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.
A few minutes later, as Ellis stared again at his résumé, he was startled by a knock on his window. The man from the Volkswagen peered down. ‘Ellis Barstow?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’re early. I’m Boggs.’ He appeared to be in his middle thirties, with crow’s feet beginning at the corners of vivid blue eyes. Ellis stood out of his car, and Boggs shook his hand and grinned. If he recognised Ellis or his car from the drive-by half a year ago, he offered no sign of it. He only tilted his head. ‘Come on.’
He led Ellis to the battered aqua-blue SUV and nodded at it. ‘What do you suppose happened?’
‘Hit by an avalanche.’
Ellis meant it as a joke, but Boggs only shook his head, as if he had encountered avalanche-struck vehicles from time to time, but this was not one. Looking at the vehicle again – the terrible dents and tears and missing windows and lamps – Ellis didn’t know how to begin to make an intelligent guess. He said, ‘Um -’
‘Rollover damage,’ Boggs said, ‘at highway speeds. Happens every day, more or less. The left rear tyre blew out, and the causes of that are being argued, but whatever the reason, it blew out and induced a leftward drift. The driver attempted to steer back to the right but over-corrected, and very quickly the vehicle had turned almost sideways. The left-side wheel rims bit into the roadway, the right-side wheels lifted, and the whole thing vaulted. After that, it spun and bounced along like a punted football.’
‘How many people were inside?’
‘Five occupants. Two fully ejected, three partially ejected. Five fatalities.’
‘All of them?’
‘Dead before the vehicle stopped moving. A matter of seconds.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘It is. It really is. And now it’s part of a very expensive lawsuit.’ He put a hand back through his hair, and it stood out yet more from his head. ‘So. Let’s say that you are a reconstructionist. You’ve been asked by an attorney involved in a very expensive lawsuit to examine this vehicle. Could you tell him how many times it rolled over?’ After a second he amended, ‘At least how many times.’
Ellis touched a scarred door, the metal cold and abrasive. He stepped back and examined the forms of the damage, the denting, scraping and tearing. It looked as if it might have been spun inside a concrete mixer. He admitted, ‘I really have no idea.’
‘Look at the scratch patterns,’ Boggs said.
Ellis wasn’t sure what he meant by patterns. Random scratches seemed to be everywhere – single long scratches, scratches in pairs and threesomes, groups of light scratches and areas that looked as if they had been attacked with a power sander. Boggs pointed to a location on the passenger-side fender. ‘Like these.’
Here was some scratching of the power-sander variety, gouged deep into the sheet metal, while above and coming down into the deeper ones at a slight angle ran a second set of scratches, longer, less deep. Ellis moved a finger over them. He crouched to get out of the sun’s glare and saw that almost perpendicular to the longer scratches lay yet a third set, very light, little more than minor disruptions in the paint.
‘Three?’ he said.
‘Three?’ echoed Boggs.
‘Three rolls?’
‘Three rolls? Why three?’
Three sets of scratches. Could that mean three rolls? Why?
‘Think about it,’ Boggs said. ‘Let me know.’
Stacks of cardboard banker’s boxes filled the corners of Boggs’s office and paperwork sprawled over the desk. Littered among the papers, as if stranded in snow banks, were toy cars – a Ferrari, a Land Rover, a GTO, a milk truck. Beside the banker’s boxes stood a shelf lined with textbooks, technical manuals, collections of conference papers. They talked through Ellis’s résumé in about fifteen minutes – college engineering classes and projects, and the supervisory job at the axle plant, which Ellis tried to gloss. He ticked through other jobs: a lawn service, a coffee shop, running deliveries, selling appliances. The conversation began to wallow, Boggs seemed subdued, and Ellis grew embarrassed. He had an engineering degree that he’d hardly applied and no useful skills. He sat here only because years ago his now-dead half-brother had been the boyfriend of a girl who was now this man’s wife. Absurd.
Yet he wanted this job. He saw an opportunity to set his life on a new path. He felt he badly needed a new path.
