The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

24

After midnight, as the merrymakers gravitated towards the seventy-inch television screen off the ballroom proper, the character of their drinking began to change, to cross the line between lubrication and anesthesia. Mixers were omitted. Whole bottles of champagne were hogged. Men danced with men, and women with their drinks. Peripheral guests and out-of-town celebrities departed discreetly, leaving the hard core of the pro-merger campaign, the Struthers-Meisner-Wesley axis, to shake their fists at the silver screen, wrangling with it, until the channel was changed to His Girl Friday, the late-night movie on KPLR.

The referendum had needed to carry both city and county by simple majorities. In the city, where less than 17 percent of registered voters had cast ballots, it was failing narrowly. In the county, with voter turnout barely 14 percent, it was missing by a four-to-one margin. Overall, the merger was receiving just over 20 percent of the vote. But even Vote No declined to term its victory a landslide. When little better than one eligible adult in seven had bothered to go to the polls, the only thing anybody could say had carried by a landslide was apathy.

Apathy? The analysts frowned. After all, the campaign had generated extraordinary publicity. Both sides had put forth cogent arguments, and neither had shied from unleashing the more vicious incentives, the racism and jealousy and greed, that tended to flush voters out in droves. The brightest lights in the St. Louis sky, the Jammus and Probsts, the Wesleys and the Hammakers, had guided the campaign. No one who paid the slightest attention to local news could have failed to grasp the importance of deciding whether the city and county should be reunited in a single new county. And yet no one, in effect, had voted.

It was a night when men and women paid to face the public would have paid to stay home in bed. The election was a Comet Kohoutek, a Super Bowl XVIII. Commenting on the returns as they came in, apparently still believing themselves to be heard at one and two in the morning, the local newspeople sensed their responsibility for the excess hype and did everything but apologize. Their eyes scurried back and forth like panicked mountaineers on Rushmore faces, appealing to their associates for help, coming to rest again on the camera only after they’d succeeded in obtaining it.

Don, uh, you wanna try and explain this?

Take a crack at this, Mary?

Bill. What would you say?

To the media, with their ethos of combat, St. Louis looked suddenly and inexplicably craven. Threatened with the prospect of thinking and deciding, the body politic had surrendered. It embarrassed the commentators — but only because they failed to place the election within the larger context. Their shame was a measure of their obsolescence. They did not understand that America was outgrowing the age of action.

With a maturity gained by bitter experience, the new America knew that certain struggles would not have the happy endings once dreamed of, but were doomed to perpetuate themselves, metamorphically foiling all attempts to resolve them. No matter how a region was structured, well-to-do white people were never going to permit their children to attend schools with dangerous black children. In any system devisable by mortals under lobbying pressure, taxes were bound to hit the unprivileged harder than the privileged, the exact nature of the unfairness depending only on who happened to be privileged at any given moment. The world would either end in a nuclear holocaust, or else not end in a nuclear holocaust. Washington would uphold repressive regimes overseas unless it decided not to, in which case communism would spread, unless it didn’t. And so on. All political platforms were identical in their inadequacy, their inability to alter the cosmic order.

Enlightened Americans accepted the world as it came. They were willing to pay a high price for the food they ate — dense buttery ice creams, fresh pastas, chocolate truffles, boneless chicken breasts — because high-quality foods went down easily, leaving the mind free for more philosophical pursuits. By the same token, sexual promiscuity was passing out of fashion. The threat of AIDS ensured that the spirit would no longer be a slave to the passions. Instead of making love, instead of making war, young people were mastering their base instincts and going to professional schools. The national economy played to perfection its role in this trend. It also came to the aid of investors uncertain about how best to spend their money, as times of instability called for greater inwardness, for devotion to arbitrage and tax-free bonds and leveraged buy-outs, to profits devolving from mathematics itself, the music of the spheres. Entrepreneurship was spiritually and financially polluting. Americans seeking purity wisely left the toxic wastes and consumer complaints and labor unrest and bankruptcies to other nations, or to the remnants of the original merchant caste. The path to enlightenment led through the perception that all communal difficulties are illusions born of caring and desire. It led through non-action, non-involvement, and individual retirement accounts. The new generation had renounced the world in return for simplicity and self-sufficiency. Nirvana beckoned.

