1 #12
“Yes, see you then.” I had a meeting too, with a preschool teacher whom I’d cultivated as a confidential informant.
A half-hour later I was at the bakery across the street from Marlowe’s preschool.
I’d chosen it, I realized, for something like the reason David was alluding to.
It was also a little shabby, a little mismatched, and there was comfort in that.
I felt that I was beginning to understand.
Spaces like the Service headquarters looked harmless.
They looked like spaces where nothing particularly sinister was happening, just people doing our jobs, and this allowed us to rest in a delusion that we were ordinary people doing ordinary work.
“Is everything all right?” the preschool teacher asked finally, a little annoyed. She’d been telling me that Marlowe, at three, was still presenting normally: a little sensitive, very intelligent, somewhat withdrawn, no sign of Nico or anyone else observing her when they were out for walks.
“Absolutely fine. My apologies.” I observed her for a moment. She was looking away, twisting a paper napkin into something like a rose between her fingers. “There’s something else you’d like to tell me,” I suggested, “but you’re not sure of how to frame it.”
She looked at me, startled.
“Please be assured,” I said, “this doesn’t have to be perfect. I will always give you the benefit of the doubt.”
The woman nodded. She was very young, no older than twenty-three or twenty-four. I understood how much she hated being forced to report on a small child.
“She’s neglected,” the woman said. “Marlowe. I know that’s a serious accusation, but there’s no other word for it.”
“Tell me more.”
Marlowe’s hair was so tangled that finally the preschool teacher had taken it upon herself to comb it, she said, even though that was against policy.
She’d brought it up several times with Marlowe’s father, but he seemed exhausted and distracted; also he routinely picked up Marlowe an hour late.
The child’s clothes were often dirty. Her father refused to pack her lunch—“She doesn’t eat that much anyway,” he’d said, “and you yourself told me you always have snacks on hand”—so by informal agreement the teachers had taken to bringing in an extra half-sandwich, an extra apple.
Marlowe was never bruised, it was nothing like that.
Just not taken care of. The little girl stared at the other parents at pickup.
Sometimes she wandered over to them, and asked if she could come too, and you didn’t actually have to be clairvoyant to see where that behaviour might lead.
I sighed. Nico had asked one thing of me, only one thing, before she’d disappeared. “Thank you for telling me,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
That night when I returned home, I spent a few minutes studying Swan Dive, and then went online to try to find more of Lucas Alkaitis’s work.
One other painting was available, from a seller in New York: a small square work entitled Olivia on Yellow Sofa.
It was a close-up of a young woman’s head and shoulders, a yellow sofa behind her.
It was apparently a portrait of the artist Olivia Collins, whoever she was, from the year Alkaitis died.
I liked the directness of the woman’s gaze.
I ordered it at extravagant cost. When it arrived a week later, I hung it at a point in the hallway where it was the first thing I saw when I came in.
Olivia Collins looked at me, and I looked back at her, and I knew it was silly to think this way, but the painting made me feel less alone in the house.
8
On the first anniversary of Nico’s disappearance, I stayed late at the office, trying to drown myself in work, but I was consumed by thoughts of my lost friend.
Finally, in the early evening, I walked down to a bar where she’d taken me a few times, a small warm place in Harbor City that featured live music on Tuesday nights.
Tonight a woman was singing with a guitar.
I sat watching and listening, drinking a cocktail, pretending that Nico was beside me, and I’d been there for a while, lost in my thoughts and in the music, before I noticed that someone had taken the next bar stool.
A man, a quiet presence, also drinking, also listening.
Then the man leaned toward me and said, very softly, “Did you come here with her too?”
I winced. “Fayed,” I said.
Nico’s husband recoiled as if I’d hit him. “Kareem,” he said. “Fayed’s my last name. I always go by Kareem.”
“I know Fayed’s your surname, but I call the other man Kareem.” I was making this up, obviously. I didn’t call the other man anything, because he was in a work camp in the desert. “Your double. So you’re going to have to be Fayed.”
“Awfully formal to call me by my surname,” Fayed said.
“I’m a chronically formal person,” I said. “And yes, I came here with her a few times.”
He nodded, and went quiet for a while. Had I been unkind? I didn’t like him, but on the other hand, he’d suffered a terrible loss. “Are you doing okay?” I asked finally, between songs.
