The Meaning of Isolated Objects Read online

  The remainder of the dream was her looking, driving the city in careful squares, like a grid on an excavation site. Block by block, scanning for his car, his gait, his face. That he wasn’t to be found, that he might never be, was what woke her.

  She pulled the sheet from its knot and stretched it up to her chin. Breathed, breathed, slow, slower.

  He was still there. She felt him, as far away as he was, Virginia, all those state lines away. But if she could feel him, it was okay.

  She got up and went to the front porch to sit and cool off some. It was so dark outside, and quiet. She heard a rustling off to the left and cursed. She’d meant to buy an extra flashlight for the front porch so she could watch for armadillos out here too.

  A little while later she thought she heard the low whine of an engine somewhere down the road, but there were no headlights, and it faded as quickly as she’d thought she heard it. Maybe she’d find another letter in the mailbox. She considered walking out there but changed her mind. It could wait until morning.

  She wished for the first time that she had a phone. She wanted to talk to Tristan and hear his voice. His lyrical accent, the way he said her name.

  She missed him, and maybe that was good, but it wasn’t enough. They had never yet sorted out how to be together.

  She made coffee and took it outside to drink while the sun came up. It wasn’t all about Tristan, this crazy trip. It also had to do with her father. It had to do with her life and what she might do next.

  It was easy to set aside in the stillness of a morning in a new landscape.

  It didn’t matter who had written the letter, or where her father was. It was of no consequence that Tristan had Kate in his bed, Kate who would never run away, but would stay there until Tristan realized what he had and make it permanent.

  None of that mattered. She was finally alone.

  Scott woke in the dark of another country thinking of his daughter. Tested the wind, got his bearings. Listened. Sighed.

  He tracked her in his head from Charlottesville to Georgia. That was the last place he knew for sure she was. His mind kept going south and west. He felt sure she was in Texas. He stopped. Wendell could take care of herself.

  Come morning he rode ninety miles in a jeep with a haji who’d as soon cut his throat as look at him, but he was the ride to the border.

  Scott spoke Pashto and Dari like a native and the driver knew but pretended not to, grunted and gestured when the front tire blew and they pulled over to change it.

  He kept one hand on the gun under his belt, felt with the other for the blade strapped to his boot.

  The driver dropped the threadbare tire on the ground and kicked it, then looked back. His eyes were dark and his jaw tense. He shifted his eyes and then looked back to Scott, who didn’t even blink, ready to do whatever needed to be done. They said time itself slowed when you killed a man, and it was true.

  Scott waited. Accounted. Blocked the images of acts this man had done to other men, women, young women no older than Wendell, girls even. The last man he’d killed had been raping a girl behind a bombed out house in a village. He had dragged him off her and made the girl run away so she wouldn’t see. Then found her and asked when her birthday was. How old she was.

  The driver cut his eyes at Scott and looked away again. Scott squeezed the handle of the gun. Hand-to-hand combat, how to move and take advantage, compensate for the difference in ages. Something he’d never taught Wendell and maybe should have. How to kill a man if he made the wrong move.

  His mind flashed back and forth. This present, Wendell’s present on the other side of the world. He could see what was around her, but couldn’t afford to lose sight of his own situation.

  The driver finished changing the tire and they both climbed back in the jeep, wary. Scott scanned: driver, road ahead, driver, behind.

  What would it have been like if Lynnie hadn’t died? Would Wendell have run off to Texas? Would Lynnie have gone after her or called Scott home? He hated that he didn’t know.

  The year before Lynnie died, they had told him he met every criterion for the study: assignments successfully completed, well thought of by colleagues. Though considered a maverick, he was not a loose cannon. He was opinionated and creative.

  He had been handpicked and carefully trained. Learned the protocols and worked his way up to the highest levels of remote viewing they’d seen. His gift was his ability to empty his mind. He created empty space for the images. He had no fear of the unknown.

