Ghost Lights

8

As soon as his taxi pulled up alongside the curb outside the small police station he saw the building was locked up tight as a drum, lights off. He got out to check the sign on the door — a paper clock with the hands stuck at seven and twelve — while a streetlight above him flickered and buzzed.

“I don’t understand,” he said to the driver as he got back in. “What about the jail, then? There has to be some kind of holding cells, at least. Supervised by police. Do you know where that would be?”

The driver shrugged and shook his head.

“But what if there are crimes committed? And someone, you know, a criminal does something and needs to be arrested? I mean, no one commits crimes after the end of the workday?”

“You come back in the morning,” said the driver, nodding. He had an accent like the harelip cadet: maybe Garifuna. “I take you to a nice hotel. Your friend be OK. Don’t worry.”

The hotel had iron gates and a fountain playing in the front garden; its lobby was empty save for a clerk at the long counter, who found him a room right away.

“Maybe you can tell me,” said Hal. “The police. What do you do if you have to call the police in the middle of the night?”

“We’ve never had to call the police,” said the night clerk, smiling. “We have a quality clientele.”

“I’m sure you do. But let’s say something happened — a break-in. Something like that.”

“Yes sir, I would report it first thing in the morning,” said the desk clerk.

Hal was exasperated. There was no way. Was the man ill-informed, or was it Hal who was wrong? There was no way to know.

In his room, which was small and so cloying he had to open a window immediately, the clock radio read 1:15. He sat down on the bed and took his phone card out of his wallet, keyed in the long sequence.

She picked up after a single ring.

“Hal?”

“Sorry to wake you.”

“Actually I couldn’t sleep. I called the resort and they said you guys were gone, both of you.”

“I had to charter a flight to the city. They arrested him.”

While he explained what he thought had happened he was preoccupied with himself — himself and the free love. What to say next, about the rest of it, the rest of their lives and whether there was a future? He was bound up in the saga, his own concerns.

“Suze,” he said suddenly. “I know it’s my fault. I don’t blame you.”

“Your fault?”

“I realized, this trip, how I’ve been preoccupied for so long. I’m always feeling regret. I go around in a daze. . years now, Suze. For years. But I know it at least. I’ve seen it now. I mean I already knew it, rationally, but I hadn’t. .”

“It’s all right, Hal. You don’t have to apologize. Please.”

“But you’ve been. . I mean, I think somewhere in there I may have left you alone.”

She was quiet. He had the window open, and a palm was waving. Outside he heard a car swish down the empty street. Had it rained? They were both alone now. She was alone because years ago he had left her for an idea of loss; he was alone because he had chosen it, without even knowing. He was afloat in the world, its vast and empty spaces. . far away from his wife and his little girl, in a foreign city where not one person knew him. A silent, sweltering city in a subtropical country, toward the equator, toward the South Pole, toward the black place in the sky around which all the stars seemed to spin.

He was awake in the warm night, alone, while everyone else was sleeping.

The walls of the room felt closer than they were, covered in a dark-red-and-white-striped wallpaper like Christmas wrapping. Beneath his legs, the bed’s coverlet was scratchy. Susan always stripped the coverlets off hotel beds as soon as she got into the hotel room. She said they were unhygienic — that hotels never washed them and they were the repositories of bodily secretions and pathogens. In the main she was not too uptight about germs, but when it came to hotel coverlets she made no exceptions.

“We’ll talk about it when you get back,” she said gently, after a while. “OK? I mean the phone isn’t the best for this, you know. This kind of conversation.”

“I just want to know if we’re going to be all right. If we’re going to get through it.” He waited for a second, then got up restlessly, holding the receiver. The red wallpaper was closing in.

The cord barely stretched but he made it to the window, gazed through the silhouettes of fronds onto the dark street. She was not answering. The silence was ominous. His stomach turned. “Or if you want to, you know, leave me. And be with that. .”

He let it trail off. Damned if he would say more.

The wait made his stomach lurch again.

“Be with—? Oh. No, no, no, it’s nothing like that, sweetheart. It’s not, you know. Anything important.”

“I see,” he said, nodding invisibly.

He felt lighter, though at the same time his skin prickled with a faint annoyance. It was not important to her, yet for it she risked everything: for a trivial fuck, or series of fucks, she had done this to him. But he should count his blessings. They were still married. It seemed they would probably continue to be. His home was still his home, his wife was still his wife. She was not trying to get away from him. On and on, as always, it would keep being the three of them, him and her and Casey.

“I mean, that’s a relief to me. Of course.”

