Gods Without Men

2009

Raj smiled up at his father, his deep brown eyes as alien and inscrutable as stars. “Look,” he said, pointing at a delivery van. Jaz gripped the little blue sneaker more tightly as his son hopped closer to the door, trying to get a better view. A miracle: That was the word Lisa used. God and Lisa were close these days.

“We’re going far,” he told him. They always went far. For several months, walking had been their main occupation; all through the winter, even when it was tough to push the stroller through the snow. Lisa would phone from the office and ask where they were. Out, Jaz would say. He’d make up fictitious errands, trips to Whole Foods, the dry cleaner. He’d tell these lies standing on corners in strange parts of the city, where bass blared from passing cars and men hung out in front of check cashers and bodegas.

He got Raj into his second shoe and carried the stroller down the steps. “You want to ride?” he asked. Raj shook his head. Hand in hand they set off down the hill, making toward the river. There was a bookstore in Chelsea he wanted to visit; no matter that there were a dozen closer places to buy a book. He and Raj would walk. Sooner or later they’d find their way across one of the bridges into Manhattan. They’d stop for a snack, sit on a bench in a park. The trip could use up most of the day.

At least it was warm. June had been wet and chilly; whole days of rain. They’d trudged the streets under twin yellow ponchos, Raj’s hair plastered against his face in wet black licks. Today the sky was gray and a humid pall lay over the street, cloaking the bodies of passersby in a sheen of sweat; the dog walkers, the neighbor carrying some kind of cake from her car to her house, its large pink box held ritually in front of her like a religious relic or an unexploded bomb. The neighbor nodded hello and grinned, campily widening her eyes in what was probably supposed to be an expression of fizzy excitement. Oh, that a day should have such cake in it! As she fished in her purse for her keys, she stole a quick, voracious glance at Raj. Jaz knew her. Carrie-Anne or Carol-Ann. Her husband was a urologist. So ingratiating now, but a few months before she’d ignored him whenever they passed on the street. Yeah, he thought. Eat shit, lady. Try and pretend you never thought what you thought about me.

They walked past the coffee shop next to the subway stop. It had once been his regular spot, but he hadn’t been in there since the previous August. One morning on the way to work, he’d been standing in line when a woman tapped him on the shoulder. As he turned to see what she wanted, she spat in his face. Murderer, she hissed. Pedophile. God hates you. He’d been too shocked to react. By the time he worked out what had happened, she was gone, out on the street, the glass door rattling in its frame behind her.

The guy behind him had seen everything. “She spat on me,” Jaz said, disbelieving. “Did you see that? She spat on me.” The guy shrugged and got interested in something on the floor. Jaz cleaned himself with wadded napkins. No one would catch his eye. Eventually, the girl behind the counter asked, in an odd sarcastic tone, if he wanted anything to drink. Then he realized: Everyone in the place knew who he was. It explained the peculiar atmosphere, the invisible bubble of indifference that seemed to be separating him from the other customers. He left immediately and didn’t go out of the house again for three days. During the months of Raj’s disappearance, he got used to how people reacted when they recognized him: the silent disgust; the animal recoil. He’d tell himself they didn’t know him, that their anger was directed at something else, some personal mental darkness his presence in the checkout line or subway car was forcing them to confront. It didn’t help. He was jostled on the street, found it hard to get service in stores. Once someone threw a soda can out of a car, which sent a great fizzy arc of orange onto the sidewalk in front of his feet.

They had been crushing, lonely months. Lisa had gone to stay with her parents in Phoenix. His old friends seemed distant, busy with their lives. One evening he walked halfway across the Williamsburg Bridge, judging the height of the mesh fence that separated him from the water. He was trying to remember what was supposed to happen. Didn’t you die on impact? You were unconscious as soon as you hit the water. Reasons to do it, reasons not to. After a while he turned and walked back.

The story running in his head had a sickening weight. He’d made it happen. He’d wanted Raj to disappear. It was all he’d been thinking about as they drove from L.A. to that awful place — how nice it would be to have his life back, the old times when he and Lisa ran around the city like latchkey kids. Then Lisa broke the string on Raj’s charm and his evil thoughts were set free to do their work. The lunatics on the Internet were telling the truth — he’d murdered his son. Through force of will, bad magic. A kind of spoon-bending.

He’d stopped speaking to his parents. At first they’d wanted him to pay for a guru to come from India; some Punjabi godman his mom had been sending money to. It will be guruji and three, four followers only. They will need hotel, meals. He’d lost his temper, told her she was pagal if she thought he’d pay to be exploited by some village swami. “But you can afford it,” she said. “You’re rich. It is for your son.” One evening she called to say his father wanted to speak to him. Papaji hadn’t been well. When he came on the line, his voice was shaky. “Beta, it is God’s will. That is all. If you will not go for the guru, try and give your wife another child, a son whose mind and body is sound. Do it quickly. Help her forget her pain. In the end it may be for the best.” All this, just two weeks after Raj had vanished. As if he were trash, genetic waste.

Back then they were staying in a business hotel in Riverside. Air-con buzzing, a slew of room-service trays. Lisa was barely present, just a catatonic hump in the bed. He put the phone down on his dad and got in beside her, running a hand over her back, her hip, smelling the unwashed animal reek of her. She groaned and reached out pale fingers, scrabbling for something on the bedside table. The TV remote. On it went, the daytime yabbering. Mufflers, double glazing, great new taste. There were days when it drove him crazy and he went to sit in the antiseptic restaurant to be spied on by the waitresses; and other days when he’d give in and watch with her, trying to follow along as Gavin crashed Deana’s car and Petra woke up from her coma.

As he sat in bed he found himself obsessing — not just about what had happened in the park, the tiny forgotten details on which it all hinged, which way he’d turned, what he’d heard behind him on the path, but about the day before, when Lisa had left him alone with Raj at the motel. Something had happened to her. Sure, she’d gotten drunk, but he had the sense that she’d been somewhere, somewhere a long way away. She’d been out of touch for almost twenty-four hours. She could have driven two hundred miles or more. Day by day he became more convinced that this journey had some bearing on Raj’s disappearance. If she knew something and wasn’t saying and because of it Raj was … When he got back to New York he planned to open her credit-card bill and look for charges from Las Vegas or Palm Springs. It wasn’t that she was lying to him. She wasn’t saying anything at all. She’d withdrawn completely. It made him feel powerless. He’d sit in the chair by the window, angrily staring at the shapeless blob bundled up under the covers, like a predatory animal waiting outside a burrow.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said to her on the seventeenth day, adopting a soothing tone. It was an experiment, a probe. “Whatever you did, it doesn’t matter. What’s happening isn’t your fault.”