At dawn the brain trust gathered in Jammu’s office for damage assessment. Seasoned campaigners, familiar with setbacks, they took the long view, eschewing childish outbursts. They paced in shirtsleeves. They smoked cigarettes. They gazed out the eastern windows at the gray streets and the fog-locked Arch. Only in their solicitude towards Jammu did they betray their awareness of the magnitude of the catastrophe.

Pete Wesley had brewed coffee, stepping back from the 30-cup pot and scowling at its controls, forcing proficiency in a field of endeavor with which he was not that well acquainted. He brought steaming conical cups in plastic zarfs, two by two, to the craving, sobering hands all around him. He pointed at Jammu. “Do you, ah,” he swallowed, nearly garbling his question, “want coffee?”

She shook her head.

The men milled with their cups, drinking. Each time one of them stopped at the big pot for a refill he glanced at Jammu. Coffee?

She shook her head.

Her foreignness and gender heightened the innate pathos of the moment, complicating, with paternal tenderness, the unwanted superiority most underlings feel when their commander has met defeat. Because it was her first American election, and she was bound to have seen it as a referendum on her personally, they were afraid she might be taking all the blame. But they were even more afraid of trying to forestall this, since in their circle the intimacy of alibis and consolation was considered bad form. They waited for her to come around, to remember again that up until the last minute the opinion polls had continued to show both city and county residents giving her very high approval ratings. If every resident had been compelled to vote, or if the sun had done them a favor by shining on Tuesday, or if the campaign had induced less boredom and more grass-roots participation, the merger would have carried easily, for the simple reason that she supported it. In the practical sense, too, the election hadn’t constituted a referendum on her, because her strength had never depended on her effectiveness in getting out the vote. The merger’s failure took nothing away from the motives her various followers had for remaining in her camp. She still formed the nexus between the industrialists like Chet Murphy and the Democrats like Wesley, between the bankers like Spiegelman and the informationalists like Jim Hutchinson, between the planners and the blacks: between private maneuvering and public opinion. In September she’d had only an aging ex-lover named Singh to comfort her in her early-morning depressions. Now she had the cream of the St. Louis elite, doting on her, trying to keep one another tactful for as long as she was gloomy, and she was still the kind of woman, brooding and brilliant, grand, who merited these attentions. The great wouldn’t have become great if they were easily satisfied with themselves.

“Hey.” Ronald Struthers stopped in the middle of the room and spread his arms, facing her. “Only thirteen more years.”

The others looked away. She raised her head. “Thirteen more years?”

“Until you’re eligible to run for the office of U.S. President.”

Her weary smile deepened the lines dividing her mouth, her soft beak, from her cheeks. The others squirmed, wishing Struthers hadn’t tried.

Then Asha Hammaker breezed in, kissed Jammu, and set a large waxed-paper bag of croissants and pains au chocolat on her desk. Wesley dumped the grounds and made a second pot of coffee with greatly enhanced self-confidence. The party grew lively, its participants finding their second wind as the light of the new day filled the office. They chatted around Jammu. Asha had left a smear of lipstick on the Chief’s forehead, a small red feather. This morning the graying zone above her left ear reached further back around her head than it had on mornings in the past.

She began to test inappropriate facial expressions, to wince, widen her eyes, stretch her lips taut across her mouth, frown deeply, balloon her cheeks and cross her eyes, all in a manner acutely reminiscent of her mother, who often, when conferring with lawyers or entertaining legislators, could not help making faces which had utterly no bearing on the matter at hand. It was a sleepy heedlessness, but also a senility, the open contempt shown for the world by people with few years remaining in it. Her friends tried not to notice.

“It’s the county’s loss, not ours.”

“Where’s Ripley?”

“We’ll just buy some of those towns. Out and out buy them.”