From the clutter on the desk he picked out the toy Land Rover and turned it. Like a bouncing football. A thought came. ‘At least three times,’ he said. He moved the Land Rover slowly over the desk, as if rolling. ‘Each time this corner hits the ground, it picks up new scratches.’ Growing excited, he elaborated: a vehicle couldn’t slide in two directions at once, so each set of overlapping scratches indicated a different time that that part of the vehicle had been on the ground. He had seen three separate sets of scratches in the area Boggs had pointed out, so that fender had hit the ground at least three times.
Boggs smiled. He took the toy and illustrated some other aspects – that the orientation of a set of scratches indicated the direction the vehicle had been travelling as it struck the ground; the deeper scratches were made when the vehicle hit asphalt while the lighter ones came as it hit softer soil off the roadway; looking closely, one could see the sequence in which the scratches were made, because the cutting of a new scratch pushed paint into the existing scratches that it crossed.
‘We do lots of reports for our clients,’ Boggs said. ‘Can you write?’
‘I won a prize for something I wrote in college.’
‘Really? Why isn’t that on your résumé?’
‘Well, it was fiction. And it wasn’t really so much an award as an honourable mention. And, in retrospect, it sucked.’
‘You like to read? Have you read Coetzee? I’ve been listening to him on tape.’
‘In your car.’
‘Yes.’ Boggs grinned. He talked happily for a few minutes about books, of Dostoevsky, of War and Peace, which he loved and which Ellis had to admit he had never read. ‘I like the Russians,’ Boggs said. ‘Do you know this one?’ he turned to his computer and clicked and a voice began -
‘… why, where in the world has his character gone to? The stead-fast man of action is totally at a loss and has turned out to be a pitiful little poltroon, an insignificant, puny babe, or simply, as Nozdrev puts it, a horse’s twat…’
‘Poltroon!’ Boggs laughed happily and turned it off. ‘Dead Souls. Did you know that Gogol could pull his lower lip up over his nose?’ He grew distracted in straightening the vehicles on his desk. ‘This job,’ he said, ‘is emotionally odd. Are you ready for that? It’s analytic, and you sometimes have to remind yourself: people died.’
‘I don’t know if -’ Ellis stalled and let the sentence lapse.
‘Well, there is no way to know. I’m just warning you, it’s odd. You look at terrible events and analyse them minutely. It’s not normal. It’s strange. Then, after you’ve done it for a while, what’s also strange is how you get used to it, and even how much you forget. It seems a little indecent to forget. That’s what bothers me, now. It’s as if, if I were a better man, I’d go back to tour the old accidents from time to time. Like those old soldiers revisiting the Somme or Gettysburg or Vietnam. Austerlitz. But no one remembers Austerlitz any more.’ He looked hopefully at Ellis, as if he might be the exception.
Ellis admitted that he didn’t remember Austerlitz.
By the time he left, Boggs had offered the job outright, and Ellis had accepted. In the parking lot he stopped to look again at the aqua-blue SUV. He scrutinised a few of the scratches, then leaned through the vacant space where a window had been. A strand of gleaming purple and green Mardi Gras beads was wrapped around the gear shift. Black tyre shards and an empty can of diet soda littered the cargo area. Dry leaves lay on the back seat, along with a yellow receipt that was, he saw, from Babies R Us. He returned to his car and sat, lightly touching his hands together, hesitating now to drive into traffic, onto the streets, the interstate. But after a minute he started the engine, and he drove.
Ellis had largely fallen out of touch with his father, so that was easy. He spoke regularly with his mother, but he waited until he had already accepted the job and begun working before he told her about it. He worried that she might think of Christopher’s death and disapprove of this work; perhaps she would articulate certain objections that he had not yet articulated to himself. But she only asked what his salary would be. He told her, and she sounded happy, and soon she was complaining that the neighbour’s cottonwood was dropping branches onto her lawn, and Ellis thought, maybe that’s all it needs to be – a job.