He felt almost off the hook, now that he knew. Now that he knew, the familiar was coming back. Already — he felt it — already the strangeness of life was receding. He heard something in the background — was it here or in the background in L.A., across the many miles? No; it was here, it was outside the window. A siren, but different from the sirens he was used to, slower and tinnier. No surprise: in a foreign country the sound of a siren was bound to be a variation on the familiar theme, not an exact replica.

It was amazing, astounding, come to think of it, that even the idea siren was replicated throughout the world — and the idea traffic lights, for instance, wherever you went: red, yellow and green. (Although in the United States officials insisted on calling the yellow lights “amber,” for some consistently aggravating nonreason — like a tic, like an officially sanctioned form of Tourette’s. If you had to go to traffic school, say, or take a test for your driver’s license at the Department of Motor Vehicles, it was a sure bet the yellow lights would be referred to as “amber,” as though the word yellow, in this official setting, was somehow regarded as obscene and therefore required a euphemism. It made him glad he did not work for the Department of Transportation, which needless to say had a checkered past anyway. For while the Service was guilty of many things — many bureaucratic complications of a Kafkaesque nature all too easily lampoonable by opportunistic politicians who irresponsibly advocated for harebrained schemes like the flat tax — at least it had the cojones to call yellow yellow.)

The world seemed to be in opposition and even turmoil on many subjects — who would claim the rights to its riches, for instance, who would hold sway from year to year or decade to decade when it came to the rule of law, dominance and extraction, trade or sales or production. On the other hand it presented a more or less united front on who should do the fighting and dying, whose children should starve or die of malaria by the tens of millions. In these matters there was the polite appearance of dispute, in diplomatic and academic circles, but in fact a stasis of hardship on a massive scale that could only reflect, in the end, a kind of global consensus.

And when it came to details like traffic signals and sirens the human population might even look, from outer space, like a single race of peaceful, compliant men.

At first he did not register the siren’s significance. Susan was saying something about emotional rollercoasters, a term he flatly, privately rejected.

You had aversions, in this life, aversions to foods like granola and terms like emotional rollercoaster. You wished to excise these items and the terms for them. But a woman like Susan, despite being highly intelligent, did not know that intuitively nor, if she did, would she necessarily respect the aversions. Instead she ran roughshod over them. In fact, few women respected his aversions.

Men also failed to respect them. People, you could almost say, did not respect the aversions.

Maybe, when all this was behind Susan and him — call it the free love, call it adultery — they could sit down and have a conversation on the subject. He could talk about the importance of aversions, and why the term emotional rollercoaster should be, as the Germans said, verboten.

Then the car went by, a light-colored car, its red lights flashing. A squad car, surely.

He should go! He should follow it. Sooner or later it had to take him to some outpost of the police, to what he needed to know.

“I was, at first I was so excited,” Susan was saying. “When you told me it was like the best gift I’d ever had, but that, you know, that euphoria of relief — it passes so quickly and regular life comes back. With its own kind of normal and boring pace. You know?”

He had his eyes on the police car’s taillights as the car made its way up the street. It had slowed down, it wasn’t going that fast. If he ran, he could catch it. Maybe it was right nearby, the police emergency. He should drop the phone and run. He should run up the dark street after it.

Now. Now. Go.

“And now it’s just like, I take for granted he’s alive and I’m back to worrying about these petty details. .”

He stayed where he was. It seemed unrealistic, impossible to catch the car. Of course, he would never know.

Standing there, watching the taillights disappear and holding the phone, he felt this had happened to him over and over. He never jumped out windows, never moved suddenly, with a jolt. The lights faded as he stood still and looked at them. He did not leap, did not give chase. It always seemed unfeasible and rash. But there was a defeatism in that, clearly, a submission to ease, a cowardly risk avoidance. The same force that had bound Susan to him through manipulation rather than honesty.

T. would have his night in jail, that was clear. He would spend the whole night in a cell while Hal lay sleeping in the soft hotel bed. Albeit with scratchy coverlet. He pictured a medieval torture chamber, the rack, a rusting Iron Maiden. Then burly sailors.

“You’ll find him in the morning. Make sure you get a good night’s rest,” said Susan.

She did not know, of course, about Gretel, spinning now in a topless dirndl in his memory, German and gold forever.

There was no need for her to know. He could tell her, but it would be selfish, a small and petty revenge.

The private sanctum of the mind. . he fell back on it gratefully. What a freedom it was, what a perfect freedom. In the future, if he felt lonely, he would have to remember this, remind himself of its benefits — the unending and sweet privacy of thinking. How no one else, no matter how great or powerful, could ever enter here. This place was truly his.

