The Reconstructionist (2 page)

When the adrenalin had faded, however, he collapsed at his desk, feeling disturbed, less at what he had done than at how it had happened, in an abrupt loss of control. In losing that, it seemed to him, he lost everything.

To his surprise, for the rest of the week he had a relatively efficient line. But after a weekend the crew resumed old habits and became, if anything, more uncooperative. It struck Ellis that if the only way to do his job was to yell at people who grew negligent about repetitious, numbing work, then probably he didn’t want the job.

Monday of the next week he watched a pair of sparrows hop around in his office doorway. They pecked and preened, observed him with one eye then the other, doubting and verifying. Ellis pulled his earplugs, and faintly in the general roar he heard a chirp. He stood from his desk and approached, hoping to move
them
toward a building exit, but they only flew into the dark overhead. He turned a circle, then came to a resolution and crossed the plant floor to his manager’s large, clean, quiet office.

A stamping-press accident years ago had taken the ends off two fingers on his manager’s right hand, and he fidgeted with a micrometer in this hand while Ellis uttered a few irrelevant phrases, then finally blurted, as if an admission of guilt, that he intended to quit. The manager boomed, ‘I’ll see if we can find you another position!’ He was half deaf.

Ellis shrugged, then shook his head. ‘I guess I don’t think the manufacturing environment feels right for me.’

‘OK! What kind of job do you think is right?’

‘I don’t know.’

The manager set both hands on the surface of the desk, as if to keep it down, and held them there while he stared at Ellis. Then suddenly he smiled and stood and extended his hand. Ellis stared at the two nub fingers, then realised that this was an invitation to shake, and to leave.

He cleaned his desk and escaped through a side door.

Then it seemed as if he had reached the edge of a cliff over a sea. He didn’t see any sign of how to move forward.

Over the next years he worked various jobs, none of which were in engineering. He spent a great deal of time reading. As a child he had fed on books, and now he continued to read – mysteries, science fiction, Calvino, Eco – books to carry his thoughts from his own life to someplace else. He contemplated returning to school for a degree in English, but couldn’t imagine what he would do with it. Teach? He doubted whether he could inspire kids, or even merely control a classroom. He felt he lacked a vocation, and that if he had one, his life would gain direction. For consolation he read and grew lost in du Maurier, Chandler, Lem, Borges.
The Big Sleep
and ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’.

One winter he spent his savings on a two-week trip to India, which he’d become interested in through reading Rushdie. He was twenty-five years old. He travelled alone, and he found himself
anxious
and overwhelmed by alienness and sensory density. And, diarrhoeal. At the end of the trip he could hardly say what he had seen except a swirl of colours, gods over doorways, filthy toilets, tattered clothes, outstretched hands. To beggar after beggar he had given away more rupees than he could really afford. He kept thinking that, but for the accident of where he had been born, this life might be his own. After landing again in the US he had to wait for one more flight to carry him home, and he sat in the airport terminal feeling flaccid and ill. His head contained a miasma and the objects around him trailed green auras. As he watched through the windows snow began to fall and soon gathered into a white, obscuring storm. Periodically he trooped to the restroom to discharge his sickness and sip at the water fountains. Flights were delayed. He sat queasy with his bag between his legs and dozed. Delay passed into delay. People around him collapsed to the floor and slept or gazed at windows where the snow fell fast and straight down.

After an indeterminate sleep he stood and began to walk. At the food stalls uniformed employees served the trapped with grumpy languor. Along the hallways travellers lay propped on bags and one another. The fluorescent lighting blued their lips, yellowed their eyes.

