Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

The Disappeared

WHAT HE FIRST NOTICED about Detroit and therefore America was the smell. Almost as soon as he walked off the plane, he caught it: an acrid odor of wood ash. The smell seemed to go through his nostrils and take up residence in his head. In Sweden, his own country, he associated this smell with autumn, and the first family fires of winter, the smoke chuffing out of chimneys and settling familiarly over the neighborhood. But here it was midsummer, and he couldn’t see anything burning.

On the way in from the airport, with the windows of the cab open and hot stony summer air blowing over his face, he asked the driver about it.

“You’re smelling Detroit,” the driver said.

Anders, who spoke very precise school English, thought that perhaps he hadn’t made himself understood. “No,” he said. “I am sorry. I mean the burning smell. What is it?”

The cabdriver glanced in the rearview mirror. He was wearing a knitted beret, and his dreadlocks flapped in the breeze. “Where you from?”

“Sweden.”

The driver nodded to himself. “Explains why,” he said. The cab took a sharp right turn on the freeway and entered the Detroit city limits. The driver gestured with his left hand toward an electronic signboard, a small windowless factory at its base, and a clustered group of cramped clapboard houses nearby. When he gestured, the cab wobbled on the freeway. “Fires here most all the time,” he said. “Day in and day out. You get so you don’t notice. Or maybe you get so you do notice and you like it.”

“I don’t see any fires,” Anders said.

“That’s right.”

Feeling that he was missing the point somehow, Anders decided to change the subject. “I see a saxophone and a baseball bat next to you,” he said, in his best English. “Do you like to play baseball?”

“Not in this cab, I don’t,” the driver said quietly. “It’s no game then, you understand?”

The young man sat back, feeling that he had been defeated by the American idiom in his first native encounter with it. An engineer, he was in Detroit to discuss his work in metal alloys that resist oxidation. The company that had invited him had suggested that he might agree to become a consultant on an exclusive contract, for what seemed to him an enormous, American-sized fee. But the money meant little to him. It was America he was curious about, attracted by, especially its colorful disorderliness.

Disorder, of which there was very little in Sweden, seemed sexy to him: the disorder of a disheveled woman who has rushed down two flights of stairs to offer a last long kiss. Anders was single, and before he left the country he hoped to sleep with an American woman in an American bed. It was his ambition. He wondered if the experience would have any distinction. He had an idea that he might be able to go home and tell one or two friends about it.

At the hotel, he was met by a representative of the automobile company, a gray-haired man with thick glasses who, to Anders’s surprise, spoke rather good Swedish. Later that afternoon, and for the next two days, he was taken down silent carpeted hallways and shown into plush windowless rooms with recessed lighting. He showed them his slides and metal samples, cited chemical formulas, and made cost projections; he looked at the faces looking back at him. They were interested, friendly, but oddly blank, like faces he had seen in the military. He saw corridor after corridor. The building seemed more expressive than the people in it. The lighting was both bright and diffuse, and a low-frequency hum of power and secrecy seemed to flow out from the ventilators. Everyone complimented him on his English. A tall woman in a tailored suit, flashing him a secretive smile, asked him if he intended to stay in this country for long. Anders smiled, said that his plans on that particular point were open, and managed to work the name of his hotel into his conversation.

At the end of the third day, the division head once again shook Anders’s hand in the foyer of the hotel lobby and said they’d be getting in touch with him very soon. Finally free, Anders stepped outside the hotel and sniffed the air. All the rooms he had been in since he had arrived had had no windows, or windows so blocked by drapes or blinds that he couldn’t see out.

He felt restless and excited, with three days free for sightseeing in a wide-open American city, not quite in the Wild West but close enough to it to suit him. He returned to his room and changed into a pair of jeans, a light cotton shirt, and a pair of running shoes. In the mirror, he thought he looked relaxed and handsome. His vanity amused him, but he felt lucky to look the way he did. Back out on the sidewalk, he asked the doorman which direction he would recommend for a walk.

The doorman, who had curly gray hair and sagging pouches under his eyes, removed his cap and rubbed his forehead. He did not look back at Anders. “You want my recommendation? Don’t walk anywhere. I would not recommend a walk. Sit in the bar and watch the soaps.” The doorman stared at a fire hydrant as he spoke.

“What about running?”

The doorman suddenly glanced at Anders, sizing him up. “It’s a chance. You might be okay. But to be safe, stay inside. There’s movies on the cable, you want them.”

“Is there a park here?”

“Sure, there’s parks. There’s always parks. There’s Belle Isle. You could go there. People do. I don’t recommend it. Still and all you might enjoy it if you run fast enough. What’re you planning to do?”

Anders shrugged. “Relax. See your city.”

“You’re seeing it,” the doorman said. “Ain’t nobody relaxed, seeing this place. Buy some postcards, you want sights. This place ain’t built for tourists and amateurs.”

Anders thought that perhaps he had misunderstood again and took a cab out to Belle Isle; as soon as he had entered the park, he saw a large municipal fountain and asked the cabbie to drop him off in front of it. On its rim, children were shouting and dangling their legs in the water. The ornamentation of the stone lions was both solemn and whimsical and reminded him of the forced humor of Danish public sculpture. Behind the fountain he saw families grouped in evening picnics on the grass, and many citizens, of various apparent ethnic types, running, bicycling, and walking. Anders liked the way Americans walked, a sort of busyness in their step, as if, having no particular goal, they still had an unconscious urgency to get somewhere, to seem purposeful.