Because if it was painful to be alone, not being alone would be torment. A mind that was invaded by other minds could be nothing more than prison. And yet there were people out there who wanted to believe in ESP, who fantasized telepathy. Maybe what they had in mind was a kind of selective mind-reading? No one sane would want to walk around reading minds in some kind of flowing, open exchange.

Did an ant have a mind of its own? A bee? Uncertain. They seemed to operate differently, dying by the thousands for the sake of a queen and all the time never stopping their work. An ant, a bee, neither seemed gripped by doubt, typically. Doubt had to be a requisite of the private mind. It was a perk of being human: your mind was your own, always and forever a secret territory.

“You too,” he echoed softly. “You too.”

• • • • •

In the morning he walked out in front of the hotel and got a car to Belmopan, about an hour away.

It was a small town, the capital, and nothing else — grass, palms, scattered pastel-colored buildings. Less slumlike than the city, but with a feeling of vacancy. The embassy was a two-story white, wooden edifice with a porch all around, columns in front, palm trees, a flag and a bright-green, well-kept lawn.

Inside a woman rose from her desk when he came through the door.

“There’s an American citizen who was arrested,” he told her without preamble. “A businessman. Down in Placencia, but they brought him up to Belize City last night. I have to find him. Get him immediate legal aid. He shouldn’t be in there.”

“Give me his name,” she said. “I’ll make some calls.”

The secretary went into another room. While he waited he sat in a teak chair and jiggled his leg. The floor was wood and a wooden fan turned on the ceiling; beside him sat a shiny, tall plant whose leaves brushed against his shoulder. He heard the sound of a fax machine dialing. Then the front door opened and two red-faced men came in wearing loud, floral-print shirts. They seemed to be familiar with the premises and moved past him into a back room, talking about sportfishing. One said he’d caught a wahoo, the other a snook.

After a while the secretary came back. She had a man with her, thin and balding, with glasses.

“Jeff Brady,” he said. “Public affairs section chief. We don’t have staff attorneys, but we do refer out. Not clear yet whether we need a lawyer though. Need to appraise the situation, put out feelers. Be on our way?”

“You found him?”

“We know where they’re holding him, yes. Taking my own car, Sarah. Binadu’s got the VW. Later.”

He drove a small, open jeep, making swift, jerky turns until they got out onto the highway. Hal held onto the door handle. The exhaust of other cars made him cough.

He resolved to act as T.’s staunchest ally. He would tell the diplomat a story that would raise his sympathies.

“He was obviously deeply affected by the death of his girlfriend. I’m not saying he’s in great shape emotionally. But he has no history of violence or anything like that. Not even a misdemeanor or an unpaid parking ticket.”

“Uh huh?”

“He’s a conscientious boss-type guy, my wife’s devoted to him. Right now, you’ll see, he’s unshaven, he looks like a mountain man, but the guy I know wears three-thousand-dollar suits and drives a high-end Mercedes. So yeah, was he depressed when he came down here? Sure. Anyone would be. But that’s it. He needed a change. Decided to do some backpacking, so he hired a local guide to take him up the river. I think they were headed for some trailhead near the jaguar preserve.”

“Ways up there. Cockscomb? Past the confluence with the Swasey Branch? You can drive there in an hour. Tourists don’t tend to take the river route.”

“Their first night out the guide apparently died. Out of the blue. He suffered a heart attack or something. Stern said he found out in the morning, because they were each sleeping in their own tents. He went into shock or something, the death of the guide really threw him.”

“I bet.”

With his left hand on the wheel, Brady fumbled with his right to shake a cigarette from his pack and light it off the dash. He seemed distracted. Hal needed to get his attention.

“I mean here he was, this young guy from L.A., up a jungle river with just this one person who was his lifeline. And that lifeline suddenly disappears. Plus the fact, this guy Stern, over the past few months, is like a death magnet. Everyone close to him dies. Or gets debilitated. My wife told me the father left the mother — this aging frat boy left the mother, you know, his wife of so many years, to be a gay stripper in Key West. Then the girlfriend dies, of some heart condition he didn’t even know she had. This woman, by the way, was twenty-three and ran marathons. His mother tried to O.D. but ended up losing her mind. She’s got dementia or something. His dog gets hit by a car. Even his business partner ditched him.”

“Rough year.”

A spark of interest. Either the cigarette or the drama was putting Brady in a better mood.