  After Wendell was born and Lynnie died, he’d thrown himself deep into the work. For several years that was all he cared about. The targets. What he could do with his mind. Just when he’d mastered the flow of time and was moving toward understanding how to alter future outcomes, they‘d shut him down.

  That was when things got hairy. That was when he’d lost control.

  He looked at the haji and then ahead to the ravaged road. The stony ground was marked with coarse grass. He could close his eyes right now and look at what this man had done, what he would likely do next. If he emptied his head, it would fill with images of whatever he focused on. It was too much sometimes. Having access to that much. Not always being able to turn it off once it got going.

  He’d gone too far and seen too much. Made some things happen that no one knew how to explain. That was when they reassigned him. He had known he needed to pull back. He didn’t want to live his life seeing things inside his head. He wanted to live in the moment. He wanted to be surprised and delighted and shocked. He was careful now how he used it. What he let himself see.

  He’d never talked to Lynnie about it. But she had known somehow. She sent him a letter once, one of many she sent when he was someplace just like this. He still had that letter, folded, soft with age, in his wallet. She wrote that she loved him. That she wished she knew where he was and what he was doing. She’d quoted Rumi.

  Look at your eyes. They are small but they see enormous things.

  Scott had taught Wendell how to navigate, with maps, a compass, the night sky. How to read terrain and find water. What she could eat to keep herself alive in the wild.

  She had a pack he’d bought and stocked for her. The essentials should she get lost or hurt. He wondered if she still had that pack. If she’d kept it stocked. He’d wanted to keep her in his sights, but he had also known she had to make her own way.

  He had tried to give her the skills that he’d learned, honed her instincts so she would always know how to react if something came out of the shadows.

  He felt confident she could hold her own in most bad situations. She knew enough to stay out of harm’s way. What worried him more were the other kind of situations. The ones where her heart was involved.

  Lynnie used to lay him on his back, her hands flat against his chest.

  I have you now, mister, your belly, your heart, all your tender places are exposed. He let her in that way and look what happened. There had to be a way to love a person without laying your gut open.

  Wendell ran high speed, but underneath it all she was cautious, like a cat. He knew she’d been promiscuous, knew too that she’d made ties with Tristan. He sensed they were complicated ties, and that she kept Tristan at a distance in some ways. But Tristan had checked out. He’d said no to the government’s offer, and Scott saw the way he looked at Wendell. She was okay if she was with him. But now she’d taken off.

  Travel safe, Wendell-girl, be steady. Don’t go too far out.

  What else could he tell her? Lay her heart open, keep it closed up tight? Either way she’d suffer. Either way would hurt.

  He had met Lynnie when she was in college. She had a face full of secrets. It took awhile to get her. She was shy, a long-legged, skittish thing with flaming hair.

  She’d told him about a dream she’d had when she was a girl. He took her to the mountains and aimed her at the wide vista of rock and tree he loved best. She didn’t say a word. He remembered the collar of her blouse against the delic
ate skin of her neck.

  He’d never doubted that Lynnie had come into his life for a reason.

  When she died he was holding Wendell. The doctor had handed the crying infant to Scott so he could take care of Lynnie. It was supposed to be the moment when new parents locked eyes over the head of their just born child. They did, but there was no time to say what should have been said. She was there and in the quick occlusion of her eyes she was gone.

  Nearing Khost the driver dodged bands of nomads on donkeys and camels, a herd of sheep, a jingle truck that reminded Scott of Wendell. She wore long earrings and bracelets that made noise when she moved her arms. His eyes were closed listening to the truck. His right eye ached from pressing against the camera’s eyepiece all those hours. Worth it for the shots he’d got. The object of interest this trip was a Pakastani. He’d caught him full face, laughing. Got a shot of his hands, the way he carried himself, slight bend in the right shoulder. All the subtle angles that would make him easier to identify later. And when the time was right, when the order came down, someone would do what had to be done.