“Terrible,” he said, “thanks for asking. Really absolutely fucking terrible.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was dismissed from UCLA for violating research protocols. I’m working for a shoe manufacturing company. A whole career, just . . .” He snapped his fingers. “Up in smoke. The commute’s hellish now too. Forty-five minutes every morning. Two trains.”
“You could’ve been disappeared by the State,” I said, “and you’re complaining about your commute.”
He fell silent. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. I’m grateful. Can I ask, do you . . . do you know where Nico is? Where she went?”
“No.” I wasn’t sure if this counted as a lie, exactly.
I was thinking of the other Kareem Fayed’s interview transcripts, that strange story about throwing a party at which Nico had suddenly appeared.
Where did Nico go? She went to a party. She went to a war.
“But what I can tell you,” I said, “is there’s every reason to believe she’s alive. ”
“Well. Nico’s resourceful.” There was something dismissive in this that made me look at him. “If there’s a way to survive, she’ll find it.”
“You’re not worried about her?”
“Of course I am. I’m sorry. I’m exhausted. I’m not sleeping much. Parenting was more Nico’s thing than mine. We have two small children.”
“You didn’t want them?” I knew it was a rude question, but I didn’t like Fayed enough to care.
“No, no, I did,” Fayed said. “I kind of pushed for them, actually. It was Nico who was hesitant.”
“Then what happened?”
“I can’t really account for it. They came along, two kids in two years, and I just . . . I liked my life, and my routines. I found I didn’t want to change anything.”
“So what did you . . . what did Nico do?”
“She had to shoulder the burden.” The man spoke as if this were an unavoidable tragedy that had befallen Nico, and had very little to do with him. “It just didn’t come naturally to me.”
I took a deep breath. Thinking of Nico in Ohio, the way she stood before me. I’m the only parent. I was looking at the door. It would be so easy to walk out and never speak to this person again.
In a booth at the back, we finished our whiskey sours and then Fayed set his glass to the side. “Okay,” he said. “That’s better, isn’t it? Takes the edge off. I’ve been here four times a week since she left.”
“You make it sound like she walked out,” I said.
“Are we sure she didn’t, though? Are we sure?” He raised a finger, as if making a solid point, and flashed a strange, hopeless grin. He was much drunker than I was, I realized then. He must have gotten a head start. “I cannot account for what happened,” he said, “and I designed the experiment.”
“You think she changed the settings somehow? Travelled somewhere else on purpose?”
“I’m just asking,” he said, with a don’t-blame-me shrug. “Can I ask you something? How many times a week are you drunk?”
“What? Why?”
“My doctor was on my case about it yesterday.”
“Less than once a week.” I was exaggerating wildly. Less than once a month was more accurate. I’ve never found alcohol especially compelling.
“You dating anyone?” Fayed asked.
“Intermittently. Nothing steady.” I liked first and even second dates, but I found it best to fade out after a night or two. My life had too many secrets.
“Women? Men?”
“Both. I like to alternate.”
“Okay, let me ask you something. You date women, so maybe you’ll understand this. Do you remember when you first realized that women are crazy?”
“What?” Oh, Nico, my friend, what were you thinking.
“I’m sorry. I’m drunk. I don’t mean you specifically, obviously, I mean as a population. Women as a group. I found it liberating, personally.” Fayed’s gaze had drifted to the musician, bent over her guitar. The musician’s hair shone gold under the lights.
“You ever date men?” I asked. “Or just women?” The other Kareem, according to his interview transcripts, had mostly—but by no means exclusively—dated men.
Fayed laughed. “I’m the straightest guy you ever met in your life,” he said.
I looked at him. His jeans were tighter than any straight man’s jeans I’d ever seen.
“She’s hot,” Fayed said, meaning the musician.
“Oh,” I said. “Sure, yeah, she’s pretty.
” But she wasn’t really my type. I’ve never been that into blondes.
I just thought her music was good. I liked her voice, low and almost raspy.
She was singing about travel across the State, hard miles on a motorcycle from Las Vegas to New York.
“Remind me,” I said, desperate to change the subject, “how old are your kids?”
“Young. Samir’s four, Marlowe’s three. You don’t have kids, right?”
“No,” I said.
“Dodged a bullet,” Fayed said.
“But just, like, as a hypothetical,” Fayed said. “Would you want to have kids?”