Later, after years, it seemed to him almost as if he had always been a reconstructionist, and he recalled only with effort that at one time it had been new to him, that it had felt like entering an obscure nation with its own language, customs and peculiar manner of thinking. On his first day Boggs had handed him a stack of technical papers – ‘A Comparison Study of Skid Marks and Yaw Marks’, ‘Physical Evidence Analysis and Roll Velocity Effects in Rollover Accident Reconstruction’ and ‘Speed Estimation from Vehicle Crush in Side Pole Impacts’. Even the word reconstructionist felt odd in the mouth.
Ellis sat at a desk in a cubicle with five-foot-high foam-core walls, two shelves for books, two file drawers, a computer and a telephone. It was one cubicle in a grid of twelve, each occupied by an engineer. ‘Eggheads in a carton,’ Boggs called it. Around the periphery of the room were a handful of walled offices where the senior engineers sat. At the rear of the building a wide door accessed an underground garage where items of physical evidence were stored: car seats burned down to their internal steel frames, pieces of exploded tyres, dismantled disc brakes, shatterproof windows glittering with cracklines, a fuel tank cut into halves for examination, a Honda motorcycle improbably twisted, a Dodge pickup truck blooming with front and rear collisions.
Ellis had projects occasionally with some of the other engineers, but for the most part he worked directly with Boggs, and he acquired the skills of the job by doing the job with Boggs. Boggs was at once boss, mentor and co-worker, and he performed these roles with patience and humour. Ellis never felt as if he were being tested or made a fool of. From the day he started, he never seriously feared for his job. He grew used to the word reconstructionist. He learned the nomenclature. When Boggs, as testifying expert, went to have his opinions taken outside of court it was at a deposition, which was called a depo, or sometimes just a dep. The pillars connecting a vehicle’s body to its roof were named alphabetically from front to back: A-pillar, B-pillar, C-pillar, and sometimes a D-pillar. A change in velocity due to a collision was a delta-V; conservation of linear momentum was COLM; primary direction of force was PDOF. The people in a vehicle were occupants. Anyone thrown from a vehicle in the course of an accident was ejected. The dead were occupants or pedestrians who had sustained fatal injuries, or, simply, fatalities. He learned the methodologies of crush-energy analysis and momentum-based analysis, how to calculate speed loss during braking, how to incorporate perception-reaction time into a time-space analysis. He learned photogrammetric techniques for identifying the locations of objects on the roadway that the police had failed to record, and he learned how to download data from airbag modules, how to examine tyres and brakes for evidence of defects or improper maintenance, how to look at light bulbs and seat belts for indications that they were in use at the time of a collision, how to document the damage to a car, how to build computer models of vehicles and terrains, how to generate data describing motion and impacts.
There were slow days, and days spent reading maddeningly useless depositions, days spent working out some trivial but necessary and elusive problem of mathematics or physics, days spent trying to find a source for obscure information on decades-old frame rails or fuel tank designs, days spent travelling between obscure towns amid empty plains in order to take a few photos and measurements of dubious utility. But even these days held at least a possibility of discovering something of significance, of seeing a problem in a new way or coming upon some small, critical, overlooked evidence. Ellis liked the work. It reminded him of the books he enjoyed, stories of sharp-eyed detectives, stories of worlds a little separated from the usual one. At intervals he came across an accident-scene photograph – a bloodstain on the road, a tooth alone on a car seat, a body burned past recognising – that made him cold in his bones and reminded him of his reservations, and at these times it again seemed possible that this was the last job on earth that he should have. But this feeling came to him less often as time passed, as case files accumulated and accident-scene photographs overlaid one another and grew indistinct.