He began to jog, and found himself passing a yacht club of some sort, and then a small zoo, and more landscaped areas where solitaries and couples sat on the grass listening to the evening baseball game on their radios. Other couples were stretched out by themselves, self-absorbed. The light had a bluish-gold quality. It looked like almost any city park to him, placid and decorative, a bit hushed.

He found his way to an old building with a concession stand inside. After admiring the building’s fake Corinthian architecture, he bought a hot dog and a cola. Thinking himself disguised as a native — America was full of foreigners anyway — he walked to the west windows of the dining area to check on the unattached women. He wanted to praise, to an American, this evening, and this park.

There were several couples on this side of the room, and what seemed to be several unattached men and women standing near the open window and listening to their various earphones. One of these women, with her hair partially pinned up, was sipping a lemonade. She had just the right faraway look. Anders thought he recognized this look. It meant that she was in a kind of suspension, between engagements.

He put himself in her line of sight and said, in his heaviest accent, “A nice evening!”

“What?” She removed the earphones and looked at him. “What did you say?”

“I said the evening was beautiful.” He tried to sound as foreign as he could, the way Germans in Sweden did. “I am a visitor here,” he added quickly, “and not familiar with any of this.” He motioned his arm to indicate the park.

“Not familiar?” she asked. “Not familiar with what?”

“Well, with this park. With the sky here. The people.”

“Parks are the same everywhere,” the woman said, leaning her hip against the wall. She looked at him with a vague interest. “The sky is the same. Only the people are different.”

“Yes? How?”

“Where are you from?”

He explained, and she looked out the window toward the Canadian side of the Detroit River, at the city of Windsor. “That’s Canada, you know,” she said, pointing a finger at the river. “They make Canadian whiskey right over there.” She pointed at some high buildings and what seemed to be a grain elevator. “I’ve never drunk the whiskey. They say it tastes of acid rain. I’ve never been to Canada. I mean, I’ve seen it, but I’ve never been there. If I can see it from here, why should I go there?”

“To be in Canada,” Anders suggested. “Another country.”

“But I’m here,” she said suddenly, turning to him and looking at him directly. Her eyes were so dark they were almost colorless. “Why should I be anywhere else? Why are you here?”

“I came to Detroit for business,” he said. “Now I’m sightseeing.”

“Sightseeing?” She laughed out loud, and Anders saw her arch her back. Her breasts seemed to flare in front of him. Her body had distinct athletic lines. “No one sightsees here. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“Yes. The doorman at the hotel. He told me not to come.”

“But you did. How did you get here?”

“I came by taxi.”

“You’re joking,” she said. Then she reached out and put her hand momentarily on his shoulder. “You took a taxi to this park? How do you expect to get back to your hotel?”

“I suppose”—he shrugged—“I will get another taxi.”

“Oh no you won’t,” she said, and Anders felt himself pleased that things were working out so well. He noticed again her pinned-up hair and its intense black. Her skin was deeply tanned or naturally dark, and he thought that she herself might be black or Hispanic, he didn’t know which, being unpracticed in making such distinctions. Outside he saw fireflies. No one had ever mentioned fireflies in Detroit. Night was coming on. He gazed up at the sky. Same stars, same moon.

“You’re here alone?” she asked. “In America? And in this city?”

“Yes,” he said. “Why not?”

“People shouldn’t be left alone in this country,” she said, leaning toward him with a kind of vehemence. “They shouldn’t have left you here. It can get kind of weird, what happens to people. Didn’t they tell you?”

He smiled and said that they hadn’t told him anything to that effect.

“Well, they should have.” She dropped her cup into a trash can, and he thought he saw the beginning of a scar, a white line, traveling up the underside of her arm toward her shoulder.

“Who do you mean?” he asked. “You said ‘they.’ Who is ‘they’?”

“Any they at all,” she said. “Your guardians.” She sighed. “All right. Come on. Follow me.” She went outside and broke into a run. For a moment he thought that she was running away from him, then realized that he was expected to run with her; it was what people did now, instead of holding hands, to get acquainted. He sprinted up next to her, and as she ran, she asked him, “Who are you?”

Being careful not to tire — she wouldn’t like it if his endurance was poor — he told her his name, his professional interests, and he patched together a narrative about his mother, father, two sisters, and his aunt Ingrid. Running past a slower couple, he told her that his aunt was eccentric and broke china by throwing it on the floor on Fridays, which she called “the devil’s day.”

“Years ago, they would have branded her a witch,” Anders said. “But she isn’t a witch. She’s just moody.”

He watched her reactions and noticed that she didn’t seem at all interested in his family, or any sort of background. “Do you run a lot?” she asked. “You look as if you’re in pretty good shape.”

He admitted that, yes, he ran, but that people in Sweden didn’t do this as much as they did in America.

“You look a little like that tennis star, that Swede,” she said. “By the way, I’m Lauren.” Still running, she held out her hand, and, still running, he shook it. “Which god do you believe in?”

“Excuse me?”

“Which god?” she asked. “Which god do you think is in control?”

“I had not thought about it.”