“So anyway, after he found the guide dead Stern went into shock I guess, and eventually he dragged the body back down to the boat. We’re talking, for miles. I did that hike, looking for him. It was exhausting even without a 200-pound dead weight to haul. I guess he wrapped it up in the tent and got it all the way down to the river, where he put it back in the boat. But then later the boat’s propeller snapped and he ditched it against the bank, body and all, and tried to hike out. He almost died too. It was a close call for him.”

Brady nodded, negotiated a pothole. The car jumped.

“The guide was older, in his sixties I guess? It was a freak thing, but there’s no way it was anything other than natural causes. A couple days later the boat floated down to the ocean, but by then there was no body in it.”

“No body,” said Brady. “At all? Huh. Problematic.”

“The guide’s brother, I met him, I mean he isn’t bringing charges or anything. It was called in by some neighbor lady or something who has a beef with Americans. I don’t even know what they’re holding him on.”

“We’ll find out. Don’t worry.”

They drove in silence for a minute or two. Cars were smaller here than at home, smaller, older, more banged-up. The road was called a highway, but as in Mexico there was no fencing alongside to keep out stray animals. The corpses of roadkill appeared every few hundred yards, here a dog, there what seemed to be a raccoon.

“You know anything about a military incursion into the jungle down there, by the way?” he asked Brady.

“Come again?”

“A military incursion.”

“Whose military?”

“Ours.”

“When?”

“I think maybe yesterday. Or the day before.”

Brady laughed abruptly.

“Uh, that’d be a no.”

“I think there was one, though.”

“I’d know. Trust me. This is a very small country.”

“I heard they were doing a flyover. Some alleged guerrilla camp of Mayans, from over the border.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“If you say so.”

“Who told you this, anyway?”

Hal looked away from him to his own side of the road. There were flat, ugly fields stretching out beside him to the east, while to the west rose the low mountains.

“A German schoolteacher,” he said slowly.

“What?”

“Long story.”

“I’m all ears. We still got half an hour to go.”

Hal told him about the armed forces, the boat trip, the hike. He told him what Hans had said as he lay down on the boat’s bench at the end, his stomach full of warm liquid.

“Aural hallucinations. Fatigue can do that to you.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“But then what about what his wife said? Yesterday?”

“Guy sounds like a weapons hobbyist. Maybe he likes to spin tales to impress the little lady.”

“Huh,” said Hal. “I don’t know, Jeff. I mean he did bring the Marines to me.”

Then it struck him that this discussion might be impairing his credibility. He should change the subject.

But Brady did it for him.

“What do you do, anyway? Stateside?”

Hal was surprised. He was sure he had mentioned it.

“IRS.”

“Kidding.”

“Why, you delinquent?”

“My brother works at the Service Center in Austin.”

“Government service runs in your family, huh?”

“That and gallbladder problems.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

By the time they got off the highway and headed into Belize City he felt reasonably confident that Brady was won over. He had recognized, in Brady, the cynical posture of high-waisted Rodriguez. And by treating Brady essentially as he treated Rodriguez — as though they were brothers-in-arms, jaded yet hearty mercenaries in civil service’s trench warfare — he was in the process of securing Brady’s confidence.

He coughed, breathing exhaust fumes as they made their way down a narrow street behind a rickety pickup full of bags of garbage.

“No unleaded gas around here,” said Brady. “Not yet. Pity. OK. Not far now.” He pulled into a parking space abruptly and braked. “Here we go. Follow me, and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

“Draconian.”

“Only because I’ve been in the situation. Trust me.”

As it happened Hal was made to wait in the lobby, near a uniformed guard standing beside a young woman’s desk, while Brady was ushered into the interior. The chairs were uncomfortable, the walls gray and the ceilings low. On a bulletin board was a picture of a wanted man with a banner above his head: FBI TEN MOST WANTED FUGITIVE. Beneath, three headings: DESCRIPTION. CAUTION. REWARD.

For a second it seemed to Hal that Belize was an outpost of America. It had been British Honduras, previously. But the British were nowhere.

An overhead fan whirred, the blades ticking monotonously against the dangling chain, but did little to aerate the room.

He wished he had a glass of ice water.

Finally Brady came out again, a portly man in shirtsleeves beside him, sweat stains under his arms.

“Hal, Jorge Luis. Hal Lindley, U.S. Internal Revenue Service.”

They shook. The man’s hand was faintly greasy. Hal’s own was probably just as bad.

“Mr. Stern is not here yet,” said Jorge, in English that was unaccented and fluent. “He’s being transported overland. They should be getting in a little later.”