Ellis discovered that Boggs didn’t generally keep friends – he could be too overbearing, too blunt, too indifferent, too silent. But somehow, because Ellis worked for him and because Boggs loved working, Ellis was largely shielded from these traits. Moreover, they were often seated side by side for long periods – in airports, airplanes, rental cars and hotel bars as they travelled to inspect accident scenes and vehicles – and the travel demands of the job curtailed other relationships even as the two of them were pushed together. They joked easily, and they could be silent easily. As years passed and Ellis came to understand the work and to participate in it with the efficiency of familiarity, they also began to go together to occasional baseball games, or pike fishing, or funny car races. They had a habit of long, desultory conversations called from desk to desk late in the office when everyone else had left. Sometimes these seemed to Ellis almost a dream of voices in the head.
‘One of the problems between my wife and me,’ Boggs said once, out of a long silence, startling Ellis, ‘is over kids. What do you think about kids?’
‘I don’t know. They’re pretty cute. I guess sometimes I get tired of their noise on airplanes.’
They were in the middle of the inspection of an exemplar Silverado, an undamaged pickup of make, model, year and option package identical to that of another pickup which had been struck head-on and burst into flames when a drunk drifted across the double yellow line. They would use measurements from the exemplar for comparison purposes. Boggs stood on a ladder, above the hood, shooting photos downward while Ellis held a measuring tape against the vehicle one way, then another. They were interested in the precise curve of the bumper. Boggs called, ‘I really don’t like them when they’re little. Like village idiots. You can’t have a real conversation.’
‘They’re cute, though.’
‘Cute, but they don’t even know how to wipe themselves. Who wants to spend day after day hanging out with a room-mate who can’t wipe his own butt?’
‘Someone did it for you.’
‘Bless her, I have no idea why. Look at what Mom got out of it. A son who sent her a case of beer at Christmas.’
‘Mindless propagation of the species,’ Ellis said.
‘You’re being sarcastic, but you’re right.’
‘You’re being sarcastic.’
‘Nope.’ Boggs grinned, took another photo, then dropped the camera and let it hang on its cord around his neck. ‘The other thing is, I’m sure that any kid I have will die before I do. Hit by a bus, drowning in a pool, SIDS, finding a gun in the neighbour’s closet, leukaemia, drafted into some dick-swinging war, whatever. How could the kid possibly survive? Most do, somehow. But I’m stuck inside my own lizard brain, and whenever I think about having some idiot kid, I get these chills. Dead kid. It would be horrible. I would go to the nearest steel foundry and jump into a batch of molten iron.’
Ellis looked up at him and said nothing.
‘I’m sorry.’ Boggs frowned. ‘I wasn’t thinking of your brother. I hadn’t made the connection. I’m the idiot.’
‘My dad’s life did go pretty much straight to hell after that,’ Ellis said. Trying to give nothing away. He already knew Boggs’s position on the topic of children, through Heather, because he was conducting an affair with her.
‘I don’t know what an accident is, really,’ Boggs said.
This – or a version of this – represented one of Boggs’s themes. And after the third or fourth time, Ellis had developed a standard response: ‘Everything’s got a name, but not every name’s got a thing.’ Or a version of this.
‘Everything,’ Boggs would say, ‘depends on the contingent and the adventitious, and if the meeting of two vehicles in an intersection can be called an accident, then what can’t be called an accident? Where my footsteps fall, where I place my hands, where I sit, where I stand, how I appear in the world, who I speak to, the kind of work I do, who I befriend, who I fall in love with?’ Boggs pouted. ‘Accident?’
Some of these conversations occurred in Boggs’s office, and Ellis had grown exquisitely familiar with the backside of the photograph of Heather that stood on Boggs’s desk – the black cardboard, the little rotating latches, the triangular folding stand, the stainless-steel frame edge. But if he came around the desk to point out something on Boggs’s computer screen, he wouldn’t let himself glance at the photo. Instead he closed his attention on the computer screen, sometimes examining it pixel by pixel. He had an attitude of awe before his yearning toward her. And anger, because that yearning appeared so irrational and futile.
Every few weeks, despite himself, he went again to the art museum and wandered. He could not deny his hope, which amazed him. Sometimes he paced a slow circle around the spot where he’d encountered Heather before, looking, smelling the air, as if he might find some evidence of her, as if by detecting her in the past he might summon her into the present.