“You’d better,” she said. “Because one of them is.” She stopped suddenly and put her hands on her hips and walked in a small circle. She put her hand to her neck and took her pulse, timing it on her wristwatch. Then she placed her fingers on Anders’s neck and took his pulse. “One hundred fourteen,” she said. “Pretty good.” Again she walked away from him and again he found himself following her. In the growing darkness he noticed other men, standing in the parking lot, watching her, this American with pinned-up hair, dressed in a running outfit. He thought she was pretty, but maybe Americans had other standards so that here, in fact, she wasn’t pretty, and it was some kind of optical illusion.

When he caught up with her, she was unlocking the door of a blue Chevrolet rusting near the hubcaps. He gazed down at the rust with professional interest — it had the characteristic blister pattern of rust caused by salt. She slipped inside the car and reached across to unlock the passenger side, and when he got in — he hadn’t been invited to get in, but he thought it was all right — he sat down on several small plastic tape cassette cases. He picked them out from underneath him and tried to read their labels. She was taking off her shoes. Debussy, Bach, 10,000 Maniacs, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

“Where are we going?” he asked. He glanced down at her bare foot on the accelerator. She put the car into reverse. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Stop this car.” She put on the brake and turned off the ignition. “I just want to look at you,” he said.

“Okay, look.” She turned on the interior light and kept her face turned so that he was looking at her in profile. Something about her suggested a lovely disorder, a ragged brightness toward the back of her face.

“Are we going to do things?” he asked, touching her on the arm.

“Of course,” she said. “Strangers should always do things.”

She said that she would drop him off at his hotel, that he must change clothes. This was important. She would then pick him up. On the way over, he saw almost no one downtown. For some reason, it was quite empty of shoppers, strollers, or pedestrians of any kind. “I’m going to tell you some things you should know,” she said. He settled back. He was used to this kind of talk on dates: everyone, everywhere, liked to reveal intimate details. It was an international convention.

They were slowing for a red light. “God is love,” she said, downshifting, her bare left foot on the clutch. “At least I think so. It’s my hope. In the world we have left, only love matters. Do you understand? I’m one of the Last Ones. Maybe you’ve heard of us.”

“No, I have not. What do you do?”

“We do what everyone else does. We work and we go home and have dinner and go to bed. There is only one thing we do that is special.”

“What is that?” he asked.

“We don’t make plans,” she said. “No big plans at all.”

“That is not so unusual,” he said, trying to normalize what she was saying. “Many people don’t like to make—”

“It’s not liking,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with liking or not liking. It’s a faith. Look at those buildings.” She pointed toward several abandoned multistoried buildings with broken or vacant windows. “What face is moving behind all that? Something is. I live and work here. I’m not blind. Anyone can see what’s taking place here. You’re not blind, either. Our church is over on the east side, off Van Dyke Avenue. It’s not a good part of town, but we want to be near where the face is doing its work.”

“Your church?”

“The Church of the Millennium,” she said. “Where they preach the Gospel of Last Things.” They were now on the freeway, heading up toward the General Motors Building and his hotel. “Do you understand me?”

“Of course,” he said. He had heard of American cult religions but thought they were all in California. He didn’t mind her talk of religion. It was like talk of the sunset or childhood; it kept things going. “Of course I have been listening.”

“Because I won’t sleep with you unless you listen to me,” she said. “It’s the one thing I care about, that people listen. It’s so damn rare, listening I mean, that you might as well care about it. I don’t sleep with strangers too often. Almost never.” She turned to look at him. “Anders,” she said, “what do you pray to?”

He laughed. “I don’t.”

“Okay, then, what do you plan for?”

“A few things,” he said.

“Like what?”

“My dinner every night. My job. My friends.”

“You don’t let accidents happen? You should. Things reveal themselves in accidents.”

“Are there many people like you?” he asked.

“What do you think?” He looked again at her face, taken over by the darkness in the car but dimly lit by the dashboard lights and the oncoming flare of traffic. “Do you think there are many people like me?”

“Not very many,” he said. “But maybe more than there used to be.”

“Any of us in Sweden?”

“I don’t think so. It’s not a religion over there. People don’t … They didn’t tell us in Sweden about American girls who listen to Debussy and 10,000 Maniacs in their automobiles and who believe in gods and accidents.”

“They don’t say ‘girls’ here,” she told him. “They say ‘women.’ ”

She dropped him off at the hotel and said that she would pick him up in forty-five minutes. In his room, as he chose a clean shirt and a sport coat and a pair of trousers, he found himself laughing happily. He felt giddy. It was all happening so fast; he could hardly believe his luck. I am a very lucky man, he thought.

He looked out his hotel window at the streetlights. They had an amber glow, the color of gemstones. This city, this American city, was unlike any he had ever seen. A downtown area emptied of people; a river with huge ships going by silently; a park with girls who believe in the millennium. No, not girls: women. He had learned his lesson.

He wanted to open the hotel window to smell the air, but the casement frames were welded shut.

After walking down the stairs to the lobby, he stood out in front of the hotel doorway. He felt a warm breeze against his face. He told the doorman, Luis, that he had met a woman on Belle Isle who was going to pick him up in a few minutes. She was going to take him dancing. The doorman nodded, rubbing his chin with his hand. Anders said that she was friendly and wanted to show him, a foreigner, things. The doorman nodded. “Yes, I agree,” Luis said. “Dancing. Make sure that this is what you do.”

“What?”