“You don’t know.”

“So tell me.”

She just shook her head. He kept pushing, but she said nothing. After a while, he realized the medication had put her back to sleep.

When he found her on the bathroom floor, he was sure she’d tried to kill herself. Frantically he dialed 911, then saw that her eyes were open. Within minutes the room was full of hotel staff and paramedics. There seemed to be nothing wrong with her, except that she wouldn’t speak. She refused to tell them whether she’d taken anything, and they drove her to a hospital and kept her there overnight while they ran toxicology tests. The results were negative.

The doctors diagnosed a “psychotic break.” Her dad flew in and tried to take charge. Louis wanted his little girl sent to some expensive clinic in Colorado. He was a guy who liked to throw money at a situation; it made him feel he was in control. Airlifted, he kept saying, like she’d been wounded on a battlefield. Jaz disagreed and they had a stand-up finger-pointing argument in the hospital Starbucks.

“We’re her goddamn family.”

“And what am I?”

“Jaz, I don’t mean that. But this is my daughter we’re talking about. And both of us know you haven’t exactly been good for each other.”

“What do you even mean by that?”

“I mind my business, Jaz. But Jesus Christ, she’s my daughter. I know when she’s not happy.”

“So you’re saying this is my fault?”

“Who the hell knows whose fault it is? But she’s up there in the — you know — in the fucking nut ward.”

Then he began to cry. The tears were streaming down his face and he was just repeating oh hell oh damn over and over and Jaz took him out to the parking lot so the people in Starbucks couldn’t see.

Price was still in the picture then. That slick asshole. Some Phoenix real-estate guy who’d given his card to Louis at the golf club. For those first few weeks, Jaz didn’t care where Louis had found him; he was just grateful for the help. The press briefings, the phone ringing off the hook; Lisa couldn’t handle any of it, which meant it was all on him. He was offered medication by a hotel doctor. He said no and then changed his mind; getting to sleep was near impossible. When exhaustion finally dragged him under, he’d dream he was digging with his hands in the ground under the Pinnacle Rocks, or else just scratching at himself, opening up sores and abscesses. The pills buried all that, at first.

The cops took them back to the scene. A wagon train of news crews trailed their Escalade, raising dust. It was a world bleached out by sunlight. The ink on the Amber Alert notices was already crackling to brown, on its way to pale yellow and that final bone-white that seemed to be the ultimate state of all things out there. Silence and death. Jaz climbed up on the rocks, looking around and shading his eyes as instructed, to recreate the moments after Raj was taken. Standing in position, framed by long lenses, he felt physically nauseated at the vast emptiness of the place. He bent over, propping himself up on his knees. Soon there would be nothing left of Raj but a few blank sheets of paper pinned on park notice boards. When the last journalist forgot about him, Jaz and Lisa would vanish too, erased from communal memory.

The police thought the abductor had been watching them. He or she must have driven behind them into the park, trailed them up the path as they walked to the rocks. They were hoping it was just a woman who wanted a kid. The young detective with the mustache said if that was the case, maybe she’d give him back once she realized he wasn’t — he stumbled over the phrasing, trying mentally, psychologically, settling for the unmodified normal. Then there were the other possibilities. A cellar; a vacant lot; the back of an unmarked van. Jaz had never given much thought to the thrill people got out of serial killers. The movies, the fat paperbacks. Duct tape and chainsaws and needles and masks. Suddenly all that Halloween glitter bore down on him as a sick weight. It was evil, debased.

Now that he was sensitized to obscenity, it seemed to jump out at him everywhere. He didn’t even have to leave his hotel room; like the haggard Latina with her cart of cleaning supplies, it just shoved its way right in. The newspaper hanging in a plastic bag from the door handle was full of it; a little girl shot at a Baghdad checkpoint; ten shoppers blown up in a street market. No, uh, por favor. Tomorrow, maybe. Come back tomorrow. But what was new? The war had always been going on somewhere. It just changed faces and locations. There wasn’t anything you could do. So why did he sit on the floor with the Weekend Edition spread out around him, tears streaming down his face? Why was that the only thing that made him feel clean?

There were gestures of friendship. People called from New York, asking how they were, offering help. Lisa’s cousin Eli started a blog, asking for information, giving updates on the search. Lisa wouldn’t speak to any of her friends except her old friend Amy, who now lived in Chicago. He called Amy to ask if she could fly out, offering to pay for her ticket. I think she needs someone, he pleaded. Someone who’s not me. Amy promised to see what she could do, and two days later arrived in their fetid room, opening curtains, forcing the two of them to clean up. She was the one who helped them find another place to stay, where it was quiet and the balcony didn’t look out onto a freeway. On her last night, the three of them had a meal in a Mexican restaurant. It felt almost normal. As she left for the airport, Lisa hugged her and wouldn’t let go, clinging, clawing at her back with her fingers.

When the accusations started, he didn’t know how to respond. It seemed outlandish. The first hint of trouble came at the second reconstruction, the one after he’d been hypnotized and remembered the car parked next to theirs at the rocks. A lot of people had turned up, not all of them journalists. There were pickups parked among the news vans. Sunshades and coolers, bored kids come to see what there was to see. He and Lisa were walking along the path. They’d been induced to push a stroller with a strange little boy sitting in it, a deputy sheriff’s son. A voice called out, “What did you do with him, Lisa?” That was all. He turned around angrily, but couldn’t see who’d spoken. Lisa was looking at the ground, her knuckles white on the stroller’s plastic grips.