And years passed. Then, on a late-spring afternoon when Boggs was across the continent, participating in a mock trial that a client had arranged, Ellis’s phone rang. Boggs, in a growly tone, said, ‘Do me a favour?’ Heather – he said – was stranded in her father’s RV in a grocery store parking lot. The engine wouldn’t start. ‘Do you know what it costs to get an RV that size towed?’ Boggs asked. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a bad connection at the battery.’
Ellis went.
The RV – a Coachmen Leprechaun, running a Ford V8 under the hood – lay at the edge of the parking lot, big and rectangular as a fallen megalith. The problem was just as Boggs had suggested. Ellis retrieved pliers and a wire brush from a hardware store down the street, cleaned the battery connections and tightened the leads, and the engine keyed on. Heather, in the driver’s seat, clapped. She climbed down and peered at the burbling engine. ‘All good,’ Ellis said.
‘Want some iced tea?’ she asked. ‘Want to come in?’ she added, in a satirical tone, gesturing at the RV’s fibreglass side door. She apologised several times for the mess before letting him enter.
Marbles, toilet paper rolls, electrical wires in many colours, seashells, dryer lint, blackened sheets of aluminum foil, quartered tennis balls, Dixie cups, images of children cut from magazines, moulded plastic zoo animals – these were gathered in coffee cans and shoeboxes all over the floor. On the little dining table lay a large set of watercolours and an old anatomy textbook with holes drilled through and plastic flowers sprouting from it. She cleared a seat for him and poured iced tea in repurposed yogurt cups. He sat with anxiety bobbing inside. Beside her, loosely arranged on the bit of counter space beside the sink, stood a few strange objects. A pair of little alien creatures – assembled from pen caps, wires, pieces of cellphones, bits of shining broken glass for teeth – looked at themselves in dollhouse mirrors. A spiky ball had been built from cigarette butts and painted an unnaturally bright sun-yellow, making it a pretty little object. And flooding from the double door of a plastic toy barn came a blob-like collection of pieces of things, arranged as if oozing into all directions. Looking closer, he saw that the blob-thing was made of many plastic soldiers, or pieces of plastic soldiers, assembled to present a surface of weaponry – pistols, rifles, bazookas, mortars, machine guns, aiming everywhere.
Heather said, ‘Don’t touch!’ But then she reached with a finger and prodded it. ‘It’s too delicate. Some day I’ll hit a pothole and destroy it.’ She apologised once more for the clutter. ‘Dad doesn’t use the RV any more, so he lets me borrow it, and it’s kind of evolved into a storage unit.’
As if conditioned by the photo on Boggs’s desk, he could look toward her only in fretful glances. ‘I should thank you,’ he said, ‘for helping me to meet Boggs, for the job.’
‘Should you? Do you like it?’
‘It’s always interesting. Every case is different.’
She talked about her father’s love of his job, as a cop. Ellis picked a roll of tape from the table and tested the stickiness of its edges. He tapped with his foot a box of toothpaste-tube caps and matchbook covers.
Into a silence he blurted, ‘That’s a lot of toothpaste caps.’
‘You can find the strangest things at garage sales. I once saw a shrunken head, set out on a blanket beside some cheap flower vases. A price was stickered onto the nose. Ten bucks, I think.’
‘It was real?’
‘I think so. I tried to buy it, but the woman decided she didn’t want to sell it after all. I offered fifty, and she started yelling at me.’
‘She lost her head?’
Heather didn’t reply, and Ellis, in anxiety, glanced at her again. ‘It’s more like she kept her head,’ Heather said, ‘but decided that she’d gotten ahead of herself.’
‘Stuck her neck out?’
Now she grinned. ‘Way out.’ She searched in a pile of construction paper. ‘I was just sort of experimenting with Popsicle sticks for Christmas tree ornaments.’ She held up a star shape, decorated with glued bits of coloured cellophane. ‘The trick is to remember to pretend that you have the clumsy hands of a child.’