“Dancing,” Luis said, “yes. Go dancing. You know this woman?”

“I just met her.”

“Ah,” Luis said, and stepped back to observe Anders, as if to remember his face. “Dangerous fun.” When her car appeared in front of the hotel, she was wearing a light summer dress, and when she smiled, she looked like the melancholy baby he had heard about in an American song. As they pulled away from the hotel, he looked back at Luis, who was watching them closely, and then Anders realized that Luis was reading the numbers on Lauren’s license plate. To break the mood, he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. She smelled of cigarettes and something else — soap or cut flowers.

She took him uptown to a club where a trio played soft rock and some jazz. Some of this music was slow enough to dance to, in the slow way he wanted to dance. Her hand in his felt bony and muscular; physically, she was direct and immediate. He wondered, now, looking at her face, whether she might be an American Indian, and again he was frustrated because he couldn’t tell one race in this country from another. He knew it was improper to ask. When he sat at the table, holding hands with her and sipping from his drink, he began to feel as if he had known her for a long time and was related to her in some obscure way.

Suddenly he asked her, “Why are you so interested in me?”

“Interested?” She laughed, and her long black hair, no longer pinned up, shook in quick thick waves. “Well, all right. I have an interest. I like it that you’re so foreign that you take cabs to the park. I like the way you look. You’re kind of cute. And the other thing is, your soul is so raw and new, Anders, it’s like an oyster.”

“What?” He looked at her near him at the table. Their drinks were half finished. “My soul?”

“Yeah, your soul. I can almost see it.”

“Where is it?”

She leaned forward, friendly and sexual and now slightly elegant. “You want me to show you?”

“Yes,” Anders said. “Sure.”

“It’s in two places,” she said. “One part is up here.” She released his hand and put her thumb on his forehead. “And the other part is down here.” She touched him in the middle of his stomach. “Right there. And they’re connected.”

“What are they like?” he asked, playing along.

“Yours? Raw and shiny, just like I said.”

“And what about your soul?” he asked.

She looked at him. “My soul is radioactive,” she said. “It’s like plutonium. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

He thought that this was another American idiom he hadn’t heard before, and he decided not to spoil things by asking her about it. In Sweden, people didn’t talk much about the soul, at least not in conjunction with oysters or plutonium. It was probably some local metaphor he had never heard in Sweden.

In the dark he couldn’t make out much about her building, except that it was several floors high and at least fifty years old. Her living-room window looked out distantly at the river — once upstairs, he could see the lights of another passing freighter — and through the left side of the window he could see an electrical billboard. The name of the product was made out of hundreds of small incandescent bulbs, which went on and off from left to right. One of the letters was missing.

It’s today’s CHEVR LET!

All around her living-room walls were brightly framed watercolors, almost celebratory and Matisse-like, but in vague shapes. She went down the hallway, tapped on one of the doors, and said, “I’m home.” Then she returned to the living room and kicked off her shoes. “My grandmother,” she said. “She has her own room.”

“Are these your pictures?” he asked. “Did you draw them?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t tell what they are. What are they?”

“They’re abstract. You use wet paper to get that effect. They’re abstract because God has gotten abstract. God used to have a form but now He’s dissolving into pure light. That’s what you see in those pictures. They’re pictures of the trails that God leaves behind.”

“Like the vapor trails”—he smiled—“behind jets.”

“Yes,” she said. “Like that.”

He went over to her in the dark and drew her to him and kissed her. Her breath was layered with smoke, apparently from cigarettes. Immediately he felt an unusual physical sensation inside his skin, like something heating up in a frypan.

She drew back. He heard another siren go by on the street outside. He wondered whether they should talk some more in the living room — share a few more verbal intimacies — to be really civilized about this and decided, no, it was not necessary, not when strangers make love, as they do, sometimes, in strange cities, away from home. They went into her bedroom and undressed each other. Her body, by the light of a dim bedside lamp, was as beautiful and as exotic as he had hoped it would be, darker than his own skin in the dark room, native somehow to this continent. She had the flared shoulders and hips of a dancer. She bent down and snapped off the bedside light, and as he approached her, she was lit from behind by the billboard. Her skin felt vaguely electrical to him.

They stood in the middle of her bedroom, arms around each other, swaying, and he knew, in his arousal, that something odd was about to occur: he had no words for it in either his own language or English.

They moved over and under each other, changing positions to stay in the breeze created by the window fan. They were both lively and attentive, and at first he thought it would be just the usual fun, this time with an almost anonymous American woman. He looked at her in the bed and saw her dark leg alongside his own, and he saw that same scar line running up her arm to her shoulder, where it disappeared.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“That?” She looked at it. “That was an accident that was done to me.”

Half an hour later, resting with her, his hands on her back, he felt a wave of happiness; he felt it was a wave of color traveling through his body, surging from his forehead down to his stomach. It took him over again, and then a third time, with such force that he almost sat up.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It is like … I felt a color moving through my body.”

“Oh that?” She smiled at him in the dark. “It’s your soul, Anders. That’s all. That’s all it is. Never felt it before, huh?”

“I must be very drunk,” he said.

She put her hand up into his hair. “Call it anything you want to. Didn’t you feel it before? Our souls were curled together.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “You are a crazy woman.”