Things seemed to slide from there. The local TV stations were giving a lot of airtime to Raj’s abduction. At first the tone was sympathetic, but by the end of the second week they seemed to be hunting for new things to say. The commentators were bored, punchy; they stopped dispensing clichés about how “unimaginable” they found the family’s “plight” and began to dissect the way they behaved at press conferences. They’re kind of a cold couple. Very aloof. Very New York. One morning they were propped up in bed, channel surfing. On the local breakfast show, two women in pantsuits — the presenter and a guest identified as a psychologist — sat on a couch and aired their opinions. As they watched, the pair began to speculate about whether he and Lisa had killed Raj themselves. “I don’t know what it is about that woman,” said one, “but I don’t care for it. She seems, you know, not quite normal. A normal mother would show some emotion.”

An hour later Lisa had a full-blown panic attack. She was rigid, gasping for breath. He tried to rise and fall with her, but she wouldn’t come down. Breathe, he said. Breathe in and out. He tried to say them, the words you were supposed to say. They had no effect. He kept saying the words. It was no good. In the end he dialed the front desk. Help, he said. For some reason he was whispering. Just come and help, OK? Because I can’t help her.

The hotel doctor filled her so full of sedatives that in the middle of the night he thought her heart had stopped. She was too still. He fumbled for the light switch, freaking out because his wife was lying dead next to him and he couldn’t find the fucking switch. This was his fault, this on top of everything else. They’d wanted to take her to a hospital and he’d said no. She was dead because he hadn’t let them take her to the hospital. He shook her violently. She turned over and groaned. After that he couldn’t get back to sleep. Slowly, the sliver of sky visible through the blinds turned from black to gray.

The next day he screamed at Price. What the hell are you doing? My wife shouldn’t have to hear that shit. It’s defamation. It’s your job to protect us. Price told him it wasn’t so easy. He didn’t speak out of malice, but Jaz and Lisa hadn’t been helping themselves. Problem was, they weren’t likable characters. They came off — not to him, mind you, but to some folks — as snobs. You couldn’t put all the blame on the media. They were just going with the story the Matharu family had been offering them. He fished in his jacket pocket and produced a page torn out of a magazine, a feature written by an ex — film producer who’d taken to following high-profile trials and investigations. They are, the man wrote, like a plaster-of-paris couple, something that can be painted to look exactly like life.

“Buddy,” he said, “we got to change the story. First of all, you need to get out, show your human side. You go to church?”

“I’m not a Christian.”

“Not practicing?”

“Mr. Price, just go do your job. Tell them we’re not snobs or whatever they need to hear to get this bullshit to stop. Everyone, including you, seems to be forgetting about our son. Raj, his name is. Remember him? The little boy who went missing? He’s the story. The only story.”

“Sir, this is me right here, doing my job. I’m telling you, go to church. You’ll get the right result.”

“I’m a Sikh, Mr. Price. And my wife’s a Jew. You probably don’t know what a Sikh is, but surely you know about the Jews. The ones who killed Jesus?”

“There’s no need for that tone.”

“Man, I thought my people were ignorant. You really are a fucking hick.”

The insult hung in the air. Jaz shrugged. “I can’t deal with your crap anymore. You don’t understand a thing about me or my family. You’re fired. Now get out of here before you drive me completely insane.”

Price balled his fists, then picked up his briefcase and left, muttering something about a lawsuit. Jaz followed him into the corridor, shouting after him to bring it on. Price called him an elitist bastard, told him he “wasn’t surprised folks felt the way they did.” He stalked off down the hall, double doors flapping behind him.

The next morning, Jaz called Louis to talk about the clinic. Lisa was sitting up in bed, groggily watching him. Hunched furtively over the phone, he felt like he was selling her out to the Gestapo.

“I don’t know, Louis. Maybe it’s the best thing. At least she could get some rest.”

Lisa’s voice was freighted with suspicion. “You’re talking about me.”

“In a minute, honey.”

He should have taken it outside. But she’d been asleep. And he hated going outside. The hotel wanted them to leave, because of the disruption they were causing other guests. People had been jostled in the lobby. There were reports of damage done to cars in the parking lot.

Louis put Patty on the line.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. “Because I sure don’t. You know your problem, Jaz? You say one thing, then do another. You were all ‘Oh I can take care of her.’ Now you find it’s too much trouble so you’re putting her in a clinic? Just throwing my daughter in a clinic. Unbelievable.”

She wasn’t interested in hearing that it had been Louis’s idea. She thought Jaz was showing a “dark side” of himself. The answer was obvious. Lisa should be back at home with them. Jaz didn’t have the strength to take offense. He drove Lisa to Phoenix. While she arranged her things in the guest room, he stood up in the kitchen and drank an awkward coffee with Patty and Louis.

“Well, then,” said Louis. “Bon voyage.” Like he was sending him off on a journey.

Jaz sat outside in the car for a few minutes, his mind blank. Then he started the engine and headed for the airport.

Going home to New York probably made things worse. Fleeing, one newspaper called it, running the story beneath a long-lens photograph of him walking through arrivals at LaGuardia. Dark glasses, wheelie case. An image of well-heeled callousness. Suddenly #matharus was a trending topic. The Internet was calling him a murderer. Everyone on earth seemed to have an opinion. He knew he should shut it all off — the TV, the Net, the constant babble of voices. But somehow he couldn’t. He wanted to know what the world thought of him, to look it in the face. He read the articles, the blog posts, watched the webcammed talking heads, immersing himself in the appalling churn of rumor like a yogi standing in a freezing river. It seemed he and Lisa were now the worst people in America. Someone found his e-mail address and sent obscene taunts, describing all the things that would happen to him when the public found out “the truth.” A journalist called his unlisted cell number and asked him point-blank if he’d killed Raj.

“My son is missing,” he told the man flatly. “I need help finding him.

That’s all.”

Should he have been angry? He couldn’t feel anything. Perhaps he was taking too many pills. Two minutes after the call and he couldn’t even remember what the guy’s voice sounded like.

Late at night he watched movies on his laptop, the kind of romantic comedies he usually saw only on planes. He tried to make his life as much like plane travel as possible. He slept in an armchair he’d dragged into Raj’s room, wearing an eye mask and a pair of bulky noise-canceling headphones. It was like staging his own extraordinary rendition, grabbing himself out of one time and place, hoping to land in another. Emotional teleportation.