  Scott’s finger had itched on the shutter. It should have been a trigger. Click, bastard, got you now. No sense putting off the inevitable.

  The driver dropped him outside Chapman Airfield. He paid the man and delivered the camera’s memory stick wrapped in plastic and brown paper to the appointed man on foot. Got a ride back to post, which swarmed with ANA soldiers and SF guys, one he needed to see before going on to Peshawar. Spent the night in a bunk, lulled easy by all the American soldiers with guns.

  Let his guard down and in came Lynnie. The night she died. It had been in her eyes that night, he’d seen it there. Something she’d needed to say. Something he needed to hear.

  What he should have said to her: I’m sorry. There were other women after he and Lynnie got married. It was always when he was away, never the same woman more than once. His odd way of keeping Lynnie sacred. She was the only one he went back to.

  Jessie suspected, but there was no way she could have known for sure. Impromptu indiscretions in other countries. Under cover, like everything in his life.

  It started that way and remained so after Lynnie’s death. He still followed the same rule. Never more than once. Never anything that could get under his skin. Nothing he couldn’t give up.

  There was a little place he went in Peshawar, to drink off everything. Another place that relieved it for half an hour, longer if he was lucky. He said he wouldn’t this trip, but that was before all the liquor didn’t work.

  He asked the question he always did. When were you born? What month and day? The answers were satisfactory so they proceeded.

  The woman’s liquid eyes cast down, out of fear or respect, but her hands were sure. What she did to his body was in no way reticent. He lay back and let her do her job. Make it disappear for as long as you can, babe, I need respite from my fucking mind. The endless reel of memories.

  She undressed him. His boots landed with a thud on the hard floor.

  Slow, he told her. Slow, baby. She nodded with a quick dart of her head.

  Lynnie.

  The woman’s hand was tight, then her mouth. He wanted more, but slow, things began to slip away. Yes baby that’s it baby. The long slide into nothing but what felt good right that moment. Scott beneath her silence, giving directions. In that small space he got what he wanted. No more, no less. It was all about him.

  That she wouldn’t look him in the eye only made it easier.

  Lynnie.

  He pushed hard against the body beneath his. Her bones seemed tiny and insignificant. The dark woman, the real woman. Faster until he knew where he was again.

  Some nights that much worked, but often he needed more. They lay in the light of two candles while he did nothing but look. She turned her head away. When he touched her, she squeezed her eyes shut tight. Made soft muted sounds that seemed like pleasure while he slid all over her. Hands. Tongue. Gentle. Rough. He forgot everything that came before. Devoured the present. That one woman.

  She had no eyes and no soul. That was all he could take.

  Back where he lived, at least for a week or so, he sprawled in the rickety chair on the ramshackle roof. Counted the stars and named them. Occupied the part of his brain that kept him safe from the other place, lower down, left side. The empty place he no longer referred to by name.

  I unpacked the miniatures in the room I’d decided would be mine. For weeks the small collection sat on the floor and I stepped over them and around them. The little soldier, the crow, an armadillo, plus a few more. My blue notebook and favorite writing pen were on the windowsill. Stacked in the corner were the three boxes I had just bought, covered in blue, fuchsia, and green silk. I sorted various photographs and postcards, assorted memorabilia into the boxes, leaving one empty. For the new part of my life still to come.

  The sound of Scott’s truck in the driveway surprised me. I ran out there, excited and then worried, what if he didn’t like the house?

  But I was wrong. The first thing he said was, “Lynnie, it’s perfect.”

  He walked from room to room smiling, until he found my study.

  “What’s this?” He was brusque, not like he’d been only moments before.

  “I’ll keep my miniatures in here, and have a desk, maybe.”

  “Why do you need a desk?”

  He seemed taller suddenly, and dark. His face had shadows in it.

  “I don’t know, Scott. Do I have to have a reason?”