“Oh yeah?” she whispered. “Is that what you think? Watch. Watch what happens now. You think this is all physical. Guess what. You’re the crazy one. Watch. Watch.”

She went to work on him, and at first it was pleasurable, but as she moved over him it became a succession of waves that had specific colorations, even when he turned her and thought he was taking charge. Soon he felt some substance, some glossy blue possession entangled in the air above him.

“I bet you’re going to say that you’re imagining all this,” she said, her hand skidding across him.

“Who are you?” he said. “Who in the world are you?”

“I warned you,” she whispered, her mouth directly over his ear. “I warned you. You people with your things, your rusty things, you suffer so bad when you come into where we live. Did they tell you we were all soulless here? Did they say that?”

He put his hands on her. “This is not love, but it—”

“Of course not,” she said. “It’s something else. Do you know the word? Do you know the word for something that opens your soul at once? Like that?” She snapped her fingers on the pillow. Her tongue was touching his ear. “Do you?” The words were almost inaudible.

“No.”

“Addiction.” She waited. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

In the middle of the night he rose up and went to the window. He felt like a stump, amputated from the physical body of the woman. At the window he looked down, to the right of the billboard, and saw another apartment building with heavy decorations with human forms near the roof’s edge, and on the third floor he saw a man at the window, as naked as he himself was but almost completely in shadow, gazing out at the street. There were so far away from each other that being unclothed didn’t matter. It was vague and small and impersonal.

“Do you always stand at the window without clothes on?” she asked, from the bed.

“Not in Sweden,” he said. He turned around. “This is odd,” he said. “At night no one walks out on the streets. But there, over on that block, there’s a man like me, at the window, and he is looking out, too. Do people stand everywhere at the windows here?”

“Come to bed.”

“When I was in the army, the Swedish army,” he said, still looking out, “they taught us to think that we could decide to do anything. They talked about the will. Your word ‘willpower.’ All Sweden believes this — choice, will, willpower. Maybe not so much now. I wonder if they talk about it here.”

“You’re funny,” she said. She had moved up from behind him and embraced him.

In the morning he watched her as she dressed. His eyes hurt from sleeplessness. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m already late.” She was putting on a light blue skirt. As she did, she smiled. “You’re a lovely lover,” she said. “I like your body very much.”

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“We? There is no ‘we,’ Anders. There’s you and then there’s me. We’re not a couple. I’m going to work. You’re going back to your country soon. What are you planning to do?”

“May I stay here?”

“For an hour,” she said, “and then you should go back to your hotel. I don’t think you should stay. You don’t live here.”

“May I take you to dinner tonight?” he asked, trying not to watch her as he watched her. “What can we do tonight?”

“There’s that ‘we’ again. Well, maybe. You can teach me a few words of Swedish. Why don’t you hang around at your hotel and maybe I’ll come by around six and get you, but don’t call me if I don’t come by, because if I don’t, I don’t.”

“I can’t call you,” he said. “I don’t know your last name.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “Well, listen. I’ll probably come at six.” She looked at him lying in the bed. “I don’t believe this,” she said.

“What?”

“You think you’re in love, don’t you?”

“No,” he said. “Not exactly.” He waited. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“I get the point,” she said. “Well, you’d better get used to it. Welcome to our town. We’re not always good at love but we are good at that.” She bent to kiss him and then was gone. Happiness and agony simultaneously reached down and pressed against his chest. They, too, were like colors, but when you mixed the two together, you got something greenish-pink, excruciating.

He stood up, put on his trousers, and began looking into her dresser drawers. He expected to find trinkets and whatnot, but all she had were folded clothes, and, in the corner of the top drawer, a small turquoise heart for a charm bracelet. He put it into his pocket.

In the bathroom, he examined the labels on her medicines and facial creams before washing his face. He wanted evidence but didn’t know for what. He looked, to himself, like a slightly different version of what he had once been. In the mirror his face had a puffy look and a passive expression, as if he had been assaulted during the night.

After he had dressed and entered the living room, he saw Lauren’s grandmother sitting at a small dining-room table. She was eating a piece of toast and looking out of the window toward the river. The apartment, in daylight, had an aggressively scrubbed and mopped look. On the kitchen counter a small black-and-white television was blaring, but the old woman wasn’t watching it. Her black hair was streaked with gray, and she wore a ragged pink bathrobe decorated with pictures of orchids. She was very frail. Her skin was as dark as her granddaughter’s. Looking at her, Anders was once again unable to guess what race she was. She might be Arabic, or a Native American, or Hispanic, or black. Because he couldn’t tell, he didn’t care.

Without even looking at him, she motioned at him to sit down.

“Want anything?” she asked. She had a high, distant voice, as if it had come into the room over wires. “There are bananas over there.” She made no gesture. “And grapefruit, I think, in the refrigerator.”

“That’s all right.” He sat down on the other side of the table and folded his hands together, studying his fingers. The sound of traffic came up from the street outside.

“You’re from somewhere,” she said. “Scandinavia?”

“Yes,” he said. “How can you tell?” Talking had become a terrible effort.

“Vowels,” she said. “You sound like one of those Finns up north of here. When will you go back? To your country?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps a few days. Perhaps not. My name is Anders.” He held out his hand.

“Nice to meet you.” She touched but did not shake his hand. “Why don’t you know when you’re going back?” She turned to look at him at last. It was a face on which curiosity still registered. She observed him as if he were an example of a certain kind of human being in whom she still had an interest.