Lisa called, crying over something she’d seen on Facebook. He was annoyed. Louis had promised to stop her from looking at it. “Why did you go online?” he asked her. “You knew what you’d see.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he? Some pervert has got him.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You think he’s alive?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You don’t know.”

“No, I don’t know. But I believe.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m feeling positive. I think it’ll come out right. That’s all I’m saying.”

“No, you’re saying you believe. That’s not the same. Your belief, Jaz? What’s that worth? I don’t even know what the word means to you.”

He couldn’t understand why she was so angry. Did she mean religion? That never used to be part of their lives. Religious belief wasn’t some precious commodity. It was everywhere. On a good day he thought of it as something like smoking — a bad habit that society was gradually breaking. On a bad day it seemed more a type of low-level mental illness. People who had it could be irrational, violent. His parents, for example, still trying to use God to control the family. As a scientist, he could term it an evolutionary throwback, perhaps with some residual social function — that was the kind of explanation he gave at dinner parties when asked about Al-Qaeda or Sarah Palin. So the honest answer to Lisa’s question was probably nothing; his belief was worth nothing at all. But that wasn’t what he’d meant. He’d only been trying to reassure her.

That night he went back to the Williamsburg Bridge, to a spot partway across, a kind of cage where he could sit back against a spray-tagged slab and watch the cyclists tear past. If he was a man of faith, maybe he would have found consolation? Or at least had a plan. A road map; some picture of the future. The cold was seeping through his jacket, so he got up and walked into Manhattan, wandering aimlessly downtown into the Financial District until he found himself outside the building on Broad Street where he used to work. He stood there for almost an hour, looking up at the mosaic of lighted windows, thinking about the Walter model and causality and guilt. If the world was made of signs, why couldn’t he read it? He had to be some kind of fool. All he could say for sure was that everything was connected — Raj, Walter, the desert. A bloom of paranoia grew up in his mind; he felt as if he was being watched by someone on one of the upper floors. Binoculars or a rifle sight. He walked away, trying to measure his pace. It took all his concentration not to break into a run.

It didn’t feel like coincidence when he got a call from Fenton the next day. “Were you watching me?” Jaz asked. Fenton said he didn’t know anything about that, but Jaz should listen up. He was sorry to have to do it, but they were letting him go. There was a long silence, while Jaz failed to formulate a reaction. He’d forgotten this part hadn’t happened yet.

The package was generous. Fenton said he felt bad, but things at the firm needed to move on and because of Jaz’s “family troubles” he wasn’t in a position to contribute. The old ham managed to sound as if losing “such a valued colleague” was a personal blow. Jaz appreciated that he was trying to be kind. He even offered to engage a private detective to help search for Raj.

“I can’t accept that from you, Fenton.”

“Don’t be so hardheaded, Jas-win-der. I mean it. It’s the least I can do.”

He sounded sincere enough, but he didn’t repeat the offer. Now that the deed was done, neither of them knew what to say.

“I’m sorry to do this on the telephone, but the idea of you having to drag your ass downtown …”

“I understand. Thanks.”

“Well. Then …” Fenton’s voice was uncertain. “Good-bye.”

He sounded relieved to end the call.

So there it was. He was free. Now there was absolutely nothing to distract him from the pain.

He spoke to Lisa every day on the phone, but it was more ritual than real conversation. She seemed better than before; camped in her parents’ spare bedroom, she was beginning to pay some attention to the world around her, even managing a few weak jokes at her mother’s expense — about the floral wallpaper she’d chosen for the house, the fussy little pouches of potpourri hanging over the closet door handles. The calls were never long. Jaz felt as if they were going through the motions with each other, priests of a faith they no longer believed in.

“How are you?”

“I’m doing OK. You?”

“Fine. Are you sleeping?”

“I have the pills.”

“What else are you doing?”

“Mom wants me to help her in the garden.”

“Does anything actually grow out there? It’s like Dune.”

“You’d be surprised. She’s got this cactus thing going on. She has plans for a wishing well.”

“Nice.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I spoke to the contractor. He knows we don’t want to go ahead with the remodeling.”

He waited for her to say something.

“So you don’t have to worry about any of that.”

“I’m tired, Jaz. I should go rest.”

“What time is it there?”

“Time?”

“Is it still light where you are?”

“Yes.”

“I miss you.”

“Sure.”

“Come home. You should be at home.”

“I don’t know.”

“I do.”

“At least here I’m not too far if—”

“Sure.”

“Look, I really am tired.”

“OK. I’ll let you get to bed. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Click.

Afterward, after one of those calls, the house would feel like a huge parquet-floored coffin. He’d look around without recognizing anything. So much stuff, so many tennis rackets and dinner plates and tastefully framed prints. Were they really his? He stopped sleeping in Raj’s room; the accusatory stares of the stuffed animals were too intense. Retreating to the master bedroom, he lay awake at night. He could sense the mass of clothes and shoes stacked behind the looming closet doors, threatening to spew over him in a tidal wave of wool and sea-island cotton.

He wanted to begin again, to be unformed, a fetus floating in warm amniotic fluid. One day, walking through SoHo, he went into a Japanese store that specialized in generic clothes and bought himself jeans, a gray T-shirt and a pair of white tennis shoes. He changed into them in the store and stuffed his other clothes into a plastic bag. He felt unburdened, glad to be free of their irritating particularity, their trace of the past. Later he gave the bag to a homeless guy outside the Astor Place subway. He kept walking until it got dark, a generic man in motion through the streets of his generic city. Finding himself outside an anonymous business hotel in Midtown, he checked in. He rode the elevator to his floor, slotted the keycard into the holder by the door, and when the lights clicked on, switched them off again. Unusually for New York, the window opened. He lay down on the bed in the twilight, listening to the traffic noise filtering up from the street. There was nothing to remind him of his own life. It was just the sound of a city, any city; an ant colony in which he was an ant who’d followed a pheromone trail to this place in which he was programmed to rest. He slept better than he had for weeks.