“Start with the county-level police force, by July, the whole thing step by step.”

“He left with his wife, I think around eleven.”

“I’d like to see some of those town councils politicized.”

“Careful, careful.”

“We’ve got the momentum.”

“You say that this morning?”

“You hear about Probst’s house?”

“The second quarter will make believers out of them.”

“From the roof, the finale.”

“Coffee, Ess?”

“This hardly qualifies as a democracy anymore.”

“Like a baby, Jim.”

“What?”

“Burnt my tongue.”

“I need a hot shower, first and foremost.”

“They’re better in France.”

They all began to sing the Marseillaise. Only Asha knew the words. The rest filled in the lyric slots with dums and doos, covering their hearts with their hands, simulating Frenchmen. Jammu rose and left the room. Singing, they looked after her and realized they might have gone a little too far. She was opening a cabinet in the outer office. She took out a black leather jacket, her holster, and a folded pair of blue serge pants. Could she be planning to do a day’s work as police chief? She never let up.

She stopped in the bathroom, pumped on the metal button above the sink until the spigot produced a pink ooze, and began to wash her hands.

She was clean. Barbara and Devi were dead, the wound of the operation was closed and the scar was only faintly visible. Jammu had made a few mistakes, perhaps. At the very least she should have ordered Singh to move Barbara from his building. Her failure to do so had resulted in a less than perfect murder. But in terms of the operation the murder was harmless. At her request, the East St. Louis police had already performed a warranted search of the building and informed her that they’d found nothing out of the ordinary, just a loft apartment in which a man and woman appeared to have been living on an irregular basis. Nothing pointed to duress, everything to normal urban life. Singh had left open the possibility of the story that would now be used: Barbara had occasionally been accompanying Nissing on his trips to St. Louis, staying in the apartment without telling her husband. One evening while Nissing was away she came out and got spooked, got in trouble, and ran. She’d certainly behaved peculiarly, of course, but as Jammu had warned Probst, Nissing was a peculiar man. It didn’t matter that the story was full of holes. With no one left to dispute it, the police had no reason to scrutinize it. The parties actually involved in the murder were in custody. The officer who’d fired the fatal shot would be given a short leave of absence for any counseling he might need, and Brian Deere and Bobby Dean Judd, the two small-time narcotics dealers who’d picked Barbara up, would be charged with second-degree murder under the principle of reasonable force. As long as there was some explanation for Barbara’s presence in East St. Louis, any explanation at all, the detectives would not be forced to use their imagination. The same went for Devi Madan’s presence in Probst’s house when it burned. Here, Rolf Ripley was the explanation. And Ripley wouldn’t be called to testify in any criminal proceeding, because there would be no criminal proceeding, because the firebug herself was dead. Jammu also believed that Probst would let sleeping dogs lie and not attempt to initiate any civil action or public crusade against her. To forge a comprehensible case, he’d have to acknowledge that he and she had had sexual relations and then advance the more or less fantastical hypothesis that she’d arranged the shooting of his wife for personal reasons. Either that, or make reference to the full story of the operation, a story she’d now placed immovably within the realm of fiction.