“I don’t know … I am not sure. Last night, I …”

“You don’t finish your sentences,” the old woman said.

“I am trying to. I don’t want to leave your granddaughter,” he said. “She is”—he tried to think of the right adjective—“amazing to me.”

“Yes, she is.” The old woman peered at him. “You don’t think you’re in love, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, don’t be. She won’t ever be married, so there’s no point in being in love with her. There’s no point in being married here. I see them, you know.”

“Who?”

“All the young men. Well, there aren’t many. A few. Every so often. They come and sleep here with her and then in the morning they come out for breakfast with me and then they go away. We sit and talk. They’re usually very pleasant. Men are, in the morning. They should be. She’s a beautiful girl.”

“Yes, she is.”

“But there’s no future in her, you know,” the old woman said. “Sure you don’t want a grapefruit? You should eat something.”

“No, thank you. What do you mean, ‘no future’?”

“Well, the young men usually understand that.” The old woman looked at the television set, scowled, and shifted her eyes to the window. She rubbed her hands together. “You can’t invest in her. You can’t do that at all. She won’t let you. I know. I know how she thinks.”

“We have women like that in my country,” Anders said. “They are—”

“Oh no you don’t,” the old woman said. “Sooner or later they want to get married, don’t they?”

“I suppose most of them.”

She glanced out the window toward the Detroit River and the city of Windsor on the opposite shore. Just when he thought that she had forgotten all about him, he felt her hand, dry as a winter leaf, taking hold of his own. Another siren went by outside. He felt a weight descending in his stomach. The touch of the old woman’s hand made him feel worse than before, and he stood up quickly, looking around the room as if there were some object nearby he had to pick up and take away immediately. Her hand dropped away from his.

“No plans,” she said. “Didn’t she tell you?” the old woman asked. “It’s what she believes.” She shrugged. “It makes her happy.”

“I am not sure I understand.”

The old woman lifted her right hand and made a dismissive wave in his direction. She pursed her mouth; he knew she had stopped speaking to him. He called a cab, and in half an hour he was back in his hotel room. In the shower he realized that he had forgotten to write down her address or phone number.

He felt itchy: he went out running, returned to his room, and took another shower. He did thirty push-ups and jogged in place. He groaned and shouted, knowing that no one would hear. How would he explain this to anyone? He was feeling passionate puzzlement. He went down to the hotel’s dining room for lunch and ordered Dover sole and white wine but found himself unable to eat much of anything. He stared at his plate and at the other men and women consuming their meals calmly, and he was suddenly filled with wonder at ordinary life.

He couldn’t stand to be by himself, and after lunch he had the doorman hail a cab. He gave the cabdriver a fifty and asked him to drive him around the city until all the money was used up.

“You want to see the nice parts?” the cabbie asked.

“No.”

“What is it you want to see then?”

“The city.”

“You tryin’ to score, man? That it?”

Anders didn’t know what he meant. He was certain that no sport was intended. He decided to play it safe. “No,” he said.

The cabdriver shook his head and whistled. They drove east and then south; Anders watched the water-ball compass stuck to the front window. Along Jefferson Avenue they went past the shells of apartment buildings, and then, heading north, they passed block after block of vacated or boarded-up properties. One old building with Doric columns was draped with a banner.

PROGRESS! THE OLD MUST MAKE WAY

FOR THE NEW

Acme Wrecking Company

The banner was worn and tattered. Anders noticed broken beer bottles, sharp brown glass, on sidewalks and vacant lots, and the glass, in the sun, seemed perversely beautiful. Men were sleeping on sidewalks and in front stairwells; one man, wearing a hat, urinated against the corner of a burned-out building. He saw other men — there were very few women out here in the light of day — in groups gazing at him with cold slow deadly expressions. In his state of mind, he understood it all; he identified with it. All of it, the ruins and the remnants, made perfect sense.

At six o’clock she picked him up and took him to a Greek restaurant. All the way over, he watched her. He examined her with the puzzled curiosity of someone who wants to know how another person who looks rather attractive but also rather ordinary could have such power. Her physical features didn’t explain anything.

“Did you miss me today?” she asked, half jokingly.

“Yes,” he said. He started to say more but didn’t know how to begin. “It was hard to breathe,” he said at last.

“I know,” she said. “It’s the air.”

“No, it isn’t. Not the air.”

“Well, what then?”

He looked at her.

“Oh, come on, Anders. We’re just two blind people who staggered into each other and we’re about to stagger off in different directions. That’s all.”

Sentences struggled in his mind, then vanished before he could say them. He watched the pavement pass underneath the car.

In the restaurant, a crowded and lively place smelling of beer and roasted meat and cigars, they sat in a booth and ordered an antipasto plate. He leaned over and took her hands. “Tell me, please, who and what you are.”

She seemed surprised that he had asked. “I’ve explained,” she said. She waited, then started up again. “When I was younger I had an idea that I wanted to be a dancer. I had to give that up. My timing was off.” She smiled. “Onstage, I looked like a memory of what had already happened. The other girls would do something and then I’d do it. I come in late on a lot of things. That’s good for me. I’ve told you where I work. I live with my grandmother. I go with her into the parks in the fall and we watch for birds. And you know what else I believe.” He gazed at the gold hoops of her earrings. “What else do you want to know?”