Seeing Heather’s face here jolted him, and he stopped in the traffic of the hallway and let people push by. He had last seen Heather Gibson a decade earlier, when he was fourteen and she was sixteen. His memories of her were surrounded by glinting, uncomfortable emotions. She sat with her back against a painted concrete wall, head tilted, eyes closed. A small woman. The skin of the left side of her face bore a slight shine of scar tissue, and Ellis wondered if he would have noticed it at all if he hadn’t been looking for it. Her dark hair, which had been curled when they were in high school, now fell straight and neat around her face. But aside from this and the scarring, something more in her face seemed strange, although he could not identify it. Perhaps only age. She had one arm propped on a duffel bag and a small blue blanket lay over her feet. She appeared to be alone. Memories
crowded
in, of her, and of his half-brother Christopher, who had been her boyfriend – so many memories and of such varied feelings that they crowded and confused one another. She had been burned in the aftermath of the accident that killed Christopher, and as Ellis stood staring with a sensation of wide confusion his attention returned again and again to the alteration of her face.

Then a passer-by struck Ellis’s bag and spun him a quarter-turn, and his illness became urgent again. He ran to the restroom.

He returned to the gate for his flight. The chairs were full, so he sat on the floor, put his bag on his knees and rested his head on it. The electronic display at the gate showed yet another delay. He dozed. Then he stood.

Heather, in her sleep, had not moved. He edged himself into an opening between people seated against the opposite wall, and he watched her in the spaces that flickered between passing bodies. She stirred once or twice but did not look toward him. He saw that her eyelids had no lashes. Those, too, had burned away. He still could hardly separate his emotions from his dizziness, his muddled senses and his abused internal organs, but he knew that he felt, at least, wonder.

Perhaps as much as an hour passed before he moved on again. The snow had slackened, and soon he boarded his flight.

Talking on the phone with his mother about the trip, Ellis mentioned that he had seen someone who looked like Heather Gibson in the airport.

His mother wanted to know why he hadn’t approached her, and he said that the woman he saw was asleep and at a distance, and he was sick, and he wasn’t entirely certain whether it had been her at all. He asked his mother if she knew anything about what had happened to Heather in the years since Christopher died. She said she didn’t.

He guessed that not knowing would bother her. And two days later she called back – she had talked to a friend who knew the Gibsons. Heather lived in the same sprawl of downstate suburbs where Ellis lived, and she had married a man named John Boggs.

This was information enough – he found an address and drove out, to a neighbourhood of two-storey homes, each on a quarter-acre of lawn, each with a two- or three-car garage, each with bits of brass around the front door – knob, knocker, porch light. Maybe a wrought-iron or picket fence. No sidewalks. The last snowfall had melted away except for a scatter of white scraps pocketed in the grass. Near the address he slowed. An asphalt driveway led to a garage on the side of the house, which was faced with brick on the first floor and wood-sided on the second. The garage door stood open. The lawn looked neatly kept, though it remained winter-brown. Several leafless trees scratched at the void. From one hung a brightly painted birdfeeder made from soda cans. A red Taurus wagon rested in the drive; a sticker on its rear bumper had a few words that he could not read and an image of an Egyptian mask, sketched with simple lines. Ellis had slowed almost to stop when he noticed, in the gloom of the open garage, a large, bearded man with a grocery bag in one hand. The man waved.

Ellis drove away determined not to return.

But weeks passed, and still he recalled again and again the interval of watching Heather’s face as she slept against the airport wall. Then on the interstate he happened to glimpse the Egyptian mask, stickered on a Lincoln Navigator a couple hundred feet ahead. Pulling nearer he saw that it advertised the city’s art museum.

For half a day he wandered among pieces by Picasso, Bruegel, Donatello, Van Gogh. Sarcophagi and medieval armour. A collection of snuffboxes. A few days later he returned. He came back repeatedly, through that spring and summer, sometimes two or three times a week. He often brought a book, and he liked the empty open peace of the place, where he could sit for an hour or two, alternately reading and watching an object of art, in a hush only rarely interrupted by one or two people strolling by. As he read, as he studied a sculpture, as he walked a high-ceilinged gallery, as he edged nearer to a canvas, a fraction of his attention was always listening for her, watching. Sometimes he sniffed the air for the trace of her presence – as he had years before, when she had visited Christopher in their house in Coil.

