YOU DIDN’T NEED a picture ID to take a six-year-old kid onto a plane, I said to Will, perched on a stool at his kitchen island, a bottle of wine open in front of me. The shaking had stopped and I was self-medicating. There had been a small, odd reassurance in Ned’s saying she was playing with her toys, maybe just that I was able to picture her. You didn’t even need a birth certificate—nothing. No piece of paper attesting to the child’s identity, the child’s relationship to you. Unless you were trying to leave the country, they didn’t ask for anything. You could walk onto a plane with any kid in the world, as long as that kid didn’t open her mouth and give you away.
And the country was endless.
Children have no identity here, I said, no one cares who they are. Although the same could be said of adults, I added. More or less, the only interest our country takes in our identities is as taxpayers, consumers or criminals, I said. They could be anywhere, the investigators had reminded us, anywhere in the country, they could be in Vegas or Boca—they could be back in Anchorage.
I couldn’t easily picture Lena standing quietly while Ned checked her in at a flight gate, but it was possible. He might have made threats. He might have threatened her. Or drugged her again.
Or she might be somewhere offshore, I thought. Ned might have a boat. She might be on the ocean.
“Don’t think along those lines,” said Will, and put his hand over mine. “You have to stop yourself going down that road. There’s nothing helpful there.”
I looked at him and felt flattened and paralyzed: depression weakened my limbs. My whole body felt inert with the exception of a core of fear that burned with its own perpetual energy like a star being born, born, and reborn.
“Come,” said Will.
I stood with difficulty, with lassitude, barely moving until he took my arm. He made me lie down on the couch across from his fireplace, covered me in a blanket.
“But I have to be at the motel,” I said. “In case he shows up with her.”
Will said nothing, because he didn’t need to: I could hear the words he won’t without anyone saying them. He only lifted the back of my head and set a pillow beneath it, smoothing a lock of hair from my eyes. He turned off the overhead lights, leaving only a table lamp or two, and sat down in an armchair somewhere behind me, where he began reading. I gazed at the fire, absorbed in its abstraction, and listened to the crisp cut of a page turning.
Most women probably wanted a man who acted more like a woman, I considered—more like a mother, even. You wanted to be taken care of. As long as he wasn’t womanish, I thought, as long as he had central masculine characteristics such as strength and confidence, in most other respects an ideal man was more like a woman.
Later I fell asleep.
MORE THAN BEFORE, with Lena gone I lost myself in research. Whatever was said in the meetings was a catalyst for my searches. There was something necessary in the order that research gave me, in the finding of lists, the recording of definitions. This is what x is. This is what y is.
Soothing.
A recent area of development is the discovery that . . . the ability to produce “sentences” is not limited to humans. The first good evidence of syntax in nonhumans, reported in 2006, is from the greater spot-nosed monkey (Cercopithecus nictitans) of Nigeria, showing that some animals can take discrete units of communication and build them up into a sequence that then carries a different meaning from the individual “words.” —The Times of London 12.2013
AT THE SECOND meeting I’d taken twice the usual dosage of my tranquilizers but I’d also been drinking coffee steadily.
I still sat back from the others, mug in hand, but this time I leaned forward on my chair, almost perched. I succeeded in sealing off my anxiety over Lena only by pretending that my life with her, my devoted focus on her, did not exist at all. Fortified in this way, holding an image in my mind of a wall placed between emotion and me, between my life and myself—by blocking out my life outside the room—I was able to listen with a manufactured singularity of purpose.