“We can come back,” said Brady. “We’ll have our interview then, and talk to the detective.”

“Do we know—”

“We’ll get the details then,” said Brady, smiling. “No problem.” He turned and shook Jorge’s hand.

Out on the street he told Hal not to seem overeager, that a casual attitude was best. Hal stopped on the sidewalk and turned to him, incredulous.

“Casual? Casual attitude? An innocent man’s languishing in prison! Who knows if the rule of law even holds? I mean do we even know if they have grounds for arresting him?”

Brady took him by the shoulder.

“The key is not to get overwrought. Trust me. Keep things low-key, unless we get indications there’s a hidden agenda. In that case, we’ll go in from a whole different angle. But there’s no sign of that yet. Best way to get him out quickly is to act like the stakes are low, like there’s no official anxiety. Act like we’re all on the same side. Because we are, basically. Walk softly, carry a big stick. Trust me.”

“Poker face. That’s what you’re saying?”

“More or less. Let’s go get some lunch. I know a nice little place right around the corner. Family runs it. Shall we?”

•

Lunch was jerk chicken they ate off paper plates on cheery red and green vinyl tablecloths. They washed down the chicken with tepid half-pints of watery beer, and afterward Hal retired to his hotel room, a relief. In the thick air the beer was making him feel heavy, his limbs difficult to lift.

He lay down on the coverlet, then thought of the bacteria Susan would assure him were writhing there — possibly even parasites such as crabs, which would take up residence in his pubic hair.

All right! Jesus.

He stood, pulled the coverlet off and lay down again on the cool top sheet. He was logy, but he was also restless. He missed Casey.

When she picked up the phone he felt drunker, suddenly, than he had since Gretel. It seemed all things were transparent, and who was he to pretend otherwise?

“I know about the phone sex,” he said.

“Shit,” said Casey.

“Yep. I do.”

“Huh,” said Casey. “What can I say. Sorry?”

“You’re not sorry,” he said. He was curious, actually. “You said you liked it. In the kitchen, to what’s her name. Who crochets the hideous multicolored afghans. And the baby booties.”

“Nancy.”

“You don’t have to lie to me, is my point. I’m your father.”

“Come on, Dad. You don’t want to know stuff like that. I mean really. Do you?”

He felt clean, miraculous. As though the details had no power over him. Everything was the idea of itself; everything was the shape of itself, not the texture — the shadow it threw or the light it cast, the arc of its traveling. Not the trivia, not the variables, no: the great sweep of feeling, the adventurous gesture.

“If it makes you happy, that’s good enough for me. Whatever. I mean not everyone wants to work for the IRS, either.”

“Nice try, Daddy. IRS, phone porn, same thing.”

“Anyway, sweetheart, I don’t need to know the details. But that doesn’t mean I need to be lied to. I’d rather get the respect of hearing the truth and having to deal with it.”

“I thought, you know, no one wants to think of their crippled kid doing phone porn for a living. Sordid. You know — do you really need the ideation? It’s like seeing your parents have sex. Right? Pretty disgusting. No offense, but who wants that? Come on!”

“The truth will set us free.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“OK, the truth will set me free. That’s what I’m seeing, since I’ve been down here. Or wait. What I’m seeing is more: I want to know the truth, but I don’t want to have to tell the truth. See? You want to have the truth available to you, but then you also want the freedom of never having to tell it yourself. That’s the deal with truth. It sets you free when you hear it, but if you have to tell it, that’s pretty much a non-freedom situation. Get it? People should tell the truth to me, if I ask them for it. But I should be able to hide the truth whenever I want to.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I resent the implication.”

“Uh huh. Mom said you’d been hitting the sauce. It’s not like you. So what is this? A mid-life-crisis thing?”

“I did have two beers with lunch. With the guy from the embassy. Beer in the middle of the day knocks me out, though. It’s humid here.”

“She also said T.’s in jail.”

“It’s more of a holding facility. Don’t worry. We’re gonna spring him. We’ll bust him out. I’m working closely with the U.S. embassy.”

“He killed someone?”

“Of course not, honey. A guy just happened to, you know, die next to him.”

“Just die?”

“Hey. It happens.”

“And there’s no, they don’t have any evidence against him, or whatever?”

“There’s no body, even. Don’t worry, Case. Hey, listen. What about Sal? How’s it going with him?”

“Oh, you know. It’s not anything, really.”

“Good to hear.”

“I bet.”

“Hey. Case.”

“Uh huh.”

“So I’ve been wondering. What happened with you and T.?”

She was silent. He was overstepping, but he couldn’t help it — there was a carelessness to him. Or he was carefree.

