out there, bright. Always bright in Phoenix, Valley of the Sun. Maybe when I get out I’ll move to Tucson, always have liked Tucson. Its uncluttered streets and mountains and open sky, the way the city invites the desert in to live.

With a perfunctory knock at the door, Marcia re-enters. ‘Almost forgot.’ A Post-It Note. ‘Call when you can, she says.’

Julie.

Back when we first met we’d walk, late afternoons, along Turtle Creek, downtown Dallas out of sight to one side, Highland Park to the other, as Mercedes, Beamers and the bruised, battered, piled-high trucks of Hispanic gardeners made their ways home on the street. Just up the rise, to either side of Cedar Springs, bookstores, guitar shops and tiny ethnic restaurants straggled. Within the year, glassy brickfront office buildings took up residence and began staring them down. Within the year, all were gone.

She tells me this when she comes to visit.

Twenty years.

She never had children. Her husband died eight years ago. She has a cat. I’ve thought of you often, Julie says.

Tucked into a compartment in the driver’s door Quentin found a rental agreement. When you need a car, rentals are always a good bet. You can identify them from the license plates mostly, and no one gets in a hurry over stolen rentals. The contract was with Dr Samuel Taylor, home address Iowa City, local address c/o William Taylor at an ASU dorm. Mr Taylor had paid by Visa. Good chance he was visiting a son, then, and that the car had been boosted somewhere in Tempe. Quentin called the rental agency, saying he’d seen some Hispanic teenagers who looked like they didn’t belong in this car, noticed the plate, and was checking to see if it might have been reported stolen. But he couldn’t get any information from the woman who answered the phone, and hung up when she started demanding his name and location.

A dead end.

He left his motel room (first floor rear, alley behind, paid for with cash) and went back to the Buick. He wasn’t driving it, but he’d left it out of sight where he could get to it.

Neither of them had smoked. Radio buttons were set at three oldie stations, one country, one easy listening. The coat folded on the back seat he assumed to be Dr Taylor’s; few enforcers (if that’s what the two were) wore camel hair. Likewise the leather attaché case tucked beneath the driver’s seat, which, at any rate, held nothing of interest. The paperback under the passenger’s seat was a different matter. Lesbian Wife, half the pages so poorly impressed as to be all but unreadable. Tucked in between page 34 and 35 was a cash ticket from Good Night Motel.

Good Night Motel proved a miracle of cheap construction and tacky cover-up the builder no doubt charged off as architectural highlights. The clerk inside was of similar strain, much preoccupied with images on a six-inch TV screen alongside an old-style brass cash register. However he tried to direct them away, his eyes kept falling back to it.

‘Look, I’m just here days,’ he said, scant moments after Quentin tired of equivocations and had braced to drag him bodily across the desk’s chipped formica. ‘Never saw them. Might check at the bar.’ And heaved a sigh as a particularly gripping episode of Gilligan’s Island was left unspoiled?

In contrast to the inertial desk clerk, the barkeep was a wiry little guy who couldn’t be still. He twitched, twisted, moved salt shakers, coasters and ashtrays around as though playing himself in a board game, drummed fingers on the bar top. He had a thin mustache and sharp features. Something of the rat about him.

Quentin asked for brandy, got a blank stare and changed his request to a draft with whiskey back. He put a fifty on the bar.

‘I don’t have change.’

‘You won’t need it.’

Quentin described the two men. The barkeep nudged a bin of lime wedges square into its cradle.

‘Sure, they been in. Three, four nights this week. Not last night, though. One does shots, Jack Daniels. Other’s a beer man. Friends of yours?’

‘Purely professional. Guys have money coming, from an inheritance. Lawyers hired me to find them.’

‘Sure they did.’

Quentin pushed the fifty closer. ‘That covers the drinks. People I work for—’

‘Lawyers, you mean.’

‘Right. The lawyers. Been known to be big tippers.’

Another fifty went on the counter, closer to Quentin than to the bartender.

‘Four blocks down, south corner, Paradise Motor Hotel. Saw them turn in there on my way home one night. Bottom-line kind of place, the Paradise. No bar, no place to eat. Gotta hoof it to Denny’s a dozen blocks uptown. Or come here.’

Quentin pushed the second fifty on to the first.

‘Freshen that up for you?’ the barkeep asked.

‘Why not?’

