Sometimes I crack under the pressure of all that language. I find myself moving my lips and before I know it I am trying to explain. The pain in my heart. The things they did. To me, to Carter, to Leonie. The shame. Every time you get suckered into thinking she wants to listen, but it slips off her, just rolls away and gets lost somewhere under the seats. You try to tell her but she loses her appetite for talk. Every time. This is how you learn: none of what happened to you happened.
Gradually I learn to keep a check on myself. On my mouth, on the sounds of my body. The slight fluttering wheeze in my breathing that never will go away, the creak of my joints as I shift position in my seat at night. Such things are tells, to a sensitive listener, someone who may wish you harm. You try not to express, but there is always something. You give yourself away and one morning the jinx is there again, all round your bed, rubbing against your ankles like a cat.
I hire someone to make inquiries on my behalf. A week later I call from a phone by the entrance of a Tulsa park and he lets me know that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. All he has is word-of-mouth. There are no documents or photos, nothing that would really hold up. But he believes his information was reliable. A suspect was taken into custody under the name of Charles Shaw. Yes, his contact is sure of the name, definitely Shaw, but there are complications. The suspect was taken to a special unit, a place which did not participate in the usual police booking formalities. I tell him I don’t understand. Participate? I thought it was the law. He tells me the place is an exception, a black site. It is exempt from scrutiny. There is no publicly available information about the special unit. There is no website for the special unit, no phone number. There is no public access. Yes, he is working on it. He is trying to find out more.
Got to keep moving. Never look in the restroom mirror. Small towns. Rusted water towers with green vines climbing the legs. Water towers overgrown with vines. Sleeping in the terminals, under the porch of a church. Sleeping in the bushes by a lake. When you are powerless, your belief or disbelief is irrelevant. No one gives a damn about what you believe. But if some reality believes in you, then you must live it. You can’t say no thank you. You can’t say I don’t want this. If horror believes in you, there’s nothing to be done.
Black sites. I know all about black sites. A pay phone on the dock at a marina in Pensacola. Evening. Standing in a narrow cone of light. I have bad news, he says. Or good news, depending. Your man was definitely being held at the special unit. No, no paperwork. Nothing like that. Everything happened very fast. Thing is he’s dead. Yes, that’s right. The day of his arrival he was found unresponsive in an interview room. They only had him for a few hours. Yes, they did. Natural causes. No, I only have what I was told. Where is he now? You mean you want me to find out what happened to the body?
Motels and bus stations. Small towns. Rooms rented by the week, by the month. I live like a spy in a wartime city, a state of constant managed terror. Where is Charlie Shaw? I close the blinds, so eyes on the walkway can’t see the order in which I pack my bag. Try to stop your body sending or receiving. Try to stop all signal traffic. And now remember that you have to eat and maintain yourself in certain other basic ways. It is not straightforward. It puts you under pressure. I climb the steps, take my seat, press my forehead against the smeared window glass. I listen to the top forty through headphones, the same songs over and over again. Bobbysoxer records. “Sentimental Journey.” “Don’t Fence Me In.” There are always audible ghosts, remnants of compression. If you make a file of all the parts that are lost, you can hear them quite distinctly. I was making eight-hour round-trips to use an ATM.
The crowd at the door. Slipping down into the dark, running down the dry hill, pushing through the jostling crowd at the door, stepping over the threshold, the crowd of uniforms competing, climbing over each other just to take a look.
Excuse me, excuse me.
A pay phone on the outside wall of a convenience store in Midland, Texas. A high wind blowing dusty topsoil into my face. No record of an inquest, says the man. But he’s dead and buried. I can give you a plot number, a location. Yes, absolutely. I have that. You can go and see for yourself.
Until I see you. Until we come face-to-face. See you for myself. Until I see you. I cannot let it lie. If I don’t find out what he wants I will have to step through the door, into the dark. I will have to see her lying there, stretched out, so cold and fair. Late one night, I walk out into a potter’s field with a spade and a flashlight and a grid reference. I find what I think is the place and begin to dig, but I can’t be sure I have it right. I am full of doubt. The ground is hard and stony. It does not look as if it has been recently disturbed. The spade feels like rubber as I try to push it in. I dig and sooner than I expected I am exhausted and my palms feel raw, already blistered at the base of the fingers where the handle of the spade has been rubbing. I lie down on the pile of earth and rest and the sky begins to lighten to a proto-gray and in that gray light I come to the realization that I will never be able to dig my way to Charlie Shaw. What do I expect to find? A body? A living man down there in the coffin? A man singing and playing a guitar, with whom I can negotiate, a man I can beg for mercy? Is that what I am digging for? To beg back my life?
STANDING AT A PAY PHONE outside a yard lined with identical storage units, somewhere outside Baton Rouge. A chemical tang in the air. Naphtha vapor, refinery smog. My clothes are covered in mud. Trash whips around my feet as the trucks go by.