The operation’s concrete appurtenances had been destroyed. So had every financial record to which American investigators might have obtained access. All of Jammu’s agents were either dead or in India, where, if their emotional loyalty ever waned, they could easily be bribed into silence. The evidence Pokorny and Norris had gathered was purely circumstantial — the circumstances were, to be sure, sometimes rather damning on the surface, but Jammu had at her disposal a complete array of plausible justifications for everything from her meetings with Devi to the real-estate transactions her mother had made through Asha, and more important, she knew how to play a paranoid public inquiry to her own advantage by raising the spectres of McCarthyism and sexism and racial prejudice and such. What worried her more at the moment was the publicity that Barbara’s death would bring to bear on East St. Louis. Theoretically a city with an exceptional police force could not be faulted for having diverted unwanted elements into a neighboring community. But Jammu had staked much of her reputation as a problem-solver on her apparent ability to make street crime simply disappear. The real story would soil her in the eyes of the public. She was ready, naturally, to present a new aspect of her personality, the aspect of a woman calm under fire and willing to accept all the responsibility she bore, however indirectly, for Barbara’s death and for the situation as a whole in Illinois. A small scandal would humanize her; already, as of this morning, she’d lost her aura of invincibility. Public life required that popular figures sometimes play the sacrificial victim. It was a part she could handle and survive. Hadn’t Indira bounced back strong after the Emergency? As for the defeat of the merger and the squatters in Chesterfield and all the other minor bitches — well, as police chief, she of course could not be expected to take the blame in any way. She might even be allowed to accumulate political capital as the voice of moderation in these and other crises. No one would stop her from using her office like this, from venturing out to solve problems far afield and then retreating to her humble official position in the face of difficulties, so long as she was deft enough to avoid charges of hypocrisy and opportunism, and successful enough to reap the region’s love and appreciation for her efforts…

The voice in her, the pressure of justification, the apology, went on and on. She pulled two paper towels from the dispenser and dried her hands. Then she changed her clothes, looking repeatedly at the mirror, at the face within the face.

…When the reporters came, she would present the facts surrounding the shooting death of Barbara, explain how the prosecution of Deere and Judd would work, and personally take the lead in exposing the crime problem in East St. Louis. She’d make an example of Barbara and, without explicitly mentioning it, allow her audience to recall how close she and Barbara’s husband had become, how personal a tragedy this was for her. And then, donning a new mood, she’d make a brave joke about the outcome of the election. But first, before she could face them, she’d need a glass of vodka and a nap. She absolutely had to get some rest this morning. Mrs. Peabody would cheerfully inform the reporters that she was sleeping. The idea would charm them — Chief Jammu is sleeping — children sleep — sweet, innocent sleep—

The shot ate its way into the walls and stalls and vanished, leaving only blood. Where one moment two individuals had faced each other in the mirror, the next moment there was no one. Wesley and the others threw down their pastries. They came running.

Two months before they were due to be married, on a warm April Sunday afternoon, Probst and Barbara had gone out driving in his silver Valiant into the western sun on Big Bend Road, through Twin Oaks, Valley Park and Fern Glen, where the lawns tumbled down shaggily to the mailboxes at the shoulder and a passing car was an event of some note for the natives, and the roads wore their original concrete topping, unreplaced since the transition from dirt to pavement twenty and thirty years earlier. Barbara sat sideways in the passenger seat with her back against the door and the fingers of one hand out the half-open window, letting the wind smoke her cigarette. Her knee was braced against the glove compartment to stabilize her as the car bounced right and left at a disruptive frequency, a bit faster than breathing, a bit slower than heartbeats, when the tires hit the swollen joints between the slabs; the jolts, like skipped frames in a movie, created the impression of excessive speed, and she slowed her own movements accordingly. She was wearing a white blouse under a gray crew-neck sweater, blue dungarees with the cuffs rolled up to the tops of her argyle socks. The strip of tint on the windshield dyed her forehead green. One of her stockinged feet rested on Probst’s right thigh, and through his pants, through the difference in humidity, he could just feel the sweatiness of her sole. Her toes wiggled languidly, of their own volition, the reflex of a foot accustomed to shoes.