“I feel happy and terrible,” he said. “Is it you? Did you do this?”

“I guess I did,” she said, smiling faintly. “Tell me some words in Swedish.”

“Which ones?”

“House.”

“Hus.”

“Pain.”

“Smärta.”

She leaned back. “Face.”

“Ansikte.”

“Light.”

“Ljus.”

“Never.”

“Aldrig.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t like the sound of those words at all. They’re too cold. They’re cold-weather words.”

“Cold? Try another one.”

“Soul.”

“Själ.”

“No, I don’t like it.” She raised her hand to the top of his head, grabbed a bit of his hair, and laughed. “Too bad.”

“Do you do this to everyone?” he asked. “I feel such confusion.”

He saw her stiffen. “You want to know too much. You’re too messed up. Too messed up with plans. You and your rust. All that isn’t important. Not here. We don’t do all that explaining. I’ve told you everything about me. We’re just supposed to be enjoying ourselves. Nobody has to explain. That’s freedom, Anders. Never telling why.” She leaned over toward him so that her shoulders touched his, and with a sense of shock and desperation, he felt himself becoming aroused. She kissed him, and her lips tasted slightly of garlic. “Just say hi to the New World,” she said.

“You feel like a drug to me,” he said. “You feel experimental.”

“We don’t use that word that way,” she said. Then she said, “Oh,” as if she had understood something, or remembered another engagement. “Okay. I’ll explain all this in a minute. Excuse me.” She rose and disappeared behind a corner of the restaurant, and Anders looked out the window at a Catholic church the color of sandstone, on whose front steps a group of boys sat, eating Popsicles. One of the boys got up and began to ask passersby for money; this went on until a policeman came and sent the boys away. Anders looked at his watch. Ten minutes had gone by since she had left. He looked up. He knew without thinking about it that she wasn’t coming back.

He put a ten-dollar bill on the table and left the restaurant, jogging into the parking structure where she had left the car. Although he wasn’t particularly surprised to see that it wasn’t there, he sat down on the concrete and felt the floor of the structure shaking. He ran his hands through his hair, where she had grabbed at it. He waited as long as he could stand to do so, then returned to the hotel.

Luis was back on duty. Anders told him what had happened.

“Ah,” Luis said. “She is disappeared.”

“Yes. Do you think I should call the police?”

“No,” Luis said. “I do not think so. They have too many disappeared already.”

“Too many disappeared?”

“Yes. All over this city. Many many disappeared. For how many times do you take this lady out?”

“Once. No, twice.”

“And this time is the time she leave you?”

Anders nodded.

“I have done that,” Luis said. “When I get sick of a woman, I, too, have disappeared. Maybe,” he said suddenly, “she will reappear. Sometimes they do.”

“I don’t think she will.” He sat down on the sidewalk in front of the hotel and cupped his chin in his hands.

“No, no,” Luis said. “You cannot do that in front of the hotel. This looks very bad. Please stand up.” He felt Luis reaching around his shoulders and pulling him to his feet. “What you are acting is impossible after one night,” Luis said. “Be like everyone else. Have another night.” He took off his doorman’s cap and combed his hair with precision. “Many men and women also disappear from each other. It is one thing to do. You had a good time?”

Anders nodded.

“Have another good time,” Luis suggested, “with someone else. Beer, pizza, go to bed. Women who have not disappeared will talk to you, I am sure.”

“I think I’ll call the police,” Anders said.

“Myself, no, I would not do that.”

He dialed a number he found in the telephone book for a local precinct station. As soon as the station officer understood what Anders was saying to him, he became angry, said it wasn’t a police matter, and hung up on him. Anders sat for a moment in the phone booth, then looked up the Church of the Millennium in the directory. He wrote down its address. Someone there would know about her, and explain.

The cab let him out in front. It was like no other church he had ever seen before. Even the smallest places of worship in his own country had vaulted roofs, steeples, and stained glass. This building seemed to be someone’s remodeled house. On either side of it, two lots down, were two skeletal homes, one of which had been burned and which now stood with charcoal windows and a charcoal portal where the front door had once been. The other house was boarded up; in the evening wind, sheets of newspaper were stuck to its south wall. Across the street was an almost deserted playground. The saddles had been removed from the swing set, and the chains hung down from the upper bar and moved slightly in the wind. Four men stood together under a basketball hoop, talking. One of the men bounced a basketball occasionally.

A signboard had been planted into the ground in front of the church, but so many letters had been removed from it that Anders couldn’t make out what it was supposed to say.

On the steps leading up to the front door, he turned around and saw, to the south, the lights of the office buildings of downtown Detroit suspended like enlarged stars in the darkness. After hearing what he thought was some sound in the bushes, he opened the front doors of the church and went inside.

Over a bare wood floor, folding chairs were lined up in five straight rows, facing toward a front chest intended as an altar, and everywhere there was a smell of incense, of ashy pine. Above the chest, and nailed to the far wall where a crucifix might be located in a Protestant church, was a polished brass circle with a nimbus of rays projecting out from its top. The rays were extended along the wall for a distance of about four feet. One spotlight from a corner behind him lit up the brass circle, which in the gloom looked like either a deity-sun or some kind of explosion. The bare walls had been painted with flames: buildings of the city, some he had already seen, painted in flames, the earth in flames. There was an open Bible on the chest, and on one of the folding chairs a deck of playing cards. Otherwise, the room was completely empty. Glancing at a side door, he decided that he had never seen a church so small, or one that filled him with a greater sense of desolation. Behind him, near the door, was a bench. He had the feeling that the bench was filled with the disappeared. He sat down on it, and as he looked at the folding chairs it occurred to him that the disappeared were in fact here now, in front of him, sitting or standing or kneeling.