He took the room for a second night, then a third. On the fourth morning he was sitting in the chair by the window, watching the workers in the office building on the other side of the street. The office workers sat at their desks and stared at their screens. They moved through the space carrying files and sheets of paper. Rarely did they speak to one another. It wasn’t clear what they were doing. He liked that; it was soothing to watch them work at their abstract task, to feel that they would carry on for as long as he cared to watch them, until they were claimed by death, downsizing, or simple entropy. Dimly he realized his phone was ringing. He thought about answering it, decided not to, then, prompted by some obscure sense of duty, picked up. At first, he didn’t understand what the voice was telling him. Who are you? … From where? … I don’t — oh, yes … Yes? … What? Are you sure?

It was the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s office. Raj had been found. Alive.

He tried to process the information. His son was safe. A little dehydrated, but apart from that … No, they couldn’t say right now where he’d been. Out in the desert. On military land. Yes, he’d understood correctly. No, they didn’t know why. Of course, he heard himself say. I’ll leave now. I don’t know how long. Soon as possible. I’ll let you know when I have an exact time. He ended the call and phoned Lisa. She sobbed incoherently. Thank God, she kept saying. Thank God, who has answered my prayers.

He checked out of the hotel and took a taxi to JFK. As they went into the Midtown Tunnel he was gripped by a sudden powerful anxiety. He’d misunderstood. This was just wish fulfillment; it couldn’t be real. As soon as he could get a signal again, he phoned the sheriff’s office. In the background he could hear what sounded like a party. “You’ll have to speak up, Mr. Matharu,” said the deputy sheriff, in the tone of a man whose back had lately been slapped a lot. “We got a bunch of folks here. Everyone’s come in to celebrate.”

“So you found him.”

“Yes, sir, we did.”

“And he’s alive?”

“Like I said. Safe and sound. He’s a tough little guy, your son.”

“I know you told me already, but — could you say it again? Just go through what happened?”

The sheriff repeated the details. Raj had been found on a Marine base in the middle of an exercise. No one could work out how he’d got there. He was ten miles from the nearest public road. The kidnapper must have dumped him, though why he chose that spot and how he got a car there were complete mysteries. The Marine Corps perimeter security was considered state-of-the-art. Heat sensors, motion sensors, aerial surveillance: the whole nine yards.

At JFK he bought a ticket for Las Vegas. At the gate he paced up and down, unable to sit still. The ground staff hand-searched him twice, suspicious that he was traveling without luggage. The flight seemed interminable. Around him people read or watched movies. He sat and listened to the rumble of the engine, willing the pilot to fly faster. A police driver was waiting for him at McCarran, a young man with a wispy mustache and a misspelled sign. They drove down I-15, the evening sunlight turning the desert a dazzling orange-gold. He phoned Lisa to find out the news.

“Are you there?”

She was sobbing. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Is he OK?”

“He’s back, Jaz. He’s really back.”

They drove on. The gold land was triumphant, a revelation of glory.

The media were waiting outside the office, the familiar mob scene — reporters taking calls in the parking lot, television lights on ten-foot stands. When he got out of the car they surged forward with mikes and cameras, calling out his name. “How does it feel, Jaz? How does it feel?” The driver hustled him through the doors and into the quiet of the lobby.

His hand was shaken by smiling uniformed men, who ushered him into some kind of conference room. A long table, plastic-backed chairs, fading public-information posters on the walls and, at the far end, Raj, sitting on Lisa’s lap. As Jaz came into the room, the little boy looked up and smiled. Together they looked like some religious image, Yashoda and Krishna, Madonna and child. Jaz fell on his knees and embraced them both. He felt his son’s hot damp breath on his cheek, smelled his hair, the soft skin of his face. He was real. It was actually happening. He exhaled and the air came out of him in a long stream, like a balloon deflating. Lisa’s hand rubbed a soothing circle on his back as he cried.

Two days later, when they boarded a plane for New York, the other passengers applauded, peering into the aisles to get a glimpse of them. For the next week the storm of publicity was even more intense than when Raj disappeared. The Matharu family was now a great American story of triumph over tragedy. They were inspirational. Everyone wanted to get close to them, to warm their hearts over the sentimental fire. Though they were offered huge amounts of money to tell their story, they declined every interview. “All I want,” said Lisa to a particularly pushy reporter who’d followed her into the women’s bathroom at JFK, “is for all the people who wrote such lies about us to have the decency to apologize.” Of course none of them did.

For a while, denied access to the central characters, the media made do with the supporting players. They made much out of the young Iraqi girl who’d found Raj. She was interviewed on evening talk shows. Everyone found her delightful. She was generally agreed to be the right kind of immigrant, a credit to America. More than one commentator quoted Emma Lazarus on the poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free; an anonymous benefactor even offered to pay her college tuition. The British rock star Nicky Capaldi made a mumbling appearance on the BBC, sporting a mountain-man beard and singing an incoherent song called “the boy on the burning sands.” He “identified with Raj,” he told the interviewer. “In a lot of ways, the boy on the sands is me.”

After a man claiming to be a film producer called his cell, asking whether he could buy the family’s life rights for a film, Jaz switched off his phone. He no longer felt the need to follow what the world was saying. He wanted to be private again. One by one, their friends phoned to congratulate them. There were some awkward conversations, as people who’d not spoken to them in months, and who’d obviously thought the worst, tried to establish the fiction that they’d been loyal and supportive all along. The only person Jaz was really happy to hear from was Amy. He and Lisa Skyped with her, holding up Raj to the webcam so she could see his face. She cried and reached out toward the screen, as if for a moment she thought she’d be able to touch him.

They didn’t go out much, preferring to stay at home, ordering in food and watching the maple outside the front window shed its leaves. Sometimes they’d take walks in Prospect Park, the three of them hand in hand, bundled up against the wind, sunk in a silence that was both companionable and eerie, as if a spell had been cast and sound had been snatched away. Sometimes Jaz would try to start a conversation, pointing out familiar things as if they were exotic and new, but he kept coming back to the conclusion that there was nothing to talk about, that somehow the months of pain and separation had exhausted words. Frequently he or Lisa would begin to cry. It would break out without warning. He’d be watching her fold laundry, red-eyed, then turn back to his book, only to find its pages were damp to the touch.