She always wanted to go driving that year. Looking back, he was inclined to see in the impulse a scientific method of filling up their time together, as they hadn’t yet developed that body of mutual friends whose weaknesses, in later years, would provide the staple of their conversational diet, and as they’d begun to tiptoe around the engineering lessons which made her face go blank, and the French literature and German science to which he tiresomely responded with comic ignorance or earnest distrust because he didn’t yet dare ask to be educated. To a couple separated by age and background and not in the mood to buy entertainment, almost any alternative to silly games or love talk, any cruising or walking or sex, was welcome. But at the time, her proposals of drives they might take had seemed more positively motivated. They seemed to spring from a hunger which he himself lacked. They were promises — as though, whenever she proposed a destination, she had been there already and could attest to its beauty or interest and then, when they arrived, she were vouchsafing him glimpses of the twenty-two years hidden inside her, in the fall foliage at the Algonquin Country Club, the Creve Coeur lake that was indeed frozen and could be skated on, the fritters and ham hocks at the all-Negro restaurant off North Jefferson Avenue. The world she promised was latent in how she looked, three-dimensional and life-sized, sinking into the seat cushion and dimpling its plaid upholstery as she said planets dimpled outer space, a woman in his car brought through the agency of something like grace, as if it were the exception, not the rule, that young people fell in love and went out together and he, Probst, were specially blessed. It was because she betrayed no consciousness of being his reward. She didn’t smile unnecessarily, didn’t comment on the route they were taking out to Rockwood Reservation, but sat in his car neutrally, as she might have sat in her father’s car, occupying herself without relation to him, intense only in anticipation of arriving. Hers was the indifference of a foreign country to a new immigrant: he was allowed to stay, but the rest was up to him. Nor could he imagine becoming used to her, although, in the universal and destructive ambition of fresh love, he wanted to know everything about her. He looked forward to fighting with her, to seeing the pink cords of her will exposed.

Winding and braking, skirting a small Ozark spread with budding oaks, they came to the intersection with Route 109, the road to Rockwood. Probst looked both ways before making his left turn. On his right, in the lane he was about to enter, he saw a pickup truck approaching fast, but for reasons he’d never understand he did not really see it. He pulled out into the intersection, aware enough of making a mistake that he floored the gas pedal. The truck was heading straight for the passenger-side door. Barbara gasped. The horn blew. Probst braced himself, accelerating. The truck swerved and slammed into the rear fender and trunk, and careened into the opposite lanes. The Valiant, half demolished, landed in the ditch. Barbara split her lip and broke a tooth on the dashboard.

After the police had come and the wrecker had towed away the Valiant and Barbara’s brother had come out to pick them up and they’d stopped at the hospital and left and had a couple of drinks, Probst asked her not to marry him. And for a while that night two distinct personalities had wrestled visibly in her, one assuring him, with the haste that grips a shy woman when a fellow diner has spilled gravy on her dress, that everything was fine and nothing had changed, and the other, like a girl too young to be mindful of any obligations but to herself, regarding him with revulsion and thinking how close this man just came to killing me.

He saw that sometime in the last twenty years the county had installed a traffic light at the intersection. The morning sun was shining on long pools of water in the ditches, on the silver propane tanks outside the houses in the distance, on his left shoulder as he drove south on 109. The asphalt was seamless. He’d been driving all night except for the two or three hours he’d spent parked in front of a Schnucks after hearing the news on the KSLX midnight roundup. He’d thought his mother’s death four years ago had demonstrated once and for all that he wasn’t a man to cry in anything but anger. But he hadn’t been married to his mother. But the intervals between the contractions of grief in him had gradually increased as the individual memories that triggered the contractions melted together into a more general history, a sad book that was closing. By the time he’d watched the sun rise over the Chrysler assembly plant on I-44 he felt he’d be strong enough to function through the day — but felt it with a dread, the fear of soberness, because when the grief ended the questions began.

Highways didn’t help. The landscapes offended the eye passively, by disappointing it, leaving unfulfilled the traveler’s hope that the opening of the country might, as roads actually did in England or Africa, reveal significant traces of the indwelling spirit. There were, for instance, the zinc-plated standards of exit signs and mileage signs — upright I-beams whose burrs and pits reflected low-cost fabrication, wide tolerances, U.S. government specifications. The structure of each sign was sturdy enough and the design pleasing enough that it teased travelers with the possibility of being appreciated as a less literal sign of place. But its impersonal adequacy denied that possibility, at least to any native. Maybe if foreign travelers passed one of these signs they might find the name “Fenton” as exotic and indicative as Probst had found “Oberammergau” and “Oaxaca” when he’d toured them, or they might have been delighted by the mile as an outsized unit of distance, or by the greeny green of the sign as it contrasted with the yellow or white signs of home, or even by the stocky proportions of the upright I-beams. But maybe not.