  “You said you wanted to make a home here. Be here when I get back from work.”

  He made it sound like his job was like every other man in Culpeper. Like he’d be home at five each day, ready for dinner and conversation. TV and lovemaking. When really he would be gone for weeks on end. Longer.

  “I just want some space to have my own things. I don’t have to give up everything.”

  Scott did this thing when he was set on something. I’d seen him do it when he first met me, an almost literal digging in with his heels, a set to his jaw. He expected to get his way.

  “Not this time, Scott. I have to win at least this one.”

  I walked out and left him standing there. I’d started a garden in the back yard and was working compost into the soil.

  The truck engine started up in front. I started crying. Tears dripped in with the black crumbly earth. It seemed we each had made too many assumptions about the other. I had relied on the dream and Rebo’s assurance that I would know him when I found him. That I would know what it was he needed me to tell him.

  But here we were and I still had no idea.

  When he returned, I wiped my eyes and went in the house. He was cutting boards underneath the carport with no shirt on. His belted pants rested on his hips, a curve of muscle lengthened along his waist. I couldn’t stop looking at him. I had dreamed him and then married him.

  I remember his skin in the afternoon sun, the way he turned as he worked the saw, his arms sanding the wood. There were so many times when he was gone in later years, when that memory kept me going.

  Scott building shelves for my miniature collection.

  The hill country outside the house in Austin, Texas was dotted with gnarled scrubby trees Wendell needed to learn names for, assorted cacti, and anthills. She poked a stick into the edge of crumbling sand and watched the ants tumble over one another in a rage, dark roiling mounds. Carefully isolated a single black ant and let it bite. The tiny sting, a surge of heat as the poison spread, skin touched with fire. Imagined an entire colony swarming and biting. You’d be burned out.

  Someone had warned her about scorpions, and she lifted rocks until she found one, smaller than she expected, sand-colored and slow-moving, not as angry as the ants.

  All she remembered from her earliest memory of her father was the back of him. Beyond his waving arm a small white plane swallowed him in its mysterious cavity and took him away. The plane pitched forward with a jerk and rolled along the grou
nd. The black tarmac glistened in the afternoon sun as her little girl arms stretched toward his disappearing form. Aunt Jessie squeezed tight, rounded Wendell’s body into her warm curves.

  As the sound of the engine faded she wiped the wet rush of tears onto Aunt Jessie’s dress, breathed in her lavender smell. Gave up trying to call him back and buried her face in the familiar shoulder.

  She learned to anticipate his returns, the homecomings he called them, absence made right by perfection.

  He never talked about his time away. “Why do you have to go again, Daddy?” Aunt Jessie looked at him and left the room. He sat silent, absentmindedly rubbing her shoulder or knee or the back of her head.

  “I go when they send me, Wendell-girl.”

  At twenty-three, she understood why he went. Nevertheless, she had spent the whole of her life making sure no one who mattered that much left her again.

  When she was younger and he was gone, Aunt Jessie always got the boxes from the top shelf of the hall closet and spread them in a row in front of the fireplace. There were three, each covered in raw silk: cobalt blue, fuchsia, and moss. Each colored box meant something. Each held a different mood.

  What was inside the boxes? All that was left of her mother, who she had been told died during childbirth, her birth, so that all her life February The Second had been strangely conflicted. Excitement and anticipation, but also sadness that ambushed her out of nowhere. Each time she celebrated the day of her own entrance into the world, she marked another anniversary of the day her mother had left it.

  That she never knew her perhaps made it easier. Whenever her name was mentioned, Aunt Jessie got tears in her eyes and her father simply pretended he didn’t hear.

  As on other days when Aunt Jessie brought out the boxes, she made tea in the cracked eggplant-colored teapot Wendell loved best. China oolong, in honor of her mother.

  “It was her favorite,” Aunt Jessie said, and although they both preferred herbal teas they didn’t use them for the ritual of the boxes.