The wider world moved on from their strange little story. There was a presidential election to think about, and their neighbors were imagining change they could believe in, canvassing and putting up posters. For a while, their lives acquired a thin membrane of normality, like a scab. Then another jolt of weirdness tore it back open. Jaz had been watching the financial crisis as if through the wrong end of a telescope; events that a few months previously would have dominated his life — the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the plummeting Dow — seemed to be taking place in an alternate reality, unconnected to his. He didn’t go online to check his own portfolio, though he knew it must be taking a huge hit. Let it all go to hell, he thought. All those giant abstractions, the gambles on thin air. Here were the falling leaves, the smell of his son’s skin. With his severance package, he wouldn’t need to look for work for at least a year — longer if the family lived frugally. He wondered whether the Walter model had predicted the chaos. If Cy and Fenton were still making money in the midst of the carnage, they’d be hailed as heroes. Fenton’s ego would be completely out of control.

It didn’t quite work out like that. A former colleague phoned to tell him that Fenton’s firm had gone under. Upstairs in the spare room, surrounded by boxes of junk to take to the Salvation Army, he listened as the man, who now worked for one of the ratings agencies, told him how things stood. No one from Fenton’s office was answering calls. According to rumor, the Walter fund had been leveraged to an unprecedented degree, borrowing to take long positions on the mortgage market. When the crash came and their line of credit dried up, the business unraveled.

In the following days, Jaz was called by lawyers and administrators, hopeful he’d help them sort out the mess. Politely, he declined to get involved, even when he heard that Cy Bachman had disappeared. The police were interested. He’d taken a case of disks and documents with him. There was some question of criminal prosecution.

A thought occurred to him, which he tried his best to suppress. What if Walter had precipitated the crash — or, if not precipitated, then nudged it along, influenced it in some way? He dismissed the idea. The problems in the mortgage market were vast, systemic. They had nothing to do with Bachman’s model. But, though he knew it was irrational, the thought kept nagging at him. Had Bachman gone live with his second, high-speed version of Walter? In Bachman’s company, Jaz had glimpsed something mystical and frightening. He remembered Cy’s expression as they peered into the display cases at the Neue Galerie. He’d seemed like a man drunk with his own power. What temptations had Walter put in his path? Why had he chosen to run away?

For a few days, the press took up the story, reporting sightings of the “fugitive financier” in various global business hubs. Then the election took over again, its frenzied culture-war tribalism leaving no room for anything else in the national consciousness. Barack Obama was elected without the Matharu family’s presence — Jaz and Lisa were too nervous to stand in line at the local polling station, not wanting to be recognized and harassed — but they mailed in ballots and gave money and stayed up late to watch the images of celebration. When they switched off the TV and went to bed they could hear car horns and whistles in the street. Jaz went to check on Raj. To his surprise the little boy was awake, and standing up by the window. He ruffled his hair.

“It’s loud, isn’t it?”

Raj looked up at him. “Beep-beep!” he said.

Jaz couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.

“Raj? That’s right! The cars! They go beep-beep!”

He swept his son into his arms and rushed back into the bedroom, gasping and sobbing like someone who’d just been pulled out of a river. It took Lisa several minutes to understand what had happened.

“He spoke! Raj spoke! He could hear all the car horns. He said ‘beep-beep.’ ”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“I knew it! I knew something was changing. The other day — he said something the other day when we were in the park. Some guy was walking this enormous Great Dane and he said ‘doggie.’ It wasn’t very clear, but I’m sure that’s what he was saying. It wasn’t just humming or babbling.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“You didn’t think I’d want to know?”

“I said I wasn’t sure. And, to be honest, Jaz, I didn’t think you’d believe me. I didn’t want you telling me it wasn’t true. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? It doesn’t matter.”

They went to bed half angry at each other. The next day, as they ate a silent breakfast, Raj pointed at the maple outside the window. “Tree,” he said. And again. “Tree.” That morning he repeated his word dozens of times, making it into a song, rising and falling, stretching the vowel out like a siren. As the days passed he added other words, giving names to things in the kitchen, out on the street.

beep-beep

tree

juice

birdy

carrot

night-night

They took him to see a pediatrician, who confirmed that he’d made an “unusual leap forward.” She encouraged them to hold conversations with him and said she had “high hopes” for the future. It might be that Raj’s condition was less serious than they’d previously thought. If he carried on progressing, they might be able to “revise their expectations upward.” Lisa was so happy that she danced down Park Avenue, twirling and skipping like a musical star. Jaz couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked so beautiful. He clutched Raj’s hand tightly, the sunlight glittering in his watery eyes. It was such a fine day. A beautiful day. They decided to walk for a while before hailing a cab. Somewhere in the Seventies, on a quiet, tree-lined block, they passed a church. Lisa suggested they go in.

“Why?”

“I want to say a prayer.”

He must have looked confused. She laughed.

“We’ve been blessed, Jaz. We ought to recognize it.”

“But—”

“Yes, I know it’s a church. But it’s all one, isn’t it? Many routes to the same truth.”

She took Raj’s hand and pushed open the big wooden door. It was a Catholic church, whose altar was dominated by a lurid crucifix on which a milk-white Jesus hung in spasms of eye-rolling agony. Lisa and Raj walked toward it, their footsteps echoing off the marble floor. Jaz hung back by the door, next to a table of flyers advertising canned-food drives and schemes to sponsor African children. Self-consciously he read a poster advertising an organ recital, trying to appear as if he belonged in the space. Lisa seemed to hesitate in front of Jesus, then turned to a smaller altar in a side chapel. She dropped change into a box and chose a slender taper, lighting it from one of a cluster already set before a plaster image of the Virgin Mary. Then she helped Raj kneel down and lowered herself beside him at the rail, clasping her hands together. It was strange to see her like that: fervent, histrionic. He half expected some priest to emerge from a back room and shoo her away — the defiling Jew in the house of Jesus — but nothing of the kind happened. A couple of old ladies appeared, dabbed their fingers in the font, made little genuflecting crosses at the altar, as if someone or something was there to respond.