“In a nutshell? He condescended, Dad.”

“He condescended?”

“He condescended to me.”

There was nothing more. Casey was not one to step into an awkward pause, to take up the slack. The static buzzed between them. He let it rest.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all, Daddy. So when are you guys coming home?”

After they hung up he lay back on the sheet, content. It always made him feel good to talk to her. She always sounded like herself, whole, confident, abrupt. Her matter-of-factness was comforting, her cheery pugnacity. When he went to see her, or even heard her speaking to him on the phone, it reminded him that she was not gone at all — not gone at all and not miserable, at least no more so than the rest of the humans. She was warm, she was there, she was not the specter of a miserable daughter that lived alongside him. That specter could be dismissed.

It was irrelevant.

•

When he met Brady outside the jail there was another man with him, a younger Anglo in a seersucker suit. It turned out he was a lawyer.

“You said there was nothing to worry about,” said Hal, alarmed. It was beyond his control after all. It had run away on him. “You said walk lightly, not to show we’re worried!”

“A basic precaution. Cleve’s an old friend of mine from Miami. Jorge knows him too. He met him last year at a pool party. Remember that, Cleve? After the ribbon-cutting? At the new youth hostel?”

“With the — that woman with the grass skirt? The supernumerary nipple?”

“Right. Right! Who kept showing it to everyone.”

“Jesus,” said the lawyer, and shook his head. He turned to Hal. “She was an entertainer I guess? Something to do with the music? But she had this extra nipple. It was, like, right under her clavicle.” He tugged his shirt collar down to display the area in question.

“It was weird, though,” said Brady. “It was little.”

“Almost like a big wart.”

“But with an areola.”

“So this won’t, this won’t make the cops think we’re adversarial?” asked Hal. “Marching back in there with an attorney?”

“It’s just a formality. Don’t worry. After you, gentlemen.”

Brady opened the door for him.

“She kept going, ‘my supernumerary nipple,’” said the lawyer. “That’s what she called it. I never forgot. ‘Supernumerary.’”

“Made it sound official,” said Brady.

“Bureaucratic,” said Cleve.

After a few minutes’ wait, with Brady and the lawyer still talking about the pool party — apparently a man had walked through a plate-glass door and been airlifted to a hospital in Mexico City — the stocky, sweat-stained man from before came out and ushered them in. It seemed to Hal that the security guard looked askance at him as they passed, as though Hal posed a security risk.

Inside they went down a brightly lit corridor and the stocky man opened the door to an interrogation room.

There was T., seated at a Formica table. At his elbow was a bottle of water.

Hal bent down and held his shoulders, then stepped back. He did not look upset.

“Are you OK? How are you holding up?”

“Fine, thank you,” said T., and smiled.

“Where were you sleeping last night?”

“We were driving for some of it. There was a rest stop. I didn’t get that much sleep.”

“Man. I’m so sorry. This is wrong, T.”

T. patted him on the arm and then looked past him, polite. “Tom Stern. Please call me T. And you are?”

Hal introduced Brady and the lawyer. On the other side of the table the stocky man arranged chairs.

“One moment,” said Jorge the stocky, and left them.

“Have they accused you of anything?” asked Hal impatiently.

“No, nothing,” said T. pleasantly.

“But so — on what grounds are they keeping you?”

“They have some questions, is what I’ve been told. They want to know what happened. Get it into the record.”

“You haven’t been interviewed officially, I assume,” said the lawyer.

“No one’s really asked me anything,” said T. “We were in a car, then a transport van with a couple of prisoners, then we stopped at a rest stop. . I’m tired. But nothing’s happened.”

“They’ll be taping this now, then,” said the lawyer. “Wish we had more time to prepare. Key is, you don’t want to disclose more than the basic facts. You ever been deposed?”

T. shook his head.

“You have nothing to hide here, I’m sure. But keep it brief. We want to avoid even the suggestion there’s anything you could have done to stop this man from dying.”

“If I had EMT training, maybe. .,” said T. pensively.

“That kind of speculation is exactly what we don’t want. Just the basic facts. No emotional statements, for instance. You think you can do that?”

Then Jorge was back, and a woman with glossy lipstick and a tape recorder.

“Excuse me,” said Jorge. “This is our stenographer. Could she—?”

There was little room. Hal saw he was motioning to the chair beside Hal, in which he had not yet sat down.

“Sure, sure,” said Hal, but then, in the ensuing arrangement of persons as they settled, was left with nowhere to sit. He leaned against the wall, arms folded.