Having had thoughtful road experiences in other countries and in his youth, Probst wanted to have them still, longed to be foreign again — as Jammu, in relation to the city, had made him. To be young, to live in the world as opposed to merely inhabiting it, a man had to stay foreign. But in the country there were only hillsides scarred with driveways and pastures, billboards for inexpensive ryes and inexpensive motels and inexpensive restaurants at the pinnacle of whose menus stood New York strip steak and batter-fried jumbo shrimp with cocktail sauce, the prices working down from there. License plates bore unhelpful combinations of characters, with too few letters to play word games, too few numbers to hunt for patterns. The rivers were muddy. Nothing raised or lowered the horizon by more than a few degrees. All the cars had four wheels, all the trucks had mud flaps behind the tires, all curves in the road translated into a single mechanism, the turning of the steering wheel. The interesting architecture — new churches with derricklike campaniles or nautical profiles, corporate headquarters with nonrectilinear floor plans or geodesic atria — was ugly. The uninteresting architecture was uninteresting. Distance diluted the color of flowers. If glamorous women or criminal men drove on the highways, the windows of their cars were smoked, or else it didn’t matter, as it didn’t matter if a truck was loaded with unusual cargo like poisonous chlorine or sheep, because everything hurried past. Probst wasn’t an aesthete. There was no cause for hatred. But as he approached the city, the countryside filled him with a sense of betrayal, a pain intense enough to counterbalance his fear and begin to answer the questions. He was alive. Sadly, angrily, in a world he was only now realizing he didn’t like, he was alive.

Outside a convenience store on Big Bend he put a quarter in a telephone.

Audrey’s voice was chiding, practical. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been driving.”

“Well, you’d better come over. Luisa’s here. Everyone’s here.”

Probst said nothing. A Hostess truck pulled up beside the booth, and out of the telephone receiver came flooding the interior of the Ripleys’ house — the smell of the cold fireplace, the clatter of cups in the kitchen and the rhythmic sucking of the coffeepot, the voices subdued in every room including the one in which the dead woman’s husband might already have been sitting, the Probst whose face the relatives, between sips, consulted like a template. Their expectations would not let him be. They pulled at his features, restoring the grieving contortions of the night before, voiding the experience and forcing a repetition — the rooms filled the phone booth, and Probst rose swiftly from the sofa, hurried down the hall past Audrey and her tray of cups, and reached the bathroom just in time to shut the door before the paroxysms overcame him.

“Martin?”

A man with pink Snoballs debouched from the Hostess truck.

“You’re coming?” Audrey said.

He swallowed. “Yes.”

At Central Hardware the orange-coated experts were opening the main doors. Nine o’clock. Probst turned north on Lindbergh, and fifteen minutes later he was pulling to a stop in front of the Ripley residence, where he recognized Barbara’s parents’ Volvo and Duane’s Nova. All the curtains in the big house were drawn. The eastern chimney dribbled white woodsmoke into the pale blue sky.

Behind the glaze of light on the storm door, whose mild concavity gathered the reflected trees into a single star-like tree with radiating branches, the front door opened and a figure looked out from the shadows inside. There was a reprimand in its indistinctness, in its seeing him without being seen. Then the storm door opened and a tall young woman in glasses stepped out. She hesitated before, looking aside, still reluctant, she made up her mind to come down the front walk to meet him. That it was Luisa brought joy to his recognition: she was a stranger to him.

When Singh had boarded in Chicago he’d scanned the central compartment of the fully booked 747 to find his seat, which, he’d been told, was situated on an aisle. Passengers were stowing their last belongings and sinking into their seats, testing them to make sure all the comforts for which they’d paid were operational, and making immediate yawning preparations for sleep. Well before Singh had edged through the roil and found his row, he was certain that a particular aisle seat in the distance was his, because a small infant in the throes of a diaper change was lying on it.