He composed himself and went back out onto the street, thinking that perhaps a cab would go by, but he saw neither cabs nor cars, not even pedestrians. After deciding that he had better begin walking toward the downtown area, he made his way down two blocks, past a boarded-up grocery store and a vacated apartment building, when he heard what he thought was the sound of footsteps behind him.

He felt the blow at the back of his head; it came to him not as a sensation of pain but as an instant crashing explosion of light in his brain, a bursting circle with a shooting aura irradiating from it. As he turned to fall, he felt hands touching his chest and his trousers; they moved with speed and almost with tenderness, until they found what they were looking for and took it away from him.

He lay on the sidewalk in a state somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, hearing the wind through the trees overhead and feeling some blood trickling out of the back of his scalp, until he felt the hands again, perhaps the same hands, lifting him up, putting him into something, taking him somewhere. Inside the darkness he now inhabited, he found that at some level he could still think: Someone hit me and I’ve been robbed. At another, later point, he understood that he could open his eyes; he had that kind of permission. He was sitting in a wheelchair in what was clearly a hospital emergency room. It felt as though someone were pushing him toward a planetary corridor. They asked him questions, which he answered in Swedish. “Det gör ont,” he said, puzzled that they didn’t understand him. “Var är jag?” he asked. They didn’t know. English was what they wanted. He tried to give them some.

They X-rayed him and examined his cut; he would need four stitches, they said. He found that he could walk. They told him he was lucky, that he had not been badly hurt. A doctor, and then a nurse, and then another nurse told him that he might have been killed — shot or knifed — and that victims of this type, strangers who wandered into the wrong parts of the city, were not unknown. He mentioned the disappeared. They were polite, but said that there was no such phrase in English. When he mentioned the name of his hotel, they said, once again, that he was lucky: it was only a few blocks away, walking distance. They smiled. You’re a lucky man, they said, grinning oddly. They knew something but weren’t saying it.

As the smaller debris of consciousness returned to him, he found himself sitting in a brightly lit room, like a waiting room, near the entryway for emergency medicine. From where he sat, he could see, through his fluent tidal headache, the patients arriving, directed to the Triage Desk, where their conditions were judged.

They brought in a man on a gurney, who was hoarsely shouting. They rushed him through. He was bleeding, and they were holding him down as his feet kicked sideways.

They brought in someone else, a girl, who was stumbling, held up on both sides by friends. Anders heard something that sounded like “Odie.” Who was Odie? Her boyfriend? “Odie,” she screamed. “Get me Odie.”

Anders stood up, unable to watch any more. He shuffled through two doorways and found himself standing near an elevator. From a side window, he saw light from the sun rising. He hadn’t realized that it was day. The sun made the inside of his head shriek. To escape the light, he stepped on the elevator and pressed the button for the fifth floor.

As the elevator rose, he felt his knees weakening. In order to clear his head, he began to count the other people on the elevator: seven. They seemed normal to him. The signs of this were coats and ties on the men, white frocks and a stethoscope on one of the women, and blouses and jeans on the other women. None of them looked like her. From now on, none of them ever would.

He felt that he must get home to Sweden quickly, before he became a very different person, unrecognizable even to himself.

At the fifth floor the doors opened and he stepped out. Close to the elevators was a nurses’ station, and beyond it a long hallway leading to an alcove. He walked down this hallway, turned the corner, and heard small squalling sounds ahead. At the same time, he saw the windows in the hallway and understood that he had wandered onto the maternity floor. He made his way to the viewing window and looked inside. He counted twenty-five newborns, each one in its own clear plastic crib. He stared down at the babies, hearing, through the glass, the cries of those who were awake.

He was about to turn around and go back to his hotel when one of the nurses saw him. She raised her eyebrows quizzically and spread her hands over the children. He shook his head to indicate no. Still she persisted. She pointed to a baby with white skin and a head of already-blond hair. He shook his head no once again. He would need to get back to the hotel, call his bank in Sweden, get money for the return trip. He touched his pants pocket and found that the wallet was still there. What had they taken? The nurse, smiling, nodded as if she understood, and motioned toward the newborns with darker skin, the Hispanics and light-skinned blacks and all the others, babies of a kind he never saw in Sweden.

Well, he thought, why not? Now that they had done this to him.

His right arm rose. He pointed at a baby whose skin was the color of clay, the color of polished bronze. Now the nurse was wheeling the baby he had pointed to closer to the window. When it was directly in front of him, she left it there, returning to the back of the nursery. Standing on the other side of the glass, staring down at the sleeping infant, he tapped on the panel twice and waved, as he thought fathers should. The baby did not awaken. Anders put his hand in his pocket, then pressed his forehead against the glass of the window and recovered himself. He stood for what seemed to him a long time, before taking the elevator down to the ground floor and stepping out onto the front sidewalk, and to the air, which smelled as it always had, of powerful combustible materials and their traces, fire and ash.