They sat quietly while she fussed with the cellophane.
She said, ‘John’s glad to be working with you. He likes you.’
‘I like him, too.’
‘But don’t you wish sometimes that he’d just shut the hell up?’
Ellis laughed. But she didn’t. She made a small adjustment to the position of the pitcher of iced tea. With a feeling of abandoning the shore he said, ‘It wasn’t a coincidence, exactly, when I ran into you at the art museum.’ He told her about seeing her at the airport, about driving by her house, about going week after week to the museum.
‘Why didn’t you say something in the airport?’
‘My mom wondered the same thing,’ he said. He was trying to joke, but she only picked up a bit of amber-coloured cellophane on the tip of her finger. ‘I was surprised.’ He looked at the oozing blob of tiny weapons. ‘I suppose I was scared.’
She set the cellophane onto a star. Was she waiting for him to go on? He couldn’t go on. He ached and jittered with embarrassment, and then, looking at the aliens’ broken glass teeth, he thought of Boggs. Abruptly he stood and said goodbye, and he fled. He saw that she was surprised; he went too quickly to see if it became disappointment.
For six weeks a pain seethed in his chest, as if his blood were attempting to flow in the wrong direction. Until, on an afternoon when Boggs had again left town, the phone rang, and Heather said she needed help moving a set of shelving she had bought.
In great caution they didn’t meet very often. Sometimes he did not see her for three weeks, four weeks, and he grew anxious. Then despairing. The architecture of his life began to look like lunacy.
Affair: the word astonished him every time it appeared in his mind. All he had done was rediscover and fall for a small, dark-haired, scarred, slow-smiling woman. That she happened to be married wasn’t a part of the equation. That she happened to be married seemed simply strange. That she happened to be married to his boss seemed strange to the point of unreality.
Sometimes Heather said that things needed to change. On a couple of occasions, she grew angry. ‘We all need to grow the fuck up!’ she cried. ‘I’ll just tell him it’s time for a divorce. It’s not a big deal. A divorce.’ She sounded very grim. It made him fearful. He wished he weren’t, but he feared to sabotage Boggs, feared Boggs’s reaction, feared the loss of his job, feared the end of his present life. He wished it could be done in some way that would not hurt Boggs. But she spoke of soon, and when soon might be remained undefined. He had decided that if she asked him to give up his job and his friendship with Boggs, he would. But finally she didn’t ask, and he wondered, what did she fear?
The covert nature of the relationship amplified, he saw, its excitement. The sense that they were getting away with something, that they should be ashamed, that no one else knew the potent emotions flowing between them, that they created and inhabited a hidden world. When their relationship became public, it would become something different. So, after he’d been working for Boggs for six years and having sex with Heather for two, he still could not say when the situation would change. Shouldn’t he want an ordinary life with her? He did. He did. And he had an obscure trust that it would come. And nothing changed.
And what was wrong with her relationship with Boggs? She said only that her husband had closed away the essential parts of himself. Ellis could see that being married to the man would be a different thing than being friends with him. There had been entire days on the road when Boggs didn’t speak a single unnecessary word. And when they examined the result of some inexplicable driver action – a driver who attempted to pass in a blind curve, or run a red, or pushed a grocery cart full of concrete mix down the street with the front bumper of an IROC-Z – Boggs often displayed a daunting misanthropy. ‘The only thing that makes humans different from animals,’ he said, ‘is that humans can be creatively stupid.’
One night, on a nearly empty highway, returning to civilisation from an accident location a couple hundred miles into the plains, Boggs had hung behind a semi-trailer for several miles and then, without a word, began edging nearer and nearer, until the front bumper of their rental was just two or three feet behind the trailer’s blunt steel framework. At 75 mph, Ellis gazed in horror at the trailer’s glowing tail lights, close and large. When he glanced at Boggs, Boggs reached down and adjusted the volume of the radio. Ellis said, as gently as he could, ‘What are you doing?’