“Excuse me.”

The mother, a young Southerner with an intricately layered coiffure, hastened to wrap up the infant and remove it. She confided to Singh that she had sort of hoped his seat would be empty.

The infant was flying to be with its father, a lieutenant at the U.S. base outside Frankfurt. Apparently the anticipation ruled out the possibility of sleep, although the mother, under the influence of a split of Moselle, went out like a light after the late dinner was served. The infant lunged and knocked aside Singh’s eyeglasses and pushed into his left eye a fist covered with clear mucus. Singh awakened the mother. She collected the arms and legs into a bundle and went back to sleep. Singh reclined deeply. He opened one eye to ward off violations of his territorial limits and saw the infant staring at him, drooling through a smile, its eyebrows raised. Singh showed teeth. The infant shrieked with laughter. He shut his eyes but the laughter continued. He opened them. Reading lights were blinking on all around him. The mother, unbelievably, snored. A weary businessman leaned across the aisle to ask if the infant belonged to Singh (had sprung from his loins, was the fruit of his seed). He shook his head and awakened the mother again. She took the infant on a tour of the plane, returned, and went to sleep. The infant began to cry. The mother awoke and proffered a bottle. The infant took a deep draught, turned to Singh, and sprayed him.

“Clifford.”

A smell of decay arose, prompting another trip for Clifford, who, on departure, took a last swipe at Singh’s glasses, which were already well spattered with juice.

Over Newfoundland Clifford vomited onto the knee of Singh’s wool trousers. Over England, with a precision that presaged a future in the artillery, Clifford threw a glistening wad of scrambled egg through Singh’s open shirt collar. The egg dropped all the way down to his belt. Determined to spend the remainder of the flight away from his seat, he rose and repaired to the lavatory. He removed his shirt, deposited the egg in the toilet, and while he was brushing yellow morsels out of his chest hair the jet encountered turbulence, causing him to lose his balance. One of the cuffs of his white Pierre Cardin dress shirt swooped into the blue liquid in the toilet. On the loudspeakers the flight attendants were advising all passengers to return to their seats and fasten their safety belts. He soaked the soiled cuff in the sink and wrung it out. The next jolt of turbulence, in combination with the slick floor of the lavatory, threw him over backwards. He extended an arm to break his fall and brought his hand down directly into the center of the toilet, onto the steel plate on which the blue liquid rested. The plate was hinged; at the pressure of his hand, it opened, activating the flush mechanism.

By the time he emerged, smelling strongly of the candy-scented toilet fluid, the plane had entered more orderly German skies and was preparing to land at Frankfurt. The pilot, a relaxed and pedagogical captain, narrated the final moments of the descent.

“Ten meters…

“Fife meters…

“We are over se runway now…

“Two meters. One meter. We lend every second now…

“Ser.”

In the Frankfurt mega-terminal Singh changed fifty dollars and bought a new shirt. His comrades would jibe him, make him pay for every hour he’d wasted in America with at least a minute of embarrassment, but they would also be disappointed if he failed to come home looking dapper, their well-traveled brother in struggle.

By noon, local time, he was in the air again on a direct flight to Bombay. From his window seat he watched the refueling operations at Istanbul and fell asleep. When he awoke he was over the Indian Ocean, an hour west of Bombay.

And then he was there, in a motor cab leaving Santa Cruz and passing bicyclists on Jawaharlal Nehru Road, tooting aside the short spindly men in turbans and dhotis who loomed up in the morning dust, and tailing, at ten miles an hour, a gray lorry on the rear gate of which three teenagers sat and kicked their legs. It was spring, Singh noticed. The old was new. He made the cabbie stop and pressed a purple 100-rupee note into his hands. In his slippery oxfords he sprinted to catch up with the lorry. One of the youths, a round-eyed schoolboy in a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt and copper-colored bellbottoms, inched aside to make room for him on the gate. He jumped, turned in midair, and landed seated, looking back into the empty western sky as the lorry carried him east to set him free among the other thirty million Indians named Singh.