“You can just tell us what happened, your version of the events,” said Jorge, and T. nodded. Jorge narrated some protocol in the direction of the tape recorder — who was present, the date, the date of the guide’s demise. T. began to tell his story, which Hal had heard before, in an even, pleasant tone. It was as though he was unaffected by stress.

Hal himself was sweating. There was no air in the room, no windows and no air. Not even a ventilation grid, he saw, looking around. Maybe if he could crack the door open? Even a few inches would offer relief. But then there would be background noise, he guessed. Ambient sound on the tape recorder, compromising its integrity.

He was wet beneath the arms. Disgusting. And the ceiling, it seemed, was perilously low, pocked with little pinpricks in what looked like white cardboard.

Yet none of the others seemed to be noticing. They were not bothered by any of it. Except for Jorge they were not even perspiring, as far as he could see. He felt a tenuous bond with Jorge. They were the only ones with armpit stains.

Possibly he was slightly claustrophobic. Before his venture into this small, subtropical and foreign country, he had never thought of himself as a wimp. Yet it seemed he was often in discomfort since he got here, uncomfortable, exhausted, or alarmed. He had turned out to be a hothouse flower — a hothouse flower from the first world that wilted in the third. An American hothouse flower, adapted only to the United States. And within the U.S. only to Southern California, or more restricted still — adapted to the unchanging mildness of West L.A., where the worst weather you encountered was gray.

“By the time I dragged myself back down to the coast,” T. was saying, in his low, well-modulated voice, “I was in a state of exhaustion. My body weight had dropped. I went to my foreman, Marlo. Later he said I was starving. But my own worry had been thirst, you know, potable water. The river water I’d been avoiding as much as I could. I was afraid of illness. Possibly giardia. Delonn had told me there were cattle upstream. So I used the filter, but I didn’t trust myself. I was afraid I was using it wrong. By the time I saw the tourists — it was a family taking pictures of a toucan — I wasn’t thinking clearly. And the recovery was slow. This is what accounts for my delay in contacting Delonn’s family. I regret. .”

The lawyer shook his head in a small, tight movement, but T. ignored him. Neither Jorge nor the stenographer, who seemed to be doing nothing other than keeping one hand on the tape recorder, noticed either.

“I regret that my recovery prevented me from contacting them earlier,” he went on. “I do think Delonn’s problem on the boat, the possible arm pain and mild distress he appeared to be having as we came up the river, were an early warning signal.”

The lawyer shook his head again, but T. was not looking at him.

“But he chose not to turn back. At that time, as I said, I asked him if he was OK. He was an older man, but he seemed to be in good physical shape. He was active. My recollection is, he said it was probably heartburn. He had no interest in turning back, so he dismissed my concern.”

The lawyer nodded, as though to affirm: good. Good. Blame the victim.

“Mr. Stern. What is your opinion,” asked Jorge, tipping his chair back onto two legs, “about what happened to the body? Go over that one more time, please.”

T. was drinking water from his bottle. He recapped it and set it down carefully.

“A couple of days after I abandoned the boat,” he went on, “I was at my campsite at night. I saw the boat drifting downriver. I ran into the river and tried to climb over the side, but I was too slow. I slipped off and the boat kept going. But while I was still hanging on I saw the inside of the boat, and the body wasn’t there. The tent, you know, that it was wrapped in? — was that bright yellow of raincoats. Even at night I would have been able to make it out. But there was nothing.”

“You’re sure?”

“He already said so,” said the lawyer.

“My guess was—”

“You don’t have to guess,” said the lawyer. “That’s all you saw.”

Hal felt heat rush to his face, and a suffocation. He closed his eyes and lights pricked at the darkness.

“Excuse me,” he said.

The hallway was slightly less stifling but not enough, and he kept going past the security guard and the reception desk, out the front door. The sky had clouded over and a cool breeze was up, and he relaxed instantly.

The guard would probably not let him back in by himself, but he was indifferent. The lawyer was his watchdog. The lawyer was being a lawyer. There was nothing Hal could do to help, past the fact of having brought him in, Brady and him. He was unsure of their competence, but what could he do? Nothing. These were guys who spent their spare time discussing women with extra nipples.

He sat down on a deep window ledge, feet planted far apart on the sidewalk, and raised his face to the sky. He took a deep breath and then looked level again, gazed in front of him. A car or two passed. Across the street there was a store that seemed to sell things made of ugly plastic. The objects festooned the windows brightly but their nature was unclear. . he had always thought of himself as competent, but then he came down here and had to do everything through proxies — all he did was delegate tasks to those who were more qualified. His own qualifications, it turned out, were limited to Service business. He had no qualifications outside those narrow parameters.