Boggs backed away. He didn’t say anything.
Ellis intended to bring it up sometime when Boggs seemed more calm. But it didn’t happen again, and nothing, really, had happened – there had been no collision, no physical evidence. It seemed almost as if he might have imagined the incident. And it was a tricky topic to raise with a man who was, after all, his boss.
He met Heather in cars and motels and in the duplex where he lived, but most often in her father’s RV, in strip mall parking lots and highway rest stops. The RV’s little windows were always shut, the lemon-yellow curtains drawn, so nothing outside could be seen, and nothing outside could see in. Still, traffic always ran nearby making its ceaseless noise, rising to a roar when the semis passed, and Ellis could imagine the vehicles and their motion quite clearly. On the RV’s dining table lay Heather’s experiments for her classes, or some of her own work – an Elvis bust made from peppermint drops, small gold Christmas tree bulbs glued together into a crashing wave. She intermittently worked for weeks or months on these things, then they sat around for a while, until she threw them away. If Ellis suggested they could be displayed or sold, she scoffed.
Nearer in memory, however, were the movements of Heather’s ribs as she breathed, the touch of her fingers on his skin, the minty odour of her shampoo and her own human scent. She called his penis Detroit; her crotch was Los Angeles. And she called it the recreational vehicle in a tone that made it a double entendre. In memory, the RV meetings washed together warmly and settled into a few singular, wondrous impressions. She moved on top of him, and when he had come, she stilled him and held him inside her until he became hard again and she renewed her movements. He’d felt as if they might go on this way, the two of them, simply, lazily, forever.
‘Tell me something you don’t like,’ she’d said once, lolling beside him.
‘Moment.’
‘What?’
‘Just the word, moment.’
‘Why?’
‘It might mean a fraction of a second, or it might mean minutes, or days, or weeks. In a history book it might mean years. It’s totally imprecise. What’s worst are things like “a moment or two”, “a few moments”. I don’t know how anyone ever understands anyone else when we use words like that.’
‘You should let your inner dork out more often,’ she said. ‘It’s cute.’ She rolled over and grabbed his penis with both hands. ‘Just don’t get cocky about it.’
‘OK. OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk economics – I have a theory that Detroit is about to experience an urban renewal.’
She asked, climbing onto him, ‘What if joking is a substitute for real communication?’
‘Detroit doesn’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, ‘and Detroit doesn’t care.’
Then, Heather’s father died. For years he had been in declining health, a decline that failed to halt his habit of burning and inhaling three or four packs of cigarettes a day. Ellis learned of the death in a brief phone call from Heather, and he ached that he couldn’t go to the funeral, couldn’t see her, couldn’t comfort her. She had not seemed especially close with her father, but he had been her only parent from the time she was four. When he did speak with her after the funeral, on the phone, she said that she was all right, more or less, that her father’s long illness had helped her to prepare for the end. But she was angry with Boggs; without consulting her, he had sold the RV.
June passed into July, and Ellis still didn’t have any opportunities to see her, until the company picnic.
The picnics were an annual, vaguely ritualised event where cold catered food lay on picnic tables and Ellis’s colleagues stood drinking beer from cans or shepherding their smaller children through the adjacent playground equipment and the company CEO stood on a cooler to give a short, vacant speech. Heather generally skipped company events, but this year she made an appearance, and Ellis smiled at her and said, ‘Hello,’ and added, ‘Boggs told me about your father. I was really sorry to hear about it.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Then he avoided her. Her presence made him anxious and wretched and a little ecstatic with secret knowledge. There were about thirty people on hand, most of the company staff. He talked and joked with the other engineers and the administrative personnel. He helped set up a volleyball net and hit the ball over a few times. He ate cold barbecued ribs, potato salad, and coleslaw with too much mayonnaise.
Boggs had wandered off and stood at the top of a grassy hill, alone, hands in pockets, looking away. The others had gathered in cliques of three or four, talking for some reason in hushed tones, and a half-dozen played volleyball. One of the newer engineers stood slouching at the edges, as if wishing someone would invite him to dance. Heather had vanished.