He waved away Quentin’s offer of payment. ‘This one’s on me.’

Afterwards — it all happened quickly and more or less silently, no reason to think he’d be interrupted — Quentin searched that faceless motel room. Nothing. Sport coats and shirts hanging in the closet, usual toiletries by the bathroom sink, a towel showing signs of dark hair dye. Couple issues of Big Butt magazine.

Quentin went downstairs and across rippled asphalt to the office, set into a bottleneck of an entryway that let whoever manned the desk watch all comings and goings. Today a woman in her mid-twenties manned it. She looked the way librarians do in movies from the Fifties. This kind of place, a phone deposit was required if you planned to use it, and even local calls had to go through the desk. They got charged to the room. The records, of course, are private. Of course they are, he responded — and should be. Twenty dollars further on, they became less private. Another dour Lincoln and Quentin was looking at them. He wondered what she might do with the money. Nice new lanyard for her glasses, special food for the cat?

There’d been one call to 528-1000 (Pizza Palace), two to 528-1888 (Ming’s Chinese) and three to 528-1433. That last was a lawyer’s office in a strip mall clinging like a barnacle to city’s edge, flanked by a cut-rate shoe store and family clothing outlet. Like many of his guild, David Cohen proved reluctant to answer questions in a direct, forthright manner. Quentin soon convinced him.

Bradley C. Smith was quite a different animal, his lair no motel room or strip-mall office but a house in the city’s most exclusive neighborhood, built (as though to make the expense of it all still more evident) into a hillside. Location was everything. That’s what real-estate agent Bradley C. Smith told his clients. But real estate was only one of Bradley C. Smith’s vocations. His influence went far and wide; he was a man with real power.

But that power for many years now had insulated Bradley C. Smith from confrontation. That power depended on money, middle men, lawyers, enforcers, collectors, accountants. None of which were present when Quentin stepped into the powerful man’s bathroom just as Bradley C. Smith emerged naked, flesh pale as a mushroom, from the shower.

There at the end, Bradley C. Smith tried to tell him more. Seemed desperate to tell him, in fact. That was what, at the end, Bradley C. Smith seized upon, holding up a trembling hand again and again, imploring with eyes behind which light was steadily fading.

Thing was, Quentin didn’t care. Now he knew why the two killers had been dispatched to that apartment on Sycamore, now he had the other name he needed. Ultimately, those two had little to do with him, with his life, with the door he was pushing closed now. Soon they’d have nothing at all to do with it, neither those two, nor Bradley C. Smith, nor the other. Quentin walked slowly down the stairs, climbed into his stolen Volvo. Soon enough it would be over, all of it.

I fail to recognise myself in mirrors, or in Julie’s memories, or in many of my own.

I remember riding in a car with a young man dressed strangely, in a plaid shirt that hung on him like a serape, black bell bottoms, an African skullcap. Remember finding a wallet bound with rubber bands once he’d gone.

I remember lying prone in a church steeple watching families come and go.

I remember a man drifting away from me in a culvert, blue dye coloring the water beneath him. Bodies below me on a motel room floor. Other bodies, many of them, half a world away.

As memory returns, it does so complexly — stereophonically. There is what I am told of Parker, a set of recollections and memories that seem to belong to him, and, alongside those, these other memories of bodies and cars, green jungles, deserts, a kind of double vision in which everything remains forever just out of focus, blurred.

I wonder if this might not be how the mind functions in madness: facts sewn loosely together, so that contrasting, contradictory realities are held in suspension, simultaneously, in the mind, scaffolds clinging to the faceless, sketchy edifice of actuality.

‘I brought you some coffee. Real coffee. Figured you could use it. I’ve had my share of what hospitals call coffee.’

He set the cup, from Starbucks, on the bedside table.

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it. City paid. You need help with that top?’

Parker swung his legs over the bed’s edge and sat, pried off the cover. The detective remained standing, despite the chair close by.

Light-gray suit, something slightly off about the seams. Plucked from a mark-down rack at Mervyn’s, Dillard’s? Blue shirt that had ridden with him through many days just like this one, darkish red tie that from the look of deformations above and below the knot must turn out a different length most times it got tied. Clothes don’t make the man, but they rarely fail to announce to the world who he thinks he might be.

‘Sergeant Wootten. Bill.’ He sipped from his own cup. ‘You don’t have kids, do you, Mr Parker?’