Apple

go

Raj

Mommy

vroom-vroom

Jesus

As the weeks went past, Raj’s development seemed to gather pace. He’d always avoided eye contact, and had disliked touch, wriggling out of cuddles, whining or screaming if he was patted or handled. Now he often met his father’s gaze, looking back out of some unfathomable depth that Jaz found unnerving. He’d sprawl on the rug in the living room and make up games, lining up his toys in familiar ranks but also talking to them, addressing them by names and designations Jaz strained to catch. There was something unprecedented about this playing, a connection to the world that had never existed for him before.

The police had admitted they were making no progress in identifying Raj’s abductor, and it was obvious that their investigation was winding down. The Marine Corps had reviewed their security footage and found nothing unusual. There were no tire tracks in the vicinity where Raj had been found. It was, one of the detectives remarked, “as if the kid had materialized out of thin air.” Jaz phoned them every week or so, but there was never any news. He got the impression he was making a nuisance of himself. His son was safe — that was miracle enough. He ought to be content, to give thanks, as Lisa did. But there were too many questions to be answered. The little boy happily lining up plastic dinosaurs on the kitchen table had been through something extremely traumatic. Until his father knew what that was, there would be a blank, an unknown on the map of their family. Here be dragons.

This was the wheel that kept turning in Jaz’s mind. Raj had come back and Raj had changed. Or, rather, Raj had come back changed. There was something different about him. It wasn’t just that he’d begun to speak. Some new spirit was animating him, driving his engagement with the world. Jaz was happy about it. Of course he was — this was better than he’d dared hope for. He just wished he could understand how it had come about. Half jokingly he’d tickle his son, asking him, “What happened to you? Where did you go?” Half jokingly. Only half. The other half was steeled for some terrifying revelation.

What happened to you?

Where did you go?

Are you still my son?

One evening, Lisa asked him if he’d be happy to watch Raj while she went to a meeting.

“What kind of meeting?”

She looked embarrassed, made a vague gesture with her hand.

“It’s sort of like a book group.”

“Sort of like?”

Eventually he wheedled the truth out of her. It was a Jewish studies class. A group met weekly to read religious texts, “from a contemporary women’s perspective.”

“I know what you think,” Lisa told him. “But it’s not like that.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You know exactly what I mean. Anyway, it’s not what you’re thinking. They’re a really interesting bunch. I’ll be back around ten.”

dog

big dog

house

my house

my daddy

mine

The group became a regular part of Lisa’s life. She started going every Wednesday, cooking food and taking it with her in a covered dish. At home, she started to drop Hebrew and Yiddish words into conversation, particularly while chatting on the phone to her new friends: schlep, meshuggeneh, goy. Standing on the stairs, eavesdropping. Was he the goy? The outsider?

Then she announced she’d found a job. He hadn’t even known she was looking. She just dropped her car keys on the kitchen counter and told him the news. She was going back to publishing, as an editor for a small imprint that specialized in esoteric and mystical books.

“And you didn’t think to discuss this with me?”

“Well, I wasn’t sure I’d get it. And then when they offered it to me, I wasn’t sure I’d say yes. But then I did.”

“You said yes.”

“I said yes.”

“So who’ll look after Raj?”

“Don’t you even start that! You’re not working. You don’t seem to want to work.”

“Hang on, it’s still my money that’s supporting us.”

“I didn’t mean that. I know where the money’s coming from, and for the moment we don’t need you to get a job. I’m not criticizing, Jaz. I get it. We’ve been through a terrible time and we both need to regroup. But why shouldn’t I have this? Give me one good reason.”

“It’s just — well, it affects me. And Raj. And you just went ahead and did it?”

“Do you want me to turn it down?”

“No, but—”

“But what?”

“It’s not even like it’s a reputable publisher.”

“By reputable you mean mainstream? Oh, come on, Jaz. Why not just come straight out and give your little speech about science and testable hypotheses and all the rest of it?”

“I’m just trying to talk about Raj.”

“Well, so am I. Unlike you, I want to work. Five years, Jaz. Five years I’ve spent at home with him. Why can’t you give me this?”

“OK. It’s not like I don’t want you to have a life. I just — well, I wish you’d talked to me about it before you agreed. We’re supposed to be a family.”

Eventually they came to an arrangement. She’d work. He’d stay home with Raj, at least for six months. At the end of that time, they’d see how things stood. The unspoken variable was Raj’s condition. If he carried on improving, then all kinds of things might be possible. Daycare, school. They’d never allowed themselves to think like that before. The idea of making plans for the future was so alien that it induced a kind of panic in Jaz. Weren’t they just offering hostages to fortune? What if they opened up their horizons again, and it didn’t work out? After Lisa left for her first day in the office he sat at the kitchen counter with Raj, who was drawing a picture, a red crayon held tightly in his small fist. Raj looked up at him, aloof and self-contained. The picture on the pad was almost recognizable; some kind of aircraft, or perhaps a rocket.

that car

that house

go Daddy

go

more juice

flying

go flying

give more juice Daddy

A new routine began, the routine of walking. Twice a week, they walked to see Dr. Siddiqi, the speech therapist. She was young and attractive, her thick black hair falling over her shoulders in a shiny wave, or tied back in a loose ponytail so that stray strands fell across her face. She didn’t wear a wedding ring. Jaz would read a magazine, or watch as she worked with Raj, who seemed to like her as much as he did. She’d make up little routines and situations, asking questions, offering and receiving objects, giving praise when he successfully completed some new routine. Though he was developing a vocabulary, he had trouble with what she called the “pragmatics” of conversation. When to ask for something. When to say hello, or thank you, or sorry. After the sessions, she’d make time to talk to Jaz, describing Raj’s progress while the little boy played, or just sat rocking solemnly on a stool by their feet. Jaz felt a strong need to open up to her, to tell her secrets. He described the lack of progress in the investigation, his own suspicion that the abductor was someone who worked on the Marine base, perhaps one of the Iraqis who helped out with their strange war games. He wanted to say more. About Raj, about himself.

“I can’t imagine what you’ve all been through,” she said one day. He flushed with pleasure. From anyone else it would have been a banality.

Mummy’s book

Give Mummy’s book

Go here Daddy

Where are you Daddy

Waiting

Where are you?