Then, stepping from a roomful of paintings – misty images labelled ‘Luminist and Tonalist’ – into an echoing marbled hallway, he saw her. Loose linen clothing, sandals, sunglasses on her head, as she never would have dressed in high school. She knew him immediately; she smiled, and with enthusiasm she hugged him and looked up at him. The scars. The eyelashes. A clotted feeling in his lungs. ‘How have you been?’ she asked.

He coughed. He forced himself to speak and told her that he had studied engineering in college but had done little with it. He mentioned odd jobs, reading books. Now he held a floor job in an appliance store, in the television department.

If that disappointed her, she showed no sign. She said she had majored in art, and since then she had been working on obtaining her teaching certificate. But she had also had a job in graphic design, shelved books at a library, written copy for an advertising firm. ‘I guess I’m not entirely focused,’ she said. She had been married almost five years. ‘He works in automotive stuff,’ she said of her husband.

‘An engineer?’ Ellis said.

‘They’re a dozen for a dime around here.’ She shrugged apologetically.

‘Do you think he could get me a job?’

She pulled her sunglasses off her head and folded and opened the temples. ‘John’s work is unusual.’

‘Unusual is OK.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It has to be better than selling TVs.’

‘Forensic engineering,’ she said. ‘He examines car accidents, to see how they happened.’ She inclined her head forward as if they might be overheard. By whom? By Christopher, was all he could think. ‘Or maybe the preferred term is accident reconstruction,’ she said. ‘They hire out to insurance companies and attorneys. I don’t know. I should have a better sense of it, but it’s pretty dark. I don’t really like hearing about it.’

She changed the subject, and they talked of a few people they had known in Coil. Where his mother had kept track of people,
Ellis
was able to give news, and he could even make Heather laugh. But then she looked at her watch. ‘Well, hey,’ she said, ‘it’s good to see you.’

His heart fisted. ‘Let me –’ Everything gyred. ‘Let me give you something,’ he said. He groped into the backpack he carried, and his hand came on pens, books, a calculator, and then a computer mouse pad that he had bought some weeks earlier, here, at the gift shop. A stupid thing, he thought, but he held it forward.

She turned it over and back again. It showed a detail from an oil painting – a grey mouse on rough floorboards, looking upward, a red ribbon around his neck. Ellis couldn’t tell what she thought of it and feared she would try to press it back. ‘For mouse-on-mouse action,’ he said. ‘Or, I guess, for the best-laid pads of mice and men.’

She rolled it between her hands. ‘You could talk to my husband,’ she said, ‘if you’re serious about looking for a job.’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘Maybe it’s OK if you can get past the ugliness. He’s mentioned that he might take on someone to help with his caseload. I don’t know if he’s serious, but it won’t hurt to ask.’ On a slip of paper she wrote a phone number. At the top she wrote ‘Boggs’. She said, ‘Everyone, except for me, calls him Boggs.’

A LARGE AQUA-BLUE
SUV lay in the corner of the parking lot, terribly mutilated – windows broken out, front and rear lamps gone, bumper covers hanging, grille missing, wheels settled on flat tyres, doors twisted out of door frames, hood bent like a potato chip.

But otherwise, the place looked like an ordinary suburban office building, with ordinary cars clustered in the parking spaces nearest the front door. Ellis had arrived early. He sat in his car, looking at his résumé. It seemed a document built from scant and shabby materials.

‘
He is in the old labyrinth
,’ said a deep voice. ‘
It is the story of his gambling in another guise
.’

A shining green Volkswagen convertible had come into the parking lot, top down though the weather was cool. ‘
He gambles because God does not speak. He gambles to make God speak
.’ It took Ellis a second to connect the voice to the convertible and its stereo. ‘
But to make God speak in the turn of a card is blasphemy. Only when God is silent does God
–’ A large, bearded man in a dark blue overcoat stood out of the Volkswagen and stalked toward the office
door
. His sand-coloured hair held itself out from his head like frayed hemp rope, and he carried a bright orange bag stuffed to overflowing with papers and binders. Ellis felt pretty sure it was the same man he had seen in Heather’s driveway.