And yet back home, day in, day out, he walked around like a competent man.

That was what his country did for people like him. It specialized them. They knew how to live, day in, day out, in one highly specific undertaking. They thrived in their tunnels, however narrow. Manual laborers knew more. Manual laborers, many of them, could perform myriad tasks if called upon to do so, but white collars like himself knew only one thing.

He was a surplus human, a product of a swollen civilization. He was a widget among men.

When civilization fell and government went with it, his people would die off, replaced by bricklayers, plumbers and mechanics — replaced by farmers, weavers, and electricians who could forage through the ruins for generators and fuse boxes and wire. There would be no more use for his kind.

Could he adapt, given time? Possibly. Although with some difficulty. His former mantle of confidence would fall away; losing authority, he would become a kind of beggar. He and the bohemians. Clearly they were even more useless than he was. This was why, no doubt, he partly identified with them. The presence of other broadly useless humans offered a certain comfort. . more comfort even than Gretel, in fact, who had been so kind to him, because the young and beautiful were in their own privileged category. They would always be needed, or wanted, at least. The young and beautiful were an end in themselves. Even in the postscript to civilization, the young and beautiful would seldom be forced to beg. Plus they were good breeding stock.

In any case civilization was not quite falling at the moment. It was on its way down, collapsing in slow motion, but it had some good years left in it yet. Chances were he would continue to be what he was, live out his life as a widget, and never be called upon to learn to, say, butcher a calf.

There was Brady, coming out the front door. He nodded briskly at Hal, shook a cigarette out of a packet and lit it.

Brady, too, was a human widget.

“My prediction,” said Brady, after a first inhale, “is they keep him in overnight. Maybe one more night for good measure. I don’t think we’re looking at a serious situation.”

“Jesus,” said Hal. “That’s great to hear.”

He didn’t quite trust Brady. Brady was not smart enough, he suspected. But still it offered some relief.

“Can I talk to him by myself? Or do the cops always have to be there?”

“Give ’em another five minutes,” said Brady. “You should be able to get some face time then.”

•

Bail was not an option, apparently. T. had not been arrested, he told Hal, sitting in the interview room again with the door wide open. He was being detained, but no charges had been brought. He was staying on a voluntary basis, until they were satisfied he was not a flight risk.

“As a courtesy,” he explained.

“You’re staying in prison as a courtesy? Why be courteous? I don’t get it. They have no right to keep you.”

“It’s all right, Hal,” said T. calmly. “Really. They’re doing a search for the body, just in case. Mostly the riverbanks, is all they can manage. Manpower issue I guess. But if they don’t find anything in the next twenty-four hours, the lawyer said, I’ll be free to leave. And if they do find it, they’ll conduct an autopsy. Verify my story.”

“That’s bullshit,” said Hal.

“It’s OK. Really. It’s not a problem for me.”

“Do you even know the, you know, the conditions? Have you gone to where they’re going to keep you?”

“Not yet. It’s just down the street.”

“And the lawyer advised you to go along with this? I mean we have money. You know. There’s plenty of it. We should be able to post a bond. You could stay at my hotel while they do their search. Their autopsy.”

“I don’t think they’ll find the body,” said T. “I think the animals got to it.”

He seemed matter-of-fact about the prospect.

“Listen. T. Why not stay in my hotel? You want to — I don’t know — have to use the toilet in front of perfect strangers? Eat gruel?”

“My own cell, they said. It’s not a high-security thing. There are private showers. And it’s just for one night.”

“I don’t know,” said Hal, shaking his head. He felt fretful. T. was not practical; in his new form he had become irresponsible, flaky. Could he be trusted even with self-preservation? “Maybe we should call a lawyer in the U.S. Someone famous. Get a referral, at least. I don’t know about this.”

“You know how you could help?”

“Just tell me.”

“If you could arrange for the flight out, a couple days down the road, that’d be great. I was thinking of walking, but now I have other plans.”

“Ha ha.”

“No, really. I was going to try to walk home, at one point.”

“In delirium, I assume.”

“I just wanted to do it. But now I think we should maybe go ahead and get back, if that works for you.”

“Good thinking.”

“Mr. Stern?”

Jorge was at the door.

“We can move you on now, sir.”

Hal stood, scraping his chair back.

“I’ll keep close tabs on you,” he told T. “That’s for sure.”

“I appreciate your concern, Hal. I do.”

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“See you,” said T.