One evening, while Lisa was at her study group, he found Raj standing in the living-room doorway, staring at him. There was something about the way he was watching, a self-contained intelligence that Jaz found suddenly terrifying. The question formulated itself: What are you? Not What are you doing? or What are you thinking? or even Who are you? What are you? What are you if you’re not my son? He poured himself a drink, told himself to get a grip, then spent the rest of the evening trying not to be in the same room as the boy, half hiding in the study but keeping the door open in case there was an emergency. When he heard Lisa’s key in the door, he almost rushed to be by her side. She scooped up Raj and cuddled him, luxuriating in the touch that she’d never been allowed before. She seemed to sense nothing out of the ordinary.

Later, as they got ready for bed, he tried to speak to her.

“Do you think it’s normal, how Raj is behaving?”

“More normal than he’s ever been before.”

“I mean — I don’t know what I mean.”

“You think he’s slipping back?”

“No, not at all. It’s just — I can’t help feeling something’s off about him.”

“Of course there is.”

“Not that.”

“Something …”

He couldn’t find the words. Lisa looked at him quizzically. Then she came and hugged him.

“I know, Jaz. I think we just have to trust in — you know. Just trust.”

“Do you ever think maybe it’s not him?”

“What do you mean?”

“That it’s not Raj.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. I’m just tired.”

He realized that if he pushed it, he’d begin to scare her. He was scaring himself. The thoughts he was having weren’t normal. They weren’t appropriate. A voice in his head was whispering, softly, insistently—This is not my child, this is not my child, this is not my child …

So he went for walks, pushing Raj in front of him, willing the voice to shut up and leave him alone. Lisa was thriving. The house was littered with manuscripts and proofs of books with words in the titles like golden and pathway and revelation and light. She was talking openly about enrolling Raj in regular school. “He’ll be ready soon, I think,” she said. “He’s actually quite gifted.” One day Jaz found a stack of papers on the kitchen counter, details of expensive specialized IQ tests — the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales. He asked why she had them.

“I think,” she said, “we have to prepare our minds for the realization that the upside may be just as extreme as the down.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Our son is very special. He’s not an ordinary child.”

“A few months ago, he wasn’t even talking.”

“Jaz, come on. Can’t you see it?”

“See what?”

“Wow, you’re really a prisoner of your own negativity.”

“I’m just saying—”

“I know what you’re saying and I wish you’d stop. I can’t be around this energy. It’s draining, Jaz. It really is.”

The next morning his old assistant phoned with the news that Cy Bachman had been found dead. Walkers had discovered his body on a mountainside in the Pyrenees, an apparent suicide. Lisa phoned Ellis, who sounded, she said, absolutely distraught. They talked for a long time, while Jaz hovered in the background. According to Ellis, the failure of the Walter model had been a personal disaster for Bachman. He’d left without telling Ellis where he was going, though the site of his death, near the Spanish border town of Portbou, hadn’t come as a surprise.

Feeling empty, Jaz took Raj to see Dr. Siddiqi. Instead of letting the session start as normal, he told her he needed to talk. She settled herself in a chair opposite him.

“What can I do for you?”

“I know I should be happy about what’s happening. What’s happening with Raj, I mean. But I’m — I have a lot of questions. There’s so much we don’t know. To be honest, I’m scared.”

“Scared?”

He stared down at the carpet, suddenly ashamed by what he’d just admitted. Guiltily he glanced over at Raj, who was sprawled on the floor, surrounded by plastic farm animals. The boy was watching him intently.

Dr. Siddiqi waited patiently for him to continue. He could feel Raj’s eyes on him, a physical sensation, two little fingers pressed into the back of his neck.

“Look, Ayesha. I know this is strange, but I can’t really talk with him in the room. Is there anyone who can look after him for a few minutes?”

“Are you OK?”

“No, not really.”

She called a junior colleague, who took Raj into another office.

“So, Jaz, what is it? Talk to me.”

“This is insane. I know. And I know I shouldn’t be feeling like this. There’s probably a name for it. A syndrome. I’ve been under a lot of pressure. We all have. As a family. What I mean to say, is, I realize it’s probably something wrong with me, not him. But ever since he came back there’s been something different about Raj. He’s not the same kid.”

“It is unusual that he’s made all this progress, just after having gone through such a trauma.”

“No, I mean he’s not the same kid. It’s not Raj.”

“I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

“It looks like him, smells like him. It has his body. But it’s not him.”

“You’re saying you don’t believe this is your son?”

“He scares me.”

“Why? He’s a little boy.”

“He looks like a little boy. For all I know, maybe he is a little boy. I don’t know what he is. But he’s not Raj.”

She looked at him carefully.

“Jaz, have you been sleeping OK?”

“Sure. Well, not brilliantly. But not too badly. Why?”

“Anything else unusual?”

“Like what?”

“Anxiety?”

“Yes.”

“Any other disturbing thoughts? About your wife, for example?”

“No.”

“Have you been — hearing anything? Anything unusual? A voice, for example. Have you felt that people are talking about you behind your back?”

“A voice?”

“Yes. For example, a voice telling you things about Raj.”

“No. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“No. I mean no.”

“That’s good. But you say sometimes you feel afraid of Raj. Have you ever had the impulse to — defend yourself against him?”

“You mean hurt him?”

“Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean.”

“You think I’m going insane?”

“I’m not saying that. But you’ve come in here and declared to me that you think your son isn’t your son.”

“You think I’m a danger to him?”

He stood up.

“Please sit down, Mr. Matharu. Jaz. Please.”

She was holding her hands out. Suddenly he wanted to embrace her, to take handfuls of her long hair and pull her close to him, to kiss her full, blue-black lips, to push his tongue between her teeth. He took a pace forward, checked himself.

“I’m scared,” he said again.

“Jaz, I know you’ve been under incredible pressure. I must ask you again, do you ever have violent feelings toward your son?”

“No.”

“That’s good. That’s very good.”

“I just want to — know. Someone had him. Do you think it’s possible they — I mean — do you think he could have been replaced?”

“Replaced?”

“By a double. Something that’s like him in every way, except it’s not him.”

She frowned, and placed her hands back in her lap, a neat, deliberate gesture, the gesture of a woman composing herself, putting up her guard. He imagined her naked, a sheen of sweat across her back, her breasts. He felt wild, disturbed. If only she’d come to him. If only she’d touch him, it might be OK.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”