Ellis started up the hill, trying to think of something to say that would make Boggs laugh. Boggs seemed to be looking at his feet. ‘Hey,’ Ellis called, and Boggs looked around, with a peculiar twist in his lips. Then he smiled, but too widely. And Ellis saw that Boggs wasn’t alone, that Heather lay in the grass at his feet.
Ellis wanted to veer away, but it didn’t seem plausible that he’d been heading anywhere else. Heather raised herself. ‘Hi, Ellis,’ she said. ‘I was telling John that he should lie down and look at the sky with me.’
‘She claims that I’ve never seen it before,’ Boggs said.
Heather settled back into the grass. ‘I’m just saying.’
‘Come on,’ Boggs said to Ellis, grumbling, lowering himself. ‘Lie down. So I don’t feel like I’m the only idiot.’
Lying side by side on the grass, Heather and Boggs looked as if they’d fallen from the sky. Boggs twitched his legs around. Ellis glanced back toward the picnic site, but then he lay down, beside Heather.
‘I haven’t done this since I was seven,’ Boggs said.
Heather said, ‘Just, quiet. Watch.’
The grass bristled coolly on Ellis’s back, and the air here smelled wormy and sharp. In the south a rough head of cumulus expanded rapidly, changing form with unnerving speed. Below it, and all across the sky, scrims of haze moved from west to east. After a minute the entire sky began to advance and recede slightly before him.
‘You can’t paint it or photograph it,’ Heather said. ‘Canvases aren’t big enough, and it’s all about the third dimension anyway.’ She moved her arm slightly, and the back of her hand came into contact with Ellis’s hand.
After a minute Boggs said, ‘Hey, Ellis, you’ve read Chekhov?’
‘A few of the stories,’ Ellis said.
‘His plays are better,’ Boggs said. ‘Uncle Vanya is on the schedule at the university, in a couple weeks, three weeks, something like that. I’m going to make Heather come with me. You want to see it? For you, it’s optional.’
‘I don’t know -’ Ellis said. Then he began coughing, hard, for time to formulate an excuse.
‘Inhale a grasshopper?’ Boggs asked.
‘It would be great if you’d come,’ Heather said. ‘It’s running for a couple of weeks. I’m sure we can find a day that works.’
Ellis, set aback, said, ‘OK.’ Then he lay transfixed, waiting with shallow breaths for the next thing. Heather’s hand still touched his.
‘Good,’ Boggs said.
A grass blade niggled his ankle, and a breeze shifted over his face, but these were only background to the touch of her hand on his, the point of pressure and warmth.
‘I’m still pissed off about that depo last week,’ Boggs said. ‘Have you read the transcript?’
‘Not yet,’ Ellis said.
‘I’ll let you try to guess the point in there when he threw his pen at me. The fucker.’
Ellis pressed her hand. She, almost imperceptibly, pressed back. The grass clutched at him while the hillside careered.
Boggs said, ‘When the wind shifts, I can smell the stink of that barbecue.’ He sat up. Heather’s hand departed. ‘I need to stop at the office for a file,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you at the airport tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow’s Monday already,’ Ellis said.
From the ground he watched Boggs and Heather rise. Their faces appeared against the sky. He couldn’t read Heather’s expression. ‘I’m going to stay here,’ he said. ‘I like this.’
‘Right on. Sleep here if you want,’ Boggs said. ‘Just be sure to get up in time to get to the airport. We’re only doing inspections. You don’t need to change clothes or anything.’
Heather gestured with one hand. Ellis listened to their steps in the grass until even that faint sound was lost.
His inspections with Boggs the next day went fine. One of the accident’s victims had been killed by a burning semi-trailer loaded with Life Savers candy, which inspired a few jokes. Life Takers. Life Enders. Life Whackers. Boggs claimed that the name and the hole in the candy had been inspired after a candy-maker’s kid choked to death on a mint.