Parker shook his head. The sergeant shook his in turn.

‘My boy? Sixteen? I swear I don’t know what to make of him, haven’t for years now. Not long ago he was running with a crowd they all had tattoos, you know? Things like beer can tabs in their ears, little silver balls hanging out of their noses. Then a month or so back he comes down to breakfast in a dark-blue suit, been wearing it ever since. Go figure.’

‘What can I do for you, Sergeant?’

‘Courtesy visit, more or less.’

‘You realise that I remember almost nothing of what happened?’

‘Yes, sir. I’m aware of that. Very little of what happened, and nothing from before. But paperwork’s right up there with death, taxes and tapeworms. Can’t get away from it.’

Holding up the empty cup, Parker told him thanks for the coffee. The sergeant took Parker’s cup, slipped his own inside it, dropped both in the trash can by the door.

‘I’ve read your statement, the accident reports, spoke with your doctors. No reason in any of that to take this any further.’

He walked to the window and stood quietly a moment. ‘Beautiful day. Not that most of them aren’t.’ He turned back. ‘Still don’t have a handle on what happened out there.’

‘Nor do I. You know what I remember of it. The rest is gone.’

‘Could come back to you later on, the doctors say. They also say you’re out of here tomorrow. Going home.’

‘Out of here, anyway.’

‘We’ll need a contact address in case something else comes up. Not that anything’s likely to. Give us a call.’

The sergeant held out his hand. Quentin shook it.

‘Best of luck to you, Mr Parker.’

When he was almost to the door: ‘One thing still bothers me, though. We can’t seem to find any record of you for these past four years. Where you were living, what you were doing. Almost like you didn’t exist.’

‘I’ve been in Europe.’

‘Well, that’s it then, isn’t it. Like I said: best of luck, Mr Parker.’

There was a time alone then, first in an apartment off Van Buren in central Phoenix where Quentin found comfort in the slam of car doors and the banging of wrenches against motors, in the rich roll of calls in Spanish across the parking lot and between buildings, in the pump and chug of accordions and conjunto bands from radios left on, it seemed, constantly; then, thinking he wanted to be truly alone, in an empty house just outside Cave Creek. Scouting it, he discovered credit-card receipts for two round-trip tickets to Italy, return date a month away. No neighbors within sight. He had little, few possessions, to move in. He parked the car safely away from the house.

There was a time, too, of aimless, intense driving, to Flagstaff, Dallas, El Paso, even once all the way to New York, road trips in which he’d leave the car only to eat and sleep, as often as not selecting some destination at random and driving there only to turn around and start back.

He thought little about his life before, about the four men he had killed, still less about his present life. It was as though he were suspended, waiting for something he could feel moving towards him, something that had been moving towards him for a long time.

‘Thanks for picking me up.’

‘You’re welcome. Guess I’d been kind of hoping you’d call.’

They pulled onto Black Canyon Freeway. Late afternoon, and traffic was heavy, getting heavier all the time, lines of cars zooming out of the cattle chutes. Clusters of industrial sheds — automotive specialty shops and the like — at roadside as they cleared the cloverleaf, then bordering walls above which thrust the narrow necks of palm trees and signage, sky beyond. The world was so full. Ribbons of scarlet, pink and chrome yellow blew out on the horizon as the sun began settling behind sawtooth mountains. Classical music on low, the age-old, timeless ache of cellos.

The world was so full.

‘Had breakfast?’ Julie asked.

Caught unawares, she’d thrown an old sweatshirt over grass-stained white jeans a couple sizes too large. Cheeks flushed, hair still wet from the shower. Nonetheless she’d taken time to ferret out and bring him a change of clothes. Her husband’s, Parker assumed. They had the smell of long storage about them.

‘Little late for that, don’t you think?’

‘Breakfast’s a state of mind. Like so much of life. More about rebirth, things starting up again, knowing they can, than it is about time of day. It’s also my favorite meal.’

‘Never was much of a breakfast person myself.’

‘You should give it a try.’

‘You’re right. I should.’

She nodded. ‘There’s a great café just ahead, breakfast twenty-fours a day, best in the valley. You got time?’

‘I don’t have much else.’

‘Good. We’ll stop, then. After that... You have a place to stay?’

‘No.’

‘Yes,’ Julie said. ‘Yes. You do.’